We went last night to see The Rivals at Colchester's Mercury Theatre. I'd never seen the play before, and was amused to find how, like Shakespeare, it was full of quotations. As well as the lines I recognised there were a lot of cracking one-liners I didn't know, and the plot twists fitted together beautifully. I thought it fully deserved to still be performed nearly 240 years after it was written. There are two sets of lovers plus two extra suitors, a fearsome female guardian (Mrs Malaprop, who is the one character from The Rivals we've all heard of), a choleric father, and several servants who all have their own agendas. I don't know why I'd expected it to be a slightly cruel play, but it turns out not to be. It rips the piss out of human vanity, hypocricy, fashion and silliness, but also shows a tender awareness of the capacity of human beings to make themselves miserable.
The Mercury chose to present it as what they termed a 'burlesque', which meant that the costumes were an eclectic mixture of Georgian, New Romantic, Cabaret and Steam Punk (to quote the programme notes. I only discovered what Steam Punk was quite recently, and I had to look it up on Wikipedia), and there was some singing, dancing, slapstick, jazzy lighting, talking to the audience and stand-up comedy, on a set like a cross between a nightclub and a catwalk. The programme notes said that this was meant to underline the parallels between the Georgian era and our own times. We thought the real reason might have been more of a desire to be different, but it worked pretty well, pacey, colourful, very funny, and genuinely touching in places. I had some reservations about some of the singing, which came over as tinny and inaudible, but I've been to one National Theatre production that fell down on that too. Not all actors are capable of singing over the noise of backing music so as to fill an auditorium while allowing the audience to hear the words, and neither miming nor miking up always work very well. (The male costumes that involved assorted disconnected bits of armour made me uneasy too, because they reminded me of a particularly unsatisfactory experimental and hideous production I went to at the E.N.O. a long time ago, but that isn't the Mercury's fault.)
Earlier this year, after I'd booked our tickets for Colchester, I saw that the Haymarket in London was putting on The Rivals with Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles. I didn't go to see that, but wonder if we'd have enjoyed it more, as an overall experience. I've no desire to see actors just because they've been on the telly or are famous in films, but enjoy seeing great stage actors like Simon Russell Beale when I do can, and they don't come to Colchester. The Mercury company are competent and solid, but they aren't Mark Rylance. But going to the Mercury is good, if you live here and not in London. The best seats in the house are £13.50 on a Tuesday, it is a twenty minute drive into Colchester and we can park for £2 in a multi-storey right opposite the theatre. So last night we left the house at 6.45pm for a 7.30pm start, had time for a tonic water in the bar before the play started, and after the 10.45pm end to the performance were home by 11.15pm. After buying a programme and the tonics and interval ice-creams (honey and ginger, very nice) we still had change from forty quid. Oh, and the seats are comfortable and have enough leg-room (true that last night it got mysteriously cold in the second half and I put my coat on, but normally the air con is very good).
If we'd gone to the West End or the National Theatre the train and tube fares would have come to over fifty quid. The train takes an hour, but you have to allow extra for delays (no point in arriving ten minutes after the play starts) and then we'd have had to get from Liverpool Street to the theatre (allowing more time for tube delays) so we'd have left the house by around 4pm. With a 10.45pm curtain we'd have been on the 11.30pm train, if not the midnight, and got home between one and two in the morning. I think the best tickets for the Haymarket production of The Rivals were £65, though deals may have been available. Including a programme and a snack by way of supper I doubt we'd have had change from £150, and without a deal on the tickets two hundred quid would probably have been nearer the mark. An incremental cost of over a hundred pounds, and an expedition that uses up the latter half of the afternoon and gets you home in the small hours, is a high price to pay for the experience of seeing two more famous actors in a different production of the same play. I can't say if the Haymarket version was better, but it would have had to be a lot better to be worth it.
Addendum Driving into Colchester we were listening to Jo Caulfield on R4. One of her gags was about how on tour she ran out of clean laundry, and was reduced to taking clothes from the pile of old stuff meant for the Oxfam shop, until she found herself doing a gig in a Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirt and a denim ra-ra skirt. Fortunately it was in Colchester so it didn't matter. We were in the audience at her last Colchester show. I didn't realize we'd made such a deep impression on her.
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