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Post by Nicholas on Aug 4, 2017 16:14:05 GMT
Were Committee to have had less courage in its convictions, I think it would have been a minor masterpiece. As it is, I think it’s a fantastic, if weirdly clichéd, obscurity. By Sondheiming the facts and nothing but, it does something fascinating with the form – but whether this particular story will quite capture the imaginations of the world remains to be seen, and it genuinely could have. Nonetheless, as it is, I was still a fan of this obscure and odd little show.
Committee dramatises a court case, as a court case, and on paper, that seems to be that. So, um, to ask the bleeding obvious, if it’s just the facts and just the words, why does this need to be a musical? Well, as the person behind me said as we walked out, “I suppose it stops it from being boring”. And genuinely, I do think that is, in no small way, that. Perhaps there’s a comment that, in this age of rolling news where entertaining matters as much as informing, this was not meant to be a show-trial, but all trials can be. Simply restaging it would grate, would be untheatrical. Making a musical of it brings it to the masses, makes a point about populism in politics. And it’s worth mentioning that I enjoyed its music – I’d hugely enjoy a cast recording.
But where Billington says “By shaping our response to the material, it overlays it with editorial comment”, I rather feel he’s missing the wood for the trees. OF COURSE it does! OF COURSE this is biased! Were it not biased it would just be talking heads – by making an editorial comment, Rourke and Fraser turn it into a battle, and clearly come on Kids Company’s side. Solely on the basis of these 80 minutes, so did I, because as it’s presented here, one wants to be idealistic and help as many people whatever the cost. The “£150 shoes” moment is defines it – for one party, that’s a scandalous waste of our money, whilst for the other there’s no price tag on autonomy and rehabilitation; taken as a political point alone, it’s easy to feel one way; taken as the 11 o’clock number in a musical, our biases are swayed towards our heroes, deliberately, obviously, willingly. And given the artifice is laid on thick, that’s completely fine. I think it’s constructed in such a way as to remain somewhat balanced – no-one would leave thinking Batmanghelidjh was anything but an idealist perfect for people skills but lacking in leadership skills, for example, whilst Yentob’s somewhat po-faced throughout – and the facts complicate the fictionalising, but the music and the structure makes its biases obvious.
Superficially, then, this ‘musical’ seems a successor to London Road – and, indeed, it’s hard to imagine this existing without that blazing some sort of trail in how ‘real’ a musical can be – but actually, the far more apt comparison would be with In The Matter of J Robert Oppenheimer, that hit Broadway smash we all know and love. Anyone who saw Morton-Smith’s more recent play (which clearly was none of the Olivier committee, given Cumberhamlet was up for an Olivier and the Heff wasn’t) would be able to tell you plenty of biographical details about Oppenheimer’s life, but equally could tell you that there were obvious elements of artifice – for starters, bombs don’t talk. Instead, anyone who sees Kipphardt’s version of that trial would assume that the court transcript is the truth. And yet, naturally, what Kipphardt presents as the honest facts are skewed and subverted to suit his argument. His Oppenheimer is HIS Oppenheimer, not the real one. It’s hard to hear that final speech Oppenheimer gives in court and not consider the man a poet, a rebel, a tragic hero – and yet it’s complete fiction, something Kipphardt wrote in addition to Oppenheimer's own words. Yet it’s presented as fact, in factual context. And indeed, isn't the rest of it skewed to make Kipphardt's point anyway? Oppenheimer objected to it, of course, primarily objecting to the entirely fictional final speech, but the entire text skewed his words to make Kipphardt's point, and Oppenheimer seemed to dislike that dishonesty too - by making his own words theatre they become fiction again. Committee is the successor to ‘let’s just stage a trial’, but by layering this ‘true’ trial with clearly overdramatic music, Rourke and Fraser lay their biases on the line, and give it to us not as the truth, but as one truth, as their truth – as show trials are, as all trials are. By “overlaying it with editorial comment” they make it work as drama.
That issue of reality/artifice has been true of verbatim works in the past, although far less over the last fifteen years or so (Simon Stephens is very interesting about that here, apparently his verbatim play’s a musical too!). I remember some discussion here, about Another World, about one of the talking heads being somewhat unscrupulous – whereas in that show (which I rather enjoyed) he’s depicted with integrity intact. Everything in that show was presented as the simple honest truth – and whilst I thought it made some worthwhile points, given the breadth of the subject tackled there, that’s clearly not true, and dishonesty in reportage is dangerous. And that’s why Committee works as a musical – unlike London Road, which was a musical about overcoming which happened to use verbatim voices to make it more real, this is a verbatim play which uses music to wear its biases on its sleeve and make its sometimes boring story literally sing. There’s an absolute honesty in this fiction, by wearing its fiction so heavily, and by balancing the boring truth and the fictionalised fantastical battle in this way, it’s an interesting step forwards in both what musicals can get away with and what verbatim plays can get away with.
That does lead to the next question: why does this need to be verbatim? Weirdly, that’s a more pertinent question than why Alan Yentob’s singing – why is it Alan Yentob using Alan Yentob’s words in the first place? For a verbatim play to work, the voice or collections thereof need to be interesting, relevant, new. This tends to be using multiple voices, multiple viewpoints, multiple times, and making something through combination. London Road used ordinary cadences to make extraordinary music (music I enjoy humming along to), and collated the themes of hurt to tell the well-trodden story of overcoming a tragedy as a community chorus. David Hare’s verbatim work is a collection of researched voices. More relevantly, in Oppenheimer, Kipphardt gives voice to one of the greatest minds talking about one of the greatest moments of the century – and truth be told, even after openly fictionalising portions to make it more morally grey and more palatable to theatre, it’s still a wee bit too static, and a wee bit too dull.
Here, there are two distinct sides – Company (good) and Committee (bad) – and the editorialising is fine, it’s what makes it drama, and it’s upfront about its drama – and that’s it for characters. As any drama goes, that’s a bit didactic, a bit stilted, a bit still. In theory, this trial transcript lends itself to some cornerstones of basic drama, as explicitly edited and editorialised. In this version of the truth, the case happens to tackle some of the oldest themes in the book: with a liberal dose of liberal bias, the trial centres on personalities vs parliament, on idealism vs accountancy, on success vs failure. The facts are almost clichéd in their archetypical approach to debates. There are moments of great drama, moments of inadvertent comedy, moments of David vs Goliath – all the moments you want in an issue like this – as the best verbatim plays do, it actually would hold up to literary criticism. But unlike the best verbatim plays, it doesn’t use the real words to comment or critique – it just uses them because they’re the words – and despite the editorialising making the themes more explicit, it’s one side vs another for 80 minutes, neither budging, until we’re dismissed, the winner dictated by fact. I rather think that by sticking solely to the transcript, the scope of Committee becomes too limited. Were this willing to expand out more, makes its characters characters and not arguments in exciting costumes, and deal with the politics politically, I think this would take Broadway by storm in its innovation – I think London Road absolutely has global appeal, and this would have too. As it is, it’s too monotonous. None of the ideas are particularly profound or fresh beyond the bizarre but brilliant concept, and whether this court case is really the best way to explore these themes I don’t know (its 80 minute run time does mean that any broader, murkier, interesting issues get put to the wayside, and that is a shame). There are also some factual gaps, as any 80 minute version of a three hour event will have, and whilst some of those would be footnotes, some omissions are bad – particularly the ending, a matter upon which the script doesn’t properly deliver, and which is necessary to know. At best, this uses deliberate artifice to make a gripping fictional debate out of interesting fact – but unlike, say, the Donmar’s past Frost/Nixon, it doesn’t delve into the two sides of its debate as anything more than two sides of its debate. In fact, I was a fan of Temple, which was sheer Socratic debate – strophe/antistrophe for 90 minutes, based on fact – but Waters made his characters caring and carefully crafted people amidst an otherwise balanced debate. By editorialising activities outside the courthouse Committee could have done this too, but in being too daringly focused in form, it remains too factual to be fascinating.
Despite this, I was very much a fan of this flawed show. I think that Fraser and Rourke have crafted a (kind of clichéd) story about the eternal debate between idealism and accountancy, between what charity is but what charity needs, and what society should offer and what society is capable of offering. I think the music was fantastic, awkward, engaging stuff. I thought the debate was crafty, the characters larger than life. And I felt there was a grand honesty in how this presented its biases. It’s somewhat simplistic and sometimes on-the-nose, but nevertheless it’s a novel idea well executed, fascinatingly done, and musically astute. Perhaps it’s more interesting in theory than in actuality, but it’s engaging and exciting nonetheless. I’d give it four stars, for the exact reasons Billington gives it two.
P.S. Is Josie Rourke secretly the most radical AD in London? In the five years (!) since she’s taken over, she’s done a great job at balancing perfectly good sell-out fodder (from The Recruiting Officer to Saint Joan), via left-of-centre revivals (Anhouil, Peter Gill, My Night with Reg) and new plays with a topical dint to them (Steve Waters’ new works), to productions which really dare to do something different – the techy well-researched wizardly of Privacy, the national study of one moment in time of The Vote (which I’m sure was going to have a rewrite and revival in 2020, thanks for botching that one up too Mrs May), to this strange adventure, to the genuinely groundbreaking Shakespeare trilogy, a four-year-long, unashamedly political, almost Hamilton-esque deconstruction of national norms and clichés, one of the most remarkable theatrical achievements, perhaps, of the decade? The Donmar still doesn’t have a reputation for being as adventurous as other theatres – perhaps because it sometimes does shamelessly populist or famous, perhaps because it’s closer to the West End – but given her track record I don’t see why. She recently did this as well, pushing the building's potential further – and given Michelle Terry’s new gig, their relationship bodes very very well for that building too. Quietly in Covent Garden, I think that building’s become far more unpredictable, progressive and exciting than it’s ever been before. Let’s step back and celebrate what a five years she’s had.
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Post by Nicholas on Aug 4, 2017 15:56:51 GMT
Images, big ideas and distorted facts. Had a hipster Julie Taymor directed a Garison Keillor monologue, it would end up something like this muddle of a show – a game, warm, entertaining misfire at trying to adapt the essence of a Dylan epic into a theatrical narrative, throwing music in whether the script can stand it or not. It’s sweet, it’s fun, and oh my does it have the best songs in London at the moment, but the thin script stretches itself even thinner to accommodate songs instead of story, and then struggles further under the weight of said songs. Beauty walks a razor’s edge – this has moments of beauty, and moments of, well...
In Girl from the North Country, Ron Cook turns out to be a dead, morphine addicted cowboy doctor. He narrates the story of Nick Laine, via the people closest to him: his ill-but-stylishly-ill wife; his writer/railroader/racist son; his peculiarly impregnated adopted daughter; and his under-moneyed widowed mistress. There are also his guests; the senior-citizen-suitor; the ‘doesn’t-know-his-own-strength’ Mice and Men cliché; his over-protective, under-characterised mother and his ‘bad investment’ father; the oily, blackmailing priest cliché; and Rubin Carter, apparently. They all do stuff. All have plots. Some have several. Sometimes they converge. Mostly they sing instead.
Can you tell what the problem is?
As jukebox musicals go – and this is indisputably a jukebox musical (an interesting, superior, and adventurous one, to say otherwise is simple snobbery) – what makes Girl from the North Country progressive and hypnotic is also what makes it dramatically inert and absolutely ridiculous. I think that, in his characters who are epithets first and characters after, in his stories which interweave, and in a setting which traps then overlaps these disparate lives, McPherson is writing a Bob Dylan song for actors. It’s a musical that wants to be one of its own songs – and takes (quite expertly, if quite technically) many elements of the music to make up itself (I wonder if, actually, Bat Out Of Hell kind of does the same, very differently?). Girl from the North Country wants to be “Gates of Eden”, or “Black Diamond Bay”, or, well, “Girl from the North Country”. And in its set-up – and in its mood – it doesn’t go as far as Dylan at his best, but it succeeds.
But mood doth not a play make. Once the elements are in place, songs can do thing with them theatre cannot. Characters come and go in a song, where they stick around on stage. In a song, Leo can appear on the Titanic for a line; a waitress can ask about hard boiled eggs for three verses; the Jack of Hearts is needed in every verse. On stage, to have them bumbling about in the back gets almost embarrassing. In a song, characters are given perfect context for perfect plots, be they Sweet Melinda the Goddess of Gloom, Napoleon in rags, or the One-Eyed Midget Shouting the Word Now. In a play, imagine those three line-dancing in the back while non-characters sang songs as they wait their turn to do some plotting again (actually, I’d pay to see that!).
Here, there’s no time to think. Girl from the North Country begins with exposition from a dead morphine-addicted cowboy doctor and only gets baggier from there. It’s a Dylanesque dramatis personae, but they don’t do enough. In McPherson’s play, Michael Shaeffer comes on in the perfect image of a priest. His mystery is revealed early on. He plays an old part, but he plays it well. He sings from the (underrated, then unforgivable, then epochal) gospel period. In a song, that would be one verse. But he’s got to hang around during the mistress and the marriage proposals and the dementia and the depression. He twiddles his thumbs for 45 minutes or so, until we’ve forgotten about him, he can come and blackmail the other lodger. This should be drama too – but the lodger and his family aren’t fleshed out yet, so it’s hard to feel much. Then they all twiddle their thumbs. Then there’s an actual murder. This should be the awful culmination of emotional highs – but we know nothing about these people, nothing but their bare basic bones, and rather than let the emotional moment matter, it turns into a karaoke barn dance. Other than that, the son’s plot strands include authorship ideals, losing his love, random racism, compromising his job, moving away, and looking after his ill mother – and he’s only the sixth most important protagonist! That’s to say nothing of Shirley Henderson sitting a lot, or Sheila Atim waiting a lot despite being absolutely wonderful. The action orbits around Nick Laine, but too much happens around him, very little to him, and nothing regarding him as a man in his own right – and he doesn’t even get a bloody song! Therefore, as our hero, he’s a wee bit dull. In songwriting, these elliptical scenes of epithets would be emotional. From the man whose The Weir perfectly calibrated the silences between stories, they feel undernourished.
Overburdened with plot, it’s not hard to follow, but it’s hard to care. Characterisation gives way to karaoke. Because there’s so little to the characters – and so much in the middle of their stories – all these people we used to know become illusions to us now. What we’re left with are under-fleshed-out characters setting up stories and failing to unite, failing to resolve. Scene after scene, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations – but no-one draws conclusions on the wall. We used to care, but things have changed.
Most of the time, McPherson’s clear-focused all around. The monologues – monologues. The Weir – five characters, five stories, stories alone. Had this had that focus, it would have worked – and indeed, at times, expertly did. Within Girl from the North Country, there is a brilliant play more in the McPherson mould, albeit mocking up the Minnesotan mindset too. The set-up – though Dylanesque in part – reminded me far less of an abstract Dylan epic, and more of an intimate Minnesotan monologue. Its folksy tangents on provincial lives in Northern America in their microcosms of meetings are the material of A Prairie Home Companion – and at its best, the thing this reminded me of most was Robert Altman’s sweet little final film in which Keillor’s monologues became manifest, and angels, cowboys and DJs can intermingle, indeed, people can sing off-topic songs into funky country radio mics, and strangest of all Lindsay Lohan can act. Less grotesque than many of Dylan’s cameo characters, the cliché of the wannabe writer, the preacher with no shame, the family regrets masked by hobbying and hardiness – these would be perfect material for Keillor’s distinctive drawl, and honestly, who wouldn’t want to see a Lake Wobegon-y world live on stage? When this focused on family, on friendship, on familiarity and on the four or five central familial figures, I felt McPherson was writing a play whose folksiness was familiar, focused, and fun – and that play I liked a lot. It’s the Minnesotan mood piece that works best here.
The characters who got McPherson’s focus, too, were exquisite – although that’s equally in part to some astonishingly good performances. Having a cast so strong, so game, somewhat wasted but committed to the script, elevates this production immensely. Ron Cook and Jim Norton, as ‘Occasional Ghost Narrator’ and ‘Punchline’, are underused as underwritten characters, and in a cast of twenty-odd they’re not alone. However, shining through, two performances beautifully characterise the joy and jumble of this unholy mess. Sheila Atim, with her eyes like smoke and her voice like chimes, gives a performance of glowing sincerity and gorgeous singing, her strident belief in her character grounding this clunky script in loneliness but hope. On the other hand, Shirley Henderson reveals a stunning singing voice – all the more surprising for her to be able to sing whilst simultaneously chewing all on the scenery she can. In a script like this, someone needs to take it ridiculously – and given permission to due to her character being one of two “disability makes me speak the truth” clichés here created, Henderson relishes the chance. It’s no coincidence that their big musical numbers are the ones which work the best – they imbue their (superiorly written) characters with the kind of emotions that need these songs to fill. Between Atim’s wide-eyed wonder and Henderson’s hilarity, the script is given a production far above what the knotty end result deserves.
They have the best tunes, too. When Sheila Atim’s loneliness is expressed like so, it’s eye-opening, or when Stanley Townsend and his wife sing about loneliness at their low ebbs, McPherson finally focuses on their feelings, and shows the show this could have been. “Forever Young” was sincere enough to wrap it up too – whilst I don’t think it felt wholly organic, it’s testament to Henderson’s strength at characterisation that it almost did. Mostly this doesn’t work, though, as a musical – and we can see that by seeing when it does work. Too many songs are given to otherwise non-speaking characters, and none given to at least three key characters – well, either this is a litmus test as to whether you go with the mood or not, or testament to inconsistent book writing. I’m afraid, given how well the mood works with the McPherson script alone and how well the songs work when McPherson bothers to incorporate, it feels far more the latter.
So there’s mood. And it’s a lovely mood. A melancholy mood. And largely this comes from McPherson’s Minnesotan mimicry. But there’s got to be more than that – which is what a Dylan song has, and what a great McPherson play has, and what this doesn’t have. The plots don’t work, the characters don’t get enough, there’s nothing to care for beyond songs I already care for. In plot trajectory, this ain’t going nowhere.
It’s worth saying that Dylan himself became unstuck in this very area. When living and breathing in front of us, this past-it singer was nothing as to this past-it singer, minstrels didn’t compare to minstrels, and an apocalyptic president was nothing as to a president of the United States who had to stand naked (quick straw poll – President Trump or President Mickey Rourke?). In cinema, the cameo nature is less egregious, but it’s still somewhat ridiculous. Girl from the North Country is far better than Masked and Anonymous, as the mood it evokes is far more moving, but it still struggling from an over-population of under-developed characters. As a mood piece, this is beautiful, if bafflingly imbalanced. As a character piece, I just think it fails as Dylan himself has failed before.
“I was thinking about a series of dreams, where nothing comes up to the top, everything stays down where it’s wounded, and comes to a permanent stop”. If you’re willing to let the series of dream-like vignettes wash over you, this has moments of profound, profound beauty – in character, in some emotions, in some of its oddities, in all of its songs. It could have been Steinbeck’s Prairie Home Companion via The Weir’s simple storytelling – and how wonderful that would be – and at its best, it was. But at other times, epithetical characters jostle for time and space, songs distract, too much happens and too little matters. It needs to be concise and too clear, instead it wiggle, wiggle, wiggles, like a bowl of soup. It goes toe-to-toe with The Weir and with “Black Diamond Bay”, and falls short, where both have mood AND character AND a purpose this lacks. Which is not to say I didn’t hugely enjoy some of its parts. There’s a lovely McPherson play where he expands on it. There are lovely Bob Dylan songs. The bits I loved I loved. The intermingling of these lovely individual pieces is ridiculous. The sum of these parts, alas, is too much of nothing.
I’d buy a soundtrack in a heartbeat, mind. All this churlishness – it’s 15 brilliantly sung Dylan songs! Admittedly, you get that on a Dylan album, but all in all I went with this. I just wish it wasn’t so meandering, so muddled, so meaningless, and it had more than that lovely mood. You could argue that whilst nothing really matters much, it’s mood alone that counts; I needed more. At the end, the mood had won me over, but the plot: why did any of it happen, and why should I care? It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why; it don’t matter anyhow.
P.S. Theatre trivia time! 1) During Dylan’s 80s wilderness, Dylan was co-star with perhaps the greatest living actor himself, Sir Mark Rylance! In Farts for Hire. 2) With the passing of the great Sam Shepard, we get the opportunity to relive the one good thing Dylan did in the 80s with Shepard's input – and what a great thing it is...
P.P.S. Whilst of course any fan of a jukebox musical’s artist will be miffed by certain omissions of superb, or relatively unknown, or leftfield, or underrated songs (although equally pleased by decent inclusions – THREE from Street-Legal!), it seems particularly odd to set this in Bob Dylan’s depression and not to use Bob Dylan’s late-period masterpiece on the depression, his superior-to-Steinbeck “Workingman’s Blues #2” ("The buying power of the proletariat's gone down, money's getting shallow and weak"). Everything that this is saying, that song says it just as good – I would hold that up as one of the finest works of his entire career, and as it details the pain of living through a depression but the joy of living anyway, it would work wonders in the main character’s mouth, were this to work as a musical, or as drama. Meanwhile, to set it in a Dylan-esque guesthouse means it really only could have ended one way...
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Post by Nicholas on Apr 18, 2017 15:05:42 GMT
“One more year in Yorkshire, January, February, April, May, September and July...” Does Gary Barlow not know his months? Blimey, opening with that song, it was going to be a long night. And it was...
As per usual, the Oliviers muck it up royally. I’m happy enough with the awards given the shortlist, but by god did they muck up the shortlist, and then, well, the three certainties in life are death, taxes and a bad Oliviers ceremony.
Let’s start with how they mucked it up on the TV – we Brits just can’t do awards, can we? The Baftas are always laughable, but they make the Oliviers look good – and lest we forget, the 2017 British Film Awards, celebrating predominantly American cinema, began by filling a music hall with a French circus. The key difference between the Tonys and the Oliviers is that self-doubt hasn’t reached the Tonys yet. Yes, the Tonys celebrate only a few square kilometres of theatre, but when Neil Patrick Harris says theatre isn’t just for the gays or the Jews or the sad embittered malcontents who write the reviews, but is for the kid in the middle of nowhere who’s sitting there living for Tony performances, no-one rolls their eyes. Here, Jason Manford let us know he’s overweight, so that kid in the middle of nowhere can go suck it, they ain’t famous. There, musicals are art. Here, we still portray musicals as naff expensive events, even as we celebrate Murder Ballads and Threepenny Operas. So if you’re not from one of a handful of London theatres, you’re dirt. Hell, here if you’re not in Angels in America, you’re dirt. I wish that weren’t true, but look at how they introduced these grand stars of theatre. How lovely would it have been to make reference to Nathan Lane’s being involved in The Frogs at a London theatre. But no. How lovely would it have been to make reference to Charlotte Richie’s being involved in The Philanthropist at one of SOLT’s smaller but still-nominated theatres. But no. How lovely would it have been to make reference to Cush Jumbo’s being involved in Common at perhaps SOLT’s biggest theatre. But no.
It’s the small moments that are the most telling – for some weird reason they’d roped in Rose Leslie to give an award, and introduced her as “an actress making a splash in Game of Thrones”. Would, um, “an actress making a splash in Game of Thrones, most recently seen in an exciting new play at the Sheffield Crucible” have been more relevant? Have been more informative? Have promoted theatre? But no. I don’t think anyone involved knew. I don’t think anyone involved actually cares. About any theatre. ITV. Primetime(ish). SOLT may be the Society of LONDON Theatre, but it’s been given an advert to tell the whole nation “No, theatre isn’t the snobby expensive London luvvie event you think it is – look at the biggest London theatre, the starriest London theatre, the best London theatre, it’s shows in Sheffield, No Man’s Land on tour and in cinemas, TCAABR from the fringe, The Girls in Yorkshire, Perpetual Succour in Scotland, it’s theatre of the regions, local to you”. What an inspiring, populist message to effortlessly give on a relatively broad scale! And instead, let alone forgetting London theatre’s (inter)nationality (without which it both creatively and financially dies), the Society of London Theatre forgets to mention a great actress like Cush Jumbo appearing at London’s National Theatre. Usually they just neglect regional and fringe theatre. This year they neglect their own! It’s pathetic.
Prize-wise, they were fine, given the cruddy nominees. I can’t get over some horribly egregious omissions (more in a sec), and of course smaller but superior shows like The Flick were always going to be overshadowed, but... Actually, let me swallow my pride and anger over omissions and deep deep love for particularly The Flick and say you know what? Potter deserved them all. Like Latecomer said – it’s a load of people whose work we’ve loved in the past doing their best work, so what if it’s populist? You put someone like John Tiffany at the helm (someone who, a few years ago, was more of an industry secret when he deservedly won for Black Watch), and give him loads of money and six hours, and of course he’ll deserve best director! He’ll pick the best collaborators and give them all that money and time, so clearly Potter deserved every single technical award possible. Jack Thorne writes it, so the script is (if knotty and plotty and less than Annie Baker) witty, sensitive, and genuinely brings big themes of little lives to larger-than-life characters in the humanising way only theatre can. And Noma and Jamie are just great actors – and hey, when Jamie Parker wins another Olivier in two or three years (more deserved, only a matter of time), then this one will be Harry’s, and that one will be ‘his’ Olivier. It’s impossible to begrudge so many great talents doing such great work going rewarded, other than churlishness towards the childishness of Rowling’s twenty-year-old children’s book.
After Potter, I didn’t love Yerma – a flimsy and psychologically shallow interpretation of a problematic play simply to get some (admittedly terrific) Dogme grandstanding in as it ends – but Billie Piper’s been deservedly validated as the extraordinary actress that she is. And hey, if Rebecca Trehearn won, something is right in the world.
The problem is the nominations themselves are bullsh*t, which made this prizes no more than the best of a bad bunch. A ‘best cast’ category would have seen the Perpetual Succour girls, and indeed The Girls, face up against The Flick trio and the Chekhov trilogy, deservedly; no ‘best cast’ category makes those cast nominations laughable. Not nominating Danny Sapini, or Yael Farber, or Les Blancs, reeks of ‘not famous enough’/’we’ve forgotten that, it was almost a year ago’. And the Genie! The most obvious and deserving winner! What?!?!?!
But there are two particularly unforgivable, frankly stupid omissions. Let’s start with Lazarus, though not for the award(s) you think. Best new musical? Possibly. Best supporting actress/actor? Absolutely. But ‘Outstanding Achievement in Music’? The one won a few years ago by Ray Davies, for doing nothing new but having once written the Ray Davies songbook? DAVID BOWIE wrote a musical from the David Bowie songbook. He even wrote kick-ass brand new music. Ignoring the headline-grabbing, wish-fulfilling, undoubtedly emotional moment that would have come from giving the late great man his much-desired theatre award, he deserved it. The Oliviers have implicitly said Ray Davies is better than David Bowie, and explicitly said that Lord Lloyd Webber’s 9-year-olds are. How was THAT back-catalogue NOT NOMINATED AT ALL?
But (moralising) I think they got not only best actress and best director, but the special award, completely wrong (also caveat – I also got it completely wrong, THIS was the best show of 2016). I think that in years to come we’ll realise just how significant Julius Caesar turned out to be, then how gloriously The Tempest wrapped up our years of personal investment in such a political way. In a year when Emma Rice did what she did so well, where Michelle Terry has that prosthetic in Cleansed only to go to Henry V, and where King Lear is one of our four best actresses, an all-female The Tempest almost feels old-hat – though that really is because Julius Caesar now IS old hat, as all things once new grow old. It’s worth saying that whilst Rice and Maxine Peake and Deborah Warner probably would have pushed for these shows and gender-bending regardless of Phyllida Lloyd, plenty wouldn’t (I don’t think Posh would have, and I have my doubts about Henry V). It’s worth saying, though, that those shows got off scott-free, whereas there was something about Julius Caesar that touched such a techy nerve that meant it bore the brunt of reviews comparing it to dancing dogs (let alone reliable Tim Walker), so these later shows came with barely a batted eye (or less frequently batted but still batted eyes, and instead more nuanced comments on the subject). It’s worth saying, after all that, that Julius Caesar was simply amazing – then Henry IV was pretty close – then The Tempest was amazing again. As Caesar developed into The Tempest, though, I think its least interesting aspect is its treatment of gender. Throughout the trilogy, the diversity of everything BUT gender – age, race, nationality, body type, even professionalism – is more radical, more novel, and hopefully more influential too – if Dame Harriet Walter can be Leah Harvey’s father, any comments about the validity of diversity and ethnicity (of which 2016 saw too many) seem even more ludicrous, even less grounded in any kind of reality. Even in this year’s nomination for Glenda, let alone the way most all-female/cross-casting is now a non-event, I think we saw some validation of 2013’s initial influential work; but what these shows were ultimately about was the way in which theatre not only can, but MUST, connect with people from every corner in every situation, must be available to all, must speak to and be given to those in need. Perhaps it’s simply too soon to judge whether it’ll leave the impact I hope, in which case it merely deserved best actress for Walter and best director for Lloyd for being so good; but what Sir Ken did (love him as I do) was a decent West End season, whereas what Lloyd and Walter did was deconstruct any ideas that these plays need to be done in a West End way. Branagh will come back to the theatre and be wonderful-as-always in three, five, ten years, and can deservedly have his award then – what Lloyd and Walter did now deserves adulation.
Ultimately, though, the Oliviers are nothing but a technical exercise and a masturbatory advert. This year they were a bad technical exercise and bad masturbatory advert. Recently, it has been exciting to see the best shows, SOLT theatres and awards attention overlap, and thus to see Robert Icke win for Oresteia or van Hove for View from the Bridge. This year, it was kind of nice to see actors like Freddie Fox and Kate O’Flynn and particularly Jamie Parker – actors we’ve admired since smaller shows for some years now – getting in on this game, finally. And hey, if we do take these as simply an advert, why not advertise theatre to the world via Harry Potter, the stunning end-result of great theatrical collaborations which just so happened to take place under the Harry Potter banner? But a) what cocked-up nominees with which to surround this advert, and b) what a cocked-up ceremony to use as your advert. Good job, Oliviers. You’ve done it again.
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Post by Nicholas on Apr 18, 2017 14:41:51 GMT
This was a lovely tribute, in which Shaffer came across as a lovely man, let alone a leading playwright. For someone who clearly was working right until the end on pushing boundaries and progressing further, what was great was that this tribute paid tribute not just to when he pushed the envelope, but to how, and why, with each new play. To have simply staggered from Equus to Amadeus with scenes and sections would have been to show him as an inventive playwright, but it wouldn’t have shown him as him; by focusing on him as a character and collaborator and creator, this painted him as a pioneer and a person instead. Hell, how wonderful to focus even on the flops – how lovely that it wasn’t just one-sided, that masterpieces were written but mistakes too were made, and that juvenilia seemed as important as the masterworks.
And to quote lovely Pennington quoting lovely Shaffer, “Oh, the actors!” Even if we didn’t get to hear F Murray Abraham do that scene or Michael Gambon pretend to be a 20-something Spaniard, how moving – and how telling – to see titans like that giving their thanks. He clearly was instrumental in vitalising a number of careers (a point Daniel Radcliffe made very heartfelt-ly, I thought), and it felt like a very personal repaying of many favours. All the little vignettes had the competence and quality of proper performances, not one-offs – was particularly struck by the power and vindictiveness Jacobi bought, in five minutes of monologuing out-doing most of his recent cosy work. And oh, seeing Maggie Smith all but recreate her Kenneth Williams days – bliss! A delight, too, for the completely random musical interludes (and Sondheim, what an anecdote!) – all giving a fuller picture of the peerson, all making the afternoon even more nice. This account is rather wonderful in summing it all up - bookanista.com/peter-shaffer/.
Within Callow's show, I felt there was an argument underneath that Shaffer may lack the immediate name-recognition of his contemporaries, but that's solely because his voice kept developing, his style kept changing, his every new play was a brand new idea. It seemed what Callow wanted to do was not just pay tribute, but make the argument that where “Pinteresque” means – to – pause – a – lot, and “Stoppardian” means “too clever by half”, “Shafferian” may not have entered the lexicon, because how do we get from blinding horses to black comedies via Amadeus and the Andes? If such a term ought to exist, it ought to mean “unpredictable, apart from predictably doing something different”; Shafferian is adventurousness, it’s curiosity, and it’s character. Kudos to Callow, this tribute was ideally Shafferian. Not that I know Shaffer’s work all too well, but I felt Shaffer would have been chuffed to be commemorated not by a stuffy series of scenes, but by this witty biographical ribbing. In fact, one of the greatest compliments I can pay this is that, despite the glitziest of casts, it didn’t feel like it was aimed at me – a near-stranger to Shaffer with only a passing acquaintance to some of his works. It didn't want to explore the work, it wanted to explore the man. It felt aimed at the family, the friends, those familiar to these words – and the fact that it then worked for me was mere testament to how well he wrote. A great tribute to a clearly great man.
Now bring on the Tchaikovsky play!
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Post by Nicholas on Apr 18, 2017 14:32:51 GMT
What a fascinating failure this show is. Amidst a back-catalogue of profound and progressive stage work, this middling, moderately-amusing political pastiche is clearly minor Sondheim – sometimes funny, often hummable, mostly mediocre. It’s not a bad show (it’s a four-star production of a three-star script) and it’s not Sondheim’s worst (Do I Hear a Waltz isn’t irredeemable, but isn’t much good either – mostly Laurents’ book there), but it’s definitely not a great show either. It’s a footnote ticked off our completist lists. And yet, I feel (both due to the show itself and the strong production) that there’s far more worth to this production of The Frogs than just juvenile doggerel. There’s far more worth to the script than its simplicity suggests – or, its simplicity gives it its worth. There’s not a great deal of depth to The Frogs, and that’s what makes it flawed, fascinating and a little bit fantastic – rather than plumb profound depths, Sherelove, Lane and Sondheim wear their hearts on their sleeves, and what hearts they turn out to be.
Like I say, it’s not bad. No show with such a rambunctious opening number could be (the fact that the number was the original number for A Funny Thing Happened does explain that, mind). Sondheim is biologically incapable of writing badly – so even if “Dress Big” isn’t “Send in the Clowns”, it’s still amusing; even if the Frog Chorus (as per its Aristophanes) does little to plot, character or subtext, it’s still tuneful. The problem is, simply, that the scatty narrative lacks the narrative of his best, and crucially the character(s) of his best. Those two songs are cameos from never-seen-before, never-seen-after people, and barely progress plot. They’re good songs, but at his platform last year Sondheim said that his songs work best not as singles, but married to their character; here, the lovely mournfulness given to Dionysus aside, Pluto, Xanthias, Hercules and the rest aren’t characters, they’re Aristophanean stock figures, which means their songs are what Sondheim dislikes – rather than character songs, just songs.
Where it’s really let down, thus, is with its book, but I lay the blame for this not at Lane or Sherelove’s feet but at Aristophanes’. As anyone who’s endured either studying these satires or seeing even good casts try to make them modern will know, Old Comedy isn’t always funny, or, frankly, good. Lots is satire, and satire ages very quickly – pre-Brexit satire’s already obsolete, so pre-Christian satire... The Frogs is, in my opinion, Aristophanes’ worst – Aristophanes was devilishly on-point in pricking academic egos, familial relationships, a strangely relevant class system, and even good and faithful versions of these are still funny; this, on the other hand, is a too-long journey into the underworld, followed by random, useless frogs, followed by a too-straight-laced argument which is only interesting because, in Aeschylus, the beginning of The Libation Bearers is lost, but Aristophanes’ character of Aeschylus quotes it so it’s remained – it’s historical trivia. Sherelove sticks too closely to this ramshackle structure (as, admittedly, does Sondheim) and thus the original script’s a scattershot road-movie and then lit-crit; by expanding this, Lane is likely the reason it’s broader and richer in character, but he too can’t resolve the original’s clunkiness. Clearly, again, it’s not a bad script, but flawed in the clunky way Aristophanes is flawed, shallow in the way Clouds or The Birds or Lysistrata have worth. The Sondheim/Sherelove/Lane/Aristophanes hodgepodge falls between two stools of neither being the rip-roaring comedy of Forum nor the profound legend-rewriting of Sweeney. Unlike the former, it tries to purport a proper a message; unlike the latter, its simple message belies its student origins: ‘Love people while they’re alive, hate bad politics, and open a book every now and then’.
That said, I think it’s a great production of a good script. Intimacy will only get you so far – what makes the Jermyn Street Theatre so special is it demands innovation, and frankly this show was as well-served here as it would have been at the NT’s Olivier. Grace Wessel’s basically setting it in a swimming pool is a nice touch, whilst the minimalism of cast and set gives the clunk from one set-piece to the next a certain fluidity. She also respects the work, and doesn’t play the non-jokes for laughs, which serves it well. Shaw does need a beard, mind. But it’s Michael Matus’ performance which profoundly elevates this show and this staging. Initially, preconceptions and all, I was somewhat surprised that he was slightly underplaying the campness and the pompousness and the Nathan-Lane-ness of it all – but as the show rolled on, the sincerity he bought to it from the beginning paid off in spades, as it’s this sincerity which made the “Ariadne” song so moving, this sincerity which gave the competition actual stakes, this sincerity which gave the production more emotional heft than the play deserves. Yes, he was also very funny throughout, but by tempering this silliness Matus – and Wessel – gave the Sondheim the character which made us care for an Aristophanes for which I don’t care.
So that’s that – four stars to Jermyn Street (congrats on the sincerity, shame about the script), three to Sondheim (congrats on the satire, shame about the shallowness).
And yet...
The script and the songs do, indeed, have little more to say than ‘Love people while they’re alive, hate bad politics, and open a book every now and then’. But boy, how well it says this. How sincerely, passionately, and desperately it says this. Its failing is its simplicity, but its salvation is its sincerity. In The Best Worst Thing, Sondheim talks about trying to get back to that teenage idealism. In this – perhaps its greatest virtue is it being originally written for students – he captures that infantile political idealism that goes with being a student, albeit with the vocabulary of a poet and the musicality of a maestro. Assassins deals with its politics sharply and satirically. This is simple, and beautiful for it. Watching Dionysus truly appreciate the great romantic poetry, to come to terms with death, to sacrifice arch on-the-nose windbaggery and go for simple, sensitive sonnets – and to do all this with the genuine, principled notion that by doing this he could change the world – the desire for change and sincerity to do so is astounding, inspiring, amazing. There’s no archness! No cynicism! No mockery or mirth! It’s written as if to genuinely say that reading more sonnets can help us overcome death, help us find our way, and ultimately help us stop Richard Nixon/George Bush/Donald Trump – or perhaps more aptly, that, actually, we do read to think, to learn, to search for truth and to live in OUR lives, and that reading more sonnets is thus our grassroots political movement where we speak up, get sore, and now, we start. It could have made a mockery of idealism. Instead it IS idealistic. Sincerely, that’s inspiring.
There are minor flaws in this production which some tinkering and a bigger location would solve; there are major flaws with this shows which can’t be solved. But sod it – for all its many blatant simple shallow faults, I loved it. The next time someone thinks Sondheim’s simply a cynic, I’ll simply send them to the last fifteen minutes of this. It’s through the filter of this imperfect but impassioned project – the sensitivity of which is perfectly captured by this production – that I’ll view Sondheim’s works from now on, knowing that there’s not only a political animal and a status-quo shaker within his giant mind, but a sincere student romantic within there too. It’s an imperfect production of an imperfect show, but the politics and sincerity on display meant it repeatedly hit just the right nerve. When I later relisten and rewatch other Sondheims – cynical Sondeims and ironic Sondheims – I’m going to have the memory of this, this stupid and simple yet sensitive and subtle and sad Sondheim.
