Eurydice – Young Vic

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

Now here’s a thing: before this blog stalled for Christmas, I think I’d got into a bit of a rut – if not here, then certainly at the Guardian blog – grumbling about the lack of regietheater (or “directors’ theatre”) in Britain, and championing what few domestic examples I could find.

I suppose it stemmed from two years of seeing hand-picked examples of the specie at various international festivals. Having subsequently seen a few more run-of-the-mill examples in their local context on the mainland I might have calmed down about it a bit.

At the same time, seeing those more workaday bits of regietheater has opened my eyes to the fact that, like Britain’s “serving the play” culture (one which I think I might have been a bit prone to over-stating), regietheater can potentially be just as predictable in its way.

The other thing that struck me – and this dawned on my watching Bijan Sheibani’s production of Eurydice at the Young Vic on Friday night – is that Britain does actually have a kind of default school of “directors’ theatre”. (I can’t believe I’m about to apply this as a near-perjorative, but here goes...) That is to say, a set of (admittedly different) conventions that can be applied to a production, which don’t appear to be decisions suggested by the actual text. In fact, in this respect, this British version of Directors’ Theatre is perhaps more perverse than its European cousin, in that while mainland directors’ theatre might foreground itself more and look more like it’s perversely chosen to ignore how the play seems designed to function, it does at least take the text as its starting point. I’ now wondering if the same could be said of the British model I’m about to outline.

I suppose it’s taken me a while to formulate this as an idea because firstly, the acting in such productions still kind of errs toward the sort-of naturalistic. At least, there seems to be a degree of “psychological realism” (as my European colleagues despairingly note it) behind the performances – i.e. the performers, you know, act sad and cry and stuff when their characters are meant to be sad. And so on. So in that respect, it looks like it’s “serving the text”, yes?

And then there’s the design. This often tends not to be naturalistic, per se. As often as not, there won’t be any set at all. Or else the playing space will be an artfully constructed kind of symbolic space – think of the long wooden trough for Sheibani’s own production of Our Class at the NT, or perhaps the mostly undressed expanses of stage used in National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch.

This gets in under the critical radar (well, mine anyway) by looking like a cross between expedient economising (building barely any set, or just having a nicely made floor is presumably cheaper (and more practical on tour) than having half a dozen elaborately detailed model interiors, perhaps relying on lengthy installation, a revolve or fly-tower) and by hardly drawing any attention to itself at all. Again, this sort of bare-stage approach again looks like it’s “serving the text” – at least to the extent that there’s not a design concept drawing attention to itself (and thus – so the thinking might go – away from the all-important text).

But Sheibani’s Eurydice made me have a look at all these aspects of what we might call British “serving-the-text” directors’ theatre.

The action is set in the round on a nicely designed floor made from large sections of black metal mesh flooring (there must be a better word for this – you know the sort of thing I mean – the sort of thing that all the gantries in Aliens are made of, for example). Above it are hung the frames of two further black metal squares with neon lights running round them. At a couple of points, sprinklers erupt, fountain-like, in the centre of the floor. And there are various lighting states, mostly providing either gloomy full cover or stark down-lighting of specific areas. You’ll have seen it all before, I expect; but it looks nice enough.

Enter Orpheus and Eurydice: two attractive black actors in swimming clothes and goggles. They talk at each other for a bit about being in love and, you know, how Orpheus is a musician and how Eurydice is a bit clever. Then they decide to get married and run off again. Then Eurydice’s father enters. He is dead. We can tell this because he’s in a blueish-white light. And because he says so. Anyway, the whole thing goes on like this until the end, and you know the story anyway, right? (here it is, if not).

Playwright Sarah Ruhl’s contribution to the myth is this addition of this dead father, the shifting of most the focus to Eurydice and the time she spends in the underworld, the almost total removal of Pluto, king of the underworld – who in the text is denoted as “Child” – the addition of a chorus of stones to help explain the underworld and then make the ending more sad, by having Eurydice not only fail to be reunited with her earthly love, but unable to return to the apparent comfort of being with her father in the underworld. All of which is fair enough, and kinda highlights how male-centric the original version was.

The back of the published playtext quotes the New York Times claiming the play is “The most moving exploration of the theme of loss that the American theater has produced.” Assuming this quote hasn’t lost the word “Hardly” or “Not” from the beginning, it’s clear that something has gone deeply awry with this production.

It’s nice, sure. It looks completely competent – although actually it drags like nobody’s business – but most of all, in no way is does it really communicate a moving exploration of loss, least of all the *most* moving one produced by American theatre.

At such junctures, it seems fair to wonder if the production is to blame. This isn’t, after all, a transfer, but the first British production of the play. And it seems hard not to conclude that – assuming the New York Times isn’t given to insane hyperbole (which seems a safe bet) – it’s this production which has drained the text of whatever power it achieved in New York.

So I had a bit of a read of the script on the way home. Not an exhaustive one, you understand, but enough to notice the extent to which this production seems to run almost at a divergent right-angle from what the play seems to be trying to do.

In fact, the show that the script seems to describe – there’s another whole essay to be written looking at the Anglophone tradition of playwrights basically directing their plays themselves through specific stage directions, set descriptions and so on, but – would, I imagine, look a bit more like actual “directors’ theatre” than Sheibani’s production does.

And yet, by ignoring all this – stage directions, seemingly the tone of the play, perhaps the best way of making the dynamic of the text work – Sheibani’s production is actually total regietheater, albeit, a sort of British *stealth* regietheater which looks like it’s making a modest, serving-the-text version of the play.

I’m not sure why this interests/bothers me so much. Perhaps it’s the level of disingenuity I’m inferring. By creating a production in which no elements really draw attention to themselves, Sheibani seems to be “letting the play speak for itself” in the manner that we (the British) understand by that phrase (i.e. – there absence of “wanky” bells and whistles – there is a chorus, for example, but they’re dealt with in the usual, slightly embarrassed, understated we-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-choruses kind of way). But, in actual fact, has put on a production that almost amounts to a tin-ear for the dynamics of the play while dressing it up in such an unshowy manner that it makes it look like it’s all the play’s fault.

Now, none of the above is to say that I’ve had some massive Damascene conversion as regards “serving the text”. I still have a lot of time for productions of texts which might be said to “run against the grain of what the text appears to be doing”. Ultimately, I guess a play is only as good in the moment as any given production is making it, be that running in the same direction that the text appears to, or radically against it. Pre-conceptions of how texts *should* be staged still aren’t helpful, but once something seems not to have worked, it seems reasonable to investigate why that might have been the case.

Hope that all makes sense, and you can still get a sense of the play which, I fear, I’ve rather allowed to become a hostage to a wider question.

Might revise a bit, once the above has had a little time to breathe.

London Assurance – National Theatre

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

London Assurance is perhaps the nicest play ever written. It’s a mid-C19th confection that makes even Shakespeare’s happiest comedies before it and Wilde after look chippy at best and steeped in impenetrable gloom at worst.

On the surface it seems to have no grudge with anyone (apart from lawyers), the characters are largely likeable – or at least are rendered with such sympathetic charm here, that it’s impossible not to warm to them – with the exception of the lawyer, Meddle, and he hardly suffers in the same way as, say Malvolio. The play’s scenario – the planned execution a marriage dictated by a will – is hardly presented as the potential tragedy which it might have been. And while the characters do have stuff at stake, it’s a) very lightly worn, b) easily resolved, and c) resolved to everyone’s betterment.

There’s none of the cruelty of Twelfth Night, none of the fear at the heart of Much Ado, and none of the snippiness that underscores Wilde’s comedys. It also feels a damn sight nicer than any of the romps of the Restoration. Hell, it even makes Four Weddings and a Funeral or Love, Actually feel like Kafka or Conrad. Perhaps the only other comic plotter who comes close in terms of fondness for their characters, pleasant absurdity and painless fun is P.G. Wodehouse. Everyone else suddenly looks like they’re obsessed with tragedy and just tack on “happy” conclusions having tortured their audiences for the preceding few hours.

That the play feels this way is curious, because on pretty much all levels there’s potential for London Assurance (originally entitled 'Country Matters' - and plainly the NT should have changed the title back) to be rather troubling. After all, one of its main characters is a upper-class, fox-hunting enthusiast, her sometime suitor is a horribly affected elderly rake, while his son is a feckless one-man credit-crunch. There’s also a very strange sequence which seems to play entirely on a number of the characters’ apparent discomfort with Jewish money-lenders.

In a way, one wonders if this isn’t the stealthiest manifestation yet of Nick Hytner’s search for the Great Right-Wing play. There’s certainly much here to delight everyone from the Countryside Alliance to the Daily Mail.

