Though an appearance in this column is not intended to imply my agreement with what is being said, these were amongst the most trenchant or provocative of this week’s theatrical reviews.
- Reviewing Monday’s opening of High Society, Susannah Clapp in today’s Observer writes of its model-turned-actress Jerry Hall’s way with a dress, but is less sure about her way with anything else. “A chignoned Hall looks amazing in a lilac hat slapped to the side of her face; she even triumphs over a gathered rosebud skirt. But she moves as if she’s left the coat-hanger in her clothes, and she sings, Rex Harrison-style, semi-speaking, only occasionally bumping into a tune”.
Kate Bassett, reviewing Hall in today’s Independent on Sunday, also had this to say: “…She can’t act for toffee. Or sing or dance. Yet she’s oddly endearing. It’s like watching a little girl in a school play, hopelessly awkward but smiling sweetly — aw, bless.”
And then there’s this hitherto unpublished comment from my partner, who said of Hall as we left the theatre: “When she grins, it’s looks like a horse having its hooves tickled.”
Reviewing Tuesday’s opening of Shoot the Crow at the Trafalgar Studios, Michael Coveney (returning to reviewing as he stands in for an indisposed Paul Taylor in The Independent) goes against the tide of praise it has mostly received elsewhere to damn with very faint praise to declare that it “has the virtues of a reasonably good night out at the Bush Theatre, or the Hampstead, or the Royal Court in its present dreary incarnation, but no appeal beyond that pathetically limited constituency”. He also levels heavy criticism of the venue: “The Trafalgar Studios is a monstrosity of development, changing the art deco auditorium of the old Whitehall Theatre into a ‘functional’ space and a silly ‘experimental’ venue below: all this in the name of ‘democratisation’ and ‘new audiences’ who might want to avoid ‘West End’ values and will, certainly, now.”
Reviewing Wednesday’s opening of Woyzeck at the Barbican Theatre, Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph writes, “The trouble with the production - and it isn’t a complaint you will often hear from me - is that it is too much fun. Gísli Örn Gardarsson’s production is so spectacular, with its acrobatics, aerial ballets and beautiful sequences in which the characters swim underwater in a giant aquarium, and make love in its turbulent waters, that you lose sight of the anger, gloom and psychotic terror of the original.”
