November 28, 2025
"Dressed in a strange tuxedo/tutu combination with the blanched face of a heroin addict, he opens with a menacing prowl round the empty stage, pausing to stare contemptuously at the audience while eating a banana."
My favorite sentence in "A Midsummer Night’s Dream review — ruined by a needlessly shocking finale/Headlong Theatre’s production turns the Bard’s tricksy comedy into a pitch black ballet-themed spectacle full of spite and horror" (London Times).
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23 comments:
>Dressed in a strange tuxedo/tutu combination<
I think I missed the tuxedo part.
When I attend plays that aren't adaptations of earlier works, I often feel that the playwright lacked the imagination needed to create a structure that is outside my world yet also credible enough to get me to suspend my disbelief. (Tom Stoppard plays are an exception.)
Over the top adaptations of Shakespeare give the lazy or less talented playwright the chance to simply redecorate a preexisting dramatic universe with their own execrable gaudy taste.
I can't help thinking that the titles of these last two posts are somehow connected. Culture, something something, zeitgeist.
Caliban to the Audience -- W.H. Auden
"If now, having dismissed your hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from the laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, you ask and, of course, notwithstanding the conscious fact of his irrevocable absence, you instinctively do ask for our so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain and take his shyly responsible bow for this, his latest, ripest production, it is I–my reluctance is, I can assure you, co-equal with your dismay–who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture, for, in default of the all-wise, all-explaining master you would speak to, who else at least can, who else indeed must respond to your bewildered cry, but its very echo, the begged question you would speak to him about."
And it goes on. Recommended.
Some call it “art”. /sarc
It sounds truly awful.
gnaw my foot off to stop the pain, worse than that sunset boulevard offering by a furlong,
That bit of tuxedo/tutu shtick is an old Cambridge Footlights wheeze from the Edwardian era, if not sooner. Sometimes when you try to be avant garde you''re just garde.
I like the good old days when adventurous directors and performers would use nudity to shock complacent, bourgeois sensibilities. And by nudity I don't mean some male actor's hairy ass.....I saw one production where Judi Dench wore pasties and not much else for her role as Titania. That's the way to make Shakespeare come alive.
Does anyone know what the shocking final scene was all about? It seems unfair to comment on it without actually saying what it was. I checked with ChatGpt. They don't know either.. The bet here is that Puck in his prankish way, substitutes a real blade for the final scene and real blood gets spilled.
It turns out A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was based on Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night so I would have gotten that one wrong on the final.
Mezzrow: "I can't help thinking that the titles of these last two posts are somehow connected."
We need an Althouse Poll: Would you rather have your son holed up in his room with his phone, or eating a banana in a tux and tutu? CC, JSM
An old sports writer (Koppett?) once wrote about the difference between average people and the people who put on the plays. The average person just wants to see the play -straight. The Producers want to put on something different. They get tired of the same ol' same ol.
So we get these weird Shakespeare productions. Trump as Julius Ceasar or Richard III. Black actors as Hamlet. "Dark and Gritty" Shakespeare comedies. The Merchant of Venice where Shylock is a "cool guy".
Bankrupt thrill seeking as "art".
I've always thought Shakespeare read better than he played. But that's just me.
There is more than enough "spite and horror" in some other Shakespeare plays.
If Shakespeare is better read than played, it maybe because the performances don't have all the footnotes explaining the vocabulary. Consider using opera technology to show subtitles and supratitles with translations into contemporary American.
Culture, darkness darkness, zeitgeist.
Tux/tutu eating a banana.
Subtle
Ocean: "The Merchant of Venice where Shylock is a "cool guy"."
That might be fun. Play him as a 70s wholesaler in the Garment District, in flares and a Quiana shirt with a gold chai pendant on his chest hair. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?...oy, I'm getting bupkis from you gonefs!" CC, JSM
well they made money lenders like chilly palmer, cool, with travolta,
but that was 30 years and a hundred pounds ago
They don't realize that if you really want to épater les bourgeois these days, il y faut parvenir sans essayer, de manière aussi pathétiquement forcée, de les épater.
Tutus and Tux is an enterprise that sells princess dresses for little girls. They don't actually sell tuxedos, but on the internet you can get mock tuxes for girls, women (a varient of the naughty maid costume) and even for dogs.
Howard Scammon at William and Mary (who was the reason Glenn Close chose to go there) was fond of saying "Hamlet in motorcycle leathers...Macbeth with his head down a well*...don't these people realise that just doing the play in simplest form is much harder, and more original?" This was in 1972.
*It may have been the other way around. But you knew that.
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