The first of the Hampstead Theatre’s Daring Pairings proper, after the two company curated nights (Talawa and Paines Plough), sees Amy Rosenthal teamed up with Cosh Omar. The pair were introduced six weeks ago, spent a couple of days brainstorming ideas for a script, which was then written in two weeks and developed over the following month. The result is Thank God it’s Friday!, a very funny Rom-Com of deferred gratification built on themes of racial/religious identity.
When writers collaborate it is always interesting to try to guess which writer wrote what bit. Omar and Rosenthal appear to have made the job slightly easier by taking it in turns with the scenes, and each offering work characteristic of their previous output. Of course, I could be doing both writers a grave injustice and Omar may have proved as adept at writing Jewish family comedy as Rosenthal has at heavily researching and depicting the Turkish Cypriot community around Dalston. But probably not. The big draw here is that Rosenthal and Omar are both writers whose previous work has drawn heavily on their backgrounds - Rosenthal’s evident love of Jewish culture and humour, and Omar’s engagement with the conflicted issues surrounding Turkishness, Islam and Britishness ( Omar - Battle of Green Lanes: Shuttleworth, Billington; Rosenthal - Sitting Pretty: Shuttleworth, Gardner '99, Gardner '05) - and that there is, at the very least, a hint of mutual antipathy between their respective camps. Given the circumstances, a play which at least touched on the divisions between Islam and Judaism within Britain, within North London even, was almost inevitable. What is more unexpected is how well the pair’s writing styles complement each other. With single authored plays, there is always that nagging doubt, except in the rarest of cases, that one side has never been given quite the full intellectual backing and forceful arguments it deserves - a sense that someone has been set up as a straw target for the playwright to prove wrong.
The play works as a pair of parallel narratives: on one side, Rachel, a determinedly single 34-year-old history teacher (perfectly captured by Susannah Wise), lives with her aging father Sam, who has started to suffer from panic attacks. On the other, John and Jan are arranging a dinner party to set Rachel up with a lawyer friend of Jan’s. Their progress impeded by the arrival of John’s friend from school Zeki, a Turkish Cypriot rockabilly, and Jan’s planned meeting with Muslim human rights lawyer Aiyse.
Given the nature of the timescale involved in its creation, it is probably fair to note that the piece isn’t yet perfect. That said, it is quite remarkable just how good it already is. Rosenthal and Omar have chosen their themes astutely and the way that they resonate across the two strands goes a long way beyond simple cohesion. Rachel’s vintage dresses from the Forties, which she wears much to her father’s irritation - “The Forties weren’t a great time for Jews, you know” - is mirrored by Zeki’s fascination with all things Fifties: Elvis, rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly; while her father Sam’s fear of persecution, seeing anti-Semitism everywhere, is mirrored by Zeki and Aiyse’s experiences as Muslims in post 9/11 and 7/7 Britain.
If there is a weak link it is in John’s increasingly bigoted girlfriend Jan who over the course of an evening is increasingly revealed to be largely intolerant of Muslims, while casually dropping in a few slurs against the Jews for good measure. Of course bigots exist, but it seems improbable that the mild and unflappable John would have stayed with one for so long or not noticed her changing perspective hitherto. As a character, her position in the play’s structure would have been infinitely more interesting if, when confronted with a lengthy and reasoned feminist argument for the Hijab, she had had any comeback beyond bluster. Too often Jan was allowed to slip into a caricature of an unlikeable, ignorant racist, when in fact there are some perfectly intelligent questions about what precisely atheists do stand for in the face of relativist arguments on one hand and increasing religious fundamentalism on the other. However, this is a small gripe and overall it is to be hoped that the play will be developed further and polished a bit and given a full staging in due course. It is an intelligent addition to the growing corpus of plays examining the fissures in multicultural Britain, and beyond that is frequently extraordinarily funny.
In addition to this full length play, following the interval, there was a chance to see 1 in 5 by Penelope Skinner. A short twenty-minute piece from the theatre’s StartNight initiative (I think - email me if I’m wrong on the details) presented as a fully-staged work in progress.
It is one of those plays that will have theatre traditionalists rolling their eyes and groaning, coming as it does from that post-Crave school of plays-for-unnamed-voices (although, thinking about it, isn’t Crave just an Under Milk Wood for depressed postmodernists? - No, Andrew. Stop being silly). These particular voices, amalgamate and loop back and forth through time to tell the story of a boy meeting a girl on Euston station, a binge-drinker made pregnant by her boss and an abusive relationship between husband and wife. As the details mount up it becomes apparent that the girl met by the boy is (possibly) the product of the drunken union of boss and binge-drunk, who marry to become the violent relationship. The narrative fragments are interspersed with the sorts of statistics that newspapers publish when reprinting the headline-grabbing press releases of spurious surveys commissioned by corporate PR firms as a way to keep their client's name in the press (cf. this one in today’s Times).
As a piece of writing it is fine and accomplished, boasting some excellent jokes and one-liners, along with a neat way of having the overlapping speeches resolve themselves into interventions across one another that nail a subtext or provide a punchline with one speaker finishing another’s sentence (kind of Two Ronnies style, but funnier). If the play is to be developed further, it could usefully play up how the store set by this sort of statistical barrage affects the behaviours of the piece’s protagonists at a more fundamental level. At the moment it feels slightly like the myriad elements haven’t quite finished meshing together. Similarly, it would be nice if the piece developed its already-present outward-looking aspect more. At the moment it runs the risk of wasting its inventiveness on a piece which doesn’t quite transcend the personal stories to a level where these really speak to the audience. That said, it is hard to envisage the piece gaining greatly from getting too much longer. But it is clearly the work of a writer blessed with acute theatrical thinking and I look forward to Ms Skinner’s next work.
Additional praise is due to director Michael Longhurst and his excellent cast of young actors (Simon Darwen, Sian Hutchinson, James Kermack, Alison O’Donnell and Gary Shelford - not a weak link between them). Longhurst displays a real facility for staging what must have looked like bewildering slabs of text on the page in a clear-sighted, witty and theatrical fashion. I can think of established directors with far longer CVs who would have consigned the whole thing to a turgid sat-down slog without a hint of the evident spark on show here.
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Thursday, 13 September 2007
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
The Racial Papers
For some reason everything theatre-related written over the last few days seems to have been somehow related to race. The Guardian today carries an interview with Blake Morrison regarding his new version of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. It is interesting to read, primarily because his is not the first reworking that the play has had recently. The other version was written by a well-known and well-respected playwright, commissioned by a leading London theatre, and has yet to see the light of day due to a very long line of very cold feet. This other reworking, you see, mischievously re-imagines the sex-striking wives of Athens as the fabled 72 virgins promised to Jihadist martyrs. As knockabout fun goes, it is certainly aiming at far harder targets than Morrison’s bland-sounding peacenik effort. Still, Morrison’s gets a nice write-up, so that’s okay.
Sticking with Islam, curiously yesterday’s Mail on Sunday carried a lengthy, self-authored profile of female Muslim playwright Yasmin Whittaker-Khan . The piece is apparently an edited version of an original article published in Index on Censorship. Presumably in that publication, vast photographs of its author and her mother did not dominate the pages (an effect faithfully approximated on the Mail’s website version of the text). In that context it also probably it read less like a pointed attack on Islam and more like part of a wider, more reasoned debate on religious censorship in theatre. The Daily Mail, after all, has an oddly ambivalent attitude toward the freedom of the arts when it comes to offended religious sensibilities. Yet it probably goes a good deal further than the Guardian when supporting attacks on, um, let’s say Islam or Sikhism within plays (although, to be fair, Melanie Philips offered a surprisingly astute defence of Jerry Springer - The Opera at the time of the furore - albeit introduced very much in her own inimitable style).
