On paper Wit is probably not my sort of thing. It’s a Well-Written Play (Margaret Edson); it’s definitely smart: imagine a less surreal, playful, American take on writing a Tom Stoppard play and then invest it with a great deal more sincerity. Formula: take a Big Thing (in this case: cancer), take a Big Artist (in this case: 17th century poet John Donne), and use one to excavate the experience of the other.
Dr Vivian Bearing (Julie Hesmondhalgh) is an American English Literature professor. Who gets cancer. The play is 1hr40 of her meta-theatrically acknowledging the audience and telling her story. A story in which she knows she’ll end up dead. As literary critics go, she’s something of an anomaly. Hers is very much a school of mathematical, almost surgical scholarship. She addresses us as she would her students, barking sardonic observations about pain like a drill sergeant at some literary boot camp.
What makes this production (Raz Shaw) absolutely shine, towering above its source-script, is Hesmondhalgh’s performance. But, more than this, it’s an almost indefinable element within the performance, some kind of spark she exudes of *essentially brilliant, lovely human being*. Indeed, part of what makes the performance so remarkable is the way that warmth-exuding actor seems in constant tension with hard-ass character. Of course, part of the point of the play is the stripping away of the character’s layers of hard-assery to some sort of “essential humanity” underneath (an American invention (to my mind), of which I’m not necessarily a huge fan, but one given serviceable enough treatment here to be worth at least giving a respectful listen).
But this isn’t just a three-way exchange between writer, director and lead actor. The supporting cast all throw in apparently effortlessly detailed performances as myriad doctors, nurses, students and colleagues, while Hannah Clark’s stark design – a runway and revolve disk in hospital green is almost too spookily evocative and perfectly-observed, also managing to bridge the gulf between America’s private healthcare and what we’re still currently used to in this country.
There should also be much praise for lighting designer Jack Knowles, whose attention to detail and nuance through is outstanding, but who also contributes in no small measure to the gigantic final gesture of the piece, a kind of transcendent moment of light and humanity, which seems as good a way of imagining death as any.
As I hinted above, it’s a curious play, though. I’ve never been an especial fan of John Donne, but here he is, apparently stripped of all historical context or history. This is a forensic study of poetry where reputations are made and broken over contested punctuation. As such, it occurs to me, that rather than being a piece in which metaphysical poetry is used to understand cancer, it often feels more like something where poetry is almost understood as a cancer, and subjected to repeated attacks as such. In the abstract, this doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, although it’s unclear from this what John Donne did to be singled out for such treatment.
So, yes. I’ve filed this bloody review far too late to be of earthly use to the production, but this was about as brilliant a production of this play as it’s possible to imagine. And one that I thought far out-stripped the clever-cleverness of the original to find a far more intelligent humane core of its own.
Hofesh Shechter is now a phenomenon. That’s a given. There was a cross-London festival of his work. His name manages to sell out shows at the Brixton Academy. There aren’t many choreographers who could do that. Even fewer of them are based in the UK. There’s no disputing the quality or ambition of the work. With Political Mother andSun Shechter redrew the boundaries of what a “dance show” could be; bigger, louder, more live, rockier. More bombastic than anything before.
Barbarians is a much smaller show (despite being longer), but it also feels like an evolution. A slight evolution, granted. Shechter’s trademark post-Gaga (the dance-language, not the singer) moves mixed with Israeli folk dance and drum’n’bass nightclubs still dominates. But, where last year’s miniature, Untouchable, with the Royal Ballet felt like his most dramatically achieved piece so far, Barbarians seems more uneven.
Actually, it’s a fine example of more being less. The first “half” – up to the first interval (there’s a second pause between parts two and three) – was brilliant. Not unreserveredly so, but it was a joy. Inventive, intricate, playful and intelligent. Corridors of light move across the stage, dancers flit in and out of light and shadow. Trademark smoke/haze make beams solid, and prickly baroque music mingles with throbbing drums’n’bass. Shechter’s own voice speaks to the the piece over the PA, asking it/himself what on earth it’s about. His conclusion – that it’s a 40-year-old man’s musings on love felt way off-beam and disingenuous to this 40-year-old male critic, but lying or being wrong about your own work is an artist’s privilege, I guess.
The remaining two parts felt less inventive, less charming, and – interestingly – more “outward-facing”, but less narrative-led. At a couple of points in part two (five dancers in skin-tight gold lamé jumpsuits) it occurred to me that moments were almost like a kind of pop concert than a dance show. This actually made me like it more, as it was such an odd thing to see in a dance show.
The last piece *was* more narrative-y, actually, and opened with a bloke in lederhosen and one of those alpine/Austrian hats and a woman whom we could read as his wife, or daughter, or even mother at a pinch. Their relationship *seems* to be an abusive one – although so much of dance can be read that way that maybe I’ve just got a bad old literalist theatre-brain. I’m not exactly what happened in their story, or why the bloke was Austrian/Bavarian/whatever. One could speculate, but I’m sure it would lead to some particularly crappy assumptions based on nationality and history that nobody really wants. Least of all me. So, yes, maybe I was actively resisting the blindingly obvious at this stage.
So, yes. I was bloody pleased to have been given the opportunity to see it. And, as the first thing I saw in a theatre in Manchester in 2016, it certainly felt like it was giving a few cobwebs a much-needed kicked (see, Unsent Postcards, passim). If only it felt incumbent on theatre to try to be this inventive, every time there was a new show on...
It’s a funny thing. I can imagine a time, relatively recently, when I might have found Ben Kidd’s neat production of Nina Segal’s debut poetic text-for-theatre really exciting. Maybe even revelatory. It’s interesting to think about what might have changed since that time.
Theatrically, the piece is reminiscent of Third Angel’s Presumption, which I saw in 2007 – Chris Thorpe and Lucy Ellinson drowing in a sea of Ikea, before we’d even really thought about “German” as a word to describe a set. Thematically, it bears some resemblance to Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs– a young couple are going to have a baby while the world explodes, and burns, and runs out around them. Without those two key precedents, would I have been more gripped?
There’s also the fact that I’ve got older. And there’s no getting away from the fact that most of my peers seem to have survived having babies. So that level of revelation and/or learning just isn’t there for me as it might be for younger audiences. The key action of the play is essentially spread over one night, where the two performers narrate their characters through a maelstrom of incessant crying, frayed nerves, into some kind of vision of an apocalypse and out the other side.
Yes, it rings true. Babies do cry, and are hard work. But it also feels maybe a bit solipsistic to invoke something akin to the destruction of civilian homes in, say, Gaza or Syria, just because your baby won’t sleep. But, like Kane before her, Segal suggests a level of connection that can’t be ignored so easily. Sure, at the level of personal discomfort, there’s no comparison. But, by naively invoking the questions “Why are there wars?” and, “Why are the world’s resources running out?” Segal – perhaps unintentionally – presents the very real answer: because everyone wants the best for their child (and because everyone insists on having as many children as they feel like). Viewed in this light, the play offers a fine, bleak portrait of a world gradually falling to pieces, and doomed by love, of all things.
Kidd’s production is great, really. At the start, the excellent performers (Adele Leonce and Alex Waldemann, who we already knew were both brilliant, but it’s nice to be reminded) tear out of a thin membrane of luggage wrap, holding all their possessions-to-come. Their empty, rented flat – an empty steel frame describes precious little low-ceilinged space – is rapidly assembled, filled, and trashed, leaving a rubbish-strewn floor. The lighting is also kind of brilliant – ranks and ranks of hanging downlights in close proximity to the performers heads – and the sound design really deserves to win several awards...
So, I should be out dancing in the street about this, right?
And I’m not. Which is stupid. It’s really, really well-made theatre. But somewhere, perhaps between the marriage of script (with it’s ultimate smallness of scope) and production (lacking the killer panache for art, or incision) and maybe a bit too much lenience with the dramaturg’s red biro (there are about ten lines – borrowed straight from the big book of terrible undergraduate poetry – that should just be cut), something happens that means while it’s an entirely “commendable” exercise, it’s hard to think to whom one would *re*commend it.
