Shorts: Dispositio

[new series, I hope]

Having written yesterday about how “if you go back to early Postcards posts, you see some stuff that basically amounts to a Facebook Status Update and possibly, at times, A Tweet”, I find myself this morning thinking, that might not be such a bad thing to reintroduce. So, I guess the deal will be something like this: I’ll try to write short things as well as long things (no *way* am I going to commit to saying I’ll do it on a daily basis, but...). Doubtless as my beginning-of-year energy wears off, they’ll become more and more infrequent, but it’s nice to have goals, right? And it’s nice for you to have something to read over breakfast.

Today’s Short is to introduce my new favourite blogger, Holger Syme (I guess this is also partly a sort of blackmail to encourage him to post *loads more stuff*). I’m not actually sure how I came across him, or how he came across me, but we’re friends on Facebook now, despite never having actually met IRL.

What I love about Holger’s blog is partly to do with his position: he’s a German, educated at Oxford and Harvard, teaching Shakespeare at Toronto University. As a result, he offers the best possible perspective on Canadian and American theatre, usefully filtered through a practical knowledge of the British scene, so you end up with (I would say) a German cultural perspective, but one with infinitely more recognisable reference points. I kind of wish he’d become a full time online critic.

The most recent post is a brilliant example. A short analysis of the New York/Broadway theatre programme, expressing frank bemusement at the anti-intellectualism they display:

“What they suggest is a pervasive sense that interpretation, let alone creative engagement, intellectual dissection, directorial and actorly experimentation — all of the things that make theatre such an exciting and present force — are largely negligible, that plays speak for themselves, that all an audience might want to hear more about are the performers and possibly the visuals.”

Well worth a read in full.

His recent review of Julie Taymor’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is likewise the best analysis of any American production I’ve read. It’s got the detail, passion and analysis, coupled with a cultural standpoint able to locate the massive black hole at the heart of the production:

“For all the creative investment in the visual aspects of this show, at its heart is a rather stunning absence of any kind of serious interpretative investment. It’s perhaps indicative that the program offer no director’s note of any kind — only a set of “perspectives” firmly anchored in the most commonplace and unchallenging takes on Shakespeare’s play... In German reviews, Taymor’s production would be described as “attitude-free.” The phrase would not be a compliment.”

So there you go. New to stuff read, which plausibly wasn’t on your radar before. And writing this has made me realise there’s a sizable archive I haven’t actually read yet. So I might go and do that too...

[cover photo by NYC-based photographer Arian Camilleri, who mostly seems to do fashion photography of a pretty vacuous sort, but I like this series of photos of smoke and light, which seemed fittingly insubstantial as elements to illustrate these short pieces...]

Don Quijote – Camden People’s Theatre

[contains a certain amount of blow-by-blow account. If you’re going to see it (which you should, I think) maybe read after]

I can’t remember the last time I felt this grateful to a piece of theatre. Tom Frankland and Keir Cooper (in association with Último Comboio, also starring Carlos Otero, with Anton Coimnra and Cis O’Boyle as creative collaborators)’s “adaptation” of Don Quixote is pretty much the perfect start to the year a blast of dark light and hopeful hopelessness in the January cold. It’s basically an hour-long, lowest of lo-fi, punk performance lecture on themes suggested by Miguel de Cervantes’s groundbreaking two-part novel. (A novel I have never read, and, given its doorstop-like qualities, probably never will.) In fact, more than “performance lecture” this is really “performance literary criticism”, albeit enacted by three blokes (plus, last night, Hannah Nicklin as the “Guest Quijote”) with a drum kit, distorted guitar, a bagful of “doing-it-crappily” effects.

The thing opens with torch-made shadow puppetry – or rather, a torch panning across a mostly static landscape. Buildings, people, knights on horseback, monsters and windmills – obviously windmills – move across the walls; like your shadow on a dark road when a car drives past.

Frankland then introduces the book. Literally introduces us to a physical copy of the book. Of which he then saws the spine with a circular saw. And, my God, I react badly to seeing books mutilated. There is something actually properly dangerous-feeling about this sort of treatment of literature. Of course that’s largely just an old commodity fetishist speaking, but then ill-treatment of books has a pretty distinct history and no one who’s done it has ever been progressive before, so the company are deliberately deploying one of the only shock-tactics likely to make a left-liberal audience feel shock. And it’s kinda great.

This literal “de-construction” of the book – Frankland then hands round the pages – takes place as he explains the novel’s brilliantly weird history: Cervantes wrote the first book, and then promised a second, which it seems likely he wouldn’t have written if other people hadn’t started writing their own “Part Two”s. Oddly, this whole story was told to me for the first time at a party in Zagreb late last year, so this bit had the weirdest possible resonance for me, connecting a damp basement in North London (Don Quijote is playing in the CPT’s cellar, rather than its conventional studio space), to a flat in the north of ex-Yugoslavia. That’s one of the hidden things that’s brilliant about this show: that is it taking a work of *world* literature, rather than parochial Eng.Lit; a book understood, loved and studied across the globe; a book that, on many levels, couldn’t speak less directly to our times and condition. It takes the book and makes it about precisely the thing that the company need it to be about.

What the company need Don Quixote to be about is – and forgive how basic this is – acts of rebellion. It’s no coincidence that Don Q. is opening CPT’s Hard To Resist season (which, following hard on the heals of the feminist Calm Down, Dear season, marks Jenny Paton and Brian Logan out as some of the canniest programmers on the alt.fringe right now). So their thesis is this: Don Quijote is a figure defined by the purity of his gesture and perhaps even his understanding of its inevitable failure. They talk about how Cervantes was captured and imprisoned or enslaved by pirates for five years, and had lost the use in his left arm. This, they tell us, is a book made from ridiculous amounts of human suffering. A book about a madman who is determined to prove a valiant knight, without a hope in hell of succeeding. They tell us about how the novel claims to be a history translated from original Arabic.

Anton tells us a story about how, just before he came over the the UK to do the show, he had been working in a primary school with children, and how, on the last day, he had bought 20kg of flower petals and had showered them over the children’s playground with the help of a massive fan as a farewell gesture, and had told the woman he loved that he loved her as they stood on the school roof watching children running around madly in the falling petals.

And then, of course, the real Anton turns up on Skype – projected onto the opposite wall – and tells us that he’s not sure about this actor (Otero) who is playing him. It’s a brilliant way of illustrating another strand of the book – the inauthenticity, the lie, at the the heart of it. And also a perfect example of why the inauthenticity itself is part of the fun, and not a lie at all, so much as a better way of revealing something true. And, oh, it’s clever, right? So you sit there enjoying both the stories, and the fact of the way that they’re being told cleverly reflects *as theatre* other important aspects of the book itself. (In a related, but completely different way to what Mitchell did with Waves/The Waves, thinking about it.)

The cmpany share with us some individuals who they’ve nominated as modern-day Quijotes, these start off with a guy who’s built a working space rocket in his back garden and keeps applying to NASA for a licence to launch it, and get progressively darker. People who have been imprisoned for their beliefs, for their naked rambling, to people who have been beaten up for how they dressed. There’s an unmistakeable left-leaning agenda, which is at least as inspiring as it is slightly over-stated. But it’s no less powerful for being blunt. The companies question to us is something like: wouldn’t we all be better off if we did exactly what we needed or wanted to do, no matter how against society and doomed to certain failure it was. Wouldn’t that be a better, or at least a possible way of trying to change the world – by changing our worlds. TBH, my inner Žižek (yes, I actually have one) recoiled slightly at this. What, I/inner-Žižek wondered, was the difference between this and rampant Rand-ianism? Isn’t Howard Rourke about as Quixotic as it gets? IS this the way we should interpret the book? What about communalism, and, well, socialism? But then this is anarchism, not communism, isn’t it?

