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Review: Evening at the Talk House, National Theatre

“You have to want to care what’s going to happen to these characters”

There’s a sequence towards the end of Evening at the Talk House where a character says things along the lines of ‘I’m so bored’, ‘I’m ready to die’ and ‘please help me get out of here’ and never have truer words been spoken. That last one might have been an internal voice though as the grinding horror of this new Wallace Shawn play rolled inexorably on. In some ways, I have no excuse. The one and only time I’ve seen his work before saw indignities inflicted on none other than Miranda Richardson, left to pretend to be a cat licking Shawn’s bald head, and so I had fair warning of Shawn’s singular style.

But it’s a style that I find utterly baffling. As a thespy crowd meet for a long awaited reunion at their old members club, they reminisce and chat effusively and endlessly about this actor who used to be in that TV show or that actress in this TV show – all made up ones of course – to a point of mind-numbing inanity. And in this version of the world, there’s a dystopian state-sponsored execution programme wiping out enemies of the state (and plenty more besides) which is carried out by out-of-work actors like many of the crew here. They also get served canapés about which they chatter excitedly, which is nice I suppose.  Continue reading “Review: Evening at the Talk House, National Theatre”

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Review: The Real Thing, American Airlines Theatre

“Half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny”

Arcadia aside, it does appear I have my Stoppard issues but in the running theme of my Broadway booking, (relative) star casting trumped common sense. In this case, it was Maggie Gyllenhaal and Cynthia Nixon that tempted me (plus Ewan McGregor and Ronan Raftery) along to this most lauded of his plays. And whilst I was glad of the opportunity to see this company, and be suitably impressed by both Gyllenhaal and Nixon, I couldn’t help but feel that I just don’t get the thing about The Real Thing.

>Seeing it for the second time, the sucker punch of the metatheatrics is necessarily lessened. Knowing the layers of the Russian dolls are just that didn’t really bring anything new for me in my feeling for the play (or the play-within-the-play, or etc etc) and I think Sam Gold’s production is mostly responsible for that with a whole lot of theatrical fussiness that adds bulk but not genuine substance – musical interludes drag, David Zimm’s set distracts with its open blandness, so much of it just feels flat.

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Review: The Winter’s Tale, Bridge Project at the Old Vic

Accompanying The Cherry Orchard as part of the Bridge Project’s first run of plays which arrived at the Old Vic last month, is The Winter’s Tale, often considered one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’.

Starting off in Sicilia, the play follows childhood friends Leontes and Polixenes, Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia respectively, as Leontes allows his jealousy and paranoia over his pregnant wife to take over. Imprisoning his wife and ordering the murder of his friend, Leontes pushes everyone to the edge to destructive effect, even sending his newborn daughter to her death, a fate from which she is thankfully spared. The second act then jumps ahead 16 years in time to Bohemia, where we see a young couple falling in love and their peculiar parentages equip them with the power to heal the terrible events of the past. Continue reading “Review: The Winter’s Tale, Bridge Project at the Old Vic”

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Review: The Cherry Orchard, Bridge Project at the Old Vic

The Bridge Project is a rather ambitious venture: an Anglo-American theatre company formed specially for three years and performing 2 plays a year in repertoire, touring across a number of venues over the world. With Sam Mendes as director, it has attracted a very strong group of actors, who have already formed a cracking ensemble, and I had my first experience with them this week in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic, the final stop in this first year of the Project.
 

The play has a new translation by Tom Stoppard, but given this is the first time I have seen it, I cannot really comment on its merits or otherwise, but the lovely lady sat next to me reassured me it was much more comic than than the last time she had seen it. It tells the story of the return of an aristocratic Russian lady, Ranevskaya, and her family to their hereditary estate since it is being sold off to pay for the mortgage. They are presented with different ways in which the estate could be saved and kept in the family, but the family do nothing and events overtake them as it emerges that their social status no longer affords them the protection that it used to. Continue reading “Review: The Cherry Orchard, Bridge Project at the Old Vic”