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Post by bigredapple on Apr 11, 2024 20:43:29 GMT
Saw this tonight
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Post by ceebee on Apr 11, 2024 20:54:48 GMT
Phenomenal. Disturbing. Compelling. Brilliant. So many questions. So sad. Absolutely gripping.
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Post by Steve on Apr 12, 2024 6:47:38 GMT
Saw this last night and agree with everyone above that it's a total smash, that the set designer deserves an A Star for brutal claustrophobic simplicity and that Rosie Sheehy is giving one of those great performances that nobody who sees it will ever forget. Some spoilers follow. . . The fact that Richard Jones did Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" previously at The Old Vic, with Bertie Carvel, and that Rosie Sheehy was in it, just feels so perfect. Cos that play could easily be subtitled "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: the Male version." Whereas, this play feels like the Sequel: "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: the Female version." We await Jones's conclusion to the Trilogy: "Capitalist Life is a Constrained Cage of Nasty Little Boxes, and you'll probably Explode in the End: AI in Charge, Human Life is Cancelled" with Rosie Sheehy as the AI lol. In "The Hairy Ape," Rosie Sheehy's character was the daughter of the Capitalist magnate who pretty much owned Bertie Carvel's character, and when she looked at him with disgust, it was like he took the red pill and realised he was in the Matrix, and he would never escape. In "Machinal," it's Rosie Sheehy's character who slowly realises she's in "The Matrix," a confused polar bear in a zoo tragically bashing its powerful head against the walls of an inescapable cage. And the garish slopped-on in-yer-face yellow paint of these walls (just two rather than the three at Bath) makes this inescapable stark triangular prison maddening in a way the Big Brother TV producers would be proud of, always looking for environments that will drive human beings up the wall lol. Anyway, I loved the way Jones has directed the ensemble to function so robotically in this prison of a space (all the windows are illusions that never open up for us), I loved the way Daniel Bowerbank's File Clerk constantly declares "Hot Dog" in blue-pilled delight at his own prison, I loved how turning the lights off seems to represent "freedom," even though we know the walls are still there in the dark, I love Pierro Niel-Mee's apparently warm young man, offering so much possibilities in such a shallow way. And most of all I love Rosie Sheehy's physicality, her moment to moment fish-on-a-hook straining against her cages (can you imagine if your "hands" were all someone thought you had to offer?), her onslaught of utterly real, utterly human despair, her immense tangible raging against the machine in every scene. I thought she was great in Hairy Ape, in The Wolves, in King John, in Oleanna, in Romeo and Julie, but God, this is something beyond, something unforgettable. 5 stars from me.
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Post by ceebee on Apr 12, 2024 6:58:28 GMT
And Steve found the words I couldn't find last night. You know you've seen something truly great when the next morning you're buzzing and would happily return to see it again and again. One of the most stunning pieces of theatre which feels like it turns the Old Vic into a voyeuristic claustrophobic telescope where the audience feels so much bigger at one end and the cast play out at the smaller end. I also found the "hot dog" phrase resonated with me - the absurdity of how humans use euphemism to numb or neutralise the harsh reality of situations or life. There is great beauty in this stark production and I just wanted to howl at the end at the injustice of the justice. Five stars from me too.
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Post by happysooz2 on Apr 12, 2024 11:25:12 GMT
I wasn’t going to book this as didn’t love the Almeida version. These early reviews are making me wonder though. Anyone who has seen both want to compare and contrast them?
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Post by Fleance on Apr 12, 2024 12:40:49 GMT
Also please compare to the 1993 Stephen Daldry/Fiona Shaw production of Machinal at the NT, which is the only production I've seen.
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Post by zahidf on Apr 12, 2024 13:11:47 GMT
Seeing this tomorrow, looking forwards to it
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Post by ix on Apr 12, 2024 21:42:30 GMT
Gosh, this is good, and really not the sort of thing I thought I'd enjoy. The physicality of the company is amazing, but it's the lighting and sound design that's as tight as a drum. The shadow work is superb.
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Post by Being Alive on Apr 12, 2024 22:49:29 GMT
Can't really decide what I made of this.
