GREENLAND

31/1/11, National (Lyttelton)

(For the first time I'm planning to link to this blog from Twitter, making it a deliberately rather than accidentally public document. Interesting the way that changes it, knowing it's no longer purely a personal aide-memoire)

Superfluous smoking alert.

2 hrs no interval. Final preview. Disappointing multi-author climate change play (Moira Buffini was the only name I recognised), with an interesting drama about the Copenhagen climate change summit struggling to get out from an unsatisfactory mish-mash of interwoven playlets and sketches. Marred by some baffling directorial decisions.

Early on there was some shadow-boxing with climate change sceptics, especially in an early scene where a student in a supermarket rows with her parents about giving up her PGCE to become an activist ("Ipswich might be under water"). They cannot comprehend: while her mother urges her not to junk her career and waste her degree her father quotes climate sceptics' "proof" that it's all nonsense. But the idea isn't developed dramatically and the scene is undermined because the girl is suspended (why, for god's sake?) in mid-air from a supermarket trolley. Maybe Richard Bean's The Heretic at the Royal Court will be more robust.

Otherwise this is preaching to the converted, among whom I am happy to count myself. At one point a scientist displays the hockey-stick graph of global temperatures suddenly soaring from the early 19thC onwards which convinced me the earth was warming (and, in conjunction with a similar graph of CO2 emissions, that man and the Industrial Revolution were responsible).

There are five parallel strands. One features the student and her subsequent career as an activist: the career is unsatisfactory, given that the Welsh hunk she falls for ditches her for a rival (perhaps he was really a policeman). In another two women address the audience about the difficulty one of them has in living up to her ideals: she goes to Starbucks once a week (no, says her friend, it's every day); she was a vegan for two months (but, says her friend, she still ate cheese). Perhaps this was supposed to be funny, but it wasn't really, even though one of the women is played by the amazing Amanda Lawrence. In a third strand a scientist who spends his summers alone in the arctic spotting and tagging guillemots talks to his younger self, a bright working-class lad from Walthamstow we first meet being interviewed by a snotty don for a place to read geography at Cambridge. At one point they're threatened by a rather impressive polar bear which provoked gales of (intentional?) laughter; at another point in one of the cleverer pieces of staging cast members' flapping hands stand in for the birds as they're tagged.

A fourth strand featured an irritating young man in a shell suit spouting cod psychology with the rest of the cast lined up alongside him on Deal or No Deal: for the life of me I couldn't see what this had to do with anything else, unless it was the foolishness of putting all your eggs in one basket (or hoping for a "one box answer" to your problems).

The fifth strand had the most potential. Young female assistant to Ed Miliband (in his days as environment secretary) tracks down a climate scientist whose latest model predicts utter catastrophe, hoping to use it as ammunition in Copenhagen. We see the conference convening, meet the delegates from Mali (the world's third-poorest country), see news footage, hear accounts of Obama's descent on the event. The assistant and the scientist climb into bed together. They talk about the future (or lack of it -- is it wise to have children?), about politics, while a conference organiser (Lawrence again) tells us why it all went wrong. There are some good jokes. I wanted more of this: character, drama, wit, an informative narrative.

The staging by Bijan Sheibani was unhelpful. The action occupied the entire Lyttelton stage, stripped bare of scenery, right to the back wall and the illuminated exit signs. Which meant the cast had to be miked because the acoustics were so bad. There were occasional bursts of Enron-style song and dance. And at the end, unclear how to finish, the lights dimmed, the cast walked slowly forward and two huge fans blew the paper shreds which had fallen as snow during the arctic scenes and the papers from the Copenhagen summit into the audience and that back wall opened to reveal a massive sun. A rip-off of Slava's Snowshow but not as stunning.

Perhaps a smaller venue would have helped. Or a single author. Or a focus on Copehagen, Full marks for tackling an important contemporary issue, but otherwise a disappointment.

HENRY VIII

12/7/10, Shakespeare's Globe

3 hrs. Rarely-performed Shakespeare... and there's a reason for that. It's not a very good play, one of his last, written with John Fletcher. Henry himself (Dominic Rowan, confident and engaging) is something of a cipher; the dramatic interest is spread too widely and too thinly across a number of central characters; the action is episodic without much in the way of a satisfying narrative arc. There seem no very good reasons why the play should start and end where it does other than political convenience: Shakespeare might have made a spectacular tragedy out of a play which included Henry's later years, but instead contented himself with a piece of tame political propaganda in which Henry is remembered chiefly as the father of the Virgin Queen, whose christening concludes the play, and (obliquely) as the father of the reformed church of England.

The best bits (in this production at any rate) were the scenes involving Katherine of Aragon (Kate Duchene) who was genuinely moving in her trial scene and near-death scene despite what A thought was a dodgy accent (Czech masquerading as Spanish): in the latter she embodied pale and pain-wracked desperation to perfection. She may have been hamming it up but the Globe is a space that can take and absorb any amount of ham.

Ian McNeice, he of the ever-wobblier jowls, was Wolsey and looked the part but didn't quite bring it off (insufficiently clear diction for one thing, as evidenced by the ease with which one of the other characters wittily parodied him at one point) so that his soliloquy about he vanity of earthly things after his downfall wasn't especially moving. And Colin Hurley, who was fine in the comic part of second citizen, lacked the heft and dignity for Cranmer, whose closing speech prophesying a glorious future for the infant Elizabeth, which should have been inspiring or at least gripping, had 'em shuffling and coughing.

Miranda Raison (who is in Spooks, apparently) looked suitably stunning as Anne Boleyn/Bullen, with the help of a great deal of make up, and caught the character's ambiguous nature nicely: she claims she can't be bought, even with the title of Queen, and then collapses instantly when told she's been made a Marchioness; she finds the masked Henry's amorous advances in the masque scene tiresome in the extreme and then (because she's worked out who he is???) suddenly flings herself at him; and generally comes across as a scheming little minx though the part as written implies the virtuous mother of a future monarch.

Amanda Lawrence from Kneehigh as the prologue/epilogue and the Welsh lady-in-waiting Virginia (to Anne's "I swear again, I would not be a queen for all the world..." replies "I would for Carnarvonshire") was as always excellent, but was also required to play Henry's fool, a near silent part with a puppet, which seemed a bit pointless.

The director Mark Rosenblatt (new to us) chose to stage the play as spectacle, which he chose to show us even when the text merely described it. There were several dramatic entrances for the king and for the pair of cardinals, the masque, and especially Anne's coronation procession and Elizabeth's christening complete with golden robes and singing choirboys and a golden canopy held up by serving men which entered or exited through the crowd. There were also some nice touches, including scenes which started centre stage before the characters disappeared through the door at the back, stll speaking (and in one case leaving a gaggle of eavesdropping ladies in waiting) to reappear through one of the side doors and continue the conversation round the front of the stage.

There was also a forestage, which would not have been there in Shakespeare's day, which made staging the processions easier but hearing more difficult: if an actor turns his back on the audience on the main stage there's a great big wooden wall to bounce his words back to us, but if he does it on the forestage the words just disappear. Worse than the Olivier.

The crowd included many tourists; A, who'd booked later and sat a little away from us, said that all four people on either side of her left at the half; the American next to me spend the whole of the first half thumbing through his programme. Someone should have warned them this isn't classic Shakespeare.

As Wolsey says at one point: "Worth the seeing", though not perhaps more than once.