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The piece ends with The The’s chirpy alt.pop classic This is the Day, but this terrible, insane song by Death in June has the same title as the play and it wouldn’t quite go away every time I thought of it.
[Written with the Chichester University “Criticism 101” students in mind. Basically: “this is what one is not allowed to do”.]
It’s an odd thing. I get that Escaped Alone is theoretically pretty good. I essentially like the sort of thing it’s doing. I should be in sympathy with its strategies for doing what it’s doing. And yet, and yet...
In terms of info, here’s what [I think] it is: Escaped Alone is the latest play by the much-loved, much-feted, British “experimental playwright” Caryl Churchill. It is fifty minutes long and is essentially a re-jigged cross between part three of her own play Far Away (2000), intercut with part two of Martin Crimp’sIn The Republic of Happiness. That is to say, it’s a picture of “the concerns of modern society” presented as a series of oblique, truncated lines; something like speed-reading a copy of the Daily Mail, while the outrages whizz by, interrupted by surreal, whimsical descriptions of possible apocalypses. It says everything about Britain – British writing, British staging, and this staging in particular – that it’s the conversations that feel interrupted by the apocalypse monologues and not the other way around. The dialogue parts take place in a beautifully realised, fully naturalistic depiction of an English back garden, replete with creosoted 5ft fence, a shed, and an only slightly wrinkly blue sky.
[Because, let’s be honest, as soon as something purports to be “naturalistic” – which I’m assuming this set does, at least in part – it’s the wrinkles between the pretence and the reality that become interesting and the focal points in theatre. I’m willing to bet that *a lot * of people look at that slightly wrinkly sky and unconsciously go, “Oh, yes, there’s the thing that stops this being uncanny,” to themselves.]
In terms of “what’s there”, by and large it’s done very well [except Kika Markham, who is either putting a brilliant performance as someone who doesn’t really understand where she is or what she’s doing, or...]. But it almost feels too simple. Too pat. Too much the path of least [or no] resistance. Like a perfectly interesting half-idea to make us think about *some things*, but staged with no further thought. (Is just how it feels. I’m sure a tonne of thought went into it really.)
Of course, it’s idiotic to jump straight in and start prescribing away – like that Harry Enfield character – before I actually offer an analysis of what *is* there. But, honestly, what is there feels so ludicrously over-legible, so underlined, that it feels almost silly pointing out the obvious possible and potential symbolism of, say, gardens: “from Eden to Homebase in one easy visual metaphor, dwelling on the state of the lawn (not ‘manicured’ like Plath’s, let’s say), and maybe the incidental symbolism of The Shed (representing the absent men? Standing in for Industry opposed to nature? Where there’s something nasty. Etc.). I don’t deny it’s all in there. Or that it adds to the piece that we experience the flashes between the familiar (if we’re familiar with middle-class back gardens, which, if we’ve got a telly, we should be at least a bit, right?) and the motr makeshift set for the unfamiliar.
The monologues take place between two neon frames so that the audience can’t see the garden any more, only the figure delivering the monologue. The frames of neon are arranged to look a bit like huge lightbulb filaments. (No particular idea why.) As I say, of the two elements in the staging, it is these monologues of whimsical apocalypse that feel like the afterthought; the problem to be solved. The garden takes more time and more space. So these “interventions” feel relegated; made unreal in a world where realism takes precedence. I don’t want to prescribe the reverse (although I’d be interested to see the production that did do this), but it still feels like an effect worth noting. Similarly, there are moments in the piece where each other woman in turn delivers something like a brief soliloquy from their garden chair. For these moments too, the lighting is dimmed around them and they find themselves softly spotlit. It feels almost like a pathologically literal approach to the text’s “experiments”. “THIS BIT IS *EXPERIMENTAL*! FFS, WATCH OUT; IT’S AN EXPERIMENT!” shouts the lighting.
So, yes; it’s an odd thing. I get that Escaped Alone is theoretically pretty good. I essentially like the sort of thing it’s doing. I should be in sympathy with its strategies for doing what it’s doing. But for some reason, in this production, at least, it felt like I wasn’t. Sorry.
It’s a while since I’ve seen a play that’s actually made me question not only the sanity of the theatre that programmed it, but also my own.
There is only one memorable line in the script of Mia Chung’s You For Me For You and it’s the quote from Chung Hyun Shik printed opposite the list of characters and notes in the the playtext.
It says: “For the frog in the well, the sky it can see is the whole world, and so the world appears a small blue circle.”
And, yes, it absolutely describes the exact problem of the whole play. I am reasonably sure that in the mind of American playwright Mia Chung, this frog is emblematic of the North Koreans who are nominally the play’s subject. For me, watching in appalled fascination, it is a very precise description of a playwright who has produced perhaps the most striking piece of American propaganda that I’ve ever seen put on stage.
Perhaps my amazement isn’t entirely down to the script. Perhaps in a less slick, cartoonish production, wherein the play was interrogated rather than served (neatly and brilliantly in many ways, I don’t deny), then the Royal Court might have come away with some of its previous (if always debatable) leftist credentials intact. But as it is, North Korea is endless hell, while America is some amusingly presented minor irritations. A veritable land of fully-functioning opportunity for immigrants and historical racism that we can all laugh about now.
Of course, I don’t deny that North Korea sounds absolutely terrible from what we’re always told about it in the West, and who am I to doubt it? Or to doubt the word of an American playwright, descended from South Korean parents, who has never been there either? It’s this more than anything that sticks in the throat. It’s the fact that this is a dramatisation of nothing more than antagonistic propaganda. *Of course* I’d be interested in hearing from the dissenting voices of North Korea. Who wouldn’t? Just as we were interested in the informed, internal critiques from Eastern Europe of Heiner Müller or Václav Havel. But this isn’t those. This is precisely the impression that the American media hands down to its audience, turned unthinkingly into a stirring anthem to American freedom. Christ knows why we are watching it in England in 2015.
The play’s central thesis seems to be that America is better because you can complain there. There is painfully rudimentary satire of the idea that American #firstworldproblems are perhaps a bit superficial – tell that to the people the Americans execute, torture, exclude and imprison, or to the the millions of victims of America’s military adventures globally, or just to the more than 1,000 people shot by American police in 2015 – but the forceful message, rammed home over and over, is that if you’re in America, you’re alright. You really can’t complain.
If this were the intention of the play, then I wholeheartedly applaud it. It is one of the most comprehensive, chilling critiques of manufactured consent imaginable. A triumph of radical overidenification. Thing is, I can’t help feeling that’s not deliberate. It’s chilling precisely because the playwright seems to really believe it.
Beyond this, the normal grumbles apply. It’s just thing incredibly flimsy-dialogue-reliant vehicle for a sentimental story from which we’re meant to learn something. It would be a pretty poor play, even without the international relations dimension. Director Richard Twyman gives it a flashy, functional, shallow, effective production; Jon Bausor’s mirrored, angular tunnel set looks nice, and makes potentially ponderous scene changes zip by in a flash of trying-not-to-be-too-Orientalist.
Imagine Mme Ranyeskaya throwing a party for burnt-out drone pilots and stage turns-turned-assassins and you’ve got something approaching the measure of Wallace Shawn’s ...Talk House. Dressed up like a kind of off-kilter pastiche of Chekhov, it’s actually about as brutal, allusive a play about contemporary America as you’re likely to see, also standing as a much-needed corrective to the pro-American propaganda of You For Me For You.
In Ian Rickson’s production, set by New York artists the Quay Brothers in an incredibly ugly blue/green, high-ceilinged set, I’m not sure the thing fully managed to find a form that fully communicated itself, with the etiolated atmosphere alienating as much as it intrigued. Nonetheless, experienced as a work of art, rather than a piece of drama, its massive, striking, sculptural form still strikes some horrible hits.
