![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
big-ass theater post
So I went to London last weekend, for about thirty hours or so, and saw three plays, 'cos I don't mess around. Performance spoilers abound, also some gruesomeness.
I'm not quite sure what I thought of this one. It had some very powerful moments, particularly Gloucester's blinding (which took place in a wine cellar; Cornwall was opening a bottle of wine with a corkscrew, and then suddenly decided that the corkscrew could be put to ... other uses). And there were also some completely WTF-ish choices, most notably having Lear turn around and bludgeon the Fool to death during the mock-trial scene. (I'd read about this beforehand, and I was glad I had, because it all happened so quickly that I wouldn't have had a clue what the hell had HAPPENED otherwise.) So the Fool is lying in this bathtub, because for some reason there were random plumbing fixtures in the Hut-on-the-Heath, and he twitches a bit and manages to deliver the "I'll go to bed at noon" line before expiring. I don't really understand the impulse to kill the Fool. I would like to see a production where he shows up at the very end, after everyone else has left or died.
However, the random-plumbing-fixtures thing did allow Lear to cast a toilet as Goneril, which was all kinds of awesome. (Also, in random awesomeness, Lear's hundred knights dragged in an entire dead caribou and slammed it on the table, all the while singing "The King of France is a mongrel bitch." One did understand why Goneril was so pissed.)
I really liked Goneril, because, well, Kate Fleetwood being fabulous, and I appreciated that this production let Cordelia be the soldier that she is (and did not put her in a silly dress while leading armies into battle), and that she kept fighting even while they were putting handcuffs on her. Regan, however, was another whole bundle of WTF, being sloppy-drunk and hysterical throughout most of the play. Having her freak out during the blinding scene could have worked if it had been more toned-down, but as it was, it just didn't.
Also kind of odd were some of the choices surrounding Edmund. He was definitely the most charmless Edmund I have ever seen, more prim-bespectacled-accountant gone to the dark side than Magnificent Bastard. (He definitely did not want to cut his own arm. In general, this production seemed to cast all the good characters as manly-men and the bad ones as wimps, which works for the Kent-Oswald stuff but is distinctly problematic otherwise.) But OK, I can roll with that interpretation, and I can even see why they cut the duel at the end (Edgar just stabbed him), given that it was a modern-dress production and judicial combat doesn't quite fit the times. But they also completely cut Edmund's moment of redemption at the end, which strikes me as ALL wrong.
Favorite moment: the "Reason not the need" speech is played sitting down, with old, hunchbacked, querulous Lear slumped like a bum against the pedestal of a statue -- specifically, a statue of a tall, statesmanly, middle-aged Lear. Also, on an only semi-related note, I never realized before how moving Lear's "I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester" line is -- because of course he isn't Gloucester by that point in the play, and it's Lear who grants him a brief moment when he is.
OK, so I knew next to nothing about this one going in, except that it was an adaptation of an epic poem by Derek Walcott that was based on Homer (very loosely, as it turned out), and I'm not sure that I followed more than half of the plot*, but it was oddly mesmerizing, anyway. (It was all done with two actors, embodying various parts by turns but mostly reciting, which made it harder to figure out what was going on, but after a while you decide not to worry about it and just let the waves of poetry wash over you. After all, you can listen to Joseph Marcell perform poetry for a damn long time. I remember looking down at the upturned faces of the people in the pit and thinking, this has to be what performances of epic poetry were actually like, in cultures that did that sort of thing.
But about the playhouse, which is the real reason why I went: It is not really a replica of a Jacobean indoor theater, more sort of vaguely Jacobean-inspired; the seating in the pit, especially, is obviously modern in design. But it is very beautiful. (I don't have pictures because I had left my camera in a pub on Inis Meain the day before; the pub owners were very nice and sent it back to Galway with the ferry, but I didn't have a chance to retrieve it before I had to leave.) I was in the lower gallery just at the corner of the stage: technically a "restricted view" seat, since you do have to lean forward a bit in order not to be looking around a pillar, but you're going to be doing that anyway since the seats are backless. I think it was a pretty good place to be.
They do cheat a bit with the lighting -- there are sliding panels in the ceiling that allow selective use of electric lights, but I think the majority of it did come from the candles. There are six chandeliers which can be raised and lowered, four of which were used during this performance, also a number of mirrored wall brackets holding two candles each, which can be detached from the walls and carried around. All of this means you can do some light effects, which I had figured was true and had always told students was the case, so it's nice to have some confirmation. E.g., the brackets can be used to focus and amplify light, say by holding them in front of someone's face, and the candles can be lit or snuffed to create mood lighting, though at a slower pace than in a modern performance, and of course the audience is very conscious of the deliberateness of it. It worked really well in this case, although I'm wondering how it would go with the faster pace of an actual early modern play.