Perversely, and perhaps connected both to that Pollesch quote about capitalists and love stories and to an excellent thing Tim Crouch quotes in the “documents” section at the end of Modern British Playwriting: 2000-2009: “For art to exist, the idea of one thing must be given by another thing” (Etienne Decroux). Because this was obviously art, but stating its political agenda quite bluntly, I ended up reading the piece as a terrific vindication of glorious failed attempts at love affairs. Which, y’know, worked for me. I think there are about as many other ways of relating to the piece as it has audience members.

There’s a final sequence where Nicklin returns from her own Quixotic quest with her audience-member Sancho Panza and starts shredding pages of the book. (More violence-against-text! Still shocking.) She then blows it at us using the fan – already a windmill stand-in – and in a blizzard paperstorm that follows you find yourself thinking: Yeah. Ok. I’ll take that. The inevitable failure is part of why makes a thing wonderful and romantic in the first place. And, yeah; I’m a terrible romantic.

This is also why revolutions shouldn’t be run as a romance.

Brave New

[Stock-take]

“The theatre blogosphere feels quietly buzzy again, after a couple of years of unmistakeable doldrums. By 2011 it all seemed a bit depleted: a dwindling faux-community of tired commentators all jogging round the same block nattering to themselves about cramp while the real conversations seemed to be happening elsewhere. It doesn't feel that way at all right now, to me – though that may be a trick of the light, I suppose: I might just be doing a better job of paying attention. But even so, the decisive impulse seems to be, simply, a deepening – and/or broadening – understanding that Twitter, in particular, won't satisfactorily contain many of the important conversations that need to be had in the sector: not just for nuance but for developed argument, it's necessary to migrate back to the longer-form, and perhaps the sense is stronger now that those conversations have to be had, that we have much to say to each other, much to learn and much to share; that we are not simply free-floating pixels in an atomised making-culture, whose principal mode of engagement is a cheerful, acquisitive networking behaviour of the sort that Twitter and Facebook foster so excellently: but that we need the means to express more powerfully and more ardently our sense of being with each other, of working not in secretive competition but in open concert and continuous dialogue.”

So began 2014, with some of the best news imaginable (at least in the niche world that is theatre/writing-about-theatre). Chris Goode restarted his blog.

Thinking about how to phrase this next bit, it seems grotesquely self-absorbed to discuss Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire largely in terms of how influential it was for me, but. It’s probably fair to say that it was reading the complete Thompsons in 2007 (I copied and pasted and printed the whole thing out so I could read it on the bus to and from work – even then, when it was only a year old, on 28 May 2007 “The Complete” ran to 183 pages of 12pt Times New Roman) that laid more than half the foundation stones for Postcards. (Credit also due to Andy Field, Alex F, George Hunka, Alison Croggon and David Eldridge), which actually started as an “everything but reviews” blog. Which seems strange now. But it also brings me to the sad news that the first online place I ever wrote for, CultureWars, shut up shop on the same day Thompson’s reopened. Starting in 2000 in Edinburgh as the Review Section for The Institute of Ideas (formerly Living Marxism), CultureWars was pretty much the proto-Exeunt of its day (insofar as it was online and run by Marxists), and, well, they could probably argue I owed them my entire career if Noises Off hadn’t got there first.

What’s interesting (and bloody terrifying, frankly), is that we’re now talking about a 14 year history of “online reviewing” in the UK – my whole “career”, in fact – kicking off with British Theatre Guide and CultureWars and winding up, well, here. Now. It’s something I’m going to be thinking a lot about over the next few months, as I’m due to write a chapter on it for Duška Radosavljevic’s forthcoming book on Theatre Criticism...

What I think is most interesting about the period, especially the latter half that Postcards and Thompson’s span, is the way that the very function of these blogs has been imperceptibly (at least to this author, at the time) changed by the way that the rest of their internet environment has changed.

Put simply, if you go back to early Postcards posts, you see some stuff that basically amounts to a Facebook Status Update. And possibly, at times, A Tweet. I think I had only just joined FB when I started Postcards. And Twitter didn’t exist (and I didn’t even join it until I lived in Berlin). There was a lot more commenting *in the comment threads themselves*. (If you want the best example, go and look at the comment thread for my review of Seven Jewish Children. It’s probably about seventeen separate blogs all on its own.) It now feels like that sort of sustained, long-form discussion normally takes place on the author’s own Facebook page, but mostly has been replaced by short tweets and retweets.

Similarly, it feels more unusual for someone to write a whole blog post in response to another whole blogpost. Things feel a bit more fast-paced now. I have to say, I quite miss that sustained long-form argument. (And, my God, don’t I just feel like Michael Billington mourning the passing of the Newspaper Letters Page argument in saying so.)

The positive result of this it that it has actually freed up blogs to become what they seem to currently be: homes for a serious, alternatives way of writing about theatre. Of course, this viewpoint has its dissenters. Megan Vaughan makes a neat point in her piece Criticism: some thoughts that “long-form blog thinkpieces are not new or groundbreaking. They are simply preserving a culture of theatre criticism that the printed press can no longer sustain.”

Having thought about this for a while, I think I’d say that where a lot of theatre blogs are now at is a place that print has *never* sustained. I’d be surprised if even Tynan would have been allowed 3,000 words on American Psycho, and certainly not in that way. That said, anyone with eyes and a red pen could also tell you that my piece could have probably been 1,000 words shorter without losing an ounce of substance. The advantage of of having infinite space comes with the disadvantage of sometimes not self-editing nearly as much as would be polite. However, I do think Vaughan’s accusation that blogs still “follow the standard form of some-words-with-some-pictures-provided-by-the-theatre’s-PR-team” is kind of nonsense as a problem.

While I also admire Vaughan’s heroine Eve Nicol for her various experiments with totally different media, I found her end-of-year “what worked, what didn’t?” blog refreshingly candid about their success. Call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I’m not fully convinced that pictures of cats are really ever going to be as much use to an archivist. Not least because cats are notoriously difficult to interpret. And we don’t want to be agonising over reviews wondering if the slightly anthropomorphised smile that we think we can see on a particular cat’s face is the reason the critic included that particular cat. (What I mean is, having read those cat reviews, I wasn’t actually sure what Eve had thought of half the shows. Or what happened in them. Or what they were. Fun though pictures of cats are to look at.)

The sorts of things that some blogs are now doing with “some words” now are increasingly streets away from anything that any mainstream theatre criticism I’ve ever read has ever done. I wonder if, in part, it’s the net result of the sort of “team sport” approach that Matt Trueman was talking about. I’ll be honest, I like team sports about as much as Maddy Costa likes militarism (oh, that was a private email so I can’t link to it, but it was her reservation about the term “embedded criticism”) but I think the premise is an excellent one. The fact that you know someone else has got your back in critical terms (that someone else might have covered the plot, or someone else focussed really hard on the design) means that it’s no longer irresponsible – as an online critic who is part of a constellation – to not cover everything. At the same time, it’s amusing that actually, given the amount of space we have, we can give a far better and more detailed account of every aspect of a show than any mainstream writer doing it “properly” has space to. Or we can just choose to do every aspect that interests us. I am still rubbish at writing about what actors actually spend their time doing on stage, for example.

But, yes. 2013, probably the best year yet for coverage. And there’s an optimistic sense that things really might keep improving.

[And now I’m going to stop this here because I’ve a review to write, and also because George Hunka has published this interesting piece on the critical scene Stateside, to which I want to write a response after writing the review...]

2013

[life goes on]

UK (in order of appearance)

Illusions

Quizoola

The Seagull

There Has Possibly Been An Incident

Fleabag (review by Matt Trueman)

Dust // In The Valley // Commonwealth

Grounded

The Events

Oh My Irma

The Future Show

#ShowOne (review by Dan Hutton)

Gorge Mastromas

Henry the Fifth


Outside UK (also in order of appearance)

Die Troerinnen

Quartet with Microphone

Ruhr Triennale

Capitalista, Baby!

Oh My Irma

Schwarze Augen, Maria

Die Brüder Karamasow

Orlando

Alles weitere kennen sie aus dem kino

Die Gelbe Tapete

Atmen

Trojanski Kolektiv (review forthcoming)


Other stuff

Art: The Settlement – I don’t know why, but I totally fell in love with this piece; part of the EmscherKunst initiative

Film: In Eldersfield chapter two
– do you know, I don’t think I actually saw a single new film this year. Even so, I like to think this short, art-house offering from Kings of England would have won even if I had.

