Story of Ash Worker Who Makes Art and Is Arrested to Return Wallet
Critic's Notebook
I Honey London Theater. Merely Non London Theatergoing.
While full of fine shows, a long-awaited binge was also full of stress about how loosely audiences followed rules about staying healthy in a pandemic.
LONDON — On the February morning time when England's National Health Service pinged me, saying I'd been identified as a contact of someone who had tested positive for Covid, I freaked out completely.
Not out of fear of getting sick; I'm boosted, and I think if I got the virus I would probably exist fine. But the last fourth dimension I came to London, in September, my euphoric playgoing trip was thrown into disarray when I tested positive post-inflow, which banished me to a hotel room for 10 alone, asymptomatic days. Was I near to become stuck hither once again?
I'd only seen ane friend this trip and he was OK, so it had to be a stranger, this person with Covid. My listen scrambled to figure out where our paths had crossed. Based on the time frame that the N.H.Due south. suggested, I would bet it was at a small, crowded theater two nights earlier — my prime suspect being the guy in front end of me who'd sneezed mid-prove. That'southward when I noticed he wasn't wearing a mask.
Which made him pretty unremarkable here, in a city with genuinely globe-beating theater but audition Covid safety protocols ranging from lax to condescending, and getting looser. Over my 12-day visit, which included some gorgeous productions I am grateful to accept seen, that lack of stringency dampened my apprehension of shows, my enjoyment of them — and ultimately my interest in going to them.
Considering even in this not-all the same-over pandemic with its ever-shifting rules, I'm used to feeling safe at the theater; used to feeling like we are all looking out for one some other, trying to keep everyone onstage and backstage and in the house good for you, in pursuit of this art that nosotros beloved. Information technology's non a minor thing, this feeling; information technology'due south rooted in empathy.
And on a purely practical level? Nosotros Americans exercise have to examination negative before we're allowed to wing home — on planes that are even so nowhere near as crowded as they used to be.
TRAVELING TO Encounter THEATER is one of those prepandemic habits that has withal to return for most of us, and it'southward been driving me a little bit crazy.
I am ane of those people — maybe y'all are, likewise — who reads the news about which plays are being done in which far-flung places and aches to exist in the room with them, burns with envy of those who tin exist, keeps checking and rechecking the mental calculus of "Can I adventure it notwithstanding?" against "Can I bear one more second non to?"
Paradigm
So when my editor, wanting a contour of the actor James McAvoy, emailed to ask if I would be willing to do the interview in London, where he is starring in Jamie Lloyd's electrifying production of "Cyrano de Bergerac" in the West Finish, my answer was an all-caps, unfettered yes. It is one of my favorite cities, and I missed it. The time to risk going, it suddenly seemed, was now.
I would need to come across that "Cyrano" again — twist my arm — considering information technology had been more than than 2 years since I'd caught it in early on previews during its original run. To take full advantage of the slog beyond the Atlantic, I would stay a while and run into a slew of other shows — starting, only hours later on passing through community at Heathrow, with a matinee called to get easy on my jet-lagged brain.
That was "& Juliet," a pop-musical riff on "Romeo and Juliet" at the Shaftesbury Theater, where we did have to testify proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test to get in, and the people near me were wearing masks. It was a jolt, though, in a more than than century-onetime West End theater that couldn't exist described as airy, to run into whole groups of people walk in and take their seats bluff.
Assembling onstage before the performance began, the actors did try, in a spirit befitting their frolic of a evidence, to encourage safer behavior. 1 briefly held up a chalkboard with a manus-lettered bulletin: "Hello," information technology said, which got cheerful hellos back from the crowd. Another brief chalkboard, another message: "Thank you," which got some applause.
But the wordless chalkboard in betwixt those 2 — bearing a friendly pastel cartoon of a mask — got merely silence. Which, in the circumstances, counted equally a response.
"& Juliet" turned out not to be my cup of tea. All the same, I'd have stayed if I'd been able to stop thinking well-nigh the ventilation, wondering what I was breathing and whether it was worth information technology.
I decided it wasn't and fled at break, dorsum onto the street, back into the open air.
Image
"THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage," that night at the Span Theater, was leagues more rewarding. Adjusted past Bryony Lavery from Philip Pullman's fantasy prequel to "His Dark Materials," and staged past Nicholas Hytner with beguiling visuals, it'south the character Lyra Belacqua's origin story.
The stagecraft is more enchanting than the narrative, but what marvelous stagecraft it is: projections conjuring a watery globe, life-size boats moving through it with a choreographed fluidity more persuasive than I'd ever witnessed onstage. And of course the spectral puppets, glowing from inside.
The lovely guy next to me, masked when he wasn't snacking, told me he felt perfectly safe at the Bridge precisely because it was airy — not similar some old W End house, he said. Until that evening, he hadn't been to whatsoever theater since the pandemic began. (You can see "The Book of Dust," whose Bridge run has ended, in a National Theater Live recording.)
Information technology makes me happy when I'm in London at the aforementioned time as an Emma Rice production. This trip it was her accommodation of Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" at the National Theater: a 19th-century classic warmed with music and breathed to life every bit if it had taken every bit its cue something Charlotte Brontë in one case wrote well-nigh the novel: that information technology "was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials."
The moor is a kind of Greek chorus in the play, while the storytelling is nimble and full of fun; Katy Owen is comic perfection as Little Linton, the pampered princeling of Wuthering Heights. But when Catherine (Lucy McCormick) dies and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) cries, "Catherine Earnshaw, haunt me!," his jagged grief rips through usa, straight to the soul.
Image
In Caryl Churchill's brisk ii-hander "A Number," given a stellar production by Lyndsey Turner at the Onetime Vic, every moment of Paapa Essiedu'south beautifully modulated performance has a similar visceral reach, right into the middle of united states of america. Opposite Lennie James every bit a begetter who secretly replaced his original son with a clone, Essiedu plays iii disparate but genetically identical men with an unshowy humanity that pops confronting Es Devlin's stylized tomato-cherry prepare.
OF EVERYTHING I SAW, though, the production that brought me in that location is the one that left me admittedly stunned. The first fourth dimension I saw "Cyrano de Bergerac," on Thanksgiving Day 2019, the production was withal a work in progress.
This time, I left the Harold Pinter Theater with a awareness through my limbs similar an electrical accuse. We are all bodies in space at the theater, and I responded to this "Cyrano" on a cellular level.
I saw other shows, likewise: at the Hampstead Theater, Florian Zeller'due south weary new psychological drama, "The Forest," about a human being whose seemingly perfect life is diddled up by his infidelity (but at least the cast includes Gina McKee and Finbar Lynch); at the Almeida Theater, Omar Elerian's overlong take on Ionesco's "The Chairs," with the reliably first-rate Kathryn Hunter in slapstick clown mode; and, at the Donmar Warehouse, "Henry V," starring Kit Harington and featuring — this will sound strange, but it is absolutely true — the most entrancing stage rain I have ever seen. I was able to snag a ticket (a terrible one; I spent a lot of time with actors' butts blocking my view) the twenty-four hour period a lethal storm blew into Britain and people canceled plans.
Image
I'd canceled my own theatergoing plans earlier that week, when the N.H.S. texted me about that contact and told me to take rapid tests for five days. In my initial overflowing of feet, I nixed a train trip to Bristol and returned my ticket to see Mark Rylance there in "Dr. Semmelweis" — a play most a pioneer in the prevention of needless infection.
Then, at the pharmacy, a clerk handed me a costless box of seven rapid tests, from the Northward.H.S. — a perk of pandemic life in England that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, would denote the end of for about people days afterwards, forth with other precautions including contact tracing.
Apparently I was fine. Each time I took a test, the consequence was negative — and each fourth dimension I reported that online to the N.H.S., the automated response reminded me to "habiliment a face covering in crowded settings."
It boggles my mind that so many theatergoers in London, sitting adjacent for hours, don't bother with that elementary precaution — if not for themselves, and so for the actors, who are not masked, and for other people in the audience who might be medically vulnerable, not able to be vaccinated however or in shut contact with people in either of those groups. It is such a uncomplicated kindness. Information technology is as well an act of inclusion.
The only theater that I saw actively request it was the Donmar, and people complied. Elsewhere any such asking was timid, and certainly not face up to face. When major W End theater operators said recently that they would no longer crave mask wearing or proof of vaccination from audience members, I had to wonder how a mask policy could count as mandatory if information technology had gone unenforced.
1 night I went to the Knuckles of York's Theater to see "The Body of water at the End of the Lane," an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel. The bear witness hadn't started yet when I noticed that the guy on one side of me wasn't wearing a mask. Then a bluff guy sabbatum down on my other side. I thought: If this were the subway, I would get upwardly immediately. Then I left.
HOW DOES A CITY — or an industry — that wants to welcome the world and its wallet non worry about things similar that? The contrast between playgoing in New York and in London isn't virtually quirky cultural differences. These are fundamentally divergent ways of navigating the pandemic.
One is cautious, cognizant of the frailty of bodies; of the gaps that remain in our knowledge of Covid and long Covid; of the fact that nosotros learn of new variants only afterward they start spreading. The other seems heedless — telling the audience, in consequence, that they tin can take their chances or stay home. I wonder how many people, surveying the options, take decided to go on their money and proceed safe.
I spent a bit more of mine, returning to the Pinter for "Cyrano." A good single seat had opened upwardly, and I grabbed it. I didn't desire to wait until the show got to Brooklyn to see it again. But I wish I had.
The audience was, hands downward, the most overwhelmingly barefaced I had seen. I kept looking at the performers, doing their jobs so gloriously on that stage, and wondering how anyone could be so reckless every bit to gamble with their health. That'due south not a correct that a ticket ought to buy you.
The next night, my last in London before I flew back to New York, I didn't go to the theater. Unthinkably, it had lost its appeal.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/theater/london-theater-pandemic-safety.html
0 Response to "Story of Ash Worker Who Makes Art and Is Arrested to Return Wallet"
Enregistrer un commentaire