David Hare is very good at burrowing around all manner of interesting topics, but I suspect he was too far away from his spheres of knowledge and understanding with the financial crisis.
Hare almost admits as much, as the narrator of the play is a somewhat perplexed author.
So to me, Hare was making the obvious points about the financial crisis well enough, but there was little dramatic tension and no new insight in the piece.
Janie liked it a bit more than i did, but I suspect that she got more out of it, being less steeped in the financial crisis in the first place.
I’m glad we saw it, but this is second division work from a first division playwright. There was little a good cast and production could do to save it.
Wall only ran for a few nights, so we did well to catch it. I thought Via Dolorosa was a fine piece, laced with great drama as well as interesting things to say. This felt comparatively preachy, about the ghastly Israel-Palestine separation barrier.
Perhaps it is so clear to me that the barrier is a bad idea, that being lectured about it by David Hare seemed surplus to requirements.
I saw the links with Berlin of course, but enjoyed the Wall part less and certainly learnt less.
I’m glad to have the text of both and I’m sure a re-read would be interesting, especially now (as I wrote in May 2017) that walls and barriers are back in fashion.
It is a companion piece for the Wall, which we went to see a few days later at the Royal Court. I think I preferred Berlin, finding it more interesting and less preachy.
Writing this up in May 2017, I realise that Trump should be made to sit through both pieces.
I recall being most impressed by the performances and the production. Also, the play did its job of getting me and Janie talking about its big issues for the rest of the weekend. Yet this didn’t feel like premier league David Hare to me; I felt there was something lacking in the play.
Sarah Hemming in the FT clearly liked it a lot, comparing it favourably with The Vertical Hour as drama (whereas I would say that The Vertical Hour worked better for me as drama) – click here to read what she wrote;
It was that sort of play/production – influential people were supposed to talk about it but not all that many people got to see it. Janie and I saw a preview, so had every right to wax lyrical from an informed perspective and from the outset.
What good news for everyone that Janie and I tend to keep our counsel to ourselves on such matters.
Joan Didion wrote a memoir about her double-loss – first her husband and then her daughter. This is her one woman play based on that memoir. Vanessa Redgrave plays Joan.
We found it moving, although the critics tended to be equivocal in their praise and in their sense that the production moves as much as it should:
This was a really good play/production. It was only on at the Royal Court for a short while – so we felt we’d got ourselves hot tickets for this one. Unusually for a David Hare, this one had started in New York 15 months before.
By gosh there was a fuss in the UK press about this one, with theatre journalists falling over themselves to heap praise, in particular on Nicole Kidman, essentially for looking the part and being able to act.
We had tickets for the first Saturday, because back then, as members of the Donmar, that was the sort of thing we did, especially if someone as grand as David Hare was credited with writing a whole new version of a play.
The play, originally known as La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, was highly controversial when it was written at the turn of the 20th century. There are 10 characters. David Hare’s version at Sam Mendes’s request at The Donmar (subsequently transferred to the Cort Theatre in New York) was not the first time the play was staged as a two-hander. It starred Iain Glen and Nicole Kidman.
Janie and I thoroughly enjoyed our evening, but probably for all the wrong reasons. My log comment speaks volumes:
Nice bodies, shame about the play.
Having been wowed by David Hare’s wonderful solo performance piece Via Dolorosa the week before…
…Janie and I found The Blue Room to be comparatively thin dramatic gruel.
Still, nice bodies as I (and the fawning journalists) said, plus a bizarre moment for me personally. Janie and I were sitting right at the front at one of the sides of the stage, as oft we did at the Donmar. As the stars took their final bow and departed the stage, Nicole Kidman seemed to look straight at me and wave at me with her fingers. One of Janie’s patients was in the audience that night and came up to us as we were leaving the theatre in a state of great excitement, because she had seen Nicole Kidman waving at me. The patient wondered whether I knew Nicole Kidman personally, to which my answer was, “not until this evening”.
25 years later, all I can say is that me and Nicole, we go back a long way.
Here are some of the fawning newspaper pieces. The Standard, seemingly without irony, devoted its Page 3 to the news & review. Frankly some of the language used in this Standard page would not be acceptable 25 years later:
In the Guardian, there is a gushing piece in The Arts Diary which, like the other papers, probably would get heavily edited or spiked today, while our friend Michael Billington did the worthy thing and reviewed Our Country’s Good at The Young Vic instead. (Janie and I went to see that the following spring when it came back from its tour.)
Janie and I thought this piece and performance was simply superb. In fact, I wrote:
Superb!!
…in my log and I am not normally the double-exclamation-mark type.
This was David Hare’s brave dive into performing a one-man-show on one of the thorniest topics he might possibly choose – the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Talk about high risk, but we thought Hare pulled off a blinder with this piece/performance.
I’ve never been sure about Shaw, but we thought we’d give this a try because it was The Almeida and because top flight Shaw productions were few and far between at that time.
Great cast and crew – see Theatricalia entry – including Emma Fielding, Richard Griffiths, Patricia Hodge, Penelope Wilton, Malcolm Sinclair and Peter McEnery, with David Hare in the director’s chair.
Despite all those good people, this one added to my/our sense of interminability, which had already been piqued by Suzanna Andler the previous week, which was soon followed by wall-to-wall coverage of Princess Diana’s tragic demise, which took ceaselessness to new levels.
Anyway, my contemporaneous words on Heartbreak House, speaking for both me and Janie:
Seemed interminable in the second half. Had “moments”, but all too few.
That was my one word verdict on my log about this one.
Richard Eyre directing Samantha Bond, Eoin McCarthy, Ronald Pickup, Dame Judi and other excellent members of the cast – here is the Theatricalia entry for this play/production.
Our friend Michael Billington didn’t like it much:
So, only me and Janie rating it highly when it first came out then – but Amy’s View transferred to the West End and Broadway picking up Tony nominations and a New York Drama Critic’s award.