Parts of Ms Whittaker-Khan’s life are undeniably tragic and she is undoubtedly brave for continuing to highlight areas of Muslim culture that she reveals to be objectionable. However, reading the descriptions of the plays (and I realise this is no way to experience them), they sounded like the very worst sort of theatre. Particularly telling is the following passage:
“Another of my plays, Bells, attracted national press coverage. This play, which I am now hoping might be made into a film, exposed the secret, seedy world of mujra, or courtesan clubs, a centuries-old tradition in Pakistan that has emerged in Britain in a bastardised form and is now growing through sex trafficking.”
Firstly one is struck by “which I am now hoping might be made into a film”. More worrisome, though, is the fact that it is a “play” which goes on to be described in largely documentary terms. Plays which “expose secret, seedy worlds” in my experience often do so at the expense of pretty much anything else that might make a play watchable or indeed, uh, theatrical. Behzti, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play, which exposed the secret, seedy world of sexual abuse in Sikh temples (also, interestingly, commissioned by Birmingham Rep), is one of the worst published plays I have read in my life - from the leaden naturalistic dialogue, the negligible yet clichéd characterisation and the naïve way that she specifies how the stage should be laid out (“different parts of the stage should represent different rooms” - astounding), through to the abysmal, clanging melodrama of the plot - which might as well have been devised by barely literate Key Stage 3 pupils in Downham Market whose only experience of drama was Hollyoaks (and I know whereof I speak). The whole play would have sunk utterly without trace were it not for the disgrace of its being rioted off stage.
It is hard to resist the sense that this is part of an ongoing trend. And a deeply unhealthy one. This article by David Edgar (who, as the writer of Playing With Fire, provided me with one of the dullest issue-based nights in a theatre that I have ever endured) makes for depressing reading. Look, for example, at the way he dispatches the plays he mentions by issue (in contrast, say what you like about Aleks Sierz’s school of In-yer-face theatre, but look at the way he describes plays: with adjectives, ideas and feelings).
The concern is threefold. Firstly - briefly - it is worrying that this material is so frequently seized upon by those with agendas that rather tend to feed on portrayals that could easily be seen to demonise Muslim or Sikh communities. Yes of course we want a theatre culture that will fearlessly confront any issue it likes. And it would be lovely if we lived in a country where either a) some people didn’t tend to wildly extrapolate that because one A does Z in a play, all As are Z-ers, or Z-ists, or whatever. But, writing about Muslim men people-trafficking at precisely the same time as the BNP are saying exactly the same thing is a difficult circle to square. It is perhaps this contrarian positioning that gives it a spurious “edginess”.
Secondly - and frankly, of more pressing concern to theatre-writers - these writers frequently appear to be encouraged to produce what amounts to emotional pornography - moreover: authentic, “urban” or exotic emotional pornography. And lastly, and worse, they appear to be encouraged to do this in a very narrow, restrictive, shallow sort of naturalism, which utterly refuses any use of language, metaphor, or most of the other things that actually make theatre vital.
As a disclaimer, I should at this point reiterate that I haven’t seen or read any of Yasmin Whittaker-Khan’s plays (although I shall be finding copies and reading them ASAP). A quick Google reveals that the plays she discusses in the Mail piece are essentially her “issue” plays, and there are a couple of others with less immediately apparent subjects.
Another disclaimer: I don’t have a problem with naturalism, per se. Or with plays that offer a take on what could be construed as an “issue”. A couple of examples: Roy Williams’s excellent Fallout could be described simply as a play about black-on-black gun crime. In fact it goes so far beyond that that to so describe it would be like calling Hamlet a play about Dane-on-Dane poisoning. Similarly, Duncan Macmillan’s published oeuvre could be boiled down to being “a play about a suspected paedophile” and “a play about a disruptive pupil” - in both cases what is actually striking about the plays is Macmillan’s deft gift for structure and form; the games that he plays with expectation and convention; the language used.
