3 STARS, October 2 – December 2. This version of the George and Dragon myth is a diverting paddle in the lukewarm shallows of a parallel universe, says Simon Collins
JOHAN PERSSON
From a critical perspective there are quite a few faults with this play. Yet that strange multi-headed beast, the audience, enjoyed it, their sympathy aroused by the central romance between George and a village-girl, their humour tickled by the amusing banter of individual characters interwoven with the fights and shouts and songs of the story’s general populace. At times it was reminiscent of Les Miserables, but also of a Christmas panto’s knockabout, and sometimes a school nativity play.
Frankly, it didn’t seem right for the Olivier, the country’s foremost theatrical space. But why was the audience so untroubled? Presumably because it’s nice to go to the theatre and watch charming actors: this is the cup of cocoa theory of drama.
Anyone hoping for something more substantial from our National Theatre, a genuine feeling for England’s history and traditions perhaps, insight into the uncertainty of the present expressed through allegory or satire or some sort of meaningful narrative form, and involving any kind of thinking, for instance about tyranny and resistance, the idealisation of heroism, how monsters are gestated, trust in a saviour, the identification and relationship of good and evil, went home sadly disappointed.
The initial idea for the play came from its director Lyndsey Turner who suggested to the young Mullarkey an updating of the story as a large project for the National Theatre. “We know squit all about St George,” she has said. They utilised as their springboard, The Dragon, a 1943 Russian play by Evgeny Schwartz, in which Lancelot defeats a dragon but finds when he returns the next year it has been replaced by a Stalinesque dictator.
JOHAN PERSSON
SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON by Mullarkey, , Writer Rory Mullarkey, Director - Lyndsey Turner, Designer - Rae Smith, The National Theatre, 2017, rehearsal image, Credit: Johan Persson/
The key motif for Mullarkey is recurrence in time. Like Blackadder or the immortal Highlander or Dr Who, George moves through time, but is characterised as a milksop, ferocious as a buttercup, popping up in three different centuries to repeat the same battle in different dress.
Most appealing to the audience is Rae Smith’s spectacular stage design and her highly inventive special effects. At a talk in the Dorfman before the performance, playwright Rory Mullarkey recalled that Smith “who thinks in images, could envisage the stage so clearly she could almost say what needs to happen in the scene.” Yet his remark unwittingly discloses the danger of workshopping a play into a mush. Once on a time a company would interpret a script in order to realise an author’s determined vision. Today it seems the author is consumed by the process of collective creation.
The outcome calls for a dire suspension of disbelief since even a parallel universe (in which dragons are real and the characters remember their past lives yet live in recognisable historical eras) needs an internal logic that is lacking here.
But at least, this is not the safe, commodified drama of the commercial theatre. Reaching for meaning outside the dull stereotypes of England now the conception of a mythic play is daring and worth the attempt even if on this occasion St George falls flat.
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