THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA at Sam Wanamaker Theatre - a new low in lows...

In the 34 years that I have been a proper theatregoer I have, naturally, seen some bad productions but I have never left a show in the interval of my own accord - yes I left Kate Mitchell's UNCLE VANYA at the Young Vic at the interval but that was at the prompting of my friend Jane who had bought the tickets for my birthday; she said she would rather buy me dinner at the late and great Alfred's on Shaftesbury Avenue.  So, Linus Roache as UNCLE VANYA or Alfred's summer pudding?  Absolutely no-brainer.

Apropos, here are some Shakespeare productions that had me chewing my programme in anger, frustration or boredom:  The National Theatre's recent AS YOU LIKE IT which I blogged was "a superficial production where the set and cast were all surface with no real insight offered or found", the National's 2011 TWELFTH NIGHT directed by Sir Peter Hall and starring his daughter where I thought "Time and again Rebecca Hall give us true moments of jaw-dropping thinness".  There was Ian Rickson's 2011 HAMLET at the Young Vic when I blogged that it "all smacked of a 1970s theatre collective production" and, showing that the Old Vic can put on ghastly Shakespeare too, the truly bizarre MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING from 2013 mis-directed by Mark Rylance where I blogged "I didn't hate it.  It just left me bemused and frustrated that it was allowed to be presented as such". But despite all the above, at least I stayed till the curtain call.

Then last week this happened...

Yes Constant Reader, I left in the interval.  It was either that or lose my sanity.

Thank you Nick Bagnall - your ghastly production has done what no other director has ever made me do.  THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA is rarely produced so here was the perfect chance to see it.  But no... I had reckoned without Nick Bagnall deciding to set it in the Swinging 1960s.  His reason?  Because the play is about young people discovering life and they did that in 1966, oh and he is 'obsessed' with the 1960s.  Thankfully the programme had a synopsis which I had to read at the end of the first act as this awful production was so confusing and ghastly.

Owen hit the nail on the head when he said it felt like a production the Upper Sixth had been allowed to put on as part of their drama studies.  This is actually a touring production for the Globe and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse.  It should have stayed beyond the pale.

Bagnall had the whizzer idea of stopping the action every so often with cod-60s music...  if he wanted to stage a musical version of the play, why not go for the 1971 Broadway musical that won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book?

The cast were woeful but special mention must be made of Garry Cooper who played the nasty Duke of Milan like the Geoff Tracy "Thunderbirds" puppet operated by someone with Parkinsons.  A more ugly performance it would be hard to imagine.

The cast were grindingly amateur and I hope to never see them on a London stage ever again.

However the main culprit for this theatrical cesspit is the Globe's éminence merde Emma Rice.  Her ghastly stamp is all over this and it fits in nicely with her reductive ethos: strip everything down to the barest minimum, cross-cast with untalented performers who however are the right gender or race to fit your Politically-Correct check list, make it understandable to anyone with no brain, distract with colour and noise to disguise the paucity of soul or emotion - oh and ramp up the mugging so it feels like New York in the 1970s.

Emma Rice has called her first season Wonder... 

I Wonder if I will ever go back to the Globe as long as her shiteous reign lasts.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at the Globe Theatre - O for a glass of Love-In-Idleness...

Last week we went to yet *another* production at The Globe - we should get some sort of badge shouldn't we?  This time it was to see - it's her again - Emma Rice's version of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

I say 'version' as Rice has done her usual shtick of ripping out every third page from the text, rearranging the character genders for no real discernible reason and then throwing a bucket of coloured paint over it all.  Oberon uses the juice of the flower Love-In-Idleness to smear on the eyes of his Queen Titania and the mortal lovers in his wood to make them fall in love with the first thing they see.  Sadly I didn't have a glass of it on me as I had issues with the production.

Appropriately Rice has gone for an Asian flavour to her production with a sitar player front-and-centre, bright saffron-coloured flower garlands hanging in the doorways and several Asian actors in the cast paying the lead roles of Hermia, Oberon and Helenus.  Helenus I hear you cry?  Who is Helenus in the DREAM?  Welcome to the tipsy-tarty world of Emma Rice.... Helenus is the swapped gender character Helena, formerly the affection-starved female ex-lover of Demetrius, now Helenus the affection-starved GAY ex-lover of Demetrius.  It's all terribly modern.

The familiar Globe space has also undergone a transformation with huge inflatables almost blocking out the sky and long green diaphanous tubes which suggest tree trunks suspended over the groundling's heads.  It's certainly visually striking even if the 'tree trunks' can obscure the action at times.  It certainly does suggest the world of the stage spilling out into the auditorium as indeed it actually does... there are three large tables at the front of the stage which allow the actors to jump from the stage into the audience and back again.

So despite all this - was it magical?  Not really.  It was all fairly earthbound and for a season that is all about Wonder and losing yourself in storytelling there was precious few opportunities to do so.  The 'rude mechanicals' were dressed as Globe ushers and there was an interminable intro where two of them went through the do's and don'ts of the theatre which was tedious.

We also had to do without the presence of Australian cabaret star Meow-Meow in the double role of Hippolyta and Titania as she was having one of her regular nights off so Nandi Bhebhe was on instead.  As Hippolyta she let her red high-heels do all the acting while her Titania was regal in bearing if not in performance.  Having such an under-powered Queen threw more emphasis on Zubin Varla's Oberon which sadly didn't merit it - he played the role like a surly England football supporter still wandering around Marseilles looking for a fight.  I did like Titania's descent from the gods for her first entrance however, her voluminous frock spreading across the stage.

There were better performances among the lovers - Anjana Vasan was an impassioned and forceful Hermia and teamed well with Ankur Bahl as her best gay friend Helenus - this being an Emma Rice production their lifelong friendship was shown by them doing the dance routine from Beyoncé's SINGLE LADIES.  The sex change for Helena got wearying after a while as the character was played less for desperate comedy value than just as a prancing nancy boy.  How very not modern.

Edmund Derrington - last seen in the original cast of SUNNY AFTERNOON - was very good as Lysander and was particularly brave for the amount of time he was on stage in just his pants.  Ncuti Gatwa was an anonymous Demetrius although he is probably the basis of some interesting anagrams.

Ewan Wardrop as Nick Bottom got his laughs easily and well and as did Katy Owen's Puck although her constant 'business' pulled focus from scenes which she was not in - the confrontation scene between Oberon and Titania was largely ignored by the groundlings as Owens picked on them to snog.  Lucy Thackeray played the am-dram theatre director Quince in the style of a very bad Julie Walters impression.

However, as with even the worst version of the DREAM - and this wasn't that - by the time Bottom and his crew did "Pyrimus and Thisbe" I was enjoying it - Rice even managed to stick in a reference to the famous Peter Brook RSC production from 1970 - and by the time Katy Owens' Puck addressed the audience for a final time while Titania and Oberon flew above the stage (albeit on very thick hawsers) I found a trickly tear on my cheek - there is something quite magical in that last speech where Shakespeare addresses his audience down the centuries:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend: And, as I am an honest Puck, If we have unearned luck Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call; So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.

The production plays at the Globe until September, go see what you think...

THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

After the very under-whelming TAMING OF THE SHREW on the main stage I must admit I was wary of going into this production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as it was a production directed by the new artistic director Emma Rice and while it was better than I expected it also betrayed all the irksome 'poor theatre' trops that signpost Director Theatre these days.

Daniel Jamieson's THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK tells the story of painter Marc Chagall and his first wife Bella who was an obvious muse for his other-worldly, surreal paintings that also drew their inspiration from their hometown of Vitebsk in Belarus.  We follow how Chagall met the vibrant and educated Bella and how she gave up her own interests in theatre and writing to bolster his painting.

WWI occurs as they marry and have a child (Marc's absence for several days after the birth proving a challenge to Bella) and unhappy with the Soviet appropriation of the arts they start a peripatetic life that takes them from Germany to France and finally the US as again a World War rages around them and news filters through that the Nazis have finished what the Soviets started, the eradication of their home village of Vitebsk.  The pay ends with Bella's sudden death in 1944 and a re-married Chagall haunted by her memory.

The action takes place on an unwieldy set of various wooden poles and canvasses which doesn't help the small acting space or the sightlines in the Wanamaker auditorium.  For a production that tried to invoke the floating otherness of Chagall's paintings I found it remained particularly earhbound.

Again my problem with the schtick of Emma Rice and co. is that for all their much vaunted imaginations it all gets awfully tired after a while - when Chagall tossed snowflakes in the air for the fourth time to denote bad weather I groaned.  It's all surface.. the passion feels very inch-thin.

This is particularly troubling when you are dealing with Marc and Bella Chagall, you never feel the desperation they must have felt at being displaced from their home again and again, in Rice's production we just get two whey-faced, sad, knock-kneed waifs who give the impression of having escaped from a Tim Burton film not a war-torn country where their Jewishness has sealed their fate.

However - despite all the overdone cuteness - there is a delightful performance lurking within it from Audrey Brisson as Bella, she far outshines the droopy sad-sack performance of Marc Antolin as Chagall.  She holds the attention throughout and suggests a three-dimensional, living person amidst the dress-up flavour of the show.