And yet it’s a complete delight. Indeed, I only mention these potential ideological stumbling blocks upfront to forestall the saccharine gush which is about to follow.

The plot is the classic young lovers initially thwarted by circumstance situation, which seems to date back to the dawn of non-tragic drama.

The feckless Charles Courtly (Paul Ready doing an uncanny of Hugh Grant playing Edward Fox (a link worth clicking, for once) playing a likeable version of Prince Charles) returns drunk in the early morning to his room at his father’s house with Richard Dazzle (Matt Cross). Thanks to a series of misunderstandings and tricks, Dazzle is mistaken for Charles and manages to get himself invited to the country house of Squire Max Harkaway, to whose 18-year-old niece, Grace (Michelle Terry), Charles’s father Sir Harcourt Courtly (Simon Russell-Beale) is due to be married, thanks to a convoluted will made by her father, Harcourt Courtly’s best friend, which only allows her to come into possession of his land if she marries said friend.

So, Richard and Charles trot off to the country to escape Charles’s creditors. Inevitably, Sir Harcourt Courtly isn’t far behind, and so everyone winds up in the country together, with Charles pretending to be an entirely made up person who just happens to be the dead spit of Sir Harcourt’s son Charles. Of course, Charles immediately falls in love with Grace, his father takes a fancy to married friend-of-the-Harkaway’s Lady Gay Spanker (it’s a mark of the conviction with which this ridiculous play is being acted that this hostage-to-fortune of a name doesn’t raise a single smirk on stage, beyond the simple innocence of it hearty intentions), played with gusto by a game Fiona Shaw. Richard Briers even turns up playing her octogenarian husband, Adolphus, of whom Lady Spanker seems enormously fond.

There’s not a lot of point in relating the myriad twists and turns of the plot. If you’ve read any P.G. Wodehouse you can imagine the basics, but [SPOILER ALERT – well, sort of...] Dazzle and Courtly Jr. enlist the help of Lady Spanker to flirt Sir Harcourt away from Grace so Charles can make a play for her, albeit in disguise. Grace is a bit too bright for all this. Sir Harcourt and Adolphus nearly come to blows and then everything is suddenly resolved completely amicably with everyone proving remarkably considerate and generous.

And this is the strange thing. The plot really doesn’t seem to bear anyone any malice. Generally in comedies, you can get a sense of whom the author really likes by how the characters all end up, but here pretty much everyone seems to come out of the story happy and improved, with the exception of Meddle, the lawyer, who doesn’t come out of it any the worse for having been through it.

Indeed, there’s a rather touching scene in which Sir Harcourt Courtly suddenly has this vast moment of self-revelation and immediately reveals himself to be a kind-hearted, decent chap who just happened to fancy himself a bit before. It’s all incredibly light and sweet.

However, the real joy and generosity about this show is generated by the performances. This is, after all, a first-rate cast by anyone’s estimation (anyone? Really? I bet I could find people who’d disagree, but...) – at least three actors who are regarded as National Treasures in Shaw, Russell-Beale and Briers, one of the best, least-showy-offy and most unsung actors of his generation in Ready and the NT’s ongoing choice of quirky leading lady in Terry (previously the eternal love-interest in England People Very Nice), along with an exceptional supporting cast.

More than the theatrical starriness, which you can take or leave, it’s the sheer expertise and enjoyment flowing off the stage that really gets you: Simon Russell-Beale’s willingness to make himself look utterly ridiculous, his enormous eyes turning imploringly or imperiously upon the audience – kind of like a wounded-but-inflatable Frankie Howerd; or the way that previously-thought-of-as-frightfully-serious actress (Three Men and a Little Lady and the Harry Potter films notwithstanding) Fiona Shaw is basically having a tremendous laugh mucking about; although it’s perhaps Richard Briers’s brief cameos as the befuddled Adolphus Spanker that take the funniest-character-acting biscuit.

There’s not really much point in any analysis beyond that, although I’m sure some would be possible. And if one worried away at it for long enough, I’m sure one could make finding the whole enterprise fun quite morally suspect and theatrically recidivist, but for once that doesn’t seem all that important. Sure, it’s hetero-normative, status-quo-endorsing, reactionary twaddle, but it’s enormously comforting, generous-spirited and brilliantly performed, so why worry?

Barker day – Riverside Studios

To Hammersmith for a whole day of Howard Barker plays – one rehearsed reading and two full productions.

It’s difficult to know the best way to approach reporting these three performances. Single reviews of each, if properly discrete entities, won’t allow for the conversation that they seem to set up around the work, whereas a lengthy essay about the whole day, recent thoughts on Barker and the whole Wrestling School aesthetic... Well, it’d be unwieldy and would probably end up obscuring the plays themselves.

So, what I’ve done is write everything in one document and then tried to separate them out as distinct reviews, albeit ones which, along with this header, can be read as a single continuous argument.

This whole Barker thing starts last October, where, during the same week that I saw Shunt’s Money and Tim Crouch’s The Author, I was also sent to review the latest Howard Barker play, Found in the Ground, for Time Out. Up to that point, I’d pretty much considered myself at the very least a wry admirer of Barker’s work. I’d read pretty much all of it (well, from Stripwell and Claw onwards – which omits his 1969/70 debuts, early Bush plays and a few radio dramas). Indeed, I’ve read far more of Barker’s work than his increasingly selective programme bibliographies admit he’s written and I’d seen pretty much everything the Wrestling School had made since the 1999 production Scenes from an Execution onwards. After Found in the Ground, I was a bit worried.

As the review, and a subsequent Guardian blog piece which I wrote on the subject, makes clear, I was pretty worried by being worried. That Guardian piece now reads to me like a rather constructive climbdown from an initial position of not inconsiderable irritation. Lots about Found in the Ground had got on my wick in a very under-the-skin kind of way.

The problem was, as well as not liking Found in the Ground, I found it rather difficult to see how it significantly differed from the other works, which I’d previously enjoyed. What hadn’t worked in FitG wasn’t so far removed from the aesthetic of previous productions and yet it had really grated. So, not only did I end up not especially liking one particular play, I wound up questioning what I’d liked about the others, and rather worrying about either something like “the scales falling from my eyes”, or else Barker finally getting closer to realising a lot of the artistic ambitions which he sets out in Arguments for a Theatre and me not liking it one bit.

Whatever it was, it felt like a slightly traumatic parting of the ways. (And, yes, I’m aware of how egocentric all this angst sounds, but...)

Which brought me nervously to Hammersmith, rather hoping that I wasn't going to hate the next eight or so hours. Not least because eight hours is a rather long time to spend not enjoying oneself voluntarily.

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Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward – Riverside Studios

[continued from above]

Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward does not bode well at all.

It is a (somewhat under-rehearsed) rehearsed reading of what is apparently to be the Wrestling School’s next production. Knowing this, I wound up watching the reading in three ways at once. Because it was a rehearsed reading, two parts of my attention were the usual “radio play pictures-in-my-head” of what (for me, at least) usually turns out to be a cinematic version of what’s being read out on stage. This was quite good. Then there’s the actual fact of looking at the actual people, actually standing or sitting there in front of you with the scripts in their hands saying the words. That was basically fine too – the radio-play element mitigating some slightly – forgivably – underpowered performances. I mean, if they’ve only had the scripts for a day, then one can’t expect miracles.

But then there was the third element. The, perhaps slightly unfair, mental picture I imagined of the inevitable Wrestling School production.

I’m not sure I can think of a more damning indictment of a critic than a panning of a production that he has only imagined, and yet that’s kind of what was going on.

If I say the text is “pure Barker”, does that communicate anything? Put simply, all the elements – though largely original within the corpus of his work – seemed completely familiar. The language, obviously the language was familiar. The subjects: her arse, her cunt, the mother, the white linen, the mechanical bed, the white linen sheets on the mechanical bed, the son, the transgressive sexual act, the talk of desire, of fucking...

You get the picture.

And so, there I was, imagining exactly what it was going to look like when it returned as a full production. And in my head it looked exactly like the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the actors would probably be mostly the same actors, approaching the text in mostly the same way, and wondering vaguely which middle-age actress it would be this time taking off her dress or her leather trenchcoat to reveal herself naked save for a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of high heels, and thinking, well, yes, it’s all very well being an “Artist” and, sure, Monet did an awful lot of water-lilies in his time, but, blimey, it ain’t half samey.

And I got to wondering about how much value there really was in all this thematic repetition, or re-treading or whatever it is. And I could still kind of see how, production-to-production this might feel quite absorbing to everyone involved, but then I only come and see the end result. And these end results – with notable exceptions – are starting to get to a point where – save for changes of names, and nominal changes of situations – thewy are becoming indistinguishable from one another. As if, no matter what period of history or dynamic between characters, the same soundscape will be drifting across the – inevitably war-shattered – landscape, the sharp high-pitch grasp of strings when *a moment* occurs, and a woman naked save for a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of high heels will be a constant.

