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.
Wall only ran for a few nights, so we did well to catch it. I thought Via Dolorosa was a fine piece, laced with great drama as well as interesting things to say. This felt comparatively preachy, about the ghastly Israel-Palestine separation barrier.
Perhaps it is so clear to me that the barrier is a bad idea, that being lectured about it by David Hare seemed surplus to requirements.
I saw the links with Berlin of course, but enjoyed the Wall part less and certainly learnt less.
I’m glad to have the text of both and I’m sure a re-read would be interesting, especially now (as I wrote in May 2017) that walls and barriers are back in fashion.
It is a companion piece for the Wall, which we went to see a few days later at the Royal Court. I think I preferred Berlin, finding it more interesting and less preachy.
Writing this up in May 2017, I realise that Trump should be made to sit through both pieces.
I recall being most impressed by the performances and the production. Also, the play did its job of getting me and Janie talking about its big issues for the rest of the weekend. Yet this didn’t feel like premier league David Hare to me; I felt there was something lacking in the play.
Sarah Hemming in the FT clearly liked it a lot, comparing it favourably with The Vertical Hour as drama (whereas I would say that The Vertical Hour worked better for me as drama) – click here to read what she wrote;
It was that sort of play/production – influential people were supposed to talk about it but not all that many people got to see it. Janie and I saw a preview, so had every right to wax lyrical from an informed perspective and from the outset.
What good news for everyone that Janie and I tend to keep our counsel to ourselves on such matters.
Joan Didion wrote a memoir about her double-loss – first her husband and then her daughter. This is her one woman play based on that memoir. Vanessa Redgrave plays Joan.
We found it moving, although the critics tended to be equivocal in their praise and in their sense that the production moves as much as it should:
This was a really good play/production. It was only on at the Royal Court for a short while – so we felt we’d got ourselves hot tickets for this one. Unusually for a David Hare, this one had started in New York 15 months before.
The highlight of this weekend – or at least the most memorable event – was me being recognised by Elvis Costello when he and his misses were heading for their seats just behind us at the Albery.
I have written that up in my piece about the play/production:
Prior To the West End, A Jaunt To Lincolnshire & Nottingham
Our diaries indicate a flurry of activity on the Friday and the Saturday, which I only vaguely remember. Janie had a podiatry course at Nottingham University on the Saturday morning and we had chosen to take the Friday off to make that a more palatable affair, not least because Janie didn’t fancy the crack of dawn start to go to Nottingham and back in a day.
We lunched at The George At Stamford, in Lincolnshire, a place I knew and linked from “back in the day” when business took me up that way. Janie checked us in to The Village Hotel and Leisure Club in Nottingham, which enabled me to enjoy facilities while she was on her training course. Janie’s diary reminds me that she arranged for both of us to have massages there on the Friday evening when we arrived, which we both deemed to be a very ordinary “pitty-pat” experience, unlike our regular arrangements in London.
After Janie’s course we legged it back down to London and then on to The Albery. It all reads very hectic in the diaries – we’d for sure avoid such a crush 25 years later, as I write.
And The Next Day…
We went to the Barbican Hall for a concert, which I have written up here, with yet more celebrity name-dropping potential for me and Janie:
A star-studded audience our night: me, Janie, Elvis Costello…
…we didn’t/don’t normally go to celebrity gala preview evenings for productions. Indeed, I think we ended up at this one by accident.
If I remember correctly, Janie booked this one on an early priority booking as she was a member of the Almeida Theatre, which was responsible for (or at least heavily involved with) this production. We tend to like and book previews, because they are usually low key and precede the hullabaloo of press nights and the like. For some reason this one seemed to be different.
We got to the Albery and our seats in good time. Then someone in the row behind me taped my shoulder and said “hello” as he was going past towards his seat. It was Elvis Costello, whom I had got to know reasonably well in the 1990s at Lambton Place Health Club (now BodyWorksWest).
In fact, for several years at Lambton Place, I was aware of this friendly fellow who was obviously in the music business, as indeed were many members at Lambton’s. I had not recognised him as Elvis Costello, despite my having several of his albums and having seen him live several times in the 1980s. On one occasion, a few years before The Albery, he and I were chatting in the steam room and I asked him what he did. He said that he used to be in a band called Elvis Costello and the Attractions. “Oh yes”, I said “I have several of your albums and saw the band live more than once. Do you mind telling me your name?” He told me, and clearly found my embarrassment at my gaff funny.
I even reviewed one of Elvis Costello’s gigs for Concourse, our student newspaper, in 1983. That was only seven or eight years before I first met him.
Anyway, roll the clock to April 1999 again. We were still on “chat quite regularly at the health club” terms, hence Elvis Costello tapping me on the shoulder, saying hello and stopping for a brief chat as he was going through to his seat.
“Who was that?” asked Janie after he and his Mrs had moved on. “Elvis Costello”, I said, quietly and matter-of-factly I thought, but my words caused a flurry among a group of celebrity-spotters in the row in front of us, who proceeded to keep turning around at regular intervals, looking at Elvis Costello and quizzically looking at me and Janie whom, I suppose, they now suspected of being celebrities worth spotting in our own right. I found this more amusing than Janie did.
Unfortunately, the pre-show hullabaloo was probably the most entertaining aspect of the evening from my point of view. I didn’t much like the play and found Cate Blanchett’s character Susan incredibly irritating.
Not as good as we had hoped it would be
…was my log comment, so I am pretty sure Janie felt the same way.
It was all very well produced and had a tip-top cast under Jonathan Kent, but that couldn’t rescue the evening for us. Here’s a link to the Theatricalia entry.
Paul Taylor in The Independent shared our doubts about this play/production, although saying that he would sooner spend three weeks stuck in a lift with Hedda Gabler than have a drink with Blanchett’s character Susan is harsher than I could have been:
We had posh nosh at The Beaumont afterwards. I think it had recently had a makeover at that time – it will have had a makeover or two since (he says, writing 25 years after the event).
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.
