January 19, 2023
Goodbye to The Good Place (Really Bestbye to the Best Place)by Randi / February 5, 2020It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Endgame by Samuel Beckett, playing a double bill with his short piece Rough for Theatre II, now at the Old Vic if you like torture.
To sort something straight off the bat: this is NOT about the last Avengers movie (which, amazingly enough, I still have not seen. I really do not care anymore about those superheroes. It’s too much). Endgame is a famous play by Samuel Beckett, the playwright of ‘theatre of the absurd’, famed for his dreary, bleak look at the human existence. He did not seem happy. People say his work is ‘tragi-comic’ but I did not get the comic part. He famously said that nothing is funnier than unhappiness…which after seeing this production, I promise you is false: I was very unhappy, and very much not amused. I have never been so close to being sure that a piece of theatre was pranking me as I was during this evening at the Old Vic, nearly shouting “oh THIS is the bad place” despite the beloved talent onstage (Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming). I’ve also never seen so many people walk out of a show, unable to wait till an interval or the end, and I’ve seen some shit.
Let’s start with Rough for Theatre II, since it’s a little nothing of a show. This production serves a double bill with Beckett’s little one-act that’s about two like, afterlife accountants but not in the brilliant Good Place way, who show up when someone is about to commit suicide and they go through his life and see whether he should or not? At least I think that’s what it’s about. It was odd and vague and incredibly short. Daniel Radcliffe gets to do a lot of box jumps which is fun for him but not for me when watching because I was like I wanna do box jumps instead of watch this. I honestly have to give Beckett props for naming it what it is.
Endgame, the main course, is one of the most unreasonable pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Remember how Alex Borstein did that episode of Friends where she had a one-woman show about why men don’t like her and talked about getting her first period, and Chandler made everyone go see it as punishment? I didn’t know Sammy Beckett but I feel like he really hated theatergoers. He’s the playwright equivalent of Lewis Black’s joke about how airplane seats in economy were created by a guy with scoliosis who is really f-ing pissed. This piece is about an invalid (Alan) and his servant (Daniel) and Alan is mean to Daniel and Daniel has a limp but Alan can’t walk or stand at all and they just are like, waiting for death? It’s considered a sort of sequel to Waiting for Godot and I guess they just replaced Godot with Death. Alan’s parents live in trashcans at the foot of the stage and sometimes they pop up and say nonsense things that are weird and not funny and he replies in ways that are absurd because I guess this is Theatre of the Absurd but just because it has an official title doesn’t make it worthwhile.
Daniel is fine, but there’s only so much you can do performance-wise with the material you are given, especially when most of your requirements are carrying a ladder to and fro and climbing up and shimmying down, over and over and over in an act that serves no purpose except to delight people who find delight in incongruous slapstick, a cheap laugh ploy that, of course, works because people love cheap laughs that don’t have anything to do with anything. Alan Cumming is fine, though overly hammy much of the time. But I don’t know what we can ask of them when they are forced to do this absolute nonsense show. Why, why is this considered a great piece of theatre? The only thing I can think of is, it’s about people waiting for the sweet release of death and when you watch it, it’s such torture that the audience feels the yearning for death along with the characters. Is that it, that the show so successfully makes the audience feel what the characters feel so that they too anticipate sweet release from the torment of this show? Is that what he was going for, because if so, man, well done Sammy, what a gottamn masterpiece of pain you’ve created. It’s a f-ing triumph. If he didn’t want us to feel that death was preferable to watching this show for much longer, then I, along with everyone who left, missed something.
INFORMATION
Rough for Theatre II was just under a half hour, which means your interval bathroom break comes when you don’t need it, adding to the whole torture vibe of the evening. Endgame is then an hour and half, which is the exact amount of time it’s safe to watch this show for before one loses one’s mind.
The Old Vic renovation is fine – there’s still not enough room in the lobby (what a mess) but the bathrooms in the basement (where you go if you sit in the stalls, so get an aisle towards the back if you need) are better and bigger. Also, they are not defined by gender, just by whether they contain stalls or urinals, which is how every bathroom should be since it’s great for everyone (except men who need to go #2) (hey that’s what Beckett is with this show!).
