The Caucasian Chalk Circle - Rose Theatre Kingston

[TallPaul]

It's been 'reimagined', I think. Lots of singing throughout, according to Mark upthread.

[bordeaux]

From Wikipedia: Brecht wrote a number of 'songs' as part of the piece, and one of its main characters is called the Singer. In 1944 the production was scored by Paul Dessau. Though there is no officially published score, the show is generally played with original music and songs performed by the cast. Many composers have created unique original scores for The Caucasian Chalk Circle. One score performed regularly is by American composer Mark Nichols, who based his music on traditional Georgian folk harmonies in polyphony. Georgian composer Giya Kancheli made an iconic score for the production of Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi.

[jek]

We saw a version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle directed by Amy Leach at the Unicorn back in 2015 and I remember being very taken with it. Obviously being at the Unicorn it was very much aimed at a younger teenage audience. The dilemmas it dealt with seemed important ones to air to a young audience. I can't remember much in the way of singing.

[jaggy]

The Complicité/ National production in the 90s had singing. Not much though.

Has anyone seen this yet and willing to give a review?

[Dave B]

We are going Tuesday with £10 secret seats after this weeks rescheduling, will happily pop up some thoughts afterwards.

[bordeaux]

Oct 6, 2022 16:35:59 GMT jaggy said:

The Complicité/ National production in the 90s had singing. Not much though.

Has anyone seen this yet and willing to give a review?

The Complicité show was one of the greatest things I've seen in 30+ years of theatre-going, easily one of my top 10 productions of a non-Shakespeare classic.  My German friends who saw it in Berlin when it toured said many German critics were also saying it was the best Brecht production they'd ever seen.

[jaggy]

Oct 7, 2022 8:53:51 GMT bordeaux said:

Oct 6, 2022 16:35:59 GMT jaggy said:

The Complicité/ National production in the 90s had singing. Not much though.

Has anyone seen this yet and willing to give a review?

The Complicité show was one of the greatest things I've seen in 30+ years of theatre-going, easily one of my top 10 productions of a non-Shakespeare classic.  My German friends who saw it in Berlin when it toured said many German critics were also saying it was the best Brecht production they'd ever seen.

Fortunately, it got a proper archive recording by the V&A so I was able to watch that. It really was brilliant theatre. I wish I could have seen their production of The Visit with Kathryn Hunter.  

[TallPaul]

There are 28 songs in this version, according to the Variety interview with CHF in the Bad Cinderella thread.

I don't think I've seen many musicals with 28 songs!

[BurlyBeaR]

Carrie Hope Fletcher holds her own as an unsentimental Grusha. She contends well with some of Haydon's clunkier directorial choices – there's a lot of running on the spot – and brings Michael Henry's score to life with some beautifully done musical moments.

WoS. 

Carrie “holds her own”. Is that a case of damning with faint praise? 

[Dave B]

We saw it last night. The place was reasonably busy but there were at least two school groups, one quite large taking up maybe half the circle. Our £10 secret seats (BO assign best available seats 24 hours before) were great seats, third row. Very happy with them and there were a few good but empty seats around, if anyone is interested in seeing this, I reckon it's worth a shot.

It's long! 19.30 and out at 22.18. The first half feels really long, only 55 minutes left after the interval so clearly a lot packed in before then. A whole lot going on all the time and it mostly works. The set is odd, it looks like someone just decided they were having a balcony at the back and then it was staged under orders to use the balcony. It has one or two small scenes that a balcony is effective for but otherwise it has cast up and down ladders for no reason at all, this got really old really fast. Far better work with the beds that move and are often repurposed

Cast. Not really being an MT fan, I only dip and out of the Musicals section here but I get the impression that Carrie Hope Fletcher is divisive and that's really all I had going into this. She's more than fine in this, her singing is great and her acting is good throughout with some moments (notably in her relationship with the solider and then the young child), no complaints about her at all. Slinger looks to be having a ball, a few minutes without even a line in the prologue and then most of the second half becomes his show which is quite a change. The cast throughout are adept at moving between roles though some allowance for the sheer variety of accent and some clear choices to play with, put them on strongly.

