NT at Home part 11
Mar. 19th, 2023 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficPart 11 (!!!) of my reviews of NT at Home. Very nearly caught up with their upload schedule! I had one left when they added two shows for March. That means this time I got through the Othello production that's been sitting there since the start of the streamer.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
All of Us
Yes, this is an issue play. It’s also really fucking good. Francesca Martinez wrote and stars in this play about Jess, a woman with cerebral palsy (she prefers the term “wobbly”). At the start of the play, you see her as a practicing therapist—but also as someone reliant on a network of caregivers and friends to prepare her food, button her clothes, help her to walk (unaided she crawls, which she does for much of the run time on the carpeted stage). You see early on that she can’t pour cereal for herself. But also that she has a life that is not limited or defined by her disability.
We also meet her neighbor, Poppy, who is in a wheelchair. The Guardian calls Francesca Mills in this role “incandescent” and I agree. Poppy is balls out, raunchy, drinks, fucks, smokes, speaks her mind—just the best time when she’s on stage.
And then you watch as these two women’s lives shrink and shrink as government welfare reform cuts their benefits and shoves them into an uncaring, underfunded, poorly trained bureaucracy to fight for the assistance that they need for basic bodily autonomy. In the opening of act two, they attend a public meeting, and Poppy describes what it’s like to have to be put to bed at 9PM in a diaper because she lost her evening caregiver and must go from 9PM to 7:30AM every night without anyone to help her get to the toilet.
This show doesn’t have any answers, just the demonstration of the human cost of cutting disability access. It makes some very direct thematic points that the systems that cut services are abuse. And the people who implement them—and vote for them—are an example of hurt people hurt people. There’s a scene where a man who had shouted Poppy down at the public meeting confronts Jess and tells her that in order to care for his disabled mom he works seven nights a week, so why should she get handouts. Jess exhaustedly replies, “Can’t you see we’re on the same side.”
There’s a lot of stuff on National Theatre at Home that is polemical, and for the most part, I think it misses and/or is talking in the wrong medium to the wrong audience. This one works. It’s deeply moving as a play, and extremely convincing in its argument for why disability services are a basic human right.
Our Generation
Another verbatim production (they really love these, don’t they?). This one is a conglomeration of interviews with teenagers. They are charming, but it runs THREE HOURS AND FIFTEEN MINUTES across THREE ACTS and if you took 600 hours of interviews and cut it down to that, could you not cut it down to two hours?
I also have to object to calling it “our” generation when no one involved in the production, including the actors, actually are the age of the interviewees. Cause you’re not putting a twelve year old on the stage for the full run of a play. And you know what teenagers in England are mostly concerned with? GCSEs. I’m not sure that’s an indication of generational anything. There are a few interludes about Tiktok but—
I was left with the question of who is this for? And the answer is—boomers. Boomers buy theatre tickets. So this is pleasant enough to watch but the framing (especially the title) give it totally undeserved portent.
The Boy with Two Hearts
This is the true story of a family fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan. The mother of the family made a speech advocating women’s rights and was marked for death, so the family, including three teenage brothers, must leave. (This is also in 2000, so before the US invasion.) The play then follows them through a series of refugee camps and stowing away in trunks and shipping containers. The majority of the action is narrated at the audience, like a memoir, rather than being acted out in dialogue. The production also had supertitles throughout, with them translating Pashto and animating at other times. The problem is the video—since it is mostly in close-ups or mid-range shots—rarely shows these titles, so dialogue in Pashto is untranslated.
It's fine. But it’s not anything particularly interesting.
Othello
The fundamental problem with Othello is that it thinks it’s Othello’s tragedy and not Desdemona’s. The racial politics are…a bit dodgy. And the domestic violence angle is just totally beyond Shakespeare, because of COURSE you would never just ask a woman or believe what she said, and of COURSE if she was a whore murdering her would be totally fine.
So anyway this is a production of Othello. It’s fine as such. I saw an absolutely stunning production with Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo a few years ago and honestly wasn’t willing to engage with this text again with my full attention, and melodrama when given half attention is solidly worthless. This is another production that is set in modern military dress, which seems to be the thing now. (Kind of hilarious that it’s mostly guns, therefore, except for the one moment that refers to a sword, so Othello pulls a FUCKING SWORD from under a military cot cause that makes sense.) Everyone also spends the majority of the run time yelling. Yes, it’s called for in the text, but it’s tiring.
Why is this one still taught in schools? Othello is sorry not that he murdered Desdemona but that he was wrong about the reason he murdered her. I’m over it.
Ugly Lies the Bone
I don’t know what this play was trying to do. It’s about an American veteran returning home from Afghanistan with life-altering injuries from an IED and severe PTSD. It alternates scenes of her failing to reintegrate into her life in an economically depressed community in Florida with scenes of her treatment for PTSD which is…virtual reality for some reason. This part of it works not at all. You see her on stage with a VR headset with CG images projected on the walls and a voice over doing guided meditation. I don’t know what we are meant to do with that. The other scenes are fine, but ultimately the play doesn’t go anywhere, have any plot, or conclude any narrative arc. At least it’s short.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
All of Us
Yes, this is an issue play. It’s also really fucking good. Francesca Martinez wrote and stars in this play about Jess, a woman with cerebral palsy (she prefers the term “wobbly”). At the start of the play, you see her as a practicing therapist—but also as someone reliant on a network of caregivers and friends to prepare her food, button her clothes, help her to walk (unaided she crawls, which she does for much of the run time on the carpeted stage). You see early on that she can’t pour cereal for herself. But also that she has a life that is not limited or defined by her disability.
We also meet her neighbor, Poppy, who is in a wheelchair. The Guardian calls Francesca Mills in this role “incandescent” and I agree. Poppy is balls out, raunchy, drinks, fucks, smokes, speaks her mind—just the best time when she’s on stage.
And then you watch as these two women’s lives shrink and shrink as government welfare reform cuts their benefits and shoves them into an uncaring, underfunded, poorly trained bureaucracy to fight for the assistance that they need for basic bodily autonomy. In the opening of act two, they attend a public meeting, and Poppy describes what it’s like to have to be put to bed at 9PM in a diaper because she lost her evening caregiver and must go from 9PM to 7:30AM every night without anyone to help her get to the toilet.
This show doesn’t have any answers, just the demonstration of the human cost of cutting disability access. It makes some very direct thematic points that the systems that cut services are abuse. And the people who implement them—and vote for them—are an example of hurt people hurt people. There’s a scene where a man who had shouted Poppy down at the public meeting confronts Jess and tells her that in order to care for his disabled mom he works seven nights a week, so why should she get handouts. Jess exhaustedly replies, “Can’t you see we’re on the same side.”
There’s a lot of stuff on National Theatre at Home that is polemical, and for the most part, I think it misses and/or is talking in the wrong medium to the wrong audience. This one works. It’s deeply moving as a play, and extremely convincing in its argument for why disability services are a basic human right.
Our Generation
Another verbatim production (they really love these, don’t they?). This one is a conglomeration of interviews with teenagers. They are charming, but it runs THREE HOURS AND FIFTEEN MINUTES across THREE ACTS and if you took 600 hours of interviews and cut it down to that, could you not cut it down to two hours?
I also have to object to calling it “our” generation when no one involved in the production, including the actors, actually are the age of the interviewees. Cause you’re not putting a twelve year old on the stage for the full run of a play. And you know what teenagers in England are mostly concerned with? GCSEs. I’m not sure that’s an indication of generational anything. There are a few interludes about Tiktok but—
I was left with the question of who is this for? And the answer is—boomers. Boomers buy theatre tickets. So this is pleasant enough to watch but the framing (especially the title) give it totally undeserved portent.
The Boy with Two Hearts
This is the true story of a family fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan. The mother of the family made a speech advocating women’s rights and was marked for death, so the family, including three teenage brothers, must leave. (This is also in 2000, so before the US invasion.) The play then follows them through a series of refugee camps and stowing away in trunks and shipping containers. The majority of the action is narrated at the audience, like a memoir, rather than being acted out in dialogue. The production also had supertitles throughout, with them translating Pashto and animating at other times. The problem is the video—since it is mostly in close-ups or mid-range shots—rarely shows these titles, so dialogue in Pashto is untranslated.
It's fine. But it’s not anything particularly interesting.
Othello
The fundamental problem with Othello is that it thinks it’s Othello’s tragedy and not Desdemona’s. The racial politics are…a bit dodgy. And the domestic violence angle is just totally beyond Shakespeare, because of COURSE you would never just ask a woman or believe what she said, and of COURSE if she was a whore murdering her would be totally fine.
So anyway this is a production of Othello. It’s fine as such. I saw an absolutely stunning production with Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo a few years ago and honestly wasn’t willing to engage with this text again with my full attention, and melodrama when given half attention is solidly worthless. This is another production that is set in modern military dress, which seems to be the thing now. (Kind of hilarious that it’s mostly guns, therefore, except for the one moment that refers to a sword, so Othello pulls a FUCKING SWORD from under a military cot cause that makes sense.) Everyone also spends the majority of the run time yelling. Yes, it’s called for in the text, but it’s tiring.
Why is this one still taught in schools? Othello is sorry not that he murdered Desdemona but that he was wrong about the reason he murdered her. I’m over it.
Ugly Lies the Bone
I don’t know what this play was trying to do. It’s about an American veteran returning home from Afghanistan with life-altering injuries from an IED and severe PTSD. It alternates scenes of her failing to reintegrate into her life in an economically depressed community in Florida with scenes of her treatment for PTSD which is…virtual reality for some reason. This part of it works not at all. You see her on stage with a VR headset with CG images projected on the walls and a voice over doing guided meditation. I don’t know what we are meant to do with that. The other scenes are fine, but ultimately the play doesn’t go anywhere, have any plot, or conclude any narrative arc. At least it’s short.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-19 08:19 pm (UTC)Have you ever watched Highlander? They're always pulling swords from improbable places. *g*
Thanks for these reviews!