STAGE DOOR
Like all Danny Rad shows, people were SPRINTING to the stage door in droves, so I skipped out on adding ‘trampled by horrible crowds’ to the night’s list of agonies. (Also what was I gonna say to them, yeesh.)
Related Posts
‘Onegin’ at the Bolshoi Ballet: So Amazing I Want to be a Ballerina Just For This
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about the best ballet ever, ‘Onegin’ at the Bolshoi. We’re back in Russia all over this website!
With all the theatre I see, I don’t have much time for ballets. I see them every once in a while but usually I’m like “this would be so much better if you were singing toooooo!” That’s why ‘An American in Paris’ is so good. And usually the plots are so alarmingly sexist that I just roll my eyes the entire time so as not to actually scream. I saw ‘Giselle’ last year the English National Opera. Do you know what that’s about? A peasant girl dies of a broken heart because her lover is a cheatin fool and then her ghost joins a ghost troop of all virgin girls who died before they were married and they dance/kill men who go through their forest. It’s forked up. Luckily, ‘Onegin’ is not actively offensive; in fact, it’s a pretty good tale of a woman actually standing up for herself, sort of, as much as you can expect in old-timey stories. More importantly, it’s the most gorgeous dancing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m including the ending of ‘Center Stage’ can you believe it? even the part where the camera pans down and then when it goes back up Jody is all of a sudden in a red leotard and she pushes everyone away and Jamiroquai goes ‘DANCE!’ and it’s the best. I was naively a little upset that the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow wasn’t playing something I was more familiar with while we were there, but I can’t imagine ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘The Nutcracker’ (now I’m out of ballets I know) being nearly as spectacular as ‘Onegin’ was. And since this week on the travel blog we are back in Russia, it’s time to talk about this Bolshoi production.
Written by Alexander Pushkin, the beloved Russian poet, the novel ‘Eugene Onegin’ inspired Tchaikovsky to write an opera about it. (I never read ‘Eugene Onegin…and I’m not sure I ever read any Pushkin actually. Sacre bleu! I mean blin!) Tchi tchi put some dance scenes in his opera, and he hired a choreographer named John Cranko to choreograph them. Cranko, cursed with an unhappy name but blessed with immense talent, crankily thought “this story merits its own ballet, not just secondary dancing in an opera! We’re gonna make a whole ballet bout this feller!” His stories are so inspirational! Everyone loves Pushkin, from all the statue makers all over Russia (so many!) to all these artists whose greatest works were inspired by his words. Fun fact, Pushkin is a classic, beloved Russian author as well as a cute nickname for a baby. Little Pushkin with that punim!
So John Cranko (no relation to Broadway director John Rando like of course not but their names speak to me in the same way now (maybe because if you change their last name o’s to e sounds they both become me)) created his magnificent ballet in 1965 for the Stuttgart Ballet. It was performed there in Germany and in London but not at the Bolshoi until like just a few years ago! What you fools been doing besides choosing presidents! Fortunately, they added it to their repertoire in time for my visit, and I got to see the Bolshoi ballet company perform something other than their speed-assisted craziness in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. They are spectacular. I don’t know why Sergei wanted to leave Russia to dance in San Francisco with Galena when they both could have joined the Bolshoi. I guess for freedom. (by the way I am still talking about ‘Center Stage’, BME.)
‘Onegin’ tells…shows…dances? basically the same story as the novel, at least the main part. It tells the tale of a girl named Tatiana and this asshat of a man named Eugene Onegin, who does not have the right to be such a confident jerk especially to women when he is named Eugene. It opens with Tatiana and her sister Olga dance-playing and dance-sewing in the garden with their mother, talking girly, and then they decide to play a much-loved Russian game where girls look in a mirror to see fatalistic/magical glimpses of their future loves. They do this in ‘War & Peace’ too (or at least the version I know much more thoroughly, the musical ‘Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812’, when Sonya tells us “Early Sunday morning, Natasha and I lit a candle, looked in the mirror [‘meer’]” and then Natasha happily comments “I see my face!” because she is an IDIOT and Sonya rolls her eyes musically and explains to her stupid cousin “they say you can see your future in the long row of candles stretching back and back and back into the depths of the mirror [‘meer’]. In the dim confused last square, you’ll see a coffin or a man. Everyone sees a man.”). Ok so I know I didn’t really need to quote ‘Comet’ yet again but admit that that helps you understand what Tatiana and Olga were doing, right? I can go on if you want me to!
So Olga’s fiancé Lensky arrives (query why they were looking in the mirror for mystical peeks at future husbos if she already was engaged), an amiable, most happy fellow who seems decent. P.s., the ballerina playing Olga was maybe 11 years old, and Tatiana maybe 14, tops. I’m not sure whether to go with the headline ‘ballet stunts your growth like gymnastics and these were indeed adults’ or ‘Russians kidnap children and force-train them into incredible dancers, can we be mad or no.’ Anyway Lensky brought a friend: the dark, brooding, could-play-Heathcliff-if-he-wasn’t-such-a-good-dancer Eugene Onegin, who is dressed all in black because he’s so dark and brooding and the only thing he can do with his face besides look handsome is scoff. So the dancer playing Onegin looked just like Eric Bana from my mezzanine seat and I hundo p would have sworn it was him save for the dancing ability. Onegin looks around at the lovely little family’s love little garden and lovely little girls and he scoffs, he scoffs this way, he scoffs that way, he scoffs hither and thither. But little Tatiana thinks he’s the keenest because she never saw a city boy before, maybe, and thinks dressing in all black is a sign of sophistication. Or whatever. That night, she dance-writes a love letter to him.
This opening scene in the garden, plus the love letter writing that night, composed Act I. It was about 40 minutes long…and then we got a 25 minute intermission! 25 minutes! I could have peed 3 times.
Act II was only 30 minutes! Man alive I didn’t even have to pee after. While short, it packs a punch. It’s Tatiana’s birthday party, and Onegin comes, but he’s such a dink that he is rude to everyone and rolls his eyes the whole time at how simple these folk are and how unsophisticated and boring. Also, he is bothered by the fact that this sweet little girl wrote him a love letter. What a dink. So he goes up to Tatiana, the birthday girl, holds her letter out, and rips it up in front of her! I KNOW! He’s the worst! But he’s not done – to add some excitement to his inexplicable boredom (they’re at a fancy party with ballerinas!), he decides to provoke his friend Lensky by flirting with Olga, his fiancée. Olga is just a little 11-year-old ballerina so she dances with him just because she likes dancing and doesn’t think anything of it other than it would be fun and maybe funny. But Lensky is pisssssed, and he challenges Eugene to a duel. And Eugene Onegin becomes a murderer! He kills his friend Lensky! Why are men!
After that we had another 25 minute intermission. These intermissions were almost longer than the actual show! This show is perfect for those with short attention spans and/or quick bladders.
In Act III, (another half hour one), time has passed and now a grown-up Tatiana has married a prince. She a princess! They are throwing a ball at the palace, and Onegin is in attendance. He is enamored with this beautiful princess and realizes oh hot damn it’s that country girl I humiliated! He goes up to her and is like ‘hey it’s me Eugene!’ and he writes a love letter to her now. My how the tables have turned on this jackwagon. She asks not to see him but he comes to her room in the palace that night anyway because of course he doesn’t listen to other people’s desires, and he pleads his love for her and they do the most INCREDIBLE flying dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s sexual and violent and they dance out their feelings to the extreme and you never want it to end. Tatiana tries to resist him but he is so powerful and dark and brooding and you’re like Tatiana no resist resist! And just when you think she might give in she stops dancing and just POINTS OUT THE DOOR without looking at him and it’s amaaaaaaaaazing. It’s the best moment of any ballet, when this woman decides she is now strong enough to stand up for herself. I loved that it was also the first ballet I’ve seen where a woman fights her desires and does something right INSTEAD OF DYING. Seriously why does every ballet kill the young girl? Obviously sad men wrote all the stories. But not this one! No young girls died in this! Sure a nice young man did and that was sad but men should stop letting their anger get the best of them and stop starting duels! Haven’t they listened to Terry Crews?
Anyway, it was the most phenomenal ballet with the most beautiful performances from the principals: Vladislav Lantratov as Onegin, Olga Smirnova as Tatiana, Anastacia Vinokur as Olga, and Ivan Alexeev as Lensky. At least I think these are their names; the programme is in Cyrillic. If you go to Moscow, you need to see something at the Bolshoi. So spectacular. And if this ballet is performed somewhere closer to you, you should see it since the girl doesn’t die! What a treat!
INFORMATION
To buy tickets, we had to sign up to the Bolshoi website. OMG I just looked and Onegin is on tonight!!! Ahhhh! Go! You can’t go! Anyway they send email confirmation which you need to bring to the box office, except the box office is very poorly signed and staffed so be ready for that. Kind of frustrating.
Just in case you thought maybe bad audiences only existed in the west (I don’t know why you would think that? people suck everywhere), the audience here was talking THE ENTIRE TIME. I got an usher at one point because this box near us was full of jerks who were talking at regular volume. I just cannot handle how bad audience behavior has become. Please don’t talk at the theatre (movie theatres count too) and please for the love of god put your phones away.
The bathrooms were the nicest in the entire country. The end.
So John Cranko (no relation to Broadway director John Rando like of course not but their names speak to me in the same way now (maybe because if you change their last name o’s to e sounds they both become me)) created his magnificent ballet in 1965 for the Stuttgart Ballet. It was performed there in Germany and in London but not at the Bolshoi until like just a few years ago! What you fools been doing besides choosing presidents! Fortunately, they added it to their repertoire in time for my visit, and I got to see the Bolshoi ballet company perform something other than their speed-assisted craziness in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. They are spectacular. I don’t know why Sergei wanted to leave Russia to dance in San Francisco with Galena when they both could have joined the Bolshoi. I guess for freedom. (by the way I am still talking about ‘Center Stage’, BME.)
‘Onegin’ tells…shows…dances? basically the same story as the novel, at least the main part. It tells the tale of a girl named Tatiana and this asshat of a man named Eugene Onegin, who does not have the right to be such a confident jerk especially to women when he is named Eugene. It opens with Tatiana and her sister Olga dance-playing and dance-sewing in the garden with their mother, talking girly, and then they decide to play a much-loved Russian game where girls look in a mirror to see fatalistic/magical glimpses of their future loves. They do this in ‘War & Peace’ too (or at least the version I know much more thoroughly, the musical ‘Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812’, when Sonya tells us “Early Sunday morning, Natasha and I lit a candle, looked in the mirror [‘meer’]” and then Natasha happily comments “I see my face!” because she is an IDIOT and Sonya rolls her eyes musically and explains to her stupid cousin “they say you can see your future in the long row of candles stretching back and back and back into the depths of the mirror [‘meer’]. In the dim confused last square, you’ll see a coffin or a man. Everyone sees a man.”). Ok so I know I didn’t really need to quote ‘Comet’ yet again but admit that that helps you understand what Tatiana and Olga were doing, right? I can go on if you want me to!
So Olga’s fiancé Lensky arrives (query why they were looking in the mirror for mystical peeks at future husbos if she already was engaged), an amiable, most happy fellow who seems decent. P.s., the ballerina playing Olga was maybe 11 years old, and Tatiana maybe 14, tops. I’m not sure whether to go with the headline ‘ballet stunts your growth like gymnastics and these were indeed adults’ or ‘Russians kidnap children and force-train them into incredible dancers, can we be mad or no.’ Anyway Lensky brought a friend: the dark, brooding, could-play-Heathcliff-if-he-wasn’t-such-a-good-dancer Eugene Onegin, who is dressed all in black because he’s so dark and brooding and the only thing he can do with his face besides look handsome is scoff. So the dancer playing Onegin looked just like Eric Bana from my mezzanine seat and I hundo p would have sworn it was him save for the dancing ability. Onegin looks around at the lovely little family’s love little garden and lovely little girls and he scoffs, he scoffs this way, he scoffs that way, he scoffs hither and thither. But little Tatiana thinks he’s the keenest because she never saw a city boy before, maybe, and thinks dressing in all black is a sign of sophistication. Or whatever. That night, she dance-writes a love letter to him.
