While waiting for the off, I was reminded how much I like the National Theatre. The areas around the theatres proper are really good. Nicely broken up, plenty of facilities and plenty of shuttered concrete. A good bit of interior design.
Picnic done we moved upstairs, where we found that they had laid on some childrens' entertainments, possibly linked to a show in one of the other theatres. Certainly there were plenty of families with young children about. One result of the entertainment is included above, telling us, inter alia, that I was the 53rd James to do such a thing.
This third visit was well worth while. We had a reasonable grip on what was going on and we thought that the performance had sharpened up in the couple or months since we had last seen it. As it happened, we explained our two visit to the same show to our taxi driver on the last leg of the journey home and his first thought was that that was a bit odd. Then he thought for a bit and remembered that in his youth he had once been to the same film lots of times, for as long as the fad lasted. From where we associated to an old friend who had been similarly smitten with 'Easy Rider'. I suppose there is the difference that, on the whole, plays are rather dearer than films.
The three stunts worked perfectly well for us the second time around, with loss of surprise not taking much away. And the sheep act had got better; they had clearly been working on their sheepiness. The modern dress did not jar in the way that it often does, the lack of fights with swords probably helping here.
I liked the music, with the quality singers and the antique instruments. And the fact that the terminal dance was not the rural romp of the Globe. While not exactly courtly, it did retain something of that, a bit of pomp and circumstance.
A lot of the delivery was quite slow, slow enough to understand what was being said, but sometimes too slow for the poetry. Hard to know what to do here, as I don't suppose many people in an audience of today are much better placed that I am when it comes to being able to cope with the dense Shakespearean blank verse at anything like the design speed. All that said, the seven ages speech (Act II, Scene VII, Uncut lines 139-166 ) much improved on last time around.
Seven ages apart, a bit of a sag in the second half of the first half again. But this is happening so regularly that I am starting to think that it something to do with me, rather than anything to do with the show. Maybe both?
Rosalie Craig was on very good form, managing to be young, playful and dignified all at the same time. Orlando, Celia and Oliver doing pretty well too. Leading to the thought that the play would only work when the actors and actresses doing the young lovers were young themselves. And thinking of the boys of Shakespeare's time, age perhaps more important than sex, The Rosalind and Orlando business was great as it was - but could easily become silly in the wrong hands, or in old hands.
The show ended on a properly equivocal note. How on earth had the good duke come to be tipped out by the bad duke, only to get back because the bad duke found Jesus or something? He did come across as a touch soft compared with his brother, but was I missing something?
PS: I am still learning. I read yesterday, à propos of something quite other, that Shakespearean blank verse comes in at ten beats to the bar, about as much as the average human working memory chip can cope with, even with the regular rhythm helping it out. I am not sure if I ever knew this before, certainly not recently, but it does seem to work on the few lines that I have checked.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=rosalind.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/rosalind.html.
Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/big-charles-1.html.
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