The Absence of . . .

‘I love crap TV’, admits NT boss

Nicolas Hytner’s tenure at the National has thus far been marked with a genius for programming. It has put the building right back at the centre of the theatrical map with an intelligent mixture of classic plays, rare revivals, new writing and adaptations: supporting both the unashamedly popular and the spectacularly avant garde. On this basis, one hopes it is Guardian arts correspondent Charlotte Higgins’s journalistic instincts which manage to make the theatre’s forthcoming season sound slightly less than wholly appetising.

Of course, it is silly to second guess what productions are liable to be like before they're actually on – this summer’s St Joan was little short of a revelation for Shaw doubters (myself included). And it’s always possible that David Hare’s new plays will be good. Besides, it’s all a matter of taste, isn’t it? Although the news that ‘Hytner was tight-lipped about [the new Hare]'s content, simply saying: "It will be a very big play"’ does little to allay such fears. It might have been more reassuring if he’d used the word “good” rather than “big” and had not been gritting his teeth at the time.

Making (yet again) the case for the sheer usefulness of the blog in the interminable, ongoing (non-) dispute, Mark Shenton’s report on the same event comes as a great relief, spared, as it is, the need to identify and quickly dispatch a (mainstream) “news” story. Shenton’s position as both a critic and a blogger (a journalist by any other name...) is interesting, particularly since he appears to use it allow him to cast himself outside the media rabble and make perceptively spiky comments about them. Of especial interest is his observation:
‘Nor did [Hytner] rise to the bait thrown down by one journalist to dismiss reality TV casting programmes: “I was totally hooked on The Sound of Music one”, he admitted – but then admitted to “loving crap TV”.’
Evidently the journalist in question had heard tell of Hytner’s near-legendary capacity for thinking off the top of his head with immensely quotable results which find themselves magically taken out of context. Although “NT boss: ‘I love crap TV’” isn’t a bad start, had this been a slow news week.

Edit: Thrillingly, Michael Billington has just filed his own version of the above piece, only an hour after mine, so now we can all indulge in exciting compare and contrast exercises.

Nice things

Meanwhile, in the absence of an end to the blog I started the other day, I shall instead note the welcome return of Geoffrey Chaucer’s blog. In case you haven’t already devoured huge portions of it, its early middle-English pastiche of spam emails in particular has to be seen to be believed.

Meanwhile, Postcards’s Unseemly Puerile Smirking Department wishes to give thanks to the Arcola Theatre for services to ludicrous innuendo in wholly inappropriate circumstances.

Elsewhere on the web, the Department of Theatre in Unlikely Contexts offers you two brief interviews with the excellent Roy Williams and the utterly adorable Jenny Worton.

Also, in case you haven’t been diverted there by Unknown Persons yet, you really must read I Am The Movies - particularly its review of The Devil Wears Prada. Then leave comments begging for more. It’s the only way.

Silly thing

Finally, my ongoing love affair with my blog stat-counter’s Last Ten Referrers function continues apace with the news that someone found Postcards by asking Google:
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows too sexualised?”
The result is the following answer, about five entries down on the first page of results.

“Postcards from the Gods: September 2007
The sexualised politics of incursion and occupation as a language to imagine a real ...... Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 56479 people; 8963 reviews......”
postcardsgods.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html - 198k - Cached - Similar pages

I do hope that the combination of a Shoot / Get Treasure / Repeat review and a Facebook Visual Bookshelf commentary was useful to them. If not, to paraphrase a former Latin master, it is a question which expects the answer ‘no’.

Edit: Although the above search may have just been replaced in my affections by the American who Googled: 'Roger Scruton Metallica'.

Everybody loves a talk show

Just to compromise my journalistic integrity further, I’ve just been made producer of the Finborough Theatre’s excellent FinboroughForum strand of discussions. Expect more on related subjects in weeks to come. And fewer reviews of plays running at that particular theatre.

Strangely, it seems that chatshow time has kicked right off in theatres across town. More centrally, the Soho Theatre has just unveiled its own first series of discussions and interviews under its new Director of Talks, Observer literary editor Stephanie Merritt.

The initial outlook was not promising. On the 16th October we get the opportunity to see “Kerry Katona talk to the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman about her new book and celebrity culture”. Leaving aside the obvious nepotism involved in the choice of interviewer, one idly wonders how much Kerry Kantona actually knows about celebrity culture. Yes, she’s been in it (I was confronted with a picture of her sunbathing topless on holiday only the other day in the News of the World) and written a spill-my-guts autobiography, but does all that exposure mean she’ll have any insight whatsoever? It is almost tempting to find out.

A fortnight later on 30th we are offered “Rude Girls” in which “blogger Zoe Margolis (Girl with a One Track Mind) talks to former Erotic Review editor Rowan Pelling about sex and feminism.” - Former Erotic Review editor and Observer columnist, cynics might note. Again, despite the neatly zeitgeist-grabbing tone, is this really any more than tabloid dross served up with a garnish of middlebrow gloss? Wouldn’t it have been rather more interesting to have the blogger and Pelling on the panel, perhaps supplemented by Lucy Prebble - the excellent young playwright behind the forthcoming adaptation of the Belle de Jour blog for television - being interviewed by someone with much less natural sympathy for their project (Ann Widdecombe or Clare Short spring to mind)? As an aside, you’ll note that the TV adaptation has changed the title to The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. The reason? Apparently ITV didn’t think its audience would understand the French, let alone the allusion.

As it turns out, the overall programme is considerably better than that. Some of the events further along the schedule look at genuinely interesting questions, alongside a selection of neatly chosen literary and artistic interviews. Clearly Merritt is going to offer a real range and depth of field. From a quick perusal of the debates on offer, Playing With Fire (although, boo to David Edgar's crappy play and using it as a title) asks: “Why do writers and artists deliberately cause offence, even when it wins them death threats?” with a panel that promises Nicholas Hytner and Stewart Lee along with a panel of eminent playwrights and writers to discuss the issues. Which sounds like an excellent event.

In “African? Caribbean? What’s the big fuss?” Tiata Fahodzi’s Artistic Director Femi Elufowoju, jr leads a panel including Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje to discuss “the arguably delicate historical relationship which exists between African and Caribbean descendants living in Britain today”. Given that the subject has been the spur to exciting plays by both, and is an area of discussion which terrifies white media pundits, this should be invaluable.

Elsewhere, Paines Plough’s conversational short new play strand, Later, has resumed at the Trafalgar Studios. The next three are on Monday 17 September, Monday 8 October and Monday 15 October. The first is curated by Leo Butler, the current (excellent and lovely) tutor on the Royal Court’s Young Writer’s Programme, and boasts a line-up that hand-picks some of its star pupils featuring new work from Polly Stenham and Alexandra Wood along with Elinor Cook, Elise Hearst and Ben Ockrent. The following two dates promise Murder at Gobbler's Wood - a collaboration between Robin French, Dennis Kelly and Enda Walsh - along with work from Paines Plough’s Future Perfect 2008.

While from last night Hampstead theatre’s Daring Pairings runs until the end of the week with, again, a selection of collaborations between a wide range of writers, which again have an exciting and innovative look to them. I’m going tonight and tomorrow night on unprecedented Blog-press tickets and will report back tomorrow.

Finally, on the subject of chat shows, I was on last week's Culture Clash on 18 Doughty Street talking about the whole of the Edinburgh experience and the current Andrew Marr series on Radio 4 in case you missed (ha!) it.

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