London Tide - Lyttleton Theatre (NT)

[theoracle]

I thought a thread already existed but no, so get the honours of starting one.

This sounds really intriguing - one of Charles Dickens’ lesser known works adapted by Ben Power with songs by Power and PJ Harvey. Cast includes Jamael Westman, Peter Wight, Bella Maclean and Tom Mothersdale. Directed by Ian Rickson who I love (and hoping this will be a redeeming piece after ‘Lyonesse’).

[drmaplewood]

Have booked for this, seems to be selling well. Expecting a long one with a 7pm start but fingers crossed its worth it!

[aspieandy]

If it comes off, it'll be something .. god bless you, Polly >>

[solotheatregoer]

Booked to see this next month too. Pretty sure I saw an interview on TV with Jake Wood who said he would also be appearing?

[bigredapple]

Have been listening to this on repeat, super excited for this one





Do we think there'll be water on stage?

[jek]

I also have tickets for this. I am looking forward to seeing Jamael Westman who I remember seeing in the first month of Hamilton (my then teenage daughter begged me to get tickets for her and her friend!) I remember seeing him a little while later in the audience of a proms concert and getting the feeling that he was a well grounded young man who hadn't let the attention go to his head. Nice to see him doing well.

[helenfrombath]

Just spoke to a friend at the National. They are estimating the runtime to be around three hours and 15 minutes, including an interval. Obviously this will fluctuate once they actually start previews on Wednesday.

[mrnutz]

Apr 8, 2024 12:18:51 GMT helenfrombath said:

Just spoke to a friend at the National. They are estimating the runtime to be around three hours and 15 minutes, including an interval. Obviously this will fluctuate once they actually start previews on Wednesday.

Why is everything so bloody long these days?

[tmesis]

I was looking forward to this but with a run time over 3 hours and listening to that dreary song, drearily performed I'm now not.

[Fleance]

Apr 8, 2024 14:39:05 GMT mrnutz said:

Apr 8, 2024 12:18:51 GMT helenfrombath said:

Just spoke to a friend at the National. They are estimating the runtime to be around three hours and 15 minutes, including an interval. Obviously this will fluctuate once they actually start previews on Wednesday.

Why is everything so bloody long these days?

I have the opposite view: Why is everything so bloody short? I'm tired of 1 1/2 hour plays with no interval. 

[Jan]

Apr 8, 2024 15:14:45 GMT Fleance said:

Apr 8, 2024 14:39:05 GMT mrnutz said:

Why is everything so bloody long these days?

I have the opposite view: Why is everything so bloody short? I'm tired of 1 1/2 hour plays with no interval. 

I'm more interested in how long plays feel rather than how long they actually are, those are not necessarily correlated. 

[Fleance]

Apr 8, 2024 15:34:50 GMT Jan said:

Apr 8, 2024 15:14:45 GMT Fleance said:

I have the opposite view: Why is everything so bloody short? I'm tired of 1 1/2 hour plays with no interval. 

I'm more interested in how long plays feel rather than how long they actually are, those are not necessarily correlated. 

I enjoyed the NT's 3 1/2 hour production of Ibsen's The Emperor and Galilean (2011) with Andrew Scott but was disappointed that they didn't present the eight-hour version.

[thistimetomorrow]

Does this have enough music to put it as a musical a la Girl From the North Country or is it more a play with songs a la Cowbois/Rice's Wuthering Heights?

[helenfrombath]

I attended the first performance last night. The show went up a few minutes late. The first act ran one hour 40 minutes. They seemed to cut the interval a bit short because of the late start. The second act was around one hour 20 minutes.
I would call this a play with music. Every single song sounds exactly the same, a combination of a sea shanty/funeral dirge. As is quite typical now there is no set, but there is a cool glossy black floor to represent the reflection of water. Furniture is brought on and off, and there are light battens that fly in and out to look like undulating waves and to make the space claustrophobic during specific scenes. There is a band upstage and the gentleman playing the guitar is seated when he's not playing, so every time he would stand up, everybody in the audience would know that someone on stage was about to sing something.
I was sitting in the circle, there were lots of walkouts at the interval. I counted at least 20 empty seats as the second half was starting.
Ben Power had a monumental task adapting this for the stage and quite a bit of it is direct address to the audience. There were lots of comments at the interval about the fact that if they just cut the songs and did it as a play straight through it would be better. Everything seemed to run very smoothly last night. You wouldn't know it was the first performance.

