Image of an Unknown Young Woman – Gate Theatre, London

[seen 08/06/15]


In terms of timing, the press night of Image of an Unknown Young Woman couldn’t have been more stark. All through Monday social media was ablaze with *that video* of the black female teenager* being violently assaulted by a white policeman in America.

Elinor Cook’s play concerns a video of the titular young woman in a yellow dress (an unexepected call-back to Icke’s Iphigenia on Friday) being shot by an unknown policeman during an anti-government protest. The first scene is set in Socialmedialand, with unknown, unnamed Twittrists carrying on as ppl on Twitter do: compulsively sharing, telling each other off for sharing, telling each other off for not sharing, pulling rank and slyly putting down each others’ ‘authenticity’ and credentials of their ‘clicktivist’ caring. Etc. It’s brilliant precisely because it is so entirely correct in every detail, and every bit as fucking maddening.

In Chris Haydon’s staging/On Fly Davis’s set, the Twitterasts loom out of the audience, divided into traverse along the Gate’s long, narrow, black space, with a raised catwalk/gantry. This is a stark world of metal railings and black-clad figures all around us and mostly above us; bearing down on us.

The next few scenes introduce us to some revolutionaries, the young man who shot the video and his girlfriend, and a wealthy Englishwoman who is sponsoring a young boy in the country where the revolution is taking place. There are occasional additions by the figures denoted as “Chorus” in the text – an address by the leader of the country gripped by protests, for instance – these few situations cycle through a period of, what? A day? A few weeks? Different timescales loop and blend seamlessly so that we’re never concerned with the logic, as much as the horrific wider reality.

This is the horrible brilliance of both script and production; by never pinning down a particular regime to take to task, we in the audience think of all of them: Burma, Uganda, Liberia, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran, America (add your own). There are descriptions of political protest, of sudden chance captures on mobile phone (or, previously, film) of the moment which can tip protest into furious revolution, compellingly horrible, the descriptions of state-sanctioned torture, murder and forced confessions to restore the status quo, and perhaps even more troubling, these interspersed scenes of calm where a rich English woman calmly, concernedly hopes that sponsoring a child in this failed state will be helpful...

The staging – often high-engergy shouting and stamping about – conveys angst and violence more than adequately; over and over again your nerves are jangled by the possible horror you’re about to witness, and by the greater horror of the fact that you’re relieved when the paid performers, who are only pretending anyway, just stop doing that and let you relax again. Irrespective of how you feel about Cameron’s Britain, the tension between our privileged lives, the calm streets outside, and the ongoing, ever-present torture and murder going on beyond our shores, is harrowing.

[Perhaps, politically, it is a flaw not to show the comfortable lives of the affluent middle classes in that country untroubled by the brutal regime, and, similarly, to not highlight the lives of those in Britain who do suffer in this way, and without even as much hope of a revolution to emancipate them. But this is more a play about Western impotence in the face of brutality abroad, I think.]

It is a brilliantly framed set of questions though: the facile nature of Twitter coverage, the absolute need for the rest of the world to see what’s going on, what’s going on not actually being a beautiful, photogenic woman being shot at random, but systematic oppression. And then, on to violence. The ever-present, biggest question for “bleeding heart liberals”: where is their privileged pacifism getting the actually oppressed? At the same time, everything we know about recent revolutions ending first in horrific bloodshed, and then with one corrupt regime being replaced by another, often worse, regime. The complacency of this viewpoint. The impossibility of knowing what to do, at the same time as not being able to actually do anything.

Meanwhile, the guy who shot the film – of, who? a girl he was having an affair with at college away from his partner? – his flat’s raided, his girlfriend’s sexually assaulted, they’re taken away to some state torture dungeon, a filmed confession is forced out of him, his girlfriend is raped? Murdered? He’s executed after the confession?

Back in Britain the nice lady who’s been helping out the rich lady shows her the scars from where she was tortured, and raped, back in this failed state. Later she plays her a recording of a man being tortured, murdered? in prison. The rich lady is worried that her money is being used to arm “terrorists”. The nice lady wants to make damn sure she knows what the “terrorists” are fighting. She wants more money for them. And through all this, one woman just wants to find her mum, who went out shopping, and had to go through the protesting. It’s a wretched, wretched situation and the play offers no solutions. How could it? It’s brilliant at confronting us again with the realities, however. And it feels like a timely reminder after all the post-election depression that’s been flying around.

As a production, it’s spare and stylish. Mostly dressed in/painted black, repeated yellow motifs – graffiti, balloons, paper, cloth ribbons – are deployed throughout, along with angry bursts of electro/metal/etc. music. The cast is pretty bloody good, and the casting – effortlessly multi-racial – makes a score of brilliant political points, both off-stage to the British theatre industry (Yes: this is what Britain looks like. Please cast accordingly.) and on stage (Yes: these conditions are probably facing someone of every colour on this stage; have a think about that, please). It’s also a bloody big cast for the Gate (9), which is also exciting. It’s very tempting to say that it’s the sort of show that Haydon’s entire time at the Gate thus far has been heading towards. A pretty much perfect synthesis of his on and off stage political convictions.

More than this, though, is the exciting discovery (discover for me, anyway), of Cook as a writer. In many ways, because of the utilitarian playing style (of which I wholeheartedly approve, this isn’t an attack), the writing doesn’t get *shown off* in quite the same way that a more stately production at, say, the Donmar might. But this is furiously good writing, I think. From the way it captures different rhythms and registers of speech, to its structural poise, it’s a very very elegant bit of work. You’re reminded of both Pinter’s political plays (over and over again of One For The Road with all the official language of sanctioned torture and rape), and somehow Caryl Churchill’s early work – that still-too-rare sense of middle-aged women as active subjects, and somehow, too, that ranginess of outdoors that I associate more with the plays of the late seventies – Howard Barker, Churchill, Brenton, et. al. The ending/s are a bit too coup-y for me to feel able to spoiler, but, again. Boom. Lovely touches.

So, yeah. Bloody good production, bloody good play, bloody good performances, not a lot of bloody fun to watch, let alone think through. But important, though, I think. Worth putting yourself through. As a companion piece to Violence and Son, which the other half of the press saw on Monday night; well, I’d recommend leaving more than 24 hours between the two unless you really enjoy despairing of the world.


* re: “black female teenager” – this originally read “young black woman” – largely to echo the title of the play. After a discussion with a director friend (not white, since you ask), I’ve changed it, because: “Black female bodies have long been sites of trauma, carrying not only the weight of the past, but present stereotypes that dehumanize and sexualize young girls before they even hit puberty. Casebolt did not think he was restraining a helpless teenaged girl, but a "black woman," with all the stereotypes and stigma that includes. This, it seems, was justification enough for her treatment”. I can’t use “girl”, because there’s an equally problematic history there, not least related to feminism. So “black female teenager” it is.

Violence and Son – Royal Court, London

[seen 09/06/15]

The contrast between Gary Owen’s recent Iphigenia in Splott and Violence and Son is stark. The former leaves you, yes, wrung out, but angry and energised. The latter leaves you, what? It feels like the only real response is head-in-hands concern at the sheer bloody awful state of men in British society.

There are two ways to write about V&S, one would be to not give away the plot points, to dance around what happens in the piece, and to try to have a discussion about the issues it raises and the means by which it raises them, while somehow not saying what they are. I imagine most of the *proper* reviews will have done that. [Billington, probably.] Since I’m not bound by a word-count, or an obligation to do it *properly*, I’m going to say exactly what happens after this photo...

In the first half, 17-year-old Liam (David Moorst) returns home to his dad’s working class Welsh flat – a beautifully realised low-walled circular pen, channelling Miriam Buether’s set for Cock – with his friend Jen (Morfydd Clark). He is dressed as Matt Smith’s Dr Who, and she’s dressed as Amy Pond (notably, in the policewoman stripogram(sp?) outfit Pond is wearing when we first meet her as an adult). He’s edging round that staple of teen rom-coms, the best friend who wants to be something more. The corner Jen’s been put in by Gary Owens is that she’d quite like to go out with Liam, but already has an attractive, rugby-player boyfriend with whom she has less in common. And is hmming and haaing. Their awkwardness is soon compounded by the sound of Liam’s dad Rick (Jason Hughes) (or “Violence”, “Vile” for short) and Suze (Siwan Morris) having sex in the next room. Unlike witty, geeky, apparently gentle Liam, Violence is hard-drinking, frank, sexist and, well, has a reputation for violence. The first *obvious* #TalkingPoint is that he recently broke the jaw of a “retard” (Rick, p.49)/“man with learning difficulties” (Liam, p.50/Jen p.51), who had been touching up women (some “really young, like fifteen”) in local pub the York. A local pub which has a reputation for women being sexually assaulted generally. The first issue on the table is a standard response to violence solving nothing, and why didn’t you just call the police? To which the response is asking Jen whether she ever calls the police when she gets groped in the York. Liam’s, almost undetectable response is to wonder why women would even go there, and Jen’s response is the free drinks. It’s a miserable and grubby picture of the world, where men are somehow helpless slaves to their misogyny, and – the implication is – women put up with it in the name of enough free booze to forget it. “Nice guy” Liam’s instinct to blame the women is no less troubling than Rick’s carefree world of jaw-breaking without due process.

#TalkingPoint number two arrives in the form of a scuffle in which Liam, having wound Rick up (not an excuse, let alone me victim-blaming, but you want context, right?), gets shoved into a wall, and ends up concussed and bleeding. The alacrity with which Suze believes Rick’s somewhat toned down version of events, contrasts with Jen’s excellent but impracticable advice that Liam should walk out of this clearly abusive relationship right now.

Calling the third major plot point a talking point would feel entirely disgusting – although, at the same time, given *that this is a made up story* (important to remember with plays, no matter how much they reflect the real world), and one that feeds the bit of theatregoing culture of treating everything as a #talkingpoint (as opposed to the ineffable, the sublime, and art which passeth all understanding), it would also be true. Liam rapes Jen.

He’s been thumped. They’re edging toward a relationship. She accepts to stay the night and suggests it would be nice to “cwtch” (Wales’s favourite word: “cuddle”) before they go to sleep. He then, in the morning, claims he didn’t hear her say no. Twice. We might even believe that he honestly didn’t hear. Which is no excuse. But we also see his mortifictation. (These really are bloody excellent performances. This is yer proper realism at its best. The sort of thing where you really forget that it’s not real, and instead of thinking about the “acting” start actually analysing bodily and facial tics to see if *a character* is lying. I mean, it really is beautifully done. Hats off to Hamish Pirie and his cast here.) Maddeningly, though, when Jen asks him to at least apologise, Liam turns on her and makes the age-old, sickening male response that she was somehow responsible. It feels like a cruel thing for the playwright to make him do. We might have hoped for more from Liam. Although, cleverly, I think, the signs were all there. The bitterness, the chippiness, the resentfulness; and yet the judgemental attitude (cf. “why do women go to the York?”, not “why are men apparently incapable of not sexually assaulting women?”). And, of course we can see the parallels between his own situation – his own powerlessness, and his own victim role; even his in-denial-ness – and the violence that he has now committed. What's much much more frightening is the way that Jen has already, at eighteen, internalised an entirely unspoken threat of violence, even from this ineffectual, weedy little bloke.  Like, Jesus Christ.  What kind of a hellish world is it where that is instinctive behaviour? (Well, this one. Duh.)

This is a fiercely intelligent play. It might feel perhaps a teeny bit schematic – I guess anything that sets out to explore male violence and rape over the course of 90 minutes using naturalism is going to (real life has an annoying habit of not setting itself out quite so neatly, in terms of themes) – but you can forgive the structural sign-posting for the searching intelligence here. I think it’s also important to at least flag up that this is not a play that seeks to make entertainment out of rape. If one has any belief in theatre as an important part of a society thinking out loud – a tool of democracy and culture – then this play, even though written, directed and designed by men, and with an all-white cast, still feels like an important addition to the conversation.

Perhaps the real brilliance of it is the way that it subtly flags up over and over again just how prevalent misogyny is in our culture. From the superficially sweet off, where Liam is dressed as Dr Who, we are uncomfortably reminded that even with this tea-time favourite, we are still required to politely overlook Stephen Moffatt’s raging sexism, like a Very Drunk Uncle at a wedding. Like Karen Gillen’s first Amy Pond costume – not Jen’s dressing up as her – what even was that? And Liam’s fey “nice guy” persona reminds us chillingly of Elliott Rodger’s murderous, misogynist diaries (digested read: “But I’m such a nice guy, and if women can’t see that and keep going out with assholes instead – the whores – they’ll be sorry”). The final moments, the idea that Rick would threaten Jen out of pressing charges, the father-son not-reconciliation, but instead perhaps symbolic engulfment – the final line, spoken as an embrace, “Daddy’s got you” *obviously* echoing more as a terrible prophecy and comfort – do feel forced. But at the same time, not untrue as an analysis of just how awful a force masculinity is.


Footnotes:

Interestingly, my first point-of-comparison for this play was Jack Thorne’s Stacey, which was also directed by Hamish Pirie, starring, blimey!, Arthur Darvill (who, obviously, played Amy Pond’s husband, Rory, in Dr Who). (Maddeningly, the only review of that show I can find is by the idiot Philip Fisher who, terrifyingly, seems to think that the play was about whether or not the character has murdered someone, not that he’s just raped someone.)

And, *obviously* Doctor-to-be Matt Smith’s (arguably) biggest breakthrough role also took place at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in Polly Stenham’s That Face.

I'm prepared to believe that these facts are entirely incidental.

The Oresteia – Almeida, London

[seen 05/06/15]

[photo by Manuel Harlan, pixelated by me*]

[What follows is one of those cases where form (of play) pretty much entirely dictates form (of review). Inescapably, it seems. This is just how it wanted to be written...]

[probably contains impenetrable spoilers]

“There isn’t one true version. There isn’t. There isn’t one one story – a line of truth that stretches start to end. That doesn’t happen any more, maybe it never happened, but even as I say this now, in each of your minds you create your own versions, different lenses pointing at the same thing at the same time and seeing that thing differently – depends on too much – the day you’ve had, what you feel about your mother, the thought you thought before this one – it all floods in, this thing this whole thing is helpless because your brain creates stories in which it is right.” (p.108; The Oresteia, Robert Icke, cf. Confirmation)

Appendix:

“‘[What do I do?]’ That is the question. It is a question blurted out at a moment of crisis, a question he never meant to ask, at least not aloud. [Orestes, son of the slain Agamemnon, murderer of his mother Klytemnestra], is facing an acute ethical problem. The play is [Robert Icke’s Oresteia]...” (p.1; Theatre & Ethics, Nicholas Ridout)

“Sometimes the commandments of religion seem to come into conflict with other reasons and desires for action. It is at such moments that an ethical crisis occurs. [Icke’s Oresteia] dramatises just such a crisis. [Agamemnon/Klytemnestra/Orestes]’s own ethical judgement seems to be in conflict not only with the judgement of [...] but also with the will of the Gods.” (p.4; Theatre & Ethics, Ridout)

Quotes:

The time of death from Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies.

God Only Knows from Thomas Ostermeier’s Hedda Gabler.

The courtroom exhibits from Katie Mitchell’s Alles weitere kennen sie aus dem kino.

Perhaps that low bass rumble from Three Kingdoms.

Jesus. Those sudden David Lynch/Relocated moments.

“the language is dead” (Icke, p.87) – cf. This is How We Die.

And maybe even a bit of Rupert Goold’s Trial of Judas Iscariot, and Deborah Warner’s Medea.

Even the casting could feel like quotes: Lorna Brown from Alice Birch’s Little Light, Rudi Dharmalingham from Ramin Gray’s The Events and Blanche McIntyre’s The Seagull, Annie Firbank from Ramin’s Golden Dragon, Lia Williams from Rupert’s Earthquakes in London, and then *of course* Angus Wright from *a lot* of Katie Mitchell. (“there has been a creative decision to not assign character names to each actor for this” email Cornershop PR, 05 June 2015 13:30:06.)

***

Ok, let’s do this:

There are a million sound textual reasons to start writing about Rob Icke’s new play, The Oresteia, with the footnotes.  This Oresteia is credited as “a new adaptation” of the Aeschylus, but to be honest, I’d have been just as happy to have accepted the idea that this is a New Play. As at least three different prefaces, introductions, and programme notes point out, the Ancient Greek authors were themselves adaptors, and that all subsequent productions are *versions* anyway. But I’d say, the sheer weight of actual new ideas and concepts, thoughts and, hell, new words that Icke has created here makes this, for my money, a new play.

It is also possibly the best new play I’ve seen this year (or equal best new- anyway). In terms of scale, it is the most impressive new play since Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III. But, Jesus, Andrew, what’s with all this “best” stuff?

In terms of my own interests: it suggests the opening of a new avenue in Britain’s reintegration with Europe. On one hand, a production that (I think) directly quotes from other key European stagings of classics, intelligently, deliberately situating it as part of that lineage; a production of a classic that speaks directly to our own concerns; and yet still, that very English solution, even while creating a brilliant piece of auteur theatre, the real solution lying in (brilliant, incisive) new writing.

It is even a play that acknowledges that I’ll think precisely this, because: “[my] brain creates stories in which it is right”. Indeed, every review you read about this Oresteia will tell you more about its author’s worldview about than the play/production. (Obviously this is true of all reviews ever, but since seeing Chris Thorpe’s Confirmation again last week, the importance of acknowledging this fact has been refreshed in my mind.)

I guess it’s always the case that a “modern dress production” of a classic text always requires a certain level of cognitive dissonance in order to work. But here, I think Icke’s production goes further. In writing in a whole first act which tells the Iphigenia in Aulis story (“adapted from” the relevant bit of Aeschylus’s chorus in the Oresteia, NOT the Euripides, says the PR email), Icke brilliantly psychologizes this 2,500-year-old story, at once giving us modern warfare, the latest euthanasia drugs, and – again – something weirdly identifiable with the Blair/Iraq story at the same time as this horrific Bronze Age proposition. Point after eloquent point about both timeless ethical questions and the most up-to-date postmodern theories on mental health, relativism and religion land with real impact. And, added to this, the feeling of a thorough, incisive, ongoing essay about how and why we stage the classics at all. As well as being incredibly moving in its own right, it feels like there’s a secondary source of power derived from the care and attention to which modernity lends its understanding in trying to rehabilitate this ancient thing.

The way that it deploys the thinking and speak of a society at home with therapy (carefully worded to *not imply* “therapy-culture” and all that reactionary back-to-stiff-upper-lip bullshit) and emotional intelligence makes this Iphigenia almost like a tortured, intimate version of Downfall. The challenge to our modern morality here is suddenly being made to see things from Agamemnon’s perspective. Like: why are we being made to feel sorry for this formerly cut-and-dried monster? But, by God, it’s well done.

A note on the writing: in all this enthusing about the *ideas* in this production, it would be very easy to neglect to mention just how good the *actual writing* is. The actual writing is fucking wonderful. It would also be easy to say that Icke has essentially adapted the poetic – *operatic* even – original into prose. This would also be wrong. There are bursts of real lyricism, but the rest of the time there’s still a real growling, rhythmic intensity to the text. More than once, I thought of Martin Crimp, who, as we know, is probably the most musical of British playwrights. This often has that same flinty, spare intensity. But it’s less elliptical. Here, when an idea comes up, it feels like it’s unpacked almost fulsomely. There is *a lot* of this sparseness, so to speak.

A note on the production: and, in all this enthusing about the ideas and writing, it would be very easy to neglect talking about the staging, which still feels somehow like it’s a different thing to discuss. Even though the production dramaturg is the very brilliant Dr Duška Radosavljevic, who has probably done more than most to erase the hard conceptual line between text and performance in our minds. *Of course* the way in which this staging operates – directed by Icke himself – adds layer upon multiple layer to the words, and enables us to read the whole in a series of particular ways. Of course Hildegard Bechtler’s design – those almost ubiquitous layers of sliding glass doors. Walls, partitions; sometime transparent, sometimes not (cf. theatrically, too many to mention, or my walk to Sainsbury’s); those Scandi-tables and benches (a bit cf. Andrews’s Three Sisters) – adds to that sense of how we read text, action, video work (Tim Reid), light (Natasha Chivers) and sound (Tom Gibbons). But I don’t think it’s heretical to suggest that visual signals are, in part, separate to abstract concepts. Of course, even just writing that down reminds me that something similar is discussed by Klytemnestra in the play, and actually both things *do* muddle together in the clearing house of the mind, and ultimately, “...it’s still light. Light inside your brain” (p.63).

“You never stop thinking, do you?” – Klytemnestra (p.36)

A note on the acting: in all this enthusing about the staging, it would be very easy to neglect to talk about the actual acting. The acting was good. No, really. The acting here is phenomenally good. Everyone in the cast is brilliant. Lia Williams is perhaps the greatest revelation (for me). I’ve seen her be *completely believable* in relatively straightforward plays, but this is a whole other thing. The demands of the text – to be public figure, private modern mum, and possessed, ancient force of nature, complete with knuckle-whitening scream – offer a challenge which is equalled, bettered, and then shredded for good measure. Emotional intelligence, vocal shifts, different physicalities to the point of believing in body-doubles. Actually thrilling performance. Angus Wright we already knew was brilliant, but here, with such a character (nominally: Agamemnon, Aegisthus, postmodern confusion and etc.) you really get a measure of just how great. Like Williams, the switches feel both immense and subtle. And his voice is just something else. How do you describe the grain of a voice. It’s the sort of thing that almost demands stupid writing. Angular, textured, authoritative? So a voice like an upper-class brick? Actually, somehow: yes. Jessica Brown Findlay and Luke Thompson are both more natural (not a criticism of the above AT ALL), and both’s greatest strengths lie in the complete defencelessness of their direct-audience-address. In a way, it perhaps feels like the different components of the ensemble are deployed separately in the production, each according to role and strengths, to perform different vital facets of a wider theatrical whole. Ensemble members with fewer lines/ less “through-line” also perform beautifully. For me, Dharmalingam feels like the closest point of contact, perhaps partly because of his accent, but then maybe also for the simple reason that he is the first person in the production to speak – a list of every name of God. Hara Yannis’s role as captive foreigner Cassandra requires her – as the stage directions put it – to: “suddenly speak in Ancient Greek from the original Aeschylus – passionate, furious, tearful. It’s terrifying to listen to”. And, well, perfectly put, stage direction. Hearing the original as if conjured from some tear in the earth itself, disinterred, is somehow doubly chilling both for the power of its resonance and for the way it *doesn’t* sound alien enough. Oh, and, Jesus Christ: Annie Firbank’s Fury. Fuck. Genuinely creepy. Brilliant.

For the sake of not actually spoilering the final focus-pull of how Icke’s Act Four achieves *being* the Εὐμενίδες I’ll not describe it in painful detail, suffice it to say, it’s a logical next step to which the whole has been pointing all along, and contains, for my money, one of the neatest defences of theatre, justice, democracy and the arts – at the same time a robust attack on them – that you could imagine.

There. I think that begins to cover it.

I think it’s brilliant. And that might well be because I can only ever see what I want to see. But I’m willing to bet that people who don’t agree with me about a single thing could also find 3hrs40 of things to love about it too. And if they can’t, then maybe that’s about the story they want to tell themselves instead.  But, for anyone who’s interested in ideas, or theatre, or just a gripping story thrillingly told (I promised myself I wouldn’t say “DVD box-set” but...), this is unmissable.



*Because none of the publicity photos I’ve seen quite managed to capture – if it’s even possible – either a sense of what the multi-layered whole *felt* like, or an image that was beautiful enough in its own right. (cf. the iconic Carmen Disruption pic.) No disrespect intended to the photo I have pixellated, though. It’s a lovely photo in its own right, just not the same as the play I thought I saw.

A Doll’s House – The Space, Isle of Dogs

[seen 03/06/15]

Chloe Mashiter’s new version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is the first I’ve seen since Carrie Cracknell’s superlative Young Vic version in 2012. And, frankly, it’s another blinder.

In a lot of ways, it feels like the most exactly opposite version imaginable while both things are still Very Good. Where the Young Vic’s ADH had a superbly detailed naturalistic set on a revolve, here we have the bare wooden boards of the docklands’ Space venue – a lovely small, deconsecrated church in some street, in the middle of nowhere – playing essentially in traverse. Where Cracknell had a full compliment of maids and tiny children and as much diversity as, well, as the middle class of C19th Sweden, here we have just five actors of various ethnic backgrounds and nationalities.

If I’m completely honest, it took me five, maybe ten minutes to completely tune in to this production’s rhythms and style. I *wanted* to completely trust the actors, and after about five minutes I totally did. I was, for example, briefly wrong-footed by Torvald (played by Swedish actor Johan Hallstrom) holding a copy of the script. I knew it was the first night of this short run, and that it had effectively been rehearsed in about a week and a half. And, hell, the guy’s Swedish. But, NO. FEAR NOT. He’s holding the script because Clever Directorial Decision (essentially serving as a set-up to a call-back in the very final minutes. Hint: this production uses Ibsen’s rarely staged “alternate ending”). But, yes, after a little period-of-adjustment to the night’s chosen theatrical style [does anyone else get this sort of genre-reacclimatisation issue, btw?] I was, to dip into the cliché barrel, gripped.

There really is so much to like about this production. The bare stage is just the start of the unfussy, clear story-telling going on here. The whole thing runs at just 1hr45 (without interval), in a new version/adaptation cannibalised by the director from an out-of-copyright translation. It really is a brilliant edit. It doesn’t feel like anything’s been missed out, but the whole is pacey as anything and folds 1hr45 into something that feels little over an hour. Any servants in the original have been dismissed, and letters/messages that arrive are delivered straight into the hand of the recipient at the relevant moment probably curtailing a lot of faffing about, and, like the doorbell, their arrival is indicated with a little electronic boing noise – there’s even an illuminated letter “icon” projected onto the upstage back wall (whatever that is in traverse), that folds this timeless production neatly onto our own era of mobile messages and phones receiving emails. As such, it constantly feels smartly contemporary, without our having to worry about either *actual* location or time-period.

[The one exception to this is the naming of the amount lent by Krogstat to Nora as £250, which is obviously, a) English money, and b) an amount wouldn’t get anyone to the seaside, let alone save their life, *now*.]

It’s also brilliant to see *another* reasonably diverse cast being so seamlessly deployed. (It really is a genuine mystery to me why this approach isn’t applied to everything as a matter of course.) I would have said “colour-blind”, but I did wonder whether it was entirely coincidence that it was the two female characters who were mixed-race, and that all the male characters were played by white men – all from different countries (UK, Sweden and Australia). It perhaps worked best because even though it was a possible extra dimension through which to read this play about societal expectations, it was equally just a useful political statement of intent (the production’s casting call was completely open to actors irrespective of race, age, or disability and Mashiter has elsewhere written a storming piece on the necessity of relaxed performances). Interestingly, in one way, it felt like it was the cross-continental distances (Rachel Handshaw playing Christine is also American) that spoke most clearly to the gulfs in comprehension between the characters.

However, for all that the above musing is/was possible during the show, and as admirable as the small staging touches were, what probably made the 1hr45 pass so fast was the sheer fact of a still-excellent rattling good story, acted with real precision and drive.

[I think those (precision and drive) are just the things I like best in performance. *Of course* they were *emotionally truthful* and *believable*, but I think other things are more interesting and important in acting like that. Pace, for example (which, incidentally, they nailed the crap out of). I think I believe *emotion* is probably something we tend to fill in for ourselves from context. Although I guess I’d find it weird if actors in Britain didn’t do *emotional truthfulness* as a matter of course – just as I’d find it weird if they *did* do them in Germany.]

So, yes. Basically, if you haven’t seen something properly off-the-beaten track in a while – and, no, Oval House, CPT, The Yard, New Diorama and BAC aren’t even remotely off that track now – get along to this. Or if you haven’t seen any “Fringe Theatre” in a while that was actually both gripping and (probably, virtually) penniless, again, this. It’s a timely reminder that big budgets can only ever do so much for a piece of work if the intellectual leg-work’s missing.

The Angry Brigade – Bush Theatre, London

[seen 02/06/15]

Because the last few James Graham plays have fallen into enemy hands (lol, jk), I haven’t seen anything by him on stage since 2010’s The Man, which I thought was totally charming. And before that, before the meteoric rise and all the telly, I’d rather liked the two Finborough plays I saw, Sons of York and Little Madam. And, it’s these, I think, that probably hold the key to what’s going on in this 2hr30 piece (with a twenty minute interval, it’s better to think of it as a 1hr10 play and then a 1hr play).

The Angry Brigade is another of Graham’s slightly wonky theatrical history-lesson plays, this time – in James Grieve’s production for Paines Plough – revisiting the facts of early seventies posh English anarchism though a dialectic between Branch (the police) and Brigade (Angry-), represented by playing off a loving pastiche of a student production of an Orton farce against a student devised piece inspired by Oh, What a Lovely War.

There is, in theory, a sound textual basis for this. Early on, one of the coppers notes that the AB have been mainlining Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle. As such, proto-postmodern pastiche is as good a way as any to try and find a way into this fascinating period.

In theory.

In practice this iteration of the production (it toured last year with a largely different cast, and from the look of the photos, a better version of the set) never quite lands. Whether in the first half where some amusingly *square* police try to investigate the (theoretically) groovy British anarchists, or in the second half, where we have our teeth set on edge by the irritating likely reality of a bunch of poshos spouting hackneyed revolutionary slogans in Hackney.

It struck me watching The Angry Brigade last night that Graham’s oeuvre increasingly resembles a kind of past life therapy for the English left (with a possible side order about the failure of theatre); a sense of going through all the previous traumas and fuck-ups one by one to see why it’s barely functioning at all at present. (And, if the same can be applied to theatre, perhaps there’s an implied examination of why “political theatre changes nothing”.) And it might well be this sense of, at best, therapy; at worst, a(nother) wake for English Socialism that makes the play so frustrating. But I think in a way the subject itself might be the cause of most of the dissatisfaction.

As a thinker, and I think it spills into the play itself, I get the impression that Graham is a sensible, moderate (to my mind) Old Labour type (by “Old Labour” I mean, the version of the party that last actually *opposed* the Conservatives, rather than offering some sort of sordid Thatcherism-with-Benefits). As such, on one hand he’s sort of ideally placed to point out the foibles of both sides – an amusingly Stoppardian police force, versus over-earnest public school radicals. But at the same time, both playwright and production sort of exemplify why the Angry Brigade failed to make anything like the same mark as Germany’s Red Army Faction or America’s Weathermen. Not, as the play seems to suggest, because the anarchists fell prey to their own inherent bourgeois Richard Curtis film tendencies; but because in Britain, apparently no amount of theory can overcome our class divisions. There is also, of course, the possibility that the Angry Brigade were likely every bit as inept as the play paints them. They were anarchists, after all, and not Marxist-Leninist like the RAF (who were hardly a model of eptness, anyway) or Weathermen.

More than this, though, I think the play feels frustrating, because its own form(s) struggle so hard with what it wants its contents to be and say. Both enterprise and analysis each acknowledge a problem, but are each then driven and scuttled by the drive to make jokes, be flippant, and entertain. It feels as if both theatrical form and political argument *want* to go further, but don’t want to alienate anyone with too much radicalism (either political or theatrical).

As a result, it feels like the second half, which explores life inside the Brigade – replete with Brechtian break-outs through the fourth wall and singing of popular TV advertising jingles to illustrate radical life within the society of the spectacle – almost condemns the politics of the group through insincere means of staging (as the means feel more like pastiche than commitment), while the suffocating nightmare of conformity is mostly achieved by having the set too small for the space (albeit in a bold move that risks looking like ineptitude, especially when the Bush’s perverse seating blocks and sightlines are brought into play), while the actual onstage action (again pastiche), ironically feels much warmer and more sympathetic to the police force than it ever does to the protestors.

Perhaps it’s because British drama has a much stronger, longer tradition of police procedurals, and essentially as a nation we’re actually quite fond of so much of our reactionary *stuff*, that trying to play off radicalism against a cosy sit-com is doomed to failure. It’s an interesting experiment of form and content, but when you consider it next to the genuine artistic risk of Caroline Horton’s Islands back in January, it looks, as '70s radicals might have put it, dead without even realising it.

A Night at the Theatre – Royal Exchange, Manchester

[22/05/15]

A Night at the Theatre isn’t the name of a show. Last Friday night, Manchester Royal Exchange actually held a sleep-over for a hundred people who self-nominated themselves as Royal Exchange audience members. It had a make-yourself-as-a-puppet section, a chat-about-theatre section, a newly commissioned lullaby performed by a choir of fifty, a section where many attendees read out a short story about their memories of theatre, and a bedtime story written by Royal Exchange Associate Artist Chris Thorpe read out by Royal Exchange Associate Artist Maxine Peake. And then there were Ghost Tours of the building led by the resident cast of The Ghost Train. And they gave everyone cocoa at night and a bacon sandwich in the morning.

