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Post by profquatermass on Dec 1, 2016 20:49:51 GMT
Anyone else see Fram? Three hours of polemic in rhyming couplets. Was that the one with the famine-ballet? That was awful. As was the rhyming one with Roger Allam as the German director. |
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 1, 2016 20:52:45 GMT
I don't do a lot of play-going in London so the worst ones I've seen have all been tours at my local theatre. There was a stunningly boring adaptation of The Girl With A Pearl Earring which premiered in Cambridge before moving to the West End whereupon it closed with great rapidity & is no doubt totally forgotten. Of almost equal dullness was an adaptation of The Woman In White which managed to run over 3 hours & felt several times longer. There was an adaptation of Portrait Of A Lady which was told backwards so, never having read the book, I didn't have a flipping clue what was going on. There was one whose title I couldn't remember but a check of my list indicates was called Born In The Gardens which had a corpse in a coffin onstage pretty much the whole show. I could go on. I saw most of these around 2008-ish when I was trying to see a wider variety of plays. More recently I have given up & mostly stick to (Mischief) comedies!
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Post by lynette on Dec 1, 2016 20:53:27 GMT
There were two plays at around the same time that were equally awful, one with Henry Goodman, one with Julie Walters, both had the same plot (kids arguing over who gets to inherit the expensive house). Last of the Rosenbergs & The Holy Haussmans, or possibly the other way round. And as mentioned above, Two Thousand Years, which I seem to remember opening with a character walking on stage carrying a big box of vegetables and saying "Huh! What about that Arab/ Israeli conflict then eh?" I had forgotten Two thousand Years. OMG, blotted from my memory. Truly dire. |
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Post by kathryn on Dec 1, 2016 21:14:05 GMT
Anyone else see Fram? Three hours of polemic in rhyming couplets. Was that the one with the famine-ballet? That was awful. As was the rhyming one with Roger Allam as the German director. Yup. And the dead boys covered in flies. The only good thing about Fram was that by comparison it made Afterlife (the rhyming one with Roger Allan as the German director) seem quite good. It was a lot shorter, for a start.... |
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 1, 2016 21:28:31 GMT
The only good thing about Fram was that by comparison it made Afterlife (the rhyming one with Roger Allan as the German director) seem quite good. It was a lot shorter, for a start.... Length can be relative though. Chekov's Swansong is only about 15 minutes but would still make it into my "Top 10 Occasions I Most Wanted To Leave A Play Early" list! |
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Post by profquatermass on Dec 1, 2016 21:32:12 GMT
I remember that Fram ended with a giant replica of the Fram in a snowy Africa because the world is getting colder. It really was that stupidest, most boring play I've seen about climate change at the National. Despite some extremely strong competition from Greenland.
The Walworth Farce was absolutely terrible and seemed to last 3 hours though I think it was only one act
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Post by bee on Dec 1, 2016 21:57:12 GMT
If we're talking productions, Fiona Shaw's Mother Courage stands out as an absolute turkey that just went on and on for days. She did another stinker about then whose name escapes me - she was a Renaissance painter who found it necessary to work topless as if she was in a 1970s sex comedy The Hour we knew nothing of - seriously, what exactly was the point of that? I kept awake by counting people and vowing not to look at my watch until another 30 had gone past Sounds like "Scenes From an Execution"? I didn't hate that but I'd pretty much forgotten all about it which I suppose is almost as bad. My personal worst would be Holy Warriors at The Globe. |
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Post by littlesally on Dec 1, 2016 22:01:45 GMT
The Cut. Dimetos. Both @ Donmar.
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Post by Phantom of London on Dec 1, 2016 22:53:23 GMT
We Want You To Watch. Thoroughly execrable. Oh Baemax, why did you go and have to bring that up? I thought I had expunged that from my memory and you have to go and bring that up, truly horrific. |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2016 23:45:18 GMT
This is gonna be unpopular, but I hated War Horse. I wanted to shoot myself in the theatre and end that nightmare.
