Mini-review – The Play That Goes Wrong – Trafalgar Studios

With the one week of spring sunshine gone like cherry blossoms in a storm, I was in the mood for some cheering up, and what should appear but Nick’s review of The Play That Goes Wrong and I thought, now, that’s the show for me – one hour long, like all of the best bits of Noises Off (or so Nick claimed), and cheap to boot. Its popularity was spoken for by the endless series of “sold out” flags for the 7:45 showings (there are two a night), but on a whim I went by the box office hat in hand – or, rather, twenty pound note in hand, which I exchanged for a single seat for the earlier show. Hurray! Let there be laughter.

And … well … is there really any need for plot? And yet there was one, a horrible murder mystery, feeling very familiar after The Mousetrap and Deathtrap: a bunch of rich people (one of them dead) are trapped in a manor while a detective tries to work out whoddunit. Did we really care? No, we were too busy listening to the light board operator complain about his missing Duran Duran cd, watching the techie girl stick her arm through the curtains to provide missing props, and awaiting the painful results of people barrelling around the set oblivious to the body parts of the “dead” character. And let’s not omit the horrible anticipation built by a bottle labelled “Toxic” being sat on the tray with the whiskey glasses: not since Drowsy Chaperone had I seen so much liquid sprayed across a stage.

On one hand you’re waiting to see how the actors can overcome the obstacles in front of them; on the other hand, you’re looking forward to seeing them fail. In fact, as the evening snowballs way past the point of believability, any time an actor actually manages to get a bit to end on approximately the right note seems like a triumph, with cheers and applause from the audience. But most of all, we were laughing our heads off – me not so much as some, but still loudly enough to get stares from some uptight woman in the front row. Whatever: you’re the one who went home covered in, um, “whiskey,” and I can’t help but feel you had it coming.

(This review is for a GIRLS ON FILM performance that took place at 7:45 PM on Monday, May 13th, 2013. It continues through TWO MINUTES LATER June 1st. Note that the 21:15 performances are £5 cheaper and GOT YOUR PICTURE may be available on the day at the TKTS booth for £10.)

Review – The Ghost Hunter – Theater of the Damned at Old Red Lion Pub

Stewart Pringle distinguished himself as author of the horror short “As Ye Sow,” which stood out amongst its B-movie brethren at a night of short Guignol/esque plays like a real corpse mixed in with the waxworks. So I was excited to get an invite to see his latest work, The Ghost Hunter, at the conveniently located Old Red Lion pub theater, and said yes without really bothering to read any of the publicity materials. I’d guess it might be spooky, and who would want to ruin the fun with an ill timed spoiler?

I really didn’t know a thing, even about the venue, which is tiny (it seats about 50). Feel free to bring your drinks in: while there’s no place to put them, the show only runs an hour, and as you watch ghost hunter Richard Barraclough (Tom Richards) put away a pint of Abbot, you’ll feel drawn to join in. Me, after an incredibly stressful week at work, well, I thought a double vodka cran was the way to go; it could only heighten the effect, right?

So now it’s time to get down to the review, and I find myself torn about how much to reveal. I loved the feeling of walking into a darkened room with a man in Victorian costume waiting quietly for us, eyes downturned, only to become animated as the lights dimmed; it seemed like a very good start to the evening. But … his pint glass has a label on it: how anachronistic! And yet … well, not, because as it turns out, Barraclough is actually the leader of ghost tours in modern York. I was a bit disappointed, as I liked the idea of a Victorian fright drama: you know, The Lady in Black is back!

But what we have to think about is what is really frightening, and, to me, a tale separated by 150 years is very easy to put out of mind when you walk away. Our Ghost Hunter spends a lot of his time talking about his work and where the tales that he tells originate, and much of it is quite … well, not banal, but rooted in normalcy. He’s clearly a good tale spinner, and you can see him working his magic as he ma)es the fluff he spins into cobwebs for his punters come to life.

However … at some point the barrier between our comfortable existence and a more uncomfortable possibility starts to come down, and by the end of the show, I can guarantee your hair will be standing on end and your heart will be aching for Barraclough’s terror. Much as in The Weir, Pringle takes the campfire ritual of the ghost story and turns it into a glimpse of a parallel, paranormal reality. Mmmm and brrr. In many ways, it was a thrill to walk out of this dark room, chilled to the bone, and into the late spring sunlight and Islington’s high street, and back into the comfortable assurance that “none of that is real, is it?” Because for a certain period of time, you, as a playgoer, will be convinced that it was.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Friday, May 10, 2013. It continues through May 25th.)

Mini-review – Ten Plagues – Marc Almond at Wilton’s Music Hall

More ambitious in concept that execution, Ten Plagues held high promise: gay cultural icon and passionate vocalist Marc Almond, the disintegrating elegance of Wilton’s Music Hall, and an original libretto and score by by Mark Ravenhill and Conor Mitchell (respectively). The theme of the plague coming to London is one that is extremely resonant today with the AIDS crisis; this was alluded to nicely in some animations of a ripple-ab’ed man that Almond at one point addresses as someone who has brought disease to him (and whom Almond sends away).

It all felt so good and so promising and yet …

Looking at it, I can’t help but think the horrible, dissonant, modernistic music was just too agonizing to make for a pleasant evening even at the trim time of sixty minutes (and about one couple evaculating per row). And then there was the thick banality of Mark Ravenhill’s lyrics: I thought of what a difference W. H. Auden would have made and wanted to cry at the wasted opportunity. Almond was dramatic and a pleasure to listen to, looking alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) debauched, decadent, and decayed (especially with his gold teeth and tattoos) – the perfect performer for the space. But he just wasn’t given enough to work with. A few wigs, the pianos, and a bit of lighting – aw, hell, but it all would have been different with better music and lyrics, wouldn’t it?

I’m not sorry I went even for £25, but it all just made me sad and gave me this incredible nostalgia for Susan Philipz’s Surround Me, because her nod to the plague history of London (at

Review – Public Enemy – Young Vic

As an Ibsen completist, I was excited by the opportunity to see a production of Enemy of the People (charmingly retitled as Public Enemy but no rapping), so much the better that seats at this Young Vic production were available for £10. Be warned, though, cheap seats fans, of the danger of the front row, far left seats: for a good section of the first scene, of two actors I could only see a hat; and for the second act, a long section in which the actors were actually in front of the curtain required me to crane my neck so far (and so long) to the right I thought I was going to get the theatrical equivalent of deep vein thrombosis. Balcony seats will likely save you from cramping.

Plotwise, Public Enemy is just as on topic now as it would have been when written – well, mostly. The lead character is a doctor who is going to save a spa town from the pollution that’s making spa-goers sick; however, when it turns out the consequences of fixing this problem will cause the ruination of the town, suddenly even his wife is asking him to reconsider letting the cat out of the bag. The situation, of a small town with a small economy and a whistleblower who’s going to upset things, has all sorts of easy-to-see parallels with our society; but the political environment is quite different. The local government in the play is far more prone to cronyism than today (not so many people appointing family members to public office); there’s a real fear of communism and yet the local publisher is proud to be a socialist; and, shockingly, the doctor himself posits anti-democratic beliefs that are right out of the Ayn Rand handbook. “The majority makes the rules, but you’re willing to admit that most people are stupid! You should all be shot!” (Oh my.)

This leads to some interesting tension as a play viewer. You want the doctor to stand up for what is right (not having people die from the poisoned water at the spa), you want him to do it more than he worries about his career (or even his family), but suddenly when he starts talking about his own superiority to the people of the town he lives in, your sympathy for him evaporates. Yeah, he is probably better educated than most of the townspeople; sure, a lot of people “vote with their wallets” (private interest over public interest); but … if he really believes that everyone is ignorant and the ignorant should be “put out of their misery” rather than be allowed to participate in government, well, all I can say is Nietzsche did it better and the consequences were pretty horrible, and maybe the good doctor should be looking at a better investment in education for his fellow citizens.

But there is no way to not feel the pull of individual greed in influencing bad decisions: you can see it today in the factory collapses in Bangladesh and the recent fertilizer plant explosion in Texas. Both individuals and governments influenced by the self-interest of the rich work to try to do things on the cheap; and the result is that people die in entirely preventable incidents. It’s amazing to watch both the newspaper editor and the publisher collapse in the face of their own loss were the doctor’s report to be published: suddenly their concern for “the public good” and “the people” are revealed to be easily punctured in the face of reduced revenue. And it’s hard not to value someone who’s willing to stand up to public pressure to save people’s lives. I’ll agree with the doctor: the minority is the one from which ideas and change generate, and minority interests need to be protected. But at the end, when he says that the strongest man is the one who stands by himself, well, in this version at least, he’s shown to be a madman. Frankly, I prefer him as a slightly misguided hero, but … well, it’s lovely that Ibsen has created a show so vibrant that there’s this much to talk about, and I was very happy to have the whole thing race along in less than 1:45 (a possible interval was replaced by a set change). If you like your theater served with a heavy side dish of politics, this play is highly recommended.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Wednesday, May 8, 2013. It continues through June 8th.)

Review – American Utopias – Mike Daisey at the Seattle Repertory Theater

After just having seen Daisey’s Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs in London, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to see his fresh, new stuff performed by Mr Daisey himself. Agony wasn’t really hitting my sweet spot as performed by a gorgeous English actor; even with the right props, he couldn’t capture the nerdish enthusiasm Daisey radiated. I longed to see the man in person, and when I got to Seattle on Tuesday I discovered my ship had come in. Sadly my travel schedule means I won’t be around for Fucking Fucking Ayn Rand, but I was able to catch American Utopias on its opening night at the Seattle Rep.

On the face of it, American Utopias seems to be about three places/events: Burning Man, Occupy (Wall Street), and Disney World. But it’s not about how these places are utopias: they are tied together by being intentional communities. Daisey, however, links them together as a monologuist will, by talking about dreams, oboes, family, “mise-en-scene,” and the other seemingly random shit that bubbles through his brain, assisted by cue sheets, a glass of water, and a clearly soaked hanky to wipe off the perennial Daisey sheen. He clued us in to his style, which is apparently to riff off of the notes; this allows him to get expansive, which unfortunately worked against the evening as it went to 2 1/2 hours (instead of the promised two) and left all three of us agreeing it was in dire need of a trim.

Best of the three was the Burning Man stuff. Daisey didn’t much bother with creating a narrative around his experience there, but managed to explain a lot of what being there is like (and why it is so hard for people to talk about it) in a way that brought a little magic to the evening. Giant pink cubes rolling across the desert? A metal giraffe that breaths jelly beans into your hand? Daisey propounded that Burning Man’s takeaway is that life is evanescent and will all “go up in smoke” at some point. This seemed belabored (the Japanese do it much better) but I’ll buy that Burning Man is an environment where people are forced to live in the moment, to their joy. This does not necessarily lead to people being able to talk about it very well afterwards, but while you’re doing it (like being in a dream), the effect is quite wonderful. I still have no desire to spend a week sweating in a dry and filthy dust bowl, but I did feel like the flavor had been captured remarkably well.

But floppy as a middle aged man’s erection (he mentions this phenomenon rather a lot during the show, so don’t go thinking this is family friendly) were the slices about the Occupy movement. Daisey’s connection is that he went to a fundraiser for Occupy – where he met an actual person who was participating in the protest – and, a year later, Daisey actually visited the site. He also had a rant on the radio the day after the evacuation where he rambled on about Bloomberg. But the connection was tenuous, and, even as I write about it, I’m having a hard time figuring out why he included it, unless it was because three is a magic number and Occupy would make his performance more politically topical. The tie-in to grabbing opportunities when they presented themselves was pretty unconvincing, as I’m not sure what Daisey would have actually done if he’d gone to the park where Occupy was happening. He didn’t go, it’s not his bag, so what?

Overall, though, this was a good show, comedy for the left, with lots of pop-culture and geek-culture references to make us feel “in.” Trim about 45 minutes out of it, tell the bozos to not sit in the balcony and distract him, and you’d have a really excellent evening. And Mike: PLEASE STOP SNIFFING YOUR SWEAT SOAKED HANKY it was freaking me out.

(This review is for a performance that took place on May 2nd, 2013.)

Review – Walk Cheerfully (1930 silent movie by Yasujiro Ozu) with Benshi-style narration – British Film Institute

I have now seen three different Japanese film directors (Ozu, Naruse, and … ?) who have had careers that have spanned at least forty years forward from the silent movie era, all primarily known for their black and white talkies, but for each of whom a substantial opus exists in the silent genre that very much informs both their future, more famous works and style but also my understanding of the styles and devices of Japanese silent cinema.

Japanese silent movies go into a further range than American silents (although if they have a Keystone Cops era I haven’t seen any proof), due to their creation so far into the 30s. Why, you might wonder, would the Japanese cling to an outmoded cinematic style for so long? It’s due, in fact, to the way they were presented: with narrators (called “Benshi”) to speak the dialogue. I’m not sure if this started because Japanese audiences were illiterate, or if it were some other reason – perhaps a story-telling tradition (maybe for theater?) that made using a narrator a natural thing. At any rate, it’s the use of Benshi that delayed the onset of talkies – not because they were so well loved that people wouldn’t give them up, but because they were unionized and fought hard against the loss of their jobs. There are probably several theses to be written on the subject – and I haven’t done any additional research – but, hearing about the Benshi, my question was: what was it like to see a silent movie with a narrator? I was told at some point they did more than speak the dialogue, that they also provided some kind of commentary; and as a silent movie and Japanese cinema fan, I burned to have the Benshi experience!

And, as if in answer to my hopes, an email arrived from the Silent London association, telling me that the BFI was going to be holding a special, members-only screening of one of the Ozu “gangster” films … with Benshi! I immediately started ticket-acquisition contortions (I wasn’t a member and it was sold out, so there was work to be done), and a few days beforehand some tickets became available and a member agreed to go with me … and we were on!

I can’t say entirely if the experience was authentic (did Benshi also have musical accompaniment? – we did, in fact, we had two musicians!), but it was extremely enjoyable. Our Benshi was a young Japanese woman dressed in a charming white gangster-style outfit, complete with white fedora. She was utterly charming and bouncy and made the whole experience mcuh more fun than it had ever been reading the intertitles alone. She told us about people’s relationships, she noted changes in time, she added laughter and sniffs, she ad-libbed (quite likely she was able to read lips to get extra words, as I noticed her additional dialogue seemed perfectly paced to what was being done on the screen – she must have practiced it many times!), she talked about emotions, and she read the lines with feeling.

The primary feeling I picked up was one of comic irony, something I never would have added myself, but looking at people’s faces when she was speaking their lines, it seemed entirely appropriate. Walk Cheerfully is Ozu’s version of an imaginary Japanese gangster-land, complete with the clothes, cars, and guns that actual organized criminals of the era in no way employed (or so the film’s notes declared). The whole thing, in fact, came off as a love letter to the Hollywood gangster genre, complete with American movie posters on the walls (I loved the one of Joan Crawford as a female boxer) and American song lyrics sung by the protagonists. The movie had a very Japanese sensibility underneath it, though – violence is clearly rejected (and not glamorized) by decent folks, the heroine herself is as traditional a good girl as you get (working hard to take care of her mother and sister, and turning down the boss’ offer of jewelry for “favors”), the sex is very much missing, and the hero actually takes a job as a window washer to get the girl. And he serves a ridiculously short jail sentence, which is seen as genuinely atoning for his past misdeeds! Perhaps there was an American gangster movie that ended so sappily at one point in time, but I’ve never seen it. And the Benshi seemed caught up in how unreal all of it was, and that it was okay for us to laugh at it, because even the characters on the screen were finding everything they were doing comic.

