Twitter word cloud – what I've been preoccupied with this week..
Doctor Who, 'The Waters of Mars' (15th November 2009)
There will be a change in the Doctor we kept getting told. What did we think before ‘The Waters of Mars’ aired? Possibly that the Doctor will give up and fail to save those he was sent to help. That his failure leads to tragedy on a grand scale and that he feels so bad he just gives up and because he can’t face it anymore he moves towards his death. No – it’s the opposite…..
….so the Doctor thinks he is invincible and he sees himself as the victorious Doctor. At the end of the ‘The Waters of Mars’, we leave him in the snow with a kind of death knell hanging over him and an ood looking with those sad ood eyes at him. The end is on its way. How exciting…..and how emotional!
It’s good to spend a little time with an idea and I felt that this was the strength of this episode. It was an interesting idea in that the people who are doomed are in our future and not in our past (such as in ‘The Fires of Pompeii).
It felt that, despite scary monsters and all the usual ‘crew of a spaceship about to be doomed stuff” the production team worked really well to build up a narrative that looked forwards and backwards at the same time. The dilemma here is that if the Doctor saves the people on the space station, time will be changed for ever. Rather than going hi tech, the programme played with the idea that things are undeveloped in this future world. I liked the idea that progress was the to grew vegetables for a Christmas dinner and this gave the episode a really simple naive and raw feel. I really liked the Doctor in his space suit just thinking, as all around him try desperately, and a little clumsily to survive, but we know they are doomed. We’ve seen their lives flash before our eyes. The old fashioned space suit makes the Doctor see vulnerable. It reminds us he needs air to survive. The production team could make the scene of the crew collecting boxes, scrambling around and trying to leave as long as they wanted, because we just know that is the end for them unless the Doctor interjects. At that point we think the Doctor’s strength will be that he leaves the people to die. In many ways there are some echoes of ‘Children of Earth’ here. In the Torchwood series, Captain Jack let the children die to save mankind, will the Doctor let these people die to save mankind. Whatever the Doctor does, he is not in a good place. As we watch the audience is placed in a position clearly wanting to know is will the Doctor save this small group of people or leave them to die? Without his companion, he is truly on his own and the decision is his own. Will he do what captain Jack did and have to come back to face the end of time, knowing the enemy was within himself.
The Doctor chooses to save the crew. Such an act of bravery, but so wrong as well….
Did we think that by this act we would see the chaos of the future that the Doctor had caused? No the time is set back and it all seems well….except that the Doctor seems to be a different person…
….the trailer at the end shows a man rising from the rubbish tip and as he turns his head we see a/the blond Master.
I still kind of secretly hope the Doctor turns into the Master and John Simm is the next Doctor. The Doctor/Master thing is just a really interesting idea …….
so we’ll have to wait for Christmas, and all the interviews – teasers, trailers tasters – the pre show hype that positions us an audience so carefully to think one thing and what we see is another.
Thoughts on…Blogs this week
Having just moved Miching Malicho over here to Between the Acts, I have been a little bit more interested in what other Theatre/Culture blogs look like this week. In reading through some blogs I came across Cultural Tales of Two Cities. I really like the way that the blog focuses on the two cities of Manchester and London, though there is a review of the RSC Twelfth Night there so clearly towns and cities between Manchester and London count. There was a very interesting comment on the casting of Richard Wilson as Malvolio in the RSC’s Twelfth Night on the blog this week. The blog notes that this production was
A play of two halves really for the RSC’s latest Stratford offering. This production of ‘Twelfth Night’ was apparently delayed until Richard Wilson was available to play Malvolio. I am just not sure that someone who is so known for one character can credibly play another. At times it felt like the audience was waiting for him to announce ‘I don’t believe it’… (Cultural Tales of Two Cities accessed 8th November 2009)
I always think that Peter Kirwin’s Bardathon is so informative, and this week he was writing about the RSC’s Days of Significance and commenting on its relationship to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I was interested to see that Blogging By Numbers was writing about Mother Courage and Their Children last week with a big But:
But – and this is one of those huge, clunking buts – I was never less than engaged. I loved the invention. I loved the humour. I loved the money I could see had been spent. I loved, loved Fiona Shaw as a Mother Courage that you were at once compelled and repulsed by. (Blogging By Number accessed 8th November 2009)
This still makes me feel I should have gone to see the whole thing after all after having the just the first half experience.
I’m writing about blogging at the moment, as well as blogging about blogging, which feels a little indulgent. I am interested in the idea that Web 2.0 opens up the web for the audience to produce and to inform what is being written and produced. The myriad of opinion out there is often engaging and interesting and we have the choice to read or not.
As blogs appear and we all get a say, one blog that seems to have gone is Patricia 1957 Arts Diary. I really enjoyed reading the posts on Patricia 1957 Arts Diary , but it looks like this has been deleted which is a shame. My move from Miching Malicho to Between the Acts is about changing virtual personas. However, the disappearance of Patricia1957ArtsDiary shows that on the blogosphere we can have a voice and silence our own voices just as quickly.
The Hypochondriac (York Theatre Royal, 28th October 2009) and The Grapes of Wrath (West Yorkshire Playhouse 4th November 2009)
Over the last two weeks, I have seen two very different English Touring Theatre productions, one a comedy and the other a tragedy. The thing about English Touring Theatre is you do know you’re on safe ground, and the story will come first and I feel with these productions that there is little ambiguity.
All of a sudden there are lots of Molieres around. There was The Miser at Manchester Royal Exchange, The Tartuffe at York Theatre Royal, The Misanthrope about to open in London and this English Touring Company production of The Hypochondriac. This is great because with Moliere we know that we will be laughing in the theatre.
I like the aesthetic of the English Touring Theatre production of The Hypochondriac, and it made me think of all those eighteenth century French painting such as Watteau and Chardin. It was very funny as well, though I am starting to understand the Moliere structure and finding it easy to work out will happen. This was a good night out at the theatre. For me, it was entertaining and not something that made me think about the issues raised. I think what the company are aiming for is about good storytelling in the theatre and so there are no frills or risks taken, which can be a good thing at times, because a production can feel clean and clear.
In comparison to The Hypochondriac, The Grapes of Wrath at the West Yorkshire Playhouse was also a very good example of storytelling on stage, and it was bleak and sad rather than funny like Moliere. The approach to The Grapes of Wrath reminded me of the Brecht I’d seen a couple of weeks ago in that it is episodic and we follow characters through lots of different situations. I’ve never read the novel, and so I don’t know the story well, but I just felt that I knew where this was going. As we followed the family on the journey and I felt that, like the Moliere, I could guess what would happen at the end, but I didn’t want to know because it would be heartbreaking. The stage was fairly bleak with an interesting use of multimedia to portray the American Dream, which was an ironic commentary on what was actually happening. The stage started as a wheat field and became a road, a barn and the camps. The car which moved around the stage representing the long and difficult journey where death visits the family on the way to a kind of promised land which is really an illusion.
I think English Touring Theatre’s approach has its place, but I feel it needs to be alongside other types of approaches to text-based drama such as Belt Up and Kneehigh, and what is happening at the National Theatre, Donmar and RSC.
Reviews and Previews: The Hypochondriac
Reviews and Previews: The Grapes of Wrath
Between the Acts is the new blog for Miching Malicho
Welcome to Between the Acts.
Miching Malicho moves here to Between the Acts, and I will continue to write about Theatre, Literature, Art, Film and TV amongst other things. This space feels like a better space to continue the reflective writing started in Miching Malicho.
In the future I would like to return to Miching Malicho with a creative project.
between the acts 