Esprit d’escalier

While I’ve been quietly thrilled by the intelligence and articulacy of all but a few of the responses to my latest Guardian blog, I’ve also been kicking myself.

It was just after lunch yesterday that I realised the Google search I should have done before writing the piece: “Black History Month” “Telegraph”. And there it is, the Britain which inspired the following passage:

“It's as if the transportation [as “livestock”] of tens of millions of human beings, whose descendants were denied basic legal rights until a generation ago and who still account for a disproportionate percentage of America’s poor, is something that can or should now be laughed off.”

The original draft also contained the phrase: “it’s like a play-off between a culture of national shame and a culture of national pride”. The articles that Google search throws up illustrate precisely the sort of thing I was thinking of.

Look at James Delingpole’s 2009 article Isn’t Black History Month a bit Racist? (I hate to pick on James, since apparently Delingpole-bashing is currently enjoying something of a vogue at the moment. I can only say that his article came first in the Google search when conducted in Germany. Besides which, given that he essentially makes his living as a free-range, pre-emptive, lefty-baiting troll – i.e. he’s given the space to deliberately start fights or, uh, “outrage” “lefties” online without even having to wait for a comment thread – the complaining seems disingenuous to say the least. Anyway...).

Read that? Good. Now maybe mentally swap Black History Month with Holocaust Memorial Day, or The Holocaust Memorial Museum, or perhaps The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or maybe the striking new exhibition centre on the site of the former Gestapo Headquarters. Then, if you like, you can also imagine if the new article had been written by a German for a national newspaper (hint: I severely doubt it would be published. I imagine the journalist would be lucky to keep their job).

This is what I mean by the difference between a country which understands the shame of its past, and one which really believes it has done nothing wrong.

Because in Britain we are taught we haven’t done anything wrong. Or at least, we were when I was at school. Perhaps things have improved a bit now. Certainly if the grumbling of right-wing commentators is to be believed, education is a bit more progressive now than it was in the ‘80s, but the fact that comment-writers even feel justified in raising such objections strikes me as a problem – they genuinely don’t seem to think Britain has anything to apologise for. That the Empire was somehow justifiable.

(passing observation: and “the right” accuse “the left” of “relativism”; what could be more relativist than justifying something which is no longer acceptable with the excuse that it was “in the past”? That “that was how people behaved then”? Also, why is it mostly (but not exclusively) “the right” who fear admitting that Britain has an ugly history? From the available evidence, national shame clearly does one’s economy no harm whatsoever)

When I was at primary school, the six houses into which we were divided were named after Clive, Livingstone, Wolfe, Drake, Shaftesbury and Scott.

In short, that’s: the chap who took India for *us*, the chap who “discovered the source of the Nile”, the chap who beat the French in Canada, a slave-trader credited with beating off the Spanish Armada, a Tory “philanthropist” who I’d somehow got the impression was responsible for the abolition of slavery, but wasn’t, and, in a last-ditch attempt to recoup a bit of British self-deprecation, our man who failed to get to the South Pole (perhaps inevitably, my house).

Bear in mind this was 1982/3-1987. This was the recent England in which I grew up. These are the first six historical figures to whom I was deliberately exposed by my (state) primary school, apart from perhaps William “the Conqueror”.

World history, as I was taught it, consisted largely of the world being discovered by the English. Europe figured only when we were at war with it. We were never taught about the Ottoman Empire or the Swedish “deluge”, nor even the Franco-Prussian War. Instead it was The Romans, The Normans, and then Britain in France (Agincourt etc.), Spanish Armada, Napoleonic Wars, WWI, WWII. Fin. As regards teaching about the slave-trade, we were taught about the heroic way in which it was abolished in Britain, with the note in passing that we did so *ages* before the Americans.

It is this flawed understanding of history that allows an argument such as Delingpole’s even to be made, and why I compare it with Germany’s where there is no such question.



At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, I might return to another strand of this topic to examine the implications of David Cameron’s impossibly slippery Munich speech on “multiculturalism”.

In the mean time, further reading on this subject/other pieces I read while writing the above (as much as a reminder to myself as anything) include/s:

Boris Johnson is right to cut funds for black History Month

Black History Month: racial equality not black and white

And, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius by George Orwell.

[edit, 24/02/11: Also - Jeremy Paxman to front BBC1 series on British empire - "Jeremy Paxman is a brilliant and distinguished broadcaster – who better to weigh up the complexities of the British empire – its glories, its tragedies, the winners and the losers, its triumph and its curse?" said the BBC arts commissioning editor, Mark Bell"]

While in other Clybourne Park news, it looks as if it premieres in Germany in April. Yes, I’m very seriously tempted to go and review it.

Under the paving stones, the beach

.

I spent a good deal of yesterday afternoon sitting in a café not getting very far in writing a piece about British theatre criticism. So I gave up, went home and read a book.

At the moment I’m alternating between Stefan Aust’s Baader Meinhof Komplex (a remarkably good bit of journalism on which the catastrophic film of the same name is based) and Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus’s book about the Sex Pistols, which draws on everything from Guy Debord, the situationists to Theodor Adorno in one of the most page-turning bits of cultural history I’ve ever read.

As it turns out, the latter offers plenty that resonated. So here, in lieu of an actual essay on British theatre criticism, theatre-making and the blogosphere, are a bunch of quotes and scans from Lipstick Traces. Think of it as a series of reflections and provocations.

Early on Marcus quotes from Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age (not a novel I’d previously heard of):

“All over the nation, families who had listened to the news looked at one another and said, “Goodness me,” or “Whatever next,” or “I give up,” or “Well, fuck that,” before embarking on an evening’s viewing of colour television, or a large hot meal, or a trip to the pub, or a choral society evening. All over the country, people blamed other people for the things that were going wrong – the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle, good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education. Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody; only a few were stunned into honourable silence. Those who had been complaining for twenty years about the negligible rise in the cost of living did not, of course, have the grace to wish they had saved their breath to cool their porridge, because once a complainer always a complainer, so those who had complained most when there was nothing to complain about were having a really wonderful time now.”


