Waste

14 December 2015 (Mon), National Theatre

An early 20th-century play by Harley Granville Barker. An up-and-coming young politician eyed for a Cabinet post is working on bill to “disestablish” the Church of England, i.e., effectively separate church and state. He is irritated when his lover, a married woman, becomes pregnant; more so when she insists on having an abortion (he wants the child, in a reversal of the usual story); and yet more so when she ultimately commits suicide. But his conscience doesn’t seem to kick into gear until he is unceremoniously dumped by the party as the scandal mounts, which sets him into deep thinking and rash action. Continue reading →

Pericles

11 December 2015 (Fri), Sam Wanamaker Theatre

This was the latest staging at the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Theatre, the first in a series exploring Shakespeare’s four late romances. I can see why this is a lesser known play. It skates perilously on the line between far-fetched and ridiculous: shipwrecks abound, a dead body in a trunk fished from the sea is revived, armor lost at sea washes up on the shore with perfect timing, Pericles miraculously discovers his long-lost daughter (presumed dead) who then discovers her own long-lost mother (also presumed dead), all of whom happen to have ended up on the same sparsely populated island. Shakespeare has never shied from allowing magic and coincidence to do his work for him, but he really got carried away in this one. Maybe that had to do with his collaborator; the excellent program says that George Wilkins wrote the first part and Shakespeare the final three acts. In any case, it led to unintended laughter in the audience in some scenes, such as when the dead woman awakens or when the long-separated family find themselves improbably reunited. It must be hard to say those lines with a straight face. Continue reading →

Hangmen

9 December 2015 (Wed), West End

Talk about gallows humor. This is the first new McDonagh play in London in a long while and the first to be set outside of Ireland. He is back to form and then some, scabrous and witty and outrageous. Continue reading →

Mr. Foote’s Other Leg

7 December 2015 (Mon), West End

Simon Russell Beale in peak form. Continue reading →

The Homecoming

5 December 2015 (Sat), London Trafalgar Studios

A little Pinter goes long way with me, but this was the one play that my friend and I could agree on; I felt I should see it at some point anyway. As with most Pinter plays, it’s too stylized and obscure to make much sense, though the characterizations on their own were interesting. A brother, who has gone off to the US, brings his wife home for the first time after years of marriage and introduces her to his misogynistic widower dad, his hopeless two brothers and his chauffeur uncle. Thrown in the middle of a bullying, macho, frat-type environment, the wife uses her sexual wiles to manipulate all and gain control. Continue reading →

Farinelli and the King

5 December 2015 (Sat), West End

This was one tough ticket. I had tried for seats several times from Tokyo, but had only managed to get a standing-room seat for the evening show (and even those were eventually sold out). I went to the box office in the morning to see if I could find something better, and ended up snagging not just a seat but a house seat for the matinee – this was apparently the final day of performances, so the producers must have been holding back a number of tickets just in case. Great luck. And I even managed to sell my standing-room ticket to an extremely grateful guy. So all’s well that ends well. Continue reading →

Othello (National Theatre Live)

19 October 2015 (Mon), Tokyo cinema

I loved Adrian Lester a few years back in Red Velvet as a 19th-century actor playing Othello, so I wasn’t going to miss him in the real thing. With direction by Nicholas Hytner and the added attraction of Rory Kinnear as Iago, my expectations were high.  Continue reading →