Thoughts: in three parts*

Cooke: Court still says ‘Cunt’

Ahead of tomorrow’s press night for the first play in the Royal Court’s exciting new season of international plays, The Ugly One, Dominic Cooke offered a series of ineffably sane and reasonable comments on his plans for the Royal Court in yesterday’s Observer (under a somewhat excitable sub’s headline).

As I’ve commented many times before, Dominic Cooke has done unbelievable good for the theatre since he took over as artistic director. His programming has been consistently intelligent and interesting. Also, not noted in this article, but far more important in many ways - although less headline-grabbing - he has already demonstrated that he is open to looking at new models of making work for theatre. The two week Rough Cuts mini-season this July was perhaps the real coup of his directorship so far. It is fantastic news that the artistic director of perhaps the leading new writing theatre in London is prepared to look beyond the literary model of play-making. In the meantime, it is surely worthy of note that he has programmed an entire season of work by non-English-speaking writers.

Katie Mitchell / Complicité

Secondly, I’d like to address a couple of the comments that have arisen from my comparisons between Complicité’s A Disappearing Number (henceforth ADN) and Katie Mitchell’s last two plays at the National.

Anonymous says: “I'm intrigued that you like Katie Mitchell's recent work so much when much of what you write [in your review of ADN] could most certainly be applied to, for example, her Attempts on Her Life or Waves.”

I really don’t think the same can be applied. I’ll try to explain why.
The primary difference between the NT stuff and ADN for me is that in the former virtually everything that you saw and heard was being created on stage. The creation of the cinematic projected images was a direct result of live human behaviour that you could watch taking place, both in the sound effects and video trickery of Waves and the vast screen projections of Attempts on Her Life. This struck me as an intensely theatrical approach to using multi-media because it foregrounded its creation and use - much like when Fecund had their sound and lighting desk on stage in Intimate Male back in 2001 (there are no doubt countless other examples). It seemed to take multi-media use to a whole new level. It wasn’t *between* the actor and the audience; it was something that the actor was doing right in front of the audience. Beyond this, I particularly liked the aesthetic employed. That the actors were also ‘performing’ their use of the technology - the running around and faux ramshackleness was all meticulously choreographed - added a further fascinating dimension.

I should make it clear that I don’t have an objection to video-projections at all. I quite liked the way they were deployed in The Elephant Vanishes, for example. But I think there needs to be an acknowledgement of what they are, how they operate and what they do to a piece of theatre. For example, in an earlier Fecund piece - their production of The Cherry Orchard - there was a scene in which the characters acted in front of a vast projection of a dance while thumping, deafening techno music played over the speakers. The only character whose speech could be heard was screaming into a microphone. This fitted perfectly with the overall aesthetic of the piece. It also seemed entirely appropriate, since it acknowledged the way that the music and projection was steamrollering the human scale. In ADN, similar steamrollering (or at least wallpapering) felt to me like it was taking place while the actors pretended it wasn’t.

Further on ‘Davis Wateracre’ (who I know, in case you’re wondering), asks: “Don't you weaken your argument by saying rather snottily that they are ‘review-proof’ and then attempting to take them down a peg? I completely understand the urge, and similarly I completely understand that this production left you cold, but should we as reviewers start from a clean slate every time?”

I would draw a distinction between what I wrote on ADN and a ‘review’ proper. I didn’t see the show on a press ticket, and had sent someone else to review it for CultureWars - partially for exactly the reasons I raise in my piece about the show. As such, I felt completely free from the constraints of reviewing/criticism proper; the piece is partially more essay than review so I felt freer to engage with the aspects of it which I found problematic and to foreground the subjectivity of those problems. Which leads me rather neatly on to...

Billington blogs on blogs
(or, The Wolf just gets crazier)

Michael Billington has written a new post in the Guardian’s theatre blog section in which (ironically) he comments on theatre blogs. He asks: “Is blogging changing theatre criticism?” And argues that it undoubtedly is. If it is, it is hard to see quite how it is changing it. Newspaper reviews today look pretty much like they did a couple of years ago before theatre blogging gained any sort of momentum.

I pretty much fall between the two (perhaps illusory) camps which he sets up - professional critics and bloggers - since I both review plays (sometimes even for money, thus “professional”) and write (keep? what is the verb?) a blog. I try to keep the two things faintly separate. If I am reviewing a play on a press ticket I will write a “proper review” for the publication under whose auspices I have been given the ticket. If I am seeing something that I’ve paid for - or am on a press ticket for the blog like I was at the Hampstead last week - then I feel freer to write what I like. Mostly on the blog I write about issues around theatre (and around reviewing it). This is obviously different to the West End Whingers site, which is almost solely a reviews website. And one which makes an absolute virtue of the independence that paying for tickets brings. While Chris Goode and Andrew Field offer a mixture of reviews and comment.

Beyond his disobliging suggestion that “the blog, in its voracious desire for news and opinion, is in danger of too much pre-emptive guesswork,” (which appears to be more a criticism of the Guardian’s own theatre blogs than those outwith - since the example given is precisely one such piece) Billington’s main point is interestingly conflicted. His central point is “I still cherish the idea of the printed review”. He makes a number of fine claims for the art of the critic. At the same time he acknowledges the many frustrations that his art endures - “The restrictions of space and time are considerable, but they force one to focus on essentials.” One can’t help wondering, despite the admirable insistence on structure (and lord knows, Postcards... could sometimes do with a bit of structuring, restricted time and space) whether he wouldn't relish just a bit less restriction.

Writing this blog, I am often reminded of that Balzac (I think) quote, which - paraphrased - says: “I would have written less, I didn’t have time.” That said, one obvious advantage with blogs and online review sites is precisely that one isn’t pressed to restrict one’s word count. Yes, discipline can be a useful, uh, discipline - but by the same token, it is lovely to read something that takes all the time it likes to go into real detail and is afforded the space to discuss the wider implications of the work. It is also great that there is now online a growing corpus of work which is discussing issues at the cutting edge of theatre-making and discussing theatre criticism in real depth. A national newspaper could never be expected to publish all that. It is not its job. I’m interested in reading it, but I’m realistic enough to know that most people aren’t.

Another benefit of the online review and blog is that it offers the opportunity for writers to experiment. I think Michael is quite right to suggest that there is a critical discipline and an acknowledged way to write reviews, but it is exciting to read people who are writing outside that box. Quite apart from anything else, being online allows reviews to hyperlink, putting the rest of the net at their disposal. I would argue that not all blogs are like informal letters - some are certainly possessed of great elegance and eloquence. Conversely, a lot of online reviews actual follow the general pattern much more than one might imagine they would.

A further bonus for online reviewers is the simple lack of duty - they are also under no obligation to cover something that they really don’t want to see. Obviously there are advantages to having one or two people covering a majority of theatrical events in the country per paper, but at the same time a different advantage would be had if those people weren’t forced to see so much with barely a nod to their tastes, and with their schedules dictated largely by commercial considerations. For example, I’m sure there are nights when three or four press nights clash and the two reviewers employed by a paper will be sent to the two plays in, say, the West End and Stratford rather than the studio production with no star names or massive subsidy in which at least one of the reviewers might be far more interested. Perhaps I’m wrong, but big openings never seem to get missed, while interesting work may be, simply because of “News Values”. There’s an interesting wider question there about what makes theatre "important", but now isn’t the time or the place.

When Michael argues that, “The nature of the newspaper review is always changing, of course... reviews are increasingly seen as an instant guide for the reader: the existence of star ratings is proof of that.” One gets a real sense of his frustration. It seems a shame that he doesn’t appear to acknowledge that a lot of those writing blogs share precisely this frustration, which is why, in part, they are writing them.

And finally, Mark Ravenhill’s piece from today’s Guardian is clever and thoughtful as always. And elsewhere, it is great to see a new post from Alex Ferguson on his Unknown Persons blog.


* Title suggested by Wallace Shawn’s play A Thought in Three Parts, one of the most exciting and provocative bits of American experimental writing for the theatre that I have read.

Watching the watchers

Earlier this week, Michael Billington offered his musings on what might constitute the “ideal theatre”. The article has already drawn two articulate responses from Andrew Field and Mark Shenton, with Field even starting to turn into Howard Barker (I mean that as a complement):
“...The best theatre is not created on a blank canvas. Theatre is, if anything, a renaissance fresco, graffiti, or something somewhere in between... Theatres shouldn't be the ideal forum in which to display a work of art. In their decrepitude or their opulence or their damned inappropriateness, they should fight the imposition upon them, they should challenge the use that is being made of them.”
while Shenton offers a typical thoroughgoing, statesmanlike overview of the question.

It’s an interesting question. Particularly when one has recently returned from Edinburgh and seen shows shoe-horned into every conceivable configuration, volume and sort of room imaginable – from the dank leaky caves of the Underbelly to the black-draped, polystyrene ceiled office spaces of the Pleasance Dome.

Billington, Field and Shenton all hit on something, but it is rather like the three blind men describing an elephant. Essentially, they each reveal what they most love about theatre through their descriptions of its ideal location.

What each seems to ignore is the need for a play to fit its playing space. Yes, Andrew’s argument for a kind of creative tension between space and play is brilliant. But I’d be wary of applying it as a formula across the board. It is a recipe for a particular form of radicalism – and a damn good one, recalling Gang of Four’s preferred self description of their musical style. It is no way to treat a revival of Private Lives, though (well, it could be, and I’d love to see it done – but not exclusively).

What is more crucial than any specific dimensions or configuration is simply that a play works in the space. I don’t have any particular prejudices in terms of theatrical configurations. After a few years of post-student pros. arch snobbery, I have mellowed to a point where I’m quite happy to watch theatre end-on, in thrust, in traverse, under a pros. arch, in-the-round or en promenade. What annoys me is when a director utterly fails to take the space into account when creating the production. One of the (millions of) thrilling things about Katie Mitchell’s production of Attempts on Her Life was the way that it felt like a site-specific piece that happened to be sited in the National’s Lyttleton Theatre. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the stage used better. The best productions in any theatre make you experience the actual space completely anew. The space doesn’t have to be perfect (or imperfect), but the best productions will understand it perfectly. [See also: any number of articles/thoughts about transfer difficulties where a production seems to almost break completely in transit]

An issue which has been interesting me recently that follows on (loosely) from this is that of audiences. It came up for me recently as I was watching The Emperor Jones in a Thursday matinee performance at the National, with the Guardian blog article arguing that the play was a racist disgrace rattling around at the forefront of my thinking. As a consequence, I was thinking much more about “race” than I ever normally do. Thus I become acutely aware that I was sitting in a virtually all-white audience - a reasonably thorough look around at the end revealed two black women, one Asian woman and a white girl with dreads out of a nearly-full house. I was also in a minority of about a dozen or so under retirement age. So, all the way through this potentially racist play, I was acutely aware of this older, white audience and was almost making mental notes of the places they laughed – mentally interrogating their responses in a particularly specific way. It was a very odd experience. I don’t recommend it.

This reminded me of perhaps my least favourite evening ever spent in a theatre: in 2000, just after I’d started reviewing for CultureWars in London, a play about pole-dancers opened at the Riverside Studios starring Kelly Brook. Due to the massive amount of pre-publicity this bit of celebrity casting had managed to score the play, it seemed only reasonable that we should cover it. Being the theatre critic I duly called the press office and arranged a ticket. The day I was going to see it (I think the night after press night) The Sun published an enormous photo from the play of Kelly Brook pole-dancing on their front page, with further shots inside of the actress topless (also from the play). As a consequence, I grimly trooped over to Hammersmith feeling as if I ought to be wearing a grubby mac and furtive expression. Anyway, the reason this was perhaps my least favourite evening ever spent in a theatre had very little to do with the play (although I wasn’t a big fan) and a lot more to do with my fellow audience members. The audience that night was almost exclusively male and overhung with an almost tangible air of testosterone heavy and half-concealed sexual menace. I’ve never been to a play which had bouncers on the door (and if I remember rightly, unobtrusively onstage throughout) before. I’m not sure I’ve ever sat in a room with so many Sun readers before or since, either. I’m acutely aware that this all sounds like a particularly nasty sort of prim, puritanical snobbery. So be it. There was even a point when I wondered to myself if I went to the theatre partially to avoid these exact people with whom I was now seated.

As a further aside, ironically, I was discussing this issue of how audiences affect one’s experience of a given play with that very show’s director the other night (we met in Edinburgh the following year, and in a fit of spectacular, drunken gaucheness, I banged on about how much I had disliked play at some length, leading to a lengthy full and frank discussion on the topics raised). She had recently been to see Cabaret, and had been somewhere between bemused and horrified that the conclusion of If You Could See Her - where the Emcee pulls the rug from under the audience’s feet with an ironical, anti-Semitic conclusion – actually raised a (unintended) laugh. Later, this same audience, who clearly weren’t thinking very hard, burst into rapturous applause the split second the lights went down at the end of the play. Fine, you might think, except that the final moments of Rufus Norris’s current production aren’t intended to whip up a crowd-pleasing finale, but rather to point ahead to the horrors which were to follow in Hitler’s Germany. With the net effect that wildly applauding the moment the curtain comes down looks insensitive at best and, well, fascistic at worse.

Fellow audience members often have the power to shape one’s experience of a play just as vividly if not much more so than a building. Not least because one is always at least dimly aware that as well as you being able to hear and see them, so – often – are the actors [-fill in your own favourite mobile phone/actor interface anecdote here]. If nothing else, this is a powerful reminder of just how live a medium theatre really is. And how ultimately little its outward trappings can matter in comparison to the actual marrow of the experience.

On adaptations and liveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Edinburgh round-up: stab one

The general consensus seems to be that Edinburgh has been a bit flat this year. Several plausible theories have been advanced as to why this might be. Looming large in many is the mostly foul weather and the widespread Festival Flu that has been doing the rounds as a result. Another theory is that there aren’t as many stand-out shows as there can be – and, oddly, those that there are seem to be struggling to find audiences. There is also the widely touted belief that the critical consensus this year is more scattergun than usual with 5 star/2 star splits not uncommon. I do wonder if this consensus spreads much further than my friends. Maybe we’ve all just got several notches more cynical and lazy. After all, innovation is only innovation once, after that it goes from being enjoyable re-tread to tired cliché all too quickly.

That said, once I warmed into the Festival atmosphere, and before I got too bogged down in Festival flu, I had a really lovely time. I’ve seen several shows which made coming up well worth while, and a couple which I wouldn’t have missed for the world – particularly Chris Goode’s utterly wonderful Hippo World Guest Book and Melanie Wilson’s astonishing Simple Girl. Other notables include Shalimar Theater's La Femme est Morte, Unlimited’s Ethics of Progress, Third Angel’s Presumption, and Real Circumstance’s Limbo. That said, despite probably achieving a thirty-plus show count, I can’t help feeling I’ve been criminally remiss. Apart from the fact that I keep taking whole days off from seeing anything because I can’t face another hour of trying not to cough while constantly wiping my red nose as silently as possible, I worry that I’ve allowed far too many things to drift. Partially this has been conducted on the “if it’s any good it’ll transfer” principle, and partially because despite things being recommended, the recommendations have been pretty lukewarm. It seems you’ll always be able to find someone to applaud your decision not to bother going to something.

That said, the shows are only part of the fun. What has been really nice this year is to get a chance to spend a bit of time with a selection of people I see far too rarely; and in conditions where everyone is at their most switched-on and critically engaged. As well as catching up with people, it’s been nice to meet some new and apparently brilliant people – of whom I can now also fail to see enough until about this time next year despite living in the same city all year round.

On my way to my current position (the computer in the Assembly Rooms club bar – I swear I am never doing Edinburgh without a laptop again) I bumped into fellow blogger Andy Field who drew my attention to Lyn Gardner’s lovely write-up of his recent site-specific/sympathetic thing (which I, of course, inevitably missed). In a way this encapsulates the whole way Edinburgh seems to work. You potter along and once in a while you just run into someone or something which makes your day. Generally speaking, it's not a bad way of being. I haven’t seen Lyn this year, but have felt more than ever before that the whole Fringe benefits from her presence like she is some sort of theatrical Mother Theresa. Lord knows where she gets the stamina from, let alone the ability to keep on turning in acute readable prose. She is an example to us all and I am not a little awed.

Szalwinska revisited, plus Edinburgh round-up

I haven't been well this week, which, coupled with being at work, has led to a bit of a slide in my productivity. Apologies. Anyway, here's a bunch of stuff. Edinburgh first, then some actual thoughts.

First up, from Andy Field’s excellent blog are the first two entries in his project to profile all the companies at Aurora Nova. As well as being brilliantly written, these offer a real insight into the companies discussed, far more than yer Fringe Programme 40-word blurbs can ever manage. Field has a real journalist’s eye for what makes an interesting story, so even if you’re not planning a visit to the Fringe, these make excellent reading. The first two are John Moran and Rotozaza.

Next, the welcome return of Chris Goode to his blog, offers the first (of many, one hopes) installment of his Edinburgh diaries. Typically uncompromising, he shares his thoughts on the first few shows that he’s seen on the Fringe.

Dan Bye gives characteristically well-crafted director’s-eye-view on Fringe foibles (my God, this is starting to read like Wogan or something) on his blog, while elsewhere, in the mainstream, Ian Shuttleworth's first few articles are up on the Financial Times site. I would especially recommend his review of Tim Crouch’s England, for is acute generosity (OK, I haven’t read it properly, because I want to come to the show fresh, so if that’s not strictly accurate, let me know, but the beginning and end seemed to point that way)

Also recommended is his trot through a worryingly large number of musicals on the Fringe – I hate to think how many hours of irrecoverable viewing time this represents. The article has the additional pleasure of an end gag which, it is hard to help suspecting, is better than any contained in the shows reviewed.

Back in the real world – of which I am still nominally a part, massive flu notwithstanding - Maxie Szalwinska takes a wider view (admittedly triggered by an Edinburgh show) wondering if theatres get too intimidated by big-name writers to ask for re-writes.

This is an interesting premise, and one which is as completely wrong as it is wholly right – that is to say, there are at least two other possible explanations to which she ought to give serious consideration, alongside her attractive thesis. She is right, that some theatres may suffer for having a literary manager who, in spite of many luminously positive qualities, may not have quite the temperament to front up to some of the biggest names in theatre and say: "Oi, Alan/Harold/Dave, rewrite please!" I am told that this was the conspicuous failing of one particular longstanding, high-profile literary manager of a major London theatre.

On the other hand, there are the two opposite positions to consider – rather than being too meek, a literary manager or department can equally be responsible for dramaturging a play to death. There is at least one London theatre with a terrible reputation for this - to the extent that writers now think at least twice before letting their scripts anywhere near it.

The other consideration is that is it hard to tell what any play is like until it is actually fully rehearsed and in front of an audience. If this weren’t so, why would all such elements be necessary for a play to properly exist? It is a cliché to observe that modern plays play better than they read – and indeed literary departments are often suspicious of the play that reads well. And this point leads on to the fact that taste is also deeply subjective. For all that Maxie didn’t seem to think much of Damascus (a pity, since I was looking forward to it), she might not be "right". Some people might think the last hour, which she didn’t go for, is terrific. I’m sure everyone can think of innumerable instances where if they’d listened to a critic, they’d have missed their favourite play of the last decade (Attempts on Her Life, anyone?), and probably a good few other examples of following someone’s recommendation to their eternal regret. Maybe Damascus is simply not cut out to be some people’s cup of tea. But, it is an interesting question to ask, nonetheless.

Finally, I notice that someone else has fallen into the trap of using the Guardian’s Right-to-Reply-type column. Having just blogged my disagreement with a critic, I’m not sure why I find this feature so questionable – probably because the real thing is only mainly used by/offered to(?) those who have been personally stung by a critical response, and so their arguments are not simply those of an interested bystander/co-commentator but of an injured party. That said, in this case, it does simply appear to be a case of an advanced withering of the writer's sense of irony. It is all very well to argue that "theatre can be instructive, challenging, empathetic and cathartic", but it does seem a bit grandiose to do so when your CV destroys your argument so thoroughly. Further down, the article continues:
"Many theatre companies, including ours, have been creating new productions, with new writing, which meet the demands of a modern audience: populist shows about contemporary issues, dealt with sensitively. The Naked Truth, for example, which is about to launch its third run in the provinces, centres on five normal women learning to pole dance; but its emotional core deals with subjects such as self-confidence, female sexuality and the social and psychological implications of breast cancer."

I really wish I thought this was satire.

Perhaps dignified silence is always the best way to respond to criticism. That said - I recently read a playwright's private email response to the reviews that his latest play had received. And his comments were as acute and as they were savage. They were also, crucially, private.

Edit: I notice that CV link has gone dead. Funny that.

William Shakespeare: middlebrow racist?

Annoyingly I'm having to write real reviews today (one on St Joan for the New Culture Forum and one on Merchant of Venice at the Globe for CultureWars). On top of this I have a couple of piece to write about the NSDF for the Times online's coverage of the Festival's presence in Edinburgh this year, and I still haven't done that piece for Dan Rebellato's Contemporary Theatre Review on the Barker funding debacle. On top of this, I'm sure I've got a couple of script reports to write up for Theatre 503.

This is all particularly annoying since I want to write a piece here about the combination of Othello and Merchant which I saw in a marathon (that really should be capitalised, shouldn't it?) seven-plus hour trip to the Globe yesterday (short version: Merchant - v. v. good. Othello - not so much) entitled "Shakespeare's Racist Plays". After describing our national playwright as "middlebrow" on Culture Clash the other night (even though I don't especially believe in the distinctions) I'm feeling a renewed interest in the Bard's work.

I think I stand by "middlebrow" incidentally: Shakespeare is, after all, far less concerned with flaunting his erudition (such as it was) than either Marlowe before him or Jonson after. If one allows that one's "brow"-rating is essentially elective (cf. Eliot and Pound choosing to self-describe "high art" for example) I don't think for a moment that "highbrow" is what Shakespeare was about. I like to imagine he'd have dismissed the entire notion of brows as hogwash. Conversely, if it is a label to be foisted upon work by critics, I really don't think that the "highbrow" label at all communicates even slightly the experience of what one sees when watching his plays.

I ought to clarify that I'm not imagining high- to low-brow as a sliding index of quality so much as intent. If anything Shakespeare gets "middle" by default for his mixture of "high" and "low" tropes. Still, I'm interested to know what other people think, both about Shakespeare and about the odd tendency to try to categorise art.

In the mean time, there's another fine example of the warring-critics school on Andy Field's blog, albeit one of the most civil and quickly concluded that I have seen.

p.s. In the most reassuring step yet taken by a Labour Arts Minister at 3.54pm James Purnell MP joined the group What Would Leo Do? on Facebook.

REVIEW