It was excellent, even though I was extremely annoyed at being stood up my date. And at considerable expense, too - I ended up getting two top price tickets whereas if I had wanted to go on my own I would have bought a cheaper seat midweek.
Most of the audience annoyances were present. The woman with the nauseously overpowering perfume The woman in front who could not turn off her mobile: her problem was unlocking it: I kept seeing the message 'Now press *' on the screen, that seemed beyond her. I miss occasionally, but not seven times consecutively, until she put in her handbag. Thankfully it didn't ring). There were people who talked over the beginning of Act Two. The play begins as soon as the house lights dim; there is no excuse to talk while Martin Shaw is on stage. There was the chap who noisily left and re-entered the auditorium halfway through the first half. And finally, when Martin was delivering an elegant soliloquy at the end, the person who opened the door allowing an arc of light to travel halfway round the auditorium and catch Martin's eye, slightly distracting him for a nano second.
Thankfully none of these marred an excellent play, which was for the most part well performed. There were no turkeys on stage although a good few were no better than adequate. Outstanding was Tony Bell as "The Common Man", a delightful comic touch - although make no mistake that this was comedy with a serious purpose. I also enjoyed Daniel Flynn as an unusually camp Henry VIII. Clive Carter as the sinister Thomas Cromwell reminded me of David Davis MP
But the star of the show was, well, the star of the show, the main reason I booked to see this, one of mmofm's Beautiful Males, Martin Shaw. He was just excellent. I'm sure if I knew the play intimately or knew more about theatre in general I would be able to find fault. But as I don't, I didn't.
A convincing portrayal of a man with high moral and philosophical principle but also with a comic side, a three-dimensional character. He conducted himself with dignity throughout, and I was particularly impressed to see how he aged throughout - obviously with the help of make-up. He had his hair long, not quite shoulder-length but considerably longer than in Judge John Deede. And very grey. I am afraid to say that I was one of the many women who gasped as he appeared to tear his shirt off. Sadly, he only pulled it down over his shoulders and it was but a brief moment before he put his head on the block and our gasps were joined by many more at the cold horror of an execution. And the stage went into darkness. He also delivered a rather splendid 'falling to the ground' moment when one of the characters landed him a blow. Over and I was struck by the sonority of his voice as it resonated through the theatre.
The play was thought-provoking. Two passages stand out. The first coincides with a thought I was having just the other day: I was thinking about people who put all their efforts into hiding their affairs from the law, thus making themselves more vulnerable to abuse, and thus more dependent upon help from the law, yet unable to take advantage of it because of the avoiding they have been doing for so long.
The other one was that a statesman has to follow his duty not his conscious. Which shocked me, because I would have thought that where there is a conflict between conscience and duty, conscience must dictate that the duty is wrong. Perhaps this was brought into sharp relief by the fact that I arrived at the theatre as the Anti-War rally passed by Although, in a dramatic twist, the play was essentially about a man whose conscience would not allow him to be expedient or dutiful and paid for that with his life.
Which I find troubling. In essence, he refused to sign an oath acknowledging the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, even when his daughter (played by Sophie Shaw, his RL daughter) pointed out that what matters is not what one says but what one feels in one's heart.
My problem is that Thomas More is painted as a martyr and a hero, perhaps in no small part as a result of this play and the resultant film. I do not see a hero in someone who stuck to dogma and defied the King without seeming to think more deeply about whether Leviticus is at all a useful set of laws for life in 16th Century England and never doubting the legitimacy of the King's Divine Right to rule.
At the end we gave Martin Shaw a resounding cheer. As I was walking up Haymarket, I overheard someone say "He doesn't sit down for the entire play, until , when he dies..."