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Post by Jan on Dec 2, 2016 7:09:37 GMT
Mark Ravenhill gets a third vote in this thread (Shopping etc., plus he co-directed the execrable Troilus & Cressida I mentioned). He really is one of the most untalented people around who quite inexplicably is held in high regard by the theatrical establishment, RSC etc. Anyone know why ? |
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Post by addictedtotheatre on Dec 2, 2016 11:45:02 GMT
Mark Ravenhill gets a third vote in this thread (Shopping etc., plus he co-directed the execrable Troilus & Cressida I mentioned). He really is one of the most untalented people around who quite inexplicably is held in high regard by the theatrical establishment, RSC etc. Anyone know why ? Also, remember 'Mother Clap's Molly House'? I still do. Shudder. |
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Post by jason71 on Dec 2, 2016 12:24:09 GMT
Complicit/Old Vic. I remember Richard Dreyfuss being fed his lines for this show. This was a truly awful show
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Post by bordeaux on Dec 2, 2016 12:36:47 GMT
Did no one else see 1953, Craig Raine's version of Racine's Andromaque at the Almeida, perhaps 20 years ago? Great cast, great director, dead play. Enda Walsh's version of Dahl's The Twits last year was also pretty awful.
Of course given that I love or loved some of the suggestion of worst plays ever above (No Man's Land, Grief, Scenes from an Execution - I saw the Glenda Jackson production - it may be that some people love the above.
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Post by Snciole on Dec 2, 2016 13:19:13 GMT
If we're talking productions, Fiona Shaw's Mother Courage stands out as an absolute turkey that just went on and on for days. She did another stinker about then whose name escapes me - she was a Renaissance painter who found it necessary to work topless as if she was in a 1970s sex comedy The Hour we knew nothing of - seriously, what exactly was the point of that? I kept awake by counting people and vowing not to look at my watch until another 30 had gone past One of the ones I walked out of. I just gave no Fs about Shaw's Reanissance mother act. |
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Post by sanddeep on Dec 2, 2016 13:31:27 GMT
Evening at the Talk House
Birdland
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Post by profquatermass on Dec 2, 2016 13:41:15 GMT
How could I forget the Globe's Bacchae? When I saw it, at least 30 people didn't make it to the interval. And that's not counting groundlings
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Post by adrianics on Dec 2, 2016 14:09:08 GMT
The Shawshank Redemption. A dreary and lethargic play, exacerbated by one of the most infuriating and pretentious programmes I've ever read in my life.
If you're going to smugly attempt to distance yourself from one of the most influential, acclaimed and beloved films in history by insisting you'll do a better job of adapting the original short story than the filmmakers did, it would be helpful to not completely rip off several artistic decisions from the film in your adaptation.
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Post by bellboard27 on Dec 2, 2016 15:29:53 GMT
In 2012 Michael Billington produced a list of ten signs that would constitute a 'lousy play'. I thought they were worth repeating here:
1. Any play in which a character aggressively masturbates within two feet of the front row.
2. The moment a child emerges from an upstairs room to describe, in graphic detail, his or her bad dreams.
3. Any site-specific show that seeks to intimidate the spectators by asking them to pose as concentration-camp victims or inmates of an institution to be pursued down darkened corridors by chainsaw-wielding figures.
4. Plays that treat sad divas (Judy Garland, Maria Callas) less as specific examples of showbiz misfortune than as tragic emblems of suffering humanity.
5. Plays that invoke memories of Fred West, Josef Fritzl, the Soham murders or the abduction of Madeleine McCann as an excuse for titillation without offering any compensating psychological illumination.
6. Any revival of a period comedy in which it takes approximately seven-and-a-half minutes to get to the delivery of the author's first line.
