A curates egg of a play, this. Good in parts. Irritating in others. It is set in an apartment block in which a pair of Manhatten sophisticates are thrown together with a vulgar pair of Melbournites when their tower apartment block has a total blackout.
Below is a Vimeo of the cast talking about the play:
I recall we enjoyed the first half of this one more than the second half. Still, we were glad to have seen it and went to Don Fernando for some Spanish grub afterwards.
A rare visit to the theatre on my own and on a Wednesday. No point trying to get Janie to a Georgian comedy; she doesn’t do classics and she doesn’t do farcical comedy of any kind.
But for reasons of my own – I still have some distantly related ideas for a comedy play on a jotter – I very much wanted to see this show, which had but a short run at the Barbican before going on to the Holland Festival.
As it happens, I had been invited that day to Lambeth Palace for lunch by the Church Commissioners (as Ian Theodoreson’s guest), so it seemed a suitable day for me to take the rest of the day off and therefore be free to spend the early part of a midweek evening at the theatre.
While suitable in practical terms, it was perhaps not quite such a suitable cultural switch from a dignified Lambeth Palace lunch under the auspices of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to a bawdy Georgian comedy under the auspices of Deborah Warner, the radical stage director. Neither the irony nor the culture shock of the switch seemed to affect me unduly on the day.
The Lambeth Palace lunch was delightful, btw. I met several interesting new people (this was the only occasion I met Rowan Williams) as well as getting a chance to chat with Ian T and the people I know in that Church of England circle. I was particularly impressed with the dignified informality and grandeur with a tasteful lack of ostentation to the whole Lambeth Palace event.
Afterwards I had plenty of time to do some reading at the Barbican Centre over a coffee or two in the afternoon before seeing the play.
Here is an explanatory vid with Deborah Warner talking about her production of the School For Scandal:
It had some super people in the cast and I thought some of the modernising ideas were quite interesting. But on the whole I thought it was a pretty standard production of a Georgian play with a few nods to modern touches.
Of course it isn’t easy to refresh ideas that have been around for centuries and get their relevance across to modern audiences…
…perhaps the two halves of my unusual day had more in common than I thought about at the time.
We thought this was a good play and production, a rare hit in our view during the Anthony Clark era. Perhaps the fact that it was a West Yorkshire Playhouse import helped.
Topical then, topical at the time of writing this Ogblog piece (December 2016), the play is the story of a Ukrainian migrant worker and the exploitative gangmasters he comes up against.
Another of those plays and productions that shocked us and got us thinking all weekend. Friday evening again too, making it quite hard work after a week’s work but never mind. Janie and I had taken sustenance at Harry Morgans early evening before the play, as was our wont when going to the Hampstead in those days.
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.
