Over on My London Your London I’ve got a review of Mariana Pineda – the 20th-century telling of the life and death of a 19th-century revolutionary heroine of the title.
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Theatre Lady of Quality TheatreCoriolanus: Macready or Kemble?
July 20, 2006 – 11:25 pm
My 19th-century blogger, Frances Williams Wynn, is tonight back at the theatre, with Macready’s Coriolanus, comparing it to that of another 19th-century great, Kemble.
“I should say that Kemble was more Roman, more dignified, and Macready more true to universal nature,” is her conclusion.
Interesting to compare it to the recent Globe production of the same play – I suspect the bull-headed military glory-seeking might have made more sense to her era than our own.
The mind metaphor?
July 14, 2006 – 7:02 am
Over on My London Your London I’ve got a review of the BAC show A Lie of the Mind, by Sam Shepherd. Is it a metaphor for the state of America in the word? If not, why not?
Greek comedy as you didn’t know it
July 13, 2006 – 8:42 am
Interesting piece on In Our Time this morning on Greek comedy – described as being most like seeing Oh! What a Lovely War. I also liked the news that agone (sp?), from which we get agony, was the ancient Greek for competition. (And they were very keen on competitions, even having them for ploughing.)
You can listen on a computer or by podcast. Well worth it.
One for the diary
July 11, 2006 – 5:29 pm
Over on My London Your London, as promised, if slightly later than hoped, you’ll find my review of Spring Awakening, a fine play from 1891 that still feels as fresh and relevant as the day it was written. It is only on at the Union Theatre until July 22, so get in quick.
My 19th-century theatre critic
July 10, 2006 – 7:56 pm
My 19th-century blogger, Miss Frances William-Wynn, is today proving again her credentials as a theatre critic, commenting on a performance of Lear by one of the era’s great actor managers, William Charles Macready. That link has a couple of images of Macready, which suggests that he certainly wasn’t classically handsome – it also explains her comment about playing all of Shakespeare’s words, since apparently around her time there was a fashion for grand spectacle and long set-changes, which required cuts in the words to reduce length.
Miss Williams Wynn says:
It is Shakespeare’s Lear: not a word is added to the text; the painfully fine catastrophe is acted; and the play, in the regular theatre phrase, well got up, excepting in the female parts, which were almost as ill dressed as they were acted. I cannot conceive a better model for a painter of Lear than Macready exhibited in face, figure, dress, and apparent age.
The latter seems to me the leading point of his representation of the character, in which he substitutes the imbecility of age for insanity, which I have hitherto considered as the leading feature of Lear.
Wikipedia has a good roundup of Macready’s career, including his involvement in a performance of “the Scottish play” in New York at which 23 were killed and 100 injured in a riot. That’s what you call taking your theatre seriously.
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