Middlemarch Part 1 - Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

To Stratford to see Middlemarch - Part 1 in the Swan Theatre.  We fancied staying over and found a relatively good deal on a room and breakfast at the Crowne Plaza, which is new to us.

A straightforward run over, to find the Crowne Plaza car park absolutely heaving - we quickly found that the hotel was playing host to a significant number of events in the Stratford Literary Festival.  That was bad enough, but when we arrived at the Reception Desk to check in we were met by both long queues and large signs like this one:

This did not bode well - and my misgivings were well founded.  The claim that the new management system would "enhance (my) experience" seemed unlikely to be true then or, indeed, ever.  While we waited for 35 minutes to get checked in I reflected that:

• There were four reception terminals available but only two were staffed.

• The processes which were "taking longer" involved each member of staff stepping away from their station for each new arrival to search by hand through a sheaf of printed reservations.

• There was no member of senior staff anywhere to be seen with whom we might reasonably have remonstrated.

• If I had, at any time in my career, launched of a piece of buggy software at the same time that its usage would be put under exceptional strain by massively increased visitor numbers I would have been invited to an "interesting" chat in a corner office...

Ho hum.

Our key-cards collected, we made our way up to our room. This was the first of two seemingly interminable corridors along the way.  When we got to the far end and realised that our room was a good way along another identical corridor at right angles to the one through which we had just passed, I confess I started to giggle at the thought of the opening sequence to the 1960s comedy spy program Get Smart.  The next morning Amanda checked her Fitbit before we went down to breakfast and again after we had returned, and announced that we'd already got more than a thousand steps under our belt...

A quick change and then (after the delays in getting parked and checked in) with no time for shopping we made our way to The Opposition Bistro, where Amanda enjoyed a rump steak:

and I, Cajun chicken with salsa, sour cream and chips (not pictured):

Followed by chocolate ice cream and rice pudding with a plum compote:

To the Swan Theatre, where this rather impressive roof structure hung from the auditorium ceiling:

over a bare stage:

Impressively, at times during the performance a variety of hatches in the stage floor opened and closed to accommodate the appearance of various items of furniture, including (occupied) beds and (fully laid) dining tables.

Happy bunnies:

Amanda has read Middlemarch, but I have not, so I was reliant on both the synopsis I got off the internet, and this family tree included in the programme, to familiarise myself with the many intertwining storylines:

Condensing the ~900 page novel down to a play of some 5 hours (tonight's production was just the first half) clearly required some significant editing by Nina Raine, who created this version for the stage.  Some evidence of just what that entailed can be seen from the number of characters that appear in the tree without any colour block to accompany their names - these characters do not appear in the play.

So what of it? I really enjoyed it - which was a major relief after the recent "As You Like It" debacle.  To carry some of the necessary long passages of exposition, Raine employed the interesting idea of having "George Elliot" (played by the lovely Amanda Root) on stage and narrating for much of the running time.  On the night that we saw it, the actor who normally plays the part of "Mayor Vincy", "Bambridge" and "Thesiger" was indisposed, so Steven Dykes (who normally plays "Dr Wrench") took on those roles and Mackensie Heynes (who normally plays "Joshua Rigg" and "Mr Hawley"), gamely also took on the more demanding role of Dr Wrench by (at times) "reading from the book".  Both are newcomers to the RSC and it was really good to see the rest of the cast pay tribute to their efforts by encouraging extra applause for them during the curtain calls.  I'm looking forward to seeing Part 2 in a week's time.

Back to the hotel, which was surprisingly quiet, given how busy it had been just a few hours earlier.  A good night's sleep, followed by a disappointingly weak shower, and then down to breakfast - eventually.  At the weekend, breakfast is served from 07.30 - 10.30, and we arrived at 09.30 to find a queue.  Fortunately we did not have to wait too long for a table, and the (self-service) hot buffet was quite acceptable.  We asked one of the staff if the Festival was responsible for how busy the hotel was, and she replied that this was "normal"...

The car packed, we moved it to our usual car park to avoid having to trek back to the hotel, and went for a stroll around town.  On the way back to the car we passed a slight, bespectacled figure walking intently towards the theatre.  We looked at each other and both agreed that it was Amanda Root - clearly on her way to the Saturday matinee performance.

Another straightforward run home - where we both spent much of the remaining part of the afternoon dozing and recovering from our adventures.

Reviews

The Birmingham Press

British Theatre Guide

BroadwayWorld

The Guardian

Jonathan Bate's Literary Remains

StageTalk Magazine

West End Best Friend

WhatsOnStage

As You Like It - Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

To Stratford to see a new all-male production of "As You Like It" starring Jonathan Groff (I had to look him up...).

