This last summer I was able to see two shows in London. The first, Mary Poppins, was solid family entertainment, a decent (if flawed) blend of the original book and the classic Disney film. The second was by the greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare, at the replica Globe. It was a disastrously self-indulgent version of one the master’s weaker plays Titus Andronicus.
To see both plays in the same week would have been odd. To seem them back to back was revealing.
As a show Mary Poppins was sometimes dark, but generally cheerful. The fine English theater (classic but comfortable) was full of children with patient group leaders and parents with much less patience attending with their own children. Disney magic and merchandising were everywhere and the queue and build-up to the show felt more Disneyland than theater. Sadly the play itself turned out to be more theater than Disney magic.
The show was generally enjoyable, but theater goers should be warned that this is not just Disney’s and Julie Andrew’s Mary Poppins brought to stage. Poppins may be the rare case where the movie is better than the book. Where the play strays from the movie, it gains the advantage (for most) of novelty, but much of the additions simply slow down the plot. Both the book and the movie are better than the play.
The author and creator of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, had mixed feelings about the movie (at best), but her strange Poppins (more eccentric and much less perfect in every way) irritated my children. The books (especially some of the later ones) lack plot and the magic seems forced at times. Stories are not connected and there is more real sentiment in the film’s “Feed the Birds” than in the entire series.
Walt Disney gets blamed for making many fairy tales too “cute” or sweetening them, but in this case the effect was mostly positive with the inspired casting of Julie Andrews in the film guaranteeing that the Traver’s acidic Poppins would not return in the stage production. Sadly, some fairly disconnected sub-stories from the books were included and these are inferior to the film’s “Jolly Holiday” with Mary.
The musical Sherman brothers score, which has stood the test of time, is burdened with new more “theatrical” music. George Stiles wrote a series of forgettable Weber-meets-Sherman-and-Sherman tunes that were allowed to overshadow the much better Sherman and Sherman material. My wife and I (along with the children in the audience) found ourselves waiting for the next too-small dose of sugar from the Sherman’s while enduring the often bombastic or treacly (!) Stile’s medicine.
The addition of oddly named “Miss Andrew” (from the book, but weird after Julie Andrews’ star turn) as a the dark Nanny, the Manichean opposite of Mary Poppins, increased the scare factor in the Second Act, but also increased the run time. While the original movie only feels long in the Chimney sweep number, the London show felt endless in a Park scene that is close to eternal.
Apparently political correctness forbade using the main sub-plot of the film where Mrs. Banks is too busy being a suffragette and Mr. Banks a banker to be good parents. Since many of us struggle with ignoring our children just as much as the Banks (if only to be able to afford the “family price” theater tickets), and since we have been taught to avoid hard moral lessons in family entertainment, the film’s needed lesson is softened.
One is allowed to ridicule the misanthropes who don’t value fuzzy virtues such as “friendship” or “family” (which must be epidemic to judge by the sheer number of family movie warnings against these sins), but must not touch those sins (being a workaholic) most of us are actually likely to commit.
Instead we are reminded that someone else (our bad Nanny) or a lack of confidence in self has caused our family problems. We don’t need to repent, but to feel better about ourselves. Apparently when we love ourselves enough, we will magically do the right thing.
Still nothing can keep one from wanting to fly a kite, feed birds, and have some sugar with our medicine by the end of the show. Walt’s magic could not be killed and both Hope and I ended up glad (on the whole) we bought the tickets. And then we took the Tubes (still a miracle to me of what men can do!) and ran to catch Shakespeare at the Globe.
This we were sorry we did.
On the good side: everyone should see a show in the rebuilt Globe. See a show there and understand why there can be so many short scenes in Shakespeare. The stage forced spare sets, but allowed for rapid shifts in audience attention to different levels of the action. This could substitute for the “shock and awe” of modern big set changes with a rapid fire shift in verbal scene setting. Shakespeare used words and his actors to do what we do with effects.
Seeing a show there also brings home the fluid boundary between actors and audience in Shakespeare’s day. The cheap seats are right in the action. You are part of the show at the Globe, but sadly this show, Titus, made one want distance not proximity to the action.