Book: Theatre-making: interplay between text and performance in the 21st century by Duška Radosavljevic. History and theory are pretty much the biggest battlegrounds in any culture war. While barely acknowledging that there’s “an enemy” at all, Duška’s book effortlessly hands recent theatre history to the good guys.

Building: Any and all the venues at the Ruhr Triennale. Just as I would be hard-pressed to name a specific event at the Ruhr Triennale as *best*, it wasn’t so much one particular building as the fact of *all of them* that made the Ruhr so exciting. Also, a phenomenal endorsement of public funding of the arts.

Music: Lohengrin – from Meine Faire Dame in 2012, through Nick Gill’s reworked version for In Eldersfield II through to it turning in Glanz und Elend... it felt like Wagner enjoying a weird sort of renaissance in alt.theatre circles.

Deaths: Patrice Chéreau, Dimeter Gotscheff. There’s no way I can possibly hope to improve on David Lan’s piece on Patrice Chéreau for the Guardian, which is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing about theatre I read all year.


Thoughts:

On the face of it, 2013 wasn’t exactly a vintage year for theatre. At least, not in the UK. But, I feel kind of strange saying that. I spent the first month of the year in Köln. And I was out of London for another at least another four-plus months in Scarborough, Zagreb, Edinburgh, Bucharest, the Ruhr valley, Berlin, Hamburg, Berlin again and Zagreb again.

And yet, London didn’t really seem to grab me much this year. Granted I also missed some stuff. Regretfully: Say It With Flowers downstairs at the Hampstead; This House and Othello at the NT; but that’s about all I can think of.

Mostly it felt like things were ticking along fine, but when I go back and look at the list for 2012... Well, not every year can catch fire like last year, I suppose.

I also spent the longest amount of time since university actually *inside* rehearsal rooms, and in April even directed a rehearsed reading of Hamletmaschine at Theatre 503, the second night of which was pretty excellent, I thought (and I can say that with total modesty since my input was minimal-to-non-existent in the event).

Then I look at the list(s) we have got here, and suddenly I remember that while the overall shape of the year feels fragmented, and the year might have felt like it took more than usually long to warm up, and while Edinburgh felt comparatively flat artistically, this year did actually get better and better.

However, if we look at this list, we also see evidence of what the Conservative Party’s cuts to Britain’s already laughable arts spending are doing. Fewer than half the UK shows really had a design which went beyond: chair, microphone (sure, they did that nicely, but it doesn’t feel as if it was a choice made in the face of several thousand pounds to play with if they’d decided on something else). While the writing, direction, and performances aren’t touched, when you compare these productions to the Outside UK list... That said, of course I might have just missed or not liked many of the domestic Big Production Values shows I saw this year...

It is also interesting that for the first time, several of my favourite shows this year are ones I didn’t even see live. Possibly the best UK thing I saw all year was Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola, which I watched from the comfort of my room in parent’s house in Shrewsbury. I could smoke, go to the loo whenever, eat and drink as I pleased, talk to my friends about what we were watching as we watched on Twitter. It was altogether much nicer than being in a theatre, which is a worry.

I was very struck by Dan Hutton’s sign-off on the Exeunt round-up of the year, however:

“In a year when we’ve had countless ‘regime’ changes at theatrical organisations – from Michael Brazier’s first outing as director of NSDF to the appointment of Rufus Norris as AD of the NT – this is an idea which feels particularly apt. Those little changes in mindset and practice will add up to something far more palpable in output over the following year. In all honesty, I’ve not seen anything that’s truly blown me away in 2013, but the general feeling of a swelling tide has been invigorating. This may be my youthful naivety talking here, but I’ve a feeling we’ll look back on 2013 as the year Things Started To Happen.”

I think I’ll always have that year pencilled into my own account as 2012, and as my own drastic revision of 2000-2009 in the face of Rewriting the Nation and State of the Nation shows, I also have a pretty soft spot for 2006/7-2009. But, Hutton’s right, and I should stop moping. For all that 2013 has felt like a pretty long slog at times, it’s a slog in the right direction, and there’s been much to celebrate. Perhaps history will be kinder to it in the long term...

Cover photo from this, which is just brilliant.

American Psycho – Almeida

[over 3000 words of anxiety and torture for you, dear reader]

The first half of this new musical of American Psycho provokes non-stop anxieties in all the wrong ways. It’s weird, I don’t remember the last time I sat in a theatre worrying about what I thought something thought it was doing so much.

[Let’s get this straight: this is going to be a pretty tough review, but it’s a tough review starting from the following position: *at last* we’re starting to see theatre in the UK which looks like it might belong to the same century as the one in which we live. Sitting with outgone Almeida artistic director Michael Attenborough behind me, I was reminded that whatever I thought of this flagship production from new AD Rupert Goold, I actually wanted to be there and whatever it was it was sure as hell blowing the cobwebs out of the fucking place. And not before time. Reviewing theatre is a dumb thing. Anything less than all out adoration reads badly. Caveats and reservations seem to loom more damningly than they are ever meant to. But, blimey, celebrations for joining the current millennium aside, there are plenty of causes for reservation here.]

It’s interesting to think back and remember quite what an impact Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho had when it was first published in 1991. It was one of about three novels Melody Maker *ever* reviewed. It was a book that achieved a startling level of cultural penetration. Possibly not because anyone actually *got it*, but because, even without *getting it*, there was something persistent and unsettling about it that people couldn’t just dismiss. American Psycho made people sit up and take notice primarily with its spectacular level of violence, and the deadpan, pedantic detail with which it described it. A matter-of-fact account of a broken bottle and dead rat shoved up someone’s cunt tended to be the bit everyone mentioned at the time. They don’t do that bit at the Almeida.

The reason American Psycho got further than the horror section of bookshops was what surrounded the horror – a non-stop, chippy, “inadvertently” camp commentary, listing in anal detail what he, the narrator, Patrick Bateman, was wearing. What everyone around him was wearing. *Where* they were eating. What their business cards looked like. The detail is dead-eyed, brand-led and relentless. Bateman sounds like a man who has memorised and endlessly regurgitates catalogue details, or the brittle prose of fashion magazines.

There are also (italicised? Can’t remember. It’s been a while) about three or four sections where Bateman offers lengthy (a page or two) disquisitions on his favourite music. The two most memorable ones are about Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News. He (Bateman) is totally serious. He discusses the highlights of Phil Collins’s oeuvre like it was Mozart. (Also, do I remember wrongly, or does he also do The Beatles at one point? That would have been very canny if it happens). These bits in the book are inspired. The fashion bits might also be bloody clever and funny if you happened to know all about fashion. Bateman might be absolutely correct, or he might be as laughably off-kilter with his taste in facewash and shirts as he is in music, but no one worth knowing would know – the point, I always hoped, is that name-checking *any* luxury brand approvingly makes you sound like a total cunt with no taste whatsoever.

By virtue of its one-note, relentless, dead, *boring* prose, the book manages to become literature by being so precisely the opposite. It’s art. You have to work at it. It’s not entertainment. It makes no effort to charm. And its point is buried within its pointlessness.

Adapting such a book obviously poses a number of problems; adapting it as *a musical* triply so. At the basic, conceptual level, there’s the problem that it just sounds like “a terrific wheeze”. “American Psycho – The Musical! Ha ha, brilliant!” people say. And, yeah, just the concept has whizzy, postmodern, showbiz chutzpah written all over it. In *ironic* day-glo, probably.

But then, what *are* we meant to be making of it? Sure, on one level it might boil back to that crude binary which I most recently saw raised in Michael Blakemore’s new memoir, Stage Blood: “[The Germans] seemed uneasy with what I regarded as the English-speaking theatre’s greatest strength – its refusal to draw a line between what was entertainment and what was art.” The other way this can be phrased is as the questions asked of the English by mainlanders: “Why are you so keen to pander to the audience?” “Why behave like prostitutes the whole time?” Or even, “why do you always have to make jokes? The people were listening anyway.”

Usually it’s a dichotomy I prefer to ignore (mostly by only ever watching German art theatre. ha ha), but American Psycho – The Musical is so unabashedly “entertainment”-first, that it seems worth inspecting. Except, *is it*? Is it *really* entertainment, or is it “art” *about* entertainment – a fractured sculpture of a musical rather than an actual musical? And if it was, how would you tell?

This is the first of the anxieties thrown up by the first half. You (well, *I*; but not only *I*) spend quite a lot of time worrying what it is you’re even watching. And why. A couple of reasons for this: the “musical” style is not the strange genre of its own that is exactly “musicals music”. Instead it’s mostly pastiche 80s synth pop. Except, actually, it *is* musicals music, just slightly disguised as pastiches of (mostly) Depeche Mode and the like. But then there’s the actual *action*. Light on plot in the first half, the piece mostly takes the form of an extended round of introductions. Bateman is introduced. His voracious consumerist colleagues at work (on Wall Street) are introduced. A bunch of ladies are introduced, who turn out to be mostly defined either by their relationship to Patrick Bateman, or one of his friends. Or by the way that men look at them.

[And, mother of God: God knows presenting a society objectifying women is tricky on stage, but I’m not sure AP–TM has found the solution. At. All. The slight defence for Goold is that a) he plainly knows he’s doing it and flags it up as “problematic” – mostly by doing it some more, and then over-doing it – and also, it’s a pretty equal-opportunities objectification free-for-all, with Matt Smith clearly leading the field (yeah, Matt Smith has his shirt off a whole lot. And Matt Smith looks pretty fucking awesome with his shirt off. (get me and my objectification)).]

The thing settles into a pattern of scene, song; scene, song; etc. pretty quickly. Then, once people have been introduced, it does feel a bit like they then start painstakingly introducing Themes, and Motifs. That the book contains so many “classic bits”, and that the book is now 22 years old, and so what it is also kinda *about* now is “hilarious” retro- fashion and technology (and, sure, iPods make Sony Walkmans look pretty funny *right now*, but...), also feels like a problem addressed but not solved.

But we should talk some more about the music. Leafing through the programme last night, I think I noticed that the writer of the music (Duncan Sheik) thought he was a big fan of Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears. Well, they had a lot of fans, and fandom plainly doesn’t translate into either understanding what makes their music good or how it works. This is yet Another (first half) Anxiety. You really can’t tell at what level you are supposed to be appreciating the music. Is it meant to be ironic? How ironic? Is it meant to actually be good? Suffice it to say, if the original music is aiming for “good” then it gets as far as “passable”/“competent”, but certainly nowhere near “memorable”. Quite a feat, given that it’s meant to be a pastiche of Depeche Mode. Surely the best thing to do would be to write songs with the same insistent, instant-ear-worm qualities, then you’d win both ways. But there’s that question of whether the music is actually meant to be cleverly reflecting the bland, godawful, corporate exterior of capitalism.

However, mercifully, there’s another strand to the music – the cast performing slightly re-orchestrated/new arrangements of popular eighties pop songs. These struck me as much cleverer and more excellent. Turning some Phil Collins into something that sounded more like impassioned soul music feels like a much better “ironic” trick. It also feels like an elegant way of dealing with the fact that this is a musical about someone whose musical tastes are fundamentally fucking awful, and, if they weren’t also a banker, a serial killer, a misogynist and a shit boyfriend, would be categorically the worst thing about them apart from their clothes. But, yes; making whatever Phil Collins (for example) song it is sound better – more “authentic” perhaps – than the original makes for a much more satisfying problematisation of the era, the musicals format, and the novel. Sometimes they also just play the original songs too. Fine. Whatevs.

What’s perhaps most fascinating about the adaptation is the extent and ways in which it conforms to – and differs from – the novel, the film. And expectation. My (dim) recollection of the book, is predominantly the relentlessness of the tone. Like this snide, American voice carping on in your head non-stop. (I imagine a younger Kevin Spacey would have done the perfect audiobook version.) What I don’t remember is it having any sort of a coherent plot, as such. Incidents would happen, sure, but it felt like they only really happened to give Bateman something to talk about. And much of the time, he would either just be telling us about *things*, or else cataloguing his fitful, ongoing murdering and torturing. The first half is a bit like this, but a strange thing happens to the sense of (un)balance. In the book you feel like Bateman is the only present being. Everyone else is only a fleeting impression on his pathological mind. Here, because that’s obviously a tricky impression to give on stage (tho’ I sort of wish they’d tried. Gotscheff’s Ivanov is, I think, the best example ever, although I don’t suggest they should just copy that). Here, *everyone* is as technicolor and *real* as Matt Smith, even if he is most famous (and it’s interesting, while his face is instantly recognisable, and while he remains the astonishing young actor I saw in That Face all those years ago, he’s not actually so very *other-worldly*. I’m reminded that “a bit strange-looking” (cf. all other reviews) though he may be, he’s a great actor precisely because he feels so relatable. It makes him an unusually compassionate Bateman. This might be a problem.).

Also, because of the way this adaptation has been made/written/structured, it feels increasingly like there is a credible plot struggling to emerge in the first half. Possibly a plot involving a 27-year-old investment banker trying to avoid getting married to his girlfriend of whom he’s evidently not all that fond. Perhaps that’s actually true of the book too if you’re a better reader than me, but my impression was of this fog of details with all the other people in it being reduced to yet another list, all so much the same, all so fogged in the pedantic details by which Bateman values things, all *dehumanised* so completely, that you, the reader, end up not seeing them as people either.

It’s a brilliant effect in the novel, but obviously one that’s much harder to reproduce in the theatre, when, as I say, we in the audience – not being psychopaths, and also not being *inside* Matt Smith’s mind as he pretends to be one as our cipher – see everyone as equally real. There’s also that problem of the lead character being unsympathetic and everyone else unsympathetic by virtue of the prose with which they’ve been drawn.

*Of course* Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has tried to negotiate a way out of this, and in the second half I think gets bloody close to succeeding. In the second half there actually is a plot of sorts. The focus shifts slightly and widens to include the crush Bateman’s secretary Jean (Cassandra Compton) has on him. In this storyline, I think Aguirre-Sacasa gets to riff much more successfully with a few tropes of his own. We’re suddenly in recognisable rom-com land, a territory much more recognisable for a musical too, and so Jean gets her torch song, and Bateman gets to have a scene where he lets her leave his apartment without killing her. This is much more interesting, because playing with clichés like these means it’s us in the audience who suddenly start wondering about ourselves (“What am I doing rooting for the guy who crucified a woman with a nail-gun?”). This is a much more profitable line of enquiry than the blunt declarations about capitalism and superficiality delivered in the first half. At last it feels like “The Musical” has swung into its own and is starting to make sense of why it’s there. Then there’s the Three Kingdoms/David Lynchian aspect to the tale, where we’re suddenly not even sure what is “Real” any more (tho’ not in the Lacanian sense, sadly), and it feels even more promising. To be honest, I could have happily taken two second halves (even if the final number is an absolutely perplexing honest-to-God trainwreck of a triple-underline. Irony or no irony. Or both.)

Oh, God. What haven’t I covered yet? More or less everything, it feels. The set, by Es “Chimerica” Devlin is a largev white room with slight false perspective potential, horizontal blinds at the back, two revolving bits of floor while let tables and chairs hove in and out of scenes with minimal(ist) fuss. The ceiling of this room *could be* like looking up at or down on the Twin Towers. But, sadly, I don’t think that’s what it’s aiming for. Unless it’s just a joke for design nerds. Onto this is frequently projected Finn Ross’s not-especially-wonderful video designs.

