Rhinoceros - Royal Court

Written for CultureWars.org.uk

When he became artistic director of the Royal Court, Dominic Cooke ruffled a few feathers by mentioning that he might put some “middle class” subjects on his stage. There was a bit of clucking about the disenfranchised and “access” and “the Royal Court’s historic role”. Well, here’s as eloquent an answer as such accusations are ever going to get. French absurdist writer Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros - given its English premiere at the Royal Court in 1960 with a production directed by Orson Welles, starring Laurence Olivier - reminds us this Sloane Square theatre has a long distinguished history of staging important international work, in which the class of the protagonists barely figures as a consideration.

It is still a strange beast of a play, depicting as it does the life of an alcoholic Frenchman - Berenger (Benedict Cumberbatch) - turned upside down when his friends and neighbours start turning into rhinoceroses. It’s a big beast, too, lasting over two and a half hours. This generous time-frame gives Ionesco plenty of time to faff around setting up the scenario, and, to be honest, the early scenes can become a little tiresome after a while. It all rather depends on one’s fondness for quaint, fussy, bookish French comedy. Mine, I confess, is limited. One gets the impression that translator Martin Crimp’s sympathies may also lie elsewhere in these initial routines. Crimp is a strange choice of translator for Ionesco (despite his earlier version of The Chairs for Complicité) with his obvious preference for sardonic wit, rather than surreal buffoonery, in his own plays. However, as the play moves on both Ionesco and Crimp raise their game considerably. By the interval, the joking has stopped and it is clear that despite the absurdity of the situation, it is no less than deadly serious.

The production similarly shifts gear. Whereas in the early stages the actors offer a selection of rather supercilious provincial types, as soon as there is something meaningful at stake the acting falls right into place. Benedict Cumberbatch makes a convincing, if slightly posh, Berenger. Jasper Britten as his friend Jean turns in a fine stab at the difficult job of playing pernickety man slowing transforming into a rhinoceros.

What is interesting about the play is the transition of its meaning. When first produced, only years after the end of World War Two and the Vichy Regime, this story of mass conformity, of changing into unthinking monsters, of the attraction of power, was clearly understood as a metaphor for Nazism. Nearly fifty years on, this is still the most obvious interpretation. But at the same time, there is the opposite interpretation that would cast Berenger’s determined individuality in quite a different light, in a similar way to Harold Pinter’s production of Twelve Angry Men in which Juror Eight’s stubborn refusal to go with the flow became a metaphor for the malign powers of oratory and a symbol for the rise of Hitler. After all, apart from a few more pointed references to the physical power and behaviour of the rhino, couldn’t Berenger’s objection that “it isn’t natural” for a human to turn into a rhino simply be seen as so much prejudice and bigotry? It is also interesting that while much else in the play is slightly vague and fuzzy, Berenger’s descriptions of alcoholism are on a par with Leo McGarry’s in The West Wing. Indeed, at several points, one wonders if it is the alcohol that protects Berenger from succumbing to pachydermal metamorphosis. If so, what does that then make the rhinoceri? Elsewhere there is much that appears to make pertinent comment on our own troubled times with judicious but sparing use of modern buzzwords like “insurgent” and “religious fundamentalist”. At root, the play remains a parable of a lone man’s struggle against his society. And, despite the intervening years, one which still resonates.

The Ugly One - Royal Court Upstairs

Written for CultureWars.org.uk

There seems to be a growing fashion for brevity in theatre. Marius von Mayenburg’s new play, which opens the Royal Court’s new season of international writing, clocks in at around 55 minutes. It is a model of concision with not an ounce of fat to be found anywhere in the script. Ramin Gray’s production sets the action on a bare stage flanked by three of the Theatre Upstairs’ leather and burlap benches, artfully littered with backstage detritus – here a step ladder, there a power-drill - all scattered as if left by some recalcitrant stage crew who are yet to make good on their promise of a set. The space’s house lights are left on throughout the action, supplemented by rudimentary additional lighting on the stage.

