Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet – Sadler’s Wells

[overdue and grumpy, or: on reading and expertise]

I begin with links and a series of admissions:

Sanjoy Roy and Luke Jennings have been watching and writing about dance a lot long than me. Years and years longer. Without a doubt, they know more than me about dance. To all intents and purposes, when it comes to “dance” I still function at that basically despicable “I know what I like-” level, which makes me hopping mad when it’s applied to theatre by others.

A second admission goes like this: having absolutely *adored* Sasha Waltz’s Continu, and having heard mostly great things about Hofesh Shechter (I’ve heard one dissenting voice; very informed, but possibly compromised by inter-personal relations), I fairly skipped along to Cedar Lake Ballet’s UK debut at Sadler’s Wells. It’s a mixed programme of three fairly short pieces (all around the half-hour mark, with generous intervals between each, making for a very relaxing evening for this smoker), each made by a different choreographer for/with the company. And I did like the Hofesh Shechter piece, Violet Kid – not *adore*, but certainly *had a lot of time for*. Unexpectedly, however, I absolutely *loathed* Alexander Ekman’s Tuplet. But, loathing it was, if anything, a far more interesting experience (intellectually at least) than *quite liking* Violet Kid. Resultantly, I was a bit preoccupied during the final piece, Crystal Pite’s Grace Engine.

I should first have a stab at saying what I think I saw:

Hofesh Shechter’s Violet Kid is a loping, tribal, rangy beast of a thing. Before training as/becoming a choreographer, Shechter trained as a percussionist, and has created/recorded the score of Violet Kid himself. And it’s a kind of percussive concerto. Rising and falling; undulating; speeding up, slowing down, and intricately recorded and treated. There is also a three-piece string section – set in a lit section of the black back wall of the otherwise gauzey, empty space.

The piece [and, boy, should I have written this up sooner – nothing worse than trying to remember choreography precisely a few days on] reminded me again of Continu. It uses the whole company – 16 dancers, male and female – splitting them various into two or three camps or moving them around as a single unit. When split off into groups (not usually along any tangible lines – not about gender, or coloured vests) they inhabit different movement patterns. If you wanted to try to characterise the movement you could do worse than suggest a troupe of orangutans crossed with a street-dance/break-dance party: the most striking movement is a kind of long-armed shuffling gallop across the stage; a terrestrial version of seeking vines from which to swing between trees. At the same time, other dancers jerk robotically.

While there isn’t a strong sense of dramaturgy or story here, there is clearly organisation and thematic elements. If it seems slightly inconclusive, that in itself is no bad thing. It is an enjoyable mood-board of a piece. Perhaps more a calling card than the actual meeting, but a fine display of what Shechter is up to.

So, how, after this promising start and a welcome fag-break (and free fizzy elderflower cordial), did Tuplet put me in such a foul mood? (Well, yes, it is a godawful title, but I didn’t even look at the programme until afterwards). It starts interestingly enough. The black back wall of H.S.’s piece has been replaced with a giant white flat, onto which are projected two square frames of film, one showing various midriffs and the other showing various close-ups of mouths, both in black and white. The mouths are making various rhythmic sucking and hiccoughing noises, a kind of arthuas Bobby McFerrin crossed with a more than usually useful Bruce Nauman.

The piece features six dancers, who come on and stand at the front in six squares of light. They move in time to the odd organic noises. There’s a section in which they dance to recordings of their names being spoken (presumably by them). Thinking back, it seems amusing, clever, nicely made; and the problems I had with it feel almost unfathomably grumpy at this distance from sitting there watching it, but there they were. I could see nothing more than an atmosphere of unbearably smug, self-satisfied self-congratulation, with all the artistry of a Gap advert (which is to say, obviously quite a lot of technical facility, and absolutely zero “soul” or point).

My problem now is: I have absolutely no idea whether this feeling came from the stage or from my imagination. Can a movement be smug? I’d say, yes, it probably can. Were these movements smug? I’m less sure. I’m sure the dancers are sincere, nice people. But then, what even the hell has that got to do with whether this piece was any good? Were their smiles “gratingly ingratiating” or just nice, simple smiles. (And, yes: with every word, I realise I articulate far more than I’m comfortable with, regarding some apparent and previously unconscious set of rules that I seem to have regarding dance.)

Following Continu, I got into a written exchange with leading theatre academic Nicholas Ridout who hadn’t liked the show.

“Dance-wise I found [Continu] pretty objectionably and complacently reproductive of really hateful gender essentialism, as well as offering the most obvious and illustrative relationship between music and dance. Dance-wise also because of its dependence on all sorts of ballet codifications (which are of course bound up with the gender essentialism) which treat the body in ways I find limiting.

“But above all, it was the pervasive tone of the whole enterprise, which, in the context of Berlin museology, is particularly hard to take. The idea that Kunst and Kultur (of a certain modernist high-mindedness) can redeem horror through the consumption of autonomous art. I am thinking here about Adorno’s observations about such work, in Commitment.

Nick goes on to use as an example “...the firing squad sequence” in Continu: “Each crumpling body is so dancerly, the image so strong and clear, the setting so abstract, the political specifics so utterly absent, the executioner and his final victim so equal. The squalid political viciousness of any event it might be thought to represent or allude to is utterly overwhelmed by the beauty of it all and our recognition of that beauty (and in that recognition our belief that knowing such beauty when we see it makes us unlikely to participate in a firing squad).”

(quoted with permission)

Which got me thinking. On one level, about how I’d really not applied anything like that level of rigour to my thinking about the Waltz, but, more productively, about the relation of intent and result, and the position of the critic to both.

Nick and I did however agree that we had in the past both let the ethical questions of work that we’d otherwise been enjoying pass us by, as had happened to me in the case of Continu (if you sign up for Nick’s persuasive analysis), or perhaps in Three Kindoms (re: the enormous discussion of that piece’s gender politics).

Now, on one level, I’m pretty sure nothing Tuplet does even begins to merit the levelling of such critical big guns. It’s a bit of fluff. It seems to seek to do nothing more than entertain and be virtuosic,  and unless you believe that it is the job of the critic to hold every such piece to account and demand that it take the world a bit more seriously (which I don’t think I do believe), then it seems unsporting to have a go at it for that.

But, more to the point, this lack of seriousness wasn’t the problem I was experiencing. I wasn’t feeling its gender (or racial) depictions (if indeed there were any) as especially problematic (though I’m sure one could have found fault. One can always find fault if one wants). And it wasn’t making beauty out of suffering. I just found it preening and self-satisfied. Which are such subjective views that they hardly seem worth mentioning. Except that they were more or less my entire experience of the thing: something I really could not get past/get over.

And yet, just as I’ve been troubled when other critics have described work I’ve loved as “self-indulgent” and thought it the most ridiculous, crass observation, here I find myself coming close to making it myself. It was a combination of factors: the cute, pleased-with-itself, too neat choreography-and-concept combined with a certain attitude of meretricious approval-seeking on the part of the dancers. It was one of those occasions when you kind of found yourself wishing that the performers didn’t seem so keen to be liked. But then maybe the choreography was about that precise desperation, and I just wasn’t reading it in the right way.

Anyway, dissatisfied, distracted and preoccupied was how I came to the third piece – Crystal Pite’s Grace Engine. This is perhaps a half-way house between the occasional beauty and continual opacity of the Shechter and the transparent entertainment of Tuplet. Here the dancers perform the piece dressed as commuters while the lighting and sound suggest a world of metro stations and trains. Variously we might be in that famous photo of Grand Central Station, or watching commuters engaged in post-apocalyptic gang warfare in some dystopian U-bahn tunnels. There seems to be a strong suggestion at a couple of points of someone throwing themselves in front of a tube – perhaps one possible interpretation of the title.

Which finally brings us to the interesting question of what expertise actually means in the MSM. I violently disagreed with Luke Jennings’s (grudgingly I admit understandable) position on Dave St Pierre’s Un Peu de Tendresse..., so I knew he and I plausibly had different ideas about what might constitute “good”. On the other hand, he certainly has knowledge and the expertise needed to articulate his views in a way that I’d be the first to admit I haven’t, necessarily. But I was keen to read his review and see how he wrote about this piece I’d hated.

However, the entirety of Jennings’s review of Cedar Lake – so far as I can make out – is this tweet:

“@cedarlake at @Sadlers_Wells. Fine, fearless dancers & choreography with blood in its veins.”

Which I dare say even a novice like me could have asserted, if it had been what I thought.

More frustratingly, Jennings doesn’t seem to have managed to get any expansion of this thought in the the relevant issue of the Observer, so I don’t get to learn more about what struck him about the dancers as especially “fearless”, or why the choreography had “blood in its veins” rather than, say – in the case of Tuplet – “a smug grin plastered over its stupid face”, for example. Similarly, while Sanjoy Roy has got a tiny bit more space to expand his thoughts – and describes/evokes the piece well – the tyranny of the star-rating and the tiny word count means that that’s all he’s got room to do.

I’m aware this is meant to be a “review” of some dance (and I hope you’ve at least got a sense of what happened and what I thought), but really is is a slightly desperate plea for someone somewhere at some newspaper to stop throttling reviews with ridiculous word counts, and for the public to stop asserting that all they want is a star-rating and a consumer guide (if there actually is a meaningfully sizeable public who do assert this). It is all very well Roy and Jennings being experts, but if they don’t actual have space to flex that expertise, all we get is a series of impressions that someone who knows next to nothing about dance (i.e. me) could have made, backed up only with the theory of their expertise but not the practice of it.

