Hamilton in London: I Have Criticisms But They Don’t Matter, It’s Hamilton and It’s Amazingby Randi / January 4, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday y’all! Today we are talking about “The Twilight Zone” at London’s Almeida Theatre, which is playing until January 27.
I cannot do scary stuff. I don’t mean horror movies; that’s a whole other level of scary that isn’t even on my radar. I mean like, anything dark or kind of about death. The Good Place is an exception because it’s the best show ever and you kind of forget they’re dead because they do such normal things and have such normal lives, kind of. Normal not-lives, I guess. But I hate Halloween, mostly because there are skeletons around. That’s the kind of thing I mean. I’m currently writing this from Paris and I don’t know what to do tomorrow because I think I’ve gone to every tourist attraction in the city – except the Catacombs, because no way jose! It’s Halloweeny down there. So what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t necessarily be the first person to go to a theatrical adaptation of The Twilight Zone, because scary and dark and not full of rainbows. But the operative word in there is theatrical, and so I had to. And guess what – while it wasn’t great, parts of it were very good and I enjoyed it a lot despite the skirr.
I cannot do scary stuff. I don’t mean horror movies; that’s a whole other level of scary that isn’t even on my radar. I mean like, anything dark or kind of about death. The Good Place is an exception because it’s the best show ever and you kind of forget they’re dead because they do such normal things and have such normal lives, kind of. Normal not-lives, I guess. But I hate Halloween, mostly because there are skeletons around. That’s the kind of thing I mean. I’m currently writing this from Paris and I don’t know what to do tomorrow because I think I’ve gone to every tourist attraction in the city – except the Catacombs, because no way jose! It’s Halloweeny down there. So what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t necessarily be the first person to go to a theatrical adaptation of The Twilight Zone, because scary and dark and not full of rainbows. But the operative word in there is theatrical, and so I had to. And guess what – while it wasn’t great, parts of it were very good and I enjoyed it a lot despite the skirr.
The Twilight Zone currently at the Almeida Theatre (right across from an Ottolenghi! Have a pure happy veggie meal before questioning the universe) was adapted from the Rod Serling (I keep wanting to say Sterling) television series by playwright Anne Washburn, who did a very interesting take on an apocalyptic future Mr Burns story a few years ago that my husband loved. I didn’t get to see that, so i was excited to see what she did here. I think her hands were a little tied creatively because, due to using famous specific episodes, there was only so much she could add or change. What we get is pretty straightforward episode play, and even though I don’t remember ever watching the TV show, I guess I did because I remembered some storylines.
Because Anne didn’t have much to do or add, I imagine that her creative juices were stymied and she wanted to let them flow or at least put some sort of stamp on the show. And unfortunately, that led to the worst part of the show: There are too many long, unnecessary monologues that ruin the pace and honestly caused me to roll my eyes a lot, which I hate doing because i have dry eyes. These vignettes, no matter how brief, stand on their own and often resonate with the human condition; that’s why they’ve persisted in the culture. You don’t need to present the story and then have someone drone on for five minutes about how that did indeed reflect the human condition and the universe is so unknown and peculiar and wow isn’t this all interesting. Kind of ruins it.
But really that’s the only purely negative thing I can point to. This adaptation is a very decent time in the theatre, and very funny at times as well. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek sarcastic presentation of the Twilight Zone, maybe poking fun at it, because there was so much of that kind of humour. It starts with the sketch (is TTZ a sketch show?), one of the few I remembered, where a bus stops in a diner where there are rumours of an alien being among the small crowd, and they can’t find out which one it is and they’re scared they’re all in danger. I really enjoyed this opener mostly because at one point, they all hide under the bar, and then when they got back up, I could have sworn that there was an actor among them who was not there before, like that the alien wasn’t even one of the original crowd but just now snuck his way in and I was like dammmmn they aren’t even calling attention to that that was just so subtle and brilliant! But, my husband didn’t notice any of that, so maybe i just miscounted. i like to think that the direction was that subtly detailed though so I’m gonna stick with my account. Anyway, one of the actresses, Adrianna Bertola, is very short, like shorter than my mom and Kristin Chenoweth um opposite of combined, and so she played all children characters and it was kind of hilarious! And everyone EVERYONE kept unwittingly pulling cigarettes out of their pockets or sleeves, and then once noticing, saying ‘I don’t smoke…’ So I thought it was going to be that kind of show, and I think it would have been a little better if it was indeed all hilarious mockery of the form.
