The play's the thing...

I must say, it's nice to see plays in English. I just saw two incredible shows in London: Warhorse and Hamlet.

War Horse is the story of Joey, a horse who is raised in the English countryside to be a hunter by a boy who loves him. The boy's father sells him to the cavalry, so Joey goes to France to fight in the first World War. The boy goes to war to try to find his horse, and the story follows the two friends. It is woven together by a traveling bard, whose songs narrate the feeling of the piece rather than the plot of it.

The moment the colt appeared onstage I knew I was going to cry. It cantered around the stage on wobbly legs as a song of creation knit together string and air and imagination, turning them into horse flesh. The magic of the horse puppets was in the twitch of the ears, the flex of the hooves, and the multi-layered sounds of its breathing and whinnying. These puppets were operated by three puppetmasters each and were so strong that they carried the actors as riders.

Other beautiful puppets were an incorrigible goose, some sweetly chirping birds, and three carrion crows on the battlefield.

With one or perhaps two exceptions, I've studied Hamlet more than any other Shakespeare play. I've read it, listened to it, studied it, done scenes from it, workshopped scenes from it in classes, seen several movie adaptations of it; however, until last week I had never sat in a theatre and watched it. Fortunately this Hamlet, set in a modern state where every move was surveyed by secret service, was the kind one dreams about - rich, high stakes, every moment creating itself for the first time.

Rory Kinnear is an all-star. His Hamlet is smart as a whip, funny, real. Watching him, I forgot I was at a play. Hamlet was entirely his own, modern and timeless.

Listening to James Laurenson play the Ghost and Player King was a masters class in acting. He handles the language of Shakespeare with such facility that for all I know, he may talk like that all the time. He takes his time and speaks to the end of the line so that the language was as easy to understand as a grocery list though it lost none of its beauty.

David Calder's Polonius was pitch-perfect : obsequious, long-winded, clueless, infinitely mockable and misguided, and ultimately pitiable.

Ruth Negga created a lovely but real Ophelia, one of the hardest women to play in Shakespeare. Her death was played as a politically motivated murder instead of a suicide - cool, right?

In truth, it ran out of steam at the end, but we can't have it all. Saw Simon Callow leaving the National theatre!

"All the world's a stage..." - oh wait, wrong play!
Maria