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Screen To Stage: The Hobbit Stars
Posted on Friday September 5, 2014, 17:55 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States
Screen To Stage: The Hobbit Stars
Usually when I've written these Screen To Stage blogs, I've been trying to compare a film to its stage adaptation. This time, I'm doing something a little different. This summer sees Martin Freeman play Richard III at the Trafalgar Studios, and Richard Armitage star in The Crucible at the Old Vic. So how did the Hobbit stars fare in their roles, and compared to one another?
First, Richard III and Martin Freeman. The Trafalgar Studios are fast becoming a hot ticket in London theatre: it was very nearly impossible to get a seat to see James McAvoy as Macbeth last year and this show has been selling about as fast. And that's with good reason: Freeman brings out the black comedy of the play, the pride in his own cleverness that Shakespeare's Richard shows as he nimbly outwits everyone about him. There's an impishness in those early scenes that's comfortably within Freeman's wheelhouse, but he never relies purely on his charm and makes no bones that Richard is a twisted bastard in more ways than the physical. His clipped delivery - he spits rather than declaiming speeches - impeccable dress and carefully oiled hair show a man in control of himself and everyone around him, but his self-control unravels when his psychopathic tendencies are no longer restrained by circumstance, and soon there is open rebellion against him. Freeman, in other words, shows once again why he's held in exceptionally high regard by anyone he's worked with: his range of emotion here is simply huge even without ever dipping into guilt, responsibility or empathy for anyone but himself.
The story, for those of you who skipped history class (for shame!) sees the hunchbacked younger brother of King Edward IV conspire to take the throne and dismantle all his brother's allies in the process, only to come a cropper himself when a noble young Tudor appears to oppose him (not coincidentally, the grandaddy of the monarch under whom Shakespeare was writing). In years gone by, Richard III was often played as a pretty thorough villain, and while he's still thoroughly bad - wooing a woman over the dead body of the father he killed; murder; child murder; mass murder - he now feels barely worse than the sort of anti-hero we're accustomed to. After watching Game Of Thrones or House Of Cards (Spacey too played Richard III in London recently), the War of the Roses feels pretty standard.
The setting is evocative but it isn't the most flexible - a 1970s office building gives the right sense of dreariness but relatively little space with which to work - but performance wise everyone's giving it all they have in a (rather abridged) story that races along towards a bitter finale.
Richard Armitage in The Crucible
Across town, Richard Armitage - who was actually named after Richard III, fact fans - is John Proctor in Arthur Miller's most likeable play (c'mon: witches, Puritans, McCarthyism and hypocrisy, what's not to love?). His production is probably a better fit for the play than Freeman's Richard: the stage is large but sparsely furnished, but still manages to feel as claustrophobic as the Trafalgar's as the forces of superstition and fanaticism close in. The story of the Salem Witch Trials chronicles a literal witch-hunt, fuelled by religious fanaticism and old grudges, that tears a town apart and threatens mainly the best of its citizens. There are almost no laughs here: Armitage is tense and guilty from the off, swaying to anger and desperation but never much to levity. It's probably understandable, with teenagers holding the reins of power and Proctor dead in their sights.
Perhaps surprisingly, this is the longer of the two, but that's just all the more time to tighten the screws on the audience and pile on more weight. Armitage, looking a bit like Hugh Jackman at the beginning of Les Miserables, roars about the stage but is gradually reduced to a shadow of himself. But as this big man is boiled down to his essence, he finds a purity in himself that he didn't know was there in a climax that remains moving and surprisingly powerful. It's that character development that was the biggest contrast between the two; Richard III finds the depths of which he is capable as the restraints on his behaviour are relaxed, while John Proctor only comes to trust himself when he's put under pressure.
To be honest, as the Hobbit stars go it's pretty much a draw; they both excelled in very different productions. I'd love to say one was far superior, but the sad fact is that that Peter Jackson guy knew what he was doing when he cast those two. All that this summer has shown is that Freeman can also kick ass as a Shakespearean villain, as if anyone ever doubted it, while Armitage can knock a complicated leading man role out of the park even without a fake nose and a giant beard.
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Ein Bericht, in dem Thorin nicht vorkommt. 
Der Hauptblick liegt auf Bilbo, 
Arianna
