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This was a revival of a play from the 1990s which we hadn’t seen and which we fancied seeing.
The subject matter is a bit gruelling and the somewhat sentimental treatment could seem mawkish, but actually we found this a good play and a well-balanced production.
Reviews (and some comparisons with earlier and subsequent productions) can be found through this search term – click here.
One of our better Friday evenings at the Hampstead Theatre back then.
A very powerful play this – a two hander set in a Latin American jail – one prisoner is a political prisoner, the other is in jail for homosexuality.
Very well acted by Will Kean and Rupert Evans in a high-quality Donmar production.
The critics suggested a lack of intimacy and power to this production, but it did the business for us as I recall it.
Click here for a link to reviews and other resources for this production.
One of those resources is an excellent Donmar “Behind The Scenes/Study Guide” – which I have also scraped to here so you can for sure see it even if the Donmar moves it or closes down!
A rare (perhaps unique) visit to the Donmar Warehouse on a Friday, perhaps because we had arranged to see John and Mandy on the Saturday. I don’t think we quite rated this play as powerful as Death And the Maiden, which we had seen with John and Mandy years earlier…
…but it had echoes of that play with the South American style and the human rights abuses.
A rare visit to the theatre on a Thursday on my own. Janie hates Restoration comedy but I had (and at the time of writing, more than 10 years later, still have) an idea for a very thorough updating of one of those Restoration plays, so I very much wanted to see this modern production of a Restoration classic.
I thought it was very well done. Rory Kinnear was exceptional, as was most of the cast, including Alleyn’s alumna Nancy Carroll.
This was before Nick Hytner found his way off my Christmas card list by forgetting where his loyal audience comes from and becoming far too much of a jobsworth cum corporate lick-spittle when running the National. So hats off to him in this regard – Hytner can direct.
I rated this production very good indeed at the time, but it was not the sort of modernisation of a Restoration play which I have in mind…
…which is a good thing…
…if I ever get around to implementing my own cunning plan. But I digress.
Click here for a link to a search term that finds the reviews, which were mostly good but not great.
Below is the trailer, which is really quite snazzy without giving away much about the show. It has a fair smattering of Nancy Carroll, which might please my fellow Alleyn’s alums…or indeed anyone who watches the vid:
One of my abiding memories of going to the Bush on a Friday evening to see this production was our irritation at the draconian Friday evening parking regulations and driving around desperately seeking a legitimate space.
“This had better be worth it”, I recall Janie saying before the show, followed by “yes it was worth it” afterwards.
Quirky play, very well performed.
The Bush resource on this one can be found by clicking here.
Reviews and stuff can be found through the search term that clicks through here.
A good one.
A rare visit to the theatre on a Monday – this was Easter Monday.
Janie and I both love a bit of Tennessee Williams and we had only seen an amateur production of the Rose Tattoo before – at the Questors some 10 years earlier.
This was a top notch production at the National – no holds barred.
Zoe Wannamaker was exceptional.
Critics seemed to think the production and performances masked a less than brilliant play – I think I probably agree with that analysis – click here for a link to reviews.
Below is the trailer from the 1955 movie – very different style:
Sam Walters really had got himself locked into the early 20th Century by this time. Frankly, we didn’t think this Galsworthy piece had aged very well. Add to that Sam’s strict orthodoxy about not cutting text, it was quite a long evening at the theatre.
Well acted and directed, we stuck it out for both halves although we did consider making a break for it at half time.
Click here for a link to the Orange Tree resource on this play/production.
The critics liked it rather more than we did. Click here for a link that finds reviews and stuff.
This was a very entertaining evening in the theatre, Sounds odd, but it was a very amusing play about suicide.
Click here for a link to the Almeida’s resource on this play/production.
We rate Tom Brooke very highly and he was superb in this piece – a free adaptation, by Moira Buffini, of a subversive Soviet era Nikolai Erdman book.
It was well received by the critics on thew whole – click here for reviews and stuff.
Two weeks in a row to the National Theatre (RNT) and two theatre visits out of three to see John Kani perform in one of his own plays.
This one, a revival of one of the most famous works to come out of the defiant anti-apartheid theatre in South Africa in the 1970s, in some ways pleased us less than Nothing But The Truth at the Hampstead a few weeks earlier.
Nothing But The Truth by John Kani, Hampstead Theatre, 9 February 2007
Again, we really wanted to like it. We had loved The Island when we saw the revival of that one. But Sizwe Banzi seemed an altogether lighter and more dated work. The play has some great lines and some excellent points to make, but didn’t move us as we felt it should.
Yes, we were glad to have seen it, but it was a bit like seeing a band of ageing rockers whom you wished you had seen “back in the day”. The point was back in the day.
It got pretty good reviews – click here to find them.
Below is a short excerpt of John Kani and Winston Ntshona performing the play back in the day – early 1980s I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8YGqgezaf8
I remember us both finding this piece about low-level BBC shenanigans interesting and enjoyable – despite a suicide forming the denouement (that is not a spoiler). I suspect, given subsequent events at the BBC, it would seem tame and much beside the point today.
I think I picked up the terms “cruel spectacles” and “waning powers”, both of which I use a fair bit, from this particular show.
Great cast, with Ben Chaplin, Paul Ritter, Bruce Alexander, Angela Thorne and Leo Bill really standing out.
Well directed by Richard Eyre and produced of course to RNT standards.
Reasonably well received by the critics – click here for a search term to find reviews.
It was worth seeing at the time for sure.
We really wanted to like this piece a lot.
John Kani is a bit of a legend of South African theatre, having been so influential in Athol Fugard’s plays and the like.
The subject matter – Truth and Reconciliation and all that – was right up our street. It was great to see John Kani performing in his own play.
In truth, this piece did less for us than we’d hoped.
It was well produced and well acted. Perhaps it had been built up so much as a modern classic that it was bound to disappoint us a bit.
It had some good moments and we were pleased to have seen the piece, but it didn’t really grab us the way we had hoped.
By way of contrast, the play we saw downstairs a few years later, A Human Being Died That Night – click here or below…
A Human Being Died That Night by Nicholas Wright, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 10 May 2013
…really did grab us. Coincidentally, our next visit to the theatre was to see a Nicholas Wright – The Reporter.
Click here for a link to reviews and stuff – mostly very good – on Nothing But The Truth.
Below is a clip from a Cape Town production of the piece, but without John Kani himself performing:
Below is an interview with John Kani: