You Are Here at Southwark Playhouse: A Pleasant Surpriseby Randi / May 27, 2021PEOPLE! Can you believe it? For the first time since March 14, 2020, when we saw Uncle Vanya in the West End and the guy behind me coughed a bunch and we realized ‘oh this is bad’ (the spectre of disease, not the play; the play was incredible) (and then I had covid – was it from him? we’ll never know (just kidding I know it was you asshole)), we were back at a LIVE FORKING SHOW in person in a theatre! Well not ‘in’ – our first show back wisely took place in an outdoor amphitheatre; we’re not crazy! Gimme that wind if I’m around other people! But wow, can you imagine how excited I am? I LOVE THE THEE UH TUHHH.
I wonder if the excitement of being back would have made me enjoy even a bad play, but we will never know because Official Return Show was quite an impressive little treat. ‘Adventures with the Painted People’, by David Greig, is a four-hander (you remember how I changed the terms to make them accurate?) that tells of a Roman officer named Lucius who gets kidnapped by Picts. It’s 2000 years ago and Romans have taken over, killed all the good Pictish men, ruined everything as invaders do for native peoples. When a group of Pictish boys find the stray Roman by the water, they knock him out and bring him to their tribe’s witch, Eithne, to be a sacrifice, naturally.
For someone being tied up in a witch’s ‘house of the dead’ which is really a cave of the dead which is much worse, Lucius never seems too angry or upset. Nicholas Karimi’s portrayal is really likeable, and you’re like aw I hope he doesn’t get sacrificed. He writes insubstantial poetry, but you can tell he feels more dreamy than the rigidity of a Roman officer’s life would normally allow. And that makes for a good pairing with Kirsty Stuart’s Eithne, the Pictish version of a manic pixie dream girl if ever there was one. (Manic pictish dream girl OH MY GOD.) She’s full of energy and conversations with spirits and flowery language, compared to the Roman’s straight lines. And yet, as she tells her captive, she wants his help to become Roman, so that she can implore the governor to work with her to implement peace instead of continued violence on her people. Maybe if he helps her, she won’t sacrifice him. Also if there’s a good pig she won’t need to.
In this early-AD Odd Couple, Eithne, witch of the salmon people who only tell stories by fire pit, learns how to read and write, learns about world history, learns about Roman life and laws. Lucius learns about the Pictish people, those that his mission has been to quash, and decides to write about this woman and her life. They both warm to each other. Over the weeks they study together in this cave, they become friends, and then they start to fall in love, obvs.
A love story between these two stark contrasts – one of straight lines, one of nature and spirits; one of the invaders vs. one of the oppressed natives – could easily have been as trite and schmaltzy (and annoying) as other attempts at heartfelt stories between colonizer and victim usually are. Although I feared that the final scene would be a bit like the U.S.-only ending of the 2005 Pride & Prejudice – which is superior, but too romantic for Brits apparently – this play managed to avoid all potential traps due to its strong writing delivering on a well-formed idea of what it wanted to accomplish. It did so with humor, great performances, and solid direction from Elizabeth Newman. I really enjoyed the set design and staging (I can’t find if Lizzie or someone else is responsible for the design), especially the circle of fire (erma erma) and the gorgeously done mosaic reveal (LOVED). The only thing I didn’t enjoy was that the little fire pit onstage blew all its smoke right in my face for a good hour as it died out, like no matter what the wind brought it right into my face, the face of the person in that audience who tolerates smoke the worst. My eyes are still burning two days later (they are like pumice, it’s not great). But that’s just me I’m weird. (See seating info below.)
Between the otherwise fresh air in Pitlochry and the lack of a stranger sitting right next to me (keep this up forever, maybe?), this returnship was about as nice as I could have hoped. Sure I got so nauseous on the winding Napoli-coastline-style drive that we had to stop so I could [redacted], but still, what a night. I highly recommend this show.
INFORMATION
The outdoor amphitheatre is up a windy hill, and although the main building and parking lot is a construction zone at present, the climb up and the amphi’s setting is beyond gorgeous. I need to talk to whoever is in charge of their gardening because um I need your help. Although the setting is lovely, the walk may be difficult for those who are less ambulatory.
