Showing posts with label Arts Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arts Theatre. Show all posts

Friday, July 13, 2012

The Arts of Empires

Stuff gets left over from the past. And then we suddenly realise that it might be worth remembering, and we find ourselves scrabbling a bit, trying to reconstruct things, put our own interpretations on them, decide what was or wasn't significant.

I've neglected to blog about the 22nd of last month, until now. It was a moderately busy day, and I've fairly recently finished putting a bunch of photos from then up on Flickr. But actually, those only cover an early part of the day.

Specifically, we made a round trip to Cambridge to catch a couple of things, starting with a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum,  where for one thing, this year's Sculpture Promenade is in full swing. That was the point when I managed to capture a decent array of pictures. As in previous years, it proved amiably brain-stretching; we were mildly amused to run into a miniature prototype for the monumental Peter Randall-Page piece that we met at the Eden Project a while back.

But we had gone to the museum chiefly to catch something that isn't likely to come back often in our lifetimes; an exhibition of 2,000-year-old tomb treasures from China, loaned from two different Chinese museums - so to see all this lot would normally require a long round trip. There was ... a lot of jade, naturally, including two of the famous jade burial suits - not so much jade armour as full-body casings, the product of imperial wealth and the belief that jade preserved the body against corruption. There were also great bronze vessels and domestic bits and pieces, which had (just) survived two millennia of burial. But I guess that the things that spoke most effectively, as art, were rather inevitably the fairly small statuettes, figures from courtly life - especially some swirling dancers, their infeasibly long sleeves falling to the floor oddly like cartoons.

But a piece of art doesn't have to be twenty centuries old to be a period piece. That evening, we had tickets for Noel Coward's Volcano at the Arts Theatre, a relic of an earlier era, but not without amusement value. Actually, this play wasn't produced in Coward's own lifetime, initially because it proved impossible to get Katharine Hepburn on board to play the lead, but probably mostly because the sexual - and especially homosexual - content was a bit heavy for the period. It hasn't had much attention since, either; this is apparently its first-ever major production, complete with Jenny Seagrove gamely tackling the Hepburn maturely-repressed-sexy role. (No other cast members whose names I recognised, I'm afraid; I mostly ended up thinking that a Noel Coward play probably has to feature actresses with names like Finty Williams and Perdita Avery.) I can't say that it struck me as a major work of art, and it's probably not one of Coward's greatest pieces, but I laughed a bit, thought a very little, and reckoned that the staging was pretty good.

The sexual content was clear enough, incidentally, but obviously no big deal by modern standards. I suspect that it took a bit of effort from the director and cast to make the gay element even clearly noticeable, and it represented a rather small twist late in the plot even then. It was hard to avoid feeling that the volcanic eruption - however well staged - ended up as a bad case of the pathetic fallacy being used for emphasis.

But it was something to be seen. Still, it was the Chinese antiquities that were something not to be missed.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Theatre: The Hypochondriac

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 18/9/2009

There is a certain category of old-fashioned stage comedy that is basically King Lear repeated as farce - the foolish old patriarch has to Learn Better before his (generally) loving daughter can claim the romantic independence she has so richly earned, while the villains who've exploited his folly have to be exposed (comically) and thus defeated. Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire is one of these; it's also a satire on the medical profession, from an era when seeing a doctor was probably a risky enough act, even if you were genuinely ill, that such attacks could be fully justified.

This production uses a new translation, by the always likeable Roger McGough, commissioned in the wake of a previous successful Molière translation from his hand. It makes the play into a franglais farce, albeit largely in fractured comic poetry well up to his general standards; still, given the amount of toilet humour (which apparently initially put McGough off attempting this particular play, so I doubt that he's added much) and the need of which he's spoken to work around (or sometimes, in practice, update) all the song-and-dance interludes that were standard in the period, I don't think that he could seriously be accused of lowering the tone much. Anyway, the thing raised a lot of honest laughter from the audience, which ain't bad for a 336-year-old comedy in anything like its original state. My knowledge of Molière is kind of patchy, but I guess his rep may well be well earned.

The production, incidentally, makes good use of a classic and classical single-location set and a highly competent cast. The acting and direction focus on the farcical aspect - I imagine that a different approach could make Argan, the old hypochondriac, into a more pathetic figure - but I don't think that anyone in this audience was complaining.


Sunday, April 19, 2009

Theatre: A Song at Twilight

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 18/4/2009

Late-period Noel Coward - 1960s, in fact - but definitely Noel Coward. If a lot of it seemed to be an excuse for the two leads to stand around spitting aphorisms at each other, well, they were pretty good aphorisms, and Peter Egan and Belinda Lang spat them pretty well.

And it does have some pretensions to theme. It's hopefully not giving too much away about the plot to note that it's quite explicitly a story from very shortly before the legalization of homosexuality in Britain, which occasionally gives it the air of a period piece. One imagines that, these days, rather more of the audience will be rather more shocked by the not-a-self-portrait-honest! lead character's crappy treatment of the people he supposedly loves or who love him than by any of that stuff - and the audience audibly gasped at one of his casual jibes about the German people, although I'd guess that this was at least somewhat consciously meant as part of the revelation of his real character. To the extent that he may be a self-portrait, it's a fairly brutal one - although having the two women in the play telling him what a genius he is, for all his flaws, from time to time, might be considered dubious.

