National Theatre reviews - Part Fifteen
May. 25th, 2025 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficIndex of NTatHome reviews
(Yes, I finally caved and just spent an hour creating an index. If someone can tell me how to make Excel include straight quotes in concatenation I'd be much obliged.)
Part fifteen in the neverending series of Ivy watches all the plays on the NT at Home service. Why am I still going? Who knows!
The Father and the Assassin
This is a play about Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Gandhi. The playwright is trying to be as accurate as possible, but many things about Godse’s life are not known. One of the main features of his life, though, is that he was raised as a girl. All the other sons of his parents had died in infancy, so his parents feared a curse and raised him as a daughter to avoid it. This actual historical fact could lead to some…very uncomfortable dramatic staging, but this play handles it well, including that being raised as a girl essentially gave Godse a trans experience, of feeling wrong in his own skin.
Godse is portrayed as playful and childish and chronically immature—but very, very charming. So the play is a cautionary tale of how thwarted entitlement can meet a radicalizing leader. Godse believes he is destined for great things, just as India is destined for great things, but as his poverty and class and character keep him far from greatness, his ambition for immortality curdles into an assassination.
It’s a cautionary tale, but left me with a whole lot of questions about this period of history.
Constellations
This is the most written for high school play I’ve ever seen. If it had debuted in 1995 instead of 2012, I guarantee my high school would have staged it.
This is a two-person show about Roland and Marianne, two people who meet and maybe fall in love. The conceit is multiverse theory (Marianne is a physicist), so the play’s five or so scenes each repeat half a dozen times with different emotions and different outcomes. (See what I mean about it being the most high school? It’s pretty much an acting exercise.) The scenes of them meeting, going on a first date, breaking up, meeting again and maybe getting back together are interspersed with the end of their story which I’m just going to spoil here—Marianne is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and is trying to decide whether to pursue euthanasia. That’s the underlying reason for the whole everything you’ve ever and never done exists in a multiverse conceit—that with a decision like that, she both does and does not go through with it.
I point out the ending, because this production has four casts, which invite you to watch it four times in a row. Which I did not do. Because I’m not watching a play about euthanasia four times. Also, the play itself is already incredibly repetitive. I watched the Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah cast—they were great. I jumped into the other casts just to see how they were different, and even watching one scene of each, the play wears out its welcome really fast. The other casts are Peter Capaldi and Zoë Wanamaker (and it makes the show very different if it’s older actors dealing with a cancer diagnosis than younger ones), Omari Douglas and Russel Tovey, and Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd.
Overall—it’s fine. It relies on its high concept to be deeper than it is. At least it’s short.
The House of Bernarda Alba
The set up of The House of Bernarda Alba is very similar to many other kitchen dramas—it is the day after the funeral of Bernarda Alba’s husband and father to four of her five daughters. But this play is slipping a message about fascism into familiar packaging about patriarchy. It was the last play completed by Federico García Lorca before he was assassinated by fascists in 1936 Spain. Bernarda Alba has declared that her daughters are of a higher class than any of the laborers in their village, and is shutting them away in her house for eight years in morning. This leads to them turning on themselves and each other with tragic ends.
This staging is a panopticon, where you see every room of the house at all times—though the pro shoot inevitably focuses in on the speakers, so loses much of the effect. You see the world going on behind them, in the public rooms of the house, while the sisters are left to do nothing but pick at each other in their seclusion. S said it was one of the shouty plays, and it is, but more motivated than most. It’s a pretty unpleasant watch, and seems to be saying something about a very specific political context that I feel too distant from to fully understand.
Also, trigger warning for choosing to graphically stage a suicide. I which modern productions didn’t try to be edgy by putting the literally obscene on stage.
The Effect
This is another play that seems made for high school productions. Four actors on an empty stage. Two are participants in a drug trial for a new antidepressant. Two are the doctors administering the trial. The play poses the question: can we trust love if we are on a psychoactive drug?
