Death Tax – Royal Court

[Honeymoon period over?]

Following on from last week’s bonkers Georgian offering, The President Has Come To See You, this week’s Open Court offering is the infinitely *straighter* Death Tax, an American play by Lucas Hnath.

While lacking the freewheeling energy of Featherstone’s production, John Tiffany brings a remarkable degree of precision to bear on a production which has had only a week’s rehearsal. So much so, that it’s impossible not to admire both cast and director for this tight, snappy, focussed production. In fact, it makes you wonder what other “straight” productions of plays spend the other three weeks of their usual allotted rehearsal time doing.

On the other hand, it is a shame that the most exciting moments in the staging come from Chloe Lamford’s wooden box being opened again – differently to how it opened in The President... – and the first few moments of the actors moving around on it; the strip-lights moving up and down; and Natasha Gordon announcing “This is a play with five scenes. This is scene one...” At that point, anything could have been about to happen, and it all felt excitingly, well, Brechtian. Granted, Lamford’s box had opened to reveal a pretty convincing hospital bed, and in it, a pretty convincing-looking patient (Maxine, played by Anna Calder-Marshall), what with real tubes up her nose, and a bleepy machine to one side, but, still, that might be an elaborate ruse. Sadly, it isn’t.

You know those Playwriting courses that they have? Ones which teach about characters wanting something, and about giving characters backgrounds, and obstacles to getting the things they want, and about conflict, and about illuminating the world through these interpersonal conflicts? In many ways, Death Tax is almost a perfect illustration of what I imagine will come out of these courses. (I should state that I’ve got no idea if Hnath’s ever been on one, or whether he’s just read Oleanna until he’s absorbed more-or-less everything you could learn about playwriting from it.)

That said, Death Tax is still actually frustrating on precisely these terms, rather on any doctrinal concerns about naturalism versus bonkers or whatever the battle-lines are these days. It’s frustrating because it starts in one place, with one specific conflict, and – after way too long setting it up – it’s a good starting point – dying woman Maxine is concerned that her vile daughter is paying her nurse, Tina (Natasha Gordon) to have her killed off before tax laws change on 1 January and the daughter’s inheritance shrinks. Leaving a little ambiguity as to whether this charge is true or not, the nurse eventually claims that the mother is right, and allows the mother to bribe her to keep her alive.

Scene two: Tina is confronted by her line-manager Todd (Sam Troughton) about receiving cheques from Maxine. To complicate this scene, Todd is in love with Tina (everyone wants something from someone else). Tina is not in love with Todd, but needs the money to get her son back from her ex-husband in Haiti. To be fair, for all that laid out cold like this it sounds contrived, Gordon and Troughton, playing with utter conviction, manage to make the situation work.

Scene three: Maxine’s daughter (no name, called “Daughter” in credits) turns up to see her mother. Now – having achieved the set-up, and then established a secondary struggle which explores themes of migrant work and power-relationships – if not along gender lines, then certainly gendered here by virtue of the fact that Todd is a man in love with Tina, a women who works under him – we get a twist. The twist is, although the mother won’t see Daughter, Daughter has a couple of reasonable things to say. She was never trying to have her mother killed (at least, that’s the impression I got). She (also) has a son. She (also) has no money. She also has a mother who she claims has treated her as if she were “evil” her entire life.
(I was briefly reminded of the definition of child abuse in Bruce Norris’s The Pain and the Itch:

Kelly: It was straight out of Alice Miller. Neglect alternating with sarcasm.
Carol: (relieved) Ohhh! Oh, I see. Oh, I though… oh, pfffft.
Cash: Oh, God. Not sarcasm.

And I never really wanted to be reminded of anything in The Pain and the Itch, ever again.)

She also knows that Tina is receiving money from Maxine. The daughter doesn’t acquit herself especially well either, but does then leave having made a rather spectacular gesture: of having cut herself out of her mother’s will. She leaves Tina with a notarized letter to this effect and fucks off.

Scene four: Tina confronts Todd with the letter. They are now in cahoots, he having agreed to cover for her and to help out with keeping Maxine alive (currently at his personal expense), until they can get the money and split it fifty-fifty. He now holds this over her, but is really hanging on to the hope that she will love him. The letter throws another cat among the pigeons. Tina wants to at least give it to the mother after they’ve got the money. Todd wants it destroyed now for fear it’ll capsize their whole (criminal) enterprise full stop.

Scene five: FAST FORWARD TWENTY YEARS!! Sam Troughton is now playing Charley, Maxine’s grandson. Gordon is now Candice, a social worker. Daughter is nowhere to be seen. Maxine is still in the same bed, still alive. “Everytime I got worse, they invented a new machine to make me better/keep me alive” she says (I paraphrase. No freebie script, alas).

This final part suddenly up ends all the previous drama into a bit of a cipher-led debate about the right to medical care (remember, this is set in America, and therefore all the care Maxine has had thus far has had to have been paid for by her). Maxine is now cleaned out of money and is therefore going to have to go into free/state care, which, as she puts it, won’t keep her alive.

We’re never told Maxine’s age, so we can’t guess what’s really at stake here, but it seems likely that she’s been extended from dying at, say, 85 to, now, 105. Yes, the play raises questions about “the value of life?” and “how old is too old?” and “can there be a ‘too old’ if medical science can keep a person alive?” And, yes, I suppose, with an ageing population and with the increasing erosion of free healthcare, even in this country (is the USA’s horrific third-world solution, now just an inevitable endgame for British National Health?), these are indeed pertinent questions.

Perhaps my main problems with the play, however, are its ways and means. For a start, each scene is just too long. Hnath writes well, but what he writes is characters who just won’t shut up. There’s no point made here once if it can be reiterated several times in a five minute monologue. The characters speak a kind of ticcy, Mamet-led dialogue, which, while stylish, is also kind of hellish to listen to after a while. For a play about the economy, it could learn a lot about economy.

Then there’s the kind of short-circuiting of each drama. Given how much time is given over to each scene, you kind of end up wanting each thread to be picked up and developed in a satisfying way. Yes, of course, there’s always an argument to be made for subverting or frustrating an audience’s expectations. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still bloody irritating. And the five second pay-off of the whole first four scenes as reported incident (a reported incident which sticks out like a sore thumb) in scene five, is a particular low point.

It’s not that I think this is a “bad play”, but it feels like it’s an accomplished first draft, and one which could do with the existing scenes cutting down to their bare bones, and then several new scenes being added to properly explore what has actually been set up.

It also constitutes another example of the “start-in-the-wrong-place argument” play. By which I mean, it takes one objectionable position and then sets it against a different, opposite objectionable position, and then makes out that these are the only options. All the problems in this play could be solved by higher taxes and proper state-run healthcare (not to mention people being less greedy, and by the state not making the bottom line unsurvivable). And no one is going to convince me that ignoring these facts makes for better drama.

But whaddaiknow? I hate reviews where critics effectively script-edit post-fact. Still, as I think I’ve said before, I think there’s kind of a point if you can say what you would rather have happened, you’re giving a basic idea of why what did happen didn’t completely work for you. Right?

And I haven’t once demanded more bonkers staging or more social context, ok?

