Kicked off with a picnic in the little park across the road from the theatre. Quite busy with winos on one side and metros on the other. Plus a scaled down version of the Diana memorial in Hyde Park - all the better for being less complicated. Possibly helped by not being designed by a committee in the full glare of the then Diana obsessed media.
Old Vic fairly full with a good mixed crowd, young and old. Maybe the odd off-duty luvvie, but no confirmed sightings.
Very good set, starting off roof in the winter rain and moving on into fetid attic. I am reminded now of the penchant of Victorian audiences for elaborate stagings, with these stagings being as, if not more important than the play. But BH was a tad unhappy with the mattresses on view which she thought should have been horse-hair rather than interior sprung. The BBC of old would have more careful about such details.
Very good music and I suspected whoever wrote it of having been familiar with the Shostakovitch preludes. For my copy see reference 1.
Very good cast, with all three characters doing well. One splendid bit, for example, when Spall was sprawled in the middle of the set, holding forth from an easy chair while wearing a fancy smoking jacket over his rags.
But the play itself, despite the humour & slapstick, I found rather depressing. Perhaps being the product of the dreary & depressed years after the second world war, which I only just missed, the play was too realistic. I remember all about squalid bedsits, boarding houses and the odd people that often wound up in them - and don't need to be reminded. Perhaps rather as FIL, having had the mending of plenty of smashed minds and bodies during that war, was not keen on blood & gore on television. I was much happier with the more fantastic 'Waiting for Godot' - with, incidentally, the costs of the production noticed at reference 2 probably being a very small fraction of those of this one.
Raining on exit, so we decided on home cooking rather than casting about for a bit of metro cooking. And no refreshments in the 'Duke of Sussex' (the Truman, Hanbury and Buxton people), a pub that I used to like, as it was being refurbished. Will it still be a pub when the builders and interior designers have finished with it?
A serious theatre goer with whom we chatted on the way home told us that she had been to several productions of 'The Caretaker', other than this one, perhaps as many as four or five over the years, some of which she recalled as being a lot darker than this one, with all its slapstick. I wonder if I would have liked them any better?
Not inclined to go to this production again, but maybe I would go to another, should one come around.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=preludes+guildford.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/godot-waiting-for-1.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment