Grief is the thing with feathers (Complicite)

[partytentdown]

Oct 18, 2018 20:14:21 GMT @parsley said:

Oct 18, 2018 20:05:45 GMT harlow said:

Can those who have booked already advise on how sold this is already? I am anxious that I will miss out as I did in Dublin and Galway for this.

If you were really anxious

You could have become a member

To ensure you got a ticket

And thereby reduce your anxiety

I see you're back.

[crowblack]

Oh... that'll be why the street was blocked off in town today - filming Peaky Blinders (yay!)

[rumbledoll]

Oct 18, 2018 21:19:53 GMT @ryan said:

I'm guessing from the picture that Cillian is playing the crow?

[

Both The Crow and The Father.

[Deleted]

Just booked for The Damned and Medea and also had a look at availability for this - "Grief" is selling pretty well although there is a fair amount left. The other two have loads of availability.

As noted above if you are worried you get 20% off with membership and save the £3 booking fee, plus you get into the art gallery for free if you like that sort of thing, so if you're booking more than one ticket, or for more than one show, it's worth considering! Bear in mind you don't get 20% off all theatre shows - doesn't apply for some visiting companies like the RSC, for instance.

[crowblack]

Oh. No matinees. That's a shame for us non-Londoners.

[Deleted]

I can't decide if I should book for the Barbican today or keep the faith that it will eventually make its way to Oxford. I wouldn't want to miss out all together, but it's going to be an expensive booking day for me if I book everything I want to see in the new season this morning.

[Deleted]

Oct 25, 2018 16:07:47 GMT crowblack said:

Oh. No matinees. That's a shame for us non-Londoners.

Yes, bit annoying. No matinees for The Damned or Medea either.

[crowblack]

Oct 26, 2018 7:20:05 GMT @baemax said:

I can't decide if I should book for the Barbican today

I rarely see things at the Barbican, but do returns for good seats pop up a lot like they do at other venues? If it's a sell out I presume they will. This is a long time off but a tasty matinee for something else may show up nearer the time to justify the overnight stay.

[Deleted]

I did manage to get into Cumberbatch's Hamlet in the end by just lurking on the website until something appeared, and seats did pop up pretty regularly, but the snag with relying on returns is you don't get your choice of price band. Still, I suppose that could be a reasonable plan B if an Oxford run doesn't materialise by next spring. I'll fill my basket first, see what it looks like!

[Deleted]

Yes, the Barbican will take returned tickets for credit and they put them up on sale online. So a good chance of returns popping up. Alternatively this means you could book now and return later if you can't make it? But bear in mind you have 6 months (I think) to use the credit.

[bordeaux]

Oct 26, 2018 7:51:05 GMT @xanderl said:

Oct 25, 2018 16:07:47 GMT crowblack said:

Oh. No matinees. That's a shame for us non-Londoners.

Yes, bit annoying. No matinees for The Damned or Medea either.

Though both are relatively short.  Medea should finish at 5 past 9.  The Damned at 5 to 10.

[Marwood]

Got myself a seat at the front of the Upper Circle in the first week of its run - I want to see this, but not so much I'm willing to pay £60 for a stalls seat.

[crowblack]

Oct 26, 2018 9:32:43 GMT bordeaux said:

Though both are relatively short.

Still no good for a northerner - it's only a 2 hour trip, but there are no trains after 9pm. I've booked for a Friday and hope I can borrow a sofa.

[Latecomer]

I asked at Oxford Playhouse today....and they were quite optimistic without actually committing! They said “watch this space”

[Deleted]

They have announced their Spring 2019 season with the last production running to 23rd March, so possible that this could come to Oxford after the Barbican run. No gap for it to be there before though.

[Marwood]

I REALLY didn’t like this : if it wasn’t for the fact I was sat on the front row of the upper balcony and to get out in the dark meant there was a high possibility of falling over the railing to my doom, I would have left by the halfway mark. I was just bored witless after half an hour or so.

If you didn’t like Misterman, you really aren’t going to get along with this. It’s basically a one man show from Cillian Murphy save for some interjections near the end from some ‘adorable moppets 😐’ - plenty of loud scratchy noises, back projection and use of flashing lights and mega phones (I’m guessing Enda Walsh has been to see U2 a few too many times in recent years)- the character of Crow is just Murphy pulling a black hoodie up and doing some regionally pronounced bollocks to no great end, like some kind of post modern Charlie Chuck.

It wasn’t a total write-off, there were a couple of nice moments (more like seconds actually) near the end but I’m probably just saying that because my own mother passed away a couple of years back, but the whole show is an awfully big haystack to go through for some not particularly impressive needles. Thank God I didn’t pay full whack for stalls seats.

