Theatre 2016: Review Thirty-Seven

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London. December 2016.

My sister and I ended up seeing this by accident, we had planned on seeing Book of Mormon but this week they've moved the matinee of this to Friday rather than the normal Wednesday (after we'd booked the day off work of course) however we hadn't had a day out together, just the two of us, since 2007 and so we looked around for another good offer.*

Roald Dahl has always an author we've both loved reading - in fact I think my sister 'discovered' him first and he certainly turned her in to a reader - so we were aware that this show existed.  However the danger with seeing an adaptation of a favourite is that it can ruin the original.  Matilda is an example of this - for however catchy the songs and talented the cast I really can't forgive them for the liberties taken with an outstanding story.

If I'm honest my heart sank further as we arrived at the theatre to find it over run with large, excited and noisy school parties...

Fortunately the show won me round, I found it captivating, inventive and all in all a pretty good adaptation of the source material. The sets were glorious and the four grandparents stole every scene they were in and making the imaginary world of Dahl come to life without CGI was very clever. My favourites were the "live broadcasts" as the children won their tickets and the gum inventing room complete with robots but all of it stayed close to my own mind-pictures.

However I did have issues with sound and or diction - several times I couldn't here the words both spoken and sung, this was more shocking as the actors were clearly wearing working microphones. I'm also surprised because it was both child actors and Wonka himself that I couldn't here.  We weren't up in the very 'gods' either and I can't blame it on the school parties as they were impeccably behaved throughout the show.

The other negative is that there are no memorable songs, in fact it might have been better had this been more of a 'show' and dropped more of the musical numbers.  The lines added for adults were also a little over the top - did Verruca Salt really mention that she wanted North Korea???
I think that this managed to create an identity of its own away from the two films - I was worried that it would be far too much like the (terrible) Depp version but it kept the darkness of the Gene Wilder version and the book - with the casual Oompa Loompa racism removed!

I'm pleased we saw the show, I'm very pleased with how little we paid for such good seats but I can't express a lot of surprise that it is closing, and although there is talk of a tour it is going to have to be reworked an awful lot to make it work in smaller theatres I think it will also lose all the magic and charm.

*I have since discovered that is just as well we didn't get tickets to see Mormon as my brother in law was ready to disown me and have my sister sleeping on the sofa if we'd seen this without him...!

Finally a sequel-ly good read!

Return to the Secret Garden - Holly Webb.

Warning this blog post may contain spoilers - but as these are plot points from books published over 100 years ago I don't mind!

I don't have a great track record reading the modern sequels to books I adored as a child. The Return to Hundred Acre Wood is a book that I can't get out of my mind and I really didn't like another sequel to a Frances Hodgson Burnett book either.

Thus it was with trepidation I reserved Return to the Secret Garden from the library.  I'm so pleased that I did.  Webb has not continued the book from the immediate end but has moved the story on to a WW2 setting. Orphans housed at London orphanage are evacuated to Misstlethwaite Manor in September 1939 and have to learn to adapt to their new life.

At first I was worried that the book was just going to be a slightly modernised retelling of the original: a sad, lonely, and bad tempered orphan arrives in the new place and immediately finds a robin who leads her around the garden to a more secret place and she also hears crying in the night... So far so derivative.

Webb however is skilled enough to use these elements that are familiar from the original to weave a new tale but that lovingly references all of the original plot elements and characters. I was very happy to be surprised by the book, and I am not ashamed to say that it did bring a huge lump to my throat in more than one place.

Like so many of the modern adaptations it isn't as long or as complex as the original but as sequels go I loved it.

Which was a relief as earlier in the year I'd read Jacqueline Wilson's updated version of What Katy Did, called simply Katy.

In this, the first half really is a rewrite of the original just modernised and as someone very familiar with the original I was bored, it didn't work and I wondered why on earth anyone would read this and not the Coolidge one.

However after Katy's accident the book changed completely and I found it to be a convincing and realistic read of how this little girl would have reacted after a life changing accident.  Also an improvement on the original is the loss of the moralising, the idea of the saintly invalid and also the miraculous recovery!

This really was a book of two halves and I am glad I carried on to the end but for anyone familiar with the original I suggest skipping ahead to the middle, the start adds nothing.

So a mixed bag for sequels/rewrites of classic books this year. I am intrigued to read Kate Saunder's Five Children on the Western Front but this will be a different sort of read as I've never yet managed to finish the original!

Theatrical Interlude 28

The Cambridge Greek Play 2013, Arts Theatre, Cambridge. October 2013.

Three years ago a friend told us about a version of Agamemnon that was being shown in Cambridge, intrigued we went and had a nice time. Intrigued because this is company that only perform every three years and when they do so it is in the original ancient Greek.

The trip didn't start well, one of the party couldn't make it and the main road from Norwich to Cambridge was shut but eventually Mr Norfolkbookworm and I met Rebecca at Cambridge station and set forth to the city. The run of bad luck seemed to continue as a phone stopped working and all the restaurants were full when it came to needing lunch. However we found sustenance and all seemed to be going well.

We had great seats in the theatre, lots of leg room and soon settled in for what we'd told Rebecca was a great experience, yes the plays might be in a dead language but that didn't matter - there were surtitles, no different than a foreign language film...

This cycle two plays were performed Prometheus before the interval and The Frogs after, tragedy then comedy.

Prometheus wasn't to any of our tastes although I can see that if you know the play/Greek it offered a lot more.   The plot was simple Prometheus has helped Zeus to over throw his father but then has helped out the human race and angered Zeus. Who has him chained to a rock.  The next 55 minutes or so are all about why he is there. With singing.  I can see from my studies into theatre why this is considered a good play and I can also see a lot of the aspects of drama that I've been reading about and I mean no offence to the cast when I say on the whole we didn't enjoy this one.

After the interval it was a different matter. The Frogs, and especially this version, is bonkers. The god Dionysus has decided that there are no longer any good jokes being written so he is going to have to go to the Underworld and bring Euripides or Aeschylus back to life in order to have some amusement.  The god is however a coward and this leads to much humour, oh and some ancient Greek politics (not that different from our own really!).

You really did have to be there to appreciate how funny and truly mad this play was, the jokes translate from stage to blog about as well as they do from ancient Greek to English - it really was all in the staging.  My mind melted when Charon and Dionysus are sitting in a row boat singing in Greek to the tune of O Sole Mio but the surtitles are showing the words to Row, Row, Row your Boat. Oh and apparently Greek frogs say brekekekex koax koax not ribbitt.

The day turned out to be great fun after all and I think Mr Norfolkbookworm and I will try to see the next play in 2016 but this really has reinforced to me that tragedies are my least favourite style of play overall, it isn't just Shakespeare!

All quiet on the reading front

I've still not learned my lesson, despite my last post being all about how much I had to read I still found myself browsing Net Galley a lot in February and then downloading lots of new things to try.

I'm not sure if the books I tried have already been published in the USA or are in proof form still but they have been very hit and miss with me, and so far (sadly) more miss than hit. In fact there has only been one that I've actually finished.

Paris in Love by Eloisa James is a year in the life of an American family who move to Paris. It is a strange book, at times it seems like a diary, at others like a letter to an unknown recipient and at other times it is so disjointed it is like overhearing one half of a conversation with an over excited teenager.

I enjoyed it, mostly, and would love to spend longer than a weekend in Paris to discover some of the places that Eloisa talks about but if I ate all that she talks about I'd be spherical!

I'm about to go on holiday and I've downloaded a few more proofs to my Kindle - for free it is worth trying lots of new authors and genres I feel.