Diary of a Grammatical Misfit

One place I never thought my theatre addiction would take me would be a train station. But oddly enough, in the last month it has taken me to two.

I went to see 30×30, a 30-minute performance that was part of the Dance Umbrella festival, a month ago. This took place on the pavement directly outside Liverpool Street station. It was interesting, not so much for the dance itself but for watching the reaction of the passers by who were not sure if what they were seeing was a rehearsed performance or just some random mad person. I wondered how much of this owed to his choice of clothes - a normal tracksuit and trainers - as I think if he’d been wearing more typical street performer clothes, people would have been less confused.

Small Metal Objects, which I saw on Monday night, was an even more extreme example of this concept. Sitting in a bank of seats in the upper reaches of Stratford train/tube station with headsets, the audience stuck out like a sore thumb. But such is the tunnel vision of commuters that only a handful even saw us, and most of those that did looked away hastily.

The reaction to the actors (who were mingling with the public, distinguishable by us because their innocuous looking headsets were transmitting their speech to our headphones) was similarly unimpressed. As the play unravelled - with drug deals and tantrums and conversations about the meaning of life - people swilled around and past these moments, oblivious and uncaring of what was happening.

It was fascinating.

The most bizarre moment was, perhaps inevitably, the ending when - from the point of view of a passer by - four random people lined up and bowed and a group of weirdos burst into applause. An utterly bewildered man, who happened to be going down the escalator at the time, was so surprised he almost lost his footing and had an accident.

Bizarre stuff. And very interesting.

OK, the looks of the male dancers were rather yummy but the deliciousness refers to the dancing, honest.

Carlos Acosta and guests from the Cuban National Ballet at Sadlers’ Wells (last week in October) was universally panned by the critics - they dismissed the choreography and the direction and the words ‘waste of talent’ were used more than once.

But I enjoyed it. It was fun, the performances were well-executed and the music was lively.

What’s more, all of the dancers seemed to be enjoying themselves, living in the moment rather than trying to show each other up. And maybe the dances were more limited in scope but personally, I prefer watching a perfectly executed simple routine than a hard piece of choreography littered with mistakes or a complex emotional role performed by a dancer who looks like she’s had every expression botoxed out of her face.

My preference may not be art. But in this case I’m happy to be one of those people that sits stubbornly and says “I don’t know much but I know what I like!”

I think I’m going to have to give up watching classical ballet at the Royal Opera House. It may be one of my great passions but I keep coming away feeling at least as irritated as uplifted.

I did really enjoy the Royal Ballet’s production of La Bayadere, for the solos. There were some brilliant individual performances (even though, since I took my mother, we had to go to a matinee and see the less senior dancers in the lead roles) and the staging and costumes were spectacular.

But an awful lot of the time, just like the last few times I have been to the Royal Ballet, I kept getting infuriated by the corps de ballet.

Maybe I’ve got the whole idea wrong (it seems the masters and mistress of the Royal Ballet don’t agree with me) but I thought the whole aim of the group dances - be it a pas de quatre or the twenty-four shades in this production - was to dance in unison.

I’m sure that they used to do so when I was younger. And I know that the Cuban National Ballet had every wili perfectly synchronised when I saw their Giselle. But the Royal Ballet’s groups are oftentimes a shambles - there’s just no attention to detail.

Sometimes this is through lack of care with props. In this ballet, for example, there is a scene where the dancers hold palm-shaped fans. There was never a single moment when every dancer held her fan at the same angle or the same height. As a result, the overall look of the dance was chaotic.

But only a few dances use props so that’s only occasionally what makes me grind my teeth. Most of the lack of unison stems from the apparent attitude that each dancer must show off their individual talent. It seems that each dancer is determined to prove that she can lift her leg a little higher, a little longer, a little straighter than her neighbour. Or he can jump higher, spin faster, leap further than his.

Well, great. I’m really pleased that dancer third from right (or whichever one) is the best dancer in the group. Good for her or him.

Except, no. I don’t give a damn. And unless their entire family is in attendance, neither does the audience. It may be a little unfair on those that can do more, but for the sake of the overall performance, if one of the dancers can only lift her leg to 10 degrees above the horizontal then please make them all do it like that. 

If a dancer is genuinely more skilled then the master or mistress of the company should know that from rehearsals and allow them the chance to show off their talent in solos. Proving their superior ability to the audience of an actual performance does nothing except make the entire production look shoddy. And it’s the Royal Ballet for goodness sake - it’s supposed to be one of the world’s best and the ticket prices reflect that. Shoddy is not an option.

