Cleansed – National Theatre, London

[seen 23/02/16]

Katie Mitchell’s production of Cleansed is astonishing. Obviously. It was never going to be anything else, was it? So what a review needs to do is to quantify in some way the manner of this astonishment.

[I should say that as well as watching tonight’s press night performance, I also saw a run-through maybe a week before the first preview. I’m glad I did, because that rehearsal essentially let me know what the production I was going to would be doing. Seeing the production then allowed me to see those things realised. It strikes me that this is an excellent way of seeing a piece like this. Because, let’s face it, Cleansed is a play that comes with *a lot* of preconceptions, a lot of critical baggage. I wonder if everyone with any taste in theatre already has their idealised production in their head? I think I’m guilty of having had at least three. And, crucially, this wasn’t any of them. So I was glad to get into the rehearsal run and see what this one was about before seeing it. I also listened to the excellent short interview with Mitchell on Radio 4 before seeing the show, and was enthralled by her description of what Tinker in the play is doing – torturing people to test their love. For me, that is “a reading” of the play. It just happens to be an incredibly convincing one. One that I’m happy to buy into and see explored, even if it’s something that I’d never have thought of myself. And in a way, I think that’s...]

What I want from great directors is a way of seeing a play that I could never have imagined for myself. And this is exactly what Mitchell gives us here.

Sarah Kane’s second Royal Court play, Cleansed, is set in “a university”. A man called Tinker is “treating” and torturing Grace’s heroin addict brother Graham, and gay couple Rod and Carl. A young man called Robin is similarly imprisoned. Tinker also forms a kind of relationship with a woman who also calls herself Grace, who seems to be imprisoned in a kind of coin-operated peepshow.

The text itself must be one of the most analysed in modern British theatre history. We seem to “know” so much about the apparent geneses of its various components. We know about regimes using university buildings (or sports stadiums, or schools) as concentration camps. We know about the variant on “crucifixion” of inserting a pole into the anus and pushing it through the body avoiding all the major organs to cause slow, painful death. We know about the mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. We even know that at least one line could be a relative of the same line when it was written by Ian Curtis.

It now feels a bit like all that “knowledge” rather gets in between the audience and the play (well, it was a worry for me, anyway). An achievement here is that this production is so thorough-going, such a complete imagining of a world, that you essentially just watch *it*. It erases *everything* else, so that you are immersed in this singular vision of the work.

In terms of the production, it’s impossible to know what to talk about first. Alex Eales’s stage design is utterly superb. A cross-section of institutional corridor with rooms off, old signs, trees growing against windows, and even plants growing up through ruined floor tiles. (And, if the “university” angle hadn’t been so clearly reiterated in pre-publicity, I’d have suggested that the corridor could have been in a hospital, opening yet another vast realm of (mis-)reading.) The way it’s lit (by Jack Knowles) seems perfect. I mean, really, it’s “just” lifelike. But there are so many decisions even there, that they could all pass entirely unremarked just because they work, and you don’t think about them, but, my God, it’s so precise. And pretty much every lighting state perfectly suits the scene that it illuminates.

Perhaps even more crucial than the set and lighting is the sublime sound design (sound design – Melanie Wilson, music – Paul Clark). I don’t think there’s a single moment of silence until the end. The piece is essentially through-scored, not just with “sound effects” (birdsong, helicopters and the like), but with this vast, cavernous echoey *place*, built out of music and noise. I don’t even pretend to know who did what, the music seems designed and the sound feels musical. The show also includes perhaps the coolest use of one of the coolest songs in existence, and frankly, hearing that played at any volume in a show that’s already this good... At the National Theatre of Great Britain... To put it starkly, Cleansed has perhaps my favourite sonic setting for a show since Gisele Vienne’s I Apologize or This Is How You Will Disappear. We’re talking all-time bests here.

The cast are great too. Although, something fascinating is how little dialogue, or even speaking happens in the piece. I think there’s probably more than you register, but this is really not a play driven by either dialogue or exposition. There are exchanges, but they are mostly short and desperate. A real skill here is the extent to which they feel that they could be improvised. So, what the performers are really doing here is performing actions and moving. In this respect, Michelle Terry should get extra credit for her performance as Grace. I don’t think the script stipulates that Grace is present throughout – I *think* it’s a directorial invention – but it’s an inspired bit of thinking. As a result of at least Terry’s physical presence on stage, more-or-less solidly throughout, often fearlessly naked, we are given an additional through-line through this illusive text.

Terry’s presence is also a good way into talking about the way that the production appears to play with what on stage is *actually meant to be real*. For example, there are black-clad and masked “orderlies” or “stage managers” or “torturers” who bring in different tables, chairs, trolleys of surgical instruments, etc. We can see them quite clearly, so we know they’re there. And sometimes they interact with the named, costumed characters of the piece – at which point we (well, I) can also assume they’re “real” in the world of the play? And yet at other times they seem to walk backwards, or in slow-motion, mostly strikingly carrying umbrellas and white funeral flowers; seemingly recreating Graham’s funeral as his entirely corporeal ghost holds his sister. But a lot of the rest of the time, it feels like we just filter them out. Or watch them as if they’re not really there. (I wish I had my copy of the script with me. But I’m pretty certain they’re not in it. [Edit: apparently they are.])

This issue of presence/invisibility is the most naked demonstration that even what we’re seeing isn’t strictly linear or literal. And yet, here, it’s presented with such a realistic conviction, that you don’t fully think to question the lines spoken by someone whose tongue we’ve just seen cut out.

The overall effect of the piece is curiously like watching a piece of dance-theatre. It’s as if Kane was really creating a kind of Pina Bausch-like ballet about torture and love, and it’s only in production that this aspect of the whole can be realised. I should say, I don’t believe for a moment that this is an inevitable consequence of someone choosing to put this play on stage. While appearing to be wholly faithful and a very “pure” version of the script, this Cleansed is brimming with tonal choices and interpretations.

I will also say, I might have got a bit used to seeing this sort of thing in Germany. In terms of Mitchell’s work, this Cleansed feels like a direct relative of her Alles Weitere... in Hamburg. What was perhaps most thrilling about this production was the simple fact of walking outside afterwards and being in Britain. It’s probably cheap and sentimental to suggest, but this feels like a real landmark production: not just Kane arriving at the National (and Mitchell triumphantly returning there), but also British theatre becoming recognisably European.

---

MUSIC SPOILERS:

I don’t think the sheer joy of seeing this played at the NT is going to wear off any time soon.



And this bit is just amazing:

The Suicide – Berliner Ensemble/Theater-am-Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin

[seen 17/02/16]

A confession: for a long time I’d rather written the Berliner Ensemble off. I’d not been especially convinced by what I’d seen of Claus Peyman as a director, I CANNOT STAND Robert Wilson, and much else about the place had struck me as a kind of Ostalgic Shakespeare’s Globe for Brecht: more a museum than a living, vital theatre.

But, well, they had a production of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide premièring while I was in Berlin, and I was keen to see it ahead of Suhayla El-Bushra’s new version opening at the National Theatre in April (having cunning missed both Moira Buffini’s 2007 adaptation, Dying For It at the Almeida *and* Deborah McAndrew’s The Grand Gesture in 2013 for Northern Broadsides – interesting Billington/Hickling divergence on how good the play itself is in those reviews...).  In the end, it turns out that French director Jean Bellorini’s Der Selbstmörder is a complete joy. Ironically.

To begin with, I had my misgivings. Georgios Tsivanoglou as Semyon Semyonovich Podsekalnikow is a corpulent clown of the Zero Mostel school. Which is not my favourite sort of comedy. The whole felt like it might content itself to wallow in a stylishly set (bühne also by Bellorini) version of (UK) Seventies Sitcom-land. And so, physically and comedically, it transpitres for the first few scenes. Granted, yes, the set is lovely – wide, low-gradient steel stairs in a shallow frame, rising to the second storey to reveal more of the same behind, with strip lights and neon, and endless different false back-walls – but a great ugly set is not the whole story. The situation, as it is played, feels like the most alienating of all possible takes on post-Brecht, and for a while I wonder if my German colleagues won’t also be feeling that it lacks any sort of “a take” on the play.

