Looking Out To Sea

Last Friday we saw The History Boys at the King’s Theatre. It was a sign interpreted show; we got cheaper tickets because we went with the signing group. I’d never seen it before and really enjoyed it. I’ll have to catch the film at some point to see how it compares. We had good seats, in the front half of the stalls at the left hand side, but the signers were at right of the stage so the view for keeping up with the interpreting was a bit poorer. I missed quite a bit because a lot of the action happened directly in front of us, requiring a tennis-watching technique: left, right, left…

In other signing news, I was at an EdSign34 lecture on Symmetry in Sign Language. It was quite interesting in terms of picking apart common structures in signs — signs that are left/right reflections of each other, signs that rotate around each other, that are translated along a plane and so on. Some styles of symmetry are much more common than others and it seems that the less-common ones are generally harder to perform. Over time they tend to change so that they’re easier to produce, like words that get their hard edges ground down. (“Fo’c’sle” comes to mind, or “Wednesday”.) The symmetry aspect was also an appeal because who can really say no to a bit of group theory?

In a few weeks a friend of mine is doing her own presentation there so I’ll be hecklingshowing my support.

Philip Pullman’s trilogy Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass adapted for the stage. Quite an undertaking. The story is huge, and covers many fantastical worlds. The adaptation for stage does some necessary cutting but still takes two performances, each about 3 hours in length, to tell the story.

We were due to watch it on Sunday (both shows in one day!) with other friends but ended up double-booked. So we passed our tickets on and got new tickets for the Thursday and Friday evening performances. These are my thoughts after each performance. Despite what you may think from reading them, I did enjoy it a lot!

Part 1, Thursday night

I’m quite enjoying it so far. It’s a long production but I haven’t ever felt bored. The story has quite a pace. I’m not convinced it translates very well to the stage though. You have to know the story to work out what’s going on, I think. And obviously there are so many elements that can’t be reasonably represented on stage — the armoured bear fight between Iorek and Iofur is an obvious example — and are better left to the imagination.

There’s quite a big cast of players but sadly the actor playing Lee Scoresby has the worst Texan accent ever concocted. It isn’t even an accent. It’s just a silly, shifting, intangible “voice”. The actor’s ham-fisted attempt at being Texan was getting a lot of laughs, and not in a good way. It was embarrassing, like a bad amateur production.

I’m also not sure about the daemon puppets. Some of them are good — Roger’s collie was particularly good, I thought, and Pantalaimon is generally excellent — but they still fall short of the descriptions. The children’s daemons never change shape, which is odd considering that’s a large part of the story.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by special effects, of course.

Part 2, Friday night

Yesterday was the first performance of part one in Edinburgh. There was another performance earlier today. So why is the first performance of part two so empty? There are two sets of audiences who you’d expect to be here. Maybe it’s just because it’s a Friday night, and people are more likely to have other plans. There are a couple more days after this to see it.

The atmosphere of the performance shifts quite a bit in this half. There is more slapstick, more laughs. The Gallivespians, for example, were extremely silly. I guess there is no way to depict 4-inch tall people with the necessary level of gravitas, so why bother.

The ending of The Amber Spyglass is one of those intensely emotional experiences that leaves a person listless and disconnected for an extraordinary length of time. I know it has that effect on me, which is why I haven’t re-read the book as much as I have the first two. It’s just not worth the emotional anguish. The ending of the play was similarly harrowing. I could hear restrained sniffing coming from all around me, as people just welled up uncontrollably.

I’m glad it’s over, but I’m still rather shocked at the power that ending has over me.

I am still attempting to catch up with everything that’s been happening lately. Last week we met a bunch of Helen’s relatives from the US (and her parents) for a meal and then went to the theatre.

We ate at Blue, the restaurant attached to the Traverse. I met Helen’s cousin, cousin’s husband and baby girl. Also Helen’s aunt, who I dimly recall meeting before, but that would be about eight years ago.

We saw Hoors at the Traverse Theatre, written by the same guy who did Black Watch. It’s a bit more low-key than the military play but still wickedly funny. The ending seemed a bit abrupt though. I’m still not sure what it was supposed to be. Helen thought that was a break for the interval because it was such a non-ending.