So, in conclusion: still hugely impressive work by Tiffany and his cast. Not my favourite play. And, I wonder if the thing that the other few weeks of a rehearsal process are the bits where character is explored in more depth – which might have led to altogether different Maxines and Daughters than the ones here.

Another thought, I wonder if, rather than making sure a thing looks polished by opening night, it would be more interesting if remaining Open Court Ensemble pieces allowed the polishing stage to be substituted for more investigation and leaving the lack-of-polish exposed as a badge of pride. It’s a risk, sure, but what’s this season for if not risk? On a different set, Death Tax could have been a part of the Cooke regime, circa Now or Later. and that’s not such a cheering thought.

Herrin-gate

Partisan-ship is a horrid thing, right? And totally undesirable in a critic? I dunno.

Walter Benjamin has this to say:

“I. the critic is the strategist in the literary battle.
“II. Anyone incapable of of taking sides should say nothing.
“V. ‘Objectivity’ must always be sacrificed to partisanship when the cause being fought over merits it.”

(Walter Benjamin, One Way Street – 1928)

While everything in my training (such as it wasn’t) suggests that this model is, at the very least, sublimated by the British model of newspaper theatre criticism, at root, I think the above maxims are still held close to every critic’s heart.

If we’re pretending that there isn’t a culture war being waged all the time, then we’re fucking kidding ourselves, right?

It might very well be a tiny, pernickity, anal, niche argument, the nuances of which the disinterested theatregoer might forgivably overlook when they go to see the odd show here and there. But the echoes and resonances of what it’s about can be felt much deeper. And by everyone.

The Featherstone takeover of the Royal Court is a perfect example. Suddenly, downstairs in the bar, everyone – especially the bar staff – is/are smiling. There’s a disco on a Thursday night. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel that by going to the theatre we’re mostly crashing a bunch of posh cunts’ evening in a restaurant. It suddenly feels like our bar again. And if they don’t like it, they can fuck off to the Donmar.

I don’t really like the “us and them” mentality. The real endgame is always going to be “us” rounding “them” up and executing “them”. If “them” don’t get “us” first. It’s ugly and it’s wrong. That said, if we haven’t spotted that a bunch of “them” seem to have staged a massive coup in government and are all but rounding “us” up and putting “us” in detention centres already, then we’re more blind than I thought.


Put simply, don’t we watch news about theatres with a kind of plus and minus ledger? Don’t we all – however unconsciously – have a kind of “wins” and “losses” column, for artistic director appointments?

Recently: Greg Doran to the RSC: lose. Josie Rourke to the Donmar: lose (well, no score draw, really). Erica Whyman to the RSC: win. Rupert Goold to the Almeida: massive win. Vicky Featherstone to the Royal Court: another massive win. Jeremy Herrin to Headlong: catastrophic loss.

And that last appointment is the reason I’m writing this. When the appointment was announced, I was on Twitter. I said a couple of intemperate things. And I think they want backing up with at least an explanation.

I should say straight off that I think Jeremy Herrin is a lovely bloke. This is the opposite of personal. In fact, it’s kind of painful that he’s such a nice bloke, because I don’t get off on kicking nice people. So: Jeremy Herrin is a lovely bloke whose life, taste, and personal choices seem to have led him to a place where he passionately supports more or less exactly the opposite sort of theatre to that which I like. And that’s actually about it. At the end of the day, this isn’t even a culture war so much as a taste grumble.

And we don’t know what Herrin is going to do with Headlong. There’s a chance that, freed of the constraints of commercial expectations, he’s going to finally get to do all those bonkers productions of little-known European and Renaissance Classics that he’s always been itching to do. That he’ll commission the most exciting New Writers and will push their work to the limits with non-literal productions, rather than doing more Polly Stenham and David Hare plays about rich kids living in precisely the rooms described by the sodding text.

On the other hand, the fear is that Herrin really does believe that Stenham and Hare are the most exciting playwrights writing in Britain today. And that the best way to “serve the text” is a matter of following stage directions. And that Shakespeare should be “revered”. And that good-looking actors are somehow better than talented ones. Which is where this stops feeling like a taste-grumble and starts feeling like something that is to do with class, and ultimately to do with oppression.

Even this is unfair. Of course Stenham could yet come up with a play that isn’t about her abandonment issues and how tough life is when you’re rich. Of course Hare could rediscover his youthful rage and get rid of his massive sense of entitlement. And of course everyone could wake up to a bit of interrogation of how and why they stage plays in the way that they do and shake things up a bit. But the suspicion is that they won’t.

And then, one of the most forward-looking, imaginative, eclectic new companies – even when they were at their worst (Salome and Electra that I saw) this was still true – will be utterly destroyed. And, worse, the legacy of Faustus, Macbeth, Enron, King Lear, ...sisters, Lulu, The Trial of Judas Iscariot, Six Characters..., etc. (some of the best nights I've had in the theatre in the last eight years) will have been for nothing. Or, rather, it’ll transfer to the Almeida. And Headlong might as well go back to being The Oxford Stage Company.

And that matters, I think. So, while I apologise for describing the appointment of Herrin as “a catastrophe”, based on no information other than the past, I don’t retract the statement. I would welcome being proved wrong, but if Headlong is turned into another polite, middle-class-talking-point company, with no apparent use for stagecraft, then this is a sorry day for British Theatre and I make no apology for saying so.

New Court

In May 2007, when Dominic Cooke took over the Royal Court, my review of That Face by Polly Stenham – opened thus:

“An early indicator of what we might be able to expect from Dominic Cooke’s new regime as artistic director of the Royal Court can be found downstairs in the theatre’s stylish concrete basement bar. Here, nestling comfortably on the shelves that until recently housed the theatre’s now-relocated bookshop, are organic teas and wine, fine dried pasta and lemons. It is unclear whether these are for sale, a knowing nod to Cooke’s much discussed promise that the theatre was going to start doing more plays for the middle classes, or simply a scene-setting installation for the Court’s new Upstairs production of 20-year-old Polly Stenham’s first play That Face, concerning the miserable lives of an upper-middle-class family...”

This historical detail is interesting to recall in the wake of Vicki Featherstone’s Royal Court takeover.

The first issue of “Surprise Theatre” (Mon 10 June ‘13) was Mark Ravenhill’s Cakes and Finance – a stand-up verbatim piece/lecture (a surprising, excellent new genre) in which he “played” ten playwrights/writers-for-theatre talking about their “Ideal Theatre”.

It is clear that Featherstone – despite (or perhaps because of) coming from the buildingless National Theatre of Scotland, and before that, the excellent touring outfit Paines Plough – has given that fact of the Royal Court’s physical form a good deal of thought.

For the first time since its 2000 post-refurb opening, the downstairs bar has – thanks to designer Chloe Lamford – been given a burst of colour. Along what was the tastefully black-gauzed far wall there are now three massive panels picturing a high green hedge and above it blue sky. Yellow and Orange lanterns now hang over colourful canteen style tables. And greeting you as you enter via the still-imposing concrete steps is a large magnetised blackboard with those colourful fridge-magnet letters spelling out this week’s “found play” – this week, an overheard conversation between a little girl and her grandmother.

In short, the Royal Court bar has been de-poshed.

The menu has also been brought a bit closer to the means of those who actually work in theatre, with a selection of burgers hovering around the £6 mark. Chips are down by a quid and there’s a 20%-off happy hour after the show comes down between ten and eleven.

This is all excellent news.

Looking round on the second night of Surprise Theatre it already looks like a younger, non-Sloanie crowd have discovered these facts for themselves, and are gratefully making themselves at home. As Royal Court revolutions go, this one strikes me as much better than a misanthropic howl from an angry young man destined to turn almost immediately into an embarrassing old bigot. 

“Affordable chips at the Royal Court? We never thought we’d see the day,” people will tell their grandchildren. And the ethos, too, and the work...

I admit, not least in my introductory chapter to Modern British Playwriting: 2000-2009, when Dominic Cooke took over from Ian Rickson, I was a bit seduced by the rhetoric. Talking to Ramin Gray for the book, he suggested: ‘When Dominic came in he did basically what Graham [Whybrow] had been saying for years and years, which was “programme the thing actively, bring in some exciting voices from outside to goad on English writers, and put on a blast of English writers who no one had ever heard of”. I mean, there was a lot of stuff that had built up on the Young Writers’ Programme and Dominic brilliantly... I mean, it was all there in the larder, Dominic just unleashed it.’

But that initial blast of fresh air felt like it transformed into something else around 2010. What started as a provocative new direction quickly calcified into a difficult middle-class-narcissist agenda, where moneyed audiences were shown repeated, increasingly flattering portraits of themselves, many of which were plainly invented with an eye on a West End Transfer.

As such, who could have predicted that the Court was going to re-open with a verbatim lecture and a week-long run of a really niche satire of Georgian politics? That The President Has Come To See You isn’t perhaps the best new play that’s been seen in Britain this year hardly matters alongside the fact of the gesture it represents.

That it’s performed by an ensemble of some of the best actors in Britain, who are learning/rehearsing a new show every week by day and then performing last week’s rehearsed show by night gives the entire building a new energy that it has been utterly lacking since before 2010. Yes, at some point, it will be nice if we don’t have to be thoroughly acquainted with the ins and outs of some really abstruse politics in order to really appreciate the plays. But, really, for now, especially in the light of what seems to be going on elsewhere, it just feels bloody great to have the Royal Court back on our side.

[cover image from here]

Generation Game: week 6/10 – The Yard

[short reviews of both shows from the sixth week of the Yard's excellent Generation Game season]

A Cure for Ageing – Ira Brand

Fox Solo – Foxy & Husk

I first saw Ira Brand’s A Cure For Ageing as a half hour scratch performance at Forest Fringe at The Gate last year. Since it is still partly in development, and Brand hasn’t been inviting journalists to write about it, as such, it feels more appropriate to update that report than to knock out a whole new review before re-seeing the finished product in Edinburgh. If you’re after a “star-rating”, take the fact that I’m perfectly happy to go and see it for a third time as indicative.

Since its last outing, it’s lost the section in which she either shows or describes a video of someone naked talking about their body and its signs of ageing. More touchingly, it’s gained another email from her mother about her grandfather’s health. Briefly, there’s also a section where Brand now carefully tips two buckets of earth onto the stage and unfussily creates a makeshift grave. She plays a tape of her grandmother speaking (in German) about her love of dancing. And she then dances on the “grave”. It’s all so not-flagged-up that this could be purely my interpretation. At no point does she say “This is a grave. This is me dancing on a grave”. It’s a curious juxtaposition, though, since the expression “to dance on someones grave” – most recently trotted out with unsurprisingly regularity after Mrs Thatcher’s death – is generally taken as a celebration of that person’s death, not of their life. Here it feels more mournful and elegiac.

As I say, the piece is still “in progress”, but even while it’s being tidied up, it’s well worth a look, especially if you’re not going to be around in Edinburgh to see the “final” version (if such shows can ever be said to have “final versions”).

***

When people have asked me what I did last night [7.06.13], after briefly describing A Cure For Ageing, I then had to try to find ways of explaining Fox Solo.

What Fox Solo is is a woman dressed as a fox – including full face make-up; half orange, half white – lip-synching with a tape of her (old, very posh) grandmother talking about love and some pop songs. It’s performed as a duet with one of those nodding dogs. Early on, for example, they both mime along to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You, Babe. Foxy does the Cher part and the nodding dog, well, s/he nods along to Sonny’s part. Given that Foxy is miming anyway, the effect of the model dog next to the unplugged mic is uncanny and very funny. There’s something oddly suggestive of transvestism and cabaret about the performance as a whole. At the same time, the piece is actually more gentle than out-and-out subversive. As the piece progresses [spoiler alert, if such performances can be spoilered], Foxy sets her nodding dog companion adrift on a heart shaped raft in the middle of a transparent container holding eight pints of milk and some red food dye. The little creature sits in the middle of this pink pond until, as their love affair gradually seems to die, Foxy tips up the container spilling pink milk and dog onto the stage. And then leaves. Fin.

It’s completely bewildering. I have literally no idea what to do with it at all. I enjoyed watching it, even though I wouldn’t have predicted vaguely transvestive, animal-play, lip-synch, cabaret was my bag at all. I’m not at all sure my critical faculties are up to it. I mean, it’s well done. Definitely. Foxy (no other performer credit given) is obviously a talented performer, but it’s so idiosyncratic – so opaque as to either function (pfft) or meaning (who wants transparent meanings anyway?) that, rarely for performance art, you really do have no idea what’s going on: what it’s really about. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it is just a woman dressed as a fox lip-synching to the voice of their grandmother talking about love and some pop songs.

Interestingly, you do still get a palpable sense of the loss one feels when love dies. It’s not manipulative – not aimed at jerking your tears from you. In fact, for all its outward-facing-ness, it’s probably quite an inward-looking little piece. For all Foxy’s wide-eyed smiles to the audience, it feels like this could be more theraputic for the character than her observers. I tell you something else: it feels more than a little ridiculous trying to analyse this. Still, if you want to go and see something that is pretty much guaranteed to be unlike anything you’ve seen before, then this is a good bet. It seems to be performed with total sincerity and produced in good faith (also rare). And it more or less entirely defies reason.

One of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Worth going to see if you ever get the chance...

Dances of Death – The Gate

“You won’t like this,” suggested my friend cheerfully as we sat down for the press night of August Strindberg’s Dance(s) of Death. “But, but, but... I liked Kenneth Branagh’s Ivanov and After The Dance, FFS” I protested, as the lights went down.

But I do like a challenge. And, apart from being interested generally in what The Gate has to offer, I’d never seen Strindberg’s Dance of Death before. This new version by septuagenarian terrible Howard Brenton also has the (questionable, it turns out) advantage of included the second, rarely performed part of the piece. But my challenge was to like it. And, for the first forty-five/fifty minutes or so, I did like it well enough...

