Tenet – The Gate

[now with added mathematical critique]

It feels a bit funny going back to the Gate after spending more-or-less a whole fortnight there. Even funnier going to see a “proper show”.

In fairness to the Gate's new management, Chris Haydon (mate. Not relation) has handled this transition well, switching from Forest Fringe to fringe-y, Edinburgh-formed, Fringe-favourites Greyscale's new show Tenet.

Even so, it's striking to wander into the Gate and see the stage has actually been painted! Red! There's a set, of sorts – well, no, let's be honest, the stage has been painted red, with a white divide down the middle, and there's a table on it, and on the table there's a model box of the stage of the Gate, painted red exactly like the real one has been. This model even has a little table in the middle of it, and in the middle of *that* table... And so on.

This turns out to be an incredible neat – and, for a mathematical illiterate like me, nigh-on indispensable – visual aide for the main subject of this show – essentially a mathematical problem.

The problem, written on one of the two boards – one on either side of the stage; one black, one white – is expressed thus:

A5 + B4 + C3 + D2 + E1 = 0 [there are Xs in there too – someone help me out here?]

I think, *think*, this is a polynomial equation. These were an abiding concern of the teenage French mathematical prodigy Évariste Galois. Here's what Wikipedia tells us about him:

“While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a long-standing problem... A radical Republican during the monarchy of Louis Philippe in France, he died from wounds suffered in a duel under questionable circumstances at the age of twenty.”

Note the dual appearance of the word “radical” there. This is pretty much the crux of this show.

The way the piece is structured is essentially part lecture, part cosy chat, part mathematical equation, and part audience-participation (all very gentle stuff, fear not: they give us tea and biscuits, someone goes on stage to shoot Galois in his duel, seated members of the audience are addressed as characters from Galois's life and we all stand up to sing La Marseillaise).

The two performers, Jon Foster and Lucy Ellinson play Galois and Julian Assange – although in that performance style of “being themseves” and relying on us to fill in the distance. Ellinson (also a friend) does (very passable) Australian accent for about a minute before declaring that to be a silly idea and reverting to her own speaking voice.

As it happens, a greater proportion of the show is taken up with explaining the short life and apparently extraordinary work of Galois. No bad thing, since Assange is a well-enough known entity for (I'd imagine) (most of) the audience to have a bit of background and an opinion on beforehand, whereas Galois was a completely unknown quantity to me.

What's clever, though is the way that – like an equation – the same things have to be done to both sides. So after a long while of Assange, er, *leaking* the facts of Galois's life, Galois turns on him and demands parity, reading off a long list of the current charges against and pro- Assange.

By even putting these two figures in the same equation, I think the show comes out rather less ambiguously pro-Assange than might be to everyone's taste – although [FAUX SPOILER WARNING] a mathematician friend did work out the equation at the heart of the show, noting that it couldn't be solved by radicals and there was not enough information – which is a pretty neat conclusion to draw when all the information isn't in yet [END OF FAUX SPOILER WARNING].

The constant refrain of the show is: “the radical simplifies”. The refrain is drawn from mathematics, but the meaning here is dual at the very least. Lucy and Jon take small cardboard versions of themselves and move them around the set, but at the end, a third figure, its head represented by one of the smiley-faces used in the model box to represent a member of the audience is introduced. It is placed on the chair and set alight. Although neither the name Mohamed Bouazizi nor the words “Arab Spring” are spoken, the parallel is clear: here is a radical simplification of a problem down to its most basic, essential elements. And that is how you solve the problem.

If I were to table caveats, one might be that Lorne Campbell and Sandy Grierson's script (directed by Campbell) perhaps avoids the “Explain what you're going to do, tell us you're doing it, tell us what you've done” formula of teaching a little too much. Although this can also definitely be argued as a positive virtue. As it is, it does feel as if while we as an audience have a shadowy inkling of what the show is doing and where it's taking us, it feels like precise clarity, or a sense of crystalisation takes a long time to show up. On the other hand, this might be precisely what makes it so satisfying when it does arrive, and could be precisely the mechanism by which the conclusion is rendered so surprisingly moving and powerful.

Because, in many ways it is one of the most eloquent, rational explanations of revolutionary thinking I have ever encountered. By expressing this thinking as a mathematical formula, the show could be argued to be under-nuancing a process as much as it is “simplifying” it, but perhaps once in a while a bit less hesitancy and a bit more proactive pro-activism is necessary.

[EDIT:  My friend Ben Curthoys, who actually studied maths (and runs this excellent ticketing software company) has just sent me this critique of my critique:


I think you might have missed the point there a bit, Andrew.

The radical simplifies, yes. It simplifies quadratic and cubic and quartic equations, every time.


But it didn't work on the quintic, and people spent a lot of time trying to find an algebraic method for solving the quintic, and failed. Galois' insight was to not attempt to answer the question "How do we solve the quintic?", but to ask instead the question "WHY CAN'T we solve the quintic?". And then answer it.


And Galois theory proves that there IS NO general solution to the quintic. It's nothing to do with there being "not enough information". No general solution exists, has existed, can ever exist, even in the future when we have much cleverer mathematicians and bigger computers. Maths is like that.


"Because, in many ways it is one of the most eloquent, rational explanations of revolutionary thinking I have ever encountered."


Yes, but not in the way you think it is. Jon Foster spends a lot of time on stage clutching his forehead and searching for the how, and the moment he realises that the question should be "why" instead is actually easy to miss.


If you make that a metaphor for politics, then that means that the revolution that's required is for people to stop going round asking "How do we fix genocide / Nestlé / famine / war / pestilence / death", but "Why do things keep going wrong?".


And what Galois proved is that for sufficiently complex polynomials, and by extension then human problems, there is no systematic solution, the radical simplifying approach simply does not work, and that we have no choice but to live in a world were some problems have been proven to be insoluble.


You might want to compare the other most famous negative result from mathematics: Any system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete: for any such system, there is an statement that is true, but which cannot be proved.

Three Kingdoms – Lyric Hammersmith

[this piece is more of very long failure to do justice to something I loved than a review]

If you're going to see one production of a new play by a British writer this year, it should probably be this one. If you've never seen any German theatre before, here is a pretty good place to start. If you have any interest in how a director can work with a script, this is essential viewing.

Put another way: the first half of this play is 1hr50. When the interval turned up, it felt like little more than an hour had passed. Overall, this three hour play felt like an hour and a half. Tops. Given that theatre is a medium that is often able to prolong one hour indefinitely, this is no small achievement.

At root Three Kingdoms is a detective thriller. The action opens in Hammersmith, London, with the unlikely-ly named detectives Ignatius and Charlie interrogating a young man who has been picked up on London's ubiquitous CCTV system throwing a sports bag into the river. The bag contains a head. The head, it eventually transpires, belongs to a trafficked sex-worker. The two detectives, apparently on a whim and independent of any formal hierarchy, decide to follow a lead which takes them first to Germany and then to Estonia.

The set is an oblong boxy room on the stage with the fourth wall cut off. It's painted in a very stained, neutral duck-egg blue or sky grey. There's an open door and a massive serving hatch (really huge – more like a landscape window that has been taken out) at the back. These give onto the kind of communal corridor common to tenement buildings across Europe. This space variously becomes police interrogation cells, departure lounges, hotel rooms, hotel lobbies, brothels, porn studios and yet more hotels, departure lounges and police cells again. It feels at once spacious yet somehow claustrophobic. The lighting tends to be artificial, variously suggesting strip-lights, or neon, or the gauche pink lighting of strip clubs and brothels.

Onto this script, and into this set, director Sebastian Nübling pours his talent for invention.

[You know all the stuff about the production, yes? Co-prod. between Munich Kammerspiele, Tallinn's Teater NO99 and Lyric Hammersmith – British writer Simon Stephens, German director Sebastian Nübling and Estonian designer Ene-Liis Semper. Actors from all three countries. Multi-lingual production. Lots of sur-titles.]

In the first scene, set in England, the English actors do English acting. The opening scene of police interviewing a young suspect is at once totally familiar and utterly different. There is no table; the room is the wrong size; there is no tape-recorder on the no-table. When they show the suspect photographs – a scene familiar from a hundred police procedural TV shows – one of the officers stick them round the walls not in the table. It's still perfectly played, and yet the differences somehow make you see it differently; makes you watch it harder from the off. It is suddenly like seeing theatre again, rather than like watching TV done live.

I *think*/It looks like the English actors in the section have also been encouraged into some more gestural (what I'll call with a massive generalisation) *German* acting. But already this scene has been preceded by an eerie version of an Estonian song, sung to a minimal, slightly trip-hop-sounding backing track by a tall, skinny, gaunt man in a slim-fitting white suit.


There's a lot to talk about and think about in Three Kingdoms; both in this production and in the text itself. In a lot of ways, even making that distinction feels a bit like failing the production. On the other hand, German critics tend to read the text of a play before they see the director's *version* of it. And this is the cultural context from which Nübling comes, so while feeling like the most organic synthesis of directorial vision and text imaginable, it is also possible to regard the two entities as entirely separate. For the record, I didn't read the play before I saw the production and haven't read it since. I would like to, but much more, I would already like to see the production again.

Without reading the text, however, my distinctions of who is responsible for what might be slightly off – I'll either correct in the text, or add footnotes later when I have – because we know that Nübling hasn't just staged every word in Stephens's script and heeded nothing but his stage directions. It feels embarrassing having to point this out, but having had a glance through the MSM reviews yesterday, it appears that it's still a point worth highlighting.

Indeed, the *seeming* near-binary opposition between this première of Three Kingdoms and Katie Mitchell's première of Wastwater last year feels usefully instructive. Where with Wastwater you came out feeling like you'd had every word of the play precisely underlined, here it seems surprising that there even are words sometimes, and it feels like you're absorbing something much more organic. This isn't to disparage Mitchell's approach one bit, by the way. But simply to note what a different experience Three Kingdoms is.

Part of the reason for this, of course, is that more than half the play (a guess) is performed in German and Estonian, so one is receiving language-based information not only as speech but also as written text.

Another part of the reason, however, is the way in which Nübling has directed the production. As I already suggested, it's pretty much impossible to describe the way that Nübling works better than Stephens himself does in the Lyric's trailer for the show:

 “Unlike a lot of British directors, he doesn't work from the inside out, but he has a kind of visualised realisation of the play that he imagines. And he stages that as a means of travelling into the play. He's never asked me what I'm trying to say with a play. It's not been anything he's interested in... He just wants to make a kind of musical energy, a kind of visceral muscle on stage, but he does it with tremendous intelligence and sensitivity.”

The best way I can think to articulate the way I understood the production is by comparing it to a sculpture. On one hand, yes, you can see the wood. The whole damn thing is wood. But at the same time, you're not just looking at a piece of wood, you're looking at the thing that the wood has been made into by a controlling intelligence. You can see the chisel marks, but at the same time you can marvel at how one thing has been made into another thing.

Except “a sculpture” might wrongly imply a kind of inertia. That would be wrong. There's a tangible energy here, not just that which is demonstrated by the electric physicality of the performers, but also in the spark of ideas – watching Three Kingdoms is like giving your synapses an electric shock.

It's worth talking about the “plot”, or the “narrative” or simply “the things that happen one-after-the-other”.

The script breaks down into an easily discernible three act structure – in fact, amusingly, on this level it's actually quite formally conservative as a play. Each of the acts is set in a different city and follows detectives Ignatius and Charlie as they try to track down the killer of Vera Petrova, a trafficked Estonian sex-worker, through a series of interviews, interrogations and meetings.

The tone here, though, is less the suspenseful police procedural, and much more like an increasingly hallucinatory involuntary journey. They interview one of Petrova's colleagues, a silent sex-worker, dressed in high heels, underwear, fur coat and a deer's head, with the aid of a Home Office Russian translator, and you start to feel the naturalism of their world slide away as their grasp on the situation gradually turns into the situation's grasp on them – an inexorable drag deeper and deeper into an increasingly sludgy world.

I should mention at this point that as well as being intelligent, surreal and all that other stuff, it's also very funny indeed. Much is mad of lost-in-translation jokes and the detectives themselves have a fine line in pop cultural banter.

By the time the interval turns up, the two detectives have found themselves in a porn factory in Germany – still no nearer to their goal and surrounded by actors wearing strap-ons, a naked camera-man roaming around the pink-lit corridor, with a dull repetitive soundtrack of mechanical moaning. Squirty cream stands in for faked ejaculate, while another naked man wipes tissues of excrement on the wall. It's at once bleak, funny and also far sexier than more or less anything the British put on stage. Ever.

After the interval we arrive in Estonia and there is another change of pace. In a subtle way, the production offers portraits of each country through a kind of distilled essence (perhaps even gentle pastiches) of their theatrical cultures. Where Britain opens with an almost Pinter-y dialogue, and where Germany inevitably collapses into mess and nudity, Estonia is represented by a violent athleticism and physicality. The four main Estonian actors conjure their country by pummelling the walls of the set with boxing gloves.

It is also here that the narrative's debt to the later films of David Lynch really kicks in, seeming to offer the sort of plot twist that makes a kind of non-iron-able Mobius Strip of the plot. Suddenly, from linear, it becomes circular but with a twist in it that means it can't be logically made back into a straight line.

[NEXT PARA POSSIBLY A BIT SPOILERY]

This is perhaps the hardest thing in the piece to process. Assuming I haven't just got this totally wrong, it seems by the end, that Ignatius, the detective who speaks no other language but English, has become his own quarry. He might have woken up in an eastern European hotel room with a dead girl. He is interrogated, tortured – a domestic iron is pushed onto his hand, echoing the bandaged hands of ___ who he is interrogating in the first scene.

[END OF POTENTIALLY SPOLIERY BIT]

When a play takes this sort of jump outside the realms of the possible, it suddenly seems to become much more difficult to talk about. “What does that mean?” suggests itself as a question. Or even simply “What just happened there?” Are we meant to reconstruct our ideas of what happened through this new development? Is this sudden transformation intended as A Big Metaphor that we're meant to Get? It is disorienting in all these ways. Being willing to allow that disorientation to be a part of the whole experience of the play feels crucial.

I suspect, in part, this might be what other critics have objected to: the fact that, on one level, the play does stop “making sense” altogether – although I would argue that this precise moment actually generates a lot new *senses*. But it's not immediately pin-downable. And if someone believed their job was to pin down and explain, then this sort of thing is inevitably going to get on their wick.

There are plenty of screamingly obvious ways for an audience member to read this slippery final twist, and I have no intention of imposing any of my many, quite vague, and far from definitive impressions as to what it “meant”. In a way, this point, more than any other in the play, doesn't even demand “understanding” so much as “experiencing”. You can feel it rather than overthink it.

Of course the play does have “themes”. Many of them common to those in Wastwater, and, in a strange way, the Trial of Ubu. These themes seem to be on a continuum with Stephens's growing concerns – at least in his plays – about the size of the world and the way that the world operates as a global concern. Ideas about travel, cultural difference and globalisation recur. And behind all that, the internet, making the world at once feel like a much smaller, more accessible place but also emphasising its vastness; and within the internet, the pornography that seems to be almost the life-blood of the internet.