Essentially, it’s a riposte to YFMFY, which recognises America’s condition. That it’s nominally also a piece about old theatrical types reminiscing about their glory days just makes it all the more prickly and horrible. Like theatre could ever have been expected to help anything! Ha ha! The very idea. All this bumbling and burbling is like attending a wake for political theatre, written as a piece of political theatre. Indeed, it’s very tempting to indulge all the indignities of this staging as artistic-satirical blows against bloody theatre.
It’s telling, perhaps, returning to the piece a long time after seeing it, in an attempt to write it up, already very little remains of what happened, particularly not plot-points. But what does linger is a sense of horror and anger about the direction in which America is headed.
If 2015 began with Rob Icke’s production of Shawn’s angry snarling 1980 play The Fever. At the other end of the year, Evening At The Talk House feels like it should have closed it with either resignation or victory, instead it felt just as angry, just as pointed, and even more vicious in form, and if anything, even more necessary.
The main thing that strikes you is the brevity. The brevity, and yet still the ripples of bemusement, irritation, affrontedness, or self-back-patting-ness that radiate through the audience. It’s like watching theatre with a bunch of peacocks; alternately shirty and self-satisfied.
The trouble is this: Caryl Churchill’s [then] latest play, Here We Go – a title that neatly anticipates its audience’s eye-rolling response – is “Difficult”. With a capital D. Of course it isn’t really difficult. It’s both easy and short. Very short. 45 minutes short.
It is divided up into three sections. In the first section a nice cross-section of people are at a wake. They speak in truncated sentences, familiar from some bits of Love and Information (for instance). The device doesn’t really work any better here for repetition. Instead it feels like an embarrassingly self-conscious attempt to be arty. Yes, we could volunteer any number of our own “explanations” to account for this weird departure from the normality of people speaking in full, articulate sentences, peculiar to the British stage. That is half the trick of this particular burnished mirror-to-nature. If you stare into it for long enough, it will reward you by showing you whatever you wanted to see in the first place. Even unto a piece of revelatory art.
In the second section, a topless, pyjama-trousered old man bemusedly rails in a void. He is, we suppose, dead. Or in the moment of dying. He muses on his fate politely; middle-classly, ho-hum-ly, recognisably. It is, in fact, quite a charming few minutes of theatre. The contradictory, received ideas that old, white, middle-class, lefties have about the eternal questions are admirably anatomised. It is somewhat socially awkward to be a socialist atheist in the afterlife, it transpires.
Then there’s the last section. The piece has been running backwards, and now we attend upon the dying man’s final days, represented here by an endless cycle of being dressed and undressed and re-dressed in pyjamas and undressed again. I think I counted this taking in three full cycles from jim-jams to clothes and out again. It takes up the remainder of the play, and as such represents maybe twenty minutes of stage time? Maybe thirty.
And it is enormously unsatisfying. Perhaps it’s meant to be. But it feels like they do it just enough times for the audience to get the point, but then be allowed out in time to either to scamper round to see Evening At The Talk House, or to go and get a nice dinner – perhaps at the NT’s nice posh restaurant – and to contemplate their mortality over a nice glass of wine. They’ve endured just enough silent repetition of an action to make them think they’re really worked for their art, a bit.
This brevity in particular made me want to scream. Although, given that the majority of the audience with which I saw the play seemed to be roughly the same age as the old man dying on stage, it would maybe have seemed a bit much to keep them longer.
But it just wasn’t enough. Not even slightly. It should really have been about four hours. *Then* I’d think this was brave, experimental work, rather than a whimsical nod to it.
Beyond that, there was the *really uncomfortable racial dimension*. Now, I’m not going to sit here and deny that old white men probably *are* looked after in nursing homes by young black women. But, my Christ, it’s acutely painful to watch someone being paid to perform only that repeated task as their night’s work as an actor. EVERYONE else in the play gets to speak. Not Hazel Holder. I mean, if this section were longer, than perhaps it would seem more justifiable. And perhaps the discomfort of the racial inequality would become more pronounced. And, well, yes, there’s an interesting question of whether anyone really has any power in this situation (which is easily answered with: yes, one person has the money to pay for the other person’s services, even if their own powers are failing them). Is a parallel being drawn between the helplessness of the reasonably well-off in old age and the poor? (I presume poor, since these jobs are seldom well-paid, although, sure, that’s a hell of a lot of assumptions right there. Maybe a lot of carers work part time and have excellently remunerated spouses.) Perhaps all this has been thought about in great detail, and the thankless labour of performing a character’s thankless labour has been deemed a price worth paying for a point made properly. I hope so. It’s still intensely uncomfortable (as was the fact that a lot of reviews chose to render this labour as entirely invisible, believing that it’s the dead white guy we’re always meant to feel sorry for). (Of course we should all also feel sorry for the dying white guy. I mean, who wants to die lonely, white, bearded and alone?)
Wags could probably take great pleasure from the glancing characteristics that dead white guy (Patrick Godfrey) shares with Jeremy Corbyn. Indeed, we learn in the wake scene that DWM was also a socialist. Perhaps the play’s about the death of socialism. Certainly the awkwardness of trendy leftie atheism seems a theme in the limbo/afterlife section is no more bleak than the current battle of a left-of-centre Labour Party with a world that has moved so far to the right that it is perceived to be “extremist”.
But, yes. Taken on its own merits, this is a slight piece, with the germs of a good idea in it. If the final section were played for, say, three hours longer, it would be the boldest piece of theatre ever shown at the National. As it is, it feels like an admission of defeat.
There is a brilliant moment relatively early in Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerin’s new dance-theatre version of Macbeth that encapsulates all that could have been hoped for from the production.
Anna Maxwell-Martin’s Lady Macbeth is delivering her “Was the hope drunk?” speech. When she gets to “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me” she just stops. For ages. She and John Heffernan’s Macbeth look at the floor. Look at a wall. Maybe they do even look at each other, but it seemed like they were both lost in their own private grief. And it’s so good. The stillness, the poigancy, the performances, everything. Here, I think, was this production’s justification for these Macbeths’ murderous rise to power; shell-shocked grief and nihilism. If your whole world has been emptied of meaning, why not advance to the top of the externally defined order by violently breaking every rule of hospitality and decency? A lot of the script has been cut here, it seems like a reasonable enough rationale.
However, mostly this production doesn’t really work. I’d have liked it to have done. There’s no earthly reason why it shouldn’t have. But due to some weird alchemical failure, it really didn’t take off on press night. (Although one reads encouraging things on Twitter from people who have seen in more recently, and it’s in Birmingham and Manchester in the New Year, and so might get itself sorted out.)
It would be easy, I suspect, to just blame the unfamiliar dance elements that have been brought to bear on Shakespeare’s play. But I don’t think it’s that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the concept, just the realisation in this particular instance. Ok, there are some technical issues. Rather than feeling like dance-theatre it feels like dance *and* theatre. Alternately. And the twain very rarely meet. Either people are dancing or they’re standing stock still and speaking. There isn’t as much dancing as you might wish for, and it maybe sometimes feels more like stock routines from the post-Shechter school, mixed with a more music-video sensibility, than, well, that any of the high-points of dance theatre that you might care to name (inevitably Café Müller, right?).
Perhaps as a result, the “acting bits,” as we must regrettably see them, not only feel isolated, but also wildly underpowered. This Macbeth lacks narrative drive or momentum like a cheap simile. Lizzie Clachan’s false-perspective underpass set works brilliantly as a set *for something*, almost in spite of itself. And there is something admirable about the way that the sliding sections do somehow manage to achieve a kind of internal architectural logic even when they shouldn’t. (That’s badly explained, but it’s bloody impressive). Nonetheless, the effect of the setting, when combined with the costumes, is to make “Scotland” seem like the name of a Vauxhall S&M club – perhaps with a middle-Eastern dictatorship theme – undergoing a series of very aggressive management takeovers.