Then, in the famous final dinner sequence – which seems to be at least half the play – seated at a stage-wide table before a corrugated iron safety curtain, the whole thing came magically alive. The whole register seemed to change, in fact. The sitcom shtick seemed to be revealed as just that – shtick – and instead Semyonovich is standing on the table singing Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. Mikhail Bulgakov’s letter to Stalin on Erdman’s is read out by Berliner Ensemble schauspielerin of some 53 years standing, Carmen-Maja Antoni. There is *a lot* of *mucking about*. And the whole feels more ridiculous, more comic, more tragic and more desperate.

For the actual final scene, the safety curtain is raised again, and the cast are ranged out on a largely empty stage, with remnants of an iron spiral staircase and a tilted coffin frame, lit like refugees from Complicité’s Mnemonic or Robert Wilson’s Einstein...

I didn’t get the impression that the piece scored any direct hits on contemporary Germany. The production felt (unusually for Germany) too reverential and contextual for that. Instead, it plays, in a contemporary fashion as an unadulterated problem comedy of “then” that we, living in the present, must unravel for ourselves. Oddly, for Germany (but not so much for France), quite a similar solution to so many British productions.

[Also oddly, as this it the final piece I saw in my last, short German tour, worth mentioning that I didn’t see a single show directed by a German in Berlin. Two Brits, one Dane and one Frog. No Germans. Which feels either oddly inclusive on the part of the Germans, or exclusive on my part. I did take one night off, though, and the obvious thing I could have seen instead would have been Nicholas Stemann’s Live On Stage! version of the Danish TV show Borgen...]

I’m now very interested to see what the latest UK version is going to do to this “lost” play. Probably scrub it clean of all the offending social context that got it banned in the Soviet Union in the first place and, ironically, make it a critique of capitalism instead. Albeit a critique of capitalism that is a part of capitalism, and one which helps to paper over the cracks by appearing to criticise it.

But, yes, while nothing especially resonated for me in the present-day moment for Germany (but then, really, how would I know?), what did resonate was the history of the play and the building and the city. But, even without those resonances, this was 2hrs30 with no interval of non-stop interest and engrossment. And that felt like a regrettably rare treat indeed. Next time I’m in Berlin I should go and see more at the BE.

Le Vin Herbé – Staatsoper im Schiller Theater, Berlin

[seen 15/02/16]

It’s fascinating to consider this revival of Katie Mitchell’s 2013 production of Frank Martin’s (1938-1941) opera/oratorio, Le Vin Herbé, in the light of the work she was making at the time and the work she’s making now. (And there’s also a lot more point in me doing that than trying to situate Martin’s music within the development of twentieth century modernism.)

The piece itself is a cycle of 18(?) songs(?) which adapts Joseph Bédiers’s Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900). As such, the piece is fascinating first for its being a (then) new French take on a story that in Germany forms such a cultural cornerstone in the form of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (lines from which even find their way into the equally canonical (and similarly problematic, anti-Semitic) The Waste Land), and for its being written at precisely the time when Wagner-fan Hitler actually went and invaded France.

Mitchell’s staging (which, as always, should properly be viewed as collaborative – chief amongst which, in my experience of this piece, being Lizzie Clachan’s astonishing stage design) sets the performance in a bombed out theatre in France in 1942 (according to a review on the Staatsoper site. I wouldn’t have known to guess specifically France, or specifically 1942; Deutschland‘45 made just as much sense to me as I was watching).

The music itself is Difficult. Capital D. I mean, it’s beautiful, yes. But without even words (for me) to hold onto (performed in French, surtitled into German, plus opera-singing to make the French difficult and, well, after a while, the feeling that there wasn’t much to be gained by my concentrating on providing my own third-rate German translations) it is Hard Work. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind Hard Work, but it would be remiss of me not not mention that it definitely is. It’s slow, sepulchral, icy, haunting, but a-melodic. If I knew it well, it might have been easier, but I didn’t.

The staging adds a huge amount the music, but does so at the music’s pace. This isn’t such an intervention that it feels like an imposition. Indeed, having seen it, it now feels incredible to think that nothing seen on stage is directly ordered by the music – being an oratio, it’s just as plausible for concert performance, and *nothing* about it demands that it be set in a bombed out French theatre with moonlight and snow falling through the ceiling.

I find this thread through Mitchell’s work – the idea of a naturalistic frame around some non-naturalistic performances – completely fascinating. We (apparently) saw it in Attempts on Her Life, in which (I’m told) there was an invisible framing device, wherein the actors were playing actors in 1997. This is obviously a much bigger development of that idea – having real opera singers *playing* French opera singers performing in a bombed out theatre during WWII.

Strangely, it wasn’t until reading an (this, unrelated) interview this morning, that it occurred to me to link the idea of a bombed French theatre with the Balaclan Théâtre attack, but I wonder if that resonance is now another part of the performance now.

Visually, the piece reminded me most of all of photographs I’d seen of Mitchell’s Oresteia, and of Complicité’s Street of Crocodiles. Physically, there is some continuity from the scene-change-“doctors” of Pains of Youth or the sphinxes of Alles Weitere..., but here they’re also subordinated by both the naturalistic frame of bombed France, and by the music, which seems to prevent the usual near-violence with which they intervene.

In the light of all this, and my not having really understood any but the barest bones of the libretto, much less appreciated its literary weight or even the impact of its meaning on any gut level, it’s kind of impossible for me to offer any sort of a final “assessment”. It’s clearly beautiful, and full of brilliant ideas. The music is also performed beautifully. The music remains slow, and beautiful (rather than, say, energising, or sentimental enough to provoke an emotional response – from me, at any rate). Overall it made me realise (not for the first time), that I often have pretty cheap preferences and desires in theatre – that it be adrenalising, and emotional, and fast. And the greatest of these is fast. Which this isn’t. As such, I’m at a massive disadvantage reviewing this. I can see it’s brilliant, but the brilliance somehow didn’t cross the orchestra pit and also move me. A strange and tricky thing to experience, and a stark contrast to her forthcoming Cleansed.

Lohengrin – Deutsche Oper, Berlin

[seen 14/02/16]

Ok. We need to talk about Lohengrin.

It’s tricky, right?

I mean, we know about Richard Wagner. We know who his most famous fan was. We know which film uses the prelude to Lohengrin and why. And we know where Berlin stands in all that mess.

So seeing Lohengrin in Berlin (and on Valentine’s Day! Ha!) was always going to feel complicated.

Regular readers will know I don’t know *a lot* about opera/classical music. I can tell eras apart. On a good day I can spot a composer or at least their period or nationality. And I know a fair amount of the famous stuff. I first came across Lohengrin properly when Christoph Marthaler used In Fernem Land in Meine Faire Dame. I *loved* it. I mean, I loved *a lot* about that musical, but that was a highlight even in an evening of highlights. So, yes. I genuinely do love the music in Lohengrin. I know stricter people than I will probably say that the problems with the opera start with the music. That it’s cheap, sentimental. Too ready to always go for the obvious “stirring” or “moving” bit. But, well, what can I say? I’m not strict. And I find lots of the music incredibly beautiful. The narrative bits could always be played faster, though, I reckon. No exposition or conversation need ever take *that long*.

Not knowing the opera all that well (which I think is the other good way to approach something; at least you get to be excited/intrigued by it as intended), and even knowing something of its past/fan-base, I was surprised by just how staggeringly fascist some of the songs/bits sounded.
For example (all libretto quotations from here), from the first substantial song:

Now it is time to defend the Reich’s honour;
East and West, to all I say:
let every acre of German soil put forth troops of solidiers,
never again shall anyone abuse the Deutsche Reich!

This! In Berlin! No wonder the production looks a bit beige. There’s literally no way you could dress everyone in stark, strong, bold colours to sing that, is there?

Do you know the plot? The plot of Lohengrin is bloody amazing. It’s worth reading the Wikipedia synopsis in full, but in short: A knight has accused a lovely maiden (Elsa) of being responsible for the disappearance of his little brother. She is brought before the King for judgement...

(The other main theme of the story – apart from its fascism – is astonishing its sexism, for instance, this is what the chorus have to say of Elsa’s first appearance:

MEN: Behold! The accused approaches!
Ah! How resplendent, how pure she looks!
He who dared make such an accusation against her
must be quite sure of her guilt!

Amazing, non?)

… Anyway, Elsa turns up and wafts about telling everyone about a dream she had. The king decides that her innocence should be decided by trial by combat, and Elsa says she’d like the knight she’d been dreaming of to turn up and fight for her. Of course.

Then her mystery knight does turn up. On a boat PULLED BY A SWAN. In this performance Mystery Knight is played by Michael Weinius, who is a shortish, portly gentleman of the Simon Russell-Beale school. All I’m saying is that you don’t exactly get the chill of seeing a kind of proto- Aryan SS superman predicted on this occasion. In this production he is also required to wear a vast pair of swan wings on his back. In theory it’s all quite grand and impressive. In practice, they flap about quite a bit as he waddles around and it’s hard not to giggle.

Anyway, Mystery Knight wins the fight; therefore, of course, Elsa is innocent; and she Mystery Knight decide to get married, on the condition that she never asks him his name. (SPOILER: THE TITLE OF THE SODDING OPERA IS A SPOILER.)

In Act Two the bloke that first accused Elsa is in a forest with his girlfriend, Ortrud, and she reveals that she is in fact a pagan witch and *some stuff*. Read the synopsis. This bit was chiefly interesting to me firstly because it makes where you locate any actual fascism in the piece harder to place – everyone’s German, and it’s a play off between Knightly Christianity and Pagan Gods. And secondly because it really wrong-foots the easy diagnosis of sexism from the first part. Ortrud is clearly brilliant, and all witchy and powerful and full of wicked plans etc. I mean, yes, there’s a feminism that would point out (not unfairly) that this just makes her some other archetype in the lexicon of woman-hating, but crucially, she’s neither flimsy nor stupid. Think Lady Macbeth with added back-up from pagan gods (both male and female).

The second part of Act Two, well, I’m afraid it got a bit lost because there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the auditorium...

So, let’s get The Fight out of the way: while we were watching Richard Wagner’s insane opera Lohengrin, the bloke sitting next to me started taking photos with his mobile phone. It was not a discreet mobile phone. It was a big glowy one with a big light-up screen and it illuminated not only itself, but also everything else for miles around. I let the first couple of times go. Sure, I thought, sneak the odd photo. Stick it to The Man. Why not take photos from the 25th row of the stalls? The opera house almost certainly haven’t thought to photograph the production or make those photos completely available online. After about half an hour of this behaviour in the second act, I gave him a bit of a nudge. The next time, I gave him a proper jogged-when-taking-the-shot-nudge. The next time I sharply batted the phone out of his hands into his lap. That got a “Danke” from a couple of people in the row behind us who were clearly sick of his shit too. He continued. I gave up. The people in the row behind us decided that if photo-bloke wasn’t going to take a hint they were going to take his phone. It all rather kicked off after that. At one point I clearly remember him standing up and shouting at them to give his phone back or he was going to make the whole opera stop (yes, all this was being conducted in English, the international language of Philistinism). By this point I was well out of the fray. At one point it looked like everything was going to break into a proper Ukrainian Parliament fight. Eventually they gave him his phone back and he looked all sulky until the interval – mercifully only about five minutes later – when he (photo-bloke) went to complain to the ushers that people had tried to stop him taking photographs, and was promptly asked to leave. I was surprised after all his shouting in the middle of the opera that he hadn’t been ejected on the spot.

The adrenalin that gave us definitely jazzed up the evening no end. But still. Oof. Blimey. Punch-ups, eh? (And, yes, I’ll admit it did worry me that this all took place in Berlin against the backdrop of Hitler’s favourite opera, and was essentially a triumph of a majority over a little bloke who was annoying them. And that the music might have got us all a bit Clockwork-Oranged-up. Still, fuck it. Hopefully he learnt something about consideration for others... :-/// )

Anyway, I missed that bit of the opera.

Read the synopsis for part three. Basically all gets tied up in a fairly vindictive/cruel/symbolic way, and some of the best bits of opera ever written happen. And even if they are cheap and populist and sentimental, I think I still love them.

Now, all this flippancy – Wagner Fight Club notwithstanding – is all perfectly real. You have a thought-track running alongside the text of the opera thinking, ‘Oh, come ON. Really?? This?’ But at the same time, it’s actually quite fun.

Similarly, Kasper Holten’s production was, in many, many ways, terrible. (frinstance, the gathered Germanic soldiery addressed by King Heinrich covered all periods from the thirty years war through to WWI. And then stopped, leaving a big old fuck-off elephant in the room, but probably safer and more acceptable than staging the elefant. The whole chorus are done out in pale khaki and beige and grey blue, which is pretty if a bit a) kitsch, and b) difficult to see. The sets are kind of blocky, and from where I was sitting made the whole thing look accidentally claustrophobic. There’s a big old almost-another-elephant-in-the-room cross that dangles from the flies in Act 2 and functions variously as walkways and ceilings. It’s *almost* very good, but then somehow ended up feeling clunky instead of vigorous (the opposite of the cross in Submission)... The big ol’ flappy wings we’ve talked about. But, yeah, as productions go, it made me feel immensely grateful for all the Richard Jones and Katie Mitchell operas I’ve seen – not to mention making me feel I was incredibly churlish about Simon McBurney’s Magic Flute which is perfection by comparison.)

But enormous fun nonetheless. And incredibly clear and watchable.

And, blimey, the music: if you don’t know the opera, maybe the best way to explain how/why it’s great is by comparing it to the soundtrack of Star Wars (any of the original trilogy, or the last one). You know how there are about three or four *really famous bits of music* for Star Wars? Same with Lohengrin. You know how bits of each of those tunes sometimes plays at a relevant point when the character that the piece of music relates to is having a big scene. Same. You know how there’s a lot of other music that you kind of know is there in Star Wars, but you couldn’t hum it, because it just fits the action where it is and the tune isn't important? Perfect. You totally know how this works. And the Big Hit Number from Lohengrin is better than any of the Star Wars ones. So, yes, about three great tunes, and three hours of music, and by playing one of them right at the beginning and then only hinting at it again until almost the end, it feels like a masterfully constructed work of art. So, yeah. Proto-fascist nutjob tho’ he be, Richard Wagner was pretty good at his day job...

[conclusion forthcoming, once I've thought of one]

Ungeduld des Herzens – Schaubühne, Berlin

[written for the Guardian]

I was lucky enough to get the Guardian to commission a review of Simon McBurney’s production of Ungeduld des Herzens at the Schaubühne.

I won’t lie; every time I manage to get a review of something from abroad into the Guardian, it feels brilliant.

Submission – Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg

[seen 10/02/16]

In early January last year, when “Islamic” terrorists stormed the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, it was a cartoon of novelist Michel Houellebecq that graced the front cover of the week’s edition. The cover was celebrating the publication of his new novel, Soumission (German; Unterwerfen, English; Submission). The subject of the novel is an imagined near-future in which France elects a Muslim Government and becomes a de facto Islamic state. The novel is narrated, like so many of Houellebecq’s novels, by slightly depressed, misanthrophic, middle-aged, white man, whom one probably imagines to resemble Houellebecq himself.

And, yes, it’s a difficult novel to admit to admiring. So much of the surface of it is patently designed to be provocative, and there’s always the concern that the impulse behind its creation is not merely benign leftist provocation. But let’s say this; while all the other consciousnesses in the book are described as secondary to those of the white, male narrator, these include all his other white, male colleagues, as well as the Muslim men and all women. And yes, while the version of Islam that flourishes in the novel’s imaginary future France is an objectionable caricature of, say, Saudi Arabia, so is actual, present-day Saudi Arabia. Nor is present-day France is hardly held up as a paragon.

What Submission really creates is a satire of is patriarchy. The big joke of the novel is that this classically “Western”, emotionally-backward, academic expert on Huysmans ends up quite pleased by modern “progressive” French society being replaced by conservative, polygamous Islamic law. It is possible to read this as Houellebecq making some sort of argument for the essentialism of patriarchy, and its demonstrable, ongoing dominance. But it’s equally easy to see it as a condemnation of precisely such a view. I don’t know how a feminist novel could skewer male self-interest more viciously.

As such, it is reassuring (while perhaps cowardly to want such reassurances) that this first adaptation for stage has been created by Deutsches Schauspielhaus’s artistic director Karin Beier, dramaturg Rita Thiele, and a mostly female production team (Licht – Rebekka Dahnke, Kostüm – Hannah Petersen)

What is then surprising, given this fact (and given my nervous need for reassurance), is that the actual production itself is remarkably *straight*. The novel, narrated by the single voice of a middle-aged white man, is transferred to stage by the cunning means of having a single middle-aged white man stand on stage and say as many of the words from the novel as can be reasonably fitted into an evening of theatre.

