The kindness of strangers: Young Vic’s A Streetcar Named Desire (NTLive)

Director Benedict Andrews needs no introduction to Sydney audiences. Over the past seven years, his productions have garnered considerable critical and popular acclaim, and not without detractors. Known for his striking theatricality as much as for his reliance upon certain stock examples of stagecraft – glass boxes, confetti falling from the ceiling, loud noises or music, bodily fluids (blood, urine, faeces, vomit, spit) being spread across the set, gratuitous nudity and/or drug-taking – it has almost become predicable as to what you’d expect to encounter in a production directed by Andrews. But in his recent production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire for London’s Young Vic, currently screening in cinemas as part of the National Theatre Live program, it is the distinct lack of these effects which makes it such an engrossing and relatively ‘straight’ interpretation of Williams’ play. This Streetcar is visceral, dangerous, strangely seductive and undeniably compelling. 

Swing your razor wide: New Theatre’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Based on a nineteenth century penny dreadful, the story of Sweeney Todd, the ‘Demon Barber’ of Fleet Street, is the stuff of legend. Whilst a largely fictional character, he is often likened to Jack the Ripper as a figure whose mythology is larger than that of any real person from the time. First published in serial form in 1846-7 as The String of Pearls, a romance, the story was quickly adapted and appropriated into different mediums, with the name Sweeney becoming ubiquitous with that of a barber. A deliciously Victorian melodrama, it has captured the imaginations of millions across the world, including those of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler who adapted Christopher Bond’s play into their successful 1979 musical.

Playing at Newtown’s New Theatre, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the story of Todd, a man who is sentenced to life imprisonment in Australia under a trumped-up charge and makes his return to London, vowing vengeance upon those who removed him in the first place. Straight off the ship, he makes his way to his old stomping ground on Fleet Street, where he meets Mrs Lovett, a pie-maker with a failing business, and the result of their two devilish wits and cunning schemes is nothing short of, well, delicious. Written with panache and flair by Wheeler and Sondheim, the musical has a dark and lyrical momentum which keeps the story moving, as it combines a story of jealousy, love, horror, thrifty business. It is, by turn, a full-blooded melodrama, a Grand Guignol concoction of blood and hellish deeds, but also a pointed social commentary that is gripping, emotional and, at times, quite darkly funny.

Pandemonium: National Theatre's Frankenstein (NTLive)

We all know Frankenstein’s monster – the block head, the shock of dark hair on its flat top, the bolts in the neck, the ill-fitting clothes, the immense iron shoe-clad feet, the lumbering gait, arms outstretched. We erroneously call this monstrosity ‘Frankenstein,’ not realising that is actually the name of the scientist who created him; the creature is, in fact, unnamed, although as this production illustrates so clearly, both creature and scientist are two halves of one being – creator and created – thus the title of Frankenstein being applicable to both man and creature. But underneath the myth and horror-appropriation of the story is Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, and this production – created for London’s National Theatre in 2011 – springs forth from Shelley’s novel into full-blooded life, first upon the stage and now upon cinema screens as part of the popular National Theatre Live program.

First published in January 1818 when Mary Shelley was twenty years old and pregnant herself, the novel is often credited as the first work of science-fiction. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the age of science was beginning – surgeons and anatomists were plumbing the human body for its secrets and workings, the discovery of electricity was almost visible on the horizon, and the modern world was about to explode in all its hulking smoking burning glory into full being through the Industrial Revolution. There was much less of a distinction between art and science as we know them today, and for many writers and thinkers of the time, the two were intertwined. At the heart of Shelley’s Frankenstein is not Hollywood’s idea of horror, but a very morbid and human fear of being born.

What do you see?: Ensemble's RED

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend…
One day, the black will swallow the red.

In the middle of his studio, Rothko sits, staring at a large (unseen) canvas, a cigarette burning in his fingers, his eyes eagerly darting around the large red expanse, the gaping hole on the wall. Around him lie the detritus and the carcases of his work: buckets splattered with dried and congealed paint the colour of blood; jars of pigments, boxes of receipts, bottles of Scotch, cartons of eggs; a phonograph, brushes, shelves overflowing. And behind him, a dropsheet covering a wall, spattered with dried paint in dark angry blobs. Enter Ken, Rothko’s new assistant, out-of-place in a grey suit. And Rothko asks him, ‘What do you see?’ 

It’s the underlying theme of the play – one of them, at least – the theme of looking, of seeing, of understanding and grappling with art. And, at times, it’s angry, it’s passionate, it’s impassioned, it’s frustrated, it’s defensive and defenceless; it’s human and intangible; emotional.

Occam's Opposite: ‘Anonymous’ and the authorship of Shakespeare

For a bit of a laugh, I decided to watch Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous, half-expecting to turn it off in the first ten minutes. But as the film progressed and the end credits rolled, I found myself enjoying it tremendously. From its cleverly staged time-shift to its impressive recreation of Elizabethan London, the viewer cannot help but be drawn into its cesspit of intrigue, danger, romance, politics, and theatre. As you may have gathered by now, I am a Bardolator, a staunch Stratfordian, and I don’t think for a minute that anyone other than the William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon wrote those thirty-seven plays, one-hundred-and-fifty-four sonnets and five narrative poems that are often cited as being the first modern works of literature in the Western canon. I’m not going to spend much time or space here on the illogicality and implausibility of Emmerich’s film or the scholarship that informed it, nor do I want to stand on my soap-box and wax lyrical about the genius of Shakespeare, because it is boring and has been done before, and it’s not what this is about. All I want to do here – all I aim to do, as with everything else on this blog – is to write about my thoughts on the film.

To build a globe

London, 1598. 

Picture a theatre in Shoreditch, a tall polygonal building, a wooden O, with tiered galleries facing a stage, a wooden embrace able to house three-thousand bodies in rapt entertainment. It is London’s first theatre, owned by James Burbage, a businessman and impresario, father of Cuthbert and Richard, the latter a soon to be well-known actor. Creatively enough, theirs is named the Theatre, the first and only of its kind for sometime. Outside the city walls, anything is possible. Here, dreams are made and acted out by men playing at soldiers and braggarts, kings and queens, lovers, tyrants, gods and mortals; a kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

This winter, in 1598, the Burbage’s and their company of players, the Chamberlain’s Men, players to the Her Majesty, found themselves in the unpleasant place of having a landlord who wanted his land back, preferably without a theatre on it. Only trouble was, as players and theatre-folk, the theatre was their only means of survival. Sure, they could have toured, but every touring company needs a base, needs a home ground, a waterhole, a place of succour and refuge; their place. The Burbage’s called a council of war, a meeting of minds, where each of the shareholders in the Theatre met to voice their concerns. Present that night was a man who has since become legendary, a William Shakespeare of Stratford. As the night lengthened and their wits wandered, desperate to find a solution to their darkest hour, a candleflame flickered in that marvellous mind.

Magic Lantern: Dickens200

Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens this year, (and, alarmingly, it started in the last quarter of 2011, when the occasion wasn’t until 7th February 2012), so I’m adding my bit to the blacking pot.

To start with, I’m going to put this right out there, in big shiny glowing letters. I find it very hard to read Dickens, all and any of his books. I struggled through Oliver Twist because I was reading it for a school assignment, and while I enjoyed it to a degree, I just wanted to cut through all the verbosity and get through it. Actually, so far as I can recall, that’s the only one I’ve read all the way through, the whole thing. If anything, I find it easier to watch the television adaptations of Dickens’ books than to read them, and it’s not as strange as it sounds. Dickens’ books, by their nature and the way they were written and published, are rather complicated, convoluted and meandering: characters come and go as they please, disappearing for some good many parts, only to reappear at the end (when you’ve forgotten who they are, so you have to scramble madly back through the book to find them again) to get their comeuppance or reward and be sent on their merry way again; three or more plot lines run simultaneously so you have a hard time of remembering who every one of his exquisitely drawn characters are… Because of their length, and the way they were serialized with parts appearing in monthly installments, the television series format suits them perfectly, more so than film, and it comes without the forgetting of characters and the convoluted simultaneous plotlines.