At which point, even being able to focus on the particulars of this specific scenario seemed largely futile. It makes much the same noise as the last one, and that is pretty much that.

By the end of ...Dying Ward, I was quite gloomy about the prospects for the rest of the day.

So it’s good that Slowly was completely different.

Slowly might well be one of Howard Barker’s best plays. At this stage in the game it was a bit hard to tell whether I was just insanely grateful that it was at least visually different to his last umpteen productions, was only an hour long, and seemed also to be formally different to, well, pretty much everything else he’s written in the past decade...

[continues below]

Slowly – Riverside Studios

[continued from above]

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

Four women dressed in severe, black, stylised renaissance dresses sit in four angular wooden chairs under pale lights. Straight-backed and rigid, they muse on the relative merits of having their bodies burned.

“We can be burned // We can be burned / shall I make the case for burning? //The case for burning turns on what occurs when women are not burned // I will describe the fate of dead but unburned women”

The main advantage being that, burned, their corpses cannot be raped and defiled by the barbarian hordes who, we learn, are approaching their – well, I assume – castle. But for their bodies to be burned, they must be dead. No one wants to be burned alive, after all and so the conversation turns to having their throats cut.

The rhythm of the piece, despite Barker’s characteristically rich language, is staccato. The women are taut, tense and on the verge of (non-naturalistic) hysteria.

What is brilliant about this text and, importantly, this staging of it, is how allusive it proves to be.

At the outset, you’re pretty much prepared to take the severe early-modern costumes on trust – believing the women to be perhaps the ladies in waiting to say Mary Queen of Scots, or, with the addition of “barbarians” perhaps some Mittel-European countesses.

But then there’s this brilliant moment where one of the women says, “We will undo our costumes at the throat / when we have exposed our throats we will call him [a servant] /.../ He will be uncomfortable / never having seen our throats / but we will reassure him...” What’s brilliant about it is the fact that in these particular costumes the throats of the four women are already exposed.

Suddenly, you get this sense that the costumes can be regarded as entirely symbolic. Instead of this coming across like a period drama, the viewer is freed to imagine these women anywhere in the world – primarily in a society that still demands that its women’s throats are covered. Suddenly we could be in Kabul or Tehran, the “barbarians” could easily be Western soldiers.

All at once there’s this telescoping effect where you re-hear the words that they’ve been saying and how much they map onto the way in which women are treated as tools of warfare and subjugation, from the sack of Troy, through the middle ages, through Henry V, through the rape of Eastern Europe by the Russians, to the Congo or Uganda today. Similarly, the language of contempt for the enemy becomes at once more and less loaded. It questions our, even uneasy acceptance of terms like “barbarian”. Much though Barker mightn’t like the thought, the play seems to be usefully *about* something.

Hannah Berrigan’s production is also outstanding. Alongside the austerely perfect crisp costumes and beautiful lighting, there is the sheer stillness of the performances. If anything, the two of three bits of actual movement and subtle shifts in lighting state feel like too much. I’d have happily watched the four women rooted, Beckett-style, to their chairs with all the discussed and implied movement simply stated rather than executed.

The performances are also quite something. Thanks, in part to the minimalism of everything else, the vocal work becomes particularly striking. Each of the four actresses is in possession of a quite remarkable voice, and here are given full licence to use them at full range. In lesser situations it might sound like a parody of the fruitiest RSC acting going, but here, coupled with the enjoyably amusing, ironic tone of their arch dialogue – this is one of those plays where Barker remembers he’s actually quite funny when he feels like it – it feels like watching virtuoso musicians using their instruments perfectly. It’s not aiming for naturalism in the slightest, instead there’s a kind of heightened epic grandeur to it all. Of the four Suzy Cooper, in particular is mesmerising with the almost overhead lights casting deep shadows under razor-sharp cheekbones.

And, yes, somehow it bears comparison to a kind of politicised, historical Beckett, conjuring the women of Come and Go, the adulterers of Play and the screaming mouth of Not I. It is also a welcome deviation from what has become the norm of Barker’s late work, instead echoing instead his great mid-period stuff like Scenes from an Execution and, more especially, The Europeans.

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Hurts Given and Received – Riverside Studios

[continued from above]

After the excitement of Slowly, Hurts Given and Received is slightly less of an adrenaline rush. But, given how good Slowly is, it also got itself a far more receptive hearing than it might have done if it had followed straight on from ...Dying Ward or Found in the Ground.

The basic structure of the thing gets right back to the classic template of late Barker work. That is: a person, usually of some power or distinction, remains in a place and is variously visited and prevailed upon by all manner of colourful intruders each of whom seems to advance this protagonist toward his or her seemingly inevitable denouement.

Here, the central tragic figure is Bach (or Bark’ as we might think, but Howard couldn’t possibly comment), a poet (and no discernable relation to Johann Sebastian, or any of his progeny), who is struggling to write a poem, but keeps being interrupted.

In many ways, this is a classic plot structure from Pat Hutchins’s Good Night, Owl! to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol via Simon Grey’s broadly loathsome Otherwise Engaged, the idea of a continually frustrated central character is a satisfying source of both comic and farcial potential.

And, in fairness, this isn’t Barker at his most serious. Sure the main thrust of the thing seems to rest on some pretty bald assertions about the importance of poetry and the terrible sacrifices that poets needs must make in order to crank out their life’s work – none of which, I have to say, is terribly convincing; but the business that surrounds this is largely pretty entertaining.

Bach’s visitors, you see, are a pretty wacky bunch. There’s his best friend Detriment – get used to the names – (Alan Cox) who enters in a ridiculous lime green shirt and trousers and then, having being rebuffed by Bach, re-enters to disembowel himself. There are a couple of mistresses – including the inevitable naked-save-for-high-heels-and-hat one, and then there’s a 12-year-old girl called Sadovee 1 (incredible performance by Issy Brazier-Jones), who essentially seduces Bach into murdering her, so that he is then in turn murdered by her (amusingly rough cockney) father, accompanied by her sister Sadovee 2 (Issy B-J again, again excellent). Alan Cox turns up again, this time as a poet called Stays (bearing a striking resemblance to T.S. Eliot) and is entrapped by Sadovee 2...

You get the picture. It’s all pretty eventful and rolls along at a fine pace.

As such it’s hugely diverting. A lot of the things that the characters say to each other are quite funny or witty, and Tom Riley has a hell of a way with acting, making the part of Bach seem like Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet crossed with David Tennant’s Hamlet, plus Tennant's Katurian from The Pillowman, all being played at once by Tom Hollander. As such, Riley does a phenomenal job of making the script sound like great, hugely, actable literature – on the other hand, he does so in a way that, thanks to either his performance or Barker’s take on the world, stops short of being an actual person. It’s technically brilliant, but seems to lack anything deeper.

And this is sort of the wider problem.

I guess we’re back to Barker’s assertion of him “fearlessly asserting a world devoid of morality” or somesuch. And, yes, it’d be an interesting idea if it came off, but it really doesn’t seem to. Not least because one man’s “amoral characters guided by the primacy of their desires” (I’m paraphrasing – those are scare marks, not quotes) is another man’s “bunch of people acting like petulant, worryingly over-sexualised children”.

Where in Slowly the whole seemed to function beautifully as a metaphor and specific comment about an actual world and actual things that actual people might conceivably actually think, the world of Hurts... seems to offer less internal logic than Alice’s Wonderland.

And again, we’re back to this wrestling with what the problem with this is. And kind of the problem is that the bits of interaction that don’t read as human – the bits that aren’t funny or don’t resonate – despite often sounding like they’re beautifully written don’t penetrate the consciousness in anything like the same way. You hear the words and acknowledge what they’re saying, but if they don’t amount to anything that does more than faintly echo a deliberately disingenuous take on personhood, what is the point in torturing yourself into entertaining them as ideas, as poetry or even as delicious nonsense?

I enjoyed the enjoyable bits of Hurts... It was possibly about twenty minutes longer than it needed to be. It contains some astonishingly good acting. And, acknowledging that Barker can’t abide functionality. Even acknowledging that. It's hard to see what it’s for. I think I get what its inventor thinks it's up to, but I’m not sure that’s what it actually does.

It a bit like being confronted by someone convinced of the fact they’ve invented a freezer compartment, but who keeps presenting you with trays of cold water instead of ice cubes. Disconcerting, certainly; but possibly not in the intended manner.

