#david kramer

(Original Caption) Strikers. Los Angeles: Actor Charlie Chaplin stands with other citizen observers during mass picketing at Paramount Studio yesterday. Left to right, front row, David Kramer, Charles Chaplin and Stanley Paley, October 1945.

He is sporting a pre Verdoux mustache.

»#pleasantcats« by david kramer

Celine 04 Show Invitation Book by Hedi Slimane

David Kramer, Late Arrival, 2015  

Hi dear!

To my surprise, I really liked it. I saw pictures before going to the play and I hated the chosen costumes and make-up, so I came in with low expectations, fearful of what they would come up with. It was my first play at the Globe, and I had been hoping for something more lavish, or out of the box; the 2007 inspired clothes and clownish faces did not bode well.

But the direction and acting really sucked me into Kramer’s world. The use of music, stage directions, and choreography I found extremely well done and engaging. I particularly enjoyed Juliet’s acting as well, and found her comedic timing, her casualness delightfully endearing; her death scene also brought me to tears, and I’m not one to tear up usually. She was superb.

Overall, this interpretation of the play is very different from my own. Although I agreed with the focus on comedy and the shift to tragedy between the first and second part, I felt that Romeo and Juliet were too long to act “genuinely” in love, and that the Montaigu boys lacked subtlety. The satire of teenage love and artificial courtship was solid—but I personally feel that satire disappears as early as the balcony scene, if not the kissing scene on Juliet’s part, whereas Kramer chose to make it abruptly passionate only after the wedding (that sex scene was so well done). Similarly, Mercutio’s death scene lost in intensity for me, but helped the general message of the play—they were too young to understand, raised to kill, unable to separate games and war.

Time and time again, the direction forced me to challenge my own vision of the play, and to change my focus in order to understand what this new take was trying to communicate, and it was intellectually wonderful. Subjectivity and relativism in literature, in translation, in drama is something that I find endlessly fascinating, and The Globe’s production really presented a personal take on the play, I felt. The teenage caricature, the heart-pumping warning bells, the satirical or overtly-sexualised deliverances of some of my favourite (and idealised) lines shocked me into thinking, which is what you want from a good performance, isn’t it?

Some suppressions I regretted a bit—shortening the boys’ scenes of friendships and Tybalt appearances for example—, some of them I found useful and/or clever —swapping Paris’ death scene with a dream(?) sequence of the family killing, or was it a dream?, removing the epilogue—, because they efficiently conveyed Kramer’s message: a message of hopelessness, a glamourisation of violence, its meaninglessness, its darkness. I thought some of the characterisation and relations were delightfully subtle (the nurse and Juliet, friar Lawrence and Romeo), and some much weaker (I disliked Lady Capulet in every scene, and I was underwhelmed with Romeo up until his death scene, which wasn’t stellar but stronger than the rest). I enjoyed the on-the-nose symbolism: the bal scene costumes, the wiping away of make-up when true passion conquered. Some direction choices (most notably mingling several scenes to increase the intensity, foreboding, urgency) I found bold and very efficient.