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ricardienne) wrote2008-07-13 02:47 pm
ricardienne) wrote2008-07-13 02:47 pm
Entry tags:
fun in Shakespeare-land
So this weekend, Father, Brother, and I went up to the Resort Town in the Mountains to see summer Shakespeare: Richard II (and the director seemed to promise both Henry IV's next year!) and Merry Wives of Windsor.
On Friday night, we almost didn't get to see anything. We showed up early to wait in line and get good seats, and had a long, fun discussion about Plantagenets (okay, it was mostly me showing off my knowledge of the five of Edward III's sons not named William), and they delayed opening the house, and delayed some more, and finally let us in, only to say that they were waiting for the director to come and make an announcement. Which he did, eventually: that due to a freak truck-accident on the freeway, some of the actors were stuck in traffic, and wouldn't be able to make it on time; terribly sorry, but we're doing MWW tomorrow, and we'll give you all comps. There was enough of a fuss, however, that they offered to put the show on when everyone got there. So yay for late-night Shakespeare and we got our history play after all.
It was lucky that we did get to see Richard II because it was an excellent production, overall. Their Richard was fantastic: I would have been happy to listen to him talk forever. He started out rather nasty and oblivious, but you could see him gradually having to turn inside as he lost power over other people (i.e. couldn't make them listen to him). It wasn't so much "growth" as a different facet of character coming out under adverse circumstances. Or something. Bolingbroke was less interesting, and had a kind of uneven character arc: angry and brutal usurper to weary king in one soliloquy lifted from 1 Henry IV or less! And then this was complicated by having him go in disguise as the groom to see Richard at the end, which didn't seem to do anything. The actor playing John of Gaunt looked and sounded kind of like a garden gnome; he was pretty good in the big John of Gaunt scene, and fit right in as a gardener, but didn't do Carlisle (most of whose lines were cut anyway) so well. York was good (there was a nifty thing going on with dying Gaunt giving his watch to York, who gave it to Bolingbroke after he failed to chastise him), and so was Aumerle. The actor playing Aumerle was surprisingly good, actually, because most of the other smaller-part people, including Northumberland, the queen, and the minions, really weren't. The woman playing the queen (sometimes playing her a valley-girl/starlet and sometimes not) also played cello for mood-music/etc. She was in my middle school youth orchestra, and the conductor always sat her first chair. (But she didn't play very well -- hah!). The setting was modern: military uniform/power suits (Northumberland appeared to be Bolingbroke's high-powered lawyer). This mostly worked, although there were some bizarre/unsuccessful choices, like having Mowbray and Bolingbroke fight with hatchets, sticking the deposed Richard in a packing crate for conveyance to Pomfret castle, and Exeter trying to kill Richard via a medic with a syringe. But overall, I really enjoyed it. Also, it hooked my brother on history plays.
I didn't enjoy MWW nearly as much. I feel somewhat guilty, having written that, actually, because I am not fond of the idea that the tragedies and the histories are higher-level and more meaningful than the comedies. I also don't like the idea, although I'm not sure it isn't sort of valid, sometimes, that there must be suffering for something to be "good." On the other hand, this production didn't help by being entirely farcical, and without a lot of point (both in terms of telos and in terms of ability to poke). It struck me that the setting of MWW is basically the same setting as a Jane Austen novel, with a little more mixing of social classes: provincial English upper-middle-class families, where (barring Falstaff) the main concern is the appropriate marriage of children, and a lot of people who think they are awesome but are actually fools. But here, all the parts were played as one-note caricatures, except for Page and Ford, who seemed not to have gotten the memo, but also tended to miss their lines. Falstaff was okay: he had some annoying tics, but more or less delivered the lines well; I realized that he does have clever things to say in MWW, although not as many or as clever as in the Henry IVs. Mistresses Page and Ford were good part of the time, but really shrill the other part of the time. (Actually, it was one scene between Mistress Page and Anne, where for a moment they both acted like real people and not like Character In A Comedy that made me think of Jane Austen, via what Margaret Drabble wrote about the couple of moments in P&P where Mrs. Bennett surprisingly normal.) Hugh Evans and Doctor Caius relied entirely on their accents, and it was not enough at all. Mistress Quickly was probably the best-acted part, the only one who was consistently funny, and also not completely flat. Actually, nothing was really that bad by itself, except for what relied on the same actor who had been crummy the night before, but it was often tedious and not that funny. And since the whole point of the show seemed to be the funniness, it pretty much failed. It was also disappointing to see the actor who had been so awesome as Richard the night before be so conspicuously not awesome as Evans. Also, they cut the Latin lesson scene, which, (and I admit that I may be alone in this) I think is funnier than a number of scenes they didn't cut. Under the circumstances, however, less was probably better. So overall, not very good, but at least now I have seen it, and it wasn't a play (see my anxieties about comedies above) that had a very good sense of, just having read it.
On Friday night, we almost didn't get to see anything. We showed up early to wait in line and get good seats, and had a long, fun discussion about Plantagenets (okay, it was mostly me showing off my knowledge of the five of Edward III's sons not named William), and they delayed opening the house, and delayed some more, and finally let us in, only to say that they were waiting for the director to come and make an announcement. Which he did, eventually: that due to a freak truck-accident on the freeway, some of the actors were stuck in traffic, and wouldn't be able to make it on time; terribly sorry, but we're doing MWW tomorrow, and we'll give you all comps. There was enough of a fuss, however, that they offered to put the show on when everyone got there. So yay for late-night Shakespeare and we got our history play after all.
