It’s time for another post from your favorite blogger in the world! Aren’t you glad I’m back? Not that you would have missed me. That’s right, I know you were hiding in this statuette of a little man inside the British Museum.
Jokes aside, yesterday I did a lot of things! I went to the British Museum and toured a couple of exhibits.
After that I traveled all over London with Kaylee, and we got another wicked vegan dish from Oliver’s Falafel (10/10 by the way), followed by some more walking and gelato (from Anita London, another 10/10). We both walked for a very long time, and for a considerable distance as well. All in all, it was a very fulfilling day for me.
Following our adventure, our group saw A Long Day’s Journey Into Night written by Eugene O’Neill, which is currently showing at the Wyndham Theatre. We were tasked with writing a critique of sorts, so I hope you weren’t expecting my usual funny-haha blog post with this one. I went in with very high hopes, because the lineup of actors for that show is stunning, and I tend to have high expectations for anything that has made it to the West End. I also read this script prior to seeing it performed, so I thought I knew what to expect, and was very excited to witness it come to life; I could not have been more wrong about what would happen on that stage.
With Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson in the lead, I felt that I was in safe hands when it came to this show. I love the script on its own, and I know both of them in their other works. I know that on their own they are wonderful actors. I was impressed by Brian’s performance and felt that he was the most alive of all of the actors, but the rest of the cast fell a little flat for me as an audience member and a lover of this play. I was not impressed by the monotone acting style of Clarkson, whose character has a strange, but very existent emotional arc over the course of the play. I felt that there was not much change from beginning to end, and it made me more disconnected from the character than I should have been, watching her on stage for three hours. Each of the actors had their moments, but I was not particularly impressed. How much of my dissatisfaction was due to actor choice or lack thereof, or directorial vision, I cannot say. I believe it was a mix of the two overall, but as I was not in the room, I feel that it is not my place to critique those portions of the production any further.
As it is, I feel that I am not entirely prepared to talk at all concerning the acting of the people on the stage. This is not because I do not have thoughts on it, but because throughout the entire runtime of the performance, I was focused all the way in on technical elements, which made it difficult to focus on the action of the play. This was partially due to the fact that this production did not agree in the slightest with the way that I saw the play initially. I tend to enter plays blind to the script as well as I can, because a lot of the time my vision for a play will interfere with what I see on stage, and disappointment takes hold. Even after letting my thoughts settle, I cannot be sure of how much of my disdain for the technical elements is based on my own ideas and how much is the actual invalidity of it. Regardless, I can say that the set and the lighting did not agree with the script in any way that I can see. I found the sound design to be wholly distracting from the aim of the play, and at multiple points I genuinely could not focus on the play due to the way that the lighting and sound designs were either overwhelming or underwhelming me.
Immediately upon the rise of the curtain I knew that the set was not what I had expected, and I grew disappointed in it over time. The script has a very elaborate description of what it should look like; in fact, upon reading it, I wondered how exactly they would plan to put this on stage. Apparently, to the set designer, Lizzie Clachan, the answer was not to put it on stage at all, which is a sentiment that I do not share. Even if the exact titles of books that were on the shelves in the script were not the same, The imagery that was lost of a performative household when Clachan decided not to put in the actual decoration of the household devastated the storytelling ability of the narrative. The only pieces of furniture that existed on the stage last night were those that were directly utilized by a cast member. While this stripped down approach is common in modern theatre, and does work very well in some instances, I do not think that it worked well here.
I also found during the show that I had no idea how the house was laid out. We see the living room, a parlor, and behind that, a room where we know leads to the kitchen on one side, then stairs and a door on the other. This much is fine, and clear; that much is prescriptive in the text. However, I found that the further into the script we got, the less clear I got on certain points. The primary one was where the front of the house was. About halfway through the script, everybody but Mary is shown going out to town. They go out of a door that is situated near the back of the set, which consistently confused me throughout the play. This is because earlier, when Jamie and James go to work on what is specifically called the front hedge, they go out of a door that is imagined on the left hand side of the stage at the front. Mary also watches them as they work, specifying again that they are working in the front, which seems to be in front of a window that makes up part of the fourth wall. This makes me wonder why the three of them were exiting out of what would be a door on the back side of the side wall of the house. I’m not sure if this is simply a misconception on my part, but I do not understand why there should be such a question over it in the first place. While this moment of inconsistency is small, it did bother me for a while that I was not sure how the house worked. It cast confusion over the entire play for me, not knowing what kind of space I was being isolated in. While the world around the house is meant to be shrouded in fog, the house should be certain.
Clachan also did the costume design, which I had no issues with. I loved Mary’s outfits and the progression of them as her grip on reality began to slip. The initial gown was beautiful, and the way that Edmund’s clothing was a mix of her clothing and his father’s was a beautiful touch, where the stage direction is impossible to meet. Similarly, Jamie is dressed like his father, but seems to be detached in costume design to the rest of the family. Overall, the costumes were nothing special for the most part, but conveyed what they needed to.
