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Apr. 27th, 2020 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI'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.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 02:05 pm (UTC)They were pretty impressive at conveying movement which in a film would be exterior shots! And the shifting of place and time at several points (Jane going back to Thornfield) was very well done.
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
I honestly think by the time we get to the Riverses and Jane really being an heiress and an independent woman, a lot of adaptations run out of gas. (We used to be lucky if they showed Lowood at all!) I believe Mrs Gaskell says in her biography that Charlotte said she wrote like a fiend until Jane runs away from Rochester, and then she had to take a break and it wasn't quite the same when she got back to it. I love the night she spends outside and the begging scenes and how destitute she is when she gets to Moor House, though -- and like one critic said "the broken Reeds are replaced by Rivers of life." Diana and Mary are like mirror reflections of Georgiana and Eliza....and although St John starts off by being kind to Jane, he winds up being as abusive in a way as John Reed ever was. The fairy-tale reversals -- Jane has a home, Jane has a family, wait Jane has an actual family and piles of money?! -- seem to put some adapters off, but it's such a great reversal of fortune, especially since it's all rewards here on earth, not St John's disembodied Paradise.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 02:45 pm (UTC)- 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!
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 02:46 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 04:30 pm (UTC)Yes, she had such a great swagger!
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 04:33 pm (UTC)I promise I am not attempting to stan the '83 miniseries in an annoying way, it has plenty of problems and I'm watching it through the forgiving lens of nostalgia, but I will just leave a link here in case you're ever in the mood to take another look at it (the whole thing is on YouTube). I think it does better than average in a lot of the areas that you've mentioned as important to you (it certainly doesn't focus on the romantic pairing and nothing else!): 1983 Jane Eyre episode playlist
I agree, Wuthering Heights is so unusually structured - and so deeply ambivalent about its own romance - that most adaptations struggle badly with it. The two-episode 2009 series with Tom Hardy as Heathcliff is the only one I've ever come across that I liked, though it still doesn't have enough time to be as complex as the novel. But it's trying; its heart's in the right place. According to Wikipedia, the script writer on that one said:
Peter Bowker observed: "How do you go about adapting the greatest love story in literature? Well, firstly by acknowledging that it isn't a love story. Or at least, it is many things as well as a love story. It's a story about hate, class, revenge, sibling rivalry, loss, grief, family, violence, land and money...".
He noted that the book had previously proved "stubbornly unadaptable", the most successful version being the Hollywood picture starring Laurence Olivier, which succeeded because "with classic Hollywood ruthlessness they filleted out the Cathy/Heathcliff story and ditched the rest of the plot. It's a great film but it does the novel a disservice."
Bowker hoped to "open up some of the other themes, not least the story of how damage is passed down through generations, how revenge poisons the innocent and the guilty, how the destructive nature of hate always threatens to overwhelm the redemptive power of love" but acknowledged that "structurally, the novel is notoriously difficult".
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 04:57 pm (UTC)*Actually, they surely enjoyed some gender-queer flirting in their drama, too, if opera is anything to go by, but I don't know anything about earlier Italian stage plays.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 05:09 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 05:54 pm (UTC)I saw the Broadway transfer in 2012, too. I just didn't write as much about it because I was too busy enjoying the rest of the trip which now makes me desperately nostalgic for everything, including my health and the ability to leave the house.
a.) Alan the Actor, who delighted me with his angsty scenery-chewing every time he stormed onto the stage
IT'S BEEN A BUS RIDE TO HELL AND BACK AGAIN.
b.) Alfie, the zombie, clearly just raised from the dead that day and trying his level best, but BOY.
Alfie still impresses me so much. By way of illustration, I'm just going to point out that you saw his actor, Tom Edden, two months ago as de Guiche in the National Theatre's Cyrano.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 06:10 pm (UTC)I've seen two I really liked, Toby Stephens as an endearingly languishing disaster bi in the 1996 film and Liam Brennan in the 2014 Globe broadcast as a rare, non-Byronic Orsino, very bluff and man's man's and not a second of panic over his sudden, unpredicted, tongue-tying attraction to Cesario, he just has no idea what to do with it (do men . . . hug?) and spends the second half of the play in an escalating state of anxiety that he's just managed to acquire two unrequited crushes now, FML.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 06:13 pm (UTC)I think Toby Stephens hires a fortune-teller rather than impersonating one himself, but a rewatch for research purposes might be in order.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 06:34 pm (UTC)+1, wish to subscribe to your production. The 1996 film perhaps accidentally gestures in this direction with its opening scene of Sebastian and Viola doing their role-swapping double drag act and Antonio watching them both so closely that we can't tell which one taken his fancy (not a spoiler: Sebastian), but then it doesn't follow through except that his denial by the disguised Olivia is devastating, because we think of the three characters as linked; his unrequited love is the hardest emotional punch in that movie after Malvolio which is not the same thing.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 11:37 pm (UTC)Well, firstly by acknowledging that it isn't a love story. Or at least, it is many things as well as a love story. It's a story about hate, class, revenge, sibling rivalry, loss, grief, family, violence, land and money
I AM SMITTEN. How did I not know about this at all? I might have just given up on WH adaptations after my parents showed young horrified me Heathcliff and Cathy gliding spectrally over the moors in a deranged happy ending. At least young Laurence Olivier was pretty. (Which was what I wound up thinking about him in P&P too. And Rebecca.)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 01:35 am (UTC)(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.)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 01:42 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 01:44 am (UTC)(Unrelatedly, I'm enjoying the WILDLY different roles in which Toby Stephens has appeared in this post so far.)
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Date: 2020-04-29 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-29 02:04 am (UTC)