After last night's hit, a dud. Worse than a dud, a bore. Can you imagine a performance slated for 75 minutes going over thirty minutes to 105?! I thought I was going to die, and not because it was Samuel Beckett's Endgame. (I had time, while watching it, to imagine all sorts of other actors I had seen recently - including fledgling actors at school - who I'm confident could have done it better.)
My friend H, an actress and director of the stage, helped me understand the problem: the two main actors, centrally John Turturro, are film actors, who have no sense of time, never get to do long scenes, and want the audience to savor their every word. They also don't know how to use or fill the space of a stage (though, to be fair, Beckett doesn't leave his actors much room to play). How do they end up in performances like this one, wasting the time of hundreds of theatergoers? They mention to some promoter that they'd be interested in doing some theater; the promoter finds a theater which thinks the film stars will sell tickets and a director who won't bruise the actors' egos; and it spirals downward from there. Very disappointing. Don't go - go see Druid's Walworth Farce instead.
