National Theatre at Home: Part Six
Aug. 16th, 2022 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficAnother in my ongoing attempt to review everything on National Theatre at Home! I’m losing ground—now there are 16 shows I haven’t seen.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
A View from the Bridge
Another Arthur Miller. Turns out that Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan were collaborating on a screenplay about the Brooklyn dock workers. They parted ways—Kazan went on to make On the Waterfront, and Miller wrote this play.
The plot is about a dock worker named Eddie. At the start of the play, his orphaned niece (his wife’s relation) has been living with them since she was a child. They have a bit of an obsession with each other that is getting…uncomfortable as she grows older.
Two of Eddie’s wife’s cousins arrive from Italy, and Eddie agrees to house them and hide them from the INS, helping them to get work at the docks. One of them, Rodolpho, gets involved with the niece, and Eddie reacts poorly. Things escalate and escalate in menace until, well, tragedy.
This play is modeled after Greek tragedies, and so has a Greek chorus framing mechanism. As an audience member, you can see the bad coming, and the inevitably of the wrong choices made, over and over. It’s an excellent examination and deconstruction of masculinity, as everything that is driving the violence is below the surface and never named. One of the best moments is when one of the Italian cousins challenges Eddie to lift a chair one-handed, by grabbing the bottom leg only (which creates terrible leverage). Eddie can’t—and then the cousin effortlessly lifts it over his head. A silent way of saying, if you cross me, I will fuck your shit up.
This is Ivan Van Hove directed, and one of the few of his where the minimalism, I think, works very effectively for the play. Mark Strong plays Eddie, and his accent is so solid, I would have sworn he was New York born and bred—he’s not, he’s a Brit. Some of the other accents slide around a lot, as is typical of British productions of American playwrights. Particularly Phoebe Fox as Catherine, who I had to give a head canon that she still had some sort of Eastern European accent from her parents, even though that makes no sense, because her accent is complete nonsense otherwise. There’s also one actor who started out strong and lost the accent as the production went on. This play also chose to make the two Italian immigrants speak with the exact same accent as everyone else—which was jarring enough, I thought for a moment we were meant to be understanding them as all speaking Italian with each other, though that’s not the case. Not that I wanted to listen to someone do a “it’s-a me-a, Mario!” accent for the whole show, but having a New York accent immediately on arrival is just an odd choice.
Definitely recommended. So far, every Arthur Miller play I’ve seen has hit it out of the park. Granted, he wrote a ton and I’ve only seen his most famous. But this is definitely worth a watch.
Hedda Gabler
I confess to having a deep affection for Hedda Gabler as a play, and Ibsen as a playwright, though this production certainly wouldn’t make you like either.
Hedda Gabler is the story of a woman who married below her station out of desperation slowly coming to realize just how thoroughly she’s fucked herself. Hedda is an unsympathetic character to the core—a mean girl who used her power to torment, and now that she finds her power curtailed by her marriage, becomes even more cruel. Hedda Gabler is called the woman’s Hamlet—not because the plays are similar, but because so few of the canonical theater roles for women allow the deep interiority of Hedda.
I find the play, like Doll’s House, to be an exploration of the cage woman are placed in in patriarchy. The fact that Hedda is so unlikeable makes it even more critical—it’s one thing to draw a portrait of a saintly wife caged by a bad husband. It’s another to show a woman who, in modern times would 100% be a politician, and a good one, chained to mediocrity by a decent, though unambitious, husband.
This is also directed by Ivan Van Hove, and in this case, the directing is awful. Van Hove is very one style fits all with his direction, and only sometimes does that style work. Putting everyone in modern dress makes Hedda’s position ridiculous—if it’s modern times, just divorce the weenie and move on with your life. The translation is also “updated” and so missing some very memorable lines, like the “cock of the walk” line that ends the play. Van Hove also stages some of the violence that’s meant to be off stage, and therefore ambiguous. Overall, the production is just grating. No one is going to learn to like Hedda Gabler from this production.
Death of England Trilogy
These three plays: Death of England, Death of England: Delroy, and Death of England: Face to Face are an odd trilogy. The first started as a monologue and then was built into a one-man show about Michael. Death of England: Delroy relates the same time period of events from the perspective of Michael’s best friend, a black man. This was staged one night only in 2020 and released on youtube, so I saw this first, confusingly. Face to Face is a two-man show filmed for BBC (so on a sound stage, not a theater) with different actors as Michael and Delroy.
Overall, these plays are an attempt to reckon with the racism and classism of modern England in a time of Brexit, and with toxic masculinity. Though I can tell they are doing something well, I’m also very much not who these shows are speaking to.
Death of England
The first play is about Michael, a working-class man in his twenties and generally a fuck up. His best friend, Delroy, is black. And his father is extremely racist. The center of the play is his father’s funeral, where he gets drunk and delivers a eulogy that is highly critical of his father’s legacy. Michael, throughout this, is torn between his love of his father and desire to be the man his father wants to be, and trying to pick apart how incredibly damaging his father’s racism is.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the show is that Rafe Spall as Michael delivers the whole thing in an extremely rapid-fire shout. I don’t know how his vocal chords survived doing this every night.
Death of England: Delroy
I watched this on the youtube channel, which was confusing as it’s the middle of a trilogy I hadn’t seen the rest of. But this is my review from the time.
After spending the first few months of the pandemic streaming shows from their archives, the National Theatre stopped doing that over the summer when they were allowed to resume operations.
On November 5, the UK went into a second lockdown. That means that the show that premiered on November 4 opened and closed on the same day. Because of that, they videotaped it, and have put it on youtube for a limited time.
Death of England: Delroy was a confusing show for me—first because it turns out it’s a sequel to a play called Death of England. That show was about a working-class white man named Michael, who goes off on his one-man monologue during his father’s funeral. This one is a one-man show from Michael’s black friend, Delroy. Between the accent and the non-linear structure, it took me a good bit to have any idea what was going on. (Also, in the UK, apparently a “bailiff” is what we would call a repo man, rather than a court official, which was also confusing.)
This is not a show I would have bought a ticket to see, frankly. A) I’m not at a point where I’d be going to see live theatre again, but b) I’m in general not a fan of one-person shows. What was interesting about it, though, is to see the way that theater is adapting already to the changing constraints of the pandemic. Most obviously—with only one actor, there’s only one person without a mask. Easiest way to reduce risk of a play. They reconfigured the Olivier theater to be in the round, and blocked off a large number of seats, so no family pod is within two meters of anyone else. They also put up plastic barriers around the parts of the stage that approach the audience.
But then they *use* those constraints—the plastic barriers become bathroom mirrors or prison cells or walls to be manhandled against. The play, while not about the pandemic, casually mentions it in several places—like explaining why Delroy has not been to see his girlfriend and new baby, and why they haven’t been to see him. They’re quarantining separately.
The action of the show is mostly around Delroy narrating the series of events that occurred the day his white girlfriend gave birth to their son. And if you think this is going to touch on issues of institutional racism and police brutality, you are correct. The single highlight of the show, to me, was Delroy explaining to a white friend (with a lot of expletives) why he voted for Brexit—burn it all down, basically.
Death of England: Face to Face
The final play of the trilogy follows the events of the previous two. In this, Michael offers to babysit his sister’s new baby so she can sleep (the sister, Carly, is Delroy’s girlfriend) and then takes the baby to meet Delroy for the first time, in flagrant violation of COVID restrictions.
This play features a different actor for each part—including the actor originally meant to play Delroy in the previous play. He had come down with COVID, and so his understudy gave the one and only performance.
