(no subject)

[skygiants]

I've been having a weekly National Theater Live viewing party over Zoom with pals and it has been lovely! We have seen all the ones that have aired so far and the plan is to continue on as they go, but this seems like a reasonable point to pause and write up my thoughts about the first lot.


One Man, Two Guvnors

I knew that this play involved James Corden and a lot of Regency farce; I did not know, but was delighted to learn, that it also involved a wacky cross-dressing plot and that the 'two guvnors' James Corden is attempting to serve are a.) a plucky heroine cross-dressing as her evil twin gangster brother in order to extort money from the family said brother was supposed to marry into and b.) her upper-class himbo fiancee, who's on the run for murdering the aforementioned evil gangster twin, neither of whom knows that the other is in town yet!

This was overall extremely silly and vastly entertaining but by far the funniest part was when James Corden, addressing the audience in character as the luckless heroic schlimazel, woefully asked if anyone had a sandwich, and then got completely thrown out of character when someone indeed popped up and helpfully offered him a hummus wrap. Under normal circumstances I would have suspected audience plant (especially since there was a very dramatic audience plant later on in the play), but James Corden was so visibly KO'd by the polite offering of a surprise hummus wrap that either this was truly unanticipated, or he is indeed the world's finest actor and should be recognized with an Oscar for this performance alone.


Jane Eyre

There were some things about this adaptation I really loved and some I did not like at all!

Things I loved:
- pretty much everything about the staging, which was cool and compelling and dramatic; certain images, like a flock of ghostly school uniforms rising into the air, will absolutely stick with me
- Bertha Rochester: a solemn woman in a red dress, a blues singer, who drifts in the background singing the transitions in Jane's life long before Jane ever comes to Thornfield Hall; a person who shapes the atmosphere of the staage and yet whom nobody ever quite interacts with in her own person, which is a really intriguing way to tell the story more or less straight through the text while calling everything anyone ever says about Bertha into question
- the truly committed actor playing Rochester's dog

Things I did not like:
- the omission of the reveal that the Riverses are Jane's cousins
- and, as a consequence, the omission of Jane's independent fortune which is a VERY IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF THE FINALE
- the omission of my absolute favorite line: "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself." WHY WOULD YOU CUT THIS. IT'S THE LYNCHPIN OF THE STORY.
- the omission of Rochester's weird cross-dressing fortune-telling interlude, nobody ever does this and yet I'm still mad about it

Things about which I have conflicted feelings:
- the fact that this was probably one of the most pointedly unlikable Rochesters I have ever seen; I understand why one wishes to avoid the trap of soft-focusing Rochester but I sort of wish nonetheless that it had done a better job of capturing the dynamic that makes Rochester worthwhile, which is that he makes Jane feel like her absolute favorite version of herself
- casting Helen Burns, Adele, and St. John Rivers all with the same actress - a lovely if slightly shouty woman with a very queer haircut, which had the hilarious side effect that as soon as she appeared as St. John, the vast majority of the watch group all immediately started rooting for Jane to run away with her

Things that made me laugh so hard I truly cannot say whether I thought they were good or bad:
- Bertha Rochester mournfully singing a slow jazz version of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy as Rochester's house burns to the ground


Treasure Island

Like Jane Eyre, this production featured a really stellar set, staging, and cast, and like Jane Eyre I had beef with some of its adaptation choices ... however I have to take a few moments first to rhapsodize about Jim, both as written and as portrayed; just a delightfully bumptious youth with bucketloads of chutzpah and no patience for any of the variably competent adults accompanying her. (Though I do wish they'd let the role continue being gender-ambiguous, as it seemed like it was going to do in the first scene, as opposed to coming down firmly on GIRL, and I also wish they had not then decided it was necessary that BECAUSE GIRL influence some of the stuff with Long John Silver.)

Now ... Long John Silver. I think Arthur Darville did a genuinely delightful job in the role, switching on a dime from charming to sinister (and his seduction of Squire Trelawny was truly sublime); my beef is not with Arthur Darville, but rather with whichever scriptwriter decided to remove all the interesting ambiguity and genuine affection from the Long John::Jim relationship and frame Long John's interest in Jim entirely as long-game villainy. I genuinely don't understand why you would do this. The tension inherent in Jim's realization that Long John is a murderous trash fire and is also, at the same time, Jim's best friend is the heart of the story! Why is Muppet Treasure Island better at this than the National Theater?

And it is hard not to feel irritably like gender stuff may have played a role in changing the dynamic from a real friendship/mentorship to straight manipulation - emphasis on straight, since one of the changes made is an attempt by Long John to seduce Jim to piracy with a kiss (which does not take and alarms Jim more than anything else, and yet). It's a pity, because the Jim is SO good, and the notion of making Ben Gunn a fellow betrayed cabin boy is honestly pretty interesting, and overall the production was a delight to watch! And yet.


Twelfth Night

Speaking of gender stuff: this is the Twelfth Night in which Malvolio is in fact and explicitly Malvolia, as performed by a dignified butch Tamsin Grieg, with all the attendant complexity and discomfort around Malvolia's feelings for Olivia and the treatment she gets for them that one might expect. It is, overall, a production that lingers very deliberately on the play's queer and inconvenient outsiders: Malvolia, foppish Sir Andrew (played as more or less in love with Sir Toby), a grave Antonio whose steadfast heartbreak seems to belong to an entirely different and far less silly play. Even Olivia, technically included in the traditionally happy ending, looks appalled rather than amused at the revelation that she's married a stranger and never quite loses that look through the end of the play.

... which does not mean that it's a joyless production; love the gratuitous birthday party, love the even more gratuitous gay bar ft. drag queen Hamlet, love especially the fact that Orsino is played by -- and in exactly the same style as -- the prep-school himbo fro One Man, Two Guvnors. This is a man who has embraced his typecasting and we salute him. Also, it thankfully does not hit the Twelfth Night failure mode of forgetting that Orsino and Cesario are gay. Orsino and Cesario are extremely gay and this is why the ending is not as depressing as it might in fact otherwise be.

Anyway, it's an extremely good production (and one that everyone else but me in the watch group had seen before and already had a variety of feelings about). Talking about it afterwards, we more or less agreed that it probably won't be a good first Twelfth Night for anybody, but as an advanced Twelfth Night -- a Twelfth Night graduate seminar, so to speak, for anyone who'd gotten a little bit tired of seeing all the play's inherent queerness resolve blithely into tidy heterosexuality again and again and again -- it was extremely important.

Comments

[kore]

I TOTALLY MISSED that the woman singing onstage was supposed to be Bertha, probably because altho she had a lovely voice, the onstage band really annoyed me and I felt like the singing took away from emotional scenes instead of underlining what was happening in them. Andyeah, the moment she sang "Crazy" (beautifully! she had a great voice and stage presence!) I was like, oh noooo.

I typically like sets which are minimal and also have elements that swap in easily for other pieces, but there was a little too much climbing up and down ladders for me. It did really work with bits like Rochester getting on his horse and Jane in the coach and Jane climbing up at the end, though. The costuming was a bit blah.

Unlike everyone else I know who saw this, I really liked Rochester -- he seemed just the right mix of vulnerable and gruff -- but I didn't like Jane Eyre at all. I think of Jane as being very quiet and sober, fading into the wallpaper, and then coming out with these very sharp honest judgments that take Rochester by surprise. She hasn't had a lot of worldly experience, but that makes her intriguing in other ways. She may seem submissive and pliant but inside there's a real core of steel that allows her to survive, and resist Rochester until she can meet him on her own terms. This actress did not have any of that. I think their leaving out some of her background, like you noted, unfortunately contributed to her Jane being kind of blank but also too nervous.

the omission of Rochester's weird cross-dressing fortune-telling interlude, nobody ever does this and yet I'm still mad about it

WHY IS THIS NEVER DONE IN ADAPTATIONS? IT'S SO AWESOME. I mean obviously the adapters don't want Rochester to seem THAT weird and also it's a little unbelievable Jane doesn't recognize him, but it's SO HILARIOUS. And the way Jane reacts to it all is so Jane.

-- I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the book they did keep in, and at how much of the dialogue was right from the book. It seemed better than most of the movie/TV adaptations about that!

[rachelindeed]

The 1980s miniseries starring Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton is the only adaptation I've ever seen that keeps the weird cross-dressing fortune-telling interlude in! It's also my favorite adaptation overall, though not solely for that reason :) I think Zelah Clarke really brings all those qualities to her Jane that you described in your comment. And Dalton is FAR too handsome for Rochester, but I don't care because he handles the language and dialogue so very well, imo, and can sell the shifts from brusque to tender to threatening to witty.

[skygiants]

Onstage semi-diegetic music seems to be a National Theater Thing and overall I've liked it more than not, including in this production, but I am really impressed that we heard nobody in the audience laughing at "Crazy."

Extremely climby staircase sets also seem to be a National Theater Thing (3/4 of the productions so far). Jane on the coach with all the energetic running really delighted me. JOG JOG JOG JOG JOG.

