La Ronde

by Arthur Schnitzler
(Play)



JAMES says:

This fin de siecle comedy of sexual manners follows a very strict formula. X meets Y, they chat, Y says it’s too bright/dark to have sex, and besides they need to get home. Then X has sex with Y anyway, they chat a bit and the scene ends. In the next scene Y goes through the motions with Z, and so on, and on the whole the characters are about as well rounded as the letters of the alphabet here representing them. In the production by Love and Madness that was my exposure to this play the sex was replaced by a highly charged Tango which was quite impressive to begin with but when I tell you there were 10 of these encounters you may understand that the novelty soon wore off. In fact, like sex itself, the whole thing quickly became tedious and repetitive.

Part of the problem is the play itself, which gives you little reason to maintain an interest. There was no sense of ‘Will they/won’t they?’ as you knew that they definitely would, within a matter of minutes. But the production didn’t help matters, changing the gender of some the characters to create an edginess but instead leading to absurdity. Would a 19 year old bloke really be worried that his mother didn’t know where he was? Also the neat circular nature of the play was ruined by the fact that a character who was male in the first scene had become female by the last. The acting was generally of a high standard, though the old bloke with the beard was a bit rubbish (and the section where he was sucking someone’s toes was just yuck). Most unforgivably the advertised ‘moments of nudity’ never appeared. There were bras and pants, which were alright I suppose, but don’t put it on the posters if you’re not going to go through with it.

As it is, this is a play that would only appeal to erotic group theorists, if such a thing exists.

3.4/10

Jerry Springer - The Opera

(Opera)

CONSTANT GUEST REVIEWER DEBBIE says:

I admit that it's my own stupid fault but I thought the fact that I hate Jerry Springer-style chat shows, Fat people, Americans, fat Americans, Musicals, Opera and crude language would be a positive asset to enjoying this satirical piece of theatre. I also thought it was about time I came off my Drama Graduate/Playwright high horse and saw something other than Chekhov, Wilde or Coward for a change.

The first thing that really annoyed me was that James had found us crap seats up in the Gods. However, it turns out that this wasn't his fault and placated by the pretty toilet paper in the ladies, I settled into the show. After 20 minutes I just wanted it to end. You know, just like that feeling you get when you watch any film starring Nicole Kidman? The show offended and irritated me. I don't mind rude words, so long as they have comic value, for instance "bollocks", but I felt uncomfortable listening to such a pile of filth. My companions however seemed to revel in it which annoyed me even more. I'm an old fashioned girl and I cannot condone coarse behaviour...which might lead some to question why I will be marrying James in a few weeks, but I digress.

My only artistic criticism is that I felt they hadn't gone far enough when creating the guests - the baby fetishist was pretty good but I think they should have hammed it up a bit more. After feeling that the show couldn't get much worse and a nice ice cream in the interval, I was further offended by the blasphemy in Act II - everyone knows that Jesus wasn't a fat man!

The staging was on the whole pretty good and I was impressed by the musicians and performers, apart from the chap playing Jerry himself. I also felt that the performance suffered a real lack of direction in Act II - it was hard to make out what they were getting at.
To conclude, I cannot fault the production itself, it's just no good for a highbrow like me. It is perfectly possible to achieve entertainment for entrainment's sake without being outrageous.

This show achieved everything it set out to achieve and perhaps for this reason I would even go so far as to say I hated it more than Les Miserables. Sorry Stewart Lee, I am a great admirer of your work in general but I think you should go back to working with Richard Herring.
I am also cross that we didn't get badges at the end, my friend Louisa did and she only went a week before us!


Staging and music score 6/10
Personal Enjoyment score- 1.5/10 (this score is solely for the toilet paper)


NEILL says:

Why would you want badges for a show you didn't even like? That's mental.

8.7/10


JAMES says:

I'll probably be sleeping on the sofa for this, but I don't think it's really fair to say you were too highbrow for the show. There were some intelligent themes discussed in there, and it is a frickin' Opera after all. Maybe it would be better to say you're too refined. I don't know, I'll throw it open to the readers. Vote in the comments about whether Debbie is too refined or too high-brow.