A few pages later, Marcus is quoting the banner Malcolm McLaren hoisted over the last stages of the New York Dolls: “WHAT ARE THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM?” and compares it to the old Situationist slogan: “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary.” He observes: “– the line was typical of the situationist style, of its voice, a blindside paradox of dead rhetoric and ordinary language floated just this side of non-sequiteur, the declarative statement turning into a question as soon as you heard it; what does it mean? You already know, the situationists had answered: all you lack is the consciousness of what you know.” (p.49-50)


On punk’s sudden, massive proliferation (see also: Chris Goode’s recent reminder of Scritti Politi’s DIY call-to-arms): “Over the next few years, far more than fifteen thousand groups of people made records. They made a blind bet that someone might be interested in they sounded like or what they had to say, that they themselves might be interested. Some were bent on fame and money, and some were not; some wanted most of all a chance to announce themselves, or anyway to change the world.” (p.65)


Four pages later he’s quoting Benjamin: ‘“The art of the critic in a nutshell,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1925-26 in One-Way Street: “to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.”’ (p.69)


“People cut records not so much on the off-chance that they would hit, but to join in: to say “I’m here” or “I hate you” or “I have a big cock” or “I have no cock.” Teenagers discovered the thrill of shouting “FIRE” in a crowded theater – or even in an empty theater.” (p.76 – Marcus, not Benjamin now)


Lester Bangs: “The punk stance is riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and any time you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.” (p.80)


The book also shares this four-page situationist-inspired leaflet from London at the beginning of the 1980s, which reminded me of London's ongoing demonstrations:

[click on image to enlarge]







Hope that helped in some way.

Game, the (ahead of...)

Having read the reviews of Greenland and The Heretic, I’d just like to remind everyone of this piece which I wrote for the Guardian on 30th December 2009:

Polar bears

“Perhaps it's just me, but particularly in Edinburgh and afterwards, the polar bear seems to have become a subliminal byword for impending ecological catastrophe. Even when a piece has got nothing to do with the environment, polar bears still seem to crop up. And it's one of those things that once you've noticed it, you can't stop. Notable occurrences include Lucy Foster's O My Green Soap Box and Im Pelz”

I would draw polar bear fans’ attention in particular to Chris Goode’s comment beneath the piece wondering if “the polar bear in [Anthony Neilson’s play The Wonderful World of...] Dissocia is the ur-polar bear in respect of the trend [I’d] identified.”:

(Wonderful World of Dissocia screen cap from a promo video on YouTube)

– and then to the representative of ursus maritimus handled by Juliet Stevenson in The Heretic:


I’m currently mulling over writing a piece about theatre which tackles the subject of climate change myself. Not having seen either Greenland or The Heretic (or Water, or If There is I Haven’t Found It Yet, or The Contingency Plan for that matter), I reckon I’m in an ideal position to do so (I did see Earthquakes in London, though).

In the mean time, anyone who is genuinely interested in the subject and how coverage of it has evolved in the last few years should go and look at Chris Wilkinson’s Guardian blog archive. If we really want to talk about ‘ahead of the game’, it’s worth noting that the first piece he ever wrote for the Guardian Theatre Blog, back in Sept 2007 asks when the climate change was going to start being taken seriously by theatres (2011, as it turns out), and it’s clearly been an abiding concern of his work since (most notably: May 2008, Edinburgh 2008, Jan 2009 and June 2010).

This sort of work written by someone who has an informed, long-standing interest in the subject is a useful corrective to the sort of glib reporting most recently offered by the New York Times which, while paying a gratifying amount of attention to polar bears (“Both plays resort to polar bears. Greenland has two actors in a polar bear suit lumbering onto the stage at one point (deemed by some critics as the play's high point), while The Heretic uses a line drawing of one standing on the tip of an iceberg as the motif on its programs.” – um, yes. It’s also got Juliet Stevenson holding a cuddly one...), does rather seem to have been written by someone *pretending* to have seen both plays.


Anyway... I should go write something proper now.

In the mean time, I can’t remember if I’ve posted this song before (apols if I have), but, on topic:

(and, no, they’re Swiss, actually; since you asked)

Or, if you prefer:


Ahoj.

Othello – Deutsches Theater

[First draft]


[Not so much a review as a blow-by-blow account running to 2,000 words. As such, there are a fair few staging spoilers. In my defence, it’s on in Berlin, and this is an English Language review for what I still consider to be a British-based blog. As such, this review is mostly aimed at people who don’t think they’re ever going to get to see it.]

Okay, there are two headlines to choose from here: 1) I’ve just seen the best production of Othello I’ve ever seen. 2) I’ve just seen a production of Othello in which Othello is played by a white woman in a gorilla costume.

My job, then, is to explain how (2) manages to be (1). Perhaps unfairly I’m anticipating a certain amount of scepticism.

Actually, there’s a third headline. Well, it’s more of a question really: When was the last time you sat waiting for a production of Shakespeare to start with a genuine sense of anticipation about what you were going to see? Like: you really had no idea what was going to happen on stage – how they were going to do it...

Director Jette Steckel’s (2009- premiered) Othello opens with a bloke in a white shirt and black trousers standing up in the middle of the audience (the DT’s Kammerspiele space is a small/medium sized hall with a smallish pros. arch stage – think the Royal Court Downstairs stage at the end of a smaller version of one of the halls in Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms) with a small video-camera. What it sees is projected onto the flat, black wall at the front of the stage. He focuses the camera onto a female couple snogging in the front row. The frame freezes. Another white-shirted figure stands. Iago (Jago - Ole Lagerpusch) and hails the cameraman. Gradually other characters stand in the audience as their characters are called on to speak. It is striking how beautifully blocked it is. Perfect “staging” even without a stage.

As the opening scene disperses, the actors mount the stage and exit through a door in the black wall at the front of the stage, their character’s name projected, scribbled on the wall. A kind of rough-mixture of Brecht and Tarantino.

Othello is played by Susanne Wolff – a white woman – wearing the same white shirt/black trousers as the other players. What’s most striking is how little this feels like a problem. Meike Droste’s Desdemona is sweet and boyish. Iago is unusually cute for an Iago – looking more like the sort of actor you might expect to see playing the good-looking best friend in anything from Romeo and Juliet to The OC. Desdemona’s father, Brabantio (Helmut Mooshammer) – standing right in front of me in the audience – is also really rather fine; dignified, slightly crumpled and obviously angry, but most crucially, actually like a person. Properly *live* and *a*live, somehow.

Then a storm destroys the Turkish fleet which was going to attack Cyprus. This is created by a bloke blowing into a microphone attached to a delay pedal, while fuzzy footage of the audience projected again onto the black wall at the front of the stage serves as the stormy sea. It should be emphasised that the bloke-with-mic. is stupidly good at doing waves, winds, the crack of timber and the destruction of a fleet at sea. That you get to watch this soundscape created from scratch and then swell and becoming impossibly evocative is all the more exciting.

At the height of the storm, the back wall crashes backwards creating a jaggedly raked stage jutting back into the dark undecorated stage dock (Bühne: Florian Lösche).

