Questions I hope HEX answers before opening nightby Randi / December 14, 2021There are no excellent boiled potatoes, but the Ferrero Rocher tower will have to do.
It’s Theatre Thursday! (Well it was supposed to be but I forgot to publish so let’s just go with it!) Today’s show is the phenomenally fun Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) playing at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus. As of publication it is one of the West End shows not closed due to Covid cases so go see it and have a laugh!
As a passionate devotee of Pride & Prejudice by way of the Colin Firth miniseries that gave way to the superior (will fight to defend) Keira/Macfadyen movie and all its subsequent instagram meme content, I am undoubtedly the target audience for this hilarious and goofy take on the classic, and yet I still was not prepared for how much fun I would have. I could spend 1000 words just saying “lol x was so funny….lol y was so funny…lol z was so funny” so to do that but in a less annoying way, I’ve made a list, I’m checking it twice*, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice,** Santa Claus he doesn’tttt exiiiiist.
*lolz like I ever edit this blog
**nice people wear masks, naughty people who don’t wear masks should be getting a lump of coal shoved up their bums next week heyooo.
The Best Parts of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) (besides everything)
– The pre-show bits
Starting even from the pre-show bits as people were still going to the bar and finding their seats, I was cracking up. The cast desperately tried to get a cleaning glove down from the chandelier in wildly entertaining hijinks, all performed while they kept telling the audience “no we HAVE NOT started yet!” It made me giddy with hysterics. I was all in from the start.
– The use of modern music
At opportune moments throughout the play, the characters grabbed microphones and sang relevant, fun, and/or scathing overviews of the current situations. My favorite was probably Elizabeth grabbing the mic and singing “You’re So Vain” to Darcy at the Bingley Ball, a perfect theatrical moment. Does it count as a jukebox musical? Don’t worry about it.
– Literally everything Hannah Jarrett-Scott did
As Charles Bingley, Caroline Bingley, Charlotte Lucas, and other characters, HJS had me sobbing with laughter. She managed to embody a believable version of Bingley without being actually like him, instead choosing a kind of doltish pomposity by way of merely a jacket. Her Sister Bingley was my favorite, that bitch. And playing poor Charlotte as in love with Lizzie was clever and meaningful without being overly sad. The audience was in stitches whenever Hannah appeared, in whichever character’s hat. She was the gem of the show for me.
– Isobel McArthur’s Mrs. Bennet
Usually portrayed to infuriating you (well, me), Mrs. Bennet here was understandable and more agreeable if only because she was so damn funny. The only reason I didn’t love Isobel’s Darcy as much is merely because it wasn’t Matthew Macfadyen melting the screen. It was still a riot. I didn’t realize until after that this actress was Isobel McArthur as in the writer of this adaptation and co-director. People shouldn’t be so talented it’s just not right.
– Mary’s glasses
Poor fucking Mary.
– The lack of Kitty
Not having anyone even briefly don a cap as Kitty made me continuously cackle. She lifts right out!
– Every time Lydia appeared onstage
Tori Burgess’s portrayal of Lydia as an out of control twit of a party girl was too on the nose. Of course she’s be the one getting drunk first. She was played exactly like so many girls I see out and about in the city on the weekends and it was glorious.
– The props
The Ferrero Rocher tower. The chandelier. The horse (below). Everything was so funny. Darn I said I wouldn’t just keep saying it over and over but really what else can I say; also it’s been a few weeks and I forgot to take notes, so.
– Mr. Bennet
Absolute genius to have him ‘portrayed’ like that, and also a scathing critique of a character that usually gets a pass simply because he isn’t annoying like his loudmouth wife. At least the mother has a purpose to her behaviour, trying to get FIVE DAUGHTERS MARRIED. Can you imagine.
– The de Bourgh family values
Every time Christina Gordon’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh appeared in her insane and elaborate getup, it was a riot, but the best was the stupid/clever joke about the song “Lady in Red” by her relative, you know, Chris de Burgh. I love when I get stupid jokes and this was no exception. Ridiculous.
– Jane on the gd horse.
As Jane traveled on horseback to the Netherfield at her mother’s urging (you know the part, when it rains and she has to stay there for a few days because rain was a death sentence back then), Christina Gordon kicking her heels in time as she sang “At Last” atop that giant fake horse was one of the funniest bits of physical comedy on stage in years. I am cracking up here just thinking about it.
Do yourself a favor and go see this if you haven’t yet. It’s at the Criterion, the one right in the center of Piccadilly Circus. Sit house right (stage left) in the orchestra and you’ll be closest to the bathrooms by the bar. It’s a bit of a cave, this theatre, with all levels underground, and you can sometimes hear the tube, but this show is so much fun you (I) will (did) forget that you’re (I’m) claustrophobic.
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“Underground Railroad Game”: The Most Scandalizing Thing I’ve Ever Seen Comes to London
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about the shocking American play that recently came to London’s Soho Theatre.
You know how art can be fucking crazy? (‘You know how people have these little habits that get you down?’) Like how artists, regardless of their medium, like to shock their audience into strongly feeling something so they do bonkers things like using feces instead of paint (real example) and preserving a shark in formaldehyde (real example) and nailing their scrotum to Red Square (real example) and constructing a complicated series of machines that take food and pass it through tubes and bowls to digest it in stages until it literally produces poo at the end (real example that I’ll discuss more of when I blog about our Australia adventure)? Well here’s one more example! ‘Underground Railroad Game’, considered one of the 25 best plays of the past 25 years by the New York Times, is forking nuts and made me feel very uncomfortable in ways no theatre has ever done. Yet unlike the aforementioned examples of alarming ‘art’, this play wasn’t being scandalous just for the sake of being scandalous – it actually had a purpose for wicking me out so much, and although I’m still grappling with it, I can’t deny that it was powerful. (The other examples are bullshirt.)
‘Underground Railroad Game’, which from now on I’ll refer to as URG because that’s the sound I made through the entire back half, is a riveting 80 minute tour of American racism on a societal level and an interpersonal level, and even though it starts off funny, it’ll leave you staring hard into the floor wishing that it would swallow you whole so you don’t have to think about how gross you feel from what you just witnessed and what it said about the world and people and black people and white people and America and just everything but then you get up because you want to take a shower.
And boy does it start off funny. The play opens on a barn at night in the 1800s, as a scared, skittish black woman enters and ravenously eats an apple from her pocket. But when she hears a man outside, she hides in a wooden box. The man still finds her but tells her she doesn’t have to be scared – he’s one of the good white men, an ‘angel’ really, who will help this runaway slave escape to the north. Their acting is overly earnest and over the top, and kind of funny but we started to worry that the entire play was going to bank on this conceit holding water for more than a few minutes. Of course, just when we thought ‘hmm is this really this play?’, the lights came on in the entire theatre, jarring the audience, and the two actors came closer downstage and said to us, “Okay class! What did we learn?”
Those two actors, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard, are the two creators and writers of this play. And they’re not playing a slave and an abolitionist – they’re playing two enthusiastic teachers at Hanover Middle School, and we, the audience members, are their 7th grade students. They explain that their little skit was an introduction to their social studies unit on the Underground Railroad, in which they will combine forces as classes. We students would be separated into Union and Confederate Troops, and during the next few weeks, the Union army would try to sneak black baby dolls from one classroom’s wooden box to the other’s without Confederate troops catching them – our own underground railroad! To see which side we were on, we were told to look under our seats, where we all found little envelopes with little army men figurines inside. (This is when I broke my theatre rule of No Talking and whispered to Husband “oh so this is like REALLY interactive, huh.”) Who has a blue figure? they asked, and the appropriate audience members whooped, as people do. You’re the Union army! Who has a gray figure? I did, and I was told ‘You’re the Confederacy!’ Instead of whooping, we all, being woke, booed, and Sheppard quickly said “Hey hey none of that! We support our troops!” and we all died laughing.
