Cock - Royal Court

[Written for CultureWars.org.uk]

There’s a great quote from the writer and director René Pollesch: “I would like to talk to the capitalists about money, but they only want to tell love stories”. Mike Bartlett’s Cock (let’s get the smirking over and done with now; I’ve been enjoying the joke for weeks, but it’ll get tiresome if we keep having to giggle through the review) comes (stop it.) at the question from the opposite direction – nominally telling a story about love, or “gender relations”, it actually proves to be an astute dissection of lives lived under advanced Western capitalism.

John and his boyfriend, M (for Man, we suppose) are bickering. They’ve been together a long time, the spark has gone. John leaves. John comes back. He’s slept with a woman (‘W’ unsurprisingly). All of a sudden his ideas of who he is, “what” he is, have been turned on their head.

As the story unpacks itself, it manages to throw up enough acute observations of the way relationships are conducted, the things people say to each other, the manner in which power and control are exercised in the name of “love”, the nature of desire and the things people do in bed to fill half a dozen less searching plays. It’s also incredibly funny and admirably filthy (at one point, W says she’s “got a gap on” – i.e. the female equivalent of a hard-on).

Bartlett’s text, too, is a thing of real precision. From the way that it is laid out on the page to its use of punctuation it has a real authority about it. While, of course, it makes perfect sense as dialogue, the exactness almost has more in common with sheet music than “proper sentences” written in the English language.

If the script is precise, then James Macdonald’s production is more than equal to staging it. Designer Miriam Buether has created a small wooden, circular amphitheatre in the middle of the Theatre Upstairs, evoking a feeling of a boutique gladiatorial arena crossed with one of those Victorian anatomy lecture theatres with viewing stalls for medical students. The stark overhead lighting is encased in a stylish circular wooden shade, adding to the impression of creatures in a Petri dish under a microscope.

I don’t know if the “wooden O” comparison is deliberate, but Macdonald certainly takes Shakespeare at his word as regards the primacy of the imagination; while the characters change clothes, get naked, have sex, and eat a meal, none of the performers undress or even handle a single prop. The pace and style of the production is singular and breathlessly intense. Andrew Scott’s M is a machinegun-fire hurricane of catty bitching in a Dublin accent trained mercilessly on Ben Wishaw’s sweetly diffident and confused Paul. Katherine Parkinson’s W cleverly manages to suggest an incredibly sexy, warm femininity while delivering her lines with a similarly stylised intense focus. It took me maybe three minutes to tune in and warm to the performance style, but once in I was absolutely hooked. It’s one of those productions that once seen, you can’t imagine any other way of doing it.

But, while the formal and emotional stakes are high, it’s the piece’s lightly worn intellectual credentials that are really fascinating. Bartlett clearly doesn’t set out to create a social critique, he’s just (“just”!) written a story that he thinks is interesting, in which characters with a bit of agency fight, have arguments and try to work out how to live. What’s fascinating is the stuff the seeps out from the edges. There’s a point where John says of coming out at university: “all these people hugged me and were proud of me and said how brave I was and suddenly people were touching me and I was wearing different clothes and I was part of a scene, even walking differently I think and everyone said the real me was emerging, that I’d been repressed...”

While this speech in its entirety feels like the moment where the play gets a bit too spelt out, it also crystallises the way in which the play moves the entire argument away from “issues” of sexuality/homosexuality and into the far bleaker territory of the commodification of desire; the way in which every feeling becomes a “lifestyle choice” expressed largely through commerce. The final moments of the play feel like The Birthday Party for desire – we’re no longer coerced and interrogated by sinister agents of The State, we’re policed by our partners. “The State” no longer needs to enforce its vision of normalcy on us; we’re unwittingly, brutally doing it to each other in the name of love.

The Roman Tragedies - Barbican

[Written for CultureWars.org]

[For those of you pressed for time, Lyn Gardner manages to arrive at pretty much the same conclusions using 1,900 fewer words. And she filed on the night. Consider me a little in awe.]

Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s The Roman Tragedies, directed by Ivo van Hove, designed and lit by Jan Versweyveld, collects Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra and stages them back to back for six hours; more or less solidly.

And what a staging it is.

The main stage of the Barbican’s theatre has been converted into a kind of chic corporate hospitality space. There are nicely minimalist sofas everywhere, large widescreen televisions, potted plants, and bars on either side, along with a small internet café, newspapers and coffee. This is Coriolanus by press conference for the CNN generation, a kind of living manifestation of Baudrillard’s The Iraq War Did Not Take Place (a massively misunderstood title, btw, which is actually derived from Giradoux’s play La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, which unfortunately became The Tiger at the Gates in English, thus depriving us of the change to understand what Baudrillard was driving at).

One of the things that is interesting when watching Shakespeare in a foreign language is seeing what’s been done with the translation back to English for the surtitles. Here, barring a few odd phrases here and there (it was nice to see “O, happy horse...” and “Serpent of old Nile” survive), Tom Kleijn’s translation is mostly rendered in slightly more colourless lexical choices than Shakespeare made. However, given the staging, this works rather well as it doesn’t feed the production back into English antiquity. Instead we are watching “Europeans” in the 21st century.

After the first twenty minutes of the play – probably the first forty minutes of any other production; quite considerable cuts have been made – there is a “Scene Change”. Not much actual scenery gets moved, however, the audience is invited, should it wish, to go up onto the stage, get a coffee or wine, sit on the numerous sofas and watch the next bit at close quarters or on the big TVs.

After this, the atmosphere in the theatre completely changes. Suddenly it’s a whole lot more relaxed. The auditorium remains slightly lit, and the doors of the Barbican theatre are left open until the closing minutes (if you’ve not been there, rather than having aisles inside the theatre, the Barbican has them running outside the auditorium, with heavy wooden doors giving access to each end of every row. These doors normally automatically close in unison when the lights go down). There’s suddenly an unusual amount of agency. Given that the show runs for six hours pretty much without a break, this atmosphere of relaxation is enormously welcome, as is the sudden dispersal of the audience. All at once there is a lot more elbow and leg room (it’s pretty much exactly the atmosphere that I proposed would be the ideal conditions for viewing The Habit of Art, actually).

But these greatly improved viewing conditions are only part of the story. Thanks to having part of the audience on stage, there’s also now a vastly increased mise-en-scene. And it works brilliantly for Coriolanus. After all, the root of all Gaius Martius’s problems is his point-blank refusal to pander to the wishes of the people, or the people’s tribunes. That said, this relationship isn’t directly invoked here. The EU-fication of the look of the thing put everyone in suits. The people’s tribunes look like young, but professional negotiators. While to an extent this is a play about the power of the outraged masses, here it is mediated (aptly enough). We see the protesting people only on video screens. In fact, rather than a corporate hospitality area, what the staging most feels like is a newsroom – indeed, there are even sections where the Volciscan leader Aufidius is interviewed by a news anchor-woman.

Instead, what having the audience on stage here seems to stage is a professional class milling about both in newsrooms – watching election reports and breaking news or those clustered around television sets in cafés and bars, watching a public crisis unfold. It evokes a world from which “the people” are excluded, and yet are presented as the raison d’etre of the leadership. As such, it feels like a perfect evocation of modern politics. Perhaps this is a particularly British reading, mirroring concerns about the professionalisation of politics, and perhaps a wider concern about power being devolved to Brussels. Either way, as a way of opening up the dilemmas of Coriolanus, it is absolutely spot-on and totally engrossing, at the same time as presenting the most successfully “contemporary” Shakespeare I’ve ever seen, and offering an incredibly successful kind of “immersive” way of viewing.

Five minutes before Coriolanus meets his end, the red LED text scroller offers the message “5 Minutes until the death of Coriolanus”. It then counts down, until he is laid on a low trolley that runs on tracks between two glass partitions. The trolley is slammed home, and a camera takes a last, over-head shot of his prone body, which appears on the vast screen overhanging the stage, with the text scroller showing his name and the dates of his life. Then, without pause, Julius Caesar starts.

If Coriolanus worked well in this mediatised update of classical Rome, then Julius Caesar positively revelled in it. Where Coriolanus adapted the text around the need for on-stage plebeians to a certain extent, this Julius Caesar plays much more thoroughly with the idea of public address and who that public is. The private plotting scenes are carried on pretty much as standard, with suited conspirators meeting in what we imagine as anonymous corporate rooms downstage, while the audience continues to mill around behind them, or is seated in the auditorium before them. It is the funeral oration which is really transformed.

Joe Kelleher in his contribution to the Theatre &... series, Theatre & Politics, uses this section of Julius Caesar for a discussion of how theatre and politics interact – where the choice is to either stage the speech to the audience – thus theoretically achieving none of the impact it actually achieves, since the audience do not then take to the stage and riot – or else staging it by showing the orations being delivered to a largely crowd of costumed extras, thus placing the immediacy of the speech as some remove.

Watching it mostly on television from a sofa by the bar on the stage, it felt like I was seeing perhaps the best version possible. I could look over and see the “real” Mark Anthony hailing a “real” audience (though a mic with that echo/short reverb effect that invariably recalls the Nuremberg Rallies, and of which I shall never tire, no matter how much of a cliché it may be). Or I could watch the close up, being live-fed into the TV in front of me, along with dozens of my fellow audience members. It perfectly evokes the kind of speech that people would watch on television in a shared public space. Like watching 9/11 coverage in bars, or those American election night viewing parties, or Barack Obama’s inaugural speech. The sort of moments that have such evident public impact that people feel compelled to watch them together, as if for reassurance.

Even though it’s plainly a fantasy – when you’re on stage, you can see the lights, the auditorium, the actors, etc. – it’s one which, thanks, I think, to precisely these sorts of resonances, feels remarkably easy to become immersed in.

The “newsroom” type feel also makes a lot of sense of the “battle” scenes. Instead of showing anyone on stage actually doing any fighting, the lights flicker, two percussionists at either side of the stage make a fearsome racket, strobe lights flash in our eyes, while the performers run to and fro with clip boards much like one might expect panicked TV executives to as outside their studios conflict rages. While only on the video screens do we see footage of troop movements, tanks moving through bombed streets and the like. Again, a perfect evocation of modern warfare being something we only see on screen.

I ducked out for slightly more of Julius Caesar than I intended, something the makers of The Roman Tragedies both intend and legislate for. Nevertheless, my take on the whole is slightly incomplete as a result.

For all the immersive properties of the first two plays, there is a certain clinical edge to them. While one does take them in experientially, there is also always a kind of forensic interest winning out. One sees the plays anatomised. It certainly opens them up, and makes fascinating and suggestive parallels, but while you are considering their political import, you aren’t really feeling the emotional journeys of the characters. Perhaps this is also due in part to the less emotive, more matter-of-fact language you’re reading. There is no deliberate manipulation of your emotions. Indeed, the text scrollers announcing the death of a character five minutes before they die is at once amusing, kitsch and distancing. It gets a knowing laugh from the audience, and as such, makes the death itself feel somewhat less tragic and more of an historical inevitability. Which, of course, they are. You become dimly aware at the lengths other productions must have to go to in order to wring some sort of tragedy out of these tragedies.

That is, until Antony and Cleopatra.

Mark Antony has of course been introduced to us in Julius Caesar, and it’s enormously satisfying to the see the two plays run back-to-back, not least because it allows us to see the absolute contrast between his brilliant statesmanship in Rome and the tragic effects of his ruination in Egypt.

What’s especially great about this performance is that Mark Antony, played by Hans Kesting is in a wheelchair throughout. Apparently this wasn’t intentional. Last Friday, Kesting just broke his leg. However, the very fact of his being in a wheelchair really galvanises his portrayal. That it is a constant through both JC and A&C means that we don’t have to view it through the prism of any sort of intended naturalism, but instead, it’s just a very actual constraint continually being negotiated. As a metaphor for Mark Antony’s frustration and political hamperedness in the first and his, well, differently sourced political frustration in the second, it is hard to beat. He tears around the set, angrily unable to do exactly what he wants to do, with a savage energy jabbing at flunkeys with his crutches.

Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra (female, don’t worry, it’s not *that* radical a production) is also outstanding. The stripped down version of the play’s text and structure does away with a lot of the speechified contextualising and instead gets straight down to business. Antony, lounging around in Egypt, is told of his wife Fulvia’s death. He whizzes back to Rome and promptly marries his co-Triumvir Octavius’s sister Octavia (Octavius, strangely, is played by a woman, however – and while not distracting from the story if the thing is modernised, then sure, why not have female leaders? But it does make it difficult to know which “sister” is being talked about sometimes). Cleopatra sits at home and doesn’t take the news at all well, and then all hell breaks loose when Mark Antony does return to Egypt.

While the preceding four hours or so have continually felt fresh and inventive, this climax to the cycle feels by far the most detailed. Octavia is presented as a sexy, rich-looking opportunist, while Nietvelt’s Cleopatra is infinitely more desirable precisely because of the force of her personality. There are nice directorial touches: Egypt’s flagrant, bisexualised licentiousness; a Roman messenger stealing a kiss from the stricken Cleopatra; and, at the very close, an actual snake, filmed close-up as it is handled by Cleopatra, its image filling the large video screen to deeply unsettling effect.

But it is the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra that really keeps you nailed to your seat (for the last hour, the audience are all returned to their seats and the emptied stage feels newly sombre – you feel that the end is coming). The stripping away of their more flowery language, perversely, allows them to demonstrate the way in which they cannot live without each other more physically. Stripped of ornate words, there’s just this savage passion. At the same time, you can see why everyone in Rome despairs of Antony. It is sheer idiocy. He might well be in love, but that doesn’t make him any the less of an idiot for allowing it to rule his decisions. Antony and Cleopatra’s decisions once at war can clearly be seen as the actions of two people whose belief in their love makes them feel invulnerable to the whole world and to logic. It is a damning indictment. And yet – rarely for this play – you find yourself compelled by their belief. Wanting them to defy the history books and somehow win the day. And yet, being lovers, even their deaths are a slightly farcical joke. Cleopatra gets a servant to tell Antony that she’s dead just to discover his reaction. His reaction is, of course, suicide. And so, when the two lovers are reunited, it is with the bitter irony that Antony has but a few minutes to live. His death, like the others before him, is portrayed with the trolley and the bird’s-eye-view photo. However, Cleopatra’s devastated scream is the first thing that really brings home the pain that death has on others. Her eventual suicide, long minutes later, is utterly devastating. The whole thing felt absolutely electric.

It’s hard to sum up six hours worth of theatre experienced in such conditions and the end of Antony and Cleopatra was such that left me feeling like my heart had been run through a wringer, quite genuinely shaken. This is a quite extraordinary performance, running from brilliant intellectual insight to raw emotion. Some of the most outstanding Shakespeare I’ve ever seen.

The Habit of Art - National Theatre

There’s something rather charming about the way that Alan Bennett’s latest play appears to side-step that most boring of critical questions: “is it actually any good?”

As a play, no, I don’t suppose it is. It certainly doesn’t quite behave like a “proper play” should. Playwrights who spend months and years fine-tuning and re-drafting their work into a perfect shape may well find they have cause to feel irritable.

What Bennett’s done is have a go at writing a proper play. One which seeks to dramatise the twilight years of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, and then, having decided that his play has too many problems to solve, has thrown up a protective frame around it by showing this initial play being rehearsed.

Thus, any problems that the play-within-The Habit of Art (called “Caliban’s Day”) has, become points of interest and potential comedy. Rather than feeling awkward about lines that clunk or devices that don’t quite come off, we are licensed to find them funny or ridiculous.

On one hand, it feels a lot like cheating. On the other hand, it works rather well.

Having scrupulously avoided reading up on the thing before I saw it, I am pleased to discover that Bennett has fulsomely admitted that this is the case.

[Finding this review harder to write, than I’d like, it’s hugely tempting to stick in the same device.]

We get two plays for the price of one: Bennett’s Auden/Britten drama about two great artists – their temperaments, their artistry, their homosexuality and their attitudes to biography – alongside which, we are presented with a commentary on the creation of such biographical plays, bits of stuff about the National Theatre and the business of writing and acting in plays (though not, significantly, about their direction).

The effect of framing “Caliban’s Day” with The Habit of Art is to lift the potentially over-heavy original and allowing some much needed lightness to circulate around it. It possibly says something about Bennett’s limitations as a dramatist that he feels the need to do this in the most literal manner imaginable, but the net effect is not dissimilar to the way in which younger, less naturalistically concerned companies deploy a similar effect. There’s an extent to which one wishes that he hadn’t done it in a way that feels like it is disingenuously apologising for itself, but one is nevertheless ultimately grateful that the effect is there.

It also means that Bennett is free to send Caliban’s Day up a good deal more than he might otherwise have felt licensed to. Some of the funniest bits concern a latex W.H. Auden’s mask and sections in which the “writer” – a very un-Bennett-y fictional chap called “Neil”, intelligently played as sulky and earnest by the equally un-Bennett-y Elliot Levey – has seen fit to deliver some very silly dire poetry into the mouths of pieces of Auden’s furniture.

[Aha! Reading Bennett’s own piece on Habit, after finishing this, it’s rather satisfying to see: “The stylistic oddities in The Habit of Art – rhyming furniture, neighbourly wrinkles, and words and music comparing notes – may just be an attempt to smuggle something not altogether factual past the literalist probation officer who’s had me in his charge for longer than I like to think and who I would have hoped might have retired by now.” Excellent.]

There’s also a fair amount of enjoyable actors’ banter. Richard Griffiths playing “Fitz” playing Auden essentially reprises his role as Hector from The History Boys while Alex Jennings as “Henry” playing Benjamin Britten has a nicely bitter line about how the critics will probably just praise his “efficient performance” – which , curiously, is pretty much what I would have done, if he hadn’t drawn my attention to it. In fact, Jennings turns in three quite brilliant performances – one as the almost regally camp Henry, a totally different performance as the diffident Britten (although one wonders if it’s Jennings’s performance of Britten or Jennings’s performance of Henry’s performance of Britten), he also doubles as Henry standing in for another actor (who’s in a matinee Chekhov and so can’t attend rehearsal – although he turns up for a bit in suitably hilarious, incongruous heavy Russian peasant costume). But like Henry says, it’s all done so well, you barely notice it is being done at all.

You’ll notice I’ve said a lot more about the “how” than the “what” so far. Post-fact, it feels like there’s an awful lot more “how” to talk about. Actually, while you’re watching it, there’s an awful lot of “what” going on. Bennett’s play is, after all, a work of incredible condensation. Two major biographies, not to mention a fair amount of detail about the biographer Humphrey Carpenter himself (Adrian Scarborough, again perfect, apparently without effort) are being staged here. As such, there’s a lot of factual detail mixed in with the quotation-heavy, ‘what’s it all about, anyway?’ dialogue (C.S. Lewis’s “fucking elves” description of Tolkien’s fiction gets a (reattributed) look-in, as do lines by Coleridge, Spender and Larkin). If this were written by a younger playwright, one might call the thing richly allusive, or even, God forbid, postmodern, but because it’s by Alan Bennett, it doesn’t really strike you that way.

It’s also interesting, in common with The History Boys, that it feels like it is set at least a good thirty years before it’s meant to be set. Caliban’s Day, is a remarkably old-fashioned play. The way the fictional playwright, Neil, talks about it – in a manner sympathetic to Bennett’s own feelings on the matter, one supposes – doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard anyone of Levey’s age say about their practice.

But again, this is by-the-by and detail. The wider sweep of the play, its arguments about biography, the characters’ observations (both sets of characters, within and without the “play”) about the way that Art is created is interesting enough, if a little antique. More interesting is the biographical interest it generates around Bennett. Here he is, after all, having achieved National Treasure status, not least with a recent run of autobiographical books to rival Katie Price, making a piece in which two artists essentially articulate their desire not to be autobiographised. And into the bargain, foregrounding *a* playwright – if transparently not himself – and then subtly inviting us to see the comparisons between Bennett and Auden and Britten.

And certainly there’s something in it. The homosexuality is one element – Bennett having lately moved from his brilliant if coy “Perrier or Evian” rebuff to seeming comfortable admitting that he is in love with a man. His characters, thanks partly to Britain’s shameful history of persecution, seem less happy, while there is also an interesting comparison to be made between Bennett’s recent run of older-men-who-like-younger-boys plays and Britten’s criticism of himself for repeatedly indulging the same theme.

There’s also a return to Bennett’s perennial theme about access to the arts. This is certainly the subject of Neil’s Caliban’s Day, which takes its title via a muddled route through Auden’s The Sea and The Mirror, a poem which seeks to upset the tidiness of the Tempest’s rather pat ending, and in doing so creates a hyper-literate Caliban who addresses the audience. “Neil’s” “Caliban” is a rent-boy who has been ordered by W.H. Auden. He doesn’t do much except stand in for the Great Unwashed (ironic, given Auden seems far less given to cleanliness), along with the Beauty of Youth and various other clichés. More affecting is the discussion between stage manager (Frances de la Tour (the programme is in BLOCK CAPITALS – not helpful when trying to work out how many capitals her name should have) who is playing a perkier version of Mrs Lintott from The History Boys) and playwright – the director is absent from this rehearsal (Bennett obviously doesn’t think much of the mediation that a director interposes between writer and actor) – about the National Theatre itself in which Ronald Eyre is said to have suggested that on the unveiling of Denys Lasdun’s building that its three spaces should immediately have been converted into a pool hall, ice-rink and box arena until the perceived elitism of the building had worn off and only then would it be fit for plays. Counter to this suggestion is the argument that the continual run of play after play after play is what has gradually made this curious building fit for purpose. I’m not sure it’s an ironclad case, but it sounds very moving in the moment.

Overall, well, you come out having enjoyed some good jokes and been given an awful lot of things to consider, and experienced some fine, moving moments into the bargain. It’s a big old grab bag. You have to do quite a lot of the work yourself, while formally it seems to be far in advance of its contents’ conclusions. It feels like it would benefit from being staged before an auditorium of sofas, with the audience free to wander in and out and make themselves cups of tea. Then it could go on much longer.

I’d quite like to see the unedited, durational version – same set, same cast, but somewhere comfy like BAC. As it is, it feels like a compromise between someone halfway to believing plays don’t need to be proper and someone who insists that they should at least try to keep up appearances. There should be something that feels quite sophisticated about the approach, but it’s hard to resist the idea that this is simply an attempt on a play that has been sent into the world before its time.

Vùng Biên Gió'i – Laterna Magika

[Rather than being an attempt at a review – which would be crass since I don’t speak German, this is offered in the spirit of a “Walk-through”. It’s an idea for reviewing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, following my reading Tim Etchells’s excellent first novel The Broken World, about which I want to write much more soon. The set-up of the novel is its narrator writing a blog that talks its reader through the many levels of a computer game. At various points, the narrator’s own insights and thoughts penetrate his straightforward descriptions and advice on the game’s content. I guess that’s what the following sort of does too]

As I remarked in my prefatory note on Prague yesterday, Vùng Biên Gió'i marks the first time I’ve actually seen Rimini Protokoll in yer actual, proper, conventional theatre (Prague’s ugliest and most Communist). I was surprised by how strange I found it.

As you’ll probably know, if you’re a regular reader, Rimini Protokoll are an enormously exciting Swiss/German theatre company, who, I think I’m right in saying, are partially attached to the Hebbel Am Ufer theatres (?).

(There are three, collectively referred to as the HAU. Hebbel was a 19th? century playwright and the Ufer is the river next to which the original Hebbel theater, is situated. It’s also worth noting that HAU Zwei does excellent pizzas, has a great bar and is in the building that used to be house the Zodiak Free Arts Lab where, Tangerine Dream and Kluster formed/played a lot, while at the same time housing the Schaubühne theater prior to its1981 move to its current location in Lehniner Platz).

RP are exciting primarily because they’re so inventive and smart. They seem to be making new, fairly unprecedented work on an almost continual basis. There’s a great post by Ant Hampton on their show Heuschrecken here, and if you check HAU’s website they seem to have new shows going up there almost all the time (ok, not this month, but…). They make urgent, live, discursive/documentary theatre that feels like it is informed not only by global concerns, but that seems as if it started to achieve a global reach. You get a sense of what the theatre of globalisation might actually feel like.

I admit I’m a bit vague on the details, but the sense you get is of this tremendous energetic collective constantly arranging new pieces and firing them off to festivals and theatres. They also seem to get specifically commissioned a lot. I think I’m right in saying that Vùng Biên Gió'i was made especially for Pražský Divadelní Festival Německého Jazyka.

Its subject is Vietnamese immigrants living in Germany and the Czech Republic. And, in particular, those living in a town right on the border between the two countries. In common with many (well, all, in various forms) of RP’s other pieces, the show does not use “actors” or “performers”; instead, everyone who appears on stage is talking about themselves, or telling other stories from their own personal perspective.

The performance style is incredibly free and unforced. As I have previously discussed, this might be to do with the German language, but in this case, since only one of the speakers – a former German border guard – has German as a first language, it seems likely that it is much more to do with a very specific and evolved performance style – which at the same time is no style at all (all this feeds back to the very necessary discussion prompted by Chris Goode’s comments following my Everything Must Go review to which I have yet to respond). This “style” really doesn’t feel forced at all. The speakers are all radio-miked, so their tone of voice is entirely conversational. They are just people being themselves (big “just” there, I know, but that’s how it *feels*) explaining something to a large group of people in a room. It reminded me of what Nicholas Ridout says about stage fright in Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (not that I especially buy the notion, but…) he seems to suggest that it emanates from the anxiety of the pretence at trying to *be* someone else (that’s a really, really slender summary of a very long chapter, which I might have got wrong, but it’s one of the things the piece made me think about anyway).

Oddly, unlike with Der Prozess, I found it much easier to follow Vùng Biên Gió'i. Perhaps this is partially because I was mostly listening to other non-native German speakers, and so perhaps at least the older “cast” (?) members, were speaking at a speed I could hope to comprehend bit of, or perhaps it was the internationalism of a lot of the words. It sounds like an advertising slogan, but “Communism” seems to be pretty much the same in most languages.

The show was about 1hr 50 and covered an awful lot of ground. Each performer told their own particular tale of how they came to be in Germany or Czech, there were charming anecdotes, complex anecdotes, a lot of explanations about how their situation has changed over the years. How they make money selling knock-off Ostalgie souveniers or bootleg cigarettes. How these jobs can be more lucrative than anything they might get even after a university education (as a biologist, as one girl said?). These personal narratives and narrations – frequently illustrated with either live feed video projection or with the actual mobile crates from which they sell their Eastern Bloc combat fatigues – are frequently interrupted by a general question posed to all the participants: “What is your experience of bombs?”, “How did you travel?” etc. The questions are posed by LED text scroller. The answers to the first were accompanied by the performers throwing those little paper cap bombs at the floor.

Photos of the participants are also shown on the live-feed, while giant cut-out, blown-up photographs of various people they’re talking about and a very German-looking pine forest are brought out and rtanged on the stage.

What was particularly fascinating for me, a Briton sitting in Prague watching a German show about Vietnamese immigrants, was the sudden total perspective shift that came with the realisation that these weren’t necessarily “economic migrants” or “asylum seekers” as we seem to assume everyone foreign is in Britain. Many had come to East Germany or Czechoslovakia under favourable terms arranged between the DDR or the CSSR and the Vietnamese. When the East Germans were short of workers, they’d apparently advertise the fact and encourage Vietnamese workers to come over in the spirit of Socialist Brotherhood. (I’m probably taking massive chunks out of the nuance here, so if you’re interested in the subject, do, for God’s sake, do some reading round and don’t just quote me).

