Love’s Labour’s Lost November 2, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , 2 commentsIn the Q&A session after the show, the cast talked about this being a difficult play to read, and so not done very often. It doesn’t have much plot, and most of the humour is in obtuse Elizabethan puns, so it’s a fair choice as the third, short-run play of the season. It’s a sellout, but that can only be because of David Tennant’s unfailing ability to attract bums to seats. Having said that, this bum had a very good evening, and the rest of the audience seemed to be doing so too.
What plot there is, is very simple. The King of Navarre and his courtiers (above) swear to study for three years, forsaking women, good eating and even a decent nights sleep for the sake of learning. This has barely started when the Princess of France and her ladies show up, with inevitable consequences.
The play is truly an ensemble piece, and the cast do a brilliant job of turning this difficult play into something very funny and accessible. Although Berowne (Tennant) has twice as many lines as anyone else, they are concentrated into more long speeches. If there is a star, it could as easily be the hilarious Spanish Duke Don Adriano de Armado (Joe Dixon) all pompous strutting and atrocious accent proving that Fawlty Tower’s Manuel and ‘Allo ‘Allo have ancient precedents. Tennant is wonderful, but the entire cast made this performance worthwhile.
In one of the most obscure parts of the play, with puns on l’envoy and geese which you’d have to have read a critical edition to get, let alone find funny, Armado, his page Moth (Zoe Thorpe) and the villager Costard (Ricky Champ) break into a rap, and have the theatre in stitches. It sounds odd, but works brilliantly. As Oliver Ford Davies (Holofernes) pointed out in the Q&A afterwards, rapping helps bring out the rhythm of the verse, as well as forcing clear diction.
And yes, this has to be one of Shakespeare’s filthiest plays, knee-deep in innuendo and often smellier stuff. I doubt there was a straight bloke in the audience sitting calmly as the milkmaid Jacquenetta (Riann Steele) worked her churn. More scatological references are funny (Berowne pronouncing faces as faeces when, dressed as a Russian, he asks the ladies to reveal theirs) or really rather odd, as when Don Armado says that the King likes to run his finger through his excrement and mustache. My text suggests the word refers to facial hair as well, but I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.
One of the strong themes of the play is the cruelty, and essential emptiness of wit, and Rosaline’s final request to Berowne to use his wit to good purpose if he wants to win her is strikingly apt this week. ‘A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the tongue of him that makes it’ would be a useful lesson for Johnathan Ross.
You wonder really what, if anything, the women see in the men. They have failed to keep their vows, try to win the women over with clever games while also deriding them. They cannot even respect their grief when the death of the King of France is announced. The only time they seem to really respect the women is in Berowne’s speech to the other lords justifying the breaking of their vows. Tennant delivers a beautifully nuanced performance, balanced between self-serving cant and a genuine, more mature, reflection on the nature of love.
Although the set is minimal, it seems sumptuous. A huge tree dominates, and is used by Tennant to hide and watch the others. Long strings of coloured polygons give the idea of a forest park. The costumes are rich, with the men in traditional doublet and hose. In an early interview for the season, director Gregory Doran said he wouldn’t put Tennant in hose, but I’m sure a fair few female fans were grateful he did.
In all, well worth the trip to Stratford. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if it hadn’t been for Tennant, and his performance alone would have made it worthwhile, but I’m now determined to make sure I see the plays the RSC don’t bring to London.
Despite the seat being much cheaper, I had a better view than for Hamlet. In the gallery, in B55, I could see everything, though I’d prefer to be down in the stalls (but in the middle, not right at the edge). Love’s Labour’s Lost runs at the Courtyard in Stratford upon Avon until the end of November, and is a complete sellout - returns and day tickets only.
Another Reason to Pay My Licence Fee October 28, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , 1 comment so farThe BBC should get rid of Russell Brand and Johnathan Ross, and spend more money on programmes such as the wonderful series of maths documentaries they’ve been running on BBC4. That’s right, maths.
