jude law as 'hamlet' - donmar west end at wyndam's

Creative Team

Director: Michael Grandage
Designer: Christopher Oram
Lighting Designer: Neil Austin
Composer & Sound Designer: Adam Cork

Hamlet: Jude Law

Polonius: Ron Cook

Claudius: Kevin R. McNally

Gertrude: Penelope Wilton

 

 

very still & clean & clear putting all emphasis on language

jude law's Hamlet works as a character easy to feel sympathy with as he processes through depression ~ denial ~ fury ~ impetuous tenderness with his mother ~ to cool well-bred alpha-mastery. He is always credible but never dangerous.

 

Fresh insight comes in the 'get thee to nunnery'' scene when it suddenly seems obvious that he is saying to Ophelia everything he has repressed saying to his mother, and this makes his avowed love for Ophelia at her graveside more believable than usual.

 

Ron Cook's Polonius is fine. Penelope Wilton's Gertrude manages to shine through her horrible business woman's woman's suit costume. Kevin R. McNally's Claudius too is crafted with sureness. Sadly the younger leads are all thin, and most ruinously thin vocally. Ophelia's mad scene was too pretty and much much too prettily sung (Tara Fitzgerald is still the only actor i have been convinced by in this scene).

 

There is no ambiguity and no emotional force in this version and I drifted out a number of times - not so much from boredom as through distraction: the fullest experience this show gave me came from Shakespeare's words, here are given a full invigoration so that the vitality of the words and the images they conjure combined with the wide openness of the  space design and the held still energy and focus in the performances kept making a head full of rich imaginings that took me away from what was happening on stage.  

 

And what emerges above all else is the apparent straight-forwardness of Hamlet - the character makes perfect sense and it is hard after watching this show to remember why or how countless essays have been written about his bewildering complexities. In this end this reduces the play to a series of stills and a more prosaic domestic drama than it should be. 

i will go back and watch again peter brook's 'hamlet' with adrian lester and try and figure out why the held energy in this startles and vibrates even out of the screen, whereas the apparently same kind of energy in this production arrives clear and fully formed and then evaporates almost without trace...

 

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso - Romeo Castellucci

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

Romeo Castellucci

Societas Raffaello Sanzio

http://www.raffaellosanzio.org/

Spill Festival 2009

http://www.spillfestival.com/index.php?plid=4

at Barbican Theatre

Presented as three separate events – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, Romeo Castellucci has dismantled, exposed and transformed Dante’s epic text into a truly lived experience.
Using a profoundly visual style, Castellucci creates a deeply unsettling world forcing you into a hauntingly beautiful nightmare, engaging all your senses in an experience you are unlikely to forget. This is highly visceral theatre, full of provocative experiences not for the faint-hearted.

Inferno traditionally tells the epic tale of a struggle between heaven and hell, between God and the devil and between the living and the dead. Castellucci transports this story to the here and now, placing into question the future of humanity.

Depicting images of family life, Purgatorio is uncomfortably set in a fraught domestic space where the use of vivid imagination protects against a tormenting reality.
In an intimate installation, Paradiso creates the ultimate frame where small groups of viewers are sent on a journey to try and find paradise.

Credits:
Direction, set design, lighting and costumes by Romeo Castellucci
Original music by Scott Gibbons
Choreography by Cindy Van Acker and Romeo Castellucci

The work of Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is considered by artists and audiences worldwide to be highly influential in contemporary performance. Having created a new non-narrative theatre, a visual language that directly challenges traditional forms, Castellucci’s visionary work is uncompromising and always surprising. Making impressive large-scale work that questions our entire human condition, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso has a company of over 60.

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has previously been presented in London as part of LIFT; Tragedia Endogonidia at Laban (2004), Genesi at Sadler’s Wells (2001) and Giulio Cesare at Southbank Centre (1999), also at Battersea Arts Centre withBuchettino (2001).

Having been performed as part of the Festival D’Avignon 2008, this is the UK premiere of Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (bite09 SPILL Festival of Performance) and one of the few opportunities to see the complete trilogy performed together.

Inferno

"Inferno" with each of these digits displayed back-to-front 

gatewaying out to us: it is us who are in this hell. each united 

letter is spluttering white light and soundscape of electrical 

shorting and buzzing is loud and abrasive.

throughout this piece the sound provides its centre moving 

through dangerous electrical sounds and loud noises of 

violence to choral sweetness.

one by one each of the "Inferno" units are removed leaving 

only the framing " " which remain for the duration at each 

side of the stage.

Romeo Castellucci comes on stage, announces who he is 

and is dressed in protective soft armour as eight large 

alsatian dogs are brought on and and chained across the 

front of the stage. loud barking offstage and by the dogs 

in front of us. one by one three dogs run on to the stage 

an attack Romeo, holding on to him. we have to take the 

image of aggression and animal attack while filtering out 

the happy tail wagging by the dogs.

a large black cube slowing arrives in the centre of the stage, 

a huge black sail billowing above it. the black drapes are 

pulled up to reveal a cubed crèche of toddlers happily encased 

and playing.

Andy Warhol walks slowly on with a polaroid, takes a picture of 

us, turns to look at the children, turns back to us and slowly 

falls in on himself.

The children are re-covered and removed, a shiny skull is left 

behind which Andy Warhol takes and places beneath a huge 

mirrored swinging wall, which lowers slowly on to break it like 

a nut.

A boy with a basketball, each bounce amplified to terrifying 

sounds, a sense of something else behind him

A great sea of people with their different coloured clothes 

slowly pout across the stage, fall down and wash as one 

mass backwards while differently aged individuals step 

forward to hold the ball replacing the boy at the front. the 

final older woman appears to greedily eat the ball 

accompanied by sickening sounds of gluttonous eating.

And so it drifts through a series of images, always slowed 

and certain and seemingly endless: 

a series of loving tableaux replaced later by a series of 

mimed throat slashings, the slow climb one by one on to 

the returned black cube, then the arms spread wide in 

some sort of universal supplication only to fall backwards, 

again and again, backgrounded by a projected list of 

Andy Warhol's works with their dates, a back projection 

of the names of deceased members of Societas that 

seemed sentimentally discordant with the rest of the piece, 

a grand piano is set alight and we watch it burn

a white horse the arrives as the sea of people are rewound 

slowly back from whence they came to then be poured 

over with vivid red blood.

and then the return of Andy Warhol to take another 

polaroid of us and then to disappear into the wreck of 

a smashed car.

somehow while it is all interesting enough the 

accumulative effect is of a scenographic hypermarket 

with the chance to view what's hot in this season's range 

- a bit too look at me look at me. but a treat for all 

that to get theatre this different from our more 

usual literary plays...

Purgatorio

Paradiso

after a long queue we are let in to the space to see a huge 

dazzlingly white cube structure, a small entrance in one 

corner into another smaller white light cubed space, 

around black hole entrance into darkness. inside this final 

space is first the sound of falling water and as eyes adjust 

we can see we are in a larger black space with a waterfall 

cascading down the back wall. there are other sounds too 

and looking up we see the naked upper torso of a man at 

the top of the waterfall apparently struggling - to free 

himself? to communicate? - evidently unhappy and caught 

in this perpetuity, and yet dangerously precarious suspended 

above this black waterfall: misery in his stuckedness but were 

he to get himself free the drop would destroy him. 

this is an apparently small piece but absolutely perfectly formed 

- the fusion of image and sound burn a permanent imprint so 

that - unusually for me - i can still easily re-summon up the 

remembered pictures days afterwards. this is a vision of life 

ever after that is oppressive in its small stuck foreverness, 

somehow all the more plausible for its absence of fire and 

brimstone or colour and movement. a superbly realised perhaps 

even heightened by our having to make a special trip to the 

barbican and queue for some time for this 5minute moment.

*** Kinkan Shonen + Toki (Sankai Juku)

19 November 2008

Kinkan Shonen (Kumquat Seed)

23 November 2008

Toki (Time)

Sankai Juku

Direction, Choreography and Design ~~~~~~~~~~ Ushio Amagatsu

Dancers

Ushio Amagatsu (toki)

Semimaru (toki)

Sho Takeuchi

Akhito Ichihara

Taiyo Tochiaki

Ichiro Haseqawa

Dai Matsuoka

Nobuyoshi Asai

Sadlers Wells

http://www.sadlerswells.com/show/Sankai-Juku

A soldier - he comes towards us - salutes - eats sand - grins eats sand again - grins again - eats sand

Four men in long skirts and masks of artful disfigurement dance together - their hands are huge and sometimes claws - then they are entwined together almost loving - then they are a gyrating diagonal line - now they are still gyrating bare bottoms in our faces - sexy rude funny subversive

A man and a peacock locked together face to beak come towards us - slow - they are one entity - then they are two separates dancing together - then they are man and ornamental bird the cock perched on his back - then they are apart: the dancer sinuously moving the bird still and watching - he will stay present for the rest of the show

Then another three dancers arrive so we are given a couple a single man and a man and a peacock - near naked the couple show us fighters wrestlers determined and cruel then increasingly tender until they are lovers - the single two men find each other and become a couple - counterpointing fighting with the other couple's loving and vice versa

A dancer comes on squashed into a small box version of himself - his face widely pleased and comic

A near-naked man hangs upside down slowly turning from a golden kite triangle of against vivid blue….

intoxicating
mesmerising
transcendental
breathtaking
moving ….

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/SankaiJuku?authkey=Gv1sRgCKaouu-v1MK8-gE##

Faure' Requiem (Bradenburg Sinfonia & Whitehall Choir)

Faure' Requiem at St Martin the Fields

wonderful treat in the newly refurbished st martin in the fields with its fabulous new window

as well as the requiem, the two other highlights were the Cantique de Jean Racine (Faure') and the Air (Andante religioso) from the Holberg Suite (Greig)

'madame de sade'

Comtesse de Saint-Fond ~~~~~~~ Frances Barber

Baronesse de Simaine ~~~~~~~~~ Deborah Findlay

Charlotte ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jenny Galloway

Madame de Montreuil ~~~~~~~~~ Judi Dench

Anne ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fiona Button

Renee, Madame de Sade ~~~~~~~ Rosamund Pike

Director ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Michale Grandage

Designer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Christopher Oram

Lighting Designer ~~~~~~~~~~~ Neil Austin

Composer & Sound Designer ~~~~ Adam Cork

Video Art & Projection Designer ~ Lorna Heavy

Act I

1772 The salon in Madame de Montreuil's house. Autumn.

Act 2

1778 The same. September.

Act 3

1790 The same. April, nine months sonce the outbreak of the French Revolution.

A difficult play - intellectual in its preponderance of words, ideas, argument - and wonderful for this, and for bringing us something non-naturalistic and this good in the west end. Annoying that a lot of the critics seem incapable of reviewing the actual piece rather than trotting out their different lists of what theatre should be as if a) their tastes are that authoritative and b) that theatre should be just one thing. (e.g. Susannah Clapp’s requirement for ‘fast pace’, and ‘women to be like women’ whatever that might mean.)

So this is an expressionist piece much closer to Brechtian theatre than the usual naturalistic fare. Played against an opulent gold-walled salon that shines and reflects wealth and purposelessness
Lighting, colours (browns to greens to icy metallic blues) and projections are used expressionistically. Played out between six articulate certain women who all arrive in impossibly ornate and heavy architectural concoctions to position themselves to present their views of the matter and who all easily breach the confines of their character types.