Post script: The best review of the evening by far turns out to be by Maria Lu at Exeunt. She describes precisely and with expertise the show I also saw. Granted she thought Tuplet was good, but she explains it in a way that allows me to see that everything I saw was present within it, and that Lu and I just have really different tastes.


Thank God for Exeunt.


[Yes, that genuinely is a post-script. I didn’t read the Lu review until I’d finished all the above. Nor am I saying it because I write for them occasionally.  Read the pieces yourself.  Make up your own mind.]

50 Acts – Platform Theatre, Kings Cross

[written for Exeunt]

Wendy Houstoun’s 50 Acts is a piece about getting old, being on stage, and the Tories fucking everything up. It appears as part of Dance Umbrella’s season at what turns out to be London’s best new theatre for decades the Platform Theatre King’s Cross (I’d been to the studio before but the main house is somewhere to get properly excited about). I mean, I would say this is now one of the five best stages in London.

(And... Not only is the venue so far benefiting from rather brilliant programming, it also looks and seems to behave like a progressive, European venue and not the ghastly relics of Empire that constitute London's hideous West End.)

(And... As if being the best new theatre space in London isn't enough, there was an exhibition curated by Tim Etchells on the way in. And... a rather neat installation down another corridor called Black Lab...)


50 Acts is the sort of piece that can upset dance purists because it’s got more speaking than movement in it. And what movement there is, as Houstoun herself points out, is being performed by someone around 50 years of age, with no formal training whatsoever. (I’m not making these dance purists up, btw, I’ve heard them grumbling at Sadler’s Wells about Ivana Müller)

However, since we’ve all kind of got over the whole skill thing in dance now (sure, it’s nice to see sometimes, but it’s no excuse for intellectual prostitution – ours or theirs), what we’ve really come to admire here is – well – Great Dramaturgy in Action, as it turns out.

It might be both useful and reductive to note that 50... bears a similarly tangential relationship to “dance” as Forced Ents (with whom Houstoun has collaborated) do to theatre. That is to say, of course it *is* dance. Or at least it is perfectly within its avant-garde rights to categorise itself as such. But it would perhaps surprise the hell out of the unwary traditionalist, who might be expecting something more like this, or even this.

Having been introduced to dance via things like Ivana Müller's While We Were Holding It Together and Dave St Pierre’s Un Peu Tendresse – Bordel la Merde (and seemingly *nothing else*) at “theatre” festivals in mainland Europe, my tolerance of-, enjoyment of-, even affection for- “dance” that perhaps contains more speech than movement; dance that you could probably spend time arguing was as much “theatre” as it was “dance”; is perhaps unusually high for the dance world, but is also perhaps inevitable given my theatre background. In short, this work looks precisely like something that in a parallel world would be being programmed at theatres. (Actually it already has been, but here it is part of a “dance” festival.)

[Diana, feel free to cut all this taxonomical wrangling when you edit the piece for Exeunt. No one needs this shit :-) *]

So what it is? Well, first off, 50 Acts is pretty much an object lesson in just how interesting one person can be on a more-or-less empty stage (of course no stage is ever “empty”, but that’s a different discussion and there’s not much actual stuff on this one) for about an hour.

The piece is divided, as the title suggests, into 50 Acts. There is a video projection on the back wall that accompanies the piece, sometimes flashing up a new Scene number. Or sometimes flashing up the same Scene number again and again to indicate to us that this is still the same scene. From time to time, the projector also shows a bunch of footage.

“This is the First scene” Announces Houstoun from the the front of the stage, unfussily lit from above in a narrow band of light almost sectioning her off in this position at the front of the stage. But then she goes to the back of the stage and the projections take over the responsibility of relaying “her thoughts” into our head.

It’s a curious sensation, but I’ve only really just thought about the fact that she almost certainly wasn’t thinking those thoughts as I was watching her yesterday [it was yesterday when I wrote that sentence] (“almost” since she might run the script in her head, or read in reverse the words in the light as it shines past her from projector to screen). But so complete is our understanding of this mode – the mode of the voiceover or the surtitle narrating the inner life of an actor before us that one is swept along to the end before one necessarily thinks to question it.

Through the following acts – beyond the usual theatre-meaning of acts, there’s also the sense of “Acts” both in the same sense as Shakespeare’s Jacques expands it, and as the kind of line-up of extraordinary “turns” that old variety posters often promised – the mode of receiving thoughts switches often between our reading the written and hearing the spoken, both by Houstoun in person and as a recording. There’s also the interplay of recorded music and stock film footage. At a few points, when she’s running about, old black and white footage of crowds also running about is shown.

Houstoun also makes use of what we might call the “list method”, also beloved of Forced Entertainment and Tim Etchells, Andy Field or Ivana Müller. That is to say, there are sections when she runs through exhaustive permutations of sentences with a certain starting point or theme. It’s a method I admit I find incredibly seductive and appealling when it’s done well, as it is here.

The cumulative effect of the piece is not conclusive, or emotionally manipulative, so much as contemplative and strangely joyful. And without watching again, from an analytical standpoint, rather than simply, notepadless, allowing yourself to get swept along with the feel of the thing, I honestly couldn’t tell you why.



*[postscript: I've just realised, reading back, that leaving notes to "Diana" in the middle of reviews makes me sound like Agent Cooper.  Which I like.  I was, however, referring to a real person.]

Desire Under The Elms – Lyric Hammersmith

[or: on uncertainty]

I have virtually no idea what to make of Sean Holmes's new production is of Eugene O'Neill's 1924 play Desire Under the Elms. Or, more properly, what I made of it.

Let's work backwards:

Sean Holmes's production offers plenty of clues. It seems faithful to the intentions of the playwright. Hang on. Does it? I don't know the play at all. So what I suppose I mean is that I am happy to take on trust that this is the plot as O'Neill wrote it. That these are the lines that O'Neill wrote. The script here is thick with a vernacular poetry. It takes a while to get the ear attuned, but once you're in there is a strange beauty in the wild, rough tongue the characters speak. It's a dialectal variety of English that recalls rustic Cornish or Irish, perhaps. Unusual possessive pronouns (yourn, hirn, hern) stand out in a play that deals primarily with possession.

On the other hand, Holmes's designer, Ian McNeil (A Doll's House, An Inspector Calls), has created an imaginative, claustrophobic, half-German response to the set. Rather than the usual naturalistic cutaway homesteads we're used to in such domestic tragedies, here we have rooms rolled in as required from the gaping wings, with only half a backdrop standing in for the wide skies and wild vistas of the “New World”. These rooms are stark, suggestively coloured, and cramped; deftly conveying the claustrophobia that the characters still find trapping them in this vast landscape. And, like Hildegard Bechtler's set for Scenes From an Execution, it isn't afraid to be ugly. Strikingly so, in the case of the small kitchenette-on-wheels in which the piece opens.

However, while the set is pulling in one direction, and the script in several others, it feels as if the acting has the casting vote on what sort of a production this is. And, by-and-large, I'd say this is pretty much proper, full-on, in-the-moment, psychological, fourth wall, big-stage naturalism (I think the “big-stage” is a necessary qualification for all audible naturalism in big theatres: no one talks that loudly in real life). Actually, the costumes contribute to this impression, also taking their cue from what – to this non-expert on the period – looks like historical research.

And I suppose it was the performances I found hardest to tune in to. It doesn't help that the chief characteristic of the two main speakers for the first twenty minutes is jammering incomprehensibility. Simeon (Mikel Murfi – nice Equity name, btw (I assume Equity, apols if not)) and Peter (Fergus O’Donnell) are two bearded brothers of the fearsome patriarch Ephraim Cabot (Finbar Lynch) who has either married his way onto this farm or else, as he claims, built it up with his bare hands. Ephraim is the subject of some resentment from the two brothers who, we tortuously learn, have had it with his treatment and are a-heading out west to the California gold-rush. They are explaining this to their apparently half-witted half-brother Eben (Morgan Watkins), to whose mother this farm probably belonged before she married Ephraim and then died.

Turns out the reason for Ephraim's protracted absence is that he's found himself a new wife, Abbie (Denise Gough – doomed to find herself forever trapped psychosexual dramas in small rooms on big stages). He returns with her, the brothers jump ship and Ephraim Abbie and Eben are left to wrangle with fate on their own. Fate, almost too inevitably, takes the form of attraction between Eben and Abbie behind the father's back.

Or at least, that's the gist of it.

Thanks to a combination of what the script's up to, and what the actors are up to, we're unsure (perhaps too unsure, perhaps just unsure enough) whether Abbie has really fallen for Eben. At least, we're not sure until fatally late in the day.

However, the performances of these two central protagonists from Watkins and Gough is curiously blank and lacking in legible subtext. Eben is forthright, but close to being an actual village idiot, and here his emotional and physical responses are played furtively close to his chest, while Gough's Abbie is made of such hard stuff (and is also an actual idiot) that we can never guess her true feelings or motivation. It's a credible reading of the play, but one that makes a lot of extra hard work of it.

In contrast, with Finbar Lynch we have the advantage of believing from the get-go. Here is a man, still tough at 72, who is all plain speaking and stated intent. His is also the driving vocabulary of the piece. A man of simple contrasts, he is hard while his dead wife and her son Eben are soft. The land is hard. God is hard. In hardness there is reassurance, for softness, only contempt.

Given the whacking great sexual undertone of the whole play, little is made of this in Ephraim's case, and notably, when Abbie is seducing Eben, her talk is all of enlarging, growth and trees, and not hardness. It's a notable qualification given the direction in which contemporary slang has headed.

