![[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
Part Twelve
I did it! I have watched every single play on NT at Home!* ** *** That is 84 shows, which is more than is on the service now, as some have expired.
The Crucible
Hard to argue with a classic. The strength of the script pulls you through most productions—this one is stripped down for set, nothing fancy. The one problem is the accents. Good lord, the accents. This is a perennial problem for National Theatre productions of American plays, but this was worse than usual. Particularly since the play is set in 1692, so you could have just had people use their British accents and been fine. Instead, most actors are trying to do an unmarked American accent with varying levels of success. And then there’s the actor playing John Proctor who is attempting a Boston accent and landing somewhere in Canada.
The accent splatter is honestly distracting and kept throwing us out of it for all of the first scene and quite frequently through the rest of it. Does this all sound fine to Brits? Dear NT—if you’re going to do American plays either just do it in your own accents or get better dialect coaches.
Blues for an Alabama Sky
This is a play from 1995 set in the Harlem Renaissance. It deals with similar themes as other works from the actual Harlem Renaissance (that is, what happens to a dream deferred), except with a lot more candor about one character being gay and another one trying to start a family planning clinic.
It’s mostly a character piece, very well performed. But to provide it some plot structure, it has created a villain out of the one black character who is new to Harlem from Alabama. All the others are appropriately liberal; the Alabaman hates the gay man and thinks abortions are murder. It is weird to turn the villain of a piece on the Harlem Renaissance into a poor black man rather than have the villain be structural racism. It also ends up being very anti-choice, I think more as an accident of other dramatic choices. But the fact remains that everyone gets a happy ending except the woman who got an abortion.
It glances past some interesting conversations that it doesn’t really dig into. For example, pushback on the family planning clinic in Harlem by the congregation of the Abyssinian Baptist Church because it is viewed as a means for white men to destroy the Black race. But the writer seems so convinced that you, the audience, will of course agree with the view that this clinic is a good thing that the play doesn’t actually address that perspective in a serious way.
In conclusion, I think there’s a reason why there isn’t even a Wikipedia page on this play. I think if you want to put on a piece that addresses these issues, there are better options. And I always find it weird when the National Theatre wades into conversations on American racism.
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, but I have to admit that 95% of my love for it is actually love of the too horny to be believed 1993 movie with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. I’ve seen that so many times I can’t help compare any other version to the line readings in the movie.
This movie is set in a resort somewhere vaguely in the thirties. It’s fine, but doesn’t quite land. Katherine Parkinson (Beatrice) and John Heffernan (Benedick) are great at the comedy—by far the best scene is the gulling scene. They don’t manage the drama, especially Heffernan. Some of the most dramatic scenes also have weirdly static staging. Everyone just stands around in the wedding scene, which I can’t help but compare to the 1993 movie where Claudio flings Hero to the ground and overturns all the benches.
I hated all of the musical choices, especially using the night guard as singers, which was jarring. The one part of the 1993 movie that has always grated is Michael Keaton’s Dogberry. In this production, I can see how he ended up making the choices he did—you kind of have to do something. This Dogberry does a few bits of physical comedy, but mostly says his lines straight, almost making the misspeaking go by unnoticed.
This production was fine.
The Corn Is Green
According to The Guardian, this is a beloved play and part of theater’s turn towards sentimentalism post COVID. It forced me to ask, though—can you do a white savior narrative when everyone’s white?
This is a semi-autobiographical play from 1938. It is about an English spinster who moves to a poor, Welsh mining town and starts a school to teach the miners’ children to read and write. One of these boys turns out to be exceptionally bright, and the teacher devotes herself to getting him out of poverty and into Oxford with a scholarship. (This boy is the character based on the author.)
If you take it on surface value, it’s a good play. But if you think about it for even a minute…
There’s the fact that the teacher comes to teach the children to read and write English--after an early part of the play makes a big deal out of the English characters comparing the Welsh to savages for speaking only Welsh. There’s the fact that taking twenty boys out of the mines and educating them does nothing to change the existence of child labor in the mines. At best, all she’s done is made children from the neighboring village go down the mines. There’s the fact that the teacher repeatedly wants to chuck the whole enterprise but only persists because this one boy is so exceptional. I’m sure it’s great to be that boy, but the amount this play avoids addressing or even thinking about systemic problems is staggering. And this, as far as internet research informs me, is the only one of this playwright’s plays to have had a measure of success. Showing that it’s not that the English admire his intelligence and hard work so much as they like looking at a work that tells them how great they are for plucking one Welsh boy out of poverty while still exploiting all the others.
It’s a good watch, but raises a lot of uncomfortable questions.
Kerry Jackson
This play had very little redeeming value. It’s a new work focused on Kerry Jackson, the owner of a new Spanish restaurant who voted Leave. She’s conservative and unapologetic and spends most of the run time of the play alternating between button-pushing hilarity and outright hate speech. There’s a plot, but it’s contrived as hell (involving her enlisting a local, liberal councilmember in her effort to run a homeless man off her property and then getting romantically involved with the councilmember).
It ultimately doesn’t have much to say about her politics. It just feels like an excuse to write a play with a lot of people saying unacceptable things and then call it commentary. The closest it gets to a message is saying that classes don’t mix in this country.
Obviously, this is trying to speak to a political and national moment that is not mine, but for my money, if you want to see something on NT at Home that addresses Brexit and racism in Britain, go for the Death of England trilogy.
Hex
This is NT’s attempt at a big budget spectacle musical. It looks fantastic. And kind of sucks.
The music is truly forgettable. The performance of the main fairy really didn’t work as she has this sort of rumpled, bed-head, hapless aesthetic, complete with exceedingly annoying incantations whenever she tries a blessing—but then when she sings it’s full-on pop star. I mean, she’s a great singer, but it doesn’t fit with the rest.
This is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the fairy that hexes her, but bears no resemblance to either the Brothers Grimm or the Disney version. In this version, the fairy is a hapless wannabe who hexes Sleeping Beauty out of frustration and impulse and loses her powers as a result. About forty minutes in, you meet the other main character of the show, which is an Ogress who is having a child by a human and wants the fairy’s help to keep her from eating her baby. (Because in this world, ogres eat human babies—they literally can’t help it. There’s a whole song about the essentialism of creatures’ behavior called “Nature of the Beast.”)
The show therefore swings between broad, panto-esque comedy and some dark fucking shit as the Ogress attempts to, and thinks she succeeds at, eating her own grandchildren and the fairy kills random servants to feed to her instead. It’s tonal whiplash.
Henry V
I generally like Henry V, but—oof, this production. They did it in modern military dress (a standard interpretation I’m tired of) and decided to amp up the realism. In particular by having an extended on-stage strangulation. They also chose to make every scene in the French court in French, which is frankly a baffling decision. The play already had some French in it. But taking a good fifth of a Shakespeare play and putting it in French with supertitles is just alienating. There’s also some Mandarin floating around for…reasons. Overall, a bunch of baffling choices which meant that overall I was thrown out of it entirely.
Phaedra
If there is one play that does not need a contemporary retelling, it is Jean Racine’s Phedre. Which also has a version on this platform, one of the first I reviewed.
The original is about a woman who falls in love with her stepson, makes a pass at him when she thinks her husband is dead, is rejected, and when her husband turns out not to be dead, accuses her stepson of rape. And then everyone dies.
In this contemporary update, the main character, now named Sofiane, is a post-menopausal politician who had a fling with a Moroccan in her youth that ended in his death. Now her dead lover’s son has reappeared with motives unknown, and she commences a heated affair with him that inevitably destroys all her relationships and ends in more death.
It’s like this play thinks that by staging a lot of sex scenes between a young man and an older woman and then having her talk in graphic detail about them it’s being edgy. It also throws in a race aspect that it doesn’t really know how to handle. (Is she fetishizing both of her lovers’ Arab-ness? Yes. And therefore--?)
It also makes the choice to make an extended monologue at the end of the play in a combination of Arabic and French, spoken very rapidly, with supertitles projected onto a rotating set. This adds verisimilitude to the Moroccan-ness of the character, but makes it rather hard to follow the climax of the play.
Just—skip it. There have to be better ways of dealing with the sexuality of older women than by hanging the story on the fundamentally sexist bones of a play originally by Euripedes.
*Until they add a new one.
**There’s another Othello production. I’m not watching it. I’m done with that play.
***I’m also not watching Yerma, a play about a woman going insane after struggling with infertility. That one’s a FUCK NO.
