I went to the theatre at the Barbican last night and left at the interval. Not because I didn't like the play, but because I was afraid I might not be able to get home afterwards.
The play was called Scenes from a Marriage, and is based on a 1973 film by Ingmar Bergman, performed by the Dutch company Toneelgroep Amsterdam. I've seen a couple of other plays by this group, including three of Shakespeare's Roman history plays - Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra - performed one after the other, with a bar and internet lounge on stage so the audience could wander on stage and buy drinks and read their e-mail.
So, this was a text originally in Swedish, performed in Dutch and presented to an English audience with surtitles.
For this production, they'd abandoned the Barbican Theatre's normal seats and built three small stages on the main stage. There was a triangular room in the centre of the stage which was a dressing room and prop store. Curtains separated the stage into three acting areas. The play comprises six scenes and in the first half, three scenes were performed three times, simultaneously. The audience had been divided into three and given coloured wristbands before being allowed into the auditorium. The colour determined which scene you saw first. When that scene ended, someone appeared to usher you through the curtain to the next scene, the whole audience moving clockwise.
This did lead to something that reminded me of the dividing walls problem at Intersection back in 1995. You could hear some of the dialogue from the other stages. Especially, in the second scene I saw, there was a shouting match going on at one point. When it got to that point in the third scene, on the stage I was watching one of the main characters was talking to a visitor and they suddenly stopped and looked in the direction of the shouting in amusement. And when the visitor left, the other character said, "Sorry about the neighbours."
Indeed, as there were window built into the central room, you could glimpse parts of the other action depending on where you sat. And, of course, each scene had to last exactly the same length of time, so audiences weren't left sitting around waiting for the scene next door to end.
The play was scheduled to start at 19:15, and the Barbican website said it lasted 3 hours 20 minutes, with a 25 minute interval. When the interval finally came, it was 21:30. The first half had lasted about two and a quarter hours!
I did some maths in my head. (Actually, I'd been worrying about this for most of the last scene.) The second half would be due to start at 21:55, and it would take a while for the audience to settle down. If the second half took as long as the first half, it would finish after midnight. There were still three more scenes to come and I had timed that it took about ten minutes for the audience to move from one stage to the next. For the play to finish at the advertised 22:35, the scenes would have to be about five minutes each. I suspect they'd underestimated how much time it would take to shift the audience, the English being more casual about these things than the Dutch.
The last fast train from Waterloo to Guildford is at 23:45. (I thought it was 23:50, but they must have re-timed it since I last caught it.) But that gets me home at nearly one in the morning, and I don't like late nights these days. Ideally, I wanted to catch the 23:15 and I reckon on at least half an hour to get from the Barbican to Waterloo. It didn't look likely I'd catch that, so I left. And, as luck would have it, my tube connections worked out and I did make it to Waterloo in under half an hour, catching the 22:00, but only by running up the escalators.
But as it happened, the first scene I saw of the play was actually the last in chronological order, so at least I know how it ends.
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