Well, by this time the Ed Hall era had started at Hampstead Theatre, but this one didn’t really work for us.
It felt to us like an “everything including the kitchen sink” gay saga. Angels in America without the sparkling wit, The Normal Heart without the heart-wrenching pathos. It spanned the decades from 1962 (a fine year IMHO) to the present day.
We really wanted to like it. We didn’t really dislike it. It just didn’t grip and/or move us.
Good troupe from the Liverpool Everyman – it was a shame really.
Janie and I are partial to a bit of Tennessee Williams. While this early play is not one of his great plays, it shows all the signs of an emerging great playwright and was a thoroughly enjoyable evening at the theatre.
A very strong cast and production from a regional source; the Royal & Derngate Northampton.
The Curious Incident centres around autism, whereas Polar Bears centres around bipolar disorder.
Polar Bears was fabulous cast (Richard Coyle and Jodhi May in particular), beautifully produced, etc., but by gosh was it depressing and predictable to watch the inevitable tragedy unfold.
It is a short play – “just as well”, I recall Janie and I agreeing – I also recall us agreeing that we were pleased to have seen it but couldn’t exactly recommend it.
It didn’t put me off from booking the dramatisation of The Curious Incident a couple of years later, thank goodness – click here for my notes on that evening – which was cracking theatre – perhaps thanks to Simon Stephens combining with Mark Haddon that time.
But unfortunately Polar Bears was a continuation of a somewhat lacklustre six months of theatre for us at that time.
There’s just something about fin-de-siecle Austrian plays that doesn’t quite float our boat, however well done they are.
Still, we were pleased to have seen this one – it was one of the best things we had seen so far that year…but then we were having a poor year for theatre up to that point.
We had been big fans of the Donmar for some while; sometimes bemoaning the awkwardness of the place for parking/transport but on balance feeling that it was worth it.
Serenading Louie was one of a few less impressive productions that started to put us off the place.
We were very keen on the idea of this one and booked a preview.
We are glad we did; the play was enjoyable, agonising and thought-provoking in equal measure.
Partly about the domestic and interpersonal aspects of ageing, the play also takes on questions of government policy around ageing, including social care and the potential for robots to provide same.
I make it sound a bit “everything but the kitchen sink” on the topic, because in a way it was, but in a good way. The themes do more or less come together into a coherent whole and there is an element of comedic romp about the play which allows room for some forgiveness.
Around the time that we booked this play, I was writing the chapter of The Price of Fish, coincidentally Chapter Six, that explains the “shrinking world” theory known as six degrees of separation.
In theory, this play is all about that concept. In practice, I struggled at times to link this social comedy with the theory.
Without the futile search for intellectual insight, it was a reasonably fun evening at the theatre but a rather lightweight one. A super cast for this revival, but I’m not sure this play is worthy of a revival within 20 years, even though the world has/had changed between times.
We weren’t as keen on this one as we had hoped to be, given the synopsis and the fact that the Almeida was going through a purple patch at that time.
I’m not sure that Patrick Hamilton works for us on the stage – indeed we have recently at the time of writing (May 2017) passed up an opportunity to see one of his in the forthcoming Hampstead Theatre run.
We’re becoming an increasingly picky pair these days. We tend to avoid booking much in that pre-Christmas period also, now, given the nightmare journeys that often ensue at that time of year.
It was of course an excellent production and very well acted. I think it was the play that didn’t quite do it for us. Janie and I like 1920’s and 1930’s styles generally, but strangely we don’t tend to like plays/the theatrical style of that era.
The reviews – mostly very good but not great – are mostly linked from the Almeida resource – here’s that link again.
The more cynical reader/theatre lover might imagine this play/production having been designed for a Broadway transfer from the outset.
A two-handed, short play about the artist Mark Rothko, with an all (both) star cast and Michael Grandage directing.
Indeed, had it not been for the fact that the subject matter interests us both and that the stars in question (Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne) are both stars we like, we might have given this one a miss. We were falling out of love with the Donmar Warehouse by then.
But this was a very interesting play and it was superbly done, so we are very glad we went to see it at the very start of its transatlantic journey.
No on-line resource from the Donmar – they are far too busy arranging West End and Broadway transfers for that…
…update – I feel bad about having said that now that the Donmar has made its educational Study Packs available for download – here is the pack for Red.
It got mostly very good reviews, but not universally so:
Finally, here is an extracts package from Playbill from the Los Angeles transfer – sadly without Eddie Redmayne by then, but still you get to see Alfred Molina as Rothko:
