Post by admin on Aug 18, 2005 8:06:01 GMT -5
There's nothing like the reclamation of an ostensibly tired theatrical warhorse to renew one's affection for play-going in a major way. R.C. Sherriff's "Journey's End" has had three London stagings in the past 15 years or so, one of which starred Jason Connery, Sean's son, in the central role of the 21-year-old army captain, Stanhope.
.
But plays, rather like jewels, can reveal different facets of themselves depending on the light shone on them. And as directed by David Grindley with a scrupulous attention that pays enormous dividends, Sherriff's darkly humane 1929 play, now revived at the Comedy Theater, isn't just a portrait of men at war at a particular place and time; it's a wounding lament for the deaths inevitably demanded by combat, however reasonable the conflict, even if Sherriff's specific view of the Great War was that it made no sense.
.
An insurance agent before he became a writer, Sherriff rooted the play in his own experiences, and Grindley's production honors its author's first-hand acquaintanceship with his subject by insisting on a striking realism all its own. Jason Taylor's dusky, low-level lighting gradually illuminates the scene: a dugout 50 yards from the front line in the immediate run-up in March 1918 to the major German offensive of World War I. With a scant 48 hours to go until attack, five British officers make their near hovel a home, the days spent both preparing for battle and trying various diversionary tactics not to think about it.
.
The loose cannon in the group, Stanhope (Geoffrey Streatfeild, inheriting a role first played for one performance only by Laurence Olivier), is also its leader: an imposing bully-boy with an alcoholic's fondness for whiskey — the liquor his best defense against going mad. Already pretty far gone is junior lieutenant Hibbert (Ben Meyjes), a neuralgia-prone hysteric with a view of life ("nothing matters") by way of Beckett. Not far behind is the shining-faced Raleigh (Christian Coulson), at age 18 an eager new recruit who worshipped Stanhope at school only to descend headlong into war's collective hell.
.
Attempting to soften the blow is onetime schoolmaster Osborne (David Haig in a tremendously compassionate turn), the seasoned second-in-command who can't quite ever leave combat behind. In one extraordinary passage, the kindly, quiet Osborne recounts an occasion on leave where he and his wife did everything but communicate their anxieties about the war even as their young sons — oblivious to the import of the real thing — enacted their own playful facsimile of battle with some toy tin soldiers. Bursts of levity are offered by the cook, Mason (Phil Cornwell), and his faintly squirm-inducing menus (tea that tastes of onion). And by the apparently jolly, but in fact deeply serious Trotter (Paul Bradley), who has developed his own mathematical method for making it through each day, while aware that losses in wartime respect no formulae.
.
The play is astonishingly un-formulaic, and its resonances across 75 years are there to be felt, despite some now archaic language (adjectives like "topping") that, in this cast's expert hands, seems absolutely fresh. The evening, too, has been carefully paced by Grindley so as to give full weight to that awful limbo in which the men find themselves counting down their fearful way toward the enemy advance. "We're all just waiting for something," says Raleigh, and the first act, in particular, marches to the unsettling beat of events imminent — and bad — to come. The second act is both noisier and a bit more bald in its proclamations. But even then, you can practically smell the company's nervous sweat as the smoke of battle seeps on to the stage, followed by the grievous quiet accompanying that rare curtain call that is also a memorial: a silent tribute prompting clamorous applause. - The old adage about an actor's task being best defined by not bumping into the furniture can be revised on the evidence of ''Honeymoon Suite,'' at the Royal Court. Richard Bean's terrific new play places an unusual onus on director Paul Miller and his exemplary cast of six. Playing the same couple at three distinct and different points in their lives, three pairs of actors share the stage almost throughout — in which case, their self-evident challenge is not to bump into one another. Or, at the very least, not to interfere with any of the parallel story lines, all of which are crafted with great skill and empathy by Bean, who has become something of a Court semi-regular of late. (His ''Under the Whaleback,'' an account of three generations of trawlerman in the northern English city of Hull, was one of the surprise glories of last year.) It's crucial, for example, that the arrival of teenage newlyweds, Eddie (Liam Garrigan) and Irene (Sara Beharrell), not break the concentration of the senior Eddie as he first appears, with the veteran comedy actor John Alderton playing the shambolic 67-year-old version of Eddie's once 18-year-old self. Long separated from Irene, who by now has become a government minister and baroness, the aging Eddie has agreed to a meeting in the very honeymoon suite where their married life began: the past quite literally haunting the present. In between those two selves is the paunchy 43-year-old Eddie (played by Jeremy Swift), who sports the embarrassing nickname, Tits, that we have seen the lustful young Eddie trying out a version of on his bride. Throughout the evening, you clock ambitions gone awry (and, in Irene's case, exceeded) and the U-turns thrown up by time, while noting an England that has itself altered, for good and for ill, in the intervening decades. The title ''Honeymoon Suite'' may sound like a bad sitcom, but don't be misled: The laughter is as honest and heartfelt as the sense of loss. There's nothing like the reclamation of an ostensibly tired theatrical warhorse to renew one's affection for play-going in a major way. R.C. Sherriff's "Journey's End" has had three London stagings in the past 15 years or so, one of which starred Jason Connery, Sean's son, in the central role of the 21-year-old army captain, Stanhope.
.
But plays, rather like jewels, can reveal different facets of themselves depending on the light shone on them. And as directed by David Grindley with a scrupulous attention that pays enormous dividends, Sherriff's darkly humane 1929 play, now revived at the Comedy Theater, isn't just a portrait of men at war at a particular place and time; it's a wounding lament for the deaths inevitably demanded by combat, however reasonable the conflict, even if Sherriff's specific view of the Great War was that it made no sense.
.
An insurance agent before he became a writer, Sherriff rooted the play in his own experiences, and Grindley's production honors its author's first-hand acquaintanceship with his subject by insisting on a striking realism all its own. Jason Taylor's dusky, low-level lighting gradually illuminates the scene: a dugout 50 yards from the front line in the immediate run-up in March 1918 to the major German offensive of World War I. With a scant 48 hours to go until attack, five British officers make their near hovel a home, the days spent both preparing for battle and trying various diversionary tactics not to think about it.
.
The loose cannon in the group, Stanhope (Geoffrey Streatfeild, inheriting a role first played for one performance only by Laurence Olivier), is also its leader: an imposing bully-boy with an alcoholic's fondness for whiskey — the liquor his best defense against going mad. Already pretty far gone is junior lieutenant Hibbert (Ben Meyjes), a neuralgia-prone hysteric with a view of life ("nothing matters") by way of Beckett. Not far behind is the shining-faced Raleigh (Christian Coulson), at age 18 an eager new recruit who worshipped Stanhope at school only to descend headlong into war's collective hell.
.
Attempting to soften the blow is onetime schoolmaster Osborne (David Haig in a tremendously compassionate turn), the seasoned second-in-command who can't quite ever leave combat behind. In one extraordinary passage, the kindly, quiet Osborne recounts an occasion on leave where he and his wife did everything but communicate their anxieties about the war even as their young sons — oblivious to the import of the real thing — enacted their own playful facsimile of battle with some toy tin soldiers. Bursts of levity are offered by the cook, Mason (Phil Cornwell), and his faintly squirm-inducing menus (tea that tastes of onion). And by the apparently jolly, but in fact deeply serious Trotter (Paul Bradley), who has developed his own mathematical method for making it through each day, while aware that losses in wartime respect no formulae.
.
The play is astonishingly un-formulaic, and its resonances across 75 years are there to be felt, despite some now archaic language (adjectives like "topping") that, in this cast's expert hands, seems absolutely fresh. The evening, too, has been carefully paced by Grindley so as to give full weight to that awful limbo in which the men find themselves counting down their fearful way toward the enemy advance. "We're all just waiting for something," says Raleigh, and the first act, in particular, marches to the unsettling beat of events imminent — and bad — to come. The second act is both noisier and a bit more bald in its proclamations. But even then, you can practically smell the company's nervous sweat as the smoke of battle seeps on to the stage, followed by the grievous quiet accompanying that rare curtain call that is also a memorial: a silent tribute prompting clamorous applause. - The old adage about an actor's task being best defined by not bumping into the furniture can be revised on the evidence of ''Honeymoon Suite,'' at the Royal Court. Richard Bean's terrific new play places an unusual onus on director Paul Miller and his exemplary cast of six. Playing the same couple at three distinct and different points in their lives, three pairs of actors share the stage almost throughout — in which case, their self-evident challenge is not to bump into one another. Or, at the very least, not to interfere with any of the parallel story lines, all of which are crafted with great skill and empathy by Bean, who has become something of a Court semi-regular of late. (His ''Under the Whaleback,'' an account of three generations of trawlerman in the northern English city of Hull, was one of the surprise glories of last year.) It's crucial, for example, that the arrival of teenage newlyweds, Eddie (Liam Garrigan) and Irene (Sara Beharrell), not break the concentration of the senior Eddie as he first appears, with the veteran comedy actor John Alderton playing the shambolic 67-year-old version of Eddie's once 18-year-old self. Long separated from Irene, who by now has become a government minister and baroness, the aging Eddie has agreed to a meeting in the very honeymoon suite where their married life began: the past quite literally haunting the present. In between those two selves is the paunchy 43-year-old Eddie (played by Jeremy Swift), who sports the embarrassing nickname, Tits, that we have seen the lustful young Eddie trying out a version of on his bride. Throughout the evening, you clock ambitions gone awry (and, in Irene's case, exceeded) and the U-turns thrown up by time, while noting an England that has itself altered, for good and for ill, in the intervening decades. The title ''Honeymoon Suite'' may sound like a bad sitcom, but don't be misled: The laughter is as honest and heartfelt as the sense of loss. There's nothing like the reclamation of an ostensibly tired theatrical warhorse to renew one's affection for play-going in a major way. R.C. Sherriff's "Journey's End" has had three London stagings in the past 15 years or so, one of which starred Jason Connery, Sean's son, in the central role of the 21-year-old army captain, Stanhope.
.
But plays, rather like jewels, can reveal different facets of themselves depending on the light shone on them. And as directed by David Grindley with a scrupulous attention that pays enormous dividends, Sherriff's darkly humane 1929 play, now revived at the Comedy Theater, isn't just a portrait of men at war at a particular place and time; it's a wounding lament for the deaths inevitably demanded by combat, however reasonable the conflict, even if Sherriff's specific view of the Great War was that it made no sense.
.
An insurance agent before he became a writer, Sherriff rooted the play in his own experiences, and Grindley's production honors its author's first-hand acquaintanceship with his subject by insisting on a striking realism all its own. Jason Taylor's dusky, low-level lighting gradually illuminates the scene: a dugout 50 yards from the front line in the immediate run-up in March 1918 to the major German offensive of World War I. With a scant 48 hours to go until attack, five British officers make their near hovel a home, the days spent both preparing for battle and trying various diversionary tactics not to think about it.
.
The loose cannon in the group, Stanhope (Geoffrey Streatfeild, inheriting a role first played for one performance only by Laurence Olivier), is also its leader: an imposing bully-boy with an alcoholic's fondness for whiskey — the liquor his best defense against going mad. Already pretty far gone is junior lieutenant Hibbert (Ben Meyjes), a neuralgia-prone hysteric with a view of life ("nothing matters") by way of Beckett. Not far behind is the shining-faced Raleigh (Christian Coulson), at age 18 an eager new recruit who worshipped Stanhope at school only to descend headlong into war's collective hell.
.
