NT at Home part 5
Apr. 12th, 2022 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficAnother round of reviews for NT at Home!
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Twelfth Night
I went looking for the review I posted for this when it aired on the youtube channel in 2020, and this is it:
That’s not a lot of detail. So to flesh it out a bit—this is possibly Shakespeare’s queerest play, with Viola cross-dressing as a boy for most of the play and being the object of lust of both a man and a woman while in that form. This production queers it more—by leaning into the subtext already there, and by casting Malvolio as a woman. The problem with queering it but sticking to the text is that you ultimately end up with unhappy endings for the queer characters—if you’re familiar with Malvolio’s fate, it’s even more wrenching when played by a woman.
Malvolia, played by Tamsin Greig (of Black Books) is worth a watch on her own. But she’s not the only one worth watching—Oliver Chris’s Orsino is a buffoon, and Tim McMullan as Sir Toby (a character I’d entirely forgotten the existence of) had me laughing out loud.
This is truly one of Shakespeare’s greats, so whether you know it and love it already or have never had the pleasure, treat yourself. This is absolutely the version to watch.
The Habit of Art
From the playwright who wrote History Boys, this is a play about a rehearsal for a play about an imagined reunion between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. This is extremely my shit.
This is a play-within-a-play—you are watching the rehearsal of a play called “Caliban’s Day” about Auden and Britten, which allows meta commentary with the fictional play’s writer, who is watching the rehearsal, from everything from the lead actor’s (Richard Griffiths) total lack of resemblance to Auden, to a discussion of what we really know about Britten’s infamous love for young boys.
The witticisms throughout are fantastic (“You forget, Ben, that this isn’t tennis. You can’t win at art.”) though I suspect the enjoyment of them will be directly proportional to how much you already know about these two. As a choral singer, Britten’s sneering references to the popularity of Tippet were hilarious to me—S, who was washing dishes while I had this on, kept wondering what I was laughing at.
The play is mainly concerned with what we are even doing looking at the biographies of artists. Does their art need biography? Do we look for flaws to dismiss them as hypocrites? Or do we write out the people they used and abused in their lives in our deification of their artistic creations?
Like I said—this is my shit. I suspect you’ll know just from the one line description whether this is also your shit.
Ian McKellan on Stage
Do you like Ian McKellan? Would you enjoy watching him talk about whatever he wants to? Then you will enjoy this. This is a one man show where he wanders from anecdote to biographical detail to reciting soliloquys. If you want biographical detail, there’s a documentary on McKellan featuring a lot of interviews with him that goes much more into the actual story of his life. This? This is a victory lap. The entire second act is him having the audience name Shakespeare plays, then reciting a bit or telling a story until they’ve gone through all of them. I imagine this was more fun in person, but it was certainly pleasant background watching while I cleaned out my closet.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
This is my first Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, though not my first Tennessee Williams. Where I found the production of Streetcar Named Desire up on NT at Home absolutely devastating, this left me a bit cold. Part of that is the material, I think—this play feels more dated and less resonant with now. And part is the production.
The direction here is austere—there’s almost nothing on the stage, which means that any sense of claustrophobia in an old Southern plantation house is gone. They also made the jarring choice to update the clothing and tech to modern, so all the characters are using iPhones. This, frankly, makes NO sense—several of the key parts of the plot simply do not work in the present day. The plot is driven by secrets: one the repressed homosexuality of a main character, which just doesn’t seem like so much of a deal now that it would destroy his life. And the other that another character has a terminal disease that he's been lied to about. This was not only normal for the time this was written but considered good medicine, a fact I find utterly horrifying. My parents both started in the medical profession at the time that this was still what was done and have some deeply upsetting stories about it. 99% Invisible did a fantastic podcast episode about the effort to change this in the medical profession and start training doctors on how to break bad news. My point is—doctors simply don’t lie to patients about terminal cancer diagnoses anymore, so that central metaphor falls apart in a modern setting.
The highlight of this production is Colm Meaney as Big Poppa. His performance pretty much redeemed the entire play. The other performances? I didn’t feel a whole lot of tension from Maggie or Brick, and other than Meaney, the British cast has a very hard time affecting American Southern accents.
It makes me wonder how the movie was, with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, but this is a text that suffered mightily under the Hays Code. Just from looking at the wiki—they removed all the homosexuality in the text, which is kind of the main plot driver, and added a happy ending. Tennessee Williams apparently hated it so much he’d walk past people waiting in line to see it and tell them to go home.
So—I don’t know if I’d like another production of this play better, but this production is solidly mediocre.
All About Eve
All About Eve is an iconic Bette Davis movie with very of-its-day gender politics. Which makes one wonder why on earth they adapted it into a play at all. I can watch a movie from 1950 about an aging actress so obsessed with her disappearing youth that she sabotages all her personal relationships, and a young starlet who connives, manipulates, blackmails, and sleeps her way to stardom and understand that I’m watching something of the real ways women in this industry would feel about their relationship to it at the time. (Not a coincidence that this is one of Marilyn Monroe’s earliest screen appearances.)
But you take that pile of catty woman tropes and dress it up as modern and…why? It just feels very tired.
