Damn the 19th century theatre with its elaborate fixed sets. Damn how static it is. Damn all that furniture and those make-believe four walls. Damn the necessity of character A having to tell character B about the things character C has been doing in the Town Hall Square because there's no way the action can move beyond the bloody fixed set. If this were Shakespeare or Brecht or a movie we'd have been able to see character C doing his public striptease and jumping on his hat and that would have been much more fun than having it described to us- no matter how waggishly.
Oh, but hang on a minute. This isn't 19th century theatre. This is a play first produced in 1980. So why, in 1980- after all that has happened in between- is Ronald Harwood still writing as if bound by the restrictions that Ibsen and Chekhov had to wrestle with? And why- given that this is a TV adaption- can't we open things up a bit?