As middle school teachers, they absolutely slayed me with their pitch perfect demeanor and comments. “Eyes up here!” they pointedly shouted at anyone who was talking to their companion or looking elsewhere. “I better not see any phones kids!” My favorite too-accurate thing of theirs was when the (extended) school bell would ring and they’d both shout together at us: “That’s not our bell! That’s not our bell! Stay seated!” One such moment had me laughing so hard that I made a little squeak-laugh sound after the rest of the audience had already quieted down from their laughter. Sheppard and Kidwell both focused their attention on me like laser beams and glared me down and then Sheppard said, “We’ll wait.” I wanted to laugh even harder at that but true to middle school form I just turned bright red instead and wanted to vomit as everyone turned to look at me, but I also became hysterical.
So I bet you are thinking this sounds just HILARIOUS and like a jolly good time, and it really was, because this was the nice little part that represented how most people learn about racism and America’s racist history – they make it palatable in our schools, and easy and clean and no one gets hurt. But that way doesn’t really work, because our history wasn’t easy or clean and way too many people got hurt, and continue to get hurt, from the racist foundations of America. These cheerful lessons don’t do much to teach kids about real racism and how it affects our society or stop them from growing up into racist adults.
And so, Kidwell and Sheppard swiftly change the story’s focus from these cute lessons for the kids onto their interpersonal relationship as teachers, and then as romantic partners, of two different races. At first it’s funny, like in their Gene-Kelly-throwback dancing around town, or when they ‘walk’ through town making jokes about race that quickly go too far. Even though they start pushing boundaries early on, they’re still boundaries we have seen before, so the discomfort is familiar.
But then. Oh but then. As their relationship progresses, they can no longer gloss over the serious issues created by their different races or the history of what that difference means. Sure both of them teach about slavery but only one of them really understands it on a profound rather than academic level. As a black woman and a white man, they are going to be haunted by the master and slave relationship of their ancestors, haunted by their own lesson plan of whether they’d be reaffirming or rewriting history together. They try to work out their issues in weird sexual ways that become somewhat cruel. Then the ‘somewhat’ falls by the wayside and these two incredibly brave performers start exorcising the demons of history in full-on sadomasochistic ways, playing back and forth with the master and slave roles as the stunned audience looks on and wonders whether we should go get help. The first glimpse of a stark naked Sheppard elicits gasps from the astonished audience, but then he’s naked for like a good 20 minutes, as Kidwell treats him like he’s on an auction block and breaks rulers on his back and chases him around with terrifying advances, culminating in him masturbating into a flag. All of it seemed real – especially, grossly, that last bit – so it was distressing, offensive, and actually appalling to watch. As I covered my face with my hands, I was flabbergasted that the adorable little middle-school-assembly show I was laughing at an hour ago had morphed into this horrifying trauma for everyone involved. But I get it. Going too far in ways we’ve never really seen before in the theatre (at least mainstream theatre) let them so powerfully argue that the horrors of slavery are as relevant and real today as they were in the past, damaging people and relationships and society still. I mean I think they had to do it, at least. I’m still quite traumatized.
INFORMATION
‘Underground Railroad Game’ is at London’s Soho Theatre until October 13th (looks like they got an extension). Tickets are pretty cheap.
No I didn’t stage door are you kidding me I saw them naked.
A German Life at the Bridge Theatre: Maggie Smith is a Treasure; This Show is Not
It’s Theatre Thursday! A German Life is playing at London’s Bridge Theatre until May 11.
First of all, let me be clear that Maggie Smith is one of a handful of global treasures (pronounced tray-sure, like fellow old-lady-treasure Emily Gilmore). If she wanted to be an honorary Golden Girl I’d allow it. She’s the best. I love her. I wish her decades more of life and health and work.
A German Life is one of the most painful theatrical events I’ve ever had the non-playsure of experiencing. And not in a good ‘oh that was dramatic and heavy in a necessary way’ kind of painful. I mean it was torture. It was almost two hours straight of wondering in agony whether Maggie Smith was losing her short-term memory and forgetting lines (the thought of which was heartbreaking), or whether this was a purposeful choice for her character. Either way, it was painful to watch. It was hundo p when you visit an older person in a nursing home and you listen to their rambling stories and how it takes them a year to get out one sentence, and once they get the sentence out, they repeat it three times so they can figure out where they wanted to go from there and you’re just like OH MY GOD SPIT IT OUT but you can’t because that’s a horrible thing to think and say (when you aren’t talking to a Nazi).