But first - dinner, and a return vsit to The Vintner.  Lamb shank for Amanda:

and no prizes for guessing what mine was (though I have reduced significantly my intake over recent months):

Followed by apple and blackberry crumble:

and chocolate ice cream:

Out and a stroll to the theatre - which was HEAVING. With performances in both the Swan and the main theatre, and with the "Groff effect" swelling the numbers in the latter, all available seats in the downstairs waiting areas were occupied, so we made our way up to the mezzanine with its view down to the shop:

A very minimal stage to begin with:

Two happy old codgers:

The much more interesting to look at (and very effective) scene after the interval:

And so to the play.  The acting, staging, lighting and music were all up to the highest RSC standards.  There was an interruption of 10-15 minutes during the second half to deal with a medical emergency when someone to our left in the First Gallery collapsed.  There followed a genuine first for me - someone did literally shout "Is there a doctor in the house?".  I figured that a PhD in Quantum Mechanics was not the kind of assistance they sought, so wisely kept quiet and a few minutes later the patient was able to shuffle out under his own steam.

Throughout the whole performance the audience were clearly in seventh heaven - I don't recall seeing that many spontaneous ovations in any other production.  I also don't recall ever seeing such an enormous bias in the gender of the audience - in one section of the stalls alone I counted four men and thirty women.  

The reviews (listed below) were almost all equally adulatory.  

And I hated the production with every fibre of my being.

According to the pre-publicity, this version of the play was supposed to challenge traditional ideas about gender, identity, and performance.  For me it did none of those things.  

The role of the director should surely be to serve the play; in this case I really felt that the play came a poor second to the director's own thoughts on sexuality and nationality - in addition to the all-male casting, the Forest of Arden was transformed into a Welsh hillside and the cast regularly broke into Welsh song arrangements. Why?

At a time when funding for the arts in general is under pressure (when isn't it?), was having 41-year-old Groff playing 20-year-old Rosalind genuinely an artistic experiment, a directorial indulgence, or simply a very effective way of putting bums on seats?  Shakespeare already offers women fewer opportunities than men; I found it perverse that the RSC should choose to reduce them still further in the name of challenging traditional ideas about gender.   In the entire canon, Rosalind is the female role with the most lines, and all evening I kept thinking about the female actors denied the opportunity to play her to accommodate this version.

“But wait!", I hear people crying, "men played women in Shakespeare’s time!”.  True - and audiences also enjoyed bear-baiting, public executions and cock-fighting, as well as emptying their chamber pots into the streets. The fact that something was customary in Shakespeare's time is not, in and of itself, an argument for reviving it on a modern stage. We've moved on from those other practices - and I wish this production had given me a convincing reason to reconsider this one.  

So - a strong "nul points" from me. 

And Amanda's verdict on my verdict? "You're too straight and too literal". Twas ever thus.

 Reviews

Boycotting Trends

Broadway Baby

All That Dazzles

Best Of Theatre

Beyond The Curtain

British Theatre Guide

Debra Hall Creative

Elemental Theatre

The Guardian

My Cultural life

Staged Theatre

Stage Talk Magazine

Style Birmingham

The Stage

Theatre & Tonic

Theatre Tradge

The Real Chris Sparkle

The RECS

The Times

What's On Stage

West End Best Friend

Don Giovanni - Royal Opera House, London

Reviews

Bachtrack

Best of Theatre

Broadway World

London Unattached

London Theatre

Opera Wire

Parterre Box

The Guardian

The Stage

Soft Machine - Pizza Express Jazz Club, Soho, London

To the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho to see Soft Machine.  A straightforward run down on the 16.14, and then a cab to the corner of Oxford Street and Dean Street.

One of the most infuriating things about the Club is that they have two ways of entering - one down a flight of external steps, direct from the street, and one that involves walking through the restaurant and then descending a spiral staircase at the back - and the staff seem to change which entrance will be used every time we visit.  

The former is more convenient, in that it avoids customers in the restaurant from being disturbed by prospective audients wending their way between tables to get to the spiral staircase, but has the disadvantage that its use in winter time can result in gales of freezing cold wind blowing down the steps straight into the club.  

We arrived in plenty of time, so I entered the main restaurant door and checked with the staff inside - "Which door will you be using for access to the club tonight?".  "This one", they replied, pointing to the restaurant door through which I had just entered. Sorted. Since it was too early to start queuing we went for a stroll around the block.

It would appear that government plans to crack down on "vertical drinking" - both inside and outwith pubs and bars - may meet some strong opposition in Soho:

We arrived back at the club - to find people queuing at the external door...  I went inside and again asked which door was being used.  "That one", came the reply, with a vague gesture in the direction of the external door.  Plus ça change...  We joined the queue and then made our way inside.

The one thing that they DO get right is that tables are allocated in the order in which bookings are made, and - as the eager beaver that I am - I was relieved once again to see my name very close to the top of the list.

A most acceptable table, very close to where I had requested:

As mentioned before, it's always a good sign when you can rest your feet on the edge of the stage:

We enjoyed a couple of excellent pizzas and waited for the band to take to the stage - 

L-R - John Etheridge, Theo Travis and Fred Baker:

Two sets of great music with a set-list spanning more than 50 years.  During the interval I got the guys to sign my copy of their latest CD.  All too soon the band took their bows and it was all over.

Out, and a brisk walk back to Oxford Street, from where we got a cab to St Pancras.  There was plenty of time to acquire refreshments and catch up with emails:

before an uneventful journey home on the 23.36, and bed by around 02.00.

