National Theatre at Home
- What We've Watched
- Apr 28, 2020
- 9 min read
Updated: May 20, 2020
Hi again, welcome back!
Hope you are all staying sane. I’ve shouted at the news a few times in the last week.
As I am sure you are aware, some of this country’s lovely theatres are releasing footage of their past productions for us to watch at home during this lockdown. One such lovely theatre is the National Theatre. Over the last month they have released one production a week on YouTube, here are some of our thoughts on those. (At the end of this post you can find links to the full cast and creative teams for each production).
One Man Two Guvnors (first produced in 2011 and streamed on 2nd April 2020), written by Richard Bean, tells the tale of Francis Henshall (James Cordon) working for 2 different employers and the chaos that ensues. This play is pure farce and stupidity, which personally I took a while to warm up to, but it was expertly done. It is incredibly well written, loads of quick humour and puns, slapstick and double entendre. It’s hard not to laugh out loud. The actors are cast beautifully. Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby) and Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris) were my favourite, they were great characters with great actors playing them. I love them both, they’re fantastic. I’m not a huge fan of James Cordon, but he did a great job and the role feels almost made for him.
The play itself has huge commedia dell’arte influences. Commedia dell’arte, to be very brief, is an Italian born style of comedy which is basically the birthplace of stereotype or stock characters. This means that a lot of the characters were the perfect vision of who they were, if that makes sense, like posh boy Stanley Stubbers, looking at him you’d think; made of money, cricket player, private school etc. which is exactly how he was presented. These stock characters were hilarious (everyone knows a Stanley), however, they were more complex than that, they had intentions and goals outside of their stereotypical outsides which made the chaos of the play even more inviting. On commedia dell’arte, my favourite joke of the play;
Francis: Some of you out there, who understand your commedia dell’arte, your humus eaters, your Guardian readers, might now be asking yourselves, ‘if the Harlequin, that’s me, has now eaten what will be his motivation in the second act'. Has anyone here said that? Perhaps in an attempt to impress a date. No. Good. Nice to know we don’t have any dicks in tonight. My characters, the Harlequin, now that he’s eaten has to find some other base motivation to drive his actions in the second half. Your job is to try and work out what that might be. Enter Dolly, mini skirt, boobs.
(Also loved the whole ‘D’ bit and ‘Are you an actor?’ ‘Does it show?’ ‘The way you stand, at an angle. As if there’s an audience, over there’).
Between scenes there were musical interludes which were useful, not just to cover the scene changes but also as a welcome change of pace before the madness started again. They varied each time, but not enough to stop me from starting to find them a bit tiring after a while.
We have actually seen One Man Two Guvnors performed, Mum thinks at the Coliseum, but seeing as if you Google that, nothing comes up, I'm going to go ahead and say it wasn’t at the Coliseum. Anyway, it was years ago, we didn’t see James Cordon or Rufus Hound, I laughed, and that’s about as much as I can remember. This NT stream was brilliant, thoroughly enjoyable and a welcome comedic relief from the stresses of the current climate.
Jane Eyre (first produced in 2015 and streamed on 9th April 2020) is the play based on the book by Charlotte Brontë (which I haven’t read, which I know is a crime). It was devised by the company and was part of a collaboration between the National Theatre and Bristol Old Vic, which I didn’t know until I read the credits at the end of the stream and was like, ok now I get some of the choices. It tells the story of Jane’s life and the trials and tribulations she goes through.
So like I said I haven’t read Jane Eyre and literally went in knowing absolutely nothing apart from ‘this might be the one with the wife in the attic'. Due to this I had quite an emotional response to it, meaning in some parts I was mad because I had no idea what was going on and in other parts I really felt for the characters as I was seeing their story for the first time (also I was right, it is the one with the wife in the attic). Mum has written some notes for this production so I’m going to let her take it away and add in any of my extra thoughts in italics.
Not your average production of this classic, but it does all end happily ever after (except that the love interest has been blinded in a fire). A minimalist set, comprising something akin to a child’s climbing frame, represents the different settings in the piece with little embellishment. This was confusing at times, as cast traversed and climbed across the apparatus. It took a long time for the set to be believable, this being when the play settled in one location.
The play opens with a couple holding a baby, and a female dressed in white making the most appalling noise! Lol. It took a while to realise that she was making baby crying noises, and was, essentially, the baby (was I just slow to catch on? Yes, you were, I got it!). The baby held by the couple unfolded to provide the dress that took the Jane from infant to child. This was really cool and a nice transition, it also kept a bit of clarity in a show that was pretty confusing. Madeleine Worrall (playing Jane Eyre) was, inevitably, old for the part, and was most convincing when playing Jane at an age closer to her own. This effect was exacerbated by close up shots in the filming, where the age of the actress was very evident – something that would have been less obvious if watching from the audience (as was intended). Up until Jane was settled at school, I had no idea what was going on. I also didn’t really feel for her a child, I found her annoying. I only really started to care about her plight when Worrall was playing closer to her age, the action also slowed down here and became clearer which helped immensely with my interest and understanding. (My notes change from ‘what the hell’ to ‘Jane just can’t catch a break – she deserves to be happy!’ in accordance with this too).
The cast (apart from Jane and Bertha Mason – wife in the attic) took a number of roles, which again was confusing (only at times, I generally found it to work), as a group of girls in the orphans’ school included bearded men and a woman of around sixty. Something, perhaps, unavoidable without a considerably larger cast. Similarly, it took me a while to realise that the man cavorting around the stage was playing Pilot, Mr Rochester’s faithful hound. Perhaps I am a simple soul, who lacks imagination, but I would guess I’m not alone in that! Still, once the penny dropped, he played a mighty good dog! Pilot was played by Craig Edwards and he was wonderful, so simple and so effective, and in my opinion very clear from his first appearance. Death, something Jane was faced with on multiple occasions, was represented by an oblong trap door, into which the ‘corpses’ walked – a bit surreal and not very convincing after a while, although it was clear that the person was moving from one world to another. I found some moments of this production to be too contemporary, this was one of those moments. Another moment was the running, lots and lots of running. I found these jarring. There were some complimentary moments of contemporary, like Jane's inner voices and thoughts played and articulated by other actors around her, I thought this worked great.
The part of the play I enjoyed most was when Jane was working at Thornfell Hall and falling in love with Rochester. Rochester was suitably grumpy and difficult, and he spent some time wooing an aristocrat. He showed signs of compassion, however, as he came to know and love Jane, rejecting the aristocrat in favour of her, as in the other match ‘there was no love’. He just blew hot and cold throughout and played her because he’s a knob. That he thought he could marry her whilst his wife was incarcerated in the same house, said something of the arrogance of the upper classes – more knob behaviour. He stops being a knob at the end, but his house has to burn down and he has to be blinded for this to happen. Jane ‘met’ the wife on the eve of her wedding, finding her wedding veil torn in two. We see the wife – but don’t realise. Throughout the play a woman enters the stage and sings. Ultimately, she is revealed as the wife, not just an incidental addition to the staging! Ok, so I have thoughts on this whole wife in the attic thing. Firstly, what the hell man. Secondly, yes, it is sort of revealed she’s the wife and in the programme, she is down as Bertha Mason. BUT. As Mum says she comes on singing, opera singing. Adele (Rochester’s ward) is not his daughter and her mother is said to be an opera dancer and this woman was doing a lot of opera singing which to me is a tie between her and Adele, but Bertha Mason is not Adele’s mum so the opera singing was confusing to me! Rant over.
Overall, an enjoyable rendition, although it took some time to settle to the approach. I am glad I stuck with it!
Yay Mum! Here are some additional brief notes from me:
The music and singing throughout was very scenic – enhanced rather than distracted, even if at one point she did sing Crazy by Gnarls Barkley.
Bessie (the maid at Jane's aunts house) hadn’t aged when Jane returned there many years later. I understand the actors are multi-roleing so ageing her visually with make-up perhaps wasn’t an option, but there was no change in physicality at all. This was a brief moment, but frustrating.
Laura Elphinstone was AMAZING! She played the most roles out of the cast and each one was different and beautifully concise. As St John, I couldn’t take my eyes off her, exceptionally well played!
As Mum said, it was very enjoyable. It took a while for me to really appreciate it, but it was very well put together and imaginative.
Treasure Island (first produced in 2014 and streamed on 16th April 2020), another play based on a book. This time the coming of age story by Robert Louis Stevenson, adapted by Bryony Lavery. I want to start out by saying that this production was stunning! I wanted the cameras to stay solely in wide shots so I could take in the vast and beautiful set. The production was played in the Olivier Theatre which in itself is an amazing space, but this set was out of this world amazing. The Olivier has a ‘drum revolve’ (a five-storey revolving section of stage), it can spin and ascend, and they really used it to its full potential here.
In this picture you can see a small amount of what they did to create the Hispaniola, later in the production they created the island, it’s ‘bubbling’ surface and the tunnels underneath it. It really was breath-taking, I can only imagine how incredible it must have been to see this in person! Other memorable technical moments were the stars, the rigging for the boat (also in the picture above) and all the tricks; illusion and created with tech – the technical call for this must have been long! The creative team (full list of names in cast list pdf, linked at bottom) did an amazing job creating this world and having the audience really believe in it.
The costume was gorgeous, all the pirates, apart from Long John Silver, were suitably spooky and scary. Long John Silver (played by Arthur Darvill) had that Professor Umbridge air about him, lure you in kindness and appearance, which of course makes his cruelty, when it appears, even more sinister. All the cast were fantastic, but of course, I had a couple favourites. Squire Trelawney (Nick Fletcher) was the perfect ditz, Grey (Tim Samuels) and Ben Gunn (Joshua James) were loveable and hilarious and Patsy Ferran (playing Jim Hawkins) was mesmerising, she had a lot of work to do and pulled it off wonderfully. The production had a narration provided by Ferran, which I thought worked very well, the text was modern yet period, which fit in nicely.
All in all this production was beautiful, very engaging and my favourite of the National Theatre shows they have streamed up to now – one reason why this review is so short and gushy, I just could not stop watching it.
(Other notable adaptations include, Treasure Planet (Disney 2002) and Muppet Treasure Island (Disney 1996), get on Disney+ and watch them!)
The National has a few more streams to come, we’ve decided to break them down in another post so keep your eyes peeled for those in the coming weeks. For now, we hope you have enjoyed these! Let us know if you saw any of them too and your thoughts. Also, what should we watch next, what do you want to see next from us?
Stay safe lads,
Ellie and Anita x
Cast and Creative Lists:
Comments