But never mind the gay stuff - what dates this for me is the revelation that a well-preserved, quite stylish lady of a certain age has no teeth, just a full set of dentures. Yay for medical progress, is what I say.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Theatre: God of Carnage

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 28/2/2009.

Yes, it's been rather a theatrical month round here. God of Carnage is by French playwright Yasmina Reza, who was also responsible for Art, which I saw a few years ago. The story goes that Reza proclaimed herself bemused when Art (in translation) won a Best Comedy award, as she thought that she was writing a tragedy; well, if God of Carnage wasn't originally intended as a comedy, then the translator, Christopher Hampton, must have added a lot of jokes in the course of his work (which is possible, I guess). But it also wants to be a bit more than "just" a comedy.

Mind you, this production sells on more than Reza's name, with a cast including the ever-wonderful Richard E. Grant, plus Roger Allam (not a name I recognised, but his face is familiar from lots of British TV, and he's good), Serena Evans, and Lia Williams. The plot is more setting-specific than that of Art - this is very overtly a story of the Parisian bourgeoisie, with lots of specific details - and tries rather hard to expose bourgeois failings. Two couples meet to discuss the fact that one of their young sons has beaten up the other, in an atmosphere of strained civility, and things naturally go downhill quickly from there. This collapse is predictable, and not just because it's necessary for the play to exist; one of the men rapidly demonstrates an appalling mobile 'phone addiction, while the other mentions an incident involving a hamster without realising how badly it shows him up... These aren't really civilised people.

Mind you, I'm not sure what sort of people they are. The mobile 'phone junkie is a lawyer who is dealing with a problematic corporate case, but he also seems to have some kind of background in international criminal law; one of the women is a mild-mannered liberal housewife who has somehow written a publishable book about Darfur. I had a slight sense that they had whatever features the plot demanded.

Which plot does dearly want to be taken seriously. This isn't just four people getting into screaming comedic rows, you understand; it's a picture of the flaws and dishonesty that fail to disguise the weakness and savagery of humanity. We're supposed to take the play's title seriously, you see; God is a god of carnage. Oh dear; I'm not actually sure that a four-hand, one-act bourgeois comedy can really support the weight of all this, and throwing in references to real, unspeakable tragedies like Darfur to add weight could just look dangerously crass. But perhaps I'm being too Anglo-Saxon about this. And it is rather a good bourgeois comedy.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Theatre: Where There's a Will

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 21/2/2009.

One could ask what one of our leading theatrical knights - a former director of the RSC and the National Theatre, pushing 80 - is doing touring the provinces with an early pocket-sized Feydeau farce. The answer, though, is quite likely "having fun", or maybe "very well, thanks". (Okay, it also turns out that his wife, Nicki Frei, was responsible for this new translation.) His program notes suggest that Peter Hall sees this play as a formal theatrical exercise... But that sounds too po-faced for what is actually an effective comedy executed in an attractive production. Very attractive, actually; the scene is the reception room of a Parisian town house, decorated in light Art Nouveau style, and the cast look dead stylish in Edwardian costume. It's great to look at. I thought that the cast were good, too, quick and straight-faced; for a while I thought that Sara Stewart was channeling Felicity Kendal, but actually I think itwas just a similar intonation (and the sort of part she was playing).

The farce is up to Feydeau's usual standards - more talky rather than slapstick by some standards, but with a certain amount of climbing in and falling out of windows. The plot also leans on some very theatrical, possibly distinctly period use of hypnotism, although this isn't over-used. It naturally also features the sort of total amiable sexual amorality that gave France such a reputation for naughtiness among straight-laced Anglo-Saxons of the time.

Anyway, I enjoyed it.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Theatre: Life & Beth

Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 7/2/2009.

One of the many odd gaps in my theatrical education involves Alan Ayckbourn. I've seen a few things of his on the TV from time to time, I believe, but I'm not sure I'd caught any on stage until we got to Absurd Person Singular at the Arts last November. But, yesterday, we followed that up with Life & Beth.

Actually, I suspect that this is relatively minor Ayckbourn. It's not terribly long (under two hours with the interval), it's got a fairly small cast, and it doesn't seem to be readable as much of a big political allegory. It's also pretty well impossible to discuss without giving away bits and pieces of the plot, so please be warned if you're going to catch this...

Actually, though, one doesn't need to know a lot about the plot to find, say, the big theatrical coup at the end of the first act not very surprising. The thing is generally a bit slight, to be honest; the overt jokes are few and far between, and only the central character is allowed any development; one of the others comes on completely mute, for rather weak reasons, and just stays that way. As all of the (living) characters are living lives of apparently-very-Ayckbournian quiet desperation, this makes the thing seriously bleak, if you let your attention shift from Beth herself. She ends up a bit better off, but by a not-very-startling route.

(Beth, by the way, was played by Liza Goddard, who ended up looking much more aged and careworn than she evidently does in reality. Marks for lack of actorly vanity there.)

The only things I was left wondering about were (a) how the central couple were so widely assumed to have a perfect marriage, when one of them was such a blatant, classical jerk, and (b) quite where Gordon actually went post mortem (assuming that he wasn't just a figment), as I think that there were some slightly dark hints.

All of which probably sounds much more negative than it should. The fact is that Ayckbourn can write, and create characters, and I'll be aiming to fill that gap in my education further in future, when the opportunity arises.