love's labours lost and found

It's all backwards but it's written and posted. Be patient and read.

We are all well acquainted with Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labours Lost. Some scholars think that All’s Well That Ends Well is the missing Love’s Labours Won.

All’s Well is more popular than LLL, and it’s produced more frequently so no one really bothered about the relationship between the two plays. But the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Chichester Festival, Jonathan Church Productions and Mr. Duncan C Weldon (I don’t know who he is, either) have come up with a production of the two plays together and now have co-produced them with the Theatre Royal Haymarket Productions. These were the final two plays I saw when I was in London in January, and they were love-erly!!

The director Christopher Luscombe came up with the idea of pairing the plays like bookends around the Great War. Indeed, LLL ends with the King and his lords going off to war. Berowne, you may remember, is required by his ladylove to make hospital patients smile. The actors go off in uniform and he has a Red Cross badge on his arm, indicating hospital duty.

Shakespeare had set each play on a country estate, one in northern Spain, the other in Sicily, but both were like English manor houses. The designer, Simon Higlett, found (he says ‘stumbled on’) Charlecote Park, a National Trust property a few miles from Stratford. Legend has it that Shakespeare was caught poaching on the estate when he was a young man. A two-page wide photograph of the building appears in the souvenir Theatre Royal program with accompanying photographs of the gatehouse (where the French princess and her ladies stayed in Love’s Labours Lost); the rooftop where, hiding amid the chimneys in the production we saw, the King of Navarre and his lords hilariously revealed their attraction to the ladies; and the library, the main setting for the action in both plays.

The house itself was remodeled in the 19th century. An Edwardian family could have lived there during the war – though probably seconded for wartime purposes.

Remember that Downton Abbey became a rehab hospital during that war? Fiction, perhaps, but based on fact. Our tour group visited an estate not far from Highclere (aka Downton Abbey) that had been used as a naval office base during the war. So some hospital beds were not inappropriate in All’s Well and the situation of one of the characters made more sense, and played with more meaning than I have ever seen.

This was Dogberry, the constable - remember the night watch that discovered the chicanery of Don Pedro and his cohorts? Like many soldiers at the end of that and later wars, Dogberry suffered from PST, undiagnosed then and often ignored or mishandled today, he had a tic, not over-used, and his speech patterns, as written by Shakespeare, were touching. The actor, Nick Haverson, received an ovation when he left the scene.

As you know, I don’t give full reviews. I just tell you about things that appealed to me. I want to mention the actor who played Berowne in LLL and Benedick in All’s Well because a friend of mine was in London shortly after the plays opened (perhaps the reason for her reaction), and disliked Edward Bennett who played these roles so much that she walked out. Our camp director (one of the guides with Arts Discovery London who set us up and took us around) told us that Bennett was playing Laertes in a production of Hamlet a few years ago when Hamlet was taken ill and he as understudy went on, and stayed for a while because the illness was serious. Well, apparently he did very well, though he was not your usual Hamlet—appearing man, so well that he was catapulted into leading roles, hence Berowne and Benedick. He’s tall, which is nice, and sort of sexy, ditto. Needless to say, he speaks well and handles himself well. There is a slapstick scene involving a Christmas tree (this All’s Well takes place over the Xmas season) when Benedick is ‘eavesdropping’ on his friends, the conspirators, reporting on how much Beatrice loves him, where his ridiculous appearances (the director’s indulgence) are aided by the tree’s convenient hidey-holes. Bennett can handle the humour without losing his dignity as Benedick. In his photograph in the program he looks gleeful and capable of goofiness. Maybe that’s why my friend walked out.

I learn something new every time I see a Shakespeare play, some nuance by an actor, some insight of a director, some different pov, some interpretation - something- that brings it all fresh fresh fresh to my eyes and heart and mind.

I am so grateful.

blog for February 18, 2017

Amadeus at the National Theatre

The last time I saw Amadeus, the play (1979) by Peter Shaffer (1926-2016) was in 1979 when it premiered at the National Theatre in London (later moved into the West End). That was the last time it appeared there until last year, shortly before (or after?) Shaffer died – in June 2016. I saw it last month (January, 2017) but audiences around the world could see it live on TV on February 2.

In 1979 I was on my way home from a safari in Kenya, suffering with from the onslaughts of a bacteria with a name like an Italian opera diva – so I found out when I checked in at the Toronto General Hospital (the Tropical Diseases Unit) on my return. I had four days stopover in London and lived on Immodium while I stubbornly attended theatre (the new musical Cats was another prize). I remembered this personal aside because I had a flu bug that ran its course in microcosm while I was there this time. When one is sufficiently distracted, one can (almost) ignore one’s physical state. I enjoyed the production even more than the first time because it was even better.

The play and the movie won a hitherto unprecedented number of awards, and it’s old and revered enough that you are probably well acquainted with it, so I won’t dwell. This new production, directed by Michael Longhurst, is spectacular. Where past productions, both stage and film, relied on a sound track to illustrate Mozart’s music under discussion and attack by the composer’s jealous contemporary, Antonio Salieri, this staging incorporated 6 opera singers and 20 members of the Southhland Sinfonia orchestra live, on stage, along with the 16 actors. And the players interacted with the actors! Dazzling!

Lucian Msamati, playing Salieri, impressed me with his power, but some of my theatre companions thought he played too large starting at the top of his emotional pain. The story, you may remember, portrays Salieri as intensely jealous of Mozart’s genius (not historically accurate but beside the point). But the play begins at the top of his angst when the character has tried to commit suicide and confesses to a priest his guilt for having killed Mozart – killed by neglect and lies. Where can he go but down? And he does, painfully. in the film Salieri calls himself the “patron saint of mediocrity”. (I checked.) In the play he calls himself the “king of mediocrity”. I noticed because I relate to that pain. I wrote in my diary that night that I was the “queen of mediocrity”. It’s very hard, not just for me but for any artist (writer, composer, poet, whatever) to admire and defer to other creators who are SO MUCH BETTER THAN I WILL EVER BE. I have long since acknowledged the need for a compost heap in the Garden of Creation. Perhaps I can help to fertilize the pile.

Do you know that poem by Clive James that begins:

"The book of my enemy has been remaindered,

And I am pleased."

I try not to be, though, and I am always warm in my praise of other creators – perhaps with a few exceptions. I won’t tell who.