NT at Home part 2
Dec. 23rd, 2021 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI continue in my quest to watch everything on National Theatre at Home. Why? Well, now I’ve started and feel compelled to continue. My first post is here.
They’ve put up quite a few more plays at this point. Most of these have an expiration of a year, though the site says they’ll be up until “at least” and then gives a date, so I think this is dependent on the individual rights negotiations. At this point only Dick Whittington has rolled off, but a few are coming off early in 2022 (particularly War Horse). Again I’m going to review in roughly descending order of quality.
All My Sons
All My Sons was Arthur Miller’s first successful play, after a string of failures. It won two Tonys in 1946. The play is about an American family shortly after WWII—the patriarch owns a factory and made armaments during the war. The mother is obsessed with searching for signs that one of her sons, who disappeared three years prior during the war, is still alive. Their other son is home for a visit and hoping to propose to his brother’s girlfriend/would-be widow.
Like any good Arthur Miller, tensions mount and secrets are revealed about what really happened during the war. This is very good as drama, but also is an interesting window into the post-war US at a time before all the myths about the war had been solidified. We have a canon now about what that period was like, but this was written so soon afterwards, that it contradicts accepted wisdom in some interesting ways.
The production is very very good, starring Bill Pullman and Sally Field as the parents, and Colin Morgan as the surviving son. But it being a British production of an American play adds some oddities. For example—they cast the neighbors as a black couple without dealing AT ALL with how that would radically change their relationship with the main family. Their race is treated as a neutral thing, and at this period in American history, a black family moving into a white suburb to buy the house of the patriarch’s disgraced business partner would not be neutral. I’m for diverse casting, but in this case it was seriously distracting.
The accents, also, are all over the place. Colin Morgan seems to have worked very hard on developing a natural mid-Western accent, which is pretty flawless. Unfortunately, Bill Pullman has affected a completely different accent, and Sally Field is just being Sally Field, so you have a supposed family where every member is speaking with a radically different accent. Then you have Jenna Coleman as the girlfriend doing that horrible UK-standard “American” accent that clangs on the ears.
Despite that, though, highly highly recommended. Buckle up, though. Arthur Miller doesn’t write comedies.
War Horse
There seems to be a rights issue with this one—it’s on the service only for a very limited time, coming off in January. This was highly acclaimed when it toured to Broadway, though I did not go see it then. I am not so interested in a war story that I was willing to pay Broadway prices, but for free—this is something of a must-see.
The reason to see this is the puppets. Full stop. The story is paper-thin and predictable. It’s Black Beauty set in WWI. Characters are good or bad solely in their relationship to how much they love horses. There are predictable beats around raising and training the horse (Joey), people trying to take Joey from his loving owner (which raises uncomfortable slavery metaphors), Joey being separated from his master, Joey forming a bond with another horse, Joey being abused, and ultimately the reunion.
But the story is just a scaffolding for the Handspring Puppet Company’s absolutely stunning puppets. Joey—which has both a foal and full-grown puppet—other horses, and, my favorite thing in the whole show, a scene-stealing goose puppet. Sometimes I’d watch the puppeteers, and sometimes I’d let them fade out and just see the puppets as living, breathing animals. It’s stunning. And not a surprise to find out the origination of the production was a collaboration between National Theatre and the Handspring Puppet Company, and the choice of text came later.
I don’t know why you would ever see a version of this story without the puppets, honestly. I have no interest in the movie. But the puppets are worth the price of admission.
Frankenstein
Frankenstein is the production that put National Theatre Live on the map. From 2011, this production starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller in both roles. That was the gimmick—one night Cumberbatch was the Creature and Miller Dr. Frankenstein; the next night Miller was the Creature and Cumberbatch Dr. Frankenstein. Both versions are on NT at Home, and if you are going to watch, you should watch both.
I have not read the book, but have been told this is very faithful as an adaptation, down to the rather baffling Arctic ending. What is interesting is to see how radically differently both actors play both characters—down to movement. Cumberbatch based the Creature’s movements on stroke victims relearning walking. Miller based them on babies learning to walk. Cumberbatch’s Frankenstein has a cold dispassion, while Miller’s is temperamental and flighty.
There are some clunkers in the production—the actor playing Elizabeth’s father appears to be in a different play than everyone else. They also added a depicted rape in this that is not in the book.