The music is .. present. It's all done with a single guitar and the Singer and guitar player is good but it's bland and inoffensive and just comes and goes and without a strong singing performance from CHF would feel really sluggish. The rest of the cast are decent though and their harmonies and chorus is well done, a range of talent in the singers but that felt embraced and deliberate which I liked. Oh yes, 28 songs... maybe? Some of them are seconds long. This is not a musical and if you were going to see CHF sing, she has oh maybe 5 or 6 songs and only a couple of them are more than 90 seconds. It's very much not a musical!

Overall, respect to The Rose for putting this one on. They have not cut costs or taken shortcuts, money has gone into this. I didn't love, I didn't hate it. I'm quite happy having spent a tenner on a ticket and we had a decent night out. My partner enjoyed it a bit more than I did, she reckons 3.5 stars. I'd go with 3 while noting that it gets a bit of a boost from the effort it's cast put in.

Finally, and most importantly - nobody stood up from the audience to move a prop last night.

[joem]

Despite never having been fond of Brecht as a playwright or as a human being, after nearly three hours of this "version" I found myself having feelings of nostalgia for him.

If I have to watch another "updated" "modernised" (oh how clever I'm going to insert an Ipad into a 1940s play cos' it's so cool and funny!) "based on" "version of" or other bowdlerisation of a revived play.... there will be blood.

[Steve]

Carrie Hope Fletcher and Jonathan Slinger make this worthwhile.

Some spoilers follow. . .

The actor playing the Singer/Narrator says at one point: "at last I'm going to get to do some acting, well, Brechtian acting," thus warning us that "Brechtian acting" is not going to be as good as "acting."

And it isn't, as long as it isn't funny, cos Brecht's Marxist satire of Capitalist injustice really isn't that funny if it's not curated and played with absolute, committed, caustic, crazed mania. And any translation that's making excuses for "Brechtian acting" plainly isn't committed enough.

Luckily, Jonathan Slinger refuses to make the distinction between Brechtian acting and acting, cos he is a caustic, crazed, committed masterclass of Monty Python level satiric zany fun as the Judge who carves up capitalism at every opportunity, even while he's constantly scared for his life.

Slinger generates some big and constant laughs in the second half (the only half in which he appears) and you could sense the school parties, in particular, putting their scripts down, feeling the grownup in the room, letting loose and enjoying the show.

The first half of the show, by contrast, is too cool for school, too playfully silly, lacking any real sense of commitment or outrage about the things Brecht wants us to be outraged about. Luckily, Carrie Hope Fletcher is there, and every time she sings about these injustices, I found myself welling up.

For me, she lifts the first half to a 3, and together with Slinger, they both lift the second half to a 4. So, 3 and a half stars from me.

[cavocado]

I'm not a big fan of updating for the sake of it, but this worked well in my opinion. The prologue was moved to a modern displaced persons camp, with a UN woman organising resettlement with her iPad. The main play within a play seemed fairly faithful to Brecht (or at least very similar to another translation I've read), but the prologue gave it modern relevance, with obvious reference to any number of recent conflicts and refugee crises.

Jonathan Slinger was great, the rest of the cast were good too, including CHF whose singing was lovely.

The amplification was a bit intrusive - sometimes too echoey, and not always the right balance between the guitar and the singer.

I agree with Dave's comment about the set - the ladders and upper stories were barely used and largely pointless, but the beds were used inventively.

It was a solid production and my friend and I had an enjoyable evening and plenty to discuss on the (long) journey home. 3.5 stars.

[cavocado]

Thanks for your point about the 'Brechtian acting' line Steve. That grated with me and I couldn't explain why until I read your post.