The play itself is much concerned with appearances: Lette (Michael Gould) is a successful engineer who has designed a new sort of plug. He should be going to a conference to deliver a paper on the product, but his boss, Scheffler, informs him that his face is “unacceptable” and that his colleague Karlmann will be doing the presentation. Lette is surprised. He’d never realised. He goes home to his wife, Fanny. She confirms that he is indeed “unspeakably ugly”. He is perturbed. He goes to a plastic surgeon – also called Scheffler – and demands reconstructive surgery. The effects of the surgery and their subsequent effects should probably remain a surprise. Suffice it to say that the surgery has a profound effect on the quality of Lette’s life, and the play becomes a fascinating meditation of the effects of one’s appearance – like four or five different morality parables running in tandem.

One of the most appealing aspects of the production is the almost rehearsed-reading style employed. The four actors are costumed only insofar as they wear shirts appropriate to their characters. There are no props. They spend quite a bit of time sitting ranged on the benches while Lette whizzes between them on a wheeled office chair. The delivery and dialogue, while not exactly deadpan, is understated and rapid. Thanks to the wholesale binning of any pretence at “realism” the actors switch characters in an instant. Aside from Gould, the other three actors - Mark Lockyer (Scheffler), Frank McCusker (Karlmann) and Amanda Drew (Fanny) – each play another couple of characters, who in each case have the same name. If this sounds like a recipe for total confusion, von Mayenburg’s script deals deftly with any such worries, using the sudden flicking between scenes as a clever device to jolt the audience like a train going over a set of points. Gray has assembled a first-rate cast who are a pleasure to watch. Gould – who ironically has a lovely, watchable face – manages to suggest changes of a man’s whole temperament with the barest hints of a smile here, a frown there, the terrifically enjoyable Mark Lockyer turns in a series of very funny studies of the self-satisfied, while the intangible transformations which Amanda Drew uses to essay the difference between a foxy housewife and a 78-year-old nymphomaniac plutocrat are quite astonishing.

If the play has a weak point, then one could point to a slightly unconvincing “madness”/split-personality scene, but this is passed over so quickly that it should scarcely be allowed to matter. It weakens von Mayenburg’s thesis slightly – if a thesis is intended – concerning the meaning of the face, but generally speaking the play puts forward only interesting and occasionally provocative ideas at such a break-neck pace that it becomes difficult to even process them, let alone dwell on the ideas raised.

It might seem premature to bracket this, along with Mike Bartlett’s recent Royal Court hit My Child, as part of a new movement in playwriting which has learnt lessons from the best recent television – hour-long shows, plunging the audience straight into the action without lengthy set-ups, rapid cutting between scenes – and re-made it as a thoroughly theatrical medium that adds the positive virtue of unapologetic presence and liveness. This production’s glorious lack of even costume, lighting, sound or set changes underlines such an approach – reasserting theatre’s potential for immediacy.


Incidentally, does anyone know anything about the poster design (above)? It is credited to Jeremy Herbert, but really reminds me of some (I think) 1930s, (I think) German surrealist art. Either way, I like it an awful lot.

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.

Blogland burnout spectacular

Don’t panic; I’m close to hitting the wall in my current run of blogorrhoea. What did it for me was clicking through from a link in Lyn Gardner’s take on whether critics should have friends who are theatre makers (no, apparently), which was helpfully provided by fellow blogger Natasha Trippney of Interval Drinks.

This in turn took me to Fin Kennedy’s blog back in December and January [scroll down to the 14th] last year, which was cited by Lyn as an example of what can happen when poacher turns gamekeeper. As Fin noted in the comments section under Lyn’s original article, that’s not strictly what happened. But, It still makes for pretty depressing reading.

Not having had enough of arguments, and feeling somewhat chastened by the description of my blog as “a great resource for the London theater scene” on The Shalimar’s blog (not the intention, I know - but no one wants to feel parochial, and I really am far more guilty of it than most), I went on to have a look at the rumpus recently being waged over at George Hunka’s website concerning his committing the first cardinal sin of criticism - writing up after leaving at the interval. I was alerted to this by Australia’s Alison Croggan’s own excellent response (oh yes, I was really doing the rounds today). Actually, George's position is something of a grey area, and one which (to the best of my knowledge) does not exist in Britain - he was on a free ticket (to a preview performance) and had been invited to write-up, but as a "blogger" rather than as an "actual critic".

