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pedantherThoughts on some more of the theatrical productions that have been made available online for people stuck at home:
. Twelfth Night, National Theatre, 2017: I have to admit up-front that I didn't make it all the way through this one; I had to give up half an hour into it because some of the performances were getting on my nerves. If I'd been watching live in the theatre, I'd probably have stuck it out, but as it was there was a point where I just couldn't take it any more. If I'd been watching live in the theatre, it might not even have been an issue; acting in a large theatre requires a different kind of performance from acting for the screen, and it may just have been that clash of expectations that made some of the performances seem stilted and overblown. Although not everybody came across badly; I thought the actress playing Viola did an excellent job (and was the most convincing Cesario I can remember ever seeing). In a way, that just made it worse: the moment I gave up was a moment just after Viola had departed from a scene, leaving the stage in the hands of a couple of actors whose performances seemed even more stilted in comparison. To be fair, the actor playing Orsino also did a solid job, it was just a solid job of playing a character who (as interpreted in this production) was a rich himbo I didn't like or care about, nor by extension about the future of Viola's relationship with him. It didn't help that the director turned the "if music be the food of love" scene, which is Orsino's big chance to get the audience's sympathy, into a comedy routine about how bad Orsino's musicians were. The set was amazing; every one of these National Theatre streams I've watched has made me envious of their set designers and machinery.
. Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe, 2009: Nothing revolutionary, but I enjoyed it. The leads were appealingly cast; Juliet in particular had a visible arc from timid and sheltered to a confident young woman determined (for better or worse) to take her life into her own hands. I didn't care for the decision to play Count Paris as a comic-relief upper class twit. Many of the performances were big, as befitted the playing space, but none of them rang false the way some of the ones in Twelfth Night did to me.
. King Lear, Stratford Festival of Canada, 2014: Unlike Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet, King Lear isn't a play I've seen so many times that I know the plot by heart and am only looking for what's different about the particular production; I knew about most of the key moments, but a lot of details were still new to me. I enjoyed this production, but it featured another example of an actor in a key role giving an admirably solid personation of a character whose interpretation didn't work for me. In this case it was King Lear himself, played from the outset as a slightly doddery old man who already suspects that he's lost his strength; it's a charming and sympathetic performance, but it has none of the power or authority or self-assurance that the role needs -- it's all Lear and no King, and the clash between Lear and his daughters sometimes comes off less as a royal power struggle and more as a regular drama about adult children dealing with a parent sliding off into senility, especially in the moments where Lear needs to be wrathful and comes off as petulant instead. Similarly, there's no dramatic change between proud Lear and broken Lear, just an old man continuing down a path his feet seemed already to be on. The actors in the Gloucester subplot did solid work with their less complicated roles, which along with the less forceful version of Lear sometimes made it seem like they were what the play was really about.
. Measure for Measure, Cheek by Jowl, 2015 (available until 25 May): I saw my first performance of Measure for Measure last year, so I thought it would be interesting to see if this took a different line on the story -- and boy howdy, did it ever. The production I saw last year took the line that Measure for Measure is a comedy, playing everything for laughs that it could get away with, and winding up with something close enough to a happy ending that audience goodwill could bridge the gap. This production represents the other end of the pendulum swing, a tightly-paced drama highlighting the unease and emotional trauma of the situation; all the comic relief bits Shakespeare carefully spotted through the script were either cut out entirely or made horrifying. Laughter from the audience in the theatre was infrequent, and mostly nervous. Nobody got a happy ending.
The show opens with a dumbshow in which an anxious young man finds himself out of step with the world around him, uncertain of the right thing to do or what people want of him -- and the onset of the dialogue reveals this man to be the Duke, a character who is often in danger of coming across as a chessmaster who thinks he knows what's best for everyone, but here represented as a man beset by doubts who isn't in control of his own life let alone anyone else's, who is never one step ahead of everyone else and is frequently a step or two behind and racing desperately to catch up; all his strategems were desperate improvisations and none of them quite came off. That included his proposal to Isabella at the end; the death glare she gave him in response and his hasty "but fitter time for that" gave the audience what was possibly the one real laugh of the show. His second attempt, a bit later, was extremely hesitant and got no response from Isabella at all.
The end of the dumbshow also brought a second surprise -- the show is performed entirely in Russian (with subtitles in the video and presumably surtitles of some kind in the theatre), being a co-production with the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre, a fact which the Youtube description completely fails to mention. I think that contributed, in a way that I don't know if it was intentional, to the effect of the performance; the expectations that for me come with subtitled Russian-language drama fit the gritty drama of the presentation in a way that might have been undermined if they'd been speaking in Elizabethan English. I also wonder how much the Russian participants influenced the staging, which was modern dress in a way that sat in the shadow of "this is a police state" without ever quite coming out and saying it a way that would have broken the spell by being too obvious about it; the final scene, where the Duke administers public justice, is staged somewhere between a press conference and the unpleasant kind of party rally.
I still don't know if I liked it, but on the principle that the purpose of theatre is to rouse strong emotion and even being hated is better than getting an "enh, it was okay", this production was a resounding success. I was unsettled for the rest of the day after I watched it, and it literally gave me nightmares.
. Here's an opportunity which I'm not sure I'll take: there are currently two different theatre groups offering streams of The Winter's Tale -- one from Cheek by Jowl, available until 25 May, and one from Shakespeare's Globe, available until 31 May. They'll almost certainly be very different interpretations, which would make comparisons interesting, but I don't know if I can fit them both in, especially since it may be a while before I've finished digesting the Cheek by Jowl production I just saw.
