Thoughts: in three parts*

Cooke: Court still says ‘Cunt’

Ahead of tomorrow’s press night for the first play in the Royal Court’s exciting new season of international plays, The Ugly One, Dominic Cooke offered a series of ineffably sane and reasonable comments on his plans for the Royal Court in yesterday’s Observer (under a somewhat excitable sub’s headline).

As I’ve commented many times before, Dominic Cooke has done unbelievable good for the theatre since he took over as artistic director. His programming has been consistently intelligent and interesting. Also, not noted in this article, but far more important in many ways - although less headline-grabbing - he has already demonstrated that he is open to looking at new models of making work for theatre. The two week Rough Cuts mini-season this July was perhaps the real coup of his directorship so far. It is fantastic news that the artistic director of perhaps the leading new writing theatre in London is prepared to look beyond the literary model of play-making. In the meantime, it is surely worthy of note that he has programmed an entire season of work by non-English-speaking writers.

Katie Mitchell / Complicité

Secondly, I’d like to address a couple of the comments that have arisen from my comparisons between Complicité’s A Disappearing Number (henceforth ADN) and Katie Mitchell’s last two plays at the National.

Anonymous says: “I'm intrigued that you like Katie Mitchell's recent work so much when much of what you write [in your review of ADN] could most certainly be applied to, for example, her Attempts on Her Life or Waves.”

I really don’t think the same can be applied. I’ll try to explain why.
The primary difference between the NT stuff and ADN for me is that in the former virtually everything that you saw and heard was being created on stage. The creation of the cinematic projected images was a direct result of live human behaviour that you could watch taking place, both in the sound effects and video trickery of Waves and the vast screen projections of Attempts on Her Life. This struck me as an intensely theatrical approach to using multi-media because it foregrounded its creation and use - much like when Fecund had their sound and lighting desk on stage in Intimate Male back in 2001 (there are no doubt countless other examples). It seemed to take multi-media use to a whole new level. It wasn’t *between* the actor and the audience; it was something that the actor was doing right in front of the audience. Beyond this, I particularly liked the aesthetic employed. That the actors were also ‘performing’ their use of the technology - the running around and faux ramshackleness was all meticulously choreographed - added a further fascinating dimension.

I should make it clear that I don’t have an objection to video-projections at all. I quite liked the way they were deployed in The Elephant Vanishes, for example. But I think there needs to be an acknowledgement of what they are, how they operate and what they do to a piece of theatre. For example, in an earlier Fecund piece - their production of The Cherry Orchard - there was a scene in which the characters acted in front of a vast projection of a dance while thumping, deafening techno music played over the speakers. The only character whose speech could be heard was screaming into a microphone. This fitted perfectly with the overall aesthetic of the piece. It also seemed entirely appropriate, since it acknowledged the way that the music and projection was steamrollering the human scale. In ADN, similar steamrollering (or at least wallpapering) felt to me like it was taking place while the actors pretended it wasn’t.

Further on ‘Davis Wateracre’ (who I know, in case you’re wondering), asks: “Don't you weaken your argument by saying rather snottily that they are ‘review-proof’ and then attempting to take them down a peg? I completely understand the urge, and similarly I completely understand that this production left you cold, but should we as reviewers start from a clean slate every time?”

I would draw a distinction between what I wrote on ADN and a ‘review’ proper. I didn’t see the show on a press ticket, and had sent someone else to review it for CultureWars - partially for exactly the reasons I raise in my piece about the show. As such, I felt completely free from the constraints of reviewing/criticism proper; the piece is partially more essay than review so I felt freer to engage with the aspects of it which I found problematic and to foreground the subjectivity of those problems. Which leads me rather neatly on to...

Billington blogs on blogs
(or, The Wolf just gets crazier)

Michael Billington has written a new post in the Guardian’s theatre blog section in which (ironically) he comments on theatre blogs. He asks: “Is blogging changing theatre criticism?” And argues that it undoubtedly is. If it is, it is hard to see quite how it is changing it. Newspaper reviews today look pretty much like they did a couple of years ago before theatre blogging gained any sort of momentum.

