Amadeus

Director's Notes on Amadeus by Peter Shaffer

Mr Anthony

During her eleven-year tenure as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher attended only one production at Britain’s National Theatre: a performance of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. 

Poster for the original RNT production of Amadeus in 1979, designed by Richard Bird and Michael Mayhew

She described it as a 'filthy play' and upbraided director Peter Hall for depicting Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. When Hall pointed out that Mozart’s correspondence was laced with lavatorial flourishes (a missive to his cousin, Marianne, is touchingly signed off: 'by the love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin'), Thatcher held her ground: 'It is not possible,' she insisted, 'not from someone who could create works of such beauty. It cannot be so.'

Simon Callow as Mozart in the original RNT production

Play of the Week

The RNT's recent production of Hamlet will be streaming in cinemas across the country from tomorrow onwards. For anyone planning to watch it, here are some thoughts from Theo Katzenellenbogen, who played Claudius in the recent SPS production of Shakespeare's tragedy.  

Play of the Week: Hamlet

In today's post, Miss Mazur introduces the senior school production of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

Review: The Real Inspector Hound

 Gabe Joseph

“A rattling good evening out. I was held.”

The average school play is an exercise in emotional range. Coming out of a production, I once heard ‘it was interesting to see that side of the pupils’. Whilst that is true, the 6th form production of The Real Inspector Hound was not full of emotional monologues or the exploration of some hero’s tortured psychology, in fact, it was a farce and a piece of meta-theatre. 

Arnav as Magnus Muldoon

Play of the Week

The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard

Dr Pryce

“What do you think you’re doing? You’re turning it into a complete farce!” 
For this year’s 6th form play, The Milton Studio will be transformed into a 1960’s style theatre as we enter the world of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. This hilarious play is a parody of the stereotypical parlour mystery. The play follows two theatre critics, Moon and Birdboot, who are watching a nonsensical setup of a typical ‘whodunnit’. By chance, they become involved in the action causing a series of events that parallel the play they are watching. In this preview, I will take you through some of the central theatrical conventions that the play explores, particularly focussing on the styles of comedy which Stoppard utilises.

Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare's Globe

Reviewed by Max Swinnerton

Last Friday, the U8 English cohort went on a trip to watch the latest production at The Globe: Antony and Cleopatra. Having studied the text in the Lower Eighth we were excited to be able to finally see Shakespeare’s words delivered onstage, and gain some extra A03* marks that had been lacking throughout the previous year. However, as we made the pilgrimage into the city, the group learned that this would be no ordinary production: the play was bilingual. The Roman characters would perform the original English and the Egyptians would act in British Sign Language. Even after Ms McLaughlin told us that we had standing tickets, and after reading a review by Time Out magazine which described it as ‘cumbersome’, we were ready to go in with an open mind. However, having now watched it and having had a week to digest, it’s safe to say the message behind the production fell flat.

Carnegie Book Club and Death of a Salesman

In today's post, Mrs Wilkinson brings us an update on the latest meeting of the Carnegie Book Club, and Adrian Sevanot Davis reviews last term's production of Death of a Salesman.

Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander

Eleven-year-old Kofi Offin has dreams of water, of its urgent whisper that beckons with promises and secrets. He has heard the call on the banks of Upper Kwanta, West Africa, where he lives. He loves these things above all else: his family, the fireside tales of his father’s father, a girl named Ama, and, of course, swimming. But when the unthinkable – a sudden death – occurs during a festival between rival villages, Kofi ends up in a fight for his life. What happens next will send him on a harrowing journey across land and sea, and away from everything he loves. Yet Kofi’s dreams may be the key to his freedom…

The Winter's Tale - an introduction

Mr Anthony

NB: The following essay contains plot spoilers regarding the play’s ending. 
 
The Winter’s Tale is a play about a man who believes a lie of his own making and is outraged when others won’t believe it too. Leontes’s confidence in his wife’s infidelity is, unlike Othello’s, entirely self-generated; indeed, Emilia’s famed description of jealousy as 'a monster begot upon itself, born on itself' is more fitting of Leontes’s condition than that of Othello, who requires three acts of careful priming by Iago before exploding with the ferocity Leontes achieves in his first scene. The refusal of Leontes’s court to support the false narrative of Hermione’s adultery reveals a political microclimate (unusual in Jacobean theatre) devoid of sycophants and schemers, devoted instead to truth and plain speaking.

Kiss Me, Kate

Introduced by Mr Anthony

There are plays about misogyny and there are misogynistic plays. Kiss Me, Kate, premiering in 1948, was something of a hybrid. 

In placing the frame narrative of a warring theatrical couple around an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the show viewed the source material through a semi-ironic lens, with the Elizabethan marriage market and its commodification of women sent up in songs such as ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ and ‘I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua’. In ‘I Hate Men’, the female lead wittily condemns sexual double standards in a strikingly modern treatise on toxic masculinity. However, the same character is also beaten publicly by her ex-husband and, in a startling volte-face at the show’s climax, appears willing to subdue herself to his mastery. The programme for the original production of Kiss Me, Kate bore the image of a whip, tipping the musical’s title from playful suggestion to baleful command.

Titus: Why Now?

Next week's school play is Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.  In today's post, Mr Broughton offers an introduction to his version of the tragedy: you can also watch a new trailer for the production here.  

‘A heap of rubbish’ was Edward Ravenscroft’s description of the play, although he was happy enough to create from it one of the most faithful Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, one which enjoyed huge popularity for over fifty years.

Why read fiction?

Sometimes we read only for pleasure – and that’s enough. Most recently I read The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope for precisely this reason. It’s a brilliant, sometimes scathing, sometimes exuberant satire of polite society. Tongue in cheek, fast and loose, it takes you on a rambunctious ride, and along the way you encounter a morally bankrupt group of high society miscreants. In short, Trollope is like Dickens - but racier.

Director's Notes on My Fair Lady

Mr Anthony

Gabriel Pascal, the film producer originally responsible for adapting Pygmalion for the screen, first met George Bernard Shaw in the nude.

Sometime in the 1920s, Pascal was swimming without trunks on the French Riviera when he saw a skinny, naked man with a long white beard holding on to a buoy. Shaw commented on the golden brown of Pascal’s buttocks and Pascal asked, as a struggling film producer, if he might produce an adaptation of one of Shaw’s plays. Shaw replied that he would only grant such a favour if one day Pascal were 'utterly broke'.

The Man who was Chesterton ...

What are we to do about G K Chesterton? The most famous Old Pauline novelist, he is renowned for his Father Brown detective stories, dramatisations of which have just reached their sixth series on BBC One. For Chesterton these were primarily a money-spinner; what really interested him was argument, whether political, theological or literary, a passion which was born during his time at St Paul’s, where the library’s fascinating archive shows him to have been an enthusiastic speaker at formal dinners and a keen debater, even editing a journal under that title.

Pictures of him abound on English-classroom walls: six-foot-four, so obese that his coffin had to be lowered out of his bedroom window, and dressed in cape, pince-nez and broad-brimmed hat with a trusty sword-stick by his side – the epitome of the Edwardian intellectual with larger-than-life persona.

Measure for Measure

Next week's school play is Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.  Mr Anthony introduces the play, and explains some of the thoughts behind his production, which updates the play to 1980s London.
 

Measure for Measure is a play about a man who starts a fire in order to demonstrate his skill in putting it out. As a politician the Duke is conceited, idle and capricious (as well as being a compulsive liar), more concerned with re-igniting public awe at his absolute majesty than with restoring the fractured judicial system that his own negligence has allowed to crumble. As such, in a PR stunt of notable modernity, he temporarily absconds from his state, overlooks the uniquely qualified Escalus as replacement, and instead appoints a politically inexperienced junior, Angelo, to flounder in his place.

The Wind in the Willows

Director's Notes by Mr Anthony

The Wind in the Willows, written by Kenneth Grahame in 1908, is one of those literary classics (like The Wizard of Oz, Alice or, now, The Lord of the Rings) for which the aesthetic potency of illustration and adaptation has somewhat eclipsed the musty old book-bound words themselves – which is why many more people claim to have read these novels than actually have.

I have never read The Wind in the Willows but, as long as I can remember, I have got the gist. A combination of the 1996 Pythonesque film adaptation directed by Terry Jones (starring Jones as Mr. Toad, Eric Idle as Rat, and a lovely turn from Victoria Wood as, of course, The Tea Lady), the charming illustrations of E. H. Shepard (an addition to the 1933 reprint, from the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh, which have become the blueprint for stage and film designers for nearly a century) and this, Bennett’s masterful 1990 stage adaptation for the National Theatre, have meant that one is so familiar with these anthropomorphized riverbank capers that one can blithely lie about having read the original with no qualms whatsoever (something, incidentally, that the recent BBC adaptation has finally allowed me to do about War and Peace).