Tag: Thalissa Teixeira

Blood Wedding at the Young Vic review ****

Blood Wedding

Young Vic, 11th October 2019

I got a bit nervous going into this. For those who don’t know, South African director Yael Farber has a certain style, an aesthetic, and approach to interpretation of classic plays, which isn’t too everyone’s taste. For me it works. Mies Julie, Knives in Hens, Les Blancs, even the much derided Salome at the NT, all drew me in. Very satisfying. We have her take on Hamlet also at the Young Vic to look forward to next year and newbie, the Boulevard Theatre, has lined her up to direct her compatriot, Athol Fugard’s, Hello and Goodbye.

For Blood Wedding though I had roped in the SO, a more forbidding critic, who is not, as most chums rightly are, as tolerant as the Tourist of, shall we say directorial longueurs. And this was near 2 hours straight through. On the benches of the Young Vic main space. And with her back playing up.

As it turned out I had nothing to fear. Lorca’s play, (his day job was poet after all), has a mythic and elegiac quality perfectly suited to Ms Farber’s ethereal approach, though this tale of forbidden love and revenge is not without drama and lends itself to a clear feminist interpretation. All this and more was on show at the Young Vic. A barely there, in the round, set design from Susan Hilferty, with occasional visual declamation via doors on one side, some artful cascades and a rope and harness which permitted muscular bad boy Leonardo (Gavin Drea) and absconding (nameless) Bride (Aoife Duffin) the striking means to pretend gallop. The intervention of the symbolic Moon (Thalissa Teixera), who can now add superb flamenco singing to her acting flair, and woodcutters (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva and Faaiz Mbelizi) made perfect, just about, sense. The bold lighting of Natasha Chivers, the score of Isobel Waller-Bridge, the spectral hum of Emma Laxton’s sound design, the balletic movement of Imogen Knight, witness the closing fight (overseen by Kate Waters) and subsequent requiem.

Most of all though Marina Carr’s beautiful translation. By shifting the setting of Lorca’s revenge tragedy to rural Ireland, though never quite leaving 1930’s Andalusia behind, Ms Faber allowed Ms Carr the opportunity to conjure an English language translation which was sympathetic to the poetry, metaphor and idiom of the Spanish original. A colonised Irish interior, suppressed by Church and State, bears obvious similarities to the paralysed, benighted Spain that Lorca delineated, critiqued and celebrated in his rural trilogy (Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba as well as BW). The hybrid setting also allowed the natural casting of the magnificent Olwen Fouere as the grizzled, austere Mother and the equally magnificent Brid Brennan as the Weaver. If I tell you that Annie Firbank as the Housekeeper and Steffan Rhodri as the outraged Father also graced the stage, along with relative newcomers Scarlett Brookes, (watch her closely in future) as Leonardo’s spurned wife and David Walmsley as the equally wronged Groom, then you can see that this was a grade A cast top to toe.

Lorca’s story is straightforward. Mother reminds son (the Groom) that his Dad and Bro were killed by the men of the Felix family next door. A dispute over land. Leonardo Felix and the Bride are still in love. Mrs Leonardo knows. The Mother finds out as well but decides to visit the Bride and her Dad. The wedding goes ahead by Leonardo turns up and steals the Bride. Outrage. Vengeance. Fight. Deaths. Sacrifice. It is very heady stuff but its chimerical qualities mean it is a long way from melodrama or even Greek tragedy. Closer to fable.

Anyway Yael Farber and Marina Carr have done a little nip and tuck with the plot but all the primitive elements are still there. That this is a traditional, brutally patriarchal society is never in doubt, as much but what the older women say, as the men, and yet there is still a sense of agency in the striking performances of Aoife Duffin and Scarlett Brooks. There is intentional comedy in the vernacular passages and there is no unintentional comedy in the brutal and fantastical scenes, (though once or twice it skirts close near the end – it is the women who mop up the blood). The cumulative effect is undeniably powerful even when the pace edges towards the, shall we say, Largo. In fact there is something of the minor key symphonic in Yael Farber’s reading.

I am not sure I would recommend this to fans of the Lion King or indeed anyway unfamiliar with this deliberately stylised auteur approach to theatre. On reflection I shouldn’t really have worried about the SO’s reaction. She reads books. Proper books. Lots of them. We are drowning in theme. Imagination, to augment the visual abstraction, is therefore no limitation for her.

Julie at the National Theatre review ***

Julie

National Theatre Lyttleton, 9th June 2018

I am not sure if I like Strindberg’s play Miss Julie. The programme notes for this adaptation of the story by Polly Stenham explicitly deals with Strindberg’s rampant misogyny and class hatred. Whilst setting, plot and, to a certain extent, the bare bones of the text, afford plenty of scope for interpretation, at its heart this is an ugly story of a spoilt rich girl who gets legged over by a scheming manipulative uppity servant. She pays the ultimate price. In that respect it is no different from maybe 90% of operas ever written and a whole bunch of classic novels. Woman as victim.

Yet ….. There is normally always something to draw you in to the moral maze here whether the story, as so often, is transposed, as here, or played straight, in the Swedish midsummer of the late C19. Mr Strindberg, despite his rather brutal thinking, standard male fare in that age I suppose, was sharp enough to offer up multiple, and often conflicting, motives for his three characters, including Kristine, the household cook and Jean’s apparent intended, in his desire to define the “naturalistic” in drama. And apparently hating all your characters, and most of what they stand for, does inject buckets of passion into themes and dialogue. So it is no wonder that later dramatists keep returning to the work.

Polly Stenham (see above) is (in)famous for writing three plays about troubled posh kids, her debut written at just 19, That Face, followed by Tusk and No Quarter, then a shift in direction to her take of post colonial guilt in Hotel, and, most recently, the screenplay for Neon Demon. I haven’t seen any of them since they sounded like they, were primed to wind me up. She is posh, was brought up by her rich Dad, opened a gallery and lives in Highgate. You can see why she might want to take on Miss Julie. But some critics love her and director Jeremy Herrrin is a big advocate. So I figured, abandon your prejudice and see for yourself.

Well I have to say that her adaptation both works, and doesn’t work, but overall there is enough here to warrant a viewing. Ms Stenham not unreasonably relocates the action to present day London, specifically Hampstead Heath borders. Julie is having a party for her 33rd birthday. Businessman Dad is absent. Mum’s dead. Her sycophantic, fair weather friends, and Julie herself, are ingesting industrial quantities of drugs and booze. Downstairs in a vast state of the art, Wigmore Street showroom style kitchen, Kristina is tidying up and preparing food for the party.-goers. Julie pops in, looking for and getting, attention from Kristina, and, when he arrives, from Jean, who is the chauffeur waiting for Dad to call from the airport/meeting. Kristina and Jean are black, Julie is white and plainly “out of control”. The dichotomy between Jean, who sees this job as a step on the way to making it big, and Kristina, who is studying law, and the aimless, hedonistic Julie is well observed, and made more pointed through the prism of colour. I was reminded a little of Jamie Lloyd’s production of Genet’s The Maids which similarly drew attention to the uncomfortable way in which the very rich attempt to alleviate their own pain and loneliness by demanding friendship from their “servants” by pretending there is no economic gulf, or transactional relationship, between them.

Tom Scutt’s set divides the luxury downstairs kitchen from the upstairs, equally tasteful, party rooms, and allows for an ensemble to show off their dancing skills against the backdrop of some thumping bass. It doesn’t hide the fact though that this is a drama of intimacy which is lost on the broad Lyttleton stage, especially when, post festivities, Jean and Julie get it on, in full-on expressive, writhing, mime fashion. It is all a bit silly, as was the unfortunate end of the caged bird here, Strindberg’s booming metaphor. Polly Sternham, wisely given the setting, has booted out many of the other crass metaphors, and also understandably downplayed Kristina’s religiosity.

Still the biggest problem for the production is in the transition from the shag to the aftermath of the shag. Easy to understand why Julie would want Jean and why Jean would want Julie. But, in this contemporary setting, it is more difficult to understand why they would go through all the fighting, metaphorical chest-beating, soul-searching and future-plotting that follows the consummation. Surely this Julie wouldn’t really give a f*ck after the f*ck, as it were, even if she could remember it. The whole fall from social grace thing doesn’t really stack up. And Jean’s “I’ve always fancied you from afar when I watched you in the garden”/”this is my economic stepping stone to escape” also rings a little hollow. The gap between them is vast, of course, in so many ways, but the shift from desire to “love/hate, I can’t live with or without you” is just too awkward. The psychological and societal do not collide in the way they should.

