Theatre 290: F/London Theatre Seminar

Intersession December 2010 January 2011

SUNY Geneseo

Professor Melanie Blood

The Shows:

Please note that in the UK you are not given programs, you need to pay for them. If you do not want to purchase a program, you may want to bring along this information. You can look up reviews and program information online, as I have here. The reviews provided are examples of what you will write for me for 3 out of our 9 shows.

1. Tuesday 12/28 7:15 pm

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare; Royal Shakespeare Company

Roundhouse; Chalk Farm Rd, London, United Kingdom NW1 8EH; Tube: Chalk Farm

TimeOut Review

“It's the die-hard lust for life and sheer overblown poetry of its middle aged lovers that makes 'Antony and Cleopatra' the hedonist's favourite tragedy. But Kathryn Hunter and Darrell D'Silva, in this RSC production, lack mutual chemistry.

“D'Silva is a good conventional Antony: a big,slightly foxed old player, bluffing his way through dodgy deals with Caesar (John Mackay), a soulless suited politico. Hunter is something else. Her Cleopatra is a twisty little 'serpent of old Nile', pointlessly cunning, and comically vicious when she whips out a gun to shoot the messenger who brings bad news. But the more she wriggles, the less she seems like a queen. And neither her lover nor her slaves look trapped in her coils.

“Michael Boyd's dynamic pragmatism as a director suits conflict-driven plays more than this last tango in Egypt (Antony and Cleopatra spend the first half carousing and bickering like divorcees on holiday and the second killing themselves by painfully slow degrees). His production for the RSC does rise to the play's single battle, turning the thrust stage into a gorgeous human chessboard, across which Cleopatra and her ladies swan, as the Egyptian ships that lost Antony the Roman world. Tom Piper's brassy drum ofa backdrop is rich and subtle.

“But design can't supply the burnished world of words,which are the main dish of this messy comi-tragedy, but are too often spoken without relish or (in Hunter's heavily accented delivery) clarity.

The style is incoherent pastiche, with Cleopatra posing with her girls in everything from a Grecian evening gown to a Chaplinesque pant suit. When she exchanges passionless kisses with them, it feels as empty as 'Sex and the City 2'- without the sex.”

Financial Times Review:

“The young lovers, Romeo and Juliet, launched the RSC’s latest London season; they are now joined by a more seasoned couple. Shakespeare’s great tragedy of passion and politics in middle age moves in, in a pacy production that emphasises the vitality and playfulness in the script yet obstinately fails to catch fire. Michael Boyd, directing, brings a new twist to the leading roles, and yet, unusually for him, doesn’t really shed any new light on the play.

“The innovation lies in the casting of Kathryn Hunter as Cleopatra: a diminutive, mercurial actor and one of the most original in the country (she has played both King Lear and an ape in Kafka’s Monkey). Her Cleopatra is no classic beauty but a tiny bundle of dynamite, playful, petulant and passionate. She darts about the stage, eyes flashing, mind clearly racing, and has Antony on his toes trying to keep up with her. It is clear to see why Darrell D’Silva’s handsome, burly and bluffly charismatic Antony might find her hard to forget: there is a lovely, unusually comic moment towards the end when, having stabbed himself, he is informed that she is not dead as he thought, and he gives a groan of self-reproach: outplayed again.

“But Hunter over-eggs the pudding: she is so insistently eccentric that she begins to grate, and her husky delivery of the lines is oddly self-conscious and sometimes obscures their meaning. While she comes over as wily and capricious (drawing a gun on the hapless messenger who brings her news of Antony’s marriage), what doesn’t emerge is her political astuteness and determination to hold her own in a turbulent political arena.

“The staging is simple and modern-dress against the beaten metal tower of Tom Piper’s set. But the political machinations don’t emerge with much lucidity or urgency, contrasting with Janet Suzman’s recent Liverpool production, which moved nimbly through the manoeuvring. There is a strong, touchingly conflicted Enobarbus from Brian Doherty, a lean, icy Caesar from John Mackay and an eerily unsettling Soothsayer from Greg Hicks.

“Despite some strong performances and plenty of witty details, this staging never quite comes to the boil. The ending, extinguishing Antony and Cleopatra and ushering in a chilly new era, doesn’t bite as it could.”