I liked this one by far the best of the three, though it requires watching all three, which is an investment. This play is very much about Michael and Delroy trying to repair their friendship and overcome the racism that has marred it in the past. And it is about Delroy trying to learn to control his rage now that he is a father. There is a moment where he says, “I lost words. I was bankrupt, just didn’t have the language. A fit of anger that missed my self, missed me, went past me, who I want to be.”
It's telling that after all the rollercoaster emotions of the play, when Michael finally leaves with the baby to take her back to Carly, Delroy only then allows himself to cry.
So all in all, the Death of England trilogy is certainly a new voice to bring to theater, and one that deals baldly with contemporary issues. But this is largely not a conversation I, as an American, am part of. So I’d give it a qualified recommendation. If reading this this sounds like something you’d enjoy, go for it, but it’s a bit tough to get through.
London Assurance
This is a deeply unfunny play. Which, for a farce, is a trick. I suppose it is sometimes educational to see what a standard type of Victorian farce is, so that you can understand just how much Oscar Wilde stood out from the crowd, like listening to Bach’s contemporaries to contextualize his genius. But I find little to recommend this beyond the academic exercise.
The plot is incredibly tired, to the point where when the main character arrives and discovers his son, I was like, oh good, we’re not going to have an hour of the son dodging his father. But no! It’s worse. The son gives a false identity which his father buys and then has to fake his false identity’s death for…
I’m sorry, I nodded off there.
There are occasional laughs from the audience, which only shows just how many crickets there are for the majority of the performance. Characters will deliver what are clearly meant to be laugh lines to absolute silence.
The funniest moments are when the staging and direction has gone deliberately against the text. For example, there is a lady who is obsessed with hunting. She apparently has a long speech on the subject, which she delivers like an auctioneer—at such a clip you can only make out one word in five. This is genuinely funny, but obviously not how the speech was meant to be delivered. Can you imagine someone doing that to Shakespeare?
And they have left in a severely anti-Semitic running gag that just made me want to bury my head under pillows. Give this a miss.
Salome
Would you like to see a visually beautiful, atmospheric, slow-motion tableau of a woman being gang raped for an hour and a half? Cause that’s pretty much this. Yael Farber has reimagined the story of Salome as “feminist” and by feminist I mean somehow Salome is the most important figure in the Jewish resistance against Rome and by calling for John the Baptist’s head was kicking off a revolution. I mean—it’s not portraying her as a jealous harlot, but. When the dance of the seven veils is essentially a slow-motion running man, I feel you have failed to live up to the source material.
I’m just going to quote from the one-star Guardian review, proving that the Guardian has plenty of snark if provoked:
Jane Eyre
This was the first show National Theatre put up on youtube during the pandemic, so this is my review from that viewing. For obvious reasons, I’m not revisiting.
In other theatre that is streaming this week only, National Theatre has Jane Eyre up. And this...is a post-modern Brechtian production of Jane Eyre, that de-emphasizes the romance to focus on Social Justice and Feminsim and...who asked for this? Seriously. WHO ASKED FOR THIS.
It opens with a grown woman crying like a baby as people pantomime her birth. It has lots of sections of people running in place while rapping train stations. There is a point where everyone mimes being sheep. There is a person who plays a dog while dressed like a normal person and walking around like a normal person, just holding a bit of rope to be his tail and barking a lot. Halfway through, the ensemble becomes a greek chorus for no reason. Jane spends a lot of time stating what she is feeling so the audience doesn't miss the THEMES (as in, "I must have freedom!" and "Women deserve education"). One of the greatest love scenes ever written is SHOUTED ALL THE WAY THROUGH TO SHOW HOW INTENSE IT IS.
It is three hours long, and I did watch all of it out of, I don't know, masochism.
Watch the first five minutes, I dare you. This is what people who hate theatre think all theatre is.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
A View from the Bridge
Another Arthur Miller. Turns out that Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan were collaborating on a screenplay about the Brooklyn dock workers. They parted ways—Kazan went on to make On the Waterfront, and Miller wrote this play.
The plot is about a dock worker named Eddie. At the start of the play, his orphaned niece (his wife’s relation) has been living with them since she was a child. They have a bit of an obsession with each other that is getting…uncomfortable as she grows older.
Two of Eddie’s wife’s cousins arrive from Italy, and Eddie agrees to house them and hide them from the INS, helping them to get work at the docks. One of them, Rodolpho, gets involved with the niece, and Eddie reacts poorly. Things escalate and escalate in menace until, well, tragedy.
This play is modeled after Greek tragedies, and so has a Greek chorus framing mechanism. As an audience member, you can see the bad coming, and the inevitably of the wrong choices made, over and over. It’s an excellent examination and deconstruction of masculinity, as everything that is driving the violence is below the surface and never named. One of the best moments is when one of the Italian cousins challenges Eddie to lift a chair one-handed, by grabbing the bottom leg only (which creates terrible leverage). Eddie can’t—and then the cousin effortlessly lifts it over his head. A silent way of saying, if you cross me, I will fuck your shit up.
This is Ivan Van Hove directed, and one of the few of his where the minimalism, I think, works very effectively for the play. Mark Strong plays Eddie, and his accent is so solid, I would have sworn he was New York born and bred—he’s not, he’s a Brit. Some of the other accents slide around a lot, as is typical of British productions of American playwrights. Particularly Phoebe Fox as Catherine, who I had to give a head canon that she still had some sort of Eastern European accent from her parents, even though that makes no sense, because her accent is complete nonsense otherwise. There’s also one actor who started out strong and lost the accent as the production went on. This play also chose to make the two Italian immigrants speak with the exact same accent as everyone else—which was jarring enough, I thought for a moment we were meant to be understanding them as all speaking Italian with each other, though that’s not the case. Not that I wanted to listen to someone do a “it’s-a me-a, Mario!” accent for the whole show, but having a New York accent immediately on arrival is just an odd choice.
Definitely recommended. So far, every Arthur Miller play I’ve seen has hit it out of the park. Granted, he wrote a ton and I’ve only seen his most famous. But this is definitely worth a watch.
Hedda Gabler
I confess to having a deep affection for Hedda Gabler as a play, and Ibsen as a playwright, though this production certainly wouldn’t make you like either.
Hedda Gabler is the story of a woman who married below her station out of desperation slowly coming to realize just how thoroughly she’s fucked herself. Hedda is an unsympathetic character to the core—a mean girl who used her power to torment, and now that she finds her power curtailed by her marriage, becomes even more cruel. Hedda Gabler is called the woman’s Hamlet—not because the plays are similar, but because so few of the canonical theater roles for women allow the deep interiority of Hedda.
I find the play, like Doll’s House, to be an exploration of the cage woman are placed in in patriarchy. The fact that Hedda is so unlikeable makes it even more critical—it’s one thing to draw a portrait of a saintly wife caged by a bad husband. It’s another to show a woman who, in modern times would 100% be a politician, and a good one, chained to mediocrity by a decent, though unambitious, husband.
This is also directed by Ivan Van Hove, and in this case, the directing is awful. Van Hove is very one style fits all with his direction, and only sometimes does that style work. Putting everyone in modern dress makes Hedda’s position ridiculous—if it’s modern times, just divorce the weenie and move on with your life. The translation is also “updated” and so missing some very memorable lines, like the “cock of the walk” line that ends the play. Van Hove also stages some of the violence that’s meant to be off stage, and therefore ambiguous. Overall, the production is just grating. No one is going to learn to like Hedda Gabler from this production.
Death of England Trilogy
These three plays: Death of England, Death of England: Delroy, and Death of England: Face to Face are an odd trilogy. The first started as a monologue and then was built into a one-man show about Michael. Death of England: Delroy relates the same time period of events from the perspective of Michael’s best friend, a black man. This was staged one night only in 2020 and released on youtube, so I saw this first, confusingly. Face to Face is a two-man show filmed for BBC (so on a sound stage, not a theater) with different actors as Michael and Delroy.
Overall, these plays are an attempt to reckon with the racism and classism of modern England in a time of Brexit, and with toxic masculinity. Though I can tell they are doing something well, I’m also very much not who these shows are speaking to.
Death of England
The first play is about Michael, a working-class man in his twenties and generally a fuck up. His best friend, Delroy, is black. And his father is extremely racist. The center of the play is his father’s funeral, where he gets drunk and delivers a eulogy that is highly critical of his father’s legacy. Michael, throughout this, is torn between his love of his father and desire to be the man his father wants to be, and trying to pick apart how incredibly damaging his father’s racism is.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the show is that Rafe Spall as Michael delivers the whole thing in an extremely rapid-fire shout. I don’t know how his vocal chords survived doing this every night.
Death of England: Delroy
I watched this on the youtube channel, which was confusing as it’s the middle of a trilogy I hadn’t seen the rest of. But this is my review from the time.
After spending the first few months of the pandemic streaming shows from their archives, the National Theatre stopped doing that over the summer when they were allowed to resume operations.
On November 5, the UK went into a second lockdown. That means that the show that premiered on November 4 opened and closed on the same day. Because of that, they videotaped it, and have put it on youtube for a limited time.
Death of England: Delroy was a confusing show for me—first because it turns out it’s a sequel to a play called Death of England. That show was about a working-class white man named Michael, who goes off on his one-man monologue during his father’s funeral. This one is a one-man show from Michael’s black friend, Delroy. Between the accent and the non-linear structure, it took me a good bit to have any idea what was going on. (Also, in the UK, apparently a “bailiff” is what we would call a repo man, rather than a court official, which was also confusing.)
This is not a show I would have bought a ticket to see, frankly. A) I’m not at a point where I’d be going to see live theatre again, but b) I’m in general not a fan of one-person shows. What was interesting about it, though, is to see the way that theater is adapting already to the changing constraints of the pandemic. Most obviously—with only one actor, there’s only one person without a mask. Easiest way to reduce risk of a play. They reconfigured the Olivier theater to be in the round, and blocked off a large number of seats, so no family pod is within two meters of anyone else. They also put up plastic barriers around the parts of the stage that approach the audience.
But then they *use* those constraints—the plastic barriers become bathroom mirrors or prison cells or walls to be manhandled against. The play, while not about the pandemic, casually mentions it in several places—like explaining why Delroy has not been to see his girlfriend and new baby, and why they haven’t been to see him. They’re quarantining separately.
The action of the show is mostly around Delroy narrating the series of events that occurred the day his white girlfriend gave birth to their son. And if you think this is going to touch on issues of institutional racism and police brutality, you are correct. The single highlight of the show, to me, was Delroy explaining to a white friend (with a lot of expletives) why he voted for Brexit—burn it all down, basically.
Death of England: Face to Face
The final play of the trilogy follows the events of the previous two. In this, Michael offers to babysit his sister’s new baby so she can sleep (the sister, Carly, is Delroy’s girlfriend) and then takes the baby to meet Delroy for the first time, in flagrant violation of COVID restrictions.
This play features a different actor for each part—including the actor originally meant to play Delroy in the previous play. He had come down with COVID, and so his understudy gave the one and only performance.
I liked this one by far the best of the three, though it requires watching all three, which is an investment. This play is very much about Michael and Delroy trying to repair their friendship and overcome the racism that has marred it in the past. And it is about Delroy trying to learn to control his rage now that he is a father. There is a moment where he says, “I lost words. I was bankrupt, just didn’t have the language. A fit of anger that missed my self, missed me, went past me, who I want to be.”
It's telling that after all the rollercoaster emotions of the play, when Michael finally leaves with the baby to take her back to Carly, Delroy only then allows himself to cry.
So all in all, the Death of England trilogy is certainly a new voice to bring to theater, and one that deals baldly with contemporary issues. But this is largely not a conversation I, as an American, am part of. So I’d give it a qualified recommendation. If reading this this sounds like something you’d enjoy, go for it, but it’s a bit tough to get through.
London Assurance
This is a deeply unfunny play. Which, for a farce, is a trick. I suppose it is sometimes educational to see what a standard type of Victorian farce is, so that you can understand just how much Oscar Wilde stood out from the crowd, like listening to Bach’s contemporaries to contextualize his genius. But I find little to recommend this beyond the academic exercise.
The plot is incredibly tired, to the point where when the main character arrives and discovers his son, I was like, oh good, we’re not going to have an hour of the son dodging his father. But no! It’s worse. The son gives a false identity which his father buys and then has to fake his false identity’s death for…
I’m sorry, I nodded off there.
There are occasional laughs from the audience, which only shows just how many crickets there are for the majority of the performance. Characters will deliver what are clearly meant to be laugh lines to absolute silence.
The funniest moments are when the staging and direction has gone deliberately against the text. For example, there is a lady who is obsessed with hunting. She apparently has a long speech on the subject, which she delivers like an auctioneer—at such a clip you can only make out one word in five. This is genuinely funny, but obviously not how the speech was meant to be delivered. Can you imagine someone doing that to Shakespeare?
And they have left in a severely anti-Semitic running gag that just made me want to bury my head under pillows. Give this a miss.
Salome
Would you like to see a visually beautiful, atmospheric, slow-motion tableau of a woman being gang raped for an hour and a half? Cause that’s pretty much this. Yael Farber has reimagined the story of Salome as “feminist” and by feminist I mean somehow Salome is the most important figure in the Jewish resistance against Rome and by calling for John the Baptist’s head was kicking off a revolution. I mean—it’s not portraying her as a jealous harlot, but. When the dance of the seven veils is essentially a slow-motion running man, I feel you have failed to live up to the source material.
I’m just going to quote from the one-star Guardian review, proving that the Guardian has plenty of snark if provoked:
Salomé is not only a revolutionary woman, she is territory. Perhaps she’s a nexus. She is certainly not a character. Her merkin has more personality.
This slow-moving tableau is accompanied by ululations and gift-wrapped in Susan Hilferty’s luscious design. Sand drizzles downwards. Fabric ruches. Light hallows. Nothing is embodied; everything is proclaimed. Lines from the Song of Solomon are mashed up with declarations about the rights of the displaced. A revolve spins slowly round, delivering newly flat episodes, as in a nightmare Last Supper at Yo! Sushi.
Jane Eyre
This was the first show National Theatre put up on youtube during the pandemic, so this is my review from that viewing. For obvious reasons, I’m not revisiting.
In other theatre that is streaming this week only, National Theatre has Jane Eyre up. And this...is a post-modern Brechtian production of Jane Eyre, that de-emphasizes the romance to focus on Social Justice and Feminsim and...who asked for this? Seriously. WHO ASKED FOR THIS.
It opens with a grown woman crying like a baby as people pantomime her birth. It has lots of sections of people running in place while rapping train stations. There is a point where everyone mimes being sheep. There is a person who plays a dog while dressed like a normal person and walking around like a normal person, just holding a bit of rope to be his tail and barking a lot. Halfway through, the ensemble becomes a greek chorus for no reason. Jane spends a lot of time stating what she is feeling so the audience doesn't miss the THEMES (as in, "I must have freedom!" and "Women deserve education"). One of the greatest love scenes ever written is SHOUTED ALL THE WAY THROUGH TO SHOW HOW INTENSE IT IS.
It is three hours long, and I did watch all of it out of, I don't know, masochism.
Watch the first five minutes, I dare you. This is what people who hate theatre think all theatre is.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-26 12:39 pm (UTC)It definitely sounds like an experience. Thank you for watching and reviewing this so others don't have to.