I pretty much fall between the two (perhaps illusory) camps which he sets up - professional critics and bloggers - since I both review plays (sometimes even for money, thus “professional”) and write (keep? what is the verb?) a blog. I try to keep the two things faintly separate. If I am reviewing a play on a press ticket I will write a “proper review” for the publication under whose auspices I have been given the ticket. If I am seeing something that I’ve paid for - or am on a press ticket for the blog like I was at the Hampstead last week - then I feel freer to write what I like. Mostly on the blog I write about issues around theatre (and around reviewing it). This is obviously different to the West End Whingers site, which is almost solely a reviews website. And one which makes an absolute virtue of the independence that paying for tickets brings. While Chris Goode and Andrew Field offer a mixture of reviews and comment.

Beyond his disobliging suggestion that “the blog, in its voracious desire for news and opinion, is in danger of too much pre-emptive guesswork,” (which appears to be more a criticism of the Guardian’s own theatre blogs than those outwith - since the example given is precisely one such piece) Billington’s main point is interestingly conflicted. His central point is “I still cherish the idea of the printed review”. He makes a number of fine claims for the art of the critic. At the same time he acknowledges the many frustrations that his art endures - “The restrictions of space and time are considerable, but they force one to focus on essentials.” One can’t help wondering, despite the admirable insistence on structure (and lord knows, Postcards... could sometimes do with a bit of structuring, restricted time and space) whether he wouldn't relish just a bit less restriction.

Writing this blog, I am often reminded of that Balzac (I think) quote, which - paraphrased - says: “I would have written less, I didn’t have time.” That said, one obvious advantage with blogs and online review sites is precisely that one isn’t pressed to restrict one’s word count. Yes, discipline can be a useful, uh, discipline - but by the same token, it is lovely to read something that takes all the time it likes to go into real detail and is afforded the space to discuss the wider implications of the work. It is also great that there is now online a growing corpus of work which is discussing issues at the cutting edge of theatre-making and discussing theatre criticism in real depth. A national newspaper could never be expected to publish all that. It is not its job. I’m interested in reading it, but I’m realistic enough to know that most people aren’t.

Another benefit of the online review and blog is that it offers the opportunity for writers to experiment. I think Michael is quite right to suggest that there is a critical discipline and an acknowledged way to write reviews, but it is exciting to read people who are writing outside that box. Quite apart from anything else, being online allows reviews to hyperlink, putting the rest of the net at their disposal. I would argue that not all blogs are like informal letters - some are certainly possessed of great elegance and eloquence. Conversely, a lot of online reviews actual follow the general pattern much more than one might imagine they would.

A further bonus for online reviewers is the simple lack of duty - they are also under no obligation to cover something that they really don’t want to see. Obviously there are advantages to having one or two people covering a majority of theatrical events in the country per paper, but at the same time a different advantage would be had if those people weren’t forced to see so much with barely a nod to their tastes, and with their schedules dictated largely by commercial considerations. For example, I’m sure there are nights when three or four press nights clash and the two reviewers employed by a paper will be sent to the two plays in, say, the West End and Stratford rather than the studio production with no star names or massive subsidy in which at least one of the reviewers might be far more interested. Perhaps I’m wrong, but big openings never seem to get missed, while interesting work may be, simply because of “News Values”. There’s an interesting wider question there about what makes theatre "important", but now isn’t the time or the place.

When Michael argues that, “The nature of the newspaper review is always changing, of course... reviews are increasingly seen as an instant guide for the reader: the existence of star ratings is proof of that.” One gets a real sense of his frustration. It seems a shame that he doesn’t appear to acknowledge that a lot of those writing blogs share precisely this frustration, which is why, in part, they are writing them.

And finally, Mark Ravenhill’s piece from today’s Guardian is clever and thoughtful as always. And elsewhere, it is great to see a new post from Alex Ferguson on his Unknown Persons blog.


* Title suggested by Wallace Shawn’s play A Thought in Three Parts, one of the most exciting and provocative bits of American experimental writing for the theatre that I have read.

Complicité's A Disappearing Number - Barbican

Complicité are perhaps The “experimental” theatre company par excellence. Advance ticket sales for their new show A Disappearing Number at the Barbican have been impressive to say the least. It is one of many signs that Britain has a far healthier theatrical culture than often suggested - a fact to be celebrated. As such, Complicité are essentially review-proof. Whatever anyone says, they now have such momentum that they will continue to sell out their shows on the basis that they are required viewing for anyone with an interest in theatre.

I came to the company slightly late. I didn’t get to see Street of Crocodiles, starting instead with Mnemonic in ‘99, which I found impressive, even if the overall thing left me a bit lukewarm. I liked The Elephant Vanishes more, although it didn’t raise strong feelings. So why did this latest show leave me so cold, disappointed - slightly cross, even?

The reason is that Complicité have got where they are today by being innovators. When they started it is my impression that they were among the first to bring the techniques taught at the Lecoq school to the British stage - and with an English flavour added to this continental sensibility. One of their first shows won the second ever Perrier Award, which - lest we forget - is awarded for comedy, not theatrical innovation. The fact that their show won it rather says all that needs saying about how funny it must have been. Subsequently, the company was talked about in reverential tones throughout university days. Street of Crocodiles seems to have inspired more artists working in theatre today than Look Back in Anger ever did.

Simon McBurney is probably one of the most influential theatre-makers of the past quarter century. Ideas which he pioneered now crop up in theatres across the country time and time again. And this is part of the problem. Because they’ve been around so long, and have been inspiring people for so long, it feels like they have been eclipsed. Those innovations which they brought to the stage have now become part of the new orthodoxy. In Edinburgh this year you could barely move for Lecoq and Gaulier-trained companies. When Mnemonic opened, their use of video projection looked pretty advanced and sophisticated. Now any student company with the time and inclination can edit together some hugely impressive multi-media wizardry on their laptops and beam it at their plays using the data projectors that have become de rigueur in even the lowliest fringe spaces. Similarly, their use of physical theatre and movement has spawned an aesthetic which is applied, sometimes almost without thought, to all but the most naturalistic productions of any play you care to think of.

None of this is Complicité’s fault, of course, and it would be churlish to hold it against them. After all, if one’s stack of laurels is that big, resting on them must be pretty darn comfy. Yes, it is a shame that the excitement of waiting for a new Complicité show, once like getting dispatches from the front-line of theatrical thinking, has been replaced by a dull feeling of aesthetic inevitability - we all know what a Complicité show is going to be like before we go in these days - but that isn’t the main problem here. Funnily it’s far simpler than that. The piece is so mired in its own multi-media-ness that it just feels impossible to get close to its characters.

A Disappearing Number tells the story of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who sent a letter to Cambridge professor GK Hardy offering his theory of, oh, some clever maths thing. The piece intercuts this historical narrative with a modern-day romance between a rather sweet Indian-American hedge-fund manager and a maths professor, whom he marries and who then dies.

At the start of the show the maths professor begins to delivery a lecture to the audience in the theatre. It is a lovely bit of direct-audience address, which displays an admirable self-awareness of precisely how far over everyone’s heads the maths is going. It is very funny and clever. Then another actor comes out, and explains that he is an actor. He acknowledges that the set is a set, pushes it around, and demonstrates that the maths professor’s glasses don’t even have lenses (why not? They could have glass in them - still, no matter). It is all looking hugely promising: we are entertained, involved, seduced. Then there is a rush of sound effect and a projection of an Indian street and all this contact is lost for pretty much the rest of the show. Suddenly the actors seem to become subsumed by this welter of video projection and recorded sound.

