7 posts tagged “royal court theatre”
I know, I know - couldn't resist.
So tonight was the second performance and just as good as the first. Interesting to see the subtle differences in the actors performances and despite the cast describing the audience as lively I felt the sadness of the play more this time.
There was a Q & A afterwards hence the cast comment. As predicted I didn't ask a question - I very nearly commented though (ooh go me!) but the conversation moved on quickly.
Mr Whishaw didn't say much but twiddled with his unruly hair a lot. He had changed into his civvies which consisted of white shirt and red braces. Can't remember what was on the bottom half because I was so taken with the red braces which I'm sure I've seen him wearing before in pictures. He's a braces man, obviously.
Rufus Wainwright was in the audience and sort of asked a question. I say sort of because it ended up being more of a statement of how he felt about the play. An interesting perspective though, he felt the playwright Mike Bartlett purposefully plays with the audience, drawing their sympathy and pushing them away again in equal measure.
There were a few other famous faces in the audience which I can't name. Coincidentally one was one of the older actors in the film I saw at at test screening just last night.
Great to get to hear what people thought of the play though and get the cast and director's viewpoint.
And aside from seeing Mr W beforehand and in the bar afterwards (alongside R P-J, Sadie Frost and the very tall Oliver Chris from Green Wing) I got to meet the lovely @polyg who is one of my theatre loving twitterers. We follow each other and via twitter discovered that we had tickets for the same night. A couple of DM's swapping mobiles and we meet for the first time.
Now that is social media.
I can only assume that the dressing rooms at the Royal Court theatre are tiny or smell of block drains or something because the actors that are performing there seem to prefer the sofa's in the public bar for a pre-performance drink or chat.
Then barely had I recovered and the man himself, Mr Whishaw, walked in and bought a banana and a tangerine (you think they'd get a bit of fruit laid on for them, the theatres aren't that impoverished surely?)
Then there was the theatre audience itself. It's like a Donmar in Pimlico with Imogen Stubbs enjoying the marvellous Cock (sorry but they will give modern plays such provocative titles) in the Jerwood Upstairs. Anyway I'm too tired now to do justice to writing about Cock except to say that it was my first visit Upstairs and the theatre was so deliciously thimble-sized that I was close enough to Mr Whishaw to touch him. I didn't, I hasten to add, I sat on my hands. However, at one point one of the other actors shoved him and I thought he was going to land into my lap.
Anyway tomorrow, tomorrow for more on that. Tired and have an early start.
Looks like I'm going to get the chance to be on the same stage as Ben Whishaw after all...
Thank you for booking to see Cock here at the Royal Court.
As you may know, the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs is an adaptable studio space that can be configured in many different ways. At the time of going on sale we had not agreed the design for this production, so were unaware of the exact seating arrangements. We can now confirm the seating layout for Cock. As always we have endeavoured to make the seating as comfortable as possible, however the unique design of this production has meant that a proportion of the seats are without back rests. There is also no space underneath the seating for coats and bags. We would therefore ask that you deposit all such items, free of charge, in the theatre’s Cloakroom, which is located downstairs in the Stalls foyer area.
Rehearsals are going well, with a current running time of 1 hour, 45 minutes without interval. The production’s design means that all seating is accessed by crossing the stage. We are therefore not able to admit latecomers or readmit anyone who leaves during the performance. We would kindly ask that you arrive in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in good time before the performance is due to start in order to deposit bags at the cloakroom and make your way to the auditorium.
If you have any concerns with the above information, please do feel free to contact our team who will be happy to discuss these with you. We are contactable on 020 7565 5050, or via email at boxoffice@royalcourttheatre.com.
I do hope you enjoy the performance of Cock and we look forward to welcoming you to the Royal Court.
Best wishes
Dan Alicandro
Deputy Sales Manager
I've been scouring the internet for months and months for news of when sometime Stanley stalker and actor-fav Ben Whishaw would be treading the boards again.
He's got films in the can (Bright Star & The Tempest) but I crave the live performance, so imagine my joy when I discovered this little golden nugget on a theatre website.
Yep Mr Whishaw is taking to the stage at the Royal Court Upstairs in November in a play called Cock about a man who falls for a women while on a break from his boyfriend. It's in a small intimate theatre, with unallocated seating so I'll be practising my elbows-out dash to the front row between now and Nov 20 (yep booked tickets already). Just hope he doesn't fling anything at me this time.
So there I was at the Royal Court Theatre, heading to the loos and who was standing over by the bar? Yep, you've guessed it, Mr Whishaw.
Now those with their finger on the pulse of London theatre-land will quickly point out the he had good reason to be at the theatre as he was taking part in a one-off read-through of a Caryl Churchill play as part of a season celebrating her 70th birthday. But ahh, I say, shouldn't he have been back stage preparing, doing voice exercises, putting powder on his nose or whatever it is that thesps do 15 minutes before curtain up?
Stalking I tell you, stalking.
And as a result he didn't have time to brush his hair before he got on stage or put on shirt that had all the buttons sewn on (I know it was only a read through and therefore there are no costumes but you are sitting on stage in front of several hundred people).
Luckily Miranda Richardson, who was also performing, was wearing the most bizarre outfit which included purple trousers and very strange yellowy-brown floppy boots that quite held me transfixed for much of the 'play', which was called Ice Cream and was excellent by the way.
