Theatre 2016: Review Nine

The Lion King, Lyceum Theatre, London. March 2016.

Many years ago my sister and I saw this but at the time all we could manage were seats right up in the Gods and our fellow audience members had no idea how to behave in a theatre. We still shudder at the memory! Fast forward a few years and Mr Norfolkbookworm sees some of the cast from this perform on Blue Peter and decides he'd like to see the show, all we had to do then was wait for our nephew to be old enough to sit through a full length musical.

That day came and off we all went to London for our joint Christmas presents!

This time we were sat on the end of a row very near the front of the stalls and for my sister and I it was like seeing a completely different show. Those who hadn't seen it were also spellbound! The plot is similar to that of the Disney cartoon but there are just enough asides and modern quips to make the spectacle feel fresh, funny and up-to-date. The cast were uniformly superb and being so close to the stage and aisle just mean that we could see the artistry in puppets and the puppeteers whilst also believing totally that they were 'real'.

The magic of the production worked on all of our party, the sad bits were sad, the funny bits funny and the comeuppance of the bad characters well received, not a weak link at all. A week on and I am still humming the songs!

I'm also pleased to report that the people sitting near us were much better behaved this time!

Theatre 2014: Review Twenty-Eight (cinema)

Skylight (National Theatre Live, Wyndham's Theatre, London. September 2014.

Thanks to the NT Live programme Mr Norfolkbookworm and I got the chance to see a play that were both interested in but just couldn't fit into our diaries this summer.  Instead on a Sunday when the weather was a bit 'British' we went to our local Odeon cinema and spent almost three happy hours watching a great piece of theatre.

All I really knew about this production was that Carey Mulligan made a spaghetti bolognese on stage during the course of the drama and I do find that it is a real test of if a play works or not as to whether this approach works.

In this case I found that it did, the characters and their motives were written well enough that without too much extraneous explanation you knew who they were, how they related to each other and what drove them.  There was an awful lot of humour in the roles and I found myself laughing with and at the three characters throughout the play. (The plot is well explained on Wikipedia if you are interested, but I'd try and see an Encore if you can.)

A mark of the writing is that my opinions of the characters changed repeatedly throughout the action and although I would put myself on the liberal end of the political and social spectrum I found myself swayed by both Tom and Kyra's speeches and on balance think I had a little more sympathy with the more traditional, conservative part by the end which really surprised me! The 'star' casting was spot on and made use of actors' idiosyncrasies without making about them not the role.

Some reviewers have criticised the role, or the actor, playing Tom's son Edward.  I found him totally believable as a teenager taking a gap year.  He was the right mix of gauche, cocky, over confident and underneath it all bewildered and insecure.  His actions in the last scene are also some of the sweetest I've seen (or read in a novel) for a long time.

As is so often the case I do wish that I had seen this on stage. As I didn't manage that then I wish I'd seen it at my usual NT Live venue - Cinema City - as the screening we were in had very few people in it and really did lose more of the atmosphere than I've ever found at an NT Live screening.  I'm really pleased that another venue was showing Encores as otherwise I'd have missed this one totally but the cavernous, 3/4 empty screen did change the experience.

I've found myself thinking about the play an awful lot, it was first written and staged in 1996 but society has changed so little in that time (or we've come full circle) that it doesn't seem dated. Only the set dressing and props plus the reference to Yellow Pages give it away that this revival wasn't set in 2014. I also want to commend the set, all too often if all reviewer/bloggers can write about is the stage then there were issues with the play but in this case the backdrop was magnificent and really did make me think we were in a rundown, inner city estate.

The good news for those who missed it is there will be another chance to see the play, it will be re staged on Broadway from next April...

Theatre 2014: Review Seventeen

Another Country, The Trafalgar Studios, London. May 2014.

It has been an incredible little while for me in May and I've packed a lot into a few weeks. This means that some of the events that happened towards the start of the month are starting to be a little fuzzy around the edges when it comes to details. However as I blog for pleasure and to create a memory for me I'm not too worried about this.

Rebecca and I had another one of our mammoth London weekends recently, and although this time we packed in slightly less than usual due to a mini heatwave we still saw three plays.

The first was the sublime Another Country with a cast of young actors - many of them only just out of college.  You'd never have guessed this and it was a shame that the theatre was over half empty for the matinee, this worked in our favour though as we were upgraded from seats at the back of the auditorium to the third row!

The entire play takes place in a boarding school and has many themes, the main one being that the old boy network rules completely and that to be different in anyway works against you. The school has been rocked by a suicide and there is a lot of soul searching taking place as well as a lot of hypocrisy.  Another plot thread is that one of the character is Julian Mitchell's idea of the Cambridge Spy Guy Bennett and how his experiences at school led him along the path he took.

This last plot strand is often the one focused on most by critics but I feel that in this revival it is a smaller part - mainly because the scandal of the Cambridge Spies is now so far away that many of the younger audience may not have heard of it, and because unlike The History Boys there is no epilogue stating where the boys go after leaving school. The friendships and the hypocrisy are what I drew.

I loved the play, and while I will look out for the film version it is going to have to be amazing to be better than the play I saw.