Postcards from the Gods

Unsent Postcards: Iwanow – Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

2011-09-21T22:11:00.006+02:00

[written 15/02/10]

[On this day in 2008, I posted my review of Kenneth Branagh's Ivanov. Since I've had this review hanging around, unfinished, for about a year and a half, I figured, for a bit of circularity, I'd stick it up today to mark the occasion.]

In a recent [ha!] piece for the Guardian Theatre Blog/CiF (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/09/beyond-theatre-boxoffice-stage-success ), which might as well have been entitled “And another thing...” , Michael Billington gets briefly exercised about “yet another myth currently gaining credence: that English Chekhov productions are full of swooning nostalgia for our own lost rural past”. “This is rubbish”, he claims.

I’m not sure who made the initial claim, but I tend to agree that British productions of Chekhov have precious little to do with British rural nostalgia; on the other hand, they do all tend to follow a certain pattern.

What I’m pretty sick of is writing disclaimers about the fact that just because I like German theater AS WELL, doesn’t mean I hate British theatre, but it seems like I need to keep reiterating them or British Theatre gets all hurt and whiny, so, for the umpteenth time, I REALLY LIKED THE KENNETH BRANAGH IVANOV. Got that? Good. Having said that...

Dimiter Gotscheff’s production of Anton Tschekow’s Iwanow is pretty damn revelatory. It premièred in 2005 and is still running in the Volksbühne’s repertoire five years later. And last night’s production was sold out.

I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a hard watch. Possibly for Germans, but certainly for Brits, particularly those without much of the language (i.e Mich). However, the imagination of the staging and dramaturgy goes a long way toward offsetting such concerns.

The best thing you can do before seeing it is taking everything you think you know about Chekhov and chucking it out of a high window. One of the ones at the top of the Volksbühne will do.

The staging is stark and simple. The absolute back of the Volksbühne stage is a curved sheer white wall, like a cyclorama, designed to improve the acoustics. Generally it is covered, curtained or obscured by the set. Here there is absolutely nothing decorating the stage, which is empty save for a low smoke machine at the back. Samuel Finzi, playing Ivanov, walks up stairs out of a near invisible trap door at the rear of the stage and stands against the back wall. Gradually the other characters join him.

He begins to walk forward. The smoke machine starts. The depth of the Volksbühne’s stage is quite remarkable. Deeper than, say, the Lyttleton by quite some way. By the time he’s reached the proscenium arch – and the stage continues for quite some way out in front of it – the stage has started to fill with smoke/fog. Smoke also pours from vents in the stage floor itself and continues to do so for the rest of the play’s two hour duration. The lights at this point are a bright grey, like cold morning sunshine in winter. Ivanov is suddenly standing alone in a fog.

From hereon in, virtually all entrances and exists are made through the fog. Characters become looming shapes gradually resolving into solidity as they emerge from the swirling smoke.

It’s impressively gorgeous, and often I caught myself just watching the smoke swirling in the lights, but it also serves a cleverer purpose. When I reviewed the Branagh/Grandage production I hit on the phrase “wrapped up in a fog of self-pity”. This is precisely that fog. It is as if we are seeing the text staged in Ivanov’s mind. A relentless fog of depression from which ludicrous characters appear to torment him. The supporting cast’s performances echo this. While Finzi’s Ivanov is still, quiet, bemused and cruel, the other characters almost dance a colourful burlesque around him – as near-grotesques.

It’s worth noting that there isn’t a lot of psychological realism on show here. It’s interesting to note how much this still wrong-foots me. I mean, I’m as big into post- stuff as anyone, but it’s remarkable how difficult I still find it not to think of that approach as “properly”. So, no, they’re not doing it “properly”.

It’s also interesting watching a production which isn’t aiming to really wrench at the heartstrings. It’s emphatically aiming in precisely the opposite direction, in fact. Obviously by watching it in German I’m bringing a pretty significant V-effekt all of my very own to the production, but, even without this minor consideration, it’s pretty clear that Gotscheff isn’t really interested in making us weep.

As Ivanov walks downstage in the first minute he is accompanied by the sound of My Heart Will Go On and Time To Say Goodbye played concurrently, jarringly, almost sarcastically on a tinny synthesiser. Thereafter, little phrases from either song play out at random, like irritating ringtones in/of this troubled mind.

This is a production which isn’t overmuch concerned with love...

[and there it stops. I think there was a “but” coming next, telling us what it *was* concerned with, but somehow I never quite got round to it. Anyway...]

Here's a video of it:

And some more photos

Mission Drift - Traverse Theatre

2011-08-08T17:12:00.008+02:00

[written for CultureWars.org]

New York's the TEAM (their name, preposterously, or marvellously, depending on your tastes, stands for Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) have become something of an Edinburgh institution. They've returned a number of times with shows of increasing size, complexity and perplexity. Mission Drift feels like their big crossover moment.

The show is a kind of hyper-speed history of North America since the 1600s, here enacted entirely by youthful, naïve Dutch couple Joris and Catalina Rapalje (Brian Hastert & Libby King), coupled with a kind of Living in End Times narrative set in Las Vegas.

The real stroke of genius here, though, is that the TEAM have also dropped a whole gig onto the thing, led by the blistering presence that is Heather Christian. She's small, bottle-blonde and vampy, and has the most incredible voice you'll have heard in quite some time - a meeting in a trashy motel between Janis Joplin, her out of Portishead and the one from Nouvelle Vague who does the cover of Psyche – pretty much ripping up the whole auditorium from the stage, and forcing a whole new level of engagement from the audience.

The music itself is an ingenious mixture of soul, gospel and blues. Coupled with a self-lacerating rendition of American history, the music has the useful effect of reminding us that whatever we might think of America's past – the near-genocide of the native Americans, the catastrophic atomic adventurism, the naked, aggressive capitalism, etc. – it is by no means a cultural desert. Although, perhaps it is mostly serving to remind us that the Devil has all the best tunes. Indeed, the whole show is soaked in an obvious affection for Americana even as it struggles to resist the structures that underpin it, which makes it a lot better than much of the knee-jerk anti-Americanism often found at the Fringe.

In terms of staging, it looks like the TEAM have been mainlining Volksbühne productions like they're going out of fashion. Perhaps all successful critiques of capitalism have to have big, rangy stages with a drum kit and a load of mess spread out over an astroturf lawn. But whatever. It looks great and gives the production exactly the space it needs.

Curiously, for all this postmodernism, this is actually a very legible show in terms of its narrative structures and how they operate. At its most simple, it's two romances: one brash, sexy and youthful, the other older and more bittersweet. The young, dumb, hot version is the history of America. The older, more careworn version is essentially the effect of that history on those living in the present it created. The great thing about the way the show operates, however, is that none of this feels half as obvious or laboured as I've just made it sound. There's a playful lightness about the way the show pushes its characters around which almost suggests you should dip in and out of the various levels at which it operates. With the added advantage of having Christian – essentially playing the soul of American Capitalism, Las Vegas and the Atomic Bomb – blow the whole thing apart every five minutes with another number. The cumulative effect is pretty special, even if it does feel that the show could probably achieve more by losing twenty minutes from the end, which gets a bit explain-y.

As a kind of theatrical snapshot of the present day, it's hard to imagine a more exciting despatch, though.

[all photos © Rachel Chavkin]

Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Postcards

2011-07-06T23:45:00.003+02:00

_

Today is the fourth birthday of Postcards From the Gods.

Looking at the above screen cap I notice that not a single thing I said then is still true.

I'm no longer theatre editor for CultureWars.org.uk, I don't do occasional programmes for TheatreVoice any more, the internet channel 18 Doughty Street no longer exists, and I stopped working as a script reader a couple of months after starting this blog. Similarly, the purpose of this blog hasn't really been to 'provide a space for “unofficial” comment or reviews that don’t quite come within the remit of any of the other places for whom I write stuff' since I started posting my reviews for CultureWars here and writing blogs for the Guardian.

Mercifully, a 4th birthday is hardly meant as a time for “taking stock”. I imagine by my own fourth birthday I'd learnt to talk and learnt to walk. I'm not quite sure Postcards has done quite as well, although I think it just about stands up.

As ever, I've got a whole bunch of half-written, half-thought-through pieces sitting on my desktop – the rest of those pieces about narrative, those reviews of Die Heimkehr des Odysseus and Ghost Machine, a bunch of thoughts about the second incarnation of the theatre blogosphere – and then there's a pile more sitting in a folder called “Unsent Postcards”. If there is one thing I have learnt in the past four years, it's not to make rash promises about when, if ever, they'll see the light of day.

Anyway, here's a cheerful little song:

doubleplus Unwin

2011-06-16T22:11:00.004+02:00

[apropos of nothing]

The artistic director of the Rose Theatre in Kingston, Stephen Unwin, has written a blog for the Guardian, apparently asking “Do we stage too much Shakespeare?”.

Having tried to work out what he was trying to say, or ask, several times, I've resorted to offering an edited version of the above piece here in the hope that it'll make more sense.
In the below version, I've pruned the verbiage, the filler and the weasel-words in the hope of uncovering his argument or question.
I have left aside the headline and the standfirst as they are seldom the work of the author, and in this case directly contradict what he says in the piece.

So: (orig. para. breaks)

Is British theatre addicted to Shakespeare?

Let me try to call for fewer productions.

There are several intellectual flaws in the argument: "the plays are universal in their appeal,"
or that: "Shakespeare has something for everyone and every new production is an addition to the sum of what we know"
This places a huge pressure on directors and designers to come up with new ideas.
Critics need novelties to write about and capture their imagination.
Theatre managements want their productions to have a unique selling point.

The result is celebrity-led productions of a few of the most famous plays.
Without this packaging the plays might not survive the commercial rigours of the modern theatre.

But we should still ask: "what is it that these first-time audiences are being offered?"
Are we revealing the heart of the play to those among the audience who are experiencing these masterpieces for the first time?
A handful of plays have become so familiar that it can be hard to see them objectively.

We take the plays and the astonishing language in which they're written for granted.
Theatre's endless circling round a few well-known titles is making it hard for both audience and producers to engage in a direct relationship with the original material.

We should reassess our assumptions about Shakespeare's contemporary relevance.
My argument is for a more scrupulous engagement with the complex web of social, psychological and political realism that is the mark of his genius – and a greater scepticism about the claim that Shakespeare can be all things to all people.

A discussion about our addiction to a few popular titles and our priorities in staging them is overdue.
Especially when we are concerned with the enormous number of people who come to the plays for the first time every year.

_____________

Even when edited to basic points, it still makes little logical sense. Interestingly, it reads much better backwards:

[especially when] We are concerned with the enormous number of people who come to [Shakespeares's] plays for the first time every year.

A discussion about our addiction to a few popular titles and our priorities in staging them is overdue.

My argument is for a more scrupulous engagement with the complex web of social, psychological and political realism that is the mark of his genius – and a greater scepticism about the claim that Shakespeare can be all things to all people.

We should reassess our assumptions about Shakespeare's contemporary relevance.

Theatre's endless circling round a few well-known titles is making it hard for both audience and producers to engage in a direct relationship with the original material.

We take the plays and the astonishing language in which they're written for granted.

A handful of plays have become so familiar that it can be hard to see them objectively.

Are we revealing the heart of the play to those among the audience who are experiencing these masterpieces for the first time?

Without this packaging the plays might not survive the commercial rigours of the modern theatre.
The result is celebrity-led productions of a few of the most famous plays.

But we should still ask: "what is it that these first-time audiences are being offered?"

Theatre managements want their productions to have a unique selling point.
Critics need novelties to write about and capture their imagination.

This places a huge pressure that it places on directors and designers to come up with new ideas.

There are several intellectual flaws in the argument: "the plays are universal in their appeal,"
or: "Shakespeare has something for everyone and every new production is an addition to the sum of what we know"

Let me try to call for fewer productions.

Is British theatre addicted to Shakespeare?

___________

Arranged like this, we can see much more clearly where the argument falters and fails, what is extraneous, and where false jumps of logic are made.

Allow me to run it as a dialogue:

Stephen Unwin: I am concerned with the enormous number of people who come to [Shakespeare's] plays for the first time every year.

Postcards: Are you, Stephen? Why so?

SU: A discussion about our addiction to a few popular titles and our priorities in staging them is overdue.

Postcards: Ok.

SU: My argument is for a more scrupulous engagement with the complex web of social, psychological and political realism that is the mark of his genius – and a greater scepticism about the claim that Shakespeare can be all things to all people.

Postcards: Well, as long as you realise that asserting that “the complex web of social, psychological and political realism” is “the mark of his genius” makes the second bit, which would otherwise sound quite interesting, sound quite suspect.

SU: We should reassess our assumptions about Shakespeare's contemporary relevance.

Postcards: That's better. I'm all ears.

SU: Theatre's endless circling round a few well-known titles is making it hard for both audience and producers to engage in a direct relationship with the original material.

Postcards: Hang on, are we still “concerned with the enormous number of people who come to Shakespeare's plays for the first time every year”? And what do you mean by “a direct relationship with the original material”? What is the “original material”of Shakespeare's work aside from the words themselves on paper? An audience in a theatre really cannot possibly not have those words mediated before them. Otherwise you'd be proposing just having a book on a stage for people to read (a “direct relationship”). Or perhaps surtitles.

SU: We take the plays and the astonishing language in which they're written for granted.

Postcards: If we're not “the enormous number of people who come to the plays for the first time every year” (who I'm beginning to suspect are not, in fact, those with whom you're concerned. Nor, more importantly are they the easily identifiable constituency you appear to imagine with this glib catch-all term) then we know how they're written, yes. I'm not sure if that's “taking them for granted” though. Isn't it just “knowledge”? On the other hand, if I'd never heard of Shakespeare before, I'd now already have your entirely unverifiable assertion of his genius to go on. And isn't that kind of how nearly everyone – certainly in Britain – first comes to Shakespeare; with an assurance of National Genius and a dog-earred copy of R&J or Macbeth in the third or fourth year at secondary school? It is still, I believe, a legal requirement, for that to be the case, in fact. So when you say “people who come to the plays for the first time every year”, do you in fact mean "14-year-olds"? Or do you mean “seeing Shakespeare” (“live”, or, indeed, “mediated”?)?

SU: A handful of plays have become so familiar that it can be hard to see them objectively.

Postcards: Now what do you mean by objectively? I'm hoping that you mean “subjectively, but without the baggage of having seen lots of other productions of them”, because that really, truly is all anyone is ever going to see, Stephen. You don't hold the key to “objectively” understanding Shakespeare any more than Jan Kott, Rupert Goold or David Tennant do. (I'm giving you an easy time, by the way. I could have gone for “can be hard to” - when you know full well it is impossible to see anything objectively) (also, for whom, precisely is it hard?).

SU: Are we revealing the heart of the play to those among the audience who are experiencing these masterpieces for the first time?

Postcards: Now, let's assume plays do have a “heart”. What would that look like, and how would it manifest itself on a stage? Do you have an answer for that? What is “the heart” of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing?

I'm not a medical man, but my understanding is that hearts function much better when not “revealed”. Their function is to pump blood around the rest of the body and do so better when nestled happily behind layers of skin and flesh and the ribcage. It's also my understanding – and, look, you started this metaphor, so don't look at me like that – it's also my understanding that, over time, the heart's function can decrease with age. People (or, uh, plays) benefit from advances in medical science. Hearts can be operated upon. Improved. Put back to working order. Have pacemakers fitted. Yes, it's possible to look at an old heart pickled in a jar. You could even put that jar on public display, but that's not really the same thing as a working heart, is it?

SU: The result is celebrity-led productions of a few of the most famous plays. Without this packaging the plays might not survive the commercial rigours of the modern theatre.

Now, let's think about this for a moment. Is that actually true? I pruned your examples, but they were David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. Now, what are David Tennant and Patrick Stewart? That's right, they are actors. What's more, they're both actually rather good actors. David Tennant, especially, is great. I saw him in The Pillowman at the National years ago. Did you see that? He was great. So were Jim Broadbent and Adam Godley (who are also a bit famous).

Now, yes, since then he's been on telly in Dr Who; so more people know who he is; because Dr Who is quite popular. Which might also be down to the fact that David Tennant is a pretty good actor. So, yes he's famous, which, I suppose, sort-of makes him a “celebrity”. But he's hardly famous-for-being-famous. As soon as there's a Jedward-led revival of A Comedy of Errors, I'll be right there with you smelling a rat, but until that point, is this “celebrity-led” or is this “famous-excellent-actor-led”?

Was the first incarnation of the National Theatre “celebrity-led” because Lawrence Olivier was the first artistic director? Was it “celebrity casting” to have John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in all those plays? Or were they famous because a lot of people all agreed that they very much liked watching them act? (Of course, your very use of the word “celebrity” mires the middle of this debate with so much unconscious class-contempt that I don't even want to start to get into it...)

SU: But we should still ask: "what is it that these first-time audiences are being offered?"

Postcards: Well, apparently it's: great actors in a really good production of a play by William Shakespeare according to all the reviews (including blogs). (x2 if you include the Globe, with its £5 tickets and its Eve Best off of The Shadowline in a bit of “celebrity casting”)

SU: Theatre managements want their productions to have a unique selling point.
Critics need novelties to write about and capture their imagination.

Postcards: Well, that's horseshit, isn't it? Theatre Critics need theatre to write about and capture their imaginations, sure. And you might well dispute the particular things happen to capture the imaginations of particular critics, but, “novelties”? Come on. You can do better than that. I mean, seriously, what strikes you as more true: “Britain's theatre critics, as a breed, are in the thrall to novelty”, or: “On the whole, Britain's theatre critics tend to have an instinctive mistrust of anything they perceive as novelty”?

SU: This places a huge pressure on directors and designers to come up with new ideas.

Postcards: It's tempting just to say “good” and leave it at that. But.
Well, it's even easier than that. The question is: what do you think would happen if there wasn't this “pressure” which you perceive being placed on directors and designers (apparently largely by novelty-hungry critics)? And are you seriously proposing that the sole driver of “new ideas” in the field of Shakespeare production is the novelty-needing British theatre-critical establishment?

Take the critics out of the equation. There are no critics. Imaginary scenario: you will get exactly the same audience – let's say you'll sell out – no matter what you do. Let's say you've sold out the entire run in advance. So, what do you do?

Do you see my point? You still have to do *something*. What do you really want to be doing? I know, I know. You want to “reveal the heart of the play”. Well, fine. But the actors still have to wear something (or not. Still a choice). And they'll have to stand on something. And they'll presumably have to be lit in some way or other – even if it's just the house lights, or a really clever trick of lighting design making it look like they really are right outside in the open air.

Let me put this as gently as I can: there is nothing you can do which isn't going to put you and your designer's vision of the play between the written text and the audience.

Of course you're welcome to argue for the primacy of your version of events. I think that's almost a crucial prerequisite of being an artist/director. Of course you can think it can only be done your way, and that is why you're doing it your way. I do think it's crass not to recognise that it is only your way, though. No matter how right you might believe you are.

SU: There are several intellectual flaws in the argument: "the plays are universal in their appeal,"

Postcards: Sure. Although, as we see above, we're all of us subject to the odd intellectual flaw. If that's not a rationale that works for you, ditch it. All I'd say is that it has clearly worked for other people (even though I'd agree and that I think it's “wrong” too). It's a bit like the fact that Katie Mitchell often seems to make this transcendent, arty work, while thinking she's strictly observing some sort of Stanislavskian method, even as her performers dance and look straight through the fourth wall – even from some really wonky theory, great productions can spring.

SU: [there are also several flaws in the argument that] "Shakespeare has something for everyone and every new production is an addition to the sum of what we know"

Postcards: Might it not be the case that people (directors) actually argue: “I want to do this play because it speaks to me (perhaps: “this is what I think its heart is”), and I'd like to make it speak to as many other people as possible”? And further people (the audience) argue: “well, crumbs, that certainly spoke to me and to the people I've spoken to about it. And, yes, it made me think about the play in a totally different way, for which I'm grateful”.

SU: Let me try to call for fewer productions [of plays by Shakespeare].

Postcards: Why? This seems to come from nowhere.

I wasn't going to bring this up, but, do you remember what you said in April?

Your application for Arts Council funding had just been unsuccessful, and you wrote a blog about it for the Guardian. The bit I'm thinking of in particular (you'll notice that I haven't dragged Dame Judi Dench into this for a bit of cheap point-scoring at all) is your conclusion:

“We wanted to become a theatrical centre for the huge number of people across south-west London, who for no fault of their own have been underserved. ACE's latest carve-up does nothing to redress that imbalance.”

What I find curious is that now you're not making a slightly contentious claim for south-west London's under-servédness in terms of theatres, you're saying that an “avalanche of Hamlets that engulfs us every other year”.

Now, as far as I'm aware, the Rose, Kingston, hasn't done a Hamlet yet (although you're hardly making much of a case for attendance of The Rose Youth Theatre's all-female (novelty!) production (set in the 1930s(!)) starring Grace Molony (Michael's daughter? “Celebrity”-by-proxy?!) on 7th & 9th July). And yet you're still content to allege that “we” are “engulfed” by an “avalanche” (3, plus Sheffield), even while the poor people of south-west London are underserved.

Come on. Buck up. Which is it?

Yes, you have a point about a local theatre being excellent for a community. And, yes, local is different to 20 minutes away by high-speed rail connection. But, really, who is being “engulfed” by the “avalanche”? “Local” aside, surely people can pick and choose which productions they want to go and see. Especially in London.

And again, yes, the fact there were three Hamlets in London in the past couple of years did mean that three other (possibly Shakespeare) plays weren't performed. On the other hand. All three Hamlets sold out. To the extent I didn't get to be engulfed in the avalanche of a single one of them. Nor did lots of other people. So where does that leave us?

Doesn't it suggest that there was sufficient public appetite for these productions to have run for longer, had there been the resources and had the cast been available? Moreover, where's this novelty you're scared of in these avalanchey Hamlets? Granted, I didn't see any of them (apart from the one I saw ont telly at Christmas), but weren't they actually all quite concerned with “doing the play”? Nothing I read about any of them suggested any significant degree of heart-obscuring.

In conclusion, I think your argument is flawed. It's flawed because you're being dishonest about what you want to say. What you seem to be edging toward asking is this:

“Why should Shakespeare's plays ever be done differently to what I imagine to be “correctly” or “properly”? The only reason these directors do them differently to “how they're meant to be done” is that they're either pandering to the plebs, updating them to make them “relevant” (a concept which I don't understand) and chucking in people from the telly. Or else it's the critics, who are all so eaten up with ennui by the thought of seeing Shakespeare done exactly as it's meant to be done that they'd clearly much rather see Pete Postlethwaite with a big train set than King Lear done properly.

As a result, despite the fact only about 400 people a night can see any given performance of a play, I propose we stop doing all the plays I've seen hundred of times before, until the critics and the public come to their senses and pay my revolutionarily pure stagings the respect that I'm certain they deserve.”

SU: Is British theatre addicted to Shakespeare?

Postcards: This is a completely different question to the one that you discuss.

Good night.

Betrogen (Betrayal) – Renaissance Theater

2011-05-27T15:26:00.006+02:00

[Long, unnecessary intro at the end]

The most surprising about Torsten Fischer's production of Harold Pinter's 1978 play Betrayal, now in rep. at Berlin's Renaissance Theater, is how normal it is.

As it opens two men are playing squash in an exact replica of a squash court, complete with glass 4th wall. On the back of the court, the precise time (20:01:etc 24/5/2011 is projected). The lights go down. The play's title, “Betrogen”, flashes up and the clock winds back the years to 1977 for the first scene of the play as Pink Floyd's Time plays.

It's quite, uh, cinematic.

In a small nod to being German, the entire play turns out to be set in a squash court. Or rather, the set doesn't change. The glass 4th wall does gradually recede throughout the action, which at least has the effect of situating each scene in a different space. Even if they are all white with a red line running round them about halfway up the wall. But even this hardly feels like an outrageous exercise in regietheater-gone-mad.

The squash court is no doubt a cunning reference to one the famous motifs of Pinter's text being Jerry and Robert (I don't need to go through the plot, do I? We all know it backwards, right?) repeatedly mentioning that they haven't played squash together for years. Here the squash court surrounds them like an emblem of this failure, and a monument to the reason behind it.

Having spent recent days [this review was written on Weds, but then Blogger went to pieces] wondering at a tendency toward nit-picking in British theatre criticism (the partial modernisation of School for Scandal, swearing in the Cherry Orchard, and Merchant of Venice in Las Vegas), I find myself doing precisely the same here (you can take the critic out of England...). After all, if you go to the effort of projecting the fact that it's 1977 on the back wall before the first scene, why are the blokes wearing totally modern squash gear? But, no matter. It's an otherwise totally conservative modern dress production of a play set in 1968-77. In a squash court. It's fine.

The other thing that amused me was noting that the play was still set in England, and the characters still nominally English. I wondered from time to time if little things they said or did (“cheers” remained in English, for instance) were there to point up this fact. Whenever two characters met up, for example, one would pour the other about half a pint of neat gin. Not so much as a sniff of tonic water. Just half a pint of neat gin.

Gin apart, the characters didn't really come across as especially English. It was hard to tell, for example, whether the potentially homo-social aspect of Robert and Jerry's friendship was being foregrounded, or whether they were two men who were just a bit more relaxed in each other's company on account of not actually being English. At one point, Jerry even stroked the top of Roberts head. Of course, by this point in the scene, he'd drunk about a pint of neat gin, so maybe that was it.

Similarly, what I'd always understood as the crucial chilliness of the dialogue – essentially a play of gritted teeth and quiet control – seems to be more or less discarded. The crucial turning-point scene where Robert discovers Emma's affair here involves him giving her a bit of a beating, rather than the more usual English reading of a cold verbal interrogation. Making his subsequent (chronologically) claim that his hitting Emma “a bit” had nothing to do with Jerry a deliberate lie.

All of which is fine too. Indeed, it's mildly surprising to see the play done “straight” - i.e. with really no hint that the director is doing anything other than what they believe the script is asking them to do (oh dear, bad explanation) – and finding it turning up in such a different place. Part of this may of course stem from Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt's German translation. In one instance, for example, it changes Emma's (now somewhat dated-sounding) admission: “We're lovers” to (the German for) “We are in love” - which potentially alters not only this crucial moment but possibly the entire meaning and trajectory of the play. Or not.

However, elsewhere in the production there are hints of, well, at best a well-meaning naïveté or at worst carelessness. The Venice scene is flagged up by a film of an aerial view on a canal ineptly projected on the back wall of a the Squash Court and the table-cloth which Emma later/earlier presents with a flourish looks like the cheapest of afterthoughts. And in the final scene (i.e. the first, chronologically) Pink Floyd's Time is played again. A full five years before it was released.

All of which suggests that the whole was flung together without much thought, which therefore may have had an impact on the acting as well. But niggles aside, the production isn't actually too bad. In the context of the apparently TV-starry cast, Heikko Deutschmann and Anika Mauer run rings around the stolid, macho Peter Kremer in the acting stakes (and indeed, in the line-learning stakes), but the show rattles along pacily enough, in spite of this.

On the whole, though, this is much more of a curiosity than an out-and-out pleasure.

Introduction:

There's an interesting phenomena in Germany. It is this: there is a total disconnection between the state-funded theatre and the commercial sector. More than this, I am given to understand that the commercial sector receives almost no coverage from the serious theatre critics. The state theatres put on their mixture of incessantly revived, and always freshly re-imagined, texts from the canon (the Schiller, the Goethe, the narrow band of Shakespeares done here, the Aeschylus, the Euripides, etc.), new writing and modern classics (plus the surprising number of literary adaptations), the Off-theaters continue with their experiments in production and reception, and it appears that no one serious ever gives the slightest thought to the commercial sector.

Coming from London, this first struck me as utterly wonderful. Having been sent as a theatre critic for the Financial Times to such “theatre” as An Audience with the Mafia and TV magician Derren Brown I was more than a little jealous. Imagine a world, I thought, where I wasn't responsible for having to have an opinion on Lloyd-Webber's latest telly placement or jukebox musical.

At the same time, I was acutely aware that this distinction – as applied to Britain – was flawed. After all, there is nothing like the same gulf between British commercial theatre and its state-funded sibling as there seems to be in Germany. On one hand, we happily produce musicals and boulevard comedies in our state houses and, at the same time, as Simon Stephens recently noted, the possibility of a West End Transfer is something of a status symbol and not one to be sniffed at. As such, apart from anything else, there is basically no point in drawing a line between “commercial” theatre and the theatre made in British state theatres. Britain has always been one for blurring the lines between “popular” and “high” art, I'd argue, and now many argue that the terms themselves are meaningless.

As a result, the rejection or ignoring of a whole section of a city's theatres just isn't in my critical DNA. Also, criticism is sort of journalism, too, right? And Berlin's commercial sector is, if nothing else, a news story. Something to be reported on...

Armed with such reasoning, I find myself about the furthest out West I've ever been in Berlin (apart from a trip to Schloss Charlottenburg or the lakes on the edge of the city), outside the Renaissance Theater for a production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal.

As it turns out, the Renaissance Theater is a rather pleasant, modest-looking building, with few nods to glitz and/or glamour. The interior foyer is a bit ironic- (or, more worryingly, perhaps *not*ironic-) chintzy-posh (think The Ambassador's Receptions), but the auditorium itself is pleasantly intimate and oddly not unlike a scaled down version of Deutsches Theater – with a similarly low rake for the audience and plush walls and carpeting – quite unlike anything in either the West End or the subsidised sector. Perhaps try imaging the Royal Court or the Duchess redecorated by the people who did Kensington Palace. It was also interesting to note that its audience was far more like those that used to be the mainstay of Britain's own National Theatre, an almost solid wall of comfortably-off retirees.

But the most striking thing is that here Pinter is relegated to the same status as Yasmina Reza (the Renaissance Theater is also showing “Kunst”(!)), Hello, I'm Johnny Cash and Ewig Jung (Forever Young!). It's a bit like the discovering the Birmingham Hippodrome includes an Elfriede Jelinek staging in its repertoire (at least in terms of comparable Nobel-winning national stature)...

[you can now go back to the start of the review...]

50 Aktenkilometer

2011-05-23T12:10:00.011+02:00

50 Aktenkilometer (50 Kilometres of Files) takes the form of wandering around the centre of ex-East Berlin (so, actually, what is now the centre of Berlin, what was the western edge of ex-Ost Berlin) with a map. This (or at least as much of the map as would fit in the scanner...):

Wearing a pair of headphones, plugged into a GPS/mobile phone/receiver thingy. This:

The (approx 100) Orange Points marked on the map, signify the epicentres and radii of signals being transmitted around the city which are receivable by your headset/device-thingy.

Whenever you hove into range, your headset starts playing you the recording attached to that site (yes, *Starts*. They're not on a loop. You get each one from the start whenever your headset moves into range, and it keeps playing it for pretty much as long as it can. It struck me as tremendously clever and complicated).

The subject of all the recordings is the East German secret police or Stasi.

There are recordings of actual telephone conversations and interviews, there are readings of files performed by actors and there are interviews with former victims of the Stasi. There are also patriotic DDR songs. Many of the recordings relate specifically to the location in which they're played.

Some might be recordings of someone making a phone call from or relating to the spot you're standing on over 22 years ago.

Others might have been recorded in the last few weeks by someone audibly moved to be revisiting this specific spot.

The clips range from the workaday business of an organisation dedicated to spying on the entire population of a city – perhaps one of the most striking things is the deadpan tones of voice of the bored agents making and taking calls, and the occasional fact of them having a bit of a laugh about something – to heartbreaking stories of betrayal, separation, torture, and imprisonment.

Some of the clips would even be quite funny if they weren't so sinister: an agent getting phoned up by a series of people all watching the same diplomat repeating the same one piece of trivial information – that he'd checked into his hotel.

I did the piece by bike (– and, as always, with sketchy German). What was striking, taking the piece this way, rather than doing it on foot, was the extent of both the project (remarkable), but also of the source material.

It was a beautiful, sunny, Saturday afternoon in late May. Berlin was full of tourists. Some doing the beautiful old buildings, some, naturally, on the Ostalgie trail. Others again no doubt looking at the city as the former capital of the Third Reich. As such, there is both a massive disconnect between the evidence of one's eyes – Berlin, the (sunny, hot,) modern, Western, capitalist shopping and tourism centre – and the evidence being beamed into your ears.

You started to feel that everywhere, every corner, ever street, every nondescript shop-front or easily overlooked side-street had a story to tell. Indeed, just cycling around for three or four hours, hearing constantly new material, new stories, new evidence, was exhausting. And this was only 100 recordings. The total running time of the recorded show is upwards of ten hours. Then you think that this was going on for forty-odd years. And not just in Berlin.

One of the strange effects of Rimini Protokoll's wider project of telling one about the world is to open your eyes to the sheer impossibility of taking it all in. When you factor history upon geography upon population, just the extent of the experience of the world starts to feel impossibly enormous. That so much of it is also composed of misery is not a cheering thought.

That said, it feels like a necessary project. It's almost a shame that the thing is voluntary and ticketed. It felt a bit like this sort of experience ought to have been mandatory for everyone in the city – an important exercise in not just papering over the past with a bunch of new shops and upmarket bars or restaurants.

Check Point Charlie today (well, Saturday). The iPad 2 advert marks the start of the Russian Sector.

Appendix:

Above: The cover of the map. Below: The “control room” at the bottom of Berlin's most prominent landmark, the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) (see top) on Alexanderplatz.

You can also listen to specific recordings in the control room by finding them on large computer monitors:

The TV Tower reflected in the glass of Park Hotel Berlin.

The thing itself. Again.

The Killing Machine

2011-05-23T08:37:00.001+02:00

[In lieu of any work materialising]

Over the last weekend I saw another new show by Rimini Protokoll and a revival of an older show by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Both of those and Die Heimkehr des Odysseus at Schaubühne are proving oddly resistant to being written about. So, in the mean time, this is a video of a previous Cardiff & Bures installation which was part of the exhibition of their stuff at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2008 (Chris Goode wrote a lovely piece about it at the time here), which I'd been meaning to share on here for ages. Take four minutes and put it on full screen.

Das Werk / Im Bus / Ein Sturz - Theatertreffen – Potsdamer Platz

2011-05-17T21:09:00.003+02:00

[Incredibly lazy Video Special!]

“So, it'll be a Sunday afternoon. What show from Theatertreffen shall we stick on at Potsdamer Platz?”

“Oh, let's give them the 3hr40 non-naturalistic staging of theatertexts about natural disasters.”

Das Werk is possibly one of the best things I've ever seen done in a theatre. Except, a) I didn't see it in a theatre, b) I only saw about half of it, & c) I understood slightly less of the text than normal – well, I got that it was about an accident in an industrial plant, and The Workers, which turns out was pretty much the size of it, but at the time I felt less like I was following it than seeing it whizz past in front of my eyes. But, blimey, what a sight.

And what a way of dealing with text. This is what was really exciting. I've had a stab at reading Elfriede Jelinek's texts/plays online and haven't had a lot of luck imagining how on earth they'd work on stage.

This arrangement of three of her texts apparently owes quite an artistic debt to the most celebrated interpreter/director of her works, the late Einar Schleef, whose Ein Sportstück (that linked clip really worth a watch – though possibly with the sound down) still stands as a landmark in German stage history.

Perhaps unwisely, given that I was outdoors and armed with my cameraphone, I've uploaded a bunch of footage to YouTube. Annoyingly, it doesn't even give anything like a sense of what it was like watching the work on a Sunday afternoon in a public space – which in turn was doubtless no substitute for being in the actual theatre. But here, third hand, it does at least remove a bit of a burden from my powers of description, which I'm probably going to need for the Schaubühne's Die Heimkehr des Odysseus [review currently forthcoming].

The first video (top) contains many of the elements that recurred throughout Das Werk: stamping, speaking in chorus, cut-up/sampled text, mass panting, high voices, the musicality of speaking...
This second – I did a bad job of recording the best bits, getting distracted by watching them - captures a late bit of a section of some declaiming over singing...

Here again, different ways the chorus was used to deliver the text. The thing I found incredibly hard to remember (no wonder German critics read the texts before they see the shows) was how none of this was “organic” to the text. And yet, how much it felt as if this was how the text was meant to be done – like it was “serving the text” perfectly (which of course it was, but at the same time, as far as I'm aware, it's not legislated for at all)

One bit I missed filming wasn't a million mile from this performance of Einstürzende Neubauten's Was Ist Ist:

The piece ended with some beautiful singing, like something out of Mahler or Strauss:

Im Bus

The second piece, Im Bus, deals with an accident during the building of a U-Bahn station.

The stage is a mess of debris. The few performers have shaken flour over themselves, daubed their faces, poured water over one another, have smoked, used a smoke machine.

Although this was possibly the end of Das Werk.

Then three curious refugees from some sort of Brecht piece have turned up to deliver some more text. This little intervention might be the whole of Im Bus. In which case, it's about ten minutes long and this is the final fifth...

Ein Sturz

The final piece, Ein Sturz (A Fall), was commissioned by Schauspiel Köln, and is a text about the library that collapsed in Köln overnight.

Annoyingly I had to leave to get to Schaubühne before it got really good, but it had just started to get messy as I was leaving...

Again, the division of the text amongst people and, here, objects – large amounts of the text spews forth from laptops or over loudspeakers – is little short of revolutionary to my mind; although I'm well aware it's been going on here for donkey's years and is nothing to get excited about.

On the other hand, the little mostly naked woman running around as “Earth” is possibly an eco-catastrophe all of her own. I'm all for metaphor and everything, but this one errs toward massive overstatement.

For all that, I suspect the two and half hours or so that I saw of this show will probably inform the way I think about how text is treated on stage for the rest of my life.

Nora oder Ein Puppenhaus – Theatertreffen – Potsdamer Platz

2011-05-16T15:55:00.004+02:00

[]

If Verrücktes Blut was pretty atypical of “German Theatre” (if an excellent “public event”), Theater Oberhausen's production of Henrik Ibsen's Ein Puppenhaus (well, Ibsen's Et dukkehjem, or A Doll's House as we Brits have it) presents an excellent example of one particular school of Regietheater. Director (and, here, designer) Herbert Fritsch was an actor in Frank Castorf's Volksbühne company while it was revolutionising post-Mauerfall German theatre. And it's clear that he's taken much of his former comrade's style on board in his directing style.

You know A Doll's House, right? Pretty typical Ibsen: bunch of people standing around in a room in a 19th century Norwegian house, dressed in period costume. The acting is incredibly subtle; a maasterpiece in naturalism.

Not here.

Fritsch's production is a garish, grotesque nightmare. Opening to the queasy, insistent strings of Bernard Herrmann's music for Hitchcock's Vertigo, the stark square playing areas is lit with alternating reds and greens.

Manja Kuhl's Nora is a disturbing Tim Burton fantasia on infantalised womanhood. Decked out in a short, voluminous chiffon pink baby-doll dress, ballet pumps and a shock of auburn ringlets, but lethally long legs. By contrast, Torsten Bauer's Helmer is a violent caricature of old age: all pealing-latex bald-wig, powery whiteface, and a wardrobe hymning the joys of beige.

The playing style offers a similar fantastical bluntness, almost as if the cast were assaulting the play rather than performing it. Lines are delivered at a pitch of near-hysteria, while the cast physically play out just about the most extreme reading of the subtext imaginable. If A Doll's House is secretly about sex and power, then it's not a secret here. Nora is forever being pawed, groped, mauled and spanked while, in turn, coquetting and flouncing, flirting and virtually forcing herself on people. A sexuality the text only hints at is here brought alive and then weaponised.

It's not a style I've always warmed to. I think there were many similarities in this performance to Castorf's recent hit Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau!, which I really tried to like, but didn't. But here, I really got it. It's perhaps easier to watch a sexual subtext physicalised than a socio-economic one, but even so, seeing this is already feeding my retrospective appreciate of the Castorf – and so perhaps apart from anything else, this Nora is an excellent entry-level performance for this style of direction. Castorf-lite, or Volksbühne-für-Beginners or something. And, yes, this took a bit of warming to, too. But once I got there, I thought it was great.

What was fascinating about the performance was the way that you could almost see the play being dismantled in front of your face. The idea that the lines the cast were shrieking at one another were the same lines that are delivered with as much understatement and earnestness as possible in other productions of Ibsen (Ostermeier's wonderful Hedda Gabler, for example) was almost reward enough for sticking with it. And yet, it was still the play. But not really functioning in anything like the way you (I, we?) think it's meant to.

Of course, there was again, here, the extra dimension of the fact that this wasn't actually *live* to consider. Unlike Verrücktes Blut, I don't think the Theater Oberhausen staging could possibly have been a recording of a live performance in front of an live audience. Instead, while this was still very defiantly a stage production, it was very much a stage production for the cameras. What might be direct-audience-address live was here close-up, to-camera work, while the way the cameras weaved in and out of the action, cutting rapidly and dancing about the performers also suggested a lot more than one take.

I also wonder again if, the freedom of watching, of being outdoors – seeing the thing on a massive screen, with close-ups available, and a whacking great sound system definitely making the performance the biggest noise-polluter by a country mile almost drowning out the occasional police siren, let alone the general low-level chatter of a public space – had a bearing on reception. Well, of course it did. I could smoke, go to the loo without upsetting anyone, and stretch my legs from time to time, all while feeling the wind on my face and seeing the blue sky above. In this respect, it was pretty much the opposite of “theatre”, and it didn't feel like a bad thing at all. That said, I would still like to sit in the same room as the original and experience it as it was meant to be intended.

While I'm not sure it said a great deal about anything very seriously, as a way of delivering the play – serving the text, indeed – it worked totally. And pretty much turned my ideas of what you could do with Ibsen on their head. Essential viewing if you can get hold of a copy.

More videos:

You get a vague sense of overall style from this clip, although this might be a particularly overwrought moment:

Although this, from very close to the end, is better – note burning cardboard fir tree in background and the music to another Hitchcock film, this time Psycho. I also love how untroubled this Nora is by the collapse of her marriage.

Verrücktes Blut – Theatertreffen, Potsdamer Platz

2011-05-16T13:49:00.008+02:00

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

Broadly speaking, Germany, or at least Berlin, doesn't seem to go in for the social-realist problem play so much. You know, those plays that are the absolute staple of English theatre: the dinner-party conversation play; the “About” play; the “liberal angst” play. Everything from George Bernard Shaw to the work of Davids Hare and Edgar.

Verrücktes Blut looks like it's already making a significant dent in this theory. Created at the Berlin theatre Ballhaus Naunynstraße, located in the heavily Turkish-populated district of Neukölln – sort of Berlin's Arcola – it is a play about young Turks in Germany.

The first interesting, or at least unexpected, thing about Verrücktes Blut is that it isn't a piece of new writing. It's an adaptation of the recent, similarly themed French film La journée de la jupe (Skirt Day!), or as blurb has it: “Frei nach einem Motiv aus dem Film...” (roughly: freely after a motif from the film...). In both, a teacher finds a gun in one of her students' bags and takes her class hostage.

Here, the piece gets off to a rather rocky start. The first few minutes involves little more than the Turkish cast rehearsing an exaggerated Masque of the Surly Youths. Then, the gun is discovered. Nine. Minutes. In. And for a good long while after that, the production consists of the whole cast screaming and shouting at maximum tension-level. Or rather, mostly the teaching screaming and shouting and the kids looking terrified and screaming or shouting only when the gun is pointed at them.

Then comes another potential pitfall. The class the teacher is taking is on Schiller's repertory classic Die Räuber. The class in meant to be memorising large chunks and performing them (apparently, yup, that really does happen in German schools. Read and weep, British teachers), so we've now got the handy contrivance of having these Turkish youngsters having to perform large chunks of Schiller. It's practically Our Country's Good for immigrants at gunpoint (not that Our Country's Good isn't immigrants at gunpoint, but...).

The teacher menaces them for incorrect pronunciation, bullies and taunts them, and calls them “monkeys” (Affen). The strapline for the show could almost be “When you teach the word culture, reach for a gun”. All this is more than a little problematic, especially for me, a total outside observer (being neither Turkish nor German). In the first instance, the production paints a more-or-less relentlessly negative view of Turkish youngsters; it then seems to suggest that German culture is forced down the necks of these youngsters basically – now literally – at gunpoint.

The subjects of the teacher's anger are considerable. At one point she is attacking male Turkish youths' propensity for over-using the word “muschi” (pussy); at another, she forces a young Turkish girl to remove her headscarf at gunpoint.

I don't know whether this latter scene is also in the French original, but it would seem fittingly emblematic for a “debate” which is raging across Europe – whether or not to introduce headscarf bans. Here the removal of the headscarf is shown as a moment of female liberation and/or empowerment. Somehow, the fact this empowerment takes place at gunpoint seems to get lost. Which seems in keeping with the direction in which the debate seems to be going: legislating to enhance people's personal freedoms by making something people do illegal.

In fact, though, it might well be the presence of the gun which keeps the play's examination of the issues interesting. In short, while it might be a bit of a crass, or symbolically heavy-handed motif, it does have the useful effect of undermining both sides at once, while at the same time proving to be an effective tool for classroom control. But I wonder if it pushes the envelope of hopelessness a bit too far. As if to suggest that there can be only violence. That brutal control is the only option.

At the end, it has emerged that one of the group has done Quite A Bad Thing and there's a quick balloon debate about whether he gets executed or not. The pupils quote a range of leading enlightenment lights (Schiller, Goethe, Voltaire, etc.) to the teacher's amazement, pleasure and ultimate irritation. It's a bit on the heavy-handed side, like the kids are all suddenly channelling Dead Poets Society. Now, if they'd managed to make the same arguments using the Koran, then we might have been onto something, but curiously, this was a play which seemed to brook virtually no multi-culturalism at all.

By German standards the staging was deemed rather conservative. i.e. the youths wore precisely the clothes Turkish youths wear, and were played by yer actual young Turkish youths (an aside: I have no idea what the correct term is for 2nd or 3rd gen. People of Turkish extraction living in Germany. They don't seem to say “Germans” and neither do the Germans, so “Turkish” I guess it is, even though they speak German, and were born in Germany). This set up a minor problem of its own – at the end of the play, a big dramatic reveal is that the teacher also turns out to be Turkish. This does not come as a big surprise to anyone with eyes. Prior to this “big reveal”, however, there's a certain uncertainty as to whether it's a Turkish actress playing a “German” teacher, or whether it's meant to be a Turkish woman. This might be complicated further by the fact the teacher actress's hair could well have been a blonde wig, rather than dye. So, yes, it did feel as if, if they were doing “naturalism” they weren't fully on top of it.

That said, I say “by German standards” advisedly, however. After all, when was the last time a British social-realist drama had a massive grand piano hung menacingly over the stage. Much less one that periodically interrupted the action to play various antique songs of German national pride – mostly about the beauty of the nature and so on. This element of the staging also added to the problems of the message the play might or might not have been intentionally delivering. After all, this grand piano looming over them did take on an immensely powerful symbolic role. It looked a bit like they'd decided to put up a symbol for God, and that they'd decided God was probably German culture.

Of course, having been made by “Turkish people”, the play gets a lot of points for “authenticity”, and apparently the actual script here was partly devised around the motifs, or *plot*, or the film. And it does seem to hit all the current discussion points – often with an enviable lack of flinching.

What is surprising to my British eyes is that it volunteers absolutely no positive things abut Turkish culture whatsoever. The teacher accuses the girls of wearing headscarves and only having anal sex so they can marry as virgins because they're frightened of their fathers and their brothers. The boys mostly behave with relentless violence and abuse. Coming from inside the Turkish community, this self-lacerating commentary on the problems of their society as they see it is fair enough. In that respect, it's like the Beat Poets' portraits of small town America. It's like Thomas Bernhard's Vienna.

Perhaps a crucial key to understanding their position is an incredibly brief moment before the play even starts where the actress playing the Turkish girl who wears a headscarf puts it on, before going on stage. At the time, I thought it was just a kind way of defending our sensibilities but I wonder now if it wasn't a way of her signalling her own opposition to the headscarf. Perhaps this is a play arguing against multi-culturalism and for enlightenment values in precisely the way that, coming from a small English town, I would argue long and hard against the German government tolerating a Small English Town community still practicing its absurd, dated, misogynist beliefs in their midst.

As a piece of theatre, it might not be the most refined at Theatertreffen, but it might well prove to be the most talked-about.

One of the songs (my footage, apologies for the slightly rough quality):

A lot of the shouting:

Couple of picutres of the screeing:

This one almost gives an impression of how many people there were, but not quite.

Robert Wilson and the power of the underdog

2011-05-12T13:53:00.000+02:00

This week, along with “Narrative” and “Britain”, I've been wrestling with what I'd been thinking of as “The Problem of Robert Wilson”.

This came about as a result of seeing his Věc Makropulos at Stavovské Divadlo in Prague and absolutely hating it.

Věc Makropulos is a frivolous little thing by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek and was later turned into an opera by Czech composer Leoš Janáček.

This version by Wilson is a massively pared-down version of the original text, but starring leading Czech opera diva Soňa Červená and with an extensive new score by Aleš Březina, who created the excellent, not un-Philip Glass-like score for the Czech show-trial verbatim opera Zítra se bude...(roughly: Tomorrow There Will Be...), also starring Soňa Červená.

But, mostly I was exciting to be finally seeing some Robert Wilson.

Yes, Robert Wilson is another party I've turned up late for. Granted, this isn't entirely my fault. His most important work, Einstein on the Beach (which is being re-done for the Barbican next year), premiered the year I was born, and hasn't been see-able anywhere for 20 years.

On the other hand, he's still working an awful lot since.

And this is where it gets tricky.

I suppose I've known that he was kind of a big deal for a while, but the last thing I remember coming/going to London was the Anglicised-cast version of his 1990 Thalia, Hamburg show Black Rider in 2004. Looking back at the reviews written at the time (Indie, Guardian, Shuttleworth for Teletext and again in Theatre Record) I remember a) not really having the first clue about Wilson's importance, b) not especially caring about Tom Waits (I still don't, really. Sorry), c) finding that the points made by the nay-sayers struck more of a chord than those made saying it was good, d) thinking it sounded a bit too much like a “super-group” and, perhaps most crucially, e) not really being anywhere near “proper-ish” critic enough to get a freebie (or, indeed, being on the treadmill/merry-go-round of seeing shows almost daily enough for this to bother me). And, as Shuttleworth and Billington note, Black Rider turned up off the back of an even more unloved Woyzeck.

Anyway, thanks to this variety of factors, I wind up getting to 35 without seeing any Robert Wilson, by which time, having been to a bunch of international festivals and talked to a lot more people (and, indeed, read a lot more stuff, including Chris Goode's long love-letter to Wilson's work on Thompson's Bank...), I'd gathered some unhelpfully epic expectations.

The other thing I'd gained, was the impression of Wilson being incredibly successful and powerful. Which isn't inaccurate. These days, it seems that Wilson can fly about the world, demand huge fees for his work, and essentially behave as if he is a genius beyond questioning. Not least because that's how other people seem to treat him (indeed, talking to Czech sources “close to the production” one got the impression of Wilson behaving with significantly less tact and local knowledge than the American army in Iraq).

Inevitably, none of this did much to endear the idea of the man (or at least Brand Wilson) to me.

Nor, annoyingly, did I subsequently find my attitude melted in the presence of his work.

I found it chilly, un-engaged, un-engaging unintelligent, and lazy.

At the same time, I was vaguely aware that this was a (the?) common criticism of his work.

This needed more research, so I watched the documentary Absolute Wilson which is excellent, at least for giving a sense of his early work and the comparative struggle it took for it to be made, but also for giving a rolling cavalcade of faces assuring you how important his work is.

Granted filmed footage of (Anglophone) theatre work tends to be unsatisfactory at the very least. But this did at least give a sense of what earlier work had looked like – what had been exciting and exotic about the stuff he'd made in the seventies, and also it gave a sense of the very different social context from which the work had sprung. This emphatically wasn't the world of Business Class lounges and exhorbitant fees.

Annoyingly, Absolute Wilson rather glosses the leaps between Wilson's struggles in America, his acceptance in Europe, the opening of Einstein on the Beach at the New York Metropolitan Opera in apparently pretty unfavourable conditions (“My father said to me, I didn't know you were even smart enough to lose $150,000”), and the leap to being in a position to be in charge of the Artisitic Programme meant to be run alongside the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and the subsequent catastrophic tanking of his project Civil Wars. From there, it positively leaps to the 1990 success of Black Rider in Hamburg and beyond and then finishes pretty rapidly with a montage of the awards and honors bestowed upon Wilson Triumphant.

Watching the documentary made me think two things. One: that I wasn't especially sure that Wilson's somewhat geometric aesthetic was ever going to be wholly my thing, but that I was willing to give it another few goes. Two: that there was a much more interesting question concerning power-relations that seemed to go to the heart of how we (and by “we” here, I specifically mean “the English”, possibly “British”) view work. Both American, not least as evidenced by this documentary, and German culture, both have their own different difficult relationships with “power”, or “success” or “authority”.

If I was going to have a stab at characterising the British attitude, (and, yes, I appreciate this is going to entail some stupidly large generalisations, and probably some contradictions, so bear with me) to “power” and/or “success” (let alone “authority”), I think it would rest largely on what strikes me increasingly as a hard-wired cultural predisposition toward “underdogs”, coupled with a resolute antipathy toward “being talked down to”. It's a trait I definitely have myself, but it's also something I find myself noticing more and more in the discussion around theatre in Britain more generally.

On one level, it's something I admire and think is crucial to a lot of the good things about British theatre. The fact that there's often a very healthy attitude of “says who?” which allows people to start doing precisely what they like. On another level, it turns into a deeply unhelpful, corrosive attitude of dissmissal, insularity, and downright stupidity which makes it feel like any sort of change is nigh-on impossible.

I noticed it mostly when I started writing for the Guardian Blog, and later for Time Out etc. And now I notice it more in the comments people make about other writers there, and about the productions/artists they write about.

The thing is this. One might have a pretty sane picture of oneself as just one person with one person's opinion. But many people who comment on the Guardian blog have a very different conception of what the very fact of writing on it makes you. One is variously needed to be “an expert”, a Guardian staff member, a member of a powerful London-centric media elite, and a theatre critic.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to me, was the discussions that would typically spring up around any article about Forest Fringe. Now, I know Andy Field and Deborah Pearson quite well. I was at the first day of the first Forest Fringe. I knew how big it was (not very), but also how important and inspiring I found it (very).

What was interesting is how quickly, almost instantaneously, after a bit of coverage by the Guardian, Forest Fringe went from being seen as a total outsider, worthy of a bit of championing and talking-up – it was, lest we forget, an almost impossibly foolhardy venture; programming a fortnight of free performances in a free venue, staffed entirely by volunteers – to being some kind of “new orthodoxy” and some sort of grotesque, overblown giant in serious need of cutting down to size. Much the same attitude seems to be applied, variously, to (for example): any Guardian bloggers, Katie Mitchell, Simon Stephens, Martin Crimp, Michael Billington, Matt Trueman, Chris Goode, etc. etc. etc. (obviously that's a fairly random list of the ones I just happen to notice).

Reflecting on how annoying I find this tendency when applied to the above, gives me pause when (to return to the subject) we get back to Robert Wilson.

Should perception, or even knowledge, of his position, colour my attitude to his work?

Here, I would argue there is a greater degree of relevance. The examples I give above are irritating, and stand out, primarily because of the degree of inaccuracy involved. The strange (and incorrect) perception of some bored souls that they are being persecuted by a tiny two-week venture into free Live Art (and more), is really not my problem.

Knowledge and understanding of how a piece of work has come into being, particularly if it accords with one's perceptions of how the work has failed, is of a different order.

As such, at the end of this perhaps unnecessarily lengthy bit of soul-searching, I draw the following conclusions:

a) I'm not sure I would have ever been a huge fan of Robert Wilson's aesthetic sensibilty.

b) If I ever would have been, it would probably when he was far more mentally and bodily immersed in its creation from start to finish, and it would have been during a time when his work really was new and original.

c) Theatre seems oddly resistant to being mass-produced.

Now, with any luck, having got that off my chest, I'll be able to look at Wilson's Lulu (currently playing at the Berliner Ensemble), his Deutsches Theater Woyzeck (going to Nottingham's NEAT festival in June) and his forthcoming new Manchester International Festival piece The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic with an open mind.

(although, just clicking through to the MIF website for the link and seeing another “avant garde super-group” cast does make my cynicism reflex crunch somewhat...)

Edit: I suppose “d)” might be something to do with my increasing feeling that I function better as a critic when trying to understand as fully as possible what a work is trying to do before writing it off. But I dare say that'll turn into a whole other piece sometime soon.

The mid-North Sea sensibility

2011-05-11T10:27:00.005+02:00

[written for the Guardian blog. Annoyingly spiked because of the sell-by date on Wilkinson's Noises Off. But, happily, the below version might now get expanded when I've got a moment...]

On Sunday, the British playwright Simon Stephens delivered the keynote speech at the opening of Stückemarkt, at Berlin's Theatertreffen – Germany's most prestigious theatre festival.

You can read the whole thing here. Highlights include: Stephens describing Britain's “theatre culture with the playwright at its heart” as “flattering, lucrative, creative and deadening” and the British of having the “polite arrogant assumptions of a small-minded nation ” and being “an island nation that looks largely inward ”.

The real subject of his speech, though, was the effect on him as a writer of having seen his plays produced abroad. It's worth noting in passing that the world premiere of his latest play, Wastwater, was directed by Katie Mitchell. And that later on Sunday he was able to go to Berlin's Schaubühne theatre and see Mitchell's production of Fräulein Julie which has been playing there in rep. since September.

If I were him, I'd have also derived some pleasure from being out of the UK after the rough ride that Wastwater was given by a majority of the British critics, who variously deemed it:
“elliptical... it is a relief to escape this manipulative, cruel and cold-hearted play” (Charles Spencer, Telegraph),
“elliptical... I was left simply with a feeling of impotent disquiet” (Michael Billington, Guardian),
“elliptical... it is hard to grasp its true purposes” (Henry Hitchings, London Evening Standard) and
“insubstantial... the play is frustratingly imprecise” (Sam Marlowe, TheArtsDesk).

I joked with him that when the production transfers to Vienna Festwochen, the German and Austrian critics are all going to find it too obvious; unless they spend time being puzzling as to the possible meaning of all the characters standing in rooms that look precisely like the rooms they're meant to be standing in.

If they did, it wouldn't be the first time that a play had fallen between the two cultures – finding itself too complex or arty for British tastes and not nearly complex enough for those of Germany.

Living in Berlin, but regularly coming back to London, I've started to notice an odd phenomenon which I've christened the mid-North-Sea sensibility. It is this: playwrights do well in Germany, come to Germany more, and see more German work. It influences their writing. They return to Britain and write plays which seem to alienate more people than previously for being “too German”. These plays then transfer to Germany only to sometimes be deemed “too English”.

But, the reverse is also true. The Schaubühne – the German theatre which enjoys most success in Britain, both with transfers of productions to the Barbican, and of plays to the Royal Court – is considered by many German theatre-makers of my acquaintance as being strangely English. Certainly compared to, say, the rigours of the Volksbühne or even the more typical German-ness of Deutsches Theater.

I am overstating this slightly to make the point. But it does make me wonder again about the extent to which our sense of nationality influences not only how we write for or about theatre, but even what we want from it. Does one have to make a conscious decision – almost akin to treachery – to get into bed with a different country's theatre-culture? Or is it that some aesthetics just appeal to some people more than others? Counter to this, is there even a sort of unconscious national resistance which some theatregoers experience when confronted with work from a different tradition. Where do these feelings come from? What factors decide them?

I also wonder how much it's a matter of translation. As Stephens's speech suggests, both we and other cultures adapt, almost cannibalise texts into our own traditions. Stephens notes the Anglicisation of foreign plays by Britain, but there's equally the Germanicisation of his own works going on here [here being Germany].

I think it's at these intersections that work can be at its most exciting – but it's almost as if the most exciting work that can be made, is doomed always to be work without a homeland.

[post script: having seen the comments (currently 12) under the Noises Off blog, I'm rather glad my piece isn't on the Guardian Theatre Blog.]

all the actors on meat hooks / they are silent

2011-05-09T20:38:00.004+02:00

Skydiving without a Parachute

Yesterday, Simon Stephens came to Berlin to deliver the keynote speech at the opening of Theatertreffen's Stückemarkt.

The full text of his speech can now be found here (on the Theatertreffen blog) or here (on Nachtkritik) (both in English).

I think it's a great provocation and it touches tangentially on a number of things I was already thinking about. Hopefully that piece will see the light of day in amidst the piece on narrartive shortly...

Erratum

I also had a bit of a chat with Simon and asked him about a textual point re: Wastwater which had been troubling me since I read the text after seeing it.
I don't know if you've read Wastwater, but the opening of scene one reads:

One June 25th, 9pm

The beginning of scene two:

Two June 23rd, 9pm

and three:

Three June 23rd, 9pm

What was the significance, I had wondered, that the first scene was two days later? Was it a conscious reference to the way that Country Music ends with the first scene chronologically? Or to the way that the scenes are numbered backwards in the text of Pornography?

No. It is a typo. I put this out there in the hope that students using the first print run of the script for years to come don't spend fruitless hours pondering the significance of this perplexing time-signature. It's a mistake. There is no significance.

Apparently, if you're in the mood for trainspotting, there's also a similar error in the text of Pornography (the Complete Plays 2 version, at least). You know how between each scene is the stage direction:
Images of hell. They are silent.

Except between Four and Three. Also a mistake. It should be there as well. You can write it in at the bottom of p.255.
You can then, of course, ignore it and all the other instances of that stage direction, as every other director to tackle the play so far seems to have done. More's the pity.

Horizon(s) – Sophiensæle

2011-05-09T13:06:00.004+02:00

[More of a description and burble than a "review"]

Stupidly, the first thing I found striking about Laurent Chétouane's Horizon(s) was that it was the first piece of contemporary dance I'd seen in ages which had a full-length original score (possibly the one before that was Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray - 3.ix.08 – [if that had an original score – check]).

It's stupid, primarily because there is a lot more in the show to admire. This was some incredibly fine, fascinating contemporary choreography. But first, soundtracks...

It's also stupid to say it, because it's not strictly accurate. Sebastian Matthias's Tremor has a full, original score, but it is composed of static, white-noise, interference. So, I guess what I mean is “proper music”. Shame on me.

But that is striking. Much (most?) contemporary dance seems to be performed either to no soundtrack at all – with the noises that the performers make deliberately taking the role of the accompaniment – or else to an industrial soundscape, devoid of recognisable notes, let alone instruments. (which, I am emphatically not against. I'm just noting the fact)

So hearing a recorded piano, or, later, string quartet (? quintet? section?) is striking.

And _ _'s score is for the most part a nice bit of work. It's evocative.

Curiously, what it evoked for me most often, and quite probably unintentionally, was a kind of deconstructed Twelfth Night.

I strongly doubt that's what it was supposed to evoke (at least, not specifically), but that's what it evoked for me. (this is another entry for the ever-growing, never-to-be-written “Coming from a very specifically British background and how that influences watching performances in Germany” piece)

There are three performers, two female, one male.

Close to the start (if not at the very start) there's some piano music.

It's a bit like Glenn Gould's treatment of Bach. Not the really early, total jazz stuff, or the terribly slow last Goldberg Variations recording. But somewhere in between (a bit more stately than the clip linked above).

At other points, the music, when it's at its best, suggests Michael Nyman scores for Greenaway films (mostly notably there's a bit that recalls his extended dirge for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover/Heysel Stadium Memorial) , Purcell's Funeral of Queen Mary and maybe a bit of Philip Glass.

It uses that curious arpeggio effect that suggests those early modern twills – like when Greensleeves is played on a harpsichord – which can wind up sounding strangely like jazz.
In its less successful moments, it does sometimes wind up sounding a bit like slightly wallpaper Serious TV Drama incidental music. Probably something by Stephen Poliakoff. The sort of music they always give his stuff. Often one piano note held and digitally treated for a portentious length of time. Followed by the same note again when it finally fades. Several times. Until you're just about ready to kill just for a different note.

Another thing that made me think of Twelfth Night is that nature of the dance here. There is something very deliberate about it; as if director Laurent Chétouane were purposefully setting about taking apart all those galliards and pavanes. You know, those dances you see in historically researched Shakespeares, yes? Well, imagine their movements taken out of context, with the partners and formality removed. It sometimes looks a bit like how that might look.

The piece is also much more fluid than previous contemporary dance I've seen. And much less mannered, in a funny way. Ok, it starts off “mannered”. One of the performers stands on the spot, exploring their own body. Flexing, bending, raising arms, hands, head etc.

There's a moment in this brief first section where the performer-on-the-spot just lowers herself by bending her legs at the knees. And you see the incredibly muscles in her calves. They're totally unnecessary for this little action that almost any of us with the use of our legs could perform – bt they're there. Like massive artillery being deployed to pick off something a slingshot could do just as well.

But, while it's obvious the performers are all clearly ferociously well-trained – there is absolutely none of the physical pyrotechnics we (I) associate with any sort of dance (now that I think about it).

Horizon(s) is all performed at a kind of walking pace. (Of course, as soon as I noticed this in the performance, about 45 minutes [guess] in, they did a bit of running, but that was it).

Thinking about dance from ballet, through to Pina Bausch and Frantic Assembly, there's always (very often) that edge of blackmailing an audience into being impressed just by the sheer virute of the, well, balletics, the virtuousity. The sheer astonishment at seeing people leaping *that high* or lifting one another, or vaulting into one another's arms. Etc. None of that happens in this. Actually, there is one very slow, deliberate sequence (or maybe two) where one person lifts another person up. But, it's not done in such a way as to make you astonished.

Instead, where the interest lies here, is almost in the intelligence of the movement. Like the music that accompanies it, there's a real sense of, well, sense, to the repetitions of movements here. The developments, while largely opaque as to any actual meaning they might contain, suggest at least an internal consistency or rigour. There seem to be purposes here. Purpose to the movements and to the sequences in which they occur.

I wonder if in part that might be down to the more classical sounding soundtrack. The slight suggestion of mathematical logic implied by something that even faintly recalls Bach acting to somehow “legitimise” or suggest an order to or for what might otherwise appear more “random” movements.

But I don't think that's entirely it.

There's also a lot of canny “being-in-the-space”. Which is to say, the performers look at the audience from time to time. And actually see them. They don't just look in our direction. They make eye contact and you can see/sense that the eye contact is held and felt. It's pretty occasional, though. Just the odd look as they're walking toward or away from a particular moment, on the whole.

Another fascinating moment in the piece is a sequence where the two female performers were doing perhaps the most “balletic” part of the show; a kind of breaking down nod to Swan Lake or at least to that school of graceful sitting on the floor bending at the torso in improbable ways. While they do this, the male performer walked around in a large circle, jumping over them on each circuit. It was at once quite funny, but more than that, had the curious effect of seeming to turn their more intricate choreography into something more like living scenery, while making his movement seem all the more real for not being so “artificial”.

And yet the show has no horror of the non-natural movement.

It's another example of the sort of thing where I feel like I might be better off knowing more of the dance-vocabularly being deployed, but at the same time, am almost reluctant to discover it, for fear of losing the pleasures that watching the work with an entirely naïve, untrained eye brings.

Of course, it probably makes my descriptions of it no earthly use to anyone, but.

Another interesting thing for me, was watching Horizon(s) after having re-started thinking about narrative for yesterday's article. For some reason, as soon as I start thinking about narrative, I seem to wind up seeing some contemporary dance.

It was fascinating sitting there watching this piece with the sure conviction that even though it was moving forward through time and space, there really wasn't a discernible narrative that one could necessarily hold in one's head.

More, that there was definitely a sense of an underlying architecture or structure, but that this didn't seek to be either a story, or necessarily even a development or “progression”. At least not in a linear sense. That said, at the same time, I tended to identify the performers as consistent “selves”. And, rightly or wrongly, I identified them with their own genders – whether or not that was relevant.

On the other hand, where the movement suggested, if not “stories” then “moments” or “situations”, I was struck by the extent to which the sorts of situations it suggested were almost deliberately ones which one doesn't find in the theatre so often. Ideas of space, the outdoors and stillness which are perhaps antithetical to the more frenetic pace of drama.

As you might already have noticed, this is the sort of work I could carry on describing for pages without ever landing a meaningful conclusion. I hold myself chiefly responsible for this, for not particularly being the best person for an analytical or assessment-style role when it comes to contemporary dance. Though, of course, you could re-name it “theatre”, and I'd still be at the same loss.

What I loved abut this piece was the way at it opened up a space in which one could sit and watch movement, completely absorbed by it – I don't remember being “bored” once (ok, maybe once) – and yet at the same time, be able to be constantly thinking, but without necesaarily constantly producing “story” or even always “meaning”.

As I happens, I did read the director's notes before I went into the piece (I've decided after some thought that not reading them is only one of two choices, rather than a necessity). As it happens, while obviously fiercely intelligent and articulate, I didn't find that my experience of the piece tallied too closely with them.

But, again, this didn't seem like either a failure (theirs or mine) or a problem.

I think there was probably some exciting liminality going on as well, but I'm never sure how one spots that. I do think the work would find plenty of admirers in the UK as well, were it to ever transfer – The Place or Edinburgh, at a guess.

It'd be nice to be able to have more of a dialogue about it. But at the same time, after seeing it, I felt like I'd experienced quite a complete work which I didn't feel any real urge to discuss straight away. There was something incredibly restful about the sensation.

Top photo - the production's own choice of stock photo, which just happens to bear a happy resemblance to Postcards's own recent colour scheme. Bottom photo, company porduction shot. Apols for lack of credit. Leave a comment below if you know who to credit it too, or object to my using them...

Narrative and Story

2011-05-08T11:20:00.005+02:00

Preamble / Background reading

Two months ago (the 8th of March, coincidentally enough), I opened this blank Word document, gave it the title Narrative and Story and left it on my desktop, intending to come back to it when I had a moment.

It was inspired by the discussion which I had suggested to Chris Wilkinson for his Noises Off column at the Guardian, and which was also taking place across several Facebook walls and in various email exchanges. It's worth re-reading that original blog, and the pieces to which it links. And also, Andy Field's brilliant response.

At the time I was halfway through writing “About”, “Properly”, “Professional” and “Political”. During that period, I also went to Hamburg to see (the not-very-“narrative” piece) This is How You Will Disappear, and the Gerhard Richter show Bilder einer Epoche at Bucerius Kunst Forum. A fortnight later, I was at the Berlin Philharmonie to see, among other things, a performance of Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen. In between, I visited the Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park.

As a result of having this unresolved essay about narrative rattling around my head, I ended up thinking about all three non-theatre works and the recent dance-piece Tremor in relation to it, as well as spending much of my review of Romantic Afternoon thinking about the subject.

Happily, the debate seems to have been reawakened across the Atlantic by George Hunka linking to Deborah Pearson's original Exeunt piece, which in turn caused it to be picked up by Halcyon Theatre's Tony Adams, Isaac Butler and “99 Seats”, before being subsequently written up as another Noises Off blog by Wilkinson.

At least I get to be (almost) timely, by finally writing something on the subject.

The Argument

It strikes me that there are two completely separate arguments going on here.

The first strand of the argument is presented –

by FT theatre critic Ian Shuttleworth here:

“Plays are linear. We can't get away from that given our current relationship to the laws of physics: plays consist of moments, of events, as we move in one direction in time whilst perceiving them. Narrative is not just a natural but, I'd argue, an inescapable response to that arrangement in anyone with any significant memory or attention span (and I say that not as a clever-dick judgement but in its medical sense). We may constantly review and revise our narrative interpretations, both retrospective and prospective (i.e. our assumptions and expectations about moments/events to come) - arguably, all the best plays do this. But that's what we do with data that we receive in succession. We have to live with that, or do the other thing.”

by Tony Adams here:

“You cannot have a work of performance free from narrative. Something happens. That is an event. Our brains are hard wired to create them even if they may not exist. Even if you were hypothetically able to create a performance in a laboratory, where nothing happened. There were no events. The act of performing that work before an audience would create its own narrative. ”

and by playwright Glyn Cannon (on my Facebook wall), thus:

“My standpoint is that narrative is a feature of all performance, be it dance, words, movement, music etc. I've never experienced any performance that escapes duration and frame, and I think the two of these inevitably activate a process of narrative in those attendant at the performance. My personal experience is that process is then deeply and implicitly connected to my sense-making of the world. Short version [his original reply was longer]: 'non-narrative' makes no sense to me, seems a bit superior, I don't think you can exist outside it. 'Anti-narrative' seems a bit more up-front and useful.”

The position could be characterised thus: “Non-narrative theatre is impossible.”

The second strand of the argument is presented –

by Isaac Butler here:

“Even if the performer does make an ostensibly narrative-less work, the audience in its hunger and desire for a narrative will impose one on the proceedings. If you want to work in performance and don’t want to deal with story, go make modern dance (which, by the way, would be fine, I vastly prefer non-narrative dance to narrative dance).” [my bold & italics]

or by "99 Seats" here:

“I made a choice to be a narrative-based artist, to tell linear, discrete stories, to employ the tropes and styles I do.
I don't do it because I didn't learn any other ways or because I lack the fortitude or courage to see past the surface. I don't do it because my only goal is to entertain and give people a good time and send them out into the street, tapping their feet. I have very, very specific reasons that I employ this very, very specific artistic style [...]
It's not an accident or the path of least resistance. In fact, I face quite a good deal of resistance. My work doesn't meet people's expectation of the work of a black artist. That's purposeful. Sure,
I could embrace the long, proud and excellent tradition of non-linear black theatre. I chose this because of the audiences I hope to reach, to bring together. This is my project.”

This position might be summed up as “Not in my artform” or “Not in my practice”.

Over the next week, I [hostage to fortune coming right up] hope to write about (emphatically not "answer") the following three questions:

What is narrative?

Is narrative theatre somehow bad?

Is “non-narrative theatre” possible?

In the mean time, I've got a review of some contemporary dance to write up (no narrative; tricky), but it really is worth reading up on the stuff linked to above...

Peaches Does Herself – HAU Eins

2011-05-05T21:38:00.003+02:00

What should we expect from a show called Peaches Does Herself, created for one of Berlin's foremost centres of avant garde performance?

Surely nothing as simple as a gig, but probably not the sheer commercial suicide of Peaches just reading to us from Judith Butler and Stephen Greenblatt for three hours either. Sadly.

“Does Herself” is, of course, an amusing provocation. Playing, as it does, with the post-modern notion of the performative self and the far older idea of playing with oneself. The show starts by acknowledging its title's double meaning with an amusing faux-lecture. Alas, this only lasts about a minute before being interrupted by a drums-and-guitar-only rendition of Rock Show. This in turn is carted off (the guitarist and drummer were playing on a wheeled plinth [what is the proper word for this?]) and a first set of curtains is drawn to reveal a large bed set atop a bunch of light cubes, with a disconsolate-looking Peaches (aha, but is it really Peaches?) perched on the edge, fiddling with her small keyboard.

Cue another song, and the descent of a large vagina made from flashing lights from the flies. From behind which steps... Another Peaches! (¡) The covers of the bed are whipped off, to reveal... another large vagina. Numerous dancers clad from head to toe in pink bodystockings emerge from this. Cue lascivious cavorting on bed, the striking of many poses, and another song...

As the website blurb has it:

“[Peaches] has created an absurd themed Opera (there will be no dialogue besides the songs themselves) that will represent her work and her concerns about gender, beauty and age.

Expect big dance numbers, odes to favorite [sic] past musicals and fantastic surprise guests.

Peaches: 'I want it to be a fantastical musical that broadway [sic] would never be able to present.'”

And this is kind of the problem. Sure, it is unlikely that you'll find Peaches Does Herself on Broadway any time soon, but in seeking to create a show that would be unstageable in the most conservative, risk-averse environment that exists for theatre, she hasn't exactly set herself a difficult target.

The fact is, by European standards, Peaches Does Herself is rather tame. After all, shows like I Apologize get state funding and garner their creators main stage billing at Avignon. By comparison, PDH is like an I Apologize tribute, performed by the cast of Glee. For the most part it's just “a bit risqué”. There's a likeable clunky amateurishness to it all, but it's still more like the local goth club doing a kind of burlesque version of the heyday of Madonna's stageshows than anything seriously subversive.

Part of the problem is that the musical format at which Peaches is tilting turns out to be bigger than the subversive abilities of the show. As such, no matter how much irony and post-irony abounds, rather than turning the jukebox musical on its head, the jukebox musical rather tames the performer.

It's even got a story! It starts off with Peaches in her bedroom alone with her keyboard, possibly goes on to include an apparently Psychik TV/Laibach-inspired dream about a transsexual stag, and then goes on to show Peaches meeting the hermaphrodite of her dreams, being thrown over for an ageing trashy stripper and ultimately winding up alone again. It's the classic tale of girl meets boygirldreamstag, girl loses boygirldreamstag, girl sings Fuck The Pain Away. Fin.

Obviously, as such, there are plainly elements that would have the American religious right reaching for their shotguns. But in Berlin it comes across as remarkably old-fashioned, narrative-based musical entertainment; naked 6ft transsexual (the striking Danni Daniels) notwithstanding. Indeed, oddly, it's probably got more in common with YMA at Friedrichstadtpalast than radical theatre.

There is even a bit where one of the songs is performed by three of the band playing [expletive deleted] “laser harps” like Jean Michel Jarre. Which really is unacceptable.

But, nah. It's all fine really. It's a likeable enough bit of fun. It's probably the least radical thing the HAU will put on this year, but that's ok. Basically, the songs suffer a bit for being plonked into the context of a slightly wonky stage show (written by Peaches, directed by Peaches. Verdict: she's a fine musician but doesn't know much about staging) and the stageshow suffers for aiming itself at Broadway rather than Hammersmith or indeed at the HAU itself – I'd love to see the version of this show that Alain Platel would have come up with, for example – but, yeah, as long as you don't expect too much from it, you'll have a perfectly nice time.

Bodenprobe Kasachstan – HAU Zwei

2011-05-05T21:27:00.003+02:00

[Possibly not quite finished]

Bodenprobe Kasachstan (Soil Sample Kazakhstan) is the best Rimini Protokoll show I've seen yet.

We know about Rimini Protokoll now, yes*? What they do is create a kind of verbatim theatre, but using the real people, rather than actors-speaking-the-words-of-interviewees (*more at the bottom, if not). Beyond the method itself, the more you see of their work, the more you also start to recognise themes running between the pieces. There's a preoccupation with Globalisation economics, immigration and history running alongside their central theme of work or labour.

In this, Bodenprobe Kasachstan is no different. It collects five people all of whom have connections to Kazakhstan and who now live in Berlin. Using bits of their life stories, and stuff they know, it gradually paints an incredibly detailed, rich portrait of the country and of its geopolitical significance.

The first speaker, Gerd Baumann,worked for an oil drilling company in Kazakhstan. He is well over six foot and looks like the kind of Aryan superman briefly popular in the middle of the last century (indeed, he grew up believing his grandfather was a high-ranking SS officer who was imprisoned for 15 years at the Nuremburg trials. Later he reveals that he discovered his real grandfather was a Jewish rocket scientist who was deported to the USSR). In the first few minutes, he explains the provenance of his equipment: “the rods are from Libya, the generators are from Halliburton”. That one sentence neatly encapsulates much of what you need to know about Kazakhstan and its oil industry. It's an amoral wasteland, doing business with companies and countires with the blackest reputations around.

The second speaker, a much older man, Heinrich Weibe, mostly relates the peculiarities of his life story. He started life as a German living in the Ukraine. When the USSR invaded the Ukraine his family (he was a child) were transported from the Ukraine to Archangelsk where his father, a minister, was imprisoned for preaching. Eventually, about a decade later, they were sent to the Ukraine.

He talks about the the barren landscape and shows a photo of the one-storey wooden houses dotted along the single road running through the town where he grew up. The picture morphs into a video showing that barely anything has changed in the past fifty or so years, other than there are now cars and massive oil tankers using the road.

Everyone's life so far has been related to the production of oil. And to their German ancestry. Apparently 1.1 per cent of Kazakhstan's population is Ethnic German.

The next speaker, Elena Panibratowa (?), was born in Kazakhstan. Her preoccupation growing up was with the country's other main industry – it's involvement, as part of the USSR, with the Soviet space programme. Apparently the town where she lived was close to a Cosmonaut training centre and so was visited by numerous politicians and Cosmonauts. Apparently Kazakhstan was also regularly used for testing nuclear weapons. First by just dropping them on it, then by blowing them up underneath it. Every second Sunday at 11.30am. She tells us how many of her family have died of cancer. There is a video of the graveyard in her home town.

Nurlan Dussali is an Ethnic Kazakh who has emigrated to German. He used to work as a broker on the energy markets. Now he sells solar energy. In a video, he demonstrates how you can make $50 in three minutes buys some stock and then selling it when it has risen in value.

Gerd tells us how much an experienced drilling engineer can make in Kazakhstan - $1,000/2,000 a day. He performs “a conversation” with a friend on video (the conversation isn't actually live, it's just him saying his bit and then the video playing his friend's bit). The friend suggest for that sort of money he should come back to Kazakhstan. Gerd refuses. They discuss the downsides of living in the country.

They also discuss prostitution and corruption.

Helene Simkin (?) is not from Kazakhstan but from its near-neighbour Tajikistan (the two countries don't actually share any borders). She talks about Tajikistan's different heritage, the fact that its language is from Iran – also a near neighbour. She sings a national song. She talks about various jobs she's had, and her dream to become a performer. She talks about being employed at bars/clubs in oil-rich countries. She compares Kazakhstan's new capital city Астана (Astana) with the cities of Dubai.

Her talk of dancing for rich men in oil rich countries is intercut with Gerd sagely noting that actually prostitutes in Kazakhstan are more expensive than prostitutes in Berlin and Nurlan discussing the new buildings of Астана - one is designed by Richard Rogers, and another which houses a lucky imprint of the presidents hand on a gold triangle inside an large golden sphere.

And this is how the piece works. Gradually, slowly, it gives you more and more information. Much of it just being people giving details of the working lives, details of aspects of their jobs, and their working and home environments, their life stories, fact and local colour. And in under two hours you've been presented with this incredibly intricate picture of how a more-or-less unknown (no, fucking Borat does not count) part of the world actually might turn out to be incredibly strategically important in the coming years.

The theory is, that there's actually a lot of untapped, undrilled oil under Kazakhstan and right now, there's something not unlike the gold rush going on over there.

A video camera is hoisted by four of the performers above a map of the area showing not national borders but drilling rights. Gerd talks about his main skill – essentially drilling sideways – i.e. under into someone else's drilling rights. It's nicely designed with slabs of rubber flooring standing in for the steppes of Kazakhstan and some stunning films of the oddly epic, but bleak panoramas.

There's music too. Unexpectedly lots, actually. Much of it very listenable as well as, y'know, anthropologically interesting. Almost enough that I considered suggesting that London Road wasn't the only verbatim musical around (although the honour of first goes to the Czech Republic's Tomorrow Will Be, for the record).

When they're not talking to us, the performers power various exercise bikes and treadmills to show what amount of energy human effort produces. We're shown a small amount of crude oil and told how far it'd get us.

The scale of all this is really beyond comprehension. The numbers involved in oil production. The size of this country with only 16 million inhabitants. The distances travelled by Heinrich from the Ukraine to Archangelsk to Kazakhstan. And yet the actual people in front of us manage to make sense of it. Or at least explain that it exists and humanise it for long enough to make it matter.

As such, part of Bodenprobe Kasachstan's appeal is its proximity to Wastwater – almost as a companion piece. The two function in unexpectedly similar ways – people talking about their lives just by mentioning places and things evoking whole systems of government, history and economics and touch on unexpectedly similar themes – perhaps those which are gradually going to be the only real underlying themes.

Here, we do not even begin to touch on “climate change” but on its counterpart: the running out of the global oil supply. This idea is rubbished. Oil isn't going to run out any time soon, given what's apparently under Kazakhstan. What is more terrifying is the amounts of money being talked about and the way that other peoples lives are shunted around by political powers, corporate interests or just by money.

It's hard to capture just by recounting what we're told and what happens on stage, just how intellectually exciting the show is. It has a real talent for picking up the epic sweep of 20th century history and telling it at a human level in a way that conveys the scale at the same time as making it almost imaginable. At the same time, it presents a clear story without really making moral comment on it.

There's an interesting piece to be written about the way that Rimini Protokoll's subject-performers are allowed to self-edit and present. But for now, I'm just very pleased to have seen such a thought-provoking piece. [and grateful to have finally gotten close to writing about it]

It should also be noted that Rimini Protokoll's first UK commission, for the National Theatre of Wales, Outdoors opens about now.

*Rimini Protokoll shows I've seen so far:

Ciudades Paralelas

Best Before

Vùng Biên Gió'i

Call-Cutta in a Box

Soko Sao Paulo

Ant Hampton has also written a brilliant description of their show Heuschrecken.

Before Your Very Eyes – HAU Eins

2011-05-05T21:11:00.005+02:00

[some written in bad mood. Might be unfair]

Gob Squad's new show, Before Your Very Eyes, is both something of a departure and pretty much exactly what you'd expect from Gob Squad. It's also the third part of “CAMPO”'s (didn't they used to be called Victoria?) “productions with children for adults” – the second part of which was Tim Etchell's much-praised That Night Follows Day.

So what it basically is is a Gob Squad show with children in it instead of Gob Squad. This is both the source of its undoubted charm, but also the start of its weaknesses. The premise is as cute as it is problematic/troubling. They've got seven children aged between 7 and 15 in this mirrored box on the stage (shades of Castellucci's Inferno), flanked by video screens (cf. most shows by René Pollesch). The show is nominally about growing up/ageing.

The children are introduced by means of videos of their younger selves dancing around on their local streets and then jumping into the mirrored box to the strains of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now. (Actually, there is a lot of recorded music in the show. Indeed, without Ryan Gosling's band-plus-children's-choir-project Dead Man's Bones it could have been quarter of an hour shorter).

Asked questions by a Big Brother-style disembodied voice (in English, mercifully), they respond in their native Flemish (the kids, like seemingly all kids in alternative theatre shows (see also Once and For All..., Teenage Riot and That Night Follows Day), are from Belgium), with (happily readable) German surtitles scrolling along atop their little cage.

Perhaps the neatest trick Gob Squad pull is having the one-year-older selves, the children now on stage, holding dialogues with their younger selves on video. This at once points up the meticulous level of planning and scripting – although the presence of instantaneous surtitles is also always a bit of a giveaway, even when they don't correspond precisely with what's said.

But even as your brain knows that it's just a neatly planned joke, you can't help but be moved when a younger version of a boy eagerly explains his current favourite toy and his one-year-older present self tells him that just between the two of them that toy isn't actually that cool. Of course, the reaction of the younger-self on the screen – looking hurt and crestfallen at his older self's words – is necessarily fake. But it still works. Which is also strangely annoying. The neatness of the trick evokes an (entirely unwarranted, I'm sure) a kind of self-satisfaction about it all. Another problem is that this level of knowingness – of editorialisation – also gets in the way.

The disconnect between this show and the rest of Gob Squad's work is that in everything else they create it and perform it themselves, so there's usually a sense of the performers owning their material; representing their own concerns. Here, while there's an obvious level of collaboration with the children, there's also this level of editorial intrusion where the company simply project their own concerns and use the children as puppets to make points.

Given that this is a piece of theatre, that seems almost a strange objection to make. Isn't that what all theatre does? I'm reminded of the discussion of children on stage in Nicholas Ridout's invaluable Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, but it's not precisely the uncanny lack of agency that rankles here, so much as the banality of some of what the children are asked to perform.

The structure of the show meets them at their own ages and then instructs them to grow up (cue frantic youngsters tugging their own and each others' limbs etc.). We next meet them all pretending to be 19. Then 45. Then at the point of death, which here seems to be about 77.

For each “age” the children perform a kind of pantomime of that age-group. At 19 they daub themselves in black lipstick and eyeshadow and don black hoodies and leather jackets to become a bunch of tiny goths. There's the disconcerting sight of children pretending to smoke and slightly sexualising themselves, which is probably always good for an alternative night out, but it's the bit where they do *being 45-year-olds* that derails the show.

The dressing up itself is perfectly nice, but the spirit of the scene which follows is a protracted bit of neurosis taken straight from the problem pages of the Daily Mail. It's all failed aspirations, women unhappy without men, everyone defining themselves by their relationships, snobbery about snobbery, and just plain snobbery. This would be the drawback to Gob Squad being Anglo-German: sometimes the Anglo- gets out.

Visually, however, this is one of Gob Squad's best. Nestled in the intimate wood-panelled, low-key grandeur of HAU Eins (a bit like the Royal Court in terms of managing to make a pros. arch hall feel somehow smaller and more intimate), there are some lovely stage pictures and the whole set-up of the children in a kitschy mirrored room – also brilliantly lit – is a pleasing, if wholly unoriginal conceit.

There's a sort of subversiveness to it. I mean, sure, it's all pretty inevitable stuff: putting kids on stage and having them pretend to smoke, say the odd swear word, and dance around to songs depicting a world sexualised well beyond their years, like a kind of Live Art Mini-Pops (actually, looking at that video: a) was Mini-Pops just a Live Art joke from the very start? b) I'm really not sure how this show actually does differ in places). Still, you get the feeling that if the Daily Mail got hold of a description and the show was going to play in Britain there'd be all sorts of fuss. So, success, right?

Not sure. For every time Gob Squad landed a punch, cocked a snook or tugged a heartstring there were bits where the cheapness of a gag or conceit threatens to knock the whole thing back into the minus zone again.

It's a good show, and I think a lot of people will like it a great deal, but for some reason (and I am more than happy to admit I was in a minority on this) I felt it didn't quite free itself from the inevitable accusations of putting words into its performers mouths, and beyond that, that those words weren't quite as profound as one might have hoped. But, I'm equally happy to believe I was just in a bad mood when I saw it, and I just took it in the way way, and wanted something other than what it was offering.

More (perhaps unfair and uncharitable) thoughts on Gob Squad [excised from first draft of above text, not least for containing far too many “I”s. A declension: “I foreground my subjectivity, you say “I” too much, he writes contemptible me-journalism” – except in this case, it might well be the other way round]

We've all seen a fair few Gob Squad shows now, yes? I came pretty late to the party, starting with Kitchen. I saw Saving the World as part of SPILL '09, Revolution Now as part of LIFT'10 and SuperNightShot revived at Bar25 in Berlin last summer.

