Reports From Theatre Land

[bookgazing]

Hello everyone, just a quick update post, after my second London trip to talk about theatre and sightseeing!

Two weekends ago I met Ana, Ana and Meghan for general hanging out on the way to a production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ at The Globe. Honestly I had a fantastic time, in fact it was one of the best days I’ve had in ages meeting new people as everything just seemed so easy (so easy that I over talked way too often).

I thought the play was lovely, but then I’ve yet to see a bad staging of a Shakespeare play, his work makes everyone try their hardest it seems. Even the adaptations I wasn’t expecting huge things from about (Alastair McGowan and Jason Merrels in a touring production of ‘Measure for Measure’) have been wonderful. And, ok I’m a celeb spotter at the theatre so it was really exciting to see cast members I recognised from television *is a philistine for being excited to see Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bell Air on stag*. The Globe’s staging is something special. It may even compete with the RSC’s varied staging experiments (look I am RSC biased ok), because the RSC theatre in Stratford does not have water features, or real trees.

The ladies were very generous and I ended up with a huge sack of books loaned and given:

Ok, maybe I bought a few as well. I couldn't get a good picture of them and have lost my patience with the camera so they were:

'The Eagle of the Ninth' - Rosemary Sutcliffe (childhood revisit after loving the film based on this book)
'Miss Hargreaves' - Frank Baker (single woman heroine)
And a non-fiction book about the real story behind Robinson Crusoe (which I can't remember the title of right now)

And then the day after I went to meet a friend who had just got engaged. Lots of ring ogling and Pimms on that occasion.

Last weekend I went on an epic theatre trip with my mum where we saw two shows, went sightseeing around London all day every day and took a theatre walking tour. Highlights included seeing the only portrait of Shakespeare with a good claim to being painted from life (Shakespeare was a rake I tell you), finding a ‘right out of Blyton’ school fete in Deans gate, which enticed us to sit with Pimms and cake made by a Latin teacher to watch Morris dancing, spotting pelicans in St James Park, a trip to Salvatore’s (the foooood is so good) and Moroccan food on the Southbank. Oh and the theatre of course:

Les Miserables: It was my second time seeing Les Mis and omfg I had forgotten how great it is. The songs from the word go are all singalongamazing. I like the crowd songs best ( ‘Work Song’ ‘At the End of the Day’, ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’), but some of the solo performances were just so outstanding that even a musical dunce like me could understand I was seeing something special.

The story is kind of a weird, but oddly hopeful mixture of the socially progressive (‘Lovely Ladies’, is a song which confronts everyone’s ideas about the comic image of the prostitute and Jean Valjean’s storyline forces the audience to question established ideas about criminality) and adherence to the limitations of old standards (oh Eponine I hope thousands have written fan fiction where you don’t have to die just because you dare to love the hero when he loves someone more traditionally feminine and socially acceptable). I’d love to know how much of the each position is Hugo and how much comes from the modern producers, which I guess means I have to read the very large set of novels.

War Horse: I’m absolutely gutted that I didn’t enjoy ‘War Horse’ more, as I was expecting to throw myself into loving it more than Les Mis. First let me say everything good I’ve heard about the staging and the puppetry is true. The puppets and the people working the horses are fantastic, as the mechanism and the puppeteers work together to produce true depictions of horse’s behaviour and movements (the front legs don’t quite look right as the horses run, after Joey grows up, but I think that’s probably a technical limitation). I loved the computerised backdrops, the actors dancing birds in flight across the stage, the creation of a tank on stage – basically all the staging, sets and costumes are amazing.

Unfortunately some of the main actors in the performance we saw were really bad at their jobs. They were obviously working off that well repeated principle that acting has to be larger in the theatre to reach the people at the back, but they seemed to lack the ability to retain the nuance of the emotions they were supposed to be portraying, as they projected larger and louder. Some of the actor’s performances were shouty. Some performances were just confusingly lacking in emotion and the actors uttered their lines with such disjointed inflection that I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the serious points they were trying to make.

