connielane (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
connielane) wrote2007-03-22 08:57 pm
connielane) wrote2007-03-22 08:57 pm
London-cation, Part 3 - "Indulging in Equitation"
WARNING: This post is heavily laden with pictures and therefore not friendly to dialup users.
Also, while I do know a bit more about movies than the average person, most of the movie facts listed in the "walk" details are not from my own head but from Kim Newman's. In fact, I have seen almost none of the films associated with the listed locations (though several of them are now in my Netflix Queue). Just wanted to give credit and set the record straight before someone thinks I'm a pompous blowhard. :P
I had an unusually morbid morning on Friday, as I did a London walk written by film critic (also journalist and fiction writer) Kim Newman called "Movies, murder, and the macabre." This was a trail of "famous" murders and deaths, mostly from movies, and iconic locations of film horror in general.
Mind the doors. Yes, I know the common usage is "mind the gap," but this is a movie quote. :P
It started at the Russell Square tube station. This location is connected with a little known 1973 horror flick called Death Line (which is called Raw Meat on the DVD, for some reason). The film is based on a strange London urban legend, in which construction on a tube station called British Museum was abandoned after a cave-in buried a group of workers (or "navvies," as Newman calls them - man, I love Brit-slang). The film operates under the assumption that there were survivors, and that they bred a race of cannibals, who prey on stray commuters and whose verbal communication is limited to three words - "mind the doors."
The British Museum, 2007 (l) and 1929 (r)
The next stop was the British Museum, which was a site for a few notable movie frights. The villain of Hitchcock's first talkie, Blackmail (1929), was pursued over the museum's rooftop (pictured above). If I'm not mistaken, I think the B&W picture below - another part of Blackmail's chase sequence - is the roof of the Reading Room (also pictured below).
The Reading Room (scanned from a postcard and not one of my photographs, sadly, as the room had been closed in preparation for a future exhibit) was a key location in Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon.
And the Hall of Egyptian Antiquities is the place where Charlton Heston resurrects an evil princess in GOF director Mike Newell's The Awakening. And here are more pictures of Egyptian artifacts than you can shake a very big stick at! Including, though it's not a movie reference (but it's verrah cool nonetheless)...
The Rosetta Stone!
At this point I started taking lots of pictures of cool-looking streets in my path. I headed from the museum to Tottenham Court Road, and Newman's map directed me to Stephen Street, round the crook of Gresse Street, and onto Rathbone Street. I walked back and forth on this street a couple of times before I found the next stop. It is, quite literally, a hole in the wall, and it no longer has the street sign it once had. I give you Newman Passage.
It's newly painted with welcoming colors, inviting visitors to the business adjacent to it, but I'll bet if I had come across it at night, I would have agreed with filmmaker Michael Powell, who described it as "a narrow, arched passageway that gives you goosepimples just to look at it." Powell used Newman Passage as the setting for the opening of his voyeuristic thriller Peeping Tom (which I have seen - hah!). Powell's protagonist Mark follows a middle-aged prostitute named Dora into the passage and up the stairs to her flat, where he impales her with a metal-spiked camera tripod while simultaneously filming her. There were also a couple of rumors that linked Newman Passage respectively to Jack the Ripper and to Jekyll and Hyde.
Mr. Peters: Got a question for you. Which magazine sells the most copies?
Mark Lewis: Those with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls.
Heading back to Rathbone Street, there is one more element of Peeping Tom's cityscape to be found. The newsagent's building above was used as the film's fictional newsagent's, the floor above which contains a studio where Mark takes risque pictures of (and eventually murders) a model named Millie.
I encountered a few distractions on my way to the next suggested stop of Wardour Street, one being a Clarks shoe shop where I splurged on a lovely pair of black leather shoes. The MST3K fan in me had to laugh at this clear reminder of "The Girl in Gold Boots."
They forgot the "me."
And some of you will no doubt get a kick out of the next picture. I spotted this building, stopped in my tracks, and almost said aloud "Put DOWN the porn and accept their deep, nonsexual love!"
It's an adult store. Called "Harmony." *dies*
Wardour Street is kind of the administrative home of the British Film Industry. No studios, but lots of offices for distributors, production companies, publicists, and post-production companies (like this one - at least, I think that's what it is). There aren't many Singin' In the Rains or Sunset Boulevards that have been made about the British film industry, so Wardour Street has not been filmed that much. But it is apparently featured in a 1974 film about the British porn industry called Eskimo Nell.
