Forest Fringe at the Gate – 3

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Chris Thorpe - What I Will Do When They Come To Take My Guns and
There Has Possibly Been An Incident 

Tom Penn

TORYCORE

Hitherto, the Forest Fringe's residency at the Gate had been a bit, well, polite.

Polite isn't a bad thing. Hell, content-wise it's still been pretty high-octane, subversive stuff, but as Lyn Gardner's review sort-of hinted, the first couple of days at least didn't *look* so *very* *formally* challenging.

Wednesday night – Night 3 – changed all that.

Chances are, if you're reading this you're also following someone on Twitter who spent much of yesterday periodically exclaiming things like: “Box Office lines close at 5:30 so get in quick for £5 tickets to tonight's @ForestFringe death metal budget speech! Quote 'T*******'”...


As it happens, the first half of the night still followed the now-quite-familiar person-on-stage-behind-a-mic format. Which, in this context, put like that, sounds like I'm being disparaging, but I'm absolutely not.

First up was Chris Thorpe, doing two of his most recent bits of work. The first, What I Will Do When They Come To Take My Guns was first seen at the Edgelands flash-conference hosted at FF last year. The second was one third of a new text, There has Possibly Been an Incident, for three voices that Thorpe is developing at .Manchester Royal Exchange

What I Will Do... is the piece of work by Thorpe I know best by quite some margin for the simple reason that there's a video of him reading most of it (the beginning and end, a small bit of the middle is missing) on YouTube (more on this subject in today's essay). As such, seeing it *live* again is both a bit of a treat and also quite odd.

What I Will Do... is inspired by the book The Turner Diaries – basically a cult racist/fascist novel from America, written in the late-seventies/early-eighties - and it is Thorpe's writing at its tautest, and most pointed. The refrain of the piece: “I want to try and write like the fascists do” is hammered home again and again. It is blunt, ugly and threatening. At first, it's almost as if there's no character and no story; just a disturbing challenge from the man sat in the chair in front of you; a challenge to your assumed leftie liberalism (hell, it presents a challenge to anyone on the left of Nick Griffin, which I suppose probably also includes most Tories). It's also an attack on the point of art. It rubbishes metaphor; it bins *uncertainty*. It yearns for things that are called the thing they are. And it is frighteningly powerful.

There is also a story, though, a story about blowing something up. And there is a character, because they're sat in a jacuzzi while narrating it, and because Thorpe isn't a fascist. But it's a terrifyingly effective bit of writing nonetheless.

I'd quite like it to be longer. Long enough to make it into a stand-alone show. I'd also be really interested to see what a director (probably a German director) could do with it. While it works beautifully as a man in a chair reading to you, I think it could easily be made to work brilliantly in a totally different way. I'm not sure if that is strictly relevant here, though.


Although I suppose it is, since Thorpe's second piece is currently being developed with the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. And, here, in the environs of FF@TG is performed by its author sitting in a chair with a microphone.

To be fair, Thorpe is a superb performer. And I'd argue it *is* *performance*. Not “acting” as such, but he's definitely a cultivated a way of *being* on stage (how I'd differentiate between that and *just reading on stage* is hard to say, though). He has a ritual of taking all the stuff out of his pockets before he starts. The first time you see him do it it obviously makes *sense*, but when you've seen him do it a few times, you maybe appreciate that there's something very specific about it. Maybe, in part, it's to do with detaching *himself on stage* with the practical necessities of *himself in the real world* (Pseuds' Corner, here I come, I know). It's worth noting that Thorpe does also have a brilliant voice; deep, growly and, on stage at least, almost perpetually sardonic, with a broad, flat Manchester accent. It's hard to think of his writing being read any other way – 'though I'm sure different performers would bring many excellent, new qualities to it.

Anyway. The second piece was one of the “voices” (of three) from There has Possibly Been an Incident, which “is kind of *about* heroism, I guess” Thorpe explained, by way of introduction.

It gradually describes being stood in a crowd, essentially watching that man go to stand in front of those tanks in Tiananmen Square.

It's an incredibly powerful bit of work, but it's also brilliantly detailed. The story fixates on the white plastic bag that the man in front of the tanks is carrying (Exactly. Go back an look at the photo, it's there, but I'd never consciously noticed it before. Had you?). It's precisely this fixing on detail that lifts the writing well clear of just describing something emotive for a cheap effect. Rather it fully re-makes your relationship with this iconic image. And, ultimately, I guess, it makes you think about how it affects you, and everyone else, ethically. It invokes molecules, distant stars and the whole universe and then up-ends the entire edifice to re-focus on “a man standing in front of a fucking tank”.


Knowing that we had T******* still to come, by the end of Chris's set I thought I'd pretty much figured out Wednesday's thing. This was nasty, hard-edged politics night. No punches were to be pulled. Difficult things were going to be looked at. Hard. Straight in the face.


Tom Penn pretty much single-handedly destroyed this thesis within about a minute of taking to the stage. And kept on destroying it throughout his half-hour long story Some Things Are Lost.

Actually, that's not strictly fair. I reckon Some Things... *is* actually about some pretty difficult stuff. But this was strictly the personal rather than the political. Also, it is just about the most middle-class thing I have ever seen in my life. Which isn't a criticism, merely an observation.

Indeed, the fact that Penn (middle name Grenville, we learn) could hold his head up, sandwiched between Thorpe's mordant, threatening stories and L___'s barely contained fury, and tell an engaging story about losing his teddy bear (who is called Gladstone) is a very real testament to his considerable talent. The piece starts with him doing THE WHOLE OF THE BEGINNING OF THE LION KING. Singing, describing the stuff, doing all the animals in different voices. The works.

I've never seen the Lion King.

Plainly it would have helped *a bit* - if only with the comedy-of-recognition and appreciating just how precise/acute his take on it was – if I had. But, for the record, you don't need to have seen The Lion King to get an awful lot out of Some Things...

It's a deceptively simple tale, albeit one with a few surprising, and not-quite-ironed-out twists. It basically describes Tom moving out of his parents' place, getting a flat of his own, losing his teddy bear, and then the rest of his possessions, and then his dad finding them all again. Which all feels like a very big metaphor. Mixed in with all this, he tells us about the first time he saw the Lion King in the cinema.

On one level, this *could* be a startlingly frank (if elliptical) account of someone a particularly nasty bout of depression. On the surface, however, it is also almost studiedly apolitical. Which felt a bit odd, in the context not only of Night 3 of FF@TG, but in the context of the week. Considered alongside Goode's Infinite Lives from the night before, for example, just sticking the Lion King into a story, without really unpacking the whole Disney thing, leaves it looking a bit, well, *uninterrogated*. That said, I'm not sure a lot of detailed socio-economic worrying would necessarily sit well within the frame of the story. Still, it feels like it'd be good to be able to feel that it had at least been thought about. The story, even the manner of delivery, all hinges on a level of almost total innocence, but in the context of last night, it did also feel a bit like an object lesson in good people doing nothing. And we all know what that leads to.