From here on in, much of the “action” is reasonably standard. After all, it is still Othello. People need to say the lines to each other. What is special here is the way in which the lines are delivered. Which is to say, there was notably little *acting* going on. Iago wasn’t “evil”. Desdemona wasn’t wet, flat, insipid and/or caricatured as she often seems to be. And Othello wasn’t black or male. Nor was he *Black* or *Male*. It’s a tricky one to explain. The three leads – all excellent – play their parts with a real intelligence and sensitivity to what their characters are doing, thinking, feeling. And yet it’s somehow not *psychological* acting, per se. Their emotions are readable, but not laboured. There’s an intensely watchable matter-of-factness about it. At the same time clearly there’s control and intelligence.

That said, while they do “get on and do the play” there are still some lovely directorial touches. A sequence involving a messenger deploys bloke-with-mic to provide the sound effects to a possibly overdone, but still fun, mime sequence involving cars, horses, a squelching swamp and the opening and closing of many squeaky doors. Elsewhere, during his early scene with Cassio, where he lays his plot, Iago performs a kind of “masque of blackness” the waves bloke-with-mic returns to beatbox while Iago pastiches a number of classic “black” dance music tropes: Michael Jackson, Shabba Ranks, MC Hammer, etc. It’s not especially clear if Iago is being deliberately crass and/or racist, or just mucking about, but it adds a frisson. The sense of Othello’s Otherness being at once conjured, marked-out and disliked. Even while the actual Othello we have so far seen is as deliberately far from “Black” and “Male” as it’s possible to be.

As the play continues, we start to see the character of Othello being further explored, or rather exploded, or deconstructed. The stage lends itself to this sort of treatment. The long black rake of the fallen wall causes the performers to treat carefully across the criss-crossed grid of the construction (see photos). The fact it is at once its concrete self and an abstract space facilitates the other disjuncture: that between performer and character.

The costumes are for the most part effortlessly contemporary. Think Reiss and All Saints, nice casual suits for the blokes and a particularly nice chunky knitted jumper/dress for Desdemona, who also wanders about in oversize t-shirts and boots looking like an appealing indie girl with short hair circa Reading ’93.

The gorilla costume makes its first appearance with Desdemona pissing about wearing just the head (early production shots suggest the full costume, this is no longer the case), at first on her own and then in the scene with Cassio, who at one stage also puts on the mask.


It’s a affectionate, funny and troubling all at once, and gives a new edge to what Othello thinks he is seeing. His new wife is wandering around in this gorilla mask, making fun with it, and in the company of another man. With no foreknowledge of what’s to come, it sounds more than a little racist to immediately associate a gorilla costume with Black masculinity. But here there is no doubt that old racist trope which is being intentionally conjured and played with.

Steckel’s approach is arresting – and not only because it makes this white Englishman squirm, being about as far as is possible from the ways in which we choose to examine racism in Britain. There’s a fair part of me that did just keep thinking “Can you do that?”, as regards the casting of a white person as Othello, and again when one learns that there’s a gorilla costume involved.

The full costume is deployed at the moment when Othello thinks he’s learnt of Desdemona’s infidelity. As a symbol of, well, it’s very much in the eye of the beholder, but it’s such a loaded bit of symbolism it seems to clearly suggest an “animal rage” which no one else in the play displays. And to associate that rage with a particular animal. And a particular animal which has a history of being used as a racist symbol. Which is an uncomfortable thing to put on stage. Even though here it is very clearly as much a comment on the play’s, of Shakespeare’s construction of a “Black man” (although, yes, it’s the director’s decision to apparently take “Moor” as a licence for “Afro-Caribbean” than what is historically more likely to intend North African).

It’s incredibly disturbing. I mean properly, electrically uncomfortable. Because as ways of pissing about representing race on stage go it’s pretty full on. It’s confronting the audience with a question about how “Black” characters are constructed by white writers in the baldest imaginable terms.

Thanks to the rest of the deconstructed staging, the image works perfectly. Indeed, beyond the signification of questions about race, it is actually, curiously, enormously touching. The gorilla costume looks heartbroken, all the more touching for being momentarily deprived of language. I think it’s also important that we see Wolff put on the costume on stage and take it off again some minutes later also onstage. It entirely foregrounds the symbolism in its own constructedness (if that makes sense).

It also marks a fascinating contrast between the effect having both Othello and Desdemona played by women, which, thanks to these two particular performances, makes the relationship seem far more tender, playful and affectionate than I’ve ever seen before. Wolff, while not going out of her way to be gruff, or affecting an impression of “a black man”, does manage to convey a commentary of a certain masculinity.

It’s worth noting that immediately after Othello/Wolff takes off the gorilla costume and the other performers return to the rake for the scene in which Othello abuses Desdemona in front of her family they begin with Lodovico (Desdemona’s cousin, also played by Helmet Mooshammer (Brabantio)) handing out the German sweets which are still apparently popularly known as “negerkuss”. It’s a startlingly acute way of at once implying both Othello’s “outsider” status and really picking at German society’s apparent casual racism.

The next time we see Othello he’s dressed in a red dress and a long blonde wig.


He looks like another racist archetype – that of the idealised trophy white woman. I think this might be genius. At the very least it’s asking the audience to do some serious work on its own understandings of the constructedness of characters and how we think performers on stage *mean*. In this sequence, there’s an utterly charming moment where D. perches on O’s arm like a little bird. Actually, Desdemona does quite a lot of bird-related physical/movement work. It’s terribly sweet yet subtle enough not to feel like a Big Thing. Perhaps in stating it so baldly here it sounds like it might be a bit over-symbolic, but in the moment it comes across as wonderfully light and playful.

The plot carries on, nearing its inevitable tragic denouement. Desdemona comes in wearing a Clawfinger t-shirt for bed, bearing the backprint Deaf Bumb Blind. Othello comes in, Susanne Wolff returned to her own long brown hair and wearing a Public Enemy t-shirt* and does Desdemona in. Then does himself in too. Sarcastically. With one of those knives with bouncy retractable blades while a series of photographs of Wolff in various guises, black, white, male, female, young, old are projected against the back wall of the stage. Iago returns and makes short work of Emilia – a hand pressed to her face removed to reveal a bloodied mess. And it all abruptly ends, with a good deal less of the protracted speechifying and explaining than usually holds the end of the play up by about ten minutes.

