“There’s a passion for in-the-round performance right now in London,” Helen_E_Shaw writes: “perhaps audiences are eager to come close.” The most successful of these stagings is Nicholas Hytner’s inventive revival of “Guys and Dolls.”
Trying to get a sense of all London theatre in one mad, weeklong dash—you can get to nine shows in seven days if you put your mind to it—is a fool’s errand. Casting my mind back, I am left mainly with an impression of people surging noisily in and out of velvet rooms.
SpitLip has been working on its brainchild since 2019, developing it in various smaller theatres before launching it on the West End, but four years of polishing hasn’t clouded its sense of freshness and risk. Every night, five actors—drawn from nine—play more than a dozen characters, and you’re never entirely sure which configuration you’re going to get. “Mincemeat” presents itself as pure up-from-the-Fringe wackadoodle merriment, but the show is also a strategic feint.
Oddly enough, “Operation Mincemeat” was the only musical I saw on a conventional proscenium stage. There’s a passion for in-the-round performance right now in London: perhaps audiences are eager to come close. The most successful of these stagings is Nicholas Hytner’s inventive revival of “Guys and Dolls” , at the Bridge, in which some theatregoers sit in tiers, while down on the floor a hundred others are herded this way and that by crew members costumed as New York City cops.
There’s a certain loss, though. To compete with all those bodies moving around, the sound designer, Paul Arditti, has cranked the amplification too high, and Sky and his beloved Sarah keep pivoting to face a different direction, never locking eyes, let alone hearts. In-the-round staging can be exciting—gladiatorial, even—but it makes it hard to illustrate intimate relationships.
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