Indeed, things were so unclear that I nearly succumbed to an attack of the DWMs. Like, *who* are these people? *Where* are these people? *What* are we even looking at here? I mean, *I* know Macbeth, but it really did feel more like watching a series of sketches based on the faint memory of the play. Which, again, could have been fine. But here seemed not to be.
I desperately wanted to like this production, not least because it was two hours long, but it just didn’t happen. No doctrinaire *reasons*, it just felt like it didn’t gel. Great idea on paper. Lovely poster. But, no.
[This review is now about two months old, and the whole thing could have improved beyond recognition since it was written]
I will say first of all that the above cartoon has haunted my view of this play since I saw it, since it pretty much encapsulates my entire problem with the play.
I didn’t like Linda one bit. Not the play, as I understood it, not this première production of it.
Which is odd.
I mean, it seemed well-written (Penelope Skinner). I personally wasn’t so into the plot, or the characters especially, but that could easily be put down to a) my being a man (although I’d argue that it wasn’t that, on the simple grounds that I wouldn’t have liked any of it any more for the characters being men) or b) to my being an implacable cynic about capitalism, advertising, Dove soap (here thinly disguised as “Swan”), beauty products, advertising again, etc.
It does seem like quite a good one of the thing it is (ostensibly realist plays about people with middle class jobs and their problems maintaining their lifestyle). It’s just not a thing I especially like.
Similarly, I think it would be hard to fault the production (Michael Longhurst). The acting seems to be first-rate. The largely believable characters are acted believably.
The issue – that women are treated badly by society, and worse when they’re over 50 – is important.
So all I can do is say why it didn’t really work for me, and you can all make your own judgements about whether this middle-aged white man’s viewpoint is really relevant in this context.
The first thing we learn about Linda is thatSex and the City actress Kim Cattrall dropped out of the production “on doctor’s orders” and has been replaced by Noma Dumezweni. Now, I have no idea whether or not the “doctor’s orders” bit is true or not. I will speculate, though, that this substitution is responsible for injecting a great deal more warmth and complexity into the piece than may otherwise have emerged. Linda the character is a woman-over-fifty who works in advertising within a cosmetics firm.
There’s a bit of an elephant in the room regarding the substitution. Cattrall is movie-star-famous and white. Dumezweni is black and is much less famous. And isn’t seered onto an unwilling public consciousness for playing a much-quoted American sex addict for ten series and two movies.
I was all for “colour-blind casting”, but I take my views under advisement from people who know more than me. In the case of “colour-blind casting”, I was very interested by Vinay Patel’s recent essay on Master of None. In it Patel lays out a stage-by-stage chart of ways that ethnic minorities can be depicted. Stage one is basically “grudgingly” and stage four is Main Character with full ethnically-inflected background (personally I’d propose a fifth stage, where ethnic minorities are so integrated in to mainstream culture that they can abandon it in irritation and start making “unwatchable” avant garde theatre, but...). Anyway, Dumezweni’s Linda is squarely Stage Three. That is to say, nothing about Linda’s background is specifically the experience of black women over fifty in Britain. It’s not not, either, if you see what I mean. In the casting here, Linda even has a mixed-race daughter from a previous relationship (and a white daughter with her (current) white husband) whom she lectures glibly about just ignoring racists. That is to say, the original casting can be read as colour-conscious (if that’s the opposite of “colour-blind”). A few years ago, I think I’d have applauded the idea that we can have a black actor playing a character on a British stage in a modern naturalistic play whose only issue with Britain was sexist ageism. Now, I’m not so sure. I mean, isn’t there an irony that in a play where the lead character protests the way that she gets ignored because of her age, that her race is *completely* ignored? Isn’t race a bit more of a live issue for everyone than this suggests?
Irrespective of all this, Dumezweni’s performance is powerful, compelling, watchable and also maybe more *likeable* than the script requires. Or maybe that’s good. Maybe that introduces an extra level of complexity.
I don’t really know what we’re meant to do with a play like this. The play itself is wildly judgemental. Or rather, all the characters in it are. And all the situations they find themselves in have not inconsiderable moral dimensions, even if those dimensions aren’t always considered by the characters. Dramamatically, it is a bit like a starter pack of ethical questions you might ask a child in a pupil referral unit to see if they have registered any traditional sense of right and wrong. Sure, in this modern world of rampant relativism on one side and rampant capitalism on the other, the fussy idea of “right and wrong” seems as mad, old-fashioned and reactionary as an Enid Blyton story, but there it is. I’m old. And possibly old-fashioned. I still think in terms of right and wrong. And, well, basically everyone in this play is wrong. All of them. The whole lot are completely selfish. Damaged, yes; unhappy, sure. But Christ, it’s heavy going spending time with them. Especially as what we’re spending time with is a compilation of all their worst moments and decisions. I had no idea what I was supposed to be getting out of having been introduced to any of them.
[And, yes, I realise there’s something obnoxious about someone as privileged as me saying, “Bleugh. I don’t want to watch plays about the awful people who choose to advertise cosmetics because I find their whole existence worse than pointless, and clearly counter-revolutionary”. In mitigation, I’m only saying it to playwrights, directors, artistic directors and designers. People, in short, who have also worked incredibly hard to ensure they never have to become senior advertising executives at cosmetics companies. People, indeed, who think that cosmetics companies are fair game for their allegorical satires on sexist ageism simply because they appear to be institutions that feed and feed off precisely this malaise. And, with that analysis, I’d tend to agree. What I find weird, is that, based on age and gender, we should nonetheless start to feel sorry for them when the ugly world that they’ve contrived to construct spits them out. If we’re really going to go to the logical end-point of this train of thought, we might as well be watching a play called “Poor Kapo” about a washed-up inmate-guard in a concentration camp.]
I also wondered a lot about the presentation. Es Devlin’s set seems to function as a metaphor for the problems of society, and also for the problems of this production. It is a glossy, white scupltural thing on a revolve, which – with many levels on two sides – presents a shiny kitchen, a shiny office, a shiny bedroom, another shiny office, etc. Apparently it went six times over budget. The idea of spending money you don’t have on perfecting a glossy, vacuous outward experience seems to speak directly to the core of the play. I mean, yes, the set did look great. And perfectly captured the horrible, bland, corporate meh-land in which its action is set. But. Well, you see where I’m going with this. Why perpetuate the awfulness? Why reproduce all the problems AGAIN and then make us spend time feeling oppressed by them? Doesn’t this play reinforce all these ideas? Isn’t it really a triumph of right-wing, patriarchal, capitalist propaganda?
The play seems to present Linda’s situation as A Classical Tragedy. What happens at the end is ambiguous, but it seems from the script as if she chucks herself off her expensive office’s expensive balcony, having tried to be both a mother and a successful advertising executive. The problem with this is that it feels like some sort of Victorian morality play. We’re used, in theatre, to seeing our tragic heroes undone by a fatal flaw. Linda has no such flaw. Arguably society does, but then, does it seem anti-feminist to suggest that actually millions of women actually do prosper and thrive? Even over fifty? “There aren’t enough roles for women over fifty” is a problem. But having the first high-profile play to address this having the central character being defeated by their age and gender was if those were their fatal flaw is a depressing remedy. It is simplistic to want these representations of women over fifty to be positive. But, if they’re not going to be positive, can their situation not at least be a bit more Richard III or Macbeth than just falling prey to a Daily Mail article about how a woman can’t have it all?
Also tragic is the fact that Longhurst and movement director Imogen Knight, who did such a spectacular job onCarmen Disruption have, for whatever reason, allowed their wings to clipped here. Is it cynical or fanciful to imagine that the reason is “commercialism”/“viability”? I honestly don’t know. But then, I don’t get “the public” or theatres’ perceptions of “what the public will wear” either. It seems to me that the British public often has better taste than they are given credit for, and that the possible avant garde version of Linda – the ripped apart, fractured, critical, antagonistic approach to the text, would have been a million times better (see also: A View From The Bridge, etc.). But, no, that’s not the production we’ve got. Which is a shame. Instead it feels like a cramped, self-fulfilling prophecy.
More than anything, Linda reads like a parable for New Labour. A decade ago or so, she was apparently having modest success in advertising, making things a tiny bit nicer for the world, while ignoring that the whole edifice in which she operated was absolutely rotten to the core and built on insupportable values. Now the edifice which she helped sustain has turned on her, another party is in the driving seat, and she sees that all the cosmetic progress she apparently made was entirely superficial. The problem was never “what sort of adverts?” after all, but the entire point of advertising. As such, on one level it’s even difficult to sympathise when a cruel system that she helped perpetuate has turned on her. There was never an attempt to address systemic injustice and the result is therefore that a lot of selfish people continue going round and round on their shiny white iceberg forever.
So, in answer to the cartoon. No. I completely support feminism. But the triumph of a feminism that only seeks equality of women and men within capitalism, and, less than that, no further social movement – so that upper-middle-class women will be equal with upper-middle-class, and working class women will only be equal with working class men – and a feminism that doesn’t also address the appalling racial inequalities still absolutely entrenched in every institution in our society is a pretty hollow victory. And I don’t think I believe that, just because I’m a white middle class man.
[Because the Almeida had asked me to do their podcast about naturalism during the run of Little Eyolf, I found myself trying to watching the production through that frame of reference. Which, as we shall see, was deeply unhelpful. It should also be noted, that the previous thing I saw before Eyolf was Roar, China! in Warsaw a week or so earlier. And, well, let’s be honest, I hadn’t been having a great time with British theatre generally since BITEF. So, this posting stands in more as a snapshot of my state-of-disgruntlement than as a reasonable review. Hence my having sat on it for so long.]
The weirdest thing about watching Richard Eyre’s new production (of his own adaption) of Henrick Ibsen’s Little Eyolf is actually how incredibly NOTHING WHATSOEVER it has to do with naturalism as I understand it.
But, I realise, I have next to no idea what anyone does mean or understand by naturalism. (This, incidentally, is a growing irritation of mine. I really want to write a book for the Theatre &; series called Theatre & Taxonomy – perhaps as a satire, or a Theatre version of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas– which will lay bare and expose the sheer laziness of the way our theatre is written about and consequently thought about. Not least, often, by me.) But – more annoying than my own lack of knowing – is my growing feeling that no one else has the faintest idea what they mean by it either.
So.
In terms of naturalism, I found the first scene of Little Eyolf more or less unwatchable. NO ONE behaves like this. No one. Basically it’s a husband and wife (and, Christ, that takes long enough to unearth), their son and the husband’s sister, or half-sister, or something. The main problem – in terms of naturalism – is the way they’re talking. L____ is so florid and classical-sounding you’d think she was actually singing an aria. Her voice seems to swoop up to a sentences first word, then daringly plummet through the sentence to magically end up back at the height from whence the swoop begun for the end. Like a kind of sonic trapeze act. Or, sometimes, I think she does it the other way round, starting low, hitting a high, and then descending back into a low for the last bit of a clause or sub-clause. I think sometimes it’s even more athletic than this. I’m attempting to describe it properly, not because I think it’s unusual, but precisely because I think it’s very usual indeed, ON STAGE. I think Imogen Stubbs probably does it most. Or perhaps Felicity Kendall. You can imagine the sort of thing, though, right? It’s kind of ok in Private Lives, or something. If you want to imagine a world of posh ladies half-singing their way through their merry lives then this is the voice you want them doing it in. As a way into serious Scandinavian drama it seems incongruous.
Against this, J_____ C__ barks his lines, mostly to us, the audience. But sensitively. He does pained barking, pleading barking, blustery barking, and sometimes, just to reassure us of his virtuosity, barking-barking. But for the first scene, fuck me there’s a lot of barking.
Now, I don’t want to be mean to actors. Generally I hardly notice them at all, and this seems very unfair indeed. They’re only following orders, after all. But because I was thinking about “naturalism” all I could think about watching Little Eyolf was how *unnaturally* everyone was behaving. Their child comes on and does a fairly decent job of acting precisely what he is: a child, on stage, acting. This sense is further compounded when the ratcatcher character comes on with an actual dog, who is mesmerising by virtue of actually being entirely convincing as a dog. In fact, I probably missed a good deal of the dialogue for the entire duration that the dog was on stage.
Dan Rebellato (who was also on the Almeida podcast) has written a sublime appreciation of the play, and it’s worth reading, not least because it half-addresses why I found the play impossible to watch as naturalism.
The set for the piece (Tim Hatley) is at once impressionist, symbolist (perhaps, although not in an overtly suggestive way) and *a bit* naturalistic. In short, it looks pretty much like most British sets look now. A kind of end-of-days mash-up of a theatre culture – running from the Globe, through Victorian painted backdrops, through the Royal Court Revolution, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble tour, and the multiple interventions of modern technology – that has arrived at a point where a white-painted wooden frame/platform with some chairs on it, looking out to a digital picture of some mountains is immediately understood as indicative and vaguely realistic, despite really being almost entirely abstract. I mean, it’s a really weird state of affairs. It’s an attractive stage to look at, but not really to watch a play performed on. The colouring is so Scandi- that it feels almost parodic, while the laid-back, washed-out, Elle Decoration/Habitat natural soothing colours would make it a lovely set to live in, but possibly a harder one to get excited about the action taking place there.
Still, as Dan’s essay suggests, I didn’t really understand the play, what the play was for, this production, or what this production of it was for.
All of which happened, despite the childish and picky tone of this review, without me really *minding*. I just felt a bit bewildered and lost and alienated. And didn’t really understand what I was meant to be trying to get.
Have you ever seen a production of Julius Caesar that actual felt modern, relevant, or – most crucially – fast? More than this, have you ever seen a production that surprised you? (Full marks to those who saw Castellucci’s Guilo Cesare at LIFT in ‘99)
What is most fascinating, watching Barbara Wysocka’s production was the way that it felt so fresh. It made me realise the extent to which even the best British Shakespeare is completely hidebound by the ancient language in which it’s written. And the overwhelming, ENORMOUS BAGGAGE that brings with it. And the ways of speaking the text seem to unavoidable – I mean, even if it’s spoken in a non-RP accent, it’s still *incredibly wordy*; the sentences, the thought processes, are *very long* no matter how it’s said. But more than this it’s the unconscious ways we have of seeing/thinking about the characters that seem to make so many productions feel like tired re-treads.
In Julius Caesar, for example, don’t we tend to think of Mark Antony, Brutus and Cassius as relatively noble and well-intentioned, to some degree? A degree usually backed-up by impeccable public school accents, evidencing Britain’s unfathomable, ongoing (at least until recently), apparent respect for the “political class”? (Or, at the very best: desire to give everyone the benefit of the doubt) They’re “heroic” in some form or other anyway. Here, I was surprised to see an almost complete contempt for *everyone*. No noble motives, it seemed. No one was to be admired. No one’s motivation was to be *understood*. This was a tragedy of gangsterism and thuggery. And the tragedy wasn’t for the characters on stage, but for the country they govern/ed.
To say that this reflects the political reality as it’s being experienced and lived in Poland at the moment is an understatement. As we know, the far-right Law and Justice Party has the first overall parliamentary majority in Poland since 1989. And the party *is* popular in the country. But at the same time, there are protests on the streets every weekend, or every other weekend. There are protests on the streets because the Law and Justice Party are essentially passing law after law dismantling what we would call the essentials of a democracy. Their most recent move is a law that co-opts the (formerly theoretically impartial) state broadcasting company into the party’s promotional machine.*
Its design (Barbara Hanicka – excitingly, there are more women called Barbara on the production team than men) is spartan and impressive. Opening with a slightly scaled-back, theatre-based version of the raked seating set (cf. Benedict Andrews’s Caligula), the exciting thing is firstly that this rostrum is on a revolve, and then secondly, that it’s later tipped into an angle and set on fire (well, politely set on fire in a couple of limited flame-proof sections, but even so...). But, within this apparently simple set you have all the playing spaces you could possibly need. Conspirators can cluster in a downstage corner while Caesar lounges in a high-up central seat, and – while completely lacking fussy naturalistic detail – the dynamic is perfect, while also avoiding the godawful “stage secrecy” often deployed.
