Good morning to you all on a fine, if somewhat chilly, Sunday morning. The Siberian weather which had been forecast has been with us for the past couple of days although this morning, I have to confess, it seems a bit milder – perhaps we’re over the worst. Mind you, we haven’t had to put up with the minus 30 degrees centigrade the Muscovites has to put up with last week but, with a good wind, it certainly felt like it. (On the other hand, never having actually experienced minus 30 degrees centigrade, how would I know?)
We had a pleasant, cultural evening out last night – off to Stratford with our friends Sue and Stuart and Dave and Sue to see Great Expectations, of which, one has to say that our expectations of it were far in excess of the actual performance. “Interesting” is the adjective that springs most readily to mind but I suppose I could legitimately be accused of being generous with that assessment. I have to say, it’s not one of my favourite novels at the best of times and the various movie and television versions I’ve seen are not ones which I would be desperately eager to revisit but Sue Kelly was particularly anxious to see the play so we organised the outing and off we went yesterday evening with, as I say, great expectations.
I suppose we could sense that our expectations would not be fulfilled within about ten minutes of the play starting. If you remember your Great Expectations, there is a lot of narration necessary. What one normally does in a film is, indeed, to have a narrator fill in the gaps. What they did last night was to have a cast of about thirty who were on stage more or less constantly, “observing” the play and taking it in turn to provide the narration. I am sure it sounded like a great idea in the conception but, in the performance, it was just daft and subsequently it was sometimes difficult to determine whether the lines someone was saying were actually coming from their character or were part of the narration.
But, even the silly narration wasn’t the worst of it – the acting was wooden (and given that these are allegedly fine actors this was somewhat of a disappointment) and the whole performance just had a feeling of tired, tediousness about it – the emotion of the novel just wasn’t there and although there were a number of good things about the production, overall one came away feeling somewhat disappointed. (Not nearly as disappointed as we were about the play we took Sallie and Rod to the last time they were here, but disappointed nevertheless).
Still, dinner after the theatre was good and the company, as always, was outstanding.
Love to you all,
Greg