Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Link/Review: Golem
This is my first contribution to the super awesome Litro Magazine: a review of 1927's new play Golem at Trafalgar Studios.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Link/Essay: Dueling and Romeo and Juliet
Here's a post I wrote for Shakespeare's Globe's blog about Romeo and Juliet and the Elizabethan culture of street violence!
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Review: The Merchant of Venice
How do you solve a problem like Shylock? The British theatre scene is going to take several cracks at the question this season: the Almeida's production of The Merchant of Venice ran this winter, and both Shakespeare's Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company are presenting it this summer. I saw the Globe's version first, and their answer to that question is compelling and simple: cast Jonathan Pryce.
One of the reasons I hate labels like 'romance' or 'problem play' or 'late comedy' is because they imply a chronological progression of Shakespeare's work that simply doesn't exist. The Merchant of Venice was probably written in the mid 1590s, but this early comedy shares all the troubling aspects that supposedly characterize 'late comedies' like Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well. The relatively straightforward comic story of the debt-ridden gentleman Bassanio's attempts to woo a wealthy heiress, Portia, can hardly hold up an air of levity when laid against the story of the Venetian merchant Antonio, whose 'joking' bond of a pound of his own flesh against 3000 ducats takes a turn when Antonio defaults on the debt and the Jewish moneylender Shylock becomes determined to claim his bond.
Director Jonathan Munby creates a convincingly dangerous Venice, filled with drunken, thoughtless aristocrats whose revels-- as we see in an extended masquerade sequence at the beginning of the play-- are capable of seamlessly devolving into anti-Semitic violence. Dominic Mafham's apparently mild-mannered Antonio, pining away with unrequited love for Daniel Lapaine's particularly dense Bassanio, displays virulent bigotry against Shylock. Its suddenness and violence, combined with the sharp, charming intelligence of Pryce's asides, weights the play at once in Shylock's favor without falling into either of the most dangerous traps: turning him into a comic caricature, or portraying him as a nebbish victim whose later retaliatory violence seems to have no cause.
Despite his many early asides, Pryce's Shylock is ultimately opaque: when he says the bond will only be a joke, and laughingly insists to Bassanio that he would gain nothing by actually claiming Antonio's flesh, it is unclear if he is setting up a long game, or really intends to make peace. Either way, the elopement of his daughter Jessica with Antonio and Bassanio's friend Lorenzo becomes an essential hinge, granted particular weight in this production by allowing the love between Jessica and Lorenzo to be genuine rather than, as is so often the case, cynical and bleak. Ben Lamb plays Lorenzo as staunchly well-meaning, though increasingly aware that there are more differences than he expected between himself and his canny, converted wife. Phoebe Pryce (surely an awkward role to be playing opposite your actual father) is an active presence even in silence: her Jessica is always watching, and unlike so many portrayals, she rejects an overly simplistic understanding of Jessica's situation. Ms. Pryce not only seems to understand, but is able to wonderfully subtly depict Jessica's simultaneous love for Lorenzo, confusion and isolation in her new culture, dislike for her father's repressive household, and affection for the man himself.
The richness and depth of the Pryces' characterizations makes it difficult for the Portia and Bassanio's half of the story to rebalance the scales, though some of the wittier secondary characters-- Gratiano (David Sturzaker), Nerissa (Dorothea Myer-Bennett), and the clown Lancelot Gobbo (Stefan Adegbola) in particular-- really shine.
It seems fairly obvious that the sudden and alarming rise of anti-Semitic violence in Europe is why everyone has decided to put on The Merchant of Venice this year, though none of the theatres in question have actually said so thus far. But the questions this production-- and particularly its trial scene-- raised for me were about power more broadly. The horror of the trial, for me, lay in the ease with which the law was turned against Shylock. We witness the full power of the state come bearing down on him, and the glee with which Portia, Antonio, and the Duke of Venice himself see it happen. They will do anything to turn the law against him.
The margins of The Merchant of Venice seethe with otherness: a Moroccan prince, a 'Moorish' maid servant, Portia's complaints about suitors who cannot speak Italian-- even Adegbola's increasingly cheerfully rebellious Lancelot, as an emissary from the lower class, contributes to the continual battering of the facade of homogeneity that the rich, white, Christian central characters seem so determined to preserve. While this production only faintly raises the specter of this power, perhaps that is correct: it shifts on the sides and underneath. Shylock can only impotently rage at the society that oppresses him, that steals his daughter from him-- and against this backdrop, is vicious vengeance is rendered, if not good, certainly not nonsensical.
One of the reasons I hate labels like 'romance' or 'problem play' or 'late comedy' is because they imply a chronological progression of Shakespeare's work that simply doesn't exist. The Merchant of Venice was probably written in the mid 1590s, but this early comedy shares all the troubling aspects that supposedly characterize 'late comedies' like Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well. The relatively straightforward comic story of the debt-ridden gentleman Bassanio's attempts to woo a wealthy heiress, Portia, can hardly hold up an air of levity when laid against the story of the Venetian merchant Antonio, whose 'joking' bond of a pound of his own flesh against 3000 ducats takes a turn when Antonio defaults on the debt and the Jewish moneylender Shylock becomes determined to claim his bond.
Director Jonathan Munby creates a convincingly dangerous Venice, filled with drunken, thoughtless aristocrats whose revels-- as we see in an extended masquerade sequence at the beginning of the play-- are capable of seamlessly devolving into anti-Semitic violence. Dominic Mafham's apparently mild-mannered Antonio, pining away with unrequited love for Daniel Lapaine's particularly dense Bassanio, displays virulent bigotry against Shylock. Its suddenness and violence, combined with the sharp, charming intelligence of Pryce's asides, weights the play at once in Shylock's favor without falling into either of the most dangerous traps: turning him into a comic caricature, or portraying him as a nebbish victim whose later retaliatory violence seems to have no cause.
Despite his many early asides, Pryce's Shylock is ultimately opaque: when he says the bond will only be a joke, and laughingly insists to Bassanio that he would gain nothing by actually claiming Antonio's flesh, it is unclear if he is setting up a long game, or really intends to make peace. Either way, the elopement of his daughter Jessica with Antonio and Bassanio's friend Lorenzo becomes an essential hinge, granted particular weight in this production by allowing the love between Jessica and Lorenzo to be genuine rather than, as is so often the case, cynical and bleak. Ben Lamb plays Lorenzo as staunchly well-meaning, though increasingly aware that there are more differences than he expected between himself and his canny, converted wife. Phoebe Pryce (surely an awkward role to be playing opposite your actual father) is an active presence even in silence: her Jessica is always watching, and unlike so many portrayals, she rejects an overly simplistic understanding of Jessica's situation. Ms. Pryce not only seems to understand, but is able to wonderfully subtly depict Jessica's simultaneous love for Lorenzo, confusion and isolation in her new culture, dislike for her father's repressive household, and affection for the man himself.
The richness and depth of the Pryces' characterizations makes it difficult for the Portia and Bassanio's half of the story to rebalance the scales, though some of the wittier secondary characters-- Gratiano (David Sturzaker), Nerissa (Dorothea Myer-Bennett), and the clown Lancelot Gobbo (Stefan Adegbola) in particular-- really shine.
It seems fairly obvious that the sudden and alarming rise of anti-Semitic violence in Europe is why everyone has decided to put on The Merchant of Venice this year, though none of the theatres in question have actually said so thus far. But the questions this production-- and particularly its trial scene-- raised for me were about power more broadly. The horror of the trial, for me, lay in the ease with which the law was turned against Shylock. We witness the full power of the state come bearing down on him, and the glee with which Portia, Antonio, and the Duke of Venice himself see it happen. They will do anything to turn the law against him.
The margins of The Merchant of Venice seethe with otherness: a Moroccan prince, a 'Moorish' maid servant, Portia's complaints about suitors who cannot speak Italian-- even Adegbola's increasingly cheerfully rebellious Lancelot, as an emissary from the lower class, contributes to the continual battering of the facade of homogeneity that the rich, white, Christian central characters seem so determined to preserve. While this production only faintly raises the specter of this power, perhaps that is correct: it shifts on the sides and underneath. Shylock can only impotently rage at the society that oppresses him, that steals his daughter from him-- and against this backdrop, is vicious vengeance is rendered, if not good, certainly not nonsensical.
