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    Review: ‘Being Mr. Wickham’ Tracks a Rake’s Progress

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    In this “Pride and Prejudice” spinoff from Original Theatre, Jane Austen’s infamous knave attempts to set the record straight.It is a truth universally acknowledged that the human body is continually renewing itself. Billions of cells are replaced every day; by some accounts, after 100 days, enough cells will have turned over to generate an entirely new person. After 30 years: You do the math.For George Wickham, the infamous knave of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” 30 years has furnished ample opportunity to live plenty of lives. Or so “Being Mr. Wickham,” a tart monodrama written by Adrian Lukis and Catherine Curzon, would have us believe. Lukis, who played Wickham in the 1995 BBC TV adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” plays him again in this hourlong Original Theater production, not so much reprising his role as a slinky hedonist as delicately prying it from Austen’s fingers.We meet Wickham on his 60th birthday, in a more pensive mood than when readers left him. Gone are his good looks — a hall pass to caddishness in a previous life. He is still married to Lydia, the most jejune of the Bennet sisters, but he has outlived Lord Byron (his hero and patron saint of bad boys), the Regency London courtesan Harriette Wilson (a former flame), and Mrs. Bennet, or “Mrs. B,” as he fondly remembers her. More devastatingly, he finds himself sentenced to live past the Georgian era into the frowzy Victorian age, which could not suit him less, with its “sanctimonious” attitudes and “piety,” as he disdainfully proclaims.Wickham, who has been working on a memoir called “My Scandalous Life,” takes us on a romp beginning with his halcyon youth at Pemberley, the palatial estate where he was raised to be the equal of its young master, Fitzwilliam Darcy. “Darcy might have had rank and position, but I had something else: charm.”So far, so Austen. But this is a tale told by Wickham, and it doesn’t take long for his account to diverge from the novel. Of his early acquaintance with Lydia, for instance, Wickham flatters himself that it was from a spasm of “reckless good will” that he “persuaded her to take off with me, to throw her lot in with mine.” If you believe his chivalrous account, I have an estate to sell you.As Wickham decants his memories, Libby Watson’s versatile set whisks us from a study in Pemberley, where a young Wickham and Fitzwilliam engage in some illicit drinking, to the office of a sinister and abusive headmaster, where Wickham first develops a taste for revenge. Lukis’s portrayal of the head of Doctor Hitchen’s Academy for Young Gentlemen, among other minor characters, is especially haunting, summoning, with an economy of words, a villain worthy of Dickens and making us see how some acts of depravity get tattooed on a developing brain.For all its jagged descents into darkness, “Being Mr. Wickham” ends somewhat improbably on a note of storybook tranquillity: with Darcy and Wickham reconciled, like “two blazing furnaces that in time have lost their heat.” Austen famously characterized “Pride and Prejudice” as “rather too light & bright & sparkling.” The description perhaps underrates her novel, but is a fitting epigraph for this play and its decorously debauched protagonist.Being Mr. WickhamThrough June 11 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Persuasion’ Review: The Present Intrudes Into the Past

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      Dakota Johnson smirks her way through a Netflix adaptation of the rekindled romance in Jane Austen’s last novel, our critic writes.The great irony of this new, not-quite-modernized adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, “Persuasion,” is that it communicates its tense relationship to its 19th-century source material in a repressed, passive-aggressive manner — an approach oddly suited to Austen’s trenchant view of society. The film doesn’t take the creative leap to transpose the beloved story in the present day. Instead, in curiously excruciating fashion, the director, screenwriters, and star imply their discomfort with Georgian-era social norms from within the novel’s period setting.Both the film and the novel begin in the early 1800s, as the story’s heroine, Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson), visits her sister Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce) in the English countryside, after their father squandered the family savings. Anne is an unmarried woman who is fortunate to be respected — or, at least, perceived as useful — by her blue-blooded relations. But in direct addresses to the camera, Anne admits that she is haunted by the memory of a love affair she was persuaded to end with an enterprising but fortuneless sailor, Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis).Now Anne is alone, and her regrets only grow when Wentworth returns to the country as a wealthy naval captain. He’s eager to find a wife, and if his sights are first set on Anne’s lively sister-in-law Louisa (Nia Towle), his attention always seems to wander