What makes a comedy? Perspective. Ask Shakespeare’s Malvolia, Titania, or Andrew Aguecheek if they’re living in a comedy and they’ll gaze at you with tear-stained incredulity. Publicly shamed, sexually humiliated, drugged and tricked into – oh yes – public sex with a donkey. Oh, how they laugh. Whether we laugh – or whether we’re encouraged to do so – depends on the production. Perhaps we … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the whisky glasses in The Red Barn and No Man’s Land
The past is another country: they drink things differently there. After the gin-marinated 1950s of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, this week I hit the whisky: in the 1960s Connecticut of The Red Barn and then with the 1970s Hampstead topers in Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Gin, in Osborne’s play, is predominantly a woman’s tipple: mother’s ruin, and the ruin of Archie’s maudlin wife Phoebe, loosening … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the egg in The Deep Blue Sea
You can’t look glamorous when eating a fried egg. Or tragic, or sombre, or noble. Can’t be done. As Hester, the anguished heroine of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, Helen McCrory is all of those things for much of the evening. But not when she’s forking down an egg. (If you fear that knowing when McCrory eats her egg, or why, may spoil it for you, best come back in a few weeks. Let’s meet up … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the mop in The Flick
No one selects a mop for its glamour. The mop that appears in the second half of The Flick is dowdier than most – a disconsolate tangle that once a day swabs the stickier kinds of refuse in a failing Massachusetts movie theatre. I don’t know if the mop I saw at the National Theatre had appeared, like actors Louisa Krause and Matthew Maher, in Sam Gold’s original New York production (photo above … [Read more...]
This is what we know
What will your death be like? Probably not like this. Blank, seen in the Bush Theatre’s recent RADAR Festival, is a semi-improvised piece by Nassim Soleimanpour. A one-time-only performer receives a script full of blanks, the key words are missing. Some blanks the performer fills; others are solicited from the audience; and a volunteer is selected to add details from their own biography. When I … [Read more...]
Election night at the theatre
You might as well spend the evening of a national election at the National Theatre: it should be, among other things, somewhere where a nation can speak to itself. So that’s where I went. Rufus Norris’ first programme as artistic director offers a spread of voices arguing about how humans should act towards each other: environmentally (Everyman), maritally (The Beaux’ Stratagem) and … [Read more...]
Get real
From your mouth to the director’s ear – that has been one idea of verbatim theatre. Using the words, experiences and sometimes the very inflections of interviewees as the basis for a production, verbatim has often seem to offer theatre a bracing hit of ‘pure’ reality, a window into authentic documentary material. But like all theatrical forms, verbatim is a shape-shifting beast. Last … [Read more...]