I Went to the House But Did Not Enter - Barbican

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

After a rather bumper week in terms of watching and writing I was hoping that I Went to the House but Did Not Enter might serve as an end-of-week chill-out. After all, it’s described as a staged concert, with texts by T.S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett set to music composed by Heiner Goebbels, performed by the Hilliard Ensemble and placed within stagings designed by the same. It doesn’t pan out quite like that.

I first came across Heiner Goebbels work at SpielArt in Munich in 2007 with his piece Stifter’s Dinge (Stifter’s Things – Stifter being an Austrian poet with a reputation for being deeply dull). What had stayed with me about that piece was firstly the surprise of going to a “theatre festival” and the first piece I saw having no actual performers on stage. The other thing that had stayed with me was the final image (was it the final image? I think it was close to the end at any rate) of a huge, shallow tray on stage being filled with salt or sand, black water gradually covering it, and dry ice drifting out over it as rain began to pour onto it from the lighting rig, making the water look like it was boiling. It was one of the most beautiful, original stage effects I’ve ever seen in a theatre. It doesn’t sound like much on paper, but, trust me, it was both very pretty and very impressive.

What I’d filtered out was that I’d actually spent much of the rest of the piece feeling a bit bored and fidgety. I soon remembered, though. Roughly twenty minutes into the 1hr45 of I Went to the House..., in fact.

Which is pretty unfair of me. I did, after all, request the ticket to see this. No one was twisting my arm. And, well, I do have a bit of a reputation for liking austere, minimalist, Teutonic work.

Well, somewhere in between watching plays with little movement in a language I don’t understand and this staged concert (in a language I did understand, with a bit more movement) lies my cut-off point. This really wasn’t my bag – although given that I’d had a pretty long week by this stage, this might partly have been a failure of my caffeine intake as much as anything else.

I should record that the vast majority of the audience seemed far better attuned to the work than I was, and applauded rapturously at the end, so it had clearly fulfilled most people’s expectations. And if nothing else, there was something oddly heartening about sitting in the Barbican’s large theatre and feeling like the dumbest non-aesthete there.

Perhaps my biggest problem was the sound of the music. I’d forgotten that I was faintly familiar with the Hilliard Ensemble from that CD of coffee-table music/portentous musical wallpaper that they did with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, which, in common with most other Classic FM listeners at the beginning of the nineties, my parents owned. My memory is that I quite liked it at the time, although I suspect I’d regard it with more suspicion now.

But, yes, the point is this is pretty monkish sepulchral stuff. Beautifully sung, but incredibly cold.

Similarly, the first setting was almost comically austere. Elegantly grey wallpapered walls of an Edwardian living room or hallway tower above the four members of the Hilliard Ensemble, themselves also clothed in sombre grey suits looking like they might come from the former half of the twentieth century. All is silent. After quite a while of this sort of silence, it becomes almost funny. There’s a temptation to giggle. The men stand silently still, contemplating a table, austerely laid with while china teacups and a white, porcelain, horse’s-head-shaped vase.

Two of the men go off and bring back on a large cardboard packing case. Slowly, very slowly indeed, everything in the room, the pictures, the curtains, the teacups, the flowers, the teapot the tablecloth and the vase are all placed in the box. Amusingly the water in the vase is also poured into an unseen receptacle within the cardboard box.

The box is moved out. Either during this process or once it has ended, the setting of Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is sung. Once this is done, or perhaps while it is still going, another box – almost identical to the last one, but slightly smaller, is brought into the room. From it nearly identical items are brought from it and placed back into the room almost perfectly reproducing the original scene – albeit with a black horse’s-head vase and different coloured flowers.


The point where the room has been packed does manage to actually pack quite a tragic punch. Coupled with Eliot’s mournful verse of a life reviewed with regret, this image of a person’s fastidious existence being neatly packed away is somewhat heartbreaking. The suggestion that this life will be replaced by a similarly ordered facsimile life by the room’s new occupant (at least I’m assuming this is the intended near-narrative; it needn’t be, but it seems the most likely) is less tragic than depressing.

For the next scenario, once Prufrock is done, the grey wallpapered walls are dismantled and slide noiselessly into the wings. The top of the room rises into the flies and the floor is rolled up. Next the full-sized frontage of a suburban Swiss or German-looking house is rolled to the front of the stage. Pavement is placed before it and a wheelie bin appears next to it. When it is all set up the lighting state – including the shadow of an unseen tree cast by and unseen streetlight – flicks on and the next scenario starts. This is the text by Blanchot, of whom I have never previously heard, although he was mates with Bataille and Levinas, so I probably should have done. Here the singers speak a vast majority of the text – a short story called La Folie du Jour, composed of a series of observations by the narrator or narrators.

The Kafka piece follows on from this set in front of the house rather than looking into its four visible rooms, is entirely sung rather than mostly spoken and is perhaps the funniest of the four pieces. I’m not sure why I kept looking for this compulsion to laugh - perhaps because the thing felt almost oppressively serious, that one was compelled to look for the chinks of lightness in its heavy armour.

The Beckett piece occasions another scene change. The house is wheeled away again and replaced by a huge corner section of a room that looks like a guesthouse from the 1950s with large ominous flowery wallpaper – think of a David Lynch film based in Scarborough crossed with the set of Romeo Castellucci’s Purgatorio and you’ll have a rough idea.

Once this scene change is finished – and I rather loved the deliberation of this – a pitch black safety curtain is lowered and the opening words of Beckett’s Worstward Ho are projected onto it in glowing green computer lettering.

“On”

“Say On”

A worrying proportion of the audience take this as an instruction. They’re probably the ones who laugh at:

“Ever tried”
“Ever failed”
“No matter”
“Try again”
“Fail again”
“Fail better”

Once we’ve got a fair way through the text, the screen lifts and the Hilliard chaps monastically sing their way through it all again, with the added incidence of their shifting about in the room slightly and gradually alighting on a slide projector and showing a selection of suggestive (not in the sense of smutty) snaps which again suggest a 1950s mid-American family on holiday, but honestly they could be anywhere. I think it’s just the David Lynch thing going into overdrive for me.

And when that’s done, the piece is over.

I’m not sure I’m managed to do full justice to just how severe all this felt as an aesthetic. It’s not that it actually made a specific point out of refusing comfort, but there wasn’t much to be had. The music had no tunes, the scenes had little or no action, the characters, or persons on stage gave away precious little about themselves.

On one hand, it felt like an exercise in reading the stage, but then there was also all this text also being sung. Strangely, in spite of all the moaning I’ve just done about seriousness and austerity, there was something refreshing about the whole thing. Like a kind of aesthetic sorbet. A minimalist palette cleanser after what was starting to feel like a theatrical motorway pile-up. As such, I think the piece has value, and probably a good deal more value to someone not quite as crushingly ignorant about contemporary music as I am. And once in a while it’s nice to be reminded that I’m not as postdramatic as I like to imagine; so, a useful experience, perhaps, if not actually *fun*, per se.

Women Beware Women - National Theatre

[written for CultureWars.org.uk]

Other than Buggins’s Turn, it’s hard to make out why the National have chosen to stage Women Beware Women. At least, Marianne Elliott’s production doesn’t seem like the work of someone with a burning desire to do the play. It feels much more like a case of someone trying to get us all through something they've been asked to do as painlessly as possible.

That’s not to say that it’s unwatchable – indeed, the intention is clearly to make it as watchable as possible – but it does feel both deeply inessential and rather like a bad job that someone’s tried to make the best of. Indeed, having spent the pre-show admiring Lez Brotherston’s modern sculptural centrepiece set, it comes as a bit of a shock when Samuel Barnett wanders on and starts speaking in early modern English.

Like last year’s Revenger’s Tragedy and Nicholas Hytner’s Man of Mode or The Alchemist before that, it feels like the NT has hit a house style for reviving plays written before, say, 1800. The costumes are largely modern-ish or at least present day retro Italian 1960s looking things, with the odd medieval jerkin thrown in for the guards. The set is a two-sided, slick, mostly black, crumbling stone arch on a revolve which basically serves as backdrops for high- and low-life interiors and exteriors depending on lighting – much of which is provided by some enormous floodlights artfully hung on either side of the stage like implacable satellites.

It’s not a bad way of doing things, per se, but it does seem to be almost the default way of doing The Classics at the moment: the modern-ish costumes, so we can kind of get what *sort* of character someone’s meant to be because they’re dressed in a way that their present-day equivalent now might dress; the slightly over-done designer kitsch/bling vileness that marks out the more regrettable end of current fashion so that the whole appeals to (or at least connotes) the Selfridges/Harvey Nicks demographic and denoting the arriviste mercantile spirit of the times; and the slightly over-stated catholic kitsch to remind us, a) we’re in Italy, and b) of the troubled religious times during which the plays were forged.

