I think this overstayed its welcome and its defining gimmick. We go into a room with headphones on the chairs; the lights go out, and we get shouted at through the headphones. For the first monologue of the play's three, this is terrifying, and terrifyingly effective. A voice is telling us about joining a violent racist group, and we're totally buying it--by which I mean, I was completely entranced, and not more than a little bit seduced, alone in the dark with a voice. It felt very video game like in a particular way: like that bit in a shooter where you sit there, unable to move your virtual body but able to turn your head around. Being led about the theatre to another set of rooms, with more chairs, through the fog and lights was also in its way extraordinary, building on the idea of being coerced and yelled at. I could feel myself warming to the simultaneous levels the play was working on: coercion, voice, embodiment...
And then I'll admit it all sort of fell to shit, in the last two monologues. I'll give the middle one a pass: oh, polite English stereotype, secretly kind of hateful, repressed homosexuality, brief dystopic elements. But the last one, with its monologue about a Christ-like baby ostrich (SRSLY), was about 70% outright stupid. And, yes, about 30% immensely effective: talking about how animals are slaughtered, standing about in the dark, with a voice speaking directly into your ears, will put the wobble in your eating meat for weeks to come.
I left wishing that this setup had been applied, frankly, to better plays--or that the work (three monologues by Philip Ridley) was more focused and, well, less naff in places. A theatre performance is not a buffet--and I feel like some of the discordant elements will, despite their lack of focus, haunt me for a while. But, even as I admired the technical acumen of the production and the fluid commitment of the actor, I wish this script had spent less time tripping over cliches.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Travesties (Apollo Theatre/Menier Chocolate Factory, 7 March)
Another definitive-as-you-might-wish Stoppard production. I had a nightmare of a time teaching Travesties a couple of years ago to students whose range of cultural reference didn't, for the most part, cover the play's. This meant in effect that I needed to explain all of the jokes, which (naturally) destroyed them as jokes. I basically said, over and over again, "well, if you know who that was, and when this was, and where this is, you'd find this hilarious." Happily, I can report that, for those who get the jokes, everything remains extremely funny here. I recently saw an academic at a conference quote Joyce's line from this play--what did you do in the Great War, Mr. Joyce--as actually said by Joyce. And however historically inaccurate might be, it feels like something we all want Joyce to have said.
Having myself attempted to bake souffles is the only reason I'd call this play souffle-like: that is, potentially light and fluffy, but in the end excruciatingly difficult to pull off. I came to Stoppard myself through student productions--Arcadia will always be seared into my heart. As with Rosencrantz last week, though, this production made me realize how difficult Stoppard actually is to do. For this to work, the actors have to work on at least three levels, and in multiple modes: everyone coming on to dance must do so at least as well as (say) Tzara talking in two accents, one heavily Eastern European and the other entirely in the mode of West End Oscar Wilde. Etcetera, etcetera, and with dancing. Everyone in this production, top to bottom, did everything that was asked of them excellently.
During the performance, what rang with me particularly were the exhortations to traditional European culture. If one were interested in reading list on conservative art, in the non-witless sense of "conservative" we don't get much of at the moment, one might do worse than to stick this play on it. But then the piece is subtler and cleverer than that: Carr, who gets the biggest speech about art, is (at least) a bloody racist; Tzara, whose anti-art musings seemed to get slightly short shrift in this production, is nevertheless also the portrait of a Wildean dandy. Even Lenin's cultural tastes get a few moments of sympathy, in between descriptions of the purges. There is, finally, something immensely generous in the play's attitude towards Joyce. Ulysses is barely in Travesties, but also everywhere alongside it, the greatness of its revolution--unlike most other things in the play--taken for granted. Ulysses, more than the Alps, is the mountain behind Stoppard's Swiss confection; I can think of no lovelier tribute of one artist to another.
Having myself attempted to bake souffles is the only reason I'd call this play souffle-like: that is, potentially light and fluffy, but in the end excruciatingly difficult to pull off. I came to Stoppard myself through student productions--Arcadia will always be seared into my heart. As with Rosencrantz last week, though, this production made me realize how difficult Stoppard actually is to do. For this to work, the actors have to work on at least three levels, and in multiple modes: everyone coming on to dance must do so at least as well as (say) Tzara talking in two accents, one heavily Eastern European and the other entirely in the mode of West End Oscar Wilde. Etcetera, etcetera, and with dancing. Everyone in this production, top to bottom, did everything that was asked of them excellently.
