…but for sure I got back to London in time to see this preview at the Cottesloe.
Bobbie might say, “more’s the pity”, as my log notes that Bobbie absolutely hated it. I merely found it long and hard to follow. That’s how I remember it and that is exactly what I wrote in my log.
Super cast – Tilda Swinton is always very watchable but does often do weird stuff. Also Aidan Gillen, latterly very well known indeed. David Bamber was in it too – thirty years on I tend to watch his son, Ethan, bowling for Middlesex instead.
The play is described as a dramatic poem in the English language text and/but it was basically a family drama.
I wrote the above piece on 14 February 2019, basically because it had been on my mind after writing up Music At Oxford a few days earlier. By strange coincidence, Bobbie Scully turned up at the Gresham Society Dinner that evening, as Iain Sutherland’s guest.
I mentioned the coincidence. Bobbie started to quiver with indignation:
I’d forgotten the name of that darned thing, but it was surely the very worst thing I have ever seen at the theatre…I think we walked out at half time…
…she said. Actually I don’t think we did walk out at half time. I’m sure I would have recorded that fact in my log whereas instead I recorded that the play was long and impenetrable.
I think we stuck it out tho the bitter end…
…I said. I also volunteered to dig deeper into the programme to see if there were in fact two halves.
Yes, there were two halves and they added up to a whopping three hours of hurt for Bobbie.
I’m not sure why we did stick it out. Perhaps I was still wet enough behind the ears to imagine t hat such a piece might yield in the second half all the answers it withheld in the first. I know not to do that now. Perhaps I was so tired and hungover from the joys of Oxford the night before I was reluctant to move on yet.
More likely, we had booked a late night eatery and jointly thought we might as well see the thing through rather than kick our heels somewhere.
Anyway, the whole experience clearly had a profound effect on Bobbie who was shaking with the trauma of recalling that evening and remembered it so well she even said…
…I seem to recall it was only on for a short run…
…which indeed it was.
Nearly 30 years on, Bobbie might wish to read the short essay from the programme too. The least I can do, upload the material, after all I put poor Bobbie through with regard to this play/production.
Postscript Two: Bobbie Chimes In With A Recovered Memory
An e-mail from Bobbie 24 hours after our encounter at the Gresham Society:
I was casting my mind back to that dreadful so-called play (it wasn’t, it was a string of tedious monologues) and had a recollection of being there after the interval in a (suddenly) half empty theatre. So I reckon that, although we did not leave at half time, about half the audience did.
And, indeed, I think that is why we stayed. We came out at the interval, intending to leave, but had pre-booked interval drinks to consume. As we did so, we watched more than half the audience exit the building. I think we went back out of sympathy/solidarity/courtesy towards the cast.
Does this ring any bells with you? Did we really watch the second half because we felt sorry for the actors? Personally, I can think of no other reason …
My response to Bobbie’s considered recollection was as follows:
Yes, we were young and foolish back then. We might well have stayed on for compassionate reasons. There’d be no such snowflake nonsense from this quarter these days. I do recall the second half seeming to drag to an even greater extent than the first half. I also remember an incredible sense of relief when the ordeal ended.
Postscript Three: Here’s a professional view…I don’t think Nicholas de Jongh in the Guardian exactly liked it either:
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.
Wow – this was a real experience in the theatre. Only a short piece – not even half an hour long – Bobbie and I will have both traipsed to the National after work, spending far more time traipsing than watching. But the memory of this piece lingers long in the memory.
I subsequently saw the piece again, in a double bill with Ashes To Ashes at the Royal Court, with Janie second time around. It is a very strong piece and no doubt can still shock and make the audience realise how bad regimes exert their power in part through the suppression and abuse of language.
What an honour to have seen the first production of this important, though short, piece of drama.
The diary is silent on what we did afterwards. For some reason, is think that we ate at the National that evening. It is quite a long play and I think the restaurant there was doing arrangements to eat part of your meal during and part after show at that time. But I could be mistaken.
Coveney on Scandal Sun, Apr 29, 1990 – 54 · The Observer (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
de Jongh on Scandal Thu, Apr 26, 1990 – 24 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