I have been told that the Russian ballet companies tend to have their corps in better order. Maybe there’s a political inference that communist attitudes (Cuba currently and Russian historically) produce better corps de ballet. But do capitalist attitudes produce better principal dancers? I’m not too sure there’s enough evidence of that to forgive the one-upmanship that I seem to see every time at the Royal Ballet.

So unless someone tells me they’ve fixed it, I don’t think I’ll go back to the Royal Ballet for a while. I’ll greatly miss the brilliance of the principals, but it’s just too annoying to come out of the theatre wanting to rant.

A word has been echoing round my head since about 8.50pm last night when I watched a series of film footage of people falling down and up stairs.

Bumpetty bumpetty bumpetty.

The oddness of my head that it should take this away when there were so many other moments it could dwell on…

Cast No Shadow is visually spectacular. A collaboration between Isaac Julien (an artist who creates film installations) and Russell Maliphant (a choreographer who, in my mind, can do no wrong since I fell in love with his style in Push).

I was there with my boss, it was the premiere, we were in the 1st circle and there was champagne. All in all, it was a very unusual Sadler’s Wells experience for me. I have only ever sat in the top circle before - I can practically find my way to 2nd circle rows B and C blind-folded - so it was odd to see the stage at a different angle. I hope that realising how much bigger it actually is won’t detract from my future experiences!

There is a trilogy of films shown in the performance, the first is set in Africa, the second in the Arctic and the third (after the interval) around the sea. The first two were amazing films but the incorporation of live dance in conjunction with the second one felt slightly unnatural, slightly ‘tacked on’. 

The thing that kept jarring with me was that the dance movements were very evocative of capoeira (a martial art/dance form) which is synonymous with heat - it originates in Brazil and I once heard a capoeirista (had to check the spelling of that!!) say that it can never be performed properly on a stage or floor, that sand is its natural ground. To set such heat in the Arctic therefore felt odd to me. However the fluid capoeira movement contrasts with the more classical ballet body forms so perhaps the ultimate aim was to create an impression of contrast. If so, then I think that worked.

There was no live dancing during the first film. Perhaps some Russian-style ballet would have been a good contrast to the African scenes - I always associate pure classical ballet with ice and cold. (And I’ve never even seen Les Patineurs!)

Given that things didn’t quite feel ‘meshed’, I wasn’t surprised when I read in the programme afterwards that the first two films had been recorded as stand alone pieces, without thought given at the time to inclusion of dance. I wonder if perhaps the project might have been slightly better if the collaboration had been from the beginning. Certainly Julien’s third film, Small Boats, - which was conceived once the project with Maliphant had already begun - worked much better as a fusion of the two art forms. It was a stunning ending. And the dancing felt much more fitting in the water context, with the dancers swirling and crashing like the tides and waves of the sea.

And falling down the stairs. And falling up the stairs.

Bumpetty bumpetty bumpetty.

Oh dear, I am a philistine. Still, perhaps it’s better than humming the inevitable Oasis song as I heard three separate people doing on their way out of the theatre!

I have never had a calmer, more relaxed Monday morning. It is chucking it down with rain and I had to wheel a suitcase through the puddle-infested streets but still, I reached the office with a serene smile.

Admittedly I was staying with friends who live very close to my work, so I got an hour-and-a-half’s lie in and then cheated by taking a taxi rather than waiting in the rain for a bus… But still, I think the serenity is mostly the result of having an absolutely brilliant weekend.

Firstly, on Friday night I met with an old school friend. We had a meal out (duck terrine with fois gras then fish pie - yummy) then we saw Spamalot - the musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Spamalot was really very good, (apart from Peter Davison as a very weak King Arthur - lacking in stage presence, humour or decent singing voice - why was he there??) The (rest of the) performances were great, especially Hannah Waddingham, the Lady of the Lake, who was bloody brilliant - fabulous singer, excellent comic timing. People should write whole new musicals especially for her…

We laughed.

And laughed some more.

I really have to watch Holy Grail again now. Maybe tonight if I manage to get home at a decent hour.

to be continued…

I’m suffering slightly from blogger’s block at the moment.

It’s a common phenomenon, even proper bloggers with real writing skills and a zillion readers get it. But it’s still aggravating. It’s just that there are several things that are on my mind at the moment but they all revolve around my friends and as several of my friends read this blog*, I cannot blog about the things that are on my mind.

Which is irritating really as this blog has proved very useful for siphoning many of the other things that have been on my mind since last October.

Thankfully, there’s always the fallback of talking about the theatre. I went to see a preview of All About My Mother at the Old Vic on Friday. I’d heard that early previews were rather disrupted but they’d obviously settled in after a week because the performance was hitch-free (as far as I could tell!) and really very good.