But, on the other hand, a) Tom Penn is *very* talented, b) he is also stupidly young (23, I think), c) he *is* dealing with big themes – possibly depression; definitely the death of a parent; hell, even “growing up” is a pretty big deal.

It was also interesting to note that while plainly the piece sat a bit strangely in the overall shape of Night 3, it did also contain unexpected resonances and echoes of earlier pieces. Penn was apparently wearing his father's suit, just as Alexander Kelly had been wearing his grandfather's. Where Chris Thorpe had earlier described distant stars failing to care about a man standing in front of a fucking tank, here Penn quoted two characters in the Lion King (no, I don't know which ones, I've never seen the Lion King) staring up at the stars imagining them to be fireflies stuck to the big dark covering that had been thrown over the world.

But, yes. Some Things Are Lost is a lovely, lovely piece of work by a stupidly talented young performer, and I suspect it will go on to have a rather successful future – perhaps in Edinburgh, or on tour, either expanded, or alongside something else.


Then there was an interval. And there was also a genuine buzz about the place.

After all, it's not every day you get to hear a budget speech delivered as death metal.


T******* is the brain-child of ever-brilliant L and, well, it does what it says on the tin. What the tin says is: "George Osborne's budget speech delivered as death metal".

Actually, I'd dispute “death metal”. There are elements of that, but actually, a lot more of it sounds like the proto-industrial music of Throbbing Gristle crossed with the “power electronics” band White House [WARNING: White House are very unpleasant indeed. They sound horrible. What they sing about is horrible. And there's an outside chance they're not joking. Open link at your own discretion], while E, when not doing the whole Death Growl thing adopts a vocal style that reminded me of Joy de Vivre or Eve Libertine from Crass.

Whatever the musical lineage, the net result was pretty awesome. Given the project was thrown together, or at least rehearsed, for only the smallest amount of time, it feels like an idea that has legs. It was also amazing to actually see something so out-and-out *alternative*/*difficult* being done in a British theatre. This is the kind of thing you usually have to go to Germany for :-)

I kind of wish Lyn Gardner had seen this night, rather than Monday's. On one level, yes, it still feels a bit like a retro- Avant Garde, but here we're looking straight at the ICA circa 1977, rather than Left-Bank 1959. In a funny way, though, given that Britain is currently staring down a massive recession under a disastrous Tory government (*they've* clearly given up on the whole coalition thing, so I'm damned if I know why I should keep up the pretence), it makes a horrible sense that the sound of protest, rejection and disgust at the government does sound like this.

There's possibly some merit in asking, re: T******* (TC) - “what's it *for*?” And, while I don't think Art (or noise terrorism, for that matter) has to be *for* anything, TC does feel like it achieves a certain, what? Catharsis? An expression of disgust? Necessary venting of feelings? At its best, it feels almost like a distillation of the myriad wellsprings of last summer's riots into pointed sonic form – the roots and causes of of all the violence being named within the sound of an inferno. Some other bits probably needed a bit of working on, though.

What's excellent about T******* is that it doesn't actually contain any *analysis*. By simply repeating from Hansard what the chancellor said, it leaves people free to draw their own conclusions. If they can still think amidst the ear-bleeding noise. (Yes, ok, I'm being slightly disingenuous; the, uh, *accompaniment* does slightly lend weight to the idea that the budget speech wasn't an entirely good thing)

I really hope E (and Chris Thorpe, and bassist (+ laptop/electronics/programming?) Steve Lawson) get to do it again sometime, somewhere. I can imagine it going down a storm late at night at Latitude, for example...


Anyway, here's a couple of snippets from the show:

Beginning:

[temporarily removed]

End:

[temporarily removed]

And this one is a list of peers who voted for the NHS reform bill and their links to private healthcare companies.

[you guessed it]

Also, rather marvellously, the full text of What I Will Do... is online here, although I reckon, if you're going to read it, you should probably* watch these excerpts of Chris reading it first...

*re: “probably” - see essay below for more detailed take on pros and cons.

The Lady's Not For Tubeing*

[Not quite finished, but kind of up-for-discussion already...]


The thing stopping me writing today's review – or at least, the thing by which I'll get massively side-tracked if I keep on trying to write the review without addressing this thing separately – is the videoing of *live* performances.

On one level, it's a bit of an old chestnut. The Guardian blog has covered it umpteen times (most recently when some lucky swine made £87 by writing 500 words around a point I made for free in three words in a comment section. Hem, hem), but it's not exactly the “rights” or “wrongs” of videoing a live performance that interests me here.

I've just got to the bit in my review where I say (well, as it currently reads):

“What I Will Do... is the piece of work by Thorpe I know best by quite some margin for the simple reason that there's a video of him reading most of it (the beginning and end; a small bit of the middle is missing) on YouTube. As such, seeing it *live* again is both a bit of a treat and also quite odd...”

Part of the reason it's odd is because I know it so well. But, unlike seeing someone read poem or short story or even playing a part in a play that you've read hundreds of times, what's odd here is that I *know* a particular *performance* of the piece.

The thing it's most like – to my mind – is getting to know the recorded versions of songs by a particular band. The album versions, as it were. These are usually, or at least used to be, the first versions of songs that you got to know really well. Then, after the album is released, the band go on tour and you hear (and see, for the first time) slightly different, *live* versions of the songs.

Or maybe you got the album of a band from ages ago and spent ages listening to it, and then the band re-form, or release a new album and tour again. (Or, if you're a fan of the Sisters of Mercy, maybe they release absolutely zip for twenty years and *still* do the odd tour to keep themselves in fags and drug-money).

Anyway, the point is, rather than just knowing What I Will Do...” as a text, I know it (primarily, solely) as a *recording*.

And seeing it *live* is like seeing a band play a song you know well slightly differently.

And I kind of like that.


Ok, so this is going to turn into a bit of a thing about the rights and wrongs of videoing live performance.


First, an obvious point:

I tend to agree that *straight* British theatre tends to make for pretty lousy filming. And I'd argue that that's not so much because of its unique properties of liveness, or the necessity of being in the same room as it to experience its full power, so much as the fact that quite a lot of it is like telly anyway. As such, actually effectively transposing it onto the same medium as telly (by which I suppose I mean *the screen of my laptop*, on which I now watch everything from YouTube, all DVDs and all TV programmes via iPlayer, 4oD, NetFlix, LoveFim and various other less legally sound sources) just tends to make it look like a less-good version of telly. There are exceptions, I'm sure. Although, the most interesting of these – let's say Katie Mitchell for old times' sake – often already incorporate a meta-level of filming anyway. I'm not sure, for example, *where* you'd even point a camera to try to capture everything that's going on onstage in, say, her production of Attempts On Her Life or Miss Julie.



I think one reason I've got more relaxed about the idea of filming performances, though, is the two years I spent in Germany. The Germans film quite a lot of their theatre productions. For broadcast. They've got a channel that actually shows quite a lot of contemporary productions. Another reason to be jealous of them, yes. However, it's also perhaps important to note that a lot of German theatre looks very different to TV naturalism (and indeed, different to British Theatre). It might also be significant that, in the main, German TV is considered (by pretty much every German I ever met) to be vastly inferior to British TV.

There's also an interesting thing about the style of acting. Much (most?) German acting owes at least *something* to that school of post-Brechtianism that I've probably tried to describe elsewhere here about a hundred times. That is to say, it is frequently very stylised. As such, it seems much less problematic to film it – at least as a document of what's going on – because there's less of a crunch between scales. That is to say, British actors in naturalistic plays suffer for being filmed because a camera close up to them can often rather tear a hole in the odd, and usually uncommented fact that they are actually having to speak PRETTY LOUDLY to REACH THE BACK OF THE CIRCLE when they are only supposed to be in a room the size of, well, a room.

However, these issues don't apply so much to things like Chris reading us his stories.

Yes, it's much better to be in the room. There's no way of replacing or replicating the sheer excitement of the shiver and chill that ran round the Forest Fringe hall while he as read What I Will Do... for the first time, when he said “ I want to try and write like the fascists do”.

At the same time, it's pretty much the only thing I saw in Edinburgh last year that I've been able to since *share* with friends.

[argh. Have run out of time. To be continued and concluded...]

In the mean time, here's the video...



*I apologise for the dreadful not-quite-pun in the title. I blame TORYCORE

Forest Fringe at the Gate – 2

[still feels a bit unfinished, but there's plenty here to be getting on with]

Chris Thorpe

Chris Thorpe and Andy Field

Chris Goode


After Monday night's somewhat packed, frenetic programme, Tuesday's FF@TG feels like a slightly more orderly affair. There's a long-ish story from week-curator Chris Thorpe, originally commissioned as part of Paines Plough's Come To Where I'm From season, a shorter work that Thorpe wrote for the first Forest Fringe in 2007, a you-can-still-smell-the-wrapping fresh piece by Thorpe and Field written yesterday afternoon and then Chris Goode performing his 2008 piece Infinite Lives.

It's interesting to note, then, that the two main pieces of the evening actually originated well away from Forest Fringe and as such the evening is partly just a retrospective of rarely seen work made by artists who have also appeared at FF. Not that there's anything wrong with that. At all. After all, FF has always presented pieces made by its various artists which have also been shown in other places, as well as originating new work. And, hell, I was very grateful for the opportunity to see the work.

Also fascinating was the way that the four pieces, when presented together, as last night, revealed some interesting synchronicities (almost certainly the wrong word, since they were written separately over a five-year period). If the first night could be seen to have loosely been united by ideas of travel and migration, place and belonging; Night 2 went from localism to globalisation via violence, aeroplane crashes and suicide.


The deal with Come To Where I'm From was that the newly-re-engergised, New Writing touring company Paines Plough commissioned a bunch of Britain's leading New/young/emerging/emerged writers to write a short story about where they were from and read it out themselves at a series of events across the country. As such, it's great to see Thorpe's Manchester Royal Exchange contribution get its first London outing.

The story of Thorpe/Manchester (how I wish experimental writers gave things titles/told me what the things' titles were) is as follows [SPOILER UNTIL END OF PARA]: some blokes get pissed after a game of football. One of the blokes falls asleep in the middle of the sitting room with his mouth open. The others take turns at dangling their bollocks over his mouth. Bloke wakes up. Goes home. Gets a golf club. Returns. And smashes one of them in the face with the golf club.

The story is told from in first person from the perspective of the sleeping man/man-with-golf-club and lurches with the same sickening drunken logic from very funny to incredibly tense very quickly indeed.

Yesterday I suggested Thorpe's prose style shouldn't remind me of Bret Easton Ellis. Last night's first piece made me think more of a cross between Chuck Palahniuk and the narrator of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - itchy violence related with autistic attention to detail (yes, I know it's probably somehow wrong to use “autistic” as a shorthand like that, but then, it's a shorthand people understand, and I don't think them understanding makes them bad people, so... And in this context, it feels apt).

It's a sort of style built on repeated, spiralling clarification: “Statement. Full stop. Not that I'm saying ___; or ____; or ____”. It's very funny, but also painful, and at times feels genuinely risky – having a narrator who does step over lines, who does lose our sympathy, who does go too far. One particular digression about how the narrator's friends are laughing like monkeys veers off into the difficult observation that the narrator hates how society has got so that every time someone says “monkey” people think they're talking about black people. It's catch-your-breath, did-he-*really*-just-say-that? stuff. It's also observed with a forensic acuity.


Thorpe's second piece is older; from the first Forest Fringe in 2007, in fact. A nice, unexpected bonus of getting to see Thorpe doing bits and pieces from across his career – at least since FF opened – is that you get to watch his style gradually evolve. Thorpe/2007 is a short piece which I'd say owes a fair amount stylistically to list-based writing of Tim Etchells.

For those of you who don't know, Tim Etchells is one of the founding members of the seminal Sheffield-based performance company Forced Entertainment. He's also possibly one of the least-acknowledged most-influential writers-for-stage Britain has. Because Forced Ents (FE) are primarily seen as makers of “devised” work, and because their work *is* collaborative, Etchells the writer seems to get overlooked as a phenomenon. Which is pretty stupid, since he's one of the best we've got.

Anyway, he (Etchells) has got one particular mode of writing which is essentially a list. And it's the length of the list, and the dizzying array of real and imagined elements on the list, that take it from being a list and into the territory of being something like a set of coordinates for a story. Or at least that's kind of how it feels to me.

For my money, Thorpe/2007 operates in the same sort of way. It's tentatively framed as the contents of a black blox recorder retrieved from inside a boy who blows up at 37,000ft. (exploding planes seem to feature heavily in Thorpe's short-fiction repertoire – perhaps an inevitable consequence of post-9/11 fiction, perhaps not). The list is such that it delights and disturbs in equal measure, with uncomfortable juxtapositons, improbable inventions and bleak jokes.


Thorpe and Field's piece which follows Thorpe/2007 was inspired by Field being delayed on the underground on the way to the theatre by “A person under a train”. “The worst sentence in the English language” observes a deadpan Thorpe as Field is fiddling around in the lighting box before the piece starts.

The piece itself is essentially another list. This time of, I suppose, possible alternative phrases for “a person under a train”. It veers around from the imaginative and poetic through social comment to the mordant and black; at once compassionate and callous; trying to conceive of the enormity of a sudden suicide, reflecting both the failure of language and society; all the while placing it in the all too familiar surrounds of London's Underground; a small angry, urgent, urban hymn to despair and the need to remember our humanity.


Coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, Chris Goode's Infinitive Lives opens on a tube.

Jon is drunk, middle-aged, and alone in a carriage on the Metropolitan Line with a young man sitting a few seats away whom he quite fancies. Jon is drunk because it was his leaving drinks after work. He's left his job to write a novel. A gay, sci-fi novel about a pair of lovers in the future called Bastian and _______, who have gills. And vaginas.