Also interesting is how little discernable heat seems to be given off by the apparently smitten Abbie and Eben. In theory they're smouldering at each other fit to burn, but, perhaps partly as a side-effect of the slightly cold, Teutonic design and lighting, you don't feel it radiating from the stage, exactly. Indeed, this feels like a distinctly wintry take on what might in other circumstances be a rather sultry play.

I found myself watching at a distance. Appreciating the interest of the play's setting, being reminded of Nick Cave's debut novel (Of course, if I'm going to take an interest in C19th American history, it's going to have to be hard-sold to me by an Australian goth. Of course.) Growing to be impressed by the dense poetry of the writing. And getting gradually into the narrative.

On the other hand, O'Neill asks us to take a lot on trust. And in the second half, the plotting has come a bit undone. Indeed, the denouement, the terrible revelation is rendered almost comic in its pathos. Matt Trueman rather brilliantly pointed out to me afterwards (and hopefully will in his review too, it's an excellent point) that by having us see a crucial act take play on stage, we go into that scene with more knowledge than Eben and as such can only see the bitter irony of his mistake, rather than sharing his not knowingness). Even so, The Thing That I Won't Spoiler is such a colossally stupid thing to do, that you hardly know where to look, or what to make of the characters.

It was at this point that I started wondering whether this really was a play about two characters with severe learning difficulties, and wondering how that would be as a dynamic. With Abbie somewhere lower on the IQ chart than that character Juliette Lewis plays in a couple of films who seems almost childlike in her lack of a grasp on things, but at the same time, dangerously, worryingly, precociously sexual.

At this point, one starts to wonder if that mightn't have been a more exciting production, which is unfair, since this is, I think, actually probably quite a good account of a play that I'm not sure I especially warmed to. On the other hand, perhaps a radically different production might have made the play's case more successfully to me.

Holmes doesn't add anything by way of an external reading or take on the piece – more this production just makes us think that bit harder about the play itself through the use of an unexpected aesthetic. Which is no bad thing in itself, except that I'm not sure it's a play that stands up to so much scrutiny. Again, perhaps this is Holmes's intent and I'm falling into the trap of wanting to have a rattling good time when there isn't one to be had.

I'm slightly less sure about the hermetically sealed acting within the context of the deconstructed staging. It's excellent too see further experimentation in mid-North Sea techniques and – post Morning – it confirms Holmes as a thoughtful, interesting theatre-maker willing to take risks. But in this instance, I'm not sure every risk fully pays off to the extent of creating an enjoyable evening in the theatre.

That said, I've been thinking about and puzzling about the production for a good deal longer already than a lot of productions that I have out-and-out enjoyed, so perhaps even this *judgement* is still a long way from definitive and still has to fully play-out.

On Criticism: Fireface – Young Vic

[primarily a piece about negative criticism]

Well, it had to happen, didn't it? I sit around, holding forth about “curation” and about “ecologies” and about “trusting companies to know what they're doing” and “only writing about things I liked, or things that interested me” and, well, it raises the question: what are we going to do when something really seems not to have worked?

Dan Hutton's For the Love of Theatre picks up and runs with something I said in The Ecologist and the Curator: “Since returning to blogging/criticism/writing-about-theatre in April, I've felt much more confident about... writing mostly/only about stuff that did indeed turn out to be interesting”. Hutton, feeds this into the wider conversation at DIALOGUE about how critics and artist might be useful to each other. The possibilities of critics just sitting on/not-writing-up shows they didn't like was batted about. And I admit it's an idea I've got a lot of time for: there's nothing worse for critics or criticism than a reputation for delighting in spite, or sadism. Even if some readers do relish it much more than enthusiastic write-ups.

On the other hand, does a continual stream of enjoyment, praise, or even just a lot of benign, in-depth, putting-in-cultural-contexts and attending-upon-the-events ultimately help the critic's readership? (Genuine question. I don't know the answer.) It feels that logic dictates that ideally from time to time there should be some examples given of the critic not liking a thing and writing about why that was, if only to give a better picture of their overall co-ordinates. Because, after all, if a reader is doing their work properly (as well as the critic doing hers properly), then they're essentially acquiring a critical judgement of their own: a critical judgement of the critic's critical judgements, as it were.

There's also the simple fact of not doing so making omission problematic. In short, if you know a critic is deliberately sitting on bad reviews/reviews of things they didn't like, then one might conclude that they've seen all sorts of things and merely not found them to their liking. This is especially problematic for a one-person operation like this where reviews might not turn up for any number of reasons (fatigue or just other things taking priority usually).

You might have guessed by now that I wasn't a huge fan of Fireface. Quite immoderately so on the night (last Thursday). More reflectively so now.

Something I've noticed, thinking about the prospect of this “negative review” since Thursday, is the extent to which this sort of negative review is actually quite a wildly different specie of thing from a positive review. In the positive review one has much to say: the performance has opened a world for you. You can talk about that world, how it was opened up, what you saw inside it, how it relates to other worlds, etc. (I hope that my Scenes From an Execution review gave this sense.) In a different sort of negative review (my ramble about precisely my problems with Boys, for example) this is also possible. I suppose that review was essentially dealing with the relatively credible creation of a world I didn't much care for. It did engage with the play itself, rather than the production. It dealt more with the play as a thesis, than as a piece of theatre.

My experience of Fireface was different to this. So what I've been thinking about is the difference between reviewing the contents that a production unlocks and, I suppose, dealing with a production that one finds obscuring its contents – keeping the world locked up, as it were.

Writing this now, I wonder if this itself is my most specific criticism of Sam Pritchard's production of Fireface. It's not my only problem with it, but I think it may have been the source of much of my discontent.

It is tricky, though. Because, when one hasn't got this world to write about – the arguments or feelings or sensations that a performance provokes – then what one is faced with critiquing is essentially the stuff with which one has far less familiarity; that is to say, the means by which you perceive it to have obscured what you believe to be the contents.

I should try to provide a description of this production.

Pritchard and his designer Amanda Stoodley have places the production on a wooden stage running the length of the Young Vic's Clare(?) studio space. The back wall of this wooden stage is made of a wide spaced, Ikea-style bookshelf/open-plan cupboard thingy (like a big one of these). The thing also has a ceiling and some front pillars, so it's maybe more a cutaway box than stage and back wall. It suggests a compromise between a kind of mythical “German” theatre aesthetic and a naturalistic British one. The shelves of the back wall have household objects shattered over them. The cast are dressed in modern dress and are wearing the items of clothing that are mentioned in the text.

The cast's acting appears to be based, broadly speaking, in the realm of the psychological. I wouldn't say naturalist or realist since on occasion Pritchard places them all facing forwards on chairs at the front of the stage. At other times, when the characters are ostensibly having face-to-face conversations, he positions them facing away from each other in strikingly non-naturalistic attitudes. Various interpretations of a vague sort of stylised speaking are also used: more blank, or more shouty, than strict observance of reality would demand. All of these elements can work. For some reason, they don't here.

The lighting and sound also telescope in and out through the realms of mimesis and metaphor, swapping white noises and flashing building site lights for off-stage doorbell sounds and a warm full cover. These switches in mood may be fitted to some concept of one or other of the character's mental states, or they maybe entirely random. There didn't seem to be any discernible scheme by which they were deployed, and their overuse made an already confusing staging seem yet more cluttered.

Marius von Mayenburg's text itself concerns a pair of disturbed, disturbing German adolescent siblings Kurt and Olga (Rupert Simonian and Aimeé-Ffion Edwards), their parents (Helen Schlesinger and David Annen) and later Olga's new boyfriend Paul (William Postlethwaite). Olga is all precocious sexuality while Kurt's attention is mostly taken up with setting fire to things. At least every other reviewer on the planet will have probably, understandably, designated the play a cross between The Cement Garden and The Fire Raisers – a potentially potent mixture of incestuous teenage desire, and the idea of the arsonists in the attic. Only here, it isn't strangers that the nice middle-class couple have to fear, it's their children. It also occurs to me now that like von Mayenburg's later play The Ugly One, the play also features catastrophic wounds to the face. And I note in passing, that Ramin Grey's unfussy productions of both this and Max Frisch's The Arsonists (as the title was translated for its last outing), could have been useful go-to points of reference for Pritchard.

The description of my problem with the production that I kept returning to was the image of all the actors pressed up so hard against the surface of the text, that there was no chance of seeing the actual play. To give Pritchard the benefit of the doubt, perhaps what I saw was precisely what he wanted to achieve, and he and I just have different views about what is good. On the other hand, several factors seemed to suggest that this wasn't the case. The pity of it is, I applaud what appears to be the direction of Pritchard's intent. He seems to be attempting a high-octane blend of British and German theatrical traditions in the manner of Sean Holmes, Ramin Grey, Benedict Andrews, Thomas Ostermeier, and perhaps latterly Sebastian Nübling.  He doesn't pull it off, however.

The biggest problem is that the acting simply doesn't work. Each cast member seems to be in different production. Annen's Father shouts his head off, Edwards's Olga employs a curious sing-song high-pitched voice, while Simonian's Kurt offers a slightly one-note pitch of angsty intensity throughout. Assuming some degree of naturalistic casting, William Postlethwaite is hopelessly miscast as Paul – projecting none of either the sexual magnetism nor facility with violence that his character's actions imply. Meanwhile, Helen Schlesinger's Mother's deadpan heart just doesn't seem to be in it – witness a scene in which her character is completely naked and the actress is grudgingly topless. Sure, we've all seen production where not a single piece of clothing is removed for nude scenes and ones where all clothing is removed for no especially text-based reason but a bit of token toplessness just feels awkward.  Carelessness like this, makes it feel as if Pritchard hasn't even really caught up with modern British stagings, let alone got the faintest grasp on the complexities of the thinking that lies behind “German bonkers stuff”.

