'Night, Mother at the Hampstead A Strong Production of a Provocative Play, + TRIGGER WARNINGSby Randi / October 28, 2021Saoirse Ronan Loves Murder in Almeida’s Macbeth
Every time I see Macbeth all I can think is “wow these people love murder more than I remember.” I’m not new to the play or anything; in fact, I debated seeing this production at all because I’ve seen the Scottish play a few times too many in recent years so I’m sort of sick of it (sorry Billy). But that debate died off quickly (like everyone in this show!) because I had to see our generation’s cinema queen as Lady Macbeth. Yep, this production stars SAOIRSE RONAN. Her first name is VERY hard to type correctly in all caps but she is such a good lil actress. While I prefer her cavorting around colonial New England breaking Little Timmy Cham Cham’s heart than being full-out Arizona Murder Horny as she is here, she does a fine job proving to the UK that she can handle our stages.
And wow, does she love murder. Her Lady Macbeth struck me more than the character ever has before as eagerly jumping RIGHT QUICK in for murder. She goes from zero to murder real fast. That god really did replace her milk with gall, as she says, although it’s more pure evil than gall. She hears her husband say two words and then is hundo p ‘OK so we’re doing this!’ Her first monologue is sexual and violent. She is a scary scary sexy lady — they have Sershersh literally writhe around on a bed thinking of how much she loves the idea of murder and power and using murder to gain power and probably vice versa too, that’s how much she writhes. It’s a good thing she doesn’t have a durder because she would definitely murder that durder.
In a wonderful showing of accessibility, the Almeida had a long weekend of livestream-only performances of this production, which is a) amazing and b) what I saw. I thought the livestream would be of a regular performance, like with an in-person audience too, but it was only livestream. I was sad to not hear a live audience coughing so I could revel in my being home, but without them the creative team got to make a more cinematic version. They took advantage of the opportunity with cameras like right up in everyone’s business, getting all the filmic angles right on stage and lots of close-ups. It made it noticeably different from the in-theatre experience, which a stream should be if possible, as it’s a different medium.
Okay so you all know the story of Macbeth, right, like how this Scottish dude is like ‘I wanna be the rulerrrr’ and he asks his wife if she’s up for killing their way to the top because you should never begin a murderous spree for power without your wife’s consent and she breaks out the gold sequins and disco ball and dances around singing ‘livin’ it up on top-ah!’ or something like that (now that would be an interesting version). What really struck me this go-round is how stupid Macbeth is. Like, the witches tell him the prophecy right, that he will be in power? But then he goes and does stuff himself to make that true…which is NOT the point of prophecies. That’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy and that’s a logical FALLACY. If you went to a fortune teller and they were like ‘oh xyz is going to happen’, what kind of jackass then goes and MAKES xyz happen? Who would take it upon themselves to prove a podunk fortune teller to be right? Wouldn’t you test their predictions by just sitting back and being like well let’s see how good you are, make that shit happen universe! If you make it happen yourself you are cheating! It does not prove anything! YOU BLEW IT. I want to see the play where this jamoke has three witches tell him what’s going to happen in the future and he goes “oh yeah? PROVE IT” AND THEN DOES NOTHING.
It struck me this go-round that Lady Macbeth is a real Karen who hates reaping the consequences of what she sowed with her shirty behavior. Not since Atonement has Saoirse played a character so purely evil who only realizes her mistaken ways and feels regret when it’s too late. Luckily though her bastard character here dies, whereas in Atonement she got to be old after ruining lives. I’m still mad about that movie and that I don’t have that green dress. Anyway, Macbeth as always teaches us that you really shouldn’t kill your friends, even if you will get to be king. Who wants to be king? Not me. Hashtag abolish the M. (Am I allowed to say that? I’ll delete ‘-onarchy’.) Saoirse when everything goes to shit was very compelling, although I always want to shout “what did you think would happen, Karen?” Really shouldn’t have killed all your friends there! Speaking of, no matter how jaded I am with this play, the scene where Macduff finds out about his family always wrecks me for a good few days. No, a WEEK! A whole week. It’s just so f-ing sad, debilitating. This one was no exception. (Wish I could shout out to the actor but the Alm’s website doesn’t list the cast by character wtf.)