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Post by Nicholas on Feb 2, 2017 4:14:41 GMT
Well I just thought this was absolutely blooming wonderful and I loved it to pieces. I’ve already seen it twice and heaven knows how often I’ve heard the soundtrack. It’s just such a wonderful piece of work, heartfelt, heartbreaking, honest. What makes La La Land work so well for so many people is yes, Jacques Demy’s clearly inspired a lot about this, and more crucially Gene Kelly’s ballets have clearly inspired a lot about this, but it’s not twee, it’s not tacky, it’s not reverential, it’s not pastiche. Through and through and through and through this is a Damian Chazelle movie – the product of a singular vision and extraordinary talent. It’s so crowd-pleasing because of how wonderfully individual it is.
It’s the most beautiful film I’ve seen in some time. Frankly it’s all I could think at moments (which isn’t to say the rest of it was lacking – I just thought it was so beautiful). Even in its most incidental moments of quiet conversation, the costumes are so elegant, the colours just that bit more vibrant, the shots so well framed – and in its least incidental moments, the glitz! The glamour! The colour! The life! Looked like a million dollars, whether looking into the stars themselves or Emma Stone’s eyes. What’s particularly wonderful is how it manages to make the most mundane moments so beautiful – a traffic jam, high-street clothing, a simple piano duet – and because the visual beauty comes from these moments, moments mostly based in believable character, the beauty actually matters, the beauty actually means something, and that makes the less beautiful moments hurt, and the more beautiful moments even more beautiful. With its own visual identity too – I didn’t feel it was references galore, I felt it was Chazelle’s vision infused with influences. Truly beautiful.
But after that – which is impossible to get over (when you think it can’t look more lovely they only bloody go to space! It takes real chutzpah to get away with that sincerely, and this absolutely did) – I think, like with his Whiplash (which I also loved) and Guy and Madeline (which is fully of fun and hugely enjoyable in its own way), Chazelle makes films which use music as much as a starting point for uncompromising arguments about reality. Whiplash had a more complex argument – that of how far is too far, that of what makes a genius a genius, that of how tight is too tight a T-shirt for JK Simmons – but I don’t think La La Land is any less serious about its music or its characters or its reality either. Chazelle doesn’t skimp on the realities of compromise. I don’t think literature students will be pouring over essays about it, true, but I think what’s made it hit such a nerve is it’s not just lovely – it’s realistic too. It’s willing to make its characters professional failures and live difficultly, it’s willing to depict the reality of paying the rent and working hard for what you love. It’s got that ending too. It has bittersweetness, it has melancholy, it has a real edge when it comes down to it. But it’s tempered with such absolute loveliness, such love for its characters (and such beauty, did I mention its beauty?) that it’s sweet, it’s lovely, it’s life-affirming, it’s honest, it’s wonderful. And they’re just great. Gosling channels Brando in Guys and Dolls in his singing but that’s no bad thing when he’s as committed as he is here – I also can’t get my head around the criticism of his character because of how wonderfully deadpan and self-mocking he plays it, more like Brando meets Buster Keaton. But it’s Stone’s movie. It’s Stone who’s got the raw honesty and physicality of a young Brando. She’s got that rare gift of being able to honestly show two emotions at once, or to outwardly hide an emotion but communicate her feelings somehow. She’d dance away with the movie, were it not that their chemistry is so strong it’s a beautiful double act. It’s not Fred and Ginger, but it’s Stone and Gosling, and thank goodness for that. It's an unsentimental delight, a great film from a great writer/director, and I think it's absolutely brilliant.
Extra points, too, for an extra pointy JK Simmons.
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Post by Nicholas on Feb 2, 2017 4:03:49 GMT
“I started getting into the idea of writing a kind of a non-narrative that just had situations within it and the audience kind of joins up the dots in their own way, in the way they want to make it. They remake the material they’re offered.” – This quote, from The Last Five Years (a wonderful documentary, well worth catching up on) may have come from the 70s, but boy does it apply to Lazarus.
There’s divisive, there’s confusing, and then there’s Lazarus. This is a curate’s egg covered in marmite – a divisive show about which I feel divided. I love being baffled by a work of art. It’s why I loved Misterman and Ballyturk, which were like Rorschach tests when discussing them with family afterwards. It’s why I truly believe that the disjointed stories and zig-zag perspective of Ziggy Stardust is one of the great narratives of the twentieth century. It’s why I’m fascinated by The Man Who Fell To Earth – I’ve seen that film twice, and where it confused me so much the first time around, it confused me much more the second, but revealed itself as a deliberately debilitating piece of work, the most alienating study of alienation imaginable. What links Walsh and Roeg as directors, though, is that I get the impression that they absolutely understand their story – its central simple meaning – and afterwards deliberately confound, confuse, control the mystery. With Lazarus, I didn’t feel that; or I only felt it in parts. I really don’t think there was that purity of vision or narrative control, which gave us the opportunity to interpret what we interpret. Instead I felt there was confusion. It's a fine difference, but a vital one.
I think that, at its heart, there’s a great musical in here. It’s between a three and five hander. It’s Newton, the girl, Mary Lou, and maybe Mary Lou’s husband and maybe Valentine. But it's swamped by so much. There are Bowie songs for the sake of it. There's an alien who sold his business, but we're told he's a man and it's the earth wot he sold. There are young dudes just to sing that one song about all of them carrying the news. There seems to be a character called Valentine because this is a great song (correct me if I'm wrong, but Valentine was Newton’s ex-lover’s reincarnation’s boyfriend’s friend’s murderer, yes?). If it's true that Bowie gave Walsh a list of well over a hundred songs, then either Bowie was writing about the same character for his entire career (before he even played the role, in which case why not make more of this autobiographical link?), or Bowie wasn't picky enough and pruning needed to be done (also, weird though it is to say, Bowie is SUCH a great songwriter that when a song as iconic as "Changes" comes on, it's so iconic it overtakes the show itself, and without strong enough context we're in Mamma Mia territory). There seemed to be digressions for the sake of digressions; there seemed to be a lot of stuff jumbled up, and why? Too much of it just can’t be unwrapped, and whereas part of the fun of, say, Ballyturk was trying to unwrap it and successfully coming up with interpretations, I think too much of Lazarus is either knotted so tightly that it takes a genius of Bowie’s scale to untie; or between the three main creative voices something’s gotten muddled and the show at King’s Cross is just a bit of a muddle. In a nutshell, I think it’s telling how many people here have simply said “No idea what happened, but I enjoyed it” (or “Hated it, no idea what happened”). There are one or two themes about which we’re all in agreement – and unsurprisingly, it’s in dealing with these themes that the show shines – but rather than take the time to fight our case, to say what we saw in it and why we saw it, we just throw up our hands and give up, saying instead "it’s just bloody confusing, isn’t it?". And I think that’s something of a failing, because I really didn’t feel that amidst the confusion there really was some clear vision, some clear statement – I think that three wonderful creatives laid out three sets of dots, and if we try and match them to anything more complex than its one central idea (more on which later), we just get a muddle.
And sadly, I don’t think van Hove was the right director for this – I just don't think he's able to deal with whatever Walsh's script means, or whatever Bowie's legacy is. There’s no wit to its obtuseness, it just feels obtuse. Versweyveld’s design, meanwhile, doesn’t have the originality or oomph that this needs. It seems recycled from Song from Far Away, which is an issue. Stylistically, too, there’s nothing original or unnerving about watching overlapping dialogues or simultaneous time-zones in theatre which there is in the movies, and was in Roeg's movie. Where in cinema these cubist time-frames are unusual (and thus Roeg’s barmy timeline makes for disconcerting viewing), we see overlapping times all the time in theatre, which feels too run-of-the-mill here for such a non-run-of-the-mill script. The theatre itself is too big, and Newton’s claustrophobia is lost on us. Where Walsh and Bowie wrote a sequel to The Man Who Fell To Earth, in this set it felt like van Hove was directing a sequel to Song from Far Away, but without that show’s central loneliness. Perhaps this would have worked on film (and had it been on film, not only could it have preserved Roeg’s weird narrative mood, but filmed in 2015 could have offered this actor continuing this performance in this style). On the stage, though, it’s a surprisingly flat-footed production. I’ve always thought Walsh is a wonderful director in his own right, and seeing van Hove do this, I wished we had this one central (sound and) vision guiding us forwards – and under Walsh maybe it would have felt more in control, if no less unclear.
So that’s my predominant and overriding issue. I can’t tell you what this is about. That’s fine. But I can't interpret it, and tell you what I think it’s about. That's not fine. That seems to be the general opinion too. So rather than perplex us all into thinking different things, it perplexes us into giving up. Confusing is good, baffling better – but there’s a line between opaque and just muddy. There’s a difference between joining the dots, and joining random dots. There’s a difference between a Rorschach test and a dirty blobby piece of paper. This fell between these extremes.
And yet, I can’t tell you how I interpreted this, but I can tell you how this made me feel. And I can't tell you just how moving I found it. Strip all the baffling bits back and get to its heart, and what you have is Thomas Newton – and what a central character he is. There’s one caveat, which is that I don’t think anyone involved quite resolved whether Newton was just singing Bowie songs (it’s a new musical), was a tribute to Bowie (as I felt the "Where Are We Now" scene was, wonderfully too) or WAS Bowie (too many specific references, too many iconic songs) – but when the rest was stripped away, we had a character and his companions face death – and even without the metatextual awareness of Bowie’s life, it’s this that makes this so moving, and this emotion that makes this, ultimately, a confusing mess but a profound success.
It’s not just that Michael C Hall is tremendous in the role, strong to mask vulnerability and compelling in both stillness and song. It’s that the Bowie songs he’s given – especially the new ones – are songs which genuinely propel the character forwards. As a fan of the film, I found the Newton/Mary Lou relationship very touching. Given that his selfishness and addiction ruined the first Mary Lou, to watch him do the same – helplessly, guiltily – to a second Mary Lou brings things full-circle in an all too human way, and Elly/Mary Lou's ‘Always Crashing’ was such a good way of articulating this. It’s a brief aside, but it worked so well. I didn’t think her character had the identity or the complexity of Candy Clark in the movie and I think that was an issue, but I thought the way the Newton/Mary Lou relationship was drawn a second time was wonderfully done (going by the cast recording, I prefer Amy Lennox to Christin Miloti).
It’s also that his central issue is beautifully told. The only thing I do think this was about is death – perhaps Bowie’s own, perhaps not, but either way definitely it's about being resolute for it. This has a beautifully honest and indeed hopeful attitude towards death – one which takes the logic that a good death is simply what follows a good life, however difficult that may be to both prove and to accept. In Hall and Caruso’s friendship and Hall and Lennox’s forgiveness, this managed to shine through whatever else was happening on stage. Now, it is inescapable that something happened on the day he died, and this IS about Bowie’s own death and acceptance towards. But even ignoring this, to me it had a notion that dying is harder than death, but to go through the cathartic difficulties of accepting past mistakes, reliving past relationships, forgiving past discretions and living well is what makes a good death; to be awake to a good life matters more than, in this sleep of death, what moonage daydreams may come. It’s touching, important, and wonderfully told.
And what most affected me was this friendship. This had one of the best depictions of platonic love I’ve ever seen on stage. Sophie Ann Caruso (who very capably handled a technical fault when I saw it) more than matches Hall, with a mysterious maturity that’s compelling to watch and brings out the inner best in others. Quite what their relationship is I don’t know (father-daughter seems too obvious for this obtuse world, yet it very may be very simply that), but whatever it is, it’s such a pure and true and wonderful portrayal of platonic love, of simple perfect equal friendship. It’s telling that whilst other iconic songs felt like tagged-on tributes, "Heroes" didn’t – in the interplay between Newton and her, there was playfulness and happiness, which led into the ending with unbearable poignancy. Bowie’s final statement being about accepting death is haunting enough, but through Hall and Caruso, through Newton and her, it becomes about accepting death through living well and living together; and however I felt about Valentine or "Valentine’s Day" or van Hove, I found this message - these moments - so extremely affecting. It’s got narrative muddle, but such emotional weight.
So I had fairly hefty reservations which meant I couldn’t give my heart to it in a way I could give my heart to Song from Far Away or Ballyturk or Blackstar – and ultimately that’s just down to too many cooks, three incredibly strong narrators all pulling in their own directions (Walsh enigmatically, Bowie profoundly, van Hove unsuccessfully). I like being confused, but I don’t like watching other people be confused, and this had too much of that. And infuriatingly, there's a briefer, tauter, perhaps cinematic version of this which is no less clear, but far more in control. But when the stars aligned... When Walsh took the characters to just the right point, and Bowie’s sound and vision gave them just the right emotional escape... Always Crashing... Where Are We Now... Heroes... It’s less good than the movie, but it’s infinitely more moving, and for that, for all its faults, I find myself a fan. I'd give it four stars, because it overcomes its many faults through one genius writing stunning new songs, and one genius writing a baggy but beguiling script, and the end result's emotional impact being so affecting. Those moments, those songs, had so much to say about the difficult necessity of dying well but living well beforehand, justified the muddle around them. Yes, I would have rather had a director who I felt captured the confusing mood with greater claustrophobia, or a script with fewer digressions and greater emphasis on its central character, and fewer jukebox-musical-esque numbers – and it would have been stronger for it. But this had moment after moment where Newton and her dealt so movingly with this biggest of all themes, and song after song after song which illuminated this beautifully, hauntingly, profoundly – and one is all you need to make it work; as a great man once said, ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?
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Post by Nicholas on Feb 2, 2017 3:36:43 GMT
Bit late to the game on this one (life...) and been away for the last four months (more life...), but nonetheless wanted to stick my oar in and give my two pennies on what I think has been the most remarkable year of theatre – in terms of quality, consistency, innovation and excitement – that I’ve seen in my time regularly theatregoing. I can’t think of a previous year with as many shows which excited, inspired and wowed me in such a profound way as this year – and that’s just 9 months! I also can’t think of a year where the worst shows have been as interesting – it’s possible I missed some absolute clunkers, but these shows aren’t as objectionable or evil as previous years’ worst. So briefly (as brief as I can be) my best and worst of this wonderful year (wonderful for theatre – for everything else...):
Worst:
3) Remember reading/seeing Doctor Faustus and thinking “Using all the powers of hell for dark arts, deep power, personal gain and fulfilling all desires – pfft, I’d become a TV magician instead!”? Me neither. Remember reading/seeing Doctor Faustus and thinking “Are we meant to feel sympathy for this devil? If only someone could give me some musical cue!”? Me neither. Teevan’s new script felt like a sitcom pilot; Lloyd’s lowest-common-denominator direction plods with the old and struggles with the new so much that even Jenna Russell and Jade Anouka can’t save it. I was actually quite bored by most of it (Teevan made Faust a boring character, and even Mephistopholes mostly just stood there and complained), and intellectually insulted by the rest; Teevan’s script is the dullest new play of the year, and Lloyd’s direction the clumsiest revival.
2) Had wonder.land been a movie, it would be tempting to lump it alongside Troll 2, The Room and The Wicker Man as a cult movie, ‘so-bad-it’s-good’. I was playing a mental drinking game – drink any time the music, dialogue or teenage angst is embarrassing – and by the end I was mentally sh*tfaced. Oh, to have actually had a drink with me... I was almost rolling in the aisles by the end – were they really going to make that clunky rhyme, hit that horrible note, say this ludicrous script? Yes, yes, yes, and with such confidence and bravado and pride that (to make a better Lewis Carroll comparison than these three (three!) writers came up with) we were almost through the looking glass, where bad was good and this was thus five stars. The extraordinary Dusty managed this feat; the gloriously ridiculous How To Hold Your Breath managed it in part; wonder.land almost did. But then I remember the angle this took. This hated its characters. This wasn’t simply a fun disaster, it was a tasteless one: it made fun of Ali and her father for being addicts, spoke down to teenagers, mocked their literacy and their street smarts and their academic potential, assumed any teenager’s IQ was barely in double figures, treated a bogstandard internet forum like it was HAL in 2001, made younger people into phone-reliant dunderheads and adults into pathetic philistines, treated internet users as loners and weirdos and then went to laugh at these people for being lonely and weird, made fun of people with serious problems because of their problems... It’s actually more like the original Reefer Madness, sincerely outraged about modern times, and this sincere internet-phobia and mocking of damaged, lonely, troubled characters gave this its really nasty edge. And Albarn’s music is just unpleasantly unlistenable. Almost hilariously terrible – but its judgemental sneer and bitter aftertaste makes it just unpleasantly so.
1) Other people found much to praise in this, it’s appeared in some people’s ‘best of’s here, and Sophie Melville is indisputably the actress of the year (challenged solely by the goddess Isabelle Huppert, similarly stuck in an otherwise terrible show, and by Harriet Walter’s superb resolution to five years of stunning Shakespearean performances): so why is Iphigenia in Splott my worst show of the year? Well, I couldn’t see it as a cry for the underclass – I saw it as a cry AT the underclass, or perhaps a cry at the middle-class whilst the underclass looked on, unrepresented. Or I saw it as our dear Parsley saw Wish List: “It's a chance for middle class audiences to indulge in poorly portrayaled social inequality porn”. That mattered. Well-intentioned though it may be, its hugely misjudged tone renders it an absolute failure, and one whose arch theatricality doesn’t just subjugate its politics but completely overwhelms them and completely undermines it. It’s about drawing this arch link between the Euripidean tragedy and Effie’s contemporary crisis, and to me it’s much more about the former than the latter, interested in Effie not as an example of the underclass but an example of an Aeschylean archetype from whom Owen can wring contrived, poverty-porn drama. The plot of Effie’s tragedy was cliché – working-class fetishism followed by that surreptitiously sexist misery porn (making her suffer to make a point, then neglecting the character's emotional response for its author's political digression instead (in short, what Megan Vaughan said) – and rather than ever truly delve into Effie’s life, her normality, her psyche (in the way that, say, Pests did so well when it was so underrated some years ago), it maintained Effie at arm’s length. And that’s the issue – it wasn’t a political play for 2016 because it was a rallying cry to fight Tory cuts and defend those rendered defenceless by political neglect; it was a political play for 2016 because it was written for Gary Owen’s bubble. It felt like a person sharing an Owen Jones article on Facebook – and like Owen Jones’ articles, it was written very much about its political victim, not for them. Melville was stunning, and she should be an awards-garlanded star after this – and it’s because of how convincing she was around the material that I felt that if Effie saw this herself, she would be offended at how it didn't want us to help her, but to contemplate the analogy of the ancient Iphigenia; then Gary Owen's politics; THEN Effie. And that trickle-down of sympathy was a misjudgement in major terms. Compare, say, to this year’s I Daniel Blake – that movie was all about honestly looking alongside marginalised characters into their world; Iphigenia in Splott was about looking AT this marginalised character from our very theatrical world, thus further marginalising her. And given what its final line was – to misquote, “What will you do when we won’t take it?” – not only was Owen aware of this, he was intending it. That says it all – 90 minutes in Effie’s company, and we’re still meant not to empathise with but to fear her – ‘we’ being the converted to whom Gary Owen archly, anciently preaches. I agree with its politics, but I disagree with the slapdash, self-satisfied, smug, sneering, sidelining way it fetishised, patronised and over-theatricalised Iphigenia first and Effie second. It’s slacktivism.
Unlike previous years, I don’t absolutely hate these shows. Last year’s Truth Lies Diana was as objectionable as any artwork can get (a piece which only gets worse the more one contemplates it). This year’s Iphigenia in Splott was simply a good idea badly, badly, very badly executed. But this year’s good, mind you, have been very good...
So if I rambled about the shows I didn’t like (but which I respect – three admirable, interesting failures; but three total tasteless failures nonetheless), just wait until I get to the shows I love. These seven shows are seven contenders for the best show I’ve ever seen, for such different reasons – powerful, progressive, profound, these are eight shows that, after time to absorb what they say, only prove themselves even richer, even deeper, and even more wonderful than they were when they blew me away at the time I saw them.
In alphabetical order, my top seven shows/joint best show of the year:
Chekhov’s First Play – The best piece of theatre about theatre I have ever seen. No step of the creative process – from writing and abandoning, to directing and interpreting, to acting and pretending, to watching and believing – was left unexplored; somehow this 70 minute (!) show managed to tackle all these themes with insight and originality. Yet far from an intellectual scattershot study of how we make theatre, this is also one of the most humane and heartfelt studies of why we make theatre, our human need for theatre. It didn’t say anything about the creative process to be arch or intellectual; it said it to say something about humanity. Writing as thinking out loud; directing as understanding; reviving as reliving; acting as being; watching as empathising; SO SO SO much more, and so much more considered... When I think back on it, I either recall something new and fascinating it said about how we make a play, interpret a play and believe in a play; or I recall when they had to burst into that great Nick Cave song and its final message of hope, and I begin to cry. I hope someone else here saw it, and I hope it returns to be seen by many more. No show has ever tackled so much about theatre with such success or wit or insight; but none has ever had such a large loving heart either.
The Encounter – Where McBurney goes, we can but follow. I genuinely don’t know where to begin with this. Like his Master and Margarita, it’s a show I know will wake me up in the middle of the night in years to come, as more and more I find something new in it. Perhaps its greatest genius came in its beginning, in one almost incidental moment – the photo taken of us beforehand. In that, McBurney makes McIntyres of us. He creates a record of us starting our encounter; he then takes us to experience whatever we organically/inorganically, sensibly/nonsensically encounter; and then like the monkey with the camera he destroys all records and evidence, so it’s down to us and interpretation and anecdote alone to recount our encounter, whatever that may have been – and due to illusions of extraordinary reality, that’s quite some encounter we’re given to tell. And this is McBurney just getting started. That’s just one thing. It’s also very much about thought and perception: the impossibility of making a narrative of the former, and the easy manipulation but wonderful necessity of the latter. And it’s about a thousand philosophical, fantastical, swashbuckling, sensitive more subjects, many of which I’ll only discover when I’ve relived my encounter in my mind a few more times. For me, the enduring theatrical image of the year is that of the end, of McBurney holding his daughter and telling her a story – it’s a profoundly moving, sensitive and caring concluding image, ending philosophy and fantasy with family and home. It’s also an image that never actually happened – but so powerful was this illusion that, as I relive my encounter with this Encounter, it did. That’s remarkable. As it circles through my memories again and again, I can’t wait to see what my next encounter with it reveals. What a show.
Faith Healer – Brian Friel was a genius, and this may be his masterpiece – a complex, haunting, mysterious riddle about why we believe. With her tremendous cast of true greats, Turner had one key directorial flourish, which was to take these short stories and turn them into duologues, albeit ones in which we are silent yet still culpable collaborators (friends? Psychologist? Conscience?) to Friel’s haunted, damaged storytellers. This gives the characters a wounded depth that’s so insightful; it also forces us to confront Friel’s masterful mystery head-on, and live with it personally. Friel wrote a masterpiece of storytelling; Turner turned it into a masterpiece of loneliness and accountability. It’s haunted me so much since, I wish I didn’t love it as much as I did.
The Flick – Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Baker’s remarkable script is that it’s all about the inartistic, portrayed in an inartistic way. Working isn’t cinematic, friendships aren’t cinematic, farewells aren’t cinematic – and by making her hero a cineaste, then setting this in a cinema (then locating her cinema in a theatre), Baker forces comparison between watching someone silently sweep up popcorn and the action of Avatar. And this inartistic honesty makes The Flick one of the most artistic, action-packed pieces of work I’ve seen – one in which (as with her wonderful Circle Mirror Transformation) great drama is simple empathy with everyday life. It’s not some platitudinous piece about the drama of normal lives – I think it’s got more to say, and is also a deep and extraordinary play about art and modernity and changes and reality – but mostly what I took away is it depiction of normal life, wonderfully portrayed. Through the empathetic construction of three of the most heartbreakingly broken yet externally normal characters you could hope to see on stage, this isn’t a platitudinous piece about the great drama of normal lives, but an impossibly complex play about impossibly complex inner lives, playing out between the ordinariness of work and the extraordinariness of blockbusters, elevated by an understanding production by Sam Gold and pitch-perfect performances from one hell of a trio. So relatable is it that I find myself referring to it on an almost daily basis – in awkward small-talk with near-strangers at work, or during any awkward overlong silence, I often wonder who the person opposite me is underneath, were Annie Baker to have written them. And quite possibly, laugh-for-laugh, the funniest play of the year too. Whenever I think back on this, I get a rush of hope.
If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me – Given that everyone involved in making this refers to it as more of a pop concert than a dance/theatre show, I’ve begun to wonder if anyone involved actually realised what a strong political statement they were making with this, or if I just read too much into Jane Horrocks’ jukebox. Nonetheless, it was a wittily aggressive statement about living through the worst of the 1980s, and the depressing legacy that followed; that political and personal pain inflicted then has its scars in how we live and love now. Through very literal but very enjoyable choreography, a fairly haunting set-list, and Horrocks’ ballsy performance and presence throughout, I think this show said more about the cultural and political relationship between Thatcherism and Cameronism (the legacies of the former and the failures of the latter) than any play by James Graham or Steve Waters or Gary Owen ever could. I was also profoundly moved by its central conceit that love is all you need – rather than the usual cliché, though, this says love will see us through the worst of the worst of our political world, and in this year in particular that’s proven a particularly helpful message. And it said all this, somehow, through merely the medium Little Voice belting out The Smiths. I still hate The Smiths. I loved this show.
In The Heights – Is Hamilton better than this? CAN Hamilton be better than this? This has a simple intention – to tell normal stories of normal people with music as their lingua franca – and like Meet Me In St Louis, it does this perfectly, using songs to elevate ordinary lives into extraordinary art, and convey the extraordinary eternal depth of ordinary everyday emotions. And yet it’s not so simple. Miranda’s a better dramatist than that. The complexity of Nina’s position is told from all angles without easy answers; the sympathy given to Usnavy and Victoria’s relationship says something Shakespearean about what, in lesser hands, would just be soapy; Usnavy's final monologue is so brilliantly written it manages to bring such depth into something so simple as moving house and moving on. And whilst Miranda’s score is buzzing with vivacity to begin with, Sheppard’s production is so brimming with passion and youth and energy and love and fun that at one point I genuinely said out loud “I love this show”. Between this cast with that energy and the joy absolutely overflowing, and Miranda’s strength as a dramatist, and its dramatis personae of surprising dimensions, it was like shot after shot of adrenaline and pheromones; every time I think back on it, it energises me to remember just how lovely it was.
Les Blancs – “In a great play, everyone is right”. In Les Blancs, Hansberry dares to write as if this is the case, despite her colonising cast of characters clearly being in the wrong – and that’s where it gets its power. This wasn’t just an extraordinarily comprehensive insight into the immediate evils of colonialism and the worldwide cultural legacy thereof. In the complexity of Sapini’s uncertain titan, it’s a statement about how easily righteous views can be challenged as wrong; in the self-doubt of white-guilt do-gooders it’s a sensitively uncertain study of what doing good actually means; and in the self-confidence of those enjoying the empire’s legacy, it’s a statement about how easy awful views are to believe and uphold. Few playwrights have the talent to write this many characters with this level of complex individuality, yet Hansberry’s willingness to humanise her worst characters whilst equally criticising her best makes this lost masterpiece is just that – a masterpiece. Anyone can write a play that says ‘Racism is wrong’; Hansberry wrote a play that says “A little too much self-doubt here and too much self-confidence there and ‘colonisation’ becomes ‘empire’ and bad becomes good”. So in writing a play about nostalgia for when the country was great, the difficulty of proving black lives matter, journalists writing about what people want to hear and not the truth, and entitled racists blagging their way to power, well, you can finish this thought... Farber knows this is THE play for 2016, but doesn’t let on – a lesser director would overdo the speechifying or overplay the contemporary resonances, but Farber starts by keeping her contemporary cards close to her chest, letting the characters develop, and only giving us hints of the anger we’re later going to feel. And boy does it make us feel angry. As an incredibly insightful and comprehensive historical overview, Hansberry makes us angry; as a 1960s set story with lines all too contemporary, Farber make us angry. As such it becomes a three-hour slow build of extraordinary emotion; accompanying astonishing monologues with unforgettable tableaus, Farber ignited a spark that became a furious fire of anger that’s yet to be extinguished. And whilst he’s not famous enough to get the Olivier, was there a better performance than Danny Sapini?
“Briefly”, I said... I make no apologies for rambling (particularly as I hope that if enough people talk about Chekhov’s First Play, some producer will give it a substantial run – and I’m desperately hoping someone else on here saw it and will join me in singing its praises). Intellectually I admire every one of these shows to no end; emotionally I adore them. Seven of the best shows I have ever seen. A better, more consistent set of shows is impossible to draw up. What a year.
A belated Happy New Year and Merry Christmas and all that to the wonderful board – particularly to everyone who made it possible a year ago and makes it possible now, but generally to the lot of you who are generally wonderful! It’s been over a year now, hasn’t it? Happy Board Birthday! Here’s to many more meetings, and very best wishes for 2017! We’ll need it...
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 1, 2016 22:07:41 GMT
Our revels now are ended...
I can’t tell you how floored I was by Julius Caesar. The Shakespeare itself was fizzing with violence, menace, conspiracy and threat; the prison was also fizzing with violence, menace, conspiracy and threat. Rather than one merely complement the other, this was Julius Caesar squared, the violence of one egging on the violence of the other, the end result being utterly haunting and still as close to a bona fide thriller as I’ve ever seen on stage. Henry IV was always going to be something of a let-down, as it couldn’t have that shock factor, and whilst it didn’t quite meet the high standard of the first, it wasn’t far off: in streamlining everything down to the simple violence of civil war, the sense of threat was palpable, the testosterone pumping, the adrenaline running (the issue is Henry IV is such a broad play it inevitably felt too much like a simplification). Following two relatively great successes was always going to be a challenge, particularly when The Tempest doesn’t seem to offer such possibilities for violence or need for the prison setting. And in some ways, this is a slight let down, though that’s partly due to expectations being raised and the shock factor no longer being there, as well as a slight betrayal of the simple, streamlined genius of Caesar. But it’s impossible to treat this clinically as merely another Tempest, and instead as the closing chapter of a hugely significant trilogy, one which I hope spawns much in the way of criticism, academia and hopefully some kind of significant, lasting document containing all the lines of thought of four years of theatre. And in that sense, it still has pragmatic issues, but it’s a greatly apt finale to these three shows.
The first thing to say is I would love to see a trilogy day, as I expect that would be more dramatically surprising. Naturally the cast has changed substantially over the years, so I’m sure there’ll be moments of pertinence I didn’t get, if the Frances Barber/Cush Jumbo/Ashley Maguire ‘characters’ go on an arc that’s as involving as Harriet Walter’s. Without that I’m sure I missed out on certain bits and bobs, I wonder how cross-casting pays off in these particular manifestations of the shows. I’m sure some of the final pay-offs are far more pertinent, and perhaps some of the prisoner’s identities and off-stage relationships offer character drama when you get to invest in one day.
Regardless, it’s impossible to see this in isolation. And that helps and hinders it. Helps, infinitely, because of the affection four years of wait has nurtured and grown. Hinders, because this doesn’t follow on half as logically as it should. There was a basic economy and simplicity to Julius Caesar. This was a prison rehearsal getting out of hand. It was what it was. The final ‘twist’ of Frances Barber being a warden didn’t diminish this reality, it added to it. Henry IV was exactly the same, albeit with the silly back-entrance to be ‘immersive’ in a way those things never are (see also: the Rickson/Sheen Hamlet). Here, from the beginning, the relationship between theatre and the prison is a little hazy; whilst I don’t think that’s a bad thing in isolation, it does rather poo on the legacy of two streamlined real-relationships. If there’s any hint of this being real – which there absolutely was in the other two, both of those felt stripped-back and amateurish to just the right, non-phoney degree – it’s rather scuppered by technology far too complex to have at this level, and given the other two were ‘real’, our expectations for this have to be nullified far earlier for this to symbolically work. As it takes so long to establish that this is all symbolism, unlike the others, it begins wishy-washy, and as it’s all metaphorical and dreamt up, there’s a risk of reading Prospero's final 'release' as wholly Tom Jones. And, actually, it made for a much more compelling relationship when the drama ‘offstage’ of the prison was getting as raucous as the drama ‘onstage’, or more to the point it was getting harder and harder to tell where one ended and the next began and when the prison itself was going to riot and mutiny right in front of us, or possibly at us – this is a much safer, more comfortable show to watch through its fancifulness. All of that said, there is one moment of utter beauty, when the audience is ‘involved’, which makes this all worthwhile, such a stunningly simple but powerfully moving moment of isolation yet involvement. So as a continuation of the themes established in 2012, it’s a slight misstep, because it misjudges what the last two shows got just right. But it’s a continuation of shows from 2012 – 2012! – and that makes it more of an event than maybe any other show I’ve seen in a long long time, possibly only Harry Potter notwithstanding.
Despite these qualms, which are qualms I only have due to seeing it as part three and not its own show, Lloyd’s Tempest is, in its own isolation, genuinely insightful and (to my simple mind at least) new. Her reading of Prospero is fascinating, but more on that later – it’s Lloyd’s setting which brings out this hidden depth to the character, but it’s absolutely the performance which richly gives it life. Lloyd’s main innovation is to take the notion of the island as a colony to a fascinatingly deeper extreme; her argument is a fairly controversial extension of the long-standing criticism that Propsero is a coloniser. She argues that yes, Prospero may imprison Caliban and Ariel, but Prospero and Miranda are themselves equally prisoners of Antonio’s device, victims who make victims to get by. It’s obvious, come to think of it, but the narrative of Prospero as ruler tends to trump the narrative of Prospero the refugee, Prospero the betrayed, Prospero stuck on an island. This production repeatedly reminds us that Prospero’s life is one of refuge, and makes the island Prospero’s prison, not his study. So with a strong performance as Prospero at its centre, this would surely make for a shocking and surprising and endlessly moving innovation...
Yes, this is possibly the best thing Harriet Walter has done this millennium (what was the consensus about Boa on the other place? I thought it occasionally contrived and saccharine, but mostly quite lovely). Her Prospero is genuinely revelatory, in a year of many Tempests. It’s quite astonishing to have a Prospero as physically strong as magically, and a Prospero clearly psychologically damaged by his loneliness. The relationship between Prospero and Walter’s prisoner (to say more would be to spoil it) is beautifully drawn in a way other prisoner/character relationships aren’t. Particularly given she’s going from Brutus to Henry to Prospero, I actually think that (unless Glenda pulls it out of the bag) the Olivier this year should be hers, over McCrory or Piper (or the ineligible Sophie Melville or Isabelle Huppert); she throws her all into this, barking out the lines like a great former Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, bringing a truly sincere love to her relationships with Ariel and Miranda and a truly scary hate to her relationship with Caliban and a truly heartbreaking yet honest desperation to her relationship with her brother/captor, darting round the stage like someone not half her age, reinterpreting the role with a menace and madness that usually is passed over for academia and intelligence, using her physical and intellectual strength to compensate for her clearly ever-dwindling psychological strength, drawing real sympathy and pity to her prisoner character, and doing this over three plays. And she plays the steel drums too. If that’s not what these awards are for, I don’t know what is. It’s her best work since “Person who flirts with Chewbacca” in Star Wars 7. She’s genuinely monumental, yet humane. Anouka’s the other stand-out, flighty and mighty, showing how wasted she was in Faustus and how witty she can be as a physical performer. Something about this set-up inspires the very best, most uninhibited from these performers. Of them, though, it’s Walter who truly dominates, utterly astonishing.
So, much as I do think the dramatic pay-off of a trilogy day will be greater, I think there’s an emotional pay-off after three/four years of investment in this saga. I’m sure there will be at least one book written about this, a document of the research and passion that made this trilogy so special, so stunning and rightly so – I can’t wait for Lloyd to let the cat out of the bag and show us all the research and secrets that made this amazing. Stage sagas don’t tend to be done. Beyond this I struggle to think of any long-running theatrical ‘event’ (marathons tend to be done in rep, not over three years). In film, in TV, sagas are easy – catch-up can take days – but for theatre, a saga like this requires so much of us, so much of theatregoers – to remain attentive over a long time, to keep our memories vivid, to sacrifice that brief bit of time every two years to keep up to date with these characters. It’s hard, in 2016, to see the conclusion of 2013’s theatre and not get nostalgic. Three/four years of investment, three/four years of theatregoing, this finale is our reward, Harriet Walter sets us free. When I saw Julius Caesar I barely knew who Ivo van Hove, Carrie Cracknell, Emma Rice, Rufus Norris, Robert Icke or Anya Reiss were. Did any of us, could any of us have predicted Tonys and Oliviers and Artistic Directorships for that lot? The West End of late 2012 wasn’t ready for the hard-hitters that would come through transfers, and I think that since then there has been a substantial swing towards controversy, misery, politics and seriousness becoming mainstream like People Places and Things, A View from the Bridge, A Doll’s House, shows I’ve seen since and can’t imagine not having as a part of my life. Hell, I was meant to see Caesar with a friend but saw it the week later as that day I ended up horrendously drunk, and when I got home from The Tempest the self-same friend phoned me, roaringly drunk herself – that’s how I bring things to full circle. Thinking about it, I’d been on the (spit on the ground) Whatsonstage board for probably under six months; back then you lovely lot barely meant anything to me (these days I don’t remember school friends but I remember you lot). Conversely yes, I’m sure that seeing all three in a day/consecutively will prove more significant regarding connections etc, but actually I think there might be a greater pay-off not from trilogy days, but from simply concluding what we started three or four years ago. If you loved Caesar – and I seem to remember, many did – The Tempest is profoundly moving. It has its own structural problems, perhaps, but for those of us who’ve invested in these years of theatregoing, it’s a clearly heartfelt farewell from all involved.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 1, 2016 22:04:38 GMT
This production is slick in the theatre and amateurish offstage: it’s the perfect The Entertainer, in an ugly photo-negative.
If Osborne’s play has any depth – and I’m not wholly convinced it is that deep – it’s in depicting how difficult it is to accept the end of an era. It’s a paradoxically timeless theme. For Archie Rice, that should be performing capable if hackneyed routines in dilapidated old halls; for Billie Rice, that should be having attitudes he abhors brought in his own home by his own flesh and blood. With a director who can physically articulate the tackiness of the former whilst domesticating the diatribes of the latter, it would be a surprisingly deep consideration of life under Eden, which would be all too pertinent today – after all, not only is the subject of generational differences about politics and protest and particularly immigration one of incredible topicality, but so is talentless performers clinging onto their desperate dreams of glory and need to perform (Sarah Harding). It doesn’t need updating to make modern: it needs clarity.
Rob Ashford is a choreographer. He treats this play like his choreographer namesake Marshall treated Chicago and (shudder) Nine; when inner angst grows too great, we cut to the stage so the emotion can be literalised through dance. It’s the Fosse line of thinking taken to its extreme. It would be a good idea had Kander & Ebb written The Entertainer, but John Osborne did, and the play isn’t written like those musicals are. The dance sequences only work at articulating the drama if the relationship between theatre and reality is airtight, and the drama has depth, and depth comes from reality. Actually, Peggs, I kind of think that this should be more Ivanov than Much Ado, given that although Branagh’s playing a comedian he’s not playing a good one, so that lack of comedy should seem tragic. But Ashford seems to miss that, and stages it like a competent musical with an incompetent book, like Much Ado with xenophobic asides. The home scenes make for dull drama: keeping them ‘onstage’ gives them an artifice which only makes sense because of Archie, and then to have characters literally come upstage to deliver points to us seems artificial, clunky, almost amateurish, not gelling with the script. On the other hand, to back up Branagh with the sexiest, sleekest dancers in fabulous costumes suggests he’s good, they’re good and this is a good dance, and that’s just not what this play is about. Rather than naff up the dancing but respect the domestic, Ashford respects the dancing and naffs up the domestic.
