A Night at the Theatre

[amateur51]

And while we are on The Ashes, the Nottingham Playhouse's eponymous production is a fascinating, enjoyable and successful telling of the story and intrigues before, during and after the Bodyline series.

Many thanks for the play alert, Belgrove - a perpetually fascinating story for cricket-lovers

[gurnemanz]

If it proves impossible to get tickets, there is a NT Live broadcast to cinemas on IIRC 26 September.

I have sometimes combined the spectacle of sport and art in a single day - a tiring business. A good few years back I went to a day's cricket at the Oval (Ashes Test), rushed via tube to the RAH for a Prom (in the arena) and then dashed for a late train back to Salisbury. I couldn't do that kind of thing now.

We were happy to book early before the reviews were out to be sure of getting seats for the NT Othello, but there was not much risk that it would be a dud. The modern setting was convincing and shone a new light on a well-known text. We had previously seen Hytner's Henry V also with Adrian Lester. Set against the Iraq war, Henry's war-making "stiffen the sinews" spin is on TV and the blokes watching it in the pub quickly switch over to to the snooker.

I read somewhere that the football fanatic Shostakovich often managed to watch two matches on the same day.

[aeolium]

And while we are on The Ashes, the Nottingham Playhouse's eponymous production is a fascinating, enjoyable and successful telling of the story and intrigues before, during and after the Bodyline series.

I have sometimes wondered about the dramatic potential of an opera based on the Bodyline series - perhaps one in a Ring-like series including one based on the West Indian demolition of England in 1976 (provisionally entitled "Grovel"?), with the Harlequin-capped ghost of Jardine making an appearance in the latter. The WNO chorus would make an impressively threatening and vocal team of barrackers in the Bodyline opera. And how better to follow a day at the cricket by attending a performance (open-air staging, of course) of one of these operas.

All we need are a librettist and a composer....

[amateur51]

I read somewhere that the football fanatic Shostakovich often managed to watch two matches on the same day.

Without a subscription to a well-known TV channel as well - now that's what I call a footie fan

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i do not go to the theatre much at all .... one Pirandello at the Royal Court at the behest of the young lady friend in late teenage years and not much else since ... except school productions involving sprog .... which is odd since i do like a good play on the telly .... last night to the newly refurbished Regal Cinema in Melton Mowbray for a re-broadcast of The Audience ...

Harold Wilson had me in real tears, not of laughter, as he described his symptoms of dementia to HM .... McCabe and Mirren were stellar in an exceptional cast ... famously no Blair but why no MacMilllan? ... i have no credentials to judge a drama performance but found this both moving, amusing and intelligent

if you live in the middle kingdom i can not recommend this cinema highly enough ... it should be off Park Lane it has been refurbished to such high standards, not a back street in the old lair of the hunting classes ...

[Belgrove]

Sweet Bird of Youth is at The Old Vic in London until the end of this month. It is a splendid production of an uneven play, but I do find Tennessee Williams' overwrought Southern Gothic rather irresistible. This is a version of Sunset Boulevard with extra booze, pills, racism, syphilis, hysterectomy and castration added for good measure - indeed reminiscent of a quiet weekend at Chez Belgrove...

Kim Catrall plays the fading movie diva Alexandra Del-Largo on the run from her last turkey of a performance and with latest toy boy in tow. If anything she is a bit too young and in good shape for the demands of the raddled role. But she is suitably monstrous in dealing out the catty barbs, principally directed at Seth Numrich's inept/fading charms as blackmailer/gigolo and his attempts to reconnect with childhood sweetheart Heavenly. Numrich plays Chance Wayne - the perfect encapsulation of character in a name. The production has a great set and the climax during a sultry thunderstorm and power cut is beautifully staged. An entertaining performance too by Owen Roe as the ghastly Boss Finley, a gouty racist hypocrite who turns an alarming beetroot when angry, which is often.

Wonderful if rather hammy stuff. But the roles are big ones and are memorably done. The Old Vic under the general direction Kevin Spacey is producing splendid work, and cleverly casts the shows to bring in the punters.

