Women Beware Women and Deaf Old Blokes

I can’t leave that last blog post up there all weekend gathering dust, so even though I am  tired and not exactly at my best, it is time to blog about something less icky.

Last week I went to the National with Andrea to see Women Beware Women, a play by Thomas Middleton.  Middleton was writing shortly after Shakespeare I believe, around the time of Ben Jonson.  I had never seen anything by him before.  His most famous play is probably The Revenger’s Tragedy. 

Women Beware Women is typical of the era.  It is tragic with a capital T.  It is gory, violent, ridiculously overblown, complicatedly sexual and lusty and full of the drive for revenge.  It also has rather cross priests in it.  I think the cross priests were an afterthought to tidy things up at the end.  The Christian version of the Deus ex Machina.  I’d have preferred a Deus ex Machina, perhaps Apollo sweeping onstage on a milk float, that sort of thing.  Maybe in the next adaptation.

The play is also very, very long and rather complicated.  Not as long as Morte D’Arthur, but not far off, and way more complicated because everyone will insist on swapping sexes, heads, masks and lovers left right and centre.

The National staged it in a kind of louche Italian bordello style with lots of mirrors and rusty scaffolding, a torch singer and stacks of running up and down stairs looking stricken.  I thought it was quite good fun. 

Harriet Walter was in it, who I have wanted to see on stage for a very long time.  She was excellent and all you would expect.  I have had a soft spot for her ever since she played Harriet Vane to Edward Petherbridge’s Lord Peter Wimsey on television hundreds of years ago.  You might know her better as Fanny Dashwood, the evil sister in law in Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility.

Apparently she was once asked why she played so many evil women.  She puts it down to her bone structure, which is exquisite.  And apparently evil.  She presumably gets this off of Christopher Lee, who is her uncle.  Thank you Wikipedia for that fascinating nugget of celebrity gossip. I shall make sure I use it wisely and well.

She is a formidable actor on stage and has done a great deal of work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including a stunning Cleopatra to Patrick Stewart’s Antony, which Andrea had the great good fortune to see, and which I missed.  So I was very pleased to be able to finally cross her off my list of people I need to see before I am too old to sit still for that long without piddling my pants.

What really made the performance for me though, were the family sitting in the row behind us. 

Audiences are as worthy of critical appreciation as the plays themselves most times.  I prefer an audience of mutes who do not eat, breathe or move if at all possible.  This is unlikely to be granted me, until I finally figure out a way to become world dictator.  Mwahahahah!

So, if you’ve got to have a rustling, fidgeting audience it is best to have an entertaining one, and this lot certainly weren’t letting the side down on that front. 

Andrea and I worked out that it was probably a middle aged, married couple who had brought her parents out to the theatre as a treat.  I surmise that they were her parents by the fact that she was being very vocal and bossing the parents around, and he was staring into the middle distance rustling his sweeet wrappers and trying to look like he was really at a football match.  In a different country.

The parents were both very elderly, and had hearing issues.  The National has hearing loops fitted in the auditorium, and if you are having difficulties you can have a pair of headphones which amplifies the voices coming from the stage.  Both the elderly man and his wife had them.  The man also had a large, inflatable cushion to sit on and about half of Boots pharmacy stashed under his seat.  As we were sitting down, the daughter was shouting: ‘NO DAD! IT’S THE LEFT SIDE.  NO! I SAID THE LEFT.  THE LEFT.  IT’S ON THE LEFT. NO! NO! YOU’RE TURNING IT DOWN.  TURN IT UP.  IT’S….ON….THE….LEFT.’

It was like being at a pantomime for the hard of hearing.  The urge to turn round and shout: ‘IT’S BEHIND YOU. ON THE LEFT.’ was very strong.

All the time he’s going ‘eh? what? eh?’ because of course he’s turning himself down every time. 

His wife then weighed in and started slapping his arm and shouting at him from the other side.

It didn’t bode well for the performance.

The husband who wished he was at a football match seemed to be mining sweeties from the bottom of the deepest halls made of cellophane.  For the first twenty minutes you could hear nothing but the rustling of plastic.  I turned round.  Andrea turned round.  The woman next to me turned round.  In the end even his own wife had had enough, and gave him a wallop.  Obviously skills she had learned from her mother.

Half way through the old man fell asleep and started whistling down his nose whilst breathing stertoriously, some of which was being picked up by his headphones, which were slipping down.  That was nice.

At half time he woke up with a jolt and demanded to know if the play was finished yet.  When his wife told him it was only half time he was really fed up and said in a very loud, creaky voice: ‘Dashed long these sorts of plays! We’ve had a lot of it already, surely.  I think it’s time it was over now.’

Assured that he was there for another hour and a half at least he collapsed in on himself like a deflating meringue, accompanied by the noise of his inflatable cushion giving up the ghost.

Then his daughter came back to rearrange him and ask him in a voice that could be heard in the Gods if he needed to go to the toilet, five or six times.  I did think about asking her if she’d just like to pop into the middle of the stage and really project it out.  It might have helped. 

Anyway, they soldiered manfully on and afterwards we scarpered before they could decamp, blocking the whole aisle and the exit and shouting about bloody, silly plays at the tops of their voices.

I was left wondering why the middle aged couple had decided on this play to take her parents to.  It’s clear he was no lover of Jacobean tragedy, and they didn’t seem particularly enthused.  Maybe they won the tickets?  I was really baffled by it.  Me, I’d love my kids to take me to see something like that.  God forbid that they’d try to take me to see Les Miserables. I’d have to drown myself in the ice cream tub at half time.   But surely, when they were sitting in the best seats in the house, and staying there for over three hours, you’d have thought they’d have checked it out first to make sure that they might actually enjoy it?

Whilst I was trying to piece all the family history together by staring round like a demented emu during the interval, I noticed that Fenella Fielding was in the audience.  I got terribly excited and pointed her out to Andrea, who went; ‘Who?’

She was in some of the Carry On films in the sixties and seventies.  You might know her best for her role in Carry on Screaming.  She had a very distinctive breathy voice and a rather amazing hair do:

I have rather a soft spot for her.  I once saw her in a bizarre performance of Pericles where she was dressed as a member of the French Resistance wearing a trench coat, beret and plimsolls.  I never did really understand it all, but it was jolly good fun.

Anyway, she must be incredibly old now, but she still has exactly the same hair do.  In fact that was what I recognised first.  I saw the back of her head and thought: ‘She’s got hair just like Fenella Fielding, fancy!’ and then she turned round, and it was Fenella Fielding, fancy! So, even though nobody but me will probably recognise her or care, I thought I ought to write it down, because living in Glenfield you don’t get to spot  celebrities every day, unless you count the transvestite in the Co-op.  He looks less like Amy Winehouse now and more like a cross between Robert Smith from The Cure and early Marc Almond when he was still into torch songs.  Nice to know he’s retaining a hint of diva, even if he has dropped the beehive.

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