Archive for 1 March, 2008
Grouching about angsty theatre
I went to see Northern Ballet Theatre’s Hamlet the week before last at Leeds Grand Theatre. Northern Ballet had obviously decided that what Shakespeare’s famous tale really needed to give it a bit of oomph was the addition of gang rape, torture and the odd stabbing, all set in wartime Paris.
I don’t remember the text of Hamlet segwaying into Sweeney Todd?
Then there’s The Grouch at West Yorkshire Playhouse where I wasted 90 minutes of my life last Friday night (only 90 minutes, we bailed out at the interval). Moliere’s The Misanthrope had been promisingly adapted to a contemporary setting, but was in rhyming couplets of the ‘fuller figure/Renee Zellweger’ variety and lumbered with a bunch of unlikeable characters who smoked like chimneys and (shock, horror) snorted coke. We’re talking about a play so enthralling that the ladies sitting on both sides of me fell asleep.
It really was that bad
I just think that a section of the Arts community (bolstered by the cushion of public funding) has lost sight of the need to engage and entertain their paying audience and have got a bit too introspective.
I’m not saying that theatres should show crowd pleasing Greatest Hits of Andrew Lloyd Webber back to back, just that there isn’t the need to shoehorn all this angst, shock and general posturing into everything.