Actually, making the dance sequences hokey would actually do wonders at representing Billy Rice’s line of thought, and make this Fosse-style make sense, but it doesn’t. For this to work you want a director who can cut between song and spoken, ‘reality’ and ‘the theatrical’, all the while appreciating the relationship between the two, the phoniness of the former and the intrinsic truth of the latter, all the while able to stage it with vim and pace. You want a Susan Stroman, who understands how to toe the line between pageantry and unpleasantness simultaneously, using the former to literalise the latter and render its ugliness palpable. You want an actual Bob Fosse, who subverts, not enhances, reality through song, directs character first and choreography second, and in All That Jazz had an Archie-ish figure similarly trying to escape reality, not enhance it, through his art – think of the final scene of that movie, the superficial sleekness but evident emptiness of Bye Bye Life. You want a Carrie Cracknell, who can articulate fraught family relationships like no other, whilst incorporating a certain musicality a la Blurred Lines or Macbeth.
Or, dare I say, you want Sir Chuckles Branagh. A marriage of the phony sleekness of Michael Caine’s house in Sleuth and the musical numbers of his Love’s Labour’s Lost would make this work. Branagh actually aped Fosse’s flashiness in one sequences in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I think Branagh understands Fosse’s subtleness: the character of Lenny or the self deprecating laceration of All That Jazz (indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if a bit of Roy Scheider informed Branagh’s performance). Most tellingly, his performances hits all the bum notes this bad performer should, with a sadness behind his eyes showing Branagh understands the script; Joel Grey always says that his Emcee is an amalgamation of the worst, most desperate performers he ever saw; Branagh’s Archie Rice so richly steals from this line of thought too. For his Garrick swansong, it’s a bold decision to make Archie so very untalented let alone ugly, but Branagh clearly understands the power that comes from bad performing. The constant awkwardness, line-flubbing and bad-name-dropping from his desperate untalented hulk is unpleasant to watch in all the right ways. He’s a man only ever able to engage with others when on stage, thus bringing faux-staginess to his real life, semi-aware that his stage skills are less than stellar; Branagh’s Archie is clearly keeping self-realisation at arm’s length, and that’s very sad to watch. Less full-bodied than in The Winter’s Tale and less damn fun than Harlequinade*, maybe, but still a stellar piece of acting (I missed The Painkiller and wonder now if, in retrospect, that might have been the highlight of this season). And for any fans of Branagh’s musical Love’s Labour’s Lost (I think there are six of us), it’s a real treat to see the man dance in person.
Other performances variable – Gawn Grainger was good but no John Hurt and I think I’d be saying John Hurt was good but no Ron Cook; Greta Saachi does the best of a bad job; daughter fairly mediocre but that’s mostly being swamped by this building and direction.
So, in a nutshell, a great actor wastes some of his best work in probably the worst directorial effort of his Garrick tenure. The real issue is that, without a proper drama around him, the star turn here is wholly diminished, with Archie a dancer first and foremost rather than a bad father first and foremost. Branagh still shines through, but it’s a battle. A dated play and a too-superficial interpretation, but to watch Branagh bring the sad self-hatred of his Ivanov back, then bury it under the bad Gene Kelly he danced in Love’s Labour’s Lost, makes for powerful, dislikeable, substantial viewing.
Just stay home, turn on the TV, watch a double bill of Wallander and Love’s Labour’s Lost instead.
*Weirdly, now the dust has settled, Harlequinade comes across as a richer study of life on the stage than The Entertainer does – and Harlequinade is so flimsy that they didn’t bother reviving it alongside The Browning Version at Chichester. There’s a perverse posthumous irony or victory in the fact that even lesser Rattigan is proving so deep and so successful, whereas Osborne very, very much looks like a period piece.
P.S. As much as anything, this theatre was just too big for this play – the Garrick’s quite glamorous, this shouldn’t be. I want a chamber version of this in Wilton’s Music Hall now it’s back in business, or possibly somewhere genuinely grotty like the Arcola – Greg Hicks was there not long ago and I bet he’d eat this part up with aplomb, particularly if he could get so up-close to his audience that it would be scary.
P.P.S. It’s also a shame that this comes so shortly after such a strong revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, another show about a lesser theatrical talent peddling his wares whilst his family circles around him with their own problems. Really, the main difference is that Osborne writes quite unpleasant characters with unwieldy and didactic monologues, where O’Neill is a poet so the genius of that play is, quite simply, how well it is written. It’s a tenuous comparison, but there were a fair few moments watching Branagh criticise his own career where all I could hear was Irons barking the same self-criticisms but with so much more substance in his speeches, or watching Branagh’s patriarch be taken down a few pegs by his children where all I could think was that these monologues were blunt and obvious compared to the desperation of the Tyrone children. It’s a superficial comparison, but one which damages this production quite a bit, if you saw Irons and Manville work their magic. Simply put, The Entertainer is a fairly good (not great) leading man’s role, but honestly it’s not that good a play, is it?
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 1, 2016 22:03:35 GMT
Whilst I’m tending towards agreeing with the ‘good but not great’, I think that actually serves this play to a fault. Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but this is not Medea, in which the histrionics are allowed to be so overplayed they’re represented through dance, and nor is it even A Doll’s House, with a plot with the mechanics of a Swiss watch and a crescendo to an iconic ending like no other. It’s a very, very withheld piece, about people who can’t express emotions. What makes this production more moving is how underdone everything is, and how Cracknell completely avoids even the potential of histrionics, making this about as quiet as it can be. I think something lingers from this production, and that comes from it being so subtle, so simple.
Carrie Cracknell has a very open-minded, even-handed approach to her drama (not always – it would have made Blurred Lines boring, and Birdland’s Andrew Scott-centricity gave that its energy – but when it comes to domestic settings particularly). What made A Doll’s House so stunning was that, however triumphant Hattie Morahan was, Cracknell’s treatment of Torvald and Krogstad was kindly, and for brief moments they became heroes of their own minor dramas with Nora, never the victim, almost a villain in their worlds; whilst we ultimately sided completely with Nora, that was despite the faults these prisms made us see in her, and that only made for richer, richer, ever richer drama – if I had to pick a best show ever, I think I’d still plump for that. Her Medea was far kinder on Jason than the play needed to be. Hell, even her Macbeth was strangely non-partisan, though that was a duffer. And here, the things that made it shine were the three dimensions every character had. Tom Burke does a wonderful self-analysis; he begins with caddish confidence and ends with caddish confidence, but at every stage where he’s allowed to be himself he lets us in on this as a façade. When he utters the awful shilling line, it sends chills through its cruelty, but also its possible faux-cruelty: that he’s saying that less because he means it and more because he thinks his ‘character’ of a cad would mean it, and the fact that he would hurt her so again for a façade... Where this egalitarian view came into its own was with Nick Fletcher (the wonderful Krogstadt from earlier), who absolutely stole the show. It looks like I’m not alone in thinking this, and if anyone from here is up for awards I hope it’s him. There’s a simple plain-speaking to him, yet a mournful tiredness, a resilience. It’s so supportive it’s tearjearking. Between the highfalutin pilot phoniness of Burke, and the slightly too-underdone support of Peter Sullivan who I did think didn’t make an impression, Fletcher injects real, sincere, human heart into this, able to articulate to her what McCrory clearly doesn’t allow herself to feel. He’s all the emotions of this piece. Marion Bailey was good in a role much too small for her – not least, when I noticed it was her, I remembered she was so good in Blurred Lines, then I remembered more about that show, then I had this bloody tune going through my head very inappropriately throughout the second half.
Helen McCrory has infinitely less to do than in Medea, and that’s why this is so powerful. Like Burke, she performs to conformity, until she’s allowed to be herself, though even then conformity is her normality; it's an exercise in breaking an unbreakable norm. She plays uncertainty. There’s a central self-doubt, in her occasional voice-cracks, her occasional shakiness, her Teflon approach to any questions about herself, all to reveal that, underneath her calm exterior there’s a desperately sad person, and underneath that there’s an absence where she’s been trying to conform for too long and the artist within, the person Hester used to be, is struggling to be heard. It’s judged rather beautifully, actually, how much of Hester is forced and how much is just because she’s not used to being ‘Hester’ anymore. As she becomes less Hester Collyer, and less Hester Page, her growing realisation that she doesn’t know who Hester alone is anymore is heartbreakingly held back, made more moving by Fletcher’s insistence on bringing out her intrinsic humanity. Because it’s less showy than some other performances (not least her own Medea) it won’t win awards, and arguably it’s less good too, but it’s a very moving portrayal of emptiness and societal conformity and loneliness which comes through clearly.
Unlike other Cracknell shows, this is not one which peaks and peaks and peaks until the tension at the end is airtight, but unlike other Cracknell shows the script she works with demands a subtlety she provides in spades. The ending, after all, is ultimately a boring act – boiling an egg – yet it takes a great director to make something so intrinsically boring so affectingly moving. Because she paints every character in a very human light, and because she demands all emotions be hidden behind the layers of Kenneth Moore-esque acting the 50s require, this Rattigan is a profoundly human, empathetic piece. I didn’t love it (not least, like Plough and Stars, the beautiful set was overblown in this too-big space), but I far more than admired this – its subtle unpicking of its characters’ restraint made for something truly heartbreaking, whilst if its central performance doesn’t set the stage on fire, that’s because it lights a much smaller spark that burns long after the drama is done.
P.S. Do any of you subscribe to the NT Podcasts, and have you heard the Helen McCrory one yet? It’s a bit underwhelming, a little too much of Libby Purves describing the show to Helen McCrory, but some interesting insights about working with Carrie Cracknell. Mostly, though, you can never over-estimate how facetious my mind can get: “Because I worked with Carrie, on Medea...” McCrory starts. “What did she say?” think I, “Kenneth Williams as Creon, Sid James as Jason, Hattie Jacques in the lead – it’s Carry On Medea!”.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 1, 2016 22:01:32 GMT
Forgot to say, hit the jackpot at Aladdin.
Ten minutes in, two girls clamber in late and occupy the two empty seats next to me.
Twenty minutes in, they start unpacking their picnic, which they’d wisely packed at the bottom of their bag, ignoring both me and the people in front turning around and doing their best Paddington Bear Hard StareTM.
Twenty-five minutes in, start eating their picnic, and when I say picnic I mean picnic – firstly something else, but then it turns out they’d packed those crisps which are very crunchy (annoying everyone who can hear), and, worse, really, really smelly (vinegary, annoying mostly me). When I notice it’s not just a small bag but TWO entire tubs of the stuff, and because clearly other people were getting antsy too, I lean over and do my best mock-polite whispering “Sorry, that’s quite noisy, would you mind waiting until the interval?”
Forty minutes in, could they heck. Crunch crunch crunch, hard stare goes ignored. I tend to assume people who eat/check phones/whisper often don’t realise how loud they’re being, and tend to be apologetic if you ask. So when these people know they’re annoying a lot of people who’ve paid an awful lot of money to be here but just don’t give a damn... I can’t quite remember what I said, but it wasn’t polite. So they put them away, and I relax, because it’s not like they’re going to do anything else to distract me, is it, I can sit and enjoy the sh-oh what the f*** are they doing now...
Out come the f***ing phones. It’s like they were working their way through a list of how to piss people off. The usher comes along (good ushers here, shining their lights on phones) and tells them off, so they graciously acknowledge their fourth wrongdoing of the night and turn it off they stroppily say (not whisper, say) “I’M TURNING IT OFF!” like a bolshy teenager, then somehow take five minutes to find the off button. And you know the best bit? I can see they’re on Facebook, and I’m 99.9% sure they were complaining about how badly I was behaving towards them at the theatre.
Something happened during the interval, and they behaved themselves in the second half, but when people are such arses you keep waiting for them to arse around further – it took a long time to relax into the show. So thanks to those two strangers, I’ve ticked off my year’s bad behaviour bingo card in one bloody hour.
P.S On a lighter note...
Not a show, but went to the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy today and (as often happens) had the experience marred by a few parents who had brought very small children with them who spent the whole time screaming with no attempt by the parents to quieten their little darlings down And also incidentally a fair few families with nice quiet well behaved children! So not saying don't bring them, but if they are screaming or running about take them out!
One of my favourite experiences in an art gallery was going around the David Hockney ipad art exhibition at the Royal Academy, some three or four years ago now. Whilst pretentious sods like myself were staring at a wall full of pictures of fairly similar, nondescript, brightly coloured trees and pretending we could see deep meaning within them, a parent turned to his little bundle of joy and excitedly said “I think I can see a Gruffalo in one of those!”.
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Post by Nicholas on Oct 1, 2016 22:00:36 GMT
I mean, we never even know why Yerma wants a baby; the only reason Stone or Piper gives us is “because she wants to, because she wants to”. I know you're half-joking here, Nicholas, but - speaking as someone who has never wanted to have children - the reason most people want a baby is basically 'because she wants to'. At least from my perspective, anyway. People don't need any other reason. Indeed, they persist in wanting babies even when it's demonstrably the worst possible thing that could happen at that point in their lives, and they'd be much better off not having them. At some point you just have to chalk it up to biological imperative. HALF-joking? Is such a thing possible? You can never over-estimate how facetious I’m being. I only got into theatre so you lot have to take it seriously when we’re comparing Fannies and Gaylords.
But you’ve hit the nail on the head, actually. That’s a perfectly legitimate(ish) reason to have a child – for the sheer damn hell of it – but it didn’t work within this drama, when it so easily could have. A few years ago Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs was similarly about a very modern hip middle-class couple thinking about having a child “because they wanted to”, but they debated whether that was good enough in this world (they decided, spoiler, that (as Yerma decides) it was), and I refuse to believe that this couple would not have had the same conversations – even briefly – about whether that’s good enough and what it entails to bring a new life into the twenty-first century (particularly given how ‘modern’ other parts of the play were – they clearly read the Guardian, if they’ll discuss Sadiq and Avocados, they’ll sure as hell discuss the carbon footprint of eighteen years of child-rearing, let alone other practical concerns). More damningly, though, they just needed to say “I want a child, because I want a child” with some clarity, and whilst it wouldn’t be motivation enough for me personally, it would be motivation enough for the drama. If it’s a perfectly realistic reason for having a child, it needed to be spoken more clearly here.
But then, I wonder if Steve’s hit the nail on the head (lot of nails today). That’s too literal. Dare I flog my dead horse one more time and look at Lars von Trier, who literally destroys the world to make a metaphorical point about depression (in Melancholia, his least objectionable film, and his bona fide masterpiece), so, in comparison, denying a woman a baby is child’s play. I suppose it’s a similar thing here – ultimately the child’s a catalyst, a thematic point. And I don’t know where Lorca ends and Stone begins on that. But I do think that there needs to be a greater sense of realism to the macguffin to make the drama really, really zing.
And I do think a lack of depth and believability hurts it dramatically and emotionally, because without realism I can’t surrender to it wholly (and it was SO CLOSE to realism!). I can believe they’d dismiss adoption, because too many people sadly do. But to return to popcultureboy’s point, I can’t believe that some as strong as Yerma would let her husband take three years to do a sperm test out of misplaced machismo, or that her husband would be so callow himself, or that her friends wouldn’t have a word and make him do it – stalling, yes; macho pride, yes; three years, no not this couple. And I wish we saw more of the ‘rational’ woman before her ‘irrationality’ over the baby took control, because actually I think that would be more believable, to give her three dimensions and watch them crash to one desperate one, would make a far richer arc, and a far less repetitive first half.
That said, still much to admire, particularly in the second half where I think we can agree on it streamlining everything down to the basic, simple, desperate emptiness of her life. And besides, I think we could all do with a Steve Mini-Me in our lives.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 25, 2016 20:17:56 GMT
Saw this THE DAY BEFORE LIN MANUEL TURNED UP, GRR, bit annoyed I’m late to the game with this one. I want to rave and tell you all how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s a rising genius who’s going to do amazing things – but he already has, and you already know that anyway, don’t you? I suppose this is a bit like a modern day Meet Me In St Louis – about a small, tight-knit, local community expressing their very domestic concerns through song (where Fosse believes song is heightened emotion, here song is not just everyday language but a glorious lingua franca) – and it’s such a wonderful, caring, full-blooded and fully-realised community that it’s equally up there with Minelli’s view of 1940s life, just a pleasure immersing yourself in this world. I imagine in fifty years this will still feel young, still sound new, still have a twenty-year old’s energy. Simply put, it’s absolutely the best, most humane, most joyous, most life-affirming musical I’ve ever seen about a power cut.
P.S. Just listening to the CD now. Still love it. There are just lyrics that are just so entertainingly clever in the way a good Cole Porter rhyme is entertainingly clever (I wonder how broad Lin Manuel Miranda’s music collection must be). See, Aladdin made me smile then ended, because it’s about a joke being funny at the time. This made me happy, because it’s about the joy of being in such a close-knit, caring community, and that happiness has stuck since.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 25, 2016 20:17:24 GMT
Surprisingly compelling, there was something of a great symphony to this play and Davies/Herrin’s production. I find myself something of a contrarian here – I really rather liked this. I found Juno and the Paycock fell flat, and I found The Silver Tassie an academic rediscovery which didn’t really work on stage, but this had a communal energy, and changes in tone, which made it quite entertaining and rather enlightening. The tone of this production was of ordinary lives lived at a fast pace as the world moved faster around them, whilst the script had a musicality which belied its domestic and political setting. I can’t say I loved this, but after two underwhelming O’Caseys, The Plough and The Stars seemed really quite a cut above, with something interesting to say about how communities start revolutions.
The Silver Tassie, of course, had that musical scene. I thought it worked in isolation, but as the second of four parts it was a sore thumb. When the drama turned into a pre-emptive O What A Lovely War, The Silver Tassie stopped being a play and started being four short plays, and that made for naff drama. The Plough and the Stars was a much better evocation of music than an actual musical section ever could be: this production had crescendos and diminuendos, solos and tutti, unison and nigh-on improvisatory jazz. Its second act, the bar, never lost momentum: outside sounds made an ostinato whilst the debate built up with lovely pace. I don’t know if Herrin brought a new energy or Davies found more to work with, but throughout I found what was impressive – and even educational – about this production was how like Caryl Churchill the overlapping intercutting dialogue was, but more presciently how scenes – like symphonies – swelled into unison (setting off a nationwide war) before softening into solos (bringing a sometimes desperate and innocent humanity into this history lesson). Because it was entertaining first and foremost to the ears (liked the set but like many things swamped in this too-big theatre) it was a rather entertaining piece of work, so when Act III exploded like it did it shocked far more pertinently than any of the explosions in The Silver Tassie, whilst the deaths in Act Four had an emotion resonance Juno and the Paycock lacked. I don’t think it’s a great play because I still think it doesn’t get to the heart of why this rebellion happened (perhaps, written so soon after the event, rewriting to add context would be good), and doesn’t consolidate its three strands of the theoretical upset causing revolution with the physical violence with the character work (interesting though all three over-stuff strands are), but I think it’s a very very good piece of theatre as seen here. Great cast, fascinating script, not perfect and not essential but surprisingly entertaining and surprisingly quite powerful.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 25, 2016 20:17:09 GMT
Is Disney’s Aladdin just a glorified panto, basically a local community show with a bigger budget? Yes. Did I still enjoy it? Yes. So is it being a glorified panto a problem?
Well, Yes and No, inevitably.
No, it’s not a problem when you’ve got some of the best songs by Menken, Rice, and the great Ashman (alongside some of their filler material). No, it’s not a problem when you’ve got the glitz of however many diamonds, sparkle everywhere. No, it’s not a problem when the dancing’s this wonderful mix of Broadway, Bollywood and Banghra, culturally all over the place but choreographically fun. No, it’s not a problem when Jasmine has her very well-received and very greatly-needed feminist awakening. No, it’s not a problem when you’ve got a genie, more on which later. No, it’s not a problem if it’s fun, and it was fun. And no, it’s not a problem when Dean John Wilson has his pecs out. It’s fun, I laughed a lot, it made me smile, and sometimes that’s all you need.
