The Corn is Green - National - Lyttelton

Dominic Cooke is one of my favourite directors, and lifts this dated on-the-nose play by his staging, and by casting Nicola Walker, who is always worthwhile. For me, a four star production of a three star play. . .

Some spoilers follow. . .

As far as inspirational teachers go, I think movies like Dead Poets Society or Dangerous Minds, or even To Sir With Love, go a lot further dramatically in developing the characters of the pupils and teachers and the relationships between them. Here the pupils are massively underdeveloped as characters, and plot developments, which are the primary driver, are archaic and dated.

That said, the milieu is the strength of the play, and Dominic Cooke, who directed the National's spectacular Follies, takes inspiration from that show's strengths, and gets in lots of Welsh mining singing choruses, as well as the dramatic device of having the main character exist in two different timelines at once, by having the character of Emlyn Williams on stage, reading the stage directions, witnessing and staging his own story.

I was reminded of how effective this same device was in the Young Vic's "The Inheritance," with Paul Hilton's terrific E. M. Forster, guiding us through his story, but this is a pale imitation of that, as the character of Emlyn Williams is, for the most part, limited to Williams's own stage directions, rather than being fully characterised.

How Iwan Davies's dashing charming extroverted Morgan Evans (the playwrights alter-ego) becomes the introspective haunted Gareth David-Lloyd was an anathema to me for almost the entire running time, but the plot developments satisfactorily resolve this question, and this resolution is part of Cooke's crafty and successful imagining.

This is the least interesting play I have seen Nicola Walker do, as "Seasons Greetings" was better plotted, "Curious Incident" better characterised, "Di and Viv and Rose" better plotted and better characterised, and "A View from the Bridge" was an all round tour-de-force masterpiece in every way. But you really appreciate an actor when they have less to work with, and Walker brings a welcome mischief to the by-the-numbers set-up, and when she finally gets some worthwhile meaty scenes, especially with Iwan Davies (who is terrific) in the latter half of the play, they both really shine.

I feel there are better plays about teachers (not least "The History Boys, "The Browning Version," "South Downs" and "Quartermaine's Terms") but if you want to see a solid but dated play about an inspirational teacher superbly done, Dominic Cooke and Nicola Walker are hands that can be trusted to make a good night of it.

3 and a half stars from me for some solid old fashioned entertainment.

Thanks jojo. My own personal favourite audio description moment was during an episode of Doctors. I must have sat on the remote as I had no idea I had turned on the relevant button. It took me a good ten minutes to realise that it wasn't one of those episodes of Doctors when they had let the work experience student/young graduate director loose. I mean they've had some weird episodes over the years (I'm not an everyday viewer but used to catch it often enough to recognise the characters). There have been flashbacks, episodes in black and white - all the sorts of things you'd reckon could be comfortably tried out when not too many people (or at least people who could be reckoned not to count - housewives like me, for example) were watching. I really did think it was just the TV production crew being a bit kooky. I was quite disappointed when I realised it was all down to me.

Yes it really is good news that The Corn Is Green is proving to be a winner. Apart from anything else I want to see all those young people they employ front of house not having to deal with fed up customers who feel they've been short changed by a production, or watching the mass exodus at the interval (I felt really guilty collecting my coat half way through George and The Dragon, for example!)

Hello, Looking forward to seeing this soon.
I hear the front row has some restriction in this production and some seats have been removed from the seating plan.

Has anyone sat in the front row? It's usually great value but does the stage design might make it less comfortable?
Thanks!

I didn’t love this as much as I imagined but I still enjoyed it as a nice Friday night after work treat. Nicola Walker is on fire as already mentioned and great to see such a strong Welsh cast on the NT stage. I can’t help but feel the set could’ve been more imaginative though and the characters could’ve been explored more vividly. The story is easy to follow though and the sound of the singing was gorgeous

This seems to be standard fare these days : a director who wants to be noticed adds a 'framing device' . All the reviews talk about that - so the director- not the play, or the cast-  are central to the critical response. Under Milk Wood at the same theatre suffered the same fate. Just do the play!

Saw it this afternoon and really enjoyed. Yes the framing devices is laboured a bit but it does work for the most part. National Theatre back doing what it does best.

The old chestnuts debate is interesting, I think there needs to be a balance between the revivals of classics and new plays because how can theatre thrive and evolve if we just stick to tried and tested.

I really didn't enjoy the 'framing' last night, it just distracted and annoyed me.

However the covers were excellent. Seriously I hardly noticed that they were reading at all. Well acted.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane was a smash hit and that was a new play so it's not true that all new plays at the National are duds. It can't just be revivals that they stage.

I really enjoyed this at the Saturday matinee, despite a one hour show stop and being booted out of the theatre. I thought this was a bit mishandled by the Nash, I couldn't see what was going on but from the stalls I could clearly hear commotion from the circle for about 15 minutes before the stage manager walked on mid-scene and halted the play. If there's a medical issue in the middle of the audience, don't try and soldier on for quarter of an hour, just pause the play, it was very distracting for the audience and presumably quite distressing for the front of house staff and even the paramedics who arrived before the show had been stopped. When we were being turfed out for an impromptu interval another patron felt very unwell and also had an ambulance phoned for her. Two casualties in the space of half an hour.

I really took exception to a pair of gentlemen in their 50s having a go at an usher for the fact that after we'd eventually finished the first act, we were daring to have an interval instead of just soldiering through into the latter half of the play. I get that being 45 minutes delayed may impact a pre-booked train or dinner reservation, but you're old enough to firstly know that during the interval usually a lot of stuff happens (in this case, an entire house being built on stage) with the crew and actors that can't simply be skipped, and also that bitterly complaining to a young lady about a medical delay is fruitless and mean. Go to the box office if you can't stay for act 2, get your money back or another date, and move on.

Anyway. It's a great play I loved it, especially the Welsh choir. I didn't hate the new changes but they were a bit intrusive and needed to be toned down in the first 2 scenes. I have a question for the esteemed community here though, what was the idea in the framing device petering out as the play progresses? We went from a black box set, to a set where you can see behind the scenes, to a properly framed and realistic theatrical set piece, all the while getting less and less of the read-out stage directions. Is this Davies coming to terms with his memories, is it him building more artifice and unreality to his past as he goes on? I wasn't sure.

I'd been reading about Emlyn Williams beforehand, and that he had a breakdown while at Oxford and started writing as (what we'd now call) therapy. So I saw the framing device in terms of EW's development as a writer and mental recovery of sorts.

At the start when the EW character runs out of the party in his dinner suit, presumably at Oxford, he is very distressed, and has the male voice choir inhabiting his head, like he's struggling to reconcile those two aspects of himself - intellectual Oxford man and working class Welsh boy. When the main play starts it is transparently artificial - no props, no scenery, actors often looking a baffled by what they are being told to do, EW often stopping and changing or re-starting the play, and his contributions get more intrusive for a while.

To me the arc of the EW character effected the changes to the play (the addition of props, not reading out the stage directions, a realistic set). It gradually becomes more seamlessly fictional rather than a work-in-progress exercise in autobiography and learning to write, so EW as a character becomes less intrusive, because it's no longer 'just' his own story/therapy.

Having said that, I did find the stage directions really intrusive and annoying after about half an hour!

We were there this evening. Our usual A £20 seats were moved a row back by phone call about half nine this morning. A bit late in the day and annoying as I didn't realise the front row was still in place and I'm too tall for B to be comfortable, I would have said no and asked for a different option had I realised.

Other than that, it was fine. I think I'm in the minority in that I liked the framing device, I like it even more reading cavocado's post above about therapy etc. I'd also agree with comments further back about Nicola Walker often feeling like she was in a different play, felt like she didn't get much to do other than be stern and then stern some more.

Very full this evening so at least it is doing well for the NT.