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Review: The Broken Heart
After a point, it must have gotten difficult for Jacobean dramatists. Revenge-filled bloodbaths are in, and sooner or later, your audience isn't going to bat an eye at your traditional stabbings, stranglings, or poison-coated objects. You need to come up with something really odd.
Luckily, John Ford was ready to deliver.
The Sam Wanamaker's latest revenge tragedy in a season full of them, Ford's The Broken Heart (directed by Caroline Steinbeis) concludes with some of the most bizarre and upsetting methods of death the new theatre has seen so far. And remember they also did Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.
Actually, The Broken Heart has occasional echoes of 'Tis Pity: its central character (at least at first) is Orgilus, a young man whose engagement was abruptly broken off by the lady's brother, Ithocles, who gave his sister away to someone else (someone else who, at one point, becomes convinced that his new bride, Penthea, is sleeping with her brother, among others). Orgilus has been driven frantic by his loss, and busies himself with obsessing over his own sister's chastity and disguising himself as a monk. Ithocles, meanwhile, has returned from war and is showered with praise, titles, and rewards from the King-- but finds that all this is worth nothing, because he has fallen in love. This is a source of twofold pain: he is in love with Princess Calantha, whom he can never hope to wed, and his new understanding of the pain of thwarted affection has caused him to feel unassuageable remorse for what he did to Orgilus and Penthea.
What's most fascinating about the play overall is its gestures towards a very modern-feeling psychological complexity. Ithocles, for example, has undergone a genuine change of heart that Orgilus refuses to acknowledge. Luke Thompson's dynamic and compelling Ithocles, by turns glowing with youthful arrogance and staggered by the weight of his own guilt, could almost be the hero of a play written 300 years later. Unfortunately for him, in Brian Ferguson's manic Orgilus, he's matched with an old-style revenger, and their clash seems almost to be as much stylistic as moral: Orgilus cannot believe that Ithocles can possibly have truly changed. It seems at the last that Ithocles can't wholly believe it, either.
Equally well-drawn by Ford and well-performed are the ladies, Amy Morgan dominating the first half as Penthea and Sarah MacRae's Calantha bursting center stage in the second. The play flits from perspective to perspective, allowing many characters-- the women included-- to take control of the story at different moments. It's not until late in the second act that the familiar steps of the revenge tragedy are set into motion, and by then it's abundantly clear that these characters will not conform quietly to their traditional roles-- though there still are, as mentioned above, plenty of deaths carried out in spectacularly bizarre manners.
Steinbeis's production joins Jacobean and steampunk-Spartan in costuming combinations that don't always make complete sense, but are unquestionably striking. She wisely allows the tone to be frequently comical, especially in scenes with Pentha's husband Bassanes (Owen Teale), the King of Argos (Joe Jameson), and even Orgilus and Ithocles. A favorite gesture is letting all the courtiers awkwardly laugh at the king's bad jokes. However, everyone is treated fairly-- which seems like a strange thing to say. But the complexities of Ford's characterizations could easily be smoothed over by an inattentive director; similarly, the blurring of comic and tragic could allow the ending to descend into violent farce, as was somewhat the case with 'Tis Pity earlier this season. Steinbeis and the actors, however, allow all the characters the dignity of their complications.
The Broken Heart is the only extant early modern play set in Sparta, and fittingly, the dominant note for most of its characters is stoicism: excessive displays of emotion are roundly mocked, impeccable self control the highest form of honor. I'm still not entirely convinced as to how a revenge tragedy was meant to make one feel-- not genuinely sorrowful, surely? The admirable resolve with which every character faces their demise makes it difficult to feel sad, exactly. Or have we just lost the ability to connect to such stylized emotions? But this production comes closer than most-- not that its characters would want you to admit it.
Luckily, John Ford was ready to deliver.
The Sam Wanamaker's latest revenge tragedy in a season full of them, Ford's The Broken Heart (directed by Caroline Steinbeis) concludes with some of the most bizarre and upsetting methods of death the new theatre has seen so far. And remember they also did Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.