7. Productions that start with an ear-splitting burst of pop music to announce their urgent contemporaneity.
8. Plays in which a run-down, travelling circus becomes a metaphor for cultural decay.
9. Family dramas in which parental sexual abuse is saved until the denouement, and produced like a rabbit from a hat, to explain the preceding two-and-a-half hours of unrelenting misery.
10. Any play in which defecation is used to cover up dramatic defects.
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Post by mallardo on Dec 2, 2016 17:18:24 GMT
I think he's making these up. The only one I have ever experienced is number 7.
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Post by bellboard27 on Dec 2, 2016 17:24:17 GMT
I think he's making these up. The only one I have ever experienced is number 7. Maybe he was trying to stop writers before they put pen to paper! |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2016 17:39:45 GMT
To be honest, I've seen some lousy plays where 1 and 10 would have actually pepped things up no end.
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Post by DuchessConstance on Dec 2, 2016 17:49:59 GMT
I've seen far too many of 9.
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Post by lynette on Dec 2, 2016 21:12:25 GMT
3 was used by the Sheen Hamlet and really got my goat and 7 by the Stoppard play about the pop star and was rubbish. So actually quite a good list.
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Post by loureviews on Dec 2, 2016 23:39:24 GMT
Anything with The Agatha Christie Company.
Evening At The Talk House wasn't exactly bad ...
I'd also echo votes for Shopping and Fkg and Fiona Shaw in Mother Courage.
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Post by Dawnstar on Dec 3, 2016 0:15:45 GMT
I can think of a couple of examples of 4, one per singer. By the interval of Over The Rainbow I just wanted Garland to carry out her repeated threat of killing herself & put herself & the audience out of their misery!
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Post by Jan on Dec 3, 2016 10:10:22 GMT
3 was used by the Sheen Hamlet and really got my goat No it wasn't. For a start it wasn't a site specific production. Also, you showed your ticket, found your seat, sat down and watched it. You weren't invited to participate in any way. The route in through the backstage area was optional and taken up by a small minority of the audience and even so no participation or intimidation at all was involved. You might as well say that in the current Donmar productions you are invited to participate as women prisoners, you just aren't , you are in an entirely conventional audience. |
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Post by Cardinal Pirelli on Dec 3, 2016 13:21:51 GMT
If we are sticking to the original idea, plays not productions, then, having gone down memory lane by looking through my list of what I've seen over the years How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel I remember finding dull and simplistic (seen 1998 at the Donmar). Musically nothing beats Paradise Found at the Menier in 2010, which managed to be banal and cheap looking and a complete Hal Prince misfire. Aim high and fail and I'm okay, aim low and the opposite (any Ben Elton play coming into that category).
On Billington's list, 6 and 7 are fine and 8 (Plays in which a run-down, travelling circus becomes a metaphor for cultural decay) has a lot of potential.
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Post by nicnotnicky on Dec 3, 2016 13:36:42 GMT
I know it was mostly loved, but I really couldn't bear Hangmen and didn't make it back after the interval. I appreciate it was set in a period when there was no problem saying things we now consider racist/sexist, but it just really felt to me as if the author was throwing that sort of stuff in excessively just to be daring/jarring/whatever. Yeah, yeah, we get the point, now stop with the gratuitous lines.
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Post by lynette on Dec 3, 2016 18:49:40 GMT
3 was used by the Sheen Hamlet and really got my goat No it wasn't. For a start it wasn't a site specific production. Also, you showed your ticket, found your seat, sat down and watched it. You weren't invited to participate in any way. The route in through the backstage area was optional and taken up by a small minority of the audience and even so no participation or intimidation at all was involved. You might as well say that in the current Donmar productions you are invited to participate as women prisoners, you just aren't , you are in an entirely conventional audience. We had to meet in a place opposite, be shepherded through a narrow corridor with prison type stuff, ask permission to go to the loo beforehand, and yes, we had tix and seat numbers but all in all it was what 3 is suggesting. Maybe you like that kind of thing. |
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