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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.
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.
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