I have not, though I would like to. A shame Jar-Jar never got to reprise his role. Honestly, I gave up with
Star Wars some time ago, despite it (and Indiana Jones) being the ground rocks of my childhood (enjoyed while sucking the orange dye our of frozen Kia-Ora lollies in the Heanor ABC, which is of course now, another block of identikit fuck-hutches for the downwardly mobile). I have a deep seated disappointment that I never got a Millennium Falcon. I did see some of the later movies, but nothing of them stuck on my mind, like they were made out of some kind of next-gen teflon. I do remember the
CGI Princess Leia Mary Poppins scene. It's one of those movie moments where you realise that hundreds of people have been engaged in producing that scene, they've all seen it, and not one of them uttered the words 'make this stop.'
I did get some cheap tickets to see
Elektra and
The Tempest last week, this year's season of Hollywood types sojourning on the London stage. They're generally not very good, but I like a curiosity.
Elektra was mostly terrible, only enlivened by the fact that I managed to convince a credulous friend that Brie Larson's brother is named Camembert before the show and I know she spent 75 minutes aching to google this. It's Milo, apparently, and I'm 'a dick.'
Pitches
Elektra as an angry punk which isn't a bad take, and Larson puts the effort in with a buzz cut and Bikini Kills t-shirt. That said, she would have been about eight when Bikini Kills disbanded, so age wasn't on her side. If they'd played the punk angle faithfully, it might have worked, but it dissolved into gimmickry, with Brie clutching a mike and doing some semblance of slam poetry and, for reasons unclear, always singing the word 'no' while stomping a distortion pedal. For more reasons unclear every name was accompanied by a sound effect, for instance there was a strange offstage crash every time she mentioned Agamemnon / father, which the first time, everyone assumed was a clumsy stagehand. That quickly evolved through amusing to annoying. Also there was a Zeppelin above the stage. As a plus, the chorus were good and I quite liked the tv reportage ending of the familicide. It would have been improved by not having the victims still on stage and evidently alive though. Maybe they ran out of money for theatrical blood. If you going to do the Greeks, buy a 50 gallon drum and splash it around. Everyone always dies, usually after or during incest.
The Tempest features Signourney Weaver. It was a bit better, but a reminder that those Hollywood types don't have the chops for theatre. The average Brit stage pounder can give the back of the gods earache. I wouldn't want Ian McKellen to shout at me, I reckon he could make your insides fall out. The Americans always have to be miked up. Even the delightful Amy Adams last year, though to be honest, and I'm sorry dear wife, I was mostly listening with my eyes.
Again, for reasons unclear, she spent most of the performance sitting on a chair and looking a bit broody. Prospero should be a trickster, a devious schema, only in the end realising that there's no real value to those schemes and making good. She was less acting, more reading the lines. A shame as the staging was genuinely very good, Stefano and Trinculo stole their comedic scenes (though somewhat knocking the somber pace elsewhere, as though the scenes might have fallen from an alternate production), Arial was excellent, as was the gimpy Caliban. Maybe someone should have let an alien on stage. Shakespeare needed more aliens. Maybe Tarantino, before he disappeared up his own fundament, should have done
Titus Andronicus. A missed opportunity, it truly is the grind-house horror of Shakey's back catalogue.
All a bit of a shame, more so after a luminous
Midsummer Night's Dream at the Barbican a few weeks before.