The women arrive and place themselves and are mostly still - Frances Barber's character getting the only real action from her whip play. All are strong and full in their characters, and listening to them reason and debate their different certainties from such fine actors who all bring such total presence makes the show compelling. And the substance of the piece is made stark and unremitting by the absolute absence of editorial comment - there are no easy indulgences of knowing who or what is right or wrong here: hear the arguments and make up your own mind. Listening to what is said in the onslaught of words is as problematic as the Marquis de Sade himself - overly ornamental sex & violations or philosophical testings on the nature of devotion? The inevitable decay of an aristocracy redolent with its own pointlessness or a new libertarian emancipation? Salacious gossip-mongering or high-minded argument?

This is a show of dense & relentless words counterbalanced by performances of crystal clarity and vibrating stillness masquerading as a richly made flummery of period opulence.

Mishima apparently wanted to make something that showed 'fire through ice', and to a greater extent this is what we get: the burning passions and pulsations of craving control are in every case perfectly glazed in icy stillness and religiously constructed manners.

And difficult in a personal sense perhaps in its investigation of a woman under the ruinous spell of a potently toxic man, not unlike a woman I know. And actually in this case (too?) it turns out not to be him she is so fettered to, but her own construction of him as a symbol of holiness which his actual presence could only shatter ...

cf. Chrstopher Harts's Sunday Times review

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article5934217.ece

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/MadameDeSade?authkey=Gv1sRgCKr55vPEm6WJqgE#

'fall of the peacock throne' (wildbird)

Wildbird presents
Fall of the Peacock Throne
by Chris Lee
Southwark Playhouse
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/whatson_detail.php?record_number=114
March 5th 2009 - March 28th 2009
Show starts: 7.30pm
Running time: 100mins


Directed by - Chris Lee
Multimedia - Graeme Roger
Sound Design - Dave Martin
Lighting Design - Ali Ross

Creative Team
Directed by - Chris Lee
Multimedia - Graeme Roger
Sound Design - Dave Martin
Lighting Design - Ali Ross
http://www.wildbird.org.uk/

Innovative new Highland theatre company, Wildbird, presents the world premiere of Fall of the Peacock Throne.
Raymond Chandler meets Greek tragedy in this political thriller charting the story of the 1953 Iranian coup alongside that of Alexander’s invasion of Persia in 333BC.
Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution the play depicts the moment when fledging Iranian democracy was strangled at birth in favour of British oil interests and US cold war strategy. This is one of the biggest skeletons in the western closet and the root cause of the so-called ‘war on terror’, a defining event that lies at the heart of western fear of the Islamic world.
Intimate in its design and execution, but epic in reach, Fall of the Peacock Throne tackles issues of conscience, empire, freedom, and power. This is a story everyone should know, whose timeless echoes thunder in our ears, demanding to be heard.
Wildbird are a new contemporary performance and multi arts company from Moray in the north east of Scotland. The artistic team was originally brought together to work on National Theatre of Scotland’s Crucible and Macbeth projects and formed Wildbird in 2006. Wildbird set out to make work that is epic, political and truly theatrical, tackling difficult and important subjects. Fall of the Peacock Throne is their second full length theatre production.

We walk into a hazy disorientating space cut through with laser beams. A projection says Tehran 1953 and when this simple sign is multiplied around the walls and the great vaulted brick ceiling we feel like we are not just getting information but inhabiting Tehran 1953. After this the film & lighting effects are more cosmetic diversions than integrated into the performance.

Athena arrives as the chorus - supplying narration, commentary and with us witness to the dual stories of opposing powers - FBI man Kermit Roosevelt vs. Mossadeq and Alexander vs. Darius in a much earlier coup. Athena is given power to apparently manipulate too - both by incitement to violent domination and in her apparent arrangements of battles. A pity then that the only female character has to be such a stereotypical sex symbol.

The play is mostly words and there are a lot of them. It seems amateur in the old fashioned sense of people doing it because they cared altho unfortunately the acting has too much of an amateurish quality and needed a much stronger performance style - more in the Brechtian mould and less or much better focused naturalism. But you sense great integrity in the writing- we trusted the material and the ethics that come with it. And it is most certainly a story that wants telling.

