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I don’t enjoy complaining, but sometimes it’s the only honest way to go. Most of the following is a complaint – so if you’re not in the mood, stop reading or listening now!
t’s been nearly a year since I was last able to see one of the Live Broadcasts from the National Theatre, which means I’ve missed at least four performances. Circumstances conspired against me. But it was with great pleasure that I realised on Thursday last week there was still one performance left of the season, and that nothing stood in the way of my seeing The Cherry Orchard with Zoë Wannamaker as Ranevskaya.
I booked a seat over the Internet and headed off into town at about 7 pm. Neither suspended public transport nor thunder-threatening clouds could put me off, and I was in time to pick up my ticket at Cinema Bio Roy just before the performance was due to start.
It was soon apparent that I needn’t have stressed. Technical problems left us with a blank screen and the message that there was “No or bad signal” – still this did give us something to chat about with our neighbours in the cinema.
Apparently, it wasn’t just us. All of Sweden was experiencing the same difficulty. The rumour went around that the start of the performance in London would be delayed until our technical problems were fixed. People said: “It had happened before.” That turned out to be as reliable as rumours generally are.
It took about 20-25 minutes to fix the reception. Perhaps we didn’t miss all that much of the play, if the NT started by interviewing the producer, or giving some background info as they did for the first four NT Live plays. Still, when at last we were able to see the play, the actors were well into the first act.
Also, there was a noticeable lag between the sound of the voices and the movement of the actors’ lips on the screen. That caused my heart to drop (remembering the experience of All’s Well that Ends Well in which the actors and their voices were slightly out of sync for the whole performance) but this problem too was fixed within two or three minutes, and I settled back at last to enjoy the play.
But no! It seems the NT has taken to adding English subtitles. When did that happen? The first four plays were blessedly free of such distractions. Have they introduced subtitling this season? Or is it new for The Cherry Orchard? The titles are rather large, very bright and fill the bottom fifth of the screen.
Now, I’m used to subtitles on Swedish TV, and I’m used to them also, when I go to the cinema here in Sweden (though I think they don’t take up nearly as much space on the screen). On this occasion, though, I found them very obtrusive. Apart from the physical feeling I was craning my neck to watch the play over the top of a blindingly whitewashed five-bar gate, the subtitles also raised a psychological barrier in my mind. They emphasised the distance between the audience and the players in a way that was not alienating so much as banal. I mean, they detracted from the feeling that I was observing a real-time performance and instead gave me the feeling I was watching a dime-a-dozen film, and a rather wooden film that.
Wooden? Well, theatre performances are not the same as film performances or television performances. I know …
In a theatre the actors are committed to behaving in a very different way from when they are in front of a camera. They must project their voices to reach the back of the theatre, they must enunciate, they must move in certain ways so as not to block the audience’s view. There is no one to shout “cut”, there’s no one going to ask them to take it again – everything has to be done in the moment.
Yes, I know this!
Going to see an NT Live performance, I allow for it. I forgive some of the theatricality because of the delight I experience in the feeling of being in a front row seat or VIP box that the close up screen images of the actors gives me.
But not this time. The subtitling kept tricking me into thinking I was watching a poorly edited film rather than a rather well-performed play.
Another thing I have against subtitles is that I cannot keep myself from reading the bloody things! So in the course of the performance I find myself not only craning and straining, but also reading the words on the screen and comparing what I read to what’s being said.
Of course, the subtitles had been created in advance, but it seemed they hadn’t been made with full attention to detail. Far too often the words the actors spoke were either twisted by the subtitles or predicted by them – I mean significant pauses were completely obviated by the fact that what the actor was going to say was already present on the screen. Furthermore, spelling mistakes were also a distraction: I suspect for example, the script actually called for the actors to use the word “deviance” and not “deviants” as the subtitles insisted.
I wonder why subtitles are being used now? Is this going to be a regular feature in future? Are subtitles also to be seen in British or American cinemas? Is the non-English speaker audience so big and have they protested so vocally about having to listen to English without subtitles?
If there’s a market for NT broadcast performances with subtitles, would it be possible to broadcast first a performance without (for those of us who really don’t need them), then rebroadcast the same performance with added subtitles? (In that way at least there would be a chance that the words would actually reflect what the actors were saying.)
All this carping may suggest that I did not enjoy the performance. It’s not entirely true. The acting was perhaps a little melodramatic or a little mannered in places (or seemed to be because of my mental conviction that I wasn’t watching a play) but certainly Conleth Hill as Lopakhin, James Laurenson as Gayev and Claudia Blakely and Charity Wakefield as the sisters were very good.
Both Zoë Wanamaker, and Mark Bonner as the tutor, coped well with some speeches that must have been a trial in rehearsal.