The revenge tragedy Titus was dark and disgusting. At least a third of my students walked out as every possible violence was done in a way calculated to minimize any thinking and maximize the brutality. Of course, the original Titus was not for children and is full of the raw emotions of a pagan, but civilized state that is dying before pagan barbarians. This version ofTitus was not for anybody, having swamped the play in noise, campy humor, and blood.
The director of Titus seemed to go out of his way to turn the play into a modern horror film. Lost is the lesson that revenge always fails and comes back to haunt and then destroy the vengeful. Vengeance is best left to the Lord in Shakespeare’s play, but in this Globe version vengeance is all that is left.
We may not want to hear relevant lessons from our family theater, but we don’t mind being horrified by our grown-up shows. After all, bad parenting is a sin most of us commit from time-to-time, but the cannibalism, assault, and murder of Titus is apparently grotesque enough to simply fascinate. Lavinia can lose her tongue violently on stage, since this emotional horror overshadows the point Shakespeare is making about the fragility of any civilization that does not know the Christ and mercy.
Mercy is what we need, but first we must realize that our own resentments and plans for personal revenge might not be so different from those found in the play. If the play is emotionally brutal enough this similarity is easy to overlook and the value of the play is lost in gore.
The bloodier the rendition of the play Titus is the less likely we are to get the point. The horror hides the fact that nobody can escape the bloodiness of a revenge cycle. Shakespeare rightly keeps Christian forgiveness out of pagan Rome and the result is horrific. However, the horror of the play does not have to be overdone in gouts of blood and semi-comic cannibal camp. Doing so aids the audience in forgetting that we too may be pursuing our own revenge.
Absurd costuming distracted the theater goer throughout the play. Some people in theater are not content with a world-class play. They want to make their own point at every turn. The wigs on the Goths in the play, with the absurd leather and latex look, made my students laugh and not in the way intended. The Goths look more like exiles from a 1970’s rock concert than men who would destroy Western civilization.
The Goths are barbarians, but moderns rather like barbarians except when they have the temerity to show up and bomb buildings in our own time. We like to imagine that all the Goths are long dead or were free spirits with KISS haircuts. Real barbarians don’t just want to have fun , but in destroying civilized life keep everyone else from having any fun at all. Sacked Rome lacked nightlife.
In the strange juxtaposition of my day, Mary Poppins and Titus served as commentaries on each other. A post-Christian Poppins told children to blame someone else, anyone else, for their troubles. This would help them to love themselves better and then to be good . . .
The temptation to believe that one can be saved by works (Pelagianism) has been replaced by the modern orthodoxy for children that one can be saved by good feelings. The emotionally Pelagian Poppins leads naturally to cynical adult Titus. It is a lie that living for self will lead to virtue. We become disappointed when medicine does not go down easily with sugar or anything else and begin to feel cheated by civilization. How dare it make us give anything up (our cause, or work) in order to live for others! I fear that the disappointment with this lie can lead to bitterness, mercilessness, and the desire for bloody vengeance on any who get in our way.
Violence was not abnormal in this perversion of the Shakespearian play, but natural. Of course Christians believe that sin is a real part of the fallen order and the innocent (such as Lavinia) do suffer. That is not the deepest truth, because in Christ (an option not found in pagan Rome) mercy and forgiveness (like that of As You Like It) is possible.
Mercy is what we need . . . and forgiveness. To get mercy we must admit guilt. Forgiveness requires that we face up to our problems (as Banks does in the original Disney film of Poppins) and repent (turn away) from our error. We can see the horror of what human life without God can be (as Shakespeare shows us in Titus), but take hope in the knowledge that the Fall of Rome in the West was not the end. Rome fell, but was reborn as the seat of Christendom and the gospel of mercy and grace.
We need our Poppins as Disney wrote her, practically perfect in every way, and revealing how short our family life falls of this high standard. We must face the fact that barbarism and the desire for revenge always lurks in the pagan edges of civilization.
Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me a sinner.