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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2018 21:34:05 GMT
I do so love Macbeth, remembering Sher and Walter, and more recently the RSC Jonathan Singer version with the children. Going way back Jonathan Pryce was great, but Nicol Williamson was not. And then the legendary Dench/Mckellen was truly thrilling, and the Hopkins/Rigg was good. The worst, and ye gods it was bad, was the royal exchange's concentration camp version with Threlfall and Francis Barber.....horrorific indeed. It was, especially when Ian Mckellen stomped up the aisles, exiting through the audience. I saw it when it transferred to the Young Vic. I was quite young then and I was petrified! And Judi Dench’s stifled scream during the mad scene will never be forgotten... Chilling!
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Post by sf on Mar 4, 2018 23:02:37 GMT
I long for schools or rather the exam boards to set Troilus and Cressida but they won’t because they only did Macbeth at school so they don’t know any other plays. We are stuck into Macbeth for ever when as we know each play comes into its own in an era and this is surely an era for torn allegiances and cynicism. All plays for all time, yes but nuanced. ( same with poetry syllabus, don’t get me started..) The exam board have certainly set Troilus and Cressida before - it was one of my A-Level set texts, although that was quite a long time ago now.
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Post by Steve on Mar 5, 2018 0:05:59 GMT
Saw this Saturday night. This is a perfectly functional Macbeth, with narrative drive, but without a defining concept to make it memorable. Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff don't have sufficient business between each other to give depth to their scenes together, but apart, each give affecting performances, as does former RSC Macbeth, Patrick O'Kane, as a deeply touching Macduff.
Some spoilers follow. . .
Norris is good at giving a play drive, but less so depth. His habit of getting very loud (rave scenes, fight scenes, etc) works extremely well in providing stark contrast for sudden silences, containing dramatic monologues, and moments of thoughtful aftermath. I suspect the enormous spinning ramp, that characters continually run up and down, also reflects Norris' sense that narrative drive, reflected by continuous movement up and down the ramp, is essential to entertaining audiences. Entertaining it is I think, but unedifying.
Unlike the Kinnear-Hytner National collaborations (Big Brother Hamlet, an Othello that demonstrated how Uniforms disguise treachery), there is little beneath the surface. Well, there is the concept that what goes around comes around, treated almost as an afterthought. This is hardly the depth of Ninagawa's elegiac overwhelming Macbeth, in which falling cherry blossoms suggested that everything in everyone's life is but a dream.
I think Norris is much influenced by popular movies, which also often are more sound and fury (Kinnear nails this speech) than soul. For instance, his witches seem like one is out of Ringu (the juddering witch), one is like Pinhead from Hellraiser (stiff and utterly still, unveiled by dissipating mist), and the third has drifted in from a David Lynch dream scene, in slow motion, and using unnatural vocal intonations, that Lynch originally created by recording actors talking backwards and then rewinding the recording. The witches are suitably freaky and frightening, but they are not original creations. Then again, what is?
In answer to a question (above), the rave scene here is indeed reminiscent of "Everyman," but noone snorts a whole tableful of coke here, so it's not a repeat. What is a repeat is the apparent use of bin bags, which here form huge black binbag stalactites from the rafters, that engulf the production. The stalactites reminded me of 80's dystopian BBC tv sci fi.
With Rory Kinnear (in strutting mode), Anne-Marie Duff (wired and tearful), and Patrick O'Kane (heartfelt and tender for his pretty chickens), what you get is an ever dynamic, sometimes disconnected, piece of entertaining sound and fury in the theatre, soon forgotten.
3 and a half stars.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2018 18:52:57 GMT
Don't forget teachers also choose texts where the school already has the books! They're not going to buy a whole new set if they can help it! I was just going to say that... ... I will never forget learning World War 2 history from a 40 year old text book printed on "War Economy" paper (the official stamp was on the front page) in 1947 either... I um... acquired? my school copy of French For Today because it was so awesomely out of date. Monsiour Bertillon travaille. Madame Bertillon s'occupe des enfants. Le chien joue dans le jardin.
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Post by lynette on Mar 5, 2018 19:06:24 GMT
Thanks Steve. I’m thinking a whole bag of jelly babies to get me through this one.
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Post by Tibidabo on Mar 5, 2018 19:21:33 GMT
Don't forget teachers also choose texts where the school already has the books! They're not going to buy a whole new set if they can help it! I was just going to say that... Not sure which schools you are talking about but I wish I'd known about them. We had to buy every single text for both my girls from Year 7 onwards - often twice as each teacher could insist on a different edition. And I'm talking state school. (This also applied to up to date science and language text books from GCSE onwards.)
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2018 19:34:37 GMT
Don't forget teachers also choose texts where the school already has the books! They're not going to buy a whole new set if they can help it! I was just going to say that... Not sure which schools you are talking about but I wish I'd known about them. We had to buy every single text for both my girls from Year 7 onwards - often twice as each teacher could insist on a different edition. And I'm talking state school. (This also applied to up to date science and language text books from GCSE onwards.) Whoa, seriously? I've never heard of that in the UK, either in any of the schools I went to or taught in. I know schools are underfunded, but that's awful!
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Post by Tibidabo on Mar 5, 2018 19:41:01 GMT
Whoa, seriously? I've never heard of that in the UK, either in any of the schools I went to or taught in. I know schools are underfunded, but that's awful! Oh yes! And we couldn't even get them off Ebay or Amazon Marketplace as they always arrived scribbled in annotated. And the horror suffered by those who had a different edition to everyone else and found not only were they on the wrong page for half the lesson, but the Shakespearean language wasn't exactly the same when they had to do the dreaded reading round the class! (Oh yes, they still do that!)
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Post by lynette on Mar 5, 2018 19:45:47 GMT
I weep.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2018 8:40:33 GMT
Whoa, seriously? I've never heard of that in the UK, either in any of the schools I went to or taught in. I know schools are underfunded, but that's awful! Oh yes! And we couldn't even get them off Ebay or Amazon Marketplace as they always arrived scribbled in annotated. And the horror suffered by those who had a different edition to everyone else and found not only were they on the wrong page for half the lesson, but the Shakespearean language wasn't exactly the same when they had to do the dreaded reading round the class! (Oh yes, they still do that!) Yes and yes. I had to buy all my GCSE and A Level books for English/Drama. I still have them and dread opening them to read my notes. In School and mostly through University we had to have specific editions in order to a) have the same page references b) in University feed the meager revenue of the editor who was in our department. When I taught history we didn't ask students to supply textbooks, but mostly because all the schools I worked in produced their own 'resource books' we had a few textbooks for reserves, that were, thankfully Monkey published post-war
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Post by bordeaux on Mar 6, 2018 11:30:53 GMT
I was just going to say that... ... I will never forget learning World War 2 history from a 40 year old text book printed on "War Economy" paper (the official stamp was on the front page) in 1947 either... I um... acquired? my school copy of French For Today because it was so awesomely out of date. Monsiour Bertillon travaille. Madame Bertillon s'occupe des enfants. Le chien joue dans le jardin. Today it would presumably be: Madame Bertillon travaille. Monsieur Bertillon joue dans le jardin. Le chien s'occupe des enfants.
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Post by lynette on Mar 6, 2018 16:52:23 GMT
Do kids learn French these days?
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Post by oxfordsimon on Mar 6, 2018 17:37:17 GMT
Je ne sais pas
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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2018 17:37:23 GMT
Do kids learn French these days? Non.
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Post by oxfordsimon on Mar 6, 2018 17:38:18 GMT
Do kids learn French these days? Non. Shouldn't that be 'le nope'?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2018 17:43:59 GMT
Shouldn't that be 'le nope'?
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Post by bordeaux on Mar 6, 2018 18:47:11 GMT
Do kids learn French these days? No - at least not if the mock A level papers I've just marked are anything to go by...
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Post by lynette on Mar 6, 2018 20:33:16 GMT
Sorry about this digression. Back to Macbeth. I saw a production of Macbeth in German once. I’ve mentioned it before because it was an informative experience. Macbeth practised stabbing on a rubber chicken ( meant to be a real chicken I think ) and the witches hung from the ceiling which I think Rufus has copied from previous comments here. Perhaps he saw the German version too.
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Post by Jan on Mar 7, 2018 7:59:18 GMT
Sorry about this digression. Back to Macbeth. I saw a production of Macbeth in German once. I’ve mentioned it before because it was an informative experience. Macbeth practised stabbing on a rubber chicken ( meant to be a real chicken I think ) and the witches hung from the ceiling which I think Rufus has copied from previous comments here. Perhaps he saw the German version too. In the Doran/Sher one during rehearsals he had the theatre (Swan) in total darkness for the witches' first appearance so the audience could see nothing, and he had their voices broadcast through tiny speakers which were able to move on wires strung out over the heads of the audience, so it seemed like at the start of the scene the witches were in the middle of the stage but then at the end they flew out directly overhead of the audience. But he cut this out of the actual production because it was "too scary". Says something about Doran.
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Post by bacon on Mar 7, 2018 9:38:00 GMT
To refine an earlier poster's assessment of the theme, I *think* they were going for 'Mad Max...goes to Glastonbury!' - which sounds bad enough - but what they actually delivered was more 'Mild Max and friends have a feeble rave near a large ramp outside a bin-bag factory'. Rory Kinnear's usual excellence is fatally undermined here by an ugly, cheap-looking, vomit-flecked mess of a production. Some awful staging - especially the feast scene, which was quite restricted from where I was sat. (How do you have a restricted view in the Olivier?) At the risk of echoing another prominent board member, Norris really does seem to have lost it as a director - his productions used to be so stylish, didn't they? (The ones I've seen certainly were). Oh, and Anne-Marie Duff is a forgettable Lady M - her run of fulsome duds trundles wearily on. There's some really wretched support lurking in there too.
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Post by alexandra on Mar 7, 2018 10:34:41 GMT
"his productions used to be so stylish, didn't they?"
Yes. Peribanez and Afore Night Come at the Young Vic, and Festen at the Almeida, were tremendous.
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Post by tonyloco on Mar 7, 2018 11:50:11 GMT
Call me old-fashioned, but how about the equivalent of a concert version of 'Macbeth' where the actors wear simple but sensibly appropriate costumes and act the text but without any scenic or production distractions, apart from perhaps some subtle lighting. Has this been done recently? Certainly the productions that I have seen in recent years have always gone for over-kill in changes to the setting and such. I would prefer to be given a straight well-acted presentation of what Shakespeare wrote – it's powerful enough as it stands – and do the re-imagining in my own head!
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Post by Cardinal Pirelli on Mar 7, 2018 12:34:49 GMT
Call me old-fashioned, but how about the equivalent of a concert version of 'Macbeth' where the actors wear simple but sensibly appropriate costumes and act the text but without any scenic or production distractions, apart from perhaps some subtle lighting. Has this been done recently? Certainly the productions that I have seen in recent years have always gone for over-kill in changes to the setting and such. I would prefer to be given a straight well-acted presentation of what Shakespeare wrote – it's powerful enough as it stands – and do the re-imagining in my own head! The Doran/Sher version was pretty much like that, all shades of black and murk. Others seemed to like it more than me, I thought it was pretty average and didn't seem to have anything useful to say.
An excellent re-imagining was the Out of Joint African set version, with suggestions of Idi Amin and his links to Scotland, the Goold/Stewart one was also well done.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2018 12:54:27 GMT
Running time
Magically reduced
From 2h 55
To 2h 30 includes interval
Am going to see the whole Thing tonight
😒
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Post by tonyloco on Mar 7, 2018 13:00:59 GMT
An excellent re-imagining was the Out of Joint African set version, with suggestions of Idi Amin and his links to Scotland, the Goold/Stewart one was also well done.
Thanks, Cardinal Pirelli, but I really do not want a re-imagining. Here is what I wrote about the Patrick Stewart version: "I have to say however that Patrick Stewart gave a formidable performance, with lots of big scale ’acting’ that was both realistic and theatrical, and he was very successful with the set pieces. But I thought that the play was over-produced, with too many sound effects and things like electronic echo on the voices, some of which were obviously amplified beyond what should have been necessary. And of course that damned service lift was particularly irritating: ‘Remember to close both doors securely before beginning your journey’, especially during a battle scene! But worse than the over-production was the fact that it was over-directed, with most of the cast hectoring and shouting even when the dramatic situations didn’t need such histrionics. For me, the lowest point in this respect was the completely over-the-top porter scene, which worked perfectly in the Open Air Theatre production in Regent’s Park earlier in the year when it was played in a straightforward way (and got a lot of laughs) but last night just seemed ludicrously affected and did not work as the comic relief after the murder of Duncan that Shakespeare obviously meant it to provide. And although it was a clever idea to present the witches as three nurses, this meant that a lot of what Shakespeare actually wrote had to be glossed over, so for example the brewing of the potion and the recital of the ingredients that went into the cauldron (alas, no cauldron and no brew last night) was done as a rap in which the words were all but unintelligible. And bringing three dead bodies in bodybags to life didn’t quite seem to be what Shakespeare had in mind for the apparition scene!" Sorry that this is getting away from the current NT production, but I am just suggesting that I would like to see a well-acted but straightforward version of the basic play.
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Post by crowblack on Mar 7, 2018 13:01:12 GMT
I um... acquired? my school copy of French For Today because it was so awesomely out of date. I wish I'd nicked my A la Page - it had illustrations by Sempe, who I love. We must have had to buy some books - primary texts for O and A level English and Drama, certainly, because mine are heavily embellished (Jane Austen covers got zombiefied with black biro long before that movie - Regency ladies with gaping jaws and gore-spattered muslin).
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2018 13:37:20 GMT
Call me old-fashioned, but how about the equivalent of a concert version of 'Macbeth' where the actors wear simple but sensibly appropriate costumes and act the text but without any scenic or production distractions, apart from perhaps some subtle lighting. Has this been done recently? Certainly the productions that I have seen in recent years have always gone for over-kill in changes to the setting and such. I would prefer to be given a straight well-acted presentation of what Shakespeare wrote – it's powerful enough as it stands – and do the re-imagining in my own head! I think that would be called a reading not a theatre production! All productions involve making choices about what you think the play is saying, what the characters are, want, feel, mean, etc, and then how you want to present it as a coherent narrative. For eg, you say 'just some subtle lighting' - but what lighting? What mood are you trying to convey? Because it's hard to do something that won't have any meaning or effect. There's no such thing as just presenting the play.
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Post by nash16 on Mar 7, 2018 13:39:12 GMT
Running time Magically reduced From 2h 55 To 2h 30 includes interval Am going to see the whole Thing tonight 😒 Reduced just in time for Press Night. Please let us know the actual running time once you've seen it. The National have a tendency to stating imaginary running times for their less great (and long) productions to lure us in!
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Post by bob2010 on Mar 7, 2018 13:55:05 GMT
Press Reviews are out tomorrow morning
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Post by nash16 on Mar 7, 2018 14:12:16 GMT
Press Reviews are out tomorrow morning #prayforrufus #prayforthekidswhollhavetowatchthiswhenittours
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