* As far as I can tell, the plot is something like this: Achille and Hector are fishermen on a Caribbean island. There is a beautiful girl named Helen, who is a housemaid in an English army officer's house, and she is living with Achille but leaves him for Hector, causing them to go to war in boats. Achille has a visionary journey-to-the-underworld experience, which is all kind of bound up with colonialism and slavery and finding his African identity, but comes back. Hector dies (I didn't quite work out how), and the English officer's wife also dies of cancer (this bit seemed somewhat random). Also, Achille has a friend named Philoctete, who gets cured of a festering leg wound through a folk remedy that has been lost-and-rediscovered. At the end of it, Helen is pregnant and back with Achille. But really, I don't think the plot was the point.
That thing you heard about people fainting during the performances? It is TOTALLY TRUE. Someone did (during the "enter a messenger with two heads and a hand" scene), and there were attendants ready with a wheelchair, apparently quite used to handling this sort of thing.
I did not have the best sightlines since I got there late, having decided that I needed ale and Greek food before the performance. So I found a spot at the edge of the stage toward the back, which wasn't too bad since there was lots of room to move around, but I do hope they film it, because I would really have liked to see Lavinia's reactions just before Titus kills her, and there was no way to do that from where I was standing. (I would also like to have seen more of how they played the scene where Marcus finds Lavinia, and I'm hoping to get a chance to compare it with the actual text and see whether they cut anything, because it seemed surprisingly NOT over-long in performance.) In general, Lavinia struck me as a bit too passive and blank-faced (a real problem with a character who is not able to talk!), but I suspect there may be some nuances that I missed because of where I was standing. She also seemed less than fully complicit in Chiron and Demetrius's murder -- it was Titus who entered with the basin -- which strikes me as a bit off, because Lavinia is recognizable a Shakespeare girl, smart and headstrong and outspoken, and she has to know what she's doing when she picks the Tereus story out of all of the possible rape narratives in Ovid.
The pillars were all draped in black, and so was the whole back of the stage except for the entrance and exit doors, which made the balcony unusable. Instead, they used wheeled carts with platforms for the "above" scenes -- e.g., the candidates' speeches, and Titus's entrance when Revenge, Rape, and Murder knock on his door. (Which was hilarious, by the way, as was Titus's whole deranged-chef act. He didn't pull off the same level of emotional depth as Anthony Hopkins, who will always be "my" Titus, but he did a good job bringing out the ambiguous craziness mixed with performative flair.)
There was, as advertised, lots and LOTS of blood, and even a bit more sexual violence than is actually in the text, since Aaron's killing of the nurse was basically rape-with-a-sword, which is particularly awful in a visceral way, coming as it does right after the tender moment with the baby. At intermission, you could hear this murmur, swelling much louder than the audience-commentary at intermission normally does; and the dance at the end was like this wild, bacchanalian release of tension. I think the palpable level of energy and shock from the audience was one of my favorite parts of the whole experience. (Really, that's why the Globe is the Globe.)
I'm not quite sure what I thought of this one. It had some very powerful moments, particularly Gloucester's blinding (which took place in a wine cellar; Cornwall was opening a bottle of wine with a corkscrew, and then suddenly decided that the corkscrew could be put to ... other uses). And there were also some completely WTF-ish choices, most notably having Lear turn around and bludgeon the Fool to death during the mock-trial scene. (I'd read about this beforehand, and I was glad I had, because it all happened so quickly that I wouldn't have had a clue what the hell had HAPPENED otherwise.) So the Fool is lying in this bathtub, because for some reason there were random plumbing fixtures in the Hut-on-the-Heath, and he twitches a bit and manages to deliver the "I'll go to bed at noon" line before expiring. I don't really understand the impulse to kill the Fool. I would like to see a production where he shows up at the very end, after everyone else has left or died.
However, the random-plumbing-fixtures thing did allow Lear to cast a toilet as Goneril, which was all kinds of awesome. (Also, in random awesomeness, Lear's hundred knights dragged in an entire dead caribou and slammed it on the table, all the while singing "The King of France is a mongrel bitch." One did understand why Goneril was so pissed.)
I really liked Goneril, because, well, Kate Fleetwood being fabulous, and I appreciated that this production let Cordelia be the soldier that she is (and did not put her in a silly dress while leading armies into battle), and that she kept fighting even while they were putting handcuffs on her. Regan, however, was another whole bundle of WTF, being sloppy-drunk and hysterical throughout most of the play. Having her freak out during the blinding scene could have worked if it had been more toned-down, but as it was, it just didn't.
Also kind of odd were some of the choices surrounding Edmund. He was definitely the most charmless Edmund I have ever seen, more prim-bespectacled-accountant gone to the dark side than Magnificent Bastard. (He definitely did not want to cut his own arm. In general, this production seemed to cast all the good characters as manly-men and the bad ones as wimps, which works for the Kent-Oswald stuff but is distinctly problematic otherwise.) But OK, I can roll with that interpretation, and I can even see why they cut the duel at the end (Edgar just stabbed him), given that it was a modern-dress production and judicial combat doesn't quite fit the times. But they also completely cut Edmund's moment of redemption at the end, which strikes me as ALL wrong.
Favorite moment: the "Reason not the need" speech is played sitting down, with old, hunchbacked, querulous Lear slumped like a bum against the pedestal of a statue -- specifically, a statue of a tall, statesmanly, middle-aged Lear. Also, on an only semi-related note, I never realized before how moving Lear's "I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester" line is -- because of course he isn't Gloucester by that point in the play, and it's Lear who grants him a brief moment when he is.