Because I am an idiot, I have never actually seen Almodóvar’s film, on which the play is based. I will rectify that as soon as possible but it means I cannot compare the two. However, the play maintains a film-like quality - not least in the constantly changing sets, even for scenes of only a few minutes. The set and production design that enabled all these changes (without disrupting the flow of the play) was absolutely amazing, and even had the capacity for a realistic looking rain storm.

I bought tickets on the strength of the cast though - Diana Rigg and Eleanor Bron to be specific. Rigg’s role was far greater and she was magnificent, Bron too was as good as I had expected. Brilliant performances from actors I knew less about came from Lesley Manville (Manuela, the Mother), Mark Gatiss (Agrado) and Colin Morgan (Esteban) who has a surprising amount of stage time in a story that is about what happens after his death! I thought the rest of the cast were also very good except the woman playing the fallen nun (I can’t be bothered to look her up) who seemed to think the best way to play the role was as a mentally retarded twelve-year-old with an irritatingly sugary voice. Annoying really, as her character was much more interesting than that. I will look forward to seeing how it should be done in the film.

Fortunately the play was not too long. This is not because I wanted it to end but because it is impossible not to fidgit at least a little bit when you’ve been sitting still too long and the seats at the Old Vic creak so badly. It drove me barmy at A Moon for the Misbegotten. Creaky seats + good acoustics = terrible effect.

Very few creaks in this one though, in every way. Owing to my self-imposed theatre quota in the build-up to my trip to New Zealand and Australia, and the fact that I have tickets for a musical this month and three dance things next month, this may well be my last ’serious’ play until next year. I’m glad it was a good one.

* Don’t get paranoid, those that do. Especially not the one that ALWAYS gets paranoid - you know who you are :)   I don’t think the friends that are on my mind read this blog, but people who know them do, at least occasionally.

After the vastness of the Lyttelton and Philistines’s cast of thousands* the night before, Saturday’s matinee performance of Elling at Trafalgar Studios (row G) felt as intimate as a lapdance.

I was a little apprehensive about this play. I’d heard good things about it and wanted to go but then wavered when my colleague went and her party was so bored they left at the interval**.  Then I decided that Trafalgar Studios is too expensive anyway (although I suppose it’s quite a small venue so the revenue per showing is probably quite low…). But then (perhaps inevitably) a ticket offer appeared and I was snared.

And I’m so glad I wavered in the right direction in the end. Coz it was great. Totally zany story of two men, brought together in a shared room in an asylum (their gloriously un-PC term, not mine) before being sent out into the world (in Oslo to be precise) to prove they can live normal lives. Their assimilation into society is a Herculean task including shopping, peeing in public, premium-rate phone lines and rescuing fair maidens. (Although maidens in Hercules’s day were less likely to need rescuing from drunken falls while heavily pregnant…)

The title role is played by John Simm, a mal-adjusted, recently orphaned mummy’s boy with a tendancy towards tall tales and tank tops. He is fabulous. He gets most of the best lines and definitely the best entrance. 

His room-mate Bjarne (Adrian Bower) is a kind of Tony-from-men-behaving-badly character. Except he’s a virgin. His attempts to get ‘chicks’ are an oafish yet kind-hearted contrast to Elling’s rather maniacal self-control. He resembles a horny 8 year old, trapped in a body far too big and unwieldy for him. Actually it’s quite hard to understand quite why Bjarne would be put in an asylum in the first place - in terms of his day-to-day activity he differs little from the average guy in the pub on a Sunday afternoon.

Their journey is conveyed with a good balance of humour and sweet sentimentality (after all, as my friend remarked “you can only laugh at insane people so much”) - I was willing them on. And although I was supposed to skip out just before the end to catch a train, there was no way I could leave until the actors had come out of character for the curtain call. It would’ve been like disappointing a child or kicking a puppy. 

And besides, I was bloody enjoying it!

Interestingly, sauerkraut featured quite prominently in Elling, as it did in Boeing Boeing. Is this a coincidence? Or is it a running theme in really good comic plays in the west end that I am just beginning to notice?

 

* OK, not thousands. Not even as many as a typical musical ensemble. But for a play, with all the cast having distinct characters (but less than distinct faces from where I was sitting and Russian names to boot which made it harder), there were a lot.

** As is probably obvious since I admit I’m easily pleased and love almost anything I go to, I have never walked out of a play before the end. In fact I mentioned this to the friend I saw Elling with and added that I couldn’t imagine I ever would. “I did once,” she said, “from puppets singing German opera… Pre-recorded and not very good opera”.    “Huh,” I replied, somewhat dumbstruck. “I suppose I should never say never!” 

I have imposed a theatre limit on myself recently, in an attempt to save some money for my holiday in November. Two trips a month seemed reasonable. It is reasonable! (*I tell myself in a fierce voice*).

But after seeing one play on Friday night and a Saturday matinee I realised my quota was already up. And it was only August 4th. It’s looking like a looooooong month. Perhaps I should take up knitting? What’s worse is that I’m already booked for two things in September and two more in October so I really hope nothing good comes out any time soon!

On the bright side, I saw two plays that might (just about) make the dry period worth it.

Philistines at the National Theatre was a welcome return to the slightly more serious side of theatre. Admittedly it was a gentle return as the humour of the play is razor sharp and hits the mark far more often than I expected for a 105-year old work. I have no previous knowledge of the play so I don’t know how much credit goes to Gorky for timelessness and how much to Andrew Upton for a clever adaptation but the wit of the end result worked well.

Other aspects worked less well and I think it was fortunate that the one-liners did hit home in the first act as it would have been pretty dire without them. There are a lot of characters involved and I took a while to get their various relationships sorted out before I could actually understand what was going on. I don’t know how universal this was - I was sitting in the circle so the actors’ faces were difficult to make out and I probably hadn’t helped myself by having a couple of glasses of wine beforehand - but for me at least, it was a little confusing. There were a lot of ‘woe is me’ speeches and not a huge amount of plot movement in the first act but things seemed to be falling into place before the interval.

In the second act the play got into its flow. There were revelations left, right and centre and the characters that had declared themselves stuck in various ruts leapt out of them and ran for the hills. The verbal sparring started to deliver knock-out punches and by the end everyone’s lives had changed. The dramatic ‘curtain’ effect of a house front with many windows was wonderfully effective too. At the beginning there is slow restrained movement from people in various rooms in the house, at the end there is only one movement in one window and it is frantic.

The huge contrast between the beginning and end window scenes were polarised versions of the change between the first and second acts. So I suppose the point of the slow first act might have been to emerse the audience in the slowness and boredom of the household’s existence before demonstrating just how quickly things can completely change. I suppose too, that as a play set in 1902 Russia and as Gorky was a supporter of the socialist movement, the larger point may have been that no matter how long a regime has reigned or how it tries to thwart the desires of its subjests, change can still come. And it is likely to be swift and painful.

There’s a lot to be said for anything that still has you chuckling days later.

Boeing Boeing’s hardly high-class comedy - the basic plot is that one man has three fiancees who are all air hostesses and whose schedules mean they are never in Paris at the same time. He has a housekeeper who is simmering on breaking point thanks to the strain of three mistresses and a visiting friend from the deepest country who is amazed at his audacious lifestyle. Of course, the weather intervenes and the slick setup is thrown into disarray as the visiting friend and housekeeper try to help the poor sap keep his three fiancees from meeting one another - even as they are all in the same flat.

So the plot is simple, the comedy is simple, the characters are simple caricatures really - scarily aggressive German fiancee, spoiled princess-type American fiancee, sultry sexy Italian fiancee, buffoon-like innocent friend (although the thick Welsh accent was genius!) and grumpy housekeeper all surrounding the smooth lover who loses his suave as quickly as his coiffed hairstyle.

But I don’t give a damn if it’s all a bit simple when I’m laughing enough for the tears to pour down my face. The laughs build steadily; starting slow at the beginning and building up to a general feeling of amused enjoyment by the interval. In the second act it goes crazy - the dialogue and the actors move faster, the jokes never stop and the audience barely gets a chance to catch its breath between laughs.

It’s also nice to feel that the cast are really enjoying themselves and, in fact, it was the regular corpsing that got the biggest laughs of the night. When one actor faced the wall and refused to turn around to deliver his line, the sight of his shoulders shaking as he desperately tried to regain control had us in stitches. And the ’support’ he was given from the rest of the cast made the situation even funnier.

I suppose I do need to head back towards some more serious theatre soon, but for entertainment value Boeing Boeing was first class.

Good gosh, such a calamity!

I had a sudden jolt of horror at a most unlikely and potentially earth shattering concept and once I had checked my diary I realised it was, in fact, true. I have no theatre tickets for anything in July…

Of course this brought me out in a cold shaky sweat. No theatre? For a whole month? And moreover, in my birthday month?

No! I shall not have it!

So despite weddings, birthdays, trips to france and periods of planned utter exhaustion I have rectified the oversight and will be going to see Boeing Boeing (which I was going to see anyway and it was on a ticket offer so that’s ok then) later in the month.

Phew, all is right with the world again. I can relax now.

Breathe.