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December 16, 2014 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Love’s Labour’s Won: Review by Peter Buckroyd

It is an inspired choice to play Love’s Labour’s Lost set just before the war – the first world war in this instance –  with Love’s Labour’s Won (better known as Much Ado About Nothing) set just after it, payed by  the same cast and both directed by Christopher Luscombe.

Love’s Labour’s Won is the harder task. I don’t think I have ever completely believed or understood Claudio and Hero and I’m afraid I didn’t in this production either. The decision to play Benedick (Edward Bennett) and Beatrice (Michelle Terry) a bit younger than usual works particularly well, though. It’s not their last chance for love or marriage; they are genuinely attracted to each other; there is strong chemistry between them; they are also a bit edgy; they want to love but find it hard to commit: all very modern and appropriate. Their scenes together are a delight but, unlike in Love’s Labour’s Won there are a few set problems. Beatrice overhears Benedick from a balcony in the stage left tower but unfortunately can’t be seen by those in the high and low numbered seats. It’s pretty ridiculous for the RSC to sell Restricted View seats at all in a twenty-first century theatre, but it’s even more ridiculous to block in such a way that maybe a hundred extra people who are not supposed to have a restricted view can’t see what is going on. There is enough in the play itself (Claudio and Hero’s antics; the Dogberry stuff; the ‘villainy’ of Don John; the fact that Shakespeare tells rather than shows Hero’s ‘unfaithfulness’) which strains credibility without adding to audience members’ alienation. Too much action takes place upstage left.

The music is great. Several non-Shakespearian songs were interspersed and the inclusion of ‘In the bleak mid-winter’ was an inspired choice by Nigel Hess. Once again his music serves the play beautifully.

The usually dreary Dogberry business is very well handled because Nick Haverson is so funny, although I felt that the scene in his kitchen was TV sitcom farce. I enjoyed the acting itself rather than the effect. Leonato (David Horovitch) needed to hear Hamlet’s advice to the players. I was not convinced that it was Leonato who was sawing the air with his hands; I strongly suspected it was Horovitch.

As in Love’s Labour’s Won there is a lot of visual spectacle and variety: Benedick hiding in the Christmas tree; Dogberry’s kitchen; the great hall of Charlecote commandeered as a military hospital.

Luscombe tried to do something about Don John’s unconvincingness by giving him crutches and making him a casualty of the war. At the previews Sam Alexander didn’t look completely comfortable with them; no doubt this  later developed into it looking as if Don John was not comfortable with them.

There is much to enjoy and many audience members greatly enjoyed the preponderance of farcical scenes. There is certainly a lot to be gained by seeing these two plays as a pair. If you come to see them make sure that you are not sitting in seats on the edges for Love’s Labour’s Won; if you do some of it might be lost.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: loves labours won, much ado, rsc, Rsc reviews, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, theatre

December 16, 2014 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Love’s Labour’s Lost: Review by Peter Buckroyd

Christopher Luscombe’s production of this lovely play is outstanding. Set at Charlecote Park, it’s lovely to look at and despite the many location changes in the text the set management is so skilful that it comes across as fluid and seamless. There are real books in the study set with which the play opens (or at least one!) and the backdrop of the Manor and its towers delightful to look at. Set pieces like the roof emerge through the extensive trap.

All eight of the lords and ladies are strongly played, Sam Alexander as King of Navarre and Leah Whittaker as Princess of France being delightful foils to Edward Bennett’s Berowne and Michelle Terry’s Rosaline. The four lords are convincing because there is something naive and innocent about their silly retreat, nowhere better shown than when Dumaine is seen wearing pyjamas on the roof with his Bridesheadian teddy bear reading his love letter, and and the ladies because they are enjoying their trip away from home.

The comic scenes, too often tiresome and overdone in productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost, are skilfully handled. Holofernes, Nathaniel and Dull play a charming game of bowls, Costard (Nick Haverson) is hilarious, the aesthete Armado (John Hodgkinson) plays the piano for Moth (Peter McGovern) to sing beautifully and Nathaniel looks tastelessly splendid in his sandals and socks. The Muscovite songs and dances are silly but delightful to watch.

