The Cane - Royal Court

[Stephen]

Opening Thursday 6th December and running until Sat 26th January.

Written by Mark Ravenhill and directed by RC Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone.

Cast: Alun Armstrong, Maggie Steed and Nicola Walker.

Anyone booked?

[david]

Booked for the Sat 19th Jan matinee. It will be my first visit to the RC. Looking forward to it.

[Marwood]

I’m going to the matinee show on December 22nd (well I will be if I’m in a fit state after the works Christmas do the night before)

[Deleted]

I booked for this ages ago and have had to move my ticket to January. The Royal Court box office were very amenable to making the switch, although I had to pay £10 per seat otherwise I was going to be at the back of the circle. Chap on the phone was about as monotone and low energy as a human can be, but he made it work.

[Tibidabo]

We're going. I couldn't resist that cast.

That, and a nice bit of misery over Christmas. Lovely!

[theatrefan77]

It's available in the GILT offer for January. £10 in the Balcony and £20 in Stalls

[Stephen]

I'll likely be behind the bar when most of you come. Be sure to say hello!

[Steve]

Saw tonight's show, and loved it. A laser-focused, one-issue, non-naturalistic (but more realistic than Pinter) play that starts slowly, but builds by gradations into something exciting, helped enormously by Alun Armstrong's remarkable performance, that anchors the tone, and builds beautifully to a meaningful climax.

It's an hour and forty minutes without an interval, so requires precision bladder control, and any drinks purchased from Steve Hamilton at the bar should be saved for consumption half way through the show, so as to delay it's passage through the body until after the show has ended.

Some spoilers follow, limited to information you cull in the opening set-up. . .

The fact that this is a one-issue show (about violence, symbolised by the titular "Cane") will bother some, who may feel that's limiting but, for me, this singular focus is a source of the play's power.

Mark Ravenhill's writing has an building block quality, whereby one character will repeat what another character just said, and then build on it. It is at once alienatingly non-naturalistic, yet teasingly mysterious, inevitable and tantalising revelations promised by the inexorable build.

How interested you are in the central issue, the morality and consequences of bureaucratically meted-out violence, may impact your experience of the play.

In my case, I was initially a little bored about a play in which angry kids are picketing a retiring teacher's door because he used to administer the cane. I was bored because I myself was caned a couple of times, and have vivid memories of other kids also being caned, the ones who, like me, would race afterwards crying to the bathroom to plunge our hands in ice cold running water, and the ones so hard they laughed in the teachers' faces, often getting hit on the behind instead as a result, and the one legend who was SO hard he laughed at that too, and got walloped on the head with the cane, and still laughed.

So Alun Armstrong's by-the-book Edward seemed mild-mannered and reasonable, compared to my own memories, and I was thinking, so what?

But there is a weird moment, early on, where Edward's wife (Maggie Steed) reminds Edward's daughter (Nicola Walker) how she once tried to kill Edward with an axe, and from that moment on, Ravenhill ensures that no matter how slow the plot progression, we are glued to each and every character clue that the three wonderful actors dole out: what storms rage beneath each character's preternatural (and absurdly funny) calm?

Maggie Steed is tantalisingly twitchy, Nicola Walker provocatively precise, and Alun Armstrong simmers like a calm volcano. For performances alone, this is worth it, but Ravenhill pays off the set-up so well that I was eventually thrilled, and my reservations about the no-interval, one-issue slowness of it all were completely overcome.

I felt as charged as if I just had my third caning, albeit delightfully metaphorical and thankfully theatrical this time! 4 and a half stars!

[lonlad]

100 minutes straight through is news and cause for bladder concern? Wow. If that's the case, the arts really ARE doomed, since that's no time at all (in a normal work day, are people really going to the loo every 90 minutes? no one I know is, unless there's a problem). Anyway, glad the play is good. Armstrong is a genius. The best SWEENEY ever.

[showgirl]

Dec 9, 2018 1:07:34 GMT lonlad said:

100 minutes straight through is news and cause for bladder concern? Wow. If that's the case, the arts really ARE doomed, since that's no time at all (in a normal work day, are people really going to the loo every 90 minutes? no one I know is, unless there's a problem). Anyway, glad the play is good. Armstrong is a genius. The best SWEENEY ever.

Apologies for going off-topic - and thanks to Steve for the informative and intriguing review which has made me want to see this - but how many times do we have to have the interval/comfort break discussion?  And I note that the above comment appears to come from a man and probably a young one at that.

There are many reasons why people may appreciate information re running time and/or lack of interval, including for planning purposes, transport home, etc.

Also, not everyone who finds it difficult to sit for a prolonged period has a bladder problem - it could be due to another health issue or medical condition entirely.  However, to give some examples, a lot of women experience difficulty after childbirth; men may have an enlarged prostate gland; people may be on diuretic medication and so on.


Great for those to whom none of the above applies (yet!) but could we please have a little more tolerance and understanding for others?

[jojo]

I'm considering seeing this in January, so I'm appreciating all of your feedback.

Dec 9, 2018 1:07:34 GMT lonlad said:

100 minutes straight through is news and cause for bladder concern? Wow. If that's the case, the arts really ARE doomed, since that's no time at all (in a normal work day, are people really going to the loo every 90 minutes? no one I know is, unless there's a problem). Anyway, glad the play is good. Armstrong is a genius. The best SWEENEY ever.

If you are expecting an interval after fifty minutes, and have been for drinks first, then it could be a problem if you don't take a tactical toilet trip first.  And as mentioned above, some people do need to go to the loo frequently, and have anxiety if one isn't available. 

[foxa]

Nov 30, 2018 11:17:56 GMT Stephen said:

I'll likely be behind the bar when most of you come. Be sure to say hello!

I was in with Mr Foxa and Snciole (as it happens) on Friday and cheekily asked the young man behind the bar if he was you, Steve Hamilton.  He seemed a bit shocked and said no.  Then I grilled him if anyone behind the bar was you and he assured me you were away that evening.  So if you were hiding behind a keg you can come out now ;-)

I was glad to see this, but had a bit of a mixed reaction.  The first 20 minutes I thought I was going to love it and there were some  later bits that I did love (the discussion of the pageant, etc.) but I felt it lost its way in the end.   The set was a bit anxiety provoking - so bare the actors seemed stranded (on purpose, I'm sure, but still I was dying for someone to haul a comfy sofa on.) There was a mishap with a stage effect so a stage manager had to come out and stop the show for a bit, which did kill the momentum somewhat.   We talked about it a lot afterwards - my husband who is of the caned generation -  remembers the bullying as being much worse than the caning which at least seemed to have rules about it.  There was a lot of accuracy - we visited my husband's old grammar school in Liverpool on (coincidentally)  the day it was being shut down and a somewhat squiffy physics professor showed us the drawer of canes (different widths, I assume for different crimes) and the ledger book.  I'll be interested to hear what people think Ravenhill was saying about education - all the alternatives he presented seemed pretty ghastly.

[Stephen]

Sorry foxa but I was in fact back home in Scotland this weekend. That is a pity but thank you for seeking me out!

Good to hear your thoughts on the play.

[Snciole]

Firstly it was so lovely to see Foxa and meet Mr Foxa. In hindsight I found the stuff about academies far more horrifying than the corporal punishment system. It was barbaric, it wasn't a deterrent but it has thankfully gone and is seen as something almost Victorian despite the fact anyone born before 1970 may have been caned before it was removed from schools in 1986.

As a play I found the relationships odd; Maggie Steed is great as the mother who always hated the cane and crucially always hated her daughter (The suggestion that Steed's character, because I don't know names sorry never practised teaching, is interesting) but the highlights are Walker and Armstrong as this father-daughter partnership who if they got on could be brutal but Walker as the unloved daughter relishes seeing her parents suffering, both professionally and personally, gives a really sinister performance.

The biggest issue is the fact that I don't think any talks of being caned in the same way they talk of sexual abuse or as Foxa said above bullying. School is just a grim place to be; are there going to plays about how awful detention is? I wasn't convinced by Ravenhill's argument that the #metoo movement is coming for these men in their 60s/70s for doing their job. Ravenhill tries to hint there is a sadomasochism element to Armstrong's relationship with his daughter and his pupils.

Finally; the set. It broke during a key reveal scene only to be another empty box (The characters get very hysterical about how full of crap the loft is and it is completely bare on stage). It wasn't helped by my awful seats in the Slips where I could often see a mirror and an audience member sleeping. I keep saying this but whilst this is good, it at times felt first draft good. I hope as the previews continue it tightens up and improves a set which doesn't reflect a script in its current form. Also I thought the broken stairs looked more like pork pies.

[foxa]

I read an interview with Vicky Featherstone today and she says it is about bringing down the patriarchy - which I have to say, I didn't get at all.

inews.co.uk/culture/vicky-featherstone-interview-the-cane-royal-court-me-too/

Snciole (always great to see you!) - sinister is a good description of Walker's performance. And yes, agree with everything else you write. It was an unsettling play, with some genuinely quirky, amusing, spooky moments. However much of it sat uneasily between naturalism and theatre of the absurd - I wonder if the set was nudging the play towards the absurd - it had an almost dream-like weirdness about it.

[Snciole]

Surely Walker's character, representing the academies, is the just the new patriarchy with its incredibly draconian approach to teaching ("Eyes forward, silence in the corridor")? Surely generations of pupils will be coming after her?

[crowblack]

I enjoyed this - great performances and a lot of tension, but plotwise I don't think it really hung together. I didn't buy the family dynamic or the idea that caning kids on the hand in the 70s or 80s would cause such a Savile-style uproar now (are they picketing Ken Loach? The kids were caned for real in Kes!) - equally, that a retiring teacher would be given a send-off involving his old clothes. I know he's using it to raise issues, but if you're going 'why wasn't the axe-wielding child sectioned? Frankly I'm not surprised they won't let her near a ladder' etc., it pulls you out of it. I really didn't like the set either, but it was well-lit in that every expression was readable, which isn't always the case, and was what you want with a cast this good.

[Marwood]

Saw the matinee this afternoon - enjoyed it without being greatly impressed by it - I can see why there was no interval as the tension that was building slowly would have been totally wasted if there was a break for pints and pies halfway through .

To tell the truth it could have done with 10 minutes or so being cut off the running, the first 45 minutes did seem a bit of a slog to get through, and I got the impression that this was originally a lot longer (no explanation as to why the daughters belongings had been burnt (although I’m guessing the axe attack might be a good indicator 😝 and the banging at the door that no one answered and that’s just for starters).

[Deleted]

Thought this was OK but a bit of a mess.

There are some interesting points - as Snciole points out, is the current approach to discipline in academies any better or in fact worse? But this wasn't really explored. Also the stuff about the logistics of caning was interesting (How did you learn to do it? Where did all the canes come from? And where did they end up?)

But I don't understand why anyone was so bothered about what Edward had been doing - he was applying a policy which was completely normal at the time, although seems very odd now, and there seems to be no implication he was going over the top in his use of the cane (as did happen - see for instance this 1994 story). Admittedly I'm old enough (in fact I'm around the same age as Ravenhill) that caning was still legal when I was at school (never happened to me though) - so I wasn't shocked by any of the details. It sort of makes sense if you assume

SPOILER: Click to show

that the daughter is actually somehow whipping this all up (so to speak!) using her weirdo psychological control techniques

And I don't see how Edward's career makes sense. He's just about to retire, so presumably is supposed to be around 65 (Alun Armstrong is 72). The stuff about Academies means the play is set in the present. Edward became Deputy Head of a large secondary school long enough ago to have done a lot of caning before it was abolished in 1986, so this must have happened at least 35 years ago which seems very early in his career to have got this role, particularly since he then apparently stays in the same job for the rest of his career. All the senior staff at my comprehensive school which was a similar size to this one were well into their 40s or 50s then, so would have retired at least 10 years ago. And in fact when I looked them up a few years ago the ones who's names I could remember are all dead (I have alibis for all of these)

And why would a deputy head be "the most popular teacher in the school" - don't think heads and deputies in that size of school would actually be doing much if any teaching

And clearly aspects of the play were intentionally surreal, but 200 kids rioting outside a house and the police don't get involved??

And how come they have an endowment mortgage and it's only just about to pay out - wouldn't it have paid out at the end of the mortgage term, and in any case wasn't there a huge mis-selling scandal about these about 10 years ago? (NB the fact I had time to worry about this would imply the play wasn't all that great)

[youngoffender]

Like xanderl I found this deeply flawed, with the occasional redeeming element. The  set-up - that pupils would become so outraged about legal punishment at their school over 30 years ago that they would put the teacher's house under mob seige

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler - click to view}
(and where was the evidence that spurred them to this, if the ledger and the cane itself had been removed?)

- is so implausible that it becomes difficult to buy into anything else. Likewise, I didn't for a moment believe that the daughter had ever gone for her father with an axe, while her motives throughout seems inconsistent and opaque. Armstrong's character is easily the most sympathetic of the three.

There's a much more interesting play to be written about this subject. The play touches on the contemporary language of 'survivors', and there is obvious dramatic potential in a former pupil confronting an old teacher who had caned him, particularly if legality were complicated by a hint of erotic motivation.

[callum]

Currently sold out for the rest of the run on Royal Court website - seems a dead cert for a transfer in the New Year?

