Woyzeck

I noticed the first attempt at Woyzeck at reference 1 and I am pleased to be able to report now that the second attempt was successful, so successful that we were even able to recover our interval drinks.

But to start at the beginning, Southwest Trains was having an engineering day at Waterloo which meant delay and change at Raynes Park. This despite plenty of notices warning about delays in the middle of August - presumably that is just the big delays.

We actually boarded a train to Victoria at Epsom, to be confronted by large numbers of boys who seemed to be carrying a huge amount of bottled water. Interrogation failed to elicit explanation, beyond it being something to do with an event in a park.

Later in the journey, my attention wandered to the colour of the live rails, which seemed to be mostly blue compared with the mostly brown of the dead rails. Was the electricity in the live rail keeping the rust away somehow? Did all the charge blow any water away? For once, google failed to provide the answer.

Picnic in our  now customary park opposite the theatre.

On into the Old Vic, more or less full, with a lot more young people than one usually gets in a matinée. Enthusiastic clappers. Row H turned out to be about right: not so close that all the noise and nudity was too much for us, not so far that we could not both see and hear what was going on.

The set consisted mainly of maybe as many as twenty eight by four flats suspended in two or three rows from the ceiling. Substantial looking things, two wire ropes apiece, with our getting various permutations as the action proceeded. I thought it was rather good.

Cast generally good, with a splendid performance by the captain's awful wife. The captain himself did not quite work, but I think that was his lines' fault rather than his fault. Woyzeck let himself down, after doing a convincing Othello job on his common-law wife, by a rather off-hand suicide. There was also quite a lot of sex & nudity, sex & nudity which was central to the plot and so was not quite gratuitous, if not quite necessary either.

From my limited knowledge of such people, I found the squaddie language of the two male leads convincing. The adaptor had done his homework in that department.

The lady next to us was not very impressed at all. A play which had been dumbed down almost to the vanishing point. She had the benefit of having seen a German version of the play, and as she also sported a plastic bag from Heffers I thought she was probably a don at Cambridge. She also thought that missing out on the bad doctor's speech in German, towards the end, which I had puzzled about, was not important. But why, in that case, go to the bother of filling it with all kinds of colloquialisms? I stick to the line that inserting a chunk of German into a play in English, in England is a bit silly. Not quite as silly as having the Saviour talk in Aramaic in a film, but tendencies in that direction.

While later, downstairs in the bar, I talked with a rather precocious young chap, the sort of person who almost certainly went to a private school and who was perusing a copy of the adapted version of the play, bought upstairs. Given all the sex in the play, I was reminded of my own exposure to 'Brave New World', years before all the sex therein could have meant much. Curious, with hindsight, how it was thought appropriate to expose me to the words long before I had any feelings or experience to go with them. Maybe it is the words which give one the framework to deal with the feelings and experience when they do turn up? Maybe that is what sex education for infants is all about? His mother, when she turned up, explained that they had been caught out by Southwest Trains too, had missed the show they had meant to go to and went to this one on the off-chance. She thought it was rather good, mentioning in passing that her work with alcoholics had given her some insight into the sort of people portrayed in the play.

A little early to eat immediately after the show, so we wandered down to St. George's Circus, where we were rewarded by the sight of a Rolls Royce with registration mark 2KU, that is to say the car assigned to the use of the chief wife (for the time being) of the Emir of Kuwait. Maybe one day we will rise to 1KU. We also noticed a number of tourist hotels, hotels which would not have been in such an area in the days of my youth. We puzzled about a building called Cecil House, which BH thought had something to do with compiling anthologies of country dances. Google did manage this one, telling me in short order this morning that we had confused Cecil House in south London with Cecil Sharp House in north London. See reference 2. But at least it was not my memory playing tricks on this occasion.

And so to eat at the restaurant tucked into the back of the Old Vic, the Waterloo Bar and Kitchen.

Off to a good start there as I managed to get Cortana to tell us which wine we had had and liked last time (see reference 4), as so was able to order it again, a Chablis, more precisely a 'Chablis 1er Cru, Cote de Jouan, Domaine Michel Colbois'. This I know from a photograph I took, just to be on the safe side, and no relation to what they put in the same position and with the same number on their internet wine list, that is to say 'Chablis 1er Cru, Côte de Lechet 2013/14, Domaine Daniel Dampt'. Leaving aside the possibility that it is not the same stuff after all, just as good second time around as first time. With it we took a green salad - which appeared to involve fresh peas, something I have not eaten for a long time - some pork rolled up in bacon and served, inter alia, with lilac mashed potato, a cheesecake and some calvados. All very satisfactory.

Following up the donnish reservations reported above, onto amazon when we got home to get the real text from 1835 (albeit wrapped up in a much more recent study edition from the US) and a DVD from 1978, the one involving Klaus Kinski, the mixed race German from Danzig. Not yet consumed, but in the meantime the couple of pages from the introduction included above suggest that the present adaptation has indeed strayed some good way from the original; a straying which the programme justifies by saying that there was no original, at least no finished original, and one is free to work up what there is how one sees fit. We shall see and I shall report further in due course.

PS: the Guardian had given it three out of five in its review, taking a position roughly between that of the social worker and the don. Clever production with a good cast, but one which has taken unnecessary liberties with the original. Reading it again this morning, a very fair review. But I think I would have gone to four. The play did compel, even in this heavily adapted version.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/not-woyzeck.html.

Reference 2: https://www.cecilsharphouse.org/csh-home.

Reference 3: http://www.barandkitchen.co.uk/.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/r.html.

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