Obsession

It jumped the shark several times over. The haunted accordion, the spewing car, the rubbish flinging, the dodgy treadmill running. Take your pick. Not since Kit's Doctor Faustus have I been so open mouthed by the naffness of the enterprise. You could hear the Barbican audience tittering away on the NT Live when to elicit laughs clearly wasn't the artistic intention and I thought the cast looked pretty peeved at the curtain call.

At times I thought the same thing. However, the way that eroticism/sexual attraction was presented throughout the play felt so unnatural and mechanical that I might simply have been reading too much into it.

Part of the issue -for me at least- was the strange way that the play presented the passage of time. In a similar way to how space was compressed on the stage using the treadmill, time in the story seemed to pass within the story in a way disconnected from what the audience sees; scenes seemed to pass in more-or-less 'real time', until a line which might suggest that months were meant to have passed.

In particular,

edit: the spoilers within the quote seem to jump around a lot. Can't get them to work properly. Finally working

Maybe it was going in with such low expectations, or maybe it was seeing Woyczeck last night, but I quite enjoyed this. It wasn't great, but it didn't bore me, the performances were strong, and I thought it flowed well. I wasn't bothered by the time jumps/time compression.
The treadmill bits didn't work but the rubbish throwing didn't overly bother me.

First van Hove production I've seen that I haven't either loved or been left completely cold by, so that's a novelty for me at least!



I guess booking things because Jude Law is hot is not such a bad move for me!

In retrospect, and having just seen Salome and Common, this by comparison seems to be a model of clarity and also grippingly involving.
And hey...Jude Law