Theatre, In Brief: In the Open, Come from Verona, Twice

Just by way of a diary note for my personal records, really...

We finally got our dose of Cambridge open-air Shakespeare for the year recently, twice. On the 17th of this month, we saw the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in Robinson College gardens. I honestly don't think I've seen a live performance of this one before, and while it was fun, I guess that I can see why not. I can quite believe that this was Shakespeare's first play (as seems to be the current academic best guess); it felt like a sketch towards his later comedy career, or somebody trying to emulate a Shakespeare comedy and not getting it quite right. The production pushed for some broad comedy with the outlaws (all female in this production, presumably purely for practical casting reasons), which didn't quite come off for me. Still, even in early, weak Shakespeare, you can suddenly get a jewel like "Who is Silvia? What is she/That all our swains commend her?" dropping in.

The prototypical nature of Two Gentlemen extends to its having a character action towards the end that probably looked a bit off even when it was written, and is likely to annihilate modern audience sympathies for the character involved entirely. Talking of which... The second part of this accidental duo was The Taming of the Shrew, courtesy of the Globe Theatre company on tour, in the Master's Garden at Corpus Christi (a bit of Cambridge architecture I'd not got into before, come to think of it), on the 23rd of the month. I'd not looked at any reviews of this beforehand, so I didn't know it was going to be an all-female cast in vaguely 1920s costume. Which actually worked rather well, especially for Petruchio, who ended up as a rather dashing roaring girl type in a pilot's coat.

But the casting and costumes didn't really address the modern problem of Kate's last speech. That was handled by having her deliver it 100% straight, but then looking at the male characters' reactions, especially Petruchio's. This turned the end of that scene into a big oops, damn moment, as it seemed to dawn on him and that others that he might have gone too far there. He'd really rather liked the untamed Kate, one felt, and now he'd lost that. From then on, everyone delivered their lines hesitantly, going through the motions and giving the play a complete downer ending. Which is probably as good a solution to that issue as any.

Good music, too, by the way.

Much Ado About ... Murder

There's a problem with trying to play Much Ado About Nothing in modern dress; these just aren't quite modern people in a modern world. They can seem that way for long stretches, but then - Beatrice snaps, spits, or whispers "Kill Claudio", and it all goes a little strange. The standard solution, by my casual observation, seems to be to set it no later than the Edwardian period - the last time that the combination of an honour culture and assumed aristocratic privilege makes this sort of thing, along with warfare as an extension of family squabbles, reasonably plausible.

Joss Whedon's cheerfully hastily assembled black-and-white movie treatment tackles such problems largely by ignoring them, bulling straight through the script as a reading by some people who happen to be highly competent actors in modern dress. Where modern equivalences can be found for details in the story, they're used; where they can't, never mind. There are occasional oddities; Beatrice and Benedick get a modern-style sexual history, whereas Hero and Claudio preserve their proper sense and assumptions of virginal purity - but even that can be seen as setting up a contrast between the worldly (and mutually suited) lead couple and the more idealistic (and flawed) secondary pairing.

However, there are hints of a darker modernity. These people in smart suits and big limos, fighting killing wars with their own family? The local cops, a bunch of bumbling dolts totally under the thumbs of the patronising rich folk? The reverence for Catholicism, in the person of a smoothly obliging priest? The improvised cable tie handcuffs and polished personal handguns? You know, it's just possible that these characters are actually a bunch of Mafiosi. They're terribly polite about it, of course - they wouldn't dream of talking business in front of the womenfolk (apart from Conrade, who's been sex-changed into a cold-eyed moll and honorary guy) - but the story ends up with a chilly edge if you look at it this way. The problem isn't that anyone contemplates killing anyone else, it's that they do so when everyone was supposed to be kicking back and taking a break from business.

(Like Whedon was, actually...)

But that's just a possibility; Whedon hasn't touched Shakespeare's words, so we just have to fit our assumptions to what ends up on the screen. And it's not like the analogy doesn't work quite well with Elizabethan aristocrats.

Amy Acker gives great Beatrice, by the way - more unhappy and betrayed than aggressive or dangerous, but well able to handle slapstick, love scenes, vengefulness, and Shakespearean prose. She's already got a decent TV career, but one suspects that a few big-movie casting directors will be calling her agent after this one.

Fragments of 2011 (and earlier)

[[Oh dear. Oh dear. Time to clear out some old junk.]]

[[I've been quite busy over the last year or so, and highly prone to displacement activities. Which has meant, among other things, that I've left a whole bunch of draft posts never being completed or posted. Well, we now have a new year, so I'm resolving (despite the fact that I do not do New Year Resolutions) to clear house a bit. These posts are highly incomplete, and they're going to stay incomplete - I'm just going to post them all in one go, as fragments and sketches falling out of my brain over that year or so. I may or may not have tidied, revised, or edited parts of them. Take them or (perhaps better) leave them.]]

[[The first actually goes right back to October 2010, oh dear...]]

Recent Reading: I Shall Wear Midnight
by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett's "Tiffany Aching" books, in the "younger readers" sub-category of Discworld stories, have always suffered from the danger of falling into a fixed pattern. While wandering around her home chalk downlands area and developing her skills, young witch Tiffany Aching encounters a supernatural threat ...

... But Pratchett is too canny a writer to fall too deeply into too rigid a pattern, and this fourth and latest book in the sub-series appears - probably - to show him quitting while he's ahead. Tiffany has aged as a character through the series, and now she's sixteen ...

[[By June 2011, I noticed that I wasn't getting everything I meant to do, done:]]

Catching Up: Late June (Going to Extremes)

I've fallen way behind on my blogging, to the point where the next few entries won't represent diary entries so much as notes made before I forget everything. [[Hah!]] My Flickr photostream is quite a bit more up to date; tinkering with photos seems to work much better as a displacement activity than jotting down text. Yes, I seem to have been keeping busy.

Anyway, the first un-diarised event in question was a trip westwards. I hadn't been to Cornwall since childhood holidays; it didn't feel as personally resonant as Charmouth and Lyme, but it still felt odd not to have seen the place for quite so long. So we booked a few days in Falmouth.

Okay, so we were in a boutique hotel within sight of a branch of the Rick Stein empire. That wasn't terribly reminiscent of childhood caravanning holidays, but it did permit a few very nice dinners. (The first being very, very good fish and chips. I get the idea about good fried fish melting in the mouth, but this is the first time I've had to use the same phrase for chips.) The hotel was good, too, apart from a shortage of parking, and also the seagulls in the morning, which showed the limitations of the place's sound insulation. ...

[[A little after that, I barely started another post:]]

Theatre: All's Well That End's Well
Shakespeare's Globe, 30/6/2011

On a very occasional theme of trips to the Globe Theatre for lesser Shakespearean drama (i.e. plays by him that we haven't seen often if at all before) ...

[[In July, we got back up to London.]]

Literary Sources and Resources

British devotees of SF sometimes like to think that this country has a special place in the history of the genre. Well, it's true that we did produce Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, and H.G.Wells, so we have little to be ashamed of - but the "special" role of British SF is ultimately defined by a negative; we didn't create the pulp magazines (or their contemporary successors, the big-screen Hollywood FX action movies) that still define SF to so many people outside of fandom. Along with those founder-figures, though, we have also produced some extraordinary visionaries in more recent times. The British Library currently has a pair of exhibitions that illustrate all this, and on the 9th, we went along to both.

Why does the BL run such things? Oh, they have the resources - and we also took in their permanent exhibition rooms, which we'd missed out on before ...

[[The two exhibitions were a small one about Mervyn Peake and a large one about British SF in general, by the way. And they were interesting.]]

[[In October, I started blogging about our big antipodean trip. My Flickr photostream is covering that better, actually, albeit long after the event.]]

To the Far Side
October 7-???

... The trip began, on the Friday: taxi (to the coach stop)-coach (to Heathrow)-747 (to Singapore). That was with an afternoon start, so it was a night flight,  on which I finally got to see Green Lantern (some smart revisionism regarding goofy Silver Age comics conventions and metaphysics, fuzzy FX visuals in an attempt to get the Green Lantern power to look right, plot all over the shop thanks to Hollywood Oedipal obsession) and Paul (current British ubergeek auteur possibly slips over the edge into self-indulgence, certainly shows rather painful media-geek tin ear for the subtleties and niceties of written SF and its exponents). I also managed an hour or two's sleep before arriving in the future in mid-afternoon.

