Orlando – Thalia Gaußstraße

[written for Exeunt, mostly]

[After posting yesterday’s review of Die Brüder Karamasow, I got into an interesting discussion with two of my international colleagues (a Pole and a Romanian) who expressed their surprise that I would “review” a stage version of a book I hadn’t read, performed in a language I wasn’t always terribly good at understanding. Leaving aside the my unconscious defence that I often don’t really think of what I’m writing these days as anything like as definitive as “a review” or even, often, “a critique”, it’s an interesting question. Then, while leaving Orlando last night, I had an unexpected revelation: “That was better,” I thought to myself, “I understood about as much of that as I understand in the average Shakespeare play...” And a penny dropped: are the British as a theatregoing nation possibly the most used to going to watch plays performed in a language that they don’t speak and frequently don’t even understand? Am I happy letting what actors are saying wash over me in something like the condition of music because I’m so used to it happening at home? Moreover, might there even be something about the purity and structure of the German language (with its Du and Sie and its early-modern sentence structures) that resonates somewhere deep in British bones? Something to ponder. Anyway, Orlando...]

If I only had two consecutive nights with which to demonstrate the sheer uselessness of using “German theatre” as a catch-all term Die Brüder Karamasow and Orlando might as well be them, with the added advantage that they are both “German” takes on the art of novel-adaptation.

Where Karamasow is all high seriousness, austerity and beauty, director Bastian Kraft and dramaturg Beate Heine’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando gathers a surprising amount of its brilliance and emotional force mostly from being very funny.

It opens with the five performers (Sandra Flubacher, Sven Schelker, Nadja Schönfeldt, Cathérine Seifert and Victoria Trauttmansdorff – all great, and all playing Orlando and all the other characters uncredited, except as an ensemble), dressed in the classic stage-version of “their own clothes”, gathered around a table downstage. Onto the table is plonked a book. The book is opened and the word on the first page, “Orlando” is projected onto the video screen upstage via the live feed camera hanging above the table. At the sides of the space are five dressing tables and costume rails to which the performers retire to don their rough, period-indicative costumes. Women don bald-wigs or dresses, and Schelker, the only male in the company, has the first go at being the eponymous hero/ine.

I’ve become a real convert to the Gatz/“German” method of literary stage-adaptation, and I was powerfully reminded of why here: a lot of books really lend themselves to being played on the stage. And not because of their storyline or dialogue, but because of the way that the author addresses herself to the reader: that the novel is so often an exercise in the most direct address possible – instructions for an imagined monologue. In this respect, Orlando is perfect for this sort of immediate transfer of its contents onto stage. The fictional “biographer” that Woolf casts herself as is discursive, inquisitive and compulsive in sharing her fascination with her audience.

However, it is pre-knowing that Orlando is/was “really” written as an extended love-letter by Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, imagining West as this hero-heroine – a kind of immortal traversing space and time, and always somehow radiant, charismatic and adored – which really gives the story its kick. Here, in this staging, I think that aspect is powerfully tangible, but perhaps it might be a case of that thing where once you’ve decided on something you’ll be able to find a trace of it no matter how absent it may be in actuality.

Another crucial aspect of this “multi-media” (as we used to call them) staging is Arthur Fussy’s musik. While the pieces immediately recall Michel Nyman’s scores for early Peter Greenaway films (mostly obviously the long funeral dirge for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and the Timelapse sequences in Zed and Two Noughts), a crucial difference is that these – at least in the context of the show – feel emotional rather than intellectual. The tunes’ strange quavery insistence give the play its time signature, but also re-plug a lot of the feelings back in that might otherwise be lost in the postmodern fun (and corpsing – deliberate or otherwise) of the quickfire costume changes and buggering about with two overlaid live video feeds. (Yes, this production also has (deliberately) rudimentary Green Screen live-projection, so that we can watch live actors lying on one videoed flat surface projected onto the live-fed picture from the “story book” which functions as a kind of swatch of all the “sets”. Peter Baur’s simple, mobile set of wheeled columns and mirrors accommodate his adept video design perfectly.)

I’m not sure that this Orlando really intends to make us feel anything especially deep, or to reflect hard on the transience of life, or the enduringness of spirit, or anything like that. It felt, as much as anything – perhaps fittingly for an adaptation of a love-letter – like its chief aim was our delight. To make us feel *stuff*: happiness, laughter, and perhaps the odd bit of prickliness behind the eyes.  The ending of this version reaches beyond the scope of the book, which famously ends with the date: “Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight.” On stage, the company, accompanied by the small real-time LED alarm clock, which has been present for the previous 1hr36, promise that then entire piece will conclude in ten minutes. Then, with the clock hanging in mid air, they proceed to make ten minutes pass as rapidly as I’ve ever seen in a theatre; projecting increasingly rapid images of the recent past as the present hurtles toward us and them until we finally meet in the absolute present, as if for the first time, and: applause.

Die Brüder Karamasow – Thalia Theater

[written for Exeunt]

Luk Perceval and Susanne Meister’s stage version of Dostoevsky’s Братья Карамазовы (Brothers Karamazov) is a thing of stark, austere stillness, beauty and concentration. Running at three and a half hours (mit pause), it offers virtually no “action”, no special effects. No cheering diversions. None of the comforting consolations that the stage can provide. And yet, it might be one of the most transporting, “escapist” experiences I’ve had in a theatre.

Annette Kurz’s stage design sets the tone perfectly. On the empty stage of the Thalia main house – roughly the same dimensions as the Lyric Hammersmith, but with a smaller, more intimate auditorium – she has created an undulating floor of black planks. In the centre there is a rusted old bell topped with rough wood. All around hang massive chime bells like suspended tree trunks (marvellously, onomatopoeically, credited in the programme as “klanginstallation” (Kurz plus Ferdinand Försch, who also composed the music that it is used to create)). Over and across this, Paulus Vogt’s lighting design casts the cold light of a grey winter’s day as if filtering in through high seminary windows; or, elsewhere, creates the impression of discrete rooms downstage, shifting subtly and imperceptibly as the narrative unfurls.

Then there’s the actual “dramatic action” itself. It would appear my German language skills are in something of a state of flux. Interacting with Schwarze Augen, Maria I was pleasantly surprised by how much German I seemed to know. Here, observing Svetlana Geier’s translation of the novel, I may as well have been watching it in the original Russian. I had enough of a working knowledge of the novel to be able to keep up with where roughly we were in the enormous, rambling, discursive “plot”, but the apparent brilliance of the text and the way it was being used here washed largely over me. (I was lucky enough to see it with a couple of friends – one English with fluent German and one Austrian (with fluent English, naturally), so I could at least have my suspicion that it was brilliant textually and linguistically too confirmed, but it’s scant use to you, dear reader.) What was also useful to to have confirmed was that way that the “version” was working. Rather than picking all the dialogue out of the novel and turning it into a script as the most straight-forward English approach might, here director Perceval and his dramaturg Meister had instead cut and pasted together whole passages of the novel, meaning that we were watching something more akin to an edited Gatz-like approach.

[I say Gatz-like for the benefit of English readers as it is far and away the nearest recent point of comparison we have. I believe the Germans have been using this approach much longer. Maybe other Anglophone companies have too – but I only seem to have seen dialogue-based stage adaptations of novels in English, hitherto. By coincidence, Duška Radosavljevic’s new piece for Exeunt seems to discuss a similar phenomenon.]

In the case of Die Brüder Karamasow, this strikes me as an excellent approach, since much of the genius of the novel comes from the way in which Dostoevsky uses the narrative voice. As such, it is great that a stage adaptation doesn’t just iron this out into the simple series of events and the things that the characters in the story do or say. Also interesting, as a result, is watching the way that the actors “perform” the “text” – hanging between character and narrative, as the original authorial voice does in the novel. There is something like the quality of sculpture in how this is executed. Even the way the space is used, how parts of the stage seem to echo, expand or contract with light or sound, seems key.

