Still, this was a superb production so we both really enjoyed it. Ben Whishaw is exceptional, but the whole cast was good, as was the design, choreography, the lot.
It all felt very different on arrival at the theatre, with the space transformed for this piece and entrances to the space where audiences normally fear to tread.
But the piece itself never really took off into the stratosphere as perhaps it should.
We heard a lot from the good-hearted middle class people who felt conflicted by the riots and/or tried to help those who got into difficulties during the chaos. We heard less from the rioters themselves.
To be fair on Alecky Blythe, she took the orthodox view on the play and stuck only to the verbatim material she could gather at the time, so I suppose that would be weighted towards those slightly safer situations…
…not least because people are not normally full of conversation while rioting…
…I imagine; not ever having been in the heart of a riot personally.
The conceit of the play is a Shakespeare pastiche, imagining a future King Charles III stumbling into a constitutional crisis with the government. (Three and a half years on, that scenario seems more likely than it did in April 2014, but I’ll leave that thought to one side).
That Shakespeare pastiche style worked in places but grated on me at times.
This was to be our last sighting of Tim Pigott-Smith, whose fine acting we enjoyed many times over the years. The whole cast was good and it was magnificently staged and produced.
I have a copy of the play if anyone wants to seek enlightenment from reading that, let me know. I challenge you.
Tucked into my copy of the play is a short script for something else – I think it is a sample from one of Simon David’s pieces – quite impenetrable without context – clearly it was that sort of night.
It was a fictionalised…somewhat fantasised account of encounters (which did occur to some extent in real life) between the writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Joseph Stalin.
We were blessed with Alex Jennings as Bulgakov and Simon Russell Beale as Stalin, with Nicholas Hytner in the director’s chair.
In truth, I don’t think it was a great play. It was a very good idea for a play with some very good scenes within it, but as a whole it didn’t quite work for me as an entire play.
But there was enough really good stuff going on to please me plenty, on balance. Whereas I think Janie found it a little drawn out and confused/confusing.
Gosh I remember how disappointed we were by this one.
We had loved Conor McPherson’s previous work whenever we had seen it – especially but not only The Weir.
But this play, set in the early 19th century, just left both of us feeling cold.
Super cast, with several of the “usual suspects” for Irish plays, not least Bríd Brennan. Plus an early sighting of Caoilfhionn Dunne.
But for us, nothing could quite save this play.
I remember saying afterwards that it was like “Chekhov had written a ghost story” and I remember smiling when I subsequently saw one of the reviews saying just that.
Lots going on, mostly in Australia, spanning eighty years. We saw this play before the Ashes started, so did not breach our “Aussie abstinence vow” during the Ashes, I’m pleased to report.
Andrew Bovell is a very good playwright; worth looking out for. Excellent cast and production too.
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:
