Very good. Performed in scouse accents if I remember correctly.
I suspect that the second note had something to do with a little Bobbie annoyance at the use of scouse accents to depict Neapolitans. Ian McKellen as scouser seemed a little strange to our ears too, but of course the bloke can act. Clare Higgins as his missus, Richard Eyre directing, fine supporting cast…what’s not to like?
It was my “get out of jail” weekend. Michael Durtnall (my chiropractor) had insisted that I “lock down” for a month to enable my back to start healing – otherwise he wouldn’t treat me. More on that elsewhere, but basically this weekend was the end of my confinement and boy did I make the most of it with Bridge on Friday, this theatre visit on Saturday and a wedding on the Sunday.
I am very keen on David Edgar so we (me & Bobbie) will have long before booked to see this just after press night. I was very pleased to have negotiated my way out of lockdown to see this.
All I wrote in my log is:
Very good. Neil Kinnock and his entourage were there the night we went.
At the time Neil Kinnock was leader of the opposition. I don’t know whether he and/or his entourage took notes during this paly, but it was a political drama to be sure.
It is set in an unspecified former communist country that resembles the former Czechoslovakia.
Excellent cast; Karl Johnson, Stratford Johns and Katrin Cartlidge standing out in my mind.
Bobbie & I were both very keen to see this one – hence our appearance on the first Saturday after press night, booking the tickets long before.
We weren’t disappointed. My log reads:
Superb. The setting was 1930’s style and they made a movie based on this production.
Below is a link to a National Theatre clip:
While below is a clip from the 1995 movie:
Janie would have got less out of this than Bobbie and I did – she is not so keen on Shakespeare, Sir Ian McKellen nor Dame Maggie. (The latter was not in the National Theatre stage production – Susan Engel played Queen Margaret.)
I rated this production very good and I remember it surprisingly well.
Howard Davies directed this one and gathered an excellent cast. Tom Wilkinson as John Proctor, Zoe Wanamaker as Elizabeth Proctor, Clare Holman as Abigail, plus a top notch RNT ensemble, as was the way at that time.
This production must have been very good, because it is quite a long play and I had “done my back” pretty dramatically the week before. Thus started a period when my back would tell me whether or not I was fully engaged in a theatrical production. For this one, I only recall the superb drama; I don’t recall the pain!
I said in the log, which is almost to be expected with a cast as fine as this under Deborah Warner.
This was an evening at The National with Bobbie. I have subsequently seen a good “Good Person” at The Orange Tree with Janie too, but this Olivier production was especially fine in my view.
This was the famous (or perhaps infamous) National Theatre production of Hamlet which took Daniel Day-Lewis to the very edge of reason and from which he quit part way through the run.
I went very early in the run – in fact it might even have been a preview – with Annalisa. I suspect that I had booked the thing with Bobbie in mind, but so long before the appointed date that Bobbie could no longer make it.
Let’s just say that, back then, I thought of Shakespeare as more Bobbie’s thing than Annalisa’s thing. Annalisa has latterly assured me that theatre, including Shakespeare, was very much her thing.
Anyway, I recall that we sat right at the front of one of those side wedges in the Olivier – you are very close to the action there, especially when the action is on your side of the stage.
I also recall that Daniel Day Lewis was a very wet Hamlet – by which I mean sweating and spitting his lines. Annalisa remarked afterwards that we should have taken umbrellas with us had we known.
It was a superb production, with a great many big names and several names that weren’t big then but went on to be big. National productions were a bit like that in those days – some still are I suspect.
I was motivated to write up this theatre visit while sitting at Lord’s in September 2018 watching, for the first time, Ethan Bamber bowl live. His father, David, was Horatio in this Hamlet production, nearly 30 years earlier.
Other big names/fine performances included Judi Dench, John Castle, Michael Bryant, Oliver Ford Davies & Stella Gonet. A young Jeremy Northam had a small part in the version we saw but stepped up to the plate when Daniel Day-Lewis walked out. Later in the run, Ian Charleson took on the role to much acclaim, just before he died.
I think this was still quite early in Richard Eyre’s tenure at the National and he directed this one himself, extremely well.
My only other recollection is a quote that Annalisa picked up from an American visitor to the National, who told his wife that he didn’t think all that much of the play – “too many of the lines were clichés”. I guess you can’t please everybody.
Postscript: An Enthusiast From Across The Pond Sought Help…
…in March 2024 I received some unusual correspondence from a gentleman in the USA, wondering whether I still had the programme (or playbill in his terms) as he was keen to see Daniel Day-Lewis’s biography notes from that production.
I have mentioned before that Ogblog serves as a fifth emergency service on occasions and this felt like such an occasion. No sirens or speeding vehicles through the streets of London needed, but I fortuitously was able to lay my hands on this particular programme with relative ease, having not yet returned that batch to deep storage.
I rated this play/production superb in my log – I remember it well and fondly.
Jim Broadbent and Linda Bassett were both outstanding – I think this might have been the first time I saw either of them in the theatre and it was, I think, my first experience of seeing an Athol Fugard play performed. If so, it was the first of many in all three cases.
The play is about a Russian soldier hiding in a pig sty for many years after the war and possible recriminations for his desertion are over. No doubt it is meant to be a parable with relevance to the Afrikaner position in South Africa.
Frankly, I found it hard to engage too deeply with the parable at the time, but did think it was an interesting and entertaining play, especially in the hands of the talented cast.
Unusually for productions that please me so much, Fugard himself directed this one – I’m not keen on the idea of playwrights directing their own work and usually detect some untrammelled egotism in such productions, but I think Fugard might be an exception to the “don’t direct your own plays” rule of thumb.
Did Bobbie enjoy this one as much as I did? I think so, at the time, but whether it stuck so long in her memory as it did mine is a question I’ll have to ask her.
Billington on Napoli Sat, Jun 29, 1991 – 21 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
Coveney on Napoli Sun, Jun 30, 1991 – 48 · The Observer (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