Rosie Sheehy is obviously spectacular, and the piece itself is deeply unsettling, but I never felt like it held my attention. My mind was always wandering, and I think that had something to do with the direction (I'm not a HUGE Richard Jones fan anyway so likely that was an issue)
3 stars for me (almost 4 because of Sheehy but it really didn't hold my attention all that well)
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Post by Dave B on Apr 12, 2024 23:01:02 GMT
Rosie Sheehy is brilliant and I loved the opening physicality and sync. I liked the set a lot and the lights and the shadow... but I found myself wondering how they were doing the lights and drifting away, so I too didn't find it holding my attention. I can easily see why someone who it did grab would rate it highly though.
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Post by zahidf on Apr 13, 2024 21:34:21 GMT
This was great! Loved the sets, staging and performance
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Post by Steve on Apr 13, 2024 22:31:00 GMT
I wasn’t going to book this as didn’t love the Almeida version. These early reviews are making me wonder though. Anyone who has seen both want to compare and contrast them? The Almeida production was clever and cool. It jumped a decade each scene, the set was like an Amazon packing plant, expanding and contracting, surrounded by an expansive darkness. Emily Berrington was like a nervous out-of-place alien negotiating all the cool cleverness from scene to scene. The Almeida production, which I liked, but which left me a little cold, is why I LOVED this production! Some spoilers follow. . . If the Almeida was ice, this production is fire. The yellow walls, inescapable windows (painted over), cramped triangular space is much more of a unity, much less clever than the Almeida production. It doesn't go for the intellectual exercise of comparing decades, or offering the escape of expansive darkness, but instead just shuts a human being in a tiny oven, peoples that oven with the boiling inanity of conformist people saying conformists things like clocks that never stop, a big Brother house that's the size of a thimble completely overpopulated and utterly maddening. And unlike Berrington , there is nothing alien about Sheehy, there's nothing to push away and say that's not like me. Sheehy is a totally normal everywoman boiling in depression and fury because of the insidious compression, noise, and lack of opportunity and fulfilment. She's like a boiling lump of a human, persistently in mental agony, getting more and more depressed and infuriated, until Jones gives her character a brief breather before breaking her. This is a much less intellectual, much less disjointed, much more physical, much more brutal, much more claustrophobic, much more relatable and ultimately much more effective production of the play, in my opinion. Sorry, Fleance, I skipped the Fiona Shaw production. In those days I mostly only went to musicals.
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Post by meister on Apr 14, 2024 6:37:10 GMT
Is the stage high for this - thinking of front row???
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Post by bordeaux on Apr 14, 2024 9:24:16 GMT
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Post by max on Apr 14, 2024 12:24:58 GMT
I'm afraid I didn't feel it transferred that well to a much larger space (Ustinov capacity is 126, Old Vic is over 1000). I was in the back row (of 6) in the Dress Circle, so that's not a terrible seat. I liked the shadow work particularly, but felt that the choreographed office was too cramped - in a small venue I'd have appreciated what they were doing, but on a large stage (with huge masking around the set) that cramped nature needed to now feel a concerted choice carrying meaning, and it didn't. The central character isn't in the start of the office scene, so it's not about how stultifying that feels - or, at least, not enough of that scene is about that; it's true she feels the weight of gossip later. Perhaps I was just too far away from the action to appreciate and feel viscerally pulled in to the detail; but in expressionism (representing that historical period) I expect bigger movement that would have carried across distance. I saw the Daldry NT version with Fiona Shaw. I can't find any video on youtube but my memory is that Shaw was lifted and manipulated around the set (or am I inventing that?). It all felt like a woman forced through a grotesque 'perfect little woman machine'. With the Ustinov/Old Vic version the impressionistic elements feel a bit like a graphic novel (which I liked very much) but don't accelerate and exaggerate the quite ordinary (for the time) expectations and indignities of conventional female 'correctness'. Without that acceleration through form, the text itself doesn't convey enough that makes us feel that murder was an awful but inevitable (and even justifiable) consequence. If we're not provoked into feeling that, what's the point of the play? One element fascinated me - I'll need to get the script and check it. Helen uses as her alibi the idea of "big dark looking men" breaking into the marital home and killing her husband. This is written in 1928, before the 1931 events that became the subject of Kander/Ebb's 'The Scotsboro Boys'. That is, a white woman reaching for a 'dark figure' to blame, or punish for something that didn't happen. Then, in prison, Helen is soothed by a man singing in his cell - in this Ustinov/Old Vic version a Black man singing a plaintive gospel song. I'm very interested in whether Sophie Treadwell intended this interpretation of 'dark figures' - and the journey of Helen (behaving like 'a Karen' as we'd say today). [EDIT: I checked the script, and this is indeed the way Treadwell wrote it: 'Dark figures' and then the 'spiritual' sung from another cell - extraordinary and, sadly, timeless/timely] Overall I'm glad I saw it. It's extraordinary that a female writer created this in 1928. I wish I'd seen it from studio theatre distance.
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Post by max on Apr 14, 2024 12:46:10 GMT
I'm only slightly joking when I say: Remember when Sheena Easton did her own version of Machinal?
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Post by happysooz2 on Apr 14, 2024 18:47:21 GMT
Steve thank you for writing that. I am somewhat in awe of you. Reading this makes me question how much of Machinal at the Almeida actually landed for me. I’m going to blame new born baby sleep deprivation…
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Post by mkb on Apr 15, 2024 21:39:51 GMT
Is the stage high for this - thinking of front row??? No, it's not. From the fourth row (E), that was actually the second row at the time of booking -- par for the course at this venue -- it looked like the front row afforded an excellent immersive view.
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Post by mkb on Apr 15, 2024 22:01:42 GMT
I hate being the first with negative feedback, but I did not enjoy this tonight.
While I appreciated the imaginative theatricality of the staging and the heightened surrealism, the narrative itself does not become engaging until the penultimate scene "The Law", and even then is predictable and clichéd.
For drama to hold your attention, it has to have interesting characters -- and here they are deliberately two-dimensional stereotypes --, a gripping story, or a spectacle for the eyes. Having only a message is not enough, especially when that message is rammed home without nuance or subtlety.
Contrary to, it seems, everyone else, I did not rate Rosie Sheehy's stilted performance as Helen Jones. Helen is incredibly irritating, not someone I could empathise with at all, and, without that, there is no point to the piece. I felt this was largely the fault of the actress and direction rather than the script. The rest of the cast fare much better in trying to bring hugely underwritten people to life.
While there was an enthusiastic response from half the audience, I sensed lukewarmness from the rest.
It's always telling when a production is this long, and the director has not the balls to include a (much-needed) interval for fear of mass second-act no-shows. There's even a natural place for one between scenes labelled "Prohibited" and "Domestic".
Two stars.
One act: 19:32-21:27 Note: seven minutes longer than advertised, and it started very promptly, and it's difficult to see how it could have run through any faster, so quite where the Old Vic are getting their 1:50 running time from is a mystery.
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Post by caa on Apr 15, 2024 22:06:38 GMT
Is the stage high for this - thinking of front row??? Saw it tonight in the front row, really great to see it close up stage height not an issue
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Post by drmaplewood on Apr 16, 2024 7:27:27 GMT
I was one of the people on my feet last night at curtain, I thought this was pretty electrifying and Rosie Sheehy was nothing short of incredible.
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Post by mrnutz on Apr 16, 2024 8:04:32 GMT
I struggled with this on Saturday night - enjoyed the early scenes and the end but the extended period of total darkness in the middle had me drifting off. Quite warm in there too which didn't help!
It ran a full two hours as well.
