![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If it's war fiction, the cute one will die. If you're lucky, he'll die onstage and somewhat beautifully; if the production is going for realism, it'll be off stage and you'll just never see the cute one again. At least this is how it goes with war-themed productions from the UK that Shakespeare Theatre has brought over this season. Adorable Karl Davies, in the final piece in The Great Game: Afghanistan, because he was young and adorable, though hot Tom McKay got to live. Same thing in Black Watch - once you see Scott Fletcher's Kenzie, you know he's a goner. All the tropes - the young one, the new guy, too adorable to live. I don't consider this a spoiler, as it's such a common trope, and if you've got a war piece, someone will die.
This isn't a flaw in the piece, but the consistency of these tropes does make war pieces predictable, and the constant use of the young, new, adorable one to pull more sympathy out of the viewer makes me wonder if it's finally been overdone, because it didn't work for me here as it was perhaps supposed to. I didn't feel an emotional connection to this piece.
And yet I would still highly recommend it because it is so beautifully done. The characterisations are individual enough to tell the twelve or so characters apart, there's a lot of humour in their camaraderie, and most importantly, the choreography is gorgeous. This piece is made by Stephen Hoggett's movement design, and his Olivier for it is probably absolutely deserved. It's beautiful and virile and unique and really makes this piece what it is. Without the movement, it's a group of guys hostile to writer who is trying to interview them about their experiences in Iraq; with the movement, the whole thing expands and becomes overwhelming. Second to the movement is the music: a mix of modern and traditional, written for the piece and things the men themselves would have listened to. The sound was so high it might have been a rock concert, but it maintains a balance between the music and the explosions - each can shake the floor and you are always surrounded by the sound.
We get a bit of everything - boredom in the war zone, difficulty fitting in back home after you can't take the army anymore, a quick history of the regiment itself, battle and death. But what always stands out is the choreography. That history of the regiment is displayed physically as well as rattled off orally: the changing uniforms with changing wars put onto our main character and taken off again, his mates in contemporary fatigues lifting him up to dress and undress him, down to the boots. Lifts, carries, rolls, even sitting on another guy's back so he can adjust his boots - the physicality is just gorgeous. When tensions break out and the sergeant, to keep order, allows the guys to fight - ten seconds only - the beauty absolutely takes over. The ten seconds run over and over, pairs fight and break up and reform and fight again, with lifts and rolls and flips that look like a combination of ballet and martial arts. It's reminiscent of why I so adore Matthew Bourne's choreography, the lines of ballet but without losing any sense of masculinity.
Some of the set details are absolutely stunning - a pool table is sliced open from the inside so that two soldiers can climb out, that same table later becomes an armoured personnel carrier, the video design is helpful in expanding the space and adding texture.
I do feel it sort of fizzles out in terms of the writing, however. We're told by our main character that the reason he left the army was not the death of several of his mates in an IED attack but "what came after". Yet "what came after" is a mission not well explained, that plays out in such an abstract manner that the viewer never wholly will grasp anything of what happened. Which may be the point, but it's rather dissatisfying when considering the plot. But that very abstraction is overwhelming and gorgeous: battle as displayed by ten men marching in formation, the formations always shifting a bit and reforming, and as men start to fall, they are picked up again and pulled back into the formations, faster and faster, more and more falling, yet in the end, they are ten standing, together, unbroken. It's beautiful, but it has no real explanatory power of "what happened". It explains how the Black Watch as a regiment has always gone on and will continue to go on, it is, in the end, about the regiment, but traditional dramatic narrative asks "but what happened to the platoon we've been following so that all of them have left the army?" I blame Gregory Burke, the writer, on this one - the contributions of Stephen Hoggett's movement and Davey Anderson's music and John Tiffany's overall direction are so strong, and this flaw is so structural, that it has to be at Burke's feet.
The cast is very strong, and particularly impressive was Paul Tinto as the lead, Cammy - Paul is the understudy and went on with such short notice that we didn't get slips, they had to tack notices to the front doors so we could see them when we left. Based on headshots, the regular, Jack Lowden, is more traditionally good looking and thus fits, again, into the tropes discussed earlier (the adorable young one dies, his older but still incredibly handsome comrade lives), and I think that makes me prefer Tinto. He's a good looking guy, but not the sort of good looking that brings any sort of expectations. Other standouts include Jamie Quinn as Fraz, which is definitely the showiest role, and Chris Starkie as Stewarty, who is actively suffering from depression and shouldn't have been sent on the second deployment that is the subject of the piece, so no one is at all surprised that he ended up more screwed up than the rest of them. And of course Paul Higgins, who has two main roles: one as the writer interviewing the lads once they are back home, but also as their sergeant while they are deployed. Ian Pirie (last in town with The Canterbury Tales for the RSC and recognisable to a large portion of my flist as one of the chain gang in the LM TAC) is notable as the commanding officer, who gets to recite several emails home to his wife covering the big picture, as well as a nice quick portrait of SNP leader Alex Salmon and a hilarious parody of Lord Elgin signing up volunteers for WWI, with a very rubbery looking prop sword that supposedly belong to his ancestor Robert the Bruce. "You want to get paid? I offer you the glory of Robert the Bruce, and you want to get paid?"
It's a solid 110 minutes, with an excellent cast, and some incredibly beautiful staging, but it didn't hit me emotionally. I don't know if I'm just over the whole genre, if the through-plot just didn't do enough for me, or if the memorable parts overwhelmed any emotional centre rather than contributed to it. I feel very lucky to have had stage seats, to have been that close and that immersed in the beauty of this production, but it didn't translate into a full engagement. My reactions were almost entirely aesthetic, unless I was laughing at the humour. Even the death scene was so beautifully done that I was concentrating on the pretty rather than the fact that adorable boy was dead. But it was so gorgeous, I feel it was absolutely worth my less than $40.
This isn't a flaw in the piece, but the consistency of these tropes does make war pieces predictable, and the constant use of the young, new, adorable one to pull more sympathy out of the viewer makes me wonder if it's finally been overdone, because it didn't work for me here as it was perhaps supposed to. I didn't feel an emotional connection to this piece.
And yet I would still highly recommend it because it is so beautifully done. The characterisations are individual enough to tell the twelve or so characters apart, there's a lot of humour in their camaraderie, and most importantly, the choreography is gorgeous. This piece is made by Stephen Hoggett's movement design, and his Olivier for it is probably absolutely deserved. It's beautiful and virile and unique and really makes this piece what it is. Without the movement, it's a group of guys hostile to writer who is trying to interview them about their experiences in Iraq; with the movement, the whole thing expands and becomes overwhelming. Second to the movement is the music: a mix of modern and traditional, written for the piece and things the men themselves would have listened to. The sound was so high it might have been a rock concert, but it maintains a balance between the music and the explosions - each can shake the floor and you are always surrounded by the sound.
We get a bit of everything - boredom in the war zone, difficulty fitting in back home after you can't take the army anymore, a quick history of the regiment itself, battle and death. But what always stands out is the choreography. That history of the regiment is displayed physically as well as rattled off orally: the changing uniforms with changing wars put onto our main character and taken off again, his mates in contemporary fatigues lifting him up to dress and undress him, down to the boots. Lifts, carries, rolls, even sitting on another guy's back so he can adjust his boots - the physicality is just gorgeous. When tensions break out and the sergeant, to keep order, allows the guys to fight - ten seconds only - the beauty absolutely takes over. The ten seconds run over and over, pairs fight and break up and reform and fight again, with lifts and rolls and flips that look like a combination of ballet and martial arts. It's reminiscent of why I so adore Matthew Bourne's choreography, the lines of ballet but without losing any sense of masculinity.
Some of the set details are absolutely stunning - a pool table is sliced open from the inside so that two soldiers can climb out, that same table later becomes an armoured personnel carrier, the video design is helpful in expanding the space and adding texture.
I do feel it sort of fizzles out in terms of the writing, however. We're told by our main character that the reason he left the army was not the death of several of his mates in an IED attack but "what came after". Yet "what came after" is a mission not well explained, that plays out in such an abstract manner that the viewer never wholly will grasp anything of what happened. Which may be the point, but it's rather dissatisfying when considering the plot. But that very abstraction is overwhelming and gorgeous: battle as displayed by ten men marching in formation, the formations always shifting a bit and reforming, and as men start to fall, they are picked up again and pulled back into the formations, faster and faster, more and more falling, yet in the end, they are ten standing, together, unbroken. It's beautiful, but it has no real explanatory power of "what happened". It explains how the Black Watch as a regiment has always gone on and will continue to go on, it is, in the end, about the regiment, but traditional dramatic narrative asks "but what happened to the platoon we've been following so that all of them have left the army?" I blame Gregory Burke, the writer, on this one - the contributions of Stephen Hoggett's movement and Davey Anderson's music and John Tiffany's overall direction are so strong, and this flaw is so structural, that it has to be at Burke's feet.
The cast is very strong, and particularly impressive was Paul Tinto as the lead, Cammy - Paul is the understudy and went on with such short notice that we didn't get slips, they had to tack notices to the front doors so we could see them when we left. Based on headshots, the regular, Jack Lowden, is more traditionally good looking and thus fits, again, into the tropes discussed earlier (the adorable young one dies, his older but still incredibly handsome comrade lives), and I think that makes me prefer Tinto. He's a good looking guy, but not the sort of good looking that brings any sort of expectations. Other standouts include Jamie Quinn as Fraz, which is definitely the showiest role, and Chris Starkie as Stewarty, who is actively suffering from depression and shouldn't have been sent on the second deployment that is the subject of the piece, so no one is at all surprised that he ended up more screwed up than the rest of them. And of course Paul Higgins, who has two main roles: one as the writer interviewing the lads once they are back home, but also as their sergeant while they are deployed. Ian Pirie (last in town with The Canterbury Tales for the RSC and recognisable to a large portion of my flist as one of the chain gang in the LM TAC) is notable as the commanding officer, who gets to recite several emails home to his wife covering the big picture, as well as a nice quick portrait of SNP leader Alex Salmon and a hilarious parody of Lord Elgin signing up volunteers for WWI, with a very rubbery looking prop sword that supposedly belong to his ancestor Robert the Bruce. "You want to get paid? I offer you the glory of Robert the Bruce, and you want to get paid?"
It's a solid 110 minutes, with an excellent cast, and some incredibly beautiful staging, but it didn't hit me emotionally. I don't know if I'm just over the whole genre, if the through-plot just didn't do enough for me, or if the memorable parts overwhelmed any emotional centre rather than contributed to it. I feel very lucky to have had stage seats, to have been that close and that immersed in the beauty of this production, but it didn't translate into a full engagement. My reactions were almost entirely aesthetic, unless I was laughing at the humour. Even the death scene was so beautifully done that I was concentrating on the pretty rather than the fact that adorable boy was dead. But it was so gorgeous, I feel it was absolutely worth my less than $40.