If you’re in the UK, pop over to iplayer and pick up ‘The Story of Maths‘ for a 4 episode trip through the history of maths from the Greeks, via the middle east to eighteenth century Europe and beyond. They’re presented by Marcus du Sautoy, who has apparently just been appointed to Richard Dawkins’ Chair for the Public Understanding of Science*, and a very interesting geek he is too.
But it’s not just this series. A couple of weeks ago, we had ‘High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos’, introducing chaos theory and its implications. Its easy to think of science presenting a definite, mechanistic view of the world, but chaos theory suggests that not only are some things unknown, but perhaps unknowable. In a sufficiently complex system such as the weather a very small change in initial conditions can send the system into unpredictable territory where it may be impossible to predict the outcome. Is that what’s happening to the climate? Or to financial markets? James Lovelock thinks the greenhouse effect is already irreversible and we watch the stock market gyrate wildly. Who needs gods and demons when this is around?
*hat-tip to Ben Goldacre on his del.icio.us feed
Loud at the Roundhouse October 19, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , 1 comment so farLast time I was in the Roundhouse, it was for the RSCs Histories Cycle, but every now and again I wonder if I’m missing something. Camden is the music centre of London, and I have to confess to never having been to a gig by a major band here. All the famous venues - Roundhouse, Dublin Castle, Koko - are within an easy walk, but somehow I’m more Barbican than Oh! Bar.
I discovered British Sea Power back in March, and have become rather enamoured of their eclectic, eccentric style. They put on a good show. Lots of odd props, including the bits of tree which are a trademark, old sirens and a bloke on a bicycle. Their fascination with coasts and seabirds dominates the videos behind the band. The addition of the London Bulgarian Choir appearing ghost-like in the mist added an ethereal quality.
But does it have to be so loud that their beautiful, lyrical songs disappear into an overamplified bass? What’s the point of losing voices and violin in the other instruments? The Great Skua is a soaring instrumental rolling like a bird in stormy skies but live became a blanket of noise. Maybe I’m just getting old. And maybe I am really more Barbican, and should just stick to cds.
British Sea Power played the Roundhouse on Friday, 17 October and are at the Forum on 29 October.
To Be or Not To Be? October 5, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , add a commentFor once the full, outrageous, West End ticket price might just have been worth paying, not that we did. Rupert Goold’s contemporary adaptation of Pirandello’s classic ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ is captivating, intellectually challenging, aesthetically pleasing and long enough to warrant an interval.
As Noma Dumezweni’s Producer tries, and is failing, to complete a docu-drama (or is that a drama documentary) about the euthenasia of a teenager, six people appear and demand that she tell their story instead. She is drawn further and further into their tale of incest and death and we spiral down into an intense consideration of the meaning of existence and the way in which theatre, or film, relates to reality. Ian McDiarmad is a creepy aged Father, guilty but continuing his incestuous relationship with his Step Daughter, played by Denise Gough.
The boundaries between reality and fiction unravel as the Producer runs behind the stage of Les Mis next door, before reappearing on the stage. Throughout, the play examines theatre as a more accurate portrayal of reality. The opera of the crucial moment when the Mother discovers the Father and Step Daughter in the act is far more dramatic and powerful than a realistic staging would be, hitting the audience with their trauma.
Hamlet is the play of the moment with even a free DVD of Zeferrelli’s 1980 version in my paper this morning. This production draws parallels with the play within a play and questioning of existence, using ‘Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I‘ to make the point that there may be more passion in a play than in real life. It tells us that there is something of Hamlet in all of us, but starts to take it a little far when self-indulgently going on about the David Tennant and Jude Law versions crowding the London stage this winter.
In all an excellent production, although it runs on about 20 minutes too far at the end, almost as if they are trying to find their way back out of the thing and losing some of the impact in the process.
Six Characters in Search of An Author plays at the Gielgud until 8 November. There seem to be lots of cheap tickets at the TKT booth, partly perhaps because it is a challenging play rather than the normal, easy West-End musical. We had good view, despite being at the end of the sixth row of the stalls (F3-4)
The Female of the Species September 28, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , add a commentA misunderstanding, and a hasty decision at the discount theatre booth in Leicester Square led me into Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species. I knew it is based on the hostage taking of Germaine Greer, but hadn’t expected a comedy.
