Before arriving at the theatre Maggi and I walked up the road to have dinner at the Japanese restaurant called Taro. We’ve eaten there quite a few times. It’s never fantastic but usually quite reliable. Today we had another dependable meal. Because of the weather forecast I had brought an umbrella with me but fortunately I didn’t need it for the walk to the theatre.
We arrived about 10 minutes before the play’s advertised beginning and the foyer was already crammed with people. We therefore made our way to our seats in the centre of the auditorium several rows back. The play started 5 minutes late and had an almost full house. I read an article in Timeout which summed up my assessment of the performance.
“It’s a fine line between the kind of plays in which people talk a lot and nothing really happens and it’s really profound, and the ones where people talk a lot and nothing happens and it’s really boring. The Assembled Parties can’t quite work out which it is. It looks and sounds like one of the good ones, with plenty of literate, sparkling conversation between its clever and conflicted characters, but there’s something ill-fitting about it, something awkward, like it’s wearing the profound kind of play as a costume.” – Tim Bano.
Tim’s review concludes :-
“Anyway you hope something more exciting will happen after the interval and, to be fair, we zip forward 20 years when half the characters are dead, so that’s interesting. Even so, it quickly settles back into those drifting dialogues, which really grate after a while, until the very end when, against all odds, in a Christmas miracle, it somehow begins to charm… and then it’s over.“
You couldn’t say the play was bad but it had no emotional content and so I walked away thinking so what after an awful lot of dialogue and some mildly funny lines, which If I lived in the states and came from a Jewish family in New York I might have found funnier.
I didn’t bother to take any pictures of the cast taking their bows and I only clapped half-heartedly.
A HAMPSTEAD THEATRE UK PREMIERE
THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES
BY RICHARD GREENBERG
DIRECTED BY BLANCHE MCINTYRE
Running time: Approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes including an interval
You would love the apartment – it’s like the sets of those plays you love, with the “breezy dialogue”. They sort of talk that way and everybody’s unbelievably nice and, like, gracious and happy. It’s like you go to New York and you look for New York but it isn’t there? But it’s here…