Simon’s Higlett’s costumes are delightful to look at, attentive to detail and with lots of amusing touches. Nigel Hess’s music complements the action perfectly and at one moment is accompanied by sheep noises in the background.

Because the whole play is so well performed the ending is particularly moving. It is a delight that Marcade’s announcement is so underplayed at the end and that the mood suddenly but subtly shifts from youthful merriment to impending doom, the announcement of the King of France’s death heralding the imminent arrival of the first world war as the lords don their army uniforms at the end. The production wonderfully balances the serious and the comic, the serious and the frivolous, the game of courting with the possible reality of love.

This is as good a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost as I have seen. You must see it, too. Come to Stratford to see this excellent cast in Love’s Labour’s Won, too, and enjoy and restful and comfort-filled stay at Moss Cottage while you do so. You will go home with lifted spirits and maybe a little nostalgia for times when life was more innocent.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: loves labours lost, loves labours lost review, rsc, Rsc reviews, shakespeare, theatre, theatre review

December 14, 2014 by billbruce Leave a Comment

The Christmas Truce: a Review by Peter Buckroyd

At first sight the choice of a play about the First World War is not the most obvious subject matter choice for the RSC’s Christmas show for families but it was an inspired idea to have a conceptual winter trilogy: Love’s Labours Lost set before the war, The Christmas Truce during it and Love’s Labours Won after it.

The Christmas Truce is about Bruce Bairnsfather from Bishopton just outside Stratford of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment who goes to war in 1914. The play begins in the summer of 1914 when recruits undergo episodes of training and then arrive in France and ends with with Christmas Day truce and the leaders’ opposition to it.

Children will understand the story and will have some sense of what went on in the war. They will be able to understand the message that as long as soldiers are fighting the unknown they can imagine that they are fighting ‘the enemy’ but when they meet the enemy and find that they are human like themselves then their view of war might change. There are some lessons during the course of the play, such as what sort of noise lots of different bombs make and what sort of life it was for women who volunteered to serve as nurses and information about Germany. There is also a sermon of which the theme is ‘blessed are the peacemakers’. There are Christmas carols and even Ave Maria.

The Christmas Truce has very high production values. Transitions between scenes are slick. Moveable props – chairs, step ladders, beds, tables – Â are used splendidly to create a train, hospital rooms, trenches, no man’s land. The sound track is busy and extensive. Sound and lighting have complex plots and are very well managed.

The show is deigned to be entertaining. If you go make sure that you get into your seat early to watch the pre-show entertainment of the village fete with coconut shy, games of catch and cricket.

The Christmas Truce is very episodic. I soon lost track of how many different episodes there were, but this creates a lot of the visual spectacle with alternating movement and stacis. There are two fragments of character development. The audience begins to feel for the reluctant recruit Liggins (played well by Oliver Lynes) and it is a great shame that he is killed off half way through the play. Â Half the British soldiers had to die in the first half of the play because the actors were needed to play the German soldiers in the second half. Character interest needed to give way to pragmatism. An attempt is also made to develop the character of Matron a little as her resistance to decorate the ward for Christmas diminishes. Dramatist Phil Porter attempts to make a parallel between the authorities of war command and hospital command.

Adults may find the lack of complexity, the sentimentality and the reductive nature of the language unrewarding. Some may feel that the play is more like a series of sketches than an unfolding drama. Some may be mystified by the sudden insertion of the sermon and by what it is meant at length to be saying. Others may not really enjoy the series of first world war cliches.

But the children at the performance I went to seemed to enjoy it and so perhaps after all the lack of sophisticated writing may be counterbalanced by the visual and aural stimulus.

