Operas

Coraline

June 24, 2018

Show:             Coraline
Type:              Opera 
Venue:            The Barbican
Date:               Wednesday 4thApril 2018
Seen with:     Tout Seule
Ticket:           £57
View:              Middle of the stalls, so pretty darn good!


Cast:             The Royal Opera; the woman playing the Mother/Other Mother had lost her voice so she walked the role and it was sung by another lady off to the side of the stage. I think they said something about her learning the music in an afternoon or a day or something like that. In any case, it was very impressive.



Verdict:         Coraline was one of the shows that I was so excited for that I didn’t really do any research, I just bought a ticket. It booked out pretty quickly, so I ended up paying more than I usually would for the ticket, but did end up with a pretty great seat.

I struggled with the show at first, but that’s completely on me. See, for some reason, I went in expecting the same or similar music to the Coralinefilm, which is composed by the wonderful Bruno Coulais. He composed some of my favourite soundtracks, not justCoraline, but Les Choristes, The Secret of Kells, and Song of the Sea. His music is full of children’s choirs, made up languages,  building harmonies, and it’s melodic. Above all, it’s melodic. It may contain strange and unsettling melodies at times, but it’s melodic.

The Royal Opera’s Coralinewas not melodic. Thanks to one of my past students (Hi Glenn!) who insisted on doing his exam program on music one year, I know enough to say that the music was dissonant.  Which is to say, sounds that don’t seem to fit together and kind of sound wrong together. Sounds that you want to move or change so that they do sound right together. At least, that’s my understanding. If anyone would like to offer up a more clear explanation, please feel free!

Anyway, the music was dissonant, the whole way through. Which was fine, and I certainly see why – Coralineis a dissonant kind of story. It did just take me till part way into the first act to get my head around it. Once I did, I could see exactly how and why decisions about the composition had been made. And I enjoyed it, I did! The set was great, swinging from one side to the other to let Coraline through the doors. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible were very funny, played to the hilt by their actors even though one of them was suffering from a cold at the time. The Other Mother’s hand was properly terrifying when it got severed and came out to chase Coraline around the room. The mirror world in which the other children were trapped was appropriately spooky, and the stage effects showed a professionalism and restraint that comes from an experienced production team, which is always nice to see.

And yet… I don’t know, I just felt that there was more that could’ve been done. If the music had switched from dissonant to melodic when Coraline entered the Other Mother’s world it would’ve been an appropriately eerie touch. Obviously Coraline couldn’t have been played by a younger singer, the role was too challenging for that, but the result was someone playing a child who didn’t appear to have ever interacted with a child in real life. Every stereotypical pout and stomped foot pulled just a little at that feeling of reality that a really good show maintains effortlessly.

Overall, a very interestingproduction, and I do use that in all senses of the word. I know a lot of people took their children to see Coraline, and there were certainly a lot of children on the night that I went. I don’t know that I would’ve enjoyed it when I was a child – I don’t think I would’ve understand what they were trying to do with the music. And seeing as the Other Mother’s hand properly freaked me out at 28, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t see it as a child after all…

Plays

Mary Stuart

May 14, 2018




Show:                 Mary Stuart (by Friedrich Schiller, adapted/directed by Robert Icke)
Type:                  Play
Venue:               Duke of York’s Theatre
Date:                   31stMarch 2018
Seen with:         Tout seule
Ticket:                £22
View:                  Upper Circle

Cast:                Juliet Stevenson, Lia Williams, John Light, Carmen Munroe, Michael Byrne, Elliot Levey, David Jonsson Fray, Rudi Dharmalingam



Verdict:    

I tried, lord knows I tried, to keep my reviews and recaps of shows brief. But that is, ultimately too difficult. Particularly  when it comes to a show like Mary Stuart. So wave bye-bye to brevity, everyone, and let’s get into it.

Mary Stuart is a long play. LONG. Of the four acts, three of them (and roughly 2 hours) take place before interval. The original play was written in 1800, and has been adapted many times as stage productions, radio plays, and an opera.

Mary Stuart examines the end of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned, and eventually executed, by her cousin Elizabeth I. Apart from a fictionalised meeting between them, orchestrated by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, most of the events and timelines in the play are real, if sensationalised for the stage.

In the Almeida Theatre’s production, the parts of Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth are decided each night at the beginning of the performance, literally on the spin of a coin. Just think about that for a second. A coin spins, the camera zooms in, and one woman is raised to glory while the other walks towards her inevitable death. Given the historical context of the play, it feels eerily appropriate.

It also feels eerily appropriate for this day and age at times. In one telling scene in the first act Mary, imprisoned, rails against the irregularities of the trial that has sentenced her to death. Some of her reasons don’t hold water today - she objects to not being tried in front of a council of her ‘peers’ (as a queen, only Elizabeth herself is her peer). But to look at some of the others; evidence not being heard in court, potential false witnesses – these could be objections made about the modern legal system.

And there’s so much more;
Mortimer, a young noble with plans to free Mary from imprisonment by force, thinking his pledge of allegiance and promise of help gives him the right to Mary’s body. 
Elizabeth being physically manhandled and manipulated around the stage by her male advisors.
Elizabeth and Dudley’s rough and tumble, push-pull courtship mirrored in mockery by one of her advisors later, the first trying to convince her to save Mary and the latter trying to convince Elizabeth to kill her. 

The core of the play is the power struggle between the two queens. Mary was younger and famously beautiful, while Elizabeth was notoriously petty and jealous of other women. The two women only meet twice in the play, once during the invented ‘meeting in the woods’ and once in a sort of dream sequence towards the end, when Elizabeth is being roped into her royal regalia for the first time and Mary is being stripped down in preparation for her death.

On the night that I saw it, Juliet Stevenson played Mary and Lia Williams played Elizabeth. Both were fantastic, although I have to say that Lia William’s paranoid, egotistical, desperate Elizabeth edged out as the favourite for me.

Elizabeth, who was called a bastard longer than any of her siblings and was more true a child of Henry than any of them. It was there in her capriciousness, in the faceless phantoms that were the root of all her fears, her childishness and inability to hear anyone praised over her.

At one stage, Elizabeth signs the warrant for Mary’s death, as she was told to do by her advisors, but then gives it to her secretary (played wonderfully throughout by David Jonsson Fray) without any clear order of what to do with it, saying that she knows he will do the right thing. He is, understandably, concerned, fearing that without a clear and direct order, he’ll get blamed for whatever the outcome turns out to be. Which of course comes to pass; when one of the Lords eventually takes it from him and serves it, ordering Mary’s execution, Elizabeth is then able to blame the secretary, saying it was never her intention to execute Mary and that the order was handed over incorrectly. The Lord who served the warrant is dismissed from court. The secretary is sent to the Tower, and his death. I don’t know whether the choice to cast a young black man as the secretary was intentional, but it certainly made yet another powerful statement on the imbalances of power and the feeling of almost inevitability that goes hand in hand with helplessness.

Mary was strident at times, to where I nearly lost my feeling for her - I wondered, like Elizabeth, at the unmatchable beauty and wit that she was said to possess. But when she pulled back, when the shrieks gave way to pleas, I understood the shrieks all the more. The urgency, the lack of agency, the educated woman backed into a corner, into a death sentence she saw coming and could still do nothing to escape. 

The young man playing Mortimer was unfortunately the weak point of the play for me. He never really moved beyond juvenile, somewhat whiny, and put me in mind of every annoying, entitled young man who ever tried to mansplain my own world to me. Which may have been his intention, in which case, bravo! But he did come across as a slightly two dimensional character.

I had a brief moment at the very beginning of the play where I was positive that I knew one of the actors from something. To the point where I had to stop and check (thank you, Google!), and then text my friend in excitement at interval. Robert Dudley was played by John Light, who is in the North and Southminiseries that Steph and I watch religiously every few years. He, and the cast on the whole, were fantastic, but the two leading ladies did very much steal the show, so bravura to them. 

Mary Stuart begs the question - why would anyone ever choose to rule? And yet, the two women at the centre of the play, do. One maybe more reluctantly than the other, although for all her claiming that she wants to be free of it, Elizabeth does nothing but cling to the throne with her fingertips if needs be. 
The show must be exhausting. Mary’s role appears the more challenging at first glance, but her motivations at least stay true throughout the story. Elizabeth vacillates, something she was famous for doing in life, to the utter despair of her advisors. On stage she is constantly wringing her hands, striding around, picking imaginary lint off the clothes of her advisors. She clearly sees herself as young and desirable, and is terrified of being confronted by a younger, more beautiful Mary. In reality, her jealousy destroyed more than just her Stuart cousin - her Grey cousins, the sisters of Lady Jane Grey, were similarly hated for their youth and beauty. So too were Catherine Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn and (possibly) King Henry, making her Elizabeth’s cousin and potential half-sister, and Catherine’s daughter Lettice. Elizabeth was a woman not so much scared of her mortality, but of having the proof of it presented in front of her.

