Going to the theatre

[Mark_Wafc]

Blackpool 4 - 1 Wigan

Well, our defending looked like an old school farce from where i was sat.

Ray Cooney would have proud.

[carmens827]

for those of you that live in the Los angeles area, may i strongly recommend seeing Martin Mcdonagh's "THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE " at the Mark Taper forum. starts tomorrow thru sept.6th. i saw this a few years back in New York ( one of Philips recommendations) and i absolutely loved it !!!! plus, the thrill of meeting Martin Mcdonagh at the Pogues after show party that same night. ( he signed my playbill with DZM's pen by the way... )I also had a chance to see Martin's "Skull of Connemara " a few months back and they played a few Pogues songs prior to curtain time. Mr. Chevron--does Martin have any more new plays lined up ??

[philipchevron]

for those of you that live in the Los angeles area, may i strongly recommend seeing Martin Mcdonagh's "THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE " at the Mark Taper forum. starts tomorrow thru sept.6th. i saw this a few years back in New York ( one of Philips recommendations) and i absolutely loved it !!!! plus, the thrill of meeting Martin Mcdonagh at the Pogues after show party that same night. ( he signed my playbill with DZM's pen by the way... )I also had a chance to see Martin's "Skull of Connemara " a few months back and they played a few Pogues songs prior to curtain time. Mr. Chevron--does Martin have any more new plays lined up ??

He's opening a new play, A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway in March 2010, directed by John Crowley, who directed the brilliant The Pillowman. Spokane is, of course, not so much in the West of Ireland as the North West of the USA, so there may be a subtle change of emphasis, though the remainder of the title suggests he has not eased off on the Kensington Gore. He tells me he may also be working on a project for Berlin with another eminent Friend-of-Poguetry.

[philipchevron]

Siegfried by Richard Wagner (McCaw Hall, Seattle) Seen August 28

Did I mention the music is extraordinary? If it sometimes gets overlooked, it's only because it sometimes becomes so integral to the overall theatrical effect, to the Gesamtkunstwerk [total artwork], that it ceases to be a separate entity. This is why, when I talked briefly to the New York Times about The Ring two years ago, I claimed never to listen to CDs of Wagner. It's not strictly true, but it is a fact that I have never listened to a Wagner musicdrama all through on CD, because if it doesn't have the sets, the lights, the dragon, the Rhine, the anvil, the fire, the golden hoard, the Norns, the ride of the Valkyries, the audience and, above all, the live, in the moment, presence of the singers and musicians, well then it isn't really a Wagner musicdrama and it most certainly is not the Gesamtkunstwerk. But there are moments of such pure feeling in Der Ring des Nibelungen, expressed in a mere 8 tone Western scale, that it almost hurts. It is not the least of the many paradoxes of Richard Wagner that his music has always spoken more eloquently on his behalf than any number of scholarly interrogations of his vanity, his anti-Semitism, his revolutionary acts, his sexual life or just about anything else worth addressing if you're an academic with a reputation in need of garnishing.

Siegfried is, of course, an especially troubling character in the Wagner dramatis personae. From Nietzche's "act of Will" to Riefenstahl's Triumph Of The Will is not, however, a journey for which Wagner can legitimately be held responsible. The Hitler Machine was not above distorting and subverting legitimate 19th century intellectual inquiry to brutally simplify an idea it needed to express in shorthand. It was, and remains today, how Right Wingers seek to convert the stupid and the stupefied to their message. Wagner's heroic ideal, his Romantic Superman, has little in common with Hitler's blond Aryan that was not put there by the Nazis, however complicit members of the Wagner family would later become in assisting the myth while hosting the Fuehrer at Bayreuth. And, while I don't pretend to have a particularly significant grasp of Romanticism, I get that it's in part about an individual's act of self-creation, free from the shackles of society and convention, not some toxic stew of health, efficiency and genetics.