[Deleted]

I'm the opposite of Marwood, I really did like this, but the first 20 minutes is a bit of a slog. Murphy goes 'full Crow' very fast and it really jarred for me. It's a tremendous, physical performance, but it happens so fast, it didn't feel...earned.

I think this will be a Marmite show, and I wonder how people who've gone to see yer man from Peaky Blinkers will enjoy it. I think the overall experience is cohesive enough and treads the right side of challenging (unlike, say, WWHSTOA, it actually has a discernible plot.)

I was expecting/hoping for it to leave me wrecked, but I connected with it more intellectually than emotionally. It didn't really move me (I cry easily in the theatre) and I am looking forward to more people seeing it so I can begin to unpick why. I didn't get much emotional release, YMMV.

I found the sound direction, lighting and projections innovative and really well-executed (well, apart from a bit with a lot of women from the 70's which I'd really like someone to explain to me.)

[crowblack]

I’ve just got back from this and there’s a fair bit to unpack. Great performance from mr Murphy, a real tour de force, and I loved the staging though feel I’d rather have seen it ina much smaller venue with a different kind of audience and maybe would have preferred not to see the children on stage - I didn’t warm to them, that fish story and the lip syncing further distances them for me (apologies for typos but I’m not used to typing on a phone!). Also feel I should have done some homework - I try to avoid reviews when I’ve already booked well in advance but it’s half a lifetime since I read ted Hughes and I feel it would have helped....or read the programme notes first.

[jek]

I'm with @happysooz on this. I enjoyed it but didn't think it the best thing since sliced bread. I did wonder whether I would have been more emotionally engaged with it if my children were still at an age of total dependence on me. Some other audience members were visibly moved - a young woman behind me was sobbing.

I too was confused with the montage of women - though I enjoyed spotting who they were and, in some cases, wondering where they were now!

Loved the teenage boys. I remember when my two were like that - all long limbs and confusion.

It certainly shared some similarities with the last Enda Walsh production I saw at the Barbican - The Second Violinist - with its clever use of projections.

[NeilVHughes]

A difficult watch if you lost a parent as a child as the flashbacks to your own grief and coping strategies became entwined with the piece and could take you out of the flow, fortunately/unfortunately I was older than these kids and was able to escape into my own life, often unsuccessfully as I hid from rather than facing my grief. (“Like a mothers kiss on your first broken heart” from Wam Wet Circles by Marillion still gets me to this day)

I found the montage of women quite emotional as they imagined/longed for a maternal element/replacement in their lives, one thing I noticed was that it did not include the ghosts of the lost parent when you see a doppelgänger, which for me continued for a number of years.

Not an easy watch, Cilian Murphy was excellent morphing between the two characters, the Barbican continues to be one of the best places to see experimental theatre on a large scale and have booked to see Rooms in a few weeks time.

[andrew]

Do you know if this does day seats?

[Deleted]

Mar 29, 2019 23:14:58 GMT jek said:

I too was confused with the montage of women - though I enjoyed spotting who they were and, in some cases, wondering where they were now!

It quite took me out of the moment. Moira Stewart! Janet Ellis!

[Marwood]

Seeing Cilla Black was the final insult as far as I was concerned 😐

[ruperto]

I really wasn’t a fan of this at all. Cillian Murphy is always great to watch, but I thought that for the most part this was a real misfire of a production, and - bar a few snippets - didn’t really capture the spirit of the book at all. The Crow in this was f***ing annoying, and he wasn’t in the book. And why was there so little interaction between the Dad and his sons and the Crow and the boys?

And don’t get me started on the ludicrously overblown visuals and sound effects, the megaphone, strobe lighting etc etc - who on earth thought that was a good idea? It’s a bit like deciding you’re going to do a stage adaptation of an Ingmar Bergman movie and then giving the job to some guy who directs videos for Metallica and Iron Maiden. I love an arena rock gig, but this wasn’t the place for those sorts of pyrotechnics IMHO. It made for a show that was often both bombastic and tedious, which is a hard combo to pull off.

To be fair, the final third worked quite well, when they trusted the source material and kept the staging relatively simple.

I could tell that the woman next to me hated it with a passion, yet there were clearly people who loved it. Lots of people were on their feet at the end, some in tears, while others sat there with their arms folded. So definitely a Marmite show, as has already been noted.

[theglenbucklaird]

I thought this was stunningly good. Funny, thought provoking but most importantly poignantly sad.

I thought this would be a marmite 'love it or hate it'. But the wife gave it a solid three stars to prove me wrong. Five stars for me