Almost Cultural

In recent years, a strange thing has happened to theatre: it's become popular... but not necessarily in the way the theatres themselves might prefer.

I refer, of course, to the trend for screening theatrical productions in cinemas. Initially, it seems like a ridiculous idea: why bother, when it's taking away one of the most important features of seeing a theatrical production - the very fact that you're right there with the performers? Upon reflection, though, the obvious answer presents itself: not everyone can afford theatre tickets (though cinemas seem to be hiking their prices up all the time) and, with some productions, not everyone can obtain theatre tickets before the run is sold out.

Such was the case with a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, put on at the Young Vic and starring the one and only Gillian Anderson. That is to say, it was one of those situations where the full run was basically sold out before my girlfriend and I even heard about it.

Amusingly, Gillian Anderson isn't the only reasonably famous name in the cast - there's also Ben Foster (Warren Worthington III in X-Men: The Last Stand, the slightly scary sidekick in the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma) and the very versatile Corey Johnson (who turns up in so many things but, memorably for me, in the New Who series 1 episode 'Dalek'). Also amusingly, playing opposite Anderson's Blanche DuBois as her sister, Stella, was Vanessa Kirby, previously Estella to Anderson's Miss Havisham in the BBC's terrible 2011 3-part adaptation of Great Expectations (inferior in almost every way to their own 1999 TV movie, though Ray Winstone was a very good Magwitch).

The stage was set on a revolving rectangular platform in the centre of the theatre - the Young Vic does pride itself on innovative use of space - on which Stella and Stanley Kowalski's tiny apartment was represented by furniture and a couple of doors. The platform started moving the moment Blanche started drinking and, as far as I can tell, didn't stop for the rest of the show... Seeing it in the cinema, I couldn't be sure as the camera frequently moved along with the stage, and the audience weren't always easily visible.

If I had a gripe about the production, it would be over the use of loud (and sometimes quite incongruous) music during scene shifts. The shifts themselves were cleverly done, with the cast moving some things around and the stage hands others, but the first couple of musical interludes I could have done without, and had my girlfriend plugging her ears. She later suggested that the excessive volume could have been more the fault of the cinema than the stage production.

If I had a gripe about the experience of theatre at the cinema, it's that far too many people were talking pretty much throughout the performance, and one can only hope they wouldn't have done that had they been in the theatre. Granted it was complimentary (on one occasion when Blanche fell over, a guy behind me commented "She's a marvellous actress" and the woman next to him replied "Oooh, yes") but, seriously, this is the sort of shit you do when at home, watching a fucking DVD, not in the cinema where everyone around you has paid the same amount (roughly equivalent to a new DVD) to enjoy the production.

And the really annoying thing is that one might expect this sort of behaviour from children or teenagers... but virtually everyone in that screen was either my age or older... The teenagers and school groups were in the adjacent screen, watching the same thing. Many of the older members of the audience clearly had mobility issues (and hadn't brought aids like walking sticks) based on the shaky way many of them leaned down to the armrests as they teetered down the stairs to the exit in between acts and at the end of the presentation. Also worthy of mention was the old lady who whacked me about the head with her handbag, shuffling through the row behind to have a natter with a friend.

So, much as I like the idea of bringing theatre to the masses, making it more accessible in as many ways as possible, the utter snob in me would prefer to keep some people away from theatre, so that those of us who actually appreciate it (and stay to applaud the cast for their encores, rather than leaving as soon as the stage lights dim or the curtain falls for the first time) have a better chance of getting a ticket for a live performance.

(Addendum 20/9/14: special mention to the little piece in the intermission, presented by Emma Freud, talking about the production and the Young Vic generally, while patrons were milling around behind her. One guy paused, in just the wrong place, to glug down most of an entire pint of whatever beer he was drinking before dashing back into the theatre... How wonderful to have captured that moment on film... I do hope they now play that recording every time)

In other news, I have recently been working with one of the Editors on a side project... a little book we're publishing on behalf of a third party. It has been an interesting project, but the Editor in question really doesn't have a very good grasp of using computers to their best advantage. For example, I split the photos we'd been supplied into sections so they could be more easily sorted through to see what we actually wanted to use (originally they were all supplied in a single directory, all photos were named with DSC-numbers and weren't in any sensible order). When we started choosing images, she suggested making new directories for photos we might possibly use, when I'd already started making subfolders of images that just weren't worth using. The second time she wanted a whole new directory where one already existed, I pointed out a better way of sorting the files, and started to use it without awaiting her agreement.

Even before that, though, she started getting on my bad side by presuming that her time was more valuable than mine - telling me she was going to have a quick lunch, then shortly after telling me she was ready to start when my lunch hour (part of my employment contract I'm aiming to keep to, to avoid my workaholic tendencies as far as possible in this environment) was only halfway through. Granted she had a schedule to keep to... but then, so did I. Working with her that day kept me away from my regular magazine work.

She also has an interesting relationship with fractions. For whatever reason, despite using OpenType fonts for her main magazine, she prefers to create fractions manually (superscript the numerator, forward slash, reduce the point size of the denominator) and feels that the automatically-generated OpenType fractions aren't as "elegant" or as easy to read. When I related this to the two designers in our team, one actually did a double-take... and not ironically.

She also had a ridiculously long-winded way of explaining that the 'oe' part of a word in the text should have been a diphthong... and claimed that it was a function that Word could not perform, while InDesign could. I mean, OK, not everyone knows that PCs deal with most special characters using alt codes (œ, Œ), but surely one should not be afraid of using a word like 'diphthong' to describe the appropriate character..?

Out in the real world, my girlfriend is getting excited about her upcoming Open University work as more of her materials arrive. The latest packages were (literally) a box of rocks and the accompanying literature (including posters) for her Geology module. Considering she's been down in the dumps and very anxious recently, it's truly delightful to see her getting so enthusiastic and feeling so positive about things... Alongside her coursework, she proposes to volunteer for a local public service and recently met up with an old science contact about doing some freelance work on the side. My girl likes to keep busy.

I'm starting to feel the need to get off my arse and do something a bit more constructive with my evenings and weekends, but still struggle with motivation and, in the case of blogging in particular, subjects to write about. If I manage to squeeze out another post here this month, September will have been my most prolific month this year... with a total of only five posts.

There's also a fair bit of sketching I want to do... not least a cartoon version of someone else's original TransFormers character, requested as a result of another toon I did for myself.

Oh, and before I forget, the third series of Body of Proof started today... it's the first time I've watched it with my girlfriend, and we had a good time picking out all the ridiculous flaws in the presentation (not least, why does Megan never tie her hair back or wear a cap while cutting up corpses?) but, as implausible American television goes, it's still pretty good fun.

On a similar note, we watched Last Days on Mars last night... a strange Brit-Flick starring Liev Schrieber, Olivia Williams and Romola Garai. Its science is horrendously flawed and it features far too many horror movie clichés, but it was reasonably fun to watch. That said, space zombies are still, ultimately, just zombies... and I was rather hoping for a bit more Dead Space-style kerb-stomping...