It was about astronauts, their lives, moon shots & stuff. I found it interesting but it didn’t work as drama for me. Janie was less interested in the subject matter but quite enjoyed the play in the round. (Did you see what I did there?).
Paul Godfrey wrote and directed it. It might have been tighter if he had let another director tweak and interpret a bit.
A strange play, this. Here is a link to its Wikipedia entry. Writing about it 25 yrars later, it seems in some ways more relevant now than it did then, as evidenced by the several revivals of it in recent years.
And there was Janie and I thinking that we’d spent an evening seeing an interesting play by Caryl Churchill performed exceptionally well. What simple souls we were/are.
I don’t really remember much about this one, which suggests it was not so memorable an evening at the theatre.
Bobbie might remember it better, but I doubt it.
Excellent cast of National Theatre usual suspects. Ron Cook, Marion Bailey, Sally Rogers, Paul Moriarty, Peter Wight, Gillian Barge, Karl Johnson and many others. William Gaskill directed. The Theatricalia entry for this one can be found here.
Michael Coveney absolutely loved it in The Observer:
I said in the log, which is almost to be expected with a cast as fine as this under Deborah Warner.
This was an evening at The National with Bobbie. I have subsequently seen a good “Good Person” at The Orange Tree with Janie too, but this Olivier production was especially fine in my view.
…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:
Billington on Ball Sat, Apr 1, 1995 – 30 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
Coveney on Ball 1 of 2 Sun, Apr 2, 1995 – 77 · The Observer (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com
