Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle is currently running at the Barbican London. A co-production by Cheek by Jowl and the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre gives us a new hilarious modern twist (in Russian) complete with subtitles.
When I read that I was going to see a play with subtitles, I wondered how this was going to work, but it did. The play started out as this post-modern type production with minimalist staging. The actors take up their various positions on stage. The play they are performing is ‘‘The London Merchant‘. One actor begins his monologue.
The action is disrupted suddenly by an older Russian couple, a grocer and his wife, in the audience objecting to the plot and telling the actors what they should be doing. This is not the play they paid to see in their minds. They are looking for a Don Quixote type play.
This is interesting for me because I recently saw Man of La Mancha which is currently showing at the London Collesuem in the Westend which is in itself a parody. Don Quixote is played by Kelsey Krammer who played Frasier Crane in the 90s American sitcom, a character that could very well find himself in a similar situation.
The woman questions their acting, storyline and costumes because there is enough “shit” in the world. She suggests her nephew as someone that can turn the performance around. She calls him out of the audience. Turns out he is a few rows up from me. So now he is playing the role of a knight in a play that doesn’t have a knight. It’s hilarious.
At other points in the performance, this same woman appears to think what is happening is real and disturbed by this gets involved to deliver her own kind of response to what she sees as an injustice.
Eventually, the players go along with the woman’s suggestion which results in them all appearing in elaborate costumes and performing a play with her nephew playing the knight. The result is a chaotic but hilarious intertwining of different realities.
This refreshing and peculiar play runs at the Barbican from 5—8 Jun 2019
at Barbican London.