The cast look like English actors claiming to be “hardbody” rich Americans. They act, sing and dance well enough – in some cases excellently, but in an ensemble it’d be unfair to name names, right? (Holly James is best by a country mile. Then Cassandra Compton is also excellent.) In a piece about superficiality but playing in a theatre, it’s always difficult to know what to do with/say about how people look. Looking at the photos of Tom Hiddleston’s Coriolanus, I was struck by the idea that he might have made a better Bateman, after all, he has his movie-star good looks confirmed by virtue of actually being an actual good-looking movie star. But, y’know, I’m all for making up the shortfall in actuality with imagination. That’s what theatre’s all about, right? Except that here it just makes everything feel that extra bit too cosy. You kind of *want* to feel more angered and terrified by the internal logic of these people’s world. You kind of want the cast to feel like they’re people as vile and superficial in those in the book. They sort of need to look like the Almeida couldn't really afford them. Instead, this feels, well, nice. Friendly. I know it’s only make believe, but this didn’t make me believe it.

Rupert Goold has been really interesting about the show, post press night, on Twitter. He says:

“Surprised by some of the reviews of #americanpsycho wanting more gore, for me the story is far more Hamlet than Titus Andronicus.”

And:

“#Americanpsycho dwells on the artist's inevitable inability to assimilate within society, their perpetual anxiety about presence. Not rats.”

The thing about Hamlet is fascinating. Calling Bateman “an artist” even more so. To be honest, I’ve thought more about these two tweets than the entire production. It’s a shame as I used to feel like I quite *got* where Goold’s sensibility was coming from, *from the production*. Now I’m getting it off Twitter post-fact. Perhaps I’m making the mistake of coming to the production with more preconceptions about the source text than I used to go into his Shakespeares with. But then, perhaps Goold was also trying to direct a vision of the novel onto a book and music which didn’t/doesn’t wholly contain them. Still, Hamlet? An artist? In the abstract these are elegant ideas indeed. But related to Bateman? This is about as radical appropriation of a novel’s text as an attempt to sell Howard Roark as a misunderstood lefty hipster. And, as a thesis, while I think it could be made to fly with spectacular results, I don’t think there’s enough time or clarity available here – I think it’d take an hour just to clear all the baggage we all came in with – to process this thought and make us see or feel it. The idea of a “perpetual anxiety about presence”, while more discernible, I would say is a seriously perverse reading of status anxiety.

What’s fascinating about American Psycho is that it explores one of the strangest fault-lines in American culture, the one that runs jaggedly between “authenticity”, “cool”, and “success”. Bateman’s brother, Sean, is dropped in as a try-hard (and therefore not-cool) spokesperson for authenticity. While Bateman himself is, in one sense, stuck in a world where conspicuous trying-hard (gym, keeping up, fashion, etc.) is prized above all else, and yet, where the supposed prize is “being cool”. Jazz musicians at the birth of cool used to take heroin to appear more relaxed, more effortless; Bateman and co. take coke. Their battle is lost before they even start fighting, would they but know it. Depeche Mode, despite their hilarious name, were never cool, and by never being cool, are pretty cool.

I have no idea whatsoever what American Psycho – The Musical is.

[Depeche Mode’s own searing analysis of free market economics below]

Trout Stanley – Southwark Playhouse

[seen 02/12/13]

Having recently used Stewart Pringle’s excellent review of Satyagraha to offset the effects of my own much more picky review, for Trout Stanley my real spur to writing is Matt Trueman’s strikingly negative review.

In the spirit of full-disclosure, I should say that I was dead excited to see Trout Stanley as soon as I got back from Germany for a number of reasons. Firstly, the excellent Canadian writer Haley McGee, of Oh My Irma fame, had already told me that reading Trout Stanley when she was 20 was pretty much the reason she wrote ...Irma. Which I loved. Secondly, its excellent Canadian director Matt Steinberg was the assistant on the Lyric Hammersmith’s #ShowOne and #ShowTwo – so a) we’d spent a lot of time hanging out, and b) I really rate him as a theatre-brain and was really intrigued to see what he was going to do. Third: I also think Sinéad Matthews is one of the best, most interesting actors we’ve got working in Britain today. Thought so in Women of Troy, thought so in Lulu and thought so again here (I missed a lot of other things due to living in Berlin). I also know her. (Although didn’t when she was in those first two things.)

So, you might argue I was “a bit too invested” in liking this production. But I think that makes for a really interesting relationship to watching a play. Possibly one much more akin to that of the non-“professional theatregoer”. And, in the case of Trout Stanley it was absolutely the right relationship for me to have watching it.

[actually, I’m not sure these qualifiers really make sense, though. After all, I’d also been told Let The Right One In was great by people I like and trust, and I know Jack, John and Steven to varying extents, so...]

However, even while disagreeing, I can understand where Trueman is coming from. There’s something so disconcertingly alien about Trout Stanley that I imagine my default response could also have been to switch off and be annoyed by it. Lucky for me, then, that I had a bunch of reasons to stick with it and work at it. Because I reckon working at this strikingly original piece of writing is the only real solution.

The reason, I think, that Trout Stanley might be construed as “difficult” here (here being London, England), is partly the range of words that we’ve got available with which to misdiagnose its style. Looking across other reviews, words like “kooky” and “zany” abound. They’re reductive words, and I don’t think they’re accurate either. However, for me, what was difficult, was realising that the play operates something much more alien – an unwavering streak of total sincerity. This is difficult for any Englishman to understand. There’s something in the style of the writing that makes us expect it to be being “ironic”. In fact, I don’t think it’s being ironic at all. As such, the default British understanding of what the play might be setting out to achieve is already all at sea. I think we start out looking at it wrong, and then, given that we’re an irritable lot, might just get cross at it for not even delivering what we (wrongly) think it’s set out to deliver.

None of this is, I think, the fault of the production. In fact, I think what might have further made reading the play and tone tricky for reviewers (people with a much more urgent need to pin a thing down than the “casual observer” – as if any theatregoer is really casual – so, rather, the sympathetic reader) is that Steinberg and cast have gotten the tone of the thing so absolutely right. And in getting it right – in playing it totally straight, and inhabiting the characters with every ounce of conviction in their bodies – they make this audacious lack of irony potentially even more unseeable.

What Canadian playwright Claudia Dey’s play does, then, is to show us these two women, the surviving twins of triplets, on the eve of their thirtieth birthday, whose whole world and relationship are a study in finely crafted, totally idiosyncrasy. The scale of linguistic invention here – as with Oh My Irma – is kinda mind-blowing. Rather than leave any sentence, or rather, line of dialogue, to the crude machinations of “how people speak”, Dey has pretty much spiked and polished every carefully chosen word until the whole fairly glistens. Played at some pace by Steinberg’s cast, you find yourself hanging on for dear life as wit and wordplay whizz past your ears with such a speed that daring to laugh will surely rob you of a follow-up piece of brilliance. But there’s something almost loving about this degree of embellishment: like a sort of non-stop banquet that you’ve unwittingly entered. Plays really aren’t normally like this, after all. (cf. that recent Guardian article arguing that operas (and later, plays) need boring bits.) Which is another reason to watch all the harder. There’s also the fact of the imagination at work here. If we get rid of annoying pigeonholes like “kooky”, then actually what you’re looking at is a staggering level of imagination and playfulness. cracked, gothic and grandiose – all intended as compliments.

And then there’s the cast: Matthews, Vinette Robinson and Dylan Smith are – put bluntly – about the sexiest cast on the London stage. That wants *a lot* of qualification. Can we just understand that I’m not talking about “magazine sexy”, but actual, credible sexy-in-the-world-of-the-play?  Thanks.  When the ridiculously named titular hero burst into the sisters’ lives – or, rather, interrupts the heart-breaking suicide attempt of the younger twin, Sugar – and immediately falls flat-out in love with her, there is a violence to the passion between them that is totally, ludicrously tangible.

Steinberg’s production is also genius. And the sort of genius that also takes working out. On the face of it, Shizuka Hariu’s set is kinda plain, but then you notice that it is at once perfectly detailed where it needs to be (the light comes on in the fringe, the sink unit is perfectly populated), but at the same time, this impressionist blank-walled wooden expanse that allows our imaginations to wander as the characters detail the fantastical landscapes of their minds.

