Clever, fast-paced, energetically played and slickly
mounted, this stage adaptation of the film Shakespeare
in Love is worth seeing before it closes. I caught it on Saturday 11th
April 2015.
Like the film, the play is littered with references to
Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Other well-known playwrights and actors of the
period feature as characters – as do monarchs, come to that. The audience is
expected to know these references and to recognise them quickly. The pace does
not let up for a moment.
Being a regular Globe-goer, I appreciated how the set on the
stage of the Noel Coward Theatre cleverly mimicked the Elizabethan-style
theatre. The scenes where we were watching the characters backstage (in the
foreground) looking out onto the actors onstage were particularly well done.
(It perhaps goes without saying that I thought the way the
play within a play was handled here was much better than in Peter Pan Goes Wrong).
With Elizabethan-style music and a jig at the end of the
play, Shakespeare in Love consciously
echoes the conventions of Elizabethan theatre. I couldn’t help thinking how fun
it would be to see this put on at the Globe. Some of the cleverness of the set
might have to be jettisoned, but it would bring the kind of immediacy and sense
of fun to the production that is a struggle to achieve in a proscenium arch
theatre.
As it is, though, Shakespeare
in Love has a pretty good go at recreating that atmosphere, and it’s
undoubtedly a clever, witty show.
I’ve just realised that I’ve only been writing about theatre
recently, and haven’t told you about any of the books I’ve been reading.
The most recent one I finished was On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This is an incredibly vivid evocation
of a time, a place and an attitude. So much so that you almost feel as if you’re
experiencing it yourself.
Except that there are jarring points for a 21st century
reader. You rush along with it up to a certain point and then you think – oh,
hang on, that’s not on.
This is especially true, for me, in the depiction of and
attitudes towards women. I’d be really interested in reading a Wide Sargasso Sea kind of novel from a
female character’s perspective. Maybe one of Dean’s wives, or one of the
Mexican prostitutes, or even Sal’s aunt. What are their stories?
But On the Road is
about capturing one man’s impressions of his travels and of his friends and of the
people he encounters. And what it sets out to do, it does perfectly. You can definitely
see why it’s called a classic.
Laughter is a funny thing. (Pun intended). I can spend all
day laughing at little things – but go into a theatre to watch something that’s
designed to make people laugh and my laughter becomes something different.
Suddenly it’s a reward I can choose to bestow or not. It’s an effort. It’s
something that has to be cajoled out of me.
Or at least, that’s how it felt while watching Mischief
Theatre’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the
Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, on 24th March 2015.
People around me were in hysterics. I found some bits quite
amusing. I suppose it’s all personal taste.
This play comes from the same people as The Play that Goes Wrong, which by all accounts is very funny
indeed. So I went into Peter Pan Goes
Wrong ready and expecting to be entertained.
The conceit of the play is that a small amateur dramatics
society is putting on a Christmas production of Peter Pan. For me – while they squeezed the mileage out of the am
dram bit – they could have made more of the Peter
Pan bit.
The original Peter Pan
(without anything going wrong) is a playful, mischievous text. It’s full of
knowing winks to the audience and doesn’t shy away from the fact that it
creates an imaginary world where fantastical, ridiculous things happen. I can’t
help but feel that if Mischief Theatre could have found a way to tease this out
in Peter Pan Goes Wrong then they
would have had a much funnier play on their hands.
But they weren’t really interested in Peter Pan. Their main focus was the am dram aspect of it all, which
they played well. They were completely committed to the world they created for
the amateur theatre company.
The programme on sale had biographies for the characters
within the play who were the cast of Peter
Pan. There were fake adverts in the programme which related to the world of
the play. In the interval, Christmas music was played – as Peter Pan was supposed to be the amateur company’s Christmas
production.
We, the audience, were very much cast as the audience at the
amateur company’s performance. When the cast addressed us as the audience, they
were in character as the amateur actors addressing their own local audience.
They played it straight in this respect.
There was no suggestion of the third layer – that we were an
audience at the Devonshire Park Theatre watching a professional company
pretending to be amateurs. There was no knowing wink to the audience, nor any
acknowledgement that they were creating an imaginary world where ridiculous
things happen.
Any why should there be? Judging by the laughter around me,
this wasn’t a problem for most of the audience. But I found it a tricky
position to be in. I was being asked to suspend my disbelief – and yet I was
also being asked to laugh. If I really did buy into the world of the play, then
the evening was not funny but painful. Lord knows I’ve seen enough
not-very-good amateur productions in my time.
