Micro (préambule) – The Gate

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

I suspect that the Gate Theatre’s Micro is going to get rather a lot of people in a tizz. Or at least it would, if it got the attention it deserves.

The problem is this: by conventional British rules, you’d be hard-pressed to call this “theatre”. And yet it’s in a theatre! Created by French choreographer Pierre Rigal, who made the excellent Press for the Gate back in 2008, you might expect this to be the usual “but it’s dance, really” objection. But it isn’t. Yes, Micro contains some “movement”, but what it most resembles is a gig, or rather an extended jam session, or perhaps a postdramatic, new wave reincarnation of those shows that Anonymous Society used to make.

As propositions go, it’s an intriguing one. Rigal has collected together four extraordinarily talented multi-instrumentalists-cum-dancers, stuck them in black band t-shirts (the Ramones, Joy Division, Aladdin Sane-era Bowie and plain black, since you ask) and essentially created a band as much as a piece of performance.

The piece starts with a wall of their equipment being gradually, invisibly moved, pushed forward, turned on and switched off. Hands appear from behind the amps. Leads are plugged in and the amplified buzz of exposed jacks fills the air. It feels and sounds like an imaginary Heiner Goebbels/Kraftwerk drum’n’bass collaboration or Stomp for post-punks.

The strangeness doesn’t stop there. Once out from behind their amps, the performers do a kind of dance scraping electric guitars against each other mid-air, while another performer pretty much fits himself into a bass drum with only his legs protruding and stomps about the stage like a disgruntled troll. It’s like Dada meeting Stockhausen in a very confined space. Some of it is very funny and rather charming.
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Gradually the wackiness recedes and the music – proper identifiable songs, no less – begins to dominate. There’s still a good deal of physical, as well as musical cleverness on display – at one point the performers pair off and between them each play two two-handed instruments using one arm each per instrument (if you see what I mean) – but from quite near the start it seems to be much more about the music.

And this is where there’s a slight problem. The movement is nice enough, but it’s hardly relentlessly, rigorously choreographed, while some of it is just people clumping around or throwing shapes that are barely evolved from ‘music and movement’. I’ve got a lot of time for the school of non-dance dance, or just “being” on stage, but this isn’t always an entirely successful mixture of the two.

The music is better, although this is obviously a matter of taste. Happily, Micro’s taste in music seems to dovetail neatly with my own. Aside from the hints at Kraftwerk and Stockhausen, an enjoyable aspect of the piece is the simple trainspottery joy of trying to work out what bits of various songs you’re being reminded of. It basically flits between the cooler end of French pop from the Sixties and the more angular end of post-punk/and early eighties guitar’n’synth – think The Cure or perhaps John Foxx-era Ultravox.

There are also suggestions of Bowie, Bauhaus, the Clash, Penetration, Joy Division, Interpol, Editors, Throbbing Gristle, Serge Gainsbourg, the Divine Comedy, Neu, Air, St Etienne, Nouvelle Vague, maybe Brigette Bardot and definitely Laibach. Regrettably, there are also worrying stretches of stuff more akin Yes or Spinal Tap. At least that’s what I heard. I’m sure other audience members could come up with a similar comparisons referencing completely different bands (I’d be fascinated to read any in the comments section below if any of you do happen to see it). Anyway, some sort of noise is a constant from the get-go and, like the movement sequences, more time might profitably be spent on the dramaturgy of the segueways.

The piece bills itself as “an experience that tries to capture the different poetries of a rock concert and which... attempts to hear but also see the music”. This comes across quite clearly even without recourse to the programme. Oddly, it’s pretty much the sole discernable “point” or “narrative” in the piece. Actually, its “a-narrativity” (ok, I just made that word up) or the quality of, uh, postdramatic-ness isn’t a problem here. After all, who watches gigs for a story?

That the performance is most like a gig does a lot to mitigate this sort of complaint – also raising some interesting questions about oft-repeated received wisdoms (repeated, not least by me, recently) about how things/bodies “automatically” become “symbolic” on stage. They do here too – *sometimes* – but at other times, because they’re doing pretty much exactly what people do onstage at gigs – i.e. playing instruments – and are no more symbolic or “readable” than those on stage at an open mic night or drunks at karaoke.

Indeed, it’s striking that the “gig” bits of the show are in fact the points at which it becomes most apparent how comparatively sealed off and hermetic the performers/performances are compared to those stage presences of their real-life counterparts (i.e. actual bands). And so, curiously, it is in the very act of *doing* that the performers become most like performers, with all the allied sensations that they are “playing a part”, that the person we’re watching playing the guitar isn’t *really* the same as the person playing the person playing the guitar.

Due to the myriad variables mentioned above, it’s kind of hard to tell whether this show will ultimately be bought into by avant-garde music fans, upstream theatre types, the Live Art crowd (unlikely: there's no bleeding or nudity at all) or yer contemporary dance aficionados. I’m pretty sure it won’t do the same sort of business as the more crowd-pleasing Press, but that’s not to dismiss it. Its problem is/might be that it walks perilously close to that most damning of lines drawn by the British mind: the suspicion that it “might be a bit wanky”. Mostly it’s charming and playful enough to shrug off such charges, but there are definitely moments where you’re not sure whether it’s walked over the line into self-parody or even self-indulgently not-caring-about-being-wanky.

That said, I was much more in favour of Micro before it offered an extended encore after the audience had applauded it at what seemed to be the end. Of course it’s part of the lexicon of a gig, but not, of course, of theatre – at least not like this. Also, encores at gigs tend to be for the song/s that the band has been teasing everyone by not playing all night – and the number chosen for this encore would never be that song, I fear.

However, to an extent, my individual bone-picking and carping should be pretty much regarded as an irrelevance. I do think that with an even better band and perhaps tighter choreography the piece would be stronger, but that’s not the point. The point is that – well, at least in my experience – this is an exciting step into virgin territory. Well, I’ve never seen it done before, and as genres go, I think it’s one that deserves a good deal more exploration.

From Cartoon de Salvo’s recent much maligned Pub Rock to Chris Haydon/Mick Gordon/Billy Bragg’s Pressure Drop, putting bands on stage seems to be a bit of a vogue at the moment. And – not that I’ve even seen the other two examples of this spuriously-cobbled-together “trend” – this certainly appears to be the most formally innovative and inventive.

For that reason alone (although I did really like a lot of the music) I reckon theatremakers should be sitting up and taking notice of this little show, because, even if they disagree with individual decisions taken by the creative team, it seems like a show that’s worth thinking about, being inspired by, and taking into account when making future work. It’s the first show I’ve seen in ages that feels like it’s asking a few questions about performance, what to perform and how to tackle performing it. It’s the first show I’d be interested in seeing a scratch night of “responses to the work” for ages, too. It’s also mildly terrifying that we live in a theatre-critical culture in which this sort of work will far more likely be ignored for “not counting as theatre” than engaged with, but that’s theatre criticism’s problem, not the Gate’s. What the Gate have commissioned is a brilliant idea, irrespective of something so trite as whether you actually *like* it or not.

Sick note

Ok, yes, even by this blog’s recent standards, this has been a bit of a hiatus. I shan’t bore you with excuses/reasons and have learnt better than to say the situation is definitely going to improve for sure from here on.

I suppose I should start posting my Time Out reviews here if only to prove I’m still alive and working as a theatre critic – hell, I might even bung up the whole archive at some point, just for the hell of it.

That said, aside from proper commissions or massive irritation, the other thing guaranteed to get me writing is the National Student Drama Festival. Oddly, as becomes clear from the below articles, I wasn’t actually at the Festival this year due to ill health. As a result, I ended up writing more for the Festival’s magazine Noises Off than I do when I am editing it. And, as I say in a couple of the pieces, it actually gave me a really useful outsider perspective on how the magazine reads to those not in Scarborough – and prompted me to urge those writing for it to address different concerns.

Having said that, I’ve no idea how usefully they’ll read in the wider context of the blogosphere, rather than as dispatches from my sick bed to a magazine which I wished I’d been more a physical part of.

I’m going to contact the writers of the pieces to which I’ve responded in my articles for permission to reprint theirs below my, well, attacks on them. But until such time as they say yes or tell me to bog off you’ll have to make do with the quotes.

(“Cover image” courtesy of my hilarious colleagues who decided that in my absence, there should be a “robot replacement” Andrew Haydon for the Noises Off Office (Noffice), which they then photographed and put on the cover (see Wednesday’s article). Ok, I admit it, I was hugely flattered)

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Friday

Christ. I can’t believe this is the last issue. Jesus, the festival goes fast when you’re not there. Writing a final issue farewell piece for a festival I haven’t attended to people I haven’t met feels slightly surreal, but there it is. I think I’m going to miss this Festival more than any since my first in 1997. Back then, I assumed the experience was unrepeatable; that I’d had what was probably going to be the best week of my life, that I’d met all the most interesting people I was ever going to meet and had been as inspired as it was possible to be.

Turns out that 1997 was just the tip of the iceberg and apart from ruining the rest of my life – seriously, kids, if you can think of a single thing that you’d rather do than theatre, do it; theatre, and by extension theatre criticism, is rarely a lucrative occupation – NSDF has been a constant source of inspiration and a motor that has kept me going in a frequently frustrating, often arid field.

You’d think – indeed, I expected – that not actually being at the Festival this year I’d somehow feel less engaged and less involved in what was going on. Oddly, perhaps because I’ve been getting a reasonable amount of sleep and haven’t had to sit through all the shows, the reverse is true. Particularly with Noises Off.

In previous years, as editor, there’s always been a ludicrous amount of work just to make the magazine physically exist. Plus the selected shows to watch. Plus trekking around Scarborough getting from venue to venue. Plus having to eat and shower (Jesus, no showers in the Spa this year? Christ). So I tended to average about two hours sleep a day during the festival. As a result, I’d invariably develop a thousand-yard-stare, gradually lose my ability to speak coherently shortly after, forget how to write altogether by Tuesday or Wednesday and be a shuffling wreck of a human being by Friday night’s disco.

This sabbatical has given me a useful, much-needed long view on what Noises Off does, can do and should do. And it feels like it’s done it all this year. It’s a shame that I’ve missed developments in the Noffice itself. From what Claire, Ben and Phil have been telling me, it seems like our premises have coalesced into a kind of late-night venue not just for written creativity, but also for performative and sculptural excellence – the phrase NSDF Fringe has been bandied about. That sounds wonderful. I hope it carries on into next year. I’ve also missed a whole year of contributors and future staff members. I hope they/you all come back next year so I actually get to meet you.

Another great thing about not being editor this year has been actually getting to read the magazine for the first time – cover to cover – when it arrives in my inbox at breakfast. And what a worryingly good magazine it’s been. One of the best and most consistent runs that Noises Off has had in several years, I think. The covers have been funny; the comment section – now innovatively moved to the front really setting the tone of the magazine and making it much more engaging – has bristled with intelligent, timely stuff; the reviews, as I’ve commented several times before, have been invaluable for someone such as myself who hasn’t been seeing the shows; the Techie pages have been inspired; H. Jazz Lowe’s serial has been as engagingly bonkers as you could wish (“How come when we got locked in the Grand Hall that time you knew where to go? You took me up the back passage...” Ha!); and the back pages themselves have been far less in-jokey (perhaps I just worried too much) than in previous years – Not Real Arts Jobs in particular is a horribly perfect satire; and the credits, well, the credits lists have been enviably lengthy.

That said, no matter how great a review is, it’s no substitute for actually seeing a show. And it’s been fascinating to see what’s scored high on the critical radar. Until yesterday, it seemed like a close run thing between Phaedra’s Love and the Whitehouse Institute as to what had won most festgoers’ hearts (with an interestingly high number of dissenting voices for each piece as well), but the late addition of The Pillowman and By the Bog of Cats it looks like the Festgoer’s Prize might be the mostly closely fought it’s been in years. The news that BTBOC has been so highly rated is perhaps the biggest surprise of the week since the play got a real savaging when it first turned up in the West End starring Holly Hunter as Hester Swane, so I wish I’d seen that. And the Pillowman - reading the reviews reminded me what a great play it is. Hell, I wish I’d seen everything (with the possible exception of Our Country’s Good – please people, stop doing that play).

Because I don’t really have the faintest idea who has done what, it feels slightly ridiculous to do the traditional Ed’s thank-yous. Suffice it to say, that I’ve glowed just that little bit more every time I’ve read something by someone whose name I recognise from previous years, knowing that they’ve come back and written for us again, and hopefully helped out in the Noffice too (yes Jasmine, Will and Jon, I’m thinking of you in particular). It’s also been a pleasure to start recognising the work of repeat contributors this year (Phoebe Alexandra Bourke, Dan Hutton and Cassandra Fumi spring to mind). It is rather lovely seeing the work of the former “Monks of the Kitchen” transformed from cryptic Ivor-Benjamin-centric ramblings into incisive reviews and pertinent comment. Fascinating as well to see multi-faceted man of uncertain middle initials Richard KTC Watson slowly but surely taking over my role as Noises Off’s grumbler-in-chief.

Without being in the office at 6am, it’s hard to know who should be being congratulated for the remarkably early times I’ve been getting my copies of the finished magazine through, although seeing John Winterburn’s name high up in the credits and seeing no writing from him (that’s right, isn’t it?) in the mag., I suspect he’s due an especial plaudit for keeping the production process running as in previous years.

But my final thanks have to go to Ben, Claire and Phil (in strict alphabetical order) for, well, for everything. For keeping the magazine going (I never for a moment doubted you would) and proving that I’m little more than a confection whose absence scarcely registers, but also for keeping me in the loop all through the week. But more than that, for taking the magazine and its office and making it properly theirs. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up co-editorship just yet, but I know next year – assuming both Phil and Claire are returning and I’m not ill – it’ll be an editorial triumvirate of equals.

So, not that we met, but, until next year…

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Thursday

‘And yes, Andrew, Rachael Shaw’s Phaedra actually managed to pull off the difficult feat of being sexy on stage.’ – Ben Curthoys (Noises Off 31/03/10, p.12)

Thanks for clarifying that, Ben. Apparently it was ‘sexy night’ in the office last night (how nice to see that tradition revived – although last time I seem to recall it amounted to little more than a lot fighting amongst the then editorial team and not much “sexy” at all). I assume, then, that today’s Noises Off is the “sexy issue”. To this end today’s ...Unwell is all about being naked, looking slutty and fucking. On stage.

It’s clearly an issue much to the fore at this year’s festival. As Dan Hutton comments: ‘The shows on offer [at NSDF ‘09] were shocking, poignant and sometimes downright rude. Compared to this year’s crop, however, they were childish; the Nuts to this year’s PornHub’ and notes: ‘Over the course of the past three days we have encountered the old fashioned “this production contains nudity and scenes of a sexual nature” sign three times’.

I should start by clarifying that the three elements I mention above are distinct and separate entities. On-stage nudity can be completely asexual and frequently intends no erotic component. Similarly, on-stage sex need not be done in the buff. In fact, the most effective naturalistic portrayals of sex on stage tend to be between performers still wearing most of their clothes.

Why should this be? The simple answer is twofold. Firstly, the stage tends to make stuff on it symbolic as well as/instead of literal. It distances audiences from ‘the real’ (which is pretend anyway), but allows the pretence to stand in for much wider “realities”. At the same time, the game of naturalism is partly to “suspend disbelief” – to make audiences forget that they’re sat amongst N other people and that what’s happening in front of them isn’t framed by black boxes or curtains. As such, sex constitutes one of the most jarring possible things to attempt to stage, because, well, not to put too fine a point on it, there are certain preconditions for sex that involve some pretty “real” things.

Theatremaker and thinker Chris Goode has written about an outstanding example of the problem on his blog Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire: ‘On the night I saw [the then Oxford Stage Company’s Cleansed] something notable happened: in the scene where Grace and her (dead) brother Graham make love, Garry Collins as Graham, on removing his clothes, had a hard-on, and it was still in evidence at the end of the scene. Afterwards, talking in a cafe with friends who’d also seen the performance, I made some flip-sounding remark about Collins’s dick having been the best actor in the play, and I think everyone cringed a bit at my being so crass. But it was true, in a more profound and heartening way than I managed to articulate at the time. In the midst of all this performing, all this simulation, all this misconceived playing-at-extremity, there was this momentary realness, uncontrolled possibly, but showing everything else up as a kind of bourgeois party game, suffocating in the tiny airlock gaps between non-tessellating “theatrical” conventions.’

But this also gets to the heart of the problem. As soon as people start faking sex on stage, at least in a naturalistic production, either one becomes acutely aware of the faking, or, more rarely, becomes anxious that the couple on stage really are *doing it*, which would be even more odd/distancing/alienating. Or, as above, one becomes acutely aware of where the “real” interferes with the pretending.

There’s also the peculiarly British preoccupation with embarrassment in regard to both nudity and sex; even to ‘being sexy’. Niamh Conway’s Phaedra review captures it perfectly: ‘a ripple of awkward giggles can be heard throughout the audience as the comedy borders on being crude’. Crude! In Britain! Imagine. No wonder the poor audience giggled nervously.

Thanks to an exchange programme for “young” critics, which I took part in for a year between 2007-’08, and various international festivals I’ve attended since, I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of work from mainland Europe. One of the most striking differences between them and we Brits is the treatment of both the body and sexuality on stage. Across ten-plus festivals, I saw copious, largely unremarked nudity and plenty of representations of intercourse. I don’t think I saw a single “warning” sign, though.

The three best examples were French-Canadian Dave Saint Pierre’s Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde!, Franco-Austrian theatre provocateurs Superamas’s Big 3rd Episode: Happy/End (not actually a good show per se, but interesting for its treatment of naked bodies on stage), and French choreographer Gisele Vienne’s astonishing I Apologize. This last piece – admittedly more “contemporary dance” than “theatre” as we British might pigeonhole it – contained some of the most sexually graphic material I’ve ever seen on stage. Performed solo by a woman who didn’t even take off her clothes. Instead it was just the execution of choreography that suggested some of the most violent and transgressive sex you can imagine.

In Britain, this sort of material tends to get shunted into the box labelled “Live Art”, rather than being allowed to exist as “theatre” as it does everywhere else in mainland Europe. But even “straight” theatre in Europe has a more mature attitude to nudity and sex on stage. I remember my first encounter with this at the Edinburgh International Festival in Alize Zandwijk’s production of Gorki’s The Lower Depths back in 1999 – at one point a fairly overweight man wandered onto the stage completely naked and amused himself for a while, well, essentially stretching his cock and letting it ping back. This went on for a good few minutes while he carried on with the dialogue. It contrasted very poorly with the British student shows still chucking in a glimpse of embarrassed undergraduate willy as a nod to “shock tactics”.

As if to prove nothing much has changed on the mainland, the last show I saw in Berlin – Deutsches Theater’s production of Brecht’s Mr Puntilla and his man Matti – had what initially looked like some fairly gratuitous toplessness for one of the female characters. At least, it looked a bit gratuitous until the man who’d underdressed her came back onto the stage stark naked and stood, unembarrassed, for the rest of the scene. The effect was intentionally comic, but through absurdity rather than embarrassment.

Of course there are still politics around asking someone else to take their clothes off so a whole bunch of third parties can see, doubly so when the audience is composed primarily of your peers. But it sounds like this source of prudishness is being firmly stamped on by this festival’s generation of students. And not before time. We’re about thirty or so years behind the rest of Europe in the maturity stakes. It would be good if we could catch up in the next decade or so. Then we might start in on thinking a bit more intelligently about representation on stage more generally, but we’ll save that issue for another day.

For final advice, lest we’ve all gotten a bit carried away by all this talk of nudity and pretend sex, we should turn to Phoebe Alexandra Bourke’s Tuesday article The Torture of the Talent Crush: “This suitor on whom you have been focussing for around 90 minutes, on whom you have been basing your hopes and dreams, does not exist. He[/she] is a character constructed by playwright, moulded by actor and staged by director.” Quite right.

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Wednesday

Hrumph. Having been sub-headed “And he doesn't like someone else today” yesterday (it really wasn’t “dislike”, just a few questions, really), and with a plea out to the Tech team to build a robot Andrew Haydon on the grounds that “our early prototypes have all gone horribly wrong, savaging innocent Festgoers who have submitted perfectly pleasant and well-meaning articles to the magazine” it’s clearly time for something different. Just as well, since Noises Off is getting to that stage where it is much harder to disagree with most of it unless one has seen the shows/discussions/queues that are being written about.

So, instead, tonight, I’m going to wax gutted. If I was at the Festival, instead of sitting in bed listening to Strauss’s Elektra and writing this article, I’d be sitting in New Hall watching Ravenrock’s production of Phaedra’s Love. And I’m rather sad that I’m not.

By weird coincidence, I first heard of Phaedra’s Love at my first ever National Student Drama Festival. This was 1997 and the play had premiered only the year before in London. As a student at Leeds – also, by weird coincidence, the alma mater of Ravenrock – and, prior to NSDF’97, one with only a passing interest in theatre, the play had naturally passed me by completely. Phaedra’s Love was the brief answer to one of the quiz night questions. The question was “What play opens with the stage direction, enter Hippolytus wanking into a sock?” (or words to that effect – I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the correct stage direction). That’s about the only thing I remember about that quiz night. But, for some reason I was completely hooked on the idea of that play, so I got someone to write down what it was and bought it as soon as I got back to Leeds. I remember reading it and being as non-plussed as I was excited. Was this good, or was it a bit childish, petulant and foot-stampy when it came to dealing with God?

It wasn’t until I saw the play performed, again by students, in Cambridge in 2001 that I got more of a perspective. Dan Shearer’s production probably still ranks in the top ten student shows I’ve ever seen. It was also pretty much the diametric opposite in terms of how it tackled the text, judging by the photos and reviews of Ravenrock’s Phaedra’s Love. Where Ravenrock sound (from the reviews) and look (from the photos) like they’ve really gone for the visceral, Shearer’s take on the text in Pembroke College’s white-walled cellars was witty, post-modern and cerebral. In fact, it remains pretty much the most German thing I’ve ever seen a British student produce.

Hippolytus was played by an incredibly beautiful young Asian man who wasn’t in the least bit fat. The pre-show state consisted of a data projector showing photos of pop icons such as Darth Vader and Mr T with the caption “Are these not great men?” (or something). The cast wore mostly white and donned fluffy angel wings when they died. Not one drop of stage blood was spilt, and I don’t remember anyone taking any of their clothes off. At a key moment, one of the female members of the cast, wearing fluffy angel wings, climbed up a step ladder, sat at the top, and played Leonard Cohen’s (well, Jeff Buckley’s version of) Hallelujah in its entirety. You get the picture. But, yes, to get to the point, I’m gutted not to be seeing another production of Phaedra’s Love (one which one of my colleagues has just emailed to say I’d have really liked. Bugger again).

Being away from the Festival has had the useful effect of focusing my attention on the reviews far more closely than when I’m editing the magazine. The process is very different, in fact. Rather than scanning quickly for a sense of tone and rather more carefully for grammatical hiccoughs and casual invective – having of course seen the shows for myself – now I’m away from the Festival, I find myself reading for nuance. Seeing how much I trust a writer’s opinion by how they justify what they’re saying or the confidence with which they say it. Even textual clues are seized upon. Are writers flogging themselves to explain something quite dull, or so fired up that their words are tumbling over each other to get out?

Phaedra’s Love is the first time I’ve really picked up on that sense of excitement, this year. The other stuff sounds good, but like stuff I might have seen before, like stuff that the other reviewers might also have see before. Phaedra’s Love sounds like it’s of a different order altogether. The size, the scope of imagination; it sounds like something that could only have been done by students (or Alan Lane) and it sounds fantastic.

It’s at times like this that one starts to yearn for a bit (a lot) more detail. How big was the band? What were the songs they played? How was the sex and violence handled? Was it gross out, genuinely squeamish, comic, horrific? Of course, selectivity is perhaps the reviewer’s most important skill. And writing for Noises Off, you’re generally in the position of knowing that virtually your entire readership has already seen the same play that you saw. Except, it’s still crucial to explain to them what it was that you believe you saw. As the disparity of opinions on every show in this magazine goes to prove, while everyone might be looking at the same stage, not everyone is seeing the same thing by ay stretch of the imagination.

It’s also interesting to note the intersections and divergences between commentaries. Reading Tuesday’s set of Phaedra reviews, it is amusing to note, for example, the way that male reviewers’ syntax seems to fail them when attempting to pin down the appeal of Rachael Shaw’s Phaedra, who – reading between the lines – sounds like she might actually have managed to pull off being sexy on stage. A feat infinitely more difficult than you might imagine, btw.

Conversely, perhaps the most interesting of the reviews is Henry Ellis’s discovery that he doesn’t really like Sarah Kane’s plays. Thanks to his admission that he’s only seen one production each of only two of her five plays, the real curiosity is – is it the productions or the writer? Could different productions have uncovered the ‘human element’ that Ellis has found lacking, or are these productions par excellence of a writer he definitely doesn’t get along with?

I can’t say how much I am looking forward to reading the second tranche of reviews. But, more importantly, I am immensely grateful to everyone writing them for reminding me about one of theatre criticism’s most vital functions: reportage. Telling people who aren’t there what a thing is like. There are people outside the festival who aren’t seeing the work and as one of them, I am very thankful that I’m you are writing about it. That said, theatre is ultimately a live medium, so the sentence that cheered me up most in all the reports on Phaedra was: “I think this show... has a future beyond Scarborough should the company wish it.” Well? Go on. Please?

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Tuesday

Like Anthony Mamos, I missed the first NSDF discussion this year, but since it still prompted his article, The Defence of Contemp-oree (Noises Off 10, Sun, p.4), I feel safe responding to the points he raises. And what a curious mixed bag of points they are. I don’t know who first raised the question: “Where are all the classical texts this year?” (although I could take a rough guess, Robert Hewison) or how it was framed, but “contemporary work” is an interesting label.

In his piece, Mamos adopts “contemporary” to mean “devised” or “completely new” – I suspect it was initially intended to include the extant plays being performed at the festival; the oldest of which being Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 22-year-old veritable geriatric Our Country’s Good. It is at least refreshing not to see that a specious division being driven between “New Writing” and “Devised Work”. That debate was always nonsense and is now largely spent, having been debated across blog on blog and in the comment threads of the Guardian Theatre Blog, even unto death. So, Contemporary Vs Classical is a nice new stupid argument to take its place.

According to Mamos, “the question of the validity of contemporary work, particularly devised pieces, was raised at today’s discussion”. Firstly, assuming this is a fair account, I’d ask “Why?” and “By whom?” After all, isn’t all work made this year “contemporary” by definition? Whether it be a new piece devised by students or Nick Hytner’s revival of The London Assurance at the NT, isn’t it all going on right now? Going on right now is the essence of contemporaneity.

Questioning the validity of “the contemporary” wholesale seems to be somewhat counterproductive, but perhaps in the Festival bubble, the question seems more pressing. Out here in the wider world, however, I can assure Mr Mamos that “the contemporary” really isn’t in need of defence. If anything, there is far more funding available to develop new work, to join a “New Writing Programme”, to “scratch” work at any number of festivals, than there is any opportunity to stage a classical text.

