Swive - Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Swive was an intense take on the teenage and middle-aged lives of Elizabeth I, depicting the challenges she encountered on her journey towards becoming Queen, and those she faced as Queen - in particular on account of her being a woman.

Elizabeth was played by two actors: Nina Cassells as Princess Elizabeth and Abigail Cruttenden as Queen Elizabeth. There were only four actors in the play and three of them played more than one role. This was particularly impressive of the two women, who played an assortment of very different characters. Abigail Cruttenden played Catherine Parr and Mary I as well as Elizabeth.

Swive presented the teenage Princess Elizabeth as innocent but astute; anxious and highly religious. Her religiousness had an OCD-like quality involving repeating the same prayer over and over again. As Queen, she remained astute and anxious, and had a nervous face-touching tic . She was also formidable and ruthless - she carried out a horrible act that made me lose sympathy for her and which I'm not sure has a basis in reality - no, not ordering the death of Mary Queen of Scots! - something involving a fork. In Swive, Elizabeth is very clear about not ordering her cousin's death.

Elizabeth's aloneness came over strongly - the extent to which she had to figure everything out by herself, and rely on herself alone - especially after the death of her step-mother Catherine Parr, when Elizabeth was fifteen. (Although that relationship had soured somewhat after Catherine's husband's predatory behaviour towards Elizabeth.)

Elizabeth's desire to remain single and inevitable lack of an heir was a major theme. Her argument with Mary I, in which she criticised her half-sister for giving her power away to her husband was one of my favourite scenes. She had to be careful about what she said, given her and Mary's respective positions, but she couldn't resist giving Mary her honest opinion about Mary's marriage, her phantom pregnancy and religious impositions. Another of my favourite scenes was Elizabeth's argument with William Cecil (Michael Gould) about whether she would have the title 'Supreme Head of the Church of England' (her father's title, which she wanted) or 'Supreme Govenor', which she ended up having because it was considered more suitable for a woman.

The lighting - candlelight - was used to good effect in this play - it was made an integral part of the story.

 I felt somewhat short-changed because Swive wasn't a full-length play and I hadn't known this in advance. It was a single act of around an hour and twenty minutes. I felt like I'd only just properly got into it before it was wrenched abruptly from me. My other issue was the occasional jarring insertion of modern language. The characters kept saying 'OK'.

Next: Anne with an E - yes, it's a Netflix series rather than a play. It's going to be a bit like living during the Commonwealth for the foreseeable future theatre-wise.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

This encapsulates the 60s vibe of  The Two Gs of Verona

The Two Gentlemen of Verona was another play in my 'Seeing all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter how un/appealing' series. I was really looking forward to going to the SW Playhouse again to experience its magical, intense, dreamlike atmosphere in all its 1600s authenticity, so you can imagine my chagrin when I looked up the play beforehand and discovered that this production was SET IN THE 1960s!!!

It was highly discombobulating to see a play set in the 60s - with 60s outfits and a set involving flashing neon lights and modern instruments and a sound system no less - being performed in a small, wooden, candlelit theatre. With big candlelit chandeliers swaying gently overhead. It simply did.not.work. Despite my anguish about Emma Rice's new regime at the Globe, it's not the case that I'm completely against modern/other era plays ever being performed at the Globe Theatre. However, I am against modern era plays ever being performed at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse - unless, say, it's a modern play set in a cave or something. Otherwise, the candles are sorely wasted.

I can see why The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not an oft-performed play. The plot was pretty weak. I felt that the cast pulled out all the stops, but they didn't have much to work with. The titular two gentlemen of Verona, good friends Valentine (Guy Hughes) and Proteus (Dharmesh Patel), go to Milan in order to work for a while at the Milanese court. Proteus regretfully leaves behind Julia (Leah Brotherhead), the woman he loves, while Valentine falls in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia (Aruhan Galieva), in Milan. When he arrives in Milan a bit later, Proteus also immediately falls for Silvia, forgets about Julia, and spectacularly betrays Valentine in order to carry out his wooing, which makes him either exceptionally naive, immature and mercurial, or a sociopath. Either way, a sympathetic character he was decidedly not.

The play is described as a comedy, but it's not. There were a few funny moments, but they mostly came about due to modern interpretations; for example, Valentine fleeing the court and joining a band - that is, a music-playing band - made up of notorious hippies. Music was used to good effect in this production. Comedy-wise, there was also a whole plotline about Launce (Charlotte Mills) and his dog, Crab (played by a person, Fred Thomas, not a real dog), which was supposed to be funny but which I didn't really get. It just didn't appeal to my sense of humour and I don't think I ever figured out exactly who Launce was. I generally don't like seeing people playing dogs, either.

I liked the interpretation of the final scene. Proteus assaults Silvia and threatens to rape her (see what I mean about it not being a comedy?) and only stops when Valentine intervenes. Julia is also there and she and Silvia watch in horror as the two men reconcile with each other. Proteus gets no comeuppance at all and the women are left feeling betrayed and shocked - Silvia by Valentine's happy reconciliation with the man who almost raped her, and Julia by Proteus' general assholery and assault on Silvia. In this production, Julia and Silvia both cry while the two 'gentlemen' embrace, which is a realistic reaction and one that I can imagine not being performed in Shakespeare's time.

photo credit: ArtGrafx Trippypoos via photopin (license)

Next: Cymbeline

Pericles - Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Scene of a Shipwreck

Shipwrecks and pirates and brothels, oh my! If Bar Mitzvah Boy suffered from too little plot, Pericles suffered from too much. No sooner did the titular Pericles, Prince of Tyre, set foot on a ship than a storm began a-brewing and he ended up stranded and friendless on foreign shores. The shipwrecks and coincidences and comings back from the dead and Marina's ability to talk herself out of ANYTHING might have made this play farcical and Comedy of Errors-esque, but it had such a strong fairytale quality and atmosphere it was easy to suspend disbelief and take it seriously. I felt that one wasn't supposed to see it as taking place in this world, but in a mystical, magical, ancient otherworld. Having never seen Pericles before but knowing it wasn't an oft-performed play, I was apprehensive. But I found this production beautiful and moving.

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse may have an irritating name (must everything at the Globe be a paean to Sam Wanamaker?) but it's a wonderful, unique theatre and I would thoroughly recommend seeing a performance there. Each time I've gone I've left feeling as though I've just had a vivid, intense, amazing dream. Because it's so small it's easy to forget about the other members of the audience and absorb yourself fully in the play. And the candlelight! It's always used to good, dramatic effect and, again, it somehow helps you feel as though you're the only person in the audience.

Pericles started off a bit weirdly, with Pericles (played by Globe stalwart James Garnon) leaving town on discovering an incestuous relationship between the woman he plans to marry and her father. It was weird because you assumed that this elaborately set-up plotline would go somewhere (e.g. that the woman would materialise later in the play at an inopportune moment), but it didn't. However, I appreciated the randomness of it.

My favourite scene had to be Pericles' first meeting with the woman he would marry, Thaisa (Dorothea Myer-Bennett). It's Thaisa's birthday and a party is held in her honour, to which various knights are invited (and which Pericles gatecrashes). It's all very festive and they play a game where Thaisa has to guess the Latin mottoes inscribed on the backs of the knights' shields. Entertaining. Original. The bedraggled, recently-shipwrecked Pericles doesn't have a shield but gives her a branch instead. And there is a dance! Excellent. THIS was when I was expecting the incestuous woman to turn up.

I loved the character of Marina (Jessica Baglow), a young woman of great integrity, who managed, with words alone, to get herself out of every single undesirable situation. And she faced many such a situation, from an evil adoptive mother to pirates to brothel-keepers. The scene in which she was reunited with her long-lost father, Pericles was genuinely touching. The subsequent appearance, from the rafters, of none other than the goddess Diana, in Pericles' dream, was the crowning moment in the play. 

photo credit: Scene of a Shipwreck via photopin (license)

Next: Wallis

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

KotBP title page, 1613 edition

This was a strange one. I wish I could get the soundtrack to it because it featured some good songs, including 'My jolly red nose'. The play's premise was as follows: a London grocer and his wife - the 'citizens' (Phil Daniels and Pauline McLynn) - go to see a play entitled The London Merchant. Soon after the play begins they interrupt it from their seats in the audience, insisting that the grocer's apprentice, Rafe (Matthew Needham), is given a part because grocer characters are underrepresented in plays. Rafe, a sweet, ordinary kind of young man, agrees, and adopts the character of the 'Knight of the Burning Pestle', carrying about a wooden pestle in a mystical glowing casket. Over the course of the play the grocer and his wife periodically interrupt the action, demanding that Rafe appear in varied scenes and guises of their own choosing. In the second half they demand to see him speak with a princess dressed in burnished gold, become King of the May, and command an army. There was also a demonic giant barber. A satire on chivalric romances, it was sillier, funnier, more arbitrary and entertaining than I'm making it sound.

