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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Much ado about Shakespeare Hall Green Little Theatre **** IF SHAKESPEARE had never lived then not
only would our stage and cinema be much the poorer, so would our
language. We all know of West Side Story (Romeo and
Juliet), Kiss Me Kate (The Taming of the Shrew) and The Boys from
Syracuse (Comedy of Errors) but let's not forget The Manchurian
Candidate, based on Hamlet, Men of Respect (Macbeth) and 10 Things I
hate about You (The Taming of the Shrew . . . again). Then there is the cult science fiction movie
Forbidden Planet based on King Lear and even The Lion King draws on
Hamlet and Macbeth and the list goes on. . and on. As for language, hardly a sentence goes by
without some debt to the bard whether it is strange bedfellows, pomp
and circumstance, full circle, method in the madness or just plain
old salad days. It may be all Greek to you, but then
all the glisters is not gold in a brave new world where you
may be eaten out of house and home but never a borrower nor a
lender be as you remember all our yesterdays, more in
sorrow than in anger, before we shuffle off this mortal coil as we
consider some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have
greatness thrust upon them. All first coined by Shakespeare who even gets
into the world of pop; Sweets for my Sweet has its origins in
Lady Macbeth's sweets to the sweet reference to funeral flowers. Yet we know very little about Shakespeare apart
from his legacy and hglt in this production try to explain some of the
gaps in review style using the techniques of the theatre of the 15th
century, with actors reading lines from rolls of paper – the origin of
today's roles on the stage. It takes a large cast, 20 in all conducted by Roy
Palmer, one of the SIX directors, acting as MC.
This was a production, devised by hglt's Jean Wilde, Patrick Ryan and Roy Palmer, which should have been on earlier in the season but a wave of cast illness led to cancelation until next year, but now the same fate, and sadly a death, has hit the scheduled production, Traveler in the dark, so hglt's homage to the bard was brought back at three week's notice - cue black coffee and midnight oil . . . stage left. In truth the result is a bit of a curate's egg -
that one is from a 19th century Punch cartoon, not
Shakespeare incidentally - and I do wonder if Shakespeare can be broken
into bite size chunks. It is a bit like a series of jokes or sketches without punch lines, speeches and scenes taken out of context, rather like a classical or operatic greatest hits album. We don't see the relationship with the whole. Mind you it does not help that our history up to Shakespeare's time made the despots and dictators of the modern world look like amateurs, with murders of rivals by the score and coups for the crown a regular event; life in court could be violet and short with more plots than a 12 acre field of allotments. So a section on The Weeping Queens, covering
Richard II, Henry IV (Parts I and II) Henry V, Henry VI (I, II and III)
and Richard III had a lot of weeping, and a lot of queens as we moved
through the Plantagenets, through the houses of York and Lancaster, with
swords a swinging, to the Tudors. Not easy to follow but well done never
the less. There were other snatches of Shakespeare set to
themes such as Love's Labour's Won, which could be a missing play, or
just another name for Love's Labour's Lost or even a sequel, or it could
be another name for The Taming of the Shrew or, according to one theory,
an earlier name for Troilus and Cressida. Hglt speculated it could even have been lost in a
copyright dispute with a leading actor who left The Lord Chamberlain's
men, Shakespeare's company
We learned other things as well such as there had
been a version of Hamlet in Texan, with a line dancing chorus and even
found out that Ian Flynn, hglt's publicity officer, is fluent in
Japanese while Patrick Ryan, another of the actor/directors, can speak
Russian, both displaying their talents in versions of Romeo and Juliet. And speaking of Russian it is remarkable how sexy
Shakespeare can sound in a genuine Russian accent thanks to Aleksandra
Everitt.
It seems unfair to single out individuals but Dan
Beaton, last seen in The Cherry Orchard gave a good account of himself
as both Hamlet and Iago and stalwarts Jaz Davison and Jean Wilde put in
a solid shift as did some of the youngsters coming through such as Lucy
Poulson and Rachel Louise Pickard.
The end saw a punk Hamlet as an encore, after a warning about strong language, heralding a sort of F****** Gordon F****** Ramsay F****** version, which perhaps served to prove that our favourite four letter epithet, is perhaps the most flexible word in the English language showing it can be used in both active and passive modes as an exclamation, verb, adjective, noun and even adverb with a bit of imagination - it worls f***ingly well. It
can also
be used as punctuation as well as a sort of hyphen to break up syllables
which is fan f***ing tastic.. It can even make a complete sentence as in
the Virgin Soldiers with the classic line telling us that the f***ing
f***ers f***ed. The punk version ended, as does Hamlet, with a
stage full of dead bodies. The sketch didn't float my f****** boat as
one might say, but the hard working cast, a manic three weeks behind
them, seemed to enjoyed it in a show that had had much to enjoy. Roger Clarke |
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