As this final week in London follows the Thames out to sea, I should give an account of a minor crisis I'm having. From the theater I've seen on this entire trip - nearly a show a day in Edinburgh and a few expensive matinees in London - I can't help but feel more and more irrelevant. Like a pawn caught in a king's prideful battle or an electric light bulb enslaved into a series circuit, my calling from Thespis has begun to feel like a tangent. A writer scribes a play. In it, people are assigned to perform physical, emotional, verbal tasks alongside/against others. A look of the production is intimated on the page and a director carries out that vision as he harnesses the particular qualities of the people onstage. The public pays to see this artificial universe and sometimes it rings a bell long dormant in their hearts. This concludes the earnest portion of my entry because I'm about to puke into my hand.
More to the point, I've had two very different takes on theatre (the "re" is a nod to the limeys) in the UK. In Scotland, there was an exciting roughness to it all. The plays and comedy were all self-produced efforts with committed, at times desperate, performances. The theatre I've seen in London has been of the pristine variety. A couple of days ago I saw the much-fluffed production of Brecht's "Life of Galileo" at the Royal National Theatre, starring Simon Russell Beale, the UK's short and puffy theatrical deity. The show must have cost a fortune: a cast of thirty, a rotating set, incredible projections, and a live, unseen orchestra scoring the play. This was a complete vision, no doubt. Yet most of the actors seemed more interested in the cheese & pickle sandwich backstage than in breathing life into a very obvious, redundant narrative. More disconcerting was how emboldened I felt by their lazy work. Their incompetence inspired me and that made me pretty sad.
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