[as a side note, I'd say these particular preoccupations, and the way in which Three Kingdoms articulates them, puts Stephens into an artistic line-up alongside Chris Goode, Chris Thorpe, Chris Haydon and Andy Field much more interestingly, perhaps, than categorising him as a writer of New Writing like, say, Richard Bean, Mike Bartlett or David Eldridge]

Beyond discussing the work in terms of the playwright – as is, of course, traditional with a new play by a British writer in Britain – it's also worth thinking about the production in terms of where it sits both in relation to Nübling's work (of which I haven't really seen enough: the première of Stephens's Pornographie and Feridun Zaimoglu's Alpsegen (video trailer here)) and theatre more generally. Actually, in relation to these other two pieces directed by Nübling the comment I can really make is that it's very different to both those other pieces, which were also both very different to each other.

If Nübling has *a shtick*, then it's undetectable between these three productions. Which might not seem a point especially worth making, but I'd hate for anyone to go away thinking that he just does this to every play he directs – it's not just a case of stick everyone in animal masks, chuck in a bit of nudity, add some *movement* and off we go. Those precise elements were specifically chosen for *this* production of *this* play. In fact, the only thing I noticed being re-used from anything else that I'd seen was that some of the incidental music also features in the video trailer for Nübling's production of Pornographie (and presumably the stage version, although I don't remember it).

Visually, Three Kingdoms reminds me much more of moments from Gisele Vienne's I Apologize - which also featured animal masks, stage mess and similar qualities of frenetic movement or deliberation.

Admittedly, these elements are not especially unusual on the German stage – the Deutsches Theater production of Dennis Kelly's Taking Care of Baby had one character wearing a duck mask, for example, while their Othello made great use of a gorilla costume. Similarly, it seems almost futile to try to point to a specific example of the use of cumulative big mess on the German stage (I think this one was the first example I saw). That said, just listing a couple of examples I happen to have seen feels shallow and perhaps as pointless as a fledgeling German critic coming to London and totting up the number of actual kitchen sinks they see in any given month. It would be a novelty for them in much the same way as these elements are to the British.

If, in actuality, animal heads and mess are quite normal strategies, it feels like they should be either considered as part of the whole or not at all, in much the same way as we tend not to obsess over the sinks in domestic drama. The idea being propagated elsewhere that doing something this way is “self-indulgent” while having a set that features working taps is “normal” displays such a catastrophic level of self-satisfaction that their dismal failures of engagement can be dismissed out of hand (for the record, I'm not dissing working taps. Those are perfectly nice).

What's fascinating about Three Kingdoms is the way that it anticipates its critics and possible criticisms. There is actually enough said on stage for Michael Billington to have sketched out his usual précis of “what the playwright is saying” had he so wished. But at the same time, that's not how you actually do experience the play. Instead of drily noting they way that the Estonian gangsters typify a new globalised understanding of commerce – and in this case, the trade in women – these moments occur within a production that exists more as a series of feelings than thoughts.

While the play deconstructs or even attacks its own potential process of Orientalising (as it were, I nearly went for “Othering”) of Eastern Europe, the production and the performers almost deconstruct the texts deconstruction. Perhaps more problematically, I'm not fully convinced it quite clears the hurdle of how to portray subjugated women. There are not enough women in the cast, and the re-gendering only runs one way – i.e. a naked man with a head can double as the mortuary slab body of a beheaded woman and later turn up in drag/as a woman, but no women ever conspicuously play men (not least because there aren't enough in the cast to do so). At the same time, making this point feels like a peculiarly British sort of over-worrying, and oddly, something I'd have worried about a lot less in Berlin (it plays at Deutsches Theater on 7th June, where it'll share a building with a woman playing Othello and more full-frontal male nudity than you can shake a strap-on at).

Perhaps the most interestingly contradictory thing about Three Kingdoms, however, is how joyous and freeing this parable about misery, suffering, sex-slavery, brutality, cruelty and murder feels. And perhaps this is its finest achievement. Rather than simply showing us that forced sex and violence against women is a Very Bad Thing and that Europe, still living through the traumas of its history, is riven with darkness and violence, and that beneath the veneer of civilisation there is a rot so deep you'd be better of burning it – sending us into the night saddened and a bit depressed – it instead shakes us, makes us feel something and fires up our brains in entirely unpredictable ways (although that might be down to *us*, in this instance, being an audience of excitable Brits rather than coolly analytical Germans).

Still, it's bloody brilliant. Go and see it.

Photos screen caps from the Lyric Hammersmith trailer except the last which was taken by the designer...

Laibach - Monumental Retro-avant-garde - Tate Modern

[written for Exeunt]

Here.

Forest Fringe at the Gate – 12

[Coney – Playful Documentary Unit]

Sleep Dogs – The Bullet and the Bass Trombone

[Dan Canham – 30 Cecil Street]


First things first: plainly I owe Sleep Dogs a massive apology. Having spent two weeks bashing out day-after reviews of *everything* at Forest Fringe at The Gate (FF@TG) – with the usual apologies to Gemma Brockis, Melanie Wilson and Chris Thorpe, whose Day 6 I missed due to Laibach – after getting my laptop snaffled on the Friday night (FF@TG – 11), my work-rate for the subsequent week consequently plummeted.

This is doubly unfair, since – along with Sam Halmarack and the Miserablites, Augusto Corrieri and Emma Bennett – I'd count them as one of my favourite “discoveries” of the fortnight (scare quotes for “discovery”, since I plainly didn't do any of the discovering any more than Livingstone "discovered" bits of Africa).

Sleep Dogs's M.O. – at least on this occasion, an occasion which, it should also be noted, was the first public outing for much of this material – could be reductively described as the “Live Radio Play”. The lights come up on a bare stage. Well, bare save for a single figure stood behind a table on which sits a keyboard, a laptop and various other electrical bits and bobs of obscure purpose. A voiceover starts. A woman's voice. It sounds like an interview or a reading from a diary (it's actually quite specific which it sounds like, but I've cleverly left it two weeks to start writing this review again, so I'm a tool and can't remember exactly).

The woman is telling a story about staying in a hotel in a city in an unnamed country – possibly, probably, South American; there are shades of Rio de Janiero, and the native language is Portuguese (?). As her story moves on, it becomes clear that she is a member of a symphony orchestra (an Oboeist?) that has found itself landing in a city on the verge of an unspecified coup – military? Marxist? No one seems to know. Eventually she finds herself on a street surrounded by a gang of children with guns.

The tape stops.

Which, I confess, was a slight relief. While the voice played, the chap on stage underscored the speech with a live musical accompaniment (and possibly ambient street noises?), but, knowing that the piece was to be roughly, what? 50 minutes in total, it felt like it might be a bit of a hard watch if this were to be the format throughout.

[that said, with hindsight, I'm not sure I'd have necessarily change it/switch it/introduce it with a “spoken live” section. It made us, the audience, concentrate pretty damn hard, making subsequent live speech feel like a positive gift]

From here the figure on stage steps from behind the table to tell us some background information. This is Tim Atack, one of the two extant members of Sleep Dogs (I'm afraid I don't know who the female voice/s belonged to – I am now not only separated from the performance by two weeks but from both my programme *and*, at present, the internet).

In the spirit of much in the previous two weeks of FF@TG, Atack's *presence* on stage is at once himself and a character without any overdone *acting*. I mean, apart from anything else, he's also nakedly The Bloke Playing Keyboard – although, since this is a tale about an orchestra, and a story in which he seems to have personal investment, his musical ability sits well within the compass of his *character*.

What is far less clear is whether or not the piece is *entirely* fictional, or whether it is Atack/Sleep Dogs (it feels inexcusable not to acknowledge this is company work, and that, apart from the actual performing on stage, it is impossible to know what member of the company (of two?) has done what – even though it *looks* like a solo show) imagining “himself” into an actual event.

[SPOILER PARAGRAPH]

I was so intrigued by this, that I asked him afterwards in the pub (The Prince Albert on Pembridge Road – don't take your laptops in there, folks). Apparently it is totally made up. I was at once very pleased, relieved and impressed. The level of detail on display here is immaculate. Really, it is one of the most detailed, plausible made-up events I've ever seen *done* in a theatre. There is a moment where Atack describes “one of those photos”. And you know the ones he means: World Famous Photos – the child burning with Napalm in Vietnam, Thich Quang Duc on fire in Saigon, the summary execution in Cambodia. Except you don't know the one he means. Which felt like the most tangible clue. But even this photo – of a Double-Bassist sprinting across a runway with machine gun bullets shooting shafts of dust around his feet – is described in such clear detail that you picture it perfectly in your mind, and then start to wonder if you have actually seen it.

[END SPOILER]

From here, I forget precisely what follows what until the final sequence. Which is frankly stunning. It is very simple. There is another voice-over, a different woman, possibly Spanish, a violinist with the orchestra, reads out her diary – although we don't know if she's “being played by an actress” (on two levels). Part of the reason we don't know if she's being played by an actress, since this is a diary, is that we don't know if the person who wrote it will still be alive after the last entry. As such, it is incredibly tense. This tension is underscored by Atack's score which here offers a relentless slow build using delays and loops into a kind of massive orchestral serialism/minimalism. The piece of extant music it most resembles (that I can think of) is Michael Nyman's Memorial for the Heysel Stadium disaster. There's a similar sickening lurch-y quality combined with growing emotional force, all the while totally responive to the recorded female voice, making it almost not matter that the voice is the not-live element, rather than the music, as is more usually the case in theatre.

I'm not doing a very good job of conveying it, but, to state it baldly, this ending really did feel like you'd been well and truly put through the wringer by the conclusion.

During the course of the show, I had hundreds of ideas of things I might change about it, and yet, by the end it felt like this first-scratch outing of something that will doubtless develop enormously, precisely what we'd just experienced as an audience was just about perfect in that time and space. Harrowing, intelligent, beautifully crafted and deftly performed. And ultimately incredibly uplifting in an impossible-to-describe kind of way.

Embedded II

The last couple of weeks, it feels like it's been a really exciting time to be writing about theatre again. Since writing Embedded:

Dan Bye wrote a response: Embedded Criticism: some Arguments, an Offer and a Dare.

Then Jake Orr wrote Melanie Wilson's Autobiographer Reconsidered.

Then Maddy Costa, wrote A Space of Dignity, Horizontality and Love, introducing...

...the new website Dialogue, Maddy and Jake's love child.

Then Catherine Love, inspired by Jake's Autobiographer Reconsidered, wrote Reviewing Reviewed: An Attempt to be Honest.

Megan Vaughn wrote a manifesto.

There was a nice namecheck for embedded at Exeunt

This morning, Culturebot, wrote up much of the above along with detailing their own processes over in the United States.

And there's definitely something of this new spirit detectable in Matt Trueman's staggeringly good review of Chris Goode's 9.

There also seemed to be rogue moments of embedded-ness in-the-wild (I'm using 'wild' here in its original sense of *actual “proper” journalism*). First up, Herald critic Neil Cooper wrote about actually *performing* in a show at the Traverse, and then young FT journalist and critic, Richard Dennis (a colleague of mine from NSDF), wrote an article which made extensive use of, well, basically all his university friends who are now working in theatre, for a feature about Young People's schemes in theatres.

Both Dennis and Cooper's pieces (I've only just noticed they're called Dennis & Cooper. Emphatically not to be confused with Dennis Cooper) demonstrate some of what I think I might have been getting at in my initial piece. What the pieces do is either get involved in something, making available a unique perspective on the experience of performing (Cooper), or, by mining that most in-depth of knowledges – the experience of living through your close friends' successes and set-backs – for insights into how the theatre industry treats young people (Dennis).

I should also firmly underline before continuing that much of what I wrote in Embedded was directly informed by pieces by *proper* critics.

Particularly, Charles Spencer's thoughtful piece about going too far, (at least, I remember it as thoughtful, am now going to find the link and read it again...)

[DAMNIT CAN'T FIND THE LINK NOW.   ANYONE?]

and Lyn Gardner and Michael Billington's blogs on whether critics and performers can be friends – “No” and “Yes” respectively (both definitely worth a read in the light of the current climate).

Also, Irving Wardle's discussion of the subject and also his description of attending rehearsals with the RSC in his (essential) book Theatre Criticism (actually, I've not read that in a while, but it strikes me I've probably unconsciously strip-mined that chapter/section, both as an ethical guide and as a concept).

But it's also been informed by a load of other stuff: thinking about the critics I've met and the various relationships they adopted toward performers, writers, directors, etc.; thinking about the points or places where the “traditional” (British) models of criticism collapse. Lots of things...

To be honest, I've been thinking about what I meant by the first piece, what I really wanted to say with it, and the possible drawbacks/counter-arguments to what I did say ever since I wrote it.

And doubtless at some point in the future I'll probably adopt some of those counter-positions against my original ideas. Because I'm like that. But also, because I think that's a good way to be. There's no point just finding a position and sticking to it without constantly interrogating and reappraising it.

I certainly hope I'm not still saying the same things I was saying five years ago, although this piece and this piece (scroll down to "My Famous Friends") from soon after I started Postcards... in 2007 do seem to reveal some similar preoccupations about seeing work made by friends. Although I'm interested by the differences of my perspective then with my perspective now.

Perhaps the thought that struck me most forcibly, though, was the fact that I essentially came to criticism though an “embedded” organisation: Noises Off, the idiosyncratic, photocopied daily magazine/fanzine/reviewspaper of the National Student Drama Festival. I must have written about my time at/debt to/love of Noises Off hundreds of times on this blog, but I'd never really stopped to consider its specific character before.

In short, Noises Off is a magazine that, for all the time I've known it (1997 – present), has at once practised and supported what could be defined as the “core values” of theatre criticism (perhaps best set out in Wardle's Theatre Criticism), and at the same time explored different models of writing about performance – all the while being funded solely by the the Festival about which it is writing. And yet with complete editorial freedom.

What's also interesting to me is that Noises Off can be *a training* as much as it is a magazine. The rigours of having to turn out daily reviews, the desire to make those reviews, or comment pieces as attention-grabbing and readable as possible – but perhaps most usefully of all for a critic starting out – actually getting to see people *reading* what you've written. And being able to discuss it with them immediately.

Obviously that doesn't happen to critics in real life very often. But, in a funny way, it's the thing that has always made reviewing for Noises Off feel far more important, engaged and engaging than almost anything I ever wrote that might have had a larger readership (ok, my review of Rupert Goold's King Lear might be an exception).

At NSDF, conversely, you could believe that your review was part of a conversation, not because that's the theory but because it was an observable actuality. You would file your copy (and then hang about the Noises Off office (Noffice) helping with layout, proofreading and stapling all through the night), and then in a discussion the next day some affronted or delighted company member would be sitting in the auditorium of the Stephen Joseph Theatre jabbing at your article in their already dog-earred copy of that day's copy with a livid or joyful finger, depending on what you'd written.