Anna Maxwell Martin, last seen (by me at least) as Cassandra Austen in Becoming Jane, plays the student Molly, who turns up at the home of Eileen Aitkens’ Margot Mason, a middle-aged feminist intellectual suffering from writer’s block. After telling her how much she admires her, Molly pulls a gun on Mason and handcuffs her to the table, holding her hostage. She calls her to account for her world-changing ideas, and the effect they’ve had on the lives of those who’ve taken them to heart. Molly’s birth mother, having abandoned her as a baby threw herself in front of a train holding a copy of Mason’s seminal work ‘The Cerebral Vagina’. Molly is not happy.
Each of the characters who appears, and does very little about the hostage situation, has a different challenge to Mason’s feminism. The daughter feels unloved, never knew her father and longs for a more assertive husband. Her husband values and supports his wife while they still fall into traditional roles. The taxi driver tried to be a new man but his wife left him anyway, and is now getting back in touch with his inner caveman. The camp publisher just wants his new book. It comes very close to being a direct attack on Mason, and feminists of the seventies, but she is big enough to take it on, and send it back to lead us through the changes to feminist ideologies over the last forty years without losing her integrity.
Aitkens is perfect in the role, slightly unsympathetic, very strong and certain of herself. Martin is wonderful, quirky and awkward, but full of a determination which suggests she’s absorbed more of Mason’s feminist ideals than she may choose to admit. At times, it almost becomes farce (in a good way) and ends with an implied Shakespearean pairing-off. It’s clever, witty and occasionally poignant.
This is a bit of a surprise for a big WestEnd theatre, and was only 2/3 full. It’s good to see something other than musicals and the very popular in Theatreland, though many who would appreciate it would balk at the ridiculous WestEnd prices. At £47.50, I wouldn’t bother, but there are lots of tickets available at the TKT booth, for a more reasonable £27.50. I had a good, if rather small, seat in the middle of the fourth row of the dress circle. The Female of the Species plays until 4 October at the Vaudeville.
What A Piece of Work is (that) Man September 18, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , 4 commentsThere is something disconcerting about seeing a very familiar TV actor on the stage. TV is a very intimate medium, in your home, watched alone or with family and a TV series can be a part of life for months or even years. The intimacy of the stage is different. The actor is right there before you, perhaps only a few feet away, but you are one of hundreds, even as it feels he is talking to you alone. You’re more aware of their physical presence, less able to see everything thats happening.
After months of waiting, and all the hype, last night I finally saw David Tennant in the RSCs production of Hamlet in Stratford upon Avon, and he is wonderful.
The royal party arrive on stage and Dr Who is standing in the corner in a well-cut suit. That’s weird. Then a miserable young man comes to life, mourning his father and appalled at his mother’s hasty remarriage. The royal party leave and Tennant sobs and rages his way through the first soliliquy (frailty thy name is woman) fetal on the floor. It’s heart breaking and the next three and a half hours pass in another world.
It’s not all painful. This company finds far more humour in the play than I’ve seen before. Polonious as the doddery old fool teased affectionately by his children, more arrogantly by Hamlet, Hamlets suspicion of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern. Tennant’s Hamlet is an irreverent student feigning madness but also reflective and selfdoubting, making good use of his trademark manic energy. It could so easily go over the top, but it never does.
Patrick Stewart is, of course, excellent. At times, he seems to anchor the stage while Tennant flies around it. Even knowing the plot, he arouses admiration, at least up to the point where he confesses the murder of Hamlet’s father. Although ruthless, he is calm and noble. His early concern for his nephew seems genuine enough.
But it is Tennant’s play. He speaks 37% of the lines (useful fact from the programme), and most of the audience are there to see him. Watching him, he constantly brings ever more meaning out of the words, with his voice, face, hands, entire body. He is Hamlet, totally and completely.
As I leave, its less with the euphoria of seeing a favourite actor than feeling the intense tragedy of the young prince.
Hamlet plays at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon until November, then transfers to London. Both seasons are completely sold out, though there are returns available on the day. If you are booking for the Courtyard, avoid the first few seats at the feet of horseshoe in the stalls. I was in D50, right beside the base of the stage, and saw a lot of backs. The actors do turn to all sides, but when they’re a little way down the thrust of the stage, those seats are behind them.
Somers Town, the Movie August 26, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden, Reviews , add a commentSomers Town is not grey. It has trees, and parks and with the warm honey and red brick of its low rise apartment blocks is as attractive as any densely built inner city area. The worst of the experimental social housing architecture of the sixties and seventies never made it here, and most estates are small. Some of us even tend plants in front of our buildings. Its streets are clean, and safer than surrounding wards. Filming in black and white makes it all look grimmer than it really is, and I suppose that was the idea.
Shane Meadows’ Eurostar-sponsored sequel to the award-winning ‘This is England’ is set a few years after the first film when Thomas Turgoose leaves for London, and ends up at St Pancras. Sleeping rough, he is attacked by some yobs who steal his bag and his money. A local woman buys him breakfast and gives him £10, before he hooks up with a young Polish lad, Marieck, and they set about hanging out in Somers Town.
The sponsorship is only obvious if you know it’s there. Marieck’s father is working on St Pancras, and at one point spouts a paean to the wonders of getting to Paris in two hours. The final scenes, in Paris (ie. after a trip on Eurostar), are shot in grainy colour.
Familiar landmarks abound. Marieck’s Dad drinks at the Cock on Charlton St, the boys fall in love with a French waitress at the Golden Tulip, and she lives in Levita House. They steal Tommo some clothes from the Chalton St laundrette and meet a bloke who, somewhat unlikely, rents deck chairs in Purchese St Open Space. Marieck lives in what seems to be a combination of Oakshott Court and a couple of other buildings.
This is an endearing if rather slight film. Tommo reluctantly wears checkered trousers and a dress, as the best clothes in the stolen laundry bag. Marieck’s father is struggling to give his son a better life, while the son spends his days taking photos and not having much to do. The two boys become good friends, but nothing really goes anywhere, and not much happens.
Other reviewers have commented that as the film is only seventy minutes it is a bit of a ripoff for cinema-goers. The Renoir in the Brunswick Centre have rectified this by showing it with a short, ‘ A Dog Altogether’, also by Shane Meadows. If you live here, or are a Shane Meadows fan, it’s worth seeing. Otherwise, perhaps one for a wet Sunday DVD.
Just Because It’s Catherine Tate, It Must Be Funny?? August 25, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , add a commentA brash slapper, Catherine Tate in Under the Blue Sky, has come back to his place and they’re getting down to it. He is a little premature and, given the amount of alcohol involved, the evening is over. She regales him with tales of former lovers and his own general inadequacy. Their relationship was ever thus, his unhealthy obsession fed by her stringing him along with contempt. He has compromising photos of her, threatens her and forces himself on her. The dialogue is witty, chuckle-provoking at first, but this is not a scene to provoke the hilarity found by some members of the audience. It’s uncomfortable, a slice of an unpleasant side of life. Although there are shades of her trademark chavs, the comedy here is very black indeed.
This is the second of the three vignettes of love between teachers which make up Under the Blue Sky. Life in the staffroom is fraught with unrequited lusts and misunderstandings. In the first Helen (Lisa Dillon) is in love with commitment-phobe Nick (Chris O’Dowd). He ‘values their friendship’, she can’t let him go. She’s the sort of woman who, if you know her, you just have to sit there waiting for the train crash and pick up the pieces.
The third is the only one which sorts itself out well. Francesca Annis does a poignant turn as Anna, the teacher in her fifties in love with her thirty-something friend. Angst at the age gap is overcome, and the audience gets to leave on a happy ending.
I went for the names - Catherine Tate and Francesca Annis - and they justify the hype. Tate’s very physical acting as she morphs from desire to disgust to fear seems over the top on the small screen, but from 50 metres in the stalls, is gripping.