And yes, all this means that Maggie was entirely successful in her portrayal (it had to be an acting decision, right, because Maggie Smith is still IN HER PRIME) of a 105-year-old woman. I mean, it’s incredible that a 105-year-old woman managed to communicate all that she did. But realism and accuracy in the portrayal doesn’t automatically make for good theatre.
What also doesn’t make for good theatre is that the show gets its message across in about 10 minutes, and the rest of the time is just playing that same one note for longer. And the message…isn’t enough. In A German Life, Maggie plays Brunhilde Pomsel, former secretary to Joseph Goebbels during WWII. The real Pomsel broke her silence at age 105 when she spoke to a group of filmmakers about her life. This play, by Christopher Hampton, is based on that. Maggie sits in a chair as Brunhilde and talks to us about her life like we are filming her for the documentary. The significance of her testimony is that she was a Nazi, who worked in Goebbels’ propaganda wing, who doesn’t think she did anything wrong. In her recounting of wartime, she spends more time explaining her favorite suit she got from Mrs. Goebbels than sharing anything she knew about what was happening in the war. It’s an effective portrait of willful ignorance, I’ll give it that. We spend this time with a self-involved person who hasn’t learned any lesson still, and so we are supposed to reflect on what makes someone ignore such atrocity, and what we would have done differently, if anything.
What bothers me about this show is how frustrated I am that the subtle messaging is not going to reach some people. Instead of thinking how horrifying it is that this woman still doesn’t get it, still thinks she was a victim for what she faced post-war, some people are going to go ‘hmm that really makes you think, there could be very fine people on both sides.’ I’m all for subtle theatre, but our audience needed to be told more clearly that Nazis were bad. I’m not joking. As usual, this show was a prime example of the disturbing humor of London audiences. Without fail, whenever there’s a soul-shocking line that would make normal humans breathe in sharply or widen their eyes or gasp, we’re with an audience that laughs. The most alarming example in my experience previously was when, in Caroline, or Change, Caroline told the young Jewish boy in her care that his people go to hell. It’s a big gasp moment. OUR AUDIENCE LAUGHED. And not in a nervous laughter way that some people on Broadway did; this was in a ‘oh that’s funny because making fun of Jews is funny’ way. Well, the Bridge audience at A German Life matched that distress by laughing every single time Maggie’s character made fun of Jews, especially their appearance, their penny-pinching ways, and especially when she motioned slightly at her nose to comment about Jews’ big noses. The audience roared. This is why anti-Semitism is back; it’s by popular demand.
And that’s why this show didn’t work for me and mostly frustrates me. It’s extremely subtle in its message, because all we get is her story and her words. It only works for people who know that the Nazis were bad and that anti-Semitism was, is, wrong. So, today, when more and more people don’t realize that anti-Semitism is wrong, they laugh along with Brunhilde like it’s their granny and then come away thinking ‘maybe not all Nazis were bad! She seemed fine!’ It’s ridiculous that I have to say this, today, but apparently we as a society haven’t reached the point where subtlety in anti-Nazi messaging makes any headway. I know some of you are like ‘you’re assuming all of that just because people laughed at the wrong things?’ No, I’m assuming all of that because of the conversations I have had every single day since 2016 about what is or is not anti-Semitic, and how often I’ve been told that just because something is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean it’s bad. When we still have people who are like ‘eh but Jews’, a restrained portrait of a non-actively-evil Nazi isn’t going to get through to anyone who needs it.
INFORMATION
I’ve previously raved about the human-friendly, modern design of the Bridge, but that was when I sat in the stalls. Sitting in the weird nether-region of the Gallery 1, which is really just more stalls at the back walls of the theatre, separated from the regular stalls by a half-step and a banister. It felt much more cramped than the regular stalls and at a weird side angle. Definitely won’t be sitting there again.
Infuriatingly, the show started 10 minutes late, in order to seat all latecomers. This is because this show has a policy of no admission or readmission once the show begins – but they also publicized the policy of ‘no latecomers allowed in’. Get your story straight! Don’t hold the curtain for people who are 10 minutes late, man alive.