The final scene of the play is haunting – Mary, stripped down to her shift, her eyes fixed on heaven, a martyr in the making, and Elizabeth, laced into a gown in which she can barely move, her face smeared with thick, white paint. Mary is the one going to her death, but it is Elizabeth who ends the play abandoned, alone in the middle of the stage, trapped, like a pale corpse in a golden dress.


Operas

Iolanthe

April 20, 2018

Show:                 Iolanthe (by Arthur Gilbert and W. S. Sullivan)
Type:                  Opera
Venue:                London Coliseum
Date:                   Saturday 7thApril 2018
Seen with:         Tout seule
Ticket:                 £20
View:                Few rows back on the balcony, so not too bad really, but slightly impaired by very active children in the family sitting in the row in front

Cast:                 English National Opera: Samantha Price (Iolanthe), Ellie Laugharne (Phyllis), Yvonne Howard (Fairy Queen), Marcus Farnsworth (Strephon), Andrew Shore (Lord Chancellor)




Verdict:           If The Birthday Party is a primer for Theatre of the Absurd, Iolanthe is a primer for opera. The official jury is probably out on whether Gilbert and Sullivan’s works are ‘comic operas’ (as they referred to them) or ‘operettas’ (the European form of light opera that G&S disliked for being too risqué). However, in comparison to G&S shows such as Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, Iolanthe plays more as a straight opera. Comic, yes, but on a grand (operatic?) scale that Pirates and Mikado don’t really set out to be. Musically, this is some of G&S’s best work, being composed somewhere in the middle of their time together. Which can turn out to be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a great way to dip your toe into more opera-like music and familiarise yourself before you head off to see something like La Traviata (English National Opera’s other production running concurrently). But if you’ve come to a G&S production expecting just fluff and frivolity, you may actually end up leaving disappointed.
All of G&S’s works are satirical, but in Iolanthe they really go after the British parliament, the House of Lords in particular. Essentially, the peers are bumbling idiots all in love with one young beautiful woman (of course) who is a Ward in Chancery (??? – appears to mean a ward of the state but under the guardianship of the Lord Chancellor particularly?) and therefore can’t marry the man she loves (a simple shepherd) without their permission. Which they don’t give.
Oh, and the shepherd’s mother is a fairy. Who was banished from the fairy kingdom for loving a mortal.
Oh, and when the beautiful girl sees the shepherd hugging his mother (who still looks young herself because she is, of course, a fairy), she assumes he’s cheating on her, so she promises to marry one of the Lords instead.
Oh, and the Lord Chancellor turns out to be the mortal that the fairy mother fell in love with, and therefore the shepherd’s father.
Oh, and at the end all the peers and fairies fall in love and suddenly grow wings and fly away to fairyland.
Just a regular night at the theatre.

The fairies were fantastically costumed, somewhere between grown-up versions of the Gumnut Babies or Shirley Barber’s Fairies and what you get when a dress-up box explodes. And they moved around the stage like Disney World princesses on crack. Staging and blocking in a G&S production is the first thing to remind you that what you’re watching is a parody. It comes out in the lyrics too, of course, and the music, if you’re familiar enough with the source material to catch the joke, but G&S knew their audiences, and they knew people need to see funny before they hear funny.

The sight gags started with a flamingo coyly peeking its head around the proscenium arch as the first thing on stage, before being abruptly pulled off, and continued on from there in pretty much the same vein. During the very sweet lovers’ duet in act one, a pair of black-morph-suited stagehands placed prop sheep around the stage and then removed them, all while feeling their way sightlessly around and bumping into each other. When the peers appeared (a-peered?), they did so in a steam engine, complete with steam, which broke through the backdrop and left it lying on the stage in tatters. One of them was recognisably dressed as Boris Johnson, down to the bumbling walk and blond mop wig. He even returned to the stage on a Boris-bike at one stage. I’m sure there were a few more gags that I missed, not being a native Brit. Probably like everyone watching Thor: Ragnarok who wasn’t an Aussie or Kiwi. But a special mention has to go to the young man playing the Lord Chancellor’s page – during one memorable song in the second act he threw his body around the stage (or was thrown) with such abandon that it was both hilarious and mildly horrifying.

