This one didn’t really float our boat, although it should have done. Michael Frayn, wrote it, Michael Blakemore directed it, Roger Allam was starring in it, the full forces of the RNT were behind it…
…but it didn’t work for us.
It is basically the story of the turn of the 20th century German/Jewish impresario Max Reinhardt, retold as a morality play.
We saw a preview and wondered whether the production was not quite ready when we saw it, but the reviews seemed to share our reservations:
As is the RNT’s wont, no on-line archive resource (inverse correlation between organisation’s size/budget and its ability to do sensible things on-line blah blah), but there is an Official London Theatre stub – click here.
Haven’t been there for years – the RSC does so little modern stuff these days.
But back then they were packing The Pit with top notch names to act and direct, quite often in modern dramas.
New England was “superb” according to my log. Peter Gill directed it. Several really good names in it; David Burke, Angela Thorne, Mick Ford, Selina Cadell, Duncan Bell, Diana Hardcastle and Annie Corbier to be precise.
I also noted that:
Richard Nelson was in the audience that night for some reason, as it was well into the run.
I rated this production very good and I remember it surprisingly well.
Howard Davies directed this one and gathered an excellent cast. Tom Wilkinson as John Proctor, Zoe Wanamaker as Elizabeth Proctor, Clare Holman as Abigail, plus a top notch RNT ensemble, as was the way at that time.
This production must have been very good, because it is quite a long play and I had “done my back” pretty dramatically the week before. Thus started a period when my back would tell me whether or not I was fully engaged in a theatrical production. For this one, I only recall the superb drama; I don’t recall the pain!
I noted that this was a very good production and I’m sure that was true. Richard Eyre in charge of an infeasibly good cast in that intimate little Cottesloe Theatre.
…David Burke, Michael Bryant, Jeremy Northam, Graham Crowden, Sarah Winman, Stella Gonet, Selina Cadell, Suzanne Burden, Wendy Nottingham… it was difficult to work out which names from the cast list to leave out from this highlights version of the list.
In truth I don’t think Granville-Barker is really for me. I find his plays stylised and very Edwardian – which is, after all, what they are.
This one is at least replete with interesting moral dilemmas but in truth it’s not Ibsen.
But I do recall really enjoying this particular evening in the theatre and I suspect that this is the best Granville-Barker experience I have ever had and ever will.
I don’t recall exactly what Bobbie thought of it but I think she, like me, was much taken with the production. I also don’t recall what we did (i.e. where we ate) afterwards. Bobbie might just remember.
This was the famous (or perhaps infamous) National Theatre production of Hamlet which took Daniel Day-Lewis to the very edge of reason and from which he quit part way through the run.
I went very early in the run – in fact it might even have been a preview – with Annalisa. I suspect that I had booked the thing with Bobbie in mind, but so long before the appointed date that Bobbie could no longer make it.
Let’s just say that, back then, I thought of Shakespeare as more Bobbie’s thing than Annalisa’s thing. Annalisa has latterly assured me that theatre, including Shakespeare, was very much her thing.
Anyway, I recall that we sat right at the front of one of those side wedges in the Olivier – you are very close to the action there, especially when the action is on your side of the stage.
I also recall that Daniel Day Lewis was a very wet Hamlet – by which I mean sweating and spitting his lines. Annalisa remarked afterwards that we should have taken umbrellas with us had we known.
It was a superb production, with a great many big names and several names that weren’t big then but went on to be big. National productions were a bit like that in those days – some still are I suspect.
I was motivated to write up this theatre visit while sitting at Lord’s in September 2018 watching, for the first time, Ethan Bamber bowl live. His father, David, was Horatio in this Hamlet production, nearly 30 years earlier.
Other big names/fine performances included Judi Dench, John Castle, Michael Bryant, Oliver Ford Davies & Stella Gonet. A young Jeremy Northam had a small part in the version we saw but stepped up to the plate when Daniel Day-Lewis walked out. Later in the run, Ian Charleson took on the role to much acclaim, just before he died.
I think this was still quite early in Richard Eyre’s tenure at the National and he directed this one himself, extremely well.
My only other recollection is a quote that Annalisa picked up from an American visitor to the National, who told his wife that he didn’t think all that much of the play – “too many of the lines were clichés”. I guess you can’t please everybody.
Postscript: An Enthusiast From Across The Pond Sought Help…
…in March 2024 I received some unusual correspondence from a gentleman in the USA, wondering whether I still had the programme (or playbill in his terms) as he was keen to see Daniel Day-Lewis’s biography notes from that production.
I have mentioned before that Ogblog serves as a fifth emergency service on occasions and this felt like such an occasion. No sirens or speeding vehicles through the streets of London needed, but I fortuitously was able to lay my hands on this particular programme with relative ease, having not yet returned that batch to deep storage.
