STAGE
The History Boys
Greenwich Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Alan Bennett's gloriously robust examination of the purposes of education gets a welcome revival.
REVIEW
I had a thought on leaving this buzzy production of Alan Bennett's classroom classic. I overheard the same thought from a genteel and mature lady who was airing her views forcefully to her son who seemed embarrassed by his generation and its crass liberties.
The History Boys is about education - education for life versus education for exams - but it is most particularly, pointedly and repeatedly about sexual predation by older men of younger boys.
Alan Bennett rather likes, one suspects, scattering the tea cups and overturning plates of battenberg that are the motifs and shackles of his status as a national treasure.
Fun stuff, but, ultimately, it all becomes overbearing and weary.
Especially when overtly heterosexual Dakin is prepared to venture over the border just to say thanks to a closet teacher where an apple or a nice card would seem commensurate with the scale of the exchange.
The film of The History Boys sidesteps quantities of this obtrusive lust (save the grope that is instrumental to the plot) and does a better job of creating convincing character and argument.
The other thing - and I fear that I may irretrievably cast myself as the soul mate of the outraged blue rinse - is that Bennett rather too often uses swear words as punchlines.
Now I have no problem with swear words as punchlines but here it is as if Bennett looks in his box of tricks and spots a nice, plump four-letter doozy and thinks "that'll please the stalls".
He is such a mellifluous and compelling writer and his arguments prowl the stage with such an air of delicious danger that it seems a shame he doesn't believe we demand more.
Why win a grin with a witty riposte when a C-bomb does the damage.
This is no way to disparage this serviceable revival of the play which sees a bunch of northern prospects put through their paces to land a place at Oxbridge.
They become caught in a tug-of-war between cynic Irwin and romantic Hector and that, and the precocity of the lads, is where the fun is to be had.
Marcus Taylor as the head steals most of the laughs but there are commendable displays all round from the talented and committed ensemble.
Until June 24. Go to greenwichtheatre.co.uk.
Showing posts with label greenwich theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greenwich theatre. Show all posts
Saturday, 23 June 2012
Too near the knuckle for comfort
Among the cacophony of nuisances that peck at my brain and fell me, kicking and (silently) screaming from the land of suspended disbelief this was a new one on me. A new form of torture.
I have ranted, not necessarily originally but with sincere vehemence, about the ubiquitous mobile phone lighting up auditoriums like Christmas trees.
I have despaired at the inability of people to let babysitters, secretaries, West Ham, do their jobs without intervention from self-absorbed so-and-so's who consider the phone to be solely an instrument of posy self-aggrandisement.
I have gnashed my teeth and rent my garments over the driving, selfish desire of people to attend performances on a highlight-only, need-to-know basis - that is, darting in and out of the foyer to take and make calls while they presume the action on stage or screen is flagging.
I have said many times and in many ways that hell is other people and there are lots of other people in theatres. And they all thinking that hiding a phone in the lap eliminates the glow from the screen (it doesn't, people, it just doesn't) or that boiled sweets are best unwrapped s-l-ow-l-y or that we all want to know that they know how it's going to end.
But this one, during a performance of The History Boys at Greenwich Theatre, entered a new realm of temple-thwacking, granny-kicking madness.
To the left of me, an obsessive (always the worst). His obsession was cracking his knuckles. Relentlessly. Seriously. And he had, like most of us, 10 digits so it was a Forth Bridge of a job - crack, pop, crack, pop. He harvested the joint relief from one round before promptly starting on the next.
He was young so my only revenge is the sure knowledge of his early on-set arthritis. A mixed blessing, of course, because, while he will be deprived of the ability to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.2 at the Albert Hall (tee hee), I will be similarly deprived of the ability to ruin his performance with a bubble-wrap and yoga marathon in the front row.
But knuckle-cracking, like yawning, appears to be contagious. To the right of me, a Facebook-lugging loon began work on his own clattering paws. Less fruitful than the gibbon to my left, he took to extraordinary feats of contortion to earn his "pop".
Fingers yanked back till they were paled and bloodless. Or bent till they were twisted like a foetus. He strained. I strained. We both hung on for the sweet joy of release.
In the end, the whole performance was like a Castanet Convention in Madrid. Imagine the noise the skeletons made while skewering Jason and the Argonauts. Or the timpani of butchers in Smithfield as they collapse a pig by hand. It was that. A whole performance delivered in Morse by tricky-fingered haters.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
I have ranted, not necessarily originally but with sincere vehemence, about the ubiquitous mobile phone lighting up auditoriums like Christmas trees.
I have despaired at the inability of people to let babysitters, secretaries, West Ham, do their jobs without intervention from self-absorbed so-and-so's who consider the phone to be solely an instrument of posy self-aggrandisement.
I have gnashed my teeth and rent my garments over the driving, selfish desire of people to attend performances on a highlight-only, need-to-know basis - that is, darting in and out of the foyer to take and make calls while they presume the action on stage or screen is flagging.
I have said many times and in many ways that hell is other people and there are lots of other people in theatres. And they all thinking that hiding a phone in the lap eliminates the glow from the screen (it doesn't, people, it just doesn't) or that boiled sweets are best unwrapped s-l-ow-l-y or that we all want to know that they know how it's going to end.
But this one, during a performance of The History Boys at Greenwich Theatre, entered a new realm of temple-thwacking, granny-kicking madness.
To the left of me, an obsessive (always the worst). His obsession was cracking his knuckles. Relentlessly. Seriously. And he had, like most of us, 10 digits so it was a Forth Bridge of a job - crack, pop, crack, pop. He harvested the joint relief from one round before promptly starting on the next.
He was young so my only revenge is the sure knowledge of his early on-set arthritis. A mixed blessing, of course, because, while he will be deprived of the ability to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.2 at the Albert Hall (tee hee), I will be similarly deprived of the ability to ruin his performance with a bubble-wrap and yoga marathon in the front row.
But knuckle-cracking, like yawning, appears to be contagious. To the right of me, a Facebook-lugging loon began work on his own clattering paws. Less fruitful than the gibbon to my left, he took to extraordinary feats of contortion to earn his "pop".
Fingers yanked back till they were paled and bloodless. Or bent till they were twisted like a foetus. He strained. I strained. We both hung on for the sweet joy of release.
In the end, the whole performance was like a Castanet Convention in Madrid. Imagine the noise the skeletons made while skewering Jason and the Argonauts. Or the timpani of butchers in Smithfield as they collapse a pig by hand. It was that. A whole performance delivered in Morse by tricky-fingered haters.
giles.broadbent@wharf.co.uk
Sunday, 3 May 2009
Review: Hanging Hooke
Hanging Hooke, Greenwich Theatre
4/5
"Chris Barnes took us on a journey of energy and intrigue. He showed us light and gloom; diverting particles and heliocentric heresies; vacuum pumps and broken hearts (which, I suppose, are the same thing, metaphorically speaking)"
- Oh, he was a real piece of work, Isaac Newton. That apple thing. What a farce. What a dismal betrayal of the truth.
Newton never discovered gravity. What happened was this: Newton was unpopular. With people generally and with Mother Nature in particular. She did not like her infinite wonders subject to the slide rule.
So the apples took a vote. One of their number volunteered to donk the boffin on the bonce in an effort to recreate the weight of opprobrium Mother Nature wished to heap upon him.
The apple did the deed but Newton survived - and the spin master, thief and revisionist turned the humiliation into a presentational triumph.
Newton never recorded the scene accurately. Around him, the evidence of other failed attempts to do away with him. To his left, an anvil trapped in the Lincolnshire sod. To his right, an Acme rocket, its fuse wire still fizzing, nose cone similarly buried.
Grrr. That Isaac Newton. He was a real piece of work. Even now he's stealing the limelight.
This production by Take The Spacedidn't mention any of that stuff. The play wasn't even about Isaac Newton. Not directly anyway. It was about Robert Hooke - the genius erased from history.
The man who discovered gravity before Newton; saw biological evolution before Darwin; designed St Paul's and the Monument alongside Christopher Wren. The galumphing innocent with the hump and the limp and the undimmed passion for knowledge who figured out how springs sprung, who gave us the biological term "cell", who was the midwife of the Royal Society and the father of microscopy.
Do have a sash window? Who came up with that doozie? That's right. Robert Hooke. Without the Hookester, there'd be no fresh air for anyone till the invention of the Expelair DX100 extractor fan hundreds of years later.
And have you heard of him? Did he get his beaky physog on a five pound note? Did Apple call its first hand-held digital device "the Hooke"? (Yeah, I know, that would have been a marketing nightmare).
No. Because Isaac Newton stole Hooke's work, smashed his portrait, plotted to burn his papers and expunge him from history. Hooke was wronged by the jackanape and coxcombe Newton who spoke fondly of his tender years watching the world in a rockpool - even though he grew up in land-locked Grantham.
I mean, come on! Figure it out, people! It was Robert Hooke who grew up on the Isle of Wight. He was the one who delighted in shells and crabs while Newton swotted like a swot and lied like a liar. The swot. The liar. Grrrr. That Newton. I'd like to have five minutes in a room alone with him.
Anyway, that was the essence of Hanging Hooke.
The telling of Hooke's story at last - 300 years later - in the form of an Olympian one-man show with the precise and charismatic Chris Barnes playing, first, Jack Hoskins, the turncoat friend of the lop-sided polymath, and then the genius himself, spider-limbed and blessed with youthful vigour initially and later, bent with bitterness and paranoia.
Was Robert Hooke our English Leonardo Da Vinci? asks the play. More pertinently, was he our Giordino Bruno?
("Who's he?" you cry. "Ex-actly!" I shout, thumping the table, as you fall into my cunning trap.)
This story by Siobhan Nicholas takes us from a 2006 Bonhams sale where Robert Hooke's vindication - his rediscovered 500-page Folio - was put up for sale, back to the genesis of a feud that threatened to erase this treasure trove of original thinking.
The story had it all - a Salieri/Mozart bonfire of the vanities, a Da Vinci Code style plot to alter history and overturn conventional assumptions. Secret societies and unyielding fidelities and rancid betrayals brought alive with a tour de force display of Barnes-storming physical and verbal gymnastics that was as breathless and seamless as the force of gravity itself.
Chris Barnes took us on a journey of energy and intrigue. He showed us light and gloom; diverting particles and heliocentric heresies; vacuum pumps and broken hearts (which, I suppose, are the same thing, metaphorically speaking).
He got us onside, did Mr Barnes. So much so that we, the audience became fired up with indignation. Railing at the injustice of this forgotten man. Ready to storm Parliament, to erect a statue made from ice cream tubs, to rally a tiny army of Joanna Lumleys, programmes held high and fashioned in the manner of a khukuri, demanding recompense for Robert the robbed.
Of course the truth may be different. Hooke may not have been spritely of demeanour and generous of spirit as the playwright and her actor would have us believe.
As I discovered later, the history books dwell on his dark side. His squabbling, his fractiousness, his anger, his bombast and... (like you didn't see this coming)... his gravity.
The writer may have stretched the truth. But the truth is elastic. Indeed, the extension of a truth is in direct proportion with the load added to it as long as this load does not exceed the elastic limit.
(Which, as all physicists know, is Hooke's Law.)
– First published on wharf.co.uk
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