Well, I suspect that some people would like Singapore to be their vision of the future. It's a bit hot for me - but then, it does have plenty of air conditioning to compensate. The difference between indoors and outdoors is ... extreme. ...

... Tuesday was our one full day in Perth, so we tried to work out our personal highest priorities in the city. First stop was the Perth Mint, a former outpost of the Royal Mint set up to process gold from the gold fields. These days, it's been handed over to the Western Australian state government, it no longer handles gold coinage provision for much of the British Empire, and the refining and casting operations have moved out of town, but the city centre building still has some impressive-looking machinery and a few museum features - including the world's largest collection of gold bars. (Okay, just a couple of rooms' worth - but still.) It also has the facilities to cast a single gold bar, as demonstrated by one of the staff several times per day (using the same gold every time). Okay, so this is basically just a short fireworks display - but an expensive one.

Then we moved on to the city's museum district, to discover that the big Art Gallery no longer opens Tuesdays. Hey ho, the big Museum was open (some good info on the history of the region, Victorian stuffed animals, a pretty good collection of meteorites), and then came lunch in the Gallery cafe, then a short bus ride to big Botanical Garden ...

...
Wedenesday was packing, checking out, and heading out to the rail terminal to get on the Indian-Pacific rail service, departing eastwards just before noon. This is a pretty comfortable way to spend three days crossing Australia, albeit in a compact cabin ... but the food's pretty good. So we spent the afternoon making our way up the valley of the Avon River, and that night, the train stopped for a few hours in Kalgoorlie, so we took a one-hour coach trip in the dark. Much of this was about the driver being flippant about this mining town, but we did get to stop at the biggest hole in the ground in the world. Sadly, this open-cast mine wasn't very active this night, so all we got to see was a couple of distant (very distant) giant (very giant) trucks in patches of spotlight as they went about their gold-gathering business.

Then we hit our bunks to try and catch enough sleep before Thursday, when we were set to cross the Nullarbour plain. Okay, so I was a little disappointed on principle to see a few trees when I woke up, but we moved into a zone of arboreal nullity soon enough. ...

[[Then I got through to November before I started another post.]]

Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

... We must have seen many of these pictures before - they're on loan from museums we've visited over the years - but ... Among other things, we must have Vermeer's Lacemaker in the Louvre, but seeing it in the flesh felt fresh - and showed (or reminded) us that it's actually rather small; the reproduction print we have on the wall at home is actually twice as big. (Banners outside blow these pictures up to huge size; actually mostly rather small.) The Fitzwilliam clearly know what the selling point of this exhibition is ... despite title, only a couple of Vermeers in the show, but plenty of other good stuff ...

[[And there, I leave things and make a fresh start. Hmm, I never even started posting about the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival open air Macbeth, which was good, but which featured one big curious inversion of effect. The evening we went, the first half got played in daylight, while the second half was played in darkness. But the first half is where you get most of the serious plot darkness, as the two lead characters plunge into evil; the second half is basically a political thriller in which light is restored.]]

[[Oh, and in the unlikely event that anyone's wondering; I can no longer be bothered to even say anything about Doctor Who.]]

Hamlet

It's a kind of twisted and unfortunate compliment to media SF that the BBC breaks a decade or two's avoidance of Shakespeare in order to make a filmed version of an RSC production of Hamlet that happens to feature the Doctor as the prince and Captain Picard doubling Claudius and the ghost. But let's not be grudging; it was three hours of good, punchy, classic drama. David Tennant did actually bring some of the tics that he's been using to make people like his Doctor to his starring role; all that nervous, eccentric intelligence, the worry in those staring eyes, the bursts of energy and introspection - it was a perfectly respectable Hamlet while also being the David Tennant that the Who-fans will have wanted to see. Patrick Stewart, meanwhile, simply applied the intelligence and gravitas and charisma that he can wheel out for any role you care to pay him for to both purposes; why the director wanted him in both roles was unclear to me - I assume it was simply that if you've got one of the best mature actors of his generation available for this play, you might as well make maximum use of your resources. The ghost isn't much of a character, of course, but Stewart had some fun with Claudius's increasing but never quite adequate attempts at murderous deviousness.

