Thoughts and Critiques

A blog about theater and the arts

Theater, London

Life is in the Minding: Stoppard’s Invention of Love at the Hampstead

by Lisa on posted in

Classicists know A.E. Housman as the most brilliant Latinist of the late Victorian era. General readers—if they know of Housman at all today—know him as a poet, author of A Shropshire Lad, a set of elegiac poems about young men and missed chances.

Tom Stoppard’s moving play about Housman explores this divided self—romantic poet and scrupulous scholar—pulled between two passions: one for scholarship, the other for a more forbidden love. He does this in part by putting two versions of his protagonist on stage.

There’s the elderly Housman (“AEH”), first seen bantering with the mythical boatman Charon and then encountering his younger self as he takes an imaginative voyage across the Styx, revisiting memories as he nears the end of his life. And there’s the younger self (“Housman”), the university student passionately devoted to classical scholarship—and to his roommate Moses Jackson.

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Daniel Fish’s Elektra: Brie Larson, a paint gun and Chekhov’s Blimp

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Whatever you may think of Daniel Fish’s bizarre staging of Sophocles’ Elektra, Brie Larson shows herself to be not just a movie star but the real deal on stage as well. In a buzzcut, Bikini Kill T-shirt and a microphone, Larson spends most of this production addressing us from downstage left, a mesmerizing standup tragedienne.

It’s a mannered but powerful performance of Anne Carson’s text, itself a mannered but powerful translation from the original Greek. The choice of “Elektra” rather than “Electra” is a conscious rejection of centuries of tradition. And I found the strangeness of this production a welcome reminder that the ancient Greeks are deeply foreign to our modern understanding.

The odd staging includes a blimp suspended above the stage, a curtain covering the back wall that rises and falls at random moments, a revolve with a stage light, a paint gun, other things I couldn’t quite identify. Much of this is incomprehensible. The paint gun gradually stains everyone’s costume with an inky black paint, suggestive of the dark desire for vengeance that drives the plot. 

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The Years: one woman’s story

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Sheets. Sheets and a table are nearly all that five remarkable actresses need to tell the story of a woman’s life over more than sixty years, from 1940 to the early 2000s.

The Years is an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir Les Années, a memoir that is both personal and collective. While recounting details of her own life, she intersperses these personal memories with details of the social and cultural life around her, telling a collective history of women over her lifetime, one woman standing in for all of us. Ernaux herself describes the book as “a slippery narrative,” one that is “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.”

It’s not obvious how such a work can work on stage. The first brilliant stroke of the adaptor, Eline Arbo, is to hand this “slippery narrative” over to an ensemble of five women, aged 25 to 77, who will each hand the story off to the next older woman as we progress through time.

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A Pretty Wild(e) Importance of Being Earnest

by Lisa on posted in

Everyone is having a grand time on stage in Max Webster’s exuberant new production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Lyttelton Theatre (NT Live will show it in movie theaters in February).

And I enjoyed myself very much, too—if not, perhaps, quite as much as everyone on stage. The cast—all of them outstanding—has mastered a particular style of British comedy: part panto, part public school gender subversion and part, of course, Oscar Wilde.

It’s a dream cast: sexy Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon, hapless Hugh Skinner as Jack, randy Ronke Adekoluejo and Eliza Scanlon as their love objects, and the incomparable Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell. Amanda Lawrence, Richard Cant and Julian Bleach provide luxury casting in the smaller roles.

Having become a bit wearied of the tendency toward minimal sets and costumes, I was delighted by the explosion of color and detail in this production. Did the National blow its entire year’s budget on this show? If so, I’m glad to have been the beneficiary of such a profusion of design talent.

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Why Should I Dance? Oedipus at the Old Vic

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Oedipus is famous for his ability to solve riddles. I’m in need of an Oedipus to solve the riddle of this production.

The creative team (Ella Hickson has written the adaptation, Matthew Warchus and the choreographer Hofesh Shechter co-direct) has set the play in an undefined time—post-apocalyptic, or post-climate catastrophe. The plague afflicting Thebes is now a drought and a harsh sun shines over a largely empty stage. Jocasta tries to convince Oedipus to abandon Thebes for a less drought-stricken area. Technology has taken a step back: the oracle’s pronouncements are delivered via an old reel-to-reel tape recorder!

So far so good. But what might one do with the Greek chorus in such a concept? The solution chosen here is to eliminate the text of the choruses entirely and bring in Shechter’s dance company to “comment” via dance on the action.

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“Paul Mescal rides ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ to Brooklyn”

by Lisa on posted in ,

So announces the New York Times headline. Meanwhile, Vulture reports that the “Irish sad-boy hunk of Normal People and Gladiator II … is bringing the production to Brooklyn.”

It is true that Rebecca Frecknall’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire is transferring from London (where I saw it two years ago at the Almeida Theatre) and will open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February. And it is true that Mescal will reprise his award-winning performance as Stanley.

What bothers me about the breathless Paul Mescal coverage, though, is that he forms just a third of a remarkable ensemble of award-winning actors that includes Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Anjana Vasan as Stella. 

And good as Mescal is, this revelatory production foregrounds the relationship between Stella and Blanche, suggesting that the heart of the play lies not in the gladiatorial combat between Stanley and Blanche—exciting as that is!—but in the relationship between the two sisters.

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Burton and Gielgud square off in The Motive and the Cue

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What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/That he should weep for her?/ What would he do/Had he the motive and the cue for passion/That I have?

Hamlet II.2

Jack Thorne’s new play,The Motive and the Cue, takes its title from Hamlet’s amazed reaction to the power actors can bring to feelings that are artificial, merely imagined, “in a fiction, in a dream of passion,” as Hamlet says. What might they do had they what he calls “the motive and the cue” engendered by real suffering?

The play reimagines the rehearsal process for a production of Hamlet, where we’re witnesses to multiple layers of imagination and artifice. Two contemporary actors—Mark Gatiss and Johnny Flynn—portray two legendary actors—John Gielgud and Richard Burton—as they clash over how to portray Hamlet, himself a character notoriously committed to artifice and pretense. 

For all Hamlet’s astonishment that the players can mimic deep emotion so effectively, he also understands that pretense may reveal the truth—which is why he instructs the players to present a specific play to the king in hopes of provoking an emotional reaction that will prove his guilt.

It’s why we continue to go to the theater—presumably not to reveal ourselves as murderers like Claudius, but to experience the deep emotional reaction that actors provoke in us. 

And Gatiss and Flynn are two actors at the top of their game. Add Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor holed up in a luxurious hotel suite while her new husband rehearses, and we have a splendid trio of performances.

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Cups of Tea and History: Pacific Overtures at the Menier Chocolate Factory

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What is history but a sum of the fragments of our personal experience? John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s unusual musical Pacific Overtures uses a series of dramatic fragments to tell the story of the westernization of Japan, from the arrival of Commodore Perry’s warships in 1853 to the present day.

The exquisite production I saw in London this week is a joint production of the Menier Chocolate Factory, a small but mighty London theater company, and the Umeda Arts Theater in Japan. This one-act version, presented in Tokyo and Osaka (in Japanese) in early 2023, is now playing in an intimate and elegant setting at the Chocolate Factory.

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Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Rock ‘n’ Roll, typically of Tom Stoppard’s plays, is a bit—or a lot—overstuffed. He maintains that at its heart, it’s a love story, but the audience might be forgiven for not realizing that until the last half hour or so.

A story of cultural and political revolution from 1968’s Prague Spring to the end of Soviet occupation in 1980, it includes digressions (or are they fundamental points?) about fragments of Sappho, the mind/body problem, the difference between dissent and moral exhibitionism, Syd Barrett (who may or may not be the great god Pan), and, of course, the significance of rock ‘n’ roll.

Much as I looked forward to the current production at the Hampstead Theatre, I didn’t find it hitting me as hard as it did when I first saw it 15 years ago. I’m surprised to find that it feels more dated than it did in 2008.

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Six: The Musical

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Six is a quick romp of a show–barely 80 minutes—in which the six wives of Henry VIII appear as pop stars engaged in a competition to determine who suffered the most from their marriage to the famous king. Each gets a big number to prove her point, with the others providing backing vocals, right up to the female empowerment ending that rejects the whole idea of a competition between them. So what if Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn were mortal enemies. They acknowledge that they were both bad ass women who gave Henry a hard time.

(In a canny move, the queens ensure that we keep our phones in our pockets by promising that we can take photos and videos of their final number.)

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