All those points are crucial to an understanding of why the production doesn't work (in my opinion, I need hardly add. Although on this occasion my opinion is entirely correct, and you shouldn't listen to anyone who disagrees with me). However, letting them pile up there still feels more like cruelty, more like kicking puppies in a sack, than like contributing usefully to any sort of an ecology. Or whatever it is we New Critics think we're up to.

On the other hand, if part of the value of the New Criticism is helping to birth new forms of work, then don't we also need to be honest when new work doesn't quite come off?

Whilst I struggled with watching the production – which even manages to make Maja Zade's version, which was originally lauded as “pitch-perfect” and “punchy” sound like the worst sort of translationese – I was interested in the challenge it posed in terms of what to do with this fact.

After all, a critics' job is not after-the-fact dramaturgy, or “outside eye” notes to cast and crew (who if they've any sense, won't read this until after the production has closed at the earliest). On the other hand, if we want future productions to be better, are we not required to describe the manner in which we thought things weren't working rather than rattling off 200 witty words and a low star-rating.

However, at this point we stumble upon a crucial problem. The problem that even to describe a problem is difficult without revealing some sort of imagined alternative solution.

If a good review is revealing of a critic's desires, then a bad review can potentially unearth all sorts of incredibly unhelpful messages.

If you ever want to dismiss the opinions of a critic, you need only look through their back-catalogue of negative reviews and make a list of what it was they were objecting to. I'm more or less certain that, taken en masse, they will make the critic look like a seething bag of contradictions. I'm sure I've come up with some of the most shoddy criteria imaginable to account for why I didn't like something. Because, after all, the not-liking happens first, and only after that does trying to work out why happen.  Pinning down how or why you haven't liked something is actually much harder than knowing you really didn't like it.  And I'm not convinced that getting the specific reason right is an absolute necessity if the main business is simply describing the thing you've seen.  The general reader doesn't require their critic to set a play to rights in their review, just a sense of what it was like watching it.

But is this something else we need to come up with? Ways of discussing how something hasn't worked while managing to avoid looking prescriptive or like armchair directors without the faintest idea of what it is to make a show?

Perhaps.

Right now, I'm just worrying about what a list of all the reasons I've ever given for thinking something wasn't good would look like.

Scenes From an Execution – National Theatre

[seen on Monday in the pen-penultimate preview. Paid £20 for an excellent seat and had a brilliant night out. God bless the NT]

Howard Barker used to proudly comment in interviews (in every interview?) that he made a point of sending every play he wrote to the National Theatre and that they hadn't produced a single one.

Of course, hundreds of other playwrights could say the same thing. It takes a shatterproof sense of self-belief to come out with it like it's an injustice. Being a playwright whose career now spans six decades (his first play Skipper(?) Dates from 1969), he might have just have got away with it, though. In the 70s and 80s he seemed to do okay, with productions by the likes of the RSC, the Royal Court and the Bush, not to mention the odd television play and radio commission, but in the late 80s where he abandoned writing social satires and plays with easily discerned points, and founded his company The Wrestling School to bypass the fact that theatre managements didn't seem to be much going for his new stuff, this stand off started to look like an impasse.

There is a rich, black irony then, that the play with which the National have broken this unofficial embargo is Scenes From an Execution. At once Barker's most successful play – perhaps also his most readily understood and point-making piece – and a play about a wilful artist who refuses to compromise their ideals regarding difficulty in the face of opprobrium, unpopularity and censure.

But beyond this irony, how brilliant that the National have decided to stage Scenes From an Execution. And not to do so with any apparent embarrassment. And to put a proper box office draw like Fiona Shaw in the starring role (Beckett, Brecht and now Barker – Fiona Shaw must be the NT's favourite way to trade off against the perceived difficulty of a play).

I have no idea how the decision to do the play was reached (though I'd love to find out), but it reads like some of the sharpest building dramaturgy in the UK today. In simple terms, Scenes From an Execution, staged at the National Theatre, now, feels so timely that it almost seems impossible that the play is already 28 years old. It speaks to our post-Olympic arts world (and to the late/post-Afghanistan/Iraq world), perhaps more eloquently and urgently than even it might have spoken in 1984, and differently than it did to the post-New Labour, victory-afterglow Britain of '99.

Let me admit now, that I went in already a massive fan of this play and my only real concern was that this production just didn't fuck it up. I don't think I'd ever seen anything that Tom Cairns had directed before, and I'd somehow avoided Fiona Shaw (perhaps a bit deliberately after going off her a lot following the Deborah Warner Medea, which everyone else seemed to think was ok. (my recollection is: it wasn't)). So I was a tiny bit apprehensive. In the event, this production not only doesn't fuck it up, it is an exciting, intelligent take on the play. (And it makes me wish I'd seen more of Cairns's previous work.)

Lending the Lyttleton's stage a strange vastness, Hildegard Bechtler's set looks – I'm not sure there's another way of saying this – operatic. The basic thing is three huge walls, occluded by hanging, structural-looking gauze panels. To one side is a high thick wall on an off-centre revolve. There's at once a base functionality and cubist abstraction about it. What's great, though, is that it's a set that isn't afraid to be a bit ugly. Deliberately so. Almost coarsely asserting the necessity of its brutal strength and practicality.

Cairns's direction follows suit. At several keys moments one is almost surprised by the way that he has placed two characters having a conversation at such a distance apart. You are forced to watch as if a tennis match. There is no drive for the sleek, pretty, dramatically inert stage pictures one might associate with Michael Grandage; nor are there the polite, painterly, safe compositions of Howard Davies. Instead, this is stagecraft that feels, for all its sometime stateliness, somehow raw. It's a mode of staging that suits Barker's script well as it creates a room that allows for both the flights of writerly rhetoric and the actually-very-funny exchanges. We get both enough pace to make the thing gallop along, but enough space to be able to feel the depth and weight of the concepts under discussion.

Scenes... is a big play. Its subject is nominally the commissioning of a painting by the Republic of Venice to celebrate its victory against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto (fascinating to rediscover a pre-9/11 play depicting “Christian vs Islam” conflict). The Doge of Venice (Tim McInnerny) has opted for a woman painter called Galactia (Fiona Shaw); a gamble since she has a messy personal life – an ongoing affair with fellow-painter Carpeta (Jamie Ballard) – and problematically definite ideas about art, which do not tally with the sort of painting that the Doge wants. Barker uses this frame to explore a whole wealth of philosophical and theoretical arguments about art, the value of art, and most insistently, the way that art functions in relation to its sponsors. Two of the best minor characters are Ostensible, a cardinal (William Chubb) and Rivera, a critic (Phoebe Nicholls).

For this production Cairns has also reinstated the “character” of Galactia's speaking sketchbook. The play was originally a radio drama, which makes a lot of sense of the fact that this is a play about a painting that we never see (think of those Stoppard radio plays which also make much of the fact that one is painting impossible images on the canvas of the imagination, or Duncan Macmillan's I Wish To Apologise For My Part in the Apocalypse in which the moon is a speaking character). Barker had originally, unfussily written in a device that allowed him to describe what was in various rooms, from the perspective of the book in which they were being drawn.

Here, the sketchbook is played by long-time Wrestling School associate and close Barker confederate Gerrard McArthur, who arrives in a rather marvellous floating bright white room which seems to magically float down from the back of the stage. The casting of McArthur is inspired. It honours the “canonicity” that has built up around Barker's work – indeed McArthur exudes a certain atmosphere of being Barker's minister in the real world, and bears a passing resemblance to the white-haired, hawk-faced poet; but also because McArthur does Barkertext in the manner of which Barker would most approve: a sardonic luxuriance with the words. It's a style that in lesser hands might feel a bit old-fashioned or Olivier-aping, but here – within the postmodern quote marks provided by sitting in a brightly lit floating space; halfway between gallery and page – it strikes the right balance between lyricism and urgency.

Indeed, for all the slight and interesting differences between the acting traditions from which the various cast members hail, this is a cohesive ensemble effort. Tim McInnerny (who doubtless prays for the day that his parts in Blackadder are no longer mentioned) turns in the best stage performance I've ever seen him give. This version of the Doge of Venice, like many of Barker's male authority figures from this period, is a beautiful concoction of wry, very British humour, chilling realpolitik and paradoxically philosophical thinking. McInnerney's performance adds boiling rage and sexual passion to the mix where Ian Pepperell's '99 take on the character was far more ascetic and ironic.

What Fiona Shaw brings to the part of Galactia is chiefly an understated warmth, humanity and credibility – three descriptions one seldom found oneself reaching for in Barker's own (frequently excellent) productions of his plays. And, again, it's different to the vision of the character created by Kathryn Hunter in '99 (lovely description of it here by Ian Shuttleworth), to the extent that it made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about the play and indeed about Barker's writing.

It also struck me that in the 13 years since I last saw the play, my own emphases and bias has changed, so that I now paid a lot more attention to the character of the critic, who before had seemed far more peripheral. Because of this attention Rivera's arguments now strike me as being some of the most interesting in the play.

Of course the real argument is between the Doge's uncanny, passionate feel for what makes great art, albeit compromised by his relationship both to the subject of the commission – both figuratively and literally, since it is his brother, Suffici (Robert Hands), who was the commander of the victorious Venetian fleet – and both the artist on one side and his cardinal on the other, who voices the Quentin Letts position of moral censorship, demanding that the state should not fund anything that even slightly undermines the teachings of the church. (It is an unexpected standing rebuke against the current Conservative party that Barker's Doge is a far more enlightened, informed art lover than any modern figure one can imagine.)

