Skylight, David Hare

No one writes dialog in English better than an English writer.  I just saw Skylight by David Hare, one England's very best playwrights who perhaps writes dialog even better than Tom Stoppard  (who after all is not a native English speaker -- but brilliant all the same). This was a National Theatre Live showing, not a simulcast but a live performance with Esther Freud as the intermission ineterviewer talking to David Hare about this reprise of hin 1996 play. 

This is a love story, of its own sort, one of the few plays Hare has written with just three people on stage in an intimate drama.  He has written much that is historic and politica. This play is political too but mainly personal. The dialog is brilliantly delivered (as directed by Stephen Daldry).  Bill Nighy plays the one time lover, whose wife has died and who is ready to reignite a love affairs with a woman who walked away and totally changed her way of life. The man is a selfish shit as is said many times, not only by his ex-lover but by his son who visits also. Bill Nighy played the same role in the first production in 1996.  He is a brilliant actor; it was a wonderful performance (and he wore a magnificently elegant bespoke suit and coat), but I couldn't help thinking he must have been so much more appropriately cast 18 years ago. He is well into his 70s and emaciated. I couldn't help thinking if they were reprising a play with a woman in such a role she wouldn't stand a chance of being recast 18 years later.  Men can get away with being sexy at that age but not women.  

Carrie Mulligan was wonderful. Although I enjoyed all the brilliant repartee, I was not truly satisfied with the ending. Feminist that i am, I nevertheless did not want her to cling to her high minded teacherly vocation, and I wanted her to be more truly loving of Nighy's very flawed (often insufferable - although enormously clever) persona.  But that's my feeling. I guess I still believe "amour omni vincit". It was a wonderful production and brilliantly acted.

 

Two Dramas

Two very different theatrical experiences: one at the Trinity Rep, the professional regional theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, connected to Brown University, and the other a simulcast from the National Theatre of London. Comparisons are somewhat unfair because of size and budget differences as well as history my the experiences were so different I keep mulling about them. The play at Trinity Rep was Love Alone, a new play by Deborah Salem Smith, a young, award winning local playwright. A cast of 6, a basic set [minimal furniture], the space was the smaller of two in that theatre, seating 175 and was nearly full -- good for a Wednesday matinee. The play was a "topic" play, the characters, sketched out more than fully drawn, served the purpose of showing the complexity of a frequent occurrence: the death of a hospital patient after a "successful" operation and the dilemma of the young anesthesiologist on whom blame was laid, acted out beside the grief of the dead woman's family, a lesbian partner and a rock singer daughter who sued for malpractice. A loaded subject. To me a subject that suggests a teleplay not a theatrical drama in which I hope for deeper understanding of people, not a discussion of a subject that is discussed in magazines and newspapers.

The production was well done, the pacing was especially admirable as the expected and necessary short scenes dovetailed between two sets of protagonists, doctor and her husband, partner and daughter. There were small directorial missteps from my point of view but I'm very picky about such things. Altogether a successful afternoon of not untypical American theatre which more and more reflects the influence of television and movies. Spare sets are refreshing, not a hindrance for the audience, generally competent actors are satisfactory to most audiences.

The next day a simulcast from the National Theatre of London of She Stoops to Conquer,. Oliver Goldsmith's comedy of manners Young director Jamie (?), with the full potential of one of the best companies in the world, staged the play with elegant over-the-top comedy and maximum panache, adding music sung by the cast and played by a sizable ensemble of musicians to mark scene changes. The imaginative exaggeration of character and acting was always high spirited without silliness or cloying cuteness. High comedy, not at all high drama. An anecdote for the ills of the time, political, financial. This was theatre with all the stops pulled out. It's equivalent does not exist in America although many Broadway musicals aspire and sometimes come very close to such taste and finesse.

How lucky I am to have had two such experiences in a single week.

Collaborators, National Theatre, London

A simulcast yesterday, of a new play, Collaborators, from the National Theatre of London, shown here at 2:00 in the afternoon [it was 8:00 in London] was a very fine play brilliantly acted, especially by the actors who played the novelist, Mihail Bulgakov, and Stalin. The in-the-round production at the Cottesloe, the smaller space in the National Theatre complex was probably seen more completely and even more intimately by the distant audience than by the inhouse audience. I could only imagine as I thought of what I had seen while driving home, that the video work had surely been plotted out by a brilliant editor/director. I have always found live in-the-round interesting but somewhat distracting as no matter where one sits, one misses a portion of the visual impact of the actor's work. When the lighting is purposely dim, as this was, and very appropriately so for the mood and setting, seeing is even more difficult for the inhouse audience.

I felt very sad and annoyed that the event was badly attended, maybe 50 or 60 people, whereas for a performance I found highly mannered and often distasteful of Hamlet the local theatre was very full. People seem to think that a famous old warhorse is a better bet than something new. Very often that is absolutely wrong. When a theatre with the resources of the National -- in terms of actors, designers, directors -- mounts something new it will be done so well that even if it's not destined to be a classic, it will be brilliantly done.

In Collaborators Bulgakov is asked to write a play for Stalin's 60th birthday. He cannot, in good conscience, write something positive about a man he loathes. The playwright's conceit is that Stalin actually writes the play himself while foisting off his pile of official documents for Bulgakov to read and initial for him -- which means Bulgakov is signing orders for murders, mass starvation in the Ukraine, deportation, etc. Bulgakov begins echoing some of Stalin's equivocations. When he finally breaks and refuses to sign more papers Stalin says, "It's man against monster, and the monster always wins." A political truth we've seen time and again in the last 100 years in so many different tyrannical states. Not a happy take home message but certainly one to ponder.

Modern Day Miracle

This season's final simulcast from the National Theatre of London yesterday was Chekov's The Cherry Orchard. Rachel and I joined a nearly packed theatre. There was a drab [on purpose] black and whiteness about the production with it's huge cast of characters [difficult to keep in mind who was who much of the time]. The translation seemed very up to date but only jarred when the word "Bozo" was used as an insult. No cast list was provided so only Zoe Wannamaker as the lady of the family is known to me although I very much liked both the entrepreneurial ex-peasant and the not so young student -- others were very good but these three had the big roles and were wonderful.

Later I thought more about the wonder of the experience itself. Perhaps people who have grown up in the computerized world take such things for granted but to me, who remember our family's first party line telephone, sitting in a theatre in Dennis, Massachusetts watching a play that is happening "in real time" as they say, 6,000 miles across an ocean is awesome [and that's not jargon]. I find that a pre-electronic era mind says, it would be less awesome if the theatre were in New York City only 200 miles away. Immediately the educated part of my mind says, don't be daft, distance doesn't matter today. Somehow the signals for the transmission bounce far up in the sky to satellite and bounce back down to be picked up immediately whether in Dennis, MA or in Rio de Janerio or in Sydney, Australia. And it's marvelous! It's amazing. I absolutely cannot understand it except in words, it touches nothing my senses can understand.

Have those who take such things for granted, as very little different than the live TV programs they watched from childhood on, lost something by never understanding that sense of wonder? Just as possibly, back in my childhood I had lost something my parents possibly had at the awe of a wire bringing electricity to their home -- although actually I remember that happening when I was 4 or so. And then is there any advantage to this kind of awe at technological advances. I'm sure smart, thoughtful people have written about such things and possibly about how the loss of amazement has affected us as both individuals and cultures. That's why I never stop reading, I'm always looking for insights I haven't found about the world around.