Set List

Set One

• Open Road - from Thirteen
• Lemon Poem Song - from Thirteen
• Seven Hours - from Thirteen
• The Tale of Taliesin - from Softs
• Waltz for Robert - from Thirteen
• Turmoil - from Thirteen

Set Two

• Facelift - from Third
• Joy of a Toy - from The Soft Machine - released as the first US single
• Song of Aeolus - from Bundles
• Green Books - from Thirteen
• Fourteen Hour Dream - from Hidden Details
• Medley:
• 10:30 Returns to the Bedroom - from Volume Two
  
• Middleburn - recreation of Hugh Hopper bass solo from a 1971 Henie Onstad Art Centre concert
  
• Hidden Details - from Hidden Details
  
• Hazard Profile Part One - from Bundles

Encore

• Backwards - from Third
• Noisette - from Noisette

La bohème - Royal Opera House, London

 

La Fille du régiment - Royal Opera House, London

To London, to see Donizetti's La fille du régiment at the Royal Opera House.  We booked to see this after seeing and enjoying Don Pasquale at Nevill Holt opera - prior to that I was completely unfamiliar with Donizetti.

One of the pleasures associated with writing entries for this blog is the opportunity to spend time doing background research and learning entirely new things.  I now know that Don Pasquale (which had its debut in 1843) is widely regarded as the last great Italian opera buffa (comic opera), harking back as it does to works such as Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Rossini's The Barber of Seville (1816).

By contrast, the earlier La Fille du régiment, written in 1840, actually belongs to the French tradition of opéra comique, which, despite its name, simply means an opera with spoken dialogue (rather than a sung recitative) combined with arias.  It has much in common with what would later become operettas and, eventually, musicals.

A straightforward run down on the 16.04 and a cab to the junction of Long Acre and Bow Street.  A measured stroll through Covent Garden for a quick peek in Ralph Lauren on King Street (no socks left in the sale - shame!) and then back to the ROH for light refreshments and people watching in the Royal Opera House Café.

To our excellent seats in the front row of the Donald Gordon Grand Tier:

And so to the opera itself.  I fully confess that at the time that we booked our tickets, and for some time thereafter, I had no idea just what kind of treat we were in for.  

The production was a revival of Laurent Pelly's celebrated staging, now famous because it avoids military realism in favour of theatrical whimsy: throughout much of the production, the action takes place against a backdrop of enormous unfolded maps, the regiment behaves like an oversized comic family and the comedy grows naturally out of individual's characters rather than artificially introduced slapstick.

The cast were headed by Spanish soprano Sara Blanch, making her ROH debut as Marie, and Juan Diego Flórez as Tonio.  Flórez first sang Tonio in Pelly's original production at Covent Garden in 2007 and, though we didn't fully appreciate it at the time, Flórez's is now regarded as one of the world's greatest portrayals of Tonio, and for those in the know (which did not include us!) his return to Covent Garden was one of the principal attractions of the revival.  

Although Tonio is a rather naïve Tyrolean peasant, Donizetti gave him one of opera's greatest vocal showpieces.  The Act 1 aria "Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" contains a sequence of nine high Cs, all intended to be sung full voice (not falsetto) and negotiating them has become something of an operatic rite of passage. 

To put this in some context, Luciano Pavarotti earned the nickname "King of the High Cs" after singing Tonio at the Royal Opera House in 1966 and his performance there was one of the events that launched his international career.  Although stylistically very different, Flórez's portrayal of Tonio is now talked about in the same breath as Pavarotti's.

Flórez did not disappoint, and the end of the aria in question gave rise to the longest, loudest and most enthusiastic mid-performance ovation we have seen.  Flórez, who ended the aria with arm held aloft, maintained the pose until the applause died away and then, feigning muscle-cramps, pretended to pull his raised arm down with his other hand - leading to yet more applause.

Mention should also be made of Tamsin Greig - yes, the comic actor of Black Books, Green Wing, Episodes and Friday Night Dinner fame - as the Duchesse de Crakentorp.  This is a famous, entirely spoken cameo role; since it requires no singing, opera companies frequently cast famous actresses, comedians, or special guest personalities to play the supercilious and domineering prospective mother-in-law - and convention has it that topical ad-libs are, if not de rigueur, certainly welcomed.  

In the original 2007 ROH production, the role was taken by Dawn French; others who have since played the part include Miranda Richardson and - in a rare instance where a legendary opera soprano took the non-singing comic role (and humorously added an unscripted aria of her own) - Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.  

On this night (and, according to reviews, every other night!) there were times when Tamsin Greig’s performance came close to stealing the show, ad libbing as she did about "10 Downing Street" and "Andy Burnham" on the day of his taking over as PM.  To the audience's delight she maintained her haughty character right up to and during the curtain call - and here is a somewhat blurry and hastily snatched shot of one of those curtain calls:

Out, to quickly find a cab that got us back to St Pancras in time for the 23.35 and a straightforward run home, with time to reflect on what had been a truly memorable evening.

Bed by around 02.00.

Reviews

All That Dazzles

bachtrack

Broadway World

London Theatre

Opera Now

operawire

The Stage