[zoomy]

A friend of mine saw that production and said it was mostly wonderful. I love TW.

[Belgrove]

Much of what I see or hear is unexceptional and so I prefer only to alert to what is good, but the National's new Edward II is so bad it is actually worth seeing. It is rare to experience a real turkey in the theatre these days, the last time I left half way through was about 20 years ago. I was tempted to leave this during the interval, but a ghastly fascination of what might transpire next drew me back - and it got worse! So bad that it ended up having a comedic value.

In truth John Heffernan's portrayal of Edward is rather good, it's the dodgy acting and portrayals of most of the principals around him that sinks this. Gaveston has a transatlantic accent for no discernible reason other than it makes him 'different', Kyle Soller provides little but agility to climb the props and cavort amongst the audience. Vanessa Kirby's Isabella smokes her fags, swigs champagne and ends a 'phone conversation (sic) with 'I'll get back to you...'. Had Marlowe the advantage of a telephone, I bet he would have found a less cliched way to ring off. Bettrys Jones' young Edward III is hampered through being made up as a dead ringer for wee Jimmy Krankie, draining his/her/its final revenge soliloquy of its power. But most hilarious of all is Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's Young Mortimer who literally ends up beating his breast and roaring like some macho cage wrestler.

The production is simultaneously set in the present and past, with ineffective use of on-stage video projected onto large screens either side of the stage. This ends up being confusing since the actors are miked and so one cannot readily discern who is speaking nor where they are. Stagehands are in full view moving props, costumes and bits of the set around for its next use. In the second act, all this paraphernalia is piled up, atop which Mortimer and Isabella survey the chaos of the civil war. It recalled David's Tennis Court Oath, or more accurately (and probably) its reference in the last Batman movie! Joe Hill-Gibbins has seen fit to make some of Marlowe's text contemporary, but I don't know why. The poker scene was suitably gruesome.

So this is a train crash of a production, so bad it's good. It can be witnessed for just £12 under the excellent Travelex scheme. Go on, treat yourself to a laugh. Who knows, maybe the professional critics will love its 'contemporary edginess'?

[aeolium]

Thanks for the review, Belgrove. Joe Hill-Gibbins is clearly wasted in theatre - he should be in opera

I wonder if the production will make it to the cinema screen on NT Live....

[Rue Dubac]

Spot on, Belgrove. It's a travesty of Marlowe. Blank verse? What's that? The action is supposed to take over twenty years, but Ed. III stays a child. What was the point of playing Ed. II's brothers as sisters? Even without the anachronisms, it made little sense. Why did they bother to do the play at all? Marlowe deserves better.
Michael Billington did not love its "contemporary edginess"...

[aeolium]

I am interested in going to a performance of Georg Kaiser's From Morning To Midnight which the NT are doing from November. Has anyone seen this play, or anything else by Kaiser, who was a very prominent dramatist in the Weimar Republic? It seems to be a somewhat Faustian story and was one of those Expressionist works that was filmed in 1922.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Kaiser

[Belgrove]

The Headlong company is touring the country with its adaptation of 1984 and is well worth seeing. Touring productions are often rudimentary in order to fit into different venues, but this is a complex and inventive amalgam of stage effects, with particularly sophisticated use of lighting and video (unlike the unintentionally hilarious Edward II at the RNT).

It is not a linear telling of the story, but relates it from the perspective of the future looking back into the past (inspired from the novel's Appendix on Newspeak). This serves to uncover layers and meanings that I had not picked up through reading the text (several times!) I had never understood why The Party expends so much effort in reconditioning those accused of Thoughtcrime before blowing their brains out, but the production latches onto a latent religiosity which makes sense of this and adds to Orwell's satire. The final scene in the Chestnut Tree Cafe becomes Purgatory. The torturing of Winston is powerfully portrayed without being explicit, nevertheless many in the paced audience watched this extended scene through their fingers, their imaginations being provoked thus.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Mark Arends' Winston is frail and utterly broken by the end. Hara Yannas is a feisty and provocative Julia. But inevitably it is O'Brien, played by Tim Dutton with avuncular charm, plausibility and adamantine ruthlessness who, like The Devil, gets the best tunes.