But it is the arguments of the critic that are most current and most poisonous. Rivera visits Galactia, both in her studio and when she has been imprisoned because of her painting, and preaches to her the doctrine of good sense, compromise and survival. Arguments that sound shamefully familiar in this age of cuts and questions about the “value” of art. Better, she suggests, that the great artists kow-tow just enough that they may continue to be funded, so that they can continue to create great art. The rejoinder to this position isn't even articulated. It doesn't need to be. It hangs in the air all around us.

The thing that moves …Execution from being merely a good play about art and the state to a great one, is the trajectory of the final few scenes. We can all imagine a play about a play that imprisons an artist because they don't like their art. And thanks to recent well-publicised versions of the story from China and Iran, we know this narrative all too well. Barker's genius is to give his authority figures a more subtle argument. An argument more subtle than any that Quentin Letts has ever figured out. How would it be, he asks, if the state were to pride itself on being able to contain, even support something critical of itself. What if an artist's criticisms of the state were not banned, or reviled, and the artist not imprisoned, but if they were state-funded and the artist were invited to dinner as a celebrity.

We think of the Cool Britannia reception at Tony Blair's Number Ten. We think of Danny Boyle's subversive praise of the NHS in the Olympic Opening Ceremony. We think even of Jenny Sealey's storming Spasticus Autisticus moment from the Paralympic Opening Ceremony. And we ask ourselves questions about the co-option of subversive art by any state. The play doesn't say anything else. This is the final moment. We are left on our own, in the dark with our applause and this question.

It's also interesting to compare this ending with Barker's own production from '99. Then, that point following the question: “Will you have dinner with me?” was a moment of intense agony for Galactia (again Shuttleworth's review records this well). Shaw's Galactia, by contrast, seems pretty happy and blasé about the whole thing. Here it is McArthur's “Sketchbook”, looking almost like Barker himself, who is left staring as Doge, hangers-on, and Galactia, or perhaps his characters, exit the stage of the National Theatre. Funded by the state. Embraced by the mainstream. Understood. Perhaps even praised (or worse, explained) by critics by whom he'd rather not be praised or understood. Being enfolded into the utility that Barker so detests.

It was only a couple of years after Beckett wrote Catastrophe (for Václav Havel), that Barker articulated this situation more bleak than being imprisoned because of your government's fear of what your art can change: being fearlessly celebrated by them because it can't change anything...

Paines Plough Roundabout season – Shoreditch Town Hall

This should be a tripartite review; Paines Plough's new London season/offering comprises three plays by up-and-coming writers Duncan Macmillan, Penelope Skinner and Nick Payne. However, thanks to the peculiarities of my schedule, I've yet to see the Payne. That said, there is an extra element to this season that deserves almost a whole section to itself.

So, I'm going to post this intro, then a review of Macmillan's Lungs below, then the review of Skinner's The Sound of Heavy Rain under that, so they can be read one after the other. Hopefully I'll not muddy the waters too much by writing about one element in a review of the other, though I suppose the conclusion will turn up at the end of the ...Rain review. Grr. Bugger. Anyway...

Intro bit (or cut straight to the chase)

The Press Day for the new Paines Plough season felt genuinely exciting. Three new plays, all by quite-established, definitely-exciting writers, and in a totally new space/venue. Ok, so Shoreditch Town Hall isn't completely unheard-of as a venue. Matt Trueman pointed out he'd last been there to see 66 Minutes in Damascus, but Shoreditch Town Hall isn't the story here.

The Big New Idea with Paines Plough's (PP) Roundabout season is the London introduction of the touring company's new building. A touring company with a building, you say? How does that work, you big numpty? Good question. What PP have done is commission someone (try as I might, I can't find a definitive credit on the programme) to design and build them a small-ish wooden in-the-round amphitheatre, the theory being that it can be taken down, driven around, and put up anywhere so that the physical aspects of any given production will be ostensibly within the company's control, rather than subject to the vagaries of the design of specific auditoria and what towns do or don't even have a purpose-built space for receiving plays.

Frankly, it's a brilliant bit of thinking. Rather than subjecting themselves to endless transfer difficulties, other people's scheduling difficulties, and just the woeful lack of towns without any sort of theatre at all, PP can now just book themselves into any hall their “Roundabout” (ok, the name's not beautiful...) will fit (which is probably most) and put on essentially the same show as they're putting on here in London or there in Sheffield.

And, it's a really nice, nifty bit of design. Granted, I suspect I won't be the first or last London critic to note the similarity in design to Miriam Buether's makeshift wooden ring for Mike Bartlett's Cock – a fact that might have been emphasised by the subject, writing and playing style adopted for Duncan Macmillan's Lungs, which I happened to see first in the space – but, I guess that's largely down to the shape and chosen construction material. I don't think Mike's Cock should have the monopoly on wooden Os.

As it happens, it's Penelope Skinner's The Sound of Heavy Rain that shows off a lot more of the potentials for the space, since it doesn't carry the stipulation: “Light and sound should not be used to indicate a change in time or place” that Lungs does. But more of this later. And so, to the plays...

Lungs – Shoreditch Town Hall

[in which I totally reproduce the usual model for talking mostly about The Play as a given and relegate the production to second place. Am interested that I did this. Continued from above...]

As I note above, it will take a strong-willed (or very new) critic not to mention that there are many superficial similarities between Duncan Macmillan's Lungs and Mike Bartlett's Cock. We might recall that many aeons ago, Duncan and Mike (both of whom I know a bit) were two of the six “Apathists” whose monthly (?) outings at Theatre 503 produced more interesting, exciting, experimental writing in a year than Caryl Churchill has in the last decade. If we want to look back further, we could also note that both writers studied under Simon Stephens in the Advanced bit of the Royal Court Young Writers Group.

However, for all that, Lungs is entirely its own thing, and a rather amazing thing at that.

I should confess, I went in with a slightly wrong idea of what the play was about. An idea that is sort-of fostered by the blurb – “In a time of global anxiety, terrorism, erratic weather and political unrest, a young couple want a child and are running out of time...” – but also by the fact I was seeing the play as part of a three-play marathon press day.

Ok, the blurb isn't misleading but it is partial. I'd say it almost perfectly describes the first half of the play. Which was the play I was expecting...  But it almost totally ignores the second bit. Added to which, thanks largely to Edinburgh, my body clock's default setting for New Writing is, roughly speaking, about an hour. Especially if there's more than one of them in a day.

The net result, then, was me being doubly taken by surprise by the second half of Lungs. That said, in an interesting way, I'm not sure if the way the first half unfolds exactly sets up the second half.

(I am talking very specifically about my experience here. Don't think these are criticisms or reasons not to see the play. If anything, I vaguely think having more of this information prior to watching the play would have helped me relax into just watching it/letting it happen when I'd seen it. So, to reiterate: I THINK THIS PLAY IS VERY GOOD. I'm just looking at some aspects I found interesting here.)

The first half, as I said, does exactly what the blurb says on the tin. And it is kind of magnificent. Macmillan absolutely nails the pre-baby anxieties of my generation and his. It is interesting to consider Lungs in the light of Katie Mitchell's Ten Billion (which I don't think has had nearly enough praise for the game-raiser it is as regards theatre's dialogue with the impending global catastrophe that is climate change). There's also a telling comparison to be made between Lungs and Churchill's Love and Information. In a funny way, the latter is almost the same play, just presented by very different (and in my view, less effective) means. The comparison is, after all, between ways that we figure the sheer amount of information now available to us, the anxieties it provokes, and the effect this has on the way we live. Where Churchill dramatises this with an almost flick-book look at the information spread across what theatrically could be taken for almost infinite space, Macmillan compresses it into the effects it all has on one couple. The picture it creates is as true, recognisable, and frightening as anything you're likely to see about yourself in the theatre this year. I mean, dear God, Macmillan has got the measure of what people say. And, also, how people say it.

The writing here is also remarkably, ridiculously good. I don't always go for stage dialogue that seeks to slavishly reproduce the way that people actually speak, but that doesn't feel like the game. Yes, it's acutely observed and hugely say-able – actors Kate O'Flynn and Alistair Cope rarely sound like they're doing anything but improvising the lines (I say this as the highest compliment) – and yet there's artistry to it too. As with Churchill and Bartlett, there's an unshowy writerliness to the crunch and fizzle of the words on words here. There are also a lot of excellent jokes.

This first half pins so many contemporary anxieties so exactly that you almost get giddy with it. By contrast, the second half feels like having laid out the terrain in which these characters live and think Macmillan is now moving them around in it. Quite a lot. In terms of time-scale, where the first half is tight, I think close together, and claustrophobic, the second covers a lot more ground, with more events, and more inventions. It's not a problem, but it is a definite shift, and one I felt oddly unprepared for. That said, as in the first half Macmillan's observations are acute to the point of invasive. How, we might idly wonder, did he get a transcription of this row, or that regrettable evening. And the subjects and events (I won't spoiler them) are common, upsettingly human occurrences. If we haven't been there in this specific instances, the chances are we will at some point.

Something unusual about Lungs is that it seems refreshingly judgement free, as theatre. Yes, it manages to pile up, dissect, and anatomise a whole range of contemporary experiences, but you don' much get the impression that Lungs is trying to teach us how to live, or sell us a particular solution. If anything, apart from certain behaviours which we all know aren't on, it sends us back into the word with even more questions and fewer answers. But perhaps a better sense of the terms on which we ask those questions, having been able to sit outside of “those conversations” and watch them happen rather than being involved and therefore having to improvise our own responses.

Richard Wilson's directorial hand feels almost invisible here, which can only be a massive compliment since there's plainly a lot of directing that must have gone on. The production feels incredibly organic, though. From actors to space to direction to text, everything seems to fit so snugly that apart from spoken content – which, given that Lungs is technically an extent text, having premièred in Washington DC last year, I suppose we can attribute directly to the playwright – it feels like there are no discernible cracks where you think “Oh, the director did this”/“Oh, this is a design decision”/“Oh, that must have come from the actor”.


In an odd way. Having not seen the Nick Payne show, I almost feel like I'd have rather seen Lungs completely in isolation, however, seeing it in tandem with The Sound of Heavy Rain did throw up some interesting additional thoughts...

(continues below)

The Sound of Heavy Rain – Shoreditch Town Hall

[continues from here]

Penelope Skinner's new play is an interesting creature for a number of reasons.

If I say “it doesn't feel like a proper play”, can we all agree that I'm not being critical, or even endorsing the sentiment?

And, let me say, I'm as surprised as anyone that I'm saying this. I don't even like the idea of a “proper play” for heaven's sake. And yet here I am, about to try to explain why I've just said it.

What The Sound of Heavy Rain is, primarily, is fun. And let's be honest, straight-up “fun” is a pretty rare commodity in the theatre. That's not to say ...Rain is just unremittingly trivial; and it serves up a real curveball six pages before the end. But, for the most part, Skinners new play is essentially a knowing, knockabout genre pastiche. The genre in question being the film noir/hardboiled private detective thriller. Obviously, we've seen private detective pastiches before, though not many in theatre, and far fewer from New Writing companies – in so many ways, this feels like the subject territory of the New Work contingent, which in itself feels like an interesting claim.

I suppose the real reason that it doesn't feel like “New Writing” – at least according to the deadly Sierz-defined ghetto – is that it isn't about a contemporary issue, and plainly isn't drawn from personal experience (well, I don't want to spoiler the ending, but actually the last bit contains some stuff that seems all too painfully real). It's, shock-horror, just a story! And a fun one! What were Paines Plough thinking?

Because it's A Story, with Twists, and Stuff, it's oddly much harder to write about than plays that purport to be An Important Tract on A Serious Social Issue. I've been robbed of my chance to hold forth on the contemporary significance of the private detective in Britain's negotiation of its post-colonial selves, or something.

James Grieve's production is similarly – frustratingly – fun. Much more use is made of the Roundabout's actual architecture here. Rather than simply a starkly lit bare stage, we find the thing's possibilities opened up and demonstrated as the playground it can potentially become. The thing has three stage entrances and exits and three adjacent entrances to the stairs at the top of the steep, short seating rake. All six access points are perpetually in use here, giving the fixed-seated audience member the impression of being sat in the middle of a busy traffic intersection on a merry-go-round. (Actually, if more productions turn out to be directed like this, perhaps “Roundabout” isn't such a bad name for the thing after all.)

Emma Chapman and Richard Howell's lighting design soaks the whole space, through a haze of smoke, in the shadows of Venetian blinds and the bright lights of multi-coloured discos.

In ...Rain we see all four actors from the Roundabout season (though, not having seen Payne's piece yet, I can't comment as fully as I'd like on the contrasts demonstrated. However, just the different in what O'Flynn and Cope are called upon for here give a reasonable idea that Andrew Sheridan and Maia Alexander will be up to something quite else in One Day When We Were Young).

Again, it's hard to say specifically the things that mark these performances out without giving away whole chunks of the missing person detective story that forms the nominal core of Skinner's work. Suffice it to say, that there's an unexpected amount of range on show here (which all adds to the FUN, dammit).

[needs more. But want to at least get these up as initial place markers. And my brain's tired now. I should get back onto “Fun” and the New Writing ecosystem...]

Continu – Sadler's Wells

[proper review. first draft/stab-at]

Sasha Waltz's Continu is apparently two works, one made for the (re)opening of the Neues Museum in Berlin and the other for the Maxxi Museum in Rome designed by Zaha Hadid. It feels like three pieces, however. Two before the interval and one afterwards.

The first piece (which I'm quite happy to believe is an opening act of the whole first half) is set to the percussion piece Rebonds 'B' by Iannis Xenakis (incidentally, I am staggered afresh that YouTube has all this stuff readily available to watch – this Information Age of ours is a wonderful thing, and not just because it might save me a lot of work trying to describe everything to the last detail). It is performed by six female dancers, dressed in similar long black or near-black navy dresses.

The interesting thing for me here was the way even in its brief duration, it taught you how to watch it. At first glance, it looks like it might be a very rough stab at synchronised movement, but as each dancer in turn is given a break-out solo section we learn to perceive them as individuals rather than as uniform members of a group, and so the individual interpretation of the group movement sections grows to feel more deliberate.

For some reason – and, God knows this is probably a useless observation – I didn't much go for this first brief section. Although having gone in more-or-less blind, and not knowing the shape of the evening, other than at some point there'd be a twenty minute interval, I was working pretty hard on reconciling myself to watching a lot more of it, and so had started to warm to the piece – concentrating on specific dancers, alternating my attention between the live percussionist (Robyn Schulkowsky) and the movement. Admiring the use of the stage and Daniel Hermann's large, looming, austere black-walled “set” (a high, dark, sheer, matte black, three-walled room, basically). And there was something interesting and admire-able about the way that the individuality of the dancers seemed to create layers within the group dynamic.

But then it stopped. After only about ten minutes. The lights went off, and when they came up again, there was no live percussionist. Given that, if I had to try to pin it down, I think it was the music I wasn't really into, I confess I was a bit pleased.

Interestingly, the second piece also begins with a piece by Xenakis: Concret PH. However, without the programme and YouTube, I'd have just described this as a slightly treated recording of some of those “rain sticks” you find in new age shops. Even with this information, I'm not especially tempted to alter that description. However, played initially in the dark the sound is nicely spooky and evocative, partly because of the sheer quality of the sound recording. There's a brittle, hi-fidelity to this treble-heavy that is pleasantly jarring at this volume.

All the dancers cluster in the northwest corner of the stage. 24 of them (though I thought I counted 25). Bent double, hands pressed against the floor. They shuffle forward, feet before hands, heads hanging down, looking like Figures at the Base of Bacon's Crucifixion.

The music for this piece is Edgard Varèse's Arcana. It's a piece I've never heard before, so I was relieved to discover post-fact that even Wikipedia agrees that it's strongly influenced by Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. The combination of this music and the shuffling group reminded me incredibly of Pina Bausch's Frühlingsopfer; to such an extent, in fact, that I started to false-memory-remember some idea that the piece was some sort of direct hommage or quotation; along the same suggestive lines as Alain Platel's Out of Context.

But it's not just the music and choreography that initially recalls the Bausch. There's also something about the way that the piece seems to make narrative and the narrative that it seems to be making. Admittedly at first the ensemble didn't seem to especially divide along any tangible lines. Waltz's company is comprises a diversity of performers that theatre can only envy for how effectively people from Africa, America, South America, the near east, the far east, the middle east, Australasia and Europe can communicate on stage. They are dressed, at random, in single colour costumes of black, gunmetal navy and tan/khaki. Shirts or t-shirts and trousers for the men and similar long dresses to before for the women. The cuts are clean, classic, minimal and modern.

The group divides into three smaller groups, still arched on all fours (I think). The groups' patterns of movements shift. Figures from the groups start to break away, pair up, dance solos. There is a sequence in which a small number of the performers cower or skulk at the stage's eastern wall, while the rest apparently riot in the northwest corner, held back by only one of their number.

A narrative – still reminiscent of The Rite of Spring – seems to emerge of fairly forcible courtships. Men and women are divided. The men perhaps the aggressors against a community of women. But then there also appear to be tribal or familial groupings. Dancers seem to emerge as specific characters. Characters with developing relationships to other characters.

At the same time, Waltz plays interesting games with impossible divisions of our attention. Several different threads, narratives, sub-plots, seem to break out simultaneously on opposite sides and ends of the stage so that it is impossible to to take them in at once. There seems to be an abduction or a rape, and retribution for it. Perhaps also a forbidden romance between members of opposing factions, and perhaps the destruction of the male party in this affair. There are stand-offs and arguments, competitions and feats of strength.

As well as the pictures of pagan Russia Stravinsky might have evoked, here it seems to owe more to the profusion of classical mythology. Something like a mash up of The Bacchae, the whole of the Trojan war and a fair bit of Ovid's  Metamorphosis all vying for attention. This sense is perhaps advanced by the way that the “stories” seem to emerge from this one central stem, this sole body of an ensemble. I wondered if this was simply a product of me over-reading the connection of the piece to a museum housing classical statuary or whether the movement and tableaux also referenced these. The piece, when standing alone, was (with happy synchronicity) originally entitled Dialoge 09. I think that dialogue is between the mise-en-scene and the ancient artefacts of the museum. (Although, looking into this a bit more (and by “a bit” I mean a Google image search), Neues Museum seems to be primarily famed for its Ägyptische stuff than its Griechischen und Römischen collections.)

What I found staggering – knowing next to nothing about the genesis of this work – was the sheer extent of it. There seemed to be more clear stories being told here than you could possibly get away with in a play. And they seemed to run like quicksilver, almost tumbling over each other, for too fast to keep a hold of or pin down. And yet this didn't seem to matter. There seemed to be a joy of cumulative effect that communicated more than underlined “meaning” or simple moral structures.

At one point close to the end all but one of the entire company line up against the back wall. The other company member shouts as if gunshots. One by one members of the company drop, as if dead until all but one is left standing.

Again, one has no clear idea of what precisely has happened or to whom, and yet at the same time, the primary meaning is totally clear. Elsewhere a pair of women seem to dance a dance of raw sexual frustration, swishing their skirts like a couple of shirty peacocks during mating season. At once abstract but incredibly, unmistakably clear in meaning. The performers, without speaking, are clearly acting. And they are great actors. And the use of the stage, the sheer pleasure of these repeated stage pictures which seem pleasurable solely because of the artfully informal positioning of bodies in space was a revelation to me. (The nearest comparison I can think of was the tangible fluency of Katie Mitchell's choreography of the crowd scenes in Idomeneo).


If the first half could be characterised by a yearning tension between wildness and formality – its most striking recurrent motif was the almost right-angled stretch: both arms and whole body from the waist up bent to the right. – then the second half perhaps distilled this into two separate bottles. It opened with a solo man in off-white (beige?) pants, in a kind of angular rictus. Toes splayed and waved like fingers, muscles seemed to spasm. He is joined by three more men, and they are spread across the large white sheet that forms a stage upon the stage in the black room. Each like a kind of pinned butterfly or low statue of a writhing form.

The rest of the ensemble enter severally dressed now in blacks, khakis and whites. Cooler, more classical. Like so many chic gallery attendees, with these near-naked men as the statues.

The music here is Claude Vivier's Zipangu. (Never has there been a less onomatopoeic title.) It starts like a fitful modernist cross between the beginning of Mahler's O Mensch! Gib Acht! from his 3rd Symphony and Bartok's Concerto for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and then just gets more violent.

(I should say at this juncture, I don't think I've ever spent such an enjoyably evening in the company of “difficult” modern orchestral music. Here the music is played at an admirably loud volume throughout, and the way that it is offset with such a strong visual component means that your attention somehow tunes in and out of appreciating the music at the same time as trying to take in all the movement, colour and potential meaning, like the best sort of information overload imaginable.)

Where the second part could be characterised by a sort of primitive aggression, this third part (or second piece?), in contrast to its accompaniment, was most memorable for moments of formal precision. There's a stunning section where three women appear to walk round the walls of the stage sideways, apparently balanced on the shoulders of three men. It is at once clever, breathtaking and incredibly elegant.

The piece builds to an unexpected conclusion (well, Ok, I peaked at my programme and knew that by fifteen minutes before the end, we still hadn't heard the adagio from Mozart's Oboe Quartet). But, even knowing it was coming doesn't quite prepare you for the way it's staged.

A single man and woman are suddenly alone on the enormous white sheet of paper, which for the duration of the piece has been getting more and more marked as dancers drew on it, and smashed dried pigment into it, leaving traces of every step in earthy red, raw umber, burnt sienna and black.

Gradually this vast page is lifted by five or six performers, who hold it as a human height, light backdrop as the couple almost waltz to the pretty, Viennese tune. After almost two hours of a solid black box, the different that this sudden marked white horizon makes is strangely hopeful all by itself. It might or might not be saying something about Kunst and Kultur, but the combination of this necessarily naïve art-on-paper and the sublime effect of Mozart feels significant and makes for a beautiful close.

It's not quite the end, however, since, as the quartet fades, so the performers left holding the paper high above their heads, with only their fingers clasping it visible, these hands gradually seem to scurry across the top of the paper bunching up on the east side, looking like they're preparing to make a run for it. While one pair of hands has been left stranded on the west hand side.

The paper drops briefly. The stage is empty, before a solitary, black clad man rushes to the far corner, picks it up and runs across the stage folding the page into a briefly billowing sail and then a collapsed, changed sculptural form.

[original place-holder "review" below] 

[very quick “review” for reasons of urgency. Proper long one to follow asap]

Work in theatre? You have to go and see Continu. Don't work in theatre, but like “The Arts”? You have to go and see Continu too.

I went solely on the basis of Sasha Waltz's reputation and didn't know anything about the show when I went in, other than checking that the running time when arriving at the theatre (it's two hours including a 20 minute interval). As such, I'm slightly loathe to give too much away (actually, I should also be trying to manage expectations a bit more efficiently...).

It took me maybe five minutes to slightly warm up to the first piece – I'd say there are three distinct pieces overall, although the first is very short and might be an intro for the second. Anyway, by the time I'd decided I could just about watch it for an hour or so, it stopped.

And then the second piece started. And was pretty different. Any misgivings I had about the first piece were eradicated within seconds.

This second piece – probably about an hour long? – is just stunning. I really don't want to say too much about it in this initial MUST SEE rave. Suffice it to say that I think it's pretty much essential viewing for anyone who wants to make or watch work for the stage. It presents possibilities about the movement of bodies on stage, the architecture of space and stage pictures involving large (-ish. 24) numbers of performers like nothing I've seen for a while. It also seems to say some really interesting things about narrative. It seems to present more ideas of stories and sub-plots than would ever be allowed – or even feasible – on the theatre stage. And, oh, look, just go, will you? It's great. Promise.

The third part (after the interval) is also pretty damn awesome. Not as all-out awesome as the second part, but frankly that's kind of a relief. The second part left me genuinely kind of speechless, or at least not-wanting-to-say-anything-and-just-think-about-it. The third part is just slightly clinical or remote enough to let you have some coherence at the end of the evening. Even so, while slightly reusing motifs from the first two pieces, it would still be a great bit of work if standing alone.

Now, while you're trying to book your tickets, I'll go away and try to write a hopefully more measured account that might be of use to people who won't get to see it, or who believe that reviews should maybe offer a bit more than breathless PR copy... :-)

(AT TIME OF POSTING, IT LOOKS LIKE THERE ARE STILL SOME £12 TICKETS LEFT)

Three Sisters – Young Vic

[long overdue. apologies. experiment in trying to review production by writing about the actors.]

Benedict Andrews's production of Three Sisters at the Young Vic is brilliant. Let's just say that now.

It manages to combine a clean, moderate version of that German “director's theatre” aesthetic with some of the best sorts of British (/anglophone) acting going. Played on Johannes Schütz's gorgeous minimalist set – a thrust stage made from umpteen matte grey, waist-high tables beneath a matte-black-framed, shallow, white box ceiling; all before a small mound of earth – it is at once clinical and warm; like getting tipsy on surgical spirit.

The cast are dressed in modern clothes, which still hint at the correct period. There are small disruptions of – or supplements to – the literal, naturalistic reality: characters putting on garish animal-themed face-masks; Kulygin and Olga return from a staff meeting at the school wearing fancy-dress animal costumes; the first “scene change” plays Pussy Riot while jets of snow briefly coat the small upstage mound of earth. But at root this is a very pure production of the play. Andrews's spare version of the script is as stark as the staging, and the best English translation of the play since Chris Goode's.

What's fascinating here is how much in the service of the play each of this devices is. In no way is this production a challenge to the text. It is a reading, certainly – in the way that all stagings of every play are – but, in truth, it's a very traditional reading. Were one so minded, one could perhaps grumble that the elements pressed into play here almost come to signify less than themselves by virtue of their co-option. But that would be to overlook how hard they also resonate within the frame of the play itself. The real star of the show here is the cast, however.

It starts with Anfisa (Ann Queensbury) sitting and listening to the radio while the three sisters work. Thanks perhaps to the unusual way it opens – the sisters are all sitting at various sides of the tables that make up the thrust stage so no one dominates the playing area at first – one's eye is as drawn to her as the “principles”. And there is something remarkable and detailed about just this simple action of sitting and listening. A picture telling a story.

There's another lovely moment early on when Orion Ben as an unnamed maid standing in line with other “minor” characters happens to just turn an look as another character in reaction to something someone says. It's just a little reaction shot, and yet it completely crystallises the relationship the servants have to their master and mistresses.

Similarly Harry Dickman's Ferapoint, a thankless bit-part of a man, is turned into a lovely doddery, comic turn, with oversize, thick glasses and an endearing hapless, old-aged hard-of-hearing-ness. At one point Andrey uses his presence to rant about his lot in life. When he's finished the old man asks: “What did you say? My hearing.” Andrey replies “If your hearing was good I wouldn't be talking to you.” It's a good joke. What makes it beautiful is the way that you feel for both of them in that moment.

If there's an element that usually trips British Chekhov up, though, it's usually the way that we map our obsession with class onto his deceptively similar-looking but temperamentally-different terrain. It is through this knowledge that we can view with gratitude Paul Rattray's Solony. Rattray is perhaps most well known for his lengthy tour of duty in Blackwatch. And here again he's another chippy, hard, Scottish soldier. There's a sort of steely look that feels disctinctly Scottish, a kind of squint that suggests both perpetual-underdog and a victorious arrogance all at once.

Perhaps the real brilliance here is in his pairing with Sam Troughton's Tuzenbach. Often, we see Tuzenbach's aristocratic roots, perhaps also his oft denied German heritage, over-played. We're used, perhaps, to a sort of Boris Johnson figure of fun. A comedy posho whom we cannot take seriously. Or else a romantic, doomed aristo. Troughton is none of these things. Or rather none in excess. Sure, Tuzenbach is slightly absurd, slightly, painfully doomed. Sure, his adoration of Irina, in this version as much as any other, is never going to end well for him. But here we have the situation simply stated and not endlessly overplayed. The Count (Baron?) does love Irina hopelessly, as much as Solony loves her violently and unreasonably. The mutual antipathy between the two men hangs thickly in the air between them, not over-manifested in some ancient Celtic resentment of the landed gentry, but like the atmosphere that enters a room where two personalities perpetually clash.

