Bačova žena – Nová Budova SND, Bratislava

[seen 15/06/15]

So this is interesting. I went into Bačova žena knowing next to nothing. I knew the title translates as “The Shepherd’s Wife” and that, like Nevesta hôľ, it was directed by SND artistic director Roman Polák.

I came out desperate to know when it was written. 1928, apparently (the same year as Journey’s End, Machinal, Pioneers in Ingolstadt and The Suicide). Apparently the play has some standing in the field of Slovakian dramatic literature, and, perhaps more pertinent to my understanding of this production (or lack thereof), has a considerable stage history, with productions exploring everything from and ethnographic to “symbolic pure, aesthetically clear emphasis” stagings. I would say Polák’s current production errs more to the latter end of this spectrum.

But. What was most fascinating to me here was just how much I Could. Not. Read. This. Production. Don’t get me wrong, I could see the perfectly serviceable English surtitles. I knew what was happening throughout – woman is told her husband (formerly a shepherd) has died abroad, woman marries again, woman's first husband was not dead, comes back to Slovakia, and has bought the estate on which she lived with him, and now still lives with her new husband (also a shepherd). Chaos ensues. She stabs herself and dies. End – No. It was the actual register of the production itself that was somehow just alien enough to completely throw me. I’ll describe it: on the large-ish stage of the studio (think: the Dorfman) there’s a high black wall only a few metres away from the front row, cutting off the whole rear of the stage. The wall is at a slight angle to the raked seating. Across this wall a slope runs down from left to right. There are guillotine-action doors through which the characters enter and exit. Occasionally retractable rungs glide out of the wall, allowing people to climb the wall.

The performers are all dressed in black and white. The men in contemporary shirts and suits, the women in close-fitting versions of peasant or nun costumes, their heads covered with something suggesting again the middle ages or a nunnery. The paintwork on the slope is scuffed and retouched. Is that a deliberate design idea or unconcern? Did it feel a bit wrong, nit-picking about that detail? Absolutely. I have no idea what SND’s annual budget is. How very Western to worry about a paint-job. But then, we do worry in Britain. This scuffed paint really made me think about sets I’d seen recently. The sheer flawlessness of the shiny glass number for the Almeida Oresteia. It’s all very well to bang on about needing everything you see on stage to be deliberate, but my God, how very spoilt we all are. How decadent to have *budget* being part of what we *read* on stage.

However, let’s leave that confusion aside for the time being, because I was being slightly inaccurate earlier. If I’d known where I was meant to be with the play, then I think I’d have known where I was meant to be with the production. And I did not know. You’ve read the précis, right? The language (at least in translation – so this could be no indication) seemed frank and without subtext. People explained what was going on to each other. The characters move the plot along in front of your very eyes, maybe only ever one step away from actually saying “Wouldn’t it be awful if [thing that happens next] were to happen”. And, for all my scepticism, I did find the honesty about how plots work quite refreshing and relaxing. None of that mad English desire to have everyone talk endless about tea with everything actually happening *in subtext*. Nah. “How do you know your husband died? You never closed his eyes yourself” is what we’ve got here. (Truly, a proper *translation* into the correct period English would have that line as: “Oh dear, Eva, you seem to have forgotten to pass me the marmalade. Don’t worry, I’ll get it myself now...”.)

[the acting, from what I could tell – and I was doing a lot of surtitle reading, don’t forget, so I wasn't always looking at it – was actually very fine. Committed, convincing, never less than entirely watchable...]

But, quite aside from production, dialogue and plot, there’s *meaning* to contend with. What the hell is the play *for*? Why’s it been written? This is something that’s been discussed a fair bit over the last two days, and the inescapable conclusion seems to be just a complete ideological divide between people who think what it says is beautiful, and people who think what it says is actually rather sexist and reactionary. The ending of the play essentially feels instructional. That titular shepherd’s wife, Eva, takes her own life, seems to be broadly smiled upon as a course to take – a lot like Luise Miller’s poisoned lemonade honourable suicide in Kabale und Liebe, a bit like Hedda’s tragic? romantic? pragmatic? desperate? suicide... *Obviously* this is problematic. Like, the poor woman has done *nothing wrong*. There are characters in drama who murder their children and get off lighter than this. She kills herself because she remarried after she was told that her husband was dead. And then he turns out not to be. Frankly, husband number one is a complete prick from the word go anyway, as is husband number two. In terms of where sexual politics are in the world of the play, the most telling scene is perhaps the one where the two blokes meet up to have a chat about which of them the wife should now live with. The wife is not invited to their little chat. I mean, really...? And all this is staged without irony. Or apology. Or any internal self-critique.

The programme of the Festival has this to say in the play’s defence: “This perfectly concentrated tragedy of this Slovak classic has inspired generations of dramatists... This intimate chamber drama features inherent encrypted archetypal elements, the characters are like cut-outs from ancient tragedies or the Bible. The potential of the dramatic template is still a potential discovery for the wider European cultural area.”

And, you know, I feel genuinely sad that I’m on the other side of this mental fence where I just can’t quite do the ideological gymnastics necessary to get over or around the fact that the basic deliberate premises and trajectories of the play are pretty much diametrically opposite to mine. At no point was I bored watching, I don’t even think I could say I disliked it. But at the same time, I was more troubled by- than at home to- the ideas.  I think "the wider European cultural area" might be best advised to ignore this "dramatic template".

We Want You To Watch – National Theatre, London

[seen (in preview) 11/06/15]

In publicity blurb, I think it says that We Want You To Watch is *about* *confronting* *Violent Pornography*. Which sounds like a total laugh, and is obviously excellent marketing copy: I definitely wasn’t worried about going to see it. Nuh uh.

But, no! We Want You To Watch turns out to be about as joyous and life-affirming an experience you can have in a theatre while the world is still in the miserable shape it’s in.

I can imagine that there are CRITICS who are cross about We Want You To Watch [I promise I hadn’t read a single other review at time-of-writing]. PORNOGRAPHY is a BIG SUBJECT. There are ARGUMENTS! There are BINARIES that need to be ORDERED. PROS and CONS which have to be PROPERLY EXAMINED.

We Want You To Watch at once acknowledges that play, which they haven't tried to make, and all those arguments against their not having down so.  Indeed, We Want You To Watch anticipates pretty much every argument against it. And also the arguments that people might expect the piece itself to make.  And while it does put information on stage, tonnes of it, it does so playfully, sincerely, insincerely, and playfully again. It is, in short, theatre.

But it’s also A PLAY with A PLOT! Sort of. In my head, it was sort of about a kind of pair of time-travelling ultra-feminists from the future, or now, and/or not time-travelling at all, who both did and did not live in a consequence free universe with Very Serious Consequences. And it had dancing. And movement. Brilliant movement.

At one point there’s a bit where Queen Elizabeth II does a few-minute-long movement sequence to explain what sex should be like. It is literally the best, most communicative, and *actually moving, beautiful thing* you’ll see on stage all year. Maybe. I thought it was awesome, anyway. Massive respect to every single person who made that moment ever happen, and HAPPEN AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE FFS. I mean, seriously. It would have been great, and brilliant, and accurate, if it had been any female character on any stage anywhere. But this was QEII at the NT. Come on. That’s how you do iconoclasm. (By really *not* taking the piss. And *still* being funny.)

Anyway, enough of die Frivolität.

According to Andrew Haydon’s Stupid Law of The Stage: Whatever Something Says It Is, That’s What It’s Not.  Therefore, while this is nominally a play about pornography – violent pornography – to me it felt more like a play about capitalism, using pornography as a metaphor. (Although, thinking about it, it's also then a play which uses the failure of capitalism as a metaphor to talk about pornography.)

What I think is *brilliant* about the way that this piece operates, is that it makes a virtue of its own inevitable failure. You *can’t* make a play about violent pornography that “succeeds”. What would that endgame even be? And, similarly, the makers* probably attack the positions they assume, maybe even more than they attack pornography itself? [On reflection, probably not, but still, the sense of postitions tabled and then retrenched-from, given almost physical form, is intellectually and viscerally dazzling.]  Moreover, though, the piece doesn’t *really* come out and say either that pornography is *wrong* or that it should be *banned*.  Instead it makes a compelling case that it’s hardly the best thing in the world, and does table the more real worry that we have no idea what the effect of the super-proliferation of it will be on the world.