The problem is that for so many unfathomable reasons, somewhere down the line it appears to have become accepted wisdom that it is easier to sell a play which can be neatly packed as dealing with an issue and summarised in a sentence. And some places still seem to commission work on this basis. One thing I hadn’t really identified as a trend through the things I saw in Edinburgh this year - and indeed saw advertised - was how few of them seemed to be “issue” plays.
The last race-based bit of writing was this wretched article from Friday’s Guardian theatre blog concerning the forthcoming Arcola production of The Merchant of Venice. As I noted when reviewing the Globe’s excellent recent production, revisionism is way too popular when it comes to Shakespeare’s more problematic ideas. I notice that Shuttleworth has already commended the idea of staging one’s own wrestling with the text in the notes following the item*. Fair enough. My review of Rupert Goold’s bold interventions into Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus last year should make it clear that I am all for experimentation with and evisceration of classic texts. It is Ms Pascal’s suggestion that “Shakespeare's play remains so problematic that I wonder if we should stage it at all” that really grates. Not least as it comes from someone about to do just that. I’m also troubled by her textual analysis that leads her to believe, “[she] still has to face the decision of how to stage the cutting of the pound of flesh”. Still, I’m sure in future we can look forward seeing Merchant set on the West Bank with all the nasty old Venetians replaced by Palestinians to give our already troubled liberal consciences something to really fret about. Or maybe, a production of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta set on board the trains to Auschwitz, just to hammer home the idea that it’s, like, really bad to hate Jews an' shit.
*Edit: see comments
Review of Pascal's Merchant of Venice here
Sticking with Islam, curiously yesterday’s Mail on Sunday carried a lengthy, self-authored profile of female Muslim playwright Yasmin Whittaker-Khan . The piece is apparently an edited version of an original article published in Index on Censorship. Presumably in that publication, vast photographs of its author and her mother did not dominate the pages (an effect faithfully approximated on the Mail’s website version of the text). In that context it also probably it read less like a pointed attack on Islam and more like part of a wider, more reasoned debate on religious censorship in theatre. The Daily Mail, after all, has an oddly ambivalent attitude toward the freedom of the arts when it comes to offended religious sensibilities. Yet it probably goes a good deal further than the Guardian when supporting attacks on, um, let’s say Islam or Sikhism within plays (although, to be fair, Melanie Philips offered a surprisingly astute defence of Jerry Springer - The Opera at the time of the furore - albeit introduced very much in her own inimitable style).
Parts of Ms Whittaker-Khan’s life are undeniably tragic and she is undoubtedly brave for continuing to highlight areas of Muslim culture that she reveals to be objectionable. However, reading the descriptions of the plays (and I realise this is no way to experience them), they sounded like the very worst sort of theatre. Particularly telling is the following passage:
“Another of my plays, Bells, attracted national press coverage. This play, which I am now hoping might be made into a film, exposed the secret, seedy world of mujra, or courtesan clubs, a centuries-old tradition in Pakistan that has emerged in Britain in a bastardised form and is now growing through sex trafficking.”
Firstly one is struck by “which I am now hoping might be made into a film”. More worrisome, though, is the fact that it is a “play” which goes on to be described in largely documentary terms. Plays which “expose secret, seedy worlds” in my experience often do so at the expense of pretty much anything else that might make a play watchable or indeed, uh, theatrical. Behzti, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play, which exposed the secret, seedy world of sexual abuse in Sikh temples (also, interestingly, commissioned by Birmingham Rep), is one of the worst published plays I have read in my life - from the leaden naturalistic dialogue, the negligible yet clichéd characterisation and the naïve way that she specifies how the stage should be laid out (“different parts of the stage should represent different rooms” - astounding), through to the abysmal, clanging melodrama of the plot - which might as well have been devised by barely literate Key Stage 3 pupils in Downham Market whose only experience of drama was Hollyoaks (and I know whereof I speak). The whole play would have sunk utterly without trace were it not for the disgrace of its being rioted off stage.
It is hard to resist the sense that this is part of an ongoing trend. And a deeply unhealthy one. This article by David Edgar (who, as the writer of Playing With Fire, provided me with one of the dullest issue-based nights in a theatre that I have ever endured) makes for depressing reading. Look, for example, at the way he dispatches the plays he mentions by issue (in contrast, say what you like about Aleks Sierz’s school of In-yer-face theatre, but look at the way he describes plays: with adjectives, ideas and feelings).
The concern is threefold. Firstly - briefly - it is worrying that this material is so frequently seized upon by those with agendas that rather tend to feed on portrayals that could easily be seen to demonise Muslim or Sikh communities. Yes of course we want a theatre culture that will fearlessly confront any issue it likes. And it would be lovely if we lived in a country where either a) some people didn’t tend to wildly extrapolate that because one A does Z in a play, all As are Z-ers, or Z-ists, or whatever. But, writing about Muslim men people-trafficking at precisely the same time as the BNP are saying exactly the same thing is a difficult circle to square. It is perhaps this contrarian positioning that gives it a spurious “edginess”.
Secondly - and frankly, of more pressing concern to theatre-writers - these writers frequently appear to be encouraged to produce what amounts to emotional pornography - moreover: authentic, “urban” or exotic emotional pornography. And lastly, and worse, they appear to be encouraged to do this in a very narrow, restrictive, shallow sort of naturalism, which utterly refuses any use of language, metaphor, or most of the other things that actually make theatre vital.
As a disclaimer, I should at this point reiterate that I haven’t seen or read any of Yasmin Whittaker-Khan’s plays (although I shall be finding copies and reading them ASAP). A quick Google reveals that the plays she discusses in the Mail piece are essentially her “issue” plays, and there are a couple of others with less immediately apparent subjects.
Another disclaimer: I don’t have a problem with naturalism, per se. Or with plays that offer a take on what could be construed as an “issue”. A couple of examples: Roy Williams’s excellent Fallout could be described simply as a play about black-on-black gun crime. In fact it goes so far beyond that that to so describe it would be like calling Hamlet a play about Dane-on-Dane poisoning. Similarly, Duncan Macmillan’s published oeuvre could be boiled down to being “a play about a suspected paedophile” and “a play about a disruptive pupil” - in both cases what is actually striking about the plays is Macmillan’s deft gift for structure and form; the games that he plays with expectation and convention; the language used.
The problem is that for so many unfathomable reasons, somewhere down the line it appears to have become accepted wisdom that it is easier to sell a play which can be neatly packed as dealing with an issue and summarised in a sentence. And some places still seem to commission work on this basis. One thing I hadn’t really identified as a trend through the things I saw in Edinburgh this year - and indeed saw advertised - was how few of them seemed to be “issue” plays.
The last race-based bit of writing was this wretched article from Friday’s Guardian theatre blog concerning the forthcoming Arcola production of The Merchant of Venice. As I noted when reviewing the Globe’s excellent recent production, revisionism is way too popular when it comes to Shakespeare’s more problematic ideas. I notice that Shuttleworth has already commended the idea of staging one’s own wrestling with the text in the notes following the item*. Fair enough. My review of Rupert Goold’s bold interventions into Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus last year should make it clear that I am all for experimentation with and evisceration of classic texts. It is Ms Pascal’s suggestion that “Shakespeare's play remains so problematic that I wonder if we should stage it at all” that really grates. Not least as it comes from someone about to do just that. I’m also troubled by her textual analysis that leads her to believe, “[she] still has to face the decision of how to stage the cutting of the pound of flesh”. Still, I’m sure in future we can look forward seeing Merchant set on the West Bank with all the nasty old Venetians replaced by Palestinians to give our already troubled liberal consciences something to really fret about. Or maybe, a production of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta set on board the trains to Auschwitz, just to hammer home the idea that it’s, like, really bad to hate Jews an' shit.
*Edit: see comments
Review of Pascal's Merchant of Venice here
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