NT Live: The Cherry Orchard

"Who cares about Chekhov anyway? A bunch of old women moaning about ducks flying home to Moscow."

 ~ Withnail [Richard E. Grant] in Withnail & I

I am always grateful to the Spectrum 8 for hosting the NT Live performances; I'm also grateful that enough people in the Capital region attend them to make it lucrative. Keep up the good work! I need the lifeline.

After sneaking off for a matinee of Harry Potter in the afternoon (bad girl! should have been working -- yes, it was fun), I headed back to the theater for the evening's broadcast. Strange to realise that this was in the Olivier Theatre: I was expecting the Lyttelton, where the production of The White Guard had been. Chekhov's been getting a lot more attention lately, so perhaps this is to be expected. The sets by Bunny Christie were as evocative as those for The White Guard and there was a brief behind-the-scenes featurette where she spoke about the design.

There was a fabulous cast (of course) headed by Zoë Wannamaker as Ranyevskaya, Charity Wakefield and Claudie Blakely as her daughters -- each coping with the dissolution of their familiar lives in different ways -- Conleth Hill as the merchant Lopakhin, who probably makes the most changes within the course of the drama and Mark Bonnar as the nascent revolutionary, Trofimov (who's name I cannot hear without thinking of Monty Python).

Everyone was terrific: Tim McMullan and Gerald Kyd provided a light touch of comic relief to break up the wistful sadness of Ranyevskaya and her family. The timing was perfect. The costuming, too, was exquisite --

-- and yet I'm just not won over to Chekhov. Maybe I'm just a Philistine or part of that audience "weaned on cinematic jump-cuts who like their irony on a plate." Or I just don't like Chekhov. I have tried before and still I'm more fond of the Gumby version than any other. At least it's brief. I can understand the impact of Chekhov's realism -- and landy, we've had a huge trend in that direction ever since -- but while I can see how it would be wonderful to act in his plays, I don't much enjoy watching them. I do like dark humour, but maybe just of a different kind (Finnish, not Russian). Or maybe I just need the right production. This one was superbly skillful, so I'm not sure what it would take.

Review: Hamlet

I am eternally grateful for the NT Live broadcasts; they bring a little bit of the London theatre experience to the (currently) frozen north, which seems so far from the city of my heart. Thank you, Spectrum 8 for hosting the broadcasts, even if Monday night's show seemed to have its share of technical difficulties, including some on-screen monkeying with the display. Hard not to call out, "No, not resolution! position!"

I'd heard great things about this production of Hamlet from the start. I'd seen Rory Kinnear in other productions at the NT and had been impressed with him, but hadn't really thought of him as a Hamlet. He fits perfectly into Hytner's vision of Denmark as police state where everyone's under constant surveillance. Hamlet, far from being a pampered prince, seems to be a confused young man mourning a father he admired and idealised. Patrick Malahide plays his uncle/stepfather as a cold and calculating bureaucrat; Clare Higgins plays his mother as a weak woman with a drink always to hand. When Hamlet speaks of how her first husband cossetted her, we see that weakness and a fear of being alone. I loved how Polonius (David Calder) is not the buffoon he's usually played to be: there's something almost chilling about him, though sometimes he pauses as if realising all at once what he's doing to his own children. His cruelty to Ophelia in particular is sharp here.

Ruth Negga, who was so lovely as Aricia in Phèdre, plays Ophelia with affecting vulnerability, goofing with her brother while their father reels off his advice, then naïvely meeting with Hamlet and guiltily giving the game away (the bible she reads has a hidden mic inside). When mad, she pushes a shopping cart across the stage like a street person though tracked yet by two of her father's staff. In an exquisitely chilling moment, Hytner has her pushed out the door by the security guys. She's become too embarrassing, so she gets bumped off.

David Calder doubles as the gravedigger, a good choice to show him as affable as Polonius was creepy. James Laurensen doubles as the Ghost and the Player King, also a nice pairing. Giles Terera's Horatio didn't seem to be quite the confidante the character normally is, though his regard for Hamlet came across clearly. The atmosphere of paranoia affects all the relationships, which gives a new reading to the dialogue -- which is everything you hope for with Shakespeare. It helped bring out the machinations of Fortinbras better as well, which is seldom done well.

