I was at the matinee yesterday, with excellent lower level stage seats, stage left. It is a wonderful experience to be as close to the action as you are in a stage seat, and to speak with various performers before the performance begins.
Bad news first. I found this play to be an awkward, almost amateurish dramatic exercise. There was no dramatic core (why should I care about the madness of the king of Spain?). I didn't care about any of the characters as people either, and their motivations seemed either transparent or irrelevant. Rylance, who was extraordinary in the Globe Shakespeare productions, has now devolved into a series of rather tiresome mannerisms - the hesitant speech, the forced laugh - and the playwright (his wife, BTW) relies heavily on his cajoling the audience into watching him. The second act is so bad, it was torture to watch (and don't sit in the first row of the orchestra unless you want to be part of the action). It also seemed to me that the far right seats in the first few rows of the auditorium must have missed quite a lot of the stage action.
Good news: the physical staging is beautiful from the stage seats, and there is something magical about looking out into the auditorium of a beautifully restored theater. The music was just exquisite - lovely playing by all of the instrumentalists and an extraordinarily lovely performance by James Hall as the singing Farinelli. Frankly I don't understand why they couldn't have a counter-tenor perform the dramatic scenes as well, rather than doubling up the part. Do they think opera singers can't act? Hall has a striking stage presence, and it would have increased the dramatic impact to have him be Farnelli and then sing as well.
Such a disappointment.
Updated On: 1/21/18 at 10:37 AM