[mrnutz]

Apr 11, 2024 5:00:45 GMT helenfrombath said:

I attended the first performance last night. The show went up a few minutes late. The first act ran one hour 40 minutes. They seemed to cut the interval a bit short because of the late start. The second act was around one hour 20 minutes.
I would call this a play with music. Every single song sounds exactly the same, a combination of a sea shanty/funeral dirge. As is quite typical now there is no set, but there is a cool glossy black floor to represent the reflection of water. Furniture is brought on and off, and there are light battens that fly in and out to look like undulating waves and to make the space claustrophobic during specific scenes. There is a band upstage and the gentleman playing the guitar is seated when he's not playing, so every time he would stand up, everybody in the audience would know that someone on stage was about to sing something.
I was sitting in the circle, there were lots of walkouts at the interval. I counted at least 20 empty seats as the second half was starting.
Ben Power had a monumental task adapting this for the stage and quite a bit of it is direct address to the audience. There were lots of comments at the interval about the fact that if they just cut the songs and did it as a play straight through it would be better. Everything seemed to run very smoothly last night. You wouldn't know it was the first performance.

Well, that sounds dull.

[max]

Apr 11, 2024 5:00:45 GMT helenfrombath said:

I attended the first performance last night. The show went up a few minutes late. The first act ran one hour 40 minutes. They seemed to cut the interval a bit short because of the late start. The second act was around one hour 20 minutes.
I would call this a play with music. Every single song sounds exactly the same, a combination of a sea shanty/funeral dirge. As is quite typical now there is no set, but there is a cool glossy black floor to represent the reflection of water. Furniture is brought on and off, and there are light battens that fly in and out to look like undulating waves and to make the space claustrophobic during specific scenes. There is a band upstage and the gentleman playing the guitar is seated when he's not playing, so every time he would stand up, everybody in the audience would know that someone on stage was about to sing something.
I was sitting in the circle, there were lots of walkouts at the interval. I counted at least 20 empty seats as the second half was starting.
Ben Power had a monumental task adapting this for the stage and quite a bit of it is direct address to the audience. There were lots of comments at the interval about the fact that if they just cut the songs and did it as a play straight through it would be better. Everything seemed to run very smoothly last night. You wouldn't know it was the first performance.

I was about to be all critical about 'the failure to adapt' - particularly when the use of Direct Address should be the mechanism for jumping us through the narrative.  But...

I looked at Audible, to find that the full audiobook as read by Meera Syal is a few minutes short of 35 hours!

Then again, Les Miserables is 68 hours.

[Jan]

When Trevor Nunn was running NT he was planning to direct a version of Our Mutual Friend as a sort of companion piece to his Nicholas Nickleby (he duplicated previous RSC programming in several ways) but for various reasons it never happened - a pity as I think it would work well with a purely straightforward narrative approach (Nickleby ran over 8hrs in total) - putting songs in it adds greatly to the difficulty of adapting. and staging it.

[lynette]

Apr 7, 2024 13:04:02 GMT bigredapple said:

Have been listening to this on repeat, super excited for this one





Do we think there'll be water on stage?

Repress/dress
really?

[max]

Apr 12, 2024 16:18:03 GMT lynette said:

Apr 7, 2024 13:04:02 GMT bigredapple said:

Have been listening to this on repeat, super excited for this one





Do we think there'll be water on stage?

Repress/dress
really?

Oh no.  "Though I dream to FOR-get"   Awful lyric scanning. 

This reminds me of when I wrote songs as a teenager managing only 4 or 5 chords on the guitar (not that you need more than 3 for a great song sometimes).  So much use of "I" - not good; either sounds very musical theatre, or sulky bedroom guiter pop.  One of the triumphs of 'At The End Of The Day' in Les Mis is that the word "I" is never used in that song.  It's all "you / you're" "What it is to be living" etc.  Never "I'm cold" "I'm hungry" which feels so expositional.  However, I guess it's handheld mic in the actual scene (they've been watching Emma Rice's 'Wuthering Heights' I reckon), so I suppose exposition is fine in that situation where it's already consciously a self-commentary song.

[jackamo]

I walked out at intermission. It was probably the worst show I have ever seen, and I make and watch theatre for a living. Dull, slow, like a funeral. Like they were just playing a game of how many times they could say ‘London’ and how many different London neighbourhoods they could mention in 3 and a half hours. Terrible writing - flat characters, half a plot. And PJ Harvey just isn’t a theatre songwriter. Every song sounded exactly the same and also were completely out of the actors ranges. Uninspiring direction that relied on moving light rigs, which were meant to look like waves or the movement of water and which eventually became so nauseating the woman beside me said she might be sick. The actors just looked embarrassed and like they wanted it to be over. The guy playing the schoolmaster kept rubbing his face and eyes as if he’d just woken up. Completely bizarre. It felt like a GCSE show. I really hope they can pull it together by Press Night. And it could have been so good…

[niallpalmer]

Sadly I have to agree with earlier posts. I made it through the first 1h30m. The script could do with a lot more humour to lighten the intensity, which is unrelenting. The songs, when they come, are monotonous and just hold things up. I really wanted to find things to like, but there’s little to commend the show. The actor playing Jenny Wren provides a little light relief, but even she can’t save this one.