In this, it’s like the ideal play about capitalism. Yes, maybe even captialism (or pornography) has its moments, but underneath those moments are ongoing, real harm, and they are connected. And, no, of course you can’t really ban it, per se.  Instead of making those arguments, We Want You To Watch *shows* us the better alternatives, and makes us *feel* that possibility. “We’re not ‘Anti-Sex’!” they say at one point. And, no, clearly they’re not. The penultimate scene of the piece – to my mind, at least – starkly evokes a lot of the rest of what’s wrong with the-world-in-which-pornography-exists, and suggests the pretty simple, workable solution of people being nicer to each other.

In Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, Engels proposes that: “The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.”

Such is the argument of We Want You To Watch, with “state power” replaced by “pornography”. It will not need to be abolished, it will wither away. Given *a lot* of other preconditions. But, it’s a hell of a compelling vision.

[We Want You To Watch was made by RashDash – who are usually Helen Goalen and Abbi Greenland – with Alice Birch (usually a writer), Caroline Steinbeis (Director), Oliver Townshend (Designer), Ben and Max Ringham (Music), lighting is by Beky Stoddart and sound Alex Caplen. Adam Charteris, Lloyd Everitt, Bettrys Jones, Helena Lymbery and Peter Marinker also performed, and maybe helped devise as well. I don’t know who did what to make this, I wasn’t there when it was made.]

Bláznove zápisky – Nová Budova SND, Bratislava

[seen 14/06/15]

Do you ever get that thing while watching theatre when your expectations start (unaccountably) high, and the entire duration of the show can be traced as a steadily downwards-moving convex arc? Bláznove zápisky is a physical-theatre/clowning adaptation of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, and, well, let’s charitably suggest that it was suffering *transfer difficulties* *at the very least* on Sunday.

Part of the reason for my high expectations was the collaboration between Kote Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre, Tbilisi, and Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Modena. It’s stupid to generalise about nations’ theatres, I know. But, nonetheless, I *really* like the Georgians, God bless ‘em. Somehow some of the most gifted, dedicated, talented performers I’ve ever seen (based on a sample so small as to be insignificant) hail from the former-Soviet republic. And I suspect, thanks to the work of Romeo Castellucci, I’ve actually seen a lot more Italian performers than I ever think I have.

But anyway, it was not to be. It seemed to start funny-and-charming, coasting on an incredibly high level of good will (and the hope that the previous night’s programming success would be repeated). But, gradually, the charm started to ebb away and the good will with it.

I could note that retaining the incidental detail that Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin’s hated boss is “a Jew” didn’t kick things off too promisingly (unless there’s production context there of which I’m unaware – Jewish director makes political point, for example). Or that, well – ok, this is *obviously* a story about objectification (or at least one could read it that way, in this production that aspect stands furthest out by a country mile), *but* no one had a gun to the head of director Levan Tsuladze *demanding* that he play up to it, did they? Yes, it’s a story about a anti-hero whose male-gaze we follow to the essentially powerless, voiceless woman (sure, she’s his social superior, and he ends up locked in an asylum), but somehow we’re sort of asked to condone his obsessive love here. Are we really meant to root for him in his unreasonable pursuit of this woman?

The company have done a pretty thorough job on transforming the original into their own thing, and for a while some of the physical theatre stage effects work well (although not nearly as well as in the spectacular photographs on the Kote Marjanishvili website and above/below – on tour, they’re much more in the tradition of likeably shambolic than precision-beautiful). Gradually, though, the slightly corrosive, wearying sexual politics, and the dragging out of the narrative do begin to grate. And then grate harder. And then harder still until by the end you’re actually quite cross.

Still, nice pics.

Also, THIS:

Kameň – Nová Budova SND, Bratislava

[seen 14/06/15]

Now here’s an interesting and exciting thing. Kameň is Národné Divadlo, Praha (National Theatre, Prague)’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s Der Stein (The Stone), which I first saw in Ramin Gray’s superb production for the Royal Court, back in 2009 (interesting to re-read that review by six-years-ago me, too. Blimey, I used to elide text and production *a lot*).

Did you see it? Or the original at the Schaubühne? Very briefly: the plot concerns a house in the former East Germany. We see scenes from 1934, 1953, 1993 (and other intermediate years in this production?), as the house is acquired from its Jewish owners by a non-Jewish German family, escaped from to the West, and then returned to post-Mauerfall. Gradually it emerges that the story that Witha has been telling her daughter, Heidrun, and that Heidrun has in turn been telling her own daughter Hannah – that they bought the house to help out their Jewish friends escaping the Nazis, that they weren’t party members, that Witha’s husband Wolfgang *definitely didn’t shoot himself when the Russians entered the town, beating back the Nazis*. That *The Stone* had been thrown through the window of the house by Nazis, not by mistake by Germans thinking that Jewish people still lived there.

Again, the title of this festival – Eurokontext – couldn’t be more apt. It’s properly fascinating to sit in Slovakia, watching Czechs, perform a German play, wrestling with the communist and Nazi past. There are already so many layers right there. Czechoslovakia’s shared history, Slovakia’s horrifying deal with Germany to *pay the Nazis* for every Jew they deported from Slovakia to the death camps, their time all together behind the Iron Curtain. The cognitive dissonance of watching a foreign play in *the wrong* foreign language.

And, fascinating again, how the changed context – from a habitual stamping ground and my native language at the Royal Court to an entirely unfamiliar language of which I know about five words (two of which are National and Theatre) – but maybe also the intervening six years, made such a massive impact on what I thought the play was about. Six years ago the thing that really made an impact on me was a story about the Germans lying to themselves about their Nazi past. (Exactly a month after I posted that review I went to Berlin for the first time.) Now, while *obviously* that is something that happens in the play – and is the Big Reveal (but not big surprise) of the play – on second viewing, in 2015, it feels secondary to a lot of the other levels happening here... Michal Dočekal’s production is about as different from Gray’s as it’s possible for two productions of the same play to be. Here’s the UK one. Just look:

The genius of Ramin’s concept was that (as far as I remember) no one could enter or leave that white box stage(?) once the play had started. Moreover, there were no costume changes. Period was evoked (as far as I remember) by *context* and maybe a bit of age-acting. But each character was dressed as if frozen in time, but doomed to play out whole different scenes from that one vantage point. Dočekal’s version irons all this out, having entrances, exits, different costumes for different time periods, etc. Similarly, the set for this Czech version is the exact opposite of a plain white box, it is ornate, dark, shimmering in places with burnished gold. It’s like a mansion designed by Klimt. In concessions to non-naturalism, the back wall of this echoey hall moves backwards at one point, and then forwards – past its original position – later, pushing the performers almost to the edge of this notional room. In my review of Ramin’s production...

[and, yes, I hate it when other critics compare one production through the lens of another, but, here, I’m afraid it’s also exactly how I watched the play. And at least I have the space to unpack the impulse, right? So it doesn’t turn into one line saying: “Ramin Gray’s production was better/worse/too-different-to-compare...”]

Anyway, in my review of Ramin’s prodution I suggested that it’d have been nice to have a bit more of an accretion of stage mess. At the time I was still very much in love with Felicitas Brucker’s staging of Hamlet is Dead... and immoderately wanted to see that aesthetic applied *everywhere* (as it happens, Gray, with Ravenhill, did exactly that a month later with Over There – what a great month or so, incidentally, that was at the Royal Court...). Anyway, Dočekal’s version does indeed have mess, although, in keeping with the aesthetic, it’s dry mess: masonry, cardboard boxes, and a steady fall of papers, or leaves, or ashes from the flies, and it works well enough – the papers/leaves/ashes especially, for all that they might represent – but I feel six years on I should at least tell Ramin he was right all along.