Apparently the original version of Infinite Lives played a couple of dates in Bradford and a couple in Oxford as a *full production* in 2008, with Unlimited Theatre's Jon Spooner playing Jon (hence me assuming that's the spelling of the character's name is the same). I didn't see that, but knowing Spooner as a performer, I imagine it was fairly different.

However, Goode is a phenomenally good performer of his own work (and other people's work, thinking about it). His introduction of the piece; [I'll have to paraphrase:] “Look, the person in this story isn't me. I'm going to be *playing a character*, but I can't be bothered to actually, y'know, act, so can *you* just pretend?” manages to distil into impossible simplicity so much of what he's written about performance, and of *being* on stage, and about liveness that you almost giggle at how brilliant he is.

And the text. My God.

As the title suggests, Infinite Lives plays with a pretty big canvas. If you were to try and break it down, you could say that it's concerned with numbers and technology; about “the future” - both imagined and actual; about eroticism and pornography, desire and love; about the internet and travel; about the ethics of globalisation and about the necessity of hope. I guess. That's some of it, anyway.

The title itself comes from a cheat-code for Jet Set Willy that gives the player infinite lives. As Jon explains, you'd think this would be good, but since it's possible to get onto a screen and fall off a ledge, the game will only keep resetting Willy to the top of his fall, so that his infinite lives are spent dying. Over and over again.

After Jon has quit his work, he spends more and more time on the internet, mostly going and watching webcam porn shows featuring a boy called Carlos. Who isn't really called Carlos. Jon even has the long number on his credit cared memorised. Carlos is in L.A. Sometimes they even spend private sessions together and when they're not both jerking off, they actually talk about themselves to each other.

Jon also talks about The Future. The future that is now behind us and that never happened. The future as imagined in the 1950s about the impossibly distant year 2000, where everything basically looked like the 1950s, except that it was encased in plastic bubbles.

At the same time, Jon's existence is incredibly “futuristic” – that is to say: contemporary. He spends his life online; all his friends are on Skype; he gets his food delivered to his door; and there's The Internet. Which no one saw coming. And trainers made god-knows-where, by god-knows-who. And computers, whose parts come from God-knows-where; and which are assembled in China by God-knows-who.

And there's Carlos. Who clearly has problems of his own.

And then there's suddenly a vision of these hundreds of thousands of lives being lived around the peripheries of our capitalism, whose days are like those of Jet Set Willy with the infinite lives, lives that get reset every day just so they can start falling and dying all over again.

At points, Infinite Lives is about as bleak as anything you'll ever see.

Surprisingly, Goode manages to tag a happy ending onto it, which on one level feels like a relief – it could just as easily have gone the other way - but ultimately, after invoking *so much* discomfort and suffering, it is a bitter sweetness.

Nevertheless, Infinite Lives is a spectacularly rich piece of work. Right up there with Goode's best. It is frankly ridiculous that last night represented its London premiere, and remains one of only a handful of performances the script has *ever* had.

Yes, on one level, this demonstrates another facet of just how useful this season of FF at the Gate is, but it also suggests something rather depressing/worrying about the state of British theatre more generally if scripts this good are somehow not being afforded much wider attention.

Les idées claires avec des images vagues

This is probably a bad idea, but.

Well.

Alongside trying to review everything at Forest Fringe at the Gate (FF@TG) I'm going to see if I can also write a “proper blog piece” every day about some aspect or other of the enterprise that catches my attention and that would doubtless derail that day's entire review if I tried to deal with it within the context of a review. So, instead, I'll be promising myself that I can get to *that interesting thing I spotted/thought of/etc./whatevs* once I've got the review proper written.

I realise this flies in the face of a lot of the brave/ill-advised things I might have said in the past about wanting to experiment with the way that reviews are written. Hopefully I can still do that too. But just without a lot of side-issue verbiage clogging up the actual critique. (Yeah. Get me. I know.)

Anyway, today's piece is, foolishly, me having a look at Lyn Gardner's review of the first night of Forest Fringe.

Her review is here.

Mine, if you haven't seen it, is here.


I'll start by noting that I'm not going to “have a go”. In many ways, I really feel for Lyn. After all, she's pretty much championed Forest Fringe since the word go, and almost certainly wasn't obliged to come along on the evening of Bank Holiday Monday to have a look at this incarnation.

I also feel for her word count. Her review comes in at 296 words. And that's to cover not only the first night, but the next eleven as well. I've gone over 6,000 on the first two days. Doubtless some people might wish that I'd written rather less so that they could have time to read it. Print it out at work and save yourself having to read the Evening Standard on the way to the Gate, I say.

However, while I realise Gardner is landed with a nigh-on impossible task in trying both to review one night of incredibly varied work, and preview another 11 days of largely unseen material, I do wonder if the result does more harm than good.

Granted, Gardner (it feels absurdly arms-length to keep calling Lyn “Gardner”, but I think for form's sake I'll have to stick with it) is well within her rights not to especially go for anything she happened to see on Monday, and to make any comments she sees fit. The problem is, those bloody star-ratings.

Since the programme of FF@TG is different, totally different, Every. Single. Night. what we have here is essentially a preview with a star-rating.

I think that's a difficulty.

Now, granted that's really a problem for the editors/arts editors, rather than the individual critic, but it underlines once again (as if it ever needed underlining again), that the star-rating system has a deadening effect on the prose it accompanies.

What Lyn actually “says” is fair enough. Three stars, as an assessment of roughly, what? 22Hrs? 30 hours of totally unseen work... Well, it's a problem, isn't it? (Not least because I'm emphatically *not* spending 12 nights of my life watching a three star show. a) that's not what I'm doing, b) that's not how it feels either).

But at the same time, would it have been better if she'd stayed away? If two weeks at the Gate Theatre had been completely ignored by the *whole* of the national press? (surprised not to have seen the Standard at least put in an appearance, on that score. But, by the same token, having noted the Sisyphean difficulties in trying to review and preview and assess twelve different nights on the same night while under the cosh of the star-system, they might have decided the game wasn't worth the candle and written it off as a bad idea).

So, yeah. I've just set up a situation where literally no one can win unless they're prepared to do what I'm doing and seeing all 12 nights (well, that's the plan, anyway).

And I suppose that's why I think I'm clever. That said, I think it would be amazing if a national critic *did* decide that these were the next twelve most important nights in London Theatre (precisely, there's also a whole rest-of-country out there that they're theoretically obliged to cover) and came to every single one and over-nighted them as if they were some sort of Live Art Proms (which, essentially, they are).

---

Since Gardner's is the only review I have to engage with, I'd also like to spend a bit of time with some of the stuff she says.

Partly in the spirit of, well, I guess being the “embedded” critic at FF@TG, and well, partly, because it's more interesting when reviews actualy *do* spark some sort of conversation in “print”.

The first thing I'm interested by is the way in which Gardner configures the Gate as somewhere:

“where, for all its many possible configurations, the relationship between audience and stage remains one of spectator and performer.”

