London Theatre

The first week in London we saw two plays: Crooked, a decidely odd play about a teenage girl with kyphosis newly relocated to rural Mississippi who befriends a Holiness Christian with "invisible stigmata" and becomes a "Holiness Lesbian." (Performed in a black box theatre over a pub, the Bush Theatre at Shepherd’s Bush.) Then, just for contrast, we saw Dame Judy Dench in "Hayfever," a delightful Noel Coward piece of fluff at the Haymarket, a big posh theatre with proscenium arch and gilded cupids.

Later we would see a lot of theatre, too damn much theatre it sometimes seemed, and some of it pretty tepid stuff. (I know, I  know, everyone's a crtitic....) Hamlet (staged as Hamlet, The Outsider  in black box can’t be acted as large as it is in a traditional theatre, or it just comes off as way over the top. The Crucible is a beautifully written play, but the the male lead here who is getting all kinds of attention just didn’t do anything for me at all. Perhpas it was an off-day. The real stars of the show were the lighting and sound. At the Almeida Theatre, we saw Enemies, a Gorky play with dozens of actors you would recognize from popular British films and episodes of Foyles War and the Forsythe Saga. The writing was good, but the acting was wonderful. And the Almeida Theatre was just the perfect place to see a performance—not too big, not too small, just right.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s easy to forget just how many elements go in to making a play work. You can have a great piece of writing with mediocre actors; the tech stuff can be brilliant, but if there’s no writing there, it’s a shrug. It made me appreciate how well our local Theatre Ensemble productions work, all things considered. I promised to be more supportive and less critical in the future.

We saw Titus Andronicus at the Globe as groundlings. This was not physically easy (Standing the whole time is difficult enough, and with all that blood and gore…!) but it was quite an interactive experience. Groundlings stand amidst the smoke, incense and fog and must dodge platforms that roll forward and back for stage extensions. In Titus, centurions and crowds of Romans march through the audience. And once an entire hunting party with blaring horns serpentined raucously though, accompanied by musicians blowing dog-shaped trumpets that emitted flat barking blasts. I will remember the spectacle always.

At The Taming of the Shrew outdoors at Regents Park, the huffing of the lions from the zoo nearby added something to the staging. Unfortunately the fireworks at the end of the play dwarfed the fireworks between the characters during the performance.

The Overwhelming, a contemporary play about genocide in Rwanda was well plotted, well staged.. The African players were particularly good. Several of the students in our group hated it, but it was late in the trip, and they dislike anything that assumes a background of knowledge they don’t yet have

I had been looking forward to the new Tom Stoppard play, Rock and Roll, but was rather disappointed in it. The writing was brilliant, but as often the case with a Stoppard play, I felt I’d have been better off reading it. And the acting was uneven: one of the leads even had trouble with the lines (they are Stoppard lines, not easy lines, to be fair) and bumping into the furniture. And though it’s a central unifying device, I’m not sure the Rock music and graphics preceding the scenes really work in the context of the play. We saw this play in previews, so perhaps some of these things will be ironed out by the time it opens. It is an intelligent play, which made up for a lot. You can talk about a Stoppard play for a long time. Again that was not an advantage as far as the some of the students were concerned. (Most of them had no idea what had happened in Prague in the 60s, had never heard of the Velvet Revolution, let alone ancient Greek poetry. Most of them knew the rock groups, though I’m sure they were all "fossil rock" to them.)

Stratford: Julius Caesar and Midsummer Night's Dream

By far the best productions we saw were in Stratford: Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. JC was just a solidly good play, well written, well staged, but unfortunately not consistently well acted. It was a huge stage, appropriate for the subject matter, I’m sure, but the staging was bare bones, an unusual choice. It did rain on stage once, which was rather nice. Ariyon Bakare as Mark Antony was excellent. Apparently there was a lot of debate about placing a 20 minute interval just before the eulogies, but the suits decided that selling more ice cream cups and drinks was imperative to the integrity of the script. Nevertheless, a good production over all. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the most daring play we saw by far. First imagine a multilingual version in six, (count’m six) East Indian languages, plus plenty of English to allow you to follow the plot, staged by an Indian company. Now add… acrobats! I haven’t seen such physical theatre since the 1960s! The company had a climbing instructor integrated into the cast, and there was much whirling about on ropes, dangling from silk swashes and bursting forth from paper covered scaffolding. It was showy, and it’s easy to get caught up in spectacle, but the acting was wonderful too.

The play was performed in the Swan, a small theatre with uncomfortable seating in the balcony that forces you to lean over to see around the safety rails. Despite this I forgot my discomfort almost immediately because the company was just so damned good.

In most productions of the play I’ve found myself just waiting for the romance to end to get back to the fairies or the mechanicals, but that was not the case here. The bewitched and confused couples were passionate, sexy, energetic and every bit as real as the imaginary characters. And Archana Ramaswamy and P. R. Jijoy as Titania and Oberon really heated up the stage. The lower orders, too, were brilliant. Joy Fernandes as Bottom was every bit the equal of a Zero Mostel, who he resembles in a South-Asian sort of way. His comic timing is impeccable, and his performance wasn’t distracted by his props: floppy ass’s ears and a colossal eggplant dangling from the front of his belt. Toward the end, when Joyraj Bhattacharya as Flute/Thisbe performs for the court, he actually gives a performance. One is pulled in and feels "her" anguish and despair at Pyramus’s death—only it have it undercut with comedy, of course. But I actually believed the performance within a performance, if only for a second.

At the end of the play when Puck gives his speech, I knew what was coming, I expected it, I almost knew it by heart already I’ve heard it so many times, yet it did not fail to move me. It’s a comedy, right? So why was I crying? Because I cry at weddings? Because I believed it. Because theatre is still alive. Because Shakespeare is still alive. Because it made me remember that I am still alive. That’s an experience well worth the trip and the prices and the uncomfortable seats.

Until I get permission to post pictures from this wonderful show, please use the two links below to go to The British Council webpages to see pictures, reviews and video clips from the Indian Production: