National Theatre at Home Part Twelve
Oct. 15th, 2023 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficPart One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
I got down to just a rather poor Henry V adaptation on the service that I hadn’t seen (and am stuck halfway through) and paused on keeping up with National Theatre for a bit. Now that they’ve added quite a few more, though, I’ve come back around and in this batch there are mostly bangers and no real stinkers.
The Seagull
This production of Chekhov’s The Seagull continues the trend of minimalist staging. Actually—to call it staged at all is an overstatement. It’s basically a table read—the actors sit in chairs in a box made of wood chips and only stand when they are changing the position of their chairs. While sitting, they have barely any movement at all. This has the effect of making Chekhov feel like Pinter (and oh hey—it was put up in the Harold Pinter theater, so there you are).
The thing is—the play is so very very good and the acting is so very very good that it’s riveting in spite of the overhanded direction. (Oh, in case we missed the foreshadowing of the Chekhov’s gun in this first Chekhov play, in the second act, one of the actors DOESN’T HAVE A CHAIR ANY MORE. Deep.)
This is a production of Anya Reiss’s new “interpretation” of Chekhov’s Seagull. This means it’s been “modernized,” including references to blogs and cell service. (Note from me: Stop it. Stop “updating” plays highly dependent on their historical settings but dropping in anachronisms. STOP IT.) I haven’t seen Seagull before, so I don’t know how much has been edited and how much is Chekhov, but it’s absolutely gripping. The clever lines (a writer talking about his obsession with cataloguing his experiences as they happen for use in his books later—“I feel like I’m eating my life.”). Everyone in the cast is phenomenal, especially Indira Varma as a fading actress having an affair with a famous writer her son’s age.
I see why The Seagull rocketed Chekhov to fame. I also see why an early production by Stanislavski rocked the theater world. This play requires the interiority of Stanislavski’s Method, and almost begs the question about whether the evolution of acting could have happened without the evolution of play writing.
I would have preferred to see the same cast fully staged, but I have to recommend it nevertheless. I do get some of the point—by stripping away all of the staging, you are just left with the raw ability of the actors to act. Their choices on miking does make it a bit The Seagull: Mouth Sounds Edition.
Having not seen other versions, I can’t recommend this one more or less, but I definitely enjoyed it.
Best of Enemies
This play relates the real-life on-air debates of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions. Both were a new breed of public intellectuals—William F. Buckley, Jr. was a founder of the National Review. Gore Vidal was a novelist and provocateur and close to the Kennedies. These on-air debates, especially their explosive at the time though tame by modern standards conclusion, is pointed to as a turning point in American politics: the moment when news coverage stopped being about relaying facts and began to be about bloviating talking heads.
The play is based on a documentary of the same name, which I have seen, and manages to capture in stagecraft the feel of montage and television clips from the doc. The only actors playing one character are Zachary Quinto as Gore Vidal and David Harewood as William F. Buckley. All the other actors cover a range of characters, from protestors and news anchors to James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, and Aretha Franklin. It’s definitely a play that benefits from already knowing a fair amount about the era.
Quinto was born to play Gore Vidal. I can’t think of more perfect casting. He’s arch and biting with an inner vulnerability that emerges in moments like when he hears of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. David Harewood is impeccable as Buckley—but this was the one thing I found confusing as a choice. Harewood is black. And Buckley was not just white, but deeply sympathetic to white supremacists. I feel like if you’re going to cross cast a role like that, the casting needs to draw out something. Here, it just means that when Harewood speaks Buckley’s actual words from the debate, they maybe don’t have the undercurrent of racism that would be obvious coming out of a white actor. Especially in a play where all the other parts are played by actors of the race of the people they are portraying—including a significant role for James Baldwin, who has a monologue about debating Buckley himself and how Buckley in that debate was performing an academic exercise and Baldwin was arguing for his value as a human being. It reads differently if they’re both black.
I enjoyed this immensely—two fantastic actors spitting out some of the most well articulated mix of politics and personal spite that has ever been aired is exactly what I want out of a trip to the theater. I missed this on Broadway, so am very glad to be able to have seen a filmed version.
Straight Line Crazy
Another play I missed in New York—by the time I heard it was at the Shed, it was sold out. Funny story about this—NT at Home sent out an email announcing it was on the service. I immediately followed the link and added it to my queue, but there was no play button. I sent an email to their help desk and was told it was blocked in my country. So sorry. A month later, I noticed that it was no longer listed in the browse section of NT at Home—but it was still in my queue. And now had a play button. That may just have been an error on their part, but I watched it immediately before they caught it and pulled it again.
This is a play about Robert Moses, starring Ralph Fiennes. Each act focuses on a single period of his life—the first act on his 1926 building of the Northern and Southern State Parkways, and the second act on his 1956 failed attempt to turn Washington Square Park into an onramp for a cross-town highway that would have sliced Manhattan in half.
I enjoyed this, but found it structurally weird. They introduced Jane Jacobs early in the play, and then she not only didn’t appear again until the second act, but was barely in it at all. I was expecting a Jacobs-Moses showdown, but almost all of the play is dialogue between Moses and his amanuensis, Finnuala Connel, an entirely made-up character. Connel provides prompts for Moses to expound and bloviate to his heart’s content, and at the very end of the play and presumably after thirty years of working with him, allows Connel to lob accusations of racism at him as a gotcha—as if anyone who worked with him for so long would have only come to such a conclusion so late.
Fiennes is very enjoyable, though from his first speech, S and I went oh no--what accent is he trying to do. He settles on something vaguely mid-Atlantic but certainly not New York. Overall an enjoyable watch, though I could have hoped for something written a little more tightly.
Jack Absolute Flies Again
Jack Absolute Flies Again is a modern adaptation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, from the creative team that updated Servant of Two Masters to One Man, Two Guv’nors. The Rivals is an example of “Restoration theatre,” from 1775. Its character Mrs. Malaprop gave us the word malapropism. The original, though, seems to have had an incredibly racist Irish character, been in close dialogue with sentimental literature of its day, and I’m sure the malapropisms would go straight over a modern audience’s head—or just no longer be scandalous.
This is therefore not so much a modern-dress version of that play but an entirely different play using its outlines. It’s a comedy of manners, set during the Battle of Britain (oh, the British do love the Battle of Britain, don’t they?). The plot is unimportant to relay—what is important is that it is hilarious. From Mrs. Malaprop’s you-know-whats (my favorite is “The Cunt of Monte Cristo”) to a sequence where one man has convinced another that a way to a woman’s heart is with bees, the whole thing is outrageously funny.
It unfortunately crashes and burns in the last ten minutes (no pun intended), taking a hard turn into sentimentalism and patriotic jingoism. I think that put the Guardian reviewer off enough he gave it two stars. If you can ignore that, though, definitely recommend.
Wife of Willesden
The Wife of Willesden is a modern translation/interpretation by Zadie Smith of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from Canterbury Tales. It updates itself to being the story of a woman in a pub, relaying her various marriages and life experiences. It impressively stays in meter and rhyme the entire time, without feeling forced or clunky, and is staged with animation and powerful acting.
However, it suffers from the same things as most modern updates of texts so old. First, in Chaucer’s time, where the life of women was barely written about at all, it can be seen as progressive. But in a modern setting, the insistence on marriage as a battle of sexes and her continual subjugation to abusive husbands does not make sense in a world where divorce is available. Second, Wife of Bath is one section of a greater, and unfinished, work. So the play very abruptly stops when the source material does.
Entertaining, for sure, and a dazzling exercise in translation, but not much more than that.
Dixon and Daughters
Dixon and Daughters is a kitchen sink drama—a one-act, ninety minute play taking place entirely in one house between a widow and her two adult daughters and one step-daughter, with few other characters. The Guardian review weirdly calls this “comic domestic noir.” I can’t find anything comic about it.
At the open of the play, the titular Dixon is returning home after three months in jail, for what is soon revealed to be perjuring herself in the trial of her late husband. The play takes its time telling you exactly what the husband did, but it is not at all difficult to figure out from the fractured relationships and alcoholic daughter that it was for child sexual abuse.
This is a play that starts with everyone shouting at each other and continues in that manner until the inevitable revelations. It weirdly introduces a homeless woman that Dixon takes in, as they were on the cell block together, though I can’t figure out what this character is for, other than non sequitors about not wearing knickers and wanting a smoke. It works best in more intimate moments—like when Dixon, alone in her own bed on her first night back calls a suicide help line and keeps insisting that she doesn’t know why she’s calling, it’s just… until she hangs up.
I also enjoyed one piece of the ending (spoiler), where the granddaughter, after hearing the dark secrets of her grandfather revealed, confesses to her aunt—the one who finally spoke out to the police—that she has dropped out of university because a tutor was sexually harassing her. As the granddaughter downplays the interactions (he only touched my neck, he didn’t do anything), the aunt stands up for her fiercely and you get at least the hope that one generation having finally learned to speak the truth will help the next do the same.
I feel like this is one of a million little plays on similar subject matter. It’s fine, but nothing revelatory.
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
I got down to just a rather poor Henry V adaptation on the service that I hadn’t seen (and am stuck halfway through) and paused on keeping up with National Theatre for a bit. Now that they’ve added quite a few more, though, I’ve come back around and in this batch there are mostly bangers and no real stinkers.
The Seagull
This production of Chekhov’s The Seagull continues the trend of minimalist staging. Actually—to call it staged at all is an overstatement. It’s basically a table read—the actors sit in chairs in a box made of wood chips and only stand when they are changing the position of their chairs. While sitting, they have barely any movement at all. This has the effect of making Chekhov feel like Pinter (and oh hey—it was put up in the Harold Pinter theater, so there you are).
The thing is—the play is so very very good and the acting is so very very good that it’s riveting in spite of the overhanded direction. (Oh, in case we missed the foreshadowing of the Chekhov’s gun in this first Chekhov play, in the second act, one of the actors DOESN’T HAVE A CHAIR ANY MORE. Deep.)
This is a production of Anya Reiss’s new “interpretation” of Chekhov’s Seagull. This means it’s been “modernized,” including references to blogs and cell service. (Note from me: Stop it. Stop “updating” plays highly dependent on their historical settings but dropping in anachronisms. STOP IT.) I haven’t seen Seagull before, so I don’t know how much has been edited and how much is Chekhov, but it’s absolutely gripping. The clever lines (a writer talking about his obsession with cataloguing his experiences as they happen for use in his books later—“I feel like I’m eating my life.”). Everyone in the cast is phenomenal, especially Indira Varma as a fading actress having an affair with a famous writer her son’s age.
I see why The Seagull rocketed Chekhov to fame. I also see why an early production by Stanislavski rocked the theater world. This play requires the interiority of Stanislavski’s Method, and almost begs the question about whether the evolution of acting could have happened without the evolution of play writing.
I would have preferred to see the same cast fully staged, but I have to recommend it nevertheless. I do get some of the point—by stripping away all of the staging, you are just left with the raw ability of the actors to act. Their choices on miking does make it a bit The Seagull: Mouth Sounds Edition.
Having not seen other versions, I can’t recommend this one more or less, but I definitely enjoyed it.
Best of Enemies
This play relates the real-life on-air debates of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions. Both were a new breed of public intellectuals—William F. Buckley, Jr. was a founder of the National Review. Gore Vidal was a novelist and provocateur and close to the Kennedies. These on-air debates, especially their explosive at the time though tame by modern standards conclusion, is pointed to as a turning point in American politics: the moment when news coverage stopped being about relaying facts and began to be about bloviating talking heads.
The play is based on a documentary of the same name, which I have seen, and manages to capture in stagecraft the feel of montage and television clips from the doc. The only actors playing one character are Zachary Quinto as Gore Vidal and David Harewood as William F. Buckley. All the other actors cover a range of characters, from protestors and news anchors to James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, and Aretha Franklin. It’s definitely a play that benefits from already knowing a fair amount about the era.
Quinto was born to play Gore Vidal. I can’t think of more perfect casting. He’s arch and biting with an inner vulnerability that emerges in moments like when he hears of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. David Harewood is impeccable as Buckley—but this was the one thing I found confusing as a choice. Harewood is black. And Buckley was not just white, but deeply sympathetic to white supremacists. I feel like if you’re going to cross cast a role like that, the casting needs to draw out something. Here, it just means that when Harewood speaks Buckley’s actual words from the debate, they maybe don’t have the undercurrent of racism that would be obvious coming out of a white actor. Especially in a play where all the other parts are played by actors of the race of the people they are portraying—including a significant role for James Baldwin, who has a monologue about debating Buckley himself and how Buckley in that debate was performing an academic exercise and Baldwin was arguing for his value as a human being. It reads differently if they’re both black.
I enjoyed this immensely—two fantastic actors spitting out some of the most well articulated mix of politics and personal spite that has ever been aired is exactly what I want out of a trip to the theater. I missed this on Broadway, so am very glad to be able to have seen a filmed version.
Straight Line Crazy
Another play I missed in New York—by the time I heard it was at the Shed, it was sold out. Funny story about this—NT at Home sent out an email announcing it was on the service. I immediately followed the link and added it to my queue, but there was no play button. I sent an email to their help desk and was told it was blocked in my country. So sorry. A month later, I noticed that it was no longer listed in the browse section of NT at Home—but it was still in my queue. And now had a play button. That may just have been an error on their part, but I watched it immediately before they caught it and pulled it again.
This is a play about Robert Moses, starring Ralph Fiennes. Each act focuses on a single period of his life—the first act on his 1926 building of the Northern and Southern State Parkways, and the second act on his 1956 failed attempt to turn Washington Square Park into an onramp for a cross-town highway that would have sliced Manhattan in half.
I enjoyed this, but found it structurally weird. They introduced Jane Jacobs early in the play, and then she not only didn’t appear again until the second act, but was barely in it at all. I was expecting a Jacobs-Moses showdown, but almost all of the play is dialogue between Moses and his amanuensis, Finnuala Connel, an entirely made-up character. Connel provides prompts for Moses to expound and bloviate to his heart’s content, and at the very end of the play and presumably after thirty years of working with him, allows Connel to lob accusations of racism at him as a gotcha—as if anyone who worked with him for so long would have only come to such a conclusion so late.
Fiennes is very enjoyable, though from his first speech, S and I went oh no--what accent is he trying to do. He settles on something vaguely mid-Atlantic but certainly not New York. Overall an enjoyable watch, though I could have hoped for something written a little more tightly.
Jack Absolute Flies Again
Jack Absolute Flies Again is a modern adaptation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, from the creative team that updated Servant of Two Masters to One Man, Two Guv’nors. The Rivals is an example of “Restoration theatre,” from 1775. Its character Mrs. Malaprop gave us the word malapropism. The original, though, seems to have had an incredibly racist Irish character, been in close dialogue with sentimental literature of its day, and I’m sure the malapropisms would go straight over a modern audience’s head—or just no longer be scandalous.
This is therefore not so much a modern-dress version of that play but an entirely different play using its outlines. It’s a comedy of manners, set during the Battle of Britain (oh, the British do love the Battle of Britain, don’t they?). The plot is unimportant to relay—what is important is that it is hilarious. From Mrs. Malaprop’s you-know-whats (my favorite is “The Cunt of Monte Cristo”) to a sequence where one man has convinced another that a way to a woman’s heart is with bees, the whole thing is outrageously funny.
It unfortunately crashes and burns in the last ten minutes (no pun intended), taking a hard turn into sentimentalism and patriotic jingoism. I think that put the Guardian reviewer off enough he gave it two stars. If you can ignore that, though, definitely recommend.
Wife of Willesden
The Wife of Willesden is a modern translation/interpretation by Zadie Smith of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from Canterbury Tales. It updates itself to being the story of a woman in a pub, relaying her various marriages and life experiences. It impressively stays in meter and rhyme the entire time, without feeling forced or clunky, and is staged with animation and powerful acting.
However, it suffers from the same things as most modern updates of texts so old. First, in Chaucer’s time, where the life of women was barely written about at all, it can be seen as progressive. But in a modern setting, the insistence on marriage as a battle of sexes and her continual subjugation to abusive husbands does not make sense in a world where divorce is available. Second, Wife of Bath is one section of a greater, and unfinished, work. So the play very abruptly stops when the source material does.
Entertaining, for sure, and a dazzling exercise in translation, but not much more than that.
Dixon and Daughters
Dixon and Daughters is a kitchen sink drama—a one-act, ninety minute play taking place entirely in one house between a widow and her two adult daughters and one step-daughter, with few other characters. The Guardian review weirdly calls this “comic domestic noir.” I can’t find anything comic about it.
At the open of the play, the titular Dixon is returning home after three months in jail, for what is soon revealed to be perjuring herself in the trial of her late husband. The play takes its time telling you exactly what the husband did, but it is not at all difficult to figure out from the fractured relationships and alcoholic daughter that it was for child sexual abuse.
This is a play that starts with everyone shouting at each other and continues in that manner until the inevitable revelations. It weirdly introduces a homeless woman that Dixon takes in, as they were on the cell block together, though I can’t figure out what this character is for, other than non sequitors about not wearing knickers and wanting a smoke. It works best in more intimate moments—like when Dixon, alone in her own bed on her first night back calls a suicide help line and keeps insisting that she doesn’t know why she’s calling, it’s just… until she hangs up.
I also enjoyed one piece of the ending (spoiler), where the granddaughter, after hearing the dark secrets of her grandfather revealed, confesses to her aunt—the one who finally spoke out to the police—that she has dropped out of university because a tutor was sexually harassing her. As the granddaughter downplays the interactions (he only touched my neck, he didn’t do anything), the aunt stands up for her fiercely and you get at least the hope that one generation having finally learned to speak the truth will help the next do the same.
I feel like this is one of a million little plays on similar subject matter. It’s fine, but nothing revelatory.