(Hmm. Maybe... If the ghost is partially - though not completely - a projection of Hamlet's neuroses, and given that Hamlet doesn't seem to have seen much of his father for some years or to have had much in common with him, perhaps the face and voice he perceives could indeed be drawn from the available alpha male on whom he's projecting his Oedipal anger? Oh, heck, maybe maybe maybe - but that's making excuses, not adding anything to the play.)

Anyway, it would be wrong to imply that this was purely a two-star vehicle. The RSC cast was as good as you could expect, including Oliver Ford Davies as a Polonius so annoying that most of the audience will have wanted to stab him in the arras by "to thine own self be true" (though he actually took a bullet through a mirror in this incarnation); Edward Bennett struck me as a bit too Wodehousean as Laertes, but perhaps that was the point, while Mariah Gale worked to convey the underlying fragility in an Ophelia who initially seemed quite smart and sensible, before rather rapidly flipping under stress, and Penny Downie was a hard-drinking satin-dressed mature jazz siren of a Gertrude.

"Wodehousean", by the way, wasn't a big problem given that this was a more-or-less modern dress production, looking kind of 1930s formal in the early scenes where smart suits, ties, and court decorations were everywhere, before the more modern leather jackets and such began to intrude. (Hamlet carrying a medieval sword to threaten his friends with in early scenes just looked clunky, though; the large flick knife that he didn't quite use on the praying Claudius was more in keeping.) The production design was fabulous - all polished black marble, huge mirrors, and chandeliers; Elsinore had clearly acquired a great interior designer from somewhere, even if the battlements were still cold and drafty places for trench-coated sentries to pace in the vaguely defined wee small hours. The minor obsession with surveillance cameras initially looked more trendy than apposite (and not very '30s), but it became clear that Hamlet was partly being driven to distraction by the sense that he was perpetually under observation, which was why he grabbed a gun to shoot out that mirror and hence Polonius, so I'll give it a pass.

Overall, then, three hours of David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, and a lot of other top professionals doing their stuff to fine effect, shiny and crisp; the Beeb can have my license money for this, and will in any case doubtless make plenty on the DVD sales, and I don't think that the Who or Trek fans will have been disappointed.

Theatre: The Comedy of Errors

Emmanuel College Master's Garden, 23/8/2009

Another day, another problem Shakespeare comedy. The problem in this case - the reason why this one doesn't get produced so much (I'd never seen it live before) - being of course that some people aren't sure if it's actually any good. It barely even makes it to the dictionary of quotations, after all. But the company from Shakespeare's Globe have not only tackled it; they've taken it on tour, in an authentic-practices sort of approach with a booth stage (a rectangular canvas box forming the back of the small, low temporary stage) and a cut-back cast engaging in much doubling up - albeit with costumes that mix modern dress and vaguely period-eastern-Mediterranean style (to go with some Arabic-style clarinet-based music, hookah pipes, and so on).

And hey, they had me convinced by the end that this early Shakespeare piece is worth seeing occasionally. It may be a farce that's labeled as a Comedy, but it turns out that Shakespeare could orchestrate a pretty decent farce when he wanted to (okay, borrowing hard from three different Latin sources); it's not Feydeau - a lot depends on someone who's spent several years searching for his long-lost twin brother not having the faintest idea why a town full of people might be mistaking him for someone else - but it raises quite a few laughs and has at least a touch of poignancy.

Not that this production tried too hard for the last, after an affecting opening scene. The doubling up included several major parts and both the pairs of twins who are central to the plot, which worked perfectly well until the climax, when they're finally supposed to be on stage together - and so the final scene saw life-sized cardboard cut-outs of two of the cast wheeled on to act as place-holders, while another actor, doubling the Duke and Angelo, spent a lot of time switching postures while talking to himself. The cast were slick enough to make this very funny, but it couldn't rise above the level of mock-amateur slapstick. Still, think of a touring Elizabethan theatre company, playing something originally written to entertain a bunch of drunken lawyers to a random audience of unlettered provincials, working with the resources they had available, and this was probably about right.

Mind you, on those terms, playing it in a University garden isn't strictly right - apparently, the University banned theatre companies. But on a nice day, with a picnic blanket and a production that was clever enough to make itself look convincingly rough-and-ready, who cares?

Theatre: Troilus and Cressida

Shakespeare's Globe, 18/7/2009

Call me a bit middlebrow, but I really do enjoy plays at Shakespeare's Globe, definitely including their "original practices" productions. The atmosphere is unique, with a combination of intimacy and theatricality; I don't know if the designers and directors have really recreated the authentic Elizabethan format, but they certainly come up with something. But we'd not been for a while, and we left booking this until a few days before, so we had to take "restricted view" seats.

And so, after a quick early dinner at The Real Greek, just down the road (the first time we'd tried this small London-based chain - not at all bad, and eminently suited to the need of a quick bite before the play), we found ourselves up on the highest level, almost behind the stage, and looking down on the heads of the cast and squinting sideways at the musicians. Actually, though, this worked pretty well; the wraparound audience is sort of much of the point of the exercise. I wouldn't put anyone off from taking these tickets.

Now, confession time; I don't think that I've ever seen a production of Troilus and Cressida before, though I think that I read it back at school. But then, one doesn't get very many chances, and looking up the history of the play, well, one wouldn't have had any for most of the period since it was written. You can tell that this is considered minor Shakespeare; it only has a handful of resonantly oft-quoted lines.

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion ... Wars and lechery ... Generation of vipers ...."

Gosh, Shakespeare was in a sour mood when he wrote this one, wasn't he? Not King Lear life-is-pain, the-gods-don't-care tragic, just life-sucks-because-people-are-idiots deep-seated annoyance. I rather wonder if he'd be out drinking with a few veterans of the Dutch wars for a few nights. I do like the idea that Achilles is somewhat based on the recently-fallen Earl of Essex, who was certainly compared to the "classical" Achilles when he was at his height of accomplishment. The play's Achilles is enough of an egomaniac sociopath glory-hound to fit my impression of Essex. (I'm not sure why this version had the play's only Welsh accent, though.)

Or perhaps, not knowing the play so well, I'm being influenced too much by a modern director's interpretation. The play's contempt for the business of war-fighting has evidently made it very much a piece for the post-1914 world, and it's doubtless impossible to avoid modernising much of it. The depiction of Cressida as a desperate victim of a male-dominated, militarised world, scrabbling to survive while being treated as property, while plausible and moving, may not have been entirely original practices. But then, this production interpreted that term fairly broadly; the fairly authentic-looking Hellenic arms and armour wouldn't have been very likely in the Elizabethan era, I think. Still, the designer and armorer had some neat (if arbitrary) ideas, giving the Trojans curved kopis-style swords and bucklers, while the Greeks had straight gladius-style blades and pelta-type crescent shields. I think that the idea was to give the audience back their own vague ideas about the setting, just as would have been the norm in Shakespeare's time; along with the warriors in skirts and Hellenic helmets, there were the women in floaty white nighties, sometimes with arbitrary cutaway panels. It mostly worked, although Helen's high heels were a bit distracting. The fight scenes were a touch stylised, sometimes going into slow motion, but given the numbers involved and nature of the stage, that was probably a necessity.

Anyway... I think that I can also see why this play was tagged as a history (rather than a tragedy or a comedy), perhaps even by Shakespeare himself. Not that it fits with the rest of his history cycle, of course, but the sense that it's re-telling an existing story to make a complicated point about the subject, and letting the messy complexities of the story just lie there rather than being resolved, because that's just how they are, not wrapped up in a neat plot. (Although not being an English history, and not featuring anyone with any sort of blood relationship to the Tudors, perhaps lets Shakespeare be more cynical than the other histories normally manage.) Actually, it's a rather untidy plot; the nominal protagonists more or less disappear by the end, as the attention shifts to the death of Ajax and the war lurches on, rolling over individuals. All this open-endedness and cynicism maybe sit oddly with the somewhat carnivalesque atmosphere of a Globe production, too; the (historically authentic) closing jig ends up feeling anomalous (although I don't know how such things work when the Globe does Lear either). But one has to wonder how Shakespeare's own audience took this thing, too (this being, one gathers, even less known than for some of his other works), and I can't think of a more enjoyable way to be confronted with such questions.