Everybody loves a talk show

Just to compromise my journalistic integrity further, I’ve just been made producer of the Finborough Theatre’s excellent FinboroughForum strand of discussions. Expect more on related subjects in weeks to come. And fewer reviews of plays running at that particular theatre.

Strangely, it seems that chatshow time has kicked right off in theatres across town. More centrally, the Soho Theatre has just unveiled its own first series of discussions and interviews under its new Director of Talks, Observer literary editor Stephanie Merritt.

The initial outlook was not promising. On the 16th October we get the opportunity to see “Kerry Katona talk to the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman about her new book and celebrity culture”. Leaving aside the obvious nepotism involved in the choice of interviewer, one idly wonders how much Kerry Kantona actually knows about celebrity culture. Yes, she’s been in it (I was confronted with a picture of her sunbathing topless on holiday only the other day in the News of the World) and written a spill-my-guts autobiography, but does all that exposure mean she’ll have any insight whatsoever? It is almost tempting to find out.

A fortnight later on 30th we are offered “Rude Girls” in which “blogger Zoe Margolis (Girl with a One Track Mind) talks to former Erotic Review editor Rowan Pelling about sex and feminism.” - Former Erotic Review editor and Observer columnist, cynics might note. Again, despite the neatly zeitgeist-grabbing tone, is this really any more than tabloid dross served up with a garnish of middlebrow gloss? Wouldn’t it have been rather more interesting to have the blogger and Pelling on the panel, perhaps supplemented by Lucy Prebble - the excellent young playwright behind the forthcoming adaptation of the Belle de Jour blog for television - being interviewed by someone with much less natural sympathy for their project (Ann Widdecombe or Clare Short spring to mind)? As an aside, you’ll note that the TV adaptation has changed the title to The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. The reason? Apparently ITV didn’t think its audience would understand the French, let alone the allusion.

As it turns out, the overall programme is considerably better than that. Some of the events further along the schedule look at genuinely interesting questions, alongside a selection of neatly chosen literary and artistic interviews. Clearly Merritt is going to offer a real range and depth of field. From a quick perusal of the debates on offer, Playing With Fire (although, boo to David Edgar's crappy play and using it as a title) asks: “Why do writers and artists deliberately cause offence, even when it wins them death threats?” with a panel that promises Nicholas Hytner and Stewart Lee along with a panel of eminent playwrights and writers to discuss the issues. Which sounds like an excellent event.

In “African? Caribbean? What’s the big fuss?” Tiata Fahodzi’s Artistic Director Femi Elufowoju, jr leads a panel including Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje to discuss “the arguably delicate historical relationship which exists between African and Caribbean descendants living in Britain today”. Given that the subject has been the spur to exciting plays by both, and is an area of discussion which terrifies white media pundits, this should be invaluable.

Elsewhere, Paines Plough’s conversational short new play strand, Later, has resumed at the Trafalgar Studios. The next three are on Monday 17 September, Monday 8 October and Monday 15 October. The first is curated by Leo Butler, the current (excellent and lovely) tutor on the Royal Court’s Young Writer’s Programme, and boasts a line-up that hand-picks some of its star pupils featuring new work from Polly Stenham and Alexandra Wood along with Elinor Cook, Elise Hearst and Ben Ockrent. The following two dates promise Murder at Gobbler's Wood - a collaboration between Robin French, Dennis Kelly and Enda Walsh - along with work from Paines Plough’s Future Perfect 2008.

While from last night Hampstead theatre’s Daring Pairings runs until the end of the week with, again, a selection of collaborations between a wide range of writers, which again have an exciting and innovative look to them. I’m going tonight and tomorrow night on unprecedented Blog-press tickets and will report back tomorrow.

Finally, on the subject of chat shows, I was on last week's Culture Clash on 18 Doughty Street talking about the whole of the Edinburgh experience and the current Andrew Marr series on Radio 4 in case you missed (ha!) it.

Edinburgh round-up: stab two

Walking through the Assembly Rooms foyer just now it struck me that there are absolutely no original playscripts for sale here this year (the script of the verbatim World War One drama Forgotten Voices is, however, available). For a venue that used to be regarded as one of the more prestigious of the Big Five (Pleasance, Underbelly, Traverse, Gilded Balloon and Assembly) this seems incredible. In the past, the Assembly Rooms has hosted tours of Shopping and Fucking, Disco Pigs, etc. and seen the premieres of plays by Liz Lochhead and etc.

This year it is hard to think which of the shows housed here actually demand publication. Perhaps, in retrospect, the sell-out success of Scarborough will prompt a London transfer – but with its deliberately fringe-friendly standing audience configuration, it is difficult to imagine the venue that will want to stick its neck out. Soho studio, perhaps? Trafalgar Studios Two?

The same scriptlessness is true across other venues (with the obvious exception of the largely published output of the Traverse). Following past Fringes, plays like Peter Morris’s Age of Consent and Guardians, or Adriano Shaplin’s entire oeuvre have been transferred and subsequently published. It is hard to imagine what might receive the same treatment this year*. I would love to read Melanie Wilson’s Simple Girl, and also Hippo World Guest Book. Similarly, I think La Femme est La Morte might profitably unleash an enjoyable rash of student productions if it were published – although given the vast amount of copyright material within the show, which is in part effectively jukebox musical, I foresee problems. But, depressingly, I can’t imagine any publishing house touching them in a month of Sundays.

Overall, this feels like a Fringe during which the written word has been utterly steamrollered by the devised and the performance-based. So many shows, even if written in part, seem to take much of their life from the specific performers involved. Roles have not so much been allocated and assumed as created from scratch. I’m not complaining, or even sounding the alarm just yet – one year’s worth of successes on the Fringe certainly doesn’t represent anything like a trend, but I do find it interesting. Not least because if the Fringe represents artists doing what they most want to be doing, then the way that most theatres are currently run seems to amount to a vast obstruction to this material.

The pervasive management model of a literary department and the requirement of an extant script prior to rehearsal would disallow many of this Fringe’s greatest successes from inclusion. In one respect this is why the Fringe is so valuable – it allows artists to stage the work and potentially achieve entry into theatres without having to submit non-existent scripts or draft exactingly detailed proposals. They can simply do their thing, prove that it has an audience, and wait for the offers of a transfer to roll in. That’s the theory, at any rate. But then a new problem arises: given the way that London theatres have chosen to brand themselves, there don’t seem to be many plausible spaces for these deserving shows to go. There’s the Lyric Studio, The BAC, The Shunt Vaults, possibly the Arcola, and God help us, the Soho, but off the top of my head, those are about the only places in London that I can imagine seeing any of the innovative, non-literary work which I’ve been enjoying on the Fringe. And there are problems with each – the Lyric, and Arcola are already programmed well in advance. The BAC has an almost pathological aversion to a decent length run and the Soho already has a problem with its image as a scattergun receiving house with nothing even faintly resembling an artistic policy.

Okay, there are all the non-producing, non-artistically directed Fringe theatres, but these generally have such appalling hit-and-miss reputations that audiences tend to stay away in droves. Come on. When did someone last go to the Oval House, White Bear, Etcetera or CPT with the same confidence that they go to the National, Royal Court or Almeida, without a friend being involved? Sure, I’ve seen some astonishing work in some of the spaces on the former list and some utterly abysmal work in the latter, but at least with the latter one has a sense that there is some guiding intelligence behind the work rather than an ongoing desperate struggle to pay their rent by filling the space with any company prepared to stump up the exorbitant weekly-rental charges.

So, what to do? The Fringe is dominated by a sort of a work that while prevalent and wonderful for a month in Scotland, seems largely unable to find anything like the same homes in London. A show can sell out Edinburgh for a month, but totally fail to even reach London (or anywhere else) or to make an impression once it has finally snuck in. Perhaps it is something about the rare atmosphere of the Fringe. For one month, people put their prejudices on hold, shelve their preconceptions and simply go to work hoping to be amazed. Do audiences in London behave in the same way? Perhaps it also has something to do with the almost tapas-like way in which theatre is consumed during the Fringe – shows are never even one’s sole daily, let alone weekly or fortnightly theatrical fix – they are one piece of a multiple-show puzzle. So the hour-or-under format rises to the fore. What might feel unforgivably brief in London seems mercifully compact in Edinburgh. Audiences want a brief intense hit, not a feature-length thought-provoker. Attempts to recreate the heady Edinburgh atmosphere in London would ultimately lead to the collapse of all concerned. The Fringe can only be intense because it has parameters, if it was as long as everyday life, it would be approached as sensibly.

I guess the obvious, if boring, answer is that since the Fringe cannot be recreated, we should simply give thanks for its existence, enjoy it when it arrives, and then go back to normal life. However, there are clearly lessons regarding alternative modes of creating work aside from the single-playwright method which need to be learned by producing houses across the country if they are to capitalise on some of today’s brightest young talents.

*Yes, SilverTongue Theatre’s Man Across the Way at the Underbelly is also published, but as a consequence of its pre-arranged post-Edinburgh transfer to Theatre 503, whose chief script reader Will Hammond also works for Oberon.

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.