Poets and the Great War

The Almeida production of The Dark Earth and The Light Sky is a rarity.  Nick Dear's play traces the last seven years of the poet Edward Thomas. We see his troubled marriage, compulsive walking and friendship with Robert Frost, who turns him to poetry. We are shown Eleanor Farjeon's adoration of him and the two rich years of productivity before his death in World War I from a shell blast at Arras in 1917.  By all rights it shouldn't be particularly dramatic, especially in the way it's written.  It combines monologues that directly address the audience with vignettes of the poet's life which seems almost entirely comprised of depression and long walks in the country.  But the quality of the writing, acting, and directorial image take real characters - now long dead - and introduce them to the audience anew, making the production fresh and utterly absorbing.

The story is undoubtedly tragic.  Bob Crowley's design evokes both the barren wasteland of the trenches of WWI and the rich soil of England's countryside.  It easily transitions to so many different locations.  In one scene, Helen Thomas actually digs potatoes out of it.  In another, a bomb explodes casting dirt in every direction.  Peter Mumford's lights are simply beautiful.  The rich ambers and purples create beautiful days and sharp spots delineate the reflective monologues, separating them from the narrative in a way that makes you feel like you're sitting alone in a room with the figures portrayed. The country sky is brought to life in all it's varieties with little pins of light creating stars and clouds actually seeming to move across the backdrop.  John Leonard sound design evokes equally and perfectly birdsong and the sounds of war.

The casting here is perfect.  The characters are utterly and painfully believable.  They capture the little dramas of an unhappy marriage and the loss of a friend so dear they seem to have been fated to know you.  Richard Eyre's directorial image fosters this approach to the story and supports the drama of the relationships of a set of average people who happened to be famous as well.  The portrayals are really beautiful.

Ayckbourn's Amateur Hour

Alan Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval is, I think. inherently funny.  Ayckbourn is a funny man and he wrote a play about an amateur operatic society, which is inherently funny.  But comedy demands to be well played or else the jokes die.  Trevor Nunn's erratically cast and oddly awkward production at the Harold Pinter Theater lacks the timing, sense of company, and ability to project that would constitute a well played production.

Nunn's production takes a somewhat condescending tone toward the endeavors of amateur theater, which is perhaps the choice guiltiest of robbing the play of its comedy.  The play demands to be linked to The Beggar's Opera (the show within the show) and it seems completely disconected not only as a result of lighting design choices that create completely different environments for the overlapping moments but also as a result of the fact that the lyrics are often inaudible.  Guy, the protagonist, is played as an inaudible nonentity, which immediately drains the energy of the script and he's actually one of the best actors.  Dafydd (yes, the character is welsh) is distinctly overplayed and comes across as a little bipolar.  The cast seems totally random (at least Twelfth Night had a sense of cohesion even if it did seem like a bunch of old guys getting together to put on a show) so the relationships seem somewhat forced.  The set also looks somewhat fake; this might work for the scenes in which the cast inhabit The Beggar's Opera but it creates a stagey feel for the scenes that are supposed to take place in the real world.  The walls of pubs don't swing.  There is one somewhat wonderful moment when Dafydd is trying to get through a tech rehearsal with a  lighting designer who is afraid of heights and a plot that's been patched in the most non-linear manner possible, but on the whole the play lacks a sense of cohesiveness and believability.  

Men Playing Women Playing Men

Some are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them.  You'd think it would come from a history play.  It's from Twelfth Night.  Similarly, some men are born to play women; some men achieve the ability to play women; and some men have women's roles thrust upon them.  It comes across as really sad when it's the third one.

Reprising the quadricentennial production ten years later, Mark Rylance and the boys are back in an all male production of Twelfth Night.  Ten years later, a lot of the men are too old to be playing women.  Mark Rylance is a great actor and Olivia can be a very funny character, but Mark Rylance playing Olivia just seems pathetic.  Quite frankly, he's too old.  His mannerisms would be comical on a younger Orsino but come across as desperate when Rylance plays them.  It's impossible to believe that Liam Brennan, who plays a fantastic Orsino, would be attracted to her, especially in her almost kabuki style makeup and incredibly severe wig.  The production suffers from the hair and makeup design; Viola and Sebastian are made to look more alike through makeup and wigs, but they end up looking like ghosts wearing hair pieces made of yarn.  It also suffers a little as a result of casting.  The actors playing Viola and Sebastian should be switched.  The actor playing Sebastian, Samuel Barnett, looks much more feminine and is honestly a better actor.  Johnny Flynn, Viola, looks uncomfortable on stage (he takes some strange beats and conspicuously watches his feet during the dancing) and disconcertingly mannish.  Then again, some men are born to play women.  Or achieve that ability later in life.  Either way, Paul Chahidi, who turns Maria into a plumply roguish figure forever eyeing Sir Toby with lascivious enthusiasm, does yield a very funny performance.  Stephen Fry is almost too good as Malvolio; it's hard to believe that Olivia would spurn his advances.

The costume and set design are positively wonderful.  Even though Mark Rylance's costume reads a little like the old version of Elizabeth I as portrayed in many movies, the outfits are fantastic.  Jenny Tiramani's set – a decorated oak screen, with some of the audience seated in on-stage galleries – suits Twelfth Night wonderfully (it's being performed in rep with Richard III), and recreates the collegiate atmosphere the play must have had when seen at the Inns of Court in 1602.  

It comes together into an alright production.  Perhaps I'm ultimately questioning the directorial image of Tim Carroll.  He chooses to play up the more sombre aspects of Twelfth Night, the longing for an unrequited love and class warfare, as opposed to the funnier aspects, namely mistaken identities and class warfare.  

