Enron

It was a bit of a struggle to get discount tickets at the Noel Coward Theatre, so I finally ended up with side balcony tickets for me and the kids. Great view as long as you didn't mind leaning forward to see anything!

The play was a witty dash through the events that led to the Enron collapse, and showing how the seeds of the later global crash were set. With music, dancing and dinosaurs to help us through the story, it certainly kept us paying attention, and it was the clearest explanation I have yet seen on how we got into our current financial mess.

The whole cast was excellent, with Sam West and Tim Piggot-Smith playing the architects of the disaster but with Tom Goodman-Hill stealing the show with his portrayal of Andy Fastow, complete with his barely controlled 'Raptors'.

I had an American sitting next to me and it was interesting to hear his take on the show, as well as his explanations of where all the characters were now. Although overall, I would have preferred him to limit his comments to the interval rather than whispering to me throughout the second half......

A New Jerusalem containing Welshmen, Pacific Islanders and National Treasures

A bit of a gap since my last post, and I seem to be missing it much more than I thought I would. Self indulgent rambling seems to be quite addictive – who knew?

So, I have decided to pull up my socks, gird my loins, get into gear, pull myself together and get a grip, along with any other metaphorical whip cracking I can think of. More suggestions for clichéd motivational phrases very welcome.

Theatre trips over the last month or so have been a bit sparse, but with some brilliant moments so I thought I would use this post to bring us all up to speed.

Nation
This National Theatre production, adapted from the Terry Pratchett novel, was quite light, and a bit clichéd, but very enjoyable as a holiday treat. We had arranged an informal tour of the theatres beforehand, an experience which was strangely disorientating, although we absolutely loved standing on the middle of the stage and working out where we were sitting that night. Eating in the staff restaurant was also a bit weird – I’m not sure I can cope with my disbelief being suspended so far as to see the ‘islanders’ knocking back a burger and chips with double tomato sauce beforehand. It was also a bit strange seeing bits of the set, props and costumes being repaired before going on to stage later that evening, but I was both amazed and impressed to see the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep the magic in place at the front of the stage.

The Habit of Art
This latest Alan Bennett play, also at the National, was multi-layered, and excellent in all respects. Frances De La Tour was just perfect, as were Richard Griffith and the rest of the cast, teetering confidently on the edge between comedy and the bleak tragedy underneath. Although I didn’t fall in love with it as I did with The History Boys, I have found it lingering, in that I keep going back over bits of it, seeing it from new angles. It seemed to be an underlining of past work as far as Bennett is concerned, and suggests that perhaps he might be a bit tired of his previous incarnations. The references to The Tempest and Death in Venice certainly make me feel that he is consciously in ‘late works’ mode, and as a result (and perhaps a bit paradoxically) it has made me really interested to see what comes next for our slightly unwilling ‘national treasure’.

Rhod Gilbert and the cat that looked like Nicholas Lyndhurst
This has been touring since Edinburgh last year, so I am a bit late to the party on this one, but the new face of Wales finally arrived at The Anvil in Basingstoke last week. Rhod Gilbert is a master in apparently incoherent rage and this was the best comedy I have seen for some time. Seemingly unstructured angry ramblings, interspersed with confessional discussions with the audience, leading to a masterful dénouement which linked everything together so beautifully I laughed for joy at the neatness of it all.

Jerusalem


Saving the best to last, I finally caught Jez Butterworth’s much praised play this week. With Mark Rylance in the lead role, I was upset to have missed it at the Royal Court last summer, so this West End transfer felt long overdue. This was all I could have wished for. A clever and angry but stormingly funny play, which puts all sorts of Englishness together in a jar, gives them all a good shake and then pulls them all out for minute inspection. We saw bits of Shakespeare and Shakespearian characters, green men and giants, morris dancing, unruly youths, colonels, publicans, prejudice, small mindedness, violence, heroism and bolshy bloodymindedness, all brought together to show the English ambivalence to their own history and sense of national identity.

The play is focused on Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, a charismatic, self-mythologising, drug dealing outsider, living in a scruffy caravan in countryside beside a new estate in a Wiltshire village. I wonder how much Jez Butterworth had this particular actor in mind when writing this play though, and whether it will survive new leading men.

Regular readers will probably already know how much I adore Mark Rylance, and this is perhaps his best performance ever, in a role which allowed him to bring aspects of his own back catalogue to add further depth to the character which toys with a range of stories about Englishness. Mark Rylance is regularly referred to as our greatest living theatrical actor and, although that is a huge claim, on this performance I think it is well deserved. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

Bye to the Tennanth Doctor

Well, rather than continuing to ramble on other people's blogs I thought I may as well add my thoughts here about The End of T(ennant)ime Pts 1 and 2. Alongside Hamlet and Outnumbered, it was one of the big events over the holiday that we all sat down as a family to watch.

Although this probably won’t be the top of many favourite episode charts, there were some great moments, enough for me to feel pretty satisfied overall. The best bit was the undercutting of the big build-up to the ‘He Will Knock Four Times’ scary prophesy. Well, he did knock four times, and it was BRILLIANT, taking it all back down to a human scale again.