3/5
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Post by Steve on Apr 16, 2024 8:18:05 GMT
For drama to hold your attention, it has to have interesting characters -- and here they are deliberately two-dimensional stereotypes --, a gripping story, or a spectacle for the eyes. Having only a message is not enough, especially when that message is rammed home without nuance or subtlety. [ I can easily imagine a great drama inspired by Ruth Snyder's life. It would be exactly like "Double Indemnity," in which a woman insures her husband, then murders him together with her lover to collect the loot, which is what Ruth Snyder did. Billy Wilder made a smashing job of that story, which is almost as good as "Sunset Boulevard." And I agree that this piece lacks all the moment-to-moment nailbiting qualities of a drama like that. Some spoilers follow. . . But Sophie Treadwell did things differently: an absolute pioneer of a woman reporter who interviewed the Mexican Revolutionary, Pancho Villa, reported on World War 1, marched with suffragettes, refused to take her husband's surname and wrote AND directed for the New York Stage! I suppose she didn't want to write a conventional drama about Ruth Snyder that's forgotten about as soon as the dramatic ride is over, and wanted to be a bit pioneering about this play too (though Eugene O'Neill had already written an Expressionist play for the New York Stage with a male protagonist, "The Hairy Ape.") So, yes, she writes "deliberately two-dimensional stereotypes," and names her protagonist, "Young Woman" and denies every character in the play a name except the antagonist, "George H Jones," the husband who dares to have individuality but reduces her only to her "pretty little hands." Treadwell adopts the Expressionist technique of 9 panels, like the "Stations of the Cross," though her panels end not with Resurrection but with Crucifixion, because she is not creating moment-to-moment drama at all, but showing us a horrific vision of our life as objects, caricaturing us as machines to reveal how we are trapped in a great big capitalist unfeeling machine (just like in Sheena Easton's video lol). The triumph of Richard Jones's production is how clearly and cuttingly he illustrates Treadwell's vision, how claustrophobic and revelatory he makes it. Unlike you, I agree with drmaplewood that Rosie Sheehy finds an "incredible" amount of humanity in all the robotic motions she has to march through. I really think there is a place for a revelatory dark Expressionist vision of humanity like this, alongside typical dramas, written by a pioneering feminist who could see the coming of AI and machines taking over the world more than a hundred years ago. Obviously don't put it on at the Gielgud though.
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Post by mkb on Apr 16, 2024 12:13:27 GMT
Another part of my issue with Helen is that there is no descent, i.e. no gradual realisation she cannot fit in with society. Right from the off on the subway carriage, she is an outsider, all angsty and apparently already in the middle of some mental breakdown. In the next scene, in the office, we see workers rubbing along, automaton-like, coping with their mundanity by taking succour in the superficial. While their mannerisms are vastly exaggerated for effect, anyone used to office politics will recognise the mood evoked instantly. If Helen has ever made any effort to fit in with or tolerate her co-workers, it has happened before the timeline we witness.
The sole character presented with any degree of warmth and humanity, is, ironically, the boss. I was expecting a monster, using his power to coerce Helen into a relationship and marriage, but, if any of that happens, it is not shown nor even implied. As presented here, he comes across very much as the sort of man who *would* take no for an answer. It is interesting that in choosing to subjugate herself to an older and unattractive man, Helen comes to despise him, but when presented with a younger and sexier variant, who is far more self-interested than her husband, Helen, for the very first time, relaxes and enjoys the experience. It seems Helen is as superficial, if not more so, than the colleagues she had no capacity to relate to.
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Post by Steve on Apr 17, 2024 17:41:46 GMT
It seems Helen is as superficial, if not more so, than the colleagues she had no capacity to relate to. I agree with your analysis. For me, the fact that Sheehy humanises her to such a massive extent despite this, and despite her terrible choices, is why this is such a powerful production for me. Spoilers follow. . . I think Treadwell's point is that society is even more terrible than the "Young Woman" is. We know she's shallow, like you say, cos she is fixated on "wavy hair" lol. A fetishistic dream she has because all this mechanised society does is compartmentalise everybody for their parts, and she's been brought up to be part of this machine. She even talks like a machine, like a ticker tape talking about how she hasn't found anyone with those all-important "curls:"
"that I’d like – that I’d love – But I haven’t found anybody like that yet – I haven’t found anybody – I’ve hardly known anybody – you’d never let me go with anybody. . ."
And she concludes in her absolutely tragic ticker tape mechanised voice: "I’ve never found anybody – anybody – nobody’s ever asked me – till now – he’s the only man that’s ever asked me – And I suppose I got to marry somebody – all girls do."
And there you have it. "All girls" are programmed to be destroyed by this society. She's just a computer program, confused and desperate about being part of the machine because somehow she's taken the red pill, and has become aware of her situation.
Imagine the foresight and bravado and audacity and genius of someone writing this in the 1920s, deliberately sympathising with the worst behaviour like this because the society that programmed the atrocious behaviour is even worse.
It's such a great pioneering play, so willing to do things differently. It's hard to fathom even now, a hundred years later. I completely understand your response, but I can't help thinking the current production is close to perfect.
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Post by ceebee on Apr 17, 2024 18:59:46 GMT
I'm loving this thread and the different perspectives on this play.
