Hamlet (City Screen – Manchester Royal Exchange, 27th March 2015)

I saw Maxine Peake as Hamlet back in September 2014. Seeing the production live was an amazing electrifying experience.  Of course, I was curious to see if Peake would play Hamlet as a man, or as a woman. Actually, she played the part as neither.  The male pronoun was retained and the rest of the characters referred to Hamlet as a man. However, Peake’s Hamlet was really gender neutral.  This production was about the person and not the gender. There were other gender swaps, Polonius became Polonia (Gillian Bevan) and Rosencrantz was played by the incredible Jodie Mcnee. McNee had just played Viola at the Liverpool Playhouse so will have been getting used to gender swap, but here her portrayal of Rosencrantz was very effective and at times gave a hint of a crush on Hamlet.

Seeing the production again in a cinema was a strange one. Manchester Royal Exchange is a theatre in the round, it challenges you to look around you, to be alert to the different entrances and exits.  It’s a dynamic space that puts you close up to the action.

The screening also puts you close to the action, but the camera chooses how you see things.  It directs your eye to look right into faces, and follows characters around the stage for you.  Most of the time you follow Hamlet, when he sits down for the wedding feast, and as she crumples in grief in her to ‘to solid flesh’ speech.  That’s to be expected, but I’m also interested in how the other characters respond, and in a cinema screening those moments can be cut.  There are also shots you just wouldn’t get in the theatre, such as looking down directly at all the clothes that become Ophelia’s grave, and we also got a birds eye view of the laying out the dress to show this was Ophelia’s burial.

I think I am happy watching screened versions of Theatre productions as a follow up to seeing the production myself in the theatre. For me, the screening is not a substitute for being in the theatre and close to the action.

Reviews of the stage production

Cast

Horatio – Thomas Arnold

Player King / Marcella – Claire Benedict

Polonia – Gillian Bevan

First Gravedigger – Michelle Butterly

Lucianus – Dean Gregory

Reynaldo/ Priest/ Francisco – Tachia Newall

Gertrude – Barbara Marten

Rosencrantz/ Second Gravedigger – Jodie McNee

Hamlet – Maxine Peake

Claudius/ Ghost – John Shrapnel

Guildenstern – Peter Singh

Osric/ Second Player/ Barnardo – Ben Stott

Ophelia – Katie West

Laertes – Ashley Zhangazha

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Punk Rock (Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, 11th October 2009)

I saw some excellent theatre this week.  Having seen The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Leeds, The Trial in York earlier in the week and now Punk Rock in Manchester, I feel that I have experienced the best of theatre and what’s great is that it isn’t all happening in London.

When I read on notices around the auditorium  that there won’t be an interval, I usually assume that the play will build up tension through to a dramatic conclusion and having an interval will undermine that tension.  So when I read notices about the running time of Punk Rock at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre,  I was thinking that this production would build to a dramatic ending and I wasn’t disappointed.  I must say Punk Rock really worked well without an interval, and I’m not sure where you would have put an interval if you’d had one anyway.  Indeed, even without an interval the time rushed by as the dialogue kept me totally engaged.  I felt that I started to get to know a set of characters, which at the start of the play, I felt I would not like much.  For example, I started to feel  for the endearing complex William (Tom Surridge) with his heart broken by the rather self-assured, on the surface, Lilly (Jessica Raine).  The writing took time to build up the situation and characters.  I found I wanted to laugh when it wasn’t really funny and at the end I had to remind myself, I was in a theatre as I found myself believing I was in the library with the characters.

In Punk Rock we are presented with a group of young  people who were struggling with the pressures of being young.  As a group they were grappling with a range of emotions, their sexual awakening, concerns about body image, and high academic expectations.  There is a pressure to succeed and the sense that an education is the key to a better future, but the effects of this pressure have not been though through.  The play carefully and sensitively dealt with some of these issues and we see characters dealing with it in many ways such as self harming, rage, self confidence and through knowledge being a defence mechanism.  It felt that the setting was timeliness and the title made me think of teenagers in the late 1970s but the mention of White Stripes brings the story up to date.  Whatever generation these young people are part of, the play seemed to suggest that the late mid teenage years bring with them a set of emotional pressures that are compounded by society’s expectation of our young people. 

