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Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2018 13:18:29 GMT
I think that just means you might lose feet, and maybe there's a possibility of furniture blocking people periodically in a way you wouldn't get from further back, but otherwise I can't imagine anything else wrong with it.  |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2018 13:19:37 GMT
Does anyone know the length of the intervals? I want to say the first one is 20 minutes and the second one is 15? Don't be in a hurry to leave the auditorium during the second one though, there's some additional content. |
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Post by jason71 on Feb 2, 2018 13:39:13 GMT
Thanks |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2018 13:53:44 GMT
Yes, no restriction to speak of in row A - a few bits of the set you can't see but you don't miss any of the action. Much better to be there than on the sides.
I think the second interval is only 10 minutes, starting from after the bit Baemax refers to. The bar is shut and there's no ice cream available in the second interval.
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Post by martin1965 on Feb 2, 2018 18:36:13 GMT
Fantastically bad review in Spectator!
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Post by NeilVHughes on Feb 2, 2018 23:44:07 GMT
Enigmatic, well crafted and perfectly paced.
A production with the confidence to allow an all pervasive silence drive the narrative, so much can be said with an expression. Never has the lighting of candles been so absorbing.
As stated previously the last line leaves no ambiguity which is in line with the premise that when you feel something isn’t right then it isn’t.
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Post by crowblack on Feb 5, 2018 0:05:26 GMT
Is that it?
I don't have a problem with slow, and I'm happy for something to take Hamlet-amounts-of-time if I feel it is offering something new, significant or profound but this just didn't.
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Post by bordeaux on Feb 5, 2018 9:53:58 GMT
Fantastically bad review in Spectator! I think he probably found it a bit difficult. He finds Pinter 'boring and baffling'. He seems to grab the wrong end of a lot of sticks in his reviews. |
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Post by crowblack on Feb 5, 2018 11:01:37 GMT
A long three hours and twenty minutes of atmosphere produces loads of false narrative trails resulting in no pay off and only the tiniest of resolutions. I'm not arguing for traditional story telling, I don't require resolution - but I need something to take away from a play and I got nothing here. Foxa is right in her comments above - the central pair of characters, Elias and Jenny, one a neurotic, the other a confused liar, are simply not engaging. No fault to the actors, Tom Mothersdale and Anneika Rose, who are excellent, but their situation, for all the window dressing with dolls and depression, is banal. Like foxa, I cared about the people of the Flick - but not these two. Yes, have to agree with this - the central couple annoyed me, and as soon as the mobile was left on the breakfast table it was clear where that plot was going and I though, well, maybe there'll be a clever or profoud twist on that, because otherwise it's such a mundane cliche, but there wasn't. It felt like a short story played at 16rpm (mixing my formats, but you know what I mean). And there may be a cultural gulf here - many of my neighbours oop north have houses that look like that, so that aspect and the belief in ghosts - many here still do - didn't strike me as jarring in a way they evidently do for a middle-class London or New York audience. Basically, for me, I suppose the guest house and old women felt 'homely' and it was the couple who felt alien. It was atmospheric, yes, but I felt it needed more than that. Btw, this is not about my attention span - I'll happily seek out Tacita Dean stuff and since a teenager have had to go to cinemas on my own because friends walk out of or fall asleep in films I like - Aki Kaurismaki etc. |
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Post by lynette on Feb 5, 2018 17:51:01 GMT
I’ve dumped the tix. What with trying to recover from this blimin cold and the length of this play I decided to change my Saturday night into a takeaway movie night at home. Now, what to watch...?
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Post by Latecomer on Feb 5, 2018 21:17:58 GMT
I’ve dumped the tix. What with trying to recover from this blimin cold and the length of this play I decided to change my Saturday night into a takeaway movie night at home. Now, what to watch...? Hope you feel better soon Lynette, I loved this play....a good companion piece to The Birthday Party for me as it felt a bit Pinteresque at times and I liked the theme of "being watched" that was explored throughout....but long evenings out in winter are not much to my liking and your takeaway movie night sounds lovely! Perhaps Amelie or Little Miss Sunshine (one of my favourites!) I also muchly like Le Gout Des Autres or Chocolat! |
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Post by lynette on Feb 6, 2018 21:47:18 GMT
Thank you, latecomer. I'll report back.
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Post by Mark on Feb 6, 2018 22:36:29 GMT
Saw the matinee today and thoroughly enjoyed. My seat in A10 was perfect for this, stage is fairly low and loads of legroom - nothing missed. Haven’t seen The Flick but with all the comments on this thread I really need to now! Marylouise Burke was just wonderful, and I loved how it played out in “real time” for the most part, and then some very obvious theatrical devices such as the clock turning and the opening of the curtains. Loved the way the play ended - that’s all the payoff I needed. The time flew by. My craziest thought towards the end was Her husband is actually dead and is being preserved in the “hidden” room upstairs, hence the reason why she likes to keep the upstairs heating off and goes up check on Jenny. |
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Post by partytentdown on Feb 7, 2018 12:12:48 GMT
Really enjoyed this show, maybe more than The Flick. I found it very absorbing and the time flew by. I’ve been trying to work out if there was or a wasn’t a paranormal explanation for the spooky goings on, so for anyone who’s seen it, I would REALLY like to discuss.. {Spoiler - click to view}
- The piano: played by ghosts or is this the electrical gizmo that George was working on in the basement?