However, that’s not all. Yes, the novel transfers well to the stage, and remains compelling and grimly, bleakly funny – perhaps all the more so for having the frisson of lots of people laughing nervously together in public. And, yes, solo performer Edgar Selge holds the attention like a particularly charistmatic eye-magnet; dry, self-deprecating, rumpled, yet still capable of oratorical flights and lyricism. But the thing that really makes this production is Olaf Altmann’s stage design.

The piece is played in front of a vast black wall close to the front of the stage. Set into the centre of the wall is a huge disc, with a large cross set into it. The cross is several feet deep and opens onto a void on the other side of the wall. Once Selge begins to speak, the cross slowly begins to rotate. It takes fifteen minutes for it to be upside down. When it is upside down, what was the topmost part of the cross is now at such a height that Selge can easily sit himself in the now upside-down cross. As I guess we all knew he was going to. The first fifteen minutes are almost all about that wait, as much as anything he’s saying. From the point when he sits in the cross onwards, the sheer beautiful simplicity and fertile symbolism absolutely transform what we’re watching. Yes, dramatically, it’s “just the novel” to some extent, but thanks to the intervention of this design, it’s also much more. As Selge speaks François’s narration, it’s the ever changing, multiple meanings of the turning cross that we wrestle with alongside it. It’s such a clever, perfect image for the story. This little man caught up in the vast symbol of Europe, now unstable, unfixed, and even already reminiscent of symbols of Europe’s horrific past, and, with the slight shadow of a crescent cast on the revolving disc, the image of the imagined future.

That the continual revolutions of the cross necessitate Selge clambering about this constantly self-refreshing symbol is also a brilliant way of keeping the staging feeling physical and fresh throughout. Of course, we’ve seen this sort of thing before, not least in miniature for a couple of minutes during Jude Christian and Fly Davis’s Goya/Asshole at the Gate. But this is the full-size real thing. 2Hrs45 (mit pause) of rotating cross, more akin the Josef K’s continually spinning bird’s-eye-viewed room in Kriegenburg’s Der Prozess. Or, perhaps we’re reminded of the horizonal revolve of Gotscheff’s Persians, or the black wall and spinning cyclorama of Thalheimer’s Faust. It’s that kind of a structural set. Cuplture on an epic scale. And perhaps it’s no accident that it recalls the archetypal work of these white, middle-aged male directors so vividly. Perhaps the set is even self-satirising at the same time as working so beautifully.

I haven’t loved a design quite so much in ages. It *did things*. It was an integral part of the meaning of the production, and one which kept on adding to that meaning. It was the diametric opposite of that shiny white fucking abortion in Linda.
So, yes. I’m not sure I have *conclusions* about the production, or what it means. The Nachtkritik review suggests that putting the novel on stage might attract the wrong sort of interest/audience, fearing a theatre overrun by Pegida fascists, but suggests that the most inflammatory/incediary passages of the novel have been removed, and this production would offer little comfort for their Islamophobia. I agree, but it never occurred to me that racists or white supremacists might go to the theatre to see/hear their views confirmed. But then, it never occurred to me that a talented, internationally respected director would ever fall out with a Hamburg theatre over their pro-refugee stance. Until it happened.

So, as we see, perhaps the pretend paranoid fantasy of an Islamic takeover in Europe is indeed a topic that needs to be aired on our stages, and in as intelligent a fashion as this, so we can actually examine the inside of the mindset that imagines “this is the greatest threat facing Europe”.

And what “Europe” is anyway.

Wit – Royal Exchange, Manchester

[seen 02/02/16]

On paper Wit is probably not my sort of thing. It’s a Well-Written Play (Margaret Edson); it’s definitely smart: imagine a less surreal, playful, American take on writing a Tom Stoppard play and then invest it with a great deal more sincerity. Formula: take a Big Thing (in this case: cancer), take a Big Artist (in this case: 17th century poet John Donne), and use one to excavate the experience of the other.

Dr Vivian Bearing (Julie Hesmondhalgh) is an American English Literature professor. Who gets cancer. The play is 1hr40 of her meta-theatrically acknowledging the audience and telling her story. A story in which she knows she’ll end up dead. As literary critics go, she’s something of an anomaly. Hers is very much a school of mathematical, almost surgical scholarship. She addresses us as she would her students, barking sardonic observations about pain like a drill sergeant at some literary boot camp.

What makes this production (Raz Shaw) absolutely shine, towering above its source-script, is Hesmondhalgh’s performance. But, more than this, it’s an almost indefinable element within the performance, some kind of spark she exudes of *essentially brilliant, lovely human being*. Indeed, part of what makes the performance so remarkable is the way that warmth-exuding actor seems in constant tension with hard-ass character. Of course, part of the point of the play is the stripping away of the character’s layers of hard-assery to some sort of “essential humanity” underneath (an American invention (to my mind), of which I’m not necessarily a huge fan, but one given serviceable enough treatment here to be worth at least giving a respectful listen).

But this isn’t just a three-way exchange between writer, director and lead actor. The supporting cast all throw in apparently effortlessly detailed performances as myriad doctors, nurses, students and colleagues, while Hannah Clark’s stark design – a runway and revolve disk in hospital green is almost too spookily evocative and perfectly-observed, also managing to bridge the gulf between America’s private healthcare and what we’re still currently used to in this country.

There should also be much praise for lighting designer Jack Knowles, whose attention to detail and nuance through is outstanding, but who also contributes in no small measure to the gigantic final gesture of the piece, a kind of transcendent moment of light and humanity, which seems as good a way of imagining death as any.

As I hinted above, it’s a curious play, though. I’ve never been an especial fan of John Donne, but here he is, apparently stripped of all historical context or history. This is a forensic study of poetry where reputations are made and broken over contested punctuation. As such, it occurs to me, that rather than being a piece in which metaphysical poetry is used to understand cancer, it often feels more like something where poetry is almost understood as a cancer, and subjected to repeated attacks as such. In the abstract, this doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, although it’s unclear from this what John Donne did to be singled out for such treatment.

So, yes. I’ve filed this bloody review far too late to be of earthly use to the production, but this was about as brilliant a production of this play as it’s possible to imagine. And one that I thought far out-stripped the clever-cleverness of the original to find a far more intelligent humane core of its own.

Barbarians – HOME, Manchester

[seen 30/01/16]



Hofesh Shechter is now a phenomenon. That’s a given. There was a cross-London festival of his work. His name manages to sell out shows at the Brixton Academy. There aren’t many choreographers who could do that. Even fewer of them are based in the UK. There’s no disputing the quality or ambition of the work. With Political Mother and Sun Shechter redrew the boundaries of what a “dance show” could be; bigger, louder, more live, rockier. More bombastic than anything before.

Barbarians is a much smaller show (despite being longer), but it also feels like an evolution. A slight evolution, granted. Shechter’s trademark post-Gaga (the dance-language, not the singer) moves mixed with Israeli folk dance and drum’n’bass nightclubs still dominates. But, where last year’s miniature, Untouchable, with the Royal Ballet felt like his most dramatically achieved piece so far, Barbarians seems more uneven.

Actually, it’s a fine example of more being less. The first “half” – up to the first interval (there’s a second pause between parts two and three) – was brilliant. Not unreserveredly so, but it was a joy. Inventive, intricate, playful and intelligent. Corridors of light move across the stage, dancers flit in and out of light and shadow. Trademark smoke/haze make beams solid, and prickly baroque music mingles with throbbing drums’n’bass. Shechter’s own voice speaks to the the piece over the PA, asking it/himself what on earth it’s about. His conclusion – that it’s a 40-year-old man’s musings on love felt way off-beam and disingenuous to this 40-year-old male critic, but lying or being wrong about your own work is an artist’s privilege, I guess.

The remaining two parts felt less inventive, less charming, and – interestingly – more “outward-facing”, but less narrative-led. At a couple of points in part two (five dancers in skin-tight gold lamé jumpsuits) it occurred to me that moments were almost like a kind of pop concert than a dance show. This actually made me like it more, as it was such an odd thing to see in a dance show.

