1/4/10, Young Vic
2 hrs 20 mins. David Harrower version of an 1895 Arthur Schnitzler play (Liebelei) updated to the late 1920s, directed by Luc Bondy.
Disappointing first half, much stronger second. In part one two lower-middle-class good time girls (milliner's assistant Mitzi and her shyer friend Christine) go round to the apartment of posh Fritz and his friend Theodore for a drunken party. Mitzi and Theo seem uninhibited (though the action never gets beyond drunken pawing, and whenever it threatens to she throws him off with apparent disdain), Christine fancies herself in love with Fritz. Fritz however is conducting an affair with a married woman, though clearly attracted to Christine as well. The party is interrupted by the married woman's husband, a model of wronged rectitude in hat and overcoat and scarf. The girls are taken into another room and shushed; a duel is offered and accepted.
In the second half we're in Christine's flat, which she shares with her father, a violinist in a theatre orchestra, and much of the time a nosy and disapproving neighbour. She imagines heself fervently in love with Fritz; Mitzi comes round; Fritz and Theo come round; Fritz and Christine embrace but he won't say he loves her; he goes off to fight duel and is killed. At the end, when the news is broken to her, she is utterly distraught.
The ending was evident a mile off, but the script neatly fixed the ambiguities of Fritz's position. It helped that Tom Hughes, who played him, has a narcissist's face; he was good at suggesting Fritz's self-absorbed brooding on the impossible position he'd got himself into, and incipient panic at the prospect of the duel; but vocally he was a bit underpowered.
The women had it. Kate Burdette as Christine utterly convincing, girlish, flirtatious, petulant, only just out of adolescence; and she brought off her hysterics at the end remarkably convincingly (when they took the curtain call Hughes looked smug, she still looked distraught). Hayley Carmichael (who co-founded Told by an Idiot) very funny as the neighbour. Natalie Dormer (who was apparently Anne Boleyn in The Tudors on TV -- Wikipedia claims this is her first stage role) pert and worldly as Mitzi.
Hughes looked the part (a touch of the Jonathan Rhys-Myers about him, in fact) but needs to project more; Jack Laskey as his friend Theodore had no trouble projecting as the noisy, jokey (though ultimately serious) good time boy with spectacle and in the first act extraordinarily sticky-up hair which was slicked down and neatly combed making him look quite different when he arrived at the end of act two in officer's uniform, not so much to bring Christine the bad news (she divined it herself) as to react petulantly when she collapsed and he complained angrily of how much pressure he'd been under himself.
Audience on three sides of a circular raised playing area, which slowly revolved. Bed, screen, grand piano, a couple of chairs and a small table in the first act and a black-framed window which revolved with the stage; bed, screen, rocking chair, white-framed window ditto in the second. Entrances and exits had to be up steps strategically placed around the revolve; there was a trolley with drinks and cakes and crockery in the well at the front in the first act, and music stands as if in an orchestra pit in the second. The steps might have been a disaster; in fact the cast negotiated them with aplomb, and occasionally the set-up was used to positive effect, like Theo coming on at the very start, teetering on the edge of the revolve, or the wronged husband stiffly and deliberately negotiating the window, which had got in his way at the top of the steps.
Great dresses -- flapper-style in the first act, a lovely white cotton number for Christine in the second act.
Showing posts with label david harrower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label david harrower. Show all posts
Friday, 2 April 2010
Monday, 8 February 2010
KNIVES IN HENS
8/2/10, Arcola
Revival of the David Harrower play which launched his career in 1995 at the Traverse. He went on to write Blackbird, an extremely powerful piece about teacher-pupil relationships and abuse which I saw with Roger Allam (and Lea Williams?).
This is a three-hander involving a ploughman, William, his wife, known throughout as Woman, and a miller, in some dirt-poor place in medieval Scotland. The villagers ostracise the miller. The wife is despatched with the grain. She's fearful of the miller, who sits and reads and writes. The ploughman spends his time with his horses in the stable at night (and with another woman?). The woman gradually discovers the power of language: the naming of things, to the greater glory of God (the miller doesn't believe in God).
It opens with a riff about language and meaning. The ploughman tells his wife she's a field. She protests that she's not a field, she's herself. He tells her she's like a field and even tells her precisely which one. In time she apparently outdoes him in her capacity for language. In the central scene of the play she sits in the miller's house and writes at length what she sees in the world and its significance.
The title refers to a moment when the wife likens words to the way a knife opens the belly of a hen as she kills it.
All rather allusive but at times quite haunting. A programme note by Mark Fisher claims Harrower can't remember writing it: his subconscious took over. It is, says Fisher, mysterious: "a play more dreamed than written." He says its international success may be explained by the openness of the script to interpretation: "It has an elemental quality that strikes a chord across cultures." The starting point was apparently T C Smout's A History of thr Scottish People 1560-1830, and Harrower's interest in a subsistence economy where survival is paramount and creativity is a luxury. "The characters use a language that is without decoration, treating metaphors with the same suspicion as any threat to their perilous way of life. They lack the vocabulary not just for abstract ideas but for anything surplus to their immediate requirements." Which presumably also helps to explain why it translates so well.
Done in the Arcola's Studio 2, a tiny space entered by going back out of the Arcola's front door and round the side. Very cold. The space had three wooden pillars which were cleverly used to suggest doorways, stables and changes of scene.
The husband, William, was OK; the miller not bad; the wife, played by Jodie McNee, was outstanding: small, north country accent (the men's accents were all over the place and none of them remotely Scottish), face that lit up when she smiled, not beautiful. She reminded us a bit of Jane Horrocks. There was a solo cello accompaniment from a (very beautiful) Portuguese musician called Maria Rijo Lopes da Cunha who also sang a lament-like song (presumably Persian or some such because she's currently developing her stuies in Persian Classical Music at SOAS) while the wife wrote her testament.
On the way from work I read a stinker of a review in the Evening Standard and feared the worst, but it turned out to b very creditable. S said she found it quite moving.
Revival of the David Harrower play which launched his career in 1995 at the Traverse. He went on to write Blackbird, an extremely powerful piece about teacher-pupil relationships and abuse which I saw with Roger Allam (and Lea Williams?).
This is a three-hander involving a ploughman, William, his wife, known throughout as Woman, and a miller, in some dirt-poor place in medieval Scotland. The villagers ostracise the miller. The wife is despatched with the grain. She's fearful of the miller, who sits and reads and writes. The ploughman spends his time with his horses in the stable at night (and with another woman?). The woman gradually discovers the power of language: the naming of things, to the greater glory of God (the miller doesn't believe in God).
It opens with a riff about language and meaning. The ploughman tells his wife she's a field. She protests that she's not a field, she's herself. He tells her she's like a field and even tells her precisely which one. In time she apparently outdoes him in her capacity for language. In the central scene of the play she sits in the miller's house and writes at length what she sees in the world and its significance.
The title refers to a moment when the wife likens words to the way a knife opens the belly of a hen as she kills it.
All rather allusive but at times quite haunting. A programme note by Mark Fisher claims Harrower can't remember writing it: his subconscious took over. It is, says Fisher, mysterious: "a play more dreamed than written." He says its international success may be explained by the openness of the script to interpretation: "It has an elemental quality that strikes a chord across cultures." The starting point was apparently T C Smout's A History of thr Scottish People 1560-1830, and Harrower's interest in a subsistence economy where survival is paramount and creativity is a luxury. "The characters use a language that is without decoration, treating metaphors with the same suspicion as any threat to their perilous way of life. They lack the vocabulary not just for abstract ideas but for anything surplus to their immediate requirements." Which presumably also helps to explain why it translates so well.
Done in the Arcola's Studio 2, a tiny space entered by going back out of the Arcola's front door and round the side. Very cold. The space had three wooden pillars which were cleverly used to suggest doorways, stables and changes of scene.
The husband, William, was OK; the miller not bad; the wife, played by Jodie McNee, was outstanding: small, north country accent (the men's accents were all over the place and none of them remotely Scottish), face that lit up when she smiled, not beautiful. She reminded us a bit of Jane Horrocks. There was a solo cello accompaniment from a (very beautiful) Portuguese musician called Maria Rijo Lopes da Cunha who also sang a lament-like song (presumably Persian or some such because she's currently developing her stuies in Persian Classical Music at SOAS) while the wife wrote her testament.
On the way from work I read a stinker of a review in the Evening Standard and feared the worst, but it turned out to b very creditable. S said she found it quite moving.
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