The performances are uniformly excellent. It’s pretty rare to be absolutely gripped by someone just saying something you don’t even really understand. Here, that’s the sort of level of charisma we’re talking about. Jens Harzer as Ivan K. and Alexander Simon as his younger brother, Alyosha, both have something of the David Tennant about them, although watching them I was forcibly reminded both of what a beautiful language German is at a purely sonic level and how differently it can be used as a tool of communication compared with English. There is both the possibility for calmer, less jagged, more lyrical speech: less dependent on inflection or intonations rising and falling; which also makes possible a way of shouting through which works more as music than the equivalent volume in English.

Patrycia Ziółkowska as Gruschenka, meanwhile, is a study in astonishing stage presence and detached physicality. She enters in off-white fur coat and hat thrown over a loose-fitting off-white dress – stark against the black void of the empty stage – and for a long while is the only significant movement on the stage, as she stalks, slow-motion, backwards, around the perimeter in high heels.

[No, I wasn’t 100% sure about the way women were presented in this production. And, not having the narrative to distract me, I did spend quite a bit of time contemplating the differences between the way that male and female directors stage female characters. No enormous conclusions, but it does feel as if there’s a difference in the way they position the body of someone from the opposite sex in terms of spectatorship. It would be crass to say that women in productions directed by men “invite” the male gaze more, but it does feel like one can observe something of the way that that gaze has already seen them – as if a crucial identification-with has often not taken place – if that makes sense.]

That said, problematically positioned by the male gaze or otherwise, Ziółkowska clearly finds an agency of her own within the staging. Her Gruschenka is continually the most active agent on the stage. Like a bolt of lightning she illuminates the craggy rockface of the three brothers’ crumpled black lives.

I wish I had already read the novel, but this production has made me desperate to do so. I also wish my command of German was such that I could deliver a penetrating and sublime analysis of how the piece’s closing moments really feel when one fully, instinctively, natively, understands the weight and connotations of the words spoken. It is a testament to the intricacy of this slow, solemn, electric production that even without precise comprehension that, as well as being one of the hardest watches I’ve ever endured, it was also somehow one of the most profoundly satisfying.

Nach Europa – Malersaal, Deutsches Schauspielhaus

[written for Exeunt]

As a way into understanding some of where “German theatre” is currently at, Nach Europa would serve peculiarly well. It is an adaptation of the book Trois femmes puissantes (translated to German as Drei starke Frauen, or Three Strong Women) by Marie NDiaye, a mixed-race French author. It has been adapted by the director Frederike Heller. It is about the struggles of three (confusingly four, here) women to reach various parts of Europe from various parts of sub-Saharan Africa. All four African women, self-described in the staged text as young, slim, and black, are played by an older, larger, white German woman.

And of all the above facts, the most surprising thing is that there is a German theatre doing a play about immigration issues. At least, it is surprising that they are doing an immigrant’s-eye-view of the issue. Even if it is third hand. Adaptations of novels are common (this week, I’m seeing versions of Brothers Karamazov and Orlando; next week, René Pollesch’s take on Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes). That the director just knocks up the version of the novel they’re doing themselves is de rigeur. Getting a playwright in would be totally weird. And of course several young black women are played by one older white actress.

The discussion about the German habit of using white actors to play black characters has been had before. I defended it in The Stage about this time last year in response to Bruce Norris kicking off about it. But, what with the leaps and bounds being made, especially at Berlin’s Gorki Theater – at least in terms of equality of opportunity – it is all starting to look a bit curious. On one hand, I totally accept any argument which says that employing actors who are “really” black in order to secure a spurious sense of authenticity is nonsense. On the other hand, not then deploying them elsewhere, as a further means of trashing spurious senses of authenticity – “real” white people as Danish princes, for example – means that you’re effectively just cutting the chance of employment for any black, Turkish, whatever actor down to nil. Which is dumb at best. And, well, racist at worst. Germany’s problem, it seems, is to still accept “white” as a gold standard of neutrality. And all BME actors as Other. (Indeed, flicking through the DS SpielZeit 2013-14, I can see only one BME actor and she is Japanese, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t quite reflect Hamburg’s make-up.)

Talking to a colleague after the show, she voiced the concern I daren’t even name: that this production was letting “fat” stand in for “black”. We both hoped that it weren’t so, but the fact that this was a conclusion so easily arrived at rather suggested to me that someone somewhere hadn’t been terribly clever at the conceptual stage. Perhaps it’s exactly the sort of provocation we should try to brace ourselves for. There is a very real prejudice against fat people. There is a very real prejudice against black people. Perhaps this sort of exchange makes us see both prejudices more clearly. Although I’m not especially convinced. I think instead, it glosses all prejudices together into one big fluffy ball of “not nice” and completely obscures all the issues in doing so.

In terms of the piece itself, if you’ve seen one play about the hardships, trials and tribulations of those migrating from Africa to Europe you’ll know exactly what it was like. Possibly many of this audience never had, and the bits where something appalling happened – at one border checkpoint we are told a man’s feet were slashed with a machete – the theatre still fell appropriately silent.

The staging was engaging enough, if a little ‘so what?’ after four hours spent with SIGNA in the afternoon. The two actors – Matthias Bundschuh and Bettina Stucky – were both energetic and charismatic, talking almost interchangeably to us and each other. Indeed, this direct audience address was far and away the most notably successful aspect of the production. I should also record that there is a third performer credited, the musician Peter Theissen, under “Mit:” in the programme. And if I’m happy to include the musician as the fourth member of a Romanian dance quartet, I don’t think I should necessarily start thinking differently just because this is theatre. And he took the bow with the two actors, so perhaps I should widen the scope of how I was thinking about the performance. In my defence, he was sat behind Sabine Kohlstedt’s opaque wall of a set.

Re: the set, while on one level it looked pretty much like any identikit anonymous wall in any European airport, all bolted together shiny pre-fab sections (albeit here rendered in differently light-able plastics and gauze). However it did occur to me, pushed so far forward, it could equally suggest those gradually stepped sets that the Germans often use as the sets for their productions of Greek Tragedies. Except here, the production is not Greek, and the steps are slammed shut like the fold-away tiers of retractable raked seating. Modern tragedy, it suggests, is a sheer wall, not gradual steps. It’s almost certainly an over-read, but it’s an over-read I became very fond off while watching this most basic and repeated of stories.

And it is precisely this – this issue of repetition – that poses precisely one of theatre’s greatest current challenges in approaching these narratives and explorations of immigration: that, contra Tolstoy, lots of families (and individuals) are now unhappy in exactly the same way. The challenge, if we want theatre to continue to take notice of them and make any kind of difference, or even just to just keep on being watchable, is how we make these representation as alive and vital and urgent as theatre must be and as their stories demand.

For my money Nach Europa didn’t succeed, but it definitely provoked a hell of a lot of useful questions.

[oh, and re: top image, at the start there was that image live, a bloke wearing feathers in silhouette, for about two minutes. And it was the best bit of the show. The rest of it looked more like...

Produktionsfotos © Matthias Horn

I have no idea what:
"Veroeffentlichung gegen namentliche Nennung, Honorar (Umsatzsteuersatz 7%) und Belegexemplar"
means, but I'm happy to take the photos down again rather tha actually pay to use them...

Schwarze Augen, Maria – Deutsches Schauspielhaus (off-site)

[written for Exeunt]

Schwarze Augen Maria invites us into Haus Lebensbaum*. It is open-day and we’re meeting the, what? Patients? Inmates? When entering, knowing nothing about the show, my immediate concern was that a lot of this review was going to be a long ethical tussle about the exoticised use of the real-life learning disabled or mentally ill in performances. Happily, it turns out that the condition under investigation, or perhaps only being contained, at Haus Lebensraum is “Tiresias Syndrome”. Which is totally made-up.
[*Tree of Life House, I guess – although I couldn’t help wondering whether the assonance with “lebensraum” was entirely coincidental.]

