Saturday, May 27, 2006
Russian Bollywood?
A 3h40 min show in a foreign language dealing with love and family and interspersed with songs... A Bollywood? noooooooo that would have been easy to watch and like. No no no. This was a Russian play with bits of Opera in between. Now I'm sure it would have been interesting... IF I'd been able to understand!!! See I don't speak Russian - although I now know that "kak" means "who" :D - and the subtitles (or overtitles or whatever you call them in a theatre) were white letters projected on a white wall (I swear!) the latter having at least the decensy to be slightly in the shadow so one could guess what the letters were... Once you did that, you also had to guess who was saying what because it wasn't indicated, they didn't even say at what point it went from one character to another, and they put chunks that covered three minutes of speech by several characters. So yeay for the subtitles, great job guys... At least the singing was good. Well really good.
So it wrung my heart to do so, especially for the poor performers who probably had no clue half the audience or more left at the interval because of the subtitles and not because of the performance, but for the 1st time in my life I left a theatre performance during the interval... I couldn't stand one hour and a half more of not understanding anything whatever. Looked like a psychological drama as well so not an action thing in which you can guess who's doing what...
Rudest thing in the world - let me denounce some people here... There was a little "enclave" at the right of the stage where some members of the audience (about 20) were seated perpendicularly to the main seating area of the audience. At the far end of that (towards upstage) was seating a couple which chose a moment of silence to step out of the enclave, walk ON THE STAGE along it and exit (not before the woman realised she'd forgotten her jacket and went back for it). How outrageous is that? One of the actors had a camera - polaroyd- which he was meant to use in the next scene and he took a pic of them leaving. That was funny :p
So they win the award for rudest people of the month!!!
# posted by V @ 11:22 AM 
