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London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Michael Blakemore.
Cast: Roger Allam, David Burke, Abigail Cruttenden, Peter Forbes, Glyn Grain, Selina Griffiths, David Schofield
Description: A new drama written by Michael Frayn, set in Austria just before Hitler's invasion, about a Jewish theatre impresario, Max Reinhardt and his ill-fated morality play, Everyman.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Eccentric: Afterlife is inspired by impresario Max Reinhardt
What an affair: Roger Allam, who plays Max Reinhardt, with mistress Abigail Cruttenden
Is anyone at the National Theatre responsible for protecting their most famous writers and ensuring they do not risk their reputations? Does its director, Nicholas Hytner, ensure the latest works of these playwrights are produced on grounds of merit rather than of reputations for masterworks like Copenhagen? The questions are prompted by exposure to the weird, dull ramble that is Afterlife.
This slightly amusing new play by Michael Frayn reminds us of his long-term fascination with the process of making theatre and broods about its nature, value and durability. Afterlife comes less than two months after the endless, haphazard trek of Tony Harrison’s Fram at the National, in which the poet raised the ghost of a dead Norwegian explorer to pose but not answer the familiar question about whether art really can change people or things.
In similar questing style Frayn is inspired by Max Reinhardt (Roger Allam), the Austrian and Jewish director-impresario famous for super-scale productions. Rein-hardt’s name meant little over here, even in his glory days before the Nazis came to power in 1933, which led to his exile in Los Angeles and cut his brilliant career to ribbons.
Afterlife strikes me as an arid eccentricity, best suited to remain in the bottom drawer of a remarkable playwright. Michael Blake-more’s production with designer Peter Davison’s imposing, high windowed exterior of Reinhardt’s own baroque Baroque Palace, Leopoldskron, with views of mountain tops and a grand Viennese cathedral, not to mention chandeliers, candelabras, and tables groaning with food and champagne seems designed to dazzle us with spectacle and high life rather than conflict or debate.
The Afterlife of the title has a double-edged meaning. It refers first to performances of an Austrian version of the morality play Everyman, staged annually by Reinhardt at Salzburg and from which leaden snippets are declaimed by the director and his circle during Frayn’s heavy-handed dramatisation of Rein-hardt’s g randly socialising, internationally touring career. Frayn makes little of the director’s problems after attacks upon his house and career were launched by troops of anti-Semites and Roger Allam’s suave, smart-suited Reinhardt, with ever gesturing hands and mobile head, doggedly tries to energise a character who remains an outline figure. Just once, when the director choreographs and conducts his servants in their moves for a big banquet, does Frayn manage to dramatise the way in which the director blurred the boundaries between performance and real life. A devoted, young mistress (Abigail Cruttenden), Selina Griffiths’s dutiful assistant, Gusti Adler and “Katie” Kommer, his business manager are in attendance, but the three characters boast not one distinctive personality between them.
The rich Everyman becomes, in Frayn’s tiresomely underlined and repetitive treatment, Reinhardt’s alter ego. Both of them are called to face judgment and the arrival of death, who in David Schofield’s menacing performance doubles as a Nazi supremo. Frayn blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, just as Reinhardt believed the theatre director should. But such theorising was not enough to give him a theatrical Afterlife, any-more than this play deserves one.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I went to see Afterlife on its last night without having seen any reviews. I was stunned. I went into the show with an open mind and the hope of seeing something truly marvellous and left .... in a foul mood having witnessed a pile of crud take shape and move.
The loathsomeness of this self satisfied, indulgent, introspective badly written piece could have best been dealt with by the application to the cast to the lines "Smited, smited, smote" If only.
Evidently Frayn believed when he wrote this that those of the theatre would love it as an homage to a great man, and that those not of the theatre would learn something important about the shallowness and inconsequence of things like Nazism when compared with the timelessness of the Salzburg Festival.
The Sound of Music did it better - at least when the swastikas are draped over the set in that the audience genuinely gasp with astonishment. In Frayns piece it was nothing but another cheap swipe at the hearts of an audience that could not fail to be untouched by this piece of tripe.
- Sara Mcgrail, London
I was taken to see Afterlife at the National Theatre on August 20. Fortunately I had not read any reviews of the play, so I was able to make up my own mind about the production.
I returned home bedazzled by a magnificent, intelligent, moving and thought-provoking theatrical experience, which made me want to write to the author and cast to congratulate them. I also wanted to read more about Max Reinhardt.
Unfortunately, I decided today to investigate what the critics had said about the play. I was dumbfounded by the torrent of lofty, vituperative, drivel that a number of them have spewed out about this wonderful production. Did they attend the same play that I went to?
Perhaps they have jaded palates. After all they are subjected to an overdose of theatre far greater than that experienced by the ordinary mortals for whom they are writing. It must be difficult for them to see things from the point of view of a person who only goes to the theatre a few times a year.
I have also been to plays in the past which had been praised by the critics, and which turned out to be incomprehensible, pretentious, and sometimes disgusting, garbage, from which I walked out.
Before I went to Afterlife, it had been praised to me by friends whose judgement I respect. This proves to me that word-of-mouth assessments of plays by one's friends are more valuable than those of newspaper critics, for whom bitchiness seems to be a high priority.
- Tony L, Southwark, London
I found a lot of merit in "Afterlife". Not being pretentious, I was not threatened by the grand baroque-ness of the play (or its production). Actually, I enjoyed it very much even though it obviously was not Frayn's best work by a large margin. But so what? Does that make it worthy of ridicule by some theatre "critics" - both real and imagined?
- Js, London UK
Afterlife is truly awful, if anything de Jong is kinder than it deserves. It is entirely lacking in original thought or spectacle and does not deserve the attentions of the talented actors or the space that is the Lyttleton. I know nothing more about the time or the people that populated this tale, there was not one properly rounded character on the stage, and the fact that the National chose to present this dire piece of theatre is to me, a simple case of the Emperor's clothes. It is a worthless piece of dross and should be consigned to the scrap heap. Added to which the person or people responsible for giving it the green light should resign forthwith.
- Gill Roberts, London, England
Je Jongh is being too harsh on this play. Certainly it does not have the impact of Copenhagen but then so very few plays do.
The biggest problem with the play is that we know all is going to go very badly for Max Reinhardt, the Jewish Austrian director hero as the Nazis gain the upper hand. In other words, the thrill in this play is not going to come from the plot and I would argue neither is it supposed to.
The joy of this play resides in the parallels we can draw from the Everyman moral play that Reinhardt staged every year and his actual life. The links between who Reinhardt aspired to be, who he was and how he was perceived by those around him all join up to create the drama.
The trouble with the production however is that it is aiming to be a movie, a spectacle rather than the abstract, fluid play that the text suggests. Sometimes Afterlife feels like the sound of music without the music.
This play could work if staged in a smaller venue and with a minimal set thereby allowing the actors greater speed and fluidity. The transition from the real to the unreal happens so fast that the setting needed must be minimal and allowed to take shape in our imagination. It could also benefit from a few trims and should be played all the way through with no interval.
I hope Afterlife is granted a second life with a more daring director.
- Another Way, New York, New York