back to Anne.For this story of rekindled romance, the film summons the handsome appointments expected for a big-budget period drama. There are extravagant mansions, brocaded costumes and magnificent vistas. But there is a crisis of contemporaneity at the heart of this pretty adaptation, and the trouble begins with its presentation of its heroine.Johnson, wearing smoky eye shadow and pink lipstick, displays the confident appeal of a celebrity sharing her secrets with the audience. Her smile reads as a smirk. The incongruous bravado of her performance is mirrored by the film’s script, written by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, which peppers lines from the novel with meme-ish truisms like, “Now we are worse than exes. We’re friends.”The contrast between the modernized dialogue and Austen’s period-appropriate language only makes both styles seem more mannered. The story’s heroine, its dialogue and even its themes of regret and loneliness seem to be swallowed up by the need to maintain an appearance of contemporary cheek.For fans of Austen’s novel, it’s hard to imagine the director Carrie Cracknell’s version providing a sense of ease or escapism. Instead, the unbearable tension between past and present serves as a disarmingly naked window into the anxieties of current Hollywood filmmaking. Better to have the whole movie be a skeptical, uncertain affair than to risk presenting a pre-feminist heroine who lacks confidence.PersuasionRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Theater

      Tomfoolery With the Classics? Play It Straight, Please.

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      Two London productions that play fast and loose with their literary sources lack the theatrical magic of another show that gives viewers the original, unadorned.LONDON — If you’re going to revisit a classic novel by a woman, you should probably give that task to women. That’s the conceit behind “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of),” a play that’s now at the Criterion Theater here for an open-ended run. The production, a success at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018, will most likely appeal to those with no time to actually read Jane Austen: Let the five gifted performers of the all-female cast relay the novel in their own larky, irrepressible way.The parenthetical in the title sets the cheeky tone. Written by Isobel McArthur “after Jane Austen,” as the playbill puts it, the show gives us all the time-honored characters, from the self-dramatizing Mrs. Bennet to her five matrimonially challenged daughters. Nor are the men excluded: McArthur, the author, doing triple duty as the play’s co-director (with Simon Harvey) and as one of the hard-working cast, drops her voice as required to play Fitzwilliam Darcy, the book’s abiding heartthrob.Putting a contemporary spin on a Regency-era tale, the play co-opts music to make a point: Barely has the bride-to-be, Elizabeth Bennet (a gleaming-eyed Meghan Tyler), fallen under the sway of Mr. Darcy before she launches into the Carly Simon standard “You’re So Vain.” In the let’s-try-everything spirit of the venture, the cast members also play musical instruments, and there’s a reference to “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is playing around the corner, in an opening sight gag involving a falling chandelier.The intention is to play fast and loose with the source while honoring its spirit, which for the most part succeeds. Mr. Darcy’s eventual confession of his desire for Elizabeth is accompanied by the swelling sounds of the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.” The overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Christina Gordon) enters to the music of the sound-alike Chris de Burgh, and we hear expletives that would surely have made Austen herself blush.The all-female cast brings a party vibe to Jane Austen’s iconic love story.Matt CrockettI wish more had been made of the suggestion at the outset that we will be viewing these characters from the perspective of the servants, whose employment enables the Bennets’s leisurely lives. At the beginning, the performer Hannah Jarrett-Scott galumphs about in Doc Martens, busy with her cleaning chores and not quite ready for the show to begin. (“We haven’t started yet,” she exclaims.)But any sort of class commentary soon disappears. This is “Pride and Prejudice” with a party vibe. “Are you having a good time?” we’re asked late on, to which the audience members at a recent matinee responded at the curtain call by leaping to their feet.Playfulness with a resilient source also informs “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a play by Christopher Durang that draws three of its title characters from Chekhov. A hit on Broadway, where it won the 2013 Tony for Best Play, the comedy is at the Charing Cross Theater through Jan. 8. The production, originally scheduled just as the pandemic took hold, is directed by Walter Bobbie, whose Broadway staging of “Chicago” recently marked its 25th anniversary.In Durang’s telling, Vanya and Sonia are no longer the uncle and niece of Chekhovian renown. Instead, they are siblings sharing discontented lives in rural Pennsylvania while their more glamorous sister Masha (Janie Dee), an actress, is off gathering toy boys like Spike (Charlie Maher).The cast of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” from left: Charlie Maher, Rebecca Lacey, Lukwesa Mwamba, Janie Dee and Michael Maloney.Marc Brenner The first half consists largely of extended chat about what costumes this trio should wear to a party: The spinsterish Sonia (Rebecca Lacey) isn’t sure whether to go as Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich, though we soon discover that she can do a spot-on vocal impersonation of Maggie Smith. The tone darkens, somewhat, after the intermission, with a series of monologues in which, as in “Uncle Vanya,” the characters address their psychic turmoil. “I’m worried about the future, and I miss the past,” says this play’s Vanya (a morose Michael Maloney), who turns out to be gay and is given to adoring the toned Spike in various states of undress.Dee’s feisty Masha has been married five times but isn’t beyond fretting about an outfit that doesn’t go down well with the locals: At such moments, the play lapses into the comparatively cheesy realm of sitcom (a genre unknown to Chekhov). Additional characters include Nina (Lukwesa Mwamba), the name referencing someone from another Chekhov play, “The Seagull,” and an emphatic seer named — you got it — Cassandra (Sara Powell). The literary forebears may be there, but the play doesn’t so much pay tribute to Chekhov as leave you pining for his wit and wisdom.After two shows that riff on (and in the case of the Durang, sometimes cheapen) an illustrious source or two, along comes Ralph Fiennes to give us the real thing, unadorned and unedited. The protean actor, rarely long absent from the stage, is directing himself in a theatrical performance of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” at the Harold Pinter Theater through Dec. 18. The production, lasting 75 minutes with no intermission, represents a decidedly highbrow alternative to the japery on view nearby.Ralph Fiennes in T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”Matt HumphreyEliot’s masterwork was written in four parts while the poet was also evolving as a playwright, and Fiennes treats this writer’s often abstruse language as the stuff of drama, as potent in its way as the Shakespeare texts to which this actor regularly returns. I doubt I’m alone in not knowing what Eliot meant by the words “deliberate hebetude” from “East Coker,” the second of the quartets. But there’s no denying the mesmeric spell of a performer who can make even the opaque sound immediate. (I looked it up later: “Hebetude” means lethargy, or dullness.)Appearing barefoot, pausing to sip water or move the gray slabs that make up the designer Hildegard Bechtler’s elegantly austere set, the actor guides us through Eliot’s extended meditation on consciousness and hope, exploration and loss. Fiennes commits himself physically to an agile performance in which his body often writhes in response to Eliot’s images. And at a time when other London stages are filtering great work through a revisionist lens, here is the thing itself, ceaselessly and restlessly alive.Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). Directed by Isobel McArthur and Simon Harvey. Criterion Theater, open-ended run.Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Directed by Walter Bobbie. Charing Cross Theater, through Jan. 8.Four Quartets. Directed by Ralph Fiennes. Harold Pinter Theater, through Dec. 18. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘United Shades of America’ and a Presidential Address

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      W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series returns with an episode on policing. And President Biden addresses a joint session of Congress.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 26-May 2. Details and times are subject to change.MondaySESAME STREET: 50 YEARS OF SUNNY DAYS 8 p.m. on ABC. This two-hour special looks at the ways in which “Sesame Street” has addressed social issues over the decades, centering the show’s recent efforts to diversify its lineup of muppets. Guests in the special include Gloria Estefan, Whoopi Goldberg, Lucy Liu and John Legend; the program would make a natural double feature paired with “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street,” a recent feature-length documentary that looks at the making of the show.TuesdayTANGLED (2010) 6 p.m. on Freeform. Rapunzel got revamped in this Disney adaptation, which updates the look and pacing of that princess tale, and adds music. The result is a “lavish, romantic musical fairy tale,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, adding that the film “has a story that takes some liberties with the genre; a nimble, kinetic visual style; and a willingness to marry complex psychology with storybook simplicity.”WednesdayPresident Biden speaking to the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate on April 23.Evan Vucci/Associated PressPRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS 9 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC and other networks (check local listings). President Biden will