I saw this in theaters back in 2011, and was glad to revisit. At this remove, some of the acting choices (particularly around speech impediments) get tiring to watch. But still a stunning production well worth watching.
A Streetcar Named Desire
I’m cheating on this one as I have not watched the taping on NT at Home—I saw this production live at St. Ann’s Warehouse. It is absolutely stunning—Gillian Anderson will amaze you. I haven’t seen the movie, but from the clips, Blanche seems to usually be played as a wilting flower. Anderson’s Blanche is a woman of steel who is fighting as hard as she can in the confines of a patriarchal system. And losing anyway.
This play devastated me. Sobbing at the end, and not in a cathartic way. I left just feeling ground up inside.
The production was on a constantly rotating stage in the round, so I’m curious how they filmed it. If they filmed it with close ups, you’d lose that whole context of the production. Watching from a static place, your perspective constantly changed, adding to the unsettling narrative.
So yes—I will absolutely recommend this for the amazing artistry, but you’ve got to be okay with having your guts ripped out. Hence me not rewatching on NT. Once was enough.
Under Milk Wood
I went into this one unprepared. I knew it was by Dylan Thomas and a work of considerable importance to the Welsh canon, and I knew that Martin Sheen particularly wanted to perform it (as many great Welsh actors, from Richard Burton to Catherine Zeta-Jones, have in the past).
I did not know two facts that would have been useful: (a) this was originally a radio play, and (b) this production added a 20-minute prologue frame story about an estranged son visiting his father suffering from Alzheimer’s in an old folks home. What this meant was, we got the start of a drama about a son needing to repair his relationship with his father and not realizing that his father is already gone—at which point S was like, I think I’m out, and I was leaning that way as well—and then suddenly there is an enormous tonal shift as Sheen starts reciting what I now realize is the start of the actual play, “It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters’ and rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”
The frame story never comes back. We at first thought the son had launched into a weird bit of poetry, and then it just—continued.
This is where knowing it’s a radio play by a poet helps, because it is as filigreed as Shakespeare. I feel like I really needed to read an annotated script before watching it. I probably only picked up about half of what was going on—a narrator is telling you about all the comings and goings in a small town, as the actors step into and out of dozens of characters. It is full of delightful little observations (“Before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes”) but we were most of the way through before I had a clear idea of who all the characters were.
So I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind for this, but I understand why it’s such a beloved piece. It clearly could be revisited and mined over and over again. In terms of this production—the frame story is aggressively terrible. Everything else seemed to work pretty well. I love Martin Sheen (and he is in his full crazy hair and beard for Prodigal Son), but you do see him sweat all the way through his shirt during the performance.
So a thumbs up on Under Milk Wood, and a meh on this production of it.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I watched this on youtube in 2020, so I’m just going to copy in my review from then:
This week’s National Theatre at Home is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a good production of it, but it is still A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I’m going to be honest, this is not one of my favorites. It has very long walls of text that are so flowery and opaque you need a raft of footnotes to parse them, which means that the actors always end up OVER ACT ING EV ERY WORD to try to get some meaning across. Also, the plot is just “fairies,” and nothing that anyone does comes from internal character development or character arcs or anything. Every one pairs off at the end because of fairies and…that’s it. (And it’s a happy ending because one of the characters is permanently bewitched). Also, yes, the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe is a riot, but it adds a half hour to the play AFTER THE RESOLUTION OF THE PLOT. I know I cannot expect historical drama to be structured like modern drama, but I find this one a clunker. #unpopularopinion
This specific production seems like it would have been magical to be present—the groundlings are standing, and the action takes place on platforms in and amongst them, so the audience is constantly shifting around. The fairies are all aerialists, so are often suspended over the crowd. Some members of the cast interact directly with the audience, and making their way through the audience is a good metaphor for being lost in the forest. Watching it on video only captures an impression of what that would have been like to experience. For example, Hammed Animashaun was hilarious as Bottom, but, as funny as it is on video, I can tell that his performance as Pyramus would have had me absolutely gasping for breath had I seen it with a live audience.
They do make one radical choice—they switch Titania and Oberon. So rather than it being about a woman spurning her husband (over possession of a slave boy yiiiiiiiiiiiikes) who then drugs her so she sleeps with a beast---it is a man spurning his wife…who then drugs him so he sleeps with a beast. Look, this play is really rape-y. I mean, it’s not anywhere near the top of the list of rape-y plays by Shakespeare (quoth Petrucchio, “Will you, nil you, I will marry you”), but you can’t get around the non-con of the play. Gender flipping it makes it feel less regressive—except it only does that cause it’s leaning full bore on the use of male rape for comedy. Oliver Chris is hilarious (and this is his third appearance in NT At Home), but he makes the plot of this funny by making male sexuality funny. So for me, this went from problematic to a whole new, different type of problematic.
As I pointed out with Twelfth Night—Shakespeare was an Englishman who lived in the sixteenth century. You can’t unproblematic his plays. I appreciate diversifying casting and trying to dance around some of the worse stuff, but most of the time, that just ends up highlighting how bad it actually is.
In conclusion, you probably already know how much you like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and if you like it, this is definitely a production to watch. If you’ve never seen it, this is a good one to start on. But it did not change my mind about the play.
This House
Also one I watched on youtube in 2020, so my review from then:
This week's NTLive is This House. This is a political drama about British Parliament, focusing entirely on the offices of the whips. I don't know zero about British politics, but jesus I do not know enough to be able to follow this. First, I had the feeling that they were enacting a specific series of events that I was supposed to be familiar with, but all I could tell was that it was probably in the seventies based on the fashion. It *was* a specific set of events. It was about the hung parliament for the Labour government from 1974-79. You know, the one that ended with a vote of no confidence that brought Thatcher into power. I'm not calling this a spoiler because clearly you were supposed to know this. The playwright is so sure that you are supposed to know this that they never mention Thatcher's name, or that of any PM, so as not to distract. But jesus. This would be like if you were a British person watching a political drama about the government shut-down during the Clinton administration, but only focused on Congressional aides but no one ever mentioned the name Clinton and you were just supposed to *know* all the arcane rules about debt ceilings and supermajorities. I know that shit in the US because it affects my life. The extent of my knowledge of British parliamentary procedure is from reading Brexit coverage and watching the British House of Cards. I could not follow this. There are a billion MPs, all played by the same five or so people. They talk in jargon about political issues and parliament rules. How many dang parties does the UK have? Everyone's shouting so I guess it's important.
In conclusion, I think the source of the drama in this is from the audience knowing that the Labour Party is desperately fighting to keep Thatcher out of power, and is supposed to believe that that was a noble fight. Without that context, it's pretty incomprehensible.
So. For British political wonks only.
Hamlet
Hamlet is a Hamlet. I’m not sure there’s all that much else to say about it. This production from 2015 stars Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead. I watched this in theaters at the time, and as I can really only stand Hamlet once every 5-10 years, I’m not going to burn that slot on rewatching the same production.
So. What I remember of this is that Ciarán Hinds is stunning as Claudius—his confession scene is the absolute highlight of the play. And there were dead leaves blowing over the stage in the second act and that was cool I guess. Look, even the Guardian was down on this Hamlet. You probably already know whether you want to watch Cumberbatch as Hamlet, so there you are.
Mosquitoes
When I was in London in February 2020, I watched The Welkin at the National Theatre. I bought the ticket just because I wanted to go to the National Theatre, regardless of what was there. I HATED IT.
So. Mosquitoes. After watching it, I looked it up and found it’s by Lucy Kirkwood, who also wrote The Welkin. Huh.
I did not hate this one. But it has a lot of the same themes and discomforts. Mosquitoes is about two sisters—Alice, who is working on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and Jenny, who is visiting Alice and her awkward teenage son. It is immediately apparent that Jenny is a mess and that her relationship with Alice is chaotic. It becomes clear that the reason is Jenny lost her only child to measles after choosing not to vaccinate her. If that just made you jerk back from the screen, buckle up.
The play is a dive into the mess of guilt and recrimination and pain piled up in these relationships, framed by the metaphor of the quest for the God particle. I can’t tell you if you will enjoy this play or not, but S and I ended up having a long conversation about the resonances to disfunctions in our own families after watching it. S loved it for perfectly capturing those ways that families can debase each other. I agreed that it did that, but cannot recommend.
Also, this was recorded for archive, so there is ENORMOUS disparity in the volume between the inter-scene music and the dialogue. So either you need to keep grabbing the remote or risk peeving your neighbors.
Really, my biggest takeaway is that if I see that something is written by Lucy Kirkwood in the future, I’m not watching it.
I’ve got nine more to go, so I think this is getting split into two.
They’ve put up quite a few more plays at this point. Most of these have an expiration of a year, though the site says they’ll be up until “at least” and then gives a date, so I think this is dependent on the individual rights negotiations. At this point only Dick Whittington has rolled off, but a few are coming off early in 2022 (particularly War Horse). Again I’m going to review in roughly descending order of quality.
All My Sons
All My Sons was Arthur Miller’s first successful play, after a string of failures. It won two Tonys in 1946. The play is about an American family shortly after WWII—the patriarch owns a factory and made armaments during the war. The mother is obsessed with searching for signs that one of her sons, who disappeared three years prior during the war, is still alive. Their other son is home for a visit and hoping to propose to his brother’s girlfriend/would-be widow.
Like any good Arthur Miller, tensions mount and secrets are revealed about what really happened during the war. This is very good as drama, but also is an interesting window into the post-war US at a time before all the myths about the war had been solidified. We have a canon now about what that period was like, but this was written so soon afterwards, that it contradicts accepted wisdom in some interesting ways.
The production is very very good, starring Bill Pullman and Sally Field as the parents, and Colin Morgan as the surviving son. But it being a British production of an American play adds some oddities. For example—they cast the neighbors as a black couple without dealing AT ALL with how that would radically change their relationship with the main family. Their race is treated as a neutral thing, and at this period in American history, a black family moving into a white suburb to buy the house of the patriarch’s disgraced business partner would not be neutral. I’m for diverse casting, but in this case it was seriously distracting.
The accents, also, are all over the place. Colin Morgan seems to have worked very hard on developing a natural mid-Western accent, which is pretty flawless. Unfortunately, Bill Pullman has affected a completely different accent, and Sally Field is just being Sally Field, so you have a supposed family where every member is speaking with a radically different accent. Then you have Jenna Coleman as the girlfriend doing that horrible UK-standard “American” accent that clangs on the ears.
Despite that, though, highly highly recommended. Buckle up, though. Arthur Miller doesn’t write comedies.
War Horse
There seems to be a rights issue with this one—it’s on the service only for a very limited time, coming off in January. This was highly acclaimed when it toured to Broadway, though I did not go see it then. I am not so interested in a war story that I was willing to pay Broadway prices, but for free—this is something of a must-see.
The reason to see this is the puppets. Full stop. The story is paper-thin and predictable. It’s Black Beauty set in WWI. Characters are good or bad solely in their relationship to how much they love horses. There are predictable beats around raising and training the horse (Joey), people trying to take Joey from his loving owner (which raises uncomfortable slavery metaphors), Joey being separated from his master, Joey forming a bond with another horse, Joey being abused, and ultimately the reunion.
But the story is just a scaffolding for the Handspring Puppet Company’s absolutely stunning puppets. Joey—which has both a foal and full-grown puppet—other horses, and, my favorite thing in the whole show, a scene-stealing goose puppet. Sometimes I’d watch the puppeteers, and sometimes I’d let them fade out and just see the puppets as living, breathing animals. It’s stunning. And not a surprise to find out the origination of the production was a collaboration between National Theatre and the Handspring Puppet Company, and the choice of text came later.
I don’t know why you would ever see a version of this story without the puppets, honestly. I have no interest in the movie. But the puppets are worth the price of admission.
Frankenstein
Frankenstein is the production that put National Theatre Live on the map. From 2011, this production starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller in both roles. That was the gimmick—one night Cumberbatch was the Creature and Miller Dr. Frankenstein; the next night Miller was the Creature and Cumberbatch Dr. Frankenstein. Both versions are on NT at Home, and if you are going to watch, you should watch both.
I have not read the book, but have been told this is very faithful as an adaptation, down to the rather baffling Arctic ending. What is interesting is to see how radically differently both actors play both characters—down to movement. Cumberbatch based the Creature’s movements on stroke victims relearning walking. Miller based them on babies learning to walk. Cumberbatch’s Frankenstein has a cold dispassion, while Miller’s is temperamental and flighty.
There are some clunkers in the production—the actor playing Elizabeth’s father appears to be in a different play than everyone else. They also added a depicted rape in this that is not in the book.
I saw this in theaters back in 2011, and was glad to revisit. At this remove, some of the acting choices (particularly around speech impediments) get tiring to watch. But still a stunning production well worth watching.