There’s a remarkable interview with Dey, which I put off reading until getting this far in the review – I daresay her public persona would already be common knowledge in Canada much as, say, Caryl Churchill’s politics are here – but in a way in this seven-year-old preview of the play’s première sheds about as much useful light on the thinking behind it as I could usefully guess or report from looking at it:

“Before I started writing this play, I was in this period in my life where I’d go to the Vienna Home Bakery, and the man would say, ‘Have a good day,’ and I'd say, ‘You too.’ And honestly what was going through my mind was, ‘I love you.’ This kept creeping up, strangers in different situations. I was going through this world like this little lighted creature, and that was the beginning of Sugar. 

“Life ruptures and reconfigures itself, and often in a much more truthful form,” she says. “That’s the life I'm interested in. It’s that world of unpredictability, where you just see someone and you're blown away. I think that only happens if you're awake to it’.”

It’s about the least British way of thinking imaginable, but there’s something quite startling and spectacular about it, and, if you look hard enough, I think you can see it shining out of this play, and this astonishing production too.

[Edit: after posting this, it occurred to me what the biggest thing that wrong-foots about the play is: effectively, it’s a genre piece in which the man comes to the house where the two sisters live after they hear that a murderer is on the loose. And what happens is, he turns out not to be the murderer. The “twist” is that there is no twist. The twist is that he’s completely honest. 

 It also occurred to me that this play overturns that conventional British wisdom that “to die will be an awfully big adventure”. Here it’s love that is an awfully big adventure. And it’s kind of glorious to see a play say that.]

Let The Right One In – Royal Court

[basically a lot of soul-searching about why I didn’t like I as much as everyone else]

Oskar is trapped between two women with drinking problems. His mother (Susan Vidler) is apparently drunk in every scene she appears in. His only other option (literally the only other woman on stage in a cast of nine) is an old woman in the body of a young girl, who is addicted to drinking blood.

Sadly, because he’s being bullied in school and out by Jonny (Graeme Dalling) and Micke (Cristian Ortega), and his dad (my God, Paul Thomas Hickey is playing dads now. God I feel old) has moved out – possibly because he’s started a relationship with a man, it’s hard to say; that bit is as coy as if portraying homosexuality were still illegal – Oskar (Martin Quinn, definitely not 12 years old. Hard to say how old he is meant to be) decides to go with option (b) rather than wait to see if there are Any Other Options At All. Ever.

In line with Matt Trueman’s recent thesis about reviewing now being a “team sport” after watching LTROI I had a read of all the other reviews, but, surprisingly, didn’t come across one which actually reflected how I felt about it. How I felt about it, for what very little it is worth, was: mostly very unhappy in the first half and much more convinced in the pacey, shock-scattered second.

As is fast becoming my habit, I should flag up Stewart Pringle and Andrzej Lukowski’s five star raves for Exeunt and Time Out, and here add supporting four-star evidence from Shuttleworth of the FT and Hitchings of the Standard. I don’t think I can really disagree with a single word that any of them have written, since they’re all plainly just reflecting their own simple enjoyment of the thing, quite without agenda. And they’re pretty much the majority.

And I should include Susannah Clapp’s review (also a “five-star rave”, now that the Observer has capitulated to the ravages of being fucking stupid and having star-ratings, much against the wishes of the anything-but-stupid Clapp). Not least because, thanks to the recent cessation of the Independent on Sunday having any critic at all (formerly Kate Bassett), and the Times’s replacement of Libby Purves with Dominic Maxwell, (and because Time Out happened to use Andrzej and Exeunt Pringle) she’s the only woman who’s written about it. Clapp is also interesting as she’s also the only critic who also saw the production in its original home at Dundee Rep as a National Theatre of Scotland production.

As a result of feeling a bit grumpy in the first half, you might expect me to naturally find Michael Billington’s three-star grumble in the Guardian and Patrick Marmion’s two-star hrumph in the Daily Mail (Patrick Marmion is all right, you know. Not AT ALL like his cynically right-wing co-critic Quentin Letts. Patrick actually likes (some) theatre and even writes plays) more conducive reading. Well, it’s hard to identify with Patrick’s position, since his two main objections are a) that it’s an adaptation at all (a stupid objection) and b) it’s not as good as the film (I haven’t seen the film, and it’s basically a subset of a) anyway).

Michael’s objections are, inevitably, about social context. And much though I might have ribbed him over the years about this recurrent bugbear of his, it’s a bit like the stopped clock: occasionally it’s right. And here I do think there’s something to be said for wanting a return of some of the social information. Look, for example, at how Pringle asserts: “Resetting the Swedish tale in some remote Scottish community is a brilliant move from Thorne, retaining the isolated otherworldliness that director Tomas Alfredson captured so perfectly in the first film version.” Given that the characters all had Swedish names, I’d assumed it was probably just Scottish actors “playing Swedes”, but Pringle’s assumption seems perfectly reasonable. There’s also the interesting thing that, not being Scottish or Swedish, suddenly the class identities of the characters became more or less illegible to me. And in realism – which this ostensibly is (explanation forthcoming) – class is an unavoidable dimension.

It is also from Billington’s review that I learn the original novel (John Ajvide Lindqvist) was set in 1981. This fact suddenly makes total sense of the Rubik’s Cube which Oskar gives to his new vampire girlfriend. But since Rubik’s Cubes still exist, that fact alone wasn’t really enough to make me think “Aha, it’s 1981. It’s Sweden! I wonder if I should be thinking more about synth-pop and impending nuclear holocaust?” Also, Sweden in 1981 is probably about the last time and place you could set something morbidly concerned with blood without it being one long AIDS metaphor. (One hopes to God that the whole dad-story isn’t a clumsy Swedish way of suggesting that dimension.)

But enough about them. Were my annoyances as inevitably guessable as Billington’s?

Everyone in chorus: Was it not German enough for you, Andrew?

Surprisingly, it wasn’t that at all.

This wasn’t about me wanting it to be something it wasn’t trying to be. My basic problems in the first half were much more boring. Firstly, I didn’t really think much of the acting was very good (director: John Tiffany). Secondly, I didn’t think the script was working (writer: Jack Thorne). And thirdly, I’m not quite as much of a fan of the particular movement sequences (movement: Steven Hoggett) deployed in the first half (boys practising stabbing moves in chorus, mother and son tossing and turning in the same bed through the night) as it would have be useful to be. And, yes, the transfer from Dundee’s wide stage to the Royal Court’s narrow one could be felt a bit in the squashed up stage picture. (I’m not saying the names in brackets are responsible, and this opinion does change in the second half. I’m just getting the info in...)

I should qualify the thing about the acting and the script. What I found most weird about the script – because I also started with Stewart’s understanding that it’d been transposed to Scotland (you hear “Oscar” rather than “Oskar”, for a long while) – was that everything that makes Thorne a great writer usually (and he usually is a really great writer) was absent. The way with words, the knack for vernacular, and most of all the non-stop joking that makes his characters so totally credibly, well, British. Here instead there was an attempt to have them speaking in the more stark, functional sentences of Northern Europe. Except, I’m not sue that worked. And much of the delivery sounded oddly forced, perhaps as a result.

The one glorious exception to this is Rebecca Benson as Eli, the vampire. Her lines work, and her performance of them, as if dragging her voice from her breathless body was perfect. Properly disconcerting and unearthly.

There was also the structure. Stewart tells me it’s pretty much – scene-by-scene – the film. Which is fine for films, but here it felt frustrating that scenes stopped when they were getting interesting, with cuts breaking momentum rather than building it as they do in films. It definitely felt filmic, without making any comment on this.

