Posh - Royal Court

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

What with it following Off the Endz into the Downstairs space and seeing it the day after the lamentable Behud, I wasn’t really looking forward to Posh. On reflection, I reckon that’s largely down to all the pre-publicity I’d seen – not the theatre’s own, so much as the stuff in broadcast and print media – which had mulishly focused on how “in the run up to the election, Posh would be really, like, *relevant*, because David Cameron is, like, posh.”

You see, Posh focuses on the activities of an Oxford dining club not a million miles removed from the Bullingdon Club of which David Cameron, his shadow chancellor George Osborne, and his Eton contemporary and London Mayor Boris Johnson were members. From this one extrapolates the gloomy impression that one is going to be subjected to two and three quarter hours of heavy-handed lecturing about how Conservatives are Very Bad Indeed. Super for the political journalists who apparently decide what makes for good theatre (answer: “theatre that takes their articles and puts them in the mouths of actors on stage”), not so good for people who like theatre.

As it turns out, Posh is a rather excellent play.

An hour or so of it was performed three years ago in the inaugural Rough Cuts season and it’s interesting to see what’s been done to it since (as an aside, it’s also mildly terrifying to consider that, like Lucy Prebble’s Enron, it has been some three years and no doubt innumerable drafts in the making – so much for “overnight success”). As such, it is fascinating to get a small insight into the way that Wade has carefully, intelligently crafted strong raw ideas and situations into an impressively subtle bit of drama.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the play is its shape. Running at 2h45, the interval doesn’t come until maybe 1h45 in. And in this first half virtually nothing happens. No. That sounds wrong and it’s unfair. Things do happen, and there’s a fair bit of introducing, explaining and contextualising as well. For the most part though, aside from a brief intro scene, it’s just closely observed interaction between the ten members of “The Riot Club” assembling/assembled in the private dining room of a country gastro-pub.

The surface of the thing is constructed almost entirely from banter between the chaps; all turning phrases, cracking jokes and generally trying to better each other through verbal fencing or simple put-down. Beneath this, moving more slowly, is a wider power struggle. Through their showing off, the young men are trying to impress one another. Some to win any recognition, some to achieve presidency of the club, others simply exercise quiet superiority or just chunter on as the affable blunderers they affect to be.

It’s a bit like watching that game where you have to guide a marble around a maze in a box by tilting the surface over which it’s rolling being played. The power in the room lists and tilts this way and that. Never stable, never stopping. Allegiances shift as weaker club members ally themselves with old top dogs or emerging pretenders to their thrones, while those suddenly granted power sift through their supporters cutting those whose endorsement would lessen them.

And all this is achieved through ten blokes basically drinking too much, boasting and calling each other dickheads. Imagine a wine-fuelled Twelve Angry Men crossed with a pack of wolves and you’d be pretty near the mark.

While the script is subtle, acute, well-observed and intricate, Lyndsey Turner’s direction is never less than immaculate and is perfectly housed in Anthony Turner’s spot-on, detailed reproduction of a recently tarted-up back room in a country pub (which, importantly, is set slightly in from the sides of the pros. arch so that we see the height and depth of the theatre stage all around it). There are also some lovely directoral decisions – the best: three or four scene changes are accompanied by the boys singing á cappella/barbershop style covers of “gritty”, “urban” R‘n’B tracks.

This is a stroke of genius on (I assume) Turner’s part (i.e. it isn’t mentioned in the script, so I’m assuming it came from the director – do put me right in comments if it ain’t so). It pretty much tackles the other theme of the play head-on. Or at least challenges the implicit charge repeatedly levelled at the characters: that “the posh” are essentially “not like *us*” and, furthermore, are a bunch of charmless cunts with whom none of “us” would want to sleep.

By having them delivering R‘n’B *hits* (well, I assume they’re hits. I haven’t really got the faintest idea) with élan, charm and no small amount cool, and crucilally, delivering them in an idiosyncratic, “posh” kinda idiom, these scene changes – much more than the text of the play – offer a working suggestion as to how or why we might like or even admire “the posh”. It rips up the “chinless wonder”, “Tory boy” stereotype and replaces it with the other end of “posh” – the rake. The cavalier cavalier, if you like.

Indeed, the cast should figure on the New Year’s Honours list for services to The Posh. Along with the three non-U parts, the ten chaps are quite outstanding. The full line-up press shot did them a disservice, making them look like an identikit roll-call of Gap models. In fact, the play shows off ten very individual young actors each of whom is possessed of a frankly disgusting amount of talent, a great singing voice and oodles of charisma. Moreover, in terms of the play, they are all pretty much spot-on casting.

What’s most interesting about the play, though, is the possible disparity between what it might be trying to do, and what ends up doing. Put simply, the script levels some pretty blunt accusations at members of this privileged elite, from the opinions it puts in their mouths to the behaviour, both reported and seen, it attributes to them. But somehow it all seems strangely mitigated.

Let me explain: primarily, this is a play about young people and, despite its curiously long first “half”, the play in which a group of young people do A Bad Thing and then fall out is a pretty tried and tested model. It’s Trainspotting, Mojo, The Secret History, Shallow Grave, Spring Awakening, Saved, hell, it’s Macbeth, Paradise Lost or even The Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden. As such, we’re pre-primed to sympathise with those who commit the crimes. More than this, though, thanks to the combination of youth, what these putative poshos are angry about, and the fact that they’re played by good-looking, charismatic actors, the theoretical class resentment angle flies out of the window. I don’t think Wade intends anything so crass as trying to teach Royal Court audiences to hate the posh through a composite scenario crammed with a melange of plausible-sounding things that the hateable-posh might do or say. But if it was, she’d have failed.

The first problem is the actors’ charm (not to mention, yet again, talent and charisma). They’re actors. They’re all great on stage. Of course they’re likeable and watchable. You get the vague sense that if we really were watching the goings on of the Bullingdon Club we’d probably be more appalled. After all, theatre isn’t a fly-on-the-wall documentary, but entertainment (or an intellectual pleasure, or whatever). What it isn’t is an exposé. I don’t think that’s what the text is trying to do, though. It certainly isn’t what the production does. What with the set’s nod to acknowledging its theatricality, the R‘n’B scene changes and, well, the fact of sitting in a theatre, watching actors, we the audience are granted a good deal of remove to consider the implications of the staged dialogue and action within a wider framework.

However, that framework needn’t just be “the forthcoming election”, “privilege”, “the Conservative Party” and “David Cameron”. One of the things that struck me, watching the Riot Club trashing the pub back room was the extent to which it was simply the social class of these characters which is supposed to make the act seem theoretically despicable. After all, if this were a play about, say the Sex Pistols or Rolling Stones, then we’d probably be encouraged to view this youthful vandalism as “rock‘n’roll” rather than tut-tutting at it as the Daily Mail might.

Which brings us neatly to the next point of surprise. On one hand, I’m sure Wade did a fairly hefty amount of research into the viewpoints of those whom she purports to depict. On the other hand, what’s interesting about the dialogue is how many similarities there are between the snobbery of these Old Etonians (&c.) and the sorts of things one hears either verbatim or equivalents-of from London’s leftie arts crowd. The Riot spit the words “Daily Mail” with the same distaste as a Guardian reader might, for example. The only real difference we’re invited to notice is that these young posh types also have a lot of money and, theoretically, power.

Except that they don’t have power. Ultimately this is a play about what powerlessness does to people. It’s both telling and accurate that these young Conservatives satirically use the language of the politically correct to describe their plight as disenfranchised outsiders. Elite or otherwise, they are, after all, very definitely a “minority”. While these characters might think they’re taking the piss by whining about how they are discriminated against and bewailing violations of their human rights, if we imagine this play was called “Black” or “Jew” and contained the same level of disobliging stereotype – even if mitigated by charming actors – well, you start to see their point. And the play also points out that while they wield a lot of theoretical power, consider themselves above the law, and to some extent are seen to get away with their crimes, one is also made acutely aware that this power of theirs is both limited and compromised. There are situations in which their “social rank” won’t protect them – two of the characters describe being mugged and all seem acutely aware that much of the rest of the country wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.

As such, the play offers a kind of unsympathetic sympathy. On the other hand, thanks to the factors I’ve mentioned, I found the ending (which I shan’t reveal, but might well be guessable) oddly cheering. I know I wasn’t meant to. It’s meant to be chilling, I think. But behind all the class stuff, it feels like there’s something even more fundamental going on. A kind of punk spirit. A Clockwork Orange for the upper classes. Sid Vicious’s My Way sung in the Queen’s English. Something about our tendency to side with underdogs. The same sort of thing that makes Shakespeare’s Richard III so attractive.

Spat back onto the pavement of Sloane Square on a gloriously sunny, plane-free Saturday afternoon, Posh left me – quite wrongly, I imagine – with a massive grin on my face. The real achievement of the play, beyond the simple pleasure of watching a great production, is how much this reaction simultaneously worried me. Posh is a lot cleverer than it likes to let on.

Photo: Johan Persson – David Dawson (Hugo Fraser-Tyrwhitt), James Norton (Miles Richards), Leo Bill (Alistair Ryle), Joshua McGuire (Guy Bellingfield), Kit Harington (Ed Montgomery), Jolyon Coy (Toby Maitland)

The Empire - Royal Court

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

The Empire is a misleadingly huge title for DC Moore’s four-men-in-a-room scenario, but it offers a pretty clear statement of intent. Set in Afghanistan in 2006 (although it might as well be now), it gives us Gary, a corporal in the British army; Hafizullah, a stoned Afghan National Army recruit; Simon, Gary’s Captain; and Zia, a man captured in a recent engagement, who turns out to be from Wanstead Park and may not may not be a Taliban fighter or a kidnapped Briton.

As such, you can see how Moore envisages this thinly drawn empire – Britain’s imperial past, its class system and the way these all echo in our current conflicts are embodied by these four men, neatly encapsulated by corporal Gary’s pithy reduction of 200 years of British history to: “thick cunts, led by posh cunts, hitting brown cunts.”

However, the real business of the play itself is the hour and a half real-time encounter, played in detailed naturalism, mostly between Gary and Zia. It’s worth noting at the outset that Joe Armstrong went down with tonsillitis at the weekend, so he’s being played by John Game, on book. Game does a pretty impressive job for someone who’s seen the show a couple of times and had maybe a half a dozen shots at the part, so everything else might possibly need to be read in the light of this.

The basic problem with Moore’s script – and perhaps this got laid a bit more bare than necessary with the late substitution – is that the dynamic between Gary and Zia doesn’t really work. At least not in Mike Bradwell’s otherwise impressively detailed production. It feels like Moore has a written a script that is far more packed with comic potential than has been tapped here. At one point Simon refers to Zia as “Ali G fucking… terrorist”. The problem is that here that insult seems to arrive from thin air, whereas actually it sounds like it is the missing key to what’s gone wrong with the dynamic. It feels like Gary should be played by a reasonably frightening Tom Hardy type: pretty resentful, pretty racist, and pretty violent – one of those people who is a bit scary even when they’re being friendly – while Zia should be a much more mouthy, funny, wideboy version of a London Asian. Perhaps it’s to Bradwell’s credit that they’re not so obvious, but a bit of “obvious” would have perhaps made for a bit more drama.

But even with this revised casting, I’m not sure Moore’s scenario quite carries an hour and a half of dramatic material. The basic question, once we discover Zia is British, is whether or not we believe his story that he was kidnapped. Perhaps it’s daft to make character judgements based on actors playing people who are made up anyway, but it never really seemed likely for a moment that Nav Sidhu’s Zia was any kind of a Taliban fighter. But then, it’s not especially plausible that Game’s Gary is a member of the British army either (any more than Armstrong’s looks). I suppose that’s a problem with naturalism – it’s always done by actors. But even so, I reckon there are actors out there who would have made this situation seem a lot more fraught than it felt last night in the Theatre Upstairs.

Moreover, it feels like all the characters are functioning in a strange sort of information void. I suppose it’s a function of the four (plus one walk one extra) hander, but here it seems like a) there should be more people running about, b) that everyone on the ground should know more about the situation, and c) that there are a lot of chases deliberately not being cut to. It feels like neither Zia nor Gary have watched the news more than twice in the past nine years. Both seem impossibly ill-acquainted with stories about British Muslims fighting with al Qaeda or the Taliban in Afghanistan.

You can kind of see the play Moore is after. Two British men, one white and working class, one Muslim and working class, from neighbouring parts of east/North-east London meeting in a bombed out ruin in Afghanistan and trying to work out if they are, or ever were, on the same side or not. But even this back-of-a-postcard summary suggests pretty much why I’m not especially convinced it’s a play that really needed to be written – let alone taking the title The Empire into the bargain. It also includes at least two of “those speeches” which tend to crop up toward the end of such plays that Never Happen In Real Life, where a character suddenly sets out their whole socio-political stall in a lengthy monologue.

What there is is pretty neatly executed, if a bit dull. It’s perfectly competent play, too, if a little unnecessary. By the end, one isn’t really any the wiser as to whether Zia is or isn’t a Taliban fighter, nor has one had any real insights into the nature of modern warfare, the British army or what we are or are not achieving in Afghanistan. I suppose as a portrait of a confused, confusing war seemingly stuck in a stasis of stalemate one couldn’t ask for much more. As a piece of theatre, though, I might have preferred it to do *something*.

Photo: Nobby Clark - Rufus Wright (Simon), Nav Sidhu (Zia)

Behud (Beyond Belief) – Soho Theatre

[written for CultureWars]

In 2004, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti (Dishonour) was cancelled after a small proportion of Birmingham’s Sikh community essentially rioted it into cancellation, objecting to a scene depicting sexual abuse which takes place in a Gurdwara (Sikh temple).

As I said some years ago, Behzti is “one of the worst published plays I have read in my life - from the leaden naturalistic dialogue, the negligible yet clichéd characterisation and the naïve way that [the script] specifies how the stage should be laid out (“different parts of the stage should represent different rooms” - astounding), through to the abysmal, clanging melodrama of the plot... The whole play would have sunk utterly without trace, were it not for the disgrace of its being rioted off stage.”

I’ve no doubt that becoming the centre of a media storm, being sent death threats and being cast as a pariah by one’s “community” are all deeply harrowing experiences. And now, six years on, Bhatti has written what the blurb on the back cover of the printed text describes as “a playful response to the events surrounding Behzti” in which “a playwright attempts to make sense of the past by visiting the darkest corners of her imagination” [my italics].

And this is pretty much where the problems start. Behud (Beyond Belief) tells more or less the exact same story, but is about a female Sikh playwright called Tarlochan Kaur Grewal (played without a scintilla of likeability by Chetna Pandya) and appears to be set in the present day (at least if the repeated references to a May 6th election are anything to go by), albeit in some sort of parallel universe where the offending play (here called Gund (Dirt/Filth)) goes on just before Christmas (as Behzti did) but the date of May’s election is already known. This kind of imprecision is emblematic of the lazy thinking on which the whole thing is built.

From the outset we are faced with a wall of dissembling evasiveness. None of the characters in the play are *actual people*. Fair enough. Bhatti probably doesn’t want to add several legal cases for defamation to her sea of troubles. Except that, by doing so, she abdicates all responsibility – at best what she’s chucked together could be seen as a kind of impressionist rendering of what her situation was like.

Except that she pushes her excuse-making further. Not only does she have the surrogate playwright figure on stage pretty much the whole time, but she has her indulge in the most banal meta-theatrical tricks imaginable. While other actors trot through the (unbelievably badly written) scenarios in which predictably incensed community leaders meet with caricatured artistic directors, racist coppers wax ignorant and the worse clichés of highly strung actresses rehearse their scenes, this “playwright” figure interrupts them to shout things like “No, that’s not how it happened”, or “This is too static. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down”. Essentially she repeatedly disowns everything that she’s written in repeated postmodern climbdowns. She pre-empts any criticism that the play is clunky, banal and trite by saying so herself. The “I’m a Writer, but I Don’t Know How to Write This Play” genre is loathsome. Every fledgling writer is allowed one stab at it and the result should never be staged. What on earth makes Bhatti think that her inability to actually write is interesting or important enough to make people watch it? Anyone who’s read Behzti already knows she can’t write. Behud only serves to confirm that a bit of suffering doesn’t have the slightest effect on ability nor does it confer nobility on the attempt.

And what a depressing exercise in massive egotism it is. Not that Bhatti is fond of herself. Oh no. The playwright (I think we’re allowed to assume that we’re meant to closely identify her the endlessly irritating “Tarlochan”) is full self-loathing. Her cipher continually self-describes as fat and untalented.

Interestingly, other characters on stage – notably the intentionally ridiculous character of the artistic director of the fictional theatre where the fictional playwright’s fictional play is staged (a hefty stab in the back for whichever idiot at Birmingham Rep ever thought Bhatti was a playwright) – argue passionately for her as a writer. Countered by a (incompetently drawn, grab-bag of assorted local government clichés) town councillor, “Joanne Stevenson” (played on auto-pilot by Lucy Briers doing a Patricia Routledge impression, apparently hoping that no one will blame her if she appears not to be there) who says all the things about the play that anyone sensible thought about Behzti, albeit mired in a set of ugly arguments that seek to equate not liking the play (Behzti or Gund, take your pick, they're more or less entirely interchangable) with being a mildly corrupt, slightly racist, careerist patsy.

Bhatti’s insights on “race” in Britain are non-existant. Indeed, Behud makes Off the Endz look like a doctoral thesis. Where that contented itself with “When the stock markets crashed and all the banks were losing money – how many black faces did you see on TV? How many of our stories did they show?” and “Life is ten times harder for us” Behud offers (from the mouth of an older male Sikh): “They [that’s All White Britons, one assumes] don’t mind us living here but they don’t want us taking part. It’s easier if you’re a woman, like Tarlochan. The Goreh [Hindi for ‘whitey’] feel sorry for you. If you’re a man, you’re the oppressor. Truth is they’re frightened of us. And jealous. They crave the power our culture gives to our sex. So they’re on a mission to emasculate us.” [my italics]

Right ho. That’s “us” told.

There’s also a white Detective Chief Inspector who gets to say: “That lot outside, they’re not like us. Don’t think the same, don’t have the same values. I’ve said it before, you can’t reason with terrorists...” and then a bit later in the same scene: “Feels like I’m living the white man’s burden all over again.”

Brilliant.

Of course, any idiot playwright can probably find people who do say these things, can even claim that such things were said to her (albeit in a way that resembles how anyone actually talks), before ultimately falling back on the tiresome defence that this is a “playful response” from “the darkest corners of her imagination” conveniently forgetting that “playful” needn’t be a synonym for “rubbish” and that she plainly has no imagination whatsoever.

It’s unfair to lay all the blame for this at Bhatti’s door. Even leafing grumpily through the script on the bus home you get a sense that this play could have been better served by a halfway competent production. Case in point: the first – admittedly trite – stage direction is “Dawn. The stage is black. The lights go up slowly to reveal an Asian woman, TARLOCHAN, lying on the floor in front of a plain desk and chair…” Director Lisa Goldman has subtly altered this so that Tarlochan is laid *on* the table, which, laid with white cloth, is looking suspiciously like an altar, suggesting the writer sacrificed, martyred according to all the best Western Judeo-Christian traditions. Perhaps that’s meant to be ironic, but it looks misjudged (not to say imperialist) to say the least. But then this is a play in which the fictional writer at one point objects to the packets of rice that the fictional director has put on the fictional stage having Arabic writing on them as demonstrative of his cultural insensitivity rather than his boring stagecraft, so why even bother thinking about it?

But none of it matters anyway, because Bhatti keeps crawling backwards out of actually saying anything with the ridiculous cartoonish post-modernism, amplified and indulged by the production at every turn.

Circling around somewhere in the ether is a recurring hint that Bhatti knows/experienced Something Very Bad. But she won’t say what it is. This too is a recurring motif – the irritation of interviewers that she won’t pin down whether she’s making specific allegations with her play, or whether she’s just created something deliberately sensational. Gallingly Bhatti quotes Picasso in the playscript: “Art is the lie that reveals the truth”. Fair enough, except this isn’t art and neither was Behzti and for Bhatti to claim otherwise reveals a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what art is. And what she’s peddling is simply journalism that refuses to say what the story is. Of course everyone is irritated.

Oddly, the comparison that keeps suggesting itself throughout Behud, perhaps in part because of Bhatti’s assertion that she is an artist or even a playwright, is that between Bhatti and Sarah Kane. Suffice it to say that this comparison provides any of the remaining nails needed to keep down the lid on the coffin of Bhatti’s claim to be an artist. Where Blasted – Kane’s Behzti, if we want to be crass about this – was completely misunderstood metaphor, the deeply trite Behzti, while it might also have been a metaphor, wasn’t a profound one – functioning at about the same level as, say, a death metal album cover’s metaphorical attack on Christianity by depicting a goat deflowing a buxom virgin over an altar beneath and upside-down cross, for example. Behud, by contrast, is Bhatti’s petulant stab at a 4.48 Psychosis. However, instead of creating a painful meditation which looks outward, it staples together scraps of ignorance and makes them scream “me, me, me, me, me, me, me”. Over and over again.

There are lots of quotes about “good writing” in the play that it’d possible to cheaply use as a conclusion, but this review is already roughly 1,500 words longer than Behud deserves anyway and you’ve probably got the point.

Behud is worth seeing only if you want to know what the new low for professional theatre looks like. Beyond belief indeed.

Sweet Nothings (Liebelei) – Young Vic

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

It’s not hard to see why Arthur Schnitzler seems to exercise more of a hold over the British stage than pretty much any other German-language dramatist, with the possible exception of Brecht. Who hardly counts as ‘popular’. A purveyor of mildly pervy tales now lent a veneer of respectability thanks to their increasing antiquity, dismissed by Hitler as a “Jewish pornographer”, he’s an almost ideal candidate for delivering arty European exotica for intelligent audiences who wouldn’t ordinarily admit going to see “relationship dramas”.

I should probably note at the outset that even on paper this was always going to tick a huge number of boxes for me. A Mittel-European text (written in 1895, it’s Austro-Hungarian, since you ask), directed by an “international” director (Swiss-Jewish Luc Bondy who works in France as a “German director” and in Germany and Austria as a celebrated director of French stuff like Marivaux – his production of Genet’s Les Bonnes is still in rep at the Volksbühne), and best of all, it’s on in London (or was. It closed last Saturday).

What’s most fascinating about watching it here, performed in English by British actors, is seeing what does and does not tessellate with the rest of our domestic theatre scene and where these disparities spring from.

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about a re-staging of Liebelei in this context – an English language version (by David Harrower – whose translation/adaptation doesn’t sound like he was terribly sure what he was doing) with a “foreign” director – is quite how little “relevance” there is to this strangely shaped drama.

Apart from being preternaturally preoccupied by sex (apparently he kept a diary which he told about every orgasm he had for a number of years), Schnitzler was also quite the keen social critic. It turns out that the main theme of Liebelei is, in fact, class. As such, Fin-de-Siècle Wien offers an even more rigidly stratified system than that of contemporary Britain. The thing is, you’d be hard pressed to spot it here unless you were really up on the period’s specific social codes and signifiers. What would be more obvious to a German-speaking audience is that the names of the two girls, Mizi and, to a lesser extent, Christine, would immediately have pegged them as the social inferiors of their dilettante lovers Fritz and Theodore.

However, it doesn’t occur to Bondy, in common with the work of most German directors I’ve seen, to deploy that simple, crucial British signifier of class: the accent (apparently accents don’t carry anything like the same weight in German-speaking countries, and Austrian accents are themselves considered slightly rural and ridiculous in metropolitan Germany. As such, Mizi and Theodore, Christine and Fritz all speak like pre-Waugh bright young things, so there’s precious little to point up what is in fact the crucial issue of the drama. It’s gettable, but certainly not as a central point of the play. A British director would have heavy-handedly gotten, oh, I don’t know, whoever today’s Martine McCutcheon is, times two, and put them opposite, well, probably the two actors who are playing Fritz and Theodore – then at least the contrast would have been tangible.

Still, it’s enjoyable seeing British actors negotiating a more German school of playing. It ends up as a kind of mid-North Sea compromise not dissimilar to Polish acting – some of Germany’s restraint and stylisation coupled with elements of Anglophone/Russian psychological realism.

So what of the play itself? The basic narrative of Liebelei (perhaps better translated as Little Crushes or Small Loves – rendered originally as Flirtation, or by Tom Stoppard’s 1986 adaptation as Dalliance) introduces us to young blades-about-town Theodore and Fritz. Jack Lasky’s Theodore is a reckless, wired young thing, with a proto-punky shock of hair and nervy disposition. He’s dating Natalie Dormer’s Mizi, a seductive bottle-blonde, erstwhile shopgirl glamourpuss (a dead ringer for Sheridan Smith from where I was sitting). His friend Fritz (Tom Hughes), the straighter, quieter, more artistic army reserve lieutenant, is dating Mizi’s similarly reserved best friend Christine (Kate Burdette).

The first scene amounts to little more than lusciously staged revelry – hints that Fritz and Christine are only just getting together, that Fritz has been carrying on an affair with a married woman, and the clouds that hang over these unions are barely essayed at all. Instead mostly it all looks like a lot of youthful drunk fun.

Thus, the tone of the second and third scenes comes as something of a surprise. Instead of retaining the light tone, everything gets very overcast very quickly. The scene changes from Theodore’s decadent pad to Christine’s Spartan room in her father’s house, where she is being lectured by her shrewish neighbour Katharina (an excellent caricature drawn by Hayley Carmichael) about her reputation.
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Christine floats about, agonises to Mizi about having fallen in love with Fritz, worries that he prefers this married woman he’s been having an affair with, and generally pines until Fritz turns up to say goodbye to her. His affair has been rumbled and he is to fight a duel with his mistress’s husband. A duel almost certain to end in his death. We know this, Christine doesn’t. From this performance, none of us are that certain whether Fritz really means it when he says he loves her.

The final scene [spoiler alert; but since the London run has finished, and the last production before this one was 24 years ago, you’re probably safe reading it – unless you’re going to see one of the mainland tour dates] shows Christine waiting for Fritz to come back “from his father’s estate” (his excuse), and then falling apart when she’s told that he’s been killed in a duel. Nothing else. The text doesn’t play any of the metaphorical/theatrical tricks of Reigen (or La Ronde, as we tend to know it), it’s simply a study of crashing sadness. We watch someone crying, howling, and railing at the world while her friends and family look on absolutely powerless to help, unable to say anything that could possibly provide comfort or even answers.

It’s a very strange shape and trajectory for a piece of drama, but its sheer unexpectedness makes it all the more powerful. It’s pretty visceral at the time, if rendered slightly theoretical by Bondy’s cool, mildly abstract staging – still halfway between that post-Brecht, semi-V-Effekt where we’re asked to think not feel. Ultimately, this is stylish, art house stuff and not the delivery of thumping melodrama. I remember thinking as the house lights went up that I’d enjoyed an excellent night in the theatre. However, coming back to put the finishing touches to this review, the sensations have faded, so I’m left with the feeling that this was a nicely presented production which might not have quite hit all the notes that the script makes available. In many ways it bears direct comparison to Katie Mitchell’s NT production of Krankheit der Jugend in November last year. Same city, similar epoch and the same curious failure to achieve resonance. Not that resonance is the be all and end all of theatre, but it’s curious all the same.

These plays are about the romantic travails and failures of the young and idealistic. If anything, it’s the gulf between their romantic idealism and our own cynical times that makes the most noise during these productions. ‘Imagine people willing to die for love!’ we briefly marvel, before going back to being sensible, having lived vicariously for a couple of hours.
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Micro (préambule) – The Gate

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

I suspect that the Gate Theatre’s Micro is going to get rather a lot of people in a tizz. Or at least it would, if it got the attention it deserves.

The problem is this: by conventional British rules, you’d be hard-pressed to call this “theatre”. And yet it’s in a theatre! Created by French choreographer Pierre Rigal, who made the excellent Press for the Gate back in 2008, you might expect this to be the usual “but it’s dance, really” objection. But it isn’t. Yes, Micro contains some “movement”, but what it most resembles is a gig, or rather an extended jam session, or perhaps a postdramatic, new wave reincarnation of those shows that Anonymous Society used to make.

As propositions go, it’s an intriguing one. Rigal has collected together four extraordinarily talented multi-instrumentalists-cum-dancers, stuck them in black band t-shirts (the Ramones, Joy Division, Aladdin Sane-era Bowie and plain black, since you ask) and essentially created a band as much as a piece of performance.

The piece starts with a wall of their equipment being gradually, invisibly moved, pushed forward, turned on and switched off. Hands appear from behind the amps. Leads are plugged in and the amplified buzz of exposed jacks fills the air. It feels and sounds like an imaginary Heiner Goebbels/Kraftwerk drum’n’bass collaboration or Stomp for post-punks.

The strangeness doesn’t stop there. Once out from behind their amps, the performers do a kind of dance scraping electric guitars against each other mid-air, while another performer pretty much fits himself into a bass drum with only his legs protruding and stomps about the stage like a disgruntled troll. It’s like Dada meeting Stockhausen in a very confined space. Some of it is very funny and rather charming.
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Gradually the wackiness recedes and the music – proper identifiable songs, no less – begins to dominate. There’s still a good deal of physical, as well as musical cleverness on display – at one point the performers pair off and between them each play two two-handed instruments using one arm each per instrument (if you see what I mean) – but from quite near the start it seems to be much more about the music.

And this is where there’s a slight problem. The movement is nice enough, but it’s hardly relentlessly, rigorously choreographed, while some of it is just people clumping around or throwing shapes that are barely evolved from ‘music and movement’. I’ve got a lot of time for the school of non-dance dance, or just “being” on stage, but this isn’t always an entirely successful mixture of the two.

The music is better, although this is obviously a matter of taste. Happily, Micro’s taste in music seems to dovetail neatly with my own. Aside from the hints at Kraftwerk and Stockhausen, an enjoyable aspect of the piece is the simple trainspottery joy of trying to work out what bits of various songs you’re being reminded of. It basically flits between the cooler end of French pop from the Sixties and the more angular end of post-punk/and early eighties guitar’n’synth – think The Cure or perhaps John Foxx-era Ultravox.

There are also suggestions of Bowie, Bauhaus, the Clash, Penetration, Joy Division, Interpol, Editors, Throbbing Gristle, Serge Gainsbourg, the Divine Comedy, Neu, Air, St Etienne, Nouvelle Vague, maybe Brigette Bardot and definitely Laibach. Regrettably, there are also worrying stretches of stuff more akin Yes or Spinal Tap. At least that’s what I heard. I’m sure other audience members could come up with a similar comparisons referencing completely different bands (I’d be fascinated to read any in the comments section below if any of you do happen to see it). Anyway, some sort of noise is a constant from the get-go and, like the movement sequences, more time might profitably be spent on the dramaturgy of the segueways.

The piece bills itself as “an experience that tries to capture the different poetries of a rock concert and which... attempts to hear but also see the music”. This comes across quite clearly even without recourse to the programme. Oddly, it’s pretty much the sole discernable “point” or “narrative” in the piece. Actually, its “a-narrativity” (ok, I just made that word up) or the quality of, uh, postdramatic-ness isn’t a problem here. After all, who watches gigs for a story?

That the performance is most like a gig does a lot to mitigate this sort of complaint – also raising some interesting questions about oft-repeated received wisdoms (repeated, not least by me, recently) about how things/bodies “automatically” become “symbolic” on stage. They do here too – *sometimes* – but at other times, because they’re doing pretty much exactly what people do onstage at gigs – i.e. playing instruments – and are no more symbolic or “readable” than those on stage at an open mic night or drunks at karaoke.

Indeed, it’s striking that the “gig” bits of the show are in fact the points at which it becomes most apparent how comparatively sealed off and hermetic the performers/performances are compared to those stage presences of their real-life counterparts (i.e. actual bands). And so, curiously, it is in the very act of *doing* that the performers become most like performers, with all the allied sensations that they are “playing a part”, that the person we’re watching playing the guitar isn’t *really* the same as the person playing the person playing the guitar.

Due to the myriad variables mentioned above, it’s kind of hard to tell whether this show will ultimately be bought into by avant-garde music fans, upstream theatre types, the Live Art crowd (unlikely: there's no bleeding or nudity at all) or yer contemporary dance aficionados. I’m pretty sure it won’t do the same sort of business as the more crowd-pleasing Press, but that’s not to dismiss it. Its problem is/might be that it walks perilously close to that most damning of lines drawn by the British mind: the suspicion that it “might be a bit wanky”. Mostly it’s charming and playful enough to shrug off such charges, but there are definitely moments where you’re not sure whether it’s walked over the line into self-parody or even self-indulgently not-caring-about-being-wanky.

That said, I was much more in favour of Micro before it offered an extended encore after the audience had applauded it at what seemed to be the end. Of course it’s part of the lexicon of a gig, but not, of course, of theatre – at least not like this. Also, encores at gigs tend to be for the song/s that the band has been teasing everyone by not playing all night – and the number chosen for this encore would never be that song, I fear.

However, to an extent, my individual bone-picking and carping should be pretty much regarded as an irrelevance. I do think that with an even better band and perhaps tighter choreography the piece would be stronger, but that’s not the point. The point is that – well, at least in my experience – this is an exciting step into virgin territory. Well, I’ve never seen it done before, and as genres go, I think it’s one that deserves a good deal more exploration.

From Cartoon de Salvo’s recent much maligned Pub Rock to Chris Haydon/Mick Gordon/Billy Bragg’s Pressure Drop, putting bands on stage seems to be a bit of a vogue at the moment. And – not that I’ve even seen the other two examples of this spuriously-cobbled-together “trend” – this certainly appears to be the most formally innovative and inventive.

For that reason alone (although I did really like a lot of the music) I reckon theatremakers should be sitting up and taking notice of this little show, because, even if they disagree with individual decisions taken by the creative team, it seems like a show that’s worth thinking about, being inspired by, and taking into account when making future work. It’s the first show I’ve seen in ages that feels like it’s asking a few questions about performance, what to perform and how to tackle performing it. It’s the first show I’d be interested in seeing a scratch night of “responses to the work” for ages, too. It’s also mildly terrifying that we live in a theatre-critical culture in which this sort of work will far more likely be ignored for “not counting as theatre” than engaged with, but that’s theatre criticism’s problem, not the Gate’s. What the Gate have commissioned is a brilliant idea, irrespective of something so trite as whether you actually *like* it or not.

Sick note

Ok, yes, even by this blog’s recent standards, this has been a bit of a hiatus. I shan’t bore you with excuses/reasons and have learnt better than to say the situation is definitely going to improve for sure from here on.

I suppose I should start posting my Time Out reviews here if only to prove I’m still alive and working as a theatre critic – hell, I might even bung up the whole archive at some point, just for the hell of it.

That said, aside from proper commissions or massive irritation, the other thing guaranteed to get me writing is the National Student Drama Festival. Oddly, as becomes clear from the below articles, I wasn’t actually at the Festival this year due to ill health. As a result, I ended up writing more for the Festival’s magazine Noises Off than I do when I am editing it. And, as I say in a couple of the pieces, it actually gave me a really useful outsider perspective on how the magazine reads to those not in Scarborough – and prompted me to urge those writing for it to address different concerns.

Having said that, I’ve no idea how usefully they’ll read in the wider context of the blogosphere, rather than as dispatches from my sick bed to a magazine which I wished I’d been more a physical part of.

I’m going to contact the writers of the pieces to which I’ve responded in my articles for permission to reprint theirs below my, well, attacks on them. But until such time as they say yes or tell me to bog off you’ll have to make do with the quotes.

(“Cover image” courtesy of my hilarious colleagues who decided that in my absence, there should be a “robot replacement” Andrew Haydon for the Noises Off Office (Noffice), which they then photographed and put on the cover (see Wednesday’s article). Ok, I admit it, I was hugely flattered)

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Friday

Christ. I can’t believe this is the last issue. Jesus, the festival goes fast when you’re not there. Writing a final issue farewell piece for a festival I haven’t attended to people I haven’t met feels slightly surreal, but there it is. I think I’m going to miss this Festival more than any since my first in 1997. Back then, I assumed the experience was unrepeatable; that I’d had what was probably going to be the best week of my life, that I’d met all the most interesting people I was ever going to meet and had been as inspired as it was possible to be.

Turns out that 1997 was just the tip of the iceberg and apart from ruining the rest of my life – seriously, kids, if you can think of a single thing that you’d rather do than theatre, do it; theatre, and by extension theatre criticism, is rarely a lucrative occupation – NSDF has been a constant source of inspiration and a motor that has kept me going in a frequently frustrating, often arid field.

You’d think – indeed, I expected – that not actually being at the Festival this year I’d somehow feel less engaged and less involved in what was going on. Oddly, perhaps because I’ve been getting a reasonable amount of sleep and haven’t had to sit through all the shows, the reverse is true. Particularly with Noises Off.

In previous years, as editor, there’s always been a ludicrous amount of work just to make the magazine physically exist. Plus the selected shows to watch. Plus trekking around Scarborough getting from venue to venue. Plus having to eat and shower (Jesus, no showers in the Spa this year? Christ). So I tended to average about two hours sleep a day during the festival. As a result, I’d invariably develop a thousand-yard-stare, gradually lose my ability to speak coherently shortly after, forget how to write altogether by Tuesday or Wednesday and be a shuffling wreck of a human being by Friday night’s disco.

This sabbatical has given me a useful, much-needed long view on what Noises Off does, can do and should do. And it feels like it’s done it all this year. It’s a shame that I’ve missed developments in the Noffice itself. From what Claire, Ben and Phil have been telling me, it seems like our premises have coalesced into a kind of late-night venue not just for written creativity, but also for performative and sculptural excellence – the phrase NSDF Fringe has been bandied about. That sounds wonderful. I hope it carries on into next year. I’ve also missed a whole year of contributors and future staff members. I hope they/you all come back next year so I actually get to meet you.

Another great thing about not being editor this year has been actually getting to read the magazine for the first time – cover to cover – when it arrives in my inbox at breakfast. And what a worryingly good magazine it’s been. One of the best and most consistent runs that Noises Off has had in several years, I think. The covers have been funny; the comment section – now innovatively moved to the front really setting the tone of the magazine and making it much more engaging – has bristled with intelligent, timely stuff; the reviews, as I’ve commented several times before, have been invaluable for someone such as myself who hasn’t been seeing the shows; the Techie pages have been inspired; H. Jazz Lowe’s serial has been as engagingly bonkers as you could wish (“How come when we got locked in the Grand Hall that time you knew where to go? You took me up the back passage...” Ha!); and the back pages themselves have been far less in-jokey (perhaps I just worried too much) than in previous years – Not Real Arts Jobs in particular is a horribly perfect satire; and the credits, well, the credits lists have been enviably lengthy.

That said, no matter how great a review is, it’s no substitute for actually seeing a show. And it’s been fascinating to see what’s scored high on the critical radar. Until yesterday, it seemed like a close run thing between Phaedra’s Love and the Whitehouse Institute as to what had won most festgoers’ hearts (with an interestingly high number of dissenting voices for each piece as well), but the late addition of The Pillowman and By the Bog of Cats it looks like the Festgoer’s Prize might be the mostly closely fought it’s been in years. The news that BTBOC has been so highly rated is perhaps the biggest surprise of the week since the play got a real savaging when it first turned up in the West End starring Holly Hunter as Hester Swane, so I wish I’d seen that. And the Pillowman - reading the reviews reminded me what a great play it is. Hell, I wish I’d seen everything (with the possible exception of Our Country’s Good – please people, stop doing that play).

Because I don’t really have the faintest idea who has done what, it feels slightly ridiculous to do the traditional Ed’s thank-yous. Suffice it to say, that I’ve glowed just that little bit more every time I’ve read something by someone whose name I recognise from previous years, knowing that they’ve come back and written for us again, and hopefully helped out in the Noffice too (yes Jasmine, Will and Jon, I’m thinking of you in particular). It’s also been a pleasure to start recognising the work of repeat contributors this year (Phoebe Alexandra Bourke, Dan Hutton and Cassandra Fumi spring to mind). It is rather lovely seeing the work of the former “Monks of the Kitchen” transformed from cryptic Ivor-Benjamin-centric ramblings into incisive reviews and pertinent comment. Fascinating as well to see multi-faceted man of uncertain middle initials Richard KTC Watson slowly but surely taking over my role as Noises Off’s grumbler-in-chief.

Without being in the office at 6am, it’s hard to know who should be being congratulated for the remarkably early times I’ve been getting my copies of the finished magazine through, although seeing John Winterburn’s name high up in the credits and seeing no writing from him (that’s right, isn’t it?) in the mag., I suspect he’s due an especial plaudit for keeping the production process running as in previous years.

But my final thanks have to go to Ben, Claire and Phil (in strict alphabetical order) for, well, for everything. For keeping the magazine going (I never for a moment doubted you would) and proving that I’m little more than a confection whose absence scarcely registers, but also for keeping me in the loop all through the week. But more than that, for taking the magazine and its office and making it properly theirs. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up co-editorship just yet, but I know next year – assuming both Phil and Claire are returning and I’m not ill – it’ll be an editorial triumvirate of equals.

So, not that we met, but, until next year…

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Thursday

‘And yes, Andrew, Rachael Shaw’s Phaedra actually managed to pull off the difficult feat of being sexy on stage.’ – Ben Curthoys (Noises Off 31/03/10, p.12)

Thanks for clarifying that, Ben. Apparently it was ‘sexy night’ in the office last night (how nice to see that tradition revived – although last time I seem to recall it amounted to little more than a lot fighting amongst the then editorial team and not much “sexy” at all). I assume, then, that today’s Noises Off is the “sexy issue”. To this end today’s ...Unwell is all about being naked, looking slutty and fucking. On stage.

It’s clearly an issue much to the fore at this year’s festival. As Dan Hutton comments: ‘The shows on offer [at NSDF ‘09] were shocking, poignant and sometimes downright rude. Compared to this year’s crop, however, they were childish; the Nuts to this year’s PornHub’ and notes: ‘Over the course of the past three days we have encountered the old fashioned “this production contains nudity and scenes of a sexual nature” sign three times’.

I should start by clarifying that the three elements I mention above are distinct and separate entities. On-stage nudity can be completely asexual and frequently intends no erotic component. Similarly, on-stage sex need not be done in the buff. In fact, the most effective naturalistic portrayals of sex on stage tend to be between performers still wearing most of their clothes.

Why should this be? The simple answer is twofold. Firstly, the stage tends to make stuff on it symbolic as well as/instead of literal. It distances audiences from ‘the real’ (which is pretend anyway), but allows the pretence to stand in for much wider “realities”. At the same time, the game of naturalism is partly to “suspend disbelief” – to make audiences forget that they’re sat amongst N other people and that what’s happening in front of them isn’t framed by black boxes or curtains. As such, sex constitutes one of the most jarring possible things to attempt to stage, because, well, not to put too fine a point on it, there are certain preconditions for sex that involve some pretty “real” things.

Theatremaker and thinker Chris Goode has written about an outstanding example of the problem on his blog Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire: ‘On the night I saw [the then Oxford Stage Company’s Cleansed] something notable happened: in the scene where Grace and her (dead) brother Graham make love, Garry Collins as Graham, on removing his clothes, had a hard-on, and it was still in evidence at the end of the scene. Afterwards, talking in a cafe with friends who’d also seen the performance, I made some flip-sounding remark about Collins’s dick having been the best actor in the play, and I think everyone cringed a bit at my being so crass. But it was true, in a more profound and heartening way than I managed to articulate at the time. In the midst of all this performing, all this simulation, all this misconceived playing-at-extremity, there was this momentary realness, uncontrolled possibly, but showing everything else up as a kind of bourgeois party game, suffocating in the tiny airlock gaps between non-tessellating “theatrical” conventions.’

But this also gets to the heart of the problem. As soon as people start faking sex on stage, at least in a naturalistic production, either one becomes acutely aware of the faking, or, more rarely, becomes anxious that the couple on stage really are *doing it*, which would be even more odd/distancing/alienating. Or, as above, one becomes acutely aware of where the “real” interferes with the pretending.

There’s also the peculiarly British preoccupation with embarrassment in regard to both nudity and sex; even to ‘being sexy’. Niamh Conway’s Phaedra review captures it perfectly: ‘a ripple of awkward giggles can be heard throughout the audience as the comedy borders on being crude’. Crude! In Britain! Imagine. No wonder the poor audience giggled nervously.

Thanks to an exchange programme for “young” critics, which I took part in for a year between 2007-’08, and various international festivals I’ve attended since, I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of work from mainland Europe. One of the most striking differences between them and we Brits is the treatment of both the body and sexuality on stage. Across ten-plus festivals, I saw copious, largely unremarked nudity and plenty of representations of intercourse. I don’t think I saw a single “warning” sign, though.

The three best examples were French-Canadian Dave Saint Pierre’s Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde!, Franco-Austrian theatre provocateurs Superamas’s Big 3rd Episode: Happy/End (not actually a good show per se, but interesting for its treatment of naked bodies on stage), and French choreographer Gisele Vienne’s astonishing I Apologize. This last piece – admittedly more “contemporary dance” than “theatre” as we British might pigeonhole it – contained some of the most sexually graphic material I’ve ever seen on stage. Performed solo by a woman who didn’t even take off her clothes. Instead it was just the execution of choreography that suggested some of the most violent and transgressive sex you can imagine.

In Britain, this sort of material tends to get shunted into the box labelled “Live Art”, rather than being allowed to exist as “theatre” as it does everywhere else in mainland Europe. But even “straight” theatre in Europe has a more mature attitude to nudity and sex on stage. I remember my first encounter with this at the Edinburgh International Festival in Alize Zandwijk’s production of Gorki’s The Lower Depths back in 1999 – at one point a fairly overweight man wandered onto the stage completely naked and amused himself for a while, well, essentially stretching his cock and letting it ping back. This went on for a good few minutes while he carried on with the dialogue. It contrasted very poorly with the British student shows still chucking in a glimpse of embarrassed undergraduate willy as a nod to “shock tactics”.

As if to prove nothing much has changed on the mainland, the last show I saw in Berlin – Deutsches Theater’s production of Brecht’s Mr Puntilla and his man Matti – had what initially looked like some fairly gratuitous toplessness for one of the female characters. At least, it looked a bit gratuitous until the man who’d underdressed her came back onto the stage stark naked and stood, unembarrassed, for the rest of the scene. The effect was intentionally comic, but through absurdity rather than embarrassment.

Of course there are still politics around asking someone else to take their clothes off so a whole bunch of third parties can see, doubly so when the audience is composed primarily of your peers. But it sounds like this source of prudishness is being firmly stamped on by this festival’s generation of students. And not before time. We’re about thirty or so years behind the rest of Europe in the maturity stakes. It would be good if we could catch up in the next decade or so. Then we might start in on thinking a bit more intelligently about representation on stage more generally, but we’ll save that issue for another day.

For final advice, lest we’ve all gotten a bit carried away by all this talk of nudity and pretend sex, we should turn to Phoebe Alexandra Bourke’s Tuesday article The Torture of the Talent Crush: “This suitor on whom you have been focussing for around 90 minutes, on whom you have been basing your hopes and dreams, does not exist. He[/she] is a character constructed by playwright, moulded by actor and staged by director.” Quite right.

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Wednesday

Hrumph. Having been sub-headed “And he doesn't like someone else today” yesterday (it really wasn’t “dislike”, just a few questions, really), and with a plea out to the Tech team to build a robot Andrew Haydon on the grounds that “our early prototypes have all gone horribly wrong, savaging innocent Festgoers who have submitted perfectly pleasant and well-meaning articles to the magazine” it’s clearly time for something different. Just as well, since Noises Off is getting to that stage where it is much harder to disagree with most of it unless one has seen the shows/discussions/queues that are being written about.

So, instead, tonight, I’m going to wax gutted. If I was at the Festival, instead of sitting in bed listening to Strauss’s Elektra and writing this article, I’d be sitting in New Hall watching Ravenrock’s production of Phaedra’s Love. And I’m rather sad that I’m not.

By weird coincidence, I first heard of Phaedra’s Love at my first ever National Student Drama Festival. This was 1997 and the play had premiered only the year before in London. As a student at Leeds – also, by weird coincidence, the alma mater of Ravenrock – and, prior to NSDF’97, one with only a passing interest in theatre, the play had naturally passed me by completely. Phaedra’s Love was the brief answer to one of the quiz night questions. The question was “What play opens with the stage direction, enter Hippolytus wanking into a sock?” (or words to that effect – I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the correct stage direction). That’s about the only thing I remember about that quiz night. But, for some reason I was completely hooked on the idea of that play, so I got someone to write down what it was and bought it as soon as I got back to Leeds. I remember reading it and being as non-plussed as I was excited. Was this good, or was it a bit childish, petulant and foot-stampy when it came to dealing with God?

It wasn’t until I saw the play performed, again by students, in Cambridge in 2001 that I got more of a perspective. Dan Shearer’s production probably still ranks in the top ten student shows I’ve ever seen. It was also pretty much the diametric opposite in terms of how it tackled the text, judging by the photos and reviews of Ravenrock’s Phaedra’s Love. Where Ravenrock sound (from the reviews) and look (from the photos) like they’ve really gone for the visceral, Shearer’s take on the text in Pembroke College’s white-walled cellars was witty, post-modern and cerebral. In fact, it remains pretty much the most German thing I’ve ever seen a British student produce.

Hippolytus was played by an incredibly beautiful young Asian man who wasn’t in the least bit fat. The pre-show state consisted of a data projector showing photos of pop icons such as Darth Vader and Mr T with the caption “Are these not great men?” (or something). The cast wore mostly white and donned fluffy angel wings when they died. Not one drop of stage blood was spilt, and I don’t remember anyone taking any of their clothes off. At a key moment, one of the female members of the cast, wearing fluffy angel wings, climbed up a step ladder, sat at the top, and played Leonard Cohen’s (well, Jeff Buckley’s version of) Hallelujah in its entirety. You get the picture. But, yes, to get to the point, I’m gutted not to be seeing another production of Phaedra’s Love (one which one of my colleagues has just emailed to say I’d have really liked. Bugger again).

Being away from the Festival has had the useful effect of focusing my attention on the reviews far more closely than when I’m editing the magazine. The process is very different, in fact. Rather than scanning quickly for a sense of tone and rather more carefully for grammatical hiccoughs and casual invective – having of course seen the shows for myself – now I’m away from the Festival, I find myself reading for nuance. Seeing how much I trust a writer’s opinion by how they justify what they’re saying or the confidence with which they say it. Even textual clues are seized upon. Are writers flogging themselves to explain something quite dull, or so fired up that their words are tumbling over each other to get out?

Phaedra’s Love is the first time I’ve really picked up on that sense of excitement, this year. The other stuff sounds good, but like stuff I might have seen before, like stuff that the other reviewers might also have see before. Phaedra’s Love sounds like it’s of a different order altogether. The size, the scope of imagination; it sounds like something that could only have been done by students (or Alan Lane) and it sounds fantastic.

It’s at times like this that one starts to yearn for a bit (a lot) more detail. How big was the band? What were the songs they played? How was the sex and violence handled? Was it gross out, genuinely squeamish, comic, horrific? Of course, selectivity is perhaps the reviewer’s most important skill. And writing for Noises Off, you’re generally in the position of knowing that virtually your entire readership has already seen the same play that you saw. Except, it’s still crucial to explain to them what it was that you believe you saw. As the disparity of opinions on every show in this magazine goes to prove, while everyone might be looking at the same stage, not everyone is seeing the same thing by ay stretch of the imagination.

It’s also interesting to note the intersections and divergences between commentaries. Reading Tuesday’s set of Phaedra reviews, it is amusing to note, for example, the way that male reviewers’ syntax seems to fail them when attempting to pin down the appeal of Rachael Shaw’s Phaedra, who – reading between the lines – sounds like she might actually have managed to pull off being sexy on stage. A feat infinitely more difficult than you might imagine, btw.

Conversely, perhaps the most interesting of the reviews is Henry Ellis’s discovery that he doesn’t really like Sarah Kane’s plays. Thanks to his admission that he’s only seen one production each of only two of her five plays, the real curiosity is – is it the productions or the writer? Could different productions have uncovered the ‘human element’ that Ellis has found lacking, or are these productions par excellence of a writer he definitely doesn’t get along with?

I can’t say how much I am looking forward to reading the second tranche of reviews. But, more importantly, I am immensely grateful to everyone writing them for reminding me about one of theatre criticism’s most vital functions: reportage. Telling people who aren’t there what a thing is like. There are people outside the festival who aren’t seeing the work and as one of them, I am very thankful that I’m you are writing about it. That said, theatre is ultimately a live medium, so the sentence that cheered me up most in all the reports on Phaedra was: “I think this show... has a future beyond Scarborough should the company wish it.” Well? Go on. Please?

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Tuesday

Like Anthony Mamos, I missed the first NSDF discussion this year, but since it still prompted his article, The Defence of Contemp-oree (Noises Off 10, Sun, p.4), I feel safe responding to the points he raises. And what a curious mixed bag of points they are. I don’t know who first raised the question: “Where are all the classical texts this year?” (although I could take a rough guess, Robert Hewison) or how it was framed, but “contemporary work” is an interesting label.

In his piece, Mamos adopts “contemporary” to mean “devised” or “completely new” – I suspect it was initially intended to include the extant plays being performed at the festival; the oldest of which being Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 22-year-old veritable geriatric Our Country’s Good. It is at least refreshing not to see that a specious division being driven between “New Writing” and “Devised Work”. That debate was always nonsense and is now largely spent, having been debated across blog on blog and in the comment threads of the Guardian Theatre Blog, even unto death. So, Contemporary Vs Classical is a nice new stupid argument to take its place.

According to Mamos, “the question of the validity of contemporary work, particularly devised pieces, was raised at today’s discussion”. Firstly, assuming this is a fair account, I’d ask “Why?” and “By whom?” After all, isn’t all work made this year “contemporary” by definition? Whether it be a new piece devised by students or Nick Hytner’s revival of The London Assurance at the NT, isn’t it all going on right now? Going on right now is the essence of contemporaneity.

Questioning the validity of “the contemporary” wholesale seems to be somewhat counterproductive, but perhaps in the Festival bubble, the question seems more pressing. Out here in the wider world, however, I can assure Mr Mamos that “the contemporary” really isn’t in need of defence. If anything, there is far more funding available to develop new work, to join a “New Writing Programme”, to “scratch” work at any number of festivals, than there is any opportunity to stage a classical text.

Mamos goes a bit further than defence, though. His “problem with classical theatre is simple – [he] doesn't like stories. [He] doesn't like being led by the hand through a narrative which aims to take [him] on an emotional curve through suspense to a unified conclusion.” Fair enough. That’s a pretty hardcore attitude and I suspect him of rather overstating his position for the sake of his argument, but that’s fine, I do see where he’s coming from. I’ve read Han-Thies Lehmann and Heiner Müller, I’ve seen work by René Pollesch, Rimini Protokoll, Gisele Vienne, Action Hero, Frank Castorf, Onroerend Goed, Tinned Fingers, Ivana Müller and, uh, Forced Entertainment (to name but several). I too, can happily live without a plot.

What’s more interesting is the direct comparison between the comments from the discussion of “the Classics” and the reviews of Dartington’s 4 Bar and Rising. Of the former Claire Trévien notes in her editorial, “Some DeMontfort students at the discussion mentioned a fear of misunderstanding these texts.” Meanwhile, the 4 Bar reviews frequently made reference to the apparently oblique nature of the work - its lack of story, its opaque meaning, etc. In other words “a fear of misunderstanding this text”.

It is apparent that this is not a simple question of ownership, but of confidence, theatrical vocabulary, entitlement, and the width of one’s frame-of-reference. Both “contemporary” movement-based, non-linear work and the canon of “classics” seem to throw different sets of students into apologetic or defiant despair.

The initial problem is one of anxiety, engendered primarily by the British education system, with a hefty bunk-up from wider British culture. British schools, with their emphasis on Shakespeare-exam passing, set up an almost perfect system for putting everyone off, while tacitly reinforcing the idea that Shakespeare – and by extension, the Greeks, the Romans, the rest of the Renaissance, the Spanish Golden Age, the Restoration, French neo-classicists, Enlightenment Germans, C19th Russians and so on – is a) difficult, and, b) something that you can get wrong.

When that is coupled to our boisterously Philistine culture, which deplores poncing about (a field into which theatre squarely falls, no matter how straightforward it is), and then to received wisdoms about “serving the text” and “doing it properly”, one can imagine why students might feel more inclined to approach something with a bit less baggage. Especially if, from the other side, they are being bombarded with information about more cutting-edge practioners and casual theories about how staging the classics is somehow reactionary, conservative or backward-looking.

Ironically, the students who have been given this impression then go on to create work which causes similar anxieties in those following the more “Eng. Lit.” route through “text-based theatre”. Coming from the latter background, I still remember the first bit of contemporary dance I saw that I didn’t dismiss out of hand, and the hours-long conversation I had afterwards with a dancer friend who patiently answered my questions until I felt comfortable that I understood what I’d seen. The fact is, assuming good faith and ability on the part of the makers, theatre can and often is a two-way exchange. There’s work in front of you (or around you, or whatever), but you often have to work at it too, but once you’re familiar with the genre, suddenly the viewing experience is transformed. The same is of course true of Shakespeare and the classics.

Mamos nearly concludes: “we could use these techniques to re-tell someone else’s classic story OR we could use them to blow the minds of our audience with something truly new... There are also some important, fascinating and truly beautiful pieces of contemporary theatre which move me and provoke thought in a way which no classical story ever could.” (We’ll ignore Sidney’s bit about being moved to virtue, as it’s the silliest sort of utilitarian argument imaginable – who wants to be “moved to virtue” FFS? Possibly David Hare and Michael Billington, but that’s not what art is for). I’m not entirely sure I buy the absolutism.

So: a plea. Stop thinking about the classics like you have been. Later this week there’s Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love. Have a look at that, note that it is “contemporary theatre” – a text – but also a “re-tell[ing of] someone else’s classic story”. And then think about the million ways Kane’s text itself might be staged. And maybe think about being less hung up on the boundaries. Stage Shakespeare. If necessary cut more than half the text. Stick a bunch of stuff into it. There’s no rule saying you can’t (in most of Europe I think there’s probably a law saying you must). Think again about what you’re trying to say, how you’re saying it, and why you’re saying it.

If you want a final argument, go and have a look at what Heiner Müller did to “classical” texts. Trust me, there’s very little by way of “narrative, emotional curve, suspense or unified conclusion”. Surprise yourself.

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Monday

This is a much better way of editing Noises Off - lying in bed watching The Wire, sleeping at night and getting the finished magazine whizzed over to me once it’s stopped being painful. I’ve even had time to sit in the garden and do a bit of reading today. Also, not being at the festival actually gives me enough time to actually write something, and enough sleep to ensure that it makes a kind of sense.

So, what to say as editor-in-absentia? Obviously, Claire and Phil are doing a horribly good job of proving just how dispensable I am, and there’s already plenty of thought-provoking content in the first issue to engage with.

The piece that most caught my eye, was Dan Hutton’s spirited defence of *proper* theatre critics. I’ll jump straight in at the least important point...

Dan Hutton says: “…if that isn't a perfect example of hypocrisy, I don't know what is.”

Dan, I’m afraid it’s the latter. The Daily Mail, for all its innumerable faults, emphatically never uses expletives, hell; it can only bring itself to describe oral sex as “an obscene sex-act”. If it is forced to quote swearwords for reasons of context it will invariably opt for three-letters-starred-out out of four (i.e. ‘c***’ as opposed to ‘c**t’, and certainly never ‘cunt’). Thus, Quentin Letts at least is free of hypocrisy when attacking a playwright for their use of expletives. Now, if Quentin Letts were to have attacked the play on the grounds that he was worried by its snide, insinuating, homophobic, racist, little-Englander tone, then you might have a case for this charge of hypocrisy you’ve now got going spare.

Hutton goes on to suggest: “Granted, the reviews of figures like Michael Billington of the Guardian and Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph may not be ideal if you want a riveting read...” For what it’s worth, I reckon Charles Spencer is a pretty good read actually, not super politically, or taste-wise, perhaps, but he can write. But neither he nor Michael Billington give the “balanced” argument Hutton claims for them. Perhaps if you were to offset the two critics one against the other, you *might* on occasion get a sort of left-right balanced view for those of retirement age, but both Michael and Charlie have their political leanings, their proclivities, their passions and their blind-spots. So let’s quickly scotch that idea of “balance” right now. Theatre critics don’t have to be balanced to be good. Indeed, they shouldn’t be “balanced”. They have to explain what it is they think they’ve seen – ideally in a way that allows other readers to see between the lines and think: “Well, Time Out’s Andrew Haydon *says* this new bit of postdramatic German avant-garde theatre is wonderful, but I think it sounds like nonsense and I shall not go.”

I’d also take issue with: “That’s what we need in a critic; someone who can put themselves in the shoes of the paying public and make a reasoned decision as to whether or not you should see the play, based on past experience.”
In fact, this is increasingly the view that editors are serving by appointing journalists who are essentially no different to the shoes of the paying public. Sorry. …whose shoes are essentially no different. The public (apparently) *want* Libby Ordinary and Quentin Pretend-to-be-Ordinary because the public can much more readily identify with them, because they disingenuously pretend they’re doing a different job. Faux-naif criticism of the sort practiced by Q. Letts, T. Young, M. Portillo, C. Hart and T. Walker isn’t different to criticism, it just knows less, or pretends to know less. It still needs to do the same thing – to tell people what it’s like seeing a particular play. Where Letts differs from Billington (and I’m not sure they differ half as much as you think – at least in terms of marking a play largely in terms of their approval of its political message) is that Letts foregrounds himself in his reviews as a harrumphing moral guardian, personally sickened by the way in which public money has been used to create yet another sickening celebration of sweary gays, or “trendy” something else. Billington, on the other hand, while just as steely in his opposite beliefs, generally absents himself from the picture altogether. What he says, *is*. Indeed, so thorough is his modesty, that he often runs the risk of looking like he really does believe that his word is definitive truth. It isn’t, of course, and while I’m sure he’d argue to the death for the primacy of the writer’s vision, he would at least concede that other people might see it differently.

Critics can’t and shouldn’t put themselves into the shoes of the paying public. For a start, it is hugely condescending to try to second guess “public taste” – as if it were somehow different to your own. Critics can describe a thing they’ve seen, perhaps lightly drawing on the authority that years of theatre-going have lent them, plus ideally a bit of other cultural knowledge, put it into a wider horizontal and vertical contexts (sorry, Robert [Hewison], nicked your phrase) and hopefully write it up in a way that other people find enjoyable to read.

I should end by apologising to Dan Hutton. You didn’t ask for any of this. You wrote a nice piece agreeing with Ian and defending theatre critics and what happens? A critic who’s not even at the festival picks up on your article and uses it as a framework to float a load of their own ideas. Perhaps that’s the most fundamental point. Ultimately, dear reader, no matter how good we critics are/think we are, you can always console yourself with the thought that we’re just parasites. Important, friendly parasites that are good for the overall ecology, perhaps, but parasites nonetheless.

(Team Noff, could someone buy Dan and drink and explain that I’m not really a c***)

Noises Off: Andrew Haydon is Unwell - Sunday

Hello. If this is your first festival, you’ve almost certainly never met me. Annoyingly, you won’t be meeting me this week either, because I’m not at the Festival. I was meant to be, oh yes. I was meant to be editing this very magazine, in fact. If you look at the Noises Off page of the programme, you’ll see my picture and biog along with Phil’s and Claire’s. Unfortunately, instead of editing Noises Off, this week I’m busy being seriously ill, or at least starting to recover from a serious illness, the gruesome details of which I shall spare you (although the astute amongst you may be able to discern the nature of this illness from a subtle series of clues left by my bastard colleagues in yesterday’s magazine :-).

