The Crucible is a place I know very well. My best friend at school and I practically lived there for a good few years. Prices were very cheap for students, and we basically went to see everything...they also had a little shop, coffee bar and clean toilets(very important!)...going to the theatre, gigs and philharmonic concerts are some of the things I miss most about having M.E.
The good news is that in the past six years, I have been improving, not in anything like a steady progression, but having spent the previous 15yrs all but helpless in bed, that I can spend so much time photographing wildlife, playing guitar, listening to music, watching films, and joy of joy, reading once more, is heaven, but really having the kind of energy to go and do all the things most people take for granted is still some way off.
Which brings me to a review for Don Juan I have just found, from the Independent:-
Don Juan, Crucible Theatre, Sheffield
Don Juan behaving badly
Rhoda Koenig
Pared to 80 minutes and light on its feet, Michael Grandage's production of Molière's play is never less than engaging. The racy adaptation by Simon Nye, of Men Behaving Badly, is amusing and pointed – it opens with the Don's servant, Sganarelle, declaring, with modern-day blasphemy: "If you don't smoke, you're wasting your life, basically.''
The set is by Christopher Oram, master of the "spare but evocative'': a bare piazza with flesh-coloured walls covered in beautifully toned patches of decay. But this morality tale is more of an amuse-bouche than a hot dinner, and not only because the Don's Spanish conquests number a thousand fewer than in the opera.
It's set in the present (Don Juan wears white trousers and open-necked white shirt and a straw hat), and the translation is agreeably cheeky when its hero indulges in the eternal pastime of finding, seducing and forgetting women – "I'm not a commitment person.'' But when it runs up against such 17th-century constructs as damnation and family honour, the play is haunted by the spectre of Blackadder, whom Tom Hollander in the title role recalls with his sudden shouts, hand-rubbing and air of sullen, ineffectual imperviousness.
Clearly this actor has some strange power over directors, having been cast as the fatally beautiful Alfred Douglas in The Judas Kiss and now the greatest swordsman of the stage. Whatever it is, it doesn't come over in his looks, closer to garden gnome than grand seigneur, or his voice and manner, those of a smirking sixth-former, offering compliments and excuses as though he doesn't expect to be believed and doesn't care. Watching the diminutive Hollander cavort with two infatuated girls to whom he has separately each proposed marriage is a sight as unattractive as it is unlikely.Grandage may have meant, by this casting, to emphasise the social aspect of the Don's fascination, a reverence for aristocracy that makes personal allure irrelevant. And, where the local lads' idea of fun is "chookin' lumps of earth at each other's heads,'' one can imagine the pulling power of anyone who talks in complete sentences and wears shoes. But how to explain his fascination for Donna Elvira, a lovely, convent-educated girl of his own class? Difficult, also, to credit Lucy Briers – scrawny, pale, reserved – as a peasant who arouses the Don's lust as well as his competitive spirit.
Anthony O'Donnell is gen-uinely earthy as the servant contemptuous of his master, and Robert East is bone-chillingly austere as the proud, starving beggar. However, the superficial tone and weightless-ness of much of the acting make this a Don Juan lite.
To 20 Oct 2001 (0114-249 6000)
I have highlighted a particularly laughable point of Ms. Koenig's review...some folk just don't know quality when they see it.
This review from the FT redresses the balance nicely...
DON JUAN
Crucible Theatre, Sheffield
Opened 2 October, 2001
As the academic programme note to Michael Grandage's Sheffield production of Don Juan acknowledges, "The upswing in Molière's fortunes in Britain has in no small measure been due to the availability of performable translations and adaptations." Translators such as Ranjit Bolt make the language, and through it the action, skip along playfully, even when the play is as problematic as this version of the story of the unrepentant philanderer. The major selling point of this production is such a new translation by Simon Nye.
Nye is adamant that his work is a translation rather than an adaptation or a "new version": the gags are pretty much all Moliere's. But the language, at once blunt and sharp, forthright yet measured for maximum effect, is entirely characteristic of the writer of Men Behaving Badly and How Do You Want Me? I am a relatively recent, after-the-fact convert to these series, and it is Nye's way with words, his knack of using them to create comic yet plausible, natural moods, that converted me. Applying the same skills to Don Juan works a treat, particularly when teamed with Grandage's entirely sympathetic direction.
Christopher Oram's design sets the action in a small Mediterranean village some time during the last century, a mere backdrop against which the Don and his manservant Sganarelle, torn between loyalty and morality, can operate. Tom Hollander is dream casting for Don Juan; his natural playfulness is here channelled by Grandage so that for the first half of the 80-minute piece the Don seems literally drunk on his powers of seduction, showing a carefree, uninhibited intoxication in his words and actions. The teamwork of writer and production is exemplified in the character's contemptuous remark about "'working at' one relationship": Nye does not create the scorn in this phrase, he just supplies the opportunity for Hollander to play it beautifully. The often unjustly overlooked Anthony O'Donnell supplies less obtrusive but sterling support as Sganarelle, with Neve McIntosh and Robert East following hard behind in a quite different register as the wronged Donna Elvira and Don Juan's suffering father.
Neither Nye nor Grandage can quite pull off the Don's odd composure when the statue comes to life as his nemesis, until the attitude hardens into last-ditch defiance as he is finally hurled into hell. Most of the preceding twists and turns, though, come off splendidly: the complexities of the Don Juan-Charlotte-Peter triangle are seen to go much deeper than the superficial chat-up, and the Don's offer of a gold piece to a beggar if he will blaspheme against God is heard in chilled audience silence, no mean feat in such a secular age. Translation and production alike ride the switchback of emotion without diminishing any single stretch of the journey. Perhaps once a year I see a show which leaves me feeling it was over too soon and that I would gladly return to it simply for fun; this is such a production.
Written for the Financial Times.
On the subject of stagework being put on the TV or going to dvd, David Tennant had a very successful run in Hamlet, and a version was filmed for the BBC and shown over xmas, and very good it was too...so maybe if the actor is popular enough, and the demand is there, it may be setting a new trend, who knows. Whether it is a good or bad thing is for you to decide.
Looking forward to getting back to my old stomping ground!!