As a result of it not working (in my, largely isolated, view) I did spend a lot of time wondering what I wanted instead. The piece reminded me of Gisele Vienne’s incredibly more stylish This Is How You Will Disappear. If you want to know how to do dance, music, forests at night-time, teenagers and buckets of blood, then that is how. The design here is fine (Christine Jones: a bunch of trees on stage is always going to be quite an attractive proposition. I could have lived with many, many more. No one else will probably bother to note that they have been arranged in quite a specific arc. Oh and there’s a whizzy climbing frame which cleverly fills with water to double up as a swimming pool at the end). The lighting (Chahine Yavroyan), to my mind, was an utter catastrophe, but I don’t like kitsch, and this pretty much lit up the forest like a disco, and bathed the vampire in cold white light sometimes. Oh, don’t get me started on the lights. They’re a matter of taste and they irked my taste all the way through.

I did also spend a lot of time reflecting on what I wanted to be different about the dance. Motifs to which I kept returning were the purity and abstraction of Alain Platel and Pina Bausch, but also the twitching stillness of Sebastian Matthias. The movement work of Frantic Assembly/Steve Hoggart is increasingly pursuing a path of illustrative realism (see my similar objection in my Curious Incident review) and I’ve never really liked it: as far back as Hymns (1999). Actually, I really want to see Sell-Out (‘98) again, now.

I also wondered a bit about whether it wouldn’t have been interesting to see a version of this using the, ahem, German method of adapting a novel, cf. the recent productions of The Brothers Karamazov and Orlando. Well, no, I didn’t wonder, I definitely thought it would have been interesting. However, I repeat, I’d have been just as happy with an English version which had been working for me. Despite the total poverty of intellectual aspiration that might entail, I’m very happy with big, dumb story and shock as a substitute for thinking (which it isn’t here. There’s definitely some stuff about relationships to think about).

Which is perhaps why I did both the central “love” story and especially the second half of the second half a lot more. Maybe I’m just impatient and actually waiting for it the finale, and the constant interruption of the love story was what made them good. But I’m not sure I totally subscribe to the “there have to be annoying/dull bits” thesis. Because the love story was great – although I did kind of wonder what sort of philosophy it had subscribed to. But, y’know, as long as it wasn’t actually misogynist (plausible, but I don’t think it was), I don’t mind bleak (the story opens with Eli essentially breaking up with her former lover because he’s got to about fifty and she hasn’t aged a day. In his fate, we see Oskar’s inevitable future. If this is a blueprint for how Lindqvist thinks of romantic attachments, it perhaps goes some way to explaining Sweden’s suicide rate). Then, in the final few sequences where things kick off and get bloody it is also great. The movement and music came completely into their own. And you just wished that there could have been more moments like this.

What makes me sad about the whole, is that it felt to me that it was largely pandering to what the creators think people will accept. It doesn’t feel like a product of rigour, but of market forces and second-guessed expectations.

What was interesting (and much more depressing), watching in a sold out (I believe) Royal Court last night, is that, by having not made off-putting, “difficult” art, the production had attracting an audience, several of whom were quite happy to chat to each other as they might in a cinema, and who giggled because the spectacle of someone pretending to be a vampire on stage actually needs quite a bit of buying-into. And they weren’t really up for even putting in that much effort. Maybe that’s a misread, but that’s how it felt. I mean, obviously theatre is “a bit silly”. There’s absolutely no way of bullet-proofing it against that fact. But I don’t think there’s anything more wretched than a couple of half-cut Sloanies dropping that realisation onto an entire theatreful of people who are all trying to keep up their half of the pact between stage and audience.

So, yes. A pretty mixed experience. One, which, thanks to the final twenty minutes or so, sent me into the night with my nerves jangled and my adrenaline going. But it felt like it’d been a long time getting there.

The Magic Flute – ENO

[seen 03/12/13]

Reviewing Nicholas Hytner’s outgoing, long-running, 25-years-old, ENO Magic Flute last year, I rather viciously concluded it was an “opulent Tory meringue” well past its sell-by date.

And, yes, Simon McBurney’s replacement production does at the very least have the advantage of looking like 21st century theatre. Unexpectedly, the theatre of the 21st century turns out to be a kind of whizzy blend of Katie Mitchell and, less surprisingly, Complicité.

It starts beautifully. The large black stage, empty save for a kind of suspended platform, is suddenly obscured by a large, lowering cinema screen. Onto this is projected a live feed of a small blackboard, the “real” version of which we can see to the side of the stage. All that happens during the overture is that a hand writes the name of the opera, the name of the composer, and the year it was composed on the board, rubbing each out before starting on the next. But he does this more or less in time with the music. And slightly hesitantly. The effect is, well, delightful and funny, actually. Not maybe the world’s most brilliant joke, but it feels like precisely the sort of level of wit and modernity to makes perfect sense of Mozart’s own skittish intro. It’s also strangely reminiscent of the title sequence from Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract.

If only there could have been more lightnesses of touch like this.

As soon as the opera starts, so does a good deal more clodhopping. Ok, I’m being tough. There is still an infinite amount to be grateful for here. From the unfussy use of modern dress (and: another nice touch – the three lady attendants to the Queen of the Night, who rescue Tamino from the video of a snake, take cell-phone snaps of his prone form) to the agile use of a near empty stage supplemented only with live-feed video backdrops and the raising and lowering of the platform, it confirms – as with Master and Margarita – that “Complicite” have got a lot better at technology again, post-A Disappointing Number.

It’s interesting coming back to opera after being in Germany and seeing David Marton’s Das Schottenstück. Konzert für Macbeth, which in turn reminded me of his Heimkehr des Odysseus. It made me think about how, when watching the work of theatre directors doing opera, what you can be struck by is what feels like their relative powerlessness.

On one hand, McBurney has been brilliant by raising the orchestra up out of its pit so that they’re a fully functional and visible part of proceedings. This is excellent. He also gets the lead flautist out of her seat and on stage to play the flute parts a couple of times. Such a better solution than having her stuck invisibly in the pit with on-stage Tamino miming like a dick. At the same time, while the score remains the same and while the orchestration stays inflexible, there is an inexorability about the unfolding of the drama that McBurney struggles with and ultimately loses against.

The main problem might be the plot. It’s so flimsy yet reactionary. Having singers even just walking about and representing the characters is just hell really. And then there’s the misogyny. It was bad enough (a lot worse, actually) in Hytner’s production, which pretty much played it to the gallery as comedy. But trying to ignore it, gloss over it, and pretending it isn’t there really doesn’t work either. I honestly don’t know what one does with the fact that a load of the “great men of artistic history” degrade women in their work. Banning it outright seems extreme, but pretending it’s fine plainly doesn’t work. The Mitchell solution of hardcore feminist interventions and reinterpretations seems ever more like the best possible course of action currently being created, and I’m sure there must be other possibilities, but just “serving the chauvinist text” really should be shot down every time someone does it until it stops.

[“Comedy northern accents” such as Papageno’s (for all I know it’s also Roland Wood’s real accent, and he’s an allegedly comic character, so fair enough, but...) might also want to be phased out. TBH, it was actually quite nice to hear a northern accent on stage at the ENO, it was just the character’s rapid descent into clowning and oafishness which rather let it down. Oh, and, re: putting the Queen of the Night in a wheelchair? Um. I think there’s a big old argument that says NO to that... (No, I don’t think Cornelia Götz needs it as she gets out of it several times and walks around. It does just *seem* to be a prop. Sincere apologies if this isn’t the case)]

It’s strange: if I had been told *this* was ENO’s 25-year-old production about to retire I wouldn’t have actually been surprised (apart from the live-feed video stuff. That would have been beyond impressive for 1989); and I’d have thought it was a shame that such a lovely production which had pretty much stood the test of time was being retired. This is how mainstream theatre should have been looking for well over two decades now. That this is the *new* production is a bit of a pity. It’s good, it’s well made, but it really lacks any sense of a progressive dramaturgy. There’s precious little energy and no critique of anything. That also means the weirdly dangerous masonic hymn to the enlightenment – in which you can virtually hear the train tracks to Auschwitz being begun – just gets played straight by a bunch of men in sober grey suits. Which feels pretty chilling.

