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Post by kathryn on Apr 18, 2016 9:57:41 GMT
Since I can't see a thread for this, and I just grabbed a Front Row ticket for 6th May, I thought I'd start one.
Anyone else going?
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Post by Marwood on Apr 18, 2016 10:06:30 GMT
I forgot tickets went on sale at 10, will have a try next week.
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Post by littlesally on Apr 18, 2016 10:07:34 GMT
Not until 8th June. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 10:08:43 GMT
Yep, I'm going in May. I was thinking about skipping it, 'cos I don't have strong feelings about Nick Payne, but I do have strong feelings about all-female casts, so I booked. Also, I hear it's currently coming in at 1 hour and 5 minutes running time!
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Post by theatreliker on Apr 18, 2016 12:17:15 GMT
11th June for me. That is a short running time.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 18, 2016 12:42:34 GMT
Yep, I'm going in May. I was thinking about skipping it, 'cos I don't have strong feelings about Nick Payne, but I do have strong feelings about all-female casts, so I booked. Also, I hear it's currently coming in at 1 hour and 5 minutes running time! You know, it's kind of sad that I'm excited about the running time. I must be getting old! |
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Post by showgirl on Apr 18, 2016 18:24:56 GMT
Hoping to catch it but waiting for a Front Row week when I can fit it in - and then for once it'll have to be an evening as it's too short to justify using a matinee slot.
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Post by peggs on Apr 18, 2016 18:51:45 GMT
Fail this morning for front row, bit of a battle for the website which seemed to get stuck every time i followed a buy date to then be told there were no tickets for that date and insisted I went back to the front row page to start again, tried for about half an hour but was at work and wasn't ideal. Will try again another week if i can.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 23, 2016 20:05:48 GMT
Awful
One hour of tedium
It feels like a under developed workshop with ideas that are poorly conceived and totally unbelievable
Takes pretentious to a whole new level
If this is the best that a writer in residence can come up with something is majorly wrong
As an observation Nick Payne seems to specialise in any sort of lack of characterisation in all his plays
And produces stunted dialogue again and again
We all fell for it once
Never again
His work lacks any sort of dramatic drive yet is so devoid of any feeling or concept it fails on every intellectual level too
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Post by theglenbucklaird on Apr 24, 2016 8:52:51 GMT
Awful One hour of tedium It feels like a under developed workshop with ideas that are poorly conceived and totally unbelievable Takes pretentious to a whole new level If this is the best that a writer in residence can come up with something is majorly wrong As an observation Nick Payne seems to specialise in any sort of lack of characterisation in all his plays And produces stunted dialogue again and again We all fell for it once Never again His work lacks any sort of dramatic drive yet is so devoid of any feeling or concept it fails on every intellectual level too Parsley at his best/worst |
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Post by DuchessConstance on Apr 26, 2016 21:59:44 GMT
1 hour 15 tonight. Odd play. Very affecting in places, and some fabulous ideas to explore, but not quite there. I agree that the dialogue is incredibly stunted, which is clearly intentional. But when every single character speaks in an identical abrupt constantly breaking off to/I mean starting to say/that is to say never/constantly stuttering/starting a sentence but never finis/sorry I mean th/you know new thoughts/just constantly stop-starting, it's just stupid. One person speaking like that is a legitimate character choice. Every character is plain bad writing. More detailed review under spoilers. I kept thinking about it on the way home, and at first it bothered me how black and white it was: Either die horribly or give up every memory of your wife. It was just such an extreme choice with absolutely zero subtly. I found myself longing for some shades to it. What if there wasn't a 100% certainty that all her memories of her wife would be destroyed? What if they had to make the decision not knowing, risking it? I was also intrigued by the mentions that the brain-replacement surgery was also used to treat mental illness or just to remove traumatic memories. I feel that would have been more fertile ground than terminal brain disease, because if you're facing the knowledge that untreated you will definitely, definitely become an incontinent paralysed wreck unable even to swallow very soon, what choice do you really have? I was far more interested in the brief mention of the man who'd decided to have his entire religious faith surgically removed because he couldn't deal with guilt. What relationships and memories did he sacrifice?
I felt it didn't really know whether it wanted to be a play about neuroscience and the dangers and possibilities of playing God, and about the nature of the relationship between memories and identity, or a straightforward morality play where someone has to chose between dying or sacrificing their loved one. More of the latter.
The one major problem I had was, she had 25 years' worth of memories removed. Gone. Yet this doesn't seem to affect her personality or identity in any way, other than not remembering/not being in love with her wife. Surely waking up to find that you're essentially now inexplicably a 30-something in the body of a 60-something (wouldn't the memories of having a terminal illness and deciding to have brain surgery have been removed too?) would have a profound effect on your sense of identity and your personality? Yet her personality didn't change a bit after the surgery, and she doesn't seem remotely bothered by any of it apart from being slightly annoyed that some strange woman claiming to be her wife keeps bugging her.
Oh and a joke about how "discharge lounge" sounds like a lounge full of discharge is not funny or interesting enough to be told once, let alone twice.
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Post by DuchessConstance on Apr 27, 2016 6:26:59 GMT
It really didn't come across that way. For one thing I think the intention was to reproduce naturalistic speech (ie most people do drift off or change ideas while speaking) rather than "theatrical" dialogue with crisp clear sentences. Second the dialogue for all the characters constantly veered seemingly at random between regular theatrical dialogue and this odd stilted stutter. If they'd kept it up throughout it would have felt like an intentional stylistic choice.
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Post by raiseitup on Apr 28, 2016 11:58:10 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Apr 28, 2016 15:51:54 GMT
4* Times
3* Standard
Solid, but unspectacular. Letts not liking it is, as always, a plus suggesting that I,will.
