Theatre 2017: Review Twelve - Travesties

Travesties, Apollo Theatre, London. March 2017.

After the wonderful performance of Hamlet in the afternoon there was always a danger that the second play of the day will be a let down and as Stoppard has a reputation for being 'hard'.

It started ominously when Tom Hollander shuffled into the theatre acting as an old man wearing slippers and a dressing gown. We then met all the protagonists of the drama in a crazy, frenetic scene and I was left feeling bewildered and totally at sea.

It calmed down in some ways as it became clear that the old man was the 'now' and the other scenes were his memories.  It got a bit confusing again when scenes started playing and then replaying themselves all slightly differently.

The plot of the play was full of information as the basic plot is that the old man, Henry Carr, is the British consul in Zurich in 1917 at the same time that James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara (one of the founders of Dadaism) were living there and that all of them crossed paths in the library.

In this play they all get to explain their ideas and ideologies and so much information is thrown at the audience that by the interval my head was reeling. Oh and thanks to the stage props I was also craving cucumber sandwiches!

After the interval the play continues in much the same vein, scenes played and replayed interspersed with appearances from the elderly Carr. However as the play comes to an end you realise that the replaying of scenes isn't indicating the passing of time (as I'd thought) but the unreliable memories of a man trying to write his memoirs.  So much of what he remembers is incorrect that I came out wondering if any of the facts/ideologies presented by Joyce et. al. were true and this took away some of the shine of the play - I guess that I have a lot of reading around the topic to undertake!

Mixed in with all of this confusion are jokes, songs, dances and a wonderful sub plot comprising of a farce plus a play within a play and while I came out confused and questioning I also came out smiling after having had a lot of fun at the theatre - just unsure if I can trust anything I learned during the 2 1/2 hours.

Interestingly the one bit of the play I  know to be true involved Lenin, the Russian Revolution and his return to Russia in 1917. These historical events happened exactly 100 years ago on the day we saw the play which did add some poignancy to the play, and accuracy here makes me hope that the explanations of communism etc were also correct.

The programme summed the play up as Oscar Wilde meets Monty Python and I can see this - but I'd add in a dash of Open University to account for the vast amounts of information included.

Theatre 2016: Review Five

Mr Foote's Other Leg, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London. January 2016.

The joy of a weekend in London means the chance to see more than just one show and after Guys and Dolls our second show was this oddball.

Once more we went in knowing nothing about it, other than the fact that Simon Russell Beale has been fantastic in everything we've seen him in and I don't think either Rebecca or I were expecting quite what we got.

The story is that of Samuel Foote who was a theatre actor, manager, director and cross dresser in the latter half of the 1700s.  He was a contemporary of Garrick and Benjamin Franklin and lived an incredibly varied life,  he also had only one leg and was at the heart of a sexual scandal big enough to rival anything in the tabloids today.

The play is also by Foote's biographer and having read the programme notes it is quite hard to separate fact from fiction and as soon as I have finished my dissertation and have time to read about the theatre in a manner not connected to my specialist topic I will be hunting the biography down.

The play is very funny, very rude and very funny and shies away from nothing when it comes to making jokes, and I can see why this play isn't for everybody* but I'm afraid that is really appealed to my (warped) sense of humour and once I realised that it was pushing buttons to make you laugh and then feel guilty for doing so I was fine.

I very much liked the way that it brought in lots of minor points about the history of theatre and Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century, it was like seeing some of the drier texts I've read over the last few years come to life in front of me, a little like happened when we saw Red Velvet.

Act One ends very dramatically with Mr Foote saying something along the lines of 'how do you top that in the second half' and I did find this to be fairly accurate. For me the story arc wasn't quite so clear after the interval, but it was interesting to see how an over the top character can all too easily tip over a line and go from funny to offensive in the blink of an eye.

Several times the play appeared to break the fourth wall and address the audience, but in fact this wasn't quite the case - the cast were addressing an audience but it was the audience of their time and not us. This made the call for a 'doctor in the house' very odd as just for a minute I wasn't sure which audience was being addressed. Later, when Foote dries on stage, it isn't the modern audience heckling him and causing him to respond but 'his' audience which gave the me a very other-worldly feel, and let me feel the history of the theatre and the 'ghosts' very clearly.

The nicest bit of the play was that it had transferred from Hampstead to the Theatre Royal Haymarket as this was in fact the theatre in which the play is set - a nice (probably intentional) circle of history. It was also fun to know that a theatre I now see as being a very 'proper' building once had such a turbulent past.

I'm glad that this transferred to the West End and that we managed a trip to London before it closed as I think this is a play I'd have been really sorry to have missed.

*I wish the couple sitting next to me had left at the interval like they talked about as their audible disapproval was most off putting!

Theatre 2015: Review Thirty

War Horse, New London Theatre, London. September 2015.

This trip turned out to be incredibly poignant as while we were ensconced in the auditorium closing notices for the production were posted.

We however found this out afterwards and in the meantime the three of us making this trip were blown away by what we saw on stage.  This was my fourth visit but the first time my companions had seen the play live, although one had seen the NT Live broadcast.

Repeated viewings of this production never disappoint me.  Each time I sit in a different area of the theatre and so see something new. This time we had seats in the 'restricted view' seats to the side of the stalls. I have put the restricted view into inverted commas because I think that we missed nothing on the stage at all, and while sometimes the actors had their backs to us that was the only inconvenience.  The seats were in fact just three rows from the front and so we really could see the whites of the actors eyes.

As ever I was instantly swept up into the story and forgot within seconds that Joey and Topthorn weren't real.  In fact where we were sitting we made so much eye contact with Joey at one point that we were all reaching for apples to share with him! This close range also showed just how good the puppets are in scenes where they are used as riders on the "half-horses."

Every time I watch this play I get a lump in my throat at a different point, after all of the work I have been doing on the Norfolk in WW1 project it was the lines about the war being over by Christmas in act one choked me up but it was the very final scene that had me swallowing hard this time.  I know that I have become more involved in the human story in the past few years and while the treatment of the animals is a way into the horrors of war I have moved on from that in some ways and do get more involved with the human story.  However there were still points I had to shut my eyes for!
As we said afterwards - without showing any blood at all this is one of the most violent and brutal things we've ever seen.

In the second act we are taken away from the bucolic Devon countryside and romantic ideas of how the war will be into the horrors of the trenches - the added realism of a real mouse around my feet was a nice,but unnecessary touch!

On the way home we were discussing what we'd seen when the man sitting behind us joined in - it turns out that he'd been the back-end puppeteer of Joey for a few years and had given Michael Morpurgo a ride on Joey!  He gave some fascinating insights to the role, how the puppets work and how hard it was to make it look so real and so effortless.  I'm just glad we had all liked the performance and were saying nice things, it isn't always the case!

I'm now planning one more trip to see War Horse before it closes, and wondering whether to really splash out for those special seats in the front stalls for the 'wow' moment or to stick with the so-called restricted view and go twice...