Kat'a Kabanova at the Royal Opera, or, Adrift in Spaces

Note: A belated review of the performance on Saturday 9th February 2019.

After last year's disappointing From the House of the Dead I'd hoped the Royal Opera's Janacek cycle was going to pick up with this second installment. Sadly, while it's mostly strong musically, Richard Jones's production left me emotionally cold and, in Act 3, increasingly irritated.

In the title role Amanda Majeski has been highly praised (some near me gave her a standing ovation). She certainly sings much of the role very finely - particularly her near monologue in Act 3. But in other places I would have liked a little more breadth to a sound that sometimes to my ear came across as a little shrill. As an actress she simply didn't make the same impression on me she seems to have made on others, though perhaps that was down to Jones's direction. The rest of the large number of solo roles were solidly taken but nobody consistently held me vocally. In the pit Edward Gardner making his house debut (and the latest candidate being advanced as Pappano's potential successor) shaped this score far better than Wigglesworth did last year's House of the Dead, and drew spirited playing from the Orchestra. But overall the musical qualities were not enough to distract from my irritation with the direction.

When We Have Sufficiently Tortured One Another at the National, or, We Are Listening to You. For Hours.

Note: This is a review of the performance on Monday 4th February 2019.

It was instructive to see this show the evening after Ian McKellen's mesmerising solo tour de force at the Bridge. This show also possesses fine performers in Cate Blanchett and Stephen Dillane, with a strong supporting turn from Jessica Gunning. Blanchett in particular delivers a mountain of text as compellingly as McKellen. Unfortunately there's a considerable gap between the poetry of such great writers as Shakespeare and Gerald Manley Hopkins, and the prose of Martin Crimp.

I'd previously seen a revival of a Crimp play at the Almeida and his two operatic collaborations with the composer George Benjamin, none of which did much for me. This text is considerably worse. We are in a garage in which a couple are playing sex games, with an audience of four. Who exactly the couple are, why they've taken to this peculiar kind of role playing, why on the theme of Pamela (this show is allegedly variations on Richardson's novel - not having read it I can't comment on to what extent that claim stacks up), and why on earth three of the quartet of watcher-participants are involved are all questions which struck me as pertinent but which Crimp never answers. He does belatedly indicate that the fourth watcher is being paid - which given what we are expected to accept that gentleman is subjected to suggests that the unemployment situation is far worse than I'd realised. In place of meaningful exploration of character or motive, or indeed plot that goes anywhere, all we get is endless talk. It was not clear to me what the message was or even if there was one. Occasionally a striking image leaps out from the verbiage, but mostly, despite the best efforts of the performers I just could not get interested in what was going on.

An Evening with Ian McKellen at the Bridge, or, In the Presence of Greatness

Note: A belated review of the performance at the Bridge Theatre on Sunday 3rd February.

If you're lucky enough to have secured a ticket for this theatrical event, the first thing to do when you arrive is buy a programme. Not only will this go, along with all the profits, towards a worthy cause chosen by the venue (for me it was for Flute Theatre to undertake educational work with Southwark school children) but it contains a map. More vividly than the list of venues on the tour's website it shows the scale of what McKellen is doing. In this era of justifiable concern about accessibility, McKellen is making a remarkable practical commitment by playing venues like The Hafren in Newtown or the Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis - places, I suspect, that rarely see a theatre performer of such stature (it struck me as a rather sad, but unsurprising comment, on my current home town of Lincoln that its fine Theatre Royal has missed out).

The show itself is in two parts. In the first, longer, section, McKellen combines recitation (from Tolkien to D H Lawrence), anecdote and autobiography. In the second, we go on a whirlwind tour through the best bits (in McKellen's view) of Shakespeare. The first with its windows into vanished worlds - a time when Bolton had three theatres, a time when male couples could not openly show their affection for each other for fear of arrest - I found the more moving. McKellen's delivery of the Shakespeare is consistently magnificent - someone should be planning a production of As You Like It so he can cross Jaques off his list, and Shallow's recitation of the dead was haunting - but the framing device, which I thought required selective deafness on McKellen's part wears a little thin.