But above is the coolest bit of film history Wardour Street has to offer, in my opinion. Hammer House was once owned by Hammer Films, which all good film geeks know was (and is) an icon of the history of horror movies, and produced such classics as:
* CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
* THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN OF THE HIMALAYAS (1957)
* HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
* REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958)
* THE MUMMY (1959)
* CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1960)
* PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962)
* THE GORGON
* FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN
* TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)
I was tempted to get my hair cut at the salon that occupies part of the space now, but never made it back after this walk. Next was a teeny little spot called Diadem Court, which is not a place that was actually filmed, but it was the given address of a murdered prostitue named Champagne Ivy in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The film was made in Hollywood, but it's rather remarkable that an American film would have given a real London address - a place which, at the time the story is set, would have been just the place a woman the likes of Ivy would live - for such a minor character. The place itself is so small that it isn't on most maps, and indeed is barely perceptible even in the most comprehensive street guide to London there is, the London A-Z. So I was rather proud I'd found it. :)
Next was Soho Square, which features in a lot of fiction, apparently, but is rarely filmed, which is a shame because it's a lovely spot. And, having been part of my getting turned around trying to find the Prince Edward Theatre the night before, I know firsthand how creepy it looks at night. :P
Falconberg Court is next, which is the address given to the Alan Howard character Michael, who I believe is the "Lover" in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. This locale was formerly a Preview Theatre, now in a different place, and is now a gay club called Ghetto, as you can see from the lovely mural. :)
I headed back down Old Compton Street, which I had a hard time seeing as macabre, since it houses the Prince Edward Theatre in which I'd seen Mary Poppins just the evening before. Also, at this point, Newman's film examples were productions that used fictionalized versions of the neighborhood (Soho) I was walking through, which didn't really inspire me to take pictures. So I held off until Great Windmill Street, home of the historic Windmill Theatre, which was featured in the recent Mrs. Henderson Presents and was known in the 1930s for its nude revues.
The theater was also featured in Murder at the Windmill and Secrets of a Windmill Girl, and is now a famous destination for table-dances. Which brings us to one of the most recognizable sites in London...
Picadilly Circus. Featured in a little-known serial killer drama East of Picadilly and, much more famously, in John Landis's An American Werewolf in London. By the time I left Picadilly Circus, I was running very short on time to make my meetup with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cynthia_black. I was only a few minutes late, thankfully, and was able to easily traverse through King's Cross Station to find our agreed-upon meeting place of Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters.
Tada! Tada! Tada forever!
We decided to venture in the direction of Tower Hill, since I'd never seen the Tower in person. (I still haven't been inside for the tour, but that will just have to wait for the next trip.) We chatted a bit about my trip so far, her adorable children, office politics, church drama (in general, not specifics :P), how nice it would be to work in a field you've been educated for, and ... oh yeah, what we thought might happen in Deathly Hallows.
We had a lovely lunch by Tower Bridge and stood our ground against the birds. Then we made our way back to the Tube station (slowed somewhat by my incessant picture-snapping - oh look, the Gherkin!), stopping for a moment whilecynthia_black told me about Traitors Gate, and headed thence to Fortnum & Mason. On the way, we admired a lovely Deathly Hallows window display at Waterstone's.
I was a bit underwhelmed by Fortnum & Mason, to be honest. I was expecting something more the size of Harrod's, but it's quite small in comparison (well, what isn't, really?). After spending the first several minutes boggling at the exorbitant prices, I started playing a little game of Guess The Price. Despite padding the price I had already considered ridiculously high, the true price of each item I looked at always exceeded my guess. Jeepers!cynthia_black managed to find some cards and a tin of biscuits (that's cookies to you Yanks) for a reasonable sum, we spent a little time in the food halls where we sampled some eel, and after a bit we went our separate ways. She was off to meet some other LJ friends, and I was off to Shaftesbury Avenue (note the now very familiar torso in the distance) to pick up my tickets before returning to the hotel to freshen up and regroup before seeing Equus.
