Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Hurricane Ariel
The other day up to St. Giles Cripplegate to see the Jericho House production of 'The Tempest' there. Never heard of Jericho House before but their site at http://www.jerichohouse.org.uk/ bills them as being into various kinds of innovation. For example, Jericho collaborates with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. They are into outreach to exiles and there is a connection with Palestine and Israel. This play was billed as being a return of the Tempest to its intended format as a masque, a popular form of aristo. entertainment at the time of writing and as pointing up its relevance to the post-structured themes of colonialism, oppression and such like. This last was a bit discouraging, as were the mostly pallid reviews, but the talk of bringing on the lutes was encouraging.
Anyway, we turn up and the show was good - and far more conventional than the wind up had led me to believe. We got to hear a lot of the words and there was much less irritating slapstick than has become the custom at the Globe.
The magic of the theatre in the round in this old and dark space worked. Minimal scenery. A few props. Good use of music and lights. Good use of the long centre aisle up to the stage in the crossing. Show stolen by a very athletic Ruth Lass as Ariel, who managed to leap and sing at the same time. Not so young either. Plus a spectacular appearance in Act III Scene III on stilts, rather like the sort of thing that sporty people without legs might bound around on. Presumably she had not read that bit of the Arden commentary which explains that the play is supposed to revolve around Caliban. Backing cast mostly satisfactory, with only one or two weak links.
They had taken some liberties with the text with much of the long Act II Scene I expunged and Gonzalo expunged altogether. Some of his lines had been given to Antonio in whose mouth they made little sense. Furthermore, Antonio had had a sex change. The resultant Antonia did a quite reasonable job if failing to ooze quite enough malice. The same lady also did rather well as Stephano, also sex changed.
A down side was that some of the famous lines got rather loss in the noise and bustle. 'O brave new world' was very feebly delivered by the otherwise rather good Miranda.
An up side was that the whole thing was done and dusted in about 2 hours, without interval. Which worked much better for me than the Globular three hour marathons with interval.
The drain being closed by the time the show was finished, we came home via Moorgate and thought that changing at Balham, that is to say one less change, might be a good idea. Which it would have been except that we bounded up the steps at Balham to leap onto a train to Epsom to find, too late, that is was the slow train via West Croydon. I think we would have done better to wait a few minutes to catch the proper train via Carshalton. Carshalton Beeches bad. On the other hand it did furnish me with a nearly new Guardian from that same morning.
Closed the night's performance with a fragment of a dream involving my cycling past two huge and slowly moving army vehicles carrying tanks, coming the other way down somewhere like Hook Road. Road too narrow and vehicles too high for me to be able to see what they were carrying properly. Tanks was something of a guess. Possibly brought on by a recent sighting on one of those large waste disposal vehicles from Drinkwater, trundling down that same Hook Road on their way from the tip. Aka waste transfer station.
PS: and to be fair to to contemporary themes of colonialism, oppression and such like, the play surprised, once again, by its bearing on still relevant themes. Including, for example, our duty towards expropriated aboriginals. And I had not noticed that what happened to Caliban afterwards was something of a loose end. Is their scope for a modern sequel?
# posted by Jim @ 2:07 AM 