This is the first Festival I’ve not been at since I first attended in 1997. Back then we had a Tory government, no one had a mobile phone, Google didn’t exist, theatre criticism was still practised by theatre critics, and, I realise to my horror, today’s 18-year-olds were only five. So, for potentially all the time you’ve been in full-time education, dear reader, I’ve been coming to NSDF. You can imagine, then, that it’s a bit of a wrench not being there (or here, from where you’re standing) this year. So, you’ll forgive me for not letting it go altogether.

With any luck, I’ll be being emailed a PDF of each day’s Noises Off so I can see what’s going on, and get a sense of how the Festival’s going. I’ve just read yesterday’s issue cover-to-cover (I recommend you do the same, although, you probably won’t get time until the train home) and it’s cheered me up like nothing on earth. The cheerful lunacy, wit and – most strikingly from a distance – the real buzz of optimism and anticipation. I always found those first issues to be a real bugger to put together, but this struck me as one of the best in years, even if reading Phil Mann’s first piece was worryingly seeing my own obituary.

Anyway, the sort-of purpose of this column – if it turns out to have a purpose at all – is, I guess to provide a kind of informed outside eye on the festival. It’s always been something that, as editor, I wished I had more of – that ability to sit outside as well as inside the festival bubble; the ability not to get sucked so far into rows, debates and even, on occasion, witch hunts, and not to lose a sense of perspective. Now I’ve got just about all the distance I could possibly wish for, and I’m quite interested to see what I get from the week following it only on (virtual) paper and what use, if any, my contributions will be.

Anyway, as I haven’t read anything about any of the plays yet – yes, I’ll have a stab at reviewing them too – I’ll suggest a different perspective on Jon Brittain’s “not being a dick” feature.

Jon makes nothing but sensible points in his article, especially in relation to writing reviews here at the festival. And, as a critic, I tend to pride myself on not being cheap or flippant at practioners’ expense. On the other hand, it is your primary duty to communicate precisely what you experienced – and ideally in a way that is entertaining to your readers, not one that is comforting to the artistes. So, by way of counter example, I leave you with a recent review by me which was written for and duly published by Time Out...

The Importance of Being Earnest – Upstairs at the Gatehouse
* (one star)

Thanks to an electrical cock-up, the press night of this production was turned into an open dress rehearsal, so all that follows should be read in the light of ‘mitigating circumstances’. This perhaps explains why the actors were wandering around under lighting states akin to a disco Battenberg cake – pink, yellow, pink, yellow – for example.

Interestingly, this is a staging of Wilde’s four-act, first draft of the play. On this showing, it is a resounding vindication of the editor’s craft. However, since this production also suffers from eccentric performances and a deeply ordinary staging, it is hard to say whether the script is entirely to blame.

Neither Marcus McSorley nor Oliver Fabian have anything like the pert charm needed to pull off Jack and Algernon, let alone comic ability, while Francis Cuka’s decision to play Lady Bracknell as a woman deep in thought, as if struggling to remember any of her lines, seems misguided at best.

Gemma Harvey turns in by far the best performance of the night as Cecily, while Louise Houghton gradually warms up as Gwendolen, despite playing the entire first scene as if on the verge of orgasm. But neither have enough stage-time to rescue the three hour production from the leaden boys and quotidian supporting cast.

Dress rehearsal or not, it’s difficult to imagine much more life ever being breathed into this creaky production. Avoid.

Off the Endz - Royal Court

Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz is the sort of play that almost killed off the Court under Ian Rickson. Essentially, it’s a play by a member of an identifiable minority (which can be pretty much anything other than white, male, heterosexual or middle class) writing something that purports to be unique to the experience of that minority. It smacks of condescension and is a theatrical cul-de-sac. For the writer and for theatre. Primarily, because of the form this sort of work takes. It is grounded in “authenticity”. We’re asked to believe that the characters are speaking precisely like people do in the real world (they’re not, but never mind). Actors are cast to look exactly like how they’d look in the real world. The sofa, telly, speakers and kitchen sodding sink, ffs, are, like, the exact same ones they’d have in real life. Forget poetry, metaphor, style or form. And forget that despite the fact that this *is* a work of imagination, it’s doing its utmost to pretend it’s fo’ real, bitch.

All that said, even if a play does belong to this terrible, misguided school, it can still be good. Exciting. Interesting. Moving. Intelligent. Funny. Off the Endz isn’t good. At all. In fact it is the longest hour-and-a-quarter I remember spending in a theatre. At the end I’d have been prepared to swear it had overrun by a full hour, bruv.

Let’s start by getting the good bits out of the way. It has some quite funny lines, and Ashley Walters’s performance as the staggeringly self-centred, misogynist would-be gangsta is worryingly believable. Walters also has a pretty impressive cock, which one gets to glimpse briefly (causing by far the biggest reaction in the audience of the night). In fact both leading males spend a fair amount of time with their shirts off, both packing physiques which rather reduce my desire to criticise the play at all.

And that’s about it on the positive side. Ultz’s set is as irritating as it is inevitable. The chic modern interiors are represented by, well chic modern interiors, while grim urban exteriors are represented by... You get the picture. Scene changes are performed under UV lighting so we can see luminous graffiti sprayed about the walls of the set. Well done. Very good. Very urban. Very evocative, man.

And then we get to the muthaf***in' text itself.

And it’s so bewilderingly awful that it’s hard to know where to start.

I mean, there’s the plot: it is hard to imagine a more tediously predictable trajectory. David comes out of prison, goes to see his ex, Sharon, who’s now pregnant and making an apparently nice life with David’s best mate Kojo. Then he goes to see Kojo at work and reveals himself to be a bit of a dick with the ladies. Anyway, the big crux is, he needs to get a job or some shit, but he don’t want that, and so quickly decides that he’ll be best off dealing “drugs” – which “drugs” remain unspecified throughout. He immediately manages source a massive supply and sets up as a dealer. Meanwhile, Kojo is struggling to pay debts, while Sharon turns out to be somewhat storecard-happy. Then Kojo looses his job...

Basically, one of them is nice and tries to do the right thing and the other one isn’t especially nice and doesn’t try to do the right thing, while justifying himself with the sort of swagger, self-importance and special-pleading that the Court hasn’t seen since Jimmy Porter started blaming everyone else for his problems in 1956.

Agbaje is conducting two critiques here: with one hand she’s painting a bleak picture of attempts at an aspirational life in the workforce during a recession – all maxed-out credit cards and wage-slavery, while with the other hand she’s conducting a callow investigation into street crime, drug-dealing, guns and gangs. And in the world of this play, that’s it. Binary choice. It’s so simple, it’s almost like a parable. It’s the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. One does idly wonder, given the obvious desire for *authenticity* exhibited elsewhere, whether plays about “people-with-jobs” should be written by “artists”, but let’s ignore that for now. It has an interesting effect. By combining a bleak view of the struggle of life under capitalism with the suggestion that to live outside it can only mean committing to a life of amoral violence, Off the Endz winds up preaching the same message as medieval Christianity: “life is shit, but you’d better not fuck about or terrible things will happen to you”. It is interesting to note that the author’s first thank you in the printed text of the play is to “Almighty God”. One wonders whether the unspoken, real message of this play is that there is a better life in the next world, so go joylessly about your business and commit no sins. Because that’s what it looked like from where I was sitting.

There isn’t even any ambiguity. Agbaje uses guns to make her moral point in the same way as the street gangs in her play use them to demand respect. Kojo strays a little bit and gets shot, but not fatally. David, having refused salvation (in the form of a train ticket to Nottingham and the ‘start of a new life’ – the opportunity to be re-born?) is last seen (according to the text), being stalked by the gang who shot Kojo (this last stage direction may have been cut in production – I couldn’t see any armed youths from my seat on the far left hand side of row E – but that’s not to say they weren’t there – my view of the left hand side of back of the stage was somewhat restricted). The implication is clear, having rejected the chance to toil with his head down, he is damned.

It is by making this a play specifically about race rather than class, that Agbaje causes the biggest problems. Given the narrative, given lines like: “When the stock markets crashed and all the banks were losing money – how many black faces did you see on TV? How many of our stories did they show?” and “Life is ten times harder for us” [my italics], it suddenly feels a whole lot more uncomfortable criticising its outlook than that of merely a dull play with an antique morality. By invoking “them” and “us”, it seems almost like it’s attempting to reserve the right to deflect criticism with: “You don’t know, you weren’t there”. Well, theatre is theatre, and this isn’t good theatre. As for the “authenticity”, I defer to a black theatre-maker of my acquaintance who said he hadn’t seen a play with clichéd, cardboard cut-out black characters that had offended him so deeply in years. That’ll do me.

In short, this is how the “authenticity” pays off: by creating a simplistic morality tale about a good person and a bad person, then filling each with clichés about “black people”, Bola Agbaje has written a play that would have been condemned as utterly racist if it had been written by a white person.


[all profanities and “authentic” words lifted from the text, except "motherfucking", which is taken from the title of the earlier Royal Court play CrazyBlack Muthaf***in'self]


N.B. For further reading, I refer you to this excellent article by Lindsay Johns.