Wagner once wrote an essay in which he claimed that Siegfied was, in part, Jesus Christ, something that gains plausibility when you remember his intended, though unwritten opera Jesus of Nazareth, in which he saw Jesus as a revolutionary. But this Seattle production suggests a slyer take - Wotan has now spent three whole operas meddling with the world in a vain attempt to repair a self-imposed breach in the laws with which he governs the world, but by Siegfried, when he meets the eponymous grandson whose birth he has engineered so that he, a mortal, will overthrow the divine law, Wotan knows the Gods are doomed. If Siegfried, son of Wotan's incestuous twin children Siegmund and Sieglinde, is to be the Hero who will bring about the destruction of Valhalla, well he'd better be worthy of the gig.

Danish singer Stig Andersen is a wonderful Siegfried. His journey from dimwitted nature boy to fully-fledged, though still innocent Lover Man is entirely convincing and is both funny and touching. By the final act, nothing could be more natural than the rapturous flowering of love with Brunnhilde, the woman he momentarily mistakes for his mother, who he never met, but is in fact his aunt. And oh yes, the Dragon (aka Fafner, the survivor of the two brothers who built Valhallla and..............well, you kinda had to be there) was fabulous and you find yourself sharing Siegfried's regret that he had to kill him. Not the least of the many threads that make Richard Wagner's version of the great Nordic myths of The Ring so masterful is how he weaves in everything from Schopenhauer to the Brothers Grimm, and Siegfried really does say to the Dragon, in effect, "what big teeth you have" and the Dragon really does reply "all the better to eat you with".

[CM]

He's opening a new play, A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway in March 2010, directed by John Crowley, who directed the brilliant The Pillowman. Spokane is, of course, not so much in the West of Ireland as the North West of the USA, so there may be a subtle change of emphasis, though the remainder of the title suggests he has not eased off on the Kensington Gore. He tells me he may also be working on a project for Berlin with another eminent Friend-of-Poguetry.

All excellent news

[philipchevron]

Götterdämmerung by Richard Wagner (McCaw Hall, Seattle) Seen August 30

"Sie hat sich auf das Ross geschwungen und sprengt mit einem Satze in den brennenden Scheiterhaufen......" ["She has mounted the horse, and leaps with a single bound into the blazing pyre. The flames immediately blaze up so that they fill the whole space in front of the hall, and appear to seize on the building itself. The men and women press to the extreme front in terror. When the whole space of the stage seems filled with fire, the glow suddenly subsides, and only a cloud of smoke remains; this drifts to the background and lies there on the horizon as a dark bank of cloud. At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood which pours over the fire."]

Top that, Bono! Seattle Opera's final part of the Ring tetralogy remains pretty faithful to the stage directions on the final pages of Richard Wagner's libretto but it adds a final touch, one of the most beautiful and moving things I've ever seen on a stage. After Brunnhilde (and her horse Grane) has immolated herself on Siegfried's funeral pyre, and after the Gods disappear stoically into the flames at Valhalla, and after the accursed ring itself has been restored to the safekeeping of the three Rhine Daughters on the bed of the mighty river, we get one final look at the forest in which most of The Ring of the Nibelung has taken place. Miraculously, three young trees, saplings, have appeared in the decimated remains of the forest. This final stage picture has earned the Seattle Ring the nickname "the Green Ring", but it also is a brilliant answer to the question that has occupied entire tomes by Wagnerian scholars over the years: if the gold is restored to the Rhine, why must the world, along with the gods, be irrevocably consumed by fire after all? Wagner himself never quite answered that question himself, though it is well known that over the 30 year period it took to write the Cycle, he changed his mind many times about the ending, illustrating, I suppose, that not even Richard Wagner was omniscient.

The Seattle Ring Festival must now be considered one of the finest in the world, maybe even the finest, while Bayreuth pauses to refocus and reassert itself. It takes place, like the World Cup, only once every four years and, just like the World Cup, I'm missing it already.

[DzM]

Yay! Carmen!