The costume design, however, was where I stopped being pleased at all with the show. Jack Knowles designed the lights for this show and looking at his resume, I had high hopes for him, because he clearly has a proper grasp on lighting design. I think that despite his prowess, this project fell short. At no point in the play did I properly see an actor’s face, other than at a singular point where every light on stage lit up, literally blinding the audience. After a few seconds wherein my eyes adjusted, as some of the lights that initially came up dimmed, I could see some of the actors’ faces for a split second. The fact that the only time I could see the actors’ faces was at the very end of the play, immediately after being blinded by an excess of light, is one of the many weak points the lighting design that I observed. That being said, I appreciate the contrast that he brought to this play, as the shadows that haunt these characters and the fog that hangs over them are a very important part of the script.
I think that regardless of the need for shadows on the stage, though, it is more pressing that the audience can see the faces of the actors. While the diction of the actors carried well in the theatre, the lack of lighting on their faces in dimmer scenes often made lines unintelligible, or would have been had I not read the script prior. The absurd amount of down lighting on the actors made it impossible to see the most important and expressive pieces of their faces, at all times other than the moment when every fixture in the theatre came up at full brightness.
One of the largest issues I had with this portion of the design was its lack of coherence with the script, which at least is consistent with the set design in that vein. It is clear to me that the lighting designer did take into account the times of day that the lighting from outside was for; it was slanted in the morning, more full at noon, and slanted in the other direction, then orangeish in the evening. At night, it was cool and nearly non-existent. However, the angles that the light came in on were not consistent with a window, but rather a lack of a wall there. Had the lighting been framed at all, I think that it would have been much more effective, but as it was, I was often distracted by the way that the lighting did not seem to be obstructed by anything, like there was simply a hall of light beyond the piano. Similarly, it is established in the script that Jamie is going to work on the front hedge, and Mary looks at him through the window that makes up the fourth wall. However, even if the light is coming in from the side of the stage, there will be a small amount of light coming through the window. It bothered me quite a bit that the front of the stage, where there was supposedly a window, was often darker than anything else. It was as if the living room was cut off from the entire world, including the rest of the house. Overall, the lighting got better over time, but I never fully enjoyed what the lighting on stage looked like. Nothing that I saw was interesting enough to weigh heavier than the confusion I felt over the lack of lighting and the odd angles it came from. While the lighting was indeed captivating in color scheme and idea, I think that the execution as a whole and the choice to bring in abstract elements nearer to the end was not a strong choice. The words of this play are the focal point, and the lighting design often overshadowed the words, or did not support them. The playwright was very precise in the script about what he wanted it to be, and I feel like in all points of design he was put to the side.
The sound design by Tom Gibbons was similarly simply either not present or too present. I feel like many elements of this play were playing the ending at the beginning, and the sound design was one of them. I understand the want to begin and end the play in foghorns, as that is literally what happens, but the specific foreboding tone of the foghorn that is picked for this show was not conducive to establishing what the initial mood of the play should be. It was my understanding that at the beginning, nobody should know that the family is going to end up in the gutter. I firmly believe that the unease caused by the noise that was played at the very beginning of the play, alongside the lack of enthusiasm by the actors playing James and Mary, did not bode well for the correct understanding of the message of the play. The foghorn is a very useful sound to use in establishing the accumulation of the fog, both outside and within the household, but I feel that its inconsistency also made it difficult to believe in practice. My only other large critique of the sound design was that during the fight choreography that occurs, which has its own issues, there were no sounds. This could be either a directorial/actor job or a sound designer job, but either way I found it extremely unbelievable that the slaps and punches in this script did not make a single noise, and this distracted me for a large amount of time following each time it occurred.
The thing that made the fight choreography questionable other than the sound design was the choreography itself. It seemed that the actors were uncomfortable with the choreography itself, or otherwise the fight director, Rachid Sabitri, did not consider the balconies when he choreographed them. There was a large, visible gap between the hand of one and the body of the other actor each time that there was a fight. They were not believable at all from the balconies, and while I am sure the stalls got a wonderful view of the violent moments, there were ways that we could have gotten a similar experience, had it been considered.
With all of these complaints, one would think that I had a terrible time. On the contrary, I really did enjoy getting to see these actors bring these characters to life. I am not sure that it was the most effective production of this play ever put on, but I did find some redeemable qualities about it, which makes it worthwhile. I think that for a student of theatre, it was a good experience, to see a production that had the makings of something wonderful but simply did not work. However, I would not recommend that others go to see this. I am glad that I saw it once, but I would not see it again.
Theatre in London U of A 