The lack of a plot and the randomness of the action struck me as unusually modern for a play of that era. The idea of members of the audience giving a running commentary on a play also seemed modern, but I suppose it was done in a minor way in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Hippolyta and Theseus watch and comment on the mechanicals' play. The contributions of the citizens do not consist only in stopping the play and putting forward their points of view. While the actors try to get the play back on track and continue with the original scenes, the citizens rustle paper, eat liquorice and offer it to other members of the audience, and talk loudly amongst themselves in the manner of stereotypical impolite theatre-goers.

My favourite character was definitely Old Merrythought (Paul Rider), a jolly, tubby, Father Christmas-like man who sings all the time and refuses to be melancholy about anything. Merrythought claims he would sing even upon seeing his sons on the gallows: 'Down, down, down they fall; Down, and arise they never shall.' When, later on in the play, he sees the coffin that he believes contains one of his sons, he does indeed sing. One of the Knight's squires, the 'dwarf' (a large man), also had some good songs, including one outside a castle where the Knight's party are to stay the night.

My favourite scene was possibly the one in which Rafe comes on as King of the May, accompanied by his entourage dressed as Morris dancers.

It was interesting to see this in the same week as Shakespeare in Love, as I have seen both plays described as 'a love-letter to London and the theatre'. I enjoyed all the references to London and its environs in KotBP; Hoxton, Mile End, Waltham Forest.

The theatre was festively decorated with festoons of greenery and dried oranges and a kissing bough suspended over the front of the stage. The music, played on seventeenth-century instruments, was as excellent as usual. The musicians wore Santa's elf-style hats. The costumes in general were bright and colourful - there was a lot of velvet and unlikely colours and nods to an earlier era. It was a good choice of play to see at this time of year; quite panto-ish. There was even a man dressed up as a woman (the princess).

Next: King Charles III

The Duchess of Malfi - Jacobean Theatre at the Globe

I can't bring myself to refer to the new theatre at the Globe as the 'Sam Wanamaker Playhouse' because (i) the Globe pays more than enough homage to Sam Wanamaker as it is, and (ii) this atmospheric, authentically Jacobean-style theatre deserves an atmospheric, authentically Jacobean-style name. So I will henceforth refer to it as Blackfriars.

Much as I was looking forward to visiting this new theatre, I was prepared for there to be obvious concessions to health and safety. Events I've attended before that have been advertised as 'candlelit' have often involved fake candles or a single candle or were candlelit for sixty seconds out of a possible hour. However, Blackfriars fulfilled my wildest expectations. There were five seven big candlelit chandeliers over the stage, which were lit/extinguished/moved up and down during the performance; a single candle attached to each of the wooden columns at the sides of the stage; and candlesticks carried on by members of the cast. There were no in-your-face exit signs. At the beginning of the play, electric lighting was still visible from outside the theatre, but about twenty minutes into the play the shutters were closed.

The ceiling was beautifully painted with clouds, cherubs, suns and a female figure. The back of the stage was similar to that of the Globe, with three entrance/exit points. The back panels were also well-decorated - I loved the dark brown and gold colour scheme. The theatre was considerably smaller than I'd expected, which meant that even from the upper gallery (and with contact lenses of an outdated prescription) one could easily see the actors' facial expressions. 

The widowed Duchess of Malfi (Gemma Arterton) was a really interesting character. She wasn't an idealised example of 17th century womanhood, but a determined, intelligent, witty person who just wanted to get on with her life, and wasn't prepared to allow her scheming, unscrupulous brothers to dictate to her. Her brothers try to prevent her from marrying, but she marries her steward, Antonio, in secret, after having wooed him. The first half was quite funny, but things rapidly took a turn for the seriously macabre and grotesque in the second half, which featured Ferdinand (one of  the brothers)'s use of mentally ill people to torment the Duchess, and multiple murders. The lighting was used to great effect during the night scenes, when the only light came from hand-held candles. One scene, featuring Ferdinand and the Duchess, took place entirely in the dark, with no candles, and ended very dramatically and horribly. James Garnon was excellent, as usual, as the calmly evil Cardinal.

The costumes were amazing - even better than the usual Globe costumes - they were probably made more intricately because they wouldn't be exposed to the weather. I loved the Duchess's sparkling bodice. The music was good but understated. Not as rollicking as Globe music often is. The jig was slow, intense and fitting to the mood of the production.

My only negative comment would be that I thought the hand-held candles were overused. Pretty much every other character came onto the stage holding a candlestick of some description. It was great for the scenes that were supposed to take place at night, but otherwise unnecessary. I understand that audience members want to see actors' faces, but it looked forced to have almost every actor holding a candle up to his or her face.

The intimate, dimly-lit nature of the theatre made it very easy to focus fully on the play, and absorb oneself  into it. The experience was a bit like having a very vivid dream. It really is a unique theatrical experience and I would strongly recommend it.