[Steve]

You might have guessed, but I LOVED this!

I do acknowledge that this is going to be marmite, with Dickens fans missing some of their favourite characters, and with some drama and musicals fans wondering why the action keeps stopping for a mournful PJ Harvey song about London which does not move the plot forward.

Some spoilers follow. . .

If you love Silas Wegg or Mr Venus or the parasitic social climbing Lammles, forget about it, they're gone. The wider world of the novel is gone.

Ben Power has focused on the two ladies, Ami Tredea's Lizzie Hexham and Bella Maclean's Bella Wilfer, and their relationships, and then he borrows a bit from Shakespeare comedies to tie up the plot more simply and directly than Dickens ties it up, albeit one character gets the more modern feminist not-defined-by-a-man "Bad Cinderella" type of trajectory lol.

Anyway, the bare bones of Dickens's ingenious plotting is still there to enjoy, although his simplistic themes are deepened by PJ Harvey's input.

This is not a musical where the music directs the action. This is a play with music which stops the plot to deepen the show with thematic resonances

So where Dickens would be saying that greed is bad and love is good, and snobbery is bad and egalitarianism is good, this production employs PJ Harvey to layer on something a bit deeper: about how landscape shapes the people on it and how people shape the landscape in return, how London is and always has been a seething mass of people's histories that imbue it with rivers of meaning and which imbue meaning in its river, and about the specificity of London as a living organism: how "London is not England, and England is not London."

If you've seen "the Detectorists" on the telly, then Dickens's vibrant plotting of London lives full of action, love, life and death is presented here as part of London's history below the ground, submerged in the tide of the river, while PJ Harvey's songs are kind of above the ground, above the water, scanning like metal detectors, finding connections, each song saying "What you got?"

Her songs are about the connections between the present and the past, about the interconnection of environment and people, about the sweep of local history.

I found the melding of bits of Dickens with bits of PJ Harvey quite unique and wonderful, more than the sum of its parts.

Ami Tredea's Lizzie's emotional responses to everything and everyone around her are brilliantly realised, and her connection with Jamael Westman's Eugene Wrayburn is moment to moment fascinating, and both these actors can sing.

That said, Wrayburn's character development here is nowhere near as well realised as it was in that 1998 BBC TV adaptation, where the 5 and a half hour running time allowed for a magnificently intricate and enigmatic depiction of the character by Paul McGann.

Interestingly, Peter Wight was in that BBC series as Bella Wilfer's Dad who hands over his daughter to the care of the wealthy Boffins. Here he plays Boffin, taking custody of Bella from her Dad, completing a kind of circle lol. Wight is great, but again, the part is much diminished in colours from the magnificent performance by Peter Vaughn in said BBC TV show (which I now would love to see again lol).

As Bella, Bella Maclean is another actor who can sing, though neither of her potential beaus, Tom Mothersdale and Scott Karim's Bradley Headstone could be classed as natural singers. Karim does make a dastardly well-acted villain, though, and Mothersdale's more nuanced John Rokesmith is utterly intense and compelling.

The untrained singing does not really matter as PJ Harvey's music is about ordinary people being part of the land and water, so earthy untrained singing is a good fit for it, and this is not a musical anyway, but a play with music. (And nobody is as earthy and untrained as Jake Wood's Gaffer Hexham, whose untrained singing was redeemed by his spot on acting).

The most surprisingly delightful performance of the evening was by Ellie-May Sheridan, as the girl who treats dolls as babies, Jenny Wren. In the Dickens, she comes across as tragic, but here she's a delightfully direct, forthright and funny friend for Lizzie, who lights up every scene she's in.

Anyway, count me among those who think that Dickens and PJ Harvey do mix well to the tune of 4 stars.

[theoracle]

Apr 14, 2024 0:06:27 GMT Steve said:

You might have guessed, but I LOVED this!

I do acknowledge that this is going to be marmite, with Dickens fans missing some of their favourite characters, and with some drama and musicals fans wondering why the action keeps stopping for a mournful PJ Harvey song about London which does not move the plot forward.

Some spoilers follow. . .

If you love Silas Wegg or Mr Venus or the parasitic social climbing Lammles, forget about it, they're gone. The wider world of the novel is gone.

Ben Power has focused on the two ladies, Ami Tredea's Lizzie Hexham and Bella Maclean's Bella Wilfer, and their relationships, and then he borrows a bit from Shakespeare comedies to tie up the plot more simply and directly than Dickens ties it up, albeit one character gets the more modern feminist not-defined-by-a-man "Bad Cinderella" type of trajectory lol.

Anyway, the bare bones of Dickens's ingenious plotting is still there to enjoy, although his simplistic themes are deepened by PJ Harvey's input.

This is not a musical where the music directs the action. This is a play with music which stops the plot to deepen the show with thematic resonances

So where Dickens would be saying that greed is bad and love is good, and snobbery is bad and egalitarianism is good, this production employs PJ Harvey to layer on something a bit deeper: about how landscape shapes the people on it and how people shape the landscape in return, how London is and always has been a seething mass of people's histories that imbue it with rivers of meaning and which imbue meaning in its river, and about the specificity of London as a living organism: how "London is not England, and England is not London."

If you've seen "the Detectorists" on the telly, then Dickens's vibrant plotting of London lives full of action, love, life and death is presented here as part of London's history below the ground, submerged in the tide of the river, while PJ Harvey's songs are kind of above the ground, above the water, scanning like metal detectors, finding connections, each song saying "What you got?"

Her songs are about the connections between the present and the past, about the interconnection of environment and people, about the sweep of local history.

I found the melding of bits of Dickens with bits of PJ Harvey quite unique and wonderful, more than the sum of its parts.

Ami Tredea's Lizzie's emotional responses to everything and everyone around her are brilliantly realised, and her connection with Jamael Westman's Eugene Wrayburn is moment to moment fascinating, and both these actors can sing.

That said, Wrayburn's character development here is nowhere near as well realised as it was in that 1998 BBC TV adaptation, where the 5 and a half hour running time allowed for a magnificently intricate and enigmatic depiction of the character by Paul McGann.

Interestingly, Peter Wight was in that BBC series as Bella Wilfer's Dad who hands over his daughter to the care of the wealthy Boffins. Here he plays Boffin, taking custody of Bella from her Dad, completing a kind of circle lol. Wight is great, but again, the part is much diminished in colours from the magnificent performance by Peter Vaughn in said BBC TV show (which I now would love to see again lol).

As Bella, Bella Maclean is another actor who can sing, though neither of her potential beaus, Tom Mothersdale and Scott Karim's Bradley Headstone could be classed as natural singers. Karim does make a dastardly well-acted villain, though, and Mothersdale's more nuanced John Rokesmith is utterly intense and compelling.

The untrained singing does not really matter as PJ Harvey's music is about ordinary people being part of the land and water, so earthy untrained singing is a good fit for it, and this is not a musical anyway, but a play with music. (And nobody is as earthy and untrained as Jake Wood's Gaffer Hexham, whose untrained singing was redeemed by his spot on acting).

The most surprisingly delightful performance of the evening was by Ellie-May Sheridan, as the girl who treats dolls as babies, Jenny Wren. In the Dickens, she comes across as tragic, but here she's a delightfully direct, forthright and funny friend for Lizzie, who lights up every scene she's in.

Anyway, count me among those who think that Dickens and PJ Harvey do mix well to the tune of 4 stars.

Phew, glad you liked it Steve as we seem to have similar taste from looking back at history on this board. I’m seeing it on Saturday and had been nervous given initial posts on the board and as I’m taking a friend after constantly singing Ian Rickson’s praises. I’m definitely intrigued and hope to be on your side of the aisle on this but can imagine how this has divided opinion

[elizk]

I also left at the interval on Friday night, now wondering how many actually stayed to the end! I am a big fan of both Dickens and PJ Harvey so was expecting to really enjoy this but it was incredibly plodding and dull with all of Dickens incredible language, wit and characterisation stripped out. The songs really didn't work well and only served to make the pace even more glacial. Disappointing evening and horrible for the actors who were doing their best with an incredibly poor script.

[holgersson]

Saw this last Friday. Having eviscaeated'Our Mutual Friend' all that is left are the bare bones of a totally predictable melodramatic plot which takes three long hours to unfold. Absolutely dire production. Dirge like, monotonous, indistinguishable'songs'on an empty stage. There is no set,just a few wooden chairs and table, constantly repositioned,with lighting rigs moving up and down being the only distraction. Felt sorry for the actors who were left directionless on this empty space. Had there ever even been a director in the room ? Deluded I stayed for the second half in the vain hope (dashed) of some improvement.