In conclusion, this is at once a dizzyingly intricate intellectual take on the play, and at the same time, one which displays a curiously conservative aesthetic – at least as far as German theatre goes. It always looks nice, and, in a strange way, aside from the intense questioning of racial politics, it doesn’t feel like theatre which is really seeking to turn the status quo on its head. At the same time, it reminded me more than anything I’ve seen since last August why I think theatre, when it’s working flat-out, is just brilliant. So, yes. If you get the chance, do go see it. Or badger the Barbican for a transfer.


* Interestingly, the T-shirts worn in the final scene by Desdemona and Othello actually form a dialogue of their own. Clawfinger are a ridiculous 90s Swedish rap-metal outfit (who are all white) and their album Deaf Dumb Blind opens with a track called “Nigger” in which the band lecture black people who use the N-word about why they shouldn’t do so, with apparently no irony whatsoever. That Othello wears a Public Enemy t-shirt while strangling Desdemona suddenly makes his actions seem almost reasonable given the circumstances :-)

http://www.deutschestheater.de/english/schedule/premieres_and_repertoire/othello/

http://www.deutschestheater.de/home/othello/bilder/

2p

Mark Titchner, 2009 for Butterworth Hall, Warwick Arts Centre (found on Tim Etchell's blog)

So, preview performances – fair game for the non-professional reviewer or not?

You’d imagine by this point in proceedings that pretty much every argument for and against would have been aired and I’d be loathe to undertake a point-by-point rehash of a 50-comments-+ thread as well as articles broadly in favour of his position from Jake Orr and Dan Baker and varying shades of against from: Laura Tosney, Corinne Furness, Glen Pearce, Ian Foster, “Sans Taste” and even half a podcast on the subject, not to mention some rather unpleasant tweets. But, annoyingly, so far no one seems to have made some very obvious points.

Trueman has accused “bloggers” of “the cynical practice of reviewing previews”.

As is clear from Tosney and Furness’s defences, the term “blogger” is far too broad. Clearly neither of these blogs is primarily or exclusively a theatre reviews blog. The front page of Tosney’s [at time of writing] takes you back as far as September 14th 2010, with not so much as the slightest hint of a review of anything in a theatre, preview or otherwise. Similarly, Furness’s Distant Aggravation blog, while clearly more theatre-oriented, gets back to 12th Jan (an article about tie-dying, I think) without any actual reviewing. There’s a bit of personal grumbling about the Old Vic’s A Flea in Her Ear (22nd Jan – A Year in Theatre: Show # 2 – no idea if it was in preview or not at that point), but it is in no way seeking to be “a review” in any conventional sense. It’s an entirely personal set of observations ranging from “I suspect that I would prefer to sit through a glorious failure than a well made-nothing.” to “I have an ongoing debate with some friends about which theatre has the best looking ushers. Two words: Old Vic”.

Obviously Trueman’s piece isn’t aimed at them, although this could have been made clearer in his original piece.

Furness’s A Flea... review, however does offer an excellent example of what Trueman isn’t talking about. A common complaint about his argument is the reductio-ad-absurdum conclusion that to stop “bloggers” or indeed any “paying punters” from blogging about, Tweeting, or discussing a show they’ve just seen, be it in preview or otherwise, is essentially to stifle a genuine human reaction – albeit channelled through some oddly contrived means. But if we accept “To Tweet is Human” as a maxim, or at least put it on the level of “as natural as chatting” then I suppose we have to live with it.

I don’t think Trueman would really argue otherwise.

On the other hand, surely anyone can see that there’s a qualitative difference between someone who blogs many mundane details of their life, their to-do lists, and so on, to someone keeping a blog which consists entirely of reviews of plays, perhaps round-ups of reviews of plays, “What’s On” features and monthly round-ups of plays and has a Twitter account named after such activities: @Dave’sTheatreView or somesuch. There is, in short, a qualitative difference between marketing yourself as a person and marketing yourself as an opinion on theatre on social media, n’est pas?

So, let’s focus this discussion on Theatre Review Blogs.

And so to the charge of cynicism...

To be honest, I’m rather surprised it’s this which has generated all the outrage. This is reflected in the way that many respondents have floundered in their attempts to refute the charge. There Ought to be Clowns’s Ian Foster in the “As Yet Unnamed London Theatre Podcast” seems to admit as much while claiming that regularly booking into one of the earliest possible previews in order to steal a march on embargoed “professional” critics “isn’t” cynical. Of course it’s cynical. The only question is why bother denying it?

There are two main points which torpedo this innocent “What? Me? Cynical?” stance:

Firstly, if a preview period runs for let’s say two weeks, if you’re only buying preview tickets because they’re cheaper, why not buy them on the last night before press night? That way, if you’re aiming to write about the show, you’ll get the closest thing to the finished version that will be “opening” the next day.

Secondly, if you’re not chasing ratings by having your review out two weeks before the critics, and you only blog “as a personal record of what you’ve seen”/“as a hobby” why not observe the press embargo anyway?

I mean, if it’s only just this hobby of yours and you’re basically only there/writing for your personal satisfaction, why not hold back your review until press night, and then post it on your blog along with a full disclaimer saying “I saw this on its first preview because I like to see plays as soon as it’s possible to pay to do so, I hope you like this entirely personal record of that first preview”?

Otherwise, why not cut the cant and admit what you’re up to?

It’s fine. You’re cynical. You’re saving yourself *some money* so you can see a show. You’ve weighed up the pros and cons of seeing a preview and have decided in favour, and are then writing about the show you saw. You’re also blogging your thoughts in a way that very frequently purports to be authoritative. Theatres are unlikely to stop selling you tickets, and you’re unlikely to stop buying them and writing about the show you saw. Fine, and fine. But why pretend otherwise?

Unlike Trueman, I’m not sure I have an enormous problem with people writing about previews on the internet, per se. After all, the West End Whingers have made it their stock in trade for years now, and apart from the not unwelcome discomfort which they caused Andrew Lloyd-Webber, it doesn’t seem to have deeply troubled the theatre establishment. Indeed, let’s be honest, the Whingers are now more a part of the theatre establishment than ANY PROFESSIONAL CRITIC. A point worth remembering, I think.

Indeed, I think in many cases what I see as the mainstream-theatre blogosphere *can* - and I stress *can* - act as a welcome corrective to the equal cynicism of commercial theatre producers whose "previews" *can* (again *can*), be ludicrously expensive and whose product might well just be a cynical attempt to exploit a perceived market. As with all ethical considerations, I’m not sure it’s just a matter of black or white right or wrong.

On one hand, if theatres are charging virtually the same (or actually the same) for a preview as for a post-press night performance, there does seem to be justification for missing the distinction which the theatre is pleading.