Playing it traverse does not harm it at all, but it didn’t add anything either: the adversarial tension of the two opposing forces wasn't revealed any more sharply in this stand-off spatial arrangement in the ways it was used so effectively in scotland thing and russian one.
The show remains Earthbound by perhaps too much stuff and too many words and probably too little distance by its writer to fully make the performance soar. But the material is good enough to easily imagine another director or company with greater objective distance giving it fuller flight.

Post Show Talk with Chris Lee
Script a combination of real stuff and stuff I've written
Also cf. 'Counter Coup' by Kermit Roosevelt

This coup was the first prototype american coup -there have been 36 since then

Iran was riddled with MI6 at this time, the British had only recently been kicked out

One of the things I wanted to explore living is Aberdeenshire where most families are employed by BP The most important thing I wanted you to get was that Mossadeq stayed true to his principles

For the last decade most plays seem to be about two people or stage talking about their feelings but I don’t get out to theatre much

I wanted to look at the idea of power - power as a moral force. But also about leadership. But also it’s about empire as well. And also to address the issue that our politicians stand up and say one thing but do another and lie about it.

Meant to make it feel like a film noi with Athena as femme fatale
The battle scene film from Cecil B de Mille's ‘Ten Commandments’

Inspiration was wanting to say something about the Iraq war. And I’ve known Ali since I was born and l wanted to honour that. Wrote the first bits in 2000. and its the 3Oth anniversary of the revolution this year. If you didn't know this story you could be fooled into fighting a war thinking it was ‘a just war’.

For these things to be done and then swept under the carpet isn't right so we need to tell stories about it.

Churchill’s memo to Eisenhower: ‘After we've got rid of Mossadeq I won't touch your oil in Saudi Arabia if you don't touch mine in Iraq’.
Mossadeq’s last speech 'They will say about me...’ are all things they did say about him in the commons.

'La Ronde' (The Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre of Tbilisi)

'La Ronde'
by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Levan Tsuladze
In Georgian with a live English translation
The Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre of Tbilisi
at Arcola
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/?action=showtemplate&sid=327

Tsuladze last charmed London audiences with his production of Faust as part of the Gate Theatre’s East Meets West Festival in 2002. Here he makes a bold interpretation of Schniztler's classic, employing his particular brand of satirical humour and warmth to convey the absurd tragedy of an indulgence in loveless sexuality.
This production is the latest in a series of Georgian Theatrical pieces that have had enormous impact on British audiences. The Georgian tradition is renowned for its inventiveness and romanticism. In a reaction perhaps to the tumultuous history of Georgia from its recent confrontation with Russia to the civil war of the 90s, Soviet oppression and two hundred years of sitting at an important international crossroads, Georgians really do know how to find humour in our crazy capacity to needlessly and repeatedly inflict pain upon ourselves. Rarely bleak, this production exudes warmth and a profound sense of humanity and will amuse and delight in equal measure.

this was such a treat of pure joyous exquisitely crafted theatre by this expert Georgian company. the levels were too low to hear a lot of the the simultaneous translation being overdubbed in microphones by two voice actors sitting to one side and having their own little interplay, but the physical performances were so clear that it was easy to read what what happening in the dance from loveless coupling to the next. the period costumes looked especially lush and expensive in the knocked back (and knocked up) set which of black panels which would slide on a rail to reveal the bare and perfect essentials of a new scene, superbly illuminated: the rain for the prostitute and the soldier to play in, the set of doorways to view the parade of strolling people, the bath for the young gentleman and the maid, the enormous brass bed for the young gentleman and the wife, the chaise longue for the wife and the husband (with the soldier at their window), the artist's studio for the writer and the young miss, the dressing room for the actress and the count. and a motif of butterflies seen only by those in moments of feeling free and happy: the prostitute and the count in a great flock of them at the end.

my only gripe was the space - our first visit to Arcola and it's quite a schlep (home at 1am) and for this setting the sight lines were appalling so a lot of us sitting in the middle missed whole characters obscured by the central iron beam, and nothing was visible at ground level (and as this was a show about people having sex there was quite a lot of that!)