Luckily, I was able to pick up my Equus tickets at the Gielgud without my confirmation numbers, because I'd left them in the room. There was a bit of embarrassment as I had to sign for, erm, all three of my tickets. When I got back to the hotel I dawdled a bit too long, and after shoving through heavy Tube traffic (you have no idea - it's like New Year's Eve every night of the week!) I was practically running down Shaftesbury Avenue. I arrived back at the Gielgud with just moments to spare and found my seat in the Dress Circle before remembering that I hadn't bought a program. Ah well, I thought - I'd get a couple more chances.
So ... Equus. Equus Equus Equus. Okay, sounding a bit like Alan Strang there. A lot of people don't like this play, but I have always found it to be deeply moving and profound. Lots of people complain about the infantile psychiatry, but to me it's infantile by design. Psychiatry is merely a device - a "black veil," as Nathaniel Hawthorne might call it, through which we see the characters and story. The whole point of the play is to make you question formulas - what's normal, what's insane, what's right, what's excessive, what's perverse, and indeed what is psychiatric evaluation itself. Martin Dysart's chief dilemma, as I see it, is his loss of faith in psychiatry and in society's accepted equations, because the human mind is ultimately too complex for everything to be accounted for. ("Account for me!")
The praise for this production has not been blindly bestowed. Richard Griffiths is spectacular, carrying the weight of the play on his shoulders and being the only actor who is on stage for the play's entirety. He also brings a tremendous sense of humor to Dysart that I'd never quite imagined, having as my only reference for the character Richard Burton's performance in the 1977 film. It's so nice to see Griffiths do something besides the one-note comic bit of Uncle Vernon. One of the great moments in the play and one which - all three times I saw it - made the play stop for a moment while the audience laughed and applauded, belongs to Griffiths. He's in the middle of his last meeting with Hesther, the magistrate, and delivers an amazing speech about which is the lunatic between himself and the patient he is treating.
Ultimately, Griffiths' biggest (and probably most challenging) job is playing a kind of Ring Master, guiding the audience through the story, directing their attention where it belongs, and subtly but effectively cuing the action from his present-moment conversation with the audience to his respective conversations with the characters in the story to the flashback events that show what has brought Alan to his current crisis.
The supporting players all do admirable work. The weakest, in my opinion, is Jenny Agutter, who plays Hesther (and who played Alan's "love interest" Jill in the 1977 film). But I don't think this is necessarily Agutter's fault. It's a quite thankless role and, in a sense, Hesther is the villain of the piece. Joanna Christie is wonderful as Jill and lends a certain amount of humor to her role as well ("It's a case of like-father-like-son, I'd say.") She plays just the right amount of provocative, and she's just sickeningly gorgeous besides.
Most notable (to me) among the supporting players are the actors playing Alan's parents, Frank and Dora. I was impressed by them from the beginning, but I was even more so watching their interactions from the stage seats. One scene in particular was especially moving, when Dora explains what she had taught Alan about sex. She is very religious, but Frank is an atheist. While she is talking about explaining to Alan about coming to "know a higher love still" she breaks down, and assumes Frank is going to laugh at her. In the film, this is really the only tender moment between the Strangs, and I was disappointed, in my first viewing of the play, to see it played differently, with Dora actually pushing Frank away instead of letting him comfort her. But from the stage seats, I had an excellent view of Frank, whose self-repressed (and I suppose wife-repressed) affection for his wife was as affecting as anything else in the play.
I want to take a moment, too, and remark on the actors/dancers playing the horses. I'm sure much, if not all, of their movements were carefully choreographed, but it's amazing how the simplest nuances of movement - helped along by masks and mini-stilts - can make a man resemble a horse. Of course, the main horse, Nugget, is played by Will Kemp, who has a great deal more to do (he also plays the Young Horseman). The most dazzling bit of his performance is at the end of Act One, as he bears Alan away through the field of "ha-ha," and quite literally gallops, stilts and all, on a rotating stage, with Alan on his back. But my favorite moment of his is at the beginning of Act One and Act Two, where Alan stands embracing Nugget. And Kemp, through the horse mask, makes a nuzzling gesture that is unmistakably affectionate and possibly the most beautiful image in the play.
Oh, and speaking of Alan, Dan Radcliffe is in the play, too.
Oh, and ... he gets naked for a few minutes.
Yeah, there's a bit more to say than that. This was, in a way, sort of an obvious choice for him to have made. If he had done little more than get through the play without falling on his face, it would probably still have been considered an achievement. The role of Alan Strang is probably the most complex and difficult role written for a young male actor since ... well, Hamlet. And it was incredibly brave for Radcliffe to even take it on to begin with. The bar was set here by Peter Firth, who played Alan so exceptionally in the original stage version and eventually in the film. Firth played Alan (in the film, at least) with a kind of delicacy that suited his rather willowy looks. He had that innocent, sweet face and the flyaway, Peter-Frampton-y hair - very much the thing in the 1970s, from what I can tell (William Katt had a similar look). Firth seemed very gentle and innocent from the beginning, which struck me as somewhat chilling, given what we knew he'd done to the horses.
Radcliffe's version of Alan is the inverse in many ways - a kind of "Bizarro Alan" from Firth's original creation. Instead of playing Alan as still and recalcitrant, he's confrontational and intense. Instead of simply singing the television commercials in his opening scene, almost as if Dysart isn't there, he steps closer to Dysart (not in a romantic sense, so turn off those shippiness bells :P) and quite literally shouts them at him. He does what good actors do, which is to take what they have - in Dan's case, his seemingly endless manic energy - and use it to create something unsettlingly real. It takes a great deal of talent to create a memorable, original character from scratch, and Peter Firth certainly did that exceedingly well. But it takes just as much talent to take a character that someone else has created so masterfully and completely make it your own, and I think Radcliffe has succeeded mightily in that.
There are several showy moments in his performance, where he's giving it all he's got and putting himself out there in a very obvious way ("Tellmetellmetellmetellme! ... Nosey Parker!"). But the best moments for me were the subtle things, like the absolute ecstasy on his face - which no one but the people seated on the stage can even see - when he's breathing in Nugget's breath. He's in character every moment he is on stage, even if he's not in the scene and is sitting or lying with his back to the audience.
I'm not going to talk about the nudity - well, yes I am, but not in the way you might think. As for Dan, he, erm, looks very nice, but is still quite clearly a 17-year-old boy. There's been so much talk about the nudity, and defenders keep rushing to say that it's not gratuitous and it's essential to the character, blahblahblah. I know that probably sounds like artsy bull to some, so I'll try to explain how not gratuitous it is. There are four moments in the play where we're meant to understand that Alan is naked, even if the actor playing him is not completely nude. Some productions, I understand, have the actor nude for all of them. The film obviously does this as well, since it doesn't really work to convey nakedness with something less than naked. (Incidentally, this has always made me think "OW!" for movie!Alan in his galloping scene, but I digress.)
This production requires Dan to be naked exactly once, for just a few minutes, at the end of the play. The other three times, the nudity is represented by him simply having his shirt off (and, at the end of Act One, his shoes and socks). He's not fully naked until it's absolutely essential that he be so. When Dysart has finally broken down all the barriers of neurosis that stand between him and the cause behind Alan's attack on the horses. In a way, this scene (nudity aside) is even more intimate than the nuzzling and galloping scenes, so it makes sense for it to be distinctive from those in terms of the nudity.
Plus, in that scene in the stable, Alan has been caught by his god, like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The nudity is essential to his sense of shame and his horror at being seen by Equus. It also makes him much more vulnerable during the blinding of the horses, giving him literally no protection, save the small hoof pick, from the raging, stomping animals. It's not skin for the sake of skin; it means something. ... Okay, so yeah, I just spent three paragraphs on the nudity, which is probably more than sufficient. :P
I love this play. I love that it's so similar to an old-school Greek tragedy. The actors in horse masks are very reminiscent of actors in ancient Greece who wore masks. The play sort of leans on the Greek connection, but in a sideways kind of way, by having Greece be one of Dysart's subverted passions. I'm so glad I got to see this.
I'm hoping to do a detailed description of the play, for anyone who's interested and won't be able to see it for themselves.
*sigh* Anyway :D After the show I was powerful hungry, having missed my chance for a pre-show dinner. But I didn't really want to sit down anywhere (plus most places were closing soon anyway). So I forgot for a moment that I was in another country and culture and grabbed some KFC comfort food to take back to the hotel with me. Rather fittingly, while I stuffed my face with fried chicken, I watched an incredibly tacky TV show called "Celebrities on the Scales" before crashing once more into bed.