 

 

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Christmas Truce, Christmas Truce review, reviews, rsc, Rsc reviews, theatre

December 14, 2014 by billbruce Leave a Comment

The Shoemaker’s Holiday: A Review by Peter Buckroyd

Philip Breen’s production of The Shoemaker’s Holiday in the Swan Theatre rather surprisingly reveals  Thomas Dekker’s play to be a neglected masterpiece. The play is in many ways a very modern theatre piece. It alternates compressed time with expanded time; Dekker chooses not to show several scenes crucial to plot development with the result that untold and half told stories lie behind much of the action. What the audience might expect to be dramatic and tension-filled scenes are omitted and merely briefly mentioned. Characters frequently defy audience expectations.

The rise of the power and significance of the merchant class is Dekker’s subject, a theme which allows him to make implicit comparisons of the behaviour of the rising merchant class with that of the aristocracy and, daringly at the end of the play, with monarchy. Shoemaker Simon Eyre attempts to intercede on behalf of his employee Ralph Damport when the latter is conscripted into the army but fails, so that Ralph and his new wife Jane are separated as Ralph goes off to war. In a parallel plot Rowland Lacy, nephew of the Earl of Lincoln, is crossing class barriers by being in love with Rose Oatley, daughter of the Lord Mayor of London  (a grocer), but he too is sent to war. Ralph goes to war but is injured. Lacy goes to war but deserts, returning to London disguised as a Dutch shoemaker, finding employment with Eyre.  The injured Ralph returns to Eyre and his old job. On their return neither man is reconciled with his partner; Jane has disappeared and Lacy keeps his head down. But in the end both couples are reconciled. Jane, having been wooed by Hammon who himself is crossing class barriers by wooing her, rejects Hammon when she recognises the injured Ralph and Lacy’s disguise is finally seen through by Rose and, despite the opposition of parent and uncle, they marry secretly.

There is a lot of material about social class, its relationship to discourse and its reflection in clothes, but what triumphs is personal integrity and sound morality. The programme comments on the emptiness of Eyre’s speech, but this is not entirely true. Although his verbosity creates a great  deal of humour it is his humanity, his adherence to promises he has made and his loyalty which shine through the surface of ridiculous verbosity. This is a play where moral integrity triumphs, with few of Shakespeare’s ironic or dark edges.  The king appears at the end,  pardons Lacy, sanctions his marriage with Rose and grants Eyre (now Lord Mayor) and all cordwainers the right to sell leather in the new Leadenhall market, the show of royal authority matched by the show of workers’ solidarity earlier in the play.

The production begins with the Prologue and a beautifully blocked dumbshow. The plot exposition is extremely economical, action moving swiftly between scenes, seamlessly linked on a bare stage. Max Jones’ s costumes are to die for: gowns and hats are gorgeous but not merely decorative. The colour matching and occasional colour symbolism are delightfully matched by satirical touches, Eyre’s costume accentuating his growing portliness and his wife Margery’s ever-bigger farthingales reflecting her rise in wealth and self-importance. I am deeply covetous of Hamm0n’s gorgeous hats.

The acting is splendid. David Troughton is wonderful as Eyre. Daniel Boyd as Ralph and Josh O’Connor as Lacy are also splendid, resisting the temptation to overdo either physical injury or the cod-Dutch accent. The harridan Margery Eyre is beautifully played by Vivien Parry, her comic timing superb and her physicality completely under control. Her transition into Queen Elizabeth reminiscent ginger wig and fine gown was gloriously comic and the discrepancy between what fell out of her mouth and the beauty of her costume a most delightful motif. The effeminately gay king (could Dekker really have been suggesting James VI of Scotland should be the next king as early as 1599? Probably not) played by Jack Holden was clear but not overdone. Boy (played by Charlie Bygate the night I saw it) was astonishingly poised both vocally and physically. These for me were the acting highlights, but this is an ensemble production with no weak links.

