Missed it: had to stay at home with a guest. D said it had an amazing set, a traverse-style stage snaking through the audience with an additional playing area at either end. Good use of audio-visual, strong environmental message up until about two-thirds of the way through and had everyone captive until we got to the fantasy, futuristic, post-death scene which went on too long and lost the audience. Good performances all round, including Geoffrey Streatfeild. She says she'd rather have seen it than not. Script by Mike Bartlett.
Showing posts with label cottesloe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cottesloe. Show all posts
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
BEYOND THE HORIZON
20/7/10, National (Cottesloe)
Eugene O'Neill's first play. Two brothers love the same woman. One is a farmer, the other a dreamer, about to embark on a three-year voyage round the world with Uncle Dick, the sea captain. The night of his departure he and the girl declare their unacknowledged love for one another and he decides not to go. The older brother (one of nature's farmers, not one of its rovers) elects to go in his stead. Three years later the marriage has turned sour, the farm has gone to rack and ruin and the elder brother is expected home imminently to restore some sort of order. Interval. We left.
It was 'prentice work, overly schematic, over-written, given a perfectly decent but only workmanlike production by Northampton's Royal and Derngate, playing on alternate nights in a double bill with Tennessee Williams's first play for which we had tickets two nights later (and to which we decided not to go: it was a frantically busy week, we were both exhausted and in the event I had to work anyway).
Being tired can't have helped my appreciation, but seeing this confirmed my prejudice about many plays in the American canon. Quite simply I find them boring. It's something to do with their often self-consciously literary language and the fact that it's hard to identify with characters who've got themselves into some predicament or other largely as a result of their own stupidity or short-sightedness or some other failing. (I know, I know. What about King Lear? you ask. But the young O'Neill wasn't Shakespeare.)
D said of the whining heroine, as we left for the interval, "She needs a slap". To which the only reply was, "They all need a slap."
The others stayed. And said it wasn't bad. Though when I asked them to recall the plot they couldn't. They also said the Tennessee Williams two nights later was brilliant, but I'm not sure I believe them.
Eugene O'Neill's first play. Two brothers love the same woman. One is a farmer, the other a dreamer, about to embark on a three-year voyage round the world with Uncle Dick, the sea captain. The night of his departure he and the girl declare their unacknowledged love for one another and he decides not to go. The older brother (one of nature's farmers, not one of its rovers) elects to go in his stead. Three years later the marriage has turned sour, the farm has gone to rack and ruin and the elder brother is expected home imminently to restore some sort of order. Interval. We left.
It was 'prentice work, overly schematic, over-written, given a perfectly decent but only workmanlike production by Northampton's Royal and Derngate, playing on alternate nights in a double bill with Tennessee Williams's first play for which we had tickets two nights later (and to which we decided not to go: it was a frantically busy week, we were both exhausted and in the event I had to work anyway).
Being tired can't have helped my appreciation, but seeing this confirmed my prejudice about many plays in the American canon. Quite simply I find them boring. It's something to do with their often self-consciously literary language and the fact that it's hard to identify with characters who've got themselves into some predicament or other largely as a result of their own stupidity or short-sightedness or some other failing. (I know, I know. What about King Lear? you ask. But the young O'Neill wasn't Shakespeare.)
D said of the whining heroine, as we left for the interval, "She needs a slap". To which the only reply was, "They all need a slap."
The others stayed. And said it wasn't bad. Though when I asked them to recall the plot they couldn't. They also said the Tennessee Williams two nights later was brilliant, but I'm not sure I believe them.
Saturday, 22 May 2010
LOVE THE SINNER
21/5/10, National (Cottesloe)
Interesting premise. A convention of church leaders in Africa is trying (and failing) to agree a common position on homosexuality: the liberal westerners find the principal African bishop intransigent. One of the volunteers assisting at the conference goes to bed in his room with a waiter, who then tries to get the volunteer to take him back with him to the UK. Back home, the volunteer's wife is going out of her mind with longing for a baby, but her husband is reluctant on ethical grounds to consider IVF.
So a wonderful stew of hypocrisy, ethical dilemmas, real religious and political differences. The problem was partly the writing. The dialogue was excessively naturalistic (though delivered in a rather mannered fashion) which meant it was allusive and rather baffling. You found yourself confused and puzzled by what was going on. The acting and the production were problematic as well: it got very shouty much too quickly, both in the disputatious meeting of bishops and in the scene in the hotel bedroom. And then there was the heavy symbolism, especially in the third scene, between the volunteer and his wife, with a family of squirrels living in the roof (the rodent man has been called) helping to drive the childless wife potty.
We left at the interval. S and Dr T stayed and said it didn't improve.
Monday, 14 December 2009
THE PAINS OF YOUTH
14/12/09, National (Cottesloe)
2 hrs 30 mins. A Katie Mitchell production of a Martin Crimp version of a Ferdinand Bruckner original more correctly translated as "the illness/disease of youth" and written in 1929.
The publisher's synopsis reads: "Vienna, 1923. A discontented post-war generation diagnose youth to be their sickness and do their best to destroy it. Promiscuous, pitiless and bored, six sexually entangled medical students restlessly wander in and out of a boarding house, cramming, drinking, taunting, spying. Freder sets about savagely experimenting with the young, pretty maid, with half an eye on his former lover Desiree, a wild, disillusioned aristocrat. Petrell abandons Marie for the ruthless underdog Irene. Marie doesn't waste any time weeping - Desiree wants her."
Or: "The sort of play written once in every generation, depicting the moral corruption and cynicism of a frustrated and disillusioned youth in a world that is hopelessly out of joint."
Way over the top but rivetting and not unconvincing. They all had tics, hang-ups and neuroses galore: checking their watches, looking over their shoulders, teasing and taunting and probing and provoking one another. This was, after all, the city and era of Freud. It's the sort of play in which someone says: "Bourgeois existence or suicide. There are no other choices."
The cast doubled as stage hands, in grey suits and white gloves, taking props on and off as the action froze and the lighting changed, covering furniture with plastic sheeting, introducing and removing glasses and clothing in plastic bags: detectives at the scene of the crime, or perhaps museum curators handling fragile artefacts. In the first part I didn't see the point. In the second part it served to highlight some important stage business, including a crucial overdose.
The fashions were elegant: splendid ladies' underwear, hats, frocks. And pyjamas! (Not for sleeping in, though: they had nightgowns for that.) There was a great deal of smoking (in one case of attractively aromatic cigars) and a great deal of shouting.
Everyone seemed to be playing games of control and dominance with everyone else. Feder was monstrous and spooky and clearly very ill, physically and mentally, as played by Geoffrey Streatfeild (whom we saw as Prince Hal/Henry V in the RSC Histories); he took delight in corrupting the housemaid and sending her out "on the game". A insisted at the interval that Desiree (Lydia Wilson), or Dizzy, the aristocrat who was so clever she scarcely needed to revise for her exams and seemed to have extraordinary sexual allure for men and women alike, plus an alarmingly suicidal bent, was also "on the game". We pooh-poohed that, insisting that she just slept around; but in part two she suddenly announced she too wanted to try walking the streets with the corrupted maid (she was prevented and promptly took a fatal overdose) so A was effectively right and we were wrong.
Marie's lover, Petrell (or "Dolly"), was weak and spineless and easily seduced by the self-made, waspishly self-defensive Irene (or "Sally" as her janitor father had originally named her). The dominance games seemed to involve quite a lot of class (the maid was delighted to discover that she and Marie both came from Passau and that her father, a carpenter, had worked for Marie's father, a bourgeois builder). D also thought they involved gender role-playing and the notion that women could only be happy and fulfilled if they had a man, perhaps because at the end Marie was taunted by the monstrous Felder into marrying him. I didn't get that: indeed, the women generally seemed admirably independent and un-dependant. They were, after all, professionals in the making (though I'm jolly glad none of them were my doctor).