The last piece *was* more narrative-y, actually, and opened with a bloke in lederhosen and one of those alpine/Austrian hats and a woman whom we could read as his wife, or daughter, or even mother at a pinch. Their relationship *seems* to be an abusive one – although so much of dance can be read that way that maybe I’ve just got a bad old literalist theatre-brain. I’m not exactly what happened in their story, or why the bloke was Austrian/Bavarian/whatever. One could speculate, but I’m sure it would lead to some particularly crappy assumptions based on nationality and history that nobody really wants. Least of all me. So, yes, maybe I was actively resisting the blindingly obvious at this stage.

So, yes. I was bloody pleased to have been given the opportunity to see it. And, as the first thing I saw in a theatre in Manchester in 2016, it certainly felt like it was giving a few cobwebs a much-needed kicked (see, Unsent Postcards, passim). If only it felt incumbent on theatre to try to be this inventive, every time there was a new show on...

In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises) – Gate, London

[seen 08/02/16]

It’s a funny thing. I can imagine a time, relatively recently, when I might have found Ben Kidd’s neat production of Nina Segal’s debut poetic text-for-theatre really exciting. Maybe even revelatory. It’s interesting to think about what might have changed since that time.

Theatrically, the piece is reminiscent of Third Angel’s Presumption, which I saw in 2007 – Chris Thorpe and Lucy Ellinson drowing in a sea of Ikea, before we’d even really thought about “German” as a word to describe a set. Thematically, it bears some resemblance to Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs – a young couple are going to have a baby while the world explodes, and burns, and runs out around them. Without those two key precedents, would I have been more gripped?

There’s also the fact that I’ve got older. And there’s no getting away from the fact that most of my peers seem to have survived having babies. So that level of revelation and/or learning just isn’t there for me as it might be for younger audiences. The key action of the play is essentially spread over one night, where the two performers narrate their characters through a maelstrom of incessant crying, frayed nerves, into some kind of vision of an apocalypse and out the other side.

Yes, it rings true. Babies do cry, and are hard work. But it also feels maybe a bit solipsistic to invoke something akin to the destruction of civilian homes in, say, Gaza or Syria, just because your baby won’t sleep. But, like Kane before her, Segal suggests a level of connection that can’t be ignored so easily. Sure, at the level of personal discomfort, there’s no comparison. But, by naively invoking the questions “Why are there wars?” and, “Why are the world’s resources running out?” Segal – perhaps unintentionally – presents the very real answer: because everyone wants the best for their child (and because everyone insists on having as many children as they feel like). Viewed in this light, the play offers a fine, bleak portrait of a world gradually falling to pieces, and doomed by love, of all things.

Kidd’s production is great, really. At the start, the excellent performers (Adele Leonce and Alex Waldemann, who we already knew were both brilliant, but it’s nice to be reminded) tear out of a thin membrane of luggage wrap, holding all their possessions-to-come. Their empty, rented flat – an empty steel frame describes precious little low-ceilinged space – is rapidly assembled, filled, and trashed, leaving a rubbish-strewn floor. The lighting is also kind of brilliant – ranks and ranks of hanging downlights in close proximity to the performers heads  – and the sound design really deserves to win several awards...

So, I should be out dancing in the street about this, right?

And I’m not. Which is stupid. It’s really, really well-made theatre. But somewhere, perhaps between the marriage of script (with it’s ultimate smallness of scope) and production (lacking the killer panache for art, or incision) and maybe a bit too much lenience with the dramaturg’s red biro (there are about ten lines – borrowed straight from the big book of terrible undergraduate poetry – that should just be cut), something happens that means while it’s an entirely “commendable” exercise, it’s hard to think to whom one would *re*commend it.

---

The piece ends with The The’s chirpy alt.pop classic This is the Day, but this terrible, insane song by Death in June has the same title as the play and it wouldn’t quite go away every time I thought of it.

Escaped Alone – Royal Court, London

[seen 03/02/16]

NOT A REVIEW.

[Written with the Chichester University “Criticism 101” students in mind. Basically: “this is what one is not allowed to do”.]

It’s an odd thing. I get that Escaped Alone is theoretically pretty good. I essentially like the sort of thing it’s doing. I should be in sympathy with its strategies for doing what it’s doing. And yet, and yet...

In terms of info, here’s what [I think] it is: Escaped Alone is the latest play by the much-loved, much-feted, British “experimental playwright” Caryl Churchill. It is fifty minutes long and is essentially a re-jigged cross between part three of her own play Far Away (2000), intercut with part two of Martin Crimp’s In The Republic of Happiness. That is to say, it’s a picture of “the concerns of modern society” presented as a series of oblique, truncated lines; something like speed-reading a copy of the Daily Mail, while the outrages whizz by, interrupted by surreal, whimsical descriptions of possible apocalypses. It says everything about Britain – British writing, British staging, and this staging in particular – that it’s the conversations that feel interrupted by the apocalypse monologues and not the other way around. The dialogue parts take place in a beautifully realised, fully naturalistic depiction of an English back garden, replete with creosoted 5ft fence, a shed, and an only slightly wrinkly blue sky.

[Because, let’s be honest, as soon as something purports to be “naturalistic” – which I’m assuming this set does, at least in part – it’s the wrinkles between the pretence and the reality that become interesting and the focal points in theatre. I’m willing to bet that *a lot * of people look at that slightly wrinkly sky and unconsciously go, “Oh, yes, there’s the thing that stops this being uncanny,” to themselves.]

In terms of “what’s there”, by and large it’s done very well [except Kika Markham, who is either putting a brilliant performance as someone who doesn’t really understand where she is or what she’s doing, or...]. But it almost feels too simple. Too pat. Too much the path of least [or no] resistance. Like a perfectly interesting half-idea to make us think about *some things*, but staged with no further thought. (Is just how it feels. I’m sure a tonne of thought went into it really.)

Of course, it’s idiotic to jump straight in and start prescribing away – like that Harry Enfield character – before I actually offer an analysis of what *is* there. But, honestly, what is there feels so ludicrously over-legible, so underlined, that it feels almost silly pointing out the obvious possible and potential symbolism of, say, gardens: “from Eden to Homebase in one easy visual metaphor, dwelling on the state of the lawn (not ‘manicured’ like Plath’s, let’s say), and maybe the incidental symbolism of The Shed (representing the absent men? Standing in for Industry opposed to nature? Where there’s something nasty. Etc.). I don’t deny it’s all in there. Or that it adds to the piece that we experience the flashes between the familiar (if we’re familiar with middle-class back gardens, which, if we’ve got a telly, we should be at least a bit, right?) and the motr makeshift set for the unfamiliar.

The monologues take place between two neon frames so that the audience can’t see the garden any more, only the figure delivering the monologue. The frames of neon are arranged to look a bit like huge lightbulb filaments. (No particular idea why.) As I say, of the two elements in the staging, it is these monologues of whimsical apocalypse that feel like the afterthought; the problem to be solved. The garden takes more time and more space. So these “interventions” feel relegated; made unreal in a world where realism takes precedence. I don’t want to prescribe the reverse (although I’d be interested to see the production that did do this), but it still feels like an effect worth noting. Similarly, there are moments in the piece where each other woman in turn delivers something like a brief soliloquy from their garden chair. For these moments too, the lighting is dimmed around them and they find themselves softly spotlit. It feels almost like a pathologically literal approach to the text’s “experiments”. “THIS BIT IS *EXPERIMENTAL*! FFS, WATCH OUT; IT’S AN EXPERIMENT!” shouts the lighting.

So, yes; it’s an odd thing. I get that Escaped Alone is theoretically pretty good. I essentially like the sort of thing it’s doing. I should be in sympathy with its strategies for doing what it’s doing. But for some reason, in this production, at least, it felt like I wasn’t. Sorry.

Unsent Postcards: You For Me For You – Royal Court, London

[seen 17/12/15]

Christ. CHRIST.

It’s a while since I’ve seen a play that’s actually made me question not only the sanity of the theatre that programmed it, but also my own.

There is only one memorable line in the script of Mia Chung’s You For Me For You and it’s the quote from Chung Hyun Shik printed opposite the list of characters and notes in the the playtext.

It says: “For the frog in the well, the sky it can see is the whole world, and so the world appears a small blue circle.”

And, yes, it absolutely describes the exact problem of the whole play. I am reasonably sure that in the mind of American playwright Mia Chung, this frog is emblematic of the North Koreans who are nominally the play’s subject. For me, watching in appalled fascination, it is a very precise description of a playwright who has produced perhaps the most striking piece of American propaganda that I’ve ever seen put on stage.