OK, so I knew next to nothing about this one going in, except that it was an adaptation of an epic poem by Derek Walcott that was based on Homer (very loosely, as it turned out), and I'm not sure that I followed more than half of the plot*, but it was oddly mesmerizing, anyway. (It was all done with two actors, embodying various parts by turns but mostly reciting, which made it harder to figure out what was going on, but after a while you decide not to worry about it and just let the waves of poetry wash over you. After all, you can listen to Joseph Marcell perform poetry for a damn long time. I remember looking down at the upturned faces of the people in the pit and thinking, this has to be what performances of epic poetry were actually like, in cultures that did that sort of thing.
But about the playhouse, which is the real reason why I went: It is not really a replica of a Jacobean indoor theater, more sort of vaguely Jacobean-inspired; the seating in the pit, especially, is obviously modern in design. But it is very beautiful. (I don't have pictures because I had left my camera in a pub on Inis Meain the day before; the pub owners were very nice and sent it back to Galway with the ferry, but I didn't have a chance to retrieve it before I had to leave.) I was in the lower gallery just at the corner of the stage: technically a "restricted view" seat, since you do have to lean forward a bit in order not to be looking around a pillar, but you're going to be doing that anyway since the seats are backless. I think it was a pretty good place to be.
They do cheat a bit with the lighting -- there are sliding panels in the ceiling that allow selective use of electric lights, but I think the majority of it did come from the candles. There are six chandeliers which can be raised and lowered, four of which were used during this performance, also a number of mirrored wall brackets holding two candles each, which can be detached from the walls and carried around. All of this means you can do some light effects, which I had figured was true and had always told students was the case, so it's nice to have some confirmation. E.g., the brackets can be used to focus and amplify light, say by holding them in front of someone's face, and the candles can be lit or snuffed to create mood lighting, though at a slower pace than in a modern performance, and of course the audience is very conscious of the deliberateness of it. It worked really well in this case, although I'm wondering how it would go with the faster pace of an actual early modern play.
* As far as I can tell, the plot is something like this: Achille and Hector are fishermen on a Caribbean island. There is a beautiful girl named Helen, who is a housemaid in an English army officer's house, and she is living with Achille but leaves him for Hector, causing them to go to war in boats. Achille has a visionary journey-to-the-underworld experience, which is all kind of bound up with colonialism and slavery and finding his African identity, but comes back. Hector dies (I didn't quite work out how), and the English officer's wife also dies of cancer (this bit seemed somewhat random). Also, Achille has a friend named Philoctete, who gets cured of a festering leg wound through a folk remedy that has been lost-and-rediscovered. At the end of it, Helen is pregnant and back with Achille. But really, I don't think the plot was the point.
That thing you heard about people fainting during the performances? It is TOTALLY TRUE. Someone did (during the "enter a messenger with two heads and a hand" scene), and there were attendants ready with a wheelchair, apparently quite used to handling this sort of thing.
I did not have the best sightlines since I got there late, having decided that I needed ale and Greek food before the performance. So I found a spot at the edge of the stage toward the back, which wasn't too bad since there was lots of room to move around, but I do hope they film it, because I would really have liked to see Lavinia's reactions just before Titus kills her, and there was no way to do that from where I was standing. (I would also like to have seen more of how they played the scene where Marcus finds Lavinia, and I'm hoping to get a chance to compare it with the actual text and see whether they cut anything, because it seemed surprisingly NOT over-long in performance.) In general, Lavinia struck me as a bit too passive and blank-faced (a real problem with a character who is not able to talk!), but I suspect there may be some nuances that I missed because of where I was standing. She also seemed less than fully complicit in Chiron and Demetrius's murder -- it was Titus who entered with the basin -- which strikes me as a bit off, because Lavinia is recognizable a Shakespeare girl, smart and headstrong and outspoken, and she has to know what she's doing when she picks the Tereus story out of all of the possible rape narratives in Ovid.
The pillars were all draped in black, and so was the whole back of the stage except for the entrance and exit doors, which made the balcony unusable. Instead, they used wheeled carts with platforms for the "above" scenes -- e.g., the candidates' speeches, and Titus's entrance when Revenge, Rape, and Murder knock on his door. (Which was hilarious, by the way, as was Titus's whole deranged-chef act. He didn't pull off the same level of emotional depth as Anthony Hopkins, who will always be "my" Titus, but he did a good job bringing out the ambiguous craziness mixed with performative flair.)
There was, as advertised, lots and LOTS of blood, and even a bit more sexual violence than is actually in the text, since Aaron's killing of the nurse was basically rape-with-a-sword, which is particularly awful in a visceral way, coming as it does right after the tender moment with the baby. At intermission, you could hear this murmur, swelling much louder than the audience-commentary at intermission normally does; and the dance at the end was like this wild, bacchanalian release of tension. I think the palpable level of energy and shock from the audience was one of my favorite parts of the whole experience. (Really, that's why the Globe is the Globe.)