All About Eve - Noel Coward Theatre

I think they are being quite strict about the no re-entry rule too. A girl in front of me disappeared about an hour in and didn’t return. Her belongings and her friends were still very much in the auditorium so I can only assume she was told she couldn’t return.

Hmm maybe she was otherwise incapacitated then. But she definitely left her stuff and I spotted her friends exchange a confused ‘where is she’ about 20 mins after she had gone out.

I paid 25 for tickets at the end of the balcony but I can't see the play?!?!

Long time reader of Theatreboard but first time commenter - be nice! :-)

I just wanted to alleviate your fears a bit souchyboyy because I saw the show from the Balcony on Saturday and really loved it! Wouldn't want you to miss out because you think it is all on screens - it isn't. The screens are there because there are bits that happen off stage - or really far upstage/in specific rooms that dont look like they can be seen by ANYONE in the theatre and they are filmed and projected above the main action - in classic 'van hove' style. so its just those bits that the screens show. For the majority of the show it was a great view of the main stage. Although when I looked to book I think the £15 seats are in the slips so they probably have more of a restricted view than I did straight on to the stage in the £25 seats.

 

Thanks for what is a clarification re screens, mosessupposes, and welcome to the Board. 

I saw this last night & I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t familiar with the story beforehand but it was pretty obvious immediately where it was going. Decent story but lifted but some fantastic performances. Lily James’ accent wavered a little in the beginning but she was fantastic when she got going in my opinion. Gillian Anderson was obviously a delight but I actually feel like she wasn’t given that much to work with. In agreement with some of those above, the best performance has to go to Monica Dolan as Karen who gave comfortably the most complex performance.

I didn’t like the screens at the very beginning but I started to love the staging (screen included) after a while. I’m not sure what changed in that time but it did- it felt like a clever way to make it look like there’s more sets for the actors to perform in.

I would personally avoid sitting far back in the stalls like I was last night, all the way in Row V because you really miss all the screen stuff despite the small monitors that are placed towards the back. Clear view of all actors & you can make out their expressions too so it’s not so bad.

Tempted to return but if I do it’ll definitely be closer to the stage.

Saw the matinee and loved it. It's very different from the film, as you'd expect from Van Hove: where the film is all moment to moment melodrama, this is all stately, doom-laden, Titanic floating toward an iceberg.

Some spoilers follow. . .

The mise en scene felt typically expansive, Visconti style, with lots of things happening, but a stately and foreboding classical music backdrop and lingering huge slow-motion style snapshots of close-up action cue an atmosphere of a slow progression towards inevitable doom, which I take to be Van Hove's point of view regarding the actions of everyone and everything in this.

Van Hove uses the colour red as a kind of motif to signify life's doomed target, so Gillian Andersen imperiously drifts about in red items for the first half of the play, culminating in her wearing a crimson headscarf, whereupon Lily James wears luminous blood red to signify life's doomed baton being passed to yet another victim.

The performances in this are perfect for Van Hove's aesthetic. Whereas in the film, Bette Davis was a fanatically flailing wasp, swiftly sadistically stinging all and sundry, Anderson is regal, gliding gracefully through her vicissitudes, infusing her lines with a bitter mournfulness that culminates in a massive close-up of her face literally appearing to age in front of us. For aging, not Eve, is this Margot's true iceberg, and her Titanic majesty cannot resist it, but must search for a way to accept her doom.

Lily James' Eve is almost as wonderful a creation. James' own radiant enthusiasm is here effectively corrupted into twitching stalking envy, and in her Faustian pact for fame, she finds her Mephistopheles in Stanley Townsend's smooth, self-satisfied, all-business, Weinstein-like Addison DeWitt, every bit as much of an iceberg for Eve as Father Time is for Margot.

With sublime decadent supporting performances by Julian Ovenden and multiple gloomy wisps of cigarette smoke, only Monica Dolan valiantly battles the fate that engulfs all the characters, and you can guess how she fares.

All in all, a marvellous, slightly disjointed, nonetheless revelatory depiction of the slow hand of fate engulfing us all. 4 and a half stars.

Dynamic pricing really is the work of the devil!

They're showing this in a cinema in Stockholm!! I've convinced my thesis partner that we need a night of semi-theatre and we're taking a trip up! Very excited, since I likely won't get a chance to see this live!

For a play about the theatre it was devoid of any theatricality.
To use the Titanic analogy, it sailed along steady, and hit the iceberg, the end. Did it sink? Did people die?

Also, as a big ol gay it was devoid of camp. I do enjoy Gillian drunk acting.

I felt there was no need for any of the extras, there seemed to be this constant battle of scale between grand and intimate.

There were many alienating elements which resulted in a restrained applause at the end.

I felt there should have been a more Becketian repeattiveness to the cycle of aging and fandom.

All in all as my companion said ‘theatre should make you feel something, I felt nothing’.

I think the venue was wrong even though I was stalls 3rd row perfect view.

To be fair, that goes with the material. The source film is brilliant but chilly, and the response it provokes is more intellectual than emotional.