We also both remeber it quite well, 25 years later. That might have a fair bit to do with the superb cast: Mark Rylance, Harriet Walter, Imelda Staunton and Oliver Cotton. The production was directed by Matthew Warchus. We didn’t recogognise his name then but we certainly do now. Here is the Theatricalia entry for this one.
Yasmina Reza (as translated by Christopher Hampton) was all the rage in the English speaking world back then. This was our fourth go at one of hers – Art having been the piece that kicked off the Reza fashion…
Anyway, apart from Art, with thought Life x 3 to be the most interesting and memorable of Reza’s works.
Again we went to a preview, so we were ahead of the critics. What did they think? Here’s Charles Spencer who seemed pretty impressed with it, at least as entertainment if not as profound drama:
Anyway, The National obviously felt the urge to have another go at Hamlet less than 12 years later, with Simon Russell Beale, Peter McEnery, Sara Kestleman and Denis Quilley to name but a few.
Janie remembers being impressed by the acting, but still not really relating to or engaging with Shakespeare. I remember feeling that I had probably previously seen the best production of Hamlet I was ever going to see, despite thinking that this was pretty darned good; especially Simon Russell Beale’s performance.
Very good indeed.
That’s what I wrote in my log.
But you don’t want to listen to us. Here are some reviews. First up – Nicholas de Jongh, who also liked Simon Russell Beale more than he liked the production
Similarly, our friend Michael Billington applauds SRB’s performance and John Caird’s directing of it, but feels that the production strips out the big picture political aspects of the play:
Janie noted in her diary that the play ran for 3 hours and fifteen minutes, so I’ll guess that she was grateful for John Caird’s cuts of the political elements – goodness knows how long the play would have taken in John Caird’s hands if we’d also had the Fortinbras sub-plot to deal with.
Still, to summarise the critics – they warmed to the production almost exclusively because of Simon Russell Beale’s quality. I’m surprised that no-one gave their review the headline, “Saved By the Beale”. They missed a trick there.
But Mnemonic didn’t need our soft spot – it was excellent in its own right.
Superb
…I said in my log and meant it.
Strangely, writing 25 years later, this piece has recently been revived (or rather, reimagined) by Complicité in London at the National.
This original production was at the more utilitarian Riverside Studios, a venue we have always liked.
Excellent cast, including Simon McBurney himself, the wonderful Katrin Cartlidge (who died tragically young) and Richard Katz, who had previously worked wonders with my material in NewsRevue – for example the Woody Allen role in Mama Mia Farrow:
I think a lot of the usual suspects ignored it until it transferred to the National a couple of year’s later…and then was reimagined more than 20 years after that.
But we saw the original production…at The Riverside…have I mentioned that before?
It was the play that lacked coherence. Janie couldn’t see past the fragile conceits of the play.
Our friend, Michael Billington, in The Guardian, seems to have shared our reservations. He says that the plot “has more holes than a second-hand colander”…
…(does a new colander have fewer holes than a second-hand one, Michael?)…
In the summer of 1996 (or was it spring 1997?), we had spent a Sunday on the Thames, on Michael & Elisabeth’s Thames sailing barge, The Lady Daphne, along with, amongst others, Trevor Nunn & Imogen Stubbs. Trevor was busy reading an early Tennessee Williams script, Not About Nightingales, which had never been performed in the UK. Despite not being among Williams best work, Trevor suggested to us the play had a lot going for it. He was thinking of putting it on at the Royal National Theatre once he became Artistic Director there. I think his appointment had been announced but Trevor had not yet taken up the role when we met him.
Anyway, we were very keen to see the finished product once the production was announced and booked to see it at the start of its run.
The only critic who really matters here on Ogblog…me…wrote:
Powerful stuff – not a great play but very well executed.
I especially remember Finbar Lynch and Corin Redgrave putting in standout performances.
Charles Spencer in The Telegraph seemed to like it:
Don’t ask me how or why we had the stomach for this violent play but not for Shopping & F***ing the week before. Perhaps the violence seemed less gratuitous. Perhaps the way it was produced/directed.