What Dočekal’s production (or watching it in Slovakia, or watching it performed by Czechs, or watching it for a second time, or watching it six years older, or watching it with a terrible Tory government in Britain) made much more vivid to me, is how this is not just a play about the Nazis and Germany and denial, but also how much it is about class. I think the most chilling thing anyone’s said to me all year was during my interview with Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hillje at the Gorki when one of them matter-of-factly explained, “well, of course, *here* we gassed our whole bourgeoisie”. They weren’t making light of the Holocaust *at all*. But they were presenting it in stark class terms. Of course Berlin had “Aryan” bourgeoisie and a Jewish proletariat too, but in Hitler’s the rhetoric was very much about “Rich Jews”: *They* have more than *you*. Why should *they* get all the good stuff? *They are crippling *our* country... Further examples can be found in today’s Daily Mail relating to asylum seekers, those on benefits, etc. but the very fundamental difference between Hitler and the Daily Mail was that he was fostering upwardly-directed class resentment. Rather than getting the lower middle classes to turn on the very poor, he directed their anger, and the anger of the workers, upwards against a “Jewish banking conspiracy”. His rhetoric probably a lot closer to Plan B’s Ill Manors than either would be happy about, I suspect (substitute “Jew-” for “rich-” and you’ve got half the ethos right there...). They were the National *Socialists*, after all.

So what you get from the interplay of characters The Stone is a much more complicated analysis than I first gave it credit for. Wolfgang acquires his Jewish superior’s house, and probably also betrays his plans to leave to his local SA or SS group. While doing so, Mieze, the wife of the (unseen) Jewish boss – in this production – is older than Witha, knowing and even slightly superior in attitude. Dignified, but still arch. Not just sympathetic, but also slightly snobby. It’s quite a brilliant way to play those scenes. It is then Heidrun’s sharp-elbowed middle-class determination to hang on to property that also resonates. And the legal backing by which this can be achieved – turfing the East German Stephanie and her grandfather out of their house because in reunified Germany she has all the correct paperwork.

If anything, watching here in ex-Czechoslovakia, what you really feel most – even after two dictatorships – is the extent to which the failure of communism is a catastrophe. (Don’t worry, I’m not all misty-eyed for secret police and no elections, although, Christ, given Britain’s electorate, it isn’t half tempting...) But, yes, if anything this version of the play shows history, not as extraordinary events, but a series of small but relentless instances of families just looking out for their own, whatever the cost.

Prečo Eva – Nová Budova SND, Bratislava

[seen 13/06/15]

Following on from the mad Slovakian epic, Nevesta hôľ, Ubik Group from Théâtre de Liège’s Pourquoi Eve vient-elle chez Adam ce soir? is the perfect theatrical palette cleanser. Short (1hr), light, fluffy, funny, stylish, sweet, but with enough content to keep the brain properly engaged, it’s exactly what you need after 3hrs30 of *proper*. (It would do brilliantly in a late-ish slot at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Fringe, for example.)

The set-up feels quite familiar: we the audience are seated (in the SND’s *brilliant* studio space) facing a small room. It has a fourth wall with mirrored windows, so we gaze at our dim, slightly warped reflections waiting for the thing to start. Lights up inside the box reveal a man sitting in a cluttered room, the walls absolutely plastered with photos, posters, newspaper articles. From my seat I can only see the right hand wall: a picture of Lenin, a poster for Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Stage Left, indeed. Apparently on the other side are Nixon, Americans, etc.

The man’s thoughts speak to us in voiceover. He’s telling us that he likes cold coffee but also hot coffee. We’re instantly reminded of the French language’s ability to make the most banal thought sound like elegant philosophy. Indeed, I do wonder if a lot of the charm and fun of this piece for me is just the simple mismatch between the Pooterish, pedantic English voice reading the surtitles in my head, and the cool, louche Frenchman speaking. Whatever it is, it’s very funny.

Also: arty. We’ve got the alienated performer behind a see-thru fourth wall (cf., oh, so many things), and also the recorded voiceover – later, also mimed to, and then sometimes replaced with microphones and live speaking (in a theatre. People actually speaking live! Imagine!) – reminding us, perhaps, of Susanne Kennedy’s glorious oeuvre. The programme notes told us that it is inspired by the works of Michail Bulgakov, Woody Allen, Andrej Tarkovsky and Ingrid Bergmann [sic – and, given an obvious allusion to The Seventh Seal, wrong]. It’s a great reading list, but not one where I’m going to get many trainspotting points for picking up the references, annoyingly. That said, having known the list going in – and for some reason, having mentally added David Lynch to it – it also occurred to me that it would be especially funny if what the voiceover of the man’s thoughts was saying was taken from the neurotic thought-processes of a Woody Allen routine. Something like “Jean Luc-Godard’s Annie Hall”...

There isn’t *a plot* so much as a series of routines. A woman turns up (set, written and directed by Cyril Aribaud, Emilia Tillberg, Ya’l Steinmann, Anja Tillber and Sylvain Daï – also performed by the last two) and quirky, perky, movie-referential dialogue ensues. As does a rather lovely Bollywood pastiche dance sequence. There is, in short, *much silliness*.

In terms of *analysis*, as you might have guessed, I haven’t got a lot. A motif that did catch my attention was repeated references to an owl. This is probably lifted from something else, that I haven’t seen – I was hoping Twin Peaks, but probably not.

The ending is strangely beautiful and calm. Having earlier twice discussed the a theory of Timothy Leary (“Did you know you have 6 to 12 minutes of brain activity after everything stops? A kind of a conscious dream. It’s infinitely longer than one second in the state of awakeness. For example, I wake up at seven, then I go back to sleep and have intricate dreams that seem hours long. Then I wake up again and it's one minute past seven. That few minutes of brain activity could be your entire life. You are that old man who’s looking back...”) at the close, the man, Adam, offers his own kind of brain-life at the point of death soliloquy:

“I walk through the door

A big owl is watching me

I’m in a forest and there’s nothing

No plot

no conspiracy

no secret

no universal truth

no ending

no illusion

no reality

no dream

nothing

Only the forest and the owl

That’s it, in the end

nothing else

I’m walking and then

I can’t hear my footsteps any longer”

FIN

Nevesta hôľ – Nová Budova SND, Bratislava

[seen 12/06/15]

There are *at least* two reviews to be written here. I’ll do my best.

Ok, so, the story of Nevesta hôľ is, I think, something like this: boy (Libor) and girl (Zuna) meet in childhood. Boy moves away(?), grows up, and is appointed game warden of some Slovakian forest back where Girl lives. Girl is all betrothed to some guy. Oh, wait, to several guys? She’s already married? Oh, her betrothed is already married? I. Just. Don’t. Know. Anyway, in spite of all these confusing odds, boy and girl seem to get together. They share conversations about their confusing pasts, in even more confusing flashback. But her wild nature is all troubling to him. Then she throws him over for some masculine essentialist. He’s sad, of course, but imagine his surprise WHEN SHE TURNS OUT TO ALSO BE A WEREWOLF!!! AND THIS IS BEFORE THE INTERVAL!!!!!

František Švantner’s 1946 novel, The Bride of the Ridge, lovingly, painstakingly adapted and directed by SND (Slovenské Národné Divadlo/National Theatre of Slovakia) artistic director Roman Polák, seems to be a bewildering beast of of a thing. The adaptation runs at 3hrs30 and, I’m guessing (no, I haven’t read the book. It isn’t even translated into English as far as I can see) it runs pretty closely to the original. Apparently Švantner (b. 1912, d. – a year younger than me – 1950) was the Slovakian García Márquez; a magical-realist, whose prose was inextricably tied up in the soil and landscape of his homeland.

A WEREWOLF, THOUGH!!! SHE TURNS OUT TO BE AN HONEST TO GOODNESS WEREWOLF!!! Actually, though, I completely bought into that. No problem. If you can’t discern a metaphor on stage when you see one, you might as well go home now.

Now, English-me did start off with some reservations about the implied gender-politics of the thing. There’s only one named female character in the play. Every other woman on stage is defined as “Miller’s Wife” or “Libor’s Mother”, or, in an instance which jumps the equality shark “Sister of Shepherd’s Wife”. Know your place, ladies! In strict fairness, though, the naming of the blokes is pretty scattergun, some having names, and some having jobs. Four war-happy Russian rapist soldiers all get their own names and titles (“Earl Boris” and so on...).

But, in the scheme of the play, is Zuna not far and away the most realised, powerful character on the stage? And, more than this, beyond the descriptions of her “wide hips” and “full breasts”, isn’t she really just a big old stand-in for Slovakia herself? Zuna’s so tied to the nature, the forest... What’s that thing she says about ugly badgers?

“Even an ugly badger will awaken joy in you if you understand its anxiety and help it.”