I suppose I've had a kind of inverse relationship with Gob Squad to the one I've had with Rimini Protokoll. Whereas with RP I always respected the work, I think my admiration for the company and what they do has tended to grow with every new show I've seen. With Gob Squad, I think I was always going to love whichever show of theirs I saw first (although I reckon I was particularly lucky that it happened to be Kitchen, but think I'd have been just as excited if it'd been Revolution Now or SuperNightShot), just because that combination of Liveness, experimental-looking techniques and their desire to be likeable was always going to be winning.

Since Kitchen, while I've liked every show since, If I'm honest I've found the smile on my face feeling a little more forced every time. I don't know if you've ever attended the recording of a radio comedy, but there's a bit at the end where they usually have to re-record some of the jokes for technical reasons (muffled sound, fluffed timing, etc.). The thing is, when they do this, you – the audience – have to reproduce the laugh to the joke. Except, second time round, you know the joke, so your natural reaction is just to nod, rather than crack up. That's some of how it's got to feeling with Gob Squad.

The problem is, they're not really peddling anything very profound. They are prime exponents of the “doing it crappily” aesthetic (cf. Ken Campbell – as quoted by Shuttleworth here or here), but unlike, say, Forced Entertainment, from whom they half-inched the aesthetic, wholesale, there doesn't seem to be the same anger. Indeed, their shows have increasingly struck me as profoundly reactionary, but perhaps I'm missing the point and their shtick is aimed at parodying and needling a prevailing atmosphere of narcissism and lassitude rather than simply furthering it.

Wastwater

2011-04-25T11:52:00.005+02:00

[English version here]

Debussy hat einmal gesagt "Musik ist der Raum zwischen den Noten".

Ähnlich funktioniert Simon Stephens Stück Wastwater. Durch Ungesagtes, durch Auslassungen in und zwischen drei nur teilweise miteinander verbundenen Dialogen zeichnet es ein detailiertes Bild von der Welt. Simon Stephens benutzt in Wastwater Zweideutigkeiten als wären sie ein Teil der Besetzung.

Das Stück besteht aus drei Dialogen an drei voneinander unabhängigen Orten. In allen drei Fällen handelt es sich um Dialoge zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau. In allen drei Fällen geht es für den Zuschauer darum, herauszufinden, wer die Figuren sind: zunächst im Kontext der Situation - wie sie zueinander stehen - später dann im Kontext zu den anderen Figuren des Texts.

Im ersten Teil des Stücks spielen Linda Basset und Tom Sturridge Frieda und Harry: eine liebende, ängstliche ältere Frau und einen nervösen, zerfahrenen jungen Mann. Es könnte sich um eine Lehrerin und einen Schüler handeln, eine Mutter mit ihrem Sohn, um ein Liebespaar. Diese Unsicherheit führt beim Zuschauen zu einem starken Fokus auf Details. Nachdem Harry über ihre lange gemeinsame Vorgeschichte berichtet, sagt er zu Frieda: "Du hast wahrscheinlich schon davon gehört, oder? Es ist bestimmt in meiner Akte." Und wieder ist man verunsichert - ist sie eine besonders chaotische Bewährungshelferin? Nach und nach wird klar, dass es sich bei Frieda um Harrys Pflegemutter handelt; dabei spielen alle anderen möglichen Verhältnisse, die man als Zuschauer im Kopf durchgespielt hat, auch eine Rolle.

Diese Art von Unklarheit ist zentral für das Stück und für die Inszenierung . Selbst die Verortung ist unsicher: Lizzie Clachlans erster von drei großartigen Bühnenräumen sieht aus wie eine alte Sternwarte aus Holz und Glas oder wie der Wintergarten eines großen Familienhauses; sie ist zugewachsen und Frieda sagt, dass sie über einen Zaun klettern musste "um hier rein zu kommen". Wir erfahren, dass das Haus in der dem Dorf liegt, das zerstört worden wäre, wenn man Heathrows dritte Landebahn gebaut hätte. Von Zeit zu Zeit wird der Dialog von vorbeifliegenden Flugzeugen unterbrochen.

Die zweite Szene erforscht eine andere Art von Spannung und Unsicherheit. Mark und Lisa (Paul Ready und Jo McInnes) treffen sich in einem Hotel bei Heathrow und es ist dem Zuschauer sofort klar, warum. Die einzige Frage bleibt, ob die beiden es schaffen, das miteinander zu tun, wozu sie sich getroffen haben. Man erfährt nicht, wie die beiden sich kennengelernt haben und wie ihr Weg in das Hotelzimmer verlief, der Fokus der Szene liegt auf etwas anderem. Man folgt einem Duell zwischen Marks Nerven (teilweise leicht überspielt von Paul Ready) und Lisas Drang nach ständiger Selbstentblössung, immer gefolgt von Angeboten an Mark, wieder zu gehen: "Falls du jetzt gehen möchtest, macht es mir nichts aus.", "Bist du angeekelt? Möchtest du nach Hause gehen?", "Habe ich dich erschreckt?". Wieder wird die Handlung von vorbeifliegenden Flugzeugen unterbrochen.

Die dritte Szene ist die beunruhigenste. Sie spielt in einem Lagerhaus, wieder in der Nähe des Heathrower Flughafens, wo Jonathan (Angus Wright) mit Siân (Amanda Hale) verabredet ist. Die Beziehung zwischen den beiden ist die unklarste von allen. Siâns koketter erster Satz "Gefällt Dir mein Kleid?" ist missverständlich: vielleicht ist er ein Mitvierziger, der sich mit einer Prostituierten trifft. Die darauffolgende Veränderung ihres Benehmens - sie wird einschüchternd, nachbohrend - scheint zu einer leicht psychotischen Geheimdienstbeamtin zu passen oder zur einer Frau, die Selbstjustiz übt. Es wird klar, dass Jonathan etwas Schlimmes getan haben muss. Etwas sehr Schlimmes. Etwas, das mit Kindern und dem Internet zu tun hat. Er hat Angst vor ihr und sie genießt es, ihn mit ihrer Macht und seiner Angst einzuschüchtern. Lange scheint es wahrscheinlich, dass er mit einer Art Pädophilie-Ring zu tun hat. Alles an seinem Benehmen und ihren Reaktionen auf ihn deuten darauf hin. Am Ende stellt sich heraus, dass Jonathan eine große Summe Geld gezahlt hat, um illegal ein Kind aus Fernost zu adoptieren. Die Umstände werden nicht weiter erklärt.

Da wir soviel Zeit damit verbringen, zu denken, dass es in der Szene um Kindesmissbrauch geht, um Kindesentführung und das Internet, geht es in der Szene auch genau darum. Die Tatsache, dass die Szene am Ende von einer Adoption erzählt, löscht nicht das aus, was am Anfang ihr Kern zu sein schien. Das Spiel des Texts mit unseren Synapsen ist in vollem Gang. Details kehren wieder, Motive tauchen wiederholt auf, subtil verändert oder gespiegelt. Harrys Hose, die "ein wenig nach Pisse riecht" wird zu Jonathan, der sich "in die Hose macht". Friedas unschuldige Drohung "das Internet zu befragen" und "durch deine Nachrichten zu gehen" wird zu Siâns erschreckend genauer Beschreibung von Jonathans Handlungen, bei der sie jede einzelne Kreditkartentransaktion, jede Benutzung seiner Ubahnkarte, jeden Click im Internet aufzählt. Sogar Lisas Beschreibung von Wastwater: "Der tiefste See hier. Er ist schrecklich ruhig. Mein Vater hat mir gesagt, seine Ruhe sei eine Lüge. 'Er sieht ruhig aus, Lisa, aber du solltest sehen, wie viele Leichen auf seinem Grund liegen'." wird gespiegelt in Siâns späterer Erzählung über das Ertränken eines Hundes eines Pflegeonkels in einem Brunnen.

Diese Resonanzen erinnern uns ständig an die vorherigen Szenen und geben dem Text als Ganzes sein wahres Gewicht. Durch sie und durch die Verbindungen der Figuren untereinander beschwört das Stück die Riesigkeit der restlichen Welt: Siân ist ein weiteres von Friedas Pflegekindern, Jonathan ist der Lehrer, der einmal Mark geschlagen hat, Harry war in einem Auto mit dem berühmten Gavin Berkshire, einem von Marks Schülern, als dieser starb. Dadurch, dass diese Zusammentreffen so kurz und elliptisch sind, dadurch, dass die Verbindungen zwischen den Figuren so wahllos und zufällig scheinen, vermittelt das Stück einen Eindruck von der Masse an Menschen auf diesem Planeten.

Der Text benennt, davon abgesehen, eine große Menge an Orten außerhalb von Heathrow*.
Trotz der minutiös genauen Bühnenräume lässt die Menge an Informationen und Beschreibungen Wastwater streckenweise wie ein Hörspiel wirken - die Aufmerksamkeit des Zuschauers wird fortwährend auf andere Orte gelenkt als den Ort, den man anschaut; man ist angehalten, sich vorzustellen, was die Figuren beschreiben. Kombiniert mit der Unsicherheit darüber, wer genau sich in den Räumen des Stücks befindet, trägt diese Tatsache dazu bei, dass die Welt außerhalb der Räume des Stücks riesig wirkt.

Das, was im Stück benannt wird, folgt einem präzisen Muster. Wastwater ist ein sehr genau konstruierter Text. Die Szenen bauen auf einander auf, wie Echos. Jede Szene beschreibt einen Mann, der sich einer Frau entzieht. Nach und nach werden die Männer älter, die Frauen jünger. Mit jeder Szene entfernen wir uns weiter von der Natur und natürlichem Licht. In jeder Szene geht es ums Abschiednehmen: von Frieda, die nicht will, dass Harry wegzieht, zu Lisa, die Mark vorschlägt, wieder zu gehen zu Siân, die Jonathan verbietet, den Raum zu verlassen. Es gibt sogar eine sehr kurze vierte Szene, zwischen Jonathan und seiner frisch importierten Tochter Dalisay (sie, die jüngste der weiblichen Figuren, er, sogar noch gealtert durch die vorherige Begegnung), in der keiner aufstehen und gehen, geschweige denn sich bewegen kann.

In jeder Szene werden Entscheidungen und Konsequenten diskutiert, vielleicht liegt hier das Hauptinteresse des Stücks: die Frage danach, wie die Entscheidungen, die wir treffen, die Welt formen und zerstören. Harry beschäftigt die Aufgabe der Jagd zugunsten der Landwirtschaft: "Keine der großen Katastrophen der Menschheitsgeschichte wäre passiert, wenn wir uns nicht für die Landwirtschaft entschieden hätten", Lisa wiederum sagt: "Du triffst eine Entscheidung. Sie bleibt bei dir. Ein bisschen so, als ob ihre Konsequenzen sich in deine Knochen einschreiben."

Selbst die Benennungen von Orten und Dingen summieren sich. Hier geht es nicht um wahllose Beschreibungen von Details. Ohne je einen einzigen Wissenschaftler oder Eisbären auftreten zu lassen, hat Simon Stephens mit Wastwater das bis dato beste Stück über Klimawandel geschrieben; ein Stück über Globalisierung, über die Welt, in der wir unsere Kinder aufwachsen lassen, über unsere persönlichen und politischen Lebensumstände. All das mit beneidenswert leichter Hand. Am Ende ist man beinahe erschöpft davon, was man sich alles vorstellen musste und gleichzeitig aufgekratzt von der Anstrengung. Was nicht sagen soll, dass es sich um ein fröhliches Stück handelt. Die letzte Szene funktioniert wie eine Art Adrenalinkick, allerdings ist sie keineswegs beschwingt. Sie beschreibt eine Welt von verlassenen Kindern, Pflegefamilien, Sozialarbeitern, Heroinsucht und Internetpornographie, addiert ein ganzes Spektrum von Pädophilie und Kindeshandel: man schaut zu und wartet die ganze Zeit über darauf, dass etwas unglaublich Gewalttätiges geschieht.

Katie Mitchells Inszenierung ist ihre geradlinigste seit den Trojanerinnen. Alles ist naturalistisch gespielt und inszeniert, ohne Videokameras und Szenenwechsel, die scheinbar von Forensikern durchgeführt werden; die Handlung spielt in Räumen, die genauso aussehen, wie die Räume, die in den Regieanweisungen beschrieben werden.

Im Kontext dieses Naturalismus sind gerade Mitchells gelegentliche Abweichungen von ihm am Interessantesten. Immer wenn Flugzeuge auftauchen, hören die Figuren auf, zu sprechen und die gesamte Beleuchtung ändert sich: das Bühnenlicht wird gedämpft und ändert seine Farbe. Es gibt außerdem zwei fast tanztheaterhafte Augenblicke. In beiden Fällen geht es um allein gelassene Männer: Mark, der in Zeitlupe auf ein Bett fällt und Jonathan, der sehr langsam seine Hand ausstreckt. All diese Momente geben der Inszenierung eine Ebene von Fremdartigkeit, als ginge es, neben den einfachen Ängsten Sterblicher davor, dass wir unsere Luft mit Abgasen verpesten und dass Fremde unsere Kinder missbrauchen, noch um etwas anderes. Beziehungsweise werden diese Ängste in kurzen Momenten ganz klar greifbar.

Die Schauspielarbeit bewegt sich zwischen Stilisierung und Naturalismus, in einer Art kondensiertem Naturalismus, Hypernaturalismus vielleicht, so dass die Handlung immer etwas zu scharf, das Benehmen der Figuren immer etwas zu klar wirkt; an manchen Stellen maniriert. Die erste Szene, in der Bassett und Sturridge sich unterhalten, wird durch ein ständiges gegenseitiges Sich-in-den-Arm-Nehmen unterbrochen, durch ständiges Sich-Anfassen, Sich-Spiegeln in den Bewegungen des Anderen. Die zweite Szene wiederum zeigt Ready bei einer Variation dieses Motivs: er kratzt sich ohne Unterlass - ein Ekzem, wie seine Figur erklärt - am Hinterkopf, während McInnes körperlich ruhig ist. Im dritten Teil ist Angus Wrights Figur so zappelig, dass es zu einem Konversationsthema wird, während Amanda Hales Siân vergleichsweise gelassen bleibt.

Die szenische Handlung passt bemerkenswert gut zum Text. Man nimmt sie kaum bewusst war, dennoch erdet sie die Struktur des Stücks. In den ersten zwei Teilen von Wastwater singen Figuren den Anfang von La Habanera aus Bizets Carmen, im dritten Teil wiederum wird Messiaens "Musik für das Ende der Zeit" [sic] falsch zitiert (tatsächlich heißt das Stück Quartett für das Ende der Zeit). In Simon Stephens Stücken ist die Musik immer ein Hinweis auf die allgemeine Grundlaune. Während die Habanera spielerisch die Liebe als Vogel beschreibt, der Menschen das Herz stiehlt, ist der Grundton von Messiaens modernistischer Musik, die während der Haftzeit des Komponisten in Polen während des zweiten Weltkriegs entstand, ein gebrochener, erschöpfter. Eine weitere wichtige Referenz in Wastwater ist ein Zitat aus Dickens Großen Erwartungen, durch Lisa, kurz vor Ende der Hotelszene: “Der Himmel weiß, dass wir uns nie unserer Tränen schämen müssen. Sie sind der Regen, der auf den blind machenden Staub der Erde fällt, der unsere harten Herzen bedeckt."

Wastwater entwirft ein komplexes, menschliches, besorgtes Bild der Welt. Es beschreibt Politisches durch menschliche Beziehungen auf die beste mögliche Weise. Es zeigt uns nicht nur den Zustand der Nation, sondern auch den Zustand des Planeten. Wastwater tut all das durch Bilder, die mitreißend und aufregend sind und die, zusammen genommen, viel mehr bieten als eine einfache Summe der Einzelteile. Das Stück zeigt eine eng gewobene Decke von Referenzpunkten, die weiter nachhallen. Es zeigt uns ein moralisches Universum, in dem individuelle Entscheidungen Konsequenzen haben, ein Universum, in dem Entscheidung in unseren Knochen weiterleben. Wastwater beschreibt die undarstellbare Riesigkeit der Welt und gleichzeitig die vergleichsweise winzigen Leben in ihr; das Stück zeigt, wie kleine, fragmentarische Momente unvorhergesehene, unvorstellbare, unbekannte Nachwirkungen haben können, die sich von ihren Ursachen entfernen wie ein Netz von Rissen auf einer zerbrochenen Glasscheibe.

Es ist schwer zu sagen, was man mehr wollen könnte von einem Kunstwerk.

________

*Sipson, Middlessex; Surrey, Kanada; Neuseeland; Asien; Südamerika; Minneapolis, Amerika; Stansted Flughafen, Essex; Epping Forest; Lancaster; Wastwater, der Lake District; das Holiday Inn in Derby; Swansea; der Charles de Gaulle Flughafen; Cebu auf den Philippinen; die Islington Filiale der Co-Operative Bank an der Ecke von Upper Street und Pentonville Road; Halfords auf der Liverpool Road; Oddbins auf dem Weg zur Holborn Ubahnstation; die Archway Ubahnstation; Seattle; Inverness; München; Salzburg, Warrington, Manchester; Teile der Elfenbeinküste; die Itury Region in der Demokratischen Republik Kongo; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Kirgistan und die Seitenstraßen der Hauptstädte Lateinamerikas.

Coronation of Poppea - The King's Head

2011-04-25T11:43:00.004+02:00

[1st and only preview – see disclaimer*]

It can only be a matter of time before some wag notices the confluence of Opera-Up-Close and Mark Ravenhill and coins the albatross term In-Yer-Face-Opera. It's hard to imagine something less fitting. Off the back of the massive sell-out and now Olivier Award-winning success of La Bohème, entrepreneurial wunderkind Adam Spreadbury-Maher, who was also, until recently, running Kilburn's Cock Tavern where La B. originated, has somehow managed to get hold of Islington's King's Head and rebrand it as London's Little Opera House. It's an ambitious project, and one for which Mark Ravenhill's new translation and staging of Claudio Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea now makes an excellent case.

Monteverdi's opera, apparently first staged in the year of his death, 1643, at the Venice Carnival had survived in two apparently differing versions (source). Ravenhill also notes that this represented Monteverdi taking his opera outside its customary in-court setting to “the people”, which chimes nicely with the staging of this version in the back room of the closest thing Islington has to a spit 'n' sawdust pub.

As narratives go, the Coronation of Poppea is distinguished largely by its playful cruelty. It starts out with the titular Poppea sulking at the Roman Emperor Nero for not yet having divorced his wife, Ottavia (the opera is historically interesting for dealing primarily with real figures and not mythical characters and Gods – and here, what Gods there were in the original have been cut). We then learn that Poppea hasn't even left her husband Ortho, who in turn is paying visits to one Drusilla, who is in turn in love with him. Thrown into this heady mix is the complicating factor that Nero is a psychopath with the power of life or death over everyone in Rome.

Morally, this is an antiquity. The philosopher Seneca, who also features, is at his most noble when putting his stoic philosophy into practice when commanded to take his own life. Similarly, if narrative serves as vindication – or as Wilde has it: “the good end happily, the bad unhappily” – then the conclusion as to what constitutes *good* here is amoral to say the least.

What is surprising, then, is how much tenderness and humanity Ravenhill's newly translated libretto and staging manage to wring from it. This is perhaps the best libretto for an opera I've ever heard. And that includes a fair few originally written in English; it knocks spots off Richard Thomas's words for Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House, for example. There isn't a clunky phrase or rhyme that I noticed. Instead you get a real sense of the revolutionary (for its time) dramatic story-telling of the original, rendered in unobtrusive but elegant, witty contemporary language. There's even a bunch of playfully self-referential “fuck”s thrown into the first three minutes. But even these are still in keeping with the context.

But it's the tender stuff that really hits home. Granted I don't know the original backwards, but assuming the words stick roughly to what was originally being said (you know, like a translation), then the felicity with which syllables fall into place, while still conveying an entirely credible and genuine and moving sense of what they mean, is pretty awesome.

The closing duet, Pur ti miro, pur ti godo is simply rendered as “When I see you, when I touch you”, for example. It sounds too simple to be even worth noting, but it's this very simplicity and acuity of feeling that makes it work.

Aside from Ravenhill's contribution as librettist and director (of which, more later), the other real star here is Alex Silverman's re-imagined score. As has been noted elsewhere, there isn't really a definitive score for L'Incoronazione... and so chopping and changing at will isn't even controversial. In terms of the music, though, it is not so much the cuts and dramaturgy that stand out as the impressive re-working of the instrumentation. Monteverdi's music has been scored for a jazz trio of piano, double bass and saxophone(s) (I think various different sizes of sax are deployed – insert own headline along “Silverman discovers Monteverdi's sax appeal” lines).

Given the twiddly, treble-heavy nature of baroque music – those almost too-sharp harpsichord trills and high-pitched violins – you might think the transition to the mellower tones of the piano and double bass would take the edge off the music. It doesn't. You can still hear the ornate curlicues of the baroque original, but splendour/grandeur are traded in for sheer energy. After all, the real difference here isn't the change of instrumentation so much as the fact that three people are filling in the notes originally provided by an orchestra. It's well worth trying to get yourself a seat from which you can also watch Silverman at the piano, which is a whole brilliant performance all of its own.

As well as cutting away a lot of polytheistic dramatic dead wood, this version also inserts a new aria written by Michael Nyman. I am a big fan of what Silverman had done to Monteverdi's score, but, if anything, I'm an even bigger fan of Nyman's new “intervention”. Probably only lasting three-to-five minutes, this is the most blistering part of the evening. It might benefit slightly from having entirely modern sensibilities from the off, rather than skillfully adapted antique ones, or it might just be that I prefer Nyman to Monteverdi – but after a lot of plangent trills, the new aria comes on almost like a cleansing dose of punk rock. It's the same insistent, hammering rhythm familiar from his Purcell pastiches for The Draughtsman's Contract soundtrack, backing a satisfyingly vindictive, vengeful prophecy of misery and death for Nero and Poppea sung by Ottavia as she covers herself in handfuls of stage-gore like a kind of jazz-baroque Siouxsie Sioux.

I should probably couch some of my quibbles here in the fact that I only saw the first preview*, although my basic problem is far more silly and fundamental: I'm starting to realise that I'm not a massive fan of small rooms. Which, when an entire enterprise is predicated on the smallness of the premises, seems much more like an irreconcilable difference of opinion. I just like being a bit further away from the action than one can actually get in the King's Head. I sat at the back – a perfectly excellent view of the new side-on Thrust stage configuration, and it still all seemed a bit close. I do wonder, though, if part of the issue here is to do with a) the production still needing a bit of time to bed in at that stage, b) the fact that opera singers presumably have much less training for the volume at which to pitch a performance in a small room with a low ceiling, and, c) an interesting disjuncture between the ethos of the music (jazz) and the singing style (still operatic).

That is: I wonder how much the style in which opera is sung has to do with the size of the venues in which it has traditionally played – that full-throttle mass of human voice making the most sound it's humanly possible to make tunefully. In a small room there's a question of whether that sound needs some adjustment or whether it is an unalterable part of the genre.

Relatedly, while with jazz the point is to look and sound as relaxed as possible, opera is perhaps the most effortful way of singing ever devised, to the extent that it sometimes looks physically uncomfortable. As such, it sometimes feels like the score here perhaps even accentuates this effort unhelpfully. I don't know if any of this is relevant, helpful or even accurate, though – perhaps it's much more a matter of conventions which I need to get more used to.

The clarity of the staging and the acting within it are admirable. Previous Ravenhill collaborator (on Intolerance) Rebecca Caine as Nero's spurned wife, Ottavia, stands out both vocally and dramatically. Although there is strong support from Martin Nelson's Seneca and counter-tenor David Sheppard as the cross-dressed, would-be assassin Ottone. Elsewhere, Adam Kowalczyk's Arnalta and Jessica Walker's Nero add to the cross-dressing fun, cross-cast to good effect (in the original, Nero is thought to have likely been sung by a castrato; in our more entlightened times, a soprano seems like a fair compromise). It's not exactly gender-blind casting, hoever. One gets the impression Ravenhill quite relishes the draggy aspect – introducing the premiere with quotes not only from Seneca, but also RuPaul.

The setting feels mildly more indicative than fully realised, but adds to the likeable sense of a DIY ethic running through the whole. And, in fairness, was infinitely more ambitious even in its lo-fi state than many far more expensive, grandiose sets in “proper” opera houses. For patently very little money, designer Katie Bellman has pulled together an look that recalls the grungy, trash-aesthetic of Frank Castorf's Volksbühne.

So: yes. The Coronation of Poppea is an excellent place for Opera-Up-Close to be right now, although I can't help hoping that a bunch of money gets flung at it so that it can transfer to a slightly bigger space – it doesn't have to be enormous, the Almeida round the corner would be excellent – and has the budget to more properly realise the set and costumes. I realise these are terrible things I'm saying and I should be embracing the tiny-room-ness of it all more wholly. I'm not sure what one does about one's desire for a bit more remoteness from one's opera, though. It plainly has nothing to do with this excellent production. I think it's just a matter of taste, and/or training. That said, if Opera-Up-Close continues to work this well, I might yet be persuaded that I want my Opera in my face after all.

[*Disclaimer: I saw the only “preview” performance. This preview was the first time this staging had been performed and, as director Mark Ravenhill explained before the show started, was still missing a couple of scenes. As well as being the only preview, it was also still a week before Press/Opening night [now almost a fortnight ago], so there was still a week of rehearsal to go. The only reason I went to this preview, was that it was the only night it was on when I was in London. That said, I emailed Mark and asked if I could have a press ticket and he said yes, thus, I think, obliging me to write. Not sure where that puts me in the critics/bloggers // to-preview/not-to-preview debate. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, Mark's a friend; although that wouldn't stop me writing an unfavourable review of his work if I thought it was bad, as I think he knows

Happily, most of the “proper” reviews I've read since seem equally thrilled with the thing. Among the best are:

Kieron Quirke in the London Evening Standard

and the blog Intermezzo

The FT – which doesn't go for the Nyman intervention at all (more fool them) – does make an interesting point about its dramatic effect]

The Knot of the Heart - Almeida

2011-04-25T11:38:00.003+02:00

An interesting phenomenon, when it comes to reviewing New Writing, is the rush and the urge to identify “themes”. In Rewriting the Nation terms:

“If the nineties were all about druggie council estates, David Eldridge's Knot of the Heart, like Nick Grosso's Ingredient X before it, proves that drug use and addiction were also very much middle class problems. The play shows Lucy, who has just started a career presenting children's television, gradually succumbing to heroin addiction; but, with an alcoholic mother and a self-harming sister, Lucy's not the only addict in the family...”

Which would be a pretty reductive way of viewing the play. Certainly addiction is something in the play, but it isn't a play “about” addiction. Indeed, if anything, it's actually all about class. Or families. Or death/grief/bereavement/guilt/love/being-a-mother/being-a-daughter. Or blame.

The point is that it's a story. It's a play about *some people*. Yes, as a study of addiction it is without recent peers – it makes That Face look like a vindictive, petulant tantrum by comparison. Early on it has more in common with those dramas of familial claustrophobia – from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Bedbound – but even this seems too schematic a placing. Neither location nor kinship are ultimately the trap. There's also more than a little of the Ibsen about it. At its core – certainly “core” in the way it is placed by the narrative – is a Dark Family Secret, the uncovering of which...

And here we run into another problem of trying to write seriously about the play. This is a strange thing about plays which tell a story, but also include what could be described as “discussion of a theme” – let's say here it is addiction for the sake of argument. The story, the way the events unfold, the simple one-thing-after-another-ness of it all, always appears to be a part of the thesis. But you're not meant to talk about “what happens” in a write-up. It's a bit like trying to explain what Christ meant with the Parable of the Prodigal Son without giving away the ending.

Eldridge has clearly done thorough research into his subjects – let's say those are heroin addiction, alcoholism, self-harm, the middle class and the language of addiction-therapy (“clearly” not least because he's said as much). Each of the three principle characters (Lucy, her mother, and her sister) could be seen to be an embodiment of one of these problems. Of course, they're not. They're characters who are meant to be quite like “real people”. As such, their relation to even this particular facet of their character is governed, at least in the dramatist's mind, by his impression of how that character would deal with a certain situation. Which of course makes them flawed ciphers for their addictions. But Eldridge is more than canny enough a dramatist to know this. So this is not a play which purports to give a definitive study of “addiction”, but rather a humane, concerned, compassionate-but-unflinching portrait of a particular woman/family through a difficult three years at the end of a difficult thirty years.

In terms of the writing, well, it fluctuates a bit. Some of the early scenes – one between the mother and the sister in particular – feel like either the actors haven't quite hit the “right” rhythm (I say this knowing full well that it's all a matter of taste), or else the language is deliberately condensed into a sort of realist cordial without the water added – all the right favours are there, but they haven't been a diluted so they don't taste like “real” real life should.

This gets ironed out by the last scene before the interval (running time: 1hr20(?), 20 min interval, 1hr6). Suddenly, all the stuff that might have been being manoeuvred into place a tiny bit obviously is in the right position and the thing takes off. The play is flat-out engrossing, without little tics distracting you.

But more than the fact that Knot... could be described as an “about” play which easily transcends its “about”ness, what's really interesting is the way it's structured. Along with “Where are all the right-wing plays?” and “Why can't young writers write 'Big Plays'?” one of the most persistent grumbles about “New Writing” is that it seldom produces “Big Parts”.

Knot of the Heart has created precisely that. It's already a matter of record at the central figure of Lucy was created by David Eldridge for actress Lisa Dillon. And it's a thumping big part: on stage most of the time; in most of the scenes; utterly central and given a hell of a lot of decisions and transformations, moods and attitudes to portray, this is indeed a Big Part.

It's also a difficult part. Lucy is by no means a sympathetic character, nor does Dillon try to make her one. She is messy, self-absorbed, selfish and deluded. What's most interesting about Dillon's performance are the switches in register. She coquettes about, making herself small, curling up, whimpering and so on, but at other points, suddenly seems to discover a deep, almost Thatcher-like stridency and power.

Margot Leicester as her mother, Barbara, is also gifted a whacking great part, which she inhabits thoroughly, if perhaps over-playing the jolly, ho-ho-ho Middle-class-mum act. Although, it's hard to tell whether it is the actress or the character who is doing the over-playing. Much more probably the latter. Abigail Cruttenden makes heavier weather of sister Angela, although again this could be a deliberate choice rather than a failure of capturing the character.

It is briefly pleasing to note that the programme contains the credit “Kieran Bew - All the Men” - although perhaps the most interesting element of this is that this might mean Knot of the Heart contains the only – unannounced, unsignalled – performance by a white actor of a black or Asian character.

The strength of Knot of the Heart is in it's clear-eyed telling of a true-sounding story. There's a feeling of well-realised authenticity and accuracy about it. Without giving away the ending, it's harder to say any more about it than that.

Wastwater - Royal Court

2011-04-21T17:03:00.007+02:00

Debussy once said “music is the space between the notes”.

This is how Wastwater works. Through the vast spaces between and within three tangentially connected dialogues, it paints a picture of the world on an enormous scale.

DISCLAIMER: as a result of the above, it is impossible to discuss Wastwater in any meaningful detail without starting to eat away at some of the things that make watching it great. As such, this review is primarily intended for those who have already seen Wastwater and those who are not going to see it. Or who don't care about that sort of thing (hello, Germans).

If you like your reviews to function as a kind of consumer guide: Go see Wastwater. It is funny, clever and terrifying. The best play yet written about climate change and globalisation. Probably the best play of 2011. Five Stars. Andrew Haydon. (& if you want a reductive critical shorthand for what it's like, try: Under the Blue Sky to the tune of The City)

Now don't read any more until you've seen it or you're sure you're not going to. Or are German.

The reason it's impossible to discuss Wastwater without giving things away is that Simon Stephens uses ambiguity here like it was a set of additional characters.

The play is made up of three dialogues in three separate locations. Each between a male and a female. In each dialogue it feels like the first game we're being asked to play is “working out who the characters are”: first in the context of the scene – who they are to each other – and then, later, who they are in relation to the other characters we've seen.

In the first scene Linda Bassett and Tom Sturridge play Frieda and Harry, a loving, anxious older woman and a nervy, distracted young man. They could be teacher and pupil, parent and child, or lovers. Not knowing makes us watch the details harder. After establishing what sounds like a long shared history, Harry says, “You probably heard about it, didn't you? They must have put it in my file.” And we're unsure again – is she a particularly unkempt probation officer? It gradually emerges that Frieda has been Harry's foster-mother, but by that point the other relationships we might have imagined for them also matter.

There's an out-of-joint-ness that is crucial. Even where the scene is set seems disputed: it looks (here, in the first of Lizzie Clachan's excellent sets) like the back of an old wood and glass conservatory or greenhouse to a large family home, but it's massively overgrown, and Frieda refers to “climbing over the fence to get in here”. We learn that the house is in the village that would have been destroyed had Heathrow's third runway been constructed. From time to time the dialogue is interrupted by planes flying overhead.

The second scene exploits a different sort of tension and uncertainty. Set in a hotel room outside Heathrow, it is almost immediately obvious what Mark and Lisa (Paul Ready and Jo McInnes) are doing there. If there's a question, it's whether they'll actually manage to do what they've set out to do. There is the unanswered ancillary question of how they met and how they got to this point, but their scene isn't interested in that. Instead it's a play-off between Mark's nerves (perhaps slightly over-played by Paul Ready) and Lisa's urge toward relentless, steely-eyed self-revelation always followed with the opportunity for Mark to leave: “If you want to leave now I wouldn't mind.” “Do you feel disgusted? Do you want to go home?” “Have I scared you a bit?” Again the action is interrupted by planes.

The third and final scene is the most unsettling. It is set in a warehouse, also near to Heathrow airport, where Jonathan (Angus Wright) has agreed to meet Siân (Amanda Hale). This is the most unclear relationship yet. Siân's flirty first line “Do you like my dress?” wrong-foots us: perhaps he's a middle-aged man meeting a prostitute. The subsequent switch in her manner – hectoring, interrogatory – suggests a slightly psychotic MI5 Officer or vigilante. It's clear that Jonathan has done something wrong. Something very wrong. Something to do with children and the internet. He's frightened of her and she enjoys teasing him with her power and his fear. For a long time, it seems likely that he's involved in some kind of paedophile ring. Certainly his behaviour and her treatment of him and the hints to what's going on point toward this. Eventually, it turns out that Jonathan has paid a large amount of money to illegally adopt a child from the far east. The circumstances aren't made much clearer than that.

Because we spend so much time in the scene thinking that it is about paedophiles, child abduction and the internet, the scene/this part of the play is about that too. The fact that it turns out to be about something different doesn't erase what the scene seemed to have been about. Again, the game that the text is playing with our synapses is in full-flight. Details recur, little moments or motifs crop up again, subtly transformed or shifted. Harry's trousers that “smell of wee a bit” here turn into Jonathan “pissing himself”. Frieda's light-hearted threat to “investigate the internet” and “go through your sent messages” becomes Siân's terrifyingly full account of all Jonathan's movements that day – she reels off all his credit card, Oyster Card uses and internet transactions. Perhaps even Lisa's description of Wastwater itself – “The deepest lake in the country [England, not Britain]. It's terribly still. My dad told me the stillness was a bit of a lie. 'It looks still, Lisa, but you should see how many bodies are hidden under there'.” finds a twin in Siân's later description of drowning a foster-uncle's dog in a pond.

These little chimes and resonances constantly reminding us of the scenes which have gone before give the momentum of the whole real weight. It is through these, and the almost glancing connections between the dramatis personae – Siân is another of Frieda's foster-children, Jonathan is the teacher who once hit Mark, Harry was in the car with Mark's star pupil, Gavin Berkshire, when he died – that the play conjures the hugeness of the rest of the world. By making these encounters so brief and elliptical, by the characters and the connections between them being so apparently random and incidental, it achieves a sense of the sheer mass of people on the planet.

The text also names an awful lot of places from Heathrow outwards*. Indeed, in spite of the minutely detailed naturalistic sets, the rush of information and descriptions sometimes make the piece feel more like a radio play - one's mind is continually being put out of the room you're looking at and being asked to imagine something that one of the characters is describing. This, especially when coupled with the slight sense of not-knowing who is in the room, again adds to the sense of the overwhelming hugeness of the world outside these rooms.

There's a precision to what gets mentioned, though. This is an incredibly tightly constructed play. The scenes echo and build on one another in ways that go far beyond happy coincidence. Each depicts a man cowering slightly more away from a woman. Scene-by-scene, the men get older and the women get younger. It has been noted elsewhere that each setting gets further from nature and natural light. Each scene is about leaving, from Frieda not really wanting Harry to go, to Lisa suggesting to Mark he might want to go, to Siân absolutely not allowing Jonathan to exit. There's even the briefest of fourth scenes – that between Jonathan and his newly imported daughter Dalisay (she youngest still, he aged even by the encounter) – where neither can leave, or even move.

In each scene there's an additional discussion of choices and consequences – perhaps the overriding concern of the play – that question of how the choices we make are shaping, and destroying the world – from Harry's concern with humanity's abandonment of hunter-gathering in favour of farming: “None of the catastrophes of human history would have happened if we'd not decided to farm.” to Lisa's: “You make one decision. It stays with you. It's a bit like the consequences of it get into your bones”.

Even the references to places and things add up. This isn't just a scattergun miscellany of detail. Without putting a single scientist, politician or even polar bear in the rooms, this is the best play yet written about climate change, globalisation, about the sort of world into which we are bringing children and how we live, both on a personal and political level. It is also about information, commerce and what the world does with children. All this is achieved with an enviable lightness of touch. By the end, you feel almost wrung-out by how much you've had to imagine as well as exhilarated by the effort. Which isn't to say this is a cheering play. The last scene might function like an adrenalin shot – you spend the whole time just waiting for something horrifically violent to happen – but it's hardly an “upper” - to a world of abandoned children, foster-families, Child Protection Officers, heroin addiction and internet pornography, it adds the spectre of paedophilia and the actuality of children being sold or abducted for adoption.

Katie Mitchell's production is her “straightest” since Women of Troy. That is to say, this is played almost entirely naturalistically – i.e. without video cameras or CSI scene-change operatives, in replicas of rooms that look exactly like the rooms in which the scenes are set, played by a cast who mostly “look like the characters”. Actually, this last point isn't always strictly observed. In the printed script, Siân describes Frieda as “absolutely beautiful. She looks about my age...”, which, with the best will in the world, isn't strictly true of Linda Bassett and those lines have been removed. Of course, it is equally possible that Siân could believe it or, indeed, be lying to Jonathan when she says it, but, as far as I remember, the lines have simply been cut. Similarly, as with many productions of Blasted, the hotel room doesn't look anywhere near as pricey as it's described as being.

Within the context of this naturalism, it is Mitchell's occasional departures from it that are most interesting. In each scene, when the planes fly over, as well as causing the characters to stop speaking, the entire lighting state also changes – dims slightly, perhaps changes colour a bit. There are also at least two moments of almost dance-theatre-style non-naturalism. Both when men are left alone – in one, Mark falls backward in slow motion onto the bed, and in the other Jonathan slowly flexes a single hand. All these moments, set within the context of the naturalism, suggest an additional layer of strangeness. As if, beyond the simple, mortal fears of burning naphtha-kerosene destroying the air we breathe and strangers torturing our children, there is also a briefly glimpsed extra dimension. Or those fears momentarily take on a tangible form.

The acting itself is an interesting mix of the stylised and the totally straight. It feels like a form of condensed naturalism – hyper-naturalism, perhaps – so that all the action is slightly too sharp, the colours of the behaviour a little over-bright. It's very tic-cy in places. The first scene, in which Bassett and Sturridge chat, is marked by the way that both are constantly hugging themselves, hands picking endlessly at arms, movements mirroring one anothers'. The second scene, by contrast, sees Ready carrying on this motif of self-scratching – he almost compulsively itches the back of his head (eczema, his character explains) – where McInnes is more physically still. The third scene has Angus Wright in the most heightened state of fidgeting yet, almost unable to keep still to the point where it becomes a subject of discussion, while Amanda Hale's Siân is comparatively sanguine.

This action is fitted to the text remarkably well. It is almost unnoticeable at a conscious level, yet all the while adding grounding to the structure of the text. Re: this structure - the first two scenes both have characters hum/sing the start of Habanera from Bizet's Carmen, while the last (mis)name-checks Messiaen's “Music for the End of Time” [sic]. In common with other of Simon Stephens's plays, the music mentioned can be read as a partial hint to the mood or tone of the piece. While the opening notes of Habanera hop darkly but playfully downward like the bird that's going to steal one's heart (cf. its lyrics), the Messiaen is an altogether more fractured, shattered, modernist piece, written during the composer's imprisonment in Poland during WWII, inspired by the book of Revelation. The other crucial structural or thematic note is the quote from Dicken's Great Expectations delivered by Lisa just before the close of the hotel scene: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.”

What Wastwater does is create a complex, humane, concerned picture of the world. It illuminates the political through the personal in the best possible way. It shows us not only the state of the nation, but of the planet. It creates this picture through scenes that are individually intriguing, exciting and which, when taken together, add up to far more than the sum of their parts. It offers a rich, densely allusive tapestry of references which resonate far beyond the walls within which they are uttered. It suggests a moral universe where individual decisions have consequences and where decisions live on in our bones. It manages to stage both the unstageable enormity of the extent of the world, and the comparatively tiny lives within it – suggestively showing how tiny, fragmentary moments can have unforeseen, unimagined, unknown impacts, which thread away from them like the network of cracks on a sheet of shattered glass.

It is hard to know what more one could want from a work of art.

____________

*Sipson, Middlesex; Surrey, Canada; New Zealand; Asia; South America; Minneapolis, America; Stansted Airport, Essex; Epping Forest; Lancaster; Wastwater, the Lake Distract; Holiday Inn, Derby; Swansea; Charles de Gaulle Airport; Cebu, Philippines; the Islington Branch of the Co-Operative Bank on the corner of Upper Street and Pentonville Road; Halfords on Liverpool Road; the Oddbins on the way to Holborn Tube; Archway Tube; Seattle; Inverness; Munich, Germany; Salzburg, Austria; Warrington, Manchester; parts of the Ivory Coast; the Itury region in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Kyrgyzstan and the back streets of the major cities of Latin America.

Funding cuts coverage

2011-04-03T13:50:00.003+02:00

So, “Arts Council England funding cuts”, eh?

Having spent much of the day itself and latter half of the week reading about them, it seems the only thing still lacking is coverage of the coverage.

The first thing that needs pointing out is that, contra the above-quoted locution, the cuts aren't really “Arts Council cuts”. Or at least, rather than simply being cuts made by the Arts Council England, they might more properly be thought of as that organisation's administration and allocation of the reduced budget allotted to them by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. It's a good rule of thumb that if an article doesn't make this distinction within the first two paragraphs, it's probably not worth reading.

While, yes, it is ultimately Arts Council England deciding where the money goes, there is less money for them to allocate than there was in the last spending round in 2008 and it is primarily this which has necessitated their making any cuts at all. At the same time, it should be noted that the Arts Council has also dug into its Lottery reserve to the tune of £82 million, in order that it might cushion the blow.

That said, ACE's response has been, rather than simply shaving an equal percentage off each organisation they had hitherto been funding – a practice charmingly euphemised as “salami slicing”, as if salamis were traditionally served by chopping fifteen per cent off one end – to conduct a thoroughgoing reappraisal of both their entire portfolio of funded organisations and indeed the entire structure of their funding model (changing RFOs into NPOs and so on).

The differences between this funding round and their last, announced in December '07, are incredible. Indeed, it's hard to believe they were carried out by the same organisation. Which, in one sense, they weren't – depending on one's view of the philosopher's axe.

Whereas in January '08 the Arts Council was issued with a vote of no confidence as a result of their proposed cuts, this time around, it has gathered almost nothing but praise. There is near-universal recognition that it has come up with a portfolio of artists, and settlements upon them, which has been rigorously thought about, re-thought about and agonised over; and in a far more difficult set of circumstances than last time.

Of course, there are individual decisions which different people would have made differently. I, for example, think it's terrible that Third Angel have had their funding cut by 100%, but would have happily cut the Tricycle by a good deal more than 11% if left to my own cack-handed devices.

Which at once touches at one corner of what makes writing about these cuts difficult: personal preference and a lack of first hand knowledge. Both these issues also go a long way toward demonstrating why we have an Arts Council in the first place.

This is best evidenced by Messers Spencer, Cavendish and Callow.

Of the three, Spencer perhaps comes out best, offering only seven short paragraphs in which he rehearses a few of his already well-known prejudices. His 2009 review starting: “Reviewers should be honest about their prejudices and one of mine is a great dislike for the Arcola Theatre in darkest [!] Dalston. It’s a nightmare to get to [from Surrey], and when you finally arrive in the neighbourhood you find yourself on a menacing main street, often patrolled by terrifying hooded youths [!]...”

Here becomes: “the Arcola in... Dalston gets an increase of 82 per cent. This seems to be an example of the Arts Council favouring a venue in a run-down location rather than one that attracts the Islington fashionistas. The posh Almeida audience may now be required to dig deeper into their pockets. ”

Never mind that Islington ceased to be fashionable in about '95. In the world of Telegraph-shorthand for “blacks” and “queers”, this imaginary play-off between “terrifying hooded youths” and “fashionistas” should keep them gurgling happily for days.

It's worth noting in passing that while those figures – some of the most quoted across reports, not least because they're rare examples of numbers different to 11 or 15 – sound extreme, the actuality is that the Almeida losing 39.0% means it's going from £1,052,543 down to £704,917, while the Arcola's 82.1% gain raises £157,418 to £314,879 – still less than half the public money the Almeida gets (also worth noting that the venues' public subsidy isn't the whole of their income. The Almeida is sponsored by the private bank for millionaires, Coutts, and the Arcola is sponsored by the American financial firm Bloomberg)

Spencer rounds his piece off with a joke about not liking the London International Mime Festival, which is, of course, totally unforgivable.

Crucially, though, at no stage does he once question the actual practice of funding the arts. It's just one guy's “Well, I wouldn't necessarily do it like that” thoughts.

Putting its finger on the problem of this subjectivity much more firmly is Dominic Cavendish's oddly chippy piece. It is worth quoting him at some length:

“I have to declare that, having looked over the Arts Council’s existing list of regularly funded clients, which will be supplanted from April 2012 with the new National portfolio, I was astonished by how many theatre companies have barely registered as significant players, let alone produced works of memorable excellence, in the 10 years I’ve been reviewing, and covering the regions.

To name half a dozen: Mimbre theatre, Spare Tyre theatre company, Dodgy Clutch Theatre, Lawnmowers Theatre, M6 theatre company and Monster Productions. Two of these companies (Dodgy Clutch, who specialise in outdoor experiences, and Monster, who have produced musical theatre for children) are now funding-less, but the others are doing OK - some are doing better than OK; Lawnmowers Theatre, which works with learning disabled, gets a 21 per cent increase.
To single these companies out is not to denigrate the work they’ve done - they’ve been so off the radar, there’s no knowing - or to imply that they won’t achieve excellent in the future; but if there’s a glaring deficit in the arts at the moment, it remains that the incredible talk about what the arts achieve and what they do for the public, taxpaying or otherwise, isn’t always matched by audiences' understanding or appreciation of what is out there.”

Which is one way of putting it. Another might be to suggest there's a “glaring deficit” in the Telegraph's regional reviewing. Except it's not even that. After all, does a theatre company which works with the learning disabled even want a review from the Daily Telegraph? Much though theatre critics might like to believe that they're the eyes and ears of the public, the fact is, if you're the second string theatre critic of Britain's most right-wing broadsheet, owned by two reclusive tax-exiles, it might have just not occurred to a company working with learning disabled children in Gateshead that Telegraph readers are interested in their work.

Cavendish's suggestion that the “incredible talk about what the arts achieve and what they do for the public... isn’t always matched by audiences' understanding or appreciation of what is out there” seems hard to verify. Or rather, he gives absolutely no evidence for his claim – although “isn't always” is such a moveable feast as to be almost impossible to disprove. It is equally likely that people might be made aware of what's going on near them by their own local information networks, advertising and media, rather than them requiring notification or critical approbation from the national press.

Granted, when Toby Frow raised the issue of regional coverage in a Guardian blog last year, the fierce resentment of even the Guardian's critics' perceived London-centric agenda reverberated through the comments section. On the other hand, isn't at least some of what the Arts Council funds not specifically aimed at the widest possible audience?

My friend Jo Wright works at South Hill Park, an arts centre which has just been cut by 100%. It's a “mixed arts” venue which serves as a local venue for touring theatre productions – they've got Noughts & Crosses and the excellent Poland 3 – Iran 2 coming in soon. They also serve as a home for dance, have a gallery and run all sorts of classes and youth groups. Etc. Jo appeared on Anne Diamond's Radio Berkshire programme (No. I didn't know that existed, but I don't live in Berkshire) to talk about what they did (link is iPlayer, so might disappear).

This is her talking about someone who'd benefited from what they did there:
"...Honey, who's 8 years old, is another one with massive autism. She let me brush her hair for the first time ever because she was in role. As a rabbit."

This doesn't need a star-rated review to prove it's valuable, does it?

But least Cavendish flags up his own subjectivity. He is surprised that he's not heard of some regional touring companies, but doesn't presume to judge them. Demonstrating again why we have an Arts Council and not just a few pundits based mostly in London.

Which brings us to Simon Callow, who, I note with great displeasure, is going to be on Question Time next week opposite Jeremy Hunt. His little contribution to the Guardian's round-up of the Arts great'n'good's take on the cuts, is flabby, self-interested, petulant, myopic and ignorant:

“I'm utterly bewildered by the way the cuts have been applied.” He begins, unpromisingly. “And I can't begin to understand... I can't imagine what... I don't know what...” he continues, before asking “[I]s the Walk the Plank theatre company really the most important thing to invest in at a time like this?” Clearly he's not the man to ask.

He then goes on to deliver a perplexing and contradictory assessment of how Tom Morris's move from artistic directorship of the BAC to directing War Horse at the NT apparently demonstrates that it is the Arts Council and not Simon Callow who don't understand Britain's theatre ecology.

The Culture Secretary must be quaking in his boots.

There is no point in reading Quentin Lett's pre-annoucement piece for the Mail, and I'm not linking to it either. Letts in the Mail is no more than a preacher to his choir of paranoid left-conspiracy theorists and online he just reads like a troll who's got above the line. As such, the online coverage fight was between the Grauniad and the Torygraph since the Indie opted for a bit of wire-copy to cover the entire thing and the Times remained behind a paywall which no one ever pays.

Having dispatched the Telegraph's contributions, it should also be stated that Charlotte Higgins's piece for the Guardian is a masterclass in hyperbole, illogical argument, imprecision and cliché.

“It is a black day for the arts in England and, for all the government's comforting rhetoric, it will have to take responsibility for a crude, unthinking vandalism to the English cultural landscape.”

I defy a right-wing satirist to come up with a better parody. The piece concludes:

“Whether the government's behaviour is blunderingly careless rather than deliberately destructive to the arts is a moot point. There is no official policy that cries "cast down the arts!". Some good intentions are signalled by the support in the budget for cultural philanthropy. But the whole picture is one of a vicious assault, on every front. ”

“Blundering carelessness” is odd, because it was “unthinking vandalism” at the beginning. Similarly, how – if it's a “moot point” whether the “government's behaviour” is “blunderingly careless” (good adverb!) or not – can “the whole picture”be “one of a vicious assault”? Carelessness, blundering or otherwise, is not assault.

And the accusation is not strictly true, since what the the Government actually did was reduce the amount of money that the Arts Council had to distribute – in line with its general policy of reducing spending across the board. It left the thinking to the Arts Council. As a result, the “vandalism” was executed with incredible thoughtfulness, and not by the government. Similarly, since Arts Council England has partially plugged the gap left by the government's re-allocation of money, “the whole picture” looks a lot less bad than it might have done.

None of this is to condone either the arts cuts or the government's wider policy of cutting public spending. But it is important to get the language right. Sadly, Higgins's stab at rhetorical flourish has already done its damage; already flashed up on The Review Show after Quentin Lett's piece as if to prove his powers of clairvoyance, and it has doubtless being logged in the memories of many others wishing for a good go-to example of “keening and caterwauling on an epic scale”.

On the day itself, far better pieces emerged from Meghan Vaughan and Dan Bye. Similarly, the first most readily accessible overview was also provided by a blogger: Fin Kennedy's no-nonsense practical guide to what had happened. (with a follow-up piece here)

Playwright and academic Dan Rebellato's piece offered an excellent overview of the cuts:

“The Arts Council has done a near-miraculous job, a much better job than the Coalition deserves. They could have enacted a programme of swingeing vandalism - axe the Royal Opera House’s annual £28.3m for example - and let the Coalition take the hurt. They’ve been, in fact, forward-looking and creative.”

The main meat of his piece, however, is an attack on the attitude of triumphal philistinism taken by those offering their pearls of artistic/economic non-wisdom in the nation's online comment boxes.

Also brilliant is NT Artisitic Director Nicholas Hytner's piece in the London Evening Standard. Hytner is perhaps the gutsiest commentator yet. He admits that he doesn't “think that we have any superior claim on the public purse at a time when, in the cause of a beautifully balanced budget, more or less everything that makes a vibrant economy worthwhile is being undermined” and even that “there is something I recognise in the adrenaline-fuelled conviction of our political masters. They govern in a spirit of swaggering certainty that I value in my creative colleagues.” He admits that the government's plans might even pan out, at least in economic terms. At the same time, his acid diplomacy lands far more punches than Higgins's bluster.

The final piece I'd draw your attention to comes, surprisingly, from the Spectator; the right-wing politics and arts magazine which also boasts Charles Moore's hunting column and the Wehrmacht-wannabe society scribbler, Taki.

It does some much-needed high-Tory legwork:

“There is a corroborative quotation circulating the internet which tells that during the Second World War, Winston Churchill’s finance minister said Britain should cut arts funding to support the war effort. Churchill reportedly retorted: “Then what are we fighting for?”

“This is fantastic, true-blue Tory red-meat support for maintaining the level of arts funding in the face of national crisis: if we can sustain the subsidy through war, what’s a little national debt and an inconvenient cash-flow problem? But I checked the veracity of this attribution with the Churchill Archives at Cambridge University, and it transpires that the great man never said any such thing.”

But also, with a fair-minded, intelligent grasp of history, it reminds the “arts used to survive without public subsidy” hawks, that:

“To those who say the market should decide, I ask you where Mozart would have been without Emperor Joseph II, or Beethoven without Archduke Rudolph? And let’s not forget that this was the era when emperors and dukes were the state: it was the taxpayers of Austria who subsidised *The Marriage of Figaro* and sponsored the Missa Solemnis. Before these it was the Church which commissioned the great works of art, and that was when the Church was the state ...”

It's the sort of eloquent rebuttal you can't help wishing someone at the Guardian had come up with.

Yes, there's also the obligatory harumphing about “bland, monochrome or monotonous, almost Stalinist uniformity in the national artistic expression” and the old canard “where are the ‘right-wing’ plays, playwrights, poets or theatre directors?”, but on the whole, it's good to read something from the intelligent right which isn't just extolling the virtues of letting the market provide the art.

That said, it's worth noting in passing that his argument, “not all art brings home the bacon, especially if it’s a Damian Hirst dissected pig suspended in formaldehyde with quotations from the Quran tattooed into its ham. And for the state to subsidise, someone somewhere must assess the merit or virtue of Tracey Emin’s enseamed bed, and they won’t all be as discerning as Aristotle or Charles Moore.”

Is based on an entirely false premise. Both Hirst and Emin were sustained not by public money but by the private wealth of Tory advertising executive Charles Saatchi: the man who created Thatcher's Labour isn't Working election campaign in 1979.

____

If we were to draw a single lesson from the coverage of the arts cuts, it would be that no election has ever been won or lost on arts funding in the UK. Also, that these funds, when considered as a totality of the UK government's spend, are pitifully small. We also see that a vocal minority would like to give the impression that the wider public don't feel that they benefit from the 17p-a-week of their taxes which are spent on the arts.

While some have argued that the government's cuts demonstrate “Tory Philistinism”, I would suggest that given some of that party's fondness for even more libertarian principles, the 30 per cent cut to ACE is more simply an expression of far wider economic aims, combined with a need to be seen to be “doing something”. I would bet that there are plenty of right-wing idiots who would argue for a total cut to the arts budget without even thinking about what that meant. This being the case, we should perhaps count ourselves lucky there's still an arts budget at all.

Beyond this, though, the Philistinism here isn't primarily Conservative but English.

Because while we're counting ourselves lucky that we've still got an arts budget at all, what's crucial to remember is that Britain's arts budget is, and was, ridiculously small.

We should also remember, that subsidising the arts isn't inimical to right-wing government. I live in a country which has a right-wing coalition that spends €1.15bn a year, 3-4% of their national budget, on the arts. The combined arts budgets of Berlin, Munich and Hamburg would more than cover ACE's entire national budget.

The root problem behind the Tories' budgeting isn't philistinism but philosophy. Current Conservative thinking has it that the arts would be best provided by extremely wealthy individuals sponsoring the arts out of the goodness of their hearts, having had their wealth subsidised by the taxpayer. Like in the middle ages.

Given that the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Mail, the Express the Sun and the Star are owned by precisely such wealthy individuals, it is little surprise that the coverage of the cuts in the mainstream media has been so one-sided. Or that there is encouragement of the perception that the English don't like the arts, and resent subsidising them.

Disproving these arguments is the first step toward better arts funding for the future.

And, while the ideological argument can't be disproved, it can be exposed as the least preferable of many alternatives, to the majority of people.

Being angry, name-calling, accusations of philistinism and “crisis thinking” can be rejected in favour of hard facts and cool logic.

This isn't a fight, it's just a sensible discussion, and one where all the evidence suggests that arts funding is an excellent idea. That point just needs to be made a bit more clearly now.

Crave (Gier) – Schaubühne

2011-03-29T18:36:00.008+02:00

The stage of Schaubühne's Saal C is a shallow semi-circle backed by a high curved concrete wall. On it are four low rectangular platforms. On those sit four functional chairs. Every lo-fi technological element has been placed just so; the mics, the bulky speakers, the starkly visible lights – above, in front, behind and on the floor, pointing at the concrete. This is the aesthetic of determined functionality.

Thomas Ostermeier's Crave premièred in the year 2000. A lovely thing about the German rep. system is that, as far as is possible, it keeps the same actors in a production as long as that staging runs. Last night it had the exact same cast as the premiere 11 years on.

Knowing this adds an interesting dimension to the production. Watching it, one imagines the number of times these performers have spoken these lines. Just the fact of the show's ongoing survival suggests one possible reading of this staging as a newer take on Beckett's Play. Four souls condemned to pour out their stories forever on these plinths in an ante-room to purgatory.

It also makes for is a disconcerting awareness of how the production's resonances might have altered. At one point, the soundscape crackles with static and a voice says, in English, possibly American, something about “all passengers the...” (died?). Evocative enough in '00, perhaps planting the faint suggestion that Kane's “nameless” speakers are all already perished. Post 9/11, the meaning changes again. You consider the way that reality and events will have textured and pock-marked this staging down the years and if the production might have grown or warped to accommodate these new meanings.

At the same time, it's incredible to watch actors who have been performing their parts for 11 years (not solidly: Gier is currently playing about once a month and has probably dropped in and out of the repertoire). Another interesting (if obvious) feature is the fact that they have all aged by 11 years. At a guess, when the run started they were probably your typical casting for Crave: A and M middle-aged, B and C younger, perhaps early/mid/late twenties. Now, of course, they're all middle-aged. B has greying hair. A's hair is much thinner than it is in photos of the premiere.

Partly this feeds into that question about “naturalistic” casting. Its white (but at least male) Othello aside, the Schaubühne tends to cast broadly to type – even if a lot of its leading mens' “types” happen to be Lars Eidinger. However, there's something more at work here. We're not, for instance, seeing several Bs and Cs being pensioned off like so many Billy Elliots once they stop passing for vulnerable teens. As such, this presentation of a slowly ageing ensemble is at once touching and profound. You start to hope that the show will run another 11 years with the same cast. There certainly doesn't seen any decrease in demand – last night's show was still all but sold out.

And it's great to see B (Thomas Dannemann) gone middle aged, not suiting his hoodie so much as once he might. Still trapped, but completely inhabiting, the movements of a younger self. Cristin König as C performs painfully thin and ill; wrapped in a dressing gown and jogging bottoms she looks as if she is trapped perpetually in a hospital or mental health facility. Perhaps here it's just because you know she's 11 years older than when cast that you start to imagine all the changes – physical, mental, emotional – this must mean and imagining them onto her wan face.

Falk Rockstroh seems to take A's early ambiguous statement “Ich bin pädophil” as a keynote for his performance. He delivers the line with unwavering, pained sincerity. Then, throughout the play, he seen undressing and re-dressing; compulsively fiddling with his collar, his tie, his trousers, his crotch. Dressed in a navy pin-stripe suit, you wonder if he's also being played as “an Englishman”. What's also fascinating about his performance is that – even when not catching everything he says – you get the impression that he's constantly signally that he's lying. Something about his gestures, or the direction he looks before speaking. It's beautifully detailed bit of acting.

Furthest away was M (Michaela Steiger) [Q: was M seated third along in the original prod?] who comes across as having least to do, although perhaps this is because she was least convenient to watch. Nevertheless, the brief episode in which she tears at the flesh of her arm with her fingers remains chilling.

That brief moment and short physical segments – breaking the original's stream of consciousness into acts with fits of spasmodic twitching suggesting a plague ward or mental hospital – are rare, however. The primary quality of both the action and of the performers voices is calmness. There is much less hysteria; none of the shrieking that graces many a student production.

Neither do the performers shirk direct-audience address. Almost without realising, we the audience slip between being ourselves – a nameless faceless mass to address – and the other person onstage whom speaker appears to be addressing. Variously we're B to M and C to A and so on. Occasionally they do look over at one another, but such moments are rare. Mostly it feels as if their solitary promentaries are enclosed on three sides by invisible walls, with only the fronts actually open toward us.

The entire production is underscored by Jörg Gollasch's soundscape. This ranges from low level hum to indistinct music; an orchestra tuning up; that sound of a news report mentioning “all the passengers...”; sporadic, insistent beeps.

Toward the end, there is another brief interlude: films of bodies bathed in green light are projected onto each performer. A's figure is near-naked, drawing, scribbling frantically on himself with a marker pen while A stands stock still, his back to us. C's remains crouched or sat, the projection aimed at her breaking over her head, across the floor and up the back wall. This is accompanied by hospital noise – the Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. of a heart monitor machine.

In the final moments, the words “In the mountains, there you feel free” - nicked straight off p.1 of The Waste Land, apparently in German in Kane's original text – stand out here in English. At the close the lights slowly start to shine on the back wall before the front lights fade down leaving the performers briefly sihouetted. And it is briefly beautiful. An obvious enough kind of beauty, albeit just about the most austere sort of obvious there is.

[Note: the above photo is from the original, original staging in the main space - the performers aren't ever on blocks this high in the smaller studio space. Pity. I like the look of the above]

[above: scan of a spread from the programme. Below: programme cover - because you want to see these too, right?]

Prinz Friedrich von Homburg – Maxim Gorki Theater

2011-03-28T16:59:00.003+02:00

When the Donmar Warehouse staged Dennis Kelly's version of Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg last year, it was accompanied by a fairly bad-tempered, largely uninformed debate, about the fact Kelly had had the audacity to change the ending.

That said, those who had seen what the Germans had done to Kelly's Taking Care of Baby earlier that year might have wryly imagined he was merely indulging in a bit of proportional retribution.

One of the most interesting things about Armin Petras's production, then, is the different alterations which he'd made. Unlike Kelly's sole noted alteration – changing the ending so that the Prinz, sentenced to death, is indeed executed rather than being given the last-minute reprieve in the text; having his blindfold removed; him asking “was it all a dream?” and being answered in the affirmative – in Petras's version the still Prinz lives. He doesn't, however, ask if it was all a dream, because here it seems like all references to dreams and dreaming have been radically downsized, if not expunged altogether.

The production is designed by Katrin Brack, who also created the wall of fog for Dimiter Gotscheff's Volksbühne Ivanov. Here, instead of fog it's a constant downpour of stage rain onto a black polyurethane floor. The production is 1h45 and it rains almost throughout. There is one moment when it stops, very close to the end, and the effect of the silence is astonishing. The effect of this fake rain perpetually tapping the plastic is incredibly unpleasant, however; if grimly, effectively atmospheric. Visually, on the other hand, it looks great – and is perhaps the most dream-like element that remains in the production.

Oddly, it also makes the production also at least look oddly like the sort of thing you might expect to find in the Donmar. The monochrome blue/white lights shining a high angles through the mist of rain onto ersatz historical costuming (Aino Laberenz) all looks terrible Grandage. On the other hand, at the Donmar, one would expect the rain to stop once you'd got the point. Here it feels like the gratuity is the point.

Interestingly, Petras's take on the text also comes across as very similar to Michael Billington's take on Kelly's version. Again, the target seems to be the historical trajectory of Prussian militarism. Except here the Prinz is clothed in the get-up of the modern neo-Nazi. His fellow Brandenburgers might be dressed in slack Prussian blue suggestions of the period's military uniforms – albeit topped off with American GI(?) helmets, his dream-girl Natalie and the Kurfürstin might be laced up inside a plasticky period ballgown (which might well *not* be plastic, but very wet material), but he's come straight out of Romper Stomper.

The argument being made is clear enough – in the military codes of Prussian history lie not only the seeds of the Third Reich but in the fringe far right of today – but it's neither a terribly original point, nor an especially creative way of making it.

Indeed, many other aspects of the production also don't really work. Perhaps the most irritating is the choice of music – the play opens (?) and closes with a terrible MOR ballad by the German neo-Nazi band Böhse Onkelz, which at least makes sense given the costuming, but then most of the rest of the piece is intercut with this melody from Michael Nyman's music for Prospero's Books.

That's not to say Michael Nyman's music for Prospero's Books isn't good, and the music does work quite well on at least 60% of the occasions it's used, but: surely using bits of Michael Nyman music from a film is something you should stop doing once you're no longer a student. Was the whole of Nyman's collaboration with Peter Greenaway intended? Was there a link to The Tempest that Petras was hoping to evoke? Or, was this a move roughly as thoughtful as choosing the music used behind trailers for science documentaries on BBC4? There's also some similarly artless use of video (Chris Kondek) – looking mostly like newsreel footage of Nazi parades, which is projected meaninglessly through the rain onto the back wall of the stage to no real effect.

More problematic, however, was the acting (and indeed “macting”), or rather the way the actors are on stage. It's almost unwatchably unfocused. Nothing anyone is doing or saying really seems to connect with anyone else. Moreover, this isn't down to a clever directorial conceit-gone-wrong (or even gone right-but-not-enjoyed). This is some pretty conservative story-telling-acting just failing to get started. It's almost like a study in one-note acting, or even no acting at all. Lot of things happen in this play. You wouldn't realise it watching this production. And this isn't down to some over-elaborated V-effekt or post- something or other, it's just a strange kind of energy lag, or charisma vortex. Perhaps it's just the rain, but this Prinz Friedrich von Homburg looks distinctly under the weather.

Unsent Postcards: Taking Care of Baby – Deutsches Theater

2011-03-28T16:49:00.004+02:00

[written 19/01/10]

I first saw Dennis Kelly’s play Taking Care of Baby at its London premiere in 2007 (the production was co-produced with Birmingham Rep and so had done a month up there before transferring to the Hampstead). I liked it enormously. Indeed, it was one of my top ten plays of 2007. The play is also much-admired in Germany. It was nominated as several critics’ choice of Best Foreign Play 2009 in Theater Heute’s annual end-of-season round-up. This might seem strange to us, since those nominations came solely on the basis of the translation, which was published in 2009, but had yet to be performed. With such ringing endorsements already in, it makes a lot of sense that the rights to the German language premiere were snapped up by Deutsches Theater, Berlin.

Prior to seeing the show, I was curious to find out how what to me seemed a very specific, very British play would play in another country. Taking Care of Baby, after all, is playing a game that is very specific to British theatre with a subject that was very current when it opened in 2007. It pretends to be a piece of verbatim theatre on the subject of a woman wrongly imprisoned for killing her children, largely on the basis of the testimony of a doctor with a theory. It seemed to be a horribly plausible, only thinly fictionalised version of the events surrounding the discrediting of Dr Roy Meadow and the overturning of the convictions of Sarah Clark, Trupti Patel and Angela Canning. Germany has far less “verbatim theatre” and an entirely different relationship to “Münchhausen’s Syndrome by Proxy”. Equally, it doesn’t seem to go in for relevance fetishism in anything like the same way, so they’re in the weird position of liking the play as a piece of writing, rather than for its meta-theatrical properties and social commentary. Interestingly, re-reading the play before seeing the production (when in Germany, etc.), I could see the Theater Heute panel's point. It is a great text. Subtle, playful and much less context-dependent than I'd imagined.

Not that you’d realise this watching this production.

Regular readers will know I’ve got a bit of a thing for German regietheater. I still count Sebastian Nübling’s Pornographie as one of the best productions of a British play I’ve ever seen. However, Sascha Hawemann’s Taking Care of Baby won’t be joining it on the podium. In fact, it compares very poorly with Anthony Clark’s original production.

I’m all for cutting texts, imposing interpretations, and creating something that might almost be counted as a new work – even in the premiere of a new play – [but I'll save that argument for another time]. I would suggest, however, that the result should at least try to be as intelligent as the original.

It's one thing to cut or play-against-the-text for a reason. It's another thing entirely to cut things, or re-attribute speeches for no readily discernible reason, while leaving large tracts of script intact while seemingly flapping undirected just because they are in the play.

There are things I like very much about the productions – small, strange and, to me, inexplicable things like the character of the child's father wearing a too-small plastic Donald Duck mask when he appears;.and the fact that the Roy Meadows character – who, in the British version, was played (brilliantly) in the only way I could have imagined: the archetypal tweedy, mid-fifties, grey-haired, slightly academic, slightly vain professorial doctor – is here played by a much younger man in a garish orange turtle-neck with trendy glasses and floppy hair.

[As such, it was perhaps these marked cultural differences that kept me from actually putting this review online for over a year. What I wondered, as I expand on here, was the extent to which my take on any play, performed in a language I didn't understand at all, in a cultural context that was all new to me, was of any earthly use to anyone.]

On the whole, however, it feels very much as if the production here has failed to gel. And beyond that, rather than making intelligent cuts or astute choices of interpretation, the director has simply ironed a fine an textured piece of work flat.

[I'm not entirely sure why I was shy of posting the review at the time, since pretty much the German reviews all seemed to have much the same issues...

See here: “Denn eigentlich hatte Dennis Kelly darauf bestanden, dass alle seine Figuren die gleiche Glaubwürdigkeit für sich beanspruchen dürften. Diese Balance aber haben Hawemann und seine Schauspielerinnen nachhaltig gestört. ”

and here: “ „Taking Care of Baby“ ist damit vor allem ein Theaterstück, das sich selbst problematisiert. In Berlin dagegen führt Hawemann zwar mit seinem Bühnen- und Kostümbildner Alexander Wolf die Relativität der Wahrheit mittels Videowänden und aufgebockter Kameras vor und scheint sich bestens auszukennen, wie gewissenlos Mediziner ticken oder wie Politikerinnen aussehen, die mit ihren Wählern auch gleich noch ihre Kinder verraten. Aber seine eigenen Gewissheiten hinterfragt dieses Theater nie. ”

etc.

Still, no matter, it's here now]

Lovers of Latvian Avant Garde Drama...*

2011-03-24T14:23:00.003+01:00

[Written for Guardian theatre blog]

Like Matt Trueman, I've also just finished reading Aleks Sierz's Rewriting the Nation.

However, fittingly, given that Remembrance Day opened last night night at the Royal Court, one of the the things I found most interesting about the book was Sierz's omission of precisely this sort of play from his consideration of New Writing in Britain.

The character of the plays which are produced under the auspices of the Royal Court's International Programme, and what is taught at their International Emerging Writers Residency, is a subject that has interested me for quite a while now.

Put bluntly, I have wondered in the past whether the scheme does more damage than good.

In short, I have wondered if the Court's practice of identifying promising young writers from across the world, shipping them bodily to London and teaching them how to write “the political explored through the personal” State-of-their-Nation plays is the best way to proceed.

Apart from anything else, it strikes me that this approach could steamroller precisely the thing it is theoretically enabling – the internationality of the writers. Rather than allowing for the breadth and depth of other theatrical cultures, it might just be forcing them into a very British model.

Similarly, with the international seasons, there's the interesting question of what happens when you give a text written by someone used to a culture of directorial interpretation to a director from our “serve the text” culture.

I now wonder, though, if these objections aren't also grotesque simplifications. Isn't it equally possible to argue that it is precisely this hybrid approach that makes the work so exciting?

Consider again Remembrance Day. It is described as a family play which explores one of the biggest faultlines in Latvian history and society – the country's successive occupation by Nazi and Soviet forces and the fact that as a result, since the country's independence from the USSR in 1990, Latvian veterans of the Waffen SS annually parade with pride through Riga.

At the same time, the only reason we Britons ever came to know this is that David Cameron and the Conservatives allied themselves with members of the Latvian far-right in the European Parliament leading to a rash of expository news stories.

As such, it strikes me that what the “International” department at the Royal Court have provided us with is not only a play about “over there”, but a piece specifically tailored to how “over there” relates to Britain, right here, right now. It might not relate much to what Latvian theatre is actually like – for that you want to check out some Alvis Hermanis – but it proves that these days that elements crucial to understanding the state of our nation extend far beyond our national borders.

[Interestingly, Sierz has reviewed Remembrance Day for TheArtsDesk.com]

* Blog title from here

Rewriting the Nation – Aleks Sierz (Methuen)

2011-03-22T19:08:00.005+01:00

[Order here - there's a way of doing this link so I make money, isn't there? Never mind]

[Work in progress, I think. Still, lots to be getting on with]

[Preamble-as-footnote*, alternative opening**]

Like In-yer-Face Theatre before it, we might guess that Rewriting the Nation is set to become perhaps the book about British Theatre in the first decade of the 2000s (the decade that never found a name, the “noughties”; the “oh, something...s”).

It is for this reason much more than any other that I suspect it will be vigorously contested and pilloried, possibly, ultimately, in every quarter. We can see from Chris Goode's blog that this process has already begun. And, yes, there is much to object to, but there are also reasons to like the thing.

Sierz is perfectly clear and up-front about what he's doing with this book. It's a survey of “New Writing” [his/their/its-own capitals]. He also candidly admits that it's a personal survey. “Theatre is all about location, location, location” he observes, continuing: “Because I happen to live in London, this book happens to tell stories from a Metropolitan persepective.” [no, that doesn't follow at all, but...] “Obviously I am well aware that the view from other audience members and indeed other cities... is different.” (p.11)

On one hand, this is slightly disingenuous. Not only is Sierz a “metropolitan” Londoner, he's also a theatre critic and -academic, and one who sees a lot more outside London than the average London theatregoer. Beyond this, there are references to watching filmed performances in the National Video Archive of Performance Recordings at the V&A Theatre and Performance Collections. And, being as this is a book about New Writing, there are also references to published playtexts and collections. There are page numbers quoted. He could, in short, have cast his net a lot wider, should he have wished to. On the other hand, we might at least admire the fact that for the most part, this partiality – and the open admission of it – make for an engaging, personal vision of the past ten years.

But is “being up-front” about the limits of the book's scope enough? Of course, on first glance this is a stupid objection. It is not possible to write a book about everything that happened in British theatre, even in London theatre, in the past decade without making more omissions than inclusions. Even so, it feels that at best, many of the depressing conclusions the book draws might have been mitigated if a wider variety of work had been included.

In short, Sierz describes a ghetto, an artistic cul-de-sac, and then concludes by lamenting that it isn't more varied.

This is not to say that the ghetto described is Sierz's invention. The “New Writing Industry” he describes in “Chapter 1 – Context” is not a work of imagination. It is a blunt, at times pessimistic and uninterrogated version of pretty much the first answer anyone familiar with the theatre industry would give if asked to describe what constituted New Writing in London/the UK (see above for disclaimers). However, his taking this as a working model and offering his own reasons for discounting certain plays and/or practices even from the compass of what might be considered to be a new play is deeply frustrating. For example, Sierz's dismisses all history plays thus: “History plays can also act, in the words of director Ramin Grey, 'as a corrective to our own myopic and self-regarding times'. True, but more often they are costume dramas with little relevance to today.” (p.64). Similarly, in a passage of pure semantic nonsense the History Boys is described as “simply not contemporary”, despite being newly written for 2004.

As such, the only pieces of theatre which make the cut for consideration are either those which fit a pretty narrow set of definitions or, in some exceptional cases, the work of the canonical and emergent-canonical plawrights – Caryl Churchill, David Hare, David Edgar, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, David Eldridge, David Greig, debbie tucker green, Dennis Kelly, Roy Williams, Richard Bean, Mike Bartlett and maybe Jez Butterworth (a list which, like that Tory cabinet has more Davids than women). Although it's worth noting that many plays by the above aren't necessarily mentioned (fair enough in the case of David Greig, who seemed to write about a million plays a year, and with such varied subjects they couldn't hope to be accommodated by such a narrow book, mildly annoying when it means David Hare's boulevard work doesn't come in for a bit of stick).

But, like In-Yer-Face... before it, the game here is bending all the work to the theory, rather than maybe seeing what the work itself might be up to.

The theory in this case is much more general and far less persuasive. Rather than taking the work of five key writers and associating their work via a certain level of violence and (mostly coercive) sex demonstrably evident at least in their first works, and then magicking up a movement from the association; here Sierz takes the umbrella “state-of-the-nation” and holds it up over what could be taken by the unwary reader for the entire theatrical output of a whole decade, and not just a narrow ghetto thereof. Moreover, he uses sections of this umbrella as the various thematic compartments into which he slots those plays which have made the grade for consideration in the first place. All the while, continually underlining the problems even he has with his approach.

In his conclusion, Sierz argues: “If you can blame playwrights for failing to write these kinds of plays. You also have to hold theatres to account for neither commissioning them, nor taking steps to widen their rather narrow repertoire of plays.” (p.237) Which might be a fair assessment to make at the end of a book which had actually considered the total output of any given theatre, including the foreign plays, the revivals, the new writing which isn't New Writing, the devised work and everything else. But this isn't that book, at which point the whole problem with the way the thesis he's been using is exposed.

Instead, one comes away from the middle of the book – the part where, with no small amount of attention, he relates the plots and/or themes of many, many of the decade's most notable, and some far less notable plays of the New Writing genre – rather depressed.

Because the theatrical output of the country (or London in most cases) that he describes seems hopelessly and hideously dictated to by a largely right-wing press. It is a picture of an artform chasing buzzwords, tag-lines and neologisms. It is a theatre which has forgotten, by this analysis, to refuse the premises of the question. It is a theatre which appears to have picked up its anxieties about race, for example, from worrying about the Daily Mail.

It is worth noting that Sierz frequently, approvingly quotes from Amelia Howe Kritzer's disastrous Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing 1995-2005, a book which is in every conceivable way far worse, more reactionary and backward-looking than Rewriting the Nation could ever be. Kritzer's thesis: “there is no question that postmodern theory and its theatrical offshoots have played a part in delegitimizing socially activist theatre and inhibiting recent development of issue based drama.”

But Sierz also provides plenty of his own conundrums: “Most playwrights wrote against traditional and stereotypical images of Englishness,” (p.227) he claims, shortly before suggesting: “If every decade throws up a new type of fictional hero... who would fit the bill in 2000s new writing? The most obvious is the underclass yob... this foul-mouthed lowlife, with or without the trademark hood, appeared in play after play.” (p. 231) What is “The Hoodie” if not perhaps *the* defining cultural stereotype of the decade (even if “subversively” framed as “hero” - a problematic enough concept in itself)? If writers were creating characters that could be pressed into service as members of such an easy exercise in stereotyping, how were they “writing against” stereotypes? Or, more pertinently I suspect, if they weren't, why then bunch their characters together as if they had been created as stereotypes?

On a different tack a few pages later, he complains: “Difficult foreign work was rare. Scared of the effect that new, or radically different, plays might have on audience attendance, most theatres played safe.” (p.237) Which might be fair enough, except a page later he goes on to say: “Cooke spent most of his first year reviving the Court's tradition of staging international work. Unintentionally, perhaps, this focus on foreign writers, followed by several American plays [an interesting distinction in itself], suggested that British playwrights had little to offer.” (p.238). One is tempted to add that while leading critics continue to choose the subject of their books as the narrowly figured State-of-the-Nation drama, theatres might continue to be persuaded that this is what critical opinion is clamouring for.

The style of binary oppositions ranged against one another in an unwinnable critical oppositions continues throughout, along with an enraging stylistic tic which sees Sierz start his mini-chapters with a (non-)statement of the bleedin' obvious and conclude them with a nugget of impenetrable gnomic wisdom.

For example:

“Other plays also used intriguing metaphors.” (p.174)
“But if couples-in-crisis plays suggest a nation in constant disagreement, they also picture the British as a passionate lot.” (p.176)

“The 2000s saw the rise of the teen angst play”(p.189)
“If Britain really was, according to New Labour, a young country, its young were almost a country unto themselves.”(p.192)

“Although the War on Terror dominated the way playwrights viewed the state of the world, there was plenty of room for other subjects.”(p. 94)
“Yet, if playwrights have had mixed success at representing the world's woes, how have they fared closer to home?”(p.99)

“The acutest crises were represented by the unsuitable couple play”(p.176)
“Here, as in so many other plays, breaking taboos seemed to be a national characteristic. And both the cause and result of unsuitable coupling was solitude, which evoked a sense of a nation of loners.”(p. 182)

I could go on.

Which is a shame. Because, for all the above, there's a lot to admire and like about the book. I do wonder if it's the book's own surprisingly hectoring, combative tone that causes one to react to it with initial hostility. It's not a gentle guide by any means, but when Sierz gets into something he's actually great. Insightful, provocative, throwing up unexpected comparisons between seemingly disparate plays. The point where he speculates about the reach and influence of David Greig's San Diego (p. 9) is just lovely – I won't quote, go into a bookshop and read it. If only there could have been more moments like this.

Similarly, when he gets to a playwright whose work he is actually, properly enthused by, the content just lights up. Rewriting the Nation has made me desperate to get my hands on the collected works of David Greig, to reassess my initial scepticism of debbie tucker green and – most remarkably – I'm even very keen to read David Edgar's Testing the Echo.

In part, this reminds me of the observation that the best work on stage can often bring the best writing out of critics. Which brings me, circularly back to the wish-list version of the book. In considering a form in isolation – replete with its triumphs and not-so-triumphs – it feels like Rewriting the Nation, ultimately reduces even the very form it sets out to chronicle. If there had been a consideration of the real raging plurality of British theatre (and “performance”, and “Live Art” - a distinction scarely even recognised on the mainland), not only might British theatre have looked a whole lot less stunted, insular and cramped, but New Writing itself might have seemed much more like the generous partner to revivals of classic texts, “alternative” work, musicals, international work, boulevard comedies, “proper” versions of Shakespeare and post-modernist stagings of Greek tragedies that it really is.

The tragedy of Rewriting the Nation is that by so limiting the scope of its inquiry it becomes unable to celebrate the future it hopes for which might very well have already begun to arrive.

*Let me say a few things before getting started. First off, I like Aleks Sierz. I like the idea of Aleks Sierz too. I like his energy. In starting and running TheatreVoice along with Dominic Cavendish, he's probably done as much for the cause of theatre online (and not just “British Theatre”) as anyone in the past decade. His book In-Yer-Face Theatre had an unarguable effect on the way that period is remembered. And he followed it up, lest we forget, with the first (very accessible, totally readable) study of the plays of Martin Crimp – one of my favourite living playwrigthts. I also quite admire his punky spirit. I don't think I'm misrepresenting him too much if I paraphrase a thing he once said to me (perhaps not entirely seriously, but meaning-it) that one “shouldn't worry too much about the actual writing, its the getting it out there that matters.” And there's his willingness to have a bit of a fight. “I do 'ave a go, missus,” we might imagine him saying. None of which, nor the "thank you" in the acknowledgements, however, mitigate my opinion of Rewriting the Nation, which, I regret to say, is mixed to say the least...

** alternative opening: As Jeremy Paxman suggests in his introduction to his book The English: “Být Angličanem bývalo kdysi jednoduché. Stačilo mluvit anglicky jako Angličan, chovat se jako Angličan a pít vědra čaje - jako Angličan.” (sorry, only have the Czech version to hand)

Souvereines, Chuck Morris - Sophiensæle

2011-03-21T23:11:00.003+01:00

[written for Freischwimmer Blog Fight!]

Having written a piece yesterday for the Guardian about deutsches freies Theater [this gives you some idea when I started these damn reviews], it seemed only right and proper that I should go and see some. Emblematic of the difficulties with such labels, the first group I saw as part of last night's Freischwimmer programme were the Swiss-Danish performance duo Chuck Morris.

Roughly speaking, Souvereines is a performance suggested by the idea of “queens” (entirely in the heterosexual, regal sense – neither the unreconstructed, nor reclaimed connotations of the Queer version of the word appear to figure in the translated version – which, we should note is “Souvereines” and not “Königinnen” anyway). It begins with the audience being asked to observe certain protocols before stepping into the auditorium, briefly suggesting a degree of interactivity, which turns out not to materialise. Instead, we're presented with a meticulously timed (the duration of each routine is set out precisely in the accompanying programme), highly stylised performance.

Opening with the two performers (no credit except “Chuck Morris”) sitting bound, back to back, Gemini-style on a kind of mobile sideboard – clad in white body-stockings, with identical blonde hair piled on their heads. It takes a little while to put the words “student drama” (along with all their most unfair connotations) from your mind.

The substance of the piece alternates between spoken text and movement. The text is a list of things “the queen” is. Various contradictory adjectives pile on top of one another. Conflicting accounts? Different queens? One is strongly reminded of the attempts to pin down Martin Crimp's Annie, with shades into Viola's “two lips, indifferent red”. I am also strongly reminded of not doing too badly in a vocab. test far more than of watching a play. No matter. These former elements, mixed in with a quiet vein of gentle ironic humour.

The same can be said of the piece's initial movement sequences, in which descriptions of queens' portraits are posed with faux high-seriousness and courtly, or not-so-courtly (“New York, 1970s”), dance-steps are named and executed.

One (this one, me) is variously reminded of bits from Angela Carter – the pre-occupation with conjoined twins and arcana – in other instances of Alice in Wonderland and at other points, all those student devised pieces about Victorian feminism (whatever happened to those?). Sitting out here in Germany, though, I'm mildly mystified as to why anyone has thought to make a show about queens at all. It feels very remote from one's British associations with the wonderful job our Helen Mirren does (although the Danes still have a Royal Family, yes? Yes). But, perhaps it's a condition of fairy tales, Disney and iconography, though, that the idea of “a queen”is no longer – perhaps has never been – dependent on any sort of a reality. And perhaps that's a lot of the point being made here.

With hindsight, all this felt a bit like pre-amble, and so it turns out to be. The main event turns up in the form of a big dress. Chuck Morris stand back to back, and don the various layers of a regal 18th century dress (think Marie Antoinette). However, both performers are encompassed within the same pannier so that the subsequent petticoats, and silk Robe à la Française have the effect of binding them together one more. There then follows an extended sequence of movement to the already persistent music which recalls both Michael Nyman and Wendy Carlos's previous takes on Purcell, culminating in a gorgeous, perplexing tableaux of one performer, skirted legs aloft, balanced on the back of the other, who is bent double beneath her.

The piece is concluded by something of a postmodern/meta-theatrical step-outside-the-performance in which Chuck Morris talk about the company Chuck Morris.

If I were in the business of trying to draw conclusions, I'd say that there were some fine visual moments on show here, as well as enough charm and ideas for the rest to pass the time. The production values are high, but not faultless (and apparently this premier was plagued by technical hitches). The piece doesn't do a lot of work for you – despite clearly having a subject, bringing a lot to the table, and having a take on it. But apart from the blossoming of music and image, I'm not sure what it really achieves. But I'm equally prepared to believe that's my fault for not working at it hard enough, or coming from the right direction. Who wants star-ratings anyway?

For an interesting second look at the piece through another pair of British eyes – albeit ones which did better in the vocab. test – here's the view of from the seat next to me.

There are also the other Freischwimmer blogs here, here, here, here and here if you can read German or bear what Google translate does to them.

Romantic afternoon, Billinger & Schulz – Sophiensæle

2011-03-21T22:49:00.002+01:00

[written for Freischwimmer Blog Fight!]

If I found Billinger & Schulz's Romantic Afternoon fascinating, it was primarily for the contribution it made to my thoughts on the recent English-language or at least British/Anglophone debate across several blogs and Facebook walls on the subject of “narrative” or “story” (this article links to the key recent texts on the subject).

The starting points of several contributors' positions can be seen in the following comment under the above-linked blog:

“Plays are linear. We can't get away from that given our current relationship to the laws of physics: plays consist of moments, of events, as we move in one direction in time whilst perceiving them. Narrative is not just a natural but, I'd argue, an inescapable response to that arrangement in anyone with any significant memory or attention span... But that's what we do with data that we receive in succession.”

Yes, this does stipulate “plays” rather than “theatre” or “a performance”, but given the way in which the properties of experience of linear time are figured, the distinction doesn't seem especially exclusive or important.

Why is this relevant? Well, because that argument was stuck in my head at the time. And because Romantic Afternoon struck me as being one of the most defiantly non-narrative pieces of “theatre” / “performance” / whatevs. I've ever seen (defiant is the wrong word in these context, since no one here seems to be having that argument, but..).

To describe: The stage action of the piece consists entirely of the six performers on stage – three men, three women – kissing one another. For 45 minutes.

Ok, that glosses over a certain amount of moving around, time spent standing apart, the bits where they swap partners, and the leanings toward certain moments of disinterested choreography. But that's the main event. Bodies on stage with their mouths variously pressed against those of another. But what was fascinating was the extent to which the piece seemed to be actively seeking to exclude the possibility of “a story” happening.

Yes, the piece was – as per the laws of physics – theoretically experienced (at least by me) with my body and “mind” moving forward in time with the performance taking place in front of me, with all the performers also moving forward in time – and ageing – at precisely the same speed. Although, I imagine that Einstein might have amusedly noted that the time was passing significantly more quickly for the six performers on the stage than for anyone watching them.

Back to “story”, though. The way in which the action on stage took place was able to suggest that the performers were not necessarily “playing” the same person from one exchange of saliva to the next. At the same time, there was never any suggestion that they were anything other than themselves. But not an actual “themself” - so to speak. At no point was there ever any sense of who these people were in what might, in another context, be called “the world of the play”. There was no sense that these kisses had “back-story”. More importantly even than this, was the sense that none of the actions had consequences. Or at least hardly ever. This was an ongoing performance of some kisses with scarcely a backward glance.

There was also barely ever any performance of anything attempting to pretend actual desire. Equally, though, it wasn't implied that these kisses being performed represented some sort of absence of desire in a postmodern world, either.

Indeed, some of the rolling around kissing, and some of the first, tender tentative steps toward the kisses, did seem to open to the possibility of readings of tenderness. But it felt that that would be largely a process of some very heavy freighting from outside. Very much the projection of the viewer's desire to see that story/feeling manifested much more than something the company had intentionally presented.

Instead, we (the audience) were presented with roughly 42 minutes of six performers not all of whom, if any, had any attraction toward one another, demonstrating kissing of all sorts. Occasionally, in the show's more choreographic moments, they'd even be making out on their own – hands stroking the back of nothing, open-mouthed, tongues wangling away in a void (or, rather, not “in a void”, but the empty space* in front of them on the stage of a performance space).

I say 42 minutes of a 45 minute piece, because at the end, for no discernable reason whatsoever (which isn't to disregard it one iota, nor to refuse an attempt at discerning, not that there need either be reason or that the reason be discernable), the company danced a charming Gap-advert's worth of bouncy dance to the equally inexplicable German children's hit Fred vom Jupiter (see bottom of review). Which I did wonder about in the context of whatever had gone before.

Still, the success of the refusal of narrative was fascinating. What I mean is, even going forward through time with the performers just didn't help. The fact that there were six of them, constantly swapping partners (yes: woman-woman, woman-man, man-man, man-woman, WWM, MMW, WMW, MWM, MWW, WMM etc.), at a rapid enough rate, and far enough apart on the stage, that it was impossible really to keep an eye on all of them at once, and so even if there had been an intended “narrative” or “story” - and I'm not even sure I'd swear that the order of what happened on the night I saw Romantic Afternoon would be what was repeated the next time, or whether that would alter or not the substance of the idea of the piece having a “story” or “narrative” - like some kind of six-way Closer. On acid!* one wouldn't have been able to keep up with it. But I'm pretty sure this wasn't even remotely the case. This was as close to a series of islated moments as its possible to have when the moments occur sequentially in an enclosed space.

What I mean is – the moments – even while being so “of a piece” were so isoloated in meaning from one another, and lacking in that sort of content, that it would have felt utterly pointless to even want to bother placing the context of a story on them. I'm not sure I can put it any more bluntly or clearly than that.

Which feels briefly like it leaves a bit of an England-shaped question-marky hole about what one is meant to do with this piece.

Actually, it doesn't. If there was a “problem” here – or if I brought one with me, or made one up while watching – I'd argue that “problem” was nothing to do with the lack of “story” or “narrative” (see Tremor for a reverse case - I absolutely promise I didn't experience even a tiny bit of story in that either) as the lack of excellence – or perhaps more accurately: focus – on the part of the performers. Two were noticeably just much more alert, and perhaps more energised, trained, or whatever, than the others. And it really made them a great deal more watchable.

It was, however, definitely a mistake to use the same piece by Purcell as Pina Bausch did in Café Müller.

Themes? Themes! Understanding of what the piece might have been driving at – if intentions of driving anywhere were even a remote consideration of the piece – then indications of where or what come more helpfully from the fact of the Freischwimmer Festival's overall theme - “[the private in the public]?”. One could certainly read the piece easily in the light of this, but oddly, despite being such a determinedly illegible piece – and one either whose form or execution made it a pretty hard watch – this possibility of a single strand of explantion feels somehow disappointingly narrow. Perhaps this was also what the piece is about, perhaps it wasn't.

But it ended with this!

Fred vom Jupiter.

* thanks to Chris Goode for identifying and locating where that piece about X+Y on Z comes from – although take a moment to tick off Stewart Lee for his youthful use of the term "prostitute" using his older self (5.30 onward)

CMMN SNS PRJCT, Kalauz/Schick - Sophiensæle

2011-03-21T22:41:00.005+01:00

[written for Freischwimmer Blog Fight!]

If Romantic Afternoon seemed to touch on questions I'd already been asking myself about “non-narrative” performance, CMMN SNS PRJCT (henceforth CSP) seems to exist far more happily within my comfort zone. And it was performed in English, God bless their Argentian/Swiss hearts.

In British terms, this was exactly the sort of show one could confidently expect to see at Forest Fringe (indeed, I have no hesitation in recommending Andy and Debo to invite Kalauz/Schick to this year's). In short it was confident, charming, demonstrably “Live”, interactive, fun, funny, smart and generous.

If you wanted a strap-line, I'd suggest billing it as a Marxist performance raffle. The thing starts with Laura Kalauz and Martin Schick standing on stage in their pants (and socks. Aw) as the audience enter. There's a table with a bunch of household possessions on it. These they give away. They then try to buy or hire clothes from the audience.

After this there's an uncomfortable moment when they return fully clothed and seem to be doing some very heavy handed alluding to Waiting for Godot. But that turns out just to be an un-introduced party game of guess-the-play. Which turns out to be terrific fun. There's all the usual playing with being a performer and what it means to be on stage and who one is, and who one's character is. This is later demonstrated again with one of the performers apparently doing/saying something heartfelt and the other than asking for the bit of paper that bit is written on and then doing it again. You know the kind of thing. This is one of them and a rather nice one of them it is too.

And all the while they're doing it in your clothes! This isn't even what they'd be wearing if we, the audience, had given them something else to wear (unless they had a hell of a lot of plants in the audience – which I doubt. Actually, I would have been fascinated to have seen the show on another night to check out how much of the liveness really is live. Pretty much all of the crowd-based stuff, I'd have guessed, and if not, it's some of the best pretending of “live” I've ever seen). You can't even judge them by their clothes! Let alone by what they're saying, when another of them says the same thing a minute later...

These meta-theatrical heads-ups are fun enough, and their more-or-less non-stop bantering with the audience is so perfectly judged – perhaps given a helping hand by the fact both performers are both attractive and charming – that when we get to a moment where Laura starts reading out a speech about how great it is that we're all together in the same room and how it's great that we all like and respect one another, it isn't until she gets to the bit about “purity of the blood” that we realise where that particular text has come from (I might be wrong about that, but there were certainly echoes and moreover there was a sudden chill in the room – discomfort and tangible hatred of the sentiments). Most chilling was how warm and fuzzy the first bit was, though.

Beyond this there's more business with guess-the-play and then even an auction of performing rights of the play – in this particular performance this struck me as being very funny. There aere also all sorts of echoes – tiny little reverberations – of the financial crisis, a mounting problem with credit and debit. It's so light that you'd think it could be missed, but at the same time somehow incredibly obvious, but charmingly so. Thinking about it, Kalauz/Schick actually have got a pretty good line in resonance going on...

They then build a big wall, briefly play with the audience's notional willingness to intervene in an act of Abramovic-style self-harm, offer a quick, neat demonstration of Marx's Kapital and Proudhon's maxim “property is theft”, give away the cash profits of the show and then, Fin! Fun!

Bis dass der Tod uns Scheidet – mariamagdalena & Gäste, Sophiensæle

2011-03-21T22:36:00.003+01:00

[written for Freischwimmer Blog Fight!]

This is probably not finished yet

Where CMMN SNS PRJCT felt like familiar theatrical territory, mariamagdalena's Bis dass der Tod uns Scheidet (Until Death do us Part) is remarkable for being both the most familiar thing imaginable, and a likely contender for the title of “thing least like a piece of theatre I've ever sat in”.

Because what Bis dass der Tod uns Scheidet is, is a wedding reception. And that, ladies and gentlemen, might be just about all it is. When I think about it, I'm surprised I've never seen anything like it in a theatre/performance space before. Actually, I almost have – the Uninvited Guest's Love Letters Straight From Your Heart has the same U-shaped table configuration and again places its audience at its centre – but still, much more different than similar.

But, I've been at wedding receptions before. And this is one. Albeit, one for someone we've never met (Polish-born, Austrian-domiciled performance artist mariamagdalena herself and a bloke playing her new husband), and it's not people who have *really* just married (they might be married for all I know, but certainly not just enough to warrant a reception).

Which is all very interesting. After all, one spends a pleasant evening at a wedding reception. And this one is no different. Drinks are brought round – the theme here is unmistakably Polish, albeit largely conducted in German – so the drink is vodka (no, I don't, fear not), the wedding band plays, and there are party games. Many party games (again, I don't). And dancing. Much dancing (Nope, don't do that either). And more drinks. And so on. So, yes, I'm having all the fun a teetotal wallflower usually does as a boozy, dance-y wedding reception. Which is more than you'd think, actually.

There are perhaps three or five moments of what might be identified as the usual sort of “performance” one “sees” in a “theatre” – there are the speeches by the bride, groom and father-of-the bride; there's a strange interpretative dance interlude in which the burly band-leader and the bride's-best-friend quick-change into preposterous leotards and prance a mock-ballet, before disappearing off to change back again. And then toward the close, there is a “first dance” in which the bride and her best friend seem to be danced ragged and drunk by the band-leader and groom.

In my enthusiasm for “stories” (I am still English, it doesn't just go away overnight the day after you read Post-traumatic Theatre, you know) I wonder if there's meant to be one about the bride being more in love with the band-leader than her somewhat insipid husband. But it seems unlikely. In short, there's no more story or organising principle here than if we really were at a wedding reception. Where, of course, there is a “story”, but it's one which has already happened, and we're sat in the beginning of “happily ever after”. Or, conversely, there are a hundred (or more) people in a room, all with their hundreds of stories. But since they are mostly strangers, you never get to hear them. You just acknowledge that they're probably there, and reconcile the narrative strategies of the strangers with your own take on the political nature of story-telling.

What Bis dass der Tod... might be doing is playing games around the idea of eastern Europe, kitsch, clichés about the Polish life as perceived from the West and about the enjoyability or otherwise of 80er/90er Europop (is that what it's called here? Probably not, on reflection).

Again, because this isn't at the heavy atmosphere end of things where one sits in one's seat in the dark auditorium and gets to contemplate the multiplicities of meaning in what one's seeing – quite the reverse: one sits in a wedding reception watching fellow gästen playing disco-musical chairs and burst-the-ballon-by-leaping-on-someone's-lap-with-it – this is *so* experienctial that one struggles to reflect much at all.

Actually, is that true? I think, actually, I reflected quite a lot. But not necessarily on the piece itself, so much as *in* the piece. Which is an interesting variation on the usual way in which “immersive theatre” appears to expect to work usually. Instead of being any pressure to “join in”, per se, instead you're joined in by virtue of being there. And just watching is taking part. You don't even need to properly configure the “wedding reception” with “willing suspension of disbelief” for it to work as a “wedding reception”. Does that make any sense at all? What I mean is, you're already there in a hall with one's own (real) boundaries about how much you ever join in with dancing, silly games, etc. and it's no different to how you'd be if the wedding reception were a real one. And, frankly, it matters not a jot, once the motions are being gone through, whether it is the real wedding of people you don't know, or an entirely pretend one.

I'm not fully sure to what end mariamagdalena made this piece – repairing to the “staging the private in public” motto again might cast some light – but, yes, interesting. If I liked wedding receptions more then I might have found my new favourite form of theatre. As it is, I imagine this might be similar to all those Duckie events at the Barbican – except without anyone taking their clothes off or bringing class into everything.

[TBC...]

What is theatre criticism for?

2011-03-11T18:41:00.003+01:00

[Given as a contribution to the University of Kent's panel event What is theatre criticism for?*]

Hello, I'm Andrew Haydon.

I'd like to start by saying how flattered I am to be invited to join such a distinguished panel. Irving Wardle's book, Theatre Criticism, served as my bible for many, many years, while Lyn Gardner has been a tremendous support and, perhaps inadvertently, one of the most formative influences on my career so far by first suggesting I go visit a German theatre festival.

On the face of it, the question “What is Theatre Criticism For?” is one which can be answered relatively simply.

What theatre criticism is *for* is, as its name suggests, for critiquing theatre. Not criticising it, critiquing it.

However, in modern Britain, where the vast majority of “theatre criticism” is printed in our national newspapers, a better working definition might be: “theatre criticism is a journalistic report on what happened in a particular theatre last night”.

Which, I'd like to make clear, for the record, I don't believe to be a bad thing.

Per se.

That said, I'd like to quote you something from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, from his essay The Empty Wheelbarrow. He says:

“In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns”, things we don't know that we know ”

The Unknown Known is ideology: things that we know without even thinking about the fact that we know them. And it's the “unknown knowns” of British Theatre Criticism that I'd like to talk about briefly.

Consider the following opening to a review:

“Last night, the management of such-and-such a theatre handed out tickets – each worth one week's income support – to the theatre critics of every national newspaper in Britain and several eminent broadcasters. They gave away the rest of the seats in the house to minor celebrities and friends of the theatre and cast.

“The seating in the theatre was arranged so that those who had the most expensive tickets could sit nearest the stage and see the action best and those with the cheapest tickets were sat at the very back of the theatre or behind inconveniently placed pillars. The play was an argument in favour of socialist principles.”

I'd argue that is a more neutral set of observations than those which usually open any given review. And it strictly adheres to the model of British Theatre Criticism as reporting upon the event.

The problem is that while those details are neither untrue nor superfluous, they go without saying. Not least because the same will be true for many critics on at least four nights out of five. Week in, week out.

After noticing this, one then notices how much else theatre criticism leaves uninterrogated.

There's a rather nice unwritten rule in British Theatre Criticism which holds that critics should try to review a play on its own terms. That is to say, it's generally considered “a bit off” to condemn a frothy, escapist musical for failing to deliver a penetrating State of the Nation analysis of the economic collapse.

But there's another dimension to this.

Because most British Theatre Criticism is published in newspapers, the form itself exists at the whim of newspaper proprietors. The vast majority of British newspaper proprietors are right-wing multi-millionaires. As such, it is a miracle that theatre criticism even continues to exist at all.

It is not a surprise, though, that the last couple of decades have seen the reduction of word-counts, the introduction of star-ratings, and the sacking of more than one critic for not toeing the editorial line.

In such a situation, Theatre and Critic suddenly find themselves on the same side of the barricade.

It is in the Critic's interests to promote theatre: to talk up its importance and emphasise its successes lest, by damning its failures too often, it be yet further sidelined and their job further marginalised.

By a similar token, I would suggest that – aside from the occasional “bitchy savaging” - newspapers prefer their “entertainment coverage” to be triumphal. They love pushing a “First Night Review” of a massive musical to the front of the paper, accompanied by massive photo of a reality talent show winner's night of glory, complete with the authoritative endorsement of the man who also writes the paper's parliamentary sketches or the definitive critical study of Harold Pinter.

“Artistic Excellence” on the other hand, seldom gets a review shunted forward, any more than fine writing or brilliance of perception do. So, one thing theatre criticism is now primarily for, is its own preservation at almost any cost.

None of this is to disparage the critics themselves. In many ways, I admire the majority greatly. These are people who, in an almost impossible intellectual, political and artistic climate, continue to fight their corner as hard as it can be fought.

Therefore, I would argue the the real issue facing criticism isn't: “What is it for?” but rather: “For how much longer will it be able to perform its function?”

“Political”

2011-03-09T23:49:00.007+01:00

Three years ago, a fellow critic and I were discussing Michael Billington. As one does. My fellow critic made the following assertion:

“The problem with Michael is that he isn't so much a critic as a Soviet-era censor: he marks plays on their politics.”

At the time (late Feb 2008), I thought this was a spot-on bit of analysis. But it's a remark that has haunted me ever since.

Why? Well, one of the basic tenets in the unwritten laws of British Theatre Criticism (also here) – at least as I've always understood it – is: “Judge work on its own terms”. Or, to put it more caustically as “Fred2006” does under Michael's review of Tiger Country: “I wonder what you think the reviewer's job is here.... Is it to lament the fact that she hasn't written the play you think she ought to have written?”

Of course, Michael is perfectly open and candid about his tastes (I wish I could now find the blog I read yesterday where he actually spells it out word by word, something like: “I favour plays that foreground the personal and the political”). Indeed, I'm tempted to suggest that it's precisely this candour that sees him being pilloried so often. Or rather, its the combination of candour and the star-rating system. Because, once his remarks have to be translated into a kind of score, one gets much more of a sense that he's docked a point from a playwright for leaving “no room to ask the really big questions. Who, one would like to know, is responsible for creating the kind of selfish society we now inhabit?” For example. As an observation in a piece of writing, one might let it pass as a foible far more easily if it wasn't seen as the justification for a lower score than might otherwise have reasonably been expected.

I say “might” advisedly. One could get the feeling these days reading Michael's reviews and some of the comments under them that his "foible" might have become a bit of a one-note rut; his position becoming a parody of itself. Praising shows which conform precisely to his prescriptive requirements, and ticking off those with whose argument he takes issue or which just don't do “about” “properly”.

The most interesting example being perhaps the contrasting reviews given to Seven Jewish Children and England People Very Nice within a fortnight.

“[England People Very Nice]'s prime flaw is that it substitutes generalised caricatures for detailed investigation of particular ethnic groups. ...while the gags come thick and fast, and the play theoretically pays tribute to Defoe's idea of “that heterogeneous thing, an Englishman”, the abiding impression is that Bean doesn't think much of our modern multiculturalism.” Two Stars.

Whereas:

“[Seven Jewish Children] confirms theatre's ability to react more rapidly than any other art form to global politics... Churchill, I'm sure, would not deny the existence of fierce external, and internal, Jewish opposition to the attack on Gaza. What she captures, in remarkably condensed poetic form, is the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter.” Four Stars.

It could be cynically implied that one man's “generalised caricatures” might be the same man's “remarkably condensed poetic form”, when they happen to agree with the politics.

But, of course, that's nowhere near the whole story. I said earlier, “it's precisely this candour that sees him being pilloried so often”. But it's not just that; the other reason that Billington gets the stick he does is, I would contend, because of the massive respect in which he is held, and the affection (yes, affection) which he also inspires. Much more even perhaps than out of frustration. I think I'm right in saying this year marks Michael's 40th at the Guardian. During that time, he has also published pretty much the definitive study of Harold Pinter, the best history and guide to the sort of plays he likes imaginable and a pretty neat collection of reviews from his first twenty years at the Guardian. Much more impressively, he's stuck to his guns. He has his beliefs and I think it would be well nigh impossible to even begin to argue that he's ever betrayed them.

Of course people argue with him. He's The critic whose mind people want to change. Perhaps that's partly down to the fact that he has such an identifiable, and thus challengeable, agenda. It's probably also a lot to do with the fact that he's the chief theatre critic of The Guardian. Which, let's be honest, is the paper that pretty much everyone working in the arts reads. As such, because of his curiously hierarchical system, it also means he winds up being the critic who covers nearly all the openings at the National Theatre, Royal Court, most of the RSC, and probably the majority of Donmar, Almeida, etc. etc. (although, part of me wonders how much of this is chicken, egg, and clever manoeuvring – i.e. by putting in enough time at the NT and West End, he is able to make his presence at The Cock or The Finborough seem like they've really arrived).

And then, beyond that, there are his politics themselves. As Chris Goode has previously suggested: “What's frustrating is that if Billington were to actually engage with the collaborative practice and collectivist principles that have inspired so many devisers, I think he might find them congenially compatible with his own politics, which are obviously amiably leftist and impatient with rigidity and deference.”

Exactly. Another part of the frustration is precisely because Billington isn't Quentin Letts or even Charles Spencer, harumphing at Martin Crimp or Katie Mitchell on the basis of their politics. He's harumphing because his politics, or more properly, a combination of his personal taste and his politics have suggested an entirely different set of solutions as to how theatre might work best.

And this is where this whole edifice I've been carefully building spins 180° on its axis...

This is why the accusation: “he isn't a critic, he's a Soviet-era censor: he marks plays on their politics” turned into the biggest question I've ever had about criticism, and about my place within it.

First, because on one level, I'm not at all sure I'm at all different.

Second, because of that assertion's close relationship to the mantra of “Judge a play on its own terms”.

This is probably the point toward which the last three pieces in this series (“About”, “Properly” and “Professional”) (or , perhaps, “thes Sieris”) have always been heading.

Oddly enough, the narrative, the story (Yes, in other news, there's a post forthcoming about “narrative” as soon as these are done), the back-story here picks up pretty much where yesterday's back-story left off. Yesterday it was late September 2007 and I was just about to have my first blog published by the Guardian.

Today's story starts two months later on in 2007 and I've just got back from Munich. The post begins:
“For the last five days I've been attending the SpielArt Festival in Munich under the auspices of the concurrent FIT Mobile Theatre and Communications Lab programme...” and goes on to detail the work I'd just seen. To cut a long post short, Munich had blown my tiny mnd.

Over the next year, thanks to the Festivals in Transition (FIT) MobileLab and also an International Association of Theatre Critics Young Critics event at the Neue Stücke aus Europa festival in Wiesbaden, I saw a lot of work from the rest of Europe.

After the last MobLab festival finished I wrote this post. It was only just over a year later. I am slightly staggered by how many of the embryonic forms of this series it contains. And how much it prefigures what I'm saying in this piece.

Lyn Gardner remarked a year after that post, “I do worry that our sending you to Europe utterly ruined you”. Ironically, I think it was outside the Barbican after The Roman Tragedies.

Which is where the Billington comparison comes in, I guess.

First of all, there's the question of “marking plays on their politics”. Initially, at least, this is largely unrelated to Europe. But, surely, don't all critics (that's professional, amateur, and very much academic) actually “mark plays on their politics”? Or rather, all other aspects of a production being equal, aren't critics *obviously* going to prefer a performance that appears to “say” something they find palatable?

This is a slightly difficult thing to describe, because I'd rather not just go straight back down the road to “About” or – Christ help us all – the “Where are all the Right Wing Plays”.

Possibly one of the most striking reviews of a play's “politics” is Lyn Gardner's one-star review of Romeo Castellucci's Purgatorio (go on, read it). I don't think I've ever disagreed more with a piece of analysis, and certainly never more with a star-rating – the piece was, even if absolutely nothing else, spectacularly well made. The production values alone should have set it apart from [anything else Lyn one-starred] (although, I suppose Lyn is one of the more regular contributors to the Zero Star Hall of Fame, so perhaps the single star was for those production values).

At the same time, who am I to argue. Lyn makes her case perfectly clearly. She saw something that she felt was utterly morally repellant, and said as much. What other mark should she have given it? And yet, isn't this precisely marking for “politics” (admittedly in the wider sense of the word)?

Quite apart from the fact that I'd argue that Purgatorio could just as easily (although I won't swear to anything – opaque doesn't begin to cover this work, and I'm not even going to try to claim I really understand Castellucci's work; although I certainly got a lot more out of it on a personal level) be trying to provoke that response, or suggest those thoughts, in order to question them. It briefly reminds me of the old NSDF catch-all term for what should be selected: “dramatic effectiveness” was the only criteria.

But can dramatic effectiveness ever be value free? (This is a whole blog all of its own, so forgive the brevity with which I'm about to skip through it now) I'd argue, almost certainly not.

What's interesting, though, is the extent to which it seems also to be controlled by context. For example, if the National Theatre were to announced tomorrow that in their next season they were going to stage Hanns Johst's Schlageter (it's the play, by Hitler's favourite playwright, from which the quote “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver” originally comes), would anyone seriously imagine Nicholas Hytner was putting it on to promote National Socialism? I imagine instead it would be received very seriously as a way of looking at a horrifying document from the past which might shed light on Britain's own current atmosphere of febrile racism.

But, extreme examples aside, don't critics review morally? Ethically as well as aesthetically? If a play was basically really good, and really well acted, apart from the homophobia, or the racism, would it get past the critic? Equally, does anything which advocates to much the reverse ever get past Quentin Letts or Tim Walker without getting a long telling-off? Did Christopher Hart not use his review of a play about homophobia in the 1950s to explain to his readers that he could not look at two men kissing in 2010?

I've always tried to resist the idea that particular dramatic forms are inherently political in a particular direction. Although, I'm not sure I succeeded. Is The Musical the “ultimate authoritarian artform” as Howard Barker once claimed? Is the problem play irredeemable after Johst's Schlageter as many Germans now argue? Is so much of theatre made within and utilising right-wing structures that its nominally left-wing message can't possibly hope to succeed? Or, conversely, is the view of theatre as irretrievably leftie such that even when we're shown the most right-wing play imaginable, we muse over it as a fascinating provocation, while the right grumble about how they're always the targets and never the snipers?

I have absolutely no idea, despite having read some convincing arguments for and against in my time.

Ultimately, my problem boiled down to the simple one of taste. Where for Billington, the taste question often seems to be one of content and authorship (fair enough, if intensely annoying for a lot of those not doing that – although there is other stuff he likes. Like "smut", surprisingly); for me it was (no surprises here) staging.

I'd always tried to like alternative theatre as well (as opposed to "instead of"). And the change in my tastes was a gradual thing. Have a look at my hilariously bemused review of Thomas Ostermeier's Zerbombt (Kane's Blasted) from 2006 (an irony being, now that I live in Berlin, the Schaubühne strikes me as the most English theatre in town. At the time, I remember thinking Zerbombt was the most German thing imaginable). But, gradually, I knew that in my reviews there was increasingly an element of either thinking-it-but-not-saying-it, or was just coming right out with it.

While Billington would frequently be: “longing for some acknowledgement of the way the NHS is ultimately the beneficiary or the victim of conflicting political ideologies.” (Tiger Country), I'd be “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. ” (Punk Rock) ; or arguing “The problem is that directors in Britain still seem largely reluctant to stick their necks too far out in terms of staging. I can't imagine any British premiere of a new play by one of our leading playwrights being given such non-literal treatment as the world premiere of Stephens's Pornography was in Germany.” (When it comes to staging, we play it way too safe); or even “The new 'modern adaptation' of the Ibsen, written by Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Gate co-artistic director Carrie Cracknell, was always going to suffer from comparison with Thomas Ostermeier's recent astonishing modern dress production from the Berlin Schaubühne” (Hedda at the Gate). And we all know there was so much more.

Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't a teary confessional. I'm not even sure it's a mea culpa, per se. I'm certainly not saying I was wrong to like all that German staging (I wasn't. It's ace). And, if criticism is about writing one's most honest response, then I can't apologise for the reviews either. And realising as much reconciles me to Michael's expression of his incompatible-with-mine taste more than any other thought experiment I've ever tried.

Of course, it's both easier and more difficult for me than it is for Michael. He has his position, which I imagine is pretty secure, from which he can ask for what he wants. But then, what I wanted had a whole country (continent, possibly) where I could just go to get it. And I now live there.

Because my position, certainly when at bottom of the food chain at Time Out, was pretty much untenable. I'd argue it would have been untenable, or at least unfair, in any position, though.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not that I had totally fallen out of sympathy with All British Theatre. Ironically, I think the best thing I saw in Britain last year was Thea Sharrock's incredible production of Rattigan's After The Dance. But then, that worried me too. Perhaps the was the moment when another penny dropped – that if I was actively disappointed by myself for liking something on the grounds that it was deeply old-fashioned, albeit perfectly executed – then I was really in trouble. That I was definitely not playing the critical game “properly”.

I do wonder about this. After all, Tynan didn't make his name by signing up for the status quo. On the other hand, the much-heralded championing of Look Back in Anger also clearly adored the way that Shakespeare was staged in Britain. Then again, he also travelled abroad, and was also able to report from Paris, Berlin and Moscow. And, when literary manager of Olivier's National Theatre drew up a massive list of world theatre classics (downloadable list at bottom of page) only a fraction of which have yet been staged.

I suppose my conclusion – AT LAST – is that I think I'm doing the right thing. I'm enjoying being back in rotation for the Guardian blog, and more than that, I'm enjoying writing here on Postcards... again. It's a slightly odd feeling admitting that I'm sort of stepping out of being a “professional” critic back into doing it online just because I think it's something worth doing. Of course, if anyone wanted to pay me for review of stuff out here, I'd be very pleased, but I think that might have more to do with just feeling a bit more chilled out generally.

Anyway, sorry, this all seems to have gotten rather personal, but I kind of felt it wanted saying. Perhaps it didn't and in a couple of months I'll take it down. But anyway, here's hoping this new rate of productivity holds up (maybe not quite this rate) and that you find it interesting, worth reading, worth recommending and, more than anything else, helpful and inspiring.

[Top picture, a Picassa treated version of a picture from here, bottom picture, author's own]

[Edit: or, to put it another way... ]

“Professional”

2011-03-08T21:43:00.005+01:00

Possibly the least helpful thing about the reams of comment in reaction to Matt Trueman's recent piece asking whether bloggers should write-up previews was the entirely specious resurrection of the “Critics vs Bloggers” trope. Specious in this particular instance because Trueman has one foot very firmly in each camp.

What I found fascinating, though, watching the comments unfold, was the extent to which the terrain of the debate had shifted in the three and a half short years since it first went massive in relation to theatre.

It was 17th September 2007 when Michael Billington posted Who needs reviews? on the Guardian Theatre Blog, in which he posited a series of provocative if largely misinformed binary oppositions between the printed review and the “blog”. The next day, St. Lyn of the Bloggers (as she then was) wrote the inspiring counter-argument Blogging saved critics from extinction. A few days later, Natasha Tripney rounded the whole dialectical farrago off with the synthesis Blogs and reviews should be best friends – a much better piece than the title suggests, although I'm biased as it contains one of the earliest and most glowing mentions of the then three-month-old Postcards from the Gods, eight days ahead of my own debut piece for the Guardian Theatre Blog.

