This Week's Theatre

Last week we saw five plays, this week we saw four. It would probably be possible to squeeze in one more tomorrow, but Steve has begun to fall asleep during the second act--he hasn't been sleeping as well as usual on this trip, and a dark theatre after wine with dinner has tended to help him to make up for those sleep losses--so it probably isn't worth trying to go to another play, particularly as there is nothing we've heard of that is wonderful that we haven't already seen.

This week's plays have been excellent, though. We started with a production of The Death of a Salesman in which Willy Loman and his family are all black; this gave an extra dimension to the story of the proud but flawed man with unreasonable expectations for his sons' achievements, who has been reduced to taking "loans" for years from his (white) neighbor.

Wendell Pierce as Willy gave a deeply moving performance that earned a standing ovation; British audiences are somewhat less free with standing Os than American audiences.

Another show was a new theatrical adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Bridge Theatre in the new cultural district at the south end of Tower Bridge. The classic book, with its winter/Christmas elements, is often brought out at the holiday season; and it is often regarded as a children's book, but it can be appreciated by all ages, and the largest population group we noticed was teenagers to early twenties. We thought it might be because the four main actors, playing the Pevensie children, might be their classmates and friends.

The staging was exciting, with vivid lighting effects, great costumes, numerous small puppets representing some of the smaller the animals of Narnia, and a huge puppet of the lion Aslan that resembled a Chinese parade dragon; his waving tail being operated by an Asian dancer emphasized the resemblance. (This picture is of a different lion puppet, possibly an Aslan 1.0 prototype, that hangs in the lobby now.)

When we had an unexpected gap in our schedule we took advantage of the time to see a revival of Noises Off, which has been called the funniest farce ever written. I don't think we had seen it since the original production in 1982. It was a splendid production, exceedingly funny. Quite possibly the funniest ever written; but the written script needs to be performed with perfect timing, which this had. We enjoyed it enormously.

The lovely old Garrick Theatre's interior is shown here since I couldn't photograph the stage during the play, and at the intermission the Safety Curtain, which would keep a backstage fire from spreading to the audience, must be lowered, to make sure it still works.

On either side of the stage are these ornate masks of comedy--I couldn't find a mask of tragedy anywhere! A theatre superstition, perhaps?

The final production of our trip was The Taming of the Shrew performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company with a gender-reversed cast. That is to say, a female Petruchia woos a male Katherine (couldn't they figured out a plausible male name for him?) , whose mother Baptista won't let any of the female suitors near her other son Bianco until her son Katherine is married, and nearly all the other characters are similarly gender-reversed. The females wear costumes that are grand and impressive and take up a lot of space, and they move with large confident gestures. The males wear costumes that are closer to their bodies, softer and gentler, and they move in ways typically more feminine; Bianco tosses his beautiful long hair a lot. There are many dialog changes from her to him, hers to his, mother to father.

At the end, as we walked out I heard several teenage boys talking about the means by which Katherine had been tamed: they expressed shock at the "psychological abuse" Petruchia had used, and they said it was "nasty." So true; it is a troublesome play as a comedy these days, but I wonder if these boys would have been sensitive to that had it been played in the original version.