And it’s kind of impossible to describe just how stupidly moving the whole thing was. Ok, let’s be honest, puppet-making didn’t have me in floods, although I was surprised and charmed by Johnny Woodhams’s workshop, other people’s puppets, and even my own stabs at the whole Blue Peter bit. It was also a good ice-breaker.

After that, I was on a panel offering something between “Provocations” and “My Royal Exchange” ideas. I was definitely least good. But Sarah Frankcom and Lyn Gardner were both very good indeed, while Yandass Ndlovu and Brenda Hickey, from the Exchange’s Young Company and Company of Elders respectively, were even better. This flowed into something a bit like a Devoted and Disgruntled’s Open Space discussions, albeit with tables as well as chairs, and questions already set out.

It was, particularly great to find myself on a table nominally discussing the suggestion that [exact form-of-words coming soon] and having my suspicion that, in fact, “normal” people aren’t greatly troubled at all by conversations theatremakers and critics have with other theatremakers and other critics. They’re theatregoers, not anally-retentive trainspotters, after all. They’re not, it seems fair to say, particularly concerned whether something is New Writing or devised. Or if the director’s interpretation of a text is painstakingly literal-minded or interpretative. They mind if it’s any good or not.

[At which point, individual tastes come into play, infinitely more than any categorisations of theatre that funders, critics, or academics might find useful when trying to talk about it. Some audiences like The Smiths or Joy Division, or the Stone Roses, others don’t. I’d say they were all good. Other people wouldn’t. I would say that all three bands have indisputably got a hell of a lot more fans now than when they started, and were *experimental*, *weird*, and *indie*, though, even though the actual music hasn’t changed at all.]

As a result of the fact that the conversations that [form of words coming] hadn’t alienated any of the people at the table nearly as much as the assumptions in the question itself, we instead ended up discussing the question of whether people felt “represented” at the theatre. Which was an interesting question to think about. Especially the night after The Funfair and, as it turned out, the night before A Nation’s Theatre. The conversation was heartening. One woman on our table – Scottish and working-class – said she was definitely aware of plays that depicted the working-class Scotland she’d grown up in, characterised by violence against women by drunk patriarchal heads of families. “That was how it was,” she said. She didn’t say whether these plays were her favourite plays ever, or feeling “represented” in that way was what she wanted most of all.

Another take on the same question came from Ndlovu on the panel, who, having spoken brilliantly on how being part of the Young Company had definitely drawn her away from “being naughty” (an understatement, she hinted), what had amazed her was seeing characters like herself represented instead of all theatre being all “Consider yourself...”. Which was the best and funniest thing skewering of The Musical’s alleged universality I’d ever heard.

So, on one level, we see that, yes, of course theatre can make people feel represented and included, and at the same time, that traditional thinking on what constitutes universality can also be amusingly flawed. Moreover, Ndlovu wasn’t saying she didn’t like Oliver!, but at the same time, she wasn’t saying it said much to her about the specifics of her life. Opening up the revolutionary possibility that things need not be *about* an audience member for that audience member to enjoy it. And, equally, shows which could be held to offer “universal” messages or narratives can have that universality entirely swallowed up by specifics.

After the discussion was Jason Singh’s new “lullaby” performed by the composer and the Sacred Sounds Choir. If the Royal Exchange has one massive advantage over almost every other theatre I’ve ever been to, it’s its architecture. If you’ve never been there, it’s this palatial hall, and in the centre – entirely unrelated to its surroundings – the theatre is a kind of octagonal glass refugee from 80s Dr Who. But, yeah, that hall. People love it. And, it echoes like mad. So sticking a massive choir all around it, and putting on some pretty lights = winning. The music itself was also rather lovely, and more “difficult” and textured than the word “lullaby” might lead you to expect, while remaining pretty, charming and musical at the same time.

Following the choir was the bit where people read out their own stories about going to the theatre. And, Christ it was moving. Regular readers will know I tend to disapprove of sentimentality, but, Christ, I ain’t half sentimental. The stories, I should emphasise, *weren’t* sentimental at all. They were just clear, concise, charming, robust, often very funny, or moving accounts of some people going to theatre. And maybe it was just the hour, or the sheer range of people there, or the conversations we’d been having, or the fierce love/fond memories that these people had for the artform, but blimey. One woman talked about someone singing ‘Amazing Grace’ in prison and getting a whole chapel full of prisoners weeping, one older Indian lady talked about her erstwhile stage career and an amusing anecdote about her wig flying off, and a ten-year-old with the smallest voice imaginable told us a lovely story about her dad and a cat in a theatre.

To round off the evening (at least before everyone got ready for bed and the ghost tours) there was Chris Thorpe’s bedtime story. I was tempted at the time to write a whole plot-spoilering, blow-by-blow analytical review of the thing, because it was genuinely, genuinely brilliant. And Maxine Peake read it about as well as perfectly as it;s possible to imagine. And it was basically a fable about a horse with a golden tail (which could feed everyone forever) killing George Osborne (well, it might as well have been) with his own greed and meanness-of-spirit (although at not point did it actually say so). Which is what all fables/bedtime stories should say.

So, yes, Jesus. That was all in all one of the best, most uplifting, joyous, thought-provoking, moving nights I’d had in a theatre in a bloody long time. It confirmed just about every cliché going about “reminding us why we do it” (or write about it, or just love it and keep going to it), and I didn’t mind a bit. There was something particularly special about the relationship that the Royal Exchange seemed to have with its audience and the care and respect with which it treated them. Properly remarkable, special stuff.

(Lyn Gardner has also written a lovely piece about the same thing here)

The Space: Manchester – Digital City

[written for The Space]

Collection of interviews with three Manchester Theatres’ Heads of Digital. 

I, Victim – Contact, Manchester

[seen 20/05/15]

While London got Ponyboy Curtis last week, Manchester – for one night only – gets its own head-on Queer confrontation with the sheer hellish state of the patriarchy in the form of David Hoyle.

And, Jesus wept, how to describe? The show opens with Hoyle wandering around the part-dressed empty stage – at the back there’s an easel and canvas, the prostrate be-panted body of a young man prone next to it. Downstage left there’s a bunch of balloons. There’s a music stand with lyrics on it stage right (that’s the audience’s right in my use of the term and who cares if it’s correct?) – and part-dressed himself in falling down bright blue hold-ups and a nightie, he holds up a series of hand painted/scrawled signs offering everything from messages of hope (literally just the word “HOPE”) and statistics about self-harm and suicide rates in the LGBTQ community (the least true of which reads: “99.9% of homosexuals commit suicide”). For the next 2-plus hours (I had to bail because I had friends staying: I was told 90 minutes, I’d have happily stayed for twice that) Hoyle basically wanders around, apparently doing as he pleases, alternating between songs, routines, jaunts out into the audience.

The routines alternate too. There’s very much a spirit of post-election *hate* in the air. More than once Hoyle calls for everyone in positions authority to be executed. It basically runs “CAPS-LOCK DENUNCIATION OF [military/royal family/northern working class upbringing/other]” and smiling, ironic self-excusing thereafter for the same. There’s a song sung to the sound of an MRI Scanner. There’s alternate sympathy with and pity for picked-out members of the audience. But most of all it feels like a plea for everyone to just stop being a Tory cunt.

Over-analysis [any analysis?] seems futile in the face of such an onslaught. I loved it. It was joyous, wry, angry, beautiful. Arty and ironic-about-its-own-artiness: heartfelt, ironic-about-being-heartfelt, still heartfelt. Oh, and funny. Very funny indeed.

I do wish I could have stayed until the end. Even if it had gone on until one in the morning.

Stage: Gorki Theatre

[written for the Stage]

A profile of Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater, written for the Stage (free sign-in required).

pics from: http://www.politicalbeauty.de/mauerfall.html

Guardian: Going Deutsch

[written for the Guardian]

I wrote a short-ish piece for a Guardian about the differences and similarities between German and British theatre.  I already want to write about five more about thoughts I've had since.

The Ghost Train – Royal Exchange, Manchester

[seen 19/05/15]

There’s *another* fun maxim in theatre criticism that you should “judge work on its own terms”. [I wrote about it before here.] The thinking goes, that there’s not much point lambasting an innocent, fun, family show for failing to serve up sublime beauty, adrenaline-fuelled fury, or something theatrically-epoch-making. Critics should also allow for modest ambition.

None of which is to say that Paul Hunter’s attempt to revive the remains of Arnold Ridley’s The Ghost Train is modest in its ambitions. Far from it. Indeed, were it not a revival of a light-hearted 1923 supernatural adventure spoof, the scale and scope of the dramaturgical reinvention here would look positively Teutonic. In fact, oddly, the first film of the play was indeed more than half-German, and I think this staging owes something to that film too. In fact, for the first scene, Hunter even wheels on a foley table, and you get a snapshot of what might have been, had there been infinitely more time to rehearse, greater budgets, more cast members, etc. (Honestly, that section is probably the funniest five minutes of the whole thing.)

But, after this, the special effects are stripped back, or become more to do with absurd physical comedy – if you’ve not seen any Told By An Idiot before, their nearest theatrical neighbour are Kneehigh at their daftest – and indeed there is quite a lot of crossover in terms of personnel between the two companies. (Usually Hayley Carmichael.) They’re quite funny. Uproariously so if you like that sort of thing. But, on Tuesday night, even with the best will in the world, some sections felt a bit on the flat side – like they hadn’t quite found the internal motor for that particular bit, yet.

Do you want to know about the story? I promise it doesn’t matter. It’s set in the 20s. Passengers on a steam train have missed their connection and are stuck at a country railway station miles from anywhere in Cornwall. An elderly station master tells them the legend of the ghost train that passes through the station and the previous station master who died of fear from seeing it. There are a pair of married couples, a elderly woman and her parrot (played by Joanna Holden), and an annoying Woosterish upper-class-twit chap. A lot of plot happens, but very quickly, and mostly at the end. The rest of it, well, some bits are funny and some bits will probably get funnier.

In terms of socio-political import, well, you could make some up if you felt like it, but it would look odd trying. In short, it’s a decent stab, in a particular style, at a fun family show. And I think it will probably get better as the run goes on, and the mechanics of the routines become even more second-nature to the talented and game cast.

The Funfair – HOME, Manchester

[seen 21/05/15]

Funny thing about Art: what you want and what you need can be very different things.

The opening of HOME yesterday was lovely. At five they had drummers, music, leader of Manchester City Council who said some excellent things about why wouldn’t you invest in culture during austerity? “Who the hell wants to live in a city which has no arts and culture?” he asked. Which was lovely. And there was Danny Boyle! Welcome HOME, indeed. And, you know, it did feel pretty bloody special.

Then there was HOME’s first home-grown production. Directed by HOME’s artistic director Walter Meierjohann and adapted by Stockport’s most famous inhabitant of Hackney, Simon Stephens, from Croatia-born Austro-Hungarian Ödön von Horváth’s Kasimir und Karoline.

On the face of it, it’s a funny choice of a play to open a new theatre. After all the celebrations, you get this 2hr15 (inc. interval) really quite depressing tale of the inevitability of abandonment and/or heartbreak in a recession, and the fickleness/meaninglessness of young love; how workers are exploited by the bourgeoisie, and the wafer-thin veneer of civilisation over violence, crime, rioting and the inevitability of death. This is a play whose constant refrain is „Sterben müssen wir alle!“ (we all have to die). “Get Happy!” it ain’t.

So, that’s the first thing. It was just plain weird to come off the back of all the lovely, slightly giddy meet‘n’greet and catching up with old friends in the blazing sunshine and be ushered into the darkness to face down the sea of troubles.

The second thing is, well, pretty much exactly while all that was going on the Guardian posted my latest ode to Anglo-German joy. So, given that the Funfair is a British adaptation of an ostensibly German play (written in German, originally set in Munich), directed by the UK’s first (Amsterdam-born) German artistic director, in a version by Britain’s biggest theatrical export to Deutschland since Sarah Kane or Shakespeare (there wasn’t a lot in between), I think whatever this had been like, it probably couldn’t have been quite as much as I’d want it to be. And, as Meierjohann makes clear in this brilliant interview with Catherine Love, he’s thrilled to be able to abandon German theatre’s insistence on “a concept”, when I guess I’m equally thrilled when British directors start adopting it. Ah, Otherness, such an annoyingly two-way street. So, yes, if I’m being honest there are a couple of recent German productions (Köln at Theatertreffen in 2010, or Castorf in München 2011), whose designs I *much* prefer (though, God knows, I was grateful not to be sitting through something of Castorf length and rigour last night). So, y’know, I’m probably not about to offer the most objective view on the production.

So, having got all that waffle out of the way, shall we talk about The Funfair itself?

HOME Theatre 1 is a rather beautiful auditorium. Narrow, intimate and high. I watched the first half of the show in stalls row F, which, given the way the stage had been extended was pretty damn near the front. I watched the second half from the upper circle (I think it’s called, second/top balcony, anyway). Sitting in the stalls, because of the relative narrowness, the proscenium feels like it towers over you, and even near the back of the theatre high-up, you still feel pretty close to the action, and with a better birds eye view down onto the movement on stage.

The piece opens with James Lusted, a Welsh actor, probably under 4ft, wandering onto the stage in spangly jacket and top hat and announcing the scene. Around him is a (fake) concrete cyclorama (like Saal C at the Schaubühne) with high doors outlined in light bulbs, and on one side, in a window set into the wall, a band, led by guitarist Joseph Runham, whose plecturm arm ends at the elbow. So far, so brilliant, right? I mean, yes, by German standards Ti Green’s set is impossibly neat and contrived. The garishness hits that precise English compromise between over-the-top and stark minimalism. If John Lewis made tasteless fairgrounds this would be it. That said, for all its not-quite-ugly-enough-ugliness, it’s kind of great at the same time...

Cash and Caroline (more usually Caz), burst onto the stage and pretty much immediately split up. Ostensibly because he’s lost his job, and losing his job has made him aggressive and argumentative. The costumes, outside of the band (basically dressed as the Tigerlilies) and Lusted’s Tiny/Narrator, are contemporary but schematic. Caroline (Katie Moore) is obliged to wear a curious white fishnet dress with period features, while Cash (Ben Batt) and his Scouse mate Frankie (Michael Ryan) wear vintage seventies leather jackets. Caroline goes off in search of funfair funtimes with shop-worker John Chase (Rhodri Meilir) (whose costume, incidentally, is a ludicrous green-pastel jacket with yellow shirt). Later, there are two straw-target, cigar-smoking bourgeois shop owners in and a freak-show of enormous-headed, grey-faced mask-wearers.

From what I can make out, Stephens’s script runs remarkably closely to von Horváth’s original. Yes, language, as well as being translated, has also been updated, and place names altered so we are mostly, specifically, in Manchester. In terms of when it’s set, however, the excitement at seeing a Blimp/Zeppelin feels as much to do with the 1929 original as now. And similarly, the freak-show section of the piece – so many shades of Secret Theatre’s Woyzeck – remains intact.

The way that the play operates is, in that German tradition, of one thing happening after another. It doesn’t feel so much plotted as allowed-to-transpire. The encounters, though pregnant with symbolism, at the same time have a curious sort of inconsequentiality to them, or rather, they do have consequences, as they would in real life, but as in Woyzeck, Baal, and maybe Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung, the things that happen, their symbolism, and their consequences feel way more random than in anything English I can think of (although maybe Stephens does get closest to it in things like Harper Regan and Motortown). And, here again, we get back to that “what you want and what’s good for you” question. I mean, I’d have quite liked something a bit more defiant and hopeful, but von Horváth is pitiless and analytical. In this story, characters – about whom we’re never really allowed to feel very much, and none of whom feel very friendly – confirm worst case scenarios. In fact, it’s more like a stage adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”. This *is* a world in which men knock women about. In which couples break up because of economic pressures. In which the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. British theatre, I think, tends to dramatise stories of hope, or at least romanticise the despair. This just gives it straight.

At the same time, and perhaps strangely, given what I’ve said about the design, there are actually some really great moments and stage-pictures. I’m not sure any production has every come together more in a single moment than when the house band suddenly play Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. Elsewhere, when the red circular curtain that’s loomed over the stage throughout finally descends for a scene in which Caroline rides round a tent on a horse, the effect is almost a direct lift from something you’d expect to see in the Black Lodge, as is the projected red curtain that “falls” for the interval. Similarly, the largely fifties soundtrack, augmented by Nick Cave’s “Push the Sky Away” and “The Passenger”, is gorgeously curated.

