I have seen The Dance of Death before – indeed both parts – but this tight version by Howard Brenton, enabling both parts to pan out in one play, worked really well for me and for Janie too.
Superbly well acted – Michael Pennington and Linda Marlowe were sensational in the leading roles (my previous experience of Edgar and Alice was Alan Bates and Franbcis de la Tour, so I know my top notch Edgar and Alices). The youngsters in the tightened up Part Two were also excellent.
An extraordinary production too, in that tiny theatre, managing to get so much out of that small space.
A short two-handed piece set in a cafe, pairs of people go to a cafe to perform the piece themselves, through the use of headphones and props provided.
This was a really powerful production of a fascinating but shocking play about a femme-fatale; but is she the abuser or the abused party? Janie and I were both affected by this piece and spent ages debating the play’s points afterwards.
Superb production in our little local gem The Gate. What luxury it is to be able to pop round the corner and see a cast and production of this quality.
A rare visit to the theatre on my own. I was keen to see this thing and Janie was struggling to find the time for it, so I just went midweek – on the opening night. Hardly a shlep, is it, from the flat to The Gate?
It was very good indeed. More or less a one man show for the excellent Hilton McRae.
…as was I. A rare miss for Daisy and I could have made her suffer for it but I didn’t. I told her that she probably wouldn’t have liked it as much as I did.
To get an idea of this productions unusual style, here is a rather tasty little promo vid that the Gate put together for this production:
I only vaguely remember this creepy play/production. It had a fine cast and I think we felt that it was all very well done but we found the play a bit impenetrable.
We have done this sort of play on a Friday evening at The Gate before (and since), because it is sometimes so convenient to see them and stay at the flat on a Friday, but heavy/dystopian drama is not my first choice of activity for a Friday night.
Anyway, beyond our temporal reasons for being unsure about it, the critics also seemed unsure:
The acting was top notch and as always we marvel at the way they manage to turn that small space above a pub into a proper space for drama. But Janie and I concurred with the reviewers about the play.
Not sure whether I cooked or whether we grabbed some Turkish food from the (now late, lamented) Manzara. As I’d delivered my Gresham lecture the night before and (it seems) gone off early on the Friday morning to see clients, I’ll guess the latter and jolly tasty it will have been too.
I wrote surprisingly vaguely about this in my log, as I am sure I wrote it up fairly soon after seeing the play:
unsure of length – recall shortish no interval
Impressionistically, I remember the evening fondly. Paula Wilcox was an actress I had only previously seen doing sitcom, but I remember realising that she really could act…and needed to for this piece.
Fortunately for posterity, despite its small scale, it was written up by proper journalists at the time. So I didn’t need to.
Robin Stringer previewed the piece in the Standard:
By gosh was I pleased when I learnt that my local, The Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, was to put on this play. Some years earlier, I had bought a book of European plays in translation and had read this play, along with some narrative about it, with a mixture of fascination and wonderment. Part of my wonderment was thinking about how on earth the play might be performed, but I suspected at the time that I would never see the piece in production.
Unlike my “how on earth might this play be performed?” musings, it worked remarkably well in this imaginative production in the Gate’s small-scale, theatre-above-a-pub environment. The Gate has reliably been extremely good at doing this sort of thing over the years.
Superb…
…was my single word verdict, which summed it up for both me and Janie.
Our friend, Michael Billington, gave a similar verdict in The Guardian, lauding performers Sean Gallagher and Jenny Quayle, plus translator Thomas Fisher in particular:
Susannah Clapp gave it a glowing and quite lengthy review in the Observer, especially praising the director, Gordon Anderson and the designer, Jane Singleton:
I don’t recall much about this one and the diary is a mess for it. I suspect that the mention of Bobbie on the Friday and The Wonder on the Saturday ended up being one and the same evening. So I’m guessing that I saw this production with Bobbie on one of those evenings.
There’s the diary page for that week. If any of my friends can help me to unpick all of that, may I just thank you profoundly in advance.
The Wonder. To the extent that I remember it, I think the production and acting was very good but that we didn’t much like the play.
An interesting but now rarely performed playwright from the late Restoration/early Hanoverian period, I’m not sure that Susanna Centilivre‘s plays have dated well. But that’s not her fault. I don’t suppose she even faintly imagined The Wonder being revived in 1989 when she dedicated it to the new king, George I, in 1714.
The Escapade Theatre Company (confusingly not the company that now bears that name) was a group dedicated to reviving plays written by or mostly about women.
Anna Mazzotti played the female lead role Isabella, with great poise and confidence I recall. I managed to track her down in 2019 as someone who did/does many Italian language programmes for the BBC and theatre in Rome -still listing The Wonder on her theatrical cv. Strangely (as she only lists two), she also lists Dealing With Clair at the Orange Tree, which Janie and I saw when the Orange Tree revived it (recently at the time of writing):
The male lead, Don Felix, was played by a young Christopher Eccleston – possibly only his second professional gig. His cv is no longer talking about this one, but it does still mention, amongst many other things, Dr Who.
Any further intelligence on this one will need to come from others, e.g. Bobbie!…
…or Michael Billington! Good old Billy – he reviewed the production in The Guardian:
