Last week Jenny and I went to the theatre to celebrate our anniversary. I had booked the seats months before to see Bryan Cranston (so brilliant in Breaking Bad) in All My Sons by Arthur Miller. Looking forward is part of the pleasure I think – especially at West End prices!
We took our seats, and I immediately thought there was going to be a problem here. The seats were low to the floor and instantly uncomfortable. Added to which it was going to be a two-hour and fifteen-minute play WITHOUT an interval. It began, and within a few minutes, I started to feel it. After forty minutes, I was numb, and my legs were aching.
The acting was superb, believable, passionate performances that layer by layer revealed the main character to be not what he seemed. In fact, he was a monster who, because of his own selfishness, had sent many airmen to their deaths. A very conflicted story. Annoyingly, this excellent piece of acting by great American actors was spoiled not only by my seat but also by the decision to play intense music throughout in the background. It had the effect of making the story seem melodramatic when just the truth would have been enough. It might work in a film, but here, silence was needed for the characters’ words to resonate.
It‘s what they call Director’s Theatre. A top director takes a well-made play and puts their own stamp on it by adding stylistic effects like music and a huge tree lying across the middle of the stage. These decisions, in my opinion, work against the power of the play – they get in the way.
It was a three-act play. I lasted two of them, but at the second interval I had to leave. I watched the rest of the play on a TV screen in the bar. There, I discovered a few people who had left the auditorium to visit the loo but were not allowed back in again. Again, the directors’ theatre decision to have no interval affected people in other ways as well.
Sometimes you have an utterly fantastic time and come out inspired, and other times you emerge wishing you hadn’t wasted your time. What a shame because, as I said, these actors were top-notch and acting their socks off. Like me, I felt that they and I found other had got in the way.
