(no subject)
I had to cover our family activities over lunchtime today but they've got a 1970s theme which means that what ACTUALLY happened was I sat and played with our Spirograph for an hour *coughs* I totally helped some children learn how to use it too but it's stupidly fun (if frustrating when you slip halfway through a complicated pattern).
This review is going to be long and rambling because it's a complicated play about a complicated subject but I'm going to try and make sense!
Holy Warriors (+Meet the Cast) @ Shakespeare's Globe
Holy Warriors is one of the Globe's new plays, it's written by David Eldridge and is about the Crusades, or rather more specifically Richard the Lionheart & Saladin. Only... well that's not exactly what it's about because apparently David got bored writing a straight history play so we start with the run up to the Third Crusade, skip over any fighting and land on Richard's death in the first half and then the second half is a strange skip through the history of Israel/Palestine/Jerusalem from the Crusades right up to Bush & Blair which is full of music as the framing device is two troubadours singing for Richard in Purgatory and THEN Richard gets a chance to have his time over again and we see the actual fighting & negotiating parts of the Crusade but in modern dress & modern language.
So a little strange and VERY ambitious. I think it may have been a little too ambitious in that I think I have a broad but not bad understanding of the history the play was covering but I spent quite a lot of time not really at all sure who various characters were. In the Meet the Cast afterwards one of them said David wouldn't be more specific & helpful in his script and said the audience would get the wider picture which we did but... well I like to know who the people on stage are meant to be :-P
That said I did really enjoy it and it absolutely started a lot of conversations for me- in the Meet the Cast, having dinner with seiyaharris afterwards and then actually it's set a lot of thoughts going combined with all the World War One commemoration things happening at the moment.
The play doesn't have any answers, how could it, but I think there probably is value in displaying the history of Israel & Palestine and that whole area on the stage in a way that doesn't really judge right from wrong (other than a general feeling of should the West really be meddling) and in which Jewish, Christian & Muslim characters are treated with respect. (Although apparently they were heckled at one performance because really the Jewish side of things gts a lot less time because of the starting point they've chosen).
Leaving the play aside for a moment all the performances are as solid as you'd expect from a Globe show. Alexander Siddig is a very charismatic Saladin and the opening with wave after wave of barefoot penitents and then Saldin appearing in cool white robes & brandishing his sword was very effective. He was especially good at seeming relaxed but then cutting off any rebellion or questioning.
And opposite him was John Hopkins as Richard and he very much went with the hyper masculine, very abrupt kind of kingship where you could SEE how it was all going to go wrong because he was never going to back down.
The rest of the cast are SPECTACULARLY hardworking. They all play a minimum of about 5 characters Satya Bhabha & Jonathan Bonnici were particularly good as Saladin's sons. Sirine Saba who I loved in Anthony & Cleopatra was Queen Sibylla & then Richard's wife Berengaria of Navarre and she was regal and stubborn and very sensual as Berengaria and hilarious all round. Oh and Jolyon Coy was having FAR too much fun as a slightly sulky Philip of France followed later by Lawrence of Arabia (looking like he came straight off the film set).
Oh! Actually there was one other actor who avoided playing ALL the characters and that was Geraldine Alexander as Eleanor of Aquitaine because once we'd got into the second half she was Richard's guide through Purgatory (well after she'd died as well). She, interestingly, wasn't cast till a week before rehersals started because David Eldridge basically rewrote the whole play just before they started rehearsing!
It was really interesting listening to the cast talking about this play, they were all passionate about it and the topics it covered but it sounds like it was quite stressful as there was a LOT to learn and it changed quite late on. One of Eleanor's speeches actually mentions the three Israeli students who were killed and the Palestinian boy killed in retribution so it really is THAT immediate.
It's also a technically quite difficult play because there's a lot of music so the cast must have learned bits of a LOT of songs and then there are endless costume changes too. One girl in the audience asked about getting into character and the answer was basically "if I get changed quickly enough I have 30 seconds to think about it" and then Geraldine said putting on her wig helped *g*
It's the sort of play I'm glad the Globe took a risk on and I think it works more than it doesn't but I imagine a second or third production might knock a few more of the edges off which would help.
A VERY long review *coughs* let me try to tack a shorter review on the end of this post and then at least I'll have written all my Globe reviews.
Midsummer Nights Dream (BSL) @ Shakespeare's Globe
I absolutely adored Deafinitely Theatre's Love's Labour's Lost as part of the original Globe to Globe season so when I saw they were coming back with Midsummer Nights Dream, and on my birthday too, I had to go!
I love the way they use BSL and movement and dance and spoken English and mix it all together to create the story in a way that everyone can follow. And although I know it's not as if Midsummers is a difficult play to follow I was certainly never lost.
It also allows them to get in some brilliant jokes at the expense of well (and ill) meaning non-signers so Peter Quince consistently attempted to sign things for the Mechanicals which Bottom would then have to re-sign leading to Peter Quince getting more and more irritated. Oh and also the lion roaring with all its might behind Thisbe who doesn't react at all until the lion suddenly realises s/he's deaf and taps him on the shoulder (honestly written out that sounds obvious but it was such a beautiful piece of business and the whole audience collapsed into giggles when they realised what was happening).
The whole thing was given a big business setting so Nadia Nadarajah and Ace Mahbaz as Theseus & Hippolyta were marrying to merge businesses and this made the Mechanicals all employees so we had lanyards with names on (brilliant for proving you're not REALLY a frightening lion) and a gorgeously fussy middle management Francis Flute.
When we got into the fairy realm Oberon & Titania were passionate and childish and had really quite a lot of chemistry *g* and I absolutely adored the way Titania told the story of her voteress and the Indian boy, it was so beautiful.
There were two Pucks, or rather there was Alim Jayda as Puck & Anna-Maria Nabirye as a fairy but they acted together all the time and Alim was very cleverly used to translate sections of really important speeches for those of us who don't sign. I actually think he was one of my all time favourite Puck's too, he just seemed to be having such a brilliant time ALL the time.
The lovers were absolutely as good too- Fifi Garfield's Hermia wore beautiful but utterly impractical heels & came with a LOT of luggage all carried into the forest by poor Adam Bassett's Lysander and then when you added the smarminess of Lee Robertson's Demetrius (apparently he's a comedian?) and Charlotte Arrowsmith as Helena who is a brilliant physical comedian as all Helena's should be <3 the four of them were actually the highlight of the forest scenes rather than Bottom and that's not at ALL to denigrate him.
I just loved it, it was the perfect play to see as a birthday treat- funny & beautiful & interesting and I will definitely be looking out for Deafinitely Theatre again!
This review is going to be long and rambling because it's a complicated play about a complicated subject but I'm going to try and make sense!
Holy Warriors (+Meet the Cast) @ Shakespeare's Globe
Holy Warriors is one of the Globe's new plays, it's written by David Eldridge and is about the Crusades, or rather more specifically Richard the Lionheart & Saladin. Only... well that's not exactly what it's about because apparently David got bored writing a straight history play so we start with the run up to the Third Crusade, skip over any fighting and land on Richard's death in the first half and then the second half is a strange skip through the history of Israel/Palestine/Jerusalem from the Crusades right up to Bush & Blair which is full of music as the framing device is two troubadours singing for Richard in Purgatory and THEN Richard gets a chance to have his time over again and we see the actual fighting & negotiating parts of the Crusade but in modern dress & modern language.
So a little strange and VERY ambitious. I think it may have been a little too ambitious in that I think I have a broad but not bad understanding of the history the play was covering but I spent quite a lot of time not really at all sure who various characters were. In the Meet the Cast afterwards one of them said David wouldn't be more specific & helpful in his script and said the audience would get the wider picture which we did but... well I like to know who the people on stage are meant to be :-P
That said I did really enjoy it and it absolutely started a lot of conversations for me- in the Meet the Cast, having dinner with seiyaharris afterwards and then actually it's set a lot of thoughts going combined with all the World War One commemoration things happening at the moment.
The play doesn't have any answers, how could it, but I think there probably is value in displaying the history of Israel & Palestine and that whole area on the stage in a way that doesn't really judge right from wrong (other than a general feeling of should the West really be meddling) and in which Jewish, Christian & Muslim characters are treated with respect. (Although apparently they were heckled at one performance because really the Jewish side of things gts a lot less time because of the starting point they've chosen).
Leaving the play aside for a moment all the performances are as solid as you'd expect from a Globe show. Alexander Siddig is a very charismatic Saladin and the opening with wave after wave of barefoot penitents and then Saldin appearing in cool white robes & brandishing his sword was very effective. He was especially good at seeming relaxed but then cutting off any rebellion or questioning.