Marie was Laura Elphinstone, first class: we saw her in Lysistrata at the Arcola and possibly Tom and Viv at the Almeida.
2 hrs 30 mins. A Katie Mitchell production of a Martin Crimp version of a Ferdinand Bruckner original more correctly translated as "the illness/disease of youth" and written in 1929.
The publisher's synopsis reads: "Vienna, 1923. A discontented post-war generation diagnose youth to be their sickness and do their best to destroy it. Promiscuous, pitiless and bored, six sexually entangled medical students restlessly wander in and out of a boarding house, cramming, drinking, taunting, spying. Freder sets about savagely experimenting with the young, pretty maid, with half an eye on his former lover Desiree, a wild, disillusioned aristocrat. Petrell abandons Marie for the ruthless underdog Irene. Marie doesn't waste any time weeping - Desiree wants her."
Or: "The sort of play written once in every generation, depicting the moral corruption and cynicism of a frustrated and disillusioned youth in a world that is hopelessly out of joint."
Way over the top but rivetting and not unconvincing. They all had tics, hang-ups and neuroses galore: checking their watches, looking over their shoulders, teasing and taunting and probing and provoking one another. This was, after all, the city and era of Freud. It's the sort of play in which someone says: "Bourgeois existence or suicide. There are no other choices."
The cast doubled as stage hands, in grey suits and white gloves, taking props on and off as the action froze and the lighting changed, covering furniture with plastic sheeting, introducing and removing glasses and clothing in plastic bags: detectives at the scene of the crime, or perhaps museum curators handling fragile artefacts. In the first part I didn't see the point. In the second part it served to highlight some important stage business, including a crucial overdose.
The fashions were elegant: splendid ladies' underwear, hats, frocks. And pyjamas! (Not for sleeping in, though: they had nightgowns for that.) There was a great deal of smoking (in one case of attractively aromatic cigars) and a great deal of shouting.
Everyone seemed to be playing games of control and dominance with everyone else. Feder was monstrous and spooky and clearly very ill, physically and mentally, as played by Geoffrey Streatfeild (whom we saw as Prince Hal/Henry V in the RSC Histories); he took delight in corrupting the housemaid and sending her out "on the game". A insisted at the interval that Desiree (Lydia Wilson), or Dizzy, the aristocrat who was so clever she scarcely needed to revise for her exams and seemed to have extraordinary sexual allure for men and women alike, plus an alarmingly suicidal bent, was also "on the game". We pooh-poohed that, insisting that she just slept around; but in part two she suddenly announced she too wanted to try walking the streets with the corrupted maid (she was prevented and promptly took a fatal overdose) so A was effectively right and we were wrong.
Marie's lover, Petrell (or "Dolly"), was weak and spineless and easily seduced by the self-made, waspishly self-defensive Irene (or "Sally" as her janitor father had originally named her). The dominance games seemed to involve quite a lot of class (the maid was delighted to discover that she and Marie both came from Passau and that her father, a carpenter, had worked for Marie's father, a bourgeois builder). D also thought they involved gender role-playing and the notion that women could only be happy and fulfilled if they had a man, perhaps because at the end Marie was taunted by the monstrous Felder into marrying him. I didn't get that: indeed, the women generally seemed admirably independent and un-dependant. They were, after all, professionals in the making (though I'm jolly glad none of them were my doctor).
Marie was Laura Elphinstone, first class: we saw her in Lysistrata at the Arcola and possibly Tom and Viv at the Almeida.
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
THE OBSERVER
22/5/09, National (Cottesloe)
Interfering Westerners getting involved in Africa with good intentions, and simply making matters worse.
