Finishing The Picture - Arthur Miller - Finborough

Thanks, im going Saturday. Hope the venue is more welcoming than my last visit!

Is this the play that was such a disaster at the Old Vic?

Can’t access that page, Foxa, but you can take it from me, it was deplorable. Yes, Resurrection. May it never be.

It did get slaughtered but surely its worth another go?

A Resurrection Blues anecdote: I saw the play after having taken a bad fall (bad enough to send me to A&E) on the street earlier that day. I thought about skipping the play and spending the evening in my hotel room, eating a room service dinner, watching TV, and feeling sorry for myself, but decided I would be better off letting Doctor Theatre work his healing powers. Well, with any other play that might have worked, but this play was in serious need of a doctor itself.

Time has mercifully erased almost all memory of the evening, but I do remember James Fox stumbling over a word (I think it may have been "pharmaceutical"), having to try saying it three of four times before he got it right, and rolling his eyes in exasperation when he finally succeeded -- a lapse in professionalism that I attributed not just to his difficulty with the word that night, but to his frustration at being part of the whole misbegotten production.

I liked this, the review on View from the Cheap Seat was more critical than me though I agree with it.

It is a good production of a difficult play. The marketing reflects this; Miller wants this to be about Monroe and the audience wants this to be about Monroe but Miller is incapable of writing about her because despite the marriage, the association with her I am not sure he knew that well. The marketing isn't quite Consent levels of inappropriateness but once you see the play it would probably be better to market it with pictures of the Strasbergs or John Huston. He, at least, has the decency to make Kitty an unseen, two-dimensional character (her only appearance being her walking naked across the stage which this production has cut) but as a result you end up with a play about making art, about the interference of those who don't understand it and those that understand it all too well, in particular, Paul Bailey's cinematographer's accurate comment is that all the audience want is to see her ass.

There are some great performances from Rachel Handshaw as the loyal but increasingly frustrated Edna and Jeremy Daws as Paul but this is a relic of a writer past his best; gone are the subtleties (The Crucible) or a deep understanding of why people do what they do (Incident at Vichy, View from a Bridge). Miller just desperately wants the world to understand his marriage, this shadow of a woman that will always dominate his memory but he is just lacking the heart and soul to get to grips with made Marilyn Kitty who she is and what she was destined to become.

A side note to the above discussion about Resurrection Blues - there was a quote from one of the producers involved, who felt Spacey treated the director, cast and others involved with the production badly, He called Kevin Spacey 'The Norman Bates of show business.' The book was published in 2010!

The comments above about Finishing the Picture make the play sound interesting and frustrating at once.