I was really excited for the first half of the play by how close it was to the book, and how much of her early life it kept in, although that made me more startled whenever it did veer away -- like, why this and not that? -- or whenever it did drop a bit of dialogue that was important to me, personally. Which of course is always the danger of watching an adaptation of a thing you care about, it's too easy to get annoyed if they drop your Favorite Thing! But I think it was an interesting set of choices, overall. I'd love to hear DVD commentary from the scriptwriter.

[rymenhild]

Still about halfway through Twelfth Night, but I have SO MANY THOUGHTS.

Orsino's 40TH BIRTHDAY PARTY ahahahaha such a character note, he's so the kind of person who would be having an enormous over-the-top party pretending he's twenty-five on his 40th birthday

I wondered on first sight why Sir Toby's actor was so young, but the answer is of course to create tension with Sir Andrew. Love Sir Andrew totally missing the buttery-bar gags -- the play has the same lines as always, but somehow they're coming out GAYYYYYY.

I wondered for a few minutes after her first appearance whether Feste is trans in this production. She's not, but she could have been and it would have fit, and it would have worked really well with the gender and sexuality play everywhere.

One text change I noticed was "She left no ring with me / What means Olivia?" where the proper name replaces "this lady." I didn't love Cesario calling Olivia by her first name that early, but I guess it's to remove ambiguity -- "this lady" could have been Malvolia in context.

Looking forward to the second half on an evening when I am not already screened out by the end of the night.

[skygiants]

Orsino's 40th birthday party is SO funny, that whole scene immediately made Orsino 10x as much of a presence to me as he usually is.

I also noticed the "Olivia" change! I wondered at the time if it was to make Viola seem mentally closer to Olivia and more genuinely attracted to her, but her acting choices otherwise don't really bear that out, so yeah, I think you're right, it's probably just to remove ambiguity.

Looking forward to your thoughts on the second half!

[heresluck]

The sandwich bit in One Man, Two Guvnors was in fact part of the show and is in the script.

I loved that production of Jane Eyre -- not unreservedly, including for some of the reasons you mention, but very much. I appreciated the director's commitment to making it, as she said in various interviews, a life story rather than a love story. Plus I loved how theatrical it is; it's not trying to do the things that a screen adaptation can do better. And oh, the guy playing Pilot the dog -- I loved everything about those choices. Such welcome levity in a production (and a story) that is not exactly a laugh riot.

I hadn't seen this Twelfth Night before and found it, overall, more interesting than compelling -- aside from Oliver Chris as Orsino, who sold "Orsino is REALLY into Cesario and isn't... quite... sure what to do with that" better than anyone else I've seen in the role, and the gay bar, which was utterly delightful. I found the Antonio disappointing, or maybe not so much Antonio himself as the complete lack of chemistry between Antonio and Sebastian. Maybe it's just because the rest of the production was so queer, but that relationship, which is so often the most explicitly queer part of a production (whether Antonio's feelings are requited or not), fell really flat for me.

And while I thought Tamsin Grieg was great, I didn't get much sense that Malvolia actually cared for Olivia; it read to me as an oddly conventional performance of Malvoli@ as social climber, kicked off by the "so and so married her steward" bit in the false letter scene. Pulling off the wig at the end reinforced that for me: this is someone who's been playing a part the whole time, which doesn't excuse the abuse she's suffered but did complicate my sympathies quite a bit.

If you think Oliver Chris is delightful as himbo Stanley and himbo Orsino, just wait until you see him in the Bridge Theatre's Midsummer Night's Dream, which was due to screen as part of NT Live this spring and thus will presumably show up on NT At Home at some point. GOOD TIMES.

[skygiants]

oh my god, is it? He got me completely! (What sold me especially is the part where he yells "tonight of all nights!" like he was completely flummoxed by it happening on National Theater Live night.) GIVE JAMES CORDEN THAT OSCAR.

PILOT WAS SO GOOD. Regardless of my thoughts about the Jane Eyre adaptation as a literary text, I thought it was just an incredibly cool piece of theater, as you say -- doing all kinds of things that can only be done in theater as a medium.

lol, I've seen so many completely oblivious Sebastians that just having Sebastian acknowledge & return Antonio's feelings at all felt great to me, but it did fizzle out somewhat in the second half ... we spent a little bit of time while watching talking about how difficult it is to figure out what to do with Sebastian in the back end, because nothing he does makes any sense, and this production didn't take any particular steps towards dealing with that.

sjd;fdsaI'M SO EXCITED, I hope they screen it!! At this point I will happily watch Oliver Chris in anything.

[flamebyrd]

We also watched One Man, Two Guvnors and I had the same “is this a plant or not?” confusion about the sandwich. The cast were clearly enjoying themselves a lot so that was fun to watch, even though a lot of the humour wasn’t really my style.