But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you need more. Some of the best shows I’ve ever seen have made me smile, but there’s been depth, be it a real inherent kindness to them, or a real political positivity, or a genuine joie de vivre. This made me smile, and then I left with nothing to keep me smiling to take away from it, beyond the tunes I knew before I went in. And this is why it’s not good enough that Aladdin is simply good enough.
So yes, scrape beyond this very thin surface and it’s a very big problem that this is a simple cheap and cheerful panto with a simple script. It’s a fun panto, don’t get me wrong, but it carries with it all the connotations and clichés and issues of panto, most problematically the cheapness and shallowness of provincial ones. Firstly, Aladdin is not Disney’s deepest work at 90 minutes, and at roughly 150 minutes no real reason for expansion is added. Dan Rebellato once wrote of ‘Mr Potato Head’ characteristics – where a person’s motivations and desires seem attached, added apropos of the person underneath and not a priori. Whilst it’s great that Jasmine says “I want to make my own destiny and not belong to a man”, one line doth not a feminist make, and rather than expand upon this Jasmine still remains the macguffin, the prize to be won. Aladdin himself is just as thin: one song doth not a character make, and (sorry, Michael!) “Proud Of Your Boy” makes Aladdin a much less fun character than the scamp he was in the shorter movie. The villains weren’t exactly Richard III in the cartoon, but turning Iago into Artie Ziff makes him less exciting, as does giving Jafar the most clichéd ‘villain tango’ song to buff his part up. Beyond characters, the script is no better than any old school panto, from puns that actually made my eyes roll to each scene being not animated magic but old-school standing still in shonky sets. I mean, hell, the lyrics of “High Adventure” mock the cheesiness of it all, and that’s one of the show’s high points.
Perhaps that would be fine in a panto, but the issue here is one almost external to the show. This isn’t Shinfield Player’s Theatre’s Aladdin, this is “Disney’s Aladdin”. It’s a problem of expectation and possibility, and execution and reality. Aladdin is possibly the most visually inventive animation of this period. Script-wise, the film is the same enjoyable muddle as this – Scheherazadian Arabic narrative which takes a Broadway back-seat when the Genie’s centre-stage – but it’s a treat to the eyes, from the Chaplin-esque Magic Carpet, to Busby Berkley music numbers, to Lawrence of Arabia in pen and ink. And Disney knows how to do visually inventive on stage: for all the criticism of The Lion King it made you believe, long before War Horse, that pieces of wood on someone’s head was a gazelle gracefully galloping or that a mighty man in a silly costume really was the king of the jungle, and Beauty and the Beast recreated the movie so wonderfully that, to my untrained eye, I still don’t know how those cartoon characters came to life, how the beast became a prince again. Disney has a reputation, a standard raised. How, wondered we as we went in, would they do the talking parrot? Elephants on stage? A magic carpet?
You know the answer: it’s a bloke, it’s just some dancers, and the carpet is so shoehorned in that the line explaining it is a joke. As is most of the staging. The market is some cardboard boxes and curtains. The cave is diamonds. The castle is a white wall. The genie came out of an obvious trapdoor. Perhaps it’s simply that this is unfortunate to open almost alongside Harry Potter, where both boundaries are pushed and simple theatrical illusions are well-incorporated, or perhaps it’s that Disney have raised my expectations too high through other work. I loved the choreography: as I say, Casey Nicholaw brings Broadway theatricality whilst respecting the Arabian source, and that amidst the magic a story ABOUT MAGIC requires would be great, but the staging is so cheap, so unimaginative – it’s how you would stage Aladdin were you to stage it in a school with limited means, and whilst sometimes stripped back IS magic, it isn’t when it’s a million-pound Disney project in such a huge theatre, and that truly matters here. When one gets to the finale, one doesn’t expect him to literally turn into a snake, but the expectation of an imaginative substitution is founded on Disney’s track record; to finish this with everyone standing still in a line and two nifty costume changes simply is not good enough for the West End, not good enough for Disney. There’s no attempt to emulate the fantastical transfigurations of the cartoon, nor to replace it with a theatrical variant. There’s just people standing still. Not even something simple choreographed. Just stillness. It was hard not to be underwhelmed.
So duff script with tacked-on ‘big-ideas’ but diminished whimsy, material over-stretched, and a really, really cheap feel to it – surely that would overwhelm any feelings of goodwill towards a moderately entertaining panto? Oh, it does. But... Really, Aladdin isn’t an Arabian fairytale, or a Broadway musical, or a Disney cartoon. It’s a star turn. The movie had Robin Williams doing a child-friendly GOOOOOOOOOD MOOOOOORNING VIETNAM! and getting away with daylight robbery. This has this year’s Olivier winner Trevor Dion Nicholas. Where this fails is underdoing the potential theatricality Aladdin offers, but where this succeeds is casting someone who understands the theatricality of Broadway, the theatricality of Robin Williams and the theatricality of Panto, alongside his own effervescence. If the Nicholas Brothers had a child with Neil Patrick Harris/James Cordern’s Tony Hosts, then there’s been a major moral, biological and time-travelling transgression you’d have this genie. His joy is infectious – when he smiles, you smiles, and boy does he smile – and that goes a long way, but he’s also got a natural charisma, clear affection for the role and the show, one hell of a role to sink his teeth and not insubstantial talent into, and every second he’s on stage it’s perhaps the most fun you can have in the West End at the mo. He sparkles where the show does not. When he comes on it’s a Broadway extravaganza, bringing 42nd Street and Busby Berkley and Broadway razzmatazz galore. When he’s doing this, it’s transcendent. It’s pure Broadway, and (literally) pure gold.
So it’s a curate’s Faberge egg. Am I just being churlish because I wanted more glitz? Again, yes and no; it’s indisputably an awful awful awful lot of fun, but it’s little more than that which it could be, should be and sets us up to be. “Disney’s Aladdin” is a mess, redeemed by one supporting turn: the Aladdin/Jasmine plot is an overstreched underdeveloped muddle which removes an awful lot of the wit from the cartoon (especially as three of the cartoon’s best characters – the carpet, Abu and Iago – are predominantly visual beings) and stumbles on in a slightly clichéd, theatrically underwhelming way. But “Disney’s Genie”, starring Trevor Dion Nicholas – it’s padded out with too much Aladdin malarkey, but what a show that is!
Disclaimer: I may sound like I’m being rude about Shinfield Player’s Theatre. Not at all. It’s the best theatre in the Shinfield area of Reading. They have a standard to maintain. Yesterday they had Dean Friedman.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 25, 2016 20:16:26 GMT
To continue the People, Places and Things comparisons from earlier – watching Yerma, I think I felt how the people who (wrongly) dismissed Macmillan’s script felt about that – bravura performance, but what’s the point?
That’s a bit mean on this. This was a game of two halves, and I was rather sucker-punched (if not devastated) by the final three chapters. But there was a major issue of slightness and factual errors that made the first two thirds unbearably so-so (an issue which Parsley gets right to the heart of – we mock him, but when he’s right he’s right), and ultimately brought a slightness to an ending that should have been devastating. And before I begin, I ought to say that I don’t know this Lorca at all, so I’m attributing all its faults to Stone – that said, this is clearly his baby and he’s clearly rewritten heaps, so I think that’s fair, esp. the ending.
Part One: Let’s Get Pregnant with Paige Britain! Yerma, our protagonist, is a bizarrely written character. As a blogger, there’s a Katie Hopkins shock-jock meanness to her (which I felt came across as over-forced and artificial) that makes her rather grating; as a person, Stone (or Lorca?) doesn’t give her depth, and this undermines her theatrical existence. Because the play only really shows us the side of her which is wanting a baby, she becomes one-dimensional when that’s all we get for 1hr45 – for once, a show could be longer: expand Yerma’s life outside this one aspect, show the whole woman not merely the prospective mother. Other than that it’s a tedious Generation Game conveyer belt of Buzzwords (Whatsapp me, Sadiq’s mayor now, avocado – buzzwords incorporated a posteriori, not from inside the box), stringing together “I want a baby I want a baby I want a baby” – the modernity feels phoney and the baby-craving flimsy. Aspects – the family relationship, the job itself – hint at the depth this could have had, and that would have been rather wonderful, but instead it’s over-simple and over-repetitive and needs some more. I mean, we never even know why Yerma wants a baby; the only reason Stone or Piper gives us is “because she wants to, because she wants to”.
And on the subject of blogs – WHERE IS THEIR MONEY COMING FROM? Buying London houses is no issue to a blogger; blogging apparently makes you Midas. Oh, and also, I know that him not getting his sperm tested is for dramatic/character purposes – about pride and masculinity and all that – but practically, Brendan Cowell stringing loved ones on for years out of stubbornness just makes him a dislikeable arse, end of; dramatically it takes the edge off as he becomes one-dimensional too and quite unpleasant, and this makes it somewhat unbelievable at times.
Part Two: a very Danish Dogme downfall. And blimey does the tone rise. Stone has taken influence from the Dogme school of filmmaking before (most specifically (he mentioned this himself) The Daughter), and with how he updates and depicts Yerma’s depression, he takes the largest leaf out of the book of Lars von Trier – a great feminist at best, a great misogynist at worst, often somehow the same thing at the same time, one of the most problematic but fascinating writers of woman characters working today. Having simplified Yerma down to nothing but a mother, to take the potentiality of motherhood away from her empties her out, leaves a void, leaves a woman bereft of identity and purpose and connections; in how explicit, full-on and devastating this self-imposed emptiness was, I was very much reminded of Bjork belting her sorrows away in Dancer in the Dark, of Nicole Kidman’s treatment in Dogville, and particularly (not least due to how, and where, Yerma inflicts violence upon herself in its final moments) of Charlotte Gainsborough dismantling herself first mentally and then physically in Antichrist. As I saw the ending’s reading of women as mothers, Antichrist does rather seem a reference point (not least that that film, too, has a terribly boring first half). And whilst (as with von Trier) there are histrionics and contrivances, I think the strength of Piper’s performance makes her desperate descent into profound loneliness utterly heartbreaking. And, crucially, ‘baby talk’ is relatively relegated – the end is simply a heartbroken woman lacking what she wants, the baby a mere macguffin, and if her heartbreak doesn’t break your heart, you must be made of Stone stone.
Billie Piper seems to be doing a Mark Gatiss – not letting her populism get in the way of becoming a stunning stage actor. The Effect was a layered piece of underplaying as required, her Paige Britain was infinitely better than the play she was in, and now this! Were she not a Doctor Who alumnus, we’d be praising her as a unique talent of the stage, so let’s. It’s nice that she’s part of this brigade shattering high/low, populist/niche culture distinctions, simply by being very very very good at her job (James Mcavoy’s another example). Even at the play’s most annoying (Stone’s writing), she’s convincing to a fault, and as the play drags Yerma down to self-inflicted humiliation, self-doubt and that act of violence, Piper just stuns (to flog my dead horse, look at the performances von Trier gets from great actress in passionate/humiliating roles). She’s been very good before, but this brings out unlikeable, naked layers which are quite painful to watch in ways few actresses are, it’s really something.
So when the script gives her meat, Piper is brilliant, and when the script doesn’t, she’s still brilliant. It’s a shame the script is only half-brilliant. In The Wild Duck, Stone’s detached observation worked because his script had heart, his empathy for Hedvig and Gregers was palpable and we were on their side from step one; that he turned Ibsen’s Sophoclean intellectual decline into a modern kitchen-sink drama heightened the impact of the downfall because Stone had brought Ibsen down to earth. Here, I don’t think Stone sets up the Sophoclean decline well or believes in the issues affecting the character that much (which may be Lorca’s fault?). The Wild Duck was observational where this was clinical; we’re outside Yerma’s head, outside her heart, never able to explore what’s driving her all this time, and that means motivation is replaced by that pat modernity, where in The Wild Duck motivation was enhanced by organic modernity. The ending is amazing, the live Dogme drama something to behold, and the acting is top notch. The beginning just sags, which brings the ending down. If Stone had given Yerma a rounder, richer life from the beginning, this would be a two-hour-plus drama of profound humanity with an utterly devastating ending, but as it is it’s a slight 1hr45 study of an over-simplified protagonist given far more depth than she deserves by a wonderful, wonderful central knock-out performance.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 25, 2016 20:14:24 GMT
With Rice’s ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ production, this is almost ‘too much of a good thing’, oddly enough. Rice’s intentions are wonderful, her innovations great. Rice’s regime will be very very good, and everything good about it was in here. So why would I merely give it three stars? That’s the problem: EVERYTHING was in here, including not just too many un-Globey ideas about how to stage Shakespeare, but every exciting mistake she’ll make. It’s good that Rice has her own identity and isn’t a Dromgoole carbon copy, it’s good that her regime is going to be more gender-balanced and inclusive and it’s good that she’s going to prioritise modernity, but good grief the anti-Bardolatory and the in-jokes and the blindingly unnecessary technology... In only her second Shakespeare but first of many to come, I think Rice wanted to show us everything she felt the Globe could be, should be and will be; rather than take ten years to make a point, she made it in three hours. The Globe under her looks set to be raucous, rollicking fun, irreverent, modern, appealing to new audiences, legitimately fun. Her Midsummer was. But this wasn’t a show as much as a show-off, and there’s the rub.
So much about this was so so lovely. Firstly, the great innovation of changing Helena to Helenus had nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with casting Ankur Bahl, who was really really lovely! With his lovely lovelorn longing and his sense of fun, he made Helenus a sympathetic but never self-pitying, stronger-than-usual lover. This production seemed mostly to care for those four lovers, with a down-to-earthness and normality to them I found quite charming, and real comic pizzazz in those four performances. Beyond that, plenty of nice touches – genuine debauchery within the fairies (though I found Puck too shouty), genuine care towards the mechanicals, genuinely unpredictable whimsy, stunning music which shows that Rice (like her predecessors) can subtly reference the play’s darker, more intellectual aspects in a way which doesn’t interfere with the fun (using Indian music and musicians, Rice is clearly answering anti-colonial scholars who critique the stealing of an Indian baby). And the inclusion of Beyonce and Bowie in this, of all buildings, was surprising and sweet, the kind of newness and modernity that was, too often, squandered by Globe traditions.
The issue was I can enjoy debauched fairies and Hoxton lovers and Globe ushers and new technology and colonial appropriation critique in isolation; thrown together in this very special theatre, it did not make a coherent show. A Dromgoole show (or a Luscombe or Dunster or Macintyre or Carroll or Rylance show there) tended to have a simplicity of purpose: primarily, make something current out of a clunky old circle. This had a complexity of intention, more about how any Shakespeare could be staged there, and less about how this Shakespeare should. Plus these lovely touches were one of too many ‘new’ aspects, alongside the neon, alongside weirdly insider and mean-spirited in-jokes... I actually think this exact show could have been wonderful, but the anti-Dromgoole anti-Rylance newness of it overwhelmed it. There was almost a meta-voice shouting over the top “WE CAN HAVE T-SHIRTS NOT CODPIECES, WE CAN HAVE SPOTLIGHTS NOT JUST THE SUN, WE CAN CALL IT HOXTON THE WORDS CAN BE REWRITTEN, WE CAN HAVE ADLIBS, WE CAN HAVE...” and that made the show a ‘statement’, not a ‘production’. I admire almost every single aspect of this show, because I can tell Rice’s irreverence is going to shake up the building in a good way, but ‘not the sum of its parts’ comes to mind – too many parts I love make for an inconsistent and un-unified sum I merely quite liked instead.
As for removing the USP of the Globe, I do and don’t agree. Would the Bard have staged a three man Tempest? In 1612, would troupes from Belarus and Israel and Hip Hop have performed these works? Would a play like Nell Gwynn have happened, and if so presumably with not Gugu Mbatha-Raw but Richard Burbage? And presumably Prospero would be played by someone most unlike Vanessa Redgrave? The Globe’s historical value was only ever one part of it from the beginning. Rylance wasn’t a traditionalist and nor was Dromgoole, so why should Rice be? I think it’s the nature of the changes, though: whatever else, the Globe had its limits, and ‘updating’ it would ruin the point. Neon... Particularly the theoretical aspects – gender switching, sexuality switching and tasteful technology – are wonderful, but giant neon and bogstandard modern costumes seem more like working against the space, rather than with it. If next year is filled with costumes and cod-pieces I’ll feel there’s been backtracking, but I hope next year isn’t quite so anti-Globe. Mostly, less neon.
What made Dromgoole great, incidentally, was that he used the limitations and the history of the Globe to be academically incisive. Last year his Measure For Measure stood contrary to Cheek by Jowl and Gibbons-Hill’s two grimy political reinterpretations, making the problem play unproblematic fun for the groundlings; rather than make it more shallow, however, he found the heart few had seen in it before, and found something truly romantic in that very weird romance. If his Measure for Measure could have flooded the Globe with sex toys, there’d have been no need for it to be at the Globe (might have made standing in the pit an awful lot more fun, mind, though this from the Oresteia kind of did the job); due to the Globe’s Jacobethan problems, it often ended up the most insightful modern Shakespearean stage in town. There is a risk that without the Globe’s problems you don’t have anything to solve, and that would be a shame.
And perversely, I think the all-encompassing modernisation may have worked against Rice. I wonder if there’d have been something even more revelatory, and even more progressive, about turning Helena into Helenus in the rigid society of the seventeenth century. And I also think that making the Mechanicals the Globe ushers would have still worked – and been funnier – had the rest of the show been staidly Shakespearean.
So when I say “Too much of a good thing”, my cup did nor o’erflow with joy during this, though I did laugh a lot. Simply, there were too many good prospects for the future, which made for a baggy three hour show. I think Rice took everything ‘good’ she wants to do with the building over the next ten years – stage Shakespeare as a modern, progressive, updated, flippant two-fingers to Bardolatry with no qualms about modernising the place – and overpacked her first show with her mission statement. I think her 2017 and 2018 shows will be more subtle, more old-fashioned and more Globe-y, whilst I hope her 2017 and 2018 shows will keep the adventure and fun and modernity of this. Her 2016 show, though, was buckling under the weight of proving many, many points about Shakespeare as modern (points most of us got over at least ten years ago), points about how Shakespeare can accommodate irreverence and rewriting (points the Globe could have taken years ago), points about how Shakespeare is going to be inclusive (points we all welcome). As such, it was a bit crazy, modern in weirdly unnecessary ways, and too much neon, but I welcome the changes and I welcome a wonderful new regime by Rice. We now know everything she intends the Globe to be, and (neon aside) it’s going to be modern and it’s going to be inclusive and it’s going to be wonderful. Her mission statement I agree with wholly. Her comedy I found hilarious. I just do hope her next production is actually, vaguely, somehow, slightly, Shakespearean.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 24, 2016 14:06:08 GMT
Absolutely agree with you lot, Parsley's criticisms are churlish given the fan love this inspires (and also, Parsley, didn't you say "WOW WOW WOW" about the first preview?). Is this the best play of the year? Actually I think it is up there, but objectively WHO CARES! With an obsession, or a passion, or a fandom, or a childhood memory, you really, really, really don’t want to be logical or clinical or analytical, but frankly you don’t have to be. The last Harry Potter book came out in 2007, the year of District and Circle. The last Harry Potter film came out in 2011, the year of A Separation. The Harry Potter play has come out in 2016, a year that unlike Kevin I’ve found absolutely bloody stunning play-wise (new plays The Encounter, The Flick, revivals Faith Healer, Les Blancs, I really think 2016’s had one of the most exciting set of highlights in years). Objectively, the Harry Potter pieces are not the best examples of their medium, no. But which film did I watch three times in one week at the cinema? Love Asghar Fahradi as I do, well...