(That said, it does make me curious about what revivals of current plays in 400 years time will look like, assuming they/humanity last/s that long)

Anyway, that’s all window dressing. We’re here to see a play. Aren’t we?

Perhaps not. It does feel a bit like the actual play itself is forever being pushed to the back of the room like an embarrassing uncle at a posh do. And with good reason. Given all the pains that have been taken to make the stage look smart and funky, the last thing you want is a shabby relic from a bygone age – with worryingly different values – turning up and cackling about incest and not terribly consensual intercourse.

The fact is, Women Beware Women is hardly a play with an attractive or modern outlook. As Howard Barker put it (in Conversation with Dead Poet - Arguments for a Theatre, p.25), "it is simply unrealistic to inflict slaughter on all the participants in the interests of morality. It was quite obvious to me you [i.e. Middleton] did not believe in that yourself but were fulfilling a convention".

Elliott seems to have taken a decision to present a lot of the characters as more sympathetic to a modern viewpoint, perhaps more than the text actually makes possible. The never-less-than-adorable Samuel Barnett turns the piece’s problematic protagonist Leantio from a man uxorious to the point of virtually imprisoning his wife into a Frank Spencerish worrier. When this fails and the object of his affections, Bianca (Lauren O’Neil), is seduced by a handily passing Duke, the way O’Neil plays a clutch of some of the most cynical lines in Eng. Lit. is more as “rape victim” than self-fashioning renaissance subject. One can see the modern point, but it reads here more like overplayed commentary on the text than actual characterisation.

Of the rest, Harriet Walter’s Livia is far and away the best thing on stage, although she – along with the other women – highlights another way in which this production is awful squeamish about what’s actually written in the text. I usually shy away from over-literal casting decisions, but here it’d be really interesting to see the play performed with an ultra-realistic cast. Put simply, the two young female love interests about both sixteen, Leantio is meant to be twenty and Livia, played by Harriet Walter (59) is meant to be 39. I know it wasn’t even written for women to play the women, and there’s no real argument for a staging where the performers are the same age as the characters they’re meant to play. Here it feels like yet another level of passing the thing off as being as socially acceptable as possible, though.

Granted the audience still seem to find Harriet Walter seducing young Barnett humorous (admittedly she is vamping and camping it up for all she's worth) – Lord knows why, she’s still the sexiest thing on stage by a country mile – but it’s the comic end of uncomfortable, not the disquieting. I’d rather see the really disturbing, near-the-knuckle version about barely-legal brides and watch the audience squirm, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the Dutch version for that. The final multiple murder ball is quite interesting; I think it manages to quote the death scenes (and possibly recent stagings thereof) from at least five other Jacobethan tragedies – although I’d have to check the text to see if that’s Elliott or Middleton’s invention.

And that’s kind of it. It’s very prettily done, doesn’t have a subversive bone in its body, beyond its repeated undermining of the text’s nastiness, and is artfully tasteful throughout. I don’t think there’s even a drop of stage blood spilt, despite the ludicrous pile-up of murder at the end. Hardly essential viewing.

_______

Spotted on press night: Jenni Murray. Raising the questions: a) is she contractually obliged to see everything with *Women* in the title, b) would Women Beware Woman’s Hour be a better title for a play?

Pressure Drop - Wellcome Collection

[In the interests of full disclosure, while he's (ironically) not actually a relation, I have known Pressure Drop director Chris Haydon for well over a decade and we’re friends. I hope this doesn’t have any bearing on my opinion of the show, but since it has given me a small amount of backgrohnd on how the show got made, rather than pretending I don’t know anything, I’ll just write whatever I feel like. As such, this may or may not *count* as “proper review”].

Pressure Drop is On Theatre’s (that’s the name of the company) latest “theatre essay”. The methodology behind these theatre essays is essentially that (in this instance) writer Mick Gordon and director Chris Haydon interview a number of people either intimately or intellectually connected to the subject under scrutiny – Pressure Drop began life as On Identity, before finding a home at the Wellcome collection as part of its own investigation into identity – and then go away and write a play in which these some of views or reflections resurface in or inform what the characters think or say.

From this process, emerges a play, crossed with an installation, crossed with a gig. Like the other recent gig-show Micro, it’s a lovely idea, but what of the practice?

The subject of Pressure Drop is, topically enough, English/British nationalism/racism (even more so since Gordon Brown’s election-trail faux pas on the subject seems to have gone nuclear this morning). Specifically, if not explicitly, the rise of the British National Party in Barking, Essex and takes the form of a promenade performance across three stages – a funeral parlour, a living room, and the corner of a pub, plus a fourth stage on which Billy Bragg and his band play songs and provide background and scene-change music and a bit of light-hearted banter.

The play tells the story of the Cleggs (again, amusingly, unintentionally topical), a working class family living in Barking. Jack (Michael Gould) has lost his father, his more successful brother, Jon (Justin Salinger) is returning from New York where he works as a banker. His best mate Tony (David Kennedy - brilliant) is trying to persuade him to stand as a local councillor for the BNP. This is all complicated by the fact that Jack’s dead father, a WWII veteran, had an abiding love of reggae music and black culture ever since his life was saved by a black soldier in the war.

As plays go, on a micro level it works quite well – the family stuff is quite moving, and there’s a nice focus-pull moment early on which raises the text above workaday naturalism. On the other hand, the politics end of stuff still feels somewhat schematic. That’s not to say that the characters don’t ring true, or that their arguments aren’t methodically researched, but it still feels a bit like the central antagonists each shoulder a thesis/antithesis position while the supporting cast are applied as light and shade around them.

There’s also the fact that, as drama, only one character – Jack – really has any decisions to make and his modus operandi is largely to stand looking helpless and be buffeted as his brother and best friend argue their positions.

I also found the casting slightly problematic. Because David Kennedy’s Tony is this built-for-violence, larger than life BNP skinhead lager lout, the other characters seem hopelessly outgunned. We never see, for example, what makes Tony want Jack to be the local councillor. Tony tells us that it’s Jack that’s the foreman – perhaps Jack is now too shell-shocked by the death of his father – but Gould’s performance suggests a man who has never been comfortable in his own skin, who has been bullied by his best friend his entire life. A man steeped in disappointments and quietly shamed by his younger brother’s success. He does “nice bloke” and “reluctant racist” well, but behind this, there isn’t quite the writing to flesh out this basic position.

There’s a sense that the text would suffer if presented as an end-on drama, but since it was conceived as a whole, along with the ‘installation’ and ‘gig’ elements, there doesn’t seem much point in criticising it for not achieving something it’s not intended to. And the presentation does alter things.

There are a couple of interesting meta- points that having the performance in promenade raises – firstly, it strikes me as excellent that in a play about resentment of immigration the entire audience is made to negotiate peaceably amongst themselves for space. Secondly, it was very interesting to watch the entire audience trot up and down the space like a big herd, all looking in the same direction at the same time. Quite early on, I took the not-as-perverse-as-it-sounds decision to try to stand somewhere else so I could watch the audience as well as the play. Standing slightly outside the crowd led to a few moments where I felt I perhaps appreciated the dramaturgy of the space slightly better than someone stood right up close to the action. On the other hand, choosing to set oneself analytically apart does make for a different experience, and perhaps not the full one, but I’ve always been suspicious of crowds.

Beyond this, the staging works well at a concrete level as well as metaphorical. There’s clearly an awareness of the likely constituency of an audience who’d come to see a play about politics with music by Billy Bragg staged at the Wellcome Collection in a converted exhibition hall, and the production ironises the sort of “let’s go and look at how the other half live” voyeurism of which this sort of play is often accused by confronting it head on, and almost highlighting the way in which these characters are being put on show in an exhibition space. Rather than saying: “Come! See the proles in recreations of their natural habitat!”, it seems to be saying: “look at yourselves looking at this, and have a think about that”. Indeed, it makes a strong case for every play purporting to be anthropological being staged in glass cases in museums so that everyone watching is made aware of this.

I should probably say a word or two about Billy Bragg’s contribution too. I’d never considered myself a huge fan before, but the new songs written for the play are musically sound enough – his voice isn’t quite as stridently Essex in all of them as it used to be, and the musicianship on show is undeniable, and, well, they’re not bad, really. The version of Pressure Drop at the end, while not perhaps as good as other versions, is still enough to have had the damn thing stuck in my head for three days. And having the music played live to a clearly appreciative audience adds an excellent extra dimension, even if lyrically, some of the new numbers seem to be a bit on-the-nose/direct compared with the more subtle way in which drama works.