address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, in keeping with the tradition of presidents to give such addresses, rather than an official State of the Union, in their inauguration year. The speech may address climate change and racial justice initiatives — particularly given that Biden will be speaking less than a week after he vowed that the United States would cut its global warming emissions at least in half by the end of the decade, and just over a week after the former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis.EMMA (2020) 5:20 p.m. on HBO Signature. Anya Taylor-Joy was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as the “handsome, clever and rich” title character in this latest movie adaptation of the Jane Austen novel “Emma.” The story, about romantic entanglements among members of the upper class in the Georgian-era English countryside, is given a candy coating here by the director Autumn de Wilde, whose carefully-crafted, striking color palette may bring to mind another filmmaking confectioner. “It initially seems that de Wilde has adapted the material using Wes Anderson software,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. But, Dargis, added, “after a while, the Anderson-ish tics become less noticeable, and both the emotions and overall movie more persuasive. Much of this has to do with the pleasure of watching people fall on their faces — and in love — and with the suppleness of the largely note-perfect cast.”ThursdayA scene from “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”Sony Pictures AnimationSPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018) 8 p.m. on FX. Spider-Man took his best-received swing through New York in years with “Into the Spider-Verse,” an animated action movie that reimagines the web-spewing hero as Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn middle schooler who learns that he’s one of many Spider-Man heroes from different dimensions. A.O. Scott called the movie “fresh and exhilarating” in his review for The Times. “The story,” Scott wrote, “is clever and just complicated enough, moving quickly through silly bits, pausing for moments of heart-tugging sentiment, and losing itself in wild creative mischief.”FridayINTERNATIONAL JAZZ DAY 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This year’s International Jazz Day All-Star Global Concert, with Herbie Hancock, Andra Day and many others, will be broadcast online in a livestream on YouTube and other sites beginning at 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday. On TV, PBS will air this compilation of archival performances from International Jazz Day concerts from the past decade. Selections include performances by Hancock, Wynton Marsalis, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox and Hugh Masekela.SaturdayJohn David Washington, left, and Robert Pattinson in “Tenet.”Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros.TENET (2020) 8 p.m. on HBO. Christopher Nolan’s latest sci-fi brain tickler was technically released in theaters late last summer, but most people didn’t take the pandemic-era risk involved in watching it — so Saturday’s HBO release should stoke fresh discussion among new audiences about what the labyrinthine, time-bending plot is actually about. The film stars John David Washington as a C.I.A. agent tasked with taking down a villainous businessman, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Doing so requires working with an ally played by Robert Pattinson and Sator’s younger wife (Elizabeth Debicki), an art dealer who is undervalued by her husband. Washington’s character, Jessica Kiang wrote in her review for The Times, is “basically James Bond, forward and backward, a kind of 00700, right down to the occasional wry one-liner.” The movie itself, Kiang added, “is undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess.”INSPIRING AMERICA: THE 2021 INSPIRATION LIST 8 p.m. on NBC and Telemundo. The NBC anchors Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb will host the first edition of this new annual event, which recognizes influential people who have used their platforms in positive ways. This year’s honorees include Bubba Wallace, José Andrés and Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, who are slated to be interviewed during Saturday night’s broadcast.SundayUNITED SHADES OF AMERICA 10 p.m. on CNN. The comedian W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series returns for a sixth season on Sunday night, with a timely episode about the history of policing in America. Bell, who was born in the Bay Area, focuses on Oakland, Calif., and the surrounding area, speaking with politicians, organizers and members of law enforcement about the state of policing in the country.THE APU TRILOGY (1955-1959) 8 p.m. on TCM. The Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s much-acclaimed trilogy about a Bengali boy becoming a man — Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959) — are best viewed together. TCM is showing them back-to-back on Sunday night, starting at 8 p.m. (All three films are also available to stream on the Criterion Channel, for those who don’t want to stay up late to catch “The World of Apu.”) More