Fans of finding fault with Stephens for the sexual politics of plays from 1920s Germany, the costume choices of female designers, and representations of the violence against women that is still a daily fact worldwide will doubtless be delighted to find more to grumble inconsistently about here. Yes, von Horváth’s play is pretty bleak in its outlook and Stephens’s version does nothing to mitigate that. None of the characters come out of it well, and neither Caroline’s blank acceptance of John Chase, nor Cash’s similar union-of-failure with Frankie’s depressed girlfriend Esther really paint any picture of authorial (or auteurial) blessing.

It’s hard to know what to conclude. “Like” or “dislike” aren’t the question here. Nor, really is “agree” or “disagree”. This is art. You don’t even have to like it for it to trouble you, and for that troubling to be the point. I think I’m definitely going to keep thinking about it. And, in a way, I think what both von Horváth and Stephens have written, and what Meierjohann has produced, are provocations. Provocations for us not to accept the world as it seems to be at the moment. Not to accept the way it’s heading. And, I think this depressing outlook from 1929 Germany, this anaylsis of where a seemingly civilised-and-quiet-if-sometimes-fractious might be headed, is one that we can’t simply ignore. Even while they are building us nice new theatres. However much we might wish it weren’t so.


Push the Sky Away:



The Passenger (live at Manchester Apollo, 1977):

He Had Hairy Hands – Lowry, Salford

[seen 15/0515]

There’s a fun maxim in theatre criticism that you should “report the event”. The thinking, I guess, being that the crackle of stage electricity needs to be reported, rather than just a precis of plot and checklist of cast and scenery that’ll hold good from night to night, and even from venue to venue. On the whole, I think we critics tend to flunk this challenge, not least because the events upon which we are invited to attended are press nights, which, at least in London, tend to be gala affairs where twenty or thirty press are deliberately outnumbered by anything up to 1,500 papered house seats occupied by friends, family, and as much as glitter as the theatre can muster.

But, let the records show that just over a year since Stewart Pringle lavished a bunch of praise on Kill The Beast’s first London outing, at the 80-seat New Diorama, last Friday they played a triumphant homecoming gig to over 300 in the Lowry’s second space, and absolutely knocked it out of the park.

It seems weird to dwell so much on the event (in fact, you will be better off reading Pringle’s review for details of *what actually happens in the show*), but after Eclipsed, Rites, Iphigenia... and Mother Courage, He Had Hairy Hands was the first show I’d seen since the General Election that actually made me feel better. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, indeed. Generally speaking, I don’t tend to go in for wild escapism, or even seem to see that much stage comedy these days (blame Germany. And the fact that it is perishingly difficult to write about), but HHHH turned out to be exactly the right show at the right time.

In general terms, the piece is a pastiche monster mash-up of seventies horror films and cop shows. Their Victoriana is the Victoriana of the late seventies, and so on. Of course one *could* read onto the show’s current success a synchronicity between that recession and this, but doing so would rightly get you thrown out of Pseud’s Corner for being too po-faced. But, actually, it reminded me much more of those old Edinburgh Fringe shows like Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight and Alice Lowe’s Moon Journey. Even the League of Gents’ ‘97 Perrier-winning, stage incarnation. So maybe the enjoyable nostalgic glow cast by HHHH was nostalgia more to earlier pastiches rather than all the way back to the originals.

Something else that’s nice about the piece is, well, the sort of uncontested Englishness of the whole thing. Yes, it would be nice, when saying that, if the company were maybe more diverse, since I’m absolutely not saying that what Englishness is all about is five white performers with impeccable RP. But it was cheering, after all that miserable bullshit in the run up to the election, to sit in a theatre in Salford with a huge audience of all ages, races, and I dare say classes (maybe no one actually upper-class, but nevermind, eh?) and all have a good laugh together before having to put up with the next five years.

Rites – Contact, Manchester

[seen 15/05/15]

Rites presents an interesting problem to me as *a reviewer*: I’m privileged, middle-aged, middle-class, able-bodied, white-British, male. (“Critic” or “blogger” hardly matters after that lot.)  The piece’s subject is FGM – Female Genital Mutilation. Or “Female circumcision” – even the terminology is contested.

The show, made by Yusra Warsama and Cora Bissett is mostly a verbatim piece on the subject, and we see the m-strong company (sorry, I didn’t get a programme) take on the roles of the numerous interviewees. There are also [what seem to be] re-enactments of videoed interviews [from America?], panel events, and even a kind of ongoing narrative thread in which one woman makes phone calls to other friends – who are also portrayed on stage – and there’s a song at the end (which, not being London Road style, stretches the credibility of the claim that all the words on stage were spoken by interviewees – if that claim is actually made, I’m not sure now).

It is very well acted indeed. There are some appropriately uncomfortable digital video graphics (Kim Beveridge). But visually, for the most part the staging is purely functional. And this is the first hurdle I came to: it wasn’t immediately obvious why this was a piece *of theatre* [four days later it feels like I might have got there]. I understand that the issue is both important, and that the myriad, often surprising sides to the argument around FGM need to be heard. I will even admit that sticking me in a darkened room and making me watch the whole piece on pain of being-thought-rude is probably the only way I’d have managed to sit through it. (Not because I’m not interested, but because it’s both so depressing and so angry.) TVs are just too easily switched off. Hell, they’re easily not even switched on in the first place. At the same time, it seems strange to me that something that is plainly of social utility and enormous educative value like this has to be presented only to a paying audience who have to self-select to attend. It is a testament to the enormous popularity of theatre in Manchester (yes, fuck right off, Rupert Christiansen), that last night’s performance was so well attended (and with a demographic reach that the retired colonels reading the Telegraph couldn’t begin to imagine).

I mean, I learnt a lot. There is a question of whether FGM is good or bad. There is (at least) one woman in America who has had it done voluntarily as an adult to feel more a part of her community (who is given the name Karamoh Bangura but whose arguments echo those of the anthropologist Fuambai Sia Ahmadu, co-founder of African Women Are Free to Choose. H/T Mark Fisher). There are four different types or styles of the operation. There is a strong feeling that (White) Western “concern” over the practice is racist, condescending, none of our business and so on. There are women who didn’t even realise they’d had it done.

I did already know that it was largely carried out by women, on women (or female children), with the help of other women. I knew that there is nothing in Islam (the piece doesn’t address Christian FGM, although it touches on historical white, Western applications of the practice – “to cure lesbianism” apparently, God forgive them).

Against this there are plenty of (non-white) voices who deeply oppose the practice – both men and women. And the inevitable white-British voices who are also against it. Like UKIP, who bend over backwards to support anti-FGM groups – because it makes foreigners and immigrants look backward and “savage”.

It’s all very difficult and depressing viewing. All the more so for knowing that your male, white, western perspective is mear-as-dammit part of the the problem. Or in no way positioned to allow you to be helpful. I chatted to a friend (same demographic as me) who saw it the night before me, and they made some fascinating points. First that this was essentially popular postdramatic theatre, and secondly, that it was proper high-quality information that was being returned for the ticket price (if we have to reduce it to base commerce). Contact has an incredibly loyal, enviable local, working class, black audience. And they are getting hardcore, relevant, activist stuff on stage. And that is all an unabashed good.

It is probably also good for me as a privileged, middle-aged, middle-class, able-bodied, white-British, male to go and see some theatre in which my opinion is the least right or relevant thing in the room.

So, yes.  A *very* hard watch.  But absolutely worth it.  

Iphigenia in Splott – Sherman Cymru, Cardiff

[seen 12/05/15]

Written for the Guardian.

Mother Courage and Her Children – Merthyr Tydfil Labour Club

[seen 11/05/15]

Written for the Guardian.

Eclipsed – Gate, London

[seen 08/05/15]

[The first 500 words of this were written immediately after seeing it, the following 500 or so the day after, it is now a week later and I’m finishing it...]

As far as I’m dimly aware, everyone else in the world loves Eclipsed. And, let’s be honest, it’s a brilliantly acted, superbly designed production; a script fizzing with sparky dialogue: funny, moving, and stuffed full of painstaking research on subjects about which we should definitely care. And, in terms of what the production represents in terms of London’s theatre ecology: yes, it’s excellent that there are five excellent parts for five excellent black actresses, and that the play is written by a young black woman and also directed by a woman, and that consequently last night’s audience looked more like the people with whom I got the tube to the theatre, than say Ascot, circa 1900. All great. No question.

At which point, my white, male, privileged opinion on any of it can just fuck right off anyway. Definitely. As Michael Billington recently observed in Matt Trueman’s interview with him, “criticism is not about the verdict. It’s about trying to write a sort of essay... about the work you’ve seen”. (Although that is a slightly disingenuous construction, if it’s an essay with a big ole star-rating.) It’s also worth saying that it’s incredibly hard to emerge from relentlessly depressing theatre – theatre which, in a full-on realist setting, presents depictions and descriptions of relentless rape, cruelty and violence without hope – and say “Yes! Result!”

And yesterday we just got landed with five more years of the Tory party: I’m not sure, even if I liked theatre that was *fun*, it would have helped last night. But deadly serious theatre about people whose lives are infinitely worse than our own didn’t help either.

But I really don’t know what we as an audience are meant to do with Eclipsed.

Here’s the plot: in a paramiliary compound “wife” number one and “wife” number three of a rebel general in the Liberian Liberation Army fighting Charles Taylor in 2003 are discussing their situation. A third, a fifteen-year-old girl, hides under a tin bath in the floor. This is a play in which repeated rape such a basic fact that it hardly warrants mention. Their situation is entirely hopeless, they keep as upbeat as possible, but basically it’s just awful. Number three is pregnant. Number two, we learn, is off out. She’s joined the soldiers. She reckons she has more power this way. That power is at the expense of her humanity. She makes a fine case for the uselessness of one’s humanity when placed in a situation where either you get raped or you find someone else to take your place. Men, all the men – the men entirely physically absent from the stage, but who hang over it in every other way – are brutal and brutalised monsters. So, yes, it’s good to see a play that does absent the men fighting the war from the stage entirely in order to examine the plight of the women. And it’s bloody fucking fantastic to see a play about Africa without a single westerner (white or otherwise) being used as a convenient dramatic “way in”.

Well, that’s partly true. The American side of playwright Danai Gurira’s heritage manifests itself in an abandoned biography of Bill Clinton. *Of course* America, as the then single largest interventionist power in the world, feels present in Liberia. (I know Africa’s not my specialist subject, by I’ve seen the statues to the guy on Bill Clinton Avenue in Prishtina, so I know it’s not just the Americans imagining things...). And, as Andrew Eldritch put it in 1990 defending the new Sisters album against accusations that it was “a bit American”: “American politics is global politics now...” (paraphrased).

This entry-level American-interest angle obviously bespeaks the play’s (originally) intended audience: Americans (and, sure enough, the play has won an armful of American awards). But, I think it also suggests what the play is really about. *Of course* the situation in Liberia is real, and all the research that the play contains rings true, as – within the usual limitations of naturalism and theatre, and the need for a “satisfying dramatic structure”/”story” – do the actions of the stage. However, the biggest truism about the theatrical stage is that whatever you put on it is a metaphor. Outwardly this play contains precious few metaphors. Yes, the women in the play are synecdoche(s?) for The Women of Liberia, and the tidy dialectic-without-synthesis in which they participate could certainly be seen as a micro picture of macro-Liberia. But this is a play that is actually about American political thinking. The central conflict is between a kind of Essential Ayn Rand (selfishness is all, altruism is evil) and impotent liberal do-gooding.

Interestingly, however, the British director, Caroline Byrne, has completely altered the playwright’s final image (yes, it’s one of those American scripts where every single minute of stage-time is dictated to the director by the writer). In Gurira’s script the youngest “wife”, who has become a soldier (simply The Girl in the published text), stands rooted to the spot with indecision. (American, Clinton) book in one hand, (Russian-designed) semi-automatic in the other, “random gunshots can be heard in the distance”. In Byrne’s production the entire back wall of the theatre lights up, and The Girl is silhouetted against a sudden picture – hitherto unseen – of African plains, and recorded music is played over this beautifully realised stage picture. And it feels kind of hopeful and epic, a bit like The Lion King or something. Where that hope comes from, I honestly couldn’t tell you. And to me it seems at odds with what the playwright implies. But really I wonder if what I really found hopeless in the play was what I’ll characterise as the “American non-choice”. Two failed ideologies in competition: “All You Need is Love” versus Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps additional feelings of impotence for this Western audience can be derived from our ongoing questions about what, if anything, we can/could/should do in terms of “international aid”.

It’s fascinating, even in the dramatic-ironic understanding of Bill Clinton’s narrative as the “big man” in America, applied through the characters’ first-hand understanding of how politics work in Liberia, describes a kind of futility. The small, new failed state looking at the vast, old, deeply failed States and hoping it might hold any kind of a solution. I can’t decide whether this is a play/production that sees America as representing something better, in which case I disagree with its analysis – apart from on the most obvious levels – or that sees in 2003 Liberia a picture of humanity, and American society in particular, writ large/in its most essential form: which is almost too bleak to contemplate.

Liberia’s president is now a woman who was educated in economics at Harvard and used to work at the World Bank and subsidiaries of HSBC. Its flag remains the star and stripes.  I still don't think capitalism is good.  

Product – Arcola, London

[seen 07/05/15]

Do you remember The War on Terror? In this brave new austerity world, it has been quietly dropped as *a thing*. Mark Ravenhill’s monologue, Product, is now a decade old.

[A DECADE. JESUS. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW OLD THIS MAKES ME FEEL. AND SHOPPING AND FUCKING IS TWO DECADES OLD. TWENTY YEARS, FFS.]

I remember liking it fine at the time. Ravenhill played the original version himself, in Trav 2, during the Edinburgh Fringe, opening just under a month after 7/7. Terrorism was very now, then.

The plot of product, is: film executive pitches ludicrous film to famous actress. So, the majority of Product’s plot is the plot of this film. It’s a simple device, but a strangely satisfying one that allows Ravenhill both to have cake and to eat cake. And it’s a play that – remarkably – has gotten way better with age, I think. You’d think all that post-9/11 “political theatre” would have evaporated once their nominal subject had been de-written, but in fact Product feels all the more savage a satire now, with the benefit of the ten year hindsight. Targets that might once have felt flimsy, too easy, or maybe unnecessary have been vindicated by time.

If I remember rightly, while I liked it at the time, nothing, no single piece of theatre, was ever going to say everything that needed saying about the events exploding about our ears, but at the same time there was no end of the things.

Now, seen in isolation, on election night, after a week in Berlin thinking about totally different things (people bumped into including: Ravenhill, Mark), Product feels like savage lesson in (recent) history and the value of cynicism. (How quick some people have been to forgive a decade of illegal war, removal of civil liberties, imprisonment without trial, and torture).

The plot of the film-within-the-play, “Mohammed and Me” (!), is a kind of action rom-com: basically, imagine a man from al Qaeda filling the gap in Bridget Jones’s life that shopping just can’t reach.

Where Ravenhill’s performance was eerie, sarcastic, ironic and sinister (all in a good way), Olivia Poulet’s runs a real gamut – acting out more bits of the film, script always in hand; where Ravenhill’s film executive was sardonic, Poulet’s is needy, desperate, pleading. When Ravenhill *said* he really needed Famous Actress to be in the project, you got the impression that this was just him unnecessarily blowing smoke up her ass. Poulet’s version *really* needs it. Where Ravenhill’s production became about male power over women – the film script’s insistence on the sexuality of the leading actress in that context was overwhelmingly troubling – in Poulet’s hands it becomes more interestingly about one woman, who has bought into an anti-woman system, trying to sell that system to another woman. A woman who, here, plainly doesn’t need or want it.

Olivia Poulet’s performance is understated – well, she understatedly sells us a Very Overstated Performance by the film exec with brilliant comic intelligence (Poulet’s not the disastrously unaware exec.). Robert Shaw’s production intelligently lets performance and script do the work (Gillian Argo’s simple design of coloured carpet tiles, green hanging blinds and chair, are more than enough).

Running at fifty minutes, it feels silly saying this, but it’s a really *enjoyable* way of spending a night at the theatre. Punchy and provocative enough to still make you wince while you laugh, and intelligent enough to offer a finely sketched overview of how Western Ideology infects far beyond the political into every aspect of the personal, there are much worse ways you could spend time/money. And that’s what we really want to know in a consumer society.
Sex and the City 2 LINK