This is new, totally immersive, site-sympathetic piece by Danish-Dutch group SIGNA – the brainchild of wife and husband team Signa Köstler (co-director, co-stage-and-costume-designer and performer) and Arthur Köstler (media design and performer) – here made in collaboration with Sebastian Sommerfeld and Mona el Gammel. Thanks to a malfunctioning main stage at the Schauspielhaus it is also the show that kicks off Karin Beier’s artistic directorship in Hamburg. Even without seeing Beier’s cancelled triptych of Greek classics, Die Rasenden (Iphigenie in Aulis, Die Troerinnen and Die Orestie), which was supposed to open the season, you get the sense that Schwarze Augen is an equally good introduction to her tenure; bringing together as it does a notably even-handed gender balance of creatives, a radical, innovative take on the classics, and a notable level of internationalism.

The patients/inmates welcome us as visitors to their hospital-home and after a few prefatory notes, perform Michel Jackson’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ (or ‘Earthsong’. In German). It is, all at once, brilliant, incredibly funny, totally serious. Focussed character acting rendering it paralysingly unnerving. We’re in the situation enough to feel that we can’t really laugh openly at such a sincere effort on the part of the characters. We really are in the room, after all, and they – in character – can see, hear and react to us. They don’t force us to pretend, or take a role through either coercion or a slightly naff sense of let’s pretend. They make us do it with manners. It’s an overpoweringly successful way of immersing us. At the same time, this much straight-faced, misplaced sincerity really is incredibly funny.

After the performance, we are divided into small groups by “a doctor” and led away by various patients to see their living quarters. As luck would have it – or perhaps this was the first thing that everyone was told – my group was taken up to an apartment on the second floor and were split up again so myself and another man got to talk to the “family’s” son while next door the two women in our group sat down and had a small coffee with the father. Th son told us that he was an expert on ghosts, or perhaps The (Holy?) Spirit. He showed us passages from the Bible which he had copied out. He sniffed our necks and when he touched our hands he cautiously tasted his fingers afterwards. He criticised us for wearing too many black or dark clothes.

The father, meanwhile, was much more matter of fact. He was sat at the family coffee table and was gradually assembling a model of a motorway pile-up. He showed us the newspaper article concerning the motorway-pile-up he was recreating. A woman had run out into the road causing a truck transporting pigs to swerve and overturn killing the animals. Several other vehicles then ploughed into the overturned lorry. Death everywhere. Nine months later, the children now living in Haus Lebensbaum with their parents were born. And born with these black eyes – large glassy contact lenses worn by the performers. Properly unnerving – and this is “Tiresias syndrome”.

From here we were more or less free to wander about as we saw fit. There were six or seven families, the doctor and, under the stairs on one floor, the woman who had walked out into the road, causing the accident, and whose children had all died, Maria (played by Signa K. herself).

The piece lasts for four hours and the effect is cumulative. You are repeatedly offered coffee and sweets. Every room you go into you notice the complete lack of bright colours. Everything is muted, or pastel, or beige; even the clothes worn by the patients and doctors. There is nothing vivid anywhere. All is fluff and neutrality. Comforting whites and baby-pinks predominate in the children’s clothing. They make themselves elaborate nests in their bunks. And you are offered more sweets. The adults, the parents, look tired, concerned. They are maybe drinking a bit more than is healthy in some cases. Many of the mothers are bedbound, sometimes mute. The fathers careworn and heavy with resignation. The children themselves – older teenagers now – are strange, awkward, curious. Tiresias Syndrome manifests itself as a condition something perhaps most akin to autism, it seems. The doctor tells us that the only medication he prescribes is anti-epilepsy drugs.

Some of the children are affectionate, some are withdrawn. Every so often they all begin to make a strange half-moaning half-singing noise at the same time and gather together in the hallways of the old building. Gradually the dusk gathers outside. At times it really is intensely spooky. You find yourself sitting on a sofa, uncomfortably close to a young girl who only looks at you in a handheld mirror in the gathering gloom, for example, as her mother leans, collapsed and silent against the threadbare armchair; tended to by her heavily bearded, unwashed husband. Free to come and go as you please, and to interact exactly how you like, how intense it all gets is entirely down to you. I tended to keep nipping to the (indoor, God be praised) smoking areas. It was interesting to see a performance in which “parents” and “nurses” also smoked. Some of the parents also drank. And you could share their alcohol, which was totally real.

One thing I didn’t get to do a lot was talk in English. It seemed that the back stories of the children (necessarily) and a good many of their parents precluded that possibility. This meant that most of my afternoon was spent talking and listening in German. As a result, I think I might have had the best experience possible, since I couldn’t try to be “cleverer” than the performers. I couldn’t be difficult, to try to break the story, or test the limits of the immersion. I was already at such a disadvantage linguistically that instead I was incredibly grateful to the performers for keeping everything working around my somewhat limited language skills. That said, for not-great German speakers, the hesitant, simple language of the children especially made it an ideal immersive performance to attend.

This is the most impressive immersive performance I’ve seen (although my experience is far from comprehensive given the amount of this work that exists in the UK), but these really were extraordinary performers: completely submerged in their roles. Mike Leigh-perfect, as I put it to a colleague last night. Utterly convincing, sustained, close-up naturalism; and incredibly life-like casting. Let’s not forget how uncomfortable I was when I went in; worrying that they really had got a couple of minibus-loads of pupils from local special schools involved and what the ethical ramifications of that might be. Admittedly, the fact that they hadn’t could perhaps be seen to raise the opposite question of the ethics of “able-” actors playing “learning-disabled” characters. However, while the specific learning difficulty is that of “prophecy” I guess it’s all pretty much up-for-grabs.

And what one does with the whole thing? Well, I wish I’d had the language skills to pursue the actual “story” further; to really wring more of the narrative from my interlocutors. But, even without that possibility, what there was felt rich and deeply allusive.

If there was a slight question for me I suppose – perversely – it was wanting a bit more pointed-ness or directed-ness in what was being alluded to. On the other hand, the sheer multiplicity of possibilities was incredible. This is a piece dealing with Greek myths, how we treat exceptional children, healthcare, ethics, adulthood, parenthood, childhood and even more banal concerns like “happiness” and our own lives. And all this was there to be contemplated, perceived, or even discussed with the performers. At the same time, just having a whole Midwich Cuckoos-crossed-with-Twin Peaks narrative to walk around inside would be pleasure enough. Also, interestingly (and fittingly, given that neither of SIGNA’s founders are German), this didn’t actually feel like “German theatre” in any meaningful sense whatsoever. That such work is being made here, and so brilliantly, is excellent news, however.

Produktionsfotos © Erich Goldmann

[Veröffentlichung honorarfrei für die Berichterstattung bei namentlicher Nennung des Fotografen. Wir bitten um eine Veröffentlichung der Bilder im Originalzustand]

Women at the NT – some facts

[guest post, mostly]

Denys Lasdun putting the finishing touches to his south bank NT

In the last week since the National Theatre’s interesting two hour NT50 extravaganza on BBC2 there’s been a gradual accumulation of criticism for the lack of representation of women writers, culminating in Sam Potter’s piece for the Guardian.

As is now inevitable with this sort of issue, I spent most of the week discussing it behind relatively closed doors on Facebook*. However, my friend, the writer and director James Morris, happened to have a spreadsheet which contained details of every production the NT had done, so he did a bit of number crunching. The below results are mostly copied and pasted directly, and reproduced here with permission.

We started out with conjecture:

“If you sort the data in that spreadsheet by playwright it makes for depressing reading. You’ll find that you probably have more productions of Shakespeare (up to and including Peter Hall’s latest Twelfth Night, to which you can add Othello and Timon of Athens since) than you do plays written by women.

“In fact, I’d go so far as to say if you added David Hare, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard together, then you’d probably have about the same number of plays by those three men alone as there are plays by all women in the NT’s history, and I’m being generous and counting plays that Katie Mitchell devised/developed from source material (e.g. Waves or some trace of her) as being ‘written’ by her.

Then James checked it out:

“Okay, I did the math: if you only take into account the Old Vic, Olivier, Lyttelton, and Cottesloe (no Shed, no Paintframe, no Loft, no Shunt, etc.) then you have 67 shows that were either written or co-written by women and 726 that were written by men. When shows were devised I generally grouped them under the gender of whoever was leading the process - whatever I did here would be flawed in some way. That makes for about 91% of shows on the National’s main stages being written by men. 31 of those 67 shows were under Hytner, along with 192 by men, meaning he’s above average at about 13% written or co-written by women.”

For all that 13% per cent is a pretty uninspiring figure, let’s at least note that ALMOST HALF of everything written by a woman to be staged at the NT was staged under Hytner’s regime. Let’s also remember that many of the men tipping this balance are “dead white males,” to use a strangely familiar phrase.

During Hytner’s time, if you discounted plays by playwrights who are dead [I count 54], you’d still have a gender imbalance, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.

No. It goes up to 23% – so, of commissions of living playwrights, we got up to almost a quarter in the last decade. Annoyingly, of course, that figure goes down again when one takes into account the fact that virtually every *version* of a foreign playwright, alive or dead (and entirely male, I think), was undertaken by a male playwright.

Of those 67 plays by women in the NT’s entire history, 42 were in the Cottesloe (14% of 291 Cottesloe productions), 16 were in the Lyttelton (5% of 214 Lyttelton productions), 6 were in the Olivier (3% of 199 Olivier productions), 3 were at the Old Vic (3% of 89 Old Vic productions)

For comparison: there have been 68 productions of plays by Shakespeare.

[NOTE: this includes duplicates with revivals and also things like the Animals & Children Took to the Streets. This information is for all productions from the first performance of Hamlet up through all announced shows for the rest of 2013.]

Re: my suggestion (made first on Facebook and then as a comment on the Guardian blog) that for the next fifty years we should just reverse these figures, James pointed out:

The NT probably does more plays in a year now than it used to, even after transferring to the South Bank. At the moment they probably do circa 22-25 shows a year. Back in the late 70s and early 80s it was more like 15-18.

So, the good news for male playwrights is that the NT can probably start commissioning more work from them again (at a rate of 50%, equal to the rate with which women will also be being commissioned and produced) sooner than 2063

***

After this, we turned our attention to directors.

Directors who have directed the most plays by women/co-written by women: Katie Mitchell (7, including several of her own workings) and John Burgess (5). Howard Davies has directed 2 plays by women and 33 by men, Hytner now has 37 productions (more than anybody else) and they were all written by men. Peter Hall has 30, all by men. Trevor Nunn has 20, all by men. Laurence Olivier has 8, all by men. Richard Eyre is the only Artistic Director of the National Theatre ever to direct a play written by a woman on one of its stages and that was more than fifteen years after he stepped down: Welcome to Thebes, by Moira Buffini. He has directed 32 productions at the National, 31 by men.

[update: see comment below from John Burgess, who adds to his five: "two Studio Nights in the Cottesloe Theatre – The Women by Clare Booth Luce (co-directed with Peter Gill) in March 1986 and Travelling Time by Rosemary Wilton in March 1987"]

There have been 7 productions co-directed by men and women, 106 directed by women, and 678 directed by men.

The number of shows directed by men whose first name is Peter is 76.

(I couldn't find details of who directed a couple of shows like Inua Ellams’ Black T-Shirt Collection [update: it was a man] and Daniel Kitson’s show the other year)

Katie Mitchell is the most regular female director with 18 productions, followed by Marianne Elliot with 11 (+ 2 co-directions), Deborah Warner and Di Trevis with 7 each, then Melly Still and Phyllida Lloyd with 5 each.

The first woman to direct for the National Theatre was Joan Plowright in 1969 - she directed Rites by Maureen Duffy and co-directed The Travails of Sancho Panza with Donald MacKechnie.

The first woman to direct an NT production on the South Bank was Nancy Meckler in 1981. Between 1969 and 1981, not a single National Theatre production was directed by a woman. In the entirety of Hall's time as Artistic Director (1973 to 1988), there were 8 productions directed by 5 different women: Nancy Meckler, Sheila Hancock, Cicely Berry, Di Trevis, and Sarah Pia Anderson.

By contrast: in 2007 alone, there were 9 productions directed by 7 different women: Anna Mackmin, Deborah Warner, Emma Rice, Katie Mitchell, Marianne Elliot, Sarah Frankcom, and Thea Sharrock.

Of those 9 productions, only one show was (co-)written by a woman: director Emma Rice's version of A Matter of Life and Death.

Of the 113 productions in which a woman was involved as director, 30 (26%) were written - or co-written - by women. Of the 678 productions directed solely by men, 37 (5%) were written - or co-written - by women.

ENDS

* As a side issue; it’s interesting how much writing-about-theatre now takes place entirely on these “unofficial” social networking sites. It still feels that between Twitter and Facebook half the impetus for blogging was totally removed when they arrived, and also that a significant amount of time was also taken off the table. This is, I suppose, my “first-wave blogger” reactionary grumble akin to Michael Billington’s bemoaning the passing of “the kind of prolonged argument about the arts that once took place in the correspondence columns of newspapers”.

Landscape II – BAC

[seen 06/11/13]

“During my time here, I thought to draw myself closer to places I knew, that the small peace and revelations of the land were the treasures of kindness. But they were reflections. Drawing me in so I may turn and see outwards.”


Melanie Wilson’s Landscape II is an extraordinary piece of theatre. Extraordinary, and possibly nigh-on impossible to write about satisfactorily.

[I tried to write a non-spoilery review, but it didn’t work, so this one might get a bit blow-by-blow because I think I’m going to need to write down everything that happened just to work it out for myself. So, y’know, go and see it first if that sort of thing annoys you. It’s also very First Person-subjective, so maybe skip it if that annoys you too.]

As well as being a writer and performer extraordinaire – I’ve been a massive fan since Simple Girl in 2007 – Wilson is also a virtuoso sound designer. Most notably, beyond her own shows, for Katie Mitchell’s recent German outings Die Gelbe Tapete and Reise Durch die Nacht. I mention this, because I think it is crucial to the way this piece operates.

The only thing I knew going in was the vague recollection of the first line of the flyer: “Three women separated by a hundred years start a conversation across time.” That’s also a useful thing to know.

I have to admit that, in the moment, I found the beginning pretty hard going. Yes, it was beautifully executed: Wilson sits very still at a wooden table, housing the necessary detritus of sound-operation – there’s a laptop, a little board of lighted switches and a small sound-desk volume control board. This is placed on a set (designed by Wilson and lighting designer Ben Pacey) suggesting the whitewashed plaster walls and floorboards of a remote cottage: the remote cottage where one of her characters seems to be now, and where one was 100 years ago. The long back wall of the cottage doubles as a vast video projection screen. It’s worth saying that this is possibly the most impressive, integrated use of video I’ve ever seen. The whole wall just unfussily lights up. There are no visible joins, no slight shudders or static; just perfect crisp, clear pictures – beautifully filmed (and projected) by Will Duke.

But, yes, hard going. The piece starts quietly, slowly: incredibly still. And, while the words, images and sound are beautiful, they’re also incredibly slow and fractured. I felt like my body and mind were operating at the wrong speed; like I really needed to have slowed down before entering. On top of this, I was conscious of Thinking Too Hard. Because of the fractures, and the space between the words, I felt like I was both overthinking everything I was hearing and at the same time not quite managing to piece everything together, and missing some of what was being said because I was too lost in my own mind listening to my overthinking – all the while thinking, this is really beautifully done, why aren’t I following it better? (Possibly because I was very tired, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.) At the same time, the piece continues to command complete attention and respect. At no point during this phase of disorientation did I feel irritable or like I wanted to leave. Exactly the opposite: I wanted to concentrate even harder, to find a way of existing comfortably in the piece.

When I said that I think the piece operates like sound design, I suppose I really meant more “like music”. Quite quickly you become aware of subtle shifts in the lighting, in the words, and in the timbre of Wilson’s voice. These tiny, subtle changes work like the leitmotifs in Wagner. I think every character, perhaps even each significant aspect of the narrative had shifts in sound, light and wordsound to designate their arrival. More concentration needed.

Then, at around the halfway point there’s a bit that makes you pretty much jump out of your skin. Tending to avoid “horror” theatre and plays designed to “shock”, it’s been absolute age since something’s made me jump in a theatre in the way that thrillers do in the cinema.

This single moment completely changed the entire game for me. Up until that point, the beauty and the meandering, while lovely to look at and listen to, hadn’t really been connecting with me. This moment of visceral shock not only connected, but also made retrospective sense of the lulling first part – like someone soothing you into a state of relaxation the better to make you jump unexpectedly. From here on in it felt more like I was fighting a battle between being very wired with adrenaline and still back to being soothed over.

Closer to the end, there is a bigger, more profound, more political shift. I won’t say what it is here/now, but strangely, it confirmed the strangest impression I’d had at the first shock*. And what this second piece of information, I suppose, does is to comprehensively re-wire your understanding of everything that has gone before – or at least it did for me. It absolutely abolishes the impression of this being perhaps a floaty, pretty-pretty, pastoral piece and makes it about something very real, urgent, and pressing. It also wires all that back into the importance of the natural beauty of the landscapes we had been previously considering. It makes the piece into a meditation not only on beauty but Art and Politics.

The quote at the top of this review for me absolutely nails the core of the whole thing, and gave me a way to retrospectively understand and appreciate it all.

Something else that is phenomenal about the piece is the severity of the disorientation it causes for a good while after it ends. The word “hallucinatory” gets used a bit too much to describe pieces of theatre, but leaving the Council Chamber space at the BAC (unrecognisable, even after having only been there the previous Friday), I felt completely spaced and wrung out for a good quarter of an hour afterwards. The conversation I had with friends afterwards was less “wasn’t that great?” (it was), but “what the hell just happened?”

Landscape II feels like a spectacular, extraordinary intelligent and, importantly, feminist achievement of the thing.

* The first shock immediately made me think of this scene from this film which I’m linking to, but clicking it will be a total spoiler. Also, it’s quite a harrowing scene.

[all the pictures used are screen-shots from the Landscape II trailer using Will Duke's film]

In Eldersfield, Chapter Two: Monument to Charlie Chaplin – Whitechapel Gallery

[seen 04/11/13]

Kings of England’s In Eldersfield, Chapter Two: Monument to Charlie Chaplin is a short 16mm black and white film made by Rosie Carr with music by Nick Gill. In the same way that Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree is a glass of water. Or, to put it another way, the film is the monument. As a film, it plays with the idea of its monumentality. It is also a documentary of a performance, but the performance exists solely for the camera. Although the fact that the performance took place in reality is also significant.

Kings of England is an umbrella term for projects convened by Simon Bowes (here working with John Pinder (co-concept development and co-direction with Bowes), Rhiannon Armstrong (interviews, field recordings and violin), Alex Eisenberg (documentation, website and print)). In Eldersfield is a project – he explained, introducing the piece – which is taking place over the course of a decade and will consist of ten Chapters. A decade is not necessarily a length of time, he added. Eldersfield is a made-up name for a place that is about history, ancestry, and the project is about commemorating and reclaiming items from the 20th Century. Chapter One – described beautifully here by Matt Trueman – was a live performance concerning the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, and a twenty minute silence he once took before replying to a question he had been asked.

Chapter Two is nominally about Charlie Chaplin. The monument, however, is as much to the National Picture Theatre in Hull (a strikingly resonant title for a cinema, particularly in these days after NT50). On 18 March, 1941, it was bombed while 150 people were inside watching Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator. Miraculously, no one was injured, but the building still stands empty and ruined on Beverley Road and is about to be knocked down. Monument, then, preserves these facts, and captures images of the building. On top of that it creates an abstract performance and evocation of them.

To this end, the film follows five children/young people (10-14) from them brushing their teeth and eating breakfast to a point where they are gathered in the studio theatre in the Hull Truck building.
[Coming to the performance straight after posting Monday’s piece on Nic Green, I was amused to remember I had once said to Bowes that his own folk music blood and soil aesthetic had also kind of troubled me. Something he wryly acknowledged.]
But, Kings of England have created a rather profoundly brilliant sort of local patriotism against nationalism: warmth, but also self-criticism.

The film looks a lot like a 1940s newsreel, or the sort of archive footage we see of new towns in the 1930s or 1950s. This is partially supported by fact the houses in which most of the children are introduced were built in this period, but there’s something more about the film stock that makes it look like it’s vintage even while they’re fastening velcro trainers and adjusting their smart phone. These images in particular feel incredibly astutely picked. We at once have this sense of “our reality”, the here-and-now, but at the same time a very familiar aesthetic of “heritage”.

What the children are bringing to the film, beyond some useful and necessary movement, is an abstracted-to-the-nth degree, almost cubist rendering of that scene from The Great Dictator in which Chaplin-as-not-actually-Adolf bounces that large inflatable globe around to the prelude from Lohengrin (which is effectively just the instrumental version of In Fernem Land, which I first happened to see in Meine Faire Dame).

For Chapter Two, the excellent writer and musician Nick Gill (over whom I’ve already fawned quite enough this year), has re-written, or re-imagined this music into a harsher, less straightforward outwardly lyrical form. A kind of angular version of the Lohengrin prelude, using (as Nick put it) about two phrases and some of the same notes, while remarkably keeping something of the feel of the original and a kind of de-problematised Wagner. Actually, (and really I’d need to hear the whole thing through a few more times before committing to this as a judgement), I think what Nick’s done is by isolating the phrases and repeating them many more times than happens in the original. And with gaps. – Making them sound much more like something that his band Monroe Transfer might have come up with on their own, and a bit like those bits of Michael Nyman where he does minimalism to Mozart or Purcell – he’s taken out that problematic unchallenged Romanticism that so appealled to the almost kitsch, chocolate box aesthetics of the Nazi party. (Interesting thing about Nazi aesthetics: the architecture and fashion tended to be pretty forward-looking, the art and thinking really didn’t.)

And that is part of the wider genius of this short film. It takes, plays with, and interrogates even these most problematic aspects of monumentalism, goes close to an artistic edge by deploying such strong symbolism as Wagner and Hitler, while concurrently offering a comment on the monumentalism of capitalism (the film cleverly tracks the children both marching through a park, past an old Victorian statue, past a town centre war memorial, and then through a shopping mall with a massive Tesco that might as well have been designed by Albert Speer), treading an intricate, intelligent path between reactionary yearning for The Good Old Days™ and palpable disgust at the corporatisation of Britain. In the best possible way, it has its cake and eats it.

As a work of art, I’d say it is one of the most intelligently critical, searching pieces I have seen this year, or in a long while, actually. I have no idea how anyone else will get to see it, but I hope conditions exist to enable a far wider constituency than Monday’s invited audience to experience this work.

Fatherland – BAC

[seen 02/11/13]

It’s astonishing how little the aesthetics of fascism have changed since the 1920s.

Nic Green’s new piece, Fatherland – wittingly or unwittingly – has the most far-right aesthetics that I have ever seen deployed in a theatre. I am curious to know the extent to which that is deliberate, and the extent to which it is unconscious. And, if conscious, what the effect that this exploration and use of fascist, Nazi, and neo-Nazi iconography is supposed to be.

The Council Chamber room of the BAC is a perfect choice for Fatherland. It is a comforting old hall: high whitewashed ceiling, crumbling plaster-work, and wooden panels. It feels like the essence of a proud, strong history gone to seed – a crucial foundation stone for fascism.

The audience is placed in four banks of seating all facing a single figure in the centre. We are flanked by three drummers on podiums, with short hair, side-partings, and tight fitting military shirts with rolled-up sleeves.

The first, what? fifteen or so minutes of the show feel quite gentle. Green recruits some men from the audience who stand in the opposite corner of the space to her and read some words about “space” (which is here defined as being dependent on there being things for space to be the space between). The piece is apparently, nominally about Green’s meeting with her father, and her interest in her (invisible, inaudible) Scottish ancestry.

She recites the words of a patriotic Scottish song and the speaks in what I assume is Gaelic.

Then the drums kick in.

Fans of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of The Will will recognise the aesthetic immediately. And it has been slavishly copied by bands wishing to invoke neo-Nazi imagery ever since (see: appendix).

Suddenly Fatherland seems a much more loaded title than I think any other reviewer thus far seems to have given credit for. So what is Green really exploring here? Is the piece deliberately drawing parallels between Scottish nationalism and National Socialism? If so, it’s a gesture as provocative as it is overlooked-by-everyone-who-has-seen-it.

What I find more disturbing is the extent to which other reviews have simply, happily bought into the sight and sound of the pounding drums, despite the fact that, minus the half-naked feminist hopping about in the centre of the stage, it feels like sitting in the midst of Anders Brevik’s wettest dreams.

Of course, on one level, it can be simply explained. Drums were pretty much a feature of most militaries – including the Scottish – from a time long before fascism became the word to define this sort of nationalism and militarism. However, since we all noticed that fascism was without exception the greatest evil ever imagined by the human mind, people tend to have been more shy about directly evoking its memory unless it is to make a very specific point, or else to directly flirt with that evil. I am not confident Green wishes to do either. Which makes responding to her Fatherland feel nigh-on impossible in a sensible way.  All I saw was fascism slightly disguised by the presence of a topless Live-Artist. How do you respond to that?


Appendix:

You think I’m kidding about just how neo-Nazi it looks? Check out...

Death in June’s We Drive East (from about a minute in):




NON’s Total War (also starts about a minute in):




And, if you’re ever not sure if someone’s using a Nazi aesthetic or not, then a good rule of thumb is: if it resembles Laibach's pastiche of it, then it’s pretty much a yes – cf. their cover of Queen’s One Vision – in German – Geburt Einer Nation (the lyrics, directly translated from Queen into German become: “Ein Fleisch, ein Blut, ein wahrer Glaube. / Ein Ruf, ein Traum, ein starker Wille” – suddenly a chilling echo of “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” – the title being a reference to that famous American bit of Ku Klux Klan-endorsing cinema history Birth of a Nation):



Similarly, it was Irwin, the art wing of NSK, of which Laibach was also a part, who managed to embarrass the Yugoslavian government by winning a competition to design a poster for a youth event based on precisely the same Nazi image as the one appropriated by Joy Division (today’s cover picture).

Post script: annoyingly, there’s no actual footage of Fatherland on YouTube, nor are there any full-stage photos which include the drummers (although I’m pretty certain I’m not just writing a review of some weird nightmare I’ve had). What there is, interestingly, is a video by Nic Green called Motherland:

The National Theatre in the 2000s

[A short extract from my chapter in Modern British Playwriting: 2000-2009]

[Given that it’s the National’s 50th Birthday, and that my chapter on the last decade in British Theatre has just been published, and given the number of competing histories that are vying for our attention, I figured rather than knock up a specific response to last night’s Live from the National Theatre: 50 Years on Stage on BBC2 last night, I’d just put this edited extract out there. It comes from a point quite close to the end of the chapter, and thanks to the way I’ve ordered the rest of the thing, other really significant stuff (Shunt, Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, the work of Katie Mitchell) is covered elsewhere. But, well, hopefully this fills in a few of the gaps that might have been left by other recent versions of the last ten years...]

‘What director of the National Theatre wouldn't merit a place on a “most influential people in theatre” list, for heaven's sake? (Answers on a postcard marked ‘Trevor Nunn Competition’ to the usual address, please.)’ – Chris Goode

History has not been kind to Trevor Nunn’s time as artistic director of the National Theatre. Taking over from Richard Eyre in 1997, and being relieved by Nicholas Hytner in 2003, he is now remembered chiefly for putting on a lot of musicals. In the last three-and-a-bit years of his tenure, the part with which this chapter is concerned, he did at the very least hold the reins while some good and/or interesting work passed through the building. David Edgar’s Albert Speer, Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clapp’s Molly House all premièred. Visionary Canadian director Robert LePage’s The Far Side of The Moon visited, and the runaway success that was Gregory Burke’s first play Gagarin Way also transferred from the Traverse Theatre. And there were solid, popular revivals of Gorky’s Summerfolk and, well, some musicals.

Encore Theatre Magazine took a less charitable view: ‘plays like Mutabilitie, or Battle Royal, or Remember This, or The Villain’s Opera look like the work of a theatre has lost any sense of what it wants to do. They were ill-matched to their theatres, underdeveloped, did not appear to have emerged from any sharpening dialogue with the theatre... At Sir Trevor’s National Theatre there seemed to be no real policy for new writing. Jack Bradley is a good man but he has evidently struggled with an artistic directorship with no instinctive sympathy for the new play.’

More important, and certainly more indicative of the shape of things to come was the Transformation season. In 2002 Nunn hit on the bright idea of constructing two new slightly different “Loft”-style spaces somehow interposed on the Lyttleton. Ticket prices were brought down and the programming was explicitly aimed at grabbing the attention of a younger audience. Former artistic director of the Gate, Mick Gordon, was put in charge as artistic director of these two new spaces. In retrospect Gordon’s programming looks inspired. A great mixture of urgent, sinuous, topical new writing from great emerging playwrights (Roy Williams, Richard Bean, Moira Buffini) alongside an astute mixture of physical, visual and dance theatre (Kathryn Hunter, DV8, Matthew Bourne), and some slightly less successful good-ideas-on-paper (Jeanette Winterson and Deborah Warner’s Power Book and any play by Tanika Gupta).

Looking back over the season at the time Michael Billington grudgingly accounts it only a partial success:

Judging by the National’s own statistics, it would seem to have had some success. The 13 shows have played to about 70% capacity. (Intriguingly, one of the most popular was the critically assailed version of The Birds.) More importantly, just over half the total audience has been under 35. 

But has the season, under Mick Gordon's direction, been an artistic success? Here the results have been more mixed... my impression has been of a dominance of style over content. I remember images from the shows I saw rather than emotions or ideas; my eyes were consistently dazzled, but I left spiritually untransformed.

In this article, as much as in the programming on which it comments, we see seeds of a conflict that was to flare up around the NT again during Nicholas Hytner’s time as artistic director.

***

Writing in the Guardian in early July 2002, Tom Morris, responding to the question “is this an exciting time for British theatre?”, replied:

In a way, the most exciting time for theatre is when there is the least going on. Radical invention requires a clean slate... So the more tired, conservative and celebrity-driven you think theatre has become, the better the opportunity to make it buzz. The extraordinary thing is that for the first time in 25 years, there is new Arts Council money available to do it with. If I were Nick Hytner taking over the National... I would be leaping with excitement at the opportunities to create something new: not something poised, snappy and chic - as some seem to think the best new theatre is - but something dirty, passionate and wild. If you see Improbable Theatre, Richard Thomas, Frantic Assembly, Complicité and Tom Waits being commissioned to make new work in these spaces, you'll know they're on the right track.

Less than a year after the article was printed, Nicholas Hytner had made Tom Morris an associate director at the National Theatre, and Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera – originally seen as a scratch at Morris’s BAC – had transferred to the Lyttleton; to a riotous chorus of approval:

There could be no clearer sign that the National Theatre is under new management than the arrival of Jerry Springer: the Opera. It’s filthy, it’s funny, it’s brilliantly original and, taken all in all, about as much fun as you are likely to have with your clothes on. (Telegraph)

Within a couple of years, Improbable and Complicité had also produced shows there. Hytner’s own first production at the National as artistic director was also a calculated bit of iconoclasm; dressed in modern British army fatigues, opening only weeks after the US/UK invasion of Iraq, the brilliant black actor Adrian Lester played Henry V to yet more acclaim. Even if the production itself was a little ordinary it was an important statement of intent; here was an NT regime with its sights clearly trained on the 21st century. It is likely, looking back over these first six years of Nick Hytner’s time as Artistic Director of the National Theatre, everyone will choose different highlights, but part of the brilliance of Hytner’s regime was its fleet ability to cover all the things people thought a national theatre should be covering, and at the same time introduce new things no one had realised were essential until they arrived, all combined with a commitment to artistic excellence and experimentation.

As well as work by writers, companies and directors already discussed in greater detail in this chapter/book [Shunt, Punchdrunk, Katie Mitchell, Kneehigh, Simon Stephens, Roy Williams, etc.], there was also excellent work from Marianne Elliot, who won a Best Director Evening Standard Award for her production of Ibsen’s Pillars Of The Community (2005) and who, with her production of St Joan in the Olivier (2007), went on to spearhead the National’s move to reclaim the works of George Bernard Shaw for the 21st century; proving plays which had long been regarded as fusty and too wordy could not only be brought back to life, but could prove fascinating mirrors of our own times. Similarly, Nicholas Hytner’s revivals of classic plays, most notably in Man of Mode (2006), demonstrated for a play to reflect modern society it need not have been newly written. Indeed, Hytner had a particularly flair for reflecting contemporary mores in old texts seen again in his productions of The Alchemist (2006) and Major Barbara (2008). Beyond this, alongside Katie Mitchell’s Chekhovs, the National also looked to Russia with Howard Davies’s fine revivals of Gorki’s Philistines (2007), Peter Flannery’s adaptation of the Russian film set in the era of Stalin’s purges, Burnt By The Sun (2009), and Bulgakov’s The White Guard (2010), and Africa for Rufus Norris’s imaginative production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horsemen (2009).

Although curiously overlooked as a new writing building, the National did in fact stage numerous new plays throughout the decade, as well as works previously discussed elsewhere in the chapter, it had enormous artistic and/or critical successes with Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (2003), Simon Stephens’s On the Shore of the Wide World (2005) and Harper Regan (2008), and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003).

And then there was Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004), which was a phenomenon all of its own. Nominally about a group of boys studying for their Oxbridge exams in Sheffield in the eighties, it was plainly set in a romanticised vision of Bennett’s own youth, with the updated setting thrown in so Bennett could make amusing mischief at the expense of contrarian television historians. Hardly even a play, so much as a set of extended, and gently funny sketches, some songs, and a slight plot playing a younger, more cynical teacher off against an older, more idealistic one. , something about it’s diffident comedy captured the country’s imagination and it sold out the National, then the West End, and then national tours, before becoming a film.

In 2005, a short way into Hytner’s time at the NT, a group of writers calling themselves The Monsterists, including David Eldridge, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Richard Bean and Moira Buffini, formed an artistic pressure group for theatres to start letting living writers write “big plays”. They demanded: ‘The elevation of new theatre writing from the ghetto of the studio “black box” to the main stage; Equal access to financial resources for plays being produced by a living writer (ie equal with dead writers); Use of the very best directors for new plays; Use of the very best actors for new plays.’(Guardian )

Plainly Hytner was listening carefully, as over the next five years, all opening on the National Theatre largest stage, with excellent casts, directors and resources behind them, came the remarkably varied fruits of the Monsterists: David Eldridge’s Market Boy (2006), Rebecca Lenkiewicz Her Naked Skin (2008), Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice (2009) and Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes (2010) – a play about Romford market in the 1980s; a play about the suffragette movement; a history of multicultural Britain focusing on London’s East End, and a mash-up of Greek classical tragedies re-imagined in contemporary Africa.

Alongside these diverse and quirky new commissions, the NT also did sterling work with adaptations of children’s books as Christmas Shows. No consideration of the decade’s theatre would be complete without noting the sheer verve of commissioning a (two-part) adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, replete with giant puppet armoured polar bears and daemons, or the immensely popular follow-up adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy (2005). But it was in 2007 that this strand of commissioning went global. Adapted by Nick Stafford, directed by Tom Morris, Marianne Elliot and in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Theatre Company the National Theatre’s version of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse is the most widely seen, and surely one of the best-loved, theatre shows of the decade. Telling the story of a young boy and his quest to find his horse after it is pressed into military service in World War One, the real triumph of War Horse was its revelatory use of puppetry to depict the horses. Review after review rhapsodised about the skill of the – visible throughout – puppeteers, and how you somehow forgot they were even there.

 This marriage of what had been, only a few years earlier, deemed “alternative theatre” techniques with mass audience appeal was Tom Morris’s finest hour at the National, confirming his desire for ‘the opportunity to create something new: not something poised, snappy and chic’ had been entirely correct.

***

[That's pretty much the tidiest place to leave that section. There is lots more in the book...]

[and, just for old times’ sake: here’s the best trailer the NT have ever made, for the thing that is still one of the best shows I’ve ever seen there...

Arc Hive

Something I’ve been meaning to do for ages is stick up my entire back-catalogue of stuff somewhere online. Obviously I could have done it here, but then it would obviously all turn up in late 2013 and make the chronology incredibly weird. Happily, Wordpress has a facility whereby you can edit the date of an article. So, that’s what I’ve done.

There is now a *very Beta-* version, which so far includes the vast majority of my reviews for Time Out – most of which have now not been available for a while now, thanks to Time Out’s appalling web-keeping during the period I wrote for them.

So here it is: the AH archive – beta version

I might at some point write a short piece about how I feel about these reviews, and maybe pick out a couple of the best and worst, but for the moment – not least because I’ve got to head out in a bit to see tonight’s performance – I’ll make do with sticking this up here. Not least so I have an excuse to use...

[...cover picture: Gerhard Richter’s 2. Nov. 2008]

TV review – Arena: The National Theatre

Thank God for the National Theatre having a 50th birthday and thank God for BBC4; otherwise we would never see anything about theatre on the telly whatsoever. Of course, in this brave new world of multi-platform this, and webcast that, I daresay we wouldn’t notice or even mind that much. Except, once the BBC does go and do something like screening Arena: The National Theatre – The Dream, we all remember how bloody good the BBC can be. And how nice it is to have our favourite artform paid a bit of attention by people with some serious resources. Put simply, it’s unlikely you’re going to see a better documentary about theatre than part one of this two part Arena programme this year. And not only because there is no competition whatsoever.

The Dream is an hour-long documentary tracing the foundation of Britain’s National Theatre through to the retirement a decade later of its first artistic director Laurence Olivier. I thought I pretty much knew this narrative, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much detail this documentary threw in to make me feel like I was still learning stuff. What is exceptional, however, is the sheer tonnage of previously unseen (at least by me) footage that they accompany it with. Clips of contemporary interviews, footage of as many plays as humanly possibly (from an age which didn’t tend to point a video camera at everything, for the simple reason that they didn’t exist), audio recording of many more, accompanied by black and white stage photos, and interviews with all the luminaries both historical and newly recorded. From all this you got a real sense of the period, how it felt to be there, how flimsy the entire enterprise often felt from the inside, but also the warmth with which it was remembered. It was also cheering to someone in my profession how much more alive someone talking about a production made it feel than listening to a recording of a performance, looking at pictures of it, or even watching a recording of it. There is something convincing about the power of human testimony that doesn’t quite come across from footage.