As a basic point, I'll take that. At least, as far as Monday night went, there was a certain authority-of-the-stage going on. That said, it's a pity that Gardner didn't stick around for the quiz, as she'd have seen just how flimsy that sense of “authority” can be and just how quickly a space can lose its spectator/performer dynamic.

I do find myself wondering if her view hasn't got it slightly wrong, and that it was simply that the work presented on Monday night wound up *asking* to be viewed in that way.

It was interesting to me, for example, that in the first half of Monday night, the audience remained lit thoroughout and in the second part it was in darkness (I think that's right).

“That audience-performer relationship may well be smashed in the course of a 12-day programme”

Obviously I'll have to wait and see too, although I suspect TORYCORE might have a fair stab at it tonight...

Of the performers, Gardner characterises them as “all... prodding away at the nature of theatre itself” having previously noted “there is a world of difference between listening to a story read in a room and hearing it read from a stage”.

One thing that does occur to me at this point is that it's Pretty Unusual to see someone just sit behind as desk, or in a chair, and just read/tell you a story. Full Stop. I mean, it's well outwith the usual boundaries of what gets presented at, say, the NT, the RSC or the Royal Court. On Monday night, I'd say “the nature of theatre itself” had been given a pretty solid prod, even if there have been more *interactive* nights at the theatre and at FF.

I'm also not wholly sure I agree that it was so very different experiencing Chris Thorpe read me the same story on Monday night as he had in Edinburgh three years ago. He sat in a chair, had a microphone and was spot-lit on both occasions; I was sat on a chair in the comparative gloom. Twice. I didn't *particularly* feel a difference.

I should note at this point that I was sat a few rows further back than Gardner, and as such, thinking about it, was probably on a level with the stage, whereas the performers would have been looming a bit more over her. Maybe that plays a part too. Interesting.

At the same time, I do wonder if it's necessarily entirely fair to judge FF@TG simply as not being in the same space as FF. Not that this is necessarily what Gardner has done here, but.


Perhaps the bit with which I actually do disagree is:

“curation is an art, and even the experimental can sometimes feel a little old-fashioned. It would only have required everyone to don turtleneck sweaters and smoke Gitanes for Monday night's dauntingly word-heavy programme of work, which included poetry and earnest performance lectures, to feel like a Left Bank gathering circa 1959”

Not least because I *was* wearing a roll-neck and would have been smoking had fire regulations permitted.

But, silliness aside, well a) I think “dauntingly word-heavy” is a shame. I'd have run with something more like “surprisingly text-heavy”. Because FF doesn't have much of a reputation for its text work. Which, thinking about it, is i) strange, and ii) a pity. Because, after all, most of the artists appearing this week have done their thing at Forest. And *their thing* has often been, well, just saying the words wot they've written.

To be honest, if anything, I really welcome this facet of FF getting a whole week's worth of explicit promotion. In the past, I've worried slightly about the creeping effect of The New Twee. Of a bit too much lo-fi cutesiness. Of a bit too much goofing around making sweet shows which largely side-step the uglier bits of life.

Damnit, I like the blackness and the word-heavy and the smoking. And, yeah, the knitwear that goes with it.

However, b) Well, I didn't think any of the actual *writing* was old fashioned. Or 1959-ish. At all. Or the mode of presentation.

And, lest we forget, in 1959, In Britain, we we most piddling about with Arnold bleedin' Wesker and John bloody Osborne. And the mainstream has barely budged an inch here since. So, frankly, even if it were like the Left-Bank circa 1959, which it wasn't, that wouldn't be an especially bad thing.

I suppose I might be able to see what Gardner is driving at, but then I think perhaps she ansd I might part company when it came to picking our favourite FF acts. And, as I say, I think this acknowledgement of the darker side of experimental work is in fact long, long overdue. Indeed, it was something that bothered me a lot in Edinburgh last year – that everything seemed to have this comforting, home-baked quality to it. If this represents a bit of a fight-back against that tendency, or just an attempt to balance it out, then I'm all for it.

Forest Fringe at the Gate – 1

Alexander Kelly/Third Angel

Theron Schmidt

Yusra Warsama

Yusra Warsama and Chris Thorpe

Chris Thorpe



The most curious thing about entering the Gate for a Forest Fringe event is the still-tangible slight dis-juncture between the two entities. On this first night, the Gate's FOH/security chap is still stolidly blocking the stairs, implacably insisting people fill up every row, from the front, row by row. It's a far cry from the find-your-own-chair/floorspace ethos of the Edinburgh space. But Forest Fringe is a concept, not a venue, now, so one mustn't get hung up.

It's interesting, though, to see FF able to present itself without the adversity, or at the very least necessity, of which it has been making a virtue, if not an aesthetic, for so long.

It's interesting to see, for example, what might be construed as a “Forest Fringe lighting state”. Normally, for about half its Summer programme, this consists of *light streaming through massive windows in a big old church-like hall above a roomful of hippies*.

Tonight, the Gate's long, low, narrow black-box space is end-on (audience *toward* the lighting box, if you know the space and care about such details), and the lighting is minimal.

There's a single chair behind an awkward table/desk, a microphone and a projection screen.

The first piece of the first night – after we've been welcomed first by Haydon (Christopher), then by Field – is Alexander Kelly of Third Angel doing “Cape Wrath (work-just-about-in-progress)”. As you gather from the title, this is the very first outing for something Kelly thinks *might* turn into a show.

Third Angel's work varies enormously. The only comparison you could make between Presumption and Class of '76, What I Heard About The World and Where From Here? is “these are very different indeed”. Ok, that's flippant and possibly untrue, but, from *acted*, prop-heavy “play” to one man slide-slow, via messy devised postdrama and early “visual theatre”, it'd be hard to pin Third Angel down to a specific style.

Cape Wrath, in its present – i.e. entirely embryonic – form, is most like Class of '76 (which I first saw at Forest Fringe, fwiw). It is 42-year-old performer (and author) Kelly, recounting a true story about his actual life. At least we might as well assume that, since he's got photos and seems entirely guileless about the truthfulness of his enterprise. (perhaps this is naïve of me, though).

The story he's telling is about following in the footsteps of his grandfather to the most North-Westerly point of the British Isles, the titular and brilliantly named Cape Wrath in Scotland (I do hope I'm not going to now Google this when I've finished and discover he's made the whole thing up. It doesn't sound made-up, fwiw). And that's pretty much it. There are accompanying slides.

Kelly is a congenial, likeable stage presence; his West Midlands accent surprisingly comfy. He claims that he is actually wearing his, now deceased, grandfather's suit. We have no reason to doubt him. He tells us about reading his grandfather's diary, and I suspect the final few minutes of the show are him reading from an adapted version of this very diary.

So that's what the show does at the moment. It feels slightly wrong to describe more, since if this is a first-ever outing for it, then it's more or less certainly going to change.

For me, the strand that most stood out, and which seemed to be left relatively unexplored – or at least which was left hanging over the rest of the narrative, was Kelly's early observation that the anecdote that his grandfather told about visiting Cape Wrath largely glossed over all the actualité. While the reading of the diary does engage with that, it felt, to me, like that element could have been the subject of more speculation.