What was most interesting to me, though, was the amount of research done and fact that the text of the play itself seemed to have deliberately left it out (at least explicitly). In this way, my earlier assessment of “thesis/antithesis” is slightly unfair. The conversations do actually run more like conversations – albeit it ones in which everyone talks in blocks of text – than “whoops! Exposition!” levels of research being put into people’s mouths. Except it felt that the research needed to be put somewhere. As if, in editing for realism, necessary information and perspectives had been excised.

As it was, what did we actually end up with? A slightly under-powered narrative trajectory possibly using a particular decision-moment in one family’s life to shed light on the whole question of the “white working-class”’s (call me an old Marxist, but the colour of a worker really doesn’t matter and discussion of it is just so much false-consciousness) alleged feelings of disenfranchisement. It’s a big ask, and I’m not sure the piece quite gets there – hedging its dramatic bets between not wanting to be too didactic or schematic and not being didactic or schematic enough.

For all this to-ing and fro-ing, with my opinion, though, perhaps the most ringing endorsement of the show I can offer is that it was my second promenade piece of the day (having also seen Would Like to Meet earlier on Monday) and I’d been told it was an hour and a half long. At the end of its actual two-hour running time, I was surprised that it’d been half an hour longer than I’d been told. So, one way or another, I’d been fully engaged and interested throughout, even if some of the sorts of things that play does aren’t necessarily my favourite sort of thing for plays to do.

Would Like to Meet - Barbican

Non Zero One’s Would Like to Meet (henceforth WLTM) is a perky, charming bit of programming on the Barbican’s part. The company, formed by Royal Holloway graduates last year, were apparently picked up after one of their number, who happened to be interning at the Barbican invited someone in programming to come and see his graduation piece. She loved it, and consequently the thing has been re-made for the Barbican. It’s an appropriate back-story for a piece which suggests a fragmented take on fairy-tale romance and happy endings.

The basic set-up of the thing is that you and five others – yup, it’s one of those profitable six-at-a-time shows (well, Internal+1, Guru Guru+1, et al) – assemble in the Barbican foyer, are sat down on a bench marked with six coloured panels, are left for a bit, and are then led over to a set of headphones which you put on and leave on for the remainder of the show’s 45 minute duration.

As such, without having shirked my duty at all, I can only accurately report one-sixth of what the show’s like. I can’t decide whether I should even say what colour route I took (and, indeed, whether the colours remain consistent to the audio-route I was given).

I did happen to see the show with Ian Shuttleworth of the Financial Times and Henry Hitchings of the Evening Standard, so if you’re interested to find out more, perhaps also go check out their reviews (they also both waffle a good deal less than me).

I should also point out, before you get excited and think this sounds like exactly your kind of thing, the show has apparently already sold out – although you could always go queue for returns, I guess...

And so, WTLM itself: well, the experience I had was very pleasant. Indeed, all six of us in the group I saw it with agreed that it was a pretty charming little piece. And not so little, really. While it’s relatively short and gentle, the themes (urg, bleugh, horrible word) are still some of the biggest available – memory, desire, mystery, love, the unknowability of the past and of others, the comfort of strangers, etc.

After an initial burst of ambient noise, there’s a voice in your ear. A pleasant, slightly ironic, young, perhaps playfully seductive male voice. The stuff it says is pretty clear and straightforward for the most part. Imagine this, stand up, look at that, turn left, do you see that? Go towards that. Stop. Look around. Think about this or that.

It doesn’t look like much on paper, but when placed in situ, played into your ears, and delivered in this warm, likable tone, it’s all rather comforting. Not enervatingly so, though. The voice also asks a few difficult questions as it’s leading you around – but of course, it can’t hear your answers, and you never have to say them out loud. But, it does ask you to write things down. Sometimes. Well, it did to me. And while you and your five co-audients are being led around different journeys around the Barbican, sometimes your paths cross. Or narrowly fail to cross (setting up the odd feeling of playing Don’t Look Now with Ian Shuttleworth)

It sets up this mini-meditation in which you drift round the Barbican, sort of at the centre of your own wistful romantic reverie, as if you’re the star of your own rom-com or spy thriller. As such it’s kind of encouraging us to behave in the same sort of solipsistic behaviour we probably undertake on our own anyway, except here it’s validated because we can actually here the voiceover. And there’s an enjoyable loss of our agency.

Part of my route took me to a small bar tucked down some stairs and round the corner from the main Barbican Theatre. Requested to pick up a small camcorder playing back a video of the room filled with people at a party, you are invited to wander round the room, looking at it both on the camcorder screen and at the mess left over from the party in the empty room in which you’re standing. It’s a beautifully spooky sensation, watching the empty spaces where people once stood. And somehow it manages to make the room feel like it stands for pretty much any party that’s ever ended.

At another stage, I was brought back-to-back with a stranger from my group for only a few seconds while she slipped and envelope into my hand and was then moved quickly away again by the instructions in the headset, as if in some John le Carré or Graham Greene novel.

The piece works beautifully. There are little points where you step outside the narrative and think – blimey, this must have taken ages to work out and set up. Not least because of the way your paths cross with the paths of the other people in your group and your headset guide remarks, entirely accurately, on what they are doing. So, while you’re aware that obviously the guide in your head(set) knows what they’re doing because he/it’s telling them what to do on their circuits. But even so, the nifty intricacy in creating likeable mise-en-scene using your fellow audience members – and no doubt putting you unwittingly into some of their scenes – is beautifully realised. Perhaps my favourite moment of the show was watching Evening Standard critic Henry Hitchings standing on a balcony in the Foyer throwing a paper aeroplane at one of the other members of the group a floor below, while the audio-guide wondered aloud why they were doing that. WLTM also has a GSOH.

So, overall, a nice, uncomplicated complicated little pleasure. Possibly not hitting all the high notes it could, but as a first piece of work from a young company, this is a remarkably accomplished bit of work. Here’s to lavish R&D grants and grander ambitions being realised for Non Zero One in the future.

The Racial Papers – Slight Return (part two)

In yesterday’s first half to this blog, I deliberately left two elephants in the room of my argument:

The first elephant is the question of how one defines a play’s nationality.

The second elephant is what we mean when we say “national” theatre.

Until I read the Lynn Nottage interview, I’m not sure the first question had ever occurred to me before. But once it had, it seemed to keep growing as a question. Up until now, if asked the nationality of a play, I’d have probably given the nationality of its author. As such, her Pulitzer-winning Ruined is an American play. Except, that if Nottage self-identifies as an African-American, goes to Africa to research her play, and then writes a play about Africa, does that make it an “African-American play”?

My unease originates from the fact that when I was growing up enlightened thinking on How Not To Be Racist started with the phrase “They were born here, they’re as British as you or me”. This was pre-“Cultural Diversity”, “celebrating difference” and Etc. This was “Inclusion”, I think. One big, lovely, not-racist, “English” (then serving as a culturally-insensitive synonym for “British”) group-hug. The basic idea then was that we ignored “difference” (i.e. skin colour, accents, etc.), and were all meant to respect each other. That seemed in keeping with the wider idea of what “the British” were meant to be like. We were meant to be decent, cricketing folks (which, back when the majority of immigrants came from India/Pakistan or the “West Indies”, excluded no one). As such, everything produced within a country by people born there, or who had settled there, would be uncomplicatedly seen as “British”. Perhaps I was being told the wrong things, but that is what my impression of what nice people were meant to think.

Perhaps this simplistic former explanation of mine wants a bit of looking at. After all, the language a play is written in often tells you little. Plays written in English could be English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, American, Australian, Canadian or from New Zealand. Plays written in German could be German, Austrian, Swiss, or potentially, given the way Europe’s boundaries have shifted, could have been written by a German citizen in German, in the German city Danzig before 1945 – now Gdansk in Poland. What nationality would that play have? And what if it was set in, oh, I don’t know, Vilnius when it was occupied by Poland, or something?

Not that he was a playwright, but I was surprised to learn – much more recently than isn’t embarrassing – that Kafka wrote all his books in German. I mean, I’d only read them in translation, and knew that he lived in Prague, so I just assumed that they were written in Czech. Fair assumption, I’d have thought, but no. Wrong. So, does that make him a German writer? I mean, literally it does. He was *writing* in *German* - that makes him a “German writer” by definition. But the fact that he did so in Prague and the fact that his writing is held by the Czechs to be exemplary of their culture... And let’s not even get started on the genre of plays in English (I nearly called them “English plays” there) christened “French farces”.

On the other hand, I have a Lithuanian playwright friend who once said that his primary motivation for writing plays was to reassert Lithuanian as a language following the Soviet occupation. Much the same sort of sentiment accompanies literary endeavour in Poland, parts of the former Yugoslavia and etc., where the assertion of the national language, of a national identity, is a matter of rehabilitation, of restoration. Writing a play in “English”, meanwhile, says virtually nothing about its origin, save for perhaps a few quirks of spelling and dialectal variants on words like “pavement”, “underground” (as in metro) and “flat” (as in apartment).

This elephant/question occurred to me really when considering the nature of the second elephant – what we mean by “national theatre”.

In short - if Lynn Nottage’s play is a play about Africa, researched in Africa, written in English by an American (or African-American. Whichever she wants) why should it be even the slightest matter of surprise that it isn’t being staged at the National Theatre of Great Britain?

This is partly the question Andrew Field raises in the comments under part one:
“The NT is the National Theatre and its funding, profile, building and everything else about it reflects its status *as a national theatre*. As a consequence it absolutely does have a responsibility to be more 'national' in scope than other theatres. A responsibility to encompass more, to accommodate more, to challenge and to inspire, to do things that only it can do with the funding and space and profile that it has.”

I do agree with the general thrust of this argument, but what I didn’t address yesterday, and what Field also doesn’t really touch upon above, is what we’re meaning by “National” here. Or rather, what purpose that word serves in the title of this institution. As far as I see it, there are two basic options for a “National” theatre: either it is a theatre *of* the nation, or it is the theatre *for* the nation. At its best, I’d say the NT (as it feels so much less oppressive to call it) does both.

*For* is reasonably simple, but what does *of* mean in practice?

But Field is also raising a wider point: “Form is as important as content, as you well know and it's no good being a thousand miles wide if you're half a metre deep.”

I suspect, knowing him and knowing the work that he has championed though Forest Fringe venture – and indeed, has championed overseas for the “British Council” (another interestingly National-sounding term) – what he’s particularly interested in is the normative aspect that putting the word “National” in front of what is our best funded non-opera-producing theatre (after all, the venues in which operas are produced are also “theatres”, as are some places where films are shown (cf. Movie Theater).

In short, by calling one building “the National Theatre” is there not an extent to which that building will then go on, in a way, to partially define what this nation understands theatre to be?

I think the answer must be both yes and no – and, for the record, I think “half a metre” is a bit harsh, even if I do understand the point he’s making; there are certainly sorts of work, which can (*should*?) be defined as theatre, that never appear at the NT. But let’s not start discussing “What Is Theatre?”

I notice in the two options I’ve suggested four paras above, I missed out the third option traditionally linked to those first two I’ve suggested: theatre made “*by* the nation”.

It’s just struck me, that this is perhaps the most significant feature of NT productions. In short, irrespective of a text’s provenance, they tend to be directed by “British” directors and acted by “British” actors. I keep saying “British”, although the question of what *nation* the National Theatre is the national theatre *of* is also interesting.

With the recent establishment of both National Theatre of Scotland and the National Theatre of Wales, does this make the building on the South Bank (and, by extension, its tours, West End transfers, and outlying operations) the National Theatre of England and Northern Ireland? (I mention Northern Ireland with the greatest of trepidation, and already wish I hadn’t). After all, if there is an NTScotland and an NTWales, does this make the NT like Parliament across the river in Westminster? Sort of *speaking for* all four elements of the “United Kingdom”, while at the same time devolving powers and responsibilities to these other national companies/assemblies? Leaving that tangent there, and returning to the main thread – and leaving aside Field’s questions of whether the *sort* of theatre the NT seems to create for a second – let’s go back to the nationality of plays (or texts) and productions.

Another striking feature of the NT, now I think about it, is that it basically never imports *productions* (or directors, and very few actors) from abroad. So, in that sense, we get an idea of one way in which the theatre is national. Everything there is “home-made”. Fair enough, perhaps. London has the Barbican which does an admirable job of importing theatre from abroad. It has the Old Vic to import copiously from America now that it’s under Kevin Spacey, and perhaps the Young Vic most notably to import directors from Europe (although that plays only the smallest part in their programming).

So, what the NT stages is extant texts, from anywhere and everywhere; old and newish, new commissions – mostly from British writers, a smattering of in-house devised work; and the occasional transfer from a regional theatre (cf. The Pitman Painters or the current Spring/Horizon double bill), or the odd production from an extant company (cf. Tara Arts’ The Black Album, Complicite’s Measure for Measure, Kneehigh’s A Matter of Life and Death or the sort-of Punchdrunk collaboration on Every Good Boy Deserves Favour). It also had that link-up with Shunt, and actually gets in a remarkable range of international work for its Watch This Space outdoor season.

And, its choices of text seem to be pretty remarkable for their eclecticism and internationalism. Yes, granted they are choices of *text*, for the most part, and granted, it is at this level where the NT might be seen to be perhaps holding back ideas of all the things that “theatre” might mean - because it can still be seen as primarily “text-led” rather than, with the exception of Katie Mitchell, “director-led”. So it does still *seem* to propagate a very particular model of making work.

And, this is in fact a way of working which seems largely peculiar to this island. Well, no, that’s not accurate, but the presentation of works “as written” or “as intended by the writer” rather than, for the most part, “staged by” or “interpreted by” a director is more British/Anglophone than it is European.

I suppose what both the elephants I’ve addressed here encompass, is the question of whether there is something “national” about the way we make theatre, write plays, tell stories, even how we gather together to watch them. And, beyond that, whether this is somehow intrinsic to some sort of “national character” – which strikes me as deeply unlikely – or as some manifestation of what various commonly experienced external social forces collectively produce – our pre-existing conceptions of ourselves, being replayed to us, amplified several times over if the words on the outside of the building, even if only subliminally, are inviting us to experience these reproductions as part of some sort of sense of collective identity.

As such, as a closing thought, I wonder if, after all this, whether the National Theatre ends up reflecting, endorsing, perpetuating, or challenging any of these ideas, and whether all four contradictory positions aren’t all part of its curiously unclear job description.

...of course, the real reason the National exists is for its excellently stocked bookshop :-)

The Racial Papers – Slight Return (part one)

In September 2007 I wrote: “For some reason everything theatre-related written over the last few days seems to have been somehow related to race.” Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Ok, not *everything*, but race on stage seems once again to be a topic of discussion. Depressingly, it seems to be exactly the same discussion as last time.

The first example occurs in this Guardian interview by Nosheen Iqbal with the American playwright Lynn Nottage:
‘I tell her I'm surprised the National theatre weren’t the first to stage Ruined here. “They told me they'd already done their Africa play last year,” she flashes back. ‘

This brief exchange raises a number of interesting points. The first is the number of assumptions and implications that Iqbal’s prompt makes about the National Theatre. The second is the curious attempt to paint the NT as some sort of box-ticking monolith of mildly racist Anglo-centricity.

As a point of fact – I went back and checked – The National actually staged two plays about Africa last year: Death and the King’s Horsemen one by Nigerian Nobel Laureate (and Leeds Uni alumnus) Wole Soyinka, and The Observer by British Writer Matt Charman.

This year - and it already feels absurdly reductive to be pigeonholing bits of theatre by continent like this – there’s Nigerian-born Inua Ellam’s 14th Tale and the American musical celebration of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, Fela!, produced by, among others, Jay-Z.

Difficult, then, to work out which single “Africa play” Nottage imagines “they told [her] they’d already done” [my italics].

Perhaps Iqbal has an axe to grind with the National Theatre regarding its criteria for selecting plays – unless, of course, the printed interview doesn’t record the bit where Lynn Nottage says: “Now, ask me what happened when I approached the National Theatre about staging Ruined…”.

Why would any arts journalist ask why a play that *is* going on at The Almeida isn’t going on at the National? Did anyone ask why Headlong’s The Trial of Judas Iscariot wasn’t at the NT, for example? (because the NT had “already done *their* biblical play in Paul a few years earlier?)

Will anyone be worrying Jenny Worton with question about why her adaptation of
Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly isn’t opening at the National instead, prior to its premiere at the Almeida in June? One suspects not. So why here?

Bluntly: what’s so “National Theatre” about Ruined that isn’t “National Theatre” about one of Rupert Goold’s best bits of work, or the World Premiere of a staging of an Ingmar Bergman script? (After all, the NT hasn’t staged *anything* Swedish since 2001’s Money. Why is no one asking if this is a conspiracy to deprive Scandinavians of their voice?)

Iqbal is implying (deliberately. I checked) that what the NT has done amounts to “dutiful box-ticking which is patronising and something they need to grow up about”. It’s as if, despite the National clearly staging other plays about Africa, there’s something racist about them not also staging this one.

I disagree. In the past year the National Theatre have done “their” Polish play, three of “their” Russian plays, “their” German play, a few of “their” American plays (a category into which Nottage’s Ruined squarely falls – the fact it happens to be about Africa is neither here nor there), “their” Greek play, “their” French play, “their” play by an Irishman who sounds like he should be French, “their” Austrian and “their” British-Asian play. It’s also worth noting that “their” German play last year was Bert Brecht’s Mother Courage, the play on which Ruined was apparently based...

Yes, it’s won a Pulitzer Prize, but that’s no guarantee of a staging at the NT either. Indeed, looking at the list of recent winners far more have gone to the Royal Court or Almeida or nowhere in Britain at all.

The National Theatre manifestly produces *the* widest selection of work produced by any single theatre in Britain. Fair enough – and no slight intended to any other theatre. Other theatres don’t have the same number of stages or anything like the same level of funding. The NT is the only theatre which has the space and the money to do what it does. Even so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have taken Enron even after it’s sell-out run in Chichester because they already had The Power of Yes, for example (“their” financial crisis play). This isn’t box ticking so much as really not being able to do all the great plays that get written.

Rather than issues about “being patronising”, isn’t another the issue here: plays that sell themselves by subject? After all, the real selling point of Nottage’s play is its subject matter, and, as a subset of this, its specificity to Africa. This isn’t even a play claiming to trade on “universals” (not that I believe in them, but Hamlet never seems to get promoted by virtue of its relation to its exploration of “Danish issues”, does it?). As such, I'm not sure that it’s in the literary department the NT where the imaginary box-ticking starts.

Let’s say they get sent a script and its subject is Africa, about which they've already had two plays last year, one the year before that, and two plays this year – two, incidentally, by Africans, two from America and one by a white British writer.

I think I'm right in saying the NT opens about 30 plays a year. Only half of these are new plays. Of those 15 (let’s say) texts, they are expected to comment on Britain, Europe, North America, the Middle east, the near east, the far east, South America, Australia, and now Icelandic volcanoes, no doubt. Not to mention: all of history, every item in any given newspaper on any given day, politics, philosophy, science, religion... All the while appealing - in theory – to *everyone* in Britain *and* everyone happening to visit Britain during a play’s run, of every age, race, sexuality, class, and so on.

The job they do is enormously impressive, even when particular productions don’t pan out. With Hytner’s regime, you can at least pretty much always see why someone thought something was a good idea at the planning stages. And, as programmes go, it does seem to offer something for everyone.

At the same time, the NT are aware that they’re not the only theatre in town. I’m pretty sure it’s not unknown for them to horse-trade with scripts which might fit other spaces better. And it’s hardly a prestige drop for Nottage that Ruined is going to the Almeida.

But, because *they’re* called *The National Theatre*, they somehow have to behave, to programme, more “Nationally”, more, well, State-of-the-Nation-ly. As if something like London Assurance, for example, somehow has to be a National Comedy, rather than simply a well produced entertainment. As if a refusal from the NT is somehow Britain turning its back on a piece. It must be a bit of an albatross, really. And it somehow allows the NT’s choice of plays to be criticised in a way that, say, the Donmar or Almeida’s choices of plays just aren’t.

After all, no one’s going to have a go at the Almeida if they don’t stage another play about Africa for ten years now, are they? I'm not convinced that them doing so now amounts to box-ticking either, though. I think it's just common sense/sensible rotation of types of play, themes, topics, etc.

Who goes to see what plays, and whether certain plays attract different audiences and why, is such a huge and unknowable topic that it’s pretty much impossible to even speculate. Mike Bradwell (formerly of the Bush) once remarked that if he put on a play about lawyers (for example), they'd get more lawyers in the audience, etc. (much the same phenomenon is being observed of Posh, Enron and The Power of Yes at the moment). So, I guess stuff that is about specific communities or countries do play, in part, to a specific constituency - perhaps to the exclusion of other constituencies (the notable exceptions being plays about the BNP and heroin addicts, one supposes). Does the British-Asian community go to see plays dealing predominantly with “gay themes”, for example? Does the gay community go to see plays about African women? Does the white middle class differ in its theatre-going habits from the Asian middle class? And so on and so on.

It’s at about this point that I start wishing people weren’t so keen to pigeonhole themselves and also start wishing that audiences weren't apparently motivated to go to the theatre by what appears to be largely a problematic tendency toward narcissism.

Which neatly brings us to the other article on race-related theatre.

To be honest, Amardeep Sohi’s Guardian blog yesterday virtually had me leaping out of my chair and cheering. Well, until the very end, anyway.

His basic thrust, which cannot be repeated often enough until it stops being true, is that “British Asian theatre” (and also “Black theatre”) is stuck in a rut of tired clichés.

His conclusion begins:
“We need characters who are layered, complex and don't break out into a dance routine mid-speech.”

This is exactly right.

However, he then goes on:
“They need to be placed in real scenarios, and encourage the audience to question preconceived ideas. Let’s... revel what it's really like to be British and Asian in 2010.”

This is more of a moot point. Well, it’s three moot points really. Let’s take them one by one.
“They need to be placed in real scenarios.”

This is the least true of the three assertions. But let’s pretend for a moment that he didn’t say “real” and meant, well, interesting, speculative, possibly poetic or metaphorical situations *or* interesting real scenarios.

“[They need to] encourage the audience to question preconceived ideas.

Well yes, possibly. Although, when allied with those “real scenarios” which are detailed above it starts to sound perilously like we’re heading for the same sorts of dramas which he has wisely deplored. Yes, as he notes, Shades was a pretty good play. Largely because it was funny, likeable and had some great performances. But let’s not kid ourselves that it didn’t also make some pretty clangingly schematic points at the same time. I think that tended to get excused because on the whole it was more like fun than the usual po-faced lecturing one gets from “issue-based drama”. But it was still cast from the same mould. Just a much better version of it. A bit like Posh, if you like. But when you compare it with something like Tim Crouch’s The Author, it’s clear that it’s not functioning at anything like the same level.

“Let’s... revel what it's really like to be British and Asian in 2010.”

The idea of plays that “revel in” what something’s “really like” sounds like the worst dramatic void imaginable. The list of reasons against is probably too long to even compile.

I think it probably starts somewhere around the problematic nature of trying to evoke a “reality” using a medium like theatre. I mean, it’s not that theatre can’t evoke things, but it just doesn’t evoke them best by trying to build a replica of, well, what it’s really like inside a British-Asian home in 2010 and filling that set with the things that “really” happen within such a place in “real” life. Mostly because what anyone’s “real” life is “really” like is generally pretty undramatic. Drama – not even theatre – does tend to focus on the exception and the exceptional. As such, using it as a means of presenting some kind of living fly-on-the-wall experience is pretty much doomed to failure.

Of course I understand the impulse. After all, the over-praised Angry Young Man movement was driven by much the same sort of desire to rip off the front off so many northern terraces and push their contents into the face of theatre audiences – to confront them with unseen realities.

And perhaps there used to be a merit in this approach, in the same way that George Bernard Shaw’s tightly constructed little fables might pass for a way of “getting people to think about [such and such]”.

But again, it’s not what theatre does best. After all, going back to Hamlet again – which, let’s be honest, a lot of people are prepared to stand behind and say is one of the best plays written in the English language – how much does it really tell us about “what it’s really like to be a Danish Prince circa 990AD” (much less “revelling in it”)? And yet, how readily it seems possible to empathise with this prince, his friends, his family.

It’s more than likely that we don’t believe in ghosts and probably don’t share Hamlet’s apparently huge faith in God. But we’re moved when his father’s ghost appears to Hamlet as he screams abuse at Gertrude; we understand his decision not to kill Claudius while he is at prayer. But more than this, it is as if something else floats above the direct meaning of the text.

In theory, Hamlet is just a very wordy thriller with an almost frustratingly inept protagonist, set in a world which, if we thought about it for a moment, we wouldn’t really credit for a second. And yet, it’s fascinating, endlessly rewarding, beautiful, mysterious, horribly moving, and somehow capable of seeming to say something about what it’s like to be alive, to love, to be bereaved, to be depressed, to lose hope and to find hope.

It strikes me that, compared to the above, having as the pinning down exactnesses about specific social situations of any given community in a contemporary or historical location as the ultimate goal for a piece of theatre is a pretty low aim.

Of course, by all means set a play wherever, and fill it with all the details you like, but who really goes to the theatre to see what taps another “community” have on their kitchen sinks? A play placed on stage before an audience won’t communicate that. It’ll communicate what’s floating above what the play directly says. And if there’s nothing there beyond just this anthropological exercise, then the audience is doing little more than looking at painstakingly costumed puppets yapping at one another in an Ikea showflat.