It was lucky that we did get to see Richard II because it was an excellent production, overall. Their Richard was fantastic: I would have been happy to listen to him talk forever. He started out rather nasty and oblivious, but you could see him gradually having to turn inside as he lost power over other people (i.e. couldn't make them listen to him). It wasn't so much "growth" as a different facet of character coming out under adverse circumstances. Or something. Bolingbroke was less interesting, and had a kind of uneven character arc: angry and brutal usurper to weary king in one soliloquy lifted from 1 Henry IV or less! And then this was complicated by having him go in disguise as the groom to see Richard at the end, which didn't seem to do anything. The actor playing John of Gaunt looked and sounded kind of like a garden gnome; he was pretty good in the big John of Gaunt scene, and fit right in as a gardener, but didn't do Carlisle (most of whose lines were cut anyway) so well. York was good (there was a nifty thing going on with dying Gaunt giving his watch to York, who gave it to Bolingbroke after he failed to chastise him), and so was Aumerle. The actor playing Aumerle was surprisingly good, actually, because most of the other smaller-part people, including Northumberland, the queen, and the minions, really weren't. The woman playing the queen (sometimes playing her a valley-girl/starlet and sometimes not) also played cello for mood-music/etc. She was in my middle school youth orchestra, and the conductor always sat her first chair. (But she didn't play very well -- hah!). The setting was modern: military uniform/power suits (Northumberland appeared to be Bolingbroke's high-powered lawyer). This mostly worked, although there were some bizarre/unsuccessful choices, like having Mowbray and Bolingbroke fight with hatchets, sticking the deposed Richard in a packing crate for conveyance to Pomfret castle, and Exeter trying to kill Richard via a medic with a syringe. But overall, I really enjoyed it. Also, it hooked my brother on history plays.
I didn't enjoy MWW nearly as much. I feel somewhat guilty, having written that, actually, because I am not fond of the idea that the tragedies and the histories are higher-level and more meaningful than the comedies. I also don't like the idea, although I'm not sure it isn't sort of valid, sometimes, that there must be suffering for something to be "good." On the other hand, this production didn't help by being entirely farcical, and without a lot of point (both in terms of telos and in terms of ability to poke). It struck me that the setting of MWW is basically the same setting as a Jane Austen novel, with a little more mixing of social classes: provincial English upper-middle-class families, where (barring Falstaff) the main concern is the appropriate marriage of children, and a lot of people who think they are awesome but are actually fools. But here, all the parts were played as one-note caricatures, except for Page and Ford, who seemed not to have gotten the memo, but also tended to miss their lines. Falstaff was okay: he had some annoying tics, but more or less delivered the lines well; I realized that he does have clever things to say in MWW, although not as many or as clever as in the Henry IVs. Mistresses Page and Ford were good part of the time, but really shrill the other part of the time. (Actually, it was one scene between Mistress Page and Anne, where for a moment they both acted like real people and not like Character In A Comedy that made me think of Jane Austen, via what Margaret Drabble wrote about the couple of moments in P&P where Mrs. Bennett surprisingly normal.) Hugh Evans and Doctor Caius relied entirely on their accents, and it was not enough at all. Mistress Quickly was probably the best-acted part, the only one who was consistently funny, and also not completely flat. Actually, nothing was really that bad by itself, except for what relied on the same actor who had been crummy the night before, but it was often tedious and not that funny. And since the whole point of the show seemed to be the funniness, it pretty much failed. It was also disappointing to see the actor who had been so awesome as Richard the night before be so conspicuously not awesome as Evans. Also, they cut the Latin lesson scene, which, (and I admit that I may be alone in this) I think is funnier than a number of scenes they didn't cut. Under the circumstances, however, less was probably better. So overall, not very good, but at least now I have seen it, and it wasn't a play (see my anxieties about comedies above) that had a very good sense of, just having read it.
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Also the mental image of them mailing him to Pomfret is incredibly hilarious. It seems vaguely like the director may have seen Stephen Pimlott's RSC production (the one with Sam West), between the hatchets (in Pimlott's production they had fire axes) and the King-in-a-Box.
Also also, I think you are quite right about MWW, which is a play that people tend to blow off because it's always dismissed in criticism as totally insubstantial. This is because the Patriarchal Establishment cannot bear to see Falstaff have his ass handed to him by women.
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Actually now that I think about it, I hadn't realized how odd it was that no one really seemed to be listening to Richard, even among his supporters, once he started to lose power. It was definitely an "oh, he's babbling on again and it isn't helping" attitude being projected.
It's nice to know that there is precedent for the hatchet. The director gave an interview to the local newspaper where he described the king-in-a-box bit as "Richard gets put in the box after he is deposed and basically stays there for the rest of the play," so I was going in wondering about the possibility of soliloquizing and murder within a (closed) box (although, obviously, I suppose, it would have been an open box). But in fact, they, er, unpacked him.
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In the Pimlott production he dragged it onstage for the prison scene, stood it upright, and climbed into it. (Since you have many Sam West fans on your flist you have probably seen photos. Like this one.) And then Exton dumped him into it at the end of the scene and presented it to Henry. Which I like better than the thing this production seems to have had going. (Did it have styrofoam peanuts in it?)
Also the thing about Richard and people listening is one of those things that gets missed out on a lot in both criticism and production: that is, that his total acquiescence ends up being a form of resistance, because he doesn't have access to more traditional manners of resistance (e.g., no army). So what he does instead is ruin it for everybody else. And it totally works.
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The box in this production was sort of like a giant plastic trombone case that stood upright. Northumberland stuffed Richard into it and latched it after the farewell-with-queen scene, and it sat on stage until the prison scene, when the jailor came on and let Richard out. (There was definitely some creepiness created in the intervening scene by knowing that Richard I In That Box the whole time). Exton turned it on its side and dumped Richard in after killing him.
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