Exactly. Isn’t it borderline madness to try to object to the reactionary characterisation of a woman who says things like that and wrestles naked in the forest with the boy-werewolves?

I’m glad you mentioned the naked wrestling...

No. Silly. Don’t be. Yes, ok, in strictly modern terms, maybe it’s not unproblematic, and if you were so-minded, you could find the gender essentialism and the female bits of the stage nudity (if anyone’s actually naked, I thought I spotted some flesh-coloured underwear) tricky. But on the other hand, isn’t it all pretty equal, gung-ho wrestling madness fun, while still set in something recognisably truthful about mid-C20th Slovakia’s (obviously) patriarchal society?

What about the anti-Semitism?

You know what, I think that reveals more about you than the play.

That’s a serious charge. There’s only one character with a Jewish-sounding surname, he’s the one who’s depicted as caring only about money – pathologically so...

And you associate that with Judaism?

No. I associate it with anti-Semitic tropes, and note that Slovakia has a long and troubling history with anti-semitism (this news report from the year the novel was published). It’s not impossible that they’re staging a piece of national art that has an anti-Semitic stereotype in it...

Well, thank God we British would never do anything like that.

It’s true, you do see things in starker relief when you’re not at home. Perhaps we’re all too used to the domestic racism of our own countries to question it strongly enough.

Ok, so, yes, it *might* have a minor character who conforms to anti-Semitic stereotypes, *if the character is even meant to be Jewish*. He might be an Austrian stereotype for all you know. Or wherever Slovakia’s equivalent of Scotland is. Also, what about that bit where the hero, Libor, refuses to go along with the villagers’ plan to kill him? Can we maybe stop worrying about a national culture you don’t really understand, but seem a bit willing to point fingers at, and talk about the thing *as theatre*.

Alright. It’s too long. And the staging is pretty old-fashioned.

Oh, fuck off. You *liked* it. And the staging reminded you of virtually everything you’ve seen at the NT in GB.

Ok, yes I did. It’s definitely maybe half an hour too long, and there are a few bits – particularly the ending, which felt more like a shrug, in terms of delivery – that could have been tweaked, but yes, in spite of myself, I did rather like it.

Why even have it be “in spite of yourself”? It’s a fine, fine staging. The main stage of the Slovakian National Theatre looks like the Olivier, (but bigger?) and Pavel Borák’s minimalist set – a raked square sloping down toward a kind of onstage lake or river, all in black – looks like, well, like an opera of King Lear on the heath, or something. Indeed, there was something about the whole that made it feel almost like it might have been a prequel to King Lear (it would certainly explain his children, although not how he comes to be king).

Can I just mention the recorded howling?

I LOVED the recorded howling. When Zuna goes off into the forest, and we discover she’s a werewolf, or some sort of elemental spirit of the forest, the nation, or something, there are actual, full-on, amplified recorded wolf howls! It’s properly great. If you’ve got your disbelief suspended, honestly it’s terrific fun.

But what about the story. Surely it meanders a bit *too* much? I mean, given a decent dramaturg or script editor, surely the whole thing could have been trimmed by about an hour without losing anything invaluable. Various minor, illustrative scenes could have been cut or condensed, it wasn’t even always clear where the story was going.

But didn’t you love that? I know it’s not the trendy thing to talk about “story” any more, but given that we’re both English, and therefore addicted to narrative, didn’t you find it geniunely exciting that from some point in the second hour onwards, you no longer had any idea where this story was going. What it was even a story *about*. You didn’t recognise the shape of the story any more. When was the last time you can honestly say that happened? You thought it was going to be this boy-gets-girl thing, then you think it’s maybe a boy-loses-girl-to-rival thing, and then, once she’s a werewolf, all bets are off.

But all those flashbacks! I mean, it didn’t help that often you didn’t even know who was in what time-stream. It’s not like they were properly flagged up or anything...

Pfft. You recognised them well enough to call them flashbacks. And didn’t the way that a flashback could walk on in the same way that a bloke in the next room might excite you? And anyway, what flashbacks they were! There’s a scene where we see, what? Zuma’s conception? Her mother is raped by four Russian soldiers all of whose throats she then rips out...

Do we trust stories men write where women are forever getting raped?

No. I’ve read that article and worried over it considerably. On the other hand, do we trust stories that somehow gloss over this horrific reality? It doesn’t take much historical knowledge to realise that Slovakia has been invaded repeatedly. It’s so central in Europe, that it feels as if the armies of much larger nations (Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary, the list goes on and on...) have been tramping back and forth through here from time immemorial. And armies rape. It’s just a hideous fact. It seems slightly futile to object to this fact being written into a novel that is essentially dealing with a national identity. The way that this fact of life is woven into the fabric of a society is all the more fascinating and chilling for its being a commonplace. Yes, it’s written by a man, but it’s hardly invented by the author. I would argue that it’s most definitely *not* included to be “entertaining”, and it doesn’t happen on stage.

You’re going to claim this as a triumph of feminism soon...

You know...

Seriously?

Well, ok, granted it’s written, adapted, and directed by men. I’d argue that even if it appears to be Libor’s story – and the title in English problematically puts Zuma in the title, but calls her the Bride of the Ridge (the ridge being a geographical feature). I’d argue that its primary sense – that this is about a woman whom people want to marry – gets subverted into a literal sense that she is married already to the ridge itself. Which seems much more like equal marriage than the hereosexual religious version...

Is this still a useful discussion of the piece?

I have no idea. It’s very long now, though.

Epic. Inconclusive, a lot of fun in places, but maybe too much effort?

The play or the review?

Ta-dah!

This is the most widely used publicity shot. Hmmm.

Celibát – Nová Budova SND, Bratislava

[seen 12/06/15]

Ok, so I’m going to cheat. “The Celibate”, presented as the opening piece in Slovakia’s EuroKontext.sk festival, is in fact Ewald Palmetshofer’s Die Unverheiratete (from *German* to English, interestingly, “The Unmarried”), which I saw at Theatertreffen in May. And I don’t intend to re-review it *fully*, five weeks later.

What is fascinating, especially for a festival that has “context” in the title, is the extent to which exactly the same play and production changes, watching it in the main house of Slovakia’s National Theatre (*very* similar to the Olivier, which in turn was modelled on Epidaurus, right?). There was also the fact of my sitting in the fourth row from the stage here, instead of the back row of the gallery as I was at Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

The main effect I noticed of location on play is/was to do with the subject. Palmetshofer’s text relates the story of three generations of Austrian women: grandmother, mother, and daughter. In the last days of WWII, the grandmother betrays a deserting German soldier to the police (or SS?) and he is executed. The play intercuts her trial – told Martin Crimp-style, by a chorus of four more women – with her granddaughter telling us about various sexual encounters and her reading of a notebook the grandmother kept (during? After?) the trial; before the granddaughter’s mother was even born. There are also scenes of dialogue with the old woman in a nursing home.

Watching in Berlin, I suggested that the grandmother’s crime didn’t seem all that important in the grand scheme of the crimes being committed around her. Berlin isn’t a city that lets you forget what happened between 1933 and 1945 in Germany (and, from 1938, in Austria). In Slovakia – despite its own horrific war record – it feels much more possible to view the crime without the baggage of watching in Hitler’s former capital.

There was also the context of having seen the play before, and recently. As a result, this time I didn’t worry so much about trying to catch every surtitle in order to follow the story. And, interestingly, now knowing the basic shape of the play, its basic (if still slightly ambiguous) storyline, it was a much more relaxing experience. The brilliant and beauty of Robert Borgmann’s staging remained, but this time it felt possible to appreciate it much more fully. And also to rethink whether I really had a problem with the piece’s presentation of women. In this, it was interesting how much of an effect being close to the front had. Rather than *women*, one saw *individuals* much more clearly. Being able to see the faces of the four chorus members (they wear heavy whiteface make-up, and so presented almost no data to the back row of Haus der Berliner Festspiele) felt particularly like it changed one’s relationship to what they were doing. Much more detailed and less conceptual or impersonal. It’s interesting that, depending on one’s seat, both versions of this subjective reality feel absolutely true. Something we don’t get to discover all that often.

 So, yes, an apt start for a festival named for *context*.

[oddly, the different seat also completely inclined me toward different photos to most accurately reflect what I thought I'd just seen.  Really interesting.]

d(ARE) / Here Be Lions – Print Room at the Coronet, Notting Hill

[seen 10/06/15]

Written for Exeunt.


Removed due to threat of legal action.

.

Image of an Unknown Young Woman – Gate Theatre, London

[seen 08/06/15]


In terms of timing, the press night of Image of an Unknown Young Woman couldn’t have been more stark. All through Monday social media was ablaze with *that video* of the black female teenager* being violently assaulted by a white policeman in America.

Elinor Cook’s play concerns a video of the titular young woman in a yellow dress (an unexepected call-back to Icke’s Iphigenia on Friday) being shot by an unknown policeman during an anti-government protest. The first scene is set in Socialmedialand, with unknown, unnamed Twittrists carrying on as ppl on Twitter do: compulsively sharing, telling each other off for sharing, telling each other off for not sharing, pulling rank and slyly putting down each others’ ‘authenticity’ and credentials of their ‘clicktivist’ caring. Etc. It’s brilliant precisely because it is so entirely correct in every detail, and every bit as fucking maddening.

In Chris Haydon’s staging/On Fly Davis’s set, the Twitterasts loom out of the audience, divided into traverse along the Gate’s long, narrow, black space, with a raised catwalk/gantry. This is a stark world of metal railings and black-clad figures all around us and mostly above us; bearing down on us.

The next few scenes introduce us to some revolutionaries, the young man who shot the video and his girlfriend, and a wealthy Englishwoman who is sponsoring a young boy in the country where the revolution is taking place. There are occasional additions by the figures denoted as “Chorus” in the text – an address by the leader of the country gripped by protests, for instance – these few situations cycle through a period of, what? A day? A few weeks? Different timescales loop and blend seamlessly so that we’re never concerned with the logic, as much as the horrific wider reality.

This is the horrible brilliance of both script and production; by never pinning down a particular regime to take to task, we in the audience think of all of them: Burma, Uganda, Liberia, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran, America (add your own). There are descriptions of political protest, of sudden chance captures on mobile phone (or, previously, film) of the moment which can tip protest into furious revolution, compellingly horrible, the descriptions of state-sanctioned torture, murder and forced confessions to restore the status quo, and perhaps even more troubling, these interspersed scenes of calm where a rich English woman calmly, concernedly hopes that sponsoring a child in this failed state will be helpful...

The staging – often high-engergy shouting and stamping about – conveys angst and violence more than adequately; over and over again your nerves are jangled by the possible horror you’re about to witness, and by the greater horror of the fact that you’re relieved when the paid performers, who are only pretending anyway, just stop doing that and let you relax again. Irrespective of how you feel about Cameron’s Britain, the tension between our privileged lives, the calm streets outside, and the ongoing, ever-present torture and murder going on beyond our shores, is harrowing.

[Perhaps, politically, it is a flaw not to show the comfortable lives of the affluent middle classes in that country untroubled by the brutal regime, and, similarly, to not highlight the lives of those in Britain who do suffer in this way, and without even as much hope of a revolution to emancipate them. But this is more a play about Western impotence in the face of brutality abroad, I think.]

It is a brilliantly framed set of questions though: the facile nature of Twitter coverage, the absolute need for the rest of the world to see what’s going on, what’s going on not actually being a beautiful, photogenic woman being shot at random, but systematic oppression. And then, on to violence. The ever-present, biggest question for “bleeding heart liberals”: where is their privileged pacifism getting the actually oppressed? At the same time, everything we know about recent revolutions ending first in horrific bloodshed, and then with one corrupt regime being replaced by another, often worse, regime. The complacency of this viewpoint. The impossibility of knowing what to do, at the same time as not being able to actually do anything.

Meanwhile, the guy who shot the film – of, who? a girl he was having an affair with at college away from his partner? – his flat’s raided, his girlfriend’s sexually assaulted, they’re taken away to some state torture dungeon, a filmed confession is forced out of him, his girlfriend is raped? Murdered? He’s executed after the confession?

Back in Britain the nice lady who’s been helping out the rich lady shows her the scars from where she was tortured, and raped, back in this failed state. Later she plays her a recording of a man being tortured, murdered? in prison. The rich lady is worried that her money is being used to arm “terrorists”. The nice lady wants to make damn sure she knows what the “terrorists” are fighting. She wants more money for them. And through all this, one woman just wants to find her mum, who went out shopping, and had to go through the protesting. It’s a wretched, wretched situation and the play offers no solutions. How could it? It’s brilliant at confronting us again with the realities, however. And it feels like a timely reminder after all the post-election depression that’s been flying around.

As a production, it’s spare and stylish. Mostly dressed in/painted black, repeated yellow motifs – graffiti, balloons, paper, cloth ribbons – are deployed throughout, along with angry bursts of electro/metal/etc. music. The cast is pretty bloody good, and the casting – effortlessly multi-racial – makes a score of brilliant political points, both off-stage to the British theatre industry (Yes: this is what Britain looks like. Please cast accordingly.) and on stage (Yes: these conditions are probably facing someone of every colour on this stage; have a think about that, please). It’s also a bloody big cast for the Gate (9), which is also exciting. It’s very tempting to say that it’s the sort of show that Haydon’s entire time at the Gate thus far has been heading towards. A pretty much perfect synthesis of his on and off stage political convictions.

More than this, though, is the exciting discovery (discover for me, anyway), of Cook as a writer. In many ways, because of the utilitarian playing style (of which I wholeheartedly approve, this isn’t an attack), the writing doesn’t get *shown off* in quite the same way that a more stately production at, say, the Donmar might. But this is furiously good writing, I think. From the way it captures different rhythms and registers of speech, to its structural poise, it’s a very very elegant bit of work. You’re reminded of both Pinter’s political plays (over and over again of One For The Road with all the official language of sanctioned torture and rape), and somehow Caryl Churchill’s early work – that still-too-rare sense of middle-aged women as active subjects, and somehow, too, that ranginess of outdoors that I associate more with the plays of the late seventies – Howard Barker, Churchill, Brenton, et. al. The ending/s are a bit too coup-y for me to feel able to spoiler, but, again. Boom. Lovely touches.

So, yeah. Bloody good production, bloody good play, bloody good performances, not a lot of bloody fun to watch, let alone think through. But important, though, I think. Worth putting yourself through. As a companion piece to Violence and Son, which the other half of the press saw on Monday night; well, I’d recommend leaving more than 24 hours between the two unless you really enjoy despairing of the world.


* re: “black female teenager” – this originally read “young black woman” – largely to echo the title of the play. After a discussion with a director friend (not white, since you ask), I’ve changed it, because: “Black female bodies have long been sites of trauma, carrying not only the weight of the past, but present stereotypes that dehumanize and sexualize young girls before they even hit puberty. Casebolt did not think he was restraining a helpless teenaged girl, but a "black woman," with all the stereotypes and stigma that includes. This, it seems, was justification enough for her treatment”. I can’t use “girl”, because there’s an equally problematic history there, not least related to feminism. So “black female teenager” it is.

Violence and Son – Royal Court, London

[seen 09/06/15]

The contrast between Gary Owen’s recent Iphigenia in Splott and Violence and Son is stark. The former leaves you, yes, wrung out, but angry and energised. The latter leaves you, what? It feels like the only real response is head-in-hands concern at the sheer bloody awful state of men in British society.

There are two ways to write about V&S, one would be to not give away the plot points, to dance around what happens in the piece, and to try to have a discussion about the issues it raises and the means by which it raises them, while somehow not saying what they are. I imagine most of the *proper* reviews will have done that. [Billington, probably.] Since I’m not bound by a word-count, or an obligation to do it *properly*, I’m going to say exactly what happens after this photo...