7.9/10

Humble Boy

By Charlotte Jones, Dir: John Caird
Royal National Theatre production – Oxford Playhouse, 29 October
(Play)



Guest Reviewer of the Week SHEILA CAMERON says:

An ‘award winning play’, - the Daily Telegraph ’cannot recommend this lovely play too highly’. Reviews in the Guardian, Times and Sunday Times produced similarly fulsome word-bites. Even the Financial Times said you should ‘not miss this’.

If ever there was proof that you should not believe the press, this week in Oxford was it. Everyone I spoke to considered leaving at the interval and felt at the end that they took the wrong decision. (I didn’t get to talk to those who actually left.) OK, there were highlights. The set was ‘sumptuously designed’ (Guardian) – a riot of waist high grass dotted with roses. And the ‘Boy’s’ trousers were a joy to behold. Tight on waist and thigh, crotch almost to the knees, and over-long in leg. Overall effect of elephant in cricket whites was classic. But you can only appreciate fat boy in the long grass for so long, and appreciation is shortened if the cast are haranguing each other in voices painfully loud for the size of theatre in pursuit of a plot that totally escaped me. Yes there were jokes, but they were tied on as loosely as the gratuitous soliloquies on superstring theory. Example: Mrs Humble (Hayley Mills, looking younger than her supposed son) is engaged to Mr Pie. (Gerrit? In case not, it was firmly pointed out that they would become the Humble Pies….) And more of this ilk. Not, in my view ‘funny, very, very, funny’ (Sunday Times). Guess their critic likes banana skins too. Overall a night in with a good book would have been preferable. And even in hardback, probably cheaper.

3/10

The Elephant Vanishes

Complicite @the Barbican, 3rd July
(Play)



JAMES says:

Based on 3 short stories by Haruki Murakami, this play was performed in Japanese by Japanese actors but with a British director and crew. Subtitles were displayed on a screen above the stage. While odd to start with, one quickly became used to this in the way that you do with a subtitled film. We were sat on the circle, however, and I hear tell that those in the stalls got sore necks from looking up at them continually. Well, hah, serves them right for having so much money. The play begins with a Japanese women explaining how the performance is delayed due to problems between Japanese and English systems, before launching on an impromptu lecture on light, which ends showing how ink spreads in a glass of water, but cannot be taken out again. Action and consequence. Then we’re into the play proper.

The set is effective, with a solitary fridge forming the stationary heart around which tables, chairs and beds revolve. The set changes themselves become performances, settling in what you think is the scene, before transforming again. The play takes the form of two distinct performances, book ended by the tale of the vanishing elephant. This was to my mind the weakest part of the performance. While containing good set pieces, such as the salaryman slowly eating his breakfast while reading his paper, projected onto a giant video screen at the back of the stage, there was too much repetition, and not enough emotion for my liking. No actual elephants, unfortunately, but they got round that alright.

The second piece was a tale of a couple who were so hungry they perform a night robbery on a McDonalds. This was expertly performed, with the main character both performing in the action and narrating as he hung above the scene on wires. This was used to its full potential, with the man walking up fridges, and gazing over screen doors at an imaginary sea. The story itself, as well as being incredibly amusing, was a superbly dreamlike affair, where events seemed to have an emotional reality, even though they made no narrative sense.

The final segment also worked more in the subconscious, although there was more of the nightmare than the dream in it. A woman, bored of her housewife life, stops sleeping and starts reading Anna Karenina. What starts as a fairly straightforward monologue to camera descends into delirium, as the set shifts and replicates itself, and the woman becomes four women, all acting simultaneously. It is hard to keep track of everything, but the lack of a strict narrative line means you don’t feel you have to,. The scenes become increasingly menacing, with sudden flashes and loud noises breaking up the lullaby soundtrack, and by the end the link between sleep and death, and fear, become explicit. The final scene, confronting the horror of mortality, is truly unsettling. Ironically enough, this was also the section that Debbie managed to fall asleep in, though she claimed to have been enjoying it ‘immensely’ up to that point.

While three distinct performances, the repetition of themes and a continuing dreamlike surreality means the shifts never felt disjointed. All are in some way tales being told, as befits the source material, and the soundtrack is just as effective in creating the mood as the scenes or actors. It’s a fantastic advert for the work of Murakami, and a really thought provoking night out.

8/10