For a while now, there's been an eerie feeling that we've been living in an era not unlike the 1930s, an era of extreme decadence just before something terrible is about to happen. Four recent plays in London reflect this zietgeist, the excellent and very intense one-woman play Zelda at Trafalgar Studios, the ambitious Spilt Milk production of Caroline af Petersens' play Save Me--also about the meteoric rise, decline, and fall of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, the National's trenchant production of Timon of Athens with Simon Russell Beale, and Mademoiselle Julie, a French adaptation of Strindberg's classic at the Barbican starring Juliette Binoche.
The most overall impressive of these four plays has to be Zelda, a 70-minute monologue in the voice of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, written and performed by the actress Kelly Burke. It is hard to say which is better, the writing of the piece based on Zelda's letters or Burke's performance. Burke, uncannily resembling a young Annette Benning, grabs us from the very start and never let's us go as she encapsulates in her words and acting both Zelda's particular story and the universal story of female creativity thwarted and the descent into madness. The story of what truly happened between Zelda and F. Scott can never be known, but it is sure that Scott used sections of Zelda's diary verbatim in his novels, published several of her short stories under his name, and adamantly discouraged her from becoming a writer herself.
Save Me at the Union Theatre captured the glamour and rampant indulgence of the Jazz Age while also providing a searing look into Zelda and Scott's tortured relationship. The performances by Sherry Newton as Zelda, Francis Moore as Scott, and William Harrison-Wallis as Maxwell Perkins, Scott and Zelda's editor and guardian angel, were compelling and fun to watch, if a tad overwrought. The play, based in large part on the brilliant biography of Zelda by Nancy Milford, is admirable for its ambition. Unfortunately, there is no real development after the first half. The second half of the play was just a reiteration of what we had already seen. I would have been much more enthusiastic about the production had I left at the interval.
Both Zelda and Save Me were performed in very small theatres in which the audience is practically a part of the production. Many hate this intimacy whereas I find it integral to my definition of theatre--far more challenging for everyone involved and therefore always a more vital experience than a play seen on a remote stage.
As if to reinforce this lack of connection or intimacy between the audience and the play, the Barbican's French production of Strindberg's Miss Julie has a big glass wall at the front of the stage behind which the action takes place. Subtle. The story revolves around the mutual manipulation of a rich woman trapped by society's prescribed femininity and the ambitious family chauffer trapped by his class. The production was a near complete disaster--why I keep going to these movie-star fueled things I don't know. There is a sucker born every minute and I am one! Banality wrapped up in style is so over! But did I nevertheless glean through all of the alienated pomp a thoroughly radical playwright who must have influenced Beckett? (btw I've never seen a Strindberg play before--so sad this was my first.)
All I can say about the Timon of Athens at the National is get thee to the play! It is all about us! How greedy and hypocritical we all are. How the only thing we truly hold sacred is gold. How we are willing to sacrifice liberty itself to the pursuit of money all in the name of liberty. And it is hilarious, moving, chilling, beautiful, start to finish. I have heard complaints about the second act but my god Simon Russell Beale goes beyond his usual genius precisely in the second act. And such gorgeous speeches:
I 'll example you with thievery:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief.
If I can, I think I will go see it again and take my sixteen-year-old son. Shakespeare never ceases to astonish me.
The most overall impressive of these four plays has to be Zelda, a 70-minute monologue in the voice of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, written and performed by the actress Kelly Burke. It is hard to say which is better, the writing of the piece based on Zelda's letters or Burke's performance. Burke, uncannily resembling a young Annette Benning, grabs us from the very start and never let's us go as she encapsulates in her words and acting both Zelda's particular story and the universal story of female creativity thwarted and the descent into madness. The story of what truly happened between Zelda and F. Scott can never be known, but it is sure that Scott used sections of Zelda's diary verbatim in his novels, published several of her short stories under his name, and adamantly discouraged her from becoming a writer herself.
Save Me at the Union Theatre captured the glamour and rampant indulgence of the Jazz Age while also providing a searing look into Zelda and Scott's tortured relationship. The performances by Sherry Newton as Zelda, Francis Moore as Scott, and William Harrison-Wallis as Maxwell Perkins, Scott and Zelda's editor and guardian angel, were compelling and fun to watch, if a tad overwrought. The play, based in large part on the brilliant biography of Zelda by Nancy Milford, is admirable for its ambition. Unfortunately, there is no real development after the first half. The second half of the play was just a reiteration of what we had already seen. I would have been much more enthusiastic about the production had I left at the interval.
Both Zelda and Save Me were performed in very small theatres in which the audience is practically a part of the production. Many hate this intimacy whereas I find it integral to my definition of theatre--far more challenging for everyone involved and therefore always a more vital experience than a play seen on a remote stage.
As if to reinforce this lack of connection or intimacy between the audience and the play, the Barbican's French production of Strindberg's Miss Julie has a big glass wall at the front of the stage behind which the action takes place. Subtle. The story revolves around the mutual manipulation of a rich woman trapped by society's prescribed femininity and the ambitious family chauffer trapped by his class. The production was a near complete disaster--why I keep going to these movie-star fueled things I don't know. There is a sucker born every minute and I am one! Banality wrapped up in style is so over! But did I nevertheless glean through all of the alienated pomp a thoroughly radical playwright who must have influenced Beckett? (btw I've never seen a Strindberg play before--so sad this was my first.)
All I can say about the Timon of Athens at the National is get thee to the play! It is all about us! How greedy and hypocritical we all are. How the only thing we truly hold sacred is gold. How we are willing to sacrifice liberty itself to the pursuit of money all in the name of liberty. And it is hilarious, moving, chilling, beautiful, start to finish. I have heard complaints about the second act but my god Simon Russell Beale goes beyond his usual genius precisely in the second act. And such gorgeous speeches:
I 'll example you with thievery:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief.
If I can, I think I will go see it again and take my sixteen-year-old son. Shakespeare never ceases to astonish me.
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