State of the Art Theatre : Warhol and Basquiat "Is it too much or am I just getting old? ........ So ugly and angry." Warhol "He's old hat. He's one…
In the debate scenes, the actors speak the words that Vidal and Buckley actually spoke. Outside the debates, they confer with their advisers about how to beat the other man, and – vain in a way that only television can make people – they protest to the network that the other man is getting more of the camera.
Cush Jumbo's soliloquies are deep and thoughtful, every word heard as they should be. This is the third time I recall the Young Vic choosing an excellent Hamlet but giving him a problematic production. There was Peter Brook's curtailing Adrian Lester's Hamlet to just Hamlet's lines in the play. There was Ian Rickson's setting of Martin Sheen as Hamlet in a psychiatric ward with Gertrude as a fellow patient and Claudius as the consultant psychiatrist. We walked through an installation of the back of a hospital with a dispensary before seeing the play. The last really successful, all round Hamlet I remember at the Young Vic was Paul Rhys's 1930s European royalty in 1999.