We were on a Richmond kick that quarter, for some reason, with three visits to The Orange Tree and two visits to the Richmond Theatre. Coincidence really, I should imagine.
Janie liked it more than I did.
That is my log’s pithy conclusion.
Excellent cast, with Stephanie Cole, Stephanie Beacham, Benjamin Whitrow & Gerald Harper. Christopher Morahan directed it. A transfer from Bath, as was often the case at Richmond.
Reading that review 25 years later, all I can think of is the wonderful Peter Cook quote: “I go to the theatre to be entertained. I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction – I can get all that at home.“
My log is silent on this one. I think we quite liked it but clearly didn’t rave about it. Our diaries add nothing. Not even the fact that, almost certainly, we went to Don Fernando afterwards for a Spanish meal.
The local gazette papers had a rave review for this piece:
By gosh there was a fuss in the UK press about this one, with theatre journalists falling over themselves to heap praise, in particular on Nicole Kidman, essentially for looking the part and being able to act.
We had tickets for the first Saturday, because back then, as members of the Donmar, that was the sort of thing we did, especially if someone as grand as David Hare was credited with writing a whole new version of a play.
The play, originally known as La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, was highly controversial when it was written at the turn of the 20th century. There are 10 characters. David Hare’s version at Sam Mendes’s request at The Donmar (subsequently transferred to the Cort Theatre in New York) was not the first time the play was staged as a two-hander. It starred Iain Glen and Nicole Kidman.
Janie and I thoroughly enjoyed our evening, but probably for all the wrong reasons. My log comment speaks volumes:
Nice bodies, shame about the play.
Having been wowed by David Hare’s wonderful solo performance piece Via Dolorosa the week before…
…Janie and I found The Blue Room to be comparatively thin dramatic gruel.
Still, nice bodies as I (and the fawning journalists) said, plus a bizarre moment for me personally. Janie and I were sitting right at the front at one of the sides of the stage, as oft we did at the Donmar. As the stars took their final bow and departed the stage, Nicole Kidman seemed to look straight at me and wave at me with her fingers. One of Janie’s patients was in the audience that night and came up to us as we were leaving the theatre in a state of great excitement, because she had seen Nicole Kidman waving at me. The patient wondered whether I knew Nicole Kidman personally, to which my answer was, “not until this evening”.
25 years later, all I can say is that me and Nicole, we go back a long way.
Here are some of the fawning newspaper pieces. The Standard, seemingly without irony, devoted its Page 3 to the news & review. Frankly some of the language used in this Standard page would not be acceptable 25 years later:
In the Guardian, there is a gushing piece in The Arts Diary which, like the other papers, probably would get heavily edited or spiked today, while our friend Michael Billington did the worthy thing and reviewed Our Country’s Good at The Young Vic instead. (Janie and I went to see that the following spring when it came back from its tour.)
Janie and I thought this piece and performance was simply superb. In fact, I wrote:
Superb!!
…in my log and I am not normally the double-exclamation-mark type.
This was David Hare’s brave dive into performing a one-man-show on one of the thorniest topics he might possibly choose – the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Talk about high risk, but we thought Hare pulled off a blinder with this piece/performance.
I wrote surprisingly vaguely about this in my log, as I am sure I wrote it up fairly soon after seeing the play:
unsure of length – recall shortish no interval
Impressionistically, I remember the evening fondly. Paula Wilcox was an actress I had only previously seen doing sitcom, but I remember realising that she really could act…and needed to for this piece.
Fortunately for posterity, despite its small scale, it was written up by proper journalists at the time. So I didn’t need to.
Robin Stringer previewed the piece in the Standard:
This was a preview of a show Ken Campbell put on at The Piccadilly Thetre later that year.
I loved Ken Campbell’s work and I seem to recall a very funny monologue in one of his earlier one-man shows when he talked about his fascination with the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and vaguely posited the idea of performing MacBeth in pidgin.
In this piece, Campbell goes into far more detail about the language and his desire to establish pidgin as a world language, or Wol Wontok, which he believed could be achieved in just a few days as the language is so easy.
Here is Ken Campbell’s Guardian piece shown on the back of the programme note above, in proper clipping/readable form:
The first part of the prodcution was fascinating and funny, but, in truth, Janie and I found the delivery of MacBeth in pidgin less funny than the idea of it being done.
Never mind. An evening in the hands of Ken Campbell is never dull and I remember this evening more fondly than my log note suggests I would:
Not as much fun as we thought it might be – the idea is funnier than the delivery
Somewhat strangely, through work, soon after seeing this play, I met Patrick Ellum, who was a former Attorney General of Vanuatu. Through Patrick, I met one of that nation’s visiting Prime Ministers and his entourage. No, I didn’t try out my pidgin on them, although I did ask them about the deification of Prince Philip in Tanna. Hopefully I’ll Ogblog that event in the fullness of time.
But I digress.
“Prince Philip” in pidgin was, “nambawan bigfella emi blong Misis Kwin“, by the way.
I digress again, but no more.
Lyn Gardner in the Guardian gave Pidgin Macbeth a guarded thumps up, while signally failing to translate The Bard’s name into pidgin properly – it’s “Macbed Blong Wilum Sekspia“, dear, not Sekstia – typical Grauniad:
Michael Gambon & Eileen Atkins couldn’t save this slight play for us.
Yasmina Reza was all the rage at that time, not least because of Art, so this play transferred for a while – indeed we missed it at The Pit, seeing it at The Duchess (but not WITH The Duchess).
Nicholas de Jongh in the Standard really liked it:
That suggests that we didn’t get a great deal out of this one, unusually for Mamet. Possibly we just felt that we’d seen a lot of material like this before.
Was it three short plays or one play with three somewhat disconnected scene?. I wrote down
The Disappearance of the Jews, Jolly and Deeny.
Splendid cast: Linal Haft, Colin Stinton, Zoe Wanamaker, Vincent Marzello and Diana Quick, directed by Patrick Marber.
Equally Gazette 23 Oct 1998, Fri Ealing and Acton Gazette (Ealing, London, England) Newspapers.com
