Smokingboot

Still trying to find some headwear for the wedding, with help from the Best Lady.  I have a hat that will do nicely, but it isn't extraordinary, so I'm keeping an eye out for something too special to resist. Found two huge fascinators, one like a satellite dish, the other like a windmill... and they are so vast, so totally diva, I almost can't resist having one. One actually rocked on my head as I moved, though I am assured the motion wasn't visible. There are environmental factors to take into account, like getting through doors or not being swept out into the Bristol Channel by an impudent wind. Still, I am tempted,as much by the look I can imagine on my groom's face, as my secret hopes that we might get messages from Alpha Centauri if we point and aim me in the right direction.

I am still caught up in Emily Carding's Richard III, and wonder why it was so much more vital, so much more alive than the Beeb's version in the Hollow Crown series*.  Of course it has the novelty value, and it requires a different kind of concentration, being much shorter, in the round, very prop-light and almost without set. It all creates intimacy, but then so does a close-up camera shot. Why then, does Carding's Assange-alike Richard resonate so much more than that of the mighty Cumberpatch?

I suppose its the interactive quality of the piece - the audience 'play' members of the cast, not by reading aloud but by... well, responding really.  No pressure but very engaging. I couldn't help thinking that for all the production's ingenuity, Carding's characterisation didn't need it per se, that her Richard could work perfectly well in an 'ordinary' production of the play. But this is as much fun as any of them, so why bother?

 The production allows the audience a chance to be involved; people could talk, and very occasionally did, though we were largely mute and immobile by our own choice. Some entered the actors space, invited and adapted to by this remarkably deft Richard. The part I got was that of Elizabeth of York,a character I have always written off as a pretty woman with a lucky break.  But this  gave me a chance to think her through. Though I stayed silent and seated because I couldn't dismiss the convention  of not getting in the actor's way, I could feel the dismay - more than dismay-  of the queen as her allies fell around her like skittles, with far worse to follow. Her character began to form in my mind, not from her own words but from Richard speaking about her and to her. Fascinating from start to finish, I was engrossed watching Richard spin his web around the court, and Emily spin hers around the audience.

I think this may be the most successful Shakespeare adaptation I have seen in years.

*Enjoyed it, but it wasn't the best...

Cat-sitting at least gave me the chance to watch the last in the Beeb's 'Hollow Crown,' series, Richard III with Benedict Cumberpatch in the lead role.  It's the second Shakespearian play I've seen him in, one on stage, one on screen. And he does seem to be saddled with the curse of over-mannered productions.

Not that that's always a bad thing; Henry VI parts II and III are weak plays. In a way that's freeing, because any gain is good, so why not play with ideas and chop things around? Nobody cares and at least it will be interesting.

But Richard III is not a weak play, and cutting speeches in half or out completely is a chair leg sawing activity.  This play is about the charm of evil.  Richard stopped from speaking has no charm.

His physical charmlessness is thrust upon  us with shirt-free abandon almost immediately. He's saying something  about the Sun of York which we can ignore, while oohing and aahing at the cold eyes, the sneering jeering mouth and the prosthetics that make his deformity of spine positively draconic. It's all a bit Deep Space Nine. So where then, lies Richard's charisma? Act 1 Scene ii, where Richard  successfully woos Anne Neville is one of the most compelling points of the play, where a strong actor can display the magnetism, the cunning, the fascination that this character holds. The scene was eviscerated, the dialogue was chopped to pieces, rendering the whole Anne Neville subplot pointless, and showing us little about either character except that Richard is stunned to have achieved his objective. Well, he might be, but we should not quite share his bafflement. We should be beginning to understand what it is in Richard that convinces others. We should have been captivated, all the while knowing that he is desperately dangerous, a 'bottled spider.'

And so it went on throughout. Many of the lighter touches were lost, as when the younger of the two princes is being a bit of a wee shite with him.

York: I pray you, Uncle, give me this dagger.
Gloucester: My dagger, little cousin? With all my heart.

But much heavier stuff was lost too; Margaret's curses were halved I think,glossed over so quickly that we really needed people's reminders about them coming true. And I can appreciate that time is a constraint, but we spent long enough watching Richard play chess with himself, -  a cliche by now surely - along with the endless and very irritating reverberations of his drumming fingers,and bizarre close ups. I can't help thinking that just letting the guy act would have had more effect.

Good Buckingham though.  But I won't be buying the box set.

A friend had bought two tickets months ago. Her PC had been 8 hours in the queue. Then she broke up with her partner, and asked me to come along instead, keeping the name of the production a surprise. I have almost wanted to cry off after the news about Dad, but to do so would leave her either alone at the theatre, or with very little time to shift the ticket. So I went.

It was Benedict Cumberpatch's Hamlet at the Barbican.

At first she was mortified, it being about a dead father and all, but when she saw that I was genuinely enjoying it, she got past wincing, and we had a great time.

Benedict is slighter and lighter than he seems on screen. I have never considered him handsome - the lower part of his face and the upper part always strike me as belonging to two different people - and if he wasn't very telegenic and a fine actor, you probably wouldn't notice him. But he is a fine actor. His is not the most dynamic of Hamlets (none of David Tennant's frenzied bouncing around) but he tries to be like a clear glass to the prose, and the result is natural, unforced... he is not trying to 'be'. It makes the language accessible and it adds pace to the already swift movement of the production. There's a lot of running around. The duel is very personal, a real fight not a gentleman's arrangement. But what is his Hamlet like? It's hard to tell. He is a basically decent bloke. More than that is hard to ascertain because any attempt to find him keeps tripping over his toys.

That's the problem with this whole production; here's the programme:


If the idea was to present Hamlet as a sullen, too-discerning half crazy brat with a mother/nursery fixation, that's OK,if a bit old. In such a case, the opulent set and the pantomime of his behaviour - dragging out an enormous play castle with giant soldiers a la nutcracker around it, trying on an indian head-dress out of a costume chest (his 'antic disposition' geddit?)- would fit perfectly. But the set is telling a very different story to the one the actors are giving us. It's the most cluttered thingful Hamlet ever. In this land of vast toys, Hamlet's meeting with Ophelia can make him look puerile and little-boy shifty. It makes sense of Laertes' and Polonius' warnings, implying that Hamlet has always been a bit emotionally underdeveloped, and Ophelia really does need to be very careful. But BC's Hamlet isn't that guy. He's just in the wrong Elsinore.

As to the prose, well, no chance of such mere stuff as words being allowed to stand alone, clearly the director doesn't trust the play, or the audience. There's all manner of tweaking, cutting and shifting of speeches, and by god, if an effect can be added, it's there. At one point we were faced with the terrifying spectacle of Laertes' death in slow motion surrounded by interpretive dance. It didn't last long, but it didn't need to.

Still, it was enjoyable for the most part. Benedict was rapt in concentration. He did not stir us - how could he, given such a raucous playground? - but he did engage and make us watch, and we had a grand evening. I am so glad to have gone. It makes me feel better about doing stuff this coming weekend, a prospect that I have dreaded since the news. My sick friend is now stable, having had a second tracheotomy, friends are inviting me out and about and though even reading the invitations exhausts me, it's time to do what I can, if I can. Life is coming back in, and I want to make room for it.