. Twelfth Night, National Theatre, 2017: I have to admit up-front that I didn't make it all the way through this one; I had to give up half an hour into it because some of the performances were getting on my nerves. If I'd been watching live in the theatre, I'd probably have stuck it out, but as it was there was a point where I just couldn't take it any more. If I'd been watching live in the theatre, it might not even have been an issue; acting in a large theatre requires a different kind of performance from acting for the screen, and it may just have been that clash of expectations that made some of the performances seem stilted and overblown. Although not everybody came across badly; I thought the actress playing Viola did an excellent job (and was the most convincing Cesario I can remember ever seeing). In a way, that just made it worse: the moment I gave up was a moment just after Viola had departed from a scene, leaving the stage in the hands of a couple of actors whose performances seemed even more stilted in comparison. To be fair, the actor playing Orsino also did a solid job, it was just a solid job of playing a character who (as interpreted in this production) was a rich himbo I didn't like or care about, nor by extension about the future of Viola's relationship with him. It didn't help that the director turned the "if music be the food of love" scene, which is Orsino's big chance to get the audience's sympathy, into a comedy routine about how bad Orsino's musicians were. The set was amazing; every one of these National Theatre streams I've watched has made me envious of their set designers and machinery.
. Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe, 2009: Nothing revolutionary, but I enjoyed it. The leads were appealingly cast; Juliet in particular had a visible arc from timid and sheltered to a confident young woman determined (for better or worse) to take her life into her own hands. I didn't care for the decision to play Count Paris as a comic-relief upper class twit. Many of the performances were big, as befitted the playing space, but none of them rang false the way some of the ones in Twelfth Night did to me.
. King Lear, Stratford Festival of Canada, 2014: Unlike Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet, King Lear isn't a play I've seen so many times that I know the plot by heart and am only looking for what's different about the particular production; I knew about most of the key moments, but a lot of details were still new to me. I enjoyed this production, but it featured another example of an actor in a key role giving an admirably solid personation of a character whose interpretation didn't work for me. In this case it was King Lear himself, played from the outset as a slightly doddery old man who already suspects that he's lost his strength; it's a charming and sympathetic performance, but it has none of the power or authority or self-assurance that the role needs -- it's all Lear and no King, and the clash between Lear and his daughters sometimes comes off less as a royal power struggle and more as a regular drama about adult children dealing with a parent sliding off into senility, especially in the moments where Lear needs to be wrathful and comes off as petulant instead. Similarly, there's no dramatic change between proud Lear and broken Lear, just an old man continuing down a path his feet seemed already to be on. The actors in the Gloucester subplot did solid work with their less complicated roles, which along with the less forceful version of Lear sometimes made it seem like they were what the play was really about.
. Measure for Measure, Cheek by Jowl, 2015 (available until 25 May): I saw my first performance of Measure for Measure last year, so I thought it would be interesting to see if this took a different line on the story -- and boy howdy, did it ever. The production I saw last year took the line that Measure for Measure is a comedy, playing everything for laughs that it could get away with, and winding up with something close enough to a happy ending that audience goodwill could bridge the gap. This production represents the other end of the pendulum swing, a tightly-paced drama highlighting the unease and emotional trauma of the situation; all the comic relief bits Shakespeare carefully spotted through the script were either cut out entirely or made horrifying. Laughter from the audience in the theatre was infrequent, and mostly nervous. Nobody got a happy ending.
The show opens with a dumbshow in which an anxious young man finds himself out of step with the world around him, uncertain of the right thing to do or what people want of him -- and the onset of the dialogue reveals this man to be the Duke, a character who is often in danger of coming across as a chessmaster who thinks he knows what's best for everyone, but here represented as a man beset by doubts who isn't in control of his own life let alone anyone else's, who is never one step ahead of everyone else and is frequently a step or two behind and racing desperately to catch up; all his strategems were desperate improvisations and none of them quite came off. That included his proposal to Isabella at the end; the death glare she gave him in response and his hasty "but fitter time for that" gave the audience what was possibly the one real laugh of the show. His second attempt, a bit later, was extremely hesitant and got no response from Isabella at all.
The end of the dumbshow also brought a second surprise -- the show is performed entirely in Russian (with subtitles in the video and presumably surtitles of some kind in the theatre), being a co-production with the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre, a fact which the Youtube description completely fails to mention. I think that contributed, in a way that I don't know if it was intentional, to the effect of the performance; the expectations that for me come with subtitled Russian-language drama fit the gritty drama of the presentation in a way that might have been undermined if they'd been speaking in Elizabethan English. I also wonder how much the Russian participants influenced the staging, which was modern dress in a way that sat in the shadow of "this is a police state" without ever quite coming out and saying it a way that would have broken the spell by being too obvious about it; the final scene, where the Duke administers public justice, is staged somewhere between a press conference and the unpleasant kind of party rally.
I still don't know if I liked it, but on the principle that the purpose of theatre is to rouse strong emotion and even being hated is better than getting an "enh, it was okay", this production was a resounding success. I was unsettled for the rest of the day after I watched it, and it literally gave me nightmares.
. Here's an opportunity which I'm not sure I'll take: there are currently two different theatre groups offering streams of The Winter's Tale -- one from Cheek by Jowl, available until 25 May, and one from Shakespeare's Globe, available until 31 May. They'll almost certainly be very different interpretations, which would make comparisons interesting, but I don't know if I can fit them both in, especially since it may be a while before I've finished digesting the Cheek by Jowl production I just saw.