On the other hand, if there is a reasonably generous discount and three or four different theatre bloggers arrange to all attend a show on its first preview... Well, perhaps the bloggers in question should be prepared to weather accusations of cynicism for trying to get in as quickly before the press as possible.

After writing the main part of this, a playwright friend suggested that perhaps very-first-previews really should be considered properly off-limits and correspondingly enormously discounted – with perhaps a change of title to “Public Dress” or similar. Although, currently enough, I note that “Theatrigirl” has just published a “review” of the Royal Opera House’s Anna Nicole Smith opera, the conditions of which she describes thus: “On Saturday morning, the ROH allowed a small audience – mostly students –in for a rehearsal/run-through of their much-talked-about new work”. Given the unbashed rave she’s given it, I don’t suppose the ROH are going to be too cross, and I'm sure she wouldn’t have written up a dress rehearsal unless she was going to be so positive, but even so, it does seem to be reviewing public dress rehearsal as final product, albeit with a disclaimer and glowingly.

Still, Actual Theatre Bloggers might want to have a think a bit more about Trueman’s initial premise. Maybe there should (and, quite possibly already is, in the mind of many) be a sliding scale of correlation between size-of-discount and nearness to observation-of-embargo, for a start. And maybe also a bit of slack cut for more laudably artistic ambitious projects in order that they might find their feet (i.e. go on the last preview before press night if the tickets are substantially discounted and it's the sort of work that might plausibly need time to fully find its feet).

Given the public facing-ness of blogs, behaviour will probably continue to be dictated by public interest. Hence the two reviews [at time of writing] of the NT’s Frankenstein already circulating. Of course, being solidly sold out, such reviews can’t really do anything more than tell people who haven’t got tickets what it’s like (really great! or really not-great! depending who you read).

However, as ultimately a question of public interest, it boils down to whether you consider the embargo-breakering bloggers to be Wikileaks or Andy Coulson, in much the same way as some readers will ultimately return to blogs because they find them well-written, reliable, entertaining and insightful and others will read any old badly written drivel if it’s “an exclusive”.

„Du kannst nicht gegen Tatsachen rebellieren”

No, this wasn't precisely how I'd envisaged my return to Postcards... either. But, since I've written it, I thought I might as well share. It constitutes a companion piece to my most recent piece on the Guardian Theatre Blog and perhaps to Chris Goode's newest blog here.


And so l'affaire de MrKennethTong seems to have drawn to a dramatic close. For those of you who missed it, it basically consisted of a former Big Brother housemate making a series of ridiculously inflammatory statements on the subject of "managed" anorexia, much to varying degrees of horror and disgust from the Twitterati. After several weeks of this (if not more, I arrived rather late at this particular party), Tong consented to give an interview to the journalist Johann Hari (the full text of which can be found here (as can the full audio files of the interview)) shortly after which, he claimed everything he'd said was "a hoax", deleted huge swathes of his Tweets and went very quiet indeed.

Given the nature of his Tweets, the company the man claims to keep, his penchant for threatening people who criticise him, and the deeply disturbing exchange in which he appears to imply that he has gotten away with rape, it seems depressingly unlikely that his Twitter campaign was intended as a hoax at all.

While the full text of the interview in which Hari seems to almost break Tong down psychologically would make a brilliant piece of theatre (ideally not performed naturalistically), as it stands it does have a slightly old-fashioned morality-tale structure to it: nasty man is confronted with error of his ways and panics. At the very least it's like the first Harry Potter book where Voldemort is temporarily banished. While the text is rich in tics and psychological insights into both antagonists - really, even the very best dramatists would be hard pressed to make this kind of thing up - at the same time, the lesson which appears to emerge seems almost too neat - the sort of thesis-play/parable which would look far too contrived on stage if it had been made up.

Much more interesting theatrically is the concept of Tong as Hoax.

It would have had some excellent precedents. Consider the work of the band Laibach - one of Slovenia's finest artistic achievements. Their basic project was basically covering well-known rock hits, while dressed in uniforms reminiscent of the Third Reich and refusing to confirm that they were joking. As such, you suddenly heard things in the lyrics of songs like Queen's One Vision or Opus's Life is Life in a whole new light.

Another example of this school of Radical Overidentification (the term coined for the movement by fellow Slovenian Slavoj Žižek) is Nike Ground, a "hyper-real theatrical performance" made by 0100101110101101.ORG in Vienna in 2003. The work essentially consisted of the claim that the city's Karlsplatz was to be renamed NikePlatz, with a giant Nike swoosh statue erected in the centre.

The point with Radical Overidentification is that is essentially re-stating what is already the case in only slightly balder terms (what Žižek called the "hidden reverse", or as Boris Groys puts it, being "more total than totalitarianism"). As such, MrKennethTong, even unwittingly, seems to be a perfect example (it's worth reading the articulation of Radical Overidentification in this article if you don't believe me). Indeed, in the interview, Tong reads like nothing more than a repository for the uninterogated truisms upon which one sector of contemporary culture is based; basically the conclusions a naive extra-terrestrial would draw from a study of our popular magazines and television programmes. The point is, he didn't make these ideas up himself. Instead, he holds up a perfectly uncritical mirror to society. Indeed, the apex of this notional Tong's achievement was getting Simon Cowell to angrily denounce the promotion of stick-thin models and conspicuous wealth as "village idiocy".

Leaving aside the fact that Tong doesn't appear to be nearly clever enough to be a radical strategy, he still provides a useful reminder of an alternative form of resistance - rather than writing a play which neatly proves you are right and which plays to the choir, it is far more unsettling (apparently even for Simon Cowell) to witness the grotesquery of the status quo applauded in all seriousness.

You Me Bum Bum Train - LEB Building

.
Ok. So the review I really want to write of You Me Bum Bum Train can’t be published until the piece has finished its run, because I’d like to engage with specifics, but to engage with them, I’d have to say what they were, which would be a pain for anyone who was going to see the thing.

Until such time, in order to fulfil my contract with the Barbican (under whose auspices, this Oxford Samuel Beckett Trust Award-funded show is presented, and by whom press tickets are granted), I’ll offer some general comments and a lot of encouragement for you to try to get hold of a ticket.

You know the basic premise, right (you’d have to have been living under a rock to have missed all the advance publicity)? You turn up, on your own, at the LEB Building in Bethnal Green at an allotted time, wearing practical clothes and with no small amount of apprehension. You are greeted, hand over everything to a cloakroom assistant and are then seated in a wheelchair and pushed out of the lobby.

