Nicholas

Finally caught up with episode one and my eyes are still bleeding.  In a brilliant episode of Frasier Derek Jacobi plays an abysmal actor and resumes that here to perfection.  Ian McKellen matches him.  This sounds like it was written by someone who not only has never seen an actual gay person outside of Are You Being Served but has no idea what actual human beings sound like, and shame on the actors for reading this and deciding it was a good idea.

I appreciate it's an American musical from an American source, but I can't help but feel that it should be spelt with a "u".

Perhaps it is undocumented that Lincoln took off his shoes in his box and desribed everything to Mary Todd as the show went along.  Booth wasn't political, he was just a bit miffed.  A bit like Richard Griffiths when a phone goes off, but with more firepower and a greater historial impact.

exuberantlyblue, on 23 March 2013 - 12:29 AM, said:

That character was actually quite interesting, but the nudity got most of the attention - as you say, he's got to be a foil to those two despite his lines being (at least for me) un-understandable.  It's a shame that people think there was no more to his part than just his part, as his role had more meat to it than just his meat.  I couldn't help but wonder quite what he had to do when he auditioned for it, though.

And I went with a few other people and all felt etiher as I did or more positively.  Mixed responses for Lady M, some saying she got better as we went along.  All positive for James McAvoy (though some had a slight bias).  Lots of enthusiasm for Jamie Ballard.  A fair bit for Banquo and Duncan too.  Apprehensions over setting, or just didn't mind.  Opinions varied from mine - good but not great - to really very good indeed.

Stevemar, you've pretty much said exactly what I thought.  That said, I really liked Ballard an awful lot and found his moment about his family suddenly astonishingly moving.  I thought McAvoy was really great at showing an evolving and morally grey character.  Claire Foy wasn't keen on, for the reasons people have said here.  I just didn't get any motivation, any love or any passion from her.

As for the setting, yes...  I remember someone criticising King Lear (I think, it might have been Macbeth) because most productions have a kingdom that's not worth fighting for, and that's what I thought here.  I first read your comment of ADD as Attention Deficit Disorder and with those flashing light and big boom scene changes would have agreed - I found it hard to settle into and not in a good way.  I mostly feel the setting was a gimmick as opposed to a conceit - it wasn't Macbeth-y and didn't add anything.

And the witches, I disliked twofold - I wasn't keen on those three and the idea behind it (everyone's said it better than I could have, but just gas masks - why?  Everyone else could breathe), and then when McAvoy came on with the potion in the second half I just knew he'd be gulping up the prophecies and whadayaknow...  But I did feel mostly positive mainly because I really enjoyed McAvoy's performance and Ballard's performance and his strengths mostly outweighed the weaknesses.

Oh, and the stage seats - I'm sure they're great to sit in, but they're quite conspicuous and sort of ruined the fourth wall for me.  At times it just looked a little, well, silly to see people flicking at a programme or talking to each other or just to see faces respond.  At the end of yesterday in the final fight they almost ran into a person, whose response was quite amusing, so people laughed (I think I did), which set a comic tone for the finale.  When a bloody Mr Tumnus head is funny...

Oh, and watch Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus.  It's like this but a bit more coherent and a bit better.

I was today in Row M too!  I was the annoying one with water, wine gums and cough sweets - very very sorry.

It was a fire drill - someone forgot to say "We're on with The Scottish Play in five..." and the stage erupted in flames.  That's not actually what happened (probably).  I assume, since it took us an extra ten minutes to get into the building, it was a fire drill, but I was a bit late and have never been gladder for a fire alarm.

Actually, on the note of coughing, given how tempremental most people's throats are at the best of times, let alone in a particularly virus-y February, I thought opening with smoke and incense was perhaps a bad idea.

Anywho, I think I'll post more tomorrow as my thoughts are more with my throat than with the theatre, but I felt a little more hohum about bits of this than most people.  There was a lot of very good stuff (McAvoy was ace, Ballard, some nice touches) but a lot that to me didn't work and overall I rather enjoyed it but bits - Lady Macbeth and a couple of what I thought were gimmicks (for example the witches and, actually, the overall setting) - didn't work.  Mostly positive though, but some fairly big quantifiers which left me thinking this was ever so slightly more tepid than most people think it.  I also had perhaps unfair problems, in row M, with the onstage seats.

Theatrical highlight of the year though - I go to my friends in the back row and say "Not too keen on Lady Macbeth, she felt a bit shouty to me, though that might just be me."  As I finish to draw breath, someone down the row said "She was a bit shouty."

Les Mis at the Oscars - congrats to Anne Hathaway, nice to see Redmayne and Barks get such a public platform.  But then there's Russell Crowe.  I think someone might have turned up his mike, which makes someone a sadist.  I didn't mind him in the film, but here dear God it was shouty, bellowy, out of time and all the wrong notes.  Les Mis won for Sound Mixing, which is evidently because they made Russell Crowe not seem toe curlingly bad.  For that it deserved it.

In a proper nutshell, I felt that Rickson never expected the audience to appreciate the mystery, and let Pinter, in that regard, speak for himself.  Instead Sewell, Scott Thomas and Williams were able to explore humans in Pinter's quite inhuman situation and flesh out this opaque brilliance.  That's a far better way of putting it.  Loved this.

Well, having let this settle, I can only say the idea of the switch was extraordinary.  I think that Rickson's direction would have made a more conventional production thrilling, but the switch adds something.  I remember reading that Simon Russell Beale called theatre something like three-dimensional criticism, and that's what I got here - lines suddenly resonated, details stood out...  Firstly I saw KST as Kate, where she felt cold and unknowable, whilst Williams pushed the sexual tension right to the fore, and Sewell was almost mad with his unknowable wife.  The other way, Williams felt initially warmer as Kate, but then her silences felt more pitiful, less dutiful, so that made Sewell perhaps less charming... and KST as Anna was flirty but somehow equally unknowable.  The first way, the pauses were quite creepy, the second they were funny.  I could go on.  They were two different though related productions.

I loved this.  Seeing it twice didn't illuminate it entirely - I love Pinter's opaqueness and he's never been as opaque as here - but it helped.  I'm not going to attempt to explain what the truth is or where they are, because I don't think that's what this production wanted to answer with this.  I felt the switch highlighted the human aspect.  As characters, they shone.  Credit especially to Rufus Sewell who gave two very different performances yet not so different that it was noticeable - tiny changes in intonation were earth-shattering.  And of course to KST and Williams for being quite a pair yet completely individual and different.  As a human drama this was just extraordinary, and highlighted by the two very different interpretations of two complex characters, whilst as a mystery it had a clear through line yet never attempted to answer something unanswerable.

In a nutshell it's wonderful theatre, wonderful acting, opaque and haunting and mysterious and wonderful.  Especially haunting.  Like Gatz, going into a theatre at 3 and not properly leaving until 10 was such an experience.  And interestingly, I prefered one way whilst my companion (who also loved it) prefered the other, and yet we were both able to talk each other around to our view.  That's why I think this was great - it was enlightening and never completely easy to understand, though always easy to admire and like, and far from gimmicky.

Caught both in one day, and blimey it's an experience I'll remember (aptly) for a long time.  A near unqualified rave tomorrow after a good night's sleep, but for now just a quick but huge thank you to Pharoah and Latecomer for the seat recommendations - I bought pillar seats, and they're pretty much unimpeded stalls tickets for £10.  Given that I had to buy 4 tickets (went with a friend twice in one day - it adds up) it really helped, and next time I go (likely alone) I'll book one of those again.  Thanks!

I was really astonished by this.  Firstly, the cast is just incredible, and were there an award for ensemble I can't think of a more deserving lot.  Frances Barber, who at the beginning I thought I wouldn't like, was brilliant, Harriet Walter equally superb and Cush Jumbo felt like a definitive Marc Antony.  More importantly, I can't remember being so engaged in a production in yonks.  It was gripping as a thriller, haunting, slightly mystifying.  The conceit of putting it in a women's prison turned out to be genius, in ways people here have more eloquently said than I could - importantly, the story of the prisoners correlates, if not completely matches, the story of the Shakespeare, which gives both stories more depth.  I adored Frances Barber literally casting a shadow over the events after her death.  Other tiny details worked a treat - I went with my parents, who both thought that perhaps the Irish accent hinted at something there with regards to that crime, for example.  I'd quite like to read Phylida Lloyd's notes on the production, because I could imagine they'd be worth analysis in themselves and there's much I missed.

Afterwards, I couldn't help but compare it to the Rickson Hamlet I absolutely hated.  With that, I felt the points that he and Sheen were trying to make and the points Shakespeare were trying to make were at odds with each other, which meant Rickson said nothing about institutionalisation and mental illness and Shakespeare said nothing about the Dane and three hours of my life were down the drain (if memory serves, wasn't it even longer?).  With this, it was a perfect marriage, and both explorations of violence, influence and power spoke clearer than ever, and for the next week I know I'll keep picking up on more.  The highest praise I can offer this is that I completely forgive Lloyd for inflicting Pierce Brosnan's singing on us.  Haunting and remarkable, five stars.

I heard that they're going to acknowledge the bitter as well as the sweet with a one-off show "Framned By Despair".

P.S. I'm flattered my prejudgement on The Audience is already famous.

Six months ago I would have said Jonathan Pryce in King Lear was going to be astonishing, unmissable, unforgettable theatre.  And then I saw it.