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Part Twelve
I did it! I have watched every single play on NT at Home!* ** *** That is 84 shows, which is more than is on the service now, as some have expired.
The Crucible
Hard to argue with a classic. The strength of the script pulls you through most productions—this one is stripped down for set, nothing fancy. The one problem is the accents. Good lord, the accents. This is a perennial problem for National Theatre productions of American plays, but this was worse than usual. Particularly since the play is set in 1692, so you could have just had people use their British accents and been fine. Instead, most actors are trying to do an unmarked American accent with varying levels of success. And then there’s the actor playing John Proctor who is attempting a Boston accent and landing somewhere in Canada.
The accent splatter is honestly distracting and kept throwing us out of it for all of the first scene and quite frequently through the rest of it. Does this all sound fine to Brits? Dear NT—if you’re going to do American plays either just do it in your own accents or get better dialect coaches.
Blues for an Alabama Sky
This is a play from 1995 set in the Harlem Renaissance. It deals with similar themes as other works from the actual Harlem Renaissance (that is, what happens to a dream deferred), except with a lot more candor about one character being gay and another one trying to start a family planning clinic.
It’s mostly a character piece, very well performed. But to provide it some plot structure, it has created a villain out of the one black character who is new to Harlem from Alabama. All the others are appropriately liberal; the Alabaman hates the gay man and thinks abortions are murder. It is weird to turn the villain of a piece on the Harlem Renaissance into a poor black man rather than have the villain be structural racism. It also ends up being very anti-choice, I think more as an accident of other dramatic choices. But the fact remains that everyone gets a happy ending except the woman who got an abortion.
It glances past some interesting conversations that it doesn’t really dig into. For example, pushback on the family planning clinic in Harlem by the congregation of the Abyssinian Baptist Church because it is viewed as a means for white men to destroy the Black race. But the writer seems so convinced that you, the audience, will of course agree with the view that this clinic is a good thing that the play doesn’t actually address that perspective in a serious way.
In conclusion, I think there’s a reason why there isn’t even a Wikipedia page on this play. I think if you want to put on a piece that addresses these issues, there are better options. And I always find it weird when the National Theatre wades into conversations on American racism.
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, but I have to admit that 95% of my love for it is actually love of the too horny to be believed 1993 movie with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. I’ve seen that so many times I can’t help compare any other version to the line readings in the movie.
This movie is set in a resort somewhere vaguely in the thirties. It’s fine, but doesn’t quite land. Katherine Parkinson (Beatrice) and John Heffernan (Benedick) are great at the comedy—by far the best scene is the gulling scene. They don’t manage the drama, especially Heffernan. Some of the most dramatic scenes also have weirdly static staging. Everyone just stands around in the wedding scene, which I can’t help but compare to the 1993 movie where Claudio flings Hero to the ground and overturns all the benches.
I hated all of the musical choices, especially using the night guard as singers, which was jarring. The one part of the 1993 movie that has always grated is Michael Keaton’s Dogberry. In this production, I can see how he ended up making the choices he did—you kind of have to do something. This Dogberry does a few bits of physical comedy, but mostly says his lines straight, almost making the misspeaking go by unnoticed.
This production was fine.
The Corn Is Green
According to The Guardian, this is a beloved play and part of theater’s turn towards sentimentalism post COVID. It forced me to ask, though—can you do a white savior narrative when everyone’s white?
This is a semi-autobiographical play from 1938. It is about an English spinster who moves to a poor, Welsh mining town and starts a school to teach the miners’ children to read and write. One of these boys turns out to be exceptionally bright, and the teacher devotes herself to getting him out of poverty and into Oxford with a scholarship. (This boy is the character based on the author.)
If you take it on surface value, it’s a good play. But if you think about it for even a minute…
There’s the fact that the teacher comes to teach the children to read and write English--after an early part of the play makes a big deal out of the English characters comparing the Welsh to savages for speaking only Welsh. There’s the fact that taking twenty boys out of the mines and educating them does nothing to change the existence of child labor in the mines. At best, all she’s done is made children from the neighboring village go down the mines. There’s the fact that the teacher repeatedly wants to chuck the whole enterprise but only persists because this one boy is so exceptional. I’m sure it’s great to be that boy, but the amount this play avoids addressing or even thinking about systemic problems is staggering. And this, as far as internet research informs me, is the only one of this playwright’s plays to have had a measure of success. Showing that it’s not that the English admire his intelligence and hard work so much as they like looking at a work that tells them how great they are for plucking one Welsh boy out of poverty while still exploiting all the others.
