So the premiere of Molly Eyre has now been and gone. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I went with no idea of what to expect… Would the director have made cuts? Would he have staged it in the way it was written? Would he have included the same number of phallic symbols that generally adorn the stage of productions under his directorship?
Answers: No cuts, no phalli, and a fantastically playful and entertaining staging that had the audience laughing in more places than I had originally intended. One lady in her eighties told me afterwards that she had rarely laughed so much. I choose to think that says more about the play, and the actresses’ engaging performances than it does about said lady’s life ;)
Although I know the play well, and although I worked on its translation from English to German, there were turns of phrase I had forgotten about, whole sequences of unexpected action – including yoga-batics and roller skating – and four women I had never seen before delivering the lines. I was captivated.
Another surprising element to the staging was the use of musical vignettes between scenes. Each track lent itself perfectly to the mood of the moment, just as the mood enhanced the melody of the same moment.
As the play neared its end, the Tartuffian character was sent the way of her sort, and the Misanthrope, the Hypochondriac and Molly herself exchanged the final words of the piece, the (to me) familiar bars of Mike Scott’s What do you want me to do? filled the room. The actresses moved in slow motion to the sound of his husky Scottish voice admitting to having tried doing things his own way, doing what people say, but going nowhere fast. “I’ve been a fool, and I’ve been a clown, I let the enemy turn me around, I’ve wasted love and I’ve wasted time, I’ve been proud and I’ve been blind,” he continued, before asking the eponymous question “What do you want me to do?”
Answers: Mike Scott, keep on making songs like that one. Edith Abels, Anne Simmering, Anna Sjöström and Christina Theresa Motsch, keep acting. You were a pleasure, an absolute joy to watch. Thank you!
