comedy, tragedy: two reviews
London for a week always means theatre time for me. My main treat will happen on Friday, but in the meantime, here are two I already managed to see.
Hobson's Choice: one of those British comedy classics which for some reason I never managed to catch before, including the David Lean film version starring Charles Laughton. This one has Martin Shaw (of The Professionals fame in his younger days) as the title character, but turns out one of those plays where the title character isn't the main character - that would be, without a question, Maggie, ably played by Naomi Frederick. As a pay, it also strikes me as a bit of a late 19th century middle and working class Lear from the daughters' pov, and done as a comedy. Which is to say: at the start of the pla, shoe shop owner Hobson is a petty tyrant to his three daughters, getting drunk in the pub and indulging in grandiose speeches while they do all the (unpaid) work both in the household and in the shop, above all the oldest, Maggie. Through the play, Maggie not only plots her and her sisters' escape but the complete overthrow of her father, establishes a rival business that soon takes away the trade, and by the end takes over the orginal shop while her father (having nearly drunk himself to death without her) concedes utter defeat and has to give complete power to her. If you think about it, there are any number of points where this could have gone into very dark territory, but the production never does - there is never any sense that Hobson's early insults and ongoing humiliations of his daughters have impaired, let alone destroyed their sense of self worth, and Maggie's triumph at the end comes without cruelty, just very matter-of-factly, and the narrative makes it clear she's saving her father's life while she's at it. Plus Maggie is such a force of nature throughout that one in the play is a match for her; that she enlists shy underpaid bootmaker Will for marriage (you could also say: bullies - he really doesn't want to marry her at the start) is one of those things that would look terribly with reversed genders, but again, the play not only goes for the comedy of shy trembling man versus strong no nonsense woman, but also makes it clear Will benefits from Maggie taking over his life; instead of an underpaid exploited worker, he ends up boss of two shops and with a much stronger sense of self worth, standing up for himself.
Everyone involved had great comic timing, and it's easy to see why this play keeps getting revived. It's also something that, like G.B. Shaw's plays, was written as a contemporary story and is now a costume play because you can't update it when its plot and problems are very much that of a specific setting, so late Victorian/early Edwardian costumes (not too grand, we're in Manchester shops, not in Ascot) are used. All in all, I felt greatly entertained, but don't have the urge to watch it again.
1984: adaption of George Orwell's novel by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan. Adapting a novel (any novel) for the theatre always is tricky, let alone this one, but team Icke and Macmillan for my money did a superb job of it. One key angle for their angle is the appendix Orwell wrote about Newspeak, which implies that the Party fell after all - since it analyzes from a future perspective that's not totalitarian -, another the question of what makes reality and how to maintain a sense of past and present if you're completely taken over. And thus, you have structures within structures - Winston is remembering, or tries to, the events leading up to his arrest and torture even while he's being tortured and his past is being rewritten (O'Brien's "where do you think you are, Winston?" Question keeps returning through the play?), but at the same time, people from a post - Big Brother world are discussing his diary as a text (fictional? Historical?), and yet that reality, too, with the end of the play is called into question.
Orwell's depiction of a totalitarian state remains as disturbing as ever. (Being German, I didn't read it in school as part of the curriculum, I read it while still at school as part of my spare time reading, and was freaked out in a "wow" way.) And absolutely not dated, au contraire, sad to say. The "hate" rallies and the blaming of Goldstein as a traitor figure for all the misery could be Turkey (and Gülen as Goldstein) now, but you don't have to go East, going West will do, too (see "Lock her up!" Chants at the recent RNC or rallies last autumn in Germany where effigies of Angela Merkel were hanged). The constant recreation of reality to fit the Party's current position, the way blatant lies are accepted no matter or ridiculous they are, and then reversed into new lies again: yes, hello, Brexit campain and aftermath, we don't even have to go to Russia for this.
One element that as a teenager didn't resonate for me the way it does now: when O'Brien, pretending to be a resistance member, gets Winston and Julia to volunteer for any number of criminal acts which sound as if they're taken from the current news but really are in the novel: kill themselves and kill any number of innocent people for the cause, throw acid in a child's face. The recording of this agreement is what O'Brien later uses to demonstrate to Winston that he can't claim moral superiority, and when I read that as a teenager, it didn't seem as effective as later things O'Brien did to me because after all Winston and Julia did none of those things, and it was all a trick. But here, on stage, in an age where people do kill lots of innocents (and themselves) for what they perceive to be a world saving cause against an evil state, it was a devastating moment.
Still not as bad as what followed, though. The way they handle the problem of torture on stage: every time it happens, the white clad goons close in on Winston so the audience can't see him, and when they go back to their position, he's got bloody finger tips, or bleeds out of the mouth etc. And then the rats. Which you don't see at all, but the imagination works overtime at this point and Winston's panicked scream that finally breaks him inwardly as well as outwardly is so harrowing because you couldn't bear it anymore as an audience member as well, even in the tv age of torture torture all the time.
If I have one complaint, than that one of the most disturbing elements of the novel, the strange, perverse intimacy between inquisitor and victim that is there between O'Brien and Winston does not come across. The film version starring Richard Burton (in his last screen role) as O'Brien and John Hurt as Winston Smith managed that, but here between Angus Wright as O'Brien and Andrew Gower as Winston it's not there, and earlier it's also not clear why Winston trusts O'Brien enough to approach him in the first place. Angus Wright is just too obviously chilling a bureaucrat from the start.
The audience isn't left off the hook at any point. One of the most effective uses of modern day technology is that when Winston and Julia are in the room they believe to be without surveillance, cherishing this little bit of privacy, they're not on stage but the audience sees them on screen, being in the position of the surveilling Big Brother in the post Orwell sense themselves. And while the appendix-inspired frame of treating Winston's diary as a historical text (or a historical fiction), complete with debate of mobile phone using contemporaries, could offer some emotional relief (the Party does fall after all, Winston wrote his plea to the future for us), it's called into question again by the end (did the Party fall, or did it just find a different method of controlling and shaping reality?), and the very end isn't the appendix inspired frame but, as in the novel, Winston's last moment of complete emotional capitulation.
I hadn't been sure the dramatic form would be able to get the power of Orwell's fiction across, but did it ever. No intermission, either, it just builds and builds and builds; the emotional effect isn't "now I've seen an adaption of a dystopian classic" but "through a mirror - into the hear and now - darkly".
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1185703.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Hobson's Choice: one of those British comedy classics which for some reason I never managed to catch before, including the David Lean film version starring Charles Laughton. This one has Martin Shaw (of The Professionals fame in his younger days) as the title character, but turns out one of those plays where the title character isn't the main character - that would be, without a question, Maggie, ably played by Naomi Frederick. As a pay, it also strikes me as a bit of a late 19th century middle and working class Lear from the daughters' pov, and done as a comedy. Which is to say: at the start of the pla, shoe shop owner Hobson is a petty tyrant to his three daughters, getting drunk in the pub and indulging in grandiose speeches while they do all the (unpaid) work both in the household and in the shop, above all the oldest, Maggie. Through the play, Maggie not only plots her and her sisters' escape but the complete overthrow of her father, establishes a rival business that soon takes away the trade, and by the end takes over the orginal shop while her father (having nearly drunk himself to death without her) concedes utter defeat and has to give complete power to her. If you think about it, there are any number of points where this could have gone into very dark territory, but the production never does - there is never any sense that Hobson's early insults and ongoing humiliations of his daughters have impaired, let alone destroyed their sense of self worth, and Maggie's triumph at the end comes without cruelty, just very matter-of-factly, and the narrative makes it clear she's saving her father's life while she's at it. Plus Maggie is such a force of nature throughout that one in the play is a match for her; that she enlists shy underpaid bootmaker Will for marriage (you could also say: bullies - he really doesn't want to marry her at the start) is one of those things that would look terribly with reversed genders, but again, the play not only goes for the comedy of shy trembling man versus strong no nonsense woman, but also makes it clear Will benefits from Maggie taking over his life; instead of an underpaid exploited worker, he ends up boss of two shops and with a much stronger sense of self worth, standing up for himself.
Everyone involved had great comic timing, and it's easy to see why this play keeps getting revived. It's also something that, like G.B. Shaw's plays, was written as a contemporary story and is now a costume play because you can't update it when its plot and problems are very much that of a specific setting, so late Victorian/early Edwardian costumes (not too grand, we're in Manchester shops, not in Ascot) are used. All in all, I felt greatly entertained, but don't have the urge to watch it again.
1984: adaption of George Orwell's novel by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan. Adapting a novel (any novel) for the theatre always is tricky, let alone this one, but team Icke and Macmillan for my money did a superb job of it. One key angle for their angle is the appendix Orwell wrote about Newspeak, which implies that the Party fell after all - since it analyzes from a future perspective that's not totalitarian -, another the question of what makes reality and how to maintain a sense of past and present if you're completely taken over. And thus, you have structures within structures - Winston is remembering, or tries to, the events leading up to his arrest and torture even while he's being tortured and his past is being rewritten (O'Brien's "where do you think you are, Winston?" Question keeps returning through the play?), but at the same time, people from a post - Big Brother world are discussing his diary as a text (fictional? Historical?), and yet that reality, too, with the end of the play is called into question.
Orwell's depiction of a totalitarian state remains as disturbing as ever. (Being German, I didn't read it in school as part of the curriculum, I read it while still at school as part of my spare time reading, and was freaked out in a "wow" way.) And absolutely not dated, au contraire, sad to say. The "hate" rallies and the blaming of Goldstein as a traitor figure for all the misery could be Turkey (and Gülen as Goldstein) now, but you don't have to go East, going West will do, too (see "Lock her up!" Chants at the recent RNC or rallies last autumn in Germany where effigies of Angela Merkel were hanged). The constant recreation of reality to fit the Party's current position, the way blatant lies are accepted no matter or ridiculous they are, and then reversed into new lies again: yes, hello, Brexit campain and aftermath, we don't even have to go to Russia for this.
One element that as a teenager didn't resonate for me the way it does now: when O'Brien, pretending to be a resistance member, gets Winston and Julia to volunteer for any number of criminal acts which sound as if they're taken from the current news but really are in the novel: kill themselves and kill any number of innocent people for the cause, throw acid in a child's face. The recording of this agreement is what O'Brien later uses to demonstrate to Winston that he can't claim moral superiority, and when I read that as a teenager, it didn't seem as effective as later things O'Brien did to me because after all Winston and Julia did none of those things, and it was all a trick. But here, on stage, in an age where people do kill lots of innocents (and themselves) for what they perceive to be a world saving cause against an evil state, it was a devastating moment.
Still not as bad as what followed, though. The way they handle the problem of torture on stage: every time it happens, the white clad goons close in on Winston so the audience can't see him, and when they go back to their position, he's got bloody finger tips, or bleeds out of the mouth etc. And then the rats. Which you don't see at all, but the imagination works overtime at this point and Winston's panicked scream that finally breaks him inwardly as well as outwardly is so harrowing because you couldn't bear it anymore as an audience member as well, even in the tv age of torture torture all the time.
If I have one complaint, than that one of the most disturbing elements of the novel, the strange, perverse intimacy between inquisitor and victim that is there between O'Brien and Winston does not come across. The film version starring Richard Burton (in his last screen role) as O'Brien and John Hurt as Winston Smith managed that, but here between Angus Wright as O'Brien and Andrew Gower as Winston it's not there, and earlier it's also not clear why Winston trusts O'Brien enough to approach him in the first place. Angus Wright is just too obviously chilling a bureaucrat from the start.
The audience isn't left off the hook at any point. One of the most effective uses of modern day technology is that when Winston and Julia are in the room they believe to be without surveillance, cherishing this little bit of privacy, they're not on stage but the audience sees them on screen, being in the position of the surveilling Big Brother in the post Orwell sense themselves. And while the appendix-inspired frame of treating Winston's diary as a historical text (or a historical fiction), complete with debate of mobile phone using contemporaries, could offer some emotional relief (the Party does fall after all, Winston wrote his plea to the future for us), it's called into question again by the end (did the Party fall, or did it just find a different method of controlling and shaping reality?), and the very end isn't the appendix inspired frame but, as in the novel, Winston's last moment of complete emotional capitulation.
I hadn't been sure the dramatic form would be able to get the power of Orwell's fiction across, but did it ever. No intermission, either, it just builds and builds and builds; the emotional effect isn't "now I've seen an adaption of a dystopian classic" but "through a mirror - into the hear and now - darkly".
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1185703.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.