Plus, the thrill of meeting Martin Mcdonagh at the Pogues after show party that same night. ( he signed my playbill with DZM's pen by the way... )

It saddens me that my pens are evidently more well connected than I am.

And A Beheading in Spokane? Strange how things keeps ending up back there. That's where the last generation or two of my mom's side of the family is from.

[philipchevron]

Yay! Carmen!

Plus, the thrill of meeting Martin Mcdonagh at the Pogues after show party that same night. ( he signed my playbill with DZM's pen by the way... )

It saddens me that my pens are evidently more well connected than I am.

And A Beheading in Spokane? Strange how things keeps ending up back there. That's where the last generation or two of my mom's side of the family is from.

Not quite as drastic as a decapitation. A Behanding in Spokane. Incidentally, I have several personal letters from MMcD, all written in pencil. Clearly, he has need of well-connected pens.

[Sportin' Life]

Great review of the Ring, Phillip. As always, I feel smarter for having read your prose. (I guess that makes up for your Glenn Beck suggestion). Maybe in four years I'll see you there.

Thanks for the great vicarious entertainment.

[DzM]

Not quite as drastic as a decapitation. A Behanding in Spokane. Incidentally, I have several personal letters from MMcD, all written in pencil. Clearly, he has need of well-connected pens.

Ahh. Perhaps I was just hoping for a Beheading when only a Behanding was on offer (I went to one year of middle-school in Spokane and can think of several old classmates that Spokane would be well-served by be-anything-ing them).

Carmen, you didn't take my pen back from him?

[philipchevron]

The Winter's Tale By William Shakespeare (RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon) Seen September 4
Directed by David Farr. Greg Hicks (Leontes), Kelly Hunter (Hermione), Noma Dumezweni (Paulina),
John Mackay (Camillo), Brian Doherty (Autolycus)

The Winter's Tale By William Shakespeare (Old Vic Theatre, London) Seen June 4
Directed by Sam Mendes. Simon Russell Beale (Leontes), Rebecca Hall (Hermione), Sinead Cusack (Paulina),
Ethan Hawke (Autolycus), Paul Jesson (Camillo)

It was a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Winter's Tale back in the 1990s that cured me of a lifelong aversion to William Shakespeare probably inadvertently inculcated by a succession of bogtrotting Christian Brothers in whose mouths the text singularly failed to "fall trippingly on the tongue" but who punished failures to memorise said text with such violent physical pain that it was not difficult to unilaterally add Shakespeare to their lengthy list of English Bastards who had shat upon Holy, Scholarly and downtrodden Ireland. But The Winter's Tale, restored to its proper context of a playhouse with a talented director (Gregory Doran) at the helm and in which only the brilliant players (led by Anthony Sher as Leontes) were expected to have commited the play to memory, was another matter. It was an extraordinary moment for me, as transcendent and healing, in its own way, as the moment in the play when Paulina restores Hermione (or her statue) to life for a grieving and repentent Leontes. The Winter's Tale is, above all else, a play about second chances, and for that reason, I've continued to feel a particular connectedness to it and gratitude for it, though I have long since learned that such epiphanies are not everyday matters, not even in the work of William Shakespeare. But I rarely miss an accessible production of this play. Just in case.

What I have since come to realise is that towards the end of his career, with an unimpeachable and still unmatched body of work behind him, Shakespeare gave himself permission to stretch the boundaries of possibility in the theatre in pretty much any direction that took his fancy. Like The Tempest which followed soon after, The Winter's Tale explores the magical qualities inherent in theatre itself. They are by some distance Shakespeare's most purely theatrical experiments which makes them vulnerable to poor productions as well as brilliant ones. Both of this year's major productions fall somewhere in the middle. Both Sam Mendes and David Farr clearly love the play, but neither of them are quite able to release the essential magic the text carries within it. Which still leaves a great deal to admire, especially in the individual acting performances. The sudden and irrational jealousy displayed by Leontes is a tricky matter for any actor and it's fascinating to watch how Simon Russell Beale and Greg Hicks make their separate and very different journeys to that moment.

Another aspect of the play that's hard to bring off is the transformation from the kingly court at Sicilia to the jollities of Bohemia (and the sinking feeling that more often than not accompanies it) and the RSC version achieves it with a terrific coup de theatre which brings an entire onstage library crashing down and asks us to believe, with some aplomb, that the wreckage is now the rural idyll of Bohemia. That it succeeds makes it all the more regrettable that the current dull RSC production of As You Like It [seen September 2] had not found a comparable solution to the problem. The Old Vic company also gave Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in repertory [seen June 2 and August 12] but it never really overcame its anaemic Tom Stoppard translation.

[CM]

...a succession of bogtrotting Christian Brothers in whose mouths the text singularly failed to "fall trippingly on the tongue" but who punished failures to memorise said text with such violent physical pain that it was not difficult to unilaterally add Shakespeare to their lengthy list of English Bastards who had shat upon Holy, Scholarly and downtrodden Ireland.

But The Winter's Tale, restored to its proper context of a playhouse with a talented director (Gregory Doran) at the helm and in which only the brilliant players (led by Anthony Sher as Leontes) were expected to have commited the play to memory, was another matter.

I got the dvd of this Mr C, live I think at the Barbican. So far seen only the opening scene but some rainy sunday I'll see the rest. Sher was a fine Prospero in the South African masque-filled Tempest. His Falstaff I would pay good money to see, and if the gods are listening, can Kevin Spacey play Richard III.

[philipchevron]

Faith Healer (Gate Theatre, Dublin) Seen September 9

The homecoming (from Edinburgh and Sydney) of the Gate's celebration of Brian Friel's 80th birthday opened last night with the return of Robin LeFevre's excellent revival of Faith Healer, now minus Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid but plus Owen Roe, the excellent Ingrid Craigie (who actually originated the Cherry Jones role in this production) and with a scene-stealing comic performance from Kim Durham (who apparently plays Matt Crawford in long-running BBC radio soap The Archers!) as the tattered showbiz agent.

It's a tough play this: no matter how many times I've seen it, and this counts as three times this decade alone, I can never quite remember what happens in it. In part this is because Friel makes misremembrance the very stuff of drama. A substantially identical story is told three times by three separate individuals, all of whom are central to the story, Francis Hardy the itinerant seventh-son-of-a-seventh-son "faith healer", his wife Grace and his manager Teddy. They are never on stage at the same time so essentially the play is four monologues, one for each character in turn and then a final one from Hardy himself. This technique alienated a lot of Broadway theatregoers when the premiere production of Faith Healer took place in 1979 [this revival fared better, with four Tony nominations including one win, for McDiarmid], though the monologue form has since become an established staple of drama, Irish drama in particular, thanks to Mark O'Rowe, Conor McPherson, Sebastian Barry and others who seized the Friel baton.

Inevitably, as their individual narratives unfold, it becomes clear that all three characters recall the same events in different ways, with different emphasis, and allocate significance to alternative parts of the story. If this is what makes it difficult to "remember" the play itself, it is also what gives it its great power. Each time I see it, it reminds me of a once familiar event being pieced together in evidential fragments. I have also discovered that each successive actor brings yet another layer of selective recall to the process, inevitably adding performance choices to the mix, and this is, in itself, fascinating, as one of Brian Friel's recurring themes is the reliability (or otherwise) of the dramatist. Of, indeed, the drama. Friel also pays his characters the great tribute of not calling their recollection into question himself. Early on, the Faith Healer himself airily tells us that nine times out of ten, his powers of healing are useless and ineffectual so, when we learn that he once cured ten people in one "performance", an event central to all three narratives, we are not inclined to discredit or disbelieve him. This is the core of the play. The one bullet in ten that life's revolver fires that is not a blank.