As it is, the piece still stands as a lovely series of moments meditating on remembrance and place, family and, well, Volk. But without being right-wing as those elements might suggest. There is something quite reassuring about the matter-of-fact way that small migrations – his grandfather from Scotland to the Midlands, the journeys made by various other travellers Kelly encounters, the fact that the woman he happens to sit next to on the coach is an English as Foreign Language Teacher. Subtly, the piece does present People not as anchored to Place, but as roaming free-agents who happen to end up in various spots, as exemplified by the couple who run the coffee shop at the end of Britain who now live in total isolation since the other families who lived there have all gradually moved away.

---

I'd never actually seen any work made by Theron Schmidt before. Oddly, he is most familiar to me as a character from Chris Goode's now sadly discontinued and much-missed blog. Indeed, the first time I saw him on stage was in Goode's recent show God/Head as he was the “special guest” the night I saw it. Schmidt is a writer, performer and lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King's College, London.

His piece, The State of Images, he tells us, was born out of research work he's been doing, thinking about images, and images on stages. For this 15-minute (ish) performance, the desk is moved from stage right to more or less centre stage, the projection screen is got rid of, and Schmidt also uses a tape player. Or CD player. Or MP3 player, which is placed on the floor by the desk. So that every time he wants to start a new track, he has to lean over from the desk to press play.

The text of the piece itself sounds like it started life constructed from the descriptions of set you find in old plays: “a lounge; there are two French windows in the rear wall; outside there are...” etc. You know the sort of thing. From these, seem to spin off ever more elaborate descriptions of objects in rooms, or ever more imaginative descriptions of perhaps paintings, or iconic scenes, or naff art on the internet. Or religious iconography.

I didn't take notes, so I can't be precise, but it felt as if the piece started off in a kind of quasi-biblical landscape and ended up in an impressionistic post-America, but even this *interpretation* feels highly subjective and like it might be closing off lots of possible avenues, as well as potentially barking up an altogether non-existent tree...
It was interesting, hearing the piece directly after Kelly's, the way that the landscapes partially melded together. Kelly's Scotland, and then Schmidt's altogether more psychological geographies.


---
This first night worked both as a game-of-two-halves, and as a suggestively cohesive whole.
---


Post-interval, the first act on-stage was Yusra Warsama. The only performer on the bill of whom I had no prior knowledge. Warsama is a writer, actor and something of a performance poet. Which was the first thing she did last night. She was wryly amusing about her Somalian heritage, noting that whenever people commissioned work from her, their first suggested topic tended to be Female Genital Mutilation. But then, dismissing the wryness, she delivered a poem on precisely that subject. Following it up with one about the positive side of wearing the hijab – she wasn't, but apparently used to – and one about English/British racism, inspired by overhearing some people on the train down saying that society “isn't racist any more”.

As a list of subjects, you might expect that to be on the bleak side, and whilst it did all feel a bit *bracing* in comparison with the first half, and a bit depressing to be sitting in a theatre in 2012, under a Tory government, *still* having to deal with the fact that society hasn't really sorted itself out as we might have hoped, there was also a good deal of wit and warmth to both poetry and performance.

In the content of the evening, however, it was less the *explicit* content of the poems that caught the attention so much as the way that they evoked new landscapes, but more even than this, the way that they also echoed this theme of travel. Warsama's evocation of Somalians as nomadic people. Her descriptions of migration and wandering, paradoxically making the idea of the place feel far less remote, suggestion almost a kindred spirit for Kelly's wandering Grandfather, or an alternate terrain for Schmidt's meta-narratives.

Perhaps also worth noting in passing that she was also the only performer all evening who did her thing standing up.

---

The next item was more fun - Warsama and curator Chris Thorpe are sat at two desks, speaking into microphones. About themselves. The twist is, they're using scripts written for them by each other. Both writer/performers had answered the same set of questions, but for their opposite number, and the point at which the person read out their *own* answers was the first time they'd seen them.

The questions seemed to range between things like “Describe yourself”, and “What do you eat for breakfast?” through to “How would you define happiness?” and “Do you believe in God?” We, the audience, never actually got to find out what the questions were, though. Instead we were read a series of answers. Some long, some short; some poetic, some funny; some thoughtful, some flippant. As a writing-for-performance exercise, it actually worked very well. You could imagine this idea being taken much further and made into a much longer piece of work involving more performers – although I also have a vague idea that Forced Entertainment have already done something quite similar, so perhaps it does/did work best as a more intimate exercise for two performers who who each other *quite well*.

Incredibly, thanks to questions perhaps about senses of belonging, of culture or family, or ancestry, this segment also added to what seem to have emerged as themes for the evening.

---

Perhaps more incredible, though was the way that the final piece, Chris Thorpe's short story written for performance at Forest Fringe in either 2008 or 2009 (I thought '08, he thought '09. He's probably right) seemed to tie the whole thing together so neatly.

Even if I don't remember which year it was I first saw it – oddly, years have a habit of not being all that relevant in Edinburgh, the Forest's hall barely changes/changed year-on-year, after all – I remember exactly where I was sat *when* I first heard it. And was actually surprirsed by how much of the story I remembered.

I kind of don't want to give too much away about the plot, which makes it hard to discuss the content.

Stylistically, I'm dying to say that it sort of reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis; except that is somehow completely and inexcusably wrong. There's a smartness and a hardness to Thorpe's prose, sure. But it's also incredibly, properly funny. Not just “amused” or “ironic”. And it's not self-regarding or dead-eyed.

But, yeah. Hell, I've got a five more short stories by Thorpe this week in which I can try to nail down a way of describing his prose style. For the time being, it is enough that this is happening. That Forest Fringe at the Gate is out of the starting gate.

Hopefully see you there at some point...




p.s. I shouldn't sign off this review without noting that after the first night of FF@TG Thorpe, Field and Kelly held “Everything is Fascinating – An Above-a-pub quiz”. Many of the questions were strongly influenced by the recent Third Angel show What I Heard About The World, which also features Thorpe and Kelly.

It would also be remiss of me not to note that the aforementioned quiz was won by a team comprising of myself and Christopher Haydon. And no one else. Ha.

Forest Fringe at the Gate

[first draft – still needs a bunch of formatting, and probably some more writing. Not to mention pictures and all that jazz. Still, thought I'd post anyway just so y'all knew I hadn't been idle all day]


Back Story -

Forest Fringe kicked off in 2007 when Deborah Pearson (full disclosure: a friend) took the opportunity to put on *some stuff* in the strange, unweildy, church-like space located above Edinburgh's Forest Café .during the Fringe festival.

The next year, she was joined by the then up-and-coming blogger, Guardian blogger, budding academic, former Aurora Nova press officer and occasional maker of work Andy Field (full disclosure: also a friend), and the two stuck together a two-week (?) programme of free, lo-fi, Live Art-y/ish performances, reading and happenings.

