Mark Rylance (promotional photo)
Patricia Hodge and Nigel Havers in Private Lives (Ambassador Theater, London)
A not atypical play in DC theater: good older plays are now retro …
Friends and readers,
My third and final blog on Izzy and my adventures in Oxford and London this past September. We were there so I could give a paper on Trollope and Women at Somerville College, Oxford for the wonderful London Trollope Society.
My criteria for the excellence of Dr Semelweiss was Izzy and I must’ve been up for 19 hours in a row before we got to the theater; we exhausted ourselves finding it and had had no dinner, the beautiful theater had small seats and while we could see very well we were high up in the auditorium. And yet we stayed awake the whole time.
It’s an important subject for our time: in the US with the Dobbs decision, women are again in mortal danger if they become pregnant. A religious belief has taken over the legal reality, and the insistence there is a separate baby inside the woman from time of conception means that in some US states she is allowed to go as near death as possible before saving her when something goes wrong either with a fetus, or a developing neo-nate late in the pregnancy. She is treated as a potential criminal by these same states’ court. The motivation is a combination of misogyny and hatred over sex; what the anti-abortion people are looking for too is to end the right to contraception so it’s compulsory pregnancy if you have sex and your body becomes pregnant. The history of women and childbirth is a fraught and frequently tragic one.
The play is about a doctor who understood the large percentage of deaths of women in childbed in hospitals was due to no one washing their hands. Midwives at home knew to do this, but, as presented in the play, male doctors felt insulted. This is probably a simplification, but we see that Dr Semelweiss lacks the social skills to navigate the competitive institution he is part of, and eventually he is put in an asylum when he becomes hysterical because no one will heed his advice. He is so quietly poignant that I found him riveting. Because we were far away I cannot comment on other performances as despite Amanda Wilkin as his wife, Maria, emerging at the play’s close in a final eloquent speech. I love moral plays when done right.
The play is not presented realistically: we have a chorus and group of dancers, all women, who represent women dying in childbirth over the centuries, and they intermingle with the dramatic scenes. His wife becomes pregnant during the play too. The reviews have been mixed: David Bennet in Variety; Andrzej in Time Out; Kate Kellaway gets it right at the Guardian
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I cannot tell a lie and we did not see Private Lives though I longed to. As luck would have it, it was sold out for the one night (a Wednesday) we could have gotten there. I might have tried alone on the Thursday, but Izzy was against yet a third night out, and I can no longer trust my immediate memory to navigate myself in a strange city. I can’t use the google maps on my phone as navigator the way she can use hers. Here is Victoria Segal for The Sunday Times. I’ve read a couple of others and watched some YouTube video clips.
Of course I should have bought the tickets ahead of time, but I felt we could not know for sure where we’d be or how my hope of seeing my friend, Rory, and also meeting with Dominic Edwardes, the generous-hearted chair who has been so supportive of everyone’s talks for the Trollope Society on-line reading group would make for a schedule.
Confession: I have always found Private Lives boring, the way I find Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest boring. They seem set up as displays of frozen wit whose emotional depths are kept at a distance and I hoped these two wonderful actors (who I’ve seen acting marvelously in films many times) would finally bring the text a living depth. But Segal’s review makes me doubt they actually did overcome the artifice. I probably would have loved the “retro” aspect of it; I find I do not like contemporary theater productions when they are too contemporary.
I think I’m sad I didn’t go because I wanted to see the theater itself. I loved being in the Harold Pinter theater, the Victoria and Albert Hall, and wanted to renew my acquaintance with a third theater if possible during this week. There was Pygmalion that night at the Old Vic, but Izzy would not hear of it.
I have such cherished memories of Jim and I going to great theatrical productions now and again when we were in London. Probably the Old Vic stays most vividly in my mind because there we saw Alan Bennet’s Wind in the Willows a fine production of Jim’s favorite book from childhood, with an actually dying Jeremy Sinden as Toad in the closing lonely scene. Jim loved it. We saw James Norton in R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End in The Duke of York’s Theater one summer evening 2011. Here the play and the actor remain with me; here’s Lyn Gardner for the Guardian.
Last we must’ve gone to the National Theater complex at the Thames almost every time we came to London in the years between 1997 and 2005, where we really did come regularly to England each summer for Jim to join with a team from the 5 English speaking countries of NATO to plan, test, and discuss present and future problems. We’d stay in a Landmark Trust renovated building and eat in (so that the money he was given for eating out paid for Izzy and I to be with him).
Cloth Fair in Smithfield, London, was the place we stayed in most often
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
10/21/2023 Macbeth in Stride. At the Shakespeare Theater in DC now called the Klein. It’s a thankless task to write a damning review so I’ll content myself with saying Macbeth in Stride is simply awful: crude, filled with cringeworthy stereotypes, hardly any Shakespearean lines. A few major scenes there but done over-the-top. The idea is to protest against Lady Macbeth having so few lines, and when she should glory in achieving power (how wonderful is ambition they crow), she goes mad and dies. And then to cite other women in Shakespeare treated equally unfairly. Equality is what’s wanted. Macbeth is presented as a white dullard. Lady Macbeth is made to represent black women in general. Spare yourself. This is not the first of their plays I have found to be obvious, juvenile, unconsciously commercialized.
They continually do things like this to Shakespeare’s plays. They do not believe their audience understands Shakespeare or has read most of the plays they go to see.
I’ll add the restaurant next door, Jaleo it’s called, is just as bad. The food is awful and the prices high. Also that few dare to write about how awful this Shakespeare theater’s repertoire often is.