Tag: Esther Ruth Elliott

Reading Hebron by Jason Sherman, Orange Tree Theatre, 5 March 2011

I wanted to enjoy this play more than I did. It was written soon after the Baruch Goldstein atrocity in Hebron in the mid 1990s.

Here is a link to the Orange Tree resource on the play & production.

It was an excellent production and a fast moving play to be sure. David Antrobus, one of the Orange Tree regulars, was excellent as the central character Nathan.

But while the play was interesting throughout and covered many pertinent issues, it didn’t quite work for me; nor for Janie. The play is primarily about a young Canadian’s sense of collective guilt for the atrocity; for my part, I found hard to buy into the collective guilt idea.

Somewhat mixed, but most of the reviews are very good for this production – the search term linked here will find them for you.

Did we have a Spanish meal at Don Fernando’s after seeing this play? You bet.

Mountain Hotel & Audience by Vaclav Havel, Orange Tree Theatre, 15 November 2008

It seemed like a good idea when we booked it. Here ‘s a link to the rubric that enticed us, along with the cast and creatives information.

We’d had previous experience of Vaclav Havel’s plays, so shouldn’t have been surprised to find the absurdity a bit lame and the drama weak.

In particular, I thought Audience (about a playwright stacking beer barrels in a warehouse) tame.

So what do we know?

Still, we enjoyed our Don Fernando dinner afterwards and never feel completely let down after an evening at the Orange Tree.

Mountain Hotel and Audience by Vaclav Havel, Orange Tree Theatre, 15 November 2008

This double bill was part of a Vaclav Havel Season that autumn at the Orange Tree.  We only attended this one evening.

Vaclav Havel is one of those writers that you really want to like and there are always some very clever lines and some interestingly weird scenes in his plays.  Yet somehow Havel never quite seems to work for me or for Janie.

Still, we enjoyed the evening.  The Mountain Hotel one was a typically Havel peculiar mix of people thrown together in a hotel garden being absurd together.  I think we even considered sneaking away a half time, but stayed to see what the second play was like.  Audience is a short quasi-autobiographical piece about Vanek, who works in an absurd beer factory.  It did not motivate us to return and see the other short Vanek plays later in the season.

It was all very well acted and well directed; David Antrobus is an Orange Tree regular and is reliably good.

You can read all about it, including who played whom and stuff, here.  Someone at the Orange Tree is doing an amazing archiving job; I am grateful to them.

Michael Billington, a long term Orange Tree fan, is polite but clearly didn’t much like the evening either.

Philip Fisher in the British Theatre Guide is more upbeat about the evening.

Ian Shuttleworth’s FT piece can still be seen archived here.

Once We Were Mothers by Lisa Evans, Orange Tree Theatre, 13 October 2007

My recall of this one is extremely sketchy. I vaguely recall the scenarios, as set out in the Orange Tree Archive – click here. I remember the cast being a collection of Orange Tree regulars and a few new faces. I remember the play not really fitting together – it was basically three separate stories, merely linked by being essentially mother and daughter scenarios.

Michael Billington wasn’t too sure about it – see here.

John Thaxter in British Theatre Guide quite liked it – here.

We’ll have dined at Don Fernando afterwards, that I can say for sure.