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Hamlet is a big play, heavy with its own importance, it always is: but the much bantered about Donmar Warehouse production, directed by the Donmar’s Artistic Director, Michael Grandage, wasn’t just big and heavy, it was also very physical: the performances, the emotions, and the set in three dimensions of weight. All the details considered the greatest effect – why have stiff costumes if you’re going to make it a physical production where the actors are going to manhandle each other as well as do some serious gesturing? Why would the characters wear anything but blacks and greys when they’re all supposed to be in mourning? And why would the set be anything by stark and cold, encouraging not just blood heating revenge to course though the veins of the young who inhabit it, but also madness. It puts more pressure on the players but then what’s the point of putting on a three hour Hamlet that hangs on anything other than the acting.
And Jude Law, who I’ve never had that much of a thing for, despite his being just the right kind of giant, slightly angular and effeminate school boy that I tend towards, was really very good – even though I didn’t really want him to be. His acting came like waves over the audience, at times frightening, especially when paired with his mother, Gertrude (Penelope Wilton) and Ophelia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) – I never thought of him as a physically large man, but he certainly seems it here – and with a sort of aloof comfort and glee in the feigned madness, that saw him doing some serious capering, yet showing warmth with his friends. This character doesn’t just have an emotional arc, he has an emotional MC Escher painting he has to take the audience with him on. Law’s Hamlet spoke direct to the audience, like we shared his conscience, so when he was withdrawn it was more acutely felt, and though some of the speeches are long, his presence didn’t really waver: at all times he was an impressive physical presence. In a very physical production.
Laertes’ (Alex Waldmann) tumble into madness, following after his sister, and for similar reasons to Hamlet, was done with a different kind of passion, which reminded how similar the experiences of these characters are. Yet Laertes’ loss took us back to the beginning to the grieving process, to the sharp shock and anger, which this character fans and then quenches more quickly than naturally self reflective Hamlet is able. It’s a deep play with a lot of layers, but in this production I saw and felt this layer with most clarity. I didn’t mind as much when Ophelia died – the women in this play find it hard to scratch into the many layers of heavy earthen emotions going on, but I was captivated by the fate of all these young, hot blooded men, especially when contrasted with the chill of the older characters.
The snow effect was very lovely, and the sound design heightened the drama. The gravedigger’s scene and the fencing match were personal highlights, and the behaviour of the audience, some of whom were really just coming to ogle dear Jude, was good – though there were a very young couple sitting in front of me who needed to get a room: I wonder how Shakespeare would have reacted to that? A testament to the green shoots of life affirmation, a rousing of a kindred hot blooded passion, or just a reminder that art can only ever compete with real life. Still, for a whole periods I wasn’t just captivated by an attractive – at times stunning sight, and I don’t mean Law, I still don’t fancy him – I really cared about what was going on. Even though this is one of those theatrical experiences where most of the audience already knows the result.
The Frontline at The Globe Theatre, July 6th
Written by Ché Walker
Directed by Matthew Dunster
Tube stations at night are unpredictable places, frequented by a congregation of random and potentially unpredictable characters. But then Shakespeare’s characters were naves and madmen as well as kings, so why should strippers, drug dealers, gangsters, god-bother-ers and hot dog sellers not tread the boards of Shakespeare’s Globe? Ché Walker thinks they should, and deposits them there by way of his new play, The Frontline, specially commissioned for The Globe theatre. His point being that these London ‘invisibles’, commonly summed up in just one word, be it hooker or addict, are also individuals with just as much potential story to them as Shakespeare’s characters.
The Globe was an egalitarian entertainer in the early 17h Century when it was first built, and Walker sees no reason for it not to be equally as accessible now, both for the audience and for the kinds of characters who appear on the stage. This is the first play about contemporary London to be staged at The Globe. Busy with characters, there are 24, and storylines, it is the setting, a tube station late at night that ties the action together. Drug deals turn sour and violent, gangs bicker over turf, reformed sinners preach to the converted, a young actor goes mad for lack of recognition for his ‘”tsunami of talent’“, a stripper and a bookish, gentle bouncer fall in love, a deluded man mistakes every woman he sees for his missing daughter, a young man is murdered and hot dogs are sold.
Walker has layered the dialogue of different storylines on top of each other. In one moment three separate arguments are taking place at once, but more often it is two, one happening on either side of the stage. The effect works in some places, creating an audio backdrop of city nightlife, but in some places it just makes it difficult to hear. The use of concurrent scenes makes use of the unusual setting of The Globe, which feels like it played a big role in the writing process. Performing in daylight, in a space where all sound carries, the actors are far more at the mercy of the audience than in a traditional theatrical setting. Audience murmurs and shuffles have more effect on the rest of the audience, and tides of dis-engagement can spread like Mexican waves where people can see each other’s faces as well as they can see those of the actors. So expecting people to isolate the intended dialogue from the mix is a tall order – unless Walker weighs all dialogue equal and is happy for people on opposite sides of the audience to walk away having seen different plays. When the timing was perfect this device was used wittily, arguments were allowed to slot together and reference each other (brilliantly in one section where one character analyses the importance of Marmite to Britain’s colonial past, while another finds out he’s about to become a father.) and there was a clever overlap of themes that heightened the mood further; but when the actors lost each other it fell into sounding like people talking over each other.
Fair play to the actors though, they would have had just as much difficulty hearing each other as the audience did, especially considering how engaged and active the audience was. The Globe is a precarious space for maintaining audience belief, but this audience was totally on side – even though the questionably suitable song numbers which littered an otherwise ‘real life’ production. And it wasn’t just cheering and clapping, I actually heard someone boo – and not in derision, but as a way of expressing his feelings and siding with one character over another – I don’t think that happens anymore in a traditional theatrical space.
Maybe the songs were in reference to Shakespearian traditions of lyrical dialogue and breaking the ‘third wall’, where characters leave their scene to address the audience in a way that suggests they know they’re players? The Frontline’s narrator, the hot dog seller, who also has a role within the play, does something similar, signposting particular events and giving the audience the gift of foresight.
For an audience to follow so many characters and simultaneous storylines, the individual voices have to be quite distinctive – especially in the beginning of the play where there are so many characters to introduce. Walker achieved some of this by including characters from different countries, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and different cultural or social groups, but some of it was just good writing, to the extent that I began to wonder if some of it wasn’t work shopped on these actors – but I checked and it wasn’t.
Each character’s path had moments in both light and shade. Quite philosophical and definitely a social commentary on the politics of multiculturalism and wealth distribution, The Frontline could have bogged the audience down with serious issues (maybe the songs were also mood lighteners?), but didn’t. Some characters spiral downward, the young actor, desperate for his big break becomes increasingly unhinged, the reformed sinner is drawn back into her old ways, the young man is murdered because of drugs; but some pass by on their way to better things, a couple begin and a baby is anticipated with excitement – life has potential, we’re told in so many (unnecessary) words. People can be murderers but they can also be good, and some surprisingly allegiances are formed under difficult conditions. These coalitions (not quite friendships) or unlikely bedfellows (literally in the case of the homeless junkie who shares his telephone booth squat with the actor.) are much more life affirming than the overt promises of a new couple and a new baby (I wonder if Walker realises this?).
The question is asked how far do people need to be degraded before they’ll be helped and how strong is our humanity in the real world of tube stations, crap jobs, no rights and financial struggle. Walker, without sounding twee, answers that though many of us have to deal with inequality, injustice and simple unfairness, there’s still hope for us yet. And he doesn’t spell that one out, just lets you leave with a warm sense of sharing something with the rest of the audience – which is something that not all theatrical settings allow, but which Shakespeare’s audiences must have felt too.
The Revenger’s Tragedy at the National Theatre, 28th May 2008
By Thomas Middleton
Directed by Melly Still
Nothing puts a spring in my step as I exit a theatre like seeing a play that finishes with everyone getting what’s coming to them. If that also means most of the cast ends up sprinkled with fake blood my pony tail will get that cheery bounce to it as well. I don’t necessarily revel in the macabre, but I am as enthralled by stories of lust, murder and revenge as the next person, and considering that The Revengers Tragedy was written in 1606, people must have been drawn to these darlings-of-the-tabloid themes through the ages. Considered high art now, this play may have been the late night TV program of its day with its naughty dark shadows and violence, virgins, sex, rape, death and shrill drama.