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Post by foxa on Apr 30, 2016 16:53:26 GMT
I'm afraid I didn't like it - I'd probably give it 2-1/2 stars (as much as I loathe aligning myself anywhere near Letts.) Those would be for the quality of some of the performances and the cool tree encased in perspex that dominates the set. The script was nothing special. It was the sort of play that if you'd caught it at the Edinburgh Festival or above some pub, you'd think - that was pretty middling. If they paid Nick Payne by the word, I'm not sure he was good value. The play only lasted one hour ten minutes and one entire scene was repeated - to no special effect. More importantly, it was hard to care about what they were saying. Poor Nina Sosanya, who really is so good, had an absolutely thankless role as a doctor. (Side note: I was annoyed that she had a speech about her 86 year old mother dying. Since she looks about 30 that seemed off - but I just looked up her age and she's actually 46. She's amazing.) Barbara Flynn gave a very warm, natural performance. I guess Payne was exploring, in a not very rich way (and I agree with Parsley, I also thought it seemed pretentious), ideas about love/memory/science. Disappointing.
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Post by kathryn on May 6, 2016 21:32:25 GMT
Well, this makes an interesting companion piece to Welcome Home, Captain Fox, with a much more sombre take in the question of whether we are the same person without our memories, and the effect of memory loss on our loved ones.
An intellectually interesting approach, because of course both the 'disease' and the 'cure' involve memory loss and the death of identity, but the effects of that loss/death seem quite different, in that the 'cure' offers a chance for a new identity to be formed. Or does it? I wasn't convinced that Lorna was ever really happy in her marriage, so maybe she's the same person all along, only the post-cure version isn't seeking the same kind of answers.
Hmm. I think this might actually stay with me more than I thought initially - I was ready for it to end when it did, it just about managed not to outstay it's welcome.
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Post by n1david on May 6, 2016 22:05:40 GMT
Yes, I saw this on Tuesday and it has stuck with me. I respected it rather than enjoyed it on the night as I thought it presented a situation and then didn't explore it very much beyond presenting the situation. I could imagine myself in the characters' positions but didn't think about it much beyond the simplistic "how would I react in this situation". Since then I've dwelled more on the nature of love and what attracts us to our partners, and "what makes a person who they are". I still don't think it's as profound as Constellations, which remains one of my best nights in the theatre ever (I was lucky enough to see it in the original RCU production), but definitely a bit more weight to it than I thought on the night. Good spot to notice the thematic similarity with Captain Fox too  |
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2016 8:34:36 GMT
Really interesting comparison with Captain Fox, hadn't occurred to me!
I also found this quietly lovely, and the length was right - I don't think more would have helped. I rather liked the approach of starting and ending with the same scene; at the start I empathised much more with Lorna being pushed for something she couldn't give. At the end, having seen the relationship through the illness at various stages, it felt completely different and pretty heartbreaking. Overall a beautiful and unsettling love and memory, which will probably stay with me for longer than more high impact plays.
You could make a few quibbles - she seemed quite sanguine about losing 20 years of her life and the relief at being cured didn't ring true since she had no recollection of being ill. And the dialogue for the doctor was very disjointed; presumably deliberately to reflect someone struggling to break bad news but not delivered well and just sounded jarring.
Also very clunky 'this is the science bit' signposting - "tell me again about what's happening to my brain and what you're going to do about it, I don't remember". Seriously, you'd get marked down in GCSE drama for that!
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Post by kathryn on May 7, 2016 11:14:05 GMT
Also very clunky 'this is the science bit' signposting - "tell me again about what's happening to my brain and what you're going to do about it, I don't remember". Seriously, you'd get marked down in GCSE drama for that! I thought part of the point of that was to show that they really didn't understand the procedure and its effects on memory - not even the scientist trying to explain it - implying that the memory/personality loss isn't quite so complete as everyone thinks. |
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Post by Deleted on May 9, 2016 9:49:37 GMT
Forgot about Front Row booking today but went on at 10:15 and there were still tickets available |
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Post by mallardo on May 9, 2016 10:35:58 GMT
I just got one at 11.20!! Latest ever.
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Post by andrew on May 21, 2016 21:09:18 GMT
A couple of empty seats today at the matinee. Those not empty included Simon Russell Beale and David Suchet. The play itself was quite fun I thought, a nice short romp through an interesting issue. Flynn and Wannamaker were great.
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Post by mallardo on May 26, 2016 15:47:11 GMT
Memo to Nick Payne:
Caught the matinee of your play, Elegy, today and was loving it until we reached the final scene which was... what? Like, the biggest cop-out ever? It screams of a writer who doesn't know where the hell to take his story. I'm sure you've convinced yourself (and others) that it's really neat and clever but it's not. It's an act of authorial desperation. Especially as your premise is so damn wonderful and affecting.
For sixty-five minutes I was engrossed, involved, gulping down tears, and then... I can't really talk about it here but you know what I mean, Nick. If this is the only place you can leave your characters then you should have rethought your story. There are many places you can take them - but you didn't take them anywhere. You abandoned them.
My advice? Make it a movie. Open it out a bit. Jump around in time like you sort of do now. The flashbacks could be amazing. It would take a lot of work but you can do it because your idea is a winner. You can thank me later.
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Post by Deleted on May 26, 2016 16:40:28 GMT
Is it written to be staged Like that? I don't have the script to check. I agree that it was a weak ending if so, but does the play text suggest that it can be staged and performed differently? If so, then it's a directorial decision rather than Payne's. I liked James Graham's author note in The Angry Brigade which gave a few possibilities for how to do it and then just left it with 'or just do what you want'!
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Post by mallardo on May 26, 2016 16:47:38 GMT
No matter how it's staged the ending is what it is. I'm always too willing to blame the director but I think Nick Payne has to man up for this one.
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