Because the main building’s under construction and the shows are happening in this relatively small outdoor area at the top of a freaking hill, that means the toilets are unavailable. There is a portapotty up on the hill – one, for everyone. Luckily it never got too crowded (do Scottish people not pee??) but I was less than thrilled about having to use a porto three times (three is the bare minimum for me at the theatre, what fun I have). It was clean and whatever but I dreamt longingly of the endless immaculate newly refurbished stalls of Broadway’s Lyric Theatre, oh those were the days. Oh there are two bar setups up there as well. Nothing more UK than two spacious bar setups with like four staff members, but one toilet.
You have to wear masks everywhere except when you are seated, which seems a bit nonsensical since that’s when you are closest to other people and not walking around an incredibly spacious garden setting. That should really be rethought. Groups are sat so there’s a good few feet between them on each row, but it doesn’t stagger from row to row, meaning you have someone right behind and right in front of you. I guess that’s smarter than being surrounded on all diagonals? but because of it I wish they didn’t actively tell people they could take their masks off once seated.
The seating is open plan; an usher will seat you as you arrive. They sat us on the far aisle from where you enter, second row, so don’t sit there if you hate smoke. Although that was probably a unique occurrence from the universe just to fork with me so you’ll be fine.
‘Adventures of the Painted People’ plays at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre (in Perthshire, the most beautiful part of Scotland), until July 4, when I assume the closing performance will be marked with nonstop fireworks from your shitty neighbors. Just kidding, not in Scotland baby!
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Jukebox Musical “& Juliet” Tailor Made for London’s Tipsy Millennials
I wanted to say something about how & Juliet may be the ‘jukebox musical to end all jukebox musicals’, but that’s incredibly mistaken considering how instantly beloved it is and how it is guaranteed to usher in a whole new wave of cringey shows using songs that make the audience repeatedly shout “I LOVE THIS SONG!” and sing along. & Juliet takes the clichéd formulation of “what if Romeo & Juliet ended differentlyyyuhhh” (that’s my best Lola Skumpy voice) and tells what would have happened if Juliet took her two besties (that she doesn’t seem to know anything about) and the HOTTEST turn-of-the-century (that’s this current century, dear) chart toppers on a little spree and just belted her face off in the closest thing to a huge arena pop concert that a musical has ever been.
& Juliet is hundo p a musical for millennials – and unlike when baby boomers say millennials and actually mean Gen Z (they hate YOOTS), I actually mean millennials because the audience has to be READY to relive the HEYDAY of boy bands and Britney Spears. This musical feeds on the slightly tipsy 30-year-old remembering what it was like when you’d be at a middle school dance and Britney’s “Overprotected” would come on and you’d be like YASSSSS and don’t even get me STARTED on “I Want it That Way” and “It’s Gonna Be Me”, two pillars of the boy band takeover courtesy of Backstreet Boys and NSYNC that of course are PIVOTAL to this show’s story.
The surprising part is, it’s a lot more fun that it ought to be. & Juliet, with a book by David West Read and music by every pop sensation you’d expect in a show like this (but mostly Britney Spears; it could really be called the Britney Spears musical because it’s like half her catalogue), forces the biggest pop hits of the late ‘90s/early 2000s (for the most part) to tell the story of Juliet if she was like I’m not killing myself just because this boy I’ve known for 4 days did it first; I’ma flee to France and dance and party and start fresh/get immediately engaged to another boy I barely know. Everything about this show is simultaneously fun and beyond cringe-worthy, a mixture that meant my eyes didn’t know what to do between all the rolling and the widening and the smiling. The framing device has Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife (and yes, of COURSE there are cringey jokes about how that’s her real name and she’s not the only one HAR HAR, guys this is England everyone knows that’s his wife’s name), confront her husband about the depressing and not exactly empowering ending to his new play. She offers to help rewrite the ending and the couple bicker…by singing “I Want it That Way” to each other. Literally, Will is like “but I want it that way” and Anne is like “tell me why?” and then all the blondes go AIN’T NOTHING BUT A HEARTACHE and I felt my stomach eat itself because a groan wasn’t enough and yet I was smiling???
So Will and Anne are like okay well let’s see what it looks like with the new material and we see Juliet (Miriam-Teak Lee) pull a Sofia from The Color Purple when she sees the dead Romeo and go ‘hellllll noooooo’ and get up and keep living her life instead of ending it at 14 (the age issue provides some hilarious material). She flees to Paris to PARTY, bringing along her gender-queer friend May (which is great for representation but having them sing “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” may have been the most forced part uhh (although Arun Blair-Mangat was like, jfc it sounded like they were playing a recording that’s how flawless)) and of course…her friend…Anne…Anne Hathaway, who wants to be in the play?? It’s awkward storytelling but they wanted the supremely talented Cassidy Janson to sang throughout the show so what are you gonna do (although the suuuuper delaaaaayed final lines of Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is” (yes that is in here too), done so she can show off even more, are way toooo over the top). Between her and Lee it is the belt-your-face-off competition of the year in there. Impressive performances abound, for sure (though I worry for Lee’s vocal health doing this show long-term), but when it’s this much belting, it’s like belted song after belted song and it’s supposed to impress you with all their belting but after all this belting you’re just like ‘yes this is still this show.’ The Act II power ballads in any of the many 11 o’clock moments don’t have as much dramatic heft because it’s just more at the same level of volume and intensity.
But what am I talking about, they don’t really care about dramatic effect and storytelling, this is ABOUT FUN. And everyone else is having a g-d ball at this show. It doesn’t matter that the side plot about Juliet’s nurse and her lover (I was like that actor kind of looks like David Bedella but there’s no way; guess what, it’s him) falls flat because they are supposed to be the comedic effect but the entire SHOW is comedic effect so that kind of thing doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter that the unnecessary marriage drama between Anne and Will is so ill-fitting for a show like this – you can’t all of a sudden have a woman cry over her crumbling marriage when the show is a ROMP of BOY BAND HITS. It doesn’t matter that everyone is miked to within an inch of their lives and it’s virtually a pop concert with a forced story that makes you groan louder than you thought humanly possible, because it’s fun. Everyone is enjoying themselves; this is one of those shows that’s beyond critique.
My favorite part was when they represented Paris by parading little landmarks across the stage, like the Eiffel Tower and then…and then the Moulin Rouge windmill, reminding me with a shudder that we haven’t seen the last of these forced pop-score storytelling shows this YEAR. I can’t wait to see if that behemoth of a show can top this one, either in terms of enjoyability or how many times I groan.
INFORMATION
& Juliet is playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, probably forever. Despite being an ENORMOUS theatre, there aren’t any bad seats. I was in the back of the circle (supes cheap) and it was a great view. There’s a good ladies bathroom in the circle (like literally…inside the theatre) but the rest of the bathrooms are old and gross and small.
If you buy directly from the theatre, they charge an extra £1.50 to pick up ticket at the box office, which should be THE DEFAULT option. Such bullshirt. You can print at home for free. BULLSHIRT.
‘Night, Mother at the Hampstead A Strong Production of a Provocative Play, + TRIGGER WARNINGS
Jed! It’s a play about suicide Jed!
(Yes, sorry, this is my Stockard impression, based on her West Wing persona, Jed!)
Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama ‘Night, Mother (ahh ahhh ahhhhh fighter of the Day Mother ahh ahhh ahhhhh) feels like it’s happening in real-time. Now playing at London’s Hampstead Theatre, the four-hander (remember) manages to create 80 minutes of straight intensity, like a tightrope of drama created by the question posed in the beginning that you wait until the very end to have answered: Is she actually going to kill herself?
The ‘she’ in question is Jessie (Rebecca Night), the adult daughter of Thelma (Stockard Channing (yes really) (she’s gonna be big you heard it here folks))(Jed! I’m gonna be in ‘Night, Mother, Jed!), who opens the action by asking her mother for old towels or plastic sheets for keeping a coming mess in check before announcing the type of mess she intends to make by the end of the night. Her mother, obviously, thinks she must be joking or exaggerating at first, but Jessie’s calm, measured, almost detached and monotone demeanor shows otherwise. She has been deliberating for a while and she has long since decided: she will commit suicide tonight.
True confession, while I have long been familiar with the existence of ‘Night, Mother, and equally the decades-long rumor of an ‘imminent’ production starring Audra McDonald and Oprah (huge if ever true), I never saw it before. I knew it was ‘about suicide’ but I didn’t know that it was entirely about a specific suicide and waiting to see if it would happen or not. And so I had no idea what the resolution would be, and this ignorance made for a gripping albeit stressful af experience, a waiting game to see which of these women would prevail in getting what they wanted. I thus can’t say whether the play would have as dramatic an effect on people who know how it ends, but the strong performances definitely made the intensity of the drama more harrowing. Stockard really is such a presence, and Rebecca held her own. It was like a subtle tug of war between the two women playing a game with no real winners, with Thelma little by little trying to get through to her daughter but using ideas and concepts that Jessie has long since rejected as being able to be swayed by.
