4 September: The People Next Door

 

I confess.  I picked up this play thinking it was something else!!  Oops.  I hope you will forgive me.

 

It is a modern play.  Very.  Be prepared for a few naughty words!  It deals with modern problems, with humour.

 

This is the 2003 Theatre Guide summary of the play (well, bits of it!)

 

I think we all deserve a treat. It's been a long, hot summer, everyone has been off at the Edinburgh Festival, and the only histrionic fiction staged for our delectation has been the Hutton Enquiry. Happily, we can now all have that special treat, because Henry Adams's Fringe First Award-Winning play has transferred from the Traverse to the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

This is a very fine piece of writing from the Caithness-born playwright, Henry Adams.  .... It's strengths lie in its wit, its characterisation and its bizarre and topical plot. It is also belly-laughter funny. It is so satisfying to reel with laughter at some of those things we fear most.

The People Next Door deals in topicalities and stands out particularly in Scottish playwriting simply by putting a hitherto neglected minority group of black and Asian immigrants on the stage. Ipso facto it's got everything going for it.

Nigel is a half Pakistani whose father did a runner when his Scottish mother was pregnant. In his daydreams he is Salim, an ultra hip, super cool guy with considerable street-cred and the lingo to prove it. In everyday reality, he lives in a tenement on disability allowance having been diagnosed with a mental disorder. He might have a borderline personality but Nigel is warm, caring, savvy and just crazy enough to have no inhibitions about saying what he thinks. In other words he is utterly loveable.

His only friends are Mrs Mac, the old Scottish widow upstairs, and a black teenager, about as smart as they come, with an unfortunate family background. Nigel suffers from chronic anxiety, and if he thinks he is paranoid a man is just about to walk into his life to show him he's not nearly paranoid enough.

Enter Phil, a bent copper with stashes of drugs in every pocket and up his nose, and a psychosis Freud would have salivated to get onto his couch. Phil bursts into Nigel's life because he has discovered that the long-lost half-brother, the golden boy, Karim, has become an international terrorist on the wanted list of every intelligence agency in the Western Hemisphere and Phil intends to show the boys in the Special Branch that the average copper, himself in particular, is just as smart as they are.

This is genuinely a topical play, with a serious political statement to make, if, like I do, you see the personal as political. But it is delivered to us with a comedy that bleeds seamlessly on occasion into farce and satire.

 

7 August: Uncle Vanya by Chekov

 

Following on from last month, in August we will again be re-reading a play.

Uncle Vanya 

Chekov

Another 2016 masterpiece!  I could not resist this, having recently seen Andrew Scott's brilliant one man production.

 

Here's what I wrote in 2016.

 

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

It was first published in 1897 and received its Moscow première in 1899.

The play portrays the visit of an elderly professor and his glamorous, much younger second wife, Yeléna, to the rural estate that supports their urban lifestyle - an estate from which they receive but take no part in maintaining. 

Two friends, Vanya, brother of the Professor's late first wife, who has long managed the estate, and Astrov, the local Doctor, both fall under Yelena's spell, while bemoaning the ennui of their provincial existence. 

Sonya, the Professor's daughter by his first wife, who has worked with Vanya to keep the estate going, meanwhile suffers from the awareness of her own lack of beauty and from her unrequited feelings for Dr. Astrov. Matters are brought to a crisis when the Professor announces his intention to sell the estate: Vanya and Sonya's home and raison d'être, with a view to investing the proceeds to achieve a higher income for himself and his wife.

The version we will be reading however is an adaptation by Brian Friel,  who has been described as 'Ireland's greatest playwright' and an 'Irish Chekhov'.  You may find the occasional word or expression that is unfamiliar - and it is possible that I will not be able to translate for you!  

Characters

• Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov – a retired university professor, who has lived for years in the city on the earnings of his late first wife's rural estate, managed for him by Vanya and Sonya.
• Helena Andreyevna Serebryakov (Yelena) – Professor Serebryakov's young and beautiful second wife. She is 27 years old.
• Sofia Alexandrovna Serebryakov (Sonya) – Professor Serebryakov's daughter from his first marriage. She is of a marriageable age but is considered plain.
• Maria Vasilyevna Voynitsky  – the widow of a privy councilor and mother of Vanya (and of Vanya's late sister, the Professor's first wife).
• Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky ("Uncle Vanya") – Maria's son and Sonya's uncle, the title character of the play. He is 47 years old.
• Mikhail Lvovich Astrov – a middle aged country doctor.
• Ilya Ilych Telegin (nicknamed "Waffles" for his pockmarked skin) – an impoverished landowner, who now lives on the estate as a dependent of the family.
• Marina Timofeevna – an old nurse.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Cheknov is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. 

Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."^[7]

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays,Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text".

Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story.^[10] He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

 Brian Friel (1929-2015)

Brian Friel was considered to be one of the greatest living English-language dramatists, and referred to as an "Irish Chekhov" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland".

Recognised for early works, Friel had 24 plays published in a more than half-century spanning career that culminated in his election to the position of Saoi of Aosdána (Head of the Irish Arts Foundation). His plays were commonly featured on Broadway and won many awards. 

 

26 June (July Reading): The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard

 

For personal reasons we'll be doing repeat readings in July and August.  Several suggestions were made, and this month we will be reading:

 

 

The Hard Problem

Tom Stoppard.

Read in 2016 which was a particularly fine year for the group and we read some brilliant plays - this being one of them!

 

Here's what I wrote in 2016:

 

The much-anticipated The Hard Problem has received somewhat mixed reviews.  I am always nervous when approaching a work by Stoppard as he is so very very clever and intellectual that watching one of his plays can be quite taxing and not an easy night out.  But I found this play not only strangely accessible but also in some respects a disappointment: I don't want to give away the ending, but for me it was too neat.  Here are some extracts from reviews.

From The Telegraph:

Sir Tom Stoppard’s new play, his first in nine years, is called The Hard Problem – a reference to the difficulty scientists and philosophers have in fathoming the nature of human consciousness. Watching it has left me with a hard problem of my own. I want to salute Stoppard, now 77 and one of our finest living playwrights ... But there’s no getting round it: this is a major disappointment.

From The Observer:

The “hard problem” of the title is the problem of consciousness. Where is it? What is it? Crucially, is “the mind” the same as “the brain”? The joy of the play, his first for nine years, is that it brings this problem to the stage and poses it crisply. The difficulty is that Stoppard then glides away from examining it. Often taxed with being too intellectual as a playwright, he is here not intellectually stringent enough. The great adventurer looks strangely conventional. 

From The Guardian:

A rich, ideas-packed work that offers a defence of goodness whatever its ultimate source... Stoppard’s play may not solve the hard problem of human consciousness. But it offers endless stimulation and represents, like so much of his work, a search for absolute values and a belief in the possibility of selfless virtue.

The Hard Problem

Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?

This is 'the hard problem' which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry.

Is the day coming when the computer and the MRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

 

Sir Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was born in July 1937 in Czechoslovakia.  He fled from the Nazis as a child refugee to Singapore with his parents and brother. When that became a difficult place to be his father sent his family to Australia and, as a doctor, remained where he felt he was needed, but he died 4 years later.  In 1946 his family moved to the UK, via time in India,  and after studying there Stoppard became a journalist and, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's mother died in 1996. The family had not talked about their history and neither brother knew what had happened to the family left behind in Czechoslovakia^. In the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, Stoppard found out that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Auschwitz and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters.  He has expressed grief both for a lost father and a missing past, but he has no sense of being a survivor, at whatever remove. "I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life."

He is a prolific writer whose works include many well-known plays and films - including Shakespeare in Love - and he has received many awards.  

His themes are always intellectual and his works include discussions on human rights; censorship; political freedom; linguistics and philosophy. 

 

5 June: Equus by Peter Shaffer

 

Thank you to Rina for suggesting that we read again this modern classic. It is gripping and absorbing, I am looking forward to getting to grips with it again.

 

And in 2017 it drove young Harry Potter fans to distraction when Daniel Radcliffe took on, and bared all, in the lead role ... (queue raciest picture to ever appear on this blog below!)

Equus is a 1973 play by Peter Shaffer, about a child psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horses.

Shaffer was inspired to write Equus when he heard of a crime involving a 17-year-old boy who blinded six horses in a small town in northern England. He set out to construct a fictional account of what might have caused the incident, without knowing any of the details of the crime, and to evoke the same "air of mystery" and "numinous" qualities as in his 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun but in a more modern setting. The narrative of the play follows the attempts of Dr. Martin Dysart to understand the cause of the boy's (Alan Strang) actions while wrestling with his own sense of purpose and the nature of his work.

