Vùng Biên Gió'i – Laterna Magika

[Rather than being an attempt at a review – which would be crass since I don’t speak German, this is offered in the spirit of a “Walk-through”. It’s an idea for reviewing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, following my reading Tim Etchells’s excellent first novel The Broken World, about which I want to write much more soon. The set-up of the novel is its narrator writing a blog that talks its reader through the many levels of a computer game. At various points, the narrator’s own insights and thoughts penetrate his straightforward descriptions and advice on the game’s content. I guess that’s what the following sort of does too]

As I remarked in my prefatory note on Prague yesterday, Vùng Biên Gió'i marks the first time I’ve actually seen Rimini Protokoll in yer actual, proper, conventional theatre (Prague’s ugliest and most Communist). I was surprised by how strange I found it.

As you’ll probably know, if you’re a regular reader, Rimini Protokoll are an enormously exciting Swiss/German theatre company, who, I think I’m right in saying, are partially attached to the Hebbel Am Ufer theatres (?).

(There are three, collectively referred to as the HAU. Hebbel was a 19th? century playwright and the Ufer is the river next to which the original Hebbel theater, is situated. It’s also worth noting that HAU Zwei does excellent pizzas, has a great bar and is in the building that used to be house the Zodiak Free Arts Lab where, Tangerine Dream and Kluster formed/played a lot, while at the same time housing the Schaubühne theater prior to its1981 move to its current location in Lehniner Platz).

RP are exciting primarily because they’re so inventive and smart. They seem to be making new, fairly unprecedented work on an almost continual basis. There’s a great post by Ant Hampton on their show Heuschrecken here, and if you check HAU’s website they seem to have new shows going up there almost all the time (ok, not this month, but…). They make urgent, live, discursive/documentary theatre that feels like it is informed not only by global concerns, but that seems as if it started to achieve a global reach. You get a sense of what the theatre of globalisation might actually feel like.

I admit I’m a bit vague on the details, but the sense you get is of this tremendous energetic collective constantly arranging new pieces and firing them off to festivals and theatres. They also seem to get specifically commissioned a lot. I think I’m right in saying that Vùng Biên Gió'i was made especially for Pražský Divadelní Festival Německého Jazyka.

Its subject is Vietnamese immigrants living in Germany and the Czech Republic. And, in particular, those living in a town right on the border between the two countries. In common with many (well, all, in various forms) of RP’s other pieces, the show does not use “actors” or “performers”; instead, everyone who appears on stage is talking about themselves, or telling other stories from their own personal perspective.

The performance style is incredibly free and unforced. As I have previously discussed, this might be to do with the German language, but in this case, since only one of the speakers – a former German border guard – has German as a first language, it seems likely that it is much more to do with a very specific and evolved performance style – which at the same time is no style at all (all this feeds back to the very necessary discussion prompted by Chris Goode’s comments following my Everything Must Go review to which I have yet to respond). This “style” really doesn’t feel forced at all. The speakers are all radio-miked, so their tone of voice is entirely conversational. They are just people being themselves (big “just” there, I know, but that’s how it *feels*) explaining something to a large group of people in a room. It reminded me of what Nicholas Ridout says about stage fright in Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (not that I especially buy the notion, but…) he seems to suggest that it emanates from the anxiety of the pretence at trying to *be* someone else (that’s a really, really slender summary of a very long chapter, which I might have got wrong, but it’s one of the things the piece made me think about anyway).

Oddly, unlike with Der Prozess, I found it much easier to follow Vùng Biên Gió'i. Perhaps this is partially because I was mostly listening to other non-native German speakers, and so perhaps at least the older “cast” (?) members, were speaking at a speed I could hope to comprehend bit of, or perhaps it was the internationalism of a lot of the words. It sounds like an advertising slogan, but “Communism” seems to be pretty much the same in most languages.

The show was about 1hr 50 and covered an awful lot of ground. Each performer told their own particular tale of how they came to be in Germany or Czech, there were charming anecdotes, complex anecdotes, a lot of explanations about how their situation has changed over the years. How they make money selling knock-off Ostalgie souveniers or bootleg cigarettes. How these jobs can be more lucrative than anything they might get even after a university education (as a biologist, as one girl said?). These personal narratives and narrations – frequently illustrated with either live feed video projection or with the actual mobile crates from which they sell their Eastern Bloc combat fatigues – are frequently interrupted by a general question posed to all the participants: “What is your experience of bombs?”, “How did you travel?” etc. The questions are posed by LED text scroller. The answers to the first were accompanied by the performers throwing those little paper cap bombs at the floor.

Photos of the participants are also shown on the live-feed, while giant cut-out, blown-up photographs of various people they’re talking about and a very German-looking pine forest are brought out and rtanged on the stage.

What was particularly fascinating for me, a Briton sitting in Prague watching a German show about Vietnamese immigrants, was the sudden total perspective shift that came with the realisation that these weren’t necessarily “economic migrants” or “asylum seekers” as we seem to assume everyone foreign is in Britain. Many had come to East Germany or Czechoslovakia under favourable terms arranged between the DDR or the CSSR and the Vietnamese. When the East Germans were short of workers, they’d apparently advertise the fact and encourage Vietnamese workers to come over in the spirit of Socialist Brotherhood. (I’m probably taking massive chunks out of the nuance here, so if you’re interested in the subject, do, for God’s sake, do some reading round and don’t just quote me).

I hadn’t really taken on board that Vietnam’s communism had been sponsored by Moscow rather than Beijing, – hence the massive American resistance to it, compared with its failure to bat an eyelash at Cambodia’s China-sponsored Communist revolution-cum-genocide. It was quite strange to see the story of post-’89 eastern Europe told from the perspectives of those who had come from the last country to actually defeat Capitalist America in open warfare.

As a piece of theatre, the thing had that strange Rimini Protokoll sense that somehow, through careful dramaturgy and playful elements, there was a real flow of the ideas which coalesce to create an impression greater than the sum of the component parts. The extra elements, the singing, the staging, all combine to make this feel like the most explicitly political show I’ve yet seen by the company, who, while not making explicit comment on the macro situation, evoke it through the intersections of the micro-narratives. As something to watch, it felt maybe twenty minutes too long, although I’m more than prepared to accept that this may well be down to my having to concentrate about fifty times harder than anyone else in the auditorium to understand it. Because it’s so specific, it feels like a transfer here might be a little oddly superfluous, but then, as I say, the sheer culture shock of realising that Vietnamese immigrants to Eastern Europe, or the former Eastern Europe (some of the “performers” arrived post-’89) came from a very different tradition of migration than the one which the British press paints as a near uniform narrative for those coming into Britain.

Video clip: the other thing the show reminded me of was Jean Luc Godard’s film about French student Maoists, La Chinoise, which – I hadn’t realised until recently – is in fact based on Dostoyevsky’s novel Бесы.

Der Prozess - Divadlo na Vinohradech

The most striking thing about Andreas Kriegenburg’s production of Kafka’s The Trial is the audacity of the visual concept. The thick safety curtain rises on a gasp-making (and vertigo-inducing in this already too-high-up-for-comfort viewer) bird’s-eye-view of Josef K’s room. Suspended mid way between stage floor and ceiling, and viewed as if at the bottom of false-perspective walls which reach out meeting the stage proper at the bottom and disappearing into the flies at the top.

The room is circular and the walls stretch out in a way that none-too-subtly also suggests a vast eye. The walls are rendered in white/gray concrete while the floor of the room itself, two desks and numerous chairs are a warm wood, the floor is scattered with white pages. Three identically dressed performers (black four-button blazers, trousers, side-partings, moustaches, the essence of 20s MittelEuropean bank clerkery) are seated about the room looking perfectly relaxed and clattering away on typewriters – magically not falling off the vertical desks to shatter on the (real) floor below – in spite of the fact that they’re suspended at ninety degrees against gravity.

And then the floor of the circular room starts to revolve. Clockwise.

You can see the problem, yes? It’s all well and good if performers have got into position to appear seated or lying on the bed before the curtain rises. We’ve all seen this sort of false perspective done before on a fixed plane. But this one was turning.

As I might have mentioned a million times before, my German isn’t up to much, so I’m afraid this “review” is going to be a lot more describey than, y’know, usefully evaluative of the overall experience.

The performances are largely conducted in that very calm, conversational German, which friends have pointed out are largely a matter of the difference between the way that German and English are spoken as languages. Gradually the piece is revealed to have eight performers (of mixed gender and age), all dressed in the same identical moustache, side-parting and suit, and all variously taking or narrating the role of Josef K (either solus or in chorus) as well as playing his interlocutors.

The conversational tone of their exchanges, without the advantage of comprehension, was such that I actually paid a lot more attention to the giant spinning floor at the centre of the eye. But, frankly, that was more than reward enough. As the room gradually rotated, performers not involved in the scene – or sometimes ones who were – (although “scene” makes the whole thing sound a lot more unit-ed than it felt) would clamber about on the turning landscape of desks and chairs, sometimes making a concession to looking like they were behaving as if the room were horizontal, sometimes simply trying to cross from one side to the other as if trapped in a Harold Lloyd nightmare. It’s hugely entertaining.

Sometimes the revolving floor also lowers – away from the eye/walls – to become a slowly spinning disk behind the main action. Performers can then indulge in walking on the spot round the edge, sitting normally at the desks or lying on the bed. However, the floor never stays flat for long, and soon it’s back up to vertical, or else halted at an angle, with the performers once more sliding and climbing their way across it.

That’s the first half anyway – during this, there was also a neat scene in which K. meets Fräulein Bürstner (who, in a rare concession to characterisation, has changed out of her suit – although retains the moustache and side parting). The scene is played with maybe only two or three Josef Ks (each physically removing their predecessor and insinuating themselves into his or her place), while the rest of the cast, laid with their heads under Bürstner’s skirts, rhythmically blowing into them, causing them to rise and fall throughout the scene.

The second half (well, after the interval, probably less than half the whole running time) sees the room floor set replaced with a stark white disk, with five black poles sticking out of it. For much of the section, five actors hang from these, monkey- or possum-like, gently swivelling round as the circle rotates, while in the foreground animated or laconic long monologues are delivered.

The whole effect is very beautiful. Even without understanding the language, it is evident that these are beautifully controlled, very precise actors. Wonderfully animate, and yet incredibly understated.

Quite how well it works as an adaptation of the book, it is hard to say – hell, my familiarity with that isn’t what it could be. The Czech review the next day suggested that while obviously accomplished, this (former-West) German take on Kafka’s classic (the production originated in Munich) might have been a bit remote and hypothetical for a nation that still feels the effect of having lived through the reality of Kafka’s fiction. It would be fascinating to see how it worked in the Barbican (pretty much a perfect space for it, I’d imagine – possibly a bit too wide/high, but I don’t imagine that would be an insurmountable problem. Perhaps reading the surtitles might distract from the sheer visual loveliness of it, and I can’t begin to comment on the text, but, while this was slow and almost too deliberate, the constant turning wheel made it feel almost Zen at times. I imagine that at least a section of the British public would find much to admire.

Pohlednice z Prahy

To Prague for Pražský Divadelní Festival Německého Jazyka (Prague Theatre Festival of German Language [theatre]). On the Thursday before flying out to Czech, I happened to be doing a Q&A session with the students of Central School of Speech and Drama’s Writing for Stage and Screen MA which is taught by my friend, the playwright John Donnelly. Along with questions about “being a critic”, John was quite keen that I talked to them about my experiences of mainland European theatre, and specifically how they relate to the role of the writer. I mention this only because it was one of those times when you discover what you know (or, at least, what you think you know – and I’m very much still learning) as you’re trying to explain it.

Granted, I probably spend a disproportionately large amount of time thinking about mainland European theatre and its relationship with Anglophone theatre (not having seen much Australian theatre, I’m just guessing from the plays I have seen produced over here, the ones I've read and production shots I’ve seen, that it doesn’t differ too wildly from our own or American traditions, at least in terms of staging and how plays are thought about (at least in the mainstream)), but nonetheless, I had a revelatory moment during the talk: It had never really stuck me before how much of what we might call mainstream subsidised theatre practice – at least in Germany (but also, seemingly, Poland and Czech) – is actually “text-based”.

Recently it feels as if that annoying (and, I’d argue, mostly spurious – cf. Field) division of work into “text-based” and “devised” has subsided a bit, at least as a bone-of-contention/source-of-conflict. On one hand, everyone (in Britain) now seems a bit happier with the idea of plurality, apart from the odd occasion when someone blunders in with a misplaced “proper” or “better”. On the other hand, it feels like much work in the past couple of years has served to make the debate seem either misplaced, or has usefully and critically changed assumptions about the terrain. Seeing Tim Crouch’s The Author (The Author! for heaven’s sake!) Upstairs in the Royal Court felt like the moment when we all happily crossed the Rubicon together and everyone, whatever prior (fictional) allegiances, could agree that this was A Jolly Good Thing.

(Another example: the following night, after Slung Low’s They Only Come At Night: Visions, which I was reviewing for Time Out, I was chatting to Jerry Killick who told me he was currently working with Forced Entertainment on devising their new show. I confessed to being very surprised by the word “devising”, since recently I’ve been thinking more and more of Forced Ents’s work as essentially written work – and more likely than not, work written by Tim Etchells. I’ve no idea if this is any more the case for Spectacular or Void Story, but it was a useful reminder of how little can necessarily be assumed just by watching a thing. It’s more the way in which things get presented and promoted that leads to assumptions.)

What’s actually different is the perception of pre-eminence of The Playwright in Britain. “I’ve been to see the new Simon Stephens”, or “the new Tim Crouch”, or “am looking forward to the new Alan Bennett”. “I’ve been disparaging the new David Hare”. It pretty much conjugates itself. The only two irregular verbs, so to speak, are Katie Mitchell and Rupert Goold. Perhaps in the case of really, really established classics (Shakespeare and Chekhov only?), it’s more likely to be “Simon Russell-Beale’s Hamlet”, or “David Tennant’s Hamlet”, or “Kenneth Branagh’s Ivanov”. Did anyone care who’d directed them?

What I’m trying to pin down, very circularly indeed, is the way that German theatre seems to function – at least to my eyes.

Essentially, it seems to be far more likely that one will be talking about the director of the piece then either the writer or a star actor (that said, I do seem to end up seeing more Regietheater than New Writing at festivals for some reason). But this shouldn’t obscure the fact that their theatre is very “text-based”. That is to say, the director – whatever they’re doing with the design of the production – seem still to work from the text up. There’ll likely be weeks of discussions between the director and actors about the text. That this can end up with productions of texts that look to our (I would still argue) more conservative eyes (ok, let’s not say “conservative”, let’s say “differently acclimatised eyes”) that look like they’re miles beyond the strangest works of the “upstream”. At the same time, this version of working with the text can include some cutting, perhaps even of new plays. But then this seems to be true in Britain’s New Writing culture too.

The best two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the disparities between the printed texts of Alexandra Woods’s Unbroken, directed by Natalie Abrahami at the Gate and Joel Horwood’s Food, presented by the Imaginary Body at the Traverse in 2006. With the latter, it was a case of a writer collaborating with a devising company and the script being worked through well past the point when a draft had been sent to Nick Hern. In the former case, it *felt* (and this is nothing but a guess) like a director had taken a red pen to the lines she didn’t fancy. So, even within our “Writers’ Theatre” perhaps it’s not so radically different on some levels.