Overall, I have to say that I found the Benshi experience utterly superior to the “read it yourself” version, and I can’t help but wish that someone would put the effort into reviving the Japanese silents with the energetic, illustrative accompaniment of Benshi that I’ve seen people put into reviving American silents with their original scores. But these days, I guess we have to be grateful that people are trying just to save these movies before they disappear forever, Might I hope, however, that the next wave might be one of further authenticity? If so, I’m quite willing to offer myself up to be trained appropriately, because I’ve rarely had more fun at the movies. Thank you to the BFI for making this evening possible – it was great!

(This review is for a showing that took place on April 22, 2013. For another take on this evening, please see Ewan at the Cinema’s review.)

Review – The Weir – Donmar Theater

Rural Ireland is poverty stricken and full of superstitious alcoholics – or so it would seem if you choose to take the world of Conor McPherson’s The Weir (now playing at The Donmar Warehouse) as indicative of a lifestyle. Before I’d moved to the UK, I’d never heard that the stereotype (or one of) of Irish people was that they were superstitious, but this is the second play I’ve seen set in modern Ireland that takes that tack. Is this really the point the playwright is trying to make? The set up for this play seems as stale and backwards as the concept of a world where a pack of cigarettes could be paid for with pocket change and a twenty pound note would be a rare sight in a pub.

But … I don’t know about these stereotypes. What I do know about is plot and character and setting. And The Weir is, at its heart, a ghost story, or a series of ghost stories, which we, the audience, get to listen to just like we were all crowded around a fire in a dark house in the winter. It takes the opportunity of people’s reactions to show the character of the people in the play, not what kind of “characters” they are but what kind of character they have, and by doing this we come to see them, not as a bunch of drunks trying to one-up each other, but as a group of individuals carefully given life by McPherson’s script. There’s “local lad made good,” a swaggering braggart who wants to show off in front of the other guys (Risteard Cooper); the helpful hand and peacemaker (Ardal O’Hanlon); the kind-hearted barman whose future happiness may be in question (Peter McDonald); and the happy go lucky, down on his luck guy who’s made some mistakes he can’t get past (Brian Cox). And then, into this knot of known quantities, comes a woman (Dervla Kirwan). I wondered where the play would go with her, what her role would be; and, in the end, I concluded, her role was to be a foil to allow each of the men to show their true natures. The well-to-to-guy comes off as shallow, protective of the social order, and quick to cast of people who upset his view of the world; the peacemaker continues to be kind but unwilling to take a stand; the down on his luck guy still good hearted but more of a sad case; the bartender someone who will stand by you when the chips are down. And the woman, well, she becomes someone who has a past, and someone whose future you wonder about, and you can’t help but hoping that somehow she and the bartender wind up together.

The setting is perfectly realistic as an old bar; although the accents seem occasionally forced, the acting is smooth and professional; and, added together, the evening has all the ingredients to let you sit back and enjoy stories and place and the strange way people behave when they feel their lives are being challenged – sometimes in ways that do them credit, sometimes in ways that show what they’re really made of isn’t much to be proud of. It was a good night out, a lovely evening of theater, and both quick (at just under two hours) and the right kind of fast, as each person’s tale drew me in so much the evening flew by. Nice job, Josie.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Wednesday, April 24th, 2013. The Weir continues through.June 8th.)

Mini-review – My Perfect Mind – Told by an Idiot at the Young Vic Theater

“Pray, do not mock me.
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less.
And to deal plainly
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”

I booked to see My Perfect Mind at the Young Vic because the subject matter – an actor about to play King Lear is suddenly incapacitated by a stroke – thinking that much of it was going to be about the frustration that stroke patients endure, retaining their mental faculties but losing their ability to control their bodies. The character’s name is Edward Petherbridge, but in this production he’s actually played by the real Edward Petherbridge, because this is his own true story adapted to the stage (although early on we are told he is actually King Lear and is hallucinating that he is an actor called Edward Petherbridge). But what a story, eh? I was curious how we were going to show that frustration that stroke victims have, of not being able to do or say what they clearly know they want to, and how we would be let into Lear when Petherbridge wasn’t able to get the words out.

What I didn’t realize, first, was that this play was going to be really funny; second, that it was going to be, essentially, a one man King Lear (a la Alan Cumming’s also-not-really-one-man Macbeth), with another actor filling in the many other roles; third, that the play would strongly explore the parallels between Lear’s loss of his mind (I tend to think of the mad bit as being a “scene” but as per the quote above, Lear goes through quite a period of self-doubt) and the actor’s loss of control over his body. Very little of this play, in fact, was about being in a hospital or recovering from a stroke; rather, it was a journey through Petherbridge’s life as an actor, with rather a lot of King Lear happening alongside. There were scenes in Bradford, scenes with his mom, some made-up scenes in a university lecture room, lots and lots of scenes from Lear (sometimes as done in rehearsal with the company in New Zealand; sometimes as done with the cleaning lady from Romania as Petherbridge is learning the role; others more straight); and lots of reminiscences about actors and acting life gone by (Lawrence Olivier wearing fake blackface for Othello while doing a Richard III limp was pretty good).

I laughed far more than I thought I would, enjoyed the in-jokes about theater, and laughed at the sadness of a seventy-year-old actor performing a children’s song at a sea-side resort (in a melding of memories past and present that perfectly captured the way the mind wanders under stress). The actors improved off each other, the audience, and the captions above the stage, so the whole thing was very fresh feeling and not at all like a medical or personal history. In fact, it was extremely touching, and when it was over 90 minutes later, I thought it had been about 45 and I’d misread my watch. Congratulations to both Petherbridge and his Fool (Paul Hunter) – you’ve created not just a performance about one person’s experience, but a fine play.

(This review is for a performance that took place on April 23rd, 2013. It continues through May 4th. I could only fit in one more play before May 5th and I feel confident that I made a good choice picking this one.)

Review – Halbwelt Kultur – PK Productions at New Wimbledon Studios

As a fan of burlesque, cabaret, Cabaret, and Weimar-era Germany, I was thrilled to get an email inviting me to review Halbwelt Kultur at the New Wimbledon Studios. I hadn’t heard of PK Productions before, but I’d sure heard of Marlene Dietrich, Bertolt Brecht, and Rosa Luxemburg.

The production was set up as a series of vignettes featuring seven different women of this era, with the cast each having a star piece while also providing support in each of the other women’s pieces. As a group, they were fairly varied in hair color, faces, and body types, but dressed in matching knicker/camisole set with garter-look stockings; when they came out to do their star turns they had special clothes (such as kimonos, evening gowns, coats, day dresses) that helped them efficiently take on their new personas. Then they performed a bunch of songs from the Weimar book (Spoliansky’s “I Am a Vamp,” Friedrich Hollander’s “Falling In Love Again,” Brecht’s “Supply and Demand”) with, I think, some new songs dropped in – I could be wrong as they did seem period appropriate but the program didn’t let me know, but they were delightfully accompanied by a three piece band that included a tiny little trumpet. And each vignette allowed the performer to talk about where the star they portrayed belonged in the cabaret constellation – although I didn’t feel like some of them were really in that galaxy at all, but rather in the larger society and pulled in to the show more because of their gender rather than their place in the “underworld.”

My favorite piece of the night was Claire Waldoff (Gabriella Schmidt), who did a crazy “dress tease” in which she saucily put on the clothes of a man while the various cabaret dancer girls flirted with her (updoing her zipper, playing with her tie, et cetera). It was full of sexual tension and laughter and was utterly charming and quite yummy. It then took the opportunity to switch into a more meaty view of the reality of her life, showing her relationship with her girlfriend Olga (Stephanie Hampton, I believe) and both the joys and then the dangers as life as a lesbian as the Weimar era was overtaken by the Nazi regime. It was both entertaining and extremely humane, though it didn’t give us any clues as to how things really resolved for them.

Halbwelt Kultur

As a piece, the evening felt a bit tacked together, as some of the non-performers featured didn’t really seem to fit in as members of the Halbvelt even though they were clearly on the edges of acceptable society; the numbers for Gabriele Tergit and Rosa Luxemburg just didn’t fit and seemed to be a case of filling out the show more than creating an artistic unity. And some of the numbers seemed very soft … Marlene Dietrich (Sarah Bradnum) just didn’t have much to say and came off a bit cartoony. I was far more interested to see the bizarre dancing and performance art that came with Valeska Gert and Anita Berber’s bits, which really pulled me into the era rather than just giving me a history lesson.

As this evening was a workshop production, I’d say it was a success – 40% of the show might be cut or reimagined, but there’s more than enough there for a good evening’s entertainment and it was a success as it stood – at least if you judged by the opening night house, which was quite sold out (as was most of the rest of the run). I’d say that between the actual performance style and the story that Halbwelt Kultur was tryign to tell, there is an even better show waiting to come out – and I’ll probably be back to see it again.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013. It continues through April 20th.)

Mini-review – Moby Dick – simple8 at Arcola Theater

Moby Dick, of all novels, not only doesn’t seem suited to the stage, it seems especially ill-suited to the low-budget, fringe theater stage. So I could help but feel myself attracted to the ballsiness that led simple8 to bring their original adaptation of Moby Dick to the Arcola Theater. I mean, if you’re going to dream, dream big, right? I’m bringing my imagination, fellahs (and as it turns out it was all men!), you take me whaling … while I’m sitting in my seat … in a crappy little, funny built theater in the middle of grimy old London town. You can do it, right?

I’m pleased to report that … wow … with three stepladders, a plank, and a mattress, simple8 did quite effectively manage to take me out on the Pequod. And not only did they do that, but with even less, they took me in a tiny boat on the open seas and harpooned a whale. And dragged it back in. I was watching them, sitting on their little stumps of wood, the five or six men that made the crew, pretending to row, pretending to throw an imaginary sharp thing at an imaginary leviathan, completely conscious of the fact that I had been bamboozled into believing into the magic of the theater … and then I shook off my standoffish critic’s glasses and stepped back into the boat. We had work to do, first getting back to the Pequod, then taking care of the whale.

If you know more than three things about Moby Dick, you’ll be aware that its structure alternates narrative with expository chapters, which would certainly pose challenges to any adaptation that tried to get too literal. This production happily embraced the opportunity to use some of these “explaining” chapters to help make the story come more to life (in our heads), for, even though Moby Dick (the narrative chapters) might be about madness, obsession, and the battle of man against nature, it’s also a book that vibrantly brings to life an entirely vanished culture. I enjoyed our lectures about the types of whales, the details of butchering, and the uses of whale oil; they gave flavor and rhythm to the evening.

They also helped lessen some of the stresses of the weight of Captain Ahab on the play. Having a madman call the shots … well, it all could have been too much of a smothering star turn, and as it was, I found myself a bit turned off by the tics and twitches of the actor (though Queequeg’s affectations grated far more). But instead, it was nicely turned into a show more about the dynamics of the men interacting with each other, with Ishmael and Queequeg’s friendship, and with Starbuck’s attempts to manage the unmentionable and unconfrontable without making it all there was to the play.

I had a few other small quibbles about this show – a few things that happen toward the very end were not clear to me until a character said what had happened – but as I (ahem) actually didn’t know the ending of the book, I won’t spoil it here. Overall, this was an extremely enjoyable production that exemplified the kind of theater I enjoy – the kind that relies on me to build empires in my head, the kind that trusts its audience to make that leap. There’s certainly wonder in seeing a play where they have all of the money to do all of the things, but I’ve always felt that you don’t need to show a helicopter to make one be there on stage, and I’ve always preferred the “less is more”/empty space aesthetic that simple8 embraces. My only regret? That I hadn’t come earlier to see their Cagliari.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Saturday, April 13, 2013. I liked it enough to buy a script. By the way, the new bathrooms in the Arcola are really confusing. I wasn’t entirely sure where the actual toliet was or what ou were supposed to do with the sink.)