Unfortunately the play’s repeated insistence that identical twins can never be of different genders (and unsympathetic mocking of anyone who disagrees) rather ruined it for me.

[skygiants]

Oh yeah, we were all eye-rolling intensely during that monologue. As much as I enjoyed the production, it was astoundingly straight given the basic premise (with the exception of Oliver Chris, a man apparently born to exude cheerfully perplexed queer frat-boy energy.)

[sovay]

One Man, Two Guvnors

I one hundred percent adored that broadcast of One Man, Two Guvnors when I saw it in 2011 and I am so very glad you have seen it now, too.

a grave Antonio whose steadfast heartbreak seems to belong to an entirely different and far less silly play.

I have seen this happen with one film and two stage Antonios and I think it may just be a thing that happens if your Antonio is any good at all. "If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant."

the fact that Orsino is played by -- and in exactly the same style as -- the prep-school himbo from One Man, Two Guvnors.

GOD BLESS YOU, OLIVER CHRIS.

[skygiants]

yesss thank you for the link to that review, I'm so glad you've seen it! I didn't have room to rhapsodize about a.) Alan the Actor, who delighted me with his angsty scenery-chewing every time he stormed onto the stage or b.) Alfie, the zombie, clearly just raised from the dead that day and trying his level best, but BOY.

GOD BLESS OLIVER CHRIS.

[nineveh_uk]

I think it may just be a thing that happens if your Antonio is any good at all

I agree. I think it's possibly partly a problem of time and genre, as is more obvious in the scene in which Malvolia is being tormented in a dungeon as 'mad', which these days in a good production is likely to be really awful and obviously cruel and distressing, but which in the original period would have been Hilarious Japes. I'd love to see a version that managed to give Antonio a happy ending, can't he have a poly relationship with Olivia and Sebastian?

[antisoppist]

Oliver Chris on Orsino: "The one thing I said to Simon was I’m not going to wear a red velvet dressing gown and lie on a rug, sipping a glass of wine, staring longingly off into the middle distance."

https://inews.co.uk/essentials/oliver-chris-ive-spent-whole-life-people-asking-im-going-play-prince-william-528929

We googled him because of where-have-I-seen-him-before in One Man Two Guvnors and hadn't noticed we'd seen him live in Twelfth Night, which sadly bears out his point in the above interview: "But by the time people have sat through the play, no-one cares who played Orsino because no-one can remember he was even in it."

[aella_irene]

He was amazing as Duke Theseus in Midsummer Night's Dream, which he plays as 'who among us has not engaged in drunk semi-nude woodland revels with our BFFs?' (Everyone else: "Not...me?")

Also he wrote The Trial of Ralegh and I would joyously attend his interpretation of a phone book.

[skygiants]

Thanks for the link! ... goodness, the resemblance to Prince William IS uncanny.

To his credit, I actually thought his Orsino was one of the most memorable bits of the production! It's very easy to have a charmless or boring Orsino and he manages to make you root for him.

[cinaed]

I didn't end up watching Jane Eyre and have Twelfth Night on my watch list, but I agree with your thoughts on Treasure Island and One Man Two Guvnors!

I was really excited at the start of Treasure Island when upon being asked if they were a boy or a girl Jim said "None of your business!" and then almost immediately leaned hard into "she's a girl!" Also agreed with the adaptation not understanding how much more interesting "Long John is my friend and my enemy" is than "Long John is evil." Both Muppet Treasure Island and Treasure Planet did it better! I will admit I was super into Doctor Livesay.

One Man Two Guvnors was a lot of fun, though I did wince a bit that the only gay character was the dead one. I honestly kept expecting her brother to show back up alive at the end of the play, having somehow survived being shot! It seemed like that kind of play! But it had a fun zaniness to it, and yes, plucky cross-dressing heroine/her upper-crust himbo boyfriend was delightful and hilarious.

[skygiants]

RIGHT? We all got so stoked at that line from Jim and then it flattened so fast, why would you raise our hopes like this! You are correct, though, Doctor Livesay was a delight. (I've still never seen Treasure Planet, perhaps now is the time ....)

Yeah, like I said somewhere above, it was really a startlingly straight production all things considered! I thought the heroine did a great job playing her brother though -- her grim mobster swagger was a pleasantly refreshing change from the general boyish style of the cross-dressing lass.

[lirazel]

and, as a consequence, the omission of Jane's independent fortune which is a VERY IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF THE FINALE
- the omission of my absolute favorite line: "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself." WHY WOULD YOU CUT THIS. IT'S THE LYNCHPIN OF THE STORY.

