cyphomandra

Six - pop musical where Henry the Eighth’s wives finally get their say. I went in without knowing any of the songs and liked this a lot. It’s short (80 minutes), punchy, emotional, and although it’s also not remotely subtle, I was hooked as soon as they started playing a techno version of Greensleeves on the intro :D (the four on-stage musicians are, like the cast, all women/nonbinary). My favourite song was Catherine Howard’s All You Wanna Do, because I am a sucker for repetition showing how relationships twist over time, the things we seek out originally becoming the same things that harm us etc (see also my otherwise inexplicable fondness for Nickelback’s Figured You Out), but I also like Catherine of Aragorn’s Beyoncé-ish No Way and Anne Boleyn’s Don’t Lose Ur Head (Anne of Cleeves goes completely off-script with a song about how fabulous it is to be wealthy and single in her own palace, postdivorce, which was also great). The audience were super enthusiastic, with quite a few in costume, and it was at the Civic, which is always an excellent venue.

Murder on the Orient Express - sometimes I just want to see a solid theatrical production with a great set, and this thoroughly delivered. It’s a relatively recent adaptation and it cuts down the number of suspects to eight, as well as removing some of the red herrings and not requiring the audience to actually study the train compartment diagram they’ve put in the program (it does, however, keep that fantastic bit of stage/detective craft with the wire mesh from the hatbox and the mostly burned letter, which I’ve always loved). The costumes are fabulous, as is the set - although we attended a preview and they had to stop twice in the first act because the carriages weren’t moving as planned - and it’s stagey without falling over too far into mockery, and Poirot manages to convey clearly the between wars setting and his own concerns about how justice is best served. Rima Ti Wiata is incredible as the much-divorced American actress, but I also really liked Sophie Henderson as Countess Andreyni, with her accent falling apart as Poirot confronts her with her past.

There were a few changes that didn’t work for me, and these were all more the adaptation rather than the performances. At one point someone said it was three years since Daisy’s death, which may have been a mistake but if not is way too recent, and the timing of the snowdrift stopping the train versus the murder itself seemed off, and there’s a key bit in the Countess’ speech that isn’t followed up on in the denouement. But I enjoyed it. It’s directed by Shane Bosher, who used to be the artistic director of the Silo Theatre from 2001-2014, who consistently put on the sort of excellent modern theatre that is the other thing that I want to see and that there seems to be a dearth of in the city nowadays. The ATC's next production is the latest Roger Hall, which I would not go to if you paid me (I haven't seen it but I have disliked his plays for ages) - they do have a Mary Shelley piece coming out in August, tho', which I could be persuaded to try.

In a time when hospitals are overflowing, our government is failing, and we do not know how to process these events… we reach back to 1986.

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is possibly my favourite play, certainly one that’s most influenced my experience with theatre as an adult. It’s simultaneously the play I’ve seen the most productions of (Millennium Approaches: twice at the Court, once at Circa, another Chch production, and once at Silo, as well as the HBO movie), and the play I have not ever made it to a live production of but desperately want to see (Perestroika: I did, optimistically, have tickets to the Silo’s production but then had twins one day earlier). It’s also one of the three plays I’ve walked out of halfway through due to a terrible production in which everyone was miscast except Prior, and I was in a five minute parking zone.

So on Friday afternoon I shut my office door and surreptitiously watched amfAR’s The Great Work Begins fundraiser for COVID19 research, forty-five minutes of scenes from Angels in America performed by a collage of actors, recorded all on their own and then stitched together like a quilt. There are multiple versions of Harper, Belize and Prior; the Angel is played by four women, and Roy Cohn by Glenn Close. It is about a pandemic stalking the streets while a right-wing government refuses to act (watching Roy Cohn dying from a disease he refuses to admit to and demanding experimental drugs that others have no hope of accessing is perhaps almost too on the nose). In terms of the play, the angels and the humans are of equal focus, with Prior, Harper, Belize and Roy’s storylines all encountered, while Joe drops out and Louis is sidelined; like turning to highlight new facets of the jewel. I liked it a lot. It’s still available to see online here.

Lysistrata, by Aristophanes; directed/adapted Michael Hurst.

My first play in 17 months! Very exciting. And a very good production, even allowing for my giddiness. I have never actually read any other Aristophanes but was first exposed to this in extracts performed by Classics students, and then saw a production, which, I was startled to find out on checking, was also directed by Michael (and in 1992. Eek); I remember that one for a moment of tenderness, although he seems to have more of a view that he'd tilted too much towards the farce side of things in the rest of it.

This version - smart, funny, lyrical and very dynamic. Choreographed by Shona McCullagh, dance sequences are integral to the action, and there are chunks of other works (Sappho etc) in there as well, sung/intoned/recited according to need. One of the actors is in a powered wheelchair; the first time I've seen that on-stage, I think, and it doesn't stop him from being just as involved as all the rest. Fabulous clothes (for the women), a touch of Monty Python for the Spartans, and of course ridiculous amounts of dick jokes, right down to the staging. I liked it a lot. It's not really a feminist polemic - I am unsure how much of the original comedy derived from the idea of women having ideas - but the female characters were all really three-dimensional (and some of the men; one guy substituted character depth for vacuuming the set at half-time in his underwear and army boots). I would like, at some stage, to see a single-sex cast version.

Each act started with a cacophonous clash of sound and bright lights, which reminded me of one of the few bits of Connie Willis' Passage that I really liked.

Anyway. Hopefully less than 17 months until my next one. Seeing as plays from the distant past are coming around again, I will just use this space to hope optimistically for a Dario Fo revival and a production of Jean Bett's Revenge of the Amazons, which was probably the play that made me fall in love with theatre.