This Welsh National Opera production of the full 13 act Prokofiev telling of Tolstoy's story was, for me, a pleasurable marathon. The first half is devoted to Natasha and the three men who fall in love (or is it lustful infatuation) with her. It is OK to sit through but, at heart, we are witnessing the story of an immature girl and three men, one of whom (Anatole) just wants to give her one, another (Andrei) who is more genuinely infatuated and the third (Pierre) who is married but falls under her spell.
In the second half, we are at war with Napoleon. The male characters from the first half are in uniform and Andrei ends up dying in the arms of Natasha. It seemed the stronger half, well-supported by a backdrop of clips from Sergei Bondarchuk's film of the story. Ending with a rousing epilogue, this half had plenty of Russian patriotism as well as dealing with such harsh realities of war as prisoners being shot rather than taken.
The singing and orchestra under Tomas Hanus were good and the one-set production seemed to work well with the addition of the backdrop of pictures and film. However, the opera itself is a bit odd. There is something of an imbalance of the characters narrating as opposed to acting out. We seem to have a succession of people coming on to tell us how they feel and what is happening rather than scenes of the happening itself. Of course, in the 'war' part this is often necessary but in the first half I felt there might have been more action.
Overall, I found this an evening that passed quickly enough but not really one that I would want to repeat immediately.
Thursday, 25 July 2019
Monday, 22 July 2019
22 July 2019. the end of history at the Royal Court.
This interesting play got an average rating from the FT and every other review I read. I can entirely see why, though if you had to force me off the fence I'd go lower. It is well acted with a great set and as engaging a story as one might expect prying into a family's business. But, on the other hand, for me, the characters seemed exaggerated and I was very unsure what significant messages I was supposed to depart with to consider. In truth, I think it will be an evening that was enjoyable but quickly forgotten.
The play is entirely set in the kitchen of a couple - Sal and David - who are the caricature of the leftish, reasonably successful FE college lecturer cadre born, like me, in 1951. Sal went to Greenham Common, keeps an untidy house and has three children. In the first act, we are in 1997 and the daughter is at Cambridge where she says everyone is depressed because they realise that that they are not as exceptional as they had been led to believe at school. She has two brothers, they younger Tom and Carl who is that evening going to introduce his girlfriend to the family. Sal believes in a lot of open talk about sex to the degree that most children - I would have thought - would find embarrassing. But not these. Finding Sal sitting on David's knees, fully dressed and ordinary, she is told to carry on giving him a blow job. Anyway, the girlfriend Harriet is introduced and immediately somewhat condemned as posh and an airhead. Then, the bombshell is dropped that she is also pregnant and the couple are looking for some help to pay for ab abortion. David - who inexplicably reads the Telegraph - makes a lot of heavy weather of this request and the evening is engulfed in argument.
Act two is ten years later and Carl and Harriet are married with children, Tom has come out as gay and Polly is working as a corporate lwayer and having an affair with her boss - sexting like mad as she chats with Tom. Harriet and Carl turn up and another argument ensues. The evening culminates in Tom attempting suicide in the locked bathroom - as you do.
Finally we are in 2017 on the verge of Sal's cremation. Carl and Harriet are now separated, Tom is living at home and Polly's career is going from strength to strength. The act is dominated by David reading out the eulogy to Sal that he is planning to give in a few minutes time. This reveals to the children a few things they didn't know about their mother - such as the fact that she was jailed for her Greenham Common activities. I must admit, this crescendo left me unmoved and the revelations seemed implausible - as if the loquacious Sal would not have let slip that she did some bird for her leftish activities.
So there we are. The writer Jack Thorne definitely captured the caricature of his target and the cast delivered the acting. But, so what?
The play is entirely set in the kitchen of a couple - Sal and David - who are the caricature of the leftish, reasonably successful FE college lecturer cadre born, like me, in 1951. Sal went to Greenham Common, keeps an untidy house and has three children. In the first act, we are in 1997 and the daughter is at Cambridge where she says everyone is depressed because they realise that that they are not as exceptional as they had been led to believe at school. She has two brothers, they younger Tom and Carl who is that evening going to introduce his girlfriend to the family. Sal believes in a lot of open talk about sex to the degree that most children - I would have thought - would find embarrassing. But not these. Finding Sal sitting on David's knees, fully dressed and ordinary, she is told to carry on giving him a blow job. Anyway, the girlfriend Harriet is introduced and immediately somewhat condemned as posh and an airhead. Then, the bombshell is dropped that she is also pregnant and the couple are looking for some help to pay for ab abortion. David - who inexplicably reads the Telegraph - makes a lot of heavy weather of this request and the evening is engulfed in argument.
