It sounds like an awkward jigsaw puzzle of clashing pieces: yet it was over two hours of non-stop dazzle of ideas, characters, ritual and movement. This is the kind of piece that shows all theatre can be, how it can be so much more than a story unfolding on stage before an audience. It was exciting, it was enthralling and it was inspiring. Thank you, Spectrum 8 for carrying the broadcasts; thank you, National Theatre for broadcasting these productions; thank you Complicite for visionary theatre; thank you to a talented cast and crew for a spellbinding experience.
Directed by actor Jonathan Croy, the cast made the most of the opportunities for slapstick wackiness, even making the dementedly brilliant choice to have the charwoman, Mrs. Drudge, be blind. The actors had a ball. Moon and Birdboot, the two critics reviewing the play and talking through it, were sitting next to us in the first row stage left. It really invited audience interaction, which happened, including a young man telling the two troublemakers at the end of the interval that he hoped they would be less disruptive in the second half.
Second half: that was the problem. This is a one act play. All the slapstick inserts helped stretch it to two hours with an interval. You could really feel the stretching in the first half. Stoppard's dialogue suits a snappy pacing that ties the moments together. All the inserted bits subsumed the dialogue. The physical humor clearly pleased the audience and the actors seemed to be having a ball. It was fun, and I was probably the only one chafing at the slackness of the pace. The set pieces like the card games and the tea service were funny, but also brought the story to a standstill, so it had to start up again and pick up speed once more. They may have decided that a one-act would not leave an audience feeling as if it got its money's worth; when the Home Made Theatre Company put it on, they added The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, which made a nice addition to the production. Great fun.
By the by, I got my contributor's copy of this so I conclude it's available now. The volume includes my essays "The Gilda Stories" and "The Vampire Lifestyle":
6 comments:
I forget who I first read to suggest that stage drama is a natural home to the discussion of and inspiration by the sciences, but certainly Michael Frayn has been doing his best to keep that true, and he most assuredly not alone. It does sound intriguing. I'm sorry I missed Mary-Louise Parker in PROOF, but my then most-active media-crush would've just been intolerable during and afterward.
And, yes, gassiness and filler, so annoying in almost every other art, is almost intolerable in live drama...the auteurist impulse, or is it simply hamming by design, seeping into the boards...
I think it was the actor directing, who wanted to give the actors as much room as possible to run with the physical comedy.
I always found annoying Steve Martin's dismissive comment that "writing about art was like dancing about architecture" -- why should that be a bad thing? Seeing how well music, dance and set design helped embody physics and math in A Disappearing Number, I would heartily welcome dancing about architecture.
Pity, you didn't see PROOF, though I saw the film and mathematics was more of a McGuffin, as the real story was about influence, authority and approval/fame.
I have a copy of the film, but Paltrow isn't quite as much a crush, and it's sitting in my TBV stack.
It was "meh" as they say. I was looking forward to it. Might have liked it better as a play.
That seemed to be the tenor of the response to both. Frankly, Parker is a better actor, even when saddled with mediocre scripts such as most of WEEDS, or ANGELS IN AMERICA, for that matter.
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