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Thursday, 18 March 2010 07:52 pmOn a work related trip to London last week I managed to squeeze in two plays.
Cat On The Hot Tin Roof was a real gem. The film is so iconic that it seems hard to compete against, but since they butchered the dialogue so much I always prefer stage productions. The cast was superb, particularly James Earl Jones as Big Daddy and Adrian Lester as Brick, who both played their roles very different to the film version (whereas Maggie and Big Mama seemed to be lifted straight out of the film). Particular the 2nd act confrontation between Brick and Big Daddy was really spellbinding.
With this being an all black cast the audience was predominantly coloured, too, and this added a whole different dynamic to the play that I found much more interesting than the fact that the actors where black.
Big shout out to the London cabbies, by the way, who can cope with frantic women jumping into their taxi, gasp 'I want to see cats on a hot tin roof, don't know where, starts in 20 minutes' and collapse on the seat....
The second play, The Misanthrope, was very good, too, but unfortunately I was not in best form, (lack of sleep due to some yanks with jet-lag doing an all-nighter in the hotel room next door), so it was hard to take in all those rapid-fire debates and arguments and fully appreciate the witticism. But Damian Lewis was absolutely adorable and milked the text to an inch of it's life. Keira Knightly was able to hold her own, which surprised me given that this is her stage debut.
Cat On The Hot Tin Roof was a real gem. The film is so iconic that it seems hard to compete against, but since they butchered the dialogue so much I always prefer stage productions. The cast was superb, particularly James Earl Jones as Big Daddy and Adrian Lester as Brick, who both played their roles very different to the film version (whereas Maggie and Big Mama seemed to be lifted straight out of the film). Particular the 2nd act confrontation between Brick and Big Daddy was really spellbinding.
With this being an all black cast the audience was predominantly coloured, too, and this added a whole different dynamic to the play that I found much more interesting than the fact that the actors where black.
Big shout out to the London cabbies, by the way, who can cope with frantic women jumping into their taxi, gasp 'I want to see cats on a hot tin roof, don't know where, starts in 20 minutes' and collapse on the seat....
The second play, The Misanthrope, was very good, too, but unfortunately I was not in best form, (lack of sleep due to some yanks with jet-lag doing an all-nighter in the hotel room next door), so it was hard to take in all those rapid-fire debates and arguments and fully appreciate the witticism. But Damian Lewis was absolutely adorable and milked the text to an inch of it's life. Keira Knightly was able to hold her own, which surprised me given that this is her stage debut.