The play as performed was in a new translation – a new “version” – by Andrew Upton. The introduction of modern slang and turns of phrase were, I felt, while sometimes appropriate also sometimes jarring. There are clearly parallels to be drawn between immediately pre-revolutionary Russia and our own age, and the language certainly helped to stress these. But frequent references to specifically 19th-century Russian circumstances (the liberation of the serfs and all the concomitant social upheaval for example) kept re-establishing the historical context of the play and distancing it, in my mind at least, from the modern world.
I read somewhere that this production of the play emphasises the political rather than the personal. I suppose that means the prominence given to Petya the tutor’s harangues, and to Lopakhin’s “holiday homes in the country” plans, but, honestly, I thought the play was still far more about personal relationships, about dreams and memory, hopes and fears, devotion and indifference.
I think it’s a testament to the strength of the play and the work of the performers that despite all the distractions and all my criticism here, I was among the small cadre in the cinema to join in the applause at the National when the actors came on for their curtain call. Nevertheless, of the five NT Live broadcast plays I’ve seen now, this was the one that impressed me the least.
As we left the cinema, Bio Roy staff handed out vouchers to the value of 90 Swedish crowns as an apology for the technical problems at the start. That was nice – 45% off the next NT Live show here (if the prices don’t go up next season). I’ll definitely try to see another performance. The cumulative positive experiences from the first four plays still outweigh the negative impressions of this one.
But NT Live Please Note! If I’m forced to peer at another play over the top of a bar of subtitles, that will be the last.
The National Theatre’s production of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov in a version by Andrew Upton, Directed by Howard Davies and starring Zoë Wanamaker was broadcast by NTLive on the evening of Thursday 30th June 2011.
The illustrations used on this page are all taken from the official poster for the broadcast culled from other Internet sites as the NTLive are puzzlingly ungenerous about making even this one image widely available. The face is that of Zoë Wannamaker in character as Lyuba Ranevskaya.
n Tuesday evening I had the pleasure to see the entertaining Hamburg/Berlin theatre collective She She Pop perform Seven Sisters, their take on Chekov’s Three Sisters, at Gothenburg’s Pustervik Theater on Järntorget.
The first time I saw She She Pop, a year ago, also at Pustervik, they were grappling with King Lear and brought in their fathers (three fathers anyway) to help out. In Seven Sisters they involve their kids (three kids aged 4, 3 and maybe 2-years-old).
As with their take on Lear (which they called Testament), Seven Sisters is less a performance of the canonical play, more She She Pop coming to terms with the play, the characters of the three sisters, their brother and his wife, and the ideas that Chekov has his characters express.
The actors’ interaction with Chekov’s text, their interpretations of key ideas and phrases, their application of Chekov’s satire to their own (possibly fictionalised) situations and personas, is all performed with a glint in the eye and a fine irony.
Seven Sisters is clearly the product of a process of improvisation, and the immediacy of that process still hangs about the performance, though I wonder how much on-stage live impro they let themselves indulge in on Tuesday. A little, I think, towards the end, because that was just where the performance limped.
Though the Seven Sisters actors are all German speakers, the performance in Gothenburg was in English. Very good English too, but improvisation in a foreign language and in front of an audience for whom the language medium is also foreign must be to take a self-imposed handicap to quite an extreme.
On their homepage She She Pop write:
By allowing and encouraging audience intervention in the development of our work we aim to explore the freedoms and difficulties inherent in the negotiation between individual decision making stategies and the production of collective/inclusive performance.
I suspect the audience in Pustervik were not ideal in this respect. (We were very passive.)
The King Lear/Testament play from last year was performed in German, with (as I remember it) an Opera-style above-the-stage super-titling screen with Swedish(?) text. It worked. It’s good to see theatre bridging language barriers in this way.
Still, if you can understand German you’ll probably get most out of a performance of Seven Sisters in its original language.
I enjoyed the performance on Tuesday and ran a part of this review on my Twitter stream in the hope of encouraging people following me in Gothenburg to go along to the second of She She Pop’s performances.
And if you, dear reader, ever have the opportunity to see a She She Pop performance yourself, then take it!
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The illustration is a picture of the programme from Tuesday. The original photos are credited to Annette Hauschild.
You’re about to hear a review of the National Theatre’s direct-feed broadcast of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art. The broadcast was made on 22nd April 2010.
The text and recording of the review are by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com
You may freely redistribute all or part of this review for non-commercial purposes provided you acknowledge The Supercargo and include a link to The Supercargo homepage.
——————————————————————— The Habit of Art
It’s been nearly four weeks since I saw Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art in a live broadcast from London’s National Theatre at the Bio Roy here in Gothenburg. I fully intended to write and record a review soon after, but circumstances dictated otherwise. I did manage to scribble down some notes, though, and before the experience quite evaporates from memory I thought I should at least attempt to say something.
This preamble is appropriate in one way. The Habit of Art is about many things, and one of them is age and another is memory.
The premise of the play is that some time in the late 60s, the poet WH Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten meet in Oxford. Meet again I should say since they were creative partners before the Second World War, collaborating on among other things, The Night Train, [actually The Night Mail] one of the early film documentaries. Auden, the elder, was the librettist. Britten, (in this retelling of the story) was in awe of his more famous companion, shy, and felt he had to struggle to keep up his side of the partnership. But it was a productive and creative partnership that resulted in several works.