Attempting to soften the blow is onetime schoolmaster Osborne (David Haig in a tremendously compassionate turn), the seasoned second-in-command who can't quite ever leave combat behind. In one extraordinary passage, the kindly, quiet Osborne recounts an occasion on leave where he and his wife did ...
www.iht.com/articles/2004/02/04/lonwed_ed3_.php
.
But plays, rather like jewels, can reveal different facets of themselves depending on the light shone on them. And as directed by David Grindley with a scrupulous attention that pays enormous dividends, Sherriff's darkly humane 1929 play, now revived at the Comedy Theater, isn't just a portrait of men at war at a particular place and time; it's a wounding lament for the deaths inevitably demanded by combat, however reasonable the conflict, even if Sherriff's specific view of the Great War was that it made no sense.
.
An insurance agent before he became a writer, Sherriff rooted the play in his own experiences, and Grindley's production honors its author's first-hand acquaintanceship with his subject by insisting on a striking realism all its own. Jason Taylor's dusky, low-level lighting gradually illuminates the scene: a dugout 50 yards from the front line in the immediate run-up in March 1918 to the major German offensive of World War I. With a scant 48 hours to go until attack, five British officers make their near hovel a home, the days spent both preparing for battle and trying various diversionary tactics not to think about it.
.
The loose cannon in the group, Stanhope (Geoffrey Streatfeild, inheriting a role first played for one performance only by Laurence Olivier), is also its leader: an imposing bully-boy with an alcoholic's fondness for whiskey — the liquor his best defense against going mad. Already pretty far gone is junior lieutenant Hibbert (Ben Meyjes), a neuralgia-prone hysteric with a view of life ("nothing matters") by way of Beckett. Not far behind is the shining-faced Raleigh (Christian Coulson), at age 18 an eager new recruit who worshipped Stanhope at school only to descend headlong into war's collective hell.
.
Attempting to soften the blow is onetime schoolmaster Osborne (David Haig in a tremendously compassionate turn), the seasoned second-in-command who can't quite ever leave combat behind. In one extraordinary passage, the kindly, quiet Osborne recounts an occasion on leave where he and his wife did everything but communicate their anxieties about the war even as their young sons — oblivious to the import of the real thing — enacted their own playful facsimile of battle with some toy tin soldiers. Bursts of levity are offered by the cook, Mason (Phil Cornwell), and his faintly squirm-inducing menus (tea that tastes of onion). And by the apparently jolly, but in fact deeply serious Trotter (Paul Bradley), who has developed his own mathematical method for making it through each day, while aware that losses in wartime respect no formulae.
.
The play is astonishingly un-formulaic, and its resonances across 75 years are there to be felt, despite some now archaic language (adjectives like "topping") that, in this cast's expert hands, seems absolutely fresh. The evening, too, has been carefully paced by Grindley so as to give full weight to that awful limbo in which the men find themselves counting down their fearful way toward the enemy advance. "We're all just waiting for something," says Raleigh, and the first act, in particular, marches to the unsettling beat of events imminent — and bad — to come. The second act is both noisier and a bit more bald in its proclamations. But even then, you can practically smell the company's nervous sweat as the smoke of battle seeps on to the stage, followed by the grievous quiet accompanying that rare curtain call that is also a memorial: a silent tribute prompting clamorous applause. - The old adage about an actor's task being best defined by not bumping into the furniture can be revised on the evidence of ''Honeymoon Suite,'' at the Royal Court. Richard Bean's terrific new play places an unusual onus on director Paul Miller and his exemplary cast of six. Playing the same couple at three distinct and different points in their lives, three pairs of actors share the stage almost throughout — in which case, their self-evident challenge is not to bump into one another. Or, at the very least, not to interfere with any of the parallel story lines, all of which are crafted with great skill and empathy by Bean, who has become something of a Court semi-regular of late. (His ''Under the Whaleback,'' an account of three generations of trawlerman in the northern English city of Hull, was one of the surprise glories of last year.) It's crucial, for example, that the arrival of teenage newlyweds, Eddie (Liam Garrigan) and Irene (Sara Beharrell), not break the concentration of the senior Eddie as he first appears, with the veteran comedy actor John Alderton playing the shambolic 67-year-old version of Eddie's once 18-year-old self. Long separated from Irene, who by now has become a government minister and baroness, the aging Eddie has agreed to a meeting in the very honeymoon suite where their married life began: the past quite literally haunting the present. In between those two selves is the paunchy 43-year-old Eddie (played by Jeremy Swift), who sports the embarrassing nickname, Tits, that we have seen the lustful young Eddie trying out a version of on his bride. Throughout the evening, you clock ambitions gone awry (and, in Irene's case, exceeded) and the U-turns thrown up by time, while noting an England that has itself altered, for good and for ill, in the intervening decades. The title ''Honeymoon Suite'' may sound like a bad sitcom, but don't be misled: The laughter is as honest and heartfelt as the sense of loss. There's nothing like the reclamation of an ostensibly tired theatrical warhorse to renew one's affection for play-going in a major way. R.C. Sherriff's "Journey's End" has had three London stagings in the past 15 years or so, one of which starred Jason Connery, Sean's son, in the central role of the 21-year-old army captain, Stanhope.
.
But plays, rather like jewels, can reveal different facets of themselves depending on the light shone on them. And as directed by David Grindley with a scrupulous attention that pays enormous dividends, Sherriff's darkly humane 1929 play, now revived at the Comedy Theater, isn't just a portrait of men at war at a particular place and time; it's a wounding lament for the deaths inevitably demanded by combat, however reasonable the conflict, even if Sherriff's specific view of the Great War was that it made no sense.
.
An insurance agent before he became a writer, Sherriff rooted the play in his own experiences, and Grindley's production honors its author's first-hand acquaintanceship with his subject by insisting on a striking realism all its own. Jason Taylor's dusky, low-level lighting gradually illuminates the scene: a dugout 50 yards from the front line in the immediate run-up in March 1918 to the major German offensive of World War I. With a scant 48 hours to go until attack, five British officers make their near hovel a home, the days spent both preparing for battle and trying various diversionary tactics not to think about it.
.
The loose cannon in the group, Stanhope (Geoffrey Streatfeild, inheriting a role first played for one performance only by Laurence Olivier), is also its leader: an imposing bully-boy with an alcoholic's fondness for whiskey — the liquor his best defense against going mad. Already pretty far gone is junior lieutenant Hibbert (Ben Meyjes), a neuralgia-prone hysteric with a view of life ("nothing matters") by way of Beckett. Not far behind is the shining-faced Raleigh (Christian Coulson), at age 18 an eager new recruit who worshipped Stanhope at school only to descend headlong into war's collective hell.
.
Attempting to soften the blow is onetime schoolmaster Osborne (David Haig in a tremendously compassionate turn), the seasoned second-in-command who can't quite ever leave combat behind. In one extraordinary passage, the kindly, quiet Osborne recounts an occasion on leave where he and his wife did everything but communicate their anxieties about the war even as their young sons — oblivious to the import of the real thing — enacted their own playful facsimile of battle with some toy tin soldiers. Bursts of levity are offered by the cook, Mason (Phil Cornwell), and his faintly squirm-inducing menus (tea that tastes of onion). And by the apparently jolly, but in fact deeply serious Trotter (Paul Bradley), who has developed his own mathematical method for making it through each day, while aware that losses in wartime respect no formulae.
.
The play is astonishingly un-formulaic, and its resonances across 75 years are there to be felt, despite some now archaic language (adjectives like "topping") that, in this cast's expert hands, seems absolutely fresh. The evening, too, has been carefully paced by Grindley so as to give full weight to that awful limbo in which the men find themselves counting down their fearful way toward the enemy advance. "We're all just waiting for something," says Raleigh, and the first act, in particular, marches to the unsettling beat of events imminent — and bad — to come. The second act is both noisier and a bit more bald in its proclamations. But even then, you can practically smell the company's nervous sweat as the smoke of battle seeps on to the stage, followed by the grievous quiet accompanying that rare curtain call that is also a memorial: a silent tribute prompting clamorous applause. - The old adage about an actor's task being best defined by not bumping into the furniture can be revised on the evidence of ''Honeymoon Suite,'' at the Royal Court. Richard Bean's terrific new play places an unusual onus on director Paul Miller and his exemplary cast of six. Playing the same couple at three distinct and different points in their lives, three pairs of actors share the stage almost throughout — in which case, their self-evident challenge is not to bump into one another. Or, at the very least, not to interfere with any of the parallel story lines, all of which are crafted with great skill and empathy by Bean, who has become something of a Court semi-regular of late. (His ''Under the Whaleback,'' an account of three generations of trawlerman in the northern English city of Hull, was one of the surprise glories of last year.) It's crucial, for example, that the arrival of teenage newlyweds, Eddie (Liam Garrigan) and Irene (Sara Beharrell), not break the concentration of the senior Eddie as he first appears, with the veteran comedy actor John Alderton playing the shambolic 67-year-old version of Eddie's once 18-year-old self. Long separated from Irene, who by now has become a government minister and baroness, the aging Eddie has agreed to a meeting in the very honeymoon suite where their married life began: the past quite literally haunting the present. In between those two selves is the paunchy 43-year-old Eddie (played by Jeremy Swift), who sports the embarrassing nickname, Tits, that we have seen the lustful young Eddie trying out a version of on his bride. Throughout the evening, you clock ambitions gone awry (and, in Irene's case, exceeded) and the U-turns thrown up by time, while noting an England that has itself altered, for good and for ill, in the intervening decades. The title ''Honeymoon Suite'' may sound like a bad sitcom, but don't be misled: The laughter is as honest and heartfelt as the sense of loss. There's nothing like the reclamation of an ostensibly tired theatrical warhorse to renew one's affection for play-going in a major way. R.C. Sherriff's "Journey's End" has had three London stagings in the past 15 years or so, one of which starred Jason Connery, Sean's son, in the central role of the 21-year-old army captain, Stanhope.
.
But plays, rather like jewels, can reveal different facets of themselves depending on the light shone on them. And as directed by David Grindley with a scrupulous attention that pays enormous dividends, Sherriff's darkly humane 1929 play, now revived at the Comedy Theater, isn't just a portrait of men at war at a particular place and time; it's a wounding lament for the deaths inevitably demanded by combat, however reasonable the conflict, even if Sherriff's specific view of the Great War was that it made no sense.
.
An insurance agent before he became a writer, Sherriff rooted the play in his own experiences, and Grindley's production honors its author's first-hand acquaintanceship with his subject by insisting on a striking realism all its own. Jason Taylor's dusky, low-level lighting gradually illuminates the scene: a dugout 50 yards from the front line in the immediate run-up in March 1918 to the major German offensive of World War I. With a scant 48 hours to go until attack, five British officers make their near hovel a home, the days spent both preparing for battle and trying various diversionary tactics not to think about it.
.
The loose cannon in the group, Stanhope (Geoffrey Streatfeild, inheriting a role first played for one performance only by Laurence Olivier), is also its leader: an imposing bully-boy with an alcoholic's fondness for whiskey — the liquor his best defense against going mad. Already pretty far gone is junior lieutenant Hibbert (Ben Meyjes), a neuralgia-prone hysteric with a view of life ("nothing matters") by way of Beckett. Not far behind is the shining-faced Raleigh (Christian Coulson), at age 18 an eager new recruit who worshipped Stanhope at school only to descend headlong into war's collective hell.
.
Attempting to soften the blow is onetime schoolmaster Osborne (David Haig in a tremendously compassionate turn), the seasoned second-in-command who can't quite ever leave combat behind. In one extraordinary passage, the kindly, quiet Osborne recounts an occasion on leave where he and his wife did ...
www.iht.com/articles/2004/02/04/lonwed_ed3_.php