What else? Lots of visual stimulus – processions upstage, figureheads on some of the auditorium columns, deft management of handprops, a wonderful range of period slang nicknames and verbal abuses (mainly from Eyre), the recurring joke of the name of Eyre’s journeyman Firk, the effect of the Shrove Tuesday bells, lovely dances, spirited singing, delightful stage pictures, the splendid moving touch of tying the red conscription ribbon round Boy’s arm at the end, mirroring Ralph’s ribbon at the beginning, the motif of recognising identity through shoes: these are just a few of the wonderfully creative touches in the production.

This is the best thing on at the RSC at the moment. Come and see it. A warm welcome awaits you at Moss Cottage, too, if you want to stay the night.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Dekker, review Shoemaker's Holiday, reviews, rsc, theatre

April 1, 2014 by billbruce Leave a Comment

King Henry IV Part ii

OMG, I thought, anticipating this production: it’s OFD – not as King Henry which might have been expected, but as Justice Shallow. And Gregory Doran makes you wait until after the interval to see him, but what a treat when it happens!
I taught this play twice for A Level many, many years ago. I wish I had seen this production before I did so. I would have taught it much more intelligently if I had done. I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that Hal’s shadow, Poins, disappears after Act 2 scene iv. He, anticipating Lear’s Fool, is no longer needed when his work on Hal is done. I hadn’t seen all the parallels between King Henry and Falstaff. I hadn’t noticed how modern all the stuff is about Rumour in the play. I don’t think I’d noticed Warwick at all.
At his best Gregory Doran infuses his productions with an imaginative and empathic intelligence which is unsurpassed. He clearly also works with his colleagues to create unified works of art where costumes, set design and lighting are all expressive of central ideas. This production is, I think, one of them.
Having seen Part I a week ago I told Bill before Part 2 began to notice the shadows this time and that I expected the shadows to have disappeared completely at the end when Hal rejects Fastaff. They did. Tim Mitchell’s lighting plot is brilliant throughout – conceptual, never merely decorative and always contributing to mood and idea. But the absence of shadows also signifies the hope of something better and so in the brightly lit Gloucestershire scenes we are asked to consider whether there can be a pastoral idyll to contrast with the machinations of court and city. While we are there it seems almost as if this is possible, but, of course, as soon as Shallow and Silence move to the city with Falstaff at the end they are caught up in its shadows and are doomed.
Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set design is similarly conceptual. It is lovely to look at as in Part 1, but if the stage is the political world there is a series of islands on a large moving block: Mistress Quickly’s tavern, Shallow’s Gloucestershire home, King Henry’s bed. The entrances and exits from these spaces become metaphors for the interaction of their characters with the main political world. They are one thing when they are separate but another when a transition is made to a greater world. This was made powerfully clear when everyone left the tavern except Mistress Quickly and King Henry entered through the door of the tavern, walked past her, down onto the main stage and sat with his legs into the trap exit from the tavern to the imagined street of the real world – a half-way psychological place as well as a halfway place for him between life and death.
There is some wonderful acting. It would be hard to imagine a better scene than that between Shallow (Oliver Ford-Davies), Silence (Jim Hooper) and Falstaff (Anthony Sher), all subtle, engaging and touching and all three masters of timing. Lady Percy (Jennifer Kirby) has very little to do but her one scene was superbly spoken and acted. What a stunning RSC debut. I want to see more of her. Part I is Hal’s play, but Part II is Falstaff’s and Antony Sher is at the height of his physical and vocal powers. I was amazed at the quiet gravitas with which Jonny Glynn infused Warwick. Jasper Britton got better and better as King Henry. Paola Dionisotti brought out all the chaotic contradictions in Mistress Quickly.
So. What on earth to make of Alex Hassell’s Prince Hal? Doran is certainly doing something with him in addition to having him and Poins bare their lovely torsos. He really isn’t appealing (flesh apart). I don’t warm to him. He is arrogant and horrible in the final scene. Maybe he’s a scheming bastard just like his father was when he ascended the throne. Most interesting and certainly something to ponder for some time to come.
I think this is one of those ‘Don’t miss!’ productions. Make a break of it and see both parts. You will have a warm welcome at Moss Cottage if you do.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: HenryIV, review, reviews, rsc, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, theatre

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