Even so …….. once you swallow this, or better still, if you know, and accept, that this is the base material on to which Ms Stenham has grafted her take, then the sight of Eric Kofi Abrefa’s Jean and, especially, Vanessa Kirby’s Julie, alternately tearing each other apart and then building each other up again, is undeniably captivating. Thalissa Teixeira, who is a magnetic stage presence to rival young Kirby (sooooo good in Robert Icke’s brilliant Vanya), shifts from supportive friend and partner to woman wronged with immense conviction. There is, in all three performances, a strong whiff of the Greek tragedy, not in the material, but in the heightened emotion, augmented by our groovy chorus. In Strindberg’s C19 world the suppressed emotions uncoil slowly. Here they are filling the stage from the off. And the end is suitably in-your-face – no final glimpse of a razor and curtain fall here. Shame. A hotel run by the three of them might have garnered some prize TripAdvisor reviews.

The text might have been a little less colourless, and a little more subtle in places, though I can see this might have jarred with the setting, but in the end, especially in the second half, (this breezes through in just over 80 minutes), I actually quite enjoyed this. Which, given I probably don’t like the play, even if some productions really work (Yael Farber’s Mies Julie being the lodestar crackling, as it did, with apartheid history), and that I wasn’t sure about the central relationship, suggests Ms Sternham and director Carrie Cracknell were on to something. It certainly feels like the audiences, based on the night I went, and the near packed-out houses, agree even if the critics were less forgiving.

I believe Ms Sternham is coming up to her 32nd birthday. Maybe just a quiet night in to celebrate I think..

 

 

The Unknown Island at the Gate Theatre review ***

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The Unknown Island

The Gate Theatre, 23rd September 2017

Saturday matinees at the Gate Theatre  represent an astonishing bargain by “that London” standards (as do Wednesday matinees though they are limited to us economically unproductive types).

So I could traipse up to Wembley to watch Spurs stuff Bournemouth for just £30 in a couple of weeks. But I would be a mile away from the action, there would be all the hassle of getting there and there would be extra trimmings to be paid for. For just a tenner at the Gate though I get to see epic theatre of the highest quality from around the world right up close (this is, along with the Finborough, the most intimate of the “quality” fringe venues). This formula has been perfected over years, but took a step up under the stewardship of Christopher Haydon, and, on the basis of this offering, should continue now that Ellen MacDougall has taken the helm (she directed Chris Urch’s Rolling STone at the Orange Tree, one of the finest new plays of the last couple of years).

I am not going to pretend that this adaption by Ms MacDougall and dramaturg Claire Slater of a short story by Portuguese writer Jose Saramango was the finest work of theatre I have seen in recent months, but there was more than enough nourishment. And I don’t just mean the olives, bread and wine on offer as the cast fittingly broke character halfway through proceedings. This is a slippery, childlike but not childish, parable with multiple interpretations which was presented very well by the four strong cast of Jon Foster, Hannah Ringham, Thalissa Teixeira and Zubin Varla.

A man comes to the court of a King and will not leave until he is granted a ship to set out to discover the “unknown” island. The aloof King is reluctant at first but the persistent man’s wish is eventually granted and, in the absence of a crew and sufficient provisions, he sets off with the cleaning woman from the Court. They don’t get “there” but the man has a whacky dream along the way. That’s about it.

Except that within the tale are all manner of allusions to the structure of society, individual agency, the power of the imagination and ultimately what really matters in life. I spent the first half wrestling with the idea that there was some long arc of allegory here relating to the history of Portugal and the nature of revolution. Then it seemed to become more of a plea for the value of “self-discovery” but not in the way of the arse-hole, narcissistic blogger (for the avoidance of doubt I am aware of the irony here), but in a more humanistic, reflective way. Anyway wherever Mr Saramango was trying to take us there was value in the journey.

The set design by Rosie Elnile is striking, walls, floor and the benches around the entire space are bathed in a (practical as it turns out) turquoise, rubbery material and the actors are dressed head to toe in crimson. There is a striking red model boat and some comic balloons put in an appearance. The actors switch characters and often overlap. And at the end, in a nod to the end of our story, a window is opened to take us back into the real world of gullible tourists filtering down to the Portobello Road to buy tat.

I suspect that those who prefer their entertainment to be of a more literal or mimetic persuasion may come out feeling a little diddled, but if you are a bit more elastic in your tastes this could be for you. Of the rest of the season Suzy Storck looks most interesting though I have no real notion as to why. Still for the price of a couple of pints in the Prince Albert downstairs I will happily test that notion.