As for the rest of the cast, they’re all doing a fine job. James McArdle in the title role is solid. Everyone is solid. But for me it’s just another decent production of Macbeth. It’s hard to really set yourself apart from the endless number of strong productions that keep on coming day in day out for the past 400 years, to find something that makes it special. It seemed like another straightforward production, albeit with more modern attire. But according to the Almeida website, there was an attempt at revolutionizing the piece: the action is occurred “a little bit later than now” and “in the ruins of an old theatre”. What do you mean a little later than now, and why? And the ruins of an old theatre? That did not come across at all, nor could I determine the reason for that. And like, why? And like, don’t? The three witches were dressed in suits too, another little piece of the inevitable modernization and distinction process that I wish everyone realized was largely unnecessary and virtually always a downgrade. Also the witches should ALWAYS be played by little girls for maximum creepiness.
INFORMATION
Macbeth is at the Almeida until November 27.
The theatre said it would be 3 hours and 5 minutes but the livestream was 2 hours 50 minutes so that’s fun. Still, a few years ago at the official Billy theatre in Stratford upon Avon it was 2 hours 20 minutes and the ushers were like ‘we love this one because it’s the shortest!’ so where did that extra halfsies come from? Is this Billy’s unrated version?
It’s sold out now, but the livestream options are now over too so if you can’t get in off the waitlist at least you are saving yourself from the unmasked coughers. Go watch Lil Wims on your TV and a different production of Macbeth on a computer at the same time and just like see what happens.
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Rose at the Park Theatre is moving, heartbreaking, and overly ambitious
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show just feels right to talk about during the High Holidays.
The first act of Rose is riveting theatre. Martin Sherman’s two-hander (that’s one actor) doesn’t feel like theatre at all; it feels like you are listening to your (probably not your your, statistically speaking) Jewish grandmother (but decades ago) recount her harrowing life of persecution. It’s written well, so that it keeps moving forward at the right pace and keeps interest up, and it’s performed exceptionally, by Dame Maureen Lipman who if she wasn’t already a dame would be made a dame for how dame good she is in this.
Telling her story, the Dame’s Rose starts in the 1920s as a little Ukrainian girl growing up with a dying dad and a severe mom as pogroms hit her shtetl. She moves to the big city of Warsaw to help her brother and his new wife and to flee the violence, but then of course violence starts there and they get moved into the infamous ghetto, and then it’s the Holocaust big time and it’s heartbreak after heartbreak and you’re like how much shit can one single woman face and you realize how many single people experienced all this suffering and it is A. LOT.
And yet, it’s not done in a way that’s just a sadness dump, which is so easily could be. Or as a ‘look how bad we’ve had it’ dump (though holy hell it’s true). In telling her history, she exemplifies all the great things about Jewishness: the humor, the darker humor, the argumentativeness, the love of playing devil’s advocate (it’s called something different in Jewish obviously but not sure what), the physical communication styles (not just Italians!), the strength, the community, and of course the importance of memories and how memory shapes us. This tale is meaningful for having us remember the history, and also for being so unapologetically Jewish.
All in the first hour plus, we cover the pogroms of the 1920s, the Holocaust, the post-Holocaust camps that many countries were responsible for – like the British, stop lying about how great they were – and then the struggle for war refugees to get to the promised land, Israel, and all the forces – like the British – that forcibly, often fatally, stopped them. I’m sure there are many people in each audience that don’t realize just how insanely awful good-seeming nations were to the Jews after the war ended, and that British soldiers eagerly killed survivors rather than let them step onto the land they were indigenous to because of the British Mandate and their complicity in the massacres of the Jewish minority population (if you don’t know all about this history but say things like ‘the current situation is not complicated!’ then I don’t know how to help you). But Rose survives all this, barely, losing everyone she knows and loves to be the one who makes it. Her recounting of what happened to her daughter is so raw yet so subtle, it feels intrusive to listen to. She builds a new family, she finds success, she grows older, all in the first act. Honestly, when the first act ended I thought it was the end of the 2 and 1/2 hour show and I did amazingly at holding my bladder. But no, all of that happens in just one act somehow. It’s the kind of interval where a lot of people just sit silently (while I climb over them to get to the toilet).