Perhaps my amazement isn’t entirely down to the script. Perhaps in a less slick, cartoonish production, wherein the play was interrogated rather than served (neatly and brilliantly in many ways, I don’t deny), then the Royal Court might have come away with some of its previous (if always debatable) leftist credentials intact. But as it is, North Korea is endless hell, while America is some amusingly presented minor irritations. A veritable land of fully-functioning opportunity for immigrants and historical racism that we can all laugh about now.

Of course, I don’t deny that North Korea sounds absolutely terrible from what we’re always told about it in the West, and who am I to doubt it? Or to doubt the word of an American playwright, descended from South Korean parents, who has never been there either? It’s this more than anything that sticks in the throat. It’s the fact that this is a dramatisation of nothing more than antagonistic propaganda. *Of course* I’d be interested in hearing from the dissenting voices of North Korea. Who wouldn’t? Just as we were interested in the informed, internal critiques from Eastern Europe of Heiner Müller or Václav Havel. But this isn’t those. This is precisely the impression that the American media hands down to its audience, turned unthinkingly into a stirring anthem to American freedom. Christ knows why we are watching it in England in 2015.

The play’s central thesis seems to be that America is better because you can complain there. There is painfully rudimentary satire of the idea that American #firstworldproblems are perhaps a bit superficial – tell that to the people the Americans execute, torture, exclude and imprison, or to the the millions of victims of America’s military adventures globally, or just to the more than 1,000 people shot by American police in 2015 – but the forceful message, rammed home over and over, is that if you’re in America, you’re alright. You really can’t complain.

If this were the intention of the play, then I wholeheartedly applaud it. It is one of the most comprehensive, chilling critiques of manufactured consent imaginable. A triumph of radical overidenification. Thing is, I can’t help feeling that’s not deliberate. It’s chilling precisely because the playwright seems to really believe it.

Beyond this, the normal grumbles apply. It’s just thing incredibly flimsy-dialogue-reliant vehicle for a sentimental story from which we’re meant to learn something. It would be a pretty poor play, even without the international relations dimension. Director Richard Twyman gives it a flashy, functional, shallow, effective production; Jon Bausor’s mirrored, angular tunnel set looks nice, and makes potentially ponderous scene changes zip by in a flash of trying-not-to-be-too-Orientalist.

The acting is good.

End. 

Unsent Postcards: Evening at the Talk House – National Theatre, London

[seen 16/12/15]

Imagine Mme Ranyeskaya throwing a party for burnt-out drone pilots and stage turns-turned-assassins and you’ve got something approaching the measure of Wallace Shawn’s ...Talk House. Dressed up like a kind of off-kilter pastiche of Chekhov, it’s actually about as brutal, allusive a play about contemporary America as you’re likely to see, also standing as a much-needed corrective to the pro-American propaganda of You For Me For You.

In Ian Rickson’s production, set by New York artists the Quay Brothers in an incredibly ugly blue/green, high-ceilinged set, I’m not sure the thing fully managed to find a form that fully communicated itself, with the etiolated atmosphere alienating as much as it intrigued. Nonetheless, experienced as a work of art, rather than a piece of drama, its massive, striking, sculptural form still strikes some horrible hits.

Essentially, it’s a riposte to YFMFY, which recognises America’s condition. That it’s nominally also a piece about old theatrical types reminiscing about their glory days just makes it all the more prickly and horrible. Like theatre could ever have been expected to help anything! Ha ha! The very idea. All this bumbling and burbling is like attending a wake for political theatre, written as a piece of political theatre. Indeed, it’s very tempting to indulge all the indignities of this staging as artistic-satirical blows against bloody theatre.

It’s telling, perhaps, returning to the piece a long time after seeing it, in an attempt to write it up, already very little remains of what happened, particularly not plot-points. But what does linger is a sense of horror and anger about the direction in which America is headed.

If 2015 began with Rob Icke’s production of Shawn’s angry snarling 1980 play The Fever. At the other end of the year, Evening At The Talk House feels like it should have closed it with either resignation or victory, instead it felt just as angry, just as pointed, and even more vicious in form, and if anything, even more necessary. 

Unsent Postcards: Here We Go – National Theatre, London

[seen 16/12/15]

The main thing that strikes you is the brevity. The brevity, and yet still the ripples of bemusement, irritation, affrontedness, or self-back-patting-ness that radiate through the audience. It’s like watching theatre with a bunch of peacocks; alternately shirty and self-satisfied.

The trouble is this: Caryl Churchill’s [then] latest play, Here We Go – a title that neatly anticipates its audience’s eye-rolling response – is “Difficult”. With a capital D. Of course it isn’t really difficult. It’s both easy and short. Very short. 45 minutes short.

It is divided up into three sections. In the first section a nice cross-section of people are at a wake. They speak in truncated sentences, familiar from some bits of Love and Information (for instance). The device doesn’t really work any better here for repetition. Instead it feels like an embarrassingly self-conscious attempt to be arty. Yes, we could volunteer any number of our own “explanations” to account for this weird departure from the normality of people speaking in full, articulate sentences, peculiar to the British stage. That is half the trick of this particular burnished mirror-to-nature. If you stare into it for long enough, it will reward you by showing you whatever you wanted to see in the first place. Even unto a piece of revelatory art.

In the second section, a topless, pyjama-trousered old man bemusedly rails in a void. He is, we suppose, dead. Or in the moment of dying. He muses on his fate politely; middle-classly, ho-hum-ly, recognisably. It is, in fact, quite a charming few minutes of theatre. The contradictory, received ideas that old, white, middle-class, lefties have about the eternal questions are admirably anatomised. It is somewhat socially awkward to be a socialist atheist in the afterlife, it transpires.

Then there’s the last section. The piece has been running backwards, and now we attend upon the dying man’s final days, represented here by an endless cycle of being dressed and undressed and re-dressed in pyjamas and undressed again. I think I counted this taking in three full cycles from jim-jams to clothes and out again. It takes up the remainder of the play, and as such represents maybe twenty minutes of stage time? Maybe thirty.

And it is enormously unsatisfying. Perhaps it’s meant to be. But it feels like they do it just enough times for the audience to get the point, but then be allowed out in time to either to scamper round to see Evening At The Talk House, or to go and get a nice dinner – perhaps at the NT’s nice posh restaurant – and to contemplate their mortality over a nice glass of wine. They’ve endured just enough silent repetition of an action to make them think they’re really worked for their art, a bit.

This brevity in particular made me want to scream. Although, given that the majority of the audience with which I saw the play seemed to be roughly the same age as the old man dying on stage, it would maybe have seemed a bit much to keep them longer.

But it just wasn’t enough. Not even slightly. It should really have been about four hours. *Then* I’d think this was brave, experimental work, rather than a whimsical nod to it.

Beyond that, there was the *really uncomfortable racial dimension*. Now, I’m not going to sit here and deny that old white men probably *are* looked after in nursing homes by young black women. But, my Christ, it’s acutely painful to watch someone being paid to perform only that repeated task as their night’s work as an actor. EVERYONE else in the play gets to speak. Not Hazel Holder. I mean, if this section were longer, than perhaps it would seem more justifiable. And perhaps the discomfort of the racial inequality would become more pronounced. And, well, yes, there’s an interesting question of whether anyone really has any power in this situation (which is easily answered with: yes, one person has the money to pay for the other person’s services, even if their own powers are failing them). Is a parallel being drawn between the helplessness of the reasonably well-off in old age and the poor? (I presume poor, since these jobs are seldom well-paid, although, sure, that’s a hell of a lot of assumptions right there. Maybe a lot of carers work part time and have excellently remunerated spouses.) Perhaps all this has been thought about in great detail, and the thankless labour of performing a character’s thankless labour has been deemed a price worth paying for a point made properly. I hope so. It’s still intensely uncomfortable (as was the fact that a lot of reviews chose to render this labour as entirely invisible, believing that it’s the dead white guy we’re always meant to feel sorry for). (Of course we should all also feel sorry for the dying white guy. I mean, who wants to die lonely, white, bearded and alone?)

Wags could probably take great pleasure from the glancing characteristics that dead white guy (Patrick Godfrey) shares with Jeremy Corbyn. Indeed, we learn in the wake scene that DWM was also a socialist. Perhaps the play’s about the death of socialism. Certainly the awkwardness of trendy leftie atheism seems a theme in the limbo/afterlife section is no more bleak than the current battle of a left-of-centre Labour Party with a world that has moved so far to the right that it is perceived to be “extremist”.

But, yes. Taken on its own merits, this is a slight piece, with the germs of a good idea in it. If the final section were played for, say, three hours longer, it would be the boldest piece of theatre ever shown at the National. As it is, it feels like an admission of defeat.

Unsent Postcards: Macbeth – Young Vic, London

[seen 03/12/15]

There is a brilliant moment relatively early in Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerin’s new dance-theatre version of Macbeth that encapsulates all that could have been hoped for from the production.

Anna Maxwell-Martin’s Lady Macbeth is delivering her “Was the hope drunk?” speech. When she gets to “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me” she just stops. For ages. She and John Heffernan’s Macbeth look at the floor. Look at a wall. Maybe they do even look at each other, but it seemed like they were both lost in their own private grief. And it’s so good. The stillness, the poigancy, the performances, everything. Here, I think, was this production’s justification for these Macbeths’ murderous rise to power; shell-shocked grief and nihilism. If your whole world has been emptied of meaning, why not advance to the top of the externally defined order by violently breaking every rule of hospitality and decency? A lot of the script has been cut here, it seems like a reasonable enough rationale.

However, mostly this production doesn’t really work. I’d have liked it to have done. There’s no earthly reason why it shouldn’t have. But due to some weird alchemical failure, it really didn’t take off on press night. (Although one reads encouraging things on Twitter from people who have seen in more recently, and it’s in Birmingham and Manchester in the New Year, and so might get itself sorted out.)

It would be easy, I suspect, to just blame the unfamiliar dance elements that have been brought to bear on Shakespeare’s play. But I don’t think it’s that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the concept, just the realisation in this particular instance. Ok, there are some technical issues. Rather than feeling like dance-theatre it feels like dance *and* theatre. Alternately. And the twain very rarely meet. Either people are dancing or they’re standing stock still and speaking. There isn’t as much dancing as you might wish for, and it maybe sometimes feels more like stock routines from the post-Shechter school, mixed with a more music-video sensibility, than, well, that any of the high-points of dance theatre that you might care to name (inevitably Café Müller, right?).

Perhaps as a result, the “acting bits,” as we must regrettably see them, not only feel isolated, but also wildly underpowered. This Macbeth lacks narrative drive or momentum like a cheap simile. Lizzie Clachan’s false-perspective underpass set works brilliantly as a set *for something*, almost in spite of itself. And there is something admirable about the way that the sliding sections do somehow manage to achieve a kind of internal architectural logic even when they shouldn’t. (That’s badly explained, but it’s bloody impressive). Nonetheless, the effect of the setting, when combined with the costumes, is to make “Scotland” seem like the name of a Vauxhall S&M club – perhaps with a middle-Eastern dictatorship theme – undergoing a series of very aggressive management takeovers.

Indeed, things were so unclear that I nearly succumbed to an attack of the DWMs. Like, *who* are these people? *Where* are these people? *What* are we even looking at here? I mean, *I* know Macbeth, but it really did feel more like watching a series of sketches based on the faint memory of the play. Which, again, could have been fine. But here seemed not to be.

I desperately wanted to like this production, not least because it was two hours long, but it just didn’t happen. No doctrinaire *reasons*, it just felt like it didn’t gel. Great idea on paper. Lovely poster. But, no.

[This review is now about two months old, and the whole thing could have improved beyond recognition since it was written]

Unsent Postcards: Linda – Royal Court, London

[seen 02/12/15]

I will say first of all that the above cartoon has haunted my view of this play since I saw it, since it pretty much encapsulates my entire problem with the play.

I didn’t like Linda one bit. Not the play, as I understood it, not this première production of it.

Which is odd.

I mean, it seemed well-written (Penelope Skinner). I personally wasn’t so into the plot, or the characters especially, but that could easily be put down to a) my being a man (although I’d argue that it wasn’t that, on the simple grounds that I wouldn’t have liked any of it any more for the characters being men) or b) to my being an implacable cynic about capitalism, advertising, Dove soap (here thinly disguised as “Swan”), beauty products, advertising again, etc.

It does seem like quite a good one of the thing it is (ostensibly realist plays about people with middle class jobs and their problems maintaining their lifestyle). It’s just not a thing I especially like.

Similarly, I think it would be hard to fault the production (Michael Longhurst). The acting seems to be first-rate. The largely believable characters are acted believably.

The issue – that women are treated badly by society, and worse when they’re over 50 – is important.

So all I can do is say why it didn’t really work for me, and you can all make your own judgements about whether this middle-aged white man’s viewpoint is really relevant in this context.

The first thing we learn about Linda is that Sex and the City actress Kim Cattrall dropped out of the production “on doctor’s orders” and has been replaced by Noma Dumezweni. Now, I have no idea whether or not the “doctor’s orders” bit is true or not. I will speculate, though, that this substitution is responsible for injecting a great deal more warmth and complexity into the piece than may otherwise have emerged. Linda the character is a woman-over-fifty who works in advertising within a cosmetics firm.

There’s a bit of an elephant in the room regarding the substitution. Cattrall is movie-star-famous and white. Dumezweni is black and is much less famous. And isn’t seered onto an unwilling public consciousness for playing a much-quoted American sex addict for ten series and two movies.

I was all for “colour-blind casting”, but I take my views under advisement from people who know more than me. In the case of “colour-blind casting”, I was very interested by Vinay Patel’s recent essay on Master of None. In it Patel lays out a stage-by-stage chart of ways that ethnic minorities can be depicted. Stage one is basically “grudgingly” and stage four is Main Character with full ethnically-inflected background (personally I’d propose a fifth stage, where ethnic minorities are so integrated in to mainstream culture that they can abandon it in irritation and start making “unwatchable” avant garde theatre, but...). Anyway, Dumezweni’s Linda is squarely Stage Three. That is to say, nothing about Linda’s background is specifically the experience of black women over fifty in Britain. It’s not not, either, if you see what I mean. In the casting here, Linda even has a mixed-race daughter from a previous relationship (and a white daughter with her (current) white husband) whom she lectures glibly about just ignoring racists. That is to say, the original casting can be read as colour-conscious (if that’s the opposite of “colour-blind”). A few years ago, I think I’d have applauded the idea that we can have a black actor playing a character on a British stage in a modern naturalistic play whose only issue with Britain was sexist ageism. Now, I’m not so sure. I mean, isn’t there an irony that in a play where the lead character protests the way that she gets ignored because of her age, that her race is *completely* ignored? Isn’t race a bit more of a live issue for everyone than this suggests?

Irrespective of all this, Dumezweni’s performance is powerful, compelling, watchable and also maybe more *likeable* than the script requires. Or maybe that’s good. Maybe that introduces an extra level of complexity.

I don’t really know what we’re meant to do with a play like this. The play itself is wildly judgemental. Or rather, all the characters in it are. And all the situations they find themselves in have not inconsiderable moral dimensions, even if those dimensions aren’t always considered by the characters. Dramamatically, it is a bit like a starter pack of ethical questions you might ask a child in a pupil referral unit to see if they have registered any traditional sense of right and wrong. Sure, in this modern world of rampant relativism on one side and rampant capitalism on the other, the fussy idea of “right and wrong” seems as mad, old-fashioned and reactionary as an Enid Blyton story, but there it is. I’m old. And possibly old-fashioned. I still think in terms of right and wrong. And, well, basically everyone in this play is wrong. All of them. The whole lot are completely selfish. Damaged, yes; unhappy, sure. But Christ, it’s heavy going spending time with them. Especially as what we’re spending time with is a compilation of all their worst moments and decisions. I had no idea what I was supposed to be getting out of having been introduced to any of them.

[And, yes, I realise there’s something obnoxious about someone as privileged as me saying, “Bleugh. I don’t want to watch plays about the awful people who choose to advertise cosmetics because I find their whole existence worse than pointless, and clearly counter-revolutionary”. In mitigation, I’m only saying it to playwrights, directors, artistic directors and designers. People, in short, who have also worked incredibly hard to ensure they never have to become senior advertising executives at cosmetics companies. People, indeed, who think that cosmetics companies are fair game for their allegorical satires on sexist ageism simply because they appear to be institutions that feed and feed off precisely this malaise. And, with that analysis, I’d tend to agree. What I find weird, is that, based on age and gender, we should nonetheless start to feel sorry for them when the ugly world that they’ve contrived to construct spits them out. If we’re really going to go to the logical end-point of this train of thought, we might as well be watching a play called “Poor Kapo” about a washed-up inmate-guard in a concentration camp.]