The last of these was Britten’s opera John Bunyan, written at Auden’s suggestion specifically for an American audience and first performed in the USA where Auden was living. It flopped. Britten blamed Auden, and Auden accepted the blame, but Britten could never forgive, and broke off all contact with the poet.
Apparently this was something Britten did. Old friends who had let him down in some way, he regarded as dead. For this reason, in later life, the two Britten and Auden never really did meet.
In this play, Alan Bennett supposes otherwise.
In the play, the elderly Auden has returned to England, to Oxford, as a Professor of English. He is respected as an icon, but disliked as a person for his rudimentary personal hygiene, his behaviour (pissing in the sink), the fact that he employs rent boys for sex and his boring repetitative conversation at the college high table. He writes, because he has the habit of art, but produces nothing of interest.
Meanwhile, Britten who is similarly revered as a Grand Old Man, has also passed his prime. Young musicians now are inspired by other, younger, more daring composers. Britten they think is staid, predictable. In reaction to this, because he also has the habit of art, Britten is composing a new opera, based on Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. It is not going well. People he trusts around him do not like the subject, though they go through the motions of helping him. The creative sparks do not fly. Auditioning boys for the role of Tadzio in Oxford, he takes the opportunity, after 25 years of estrangement, to seek out Auden at his lodgings.
The Habit of Art, though is not just a representation of this meeting. Instead it is a play within a play. The play in which Auden and Britten meet is being rehearsed in a rehearsal room at the National Theatre, with some of the actors, the stage manager and her assistant, the writer. This is the first run through. Not all the lines have been decided. The actors speak their lines in character, but also break out of character to argue with the writer and the stage manager, complain about the absent director, criticise and tease one another, discuss Auden, Britten, and Humphrey Carpenter (apparently the narrator of the Auden/Britten play).
This structure allows Bennett to stand back from the play, and to make fun of his characters, of the pretensions of actors and writers, to allow the compass of the play to go beyond poetry and music to include performance and playwriting, and to explore issues such as the creative process, aging, music, poetry, theatre, fame, homosexuality, loneliness.
The actor who carries the biggest role in The Habit of Art, playing both “Fitz†and “Fitz as Audenâ€, is Richard Griffiths. He performed brilliantly and showed what a very good actor he is. Switching easily from the mannered enunciation of Auden to the more natural voice of Fitz (though Fitz – as an actor – can ham up his performance with accents too). Fitz (though not Griffiths) is an actor past his prime, whose memory is a bit patchy and who nods off from time to time.
The Habit of Art - Collage
Playing the slightly effeminate “Henryâ€, the actor performing the role of prissy Britten, is Alex Jennings. As Britten, he seems to be trying to rediscover the fire of his youthful creativity. Re-building the bridges he has burned with Auden. At the same time proud of his achievements and bitter and more than a little confused to find himself sitting on the establishment benches, sidelined by composers like Michael Tippet. The poisonous delivery of Tippet’s name sticks with me.
In this context, it is interesting to consider how these three well-known British actors are presented to their Swedish audience. The touchstone, I’m sorry to say, is film and, more particularly, Harry Potter. Richard Griffiths is “known to Swedish audiences as Harry Potter’s unpleasant uncle.†Adrian Scarborough is “Ron Weasly’s father from the Harry Potter films.†Alex Jennings, who doesn’t seem to have a Harry Potter credit (yet) is identified in our Swedish programme leaflet as “Prince Charles in The Queen.†He was good in that role, true, but he is better in this.
Another performer without a Potter credit and so virtually unknown in Sweden, Frances de la Tour, plays the role of Kay, the much tried stage manager. It is a wonderful performance. Her character’s efficiency and good nature, as well as the delight she takes in reading in for absent minor characters, are compelling. The scenes where Kay talks about actors and directors she has worked with, Richard Eyre, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and about the National Theatre itself, and in which the younger cast members listen with fascination, were so believable. Actors fascinated by the lore and the history of their own craft. Despite Bennett’s joking about actors and acting, there is a deep love for the craft and its performers, which wells up especially in Kay’s role.
At the end, Kay gets to switch off the lights and end the play, too. It was a nice touch, and I don’t know how Frances de la Tour did it, but in the simple action, and the pause just before, as she looks around the now empty stage, there is a wonderful feeling of contentment mixed with a kind of bitter-sweet longing.
Or maybe I was just reading too much into the scene.
Technically, this NT Live broadcast was very satisfactory. There was no sound delay (as in All’s Well that Ends Well) and the Lyttleton stage felt to be the right size for the performance and for the broadcast. It helped the atmosphere in Gothenburg that the cinema was filled, (though not to overflowing). It was a better turn out than for either All’s Well or Nation, about on a par with Phedre.
It was good to be able to hear the reactions of the audience in London, as they helped cue reactions in Gothenburg. I’m sure most of the audience here were fluent users of English and a number will, like me, have been native speakers. But for the Swedes, even though the actors delivered their lines with clarity, it’s still a bit more of an effort. When one is used to subtitles one forgets how much of a crutch they are. I think most people got most of the jokes. The only times I particularly noticed our audience out of phase with London were when Donald defends his character Humphrey Carpenter and stresses how he “practically started Radio 3â€. That got a laugh in London but fell flat in Gothenburg. And then when Auden claims to once have been compared to a Swedish deckhand, that got a much bigger laugh here than in London.
The Habit of Art - Programme and portraits
What didn’t work? Well, once again (as in All’s Well) there were several characters who were almost never picked up by the camera, apparently because they had little or nothing to say. This did not detract from the enjoyment of the play, but did raise a few eyebrows in the interval or on the way home. The Dresser? Oh yes, he had a line or two. The Chaperone? She sat at the back in the first act.
So, I come to the end and I realise my memory (with the help of my notes) is not so ropy after all. Of course, I’ve missed mentioning several of the other performers. I’m sorry, chaps, that’s the way of the world!
What more to say? The introduction, the little conversation/interview in the open air on a balcony of the National with the Thames and the North Bank in view behind, is so much better now. The camera angles have been worked out and we don’t see interviewer looming over interviewee as in the very first broadcast. The little documentary info film about the real relationship between Auden and Britten was also appropriate, interesting and helpful.
I definitely want to see more, and I’m looking forward to the next season (and keeping my fingers crossed that Bio Roy will continue to show the broadcasts). I’m not sure about the extra broadcast, London Assurance, on the 28th June. The date might work for me, but I was very negative to some of the technical aspects of the previous broadcast from the cavernous Olivier stage. Still, it would be nice to see if those problems can be overcome – or if London Assurance is a more appropriate play for the stage. Maybe.
In the meantime, it’s time for me to wind this up with thanks to Alan Bennett, to the performers, to the backstage staff and to the broadcasters for a funny, witty, moving, engaging and very well acted play. Thumbs up!
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Thanks for listening!
That was a review of the British National Theatre’s production and direct-feed broadcast of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art made on 22nd April 2010.
This text and recording are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike license by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com This work by John Nixon, The Supercargo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.thesupercargo.com/contact/. ———————————————————————- Illustrations
The illustrations are all taken from the Internet site of the National Theatre. In “The Habit of Art – Collage”, the pictures show Top: (l) The stage with actors; (r) Griffiths as “Fitz/Auden”, Scarborough as “Donald/Carpenter”, Jennings as “Henry/Britten”. Bottom: (l) Griffiths; (c) Jennings; (r) de la Tour as “Kay.” These are all copied from the Production Gallery for The Habit of Arthere. Photographs by Johan Persson.
The the “Programme and portraits”, the illustrations show (l) Programme/poster frontpage with Jennings and Griffiths as Britten and Auden; (r top) Alan Bennett; (r bottom) Francis de la Tour. The two black and white portraits were taken from other pages on the NT site. ———————————————————————
You’re about to hear a review of the British National Theatre’s production of All’s Well that Ends Well, seen live in a cinema in Gothenburg last week on Thursday 1st October. This review was completed on 8th October 2009. The text and recording of this review are by me, John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com. You may freely redistribute all or part of this review for non-commercial purposes, provided you acknowledge The Supercargo and include a link to The Supercargo homepage.
I’m cross with myself for not getting around to this sooner. I managed to review Phedre within 24 hours, but time has not been at a premium lately.
For anyone who just wandered in, the National Theatre in London has joined the ’live streaming’ movement and started broadcasting high definition, surround-sound films of on-stage performances. These are broadcast by satellite link to specially equipped cinemas and shown simultaneously to audiences around the world. At least that’s what I thought was happening, but I’ve just found out that some places are recording the broadcasts in order to show them at more reasonable local times.
Here in Sweden, we’re one hour ahead (when it’s 6 p.m. in London, it’s 7 p.m. here) so we get the live feed.
Phedre was fantastic. My first experience of the technology, but also a very gripping play and a wonderful performance by the cast. All’s Well That Ends Well was the second of the NTLive broadcasts and I was looking forward to it very much.
Perhaps too much.
It immediately seems unfair to say that. Unfair on the actors, on the people back-stage and on the performance. So I need to draw distinctions between what was going on in front of the audience in London, what was going on in the cinema where I sat, and what may have been going on in the spaces between.
Let’s start by saying that I thought the performance was very, very good. In particular, Michelle Terry made a wonderful Helena. It’s a big part and holds the whole play together, so it needs to be acted with authority, which is just what she achieved. George Rainsforth’s Bertram was just as good-looking, immature and shallow as he needed to be and Conleth Hill, as the bragging coward Parolles was a fine comic performance.