Then, for the next forty minutes (is it really forty? It seems like about five minutes) you are catapulted through a series of scenes, the precise nature of which it seems only fair not to reveal until they’ve ceased to exist. Suffice it to say, one is variously impressed, delighted, amused, mildly worried, occasionally embarrassed and sometimes made to jump a little, with the result that by the end your awareness is heightened, your pulse has risen, and you’ve got something of the reckless, energetic fearlessness usually only available through a hard night’s drinking.

YMBBT’s creators, Morgan Lloyd and Kate Bond, trained as visual artists rather than theatre-makers. I have no idea how much theatre they might have undertaken to see for themselves in the meantime, but my guess is: not much. In this instance, it works to their advantage. Instead of recognisable theatrical references, what we have here is a fascinating mixture of the logic of dreams, the visual language of cinema and the unexpectedness of late-night channel surfing, unhampered by a reverence for theatre’s history or current trends.

In fact, one of the most striking things about YMBBT is how few of the scenarios into which you’re plunged are ever seen in theatre. And it’s not simply because of the perspective change. Of course the immersion factor does completely alter the way in which you experience the scenes – being “inside”, either as participant or observer, is different to looking though a fourth wall – but the “subjects” or “situations” themselves that are also new. Or rather, they are nearly all stock scenarios, but stock scenarios from film or TV, rather than the usual subjects of theatre.

In a way, YMBBT is like a hectic fast-paced exam in pop-cultural knowledge. The game is almost like a matter of correctly identifying the new trope in which you’ve found yourself, and then adjusting your behaviour accordingly (or not).

In fact, I’d be very interested to know what strategies other participants adopted either throughout or in particular scenes.

There’s more than a hint of narcissism about the piece, which ends up perhaps reflecting more on you and how you deal with situations than on the situations themselves. Or maybe that’s just my own narcissistic reading.

But beyond this, when it’s possible to talk about the actual scenes themselves, there are interesting observations to be made about the world that the piece chooses to construct, in terms of what has been included and excluded. Analysis of the state-of-the-nation-ness on display here also wouldn’t go amiss, but is impossible until the thing closes.

Suffice it to say, for now, it’s an impressively broad landscape that YMBBT offers but an interestingly selective one, and it’d be interesting to hear, somewhere down the line, whether there were specific rationales behind the choices and whether there were any particular themes, unified or disparate, that the company were interested in drawing out for their audiences. Or perhaps the thing should be read more as a collection of pieces in a gallery. Curated, to an extent, but not necessarily with the aim of telling a story, per se.

Anyway, more when possible. Until then, although it’s sold out, it might still be worth seeing if there are returns, or even whether it’s possible to swell the ranks of the volunteer “audiences”...

Kinemaatiline Müsteerium – an old barn, Rakvere

For some reason, more and more people seem to be doing “photo-essays” at the moment. Happily, Estonians Erik Alalooga and Hans Gunter Lock’s site-something piece, Kinematic Mystery, offers a perfect opportunity to do likewise.

The blurb for Kinematic Mystery cutely notes that it “is an interactive performance that cannot happen if the audience is too passive!”

However, in common with Answer Me, there are absolutely no suggestions as to how to be usefully *active*. Presumably this is the mystery.

The audience is bussed over to the “site” and stand around in the yard.


Many have been given keys. We then go through the lengthy rigmarole of finding which key fits the door to allow us to enter. The odd encouragement, or perhaps insult is shouted in Estonian. I don’t speak Estonian, but even those who do look pretty non-plussed.

Eventually, some poor soul (a plant?) finds the key and we get to enter via one of the least safe ladders I have ever used.


Once inside the space – perhaps the dustiest room I’ve ever been in, in my life (Estonian theatre really isn’t a victim of Health and Safety regulations, or indeed any regulations, so far as you can tell)


- one is confronted with a range of Heath Robinson-esque machines.




They’re a little reminiscent of Eduard Bersudsky’s creations for Sharmanka’s Gothic Circus, as seen at LIMF ’09 in the Shunt Vaults.

The piece’s blurb continues:
“If there is a red switch and you don’t know its function, would you push it?
Would you have enough courage?
There is always the possibility to deny the suggested chance and contribute to the retardation of the process.
But you must take full responsibility if you decide to switch the switch!
What dominates at the moment of choice – conservatism or adventurousness?
The red switch is waiting for you!”

On this showing, plenty of people had plenty of courage, but the purpose of the machines remained obscure.


People gamely prodded and poked at them, but not a whole lot seemed to happen. No further instructions were forthcoming. The rules of engagement remained somewhere between opaque and non-existent.

Then, someone went into the wrong place and knocked a rather lethal looking axe which wasn’t apparently meant to be knocked, and severed all the power in the barn.

Someone else found another key and the audience exited again.


Apparently into someone’s back garden






Perhaps an object lesson for companies making interactive work not to obscure the channels and purposes of the interaction too much? Or maybe I’m just too used to being spoon-fed.

Answer Me – Dood Paard – Rahu Hall

[I’m afraid this is less a review and more like a 2,000 word exercise in catharsis. Feel free to skip it. It’s mostly just a dialogue with myself checking that I hadn’t missed the point. I’m pretty sure I didn’t and that this really was the worst thing I’ve seen since Making Ugly in 2006. Oh, and the tenses skip about like nobody's business, but I just can't be bothered to correct them all]

Veteran Dutch company Dood Paard’s new show Answer Me is one of the most comprehensive failures I have ever witnessed in a theatre.

That it failed is undisputed. Of a starting audience of maybe 300, roughly a third left before the end. Of those who remained until it finished half simply left instead of applauding. And, judging by every conversation I had or overheard afterwards, those who did clap were just being polite. What is more interesting is how and why it failed. And, moreover, why it provoked such an actively hostile response.

Answer Me is billed as a performance about interrogation. This is just about a fair description of its starting point. Four performers stage take to the stage dressed in a mixture of military uniform and spangly, tarty kitsch. Think Rocky Horror Show in a mixture of khaki and gold lamé. They immediately begin by barking a series of questions at the audience:
“Who are you? What's your name? How old are you? Where do you come from? Are you a journalist? Do you love me? Are you Dutch? Turkish? Portuguese? Do you even know where that is, Portugal? What they speak there? What do you speak, actually? Can you even speak? Why are you here? What were you doing in Pakistan? What were you doing in Utrecht? What were you doing in Riga? Are you married and if yes, why? Was there a woman who wanted to marry you? A man perhaps? Where do you come from? What're you after here? What have you done? Name? Age? Profession? Keep your head up! You are a terrorist! We’ve got you now! And we’ll give it to you good! You fuckers! Have you ever worn blue shoes? Have you ever seen kid’s films? Do you drink water! Do you love your mother? Do you love your father? Did Tommy Cooper pay for your ticket? Have you ever had a pet? A dog, a cat, or a marmot? Or a Negro? Have you ever experimented with explosives? Would you like to work for us? You’ll mix in interesting circles. Harley bikers’ circles. Would you tell us something interesting? Can we arrange a fine place for you to spend the night? Nice and warm. With a mattress. And a blanket. A shower. If you cooperate with us you’ll be able to sleep in peace. As long as you want. I know that your God gives you power. You’ve been living in those tiny cages for so long. No one could keep that up. You all pray and your God helps you. Otherwise you’d go crazy of course. Do you love me? Answer me! Bastard! I love you.”

