NT at Home part 7
Sep. 12th, 2022 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficOh my goodness, we're already at part seven of this series. That's 51 plays watched and reviewed!
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Rockets and Blue Lights
I’m calling this the best of this bunch, though it is by far the hardest to watch. I’m just going to put a big ol’ trigger warning on the rest of this synopsis even for very graphic depictions of slavery. Click on down to the next one for a return to my usual snarky reviews.
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This play has five or six different nested stories going on, each reusing the same cast (for once this was not actually confusing). All of it is about Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, which depicts the Zong massacre. I was unfamiliar with this event. Zong was a slave ship that, in 1781, threw 130 enslaved Africans overboard to their deaths for the insurance money. This, at the time, was not even a scandal—just a lawsuit of maritime insurance. It was picked up by the abolitionist movement later on, and the painting was from 1840.
In one layer of the story, we follow a modern Black actress who has agreed to play an enslaved women in a movie about Turner’s painting. In the first table read, she discovers that the meaty part she’d signed on to play about this woman’s life before enslavement has been completely removed in favor of devoting more of the script to developing Turner—at the suggestion of her incredibly shit white coworker, the actor playing Turner. She agrees to film it anyway because the only way to even get the story told is to kowtow to a white man’s narrative.
In another, we follow a Black family shortly after the abolition of slavery in the UK in 1807. The husband and wife are deeply alienated from each other—as one observes, once you have been unmade as a person, you can’t be made whole again. The husband signs on to sail on what he thinks is a merchant ship. The ship itself is a former slaver, and the wife does not want him to sail, but he insists on going—maybe because of the call of the sea, maybe because he can’t face seeing the brands on his wife’s body. When they get to Africa, he discovers that the ship is illegally picking up a cargo of slaves to take to Brazil, where the slave trade is still legal.
The layers allow the play to show and comment on slavery. There are scenes of flogging—but where the Black actor is on one side of the stage screaming and the white actor is flogging empty ground on the other side of the stage. An artifice that both shows the horror and creates distance from it in a way only stage could. Then the Black actor gets up and has a conversation about the inevitable “torture porn” in films like this. And how the repetition of imagery showing the Black body being brutalized only reinforces to the white audience that they were never slaves.
There are a number of other narratives weaving through this as well. It does not pull its punches about the complicity of England in the continuation of slavery even after its own abolition act. Reviews point to this fact specifically as important, as the majority of slavery depictions in the UK are American, as if it was only an American problem. Nothing about this leaves you feeling good.
I can only conclude that the program would have had the painting of The Slave Ship in it, because the play does not and it’s central to all of the storylines. I had to look it up. So if nothing else, this introduced me to some things I did not know. And I think has some absolutely devastating depictions of the reverberations of slavery. If you don’t come out of this wanting to punch the actor playing Turner, you haven’t been paying attention.
Young Marx
This play wants to be Picasso at the Lapin Agile, but isn’t quite as clever. It takes place in the years Marx lived in Soho in London. And, despite the title, he was not young at the time—he’d already written The Communist Manifesto. Stuff happens—there are affairs, a duel, a communist party meeting, spies, a brawl in the British library—but there’s not a very clear narrative arc.
The performances are all entertaining (I love Oliver Chris in anything he does, and here he is playing Engels). Though I’ve read some of both Marx and Engels, I know very little about their biographies, and as S said, feel I know less after watching this. I feel like I need to fact check the whole thing.
There are undeniably entertaining moments, like when Marx quibbles himself out of getting anything for a silver gravy boat he’s trying to pawn by arguing its value should be based on its utility, and therefore nothing. He makes breakfast and waves a sausage around and talks about the alienation of the modern economy (I was like…I think I’ve heard this quoted in a Philosophy Tube video).
Overall, a series of very entertaining vignettes that failed to form much of a whole or teach me anything.
As You Like It
I don’t think I like As You Like It. I’ve seen it a few times and it’s never clicked. Sure, it has the all the world’s a stage speech (those Jacques is just an insufferable character). And the character of Rosalind is held up as Shakespeare’s beefiest female part—though that says more about everything else he wrote than saying something positive about Rosalind. I think people remember all the Rosalind/Orlando repartee. But the opening of this thing is completely baffling—too many fathers either in or out of favor, wrestling for some reason? Characters show up and then disappear halfway through (what happens to Adam, Orlando’s servant, after they meet the duke? Did he die off screen?). And every choice everyone makes is baffling, particularly Rosalind’s.
That being said, seems like this is a pretty decent production of it. I HATED every single scene transition. The first act has a manic office aesthetic going for no reason I can tell with loads of electronic chirping. All this is, I think, there entirely for the transition to the Forest of Arden—the office furniture is dragged up into the rafters to hang like some menacing mobile for the rest of the play. A singing troupe is suspended in this furniture, providing whistling wind and howling wolves and chirping birds. That’s cool and all, and I’m sure worked better in person. The acting is…fine I guess? The stand out for me was Patsy Ferran as Celia, which just makes it all the more obvious how much Celia gets screwed over by the play.
After watching this, S said, “I think I’m done with Shakespeare.”
Paradise
This is almost entirely uninteresting.
A modern dress version of the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” and if you’re thinking, gee, I’ve never heard of that one, well, there’s a reason. Philoctetes is about the warrior of that name who, years ago, was stranded on an island by Odysseus was Philoctetes was wounded—a wound that is still suppurating and foul (and yet didn’t kill him) ten years later. Now in the middle of the Trojan War, Odysseus received a prophecy from an oracle that in order to win the war, he needs Philoctetes and his legendary bow. The majority of the action of the play is Achilles’s son trying to manipulate and then plead with Philoctetes to join the war and Philoctetes howling and crying and writhing around.
The entire cast is women, but nothing else was done to gender flip the clearly male roles. And though the plot turns on something distinctly ancient—a legendary bow—the script keeps referring to pizza and enhanced interrogation techniques and reality shows. It does not work. At all. I don’t think an ancient dress version would have worked either—this doesn’t seem like a play that’s retained any relevance. Give it a miss.
Home
Home is another instance of verbatim theater (after Love). Verbatim theater takes actual interviews and uses the words verbatim as dialogue for the actors. It was pioneered as a way to create a play around different witness accounts of a specific event (think Come From Away).
Home, though, is about a housing complex for homeless youth. The play therefore doesn’t have a plot, as it is a series of monologues from different people interviewed. With only seven actors, each actor plays a number of roles, which makes it harder to understand. The one clever touch, was there was one resident who declined to be interviewed but apparently hung out and interjected in other people’s interviews. All of her dialogue is (excellent) beat boxing.
When talking to a friend about this, she called it “lazy documentary making.” I have to say it feels a bit like having a hammer and looking for a nail—like theater is your method, and you’re trying to solve the homelessness crisis with theater. By staging it with professional actors, though, you’re putting a layer of distance between the rich audience and the actual people, who they maybe wouldn’t have been so comfortable being in a room with. It feels perverse for actors to gain praise mimicking others’ stories, rather than allowing those people to speak for themselves. And as I am watching a video recording, there are a lot of questions I have about how this was done—were the interviewees given tickets to see the show? Did part of the ticket price go to a donation, or was this for profit.
Overall, it feels like something created to make the audience feel like they’ve done something for social justice when they haven’t. It’s not that I don’t think exercises in empathy aren’t important, but it feels like there must be a better way to go about it than verbatim theater.
