tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post3239449719937509139..comments2023-09-20T14:34:21.102+02:00Comments on Postcards from the Gods: England People Very Nice - National TheatreAndrew Haydonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05568061302451610140noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-73271254476643915602009-03-21T02:16:00.000+01:002009-03-21T02:16:00.000+01:00Well, I said I'd state publicly if I changed my mi...Well, I said I'd state publicly if I changed my mind once I'd seen the thing, and now I've seen it, and... I have to admit, the protesters kinda have a point. <BR/><BR/>Not about racism as such, at least not in the way that they mean: as you've remarked elsewhere, Andrew, Richard Bean is an equal-opportunities piss-taker, and certainly as a fellow Irishman I can't imagine that Keith Kinsella's outrage was anything but confected in order to make the complaints look less than entirely Bangladeshi-Muslim-centred.<BR/><BR/>But as one character in the play - and, tellingly, a BNP member - remarks, it's not about skin colour any more, but culture. Bean's target is Islamism, and he isn't very good or very diligent at distinguishing it from Islam <I>per se</I>.<BR/><BR/>Islamism isn't the subject of more than trace levels of piss-taking in the play; it's the subject of hostility. Granted, it's not the only extremism shown growing, as far-right British nationalism also gets some focus; but the latter's growing hold is given, if not sympathy, certainly some understanding, whereas no remotely comparable approach is taken to the growth of Wahhabism and the like. <BR/><BR/>It wouldn't have been that hard to show younger Muslims perceiving a lack of rigour in their antecedents' practices, but instead what we're shown is bigmouthed youth simply dissing their elders and booming about "protecting our territory". The appearance of the doubly hook-handed Wahhabi imam is clearly meant to be a cartoon, but when his portrayal becomes an <I>actual</I> cartoon, an animation spouting lines of offensiveness and hatred, it serves to remind us that cartoons aren't <I>by definition</I> funny, and can in fact be instruments of hatred themselves. <BR/><BR/>I don't think "hatred" is putting it too strongly. More than once I felt myself on the verge of walking out, and all that kept me in my seat was the desire to be able to discuss it afterwards from a position of having seen it all.<BR/><BR/>Another problem leading to an imbalanced portrayal of Islam is that for much of the second act even the principal "good Muslim", as it were, Mushi, is shown being driven by a sense of religious commission to sire twins and give one to the mosque. Although little explicit comment is made on it, the subtext is that it's a pernicious delusion, and his redemption (so to speak) comes when he frees himself from the idea and breaks with the mosque with which he has been involved for decades. Yes, this break is explained in terms of the extremism of the new imam, but there's an untidiness of connotation there.<BR/><BR/>It all, for me, devalues the attention paid to love throughout what has gone before: it seems to me to suggest that love and intermarriage are the greatest tool in the box, or perhaps the strongest weapon in the arsenal, of integration/assimilation, rather than it being the end and integration the means.<BR/><BR/>I have to say, there wasn't the slightest harbinger of this in the first half; throughout the interval I was as confident as ever that the protesters were, as I said earlier in this thread, <I>earnest people missing the point that it's about them in ways other than they think</I>. But the second half left me deeply disturbed, and I don't think that feeling's going to lift for some time. Which is handy at least, because I'm told I'll need something extrinsic to keep me going through <I>Madame De Sade</I> when I see it tomorrow.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-87990280537380012742009-02-17T05:47:00.000+01:002009-02-17T05:47:00.000+01:00Hello Andrew,I’ve been trying to find books detail...Hello Andrew,<BR/><BR/>I’ve been trying to find books detailing the people and moments within British Theatre over the last couple of years. There haven’t been any really, so I’ve printed off some blogs in their entirety and read them back to back.<BR/><BR/>Since seeing Shun Kin, I’ve been trying to pin the qualities in which it and McBurney’s work is somehow different from theatre in England that surrounds it. I can’t quite place these.<BR/><BR/>I liked the way it felt so personal. That the work was less about Shun Kin and about himself, spending time with him self and qualities of being alone. In the general press there were remarks about devices or ways of movement he has used in the past, suggesting that in their re-use he had run out of ideas. <BR/><BR/>There was the use of devices like when Shun Kin kicks her servant only for other actors to take the place of the servant being kicked, the actors moving in a circuit only to change at each kick, as seen in Mnemonic, or the spatial games as in A Dissapearing Number. Unusually, his device of introducing the evening with a false narrator, only for the show to go in a completely opposite direction wasn’t there.<BR/><BR/>I enjoyed that the work was less explosive than usual and that he is entering a later stage of his career. These repetitions of devices acquire meaning in his work within the narrative of the play and the narrative of the director, like hearing the same chords in a piece of music, only for them to change by the sound that surrounds them. I thought of the minimalist composers John Adams and Steve Reich, late paintings by Rembrandt and drinking aged liquor.<BR/><BR/>The moment I loved most, was at the beginning where after lining against the back of the stage, the wall starts to move back imperceptibly with the actors slipping into the darkness. Small and precise details that mean so much.<BR/><BR/>I read about him being a visual director, but his work differs very much from directors or companies that are called visual or even physical. I’d like to replace the terms visual and physical for him with animal. There is something about his senses, the way the characters sniff each other, the smell and sight of dust as its blown off an old book and the strangest voices imaginable. Some other directors have this animal quality, but McBurney is unusual in that this instinct is matched by some very accurate and considered thought process. <BR/><BR/>Maybe his work affects me because I feel a lack in certain areas of theatre, when I read a Caryl Churchill play for example I feel this mental dissection, which I never get in the performance, in venues such as the Royal Court. I also find work generally billed as visual or physical so mentally unconsidered, in terms of narrative and intent.<BR/><BR/><BR/><BR/>The Barbican judging the effects of the economy and I don’t think in future seasons serious work like this will be able to come over, this makes me a little sad.<BR/><BR/>As venues such as the Young Vic, National, Royal Court have dedicated facilities to forward the way they see theatre to young and mid-scale creatives, the Barbican needs some way of transferring the qualities and influence of the directors it works with to British theatre at this level in a meaningful way.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-69166191483516791782009-02-15T05:22:00.000+01:002009-02-15T05:22:00.000+01:00J.H. - My Shun-kin review is here. Feel free too...J.H. - My Shun-kin review is <A HREF="http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/127960/shun-kin.html" REL="nofollow"> here</A>. Feel free too engage with it here...Andrew Haydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05568061302451610140noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-91406684892227701632009-02-14T22:52:00.000+01:002009-02-14T22:52:00.000+01:00Gad. It sounds horrible!Gad. It sounds horrible!Alison Croggonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-56544329724354630602009-02-14T22:20:00.000+01:002009-02-14T22:20:00.000+01:00Will you be posting your review of Shun-kin by Com...Will you be posting your review of Shun-kin by Complicitie,<BR/><BR/>I'd like to talk about itAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com