An impressive, uncomfortable and memorable show.

[Dave2002]

Is "The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas" at the Royal Court worth seeing?

BTW: I thought the Marlowe at the NT, Edward II was OK.

Then again, I don't always like what everyone else does. I didn't like Othello (recent NT) and gave up and went home.

Another decision to make is whether to even bother with Fidelio at ENO - apparently it's really not very good.

[Nick Armstrong]

Epic theatrical experience lately: the production by PUNCHDRUNK with the National Theatre of "The Drowned Man" - an 'immersive promenade experience' in which you lose yourself in the production, which fills four storeys of the enormous disused GPO sorting warehouse next to Paddington Station. You go in down a dark passage, at the end of which you are told that the perfomance is best experienced on your own, given a mask and sent out to discover the building and the stories...

The masks are a brilliant touch - easy to wear even with glasses, and not constricting - they jut forwards from the nose, so there's no breathing or condensation issues...



And they mean that the building and the action is surrounded by all the masked figures of the audience, like phantoms all around. (I went to Punchdrunk's last show, a Poe-based spectacle called 'The Masque of the Red Death' filling the former Battersea Town Hall with gothic scenes and dramas - the masks were wonderful there too, even more appropriate if anything...) And when you come upon performers, you can peer at them unashamedly - you become a licensed voyeur, watching the various pockets of drama as they unfold... and poking into every corner of the set...

... and it's the set which is the star - four levels, mostly dark and misty in atmosphere, a constant threatening ambient sound-track...

one floor an entire town square at night with, beyond it, a wooded area and trailer park and scary motel;

another floor the town outskirts, desert sand and deserted with an abandoned car, a delapidated bar, and a lonely chapel containing wicker-man style skeleton mourners in top hats from some spellbound funeral service;

and another floor a series of movie studios and backrooms, dressing rooms, props rooms, recording studio, medical centre, etc etc (and there's a bar area where you can buy drinks and relax with cabaret music and illusionists)

... each shop, each room, each trailer dressed in infinite detail - you can pick up any of the props, take letters out of envelopes and read them, feel in pockets for clues... sit in the chairs...

And there is interaction with the performers. At one point I was sitting down surveying the scene (it's a 3 hour show, pretty knackering) and I heard a voice in my ear whispering in a gravelly voice "Get out of my chair"... an actor in character about to embark on a scene, and needing my chair... So excitingly, you feel part of the action - and indeed there are 'private moments' - at one point I was wandering to the edge of the wood and suddenly there appeared in front of me a Pierrot figure who'd been appearing in one of the 'films' being shot in one of the 'studios' - he stretched out his hand with a finger to his lips, took my hand, and led me to a secret door, down a passage to a child's bedroom, had me take off my mask and sat me on the bed and proceeded to tell me a story about a little boy flying to the moon etc etc etc.... then led me off out of another door, down a spiral passage (I think in fact the warehouse parking area) to the darkened basement and showed me several nightmare scenes (e.g. a dead horse ) by the light of his torch.... then led me back to a door and released me back into the main building...

Then at the end, all the audience are shepherded skilfully back into the main area and there is a final 'show' on one of the studio stages - dance and music, like a 'wrap' party.

Some of the areas of the set can been seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DZKNNMombV8

Worth a visit if you like fantasmagorical experiences, aren't too worried about a coherent narrative (depending on how you approach the evening, there isn't much of one) and have comfy shoes.

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/the-drowned-man-a-hollywood-fable

Some reviews with which I would agree here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23329899

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/jul/21/drowned-man-machine-masque-anarchy

http://metro.co.uk/2013/08/12/punchd...enace-3920135/

[Anna]

I'm afraid that would absolutely freak me out - I have a total phobia about masks and clowns - I'd probably collapse in hysterics - the thought of the Venice Festival brings on a severe case of the heebie-jeebies!! So, I'm afraid it's not for me, but I'm glad you enjoyed it! Good review though!