The fact that the Harry Potter pieces, objectively, aren’t the best pieces of the year takes nothing away from our passion towards them. Potter’s a lovely franchise, particularly, in that I do think Rowling’s a very good writer (and Thorne indisputably is) and truly cares about the characters, so what we get tends to be good as opposed to filler. As a piece of theatre, Cursed Child is clearly something a cut above, but that’s almost by the bye – we bring to it so much goodwill, so much expectation, so much hope and passion and enthusiasm, and what matters first and foremost is that that is paid off (which is why I think it’s wonderful that Tiffany didn’t overload this with special effects, but made particularly the final quarter so focused on character). Things that happen, particularly in Act III (trying to not do spoilers, but let’s say moments of character), are the pay-off of twenty years of loyalty to these characters. That’s why this is special – not because Act III is the best-written third act in history, but it’s the one which offers the most reward back for its audience.
Would you enjoy this were you not a Potter fan? I think yes, three/four stars, you’d be wowed by the effects, entertained by the adventure, moved by the ending and content enough. But when you bring your own encyclopaedic knowledge and personal passion with you, it becomes something so much else. I assume Parsley didn’t bring that, but what Bend It To Beckham was to him Harry Potter is to a generation.
Sounds like you're one of those Harry Potter fans who's never forgiven JK Rowling for marrying Harry to Ginny & Ron to Hermione rather than Harry & Hermione to each other. ;-)
I’m more miffed she rewrote the perfect ending in the first place...
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 8, 2016 1:47:43 GMT
Nicholas, oh I did miss you terribly! Enjoyed your review v much. It's a pity you haven't seen it at NT as well 'cause it would give us a unique insight and you - a chance to compare (I confirm that Mr Streatfeild is doing more than fine but since I have a big crush on him after The Beaux' Stratagem last year you can't consider my opinion an objective one and I won't go any further.. Now to the questions. I do not actually know how excessively Shakespeare is studied in English schools, but I would imagine we have much less of Chekhov - just a couple of major plays alongside Ostrovsky and Gorky. And no, Bob Dylan is hardly known in Russia 'cause nobody understands what he's singing about lol )) But I love his early work to bits and consider him the greatest songwriter ever. You can ask away anything you like - will try to answer to the best of my knowledge (though I'm not as hardcore theatre-goer in Russia as I am in UK).
Спасибо! I’ve messaged you a load of questions so not to interrupt here – don’t feel you have to answer them all, but thanks!
I’d be tempted to go back to Ivanov – it was the best part of the trilogy, and I do love Streatfield too – but doubt I’ll have the time, because life... But The Beaux Stratagem was rather lovely, and that was pretty much all down to him! I went because of Samuel Barnett and Susannah Fielding, both great as always, but they had all that boring ‘getting divorced’ malarkey and all that was a bit of a downer, compared to Geoffrey Streatfield who literally danced away with the whole show! Wasn’t he wonderful in that? Can’t think of it and not smile. A trifle, oh a triiiiiiifle...
And I love that you say Russians don’t understand Dylan’s voice – Dylan fans at Dylan concerts don’t understand Dylan’s voice! I mean, listen to this or this and blimey it’s barely the same song it was fifty years ago! But that’s just part of the man’s genius, isn’t it?
Ivanov wasn't as good in my view as the Branagh version of some years back which was the first time I thought maybe i didn't dislike Chekhov as much as i thought i did, but it still all held together. I appear too tired or perhaps just not bright enough to fully understand Nicholas' review above as to why the direction made it more Ivanov focused but I did want to see more of Nina Sosanya and I remembered Lvov working better in the Branagh version. Whilst there were times when you just want to shake Ivanov especially in the treatment of his wife I always viewed the character through the lenses of pity, from the opening scene Steatfeild playing him very much as a man staring at this seeming chasm of endless darkness.
A) By using weird phrases and writing long spiels, I hopefully sound relatively smart and informed, whereas truth be told I haven’t a clue what I’m going on about most of the time. I say it’s a directorial choice – I’ve no idea how direction really works, I’ve just got to blame somebody and Kent will do.
B) Ivanov’s depressed, making him a misanthrope. In the Grandage version, his misery was one part of a bigger world. In this version, his misery was ALL the world. As you say, he was staring into this chasm of darkness, and it seemed the stage itself was that chasm: in how grotesquely the supporting characters were played (cattily gossiping whilst playing cards and ignoring Ivanov’s pain, making fun of genuine misery – it was like a Hogarth painting), the show shared his misanthropic view of other people. So I suppose I mean less Ivanov focused, and more through Ivanov’s eyes. In its way that was great, a truly immersive look at depression, but I think it gave Sosanya and Mcardle less to dig their teeth into than Mckee and Hiddleston had. I did like how dark and misanthropic this felt, but I preferred the more observational and even-handed Branagh version.
But I would say that – you say that for you Ivanov was what first made you not hate Chekhov, for me Ivanov was what first wowed me about theatre in the first place! 2008! Eight years, time flies...
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 2, 2016 12:14:47 GMT
I thought maybe it's because the first two I saw, the Anya Reiss version and that Regents Park one with the overhead mirror and Hans Zimmer-esque music blasting out every now and then, just detracted from the play. Having seen this version at Chichester, the most naturalistic of the three, I've come to the conclusion that this is a play about people with problems that is just not for me.
I loved the Regent’s Park Seagull. It captured the preening, posturing pretention of the protagonists perfectly – can Janie Dee play a flibbertigibbet or what? – whilst the open air theatre naturally drew constant comparisons to Konstantin’s ‘new kind of’ outside theatre from act one, a comparison which Dunster and Betts ran with, making their Seagull a subtly subversive version and positioning Chekhov’s theatrical progressiveness alongside Konstantin’s (and Betts’ rewrite of Konstantin’s play pulled no punches in mocking his pretention, so already this interpretation was laced with irony). That mirror was an excellent example of a very simple piece of scenery very effectively making a very big difference throughout (the best example would obviously be Ivo van Hove’s simple illuminated box, his Miller Corner); here it allowed the drama to chug on naturalistically on the ground, but then gave proceedings the cinematic airy-fairy airs of Sophia Coppola, or the photographic beauty of even something rather fantastical like the Cottingley Fairies, as well as its own unique floaty quality, drawing out organic beauty in ordinary conversations, all whilst enhancing the point about new theatre, old theatre, pretentious theatre and all that. The little other modernities – the Hans Zimmer blasts, the pre-recorded voiceover – just added to this traditional/modern, real/theatrical, naturalistic/beautified, Trigorin/Konstantin dichotomy. And I thought Betts’ version was very witty, very successfully updated and, occasionally, very new (notably that new last line). I thought it tremendous stuff. And, crucially, actually funny. Loved it.
Anywho, now that absolutely necessary blast from the past is over, watch as I pretend to know what I’m talking about when talking about Russian theatre in a thread where we have an actual Russian correspondent... Incidentally, RUmbledoll, I'm loving all the insights into how Russians do Chekhov/Microsoft and am trying to hold off from getting overly nerdy/nosey asking a hundred questions about Chekhov and theatre in Russia (one quickly – is he taught in school in Russia like Shakespeare is here?), but the one question I really HAVE to ask now is, from your avatar (presumably not you, although if it is...), is Bob Dylan actually big in Russia?
I’d absolutely agree, before I ramble on, that Chekhov is the second greatest playwright after Anya Reiss Shakespeare. To quote Tolstoy to Chekhov, “I can’t stand Shakespeare, but your plays are worse than his”. In fact, personally, I might prefer Anton to Bill.
I saw these in Chichester and liked them well enough. Four stars, I’d say, for the whole day’s energy; relatively, though, I’d say four for Platonov, four for Ivanov, and three for The Seagull, which unsatisfactorily wraps up an otherwise much better if not unproblematic day. As individual versions, the first two have much merit and I’d recommend both individually as good theatre. As a whole day, you can’t help but be swept up with the energy, though how you like eleven hours of Chekhov is wholly dependent on how much you like one hour of Chekhov, so the marathon won’t be for everyone (e.g. I couldn’t stand In The Vale of Health, merely because I can only stomach so much Simon Gray in one day, and four solid solo plays – enjoyable in isolation – became an endurance test consecutively, eleven hours of anyone can be tiresome to some). As an intellectual exercise, I think they make a strong claim that Chekhov the writer was as talented at 18 as he was at 44 (this book does too); I don’t think, however, they make any claim that Chekhov the theatremaker was as talented at 18 as he was at 44 – a more interesting claim – and the fault there lies not with imperfect Chekhov but with overcareful Hare and Kent.
Starting at the end, The Seagull was the worst by a long way, because it suffered what I felt The Master Builder suffered from – translation-itis. There was a line in Hare’s Master Builder which went something like “And what else is there about me that you find attractive?”. There were others like it too, that one sticks in the memory more. It was a line that jarred, one of those awful moments where you’re aware you’re hearing a translation, as the stuffy vocabulary and iffy sentence structure sounds a little too babelfish.com-y – a little too word-by-word literal-translated. His Seagull suffered so too. Too many lines weren’t well suited to dialogue. Amidst other lines I can’t remember now, the bloody frigging bloody frigging swears in The Seagull just did not work, they sounded like Sir David Hare’s uncomfortable concession to modernity, like Sir David Hare trying to rap or play Pokemon Go and keep up with the youthful Bettses and Donneleys and even Reisses, the other modern Seagull updaters whose swearing was successful. Beyond that there was a certain discomfort to it, a certain tension between Sir David Hare the academic translator and Sir David Hare trying to emulate a young satirist, which led to uncomfortably over-verbose language mixed with weird swearing and inconsistent modernities. Anna Chancellor would make a wonderful Arkadina in a better script. My criticisms of Ivanov and PLatonov are slightly personal, slightly fatuous and slightly redundant as I’d recommend both of those shows for much I admire in them. My criticisms of The Seagull are because it’s not a very good version of The Seagull, well acted though it may be. And, crucially, not funny. Three stars, one for Chancellor, one for James and one for Vinall, none for Hare.
Ivanov was good, and writing it up now makes me realise just how good it was. Kent made the first few scenes unbearably overcast with the dark clouds of depression, making us unable to see Ivanov’s townspeople as anything but unwanted interlopers, making the flippancy of their dialogue seem positively immoral next to the grief of the world – due to depression, boring dialogue becomes positively Hitchcockian in how it’s hiding true emotional distress, and for that Kent deserves much applause. The card-playing scene was horrible and lonely for this reason. As a tonal evocation of depression I was amazed by the full-on first two acts. It lost some steam after that, and by being so focused on Ivanov’s own overcast outlook we lost the chance to really get into the heads of Chekhov’s comprehensive and well-constructed supporting cast: this sidelined Nina Sosanya in a way Grandage/Stoppard never sidelined McKee (her again, always wonderful), but the biggest tragedy was Dr Lvov, who baby Tom Hiddleston played with slimy duplicity and self-righteousness, where here James Mcardle lacked the chance to show the second of Lvov’s two faces due to Kent’s Ivanov-centric direction. Not much point saying Sam West was very good as it’s now Geoffrey Streatfield (an actor who is always very good), but Sam West was, indeed, very good.
Platonov was a blistering performance by James Mcardle and a superb supporting cast (esp. Olivia Vinall and the always wonderfully sympathetic Nina Sosanya), marred by MOR direction. Now, the worst thing you can do when talking about a play is merely compare it to previous productions and not judge it on its own merits, but sod it. Three years ago a stunning piece of punk theatre was made from Chekhov’s first play (apparently Platonov was played by Jack Laskey, who I’ve since effused about in Lawrence After Arabia, there he had a real sad bravado, turns out I’m a big Laskey fan): Helena Kaut-Howson’s Sons Without Fathers brought the energy and vitality of a rock concert to the tale of a washed up rock star that PLatonov is (well, that is if you think doctors are rock stars, and given Chekhov wrote this as a teenage medical student, I’m willing to psychoanalyse and say that’s what he thought of junior doctors (and frankly, junior doctors are rock stars)). That show and Laskey’s performance had the bravado and energy and spunk of a showy-offy young man which suited the flawed script wonderfully, what with the script’s flaws being too much of a young man showing off. Here Hare handles it like a bus-pass-holding knight-of-the-realm wearing the white gloves of a historian. So I suppose not enough of Sir David Hare’s spunk. Perhaps I’ll forgive it that. His script, though, had a politeness and a formality that doesn’t do justice to the debauchery Chekhov indulges in, making a ‘well made play’ of a script that’s anything but. Kent, though, makes a museum piece of it too by behaving carefully and treating it with the over-reverence which hampered Lindsay Posner’s Vanya – it was slow, well-staged, politely ordered and sleek, and by staking such a claim for its worth as a piece of literature they rather forget its energy as a piece of theatre (Michael Frayn does both, incidentally, so Hampstead’s Wild Honey is probably a hot ticket if casting is good (bring back Laskey)). This show IS a wonderful well-made play, admittedly, but I think there's an edge to the manuscript which warrants a risk Hare wasn't willing to take. There was a real politeness to both the character of Platonov and the feel of Kent’s Platonov which meant I never felt the narrative’s excitement or sexiness, nor believed the narrative’s contrivances, wonderful though Mcardle and the women were.
And just this May, Dead Centre brought Chekhov’s First Play to Bristol, which uses the unfinished manuscript as a springboard to make damning, vital and biting observations (in only about 70 minutes, no less) about what we bring to the theatre and what theatre gives back to us, and much else besides. It was one of this year’s best pieces of theatre. Shame you can’t see it. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah (though in all sincerity, did anyone see Chekhov’s First Play in Bristol, Ireland or internationally, and if so do you share my immense admiration for it?).
I’ve been agnostic about Olivia Vinall in the past, but she comes out of this trilogy a conquering hero. Her three performances are three separate triumphs, and to see her evoke three separate types of hurt and loneliness one day is really something.
There’s an awful lot to admire in the trilogy, not least the actors who tick off all three, and the very convincing literary claim that Chekhov’s early plays are early masterpieces. Perhaps I was a bit put off by rather bad seats in Chichester, or a bad memory since last November, or a bad The Seagull wrapping up an otherwise very good day. I’d absolutely recommend these. I just wish that the eleven hour extravaganza had the bravado of an arrogant young student, or the reckless ambition of a playwright thinking he was finished. According to the programme and press material, one reason for these revivals was to prove that young Chekhov’s writing deserves the same literary attention, appreciation and criticism as the Chekhov of those final three masterpieces. As someone who studied Chekhov, my answer is “Well, duh”. As a theatregoer, I think Kent and Hare absolutely make that literary claim, but I think that in doing so they fail to make that theatrical claim, sacrificing some theatrical daring and, more damningly, some theatrical vivacity for the sake of well-made well-done well-intentioned intellectual points. Platonov is an eight hour risk, Ivanov is a haunting depiction of depression, and The Seagull is a theatrical cry to rally forwards; here Platonov was a very good but very safe well-made-play, Ivanov was a very good haunting depiction of depression, and The Seagull was a bit of a botch job. What makes all Chekhov genius is his lifelong subtle innovation and his huge humanistic heart; what makes Young Chekhov exciting is that those elements were filtered through his early satiric eye and a lack of inhibitions from the follies of youth. Sadly Hare and Kent turn Young Chekhov into 156-Year-Old Chekhov, Platonov now the contemporary of The Moderate Soprano. As such, whilst it’s an entertaining, moving eleven hours of theatre (or eight hours, followed by The Seagull), it doesn’t zing with the passion or the identity that something as theatrically intense, individual and focused as, say, Icke’s Vanya, or Herrin’s Vanya, or Mitchell’s Cherry Orchard, or those other aforementioned Chekhov triumphs. Those were theatrical. This was intellectual. There’s the rub. Much to admire, much to move, much to like, but oh how I wish it had risk, provocation, impoliteness, youth. That would have pushed this from “Very Good But Not Unproblematic” to “Essential Intellectually, Essential Emotionally”. That might be less true to Old Hare, but that would be much much truer to Young Chekhov.
Still, four stars! Four over-polite and over-intellectual stars, but four well-acted well-deserved stars nonetheless! Bugbears are more to write than praise. I’m an arse sometimes. Well done to all concerned.
Quick intellectual addendum: if this really wanted to get to grips with Young Chekhov, it would feature The Wood Demon, his third play and great anomaly. I always wish that someone would eventually try and find the merit in it: the only Chekhov I’m yet to see and the only bad play Chekhov wrote, and it’s BAAAAAAAAAD... It’s the slapstick Uncle Vanya down to Vanya’s slapstick suicide, complete with act three’s property talk intact – and as well as having too many characters, being too morally black and white and obvious, making Vanya a figure of fun and then actually having Vanya shoot himself only for everyone to move on immediately (spoiler), the jokes just aren’t funny. I say all this believing it to be terrible literature, but possibly an edit, or an ironic touch, or a sensitive touch may find the good in it. Had Hare and Kent tried this, they may have made it funny or humanistic or half-decent, and THAT would prove something theatrical and new about Young Chekhov. Regardless, I know Trevor Nunn once wanted to do it, and whilst he’s a variable director I’d love to know what he finds exciting in it. Given her teenage bastardisations of the great man’s great work, for once I think Anya Reiss would do a good job with this lesser effort. I think I say this every time I see any Chekhov. In fact, has anyone seen any production of The Wood Demon, and is it as bad as I fear?
P.S. Former Ivanov Sam West recently narrated a wonderful podcast called Borders: An Odyssey, which is possibly the best piece of new literature I’ve encountered all year: a sprawling Sebaldian epic retelling of refuge which is sweet in its classicism, comprehensive in its scope and vital in its political modernity – do hunt it down, brilliant stuff. Also West was just behind me at The Flick and has a lovely belly laugh, clearly enjoyed that.
P.P.S. Incidentally, I like Joshua James a lot – here his Konstantin was a sensitive soul, Here We Go was a mini-masterpiece, his Ferdinand in The Tempest was very touching, and in particular Fathers and Sons with Seth Numrich was a tour-de-force double act between those two rising stars pushing each other on to greater levels of greatness (once again, Friel’s a genius) – but he was in the audience of Kings of War at the Barbican and didn’t say thank you when I held the loo door open for him so now he’s dead to me. Hot showbiz gossip, that.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 1, 2016 18:58:12 GMT
I’ve always loved theatre as storytelling (to misquote Mark). Given the connection between person and person that comes only from the stage, it’s surprising that so few shows appeal to that very base need we have to hear stories, but from The Weir to The Testament of Mary to Richard III there’s a strange frisson in the air when actors simply tell stories to each other and let us eavesdrop (two of those three are Irish; this is Irish; I wonder if there's a link, another debate/racial stereotype for another day). Theatre is also, abstractly, a discursive medium; theatremakers who actively deploy the second person are a rare breed, but being willing to subtly break the fourth wall and turn us into confidents is a risk worth taking when the script so implicates the audience. Friel’s script is (as many of his language-loving scripts are) theatre as storytelling. Turner’s production, then, is theatre as the second person. Together...
If Turner does something remarkable in her direction, it’s to require her actors to charge right at us audience. This was not a series of monologues, it was a series of desperate, one-sided conversation pieces, duologues with us as very quiet second characters as this second-person spiel poured out of our protagonists. It was a piece of eye-contact, of questioning, of “I’ll tell you...”, of friendliness – not of the insularity of many monologues. Given that the piece requires the audience to do their homework, take away from the stories what they will and piece together whatever truth there is, it was wonderful to place us, where? On a jury bench? As a friendly ear? A conscience as in a soliloquy? Whatever, it was more than a fly on the wall, and that was Turner’s brilliant shift, to push the personability of the monologues to the fore, slightly force us to lean forwards, and very much force her cast to give their all in a desperate act of needing a connection, despite the isolation of the monologistic script.
And I’d like to agree with Billington, naturally. The play has a mystery about why something amazes us, why a man telling us something is true is inherently believable. Does greater connectivity help with it? Yes, but there’s something about the play itself that I don’t think we’ll ever get to the heart of, something indescribable about it that makes it just work.
Naturally, a wonderful cast. McKee’s broken nature was so beautifully underplayed she made a truly pitiable figure I won’t forget in a hurry (she's always a favourite, and Bake Off's Kate reminds me rather of her). Ron Cook’s one of the finest stage actors, and it’s a part which requires that Shakespearean sensitivity and that Pinter-esque masculinity which he can do like no-one – every time he acts it’s a masterclass, but THIS is a masterclass. And now I’d like to ask, why the earlier criticism of Dillane? Is it simply he hadn’t learnt it all in previews? In its last week he was clear as a bell, laid back as needs must and forgot not one single word. He was a shabby, skeletal, self-deluding fool, something in his eyes telling us he was telling his story to convince himself as much as to convince us. Of all the broken characters, it was the fact that he seemed the least willing to acknowledge his cracks that he felt the most damaged yet the most dangerous of them all. Plus he had the intelligence not to follow through with this...
Two or three years ago, English Touring Theatre staged Translations. It was a very slow production, very languorous and laid-back, lulling you like a lullaby into listening. That sounds like bad, boring theatre, but what James Grieve’s direction did was make Friel’s use of language the star of the show; it was a community built through its language in a play about said language, and to let each line echo literally made its meaning echo in our minds. Friel’s language was the driving force behind pace, character, behind all the world of Ballybeg. Friel’s language being what it is, subtlety and clear-speaking was Grieve’s masterstroke, as it seems Ballybeg is a world of words, and once we’ve found our way in through clarity and precision, what a world Ballybeg is! As with Translations, Faith Healer is about Ballybeg, the power of words and the power of performance. Turner does something very similar to Grieve with her cast – take it slow, take it direct to the audience, make us listen, make us care. And for me, because of that, this is really something, an absolute redemption for the piss-poor Hamlet direction, a wonderful reminder of the talent we recently lost, and straight up there with The Flick and The Encounter as one of the absolute hits of the year.
Brian Friel was a genius.
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Post by Nicholas on Sept 1, 2016 18:54:19 GMT
Saw this in its final week, and thank goodness I managed to squeeze it in. What a production, just what a production. A delight, with the depths of this iconic show honoured. Such a lovely watch, such a wonderful production.
The thrill of an actor’s life, the restlessness of the river, the inevitable passage and changes of time; because those are the predominant senses when watching this beautiful production, the fact that this is one of the deepest musicals in London almost passes you by. Almost. The wonder of Evans’ production is that Evans’ sense of musicality gives this a lightness, a simplicity, a watchable-ness that belies its reputation as a piece of history, and puts character over context – this isn’t to say the historical context is in any way sidelined, as in fact the reality of the book’s look at race and sex is far more interesting when the characters in the middle of the fractious time come first. The simple, streamlined set gives such a streamlined sense of time and place which works a charm, and with time and place effortlessly established the transgression of the script is good to go, Evans' primary innovation being to bring the women wholly upstage and make this all about them, hardly at all about the Gaylords of the world. By putting the women first and foremost, it manages to say as much about society’s treatment of gender at the fin de siècle as it does about society’s treatment of race. It’s so elegant that it’s so easy to watch, and that makes it so powerful.
The ideas of the strength of these women in a much weaker time, and the racism so accepted it’s terrifyingly everyday and almost mundane, surprise and shock, respectively. As Evans directors, this is still relevant as emotional entertainment, as opposed to merely musical significance. It’s nice that Evans has the confidence in his audience to work this out for themselves. It snaps along – as does life, as does showbiz – so, more strikingly than hammering home the point, the casual nature of these attitudes comes across so terrifyingly with hindsight. Having said that, some moments were depressingly, unforgivably modern – a bit like Les Blancs, lines that should be dated weren’t, and like Les Blancs they were given fair prominence and had time taken to shock us not just in their content but in their modernity. Evans brings out the best of Hammerstein’s book, but he does so with such subtlety and musicality that all I thought when watching was “Blimey, I’d forgotten how many great songs are in this show”.
Enough has been said about what a uniformly wonderful cast it is, but let’s just repeat it. Dramatically, the characters are fleshed out with sensitivity and understanding. Musically, blimey they can’t half belt! Uniformly, what a wonderful cast.
Show Boat may occupy such a serious slot in musical theatre history, but this production was full of lightness and life. Evans does wonders through simplicity and wonderful casting. This production did justice to the great depths of this great musical, but it equally did justice to its theatricality and musicality. It was just a glorious watch, just glorious, absolutely glorious. It sits somewhere alongside She Stoops and Nell Gwynn as one of those shows I'll turn to when I'm low on Vitamin D, which is not to say it undersold the poor treatment of race and women, but it over-emphasised the togetherness, warmth and humanity. I suppose what I'm saying is there's a Gaylord in us all.
And let’s start calling her Dame Rebecca Trehearn, shall we?
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Post by Nicholas on Aug 30, 2016 4:31:19 GMT
If Harry Potter is a fairytale, The Cursed Child is its Into The Woods.
In Boyhood, Mason Jr visits the launch of Half Blood Prince when he’s 9. Not only was it a moment so many of my (in fact, many) generation(s) can recognise, but for Linklater’s tale of time passing it’s a canny comparison – we watch Mason grow up in the same way Mason watches Harry grow up, in the same way we all saw Harry grow. Latecomer mentioned reading them to her children – she’s certainly not alone there, that’s how my brother and I were read the novels too! With Harry Potter saga, Rowling (more visually in the movies, but nevertheless very much so still in the novels) took her characters on a similar track to Linklater – the reason this was the series no-one gave up on was because the characters aged before our eyes, alongside us, covering seven years of teenage life as opposed to merely seven fantastical adventures (the adventures didn’t hurt, mind, but we came for the adventure and stayed for the puberty). And so it goes on. The Cursed Child is to The Deathly Hallows what The Deathly Hallows was to The Philosopher’s Stone – the same story, only adjusted for age, à la Boyhood. Returning to these characters ten years/nineteen years later, The Cursed Child is a surprisingly adult, continuingly dark saga. It’s a sensitive, comprehensive and even psychological reunion with our fictional friends, and reappraisal of what came before; this is why The Cursed Child is a beautiful piece of theatre, and the perfect continuation/conclusion of the novels.
“All was well”. Thus ends Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk, yet such drama and insight and humanity is found when looking at what a ‘happy ending’ is when morality is grey where it seemed black and white, where difficult journeys cannot have simple ends, and where everyone ends up happy, though happily ever after remains to be seen. And so to Into the Woods, a profound and poignant putting away childish things and becoming a man, and a serious study of how happy endings are merely happy intermediate-conclusions. And what do we learn from Sondheim’s great work? Witches can be right, giants can be good. Careful the things you say, children will listen. And, of course, no-one is alone.
“All was well” – well, another story ends that way too. My primary emotion going into The Cursed Child was – as it seems to have been for a lot of you (been away, only just catching up on two months of theatreboard, wish me luck!) – fear. Seven books, eight films, we had our happy ending. Wasn’t that that? Drama doesn’t come from people being ‘well’, but quite the opposite; was Rowling going to go back on her word, to force drama where none need occur, to undermine those three simple words? No, what Rowling has done (the Thorney script is indisputably Rowling’s story) is to cannily create an addendum to that. This adventure (a very fun, very exciting adventure) is window dressing an exploration of the reality of living a fantasy life, a chance to look at the consequences of childhood playtime. Albus’ story is about wanting better from the past and more from the future, of having expectations that can never be met, and wanting simply a good relationship with your parents. Harry’s story is about what happens when heroes grow up, when you can’t be Peter Pan and have to be Peter Llewelyn-Davies (what a subject for a play, eh?). Going back to Hogwarts rather suggests notions of romanticism and nostalgia or perhaps that Welsh idea of hiraeth. Going back to Godrick’s Hollow takes us to reality, regret, trauma. Between these two extremes sits The Cursed Child.
The Harry of The Cursed Child is a lovely grown-up. Firstly, he’s clearly the Harry of seven other books, grown more normal with time. Mostly, though, it’s the way he has to be normal that makes him special. That last line, “All was well”, was a significant choice of words. “Well” is not “happy”; “well” is not “wrapped-up”; “well” is, well, “well”, content at best. And how could a life like Harry’s – from abused child to child star to child soldier – be happy or wrapped-up, given all he went through? To not just age up our hero, but to turn him into a worry-wart with nightmares of wetting himself and doubts of his worth as a father, well, it’s takes Harry down many many pegs after seven novels of eulogizing, down to the uncomfortable levels of you or I. It’s a great decision to see the abuse of the Dursleys as abuse, not the children’s lit cliché of orphan life being great. It’s a greater decision to see Harry genuinely struggle with many types of survivor guilt, and show Harry knowing that the pain in his head is not some external, expeliarmus-able antagonist, but his own invincible inner life. It’s the greatest decision to then have adult Harry struggling with something so ordinary as fatherhood. Where Rowling could have contrived some unnecessary adventure to bring Harry back, it’s better that his great conflict now is not noseless nemeses but simply the question of how to say to your child in the night that nothing’s all black but nothing’s all white, how do you say it will all be all right when you know that it might not be true? Draco’s worth bracketing in here too, actually – how wonderful to make the tertiary protagonist the former tertiary antagonist, making a hero of him by merely domesticating him. Witches can be good, Malfoys can be good. Possibly the most affecting moment was his simple admission that all he wanted in life was to be happy – it’s a line of therapeutic self-knowledge which truly breaks your heart. Draco and Harry’s begrudging but well-earned friendship is a lovely mirror to the easy and loving relationship of their sons.
Incidentally, Jamie Parker IS Harry – little things in how he walks out, holds himself, has his hair – it just is Harry. His demeanour, laid-back but lost in his past, IS Harry. Parker’s wonderful; always is, always will be, absolutely is here.
We’ll return to Harry in a second, for now let’s turn to future slash-fiction stars Albus and Scorpius. Thorne had a very hard task on his hands – write a Harry Potter play where Harry’s a bit of a bore, and our heroes instead are rank strangers and have six hours to endear themselves to us as Harry had over a decade to do – and yet, lo and behold, if Scorpius particularly isn’t a fan favourite there’s no justice in the world, and both are wonderful protagonists to bring us back to the Wizarding World. Even from the off, there’s something moving about a Malfoy and a Potter bonding at all, let alone so strongly (perhaps their characters work well because they’re new after a decade, not despite, given the baggage we’ve brought to them – again, the idea of hatchet-burying and the ridiculousness of grudges is there through this friendship), but both are wonderfully realised as new people, new characters, new friends. In part, that’s because of the spectacularly, unapologetically uncool performances by Sam Clemmett and Anthony Boyle, making these characters whose nerdy charisma instantly attracts us audience (someone, I think Sebastian Faulks, once said that an author can instantly get a reader on/offside by making his characters readers or not, as readers ourselves it’s an instant link – Scorpius in particular being an intellectually successful and intellectually happy purveyor of nerd culture makes him an instant hero). Much as I’m banging on about the substance of the play being a fascinatingly revisionist take on the Potter legacy, the real reason it works is plain and simple – these two new characters are great, we love them, and we enjoy their adventure.
Through this friendship (lovely in writing, beautiful in their performances), Thorne and Rowling are true to much/most of what we loved about Harry Potter in the early days. Albus and Scorpius are troublemakers, they’re intellectuals, they’re scamps, they’re wits. Having our cake and eating it, we do get an adventure amidst the highfalutin human touches, and that’s through these two and Thorne. There is genuine jeopardy in a way never quite felt in books 1-6 – here, Harry could die in any duel at this stage in his life/narrative, as frankly could the children too. There’s also still the fun we had during the early books, of japes and adventures with Albus and Scorpius. Contrarian/easily-pleased, I felt that Delphi became a rather impressive villain as the piece built up, her villainy unexpected, and the fourth act thwarting her was edge-of-your-seat stuff. But in act four, literally returning to the past and the most awful moment in Harry’s life, adventure takes a back seat as contemplation and family comes forwards. Worse than Delphi is self-doubt, fear, guilt, and shame; with the adventure taking us into the past, so too Thorne looks back on Harry’s awful childhood and doubtful future, and Albus’ living with this legacy and wanting something more. In the church, where the father/son narrative meets, Rowling and Thorne move this to moving territory about moving forwards, making it maybe the most important chapter in the saga.
Time travel, and the Constellations-y multiverse exploration, is the only way Rowling can both indulge our adventurous inner children and explore the ‘well’ adult world. As utilised here, it’s a wonderful narrative work. It’s not, in fact, fanfic, nor ‘terminator territory’ (nor the subculture of Harry/Terminator fanfic which apparently exists, oh brave new world that has such people in it). Admittedly, though, the peculiarities of all time travel narratives still hold – i.e. quelle coincidence that in every permutation of reality Scorpius was Scorpius born same time same place same upbringing same conception one assumes – but why split hairs? It’s the perfect way to continue this contemplation of the past, to literally visit regrets and traumas. Before we reach the church and those deaths, The Cursed Child has taken some stunning steps. There’s a real narrative audacity in not just killing off Harry but changing the entire ending therein; there’s a narrative audacity in bringing back someone like Snape, whose death had such significance; there’s a narrative significance in taking a story so set in stone and stomping over its canon to make a point. None of these audacities would work without a certain weight to how they’re dealt with; some of that is wrapped up in act four, but much is raised along the way. Bringing Snape back doesn’t feel like a tokenistic fan-favourite cameo, but quite the painful opposite – a reminder of the reality and finality of his death, and an acceptance of a greater good (and gosh, what a moving line Snape's is about Albus bearing his name, getting teary now). Brining Hagrid back, I felt, brought his story to a circle – as Hagrid held Harry, I thought of Harry hugging Hagrid after the Battle of Hogwarts, and the endurance of the relationship brought a tear to my eye. As for actually going so far as to kill off Harry: that felt not only sacrilegiously shocking, but tantamount to killing off George Bailey, and that movie touched upon some rather serious themes too.
And after all this, getting into Godrick’s Hollow’s church and causing the Potter’s deaths... After three acts which a) say very clearly that death is bad, that even fictional wars have unnecessary victims, and it is good and right to try and save lives, and b) say very clearly that one always must put others first, this is a moment that goes to the heart of Harry Potter and Harry Potter, and devastates our emotions as it does so. We’ve seen Snape acknowledge that his life is sacrifice worth making and make it twice, we’ve seen Hermione and Ron suffer and die for a better, alternate world; we’ve seen Scorpius squander some happiness for him for more happiness for all; those are nothing compared to this (especially with that sparse stage, watching Harry watch Voldemort is horrible). Watching Harry become a tantamount-accessory to his parent’s murder, and make a sacrifice with the bed-wetting self-doubting bad-parenting unheroic consequences...
So, a word on the final few moments, the Albus/Harry dialogue. It’s imperfect, it’s unhappy, it’s full of shame and regret and denial. But how human! After everything we’ve seen, the act of trying to be a family, the act of accepting the world at its worst, the act of simply going on – even after seven books of adventure and six hours of time travel, this is real heroism. Now we have put down childish things, just living in an imperfect world with imperfect families and imperfect lives is the real victory. Adulthood, fame, guilt, work. Childhood, parenthood, family. Narratively, the adventure we watch is one big 360 degree turn around. Thematically, however, this ending is a human addendum to The Deathly Hallows’s happy ending – explaining what true heroism is, and what living "well" has to mean.
Enough time has passed in the real world to now treat the Harry Potter phenomenon with a pinch of salt and degree of scepticism (whilst still un-hypocritically enjoying it wholly, of course). The dual narrative of The Cursed Child does this for us, Rowling becoming her own Bettleheim and Thorne her respective Sondheim. It’s a wonderful work of theatre, and whilst some lines are clearly Rowling’s own, all credit for the theatrical strength of this goes to Thorne. I still think the basic adventure Scorpius and Albus go on is fun enough in and of itself, but the life adult Harry leads is that not of Peter Pan or Paddington Bear, but of you or I; in taking us down this narrative path – of paperwork and bills and getting parenting wrong – Rowling has not butchered her happy ending, but broadened it, domesticated it, humanised it.
The funny thing is, thus far I’ve written predominantly about the play, about the narrative, about the script. I’ve read the script since, natch, and I think it works wonderfully as a book (not least some very evocative stage directions, Thorne writes so readably) and I hope non-theatre-going-readers will get this much out of the story and dialogue alone. As a piece of theatre, though, WOW, and yet what discipline. I’ve said before that my favourite moment of His Dark Materials was not witches flying or bears fighting, but of the puppeteer removing his mask and Samuel Barnett becoming death. I don’t think I’m alone in saying my favourite piece of staging here was the moving staircases, a moment without light and magic but basic staging. Tiffany’s staging does have more WOW moments than perhaps anything I’ve seen, more “How did that happen?” conversations afterwards, but what’s wonderful is that they’re narratively led, Tiffany putting meretricious show-offery to one side unless it’s needed – and blimey, many moments, particularly the dementors, and PARTICULARLY disappearing into that phonebox, simply had to be actual factual magic to happen. One has to respect Tiffany for not overdoing this, for not turning it into merely a magic show. As I say, the WOW moments were plentiful and amazing, but they were very, very sensitively employed.
And I just realised how much I’m underselling the staging. Blimey, there were moments and a half. Really, truly, WOW WOW WOW.
And on the stage side of things, Noma Dumezweni is as much Hermione as Jamie is Harry. She has a cheek and a sarcasm which ages the character nicely, and Dumezweni always has a natural, fierce, magical intelligence – she’s naturally Hermione. Similarly Thornley has Ron’s gangly awkwardness even when fighting a rebellion, and Alex Price feels very much like (hello to) Jason Isaacs in how he does Draco. Poppy Miller is also absolutely wonderful as Ginny – slightly fleshing out that character works wonders, given how poorly the movies sidelined her and how the books never offered us the bogstandard scenes of togetherness where Harry and Ginny’s attraction could grow (her little speech about exploding snap – for all that the staging was magical, it really was the little things that made this special).
Oh, and the fact that someone in the canon finally used FLIIIIIIIIIIPENDO! is the best bloody part of this all.
Without being too portentous about this family-friendly franchise, there was something special about the way Rowling aged the series, taking Harry from precocious child hero to a true young adult. Harry Potter may have begun with the twinkly child-friendly chimes of John Williams, but it ended with the abattoir blues of Nick Cave (fab music here, BTW, hopefully Heap will release a CD soon). If The Deathly Hallows is a Nick Cave murder ballad, The Cursed Child is a Stephen Sondheim melancholic one: a little more sad, a little more contemplative, and far more narratively significant. The Cursed Child is the most ‘real’ of all the Potter stories, the most empathetic, the most emotional. It’s a piece about consequences and regret; one which says that (even after seven books of heroism) we don’t live in the best possible world, where heroes lose, where good people and dear friends die, and all we can do in response is cope; perhaps we can cope together. It’s a piece with the simple message that life always must go on and will go on, and what makes life going on worthwhile is family and friends, not magic and mischief; life with some love and some contentment is as good as life can be. Saying it in such a blatant, dark way through Harry Potter has a resonance that actually can’t be understated. Saying all this through characters we love, and characters we felt we fought with, has a real pertinence, a real relatability, a real poignancy that actually can’t be understated. The final moments of this piece are, frankly, the best of the whole series. The fourth act of The Cursed Child is everything wonderful about Potter, and the final scene of The Cursed Child is everything wonderful about Potter distilled into one moment of tear-jerking plain-speaking moralistic humanity. It’s Harry as our contemporary, our friend, our equal. It’s plain. It’s honest, real, relatable. Which is weird when we’re talking about a play which ends with our time-travelling heroes shooting fire at a bird girl. It’s the perfect eighth chapter. With all the compromises and caveats this contains, all is still well.
Plus my friend said that were I blonde I’d look like Scorpius, so I’ve been walking on air since.
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Post by Nicholas on Jul 16, 2016 12:36:04 GMT
Next Saturday, can't wait! Next Saturday as in today (bit late to the game here)? Me too! If you see me, say hello - I'll be in the stalls row P, probably wearing some kind of blue jumper (or just a light blue shirt, if it stays this hot), black trousers, and brown bag (heaven knows what Parsley would make of my fashion sense), brown hair, probably will also be bumming about by the box office/free water before/after the show. If you're busy then obviously that's fine, but if you've got a sec be lovely to put another face to another name on here!
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