Tune in next time when I move out of the cupboard, get quite close to Dan Radcliffe, and watch Jason Isaacs point a gun at a dumb waiter.
Also, while I do know a bit more about movies than the average person, most of the movie facts listed in the "walk" details are not from my own head but from Kim Newman's. In fact, I have seen almost none of the films associated with the listed locations (though several of them are now in my Netflix Queue). Just wanted to give credit and set the record straight before someone thinks I'm a pompous blowhard. :P
I had an unusually morbid morning on Friday, as I did a London walk written by film critic (also journalist and fiction writer) Kim Newman called "Movies, murder, and the macabre." This was a trail of "famous" murders and deaths, mostly from movies, and iconic locations of film horror in general.
Mind the doors. Yes, I know the common usage is "mind the gap," but this is a movie quote. :P
It started at the Russell Square tube station. This location is connected with a little known 1973 horror flick called Death Line (which is called Raw Meat on the DVD, for some reason). The film is based on a strange London urban legend, in which construction on a tube station called British Museum was abandoned after a cave-in buried a group of workers (or "navvies," as Newman calls them - man, I love Brit-slang). The film operates under the assumption that there were survivors, and that they bred a race of cannibals, who prey on stray commuters and whose verbal communication is limited to three words - "mind the doors."
The British Museum, 2007 (l) and 1929 (r)
The next stop was the British Museum, which was a site for a few notable movie frights. The villain of Hitchcock's first talkie, Blackmail (1929), was pursued over the museum's rooftop (pictured above). If I'm not mistaken, I think the B&W picture below - another part of Blackmail's chase sequence - is the roof of the Reading Room (also pictured below).
The Reading Room (scanned from a postcard and not one of my photographs, sadly, as the room had been closed in preparation for a future exhibit) was a key location in Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon.
And the Hall of Egyptian Antiquities is the place where Charlton Heston resurrects an evil princess in GOF director Mike Newell's The Awakening. And here are more pictures of Egyptian artifacts than you can shake a very big stick at! Including, though it's not a movie reference (but it's verrah cool nonetheless)...
The Rosetta Stone!
At this point I started taking lots of pictures of cool-looking streets in my path. I headed from the museum to Tottenham Court Road, and Newman's map directed me to Stephen Street, round the crook of Gresse Street, and onto Rathbone Street. I walked back and forth on this street a couple of times before I found the next stop. It is, quite literally, a hole in the wall, and it no longer has the street sign it once had. I give you Newman Passage.
It's newly painted with welcoming colors, inviting visitors to the business adjacent to it, but I'll bet if I had come across it at night, I would have agreed with filmmaker Michael Powell, who described it as "a narrow, arched passageway that gives you goosepimples just to look at it." Powell used Newman Passage as the setting for the opening of his voyeuristic thriller Peeping Tom (which I have seen - hah!). Powell's protagonist Mark follows a middle-aged prostitute named Dora into the passage and up the stairs to her flat, where he impales her with a metal-spiked camera tripod while simultaneously filming her. There were also a couple of rumors that linked Newman Passage respectively to Jack the Ripper and to Jekyll and Hyde.
Mr. Peters: Got a question for you. Which magazine sells the most copies?
Mark Lewis: Those with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls.
Heading back to Rathbone Street, there is one more element of Peeping Tom's cityscape to be found. The newsagent's building above was used as the film's fictional newsagent's, the floor above which contains a studio where Mark takes risque pictures of (and eventually murders) a model named Millie.
I encountered a few distractions on my way to the next suggested stop of Wardour Street, one being a Clarks shoe shop where I splurged on a lovely pair of black leather shoes. The MST3K fan in me had to laugh at this clear reminder of "The Girl in Gold Boots."
They forgot the "me."
And some of you will no doubt get a kick out of the next picture. I spotted this building, stopped in my tracks, and almost said aloud "Put DOWN the porn and accept their deep, nonsexual love!"
It's an adult store. Called "Harmony." *dies*
Wardour Street is kind of the administrative home of the British Film Industry. No studios, but lots of offices for distributors, production companies, publicists, and post-production companies (like this one - at least, I think that's what it is). There aren't many Singin' In the Rains or Sunset Boulevards that have been made about the British film industry, so Wardour Street has not been filmed that much. But it is apparently featured in a 1974 film about the British porn industry called Eskimo Nell.