That said, while re-reading the articles from that period for this piece, I rediscovered the brilliantly provocative, bracingly angry and sadly now defunct Encore Theatre Magazine. As early as November 2006 it was drawing up (far more meaningful) battle lines against the print-based critics, before exploding against them in the wake of their reviews of the Crimp/Mitchell Attempts on Her Life (another declaration of interest – it was in the comments under that Encore piece that I found the first piece real of praise for anything I'd written, posted by someone I didn't know: “Have a look at Andrew Haydon’s review on Culture Wars. The backlash against ‘amateur’ bloggers and reviewers by the broadsheet critics made me laugh. As if you’d ever get anything this articulate and intellectually rigorous in a newspaper...” - which suggests that the critics vs bloggers thing had kicked off earlier than I remember).

Also prior to Blog September, there was also May 2007's Dead White Males saga (as summarised there by the West End Whingers). So, the background to Billington's defence of the print critic against the “blogger” was counter-action against a genuine sense of revolution (at least in terms of the tiny world of writing about what one thinks about some performances).

Given that I started Postcards... in July 2007, at the point when the DWM debate blew up I was neither “professional” critic nor “blogger”. I was the theatre editor for the online magazine CultureWars.org, for which I'd been reviewing since it started in Edinburgh 2000. As such, at the time, I pretty much subscribed to the doing-it-“properly” model of theatre criticism, albeit one with slightly more flexible wordcounts.

Blogging, I thought, was an entirely different activity to criticism or, more prosaically, “writing reviews”. After all, I was the theatre editor of an online reviews site – an entity which seemed to be entirely absent from the discussion about “bloggers vs critics”. Granted there were “blogs” which were mostly reviews, the West End Whingers being the most celebrated example. But back then, as I wrote in my first ever post here “The purpose of this blog is to provide a space for “unofficial” comment and reviews which don’t quite come within the remit of, well, any of the other places for whom I write stuff.”

So there we were in 2007/8. If you want to have a look at what the “blogosphere” (I really do hate that word – does anyone know a better one?) looked like then, take a look at Chris Wilkinson's first post when he took over the Guardian Theatre Blog's Noises Off column from Kelly Nestruck. An instructive comparison is to then look at most of the Noises Off blogs from mid-09 onwards, where, apart from the flagging up of the odd post from Chris Goode, almost all the action reported seems to be in America. Since Noises Off's function has never been to round up the reviews blogs, but to offer a digest of the “think-piece blogs”, it's fair to say that it seemed for a very long time like blogging had pretty much gone extinct in the UK outside the Guardian's own theatre blog.

About a year later Lyn Gardner expressed her concern that the Guardian, by picking up pretty much everyone with a non-review-based theatre blog who could write, and giving them occasional work as *Guardian* bloggers, had accidentally broken the ecology of Britain's theatrical blogosphere. I certainly know what she meant. I know that I was certainly guilty at many points of – if I had an idea for a blog piece – always pitching it to the Guardian first, and would rarely write things here instead. After all, if you can write something for money in 500 words, why on earth would you write it for free across 2,000+ words?

At the same time, however, there were other reasons for the death of what we might call the original theatre blog scene. Not least among them is the word “professional” again. The most notable early casualty was David Eldridge's (still greatly missed) blog One Writer and his Dog, which Eldridge closed essentially after a Guardian Noises Off column which he felt damagingly re-contextualised some quotes from his blog – I think about audiences at the National Theatre. Of course, Eldridge was always going to be a playwright with a career to consider first and a blogger second.

It's pure speculation, but wonder if it was the same sort of consideration that also played a part in the gradual quietening of other blogs. Certainly when I started, I didn't know anyone at the Guardian, didn't know any of their bloggers, and think I'm right in saying that (although I could be misremembering the chronology) I barely knew any other critics except Ian Shuttleworth and Robert Hewison (from NSDF). Within six months of starting Postcards... I was reviewing weekly for Time Out, occasionally for the FT, blogging on a nigh-on weekly basis for the Guardian and doing round-table discussions with critics like Mark Shenton and Matt Wolf on TheatreVoice.

As such, I was significantly more busy, thus long musing blogs (such as this one) tended to get sidelined with reviews to write, The Game to stay on top of and Guardian blogs to write (for money!). Much more than this, though, turning “professional” definitely had an effect on what I felt able to say. I remember reading back over some of my earliest Postcards... pieces about a year or so on, and being staggered by what I'd felt able to say about people who were now my colleagues, or in some cases, my boss. So, again “professional”ism even at this low level already had its drawbacks.

Anyway, that's my version of the back-story. In short: in 2007, theatre blogs were relatively new. And, in the main, they had a very different slant on theatre to the majority of reviews published in the press.

Fast forward to 2011 and the kerfuffle over Trueman's piece, which brought to my attention a bunch of new theatre blogs. Which, if I wasn't looking too carefully, I'd say largely reproduced the exact same reviewing agenda as the mainstream media.

It's worth noting at this point, however, that the seemingly unchangable monolith of “Dead White Males” had also altered. From Billington, de Jongh, Nightingale and Spencer, we had shifted to Billington, Hitchings, Purves and Spencer. A quarter less male, and markedly less “dead” - if still both privately educated, and both Oxford graduates (making the first string critics of every London daily bloody Oxonians, FFS).

More interestingly for this discussion, and more depressingly for anyone who had been a theatre critic before their appointments, neither came from a background of theatre criticism. Hitchings – who, in the interests of transparency, I should say I hung out with a fair amount while still in London and who like a great deal – came to the Standard off the back of eminently readable books on Samuel Johnson, new words and, er, bluffing your way through something you know nothing about. :-)

Similarly, Libby Purves came to the Times from, er, her columns in the Times, her weekly Wednesday R4 show, Mittwoch, on which she'd regularly interview actors and directors, and off the back of an apparently prodigious theatre-going habit and friendship with Christopher Green of Duckie, which at least made her look a bit cool.

Whilst (although I'll confess now the same elephant in the room feeling as everyone else about the number of stars Purves hands out) I think both appointments have probably had a positive effect on the general perception of the mainstream critical landscape (in short, Purves isn't old or male and Hitchings isn't a tosser), they do also mark the largest step yet into the phenomenon of getting name writers rather than people who had already done a bit of time as a theatre critic.

Last time this conversation came up, Susannah Clapp said she remembered getting the same sort of comment when she started at the Observer's theatre critic ten years ago, remarking, “No one's born a theatre critic, are they?” Which struck me at the time as a fair enough comment. It now occurs to me that people can have smaller versions of the same job first, though. No; one might not be born a “theatre critic”, but having First String thrust upon one isn't the only other option.

And this is where the debate about what constitutes a “professional” critic really gets interesting.

We all know what people mean when they say a “professional” critic. It's someone who gets paid for being a critic, right? This is the point where the argument about the “Professional” vs the “Blogger” starts to fall apart.

When Michael wrote his piece in 2007, he could at least lean, heavily, on the fact that whatever you thought of the professional critics of the day (specifically, those of the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and Standard) they had at least, if absolutely nothing else, put in a staggering amount of time in the service what they were doing. Well over a century between them. Probably going on for two. And it's hard not to respect that.

I should say at this point that none of this is aimed at Henry or Libby. Because of the Times paywall I've barely even read enough of Libby's work to be able to characterise it – other than noting its unusually glass-4/5-full stance (something which I might get onto sometime if I have time).

But elsewhere there are more dubious appointments. One thinks immediately of Quentin Letts, Tim Walker and Christopher Hart. All three are, in the most technical sense of the word, “professional critics”. What they write is “professional theatre criticism”. Automatically. They don't have to write well. They don't have to write insightfully. They don't even have to write accurately. And nonetheless they are professional theatre critics. Indeed they might appear to hold theatre in contempt and review it solely as a means to express their contempt, but their arts editors have appointed them and so they are professional critics.

[& My heart is in the coffin there with theatre criticism, And I must pause till it come back to me. etc.]

That is part one of Why British Theatre Criticism is being gradually rotted away to nothing.

The kernel of part two lies in the hands of the arts editors, editors and owners of newspapers.

The generously viewed crux/problem is: far fewer people can see any given piece of theatre than can read a book, buy and album, see a film or watch TV. The horrible truth is, you'd need to tour any performance for the better part of a year, selling out 1,000 seater venues every night, to even get the same viewing figures as a badly received TV show. As such, even if it's a review of some utter shit, the TV review will be understood to have more reach, more “relevance” and more connection with readers than the most intelligent consideration possible of the best piece of theatre ever made (obv. both judgements subjective anyway, but...).

The less generous view is that the British press is by and large anti-art, anti-intellectual, horribly right-wing and parochial in the extreme. As such one could start to feel that even if theatre reviews were ever given enough space, that space seems increasingly likely be given to an idiot philistine so that they had more words with which to take the piss.

As such, on the bright side, we do now at least have a situation where the term “professional theatre critic” is being devalued so quickly and to such an extent that there is no reason in the world why one should believe a "professional" to be necessarily better qualified to write on the subject than someone who isn't being paid money.

Which is more or less what most people with half a brain said four years ago. But it's nice that the owners of newspapers have decided to fast-track the proof.

[Edit: that ending is monstrously ungracious. I should add in that in the main, the critics I met were a lovely bunch. They were also intelligent, perceptive, sensitive, and sometimes great writers - and almost all of them seem to be criminally under-rated by their employers.]

“Properly”

2011-03-07T15:51:00.006+01:00

If “About” was concerned with playwriting and criticism, “Properly” is about direction and criticism.

It started out with the title:

““Properly”: Deadly word. Necessary word?”

and started life as an essay against the idea of there being a “proper” way of directing *anything* (there are also elements of it which feed back into “About” - the “proper” way to write a play “about” something was mentioned. And it might have, at some point, gone on to discuss the “proper” way to review...). It was most recently spurred by a comment made under my Othello blog or on another recent Guardian theatre blog, where some commenter would have said: “This is all well and good, but I wonder if [such-and-such a director] would be able to do it properly.” Or, even more simply, “I don't understand why people can't just do Shakespeare properly any more.” Or maybe it was a review. I forget.

I'm not sure what worries me more: the fact that there are people out there who obviously care about theatre enough to read blogs and comment with their opinions who can still believe that there's a way of doing Shakespeare “properly”, (or of doing a new play “properly”, for that matter); or the fact that when I read those comments, I do still immediately get a mental image of the production they mean when I read the word “properly”.

I think it's the latter.

After all, I'm not immune to having grown up somewhere. And that somewhere was Britain, and Britain has got its culture/s, and that culture has its, I dunno, cultural markers? Elements of commonalty? What I mean is: If you grew up in Britain when I grew up in Britain, unless you had a particularly exceptional life then there are probably certain cultural items that you'll recognise and maybe certain cultural expectations that you'll have unconsciously absorbed.

I reckon a big one of these is “properly”. It's got a Shakespearean context and, perhaps more interestingly, I think it's got a contemporary theatre context too.

I wonder if I asked you all (or at least the Britons among you) to close your eyes and think of Shakespeare “done properly” right now, whether you'd all come up with roughly the same sorts of images. I'm not asking about Shakespeare done “well”, or “imaginatively”, or “the best you've ever seen”, I'm talking about “properly”.

Does it involve ruffs? Does it involve meticulously researched historical costumes? Big hats? Big dresses? Swords in belts? Possibly the Globe Theatre itself? (full marks if it also involved Felicity Kendall as Viola on the front cover of the BBC Shakespeare text of Twelfth Night).

That's Shakespeare done properly, right? I'm not imagining this, am I? Whether we like it or not, if someone says “done properly” then we know what they mean, and what they mean is that, right? Whether we like it or not, we all understand/associate a particular school of doing Shakespeare with the word “properly”.

Perhaps it's an accident of language that anyone chooses to introduce notions of propriety into what should be a question of artistic interpretation. Or perhaps it's the absolute opposite of a linguistic accident; subconscious or otherwise. After all, “properly” is quite an old-fashioned word now, isn't it? Quite an odd word for one grown-up to use about another grown-up's work. One washes one's hands properly, one shouldn't have to direct Shakespeare as if deviation from Elizabethan costume and bellowing the lines in a plummy voice is somehow just a failure of effort. Or, even more stupidly, as a misunderstanding of some unseen “rules”, rather than an entirely valid difference of opinion.

I should point out at this juncture that I don't have any personal or political animus against productions which do opt for historical costumes. I've heard the arguments against, and I'm not convinced they really add up to the need for an immediate cessation. Nothing worn by an actor on a stage is an accident. As such, claims made for the comparative neutrality of modern casual dress or even the actors' own clothes don't wash either. They do, however, forcefully highlight what level of decision historical costumes are. How much, rather than being some kind of default “proper” version, they are in fact the massive imposition/importing of any number of external value systems. Directors should obviously have a very clear idea of why they're using them.

No. What I have a problem with is the very notion of “properly”. And this goes beyond productions of Shakespeare...

The fact that one very particular way of doing things can be widely imagined to be the “proper” or “right” way of doing things has two main pitfalls. The first is that it will legitimise an awful lot of lazy thinking/no thinking at all. Second, and worse, though, is that the existence of a “proper way of doing things” automatically de-legitimises any other choices. That creates the possibility of the criticism that something “hasn't been done properly”; hasn't been “done right”.

A director, by not producing a play in a certain way, is can be suggested to have somehow misunderstood the play. Or else, even more gallingly, a hugely intelligent staging of a play can be reviewed as something of a novelty, a kind of licensed court jester, a nice little break from “properly” before everyone gets back to doing everything “properly”.

If there was one thing I could change about British theatre, it would quite possibly be the idea in people's minds (mine included) that something can be done “properly”.

To give a non-Shakespearean example: a good few years ago now, I saw a production of The Crucible at LAMDA. It was an excellent production, I thought. At the time I don't suppose I'd seen more than a handful of plays from anywhere other than Britain, whereas the director Gadi Roll had started his work as a director in Israel and Europe. I was mostly staggered by how fast the play was done. By British standards it was an incredibly stylised way of doing Miller's Crucible. The last time I'd seen it before that was for my A-Levels in Birmingham's Old Rep, in what was – well – exactly the production you'd expect of The Crucible in a theatre called the Old Rep in Britain. Historical costumes, psychological acting, nice loud voices and a bit of shouting in the fraught bits. Totally "properly", in fact.

When the LAMDA finished, despite being utterly exhilarated just from watching the play – and how often does that ever happen really? – one of my first thoughts was that I'd like now to see it done “properly”. Why? Hadn't seeing it done improperly just made my night? Hadn't seeing it done properly all those years ago left me entirely indifferent (ditto Birmingham Rep's “proper” A View From the Bridge w. Bernard Hill (circa '95))? So where did this impulse to see it done "properly" come from?

I don't have an answer to this.

But it seems/suggests that the idea of “properly” is very deeply ingrained and will, I think, take a lot of de-conditioning to get rid of. If I were to make modest proposals, I imagine I'd start with the critics – I have no idea how much reach they or their opinions really have, but if we imagine there's some sort of tickle-down effect, I wonder what would happen if notions of “proper” and “traditional” were somehow disallowed. Or, even if they were treated with the same suspicion currently reserved for “innovation” or “novelty” for a while. Yes, I know some innovation is already praised, and some over-reliance on “traditionalism” is reprimanded, but I wonder what it'd be like if the reverse were briefly the cultural norm, and rather than the exception.

I'm not arguing for a new orthodoxy. That wouldn't benefit anyone. I've been at pains to point out in this piece and in “About” that I'm not arguing for one thing replacing another. Rather that “alternatives” to “properly” should stop being treated like missteps or novelties. I'm interested in a greater plurality of approaches, and for that to happen, I believe the idea of one particular way of doing things being right has to be abolished.

The above reverse-position is just a thought experiment, of course. But it does make me wonder what our theatre culture would look like if there wasn't this incredible, monolithic deference to the past, to tradition, and to “properly”.

[Illustrations all paintings of the performance of The Mousetrap in Hamlet by: (top to bottom) Daniel Maclise, Edwin Austin Abbey and Keeley Halswell]

This Is How You Will Disappear - Kampnagel, Hamburg

2011-03-06T09:09:00.004+01:00

This Is How You Will Disappear is the 5th(?) collaboration between French choreographer and director/+director-of-puppetry Gisèle Vienne, the cult American author Dennis Cooper and Anglo-Austrian musician/composer Peter Rehberg. Added here are Stephen O'Malley of the enormous-in-certain-circles band Sun O))) and the septuagenarian Japanese smoke-machine artist Fujiko Nakaya (pictures of her work here). It's almost like an ultra-underground supergroup: the biggest fish from the least-known, most-difficult ponds.

This is how it opens: there's a gymnast (female, blonde) and her trainer (male, forties). They're in a clearing in the woods. Or a in forest. She's doing exercises; stretches and somersaults on the forest floor. He's helping out with a hand placed here on the small of the back or, there, helping her make her toes touch the back of her head.

This is how it sounds: almost overwhelming the scene is this incredibly loud noise-scape. It sounds like it has been composed from massed ranks of overdriven guitars, horrible static shocks and the sound of distant screaming. It makes everything happening on stage seem like the most tense thing in the world. “An atmosphere of menace” doesn't come close to describing just how terrifying the music makes this scene.

This is how it looks: the setting is pretty self-explanatory. It manages to suggest and encompass everything from mankind's earliest, primal understandings about forests after nightfall, right through to the woods at night of modern American horror films. As stages go, this is one of the most spooky I've ever seen. The light is so sparse and the mists are such that you really can't see beyond the first couple of trees. Apart from the area where the athlete and her trainer are, all is darkness. And there's this music heavily implying that the very worst thing imaginable is almost certainly lurking in the darkness. I found myself having to keep looking away from the stage at the comparatively reassuring walls and ceiling of the auditorium to remind myself it was made up.

The way the scene and the soundtrack develop is essentially an exercise in ratcheting up tension and it far out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock. I shan't say any more than that. There are other scenes and other elements, but since – to me, at least – one of the performance's greatest virtues is suspense, it'd be wrong to give anything away.

I will say that the lighting states, designed by Patrick Riou, shift constantly – at one stage (or more) these are supplemented, or supplanted, by a stark video projection made by Shiro Takatani, which casts sharp, bright verticals against the black forms of the trees. The fog rises and falls, and that there are some arresting stage-pictures, veering between an almost cinematic photo-realist set and a totally non-naturalistic installation, sculpture or comment on the activity of creating of a forest on stage. Each adds a sense of layered meaning of the whole.

There is also more of Vienne's choreography (which I first saw in I Apologize in 2008, but which was – understandably – absent from the sit-down, one-man show, Jerk); a kind of jerky, dancing-under-strobe-lights movement. I've got no idea if this is a quote from another choreographer or her own invention. It feels like a part of Vienne's signature style, and seems to perfectly communicate the themes of her work. To describe: this stylised dancing is like a ballet about torture being executed with every other frame missing, performed at half-speed.

Vienne's thematic preoccupations are also well-met by those of Dennis Cooper, who has written the small amount of text featured in the show. Cooper has the distinction of being the author who wrote the book I've ever been unable to finish due to its content being too violent (Closer). I've not tried another since. I will say, his texts are much less all-out unbearable here (and milder than those in I Apologize). Indeed, if anything, there seems to be an (unexpected) element of self-ironisation; of playing with his own tropes, so to speak. Or perhaps not.

An interesting effect of knowing something of Cooper's background, or at least nationality, and also watching the performance in Germany, is that it seemed to lend several further dimensions to the associations which occur to one while watching the performance. For instance, this genre of what I'd initially read as an all-American cheerleader out in the woods at night, started to remind me of the sort of thing idealised by Leni Riefenstahl before 1939. Indeed, whether intentionally or not, the music also often takes on a distinctly Wagnerian tone, while the whole centrality of the forest and an athletic, blonde maiden... Similarly, the woods, the light through the trees, frequently evokes the work of German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

So, what does slinging all these things – and a bunch of other parts that I'm not telling you about – together in a wood with a smoke sculpture and a kind of heavy metal orchestra amount to?

If I say the best thing about This Is How You Will Disappear is its title, don't misunderstand me. That's not to say nothing else is any good. The rest of it is great. But the title really hangs over the piece. Following “About” a friend emailed me the following quote from a Saki short story:
“They leaned towards the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title. A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted “Bad News”, suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey...”

Which turned out to be exactly how I watched This Is How You Will Disappear.

What's immediately striking is the threat of it: This is how you will disappear, dear viewer. In woods, at night, violently. In clothes that are too small. Also the certainty; the Will Disappear. At each turn our understanding is underpinned by this idea of disappearance. The title suggests a meditation on the topography of certainty introduced to violence, rape and murder by slasher flicks, even the normalisation into cliché by the way such events are reported in the media. There's a hint that the title that almost suggests a knowing cynicism at it all: “This is how you will disappear, this is how I will disappear. It's how everyone disappears, these days”. Cynicism, yes, but also that sense of a corrosive fear; the sense that this is the thing that we're most frightened will happen.

There's also a hint that the whole performance gradually stacks up to a depiction of humanity abolishing itself, via the personal being subsumed into the quest for perfection. Humanity against human inhumanity, or against nature. The idea of the dark sides of our natures, outdoors in the nature, in the dark.

[Trailer for the show here – which might deserve a bit of a [SPOILER ALERT] for showing a couple of the coups that I wouldn't have let on about, albeit with no real context - In short, watch it, but then try to forget what you've seen if you ever get to go see the show]

[Photo at top from Dennis Cooper's blog here]

“About”

2011-03-03T20:36:00.002+01:00

For the last few weeks, I’ve had four Word documents staring accusingly at me from my Desktop every time I’ve opened my laptop.
They’re entitled: “Properly”, “About”, “Professional” and “Political”. I've come to think that they're the same article approached from four different directions. There's also a fifth piece called “Criticism”, but we'll come to that in due course...
Today I'm going to have a stab at writing “About”.

ABOUT

My favourite theatre joke:

Someone meets their friend out of a theatre, “What's it about?” she asks.

“It's about three hours” the friend replies.

But it's true; “What is it about?” is pretty much the first question anyone ever asks about a play, film or book. Or maybe the second thing after: “Was it any good?”.

As such, you could argue that telling your readership what a play is *about* lies at the heart of theatre criticism.

But I'm interested in something earlier in the process than reception/perception of the production here: how theatres and then audiences commission and then sell, or are sold, the idea of plays “about” something.

The question most recently re-occurred to me when I read the Guardian Theatre Blog piece The Biting Point: Southall 30 years on. I'll admit part of the reason it made me think about the question of how we make plays “about” something, is that it was published directly before my own article which, give or take a bit of nuance, pretty much uses a German staging of Othello as a club with which to bludgeon the far more mainstream Clybourne Park.

And here, just before it was published, was a perfectly reasonable article talking about taking the straight-forward (perhaps: “proper”) approach to writing a play “about” a particular subject – the subject of racism. The subject to which my blog was just about to suggest about the least straight-forward approach possible. As a result, I had kittens and read the Biting Point blog several times hoping that it didn't become a club with which I was about to be bludgeoned.

However, the Biting Point blog would have bothered me anyway – completely in the abstract, purely in intellectual terms - I haven't seen the play, although I do have a copy which I intend to read as soon as I have a moment – in the same way that the titles of some of the sessions at this year's Devoted and Disgruntled bothered me. At D&D (Matt Trueman's review of D&D here for the uninitiated), as always, there seemed to be sessions called for pretty much every conceivable aspect of theatre under the sun, and several sessions not even faintly connected to theatre at all, which is all part of the fun. But there was a repeated strain of question which seemed to be formulated thus: "How can Theatre block the flow of a river in a steep valley, thereby storing all the water in a reservoir, which can then be used for hydro-electricity or irrigation?"
To which the sensible answer is: You want a dam for that, not theatre.

It might sound too flippant an objection, and I'm not *implacably* opposed to theatre being put to utilitarian purposes, but nor am I much of a fan of the practice. And there are some things which other media do better. For the presentation, analysis and discussion of historical fact, for example, there is the book. For reporting facts quickly and accurately, there is the newpaper or the internet. For reaching large numbers of people, there's television. For trying to bring about a change of policy or government there is armed resistance or mass demonstration.

As soon as I write the above, I think of examples which disprove my assertions, or else I long to see the shows which prove me wrong. I suppose what I'm clumsily getting at, it that what theatre does best is still basically theatre. Except everyone has a different definition of what actually constitutes “theatre”.

What I find frustrating is the overwhelming prevalence of one particular model for exploring “about”. I don't think it's too much to describe it thus: you pick an Issue, any Issue; you then create a small group of characters, usually about six and put them in a situation in which they come into contact with The Issue. The Issue is then explored by the characters talking about It, their relationship to It. Possibly, if you're lucky, there's a story, how It changes them. At the moment, I'm struggling to think of a single play I've liked which has done the above.

I'll enter a couple of qualifiers here. I don't think this applies to all modern British plays by any stretch of the imagination. The best contemporary play of the last six months or so that I've read recently is John Donnelly's The Knowledge. It was reviewed in various quarters as “about teachers” or “about school” (see also: “reeks of authenticity... Clearly written from experience” - The Guardian, “Donnelly has personal experience of working in state schools and his play has a satisfying smack of authenticity” - The Telegraph), but that possibly says more about the fact that critics need to say something to fill the “about” slot before going into detail. Granted it was also a part of the Bush theatre's season “about” education (“In response to one of the most urgent and divisive issues of our times, the Bush presents The Schools Season: The Knowledge by John Donnelly and Little Platoons by Steve Waters. The season will bring together an ensemble company of ten actors and a series of talks, debates and events which will examine education in Britain today”), but I still reckon John (declaration of interest, he's also a friend, but that doesn't make his play any less good. Being friends only means I'd possibly keep my mouth shut if I'd really hated it, never that I'll say it's better than it really is) pretty much got himself out of writing an “about” play.

Of course it *is* *about school*, but basically it's about people. There's no one “issue” constantly putting words into the characters' mouths, no one subject they're constantly forced to discuss. The cast of characters aren't thinly veiled ciphers for this or that side of a particular argument. I wouldn't even say that they're even demonstrative of particular behaviours as each character, much as in life, tends to act in different ways in different situations. If the the play has an issue, it might best be expressed as “people do stuff”. Which, on paper/in theory, sounds like a terrible mess, but it really isn't. Moreover, reading it, it struck me that this was a rare thing to see in written for British theatre – a play that wasn't begging to have its subject recognised.

Reading this play forcibly reminded me that I don't actually dislike narrative drama (and before it After the Dance). And made me think: a good story well told can be just as effective as a non-linear or abstract work for making you think about things if it functions in the same much-less-directional way. It was a bit of a revelation for me.

Because, the debate does seem stupidly polarised. Either something falls into the “issue play” *about*-a-subject camp, or else it seems to be “bonkers, devised, crazy avant-gardism” or something (yes, I know this is rough, but let's run with it).

And, yes, you and I both know which camp I prefer (this is something I intend to get back to in “Criticism”, but, in brief, after a while having a “preference” just became too problematic – at least for someone in my position, especially when the preference is for the losing side).

However, I'd argue that this is a two- (or maybe three-) way problem (the possibly third party being theatre managements) – on one hand critics (or more widely and more properly “the media”) like legible, easily summarised “about”s. Look at the coverage of Greenland or The Heretic. Look at the amount of it, and then look at the character of it. Irrespective of the actual plays, or even their popularity, both plays got massive additional coverage because they were big *about* plays in major London theatres. In short, if you pick the right *about*, you get a lot of extra, free publicity. The other party – writers (and maybe theatres) – will obviously notice this, understand how *about* plays are written, go away and write/commission them.

The problem is, this process of legibility means that the worse sort of plays are those which garner some of the most coverage (obviously it's better to get an Oscar winning director and two fairly huge actors – then at least the story will be the show itself...). It's a process that means that theatre (at least, non-musical-theatre) gradually acquires a reputation for being dull, “worthy” and issue-based, thus guaranteeing reduced coverage and less space for criticism, which in turn means shorter, necessarily less insightful, more shorthanded reviews, which means plays strive for even greater legibility knowing full well that the press can't hope to unpack nuance or subtlety in 120 words. So it goes.

Of course, there are also good, sensible, rational reason for the popularity of this sort of hi-legibility theatre, which is that it can be much more easily written about. Or, from the artist's point of view (and the theatre producing it), it's much less of a hostage to fortune. If a play has a clearly defined *about* then obviously it's easier for everyone to discuss that, rather than the alternative which I suppose I am proposing – the abstract *about* or the narrative *not-about* play (or rather, the narrative play which doesn't explicitly name its subject or subjects).

I mean, these would take a bit of effort, no? And I wonder if effortlessness is something that British theatre has come to strive for. I'm not talking about impossible exertion here, just something more than being handed everything on a plate; clearly labelled and more-or-less pre-chewed.

The problem with something that doesn't spell things are manifold – for starters it's asking more of the viewer, and of its critics. Equally it leaves itself open to the chance that people are going to be able to miss what it's saying. There's also the fact that in part it's opening itself up in order to open up its audience. As such, the experience of the show that people have, what they take from it might be more personal. The very personal response is also kind of an anathema to theatre criticism as it's currently practised.

In a way, I can kind of appreciate why everyone seems to have settled for this way of doing things. But I don't think it's doing playwrighting, criticism or British theatre any favours.

I suppose what I'm really proposing is a fairly significant cultural shift. I'm not sure where it would have to begin, though – the commissioning process, the PR blurb or the reception committee (i.e. the critics – and, sure, the blogosphere).

It would be interesting to see what happened if something like this was sold as “a response to one of the most urgent and divisive issues of our times”. I intend this as acts of good faith on all sides. I don't mean, just finding any old piece of dance and slinging it on while labelling it “a response to the financial crisis” or some such, and then the press pseuding-it-up and saying they totally get it or alternatively flatly refusing to give it any credit at all.

I mean actual artists, playwrights and performers being allowed the lee(sp?)-way to produce something more than a pros and cons Punch and Judy show, and then for the critics and public to respond to it by actually sitting, watching hard, thinking about what they've seen, and maybe seeing if the piece resonates for them. Of course not everything will resonate with everyone, but then not everyone likes everything at the moment anyway, so as a direction to open up, what's to lose?