To me, the story felt so modern and relevant. Existentialism versus nihilism. The familar pattern to many of the need of an individual who yearns to love, earns to live, and learns to comply. The desire to be accepted rather than subjected. She literally rages against the machine: against the buzzing bee-hive of the office, against her mother's old-fashioned values and lecturing, against her husband's old-fashioned mannerisms and repetition. And, of course, his hands.
Steve made the analogy that she's just a computer program, and I agree. She goes rogue against the machine instead of opting for convention and co-dependency (socially and maritally).
In today's world she'd not be getting any likes, follows or shares. She's not being heard. She's trapped in a world where everybody seems to know, understand and follow the rules. The murder of her husband, in the context of this play, is simply the device to examine and cross-examine her motivations, means and potential madness.
At the end, I felt desperately sad for her. I felt she had been let down. I felt that the world had conspired to create the inevitable malfunction and that a decent data analyst would have spotted the rogue code long before it came to do any harm: to the machine or to her.
We've not even got onto women's rights, objectification, subjugation or how the media still seems to act as some kind of social metronome, as much today as it ever did. Consider the parallel story of Ruth Snyder and the fact that even on her deathbed by execution, the 'paps' still managed to get their picture for the front pages. Ironically, splashed as "what a woman shouldn't be" rather than the modern day fetish of "what a woman should be".
This play is so relevant on so many levels. It has been a long time since a play provoked so many thoughts. I apologise if some of my thoughts lack cohesion or are not as erudite as some of the others on this thread. Mine is more of a stream of excitable consciousness.
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Post by Being Alive on Apr 17, 2024 20:30:27 GMT
Two of my friends thought this was literally the worst thing they'd ever seen - which I sort of understand in a way.
It's right on the edge for me if not working at all, but I still thought Sheehy was very good so ended up with 3 stars.
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Post by edi on Apr 17, 2024 21:18:21 GMT
I really liked it. I recognised many of my feelings in this story, the feeling of screaming inside when stuck on public transport (I don't use public transport for that reason). Screaming inside when my mother lovingly overfeeds me, LOL. Screaming inside when i must behave the way social norms expect me to. Obviously we all learn how to deal with such mundanity without killing anybody,
I cannot believe this was written in 1928, it seems not much changed since
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Post by ix on Apr 18, 2024 10:07:08 GMT
This play is so relevant on so many levels. It has been a long time since a play provoked so many thoughts. I apologise if some of my thoughts lack cohesion or are not as erudite as some of the others on this thread. Mine is more of a stream of excitable consciousness. I think your thoughts are excellently expressed. Thank you.
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Post by blamerobots on Apr 19, 2024 22:25:16 GMT
Scribbling my thoughts down on the tube. Apologies if it seems horrifically disorganized I'll probably edit this in the morning when I've had a better think
Sheehy is at the top of her game constantly throughout this entire production. The set, lighting (the shadow work... god), costume and sound is superb. The ensemble is great. They create this "society" that Helen is against well. I read Sheehy's performance as depicting the traits of being neurodivergent vs. outwardly neurotypical society with her behaviours, tics, habits and manner of speaking and reaction to sound and light and interactions with others. It resonated with me personally. Prohibited felt all too familiar. I hope this was intentional in some part rather than just being an "quirky" performance because it brought a new angle to the character I had never thought of before. The feeling of neurodivergency of you being up against your own machine is a message I can't think of being presented in a show I've seen recently, and one I appreciated. What this production is sorely missing is utilising the absolute bombshells of metaphors that the script gives us and basically screams at us to use to full effect on stage with visual elements. The themes of "raging against the machine" is the most prominent of course, but I couldn't fathom a machine from the style of the production. The themes of the industrialisation and repetition of the time period, the prohibition of both the literal and social in the time period and the patriarchy so prominent in that time period up to today, present into the script felt understated and only occasionally shone through for me, confined to the requirements of the script rather than being brought onto the stage in a fully meaningful way. It felt aimless, and at some point I wondered about the direction the actors had been given for certain moments. I guess some amount of visual spectacle also detracted from what the actor's were saying. Maybe it all flew over my head but I left the theatre wondering if it could have packed even more of a punch than that ending had already done. I end up feeling mixed about the whole thing in terms of what they're trying to depict, I feel it's almost there but I'm not sure of what the director is wanting to say and what direction they are pushing in that I don't know what to change or add. The great cast and design lifts this production up singlehandedly, and I'd recommend seeing it just for them.
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