Dance of Death itself is a kind of misanthropic, Scandinavian old-people’s Private Lives, or an even bleaker version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. A married couple approaching their thirtieth wedding anniversary bicker, fight and torture each other. Edgar (Michael Pennington) is a retired, middle-ranking army officer, his wife Alice (Linda Marlowe) is a thwarted actress. Apparently, they’re such a pair of old cunts that no one else on the island where they live even invites them to social events any more, and you can see why – they’re self-absorbed, showboating old drama queens. One stormy night Edgar’s old friend Kurt (the excellent Christopher Ravenscroft) turns up to visit. TBH, not a great deal happens. Edgar blusters at him and then almost has a heart attack. Kurt sits with him through the night. Alice flirts with Kurt. There’s a lot of territory marking and to-ing and fro-ing and eventually [SPOILER] it turns out Edgar and Alice are likely to remain together torturing each other, and anyone else who slips into their orbit, until they die.

In the Havershambles of a second part, the focus shifts partially to Edgar and Alice’s daughter Judith (Eleanor Wyld), and Kurt’s son Allan (Edward Franklin) where Judith is coming on all Estella with Allan’s Pip. Edgar continues his campaign to “destroy” Kurt mostly and Alice a bit too, this time using their children and Kurt’s money. I won’t tell you how it ends, but a few days later, I don’t really remember it even mattering much.

Tom Littler – who has spent three years with the Peter Hall company – offers a production that is almost a dictionary definition of safe and conservative. Nothing wrong with that, of course. In many ways, it is potentially exciting to see these big old actors up-close, prowling round the Gate’s tiny stage like so many caged big beasts. Annoyingly a few things conspire to puncture this proposition. Firstly, for my money the performances could mostly do with being turned down from 11. We’re not in the Theatre Royal Bath now. You can hear someone whisper on stage from the back of the Gate. Certainly no one needs to raise their voice. Beyond this, at certain crucial dramatic moments the production barely avoids tipping over into melodrama. Perhaps all this is the director’s intention, but for me it was all a bit shouty, and old-school.

Then there is the problem of characterisation. Generally I’m not a big fan of Michael Pennington. He has a pronounced line in capering, which I just can’t stick. So, I was pleasantly surprised here to find myself rather admiring his largely de-capered portrayal of Edgar. Until, as I say, abut the 45/50 minute mark, at which point, we’d been fed so much information about Edgar’s character that what the actor was doing didn’t seem even remotely to communicate the character he was apparently playing. Now, all this could be part of some very clever thinking on the part of actor and director. There is, after all, the fact that most of the things we’re told about Edgar are things we’re told by his wife, who is herself a ridiculous old drama queen, milking the alleged tragedy of her situation for all the sympathy, melodrama and leverage she can get out of it. On the other hand, Pennington just doesn’t really seem up to the job of being even credibly mistaken for a frightening tyrant. He Is much more befuddled, cuddly and grumpy, so when he does start properly making people’s lives a misery in the second part, it seems all the more surprising. I’m not really sure what I wanted instead (well, Ian McDiarmid, probably); I’m not saying I need my villains to be pantomime villainous, but at the same time, well, if someone is being actually nasty, don’t we need to get a sense of that? Here instead, it felt like everyone on stage was an unreliable narrator, to the extent that the story stopped mattering because there was no way of believing any of it.

There is also the matter of Jerwood Young Designer James Perkins’s set. On first glace, its curved walled study/living room is a fine, functional, anywhen room which offers a credible space for the actors to inhabit. There are perhaps nit-picky details of construction, but on the whole it is sound. It is in the second half, when the room transforms into a conservatory, the windows of which given out onto – well, onto a bunch of projections of different paintings and photographs scene-by-scene that we’re into stranger territory. Obviously I’m not about to blow something up for a sudden shaft of non-naturalism, but in the scheme of this production it is bloody strange, and rather artlessly done. Worse, though, is William Reynolds’s lighting design, which has to be one of the worst I’ve ever seen, with every light pressed into service, and still there is pooling, the projections are all but eradicated, several lights seem only to be lighting the beam in the Gate’s ceiling directly in front of them (distracting), or the heads and shoulders of the first two rows (again, distracting in this sort of fourth-wall production). And the less said about the sickly green light that comes on whenever Edgar is feeling a bit ill the better. On the up-side, Linda Marlowe stagey-ness actually fits the melodramatic Alice rather well, even if her cattiness is a bit too pat. And both Franklin and Wyld as the two youngsters are actually rather good. Christopher Ravenscroft, who I think is one of my favourite actors of his generation since I saw him in Taking Care of Baby, is also mostly great, although he does get regrettably co-opted into some of the melodramatics to the detriment of his performance.

Beyond this, there is also the problem of Strindberg’s utterly stupid views of humanity to deal with. Incredibly, Sue Prideaux who writes the introduction (and Brenton, I think), both comment approvingly on Strindberg’s feminism – Prideaux noting his 1884 book Getting Married as a 24-point manifesto for Women’s Rights. I find this notion preposterous. Strindberg is nothing if not an irredeemable misogynist of the first water and this play bears that out as much as anything. The only way Strindberg might hope to mitigate charges of woman-hating is to plead in his defence that it’s not just women. And he might be onto something with that. He takes such a dim view of humanity en masse that to suggest it’s just women he hates is perhaps a bit unfair. Oddly, there’s also *another* fairly in-depth bunch of chatter about the politics of Scandinavian water regulations (cf. Enemy of the People), which for perhaps Pavlovian reasons, didn’t endear the piece to me further. It did also make me wonder whether Scandinavian water regulations weren’t somehow the new sign of our own troubled political times, albeit in a way which is utterly impossible to fathom.

Overall, it could be that my friend was right; that I was destined never to like this, but, having given broad-mindedness my best shot, I think there’s also plenty for fans of naturalism at which to bridle. On the other hand, the production doesn’t really embarrass the Gate, and if you’ve not seen the play(s) before and are keen to do so, then this is a production that will at least keep you engaged and show you what happens with a minimum of fuss. Not exactly a high point of my theatrical year so far, but a respectable distance from its nadir.

Unsent Postcards: Luxuriant – People’s Palace, QMUL

The best description of Simon Vincenzi’s Luxuriant I can offer is that it is far too much of not nearly enough. And vice versa.

I intend this as a compliment: this is spare, stark, arresting work.

If you want a cheap visual shorthand, imagine David Lynch trying to knock up a cabaret at some point after an apocalypse using only shell-shocked transvestites. That’s kind of how it feels and how it looks.

There is almost painful, potentially infinite iteration of just a tiny sequence of opaque movements. At the same time, there is something sumptuous, almost decadent about just how much it refuses to tell us, about the sheer quality and attention to the detail of this opacity.

The piece opens with a group of men. Jittery. Scampering. They’re on the huge stage of the newly reopened People’s Palace Theatre. They’re clustered round a video camera, skittering this way and that, dressed in tight black t-shirts, pink tights, and, what? Mickey Mouse ears? One of the troupe – with his genitals bound up in shiny black gaffa tape – trembles and preens before the camera, as if making some kind of off-kilter porno.

Then there’s a woman on the stage. She’s dressed in some sort of futuristic tent, or carapace. She speaks, or sings, or screeches, into a concealed microphone, which delays, distorts, flanges and reverberates her voice. Her falsetto Throbbing Gristle-isms echo around the hall.