Man I’m going on about the first act, huh. It’s because it was special. It would have been something if that was the whole show, this tale of one woman’s strength through persecution and suffering to represent so many similar tales that it’s an amalgam of. The second act, though, tries to do too much. For a show that starts with the pogroms of the 1920s, it is insane that it also tries to cover the modern crisis in the Middle East. This attempt feels like one meant to appease – who, I have no idea – by saying ‘we realize that in talking about Jews all night we better share the other side!’, the other side of what being the important question, but I got that feeling, like they felt the need to both-sides the topic of Jewish oppression. Of course, a full and honest (and well-informed) look at the crisis would be important, but it felt tacked on, a weird addition to this particular show, and like a sort of apology for taking up all this time making a fuss about Jewish suffering. Also, on a dramatic level, it was a strange turnabout from being all about Rose’s journey from her perspective, being directly in all this terrible action and direct suffering, to then have her tell us thirdhand about what’s happening to other people via people related to her. It would be nearly impossible for what feels like a weirdly intentioned CYA addendum to have the same emotional impact or the same integrity as the personal part that came before, and so of course it doesn’t.
INFORMATION
The show runs 2 1/2 hours.
The Park Theatre is an absolute shit show. The circle/mezz level uses those terrible seats, I don’t know what it’s called, where you don’t have your own seat but squeeze onto a longer row kind of jawn with strangers and your ENTIRE ROW has to stand up and lift the seat for anyone to walk by because there’s no legroom. Also, the Park’s website seat map is a travesty because it shows aisles at the far ends but there’s no actual exit over there, and if I worked for the ADA I would sue them for that. ALSO what kind of theatre has a bar space as its only entry/exit and PUTS A BIG LONG TABLE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF THAT SPACE? a fire hazard omfg anyway thank god the show was good because I am probably not going to be invited back after this rant.
Appropriate at the Donmar: So Much to Work With, So Much that Doesn’t Work
Today’s show is Appropriate, playing at the Donmar Warehouse until October 5.
In the week leading up to our performance of Appropriate, husbo and I were debating the pronunciation of the title: Was it “appropriate” like when something is or is not proper? Or was it “appropri-ATE”, like what white people with dreadlocks do to a culture that isn’t theirs? Is it both?! Both would be amazing. We were pumped. Sadly, our intrigue over the title was more exciting than the actual play.
While the show does somewhat engage both meanings of the word, Appropriate puts a lot of interesting feelers out there regarding racism and prejudice and how modern-day Americans deal with their history and their present relationships with bigotry and what’s proper and what’s not – but fails to deliver real meaningful conversation about any of it. We have a family drama (a very classic-feeling one in many ways, largely because the playwright ‘stole’ (his words!) bits from all the classic American plays) of a pretty shittastic family convening at their deceased patriarch’s plantation home before it goes to auction, and, as expected, ghosts (and ghost-like hoods) from the family’s history are dug up, as are interpersonal issues between the remaining relatives and their own prejudices.
The plot centers on the three grown children of the patriarch, Franz (a total fuck-up former child rapist??) ( played by Edward Hogg), Bo (who seems semi normal) (played by Steven Mackintosh), and Toni (Jean-Ralphio was really singing about her and not his sister – she is THE WORST) (played by Monica Dolan), and their families. When a book of horrifying old photographs – of black people being lynched – are found, reactions vary. Most want to sell the photos to pay off the father’s lingering debts. Some characters just want to hide them from their kids. The struggle over what to do with the pictures reflects the larger struggle among the family of whether they trust each other (they do not) and of what these pictures mean for them, for their memories of their father, and whether they care.
Toni, she doesn’t care. Toni sucks. I can’t BELIEVE that they got the character of Toni to suck even more than the character who literally was a child rapist. Dolan starts off the show pitched at an 11 on a scale of 1-10 so she has nowhere to go and no choice but to stay at an 11, just screaming at the same level of intensity so you never really care about anything she says and can too easily ignore her. You wait and wait for this main character to explain in an impassioned climactic reveal the reason why she is such a g-d bitch to everyone and why she doesn’t care that her father was a klan member, or why she’s cool with her teenage son using racist language, or why she hates everyone in her family especially her brother’s Jew wife (this is a phrase that is used), aside from the obvious reason of ‘she’s also a bigot’, but instead, her big climactic reveal is that she’s sad (but in a loud way) because there’s no one left in the world who held her as a baby. Fuck you, lady. That’s most people. And that’s not a good enough excuse to be a racist piece of shit. In fact, nothing in the play helped give the characters enough reason to act as they do, in all their variously bigoted ways.
And that might be the most brilliant part of the play – how realistically shitty it made its characters, how realistic it is that Toni would be racist like her father and that her teenage son would be too, and that when they use racist language no one would be around to hear them and Toni wouldn’t think anything of it. But there’s so much that feels close to powerful that stops short. There’s so much that could be said about dealing with the father’s racist history, but instead there’s a lot of bickering among siblings. Which is again, realistic, but the less interesting choice.
The playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, is relatively young man whose works are already regarded as modern American classics. He’s African-American, so we know that his decisions about how to discuss racism were carefully and precisely made. But, I honestly think that more than any other show I’ve ever seen in London, this one can be too heavily influenced by its audience. During the entire last third, the elephant in the room, at least for me, is that no one in the all-white family at any point says ‘maybe we shouldn’t be profiting off of black suffering again,’ off of black people’s trauma that their family caused. It seems like the family fails to say this precisely because they are so terrible and because their whiteness blinds them from this realization. And I believe that’s kind of what BJJ was going for, the power of what he doesn’t show or tell, but I think the mostly-white London audience would have to be in on the joke for that to work here, and they are really, really not. It seems like a vital point that he left unsaid, assuming that decent people would find the omission flagrant, but maybe there aren’t as many decent people as he thinks.
And along the same lines, I hope, I really hope, that he wanted audiences to find the same problems with how the play and the characters treat Jews, but I fear that I’m misplacing this hope. AS USUAL, London audiences react in really troubling ways to anything about Jewishness. Bo’s wife, Rachael (played by Jaimi Barbakoff) – a character that Ben Brantley called “defensively Jewish” in 2014 even though a) that’s not apparent and b) that’s not a thing? would you say that about a black person? (Brantley is such an ass) – tells Toni the father did not like her because she was Jewish. Although this sheds more light on the father’s definite racism, our audience dismisses it, agreeing with Toni that this Jew doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say, instead of realizing for themselves that this is A Bad Take. I’ve shared frequently over the years how troublingly London audiences react to anything Jewish in plays – like when they laughed really hard in Caroline, or Change, when Caroline tells her young Jewish charge that he will burn in hell (they did not laugh like that in NYC (because it’s…not funny)) – and this was another doozy. When Toni calls Rachael a slur, when Toni dismisses Rachael’s valid concerns about her father, saying he didn’t like her not because she’s a Jew but because she’s an annoying person – all of this made our audience side with Toni, who is the wrong person to side with. I doubt BJJ expected this, or at least I hope he didn’t mean for it. When Toni and Rachael fight, the audience’s hate of Rachael was palpable. In fact, in other reviews I’ve seen, most are calling Rachael the most unlikable character, which blows my mind. Did they SEE the others? If BJJ was trying to get the audience to realize for themselves how the family should be refusing to profit off of black suffering again, and if he similarly wanted the audience to identify on their own that the anti-Semitism of the characters was wrong, it did not work.
I was truly disturbed for most of this play, and not in the good way that drama should disturb your comfort. I was mostly unsettled by the people around me, who seemed to be getting a way different message from the play than I was, one that was super troubling especially in today’s very racist times. And then I was troubled that maybe they were getting exactly what was intended after all, and that I maybe expected equality that wasn’t there.
The best parts were Isabella Pappas’s performance as Rachael’s young daughter, since she is an astoundingly natural performer, and at the end when Bo and Franz awkwardly say goodbye and then don’t know what to do so they shake hands, and immediately in my head I heard Chris Farley’s Tommy Boy say “Brothers don’t shake hands! Brothers hug!!!” and laughed hysterically.
INFORMATION
Appropriate plays the Donmar Warehouse in London until October 5.
The first act is only 50 minutes so the second act is way too long, about an hour and a quarter.
You’ve already heard how forked up our audience was and judging from my entire theatre-going experience in London, it was not a fluke. But what’s more, five phones went off during the final scenes.
1 Comment
Quoting “mare” !lol
Another wonderful written review❤️