The performances, in common with the dramaturgy (Tomasz Śpiewak) and the design, are brutally effective and unshowy. I mean, look, I don’t speak Polish, so I’m at a disadvantage, but you can kind of see whether someone’s compelling or not *even more* if you’re still interested in watching them even when you don’t actually understand the words coming out of their mouth. To me they seemed completely *real*, in-the-moment, energetic performances – think so many Lars Eidingers. The connection with the audience, established when they were talking to them, doesn’t just cut off when the cast are talking to each other. This is neither fourth-wall nautralism, nor that Globe Shakespeare playing to the crowd. Rather it’s just a set of very engaging exchanges that we’re invited to contextualise and re-imagine for ourselves taking place on a design that guides our thoughts about why those exchanges might be resonant.
Added to these elements is a soundtrack of 80s cult Polish post-punk protest (apparently) music, which adds another layer to the production. The aim here isn’t just to reflect the current political situation (because, really, why would you use Julius Caesar as a play to talk about a resistance you want to see succeed?). The presence of this music – obliquely against the communist times of the 1980s when it was written – suggests instead (to me) a process of ongoing disillusionment with overturning governments. The liberation from communism has led, now, to the increasingly illiberal Law and Order Party: “what hope is there, really?” the production almost demands.
By presenting this old play, based on ancient history, it feels that this production harnesses those centuries upon centuries of tradition to hammer home two points: 1) revolt is necessary, vital and exciting, 2) the results of revolt necessitate further revolt. Always.
It feels like an accurate and timely reading, but an exhausting prospect.
***
[preamble to the above]
After I saw Julius Caesar, I sent the following email (slightly expanded below to make sense to those of you who have not seen the show) to the theatre’s dramaturg:
“Which bit of text were they doing at the very start? (The first two people who come on stage. Cassius and Brutus, I think? Or was it Cassius and Mark Antony? Argh. What were they addressing directly to the audience?”
[Now, looking at the text, perhaps thanks to the multiple doubling up – or *not* doubling up – my guess is that the normal, “original” opening lines of Marullus and Flavius are here being performed without the scripted replies from on-stage plebs. Who the characters speaking the lines were was never clear, but in this cast of seven – five men and two women, with one woman playing multiple parts, some female, some not – and with the other woman on stage being the director...
The other reason it wasn’t clear was because the people speaking sounded exactly like normal people... Hang on to that thought in particular...]
“Was there ad-libbing? What was that *really* big laugh? And those other laughs in Mark Antony's funeral speech? They felt very specific and loaded.”
[And no one in Britain ever laughs at these bits, do they? No one *really laffs* at “honourable men”, do they? Even though rherotically it’s so good and so well written. No actor manages to make it surprising enough to be funny, do they? It’s always more hectoring, in UK, isn’t it?]
“And when Barbara Wysocka did the Mark Antony speech – had it been it reassigned? To Calphurnia? Or was she “playing” Mark Antony? Or am I being *WAY TOO LITERAL* here? Need there be that degree of continuity or ‘character’? Was she doing it *as herself*? As the director?”
“How do your Polish critics approach performances like this? This is really interesting to me, because I think the UK approach would be simply to describe how it deviates from the written play – in part just because that’s the simplest way to outline the things that are most interesting (to me), and because people who read theatre reviews tend to know the basic plots of Shakespeare's major plays – but it feels then that I’d end up reviewing what’s not there and what’s *not as it was written in 1599*, which seems silly since something obviously coherent was there... Shouldn’t I just review that as if it was a new play?”
Of course, part of the reason I feel like this about approaching Wysocka’s production (and need to ask some of those questions at all) is because I don’t speak Polish. And there were no surtitles. So, much more than the problem of “preconception” here is the problem that my prior knowledge of the play is also the blueprint for my understanding in the moment. [Perhaps this is always a problem we have with watching extant plays in Britain. But I don’t fully understand why it would be so specific to Britain. But even so, I guess in part it’s put-downable to something akin to that “It’s not how I imagined them” feeling you get when you see “the film of the book”.]
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.”** [my italics]
It was Slavoj Žižek who pointed out that there is a missing fourth category, the Unknown Known, which – he claimed – describes ideology; unconscious assumptions, things we don’t even think about knowing.
Taken as a full set, they are an incredibly useful way of approaching talking about what we see when we see “Shakespeare” performed in a foreign country; and then, beyond that, how we see something about our own Unknown Knowns about Shakespeare...
I haven’t yet had a chance to read erstwhile Guardian theatre editor Andrew Dickson’s book Worlds Elsewhere on the subject, but I’d be lying if claimed I didn’t enjoy with great schadenfreude the description of his chapter on Germany as: “a total waste of time. Facile about Germany, facile about Shakespeare, unspeakably ignorant about contemporary theatre: why bother travelling to another country, ostensibly to research what Shakespeare means to its theatre, if you're not going to make the slightest effort to understand what you're seeing on stage? The worst kind of reactionary claptrap.”***
But, at the same time, I absolutely felt the implied chill of such criticism about my own modest efforts in this department:
Polish
The performance history of Julius Caesar in Poland
When it comes down to it: Poland’s more over-arching reasons and/or methods in theatre – neither (in general terms) definitively “text-based” (so problematic a term) British, nor the pure “regie/concept/abstraction” of Germany. [my suspicion is, like maybe Nübling and Ostermeier, Poland has a less doctrinaire sort of directors’ theatre that is less to do with intellectual concept and more to do with visceral excitement, but with an more naturalistic/realist inheritance in its acting style?] Unknown Unknowns (The things I don’t know I don’t know):
Well, I don’t know, do I?
Unknown Knowns:
[return to top]
***
These are the songs from the soundtrack:
Kult – Po co wolność [For what is freedom?]
Republika – Gdzie są moi przyjaciele [Where are my friends?]
sorry about the video for this one. Only one I could find on YouTube.pl...
Brygada Kryzys – Centrala
* I mean, of course the fucking Tories have as near as dammit done the same to the BBC, and everyone in Britain has sat about, moaned a bit on Twitter, and mostly decided that “It’s probably fine really”. And this is kind of the difference I’m talking about. It’s much easier to be in control in Britain. You know; proper, stranglehold control. I mean, sure, it’s ghastly in Poland, but at least they have people protesting on the streets against a government that is infinitely more popular than the Conservatives are in the UK. The weird difficulty that both Britain and Poland have, is that neither party is actually doing anything *that bad* compared with the worst case scenarios of history. (Ditto Hungary.) It feels as if a widely understood term needs to be coined to discuss this problem that if a modern regime isn’t committing genocide, doesn’t have a Gestapo, isn’t rolling Soviet tanks into the town centre, it’s somehow ok...
**I was reminded by this [today] by Vinay Patel, so thanks, Vinay.
*** “2013. I’m in Berlin, where I've just seen Raphael Sanchez' Coriolanus. Not a great production, but one that had me reflecting on the difference between German and Anglo theatre, and the differences in critical cultures. So I wrote a blog post about it, in which I said the following:
‘Even the most conservative critics seem to have accepted that performance is necessarily a dialectic – that any production that doesn’t transform the play it brings to the stage isn’t really doing what theatre is supposed to do. And that strikes me as a fairly profound difference in attitude to the way most reviewers write about theatre in the major English and North American papers. The German critics’ consensus on this Coriolanus was something like “Stellar actors, some nice scenes, but conceptually a mess; lazily thinks it’s enough to rely on Shakespeare and add some ornaments from the toolkit of modern theatre. Same old, same old. Mr Sanchez needs to think harder and give his actors something more interesting to do.” I have a sense that English reviews of Sanchez’s take on Coriolanus, by contrast, would have said something like “A lot of incomprehensible nonsense and heady stuff, but some very well-acted scenes; Mr Sanchez should have trusted his actors and Shakespeare more and given us more of the latter”.’