The original stage production ran at the National Theatre in London between 1973 and 1975.

8 May - What's in a Name? Le Prenom

 

I watched the film, Le Prenom, a short while ago and fell in  love with it - an unusual situation as I don't often feel so passionate about (Belgian)French films!

And then a friend told me that the text exists in English!  Hurrah!  

As a result of this (and the aforementioned friend being the person behind ETCetera theatre group) I will be directing Le Prenom for next April in English and French.  I am hoping that this will be good for my French as well as providing Brussels with a good version of this "interesting" play.

Le Prenom / What's in a Name

 by Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte

 

Vincent is about to become a father. At a meeting with childhood friends he announces the name for his future son. The scandalous name ignites a discussion which surfaces unpleasant matters from the past of the group.

 

 

20 March: The Welkin

 

CANCELLED

My apologies.  We will do the Welkin on 24 April

 

 

Firstly, some very belated photos of our little trip to see Witness for the Prosecution in January.  I think we all really enjoyed it!  We had lunch beforehand and then had time to enjoy the beautiful architecture inside the old County Hall - I grew up in London under the LCC and yet had never been inside County Hall before, so I did, I'm afraid, find it quite exciting.  Anyway, the Council Chamber was an excellent setting for this play, the actors were very good and the stage well used!  What more can you want?

But back to the Brussels based activity!  Thank you again for agreeing to meet on 20th March!  We will read a play that might require some reader-gymnastics as there are so many characters, but let's just do it and enjoy it!

The Welkin by Lucy Kirkwood

 

 

Lucy Kirkwood is a young contemporary writer of some acclaim, and The Welkin was performed at The National in 2020.  Just before .... During Covid I watched another of her plays, Mosquitoes, via NT at Home which I am sure I have mentioned in the past (https://www.ntathome.com/)

The Welkin

I was attracted to the play mainly because of Maxine Peake, who was in the NT production, and who I trust to only be in good plays!  I do hope that you agree with this way of choosing plays!  

The year is 1759 and the country awaits the anticipated arrival of Halley’s Comet. The daughter of Lady Wax has been murdered and the residents of this rural town are out for blood. Sally Poppy has been found guilty of the crime, along with her lover who has already been hanged. Sally’s journey to the noose is dependent on whether she is really pregnant, as she claims, or openly lying. If she is pregnant, she will be transported and her life will be saved. Sally’s fate lies in the hands of twelve women, gathered together to make a unanimous decision one way or the other. Some of the women have reasons for being part of the jury, others cannot wait until their duty is over. Their status, age, and class is varied; one is in the first flush of marriage, another is in her eighties. One of the women is barren, another has had twenty one children. Amidst their bickering and teasing, one woman understands the importance of their presence in the jury room. The midwife, Lizzy, knows that, despite the mob baying for blood outside the window, the twelve women have the chance to make an important, life-changing decision in a world governed by men. However, there is a devil in their midst and the women must wrestle with their consciences to come to a decision.

 

 

 

28 February: Wife After Death

Firstly, many thanks to Rina for providing the wonderful Galette des Rois, they really were fabulous.

And my thanks to you all for bearing with me as this year is going to be a bit of a bumpy ride for dates!

I'm putting this up in the hope that we can meet on 28th February!

Wife After Death 

by Eric Chappell

Comedian and national treasure Dave Thursby has died, and on the day of his funeral, friends and colleagues gather beside his coffin to pay their last respects. There's Harvey, who wrote Dave's material; Vi, Harvey's wife; Kevin, Dave's agent, and Kevin's wife Jane. Dave's glamorous widow Laura has arranged a funeral to remember, complete with a horse-drawn hearse and an attendant dog. An unfamiliar woman in flamboyant mourning clothes turns out to be Kay, Dave's ex-wife from before he was famous, and a series of revelations end with Kevin throwing a drink into the coffin and all the guests asking themselves if they ever knew the "real" Dave.

 

 Eric Chappell 

Chappell wrote the play The Banana Box, which was given a staged reading at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1970. A production ran in Leicester in 1971, with Wilfrid Brambell in the role of the landlord, and was later produced in the West End in 1973, with Leonard Rossiter in the role.  This play later became the basis for sitcom Rising Damp, which aired from 1974 to 1978 and won the 1978 BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy.