An Actor Convalescing in Devon - Hampstead Downstairs
Apr 10, 2024 22:19:40 GMT
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Post by Steve on Apr 10, 2024 22:19:40 GMT
Saw this tonight and thought it was wonderful.
Some spoilers follow. . .
This is like an amiable one hour ten minute episode of "Talking Heads," where you get insights into acting, aging, memory, Shakespeare, storytelling, the inevitability of change and the importance of love.
This is a one man play featuring Paul Jesson, written especially for Paul Jesson by Richard Nelson, with input by Paul Jesson, such that the fact and fiction blur, and I for one, couldn't tell you where one begins and the other ends.
Both character and actor have had part of their jaw removed to cut out cancer, and have had to convalesce. There are reminiscences about acting in Shakespeare plays, anecdotes about Laurence Olivier and whatnot, that all felt like utterly real, albeit desperately moving and elegaic, chit chat.
I recall Jesson as a brilliant Gloucester opposite Derek Jacobi's Lear at the Donmar, and he was great too as Cardinal Wolsey opposite Ben Miles's Thomas Cromwell in "Wolf Hall." In film, he was affecting opposite Timothy Spall, in "Mr Turner," as the painter's loving, secretly unwell Dad.
Here, after his convalescence, while he may have acquired what sounds like a lisp, it is much more mild than you might imagine, just like anyone who has had a lifelong lisp, and it has had no deteriorative impact on his moment to moment acting, where you feel you can almost touch his thoughts as they emerge as bright and misty-eyed reminiscences.
This play feels like an episode of Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads," though Richard Nelson is less committed to drama than Bennett.
Like Granville-Barker, the lead character in his play "Farewell to the Theatre," which also played at the Hampstead Theatre, Nelson is more interested in creating an involving meaningful theatrical world and immersing us in it, than playing dramatic tricks on us, and in that he very much succeeds.
The collaboration between Nelson and Jesson in creating this play actually feels more like a three-way collaboration, where Shakespeare is a third partner, for Shakespeare's insights and lines inform much of the play, much of which involves Jesson's character recollecting the peculiarities of his beloved partner, Michael.
Having himself played Leontes in "The Winter's Tale," at the Globe, here Jesson's character is impelled to speak the last act lines of Paulina (last heard by me spoken by Judi Dench in Kenneth Branagh's West End production) about how "dear life redeems you," and indeed, there is something very redemptive about this conversational, uneventful but deeply moving production.
4 stars from me.
Some spoilers follow. . .
This is like an amiable one hour ten minute episode of "Talking Heads," where you get insights into acting, aging, memory, Shakespeare, storytelling, the inevitability of change and the importance of love.
This is a one man play featuring Paul Jesson, written especially for Paul Jesson by Richard Nelson, with input by Paul Jesson, such that the fact and fiction blur, and I for one, couldn't tell you where one begins and the other ends.
Both character and actor have had part of their jaw removed to cut out cancer, and have had to convalesce. There are reminiscences about acting in Shakespeare plays, anecdotes about Laurence Olivier and whatnot, that all felt like utterly real, albeit desperately moving and elegaic, chit chat.
I recall Jesson as a brilliant Gloucester opposite Derek Jacobi's Lear at the Donmar, and he was great too as Cardinal Wolsey opposite Ben Miles's Thomas Cromwell in "Wolf Hall." In film, he was affecting opposite Timothy Spall, in "Mr Turner," as the painter's loving, secretly unwell Dad.
Here, after his convalescence, while he may have acquired what sounds like a lisp, it is much more mild than you might imagine, just like anyone who has had a lifelong lisp, and it has had no deteriorative impact on his moment to moment acting, where you feel you can almost touch his thoughts as they emerge as bright and misty-eyed reminiscences.
This play feels like an episode of Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads," though Richard Nelson is less committed to drama than Bennett.
Like Granville-Barker, the lead character in his play "Farewell to the Theatre," which also played at the Hampstead Theatre, Nelson is more interested in creating an involving meaningful theatrical world and immersing us in it, than playing dramatic tricks on us, and in that he very much succeeds.
The collaboration between Nelson and Jesson in creating this play actually feels more like a three-way collaboration, where Shakespeare is a third partner, for Shakespeare's insights and lines inform much of the play, much of which involves Jesson's character recollecting the peculiarities of his beloved partner, Michael.
Having himself played Leontes in "The Winter's Tale," at the Globe, here Jesson's character is impelled to speak the last act lines of Paulina (last heard by me spoken by Judi Dench in Kenneth Branagh's West End production) about how "dear life redeems you," and indeed, there is something very redemptive about this conversational, uneventful but deeply moving production.
4 stars from me.
