Tag: Edyta Budnik

The New Real by David Edgar, The Other Place, 14 October 2024

Not to be confused with The Other Palace, in Westminster, which I visited with my old school pals a few days earlier…

“You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Immature Forever”, Dinner With Fellow Alleyn’s Alums, Then Tink by Lizzy Connolly & Kat Kleve, The Other Palace, 8 October 2024

…this visit to The Other Place, in Stratford-Upon-Avon, was the excuse for me and Janie to take a short break in that wonderful town this autumn.

A Short Autumn Break In A 15th Century Cottage In An Old Market Town Part One: Stratford-Upon-Avon, 13 to 16 October 2024

We’re big fans of David Edgar’s plays. Indeed, this was our second David Edgar premier in the past few weeks – his plays seem to come along with the regularity of London buses these days (nothing for ages, then two together):

Here In America by David Edgar, Orange Tree Theatre, 14 September 2024

But in truth I cannot rave about The New Real the way I raved about Here In America.

There was a lot to like about The New Real. Terrific cast who all acted superbly well. Excellent production using the traverse stage and screen effects well. But the overall effect of this rather long play was a sense of over-stimulation by the end of it. So many ideas about politics. So many screen and stage effects. And relatively little human drama to illustrate rather than declaim the points David Edgar wanted to make.

Anyway, despite both coming out of the experience with headaches of over-stimulation, we’re both glad that we have seen this play.

Here is a link to the RSC resources on this one, which will tell you all about the cast and creatives and that sort of thing.

Here is a Google search which should find reviews for this play/production. I believe many/most reviews express a similar view on this play/production to ours…but perhaps with a bit more critical heft than I choose to muster.

Albion by Mike Bartlett, Almeida Theatre, 27 October 2017

As  usual for the Almeida, we booked this as soon as it was announced because it sounded very interesting and we normally enjoy the Almeida stuff.

We normally go to a Saturday preview or an early Saturday in the run; this time we couldn’t do those dates, so chose a Friday two or three weeks into the run.

The play/production has had universally good reviews, which sounded like good news, but in truth this play did not really do the business for us. A shame, because the cast were superb, seemed very much a team, the design was stunning and there were some excellent coups de theatre and some very good lines. But the play just didn’t work for us.

To us, the garden was a rather clunky metaphor for that section of the English elite that hankers back to bygone glorious times.  A dramatist’s reaction to David Goodhart’s The Road To Somewhere.  The plot, limited though it was, contained one or two rather predictable twists that were well-signalled in advance and very clumsily explained in arrears.

As King Charles III is Mike Bartlett’s Shakespeare pastiche play, Albion is his Chekhov pastiche. Janie liked neither; I had more time for the Shakespearean style of the King Charles III one (to be Ogblogged in the fullness of time).

We’re not averse to Mike Bartlett – we loved Game and we loved Wild. Bartlett can have such an original voice, I’m not sure why he falls back on pastiche. Janie points out that his pastiche ones seem to be way more successful with critics and the transfer market than the more original ones.

“Most of the theatre audience is naff,” says Janie, with her trademark subtlety and tact.

In truth, the Almeida audience the night we saw Albion was dreadful and irritated us. Older on average than the Saturday night crowd, they seemed especially and unnecessarily elbows-out pushy at the bar and in the queues for tickets/entry. Janie was especially irritated by the woman sitting next to her who took off her shoes and then held us up for five minutes at the start of the interval trying to put her shoes back on her ever so smelly feet.

I had spent an hour before the show saying goodbye (workwise) to Ian Theodoreson at his leaving drinks in The Barley Mow. A shorter play would have probably suited me better on the night. But we have both turned up to theatre after longer, harder days than this; in truth this play/production just wasn’t to my/our taste.

Here is a link to the Almeida information hub on Albion – including links to those rave reviews.