Gillian Anderson stars as Margo, the Bette Davis character. She’s very good. But she’s not Bette Davis. The direction is frankly distracting, with an enormous screen over the stage and entire scenes played offstage and projected onto the screen, making one wonder why one’s at the theater at all if one is just watching a (worse) movie. Also, adding Margo puking into a toilet does not help this production’s charms.
In conclusion—watch the movie. The movie really is worth it. This just seems like some high-brow IP name recognition cash grab.
Love
Love is an hour-long slice of life drama about several people in a homeless shelter. There is no plot here—this is just about showing the grinding reality of being unhoused, and the ways the system is set up to make escaping this state as hard as possible. This was based on the playwright’s observations of real unhoused people and it shows. Not a fun watch, and recommended only insofar as any of this is news to you.
Top Girls
What the fuck even is this play. Here is the description on NT at Home:
This is what the first hour of this play actually is: a girls’ night out with an assortment of real, mythical, and made up by this production women talking over but not to each other on a variety of completely disjoint subjects. The employment agency doesn’t show up until the very end of the first act. I had to pause the play and google what the hell was going on.
This feels very much like Angels in America, where all the dialogue is very clever but I don’t know why in the name of god you’ve made any of these choices and nothing is going anywhere. I am not a fan of magical realism in general, and I’m really not a fan in theater. Especially when it is constricted to essentially an entirely separate one-act play that is stuck on the front of a totally different play.
The rest of the play is three scenes in reverse order of a family drama between Marlene, her sister, and her sister’s daughter Angie who is actually secretly Marlene’s daughter. This bit was maybe radical in 1983, but feels very tired now—the woman who gave away her child so she could pursue a career. The only bite to this is a particular cruelty Marlene shows to her daughter. Angie suspects who her true mother is and runs away to London to live with her. This plot thread is left completely dangling, except in Marlene’s observation when she thinks Angie’s asleep that Angie’s not very bright and isn’t the right kind of woman to have a career. This section is interspersed with many interviews with women job prospects at the Top Girls agency that illustrates the absolute garbage women had to deal with in the workplace in the eighties.
The last scene of the play is a visit of Marlene to Joyce, which leads to a screaming row about politics. The end. There is a certain class of play that confuses loud arguments with drama, and this is definitely one of those.
So yeah, not a fan of this one. Feels like several different ideas stuck on to each other, and whatever vital something it was tapping into at the time is, thankfully, forty years out of date now.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Twelfth Night
I went looking for the review I posted for this when it aired on the youtube channel in 2020, and this is it:
This week's National Theatre Live is Twelfth Night, and it is fantastic. Twelfth Night is one of Bill's best, and this is a truly excellent production of it. Definitely check it out.
That’s not a lot of detail. So to flesh it out a bit—this is possibly Shakespeare’s queerest play, with Viola cross-dressing as a boy for most of the play and being the object of lust of both a man and a woman while in that form. This production queers it more—by leaning into the subtext already there, and by casting Malvolio as a woman. The problem with queering it but sticking to the text is that you ultimately end up with unhappy endings for the queer characters—if you’re familiar with Malvolio’s fate, it’s even more wrenching when played by a woman.
Malvolia, played by Tamsin Greig (of Black Books) is worth a watch on her own. But she’s not the only one worth watching—Oliver Chris’s Orsino is a buffoon, and Tim McMullan as Sir Toby (a character I’d entirely forgotten the existence of) had me laughing out loud.
This is truly one of Shakespeare’s greats, so whether you know it and love it already or have never had the pleasure, treat yourself. This is absolutely the version to watch.
The Habit of Art
From the playwright who wrote History Boys, this is a play about a rehearsal for a play about an imagined reunion between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. This is extremely my shit.
This is a play-within-a-play—you are watching the rehearsal of a play called “Caliban’s Day” about Auden and Britten, which allows meta commentary with the fictional play’s writer, who is watching the rehearsal, from everything from the lead actor’s (Richard Griffiths) total lack of resemblance to Auden, to a discussion of what we really know about Britten’s infamous love for young boys.
The witticisms throughout are fantastic (“You forget, Ben, that this isn’t tennis. You can’t win at art.”) though I suspect the enjoyment of them will be directly proportional to how much you already know about these two. As a choral singer, Britten’s sneering references to the popularity of Tippet were hilarious to me—S, who was washing dishes while I had this on, kept wondering what I was laughing at.
The play is mainly concerned with what we are even doing looking at the biographies of artists. Does their art need biography? Do we look for flaws to dismiss them as hypocrites? Or do we write out the people they used and abused in their lives in our deification of their artistic creations?
Like I said—this is my shit. I suspect you’ll know just from the one line description whether this is also your shit.
Ian McKellan on Stage
Do you like Ian McKellan? Would you enjoy watching him talk about whatever he wants to? Then you will enjoy this. This is a one man show where he wanders from anecdote to biographical detail to reciting soliloquys. If you want biographical detail, there’s a documentary on McKellan featuring a lot of interviews with him that goes much more into the actual story of his life. This? This is a victory lap. The entire second act is him having the audience name Shakespeare plays, then reciting a bit or telling a story until they’ve gone through all of them. I imagine this was more fun in person, but it was certainly pleasant background watching while I cleaned out my closet.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
This is my first Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, though not my first Tennessee Williams. Where I found the production of Streetcar Named Desire up on NT at Home absolutely devastating, this left me a bit cold. Part of that is the material, I think—this play feels more dated and less resonant with now. And part is the production.
