On 18th March students of English as the first language of higher classes visited a theatre performance Canterville Ghost in Měšťanská Beseda. The theatre was played by an English Group and was given in English. I was a classic written by Oscar Wilde. Here are some of their reactions on the performance.
The Canterville Ghost is a story y Oscar Wilde. This story is happening in 19th century. The story shows a great contrast between American and British society.
An American family is up to buy a castle in Canterville, but they are warned by the owner of the castle. Firstly, the owner doesn´t want to sell his castle, but he is in a difficult situation because he has no money and he needs to pay his taxes. As the story continuous it is more and more complicated. Eventually, the owner sells the castle and falls in love with nice Virginia, a daughter of the American lady.
I cannot say that I don´t like this performance, because it was very interesting. I really liked the way they were singing their songs and their acting as well. Except for American lady, the actress with black hair, I don´t like her at all. I can say that I hate her voice, it was very awkward to me. However, this is my only one bad point of the play.
On the other hand, I absolutely liked the way how it was funny. The jokes about gypsies were definitely the best!
In my opinion, I can really recommend this play. It was very nice and mostly understandable. I believe you will like it.
Jakub Fišer, Sexta A
I must admit that this was the worst theatre play I´ve EVER seen for 160 Crowns. I expected to get much more than just a craziness and some water on my clothes.
There were five characters: The Ghost, the man who is selling a castle and three members of an American family that wish to buy the castle.
The story begins when the Americans arrive to see their castle but the owner doesn´t want to sell it because he is scared of the ghost. Then he comes up with a plan to kill a son of the Americans and marry the daughter.
I expected absolutely different level of acting. Especially because I knew that it was a story of a famous and unique author Oscar Wilde. The actors were screaming, making embarrassing jokes and splashing water on the audience. I also couldn´t hear absolutely anything because the actors were speaking very silently.
In the middle of the play the actors started to run around the audience and shouted something racist about gypsies. I expected it to get better in the second half but I was even more disappointed because it didn´t.
I hope I will never see anything like this again but I suppose nothing can be so wicked.
Václav Knížek, sexta A
A play inspired by a novel of a literature giant Oscar Wilde took place at Měšťanská Beseda in Pilsen and was performed by English actors. The plot itself takes places in 19th century and only five characters appeared. Even though there are about ten characters in the original plot.
At the very beginning of the play we meet a man, whose name wasn´t even said, and the ghost. Then a storm comes and typical American family appears – a woman with two children – Virginia and slightly retarded son Washington. The stumbling block is not introducing the father – an American ambassador. Therefore, we are forced to believe that a fearless group of new riches came to buy a haunted castle just for fun.
An unknown music inclined author of the play tried to make jokes out of nowhere, including praising Coca Cola song, inappropriate sexual hints or “satiric” try of blaming gypsies for killing Virginia.
Call me old-fashioned but in my opinion, the actors deserve at least an Oscar nomination for accepting and playing a play like this. The author made a classic story so fresh I wanted to start hoovering, not mentioning that it had very little in common with the original story.
Bára Šandová, sexta A
On Friday we visited Měšťanská Beseda to see an English play. It was played by four actors, two men and two women. The story was set in England at the castle of Canterville in the 19th century. It had a form of a musical.
It was a story about a castle in England which was bought by an American family. But the castle is haunted. The British gentleman who is selling the castle warns the family, but they don’t care at all.
When the play started I noticed that it was very difficult to understand the actors. I don´t know if it was caused by poor acoustic or just voices not strong enough, but it was one of the reasons why I couldn´t pay attention properly. I could only focus on the girl´s voice, which was very highly pitched and annoyed me. On the other hand, they sang quite well. It sounded clear and I could understand more.
Their acting skills weren´t that great in my opinion, but maybe it was caused by conscious overacting. Many of the jokes used in that play were immature and I didn´t find them funny at all. And by what I could see around me, not many people did. Some were sleeping, some were reading of were on their phones. I wouldn´t necessarily say it was a bad play, but it was bad for our age. The actors were probably expecting a younger audience, even though the level of English used in the play was proper for us.
Markéta Zindulková, sexta A
I would like to say, that The Canterville Gost wasn´t what I expected. I was looking forward to see something more classical. To be honest I didn´t even know that it was written by Oscar Wilde and when I found out I couldn´t believe that he wrote something this “interesting”. As the performance began I got a bit upset by the voices of the actors, because some of them were really loud and because this room wasn´t really fit for theatre. There were a lot of echoes so I couldn´t understand a thing they said.
For the actors, I really don´t think they were professionals, because sometimes they were overacting in quite annoying way and I really hated that. I´m not sure if it´s only me, but in my opinion, the plot was really, really chaotic, so I got lost almost all the times.
Another thing that I didn´t like that much was their singing and the sounds coming from the computer, because it was so loud, that my ears literally did hurt a lot and you can´t concentrate when something like this is happening.
I was expecting something better for this big amount of money and I really didn´t enjoy it.
Jan Mařík, sexta A
On 18th March we visited Měšťanská Beseda to see Canterville Gost theatre played by a group from England. I was looking forward to that because it was played by English actors and it could improve my English a lot. Sadly, I was quite disappointed. We came to the grand room of Měšťanská Beseda and sit down on not so comfy chairs. Which is a bit of an issue considering 2 hours play. The play itself was pretty good as it seemed to stick to the major idea of the original which was written by Oscar Wilde.
My second big “no” came when the play started. They had two big static microphones but only for the singing parts of the play. However, they had no mics for the rest of the performance. I wasn´t sitting that fa from them and I listen to English every day so I heard and understood pretty well. Bur a I looked around that was definitely not the case of everybody.
For the length of the play, it was a bit too long for me. I don´t mind watching two or three-hour play but it has to be interesting at least 80% of the time. This play was composed from dancing and singing performances a lot. It was quite good for a couple of times but when I realised it´s basically 70% of the whole play, I became a bit bored in the end. I guess this could be fixed for us by at least using of more coulisses. Of course they can´t exchange the whole castle but some other details were missing.
And lastly, the actors themselves… I know that British people have a bit different kind of humour than us in here and I´m trying to get used to it for a year already, but it was sometimes too much even for me. Some of the moments were really funny but there were times when it was just too much and it became stupid. I pretty much liked how all the actors played their roles. The woman who played the mother was often playing too much emotionally for me but if was still OK. The two men played genially. I really liked those two. They were funny, sarcastic and kept the play alive in couple of places and lastly, the young lady… She was somewhere between the mother and the two men but from the ninth line she looked pretty beautiful and kept me awake in the end of the play. At the end of the play I even saw some people sleeping of playing card games.
Adam Vacek, sexta A
