One “play” uses only voice-overs. Another features a main actor only on video. And under Covid rules, an 11-person Shakespeare cast counts as an army.
LONDON — Theaters here are gradually reopening for business, but not in ways you might expect. Take the astonishing 45-minute installation at the Bridge Theater, “Flight.” A story of Afghan refugees crossing Europe to start a new life, this collaboration between the directors Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison uses diminutive claylike figures in revolving boxes to chart the journey of two boys, Kabir (a plaintive Nalini Chetty) and Aryan (Farshid Rokey), from Kabul to London.
You learn of their quest via headphones (Emun Elliott is the adroit narrator) as you sit in a booth to which you’ve been led by a member of the staff. Although the project, from the Scottish company Vox Motus, seems an explicit response to coronavirus restrictions, “Flight” was in fact conceived before the pandemic and played at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017 before traveling widely, including to New York in 2018.
The Bridge had scheduled a return engagement in collaboration with the Barbican in December, only to have it halted by a five-month lockdown. The current return offers an unmissable opportunity to experience something that may not technically qualify as theater — it’s just as much a shifting cyclorama — but speaks with piercing humanity. “Perhaps we could learn to fly,” one of the boys remarks, eager to reach his destination in any way he can, by which point the singular wonder of “Flight” has sent the heart soaring.
And what of actual actors? In this climate, don’t expect them all to share a stage. The recent Soho Theater revival of “Herding Cats,” Lucinda Coxon’s brittle 2010 play set in the world of online sex, had the distinguishing feature of beaming in the American actor Greg Germann (“Grey’s Anatomy”) live from Los Angeles. Appearing intermittently on a giant screen, Germann joined his British colleagues, Sophie Melville and Jassa Ahluwalia, in a play about the difficulty of making connections. How apposite, then, to have had one cast member a continent away.
The production, directed by Anthony Banks, has finished its brief run but will be available June 7-21 via the video-on-demand service Stellar, and it will be interesting to see how its components link up online. Watching in a socially distanced theater, I was struck by my feeling of alienation from the characters. The fast-talking, angsty Justine quickly wears out her welcome in Melville’s frantic portrayal, and Ahluwalia can do only so much to flesh out the cryptic Michael, a pajama-wearing shut-in who makes his living on the telephone chat line that brings him into contact with Germann’s quietly threatening Saddo.
The most arresting sight was the curtain call, in which the two onstage actors did their best to link hands with the looming figure of Germann during the bows. Might this mark some weird new way forward for trans-Atlantic productions, in which American actors become part of a London play without ever getting on a plane?
After one show with no actors and another featuring only two in person, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the season opener at Shakespeare’s Globe, seems to be populated by a veritable army: Its 11-person cast represents a notably high number in these Covid-cautious times. But that figure is smaller than usual for this play and has been achieved by doubling of roles. The members of the ensemble, for instance, take turns playing that quicksilver fairy, Puck.
The Globe, normally crowd-friendly, has blocked off rows of seats in accordance with government protocols, and the fabled yard, usually home to 700 “groundlings” standing shoulder to shoulder, offers carefully arranged chairs, still for the remarkably low price of 5 pounds, or $7. The production is a partially recast version of the “Dream” seen at the Globe in 2019, where it was the debut at the theater of the associate artistic director Sean Holmes.
As was the case then, Holmes’s raucous approach works best as a colorful, elaborately costumed party, complete with streamers and a piñata, and with Titania (a sprightly Victoria Elliott) emerging from a recycling bin. Before the performance begins, the five-person Hackney Colliery Band warms things up with a brass-heavy version of “The Power of Love,” instructing the audience to “relearn how to clap.” Snatches of pop songs recur throughout the play, and Bryan Dick’s floppy-haired Lysander gives off a rock-star vibe.
The costumes are a carnival, mixing thigh-high boots with Elizabethan ruffs that seem to sprout from the young lovers’ backs and with turquoise headgear for Peter Bourke’s Oberon. Jacoba Williams’s Snout at one point appears in a pink skirt and sequins as if ready for an Abba tribute concert.
An appeal early on from the weaver Bottom (Sophie Russell, delightful) to her colleagues in the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play-within-a-play to “spread yourselves” could have been written with the pandemic in mind, and Quince (Nadine Higgin) informs Flute (George Fouracres) that he can play Thisbe “in a mask” — which seems apt given the masks that the actors slip on as they move through the yard toward the stage. The physical intimacy associated with the play has also been adjusted: Rather than reclining into one another, the smitten Lysander and Hermia lie at right angles, only their footwear touching.
This isn’t the most poetic “Dream” or the most reflective, but it offers one moment that stops the heart. It comes near the end when two senior characters abandon the rules and take hands in a firm gesture, held for a noticeably long while. There before us is the human connection that we have been deprived of for so long and that, with luck, may again become the norm as we move toward midsummer.
Flight. Directed by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison. Bridge Theater, through June 6.
Herding Cats. Directed by Anthony Banks. Stellar, online, June 7-21.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Directed by Sean Holmes. Shakespeare’s Globe, in repertory through Oct. 30.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