In his defence, Hunka can be found musing on: “useless dichotomies -- critic/playwright, amateur/professional -- which only serve to Balkanize the practice of theatre production, reporting and criticism in the United States. Preserving these dichotomies only serves to more firmly entrench the status quo in which these dichotomies encourage antagonism and separation.” This reminds me a lot of what I wrote about at no small length yesterday.

Anyway - yes: he makes a full admission that he left at the interval. No: I’m not sure that’s enough. Nor am I sure that I’m not sure. Obviously it’s terrible manners. But then so is boring someone half to sleep. Obviously a critic can’t report accurately on a play if they haven’t seen it all, and that is their job. By the same token, a blogger is probably well within their rights to leave at the interval if they really can’t face the second half. It is - as Ian Shuttleworth once remarked when someone threw a chair at my head - practical criticism in action. I’ve certainly felt no compunction about not returning for the second halves of West End shows that I wasn’t reviewing.

Hunka in turn points to theatre director Isaac Butler’s attack on US dramaturgy, which he describes as an “annual churlish slog” - this seems a little harsh given that Butler appears to have directed two of Hunka’s plays. Or perhaps “churlish” is a term of approbation in New York. That, or Butler didn’t do a very good job with the plays. Either way, in many respects Butler’s post seems to echo quite a lot of what gets said over here when writers are complaining about the culture of dramaturgy. What is heartening however, is Christopher Shinn’s comments on the matter. Specifically his praise for:
“other societies, which have much healthier new-writing structures in place -- where young playwrights are getting full and enthusiastically-received productions -- [which] have nothing even approaching "development" as we understand it in America. [...] Dominic Cooke's season since taking over the Royal Court is an example of what happens when structures exist that support the writing of plays (new writers' groups) and then productions. The intermediate step of readings and development without a commitment to production is largely lacking in the U.K. I am a product of a culture that produces, at the highest level, the untested plays of untested writers, and over there I'm one of dozens.”

As the row on Fin Kennedy’s blog, and several spats like it since across a variety of other blogs, attest, we in Britain fret and stamp around a lot worrying about our lot and about theatre here. For the most part, I try not to despair too much. Three years of being paid to read the Daily Mail and the tabloids has instilled in me an almost complete mistrust of hand-wringing and worst case scenarios. Yes, there are issues that want looking at and talking about - most obviously: the ongoing prominence of the British tradition of text-based work, the models of theatre management this can put in place, and the wider issue of what audiences want, expect, and are prepared to work at, or indeed are equipped with the intellectual reference points to deal with - but in our collective passion to improve everything, let’s not forget that we've got plenty to be pleased about too.

Royal Court - Rough Cuts II

Posh / The Girlfriend Experience

The second offering in the Royal Court’s promising Rough Cuts season is another pairing of two works-in-progress, this time both first halves of longer plays rather than fragments – this week looked to be full-first-draft week – from the writer Laura Wade, in collaboration with director Lyndsay Turner and the company Recorded Delivery. As it turns out, where the first Rough Cuts night stood out for the vast differences between the two pieces on show, this double bill is notable for the many unexpected congruencies which spring up between the pieces. If this was not at least partially deliberate, then it was certainly fortuitous. Indeed, one of the impressions I was left with was that it was a pity that the two pieces would subsequently be being developed in isolation and shown separately since they had worked so brilliantly in tandem.

What they were about was, at root, class (well, class and sex in the case of the latter).

There are probably still a million books to be written on why class continues to exercise such a peculiar hold over the imaginations of the English. And those books will, of course, be devoured in their thousands because, as I say, the English just can’t get enough of it. So I’ll try not to dwell on that question here.

First up was the putative first half of Laura Wade’s new play Posh. Starting as an inquiry into the lives of the moneyed classes who live in the immediate environs of the Sloane Square theatre (one senses the commissioning hand of the Artistic Director’s mission statement), the brief introduction to the piece explains that this brief quickly led to a fascination with the secret Oxbridge drinking and dining societies, such as are now regularly detailed by outraged articles in the Daily Mail centering on pictures of a young David Cameron/Boris Johnson/George Osborne wearing floppy fringes and expensive togs.

