Upstairs, but with a stellar cast – Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall, this was a stunning piece of theatre that genuinely wowed us…
…and by 2012 Janie and I were not easily wowed.
In fact Janie doesn’t usually go for these “science meets love” type plays, but this one is truly exceptional, making her feel neither dumb nor condescended.
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:
What a grim evening of theatre this turned out to be.
The only ungrim thing about the evening was bumping into George Littlejohn and his good lady in the foyer before the show and then again in the interval. I have known George since 1994 when we met, for reasons that will only be explained to you if you click here, at the 1994 inaugural Accountancy Awards. Only click if you find pompous awards funny; don’t click if you take them seriously.
The play is about young upwardly mobile Viennese trainee doctors in the 1920’s, who should have been among the most happening people on earth were it not for their unfortunate juxtaposition with time and space (i.e. 1920’s Vienna) and their existential angst.
Janie and I hated the first half of the play and resolved not to stay for the second half. I’m not saying that it was either going to be members of the cast, or us, or a mixture of those two cohorts, but suicide was clearly on the cards during the second half. We made absolutely certain it wasn’t going to be us.
Unfortunately for George and his good lady, they had some sort of connection with someone involved in the production, so they stayed for the second half. We wished them luck as we waved them goodbye.
The irony of the bad straplining of that last piece will not be wasted on George Littlejohn, who was at one time the editor of Accountancy Age, no less, but has since managed to exceed even those giddy heights.
Despite their ordeal, sticking out the whole evening, I am pleasantly surprised, indeed delighted, to report that both the Littlejohns seem hale and hearty at the time of writing (January 2017). Janie and I ran into them both again at the Curzon Bloomsbury on New Year’s Day 2017 – click here, which triggered this memory and hence this write up.
David Hare is very good at burrowing around all manner of interesting topics, but I suspect he was too far away from his spheres of knowledge and understanding with the financial crisis.
Hare almost admits as much, as the narrator of the play is a somewhat perplexed author.
So to me, Hare was making the obvious points about the financial crisis well enough, but there was little dramatic tension and no new insight in the piece.
Janie liked it a bit more than i did, but I suspect that she got more out of it, being less steeped in the financial crisis in the first place.
I’m glad we saw it, but this is second division work from a first division playwright. There was little a good cast and production could do to save it.
Interesting list of young playwrights collaborated on the piece, though; James Graham in particular having shot to playwright stardom relatively quickly since.
I don’t remember hating it – but I do recall that curates egg feeling about it. “Sounded better as an idea than it turned out to be as a play” was probably Daisy’s verdict.
We have long been a fan of Shawn; in my case dating back to seeing the film My Dinner With Andre hundreds of years ago.
Janie and I by chance got to chat with him at the Almeida when he was over for Miranda Richardson’s amazing performance as Aunt Dan in Aunt Dan and Lemon (to be Ogblogged in the fullness of time no doubt)…
So here was a new Shawn play with Wallace Shawn himself and Miranda Richardson in it. Plus Andre Gregory directing it. Ahead of the piece we were a little starstruck – a rare emotion for us.
In truth, this piece didn’t hit the giddy heights of some of Shawn’s others. The notion of dystopia following scientific tinkering has (in my view) been overdone by others rather more than Shawn’s political and social frets.
The play was more than three hours long, so I suspect we settled for a shawarma supper to take home. The evening certainly kept me and Janie in conversation for the rest of that evening and indeed the rest of the weekend.
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.
We were more than a little disappointed with this one.
We’d fallen out of love with the Hampstead Theatre during this Anthony Clark era, so hadn’t been going there as much. But this cast looked terrific and the play sounded interesting…promising more than it delivered.
I don’t think it sent us into quite the level of ecstasy that the critics describe, but we did enjoy this one a lot, without finding much depth; it is basically a slightly quirky, sinister comedy about suburban infidelity.
But it did for sure signal Jez Butterworth on that upward trajectory to playwriting stardom.
