me + richard armitage at the theater: more headcanon, anyone?

Sort of like this. Or like this. It will take me a few paragraphs to get there. Start at the prompt for more direct Armitage ruminations.

Last spring, I fell deeply into the rabbit hole of NT Live and Stratford Festival theater transmissions — they are now 200 miles from home round-trip, but going to work already takes me 50 miles in that direction anyway, and I (thought I) had the support of the dadsitter. I saw several things I loved, but I didn’t write about most of them. This was the last one; I also saw Coriolanus, All about Eve, The Tempest, The Lehman Trilogy, and The Audience, and ideally I’d have written at least about Lehman and the Stratford productions.

Fast forward through the summer, and my options became more limited. I learned that the dadsitter was drinking with dad while I was away, and the doctor told us dad needed 24 hour supervision. We introduced the senior helpers into our lives, and dad was resistant. So although I bought two tickets for transmissions earlier this fall (One Man, Two Guv’nors and Midsummer Night’s Dream), I no longer felt comfortable leaving dad alone for more than twelve hours, even with senior helper support, and so I returned them. A month later, with the washing machine drama behind us, however, the GCM pointed out to me that we need to practice separations and following plans for days that deviate from the norm. Although dad’s been beyond prickly about the senior helper, the GCM pointed out that in the spring, if he does not move into assisted living, he’ll have to accommodate to even more of their presence, as I’ll be working five days a week.

So I decided to try to go to a transmission again and last week I saw Hansard via NT Live. It’s ostensibly a play about 1988 (Thatcher’s third term, unemployment, coal miners, AIDS, Section 28), viewed through the conflicted private lives of a Tory MP and his more liberal wife. (I also felt it was as much about Brexit as about 1988). The play has one act, is only 90 minutes long and has very little plot. The MP (Alex Jennings) returns to his cottage in the Cotswolds for a weekend during which we learn that his wife (Lindsay Duncan) tried to reach him that week on an important day, couldn’t, and concluded that he was having an affair. From there, they tear at (the remains of) their marriage like vultures clawing the meat from a corpse. By the middle of the play, it seems as if there will be nothing left. It’s been compared to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that’s not far-fetched. As the manner in which the plot moves to the play’s end is apparently controversial, I’ll end the plot summary there. The consensus of the reviews seems to be: excellent performances (both the actors are Olivier winners), mediocre but promising play by a debut playwright.

Armitage ruminations

Richard Armitage (backstage somewhere?), Marie Claire, 2005.

What I thought of the play made me wonder again what Armitage is like as a theatergoer. And what it would be like to go to the theater with him. And what he really likes in plays. He’s said something about plays he’d like to do (Macbeth, Oedipus, Coriolanus, Pinter), and he’s expressed enjoyment over a few plays over the years (the main one I remember is the Mike Bartlett play, Wild, but there have been others). He seems to appreciate Mamet.

I concluded that he might not have liked this play much — mainly because of the script. Armitage, like many actors, has regularly praised “truthfulness” (it’s not quite fair to equate this idea with “truth” but I won’t get into the philosophical dimensions). Although the conflict at the heart of the play was probably real for many couples of the 80s, this play doesn’t have much to do with how real people talk or conduct their conversations, let alone their relationships. The script was very taut and said a lot, but more in the style of a Platonic dialogue than an account of an argument between marital partners or lovers — most of whom probably couldn’t maintain such a cutting debate for an hour and a half without a break of some kind. (On that level: kudos to Jennings and Duncan as this play must be simply exhausting to perform.) And most people who are emotionally involved in an argument just aren’t this articulate (not even upper-class Brits); most people who are really angry are left speechless at times, grasping for words or drowning in their rage at what’s being said to them. So the very sophistication of the script contributed to the feeling of irreality in the characters’ speech and emotions. Seen from the standpoint of classical dialogue, it was also clear who was winning this argument; the script tries to make the MP and his positions sympathetic, but not, in my opinion, with very much success. What I do think the script did extremely well, however, was to weave the political positions of the couple into a meta-discussion of their relationship and particularly the question of how they had come to terms with the path and events of their family life. They had a son together and 1988 was the year of Act 28, a measure supported by the Conservative government at the time. Most of the reviewers seemed to feel this problem was not set up very well by the script, but I thought it was obvious and interesting, and I admired the artistry of the script (even if I can imagine that it wouldn’t be easily accessible or attractive to the average critic).

I tend to think about Armitage as preferring plays that are either more openly visceral — The Crucible — or with epic themes — Oedipus. Vanya speaks both to his appreciation of modernism (Bulgakov), his love for mood (the whole question about method acting that he dances around all the time), and perhaps to an appreciation for the openly, emotionally philosophical. I suspect — despite the fact that this play to some extent deals with the failure of the characters to confront their feelings — that Armitage would see this play as somewhat too heavily cerebral. This play tells us a lot but it doesn’t show us much, and given Armitage’s interest in the movement of characters, I suspect he would have found it unsatisfying. I wonder, though, what he thinks about Act 28, and how the play handled that theme. He would have turned seventeen in 1988.

So many questions. There are other details in my Armitage theatre-going headcanon. I’m guessing he’d try to get his tickets comped if he knew anyone in the production and that sitting in the best seats is not particularly important to him. I’m guessing he maybe has a glass of sparkling wine in the interval but not an ice cream. I’m guessing he prefers to go to the theater alone. I also hypothesize that he would prefer to let the feeling of the play linger than talk about it in a lot of depth, at least in the immediate aftermath of the curtain fall. Maybe he’d want to talk about it more the next day, but I’m guessing that in the short term he would prefer to linger in the feeling.

At the same time, I secretly hope that I’m wrong about that. My wondering about this stuff always comes in the atmosphere of the 100 mi drive I’ve got in front of me when I leave the cinema, in the dark, which I’ve always found especially conducive to fantasy and brainstorming. In the days when I regularly drove 1500 mi I did a lot of that. Now it’s a bit more curtailed. But this spring, I found myself imagining Armitage in the passenger seat and wondering what he’d have thought of the Stratford Coriolanus — I found it a triumph, particularly the bravura performance of André Sills — what would Armitage have thought of Sills? Of the staging, which actively incorporated news broadcasts, the Internet, and text messaging? What would he have thought of the movement strategy in Lehmann? I loved it, even though I didn’t buy Simon Russell Beale as a Jew in the least and enjoyed him somewhat more in the comic phases of the characters he played. Would Armitage have approved of the gender swap in The Tempest? This is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and Prospero is a role I’d wish for Armitage someday, but I felt that some of the cultural and political implications of the play were swept aside by casting a female Prospero.

In any case, I’ll have another opportunity to play this headcanon game again soon. I’ve got a ticket for the NT Live transmission of Present Laughter, and the senior helper is already scheduled.

@oldvictheatre back at The Old Vic last night to see Present Laughter. Congratulations Matthew, Andrew and all the cast for a brilliant night. Looking forward to A Very Expensive Poison by Lucy Prebble. Best theatre in London. 🙏

— Richard Armitage (@RCArmitage) August 6, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

~ by Servetus on November 12, 2019.