50 Years on Stage
This is a gala event—almost three hours of archival clips and scenes from plays they have performed starring some of their starriest alums. I had it on as background noise—really, it’s not worth much as a watch. Just made me wish they’d release more of their archival material. The highlight was a scene from History Boys about two and a half hours in, but then, I already knew I liked History Boys. Give it a miss.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Rockets and Blue Lights
I’m calling this the best of this bunch, though it is by far the hardest to watch. I’m just going to put a big ol’ trigger warning on the rest of this synopsis even for very graphic depictions of slavery. Click on down to the next one for a return to my usual snarky reviews.
*
*
*
*
*
This play has five or six different nested stories going on, each reusing the same cast (for once this was not actually confusing). All of it is about Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, which depicts the Zong massacre. I was unfamiliar with this event. Zong was a slave ship that, in 1781, threw 130 enslaved Africans overboard to their deaths for the insurance money. This, at the time, was not even a scandal—just a lawsuit of maritime insurance. It was picked up by the abolitionist movement later on, and the painting was from 1840.
In one layer of the story, we follow a modern Black actress who has agreed to play an enslaved women in a movie about Turner’s painting. In the first table read, she discovers that the meaty part she’d signed on to play about this woman’s life before enslavement has been completely removed in favor of devoting more of the script to developing Turner—at the suggestion of her incredibly shit white coworker, the actor playing Turner. She agrees to film it anyway because the only way to even get the story told is to kowtow to a white man’s narrative.
In another, we follow a Black family shortly after the abolition of slavery in the UK in 1807. The husband and wife are deeply alienated from each other—as one observes, once you have been unmade as a person, you can’t be made whole again. The husband signs on to sail on what he thinks is a merchant ship. The ship itself is a former slaver, and the wife does not want him to sail, but he insists on going—maybe because of the call of the sea, maybe because he can’t face seeing the brands on his wife’s body. When they get to Africa, he discovers that the ship is illegally picking up a cargo of slaves to take to Brazil, where the slave trade is still legal.
The layers allow the play to show and comment on slavery. There are scenes of flogging—but where the Black actor is on one side of the stage screaming and the white actor is flogging empty ground on the other side of the stage. An artifice that both shows the horror and creates distance from it in a way only stage could. Then the Black actor gets up and has a conversation about the inevitable “torture porn” in films like this. And how the repetition of imagery showing the Black body being brutalized only reinforces to the white audience that they were never slaves.
There are a number of other narratives weaving through this as well. It does not pull its punches about the complicity of England in the continuation of slavery even after its own abolition act. Reviews point to this fact specifically as important, as the majority of slavery depictions in the UK are American, as if it was only an American problem. Nothing about this leaves you feeling good.
I can only conclude that the program would have had the painting of The Slave Ship in it, because the play does not and it’s central to all of the storylines. I had to look it up. So if nothing else, this introduced me to some things I did not know. And I think has some absolutely devastating depictions of the reverberations of slavery. If you don’t come out of this wanting to punch the actor playing Turner, you haven’t been paying attention.
Young Marx
This play wants to be Picasso at the Lapin Agile, but isn’t quite as clever. It takes place in the years Marx lived in Soho in London. And, despite the title, he was not young at the time—he’d already written The Communist Manifesto. Stuff happens—there are affairs, a duel, a communist party meeting, spies, a brawl in the British library—but there’s not a very clear narrative arc.
The performances are all entertaining (I love Oliver Chris in anything he does, and here he is playing Engels). Though I’ve read some of both Marx and Engels, I know very little about their biographies, and as S said, feel I know less after watching this. I feel like I need to fact check the whole thing.
There are undeniably entertaining moments, like when Marx quibbles himself out of getting anything for a silver gravy boat he’s trying to pawn by arguing its value should be based on its utility, and therefore nothing. He makes breakfast and waves a sausage around and talks about the alienation of the modern economy (I was like…I think I’ve heard this quoted in a Philosophy Tube video).
Overall, a series of very entertaining vignettes that failed to form much of a whole or teach me anything.
