{ grant my last request and let me hold you / don't shrug your shoulders / lay down beside me. }

[delga]

In the past fortnight I have seen two plays, hurrah. The first was The Playboy of the Western World with Robert Sheehan and Ruth Negga, and the second was Death and the Maiden with Thandie Newton, Tom Goodman-Hill, and Anthony Calf.

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The Playboy of the Western World was not what I thought it was going to be, but was very, very funny. There's a real edge of tragedy to it, too, as the protagonist is taken in, and later summarily rejected by, a small rural community. Whilst in the people's good graces, he charms a barmaid, invites attention from a local widow, and is alternately cheered and jeered at by the pub regulars. Sheehan was his usual booming self as Christy Mahon, but it was Negga's turn as the sharp and sometimes acerbic Pegeen Mike that I loved the most.

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Death and the Maiden was quite different, and by the end my muscles ached with tension. Thandie Newton played Paulina Escobar (née Salas), a woman who is still living with the mental scars of having been raped and tortured under a military regime almost twenty years previous. One night her husband, Gerardo - having just been made the head of a commission that is looking into the crimes committed during the military coup - is given a lift home by Roberto Miranda, a doctor. Paulina is convinced that Miranda led the group of men who abused her. She ties him up and subjects him to a trial, eventually eliciting a confession from him that was fed to him by Gerardo who is frantic over his wife's sudden breakdown.

It is never clear whether or not Roberto is innocent, and there are two harrowing scenes in the third act where first Paulina and then Roberto recount the events of twenty years previous that were staged brilliantly. It was difficult for me to watch some of the latter half of the play because I do not engage in victim blaming, but the play is orchestrated in such a way that you have to question both Roberto and Paulina. It is a treatise on the nature of judgement, and was very neatly put together. There were moments when I wish it had been a little looser - a little messier. I don't know that I can recommend it (it's miserable, honestly) but it was very, very good.

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Up next: three posts on London Film Fest. I am still trying to work out how I want to do these posts, so please forgive me for the succession of them that are about to sully your flists.

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edit: Apparently I completely failed on posting about Di and Viv and Rose which hestia8 and I went to see four weeks ago, or Othello, which I saw a day later with the Ex-Flatmate.

Di and Viv and Rose, written by the wonderful Amelia Bullmore (who I bumped into in the ladies - awkward), and performed by Tamzin Outhwaite, Nicola Walker and Claudie Blakley respectively, was the story of three women who became friends during university and the trajectory of their friendship over thirty years. It was wonderful. Bullmore really nailed that atmosphere of university house-sharing, but also of female friendship on the whole. Who doesn't know that girl who was flighty, and fun-loving, and pregnant too early in life? Who doesn't know that girl who was serious, and dedicated to her studies, and always reforming your life in terms of current feminist theory? Who hasn't, at some point, come back from a night out, only to fling themselves around their front room to some song on the radio with their best friends in tow?

It was very, very well written. and the cast more than did justice to the script. The Hampstead Theatre downstairs theatre is a tiny slip of a stage, but all the women filled it with real kindness. I related to so much of it, even the later acts that took place post-university through to middle age. I'm not sure that I agree with Bullmore's implicit judgement of Viv by the end of the play, but I think that what transpires between Di and Viv in the closing confrontation is very true to life. During the interval, and after the play had ended, hestia8 and I couldn't stop talking about what we were watching, but what I think is the real sticking point of the play was that we could talk about it and other things in our lives at the same time. The play complemented our experiences, and I think Bullmore has a real deft touch in that way, that this could be very much a piece of theatre, and yet also something of a mirror.

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I only today discovered that the artistic director of the Sheffield Crucible is Richard Wilson. I don't know why, but it seems apropos. It's a wonderful stage, with the seating coming on three sides. After some fuckery with the trains The Ex-Flatmate and I had to run for the theatre and made it by the skin of our teeth.

I like Othello a lot because Iago pushes and pulls people all over the place with a sort of grace, but I am aware that of all the tragedies it is that play, the one that people don't really buy into. I think a lot of the problem is that unlike other Shakespearean works, it is not an ensemble piece, and so if your cast is weak, then there is nothing to cohere the action. There has to be chemistry between your Iago and Othello and Desdemona. At no one time does the cast know everything about one another, and that's a tricky thing to stage successfully.

Luckily, this cast was led by Clarke Peters and Dominic West. Of course, I'd just seen West in Butley where he played a McNulty-like university professor, verbose and down on his luck. If I had any doubt that he's a skilled actor, it was dispelled by his Iago who was cunning and louche, and completely different from Butley. Peters had less to work with, save for Othello's rage which seemed to burst from him in a torrent. The acoustics in the Crucible are bloody fantastic. The rhythm of the verse between them was brilliant, and the rest of the cast was very good, too, which helped. I was amused by the actress playing Emilia, Iago's wife, taken in completely by her light character and suddenly shrewish turns. I never felt like the two leads were eating up the stage; they were gracious with their performances. At some point, I need to go to the Crucible again. What a brilliant location. I recommend you go if you have the chance.