I hadn’t really taken on board that Vietnam’s communism had been sponsored by Moscow rather than Beijing, – hence the massive American resistance to it, compared with its failure to bat an eyelash at Cambodia’s China-sponsored Communist revolution-cum-genocide. It was quite strange to see the story of post-’89 eastern Europe told from the perspectives of those who had come from the last country to actually defeat Capitalist America in open warfare.

As a piece of theatre, the thing had that strange Rimini Protokoll sense that somehow, through careful dramaturgy and playful elements, there was a real flow of the ideas which coalesce to create an impression greater than the sum of the component parts. The extra elements, the singing, the staging, all combine to make this feel like the most explicitly political show I’ve yet seen by the company, who, while not making explicit comment on the macro situation, evoke it through the intersections of the micro-narratives. As something to watch, it felt maybe twenty minutes too long, although I’m more than prepared to accept that this may well be down to my having to concentrate about fifty times harder than anyone else in the auditorium to understand it. Because it’s so specific, it feels like a transfer here might be a little oddly superfluous, but then, as I say, the sheer culture shock of realising that Vietnamese immigrants to Eastern Europe, or the former Eastern Europe (some of the “performers” arrived post-’89) came from a very different tradition of migration than the one which the British press paints as a near uniform narrative for those coming into Britain.

Video clip: the other thing the show reminded me of was Jean Luc Godard’s film about French student Maoists, La Chinoise, which – I hadn’t realised until recently – is in fact based on Dostoyevsky’s novel Бесы.

Der Prozess - Divadlo na Vinohradech

The most striking thing about Andreas Kriegenburg’s production of Kafka’s The Trial is the audacity of the visual concept. The thick safety curtain rises on a gasp-making (and vertigo-inducing in this already too-high-up-for-comfort viewer) bird’s-eye-view of Josef K’s room. Suspended mid way between stage floor and ceiling, and viewed as if at the bottom of false-perspective walls which reach out meeting the stage proper at the bottom and disappearing into the flies at the top.

The room is circular and the walls stretch out in a way that none-too-subtly also suggests a vast eye. The walls are rendered in white/gray concrete while the floor of the room itself, two desks and numerous chairs are a warm wood, the floor is scattered with white pages. Three identically dressed performers (black four-button blazers, trousers, side-partings, moustaches, the essence of 20s MittelEuropean bank clerkery) are seated about the room looking perfectly relaxed and clattering away on typewriters – magically not falling off the vertical desks to shatter on the (real) floor below – in spite of the fact that they’re suspended at ninety degrees against gravity.

And then the floor of the circular room starts to revolve. Clockwise.

You can see the problem, yes? It’s all well and good if performers have got into position to appear seated or lying on the bed before the curtain rises. We’ve all seen this sort of false perspective done before on a fixed plane. But this one was turning.

As I might have mentioned a million times before, my German isn’t up to much, so I’m afraid this “review” is going to be a lot more describey than, y’know, usefully evaluative of the overall experience.

The performances are largely conducted in that very calm, conversational German, which friends have pointed out are largely a matter of the difference between the way that German and English are spoken as languages. German, to an English ear, sounds a lot calmer and more relaxed. Laconic even. English is as much a play of inflection, and pitch. It’s flightier. We squeak, bellow or emphasise where the Germans – by and large – seem to talk evenly and rationally (I generalise wildly, but bear with it). There also seems to be a difference in the way that German women don’t seem to be half a gender-differentiated from men in terms of speech patterns. British women, a (female) German friend suggested, are often a whole lot more expressive. British men less so, but probably still more than German women, apparently.

Gradually the piece is revealed to have eight performers (of mixed gender and age), all dressed in the same identical moustache, side-parting and suit, and all variously taking or narrating the role of Josef K (either solus or in chorus) as well as playing his interlocutors.

The conversational tone of their exchanges, without the advantage of comprehension, was such that I actually paid a lot more attention to the giant spinning floor at the centre of the eye. But, frankly, that was more than reward enough. As the room gradually rotated, performers not involved in the scene – or sometimes ones who were – (although “scene” makes the whole thing sound a lot more unit-ed than it felt) would clamber about on the turning landscape of desks and chairs, sometimes making a concession to looking like they were behaving as if the room were horizontal, sometimes simply trying to cross from one side to the other as if trapped in a Harold Lloyd nightmare. It’s hugely entertaining.

Sometimes the revolving floor also lowers – away from the eye/walls – to become a slowly spinning disk behind the main action. Performers can then indulge in walking on the spot round the edge, sitting normally at the desks or lying on the bed. However, the floor never stays flat for long, and soon it’s back up to vertical, or else halted at an angle, with the performers once more sliding and climbing their way across it.

That’s the first half anyway – during this, there was also a neat scene in which K. meets Fräulein Bürstner (who, in a rare concession to characterisation, has changed out of her suit – although retains the moustache and side parting). The scene is played with maybe only two or three Josef Ks (each physically removing their predecessor and insinuating themselves into his or her place), while the rest of the cast, laid with their heads under Bürstner’s skirts, rhythmically blowing into them, causing them to rise and fall throughout the scene.

The second half (well, after the interval, probably less than half the whole running time) sees the room floor set replaced with a stark white disk, with five black poles sticking out of it. For much of the section, five actors hang from these, monkey- or possum-like, gently swivelling round as the circle rotates, while in the foreground animated or laconic long monologues are delivered.

The whole effect is very beautiful. Even without understanding the language, it is evident that these are beautifully controlled, very precise actors. Wonderfully animate, and yet incredibly understated.

Quite how well it works as an adaptation of the book, it is hard to say – hell, my familiarity with that isn’t what it could be. The Czech review the next day suggested that while obviously accomplished, this (former-West) German take on Kafka’s classic (the production originated in Munich) might have been a bit remote and hypothetical for a nation that still feels the effect of having lived through the reality of Kafka’s fiction. It would be fascinating to see how it worked in the Barbican (pretty much a perfect space for it, I’d imagine – possibly a bit too wide/high, but I don’t imagine that would be an insurmountable problem. Perhaps reading the surtitles might distract from the sheer visual loveliness of it, and I can’t begin to comment on the text, but, while this was slow and almost too deliberate, the constant turning wheel made it feel almost Zen at times. I imagine that at least a section of the British public would find much to admire.

Pohlednice z Prahy

To Prague for Pražský Divadelní Festival Německého Jazyka (Prague Theatre Festival of German Language [theatre]). On the Thursday before flying out to Czech, I happened to be doing a Q&A session with the students of Central School of Speech and Drama’s Writing for Stage and Screen MA which is taught by my friend, the playwright John Donnelly. Along with questions about “being a critic”, John was quite keen that I talked to them about my experiences of mainland European theatre, and specifically how they relate to the role of the writer. I mention this only because it was one of those times when you discover what you know (or, at least, what you think you know – and I’m very much still learning) as you’re trying to explain it.

Granted, I probably spend a disproportionately large amount of time thinking about mainland European theatre and its relationship with Anglophone theatre (not having seen much Australian theatre, I’m just guessing from the plays I have seen produced over here, the ones I've read and production shots I’ve seen, that it doesn’t differ too wildly from our own or American traditions, at least in terms of staging and how plays are thought about (at least in the mainstream)), but nonetheless, I had a revelatory moment during the talk: It had never really stuck me before how much of what we might call mainstream subsidised theatre practice – at least in Germany (but also, seemingly, Poland and Czech) – is actually “text-based”.

Recently it feels as if that annoying (and, I’d argue, mostly spurious – cf. Field) division of work into “text-based” and “devised” has subsided a bit, at least as a bone-of-contention/source-of-conflict. On one hand, everyone (in Britain) now seems a bit happier with the idea of plurality, apart from the odd occasion when someone blunders in with a misplaced “proper” or “better”. On the other hand, it feels like much work in the past couple of years has served to make the debate seem either misplaced, or has usefully and critically changed assumptions about the terrain. Seeing Tim Crouch’s The Author (The Author! for heaven’s sake!) Upstairs in the Royal Court felt like the moment when we all happily crossed the Rubicon together and everyone, whatever prior (fictional) allegiances, could agree that this was A Jolly Good Thing.

(Another example: the following night, after Slung Low’s They Only Come At Night: Visions, which I was reviewing for Time Out, I was chatting to Jerry Killick who told me he was currently working with Forced Entertainment on devising their new show. I confessed to being very surprised by the word “devising”, since recently I’ve been thinking more and more of Forced Ents’s work as essentially written work – and more likely than not, work written by Tim Etchells. I’ve no idea if this is any more the case for Spectacular or Void Story, but it was a useful reminder of how little can necessarily be assumed just by watching a thing. It’s more the way in which things get presented and promoted that leads to assumptions.)

What’s actually different is the perception of pre-eminence of The Playwright in Britain. “I’ve been to see the new Simon Stephens”, or “the new Tim Crouch”, or “am looking forward to the new Alan Bennett”. “I’ve been disparaging the new David Hare”. It pretty much conjugates itself. The only two irregular verbs, so to speak, are Katie Mitchell and Rupert Goold. Perhaps in the case of really, really established classics (Shakespeare and Chekhov only?), it’s more likely to be “Simon Russell-Beale’s Hamlet”, or “David Tennant’s Hamlet”, or “Kenneth Branagh’s Ivanov”. Did anyone care who’d directed them?

What I’m trying to pin down, very circularly indeed, is the way that German theatre seems to function – at least to my eyes.

Essentially, it seems to be far more likely that one will be talking about the director of the piece then either the writer or a star actor (that said, I do seem to end up seeing more Regietheater than New Writing at festivals for some reason). But this shouldn’t obscure the fact that their theatre is very “text-based”. That is to say, the director – whatever they’re doing with the design of the production – seem still to work from the text up. There’ll likely be weeks of discussions between the director and actors about the text. That this can end up with productions of texts that look to our (I would still argue) more conservative eyes (ok, let’s not say “conservative”, let’s say “differently acclimatised eyes”) that look like they’re miles beyond the strangest works of the “upstream”. At the same time, this version of working with the text can include some cutting, perhaps even of new plays. But then this seems to be true in Britain’s New Writing culture too.

The best two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the disparities between the printed texts of Alexandra Woods’s Unbroken, directed by Natalie Abrahami at the Gate and Joel Horwood’s Food, presented by the Imaginary Body at the Traverse in 2006. With the latter, it was a case of a writer collaborating with a devising company and the script being worked through well past the point when a draft had been sent to Nick Hern. In the former case, it *felt* (and this is nothing but a guess) like a director had taken a red pen to the lines she didn’t fancy. So, even within our “Writers’ Theatre” perhaps it’s not so radically different on some levels.

One of the things that was fascinating for me in the case of the first show I saw in Prague – Andreas Kriegenburg’s Der Prozess (Kriegenburg being the director, natürlich) – was that the publicity material reads:

1.11. So, 19:00 | Weinberger Theater | ERÖFFNUNG
F. Kafka: DER PROZESS
Münchner Kammerspiele | Regie: Andreas Kriegenburg

All pretty self explanatory. The top line is pretty much unavoidable, and the bottom line makes perfect sense in terms of billing given that this is a festival of German theatre in Prague, and the way that German theatres operate – i.e. as buildings that can be identified as artistic endeavours – i.e. they seem to tend to go one step beyond an “artistic policy” and into dramaturged seasons of premieres (although these premieres also run alongside the theatre’s repertoire – which, thanks to a standing repertory company, can often been a show that was premiered over ten years ago – shown maybe once every month/few months).

So: dates, times and place; fine.

Point of origin and directing credit; fine.

But look at the author credit. It’s not “Franz Kafka’s The Trial” (cf. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”). It’s presented like a writer credit. Now, my German’s not great (read: non-existent), but even I’d be willing to swear that there’s no way they staged the whole 200+ page novel in two and a half hours. There was certainly a sense that they were, in part, playing with the edited text of the novel, there were various “he said”s and “she said”s, but obviously it had been cut, it’s a work of adaptation. But no writer credit, no dramaturg credited and no suggestion of “devised with the ensemble” – nor much of a feeling of that later process either, although, as I suggest above, I’m not convinced spectators are necessarily the best judges of that.

Similarly, the next night, Rimini Protokoll’s Vùng Biên Gió'i - Regie: Stefan Kaegi. Sure. No problem. Except: everyone on stage was speaking pretty much solidly through the show’s one hour fifty minute duration. And what they were saying was definitely scripted, because there were pre-prepared surtitles.

I guess this element of scripted-ness surprised me slightly, as I’ve always tended to think of Rimini Protokoll as a company who deal very much in Liveness. In actual fact, I suppose this actually varies considerably from show to show. My first encounter with them (or at least with Stefan Kaegi’s work) in Soko Sao Paulo did actually have non-actors speaking prepared bits of text, albeit ones of which I think they’d at least written the first draft themselves. The point was this was real people telling their own stories in their own words. The dramaturg’s hand (postdramaturg?) was not much in evidence (although, given that the non-actors were speaking in German or Portuguese, I couldn’t swear to it).

In Call-Cutta in a Box I remember it was the scripted element of an apparently “live” encounter with a call centre worker in India (via first Skype phone and then web cam), which caused my colleagues from FIT Mobile Lab most problems – in a way not dissimilar to the discussions about agency occasioned by Internal in Edinburgh this year.

