8/12/10, National (Olivier)
3 hrs 30 mins. Superfluous smoking alert.
Time Out's Caroline McGinn reckons Rory Kinnear's Hamlet was the best she's seen. Personally I'd rather be guided by the audience reaction: silence during some of the set-pieces (like the play) but a cannonade of coughing during the soliloquies. That to me suggests a decent production but a leading actor who, while perfectly intelligent and speaking the words in a way that enables one to follow his train of thought with beautiful clarity, lacks the necessary charisma.
A decent production (by Nick Hytner) but derivative: reminded me an awful lot of Greg Doran's similar modern dress production with David Tennant for the RSC last Christmas, especially the idea of surveillance (CCTV cameras in Doran's version, secret service operatives with earpieces in this).
David Calder strong as Polonius and the gravedigger. Ruth Negga the most convincing Ophelia I've ever seen -- I thought she was a genuine teenager but it turns out she's 30 or thereabouts and highly experienced. (She's also half-Irish, half-Ethiopian; Alex Lanipekun who plays Laertes is also mixed race' so presuambly this wasn't colour-blind casting but a suggestion that Polonius's late wife was black.) James Laurenson interesting but underpowered as the Ghost and the Player. Patrick Malahide definitely underpowered as a Machiavellian Claudius: a piece of very effective screen acting totally lost in the Olivier's vast spaces. Clare Higgins tottering about on a pair of very high heels playing Gertrude as a hard-bitten old party who's seen it all. (She was also very clearly miked, which in this theatre is a bonus, though I couldn't spot anyone else who was.)
The smoking? Hamlet lights up twice, the first time on his student-style mattress in a room full of piled up books... and takes no further puffs.
Showing posts with label english national opera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label english national opera. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Monday, 2 March 2009
LA BOHEME
27/2/09, ENO.
New production by Jonathan Miller.
It wouldn't be fair to say we came out singing the set, but design was a big part of this show's success.
The critics were rather rude. But then opera critics see too many productions of Boheme: they're bored, pernickety, hard-to-please. We've only ever seen it once, at this address many years ago, and I remember only two things about the evening: the soprano's voice cracked as she left the stage at the end of Act One and the beauitful love duet; and the bohemians' small, freezing garret apartment filled the whole of the Coliseum's vast stage.
No such problems with Dr Jonathan's version. The set was a triumph: a two story affair which came apart and turned to reveal a new setting. In the first version we were presented with the upstairs: a convincing attic studio, long and thin, at the top of a staircase in the centre running down towards the audience and turning into a hallway back to an open street door; at the top of the stair on the other side was a smaller room with a loo off it (used more than once). In the second version the whole thing turned to reveal the downstairs: a convincing Parisian cafe of the 1930s with tables, benches, awnings and the rest. In the third version the two halves came apart to reveal an alley between two buildings, and a cafe on the corner downstage left.
The date was the 1930s, the earliest for which we have decent photographic references for the period.
We thought it was a triumph for the designer.
The acting was convincing, too: from the upper circle they looked about the right age, behaved in a convincingly "playing-at-poverty-with-youthful-high-spirits" way and were equally convincing in the final act as Mimi was dying.
To my ear the singing was pretty good as well: musically we have no complaints.
New production by Jonathan Miller.
It wouldn't be fair to say we came out singing the set, but design was a big part of this show's success.
The critics were rather rude. But then opera critics see too many productions of Boheme: they're bored, pernickety, hard-to-please. We've only ever seen it once, at this address many years ago, and I remember only two things about the evening: the soprano's voice cracked as she left the stage at the end of Act One and the beauitful love duet; and the bohemians' small, freezing garret apartment filled the whole of the Coliseum's vast stage.
No such problems with Dr Jonathan's version. The set was a triumph: a two story affair which came apart and turned to reveal a new setting. In the first version we were presented with the upstairs: a convincing attic studio, long and thin, at the top of a staircase in the centre running down towards the audience and turning into a hallway back to an open street door; at the top of the stair on the other side was a smaller room with a loo off it (used more than once). In the second version the whole thing turned to reveal the downstairs: a convincing Parisian cafe of the 1930s with tables, benches, awnings and the rest. In the third version the two halves came apart to reveal an alley between two buildings, and a cafe on the corner downstage left.
The date was the 1930s, the earliest for which we have decent photographic references for the period.
We thought it was a triumph for the designer.
The acting was convincing, too: from the upper circle they looked about the right age, behaved in a convincingly "playing-at-poverty-with-youthful-high-spirits" way and were equally convincing in the final act as Mimi was dying.
To my ear the singing was pretty good as well: musically we have no complaints.
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