In order of events, the play follows cycles of lust (for women or power) followed by death then revenge. Repeat, sometimes changing the order of the final two phrases. Two sparks set events and characters smouldering: the violent rape of a virtuous lady by one of the Duke’s stepsons and the murder of Vindice’s (Rory Kinnear) fiancée by the Duke (Ken Bones), payment for her refusal to submit to his lust. Delaying sentencing his stepson on the rape charge cements the Duke’s place at the top of the revenge hit list on one hand and incurs the wrath of his new wife on the other who seduces the Duke’s eldest son, a bastard (whose revenge is to cuckold the cuckold.). Vindice, the main avenger, has a brother, Hippolito, (Jamie Parker) who has a place in the Duke’s court and can get a disguised Vindice a job procuring virgins for the Duke’s only legitimate blood son and heir, Lussurioso (Elliot Cowan). The catch is that the virgin Lussurioso has taken a fancy to is Vindice’s sister and though she is adamant she isn’t for sale, disguised Vindice is able to tempt his own mother into assisting in procuring her daughter’s flower. Vindice is then tasked to procure a virgin for the Duke, which he reads as an invitation to assassinate him – using a puppet wearing the poison coated skull of his betrothed (!) whose kiss is murder. Multiple groups have their eye on terminating the new Duke, his stepbrothers (who have already accidentally ordered the execution of their youngest brother, the rapist), the Duke’s bastard and Vindice and co.. A masked ball seems to all the best time for it and in the ensuing energetically danced sword and knife fight a lot of characters meet their end.
The plays opening scene is a Dante worthy explosion of hedonistic noise and movement, a pulsating party throbbing with a big fat rappers bass line to which the almost castrati voice of a counter tenor (Jake Arditti) adds waves of colour. The lazy Susan stage, set with three different rooms all fitting together like pieces of pie, spins, and almost primal dancers lead us through the lush ‘bordello’ room, the ‘monk’s cell’ and the ‘statesman’s court’. Usually mash ups of thumping music and bard era dialogue with backdrops featuring pudgy Michelangelo cherubs and costumes including white Italian pimp suits and medallions look like a lame attempt to ‘attract the kiddies’ but I have never seen a more successful blending of traditional and modern. There were a few grey heads shaking in the audience but the loud opera remixes and modern body language and staging made it clear why audiences at the time the play was written would have enjoyed it: it’s a passionate, violent story where the characters are compelled to act, the scenes are short and to the point, there is plenty of action and lots of people talk about sex and even more people die.
The impetus keeps pounding and the story dashes between scenes of plotting and scenes of action without too much idle chatting about it. And everyone appears to be plotting: brother against brother, son against father, wife against husband, mother against daughter. The prevalence of nastiness, even against flesh and blood does make the story complex to follow, (our 2008 morals are more offended by the possibility of that much power and the possibility of that much corruption.) though there are few characters truly aligned so maybe it is logical just to imagine it’s everyone versus everyone. Vindice’s disguises could also have made things more difficult to follow but again the dastardly themes run so strongly through the play that even if you don’t follow the dialogue precisely, the staging and clear tones make it abundantly clear what the characters have planned.
It was the details which made this performance so engaging. All the way through the tempo of the dialogue and the action drove the story on at the right pace, the climactic sword fight was forceful and exciting, somewhat of a dance but designed to be so and the deaths head puppet was beautifully and carefully manoeuvred by Vindice (as I imagine you would treat your ex-lover‘s skull?). The National is a big space to fill but the pie slice staging fitted well. Backdrops painted on partly sheer screens were used to dramatic effect and clever backlighting tricks made minimal sets more powerful. Scantily clad dancers and the music also helped to eat up empty space and keep the audience hooked on the action.
Lucky they had such a big (and very strong) cast to kill off.
That Face at the Duke of York Theatre, May 14 2008
Written by Polly Stenham
Directed by Jeremy Herrin
‘The family that separates dominos separately into crisis’, could be the by-line of alcoholic Martha’s upper middle class family in Polly Sternham’s ‘That Face’. Left by her husband, for a younger, more amicable alternative, Martha (Lindsay Duncan) flounders, self absorbed, into a cycle of escalating madness dragging her children with her; her son, Henry, (Matt Smith) held oedipal-ly close, her daughter, Mia, (Hannah Murray) held at arms length in boarding school like a pedigree stray.
