Theatre of unreality

Last night I went to see Hysteria at the Oxford Playhouse, written and directed by Terry Johnson. It was a slightly odd mixture of farce and serious drama about the origins of trauma in childhood abuse. Possibly without the farcical elements, it might have been harder to watch, because more painful. It was a good counterpoint to the film A Dangerous Method, about Jung, Spielrein and Freud. Anthony Sher was brilliant as Freud (better than Viggo Mortensen by quite a long chalk). The play hinged around a case history where Freud had initially concluded that the patient had been abused as a child, and then changed his mind when it became apparent to him that most of the upper echelons of Viennese society were child-molesters. I seem to remember something along those lines in the history of psychoanalysis. Dalí also made an appearance and there was a bit when the whole set turned into a Dalí painting, including a melting clock (I don't know how they did that, but it was very clever). So, all in all, a brilliant production, very thought-provoking.

Last week, I went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream in the gardens of Wadham College, performed by the Oxford Shakespeare Company. It was an utterly, utterly brilliant and magical performance. A really beautiful production. The actors were very physical in their performance, they put life into the lines, the costumes were great, the space was magical, the lighting was magical. I thought the extra bridging dialogue that they had inserted was a little unnecessary, but funny all the same.

Both plays dealt with reality not being quite what it seems, but in very different ways.

weird juxtaposition

Last week we went to see three productions, all about as different as could be, because friends were in them.

On Wednesday, we went to see Oliver! at the Bath Theatre Royal, because Balador was in it. It was quite weird watching a musical where you were trying to catch sight of a member of the chorus all the time. I'm not normally a fan of musicals (and have managed to avoid most of them) but I quite enjoyed watching it because we did the first scene for a school concert, and I was a scrubber in the workhouse (in the original meaning of the word scrubber). Also Balador was excellent (especially his impression of a drunk - you'd think he had been practising...)

On Thursday, we went to see a concert of Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Elgar and Vaughan Williams in Bath Abbey. The acoustic was a bit strange because we were sitting in the choir stalls, the rest of the audience were in the nave, and the choir were in the transept facing the nave. But the music was wonderful - particularly Tallis' Spem in Alium, which is glorious, nay, celestial (though I am still wondering why he is placing his hope in garlic).

On Saturday, we went to see a community theatre production called Brave at the Bristol Old Vic, which described itself as an evocation of childhood, and turned out to be a series of cameos interspersed with minimalist music and lots of people rushing about on the stage. Some quite amusing bits, but I wouldn't have bothered if my friend hadn't been in it. Still, it was better in some ways than some professional experimental theatre that I have seen.

theatricals

Last week we went to see Mine by Xavier Leret at the Bristol Old Vic (he's posted some extracts from the forthcoming film on his blog). The dialogue was mostly very realistic (as far as I could tell, never having been stuck in a minefield in the middle of the night with two psychopaths) and the moral dubiousness of journalists' desire for a "story" was brought out by the unfolding plot. The way in which the context of the locals' lives was brought out by the story about Huso and the brandy was very good, as well. Nick was at college with Xavier.

This week we went to see the play of The Marriage of Figaro (original by Beaumarchais, translation and adaptation by Ranjit Bolt). Bolt's version was set in Moghul India and performed by Tara Arts in a style influenced by Bhavai theatre. It was very high energy and very enjoyable, with great costumes, music and dialogue. I sat next to Ranjit Bolt in a theatre in Cambridge once (around 1991 or 1992), and we got chatting (this is before he was famous, but he was just about to hit the big-time). Very nice chap.