In the first half, 17-year-old Liam (David Moorst) returns home to his dad’s working class Welsh flat – a beautifully realised low-walled circular pen, channelling Miriam Buether’s set for Cock – with his friend Jen (Morfydd Clark). He is dressed as Matt Smith’s Dr Who, and she’s dressed as Amy Pond (notably, in the policewoman stripogram(sp?) outfit Pond is wearing when we first meet her as an adult). He’s edging round that staple of teen rom-coms, the best friend who wants to be something more. The corner Jen’s been put in by Gary Owens is that she’d quite like to go out with Liam, but already has an attractive, rugby-player boyfriend with whom she has less in common. And is hmming and haaing. Their awkwardness is soon compounded by the sound of Liam’s dad Rick (Jason Hughes) (or “Violence”, “Vile” for short) and Suze (Siwan Morris) having sex in the next room. Unlike witty, geeky, apparently gentle Liam, Violence is hard-drinking, frank, sexist and, well, has a reputation for violence. The first *obvious* #TalkingPoint is that he recently broke the jaw of a “retard” (Rick, p.49)/“man with learning difficulties” (Liam, p.50/Jen p.51), who had been touching up women (some “really young, like fifteen”) in local pub the York. A local pub which has a reputation for women being sexually assaulted generally. The first issue on the table is a standard response to violence solving nothing, and why didn’t you just call the police? To which the response is asking Jen whether she ever calls the police when she gets groped in the York. Liam’s, almost undetectable response is to wonder why women would even go there, and Jen’s response is the free drinks. It’s a miserable and grubby picture of the world, where men are somehow helpless slaves to their misogyny, and – the implication is – women put up with it in the name of enough free booze to forget it. “Nice guy” Liam’s instinct to blame the women is no less troubling than Rick’s carefree world of jaw-breaking without due process.

#TalkingPoint number two arrives in the form of a scuffle in which Liam, having wound Rick up (not an excuse, let alone me victim-blaming, but you want context, right?), gets shoved into a wall, and ends up concussed and bleeding. The alacrity with which Suze believes Rick’s somewhat toned down version of events, contrasts with Jen’s excellent but impracticable advice that Liam should walk out of this clearly abusive relationship right now.

Calling the third major plot point a talking point would feel entirely disgusting – although, at the same time, given *that this is a made up story* (important to remember with plays, no matter how much they reflect the real world), and one that feeds the bit of theatregoing culture of treating everything as a #talkingpoint (as opposed to the ineffable, the sublime, and art which passeth all understanding), it would also be true. Liam rapes Jen.

He’s been thumped. They’re edging toward a relationship. She accepts to stay the night and suggests it would be nice to “cwtch” (Wales’s favourite word: “cuddle”) before they go to sleep. He then, in the morning, claims he didn’t hear her say no. Twice. We might even believe that he honestly didn’t hear. Which is no excuse. But we also see his mortifictation. (These really are bloody excellent performances. This is yer proper realism at its best. The sort of thing where you really forget that it’s not real, and instead of thinking about the “acting” start actually analysing bodily and facial tics to see if *a character* is lying. I mean, it really is beautifully done. Hats off to Hamish Pirie and his cast here.) Maddeningly, though, when Jen asks him to at least apologise, Liam turns on her and makes the age-old, sickening male response that she was somehow responsible. It feels like a cruel thing for the playwright to make him do. We might have hoped for more from Liam. Although, cleverly, I think, the signs were all there. The bitterness, the chippiness, the resentfulness; and yet the judgemental attitude (cf. “why do women go to the York?”, not “why are men apparently incapable of not sexually assaulting women?”). And, of course we can see the parallels between his own situation – his own powerlessness, and his own victim role; even his in-denial-ness – and the violence that he has now committed. What's much much more frightening is the way that Jen has already, at eighteen, internalised an entirely unspoken threat of violence, even from this ineffectual, weedy little bloke.  Like, Jesus Christ.  What kind of a hellish world is it where that is instinctive behaviour? (Well, this one. Duh.)

This is a fiercely intelligent play. It might feel perhaps a teeny bit schematic – I guess anything that sets out to explore male violence and rape over the course of 90 minutes using naturalism is going to (real life has an annoying habit of not setting itself out quite so neatly, in terms of themes) – but you can forgive the structural sign-posting for the searching intelligence here. I think it’s also important to at least flag up that this is not a play that seeks to make entertainment out of rape. If one has any belief in theatre as an important part of a society thinking out loud – a tool of democracy and culture – then this play, even though written, directed and designed by men, and with an all-white cast, still feels like an important addition to the conversation.

Perhaps the real brilliance of it is the way that it subtly flags up over and over again just how prevalent misogyny is in our culture. From the superficially sweet off, where Liam is dressed as Dr Who, we are uncomfortably reminded that even with this tea-time favourite, we are still required to politely overlook Stephen Moffatt’s raging sexism, like a Very Drunk Uncle at a wedding. Like Karen Gillen’s first Amy Pond costume – not Jen’s dressing up as her – what even was that? And Liam’s fey “nice guy” persona reminds us chillingly of Elliott Rodger’s murderous, misogynist diaries (digested read: “But I’m such a nice guy, and if women can’t see that and keep going out with assholes instead – the whores – they’ll be sorry”). The final moments, the idea that Rick would threaten Jen out of pressing charges, the father-son not-reconciliation, but instead perhaps symbolic engulfment – the final line, spoken as an embrace, “Daddy’s got you” *obviously* echoing more as a terrible prophecy and comfort – do feel forced. But at the same time, not untrue as an analysis of just how awful a force masculinity is.


Footnotes:

Interestingly, my first point-of-comparison for this play was Jack Thorne’s Stacey, which was also directed by Hamish Pirie, starring, blimey!, Arthur Darvill (who, obviously, played Amy Pond’s husband, Rory, in Dr Who). (Maddeningly, the only review of that show I can find is by the idiot Philip Fisher who, terrifyingly, seems to think that the play was about whether or not the character has murdered someone, not that he’s just raped someone.)

And, *obviously* Doctor-to-be Matt Smith’s (arguably) biggest breakthrough role also took place at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in Polly Stenham’s That Face.

I'm prepared to believe that these facts are entirely incidental.

The Oresteia – Almeida, London

[seen 05/06/15]

[photo by Manuel Harlan, pixelated by me*]

[What follows is one of those cases where form (of play) pretty much entirely dictates form (of review). Inescapably, it seems. This is just how it wanted to be written...]

[probably contains impenetrable spoilers]

“There isn’t one true version. There isn’t. There isn’t one one story – a line of truth that stretches start to end. That doesn’t happen any more, maybe it never happened, but even as I say this now, in each of your minds you create your own versions, different lenses pointing at the same thing at the same time and seeing that thing differently – depends on too much – the day you’ve had, what you feel about your mother, the thought you thought before this one – it all floods in, this thing this whole thing is helpless because your brain creates stories in which it is right.” (p.108; The Oresteia, Robert Icke, cf. Confirmation)

Appendix:

“‘[What do I do?]’ That is the question. It is a question blurted out at a moment of crisis, a question he never meant to ask, at least not aloud. [Orestes, son of the slain Agamemnon, murderer of his mother Klytemnestra], is facing an acute ethical problem. The play is [Robert Icke’s Oresteia]...” (p.1; Theatre & Ethics, Nicholas Ridout)

“Sometimes the commandments of religion seem to come into conflict with other reasons and desires for action. It is at such moments that an ethical crisis occurs. [Icke’s Oresteia] dramatises just such a crisis. [Agamemnon/Klytemnestra/Orestes]’s own ethical judgement seems to be in conflict not only with the judgement of [...] but also with the will of the Gods.” (p.4; Theatre & Ethics, Ridout)

Quotes:

The time of death from Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies.

God Only Knows from Thomas Ostermeier’s Hedda Gabler.

The courtroom exhibits from Katie Mitchell’s Alles weitere kennen sie aus dem kino.

Perhaps that low bass rumble from Three Kingdoms.

Jesus. Those sudden David Lynch/Relocated moments.

“the language is dead” (Icke, p.87) – cf. This is How We Die.

And maybe even a bit of Rupert Goold’s Trial of Judas Iscariot, and Deborah Warner’s Medea.

Even the casting could feel like quotes: Lorna Brown from Alice Birch’s Little Light, Rudi Dharmalingham from Ramin Gray’s The Events and Blanche McIntyre’s The Seagull, Annie Firbank from Ramin’s Golden Dragon, Lia Williams from Rupert’s Earthquakes in London, and then *of course* Angus Wright from *a lot* of Katie Mitchell. (“there has been a creative decision to not assign character names to each actor for this” email Cornershop PR, 05 June 2015 13:30:06.)