[David J]

Watching this I thought this would have been a great exploration on today’s outrage culture where people’s pasts are dug up and their actions or words they’ve said are taken out of context and splattered all over social media as morally damning

It certainly felt like that hearing about the kids protesting outside who sound like they weren’t caned or even in the school when caning was around. They were just part of a collective moral witchunt

What this play could have done with was a bit more context on who the kids were and as memtioned above how the information on the caning was dredged up in the first place. In fact Mark Ravenhill should elaborated on a couple things such as the axe scenario

So not a bad play and Alun Armstrong undoutedly gave an emotional performance. At times it felt like he regretted giving up on his daughter. It just get skimmed over that and to me that’s the main problem with the play when it came to addressing some potentially serious issues

[Tibidabo]

Well, this was a giant Xmas pudful of disappointment, despite some stellar acting.

Firstly the set. We absolutely hated it and just didn't get it. Far too much symbolism going on. We were seated near the front, at the end of a row, stage right. I couldn't see the stairs. All I could see were some the rodent-chewed ends. I had no idea if I was missing something and, as there was no interval, was unable to ask anyone else. I had no idea if there was a door or that there was a mirror. We didn't understand which room they were supposed to be in. A hall? (stairs are normally in a hall) A lounge? If so, why only a console table and one dining chair? And why the entrance to the attic? Who sits at a computer in such a place? We really didn't get it.

All the busy teachers I know who have let their house go undecorated, have also acquired years and years' worth of clutter. It became annoying watching them just stand around amongst bareness for most of the time. Why no chairs? Why no fiddling with aforementioned missing clutter? 

The direction. Awful. Why were they required to stand, stock still, facing the wall when someone else had a long speech? 

The script. Who would those children outside have been? 99% of schools stopped caning years (not months, as mentioned in the script) before caning was finally abolished in 1986. These would not even have been the children of those caned, but the grandchildren. I agree with @xanderl above in that the maths do not add up. Also, caning was abolished. Why the fuss? How did the mob even know? (This was addressed

SPOILER: Click to show

with the whole thing about the children going into the attic

but not answered.)

From showing her mother total disdain throughout the play, out of nowhere Anna had a sudden turnabout and invited Maureen over to meet the grandchildren. Why?

The acting was stunning. Nicola Walker was understated and excellent, losing some of the over-thinking she occasionally brings to her TV work. But I feel she was mis-cast and would have loved to have seen a more naturally feisty actress in the role. 

I must mention that the ushers and bar staff were truly lovely. The lighting in the public areas, however, seems to have been modelled on the glum, cheerless Chocolate Factory. As I went into the even gloomier toilet corridor, the two doors I was greeted with did not have the shape of the words I was expecting and I faltered in my step. As I slowly realised I was facing a sign saying 'toilet (cubicles and urinals)' and the man behind me irritably retorted "That's the Men's!" Actually, sir, technically it isn't...

So we didn't like it. The view was badly restricted (not what I'd paid for.)  I really thought I was missing something important on stage right. At the end it felt like we'd been at one of those bewildering physical-theatre 'A' level shows, when everyone has to suddenly nudge granny awake, clap like sealions, grin like Cheshire cats and hide the relief that it's all, mercifully, finally over.

[Deleted]

Dec 31, 2018 16:03:37 GMT Tibidabo said:

Well, this was a giant Xmas pudful of disappointment, despite some stellar acting.

Firstly the set. We absolutely hated it and just didn't get it. Far too much symbolism going on. We were seated near the front, at the end of a row, stage right. I couldn't see the stairs. All I could see were some the rodent-chewed ends. I had no idea if I was missing something and, as there was no interval, was unable to ask anyone else. I had no idea if there was a door or that there was a mirror. We didn't understand which room they were supposed to be in. A hall? (stairs are normally in a hall) A lounge? If so, why only a console table and one dining chair? And why the entrance to the attic? Who sits at a computer in such a place? We really didn't get it.

Agree on the weird layout of the room

You weren't missing anything I think - all there was to see was the ragged ends of some of the stairs, leading to a door halfway up the wall where Alun Armstrong emerged from - presumably this was the study. And yes, how come it was a two storey house with apparently a double height living room which led to the attic.

[Tibidabo]

Dec 31, 2018 16:16:21 GMT @xanderl said:

how come it was a two storey house with apparently a double height living room which led to the attic.

Well, we took this (and what subsequently happened, twice) to show

SPOILER: Click to show

the ceiling caving in on him and his life.

As I said, too much symbolism lol!

Yes, I'd sort of worked out by the end that there was a door somewhere and nothing much else of interest. I thought I could detect a gap between 3 normal stairs and then the dog-chewed ones, but wasn't sure. And I wasn't sure what that would signify if so. 

We could see various cups and glasses of water secreted around the set - presumably for Maggie Steed as she had a bit of a cough. It's a tour de force of a script for all three, especially considering the older two's ages.