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Post by parsley1 on Feb 8, 2024 21:43:38 GMT
Very clever and interesting play
Quite a negative portrayal of Hitchcock
I would be surprised if the actors don’t get awards nominations
All 4 are stunning
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Post by Rory on Feb 8, 2024 22:41:10 GMT
Very clever and interesting play Quite a negative portrayal of Hitchcock I would be surprised if the actors don’t get awards nominations All 4 are stunning Thanks parsley1, I have been really looking forward to hearing about this one. |
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Post by parsley1 on Feb 8, 2024 22:50:40 GMT
It’s a bit dark and oppressive in parts
Some of it slightly loses focus
Elements are too clever for their own good
A few very acerbic lines and exchanges
One or two very uncomfortable moments
Overall it’s very film like in execution and the set and production standards are top notch
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Post by showgirl on Feb 9, 2024 4:28:43 GMT
Encouraging parsley1 as I too had booked and had been looking out (with some trepidation, given Hampstead's recent main house track record) for comments and reviews. I'm still a little concerned as their website says 1 h 40, no interval, which is a long time simply to concentrate, never mind sit without a break if you have any injury or impairment, but I booked an aisle seat as usual so will hope for the best. |
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Post by showgirl on Feb 11, 2024 4:29:46 GMT
Btw, for anyone interested in a bargain ticket, I'm offering a £10 stalls seat for next Saturday's matinee, ie Saturday 17 February - see Noticeboard. I'm gutted to have to give it up but it's the only day a friend & I can both see something else further afield & he won't forego his football match on another Saturday when I can also go. No £10 seats available now nor anything close to that due to dynamic pricing.
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Post by stevemar on Feb 11, 2024 8:28:17 GMT
I’ve sent you a message Showgirl, thanks.
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Post by blaxx on Feb 11, 2024 21:06:21 GMT
Anyone else has seen it? Torn between this and the Almeida's King Lear.
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Post by pws on Feb 11, 2024 23:28:39 GMT
Anyone else has seen it? Torn between this and the Almeida's King Lear. Both??? |
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Post by blaxx on Feb 12, 2024 1:33:11 GMT
Anyone else has seen it? Torn between this and the Almeida's King Lear. Both??? I wish, only have space for one on this trip. Very curious about this one. |
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Post by bordeaux on Feb 12, 2024 8:37:23 GMT
Anyone else has seen it? Torn between this and the Almeida's King Lear. There will be another King Lear along very soon no doubt... |
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Post by bgarde on Feb 12, 2024 11:36:19 GMT
I'm going this evening. I wasn't sure either but the story is right up my street. For tickets this week I used a £15 offer from Time Out so shouldn't feel short changed if I don't like it...
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Post by Rory on Feb 12, 2024 12:00:07 GMT
I'm going this evening. I wasn't sure either but the story is right up my street. For tickets this week I used a £15 offer from Time Out so shouldn't feel short changed if I don't like it... I've used that offer too for later in the month. Will be interested to see where the seats are. |
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Post by blaxx on Feb 12, 2024 18:31:35 GMT
I'm going this evening. I wasn't sure either but the story is right up my street. For tickets this week I used a £15 offer from Time Out so shouldn't feel short changed if I don't like it... Hope you report  |
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Post by mjh on Feb 12, 2024 23:30:59 GMT
Could anyone please confirm what time an evening show ends for this?
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Post by mkb on Feb 13, 2024 0:28:04 GMT
Could anyone please confirm what time an evening show ends for this? Tonight ran 19:36 to 21:05. |
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Post by bgarde on Feb 13, 2024 12:47:20 GMT
I'm going this evening. I wasn't sure either but the story is right up my street. For tickets this week I used a £15 offer from Time Out so shouldn't feel short changed if I don't like it... I've used that offer too for later in the month. Will be interested to see where the seats are. I was Stalls, Row D - so, a worthwhile offer. I really enjoyed this - good sense of atmosphere, simple but effective set design. The performances were generallly impressive, too. I was especially impressed with Jonathan Hyde as Vincent Price. McNeice doesn't attempt Hitchcock's accent and I did miss that a bit (more for what it signifies). All four characters are on the stage together throughout although do not interact outside of their partner. The themes are interesting, a play to mull on after and it will linger in the memory. It whizzes by. Looking forward to The Divine Mrs S next! |
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Post by mkb on Feb 13, 2024 17:34:55 GMT
I'm a film nut. I regard Alfred Hitchcock as one of the greatest directors of all time, and it's madness that he never won a Best Director Oscar. I'm quite fond of camp horror too, although I've never seen Michael Reeve's Witchfinder General, something I need to rectify.
So Double Feature, involving Hitchcock and leading lady Tippi Hedren in 1964, and Reeves with his star, Vincent Price, in 1968, has much to interest me, and the focus is on the power dynamics between each pairing of actor and director and how abusive those relationships can be.