It is the toppling of Mia’s domino that brings father, Hugh (Julian Wadham), back to London to deal with his erstwhile responsibilities. Armed with Martha’s valium, Mia ‘accidentally’ sends a younger girl, comatose, into hospital and is tossed out of school to Martha’s unwelcoming door, behind which Martha is engaged in a dangerous relationship of mutual and uncomfortably sexualised enabling with her son Henry. The play’s crisis coincides with Henry’s as he, who at 18 has held Martha together for the five years since Hugh’s exodus, has his need for her effortlessly bypassed by his father’s will to have her and her dependencies removed from the equation.
‘That Face’ is a bit like an after school special dealing with alcohol and drug abuse (and possibly even incest) gone wrong. Individual scenes feel real, suggesting an element of the autobiographical but the characters have a short journey making them hard to see as real people. Lindsay Duncan as Martha does a beautiful, graceful, quite Blanche Dubois, alcoholic from her first scene to her last, her walk a language of degraded glamour in itself. Mia begins as an unpredictable, lonely, fifteen year old, boarding school girl and ends similarly and Henry’s downhill gradient is slight: he’s already left school to heal a mother who doesn’t want it. So who is the main character taking the journey most narratives revolve around? Martha commands the greatest attention but the most interesting chapters in her story happen on either side of the play and Mia and Henry’s dominos wobble so wildly in the first two scenes that it feels like being first on the scene of a car crash wondering what happened. Despite this the play has great structure; each scene is well crafted and flows seamlessly into the next helped by the staging, which centres around an increasingly crumpled and detritus accumulating double bed. A dream for drama students, many of these scenes would lose none of their power if seen on their own.
A lot has been made about Sternham’s age, she was 19 when she wrote ‘That Face’, and it shows. Not in an amateur way but in a lack of light and shade. The intensity is there from the first scene, a boarding school initiation more Abu Ghraib than St. Trinians, and then continues to increase to heart attack rate rather than allowing pressure remissions before ramping up the adrenalin to a tremor level crisis. By the climactic scene, where the family is reunited, the dialogue and acting are already at fever pitch and the hysteria that sees Henry, drunk, clad in his mother’s jewels and negligee, pissing on the bed couldn’t push me above my the intensity plateau. It felt like that point in an argument where you’ve already thrown everything breakable and are down to the cushions.
The one comic scene shined out as one of the most memorable: Martha, drunk, but in good spirits, chats cheerily to the talking clock, brilliantly taking up both sides of the conversation. In this play Sternham’s writing is strongest when her stage has only two speaking characters and this scene was no exception.
One of the great benefits of Sternham’s age was the language used by Mia and Henry. It’s good to hear teenage banter that doesn’t sound like the OC sprinkled with try hard hip hop lyrics. Her older characters have strong voices as well; Martha’s dialogue bubbles messily fleshy beneath her well brought up shell and Hugh is the perfect cardboard cut-out absentee father.
This is a well crafted, well written play which takes a fresh, real perspective to themes not much dramatised. Individual scenes easily enlist emotions but without an obvious character to back and the intensity woodpeckering away for its one 90 minute act it left me feeling more hollow than I would have hoped.
‘That Face’ debuted in a much more intimate setting and could have been lost in a west end size theatre but the staging used the extra space to accentuate the feeling of each character being lost instead of just losing them in the emptiness.
The Lover and The Collection, a double bill of The Lover and The Collection, by Harold Pinter
The Comedy Theatre 30th April
The Lover, a Pinter one act two hander, sparkles with emerald style (diamonds being just a bit too obvious.).
An intimate look at a marriage where a set of careful compromises are in play, the tone is glib and the actors (Gina McKee and Richard Coyle) are clearly ’acting’ but the emotions are surprisingly raw. No one would expect the writing to do anything less than whip, dice, turn and sing, but in The Lover, Pinter leads the audience up a very twisting garden path with a lot of nice flourishes and witty moments along the way.
The couple, ten years into their marriage, are exploring their differing desires for duality on that rickety old bridge between love and lust and instead of finding a spot in the middle they’re moving straight from one end to the other by conducting very civilised affairs – with each other. The brilliant frission between the terribly British Mr. and Mrs. amicably discussing the affair as if it’s being conducted outside the marriage, and the role playing, bongo drumming, intimate personal fantasies they act out had me on-side from the start. I got the impression that the audience felt in safe hands with the actors and narrative and were eagerly following the couple as they began to explore a bit more than just the difference between being a man and a woman or a whore, lover, mistress or wife.
The two-roomed staging was suitably stylish and clever and the era was 40’s – 50’s chic (and that goes for the dialogue as well as the look.). The sex was less suggested, more real, and more sexy and honest than overt (with coitus performed under the tea table.) as were the emotions – I thought they all trod the line awfully well, darling.
The Collection, with two extra characters (played by Charlie Cox and Timothy West), was a similar dip into the intimate world of personal relationships, partnerships and desire, with the extra characters adding the possibility of homosexuality into the mix. The story centres around the confession and re-confession of a one night stand; did the young married woman really do ‘that’ with the louche but glamorous toyboy? As the partners of the standees become involved events are revised and the winners’ and losers’ roles are cleverly re-assigned. Insecurity reigns as does the clever arrangement of the actors’ bodies on stage which is suggestive but without being an utter farce, and more witty dialogue, including what has to be one of the best monologues I’ve ever seen: a tremendous moment from Timothy West as he explains that his young ‘friend’ is a “slum slug”. More emotive words have never been spoken in love and I will keep that one for future use.
In both plays it is the female characters who come off best, playing cat and mouse games with the truth and kneading and seasoning the situation to their own tastes. Both girls (both played by Gina McKee) are durable and comfortably capable of duality and expertly play their strengths and weaknesses. Both plays explored the themes of love, partnership, sexual desire and insecurity but I still appreciated the underlying sisterhood of those graceful slips of things playing to get what they need and winning . Without this edge, The Collection would be a bit like the decadent versus the ‘proper’, but the bourgeois tone Pinter allows his characters shows up their flaws warmly.
In spite of the comic and unerring tip of the banter flashing across the surface of this evening’s theatre, I found the underlying emotions honest. I like the idea of these characters being real people. In fact, I hope very much that there are people creative enough to add this kind of drama to their personal relationships as they tread back and forwards on the love-to-lust bridge via insecurity. I just hope they’re not living next door to me (unless they’re a slum slug, of course, and then I may get the opportunity to utter those words.).
P.S. It should have been called ‘The Pinter Collection’…
The Internationalist at The Gate Theatre, 25th April 2008
Written by Anne Washburn
Directed by Natalie Abrahami
Ever considered how many ways there are to misunderstand someone? If you don’t speak the lingo you’ve already got that going against you, but to add to that you can misread their body language, misinterpret cultural nuances, have different expectations of your relationship or just not get what‘s going on. In The Internationalist, written by Anne Washburn, the characters misunderstand each other on all of these levels and probably some deeper ones I didn’t get either because I was soundless-laughing too hard at how clever she is.
Witty dialogue set up characters and scenes quickly and distinctively, speedily immersing the audience in the story as Lowell (Elliot Cowan), the internationalist of the title, gropes his way, almost drunkenly, through a foreign business trip. Washburn makes it clear that the characters and their relationships are the focus by leaving other details slightly blurry. We don’t know what kind of business Lowell is in, which country he’s visiting (though it’s definitely European) or what kind of person Lowell is at home.
Arriving at the airport after a disastrous flight he ineptly meets Sara (Jennifer Higham), a company colleague, who begins to guide him along the garden path of unexplainable distractions which is her country, leading him into an exotic, romantic situation where he’s suddenly cast as the Hollywood heartthrob. Their relationship is only just recovering from the problematic meeting before it goes awry again at the office where it turns out that Sara isn’t what she’d seemed (a colleague) but his junior in the company. Brilliant use of a second language, Washburn’s own creation, which hovers somewhere around Latin (a hybrid of Germany and Scandinavia in sound), has the other four actors (who play the rest of the characters) slipping in and out of understanding. When Lowell’s in the room they speak Washburnian, when he’s not they’re understandable to the audience. One of the funniest touches is their differing grasps of English and the delicate but cleverly logical ways they misuse it as they welcome Lowell. Taking on the Hollywood heartthrob role Sara has ascribed to him, Lowell starts looking for more adventure but only ends up in confusing situations without a guide or a phrasebook.
There are a couple of great stories and monologues thrown into the mix by the ’other’ characters which are a bit like divertissements in a play so closely focused on the character’s relationships. One was mostly told in Washburnian but escalated my silent chuckling appreciation of cleverness to proper laughing-out-loud-‘cause-its-funny (all I really know is that it had something to do with a naked man wearing flippers but the body language of the cast made it contagious). They also offered their observations about Americans from an international perspective, some quite philosophical, expressing not just an interest in what Americans do and don’t know but also in the relationship between their isolation and power “America hasn’t lost in the same way other countries have, hasn’t had our own people killed on home soil.”. An interesting glance at international cultural hierarchy was presented alongside some feverish un-packaging of cultural clichés.