Perhaps because we were demob happy – although we had cancelled our main spring holiday plans because of Phillie’s indisposition, we had decided to take a week off an go to Majorca for some much needed rest. We flew off early the next morning.
We were tending to book RNT things in preview or very early in runs, so this was an unusually late visit to see this one – perhaps we couldn’t get the seats we wanted until later or perhaps we missed it in the first block of dates.
Anyway, we thought this was “very good”.
One of our favourite troupes, Théâtre de Complicité, was responsible for this one. Juliet Stevenson played the lead along with Simon McBurney who also directed. The Theatricalia entry can be found here.
This was the first of those “in the round” productions that the RNT did at The Olivier while it was being refurbished.
Nicholas de Jongh in The Standard was not too keen on it:
We celebrated our homecoming from the Middle East with a visit to the theatre to see this wonderful production of, coincidentally, Pinter’s The Homecoming.
What a cast. Lindsay Duncan, Michael Sheen, Eddie Marsan, Keith Allen & David Bradley. Roger Michell directed it.
We were ever so keen to see this one. We saw Landscape in the afternoon/early evening and this one at the regular theatre hour – a veritable theatre-fest of stuff we were very keen to see.
As usual a stupendously good cast assembled by Complicite, including Kathryn Hunter, Toby Jones and Marcello Magni. Simon McBurney at the helm but not on the stage for this one.
…and hung around for the Complicite. I guess we were a little time poor for theatre and stuff that autumn, as I was busy birthing Z/Yen and stuff that autumn.
Still, we highly rated both shows so that must have been a day to savour.
This is the third and final part of my 25th anniversary Ogblog trilogy on “how Janie and I got it together”. In case you missed the first two parts and are interested in reading them, here are links to the first two episodes:
So, the ossobuco supper gave me the perfect opportunity to phone Janie to thank her for her hospitality and ask her out.
As luck would have it, I was sitting on a pair of hot tickets, The Street Of Crocodiles at the Cottesloe Theatre. It was my habit back then to book up quite a few such productions a long way in advance, with Bobbie Scully in mind for first dips, but with an unwritten agreement with Bobbie that she couldn’t commit that far in advance and that I might need to find someone else to join me…
…anyway, I had these tickets for 29 August and they seemed an ideal way to reciprocate.
Janie seemed keen on the idea, so the date was set.
I also offered to cook Janie a pre-theatre meal, after first checking that she liked Chinese food.
I can’t remember exactly which dishes I went for, but I’ll guess I plugged for bankable favourites that were reasonably easy to prepare and which needed relatively little clearing up afterwards:
cha chieng lettuce wrap – probably using veal mince or a mix of veal and pork mince;
chicken and cashew nuts with yellow bean sauce;
I thought the second main dish was steak slices with onions, mushrooms and black bean sauce, but Janie reckons the second dish was prawns with ginger and spring onions and now I think she is right;
pak choi with oyster sauce;
steamed basmati rice.
No TripAdvisor review for the meal, but on reminding Janie about it just now, she has described it as “amazing”, so there you go.
But far more amazing than my meal was The Street Of Crocodiles. It really was a stunningly good show.
The play is based on the stories of Bruno Schulz, which (from what we can gather) were weird enough when written, but when given the Complicite treatment, they become a sensory overload of words, music and movement.
Janie had driven to my place and insisted on also driving to the National Theatre – the latter habit being one she rarely deviates from 25 years later.
The evening seemed to have gone splendidly well. Janie was very complimentary about my cooking and seemed very taken with the show.
When we got back to my place, I asked Janie if she wanted to come back upstairs to my flat.
She said no.
I asked her if she was absolutely sure.
Janie said that she was absolutely sure and drove off.
So that was that – although on this occasion I sensed that “no” meant “not this time” and that there would be plenty of other times.
Life Spencer Telegraph 11 Dec 2000 The Daily Telegraph (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Life Bassett Indy 10 Dec 2000 The Independent (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Life Billington Guardian 8 Dec 2000 The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
Life de Jongh Standard 8 Dec 2000 Evening Standard (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