As I've remarked before, Noises Off *invented* “User Generated Content” in 1965 and hasn't changed much since. Which is perhaps why I found the early days of the British theatre blogosphere so exciting (and I'm definitely going over old ground I've written about before here). It felt in 2006 and 2007 was like a *virtual* version of that atmosphere; you wrote an blog, and then someone else, who you might not have ever met, possibly on the other side of the world, x2, or across the Atlantic, would write something about what you'd written.

This even had an advantage over NSDF in that it *wasn't* spatially or temporarily specific. Someone thousands of miles away could pick up on your point weeks later. Obviously, this also feeds into the conversation about the advantages of everyone being in the same place at the same time versus the possibilities of a “global” “community” made possible by the internet.

Anyway, I'm moving slightly away from the “embeddedness” point. Part of what was exciting about the early years of the theatre blogosphere was that playwrights like David Eldridge, Chris Goode, Fin Kennedy and Bens Yeoh & Musgrave also wrote blogs. So not only were “critics” able to open up their practice a bit more, and muse publicly on things wot thry thought, bu there was also the possibility of a written dialogue. Perhaps this is one of the starting points of “horizontality”.

Tomorrow, I'd like to open this discussion further, by looking at some already running models and examples of the sorts of “embeddedness” or “horizontality” of which I might, in part, be thinking.

[Edit: I *say* tomorrow, but frankly, I should write a couple of reviews first...]

Trailer Park

(Digital & Theatre iii)

What's been interesting to me this week, both on Twitter and across various blogs, is a) the ongoing rumbly (and still largely-unfocussed/wide-ranging) discussion about Theatre and The Internet, and b) the number of trailers for theatre I've seen this week. Perhaps it was ever thus, and I'm only noticing it now, because I've become more conscious of them as *a thing* now that I've just written something about it, but it really does feel like, since feeling irritable about that Observer piece last Sunday, I've seen more trailers in one week than I ever remember doing before...

So, before getting on with finishing all those outstanding pieces I'm actually *meant* to be writing, I've knocked up some sort of hit parade of recent theatre trailers and had a bit of a think about them (that said, the following are arranged more thematically/in the order I'd like to talk about them than in ascending order of greatness).

First up is the Lyric Hammersmith's trailer for the international co-production of Simon Stephens's new play Three Kingdoms:


I like it. Not unreservedly, but I do like it. But perhaps part of the reason I like it is simply because I'm looking forward to it anyway and this provides something to which those shivers of anticipation can be attached. That said, I've been looking forward to Three Kingdoms since I saw its German trailer sometime last year:


 It strikes me as interesting, the different grammars, the almost different shows that seem to be suggested by the two trailers. I kind of wish they'd kept that bit of Wicked Game in the English version, although I do think the German trailer's decision to faux-black and white everything – and without turning the contrast up at all – does the film no favours.

However, to put all this in some sort of local context, I think the Three Kingdoms trailer is infinitely superior to – picking an example at random after searching Lyric Hammersmith on YouTube – this trailer for Mogadishu - which with no additional information, could be a (fairly nothingy) advert for anything. While the trailer for director Sebastian Nübling's production of P*rnografie (also Simon Stephens), has been my go-to example of why I think YouTube trailers for productions are a good idea since 2008.

That trailer isn't the Lyric's only online promotional video for Three Kingdoms. They've also put out a longer video featuring clips from the show and interviews with both Simon Stephens and Lyric artistic director Sean Holmes:


If anything, this approach strikes me as more successful. Part of me wants to say 'because it feels more “native”', although I'm not sure that's true. But I like the explain-y quality of it – Stephens's stab at describing Nübling's way of working as a director (from 3:00) is likely to be better, and almost certainly more informed, than anything written after press night, for example. Moreover, it's incredibly useful for a potential audience: they get told something about this potentially unfamiliar way in which the director (coming from well within the German school of Regietheater or “director's theatre”) comes at a text. It's not told as a warning or to scare the horses, it's simply someone explaining very lucidly and engagingly why they think something is great. And I think that's a pretty good approach.

Interestingly, it's also the approach that the Donmar Warehouse have taken with their new trailer for their revival of the Robert Holman play Making Noise Quietly:


Indeed, this is even more interesting, as it doesn't feature *anyone* who is actually involved in the production. Instead, Hannah Price (who apparently made the film, according to Facebook – and I can't find any other credits), simply films and intercuts interviews with five playwrights who all really love Robert Holman's work: Ben Musgrave, David Eldridge, Duncan Macmillan, Sam Ellis and (again!) Simon Stephens (Mark Shenton provides a nice bit of background reading on Holman's influence here).

I'm wondering if this is going to become a new sort of MO for trailer-makers. I suppose *the interview* per se, is already a bit of a perennial favourite, along with the much-derided *Rehearsal Footage*, although this strategy of interviewing enthusiastic "experts", or even, in the best sense of the word, amateurs, seems relatively new to me and strikes me as a highly profitable line of inquiry.

I don't have as much of an animus against rehearsal footage as some, but rehearsal footage is, in general, about the least interesting thing you can put in a trailer (although, interestingly, Hannah Price again, gets round that in her previous Donmar trailer for The Recruiting Officer by concentrating on the live musicians featured in the show. They're really good, and, unlike people practising acting, transfer brilliantly to video. When backed up with a little interview with Donmar AD and show director Josie Rourke and then given a bit of voice-over context and shown playing in front of the assembled cast, you end up with the first thing that (belatedly) makes me actually quite want to see the show).

There is a cultural difficulty for Britain regarding trailers wanting to do anything else, though. Have a look at the trailer for Thomas Ostermeier's production of William Shakespeare's Maß für Maß (No, really. This one really is really, really good. Watch it):


To the best of my recollection, this was posted online a good couple of weeks before a single public performance had taken place. And not a rehearsal shot in sight. Now, obviously this isn't an option available to most British theatres. It is, however, probably the best preview trailer I've seen. It gives you an immediate, thrilling, almost visceral sense of what the production looks like – and it looks great.

It is videos like this that made me think the approach recently adopted by Rupert Goold and Headlong here might be the best domestic alternative – perhaps at least until a show is up and running. Although, here again we run into the difficulty of the differences between the German rep. system and Britain's usual one solid run. Measure for Measure opened last September or October and can next be seen on May 30th.

Slightly off the subject of actual trailers, but closely related to the Domar's big old advert for Robert Holman, is the Royal Court's fascinating What Plays To Read – Young Writers' Toolkit 5:


I have to confess, I'm not a huge fan of Largo Films's 13-second intro – curiously reminiscent of that late-night advert for gay chatlines featuring Bronski Beat's Smalltown Boy – which sits curiously at odds with Royal Court literary manager Chris Campbell's admirably chunky knitwear in the first shot. There are other things to grumble about too: the lighting fluctuates annoyingly; no one's name (or job) is mentioned, so you've got no idea where they're coming from necessarily (I mean, I know who Chris Campbell and Leo Butler are, but how many non-combatant members of Joe Public do?). On the plus side, it has got Doctor Who rather adorably singing the praises of Simon Stephens like he was, well, Simon Stephens talking about Robert Holman. It's also nice to see (if surprising) to see so many people opt for Caryl Churchill's last good play, Far Away.

Dislike of slightly flashy production values is also my main problem with the Globe's 30 second Globe to Globe season trailer:


Well, that and the fact that it's just too damn fast – apart from the final 5 seconds (1/6th of the total), which are just logos. But it gets the point across. And it looks like it's been made for maybe cinemas or TV rather than a leisurely watch on YouTube (does anyone else even do that?)

However, the Globe more than redeems itself since it also has a dedicated YouTube channel and some of the individual shows also have their own individual trailers. More may appear as th season progresses. At the moment, easily the best is the one for Juba Arabic from South Sudan's production of Cymbeline:


Filmed in situ in South Sudan, the short film brings alive not only the possibility of the play, but also the company, their country, and that country's situation. And, yes, it made me more interested (a lot more interested) in seeing the play.

