Stuff and Moonshine

A couple of days ago I read a_t_rain’s lovely Will Shakespeare & Ben Jonson fic Bird-Song, and commented that I really loved the behind-the-scenes feel of Will and his fellow playwrights and actors (and their families) bouncing ideas off each other and arguing about what will work best in performance, like a 20th-century rock band. I assumed the last comparison was my imagination acting up, but it turns out that was part of the inspiration. Until two days ago I hadn’t heard of two-thirds of these people, and now I love all of them.

Anyway, I found out the following days there’s a whole series— so far I especially like Nameless, (helps if you’ve seen or at least heard of A Yorkshire Tragedy) and Stripped (in which the King’s Men feel a bit Led Zeppelin to me, what with the complicated grief and numinous stuff happening on a rainy trip to Wales).


In a slightly different genre: Couture and the Theater. Following the events of Top Hat (1935), Horace Hardwicke and Beddini find themselves in conversation. Madge figures it out (and approves) before they do.

Andrew found it for us yesterday. Visually striking— I’m guessing it was shot in front of a green screen, but the stylized backgrounds justify it. (ETA— my apologies to the set designers— apparently some of those spaces were real, constructed on a soundstage, although there was a lot of post-production and VFX compositing) The story takes place in a world of mist exteriors and cyclopean stone interiors that somehow must also contain the occasional translucent screen when a dramatic silhouette is needed; it’s like a combination of Throne of Blood and the Welles Macbeth. The costumes are all quasi-medieval, but Lady MacBeth and Lady MacDuff’s gowns and hairstyles have a vaguely 1940s quality which fits with the black-and-white aesthetic (Andrew also thought one of the Murderers was playing his part in a very Elisha Cooke, Jr way). 

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are just as good as you’d expect. I like that Washington’s Macbeth definitely has that milk of human kindness his wife complains about, so he’s got a moral position to fall from. As Duncan, Brendan Gleason somehow manages to act average-sized and subtle. The performer who’s really stayed with me, though, is Kathryan Hunter as the Witches — according to Wikipedia, she’s mainly a stage performer, known for often playing male roles. Onscreen, the Sisters are sometimes three in one body, sometimes three separate figures, sometimes an old woman with two reflections in a nearby mire. Hunter bends her limbs in impressive ways and has a croaking little voice. No offence to Andy Serkis or Weta, but if she’d played a live-action Gollum the character would have been twice as creepy and twice as pathetic.

This aimed-at-young-people 2017 Dutch production of King Lear looks interesting anyway, but the reviews as run through Google Translate really make me sorry I missed it:

“FRUSTRATED CHILDREN, UNHAPPY FATHERS

Published by Max Arian on 5 March 2017

The daughters of Lear are not just hypocritical and selfish strands at De Toneelmakerij. They have a reason to complain about their father, because he never saw them in the past, he only had an eye for his youngest daughter Cordelia. And the (bastard) son Edmond van Gloster is not such a villain at all, but it is unbearable to him that his father constantly confuses him with his other son, Edgar.”

I don’t know if “confuses” is a Google Translate error for “compares,” but I really like the idea that Gloucester, along with constantly needling Edmund for being illegitimate, also keeps slipping up and forgetting which of his sons is which.

 

“When daddy runs into his exposed hole, his offspring is blind.

Does Dad have a million in his o bag, what are his children kissing him?”

--The Jester from King Lear

The scariest thing is that I recognize which lines got put through the double-translation wringer there.

 

“Knows (Tjebbo Gerritsma) Edelman, loyal to Lear

Also useful to know:

• Kent disguises himself to be unseen

To continue to serve King Lear

• Cordelia disguises himself as a jester to be King Lear’s father
• Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom”

Does Kent mean “Knows” in Dutch?

 

“The relationships between father and sons are already with the Gloucesters as explosive as between Lear and his daughters. Cordelia, that sugar roll, does not make sense to surpass her two sisters sweet words to her father spawn. She likes him, ready. If he is not satisfied with that takes, too bad. In that case not part of his realm, then cast away.”

 

“Despite a nice shape, a long seat”

Headline of a review that felt the show was a bit long

 

“Shakespeare wrote King Lear around 1605, between Othello and Macbeth. It usually gets along with Hamlet as one of his biggest tragedies. Liesbeth Coltof edits and directs the piece to the Stage production for everyone aged 15 and older.

 

Makers

Text William Shakespeare

Editing and direction Liesbeth Coltof

Dramaturgy Paulien Geerlings

Décor and lighting design Guus van Geffen”

 

“My granddaughter of fourteen felt that a lot of angry children had been stuffed into it. That is a problem of the original piece, which sometimes seems to contain some characters and intrigues too much. Colthof has not been able to completely undo that effect with her excellent editing.”

 

www.toneelmakerij.nl

 1. If Dwarves in Scandinavian mythology reproduce by building more dwarves using their crafting skills, does that make them actually a race of self-replicating androids? I don’t think I’ve ever seen them portrayed that way, but it’d be cool.

2. Re-read King Lear, because it’s a favourite of mine and I hadn’t looked at it in a while. The Earl of Kent really is the designated driver of that story, isn’t he? I mean there are scenes where literally everyone else on stage is screaming gibberish around him, and there’s Kent, having an equally bad day but having to go through it sane and sober. At least he gets to take out his frustrations on Oswald; though rereading that scene, and Kent’s subsequent account of what happened, makes me think any director staging this should precede II, ii with a wordless scene of Oswald’s message from Goneril being welcomed and Kent’s message from Lear ignored, so we can see just why Kent loses his temper afterwards.