How do you know if a show is any good? Well, sometimes the audience can help you decide, especially if your fellow spectators are vocal in their enthusiasm. Recently, I caught up with Joe Hill-Gibbins’ excellent revival of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Young Vic. It’s a terrific play and a terrific night at the theatre. Whereas I remember the original 1996 Druid production as claustrophobic, cramped and tight, this time the play is broad, ample and very entertaining. Clearly, the large, open space of the Young Vic has opened out the play.
At first, this modern play seems to be stuck in a historical past. The story is set in a kitchen in the west of Ireland. Tradition seeps from the squalid walls: there is a dusty crucifix hanging above the range; there is a religious embroidery with its wry message: “May you be half an hour in Heaven afore the Devil knows you’re dead”; and there is a photograph of John and Bobby Kennedy. Yes, this
is olde Oirland – no trace of any Celtic Tiger.
It is also a recognisably theatrical set, alluding to the plays of Irish writers such as John Millington Synge and John B Keane, with perhaps even a hint of Samuel Beckett. Here, old Mag sits in a rocking chair all day while Maureen, her 40-year-old daughter, does the domestic chores. The women are bound in an embrace that both suffocates them and enables them to breathe the breath of life. Mutual hatred binds them together as surely as mutual need.
comedy supervised by the German poet Ludwig Tieck at Berlin in the same year Weber wrote Oberon.
In 1840, Charles Mathews and Elizabeth Vestris staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream more or less as the dramatist had written it, – the first complete performance since Shakespeare’s death. In 1842, Mendelssohn was commissioned by the King of Prussia to compose incidental music for a production in Berlin. Mendelssohn saw the music as a “magic dimension” to the drama, and interestingly provided no music following the Overture until the after the first act when the lovers are banished to the wood near Athens.
Although this comedy continued to attract composers, Mendelssohn’s music was consistently used in stage productions, although Harley Granville-Barker made the effort to break with tradition by using English folk songs in his production at the Savoy Theatre in February 1914.
The play fascinated the Austrian producer Max Reinhardt, who produced it a dozen times. His elaborate production of 1905 used a revolving stage and offered a forest with moss and trailing leaves and a pond illuminated from beneath on which the fairies danced by moonlight. Marlene Dietrich made her mark in a Reinhardt production when she was 18. He directed a film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Broadway and this production was glamorously reproduced in his Hollywood film in 1935, with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck, with Mendelssohn’s music.
This beautiful CD blends bits of Shakespeare’s enchanting play with Mendelssohn’s delicate and witty music. It gets almost full marks, although I longed for more breathless enchantment in the Overture and a little more excitement in the Wedding March. The Scherzo and Nocturne are superb.
