The Lady From Dubuque by Edward Albee

Tonight I saw Edward Albee's The Lady From Dubuque at the Haymarket Theatre. Reviews for the play were really mixed, so much so that had Maggie Smith not been starring in it, I probably would have given it a miss. Which would have been such a shame, as I thought that the production was excellent. (I wonder if the fact that the original run of The Lady From Dubuque on Broadway in 1980 only lasted twelve days still affects reviews of the play today.)


Michael Billington wrote that he was "simultaneously tantalised, intrigued, and entertained" by the play. I would agree and also add "irritated" but this is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean irritated in the way you sometimes wish George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would just shut up and calm down and stop making their guests squirm, but really, you don't want the chaos to stop. I'll call it the "Albee Irritation" and will admit that I enjoy it. And Maggie Smith was brilliant...of course.

Happy Days at the National Theatre

Tonight: Happy Days with Fiona Shaw at the National Theatre. The set was absolutely astounding - perhaps the best I have ever seen. (Created by set designer Tom Pye, you can read more about the creation of it here.) The photograph doesn't really do the set justice - it was like the combination of the aftermath of a catastrophic war and the lonely surface of the moon with spotlights. When I read the play many years ago in university, I pictured the stage as quite small - something I thought as a necessity for such an extended monologue composed of fragmented thought. But the Lyttelton Theatre is huge and therefore it needs a huge stage presence to pull off the material. Enter Fiona Shaw.


She was luminous, just as she was in Woman and Scarecrow. Beckett is never given enough credit for his humour, maybe because it is difficult to pull off in performance. Shaw seems to have created the perfect blend to reel off these important lines: part deadpan delivery, part unassuming persona and part delicious irony.

The program quotes Roger Michell, who worked with Beckett on the 1979 production of Happy Days at the Royal Court. He recalls that at the end of one long day of rehearsal, Beckett said with a wry smile, "That's it. Now I must return to my room and resume my inspection of the empty space."

The Seagull at the Royal Court

Last night I saw The Seagull at the Royal Court Theatre - it plays until mid-March and its run is already completely sold out. And rightly so - it was brilliant. Very rarely do I sit through a three hour play and lose my own sense of time, an even greater achievement when you consider that Chekhov isn't always the most engaging of playwrights.

Kristin Scott Thomas (even more stunning in person), Chiwetel Eijofor, and Mackenize Crook were good, but the show was almost stolen by (according to her resume) a relatively inexperienced actor. Playing the young, passionate and ultimately destroyed Nina was Carey Mulligan. Michael Billington writes that Mulligan "doesn't fully convey Nina's ravening ambition" and I can see his point. But her excitement at her decision to become an actress and her anguish when she is tossed aside by Eijofor's Trigorin was palpable.

My friends and I took up residence in the wonderful Royal Court bar after the performance and suddenly realized that Kristin Scott Thomas, Mackenzie Crook and some of the other cast were relaxing with drinks behind us. Caught up in the atmosphere of the Royal Court (where else do the actors drink in the same bar as the patrons afterwards?) I signalled the waitress and bought the actors a round of drinks. Mackenize Crook came over to the table to thank us and had a wee chat. This is exactly why I live in London.

Three Brief Reviews

My cultural leanings of the past week:


David Hockney Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Brilliant. While the large, bright canvas portraits were great, I actually prefered the informal ink on paper portratis of Hockney's lover. There is something about art so simple and sparse, yet inherently fluid that gets me. It's the same with the prose of writers like Ondaatje and Berger. Nothing extraneous to clog up the essence of a work.

The Isabelle Huppert season is on at the National Film Theatre. Last night I saw the stark portrait of a collapsing relationship - La Séparation. Also brilliant. And again, nothing extraneous in the filming of incredibly intense emotions. Such a relief to see a film that is so unHollywood.

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You at the Royal Court Theatre. Nowhere close to brilliant. My own prejudice perhaps as I don't particularly like Caryl Churchill's work. But an evening at the Royal Court, housing one of my favourite bars in the city, to celebrate the completion of my thesis chapter was welcome in any event.

4:48 Psychosis

Tonight I saw the Sarah Kane play 4:48 Psychosis at the Summerworks Theatre Festival. I first encountered the work of Sarah Kane in 2000 during a theatre course in my MA program at Kings College London. In 2001, the Royal Court Theatre ran a season of Sarah Kane's work and I saw almost all her plays here, including 4:48 Psychosis. It was one of the most riveting moments of my life - I did not realize I was crying until the lights came up and I was overwhelmed by the rawness and emotion and beauty of such a stunning piece of theatre. In a sentence, the play is a chaotic meditation on the disintegration of the mind from mental illness.

The play is almost like a long poem, and I suppose can be interpreted in a few different ways. But the way this director interpreted the play was just...terrible. The original production had three actors who assumed various roles (patient, doctor, witness) and rotated as such. But the Summerworks performance had the actors take specific roles which they maintained throughout the play - patient, doctor, and the witness that was portrayed as some kind of blood soaked zombie. By assuming static roles and having tremendously long monologues throughout, the intentional chaos of the play wasn't communicated at all. The play was also overacted, sometimes embarrassedly so, and this stripped the beauty out of Kane's words.

The Royal Court performance made wonderful use of props and lighting - a large mirror was hung on a slant above the stage, which reflected a second mirror that lay on the stage. As one actor counted the serial sevens, another wrote the numbers on the mirror - but backwards, so the hanging mirror displayed the numbers in the correct form. It was a beautiful portrayal of the delicate nature of chaos. Tonight's performance, on the other hand, had a transparent plastic curtain smeared with fake blood and a handheld flashlight. Sigh. I won't go as far to say that this performance was a disservice to Kane's work, but it was appallingly disappointing. For a better idea of how brilliant the Royal Court performance was, here is a review of it.

I wanted to quote some of 4:48 Psychosis here and have spent over an hour trying to choose a passage. I could just reprint the entire play, but in the end I chose this:

Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?

Woman and Scarecrow

Last night I saw the positively brilliant play Woman and Scarecrow by Marina Carr at the equally brilliant Royal Court Theatre. It was a sort of coming full circle moment for me. I dragged my dad along (poor jet lagged man) as he had never been to the Royal Court before. Yet it was my dad who gave me my first play script - a copy of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger, which caused a huge stir upon its premiere at...the Royal Court Theatre.

I want to write that Fiona Shaw's performance was unbelievable, yet the true description is that her performance was painfully believable. The kind of performance where you realize you have been holding your breath. It was as hilarious as it was traumatic and as my dad so aptly put it: How on earth does she walk off the stage at the end of the play and just have a cup of coffee after that?

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

My second book recommendation for 2006 is a hearty one. I just finished The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and loved it. I had previously attempted to read Waters' Tipping the Velvet but not being a fan of period pieces or historical fiction, I abandoned it fairly quickly. However, The Night Watch is set in wartime London, something that fascinates me, partly because when I lived there I used to wander around looking at which buildings survived the Blitz and which didn't (like Kings College London where I spent my days). And partly because I read a fascinating account of the effect the Blitz had on Londoners in A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century.

The book is comprised of four storylines that center around individual characters, but they are all connected in some way. Kay, a former ambulance driver, who now dresses like a boy and spends her days spying on the patients being treated by her landlord. Viv, who is consumed with loyalty to her married ex-soldier boyfriend and her brother, Duncan, recently released from prison. And finally Helen, who cannot stop second-guessing her lover for some mysterious reason.

Waters' style is somewhat cold and clinical, but this turns out to be extremely effective as she layers the story until small nuances are picked up and the connections between characters are realized. The book also reads backwards - beginning with the post-war exhaustion of 1947, through the numbness of 1944, to the disbelief and suspended normalcy of the Blitz in 1941. A piece of work I will have to read again to truly see everything Waters has built in this story - and very much recommended. For a much better review that this, The Guardian comes to the rescue.

Balanchine's Ballet

Last night I went to see the National Ballet's Balanchine Triple Bill. It was tear-wellingly brilliant.

George Balanchine created the kind of ballet I love - the perfect mix of modern and classical. The Four Temperaments was originally subtitled "A Dance without a Plot" and declared that ballet no longer needed to be airborne and pretty, but could be non-narrative, evasive and challenging. This resulted in pushing the dancer's body to the limit, which is so beautiful to watch in the delicate lighting, slim-fitting costumes and quick music. But then Theme and Variation was choreographed, as Balanchine wrote, "to evoke that great period in classical dancing when Russian ballet flourished with the aid of Tchaikovsky's music." Pretty tutus, big jumps, soloists flying across the stage - ahhh.

Good Night, and Good Luck

I just returned from seeing Good Night, and Good Luck and I urge you and everyone you know to see this film. It was astonishing to watch a film about the evils of McCarthyism and see how similar it is to the reactionary politics of today's presidency. Not only is this a beautiful black and white film with superb acting, it's an important film. The entire transcript from Edward Murrow's attack on McCarthy can be viewed here.

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.....We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Possessing (nearly) three university degrees in English Literature, having people ask me for book recommendations comes with the territory. I don't mind, in fact, I love sharing some of my favourite books and have an image in my head of one copy of such a book being passed on and on, becoming dog-eared on almost every page and looking very well-loved.

Though it came out in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is my first recommendation for 2006. The story is told by Cal, a young man living in Berlin in the present day - but Cal lived as a girl until the age of fourteen. The secret to the one malfunctioning gene that caused Cal to be born a hermaphrodite is told in a sweeping saga of three generations of a Greek family who emigrated to Detroit in the early part of the twentieth century. Apart from a beautiful story, why did I love this book? A writer must have great skill to invite the reader to invest emotionally in his characters as well the ability to present sometimes horrific incidents with a precarious edge of comedy. And an editor must have a great amount of skill to ensure that a 500+ page book does not wane in the middle or become rushed at the end, which this novel did not.

I discovered this wonderful interview with Jeffrey Eugenides by the insightful Jonathan Safran Foer which addresses issues such as the postmodern aspect of the novel, the fatigue involved in writing such a large book, authorial influences, and what he wouldn't sacrifice for his writing.

Epitaph for George Dillon

One of my favourite theatre venues in London is the Comedy Theatre, where on Wednesday I caught the matinee performance of Epitaph for George Dillon. Starring the striking Francesca Annis (who was just as brilliant as she was when I saw her in an Ibsen production a couple of years ago) and Joseph Fiennes, it was an interesting play for a couple of reasons.

There was an audible gasp from the female members of the audience when Joseph Fiennes walked on stage and though he's a fantastic actor, I couldn't get past the fact that he was kissing his sister-in-law on stage. While the play was written before Look Back in Anger, it didn't premiere until two years after the latter play's great success. It seemed to me like a warm-up for the alienation and asphixiating nature of the social climate of the 1950s that we all now recognize as being classic John Osborne. But there was something also a little different - whether this was due to the fact that the play was co-written by the largely forgotten Anthony Creighton or to the inexperience of an emerging voice is unknown. An interesting academic paper maybe, but I'm a little busy at the moment.

It's Evolution Baby

Today I am hungover, deaf, and have lost my voice.
Thank you Pearl Jam!

Last night was my fourth Pearl Jam show in the last nine years and was easily the best one. The crowd was loud and respectful, the band was tight and energized, and the setlist was awesome. Highlights were Blood, Black and You've Got to Hide Your Love Away....and then guess who shows up for a ceiling-lifting rendition of Rockin' in the Free World:

When I was fourteen, I borrowed Pearl Jam's Ten from a friend and copied it onto a cheap blank tape. It was the only tape I ever owned that I wore out and there's something magical about singing along to the songs that were the soundtrack of my adolescence so many years later. Just with a few vodka and sodas this time.

Harsh Times

Last night I saw Harsh Times at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was one of those films I probably would never have seen if it wasn't at the festival - too violent for my taste, not the kind of subject matter I find particularly interesting, and would something like this be worth forking out $12 for a ticket?

If this film comes to a theatre near you (though this may be doubtful - I can't imagine what it's rated) - it's well worth whatever they're charging for tickets. It is the brutally intense story of two lifelong friends, Jim (played by Christian Bale) and Mike (played by Freddy Rodriguez), who blow off looking for employment in favour of getting driving around the worst parts of Los Angeles with beer and dope and finding a whole lot of trouble. The screenplay is written by David Ayers of Training Day fame, and Harsh Times is his directorial debut.

I'm not giving anything away here when I say that I spent the entire film gripping the armrests while waiting for the characters to self-destruct - the audience is meant to feel that way and I could actually feel the stress of a couple hundred people rising in the theatre. The film is gritty and real and all consuming and Christian Bale's performance is brilliant. If you can stomach a lot of violence, a lot of stress, and an essentially sad story - see it.

The House of Yes

houseofyes
Originally uploaded by sarah4855.

As shown in the All Consuming sidebar, I watched The House of Yes last night. Or rather, in the early hours of today, as my insomnia raged. A friend gave me the dvd to watch on one of my transatlantic flights, but I never got around to it....in the end, it worked out well, because it was the perfect movie for my insomnia. Not because it put me to sleep, but because it made me happy to be awake in the wee hours of the morning watching it. It was hilarous.

I had read the original stage play by Wendy MacLeod, but the humour wasn't as wry and as sharp on the page as it was on screen. This was due mostly to Parker Posey's brilliant performance (she won at Sundance for this particular one) - while I had never been a big Posey fan, I am now. So thanks D. for the dvd gift. "Now please excuse me, I have to go baste the turkey and hide the kitchen knives."

Bad Education

Bad Education
Originally uploaded by sarah4855.

I finally got around to seeing Pedro Almodovar's latest film Bad Education (La Mala Educacion) last night. It was well worth the wait - I absolutely loved it. The film had a couple of scenes with characters diving into a brilliant blue, cool and refreshing swimming pool - these scenes, with their bright colours and beautiful juxtaposition of contrasting objects, occasional snippets of slow motion highlighting the clean lines of movement - are perfect examples of how Almodovar films seem to me in their entirety. Maybe it's because I was just in Madrid earlier this month and the relaxed Spanish mode is still with me, but in a word, I found this film beautiful.

Gael Garcia Bernal is appearing on the London stage in Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding at the Almedia Theatre soon. I'm hoping to snag a ticket and see the new adaptation.

Sarah's rating: **** out of 5