During the performance, what rang with me particularly were the exhortations to traditional European culture. If one were interested in reading list on conservative art, in the non-witless sense of "conservative" we don't get much of at the moment, one might do worse than to stick this play on it. But then the piece is subtler and cleverer than that: Carr, who gets the biggest speech about art, is (at least) a bloody racist; Tzara, whose anti-art musings seemed to get slightly short shrift in this production, is nevertheless also the portrait of a Wildean dandy. Even Lenin's cultural tastes get a few moments of sympathy, in between descriptions of the purges. There is, finally, something immensely generous in the play's attitude towards Joyce. Ulysses is barely in Travesties, but also everywhere alongside it, the greatness of its revolution--unlike most other things in the play--taken for granted. Ulysses, more than the Alps, is the mountain behind Stoppard's Swiss confection; I can think of no lovelier tribute of one artist to another.
Friday, March 17, 2017
Low Level Panic (Orange Tree Theatre, 4 March)
God bless the Orange Tree, really and truly, for consistently the smartest selection of plays I've seen in London. When I recommend them to friends, as I always do, I say that this is a proper theatre: handsomely-mounted, thoughtful productions. Their commitment to interesting but less-performed plays is simply invaluable: I suspect I would never have seen Mustapha Matura's Play Mas, or (in a very different vein) Shaw's Widower's Houses, at least in proper productions, were it not for their interventions.
If I were trying to be provocative, I would say that this play, from 1998, was about the Internet: specifically, about pornography and Internet dating, only before either of these were anything like mainstreamed. It really isn't: it's about relationships among women, and particularly the ubiquity of male desire in a certain kind of straight, pan-middle-class female life.
And this is where my reservations about the piece begin. Along with Seventeen, this is the second piece of theatre I saw this week in which no characters exceeded their types--that is, presented no idiosyncrasies, no signs of individual life beyond being twenty-somethings having sexualised, desired, desiring, problematic bodies. I honestly do not know if anyone actually has hourlong conversations with their mates in the bathroom, particularly when one of said mades is naked. But I do know that people tend to be weird in a way that the characters in this play were not. I thought, again, of the Bechdel Test: I don't know that the characters in here were ever free of Talking About Sex and Appearance. And of course this is, I would say somewhat laboriously, the play's point. But, just as the laughs in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern made the core of existential angst seem all the more powerful, some sense of these people as individuals would have heightened the play's stakes. It's hard to mourn lost or abandoned individuality if the play doesn't itself seem very interested in these things.
Everyone appearing in this was great--but they had to put up with a very laboured script and--again--little chance to be more than a type. I particularly felt sorry for Sophie Melville, who had the play the most panicked, most middle-class, most troubled of the three women. This was as I have come to expect from the theatre an all-out, dedicated staging, and I appreciate the seriousness with which the production addressed what was in the script. Having Mary, her character, climb the set at various moments felt appropriate to the character's need to live with the aftermath of a sexual assault. These actions were just set in the midst of a landscape of pretty mundane-seeming concerns: it's easy to get sex, but hard to get a boyfriend; my flatmates keep leaving their stuff in the bathroom. This disjunction is of course on some level the point--and I admired the staging's commitment to showing that, on some level, this was an experience this character could not move past. But I wish more had been there: that they play had itself had a more expansive account of what women's lives might be like.
If I were trying to be provocative, I would say that this play, from 1998, was about the Internet: specifically, about pornography and Internet dating, only before either of these were anything like mainstreamed. It really isn't: it's about relationships among women, and particularly the ubiquity of male desire in a certain kind of straight, pan-middle-class female life.
And this is where my reservations about the piece begin. Along with Seventeen, this is the second piece of theatre I saw this week in which no characters exceeded their types--that is, presented no idiosyncrasies, no signs of individual life beyond being twenty-somethings having sexualised, desired, desiring, problematic bodies. I honestly do not know if anyone actually has hourlong conversations with their mates in the bathroom, particularly when one of said mades is naked. But I do know that people tend to be weird in a way that the characters in this play were not. I thought, again, of the Bechdel Test: I don't know that the characters in here were ever free of Talking About Sex and Appearance. And of course this is, I would say somewhat laboriously, the play's point. But, just as the laughs in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern made the core of existential angst seem all the more powerful, some sense of these people as individuals would have heightened the play's stakes. It's hard to mourn lost or abandoned individuality if the play doesn't itself seem very interested in these things.
Everyone appearing in this was great--but they had to put up with a very laboured script and--again--little chance to be more than a type. I particularly felt sorry for Sophie Melville, who had the play the most panicked, most middle-class, most troubled of the three women. This was as I have come to expect from the theatre an all-out, dedicated staging, and I appreciate the seriousness with which the production addressed what was in the script. Having Mary, her character, climb the set at various moments felt appropriate to the character's need to live with the aftermath of a sexual assault. These actions were just set in the midst of a landscape of pretty mundane-seeming concerns: it's easy to get sex, but hard to get a boyfriend; my flatmates keep leaving their stuff in the bathroom. This disjunction is of course on some level the point--and I admired the staging's commitment to showing that, on some level, this was an experience this character could not move past. But I wish more had been there: that they play had itself had a more expansive account of what women's lives might be like.