If you were to ask me what Faith Healer is about, I might be glib and declare that, like all Brian Friel's plays, maybe all Irish plays, it is about a search for identity, a search for home. Or I might be lazy and quote from Fintan O'Toole's programme note on the "musicality" of Friel's works which are heard: "not as crashing symphonies but as intimate pieces of chamber music in which a single note can hint at the cacophony beyond. This sense of pity is all about being attuned to Wordsworth's 'still, sad music of humanity'". But the truth is, I don't really know, which is one of the things that keeps drawing me back to the play and why it surprises and delights me each time, as though I'd never seen it before.

Celebrations of Mr Friel's birthday continue this week at both the Gate and the Abbey theatres.

[philipchevron]

The Yalta Game by Brian Friel (Gate Theatre, Dublin)
Afterplay by Brian Friel (Gate Theatre, Dublin)
A Birthday Tribute To Brian Friel (Abbey Theatre, Dublin)

All September 13

The quite great and the quite good were out in force at the Abbey last night to celebrate Brian Friel's 80th birthday. The Saoi himself looked, frankly, a bit knackered after his week long birthday party and made good his exit at the tail end of his final standing ovation, just in case anyone wanted to take him clubbing or something. Of course, the Irish know all about throwing parties, though this was of course on the more genteel end of the spectrum, faintly redolent of the Anglo-Irish Big House, the Irish people's relationship with which the playwright has written with such wit and insight and wisdom over the years. Hosted and MCed by Sinead Cusack, John O'Connor played some John Field Nocturnes on the piano; Thomas Kilroy told us about a trip he and Friel had recently made to the shed where Chekhov wrote Three Sisters, more of a pilgrimage really; Seamus Heaney read some appropriate poems, some even written by himself; the edgiest the evening got was when Cora Venus Lunny (violin) and Conor Linehan (piano) gave us an impish take on Cole Porter's "Anything Goes". But that would be to discount the semi-performed excerpts from Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), Translations (1980) and, complete with a moving reunion of most of the original Mundy sisters, who took the play from the Abbey to the West End and Broadway and the Tony Awards, Dancing At Lughnasa (1990), all brilliant reminders of just what it was we were celebrating in the first place. Brid Brennan, Rosaleen Linehan, Catherine Byrne and Brid Ni Neachtain were joined by Anita Reeves, Ciaran Hinds, Des Cave and Rory Nolan for the latter, while Darragh Kelly, Nick Dunning, Charlie Bonner and Eamon Morrissey took part in the other excerpts. Direction of the evening was by Patrick Mason, who won his Tony for Lughnasa, or just Dancing, as Sinead Cusack joked (possibly) the Broadway producers had wanted to retitle the play for its New York run.

Earlier, Afterplay was something of a masterclass of the Friel art in action. Friel imagines a chance meeting between two strangers - to each other, if not to us - Sonya Serebriakova (from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya) and Andrey Prozorov (from Three Sisters) in a cafe in Moscow in the early 1920s. Once he gets the slightly clunky (there's probably no way it couldn't be) technical exposition out of the way - "My uncle...Vanya" and "just Two Sisters now, one died" both have the unobtrusiveness of sore thumbs - we are in familiar Friel territory, a deep ache of longing and regret and loss lurking under almost every exchange of dialogue, however inconsequential the protagonists mean the conversation to be, however unrevealing of them they hope it is. Frances Barber and Niall Buggy - himself the best Vanya of his generation - were superb, guided by Garry Hynes' typically shrewd direction. The Yalta Game is Friel's version of a Chekhov short story, "Lady With Lapdog" and Patrick Mason's production, with Rebecca O'Mara and Risteard Cooper, was also exemplary.

[dave 81]

Sorry, no reviews. But, received a nice booklet in the mail from Atlantic Theater Company with some nice reviews for their '09-2010 season. I honestly don't remember subscribing to anything when we saw the "lieutenant" in '06, and I actually didn't know William H. Macy, (one of my favorite actors,) was one of the founders.

I think I'd like to see "Gabriel."