As Andrew Field has already noted, I wrote about this very idea of intrusive, fixed technological elements in a recent blog entry. I would like to make it quite clear that this issue is not a matter of doctrine for me. There is nothing worse than someone writing off a piece of theatre because it does not fulfil some wholly external criteria which they bring to it. I have thought hard about this and I’m pretty sure that’s not what I’ve done. Even though A Disappearing Number did seem to confirm a number of the things which concerned me in that previous article. Most significantly was the way that the actors seems entirely dwarfed by the scale of the projects. Occasionally when the actors were standing as if within a film sequence it was a nice trick, and effective - but never more than that. More frequently the films seemed to provide nothing more than attractive moving wallpaper. Then there was the nature of the projected material - picture postcard views of Indian streets and Trinity Cambridge, rippling water and numbers falling like snow (or like they do in The Matrix screensaver on your PC circa ‘03). This is not beautiful; it is simply pretty - like the pictures that fill the frames sold in Ikea - much less sublime.

Beyond the actual nature of the images themselves was the fact of their being projected. I shall try not to dwell too much on comparisons between these films and the projected images used to such astonishing effect in Waves and Attempts on Her Life. Suffice it to say that once one has seen the images that are projected being made live, it seems like several steps back to simply pre-record. Especially given the speech at the beginning that draws our attention to the artifice of the theatre. It is as if McBurney views film with rather more reverence. And it was the irreverence of his approach to theatre that was part of the initial brilliance, wasn’t it?

Elsewhere in the play, a significant section of plot finds the hedge fund manager spending a night trapped in the lecture theatre, while trying to transfer his late wife’s phone number into his own name. To this end, he speaks to an Indian call centre operator. These conversations are clearly intended as broad comedy, and I wondered if the fact of their being (presumably) recorded had impacted on that. I didn’t find them especially funny anyway, although I’m happy to record that much of the audience did, in much the same way as people are still laughing at “Not even for ready money” in The Importance of Being Earnest - theatre often has a strange way of making audiences laugh because they know something is a joke, rather than because it is funny. [I’m afraid from the seat that I was in, there are any number of details which might have passed me by, since a proportion of the stage simply wasn’t visible - so if he was in fact talking to an actor wearing a mic at the back of the stage, I wouldn’t have known.]

There were other troublesome elements too. The piece seemed to quickly resolve itself into what was effectively a cavalcade of scene changes. It felt as if hardly any scene really had a chance to really get going before it was cut off. As a result, our relationship to the characters felt continually on hold, deferred. Ultimately it was this distance that really finished me off. The narratives were so slight, and the cuts between them so numerous I found it very hard to keep caring, no matter how hard I tried. So when at one stage the maths professor woman has a miscarriage, of course it was tragic, such an event always will be, but in the circumstances it felt like it had been dropped in from nowhere for no apparent reason. The sudden lighting effect that accompanied it also seemed forced. Shortly before (or after) when they brought on a little puppet child to represent the young Ramanujan rather than enchanted, I was actually irritated. It seemed wholly contrived to wring a little more wonderment out of the audience while the whole scene in which it featured meant nothing, added nothing and appeared wholly superfluous, other than to introduce a cute puppet. Similarly, the use of Nitin Sawney's music, traditional Indian dance forms and a virtually redundant live Tabla player at best added litle beyond an additional layer of multicultural goings on, but more frequently put one in mind of getting stuck in the college rooms of a stoned maths student trying to explain the world while showing his gap-year photos.

I’m sure hundreds, possibly thousands of people will love this show, and I don’t think that they shouldn’t. But for me something absolutely failed to click, and we were left with what felt like nothing more than Complicité by numbers (no pun intended).

Edit: I nearly forgot, there is a video on YouTube posted by Warwick Arts Centre promoting the show which gives a very vague idea of some of the music and projections:

Coming soon...