The audience are stood, scattered about the vast hall of the newly refurbished and re-opened “People’s Palace” hall in the grounds of QMUL. The hall is in near darkness and filled with smoke-machine smoke. The men – Troupe Mabuse, I think we’re encouraged to think of them as – are off the stage now and skittering about the floor in their strange tribal patterns. As a result, there’s a fair amount of shuffling, or sudden getting-the-fuck-out-of-the-way on the part of the audience, lest we be suddenly entangled with six ft of skittering PVC Mickey Mouse.

The piece lasts, what? an hour? an hour and half?

It isn’t “immersive” in the crap sense of the word. There’s no real pretence – or indeed set-up – suggesting that we’re anywhere other than right where we know we are. As a result, it’s strange that at the same time as quite revelling in the sheer copious strangeness of what we’re seeing, we are (or at least I was) inventing sort of “other locations” and “other times” where we might plausibly be watching this work. Perhaps because it is so unlikely that this is precisely what we are doing right now, on a Friday night, in a hall on Mile End Road, with a nice new refurbished bar on the other side of the doors. So we (I) reach for words like “post-apocalyptic” and “Lynchian”.

I’m not sure that’s the whole story, though. Troupe Mabuse’s apparent stated intention or goal or mission is a performance of The Gold Diggers, a 1930s film which I’ve never seen, but which I’m pretty prepared to bet doesn’t look anything like this *at all*.

I kept on being reminded what Nicholas Ridout, who curated this piece, as part of the Peopling The Palace events [a couple of months back, now] at QMUL, wrote as the conclusion of his excellent book Theatre & Ethics. In it, he describes Maria Donata D’Urso performing In Pezzo at the Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisbon in 2002. She: “is visible, naked, in low light, surrounded by an insect-like scratch and crackle of electronic sound. As she moves her limbs slowly in the subdued and tightly focused pool of light, it soon becomes impossible to make out the relationships between surfaces and volumes... This effect of an apparent separation of the evidence of a human mind (intention) and the actions and organisation of a human body is profoundly unsettling as well as very beautiful.” Ridout is using this description of her performance to illustrate a key part of his thesis:

“The performance appears, at least, to have no interest other than the meticulous presentation of the surfaces of the body to the light. In this regard it may be regarded as having nothing other than aesthetic content. It contains no proposition about the nature of the world, offers no narrative or dramatic encounter or anything that might solicit from an audience any ethical response. There is nothing to be ethical about here.”

This above passage felt crucial as a possible way into understanding Luxuriant. It also felt as if something like the below was also taking place:

“The challenge issued by this work, from the place of the other, is to our conception of what it is to be or have a human body, and to have intentions that make it do things. The human figure, so often the luminous centre of the aesthetic experience and the presence with which the spectator may easily identify, is here shadowed and obscured in such a way as to render it utterly strange to all those human figures who sit in the dark and watch it.”

Ridout’s conclusion from this, citing Levinas and Hans Theis Lehmann among others, is that:

“the event of theatre [should be] approached with uncertainty, with a view to the possibility of surprise, challenge or affront...

… that theatre [currently, normally] justif[ies] itself in terms of its contribution to an ethical life, might be the very thing that prevents any theatre from meeting such a demand. Theatre’s greatest ethical potential may be found precisely at the moment when theatre abandons ethics.”

Reading Theatre & Ethics back in 2009, I remember finding it difficult to imagine such a piece of theatre (I proposed Andy Field’s the other night i dreamt the world had fallen over as an early working example). I think Luxuriant went a lot further toward perhaps making me appreciate what Ridout is talking about. During the performance itself we’re in a kind of imaginative and ethical freefall (and free-for-all). It is disconcerting, without ever really explicitly making it clear what it is you could, should, or might be disconcerted by.

The sheer oddness of that situation alone – certainly when compared to, say, being spoonfed an easily understood and digested moral dilemma at the Royal Court – feels like some faculty of reason, curiosity, or sheer puzzlement that most theatre feels like it is actively seeking to keep sedated is suddenly, violently being reawoken.

As such, even when flailing around failing to pin the piece down, even just enough to describe and reflect on it, the piece still feels urgent and strange.

[watching the trailer won't help much, but here you are:

“Public Enemy” – Young Vic

["Vi kommer til å trenge en større filtrering enhet"*]

You want more acting? THIS MUCH MORE ACTING?

The heart of Ibsen’s En Folkefiende is a MASSIVE FUCKING PLOT-HOLE. This is made especially clear and galling by Richard Jones’s new production for the Young Vic. The key issue of Isben’s drama – not changed one iota in David Harrower’s “version”, which then oddly finds itself put into a clunking Norway-in-the-Seventies setting – is that a small town has styled itself as a bathing resort, only for the town’s maverick Doctor Stockmann to discover that these baths are full of toxic bacteria.

It’s a pity for the town, sure, but it’s also an open and shut case. Stockmann has the scientific evidence. However, the town mayor (who also happens to be Stockmann’s brother), seems to reckon it’s just a matter of hushing up these findings and carrying on as if nothing had happened. The reasons given for Not Doing Anything tend to focus on the damage that publicising the problem would have on the town’s economy and the significant costs of cleaning up the problem (which is here presented as totally do-able, but just prohibitively expensive). All this seems to rather ignore that fact that, given Stockmann is right (we must presume, and it wouldn’t hurt the characters to at least consider) the alternative the town is choosing to face instead is *at the very best* half a successful season, followed by a mountain of corpses and some very difficult questions being asked.

I’m just about prepared to go along with the idea that the idea of lawsuits for corporate manslaughter were an underdeveloped phenomena in 1882 Norway, and even that health and safety checks on bathing water were not routine... But, probably *after* the bodies start piling up, and given that the science exists enough for Dr Stockmann to have discovered the toxic properties, surely someone else would also be able to also put two and two together. At which point, even if the town successfully en masse manages to deny any prior knowledge of the toxicity of its deathtrap resort, the ongoing success of the resort is still totally shafted, with the added stigma of having its name forever linked to the deaths of hundreds of holidaymakers.

It’s just silly.

Which rather short-circuits the first three acts of the play, since no one once addresses this glaring omission.

Of course we can all still think in the modern world of examples of local councils, or companies, or governments, or global corporations who have flouted health and safety, who have put the lives of workers, or even populations at risk. On the other hand, the way that this town is painted – small, economically precarious – suggests that they are hardly in a position to be able to take risks.

Yes, I know we’re meant to see it as, y’know, a metaphor for a wider tendency toward a corrosive, damaging self-interest of a community. But when – sitting in the stalls – you could fill the holes in their arguments with water and call them another bathing resort, but no one on stage even addresses them, then the whole debate feels stupid and redundant.

However, this is only the first three acts. Ibsen has another trick up his sleeve for Act Four, in which Stockmann is to address the town over his findings and is supposed to plead with them to see reason. Instead of sensibly pointing out to them that if they don’t clean up their bathing resort, then they will have a massive lawsuit on their hands, Stockmann opts to denounce the entire town as fools, and proceed to give a lengthy rant about the primacy of the intellectual individual over the stupid masses like some kind of proto-Ayn Rand.

In 2013, we can see this speech for what it is – seductive fascistic nonsense. We have perhaps, for example, read John Carey’s forensic examination of this sort of thinking in The Intellectuals and The Masses (which I happen to be re-reading now), which draws a detailed picture of the emergence of this sort of post-Nietzschean thinking, traces it through the intellectuals and artists of the 1880s through to the 1930s, where it found its logical conclusion in Hitler’s rise to power. So, yes, liberal humanism had its problems back then. And, sure, the rhetoric in David Harrower’s version certainly makes it clear that you can knock up a modern-sounding version of the same which sounds very familiar, cf. the humorous columns of, say, Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell, or anyone else who makes a living despairing at the stupidity of the majority of other people (I would have included Richard Littlejohn or Quentin Letts, except, strangely for humourists, they make their fun picking on minorities, not masses).

Still, Stockmann’s basic schoolboy error is the same as that of Coriolanus and Gerald Ratner: he tells the people that he thinks they’re idiots to their face. Which tends to be a poor way of winning round an audience.


Irritation with Ibsen’s 131-year-old story aside, time should also be taken to wonder what the hell Richard Jones thinks he is doing.  David Harrower’s “version” of the play is a curiously colourless object. Just about speakable, it does feel rather that Harrower has let himself be steamrollered a bit by the literal translation provided for him to do his version. As such, there’s no real point in this having been done by a playwright at all. As with his clunking version of Woyzeck, you could probably get any half-intelligent actor to paraphrase a better version of the text from the literal.

Jones, in collaboration with designer Miriam Buether, the contrives to make the blandness of the tranlsation even stranger by setting the the production in a remarkably ugly room in 1970s Norway. The back wall is knowingly appalling orange 70s wallpaper, the rest of the the shallow stage, a varnished wooden cabin. A window, stage right, inexplicably gives onto a glittery kitsch picture of a fjord. Despite the half-assed presence of a – clichéd – “revolutionary” stencil later, none of the language is especially that of seventies European left-wingers.

Indeed, one spends the first three Acts wondering what on earth could possibly have made Jones pick this period. Does he just like actors in scratchy-looking nylon clothes? Is this Norway at its most recently quintessential? Is this the last possible point in European history that anyone seriously considered social change? The whole thing feels like someone being glib and embarrassed by the earnestness of their material and attempting to defuse any possible seriousness with a kitschy, ironic, knowing, hipster set. Great.

Also, what the hell happened to the acting? There are some seriously good actors in this play. And there is also Darrell D’Silva, but you can’t have everything. But even the good actors (notably Nick Fletcher and Bryan Dick) seem to have been directed into doing a bunch of very odd shouting. Elsewhere there is woodenness that puts the log cabin to shame. Indeed, the style is so strange that I honestly wondered if I was missing the point of a particularly significant stylistic choice. It feels as if the whole thing might have taken its cue from a a 70s farce, or else some strange stylised form of acting deployed by New York or German avant gardists.

Perhaps the most galling part of this largely galling staging, however, is the totally bogus use of direct audience address. This scene which – like Mark Antony’s also famously problematic-to-stage funeral oration – can be played either to an onstage audience or to the actual audience, is here played out to the audience.

Except, being British theatre, we know exactly what is expected of us: nothing.

I couldn’t help wishing that I had been watching Thomas Ostermeier’s Volksfeind instead (TBH, that was true throughout, but it was most true here). Matt Trueman gives the most glowing account of the electricity that the opening of this speech into an actual discussion in the audience, although Jana Percovic’s counter-argument against Ostermeier is also vital reading (which last night I had remembered as this much more favourable piece about Berlin audience interaction).

But, no. We are emphatically not expected to speak. I was briefly excited that something vaguely radical might have been about to happen, but it didn’t. Granted, this part of the staging is still far and away the most successful part of the play. Apart from anything else suddenly makes total sense of the reconfigured Young Vic auditorium – which is set up a bit like a small public meeting in a town hall might be – but by doing so, it also stops the whole rest of the staging making any sense at all. And the fact during the scene we’re both *there* (our applause is the applause in the hall) and *not there* (what would have happened if any of us *had* asked a question? I wanted to ask about what year it was. I had a bunch of smart arse questions; I was ready to go. But at the same time, I kind of got the impression that wasn’t the game, and I didn’t want to spoil the evening for everyone else) – how does that work? Does it work? And who are we when we’re watching the stuff before and after the meeting? Is the wooden acting intended to indicate that we’re seeing part of a kind of pre- and post-town hall meeting burlesque?

Actually, to an extent, the slipping-between-modes-thing can be fine (it isn’t here, but it can be). The being co-opted without being co-opted is less good. Not least because the audience in the theatre could have probably turned the course of the play around. After all, Stockmann’s vanity shouldn’t really be allowed to trump the life and death matter of the poisoned water. And science isn’t a democracy.

Ironically, I should note that the performance was well-attended, with a laudable spread of people, and received an enthusiastic response when it finished. At which point, on first glance, to dismiss these diverse peoples enjoyment of the show would seem like a massive bit of Stockmannism.

However, I think this distinction can be drawn – there is nothing wrong with any of the people who enjoyed Public Enemy last night. However, I think there is a better production of the play – one with fewer internal contradictions and a greater willingness to work out why the hell it is staging the play in the first place – that they could have enjoyed more. One doesn’t have to be a snob or a dangerous Ayn Rand-alike to believe that we could all be being given something better.

Postscript:

What is with the publicity image? (see above) It’s perhaps the most confusing part of the production. It seems to almost suggest that the version the Young Vic wanted was more to do with Malcolm X and methamphetamine. Now *that* would be a production:

Mayor: But our community needs the money!

Malcolm X: But I’ve done some tests and it turns out this methamphetamine you’ve been selling everyone is really bad for them!

Mayor: The game’s the game.

Etc.


Post-post script: I am blaming the fact I saw this almost entirely on Henry Hitchings (well, him and the fact it’s still kind of my job). He wrote a perfectly fair-minded three-star review for the Standard, which I happened to read on the Tube. Sadly, it contained the words: “The use of strobe lights is one of several conceits that are too abrasive”. And it put me in mind of Hitchings’s three-star review of Three Kingdoms (“the symbolism becomes overwrought. Strenuous attention is paid to the seemingly trivial... The results are disorientating — sometimes in a good way, sometimes not... The spectacle can be cloying,”) and so I had to check for myself.

FWIW, I didn’t think there were nearly enough conceits, and the strobe lights weren’t nearly abrasive enough. If only there could have been more moments like that.

[* "We're going to need a bigger water-filtration unit"]

The Seagull – Headlong at Watford Palace Theatre

[in which I abuse the privileges of a press ticket to breaking point]

[In the spirit of full disclosure: I’ve known John Donnelly since his A Short Play About Sex and Death at Leeds Uni was the reason I first went to the National Student Drama Festival in 1997. And we’ve been mates ever since. And since that NSDF is pretty much the single reason I’m where I am today (in a pub writing a review. Thanks a bunch). The first thing I ever directed was a short play by John Donnelly (starring Lucy Ellinson. Yes, that Lucy Ellinson). And, on the night I saw this Seagull in Watford, the actor John Hopkins (currently rehearsing with the RSC), who’d starred in A Short Play About Sex and Death, was also there (which in itself says something about the loyalty of university theatre friends). And we all went for a drink after and I was introduced to director Blanche McIntyre and half the sodding cast. So, yeah. This is about as compromised a review as it’s possible to imagine.]