[FairyTale - l. to r. Bertram reluctantly takes Helena's Hand at the command of the King. Helena as Red Riding Hood and as Alice. Photos from the NTLive Internet page for All's Well.]
All’s Well is a topsy-turvy version of a classic fairytale. The poor hero, who performs an impossible task to win the hand of the princess and live happily ever after, becomes the poor girl (Helena) who cures the king and wins the hand of her count (Bertram) only to be rejected. She’s neither pretty nor noble enough for him, and besides, he doesn’t love her. They marry because it is the king’s will, but Bertram leaves Helena, the marriage unconsummated, and sets out on his own fairytale adventure, to win renown in the wars. She follows him and wins him back by guile, and so the play ends well. So all’s well, isn’t it?
(The uncertainty about the ending was nicely highlighted by the wedding photo sequence at the very end of the performance.)
The National Theatre’s staging made very good use of the fairytale elements in the story as well as the way Shakespeare brings them into conflict with reality. (Ok, stage reality.) Lots of references to fairytales and nursery rhymes in the costumes (Alice in Wonderland, Little Red Riding Hood), in the shadow plays and animations at the back of the stage (in particular, Dulac’s illustrations from Perrault), in the lighting (Gothic in France, golden in Italy).
But plays – and Shakespeare’s plays in particular – can be helped along only so far by good staging. Eventually everything comes back to the words, the sense and the delivery. As I’ve said, there was nothing wrong in this performance with the delivery. But now I’ve read it through as well as seen it, I have to say that don’t think All’s Well is one of the bard’s better efforts. Some parts, especially in the first half are really difficult to follow. Wordy. Obscure.
I still don’t know what the Countess and her Clown were going on about. It didn’t seem to move the action along. I suppose in Shakespeare’s day it might have been side-splitting and helped people over the sticky bits, but if so it hasn’t aged well. Not that Clare Higgins as the Countess and Brendan O’Hea as the Clown weren’t giving it their all, but I really feel this performance would have been helped by some judicious pruning.
There were a number of puzzled and not a few glassy eyed looks in the foyer during the interval on 1st October as we all trooped out to stretch our legs.
The pace, though, picked up in latter part of the first half, and after the interval it bowled along nicely. Generally, everyone I spoke to after was satisfied and didn’t feel their evening had been wasted.
Technically though, there were aspects of the broadcast that were less than satisfactory.
The thing I was afraid of before seeing Phedre, and which I thought was completely buried by that experience, was that filmed stage performances can be so static. All’s Well has partly dug that back up. To some extent it’s the play, being so slow and sticky in the first half. But it could also be that the Olivier Stage at the National is just too big for these broadcasts.
I’ll try and explain. The most delightful things about seeing both Phedre and All’s Well in these filmed versions are all the close-ups of the actors’ faces. Much of my experience of live performances in big theatres has been, of necessity, from the cheapest seats at the back of the stalls or up in the gods. In these filmed performances, seeing the actors’ expressions as well as their body language is just wonderful. But what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.
The close-ups give an intimate theatrical experience, but at the same time, they take away the audience’s options to see what else is going on on-stage. In Phedre, that didn’t seem to matter, but in All’s Well, with a larger cast, I think it did. Now, I could see that the Director for Screen was trying to include middle distance and wide shots as well as tight close-ups, but I don’t think this worked out as well as it might have, perhaps because the stage was so large.
Yes, we did occasionally see people on stage reacting to whatever event was in focus, but only enough to realise that we were probably missing much more. I for one would have liked more, wider shots. But I would not have appreciated more of the fish-eye lens.
Where a wider shot of the Phedre stage was able to capture the whole space without much distortion, the (mercifully few) fish-eye shots of the All’s Well stage gave me the feeling that I was looking through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses. Actors and set were swallowed up by the empty boards and the looming back wall. Only the person standing centre front stage was identifiable, though as a rotund and rather squat version of him- or herself.
I think this problem did not help the play in the first half. The long shots isolated the performers in an expanse of distorted space and the tight close-ups, excluding other business on stage; both contributed to making an already slow action seem more stilted.
Here’s a thought. How about experimenting with a split screen? Show a medium distance shot alongside a close-up. I think it could enhance the theatrical experience by giving the audience the opportunity to look elsewhere than just at the central characters. At the same time eschew the fish-eye lens. Please.
Unless you really want to stress Brechtian alienation.
Another technique to alienate the audience, I should think, is to have the sound out of synch with the actors’ lips.
There’s a noticeable delay over the Internet. Video-conferences quite frequently involve watching someone saying what you have already heard them say in your headphones. It was another thing I was afraid of when I went to see Phedre, but there was no problem of that sort at all, then.
Unfortunately, I was aware of just such a delay throughout all of All’s Well. To be sure, the pre-performance interviews and documentary were far more seriously out of synch than the performance itself, and over the course of the play I adjusted to the delay, but whenever there was a sharp noise I was reminded of it. Someone slapped table, and then the hand went down. I should say, though, that my companions were divided about this, some insisted they couldn’t detect a delay in the play, so it may be a matter of individual sensitivity.
And what about those interviews? Just as my wife and I were regaling our friends with a description of Jeremy Iron’s terribly awkward interview before Phedre, up on the screen comes an equally awkward performance introducing All’s Well. I have the impression that the interviewer and interviewee are squashed into a space that is too small for them, that they have neither of them rehearsed what they are doing, and that the interviewer is a terribly shifty looking fellow who towers over his interviewee. The interview indoors with director Marianne Elliott was less awkward, but her body language made it so obvious that she had no wish to be there.
Well, I suppose it contributes to the feeling that everything is “live†and that things might go wrong.
The little pre-performance documentary about the play was nice to see though, and especially to hear a much more relaxed Marianne Elliott confess that she was as ignorant of All’s Well as I was before she started to direct this production.
The interview on stage during the interval with the designer Rae Smith was interesting too, but I’d have been happier if it had been incorporated into the pre-performance documentary. Not least because she didn’t seem to know where in the action of the play the interval had come. I thought that was a bit odd.
I could say more, in particular about the freezing draught, poor local advertising and consequent poor turnout at Bio Roy in Gothenburg where I saw the play, but I think that would be to try your patience.
Instead, I’ll sum up. I enjoyed the play, though I would encourage Mr Shakespeare to re-write the first act! I thought the staging, performance and interpretation were excellent. The choice of camera angles was not always as fortunate as it might, perhaps, have been, though the Olivier stage may be inimical to live filming of this nature. The biggest technical disappointment was the out-of-synch sound.
I’ve got fewer stars in my eyes about live streaming now, but I’m still enthusiastic. What I said about Phedre still holds true. I still think its wonderful “here, in Gothenburg, in Sweden, to be able to see a performance direct from a stage of the National Theatre in London. A no-holds-barred performance, not dumbed down for a provincial public, or subtitled, or with actors performing at anything less than their professional peak.â€
And I’ll certainly be back on the 30th January for the next NTLive broadcast, Terry Pratchet’s Nation.
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Thanks for listening. That was a review of the British National Theatre’s production and direct feed broadcast of All’s Well That Ends Well, made on the 8th October 2009. This text and recording are licensed under the Creative Commons attribution / non-commercial / share-alike license by me, John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com.
You’re about to hear a review of the National Theatre’s direct-feed broadcast of Phædre made on 25th June 2009.
The text and recording of the review are by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com
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[Illustration above is from a screenshot of the National Theatre's page for Phèdre. Link here: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/45269/productions/phegravedre.html]
I’m still feeling buoyed up by the experience of seeing Phædre yesterday evening. What a fantastic performance! And what a fantastic use of technology! Here, in Gothenburg, in Sweden, to be able to see a performance direct from a stage of the National Theatre in London. A no-holds-barred performance, not dumbed down for a provincial public, or subtitled, or with actors performing at anything less than their professional peak. The images were almost always crisp and clear and the cutting from camera angle to camera angle was choreographed almost to perfection. In the auditorium of the cinema we had a better view of the actors’ expressions than I’d guess many people sitting at the back of the theatre in London did. The sound quality was also generally very good, and with surround-sound we could hear and share the reactions of the live audience.
People who have seen the operas that have been broadcast in this way may not have been so bowled over by the Phèdre experience, but this was my first taste of modern direct-feed technology and I found it captivating.
Of course, it helped that the play was so gripping, the language so powerful and the actors, all of them, so brilliant and working so well together. I came, I admit more than half because of Helen Mirren, and she was magnificent as Phèdre. The older woman consumed by her incestuous desire for her husband’s son, confused by her feelings, desperate to resist them but unable to do so, torn and poisoned by them, sometimes the perpetrator sometimes the victim. Mirren gave the character life and depth.
But this was an ensemble piece. If any one of the principals had been performing under par, it would have drawn down the quality of the whole.
Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus, the young prince of fast principles who is the object of Phèdre’s desire and the focus of her jealousy, was a revelation. (In the Swedish language flier ticket buyers received here he is “known from Mamma Mia! … as Meryl Streep’s son-in-law-to-beâ€. I didn’t find that helpful.)
Hippolytus represents youth, nobility, restraint and moral probity. The son of the hero Theseus and his first, Amazon wife Hippolyta, but not himself the stuff of legend. Set aside by Phèdre and displaced from succession by her children, Hippolytus is yet not resentful. He honours his father, even though disapproving of his reputation as a womaniser. It can’t be an easy task to play this role without making the character seem either anonymous or a prig, but Cooper manages to make Hippolytus both believable and likeable. Essential for the play to work, of course, since the tragedy turns on Hippolytus’s reaction to Phèdre’s advances and then to her false accusations of rape, and to his father’s rejection and curses that ultimately lead to his death.