The shattering "eyeball-eating scene" from Mark Ravenhill’s one-man Edinburgh version of The Complete Sarah Kane*.


I’m still in Edinburgh detox mode. To this end, I have finished the latest Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel, and played on YouTube. I can’t recommend the Rebus novels highly enough as a mode of de-Festivalisation. They are all set in Edinburgh and almost all of them totally ignore the Festival. It is a good way to reclaim the city as a functioning place rather than a three-week drinking binge. Reading them while actually there is even better. I was very pleased with my morning routine this year, which included buying a newspaper and getting on the bus and reading it on the way into town from Morningside - yes, I know it’s lazy, but it was lovely to keep pricking the Festival bubble every day.

On the bright side, it’s nearly September and thus the new rash of London openings kicks off pretty soon...

The Cut sees an unlikely twin-set of films about cross-dressing adapted for stage with Ma Vie en Rose already running at the Young Vic (already drawing a stinking review from Charles Spencer). A more hopeful bet may come in the form of the Old Vic’s star-studded production of Almodovar’s All About My Mother. I emphasise “may”.

Also recently opened is the Emperor Jones at the National, which also reopens the doors on its enormously popular Enda Walsh/Mark Ravenhill pairing from last year’s NT Connections, Chatroom/Citizenship.

I suppose everyone who has ever cared about theatre should probably try to get excited at the prospect of the new Complicité show A Disappearing Number which opens next week at the Barbican. With original music by Nitin Sawney, we are promised. As if that helps.

Over in Hammersmith, the Lyric chucks on the first of the long march of Edinburgh refugees with the NTS Bacchae and Subway from the Traverse. Similarly, at the Soho, Tam Dean Burn in the adapation of Luke Sutherland's novel Venus as a Boy opens shortly.

Over at Hampstead their inventive and interesting Daring Pairings season kicks off the week after next, with a collected/edited selection from Mark Ravenhill’s excellent series of shorts that comprised this year’s Ravenhill For Breakfast, followed by a selection of works created by collaborations between diverse writers. This is followed by another verbatim play from Robin "Talking To Terrorists" Soans - Life After Scandal - which is based on interviews with Neil and Christine Hamilton, Charles and Diana Ingram, Jonathan Aitken, Edwina Currie and Craig Murray (again).

Probably the most exciting forthcoming London season is the Royal Court’s ambitious international season, kicking off with Martin Crimp’s new translation of Ionesco’s seminal anthropomorphic fascism parable Rhinoceros running in rep with a new version of Max Frisch’s Fire Raisers (here translated as The Arsonists) from Alastair Beaton, while upstairs there is: The Ugly One by Germany’s Marius von Mayenburg, Kebab by Romanian Gianina Carbunariu, Free Outgoing by India’s Anupama Chandrasekhar and in a double bill, The Good Family by Swediah Joakim Pirinen alongside The Khomenko Family Chronicles by Natalia Vorozhbit from the Ukraine.

Another couple of interesting items come in the form of Punchdrunk’s Masque of Red Death at the BAC and the new production of The Country Wife at the Haymarket, which marks the theatre’s new lease of life as a producing house.

Somewhat less inspiring on paper, but no doubt deftly executed are: Awake and Sing! at the Almeida and Flight Path at the Bush (whose entire first season under Josie Rourke lacks the same excitement as the Court under Cooke, but we shall wait and see). Similarly Fragile and (what sounds like a woefully misconceived) Merchant of Venice at the Arcola both sound slightly on the worthy-but-dull end of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, for those of you unable to achieve Edinburgh closure just yet, there’s still Hippo World Guest Book - Redux if your afternoon isn’t quite the same without sitting in Brooke’s Bar listening to Chris Goode yelling: "AND I AM NOT A MORON OR I WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO TYPE!" through the wall at tea time.

Alternatively, this mad little song from Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, which I was overjoyed to find on YouTube, might just do the trick.



* not really.