(copied and pasted from their website, here)

You get a rough sense from the above of the tone of the thing, but perhaps not quite enough of an idea of just how childish it sounded. And then, working against this already underwhelming text are the unspeakably bad performances. The basic mode is that of the grotesque. To this end, the performers gurn like mad and shout in deliberately ugly voices, while twisting their bodies like a line of schoolchildren desperate for the loo. It is so one-note as to be almost a parody of how to bore on stage – how to perform in a way guaranteed to switch any audience off.

The lines are distributed apparently at random between the four performers (joined later by a fifth). They are shouted at the audience. Sometimes they are addressed to a single person, sometimes thrown open to the whole audience. The “you” here pings between singular and plural.

Pretty quickly you get a sense of the piece’s concerns: terrorism, perhaps most specifically Islamist terrorism, state homophobia and state racism. Beyond this, there then begins a series of more pointed accusations that could increasingly be read as attacks on the audience for being complacent, apathetic dupes of Western capitalism.

This is pretty galling. We’ve all read (and maybe even seen) Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience, but now the thing that’s most offending this audience is seeing a very old idea trotted out again quite so flagrantly and ineptly. But I’m not quite sure that’s the whole story.

There are two far more basic, central problems. Firstly, there was the irritating inaccuracy of the accusations combined with the sheer stupidity of the assumptions behind them which the company were making, added to the fact that they were on stage in front of us wasting our time with this stupid, boring, patronising, clichéd, GCSE-Marxist stuff as if they were possessed of some new, radical bits of thinking.

Following on from this irritation, the second major problem was that either singly or collectively we were being asked questions. And there was no indication whatsoever whether or not we were meant to respond. So, we sit there listening to these trite constructions of ourselves framed as questions and completely unsure if we’re meant to respond in any way. Since, through the piece, an increasing number of the insults hinge on the fact that we don’t have thought enough in our heads to respond, this presents an interesting dilemma. Patently a vast majority of the people in that theatre had plenty to say. One got the sense that everyone was not responding out of politeness either to the performers on stage or to their fellow audience members.

It’s really hard to know what the company imagine the show achieves.

It also feels almost impossible to write about it without giving the impression that this was “edgy”, “challenging”, or “confrontational”. You’ll just have to trust me.

The sloganeering is rubbish. Every observation is a commonplace. The performances are just terrible. You get the impression that everyone on stage thinks they’re being terribly shocking – that they’re really presenting you with ideas you’ve never heard before – making connections between things that you could never have thought of, when in fact they are compiling the most banal, over-exposed list of associations imaginable.

And of course it occurs to you that maybe this is the point. Maybe it’s about the boredom and how rubbish the performances are, and about how shallow and idiotic the politics are. And about how everything everyone says on stage is manifestly less intelligent than the stupidest thought anyone in the audience had before breakfast. But even if that is the point (and there’s a worrying sense that it isn’t) it isn’t a very good one, or an interesting one, or even one that’s being very well made or pointfully prosecuted.

It amounts a sort of checklist of the most trite list of observations of life under advanced Western capitalism imaginable. The sort of thing that a disaffected Rage Against The Machine fan could have knocked up in half an hour.

By this point, people had started to leave in a steady tickle that was turning into a stream.

Then, as if to demonstrate a complete lack of their grasp of stagecraft or even of the meaning of what they were doing, about half way through the performers produce a chair and one of them sits in it. From this moment, half the questions still being yelled by the other performers are directed at him, while other questions were still thrown out to the audience or barked at individual audience members. The on-stage interrogation could in no way be said to amount to anything even slightly approaching drama (or post-drama), while the other questioning remained as superficial as before. What the change of focus does do, however, is demonstrate that even the performers didn’t have enough faith in the original format to believe it could sustain an hour.

By this stage the hostility in the audience had reached the stage where several clumps of people who hadn’t left were chatting quite openly amongst themselves, phones were being flagrantly checked, the rudeness from the stage was essentially being responded to in kind.

Sadly, the performers didn’t really seem to have the faintest idea what to do with all this negative energy they’d produced. Apparently this wasn’t the aim at all. They all looked a bit uncomfortable. In between trying to shout lines aggressively at us, they looked a bit worried by the number of people leaving. Again, it’s hard to convey how clear it was that this wasn’t the point. Even writing this, it sounds interesting, and perhaps like the sort of thing that Forced Entertainment might have made, and which would have been good.

But, still the performers continued to act in a way that was at once unwatchable and perfectly suited to their obnoxious text. And still people kept on filing out of the theatre.

It’s very hard to pin down precisely what it was that pissed everyone off more: the fact that nothing about the material being presented was anything new or the fact that the whole thing was just so childishly obnoxious. It was one of those pieces that, if it had been created by students whose sole purpose had been an experiment in getting a reaction out of an audience, provoking real hostility, then one might have been able to credit them with having at least achieved this aim, regardless of one’s view of such a purpose. But the problem here was that the piece really did seem to think it was being clever.

Infrequently there were bits where the performers on stage broke into ironic (or perhaps it wasn’t ironic) applause. They encourage the audience to join in. The audience joined in. We were still being asked questions. Still no one had really responded. No. That’s not true. At one point in the middle a girl in the front row had been asked what her name was and she’d said. No one else had said anything in response to anything.

It was during one of the rounds of applause that I decided to see what level of engagement was being asked for. The applause stopped. I didn’t. I kept clapping for a bit. I was interested to see what would happen next. I was also interested to know whether anyone else would join in. If I’m entirely honest, part of me hoped that if everyone had immediately joined in, then we might be able to close the show early with a display of group solidarity suggesting that the show was over whether the performers liked it or not.

The performers looked surprised. I had at least assumed they’d have some sort of contingency plan for dealing with responses from the audience. After all, this is a text which asks between 20 and 60 questions a minute for an hour. And apparently there’s no back up plan as to what to do if anyone actually responds all the accusations of being bovine and empty-headed by refusing to play along.