One of the things that was fascinating for me in the case of the first show I saw in Prague – Andreas Kriegenburg’s Der Prozess (Kriegenburg being the director, natürlich) – was that the publicity material reads:

1.11. So, 19:00 | Weinberger Theater | ERÖFFNUNG
F. Kafka: DER PROZESS
Münchner Kammerspiele | Regie: Andreas Kriegenburg

All pretty self explanatory. The top line is pretty much unavoidable, and the bottom line makes perfect sense in terms of billing given that this is a festival of German theatre in Prague, and the way that German theatres operate – i.e. as buildings that can be identified as artistic endeavours – i.e. they seem to tend to go one step beyond an “artistic policy” and into dramaturged seasons of premieres (although these premieres also run alongside the theatre’s repertoire – which, thanks to a standing repertory company, can often been a show that was premiered over ten years ago – shown maybe once every month/few months).

So: dates, times and place; fine.

Point of origin and directing credit; fine.

But look at the author credit. It’s not “Franz Kafka’s The Trial” (cf. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”). It’s presented like a writer credit. Now, my German’s not great (read: non-existent), but even I’d be willing to swear that there’s no way they staged the whole 200+ page novel in two and a half hours. There was certainly a sense that they were, in part, playing with the edited text of the novel, there were various “he said”s and “she said”s, but obviously it had been cut, it’s a work of adaptation. But no writer credit, no dramaturg credited and no suggestion of “devised with the ensemble” – nor much of a feeling of that later process either, although, as I suggest above, I’m not convinced spectators are necessarily the best judges of that.

Similarly, the next night, Rimini Protokoll’s Vùng Biên Gió'i - Regie: Stefan Kaegi. Sure. No problem. Except: everyone on stage was speaking pretty much solidly through the show’s one hour fifty minute duration. And what they were saying was definitely scripted, because there were pre-prepared surtitles.

I guess this element of scripted-ness surprised me slightly, as I’ve always tended to think of Rimini Protokoll as a company who deal very much in Liveness. In actual fact, I suppose this actually varies considerably from show to show. My first encounter with them (or at least with Stefan Kaegi’s work) in Soko Sao Paulo did actually have non-actors speaking prepared bits of text, albeit ones of which I think they’d at least written the first draft themselves. The point was this was real people telling their own stories in their own words. The dramaturg’s hand (postdramaturg?) was not much in evidence (although, given that the non-actors were speaking in German or Portuguese, I couldn’t swear to it).

In Call-Cutta in a Box I remember it was the scripted element of an apparently “live” encounter with a call centre worker in India (via first Skype phone and then web cam), which caused my colleagues from FIT Mobile Lab most problems – in a way not dissimilar to the discussions about agency occasioned by Internal in Edinburgh this year.

But, on the whole, Rimini Protokoll = Live, I reckoned. Or at any rate, not “authored”. In actual fact, Vùng Biên Gió'i was the first time I’d seen the company in an actual theatre building. Nevertheless, all the central elements were still in place: the people were all precisely who they said they were and the stories they were telling were their own. As such, it surprised me even more to imagine that the whole traffic of the stage would be written down somewhere – possibly with lighting cues scrawled all over it just like a LX copy of something by George Bernard Shaw or David Hare would have – and yet, no writer was credited. Perhaps this is because “Regie: Stefan Kaegi” covers the whole creation of the work.

While I was in Prague, I also happened to watch a video of Michael Thalheimer’s staging of Gerhard Hauptmann’s play Ratten at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater. It was perhaps this that made me appreciate more than anything else the direction in which my thoughts had been headed concerning the way in which we perceive German/“European” theatre “over here”.

The play is a 1912 straightforward tale of a childless underclass couple who try to buy a baby of a pregnant Polish prostitute. I imagine it being something like a cross between Gorki’s Lower Depths and maybe a cheerless Shaw or Granville-Barker, full of social comment and miserable characters. The point being, it’s an old-fashioned, well-made play. Now go look at that YouTube clip. It’s basically a modern dress production of an old fashioned play. I’m afraid I don’t know the original script at all, so I couldn’t tell you if the text has been cut, mucked about with, or modernised, but it was my impression that it hadn’t been. And yet, it’s Olaf Altmann’s set that really changes things. You can’t get a real sense of it from the clip, but what the letterbox format of the set essentially does is ensure that no performer can stand up straight throughout the show. In one sense it’s *just* a staging of a play. And, on a really, really basic level, you can see precisely how imposing such a metaphorical space on the actors absolutely *is* “serving the text”. And yet, it’s absolutely *not* like any approach I’ve ever seen here in Britain.

So, to conclude very briefly, having stalled this piece for over a week and written parts of it into other exchanges elsewhere now – not least my most recent Guardian blog (well, the original draft anyway), I think I’m still trying to figure out how/why it is the mainland European theatre *feels* different to British theatre, even when it often appears to be springing from the same starting point. I’m now thinking a lot more about the dramaturgical application of design. The way design is used as an extra character or comment on the piece. This might well bleed into how I write about British theatre in the interim. Which will probably get on everyone’s tits. Ok, I’m just burbling now. Time to post.

Any useful questions to refocus/repoint this piece gratefully received.

Oh, and here's a thing:

A question of attribution

You might already have read my Guardian blog this week, but after a bit of hmming and ha-ing, I thought I’d post my first draft here, since I think it is significantly different enough to the final piece to be of additional interest. If you have read the original, I hope the new-to-you bits putting it in a wider European context justify a re-read enough to forgive the bits that are just directly repeated.

Watching lots of German theatre last week, I was also struck by how culturally conditioned our assumptions might be. In Britain, it seems fair to say that the idea of a “writers’ theatre” prevails – if only subconsciously. That is to say, if a critic is reviewing a new play then they will generally tend to credit most of the action on the stage to the writer. The director will have been “serving the text”. Of course, many British writers collaborate in this process, offering scripts containing descriptions of the room or rooms in which the play is set and even tones of voice in which a character delivers a line, or to whom. Thus, critics needing to apportion responsibility seem to lean toward painting the director as someone who has simply moved the actors around within a world created by the writer.

A particularly striking example comes from a few years ago, when Telegraph critic Charles Spencer reviewed Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water). It’s a particularly personal attack on Ravenhill, and centres on Spencer’s distaste at a scene in which four friends of a coma victim sexually violate her. Except, Mark didn’t write that scene. The production was created by the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly and they just happened to stick in this movement sequence in between two written scenes. So, the direction of Spencer’s bile was entirely misaimed.

In the opposite vein, consider the adulation and opprobrium heaped in equal measure on the shoulders of Katie Mitchell or Rupert Goold. As soon as either of them stage a play, it often feels as if the play or writer becomes nigh-on invisible; a mere provider of lines around which these directors weave their illuminating/infuriating (delete according to taste) spells.

At the same time, designers seem to get even shorter shrift. Something I am frequently struck by in German theatre is the sheer imagination of their stagings, and to give them their due, the credit for “Bühne” is right next to “Regie”. But surely there are similar examples in British theatre – after ten years in the West End and extensive touring, pretty much everyone knows the house that falls to pieces at the end of Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls, but who could name the designer (without using Google)? Or: who created the chilling Stalinist basement that gave Goold’s Macbeth so much of its power?

I’ve already written about the short shrift actors often seem to get (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/sep/30/how-to-describe-great-acting) from critics, but even here, how do we know where the performance comes from? Has a director spent weeks creating genius in intense collaboration, or, worse, is a dreadful performance from an actor precisely because they have followed to the letter a set of utterly wrong-headed directions?

