Looks like we’d started to switch from our Friday evening Hampstead habit towards Saturday evening at the Hampstead, which subsequently became our norm. Important titbit of information, that.
We have long been a fan of Shawn; in my case dating back to seeing the film My Dinner With Andre hundreds of years ago.
Janie and I by chance got to chat with him at the Almeida when he was over for Miranda Richardson’s amazing performance as Aunt Dan in Aunt Dan and Lemon (to be Ogblogged in the fullness of time no doubt)…
So here was a new Shawn play with Wallace Shawn himself and Miranda Richardson in it. Plus Andre Gregory directing it. Ahead of the piece we were a little starstruck – a rare emotion for us.
In truth, this piece didn’t hit the giddy heights of some of Shawn’s others. The notion of dystopia following scientific tinkering has (in my view) been overdone by others rather more than Shawn’s political and social frets.
The play was more than three hours long, so I suspect we settled for a shawarma supper to take home. The evening certainly kept me and Janie in conversation for the rest of that evening and indeed the rest of the weekend.
Janie and I are both very partial to a bit of Strindberg.
Creditors is a top drawer Strindberg play and this was a top draw production of same at the Donmar.
I had seen a smaller scale production of this before – at The Gate back in the 1980s – I’ll review that too in the fullness of time. But this version of Creditors, in David Greig’s edgy hands, was even more gripping than I remembered the play.
We had such high hopes for this one. We love the Almeida. We loved Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train by the same author at the Donmar a few years ago…
…but this one didn’t really work for either of us. The acting was good, but the play left us cold and disappointed. Perhaps we were expecting too much.
There’s a good Wikipedia entry for this play and production too. It states that the original off-Broadway production was reasonably well received, whereas the Almeida production was almost universally well received. I’m not so sure about more-or-less universal:
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.
…was my log note for this one. “His” referring to Stephen Poliakoff, whose best I rate very highly.
Janie and I saw this one as part of an extraordinary whistle-stop long weekend which took in three plays at Stratford (this the second of the three), a motorised hike to the Welsh Borders for lunch at The Walnut Tree before going on to Hay-On-Wye for some overnight- second-hand-book-buying on my part before stopping off for a long lunch at Raymond Blanc’s place (Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons) in Oxfordshire and then home. Friday to Monday. The other bits have been written up separately from this piece – click here or below.
I think we stayed in the Shakespeare for this trip. Janie booked it but only wrote down “Twelfth Night Room £115 per night” which I suspect in those days was a suite or certainly a superior room. I did the rest of the trip, including The Old Black Lion in Hay.
As for Talk Of the City, Poliakoff directed this one himself, if I recall correctly, which I think might have been (and often is) a minor mistake – i.e. playwrights, even if superb directors, can usually do with an external eye as director on their own works.
Whose brilliant idea was it to pair The Real Inspector Hound with Black Comedy? Well, if I’m not totally mistaken The Bear Pit at Alleyn’s School did so back in the mid 1970s. It worked well then (I shall write up The Bear Pit production in the fullness of time) and it worked well nearly 25 years later, in the late 1990s, too.
Superb evening…
…was my take on it in my log. How could it not be – what a cast! Desmond Barrit, David Tennant, Nichola McAuliffe, Sara Crowe, Anna Chancellor…and Greg Doran directing.
While The Independent previewed the event the morning after our visit wondering, over three pages, whose brilliant idea it was to pair these two short plays? (The Bear Pit at Alleyn’s School. Do you arts journos know nothing?)
I’ve long been partial to a bit of Potter, as has Daisy.
I had seen the original TV film of this one and to some extent had my doubts about it, as I have never much enjoyed the conceit of adult actors playing the role of children.
Still, the chance to see a National production of a Potter won the day. Many members of this fine cast went on to bigger and bolder things. Steve Coogan, Nigel Lindsay, Debra Gillett, Geraldine Somerville. Patrick Marber directed it.
Whereas Michael Billington wrote highly of it, finding it more translatable from screen to stage than most Potter and describing it as “Potter at his best”:
We were both ambivalent about it. It was clearly a fine production. It pleased me more than the TV version. But that “adults playing children” thing still didn’t really work for me.
Below is an excerpt from the original 1979 TV film:
I liked this more than Janie did. I thought it was a very good production and I have long had an affection for the play.
Janie sees this as an example of Tom Stoppard being “a bit too clever for his own good”, a view I can understand but with which I don’t agree. Let’s just say that Janie does not remember this fondly.