Anna Chancellor as an election observer, with unsatisfactory personal life, who intervenes to press for a voter registration drive between the first and second rounds in a small West African state, knowing it will favour the opposition candidate. He duly wins and the president concedes, but only after the observer has been summoned by the head of the army to answer his question: "What happens now?" She has presumed to set herself up as a kind of deus ex machina, and the locals resent it: Sandhurst-educated in the case of the general, Harvard-educated in the case of one of the judges on the election commission to whom she originally takes her case for a registration drive and who send her translator away; when she protests, fearing a deliberate intent to refuse her a hearing, they point out (in perfect English) that they all speak perfect English.
AC does uptight very well. Chuk Iwuji (last seen as Henry VI in the RSC's Histories) is her young translator, with whom she has a fling. James Fleet is a slimy MI6 man in rumpled linen suit, initially contemptible, later revealed to be unplasantly Machiavellian and manipulative.
I wrote in my notes: "Set: blinds". But that was several weeks ago (the perils of not writing up a show straight after seeing it) and I can't now remember much about it. But it was good. Perhaps it used those blinds to hint cleverly at African heat.
There was a deeply unconvincing pair of scenes with a TV reporter. Why is it that they never get the details right? He was cynical (fair enough), wheedling (some are, but it doesn't get you very far), attempting blackmail (which never works, quite apart from being unethical). And the flaws in that characterisation made you wonder how convincing the others are. They seemed OK to me, but you never know...
It wasn't as good as the Overwhelming, about the Rwandan genocide, which we saw in Leeds two or three years ago and which tackled similar issues. That seemed a more layered piece in which the complexities of African society and politics were handled more convincingly. This was too schematic.
It wasn't as good as Death and the King's Horseman (21/4/09) either.
There was a touching scene with the translator's elderly father, who is dying. A scene with a young boy beaten up by thugs for ferrying voters to the polls on his moped.
I came away reflecting (as one always did after listening to George Bush) that dominant ideologies always seek to proselytise, that it is an unappealing trait, and will almost certainly fail.
Interfering Westerners getting involved in Africa with good intentions, and simply making matters worse.
Anna Chancellor as an election observer, with unsatisfactory personal life, who intervenes to press for a voter registration drive between the first and second rounds in a small West African state, knowing it will favour the opposition candidate. He duly wins and the president concedes, but only after the observer has been summoned by the head of the army to answer his question: "What happens now?" She has presumed to set herself up as a kind of deus ex machina, and the locals resent it: Sandhurst-educated in the case of the general, Harvard-educated in the case of one of the judges on the election commission to whom she originally takes her case for a registration drive and who send her translator away; when she protests, fearing a deliberate intent to refuse her a hearing, they point out (in perfect English) that they all speak perfect English.
AC does uptight very well. Chuk Iwuji (last seen as Henry VI in the RSC's Histories) is her young translator, with whom she has a fling. James Fleet is a slimy MI6 man in rumpled linen suit, initially contemptible, later revealed to be unplasantly Machiavellian and manipulative.
I wrote in my notes: "Set: blinds". But that was several weeks ago (the perils of not writing up a show straight after seeing it) and I can't now remember much about it. But it was good. Perhaps it used those blinds to hint cleverly at African heat.
There was a deeply unconvincing pair of scenes with a TV reporter. Why is it that they never get the details right? He was cynical (fair enough), wheedling (some are, but it doesn't get you very far), attempting blackmail (which never works, quite apart from being unethical). And the flaws in that characterisation made you wonder how convincing the others are. They seemed OK to me, but you never know...
It wasn't as good as the Overwhelming, about the Rwandan genocide, which we saw in Leeds two or three years ago and which tackled similar issues. That seemed a more layered piece in which the complexities of African society and politics were handled more convincingly. This was too schematic.
It wasn't as good as Death and the King's Horseman (21/4/09) either.
There was a touching scene with the translator's elderly father, who is dying. A scene with a young boy beaten up by thugs for ferrying voters to the polls on his moped.
I came away reflecting (as one always did after listening to George Bush) that dominant ideologies always seek to proselytise, that it is an unappealing trait, and will almost certainly fail.
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