Machinal - Ustinov, Bath / Old Vic

Just received an email with 50% off for certain dates. I hope this isn’t because the show isn’t selling - although it appears that way.

We’re lucky to see lots of things in the West Country and this is categorically the best piece of theatre it’s produced in a long time. Rosie Sheehy is unfathomably talented and delivers a tremendous performance.

So if you want a great piece of theatre, go to this!

Is there a code for the 50% discount? It would be hard to eradicate memories of Fiona Shaw and that set at the NT years ago......

Saw this tonight

Saw this last night and agree with everyone above that it's a total smash, that the set designer deserves an A Star for brutal claustrophobic simplicity and that Rosie Sheehy is giving one of those great performances that nobody who sees it will ever forget.

Some spoilers follow. . .

The fact that Richard Jones did Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" previously at The Old Vic, with Bertie Carvel, and that Rosie Sheehy was in it, just feels so perfect.

Cos that play could easily be subtitled "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: the Male version."

Whereas, this play feels like the Sequel: "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: the Female version."

We await Jones's conclusion to the Trilogy: "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: AI in Charge, Human Life is Cancelled" with Rosie Sheehy as the AI lol.

In "The Hairy Ape," Rosie Sheehy's character was the daughter of the Capitalist magnate who pretty much owned Bertie Carvel's character, and when she looked at him with disgust, it was like he took the red pill and realised he was in the Matrix, and he would never escape.

In "Machinal," it's Rosie Sheehy's character who slowly realises she's in "The Matrix," a confused polar bear in a zoo tragically bashing its powerful head against the walls of an inescapable cage.

And the garish slopped-on in-yer-face yellow paint of these walls (just two rather than the three at Bath) makes this inescapable stark triangular prison maddening in a way the Big Brother TV producers would be proud of, always looking for environments that will drive human beings up the wall lol.

Anyway, I loved the way Jones has directed the ensemble to function so robotically in this prison of a space (all the windows are illusions that never open up for us), I loved the way Daniel Bowerbank's File Clerk constantly declares "Hot Dog" in blue-pilled delight at his own prison, I loved how turning the lights off seems to represent "freedom," even though we know the walls are still there in the dark, I love Pierro Niel-Mee's apparently warm young man, offering so much possibilities in such a shallow way.

And most of all I love Rosie Sheehy's physicality, her moment to moment fish-on-a-hook straining against her cages (can you imagine if your "hands" were all someone thought you had to offer?), her onslaught of utterly real, utterly human despair, her immense tangible raging against the machine in every scene. I thought she was great in Hairy Ape, in The Wolves, in King John, in Oleanna, in Romeo and Julie, but God, this is something beyond, something unforgettable.

5 stars from me.

I wasn’t going to book this as didn’t love the Almeida version. These early reviews are making me wonder though. Anyone who has seen both want to compare and contrast them?

Seeing this tomorrow, looking forwards to it

Can't really decide what I made of this.

Rosie Sheehy is obviously spectacular, and the piece itself is deeply unsettling, but I never felt like it held my attention.
My mind was always wandering, and I think that had something to do with the direction (I'm not a HUGE Richard Jones fan anyway so likely that was an issue)

3 stars for me (almost 4 because of Sheehy but it really didn't hold my attention all that well)

This was great! Loved the sets, staging and performance

Is the stage high for this - thinking of front row???

I'm afraid I didn't feel it transferred that well to a much larger space (Ustinov capacity is 126, Old Vic is over 1000). I was in the back row (of 6) in the Dress Circle, so that's not a terrible seat.  I liked the shadow work particularly, but felt that the choreographed office was too cramped - in a small venue I'd have appreciated what they were doing, but on a large stage (with huge masking around the set) that cramped nature needed to now feel a concerted choice carrying meaning, and it didn't. The central character isn't in the start of the office scene, so it's not about how stultifying that feels - or, at least, not enough of that scene is about that; it's true she feels the weight of gossip later. Perhaps I was just too far away from the action to appreciate and feel viscerally pulled in to the detail; but in expressionism (representing that historical period) I expect bigger movement that would have carried across distance.

I saw the Daldry NT version with Fiona Shaw. I can't find any video on youtube but my memory is that Shaw was lifted and manipulated around the set (or am I inventing that?). It all felt like a woman forced through a grotesque 'perfect little woman machine'. With the Ustinov/Old Vic version the impressionistic elements feel a bit like a graphic novel (which I liked very much) but don't accelerate and exaggerate the quite ordinary (for the time) expectations and indignities of conventional female 'correctness'.  Without that acceleration through form, the text itself doesn't convey enough that makes us feel that murder was an awful but inevitable (and even justifiable) consequence. If we're not provoked into feeling that, what's the point of the play?

One element fascinated me - I'll need to get the script and check it. Helen uses as her alibi the idea of "big dark looking men" breaking into the marital home and killing her husband. This is written in 1928, before the 1931 events that became the subject of Kander/Ebb's 'The Scotsboro Boys'. That is, a white woman reaching for a 'dark figure' to blame, or punish for something that didn't happen. Then, in prison, Helen is soothed by a man singing in his cell - in this Ustinov/Old Vic version a Black man singing a plaintive gospel song. I'm very interested in whether Sophie Treadwell intended this interpretation of 'dark figures' - and the journey of Helen (behaving like 'a Karen' as we'd say today).   [EDIT: I checked the script, and this is indeed the way Treadwell wrote it: 'Dark figures' and then the 'spiritual' sung from another cell - extraordinary and, sadly, timeless/timely]

Overall I'm glad I saw it. It's extraordinary that a female writer created this in 1928. I wish I'd seen it from studio theatre distance.

Steve thank you for writing that. I am somewhat in awe of you. Reading this makes me question how much of Machinal at the Almeida actually landed for me. I’m going to blame new born baby sleep deprivation…

I hate being the first with negative feedback, but I did not enjoy this tonight.

While I appreciated the imaginative theatricality of the staging and the heightened surrealism, the narrative itself does not become engaging until the penultimate scene "The Law", and even then is predictable and clichéd.

For drama to hold your attention, it has to have interesting characters -- and here they are deliberately two-dimensional stereotypes --, a gripping story, or a spectacle for the eyes. Having only a message is not enough, especially when that message is rammed home without nuance or subtlety.

Contrary to, it seems, everyone else, I did not rate Rosie Sheehy's stilted performance as Helen Jones. Helen is incredibly irritating, not someone I could empathise with at all, and, without that, there is no point to the piece. I felt this was largely the fault of the actress and direction rather than the script. The rest of the cast fare much better in trying to bring hugely underwritten people to life.

While there was an enthusiastic response from half the audience, I sensed lukewarmness from the rest.

It's always telling when a production is this long, and the director has not the balls to include a (much-needed) interval for fear of mass second-act no-shows. There's even a natural place for one between scenes labelled "Prohibited" and "Domestic".

Two stars.

One act: 19:32-21:27
Note: seven minutes longer than advertised, and it started very promptly, and it's difficult to see how it could have run through any faster, so quite where the Old Vic are getting their 1:50 running time from is a mystery.