But, on the whole, Rimini Protokoll = Live, I reckoned. Or at any rate, not “authored”. In actual fact, Vùng Biên Gió'i was the first time I’d seen the company in an actual theatre building. Nevertheless, all the central elements were still in place: the people were all precisely who they said they were and the stories they were telling were their own. As such, it surprised me even more to imagine that the whole traffic of the stage would be written down somewhere – possibly with lighting cues scrawled all over it just like a LX copy of something by George Bernard Shaw or David Hare would have – and yet, no writer was credited. Perhaps this is because “Regie: Stefan Kaegi” covers the whole creation of the work.

While I was in Prague, I also happened to watch a video of Michael Thalheimer’s staging of Gerhard Hauptmann’s play Ratten at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater. It was perhaps this that made me appreciate more than anything else the direction in which my thoughts had been headed concerning the way in which we perceive German/“European” theatre “over here”.

The play is a 1912 straightforward tale of a childless underclass couple who try to buy a baby of a pregnant Polish prostitute. I imagine it being something like a cross between Gorki’s Lower Depths and maybe a cheerless Shaw or Granville-Barker, full of social comment and miserable characters. The point being, it’s an old-fashioned, well-made play. Now go look at that YouTube clip. It’s basically a modern dress production of an old fashioned play. I’m afraid I don’t know the original script at all, so I couldn’t tell you if the text has been cut, mucked about with, or modernised, but it was my impression that it hadn’t been. And yet, it’s Olaf Altmann’s set that really changes things. You can’t get a real sense of it from the clip, but what the letterbox format of the set essentially does is ensure that no performer can stand up straight throughout the show. In one sense it’s *just* a staging of a play. And, on a really, really basic level, you can see precisely how imposing such a metaphorical space on the actors absolutely *is* “serving the text”. And yet, it’s absolutely *not* like any approach I’ve ever seen here in Britain.

So, to conclude very briefly, having stalled this piece for over a week and written parts of it into other exchanges elsewhere now – not least my most recent Guardian blog (well, the original draft anyway), I think I’m still trying to figure out how/why it is the mainland European theatre *feels* different to British theatre, even when it often appears to be springing from the same starting point. I’m now thinking a lot more about the dramaturgical application of design. The way design is used as an extra character or comment on the piece. This might well bleed into how I write about British theatre in the interim. Which will probably get on everyone’s tits. Ok, I’m just burbling now. Time to post.

Any useful questions to refocus/repoint this piece gratefully received.

Oh, and here's a thing:

A question of attribution

You might already have read my Guardian blog this week, but after a bit of hmming and ha-ing, I thought I’d post my first draft here, since I think it is significantly different enough to the final piece to be of additional interest. If you have read the original, I hope the new-to-you bits putting it in a wider European context justify a re-read enough to forgive the bits that are just directly repeated.

Watching lots of German theatre last week, I was also struck by how culturally conditioned our assumptions might be. In Britain, it seems fair to say that the idea of a “writers’ theatre” prevails – if only subconsciously. That is to say, if a critic is reviewing a new play then they will generally tend to credit most of the action on the stage to the writer. The director will have been “serving the text”. Of course, many British writers collaborate in this process, offering scripts containing descriptions of the room or rooms in which the play is set and even tones of voice in which a character delivers a line, or to whom. Thus, critics needing to apportion responsibility seem to lean toward painting the director as someone who has simply moved the actors around within a world created by the writer.

A particularly striking example comes from a few years ago, when Telegraph critic Charles Spencer reviewed Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water). It’s a particularly personal attack on Ravenhill, and centres on Spencer’s distaste at a scene in which four friends of a coma victim sexually violate her. Except, Mark didn’t write that scene. The production was created by the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly and they just happened to stick in this movement sequence in between two written scenes. So, the direction of Spencer’s bile was entirely misaimed.

In the opposite vein, consider the adulation and opprobrium heaped in equal measure on the shoulders of Katie Mitchell or Rupert Goold. As soon as either of them stage a play, it often feels as if the play or writer becomes nigh-on invisible; a mere provider of lines around which these directors weave their illuminating/infuriating (delete according to taste) spells.

At the same time, designers seem to get even shorter shrift. Something I am frequently struck by in German theatre is the sheer imagination of their stagings, and to give them their due, the credit for “Bühne” is right next to “Regie”. But surely there are similar examples in British theatre – after ten years in the West End and extensive touring, pretty much everyone knows the house that falls to pieces at the end of Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls, but who could name the designer (without using Google)? Or: who created the chilling Stalinist basement that gave Goold’s Macbeth so much of its power?

I’ve already written about the short shrift actors often seem to get (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/sep/30/how-to-describe-great-acting) from critics, but even here, how do we know where the performance comes from? Has a director spent weeks creating genius in intense collaboration, or, worse, is a dreadful performance from an actor precisely because they have followed to the letter a set of utterly wrong-headed directions?

But then, beyond this, how much of our enjoyment has been subliminally created by barely perceptible shifts in light, or by sound effects or compositions that complement the action on the stage?

In short, while it feels as if culturally we might finally be moving away from anxieties about “directors’” vs. “writers’” theatre (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2007/mar/15/ourplaywrightsshouldbewrit), who actually did what still seems to be an impenetrable mystery from this side of the footlights.

Pains of Youth - National Theatre

[Written for CultureWars]

If we didn’t know so much about her working methods, it’d be tempting to suggest that in the spirit of some impish joke, Nick Hytner actually employs two directors called Katie Mitchell. One does stuff with video cameras and sound effects and producing live video images, the other committed to a kind of Stanislavskian naturalism to the point of near absurdity.

It’s this second version that the NT has hired to direct Austrian Ferdinand Bruckner's 1923 play Krankheit die Jungen. Set in the living room/lobby of a student flat, the piece deals with a set of (mostly) youngish medical students as they hang out, falling in and out of love and bed with one another. Kind of like an accelerated, downbeat, philosophised version of Friends, if you will.

Naturalism to this extent almost feels like some sort of perversion. It feels fetishistic, almost hysterical. In this respect, it rather suits the post-Freud feverish atmosphere that the students inhabit. But that’s about the only respect. The only departure from this studied realism is the completely theatrical scene changes. These are performed (in all senses of the word) by the members of the cast not involved in the interrupted scene entering in sharp black designer suits, the women in notably high heels for stand-in stage managers, and variously they remove items not wanted for the next scene into clinical-looking plastic bags, or solicitously insert a smoking half-cigarette into the waiting hand of an actor. Drinks are poured with a conjuror’s flourish and then they depart, like chic Scene of Crime Officers from the fashion police.

These scene changes at least feel like a clever joke on Katie Mitchell’s part against herself; as if slyly acknowledging that naturalism of this order is ludicrous. But the rest of the time, the business of studiously being “in the room”, is taken deadly seriously. So much so, that you gradually notice that no one in real life actually concentrates that hard on appearing to be where they actually are. It’s very strange and very disconcerting. It’s almost like a performance of a performance of performing. It’s not that it isn’t “good”, whatever that means, it just feels deeply weird, like something that’s ordinarily so conventional is trying extra hard to problematise itself. Not that I know Mitchell’s mind, but I’d be willing to suggest, this isn’t necessarily her intention.

It’s interesting that what I ended up watching here was the way that the play was done. In part, I’d put it down to the (ironically) V-effekt of its naturalism, but also to the way in which the play is constructed. First staged in 1926 in Vienna (precisely where and when the play is also set - although the programme is rather confusing on this point) you get the impression that while the play itself isn’t especially opaque about its concerns, they would have actually fed much more specifically into the Austrian national imagination of the time. Perhaps this is also a condition of Mitchell’s staging, combined with a nervously copious context-filled programme, offering essays on virtually every conceivable aspect of the period, from the origins of the dances the girls do to the post-Austro-Hungarian empire atmosphere of inter-war Vienna. There’s also the usual stuff about Hitler and Freud, although with perhaps a little too much hindsight-based emphasis on the former given the year and country of the play (yes, Hitler might have been born in Austria, but he’d buggered off to Munich in 1913, was only just out of prison and leading a very minority German party in 1926).

So, what do all these factors leave you watching? Well, it’s an engrossing two and a half hours (inc. interval). The travails of the students' love lives are interesting enough. But, although I’m wary of using the words “cold” or “clinical”, it does feel here like the interest is at something of a remove. This isn’t gutsy, heart-wrenching stuff, but at the same time, the socio-psychological musings of the students now feel more like fascinating items of historical interest rather than plausible designs for living. You find what’s happening engrossing, but given the turns the plot takes, it feels like there’s a crueller, more involved production possible. However, Mitchell’s version (or perhaps it’s partly also Martin Crimp’s translation) opts for “detached”. It’s cool and spiky, but not in the least bit moving. As such, it’s hard to really rave about it, even though the cleverness, precision and techniques are beautiful.

The Power of Yes - National Theatre

[Written for CultureWars]

“This isn’t a play” says “David Hare” at the start of his latest “play” The Power of Yes. That’s alright, David, neither were Berlin or Via Dolorosa. And, frankly, if Gethsemane and The Vertical Hour were anything to go by, we should all be rather grateful.

At a later point, one of Hare’s “characters” recalls Andy Warhol’s suggestion that people continue to have sex because it reminds them that sex used to be good. Perhaps this is why the National Theatre keep on staging whatever notebook David Hare happens to hand them.

The Power of Yes is a piece of verbatim theatre. David Hare went out with a dictaphone, or video-camera, or whatever, and interviewed a load of people about the recent financial crisis and then edited the results into an hour and fifty minutes of the bits he thought were interesting and shaped them into a kind of narrative, sometimes, within the process, commenting on this fact to the people he was talking to.

Unusually for this sort of interview-based (as opposed to transcript-based) verbatim theatre, Hare himself is represented on stage (sadly not by Alan Bennett in a wig). Actually, Anthony Calf’s performance of David Hare is a remarkably good one. There’s even the neat visual gag that he’s wearing exactly the clothes Hare wore on exactly the same stage when performing Berlin. Or perhaps Hare’s only got one set of clothes. But, yes, Calf is so convincing that by about halfway through you’ve almost forgotten it isn’t him who’s irritating the hell out of you, but an uncanny impression of the person who is.

And, to give Hare his due, I think he knows as much and plays with it. The structure of the piece – its subtitle is “A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis” (self-dramatist might be closer the mark, but I digress) – foregrounds his quest for knowledge. In this respect, the piece is almost identical to Berlin. It starts with Hare not getting something, and ends with him concluding that it’s about the death of an idea. I’m looking forward to the piece where he goes about trying to comprehend astrophysics and concludes it’s all about the death of an idea. I mean, really, surely there are hundreds of things David Hare doesn’t understand.

The problem is, David Hare really doesn’t get it. And, because of the way the piece functions, that’s our problem; because he’s up there asking all the questions, effectively on our behalf. And either he thinks we really are very stupid indeed, or he is radically out of touch with the real world. As such, the first half of the play virtually turns into a lecture. At several points a blackboard is even wheeled out for Christ’s sake. Normally, as a critic, it feels slightly silly or ostentatious to have a notepad parked on one’s lap. Here it felt like everyone in the audience ought to be issued with one.

It turns out that the script isn’t by any means the biggest problem. The beginning is indeed rather droll and the rest of the structure is perfectly sound, if pretty much the most obvious way of doing presenting the story. The material, of course, necessarily depends on the acuity or sense of humour of the interviewee. Some are incisive, witty and make good jokes. Lots of others talk in dead language and platitudes and are probably made several degrees more interesting just by dint of being played by actors.

Visually, however – directorially – the piece swings between complete inertia, visual sign-posting of such ludicrous literalism that it’s hard not to conclude it is intended as a joke and some of the worst theatrical kleptomania I’ve ever seen. There’s one sequence practically lifted wholesale out of Complicite’s A Disappearing Number, but without either the wit or the warmth. But mostly it’s just men in suits standing around. Sometimes there’s a woman in a suit. Very occasionally there’s a nice stage-picture, and the stage does have an admirably shiny black floor. But that’s about it. The acting is pretty good.

Given how pressing the issues are, it is strange how uninteresting …Yes manages to make them. In a way, it feels like it’s because the whole thing is mediated through “Hare” – this fictional construct of an actual playwright. It’s not about the financial crisis, it’s about his interest in it. And it feels like that’s the thing we should be interested in. It’s about him feeling for us, taking the sins of capitalism onto his Christ-like shoulders and bearing them for us. He gets jolly cross on our behalf, to absolutely no real effect. Perhaps his impotence is also our impotence.

Elsewhere, some of his clever-clever self-reflexivity rebounds rather badly on him. At one point close to the start, one of his interviewees suggests that he’s got a tough job in trying to dramatise the financial crisis, and isn’t it going to be impossible to stage the stock market. I don’t think I’m going too far to suggest that the knowing laughter this elicited was two-fold. One, the intended: “Oh, ha ha, yes, very good, how on earth would one stage the stock market? Ha ha!” and, Two: those who had recently enjoyed Enron and seen an imaginative writer and director do just that laughing at the dramatic irony. Ha ha, indeed.

At another point, Hare is pursuing the arrogance of merchant bankers in a conversation with a (former?) Financial Times journalist. The journalist (here played by Claire Price) asks him “but don’t you also ignore your critics” (or words to that effect), Hare’s response is quite remarkable rage concluding “writing plays doesn’t ruin people’s lives” (again, I’m paraphrasing, the NT really should give away script-programmes rather than charging £8.99 for copies of the text). Actually, the FT journalist seems to have precisely skewered the massive truck-sized hole in Hare’s project. He seems to want to preach some sort of left-ish message, I guess, but the means he’s using are entirely right-wing. Everything on the stage is normative. By chasing a news agenda, he’s already so buried in the system, that he can’t even see it around him. He, like these merchant bankers he so despises, suffers from colossal arrogance and flatly refuses to recognise it.

There’s no doubt that Hare sets himself up for this sort of criticism. Indeed, viewed optimistically, the play’s a piece of self-reproach as much as anything. Having himself portrayed on stage as well as being responsible for the script, does make writing about the piece feel unduly personal. I have nothing against the actual David Hare, who I’m sure is charming and generous, but here he does present himself in a deeply unflattering, and central, spotlight. Less forgivable is just how dull the play is to watch. Sure there are bits of narrative interest, and the stuff with billionaire financier George Soros, charismatically rendered by Bruce Myers, is fascinating. The piece concludes with a rather beautifully rendered dinner between the two in an anonymous skyscraper looking out over the twinkling lights of the financial centre of some major world city or other. While failing to land any particular punch, it does feel oddly, fittingly Faustian. Here we are with David Hare, his concerns, and a multi-billionaire enjoying a glass of mineral water. Lovely. How polite. How informative.

Beyond the Frontline - The Lowry, Salford

This is still in progress, but, well you can see what I've written so far if you like... [sorry it's still unedited and rambly]

Oh, and currently contains spoilers too...

On one level, the most impressive thing about Beyond the Frontline is its sheer scale. Essentially it’s a promenade, avant garde, requiem to the British Army with a cast of about 150. Intriguing, no?

The actual form of the piece is quite simple. The audience is led into a field tent nestled by the side of Salford’s imposing Lowry centre. In the dark, in driving rain, the nervous, grim expressions on the soldiers’ faces make for an unnervingly realistic atmosphere of tension. We are divided into numbered chairs and greeted by the commanding officer (Oliver Senton). In a rather neatly crafted speech he informs us of our role as inspectors, cleverly blurring the theatrical rules into briefing and backstory – the British Army deployed on our own streets as a counter-insurgency force.

Because Beyond the Frontline isn’t concerned about the rights and/or wrongs of any specific conflict, who “the enemy” are is left deliberately unclear (al Qaeda? The Continuity IRA? The Scottish?). While this is helpful to the show’s general theory – “in a civilised society when men and women lose their lives in the course of their duty, society should take a moment to pay tribute” – it suspends the action in a kind of moral void. Perhaps reflective of the state of soldiering. We don’t get to worry about the rights and wrongs of the conflict, only that the soldier’s duty is to carry out work that their country has asked them to do.

The format of the show is essentially another variation on the headphones and boxes formats of earlier shows Last Seen and Helium. Following the briefing, the audience is divided into four groups and each taken out into the plaza in front of the Lowry, where officers lecture us on the principles of this sort of military presence. We are shown checkpoints. People passing through the square have their papers checked by sentries, dozens of soldiers line the rooftops around the square, and can be seen in the windows of the theatre and outlet mall opposite. Searchlights sweep the rainswept paving. It’s all enjoyably apocalyptic and totalitarian, contrasting with the clipped but friendly, urbane tone of the officers. Suddenly there’s a massive explosion at the far end of the square. Our headsets crackle into life as suddenly dozens more soldiers are running across the square; there is gunfire; confusion; we hear orders being issued as we are rushed toward a set of nearby trucks.

Inside each truck is the next part of the show – essentially four dramatic monologues. Each audience only sees one monologue as part of their experience of the hour-long piece, however. Having nothing better to do in Salford, I went round all three of the evening’s performances (shows start at 7.00, 8.15 and 9.30) and managed to catch three of the four (apologies to Dom Fitch and John Hunter). It’d be helpful if these monologues had names (or if the programme made the credits a bit clearer – bloody ensemble efforts). Each monologue is an entirely separate commission from a different writer. As a result each is wildly different, and makes for a completely unique middle of the show, which in turn impacts on how one experiences the final segment.

Comparisons between the three pieces were fascinating. How each negotiated its place within the truck, how they differed in terms of style and content, and indeed in performance.

Joel Horwood’s piece, for example, cleverly morphed from being us, the audience, really in the back of the truck with a solider into a hallucinatory death rattle. Chris Thorpe’s piece, by contrast, made no such concessions to setting – immediately, once we were in the truck, we were in a room with Chris Thorpe, a upturned spotlight and a microphone.

Of the three I saw, the first – sat in a leaking truck, following driving rain in the square – suffered slightly for being seen with fifteen-odd sixth-formers who, while perfectly amenable, were also catching one another’s eyes and looking slightly self-conscious and disconcerted. It also sat mid-way between the other two pieces, neither naturalistic or totally frame-bursting. Instead, Dave Toole plays a kind of fragmentary ghost (by Matthew David Scott). An echo in the back of the truck. Perhaps from a previous tour of duty. His reflections intercut with static, crackle and snippets of dialogue through our headphones as this ghost’s final moments play out in a kind of feedback loop. It’s a grimly effective little piece, but perhaps slightly too fractured and clever to achieve either a real punch or a sense of intellectual vertigo. Which is precisely what the other two do, respectively.

Horwood’s piece is, in many ways, typical of his writing: touching recollections of adolescence, some excellent jokes, and a real emotional kick at the end. Simple but effective. It also had some new stuff: a disconcerting Donnie Darko-like imaginary best friend called Roof-Rack, who seemed to have horns and fur and some beautiful linked images of death and blood soaking into snow, or bandages. It also has an outstanding performance from Daniel Rigby who flips from friendly, chatty squaddie to Welsh youngster and back again...

Chris Thorpe’s text, by contrast, is a taut, angular bit of writing that hurtles at psychotic speed with chippy intensity from a near-Marxist-theory version of why bread is made in factories to the emotional breakdown of someone who designed computer software to make it easier for soldiers to kill people. Thorpe’s performance couples a flat accent and blunt mateyness to a piercing, unblinking stare and machine-gun delivery in the glare of stark white lighting. While it’s not exactly ‘moving’ in the sentimental sense of the word, it is perhaps all the more horrifying for its relentless pursuit of logic.

Money - Shunt

This is also nearly finished, but I need to put this post up now so I can link to my Beyond the Frontline review for a Guardian blog.

The Author - Royal Court

[sorry it's late. Still needs a bit of an edit, but here goes...]

Forgive the preamble. The Author is one of those pieces of theatre that really forces the critic to think about the purpose of their review. Put simply, I went in with very little information about the form or content of The Author. That seemed pretty much the perfect way of experiencing it. The Author is definitely worth seeing. Go and see it. Don’t read any more until you have seen it.

But then there’s the people who won’t get to see it. And the people who have seen it and want to read about it. There’s a sense that one should write both a spoiler-free review and then one in which the contents of the play and what (and how) they mean are discussed. Because of the way in which The Author is constructed, discussing what it says in anything beyond generalities will alter the way in which a person experiences it saying them.

Ok, so we can’t make theatre in a void. As Ian Shuttleworth discusses in a recent Theatre Record editorial, normal critics just need to make a judgement call, and hope it doesn’t upset the apple cart too much. Given the option, it feels like it would be good if there was also space for more in-depth reviews which don’t have to strain not to let the cat out of the bag and consequently can discuss what’s in the play and what that means.

So, again, if you’re going to see The Author, you’ll have a different experience of it if you carry on reading now.

One of the most fascinating things about The Author is precisely this sort of choice. The idea of choice is also central to the way in which it operates. When you enter the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs to take your seat (unallocated: again, choices), you look at the two banks of seating arranged in traverse, and then you notice that there’s no space between them. There is either no stage or it is all stage. What we’ll be watching is each other. Even just as an arrangement it feels uncanny. Because we’ve been here before we know the seats and seeing them just facing each other, implacable, is somehow oddly disconcerting. It’s funny, of course, but also a little unsettling. There’s something about the proximity of the two front rows, as well. Perhaps even a little too close together.

After a deliberately long period of pre-show seatedness, performer Adrian Howells, sat with us in the audience, starts to talk loudly to the (in this case) woman next to him. He is playing an audience member called Adrian. Good natured banter about how much he loves the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs ensues. At this point, depending on how much attention you paid to the programme or posters, you might or might not know how many other people in the audience are also performers. If you know what Tim Crouch, the author of The Author looks like, and know he is also in The Author, you might spend time amusing yourself watching the author instead of watching The Author.

After a while, Adrian stops talking. There is a pause. A very long silence, in fact. The “house lights” go down so that we, the audience, are the only thing that’s lit. Music plays.

The cessation of performance, the change of lighting to focus our attention on, well, on the performance area, which is also where we are sitting, means that we have our attention drawn – as audience members – to one another. Most people in the audience have come as couples, and so turn to each other and talk quietly. There’s a pleasant if bemused atmosphere. What was interesting to me was that while the piece was playing a game with expectation, revelling in its liveness, in the fact that anyone in the audience could do anything, there was also a printed script in the programme. At any stage, one could open it up to find out what’s going to happen next. Of course, in theory, this is an option for any play at the Court. But normally one’s sat in darkness. You’d have to squint. It’d feel rude to the actors to look at the script instead of watching them. One is normally coaxed into the suspension of disbelief.

Here, there’s a very interesting game being played with suspension of disbelief – with what’s “real”. Tim Crouch really is real. He really is the author of The Author. He is also the next person to speak. He talks about being led to a flotation tank by an attractive young woman. His description of her goes slightly too far. He asks us if it’s ok for him to continue. We’re always in The Royal Court Theatre Upstairs with him, but he’s talking about being somewhere else. We’re not sure that “real” Tim Crouch would think like this about a young woman leading him to a flotation tank. So, oddly, it becomes fine for him to continue. Because we’re reassured that he’s acting. Or performing. The person he says he is (who he actually is), isn’t “him”. At least we hope not.

Gradually two more performers are revealed and begin to talk to us about their experiences relating to a play they’d been in (or, in Adrian’s case, seen) written by Tim Crouch, and performed in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court. Tim is also talking to us about this play that he wrote and directed. The play of which he was The Author. This play that it’s claimed Tim wrote – if you know his back catalogue, or the recent production history of the Theatre Upstairs, then you’ll know it’s a made-up play – is a pointedly satirical conflation of several Royal Court Upstairs shows. It’s about father-daughter sexual abuse. Adrian talks about how many dead babies he’s seen in the Theatre Upstairs.

Tim and the actors talk about the (unnamed) play (“The title of the play referred to the girl in it, I suppose. It was her face on the poster, in the brochure – looking dreadful!!” – Adrian). About the subject: war, sexual abuse, violence; about their rehearsal process; about how they watched videos of soldiers raping women; about how they watched videos of beheadings; about how they visited the country where the play was set and met people they thought were like the characters in the play; about how they copied these people’s physicality; about how Esther was “lucky enough” to meet a 17-year-old girl who had been raped by her father – “Just like her character”.

Tim talks about how the play was “a poem, really”, he talks about how the violence in the play is a metaphor, but also an examination of precisely the sort of violence that exists in the world. How what they presented on stage was nothing compared to some of the things they’d seen in their research.

Even knowing that the play they were talking about is fictional, you know that the genre absolutely isn’t. You can think of the countless examples. Your mind returns again and again to Blasted, to the ultraviolence of “In-Yer-Face” theatre. You remember reading all those arguments about how the writers were exploring society’s violence in their plays in Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre. If you were there the night I was there, you can watch Aleks spotting the references and smiling. You can recognise the absolutely real descriptions of research trips abroad, of actors researching their parts, of writers researching their plays, of actors talking to people who have suffered; and you can recognise yourself as an audience member watching these shows.

While doing no research beyond the theatre, The Author manages to talk eloquently about violence in the real world and the difficulty of making art about it. About the ethical questions that making art that examines violence raises. About the ethics of watching, consuming, art about violence. It actually takes a pretty stern, unequivocal, ethical stance. It finds it wrong. It makes us deeply uncomfortable that an actor and a writer will *interrogate* a rape victim in the service of their art. There’s an interesting performance style at play here. The way Crouch talks often sounds more like liturgy than in-the-moment psychological realism. On the other hand, the “scene” in which he and the actor Vic “interrogate” “Karen” his chilling precisely because of the cold aggression being pretended behind Crouch’s eyes.

Given the final two events which the narrative of The Author describes, it would be easy to conclude that Crouch’s point is that if reasonable, concerned, “nice” people spend enough time looking into violence, researching violence and sexual violence, looking at it, it will eventually make them psychotic. I think Crouch is actually more interested in making us think about the ethical implications of this sort of research-based “poetry” than simply slamming it. In a way, the play even questions the ideas of “authenticity”, and appears to make an interesting case against them. As such it constitutes a real line-in-the-sand moment for theatre. Of course real companies and practitioners will point out that they would be, are, more careful than these fictional counterparts; but Crouch’s challenge still stands. Is “behaving well” enough? I’m not sure I feel as unequivocal on the point as Crouch does, but having seen the play, it’s a position that suddenly feels much harder to justify.

That the Royal Court has commissioned and housed this J’Accuse against itself adds a fascinating extra dimension. It’s worth noting in passing that the script insists “T]he Author is set in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre – even when it’s performed elsewhere.” Then, later “The names of the characters in this text are the names of the actors playing them for the Royal Court premiere. If the actors change, the character names change accordingly, with the exception of the author, whose character’s name should always be Tim Crouch” and then at the bottom “The printed text may differ slightly from the play as performed.” It feels as if these elements are almost strangely contradictory, although I would be fascinated to see the piece performed by a wholly new cast in a totally different building, but can’t help feeling that although the play itself is very strong, the immediate and obvious resonances of its site-specificity would be lost. It would also be interesting to see what the effect of having “Adrian”’s part played by an actual audience member fitted with an earpiece, á la An Oak Tree.

To conclude, this is a rich, densely allusive and morally urgent piece of theatre and essential viewing for theatregoers. Moreover, it is a piece that deserves and rewards being discussed and thought about. It is not just a play; in the most real sense possible, it is the start of a conversation.