Mamos goes a bit further than defence, though. His “problem with classical theatre is simple – [he] doesn't like stories. [He] doesn't like being led by the hand through a narrative which aims to take [him] on an emotional curve through suspense to a unified conclusion.” Fair enough. That’s a pretty hardcore attitude and I suspect him of rather overstating his position for the sake of his argument, but that’s fine, I do see where he’s coming from. I’ve read Han-Thies Lehmann and Heiner Müller, I’ve seen work by René Pollesch, Rimini Protokoll, Gisele Vienne, Action Hero, Frank Castorf, Onroerend Goed, Tinned Fingers, Ivana Müller and, uh, Forced Entertainment (to name but several). I too, can happily live without a plot.

What’s more interesting is the direct comparison between the comments from the discussion of “the Classics” and the reviews of Dartington’s 4 Bar and Rising. Of the former Claire Trévien notes in her editorial, “Some DeMontfort students at the discussion mentioned a fear of misunderstanding these texts.” Meanwhile, the 4 Bar reviews frequently made reference to the apparently oblique nature of the work - its lack of story, its opaque meaning, etc. In other words “a fear of misunderstanding this text”.

It is apparent that this is not a simple question of ownership, but of confidence, theatrical vocabulary, entitlement, and the width of one’s frame-of-reference. Both “contemporary” movement-based, non-linear work and the canon of “classics” seem to throw different sets of students into apologetic or defiant despair.

The initial problem is one of anxiety, engendered primarily by the British education system, with a hefty bunk-up from wider British culture. British schools, with their emphasis on Shakespeare-exam passing, set up an almost perfect system for putting everyone off, while tacitly reinforcing the idea that Shakespeare – and by extension, the Greeks, the Romans, the rest of the Renaissance, the Spanish Golden Age, the Restoration, French neo-classicists, Enlightenment Germans, C19th Russians and so on – is a) difficult, and, b) something that you can get wrong.

When that is coupled to our boisterously Philistine culture, which deplores poncing about (a field into which theatre squarely falls, no matter how straightforward it is), and then to received wisdoms about “serving the text” and “doing it properly”, one can imagine why students might feel more inclined to approach something with a bit less baggage. Especially if, from the other side, they are being bombarded with information about more cutting-edge practioners and casual theories about how staging the classics is somehow reactionary, conservative or backward-looking.

Ironically, the students who have been given this impression then go on to create work which causes similar anxieties in those following the more “Eng. Lit.” route through “text-based theatre”. Coming from the latter background, I still remember the first bit of contemporary dance I saw that I didn’t dismiss out of hand, and the hours-long conversation I had afterwards with a dancer friend who patiently answered my questions until I felt comfortable that I understood what I’d seen. The fact is, assuming good faith and ability on the part of the makers, theatre can and often is a two-way exchange. There’s work in front of you (or around you, or whatever), but you often have to work at it too, but once you’re familiar with the genre, suddenly the viewing experience is transformed. The same is of course true of Shakespeare and the classics.

Mamos nearly concludes: “we could use these techniques to re-tell someone else’s classic story OR we could use them to blow the minds of our audience with something truly new... There are also some important, fascinating and truly beautiful pieces of contemporary theatre which move me and provoke thought in a way which no classical story ever could.” (We’ll ignore Sidney’s bit about being moved to virtue, as it’s the silliest sort of utilitarian argument imaginable – who wants to be “moved to virtue” FFS? Possibly David Hare and Michael Billington, but that’s not what art is for). I’m not entirely sure I buy the absolutism.

So: a plea. Stop thinking about the classics like you have been. Later this week there’s Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love. Have a look at that, note that it is “contemporary theatre” – a text – but also a “re-tell[ing of] someone else’s classic story”. And then think about the million ways Kane’s text itself might be staged. And maybe think about being less hung up on the boundaries. Stage Shakespeare. If necessary cut more than half the text. Stick a bunch of stuff into it. There’s no rule saying you can’t (in most of Europe I think there’s probably a law saying you must). Think again about what you’re trying to say, how you’re saying it, and why you’re saying it.

If you want a final argument, go and have a look at what Heiner Müller did to “classical” texts. Trust me, there’s very little by way of “narrative, emotional curve, suspense or unified conclusion”. Surprise yourself.

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Monday

This is a much better way of editing Noises Off - lying in bed watching The Wire, sleeping at night and getting the finished magazine whizzed over to me once it’s stopped being painful. I’ve even had time to sit in the garden and do a bit of reading today. Also, not being at the festival actually gives me enough time to actually write something, and enough sleep to ensure that it makes a kind of sense.

So, what to say as editor-in-absentia? Obviously, Claire and Phil are doing a horribly good job of proving just how dispensable I am, and there’s already plenty of thought-provoking content in the first issue to engage with.

The piece that most caught my eye, was Dan Hutton’s spirited defence of *proper* theatre critics. I’ll jump straight in at the least important point...

Dan Hutton says: “…if that isn't a perfect example of hypocrisy, I don't know what is.”

Dan, I’m afraid it’s the latter. The Daily Mail, for all its innumerable faults, emphatically never uses expletives, hell; it can only bring itself to describe oral sex as “an obscene sex-act”. If it is forced to quote swearwords for reasons of context it will invariably opt for three-letters-starred-out out of four (i.e. ‘c***’ as opposed to ‘c**t’, and certainly never ‘cunt’). Thus, Quentin Letts at least is free of hypocrisy when attacking a playwright for their use of expletives. Now, if Quentin Letts were to have attacked the play on the grounds that he was worried by its snide, insinuating, homophobic, racist, little-Englander tone, then you might have a case for this charge of hypocrisy you’ve now got going spare.

Hutton goes on to suggest: “Granted, the reviews of figures like Michael Billington of the Guardian and Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph may not be ideal if you want a riveting read...” For what it’s worth, I reckon Charles Spencer is a pretty good read actually, not super politically, or taste-wise, perhaps, but he can write. But neither he nor Michael Billington give the “balanced” argument Hutton claims for them. Perhaps if you were to offset the two critics one against the other, you *might* on occasion get a sort of left-right balanced view for those of retirement age, but both Michael and Charlie have their political leanings, their proclivities, their passions and their blind-spots. So let’s quickly scotch that idea of “balance” right now. Theatre critics don’t have to be balanced to be good. Indeed, they shouldn’t be “balanced”. They have to explain what it is they think they’ve seen – ideally in a way that allows other readers to see between the lines and think: “Well, Time Out’s Andrew Haydon *says* this new bit of postdramatic German avant-garde theatre is wonderful, but I think it sounds like nonsense and I shall not go.”

I’d also take issue with: “That’s what we need in a critic; someone who can put themselves in the shoes of the paying public and make a reasoned decision as to whether or not you should see the play, based on past experience.”
In fact, this is increasingly the view that editors are serving by appointing journalists who are essentially no different to the shoes of the paying public. Sorry. …whose shoes are essentially no different. The public (apparently) *want* Libby Ordinary and Quentin Pretend-to-be-Ordinary because the public can much more readily identify with them, because they disingenuously pretend they’re doing a different job. Faux-naif criticism of the sort practiced by Q. Letts, T. Young, M. Portillo, C. Hart and T. Walker isn’t different to criticism, it just knows less, or pretends to know less. It still needs to do the same thing – to tell people what it’s like seeing a particular play. Where Letts differs from Billington (and I’m not sure they differ half as much as you think – at least in terms of marking a play largely in terms of their approval of its political message) is that Letts foregrounds himself in his reviews as a harrumphing moral guardian, personally sickened by the way in which public money has been used to create yet another sickening celebration of sweary gays, or “trendy” something else. Billington, on the other hand, while just as steely in his opposite beliefs, generally absents himself from the picture altogether. What he says, *is*. Indeed, so thorough is his modesty, that he often runs the risk of looking like he really does believe that his word is definitive truth. It isn’t, of course, and while I’m sure he’d argue to the death for the primacy of the writer’s vision, he would at least concede that other people might see it differently.

Critics can’t and shouldn’t put themselves into the shoes of the paying public. For a start, it is hugely condescending to try to second guess “public taste” – as if it were somehow different to your own. Critics can describe a thing they’ve seen, perhaps lightly drawing on the authority that years of theatre-going have lent them, plus ideally a bit of other cultural knowledge, put it into a wider horizontal and vertical contexts (sorry, Robert [Hewison], nicked your phrase) and hopefully write it up in a way that other people find enjoyable to read.

I should end by apologising to Dan Hutton. You didn’t ask for any of this. You wrote a nice piece agreeing with Ian and defending theatre critics and what happens? A critic who’s not even at the festival picks up on your article and uses it as a framework to float a load of their own ideas. Perhaps that’s the most fundamental point. Ultimately, dear reader, no matter how good we critics are/think we are, you can always console yourself with the thought that we’re just parasites. Important, friendly parasites that are good for the overall ecology, perhaps, but parasites nonetheless.

(Team Noff, could someone buy Dan and drink and explain that I’m not really a c***)

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Sunday

Hello. If this is your first festival, you’ve almost certainly never met me. Annoyingly, you won’t be meeting me this week either, because I’m not at the Festival. I was meant to be, oh yes. I was meant to be editing this very magazine, in fact. If you look at the Noises Off page of the programme, you’ll see my picture and biog along with Phil’s and Claire’s. Unfortunately, instead of editing Noises Off, this week I’m busy being seriously ill, or at least starting to recover from a serious illness, the gruesome details of which I shall spare you (although the astute amongst you may be able to discern the nature of this illness from a subtle series of clues left by my bastard colleagues in yesterday’s magazine :-).