It’s a good watch, but raises a lot of uncomfortable questions.
Kerry Jackson
This play had very little redeeming value. It’s a new work focused on Kerry Jackson, the owner of a new Spanish restaurant who voted Leave. She’s conservative and unapologetic and spends most of the run time of the play alternating between button-pushing hilarity and outright hate speech. There’s a plot, but it’s contrived as hell (involving her enlisting a local, liberal councilmember in her effort to run a homeless man off her property and then getting romantically involved with the councilmember).
It ultimately doesn’t have much to say about her politics. It just feels like an excuse to write a play with a lot of people saying unacceptable things and then call it commentary. The closest it gets to a message is saying that classes don’t mix in this country.
Obviously, this is trying to speak to a political and national moment that is not mine, but for my money, if you want to see something on NT at Home that addresses Brexit and racism in Britain, go for the Death of England trilogy.
Hex
This is NT’s attempt at a big budget spectacle musical. It looks fantastic. And kind of sucks.
The music is truly forgettable. The performance of the main fairy really didn’t work as she has this sort of rumpled, bed-head, hapless aesthetic, complete with exceedingly annoying incantations whenever she tries a blessing—but then when she sings it’s full-on pop star. I mean, she’s a great singer, but it doesn’t fit with the rest.
This is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the fairy that hexes her, but bears no resemblance to either the Brothers Grimm or the Disney version. In this version, the fairy is a hapless wannabe who hexes Sleeping Beauty out of frustration and impulse and loses her powers as a result. About forty minutes in, you meet the other main character of the show, which is an Ogress who is having a child by a human and wants the fairy’s help to keep her from eating her baby. (Because in this world, ogres eat human babies—they literally can’t help it. There’s a whole song about the essentialism of creatures’ behavior called “Nature of the Beast.”)
The show therefore swings between broad, panto-esque comedy and some dark fucking shit as the Ogress attempts to, and thinks she succeeds at, eating her own grandchildren and the fairy kills random servants to feed to her instead. It’s tonal whiplash.
Henry V
I generally like Henry V, but—oof, this production. They did it in modern military dress (a standard interpretation I’m tired of) and decided to amp up the realism. In particular by having an extended on-stage strangulation. They also chose to make every scene in the French court in French, which is frankly a baffling decision. The play already had some French in it. But taking a good fifth of a Shakespeare play and putting it in French with supertitles is just alienating. There’s also some Mandarin floating around for…reasons. Overall, a bunch of baffling choices which meant that overall I was thrown out of it entirely.
Phaedra
If there is one play that does not need a contemporary retelling, it is Jean Racine’s Phedre. Which also has a version on this platform, one of the first I reviewed.
The original is about a woman who falls in love with her stepson, makes a pass at him when she thinks her husband is dead, is rejected, and when her husband turns out not to be dead, accuses her stepson of rape. And then everyone dies.
In this contemporary update, the main character, now named Sofiane, is a post-menopausal politician who had a fling with a Moroccan in her youth that ended in his death. Now her dead lover’s son has reappeared with motives unknown, and she commences a heated affair with him that inevitably destroys all her relationships and ends in more death.
It’s like this play thinks that by staging a lot of sex scenes between a young man and an older woman and then having her talk in graphic detail about them it’s being edgy. It also throws in a race aspect that it doesn’t really know how to handle. (Is she fetishizing both of her lovers’ Arab-ness? Yes. And therefore--?)
It also makes the choice to make an extended monologue at the end of the play in a combination of Arabic and French, spoken very rapidly, with supertitles projected onto a rotating set. This adds verisimilitude to the Moroccan-ness of the character, but makes it rather hard to follow the climax of the play.
Just—skip it. There have to be better ways of dealing with the sexuality of older women than by hanging the story on the fundamentally sexist bones of a play originally by Euripedes.
*Until they add a new one.
**There’s another Othello production. I’m not watching it. I’m done with that play.
***I’m also not watching Yerma, a play about a woman going insane after struggling with infertility. That one’s a FUCK NO.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-16 12:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-17 02:34 am (UTC)