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:

On adaptations and liveness

I had intended to spend today’s entry thinking about comedy. It is my comedy reviews from Edinburgh that are still gazing mournfully up from my computer screen saying, “Hey, what’s wrong with us? Huh?” as I resolutely fail to polish them off and file them. Comedy is bloody hard to write about. The main problem is that it is largely composed of jokes. Jokes are based on some element of surprise. It is the unexpectedness of a punchline - the neatness of the observation - that makes an audience explode into laughter. Therefore, repeating them willy nilly to give some idea of what’s on offer isn’t really an option.

When discussing this dilemma with comics in Edinburgh they agreed, saying that they’d rather not have a single joke from their act repeated in reviews. At the same time, there is often precious little else to discuss. There’s frequently no plot, no characters, no set - there isn’t even lighting or sound very often. So, many of the things that compete for the theatre critic’s attention are removed. It is material and the delivery thereof that is key; and when the material is secret that’s a pretty hard write. There’s also the fact that I’ve not had much practice at comedy reviewing. Although from the dark mutterings about one particular comedy critic in Edinburgh, who shall remain nameless, concerning his apparent laziness in just repeating swathes of a comedian’s set in lieu of much actual review, perhaps inexperience may be just the thing required.

Anyway, I’ve been diverted. Andrew Field, in his latest blog article, attacks a piece by Marcel Berlins from the Guardian in which the latter confesses himself to be disturbed by theatres making adaptations of films. I do understand where Berlins is coming from. It’s not that I think theatre shouldn’t "do" film - Field skewers him on all sensible points on this score - but I do find the current slew of film adaptations surprising.

As I noted yesterday, The Cut has been fairly stuffed with adaptations of European cinema’s best-loved recent transvestite melodramas. Birmingham Rep/West Yorkshire Playhouse boast a forthcoming Emma "Kneehigh" Rice adaptation of Brief Encounter (incidentally, would anyone else describe Emma Rice as having a "lush romantic sensibility"?). Meanwhile, following the success of The Producers, the West End is awaiting the arrival of what feels like dozens of adaptations of films into musicals (to which Berlins does not object) with Broadway’s Hairspray (which has already been transformed back into a film) and Desperately Seeking Susan (turned into a Blondie jukebox musical) opening in the next month.

Granted, Brief Encounter was a film adaptation of Coward’s one-act stage play Still Life in the first place, which maybe legitimises attempts by theatre to reclaim it. But even so, I can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed at the prospect. For heaven’s sake, it’s Kneehigh: I’m not sure Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) will cope well with Mike Shepherd in his y-fronts. Moreover, you’ll note that Still Life and Brief Encounter are different titles. Some acknowledgement, perhaps, that the two items are different products. Berlins is correct to note that theatres, when doing these adaptations, do seem to retain the titles of the plundered artefacts for ease of advertising. After all, if you’re significantly adapting one work with the aim of making something new, shouldn’t you stick your neck out and call the new thing something, uh, new? Or is this the area in which the British finally get all European on an original text and claim some sort of auteur-ship in a way which, by and large, our directors don’t with text-based plays - e.g. Shakespeare - without the addition of "On...", "...Project", "Escaping..." or similar?

In passing, I find fascinating Berlins’s assertion that he doesn’t "object to plays made into films, of which there are thousands, many of them clearly better in their new guise." Which films is he thinking of? Almost without exception, every film that has been made from a play in the past decade has endured reviews which all contain the same chestnut "does not escape its theatrical roots" or some variation thereon - The Libertine, The History Boys, Closer, Some Voices, Mojo, etc. the list just goes on. The only unqualified success I can think of is The Madness of King George [III], and that’s going back a while.

As Field notes: "The original still exists... - Berlins talks as if they've made the Young Vic's version of All About My Mother from the dismembered remains of every print of Almodovar's original film." So why would anyone get antsy about an adaptation? Berlins does so because he thinks it’s not theatre’s job. This point is moot to say the least. Berlins is a (very fine) legal correspondent who happens to like a film and doesn’t want to see it spoiled. He then extends this anxiety well beyond its remit into a plea for theatres to produce more new writing, so it seems silly to engage with him on arguments about what theatre should "stand for". (Field, incidentally, estimates the National’s ratio of new to old plays at 10% new to 90% extant. I am reliably informed that the actual ratio is closer to 50-50).

But the point Berlins inadvertently raises - concerning cinema’s fixity versus theatre’s de facto fluidity - is a fascinating one. One of the only things of value that I found in the recent Roger Scruton book that I read for Culture Clash was his interesting observation that pop music was a medium defined by its fixity. Scruton doesn’t know enough about pop music to make this assertion stick (think of all those gigs, bootlegs, unreleased demos and cover versions before claiming that the pop song is defined by its existence in a single recording), but the fact that pop music, and similarly cinema, can offer something even suggesting a definitive article is a stark contrast with theatre (and by extension sheet music/folk music/opera etc. which only exist properly in performance).

Theatre’s own relationship with fixity is quite problematic. Chris Goode’s description (you’ll have to scroll down - the entry is "Straight back down, y'all, straight back down to earth", on Monday, May 28, 2007) of the technical set-up for Speed Death... in Plymouth is a good example:

'Like most machines, this machine has no intelligence within itself... There is something incredibly estranged about [its] experience. That radio that Gemma turns on in scene 7: that's the DSM, who can just about see and hear the performance, slightly anticipating the motion of Gemma's thumb and saying "Sound cue 18 [or whatever] -- Go!" to the sound operator, who is one floor up and listening to the DSM's voice on headphones, and cannot see and can barely hear the performance, and whose job it is then to press the button that launches the sound effect of the radio which then plays from a speaker in roughly the right area of the stage, at a pre-ordained volume level and for a pre-determined duration. This is what "she turns on the radio" now means.'

And Chris is pretty rigorous about this sort of thing. In Edinburgh one very popular Fringe First winning show I saw was I Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. This consisted of an (un-mic-ed) actress performing in front of, and with, a video film playing on a giant screen that took up the whole back wall of the set. The acting also took place in the face of a loud barrage of pre-recorded sound over which she had to provide the voices for the on-screen actors herself. There was so much that took place on the screen, it often felt that the removal of the sole live element would not have deprived us of very much (even less if there had been a soundtrack). More significantly though, the actress could do nothing to interfere with the speed of the film. If she wanted to go faster, she couldn’t. If she wanted to pause for a laugh, she couldn’t or she would have been out of sync. Even in less extreme examples (the use of recorded music or voiceovers) theatre’s increasing use of technology - wonderful though it can be - is forever chipping away at the idea of liveness, and introducing fixed elements.

The obvious answer, and one to which many theatre-makers are increasingly turning, is to become a kind of "liveness" zealot. In extreme cases - and don’t get me wrong, it’s an aesthetic of which I’m very fond - this sees lighting and sound desks operated on stage, all lights visible and even foregrounded, and an explicit acknowledgement of the stage effects being employed. Even the National is very canny about having its musicians unobtrusively visible as they provide the live incidental music in the Olivier, although it tends to shy away radicalising the same option in the more conventional pros. arch Lyttleton and studio Cottesloe spaces. I’m not sure that it is absolutely necessary for everyone to adopt this approach to forestall the calcification of theatre as a live medium. After all, another growth branch in theatre is the ultra-technical show - think The Elephant Vanishes. There is room for all sorts of different approaches as long as those in control don’t lose sight of what’s important and accidentally create something from which the removal of all human involvement would make no significant difference.

Following yesterday’s brief excursion into my limited acquaintance with Godard, this discussion recalls another of his films: One Plus One - his film of the Rolling Stones recording Sympathy For the Devil intercut with footage of leftist militants - as a fixed article recording the gradual evolution and eventual fixing of another fixed article, all made to look as live and inventive as possible. It is an interesting second front to consider.



Finally, in an extraordinary attempt to make this look like a well thought out and tidy article, I’m currently listening to Love Songs You Can Dance To, the new album by The Popsocks - recorded pop music by Stefan Golaszewski, one quarter of the comedy sketch group Cowards. It’s not live, but it is very funny and sweet. And I'm not going to tell you any of the jokes.

Edit: Mark Shenton's Stage blog today offers an even broader context of how much new work this autumn is an adaptation.