The direction here is austere—there’s almost nothing on the stage, which means that any sense of claustrophobia in an old Southern plantation house is gone. They also made the jarring choice to update the clothing and tech to modern, so all the characters are using iPhones. This, frankly, makes NO sense—several of the key parts of the plot simply do not work in the present day. The plot is driven by secrets: one the repressed homosexuality of a main character, which just doesn’t seem like so much of a deal now that it would destroy his life. And the other that another character has a terminal disease that he's been lied to about. This was not only normal for the time this was written but considered good medicine, a fact I find utterly horrifying. My parents both started in the medical profession at the time that this was still what was done and have some deeply upsetting stories about it. 99% Invisible did a fantastic podcast episode about the effort to change this in the medical profession and start training doctors on how to break bad news. My point is—doctors simply don’t lie to patients about terminal cancer diagnoses anymore, so that central metaphor falls apart in a modern setting.
The highlight of this production is Colm Meaney as Big Poppa. His performance pretty much redeemed the entire play. The other performances? I didn’t feel a whole lot of tension from Maggie or Brick, and other than Meaney, the British cast has a very hard time affecting American Southern accents.
It makes me wonder how the movie was, with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, but this is a text that suffered mightily under the Hays Code. Just from looking at the wiki—they removed all the homosexuality in the text, which is kind of the main plot driver, and added a happy ending. Tennessee Williams apparently hated it so much he’d walk past people waiting in line to see it and tell them to go home.
So—I don’t know if I’d like another production of this play better, but this production is solidly mediocre.
All About Eve
All About Eve is an iconic Bette Davis movie with very of-its-day gender politics. Which makes one wonder why on earth they adapted it into a play at all. I can watch a movie from 1950 about an aging actress so obsessed with her disappearing youth that she sabotages all her personal relationships, and a young starlet who connives, manipulates, blackmails, and sleeps her way to stardom and understand that I’m watching something of the real ways women in this industry would feel about their relationship to it at the time. (Not a coincidence that this is one of Marilyn Monroe’s earliest screen appearances.)
But you take that pile of catty woman tropes and dress it up as modern and…why? It just feels very tired.
Gillian Anderson stars as Margo, the Bette Davis character. She’s very good. But she’s not Bette Davis. The direction is frankly distracting, with an enormous screen over the stage and entire scenes played offstage and projected onto the screen, making one wonder why one’s at the theater at all if one is just watching a (worse) movie. Also, adding Margo puking into a toilet does not help this production’s charms.
In conclusion—watch the movie. The movie really is worth it. This just seems like some high-brow IP name recognition cash grab.
Love
Love is an hour-long slice of life drama about several people in a homeless shelter. There is no plot here—this is just about showing the grinding reality of being unhoused, and the ways the system is set up to make escaping this state as hard as possible. This was based on the playwright’s observations of real unhoused people and it shows. Not a fun watch, and recommended only insofar as any of this is news to you.
Top Girls
What the fuck even is this play. Here is the description on NT at Home:
Marlene is the first woman to head the Top Girls employment agency. But she has no plans to stop there. With Maggie in at Number 10 and a spirit of optimism consuming the country, Marlene knows that the future belongs to women like her.
This is what the first hour of this play actually is: a girls’ night out with an assortment of real, mythical, and made up by this production women talking over but not to each other on a variety of completely disjoint subjects. The employment agency doesn’t show up until the very end of the first act. I had to pause the play and google what the hell was going on.
This feels very much like Angels in America, where all the dialogue is very clever but I don’t know why in the name of god you’ve made any of these choices and nothing is going anywhere. I am not a fan of magical realism in general, and I’m really not a fan in theater. Especially when it is constricted to essentially an entirely separate one-act play that is stuck on the front of a totally different play.
The rest of the play is three scenes in reverse order of a family drama between Marlene, her sister, and her sister’s daughter Angie who is actually secretly Marlene’s daughter. This bit was maybe radical in 1983, but feels very tired now—the woman who gave away her child so she could pursue a career. The only bite to this is a particular cruelty Marlene shows to her daughter. Angie suspects who her true mother is and runs away to London to live with her. This plot thread is left completely dangling, except in Marlene’s observation when she thinks Angie’s asleep that Angie’s not very bright and isn’t the right kind of woman to have a career. This section is interspersed with many interviews with women job prospects at the Top Girls agency that illustrates the absolute garbage women had to deal with in the workplace in the eighties.
The last scene of the play is a visit of Marlene to Joyce, which leads to a screaming row about politics. The end. There is a certain class of play that confuses loud arguments with drama, and this is definitely one of those.
So yeah, not a fan of this one. Feels like several different ideas stuck on to each other, and whatever vital something it was tapping into at the time is, thankfully, forty years out of date now.