Tuesday, July 19, 2011
I don't get the hype. Mark Rylance is brilliant, let there be no mistaking that. He could stand on stage and read the phone book and he would have more presence and be more interesting to watch than any actor appearing in the Great White Way of late. But this play...
I didn't care about the Rooster. As the play unfolded, in fact, I cared less and less about him. Like The Cherry Orchard, with the waiting around for the inevitable, here too I felt like I was waiting just the same. While he needed his brood, they seemed disrespectful of what he provided for them and thus, they were equally uncompelling. Calling up the ancients was undeveloped and unrealized. They could have gone much further (a recurring theme in many works I've seen in these many weeks). Jerusalem (the folk song from which the play gets it's title) is completely unknown in the US, so the significance of the work is entirely lost in the American context.
I often wonder, "Why this play? Why now?" Perhpas in the UK at The Royal Court, this all made sense, but here in New York, I was set adrift without a flotation device, so I drowned among the ideas, ideas that did not speak to me, that did not interest me, that did not engage.
No comments:
Post a Comment