| LONDON Last Week (Long and maybe spoilers) | |
| Last Edit: sergius 08:43 am EDT 10/07/24 | |
| Posted by: sergius 08:32 am EDT 10/07/24 | |
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| THE OTHER PLACE (National)—Sooner or later, every family finds tragedy. Or is it the other way around? Regardless, this contemporary (very loose) adaptation of ANTIGONE by Alexander Zeldin, who wrote and directed LOVE which played the Armory last year, knows that tragedy can’t be stopped. At 80 minutes it barrels into horror. It’s the speed of devastation that’s so ravaging. Zeldin gets this down. As with the original, this ANTIGONE makes grief the cynosure of tragedy, its cause and its consequence. It’s what we do to avoid grief that harms us the most. Like any good tragedy, Zeldin’s comes straight for you. It’s a big black train. Somewhere Sophocles is grinning. There’s a good chance this train gets here. JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK (West End)—One of Sean O’Casey’s great tragicomedies, it’s a challenge to find and retain a balance between the play’s comic, music hall antics and its social realist sorrows. Unfortunately, Matthew Warchus loses his way here. Mark Rylance and J. Smith Cameron are in different plays. Well, Rylance and everyone basically. As others have noted, he alone is in a panto. This works fine in the more comic first Act, but the play sputters as it turns tragic; Rylance, a superb vaudevillian, has already tilted it from its axis. Given this, all the others can do is huddle in the corner looking dumbfounded. J. Smith Cameron especially, and already underpowered, is pretty much left in the dust. O’Casey’s not easy, but this take is a misfire. LOOK BACK IN ANGER (Almeida)—It’s rarely done anymore and within minutes of this production it’s clear why. Jimmy Porter, the now mythic “angry young man” at its core, is a tiresome, hateful chauvinist. Today, the play registers mostly as an extended misogynistic rant; it’s ugly. LOOK BACK IN ANGER, it has been said (and said and said), shoved theatre from the drawing room into the kitchen and, in the process, altered the course of British theatre and beyond. Fair enough. Osborne’s work is undeniably significant and important. It represents not only the theatrical decentering of class privilege, but also, it's been argued, the straightening out of the presumably fey and sometimes camp theatre of Coward and Rattigan. So, what may have been brash and incendiary in 1956, thankfully seems much, much more complicated now. This said, I was very glad to see this—it’s a predictably superb Almeida production—and I will be equally glad to not see it again. GIANT (Royal Court)—LOOK BACK IN ANGER premiered at the Royal Court where, 68 years on, there’s this new—and timely—provocation. Nicholas Hytner directs John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in the days after he published an overtly anti-Semitic and scandalous book review that threatened his career and permanently altered his reputation. GIANT is a cracking piece of political theatre about a subject that is, sadly and disturbingly, as relevant now, especially now, as it was in the early 1960s when the play is set. It's a smart, savage work that, on every front is expertly presented. The legitimate and painful argument at its center makes for breathtaking theatre. It's probably on to a West End run before NY. HERE IN AMERICA (Orange Tree Theatre)—I’d never been to this theatre before and it’s charming. The play, not so much. It’s about Miller and Kazan’s involvement with HUAC or something, and it just goes nowhere not so fast. For some unclear reason, Monroe’s also a part of this misbegotten business. HERE IN AMERICA is the quintessential Wikiplay; it’s a characterization-free encyclopedic mess. The actors are completely at sea here in a very, very rickety boat. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (Shakespeare’s Globe)—Another wreck. To be sure, the play can be hard to put over these days, but this production doesn’t even try. There are puppets (rarely a good sign) and lots and lots of desperate we-know-this-is-terrible clowning. Additionally, all of the design elements were unrelievedly ugly. I left at the interval—it’s London—which I rarely do. A FACE IN THE CROWD (Young Vic)—In London, this new musical, promising if still underdeveloped, is perhaps a bit lost in translation. Its subject and musical forms are very specifically American and this could be one reason why it’s received a somewhat lackluster reception. (OPERATION MINCEMEAT might follow this blueprint when it arrives, misguidedly I think, on Broadway next year). Ramin Karminloo is giving a rousing, star performance here and the score by Elvis Costello is surprisingly apt and full. Sarah Ruhl has written the book, based on the movie, which, though a gentler satire than it could be, is nonetheless swift and efficient. A FACE IN THE CROWD is a work of intelligence and craft and deserves another life—and another director and choreographer specifically. THE REAL THING (Old Vic)—“I can’t find one part of me where you’re not important.” There are moments like this in THE REAL THING where the beauty of Stoppard’s speech is stirring. This revival is led by a very fine James McArdle (effectively acerbic and bewildered) and it’s a reminder that Stoppard has always been emotionally as well as intellectually fervent. I saw the original Broadway production with Irons and Close, and I don’t really remember it. Seeing it now, I see that I may have been too young then to understand it. THE REAL THING is steeped in the kind of regret that only aging and loss can bring. It’s a map of sorrow. OEDIPUS (West End)—Back to Sophocles. This is just getting underway, but I expect it will land resoundingly when it opens in a few weeks. Robert Icke has written and directed another contemporary adaptation of a Greek tragedy, and it’s entirely gripping. Mark Strong and Lesley Manville exude heat and sorrow equally and Icke provides a context for their deep pathos that’s both in time and, as tragedy must be, out of it as well. The constant presence of a countdown clock and the pervasive, faintly rumbling ambient score make plain and stunning tragedy’s principle aspect: its inexorability. I’ve seen a good deal of Icke’s work and, for my money, he’s the most legibly dynamic of the current crop of directors (Lloyd, van Hove etc.) who work in this vein. 2,400 years on and OEDIPUS is still shocking and horrible. Another likely transfer--maybe to BAM or, again for Icke, the Armory--this OEDIPUS is, in every sense of the word, essential. |
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