This is the first Festival I’ve not been at since I first attended in 1997. Back then we had a Tory government, no one had a mobile phone, Google didn’t exist, theatre criticism was still practised by theatre critics, and, I realise to my horror, today’s 18-year-olds were only five. So, for potentially all the time you’ve been in full-time education, dear reader, I’ve been coming to NSDF. You can imagine, then, that it’s a bit of a wrench not being there (or here, from where you’re standing) this year. So, you’ll forgive me for not letting it go altogether.

With any luck, I’ll be being emailed a PDF of each day’s Noises Off so I can see what’s going on, and get a sense of how the Festival’s going. I’ve just read yesterday’s issue cover-to-cover (I recommend you do the same, although, you probably won’t get time until the train home) and it’s cheered me up like nothing on earth. The cheerful lunacy, wit and – most strikingly from a distance – the real buzz of optimism and anticipation. I always found those first issues to be a real bugger to put together, but this struck me as one of the best in years, even if reading Phil Mann’s first piece was worryingly seeing my own obituary.

Anyway, the sort-of purpose of this column – if it turns out to have a purpose at all – is, I guess to provide a kind of informed outside eye on the festival. It’s always been something that, as editor, I wished I had more of – that ability to sit outside as well as inside the festival bubble; the ability not to get sucked so far into rows, debates and even, on occasion, witch hunts, and not to lose a sense of perspective. Now I’ve got just about all the distance I could possibly wish for, and I’m quite interested to see what I get from the week following it only on (virtual) paper and what use, if any, my contributions will be.

Anyway, as I haven’t read anything about any of the plays yet – yes, I’ll have a stab at reviewing them too – I’ll suggest a different perspective on Jon Brittain’s “not being a dick” feature.

Jon makes nothing but sensible points in his article, especially in relation to writing reviews here at the festival. And, as a critic, I tend to pride myself on not being cheap or flippant at practioners’ expense. On the other hand, it is your primary duty to communicate precisely what you experienced – and ideally in a way that is entertaining to your readers, not one that is comforting to the artistes. So, by way of counter example, I leave you with a recent review by me which was written for and duly published by Time Out...

The Importance of Being Earnest – Upstairs at the Gatehouse
* (one star)

Thanks to an electrical cock-up, the press night of this production was turned into an open dress rehearsal, so all that follows should be read in the light of ‘mitigating circumstances’. This perhaps explains why the actors were wandering around under lighting states akin to a disco Battenberg cake – pink, yellow, pink, yellow – for example.

Interestingly, this is a staging of Wilde’s four-act, first draft of the play. On this showing, it is a resounding vindication of the editor’s craft. However, since this production also suffers from eccentric performances and a deeply ordinary staging, it is hard to say whether the script is entirely to blame.

Neither Marcus McSorley nor Oliver Fabian have anything like the pert charm needed to pull off Jack and Algernon, let alone comic ability, while Francis Cuka’s decision to play Lady Bracknell as a woman deep in thought, as if struggling to remember any of her lines, seems misguided at best.

Gemma Harvey turns in by far the best performance of the night as Cecily, while Louise Houghton gradually warms up as Gwendolen, despite playing the entire first scene as if on the verge of orgasm. But neither have enough stage-time to rescue the three hour production from the leaden boys and quotidian supporting cast.

Dress rehearsal or not, it’s difficult to imagine much more life ever being breathed into this creaky production. Avoid.

Off the Endz - Royal Court

Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz is the sort of play that almost killed off the Court under Ian Rickson. Essentially, it’s a play by a member of an identifiable minority (which can be pretty much anything other than white, male, heterosexual or middle class) writing something that purports to be unique to the experience of that minority. It smacks of condescension and is a theatrical cul-de-sac. For the writer and for theatre. Primarily, because of the form this sort of work takes. It is grounded in “authenticity”. We’re asked to believe that the characters are speaking precisely like people do in the real world (they’re not, but never mind). Actors are cast to look exactly like how they’d look in the real world. The sofa, telly, speakers and kitchen sodding sink, ffs, are, like, the exact same ones they’d have in real life. Forget poetry, metaphor, style or form. And forget that despite the fact that this *is* a work of imagination, it’s doing its utmost to pretend it’s fo’ real, bitch.

All that said, even if a play does belong to this terrible, misguided school, it can still be good. Exciting. Interesting. Moving. Intelligent. Funny. Off the Endz isn’t good. At all. In fact it is the longest hour-and-a-quarter I remember spending in a theatre. At the end I’d have been prepared to swear it had overrun by a full hour, bruv.

Let’s start by getting the good bits out of the way. It has some quite funny lines, and Ashley Walters’s performance as the staggeringly self-centred, misogynist would-be gangsta is worryingly believable. Walters also has a pretty impressive cock, which one gets to glimpse briefly (causing by far the biggest reaction in the audience of the night). In fact both leading males spend a fair amount of time with their shirts off, both packing physiques which rather reduce my desire to criticise the play at all.

And that’s about it on the positive side. Ultz’s set is as irritating as it is inevitable. The chic modern interiors are represented by, well chic modern interiors, while grim urban exteriors are represented by... You get the picture. Scene changes are performed under UV lighting so we can see luminous graffiti sprayed about the walls of the set. Well done. Very good. Very urban. Very evocative, man.

And then we get to the muthaf***in' text itself.

And it’s so bewilderingly awful that it’s hard to know where to start.

I mean, there’s the plot: it is hard to imagine a more tediously predictable trajectory. David comes out of prison, goes to see his ex, Sharon, who’s now pregnant and making an apparently nice life with David’s best mate Kojo. Then he goes to see Kojo at work and reveals himself to be a bit of a dick with the ladies. Anyway, the big crux is, he needs to get a job or some shit, but he don’t want that, and so quickly decides that he’ll be best off dealing “drugs” – which “drugs” remain unspecified throughout. He immediately manages source a massive supply and sets up as a dealer. Meanwhile, Kojo is struggling to pay debts, while Sharon turns out to be somewhat storecard-happy. Then Kojo looses his job...

Basically, one of them is nice and tries to do the right thing and the other one isn’t especially nice and doesn’t try to do the right thing, while justifying himself with the sort of swagger, self-importance and special-pleading that the Court hasn’t seen since Jimmy Porter started blaming everyone else for his problems in 1956.

Agbaje is conducting two critiques here: with one hand she’s painting a bleak picture of attempts at an aspirational life in the workforce during a recession – all maxed-out credit cards and wage-slavery, while with the other hand she’s conducting a callow investigation into street crime, drug-dealing, guns and gangs. And in the world of this play, that’s it. Binary choice. It’s so simple, it’s almost like a parable. It’s the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. One does idly wonder, given the obvious desire for *authenticity* exhibited elsewhere, whether plays about “people-with-jobs” should be written by “artists”, but let’s ignore that for now. It has an interesting effect. By combining a bleak view of the struggle of life under capitalism with the suggestion that to live outside it can only mean committing to a life of amoral violence, Off the Endz winds up preaching the same message as medieval Christianity: “life is shit, but you’d better not fuck about or terrible things will happen to you”. It is interesting to note that the author’s first thank you in the printed text of the play is to “Almighty God”. One wonders whether the unspoken, real message of this play is that there is a better life in the next world, so go joylessly about your business and commit no sins. Because that’s what it looked like from where I was sitting.

There isn’t even any ambiguity. Agbaje uses guns to make her moral point in the same way as the street gangs in her play use them to demand respect. Kojo strays a little bit and gets shot, but not fatally. David, having refused salvation (in the form of a train ticket to Nottingham and the ‘start of a new life’ – the opportunity to be re-born?) is last seen (according to the text), being stalked by the gang who shot Kojo (this last stage direction may have been cut in production – I couldn’t see any armed youths from my seat on the far left hand side of row E – but that’s not to say they weren’t there – my view of the left hand side of back of the stage was somewhat restricted). The implication is clear, having rejected the chance to toil with his head down, he is damned.

It is by making this a play specifically about race rather than class, that Agbaje causes the biggest problems. Given the narrative, given lines like: “When the stock markets crashed and all the banks were losing money – how many black faces did you see on TV? How many of our stories did they show?” and “Life is ten times harder for us” [my italics], it suddenly feels a whole lot more uncomfortable criticising its outlook than that of merely a dull play with an antique morality. By invoking “them” and “us”, it seems almost like it’s attempting to reserve the right to deflect criticism with: “You don’t know, you weren’t there”. Well, theatre is theatre, and this isn’t good theatre. As for the “authenticity”, I defer to a black theatre-maker of my acquaintance who said he hadn’t seen a play with clichéd, cardboard cut-out black characters that had offended him so deeply in years. That’ll do me.

In short, this is how the “authenticity” pays off: by creating a simplistic morality tale about a good person and a bad person, then filling each with clichés about “black people”, Bola Agbaje has written a play that would have been condemned as utterly racist if it had been written by a white person.


[all profanities and “authentic” words lifted from the text, except "motherfucking", which is taken from the title of the earlier Royal Court play CrazyBlack Muthaf***in'self]


N.B. For further reading, I refer you to this excellent article by Lindsay Johns.

The Misanthrope - Comedy Theatre

[Written for CultureWars.org.uk]

Once in a while, you have to stop and marvel at commercial theatre. In the midst of a season packed out with grim forced jollity and horribly saccharine “family” shows, some lunatic decides to put on Martin Crimp’s translation of Moliere’s venomous little play and then succeeds in making it the hottest ticket in town by attaching it to the stage debut of Britain’s most bankable starlet (second most bankable, by numbers, apparently, after Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame).

Hitherto, I’d never really got the Keira Knightley thing. I don’t know who her constituency is. No one I know ever seems to have anything positive to say about her, her screen acting is frequently derided, and women seem to take exception to her face. And yet she seems ever-present and able to command huge fees for her work. Entering the Comedy Theatre at last night’s press night, I got the feeling that I was the only person in the building who was excited that they were going to see something by Martin Crimp.

And, so here’s the surprise headline – it turns out Keira Knightley is a pretty damn good stage actress. Even if she has been given a massive postmodern bunk-up by the text.

Crimp’s adaptation of Moliere’s tale, allegedly transposes the action to contemporary London. At least that’s the theory. However, because he isn’t complete re-writing of the play, this is a bizarrely unrecognisable London full of intellectuals, gossip journalists familiar with Derrida and Barthes, and yet only one playwright who rails against the superficiality of the contemporary scene.

What is immediately recognisable, though, is the cult of celebrity. Knightley plays Jennifer, an American actress currently the toast of London’s fashionable set. She has embarked on a relationship with Alceste, a perpetually angry playwright who loathes the social scene, spouts sixth-form Marxism, and is perpetually jealous of Jennifer’s flirtatious ways and rumoured string of lovers.

Sadly, Damian Lewis makes for a pretty rum misfit. Fashionably dressed and clearly a regular gym-goer he doesn’t look as if he objects to anything contemporary London has to offer. But it’s his performance that really finishes him off. Sure, Alceste isn’t meant to be exactly likeable, but Lewis turns well-aimed, humorous disgust into petulant, high-pitched apoplexy.

Knightley, on the other hand fairly radiates star quality. She starts a little uncertainly, but once the script has given her time to warm up – no one really shines doing exposition – the near-perfection of her casting comes into its own. In part it’s the game it plays with reality – any actress could have stood there and looked beautiful, but virtually no one else could have brought so much of the baggage of fame with them. And she’s no slouch at the part itself. Well, partially. The text calls for someone iconic, but also a character who is believed to be slutty on screen and off. Knightley plays it more coquettish than sexually voracious. The crucial point is that while using her sexuality to get on in the world, Jennifer is in fact completely faithfully devoted to Alceste. Knightley might let too much of the subtext in a bit too soon, making Alceste’s gnawing jealousy look a lot more like rampant paranoia as a result. However, when the revelation comes that Jennifer, far from being a superficial airhead, is in fact far more penetrating and astute in her judgements than even Alceste, Knightley’s combination of shimmering intelligence, beauty, defiance and fear is about as effective as you could hope for.

Of the supporting cast, Dominic Rowan as Alceste’s sounding-board mate speaks his lines very well. Tim Mullan as Covington, the theatre critic (ho ho) who has written a play, disappoints my inner theatre-nerd by playing the part precisely as written: as a stock comic character. He’s fairly funny, but as fits the text, his character doesn’t really map onto any actual critic or their place within theatre’s ecology. Much better is Tara Fitzgerald who looks like she’s having enormous fun as Marcia, Jennifer’s drama school mentor, with designs of her own on Alceste, playing her as an almost psychotic luvvie of the worst sort.

Beyond the acting, Hildegard Bechtler delivers a pleasingly elegant impossibly high-ceilinged hotel room set, which by neatly echoing the play’s seventeenth century origins looks like absolutely nowhere in London at all, but I guess that’s fine. Amy Roberts, on the other hand, serves up a set of costumes that are almost all disastrously ugly and mostly wrong for the characters.

Indeed, it seems a bit uncertain at times if Thea Sharrock actually has the faintest idea what she’s doing with the play or why. The actors all come at the text’s rhyming couplets from different directions and wind up in different places. I don’t think Crimp’s adaptation is perfect, but it’s very hard to assess the script when some actors are effortlessly pulling it off, while others are mangling their lines to such an extent that they sound unplayable. Damian Lewis, as I’ve said, is atrocious casting, and his relationship with Knightley is pretty much entirely carried by her. He just shouts in her general direction. You have to do a lot of work to recognise the love story that is underpinning events. And yet the whole just about manages to cohere, if only because the events in the script keep happening and you can see what the play is meant to be doing, even if this production isn’t actually doing it all for you.

For all that, though, there’s still something remarkably pleasing about seeing an expensively dressed press night audience so comprehensively ridiculed from the stage and knowing that they’ve all paid exorbitant prices for the privilege.

Cock - Royal Court

[Written for CultureWars.org.uk]

There’s a great quote from the writer and director René Pollesch: “I would like to talk to the capitalists about money, but they only want to tell love stories”. Mike Bartlett’s Cock (let’s get the smirking over and done with now; I’ve been enjoying the joke for weeks, but it’ll get tiresome if we keep having to giggle through the review) comes (stop it.) at the question from the opposite direction – nominally telling a story about love, or “gender relations”, it actually proves to be an astute dissection of lives lived under advanced Western capitalism.

John and his boyfriend, M (for Man, we suppose) are bickering. They’ve been together a long time, the spark has gone. John leaves. John comes back. He’s slept with a woman (‘W’ unsurprisingly). All of a sudden his ideas of who he is, “what” he is, have been turned on their head.

As the story unpacks itself, it manages to throw up enough acute observations of the way relationships are conducted, the things people say to each other, the manner in which power and control are exercised in the name of “love”, the nature of desire and the things people do in bed to fill half a dozen less searching plays. It’s also incredibly funny and admirably filthy (at one point, W says she’s “got a gap on” – i.e. the female equivalent of a hard-on).

Bartlett’s text, too, is a thing of real precision. From the way that it is laid out on the page to its use of punctuation it has a real authority about it. While, of course, it makes perfect sense as dialogue, the exactness almost has more in common with sheet music than “proper sentences” written in the English language.

If the script is precise, then James Macdonald’s production is more than equal to staging it. Designer Miriam Buether has created a small wooden, circular amphitheatre in the middle of the Theatre Upstairs, evoking a feeling of a boutique gladiatorial arena crossed with one of those Victorian anatomy lecture theatres with viewing stalls for medical students. The stark overhead lighting is encased in a stylish circular wooden shade, adding to the impression of creatures in a Petri dish under a microscope.

I don’t know if the “wooden O” comparison is deliberate, but Macdonald certainly takes Shakespeare at his word as regards the primacy of the imagination; while the characters change clothes, get naked, have sex, and eat a meal, none of the performers undress or even handle a single prop. The pace and style of the production is singular and breathlessly intense. Andrew Scott’s M is a machinegun-fire hurricane of catty bitching in a Dublin accent trained mercilessly on Ben Wishaw’s sweetly diffident and confused Paul. Katherine Parkinson’s W cleverly manages to suggest an incredibly sexy, warm femininity while delivering her lines with a similarly stylised intense focus. It took me maybe three minutes to tune in and warm to the performance style, but once in I was absolutely hooked. It’s one of those productions that once seen, you can’t imagine any other way of doing it.

But, while the formal and emotional stakes are high, it’s the piece’s lightly worn intellectual credentials that are really fascinating. Bartlett clearly doesn’t set out to create a social critique, he’s just (“just”!) written a story that he thinks is interesting, in which characters with a bit of agency fight, have arguments and try to work out how to live. What’s fascinating is the stuff the seeps out from the edges. There’s a point where John says of coming out at university: “all these people hugged me and were proud of me and said how brave I was and suddenly people were touching me and I was wearing different clothes and I was part of a scene, even walking differently I think and everyone said the real me was emerging, that I’d been repressed...”

While this speech in its entirety feels like the moment where the play gets a bit too spelt out, it also crystallises the way in which the play moves the entire argument away from “issues” of sexuality/homosexuality and into the far bleaker territory of the commodification of desire; the way in which every feeling becomes a “lifestyle choice” expressed largely through commerce. The final moments of the play feel like The Birthday Party for desire – we’re no longer coerced and interrogated by sinister agents of The State, we’re policed by our partners. “The State” no longer needs to enforce its vision of normalcy on us; we’re unwittingly, brutally doing it to each other in the name of love.

The Roman Tragedies - Barbican

[Written for CultureWars.org]

[For those of you pressed for time, Lyn Gardner manages to arrive at pretty much the same conclusions using 1,900 fewer words. And she filed on the night. Consider me a little in awe.]

Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s The Roman Tragedies, directed by Ivo van Hove, designed and lit by Jan Versweyveld, collects Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra and stages them back to back for six hours; more or less solidly.

And what a staging it is.

The main stage of the Barbican’s theatre has been converted into a kind of chic corporate hospitality space. There are nicely minimalist sofas everywhere, large widescreen televisions, potted plants, and bars on either side, along with a small internet café, newspapers and coffee. This is Coriolanus by press conference for the CNN generation, a kind of living manifestation of Baudrillard’s The Iraq War Did Not Take Place (a massively misunderstood title, btw, which is actually derived from Giradoux’s play La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, which unfortunately became The Tiger at the Gates in English, thus depriving us of the chance to understand what Baudrillard was driving at).

One of the things that is interesting when watching Shakespeare in a foreign language is seeing what’s been done with the translation back to English for the surtitles. Here, barring a few odd phrases here and there (it was nice to see “O, happy horse...” and “Serpent of old Nile” survive), Tom Kleijn’s translation is mostly rendered in slightly more colourless lexical choices than Shakespeare made. However, given the staging, this works rather well as it doesn’t feed the production back into English antiquity. Instead we are watching “Europeans” in the 21st century.

After the first twenty minutes of the play – probably the first forty minutes of any other production; quite considerable cuts have been made – there is a “Scene Change”. Not much actual scenery gets moved, however, the audience is invited, should it wish, to go up onto the stage, get a coffee or wine, sit on the numerous sofas and watch the next bit at close quarters or on the big TVs.

After this, the atmosphere in the theatre completely changes. Suddenly it’s a whole lot more relaxed. The auditorium remains slightly lit, and the doors of the Barbican theatre are left open until the closing minutes (if you’ve not been there, rather than having aisles inside the theatre, the Barbican has them running outside the auditorium, with heavy wooden doors giving access to each end of every row. These doors normally automatically close in unison when the lights go down). There’s suddenly an unusual amount of agency. Given that the show runs for six hours pretty much without a break, this atmosphere of relaxation is enormously welcome, as is the sudden dispersal of the audience. All at once there is a lot more elbow and leg room (it’s pretty much exactly the atmosphere that I proposed would be the ideal conditions for viewing The Habit of Art, actually).

But these greatly improved viewing conditions are only part of the story. Thanks to having part of the audience on stage, there’s also now a vastly increased mise-en-scene. And it works brilliantly for Coriolanus. After all, the root of all Gaius Martius’s problems is his point-blank refusal to pander to the wishes of the people, or the people’s tribunes. That said, this relationship isn’t directly invoked here. The EU-fication of the look of the thing put everyone in suits. The people’s tribunes look like young, but professional negotiators. While to an extent this is a play about the power of the outraged masses, here it is mediated (aptly enough). We see the protesting people only on video screens. In fact, rather than a corporate hospitality area, what the staging most feels like is a newsroom – indeed, there are even sections where the Volciscan leader Aufidius is interviewed by a news anchor-woman.

Instead, what having the audience on stage here seems to stage is a professional class milling about both in newsrooms – watching election reports and breaking news or those clustered around television sets in cafés and bars, watching a public crisis unfold. It evokes a world from which “the people” are excluded, and yet are presented as the raison d’etre of the leadership. As such, it feels like a perfect evocation of modern politics. Perhaps this is a particularly British reading, mirroring concerns about the professionalisation of politics, and perhaps a wider concern about power being devolved to Brussels. Either way, as a way of opening up the dilemmas of Coriolanus, it is absolutely spot-on and totally engrossing, at the same time as presenting the most successfully “contemporary” Shakespeare I’ve ever seen, and offering an incredibly successful kind of “immersive” way of viewing.

Five minutes before Coriolanus meets his end, the red LED text scroller offers the message “5 Minutes until the death of Coriolanus”. It then counts down, until he is laid on a low trolley that runs on tracks between two glass partitions. The trolley is slammed home, and a camera takes a last, over-head shot of his prone body, which appears on the vast screen overhanging the stage, with the text scroller showing his name and the dates of his life. Then, without pause, Julius Caesar starts.

If Coriolanus worked well in this mediatised update of classical Rome, then Julius Caesar positively revelled in it. Where Coriolanus adapted the text around the need for on-stage plebeians to a certain extent, this Julius Caesar plays much more thoroughly with the idea of public address and who that public is. The private plotting scenes are carried on pretty much as standard, with suited conspirators meeting in what we imagine as anonymous corporate rooms downstage, while the audience continues to mill around behind them, or is seated in the auditorium before them. It is the funeral oration which is really transformed.

Joe Kelleher in his contribution to the Theatre &... series, Theatre & Politics, uses this section of Julius Caesar for a discussion of how theatre and politics interact – where the choice is to either stage the speech to the audience – thus theoretically achieving none of the impact it actually achieves, since the audience do not then take to the stage and riot – or else staging it by showing the orations being delivered to a largely crowd of costumed extras, thus placing the immediacy of the speech as some remove.

Watching it mostly on television from a sofa by the bar on the stage, it felt like I was seeing perhaps the best version possible. I could look over and see the “real” Mark Anthony hailing a “real” audience (though a mic with that echo/short reverb effect that invariably recalls the Nuremberg Rallies, and of which I shall never tire, no matter how much of a cliché it may be). Or I could watch the close up, being live-fed into the TV in front of me, along with dozens of my fellow audience members. It perfectly evokes the kind of speech that people would watch on television in a shared public space. Like watching 9/11 coverage in bars, or those American election night viewing parties, or Barack Obama’s inaugural speech. The sort of moments that have such evident public impact that people feel compelled to watch them together, as if for reassurance.

Even though it’s plainly a fantasy – when you’re on stage, you can see the lights, the auditorium, the actors, etc. – it’s one which, thanks, I think, to precisely these sorts of resonances, feels remarkably easy to become immersed in.

The “newsroom” type feel also makes a lot of sense of the “battle” scenes. Instead of showing anyone on stage actually doing any fighting, the lights flicker, two percussionists at either side of the stage make a fearsome racket, strobe lights flash in our eyes, while the performers run to and fro with clip boards much like one might expect panicked TV executives to as outside their studios conflict rages. While only on the video screens do we see footage of troop movements, tanks moving through bombed streets and the like. Again, a perfect evocation of modern warfare being something we only see on screen.

I ducked out for slightly more of Julius Caesar than I intended, something the makers of The Roman Tragedies both intend and legislate for. Nevertheless, my take on the whole is slightly incomplete as a result.

For all the immersive properties of the first two plays, there is a certain clinical edge to them. While one does take them in experientially, there is also always a kind of forensic interest winning out. One sees the plays anatomised. It certainly opens them up, and makes fascinating and suggestive parallels, but while you are considering their political import, you aren’t really feeling the emotional journeys of the characters. Perhaps this is also due in part to the less emotive, more matter-of-fact language you’re reading. There is no deliberate manipulation of your emotions. Indeed, the text scrollers announcing the death of a character five minutes before they die is at once amusing, kitsch and distancing. It gets a knowing laugh from the audience, and as such, makes the death itself feel somewhat less tragic and more of an historical inevitability. Which, of course, they are. You become dimly aware at the lengths other productions must have to go to in order to wring some sort of tragedy out of these tragedies.

That is, until Antony and Cleopatra.

Mark Antony has of course been introduced to us in Julius Caesar, and it’s enormously satisfying to the see the two plays run back-to-back, not least because it allows us to see the absolute contrast between his brilliant statesmanship in Rome and the tragic effects of his ruination in Egypt.

What’s especially great about this performance is that Mark Antony, played by Hans Kesting is in a wheelchair throughout. Apparently this wasn’t intentional. Last Friday, Kesting just broke his leg. However, the very fact of his being in a wheelchair really galvanises his portrayal. That it is a constant through both JC and A&C means that we don’t have to view it through the prism of any sort of intended naturalism, but instead, it’s just a very actual constraint continually being negotiated. As a metaphor for Mark Antony’s frustration and political hamperedness in the first and his, well, differently sourced political frustration in the second, it is hard to beat. He tears around the set, angrily unable to do exactly what he wants to do, with a savage energy jabbing at flunkeys with his crutches.

Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra (female, don’t worry, it’s not *that* radical a production) is also outstanding. The stripped down version of the play’s text and structure does away with a lot of the speechified contextualising and instead gets straight down to business. Antony, lounging around in Egypt, is told of his wife Fulvia’s death. He whizzes back to Rome and promptly marries his co-Triumvir Octavius’s sister Octavia (Octavius, strangely, is played by a woman, however – and while not distracting from the story if the thing is modernised, then sure, why not have female leaders? But it does make it difficult to know which “sister” is being talked about sometimes). Cleopatra sits at home and doesn’t take the news at all well, and then all hell breaks loose when Mark Antony does return to Egypt.

While the preceding four hours or so have continually felt fresh and inventive, this climax to the cycle feels by far the most detailed. Octavia is presented as a sexy, rich-looking opportunist, while Nietvelt’s Cleopatra is infinitely more desirable precisely because of the force of her personality. There are nice directorial touches: Egypt’s flagrant, bisexualised licentiousness; a Roman messenger stealing a kiss from the stricken Cleopatra; and, at the very close, an actual snake, filmed close-up as it is handled by Cleopatra, its image filling the large video screen to deeply unsettling effect.

But it is the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra that really keeps you nailed to your seat (for the last hour, the audience are all returned to their seats and the emptied stage feels newly sombre – you feel that the end is coming). The stripping away of their more flowery language, perversely, allows them to demonstrate the way in which they cannot live without each other more physically. Stripped of ornate words, there’s just this savage passion. At the same time, you can see why everyone in Rome despairs of Antony. It is sheer idiocy. He might well be in love, but that doesn’t make him any the less of an idiot for allowing it to rule his decisions. Antony and Cleopatra’s decisions once at war can clearly be seen as the actions of two people whose belief in their love makes them feel invulnerable to the whole world and to logic. It is a damning indictment. And yet – rarely for this play – you find yourself compelled by their belief. Wanting them to defy the history books and somehow win the day. And yet, being lovers, even their deaths are a slightly farcical joke. Cleopatra gets a servant to tell Antony that she’s dead just to discover his reaction. His reaction is, of course, suicide. And so, when the two lovers are reunited, it is with the bitter irony that Antony has but a few minutes to live. His death, like the others before him, is portrayed with the trolley and the bird’s-eye-view photo. However, Cleopatra’s devastated scream is the first thing that really brings home the pain that death has on others. Her eventual suicide, long minutes later, is utterly devastating. The whole thing felt absolutely electric.

It’s hard to sum up six hours worth of theatre experienced in such conditions and the end of Antony and Cleopatra was such that left me feeling like my heart had been run through a wringer, quite genuinely shaken. This is a quite extraordinary performance, running from brilliant intellectual insight to raw emotion. Some of the most outstanding Shakespeare I’ve ever seen.

The Habit of Art - National Theatre

There’s something rather charming about the way that Alan Bennett’s latest play appears to side-step that most boring of critical questions: “is it actually any good?”

As a play, no, I don’t suppose it is. It certainly doesn’t quite behave like a “proper play” should. Playwrights who spend months and years fine-tuning and re-drafting their work into a perfect shape may well find they have cause to feel irritable.

What Bennett’s done is have a go at writing a proper play. One which seeks to dramatise the twilight years of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, and then, having decided that his play has too many problems to solve, has thrown up a protective frame around it by showing this initial play being rehearsed.

Thus, any problems that the play-within-The Habit of Art (called “Caliban’s Day”) has, become points of interest and potential comedy. Rather than feeling awkward about lines that clunk or devices that don’t quite come off, we are licensed to find them funny or ridiculous.

On one hand, it feels a lot like cheating. On the other hand, it works rather well.

Having scrupulously avoided reading up on the thing before I saw it, I am pleased to discover that Bennett has fulsomely admitted that this is the case.

[Finding this review harder to write, than I’d like, it’s hugely tempting to stick in the same device.]

We get two plays for the price of one: Bennett’s Auden/Britten drama about two great artists – their temperaments, their artistry, their homosexuality and their attitudes to biography – alongside which, we are presented with a commentary on the creation of such biographical plays, bits of stuff about the National Theatre and the business of writing and acting in plays (though not, significantly, about their direction).

The effect of framing “Caliban’s Day” with The Habit of Art is to lift the potentially over-heavy original and allowing some much needed lightness to circulate around it. It possibly says something about Bennett’s limitations as a dramatist that he feels the need to do this in the most literal manner imaginable, but the net effect is not dissimilar to the way in which younger, less naturalistically concerned companies deploy a similar effect. There’s an extent to which one wishes that he hadn’t done it in a way that feels like it is disingenuously apologising for itself, but one is nevertheless ultimately grateful that the effect is there.

It also means that Bennett is free to send Caliban’s Day up a good deal more than he might otherwise have felt licensed to. Some of the funniest bits concern a latex W.H. Auden’s mask and sections in which the “writer” – a very un-Bennett-y fictional chap called “Neil”, intelligently played as sulky and earnest by the equally un-Bennett-y Elliot Levey – has seen fit to deliver some very silly dire poetry into the mouths of pieces of Auden’s furniture.

[Aha! Reading Bennett’s own piece on Habit, after finishing this, it’s rather satisfying to see: “The stylistic oddities in The Habit of Art – rhyming furniture, neighbourly wrinkles, and words and music comparing notes – may just be an attempt to smuggle something not altogether factual past the literalist probation officer who’s had me in his charge for longer than I like to think and who I would have hoped might have retired by now.” Excellent.]

There’s also a fair amount of enjoyable actors’ banter. Richard Griffiths playing “Fitz” playing Auden essentially reprises his role as Hector from The History Boys while Alex Jennings as “Henry” playing Benjamin Britten has a nicely bitter line about how the critics will probably just praise his “efficient performance” – which , curiously, is pretty much what I would have done, if he hadn’t drawn my attention to it. In fact, Jennings turns in three quite brilliant performances – one as the almost regally camp Henry, a totally different performance as the diffident Britten (although one wonders if it’s Jennings’s performance of Britten or Jennings’s performance of Henry’s performance of Britten), he also doubles as Henry standing in for another actor (who’s in a matinee Chekhov and so can’t attend rehearsal – although he turns up for a bit in suitably hilarious, incongruous heavy Russian peasant costume). But like Henry says, it’s all done so well, you barely notice it is being done at all.

You’ll notice I’ve said a lot more about the “how” than the “what” so far. Post-fact, it feels like there’s an awful lot more “how” to talk about. Actually, while you’re watching it, there’s an awful lot of “what” going on. Bennett’s play is, after all, a work of incredible condensation. Two major biographies, not to mention a fair amount of detail about the biographer Humphrey Carpenter himself (Adrian Scarborough, again perfect, apparently without effort) are being staged here. As such, there’s a lot of factual detail mixed in with the quotation-heavy, ‘what’s it all about, anyway?’ dialogue (C.S. Lewis’s “fucking elves” description of Tolkien’s fiction gets a (reattributed) look-in, as do lines by Coleridge, Spender and Larkin). If this were written by a younger playwright, one might call the thing richly allusive, or even, God forbid, postmodern, but because it’s by Alan Bennett, it doesn’t really strike you that way.

It’s also interesting, in common with The History Boys, that it feels like it is set at least a good thirty years before it’s meant to be set. Caliban’s Day, is a remarkably old-fashioned play. The way the fictional playwright, Neil, talks about it – in a manner sympathetic to Bennett’s own feelings on the matter, one supposes – doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard anyone of Levey’s age say about their practice.

But again, this is by-the-by and detail. The wider sweep of the play, its arguments about biography, the characters’ observations (both sets of characters, within and without the “play”) about the way that Art is created is interesting enough, if a little antique. More interesting is the biographical interest it generates around Bennett. Here he is, after all, having achieved National Treasure status, not least with a recent run of autobiographical books to rival Katie Price, making a piece in which two artists essentially articulate their desire not to be autobiographised. And into the bargain, foregrounding *a* playwright – if transparently not himself – and then subtly inviting us to see the comparisons between Bennett and Auden and Britten.

And certainly there’s something in it. The homosexuality is one element – Bennett having lately moved from his brilliant if coy “Perrier or Evian” rebuff to seeming comfortable admitting that he is in love with a man. His characters, thanks partly to Britain’s shameful history of persecution, seem less happy, while there is also an interesting comparison to be made between Bennett’s recent run of older-men-who-like-younger-boys plays and Britten’s criticism of himself for repeatedly indulging the same theme.

There’s also a return to Bennett’s perennial theme about access to the arts. This is certainly the subject of Neil’s Caliban’s Day, which takes its title via a muddled route through Auden’s The Sea and The Mirror, a poem which seeks to upset the tidiness of the Tempest’s rather pat ending, and in doing so creates a hyper-literate Caliban who addresses the audience. “Neil’s” “Caliban” is a rent-boy who has been ordered by W.H. Auden. He doesn’t do much except stand in for the Great Unwashed (ironic, given Auden seems far less given to cleanliness), along with the Beauty of Youth and various other clichés. More affecting is the discussion between stage manager (Frances de la Tour (the programme is in BLOCK CAPITALS – not helpful when trying to work out how many capitals her name should have) who is playing a perkier version of Mrs Lintott from The History Boys) and playwright – the director is absent from this rehearsal (Bennett obviously doesn’t think much of the mediation that a director interposes between writer and actor) – about the National Theatre itself in which Ronald Eyre is said to have suggested that on the unveiling of Denys Lasdun’s building that its three spaces should immediately have been converted into a pool hall, ice-rink and box arena until the perceived elitism of the building had worn off and only then would it be fit for plays. Counter to this suggestion is the argument that the continual run of play after play after play is what has gradually made this curious building fit for purpose. I’m not sure it’s an ironclad case, but it sounds very moving in the moment.

Overall, well, you come out having enjoyed some good jokes and been given an awful lot of things to consider, and experienced some fine, moving moments into the bargain. It’s a big old grab bag. You have to do quite a lot of the work yourself, while formally it seems to be far in advance of its contents’ conclusions. It feels like it would benefit from being staged before an auditorium of sofas, with the audience free to wander in and out and make themselves cups of tea. Then it could go on much longer.

I’d quite like to see the unedited, durational version – same set, same cast, but somewhere comfy like BAC. As it is, it feels like a compromise between someone halfway to believing plays don’t need to be proper and someone who insists that they should at least try to keep up appearances. There should be something that feels quite sophisticated about the approach, but it’s hard to resist the idea that this is simply an attempt on a play that has been sent into the world before its time.