By BRUCE DENNILL
The Hollow Crown / Directed by Fred Abrahamse / Hilton Arts Festival: Memorial Hall, Hilton College
A stage set-up that involves nothing more than four chairs, two lecterns and two pedestals with crowns on top of them informs audiences that The Hollow Crown is not a play, but rather a different sort of staged entertainment. Devised by John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company and first performed in 1960, it’s a recital featuring four different readers, separately and collectively sharing letters, writings and speeches from and about British monarchs. These are sourced from diaries and historical records, alongside pieces from Shakespeare and musings of writers including Jane Austen, EM Forster and William Thackeray.
The cast for this South African production includes luminaries Graham Hopkins and Fiona Ramsay alongside Marcel Meyer and Matthew Baldwin – a quartet steeped in Shakespeare and similar performance styles in which simply standing and delivering text can be elevated to an art form. The format initially takes a bit of getting used to as each of the cast read from scripts in their laps, standing and moving to the lecterns for longer speeches or sitting and slinging around quickfire, perfectly timed snippets of dialogue where the script involves either more than one character or a character and a narrator.
The text is supported by images of the kings and queens being spoken about on a large screen behind the actors, further bringing to life the rich, detailed history behind the script. The phrase, “You can’t make this stuff up” applies to many of the readings, though perhaps in the current age, with contemporary leaders, we are less surprised by the effect of individual hubris and entitlement on society at large. There are multiple moments of levity and charm among the more worrying facts, with an assessment of how effective centuries of English royals had been by a young Jane Austen being particularly amusing.
The performances by all four of the cast are excellent as they adopt various accents to give showpiece speeches as well as interacting briskly and confidently in their own voices, giving whip and fizz to the repartee encouraged by both Barton’s script and Fred Abrahamse.
All of the above makes for an unfailingly entertaining canter through antiquity that engenders an appreciation for writing, wit, storytelling, acting and public speaking. Not bad for a show with four chairs for a set…