Not David Mamet’s best play, but even modest Mamet on the subject of Race provides plenty tension and interesting drama. We needed to suspend belief a little too much on this one – as is the way with lesser Mamet.
Perhaps the irritating pun in the title should have warned us off this one – but we like the Orange Tree and the cast included some excellent Orange Tree regulars so we went for it.
We found this a tame, irritating comedy on the whole. We stuck it out – it wasn’t that bad – but it wasn’t that good either and we felt it could have been so much better.
It is often a mistake for an playwright to direct their own play – especially with comedy – this one was an object lesson for that theory.
We thought this was a very interesting and engrossing night at the theatre.
Ayad Akhtar won the Pulitzer Prize for drama with this visceral play about a Muslim corporate lawyer, Amir, in New York, whose life unravels during a dinner party.
Amir is a Westernised Muslim, who admits to feeling anti-Israel, on largely “tribal” grounds. But is Amir’s position anti-Semitic and is this issue the cause of his corporate undoing and more?
Although Disgraced (like Checkpoint Chana) rather unrealistically rushes the central character’s disintegration, it emerges from a far more subtle and interesting debate. It is also a far better piece of drama.
Excellent cast and production for Disgraced at the Bush too.
Occasionally an evening of theatre is so different and electrifying it sticks permanently in your memory as one of our very best theatre experiences. Janie and I both feel that way about A Human Being Died That Night.
The play is based on a book by Pumla Gobodo-Madikiezla, describing her work as a member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission interviewing Eugene de Kock, who had been jailed for his murderous role in the apartheid regime.
We attended the first ever performance of this play, at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.
The downstairs lobby area is actually part of the performance space. We were told to sit around and wait, then the character of Pumla Gobodo-Madikiezla, played by Noma Dumezweni does a sort of presentation for us, explaining the background to her involvement and the effect that her interactions with de Kock had on her…
…then she invites us to join her to witness her experiences and leads us into the main downstairs studio space, which is an interview space in the prison where de Kock (played by Matthew Marsh) is incarcerated.
Below is a vid of an interview with the two main actors when the production was revived at the Hampstead the following year:
Below is a short, sharp vid of an interview with Noma when the play transferred to New York:
I’m not a great lover of Howard Brenton’s work; the best of it is terrific (e.g. Pravda, which he wrote jointly with David Hare), while some of his plays seem to me to be gratuitously violent, ponderous or both. But this one is excellent.
A fabulous piece of design, trying to utilise Ai Weiwei principles without overdoing it, the set was eye-catching throughout.
A large cast, all good, led by Benedict Wong who was superb as Ai Weiwei – the fact that he really looks the part helps but would not have been sufficient – he is also a very good actor. James MacDonald is a very reliable director too.
Parenthetically, Benedict Wong SO looks the part that Janie mistook him for Ai Weiwei himself at the theatre a couple of years later – click here or below:
Janie and I saw this one the day after we got married…
…I’m not sure the thoughts of Gertrude Stein were entirely appropriate for that occasion…
…not that it was always possible to work out from these pieces what the thoughts of Gertrude Stein really are/were.
We really wanted to like this assortment of short pieces. Some of them were really interesting and/or enjoyable. But some were, I suppose predictably, very obscure indeed.
It was very well done – Katie Mitchell and a very strong cast. The downstairs had been transfromed into several performance rooms – the audience had to mill around as the scenes/performers moved from piece to piece. We liked all of that.
A rare (at that time) visit to the Hampstead on a Saturday. It was the start of a trend away from Hampstead Theatre Fridays towards Hampstead Theatre Saturdays for us.
Gosh, this one didn’t really work for us, although we thought it would. We like Bruce Norris’s plays and the Royal Court was serving up a stellar collection of cast and creatives.
To some extent we were unlucky – we’d booked an early preview and the mechanically complicated set had encountered some technical problems. We were kept waiting 30 minutes or more for a delayed start…
…for a play that we knew was quite long anyway…
…and at that time we were more easily pleased by short, sharp (and possibly less challenging) pieces.
But the other problem I had with this piece was the rather obvious way that points about the financial crisis and subsequent political/economic responses were rather obviously rammed down our throats.
Also, the play latched onto one of my bugbears which is the misrepresentation of Adam Smith’s subtle body of work into an unkind representation of all that is coldly economic.
It all felt a bit “tell rather than show”, which detracted from the drama, which is probably why the Drama 101 text book suggests “show rather than tell”.
Below is the trailer vid…
…and below this line is a behind the scenes vid:
It was all very clever and the cast was excellent, but by half time – pushing towards 22:00 already, we decided to give the second half a miss. After all, I had the script in my hand and could pretty well work out what was likely to happen.
Another Friday evening well spent at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.
Here is a link to the Hampstead resource.
This was a strange play in many ways; a drama about a pretty unpleasant, or at least dysfunctional, couple, who lost a child and desperately want to replace her…possibly with a clone.
There was weirdness and creepiness about it, plus some good lines and drama. It was very well performed and helped cement our view that the Hampstead Downstairs is a seriously happening thing.