The other actors weren't that much better particularly Hattie Morahan's scarlet snakeskin cowboy boots teamed with black skinny jeans and black cardie which were equally distracting. Gok Wan would have had a field day.
And while I'm here, I just like to comment on who lifted the stone that all the actors live under because they were out in force. Nobody mega famous mainly loads of familiar faces from the telly. The only one I can name is Eddie Redmayne who is currently playing Angel in the marvellous BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
I think other than myself and a small gaggle of Whishaw fans the rest of the audience seemed to be made up of wannabe thesps. Snatches of conversations I overhead almost invariably included tales of auditions and which actors in audience were in what or had been. And then there was the air kissing...
Have been meaning to write up my thoughts on Polly Stenham's That Face which I saw a couple of weeks back but I've been lazy. And I'm glad I was, because it means I can kill two birds with one stone and comment on last nights The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold too.
Both are about families and it is interesting to see certain parallels even though there is more than 50 years between their creation.
Stenham is the West End's hot new talented playwright. She penned That Face aged only 19 and after a successful debut at the Royal Court Theatre it transferred to the West End.
She's got more writing talent in her little finger than I'll ever have producing such a rounded, well structured and well observed piece at such a tender age but if she is half as talented as this implies then I'm more excited about what is to come.
That Face is the story of a posh middle-class family, fractured by divorce and going into free fall. The mother is a drunken, vallium-popping recluse played with just the right amount of stagger and neurosis by Lindsey Duncan. Her son is trying desperately to straighten her out having dropped out of university to keep an eye on her but has in his immaturity becomes dependent on her neediness.
And the teenage daughter played by Skin's Hannah Murray has just gone a bit wild without the steadying parental influence and at the start of the play is in the process of getting kicked out of her posh school by drugging and torturing a younger pupil as part of a initiation ceremony.
It skips along at a merry pace exposing some foibles and failings in modern western society as kids try to clean up the mother before Dad arrives to cart her off to a clinic. Duncan's is not the only sterling performance in fact the only weakness was Murray who had a tone of voice that just grated after a while and played the neglected spoilt teenager in the stiff-armed gesturing way that seems to have come straight out of drama school.
The ending came all to quick which was a sign of how enjoyable the whole thing was and the same can be said for the Chalk Garden at the Donmar.
Bagnold, who is probably most famous for writing National Velvet, based the idea on her own experience. Once again a dysfunctional family is the central theme this time an eccentric Grandmother who, disapproving of her daughters remarriage has taken her teenage granddaughter in. It is a posh household with an aging, bedridden butler living unseen upstairs but always at the end of the phone voicing opinions, a paranoid man servant who was imprisoned as a consciencious objector during the war and the new Governess who is just quietly strange compared to everyone else.
Naturally the granddaughter is intelligent but completely wild and over indulged. In the story, the Governess has a secret to hide but her presence does more than make the family want to unravel her mystery, it also unearths a few painful truths about their own relationships.
It was refreshing to see a play that had a predominantly maturer cast led by the wickedly funny Margaret Tyzack who plays the Grandmother and Penelope Wilton who plays the Governess. I feel I'm doing a great disservice to Wilton when the one role she's had which I always remember is Sean's mum in Sean of the Dead. She is certainly an actress of far more depth and scope than that performance betrays.
Felicity Jones at 24 plays the 16 daughter and is one of those actresses who'll be pulling off characters 10-15 years her junior for much of her career. I was impressed by her in ITV's Northanger Abbey and had to google her when I got home just to check she really is in her 20's. Having those extra years of experience certainly helped in her performance compared with Murray in That Face but there was still a bit of the stiff-armed, precociousness going on.
The Chalk Garden is clever and brilliantly funny with some great one-liners. Several audience members felt moved enough to utter a very British middle class 'bravo' during the final applause and if I wasn't an oik and under 50, I'd have said 'bravo' too.
Tonight Nadia and I went to see The Pain and the Itch by Bruce Norris at the Royal Court theatre. It is a social satire set around a thanksgiving dinner. Sexy spy no. 1 (Matthew Macfadyen *sigh*) starred and put in a sterling performance on what was the first night of preview week.
He plays a character unlike any I've seen him play before which is refreshing as so many actors these days seem bent on playing it safe in the choice of roles.
This character is incredibly annoying. He is house husband, staying at home to look after the kids while his wife goes off to work to pay for their affluent lifestyle, a lifestyle they feel guilty about but not enough to turn there back on it and do something more worthwhile and fulfilling.
The role reversals in the family unit is obviously causing tension and the death of their immigrant non-english speaking maid and the subsequent explanation of the events leading up to her death exposes the lies their lives have become built around. Indeed the denouement has a liberal sprinkling of irony. It all sounds very serious but is actually very funny, with a cleverly observed writing and acting.
The Royal Court is a lovely theatre, medium sized with reasonably comfy seats - we had a great view from the centre of the third row. *sigh*
It has been refurbished in recent years and the bar/restaurant has a functional, minimalist look and serves superb un-pretentious food - much of it from Borough market and Neal's Yard and is very reasonably priced. Worth a visit on it's own if you are looking for a quick meal in the Sloane Square area.
Sexy spy no. 1. So close. *sigh*