As You Like It
I don’t think I like As You Like It. I’ve seen it a few times and it’s never clicked. Sure, it has the all the world’s a stage speech (those Jacques is just an insufferable character). And the character of Rosalind is held up as Shakespeare’s beefiest female part—though that says more about everything else he wrote than saying something positive about Rosalind. I think people remember all the Rosalind/Orlando repartee. But the opening of this thing is completely baffling—too many fathers either in or out of favor, wrestling for some reason? Characters show up and then disappear halfway through (what happens to Adam, Orlando’s servant, after they meet the duke? Did he die off screen?). And every choice everyone makes is baffling, particularly Rosalind’s.
That being said, seems like this is a pretty decent production of it. I HATED every single scene transition. The first act has a manic office aesthetic going for no reason I can tell with loads of electronic chirping. All this is, I think, there entirely for the transition to the Forest of Arden—the office furniture is dragged up into the rafters to hang like some menacing mobile for the rest of the play. A singing troupe is suspended in this furniture, providing whistling wind and howling wolves and chirping birds. That’s cool and all, and I’m sure worked better in person. The acting is…fine I guess? The stand out for me was Patsy Ferran as Celia, which just makes it all the more obvious how much Celia gets screwed over by the play.
After watching this, S said, “I think I’m done with Shakespeare.”
Paradise
This is almost entirely uninteresting.
A modern dress version of the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” and if you’re thinking, gee, I’ve never heard of that one, well, there’s a reason. Philoctetes is about the warrior of that name who, years ago, was stranded on an island by Odysseus was Philoctetes was wounded—a wound that is still suppurating and foul (and yet didn’t kill him) ten years later. Now in the middle of the Trojan War, Odysseus received a prophecy from an oracle that in order to win the war, he needs Philoctetes and his legendary bow. The majority of the action of the play is Achilles’s son trying to manipulate and then plead with Philoctetes to join the war and Philoctetes howling and crying and writhing around.
The entire cast is women, but nothing else was done to gender flip the clearly male roles. And though the plot turns on something distinctly ancient—a legendary bow—the script keeps referring to pizza and enhanced interrogation techniques and reality shows. It does not work. At all. I don’t think an ancient dress version would have worked either—this doesn’t seem like a play that’s retained any relevance. Give it a miss.
Home
Home is another instance of verbatim theater (after Love). Verbatim theater takes actual interviews and uses the words verbatim as dialogue for the actors. It was pioneered as a way to create a play around different witness accounts of a specific event (think Come From Away).
Home, though, is about a housing complex for homeless youth. The play therefore doesn’t have a plot, as it is a series of monologues from different people interviewed. With only seven actors, each actor plays a number of roles, which makes it harder to understand. The one clever touch, was there was one resident who declined to be interviewed but apparently hung out and interjected in other people’s interviews. All of her dialogue is (excellent) beat boxing.
When talking to a friend about this, she called it “lazy documentary making.” I have to say it feels a bit like having a hammer and looking for a nail—like theater is your method, and you’re trying to solve the homelessness crisis with theater. By staging it with professional actors, though, you’re putting a layer of distance between the rich audience and the actual people, who they maybe wouldn’t have been so comfortable being in a room with. It feels perverse for actors to gain praise mimicking others’ stories, rather than allowing those people to speak for themselves. And as I am watching a video recording, there are a lot of questions I have about how this was done—were the interviewees given tickets to see the show? Did part of the ticket price go to a donation, or was this for profit.
Overall, it feels like something created to make the audience feel like they’ve done something for social justice when they haven’t. It’s not that I don’t think exercises in empathy aren’t important, but it feels like there must be a better way to go about it than verbatim theater.
50 Years on Stage
This is a gala event—almost three hours of archival clips and scenes from plays they have performed starring some of their starriest alums. I had it on as background noise—really, it’s not worth much as a watch. Just made me wish they’d release more of their archival material. The highlight was a scene from History Boys about two and a half hours in, but then, I already knew I liked History Boys. Give it a miss.