A Streetcar Named Desire
I’m cheating on this one as I have not watched the taping on NT at Home—I saw this production live at St. Ann’s Warehouse. It is absolutely stunning—Gillian Anderson will amaze you. I haven’t seen the movie, but from the clips, Blanche seems to usually be played as a wilting flower. Anderson’s Blanche is a woman of steel who is fighting as hard as she can in the confines of a patriarchal system. And losing anyway.
This play devastated me. Sobbing at the end, and not in a cathartic way. I left just feeling ground up inside.
The production was on a constantly rotating stage in the round, so I’m curious how they filmed it. If they filmed it with close ups, you’d lose that whole context of the production. Watching from a static place, your perspective constantly changed, adding to the unsettling narrative.
So yes—I will absolutely recommend this for the amazing artistry, but you’ve got to be okay with having your guts ripped out. Hence me not rewatching on NT. Once was enough.
Under Milk Wood
I went into this one unprepared. I knew it was by Dylan Thomas and a work of considerable importance to the Welsh canon, and I knew that Martin Sheen particularly wanted to perform it (as many great Welsh actors, from Richard Burton to Catherine Zeta-Jones, have in the past).
I did not know two facts that would have been useful: (a) this was originally a radio play, and (b) this production added a 20-minute prologue frame story about an estranged son visiting his father suffering from Alzheimer’s in an old folks home. What this meant was, we got the start of a drama about a son needing to repair his relationship with his father and not realizing that his father is already gone—at which point S was like, I think I’m out, and I was leaning that way as well—and then suddenly there is an enormous tonal shift as Sheen starts reciting what I now realize is the start of the actual play, “It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters’ and rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”
The frame story never comes back. We at first thought the son had launched into a weird bit of poetry, and then it just—continued.
This is where knowing it’s a radio play by a poet helps, because it is as filigreed as Shakespeare. I feel like I really needed to read an annotated script before watching it. I probably only picked up about half of what was going on—a narrator is telling you about all the comings and goings in a small town, as the actors step into and out of dozens of characters. It is full of delightful little observations (“Before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes”) but we were most of the way through before I had a clear idea of who all the characters were.
So I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind for this, but I understand why it’s such a beloved piece. It clearly could be revisited and mined over and over again. In terms of this production—the frame story is aggressively terrible. Everything else seemed to work pretty well. I love Martin Sheen (and he is in his full crazy hair and beard for Prodigal Son), but you do see him sweat all the way through his shirt during the performance.
So a thumbs up on Under Milk Wood, and a meh on this production of it.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I watched this on youtube in 2020, so I’m just going to copy in my review from then:
This week’s National Theatre at Home is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a good production of it, but it is still A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I’m going to be honest, this is not one of my favorites. It has very long walls of text that are so flowery and opaque you need a raft of footnotes to parse them, which means that the actors always end up OVER ACT ING EV ERY WORD to try to get some meaning across. Also, the plot is just “fairies,” and nothing that anyone does comes from internal character development or character arcs or anything. Every one pairs off at the end because of fairies and…that’s it. (And it’s a happy ending because one of the characters is permanently bewitched). Also, yes, the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe is a riot, but it adds a half hour to the play AFTER THE RESOLUTION OF THE PLOT. I know I cannot expect historical drama to be structured like modern drama, but I find this one a clunker. #unpopularopinion
This specific production seems like it would have been magical to be present—the groundlings are standing, and the action takes place on platforms in and amongst them, so the audience is constantly shifting around. The fairies are all aerialists, so are often suspended over the crowd. Some members of the cast interact directly with the audience, and making their way through the audience is a good metaphor for being lost in the forest. Watching it on video only captures an impression of what that would have been like to experience. For example, Hammed Animashaun was hilarious as Bottom, but, as funny as it is on video, I can tell that his performance as Pyramus would have had me absolutely gasping for breath had I seen it with a live audience.
They do make one radical choice—they switch Titania and Oberon. So rather than it being about a woman spurning her husband (over possession of a slave boy yiiiiiiiiiiiikes) who then drugs her so she sleeps with a beast---it is a man spurning his wife…who then drugs him so he sleeps with a beast. Look, this play is really rape-y. I mean, it’s not anywhere near the top of the list of rape-y plays by Shakespeare (quoth Petrucchio, “Will you, nil you, I will marry you”), but you can’t get around the non-con of the play. Gender flipping it makes it feel less regressive—except it only does that cause it’s leaning full bore on the use of male rape for comedy. Oliver Chris is hilarious (and this is his third appearance in NT At Home), but he makes the plot of this funny by making male sexuality funny. So for me, this went from problematic to a whole new, different type of problematic.
