Get your hands ON SOME National treasures
The Cherry Orchard (ntathome.com) Verdict: Bittersweet cherries ★★★☆☆
I Want My Hat Back (ntathome.com)
Verdict: The hat fits, so I’m wearing it! ★★★★☆
DEAR reader, dare I ask if, like me, you’ve lost track of your monthly entertainment subscriptions? I am thinking Netflix (£ 5.99), Now TV (£ 9.99), Apple TV+ (£ 4.99) and Disney+ (£5.99).
However, I have a bad feeling there may be more, turning over on auto-renew . . .
Be that as it may, it’s surely worth doing a cost-benefit analysis of the National Theatre’s impressive new portal, ntathome.com, which launched this week. It offers access to top-of-the-range recordings of some of its greatest hits of recent times — accessible on phones, tablets and tellies (with internet access). Offerings include Helen McCrory’s Medea and Helen Mirren’s Phedre.
If there’s one thing Covid has taught British theatre, it is that it’ s avery marketable commodity. Oh, and you should film everything.
The National Theatre had 15 million views of its free online content this summer. In context, that’s about 15 times its annual capacity of almost one million.
The new service will potentially earn it a considerable amount of dosh — especially if subscribers max out on the annual fee of £99.98, or £9.98 a month, for unlimited access. (For comparison, posh arts platform Marquee TV carries RSC plays, ballet and opera from Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and the Met in New York for £ 4.99 per week, £ 8.99 per month or £89.99 per year, after a 14-day trial.)
But some NT supporters may baulk, feeling that they have paid quite enough to the institution already, in tickets and in taxes. Renting The Cherry Orchard f or £ 7. 99 may seem easier on the cash flow. But compared to Now TV’s £9.99 monthly entertainment pass — covering blockbuster shows such as The Undoing — it is still quite steep. So what do you get for your money? Well, let’s start with Howard
Davies’s 2011 production of Chekhov’s masterpiece The Cherry Orchard, boasting tidily updated dialogue from Mr Cate Blanchett (Andrew Upton). Zoe Wanamaker plays a Russian landowner at the turn of the 20th century who’s been bankrupted by feckless partners and is forced to sell the family home with its beloved orchard.
Wan a maker is baroque in her selfdramatisation and devout in her determination to reject reality. Conleth Hill, as the former serf who offers to buy the estate, could do more to earn her contempt. But he is a peerless actor, bringing dignity to his role. Then there’s the support: Claudie Blakley, as Wanamaker’s lovelorn daughter; and Mark Bonnar as a long-haired student hitting middle age.
And who wouldn’t want to watch Kenneth Cranham as the senile butler? I’d probably pay just to hear him read NT at Home’s terms and conditions.
The production does look slightly stretched on the Olivier’s yawning stage, and feels even longer than it did at the theatre (159 minutes, plus some pleas for further donations to the NT’s coffers).
But there is a gathering sadness to its course which I certainly found affecting at the finish.
THERE are also l i ghter options, i ncluding the brilliantly bonkers 2015 production of Jon Klassen’s toddlers’ story I Want My Hat Back. The hour-long tale of a bear enraged by the loss of his red pointy party hat (sometimes it’s the little things) flew by for me.
Marek Larwood is brilliant as the grizzly, fitted with a brown balaclava with ears, fur coat, sheepskin slippers and Led Zep T-shirt. He’s like a cross between an inebriated Cockney cab driver and a slightly less dishevelled Boris Johnson.
Performed on a shag-pile carpet surrounded by 1960s decor, and backed by Arthur Darvill’s music — a mix of flamenco trumpet, circus drumming and piano — it’s a wonderfully simple pleasure.
And at £5.99 to rent, parents may want to compare that to the price of renting Frozen. I would much rather sing along to I’ve Got A Hat And It’s On My Head than yet another round of Let It Go.
I would therefore like to propose taking out a month’s subscription and cancelling auto-renewal. That way you can binge now, and rent or renew later. After all, we are promised many more top titles in the months to come.