What was also exciting about The Dream is the way that it situated that work done at the National. Exciting, and strangely fascinating. Fascinating, because the ecology it described seems at once so familiar and so remote. What struck me was the extent to which the first NT company was repeatedly framed as “taking risks”. Coupled with Tynan’s Europhilia and the company’s absolute adherence to the principle of the ensemble, it feels like a high point of British theatre to which we’re only now gradually beginning to return. At the same time, I was completely intrigued by the way that the opposition between Olivier’s NT and Peter Hall’s RSC was framed. [Someone – check] describes the NT as the Cavaliers to the RSC’s Roundheads, suggesting an aura of high puritan seriousness about Hall in Stratford compared to the flamboyance of the NT. I also found it fascinating that Peter Hall is broadly credited for, well, for apparently inventing or at least popularising the way most modern directors work: that is to say, actually working with the actors on the script. Similarly, it was interesting that Peter Brook is mostly identified with the RSC.

From a modern vantage point, it feels impossible to guess in which direction one might have felt instinctively, tribally pulled. Both organisations have changed beyond recognition now – I don’t suppose for a moment I would describe the NT in its current phase as the more Cavalier than the RSC. But then, I don’t think I’d choose that kind of Oxford/Cambridge dichotomy at all.

Given how much I loved the first, hour-long account of the first decade, I was surprised by just how depressing I found the second, hour-and-a-half long account of the next forty years.

That said, I think the reasons are clear enough. Firstly, the period is infinitely more depressing: from the white heat of hope and promise exemplified by both the period and the personalities of the sixties, both are sapped in the seventies and we wind up with the oleaginous Peter Hall and Mrs Thatcher in charge. Then there is the narrative itself, which suffers the indignity of Peter Hall being made to look quite radical and left-wing by virtue of the fact that he is facing Thatcher’s Conservative government. Of course, one thing that made it all the more depressing was the amount of time it was given. *Obviously* The Dream was a better documentary: it had an hour to cover ten years. War and Peace had thirty more minutes to cover thirty more years. But there was also the addiction to rehashing the old narratives. The familiarity of the stock Rock‘n’Roll Years footage of The Winter of Discontent, Northern Ireland, Punk, The Falklands, Yuppies, The Stock Market, The Eighties... felt desperately hackneyed.

Mostly, though, the problem was that not only were the markers of the period, and the narrative of Hall’s clammy successes, followed by Eyre’s decent stab, Trev’s bunch o’ musicals, through to Hytner’s triumphs all too familiar, but that they were given next to no time, and definitely no back-up. Where in The Dream we had spent time with the people who had been involved – we got to listen to their versions of events, warm, fond memories enlivened by anecdotes and opinions – here it felt mostly like someone explaining everything over a newsreel. And, yes, while it was nice to hear from Lucy Prebble, I couldn’t help wishing the Beeb had had the same courage it had shown in part one and had devoted an hour to each decade. Or it could at least have spent less time dwelling on the main events of the seventies, eighties and nineties until what is essentially my entire lifetime felt like a series of miserable political wrangling interspersed with popular productions of Guys and Dolls. Perhaps this is the truest sense of how it did feel, but it is such a familiar account that I can’t help but think it is time for a new voice to point out other aspects.

Certainly the account of the Hytner years, after an early acknowledgement of his early vitality – at least in the form of Jerry Springer The Opera, Elmina’s Kitchen and Adrian Lester’s “Iraq-invasion” Henry V, but no Punchdrunk or Shunt, and remarkably no mention of Tom Morris; arguably Hytner’s first Tynan – quickly lapses into a list of big-hitting West End Transfers. Of course those matter. Of course. But there was other stuff too. The focus on the big money-spinners at the expense of a lot of other artistic excellence (I don’t say the popular money-spinners aren’t excellent or arty either, I’m on record as having hugely enjoyed both War Horse and Curious Incident...) all rather seemed to suggest just how deeply the Thatcher years had eroded our ability to think artistically rather than financially. And of course, they didn’t and haven’t. But you wouldn’t know it from watching the second part of the Arena doc., which felt curiously slung-together-by-interns-who-didn’t care in comparison to the first one. Oh well; there’ll be another birthday in fifty years time when we can set the record straight...

The episodes are currently on iPlayer until:

The Dream – 7 November

War and Peace – 13 November

Unsent Postcards: Political Mother – Sadler’s Wells

[having now written a proper response to a Hofesh Shechter choreography, I feel less irresponsible posting this frankly thin review of his earlier work which I saw in July. Probably best to read the Sun review first]

I saw Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother – the choreographer’s cut an obscenely long time ago now (4th July, according to my diary). And there were logistical reasons why it didn’t get written up over-night. But the reason that it’s taken until now to really dig into writing about it (and this in the welter of pre-Edinburgh desktop and conscience clearing) is that I wasn’t at all convinced I had anything useful to say. [n.b. this paragraph written at the end of July]

As I’ve often whined before, writing about contemporary dance is harder than writing about theatre. But, when it’s grabbed me by the throat and astonished me, I’ve banged out a response as best I could as quickly as possible. But I’m not sure lack of astonishment was the problem here. I definitely came out singing the praises of Lee Curran’s lighting design to the highest heavens, but I wonder if there’s a slight hitch when you’re most struck by a lighting design at a piece where the pyrotechnics are meant to be taking place under the lights.

The basic deal with Political Mother is that it’s a whacking great gig slapped on top of some – surprisingly episodic and slight – contemporary choreography. The stage is set up so that the dancers are on the floor, in a first tier around them on three sides is a classical string section, and on a platform above these is a several-piece rock band. The lighting and set is such that any section can be completely plunged into darkness and obscured completely from view.

The music is kind of excellent – although not as loud as it could be – but mostly it sounds like a slightly less intricate Godspeed You Black Emperor or the Sisters are their sludgiest. At times the band is joined by a vocalist, singing inaudible/incomprehensible lyrics while throwing Great Dictator shapes. The net effect in these cases is essentially Rage Against The Machine. Nothing more, nothing less. And there’s something a bit Stadium Rock about the whole thing.

Then there’s the problem of the title. I think if it had been called anything which didn’t include the word “Political” in the title (which, as it stands, comes off sounding like a Freudian slip and you wonder what word he meant instead of “Mother”) it would have been less problematic. As it is, it feels like perhaps there ought to be more content. Even without knowing Shechter’s Israeli roots, the combination of vaguely ersatz Middle-Eastern-sounding music and the – perhaps not obviously Jewish/Israeli, perhaps so – Batsheva influence on Shechter’s choreography, combines to put one vaguely in mind of “the Middle East”. Which is quite a, y’know, “Political” place. At the same time, the posturing dictator-like figure most readily recalls the ideologues of mid-C20th fascism – although there’s also perhaps something of a suggestion of later African dictators in the uniforms from Idi Amin to Col. Gaddafi.

The net effect seems to imply something like “Well, there are a lot of politics in the world”; maybe even something like: “all politicians are the same”; perhaps a hint of “if voting changed anything they’d make it illegal”. Perhaps it’s the music. Perhaps it’s the circular dances; and the raised hands of the dancers: as if in worship, or in the thrall to an analogy of another political cult that demanded raised hands. Of perhaps it’s a gesture of surrender.

(as an aside, it still strikes me as remarkable that no one took a decent photo of what the WHOLE STAGE looked like)