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Highly consumes culture: NTLive Richard II
Feb. 5th, 2019 05:38 pmI forgot to post about this back in January, but I saw the 15th Jan National Theatre Live broadcast of Richard II from the Almeida Theatre. Some thoughts:
1. The language was beautifully delivered. I've never seen this one live before, so I haven't got a point of comparison, but the best parts were breath-stopping. The choice of play seemed timely, too: there's Something about hearing 'this sceptred isle, this seat of kings' on the eve of brexit. Likewise the spectacle of a tiny elite tearing themselves apart at the expense of a nation, that's also Timely.
2. However, I wasn't sold on the staging and costuming. The choice to work with a box set with no exits I actually liked - someone in the intro interview described it as 'claustrophobic', and I think that really brought out an aspect of the play that's easily missed as you're reading it (with all the 'a room in x place' and 'near such and such' scene opening tags). But the green-grey container-ship style I did not like at all, and I spent way too much time staring at the divisions between bricks in the walls. I also think the costuming made an awkward, unsatisfactory compromise between neutral non-characterised 'actors in black and grey' and actual characterised costuming, and they didn't do *enough* of the 'have an a single costume item or prop to distinguish a particular character from several played by the same actor' thing. Likewise, the hurling buckets of blood was effective for the scene but left us with several random characters played by the same actors inexplicably bloodstained.
3. Really couldn't grok late-middle-aged Richard II. Good actor, but... John of Gaunt was *younger* than him, it didn't work at all. Took away a key aspect of the Richard-Henry foil/balance relationship, too.
3.a. The buckets of mud and dirt in the garden scenes and the heaping dirt on Richard's head toward the end was A Good Effect.
This has been A Report On Culture.
1. The language was beautifully delivered. I've never seen this one live before, so I haven't got a point of comparison, but the best parts were breath-stopping. The choice of play seemed timely, too: there's Something about hearing 'this sceptred isle, this seat of kings' on the eve of brexit. Likewise the spectacle of a tiny elite tearing themselves apart at the expense of a nation, that's also Timely.
2. However, I wasn't sold on the staging and costuming. The choice to work with a box set with no exits I actually liked - someone in the intro interview described it as 'claustrophobic', and I think that really brought out an aspect of the play that's easily missed as you're reading it (with all the 'a room in x place' and 'near such and such' scene opening tags). But the green-grey container-ship style I did not like at all, and I spent way too much time staring at the divisions between bricks in the walls. I also think the costuming made an awkward, unsatisfactory compromise between neutral non-characterised 'actors in black and grey' and actual characterised costuming, and they didn't do *enough* of the 'have an a single costume item or prop to distinguish a particular character from several played by the same actor' thing. Likewise, the hurling buckets of blood was effective for the scene but left us with several random characters played by the same actors inexplicably bloodstained.
3. Really couldn't grok late-middle-aged Richard II. Good actor, but... John of Gaunt was *younger* than him, it didn't work at all. Took away a key aspect of the Richard-Henry foil/balance relationship, too.
3.a. The buckets of mud and dirt in the garden scenes and the heaping dirt on Richard's head toward the end was A Good Effect.
This has been A Report On Culture.
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