This was a shocking, startling and shattering story that is still with me today as I write about it here in my blog.

Reviews and Previews

Punk Rock in the Evening Standard
Punk Rock in the Financial Times
Observer on Punk Rock
The Stage on Punk Rock
What’s On Stage, Punk Rock
Official London Stage on Punk Roack
Charles Spencer on Punk Rock

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The Miser (Manchester Royal Exchange, 26th September 2009)

I found The Miser at the Manchester Royal Exchange theatre very funny.  The audience became very involved throughout and there was a very humerous moment of audience interaction when Dame Claude, the maid servant,  starts to polish the audience members.   Derek Griffith’s played the Miser with wonderful timing and lots of energy.  The plot was straight forward and the production moved on at a fast pace with a short second half.    The ending was an ironic comments of those plots where revelations plays a big part.  Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors comes to mind.  The revelations are so unbelievable they became entertaining, rather than astonishing, and helped bring the play to a closure very quickly.  If felt like nothing was left undone.

In this production there  was a washed out sense about The Miser.   The set looks as if the house was being redecorated with plastic sheets straddled part of the auditorium.  The servants and the Miser  wore cream which made them look like crumbling sandstone statues who had had  a fight with a bag of four.   They also looked like decorators, which was probably the point.  The costumes were loosly based on the costumes from the period that the play was written, but also detracted from the period looking at times like the new romantics of the early eighties.  There was a sense that the events of the play might happen at any time and I am sure the audience were meant to feel that the play had a relevance to our own society.  The line that you can’t trust banks got a big laugh, and may be there was a feeling that converting wealth above other things was not to be admired.  It seems strange that Harpagon gets his money back, because we are used to seeing the baddies getting their comeuppance.  As Harpagon was left with his money at the end, it felt that the money isn’t that important to everyone else.    Love prevails in the end.  There was no sense of tragedy as in Shakespeare’s comedies, Harpagon’s punishment was to get wet as the water collected on the plastic sheet above him leaked over him.  This production was pure comedy and worked very well with this cast and in the setting of the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester.

Reviews  and Previews

The Guardian on The Miser

Further Information

Manchester Royal Exchange http://www.royalexchangetheatre.org.uk/event.aspx?id=179

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Everybody Loves a Winner (Manchester Royal Exchange, 15th July 2009)

Yes of course, it would be possible to go to a Bingo Hall and have similar experience to watching the Manchester Royal Exchange’s production of Everybody Loves a Winner. The audience enters the stalls through an entrance lined with fruit machines, and once in the auditorium they are confronted with a replica Bingo Hall with the rectangular tables awaiting the players. Other entrances to the stalls are now fire exits. In my view, it’s not the point that we could go to a Bingo Hall to play bingo and not bother with this theatre visit, because even though the production gives the audience chance to play bingo, we also get a snippet into the lives of the people who visit and work at this particular Bingo Hall. Amongst the customers who queue for the morning, afternoon and evening sessions is Elsie (Joan Kempson) who causes problems for the hygiene team (toilet cleaners) and wants the world to stop at the moment before the last number is called. There’s Maureen (Sally Bankes) who wants to win so she can go and have a holiday in Sharm el-Sheikh. Maureen becomes competitive with audience members and she is so ambitious that if she wins, she will be going home drunk in a taxi while the rest of us are still on the bus. There’s Janice, the nurse, (Patti Clare) who brings her mother to the bingo, but also nurses her at home. There’s the staff, Debbie (Emily Alexander) and Joy (Amanda Henderson), with dreams of being models and pop stars, but have their future, according to the manager Linda (Sally Lindsay) ,starring them in the eyes in the shape of Elsie. Ian Puleston Davies’s bingo caller, Frank looks confident as he calls the numbers, but underneath he is uncertain and fragile.

There’s a reflection of the kind of work that comes out of the Hull Truck Company here. This production is funny, touching and definitely gets the audience involved.

Reviews and Previews

Everybody Loves a Winner (Independent on Sunday)
Everybody Loves a Winner (Times Review)
Everybody Loves a Winner (Independent review)
The Stage Review of Everybody Loves a Winner (The Stage)
Everybody Loves a Winner (Observer)
Everybody Loves a Winner, Manchester Royal Exchange (Financial Times)

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Haunted (Manchester Royal Exchange, May 30th 2009)

Jack (Niall Buggy) and Gladys (Brenda Blethyn) have been married for many years, and one day while Gladys is at work, a young woman, Hazel (Beth Cooke) knocks on the door and Jack begins an obsession, which ends in tragedy for all three characters. Hazel is invited back, and when she visits, Jack gives her his wife’s most treasured possessions.

For those who know the stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, they will know that it is in the round. When the audience enters the auditorium, they are confronted with a small living room with a few chairs and a doll on a swing in the Berry’s flat. The sense of looking into an enclosed world is an important element in the viewing of Edna O’Brien’s Haunted. The set is part of the rawness of the theatre itself. You can see the actors entering and exiting and just make out through frosted screens the actors making their changes off stage. I felt that blurring between the fiction and reality is played out in the play itself.

At the beginning of the production, the two women, Hazel and Jack’s wife Gladys stand on a revolve which transports them round the edges of the living room as if they are images of ghosts set before Jack. The white wedding dress worn by one woman is contrasted with the white surgical gown and cap worn by the other. The figures feel like two visions of the same women and this sense of just not quite knowing something is there throughout the play. We are aware at the end of the play that this is a retrospective scene, but it sets up the feel of the production from the start.

It is never clear where, or when, the play takes place, though we are given some sense of the place and atmosphere through character’s dialogue. Edna O’Brien wrote in the programme, “I first conceived of a room not in the hub of the metropolis of London, but on the outskirts, on the fringes, that physical metier reflecting the life and aspirations of the three characters”. The characters talk about the being on the outskirts of London, but as the audience are only taken to the flat of the Berrys and the seaside with Jack and Hazel. The play deals with the texture and feel of possessions and about how relationships can be seen this way as well. Towards the end of the play, Gladys wears a stunning coat and dress set with a large rose pattern which make us think of the flowers in the garden that at times is projected onto the stage. Yes, there isn’t the smell of tomatoes just before they become ripe, but we feel it and understand why this is such an important image for Gladys at the end of the play. Tastes and smells are important such as the taste of Madeira wine. Gladys is always smart, wearing her heels and coming home from work at the doll factory looking unruffled, but as the audience underneath she is struggling to cope with pressures of life and work. Jack has a delight in language as well, repeating Hazel’s elocution verses like a child delighting in the challenge and sounds. There are constant references to Shakespeare especially Hamlet and Ophelia. It isn’t surprising that Hazel goes mad like Ophelia, maybe her confusion about her relationship with the father figure she clearly relates to.

It’s the emotional betrayal which is so shocking in this play, when it is Gladys who goes out to work, so Jack can stay at home. Jack had been with other women, so infidelity wasn’t new in this relationship. Jack pretends he has cancer, but he is the route of the emotional cancer in his relationships with his wife and the Hazel. Gladys feels that reading has no function if Jack can’t get a job. Her speech at the end of the play about the problems of dreaming shows her frustration with Jack as well as her anger. Brenda Blethyn makes this role work so well and uses her whole body to convey her emotion through the production. Her facial expressions, the way she stood conveys her broken heart and sense of betrayal when she gave her husband more chances. The end is just so sad. Is Hazel like the doll that overlooks the set throughout? Each doll made in Gladys’ factory has its own personality, determined by the way the eyelashes are stuck on. I think Gladys is also the doll who looks on and can’t really change things.

There are gasps from the audience when Gladys appears at the door towards the end of the play. In this play, there are elements of the farce genre. I discuss farce in my blog when I talked about Boeing Boeing. The fairground ride reflects the opening scene and at the end, rather than just going round and round and in and out like a stage farce where the boy does get his girl the lives of the characters are truly destroyed.

Reviews and Previews

Theatre review, Haunted / Royal Exchange, Manch…
Theatre review, Haunted / Royal Exchange, Manch…
Theatre review: Haunted / Royal Exchange Theatr…
Haunted, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester – R…
The Stage / Reviews / Haunted

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