But above is the coolest bit of film history Wardour Street has to offer, in my opinion. Hammer House was once owned by Hammer Films, which all good film geeks know was (and is) an icon of the history of horror movies, and produced such classics as:
* CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
* THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN OF THE HIMALAYAS (1957)
* HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
* REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958)
* THE MUMMY (1959)
* CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1960)
* PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962)
* THE GORGON
* FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN
* TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)
I was tempted to get my hair cut at the salon that occupies part of the space now, but never made it back after this walk. Next was a teeny little spot called Diadem Court, which is not a place that was actually filmed, but it was the given address of a murdered prostitue named Champagne Ivy in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The film was made in Hollywood, but it's rather remarkable that an American film would have given a real London address - a place which, at the time the story is set, would have been just the place a woman the likes of Ivy would live - for such a minor character. The place itself is so small that it isn't on most maps, and indeed is barely perceptible even in the most comprehensive street guide to London there is, the London A-Z. So I was rather proud I'd found it. :)
Next was Soho Square, which features in a lot of fiction, apparently, but is rarely filmed, which is a shame because it's a lovely spot. And, having been part of my getting turned around trying to find the Prince Edward Theatre the night before, I know firsthand how creepy it looks at night. :P
Falconberg Court is next, which is the address given to the Alan Howard character Michael, who I believe is the "Lover" in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. This locale was formerly a Preview Theatre, now in a different place, and is now a gay club called Ghetto, as you can see from the lovely mural. :)
I headed back down Old Compton Street, which I had a hard time seeing as macabre, since it houses the Prince Edward Theatre in which I'd seen Mary Poppins just the evening before. Also, at this point, Newman's film examples were productions that used fictionalized versions of the neighborhood (Soho) I was walking through, which didn't really inspire me to take pictures. So I held off until Great Windmill Street, home of the historic Windmill Theatre, which was featured in the recent Mrs. Henderson Presents and was known in the 1930s for its nude revues.
The theater was also featured in Murder at the Windmill and Secrets of a Windmill Girl, and is now a famous destination for table-dances. Which brings us to one of the most recognizable sites in London...
Picadilly Circus. Featured in a little-known serial killer drama East of Picadilly and, much more famously, in John Landis's An American Werewolf in London. By the time I left Picadilly Circus, I was running very short on time to make my meetup with
cynthia_black. I was only a few minutes late, thankfully, and was able to easily traverse through King's Cross Station to find our agreed-upon meeting place of Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters.
Tada! Tada! Tada forever!
We decided to venture in the direction of Tower Hill, since I'd never seen the Tower in person. (I still haven't been inside for the tour, but that will just have to wait for the next trip.) We chatted a bit about my trip so far, her adorable children, office politics, church drama (in general, not specifics :P), how nice it would be to work in a field you've been educated for, and ... oh yeah, what we thought might happen in Deathly Hallows.
We had a lovely lunch by Tower Bridge and stood our ground against the birds. Then we made our way back to the Tube station (slowed somewhat by my incessant picture-snapping - oh look, the Gherkin!), stopping for a moment while
cynthia_black told me about Traitors Gate, and headed thence to Fortnum & Mason. On the way, we admired a lovely Deathly Hallows window display at Waterstone's.
I was a bit underwhelmed by Fortnum & Mason, to be honest. I was expecting something more the size of Harrod's, but it's quite small in comparison (well, what isn't, really?). After spending the first several minutes boggling at the exorbitant prices, I started playing a little game of Guess The Price. Despite padding the price I had already considered ridiculously high, the true price of each item I looked at always exceeded my guess. Jeepers!
cynthia_black managed to find some cards and a tin of biscuits (that's cookies to you Yanks) for a reasonable sum, we spent a little time in the food halls where we sampled some eel, and after a bit we went our separate ways. She was off to meet some other LJ friends, and I was off to Shaftesbury Avenue (note the now very familiar torso in the distance) to pick up my tickets before returning to the hotel to freshen up and regroup before seeing Equus.
