troisoiseaux | Entries tagged with theater: filmed

Went to a National Theatre Live screening of the Donmar Warehouse Macbeth starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, which was very... whispery. The whole ~thing~ with this production was that the (live) audience wore headphones that piped in the actors' voices and atmospheric sound design - in the porter's scene, which was not just kept in but added to, with the drunken porter riffing off the audience, he joked about how they'd "paid sixty quid to see a radio drama" - so most soliloquies were delivered sotto voce and, in the NTL filmed version, with the camera tight on the actor's face. Super stripped-down staging, in a tiny black box theater with a white platform for the stage and a sort of glass wall behind it - much of the dialogue in scenes that didn't include Macbeth or Lady M. was delivered by actors sitting in a row behind the glass - and, besides Lady M.'s white dress, everyone was dressed in a variation of grey sweater, black kilt. Also a very Scottish production— everyone but Jumbo's Lady M. and (iirc?) the one child actor had Scottish accents, and a trio of live musicians played celtic folk music.

Macbeth is probably the Shakespeare play I've seen the most productions of, but it tends to leave me feeling cold - disconnected, I guess? - and I think I've figured out why: most of the productions I've seen have cast Very Famous Actors in the main roles (Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga; Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma; David Tennant and Cush Jumbo— side note, what's up with the white man as Macbeth/woman of color as Lady M. casting trend?) and so I'm never not aware that I'm watching [insert actor here] Doing Macbeth...? Which is not to say that I didn't appreciate watching David Tennant Doing Macbeth. He was great, especially after the witches' second prophesy, when he played Macbeth (Macbennant?) with the loose-limbed confidence of a man who is delusions-of-grandeur-level convinced he literally cannot lose; the moment his performance sent a chill of oh, he's crazy crazy down my spine was his curt delivery of "cure her of that", when the doctor informs him of Lady M's mental illness— even more than how he then physically attacked the doctor when he tries to explain that, no, it doesn't work that way.

( Various staging details )

Spent the weekend watching Angels In America, Tony Kushner's two-part, collectively seven-hour tour de force of a play about the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan era through the interconnected lives of six New Yorkers; this was the West End revival with Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn and Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter. God, what a play. And god, the stagecraft of this production— the Angel is played by actress Amanda Lawrence and a half-obscured crew of three(?), two individually puppeting each of the Angel's enormous wings and one(?) who lifted Lawrence herself, and at one point in Part Two: Perestroika, there's a "flying" scene in which Lawrence, the multiperson angel-wing-puppet crew, and Garfield are all lifted into the air by flight harness. (A scene that, according to one of the "fun facts" during the NTAH recording's one-minute intermissions, took four months to rehearse.) The set itself was like... a series of shadow boxes, these minimalist tableau sets that were moved on and off the stage in a way I never quite wrapped my head around - beyond strategic lighting/shadow doing a lot of work - because the stage had a rotating platform, but also trap doors(?) large enough for entire set pieces to be raised & lowered from it, and then towards the end of Part Two there's a scene where all the lights go up and you see the stage in itself and any sense I had of the physical space they were working with went right out the window and just. The magic of theater, baby!

I've been seeing gifs of this production - Andrew Garfield's scenes, mostly - for years, and Andrew Garfield was in fact fantastic, but so was literally everyone in it; I was especially impressed by Denise Gough as Harper, the falling-apart wife of Russell Tovey's closeted gay Mormon Roy Cohn protegé Joe. I also hadn't osmosised from the gifs and the snippets of script I'd encountered how... liminal it is, full of ghosts and hallucinations, with all of the actors playing multiple roles and scenes overlapping on stage. I've been meaning to listen to the full-cast audiobook (with the 2018 Broadway revival cast, almost entirely the same as this one but with Lee Pace instead of Tovey) for, again, years, but I'm so glad I actually watched it instead.

Watched Young Marx (Bridge Theatre, 2017), which is kind of like if Hamilton was about Karl Marx, except not a musical and more cheeky than sentimental. But there was a duel, and an affair— the plot was basically "did you know that Karl Marx's personal life was a mess?", although from my Wikipedia dive afterwards, it seems like they took creative license with the details— and the loss of a son, and revolutionary meetings, and the writing of a historically significant work, so the comparison isn't not apt. Really enjoyed this! I don't think I've seen Rory Kinnear (Marx) in a role that let him be as loose and funny as this one - he tends to play buttoned-up types? - but he was great; I didn't know of Oliver Chris (Engels) before NTaH, but I've seen him in a few shows now - as Orsino in Twelfth Night and Oberon (role-swapped with Titania) in A Midsummer's Night Dream - and he was also great.

