a night of high culture

We went into Colchester last night, for another trip to the theatre.  It has been a very cultural week, by our standards, and last night was downright highbrow, since we went to see Cheek by Jowl's performance of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.  All I knew about it was that it was a Jacobean tragedy, and that Cheek by Jowl were a tippety top company of international rather than regional standing.  The Systems Administrator actually studied the text at school (the SA's Eng. Lit. syllabus sounds much more exciting than mine, we got Romeo and Juliet, a very clunkily constructed play, and Great ruddy Expectations).

Last night was the second ever of the current tour.  I say current, because the production was previously staged a couple of years ago.  You can work out where by looking at the trail of 2012 reviews on the web.  I purposely didn't look up anything until afterwards, for fear of plot spoilers, though given that I've seen The White Devils and The Duchess of Malfi I was expecting gore, and no happy ending.  This time round, after Colchester they are going to Taipei, then the Barbican, Cambridge, Oxford, Southampton, Bath, Amsterdam and The Hague.

I loved it.  I was utterly gripped from the moment the lights went down, came up again, and the full cast came dancing on to the stage.  It is a very physical production.  Even when they are not party to events, many of the actors remain in view a lot of the time, sitting around the edges of the stage, or gathered around the characters who are speaking like the crowd in a Renaissance painting of a biblical scene.  There are long gaps in the dialogue, when characters who believe they are unseen mess around, while other characters observe them.  There is lots of music, dancing, play fighting and pretend real fighting.  Indeed, by the end the SA felt sorry for the lead actress, whose knees had gone quite pink after spending a large part of two hours being thrown around the stage in her knickers.  It was all a far cry from the reverential and deeply dull tripping iambic pentameters of my school days, it-is-the-east-and-Juliet-is-the-sun etc etc.

So it was wonderful.  The actors in their modern suits made the circa 1630 language sound completely natural, and there was enough physical acting going on to make sure that we got the gist of it, even if occasionally struggling to keep up with the archaic speech done at full production speed.  Some of the 2012 reviews said there was a bit too much dancing and prancing, but I liked it all.  I shall be disappointed if the national reviews don't heap praise on it this time round.  If they don't I shall have to conclude that I am a simple, provincial, middlebrow creature who is easily pleased.

It runs for an hour and fifty-five minutes with no interval, so if you're thinking of catching it at the Barbican (or indeed Oxford, or Taipei) then don't drink too much coffee first, or anything that's likely to irritate your bladder.