Despite these reservations, there were moments that made me
laugh out loud. And there were moments that I recognised with amusement from
real productions I’d seen. I just felt that it could have been much funnier if
only Mischief Theatre’s writing and direction had been a little more
mischievous.
I went to see the last performance of Farinelli and the King at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on
Sunday 8th March 2015, and I haven’t had much time to write about it
since. So sorry this is rather short!
This was a strange, sad little play – both humorous and
melancholy. Musing on the relationship between dreams and reality, madness and
reason, the physical and the metaphysical, the court and the forest, private
and public.
The dual casting of Farinelli – singer (William Purefoy) and
actor (Sam Crane) playing the same role – only heightened this sense of
duality. The voice as separate from the man.
And surely the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is the ideal setting
for this play. Close, candlelit, intimate, but with obscured sightlines meaning
you could only ever see part of the action. A wonderful acoustic, too –
important for the music.
It was my first visit to the Globe’s indoor theatre and it
felt a little strange coming to the Globe and not worrying about the weather.
It’s another magical space, though. And it’s always a pleasure to see Mark
Rylance do his thing. Especially here.
Is there a better start to a performance than the sound of
an orchestra tuning up? That single A note and then the rest of the instruments
joining in… And then the conductor comes on and we all applaud and we’re off!
The Royal Ballet’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (at the Royal Opera House Dec 2014) has all the
trappings of a traditional ballet, which it at once subverts and enjoys
beautifully. The music and choreography feel as if they would fit in one of the
classics, at times nodding to ballets such as Swan Lake in an affectionate
pastiche.
The notorious multiple curtain calls of a ballet are also in
some evidence here – but they are lampooned by the Queen of Hearts’ unashamed
milking of the audience applause at the end of her solos.
It’s interesting that the Queen of Hearts (Zenaida Yanowsky)
is the only one to break the fourth wall and acknowledge the audience’s
presence mid-story. Twice, still perfectly in character, she encourages the
audience to applaud more – and then signals when to stop. Perhaps inevitably,
she’s the dancer who gets the biggest cheer of the night at the final curtain
call.
But then who would have thought that a classical ballet
could be so funny? The Queen of Hearts, in particular, is a great comic
creation, but Alice (Sarah Lamb), the White Rabbit (Ricardo Cervera), and
others all prompt laughs too. It’s all so perfectly choreographed and
performed, it seems effortless in managing to be both funny and beautiful,
traditional and new.
And it’s imaginatively put together besides the actual
dancing and music too. The use of projections and puppetry in telling this
dreamlike tale are incredibly effective, the floating Cheshire Cat is inspired,
and the costumes (particularly the tutus in the shape of suits of cards) are
very clever.
The story of Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland has been adapted to fit a ballet style and
structure in this production. So we have the usual characters and set pieces
like the Mad Hatter’s tea party (in this ballet the Mad Hatter tap dances!),
but we also have a framing narrative (or two) and a bit of a love story as
well. We see roles being doubled up – along the lines of Hook/Mr Darling in Peter Pan, here we have Queen of
Hearts/Mother – and the bringing of part of the story into the present day
provides another fresh angle.
All of this draws on and feeds into the sense of Alice in Wonderland as a sort of modern
myth or folk tale. Like Peter Pan,
the story and characters are so well known that they can be shaped and pulled
any which way and still feed back into the myth. The ‘original’ almost ceases
to matter when a story has permeated the culture to such an extent. Alice is
like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty now – she’s in a book, a Disney film, a
ballet. A story that gets retold. Re-imagined. And surely that’s the best any
story can hope for?
Full of fun, full of pathos, full of character. This
adaptation of Dickens’ Bleak House by
The Pantaloons (performed at Eastbourne’s Underground Theatre on 25th
October 2014) was a treat from start to finish.
In the vein of their comprehensive(ish) The Canterbury Tales, The Pantaloons promised to present all 67 chapters of the
novel Bleak House on stage. And, although
they sometimes forgot which chapter number they were up to, they did not
disappoint. With some scenes lingered over and some chapters dispatched in a
sentence, the cast of five swept us through the story and the multitude of
characters with charm and flair.
I read Bleak House
when I was at university, and I watched the BBC’s rather brilliant 2005
adaptation not long after reading the book, so I inevitably started the evening
with that version in mind. But it didn’t take long for me to forget all about
it.
Dickens’ larger than life characters suit The Pantaloons’ style
perfectly – and we were treated to some classic performances in Bleak House. Ross Drury in the guise of
Krook, Hortense or Guppy only had to walk on stage to get a laugh, and the
Smallweed family were another characterful highlight.