Experimental, Cinematic, Animated Theater

On the edge of a major metropolis lies the Bayou: a sprawling tenement block of which people say "If you're born in the Bayou, you die in the Bayou."  I drag my parents to some weird productions.

After catching a plane five hours ahead of schedule to beat a weather front so severe the BBC felt it newsworthy, the Eames family touched down in London.  First up: 1927's The Animals and Children Took to the Streets.  It somehow ended up billed as a children's show.  It's not.  It's a really wacked out combination of projected animations, musical theater, and meta story telling.  It's kind of like Adventure Time;  it may be billed for children, but it is not for children.  

The show is somehow performed by three women and a host of animated characters including various rival gangs of children.  Children really are a menace in this show.  The plot has a gang of child-pirates go on  the rampage, take over a middle-class park and even kidnap the mayor's cat before being whisked off in black ice-cream vans and effectively sedated by gumdrops infused with a drugstore's worth of sedatives.  At the beginning Agnes Eaves and her daughter arrive in the hopes of reforming the children through arts and crafts (specifically pasta collage), only to leave when the going gets tough.    It mixes together in something that feels like part silent movie, part social commentary, part Cabaret.  

It is seamlessly synchronized and well worth it.  It's just not really for the kids.  I don't know who got that idea...

The Recruiting Officer

I feel like I should make a few disclaimers to begin this post, just so you take my praise with an appropriate grain of salt.

I love the Donmar.

I am ever so slightly obsessed with Mark Gatiss (I follow him on twitter!).

Steven Moffat was sitting 20 feet away from me when I saw this performed.

The cast is 98% comprised of very good-looking men (there are some women as well).

Good?  Awesome.

This production is the first for the Donmar Warehouse’s new Artistic Director.  Given the quality of the show, I think we need not worry about the regime change.  The audience files in as the actors walk about the stage lighting the many candles surrounding the space.  This, combined with the scenic design, evokes a warm tavern or public house of the late 1600s.  It’s really cool is what I’m saying.  Five of the actors also double as musicians, whose antics add to the fun of this hilarious show.  And it’s a lot of fun.  There’s cross dressing, bawdy humor, and a German doctor named Conundrum from the far away land of Algebra (in the words of Captain Brazen: “I find his place of nativity hard to calculate”).  And that’s just one scene. 

The comedy is tinged with a hint of realism, stemming from the playwright’s experience as a recruiting officer.  Farquhar wrote this play in a time of patriotism and pride in the British army in the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession.  There was a certain glamour surrounding the officers of the army. But the final scene of the play (I won’t say how) still manages to evoke the horrors of war.  It leaves you with a slightly unsettled feeling in spite of the post-comedy high.  Which I think makes this a really good play.  The acting is wonderful, the lighting (both candle and instrument) is perfect, and the set pulls the whole thing together into a very realistic, mutable environment; but the writing and the directing make the production special.

It's Man vs. Monster, and the Monster Always Wins...

I feel like this is become a theme of my theater going experience.  In any case, I have touched down in London for another bout of theater going madness and have hit the ground running.  My family used to kind of live in London, so nowadays we try to come over every few months to catch up with friends, see some museum exhibits that we know won't come to New York, and - more importantly - see theater.  Today, we saw two of the hottest tickets in London: The Madness of King George III and Collaborators.  It seems only fitting to start with the matinee...

The Madness of King George III is a revival of an Alan Bennett play that I should think needs no reviving.  Suffice it to say that I think the playwright is doing something wrong when you care nothing for the characters on stage.  This is now the second play I've seen by Mr. Bennett, and I think I might be done with him.  My family managed to get tickets to The Habit of Art a few years ago, another inexplicably hot ticket in London, and not even the impeccable staging and acting of Alex Jennings could save it from Mr. Bennett.  But setting all that aside (which seems like a ermarkable feat) the acting of David Haig (King George Himself) and Nicholas Rowe (who does an excellent job playing the part of Prime Minister Pitt) as well as Janet Bird's design save the show from being completely unwatchable.  The script may be tedious, self-important, and awkward, but the actors bring it to a watchable level of mediocrity.  In this play, the man is King George, the monster is porphyria, and all seem to be fighting against the script.  It is ultimately unclear who or what has won.

The exact opposite is true of Collaborators, a new play by John Hodge now on at the Cottesloe at the National Theater.  This play mirrors in form and content the spirited insanity that is the work of the central character: Mikhail Bulgakov.  I am a huge fan of this author.  If you haven't read The Master and Margarita, you should move it to the top of your to read list.  The plot kind of defies description, but it is an awesome story.  Seriously, read it.  But for the play,  I have nothing but wonderful things to say about it.  From the set to the lighting to the script to the cast, nothing is amiss.  I also kind of love the National Theater.  The light board op, upon hearing that I do lighting, actually allowed me into the booth to look at their set up.  Serious nerd out moment.  The play itself takes a look at an immagined meeting between Bulgakov and Stalin as Bulgakov writes a play that, for him, is impossible to write.  It is a celebration of Stalin's youth to be performed for his 60th birthday.  It is as hilarious as it is dark, and man o man does it get dark in the second half.  As far as I could tell, it was pretty darn historically accurate, which was welcome after some of the glaring historical inacuracies of The Madness of King George III.  Alex Jennings was amazing as Bulgakov as was Simon Russell Beale as Stalin.  As for the script, in the first act, it succedes in humanizing Stalin, a psychopathic, dictatorial mass murderer.  Alan Bennet, take notes; this is how you make people care about your characters.  The set created an environment perfectly suited for this mad spin through Moscow, the last months of Bulgakov's life, and Stalinist Russia as a whole.  This a show truly deserving of the hype.