Watched Prima Facie (Harold Pinter Theatre, 2022), a harrowing one-woman play with Jodie Comer as a defense barrister who finds herself experiencing the legal system from a different angle, and questioning the system she'd always believed in, after she is the victim of a sexual assault. I can see why Comer won both an Olivier and a Tony for this. As a random detail that stuck out: I don't have a great ear for different English accents, but I could tell that Comer kept slipping between two of them - her character, Tessa, is a London barrister from working-class Liverpool - as both intentional code-switching and as a facade dropping in moments of high emotion, which was a nice touch.

Watched Underdog: the Other Other Bronte (National Theatre, 2024), which was especially interesting to watch with

osprey_archer's review in mind because I was coming at it from a completely different background: I love Jane Eyre, but I'm otherwise a total casual when it comes to the Brontës - it's only a slight exaggeration to say any preconception I had was just that one Hark! A Vagrant comic - and so I was perhaps more open to being sold on Underdog's take on the Brontë sisters and their respective literary legacies. It's also just a very fun play to watch! Great energy from the main actresses, clever use of a small ensemble cast playing both bit parts and Greek chorus and of weaving scenes from the Brontës' works into the narrative about their lives, and very fun effects. (I liked the one where, when the sisters send their first works off to publishers, they put their manuscripts into a basket that's pulled up out of view, only for the rejection letters to literally rain down.) What Osprey's review had not prepared me for was to be emotionally wrecked by the last ten minutes or so: ( ... )

Watched As You Like It (National Theatre, 2016), which was charming. I've seen this play before, but even beyond the fact that particular production was a Beatles jukebox musical, it was cool to see what the two stagings did differently. The 2023 STC production tried to make it make sense by grounding it in a particular time (1960s) and place, while this production was a very vibes-based staging: for example, the 2023 one played Duke Frederick's court as a sleazy Vegas club with a wrestling show for entertainment/profit; this production also went the obvious WWE-style wrestling route for Orlando's fight with Charles the Wrestler, but set it inexplicably in the middle of an open-plan office, because why not. The set was very cool! When the action shifted from the court to the forest of Arden, the orderly rows of desks and chairs became a giant's mobile of furniture hanging from the ceiling. Celia stole the show in this one - with the melancholy Jaques as a close second, particularly for his dramatic "kill me now" interpretative dance during Amiens' song - but I was also surprised and delighted to recognize some of the actors in smaller roles: Fra Fee (one of the revolutionaries in 2012 Les Mis) as one of Duke Senior's courtiers-in-exile and Siobhán McSweeney (Sister Michael in Derry Girls) as the shepherdess Audrey (whose courtship by Touchstone is, I must say, much cuter when done as a duet of the Beatles' "When I'm 64").

Watched Present Laughter (Old Vic, 2019) with Andrew Scott as a flamboyant light comedy actor in the 1930s careening towards a mid-life crisis and a love ~~triangle~~ heptagon, which is in fact a great role for Scott, who does "guy trying to mask that he's achingly lonely" very well. (Interesting to watch this one after Vanya, since there's some similar... core to Scott's version of this character, Garry, and his Ivan.) This production genderswapped a couple of characters (and, presumably, some of the references to Garry's past flings?) to make it queerer: in the original, both Garry and his manager Morris have an affair with Joanna, the wife of Garry's producer Henry; here, Joanna is Joe and Henry is Helen (whose own extramarital flings, as referenced, are not genderswapped, and who is styled with shades of Dorothy Arzner).

Live

Saw Studio Theatre's Summer 1976, a two-actor play about the friendship between two women - prim artist and single mom Diana and free-spirited faculty wife Alice - brought together when their five-year-old daughters become BFFs. It's a time-space slipstream of a play, unfurling as a story told directly to the audience by two competing (and conversing) narrators and as scenes "really" (or not really) taking place in 1976 or in 2003.