This demonstrated the piece’s greatest and most ugly weakness. Here was a show all about accusing the audience of being weak and complicit in their own servitude and of not having a clue, and yet it could only present this argument if the audience were polite enough to sit there and let that accusation be the case.

And even this might be fine if the audience were meant or allowed to challenge these accusations, but since the show’s producer later told me that it wasn’t meant to be what happened, then it really is impossible to see what conceivable value there was to any of it.

I shan’t even go into the extent to which it felt embarrassing watching Dutch performers doing such a terrible show that about totalitarianism, homophobia or state interrogation in front of a largely Estonian (and other Baltic states) audience who have only been free of Soviet occupation for 19 years. The combination of terrible text and terrible performances coupled with distinct impression that these people really thought they were doing us a favour by telling us about what a terrible place they thought the world was only heightened one’s embarrassment for them. The sheer arrogance of it was quite breathtaking.

The most worrying thing was that afterwards the company really didn’t seem to have grasped just how utterly, terribly, offensively, dreadfully misguided the whole thing was. Apparently it had worked perfectly well in a smaller space in Portugal. Excuses about the size of the venue and the audience’s comprehension of the (poorly delivered) English text abounded.

I hope that on sober, mature reflection, the company bin the project entirely and start something else altogether. It is a piece of theatre with absolutely no value whatsoever. It is trite, simplistic and patronising. It doesn’t understand its own relationship to the stage or to its audience.

Sometimes, the only constructive criticism possible is: You’re wrong. This doesn’t work on any level. Please, please stop.

Big Bang – Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio – Baltoscandal 6

[written for Baltoscandali Ajaleht]
[the above pic is from Quesne's previous show, but still gives a rough idea of the sort of staging. Will post a properly relevant photo as and when I get hold of one]

It is possible for a performance to remind you of a show you haven’t seen? For reasons that I find slightly suspect, Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio’s Big Bang reminded me hugely of Forced Entertainment’s World in Pictures. Which I’ve never seen.

Ok, there are some good reasons. For a start Big Bang seems to have a similar topic: a kind of potted history of humanity -- or perhaps the planet -- from the ice age up to our own ecologically concerned times. I say “seems” – the work doesn’t exactly bend over backwards to fix or underline what various sequences actually mean/represent.

There’s also the comparable sort-of-clownish, sort-of-ramshackle sense of humour and aesthetic: the piece starts, for example, with performers shuffling about on their hands and knees, first under white plastic sheeting before emerging from under this to similarly shuffle under white and then brown fake furs, suggesting a rudimentary vision of ice caps melting, polar bears evolving and then brown bears or perhaps walruses turning up. The stage lights conspire with this impression, rapidly suggesting suns rising and setting, while a smoke machine delivers stuff that could easily be read as arctic mists. All this is also very funny and, when the bears start speaking with cute French accents, tres charment.

Quickly, the bears evolve into cavemen wearing furs in some cases, and a small group of apparently multicultural French designers in others. The stage rapidly fills with the detritus of ancient and modern life: wood fires, an upturned car and, for some reason, an ever-growing pile of inflatable dinghies. The cavemen sit in the upturned car reading graphic novels drinking Lilt. Such is progress.

The back wall of the stage is lowered to reveal a further similarly sized stage behind it, this time in green. Water rains down from a shower hidden in the ceiling. There’s more smoke. Music plays. Some players don green overalls, blending into the backdrop and performing obscure tasks. A ‘cello is moved across the back of scene. A small heap of material at the back of the growing onstage lake becomes a silhouetted island, vaguely discernable through the mist. The scale bounces between miniature and actual. Other performers wear space helmets and pose tableaux. A small lonely astronaut sits in the abandoned overturned car downstage reading a graphic novel. Inflatable dinghies pile up in the pond.

It is uplifting, optimistic, funny, pretty, wistful and melancholy. Sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once.

There’s a sense that there might be the tale of a society naïvely driving itself toward eco-catastrophe though joie-de-innovation in amongst all the fun and romance, but it could equally claim to be the world’s most innovative staging of The Tempest. There’s care and attention behind the creation of the stage-pictures which repays whatever level of investment you might bring to bear on reading them, and enough archetypes at play to offer any number of satisfying variations of the story they might be telling.


above: the ante-room of the venue "Baltoscandal 6" - a massive deserted factory on the outskirts of Rakvere.

Muki Munad – Cabaret Rhizome – Väikese Maja Kolakamber

[written for Baltoscandali Ajaleht]



If part of the job of the theatre critic is to explain the context of work (or at least their perception of a work’s context) to their readers, then in one’s own country, this is pretty standard stuff. Indeed, familiarity with current climates and forms of work is the backbone of one’s practice.

Watching work from another country is more complex. Doubly so in the context of seeing national work at an international festival. Does the work’s inclusion point to it symbolising a particular apex of a national form, or is it, even in the context of its home country, unusual work which has been selected for that very reason?

It doesn’t help that Cabaret Rhizome’s Muki Munad (or Muki’s Balls in English – Muki being the most popular Estonian name for a dog and “balls” carrying the same full set of connotations as it does in English from “courage” through “nonsense” to “testicles”) has to be one of the oddest things you’re likely to see in any language for quite a while.

It’s a kind of physical comedy show about the end of mankind, as enacted by four guys in white dressing gowns, one guy dressed as a dog and a fairly sizeable white rooster bathed in red light.

Beyond post-Python clowning routines revolving around some schtick with hard-boiled eggs, a much-fetishised wig and dress standing in for womankind, and a lot of Sesame Street-style running around and screaming (think: Beaker meets Beckett), it’s very hard to know what the thing’s driving at. Is this simple love of absurdity for absurdity’s sake, or do the stentorian narrative voiceovers – apparently delivered by the aforementioned rooster – signify something more satirical or philosophical?

There seems to be some sort of satire of gender politics or the eternal failure of the sexes to comprehend one another thrown into the mix, but whether this is really meant to be taken seriously or is just a springboard for more mucking about is unclear.

Apparently the company have their own space in Tallinn in which small audiences are sat in comfy sofas and get to watch the entertainment as if in the comfort of their own living room. Perhaps this is the most significant missing bit of context. Seeing it while crammed past capacity into a Very, Very Hot Room and sandwiched between other shows with barely time to draw breath, perhaps some of the necessary relaxation of the original article is lost.

Nevertheless, it’s testament to something about that show that one leaves such conditions in a slightly better mood, if not, perhaps, much wiser.