Luckily, I was able to pick up my Equus tickets at the Gielgud without my confirmation numbers, because I'd left them in the room. There was a bit of embarrassment as I had to sign for, erm, all three of my tickets. When I got back to the hotel I dawdled a bit too long, and after shoving through heavy Tube traffic (you have no idea - it's like New Year's Eve every night of the week!) I was practically running down Shaftesbury Avenue. I arrived back at the Gielgud with just moments to spare and found my seat in the Dress Circle before remembering that I hadn't bought a program. Ah well, I thought - I'd get a couple more chances.
So ... Equus. Equus Equus Equus. Okay, sounding a bit like Alan Strang there. A lot of people don't like this play, but I have always found it to be deeply moving and profound. Lots of people complain about the infantile psychiatry, but to me it's infantile by design. Psychiatry is merely a device - a "black veil," as Nathaniel Hawthorne might call it, through which we see the characters and story. The whole point of the play is to make you question formulas - what's normal, what's insane, what's right, what's excessive, what's perverse, and indeed what is psychiatric evaluation itself. Martin Dysart's chief dilemma, as I see it, is his loss of faith in psychiatry and in society's accepted equations, because the human mind is ultimately too complex for everything to be accounted for. ("Account for me!")
The praise for this production has not been blindly bestowed. Richard Griffiths is spectacular, carrying the weight of the play on his shoulders and being the only actor who is on stage for the play's entirety. He also brings a tremendous sense of humor to Dysart that I'd never quite imagined, having as my only reference for the character Richard Burton's performance in the 1977 film. It's so nice to see Griffiths do something besides the one-note comic bit of Uncle Vernon. One of the great moments in the play and one which - all three times I saw it - made the play stop for a moment while the audience laughed and applauded, belongs to Griffiths. He's in the middle of his last meeting with Hesther, the magistrate, and delivers an amazing speech about which is the lunatic between himself and the patient he is treating.
Ultimately, Griffiths' biggest (and probably most challenging) job is playing a kind of Ring Master, guiding the audience through the story, directing their attention where it belongs, and subtly but effectively cuing the action from his present-moment conversation with the audience to his respective conversations with the characters in the story to the flashback events that show what has brought Alan to his current crisis.
The supporting players all do admirable work. The weakest, in my opinion, is Jenny Agutter, who plays Hesther (and who played Alan's "love interest" Jill in the 1977 film). But I don't think this is necessarily Agutter's fault. It's a quite thankless role and, in a sense, Hesther is the villain of the piece. Joanna Christie is wonderful as Jill and lends a certain amount of humor to her role as well ("It's a case of like-father-like-son, I'd say.") She plays just the right amount of provocative, and she's just sickeningly gorgeous besides.
Most notable (to me) among the supporting players are the actors playing Alan's parents, Frank and Dora. I was impressed by them from the beginning, but I was even more so watching their interactions from the stage seats. One scene in particular was especially moving, when Dora explains what she had taught Alan about sex. She is very religious, but Frank is an atheist. While she is talking about explaining to Alan about coming to "know a higher love still" she breaks down, and assumes Frank is going to laugh at her. In the film, this is really the only tender moment between the Strangs, and I was disappointed, in my first viewing of the play, to see it played differently, with Dora actually pushing Frank away instead of letting him comfort her. But from the stage seats, I had an excellent view of Frank, whose self-repressed (and I suppose wife-repressed) affection for his wife was as affecting as anything else in the play.
I want to take a moment, too, and remark on the actors/dancers playing the horses. I'm sure much, if not all, of their movements were carefully choreographed, but it's amazing how the simplest nuances of movement - helped along by masks and mini-stilts - can make a man resemble a horse. Of course, the main horse, Nugget, is played by Will Kemp, who has a great deal more to do (he also plays the Young Horseman). The most dazzling bit of his performance is at the end of Act One, as he bears Alan away through the field of "ha-ha," and quite literally gallops, stilts and all, on a rotating stage, with Alan on his back. But my favorite moment of his is at the beginning of Act One and Act Two, where Alan stands embracing Nugget. And Kemp, through the horse mask, makes a nuzzling gesture that is unmistakably affectionate and possibly the most beautiful image in the play.
Oh, and speaking of Alan, Dan Radcliffe is in the play, too.
Oh, and ... he gets naked for a few minutes.