And opposite him was John Hopkins as Richard and he very much went with the hyper masculine, very abrupt kind of kingship where you could SEE how it was all going to go wrong because he was never going to back down.
The rest of the cast are SPECTACULARLY hardworking. They all play a minimum of about 5 characters Satya Bhabha & Jonathan Bonnici were particularly good as Saladin's sons. Sirine Saba who I loved in Anthony & Cleopatra was Queen Sibylla & then Richard's wife Berengaria of Navarre and she was regal and stubborn and very sensual as Berengaria and hilarious all round. Oh and Jolyon Coy was having FAR too much fun as a slightly sulky Philip of France followed later by Lawrence of Arabia (looking like he came straight off the film set).
Oh! Actually there was one other actor who avoided playing ALL the characters and that was Geraldine Alexander as Eleanor of Aquitaine because once we'd got into the second half she was Richard's guide through Purgatory (well after she'd died as well). She, interestingly, wasn't cast till a week before rehersals started because David Eldridge basically rewrote the whole play just before they started rehearsing!
It was really interesting listening to the cast talking about this play, they were all passionate about it and the topics it covered but it sounds like it was quite stressful as there was a LOT to learn and it changed quite late on. One of Eleanor's speeches actually mentions the three Israeli students who were killed and the Palestinian boy killed in retribution so it really is THAT immediate.
It's also a technically quite difficult play because there's a lot of music so the cast must have learned bits of a LOT of songs and then there are endless costume changes too. One girl in the audience asked about getting into character and the answer was basically "if I get changed quickly enough I have 30 seconds to think about it" and then Geraldine said putting on her wig helped *g*
It's the sort of play I'm glad the Globe took a risk on and I think it works more than it doesn't but I imagine a second or third production might knock a few more of the edges off which would help.
A VERY long review *coughs* let me try to tack a shorter review on the end of this post and then at least I'll have written all my Globe reviews.
Midsummer Nights Dream (BSL) @ Shakespeare's Globe
I absolutely adored Deafinitely Theatre's Love's Labour's Lost as part of the original Globe to Globe season so when I saw they were coming back with Midsummer Nights Dream, and on my birthday too, I had to go!
I love the way they use BSL and movement and dance and spoken English and mix it all together to create the story in a way that everyone can follow. And although I know it's not as if Midsummers is a difficult play to follow I was certainly never lost.
It also allows them to get in some brilliant jokes at the expense of well (and ill) meaning non-signers so Peter Quince consistently attempted to sign things for the Mechanicals which Bottom would then have to re-sign leading to Peter Quince getting more and more irritated. Oh and also the lion roaring with all its might behind Thisbe who doesn't react at all until the lion suddenly realises s/he's deaf and taps him on the shoulder (honestly written out that sounds obvious but it was such a beautiful piece of business and the whole audience collapsed into giggles when they realised what was happening).
The whole thing was given a big business setting so Nadia Nadarajah and Ace Mahbaz as Theseus & Hippolyta were marrying to merge businesses and this made the Mechanicals all employees so we had lanyards with names on (brilliant for proving you're not REALLY a frightening lion) and a gorgeously fussy middle management Francis Flute.
When we got into the fairy realm Oberon & Titania were passionate and childish and had really quite a lot of chemistry *g* and I absolutely adored the way Titania told the story of her voteress and the Indian boy, it was so beautiful.
There were two Pucks, or rather there was Alim Jayda as Puck & Anna-Maria Nabirye as a fairy but they acted together all the time and Alim was very cleverly used to translate sections of really important speeches for those of us who don't sign. I actually think he was one of my all time favourite Puck's too, he just seemed to be having such a brilliant time ALL the time.
The lovers were absolutely as good too- Fifi Garfield's Hermia wore beautiful but utterly impractical heels & came with a LOT of luggage all carried into the forest by poor Adam Bassett's Lysander and then when you added the smarminess of Lee Robertson's Demetrius (apparently he's a comedian?) and Charlotte Arrowsmith as Helena who is a brilliant physical comedian as all Helena's should be <3 the four of them were actually the highlight of the forest scenes rather than Bottom and that's not at ALL to denigrate him.
I just loved it, it was the perfect play to see as a birthday treat- funny & beautiful & interesting and I will definitely be looking out for Deafinitely Theatre again!