Playwright John Logan chooses to side squarely with Tippi Hedren's autobiography allegations that she published some time after Hitchcock's death, even though other accounts suggest Hitchcock was far from being a Weinstein and was misunderstood in his methods (that play badly by modern mores) for getting the best performances from his leading ladies. Whatever the truth, it is fascinating watching the two stories which play out simultaneously in the same space, an English country cottage that is either in the middle of the Universal Studios Hollywood lot or the English countryside, depending on the tale. (The set design is detailed and well done, with a very extravagant shift -- literally -- that occurs late on.)
There is some good acting on display. Three of the characters are familiar and their mannerisms, if not quite the voices, are spot on. Actually that's not quite right, Joanna Vanderham as Tippi is mesmerisingly brilliant as the Hitchcock blonde, voice and all. The unknown is 24-year-old director Michael Reeves, who would live only another year. Rowan Polonski captures well the sense of a career-minded individual with so much to give yet hamstrung by personal struggles.
It's an interesting play, if not a great one, and it's well executed.
Four stars.
One act: 19:36-21:05
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Post by Steve on Feb 13, 2024 18:24:19 GMT
I'm quite fond of camp horror too, although I've never seen Michael Reeve's Witchfinder General, something I need to rectify. . . It's an interesting play, if not a great one, and it's well executed. Four stars. One act: 19:36-21:05 Thanks for the review. I'm really looking forward to this now! Just a note of caution about "Witchfinder General:" as I recall, it's absolutely brutal with nothing camp about it whatsoever. Zero laughs. It's just a nightmare vision of a nightmare society. I think that's why the film is remembered, because it really stands out from all that camp Hammer stuff. :0 |
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Post by mkb on Feb 13, 2024 19:36:20 GMT
I'm quite fond of camp horror too, although I've never seen Michael Reeve's Witchfinder General, something I need to rectify. . . It's an interesting play, if not a great one, and it's well executed. Four stars. One act: 19:36-21:05 Thanks for the review. I'm really looking forward to this now! Just a note of caution about "Witchfinder General:" as I recall, it's absolutely brutal with nothing camp about it whatsoever. Zero laughs. It's just a nightmare vision of a nightmare society. I think that's why the film is remembered, because it really stands out from all that camp Hammer stuff. :0 Well that figures, as Reeves's character is desperately trying to make something unlike Price's previous camp horror outings in the face of studio opposition. That's a big strand here. |
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Post by Fleance on Feb 13, 2024 20:20:40 GMT
I'm quite fond of camp horror too, although I've never seen Michael Reeve's Witchfinder General, something I need to rectify. . . It's an interesting play, if not a great one, and it's well executed. Four stars. One act: 19:36-21:05 Thanks for the review. I'm really looking forward to this now! Just a note of caution about "Witchfinder General:" as I recall, it's absolutely brutal with nothing camp about it whatsoever. Zero laughs. It's just a nightmare vision of a nightmare society. I think that's why the film is remembered, because it really stands out from all that camp Hammer stuff. :0 is one of the great horror movies: horror in the midst of great beauty. I first saw it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York many years ago. It depicts the total victory of evil over good. Even the audience is corrupted by the end. When the (good) Ian Ogilvy shouts "You took him from me," the audience feels the same way. |
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Post by aspieandy on Feb 17, 2024 17:39:09 GMT
This seemed to me to be an unusually smart concept. For architecture, witness quite the array of contrasts and opposites, parallels and mirrors, the absolute and situational empowerment of all 4 protagonists, vulnerability/flaws, emotional chess. And .. their choices. In one sense, it’s a nuanced discussion piece. In this form, it’s a work I can admire rather than, say, a piece you might bond with. I’m sure it will pop into my head for a while to come. It’s fully developed and perfectly fine. I’m not a pro so I can’t say that tweaks could help, though maybe Hitch could be a little warmer and appealing. That’s obv. difficult given what’s in play (and personally the man playing him is typecast, I hope not for others). Maybe it was an absence of presence (with the Hitch character). Pass .. On a less significant note; the set/setting was just bleak. The cooking device, uninspired.
Overall; pretty engrossed.
Fwiw, Marnie was 1964 and Witchfinder General 1968. Hedren was still acting 50 years later. Looking at her Wiki page, she has more awards than Nelson Mandela.
Also, I'm currently rewatching S2 of Madmen - what an interesting reference point that is!
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Post by mrbarnaby on Feb 17, 2024 20:14:43 GMT
This seemed to me to be an unusually smart concept. For architecture, witness quite the array of contrasts and opposites, parallels and mirrors, the absolute and situational empowerment of all 4 protagonists, vulnerability/flaws, emotional chess. And .. their choices. In one sense, it’s a nuanced discussion piece. In this form, it’s a work I can admire rather than, say, a piece you might bond with. I’m sure it will pop into my head for a while to come. It’s fully developed and perfectly fine. I’m not a pro so I can’t say that tweaks could help, though maybe Hitch could be a little warmer and appealing. That’s obv. difficult given what’s in play (and personally the man playing him is typecast, I hope not for others). Maybe it was an absence of presence (with the Hitch character). Pass .. On a less significant note; the set/setting was just bleak. The cooking device, uninspired.
Overall; pretty engrossed.
Fwiw, Marnie was 1964 and Witchfinder General 1968. Hedren was still acting 50 years later. Looking at her Wiki page, she has more awards than Nelson Mandela.
Also, I'm currently rewatching S2 of Madmen - what an interesting reference point that is!
What on earth? |
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Post by Steve on Feb 18, 2024 0:43:42 GMT
I LOVED this! One of the Double Features is more of a thriller, the other more of a cerebral but funny conversation. The first one mostly makes you feel something, the second mostly makes you think something. Since the two pieces, both about relations between directors and actors in the film industry, interwoven, are so complementary, reflecting each other, it all works very well together. The actors are uniformly superb, though there is no doubt that it is Joanna Vanderham's astonishing portrayal of Tippi Hedren that is key to making this exciting. Some spoilers follow. . . If you lined up the 4 real life people depicted here by John Logan, there's no doubt that Hitchcock was the most objectively powerful person in the industry (one of the few directors the public could name, a brand name, mega successful and wealthy, with a major ownership stake in his studio) and Tippi Hedren was the least powerful (a model picked by Hitchcock as his muse, famous for being in his movies). It's the power disparity that makes their meeting so nail-biting, with nasty old Hitchcock creating serious predatory vibes from the off by immediately relating an inappropriate anecdote about how Grace Kelly would lick her lips to suggest "cum." Logan loads Hitchcock's dialogue with words that can have double meanings, so Hitchcock may be talking about a film climax, but when he says "climax," Vanderham's Hedren's ultra-expressive face quietly winces somewhere between disgust and fear, and so it goes, with double entendres lacing the power dynamic with disturbingly increasing tension. To make matters worse, Vanderham's Hedren is playing Marnie, an abuse victim, which gives Hitchcock plausible deniability for everything he is saying. . . Anyhow, McNeice is great at playing big powerful icons, having played Wolsey at the Globe and Churchill in a couple of plays, and his powerful poise and deadpan delivery of double entendres is surface calm, but filled with punchy predatory hints beneath the surface. Vanderham weirdly has sort of played "Marnie" before (her character in "The Runaway" opposite Jack O'Connell basically shared Marnie's backstory, exactly), she's also played a "muse" before too (Emun Elliot was ever googly-eyed over her character in the BBC's "The Paradise lol), and she's a massively accomplished stage actor, having brilliantly held her own in the company of superstar stage duo, Andrew Scott and David Dawson in "The Dazzle," but what makes this performance remarkable is how she captures that familiar sense of a Hitchcock heroine's mounting fear and dread, as if in a Hitchcock thriller, while also playing Tippi Hedren, a model turned actress having a quotidian business dinner conversation. The destabilising sense of fiction and reality merging is brilliantly achieved in the writing and the performances of both McNeice and Vanderham. The other two characters are much closer in status. Both Vincent Price and Michael Reeves are men. Reeves gets to tell Price what to do, but Reeves can't do without Price. Reeves is independently wealthy, Price has more credits than you could count. Further, both Reeves and Price have elements of humour and warmth to them, so compromise between the men always feels possible. Because of this, Jonathan Hyde's marvellously witty and evocative Price and Rowan Polonski's tense film artiste (he's like a tortured version of Coldplay's Chris Martin, another public schoolboy like Reeves, who Polonski very much resembles) have a dynamic that is more cerebral, conversational and funny than the more dramatic Hitchcock-Hedren faceoff. The way I look at it is that Logan has created a sort of Freudian set-up, where the Hedren-Hitchcock scene is like the scary uncontrolled "id" of the piece, the Price-Reeves scene is like the "superego," a rational debate about art, relations and morality, which puts us, the audience, in the position of "ego," having to mediate between these two interwoven and reflecting scenes, comparing and contrasting in our own minds to decide the meaning of it all. I give this 4 and a half stars of complex, cerebral enjoyment anchored by a neo-Hitchcockian performance to savour from Joanna Vanderham. PS: I just remembered that McNeice's Churchill was in the same "The King's Speech" play where Jonathan Hyde taught Charles Edward's King how to speak. Here, his Vincent Price really needs to teach McNeice's Hitchcock the same thing lol. |
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Post by aspieandy on Feb 18, 2024 3:48:15 GMT
LOL. Love the enthusiasm Steve Somewhere, I'm sure John Logan must have a 50-page Treatment of this play.
You have to think ambitions for this reach beyond a few weeks at Swiss Cottage.
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Post by mg00000 on Feb 18, 2024 9:07:36 GMT
Assumes knowledge of the characters and works referred to. Uninspiring script. Static production. No dramatic development or surprises. 4 equally unsympathetic characters. On the plus side, you may come out of this with one or two cookery tips. 2 stars as it was raining during the performance and Hampstead theatre provided adequate shelter.
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