#completelycumberbatched

[nenime]

completelycumberbatched replied to your post:No okay why are people suddenly reblogging the pic...

People are CREEPY. Once I found someone on tumblr posting a photo of my friend with David Tennant that she’d only ever uploaded to facebook, which is locked. Fuck knows who nicked and shared that :-/

Ah that's creepy D; I put this one on Tumblr after I'd been to the show in Feb 2011 but for some reason it's started getting notes again :/

[mr-segundus]

kit-katie said: I’m at the matinee, if I’d been able to get home I would have gone to the last performance!

aww never mind, it'll still be fab!

completelycumberbatched said:YES! I’ll be the one crying a little bit, probably :P Would be awesome to meet anyone else going!

I think quite a few hefferfans are going, maybe see you there?

[lizimajig]

Act V scene iii, I believe - the one with Gurney and Maltravers shaving him, anyway :)

Thanks! Now I have an awesome mental image for the next time I give it a read. :)

[thesnowhasturnedtoslush-blog]

completelycumberbatched replied to your post “My snapchats go like this - someone sends me a snapchat of a super fun...”

I am far more interested in having a windowsill garden than a night out! Priorities xD

Definitely! I treat my coriander and bamboo plants like they're my children, haha :)

[ohdeargodwhy]

completelycumberbatched replied to your post: completelycumberbatched replied to your post: in...

I will! I’ll be the one in a black biker jacket, purple bag and cat brolly, doing her best drowned rat impression :P

okay, i'll be in a hannibal tee :)

[ohdeargodwhy]

completelycumberbatched replied to your post: in the next week i am seeing 4 things at the...

YES! Thursday = Heffday! :D *bounces with glee* Are you staying for The Pride afterwards?

excellent! if you see me around say hi!

nah i have to rush off to my target shooting session straight after...

[mr-segundus]

completelycumberbatched replied to your post: I’m trying to write my first play and I often...

Oh myyyy. I NEED THEM ON STAGE TOGETHER. YOU HAVE TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN *grabby hands*

They would be genuinely amazing, they have such much talent and magnetism between them! I will do my best to make it reality, I promise

[anotherboywholived]

Edward II at the National Theatre, 28th August 2013

Note: This was not only the first night but the first dress rehearsal, due to an over-running tech week; believe me when I claim this production a true meld of theatre and film. I expect a lot may have been changed in preparation for tomorrow's Press Night... 

Some things are so turbulent the shock to your senses remains days, weeks, years after the fact. Sometimes you can tell in the early days if something’s going to stay. This is the throne Edward II sits upon.

I cannot help but continue to turn over the production in my brain, each aspect jarring my senses in every imaginable way. It’s so impressive it strikes me back to a previous summer when my theatrical world was similarly changed by a performance at the opposing end of the technical spectrum.

Edward II is a tremendous mixed media with a tone pushing in the all the right places, even when straying deep into zones so unsettling they border upon tolerability – and yet never feel unnecessary.  Throughout its three hour run time it often tethers itself towards transgression, teetering upon the edge of ‘too much’ and only slipping into finely tuned horror when an opportunity for its audience to rattle a collective breath limps upon its heels.

A much-oft complaint from mine own mouth is the common inability of the director to push the audience to the very limits of their souls, playing with ideas while remaining too reticent in regards to honest horror; shying away from allowing the ideas to expand towards the natural conclusion such concepts beg for. Yet several things here show it is not a fear which director Joe Hill-Gibbins has given mind, as he simultaneously forces some from their seats in order to allow others to experience the ultimate limits of their own selves, shaken down to the core ta to a genius display of intensity.

Of course, a concept is merely a collection of essays without a carefully chosen team, and with the odd glaring exception (naming no names until the run has finished as comment of that beyond alteration is utterly unnecessary) Hill-Gibbins has cast incredibly well, especially with his lead.

Here he hands John Heffernan a long-overdue opportunity to prove all he can do – raptures of childish glee heighten to sinful perversity before a broken man stumbles into darkness, a slain soul standing in a body without will. As the next scene rolls onto the green a camera closely tracks the eyes losing light over an eternity; our director displaying the true selflessness of personal unimportance required by the greatest of artists as he gives the man in the stalls the right to decide where to focus his own eye, an eerie echo of the sensual intoxication which earlier took place upon the stage.

The night I first saw Edward II I couldn’t sleep 'til gone six am, so imprinted were its images upon my brain. Edward has singular moments of explosiveness and an overreaching joy of the dramatic through almost every movement. It is not perfect – the balance between need and gratuity is sometime shaky, and a beautiful build of tension is intolerably dashed due to a misplaced interval. It yet remains, however, one of the most impressive things I have ever seen.

It must be noted, mind, that this interpretation is certainly marmite in its form, being either intensely adored or utterly abhorred. No matter where one falls, it strikes me that the mesh of means may remain with us for a long time to come; it did, indeed, make me think often of Peter Brook’s undeniably influential Midsummer Night’s Dream– the sort of production which holds influence so far down the line that its effects retain upon those far too young to have been there to see it. Theatrical greatness is a funny old thing.

Perhaps such a leap is merely a display of my inexperienced intuition; regardless of its conclusion in wider theatrical history, Edward II is in the least, in that perchance inexperienced intuition, fucking incredible. For now.