[Edit: re: the direction - see below. Tim says it better than I ever will]

Gospels of Childhood - Barbican

[Written for CultureWars]

Teatr ZAR’s Gospels of Childhood is a triptych of pieces which may well challenge some people’s ideas of what teatr is. The first piece Gospels of Childhood/The Overture, presented in St Giles’s Church across the pond from the Barbican’s non-Silk Street entrance, is a sung-through meditation on religious themes accompanied by dark, elliptical, visual theatre. The music is solemn Catholic or Orthodox polyphonic chant. It sounds unmistakably devotional. It is beautiful and serious; monastic; conjuring, inside the plain Protestant interior of St Giles’s, a medieval middle-Europe. There is a starkness about it, accentuated by the almost Middle-Eastern harsh edge to the women’s voices. It’s music that sounds ineffable and ancient, and yet within it you can hear the shifting of tribes, borders and empires across the mainland. Trade routes and religions cutting swathes through cultures. The combination of this music, Polish Catholicism, and the rough wooden stage on which sinewy figures contort in candlelight, or shovel earth in the darkness, is heady and powerful in the extreme. [It also serves as a perfect counterpoint to the appalling picture painted of Polish Catholicism in the National’s Our Class, the night before. Where the former pinpoints modern disgust with the crimes engendered and committed in the name of this faith, Gospels... reminds us why a rational subject might seek a sense of The Divine and how beautiful it can be.]

The second part Caesarean Section/Essays on Suicide, which takes the audience into the Barbican’s Pit Theatre, is enormously different. While the natural elements of the first piece were candlelight, wood, earth and the stone of the church walls, here they are wine, broken glass and cold electric light. Played in traverse, on another rough wooden stage, Essays... opens with the performers mostly dotted about the edge of the stage with string instruments, while another member of the ensemble sits at a piano. The lights go out and there is the amplified sound of smashing glass. You hope that it’s just pre-recorded, but it’s somehow too close and too recognisably real.

The stage is divided down the centre by a thin, shallow, underlit trough filled with broken glass. There is broken glass on the stage. A performer takes off her shoes, puts them on her hands and dances, violently. This is much more fully realised dancing than the movement of the first part. It is also intensely, jarringly difficult to watch. The dance itself is hard enough, underscored by pained strings and wailing voice, the body spasms and rips at itself. All the while, exposed skin flirts with shards of glass.

Essays...’s 50-minute length is divided into 18 fairly recognisable episodes. Most use similar strategies of discomfort. Broken glass remains a constant. The trough recurs as a feature in several sequences. Performers hold wine glasses in their teeth or hands while attempting feats that could easily see them fall and lacerate themselves. And self-laceration is the point; not literal, but spiritual or figurative. It’d be easy to categorise the piece more as contemporary dance or “dance theatre”, but as was pointed out to me afterwards, much of it is pure Grotowski – anguished, over-exaggerated facial contortion and emphatic physical movement.

For a largely abstracted form, by God does it communicate. I was assiduously not looking at the programme or the printed synopses sheet until afterwards to see what I got from the piece without being told what to think beyond the suggestive title. When I read it, it was one of those pleasing moments when you think: “Yup, that’s what I got, too”.

It’s not like it’s particularly oblique. In one section, one of the female performers strains toward a spotlight on the ceiling. Trying to reach out to it, to hold onto it. She uses a chair, and latterly one of the male performers – and all the while there’s that ever present danger; if she succeeds even on standing on his shoulders and reaching out as far as she can, there’s nothing within her reach to hold onto. She’ll simply fall a long way. Face first. The piece keeps up the dialogue with the divine, but here it is more like screaming at the unreachable, unanswering dead God of existentialism, rather than the living, breathing Christ of the Gospels.

The third section, for which I did happen to read the blurb beforehand, turned out to be the least affecting of the three. Although, after the nerve-jangling that Essays... had given me, I was pleased to be returned to the nave of St Giles and a tranquil looking stage overhung with a large canvas sail. Under soft-focussed lights, this gently rose and fell, like the opening of several minimalist productions of The Tempest. Aptly enough as the first episode in Anhelli/The Calling is named The Storm, and starts with an excerpt from Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (in Polish) to open a seafaring-based narrative that pays tribute to the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki’s voyage from Naples to the Holy Land.

Reading the rest of the themes Teatr ZAR wanted to explore in this final piece afterwards (as I write this, in fact), it is remarkable how clearly they seemed to come across through the mixture of song/hymn and physical movement. The final piece is a synthesis of the heavy physical exertion of Essays... and the more reflective atmosphere of The Overture....

Gospels of Childhood is quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen made by a British company. The best way of describing the whole is more as a choral concert illustrated by stage pictures, but this doesn’t capture the extent to which the songs had a dramaturgy, or how central the action was to the pieces. It was by turns, beautiful, fascinating, reflective, visceral, intensely sad and deeply moving. Here’s hoping for more of this company over here soon.

Photo - Ditte Berkeley, Kamila Klamut in Essays... Photographer: Lukasz Giza

________________________________________

The below gives the vaguest impression of the sort of music I’m talking about, but this is the soft-focus, airbrushed version of what, live, sounded a whole lot more raw and intense.

Our Class - National Theatre

[Written for CultureWars]

Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class examines what is still one of the most urgent, pressing questions facing modern Europe: what did you do in the war? Usefully, it examines the question in relation to Poland, and, more crucially, from a Polish perspective.

The British education system – or at least the one I grew up with – paints a very specific, Anglo-centric narrative of the course of World War Two. On September 1st 1939, Hitler invades Poland. Britain asks him nicely if he wouldn’t mind awfully not doing so, no such undertaking is received and consequently this country is at war with Germany. In Britain, Poland then vanishes from the radar, largely because, although we might well have declared war on Germany because they invaded Poland, we didn’t do a terribly good job of defending Poland, or countermanding the attack. Precious little is made, for instance, of the USSR’s subsequent invasion of Poland, 17 days later, from the east. Little figures in our history books about the appalling treatment meted out to the Poles by each side. The massacre of 20,000 Poles by Soviet soldiers in Katyn is passed over as are the thousands of Poles slaughtered by the Nazis.

Poland next crops up in the Anglo-narrative with the establishment of the concentration camps and their subsequent transformation into death camps in 1942. The suffering of the Poles in WWII is oddly abstracted in our history books. At the same time, the way that the Poles regarded their Jewish neighbours similarly goes largely unreported. Poland was an occupied country in which the Nazis killed the Jews, runs the official wisdom. At the end of the war, the way in which Britain, with the flick of a pen, carved off a chunk of Poland in the east to give to Russia, gave it a bit of Germany in recompense, and then handed the whole thing over to Stalin anyway, is reported as a masterpiece of diplomacy.

Our Class is set in the Polish town of Jedwabne before, during and after the Second World War. On the 10th July 1941 virtually all the town’s 1,600 Jewish inhabitants were rounded up by their non-Jewish neighbours and murdered. Most were burned alive inside a barn. Following the war, with Poland under Soviet occupation, the crime was blamed on the Gestapo and a monument erected to commemorate the dead.

The play starts in 1935 (although the programme suggests 1926). The ten characters are school children, classmates, in Jedwabne. They introduce themselves, play, muck-about, flirt and generally behave as children do. Time passes. The play is structured as “A Story in XIV Lessons” and played in-the-round on dark wooden boards bounded by a low aluminium bench, replete with modish under-seat striplighting designed by Bunny Christie. As such, the characters/actors never leave the school-room. The fact they were once in a class together is never allowed to disappear. Instead, the wooden playing space – under adept lighting from Jon Clark – becomes interiors, exteriors, wide-open fields, roads at midnight, pig-stys and Śleszyński’s burning barn.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. Having a class of ten stand in for the entire population of a town and by extension Poland has its advantages dramatically. The small tensions can easily be understood as emblematic of the wider malaise. One childhood playground snub or taunt stands in for the thousand or hundred thousand such insults. On the other hand, once characters become such symbols, quirks of fate peculiar to them suddenly seem rather unlikely, when they’re standing in for a tenth of Poland. “What are the chances of that happening?” you wonder. It demonstrates both the power that they achieve as metaphor and the effect that becoming a metaphor has on particularity. By and large, though the play manages to handle these concerns.

The build up to the atrocity, littered with other acts, escalating from unkindness to barbarism, runs concurrently with the suffering and compromises being inflicted on the Poles (Jewish and gentile alike) by the Soviets. Here it suggests that it is Polish identification of the Jews with the Bolsheviks that gives rise to their increased prejudice, but the seeds of their anti-Semitism are already well rooted in the nation’s Catholicism. At the same time, the choice facing the Poles – to collaborate with whichever occupying force happens to have taken over or die – remain stark and impossible.

The staging is admirably straight-forward. There are no costume changes and few props, while the lighting design and stage – the cold lights on the dark wood and aluminium contrive to foreground the minimalism. The cast are excellent. While the acting is ostensibly psychological realism, it isn’t laboured or over-played. The pace moves too fast to allow for self-indulgence. This is also partly down to the style of the piece, which involves a lot of characters narrating themselves, their actions and what is happening to them. People take up each other’s stories from their own perspectives. It makes a nonsense of the theatrical maxim “show don’t tell”, but the cumulative effect of an unbroken but disputed narrative line – ten different versions of the same story – is an effective way of handling a subject that needs more than to just be acted out.

Being written by a Pole, Our Class allows perhaps less optimism than an external eye might have granted. This is a document of savage national self-criticism, unflinching in its accusations. It points at quislings and failures of heroism, it shows that – unprompted, unbidden – a townspeople took it upon themselves to commit mass murder. It doesn’t mark them out as exceptional. It allows for no excuses. Most stringently of all, it does not allow either of the Polish characters who offer refuge to Jews to bask in uncomplicated heroism. Instead, they are characterised by self-interest and still-lurking prejudice. At worst, the Polish connive with the state and with the church to wash their hands of any responsibility. This is a play as much about Poland’s anti-Semitism since the war as before and during. Undoubtedly Poland was a victim in WWII and beyond, but, Słobodzianek argues, no amount of victim status excuses these actions.

Enron - Royal Court

[Written for CultureWars]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock since the spring, you might already have heard that Enron is very good. Going to see these blockbuster, multi-five-star awarded shows is always a slightly strange experience. You kind of forget beforehand that you still have to watch the play. Even if you’ve read the reviews, because of the cumulative effect, you don’t really know *why* something’s meant to be good, you just get this impression that you’re in for a rollercoaster of perfection. Which isn’t how theatre actually functions. Things that are good are good because you have to watch them carefully and think about them (or at the very least *feel* them) and where they end up being good is inside your head (or heart, or wherever). For all that, Enron is, of course, very good.

What’s fascinating about Enron is its formal qualities. Essentially it’s a musical about capitalism. Except, it’s not actually a musical. It does have a handful of songs and a few non-sung dance sequences, but that’s not why it feels like a musical. That said, the songs that there are are rather good and a few more wouldn’t have hurt - the first, for instance, is a Philip Glass-like number about the stock markets with the stock and prices of the metal markets sung against a projected matrix of ticking, pulsing numbers (see above). What’s interesting about it, though, isn’t the points where the piece clearly *is* a musical – i.e. when the cast are singing or dancing – but the way that this aesthetic informs the wider bulk of the play’s dialogue-based substance.

It’s hard to forget Howard Barker’s description of the musical as the authoritarian art form. And it’s intriguing, in the light of this, to see how the piece positions itself in relation to the ideologies that it presents. By and large, the piece resists taking cheap pot-shots at targets that might be regarded by many of a leftie bent as so many fish in a barrel. Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling (Sam West) is instead given a coherent, logical and persuasive worldview. It’s one with which, of course, we’re free to disagree, but you get the feeling he wouldn’t care. And moreover, our disapproving wouldn’t get us anywhere. Skilling is just one man who is articulating something far more widely held, believed and, crucially, something of which we are all a part. Even though most of the play is just people talking to each other in variously flashily designed interiors it still *feels* monolithic like a musical. It’s got a kind of steamrolleriness about it. In short, it feels a bit like watching global capitalism itself. It’s not the characters making assertions and explaining how markets work, it’s the knowledge that what they’re talking about is real. It’s like an attempt to make an ideology tangible.

Of course, there’s always inevitably going to be something inexorable about watching a story to which we all know the outcome – like United 93, we know it’s going to crash at the end. In one of the production’s few false moves, the crash of Enron is played out – as in life – uncomfortably close to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Historically this might well be true; visually, it comes perilously close to drawing the unintended parallel that, like Enron, the WTC had it coming. I don’t suppose for a minute this is the intention, but equating the shredded documents of a criminally corrupt company with the ashes that rained on New York is a step too far.

A couple of scenes close to the end of the play – Skilling attending Kenneth Lay’s funeral, Skilling being plainly bonkers in a New York street, feel slightly over done – possible missteps toward the judgemental, which jar with the way the rest of the text operates. But Prebble’s script pulls it back in the final scene in which Skilling, defiant and angry, directly addresses the audience. By making him a scapegoat we are trying to banish something of ourselves. The stock market is a testament to human ingenuity. That, sure, it’s not perfect, but look at the world, look at ourselves, and consider the advantages it has given us. It’s a difficult argument to refute. Here we all are, after all, in a lovely theatre, where we have paid to be, watching the people we’ve paid tell us a story about money.

If the comparison isn’t too much, it is reminiscent of the Jews in Auschwitz who put God on trial, who found him guilty, and then immediately fell to praying. Here we are living within a system which that has collapsed around our ears – Enron now stands as a harbinger of the subsequent far wider collapse – and yet we cannot conceive of anything else.

Enron isn’t a play that preaches resistance or suggests alternatives. On a very basic level it isn’t trying to. It ably and entertainingly tells how a handful of very clever men tried to conjure a lot of money out of thin air and weren’t quite clever enough to be able to do so.