Seventeen (March 6, Young Vic)
This was a sort-of interesting conceit that got increasingly purposeless as it played out. The play's characters were all suburban teenagers, but played by actors in their 50s. This produced occasional moments of insight, particularly in the early parts of the play, as the actors said extraordinarily heedless, youthful things, playing into the conceit of the thing and seeming a bit disjointed. Then more mature expressions, often regarding the banal matters of everyday life, would, when said by older actors, suddenly sort of snap the characters out of seeming youthful. This was in its way an interesting effect: a reader more interested than I could no doubt do something with the play's multiple languages, showing how the older cast revealed how the language of youth is shot through with the language of age.
And that's about it, upside-wise. I don't know that this succeeds in any sense as a play about teenagers: I don't know if young people talk like this, or (particularly) if they schedule all of the meaningful events of their lives to happen in one evening. And I don't know that having older actors playing young people consistently demonstrated any interest: it felt like the production sort of settled down in its second half, and interesting things stopped getting passed across the different layers of the conceit. Ultimately this felt a bit like a technical exercise: the actors--consistently committed to "youth," at least as it involves running about the stage--stopped having anything non-cliched to do. And the generic "youth" of the characters prevented them from having any particular idiosyncrasies. This is youth as adulthood imagines it: popular music, difficult parents, going off to university or not, having crushes. None of these young people had any interests beyond this; the play as such failed a sort of generational Bechdel test, with no-one involved doing anything beyond being generic types. I think that with younger actors this would have been quite dull; but I'm not sure the against-type casting, age-wise, produced enough of anything to warrant this production.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Old Vic, 28 February)
I suspect that this will be as definitive production of this play as I will ever see. Everyone involved was simply perfect in their parts. Even the minor characters--so Hamlet and the rest--were tremendous; I would happily have watched that staging of Hamlet afterwards, or before. David Haig as the Player King nearly, nearly walked away with the whole piece--he does, after all, get the bulk of the good lines, and doesn't need to bear the weight of the joke essentially being on him. But the central R&G were near-definitive, including (yes) Daniel Radcliffe, sinking perfectly into the slighter of the two parts.
What a sad, sad script this is, all the more so for the near-perfect jokes (and some quite terrible ones) contained within. The last time I read this I must have been in undergrad, and the nods to Beckett--the barrels and whatnot--were lost on me; I'm sure I thought the "gods aspiring to maidenheads" line, here happily glossed over, was hilarious. I think it has aged with me; now at thirty-six, I found its treatment of death properly terrifying, probably because the fissiparous wit made being alive seem comparatively more enjoyable. (This doesn't always happen to me with live Beckett.)
What a sad, sad script this is, all the more so for the near-perfect jokes (and some quite terrible ones) contained within. The last time I read this I must have been in undergrad, and the nods to Beckett--the barrels and whatnot--were lost on me; I'm sure I thought the "gods aspiring to maidenheads" line, here happily glossed over, was hilarious. I think it has aged with me; now at thirty-six, I found its treatment of death properly terrifying, probably because the fissiparous wit made being alive seem comparatively more enjoyable. (This doesn't always happen to me with live Beckett.)
Adriana Lecouvreur (ROH, 27 February)
I started enjoying this a lot more once I gave up trying to understand what was happening minute to minute, plot-wise, and let my mind sort of drift. Do we need opera to provide good plots, or even to make sense minute to minute? The man beside me was talking about the way the mezzo (younger) was challenging the lead soprano (Angela Gheorghiu, obviously a big deal), and the script seems designed to set up these sorts of challenges. Might operas--or some of them--be thought of as structures for providing these sorts of meta-operatic challenges, rather than as anything like realistic entertainments?
David McVicar remains one of my favorite opera designers. Again, leaving the plot aside, this was one of the loveliest minute-to-minute operas that I've seen; in my mind's eye I can still three dancers lined up at the edge of the setting, just watching the principal actors at center stage. I'm not sure that this made a lick of sense, but it was one of the loveliest night's out I've had in a while.
David McVicar remains one of my favorite opera designers. Again, leaving the plot aside, this was one of the loveliest minute-to-minute operas that I've seen; in my mind's eye I can still three dancers lined up at the edge of the setting, just watching the principal actors at center stage. I'm not sure that this made a lick of sense, but it was one of the loveliest night's out I've had in a while.
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