Thoughts and Critiques

A blog about theater and the arts

Theater, London

Burton and Gielgud square off in The Motive and the Cue

by Lisa on posted in

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

by Lisa on posted in

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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Emma Corrin explodes the gender binary in a delightful Orlando

by Lisa on posted in

Near the beginning of Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the housekeeper Mrs. Grimsditch (a tartly funny Deborah Findlay) addresses the audience, “Ladies and gentlemen—sorry, everyone—”

And so begins a witty celebration of gender fluidity and the exploration of self.

For those unfamiliar with the book, Orlando is a pseudo-biography recounting the adventures of a young nobleman born during the reign of Elizabeth I, who somehow lives on to the present day. And who wakes up one morning in the late 17th century to find himself changed into a woman.

Woolf dedicated the book to Vita Sackville-West (“the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” writes Sackville-West’s son), and Orlando the character is transparently based on Woolf’s bisexual lover.

The prescience of this 1928 novel is astonishing. How is it that Woolf, born in the Victorian era, could play so freely with gender identity? How, as Alison Bechdel has put it, was she able to “[invent] her way into the future?”

Emma Corrin as Orlando. Photo: Marc Brenner

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Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome! 

by Lisa on posted in

From the jump, Cabaret’s emcee (an electrifying Callum Scott Howells) invites us into the world of the Kit Kat Club, a 1930s Berlin cabaret.

And we really are at the Kit Kat Klub, since the West End’s Playhouse Theatre has been converted into that seedy joint. We enter via a stage door, where we’re given a glass of schnapps before proceeding along dingy corridors to a series of bars set up for pre-show entertainment. I stayed in the Grüne Bar (the Rote Bar and Goldene Bar were upstairs) and sipped my schnapps alongside a beaded curtain, through which I could watch musicians and scantily clad dancers.

The illusion continues when we enter the theatre proper. I did not hand over £200+ to get a café table next to the stage (the small circular stage is surrounded by the audience), but my seat, next to a dim table lamp, had a worn wooden table for drinks, and I was close enough to feel that I was present in the club. 

And that’s important. Director Rebecca Frecknall has designed this whole experience so that we feel not just immersed, but complicit, in everything that takes place in this story.

Callum Scott Howells as the emcee. Photo: Marc Brenner

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An Unsettling Henry V at Shakespeare’s Globe

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Bardolph, hanged for stealing from a church, slowly rocks in his noose as the lights come up for intermission. This image haunts me, summing up as it does Holly Race Roughan’s brutal take on Henry V.

And what’s more exciting than to see a familiar play in an entirely new way? Roughan’s production at Shakespeare’s Globe takes a familiar text and makes it utterly unfamiliar and unsettling.

Oliver Johnstone as Henry V. Photo: Johan Persson

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Hadestown

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Hadestown is a folk musical, now Broadway-bound after a long production history. Anais Mitchell (daughter of Quaker sheep farmers Don and Cheryl Mitchell of Middlebury) started with a concept album, which then became an off-Broadway show directed by Rachel Chavkin of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. It’s now on the huge Olivier stage at the National Theatre. And it’s good.

André de Shields plays Hermes, the charismatic narrator who recalls Morgan Freeman in The Gospel at Colonus as he guides us through the elements of a universal story. With a few twists.

André de Shields as Hermes. Photo: Helen Maybanks

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The Inheritance

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Matthew Lopez’s new play, The Inheritance, is a massive, nearly 7-hour work, performed in two parts, which we saw over two consecutive nights. It’s an intriguing re-working of Forster’s Howards End, imagined as a story of gay life in 21stcentury New York. Forster himself (“Morgan” in the play) appears as well, helping the young men of the play tell their story.

Kyle Soller, Paul Hilton, John Benjamin Hickey. Photo: Simon Annand

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