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I can call spirits from the vasty deep
Continuing my fine tradition of two-nights-before-close reviews, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I just got back from Theatre@First's Henry IV, marking the rare performance of a Shakespearean history play outside the BBC. Cross-casting Falstaff? Works really well. Joan for John is historically suitable and less familiar than Jane; she is a big woman in a green plaid shirt and a perpetual slight hangover frown, her hair streaked with grey and her pockets full of IOUs, and the story's ending has the necessary sting because as much as she blusters and brazens, whatever else she falsifies, her affection for Hal is true. Cross-casting Northumberland would have worked a lot better if the adaptation—condensing both parts into one two-act play—had not cut most of her lines. I missed Glendower's scenes, but they may have been the price of getting out before midnight. Hotspur moves as well as he speaks, restless, roving, tensile as live steel; at the other end of the spectrum, their nearly silent Peto runs an eloquent line in count-me-out understatement—No, no, they were not bound. He does card tricks for Bardolph as they lean up against the proscenium and probably takes all her money. Something more should have been done with the chemistry between Poins and Hal; their last scene together closes on the unresolved And to thee. Anyway, two more performances and then it's all Greek tragedy until Thanksgiving. I really hope they follow it with Henry V next season. Someone who isn't the BBC should.
The rest of this post is an assortment of stuff I didn't post earlier in the week.
1. Courtesy ofhandful_ofdust: Peter Cushing hand-painting a scarf for Helen.
2. In addition to being an extraordinary account of a life and an equally fascinating lens on race in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tom Reiss' The Black Count (2012)—the biography of Alex Dumas—has marvelous footnotes. Latest in the list of things I have learned from reading it:
"Tippoo's plucky army was famous for its 'rocket brigades,' which fired special long-range rockets out of steel and bamboo tubes. In one battle in April 1799, Tippoo's rocket fire disoriented the normally unflappable Colonel Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, and forced a retreat. ('So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger,' wrote one British officer.) But the British army gained the upper hand when a shot struck a magazine of Tippoo's rockets, causing a massive explosion. The victorious British hauled away hundreds of rocket launchers and fire-ready rockets, and four years later they began their own rocket program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal in England, under the direction of William Congreve. It was the so-called Congreve rockets, improvements on Citizen Tippoo Sultan's rockets, that provided the 'rockets' red glare' when the British bombarded Washington, D.C. in 1812."
3. Carthaginian glass head pendant! (Want more?)
4. Rafael can get that fez off by himself.
5. Does anyone have the version of "The Two Magicians" where the last thing he turns into is a coverlet and the last thing she turns into is a clothes moth with an appetite? Apparently I don't.
Tomorrow we recycle a lot of seltzer bottles. It's exciting.
P.S. This vase is really cool.
derspatchel and I just got back from Theatre@First's Henry IV, marking the rare performance of a Shakespearean history play outside the BBC. Cross-casting Falstaff? Works really well. Joan for John is historically suitable and less familiar than Jane; she is a big woman in a green plaid shirt and a perpetual slight hangover frown, her hair streaked with grey and her pockets full of IOUs, and the story's ending has the necessary sting because as much as she blusters and brazens, whatever else she falsifies, her affection for Hal is true. Cross-casting Northumberland would have worked a lot better if the adaptation—condensing both parts into one two-act play—had not cut most of her lines. I missed Glendower's scenes, but they may have been the price of getting out before midnight. Hotspur moves as well as he speaks, restless, roving, tensile as live steel; at the other end of the spectrum, their nearly silent Peto runs an eloquent line in count-me-out understatement—No, no, they were not bound. He does card tricks for Bardolph as they lean up against the proscenium and probably takes all her money. Something more should have been done with the chemistry between Poins and Hal; their last scene together closes on the unresolved And to thee. Anyway, two more performances and then it's all Greek tragedy until Thanksgiving. I really hope they follow it with Henry V next season. Someone who isn't the BBC should.The rest of this post is an assortment of stuff I didn't post earlier in the week.
1. Courtesy of
handful_ofdust: Peter Cushing hand-painting a scarf for Helen.2. In addition to being an extraordinary account of a life and an equally fascinating lens on race in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tom Reiss' The Black Count (2012)—the biography of Alex Dumas—has marvelous footnotes. Latest in the list of things I have learned from reading it:
"Tippoo's plucky army was famous for its 'rocket brigades,' which fired special long-range rockets out of steel and bamboo tubes. In one battle in April 1799, Tippoo's rocket fire disoriented the normally unflappable Colonel Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, and forced a retreat. ('So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger,' wrote one British officer.) But the British army gained the upper hand when a shot struck a magazine of Tippoo's rockets, causing a massive explosion. The victorious British hauled away hundreds of rocket launchers and fire-ready rockets, and four years later they began their own rocket program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal in England, under the direction of William Congreve. It was the so-called Congreve rockets, improvements on Citizen Tippoo Sultan's rockets, that provided the 'rockets' red glare' when the British bombarded Washington, D.C. in 1812."
3. Carthaginian glass head pendant! (Want more?)
4. Rafael can get that fez off by himself.
5. Does anyone have the version of "The Two Magicians" where the last thing he turns into is a coverlet and the last thing she turns into is a clothes moth with an appetite? Apparently I don't.
Tomorrow we recycle a lot of seltzer bottles. It's exciting.
P.S. This vase is really cool.
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It is!
But am I a bad person in that I am now shipping lion/goat?
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The relationship might be dietarily complex, but I make no moral judgment.
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You, too!
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No, and having spent the morning cleaning out my closet I'm sort of glad I don't. Going out to buy cedar balls later.
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That's fair! I'm so sorry. Ergh.
(I needed it as an antidote to reading about violent misogyny while realizing I was listening to a version where she doesn't escape him; bide, lady, bide—there's nowhere you can hide was all of a sudden a lot more upsetting.)
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I just came back from seeing the same production of Henry IV, and enjoyed it tremendously. The tension of everyone talking about Percy and Hal as being each other's opposite, and talking to each of them about the other long before we ever see them meet, was elevated to the level of pure awesome by having the roles play by two actors who resemble each other. Maybe that's traditional for this play? I don't know, I've never seen it before, only read bits of it? But, anyways, it created this wonderful feeling that when the two of them met, they would somehow cancel each other out and a new character would arise from the ashes. Which, in a way, is sort of what happens.
I knew as soon as I saw the cast list that Melissa's take on Falstaff would be heartbreaking. And that was before I knew Shelley would choose to end the play on that line instead of finishing the scene as written. That entire last scene, in this production, kind of blew my mind.
(I want to see T@F do Henry V too. I imprinted hard on the Branagh film version, being fifteen years old when it came out, but I never get tired of seeing new productions of it.)
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Same, plus the Young Tradition. But they've all got the ending I'd rather not listen to right now. (See reply to
Maybe that's traditional for this play? I don't know, I've never seen it before, only read bits of it?
I've only seen Henry IV similarly amalgamated as part of the Actors' Shakespeare Project's The Coveted Crown, where they were visual foils—Hal dark, Hotspur bright. They didn't continue with Henry V, either!
I knew as soon as I saw the cast list that Melissa's take on Falstaff would be heartbreaking.
I'd never seen her before;
And that was before I knew Shelley would choose to end the play on that line instead of finishing the scene as written.
Yes; I liked that. It needed another beat before the lights went so abruptly down (unless the sudden stop was the point; I was expecting another scene change, not the very clever credits music), but it was a harsh, unnerving ending. I liked Poins standing back with his arms crossed, forewarned how this scene is going to end; Peto tugging Bardolph offstage, twigging faster than Falstaff that the game—that is all it ever was—is over. I am not sure that I liked Hal's renunciation being so outwardly angry: I felt there could have been some less declamatory way of showing us how much it cost him to break with Falstaff and Eastcheap. But it worked very well. It's over faster than anyone is ready for.
(I want to see T@F do Henry V too. I imprinted hard on the Branagh film version, being fifteen years old when it came out, but I never get tired of seeing new productions of it.)
I've seen Branagh's and Olivier's; I didn't imprint on either, though if I combine them and squint I feel like I'm getting a decent rounded view of the play. How does the BBC's Hollow Crown do with it?
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I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't yet seen it. It's rare that I can actually schedule a large chunk of time to watch something on a screen from start to finish, and many people have told me that this is basically the only way in which the BBC Hollow Crown really makes sense. Kind of intimidating.
Imprinting on the Branagh version had, I think, very much to do with being fifteen when it came out--old enough to follow the language and young enough to see only its virtues. (It may also have had something to do with my being the same age as Christian Bale. :))
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Wow. Marathon Shakespeare. I feel like that shouldn't be true—surely you must be able to pause between plays and catch your breath—but I haven't seen it; maybe they're cleverly interwoven in some way that makes it harder to find a stopping point.
Imprinting on the Branagh version had, I think, very much to do with being fifteen when it came out</i I think that's perfectly fair.