For my money, though, in a lot of ways, perhaps the most effective trailer appearing on YouTube last week was the new one for the Uninvited Guests' Make Better Please:


 It maybe takes a (tiny) bit of time to warm up, but then it feels like a) it really lets rip, and, b) gives you (perhaps – I haven't seen the actual show) a really good impression of what it might be like to see the show – or at least what the show is like.


Obviously, the *actual* best trailer currently on YouTube isn't for theatre at all, however...

- Fin - 

Media Studies

(Digital & Theatre ii)

“Woo/Woah, it's a video!”

Such was the initial spread of opinion that greeted the release of the theatre company Headlong's new video Falling Headlong.

One of the drawbacks of being completely immersed in writing up every single edition of Forest Fringe at The Gate was that I started having less and a less time to write anything else. Especially if I was also going to do any reading, and/or hanging out, either on Twitter or in real life.

When Falling Headlong (FH) came out, I had a nice discuss of it on Twitter while writing up that day's FF piece, but didn't quite find the time to write a proper article on the subject. At the same time being painfully/acutely aware that I'd already left one article on the subject of videos and performance hanging from the previous week.

In the interim, four notable additions to the discussion have turned up (as well as this interesting side-issue at the Guardian). First, “digital native” Jake Orr wrote a wide-ranging-but-brisk overview of Digital and Theatre, including a consideration of the new Headlong video. In turn, Orr tweeted a link to Chris Unitt's very technical, focussed notes on the Headlong video itself. Then on Sunday the Observer waded into the fray, albeit in the least informed or interesting way imaginable. I've already commented on the Observer piece itself in general terms, but it does seem worth asking, if only in the spirit of constructive inquiry, what on earth possessed them to approach the story that way (almost redolent of the Daily Mail, with its tone of: “Decrepit Artform Grooms Youngsters Online!”)

Then Mark Shenton, *blogging* for The Stage, added a somewhat alarmist contribution of his own.

In a lot of ways, Shenton's piece offers an interesting counter-balance to my recent article “Embedded”. In his piece, Shenton worries about the potential passing of the current cosy relationship between PRs and arts journalists, or critics. In short, he seems concerned that anyone might begin to think about depriving him of his status as a gate-keeper. His piece reminds me that, no matter how tendentious my claims regarding the value of “embeddedness” felt, there is already an argument that theatre critics are already pretty cosied up to the theatres from whom they claim distance.

Witness Shenton's dire predictions: “If the PR machinery excludes journalists in the game and goes straight to whom (they think) are the audience [sic], they’ll preach only to the already converted (i.e interested enough in their work enough to follow them on Twitter and Facebook), and lose the wider audience that journalism reaches” he grumbles. This strikes me as quite a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet and social media works.

He goes on to issue a slightly passive-aggressive-sounding threat: “once journalists are excluded, we’re simply not going to be interested in following where others have already led, so the story is dead to us.” (“You're dead to me, Headlong”!)

Given how quickly a story can now spread online, or on Twitter, I wonder if even this concern is already far behind the times. “In the long run, too, it all contributes to the death of conventional journalism.” He continues. “If we’re not needed, we won’t be here anymore — and once we’re not, there won’t be any need for PRs either to serve us, either.”

All of which would be a terrible pity if “conventional journalism” wasn't so frequently the worst thing you could possibly imagine.

(it's possibly also worth remembering that Shenton, as the theatre critic for the Sunday Express and *a blogger* for The Stage already sits completely outside “conventional journalism” thanks to the Express proprietor Richard Desmond's decision to put all his papers outside the remit of the Press Complaints Commission, making them, what? Racist comics, I suppose.)

More importantly, don't his objections sound a bit like someone angrily slamming the door of an empty stable? I don't read Shenton regularly, so I'm happy to stand corrected, but to the best of my knowledge, he didn't write a thing about, for example, the Forest Fringe season at the Gate. Why? Presumably because he didn't think his readers would be interested. And, on balance, that was probably a fair enough assessment. Shenton tends to write about musicals, the West End, Broadway, very mainstream theatre and cabaret performed by the stars of West End musicals and Broadway. Anyone following him in the hope of a heads-up on the cutting edge of the avant garde is likely to be disappointed.

All this which a nonsense of his claim that the regurgitation of press releases will necessarily reach a wider audience, much less Headlong's most likely audience, thanks to their being written up by a “conventional journalist”. Lots of press releases get ignored. Loads. I don't know how many papers wrote up Headlong's last season press release – probably a reasonable number given that it included the eminently *newsy* Decade – the 9/11 10th anniversary show, but this is still missing the point and arguing the toss about something that isn't even strictly relevant.

After all, all Headlong have *actually done* is release a video online. It *obviously* *wasn't* a “Press Release”. Nor, as many have subsequently commented, was it trying to be. It didn't contain anything like enough information for a start. Let's be honest, they were trying something new. They were trying something *a bit different*. No, I know – before everyone gets all antsy – I know online video trailers aren't new. FFS, I wrote an article about them in 2008. I'm I'm pretty sure even that wasn't the first article on the subject. (At this point, I should retrospectively give a heads-up to Lyn Gardner's admirably brisk, no-nonsense Theatre Round-Up piece on this subject, and thank her for also linking to that article).

Falling Headlong *wasn't* a “trailer”, per se. It was more of a season *teaser*. I saw it more as, on one hand, a kind of Company mood board, and, on the other, a kind of statement of intent – a way of giving people an oblique picture of who Headlong think they are as a company, and, even more interestingly, a kind of idea of how they see their forthcoming season fitting together.

I don't suppose it even began to cross their minds that they were effecting a massive job-endangering paradigm shift by simply slinging their video online drawing attention to it on FB and Twitter,and hoping that a load of their followers would retweet and *Share* it, thereby also bringing it to the attention of those people's Friends or Followers, who might not necessarily follow Headlong (precisely the opposite of preaching to the converted, in fact. And, moreover, making much more of an offer of something to share than a small, dry re-write of a press release).

We're all aware that, thanks to wide range of factors, arts coverage in the British mainstream media is pretty tiny, and theatre's share of this perhaps tinier than some. There's less money for it now than possibly ever before. It is now perhaps read (at least as hard-copy) by fewer people than ever before – to the point where it's starting to feel slightly silly to still call some newspapers “mainstream”.

No wonder theatres and theatre companies are starting to look into as many new and different ways as possible to circumnavigate the potentially crippling reliance on Britain's mainstream media for *any* attention or publicity at all. It's also worth noting in passing that even a straight-up great review or bad review doesn't necessarily hold much sway. Look at the continued success of the universally panned We Will Rock You as compared to the more-or-less universally lauded stage version of The King's Speech from which the public stayed away in droves and which is soon to close – the news of which is doubtless prompting another round of those intensely boring “Is the West End in Crisis?” articles, which do sometimes appear to be the only sort of arts coverage that newspapers are capable of printing.

One thing Shenton's article did usefully make me wonder, was whether the angle of the Observer's piece was informed by the same annoyance at feeling “bypassed”. As if – because Headlong had dared to put out a video that anyone could watch, rather than a press release, exclusive to all newspapers – they had asked a fatally under-informed staff writer to knock up a piece snidely condemning the matter out of pique.

But what do Shenton and The Observer think they're achieving with articles like these?

Is Shenton seriously suggesting that it will be Headlong releasing season trailers on YouTube rather than the Philistinism of his proprietor coupled with a worse recession than the 1930s that most puts his job in jeopardy. Moreover, would Shenton have actually covered the fact that Headlong had announced their new season on his Stage blog at anything like this length if their PR had just sent him a press release? And how many Sunday Express readers are Headlong really targeting? (doubtless, they'd say “well, all of them, obviously” - but, come on, it's the Sunday Express. It's barely better than the in-house newsletter of the EDL. And how many bigots actually like New Writing and the slightly art-house end of theatre anyway?) 

Similarly, does the Observer think articles like that are going to encourage Headlong to want them to cover their future projects, if that's the level of informed professionalism they can expect?

My real question, though, is: If the default position of “conventional journalism” toward theatre is apparently either alarmism, cynicism or outright hostility, and that's when it bothers to cover theatre at all, then what exactly does theatre have to lose if “conventional journalism” does die out?

(for the record, I'm not half as convinced that *the mainstream media* is going to fall over – certainly some newspapers are changing their business models fairly rapidly, but as someone I recently read, or heard on the radio, said: “it's like the death of vinyl, or even the current ructions facing the music industry – they haven't actually stopped music...” [paraphrased as well as unattributed! Terrible! I should write arts features for the Observer...]).

Moreover, I find this sense of possible change in the air much more something to be excited about than something to dread. I prefer the future (hell, it's already some people's present) where rather than having to endure one ludicrously under-informed bit of sneering at (in this case) Headlong's expense, or a facile write-up of a press release – cherry-picking and partial reporting by an already pressed-for-time arts correspondent, which will put as many people off as it switches on – there will be (is) an engaged community of theatregoers who will have multiple alternate sources to turn to for coverage, insightful comment, and perhaps where they'll be able to simply *follow* PRs, theatre companies, other like-minded souls on Twitter, or what-have-you.

They will, in fact, be made aware in a single day of a vastly greater amount of stuff, being written about better, by informed people who actually care, than they ever got from reading a newspaper.

Cynicism and churnalism won't really cut it any more. If the Observer's piece is indicative of what we can look forward to from the “professionals” now staffing the paper for which Kenneth Tynan used to write, FFS, then I see absolutely no reason why the intelligent reader won't declare the term “professional” a vastly unhelful distinction and go off in search of an amateur who actually knows what they're talking about. 

Anyway, enough of the polemic; here's the video:



And now I need to get back on the reviewing horse. Next up, in no particular order are still: NSK symposium, Laibach at Tate Modern, last nigfht of Forest Fringe, Making Noise Quietly at the Donmar and then some reflections on the Forest Fringe experience and maybe a few more thoughts about the whole “embedded” thing.

Writing more about “Embedded” feels like a particularly urgent thing at the moment, not least because, given the stuff coming out of the Leveson Inquiry this week, it feels like maybe the worst time imaginable for a “journalist” (of any description) to start beating a drum for a cosier relationship with those about whom they write.

That's not what I meant. That's not it at all...

[and, now, because I've taken so long to get around to posting this, Matt Trueman has well and truly gazumped me, and with much more élan and less bad temper, with his excellent new Noises Off round-up on online critics writing about online issues (including the Headlong trailer)]

Forest Fringe at the Gate – 11

Deborah Pearson - The Future

[Dan Canham – 30 Cecil Street]

Sam Halmarack and Miserablites

Well, here's an interesting problem. I'm back in the small dressing room of the Gate Theatre about to write up Deborah Pearson's show The Future, having already written most of my Sam Halmarack review last night, so, if I type quickly, I can have the review of tonight's show up online before it's even finished.

Happily, this conundrum so neatly reflects the way that Pearson's piece works it's worth doing just as a form-follows-function postmodern joke...


What The Future is, then, is Pearson sitting down on the stage of, in this instance, the Gate and telling us what's going to happen starting twenty minutes in the future.

It starts with her telling us the final three lines of her show. She then describes how we're going to clap. Even if some of us were bored. She then gently outlines Dan's show 30 Cecil Street, which, being a co-founder and -director of Forest Fringe, she'll have already seen last year, so no great act of clairvoyance there.

She then moves to describing the interval. And, oddly, I'm in this bit (I presume me). She says: “I will say hello to a friend who is blogging about tonight, and we will skirt round that subject”. She's wrong, actually. I really liked the piece and will have already written the review and I will tell her so. But, in a funny way, that will now be partly to do with the way that the show does feel like a bet with the future.

She mentions Andy Field giving her a big hug and mocking her new haircut. I'm sure he'll also go out of his way not to do so now.

It's after this bit that the show starts to get more, well, more sustainable. Because so far, while speculative, everything she's described has a pretty sound basis, if not in *fact* then in *likelihood*.

Beyond the interval, however, Pearson tells us that she has to leave because she's doubled booked herself – she's telling us essentially that she already failed in the past to properly order the future.

She has to go somewhere else.

Where and what is left ambiguous for a while. She goes down to the Circle Line platform of Notting Hill Gate station and waits for an East Bound train.

(I'm interested to note that I am now writing about these events in the ast, since she has now told *us* about them, even though, even as I am writing *now* these events remain in the future.)

She tells us about how she feels dead when she's underground and thinks about whether she always feels that way. And wonders whether, conversely, she feels *more alive* the higher up she is. She wonders if this is why she cries most at films on aeroplanes.

It transpires she is going to the wedding of an ex-boyfriend from when she was 19. Her fiancé is his Best Man.

Now, this is the bit where I have no idea whether it's true or not.

If it is all completely true, then to my mind this show either a ) has a very short shelf life indeed, b) will never be “true” again, or c) will involve an awful lot of work before any future showings, where Pearson will have to describe whatever she's *actually* likely to be doing after each and every time she performs it.

I've no idea if it's true or not, but I like the fact that something that's already doing something unlikely – i.e. purporting to describe the future – still has the ability to make me worry about “truth”. That's very odd and very clever.

It's also a canny way of being able to describe the way people perhaps live. Like we can already anticipate so much of the future, just by knowing what our plans are, where we're going, how our friends behave. But there's interesting slippage too. At one point Pearson tells us she's never been to the place that the reception is being held. Later she describes the pictures of “Hollywood stars on the walls”. I only noticed that example just now when thinking about this section of the show.

As well as possibly telling us something about Pearson and her relationships, the piece also does a pretty damn good job of making us (well, me) think about the weddings of friends, the way that the past acts on the present, and also how little we really do know about the future.

I should also record in passing that Pearson is a lovely, engaging presence on stage, and has a gorgeous soft Canadian (it is Canadian, right?) accent...

And I'm out of time...

[I sit out Dan Canham again to write the all of the above. They're now clapping next door, so I'm going to post this now. The below was written after seeing last night's show of Sam Halmarack and Miserablites this afternoon. I hope it still describes what I'm now about to watch...]

So, how best to write about Sam Halmarack and Miserablites?

(It's possibly worth noting that it's the first piece that has also made me want to write a “proper” review so they can use it commercially and stick it on the back of flyers and stuff... I might yet do that too)

This is their programme blurb:

“Sam Halmarack and Miserablites are the bombastic pioneers of interactive stadium pop. Get ready for handclapping anthems and electro music to move and inspire. With songs and stories and a little help from you we will all come together to offer a unique take on what it means to be redeemed by music.”

Anything more I say about the show will start letting the cat out of the proverbial bag.

On the other hand, it's pretty much impossible to write analysis of a secret.

So, uh, SPOILER WARNING: THE REST OF THIS REVIEW IS SORT OF "SPOILER"

So, the shtick here is that it's a one-man character comedy show about what happens when Sam Halmarack's band don't turn up.

From this fairly unremarkable premise, performer Sam Halmarack (it's also his real name) manages to wring a show of incredible intelligence, poignancy and wit.

There's also a reason I don't write about comedy very often. In fairness to this show, it feels slightly “reductive” to label it as “comedy”. At the same time, that seems to suggest that “comedy” isn't capable of *saying something* or *being poignant*, when plainly it can. The reason I don't write about comedy, however, is that serious analysis applied to comedy looks *even more preposterous* than a lot of people think it already is when applied to stuff that seems to invite it.

But anyway.

What I think is brilliant about this show is the number of levels it operates at. Firstly, there's the totally available primary level in which we gradually learn how quite a lonely guy has been let down by people. At this level, is a bit like, say, The Office (Halmarack is probably a bit sick of being compared to Mackenzie Crook, but, well, let's say there's a passing resemblance that gets emphasised by the character he's playing here): a comedy of disappointment, almost an invitation to find someone else's heartbreak funny. So, y'know, The Office. Or Chekhov.

The second level, however, is perhaps the one that interested me more, since as well as this character comedy, SHM also presents a *really good* analysis of pop music's uninterrogated totalitarian leanings. Ok, that's maybe overselling it slightly, and one could definitely argue that this is just another level of the character-comedy – the central character's tragic lack of awareness that he's writing songs that basically rely heavily on Nietzsche and Triumph of the Will. And I suppose it also stems from having seen Laibach last weekend (review still forthcoming).

Although Halmarack's strategy is the exact opposite to Laibach's – rather than taking extant material and dressing it up with uniforms and German, what Halmarack does is to dress up new songs with eighties synths and a Shoreditch hipster/twat uniform and let the lyrics speak for themselves.

As a result, the third level is the most interesting – the fact that undernearth all this, I also strangely found it very moving indeed. Which I wasn't expecting.

Yes, part of this comes from the character's pathos – and the fact the character is, at times, unsympathetic is clever and interesting; like The Office in you're being made to feel sorry for someone who is at the same time alienating you – but another part of it comes from the problematic songs themselves. Since, along with pointing to pop's long history of questionable sentiments, at the same time the songs also do an incredible job of articulating what Britain feels like at the moment.

This is Austerity Britain – The Musical! It is every bit as much a show about the poor being oppressed as it is about a guy trying to get his music heard. The central, heartbreaking question of the night is “When do you give up?” And, it's own little way, even with the difficulty and the crunchy textures, it makes a pretty strong case for “never”.

It's also perhaps significant that this is the first show that invites the whole audience onto the stage.

It's interesting to note that this also has the effect of making it feel like the most “Forest Fringe”y show of the whole fortnight. (I acknowledge that since I've already argued that FF shouldn't be solely defined by its erstwhile Edinburgh home, what I really mean here is “It's most like shows at Forest in Edinburgh used to be”).

The effect this has on the show, however, is to transform this lone artist and his “character comedy” into something which we really are *all in together*. And I think it's this fact, the fact that Halmarack actually *needs us* to take part for the piece to work, that adds to this ultimate aticulation of resistance.

Since I'm being ludicrously honest in these reviews, I should probably also admit/confess I didn't get on stage. I sat in the stalls and watched. But as I've often noted, I'm not a big joiner. Come the revolution I'll probably be sitting at the side of one of the barricades writing about it.

[Will tidy up this second review tomorrow]

Forest Fringe at the Gate – 10

Augusto Corrieri – In place of a show

[Dan Canham – 30 Cecil Street]

[Sam Halmarack and Miserablites]


I'm writing this straight after watching Augusto Corrieri's In place of a show, in place of watching Dan Canham's 30 Cecil Street for the third time this week. I imagine I will watch it tomorrow or on Saturday however.

Part of the reason for not watching tonight, is my desire to get as much down about In place of a show while it's still fresh in my mind.

Which is an odd decision, since on many levels, it is the sort of piece that I might benefit from spending some time with before writing about it.

In place of a show is a performance lecture. A genre, the more of which I see, the more I think is one of the best ideas ever. And Corrieri's is one of the best of a Best Idea I've seen.

Its basic question is about empty theatres. Its contention – similar to Chris Goode's (aptly titled for this week) the Forest and the Field, (aptly, written up under that link by star-of-a-couple-of-nights-ago Tassos Stevens), and, in a different way, to Alex Kelly and Annie Lloyd's The Dust Archive – is that an empty theatre is never empty. There are lights, and chairs, and a stage. And memories. Etc. etc. (his full description, which includes a chandelier, took me right back to Berlin and the Volksbühne).

Corrieri goes on to suggest that even if you were to remove all these elements, you would still have an empty room. A room with walls which keep out the outside. A theatre, he suggests, is a building with a door. And he tells us that he is interested in that journey between inside and outside.

Corrieri is researching a PhD and to this end, he found himself at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Northern Italy – Europe's first purpose-built indoor theatre. He describes the space, noting its ceiling, painted to look like a sky, and its walls, painted to look like (then contemporary) street scenes. He notes the orchestra pit and the auditorium shaped like the standard Roman amphitheatre.

He goes into the theatre and sits, experiencing an “empty theatre”. For the first ten minutes he is all alone. Then some people turn up. The theatre is, after all, a tourist attraction as well as a site of academic interest. He describes the other people. Wittily.

And then a swallow flies across the space's painted sky.

[now writing at 15.51 the next day after spending way too much time on Twitter, of which more later]

This swallow gradually takes over the piece. Symbolising an element of “outside” *inside*.

Corrieri thinks his way round the possible meanings, symbolisms and paradigm shifts that this bird effects. He quotes John Berger writing on a similar incident in an opera house in [Vienna?], and notes the superstition that if a bird is killed on the stage of an opera house, then the building will burn to the ground. He notes that this very theatre that Berger is describing already burnt to the ground in 1951, although he does not know, he wryly notes, whether the death of a bird was involved.

As well as being fiercely intelligent stuff, what's lovely about Corrieri's piece is also his performance of it. He's got a really lovely way of talking that sounds at once precise, but also slightly amused by this precision. Although he remains straight-faced throughout, and the thing really is an academic lecture, it also feels brilliantly, enjoyably wry about its academic-ness. Actually, along with the sudden appearance of the bird, it does seem to share a certain amount of common ground with Emma Bennett's Bird Talk from the previous night – at least in its ability to make what could be quite a difficult form (her: modernist poetry, him: the academic lecture) into something incredibly *watchable* and listenable.

The piece also now has a coda, which I really can't decide whether to reveal or not. I think, on balance, I shouldn't, at least not while the piece still has a performance life, as it really does lift the piece from mere brilliance to something pretty much sublime. It's a real-life final twist in the tale that is so perfect that you'd think it was made-up (I made a conscious choice to ask afterwards and it isn't). But it's real life pretty much imitating a short story by Italo Calvino or Paul Auster, or perhaps Jorge Luis Borges in a way that makes you giggle at how brilliant the world can sometimes be.

I really hope a lot more people get to see it at some point in the future.

[after In place of a show there was then last night's performance of 30 Cecil Street, during which I wrote some of the above]


Then, after the interval, was Sam Halmarack and Miserablites.


Which is playing again tonight.

And I'm very tempted to leave writing it up until tomorrow, just because I knew literally nothing about it going into the show, and that does feel like the ideal way to experience it.

I do urge anyone who's around tonight to come and see it, though. That much I will say.

Although I don't even really want to burden it by raising people's expectations.

It was, for me, a highlight of a fortnight of highlights.

It's also quite a different show to a lot of the other shows of the last fortnight.


So, yes. I'll start writing about it now, but will post that review as part of tomorrow's write-up of tonight.

But seriously, it's still quite early, if you can get along to the Gate tonight, just do it.