Here, Rupert Goold’s customary directorial flair looks strangely normalised. If he’d taken all the elements on stage here can applied them to, say, Hamlet, certain critics might bridle at the imposition. The production has actors in suits dressed as giant mice; or pretending to be Jurassic Park raptors, which represent the embodiment of complex financial debt restructuring mechanisms; or performing choreographed sequences wielding light sabres to represent Enron’s blitzkrieg on California’s deregulated energy market. Where elsewhere there’d feel like a certain radicalism about men dressed as dinosaurs, in the service of this not-actually-a-musical they feel perfectly safe. Perhaps musicals just allow for more spectacle as default, where in “the classics” it would still feel subversive.

So, what are we to make of Enron? Is it theatre’s admission of defeat? A mea culpa from the Royal Court who, after decades of counter-capitalist rhetoric, still charge money for tickets, pay actors, and cannot move outside the system it sought to criticise? At the same time, isn't it all the more deadly in its critique precisely because of its refusal to accuse? It shows us people being clever, having money, enjoying the money and the material advantages it brings. It also, crucially, locates their desire to look after not themselves, but their families. The flitting presence of Skilling’s infant daughter, slowly counting millions of dollars, is as much a symbol of his humanity as the implacability of the dollar.

As we all know, the show has already sold out its run at the Royal Court and transfers from there to the West End in January (tickets on sale from the Royal Court Box Office now), and no doubt from there to Broadway. I suspect in each of these new locations it will feel ever more contradictory and strange.

the other night i dreamt the world had fallen over – BAC [scratch]

[in the spirit of writing about a scratch performance, this is very much scratch-criticism]

I’ve been thinking about theory a lot, recently. I’ve been reading a few books – Nicholas Ridout’s Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems and Theatre & Ethics, and Joe Kelleher’s Theatre & Politics – that suggest disconcerting and often difficult-to-imagine models of theatrical engagement. The conclusion to Ridout’s ...& Ethics, having made a nonsense of the idea that theatre can meaningfully posit an ethical argument straightforwardly or behave ethically, suggests: “Theatre’s greatest ethical potential may be found precisely at the moment when theatre abandons ethics”.

Kelleher’s ...& Politics concludes: “...The system is thick with interference ... In this image the actors will be waving still, transmitting nothing beyond the act of transmission ... the ‘message’ and its transmission may never have as much to say to us as the renewed image of those performing bodies crossed by language and linked by the distance that separates them, from each other and from ourselves ...”

The brief programme description/introduction for the other night... reads:
“Outside it was getting dark. A Storm is coming. Dogs are howling. People run in the street.
In here no one seemed to have noticed.
People shift awkwardly in their seats, and wonder if they should be doing anything.”

I like the way the two passages seem to complement each other. Kelleher’s analysis tipping into a sort of romantic apocalypse. Both remind me of the voiceover at the start of Dead Flag Blues (YouTubed below).

For all its claims to reflect the influence of David Lynch – this weekend’s theme for BAC’s Scratch Festival – the piece was much closer to Tim Etchells at his most bleakly beautiful. What was also brilliant was how perfectly the work chimed exactly with the works of theory.

The form of the work was as follows:
A girl sits in front of a television set with a piece of paper taped over it covering most of the screen.
The audience were sat down and twenty members were selected to sit in ‘an audience’ on the stage.
[note to scratch: Was it important that they became “an audience” on the stage in front of us? What would the effect be of staging the piece in a space regularly used in traverse? It would still work, IMHO, but it would be different. How central is the idea that the “real” audience of the piece is the one watching from the stage?]

Above this “audience” now facing us – the rest of the audience – was a large screen onto which scrolled white instructions on a black background. Endearingly slightly askew, a white edge round these instructions mirrored the chinks of static visible behind the paper on the TV screen.

The screen tells us the girl is not important. This isn’t about her, it says. It’s about us. And what happened that night. And now we’re going to show “the audience” how it went. “people shifted awkwardly in their seats” it tells us. We do so. “people coughed”. Again, we do. “people checked their phones” and so on.
[note to scratch: this could have gone on longer. It felt that if the instructions had been slower – if this were a fuller piece – then they the signs of discomfort might even come slightly before the instruction – maybe add in, “someone laughed knowingly”]

The instructions get more and more specific, singling out one person to do something – “someone run outside the theatre and came back in to say what the weather was like”; “someone in the back row tried to get up and leave but couldn’t get past their neighbours”; etc.

By this point, the audience was doing quite a good job of co-operating. Someone always stepped up to the plate for each instruction. After a while longer, the instruction comes to leave. We are standing up, filing out, still looking at the screen, still acting together as a unit and still following, and interpreting the instructions.

There are two final moments: 1 – we are all huddled together on the stairs staring at the ceiling – beyond the ceiling into the sky as music deafens us, then: 2 – the girl watching the TV keels over. A scratchy recording of Blue Velvet plays and we are all dancing slowly together on the stage.

It Ends.

There’s some other detail I should have threaded in about static-y scratchy white noise occasionally interrupting the building, climactic soundtrack anthem [what was that, Field?]. There are bits of description of apocalyptic stuff on the screen sometimes, as well as the instructions. Many not dissimilar to these from an earlier piece.

There was something oddly exhilarating about the piece. The breathless, apocalyptic romanticism, combined with a childlike sense of playing. And of mucking about in what’s meant to be a serious space. The way it sets up audience as almost unwatched actors. The way that our spectatorship was returned *in kind*. I haven’t got to the relevant chapter in Ridout’s Stage Fright..., about eye contact, but the wider theses seem directly echoed here. This did feel like a piece of political theatre of the sort described/suggested by the Ridout and Kelleher. It seemed to be a piece that suggested in ten minutes much more than could have been asserted in fifty.



Today’s “cover” image is a photo of a Pistoletto installation in Vienna from Tim Etchells’s blog.

2nd May 1997 – Bush Theatre

[Written for CultureWars]

Set on the first day of New Labour’s landslide victory after 18 years of Conservative rule, Jack Thorne’s new play offers three half-hour duologue snapshots from three different bedrooms around the country. Unsurprisingly, given the play’s political theme, these are divided between the three main parties: Conservative, Lib Dem and Labour. I’ve got a horrible feeling that the pre-scene lighting state for each might even have been blue, yellow and red accordingly. The scenes also run the full gamut of human sexuality from gay to straight to Old.

The piece starts promisingly enough, with an Alan Bennettish couple fussing around. It soon becomes clear that he is a Tory cabinet minister about to lose his constituency. It isn’t quite clear why he isn’t at the count, but his ailing health – he is perpetually on the verge of a heart attack – might provide the answer. His wife fusses around him as he looks through their daughter’s holiday snaps. Dramatically, it’s all going quite well until he suffers some sort of minor seizure, staggers across the room, falls to the floor and is apparently able to get up again. There then follows a passage in which this 1997 Tory cabinet minister praises the political career of former Labour Home Secretary and Chancellor Roy Jenkins.

The speech feels like this erstwhile Tory has got a Labour playwright with a gun to his head making him say these meticulously researched, but almost anachronistic points. Jenkins’s achievements that he praises seem mostly to date from the sixties and early seventies, while his estimation of the man as a political player unaccountably overlooks the hash he made of Labour in the early eighties as part of the Gang of Four (the SDP leadership, not the band). In short, it is a curious bit of hagiography to surface and from a wholly unbelievable source. From here, there are a few little bits of Tory callousness, a monologue from the wife about her dutifulness, and both seem to have stopped being people and turned into ciphers for some ideas about the Conservative Party, which don’t ring nearly true enough. That is to say, they don’t sound like people who believe in Conservatism, but like the people that people who don’t believe in Conservatism think Conservatives sound like, while the minister’s heart condition feels like a vindictive metaphor too far.

Faring slightly better, the second scene offers a would-be one-night-stand between Ian, a Lib Dem party member, and a drunken young woman called Sarah he’s met at a Party election night party. This is Thorne on his home territory. Awkward, socially self-conscious, fumbled sexual encounters – á la Fanny and Faggot or When You Cure Me. And all in all, it mostly works. Granted the political content seems almost incidental, but this seems to work better. That said, perhaps the caricature of a Liberal bloke who really is much too nice for his own good is too clear an authorial comment. “But you’re not going to win the whole thing? You can’t win the whole thing?” Sarah asks him at one point, pretty much summing up his prospects as a human being. “Oh no... No... Definitely not” he replies with a perfectly judged smile that suggests a lifetime spent deliberately avoiding success.

If there’s a problem here, it’s more that designer Hannah Clark’s attractive, traverse box set – raised floor, walls at either end and a ceiling – built inside the Bush’s tiny above-the-pub space means that both actors are virtually hunching themselves in order to fit – especially when Phoebe Waller-Bridge is required to stand (well, semi-stand) on the bed.

The last scene – New Labour – is again an awkward negotiation, this time between two vaguely northern ‘A’-Level schoolboys. Both keen politics students and New Labour supporters – tellingly both presumably born at the beginning of Mrs Thatcher’s first term in office. One is gay and nursing an enormous crush on his apparently cleverer, richer, more attractive probably straight friend. The result is a direct toss up between The History Boys and Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing. The boys themselves, their awkwardness, gaucherie and ingenuous bravado are fairly well-drawn, although their sheer charmlessness is played rather too convincingly to make them sympathetic. Both, in fact, come across as so awful that watching becomes nail-bitingly embarrassing.

More problematically, again, the politics feel way too heavy-handed. Both are New Labour supporters. The poorer, less successful, more northern-sounding one is in love with the Cambridge-bound, posher, more attractive one. Have we got that metaphor now? Yes? Labour has won again, but it’s not what it were. It’s gone all posh, and the poor are still going to get left behind. Labour isn’t nice like what it used to be.

Perhaps it’s slightly unfair to read it so starkly, but it feels like these themes, which could be slowly, subtly occurring to us, are instead so underlined and flagged-up that it feels like Lehrstück. Moreover, the randomness of the scenes makes it feel like the whole should have more of a through line. Some sense of the overall dramaturgy adding more to the sum of the parts. Granted there’s a simple metaphorical chronology – from aging, nearly dead Tories through to bright, young, but set-to-be-disappointing New Labour, via a nice-but-pointless Lib Dem – but even this feels as if it would benefit from being shuffled. Given the heavy-handedness of the Labour and Tory segments, the piece is never going to feel anything other than didactic, but even so, choosing this most direct path through the early hours of election night still seems too much. It feels as if it needs more characters, more variety, much more randomness and much less overstated connectedness to the actual events. Thorne still has a gift for amusing dialogue and sympathetic characters, although one still yearns to see him produce a female character who isn’t a victim. Ultimately, though, 2nd May 1997 doesn’t show his undoubted talents off to their best advantage.

Everything Must Go – St Augustine’s

In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have written a word about Everything Must Go, or; The Voluntary Attempt to Overcome Unnecessary Obstacles. The show, you see, is a one-woman piece about the performer’s father. Apparently it was to be a two-person show also starring her father. At the time of entering the show for the Fringe he was suffering from terminal cancer. The one-sided A5 photocopied programme sheet reads as follows:
“Dad performed the show with me three times.
He died of pancreatic cancer on 2 June 2009
The show will continue to tour after Edinburgh. This is a labour of love.”

Now, I’m a theatre critic, not a labour-of-love critic. This is a piece that demands to be put beyond criticism. Ordinarily there’d be no point in just writing about how much one didn’t like this show. If one’s tastes don’t coincide with it, why harp on about it? Simply let the matter drop. Yes, it was recommended to me by people to whom I listen. They had found it moving, so I went along – misery junkie that I apparently am – fully expecting to be moved. Having not been moved in the slightest, this review would have stopped there. On leaving the theatre I would have – did, in fact – make a mental note not to write about it. Except.

Except, Everything Must Go (not to be confused with Tim Etchells’s amusing alternative Fringe programme pastiche written for Forest Fringe, the recent strand of Soho Theatre shows, the somewhat more distant play by Patrick Jones or indeed the album by Jones’s brother) won a Total Theatre Award, beating Icarus 2.0, If That’s All There Is and Company F/Z’s Horse in the Devised Performance category. It is also, now, apparently going to transfer to the Barbican. At this point, it becomes legitimate to start treating the show as a piece of theatre. As such, uncomfortable though it is to say so, and without wishing to cast the slightest aspersions on writer, puppet-maker, prop-maker, costume-maker, camera operator and performer Kristin Fredricksson’s feelings for her father, it fails.

The piece itself offers a slightly choppy look back over Karl Fredricksson’s life, from his conception to old age, noting a wealth of eccentric traits – he got his taps metered and then did his utmost to get his water from elsewhere, for example – and showing films of him as a young man and giant blown up cut-out photos of him through his life. And that’s about it, really. There’s some moving around. A bit of half-hearted puppetry, a rather ill-advised sing-along with
Serge Gainsbourg’s Lemon Incest. The problem is, the show isn’t affecting because of its content, the skill with which it’s made, or its insights into grief. It is affecting (if it is affecting at all) because the person on stage in front of us is actually very sad. It’s not a performance of grief, it’s not even an overt display of grief, it’s simply our knowledge that losing a parent hurts like hell and that the person in front of us is telling us about a parent who died two months earlier.

I couldn’t help wishing that the whole show was an elaborate meta-theatrical game. That “Karen Fredricksson” was a made up character, that the man of whom she had photographs and with whom she’d videoed interviews was simply another performer. That he was safe and well somewhere else and that her dad was similarly alive and well. Somehow then the scrappy, charmless aesthetic would just about make sense.