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Saw All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain at the STC, a solo show by Patrick Page that charts the development of Shakespeare's villains: from early characters like Richard III and Titus Andronicus' Aaron, one step up from the "vice" characters in morality plays and just inherently bad guys in ways tied to the then-accepted premise of physiognomy (Richard's disability, Aaron's race); to Shylock, who could easily have fallen into the same category but who Shakespeare gives an actual, and understandable, motivation for revenge; to "villains with a conscience" like Hamlet's Claudius and Measure for Measure's Angelo; to Iago, who Page argues is a sociopath in the "Hare's checklist" sense; and finally Macbeth, the darkest of Shakespeare's villains for the way he (to paraphrase) recognizes his plan is evil, does it anyway, and then gains an appetite for it. Half TED Talk - weaving in pop culture and psychology and historical context and Page's thoughts on the different roles - and half anthology performance of Shakespeare's best villain soliloquies/scenes, with a Q&A afterwards. Fascinating stuff, and now I have like three more plays I need to watch.

Filmed

On the theme of one- or two-actor plays, I also recently watched Andrew Scott's Vanya - a one-man, modernized, Irish-ized adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya - via National Theatre at Home. Andrew Scott is so good in this: in playing all of the characters, he gives each of them a little identifying tic (e.g., fiddling with a necklace) but I feel like you could tell apart the different characters by the way he holds himself and speaks as them alone, and he shifts so seamlessly between roles. One thing I noticed in this - and again, in a different way, in Summer 1976 - is how much more the audience has to take on trust when the play is just one (or two) actor(s) conjuring up a world from thin air/minimal set/props. Vanya used this in a tongue-in-cheek way a few times: a late-in-the-show reference to a dog that's "been here the whole time"; when Ivan shoots his brother-in-law, he spends a full minute freaking out before revealing that he missed.

STC artistic director Simon Godwin directed two different productions of Much Ado in 2022: I saw the one in DC, which was set in a modern cable newsroom with Beatrice and Benedick as sniping co-hosts of a daily news show; this was the one in London, set against the backdrop of an art deco Hotel Messina in a version of 1930s Italy without the encroaching fascism.

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Last night, I watched the Bridge Theatre's 2019 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (courtesy of National Theatre Live At Home) with Gwendoline Christie as Titania, which I was very much looking forward to seeing, although it turns out this staging swapped Oberon's and Titania's roles so technically it was Gwendoline Christie as Oberon, which turned out to be even better!

As you can probably guess from that, this production was WILD. It had a stage made up of moving platforms! Aerial acrobatics! Bottom and Oberon dancing to Beyoncé!

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This production is SO fun to watch; I cannot emphasize enough how much fun it is. It's on YouTube until July 2!

I've been seeing gifs and photos of the Globe Theatre's 2013 production of A Midsummer's Night Dream floating around Tumblr for years (...mostly of the Oberon/Puck kiss, because Tumblr) so it was very cool to get the chance to actually see the show!!!

The group of mechanicals with theatrical aspirations were the highlight of the play by far, although Oberon and Puck were a close second, at least once they got to the "plotting mischief" stage of the plot and the two actors could play off of each other, which they did excellently. (Prior to that, the actor who played Oberon seems to have received stage directions of "shout all of your lines as loudly as possible, because you are filled with RAGE," which was... a choice?)

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The show will be available on YouTube until June 28!

My mom and I have been rewatching Elementary, so we were very excited to see that National Theatre Live released BOTH filmed versions of Danny Boyle's production of Frankenstein, where Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch alternated the roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. I had previously seen the version with Cumberbatch as Frankenstein and Miller as the Creature, which was the one that played in movie theaters. Having now seen both versions - we watched the one with Cumberbatch as the Creature last night, and with Miller's Creature tonight - I can see why; it's definitely the stronger casting.

Cumberbatch's Frankenstein ranged from socially awkward to truly unhinged, while Miller's Frankenstein just came across as... shout-y. The difference really struck me in Frankenstein's first interaction with his fiancee Elizabeth (Naomie Harris): Miller's Frankenstein came across as dismissive of Elizabeth's insistence that, since they were engaged, they should actually talk to each other, while Cumberbatch's seemed genuinely confused. On the other hand, Miller brought more nuance to the Creature.

The stage and sound and light design for this show is incredible— it's worth watching for that alone. The scene with the train has stuck with me since I first saw it, years ago, and was even cooler than I remembered.

The version with Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature is available on YouTube until May 8, and the version with Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature will be available through May 7. I found it interesting to watch both and compare the actors' takes on both roles, but if you want to watch just one and not the other, my recommendation is 100% the version with Miller as the Creature.