Act two is ten years later and Carl and Harriet are married with children, Tom has come out as gay and Polly is working as a corporate lwayer and having an affair with her boss - sexting like mad as she chats with Tom. Harriet and Carl turn up and another argument ensues. The evening culminates in Tom attempting suicide in the locked bathroom - as you do.
Finally we are in 2017 on the verge of Sal's cremation. Carl and Harriet are now separated, Tom is living at home and Polly's career is going from strength to strength. The act is dominated by David reading out the eulogy to Sal that he is planning to give in a few minutes time. This reveals to the children a few things they didn't know about their mother - such as the fact that she was jailed for her Greenham Common activities. I must admit, this crescendo left me unmoved and the revelations seemed implausible - as if the loquacious Sal would not have let slip that she did some bird for her leftish activities.
So there we are. The writer Jack Thorne definitely captured the caricature of his target and the cast delivered the acting. But, so what?
Thursday, 18 July 2019
17 July 2019. Le Nozze di Figaro at ROH
This somewhat daft tale provided a vehicle for excellent singing, acting and staging to provide an engaging if, I felt, slightly over-long evening at the ROH. In the last half-hour I was beginning to suffer from Mozart overexposure. Anyway, the story is of Figaro who plans to marry his fellow-servant Susanna. However, the Count has designs on her and the older and less enticing Marcellina has designs on him. Things go merrily along until towards the end Marcellina discovers Figaro is in fact a son she had after an affair nany years before with the very man - Bartolo - who is now Figaro's enemy in the household. It was at this point in the proceedings that I felt the curtain should have come down for the audience to go home and ponder upon this implausibility. Instead, we carried on with the count's wife pretending to be Susanna, Figaro thinking his beloved is indeed unfaithful and the Count making a fool of himself. Finally all is revealed and everyone is forgiven.
The moral that Mozart / Da Ponte seem to be advancing is that women are not to be trusted - but neither are men. All seem to be up for a bit of hanky-panky. Overall, it's a makes-you-smile rather than makes you think evening. Definitely well sung, well acted and well staged, it's a comforting event that sends the audience home happy.
The moral that Mozart / Da Ponte seem to be advancing is that women are not to be trusted - but neither are men. All seem to be up for a bit of hanky-panky. Overall, it's a makes-you-smile rather than makes you think evening. Definitely well sung, well acted and well staged, it's a comforting event that sends the audience home happy.
16 July 2019. Peter Gynt at the National Theatre.
This production of David Hare's adaptation of Ibsen's work had received very mixed reviews. It's distinctly long at almost three hours, excluding the intervals and so needs to maintain one's attention. Many critics, such as the FT's Sarah Hemming saw it as a long slog; others, such as Michael Billington gave it four stars. What everyone agreed upon was that James McArdle's near constant presence on-stage as Peter was an outstanding feat of acting.
The first act was about 80 minutes and I found it pretty tedious. I was very much on the cusp of giving up as all we seemed to be doing was sitting through Peter giving his wildly fanciful accounts to his mother of what he had been up to. She quickly twigged that all he was doing was recounting the plot of war films she knew perfectly well. All this seemed based on the idea of the importance nowadays of having a story, no matter whether true of fake. But this brought up the first fundamental problem for me. Was this a translation, update or complete rewrite of Ibsen. By the end I was not entirely clear but the answer seemed to be a rewrite using an Ibsen framework.
Quite a few people did not return for the second and third acts - each rather shorter than the first. This seemed a pity as, for me but not for the critics, things picked up. The second act was quite fast-mving as Peter on a voyage of discovery was found in various locations such as a Trumpian golf course in Scotland. Then, in the third act, we had Peter in his old age taking stock of things and giving us his wisdom. This seemed quite good but I'm not sure we needed to have the preceeding two plus hours to get round to it. And, less than a week later, I find it hard to recall what the pearls of wisdom were. The main one, I think was that what we needed to do was self-improve.
So, this was certainly not an unmissable evening. Equally, having bought a ticket, I think it was worth attending if only for McArdle's acting, the brilliant set and the overall transportation into another world for the evening. That said, I definitely wouldn't want to see it again.
The first act was about 80 minutes and I found it pretty tedious. I was very much on the cusp of giving up as all we seemed to be doing was sitting through Peter giving his wildly fanciful accounts to his mother of what he had been up to. She quickly twigged that all he was doing was recounting the plot of war films she knew perfectly well. All this seemed based on the idea of the importance nowadays of having a story, no matter whether true of fake. But this brought up the first fundamental problem for me. Was this a translation, update or complete rewrite of Ibsen. By the end I was not entirely clear but the answer seemed to be a rewrite using an Ibsen framework.
Quite a few people did not return for the second and third acts - each rather shorter than the first. This seemed a pity as, for me but not for the critics, things picked up. The second act was quite fast-mving as Peter on a voyage of discovery was found in various locations such as a Trumpian golf course in Scotland. Then, in the third act, we had Peter in his old age taking stock of things and giving us his wisdom. This seemed quite good but I'm not sure we needed to have the preceeding two plus hours to get round to it. And, less than a week later, I find it hard to recall what the pearls of wisdom were. The main one, I think was that what we needed to do was self-improve.
So, this was certainly not an unmissable evening. Equally, having bought a ticket, I think it was worth attending if only for McArdle's acting, the brilliant set and the overall transportation into another world for the evening. That said, I definitely wouldn't want to see it again.
15 July 2019. Europe at the Donmar
This was a totally engaging evening, with a great play, excellent acting and a clever and dramatic set. Written in the 1990s by David Greig, the play felt entirely contemporary, capturing issues with which we wrestle today. The action is set in a small central European border town that has fallen on hard times because the border is no longer relevant and trains do not stop there anymore. The ensuing poverty of the town has stoked a rise in skinhead activity that comes to an ugly head as the play progresses.
Initially, we are introduced to the station master and his female assistant together with and emigrant and his daughter who have hit upon the town as a place to stay for a few days. The militaristic station master is initially hostile but thaws when the emigrent father reveals his love of trains and timetables and they become friends; meanwhile the assistant and the daughter embark on an affair with the assistant planning to leave the town for a life of adventure in the big wide world. The skinheads, one of whom is the assistant's husband bewildered by the emptiness of his marriage do not take kindly to the new arrivals or the turn of events; they beat up the father and, in an increasingly tense and escalating implosion end up petrol-bombing the station, incinerating the station master and the father, who have remained in the town after the assistant and the daughter have set off on the bus.
Time passed quickly in this captivating evening. The acting was complemented by an extremely clever set with lighting and sound effects that evoked convincingly the trains passing through the town as well as the arrival and departure of the bus. All in all a great evening that I'd happily repeat and that thoroughly deserved the four stars awarded by the FT
Initially, we are introduced to the station master and his female assistant together with and emigrant and his daughter who have hit upon the town as a place to stay for a few days. The militaristic station master is initially hostile but thaws when the emigrent father reveals his love of trains and timetables and they become friends; meanwhile the assistant and the daughter embark on an affair with the assistant planning to leave the town for a life of adventure in the big wide world. The skinheads, one of whom is the assistant's husband bewildered by the emptiness of his marriage do not take kindly to the new arrivals or the turn of events; they beat up the father and, in an increasingly tense and escalating implosion end up petrol-bombing the station, incinerating the station master and the father, who have remained in the town after the assistant and the daughter have set off on the bus.
Time passed quickly in this captivating evening. The acting was complemented by an extremely clever set with lighting and sound effects that evoked convincingly the trains passing through the town as well as the arrival and departure of the bus. All in all a great evening that I'd happily repeat and that thoroughly deserved the four stars awarded by the FT
13 July 2019. Cash Cow at Hampstead
A very well-acted ninety minutes by Jonathan Livingstone and Phoebe Pryce who were constantly and exclusively on-stage. Most of the time they were playing the pushy and cashing-in working class parents of a girl who was a tennis protege and making a life on tour. The action moved rapidly and repeatedly between time-settings, moving from the child's conception to the parent's planning to visit her as a grown up who had given up tennis and was living in America, alienated from her parents to the point of being in litigation with them. This made for an engaging telling of the unfolding of events that forced the audience to concentrate and take an active role in piecing the story together. In a nutshell, we had the parents identifying their daughter as a potential star, making sacrifices aoof time and money for her to realise her potential, pushing and hothousing her and perhaps bringing about the eventual disaffection with the sport and metamorphosis into a 'celebrity'.
Aside from being the parents, the actors from time to time played out the daughter's lines and overall gave us a good feeling for the child's compliance with the parents' ambitions that culminated in eventual rebellion. So it was certainly an engaging evening, albeit one that for me pushed the boundaries of plausibility with the parents' plans to sue the daughter if not the daughter's alienation from her parents. Were there takeaways? I suppose if you have children, it would be an interesting evening to prompt thought on the extent to which children should be pushed to realise their talents and how parental sacrifice should not carry the expectation or price of payback. I don't think it was a great play but Oli Forsyth's work was certainly worth the hour and half of its duration.
Aside from being the parents, the actors from time to time played out the daughter's lines and overall gave us a good feeling for the child's compliance with the parents' ambitions that culminated in eventual rebellion. So it was certainly an engaging evening, albeit one that for me pushed the boundaries of plausibility with the parents' plans to sue the daughter if not the daughter's alienation from her parents. Were there takeaways? I suppose if you have children, it would be an interesting evening to prompt thought on the extent to which children should be pushed to realise their talents and how parental sacrifice should not carry the expectation or price of payback. I don't think it was a great play but Oli Forsyth's work was certainly worth the hour and half of its duration.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)