Now that we have officially seen all of the official plays
for the course, I can’t help but arrange a hierarchy of sorts for them in my
brain. At the bottom we have As You Like It
at the Open Air Theatre, the best thing I can say about that performance is
that the theatre was pretty. Just above that show is For King and Country at the Southwark Playhouse, and I am actually sorry
about this one because I think the subject material was really very
interesting, the execution was just terribly boring, and maybe that means I’m
simply not cultured enough to appreciate it, but it was boring. Working the way
up the list, third from the bottom is Hamlet
at the Globe Theatre, a bad performance of a bad play, but there was at least
something happening on stage, and it made sense which automatically puts it
ahead of the last two. The next three are all Globe theatre productions, not my
favorites but still an interesting experience and some of them were performed
very well. Winter’s Tale, As You Like It and Othello, in that order ranged, for me, from acceptable to fun to
great respectively. Because they were all performed at the same theatre with
similar set designing benefits and detriments, most of my feelings for these
productions stem from casting, and script, which were both top notch for Othello. The trio of plays coming in
just under my top three all-time favorited favorites for this trip are, in
order again, Measure for Measure at
the Changeling Theatre, Consent at
the Harold Pinter Theatre, and £¥€$
at the Almeida. Measure for Measure
was one of those Shakespeare plays that I had never heard of before, let alone
read, and strongly disliked at first, but it grew on me, and I thought Changeling
Theatre’s performance was creative and interesting. Consent was a wonderful script, and £¥€$ was just something else.
Alright, I know
this sounds like mindless droning, but I’m getting to my point soon. My top
three all-time favorited favorite plays for this trip were, in no particular
order, Bat Out of Hell at the
Dominion Theatre, Flesh and Bone at
Soho Theatre, and A Monster Calls at
the Old Vic. These three plays were exceptional across the board in scripted
content, cast performance, set, staging, and directorial vision. The reason I
felt the need to inform everyone of this list is because I have always thought
of myself as a woman of the theatre
more or less, I haven’t been able to go as often as I would like, but it’s
something I truly love and largely why I wanted to go on this trip in the first
place. I had always viewed London as a city of theatre, a metropolis of the
fine arts where culture flourishes on the stage and even famous film actors
find it an honor to perform at the Old Globe Theatre or the Apollo, or where
they might have gotten their start in a small black box in a weird part of
Southwark reciting Shakespeare above a bar pulsating music.
I see a
play like A Monster Calls and the
sheer talent from the performers is astounding, coupled with the precision in
their blocking, and the set design which must have required either a lot of
skill, a lot of practice, or a lot of prayer because with the amount of
acrobatics happening on that stage someone could have, theoretically, gotten
very hurt. The choice to make the tree out of rope, and then find ways to use
the rope to make sense in other scenes so it wasn’t constantly coming on and
off stage was my favorite part because it allowed the play to have a kind of
visual reminder all the time that the tree is always and has always been
watching as well as provide the practicality of using it for other purposes in
other scenes and having it readily available when needed. The cast’s quick
changes, and chair positioning was another one of those precise aspects of the
play’s staging that when done correctly, as it was, creates the perfect set in
each scene with very little practical effort, but would have also required a
lot of practice. The sound effects for the tree’s voice were the exact right
amount of frightening, intriguing, and demanding attention. The way the
production gave life to the story’s yew tree is exactly what is so wonderful
about the theatre, it does everything a script can’t and a film doesn’t. It
gives voice, and life to the characters on the page, but maintains this
intimacy with the audience because it’s live, and because there is always
something special gained about being able to look a person in the eye, and have
them look back.
I look at a
play like Flesh and Bone and I can
remember seeing the spit fly out of Terrence’s mouth and onto Jamal’s face when
they argue in the bar scene. I remember talking to Elliot Warren after the play
and asking about his inspiration and him telling me that the play was something
he started writing about a year ago, and that he just wanted to get a message
out about working class people in London today. And I read about it a little
more in the opening pages of the program, and seeing how he had conducted
auditions in his kitchen just a couple of months before performing it. And I thought how sketchy it would be, as an
actress, to just show up in some random guy’s house expecting to audition for
his new play, especially in today’s climate. But that was how much they wanted
to act, and he held auditions there because that was the only place where he
could and he had to put on this show. I have just found it very uplifting, I
guess, to the passion and the drive to create art in the theatre here in
London. It is certainly everything I thought it would be, and it’s one of the great
gifts London offers the world.
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