The thing is—all the bioethics in this play are nonsense. Like, the administrator of the drug in the trial has a huge fight with the primary investigator when she finds out it’s a double blind. And—that’s a very normal thing for a clinical trial! Like. What even? Everything this play wants to say is completely subsumed in the fact that it’s being said by a playwright who doesn’t know a dang thing about clinical trials or psychoactive medications.
Also, this is Jamie Lloyd directed, which means that the actors are miked so that you got All. The. Mouth. Sounds. Lloyd seems to really like doing that.
The Other Place
A retelling of Antigone in modern times, you say. Isn’t that play about the conflict of different morality systems, opposing blind loyalty to the ruler with Greek funerial practices, you say. Why yes, yes it is. How does one update that to modern times when neither of those are value systems anymore?
Well you might ask. And it does mean that Annie’s insistence on keeping her father’s ashes in the house rather than scattering them is extremely out of leftfield. So in order to justify the tragedy, this play adds child sexual abuse. Which makes it not very like Antigone at all, except for a weird focus on the disposition of a body.
So if it’s not Antigone, is it any good? Not really. There are a million of these plays (I’ve seen them—National Theatre has so many). Estranged family member comes home. Secrets are revealed, almost always sexual abuse. Tragedy ensues. This is an example of that category, and a pretty run of the mill one. At least it doesn’t show the suicide on stage? Yay?
London Tide
This production combines two things the National Theatre is very bad at: adaptations of books and musicals. From the opening moment, we are treated to the entire cast standing in a line and expressionlessly singing, “This is a story of London,” over and over. The music is awful. And they seem to have hired people who can’t sing—or hired people that can and directed them very badly.
As it’s based on Dickens, there’s a base level at which the plot is interesting, but the authors didn’t seem to understand what makes book musicals work—you’ll get a dramatic scene acted out, then everything stops for a song. The characters don’t experience their heightened emotions in the song, the song is redundant. You could excise all of the songs and the play would work fine. That makes the choice to make this a musical honestly baffling, given how terrible the music is.
You’ve been warned. This one is pretty awful.
(Yes, I finally caved and just spent an hour creating an index. If someone can tell me how to make Excel include straight quotes in concatenation I'd be much obliged.)
Part fifteen in the neverending series of Ivy watches all the plays on the NT at Home service. Why am I still going? Who knows!
The Father and the Assassin
This is a play about Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Gandhi. The playwright is trying to be as accurate as possible, but many things about Godse’s life are not known. One of the main features of his life, though, is that he was raised as a girl. All the other sons of his parents had died in infancy, so his parents feared a curse and raised him as a daughter to avoid it. This actual historical fact could lead to some…very uncomfortable dramatic staging, but this play handles it well, including that being raised as a girl essentially gave Godse a trans experience, of feeling wrong in his own skin.
Godse is portrayed as playful and childish and chronically immature—but very, very charming. So the play is a cautionary tale of how thwarted entitlement can meet a radicalizing leader. Godse believes he is destined for great things, just as India is destined for great things, but as his poverty and class and character keep him far from greatness, his ambition for immortality curdles into an assassination.
It’s a cautionary tale, but left me with a whole lot of questions about this period of history.
Constellations
This is the most written for high school play I’ve ever seen. If it had debuted in 1995 instead of 2012, I guarantee my high school would have staged it.
This is a two-person show about Roland and Marianne, two people who meet and maybe fall in love. The conceit is multiverse theory (Marianne is a physicist), so the play’s five or so scenes each repeat half a dozen times with different emotions and different outcomes. (See what I mean about it being the most high school? It’s pretty much an acting exercise.) The scenes of them meeting, going on a first date, breaking up, meeting again and maybe getting back together are interspersed with the end of their story which I’m just going to spoil here—Marianne is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and is trying to decide whether to pursue euthanasia. That’s the underlying reason for the whole everything you’ve ever and never done exists in a multiverse conceit—that with a decision like that, she both does and does not go through with it.
I point out the ending, because this production has four casts, which invite you to watch it four times in a row. Which I did not do. Because I’m not watching a play about euthanasia four times. Also, the play itself is already incredibly repetitive. I watched the Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah cast—they were great. I jumped into the other casts just to see how they were different, and even watching one scene of each, the play wears out its welcome really fast. The other casts are Peter Capaldi and Zoë Wanamaker (and it makes the show very different if it’s older actors dealing with a cancer diagnosis than younger ones), Omari Douglas and Russel Tovey, and Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd.
Overall—it’s fine. It relies on its high concept to be deeper than it is. At least it’s short.
The House of Bernarda Alba
The set up of The House of Bernarda Alba is very similar to many other kitchen dramas—it is the day after the funeral of Bernarda Alba’s husband and father to four of her five daughters. But this play is slipping a message about fascism into familiar packaging about patriarchy. It was the last play completed by Federico García Lorca before he was assassinated by fascists in 1936 Spain. Bernarda Alba has declared that her daughters are of a higher class than any of the laborers in their village, and is shutting them away in her house for eight years in morning. This leads to them turning on themselves and each other with tragic ends.
This staging is a panopticon, where you see every room of the house at all times—though the pro shoot inevitably focuses in on the speakers, so loses much of the effect. You see the world going on behind them, in the public rooms of the house, while the sisters are left to do nothing but pick at each other in their seclusion. S said it was one of the shouty plays, and it is, but more motivated than most. It’s a pretty unpleasant watch, and seems to be saying something about a very specific political context that I feel too distant from to fully understand.
Also, trigger warning for choosing to graphically stage a suicide. I which modern productions didn’t try to be edgy by putting the literally obscene on stage.
The Effect
This is another play that seems made for high school productions. Four actors on an empty stage. Two are participants in a drug trial for a new antidepressant. Two are the doctors administering the trial. The play poses the question: can we trust love if we are on a psychoactive drug?
The thing is—all the bioethics in this play are nonsense. Like, the administrator of the drug in the trial has a huge fight with the primary investigator when she finds out it’s a double blind. And—that’s a very normal thing for a clinical trial! Like. What even? Everything this play wants to say is completely subsumed in the fact that it’s being said by a playwright who doesn’t know a dang thing about clinical trials or psychoactive medications.
Also, this is Jamie Lloyd directed, which means that the actors are miked so that you got All. The. Mouth. Sounds. Lloyd seems to really like doing that.
The Other Place
A retelling of Antigone in modern times, you say. Isn’t that play about the conflict of different morality systems, opposing blind loyalty to the ruler with Greek funerial practices, you say. Why yes, yes it is. How does one update that to modern times when neither of those are value systems anymore?
Well you might ask. And it does mean that Annie’s insistence on keeping her father’s ashes in the house rather than scattering them is extremely out of leftfield. So in order to justify the tragedy, this play adds child sexual abuse. Which makes it not very like Antigone at all, except for a weird focus on the disposition of a body.
So if it’s not Antigone, is it any good? Not really. There are a million of these plays (I’ve seen them—National Theatre has so many). Estranged family member comes home. Secrets are revealed, almost always sexual abuse. Tragedy ensues. This is an example of that category, and a pretty run of the mill one. At least it doesn’t show the suicide on stage? Yay?
London Tide
This production combines two things the National Theatre is very bad at: adaptations of books and musicals. From the opening moment, we are treated to the entire cast standing in a line and expressionlessly singing, “This is a story of London,” over and over. The music is awful. And they seem to have hired people who can’t sing—or hired people that can and directed them very badly.
As it’s based on Dickens, there’s a base level at which the plot is interesting, but the authors didn’t seem to understand what makes book musicals work—you’ll get a dramatic scene acted out, then everything stops for a song. The characters don’t experience their heightened emotions in the song, the song is redundant. You could excise all of the songs and the play would work fine. That makes the choice to make this a musical honestly baffling, given how terrible the music is.
You’ve been warned. This one is pretty awful.