Louisa was in town this week, my longtime drinking-and-theatre buddy who initiated Drunk Theatre Week with me at the National’s Edward II. Clearly the only thing to do was continue with our theme of Gay Renaissance Theatre, so on Monday we saw David Tennant’s hair-extensioned Richard II at the Barbican (RSC) and on Wednesday Tom Hiddleston’s beefy topless-showering Coriolanus at the Donmar.
Drinks
What it says in the headline.
I liked this high school psychodrama retelling of Romeo and Juliet, focusing on Romeo's first 'love', Rosaline, but it needed a MUCH higher body count.
My first draft of a post about the National Theatre's 'Othello' just read "ADRIAN LESTER" with big doodly hearts around it, so I apologise if this second try goes off the rails later. The play was REALLY GOOD.
So it turns out I don’t really get on with Eastern European theatre. This is a shame, because it’s The Next Big Thing in London theatre apparently (as everyone who saw Three Kingdoms will tell you) and I’m sure it’s very exciting if you are into it, but it gets a big old ‘meh’ from me, which is unfortunate because I am SO INTO weird pretentious experimental theatre in theory, I just find it a bit difficult in practice.
This may be the result of a module I took as a drama studies major, where a European artist collective led us in a “devised theatre practice” in which I pretended to hang myself with a keyboard cord to Daft Punk and a classmate dropped trou and mimed sexual intercourse with a watermelon, which we then smashed on the stage and consumed while I played an Irish polka on the fiddle. (For the record, I received a first-class mark in the module.)
Grupo Galpão’s production was Romeo and Juliet: The Comic Opera. The company did much more singing than speaking, and Juliet (Fernanda Vianna) was a ballerina while Romeo (Eduardo Moreira) teetered on stilts. When I walked in I was extremely pleased to see they were running it without an interval, which implied both a quick running time and a tight production.
Photo (c) Ellie Kurttz