The Guardian’s Review

“Something has gone badly awry in Michael Boyd's modern-dress revival of Shakespeare's tragedy of passion, politics and performance, which is reduced to farce – a very dull one.

“Farce isn't itself a problem; after all, this is a play about delusions and illusions, about the love affair between a drama queen and a great warrior who manages to botch everything he touches, including his own death. There are moments when the comedy is neatly played, such as when the messenger who brings Cleopatra news of Antony's marriage to Octavia has a gun pulled on him. It's a very funny scene, but is also perhaps a sign of desperation in an evening that is taken at breakneck speed yet still manages to drag.

“Love, we all know, is blind; opposites are supposed to attract. That still doesn't explain the mismatch between Kathryn Hunter's playful, diminutive Cleopatra, who leaps upon Antony like a gleeful monkey, and Darrell D'Silva's bluff, grizzled soldier. I reckon he'd run a mile from this infuriating, self-dramatising woman, who likes to play the little girl and surrounds herself with an entourage of quick-change artists whose outfits complement her own.

“Hunter is unconventional, spiky and mesmerising, and D'Silva is solid and intelligent, but there's zero chemistry between them. They appear to be acting in entirely different plays and prove as fatal to this production as they do to each other. John Mackay's calculating Caesar, Brian Doherty's plain-spoken Enobarbus and Greg Hicks's watchful Soothsayer do good, unshowy work, but the evening lacks spark and confidence, and features one of those wave-a-bit-of-material-around battles that the RSC has been churning out for 30 years.”

2. Thursday 12/30 7 pm

Peter Pan (Christmas Pantomime)

starring David Hasselhoff at New Wimbledon

Tube: Wimbledon; bus – outside our districts

3. Friday 12/31 5:30 pm

Billy Elliott

Victoria Palace Theatre; 8 Victoria St, London, United Kingdom SW1E 5EA; Tube: Victoria

TimeOut Review:

“A confession: sometimes I lazily assume that all long-running West End musicals are soulless corporate juggernauts unworthy of my attention. A revelation: 'Billy Elliott', one year on, is an electrifying, ballsy, compassionate and political show. Musicals tend to tell stories of individual triumph. It would have been easy for Lee Hall and Elton John's show to use Billy's individual ballet-dancing success to absolve his Durham community's wider distress in the midst of the 1984 miners' strike. But Stephen Daldry's production is as much about the community's struggle as Billy's. 'It's everybody's future, it's everybody's past,' as one lyric has it. 'It's not about a bairn who wants to dance.'

“The show's even more notable achievement is to keep the miners' doomed campaign entertaining and inspiring, without soft-soaping it. We're shown the in-fighting, we're shown the narrow-mindedness - which leads to Billy being thought a 'poof' for harbouring dance ambitions. But we're also shown a group of working class people who look out for one another; a communitarianism that Thatcher (the butt of a gleefully abusive song) and later Blair (who crops up here preaching socialism - ho ho! - to a miners' welfare club) would do their best to destroy. What Billy says about ballet, one might equally say about the 'solidarity' of which his people sing: 'it's like forgetting who you are and at the same time something makes you whole.'

“Meanwhile, Billy's story - notwithstanding the success of the film - has really found its medium in this musical. His whole journey - from hope through frustration to his dreams being realised - can now be expressed through dance. The closing sequence to Act One, when Billy's claustrophobia is manifested in a furious tap-dance directed against a wall of police riot shields, is awesomely powerful. Colin Bates is a spirited Billy and Philip Whitchurch touching as the dad who swallows his prejudices to support his kid. Perhaps Billy's cross-dressing pal Michael, singing 'what's wrong with expressing yourself?' in high heels and a cocktail dress, is stretching things a bit. But at least it's theatrical, and humane and funny, like much else in this marvellous British musical.”

4. Tuesday 1/4 7:30

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

Vaudeville Theatre; 404 The Strand, London, United Kingdom WC2R 0NH Tube: Charing Cross

TimeOut Review

“Lindsay Posner's revival of Oscar Wilde's 'An Ideal Husband' glistens with star actors. Samantha Bond oozes snaky glamour as the villainess of the piece, society blackmailer Mrs Chevely. Alexander Hanson is impressively subtle as rising politician Sir Robert Chiltern, desperate to hide his youthful crime from his public and his upstanding spouse. Rachael Stirling plays his deceived wife with sonorous force, like a pre-suffrage Mrs Thatcher. And Elliot Cowan delights as Viscount Goring, a Wooster-ish dandy with a heart of gold - and repartee as preposterously witty as his morning suits.

“Even so, it's the lesser-known Fiona Button who breathes vital fresh air into Wilde's staid old comedy and steals the show: as Sir Robert's little sister Mabel, she is pert, hilariously sharp and so kittenishly strategic that her bachelor quarry, Viscount Goring, is doomed from the fisrt scene.

“Wilde's play had a pertinent makeover from Peter Hall back in 1992. In less inspired hands, it's not quite ideal. There are topical jokes whose topics are long-forgotten; pleas for charitable understanding which resonate with the scandal which would bring down Wilde's own gilded life; and a plot which awkwardly blends the moral high ground of tragedy with the silliness of farce. The one-liners are always a joy: 'To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance' opines Goring, bringing the house down as he preens before his long-suffering butler. But before the fun begins there's a long, awkwardly staged first act set at a party full of dull caricatures: only a treat if you're partial to French attachés with silly accents.

“In Wilde's ripest comedy, 'The Importance of Being Earnest', the wit bubbles up very naturally from the young lovers, their pranks and their hot pursuit of each other. In this older, more cynical setting, the aphorisms are worn like a fashionable affectation of youthful carelessness by smooth and spiteful operators and ageing bright things. Even the dowager Lady Markby, despite Caroline Blakiston's admirable efforts, lacks a handbag to knock us out with.

“Everyone on Stephen Brimson Lewis's swanky set dresses prettily and speaks wittily, but too often they speak with one voice, which is too prepared to be admired. Eventually, the production sparkles: but, as Wilde's opulent play stops short of suggesting, not all that glistens is gold.”

5. Thursday 1/6 7:45

Black Watch by Gregory Burke

National Theatre of Scotland, Barbican Theatre; Barbican Centre, Silk St, London, United Kingdom EC2Y 8DS

Tube: Barbican

TimeOut Review

“It's ironic that, since the iconic Black Watch regiment was disbanded, Gregory Burke and John Tiffany's theatrical version has toured the world, winning hearts and minds. Like the regiment, it has also provided jobs for cocky young Scotsmen: the new ensemble is funnier and more self-deprecating than the original - possible, perhaps, now the wounds of that frustrating final campaign in Iraq are less raw.

“The red-hot relevance that helped 'Black Watch' storm the awards three years ago has faded. But it remains a landmark piece of theatre.The left-leaning British theatre world leapt on Iraq with a vengeance but Gregory Burke's play went beyond the Nimby-ish tone of some anti-war dramas, gaining unforgettably authentic access to combat-weary soldiers through verbatim interviews, reproduced onstage. It also went beyond the dryness of docu-drama, combining two very different kinds of contemporary theatre to brilliant effect: hard-hitting political documentary, and extravagantly expressionist choreography .

“Anyone who's seen the Edinburgh Tattoo knows that military pageantry (the music, the marching, the flamboyant tartans and feathers) is the theatre of war. John Tiffany's production developed this into a limber and powerful dramatic language for expressing pain, loss and pride through mime and music - movingly apt for soldiers whose actions speak louder than words.

“Sequences like the history of the regiment told by a soldier whose pals re-dress him in its every grab from eighteenth century kilt to twenty-first-century khaki; the sudden aerial death of three ambushed men; and moving marching songs like 'The Gallant Forty Twa', may not strike the same chord now as they did when British boys were dying in Basra. But, post-Iraq, 'Black Watch' stands as the most important dramatic account of the war from the invaders' perspective.”

6. Saturday 1/8 7 pm

Ghost Stories at Duke of York’s; St.Martin’s Lane; Tube: Leicester Square

“Everything about Ghost Stories (co-written by Jeremy Dyson of the League of Gentlemen) sets out deliberately to spook you, from the warning on the programme ('we strongly advise those of a nervous disposition to think very seriously before attending') to the eeriness of the auditorium - all flickering lights, police tape and apparently random numbers chalked on the walls.

“And then you find yourself in a lecture theatre, with co-writer Andy Nyman's jovial yet occasionally obnoxious Professor of the Paranormal setting out to debunk ghost stories, insisting that they all have a logical, probably psychological, explanation. You just know you're being lulled into a false sense of security and brace yourself for the first shock.

“Nyman's professor illustrates his point by playing dictaphone recordings of three 'percipients' (people who claim to have had paranormal experiences) that he thinks he can explain. The recordings are brilliantly brought to life by David Cardy as a night watchman who feels guilty about not visiting his daughter in a coma more often, Ryan Gage as a middle class student driving without a licence and Nicholas Burns as an arrogant banker type.

“The jump-out-of-your-seat shocks are effective, but the real darkness isn't apparent until the evening's almost over. And right at the very end, you feel seriously spooked. Disconcerting and very clever.”

7. Monday 1/10 6 pm

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Olivier at Royal National Theatre, director Nick Hytner: South Bank; Tube: Waterloo

TimeOut Review

“Despite the hopes and the inevitable hype, great Danes are a rare breed. We've had some famous ones lately: David Tennant's mercurial, eyeball-swivelling joker; Jude Law's accessible playboy prince. But neither achieved greatness, partly because there's so much more to Shakespeare's tragedy than the star who speaks those famous soliloquies. A great Hamlet also needs a truly appalling family (the mother; the fratricidal uncle who has popped into her bed and on to the country's throne). More, the 'rotten' state of Denmark which disgusts his will, must hold a mirror to the ulcers of our own time.

“Nicholas Hytner's production - for a National Theatre which is peaking artistically and financially under his leadership - is great on all these counts. It opens in a hi-tech surveillance state where Hamlet - heavy with sadness, in Rory Kinnear's touching and meticulous performance - is continually spied on by dead-eyed, sharp-suited flunkeys with 'Matrix'-style earpieces. His stepfather, Claudius, (the superb Patrick Malahide) is a remorseless political operator with a close physical resemblance to Vladimir Putin: at court, he switches between realpolitik and slick statesmanship, and delivers his soapiest speeches straight to camera, sitting beneath a horribly avuncular portrait of himself. It's a deeply ingenious way to convey his grip on the whole nation and characteristic of Hytner's production, which serves Shakespeare's tragedy without flashy originality but with understated excellence and a Jeeves-like discretion.

“There's subtle reinvention and deep feeling everywhere, on the great ramparts of the tragedy, and in its less-illumined corners. The royal family is murderously sexy and, at times, persuasively banal. Clare Higgins is lushly dysfunctional as Hamlet's mother: teetering around in stilettos and knocking back the bubbly to kill the pain, she's a tough old broad who's witnessed and wept for it all yet who can see the funny side when her son accidentally knifes the king's spymaster (David Calder's Polonius) in her bedroom.

“James Laurenson is a revelation as the ghost of Hamlet's father, also doubling as the actor who helps unmask his murderer by staging a subversive drama. These two ornately speechy roles are often reduced to melodrama and parody: here, Laurenson helps Hytner make the play-within-a-play into a moving tragedy-within-the-tragedy.

“Rory Kinnear's Hamlet is sympathetic, unstagey, subtle, very funny and so natural that every word he says, even Shakespeare's most quoted, seems coined on the spot. A balding student who kips on a dingy mattress and chalks smiley-face graffiti on the castle walls to protest against its king, he dreams up 'To be or not to be' on a fag break.

“Hamstrung by depression (the jelly-legs in moments of crisis are eloquent); betrayed by everyone including his teenage girlfriend (Ruth Negga's Ophelia); and afflicted by bad dreams, his humour is an outlet for the essential humanism that is such a handicap to him in this shark-tank world, his antic posturing (and smelly tracksuit) are ways to keep that world away. Hamlet has been madder, braver, grander and more charismatic than this. But Kinnear makes you laugh with him, concur with him and weep for him right to the bitter end.”

8. Wednesday 1/12 7:30

Giselle at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Bow St, London, United Kingdom WC2E 9DD; Tube: Covent Garden

Timeout promo:

“A gorgeous 'Giselle' from the Royal Ballet, who tell this story of a young girl betrayed and driven to madness to perfection. Marianella Nuñez was outstanding in the lead role last time she danced it, and she'll be performing (partnered by Rupert Pennefather) on Jan 13 and 19.”

*Accomplice was sold out through February. I will add a 9^th show, aiming for a fringe show, or show with an unusual venue, for a free night in London. Other options: Men Should Weep (National) The Rivals (Haymarket, Peter Hall) Master Builder (Almeida)