Though in command of both these men Vershinin (William Houston) seems to live in another world altogether. Oddly, I haven't knowingly seen Houston in anything since the RSC Troilus and Cressida from '99. I've seen him mentioned in dispatches from more recent outings at Stratford in the past decade, though, and he now sounds like he's spent ten years soaking in a vat of that company's Voice Department. As such, Vershinin runs closest to doing a bunch of stuff that I'm really not over-keen on actors doing. There was a point where I realised that the performance was irresistably reminding me of Douglas Renholm from The IT Crowd. And once thought, it was a hard image to displace. However, at the same time, it doesn't just feel like an actor in a different production. You get the sense that he could easily do it different, and instead, the great big, amazing, old-school, Olivier voice is a character choice for Houston the actor. There's something about the big oaky disconnect between life as it is usually spoken and Vershinin's interior world that seems to make sense of the performance. Teetering, in the world of the play, between being a preposterous ham and the plausible, cultured, charming romantic and crucially Muscovite man for whom Masha falls.

Vanessa Kirby has apparently been on TV. As such, a bit too much of the pre-publicty for the show did seem to focus on interviews with her of the “She wafts into the room, everyone stares” school. It is important to remember that she didn't ask anyone to write like an idiot about her.

But we can ignore all that because Kirby is genuinely brilliant. Primarily, she's brilliant because she's very funny and, without being “meta-”, very self-aware. She also pins down more than any other woman I've seen on stage precisely her class of posh-but-not-that-posh- girls in their early twenties. The ironic twangs, the questiony inflections, the sometimes mid-Atlantic borrowed speech patterns, The whole postmodern accent mash-up that references everything from patois to Patsy (AbFab). She's also brilliant because she's plainly not afraid to play Masha as an utter cunt. Self-involved to the point of callous, cruel and uncaring, and yet richly sentimental and capable of appalling feeling – the moment when she realises she has lost Vershinin forever, the howl, the breakdown, the sheer snot and mess of it all is something else.

But the performance does not exist in isolation. Her other counter-point, Adrian Schiller's Kulygin also avoids the pitfall of comic caricature and, as such, makes richer the portrayal of the horrible gulf in the marriage between Kulygin and Masha. Because we can see the vestiges of a perfectly nice, small-scale ambitious, intelligent guy here. And we see how much just that small-scale thinking grates on Masha, and in turn, how it grating on her panics him, making him more needy, more desperate, less attractive. The eternal vicious circle of a failed and unequal relationship, where someone loves someone else who is gradually growing to despise them. That this is all readable in the smallest of gestures, body-language and even perhaps costumes design – the way his gunmetal blue bomber jacket compares with her slightly cheaply provincial, but still effortfully glamorous lacy tops – reveals yet more of the intricacy and depth of the thinking behind the production.

It is striking, what with Andrews being an Australian, that he makes the biggest outcast in the Prozorov household, Natasha (Emily Barclay), an Aussie. Until I started reading a couple of Australian theatre blogs, I had no idea of the extent to which the Australian's perceive a total lack of respect for them from the British. I wonder if this casting by Andrews is intended to reflect that, and I wonder if it resonates more strongly for him and Barclay than it will for anyone British in the cast or audience (since I really don't think the theatre-going British really think anything in particularly snobby about Australia. I mean, Nick Cave's Australian. End of).

Barclay inhabits the role to perfection, however. So much of Natasha's character is either reported by other characters or in her behaviour, that I would argue that her actual social class doesn't even necessarily matter. It's the sisters' treatment of her, of her-and-Andrey's burgeoning romance, and then her subsequent transformation into a semi-monster – lording it up over the sisters and their servants, while carrying on an affair with the leader of the council, under her husband's nose – that matters.

And while all this is perhaps stated more plainly than other relationships – we see her dashing out of the house to meet her lover dressed in a fur coat, high heels and a nightie; we see her fretfully carrying a baby alarm/intercom about with her everywhere; we see her padding softly through rooms carrying only candle looking for all the world like Lady Macbeth (Not the only Shakespeare quotation in this theatre-literate production – elsewhere __ declares “The Rest is Silence”, recalling Chekhov's obvious love of W.S. – cf. Ivanov).

Interestingly, there is a self-containment to this Natasha. The Otherness, her lack of belonging to any class – thinking herself better than the servants and being picked on as “less than” the Prozorovs – and the myriad motifs which float around her all give a sense that there was never any real connection between her and Andrey. An impression brilliantly fostered by Danny Kirrane's performance.

Kirrane was last seen (by me) in Ella Hickson's Boys (about which I wrote plenty here) playing an overweight tragic sad-sack. He fact that he's playing more or less exactly the same sort of character here did make me initially uncomfortable. I find the idea of a kind of biological determinism in casting a deeply ugly spectacle. The idea that someone's physical appearance plays a meaningful part in their destiny strikes me as pretty much counter to everything progressive I believe. So, yeah, having Kirrane as a slightly big bloke doomed to be dumped on by life again didn't sit comfortably.

Thing is, Chekhov is no Ella Hickson. Here we see everything that (was it "Benny" in Boys?) could have been. Yes, Andrey's still dumped on, but in Three Sisters *everyone* is being dumped on. It's be weird if some of the shit flying around didn't stick to someone. So rather than being presented with a sad-sack with no agency we get a present actor feeling their way through to their character's end-point in the play. And Kirrane is an excellent actor. Nimble, ironic, and very funny. Not a one-note depressive, but a mercurial tumble of diffidence, anger, reserve and excess.

Interestingly – much more interestingly than Natasha's Australian-ness – Kirrane pretty much hangs on to his (Yorkshire? Lancashire?) accent, and it's not really used as any kind of index of class, or anything else. Perhaps in part this could be down to Andrews's lack of know-how when it comes to the intricacies of the British tradition of putting people in a pigeon-hole within ten second of them opening their mouths, but the effect feels more continental than that – that the reason Kirrane is playing Andrey is essentially down to talent and spirit rather than looks and accent. He's got a slightly world-weary-before-his-time demeanour which gives Andrey a lovely kind of crumpled gravitas that you don't when having him played as the whiney, picky, student loser of other productions.

Also a revelation is Michael Feast's Chebutykin. I mean, sure, we know Michael Feast is a Great Actor. He was good in Rupert Goold's Macbeth, and I saw him in a lovely close-up performance of something otherwise forgetable at Theatre 503. It says something that I didn't even recognise him until I looked at the programme at half time. True, he's grown a beard, but he's also doing some serious acting here. Where I'd (naïvely) suggest that most of the other performers are pretty much inhabiting the characters as if they were versions of themselves, Feast – unless he's been being someone else in every other performance I've seen, which also seems plausible – has made up an entire set of characteristics for himself here, and lives them with utter conviction.

Conversely, in this Three Sisters, Olga (played by David Tennant's Hamlet's Ophelia, Mariah Gale) seems to do very little. She succeeds almost by functioning as an absence. Totally in keeping with her position as an unmarried schoolteacher who has all but given up on any hopes of getting married, nurses a secret love for __, and whose face seems to weather and harden as the years mount up through the play. She doesn't have a big moment, she never seems to say anything world-shattering, and it's this play of incremental defeat that totally defines her character and presence on stage. In it's way, it is the most generous performance of the night – letting others shine more noticeably in the pale light of Olga's failures.

Gala Gordon's Irina, by contrast, is problematic to a (/this heterosexual, male) critic in the exact opposite way to Danny Kirrane's Andrey is. That is to say, Gordon is distractingly beautiful. A kind of cross between Juliette Binoche and Bambi. Huge brown eyes, an appallingly attractive mouth. Exactly the sort of thing you don't want to read a middle-aged man writing about. But (bear with me here, this isn't mere objectification), that's part of the key to how this Irina works. Several characters are entranced by her. Sure, it's a bit literal-minded to actually have someone arrestingly beautiful play someone arrestingly beautiful, but it does have the effect of demonstrating to the audience where those characters are coming from. As such, Irina's slightly sappy sentimental version of work: “The only thing that matters is work... It's the only thing that gives life any meaning, any purpose, any chance of happiness.”

Granted, this innocence and virtue of this is, on one level, true. And I imagine Chekhov – apparently a master of seeing every side of an argument and its drawbacks all at once – knew this. But at the same time, putting these sentiments in the mouth of a privileged provincial rich-kid must have also been deliberately grating. Thanks to Gordon's guilelessness, we at least see the earnestness and sincerity of Irina's beliefs while being able to feel how annoying they might be to others in the world of the play, but thanks to her doe-eyes, we also understand why the otherwise resentful Solony is smitten rather than spoiling for a fight.

Last, and not least are Gruffudd Glyn and Richard Pryal playing two soldiers Fedotik and Rodé. Neither has more than a handful of the most functional lines (that I remember), but they do also provide the basis for some of the most exciting moments in the play – arriving toward the close of the first half in giant clown-heads with guitar and (balalaika? ukulele?) for the rendition first of some 12-bar blues, and then, at the drunk Tuzenbach's instigation, the hair-on-neck-raising rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit as a kind of drunken singalong folk song.

And that's the production. A beautiful set, dismantled during the second half, and some of the best performances currently available in London running through this ever-older play like it was finished just before the Olympics. At once, not trying to say anything noticeably huge or meta- about the world, but somehow pinning down so much that seems true and funny and sad about it.