Unfamiliar quotations
“My family took it hard, however, when I began telling them to go to hell. It was like being bitten by a rabbit.” Dion Fortune, The Sea Priestess.
Chekhov, The Seagull from The National at Home
I mentioned on my birthday post that re-reading Chekhov’s plays and watching recordings of productions is on my to-do list for the next twelve months. So far I have read The Seagull and Uncle Vanya in the Senelick translations. I also watched The Seagull via the National Theatre at Home streaming service.
This 2022 production features Emilia Clarke, best known for playing Daenerys in Game of Thrones as Nina. At 35+ she’s far too old for Nina as written (who is 19 when the play begins), but they change a few lines to make her in her late 20s in Act I, and it works OK for me. The point of Nina is not that she’s very young, it’s that she’s very naive, inexperienced, and impressionable, and I thought that Clarke was convincing.
Nina is a great role for an actress, since by Act IV, her life has been completely upended and she’s showing signs of terrible grief and trauma, and again I thought Clarke was very good. I thought all the actors were very good. I don’t think I have ever seen The Seagull performed, and Tom Rhys Harries’ Trigorin was very different than I’d pictured the character, but seemed quite right. Indira Varma as Arkadina was excellent—imperious one moment and pathetic the next— and I quite liked Sophie Wu’s mannered, deadpan Masha.
The production, directed by Jamie Lloyd, was odd, though. There’s virtually no set, and the actors remain seated through most of the action in plastic chairs. Costumes are minimal (Dr. Dorn’s unbuttoned third button is doing a lot of work here). And while I don’t need a samovar onstage to enjoy a Chekhov production, the non-naturalistic presentation meant I felt the actors were physically constrained. This puts a great deal of emphasis on their faces and voices. I would have liked to see how these people move about, to be able to read their body language more. And the fact that the actors almost never leave the stage puts them sometimes in odd positions of maybe-acting in the background when other characters have the focus. Poor Daniel Monks as Konstantin seems to spend the entire evening looking absolutely stricken, even when he is nominally “offstage.”
I assume that there were large cuts to the script, including the quite obvious cut at the beginning when the play begins with the interruption of Konstantin’s play-within-the-play. It’s hard to say, but I think that might have led to the supporting characters feeling under-developed. I know I would have liked to have seen more of Gerald Kyd as Dorn and Robert Glenister as Sorin.
Overall I enjoyed it and was happy to learn that the National Theatre at Home exists. I expect I will subscribe for a few months, binge a bunch of theatre, then cancel for a long while.
Reservation Dogs, season 1-3
Shanon and I were in no hurry to finish Reservation Dogs because we love the show so much. I can’t think of another show right now that kept up the quality for three seasons like this. I feel like every episode is at least good, and many episodes are really great. The core cast is phenomenal, the supporting cast and guests (oh shit it’s Ethan Hawke!) are great, the writing is really tight—Shanon pointed out to me that it doesn’t feel like a <30 minute show, but it is. Usually when a show is about teenage characters, it’s hard to care much about the parents, but Reservation Dogs had me caring about the parents and the grandparents and all the extended families. Really can’t recommend it highly enough.
And I’m glad that they called it done after three seasons. I would hate to see it lose focus and quality. I just hope all the talented people who made the show continue to get great opportunities to tell more stories.
I so wish I had a copy of the "Drama Is Pretentious" server (actually just a text document that lived buried somewhere in the college network) from my freshman year wherein people anonymously discussed campus productions, because "Dr. Dorn’s unbuttoned third button is doing a lot of work here" is a perfect example (if slightly more elevated) of the kind of thing we talked about.