But Kinnear really was a wonder. The first few lines, his delivery seemed almost too clipped and arch, but it worked. In the first speech he's conveying his anger and betrayal. Throughout Kinnear presents the lines as if they were thoughts arising from his head, not "speeches" written down. It's hard: even people who've never seen a Shakespeare play know "To be, or not to be." I get impatient with actorly excesses: Kinnear gave an utterly natural performance -- especially so when Hamlet is conscious of performing as he puts that "antic disposition" on and overplays. Hamlet is trying to figure out what's real and what's not, and like so many people, sometimes it's the loss of things that makes him realise what matters most. It's a wonderful process of discovery in this production.

The only real disappointment -- it's a stellar cast, the sets wonderful, everything really moved along despite the three and a half hour length -- was Patrick Malahide. At times it looked like he might have been reading off a prompter as he stared too fixedly in the same direction. I know he can be fantastic. I saw him with Jeremy Irons in Embers, where he spends most of the play listening to Irons' character, yet he seemed every bit as present as Irons. Maybe it was an off night. I loved this. I wish I could see it again. Maybe they'll put it out on DVD. I hope so.

And yes, you can buy the t-shirt :-)

Laurie Anderson's 'Delusion' & Nowhere Boy

Friday I had the chance to catch a couple of fun things: Laurie Anderson's Delusion at EMPAC (my favourite local venue) and Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy at the Spectrum 8 (as usual). Of course there were several other things possible that night -- among them, Nick Lowe sob! -- but one can't do everything (but two might try, but how to make two of me...?).

Nowhere Boy tells the story of John Lennon's teenage years living with his aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott Thomas) while getting reacquainted with his mother (Ann-Marie Duff)who had left him at the age of five and the emotional turmoil inherent in that situation, as well as the budding musical career he got off the ground between various hooliganish larks. Initially the film's release was overshadowed by director Taylor-Wood's relationship with her much younger lead actor, Aaron Johnson -- a disparity and relationship that would raise few eyebrows if the genders were reversed. The film has a brilliant cast all around (and not too terrible with the Liverpudlian accents for the most part) and definite emotional hooks, but the script doesn't really hang together well. Despite its basis in fact, it's not always compellingly believable, but I did enjoy it on the whole. There are plenty of little tidbits for the fans, like the drawings hanging on the wall that later show up on Lennon's Walls and Bridges LP. The visual accuracy of recreating existing photos through careful wardrobe choices: a pity the same care is seldom applied to crafting the script (cf. Sid & Nancy where the "My Way" sequence mimics the video precisely, but the filmmakers can't be bothered to find out how many siblings Nancy has).

Laurie Anderson is always an interesting performer. I had seen her talk about developing this piece at MassMOCA months ago, so I was already curious to see what had come. It was a much more visual show than some of the others I'd seen in recent years, with images and words projected on the giant screen behind her, on a sofa as well as two uniquely shaped screens on either side of the stage. The show, "a meditation on life and language", ranged widely across a wide variety of subjects in a dialogue between her own voice and the "male voice" she's been using for years that now has the name of Fenway Bergamot. Many of the themes had great resonance for me particularly her thoughts on the impact of silence and her descriptions of her travels in Iceland and how they sparked revelations about her own family. She rode Icelandic ponies at Halldór Laxness' farm (I only rode them at the farm across the way) and met a man who had a brilliant idea to turn a decrepit barn into dance club. Looking around the bleak landscape, Anderson realised at last who this man reminded her of: her own father and his enthusiasm for completely impractical notions.

In one of the most moving -- and difficult -- parts of the evening, she spoke of her mother's death and her difficulty in dealing with the loss of someone she "did not love". A priest she talked to suggested that she simply say that she had always cared about her, but she never got the chance to say those words. Anderson described her mother's delusions at the end of her life, animals she could see on the ceiling, and her gratitude, thanking everyone for coming, for all they had done. It was a really naked moment. She described a dream in which she gave birth to her dog, but also caught herself out in the dream because she had engineered the experience.

There was enthusiastic applause at the end, which continued even after she had come out for another bow, and I had just thought, "well, it's not as if she could do an encore..." when she stepped out again and did just that, picking up the electric violin and stepping to the edge of the stage where we could see her without the lighting (we were in the second row) and played a plaintive tune that held the audience spellbound.

Wonderful.