There’s nothing quite like the smell of freshly trodden grass mingling with pungent diesel fumes to embody a night out at a fun-fair or circus. I remember the good old days when there were three or four giant circuses doing the rounds in England. What I remember best, and what was almost the most exciting, were the roaring lions and tigers leaping through hoops and the troops of huge lumbering elephants trundling around the ring.
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Rhythms are sometimes dazzling in their intricacy and executed with wit and panache. ‘Instruments’ vary from matchboxes to oil drums: one of my favourites was a little number, performed in the dark using Zippo style lighters which created not only rhythms, but also clever patterns as the lighters lit . . . with such a highly polished and entertaining set of routines the audience can simply marvel at the immaculate conception and execution.
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Sir John Falstaff is probably the Bard’s greatest comic creation and after playing a supporting character in Henry IV Pt 1, followed by a guest appearance in Pt 2 he now gets his own show. His farewell appearance is off-stage in Henry V. Mr Rutter’s Sir John is a very coarse and vulgar fellow for whom it is difficult to have much sympathy. His quest to woo two married women backfires and he finds himself in the proverbial.
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The play draws intriguing parallels between Dostoyevsky’s life and that of Myshkin, the main character in his semi-autobiographical novel, The Idiot . . . To my mind, the most interesting parts of the play happened when the action wasn’t relying on gimmicks. The passages of dialogue or monologue were satisfyingly clever and often acerbic critiques of the audience, but I thought there were too many experimental elements to make this a truly enjoyable experience.
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The first play is about the break up of a relationship. It is cleverly staged; for example a couple are in bed, amusingly depicted by Scott holding a pillow behind his head as shown in the publicity photographs, and a duvet laid over a table became a bed. There are many clever one-line jokes. The play shows how a woman and a man, both very needy, find it difficult to give up on their relationship even though it is not ideal and they obviously don’t really understand each other.
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The RSC’s new Hamlet is patently original. Gone are the cliché blond Nordic tresses so favoured by Olivier and others, gone are the wind-swept rocky battlements of Elsinore and in are the brightly coloured Afro fabrics and jungle drums of medieval Denmark’s first black royal family . . . I really liked Cyril Ni as the obsequious Polonius, always eager to please and smooth the troubled waters but, to my mind, the best performance came from Natalie Simpson as his daughter Ophelia.
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