But then, beyond this, how much of our enjoyment has been subliminally created by barely perceptible shifts in light, or by sound effects or compositions that complement the action on the stage?

In short, while it feels as if culturally we might finally be moving away from anxieties about “directors’” vs. “writers’” theatre (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2007/mar/15/ourplaywrightsshouldbewrit), who actually did what still seems to be an impenetrable mystery from this side of the footlights.

Pains of Youth - National Theatre

[Written for CultureWars]

If we didn’t know so much about her working methods, it’d be tempting to suggest that in the spirit of some impish joke, Nick Hytner actually employs two directors called Katie Mitchell. One does stuff with video cameras and sound effects and producing live video images, the other committed to a kind of Stanislavskian naturalism to the point of near absurdity.

It’s this second version that the NT has hired to direct Austrian Ferdinand Bruckner's 1923 play Krankheit die Jungen. Set in the living room/lobby of a student flat, the piece deals with a set of (mostly) youngish medical students as they hang out, falling in and out of love and bed with one another. Kind of like an accelerated, downbeat, philosophised version of Friends, if you will.

Naturalism to this extent almost feels like some sort of perversion. It feels fetishistic, almost hysterical. In this respect, it rather suits the post-Freud feverish atmosphere that the students inhabit. But that’s about the only respect. The only departure from this studied realism is the completely theatrical scene changes. These are performed (in all senses of the word) by the members of the cast not involved in the interrupted scene entering in sharp black designer suits, the women in notably high heels for stand-in stage managers, and variously they remove items not wanted for the next scene into clinical-looking plastic bags, or solicitously insert a smoking half-cigarette into the waiting hand of an actor. Drinks are poured with a conjuror’s flourish and then they depart, like chic Scene of Crime Officers from the fashion police.

These scene changes at least feel like a clever joke on Katie Mitchell’s part against herself; as if slyly acknowledging that naturalism of this order is ludicrous. But the rest of the time, the business of studiously being “in the room”, is taken deadly seriously. So much so, that you gradually notice that no one in real life actually concentrates that hard on appearing to be where they actually are. It’s very strange and very disconcerting. It’s almost like a performance of a performance of performing. It’s not that it isn’t “good”, whatever that means, it just feels deeply weird, like something that’s ordinarily so conventional is trying extra hard to problematise itself. Not that I know Mitchell’s mind, but I’d be willing to suggest, this isn’t necessarily her intention.

It’s interesting that what I ended up watching here was the way that the play was done. In part, I’d put it down to the (ironically) V-effekt of its naturalism, but also to the way in which the play is constructed. First staged in 1926 in Vienna (precisely where and when the play is also set - although the programme is rather confusing on this point) you get the impression that while the play itself isn’t especially opaque about its concerns, they would have actually fed much more specifically into the Austrian national imagination of the time. Perhaps this is also a condition of Mitchell’s staging, combined with a nervously copious context-filled programme, offering essays on virtually every conceivable aspect of the period, from the origins of the dances the girls do to the post-Austro-Hungarian empire atmosphere of inter-war Vienna. There’s also the usual stuff about Hitler and Freud, although with perhaps a little too much hindsight-based emphasis on the former given the year and country of the play (yes, Hitler might have been born in Austria, but he’d buggered off to Munich in 1913, was only just out of prison and leading a very minority German party in 1926).

So, what do all these factors leave you watching? Well, it’s an engrossing two and a half hours (inc. interval). The travails of the students' love lives are interesting enough. But, although I’m wary of using the words “cold” or “clinical”, it does feel here like the interest is at something of a remove. This isn’t gutsy, heart-wrenching stuff, but at the same time, the socio-psychological musings of the students now feel more like fascinating items of historical interest rather than plausible designs for living. You find what’s happening engrossing, but given the turns the plot takes, it feels like there’s a crueller, more involved production possible. However, Mitchell’s version (or perhaps it’s partly also Martin Crimp’s translation) opts for “detached”. It’s cool and spiky, but not in the least bit moving. As such, it’s hard to really rave about it, even though the cleverness, precision and techniques are beautiful.

The Power of Yes - National Theatre

[Written for CultureWars]

“This isn’t a play” says “David Hare” at the start of his latest “play” The Power of Yes. That’s alright, Sir David, neither were Berlin or Via Dolorosa. And, frankly, if Gethsemane and The Vertical Hour were anything to go by, we should all be rather grateful.

At a later point, one of Hare’s “characters” quotes Andy Warhol’s suggestion that people continue to have sex because it reminds them that sex used to be good. Perhaps this is why the National Theatre keep on staging plays by David Hare.

The Power of Yes is a piece of verbatim theatre. David Hare went out with a dictaphone, or video-camera, or whatever, and interviewed a load of people about the recent financial crisis and then edited the results into an hour and fifty minutes of the bits he thought were interesting and shaped them into a kind of narrative; sometimes, within the process, commenting on this fact to the people he was talking to.

Unusually for this sort of interview-based (as opposed to tribunal-based) verbatim theatre, Hare himself is represented on stage (sadly not by Alan Bennett in a wig). Actually, Anthony Calf’s performance of David Hare is a remarkably good one. There’s even the neat visual gag that he’s wearing exactly the clothes Hare wore on exactly the same stage when performing Berlin. Or perhaps Hare’s only got one set of clothes. But, yes, Calf is so convincing that by about halfway through you’ve almost forgotten it isn’t him who’s irritating the hell out of you, but an uncanny impression of the person who is.

And, to give Hare his due, I think he knows as much and plays with it. The structure of the piece – its subtitle is “A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis” (self-dramatist might be closer the mark, but I digress) – foregrounds his quest for knowledge. In this respect, the piece is almost identical to Berlin. It starts with Hare not getting something, and ends with him concluding that it’s about the death of an idea. I’m looking forward to the piece where he goes about trying to comprehend astrophysics and concludes it’s all about the death of an idea. I mean, really, surely there are hundreds of things David Hare doesn’t understand.

The problem is, David Hare really doesn’t get it. And, because of the way the piece functions, that’s our problem; because he’s up there asking all the questions, effectively on our behalf. And either he thinks we really are very stupid indeed, or he is radically out of touch with the real world. As such, the first half of the play virtually turns into a lecture. At several points a blackboard is even wheeled out for Christ’s sake. Normally, as a critic, it feels slightly silly or ostentatious to have a notepad parked on one’s lap. Here it felt like everyone in the audience ought to be issued with one.

It turns out that the script isn’t by any means the biggest problem. The beginning is indeed rather droll and the rest of the structure is perfectly sound, if pretty much the most obvious way of doing presenting the story. The material, of course, necessarily depends on the acuity or sense of humour of the interviewee. Some are incisive, witty and make good jokes. Lots of others talk in dead language and platitudes and are probably made several degrees more interesting just by dint of being played by actors.

Visually, however – directorially – the piece swings between complete inertia, visual sign-posting of such ludicrous literalism that it’s hard not to conclude it is intended as a joke and some of the worst theatrical kleptomania I’ve ever seen. There’s one sequence practically lifted wholesale out of Complicite’s A Disappearing Number, but without either the wit or the warmth. But mostly it’s just men in suits standing around. Sometimes there’s a woman in a suit. Very occasionally there’s a nice stage-picture, and the stage does have an admirably shiny black floor. But that’s about it. The acting is pretty good.

Given how pressing the issues are, it is strange how uninteresting …Yes manages to make them. In a way, it feels like it’s because the whole thing is mediated through “Hare” – this fictional construct of an actual playwright. It’s not about the financial crisis, it’s about his interest in it. And it feels like that’s the thing we should be interested in. It’s about him feeling for us, taking the sins of capitalism onto his Christ-like shoulders and bearing them for us. He gets jolly cross on our behalf, to absolutely no real effect. Perhaps his impotence is also our impotence.

Elsewhere, some of his clever-clever self-reflexivity rebounds rather badly on him. At one point close to the start, one of his interviewees suggests that he’s got a tough job in trying to dramatise the financial crisis, and isn’t it going to be impossible to stage the stock market. I don’t think I’m going too far to suggest that the knowing laughter this elicited was two-fold. One, the intended: “Oh, ha ha, yes, very good, how on earth would one stage the stock market? Ha ha!” and, Two: those who had recently enjoyed Enron and seen an imaginative writer and director do just that laughing at the dramatic irony. Ha ha, indeed.

At another point, Hare is pursuing the arrogance of merchant bankers in a conversation with a (former?) Financial Times journalist. The journalist (here played by Claire Price) asks him “but don’t you also ignore your critics” (or words to that effect), Hare’s response is quite remarkable rage concluding “writing plays doesn’t ruin people’s lives” (again, I’m paraphrasing, the NT really should give away script-programmes rather than charging £8.99 for copies of the text). Actually, the FT journalist seems to have precisely skewered the massive truck-sized hole in Hare’s project. He seems to want to preach some sort of left-ish message, I guess, but the means he’s using are entirely right-wing. Everything on the stage is normative. By chasing a news agenda, he’s already so buried in the system, that he can’t even see it around him. He, like these merchant bankers he so despises, suffers from colossal arrogance and flatly refuses to recognise it.

There’s no doubt that Hare sets himself up for this sort of criticism. Indeed, viewed optimistically, the play’s a piece of self-reproach as much as anything. Having himself portrayed on stage as well as being responsible for the script, does make writing about the piece feel unduly personal. I have nothing against the actual David Hare, who I’m sure is charming and generous, but here he does present himself in a deeply unflattering, and central, spotlight. Less forgivable is just how dull the play is to watch. Sure there are bits of narrative interest, and the stuff with billionaire financier George Soros, charismatically rendered by Bruce Myers, is fascinating. The piece concludes with a rather beautifully rendered dinner between the two in an anonymous skyscraper looking out over the twinkling lights of the financial centre of some major world city or other. While failing to land any particular punch, it does feel oddly, fittingly Faustian. Here we are with David Hare, his concerns, and a multi-billionaire enjoying a glass of mineral water. Lovely. How polite. How informative.

Beyond the Frontline - The Lowry, Salford

This is still in progress, but, well you can see what I've written so far if you like... [sorry it's still unedited and rambly]

Oh, and currently contains spoilers too...

On one level, the most impressive thing about Beyond the Frontline is its sheer scale. Essentially it’s a promenade, avant garde, requiem to the British Army with a cast of about 150. Intriguing, no?

The actual form of the piece is quite simple. The audience is led into a field tent nestled by the side of Salford’s imposing Lowry centre. In the dark, in driving rain, the nervous, grim expressions on the soldiers’ faces make for an unnervingly realistic atmosphere of tension. We are divided into numbered chairs and greeted by the commanding officer (Oliver Senton). In a rather neatly crafted speech he informs us of our role as inspectors, cleverly blurring the theatrical rules into briefing and backstory – the British Army deployed on our own streets as a counter-insurgency force.

Because Beyond the Frontline isn’t concerned about the rights and/or wrongs of any specific conflict, who “the enemy” are is left deliberately unclear (al Qaeda? The Continuity IRA? The Scottish?). While this is helpful to the show’s general theory – “in a civilised society when men and women lose their lives in the course of their duty, society should take a moment to pay tribute” – it suspends the action in a kind of moral void. Perhaps reflective of the state of soldiering. We don’t get to worry about the rights and wrongs of the conflict, only that the soldier’s duty is to carry out work that their country has asked them to do.

The format of the show is essentially another variation on the headphones and boxes formats of earlier shows Last Seen and Helium. Following the briefing, the audience is divided into four groups and each taken out into the plaza in front of the Lowry, where officers lecture us on the principles of this sort of military presence. We are shown checkpoints. People passing through the square have their papers checked by sentries, dozens of soldiers line the rooftops around the square, and can be seen in the windows of the theatre and outlet mall opposite. Searchlights sweep the rainswept paving. It’s all enjoyably apocalyptic and totalitarian, contrasting with the clipped but friendly, urbane tone of the officers. Suddenly there’s a massive explosion at the far end of the square. Our headsets crackle into life as suddenly dozens more soldiers are running across the square; there is gunfire; confusion; we hear orders being issued as we are rushed toward a set of nearby trucks.

Inside each truck is the next part of the show – essentially four dramatic monologues. Each audience only sees one monologue as part of their experience of the hour-long piece, however. Having nothing better to do in Salford, I went round all three of the evening’s performances (shows start at 7.00, 8.15 and 9.30) and managed to catch three of the four (apologies to Dom Fitch and John Hunter). It’d be helpful if these monologues had names (or if the programme made the credits a bit clearer – bloody ensemble efforts). Each monologue is an entirely separate commission from a different writer. As a result each is wildly different, and makes for a completely unique middle of the show, which in turn impacts on how one experiences the final segment.

Comparisons between the three pieces were fascinating. How each negotiated its place within the truck, how they differed in terms of style and content, and indeed in performance.

Joel Horwood’s piece, for example, cleverly morphed from being us, the audience, really in the back of the truck with a solider into a hallucinatory death rattle. Chris Thorpe’s piece, by contrast, made no such concessions to setting – immediately, once we were in the truck, we were in a room with Chris Thorpe, a upturned spotlight and a microphone.

Of the three I saw, the first – sat in a leaking truck, following driving rain in the square – suffered slightly for being seen with fifteen-odd sixth-formers who, while perfectly amenable, were also catching one another’s eyes and looking slightly self-conscious and disconcerted. It also sat mid-way between the other two pieces, neither naturalistic or totally frame-bursting. Instead, Dave Toole plays a kind of fragmentary ghost (by Matthew David Scott). An echo in the back of the truck. Perhaps from a previous tour of duty. His reflections intercut with static, crackle and snippets of dialogue through our headphones as this ghost’s final moments play out in a kind of feedback loop. It’s a grimly effective little piece, but perhaps slightly too fractured and clever to achieve either a real punch or a sense of intellectual vertigo. Which is precisely what the other two do, respectively.

Horwood’s piece is, in many ways, typical of his writing: touching recollections of adolescence, some excellent jokes, and a real emotional kick at the end. Simple but effective. It also had some new stuff: a disconcerting Donnie Darko-like imaginary best friend called Roof-Rack, who seemed to have horns and fur and some beautiful linked images of death and blood soaking into snow, or bandages. It also has an outstanding performance from Daniel Rigby who flips from friendly, chatty squaddie to Welsh youngster and back again...

Chris Thorpe’s text, by contrast, is a taut, angular bit of writing that hurtles at psychotic speed with chippy intensity from a near-Marxist-theory version of why bread is made in factories to the emotional breakdown of someone who designed computer software to make it easier for soldiers to kill people. Thorpe’s performance couples a flat accent and blunt mateyness to a piercing, unblinking stare and machine-gun delivery in the glare of stark white lighting. While it’s not exactly ‘moving’ in the sentimental sense of the word, it is perhaps all the more horrifying for its relentless pursuit of logic.

Money - Shunt

This is also nearly finished, but I need to put this post up now so I can link to my Beyond the Frontline review for a Guardian blog.

The Author - Royal Court

[sorry it's late. Still needs a bit of an edit, but here goes...]

Forgive the preamble. The Author is one of those pieces of theatre that really forces the critic to think about the purpose of their review. Put simply, I went in with very little information about the form or content of The Author. That seemed pretty much the perfect way of experiencing it. The Author is definitely worth seeing. Go and see it. Don’t read any more until you have seen it.

But then there’s the people who won’t get to see it. And the people who have seen it and want to read about it. There’s a sense that one should write both a spoiler-free review and then one in which the contents of the play and what (and how) they mean are discussed. Because of the way in which The Author is constructed, discussing what it says in anything beyond generalities will alter the way in which a person experiences it saying them.

Ok, so we can’t make theatre in a void. As Ian Shuttleworth discusses in a recent Theatre Record editorial, normal critics just need to make a judgement call, and hope it doesn’t upset the apple cart too much. Given the option, it feels like it would be good if there was also space for more in-depth reviews which don’t have to strain not to let the cat out of the bag and consequently can discuss what’s in the play and what that means.

So, again, if you’re going to see The Author, you’ll have a different experience of it if you carry on reading now.

One of the most fascinating things about The Author is precisely this sort of choice. The idea of choice is also central to the way in which it operates. When you enter the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs to take your seat (unallocated: again, choices), you look at the two banks of seating arranged in traverse, and then you notice that there’s no space between them. There is either no stage or it is all stage. What we’ll be watching is each other. Even just as an arrangement it feels uncanny. Because we’ve been here before we know the seats and seeing them just facing each other, implacable, is somehow oddly disconcerting. It’s funny, of course, but also a little unsettling. There’s something about the proximity of the two front rows, as well. Perhaps even a little too close together.

After a deliberately long period of pre-show seatedness, performer Adrian Howells, sat with us in the audience, starts to talk loudly to the (in this case) woman next to him. He is playing an audience member called Adrian. Good natured banter about how much he loves the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs ensues. At this point, depending on how much attention you paid to the programme or posters, you might or might not know how many other people in the audience are also performers. If you know what Tim Crouch, the author of The Author looks like, and know he is also in The Author, you might spend time amusing yourself watching the author instead of watching The Author.

After a while, Adrian stops talking. There is a pause. A very long silence, in fact. The “house lights” go down so that we, the audience, are the only thing that’s lit. Music plays.

The cessation of performance, the change of lighting to focus our attention on, well, on the performance area, which is also where we are sitting, means that we have our attention drawn – as audience members – to one another. Most people in the audience have come as couples, and so turn to each other and talk quietly. There’s a pleasant if bemused atmosphere. What was interesting to me was that while the piece was playing a game with expectation, revelling in its liveness, in the fact that anyone in the audience could do anything, there was also a printed script in the programme. At any stage, one could open it up to find out what’s going to happen next. Of course, in theory, this is an option for any play at the Court. But normally one’s sat in darkness. You’d have to squint. It’d feel rude to the actors to look at the script instead of watching them. One is normally coaxed into the suspension of disbelief.

Here, there’s a very interesting game being played with suspension of disbelief – with what’s “real”. Tim Crouch really is real. He really is the author of The Author. He is also the next person to speak. He talks about being led to a flotation tank by an attractive young woman. His description of her goes slightly too far. He asks us if it’s ok for him to continue. We’re always in The Royal Court Theatre Upstairs with him, but he’s talking about being somewhere else. We’re not sure that “real” Tim Crouch would think like this about a young woman leading him to a flotation tank. So, oddly, it becomes fine for him to continue. Because we’re reassured that he’s acting. Or performing. The person he says he is (who he actually is), isn’t “him”. At least we hope not.

Gradually two more performers are revealed and begin to talk to us about their experiences relating to a play they’d been in (or, in Adrian’s case, seen) written by Tim Crouch, and performed in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court. Tim is also talking to us about this play that he wrote and directed. The play of which he was The Author. This play that it’s claimed Tim wrote – if you know his back catalogue, or the recent production history of the Theatre Upstairs, then you’ll know it’s a made-up play – is a pointedly satirical conflation of several Royal Court Upstairs shows. It’s about father-daughter sexual abuse. Adrian talks about how many dead babies he’s seen in the Theatre Upstairs.

Tim and the actors talk about the (unnamed) play (“The title of the play referred to the girl in it, I suppose. It was her face on the poster, in the brochure – looking dreadful!!” – Adrian). About the subject: war, sexual abuse, violence; about their rehearsal process; about how they watched videos of soldiers raping women; about how they watched videos of beheadings; about how they visited the country where the play was set and met people they thought were like the characters in the play; about how they copied these people’s physicality; about how Esther was “lucky enough” to meet a 17-year-old girl who had been raped by her father – “Just like her character”.

Tim talks about how the play was “a poem, really”, he talks about how the violence in the play is a metaphor, but also an examination of precisely the sort of violence that exists in the world. How what they presented on stage was nothing compared to some of the things they’d seen in their research.

Even knowing that the play they were talking about is fictional, you know that the genre absolutely isn’t. You can think of the countless examples. Your mind returns again and again to Blasted, to the ultraviolence of “In-Yer-Face” theatre. You remember reading all those arguments about how the writers were exploring society’s violence in their plays in Aleks Sierz’s In-Yer-Face Theatre. If you were there the night I was there, you can watch Aleks spotting the references and smiling. You can recognise the absolutely real descriptions of research trips abroad, of actors researching their parts, of writers researching their plays, of actors talking to people who have suffered; and you can recognise yourself as an audience member watching these shows.

While doing no research beyond the theatre, The Author manages to talk eloquently about violence in the real world and the difficulty of making art about it. About the ethical questions that making art that examines violence raises. About the ethics of watching, consuming, art about violence. It actually takes a pretty stern, unequivocal, ethical stance. It finds it wrong. It makes us deeply uncomfortable that an actor and a writer will *interrogate* a rape victim in the service of their art. There’s an interesting performance style at play here. The way Crouch talks often sounds more like liturgy than in-the-moment psychological realism. On the other hand, the “scene” in which he and the actor Vic “interrogate” “Karen” his chilling precisely because of the cold aggression being pretended behind Crouch’s eyes.

Given the final two events which the narrative of The Author describes, it would be easy to conclude that Crouch’s point is that if reasonable, concerned, “nice” people spend enough time looking into violence, researching violence and sexual violence, looking at it, it will eventually make them psychotic. I think Crouch is actually more interested in making us think about the ethical implications of this sort of research-based “poetry” than simply slamming it. In a way, the play even questions the ideas of “authenticity”, and appears to make an interesting case against them. As such it constitutes a real line-in-the-sand moment for theatre. Of course real companies and practitioners will point out that they would be, are, more careful than these fictional counterparts; but Crouch’s challenge still stands. Is “behaving well” enough? I’m not sure I feel as unequivocal on the point as Crouch does, but having seen the play, it’s a position that suddenly feels much harder to justify.

That the Royal Court has commissioned and housed this J’Accuse against itself adds a fascinating extra dimension. It’s worth noting in passing that the script insists “T]he Author is set in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre – even when it’s performed elsewhere.” Then, later “The names of the characters in this text are the names of the actors playing them for the Royal Court premiere. If the actors change, the character names change accordingly, with the exception of the author, whose character’s name should always be Tim Crouch” and then at the bottom “The printed text may differ slightly from the play as performed.” It feels as if these elements are almost strangely contradictory, although I would be fascinated to see the piece performed by a wholly new cast in a totally different building, but can’t help feeling that although the play itself is very strong, the immediate and obvious resonances of its site-specificity would be lost. It would also be interesting to see what the effect of having “Adrian”’s part played by an actual audience member fitted with an earpiece, á la An Oak Tree.

To conclude, this is a rich, densely allusive and morally urgent piece of theatre and essential viewing for theatregoers. Moreover, it is a piece that deserves and rewards being discussed and thought about. It is not just a play; in the most real sense possible, it is the start of a conversation.

[Edit: re: the direction - see below. Tim says it better than I ever will]

Gospels of Childhood - Barbican

[Written for CultureWars]

Teatr ZAR’s Gospels of Childhood is a triptych of pieces which may well challenge some people’s ideas of what teatr is. The first piece Gospels of Childhood/The Overture, presented in St Giles’s Church across the pond from the Barbican’s non-Silk Street entrance, is a sung-through meditation on religious themes accompanied by dark, elliptical, visual theatre. The music is solemn Catholic or Orthodox polyphonic chant. It sounds unmistakably devotional. It is beautiful and serious; monastic; conjuring, inside the plain Protestant interior of St Giles’s, a medieval middle-Europe. There is a starkness about it, accentuated by the almost Middle-Eastern harsh edge to the women’s voices. It’s music that sounds ineffable and ancient, and yet within it you can hear the shifting of tribes, borders and empires across the mainland. Trade routes and religions cutting swathes through cultures. The combination of this music, Polish Catholicism, and the rough wooden stage on which sinewy figures contort in candlelight, or shovel earth in the darkness, is heady and powerful in the extreme. [It also serves as a perfect counterpoint to the appalling picture painted of Polish Catholicism in the National’s Our Class, the night before. Where the former pinpoints modern disgust with the crimes engendered and committed in the name of this faith, Gospels... reminds us why a rational subject might seek a sense of The Divine and how beautiful it can be.]

The second part Caesarean Section/Essays on Suicide, which takes the audience into the Barbican’s Pit Theatre, is enormously different. While the natural elements of the first piece were candlelight, wood, earth and the stone of the church walls, here they are wine, broken glass and cold electric light. Played in traverse, on another rough wooden stage, Essays... opens with the performers mostly dotted about the edge of the stage with string instruments, while another member of the ensemble sits at a piano. The lights go out and there is the amplified sound of smashing glass. You hope that it’s just pre-recorded, but it’s somehow too close and too recognisably real.

The stage is divided down the centre by a thin, shallow, underlit trough filled with broken glass. There is broken glass on the stage. A performer takes off her shoes, puts them on her hands and dances, violently. This is much more fully realised dancing than the movement of the first part. It is also intensely, jarringly difficult to watch. The dance itself is hard enough, underscored by pained strings and wailing voice, the body spasms and rips at itself. All the while, exposed skin flirts with shards of glass.

Essays...’s 50-minute length is divided into 18 fairly recognisable episodes. Most use similar strategies of discomfort. Broken glass remains a constant. The trough recurs as a feature in several sequences. Performers hold wine glasses in their teeth or hands while attempting feats that could easily see them fall and lacerate themselves. And self-laceration is the point; not literal, but spiritual or figurative. It’d be easy to categorise the piece more as contemporary dance or “dance theatre”, but as was pointed out to me afterwards, much of it is pure Grotowski – anguished, over-exaggerated facial contortion and emphatic physical movement.

For a largely abstracted form, by God does it communicate. I was assiduously not looking at the programme or the printed synopses sheet until afterwards to see what I got from the piece without being told what to think beyond the suggestive title. When I read it, it was one of those pleasing moments when you think: “Yup, that’s what I got, too”.

It’s not like it’s particularly oblique. In one section, one of the female performers strains toward a spotlight on the ceiling. Trying to reach out to it, to hold onto it. She uses a chair, and latterly one of the male performers – and all the while there’s that ever present danger; if she succeeds even on standing on his shoulders and reaching out as far as she can, there’s nothing within her reach to hold onto. She’ll simply fall a long way. Face first. The piece keeps up the dialogue with the divine, but here it is more like screaming at the unreachable, unanswering dead God of existentialism, rather than the living, breathing Christ of the Gospels.

The third section, for which I did happen to read the blurb beforehand, turned out to be the least affecting of the three. Although, after the nerve-jangling that Essays... had given me, I was pleased to be returned to the nave of St Giles and a tranquil looking stage overhung with a large canvas sail. Under soft-focussed lights, this gently rose and fell, like the opening of several minimalist productions of The Tempest. Aptly enough as the first episode in Anhelli/The Calling is named The Storm, and starts with an excerpt from Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (in Polish) to open a seafaring-based narrative that pays tribute to the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki’s voyage from Naples to the Holy Land.

Reading the rest of the themes Teatr ZAR wanted to explore in this final piece afterwards (as I write this, in fact), it is remarkable how clearly they seemed to come across through the mixture of song/hymn and physical movement. The final piece is a synthesis of the heavy physical exertion of Essays... and the more reflective atmosphere of The Overture....

Gospels of Childhood is quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen made by a British company. The best way of describing the whole is more as a choral concert illustrated by stage pictures, but this doesn’t capture the extent to which the songs had a dramaturgy, or how central the action was to the pieces. It was by turns, beautiful, fascinating, reflective, visceral, intensely sad and deeply moving. Here’s hoping for more of this company over here soon.

Photo - Ditte Berkeley, Kamila Klamut in Essays... Photographer: Lukasz Giza

________________________________________

The below gives the vaguest impression of the sort of music I’m talking about, but this is the soft-focus, airbrushed version of what, live, sounded a whole lot more raw and intense.

Our Class - National Theatre

[Written for CultureWars]

Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class examines what is still one of the most urgent, pressing questions facing modern Europe: what did you do in the war? Usefully, it examines the question in relation to Poland, and, more crucially, from a Polish perspective.

The British education system – or at least the one I grew up with – paints a very specific, Anglo-centric narrative of the course of World War Two. On September 1st 1939, Hitler invades Poland. Britain asks him nicely if he wouldn’t mind awfully not doing so, no such undertaking is received and consequently this country is at war with Germany. In Britain, Poland then vanishes from the radar, largely because, although we might well have declared war on Germany because they invaded Poland, we didn’t do a terribly good job of defending Poland, or countermanding the attack. Precious little is made, for instance, of the USSR’s subsequent invasion of Poland, 17 days later, from the east. Little figures in our history books about the appalling treatment meted out to the Poles by each side. The massacre of 20,000 Poles by Soviet soldiers in Katyn is passed over as are the thousands of Poles slaughtered by the Nazis.

Poland next crops up in the Anglo-narrative with the establishment of the concentration camps and their subsequent transformation into death camps in 1942. The suffering of the Poles in WWII is oddly abstracted in our history books. At the same time, the way that the Poles regarded their Jewish neighbours similarly goes largely unreported. Poland was an occupied country in which the Nazis killed the Jews, runs the official wisdom. At the end of the war, the way in which Britain, with the flick of a pen, carved off a chunk of Poland in the east to give to Russia, gave it a bit of Germany in recompense, and then handed the whole thing over to Stalin anyway, is reported as a masterpiece of diplomacy.

Our Class is set in the Polish town of Jedwabne before, during and after the Second World War. On the 10th July 1941 virtually all the town’s 1,600 Jewish inhabitants were rounded up by their non-Jewish neighbours and murdered. Most were burned alive inside a barn. Following the war, with Poland under Soviet occupation, the crime was blamed on the Gestapo and a monument erected to commemorate the dead.

The play starts in 1935 (although the programme suggests 1926). The ten characters are school children, classmates, in Jedwabne. They introduce themselves, play, muck-about, flirt and generally behave as children do. Time passes. The play is structured as “A Story in XIV Lessons” and played in-the-round on dark wooden boards bounded by a low aluminium bench, replete with modish under-seat striplighting designed by Bunny Christie. As such, the characters/actors never leave the school-room. The fact they were once in a class together is never allowed to disappear. Instead, the wooden playing space – under adept lighting from Jon Clark – becomes interiors, exteriors, wide-open fields, roads at midnight, pig-stys and Śleszyński’s burning barn.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. Having a class of ten stand in for the entire population of a town and by extension Poland has its advantages dramatically. The small tensions can easily be understood as emblematic of the wider malaise. One childhood playground snub or taunt stands in for the thousand or hundred thousand such insults. On the other hand, once characters become such symbols, quirks of fate peculiar to them suddenly seem rather unlikely, when they’re standing in for a tenth of Poland. “What are the chances of that happening?” you wonder. It demonstrates both the power that they achieve as metaphor and the effect that becoming a metaphor has on particularity. By and large, though the play manages to handle these concerns.

The build up to the atrocity, littered with other acts, escalating from unkindness to barbarism, runs concurrently with the suffering and compromises being inflicted on the Poles (Jewish and gentile alike) by the Soviets. Here it suggests that it is Polish identification of the Jews with the Bolsheviks that gives rise to their increased prejudice, but the seeds of their anti-Semitism are already well rooted in the nation’s Catholicism. At the same time, the choice facing the Poles – to collaborate with whichever occupying force happens to have taken over or die – remain stark and impossible.

The staging is admirably straight-forward. There are no costume changes and few props, while the lighting design and stage – the cold lights on the dark wood and aluminium contrive to foreground the minimalism. The cast are excellent. While the acting is ostensibly psychological realism, it isn’t laboured or over-played. The pace moves too fast to allow for self-indulgence. This is also partly down to the style of the piece, which involves a lot of characters narrating themselves, their actions and what is happening to them. People take up each other’s stories from their own perspectives. It makes a nonsense of the theatrical maxim “show don’t tell”, but the cumulative effect of an unbroken but disputed narrative line – ten different versions of the same story – is an effective way of handling a subject that needs more than to just be acted out.

Being written by a Pole, Our Class allows perhaps less optimism than an external eye might have granted. This is a document of savage national self-criticism, unflinching in its accusations. It points at quislings and failures of heroism, it shows that – unprompted, unbidden – a townspeople took it upon themselves to commit mass murder. It doesn’t mark them out as exceptional. It allows for no excuses. Most stringently of all, it does not allow either of the Polish characters who offer refuge to Jews to bask in uncomplicated heroism. Instead, they are characterised by self-interest and still-lurking prejudice. At worst, the Polish connive with the state and with the church to wash their hands of any responsibility. This is a play as much about Poland’s anti-Semitism since the war as before and during. Undoubtedly Poland was a victim in WWII and beyond, but, Słobodzianek argues, no amount of victim status excuses these actions.

Enron - Royal Court

[Written for CultureWars]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock since the spring, you might already have heard that Enron is very good. Going to see these blockbuster, multi-five-star awarded shows is always a slightly strange experience. You kind of forget beforehand that you still have to watch the play. Even if you’ve read the reviews, because of the cumulative effect, you don’t really know *why* something’s meant to be good, you just get this impression that you’re in for a rollercoaster of perfection. Which isn’t how theatre actually functions. Things that are good are good because you have to watch them carefully and think about them (or at the very least *feel* them) and where they end up being good is inside your head (or heart, or wherever). For all that, Enron is, of course, very good.

What’s fascinating about Enron is its formal qualities. Essentially it’s a musical about capitalism. Except, it’s not actually a musical. It does have a handful of songs and a few non-sung dance sequences, but that’s not why it feels like a musical. That said, the songs that there are are rather good and a few more wouldn’t have hurt - the first, for instance, is a Philip Glass-like number about the stock markets with the stock and prices of the metal markets sung against a projected matrix of ticking, pulsing numbers (see above). What’s interesting about it, though, isn’t the points where the piece clearly *is* a musical – i.e. when the cast are singing or dancing – but the way that this aesthetic informs the wider bulk of the play’s dialogue-based substance.

It’s hard to forget Howard Barker’s description of the musical as the authoritarian art form. And it’s intriguing, in the light of this, to see how the piece positions itself in relation to the ideologies that it presents. By and large, the piece resists taking cheap pot-shots at targets that might be regarded by many of a leftie bent as so many fish in a barrel. Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling (Sam West) is instead given a coherent, logical and persuasive worldview. It’s one with which, of course, we’re free to disagree, but you get the feeling he wouldn’t care. And moreover, our disapproving wouldn’t get us anywhere. Skilling is just one man who is articulating something far more widely held, believed and, crucially, something of which we are all a part. Even though most of the play is just people talking to each other in variously flashily designed interiors it still *feels* monolithic like a musical. It’s got a kind of steamrolleriness about it. In short, it feels a bit like watching global capitalism itself. It’s not the characters making assertions and explaining how markets work, it’s the knowledge that what they’re talking about is real. It’s like an attempt to make an ideology tangible.

Of course, there’s always inevitably going to be something inexorable about watching a story to which we all know the outcome – like United 93, we know it’s going to crash at the end. In one of the production’s few false moves, the crash of Enron is played out – as in life – uncomfortably close to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Historically this might well be true; visually, it comes perilously close to drawing the unintended parallel that, like Enron, the WTC had it coming. I don’t suppose for a minute this is the intention, but equating the shredded documents of a criminally corrupt company with the ashes that rained on New York is a step too far.

A couple of scenes close to the end of the play – Skilling attending Kenneth Lay’s funeral, Skilling being plainly bonkers in a New York street, feel slightly over done – possible missteps toward the judgemental, which jar with the way the rest of the text operates. But Prebble’s script pulls it back in the final scene in which Skilling, defiant and angry, directly addresses the audience. By making him a scapegoat we are trying to banish something of ourselves. The stock market is a testament to human ingenuity. That, sure, it’s not perfect, but look at the world, look at ourselves, and consider the advantages it has given us. It’s a difficult argument to refute. Here we all are, after all, in a lovely theatre, where we have paid to be, watching the people we’ve paid tell us a story about money.

If the comparison isn’t too much, it is reminiscent of the Jews in Auschwitz who put God on trial, who found him guilty, and then immediately fell to praying. Here we are living within a system which that has collapsed around our ears – Enron now stands as a harbinger of the subsequent far wider collapse – and yet we cannot conceive of anything else.

Enron isn’t a play that preaches resistance or suggests alternatives. On a very basic level it isn’t trying to. It ably and entertainingly tells how a handful of very clever men tried to conjure a lot of money out of thin air and weren’t quite clever enough to be able to do so.

Here, Rupert Goold’s customary directorial flair looks strangely normalised. If he’d taken all the elements on stage here can applied them to, say, Hamlet, certain critics might bridle at the imposition. The production has actors in suits dressed as giant mice; or pretending to be Jurassic Park raptors, which represent the embodiment of complex financial debt restructuring mechanisms; or performing choreographed sequences wielding light sabres to represent Enron’s blitzkrieg on California’s deregulated energy market. Where elsewhere there’d feel like a certain radicalism about men dressed as dinosaurs, in the service of this not-actually-a-musical they feel perfectly safe. Perhaps musicals just allow for more spectacle as default, where in “the classics” it would still feel subversive.

So, what are we to make of Enron? Is it theatre’s admission of defeat? A mea culpa from the Royal Court who, after decades of counter-capitalist rhetoric, still charge money for tickets, pay actors, and cannot move outside the system it sought to criticise? At the same time, isn't it all the more deadly in its critique precisely because of its refusal to accuse? It shows us people being clever, having money, enjoying the money and the material advantages it brings. It also, crucially, locates their desire to look after not themselves, but their families. The flitting presence of Skilling’s infant daughter, slowly counting millions of dollars, is as much a symbol of his humanity as the implacability of the dollar.

As we all know, the show has already sold out its run at the Royal Court and transfers from there to the West End in January (tickets on sale from the Royal Court Box Office now), and no doubt from there to Broadway. I suspect in each of these new locations it will feel ever more contradictory and strange.