I also wondered a lot about the presentation. Es Devlin’s set seems to function as a metaphor for the problems of society, and also for the problems of this production. It is a glossy, white scupltural thing on a revolve, which – with many levels on two sides – presents a shiny kitchen, a shiny office, a shiny bedroom, another shiny office, etc. Apparently it went six times over budget. The idea of spending money you don’t have on perfecting a glossy, vacuous outward experience seems to speak directly to the core of the play. I mean, yes, the set did look great. And perfectly captured the horrible, bland, corporate meh-land in which its action is set. But. Well, you see where I’m going with this. Why perpetuate the awfulness? Why reproduce all the problems AGAIN and then make us spend time feeling oppressed by them? Doesn’t this play reinforce all these ideas? Isn’t it really a triumph of right-wing, patriarchal, capitalist propaganda?

The play seems to present Linda’s situation as A Classical Tragedy. What happens at the end is ambiguous, but it seems from the script as if she chucks herself off her expensive office’s expensive balcony, having tried to be both a mother and a successful advertising executive. The problem with this is that it feels like some sort of Victorian morality play. We’re used, in theatre, to seeing our tragic heroes undone by a fatal flaw. Linda has no such flaw. Arguably society does, but then, does it seem anti-feminist to suggest that actually millions of women actually do prosper and thrive? Even over fifty? “There aren’t enough roles for women over fifty” is a problem. But having the first high-profile play to address this having the central character being defeated by their age and gender was if those were their fatal flaw is a depressing remedy. It is simplistic to want these representations of women over fifty to be positive. But, if they’re not going to be positive, can their situation not at least be a bit more Richard III or Macbeth than just falling prey to a Daily Mail article about how a woman can’t have it all?

Also tragic is the fact that Longhurst and movement director Imogen Knight, who did such a spectacular job on Carmen Disruption have, for whatever reason, allowed their wings to clipped here. Is it cynical or fanciful to imagine that the reason is “commercialism”/“viability”? I honestly don’t know. But then, I don’t get “the public” or theatres’ perceptions of “what the public will wear” either. It seems to me that the British public often has better taste than they are given credit for, and that the possible avant garde version of Linda – the ripped apart, fractured, critical, antagonistic approach to the text, would have been a million times better (see also: A View From The Bridge, etc.). But, no, that’s not the production we’ve got. Which is a shame. Instead it feels like a cramped, self-fulfilling prophecy.

More than anything, Linda reads like a parable for New Labour. A decade ago or so, she was apparently having modest success in advertising, making things a tiny bit nicer for the world, while ignoring that the whole edifice in which she operated was absolutely rotten to the core and built on insupportable values. Now the edifice which she helped sustain has turned on her, another party is in the driving seat, and she sees that all the cosmetic progress she apparently made was entirely superficial. The problem was never “what sort of adverts?” after all, but the entire point of advertising. As such, on one level it’s even difficult to sympathise when a cruel system that she helped perpetuate has turned on her. There was never an attempt to address systemic injustice and the result is therefore that a lot of selfish people continue going round and round on their shiny white iceberg forever.

So, in answer to the cartoon. No. I completely support feminism. But the triumph of a feminism that only seeks equality of women and men within capitalism, and, less than that, no further social movement – so that upper-middle-class women will be equal with upper-middle-class, and working class women will only be equal with working class men – and a feminism that doesn’t also address the appalling racial inequalities still absolutely entrenched in every institution in our society is a pretty hollow victory. And I don’t think I believe that, just because I’m a white middle class man.

Unsent Postcards: Little Eyolf – Almeida, London

[seen 30/11/15]

[Because the Almeida had asked me to do their podcast about naturalism during the run of Little Eyolf, I found myself trying to watching the production through that frame of reference. Which, as we shall see, was deeply unhelpful. It should also be noted, that the previous thing I saw before Eyolf was Roar, China! in Warsaw a week or so earlier. And, well, let’s be honest, I hadn’t been having a great time with British theatre generally since BITEF. So, this posting stands in more as a snapshot of my state-of-disgruntlement than as a reasonable review. Hence my having sat on it for so long.]

The weirdest thing about watching Richard Eyre’s new production (of his own adaption) of Henrick Ibsen’s Little Eyolf is actually how incredibly NOTHING WHATSOEVER it has to do with naturalism as I understand it.

But, I realise, I have next to no idea what anyone does mean or understand by naturalism. (This, incidentally, is a growing irritation of mine. I really want to write a book for the Theatre &; series called Theatre & Taxonomy – perhaps as a satire, or a Theatre version of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas – which will lay bare and expose the sheer laziness of the way our theatre is written about and consequently thought about. Not least, often, by me.) But – more annoying than my own lack of knowing – is my growing feeling that no one else has the faintest idea what they mean by it either.

So.

In terms of naturalism, I found the first scene of Little Eyolf more or less unwatchable. NO ONE behaves like this. No one. Basically it’s a husband and wife (and, Christ, that takes long enough to unearth), their son and the husband’s sister, or half-sister, or something. The main problem – in terms of naturalism – is the way they’re talking. L____ is so florid and classical-sounding you’d think she was actually singing an aria. Her voice seems to swoop up to a sentences first word, then daringly plummet through the sentence to magically end up back at the height from whence the swoop begun for the end. Like a kind of sonic trapeze act. Or, sometimes, I think she does it the other way round, starting low, hitting a high, and then descending back into a low for the last bit of a clause or sub-clause. I think sometimes it’s even more athletic than this. I’m attempting to describe it properly, not because I think it’s unusual, but precisely because I think it’s very usual indeed, ON STAGE. I think Imogen Stubbs probably does it most. Or perhaps Felicity Kendall. You can imagine the sort of thing, though, right? It’s kind of ok in Private Lives, or something. If you want to imagine a world of posh ladies half-singing their way through their merry lives then this is the voice you want them doing it in. As a way into serious Scandinavian drama it seems incongruous.

Against this, J_____ C__ barks his lines, mostly to us, the audience. But sensitively. He does pained barking, pleading barking, blustery barking, and sometimes, just to reassure us of his virtuosity, barking-barking. But for the first scene, fuck me there’s a lot of barking.

Now, I don’t want to be mean to actors. Generally I hardly notice them at all, and this seems very unfair indeed. They’re only following orders, after all. But because I was thinking about “naturalism” all I could think about watching Little Eyolf was how *unnaturally* everyone was behaving. Their child comes on and does a fairly decent job of acting precisely what he is: a child, on stage, acting. This sense is further compounded when the ratcatcher character comes on with an actual dog, who is mesmerising by virtue of actually being entirely convincing as a dog. In fact, I probably missed a good deal of the dialogue for the entire duration that the dog was on stage.

Dan Rebellato (who was also on the Almeida podcast) has written a sublime appreciation of the play, and it’s worth reading, not least because it half-addresses why I found the play impossible to watch as naturalism.

The set for the piece (Tim Hatley) is at once impressionist, symbolist (perhaps, although not in an overtly suggestive way) and *a bit* naturalistic. In short, it looks pretty much like most British sets look now. A kind of end-of-days mash-up of a theatre culture – running from the Globe, through Victorian painted backdrops, through the Royal Court Revolution, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble tour, and the multiple interventions of modern technology – that has arrived at a point where a white-painted wooden frame/platform with some chairs on it, looking out to a digital picture of some mountains is immediately understood as indicative and vaguely realistic, despite really being almost entirely abstract. I mean, it’s a really weird state of affairs. It’s an attractive stage to look at, but not really to watch a play performed on. The colouring is so Scandi- that it feels almost parodic, while the laid-back, washed-out, Elle Decoration/Habitat natural soothing colours would make it a lovely set to live in, but possibly a harder one to get excited about the action taking place there.

Still, as Dan’s essay suggests, I didn’t really understand the play, what the play was for, this production, or what this production of it was for.

All of which happened, despite the childish and picky tone of this review, without me really *minding*. I just felt a bit bewildered and lost and alienated. And didn’t really understand what I was meant to be trying to get.

I almost feel like I should be apologising.