Cooper’s efforts to make Hippolytus likeable are helped, of course, by his love for Aricia and the love she holds for him. Aricia is the last surviving heir of an Athenian family that Theseus has all but wiped out. Although she is innocent of any blame, and so cannot be killed, Theseus still fears her and has left Hippolytus instructions to guard her well.
Aricia, played beautifully by Ruth Negga, is a young woman who, in the course of the play, is taken from a condition of fear and uncertainty through the giddy experience of freedom and sudden love to the very edge of despair.
Hippolytus, keeping his word to Theseus, waits until receiving what he believes is reliable information that his father has died before revealing his love, releasing Aricia and promising to help her take what he believes is her rightful place as Queen of Athens. A modern audience may well find itself wondering why he waits; if he truly believes his father is wrong to hold Aricia, if he truly loves her. Again, this could easily come across as weakness, but Cooper’s performance, helped by Negga’s, makes all this reflect positively rather than negatively on Hippolytus’s character.
Oenone has more stage time and is more intrinsic to the story, although she is the first character to die. Oenone only wants the best for her girl and cannot see that the actions she encourages Phèdre to take lead to disaster. She has some good scenes, but her final appearance was gripping, when she realises she has lost Phèdre’s affection and, perhaps, comes to an understanding of the tragedy she has partly caused.
Oenone’s departure from the stage is the only criticism I have of the editing choices made by the technicians. At the end of her scene she crossed front stage right and presumably leapt to her death from the balustrades. But the camera allowed her to pass out of shot and we neither saw her jump nor leave the stage. I thought this was a bit clumsy.
Finally there is Stanley Townsend’s Theseus, who returns triumphant from the shores of death to precipitate the tragedy.
Neither Phèdre nor Theseus can see Hippolytus’s true worth. Phèdre falsely accuses Hippolytus of rape in the belief that she is pre-empting his own accusations. Theseus, who has seduced so many women in his time, and whose most recent dice with Hades started out as an escapade to help an old friend cuckold another ruler, chooses to believe Phèdre’s falsehoods rather than accept his own son’s assurances. Like any modern cynic, he finds it easier to believe in corruption than in innocence. And so the stage is set for the final tragic outcome.
As I say the story, the language and the acting combined made this a play that would have been gripping to see in any theatre. In a way, I wasn’t expecting anything less. But I did enter the cinema with some doubts.
What I was expecting was a filmed play. I was expecting it to be rather static, to be viewed from just a few camera angles front of stage, for the actors to be in the middle distance, for the sound to be muffled at times and for the microphones to pick up and amplify inadvertent sounds (breathing, rustling of clothes, bangs, clicks or footsteps). My expectations went mostly unfulfilled.
Of course, Greek tragedy is rather static, even transmitted via Jean Racine and Ted Hughes. It is difficult to ignore for example the unities of time and place which are so alien to modern drama. Still, because of the camera angles, the close-ups and the way the cameras could follow the actors about, I did not feel the play was at all as static as I had feared. The sound quality was generally very good (though a bit over-loud in places and especially during the first 20 minutes or so). There were changes in sound quality at times, but nothing like as significant as in many filmed plays I have seen. I don’t think there were any words I could not hear, and yet the performance was very natural without anyone over enunciating.
Above all the actors seemed comfortable, not as though they were playing for the cameras.
The cinema Roy on the Avenue, Gothenburg’s main street, started to show direct-feed events about a year ago after closing as a regular cinema. It is part of a chain of digital cinemas across Sweden run by the People’s Houses and Parks movement (Folkets Hus och Parker) offering alternative venues to the commercial cinema. Up to now, their stock shows seem to have been operas – at least those are the shows I’ve mostly been aware of. Opera has a limited, but often a more dedicated audience and music is a more universal language, so I can understand how it might have more appeal in a country where English is not the mother tongue.
Of course, many Swedes understand English to a high level, but I did have my doubts about this. A dense, complex and relentless stream of language without subtitles. How would the audience react? The first ten minutes or so were difficult for some at least. The woman in the seat in front of me was paging through screens on her mobile phone until I tapped her on the shoulder. (And I’m not talking about teenagers here. The average age of the audience at Roy was a good generation older than the average age of the audience in London as far as I could see.) But this is where the quality of the acting made itself felt. Even if people did not understand every word or even every sentence, the power of the acting carried the message across and after about ten minutes the audience was captivated.
In the end, as the audience in London applauded, so did we, and at least some of us kept on applauding as each of the actors took their bow. From the response I read on Twitter after the play, mine was not the only cinema audience that reacted with applause. I wish the communication had been two-way so the cast in London could have seen and heard the impact they had around the world.
There are three more direct-feed plays scheduled from the National over the coming year and after this experience, I will do my best to get to see all of them. And spread the word. Roy was not full by any means and I want this exercise to be so successful that more plays will be offered in the future and more theatre companies will be encouraged to invest in the technology to broaden their audience in this way.
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Thanks for listening!
That was a review of the British National Theatre’s production and direct-feed broadcast of Phèdre made on 25th June 2009.