Actually, The Broken Heart has occasional echoes of 'Tis Pity: its central character (at least at first) is Orgilus, a young man whose engagement was abruptly broken off by the lady's brother, Ithocles, who gave his sister away to someone else (someone else who, at one point, becomes convinced that his new bride, Penthea, is sleeping with her brother, among others). Orgilus has been driven frantic by his loss, and busies himself with obsessing over his own sister's chastity and disguising himself as a monk. Ithocles, meanwhile, has returned from war and is showered with praise, titles, and rewards from the King-- but finds that all this is worth nothing, because he has fallen in love. This is a source of twofold pain: he is in love with Princess Calantha, whom he can never hope to wed, and his new understanding of the pain of thwarted affection has caused him to feel unassuageable remorse for what he did to Orgilus and Penthea.
What's most fascinating about the play overall is its gestures towards a very modern-feeling psychological complexity. Ithocles, for example, has undergone a genuine change of heart that Orgilus refuses to acknowledge. Luke Thompson's dynamic and compelling Ithocles, by turns glowing with youthful arrogance and staggered by the weight of his own guilt, could almost be the hero of a play written 300 years later. Unfortunately for him, in Brian Ferguson's manic Orgilus, he's matched with an old-style revenger, and their clash seems almost to be as much stylistic as moral: Orgilus cannot believe that Ithocles can possibly have truly changed. It seems at the last that Ithocles can't wholly believe it, either.
Equally well-drawn by Ford and well-performed are the ladies, Amy Morgan dominating the first half as Penthea and Sarah MacRae's Calantha bursting center stage in the second. The play flits from perspective to perspective, allowing many characters-- the women included-- to take control of the story at different moments. It's not until late in the second act that the familiar steps of the revenge tragedy are set into motion, and by then it's abundantly clear that these characters will not conform quietly to their traditional roles-- though there still are, as mentioned above, plenty of deaths carried out in spectacularly bizarre manners.
Steinbeis's production joins Jacobean and steampunk-Spartan in costuming combinations that don't always make complete sense, but are unquestionably striking. She wisely allows the tone to be frequently comical, especially in scenes with Pentha's husband Bassanes (Owen Teale), the King of Argos (Joe Jameson), and even Orgilus and Ithocles. A favorite gesture is letting all the courtiers awkwardly laugh at the king's bad jokes. However, everyone is treated fairly-- which seems like a strange thing to say. But the complexities of Ford's characterizations could easily be smoothed over by an inattentive director; similarly, the blurring of comic and tragic could allow the ending to descend into violent farce, as was somewhat the case with 'Tis Pity earlier this season. Steinbeis and the actors, however, allow all the characters the dignity of their complications.
The Broken Heart is the only extant early modern play set in Sparta, and fittingly, the dominant note for most of its characters is stoicism: excessive displays of emotion are roundly mocked, impeccable self control the highest form of honor. I'm still not entirely convinced as to how a revenge tragedy was meant to make one feel-- not genuinely sorrowful, surely? The admirable resolve with which every character faces their demise makes it difficult to feel sad, exactly. Or have we just lost the ability to connect to such stylized emotions? But this production comes closer than most-- not that its characters would want you to admit it.
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Some Thoughts: Othello
I had the opportunity to see Playing Shakespeare's Othello at the Globe, their educational performance that is being presented for free to secondary schools in London. Though I feel like I've seen about a hundred Othellos recently, this production illuminated some things in interesting ways that seem worth highlighting.
Othello himself (played by the preposterously handsome and very talented Lloyd Everitt) is presented as more explicitly foreign than I've previously scene: he speaks with what I believe is a West Indian accent, though I'm not entirely sure. While quoting Othello in the scene before we've actually met him, Iago (Jamie Beamish, whose magnetic and mercurial Iago's finest hour is when he extravagantly decries honesty in favor of wisdom in order to regain Othello's trust) imitates this accent, leaving us unsure until the next scene if this is actually a trait of his, or just exaggerated racism on Iago's part. In the text, Othello is of course specified as being not only racially other, but foreign as well-- he's not just a black Venetian. The accent is a useful reminder of this double difference, and draws attention to Iago's many references to Othello perhaps not being acquainted with the customs of the country... which helps make Othello's belief in Iago's lies still more credible.
The setting is World War I, which some people are probably totally sick of this year, but I think works really well for the play. It allows for the explicitly military setting that I'm increasingly viewing as an essential element of the play, along with rigidly divided and traditionally signified class differences that are equally important and sometimes a little too blurred in a contemporary setting.
The play is only an hour and 50 minutes with no interval, and some of the heaviest cuts are to Desdemona's speeches, including entirely excising her speech about following Othello to the wars. Obviously, I am usually hugely opposed to the all-too-common impulse to cut female characters' lines just because they don't seem very important (they are!!!), but in this case, it has a really interesting effect that I definitely didn't hate. Stripped of most of her speech at the beginning of the play, Desdemona (Bethan Cullinane) becomes much more of a cypher, and it then becomes strangely easier to believe in Othello's suspicion because she is so constantly cheerful, polite, and performative in her sweetness. It is easy to imagine her lying to her father, and I was very aware, when she denies to Othello that the handkerchief is missing, that she instantly resorts to cheerful lying rather than just telling the truth. Only after Othello is fully convinced of her adultery do we begin to see Desdemona's real character-- and therefore, her innocence. It strengthens Othello's character without ultimately depriving hers of too much depth. (But in general I think we should just let ladies have all the lines they can get.)
The scene where Iago gets Cassio drunk is rapidly becoming one of my favorites, and has often proved to be a really excellent moment of crystallization for a lot of a given production's ideas, especially about class. In this case, the soldiers sing and play a drinking game to which Cassio only vaguely knew the rules, and which quickly devolves into a gleefully seized chance for the enlisted men to haze their officer. In response, Cassio drunkenly attempts to salvage his dignity with a flash of rage, which leads smoothly into his attack on Roderigo. Freddie Stewart's is a more openly self-interested Cassio than many I've seen lately, more completely disdainful of Bianca, and hinting at a genuine interest in Desdemona early on.
The violence is all very sharp and well-handled, some of the best hand-to-hand combat I've seen in a while, particularly a chillingly intimate moment (and a nice foreshadowing of what was to immediately follow) in the penultimate scene when Roderigo attacks Cassio and Iago wounds him. As Roderigo stumbles away, Iago comes up directly behind Cassio and covers his eyes with his hand. Cassio manages at first to block Iago's thrust (which, unlike many where he hastily goes for the hamstring, is clearly intended to be a killing blow) and they grapple there for a few moments before Iago manages to redirect and go for the leg.
Obviously this production is after something much different than most things I talk about on here, but I appreciated that the director (Bill Buckhurst) and team clearly did not decide that being an educational production meant that they didn't need to bother clearly thinking through a concept or trying to achieve nuanced and well-conceived performances. In fact, though the style is often more declamatory and outward-facing than I've gotten used to seeing lately in the Sam Wanamaker, I think in many ways the scenes that more completely eschew naturalism in this way are the most successful, and a useful reminder of the style of performance the space demands.
Othello himself (played by the preposterously handsome and very talented Lloyd Everitt) is presented as more explicitly foreign than I've previously scene: he speaks with what I believe is a West Indian accent, though I'm not entirely sure. While quoting Othello in the scene before we've actually met him, Iago (Jamie Beamish, whose magnetic and mercurial Iago's finest hour is when he extravagantly decries honesty in favor of wisdom in order to regain Othello's trust) imitates this accent, leaving us unsure until the next scene if this is actually a trait of his, or just exaggerated racism on Iago's part. In the text, Othello is of course specified as being not only racially other, but foreign as well-- he's not just a black Venetian. The accent is a useful reminder of this double difference, and draws attention to Iago's many references to Othello perhaps not being acquainted with the customs of the country... which helps make Othello's belief in Iago's lies still more credible.
The setting is World War I, which some people are probably totally sick of this year, but I think works really well for the play. It allows for the explicitly military setting that I'm increasingly viewing as an essential element of the play, along with rigidly divided and traditionally signified class differences that are equally important and sometimes a little too blurred in a contemporary setting.
The play is only an hour and 50 minutes with no interval, and some of the heaviest cuts are to Desdemona's speeches, including entirely excising her speech about following Othello to the wars. Obviously, I am usually hugely opposed to the all-too-common impulse to cut female characters' lines just because they don't seem very important (they are!!!), but in this case, it has a really interesting effect that I definitely didn't hate. Stripped of most of her speech at the beginning of the play, Desdemona (Bethan Cullinane) becomes much more of a cypher, and it then becomes strangely easier to believe in Othello's suspicion because she is so constantly cheerful, polite, and performative in her sweetness. It is easy to imagine her lying to her father, and I was very aware, when she denies to Othello that the handkerchief is missing, that she instantly resorts to cheerful lying rather than just telling the truth. Only after Othello is fully convinced of her adultery do we begin to see Desdemona's real character-- and therefore, her innocence. It strengthens Othello's character without ultimately depriving hers of too much depth. (But in general I think we should just let ladies have all the lines they can get.)
The scene where Iago gets Cassio drunk is rapidly becoming one of my favorites, and has often proved to be a really excellent moment of crystallization for a lot of a given production's ideas, especially about class. In this case, the soldiers sing and play a drinking game to which Cassio only vaguely knew the rules, and which quickly devolves into a gleefully seized chance for the enlisted men to haze their officer. In response, Cassio drunkenly attempts to salvage his dignity with a flash of rage, which leads smoothly into his attack on Roderigo. Freddie Stewart's is a more openly self-interested Cassio than many I've seen lately, more completely disdainful of Bianca, and hinting at a genuine interest in Desdemona early on.
The violence is all very sharp and well-handled, some of the best hand-to-hand combat I've seen in a while, particularly a chillingly intimate moment (and a nice foreshadowing of what was to immediately follow) in the penultimate scene when Roderigo attacks Cassio and Iago wounds him. As Roderigo stumbles away, Iago comes up directly behind Cassio and covers his eyes with his hand. Cassio manages at first to block Iago's thrust (which, unlike many where he hastily goes for the hamstring, is clearly intended to be a killing blow) and they grapple there for a few moments before Iago manages to redirect and go for the leg.
Obviously this production is after something much different than most things I talk about on here, but I appreciated that the director (Bill Buckhurst) and team clearly did not decide that being an educational production meant that they didn't need to bother clearly thinking through a concept or trying to achieve nuanced and well-conceived performances. In fact, though the style is often more declamatory and outward-facing than I've gotten used to seeing lately in the Sam Wanamaker, I think in many ways the scenes that more completely eschew naturalism in this way are the most successful, and a useful reminder of the style of performance the space demands.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
I sometimes think that the most effective plays invite an audience to step into the mind and heart of someone whose point of view the have never previously had cause to consider; to spend an evening looking through someone else's eyes. This is what The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, adapted from Mark Haddon's novel by Simon Stephens, achieves.
Masterfully directed by Marianne Elliott, Curious Incident sees the world through the eyes of Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy who is somewhere on the autism spectrum, confused by people but brilliant at mathematics, and determined to set the world to right when he finds his neighbor's dog stabbed with a rake in her garden. Graham Butler presents Christopher with complete, guileless sincerity and impressive physical control. Elliott and her designers create a technological dreamscape: a black box of a set intersected with a light-up grid, projections of mathematical equations, numbers, drawings, and noises, roiling ensemble movement by Frantic Assembly's Vicki Manderson-- and Christopher at the center of it all, whose alternating coldness and intensity, when cast against this depiction of his elaborate and confusing perspective on the world, become perfectly understandable. Christopher sees his journey as an epic quest or a Sherlock Holmes adventure, and the play itself never mocks him by reminding us to think of it otherwise.
The action is complemented by narration 'written' by Christopher and read out by one of his teachers, Miss Siobhan (Sarah Woodward). From her, as well as Christopher's neighbors and parents, we get glimpses of the workings of the world outside Christopher's mind. We see or overhear only the conversations and exchanges that Christopher does, but often we receive information from them that he does not. It's a really remarkable and effective layering of Christopher's subjectivity and our position as outsiders looking into his world; we are never fully pushed away from our alliance with him, but we simultaneously can fill in richer details about the 'real' world that all rush to the forefront in the beautiful final moments of the play.
Curious Incident takes full advantage of the opportunities presented by live theatre (at one point literally declaring its intention of doing so) and revels in the limitations. I never thought that this might make a good movie (a far-too-rare feeling with new plays, in my opinion) and more significantly for an adaptation, I never found myself wondering about the novel. Not that I'm not curious to read it now, as I'm sure it's very good, but the storytelling and even the narration never left me picturing words on the page, or wondering how a scene would have been illustrated with prose. The story felt not like prose slightly twisted to fit onstage, but essentially theatrical.