- The ‘lost’ room – genuinely a spooky missing room, or an actual room annexed off the other bedroom. As a poster above suggested, is this where she’s keeping the deteriorating body of her husband, hence why she’s so alarmed that Jenny has gone in there (and she wants to keep the heating low)?
- What was the spooky language that Eli found in the journal and why was it different from what was read out earlier? Some kind of spell/curse?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2018 12:23:23 GMT
(Hopefully this reply is non-specific to not require a spoiler tag, but shout at me if you disagree and I'll fix it.) I've seen John described as an uncanny play rather than a supernatural one, so I think while there are mysterious goings-on that aren't easily explained, I think they're very purposefully meant to be low-key and/or ambiguous. Which I kinda love, 'cos if you're searching the internet for evidence that ghosts exist, you don't get perfect videos of spectral figures clearly identifiable as long-deceased persons, you get photographs of "orbs". Evidence of "real" hauntings always tends towards the vague rather than the conclusive, and even if you *want* to believe in ghosts, most evidence can be VERY easily explained away. So we can read what we like into the play, but although your discussion points (among other things) could be used as evidence of spookiness, there's no way they can be considered conclusive. |
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Post by alexandra on Feb 7, 2018 13:52:27 GMT
Oh. I was thinking of booking for this, and now you've put me off, which is fair enough. I'm perfectly happy with mood music and no pat answers, but I am absolutely not the sort that searches the internet for evidence that ghosts exist because they don't. Will I like it? I expect a guaranteed response. |
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Post by Latecomer on Feb 7, 2018 14:52:27 GMT
Oh. I was thinking of booking for this, and now you've put me off, which is fair enough. I'm perfectly happy with mood music and no pat answers, but I am absolutely not the sort that searches the internet for evidence that ghosts exist because they don't. Will I like it? I expect a guaranteed response. Yes, you will like it. I don't believe in ghosts either and I loved it. Just a hint of Pinter here and there, lots of very grounded dialogue and about as mystical as Jerusalem. I'd say the level of mystery is about the same as when you end a conversation with your elderly relatives...did they really say that? Did that actually happen in their past or did I hear it wrongly? This can of course, equally well apply to teenagers of today, where they delight in baffling you by using words that mean the opposite of what they are....."it's bad"!!! |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2018 15:50:23 GMT
Yeah, any spookiness is obliquely hinted at rather than explicitly staged. As Latecomer points out, it's no spookier than Pinter. |
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Post by mallardo on Feb 7, 2018 17:41:32 GMT
Why do we think it's set in Gettysburg, a place resonant with large events? Or is this another of Ms Baker's false trails?
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Post by samuelwhiskers on Feb 8, 2018 1:02:51 GMT
I think we can take the setting at face value. Too much detail for it to be a hoax.
I must be slow because I didn't realise the piano playing was supposed to be inexplicable at first. I assumed she'd knocked the little jukebox on by accident. It wasn't until later when they both played that I realised.
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Post by mallardo on Feb 8, 2018 1:30:30 GMT
I think we can take the setting at face value. Too much detail for it to be a hoax.
The detail re Gettysburg is all accurate - I once spent a night there in a rundown motel with my then girlfriend now wife; Annie Baker captures the mood and feeling of the place exactly. But to what effect? Why be this specific about the setting unless it's critical to whatever point she wants to make?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2018 9:44:03 GMT
It's clearly a pianola, a self-playing piano. Used to be reasonably popular but ultimately just not as space-friendly as a record player. {Spoiler - click to view} The first time it plays is after Jenny has pressed a key, so I guess that's what sets it off. The second time it plays is when no one is anywhere near it. I'd be more inclined to presume that any uncanny presence has pressed a single key or kicked off the mechanism by some other means, rather than is sitting at the bench and playing a full-on jolly tune with ghostly fingers. So I wouldn't have considered the first time as inexplicable, but as a lifelong ghost-agnostic, I could probably come up with an explanation for the second time not being inexplicable either (mouse in the mechanism? Someone pressed a sticky key while we weren't watching and it didn't unstick until later? Power surge?). |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2018 10:05:15 GMT
A pianola has to be played by a performer. Skill is required to control the tempo and to keep the roll in its correct place.
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Post by partytentdown on Feb 8, 2018 10:26:47 GMT
I think we can take the setting at face value. Too much detail for it to be a hoax.
The detail re Gettysburg is all accurate - I once spent a night there in a rundown motel with my then girlfriend now wife; Annie Baker captures the mood and feeling of the place exactly. But to what effect? Why be this specific about the setting unless it's critical to whatever point she wants to make?
Lots of ghosts? |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2018 10:29:52 GMT
There is a member of the pianola family called the "reproducing piano" that claims to need no real human input. Or, as someone suggested earlier, the unseen George may have had a hand in tinkering with this particular pianola to make it less manual. We're significantly further ahead tech-wise than we were a hundred years ago after all, and asking anyone to believe that a ghost would sit down and perfectly play a jolly little tune from start to finish with their unseen fingers is... well, significantly more than I think Annie Baker is asking of us.
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