This text and recording are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike by John Nixon, The Supercargo of www.thesupercargo.com
We had grand weather all through the celebrations of the first weekend of spring, but Friday 1st May was best. As indeed it should be for the International Workers’ Day! There were to be five processions and meetings for different shades of red here in Gothenburg, so I took my camera and digital recorder and set off to capture the day for posterity. My latest scrimshaw – here below – is the result.
All the photos and film sequences and all the sounds were recorded between about noon and about 5 p.m. and I’ve arranged them in approximate chronological order, except that the photos of posters were taken along my route as I walked into town for the first meeting, and the soundtrack is a bit jumbled up for dramatic purposes.
Syndicalist poster
Truth to tell, I didn’t find any of the speeches I heard especially inspiring, so I ignored them when I made the soundtrack. Instead I used more of the Social Democrat’s marching band to end the film. I also used the Anarchist’s drumming behind the opening credits because I thought it worked well as an intro and I never managed to get any film or photos of them.
The five meetings were each preceded by five marches from in or around the Iron Square (Järntorget) – staggered so they would not all be marching at the same time. Also they were marching to different points in the town centre so their different meetings wouldn’t compete for the same spot. Good for me and any other non-affiliated bystanders because we were able to compare the different groups without too much effort.
It was a little difficult to handle both the sound recording and the filming or photographing at once, but my solution was to set the recorder working and stand it on the pavement between my feet while I took my pictures. Just necessary to choose a good vantage point for the filming and not wander away from the recorder.
Not only did we have a good weather, but it was also a very good natured day – at least from where I was standing. At one point I did find myself surrounded by very big policemen in outsized uniforms and helmets, but they turned out to be more interested in making sure the Socialist procession passed the Anarchist party without incident, and when it did they disappeared again.
Parades
I’ve used the word “procession†in the film. I don’t know. My upbringing wants me to call them “demonstrationsâ€, but honestly, they weren’t. As you can see from the film sequences and the pictures above, everything was very what the Swedes call lagom – “just enough†– and really rather peaceful. Even the slogans that got shouted were not particularly aggressive. The Left Party were downright quiet – hear how their MC struggles to get them to shout “socialist†in chorus. The Communists sounded like they were caught in a time warp from the late 60s, the Social Democrats could have been parading down the high street in some country town in England (if it wasn’t for the red flags and “The International”). Only the Anarchists and their drumming and the Socialists and their slogans had a bit more bite – but the Socialists were very few, and the Anarchists really sounded more like they were playing for a carnival.
I guess it was a very Swedish May Day. And why not – it was in Sweden.
Lars Ohly and Left Party Posters
I was very happy to get a picture of the one big speaker of the day – the leader of the Left Party, Lars Ohly, in Gustaf Adolf’s Square (Gustaf Adolfs Torg) outside the city hall. Despite two terrible political assassinations during the time I’ve lived in Sweden (Olof Palme’s murder in 1986 and Anna Lind’s in 2003), Swedish politician still act as though they were immune – and generally speaking, they are. I didn’t see any police protection (though I suppose he must have it). There were lots of other cameramen clustered about, with considerably larger cameras and longer lenses than mine. No doubt they got better, sharper images, but I was pleased anyway with these pictures. (It’s the one on the right that got into the film.)
The reds with the best Big Name Attraction – the Left Part with Lars Ohly
The reds with the best nostalgia factor – the Communists
The reds with most enthusiasm for least numbers – the Socialists
The reds (and blacks) with the best music – the Anarchists
The reds with the most supporters, banners, flags, and bands – the Social Democrats
The happiest people – the citizens of Gothenburg watching the activity and enjoying the sun. And me with my camera.
Nostalgia with the Communist Party in Grönsakstorget
——————————————————————– This blog entry is tagged as a scrimshaw. Scrimshaws are things sailors made (perhaps still make) on long sea voyages to while away the time when they weren’t working. The classic scrimshaw is a ship in a bottle. My scrimshaws are videos, puzzles and odds and ends that don’t really fit into the blog+photos+podcast format I have for this site. To see more of my scrimshaws click on the scrimshaw tag in the yellow box below, or on SCRIMSHAWS in the header bar.
t’s been nearly a year since I was last able to see one of the Live Broadcasts from the National Theatre, which means I’ve missed at least four performances. Circumstances conspired against me. But it was with great pleasure that I realised on Thursday last week there was still one performance left of the season, and that nothing stood in the way of my seeing The Cherry Orchard with Zoë Wannamaker as Ranevskaya.
I booked a seat over the Internet and headed off into town at about 7 pm. Neither suspended public transport nor thunder-threatening clouds could put me off, and I was in time to pick up my ticket at Cinema Bio Roy just before the performance was due to start.
n Tuesday evening I had the pleasure to see the entertaining Hamburg/Berlin theatre collective She She Pop perform Seven Sisters, their take on Chekov’s Three Sisters, at Gothenburg’s Pustervik Theater on Järntorget.