***

Ok, let’s do this:

There are a million sound textual reasons to start writing about Rob Icke’s new play, The Oresteia, with the footnotes.  This Oresteia is credited as “a new adaptation” of the Aeschylus, but to be honest, I’d have been just as happy to have accepted the idea that this is a New Play. As at least three different prefaces, introductions, and programme notes point out, the Ancient Greek authors were themselves adaptors, and that all subsequent productions are *versions* anyway. But I’d say, the sheer weight of actual new ideas and concepts, thoughts and, hell, new words that Icke has created here makes this, for my money, a new play.

It is also possibly the best new play I’ve seen this year (or equal best new- anyway). In terms of scale, it is the most impressive new play since Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III. But, Jesus, Andrew, what’s with all this “best” stuff?

In terms of my own interests: it suggests the opening of a new avenue in Britain’s reintegration with Europe. On one hand, a production that (I think) directly quotes from other key European stagings of classics, intelligently, deliberately situating it as part of that lineage; a production of a classic that speaks directly to our own concerns; and yet still, that very English solution, even while creating a brilliant piece of auteur theatre, the real solution lying in (brilliant, incisive) new writing.

It is even a play that acknowledges that I’ll think precisely this, because: “[my] brain creates stories in which it is right”. Indeed, every review you read about this Oresteia will tell you more about its author’s worldview about than the play/production. (Obviously this is true of all reviews ever, but since seeing Chris Thorpe’s Confirmation again last week, the importance of acknowledging this fact has been refreshed in my mind.)

I guess it’s always the case that a “modern dress production” of a classic text always requires a certain level of cognitive dissonance in order to work. But here, I think Icke’s production goes further. In writing in a whole first act which tells the Iphigenia in Aulis story (“adapted from” the relevant bit of Aeschylus’s chorus in the Oresteia, NOT the Euripides, says the PR email), Icke brilliantly psychologizes this 2,500-year-old story, at once giving us modern warfare, the latest euthanasia drugs, and – again – something weirdly identifiable with the Blair/Iraq story at the same time as this horrific Bronze Age proposition. Point after eloquent point about both timeless ethical questions and the most up-to-date postmodern theories on mental health, relativism and religion land with real impact. And, added to this, the feeling of a thorough, incisive, ongoing essay about how and why we stage the classics at all. As well as being incredibly moving in its own right, it feels like there’s a secondary source of power derived from the care and attention to which modernity lends its understanding in trying to rehabilitate this ancient thing.

The way that it deploys the thinking and speak of a society at home with therapy (carefully worded to *not imply* “therapy-culture” and all that reactionary back-to-stiff-upper-lip bullshit) and emotional intelligence makes this Iphigenia almost like a tortured, intimate version of Downfall. The challenge to our modern morality here is suddenly being made to see things from Agamemnon’s perspective. Like: why are we being made to feel sorry for this formerly cut-and-dried monster? But, by God, it’s well done.

A note on the writing: in all this enthusing about the *ideas* in this production, it would be very easy to neglect to mention just how good the *actual writing* is. The actual writing is fucking wonderful. It would also be easy to say that Icke has essentially adapted the poetic – *operatic* even – original into prose. This would also be wrong. There are bursts of real lyricism, but the rest of the time there’s still a real growling, rhythmic intensity to the text. More than once, I thought of Martin Crimp, who, as we know, is probably the most musical of British playwrights. This often has that same flinty, spare intensity. But it’s less elliptical. Here, when an idea comes up, it feels like it’s unpacked almost fulsomely. There is *a lot* of this sparseness, so to speak.

A note on the production: and, in all this enthusing about the ideas and writing, it would be very easy to neglect talking about the staging, which still feels somehow like it’s a different thing to discuss. Even though the production dramaturg is the very brilliant Dr Duška Radosavljevic, who has probably done more than most to erase the hard conceptual line between text and performance in our minds. *Of course* the way in which this staging operates – directed by Icke himself – adds layer upon multiple layer to the words, and enables us to read the whole in a series of particular ways. Of course Hildegard Bechtler’s design – those almost ubiquitous layers of sliding glass doors. Walls, partitions; sometime transparent, sometimes not (cf. theatrically, too many to mention, or my walk to Sainsbury’s); those Scandi-tables and benches (a bit cf. Andrews’s Three Sisters) – adds to that sense of how we read text, action, video work (Tim Reid), light (Natasha Chivers) and sound (Tom Gibbons). But I don’t think it’s heretical to suggest that visual signals are, in part, separate to abstract concepts. Of course, even just writing that down reminds me that something similar is discussed by Klytemnestra in the play, and actually both things *do* muddle together in the clearing house of the mind, and ultimately, “...it’s still light. Light inside your brain” (p.63).

“You never stop thinking, do you?” – Klytemnestra (p.36)

A note on the acting: in all this enthusing about the staging, it would be very easy to neglect to talk about the actual acting. The acting was good. No, really. The acting here is phenomenally good. Everyone in the cast is brilliant. Lia Williams is perhaps the greatest revelation (for me). I’ve seen her be *completely believable* in relatively straightforward plays, but this is a whole other thing. The demands of the text – to be public figure, private modern mum, and possessed, ancient force of nature, complete with knuckle-whitening scream – offer a challenge which is equalled, bettered, and then shredded for good measure. Emotional intelligence, vocal shifts, different physicalities to the point of believing in body-doubles. Actually thrilling performance. Angus Wright we already knew was brilliant, but here, with such a character (nominally: Agamemnon, Aegisthus, postmodern confusion and etc.) you really get a measure of just how great. Like Williams, the switches feel both immense and subtle. And his voice is just something else. How do you describe the grain of a voice. It’s the sort of thing that almost demands stupid writing. Angular, textured, authoritative? So a voice like an upper-class brick? Actually, somehow: yes. Jessica Brown Findlay and Luke Thompson are both more natural (not a criticism of the above AT ALL), and both’s greatest strengths lie in the complete defencelessness of their direct-audience-address. In a way, it perhaps feels like the different components of the ensemble are deployed separately in the production, each according to role and strengths, to perform different vital facets of a wider theatrical whole. Ensemble members with fewer lines/ less “through-line” also perform beautifully. For me, Dharmalingam feels like the closest point of contact, perhaps partly because of his accent, but then maybe also for the simple reason that he is the first person in the production to speak – a list of every name of God. Hara Yannis’s role as captive foreigner Cassandra requires her – as the stage directions put it – to: “suddenly speak in Ancient Greek from the original Aeschylus – passionate, furious, tearful. It’s terrifying to listen to”. And, well, perfectly put, stage direction. Hearing the original as if conjured from some tear in the earth itself, disinterred, is somehow doubly chilling both for the power of its resonance and for the way it *doesn’t* sound alien enough. Oh, and, Jesus Christ: Annie Firbank’s Fury. Fuck. Genuinely creepy. Brilliant.

For the sake of not actually spoilering the final focus-pull of how Icke’s Act Four achieves *being* the Εὐμενίδες I’ll not describe it in painful detail, suffice it to say, it’s a logical next step to which the whole has been pointing all along, and contains, for my money, one of the neatest defences of theatre, justice, democracy and the arts – at the same time a robust attack on them – that you could imagine.

There. I think that begins to cover it.

I think it’s brilliant. And that might well be because I can only ever see what I want to see. But I’m willing to bet that people who don’t agree with me about a single thing could also find 3hrs40 of things to love about it too. And if they can’t, then maybe that’s about the story they want to tell themselves instead.  But, for anyone who’s interested in ideas, or theatre, or just a gripping story thrillingly told (I promised myself I wouldn’t say “DVD box-set” but...), this is unmissable.



*Because none of the publicity photos I’ve seen quite managed to capture – if it’s even possible – either a sense of what the multi-layered whole *felt* like, or an image that was beautiful enough in its own right. (cf. the iconic Carmen Disruption pic.) No disrespect intended to the photo I have pixellated, though. It’s a lovely photo in its own right, just not the same as the play I thought I saw.

A Doll’s House – The Space, Isle of Dogs

[seen 03/06/15]

Chloe Mashiter’s new version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is the first I’ve seen since Carrie Cracknell’s superlative Young Vic version in 2012. And, frankly, it’s another blinder.

In a lot of ways, it feels like the most exactly opposite version imaginable while both things are still Very Good. Where the Young Vic’s ADH had a superbly detailed naturalistic set on a revolve, here we have the bare wooden boards of the docklands’ Space venue – a lovely small, deconsecrated church in some street, in the middle of nowhere – playing essentially in traverse. Where Cracknell had a full compliment of maids and tiny children and as much diversity as, well, as the middle class of C19th Sweden, here we have just five actors of various ethnic backgrounds and nationalities.

If I’m completely honest, it took me five, maybe ten minutes to completely tune in to this production’s rhythms and style. I *wanted* to completely trust the actors, and after about five minutes I totally did. I was, for example, briefly wrong-footed by Torvald (played by Swedish actor Johan Hallstrom) holding a copy of the script. I knew it was the first night of this short run, and that it had effectively been rehearsed in about a week and a half. And, hell, the guy’s Swedish. But, NO. FEAR NOT. He’s holding the script because Clever Directorial Decision (essentially serving as a set-up to a call-back in the very final minutes. Hint: this production uses Ibsen’s rarely staged “alternate ending”). But, yes, after a little period-of-adjustment to the night’s chosen theatrical style [does anyone else get this sort of genre-reacclimatisation issue, btw?] I was, to dip into the cliché barrel, gripped.

There really is so much to like about this production. The bare stage is just the start of the unfussy, clear story-telling going on here. The whole thing runs at just 1hr45 (without interval), in a new version/adaptation cannibalised by the director from an out-of-copyright translation. It really is a brilliant edit. It doesn’t feel like anything’s been missed out, but the whole is pacey as anything and folds 1hr45 into something that feels little over an hour. Any servants in the original have been dismissed, and letters/messages that arrive are delivered straight into the hand of the recipient at the relevant moment probably curtailing a lot of faffing about, and, like the doorbell, their arrival is indicated with a little electronic boing noise – there’s even an illuminated letter “icon” projected onto the upstage back wall (whatever that is in traverse), that folds this timeless production neatly onto our own era of mobile messages and phones receiving emails. As such, it constantly feels smartly contemporary, without our having to worry about either *actual* location or time-period.

[The one exception to this is the naming of the amount lent by Krogstat to Nora as £250, which is obviously, a) English money, and b) an amount wouldn’t get anyone to the seaside, let alone save their life, *now*.]

It’s also brilliant to see *another* reasonably diverse cast being so seamlessly deployed. (It really is a genuine mystery to me why this approach isn’t applied to everything as a matter of course.) I would have said “colour-blind”, but I did wonder whether it was entirely coincidence that it was the two female characters who were mixed-race, and that all the male characters were played by white men – all from different countries (UK, Sweden and Australia). It perhaps worked best because even though it was a possible extra dimension through which to read this play about societal expectations, it was equally just a useful political statement of intent (the production’s casting call was completely open to actors irrespective of race, age, or disability and Mashiter has elsewhere written a storming piece on the necessity of relaxed performances). Interestingly, in one way, it felt like it was the cross-continental distances (Rachel Handshaw playing Christine is also American) that spoke most clearly to the gulfs in comprehension between the characters.

However, for all that the above musing is/was possible during the show, and as admirable as the small staging touches were, what probably made the 1hr45 pass so fast was the sheer fact of a still-excellent rattling good story, acted with real precision and drive.

[I think those (precision and drive) are just the things I like best in performance. *Of course* they were *emotionally truthful* and *believable*, but I think other things are more interesting and important in acting like that. Pace, for example (which, incidentally, they nailed the crap out of). I think I believe *emotion* is probably something we tend to fill in for ourselves from context. Although I guess I’d find it weird if actors in Britain didn’t do *emotional truthfulness* as a matter of course – just as I’d find it weird if they *did* do them in Germany.]

So, yes. Basically, if you haven’t seen something properly off-the-beaten track in a while – and, no, Oval House, CPT, The Yard, New Diorama and BAC aren’t even remotely off that track now – get along to this. Or if you haven’t seen any “Fringe Theatre” in a while that was actually both gripping and (probably, virtually) penniless, again, this. It’s a timely reminder that big budgets can only ever do so much for a piece of work if the intellectual leg-work’s missing.

The Angry Brigade – Bush Theatre, London

[seen 02/06/15]

Because the last few James Graham plays have fallen into enemy hands (lol, jk), I haven’t seen anything by him on stage since 2010’s The Man, which I thought was totally charming. And before that, before the meteoric rise and all the telly, I’d rather liked the two Finborough plays I saw, Sons of York and Little Madam. And, it’s these, I think, that probably hold the key to what’s going on in this 2hr30 piece (with a twenty minute interval, it’s better to think of it as a 1hr10 play and then a 1hr play).

The Angry Brigade is another of Graham’s slightly wonky theatrical history-lesson plays, this time – in James Grieve’s production for Paines Plough – revisiting the facts of early seventies posh English anarchism though a dialectic between Branch (the police) and Brigade (Angry-), represented by playing off a loving pastiche of a student production of an Orton farce against a student devised piece inspired by Oh, What a Lovely War.

There is, in theory, a sound textual basis for this. Early on, one of the coppers notes that the AB have been mainlining Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle. As such, proto-postmodern pastiche is as good a way as any to try and find a way into this fascinating period.

In theory.

In practice this iteration of the production (it toured last year with a largely different cast, and from the look of the photos, a better version of the set) never quite lands. Whether in the first half where some amusingly *square* police try to investigate the (theoretically) groovy British anarchists, or in the second half, where we have our teeth set on edge by the irritating likely reality of a bunch of poshos spouting hackneyed revolutionary slogans in Hackney.

It struck me watching The Angry Brigade last night that Graham’s oeuvre increasingly resembles a kind of past life therapy for the English left (with a possible side order about the failure of theatre); a sense of going through all the previous traumas and fuck-ups one by one to see why it’s barely functioning at all at present. (And, if the same can be applied to theatre, perhaps there’s an implied examination of why “political theatre changes nothing”.) And it might well be this sense of, at best, therapy; at worst, a(nother) wake for English Socialism that makes the play so frustrating. But I think in a way the subject itself might be the cause of most of the dissatisfaction.

As a thinker, and I think it spills into the play itself, I get the impression that Graham is a sensible, moderate (to my mind) Old Labour type (by “Old Labour” I mean, the version of the party that last actually *opposed* the Conservatives, rather than offering some sort of sordid Thatcherism-with-Benefits). As such, on one hand he’s sort of ideally placed to point out the foibles of both sides – an amusingly Stoppardian police force, versus over-earnest public school radicals. But at the same time, both playwright and production sort of exemplify why the Angry Brigade failed to make anything like the same mark as Germany’s Red Army Faction or America’s Weathermen. Not, as the play seems to suggest, because the anarchists fell prey to their own inherent bourgeois Richard Curtis film tendencies; but because in Britain, apparently no amount of theory can overcome our class divisions. There is also, of course, the possibility that the Angry Brigade were likely every bit as inept as the play paints them. They were anarchists, after all, and not Marxist-Leninist like the RAF (who were hardly a model of eptness, anyway) or Weathermen.

More than this, though, I think the play feels frustrating, because its own form(s) struggle so hard with what it wants its contents to be and say. Both enterprise and analysis each acknowledge a problem, but are each then driven and scuttled by the drive to make jokes, be flippant, and entertain. It feels as if both theatrical form and political argument *want* to go further, but don’t want to alienate anyone with too much radicalism (either political or theatrical).

As a result, it feels like the second half, which explores life inside the Brigade – replete with Brechtian break-outs through the fourth wall and singing of popular TV advertising jingles to illustrate radical life within the society of the spectacle – almost condemns the politics of the group through insincere means of staging (as the means feel more like pastiche than commitment), while the suffocating nightmare of conformity is mostly achieved by having the set too small for the space (albeit in a bold move that risks looking like ineptitude, especially when the Bush’s perverse seating blocks and sightlines are brought into play), while the actual onstage action (again pastiche), ironically feels much warmer and more sympathetic to the police force than it ever does to the protestors.

Perhaps it’s because British drama has a much stronger, longer tradition of police procedurals, and essentially as a nation we’re actually quite fond of so much of our reactionary *stuff*, that trying to play off radicalism against a cosy sit-com is doomed to failure. It’s an interesting experiment of form and content, but when you consider it next to the genuine artistic risk of Caroline Horton’s Islands back in January, it looks, as '70s radicals might have put it, dead without even realising it.