The Ugly One - Royal Court Upstairs

Written for CultureWars.org.uk

There seems to be a growing fashion for brevity in theatre. Marius von Mayenburg’s new play, which opens the Royal Court’s new season of international writing, clocks in at around 55 minutes. It is a model of concision with not an ounce of fat to be found anywhere in the script. Ramin Gray’s production sets the action on a bare stage flanked by three of the Theatre Upstairs’ leather and burlap benches, artfully littered with backstage detritus – here a step ladder, there a power-drill - all scattered as if left by some recalcitrant stage crew who are yet to make good on their promise of a set. The space’s house lights are left on throughout the action, supplemented by rudimentary additional lighting on the stage.

The play itself is much concerned with appearances: Lette (Michael Gould) is a successful engineer who has designed a new sort of plug. He should be going to a conference to deliver a paper on the product, but his boss, Scheffler, informs him that his face is “unacceptable” and that his colleague Karlmann will be doing the presentation. Lette is surprised. He’d never realised. He goes home to his wife, Fanny. She confirms that he is indeed “unspeakably ugly”. He is perturbed. He goes to a plastic surgeon – also called Scheffler – and demands reconstructive surgery. The effects of the surgery and their subsequent effects should probably remain a surprise. Suffice it to say that the surgery has a profound effect on the quality of Lette’s life, and the play becomes a fascinating meditation of the effects of one’s appearance – like four or five different morality parables running in tandem.

One of the most appealing aspects of the production is the almost rehearsed-reading style employed. The four actors are costumed only insofar as they wear shirts appropriate to their characters. There are no props. They spend quite a bit of time sitting ranged on the benches while Lette whizzes between them on a wheeled office chair. The delivery and dialogue, while not exactly deadpan, is understated and rapid. Thanks to the wholesale binning of any pretence at “realism” the actors switch characters in an instant. Aside from Gould, the other three actors - Mark Lockyer (Scheffler), Frank McCusker (Karlmann) and Amanda Drew (Fanny) – each play another couple of characters, who in each case have the same name. If this sounds like a recipe for total confusion, von Mayenburg’s script deals deftly with any such worries, using the sudden flicking between scenes as a clever device to jolt the audience like a train going over a set of points. Gray has assembled a first-rate cast who are a pleasure to watch. Gould – who ironically has a lovely, watchable face – manages to suggest changes of a man’s whole temperament with the barest hints of a smile here, a frown there, the terrifically enjoyable Mark Lockyer turns in a series of very funny studies of the self-satisfied, while the intangible transformations which Amanda Drew uses to essay the difference between a foxy housewife and a 78-year-old nymphomaniac plutocrat are quite astonishing.

If the play has a weak point, then one could point to a slightly unconvincing “madness”/split-personality scene, but this is passed over so quickly that it should scarcely be allowed to matter. It weakens von Mayenburg’s thesis slightly – if a thesis is intended – concerning the meaning of the face, but generally speaking the play puts forward only interesting and occasionally provocative ideas at such a break-neck pace that it becomes difficult to even process them, let alone dwell on the ideas raised.

It might seem premature to bracket this, along with Mike Bartlett’s recent Royal Court hit My Child, as part of a new movement in playwriting which has learnt lessons from the best recent television – hour-long shows, plunging the audience straight into the action without lengthy set-ups, rapid cutting between scenes – and re-made it as a thoroughly theatrical medium that adds the positive virtue of unapologetic presence and liveness. This production’s glorious lack of even costume, lighting, sound or set changes underlines such an approach – reasserting theatre’s potential for immediacy.


Incidentally, does anyone know anything about the poster design (above)? It is credited to Jeremy Herbert, but really reminds me of some (I think) 1930s, (I think) German surrealist art. Either way, I like it an awful lot.

Royal Court - Rough Cuts

Following their hugely successful first six months under Dominic Cooke, and with the largely garlanded Downstairs show The Pain and The Itch extending its run until the 4th August, the Court has programmed two weeks of what are effectively scratch performances.

I know there is a fair amount of debate around the usefulness of scratch culture. Chris Goode has gone on record to attack (albeit with a careful and nuanced set of objections) the prevailing scratch culture, and Mike Bartlett in an earlier interview on TheatreVoice made many of the same points about "scratch" potentially offering so much of a safety net that writers need not commit to their work, and also of running the risk of drowning in feedback forms and the sort of well-intentioned dramaturgical advice that can leave plays utterly stripped of the initial spark that made them worth writing in the first place.

That said, I’m real sucker for experimental works-in-progress and readings. All the more so when they constitute a significant programming decision on the part of one of London’s foremost producing theatres. Whatever you think of any given individual play, or about the politics of scratch, it is hard to deny that Dominic Cooke’s first six months at the court have been little short of miraculous.

Wednesday’s offering was a double bill of fragments from two potentially longer, larger, as-yet-unfinished works - one by long-standing Royal Court writer Leo Butler, who teaches on the Court’s Young Writers Programme and whose first professional play was staged at the theatre several years back, and the other by one half of The Right Size: Sean Foley.

In terms of a double bill it is hard to imagine a greater distance between two pieces: Butler’s Airbag - the result of a collaboration between him and the Nigerian choreographer Anthony Odey - is a perplexing series of fragments in which an old lady in sheltered accommodation describes seeing a number of gorillas outside her window, intercut with spectacular and vigorous displays of Nigerian dance, accompanied by tribal drumming and continually underscored by a slow heartbeat sound effect. Sean Foley’s A Liability, by contrast, offers short scenes from a potentially longer light comedy about a man who can stop telling the truth. It’s hardly an original premise (the Jim Carrey Liar Liar, for starters, apparently), but curiously the hardly-staged reading of half-an-hour’s worth of material served what there was very well indeed. With its jaunty live guitar breaks between scenes and little songs to move the action along, it worked very well as a half-hour radio comedy.

It’s no surprise that Foley writes a good comedy - he is a comedy writer and performer, after all - although this was less in the clownish vein of The Right Size and more like, well, writing. Directed by Terry Johnson, it is quite easy to imagine A Liability morphing into a slick West End product. This would be a shame, as much of its charm derived from its lo-fi production values, which chimed well with much of the more whimsical comedy - the play opened with its main character (played by Sean Foley himself) being gradually drawn into a conversation with a woman on the tube’s teddy bear.

Of the two pieces, Airbag was the more inconclusive experience. The juxtaposition of the rich imagery of the old woman’s speech - much of it couched in uncomfortably racist terminology concerning the size, physique and colour of the “gorillas” she can see - when interspersed with sequences of African dancers opened up a strand of inquiry which remained explicitly unaddressed throughout. Talking to Leo afterwards, he agreed that the tension was deliberate, and that in the pieces that we saw, it wasn’t directly addressed. In fact, talking to him clarified a lot of things about the piece for me, about which I had previously been unsure. It also offered an insight into how he saw the piece developing. It sounds like it could turn out to be a really exciting project, and quite unlike anything else the Court has staged. Even if it doesn’t get picked up for further development, a small number of people can at least claim to have seen a piece of partially dance-based theatre at the Royal Court - something unimaginable 12 months ago.