This opening scene in the garden, plus the love letter writing that night, composed Act I. It was about 40 minutes long…and then we got a 25 minute intermission! 25 minutes! I could have peed 3 times.
Act II was only 30 minutes! Man alive I didn’t even have to pee after. While short, it packs a punch. It’s Tatiana’s birthday party, and Onegin comes, but he’s such a dink that he is rude to everyone and rolls his eyes the whole time at how simple these folk are and how unsophisticated and boring. Also, he is bothered by the fact that this sweet little girl wrote him a love letter. What a dink. So he goes up to Tatiana, the birthday girl, holds her letter out, and rips it up in front of her! I KNOW! He’s the worst! But he’s not done – to add some excitement to his inexplicable boredom (they’re at a fancy party with ballerinas!), he decides to provoke his friend Lensky by flirting with Olga, his fiancée. Olga is just a little 11-year-old ballerina so she dances with him just because she likes dancing and doesn’t think anything of it other than it would be fun and maybe funny. But Lensky is pisssssed, and he challenges Eugene to a duel. And Eugene Onegin becomes a murderer! He kills his friend Lensky! Why are men!
After that we had another 25 minute intermission. These intermissions were almost longer than the actual show! This show is perfect for those with short attention spans and/or quick bladders.
In Act III, (another half hour one), time has passed and now a grown-up Tatiana has married a prince. She a princess! They are throwing a ball at the palace, and Onegin is in attendance. He is enamored with this beautiful princess and realizes oh hot damn it’s that country girl I humiliated! He goes up to her and is like ‘hey it’s me Eugene!’ and he writes a love letter to her now. My how the tables have turned on this jackwagon. She asks not to see him but he comes to her room in the palace that night anyway because of course he doesn’t listen to other people’s desires, and he pleads his love for her and they do the most INCREDIBLE flying dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s sexual and violent and they dance out their feelings to the extreme and you never want it to end. Tatiana tries to resist him but he is so powerful and dark and brooding and you’re like Tatiana no resist resist! And just when you think she might give in she stops dancing and just POINTS OUT THE DOOR without looking at him and it’s amaaaaaaaaazing. It’s the best moment of any ballet, when this woman decides she is now strong enough to stand up for herself. I loved that it was also the first ballet I’ve seen where a woman fights her desires and does something right INSTEAD OF DYING. Seriously why does every ballet kill the young girl? Obviously sad men wrote all the stories. But not this one! No young girls died in this! Sure a nice young man did and that was sad but men should stop letting their anger get the best of them and stop starting duels! Haven’t they listened to Terry Crews?
Anyway, it was the most phenomenal ballet with the most beautiful performances from the principals: Vladislav Lantratov as Onegin, Olga Smirnova as Tatiana, Anastacia Vinokur as Olga, and Ivan Alexeev as Lensky. At least I think these are their names; the programme is in Cyrillic. If you go to Moscow, you need to see something at the Bolshoi. So spectacular. And if this ballet is performed somewhere closer to you, you should see it since the girl doesn’t die! What a treat!
INFORMATION
To buy tickets, we had to sign up to the Bolshoi website. OMG I just looked and Onegin is on tonight!!! Ahhhh! Go! You can’t go! Anyway they send email confirmation which you need to bring to the box office, except the box office is very poorly signed and staffed so be ready for that. Kind of frustrating.
Just in case you thought maybe bad audiences only existed in the west (I don’t know why you would think that? people suck everywhere), the audience here was talking THE ENTIRE TIME. I got an usher at one point because this box near us was full of jerks who were talking at regular volume. I just cannot handle how bad audience behavior has become. Please don’t talk at the theatre (movie theatres count too) and please for the love of god put your phones away.
The bathrooms were the nicest in the entire country. The end.
A FANTASTIC Shirley Valentine at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the classic Shirley Valentine, which just finished its run in Pitlochry.
Okay I said ‘classic’ because I know now that it is but to be honest, I had never heard of this show/movie/amazingess before seeing it last weekend. I think it’s probably an American millennial pop culture gap, because after the show we mentioned the name to my parents and they were like “oh my god Shirley Valentineeee what a great movie” and went on for hours (not hours) recalling the cast, and then we mentioned it to our our-age British friends and they were like “oh yeah for sure Shirley Valentine, it was big here!” So apologies Shirls, but better late than never. Anyway WHAT A SHOW. My takeaway: Sally Reid as Shirley is giving a performance that argues for the Oliviers to award regional theatre treats.
Shirley Vals is about a very bored, very neglected housewife who spends her days talking to a wall about literally everything, man she can talk. The whole first act is watching her talk ‘to the wall’ about her whole life — her shitass husband, her annoying-seeming kids, her full-of-shit faux feminist friend, all the people she went to school with, all her fears and anxieties and preoccupations, mince. It’s a two-hander (real definition) but you’d never know it, with all the vibrant pictures she paints and all the relatable takes on mid-life housewifery and just life in general for all humanssss we all have more in common than we thiiiink. The gist of the action is, her friend has invited her on a vacay to Greece for two weeks, already paid for. People who have been lucky will read that and be like ‘okay awesome lezzzzgooooo, maybe make it 3’, but people like Shirley fret over how she could possibly unglue her feet from her kitchen floor, explain to her not-listening-anyway husband, and generally, mostly, how she could dare to do something with or in her life that isn’t to simply suffer in silence and watch it pass by. SHIRLEY! GOOOOO!
You know I get v v close to screaming when I’m riveted by the action up on that stage, and Shirley’s hemming and hawing and ‘I couldn’t possibly’ and ‘but oh I must’ and ‘no no I mustn’t!’ and ‘but mustn’t I’ left me so scared that she wouldn’t go, but hooray huzzah she does, and she liked it, and she loved it. And so did we. On her whole journey of telling us her life story and then living one, she shares with simplicity and straightforwardness some revelatory things about humanity, shared insecurities, assumptions people make. The threads of these various aspects were the best part of the play, by far. She shares about the girl from school that she was jealous of, intimidated by, and then recounts how she ran into her the other day and they had tea, and both learned that the other felt the exact same way. They could have been friends but they were too in their own heads, deciding what the other thought and felt without actually bothering to find out the truth. I MEAN THAT IS VERY UNIVERSAL. (Also this provided one of my favorite accent parts: when the friend revealed she now works as a classy escort, Shirley says ‘hawker’ or at least I thought that’s what she said. I was like what does being a hawker mean. A salesman?)
In a similar manner, the interaction with Shirley’s judgmental neighbor was beautiful and touching. Shirley always felt small around her but when the neighbor revealed she thought she was brave, I mean, that was the most emotional part of the whole very emotional show, I think. Like with the friend, it showed how assumptions about others are rarely right (I’m sometimes right) and you’re never alone in what you’re thinking or feeling. SO TOUCHING. Just lovely. I said interaction but it’s just one woman up there. Sally does such a gorgeous job of delivering a whole world that as I’m remembering the play I’m actually seeing a whole cast of characters in my mind.
Anyway I’m so happy this not-real-but-she-became-so-real-so-I’m-thinking-of-her-as-real-and-anyway-there-are-plenty-too-many-really-people-just-like-her-in-real-life-so-I-hope-they-also-get-theirs woman went to Greece and had a ball and rethought her life because life is too short to be stuck talking to a wall. What a flawless production of a great, moving play. Liked it, loved it.
INFORMATION
The Pitlochry Festival Theatre is an enormous space that I don’t think could ever be filled even if everyone in town during the height of tourist season came, so there’s usually room to move around away from people, which is the greatest thing you could ever ask for when out in public. The theatre went through a recent refurb and it shows, except for the bathrooms which didn’t get the memo, which is a shame but there’s never really a line. The bar has vegan treats (still no ice cream) and little water fountain spouts. All in all a fantastic theatre.