Further, coming to The Seagull roughly a week after its press night in Southampton seems to have been another error (see also: Narrative). The reviews have been pretty unavoidable on social media. And, well, there’s nothing like having your expectations managed, and this was nothing like having your expectations managed. From Matt Trueman’s five-star rave in his Torygraph début downwards, the only person who apparently didn’t love Headlong’s new Seagull was the Salisbury Journal’s Elizabeth Kemble (like “a bad school production, made by rebelling teenagers who wanted to shock their audience by sticking in a sex scene, a bit of nudity and littering the dialogue with the F word”). And even Kemble sagely concedes that these things are “always a matter of opinion”.

A couple of the reviews (notably Lyn’s and Matt’s, ironically) suggest that the crux of this production is a battle of youth versus age. For my money, it breaks down into a much more undeclared war between the sexes. In the staging of Konstantin’s play, it is predominantly the hostility of his mother, Arkadina, and the nerviness of his would-be actress, Nina, that derail the project. The kindly, elderly(-ish) doctor, Dorn, is actually rather encouraging. Where men fight – most obviously Konstantin and his mother’s lover, and his inamorata’s seducer, Trigorin – it is because of women. Obviously, as an essay in gender politics, this isn’t a super way of looking at it. Director McIntyre (and probably Chekhov) get around this by at least crediting the women with a respectable amount of agency of their own. These are not merely simpering playthings stuck into the play to facillitate the Big Important Feelings of some guys.

There are no winners in Chekhov. Only different sorts of loser. Here it doesn’t feel implausible to suggest that in Donnelly/McIntyre’s version the women do finish up ahead, if only on points. Abigail Cruttenden’s Irina and Pearl Chanda’s Nina are, by the end, slightly less broken than their respective lovers. Even Jenny Rainsford’s booze-soaked, bitter, pragmatic Masha with her solution: “It's what you do isn’t it when something makes you miserable? Find something else to make you even more miserable” somehow seems to come out on top of her situation, albeit in the worst way imaginable.

The men here, at least, the younger men, seem much more mad and neurotic. Alexander Cobb’s Konstantin is convincingly young, gauche and embarrassingly petulant. He’s not been glossed or smoothed into a tragic hero, instead, he’s horribly accurate as precisely the sort of precocious teenage nightmare we all wish we’d never been. It’s a pity he kills himself, since, in a few years he’d have probably have graduated to becoming the (also uncannily accurate) desperate mix of cynicism and fear displayed by Gyuri Sarossy’s Trigorin. Rather than playing him as a louche seducer, Trigorin here seems pretty much at the mercy not only of his career as a writer, but of his attachment to Arkadina and Nina’s subsequent attachment to him. Yes, he still behaves like an utter shit, but remarkably he comes off looking like a victim of circumstance – someone just a bit to immature to actually be relied on for anything by anyone ever. You don’t get the impression that this Trigorin is ever really enjoying himself any more than Konstantin isn’t. Or Nina isn’t. Or Arkadina isn’t. Indeed, if anything, this production makes a strong case for never aspiring to artistry of any sort whatsoever in your life. Or, at least, making damn sure you prefer labour and settling down with whomever is closest.

The most obvious touchstone for this production for other reviewers seems to have been Benedict Andrews’s revelatory Three Sisters seen at the Young Vic last year. It is also interesting to note, in passing, that no one as seen fit to compare it with Anya Reiss’s recent (largely unpopular) modernised Seagull set on the Isle of Man (snigger), seen late last year (though not by me) at the Southwark Playhouse.

For my money it unwittingly owed a good deal more to Dimiter Gottscheff’s Volksbühne Iwanow. Here, as with the Gottscheff, the staging is essentially played on a bare stage with a stark concrete wall at the back and a smoke machine. By sheer coincidence the back wall is also graffitied on during the progress of the play. Unlike Gottscheff’s production, the stage is not totally empty. McIntyre’s designer Laura Hopkins (who also designed Rupert Goold’s astonishing break-out (at least to me, having missed The Tempest) Faustus) has plonked a massive, rough wooden see-saw on the stage. It’s a glorious, bold gesture (which goes some way to mitigating the slightly odd – and presumably touring-practical – decision to have the concrete-looking back wall only a couple of metres high) and it works beautifully as a simple, adaptable piece of set. In act one it is a kind of jetty, in two a kind of almost not-really-real metaphorical see-saw, in three and four a simple table pointing first up- and down-stage and then finally left and right. Of course, niether McIntyre nor Donnelly have Gottscheff's stern contempt for the idea that we might be seduced by the bourgeois comfort of identifying with the characters, but this is not entirely a bad thing.  What the production lacks in Marxist rigour, it makes up for in excellent jokes and painfully acute characterisations.

The biggest difference that Donnelly has made to the script [at least: a) I think it’s a change, and b) I think it’s one made by Donnelly rather than McIntyre – at least in the first instance] is that there are moments of direct audience address. The first of these feels genuinely shocking. You are taken completely by surprise when a character from Chekhov speaks directly to you, a member of the audience. In its own way it’s probably the most iconoclastic gesture you can imagine someone making with a Chekhov play, what with all the Stanislavskian baggage that it’s accrued (certainly in Britain, anyway). That said, it does feel slightly like this playfulness could have been more extended into the way that the stage is treated the rest of the time. Granted, what with the big see-saw and the modern dress costumes, the production *does* go further with it, but I suppose I’d have been happy for it to have gone further still. [take out the words, replace with animal heads and proper nudity, etc.] But, yes, this works. This is a good, solid, intelligent, British take on how to do Chekhov in the 21st century. If it feels to me more like the start of an important process rather than its end-zone, then that probably say more about me than about the production. But this if this is the shape of things to come, then I very much look forward to what comes next, and to Elizabeth Kemble’s ongoing, deepening despair

Unsent Postcards: If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep – Royal Court

[sat on my hands on this one too. Rather wish I hadn’t now]

There a mismatch between Anders Lustgarten’s rhetoric and the latest play he’s written. Having read the recent interview in the Evening Standard, I went in expecting (and hoping for) the theatrical equivalent of a Crass album. In the event, the play Lustgarden has written is deeply conservative, both formally and politically. Similarly, Simon Godwin’s “production without decor” rather undermines itself: firstly by having décor, and secondly by feeling more like a sulk than a production:“If you don’t give me a play, I won’t make a production” it seems to shrug.

The play is divided into two parts. The first, of ten scenes, might be subtitled: Scenes From Our Undoing, and features a series of One-Dimensional Men and Women bluntly explaining their miseries to even less developed secondary characters in a privatised near-future Britain. The second, which could be titled: Scenes From Our Redemption, is a single 32 page scene set in an “activist” “Court of Public Opinion”, in which several activist characters explain everything that Anders Lustgarten thinks through the clever dramatic device of being several characters who all think the same things that Anders Lustgarten thinks, saying those things to each other: excitedly and earnestly.