The familiarity of their everyday routine, as Jessie fills all the various candy jars and goes through instructions for the milkman and the garbage collection, provides a kind of alarming contrast to the main subject of their discussion. A lot of their evening has threads of humor, like when Jessie requests a cup of cocoa even though neither of them like it, but the context keeps it all unsettling. The play’s structure takes the emotional family drama and heightens it with this overarching question, so you have the mother-daughter-conflict dynamic, with its familiar and unfamiliar aspects, and it’s put on this crazy other level when so much rides on their conversation, all the little things they say or don’t say having the power to determine what comes next. Everything they say creeps them closer to a final something. As the night wears on and as Thelma has fewer means of delaying Jessie’s plan, the anxiety increases. It’s like a (mostly) calm constant battle between the two about whether Jessie can be overruled, until the very end. Thelma uses what she knows – routine and familiar comforts and topics – to try to get through to her daughter, when these are exactly the things she wants no more of. The ways Thelma tries to make her realize how much life contains reveal how little their lives actually contain, and while for Thelma this is everything, and enough, it isn’t for Jessie.
I don’t know how I feel about what the play is saying, or trying to say. They show someone set on committing suicide who explains matter-of-factly that it is a logical and fine decision, as though it’s not in and of itself the sign of a need for mental help, as though the making of the decision doesn’t necessarily show that the person is not of sound mind (I know I just forked you right up there with double negatives, Jed!). Maybe the whole success of the play is in that strange uneasy confusion, about what shape our remorse is supposed to take, and for which character and why. Overall, you feel bad for everyone, and when you were distracted by the candy jars the provocative framing of the subject sneaks in through their mundane lives.
‘Night, Mother originally premiered in the UK (after Broadway) at the Hampstead in 1985, so it’s nice that this solid new production of such an important play in the canon is here, and with such a star as Stocks McBocks. It would be a great first production of the play for newbies like me. For people who know the show well, I am really interested in knowing whether it’s ever as interesting as the first time.
TRIGGER WARNINGS
The Hampstead, like all good theatres, provides content warnings on their shows. For this one it said simply “The play includes themes of suicide throughout.”
Now, I’ve noticed in recent years that shows’ warnings will include things like loud bangs, fireworks, flashing lights, and gun shots to help prepare audiences. And I am ALL FOR thorough warnings. However, I realize there is a line that many do not want crossed, for when warnings give too much away. When warnings are spoilers.
I have always argued for the balance to be on the side of people who need to be mentally prepared for certain content, and who can then make a more informed decision about whether they can safely consume the content or whether they should avoid it. And I still do believe that, for sure; it will always be more important to help protect someone’s emotional and/or mental state than to keep a show completely spoiler-free. (And theatres like the Hampstead have a great system: On their website, you have to click on a separate page for the content warnings for each play, so that people who have no trauma concerns and don’t want anything close to spoilers will never have to see the warnings if they don’t want to.)
However, for this show, I’m a little stuck on how they would ever do a more complete, and helpful, warning. Hampstead got around it by simply saying ‘themes of suicide’. But if the theatre decided to address the inclusion, or not, of gun shots, then they would be telling us how it ends. Whether or not there is a gun shot in this play, it would be spoiled by whether or not the trigger warning includes gun shots. (A literal trigger warning.) I don’t want to spoil this particular play (even though I’m sure I’m the only person who didn’t know what was going to happen), but my entire experience of this play was the suspense, that tension in not knowing how it would end. If the trigger warning had said “warning; contains gunshots” well, then, the suspense is gone, isn’t it? I’d assume what was going to happen. And that’s too bad. But, if I’m someone who has stressful reactions to gun shots (and I am!) and I wasn’t told that a play had one, then I would be upset at that too. I’m not sure how you could ever give a complete content warning for this play without spoiling the action. It’s an interesting problem to consider, I guess. I really don’t know how to solve it. This might be the first time I’m ending a theatre post by saying I DON’T know exactly what to do to make this experience better!
