Mini Reviews

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I still have three shows to go over the next two days, but there are four shows I haven’t written about, so here are some brief comments.



We had three Shakespeare plays scheduled this week. I like Shakespeare. Really. But I generally find myself in a bad mood when I go to see the Royal Shakespeare Company at their winter home at the Barbican. I always get lost finding my way to the Barbican complex and then to the theater within the complex's endless warrens. And then I find myself in the huge, impersonal theater, watching actors lost on a too-large stage.



So Macbeth Monday night. It was acceptable but unexciting. The one interesting idea was placing on stage throughout the porter, who fulfills multiple functions aside from his famous comic scene at the gate. He functions as timekeeper, setting a clock that counts down to Macbeth's death. (A tired idea, perhaps, but impressive to see the actors time the death to the second!) He keeps a running tally of the Macbeths' victims and vacuums up the carpet after them. He functions as hand of fate when he points Macduff in Macbeth's direction during the final battle. He's a sinister and mysterious figure, who resets the clock when Malcolm become king. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown..."



Romeo and Juliet Wednesday night. I didn’t want to go back to the Barbican so I went rogue and saw The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. It’s a long-running show which I’ve never seen so I thought I’d check it out.



It’s an impressive staging of a pretty thin story. For those of you who don’t know, it’s based on the book of the same name about a precocious boy on the autism spectrum. What distinguishes it is the prodigiously overstimulating production, meant to help neurotypical people understand how everyday stimuli are processed by those on the spectrum. Well, maybe. There were lots of adolescents at the performance, and I’m told that school groups of children on the spectrum regularly go. Is that possible? It seems to me entirely unwatchable by anyone who can’t process even a normal level of stimulation.



But … a puppy! The screams of the girls behind me when the puppy appeared were as loud as any of the sound effects. The puppy was adorable.



Friday evening was another uneasy head wearing a crown: Richard II at the Almeida. The Almeida is a terrific small theater (it originated the production of Summer and Smoke that we saw in the West End Thursday night), but not even good theaters strike gold every time. I thought the production was quite dreadful, more like a student workshop than a finished product, and it would be entirely incomprehensible to anyone who was not familiar with the text.



It was pared down to 100 minutes, with just eight actors dressed in t-shirts and jeans, and with buckets of water, soil, and blood (helpfully labeled), all of which ended on Richard by the end of the play. The one reason to go was Simon Russell Beale as Richard. He’s utterly wrong for the part, much too old, but he’s a consummate Shakespearean and I wish the production had been worthy of him.



Tuesday night was not Shakespeare. We went to a pair of Pinter one-acts (Party Time and Celebration), Part VI of a project that is producing all of his short plays this season. I may not be sophisticated enough to understand or appreciate Pinter. Party Time and Celebration both send up different sorts of rich people, but the targets struck me as just too easy and the satire didn't land for me. Your results may vary.



Saturday: Sweat at the Donmar Warehouse and Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells. Sunday wraps up with Trevor Nunn’s Fiddler on the Roof at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Home on Monday to rest after 17 shows.

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