I feel I’m rather letting my blog name down at the moment

It isn’t that I’m not seeing theatre (though I’m not seeing as much as I would like to), it’s just that I’m not writing about it. I have written more about walking over the last few months than I have about theatre, and that’s rather shocking.

To bring you up to speed, I have seen the following:

Twelfth Night
Peer Gynt
Dido, Queen of Carthage
His Dark Materials Parts 1 & 2
Barbershop Quarter – an Avignon Festival Fringe show – in French!
Blood Brothers

Quite a mixed bag really, and all enjoyable in their own way. Twelfth Night was a YTR production, and was pretty good, though I didn’t like their Olivia. Peer Gynt was a National Theatre of Scotland production, but it was at the Barbican, and I wondered if once again the Barbican was going to be the theatrical pits. Thankfully, though not ‘my’ Peer, which is much more beautiful, there were a lot of things I liked, and ultimately it moved me. Dido I enjoyed, though as a play it’s clear from the writing that Marlowe* wasn’t Shakespeare (not even very early Shakespeare). Some good performances though. If this is all sounding a bit half hearted, well, none of the productions were standout.

I did really enjoy the two parts of His Dark Materials at West Yorkshire Playhouse. I hadn’t really liked the books and had stalled part way through the second one, so I came to a lot of it new. What stuck me was that it’s a very complicated story. As with most alternate universe stories, there’s a lot to take in, as you can’t rely on the natural order of things to carry you through, also, the names can be difficult to remember. The other problem with any fantasy story is, of course, how do you stage it? This one has an ‘armoured bear’, and I’d never actually worked out what one of those was in the books, never mind what it might look like on stage.

They actually did it very well, though I felt Part 2 worked much better than Part 1. It was definitely a production where you needed to see both parts – a potential problem in Leeds, as there were considerably more performances of Part 1.

As for the last two, well, one is coming up in my ‘holiday blog’, and the other is a whole other story.

*Though it is equally very clear that Shakespeare knew the play, and ripped off some of the ideas mercilessly for Hamlet. It’s a good job Marlowe was dead by then, as Will did it all so much better