But it wasn’t just the broader characters who made the
evening so memorable. The quieter parts and more poignant moments were equally well
played. As the deaths mounted and truths unravelled in the second half, the
transitions between comedy and pathos were seamless.
The background music and songs helped build this atmosphere:
sometimes haunting, sometimes used to comedic effect, and sometimes with
self-referential lyrics telling us how many chapters until the interval. My
favourite chapter from the book (the spontaneous combustion scene, obviously) was
also a great moment on stage; the tension building – with help from the music
and lighting – to a comedy-horror climax that ended the first half.
Finally, I really ought to give a mention to the audience,
who – as always in a Pantaloons show – played a big part in making the evening
an entertaining one. (It was very sweet of the cast to comment on as much at
the end of the performance too – always nice to feel appreciated as an audience!).
The Pantaloons are experts at audience interaction and
during the course of this performance of Bleak
House they good-naturedly poked fun at two particular audience members: an
‘inebriated actor’ who had also been in the audience at their History of Britain in the summer, and a
man called Owen. When the time came in the plot for a murderer to be revealed,
a dramatic pause was left. With perfect timing, an unknown audience member
called out: “It was Owen!”
I enjoyed that, and The Pantaloons seemed to as well. And
the same goes for the whole of Bleak
House. A treat from start to finish.
The Pantaloons are currently on tour with Bleak House - visit their website www.thepantaloons.co.uk for more info.
Well this was all pretty timely.
2014 is the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War One. I have recently been re-reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration – a novel about shell-shocked patients in a WW1 psychiatric hospital. And the day before I went to see Doctor Scroggy’s War at the Globe (which I saw on 27th September 2014), the Commons voted in favour of military intervention in Iraq.
So let’s take those one by one, shall we?
It’s a century since WW1 started. The Great War looms large in our culture at the best of times, but this year it’s everywhere. I imagine that’s why the Globe put Doctor Scroggy’s War on this summer.
The anniversary also means that we’re looking back and evaluating the events of a hundred years ago. There’s recently been a backlash in certain quarters against the widely held view of the war as a futile tragedy of epic proportions. Some are trying to claim it as a shining example of what makes Britain great. (And this is when I can’t help turning into one of the History Boys: “You can’t explain away the poetry”, I cry!).
Doctor Scroggy’s War recognises both perspectives. One of the play’s main characters, a soldier named Twigg, wants to return to the war after being injured – he enjoys the frontline action. And though other characters disagree with him and find it incomprehensible, his attitude is recognised as existing, alongside other responses.
That’s something the play has in common with Regeneration. A complex look at the motivations and responses of those involved in war – and, especially, those injured in war.
Doctor Scroggy’s War is concerned with physical injury, but emphasises the role of psychological healing as well. It looks at the real-life Dr Gillies’ pioneering facial reconstruction techniques alongside his alter ego Dr Scroggy’s important sense of fun. Regeneration, meanwhile, looks at the pioneering psychological therapy of the real-life Dr Rivers, and examines how psychological scarring can produce physical symptoms. Both pieces deal with the crossover between the psychological and the physical.
Both Doctor Scroggy’s War and Regeneration also mix fact and fiction in their storytelling, with real-life characters interacting with fictional ones. It’s a thought-provoking mix when you’re navigating your way through competing narratives about the war. That blur between ‘true’ and ‘made up’ and whether things are any less true for being made up.
And that brings us to current world events, where it sometimes feels like WW3 is happening on the sly. The competing narratives, the debate over what is true or not – these don’t ever go away. We might wonder how we can learn from the past (and there were certainly some mutterings amongst the Globe audience about how we don’t seem to).
But what I feel I’ve learnt from these plays, books, poems and other recollections of the First World War is that there is no single past. There is no standalone truth or one story that makes sense of it all.
In Doctor Scroggy’s War, themes of national identity, class politics, and gender inequality were also touched upon. More viewpoints to consider; more clashes and crossovers between different truths. And, as befits the Globe space, various characters addressed the audience directly at times, giving their individual perspective on events.
My favourite moment was when Twigg said to the audience: “You all know what’s going to happen to me.” It was a brave recognition that we all know the drill – we’ve seen the films and read the stories – and we, as an audience, know how these narratives play out.
But just acknowledging that challenged us to recognise the very ‘story-ness’ that most stories want you to ignore.
We were in a theatre, watching a play. There was a jig at the end. The play may have featured real people and real events, but it was a story nonetheless. One story amongst many. A narrative. A response. A truth?