‘Flash forward to 2015. Andrew Dickson, former Guardian theatre critic, publishes a book about international Shakespeare, featuring a pretty terrible chapter about Germany, in which he writes about that same Coriolanus. And AMAZINGLY, he makes my 2013 fantasy a reality:
“By the time I returned to the Deutsches Theater, this time to see a performance, I felt I was clutching at straws. A friend of a friend, Ramona Mosse, had kindly offered to talk about her work on postwar political theatre; we’d settled on combining this with a new production of Coriolanus. The show was even more self-consciously baffling than the productions in Munich: acted by five female performers wearing wigs to a soundtrack of corny eighties pop music, its logic largely eluded me.
‘“One reason it was liberating to encounter Shakespeare in translation was that he could be the best of both worlds: both ancient and modern, both canonical and contemporary. The Romantic Schlegel-Tieck now being deeply un-hip in Germany, most theatres re-translated him each time they mounted a new production. Given everything I’d discovered about culture in the Third Reich, a suspicion of received wisdoms and the classical canon was understandable. But was this still Shakespeare? I felt we’d gone over the edge”.’
Fun!
Anyway. I think we’re done with talking about Julius Caesar now.
How would you describe the experience at Belgrade international theatre festival?
I loved it. That’s not a very precise or scientific answer, but this was the first time I’d been, and I found pretty much every show absolutely fascinating in one way or another. It helped that I though most of them were also brilliant, but even the ones that didn’t work for me were so different to the normal things I see that I was pleased to have experienced them.
What are your impressions of Bitef's programme this year? What would you say that is important about a festival’s selection?
Well, I didn’t realise before I was asked these questions that the theme of the festival, or its main focus, was ‘Political Theatre’. But, now I’ve been told, that does make a lot of sense of what I saw. That said, I’m quite old-fashioned, and think *all* theatre should be political, and theatre which isn’t is just lazily endorsing the status quo, so...
That said, I think the sorts of politics, and the really very different approaches toward examining them, were fascinating. And the selection brilliantly varied and exemplary. And, that probably betrays what else I hope for at international festivals – programmes which are bold, varied, and somehow both typical (of types of theatre) but full of unique or outstanding things.
A tendency that was in the focus at this year’s Bitef was political theatre. What impression of this theatre tendency did you get?
Certainly the impression that political theatre is alive and thriving in ex-Yugoslvia (and France!). But, also, reassuringly, that there is no consensus on what a performance with political themes/ambitions should look like, or how it should behave.
How would you explain what is important about having political theatre performances? Why this type of theatre is important now?
If we accept that all Art is political, then I’d rather see theatre that is aware of its own politics and is trying to do something with them. A-political theatre is not only impossible, but theatre which thinks it is invariably fails.
Political theatre is important now because theatre – perhaps by virtue of being marginal, or local, or non-transferable in any bulk sense – seems to have resisted the neo-liberal consensus whitewash rather better than most other artforms (particularly television and film, books and music).
From your experience, how does theatre treat political topics?
From my experience here or in the UK? In the UK I think we might *sometimes* have had a tendency in the past for the most mainstream pieces of “political theatre” to be somewhat blunt, and unhelpfully didactic, within an ostensibly naturalistic frame. This has often resulted in rather futile reproductions of the problems such pieces seek to discuss.
What I loved about the work here was the sense of being given both critical apparatuses and enough space within the dramaturgy of the diverse pieces to apply them usefully.
On your blog, you have already written critiques of performance from Bitef's programme, what performances particularly made an impression on you?
It’s now a week on and – for various very different reasons – I think the Ibsen as Brecht, the Iliad, and Discreet Charm of Marxism all really made very big impressions on me. I also really loved Adieu, but in a way that perhaps didn’t change the way I thought so much as just being a virtuousic display. It’s ironic, because I didn’t really think the performance The Discreet Charm of Marxism was a success at the time, but in fact, because in the performance I saw the audience rebelled against what it seemed they were supposed to do, I think it made much more impression than anything that could have been planned-for.
What would you say are the values that Bitef nurtures?
Artistic excellence across a diverse selection of engaged theatrical modes? (I’m not sure I think in “values”.)
As you have seen many theatre festivals, you have met many different audiences as well. How would you describe Bitef's audience?
It’s a good audience, I think. It felt like the festival is very much a part of the city. I didn’t have that sense that you sometimes get a festivals of “where are the people who actually live here?” This felt like a festival that the people of Belgrade – at least some of them – are proud of and attend.
What is important for you as a theatre critic at a festival?
Apart from a decent wi-fi connection and time to actually write (and selfish things like air-conditioning, surtitles and maps – all wonderful, btw), I suppose – boringly – I like it when I like the work, and feel some sort of affinity with the programming. Actually, that is an interesting thing: you *can* go to a festival and see some really great work, but feel nothing toward the festival as a whole. Or, you can go to a festival and see nothing you like and still find the festival’s atmosphere and ethos charming. At BITEF49 I was lucky enough to feel both things.
What is your opinion on how and why is it important that theatre critics are guests of festivals?
Well, most obviously – at least in my position – to describe what I’m seeing as best I can for an absent audience back home, and perhaps, of secondary interest, to report *from my perspective as one foreigner* to the people who have made the work. To maybe give an impression of how work looks from the very outside (i.e. not only outside the work, but outside the culture that produced it).
What is the role of theatre critic at a festival?
Well, I imagine every critic (and perhaps every Festival) will give different answers. In the UK’s Edinburgh Fringe, for example, the role is often reduced to that of a consumer guide with no possibility for all but the briefest analysis. I guess, from my perspective, the ideal is to report the work as accurately as possible – while acknowledging one’s subjectivities – and to put it into as many useful and interesting contexts as possible for what readers I have.
What is your approach to writing critical view of a theatre performance?
Blimey! That’s quite a big question. The short version: try not to be formulaic. Try to report the event. Try to acknowledge your own subjectivity without putting yourself before the performance in the report. Try to provide context. Try to be interesting. Try to make a review as accessible as possible without simplification. Remember that people can Google things they don’t understand.
How would you describe the position of theatre criticism today? Who is the target audience for criticism?
Well, there’s no single position. There are a lot of things that count as “theatre criticism” and each one has a different audience. And, given that those audiences tend to be self-selecting, in one way the target audience is anyone who reads it and likes what they’ve read. Theatre criticism necessarily preaches to the converted. It’s not much of a tool for evangelism, more’s the pity.
How important in your critiques is responsibility towards the author of an artwork?
There’s an interesting implied question here about who the author of an artwork is. Certain poststructuralists would argue that it is the emancipated audience member, the active “reader” of the work of art. Let’s assume you don’t mean that, and you don’t mean the literal author – say, Homer – when they’re dead. Let’s assume you mean whoever made the piece.
There’s a truism in British criticism – which used to be more widespread – that your duty is only to your editor and/or your reader. I’m not sure I agree. I think it’s useful to be able to reassure the person whose work you’re writing about – even if you hate the work, and possibly their perspective, their take on the world, and everything they think about art – that you’re not actually a moron. That might make them at least take your critique at least more seriously (And I don’t think this seriously damages a critique’s relationship with its other readers). But then, if there’s just a complete mismatch of outlook between critic and auteur, then it’s probably best that the auteur doesn’t bother reading the critic and possibly better that the critic avoids the auteur’s work too. I mean, if they’re just this idiot, what do you do with that?
How important is responsibility towards the audience's opinion of that artwork?