It's difficult to overstate now just how important Forest Fringe seemed to be for the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe. The main thing was that it was free for the artists who used it. It was also pay-what-you-can to the punters (altho', I would be fascinated to know how much this policy ever actually collected over the years. My guess is somewhere under twenty quid, but I'd be happy to be wrong). Very simply, this meant that for the price of the train fare and finding somewhere to sleep, a wide variety of artists could present work in a non-commercial environment. They could put on something *because they wanted to* without fear of the financial consequences. Similarly, exhausted Fringe-goers, used to being bled dry financially by mainstream venues, could just wander in and see *something* for whatever change they happened to have in their pocket. Or for free.

Also difficult to overstate is just how much press the damn thing got in the early days. Or rather, Forest Fringe (FF) was always very good at getting previews. And blogs. And think pieces. Allegedly, this is because the management are part of an ill-defined, shadowy, metropolitan elite who exist solely to promote and foist their unpopular vision of Art onto helpless hapless Fringe-goers (see the comment thread of EVERY SINGLE GUARDIAN BLOG EVER WRITTEN ON THE SUBJECT for further details). What always seemed to be harder was for FF to get actual reviews of specific shows. Possibly I'm imagining this, but my impression was always that, thanks to various factors (number of shows in Edinburgh, length of runs at FF, the often “scratch” nature of the performances), individual shows rarely got proper write-ups.


Reviews -

On one level, this felt right and proper. If there's a minor kerfuffle about reviewing preview performances of “proper” plays, then on some levels reviewing scratches is an even more delicate matter.

At the same time, a notable feature “scratch culture”, at least as fostered by the BAC, is the feedback form.

And anyway, not all the stuff at FF was “scratch” by any stretch of the imagination.

Although some of it has, famously, been durational – and how to best/properly review that?

A lot else that FF has presented over the years occupies that interesting realm that, well, that the more old-fashioned sort of theatre critic might term “not proper theatre”. Well, fair enough. I think there are probably plenty of acts who have performed there over the years who wouldn't self-identify as “theatre” either.

Perhaps, then, another of the problems that faces FF as far as reviews are concerned is the lack of an agreed language with which to describe the work. Or at least, a lack of accessible terminology. Or even, more stupidly/simply than that, the lack of a proper *section* into which a finished review might be put – if the piece in question hovers round the margins between Dance, Theatre and even possibly Comedy.

At the same time, inventing a new category – “Performance” or “Live Art” seem the likeliest contenders – seems to run contrary to the whole spirit of an enterprise whose guiding principle has been to open up and make more accessible sorts of work which might have hitherto been deemed obscure, obscurantist or “niche”.

Which, less-than-neatly brings us to the present.


The Present -

Now Forest Fringe are presenting a two-week residency at London's bijou Gate Theatre. Gate *Theatre*. They're not above the Forest Café and there's no Fringe Festival. They're also charging for tickets. And there are proper seats.

All of this points to the huge success that the Forest Fringe *brand* has enjoyed; the very fact that a project which is essentially curatorial by nature has established an aesthetic that another artistic director (the Gate's new artistic director Chris Haydon – full disclosure: friend, but not relation) can wish to import wholesale – effectively *programming* *someone else* to do their *programming* for a fortnight...


MixPod -

Curation seems to be something of a *thing* at the moment. Quite by chance, I happen to have just got to the chapter about it in Simon Reynold's excellent Retromania, and cultural theorists on Twitter seem to be forever linking to new essays on the subject.

The previous chapter of Retromania dealt with the iPod. Reynolds, a lifelong record collector, wonders what to make of an object that can contain in a few square centimetres the same amount of music that he spent most of his life carefully accruing. The book also considers the change that the advent of YouTube has had on *scarcity* - the fact that, thanks to a fevered few years of uploading, one can now find online pretty much anything that was ever filmed. Nothing is *rare* any more, you just need to know to look for it.

Interestingly, a few short months before the first co-curated Forest Fringe, Field wrote the following blog for the Guardian:

Theatre Needs its iPod Moment (not his title, it needn't need pointing out).

In a key passage, he suggests: “What I want is a more iPod-like relationship between careful planning and chance. A structure which truly places chance at its heart, allowing it to weave little moments of carefully planned artfulness into impossibly rich, unpredictable tapestries that seem to reach deep into our minds and pluck at exactly what it was we were thinking; mixing things together into unique patterns that we never thought would work and yet strangely, brilliantly, really do.”

Although he's talking here about single pieces of theatre, taken out of context, the passage could easily be framed as a description not only of how FF worked, but of why it succeeds. Meanwhile, in Diana Damian's (excellent) new Exeunt interview with not only Field, but the two actual curators of Forest's fortnight at the Gate, Chris Thorpe (friend) and Dan Canham, Thorpe hits on an even more useful analogy:

“It’s like one of those evenings that you spend with someone, like an old friend or perhaps someone you just met. You take it in turns to play each other different tracks because you’re making a live mix-tape as you go along. You’re trying to excite each other and say this is something you might not have heard before, or if this is something you know, let’s listen to it together.”

Between them, these two passages seem to perfectly encapsulate the spirit in which this “curation” has taken place.

The reason that Forest Fringe has become so successful over that past five years, is precisely thanks to this combination of careful curation, real enthusiasm and chance. Hand-picked artists taking chances on new material, while lined up in such a way that, at best, they coalesce into something greater and more meaningful than the sum of their parts.

Which, handily, is also a pretty neat description of how and why the first night was so good...

Go to: Forest Fringe @ The Gate – 1


[oh, ridiculous bit of serendipity – today's Guardian has a nice Q&A with Simon Reynolds about Retromania]

Unsent Postcards: Iwanow – Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

[written 15/02/10]

[On this day in 2008, I posted my review of Kenneth Branagh's Ivanov. Since I've had this review hanging around, unfinished, for about a year and a half, I figured, for a bit of circularity, I'd stick it up today to mark the occasion.]

In a recent [ha!] piece for the Guardian Theatre Blog/CiF (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/09/beyond-theatre-boxoffice-stage-success ), which might as well have been entitled “And another thing...” , Michael Billington gets briefly exercised about “yet another myth currently gaining credence: that English Chekhov productions are full of swooning nostalgia for our own lost rural past”. “This is rubbish”, he claims.

I’m not sure who made the initial claim, but I tend to agree that British productions of Chekhov have precious little to do with British rural nostalgia; on the other hand, they do all tend to follow a certain pattern.

What I’m pretty sick of is writing disclaimers about the fact that just because I like German theater AS WELL, doesn’t mean I hate British theatre, but it seems like I need to keep reiterating them or British Theatre gets all hurt and whiny, so, for the umpteenth time, I REALLY LIKED THE KENNETH BRANAGH IVANOV. Got that? Good. Having said that...

Dimiter Gotscheff’s production of Anton Tschekow’s Iwanow is pretty damn revelatory. It premièred in 2005 and is still running in the Volksbühne’s repertoire five years later. And last night’s production was sold out.

I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a hard watch. Possibly for Germans, but certainly for Brits, particularly those without much of the language (i.e Mich). However, the imagination of the staging and dramaturgy goes a long way toward offsetting such concerns.

The best thing you can do before seeing it is taking everything you think you know about Chekhov and chucking it out of a high window. One of the ones at the top of the Volksbühne will do.

The staging is stark and simple. The absolute back of the Volksbühne stage is a curved sheer white wall, like a cyclorama, designed to improve the acoustics. Generally it is covered, curtained or obscured by the set. Here there is absolutely nothing decorating the stage, which is empty save for a low smoke machine at the back. Samuel Finzi, playing Ivanov, walks up stairs out of a near invisible trap door at the rear of the stage and stands against the back wall. Gradually the other characters join him.

He begins to walk forward. The smoke machine starts. The depth of the Volksbühne’s stage is quite remarkable. Deeper than, say, the Lyttleton by quite some way. By the time he’s reached the proscenium arch – and the stage continues for quite some way out in front of it – the stage has started to fill with smoke/fog. Smoke also pours from vents in the stage floor itself and continues to do so for the rest of the play’s two hour duration. The lights at this point are a bright grey, like cold morning sunshine in winter. Ivanov is suddenly standing alone in a fog.

From hereon in, virtually all entrances and exists are made through the fog. Characters become looming shapes gradually resolving into solidity as they emerge from the swirling smoke.

It’s impressively gorgeous, and often I caught myself just watching the smoke swirling in the lights, but it also serves a cleverer purpose. When I reviewed the Branagh/Grandage production I hit on the phrase “wrapped up in a fog of self-pity”. This is precisely that fog. It is as if we are seeing the text staged in Ivanov’s mind. A relentless fog of depression from which ludicrous characters appear to torment him. The supporting cast’s performances echo this. While Finzi’s Ivanov is still, quiet, bemused and cruel, the other characters almost dance a colourful burlesque around him – as near-grotesques.

It’s worth noting that there isn’t a lot of psychological realism on show here. It’s interesting to note how much this still wrong-foots me. I mean, I’m as big into post- stuff as anyone, but it’s remarkable how difficult I still find it not to think of that approach as “properly”. So, no, they’re not doing it “properly”.

It’s also interesting watching a production which isn’t aiming to really wrench at the heartstrings. It’s emphatically aiming in precisely the opposite direction, in fact. Obviously by watching it in German I’m bringing a pretty significant V-effekt all of my very own to the production, but, even without this minor consideration, it’s pretty clear that Gotscheff isn’t really interested in making us weep.

As Ivanov walks downstage in the first minute he is accompanied by the sound of My Heart Will Go On and Time To Say Goodbye played concurrently, jarringly, almost sarcastically on a tinny synthesiser. Thereafter, little phrases from either song play out at random, like irritating ringtones in/of this troubled mind.

This is a production which isn’t overmuch concerned with love...

[and there it stops. I think there was a “but” coming next, telling us what it *was* concerned with, but somehow I never quite got round to it. Anyway...]

Here's a video of it:



And some more photos

Mission Drift - Traverse Theatre

[written for CultureWars.org]

New York's the TEAM (their name, preposterously, or marvellously, depending on your tastes, stands for Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) have become something of an Edinburgh institution. They've returned a number of times with shows of increasing size, complexity and perplexity. Mission Drift feels like their big crossover moment.

The show is a kind of hyper-speed history of North America since the 1600s, here enacted entirely by youthful, naïve Dutch couple Joris and Catalina Rapalje (Brian Hastert & Libby King), coupled with a kind of Living in End Times narrative set in Las Vegas.

The real stroke of genius here, though, is that the TEAM have also dropped a whole gig onto the thing, led by the blistering presence that is Heather Christian. She's small, bottle-blonde and vampy, and has the most incredible voice you'll have heard in quite some time - a meeting in a trashy motel between Janis Joplin, her out of Portishead and the one from Nouvelle Vague who does the cover of Psyche – pretty much ripping up the whole auditorium from the stage, and forcing a whole new level of engagement from the audience.

The music itself is an ingenious mixture of soul, gospel and blues. Coupled with a self-lacerating rendition of American history, the music has the useful effect of reminding us that whatever we might think of America's past – the near-genocide of the native Americans, the catastrophic atomic adventurism, the naked, aggressive capitalism, etc. – it is by no means a cultural desert. Although, perhaps it is mostly serving to remind us that the Devil has all the best tunes. Indeed, the whole show is soaked in an obvious affection for Americana even as it struggles to resist the structures that underpin it, which makes it a lot better than much of the knee-jerk anti-Americanism often found at the Fringe.

In terms of staging, it looks like the TEAM have been mainlining Volksbühne productions like they're going out of fashion. Perhaps all successful critiques of capitalism have to have big, rangy stages with a drum kit and a load of mess spread out over an astroturf lawn. But whatever. It looks great and gives the production exactly the space it needs.

Curiously, for all this postmodernism, this is actually a very legible show in terms of its narrative structures and how they operate. At its most simple, it's two romances: one brash, sexy and youthful, the other older and more bittersweet. The young, dumb, hot version is the history of America. The older, more careworn version is essentially the effect of that history on those living in the present it created. The great thing about the way the show operates, however, is that none of this feels half as obvious or laboured as I've just made it sound. There's a playful lightness about the way the show pushes its characters around which almost suggests you should dip in and out of the various levels at which it operates. With the added advantage of having Christian – essentially playing the soul of American Capitalism, Las Vegas and the Atomic Bomb – blow the whole thing apart every five minutes with another number. The cumulative effect is pretty special, even if it does feel that the show could probably achieve more by losing twenty minutes from the end, which gets a bit explain-y.

As a kind of theatrical snapshot of the present day, it's hard to imagine a more exciting despatch, though.

[all photos © Rachel Chavkin]

Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Postcards

_

Today is the fourth birthday of Postcards From the Gods.

Looking at the above screen cap I notice that not a single thing I said then is still true.

I'm no longer theatre editor for CultureWars.org.uk, I don't do occasional programmes for TheatreVoice any more, the internet channel 18 Doughty Street no longer exists, and I stopped working as a script reader a couple of months after starting this blog. Similarly, the purpose of this blog hasn't really been to 'provide a space for “unofficial” comment or reviews that don’t quite come within the remit of any of the other places for whom I write stuff' since I started posting my reviews for CultureWars here and writing blogs for the Guardian.

Mercifully, a 4th birthday is hardly meant as a time for “taking stock”. I imagine by my own fourth birthday I'd learnt to talk and learnt to walk. I'm not quite sure Postcards has done quite as well, although I think it just about stands up.

As ever, I've got a whole bunch of half-written, half-thought-through pieces sitting on my desktop – the rest of those pieces about narrative, those reviews of Die Heimkehr des Odysseus and Ghost Machine, a bunch of thoughts about the second incarnation of the theatre blogosphere – and then there's a pile more sitting in a folder called “Unsent Postcards”. If there is one thing I have learnt in the past four years, it's not to make rash promises about when, if ever, they'll see the light of day.

Anyway, here's a cheerful little song: