Follies National Theatre: A Folly of Direction and Visual Storytelling
It pains me to write my very first theater review that so fervently contrasts what seems to be a general consensus in London theater review circles, but I started this blog with no connection to my real name for a reason. I want to share my thoughts honestly.
Now, some caveats: I’m not a musical theater person. I’m also not not a musical theater person. I like a good musical, and have enough experience watching them that I know what good work looks like. That being said, all of my training is in contemporary american theater and in the avant-garde. I am drawing from a theater education that had absolutely zero musical content.
That being said, the National Theatre’s production of Follies was... alright.
Now, I want to call a spade a spade. When you see a main-stage musical at the National Theatre in London, you’re going to see amazing production value. It’s going to have the best cast, the best band, an expensive and elaborate set, incredible costumes, all the dressings and baubles. You know how musicals are, and it’s going to be a musical with all the best resources available to it. I’m judging it on a playing field with its peers, not as compared to a hypothetical production of Follies put on at a local theater in rural Kansas.
The performances were outstanding, with brilliant vocals and a stellar band that took my breath away. Not a single performer fell short, though there were no particular standouts. Every actor was perfectly cast in their role, with a great range of performances and types. This was not the source of my gripes with this production.
What stuck out to me so painfully was how unfocused the blocking was. What a weirdly specific complaint, right? But you must remember, theater is a visual medium. And as such, rules of art and design in terms of composition apply just as much to your stagecraft as they would to say, a shot in a film. You should be able to guide the audience’s eye so they’re taking in just the information you want them to, lead them through the beats of your story and its arcs and themes, without so overwhelming them with sensory input that it all becomes visual mush. This is exactly what Follies’ issue is. For the entire first 40 minutes of the show, possibly longer, there were no focal points visually whatsoever.
Now, that’s all a lot of academic bullshit. What’s the effect of this failure on the actual performance itself?
When the audience is presented with this kind of visual white noise, their eyes tend to just slide off important information. It isn’t processed neurologically in the same way, because no visual cues are telling the brain to focus more on any given thing. It becomes confusing, hard to follow, and most damningly, boring as hell. I polled my classmates, and while they overall had a nice time, they all mentioned how it took a long time to understand what was going on, they couldn’t figure out who the main characters were supposed to be, and they were bored for the first 45 minutes. This is... not good my dude.
Additionally, the use of space between characters in smaller conversations was absolutely baffling. Conversations would happen with outrageous amounts of space between the characters that completely killed all tension and stakes in their interactions.
The show has an interesting mechanic of many characters having a “shadow” self, a reflection of their younger self from the past upon which they are reminiscing. This absolutely has incredible potential for effective and interesting visual storytelling that could only be done in the medium of musical theater, using dance and tableaux to take advantage of the heightened theatricality to really illustrate the emotional stakes. However, this mechanic was so incredibly mismanaged. Half the time, the shadow selves merely stood onstage absently, doing absolutely nothing in the shadows. Their lack of motion and lighting and relationship with the scene whatsoever makes their presence actively distracting from the action. There also seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to who had shadow selves and who didn’t. All of this only contributed to the visual white noise, as there would be entire shadow dance routines happening that were completely unrelated to the “main” action that was happening, and that had not been staged in a way that set them up as mere backdrop but rather had almost equal visual weight (thank you lighting designer).
It only made it more clear how confusing the blocking was once scenes wherein the completely competent choreographer had more control over the layout of the visual space, like in the Follies at the end. The actors were moved around in ways that guided the eye, despite there being a lot happening onstage, and the visual information always contributed to the overall understanding of the arc of the scene. It was such an incredible relief. I felt woken up and refreshed, it was lovely. Those 20 or so minutes of the Love Land sequence were undoubtedly my favorite part of the show.
I also just didn’t adore the script, and thought all the ensemble characters that had full numbers could have been cut altogether, though after some research it appears that that is a vestige of the play having not aged well, as I lack the cultural connotations to get the in-jokes. Though, that raises a question of why the show keeps getting put on today that I won’t address here.
Listen, I did have fun. When the show was focused on the main plotlines of the four leads, it was generally successful, but the ensemble was distracting and killed pacing, the chaotic blocking made what could have been a visually stellar production into visual mush, and it was kind of boring. The real folly here was slouching on staging and skipping straight to spectacle.