Okay, I haven't even watched this adaptation and now I'm angry!!!

the omission of Rochester's weird cross-dressing fortune-telling interlude, nobody ever does this and yet I'm still mad about it

OMG SAME.

the dynamic that makes Rochester worthwhile, which is that he makes Jane feel like her absolute favorite version of herself

YES. They delight each other and so many adaptations seem not to understand that!

[skygiants]

It was especially weird to me because they kept all the stuff that leads up to it, especially the conversations with Helen that help her to form her moral sense -- but then the moment itself, her big moral stand for self-respect, skips all the key dialogue and falls weirdly flat! I do not understand. :(

The thing about Rochester is that yes he is a garbage fire but also he is Jane's particular garbage fire -- like, I get it, it's very hard to hit that particular balance note of 'she is on a completely different ethical plane than him BUT their weird feral goblin personalities match each other exactly!' I don't know that any adaptation has done it perfectly but some definitely come closer than others.

[bookblather]

Honestly the Muppets do everything in a stellar manner and the only way I will watch a remake of The Princess Bride (seriously WHY) is if they do it.

I'm... pretty sure I remember Toby Stephens doing the weird fortune-teller bit in that miniseries? But I could be wrong, I could have just made that up in my head because I really want to see Toby Stephens do the weird fortune-teller bit.

[sovay]

But I could be wrong, I could have just made that up in my head because I really want to see Toby Stephens do the weird fortune-teller bit.

I think Toby Stephens hires a fortune-teller rather than impersonating one himself, but a rewatch for research purposes might be in order.

[qian]

One thing I thought was interesting about the Jane Eyre production, and I don't know how to feel about it, is the fact Bertha is black and the majority of the rest of the cast is white (leaving aside the woman who plays Bessie etc). I think Bessie helps it not be dodgy and perhaps it is a critique of the racial dynamics in the text?? But perhaps it doesn't come off???? I don't really know.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I'm not sure either - when it was just Bertha and Bessie, I felt like it was pretty likely that the casting was deliberate and meant to be saying something about race and class and power dynamics (and I was not sure how to feel about it either), and then the woman who played Bessie also turned out to also be cross-cast as Blanche Ingram and that destabilized my theories a bit. But the music and costuming for Bertha did evoke for me a very blues-singer vibe in a way that made me think that they had a black woman in mind for the part .... but then I also wondered if that was me bringing too much of a USAmerican context to it -- I think of that tradition as specifically African-American, which is somewhat to the side of both Jane Eyre and the National Theater!

(Semi-relatedly, I also couldn't find a coherent paradigm for the combo-casting of Helen-Adele-John - I can see a throughline with Helen and Adele, and with Helen and John, but I'm at an absolute loss to find something that connects all three of them.)

[pedanther]

I do wish they'd let the role continue being gender-ambiguous, as it seemed like it was going to do in the first scene, as opposed to coming down firmly on GIRL

Same!

I've been struggling with these National Theatre streams -- I've seen Treasure Island and part of Twelfth Night -- I think because the actors are all giving big performances to match the space they're in, but my brain is trying to watch it as a TV show and consequently judging the acting as overblown. It wasn't too bad in Treasure Island because a lot of the characters were meant to be larger than life anyway, but with Twelfth Night I had to tap out after the first half an hour and I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to try it again now that I think I've figured out what's up and have an idea what to expect.

[skygiants]

Oh, that's interesting! I think I'm used enough to watching filmed theater (and have seen enough of the NTL performances in movie theaters etc.) that it isn't a problem for me, but I can definitely see how the mismatch between Theater Brain and TV Brain would cause a cognitive dissonance.

[lokifan]

- a lovely if slightly shouty woman with a very queer haircut, which had the hilarious side effect that as soon as she appeared as St. John, the vast majority of the watch group all immediately started rooting for Jane to run away with her

I WOULD ENTIRELY AGREE.

And yes it sounds like I'd 100% agree with your adaptation opinions here. Man, Muppets adaptations are always the best versions.

[skygiants]

My watch group is skipping out on Streetcar Named Desire this week so we can watch Muppet Treasure Island instead ... we all feel OK about this choice. >.>

[kate_nepveu]

Belatedly, I'm very glad that James Corden was once genuinely funny and talented, as I've found him mostly A Bit Much and wondered why he was a thing.

[skygiants]

My main impression of him before this was "tried his best as the Baker in the deeply underwhelming Into the Woods film and yet remained underwhelming" ... I do feel like The Sandwich Incident has really given me a glimpse into the true depths of his comedic gifts.