Stephen Jeffreys’s translation of both sing and spiel oddly opts to bring out as many parallels with The Tempest as humanly possible, to the extent that Sarastro evens comes out with: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” at one point. (Hang on, do you want me to explain the plot? In short, it’s a bit like the Tempest, but not really at all.) And rather than Jeremy Sams’s light, witty English version (far and away the best thing in Hytner’s production), Jeffreys aims mainly for a translation in which repetition of key elemental words such as “steel” perhaps aim for a darker version of the text. I’m not convinced it fully works, but the legible attempt is there and clearly thoughtful.

Overall, then: this is a solid production. One which I’d very much have liked to love a lot more than I did. It seems to owe a vast debt to Katie Mitchell’s pioneering work, both visually and sonically (the other artists credited in the production reads like a round-up of past Mitchell collaborators with Finn Ross (Die Ringe des Saturn, Köln) on video, Gareth Fry (oh, lots) on Sound design and even Ruth“-in-the-booth” Sullivan (Die Gelbe Tapete) doing foley), but where Mitchell also offers feminist rigour, McBurney has, it feels, substituted a slightly woolly technological romanticism. I imagine for a lot of people it will feel perfectly, bracingly modern, and maybe I’m just an old grump, but I want the feminism and rigour back too.

But, as I say, it does look nice...

(this is a chalk drawing live-feed-projected onto a screen in front of two performers floating mid-air on wires in front of a recorded-video backdrop. Pretty.)

Katie Mitchell interview

My interview with Katie Mitchell for Exeunt is now online here.

In the absence of anything more to say about it than that at the moment, here's a nice big picture of her production of the opera Written on Skin.

(photo by Steven Cumminsky)

Satyagraha – ENO

[seen 04/12/13]

“Philip Glass’s undulating, ecstatic opera in the key of resistance returns to ENO for a third time, and it’s an honest to the gods near-spiritual experience of sharp, hot beauty and political provocation. Director Phelim McDermott’s production well deserves the acclaim that’s been heaped upon it in the six years since its premiere: its balancing of eye-widening spectacle and delicate intimacy is unrivalled, and despite the stately ritualism of its pacing, its message cuts deep and fierce.”

 So said my colleague Stewart Pringle, reviewing this run of Satygraha’s press performance for Exeunt a fortnight ago. I open with his magnificent first paragraph largely to flag up the fact that another viewpoint, expressed by a near-contemporary, whose views I totally respect, is possible.

I haven’t read on in Stewart’s piece, because I want to work out *why* I disagree for myself rather than get embroiled in a point-by-point, “ah, but!”-style disagreement. At the end of the first third (the show has three fifty-minute sections, coupled by generous interval allowances) I was kind of rapt. I had, granted, arrived fifteen minutes late (I was at ENO the night before for a three hour Magic Flute which started at half seven, this is a 3hr10 opera, so it starts at seven, silly me), but given the pace that the thing is moving at, and its general level of penetrability, I don’t think I missed a big old magical opening and all the exposition.

The actual scheme of Satyagraha is rather appealing: what Glass and his librettist, Constance De Jong, have done is construct a piece which nominally/fleetingly tells the story of Gandhi’s life with a text composed from excerpts from the Bhagavada Gita. As such, unusually for ENO (whose main remit is to stage operas in English), it is through-sung in Sanskrit. I presume this is because it was created by an English-speaker, and therefore all the foreign words are therefore allowable. If only Mozart and Wagner had had the foresight to be actually English-speakers. Then no one would have to translate their gorgeous German libretti at ENO either (see: here). Occasionally, but by no means comprehensively, bits of what they are singing are projected in English onto associate director Julian Crouch’s cardboard-as-corrugated-iron cyclorama set.

Improbable’s design for Satyagraha spends a lot of time in the realm of the deliberately ugly. The corrugated iron walls (which eventually part at the finale to reveal blue skies) perform well in their allotted function as an oppressive prison-like setting. However, they are also covered in doors and windows. So people can stick their heads in, the (very occasional) puppet can appear, and the enormous cast of chorus and extras can walk in and out. So not much of a prison, actually. But the sense of oppression remains. It is perhaps significant that the costumes are designed by someone else (Kevin Pollard), the videos are by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer, and the puppets – not credited with a sole designer – have been knocked up by just about everyone Improbable have met, by the looks of the programme.

Re: the puppets – pretty much every photo I’ve seen of the production includes them. They are on stage for a possible grand total of five minutes. So that’s quite a weird disjuncture. When they appear you think, aha! Now we’re getting to it. But no, all the huge ones with human faces just appear in a fraction of the short bit when Gandhi is in South Africa (of which, topically, more later).

On the costumes: they seem to cause a number of different problems. One is that the production never seems quite stable in terms of tone. Gandhi (sung by the resolutely white and not-at-all-Indian Alan Oke) is dressed precisely as Gandhi is seen dressed in photos. Now, I don’t have a problem with a white person playing India’s most famous anti-British-rule campaigner. I’m sure even Gandhi would chuckle at the irony. But to have said white guy dressed exactly as Gandhi feels like a misstep. Sure, he’s white; it’s non-naturalistic... apart from the entirely naturalistic costume. You see what I mean? This problem is compounded by elsewhere the costumes, notably of the British rulers and army in India, being highly colourful comic-book-like creations.

It’s a style of “alternative theatre” that I think was at its height in roughly 1996 (coincidentally the year Improbable formed). It isn’t my favourite aesthetic in the world, but it’s worked better than it does here. But now it also has to contend with feeling a bit like a museum piece. Much the same goes for the style of “movement” deployed. I’ve never been a big fan of it as a genre, but there can be beautiful, arresting examples. But this isn’t one of them.

However, I suspect that the reason I spent so much time dwelling on nit-picky elements of the design and dramaturgical thinking was because, well, because there’s not so much else to think about. What Stewart calls “undulating” and “ecstatic” or politely glosses as “stately ritualism” I think I might get perilously close to calling “boring”. It’s strange. I used to listen to a lot of Philip Glass at university, and I remember thinking he was dead good. And I think I still have quite a soft spot for Koyaanisqatsi and his take on Bowie’s Low album. But, somewhere along the line either he changed or I did.

I didn’t see Einstein on the Beach last year, and I really wish I had, because that does sound amazing. It also sounds infinitely more challenging in terms of its staging. Here what is a fiercely abstract text and concept is perhaps given a frustratingly literal form. Even if it is in the best style of “alternative theatre” we notice that it is actually plugged into some of the worst excesses of British mimesis.

But then, I also managed to get into being quite annoyed by the thrust of Glass’s “argument”. The piece has three parts. The schema links each to a different figure: Tolstoy – who wrote to Gandhi and inspired him, Gandhi himself, and then it concludes with Martin Luther King. I found this last part the difficult bit to take. It was as if Gandhi’s own life and achievements somehow weren’t quite enough, and could only be perfected by application to an American version. This isn’t the fault of the production at all. This is just sheer irritation at American self-celebration. Nothing happens unless it’s about America, it seems. That this was made in 1980 of course means Glass was unable to anticipate Barack Obama, and I think even this production pre-dates his election, but the recent news has rather served to explain the sense of discomfort that I experienced in the theatre (the night before Mandela died). There is a curious triumphalism about the martyrdoms here of Gandhi and King. As if, in America in 1980, they had anything to be complacent or celebratory about, apart from maybe their baby steps toward becoming some sort of mildly less racist society.

I should say, amongst all this griping there were some moments in the stagecraft which were very pretty. And much more important, that Alan Oke has got possibly one of the most spectacular voices (what a strange choice of adjectives for a voice) that I’ve ever heard: powerful, unforced, pure, and richly resonant. I think I’d happily listen to him sing his bits in concert for hours.

But, on the whole I just kept on feeling troubled by different things. The antique “alternative theatre” vibe, that seemed to have simply submitted to politely flattering the opera’s wealthy patrons and an opera that seemed to offer nothing more than hippy platitudes, content to celebrate the murder of two radical campaigners for social justice as some kind of groovy cosmic balance.

I’m sure there’s a great opera to be written about white oppression and colonialism, but I’d think it might have to be a damn sight angrier and more powerful than this one to succeed.