Because there is no coherent overall style, the audience is left uncertain what it is watching and why. It’s a pity, really, because there are so many good actors here – the cast is enormous – and marshalled in the one direction the results might have been very different.
The National Theatre has another smash hit on its hands with the play Great Britain by Richard Bean starring Billie Piper and Robert Glennister. The play satirising the phone hacking scandal and other dubious press practices opened at The National Theatre shortly after the verdicts on real life phone hacking trials had concluded. News of the transfer comes just two days after the play opened. The play, starring Piper as an ambitious tabload news editor, was rehearsed in secret while the phone hacking trial was taking place. The play will move to the Theatre Royal Haymarket from 10 September.
Blurred Lines is one of the best things to play at the National Theatre in the last six years. It is a significant and provocative work of great sweep and scope.
There has not, since 2007, been a National Theatre production of a Shakespearean play anything like as engaging, thrilling and involving as the Sam Mendes helmed revival of King Lear now playing in the Olivier Theatre.
It has to be said that, taking into account the whole experience, The Light Princess is no better or worse a musical than Viva Forever! In both cases, the book needs fundamental reworking, the score too, and there were avoidable casting issues – but each had/has real potential.
Godwin’s sensational production will be long remembered – chiefly for being exactly what The National Theatre should be about all the time: first rate productions of first rate texts with first rate casts. The theatrical world’s other triple threat.
Punchdrunk, since forming in 2000, have unabashedly muddied the theatrical waters and, in this mega collaboration with The National Theatre, have redefined the form and its capabilities entirely. So, go. Marvel. Dance. And if you don’t come out with shoes full of sand, bark in your hair, drowning in sweat and emotionally exhausted, then you’re not doing it right.
