"Well it was more interesting than the staff meeting" (The Rose Tattoo - National Theatre)
The Girl's response to the Rose Tattoo may be true, but I'm guessing it was a close run thing.
I'm not sure there was a single thing about this production that didn't irk me. The plot is thin, especially when stretched to a arse numbing three hours. The design with its isolated spinning house (look at us look at us we have a fancy drum revolve which we must use at every oportunity) just highlighted how the production fails to fill the cavernous Olivier. There are too many bit parts, random children run around the stage, sailors turn up for 30 seconds in the first act and aren't seen again until the curtain call (nice work if you can get it) and a bloody goat that just wanders around looking bored. I wonder if the production team hadn't spread their jam so thinly whether they could have got a cast that actually looked like they were doing anything more than mailing their performances in.
Even Zoe Wanermaker in the lead role as the distraught scillian-american widow grated after about five minutes. Her charecter, despite being on stage for virtually the whole 3 hours, never procedes past being a caricture, and as she spends virtually all her time wailing and gnashing her teeth a bloody annoying one at that.
Oh and the accents, the accents! They were all over the place. The Girl, being a fully paid up american, can spot a brit doing an US accent a mile off. I'm not so fussy, but you would have thought that the cast could have picked one accent and stuck with it. Susannah Fielding as Rosa managed to get through three in a single sentence, none of them close to an authentic southern accent.
All in all not recommended.
I'm not sure there was a single thing about this production that didn't irk me. The plot is thin, especially when stretched to a arse numbing three hours. The design with its isolated spinning house (look at us look at us we have a fancy drum revolve which we must use at every oportunity) just highlighted how the production fails to fill the cavernous Olivier. There are too many bit parts, random children run around the stage, sailors turn up for 30 seconds in the first act and aren't seen again until the curtain call (nice work if you can get it) and a bloody goat that just wanders around looking bored. I wonder if the production team hadn't spread their jam so thinly whether they could have got a cast that actually looked like they were doing anything more than mailing their performances in.
Even Zoe Wanermaker in the lead role as the distraught scillian-american widow grated after about five minutes. Her charecter, despite being on stage for virtually the whole 3 hours, never procedes past being a caricture, and as she spends virtually all her time wailing and gnashing her teeth a bloody annoying one at that.
Oh and the accents, the accents! They were all over the place. The Girl, being a fully paid up american, can spot a brit doing an US accent a mile off. I'm not so fussy, but you would have thought that the cast could have picked one accent and stuck with it. Susannah Fielding as Rosa managed to get through three in a single sentence, none of them close to an authentic southern accent.
All in all not recommended.
posted by Bernard at 11:03 pm
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