As I pointed out with Twelfth Night—Shakespeare was an Englishman who lived in the sixteenth century. You can’t unproblematic his plays. I appreciate diversifying casting and trying to dance around some of the worse stuff, but most of the time, that just ends up highlighting how bad it actually is.
In conclusion, you probably already know how much you like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and if you like it, this is definitely a production to watch. If you’ve never seen it, this is a good one to start on. But it did not change my mind about the play.
This House
Also one I watched on youtube in 2020, so my review from then:
This week's NTLive is This House. This is a political drama about British Parliament, focusing entirely on the offices of the whips. I don't know zero about British politics, but jesus I do not know enough to be able to follow this. First, I had the feeling that they were enacting a specific series of events that I was supposed to be familiar with, but all I could tell was that it was probably in the seventies based on the fashion. It *was* a specific set of events. It was about the hung parliament for the Labour government from 1974-79. You know, the one that ended with a vote of no confidence that brought Thatcher into power. I'm not calling this a spoiler because clearly you were supposed to know this. The playwright is so sure that you are supposed to know this that they never mention Thatcher's name, or that of any PM, so as not to distract. But jesus. This would be like if you were a British person watching a political drama about the government shut-down during the Clinton administration, but only focused on Congressional aides but no one ever mentioned the name Clinton and you were just supposed to *know* all the arcane rules about debt ceilings and supermajorities. I know that shit in the US because it affects my life. The extent of my knowledge of British parliamentary procedure is from reading Brexit coverage and watching the British House of Cards. I could not follow this. There are a billion MPs, all played by the same five or so people. They talk in jargon about political issues and parliament rules. How many dang parties does the UK have? Everyone's shouting so I guess it's important.
In conclusion, I think the source of the drama in this is from the audience knowing that the Labour Party is desperately fighting to keep Thatcher out of power, and is supposed to believe that that was a noble fight. Without that context, it's pretty incomprehensible.
So. For British political wonks only.
Hamlet
Hamlet is a Hamlet. I’m not sure there’s all that much else to say about it. This production from 2015 stars Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead. I watched this in theaters at the time, and as I can really only stand Hamlet once every 5-10 years, I’m not going to burn that slot on rewatching the same production.
So. What I remember of this is that Ciarán Hinds is stunning as Claudius—his confession scene is the absolute highlight of the play. And there were dead leaves blowing over the stage in the second act and that was cool I guess. Look, even the Guardian was down on this Hamlet. You probably already know whether you want to watch Cumberbatch as Hamlet, so there you are.
Mosquitoes
When I was in London in February 2020, I watched The Welkin at the National Theatre. I bought the ticket just because I wanted to go to the National Theatre, regardless of what was there. I HATED IT.
So. Mosquitoes. After watching it, I looked it up and found it’s by Lucy Kirkwood, who also wrote The Welkin. Huh.
I did not hate this one. But it has a lot of the same themes and discomforts. Mosquitoes is about two sisters—Alice, who is working on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and Jenny, who is visiting Alice and her awkward teenage son. It is immediately apparent that Jenny is a mess and that her relationship with Alice is chaotic. It becomes clear that the reason is Jenny lost her only child to measles after choosing not to vaccinate her. If that just made you jerk back from the screen, buckle up.
The play is a dive into the mess of guilt and recrimination and pain piled up in these relationships, framed by the metaphor of the quest for the God particle. I can’t tell you if you will enjoy this play or not, but S and I ended up having a long conversation about the resonances to disfunctions in our own families after watching it. S loved it for perfectly capturing those ways that families can debase each other. I agreed that it did that, but cannot recommend.
Also, this was recorded for archive, so there is ENORMOUS disparity in the volume between the inter-scene music and the dialogue. So either you need to keep grabbing the remote or risk peeving your neighbors.
Really, my biggest takeaway is that if I see that something is written by Lucy Kirkwood in the future, I’m not watching it.
I’ve got nine more to go, so I think this is getting split into two.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-27 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-27 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-27 05:29 pm (UTC)My review of I Want My Hat Back is on my first post, linked above. I will note you can rent any of these a la crate if you don’t want a subscription.