Yeah, there's a bit more to say than that. This was, in a way, sort of an obvious choice for him to have made. If he had done little more than get through the play without falling on his face, it would probably still have been considered an achievement. The role of Alan Strang is probably the most complex and difficult role written for a young male actor since ... well, Hamlet. And it was incredibly brave for Radcliffe to even take it on to begin with. The bar was set here by Peter Firth, who played Alan so exceptionally in the original stage version and eventually in the film. Firth played Alan (in the film, at least) with a kind of delicacy that suited his rather willowy looks. He had that innocent, sweet face and the flyaway, Peter-Frampton-y hair - very much the thing in the 1970s, from what I can tell (William Katt had a similar look). Firth seemed very gentle and innocent from the beginning, which struck me as somewhat chilling, given what we knew he'd done to the horses.
Radcliffe's version of Alan is the inverse in many ways - a kind of "Bizarro Alan" from Firth's original creation. Instead of playing Alan as still and recalcitrant, he's confrontational and intense. Instead of simply singing the television commercials in his opening scene, almost as if Dysart isn't there, he steps closer to Dysart (not in a romantic sense, so turn off those shippiness bells :P) and quite literally shouts them at him. He does what good actors do, which is to take what they have - in Dan's case, his seemingly endless manic energy - and use it to create something unsettlingly real. It takes a great deal of talent to create a memorable, original character from scratch, and Peter Firth certainly did that exceedingly well. But it takes just as much talent to take a character that someone else has created so masterfully and completely make it your own, and I think Radcliffe has succeeded mightily in that.
There are several showy moments in his performance, where he's giving it all he's got and putting himself out there in a very obvious way ("Tellmetellmetellmetellme! ... Nosey Parker!"). But the best moments for me were the subtle things, like the absolute ecstasy on his face - which no one but the people seated on the stage can even see - when he's breathing in Nugget's breath. He's in character every moment he is on stage, even if he's not in the scene and is sitting or lying with his back to the audience.
I'm not going to talk about the nudity - well, yes I am, but not in the way you might think. As for Dan, he, erm, looks very nice, but is still quite clearly a 17-year-old boy. There's been so much talk about the nudity, and defenders keep rushing to say that it's not gratuitous and it's essential to the character, blahblahblah. I know that probably sounds like artsy bull to some, so I'll try to explain how not gratuitous it is. There are four moments in the play where we're meant to understand that Alan is naked, even if the actor playing him is not completely nude. Some productions, I understand, have the actor nude for all of them. The film obviously does this as well, since it doesn't really work to convey nakedness with something less than naked. (Incidentally, this has always made me think "OW!" for movie!Alan in his galloping scene, but I digress.)
This production requires Dan to be naked exactly once, for just a few minutes, at the end of the play. The other three times, the nudity is represented by him simply having his shirt off (and, at the end of Act One, his shoes and socks). He's not fully naked until it's absolutely essential that he be so. When Dysart has finally broken down all the barriers of neurosis that stand between him and the cause behind Alan's attack on the horses. In a way, this scene (nudity aside) is even more intimate than the nuzzling and galloping scenes, so it makes sense for it to be distinctive from those in terms of the nudity.
Plus, in that scene in the stable, Alan has been caught by his god, like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. The nudity is essential to his sense of shame and his horror at being seen by Equus. It also makes him much more vulnerable during the blinding of the horses, giving him literally no protection, save the small hoof pick, from the raging, stomping animals. It's not skin for the sake of skin; it means something. ... Okay, so yeah, I just spent three paragraphs on the nudity, which is probably more than sufficient. :P
I love this play. I love that it's so similar to an old-school Greek tragedy. The actors in horse masks are very reminiscent of actors in ancient Greece who wore masks. The play sort of leans on the Greek connection, but in a sideways kind of way, by having Greece be one of Dysart's subverted passions. I'm so glad I got to see this.
I'm hoping to do a detailed description of the play, for anyone who's interested and won't be able to see it for themselves.
*sigh* Anyway :D After the show I was powerful hungry, having missed my chance for a pre-show dinner. But I didn't really want to sit down anywhere (plus most places were closing soon anyway). So I forgot for a moment that I was in another country and culture and grabbed some KFC comfort food to take back to the hotel with me. Rather fittingly, while I stuffed my face with fried chicken, I watched an incredibly tacky TV show called "Celebrities on the Scales" before crashing once more into bed.
Tune in next time when I move out of the cupboard, get quite close to Dan Radcliffe, and watch Jason Isaacs point a gun at a dumb waiter.