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Post by Jan on Mar 18, 2018 9:31:48 GMT
Finally got to it this afternoon. Lovely, well-behaved audience. Loved the set and staging, did get a very strong feeling Pinter was talking about the hold religion has on people most of the time. Mangan, I'm afraid, I had a problem with. I don't know if it was him, the movement or dialect coach, but I'm afraid he made a total hash of being Jewish. He couldn't pronounce words familiar to all Jews, and his rhythm and body movement were utterly, utterly wrong. Don't know if it was his fault or one of the team, and I refuse to apportion blame, but I'm afraid it did rather wreck the play for me. One possible blooper, if anyone can help? Act Two Goldberg sits on a chair and invites Lulu to sit on his knee. This afternoon, he tells her after a moment, to "please assist me by sitting on the table for a moment." She seemed surprised to be asked, and he then played with her leg and she did a line about being tickled. I got the idea something went wrong and they were covering? Or is it how it is always? Could Mangan's mispronunciation be a typical bit of Pinter's misdirection? I thought one of his trairs was you can't trust the characters, what they say, what is real etc? Goldberg says he's Jewish but his mannerisms say his isn't? And Lulu on the table happened when I was there too. I saw a review of this in the Jewish press which noted that Pinter had written the character to be an exaggerated parody of a type of Jewish person - they were not bothered by Mangan’s performance, it was not meant to be naturalistic
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Post by Jan on Mar 19, 2018 12:33:19 GMT
Thanks on both. It was just that the audience was laughing so much that I thought I'd missed something there. OK on the non-naturalistic, but even in parody I'm not sure he'd get the actual pronunciation wrong. The mis-direction that he isn't actually Jewish, now that I would buy, that's really interesting, firefingers . Hard to say on the pronunciation - Zoe Wanamaker is Jewish of course so if it was not intended I might have expected him to have asked and her to have corrected him during rehearsals.
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Post by Jan on Mar 19, 2018 15:21:00 GMT
Good point, she would have said something for sure. It was the way he was treating them as such obviously alien words and the whole rhythm was off. If he was in parody, he'd heighten, perhaps, but not actually mis-time? Faking, though, he'd get it wrong in the way he did, I'd feel. Supporting your view is the fact Pinter confirmed he’d made those two characters Jewish and Irish as representatives of historically persecuted minorities who had had to assimilate to life in UK. So there is no doubt the character IS Jewish.
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Post by lynette on Mar 19, 2018 16:24:50 GMT
What were the words mispronounced?
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Post by lynette on Mar 19, 2018 19:46:57 GMT
I don’t think Pinter used it, but it usually 'chutzpah' that is mispronounced. Ironic really. I don’t see what you can do wrong with 'Gefilte fish' 😳
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Post by popcultureboy on Mar 19, 2018 22:47:53 GMT
Thanks on both. It was just that the audience was laughing so much that I thought I'd missed something there. What you missed was he asks her to get off his knee because her sitting on his lap has got him, well, over excited. When she moves to sit on the table, Mangan adjusts himself as if he's covering a certain tumescence in the groin region....
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Post by david on Apr 4, 2018 22:32:01 GMT
Saw this tonight via day-seating. For £15 not a bad view from the front row A17. Great ensemble piece with no real weak links and some really great comedy which is ultimately a very dark piece of drama.
Of the two Pinter productions to have graced the WE In the last 12 months, I actually got more out of this than No Mans Land as I felt the plot was easier to follow, though with NML I got a greater satisfaction seeing Stewart and McKellan at work with their verbal sparing rather than trying to understand what was happening. Even now I couldn’t explain to people who ask what the play was about!
What was interesting was listening to people’s comments about the piece of drama we had just watched. Comments ranged from really good to those who where left completely baffled by what they saw. Though overall, I suppose maybe that’s the whole point, everybody will take away something different, and draw their own conclusions about what the piece was about. At times I think that what makes a piece of good drama. It can be too easy to put a piece of drama on stage or tv and give you all the answers, whereas in the case of Pinter he makes you work as an audience member to try and make you think about the subject material and gets you to work just as hard as the actors performing the work.
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Post by Jan on Apr 5, 2018 8:28:39 GMT
Saw this tonight via day-seating. For £15 not a bad view from the front row A17. Great ensemble piece with no real weak links and some really great comedy which is ultimately a very dark piece of drama. Of the two Pinter productions to have graced the WE In the last 12 months, I actually got more out of this than No Mans Land as I felt the plot was easier to follow, though with NML I got a greater satisfaction seeing Stewart and McKellan at work with their verbal sparing rather than trying to understand what was happening. Even now I couldn’t explain to people who ask what the play was about! What was interesting was listening to people’s comments about the piece of drama we had just watched. Comments ranged from really good to those who where left completely baffled by what they saw. Though overall, I suppose maybe that’s the whole point, everybody will take away something different, and draw their own conclusions about what the piece was about. At times I think that what makes a piece of good drama. It can be too easy to put a piece of drama on stage or tv and give you all the answers, whereas in the case of Pinter he makes you work as an audience member to try and make you think about the subject material and gets you to work just as hard as the actors performing the work. I always suspect Pinter appeals most to people who really like theatre and go to theatre a lot, so they are familiar with the conventions he is playing with - same way that people who know a lot about music are the ones who like jazz whereas the casual listener mostly will not.
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