What a treat yesterday to see a production of David Hare's Skylight, with Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan, right in my own little town.
The New York Times called it a "nigh perfect production" in a review of the London stage play last summer. Perhaps the reviewer meant a "Nighy" perfect production -- playing the protagonist Tom, Bill Nighy is brilliant, all restless energy, sometimes twitchy, sometimes explosive. The female character, Kyra, unfolds more slowly. Though considerably younger than her one-time lover, she is more mature -- contemplative, nurturing and parsing any anger she has rather than giving into it, ready to acknowledge that personal happiness does not seem to be her lot, and yet finding slivers of happiness and satisfaction in other ways as she goes through her days.
In person at the Wyndham Theatre in the West End this must have been an absolutely physical experience. These two actors, along with a third, Matthew Beard, all awkward boyhood embodied, warm the stage while playing on a set designed to make one feel the chilliness of a December night in a London housing estate.
I have been privileged to see great acting in that theater; my daughter and I saw Derek Jacobi as Malvolio, Victoria Hamilton as Viola, and Indira Varma as Olivia in Twelfth Night at the Wyndham in 2008. I've also seen a David Hare production in London -- Amy's View, with Dame Judi Dench herself.
But yesterday we were able to walk down the street in our Ohio village to our newly renovated non-profit movie theater to experience live theater. And a fascinating experience it was.
It may be that knowing the space makes a difference. I have been to fewer than a dozen live theater shows in London, and yet both National Theatre Live productions which I've seen at the Little Art Theater have been filmed in spaces I've experienced personally.
The idea of National Theatre Live, if you haven't seen a production yet, is to take you into the audience on a specific night. You see the crowd before the play starts; you hear them reacting -- laughter, clapping -- as you experience the actors. You have an "intermission" of about a half hour (lovely, when the productions run close to three hours) and an interview before the curtain goes up for the second act, with an actor or the director or the playwright. The goal is to bring the London stage to the rest of the UK and the world. Touring is expensive, but with a film crew and a little bit of editing, live theater can come to its audience.
I am nothing but thrilled that I can have these experiences. For me as for many, a trip to London is a luxury. I can sometimes pop into the theater if I happen to be in England on business -- but I know from experience that I need to be there for a few days before trying to go to a show. Which means that my opportunities for live London theater are rare indeed.
(One time I arrived the day before a conference at University College London and walked ten miles or so all over the city, trying to get over my jet lag. My friend and I managed to get 10 pound front row seats at the National Theatre to a very talk-y play, and I was humiliated during intermission when the people behind me asked me to please stop nodding my head all the time. I was falling asleep, and that was interfering with their ability to enjoy the play!)
So I don't want to complain. (Okay, I'm about to complain.) It's the "little bit of editing" that got to me.
The acting was superb. All three of the actors inhabit their roles physically, and we feel that we are in this shabby apartment with them, sensing the cold of the winter night, looking out the windows through leaky single-paned glass. I can imagine other aspects of the stage production -- as Kyra prepares her pasta sauce, for instance, we can hear the onions and the meat sizzling and crackling in the pan. In the London theater I think the smells must have been quite overwhelming -- it reminded me of an off-Broadway production of Our Town we saw a few summers ago, when the scent of bacon and eggs filled the tiny theater.
Another vivid example of this idea -- inhabiting the roles physically -- was Tom's nervous energy as he paced the apartment, pulling out the chair at the table repeatedly and then kicking it back into place so that he could stride around the table once again. But even more than this was the actor's use of his body. Bill Nighy has something wrong with his hands -- the ring and little finger are curled in, claw-like. In this role, he turns this ailment into something expressive, important -- we watch his hands and the gestures he makes with them, and we feel his pain -- at the loss of his lover, his wife, his children.
There is a point in the first half where Tom and Kyra are, briefly, both seated at the table. She is holding her glass of red wine -- throughout their scene together, she picks up the wine and carries it around with her, but barely sips at it, while he goes through shot after shot of whiskey in his high ball glass, crossing the entire stage to the kitchen to pour himself another. Tom lays his hand on the table next to hers, inches it toward the glass and her fingers -- and she pulls her hand away, picking up the glass and then rising to tend to her pasta sauce.
In the production we saw, that gesture was full-screen. The camera cuts to a close-up of their hands, and the gesture gains meaning. He wants her, tentatively. His fingers are curled with pain and longing. She refuses the solace of the alcohol, or the touch. It is a visceral moment.
And a false one. At the Wyndham, you would have to be looking carefully at just the right angle to get all the meaning of this gesture -- not fumbling in your pocketbook for a throat lozenge, not worrying about whether that sauce might start to scald unattended, not gazing at snowflakes beginning to fall outside the windows. And while it's nice not to miss the meaning, it's also not live theater to have your eye directed to a symbolic moment. That, my friends, is film.
Just one example, but a telling one. For me, theater is all about the stage -- the entire stage. When I teach Chekhov's Three Sisters, I remind the students that having many of the characters on present at once, even if only a few are speaking or interacting, changes the way we perceive them and the space. The plot changes, in fact, based on how the characters are placed on stage. In the interview at intermission, David Hare talked about how he wanted to write a play in one room, and for me that room is a key feature to what happens in the play itself. The room, where Kyra has chosen to isolate herself, and where her aloneness is violated first by the son and then by her lover, also has a role in the play.
I talked about the editing during the intermission with a retired actress and theater director friend of mine, and she disagreed. She enjoyed the close-ups -- of the tears on the actress's face, of the hands not quite touching at the table. For her, these edited moments enhanced the production. She's right, of course -- they were striking. But they were not "theatre live."
 |
| Photo Credit: John Haynes, New York Times |
In person at the Wyndham Theatre in the West End this must have been an absolutely physical experience. These two actors, along with a third, Matthew Beard, all awkward boyhood embodied, warm the stage while playing on a set designed to make one feel the chilliness of a December night in a London housing estate.
I have been privileged to see great acting in that theater; my daughter and I saw Derek Jacobi as Malvolio, Victoria Hamilton as Viola, and Indira Varma as Olivia in Twelfth Night at the Wyndham in 2008. I've also seen a David Hare production in London -- Amy's View, with Dame Judi Dench herself.
But yesterday we were able to walk down the street in our Ohio village to our newly renovated non-profit movie theater to experience live theater. And a fascinating experience it was.
It may be that knowing the space makes a difference. I have been to fewer than a dozen live theater shows in London, and yet both National Theatre Live productions which I've seen at the Little Art Theater have been filmed in spaces I've experienced personally.
The idea of National Theatre Live, if you haven't seen a production yet, is to take you into the audience on a specific night. You see the crowd before the play starts; you hear them reacting -- laughter, clapping -- as you experience the actors. You have an "intermission" of about a half hour (lovely, when the productions run close to three hours) and an interview before the curtain goes up for the second act, with an actor or the director or the playwright. The goal is to bring the London stage to the rest of the UK and the world. Touring is expensive, but with a film crew and a little bit of editing, live theater can come to its audience.
I am nothing but thrilled that I can have these experiences. For me as for many, a trip to London is a luxury. I can sometimes pop into the theater if I happen to be in England on business -- but I know from experience that I need to be there for a few days before trying to go to a show. Which means that my opportunities for live London theater are rare indeed.
(One time I arrived the day before a conference at University College London and walked ten miles or so all over the city, trying to get over my jet lag. My friend and I managed to get 10 pound front row seats at the National Theatre to a very talk-y play, and I was humiliated during intermission when the people behind me asked me to please stop nodding my head all the time. I was falling asleep, and that was interfering with their ability to enjoy the play!)
So I don't want to complain. (Okay, I'm about to complain.) It's the "little bit of editing" that got to me.
 |
| Photo credit: John Haynes |
Another vivid example of this idea -- inhabiting the roles physically -- was Tom's nervous energy as he paced the apartment, pulling out the chair at the table repeatedly and then kicking it back into place so that he could stride around the table once again. But even more than this was the actor's use of his body. Bill Nighy has something wrong with his hands -- the ring and little finger are curled in, claw-like. In this role, he turns this ailment into something expressive, important -- we watch his hands and the gestures he makes with them, and we feel his pain -- at the loss of his lover, his wife, his children.
There is a point in the first half where Tom and Kyra are, briefly, both seated at the table. She is holding her glass of red wine -- throughout their scene together, she picks up the wine and carries it around with her, but barely sips at it, while he goes through shot after shot of whiskey in his high ball glass, crossing the entire stage to the kitchen to pour himself another. Tom lays his hand on the table next to hers, inches it toward the glass and her fingers -- and she pulls her hand away, picking up the glass and then rising to tend to her pasta sauce.
In the production we saw, that gesture was full-screen. The camera cuts to a close-up of their hands, and the gesture gains meaning. He wants her, tentatively. His fingers are curled with pain and longing. She refuses the solace of the alcohol, or the touch. It is a visceral moment.
 |
| poster for the National Theatre Live |
Just one example, but a telling one. For me, theater is all about the stage -- the entire stage. When I teach Chekhov's Three Sisters, I remind the students that having many of the characters on present at once, even if only a few are speaking or interacting, changes the way we perceive them and the space. The plot changes, in fact, based on how the characters are placed on stage. In the interview at intermission, David Hare talked about how he wanted to write a play in one room, and for me that room is a key feature to what happens in the play itself. The room, where Kyra has chosen to isolate herself, and where her aloneness is violated first by the son and then by her lover, also has a role in the play.
I talked about the editing during the intermission with a retired actress and theater director friend of mine, and she disagreed. She enjoyed the close-ups -- of the tears on the actress's face, of the hands not quite touching at the table. For her, these edited moments enhanced the production. She's right, of course -- they were striking. But they were not "theatre live."
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