tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post1429903372414194334..comments2023-09-20T14:34:21.102+02:00Comments on Postcards from the Gods: On Criticism: Was ist ist / Was nicht ist / Ist möglichAndrew Haydonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05568061302451610140noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-63599706508330339242012-09-13T08:38:01.227+02:002012-09-13T08:38:01.227+02:00I'll do a proper reply to Hannah's post wh...I'll do a proper reply to Hannah's post when I've woken up a bit, but since Arguments for a Barker are always interesting and fun, I'll post a piece I wrote for Noises Off magazine at this year's International Student Drama Festival in response to a student critic's total annihilation of the (new) Barker play, <i>Five Names</i>, that was presented by Aberystwyth University: <br /><br />“Was there something I missed, or is <i>Five Names</i> really as barren and plain as the white make-up on the actors faces?”<br /><br />Thanks to editorial privilege, I've been able to read your review and can answer: yes, William Carlisle, there was something you “missed” – although I'm not going to claim it was necessarily your fault. <br /><br />Earlier in your review, you assert: “If you have to read the programme or have the meaning explained to you in order to understand a piece of art then something has clearly gone wrong.” Coincidentally, I wrote <a href="http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/embedded-iii.html" rel="nofollow">a piece for my blog recently</a> arguing precisely the reverse of this proposition; it's far from a watertight refutation of your claim, but it does, I hope, make a reasonably strong argument. <br /><br />I won't re-hash the whole thing here, but the crux of my counter-claim is that you're always going to go into a piece of theatre with a huge, rambly, undefined amount of your own knowledge. Whether that knowledge happens to coincide with the knowledge that the playwright displays in the play is largely a matter of luck. To take an easy example, imagine knowing nothing about <i>Hamlet</i> before seeing <i>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</i>. <br /><br />All of which is to say, there is available knowledge that would possibly have changed your understanding of the play. Your discussion of the play's alleged “meaninglessness” is relatively brief, so I don't know if you *got* who the characters were. I'm not at all sure I *got* all of them, but the central three vignettes – Sarah and Abraham, Penelope and Odysseus, and Charles VII and his servant – are all clearly figures taken from Biblical, classical and historical sources. At which point, Barker's meditations on their situations – pregnancy at 90, a wanderer's sense of “belonging”, and a King with a recently poisoned mistress – became, variously, much more funny, interesting, imaginative and iconoclastic. Even the fact that the first and last characters – “Corporal Webb” and “Mrs Williams” *don't* appear to have particularly legendary status suddenly seems more significant. <br /><br />Other information I found useful when watching <i>Five Names</i> came from my 14-year relationship with the plays of Howard Barker (coincidentally, the first time I ever saw anything by him was his monologue Und, in the Studio of the Crucible. In 1999). It just so happens that I've read more-or-less everything he's written (at least up until the mid-00s), including his seminal, maddening, contradictory and brilliant manifesto <i>Arguments For a Theatre</i>.<br /><br />None of which is to say that I want to change your opinion of the piece. If anything, reading Arguments..., it is possible to get the impression that Barker would prefer your response to mine. He writes a lot about wanting to make plays that people don't understand. And, yes, perfectly valid responses to this can range between “why?” to “Oh, fuck off”. But, I'd argue those aren't the only responses. <br /><br />Your review is couched in a context of enviable certainty. You know how you felt, and evoke it well. On the other hand, I hope this response shakes your convictions enough to make you want to explore the man and his work a bit more. After all, this is partly Barker's strategy too; to irritate and plant something that gnaws at his audiences; something that makes them want to wrestle more with the work. And in this, here supported by an excellent production by Phoebe Patey-Ferguson and William Pritchard, I think <i>Five Names</i> succeeds admirably.Andrew Haydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07615226061116376519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-83036612912484851952012-09-13T02:09:22.624+02:002012-09-13T02:09:22.624+02:00RE: Hannah Silva on Barker.
"Good news abou...RE: Hannah Silva on Barker. <br /><br />"Good news about the NT revival. Wouldn’t it be how the world should be if they went on to produce the plays he is writing now?"<br /><br />Really honestly not. No. Really. Have you read or heard some of his recent wrestling school stuff? No. Jesus. No. BigFrenchynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-48877623850618324422012-09-13T00:37:01.587+02:002012-09-13T00:37:01.587+02:00Hi Andrew,
I think I'll be reading this in bi...Hi Andrew, <br />I think I'll be reading this in bite size chunks (and your previous one too) but just to respond a little to the bits where you mention me... :)<br /><br />- Thanks for picking up on the kind of contradiction between my talking about a 'play' as opposed to the performance etc. I've wondered how to communicate this. Because on the one hand I've been brought up on Dartington College of Arts, The Wooster Group, Forced Ent, Complicite - Lehmann's idea of 'postdramatic theatre' and various others etc etc , I didn't even think about a 'play text' until a few years ago. But then I wrote a play. And it is something different to a devised text, or to my show Opposition, or to the work I'm making right now with a group of artists in a park in Nottingham. I stayed up through the nights and I wrote a play. It does play with language and form and all that as that's just how I write...And after a while of sending it (and the next ones) off and meetings with people I discovered that there's actually no point in sending this play to a 'new writing' theatre - that it is something in between what people are calling 'new work' and 'new writing'. That the process that those theatres use to get the work from page to stage isn't appropriate for my work. I’ve accepted this actually and am looking forward to directing ‘Hunger’ myself, but still think the wider debate needs to continue. I can give you some examples of how non-naturalistic work has been battered back in this new writing world, but would rather do that by email...<br /><br />And anyway, I totally agree with you - it's a very exciting time to be making work and the 'new writing' theatres and climate are changing. I wrote a rave blog about my first experience of the Bush under Younis etc, and the others you mention make things very exciting too, it seems - I'm not really in that world so can't say. But it seems like a kind of renewal. Brilliant. It'll raise more questions about how to find 'plays' 'plays?' in a different way...how to ‘develop?’ writers…but that's all very exciting. <br /><br />By the way, I wasn't 'complaining' that there isn't any other place to send the work, I was just stating an interesting fact - the playwriting scene is very different to the poetry scene in that sense. Not that I'm applauding the divisions within the poetry world. And I don't think that comment is incongruous with my final comment about the playwrights themselves changing things. Personally, I hope that sometime I'll get to a stage where I can produce work of other playwrights who I think need to be heard and are not in a position to produce their own work. <br /><br />Just starting to think on the other issues - you mention Barker's reputation etc. Well, I don't know him, or what happened in the past that resulted in him being banished to Exeter University and for his play Blok/Eko to run for a few nights in Exeter, only one night in a college in London and for my review to be the only response.....but.....I don’t think I could be laughed at for describing him as the best living playwright so something doesn't seem quite right there. Good news about the NT revival. Wouldn’t it be how the world should be if they went on to produce the plays he is writing now? <br /><br />I'm aware I've done a bit of ranting about new writing theatres /non-naturalistic writing etc for a little while, and perhaps next the debates will move into new territory. I think my next Exeunt article will reflect that. And my last one was also intended as a bit of a celebration of some incredible writing by some of my favourite playwrights.<br /><br />I like your unpacking of the critics approach to reviewing play/production, might come back to that. Laurens wrote a bit about this too in an unpublished section of our interview….<br /><br />Thanks for adding to my request for more entries on Google!Hannah Silvahttp://hannahsilva.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-34125525466450007652012-09-12T17:23:39.985+02:002012-09-12T17:23:39.985+02:00I wouldn't have said so, no.
Certainly not e...I wouldn't have said so, no. <br /><br />Certainly not entirely by any means. <br /><br />Leaving aside what gets put in front of "mainstream critics" at the Barbican, Edinburgh International Festival, LIFT and so on, I'd say there's still plenty of it about in places like the the Lyric Hammersmith, The Young Vic, sometimes at the National, the Royal Court and the RSC. <br /><br />Similarly, while, say, Anthony Neilson, Chris Goode and Howard Barker do tend to direct their own work, Tim Crouch, Simon Stephens, Caryl Churchill and many others do not. <br /><br />And as I say, I think the situation is always very much in flux. Andrew Haydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07615226061116376519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-28429390927742788632012-09-12T16:55:14.910+02:002012-09-12T16:55:14.910+02:00Hasn't non-naturalistic stage action given up ...Hasn't non-naturalistic stage action given up on the mainstream and found it's own places and audiences amongst experimental theatre / live art? And therefore rejected the opportunity to be judged by mainstream critics?<br /><br />I observe that those writers who really want to make good on their experimental writing are obliged to direct it themselves. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com