Theatre 2016: Review Twenty-Six

Doctor Faustus, The Barbican, London. September 2016.

I'm easily swayed into going to the theatre and this time it was my friend the Upstart Wren who was keen on seeing this.  I have a love/hate relationship with the RSC but Doctor Faustus is a play I like a lot and so I was quite happy to accompany her.  It all started well, trains were on time, we found the Barbican with no problems and our seats were excellent...

The opening was promising too - the roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles are shared between two actors and at each performance the decision as to who plays which role is decided by striking matches, however as the characters were dressed identically at this point I can't remember whether the owner of the match that went out first played Faustus or Mephistopheles - already not a good sign for the play!

I got more hopeful as the start did show Faustus surrounded by books, but my reading of him is that he feels he has learnt all he can from the books he has but wants more which is why he makes his pact but in this version he starts by throwing books away in disgust and I had the feeling that he was bored by them not that he was a renowned scholar.

It just went downhill from here on. The text had been drastically cut but the time filled with lots of modern dance and whitewashing of the stage. I never felt that the good and bad angels were actually fighting for Faustus, they merely seemed bored and one of them could barely speak the line.
A moment of levity came with the appearance of the deadly sins although even this became smug and self referential as covetousness appeared to look like Antony Sher's Richard III - a role he played for the RSC...

image from Findingshakespeare.com

My biggest discomfort from the play came ultimately from the feel of the piece. I found it to be incredibly anti-Semitic in tone.  At times, to stress the evil events, a black and white film is played at the back of the stage - this reminded me utterly of the propaganda films created by Goebbels during the late 1930s and early 1940s, also the words Faustus speaks to conjure throughout the play were certainly not the Latin of the original and had, to my ear, the harshness and cadences of Hebrew. 

I'm not the only one who has been made uncomfortable with this - other have commented that the students/devils have the look of Jewish scholars.

I'm pleased I saw this version of the play for it reminds me how good the Globe's version from 2011 was. I think that cutting out all of the humour from the play (like Shakespeare Marlowe's plays are a good balance of comedy/tragedy) was a mistake, the play felt unbalanced. I've also read the play since seeing it and I don't think I like the additions either. 

Ultimately I never believed in either of the leads - possibly because Mephistopheles looked just like Richard O'Brien when he played RiffRaff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Theatre 2015: Review Thirty-Two

Hamlet, The Barbican, London. September 2015.

I'm late getting this review up, uni has restarted and I had a short break away but even without these reasons I'd have found it hard to review this play.

Rebecca and I were hoping that with much better seats we'd love the play more. And indeed this time we were sat at the front of the circle and on the opposite side of the auditorium so in theory all should have been well...

While we could now see all of the balcony scenes, and they were worth seeing, we lost the wonderful depth and wonder of the stage and while not a lot of lines were given in this area the 'wow factor' was well and truly lost.

Once more we found that the actors weren't engaging/making eye contact with the auditorium and all three of us decided that it was a bit like watching the play on the television rather than live. Act One is also far too long!

I feel sorry for the third of our trio, she doesn't join us as often in our theatre trips and last year we dragged her along to the grim Richard III and this summer it was Hamlet... I think we all agreed that Cumberbatch was worth seeing but the rest of the cast were insipid still. Oh well perhaps I wasn't being overly grumpy in August, perhaps this really is a duff production!

Theatre 2015: Review Twenty-Four

Hamlet, The Barbican, London. August 2015.

I have to add the disclaimer to this review stating that the production was still in preview when we saw this performance, although at the time of booking we weren't aware of this.

As well as being the most eagerly awaited theatrical event of the year this Hamlet has also proved the most controversial. A quick Google search will bring up pages of controversy surrounding the production and with that much hype it was always going to be be hard to live up to.

When Rebecca and I saw this the production had moved the 'To Be...' speech back into a more traditional location and I was a little sad at that - if you are going to be daring with a play then be really daring! Instead the play opened with Hamlet (Cumberbatch) sat on the stage listening to Nature Boy looking through his childhood possessions.  The speeches usually given to by the guards on duty then were spoken by Hamlet. It didn't feel odd or out of place at all and I can see that with this melancholy start how the To be... lines would have worked.

Following this the stage opens right out into an opulent stately home and as the Barbican's stage is so big I did really feel like I was looking at a National Trust property.  The play then continued in a servicable fashion, the text had been reworked so that narratives were easy to follow but there were no standout brilliant parts for me.  In fact I started getting incredibly frustrated by the direction which had the lighting change and the rest of the cast move in slow motion each time Hamlet gives a soliloquy. I can see how the criticisms of a dumbed-down production have arisen.

Many of the reviews that have been published since press night praise Cumberbatch but are less kind to the play as a whole and I think that I agree with that.  He was a good Hamlet, he managed to make a character I have never liked tolerable, The set was the other star!  We had seats in the gallery for this performance and only once did we notice an actor playing to the whole audience - something that is very noticeable after frequenting the Globe and seeing how they encompass everyone.  Our seats were also not listed as restricted view and they certainly were! To add insult to injury the programme - no more than a collection of images freely available on line - costs £8.50, the same as a glass of champagne from the bar.

This feels like a very grumpy review and I am glad that I will see the play again in September, from better seats, as I can then make an informed decision about what I really feel about the production.

Theatrical Interlude 33

Richard II, RSC at The Barbican, London. December 2013.

This play is one of the ones that I've looked at in a little bit of detail this semester and so for the first time I went into the auditorium with some insight into the play. For which I am quite glad.

Whilst this was a good production, with actors who were clearly at home speaking Shakespeare's words clearly - as if they were normal dialogue and not something special -  the start of the first half to me seemed a little unclear.

From the reading I've done I knew why the King behaved as he did but I didn't see that on the stage. In fact the start of the play was only explained in the last half of the last act...

On the plus side other scenes that I'd read in the play but that hadn't made an impact on me for their importance did make a lot more sense on seeing them on the stage, but even then to make them stick out perhaps they were over played a little for some light relief in a dark play?

The plot of Richard II is very similar to that of Edward II (history does repeat itself after all!) and having seen both plays in quick succession I can say that while Edward II was quite frankly a little too experimental at times I found it was easier to understand why that King had to be deposed. In Richard II he was a little wishy-washy, vague and had too much self importance but the real reasons why his nobles felt he should go didn't come across. I know that in general it is better to show than to tell but in this case I thought we needed a little more of both!

I'm very pleased to have seen this production as David Tennant was very good but apart from his hair and the overall impression of the play I don't think anything else from the production will stay with me - it was a nice way to spend an afternoon but not a standout production for me.