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 nick hytner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nick hytner. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Thursday, 11 March 2010
LONDON ASSURANCE
8/3/10, National (Olivier)
2 hrs 40 mins. Simon Russell-Beale camping it up splendidly in Dion Boucicault's 1841 comedy. Not a great play but funny when done as well as this. Parts of it I thought were strikingly modern and then realised that someone must have rewritten some scenes, or added additional dialogue. It turns out to have been Richard Bean, who wrote England People Very Nice, and who is credited in small type with the "textual revisions".
We saw it in preview. The others withheld this information until the interval, knowing my dislike of previews, but I'd deduced that it hadn't yet properly opened because of a few minor flaws: a door in the first scene that didn't shut properly, the odd fluffed line. And one or two of the supporting cast had yet to find the laughs. But it was pretty much complete and I laughed a lot.
Here's Michael Billington's review:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/11/theatre-stage-review-london-assurance-olivier-billington
2 hrs 40 mins. Simon Russell-Beale camping it up splendidly in Dion Boucicault's 1841 comedy. Not a great play but funny when done as well as this. Parts of it I thought were strikingly modern and then realised that someone must have rewritten some scenes, or added additional dialogue. It turns out to have been Richard Bean, who wrote England People Very Nice, and who is credited in small type with the "textual revisions".
We saw it in preview. The others withheld this information until the interval, knowing my dislike of previews, but I'd deduced that it hadn't yet properly opened because of a few minor flaws: a door in the first scene that didn't shut properly, the odd fluffed line. And one or two of the supporting cast had yet to find the laughs. But it was pretty much complete and I laughed a lot.
Here's Michael Billington's review:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/mar/11/theatre-stage-review-london-assurance-olivier-billington
Saturday, 1 August 2009
PHEDRE
29/7/09, National (Olivier)
Helen Mirren and Margaret Tyzack in Racine's tragedy. Missed it: was in Paris. D said it was another cracker.
Helen Mirren and Margaret Tyzack in Racine's tragedy. Missed it: was in Paris. D said it was another cracker.
Reviews here:
Sunday, 29 March 2009
ENGLAND PEOPLE VERY NICE
25/3/09, National (Olivier).
Blogspot lost my first version of this review so, in brief...
Controversial Richard Bean play, directed by Nick Hytner, about immigration. A sprawling play-within-a-play: inmates at an immigration centre put on a devised play about the successive waves of migrants who have arrived in Spitalfields/Brick Lane since the Huguenots. Could teach the Convicts' Opera a thing or two about use of framing: done with a light touch, at the start and finish (and briefly immediately before and after the interval), plus some jokes in the play itself which have been set up in the prologue and so are welcomed as old friends by the audience.
Very funny, though much of the humour comes from shameless use of stereotypes. The Huguenots are all frightfully elegant; the Irish keep pigs in their rooms and breed with their siblings; the Jews are all revolutionary socialists and anarchists; the Bangladeshis invent chicken tikka masala.
Dramatic tension flagged towards the end of the first act, in the Jewish section, when posh Ruth (whose daddy owns the docks) foments working class revolution; and there was a frisson towards the end when today's Islamic extremists are mocked (in the shape of a radical girl who speaks in rhyming rap and a mad mullah with two hooks for hands). That seemed harder to take than the earlier sections. Is that because it's always difficult to see today's bogeymen as ultimately harmless, as it is possible to see their predecessors? Or because unlike previous waves of immigrants -- who within a generation or two are seen to have melded with the existing inhabitants and become thorough-going cockneys, suspicious in their turn of the next wave of new arrivals -- this lot seem less willing to reach an accommodation with their host society?
There are lots of running gags. A barmaid (Sophie Stanton, who starts each section with an explosive "fackin' Irish..." or whatever), a pub landlord (Fred Ridgeway, who fills in the barmaid's "wossnames" with erudite glosses) and a customer (Trevor Laird, "I got them Jews upstairs from me...") who comment chorus-like on proceedings. A young couple (Sacha Dhawan and Michelle Terry) who embark on doomed Romeo & Juliet style romances between incomer and existing inhabitant. A thug, Hugo, who knifes one of the newcomers. Etc etc.
Simple set, designed by Mark Thompson: a blank wall full of doors and windows, one section of which moves forward to form the bar. Great use of animations (by Pete Bishop) projected onto the wall, which sketch in historical developments. Music from a live four-piece who double as immigration centre warders in the first scene.
Blogspot lost my first version of this review so, in brief...
Controversial Richard Bean play, directed by Nick Hytner, about immigration. A sprawling play-within-a-play: inmates at an immigration centre put on a devised play about the successive waves of migrants who have arrived in Spitalfields/Brick Lane since the Huguenots. Could teach the Convicts' Opera a thing or two about use of framing: done with a light touch, at the start and finish (and briefly immediately before and after the interval), plus some jokes in the play itself which have been set up in the prologue and so are welcomed as old friends by the audience.
Very funny, though much of the humour comes from shameless use of stereotypes. The Huguenots are all frightfully elegant; the Irish keep pigs in their rooms and breed with their siblings; the Jews are all revolutionary socialists and anarchists; the Bangladeshis invent chicken tikka masala.
Dramatic tension flagged towards the end of the first act, in the Jewish section, when posh Ruth (whose daddy owns the docks) foments working class revolution; and there was a frisson towards the end when today's Islamic extremists are mocked (in the shape of a radical girl who speaks in rhyming rap and a mad mullah with two hooks for hands). That seemed harder to take than the earlier sections. Is that because it's always difficult to see today's bogeymen as ultimately harmless, as it is possible to see their predecessors? Or because unlike previous waves of immigrants -- who within a generation or two are seen to have melded with the existing inhabitants and become thorough-going cockneys, suspicious in their turn of the next wave of new arrivals -- this lot seem less willing to reach an accommodation with their host society?
There are lots of running gags. A barmaid (Sophie Stanton, who starts each section with an explosive "fackin' Irish..." or whatever), a pub landlord (Fred Ridgeway, who fills in the barmaid's "wossnames" with erudite glosses) and a customer (Trevor Laird, "I got them Jews upstairs from me...") who comment chorus-like on proceedings. A young couple (Sacha Dhawan and Michelle Terry) who embark on doomed Romeo & Juliet style romances between incomer and existing inhabitant. A thug, Hugo, who knifes one of the newcomers. Etc etc.
Simple set, designed by Mark Thompson: a blank wall full of doors and windows, one section of which moves forward to form the bar. Great use of animations (by Pete Bishop) projected onto the wall, which sketch in historical developments. Music from a live four-piece who double as immigration centre warders in the first scene.
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