The orchestra received the loudest applause of the evening, and for good reason – the music was flawless. The acoustics in the Coliseum are fantastic, and sitting through the overture in darkness was an experience in and of itself.

Speaking of music, G&S parodied both Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Wagner’s Ring cycle for the fairies and the Fairy Queen respectively. Not being a fan of Wagner, I didn’t pick up on the second, but I had distinct little moments of confusion throughout the show that I’ve since realised were related to the Mendelssohn connections. I’ve loved the music from Ein Sommernachtstraum since performing snippets of it (in English) with my choir as a teenager. During Iolanthe, I kept hearing little things that made me expect someone to launch into ‘Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt!’ (or, as we the chorus sang, ‘Philomele with melody, sing in our sweet lullaby!’).

Although most were strong vocally, some of the cast struggled with diction at times, which was a shame. It did mean that you had to rely on the surtitles at times, even though the performance was in English. But as that was really the only (small) complaint to be made, it was overall a very enjoyable performance!

Notes:               Iolanthe was the first new theatre in the world to be lit by electric lighting instead of gas.


Plays

The Birthday Party

March 28, 2018


Show:                 The Birthday Party
Type:                  Play
Venue:                The Harold Pinter Theatre
Date:                  Tuesday 28th March 2018 (Matinee)
Seen with:         Tout seule
Ticket:                £22
View:                  ‘Restricted view’ but not too bad – able to ignore the small column a few rows                   ahead and almost ignore the head of the tall man in front




Cast:                   Toby Jones, Zoe Wanamaker, Peter Wight, Stephen Mangan, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Pearl Mackie

Verdict:         In my very, very (veryveryvery) humble opinion, The Birthday Party is Theatre of the Absurd made accessible to a wider audience. Although audiences and critics didn’t seem to agree when it was first staged in London in 1958 – I’m pretty sure it closed after less than a week. I’ve also seen it described as Comedy of Menace, but I’m going to stick to absurd, for the simple fact that it is. It’s absurd. And yet it is accessible. It follows a familiar 3-act structure, the action takes place in a recognisable setting (a boarding house at the sea side), the characters appear functional and properly formed at first glance, and you feel for almost the entire first act that the play is going somewhere, that it’s going to resolve in the expected manner.
Putting on the Speech Pathologist hat for a moment, it almost reminds me of patients with fluent aphasia – they use a lot of words, but since they don’t use content words they don’t really say anything. The Birthday Party almost appears to be a functional and comprehensible story on the surface, but when you look closer you realise that everything in it – characters, plot, dialogue – is untethered and incomprehensible.
The show itself was fantastically acted, particularly Stephen Mangan, who was eerily charismatic and creepy at the same time, and Zoe Wanamaker, who was the addlepated Meg right down to every twitch of her fingertips. The staging was also just great – the lighting that so fluidly showed the passage of time through the day, the windows and doors and half-glimpsed rooms that allowed the ambient noise to filter through to the audience. Very much enjoyed!

Notes:                 Fun fact – The Birthday Party was originally staged at the Lyric Hammersmith, which is just up the road from me and *technically* my local theatre. Isn’t it a lovely sounding thing, to have a local theatre?



The List

The List

March 28, 2018

The play's the thing...and also the musical...and the opera, and the Ballet, and...you get the idea.

London is a playgoer’s delight, and I fully intend to make the most of it. To that end, ‘I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list…’

Plays
  • The Birthday Party
  • Mary Stuart
  • Long Day’s Journey Into Night - missed it!
  • Fanny and Alexander - missed it!
  • The Play That Goes Wrong
  • Lady Windemere’s Fan
  • An Ideal Husband
  • The Moderate Soprano
  • The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Uncle Vanya
  • 3 Women
  • Killer Joe
  • King Lear
  • Life and Fate
  • One For Sorrow
  • Red
  • Tartuffe
  • The Height of the Storm

Musicals
  • Hamilton
  • The Rink
  • The King and I
  • Company
  • Kiss Me Kate

Ballet
  • Rumplestiltskin
  • Sleeping Beauty
  • Les Ballets Trockadero Programmes A and B
  • Akram Khan’s Giselle - missed it!
  • La Bayadere
  • The Concert
  • Les Patineurs
  • Winter Dreams
  • The Firebird

Opera
  • Iolanthe
  • The Mikado
  • Coraline
  • Don Giovanni
  • TriOperas
  • Carmen
  • Hansel and Gretel
  • La Fille de Regiment

Other
  • The Grift
  • Ed Sheeran