We meet our hero attempting to tap his godfather for enough money to cover the damage that he and his friends – members of The Rioteers (I couldn’t help imagining The Riot Group for some reason), essentially an exclusive gang dedicated to upper class vandalism. As his tale unfolds, his godfather becomes more and more disenchanted with his young charge – the problem? The damage described simply wasn’t extensive or flamboyant enough. So the godson is sent off with a bee in his ear about doing something to restore proper hell-raising to the club. From here we see the club plan greater excesses (ten bird roasts, prostitutes under their tables, chartered flights to Lebanon...), although, rather like Britain’s latest round of terrorists, the planned destruction doesn’t really come off. There is an intriguing scene later (which I very much hope continues as a strand through the play) when the hero appears to be speaking, in similar circumstances to those at the start, with a long-dead ancestor who was once a member of the Rioteers – a sort of George Etherege/Lord Rochester figure (cf. The Libertine) – who is similarly disappointed by these bungling aristos’ attempts at carnage. The whole thing builds up to a situation where, following another attempt at hell-raising, the club are caught, arrested and told by college authorities that one of their number is to be sent down as an example, and that they have an hour to decide. The scene is closed by a rousing speech by one of the club who discourses like Harry V outside Harfleur on his hatred of the poor.

In fairness, Wade picks his targets well. If his coda were not that he blames the poor, then the lengthy list of targets for opprobrium would probably strike chords left, right and centre in varying degrees – reality TV, dumbing-down, people who keep cheese in the fridge, etc.

Of course, Wade has not written a Right Wing Play on the subject. Hell, apart from the actual club members themselves, very few of The Right actively condone this sort of behaviour, even if they tacitly endorse the privilege which creates it. Even the Telegraph will tut-tut when the Bullingdon boys run amok and trash another out-of-town restaurant, and it - at an informed guess - has the highest proportion of ex-club members, Old Etonians, &c. on its staff.

That said, she has not peopled the club solely with upper class caricatures – although some of the minor characters firmly occupy such territory. The boys are accorded a certain amount of nobility in amongst their ignoble carryings on. But then it would be illogical to create a play in which the audience was repelled utterly by all of the characters all of the time. Instead we are given what could well be reasonably acute depictions and left to worry about our allegiances. It is also interesting to consider that Wade is trading heavily on the mythology and glamour that surrounds those old public schools even at the same time as seeming to implicitly deplore a certain strata of their alumni. It will be very interesting to see how the rest of the play develops this material. Here’s hoping for a speedily written second half and a full production early next year.

- Interval -

In complete contrast, Recorded Delivery’s The Girlfriend Experience is a verbatim show consisting of taped scenes from an independent Bournemouth brothel. It has been set up by ____ who, tired of working for other madams and pimps, has struck out on her own along with her friend ___. Unlike most depictions of prostitutes/sex workers/call-them-what-you-will both are in their forties and at the upper end of the dress size register. What we get in the first forty-five minutes is both straight-to-audience/interviewer explanations of various aspects of the job, and interactions between the women.

It is almost as if the piece’s creator, Alecky Blythe, has stumbled across a perfect piece of tape-your-own-Beckett or Pinter, with added social commentary and relevance. There is plenty of humour here, as the women discuss their working lives, but also an overarching feeling of desolation. I was reminded of a comment made by one of the characters in Dennis Kelly’s recent pseudo-Verbatim show Taking Care of Baby – she is describing the way that life-sentence prisoners in a women’s prison spoke to one another, they are all, she notes, people who have committed horrific crimes – but they spend the whole time talking to each other in little-girl voices. I don’t know where Kelly got that observation from or whether he made it up, but the same happens here – everything is kept light – there is a constant level of enforced jollity, as if no one really wants to face what they are doing – at least not in their moment-to-moment interactions. At the same time, however, the interviews are disarmingly forthright and frank, and don’t given the impression that these women either feel sorry for themselves or seek our sympathy. And yet that sympathy is terrifically hard to let go of. A scene close to the end, in which the two women are sitting watching TV, waiting for the phone to ring with a client, is incredible theatre. We know they need the money, we can see they are bored, and so we both want the phone to ring, but at the same time can’t help feeling that maybe it would be better if they didn’t have to have sex with men for money. It is amazingly powerful stuff, like a staging of Godot in the middle of a relativist’s moral quagmire.
_______________

Posted from work, so apologies to readers who catch this before I’ve had a chance to check the programmes and put in the names/details/facts I’ve forgotten, and any links I might add.

Meanwhile...

I'm hoping to have a proper post up later this afternoon covering the second set of Rough Cuts at the Royal Court which I saw a week ago - not least since I see from my obsessive checking of my new blog stat counter that the Google searches which are most frequently finding this blog are those for "Laura Wade". It is hard not to speculate about who is conducting these searches. Does she have so many ardent admirers, forever trawling the net in search of their heroine? Apparently so. So I'd better not disappoint them.

In the mean time, and at the risk of turning my blog into little more than an alerts service for - and running commentary on - the Guardian's Theatre Blog, I shall draw your attention to this story from Lyn Gardner yesterday...

Oh, and I saw the much-praised Elling last night. Expect a CultureWars review, and possible meta-commentary here if I can't reasonably fit the questions it raised for me as part of a continuum about depictions of the relationship between madness and artistic/divine inspiration (cf. ...Dissocia, Speed Death..., St Joan) into the review proper...

And then expect millions of further posts about why I feel the need to divide my reviews into "proper" and "other" as my contribution to the brewing debate on what makes for good theatre criticism/writing-on-theatre (to borrow and paraphrase a better man's distinction) some time in the future.

. . stop press . . . stop press . . . stop press . . . stop press . . .

Another Google search for Ms Wade has just tipped someone onto the site. I just had a look to see if Postcards had somehow got to the top of Google's Wade references. It has not. It is on page 11. Someone is looking very thoroughly through mentions of her. How very strange.

Writing what you know

If, as I’m starting to suspect, all blogging is a long game of follow my leader, then, following Mark Ravenhill’s recent Guardian Arts blog post, this week’s hot topic is biographical readings of writers’ work. The subject has already kicked off a heated exchange on David Eldridge’s blog between him and critic Ian Shuttleworth*. Ravenhill’s original post is as fair-minded and witty as it is light, but he raises an interesting point. The most striking passage for me is his admission ‘I'd bump into friends from university and see they were longing to ask: “How long were you actually a rent boy for?” In the end, I decided all this gave me a grungy glamour. Without ever actually lying, I never disabused them of the notion.’

Of course he did. We all wanted to look grungy and glamorous in ’96. But there’s something else going on here. It is David Eldridge who connects it to Max Stafford-Clark, to whom the quotation “all plays are either autobiography or journalism,” is attributed. The way this belief manifested itself in Stafford-Clark’s work with writers has cast an extremely long shadow in its legacy for the Court.

A writer friend of mine, who shall remain nameless – for reasons which shall become clear – once wrote a provocative (and immediately countered) article for Noises Off magazine arguing that Graham Whybrow’s claim that he could identify the work of any Royal Court writer on the strength of a single page of their work was probably predicated on the fact that within the given page there’d either be a character who was a one-legged black lesbian; so it was probably by the Court’s one-legged black lesbian writer, or... so on, and so on.

I wouldn’t go that far, but it seems fair to say that for a while a certain brand of identity politics was at the very least not-discouraged, particularly around the young writers programme. I shall give a biographical example: - a few years ago a (different) writer friend who I knew from university had a play staged as part of the Royal Court’s Young Writer’s festival. I had produced an earlier (first?) play of his at university – it was a Camus-esque, Big Themes play in which six people gradually discover that they are in a lift to hell during some sort of (presciently enough) Islamist holocaust. His piece staged for the young writers’ programme was about growing up in as a Persian (which he was), in Wolverhampton (as he had) and working in one’s father’s corner shop (which he did). Perhaps it is unfair to blame the Royal Court for this – and perhaps it was the stronger play for not being so ambitious – but you can see from where the idea that they didn’t discourage a certain type of biographical authenticity comes.

This idea has turned on Max Stafford-Clark and bitten him on the arse at least once. There is a passage in Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia in which the young Karim (a thinly veiled, wish-fulfillment version of a young Hanif Kureshi, m’lud) is working as a writer (as Kureshi did) with a director of strong left-wing inclinations, who is widely thought to be a thinly veiled version of M S-C (with whom Kureshi did indeed work when he was a young Royal Court playwright). The book contains a scene in which the director, along with his wife, seduces Karim and his girlfriend with the aim of essentially stealing the girlfriend. So much for teaching people to write what they know. This story has an amusing – if wholly apocryphal coda: when filming the excellent BBC adaptation some years later, the set for this (enormously memorable – at least to this impressionable young thing) scene was dressed to exactly resemble M S-C’s house. Shortly after this has been televised – so the apocryphal story goes – M S-C had invited a couple of people back to his house. They arrived at the house, and entered the living room in question.

“So, this is where it all happened, then?” says one of the party, with a knowing look.

Awkward silence descends for the rest of a much-shortened rest-of-evening.

But I digress.

While Ravenhill suggests that it is a little odd to be confused with a character from your play, he then goes on to note the useful critical insights that such a school of criticism can sometimes offer. Eldridge, however, uses the occasion to take some issue with his work being read autobiographically –understandably, given the personal repercussions which he describes. What is fascinating is the fact that he does not comment on the fact that the play has also been reviewed autobiographically. He cites some initial comments from Ian Shuttleworth’s review, but omits to mention the end:

“I come from a similarly sacrificing working-class family, and I keenly feel similar debts to the departed. I could therefore be expected to connect profoundly with Eldridge's play. But not a sausage, I'm afraid.”

As a critic (ha!), not a writer, I find this sort of thing fascinating. Shuttleworth, after all, is giving explicit and personal grounds for the reason that he didn’t like the play. No pretence of objectivity or Olympian judgment here. This is explicitly a man with a history, sitting in a theatre, watching a play about another man with an apparently similar history. While on one hand it suggests it should have been a pushover for the play to have *got* him, it simultaneously admits the possibility that as someone so strongly identifying with the subject matter, he may not be the best judge.

Critics are often criticised for the dual, contradictory sins of both pretended objectivity and excessive of subjectivity. I find it interesting (not to mention brave) how readily Charles Spencer will talk about his position as a recovering alcoholic to contextualise his response to works dealing in similar themes of addiction. Similarly, if you can find a review of a play about Belfast by Ian Shuttleworth in which doesn’t mention his connection to that city, then you’re a better man than I am.

I guess the point of all this is that all writers, not to mention directors, actors, probably sound-designers and lighting designers, and other artists of any stripe you care to mention, will bring something of themselves to their work - both wittingly and unwittingly; and those watching their work, whether writing about it or not, will speculate over it, as much as they will appreciate other elements and the whole. But is it really, as David Eldridge says, “reductive” or “wrong-headed” to speculate? In much the same way as his play pricked the curiosity of his reviewers with its incidental spatial and temporal intersections with his own life, isn’t it precisely these same sorts of starting points that often ambush writers with ideas?

At the same time, I do hope we have gone beyond the era of identity politics into one where “write what you know” is only a helpful suggestion rather than an absolute and final restriction. I don’t want to be party to a culture, which, when faced with two plays on any given issue, will always pick the one written by the person who has the closest personal connection to the issue over the play that is best, irrespective of its author.

So, write what you know. Or don’t. Some part of you will creep in anyway and give your biographers and critics something to agonise over. But, if you are writing about what you know, please don’t do what John le Carré does and forget to tell everyone what it is you know before continuing the story; it makes it almost impossible to understand.

*In the interests of full biographical disclosure, Ian and I have a long personal history; I don’t know Mr Eldridge at all.

Blog backlog (blogklog?)

Only days after starting this blog, I've already gotten behind in posting on it. Apologies. Over the next few days I should have written up The National's new production of St Joan, which I saw in preview (on an extraordinarily reasonable Facebook offer preview ticket costing just £5) and the second Royal Court - Rough Cuts evening, which featured work from Recorded Delivery and Laura Wade. I also hope to jot down some thoughts on the scratch performance I saw at the Camden People's Theatre last night.

However, none of this is likely to happen today since I've got a party to go to in about an hour and several emails to write before then. Instead, here's a quick selection of interesting bits from the weekend's press which may be of interest.

First up is a somewhat breathless whizz through some of the theatre on offer at this year's Latitude Festival from The Independent, although sadly not mentioning Postcards' friends Small Change or Pegabovine.

The second article is an account of one of the new Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport's first speeches after his appointment. There's already a fine commentary on this over at Dan Bye's blog, so I shan't waste my breath, other than to observe that I wholly heartedly approve of the minister's access policy when it comes to adding perfect strangers on Facebook. I should also use this space to observe that his claim to have seen "Kneehigh's Caucasian Chalk Circle at the National" is patent nonsense, or poor reporting, since no such show exists.

The last thing, which you've all undoubtedly read as well, is this very sweet article from Friday's Film & Music supplement in the Guardian about the odd mutual appreciation between playwright Alan Ayckborn and French auteur Alain Renais. As a devotee of Scarborough thanks to firstly grandparents and now also the National Student Drama Festival, it's nice to know that it exercises its strange charm beyond our narrow national boundaries.

Royal Court - Rough Cuts

Following their hugely successful first six months under Dominic Cooke, and with the largely garlanded Downstairs show The Pain and The Itch extending its run until the 4th August, the Court has programmed two weeks of what are effectively scratch performances.

I know there is a fair amount of debate around the usefulness of scratch culture. Chris Goode has gone on record to attack (albeit with a careful and nuanced set of objections) the prevailing scratch culture, and Mike Bartlett in an earlier interview on TheatreVoice made many of the same points about "scratch" potentially offering so much of a safety net that writers need not commit to their work, and also of running the risk of drowning in feedback forms and the sort of well-intentioned dramaturgical advice that can leave plays utterly stripped of the initial spark that made them worth writing in the first place.

That said, I’m real sucker for experimental works-in-progress and readings. All the more so when they constitute a significant programming decision on the part of one of London’s foremost producing theatres. Whatever you think of any given individual play, or about the politics of scratch, it is hard to deny that Dominic Cooke’s first six months at the court have been little short of miraculous.

Wednesday’s offering was a double bill of fragments from two potentially longer, larger, as-yet-unfinished works - one by long-standing Royal Court writer Leo Butler, who teaches on the Court’s Young Writers Programme and whose first professional play was staged at the theatre several years back, and the other by one half of The Right Size: Sean Foley.

In terms of a double bill it is hard to imagine a greater distance between two pieces: Butler’s Airbag - the result of a collaboration between him and the Nigerian choreographer Anthony Odey - is a perplexing series of fragments in which an old lady in sheltered accommodation describes seeing a number of gorillas outside her window, intercut with spectacular and vigorous displays of Nigerian dance, accompanied by tribal drumming and continually underscored by a slow heartbeat sound effect. Sean Foley’s A Liability, by contrast, offers short scenes from a potentially longer light comedy about a man who can stop telling the truth. It’s hardly an original premise (the Jim Carrey Liar Liar, for starters, apparently), but curiously the hardly-staged reading of half-an-hour’s worth of material served what there was very well indeed. With its jaunty live guitar breaks between scenes and little songs to move the action along, it worked very well as a half-hour radio comedy.

It’s no surprise that Foley writes a good comedy - he is a comedy writer and performer, after all - although this was less in the clownish vein of The Right Size and more like, well, writing. Directed by Terry Johnson, it is quite easy to imagine A Liability morphing into a slick West End product. This would be a shame, as much of its charm derived from its lo-fi production values, which chimed well with much of the more whimsical comedy - the play opened with its main character (played by Sean Foley himself) being gradually drawn into a conversation with a woman on the tube’s teddy bear.

Of the two pieces, Airbag was the more inconclusive experience. The juxtaposition of the rich imagery of the old woman’s speech - much of it couched in uncomfortably racist terminology concerning the size, physique and colour of the “gorillas” she can see - when interspersed with sequences of African dancers opened up a strand of inquiry which remained explicitly unaddressed throughout. Talking to Leo afterwards, he agreed that the tension was deliberate, and that in the pieces that we saw, it wasn’t directly addressed. In fact, talking to him clarified a lot of things about the piece for me, about which I had previously been unsure. It also offered an insight into how he saw the piece developing. It sounds like it could turn out to be a really exciting project, and quite unlike anything else the Court has staged. Even if it doesn’t get picked up for further development, a small number of people can at least claim to have seen a piece of partially dance-based theatre at the Royal Court - something unimaginable 12 months ago.