The success of such an unusual story in both London and New York probably speaks for itself, at this point. But it's always exciting to experience such a moving, well-crafted evening at the theatre.
Masterfully directed by Marianne Elliott, Curious Incident sees the world through the eyes of Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy who is somewhere on the autism spectrum, confused by people but brilliant at mathematics, and determined to set the world to right when he finds his neighbor's dog stabbed with a rake in her garden. Graham Butler presents Christopher with complete, guileless sincerity and impressive physical control. Elliott and her designers create a technological dreamscape: a black box of a set intersected with a light-up grid, projections of mathematical equations, numbers, drawings, and noises, roiling ensemble movement by Frantic Assembly's Vicki Manderson-- and Christopher at the center of it all, whose alternating coldness and intensity, when cast against this depiction of his elaborate and confusing perspective on the world, become perfectly understandable. Christopher sees his journey as an epic quest or a Sherlock Holmes adventure, and the play itself never mocks him by reminding us to think of it otherwise.
The action is complemented by narration 'written' by Christopher and read out by one of his teachers, Miss Siobhan (Sarah Woodward). From her, as well as Christopher's neighbors and parents, we get glimpses of the workings of the world outside Christopher's mind. We see or overhear only the conversations and exchanges that Christopher does, but often we receive information from them that he does not. It's a really remarkable and effective layering of Christopher's subjectivity and our position as outsiders looking into his world; we are never fully pushed away from our alliance with him, but we simultaneously can fill in richer details about the 'real' world that all rush to the forefront in the beautiful final moments of the play.
Curious Incident takes full advantage of the opportunities presented by live theatre (at one point literally declaring its intention of doing so) and revels in the limitations. I never thought that this might make a good movie (a far-too-rare feeling with new plays, in my opinion) and more significantly for an adaptation, I never found myself wondering about the novel. Not that I'm not curious to read it now, as I'm sure it's very good, but the storytelling and even the narration never left me picturing words on the page, or wondering how a scene would have been illustrated with prose. The story felt not like prose slightly twisted to fit onstage, but essentially theatrical.
The success of such an unusual story in both London and New York probably speaks for itself, at this point. But it's always exciting to experience such a moving, well-crafted evening at the theatre.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Review: Othello
There are a lot of factors, of course, but I think one of the reasons that West Side Story worked, and continues to work so well is because gangs are one of the last areas in contemporary life where audiences will readily accept that murderous violence can spring up at the drop of a hat. Frantic Assembly's Othello, running at the Lyric Hammersmith, adopts this setting, and the feel does remind one of West Side Story, but it manages to achieve its startlingly contemporary feel with Shakespeare's original language.
Said language is, admittedly, in a shortened form-- 100 minutes with no interval, though the scenes were adapted masterfully and nothing essential felt lost-- and delivered in heavy Northern accents that had the London A-levels students sitting around us giggling for about the first quarter of the play. Boys and girls alike have track pants and trainers, the ladies in crop tops and the boys in hoodies. They smoke and drink and play the slots machine in the corner, the 'Turkish fleet' consists of unseen honking cars and a brick thrown through a bar window, and lieutenancy is conferred by passing along custody of a baseball bat. Scenes are supplemented with long, silent sequences of dynamic, hip-hop inflected dance that tells the story as clearly as any of the dialogue.
Othello's (Mark Ebulue) difference is marked in many ways besides his race: he's more obviously muscular than other men, southern-accented, and calm and steady in contrast to the impulsive exuberance of the others-- which makes the change that Steven Miller's temperamental Iago is able to work in him so sinister. This is not an Iago who is able to think ten steps ahead-- we see him working it all out in the moment, sometimes almost a beat too slowly (as when Roderigo threatens to expose him)-- and the excitement and tension of watching this process is at least as compelling as more composed Iagos playing ringmaster.
Kirsty Oswald's Desdemona is perhaps my favorite I've ever seen: spirited and defiant not just to her father, but throughout. She does not cry for the entirety of the final two acts, as so many Desdemonas unfortunately do, but teases, flirts, and fights for her life. She's no chaste angel, but it is equally clear that she would never betray the man she loves. One of the most interesting examples of director Scott Graham's adaptation is the rearrangement of scenes and entrances to allow Desdemona and Othello to have an early scene alone. I'd never before realized that they are, in the original text, never left by themselves before he kills her. Here, they are allowed a moment of intimacy and private tenderness that grounds their love in more than just public protestations. Desdemona's friendship with Emilia (Leila Crerar) is one of equals, and the latter's desperate loyalty comes from a form of friendly love that is much more recognizable to a modern audience than the mistress/servant relationship. After shrinking from Iago's cruelty and allowing herself to be casually groped by most of the others, Emilia blazes to life in the final third of the play, and when she finally seizes the right to speak for herself, she is fearless and formidable.
The set (design by Laura Hopkins) moves seamlessly from very dingy bar to back alley, but even when safely indoors the walls will undulate to underscore the characters' uncertainty and distress-- as Cassio (a charming Ryan Fletcher) is getting wasted, for example, or Iago is panicking about how to plant the handkerchief on him. Though the excellent dance/movement sequences peter off towards the end of the play, the final moments of violence are viscerally shocking in a way that such well-trodden tragedies often cannot quite manage. I was most aware, during the final moments, of how young everybody seemed to be-- and that unlike the glooming peace that ends many versions of Othello, the cycle of violence here has no end in sight.
Said language is, admittedly, in a shortened form-- 100 minutes with no interval, though the scenes were adapted masterfully and nothing essential felt lost-- and delivered in heavy Northern accents that had the London A-levels students sitting around us giggling for about the first quarter of the play. Boys and girls alike have track pants and trainers, the ladies in crop tops and the boys in hoodies. They smoke and drink and play the slots machine in the corner, the 'Turkish fleet' consists of unseen honking cars and a brick thrown through a bar window, and lieutenancy is conferred by passing along custody of a baseball bat. Scenes are supplemented with long, silent sequences of dynamic, hip-hop inflected dance that tells the story as clearly as any of the dialogue.
Othello's (Mark Ebulue) difference is marked in many ways besides his race: he's more obviously muscular than other men, southern-accented, and calm and steady in contrast to the impulsive exuberance of the others-- which makes the change that Steven Miller's temperamental Iago is able to work in him so sinister. This is not an Iago who is able to think ten steps ahead-- we see him working it all out in the moment, sometimes almost a beat too slowly (as when Roderigo threatens to expose him)-- and the excitement and tension of watching this process is at least as compelling as more composed Iagos playing ringmaster.
Kirsty Oswald's Desdemona is perhaps my favorite I've ever seen: spirited and defiant not just to her father, but throughout. She does not cry for the entirety of the final two acts, as so many Desdemonas unfortunately do, but teases, flirts, and fights for her life. She's no chaste angel, but it is equally clear that she would never betray the man she loves. One of the most interesting examples of director Scott Graham's adaptation is the rearrangement of scenes and entrances to allow Desdemona and Othello to have an early scene alone. I'd never before realized that they are, in the original text, never left by themselves before he kills her. Here, they are allowed a moment of intimacy and private tenderness that grounds their love in more than just public protestations. Desdemona's friendship with Emilia (Leila Crerar) is one of equals, and the latter's desperate loyalty comes from a form of friendly love that is much more recognizable to a modern audience than the mistress/servant relationship. After shrinking from Iago's cruelty and allowing herself to be casually groped by most of the others, Emilia blazes to life in the final third of the play, and when she finally seizes the right to speak for herself, she is fearless and formidable.
The set (design by Laura Hopkins) moves seamlessly from very dingy bar to back alley, but even when safely indoors the walls will undulate to underscore the characters' uncertainty and distress-- as Cassio (a charming Ryan Fletcher) is getting wasted, for example, or Iago is panicking about how to plant the handkerchief on him. Though the excellent dance/movement sequences peter off towards the end of the play, the final moments of violence are viscerally shocking in a way that such well-trodden tragedies often cannot quite manage. I was most aware, during the final moments, of how young everybody seemed to be-- and that unlike the glooming peace that ends many versions of Othello, the cycle of violence here has no end in sight.
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