My companion found the ending slightly ambiguous (some of it was spoken in Washburnian) but for me it summed up the whole play. It also resonated with my twenty-something’s need to be understood but difficulty in knowing how best to make that happen. More importantly it made me smile and think.
Logistically The Gate Theatre is a challenging space. Small, with only one possible exit the director, Natalie Abrahami, chose to have everyone on stage all the time – but the acting had me totally focused on what I was supposed to be looking at so this was a far less distracting choice than it could have been. She used a couple of nice movement moments and some clever backlighting to smooth out the scene changes but all these touches complimented the writing so well that I’m only really noticing them in hindsight. The actors warmed into their roles and could have been more naturalistic in such an intimate space but now I’m just in the realms of constructive criticism ‘cause I pretty much wish I had written this play myself.
Fram at The National Theatre, 15th April 2008
Written and Directed by Tony Harrison
You know there is a problem when a theatre review begins: “The set was engrossing.”
Creative use of the space and wiz bang, National-Theatre-budget-standard effects compelled the action from the moonlit interior of Westminster Cathedral 2008 to the Arctic 1895 and back again via original footage, film and a brief, inexplicable trip to the ballet. The performers were equally strong, and the topic, the life and times of arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, comfortably worthy of dissection and theatrical reproduction. It was the fusion of these parts – the text and direction – which was the ice flow which sunk Fram (taken from the name of Nansen’s boat.).
Writer/ director Tony Harrison thought Nansen’s need to be a hero, first as a North Pole racer then as an international envoy for the 1921 Russian famine, was best explored in a rhyming prose somewhere between Roald Dahl and a classical Greek play. This was delivered to the audience panto style with added overt dramatic outbursts and confronting projected images which alternated in belittling the seriousness of the material and emotionally sensationalising it. I was provoked but I doubt it was for the right reasons.
A naff projection of the narrator, Gilbert Murray (Jeff Rawle), a 19th Century translator of classical Greek plays and his muse, actress Sybil Thorndike (Sian Thomas), entering the National Theatre settled me into the idea of this being a schools production. That was until the swearing started, including a tirade of Mamet worthy f***s and a c***, still a step too far for most audiences, which made me wonder who the h*** this production was for. Jokes about ancient Greek texts even a theatre student wouldn’t get only confused me more (I don’t know many anarchic ancient Greek scholars with a passion for the history of Arctic exploration?).
I did develop a sympathy for Nansen (and I certainly learnt a lot about him over the three hours), but it was mostly concern about him turning in his grave. Desperately inviting the image of a starved victim of the Russian famine (one of Nansen’s projected slides) to throw off its theatrical pretence of death, only to have it do so with a cackle made me feel angry at Harrison rather than conveying the emotion Nansen must have felt when he took the photo to show the world . Again I was confused: Why was the audience being provoked? What was I supposed to be getting from this? The only character I really connected with was Hjalmar Johansen (the excellent Mark Addy), Nansen’s storm-darkened Arctic companion, who, like me, gave the impression he would rather be somewhere else and was unhappy about where the production was headed. He would have likened the evening to spending an Arctic winter in a shared bear skin sleeping bag with the stench of two men and Nansen’s recited poetry (another thing Fram taught me about Nansen – which made me think censored it could still be a successful schools production?).
After a random ten minute ballet which had no clear reference to anything before or after (other than getting another top stage name, Wayne McGregor, enticingly added to the programme?) and a painfully long, frustrating scene re-enacting a meeting between famine relief agencies, the interval came offering a chance to sit back and try and understand why… My companion wanted to leave but Nansen and Johansen stuck it out in the Arctic and I said damn it, we would too. Later when he had his coat over his eyes and I was repeating a mantra of ‘please stop, please stop, please stop…’ as a poet with his mouth, eyes and ears sewn up hummed for five minutes I was questioning my decision.
The long-promised Fram only appeared at the very end, half sunk in the ice (in real life it survived the arctic) and the characters of Nansen and Johansen tried, I think, to summarise what we’d just seen. It was a dramatic image, them sitting on top of the sinking ship…I’m not a theatre cretin and I wanted to get it and to enjoy it – but I just didn’t.
Looks great on paper... 