Oof, I dunno. I’m not sure that ever really comes up for me. Like, the way criticism works in UK is that (critics) tend (in theory) to see the work before anyone else. Obviously this has changed a bit with the combination of previews and Twitter. Ultimately what anyone else thinks about a thing should kind of be entirely irrelevant to what you think about it. Nothing exists in a vacuum – especially things resting on the status of a play, or of its star, or something – but I think either trying to prove you know more than an audience, or pandering to their (imagined?) pre-opinion is entirely dishonest and so best avoided.
Whose point of view you are trying to “meet” in your critiques and are you trying such thing at all?
Again, really hard question. I think, if anything, my own. I mean, you think such a lot during a play, and see so much, and so many things happen, that *obviously* it’s impossible to write down everything you’ve thought about it, even at the time. And that information isn’t necessarily what would be useful to anyone else reading it. So I guess the point of view you’re trying to relate is a meaningful version of your own, that will communicate it to anyone else, and even to yourself in later years. It’s very satisfying, when you read a review back years later, and think “Yes! That was it. That was what I saw and how I felt. That is honest and right.” Just making that happen is harder than you’d think.
This year BITEF welcomed the AITC/IATC symposium? One of the topics was a theatre festival’s role and the theatre festival as part of the globalisation of theatre. What is your opinion on that topic?
It’s an interesting one. And maybe it’s more pressing than I realise. How globalised do I think theatre currently is overall? Not very. How globalised do I think it will get? Well, hard to say, but not too much more, I hope. Although I think there’s also a positive version of this narrative where we see cross-cultural collaborations which actually create something entirely new, and alien to all the component cultures, and that *is* good.
Yes, there is can be a cynical feeling that there’s a sort of “International Festival Theatre Show” which is tending towards a certain “globalisation”, but I dunno, I wonder if that isn’t too easy a criticism. Without other defining factors it feels just like a generalised term of abuse.
What in your opinion does the phrase “Embodied critic” mean?
Well, I wasn’t at the AITC/IATC symposium, but *I think* it relates to the idea of a critic owning their own presence and what the facts of that presence mean. A bit like Observation Principle in science – that the results of an experiment are always going to be affected by the fact of their being observed. I’m not sure how much experience of things we aren’t at we will ever achieve in order to test this theory, though.
What forms of theatre critiques do you favour? (The “form” can also refer to writing “form” or style of written critique.)
I seem to always write things that are much too long when left to my own devices. See the four pages above.
Can a theatre critic be creative and how important is the signature (style?) of a critic?
Yes, a critic can be creative.
How important is a given critic’s style? It’s hard to say. I mean, it’s partly down to a reader’s personal taste right? Perhaps there’s something about various styles that is also connected to the content. In the mainstream, our more right-wing critics in Britain tend to make more jokes (generally directed at the work, the artists, and the concept of theatre) and understand less (or pretend to understand less).
How does a critic watch theatre performances, and what does your process of writing a critique look like?
Well, I don’t use a notepad, so, as far as I’m aware, I watch theatre in exactly way as anyone else. But, well, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? I suppose I do watch with an awareness that I’m going to be writing, but generally speaking, I write about *the whole thing* *afterwards*, so during I guess I try to watch like anyone else – albeit like anyone else who goes to the theatre quite a lot.
I’m afraid, there’s also no real method to my writing a critique/review either. I tend to sit down with my laptop – usually the next morning – and just write what I thought. I guess, because I’ve usually got unlimited space (on my blog), I can do this in any order, and at any length, and can theoretically take as much time as I like. Obviously that’s different for publications who want a specific number of words (330 – the Guardian, for example) by 10am the following day. Then I maybe take more time over word-choices and selecting what’s most important, but with the loss of some fluency and detail.
What must a theatre critique take into consideration for the perception of the work?
I think that probably depends on both what the critic herself has perceived, and what the work itself is like. I guess it also depends on the reader. When reading other people’s reviews, if I get to the end and they haven’t discussed what it looked like, I can feel like I’m missing something. Equally, I think it’s important for a review to engage as much as possible with a piece of work’s intellectual arguments (which, I’d argue, includes its visual aspect). This is a difficult thing about reviews – they exist in the present (and may work a bit like an advert, if the critic likes the work), but also into the future as possibly the best record of the work that no longer exists to be seen.
At the same time as both of these things, they exist as a part of culture in their own right; arguing with current politics and aesthetics, etc. In short, you have to take everything into consideration. How much of what you’ve considered can usefully make it into the piece varies. I think, even in reviews, there’s a lot of unwritten material lurking between the lines. As with anything, the more of the context for the review you know, the better you will understand it. Stupidly, there’s probably even a whole life’s trajectory being mapped in the ongoing reviews filed by any given critic, and the events taking place in the wider political and cultural climate that surrounds them.
I was [recently] sent the following invitation to write a piece about The National Theatre Festival of Great Britain, by the Hungarian theatre magazine Színház.
It was a very reasonable request. They even sent me a very helpful set of things I might want to think about; questions I might want to answer in my piece about the National Theatre Festival of Great Britain. Look:
Is the national theatre festival in Great Britain a showcase of the supposedly “best” shows from all around the country, not only from a region? We would like to have a critical view on: How representative is the festival? What are the selection criteria? Who are the selectors? What are its values? Which aesthetics are preferred by the Festival? How would you describe it currently? Progressive? Old fashioned? Are there any conflicts around the festival, and why? Is it supported by current politics/cultural-politics? Does it have a serious audience supporting it? Does it have an international audience?
I imagine it would have been a great piece, but for one small problem: there is no National Theatre Festival of Great Britain. Or England, or Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland separately. I’ve been abroad. I know exactly the sort of festival Színház’s editors meant: Theatertreffen in Germany, Warsaw Theatre Meetings in Poland, the Teaterbiennale in Sweden and so on. So, why don’t we have one in Britain?
The most obvious answer is: British theatres are organised almost entirely differently to those in mainland Europe mentioned above in terms of contracts and ensembles. Almost everywhere else in Europe (it seems), each theatre has a permanent ensemble who are contracted for at least a season at a time and productions are designed to play in rep. In Britain, with painfully few exceptions, companies are assembled on a play-by-play basis. They rehearse, play the show for however many weeks, and then disband. It would be a logistical and economic nightmare to try to reassemble the ten most artistically successful shows of the previous season; it any time; in any city in the UK.
Beyond that, there is also the question of Britain’s prevailing economic/ideological culture. As an Englander, it’s not until you travel outside the UK (and, by extension, the USA; from where we seem to be gradually re-inheriting a lot of economic policies at present) that you realise quite how profoundly based in neoliberal capitalism even our “art” culture is. In Britain, if we have an equivalent to the National Theatre Festival, it is, I suppose, the West End Transfer.
Put in the most positive terms, this means: taking a show that has proved to be enormously popular in a smallish theatre that receives small amounts of state funding (all British theatres, even state “funded” ones receive a significant proportion of their budgets from corporate sponsorship and private donations), and transferring it to a larger, privately owned theatre; often charging a lot more money for tickets. These West End transfers tend to last for 12 weeks in their original form (because it is still difficult to get the entire original cast to commit, due to the fact that they may have prior film or television obligations), although second and third casts are not unheard-of. At best, the West End transfer is a meeting of artistic excellence and popular acclaim. In this trajectory, the next stage is the transfer to Broadway, where I’m given to understand ticket prices are even higher (a seat roughly the same distance from the stage forthe same playcould plausibly rise from £9 (€12) in previews at the Almeida to $239.25 (£156/€211) for a Friday night on Broadway). One does not have to be a genius to see the less positive aspects of taking art out of a public context and into a private one.
Beyond this, I have a sense – perhaps one which is mirrored by controversies at other National Festivals of Theatre Excellence – that the UK would be quite resistant to this level of top-down organisation in quite such an explicit way. And there’d be yet more grumbling if it was held in London. Or not-in-London. And no one would be able to agree on what should be shown anyway. On balance, with UK theatre in its present fractured and immiserated form, I think we might have had a lucky escape.
