London,

No belief in Afterlife

By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard  11.06.08

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.

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