But it wasn’t, and most of the rest of it was quite serious. Sure there was the very brief ballet-of-subjectivity when a society of disgusting faced monsters unwraps a surgery patient’s head to find that she is HORRIFICALLY DISFIGURED i.e. without one of those masks and just her plain human-faced self. So that was funny. But that came sandwiched in between much more troubling and dire skits (is it a skit show) like the one about a woman, played very effectively by Amy Griffiths, who meets a strange young child (again the short adult) who warns her about a strange man that she sort of remembers, only for the woman to realise a bit too late that the man is a murderer from her past and the child was her young self. SO CREEPY. And the one where a couple hears their daughter yelling for them but she isn’t in her bed, she’s been sucked into some kind of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar time void in another dimension and it’s really sad because the dog gets into the warp zone too (but they make it out thank dog). There were so many creepy ones like that, including one that i didn’t like because it made me so uncomfortable: It featured John Marquez (related to Mimi?) as a man who was terrified of going to sleep because he was tortured in his sleep in a circus-like setting (i mean that’s torture anytime) and a tantalising woman (Lizzy Connelly) who lures him, I don’t know, further into sleep? trying to kill him? and she has scary gray and white hair and leads the ensemble in this INCREDIBLY weird masked dance (I hate masks so scary) which was straight out of that weird play Bette Midler’s character was in in Beaches, her show-within-the-show that wasn’t about Otto Titsling. So yeah, a creepy masked dance is bad enough for me but to make it a story about how sleep is a bad thing you need to avoid or else you die??? Literally the meanest story you could tell me. My husband, on the other hand, thought this was great, and especially enjoyed the weird ass dance so take that for what it’s worth.
A great creepy ass ‘episode’ featured here – and told quite effectively in a broken up manner, as many of the stories were interspersed among each other, weaving in and out – told of three military heroes who keep disappearing, not only from space but from collective memory, one by one. As one would leave, the remaining would ask a third party what happened to x, and the third party would be like x, who’s that? And the remaining would be like ‘you know the guy in this front-page newspaper story with the picture of the three of us’ and throughout the telling the newspaper photo would change from three people to two people to one. It was so well done; i didn’t even notice them grabbing different papers, but it was incredibly effective. And kind of funny too, at times, if you think of it as a comedy instead of focusing on how the idea of it is horrifying.
The stories that stuck with me the most, however, were the ones that seemed most human and most realistic, with no aliens and little sci-fi as you’d stereotypically think of it. Whereas before seeing this show I would have guessed that TTZ was most in its element with those kinds of alien-y or weird-metaphysical-phenomena stories, after seeing this i understand that the genius of it comes in these more realistic, normal-human stories that ask very unnerving questions about the plain human condition that we all experience. For example, one that I keep thinking about is a take on a theme that we’ve seen repeatedly in many different art forms, but it doesn’t make it any less upsetting. In this one, an astronaut is going to be sent on a mission that will take at least 50 years, but he will spend most of it on his ship in a cryo-chamber so he won’t age. Unforch, he falls in love right before his mission, with a woman (a great Franc Ashman) who would be left on earth to age naturally, and so when he leaves, they are saying goodbye to their relationship for good. Then 50 years pass and the astronaut has returned to earth. yippee! But oh no: Of course, humans being terrible at communicating but wanting to make nice gestures, the woman decided to cryo-freeze herself the entire time so that when her man returned, they would be the same age. But of course, humans and so on, the man decided NOT to take his cold nap in his ship and instead spent the 50 years ageing as normal. Ughhhh you guysss! It’s so sad right! Kind of like a Magi twist kind of thing but sooooo much worse i mean homegirl’s hair would grow back but you can’t un-age! FFS i’m still kind of really mad about this one and it’s not real. Just so sad to think about! Remind me that it’s not real!
The other one that made the biggest impact and I thought was impeccably done was a sketch about racism in America. In this story, it was the height of nuclear-war fears (now?) and, so sad, a bomb was coming right to the heart of America. A neighbourhood of families dealt with the news and their decisions in a tense situation that made all kinds of brutal thoughts come out among them. Only one of the families has a bomb shelter, and the rest fight about who should get to join them in their tiny hole. They start understandably enough, a young white couple arguing that they should get to go because they have a baby, things like that. But as time to fight for survival runs out, they lose all restraint and the gloves come off and they resort to all kinds of race-based arguments. “My people were here first” vs. “Well my people literally built everything you see around you.” “You can’t love this country like I do because you weren’t born here” vs. “Well I actually had to take a test to become a citizen, you were just an accident of birth.” Things like that. I was riveted, honestly, and so impressed by how much it really reflected the innerbelly of racist America. I particularly loved when the white woman so perfectly yelled about how the minorities in the room, especially the black couple, didn’t deserve to be the ones to survive because they hadn’t been there as long and they don’t love America like the whites do and yada yada bullshit like that, which she immediately followed with “Now I don’t have a racist bone in my body…” and I GUFFAWED because it was just too too perfect. Oh white American women we have SO MUCH work to do. This scene was just too accurate with the things that come out when you think you have nothing and everything left to lose, and too spot-on with how the various groups in America think and talk. And on top of all that, it portrayed really realistic survival instincts and things that people would very believably resort to if this kind of event arose, which I really really hope it never does.
So The Twilight Zone, made theatrical, had some very poignant and provocative moments. Some of them worked very well in the theatre, but some I couldn’t help but think probably gained nothing from the transfer off the small screen. The racism scene worked well because it was so theatrical, but others clearly would have been equally or more effective on TV. I wonder what the selection process for the adaptation involved. It’s always hard to compare adaptations of the same work across different platforms, and for something so famous and well-known, this translation, while not great, is solid and pretty entertaining, even if it has too many scary masks (and those cringey monologues) for my taste.
INFORMATION
The Almeida is a cool spot in Islington, so far from the normal theatre district, which is nice. However, it is a very cramped lobby, and they don’t open the auditorium up for way too long so everyone is kind of squeezed in vying for standing space, which is ludicrous. They need to just open the doors earlier. Also, tickets are a little expensive for it being essentially an experimental hip downtown-style theatre joint (except uptown, but I’m using NYC speak).
Because Anne didn’t have much to do or add, I imagine that her creative juices were stymied and she wanted to let them flow or at least put some sort of stamp on the show. And unfortunately, that led to the worst part of the show: There are too many long, unnecessary monologues that ruin the pace and honestly caused me to roll my eyes a lot, which I hate doing because i have dry eyes. These vignettes, no matter how brief, stand on their own and often resonate with the human condition; that’s why they’ve persisted in the culture. You don’t need to present the story and then have someone drone on for five minutes about how that did indeed reflect the human condition and the universe is so unknown and peculiar and wow isn’t this all interesting. Kind of ruins it.
But really that’s the only purely negative thing I can point to. This adaptation is a very decent time in the theatre, and very funny at times as well. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek sarcastic presentation of the Twilight Zone, maybe poking fun at it, because there was so much of that kind of humour. It starts with the sketch (is TTZ a sketch show?), one of the few I remembered, where a bus stops in a diner where there are rumours of an alien being among the small crowd, and they can’t find out which one it is and they’re scared they’re all in danger. I really enjoyed this opener mostly because at one point, they all hide under the bar, and then when they got back up, I could have sworn that there was an actor among them who was not there before, like that the alien wasn’t even one of the original crowd but just now snuck his way in and I was like dammmmn they aren’t even calling attention to that that was just so subtle and brilliant! But, my husband didn’t notice any of that, so maybe i just miscounted. i like to think that the direction was that subtly detailed though so I’m gonna stick with my account. Anyway, one of the actresses, Adrianna Bertola, is very short, like shorter than my mom and Kristin Chenoweth um opposite of combined, and so she played all children characters and it was kind of hilarious! And everyone EVERYONE kept unwittingly pulling cigarettes out of their pockets or sleeves, and then once noticing, saying ‘I don’t smoke…’ So I thought it was going to be that kind of show, and I think it would have been a little better if it was indeed all hilarious mockery of the form.
But it wasn’t, and most of the rest of it was quite serious. Sure there was the very brief ballet-of-subjectivity when a society of disgusting faced monsters unwraps a surgery patient’s head to find that she is HORRIFICALLY DISFIGURED i.e. without one of those masks and just her plain human-faced self. So that was funny. But that came sandwiched in between much more troubling and dire skits (is it a skit show) like the one about a woman, played very effectively by Amy Griffiths, who meets a strange young child (again the short adult) who warns her about a strange man that she sort of remembers, only for the woman to realise a bit too late that the man is a murderer from her past and the child was her young self. SO CREEPY. And the one where a couple hears their daughter yelling for them but she isn’t in her bed, she’s been sucked into some kind of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar time void in another dimension and it’s really sad because the dog gets into the warp zone too (but they make it out thank dog). There were so many creepy ones like that, including one that i didn’t like because it made me so uncomfortable: It featured John Marquez (related to Mimi?) as a man who was terrified of going to sleep because he was tortured in his sleep in a circus-like setting (i mean that’s torture anytime) and a tantalising woman (Lizzy Connelly) who lures him, I don’t know, further into sleep? trying to kill him? and she has scary gray and white hair and leads the ensemble in this INCREDIBLY weird masked dance (I hate masks so scary) which was straight out of that weird play Bette Midler’s character was in in Beaches, her show-within-the-show that wasn’t about Otto Titsling. So yeah, a creepy masked dance is bad enough for me but to make it a story about how sleep is a bad thing you need to avoid or else you die??? Literally the meanest story you could tell me. My husband, on the other hand, thought this was great, and especially enjoyed the weird ass dance so take that for what it’s worth.
A great creepy ass ‘episode’ featured here – and told quite effectively in a broken up manner, as many of the stories were interspersed among each other, weaving in and out – told of three military heroes who keep disappearing, not only from space but from collective memory, one by one. As one would leave, the remaining would ask a third party what happened to x, and the third party would be like x, who’s that? And the remaining would be like ‘you know the guy in this front-page newspaper story with the picture of the three of us’ and throughout the telling the newspaper photo would change from three people to two people to one. It was so well done; i didn’t even notice them grabbing different papers, but it was incredibly effective. And kind of funny too, at times, if you think of it as a comedy instead of focusing on how the idea of it is horrifying.
The stories that stuck with me the most, however, were the ones that seemed most human and most realistic, with no aliens and little sci-fi as you’d stereotypically think of it. Whereas before seeing this show I would have guessed that TTZ was most in its element with those kinds of alien-y or weird-metaphysical-phenomena stories, after seeing this i understand that the genius of it comes in these more realistic, normal-human stories that ask very unnerving questions about the plain human condition that we all experience. For example, one that I keep thinking about is a take on a theme that we’ve seen repeatedly in many different art forms, but it doesn’t make it any less upsetting. In this one, an astronaut is going to be sent on a mission that will take at least 50 years, but he will spend most of it on his ship in a cryo-chamber so he won’t age. Unforch, he falls in love right before his mission, with a woman (a great Franc Ashman) who would be left on earth to age naturally, and so when he leaves, they are saying goodbye to their relationship for good. Then 50 years pass and the astronaut has returned to earth. yippee! But oh no: Of course, humans being terrible at communicating but wanting to make nice gestures, the woman decided to cryo-freeze herself the entire time so that when her man returned, they would be the same age. But of course, humans and so on, the man decided NOT to take his cold nap in his ship and instead spent the 50 years ageing as normal. Ughhhh you guysss! It’s so sad right! Kind of like a Magi twist kind of thing but sooooo much worse i mean homegirl’s hair would grow back but you can’t un-age! FFS i’m still kind of really mad about this one and it’s not real. Just so sad to think about! Remind me that it’s not real!
The other one that made the biggest impact and I thought was impeccably done was a sketch about racism in America. In this story, it was the height of nuclear-war fears (now?) and, so sad, a bomb was coming right to the heart of America. A neighbourhood of families dealt with the news and their decisions in a tense situation that made all kinds of brutal thoughts come out among them. Only one of the families has a bomb shelter, and the rest fight about who should get to join them in their tiny hole. They start understandably enough, a young white couple arguing that they should get to go because they have a baby, things like that. But as time to fight for survival runs out, they lose all restraint and the gloves come off and they resort to all kinds of race-based arguments. “My people were here first” vs. “Well my people literally built everything you see around you.” “You can’t love this country like I do because you weren’t born here” vs. “Well I actually had to take a test to become a citizen, you were just an accident of birth.” Things like that. I was riveted, honestly, and so impressed by how much it really reflected the innerbelly of racist America. I particularly loved when the white woman so perfectly yelled about how the minorities in the room, especially the black couple, didn’t deserve to be the ones to survive because they hadn’t been there as long and they don’t love America like the whites do and yada yada bullshit like that, which she immediately followed with “Now I don’t have a racist bone in my body…” and I GUFFAWED because it was just too too perfect. Oh white American women we have SO MUCH work to do. This scene was just too accurate with the things that come out when you think you have nothing and everything left to lose, and too spot-on with how the various groups in America think and talk. And on top of all that, it portrayed really realistic survival instincts and things that people would very believably resort to if this kind of event arose, which I really really hope it never does.
So The Twilight Zone, made theatrical, had some very poignant and provocative moments. Some of them worked very well in the theatre, but some I couldn’t help but think probably gained nothing from the transfer off the small screen. The racism scene worked well because it was so theatrical, but others clearly would have been equally or more effective on TV. I wonder what the selection process for the adaptation involved. It’s always hard to compare adaptations of the same work across different platforms, and for something so famous and well-known, this translation, while not great, is solid and pretty entertaining, even if it has too many scary masks (and those cringey monologues) for my taste.
INFORMATION
The Almeida is a cool spot in Islington, so far from the normal theatre district, which is nice. However, it is a very cramped lobby, and they don’t open the auditorium up for way too long so everyone is kind of squeezed in vying for standing space, which is ludicrous. They need to just open the doors earlier. Also, tickets are a little expensive for it being essentially an experimental hip downtown-style theatre joint (except uptown, but I’m using NYC speak).
OH OH this will have nothing to do with your experience, but I must share: The man sitting two seats away from me (I was next to his wife) PEELED AND ATE AN ORANGE DURING THE SHOW. WHO DOES THAT. WHOOOO DOES THAT. It was the strongest smelling orange ever and even though I like oranges I got nauseous. WHO DOES THAT OMG CAN PEOPLE PLEASE TRY TO BEHAVE BETTER IN THE THEATRE FFS?
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All My Sons at the Old Vic: I Don’t Know How Many Sons We’re Talking About But I’m Bored
You tell me Sally Field is coming to London, I’m gonna be there front and center holding up a big sign with GO SALLY! WE LIKE YOU! written in bubble letters. Metaphorically speaking, of course; I’m not a monster. So the chance to see the absolute ledge, what a ledge, perform live is something I’m grateful for. I’m glad I got to see her. What a treat.
You can tell I’m trying to delay talking at all about the play, huh? Okay, well let’s just say it’s fitting that I saw All My Sons at the Old Vic theatre in London in the same week I finished reading Zadie Smith’s book Swing Time, as both were not unpleasant to experience, but ‘not unpleasant’ is literally all I can say about them. There was nothing gripping about either work. While I liked watching both Sally and Bill Pullman (seriously, Bill Pullman! ledge on ledge!), everyone else felt slightly (or heavily) miscast and misdirected. It felt like Arthur Miller’s classic play has aged out of relevance, and rather than feeling like a noteworthy period piece, it instead felt like a dusty relic.
Sally and Bill (I met them; we’re friends) play a married couple of an adult son. Just one son. They had another son but he died in the war (sad). Two sons is still not enough for an ‘all’, you’re correct – the title phrase reveal was one of the only creative turns of phrase in the whole script. Anyway, so the dead son (sorry) had a sweetheart when he went off to war (as they do, as they do). Ever since – three years now – the girl, Ann, has been corresponding with the other (living) (sorry) son, Chris, and THEY now want to get married. This play was written in a time when it was SUPER NORMAL for a girl whose sweetheart died in war to marry the guy’s brother instead, and that is WEIRD. Luckily, the family also thinks it’s weird, but not in a women-aren’t-property-to-be-inherited-when-a-family-member-dies-that’s-super-gross way, more in the they-don’t-actually-believe-their-son-died way.
Turns out, War Son was only reported ‘disappeared’ those three years ago, so even though all signs point to Dead, Sally (let’s just call her Sally) is making herself sick holding onto any thread of hope that her son is alive. Which you can’t really fault her for, it’s so sad. Poor sad Sally! But even WITHOUT the hope that the son is still alive, it’s still super weird to sign off on your other son marrying the fiancee. Oof.
Anyway, the girl, Ann, comes to visit the family so she and Chris can announce the engagement, and we learn about the friction between the two families that exists for reasons other than brother-swapping weirdness. Bill and Ann’s father worked together, and some shady shit went down, but only Ann’s father ended up in jail. Did her father do crimes? Or was Bill guilty but got away with it by throwing Mr. Ann under the bus? The problem with this being the main conflict is that no one cares.
The other main problem with the show is that Chris (Colin Morgan, Merlin) is miscast, and without a strong Chris to really nail all the nuance and emotional beats and relationships, it all falls apart. His choices felt off, like surprisingly off; I’m surprised at the director here. The only confident, successful directorial choice was the very opening moment, with the house moving upstage amid flashing Americana television screens. I’m disappointed that that new, confident display of this classic work wasn’t continued at any other moment.
In fact, the only emotional beat that rang true was an extraordinarily minor moment between Ann’s brother George and a super-minor-character-neighbor-lady when they acknowledged that they would have ended up together had George not gone off to army, mother. It’s like, literally the neighbor lady’s only scene, so great job making your mark, but the fact that nothing else in the entire show felt as authentic is a shame. Of course, London audiences being as insane as they are, they laughed when George declines meeting her kids, even though it’s a heartbreaking moment, but that’s CLA (crazy London audiences) for you.
While I’m sure this play was revelatory in its time, what being about the problems with profiting from war and all the emotional turmoil it causes in its wake, it felt irrelevant today. And some of the twists seemed nonsensical. When Bill Pullman yells at his son (living) in the climax, he all of a sudden asks, “Was the money the problem? You had too much money?” and I literally went, “um, weird flex”, because that was literally the most random reaction to the argument, coming out of nowhere and clearly not the issue. Everything sort of felt untethered like that, disjointed and random. Even the big reveals at the end, both about Bill’s true actions regarding the crime and the other son’s disappearance, feel incredibly unsatisfying. (They also don’t make a ton of sense on examination. If Larry (dead son) knew about the dad’s trial and potential crime, that means it was at least MONTHS since the incident/arrest, and he never once spoke to his family to hear their response or thoughts? He just assumed his father was guilty and then decided to do what he did? do not buy it.)
And yet, despite all this disappointment in the play, I think Sally (and Bill, really) did a nice job. Poor sad Sally was literally shaking the entire time, but you believed that she was a grieving mother with too many traumas to keep in their appropriate boxes, leaving everything threatening to unravel. I just didn’t think this production was strong enough for her talents.
“No Man’s Land”: Being In The Same Room As Ian McKellen & Patrick Stewart Makes Up For Whack Play
Like most people, I would pay crazy amounts of money to see those fine two knights, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, just talk to each other and be adorable, as they are. I’d be happy pay to hear them go over their grocery lists with each other. I’d be happy to see them perform nonsense that I don’t really understand or even like. So I guess you can say I’m happy, because I saw them perform nonsense that I didn’t really understand or even like.
The Two Sirs recently delighted Broadway audiences by performing together in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” and Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in repertory. Performing shows in repertory seemed to be a hot trend this season (with the amazing Shakespeare’s Globe productions of “Richard III” and “Twelfth Night”). And the chance to see the Two Sirs, the cutest old-man-BFFs ever to exist, onstage together was too good to pass up. But “No Man’s Land” is legit the strangest play.
The Two Sirs recently delighted Broadway audiences by performing together in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” and Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in repertory. Performing shows in repertory seemed to be a hot trend this season (with the amazing Shakespeare’s Globe productions of “Richard III” and “Twelfth Night”). And the chance to see the Two Sirs, the cutest old-man-BFFs ever to exist, onstage together was too good to pass up. But “No Man’s Land” is legit the strangest play.
I think that no matter how hard I try I just am not a Pinter fan. (If you want to persuade me otherwise, please feel free to make suggestions and/or offer critical analyses to assist in my literary edification.) “No Man’s Land” opens with McKellen, seemingly a rambunctious, slightly offputting sort-of-scallywag of an Englishman, in the well-appointed (or we are meant to think it’s nice, but the set is sparse) home of Patrick Stewart’s character, a wealthier man who says very little and seems kind of out of it before he gets reeeally out of it and starts falling and crawling. For the first oh, twenty minutes, the two men pretty much just drink, toast to each others’ health, sit in silence, then drink more after more toasts.
When they did actually say words, I had trouble understanding what they were saying (was is the pretend drunkenness or the terrible acoustics?), so when Billy Crudup and Schuyler Hensley entered as Stewart’s henchmen/assistants, I was excited. But then poor Billy opened his mouth. I don’t know what kind of ‘English’ accent he was doing, but it sounded like the dog from ‘Up’ with the broken voice collar after having done crystal meth in Courtney Love’s bathroom and then drinking lemon juice. Like what in the everlasting tuck. How did the director, or anyone on set before opening night, fail to address the issue of this accent? It threw me off at first, but then it just pissed me off. Billy is so much better than that.
So Ian and Pat were drinking, acting aloof, saying random ass things to each other, and Billy and Schuyler were alternating between hospitably tending to the guest and threatening to beat him and throw him out. There was little to no pattern evident in the attitude changes. But then in the second act, Pat opened up and shared his life story, and we learn that these two characters are not strangers as it appeared in the first act. No, they went to school together, had the same group of friends, and Pat even had an affair with Ian’s wife, which he was not in the least bit ashamed of talking freely about. It was totally awk. And then Pat talked about how he was all afraid of this dream he has where he’s by the lake or something and that place he nightmares about is his no man’s land or some weird shit like that. I was just worried the whole time that someone was going to beat up Ian McKellen and he would actually get hurt because he’s old but no one would realize that he wasn’t faking his injuries.
The second act’s change in dynamics didn’t really help move the story. There really wasn’t a story. In fact, I could not tell you want the show was about, more than I have above, even for a million dollars. I mean it’s more about the existential dwellings and commiserations and reminiscences about the two old men who once upon a time were acquaintances. It’s not really about things happening.
The one thing that struck me was that it was just like the Bunuel movie mentioned in “Midnight in Paris” where the characters are unable to leave the room, no matter how much they want to. I love how in “Midnight”, Bunuel himself is like “That’s the worst idea for a movie ever; why couldn’t they just leave? Why couldn’t they just leave!!!” So that’s what Ian’s role and the play in general made me think of. I was ready to scream after 4 minutes in, “Ian! My dear! Why don’t you just leeeave!!! Ian! Go! Get out of there!” But frustratingly not only does he not leave, he ends up begging to stay indefinitely! INDEFINITELY. Whaaat kind of masochist! Oh Pinter. I just don’t get you!
Despite my complaints, this production was amazing. Why? Because I got to see Stewart and McKellen on stage together, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This show was worth seeing and paying full price five times over for, because this pairing will likely never happen again outside of X-Men movies. I would have loved spending a few hours in the Cort Theatre even if the Two Sirs just read the phone book. Which actually would have made more sense than this play. Oh Pinter. Someone explain him to me.