Under the Blue Sky is at the Duke of York’s Theatre until 20 September. For 90 minutes with no interval, its probably not worth the silly West End ticket prices (£47.50 for a good seat - ouch) but get 50% standby tickets from the TKTS booth in Leicester Square.
A life as Everyman - Michael Frayn’s Afterlife August 17, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : London, Reviews , add a commentWhen Michael Frayn’s new play, Afterlife, opened in June, it was to mixed reviews. Using the medieval miracle play Everyman to tell the life of Max Reinhardt, the German Jew who established the Salzburg festival in the 1920s with the play as a centrepiece, is either appreciated or not.
Everyman, or Reinhardt (played by John Allam), is summoned by Death to the presence of God to be judged. He calls upon his friends to join him on the journey, but they decline. His worldly goods are no use to him. The Poor Neighbour, spurned by him early in the play, changes into Muller, the Nazi who takes over his house after Austria is occupied and Reinhardt flees to America.
The many women in Reinhart’slife are represented by two, who are Everyman’s redemption. His mistress and later second wife, Helene Thimig, played by Abigail Cruttenden is Faith, and his Deeds are represented by his secretary, Gusti Adler (Serina Griffiths).
Frayn weaves the stories of Reinhardt and Everyman together to present an impression of the character of the man more than biographical detail. He appears to have lived as if on a stage, better with an audience than making conversation in a small group, shown through the rhyming couplets and repetition of parts of the script, breaking of into ordinary prose when events are more mundane. As he rehearses his household staff for a banquet, you see the Reinhardt who was notorious for directing every last detail of a play, down to the actors gestures and tone.
The sets are spectacularly simple. Most of the play is set either on the steps of Salzburg Cathedral, where Everyman is performed, or in Leopoldskron, the baroque palace which Reinhardt and Thimig restored and which he believed would be his most lasting legacy. Each is represented by huge, white frontages which move back and forward as the scene changes and imply grandeur.
In the end, Reinhardt’s real legacy is the annual production of Everyman, which continues this summer in Salzburg, and so this play grasps the significance of the man. It is clever and polished, like Reinhardt himself.
It is on at the National Theatre until 30 August, and well worth seeing.
London Bones July 29, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden, Reviews , 1 comment so farIn a rotunda on a traffic island, the Museum of London stores the bones of 17,000 former denizens, recovered from burial sites dating from Roman times through to the 19th century. Their names are rarely remembered and even the date of their death is often unsure. Some come from the outskirts, Merton Priory and Chelsea Old Church, but most are from the older parts of London itself, the City, Spitalfields, Holburn.
Twenty six of these skeletons can be seen until 26 September at the Wellcom Collection’s Skeletons exhibition, which had a private viewing last night. Most of the people on display were the victims of awful diseases with symptoms showing in their bones. Syphillis, tuberculosis, osteoarthritis, healed and unhealed fractures, all making me very grateful to live in an age with antibiotics and anesthetics.
A few showed signs of bathrocephaly, where the skull has a step at the back. This can occur for many reasons, including diseases and being born in a breech position, and affected 1/10 of the population well into the nineteenth century but is now very rare. The cause of the change wasn’t clear in the exhibition, though I wonder if it reflects a change in the way breech babies are delivered?
It was a fascinatingly macabre way to spend the evening, arousing curiosity but at the same time disturbing. Looking closely at the skeltons, its easy to get some idea of their lives, and to wonder about them. Those broken ribs had healed, but how did they happen? How did deformities of leg-bones affect the person’s mobility? The private viewing was for members of the Wellcome Collection’s club, many of whom are medics, so there were plenty of people with well-informed ideas.
I’m always a little ambivalent about exhibitions of dead bodies, whether its that sad naturally mummified body in the British Museum, or the proud Pharaohs reduced to spectacle in Cairo, and it is important to remember that these were real people, who lived around here. This is a very respectful presentation and, in an odd sort of way, renders them more human. I wouldn’t mind if that was me, in a few hundred years time.
The exhibition is on until 26 September, free, and well worth seeing. Oh, and if you’re a bloke who doesn’t fancy a prostate check, go and have a look at the skeleton who died of prostate cancer, and then pluck up the courage for a doctors visit.