Overall, there were huge plot holes, completely un-patched and leaking irritating questions all over the place, and the long goodbyes were indeed indulgent, but I didn’t care one tiny bit. This was a big fat sentimental goodbye to this Doctor, his companions and also to Russell T Davies’ version of Who, and it was exemplary in giving us all that was brilliant as well as a bit flaky and irritating about this incarnation.

Finally, I loved the fact that the Ood seemed to be referencing Hamlet, offering to sing him to his sleep (ok, they may not be flights of angels, but it worked for me!).

I will certainly miss David Tennant as the Doctor, and hope he hurries to find something that will keep him popping up on our tv screens, or, even better, gets himself to a theatre near me very quickly.

As for the next Doctor, time will tell whether Matt Smith is a Tom or a Colin Baker, but I’m optimistic….

Darker Shores

Watching the first preview night of Darker Shores at Hampstead Theatre was a slightly nail-biting experience. The first night had been delayed as Tom Goodman-Hill had taken over his role from Mark Gatiss just a couple of days earlier, and I was beginning to wonder if all my visits to this theatre were going to be jinxed.

Despite this, all appeared word perfect and, if the pace slipped on occasions and some scenes meandered about a bit, overall this was a very creditable performance. Tom Goodman-Hill did an excellent job playing Professor Gabriel Stokes, a Victorian widower consulting an American spiritualist/potential huckster after a supernatural experience and recruiting him to investigate further in the best tradition of ghost stories. Julian Rhind-Tutt played Tom Beauregard, the American ex-civil war soldier turned ghost-finder, battling his own demons in a performance nicely balanced between bravura showman and troubled war veteran and throwing in a few magic tricks for good measure! The rest of the cast did a brilliant, understated job in holding the whole thing together, leaving the men to get on with the melodrama.

On second viewing, I had a much better seat and the pace had picked up considerably so that the plot whipped along quite nicely. There are fantastic special effects throughout, best appreciated from the stalls, and the final reveal, when we find out what all this is about, was a real treat, particularly as I hadn’t seen it very clearly on the first visit. Despite following the tradition of plays like Women in Black, there is a secular sensibility underwriting it all, giving Gabriel Stokes in particular some great (and funny) lines which mean that for most of the play I was never quite clear whether we are supposed to take it all seriously or not. The slightly uncertain chuckles from the audience seemed to suggest to me that they felt the same way!

The one thing that was missing was the final chiller moment – I think it is there in embryo, but it seemed to get lost in the final scene on both occasions I saw this, and I would love to see it built up a bit more. I’m going again in January, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Saying it again

As promised, I did manage to get back to see Speaking in Tongues again... twice as it happens. I won some tickets, so took my sons, then went again with a friend.

Seeing plays more than once is always fascinating, watching the performances grow and develop, and how a different audience can change the whole evening. Then, of course, there is my own changing responses, finding that some things still work for me, whilst others lose their shine.

On the second viewing, the co-ordination of the actors had certainly developed much more, and the flow of the speech had reached that comfortable, lyrical stage so I had a great night again.

On the third night though, it was as if they had all gone off the boil a bit. John Simm had altered his playing of the role, as if he was putting less of himself into it, particularly in the second half... and I really missed the notebook that he battled to get out of his pocket on both previous occasions - this time he simply didn't bother. I have read since about Ian Hart's little grumbles about audiences and apparent temper tantrum and I wonder if some of that was contributing to the strange atmosphere?

The audience seemed to still be having a good time though, so maybe it was just me, and three viewings is one too many.

I bet they still haven't found what they're looking for

After a little trip to my Blogger account to see if my visitor count has reached double figures, I've spent some time speculating on what exactly would lead you to type the words 'Stalin dancing' into a search engine. And then just what that visitor would feel when they ended up here.

Sorry anyway, whoever you are.

Update: Just done the sensible thing and googled it for myself and found this and this

I love the internet.

Endgame

I’ve always put off going to see Endgame on the basis that, as with the heavy end of literature or swimming the channel, you need to work up to it, and I’ve never really felt that I am out of the shallow end of my theatre going. But when I found out that Mark Rylance was appearing as Hamm in the Complicite production at the Duchess Theatre I decided it was worth getting rid of my armbands and going for it.

Actually, I don’t know what I was worried about really. I’m not saying I understood it all, but it appears to me that was part of the point. The cast seemed to me to bring this very stagey piece to life very well, so that, although I was often mystified, it somehow seemed as if we were all in together. I loved the tenderness between Miriam Margolyes and Tom Hickey as Nell and Nagg, and once I had got past Simon McBurney’s clowning (is it supposed to be that cheesy?) I thought he managed the role of Clov very well, trapped in his relationship with Hamm, partly by being the only character with the power of movement.

Mark Rylance was, of course, as absorbing to watch as always, and the absolute centre of the play in all senses. An exceptionally physical actor anyway, it was intriguing how he managed to convey a kind of balletic quality to every movement he made, regardless of the fact that he remained fixed to his wheelchair throughout. He coaxed the humour and pathos out of every possible line and, despite the theatricality of the whole play, managed to avoid it ever feeling forced.

Hamm asks ‘We're not beginning to ... ... mean something?’ Well yes, I think they did, even if only when seen out of the corner of my eye.