It’s hard to see, for example, how the show would have worked if he had lived. His absence, though loud and clear throughout the show, didn’t make any actual sense in terms of where he was missing in the piece. Obviously the show will have been rethought, but even so, it’s hard to see how it might have worked any better had he not died. So, morbidly, the piece seems to depend on his death. Were it not suddenly a piece about loss and bereavement, this would have been perhaps at best an eccentric father-daughter piece about an odd life well-lived. Although, with a terminal cancer patient on stage, I can’t quite see how it wouldn’t still have been more than a little exploitative.

The thing is, without the death there’d be nothing here. And somehow bringing the actual fact of an actual death onto the stage feels here like the worst sort of emotional pornography. I’m pretty sure other performers have made similar work, and that their work has been good. Everything Must Go, on a very basic level, is not good. It is poorly designed and poorly executed. Fredricksson is not a very engaging performer. She is, however, unimpeachably unhappy. And that invites us to reflect on our own sadness. I don’t doubt some people got an awful lot out of the piece, and for entirely honourable reasons. I’m afraid, though, that the whole exercise left me utterly cold and with a taste of unwitting exploitation in my mouth.

Put simply, nothing about the piece suggests that Fredricksson has anything that even approaches another show in her, and praising this piece because of its proximity to a sad event is to promote her well beyond her abilities as an artist.

Punk Rock - Lyric Hammersmith

[Written for CultureWars]

The prospect of a new Simon Stephens play is greeted by pretty much the same excited anticipation as we used to wait for new records by the Pixies. Formally inventive, intelligent, raw, Stephens’s work frequently demonstrates what is great about New Writing.

Set in the present day, in a fee-charging grammar school in Stockport, Punk Rock is a one hour fifty minute slow build in tension and intensity to an explosive, yet oddly calming, climax, with a static/feedback coda.

William Carlisle (Tom Sturridge) is a model of intelligent, alienated youth everywhere. His obvious and immediate attraction to pretty, spiky, clever new-girl Lily (Jessica Raine), an evident dislike of his fellow six-formers and increasingly erratic behaviour set up a chain of events leading to an apparently inescapable tragic conclusion.

Thanks to the pre-publicity – interviews with Stephens in which he talks about the Columbine shootings, for example – the audience already knows in which particular direction this messed-up kid is heading. Carlisle seems pitched as a school-age Hamlet: given his intelligence and his situation, the shape of his tragedy seems almost pre-determined.

Sarah Frankcom’s production is a strangely mixed affair. Designer Paul Wills’s set conjures a lofty, semi-circular gothic library, seemingly situated at the top of some distant turret. The looming dark wood recalls Muriel Gerstner’s design for the Hamburg world premiere of Stephens’s Pornography. Brueghel’s Tower of Babel is here replaced by the equal impossibility of a weight of knowledge represented by the unreadable number of dusty leather bound tomes.

The black school uniforms suspend the characters half way between a Harry Potter romantic ideal of school life and the modern world of mobile phones, short skirts and faintly ludicrous bright green puffa jackets. Stephens’s script also sees the characters shift between fully realistic dialogue and something more knowing or stylised. Characters themselves pastiche different registers. Bennett Francis in particular, played here by Henry Lloyd-Hughes as a kind of aesthete school bully (not a million miles away from School Bully in Ripping Yarns (05.35)), frequently deploys antique schoolboy slang lifted wholesale from the pages of PG Wodehouse or Anthony Buckeridge with a host of ironic “I say”s and “old chap”s. The text is at once on a level with the pupils and knowing a lot more about them than they know about themselves, sometimes resonating with precisely the sort of constructions used by precocious teens and other times sounding wise well beyond their years, like disaffected, nihilist History Boys.

At times it feels as if Frankcom hasn’t quite decided how she wants to approach the text. Some of the actors (Banks, West) dealing in fine-tuned naturalism and others – Lloyd-Huge and Sophie Wu as Francis’s girlfriend Cissy – turning in much more stylised performances. Tom Sturridge’s Carlisle seems to fluctuate between “being” and “showing”. That’s not to say any of the performances are bad – quite the reverse, they are all fascinating, but sometimes the whole feels a little over-directed. Similarly, because of the ostensible naturalistic casting – albeit with the audience having to overlook that 17-year-olds are plainly being played by actors in their mid-twenties, and with accents obviously playing a part in the construction of the world of the play – I started longing to see the German premiere, ideally with all the characters played by 70-year-olds so that one could appreciate the text, without worrying about nit-picky issues of detail and realism. There’s a sense that because the play itself isn’t just simple naturalism – it’s somehow too intelligent, too knowing for that – and the bits of naturalism that do filter in end up distracting from one’s appreciation of the play.

There’s the strange question of “being convinced”. Do we buy Carlisle’s slightly too sign-posted mental illness? Are the bits of research on Columbine that have filtered into the text perhaps a little too noticeable? When Carlisle talks about his sense of feeling better than everyone else in the school, are we not hearing a playwright’s précis of Harris and Klebold? It feels that this production wants us to put that out of our heads, but at the same time, its attempt to create a hermetic world continually draws our attention back to its constructedness and its relation to a wider reality. Perhaps that is the point.

For all that, this is an electrifying piece of theatre. Stephens has a real feel for amping up tension. The way that the play trades on the accumulation of small cruelties, both deliberate and unintentional, winding a situation toward breaking point, is perfectly pitched. The penultimate two scenes are masterclasses in stretching an audience’s nerves to breaking point. Sharp bursts of fractured grunge tracks (the White Stripes, Nirvana, Mudhoney) are administered like electric shocks in the scene breaks.

The play resonates on a number of levels, like an If... for the post-ideology generation. It suggests the way that intelligence and sensitivity can be curdled into unacknowledged proto-fascism by pettiness and the meaninglessness of everyday teenage life. As a title, “Punk Rock” is brilliant. Crucially, no actual punk music is played or mentioned in the show (no, of course the White Stripes and Nirvana don’t count). Someone at press night suggested that, in common with Country Music, Stephens has structured the play like the songs. I disagree. Punk music was, at its inception, about as formally reactionary as it gets. Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, guitar break, chorus, end. Punk Rock, by contrast, is a long, slow deliberate build with a white noise fade-out. It’s more like Einstürzende Neubauten than The Damned. However, it’s precisely that reactionary tendency within something theoretically rebellious that Punk Rock identifies and explores – how teenage rebellion winds up spouting the rhetoric of the far-right and the individualist.

We already know that Stephens is a playwright of enormous compassion and moral anger, here we see that manifested almost as a blunt end result. “Look at this,” he seems to say. “Is this what we want? Because it’s what we’re making.” As with his earlier play Herons, with which Punk Rock shares a number of similarities, or indeed Pornography, it’s not a piece that claims to offer answers or a unified theory of everything, instead it shows a human situation and forces the audience to ask the questions and then go out and look for the answers.

Oh, My Green Soap Box - Pleasance Courtyard

One of the luxuries of writing long-form, post-fact reviews of shows is that it gives an opportunity to engage with other reviews of the same piece which simply isn’t available to the overnight critic. Of course, there’s a lot to be said for not knowing what everyone else is saying, it avoids knee-jerk contrarianism (is that a word?) for a start. At the same time, without wanting to turn into a review of the reviews, of meta-criticism, having other reviews as co-ordinates can be very helpful in clarifying one’s own thinking.

I already touched on Lucy Foster’s Oh, My Green Soap Box in my first post-Edinburgh post, in which I called it “adorable” and “heartbreaking” without much by way of explanation. Since one of my biggest bug-bears in Edinburgh this year was the ludicrous proliferation of decontextualised words of praise, here’s some context...

In many ways, Oh, My Green Soap Box is a pretty straightforward one-woman-show. Long-time Improbable Theatre associate Lucy Foster talks to the audience, tells us stuff, shows us videos (see above), does a little dance and generally *is*. On stage.

The nominal subject of the piece is Foster’s concern with matters ecological. The piece opens as the launch of a campaign. On the surface it’s a campaign to save the polar bear. As the ice-caps melt thanks to global warming, polar bears will have nowhere to live and will eventually become extinct, so the thinking goes.

Mercifully, Foster doesn’t really go into the thinking too much. This is not a piece that wants to bash us Al Gore-style over the head with proof, or lists of things that we ought to be doing to save the planet. Anyone looking for a fiery bit of eco-propaganda will be disappointed – everyone else can breathe a sigh of relief. What follows is in fact a nifty subversion of the one-person “confessional”/“biographical” show. Again mercifully, Foster doesn’t actually come right out with: “When I was younger I did such and such” – instead the piece somehow contrives to make the extinction of the polar bear play out like a reflection on the most devastating break-up you’ve ever experienced. And it’s all the more moving for it. So much so, that I’d say the eco- thing is a bit of a blind and that actually the real subject here is heartbreak and loss. Imagine Improbable doing Crave, only about Polar Bears, and you’d not be far off.

Foster’s stagecraft is similarly subtle – so much so that you don’t really realise it’s happening until, looking back, you are confronted with an imaginative arctic world created – like a child’s game – from bedding and a sheet draped over a couple of chairs that had been unobtrusively hanging about. I disagree with Matt Trueman that as a performer “she is always a touch too controlled and measured in her delivery” nor did I “find myself wishing that she’d let go, abandon the fixities of the text... and really talk to us as people”. For my money, Foster does exactly that – there’s a brief section where she looks each audience member in the eyes in turn and makes a brief gesture. Touching or silly, there is a real sense of being connected with the performer on stage. Nor did I find her “too controlled”. Perhaps it’s a matter of seeing different performances, or having different perspectives/emphases. It may even be something as trite as having been touched by different things, but I found ...Soap Box sparky, insightful and almost chokingly sad in places. A beautiful piece of work.


Oh, My Green Soap Box transfers to the Oval House from Tuesday, 03 November to Saturday, 07 November at 7.45pm

Vanya - The Gate

Vanya is the latest in what could flippantly be termed the Gate’s occasional “Half the title, half the play” series – stripped-down, modernised or experimental new versions of classic texts by Ibsen and Chekhov (we look forward to Gho and …nov). In truth, there’s not much of a common thread within this strand beyond the venue and the quirk in titling. Three different directors, three different writers and three wildly different apparent intentions and results.

Sam Holcroft’s Vanya is essentially a stripped-down, minimalist, modernised version of the Chekhov classic taking the four central characters – Vanya, Astrov, Sonya and Yelena – and playing their tragic trajectories stripped down to stark interactions with one other. In her director’s notes, Natalie Abrahami likens their plight to the heads in Beckett’s Play, cyclical and doomed to keep repeating their tragedy every time the play is read or performed.

To this end, designer Tom Scutt, has created a neat, revolving, packing crate-like shed of a set, in which Vanya and Sonya are boxed at the beginning and end of the play. Actually, it’s a stage design that owes a lot more to Enda Walsh’s Bedbound than Play, but the (already similar) meaning is unmistakeable. Every time the box – poignantly marked “Fragile” – is opened, the same thing will happen. They begin alone, together; they end alone, together; these are people who have no chance to learn or grow.

Holcroft’s script is a less elegantly structured affair. Stripped of the other characters and the finesse as Chekhov’s four act model, the timescale of the piece becomes slightly blurred. Moreover, some of the transition into colloquial English does mean that characters often blurt rather more bluntly than they do in the original. It initially feels as if there’s less build, less subtlety. Fiona Button’s Sonya sets the teeth on edge for quite a while, while Robert Goodale’s Vanya is so nakedly, appallingly needy that you just want to give him a good kick. Perhaps it’s the effect of removing some of the Russian-ness from the story, but you just want him to pull himself together and to stop being so painfully gauche.

However, somewhere before the half-way mark, the tragic momentum takes hold. As it becomes clear that Simon Wilson’s diffident, indifferent Astrov – turned here into something of an eco-campaigner with his talk of “squandering our resources” and veneration of ant societies – has cast his spell, not only on the awkward Sonya, but however briefly on her beautiful stepmother Yelena (Susie Trayling), the inevitability of all four’s emotional desolation suddenly makes the action horribly, grippingly compelling and Holcroft’s script takes off.

There are some oddities thrown up by the approach that has been taken. On one hand, it feels like we are simply watching some of Uncle Vanya in a modern translation, and as such it is informed by the other Vanyas we have seen. The names haven’t been changed, so we assume they are still in Russia. But a more modern Russia, perhaps, apart from the candles and oil lamps. But then why the modern dress? Perhaps the setting is unimportant. The play has, after all, been stripped of its social comment, although the new, louring environmental dimension is an interesting addition, and one that I can’t help feeling is going to start permeating more and more theatre as concern over forthcoming eco-catastrophe mounts.

There is also the question of overt theatricality – something that this version both foregrounds and retreats from in equal measure. The obvious artifice of the set – the way it almost creates a stage upon a stage – has the effect of heightening our awareness that we are watching Theatre, while at the same time seeming to enclose the actors, the characters, behind what is almost an eighth wall – literally so at the beginning and end. The style of acting – the British-do-classics modern naturalism, basically – doesn’t suggest the performers’ awareness of their being actors, even as the staging emphasises precisely that. They are ‘being’ their characters, it seems. Curiously, though, there are several direct audience address monologues. One, by Yelena toward the end, is explicitly accusatory on the subject of male attitudes to beauty, and appears to be directed straight at the male members of the audience. However, it is the staging rather than the performances that force us to consider the theatricality of the presentation - the curious pretence that the actors are people who don’t know they’re part of a play, even as their boxy wooden world tries to tell them otherwise.

At root, however, this is a Vanya that is interested in the deeply painful human tragedy on display. And, by God, it’s very, very sad indeed. Perhaps more could have been done to draw out quite how painful Yelena and Astrov’s situations are, but the final image of Vanya and Sonya, utterly destroyed, shutting themselves back up in their little crate marked fragile until tomorrow night, and the night after that, and the night after that, is both beautiful and utterly heartbreaking.

production photo by Simon Kane