Tag: Margot Leicester

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.

King Charles III by Mike Bartlett, Almeida Theatre, 5 April 2014

Janie didn’t like this one at all.

I rather liked it in parts; far more so than Albion – Mike Bartlett’s most recent play at the time of writing (November 2017), also directed by Rupert Goold at the Almeida.

The conceit of the play is a Shakespeare pastiche, imagining a future King Charles III stumbling into a constitutional crisis with the government. (Three and a half years on, that scenario seems more likely than it did in April 2014, but I’ll leave that thought to one side).

That Shakespeare pastiche style worked in places but grated on me at times.

This was to be our last sighting of Tim Pigott-Smith, whose fine acting we enjoyed many times over the years. The whole cast was good and it was magnificently staged and produced.

Here is a link to the Almeida resource on King Charles III.

The play/production got mostly rave reviews – this search term will get you to the bulk of them.

Below is the trailer they used when it was up for a Tony:

 

The Knot Of The Heart by David Eldridge, Almeida Theatre, 16 April 2011

This was a challenging play about addiction and the impact of those with addictions/addictive personalities on their loved ones.

Lisa Dillon was superb in the lead; it seems the lead part was pretty-much written for her. As usual at the Almeida, it was a well-chosen play, extremely well acted, directed and produced.

Islington Almeida Theatre 2011
David Eldridge was very much on our watch list as a writer; we’d seen a few of his that we really liked, not least his adaptation of Festen at the Almeida.

I must admit though, we both found this a tough watch. Perhaps it was too soon after Phillie’s passing for us to be suitably sympathetic to a character whose misery and tragedy seemed largely self-inflicted. But it was undeniably an excellent evening’s theatre.

Here is the Almeida resource on this play/production.

Below is a good trailer with quotes David Eldridge and Michael Attenborough commenting:

The play and production were (deservedly) very well received by the critics – here is a search term that finds reviews and other relevant resources.

Extremely powerful stuff.

Broken Glass by Arthur Miller, Lyttelton Theatre, 13 August 1994

The play is well described on Wikipedia here. We saw the UK premier at the RNT.

What a cast; Henry Goodman, Margot Leicester, Ken Stott…David Thacker directed it. Theatricalia has this record for the play/production we saw – click here.

Janie and I rated it “very good indeed” at the time. I do recall it being a very interesting play and the RNT production was top notch, as RNT productions were wont to be at that time.

Here is a link to a review of the original New York production of this play, a few months before the RNT production.

Here’s Michael Billington’s review:

Billington On Broken GlassBillington On Broken Glass Sat, Aug 6, 1994 – 26 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com

Michael Coveney hated it:

Coveney On Broken GlassCoveney On Broken Glass Sun, Aug 7, 1994 – 68 · The Observer (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com

Lots of Olivier Awards for the RNT production, including BBC Best Play Award.

The Last Yankee by Arthur Miller, Duke Of York’s Theatre, 14 August 1993

We saw this production after it transferred from the Young Vic to the Duke of York’s.

We hated the discomfort of those West End theatres, but this was one we really wanted to see.

We didn’t see Peter Davison and Zoe Wannamaker at The Duke of Yorks, we saw Matthew Marsh and Margot Leicester instead. A fair swap, I’d say.

Below is Michael Billington’s review:

Billington Last YankeeBillington Last Yankee Thu, Jan 28, 1993 – 30 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com

Below is Michael Coveney’s review of same:

Coveney On The Last YankeeCoveney On The Last Yankee Sun, Jan 31, 1993 – 55 · The Observer (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com

I seem to recall we thought this play was a bit all over the place. It was very well received, but we thought it had glimpses of Miller’s greatness without being of Miller’s very best.

Still, well worth seeing, we felt. It wasn’t until Mr Peters’ Connections a few years later that we concluded that Miller’s light really had (excuse the pun) petered our.