While bad acting is obviously always a problem in a play, it was especially detrimental to my reaction towards ‘War Horse’. The play’s story is hugely sentimental. There’s a scene where Joey the horse is creates the opportunity for co-operation between soldiers on both sides of the trenches. The finale has Albert reuniting with his horse, while blinded by tear gas, just before bells signal the end of WWI. These are not subtle scenes. Their meaning and intent are clear; war is hell and we should all weep for those caught up in it. Now the uncompromising forcefulness of this message and the blatant attempt to inspire sympathetic emotions should not necessarily have been something that turned me away from this play. I agree with the sentiment that war is harmful and it would be inaccurate for me to say that I’m put off entertainment by heavy sentiment, or obvious displays of politically partial sentiment. I do prefer this kind of message to be subtle and less one sided, but I adored ‘The Lion King’, which is very sentimental and I enjoyed ‘Blood Brothers’ which contains a political message that lacks ambiguity. I could name lots of other media I like that is kind of sappy (Les Mis, that I’ve praised above got me in the heart with ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ and ‘Castle on a Cloud’ which are both very much ‘cry, damn you’ heart string tugger songs), or very one-sided in its political stance, but something about the combination of sentiment, straight down the line opinions and awful acting triggered a bad reaction that I don’t think I’d have had if the play had just been kind of fuzzy hearts wanting and firm in its opinions.

I did find myself so interested, as a big ‘Black Beauty’ fan, in the parallels between Anna Sewell’s novel, which was partly written to illuminate the poor treatment of cab horses and ‘War Horse’, which shows a lot of the pain horses went through as they served in WWI. I think the production company (and I assume Michael Morpurgo, the author of the novel the play is based on) have tried to follow a similar structure to ‘Black Beauty’, as the play sees one horse as he’s passed on to different ‘owners’ (there are other similarities that suggest this play is actively recognising a link to Sewell’s novel, but the structure seems like the main one to me).

It’s interesting just to compare the difference in structure, but I can’t quite stop myself from making judgement comparisons as well. Which piece of media uses this type of structuring device the best? I’m not convinced that there’s enough space in this production to pull off this structure as successfully as in ‘Black Beauty’. The play requires a narrator to help the audience understand what is going on and without having Joey talk in a permanent voice over (as Black Beauty does in the 1994 film) humans must take that part. In order to care about the thoughts each character has about the brutal world they live in, the audience needs to get to know and care about each human narrator as much as they care about the constantly present Joey. In my opinion the play just doesn’t support the audience enough to encourage them to form a deep connection with all the multiple human ‘owners’. Some of these human characters lack development. Some are cast off as soon as is convenient for the plot, for example a French child whose live is eventually blown apart by war never finds Joey again. For all the audience knows wanders in the woods alone until she dies, even though she has shown just as much narrative innocence, kindness and morality as Albert and so has by the rules of this narrative earned a similar happy ending). The narrative doesn’t encourage the audience to care what happens to her after she’s played her narrative part (sweet girl who learns a bit of English and shows her love for a horse). The consequence of including so many characters that lack back story or depth of personality is that a majority of the play has no emotional resonance and the audience must rely on their connection with the horse to feel the full importance of everything that takes place in the play. I came away feeling I’d have enjoyed ‘War Horse’ with just the horses and a mime show from the actors.

Saying that, one of the most affecting parts of the play comes when a less developed character (Albert’s cousin) must charge Joey into the gaps of the enemy lines. His repeated, desperate cry of ‘Where are the gaps, sir?’ as the sounds of war play loudly through the theatre, brought to life a soldier’s experience through the simplicity of the fear and perseverance on display. I’ve got to give ‘War Horse’ some of my heart for that and the vivid mechanical recreation of horses; I just wish I could feel a little bit more towards it.

Now a question for you all. What production should I see next be it musical, plays or Shakespeare if the opportunity comes up?