There are more problems though: while Lustgarten’s politics may be serious and unimpeachable, his imagination isn’t. Lettuce Dream attempts to be a dystopian satire, but its inventions just aren’t sharp enough. As Stewart Pringle has already pointed out, given that the situation *right now* is an obscenity, why bother making up badly thought-out extras? But if you’re going to make-up extras, then they should be better than these: a government dept. called:“Department of Home and Business Affairs”, a hedge fund called “Empathy Capital”, a private security/prison service called “Competitive Confinement”, a new tax called “Debt Tax”.

Then there are the characters. Who have no interior lives whatsoever. They exist solely to illustrate their bit of the social milieu. There are the aforementioned business types, who wear suits and talk about business. There is Joan, who explains to “Workman” that she was “42 years a nurse. Looking after people”, who refuses to pay her debt tax because she “didn’t cause it” and remembers “Fought a war for this. Fought a war for our rights... Not the Germans. After that. A war against our lot. The elite.” Yes. Those words were actually spoken – without irony – in a British theatre this year.

There’s Ryan, a student who seems to have been caught up in some looting, to whom “Man” is explaining a bunch of stuff about how privatised justice works and, y’know, being a cardboard cut-out nasty police explaining man. Then there are Jason and Ross, two of Ryan’s friends in “A Wetherspoon’s in a satellite town” (*a* satellite town. They could be anyone. Those places. You know.) who spend four pages articulating why young unemployed white men might think racist things.

So, there’s a choice between nameless functionary of the state, or named functionary of Lustgarten’s social analysis. I don’t remember giving the slightest fuck about any of them, and I didn’t get the impression Lustgarten wanted me to (or Godwin either for that matter). Not for Brechtian reasons of Verfremsdung-ing, nor to refuse the bourgeois comforts of identification, but simply because he doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck about these people either. Or rather, he cares about their plights, and so it is just their plights that are articulated. Which doesn’t really amount to drama. Indeed, it barely amounts to the level of characterisation present in a corporate training video. And there are too few jokes, and zero poetry to leaven this deadness.

Given these meagre scraps to work with, the cast actually put up a sterling defence, at least of their own abilities to act. We come away with credible performances of unspeakable lines. And, yes, as other commentators have noted, it’s nice to see Ferdy Roberts playing another policeman.

Presumably Simon Godwin can take some of the credit for that, which is a good job, as the rest of the “without decor” concept is about a sloppily handled as it is possible to imagine. For a start, a massive scaffolding tower which I think at one point even has a door attached to it, isn’t “without decor”. Ramin Grey’s The Ugly One, designed by Jeremy Herbert, did “decor without decor” beautifully, and actually taking everything away also counts, but having the stage strewn with costumes and the other stuff of naturalism isn’t really “without decor” is it? Also, why have the Royal Court flagged up the "without decor" thing so much? Do Sloane Sqaure audiences now regularly demand their money back if there isn’t a lovingly-crafted naturalistic replica of the inside of some posho’s house? Plausibly some, I suppose. It’s bad enough for them that there’s this “playwright” telling them all to go fuck themselves, without having to suffer the additional indignity of having to imagine the rooms in which the characters who are telling them to go fuck themselves are standing.

So I was bored, yes. But worse, I was deeply irritated. I was irritated by the way that we the audience were being sold all this as “insight” as “a revelation”. As if Anders Lustgarten believes he’s the first person who’s written a play suggesting that capitalism isn’t the way forward – indeed, Lustgarten removes all trace of doubt that this is his opinion in his unbelievably condescending three page intro to the script, which concludes: “I wrote it to make you feel, and therefore think. I hope it worked.” As is evident from this review, I *felt* irritated, therefore *thought* it wasn’t a great play. But, flippancy aside, what a monstrously arrogant thing to say about one’s audience. To have a baseline assumption that, in our day-to-day lives, we are unfeeling and unthinking, and need fucking Lustgarten to show us some stuff we couldn’t have ever possibly felt or therefore thought for ourselves.

There’s a near-constant accusation that political theatre preaches to the choir. This commits a worse sin – of assuming that the choir has never even been to church before. There is *nothing* in this play for anyone with the slightest social conscience or feeling of opposition to the current government. There are a few factoids thrown into the Activist Saviours section, but even these are familiar. There are the portraits of the country on its knees, which we already live in.

But it’s the fact that it’s so dramatically meagre that really grates. Not only are we being told nothing new – or, if it is new to some audience members, being presented with it in such an unconvincing form that they’d be well within their rights to shoot the messenger – but that it’s being told in such a way as to play right into the hands of anyone who does assert that explicitly political theatre is A Bad Thing or that it preaches to the choir, or that it won’t change a single mind will have all their prejudices confirmed here.

So, to recap: this sort of thing – in principle – could be good. But this is a very bad example of a potentially good thing.  Just don't ever do it this badly again, please. 

Unsent Postcards: Spades – Roundhouse

[unaccountably, I thought I'd leave a cooling-off period before posting this]

Apparently the famous Canadian auteur Robert Lepage used to be good. I have to take this on trust as he’s one of those parties I turned up late for. I saw his enormously long, and far-from-finished Lipsynch in 2008 at the Barbican and thought it was flashy, cold, horribly over-long, vain and only sporadically interesting. But it had a certain chuztpah to it. I liked that Lepage was happy just to sling on his half-finished devised piece and make us pay money to watch his glorified scratch night.

I’ve got no idea if he thinks “Spades” is finished or not. (The title alludes to the unhappy prospect that he’s planning on doing a quartet of these pieces, each tenuously based on the apparent properties of a different suit in a pack of playing cards.) It’s two and a half hours long and very little really happens.

The big deal about Lepage was apparently his way with a mise-en-scene. In his prime he could apparently knock-up a half-decent stage picture. No more. Spades at the Roundhouse is playing in-the-round, which of course means that there’s no way to create a single unified spectacle for the whole audience, who are all looking at it from different angles. So, things that in-the-round theatre is good for are: things in which either the drama is compelling, or else: things where the quality of the image is not dependent on the angle from which it’s viewed. Lepage opts to side-step either option and presents only one spectacle (a “sandstorm” at the end, which consists of a smoke machine, some extractor fans, someone spinning round in the middle to make it swirly, and a lot of red light) and next to no drama at all, compelling or otherwise.

There are stabs at drama. There are a range of characters, but they are undone by the fact that they speak some of the worst dialogue you will hear spoken on the London stage this year, and the fact that they are all wankers. I say that. Actually, all the male characters are wankers. None of the female characters get enough stage-time to really develop beyond “very irritating” (and "wearing bikinis" mostly). But there we go, that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.

There are themes too. The main themes of Spades are The War In Iraq and Gambling in Nevada, near a military base, where some soldiers are, who are going to go to Iraq. I think there’s also some sort of shamanistic elemental mythical cowboy bullshit stirred into the mix, which only serves to make the whole thing feel like someone’s tried to make an Iraq play out of The Cult’s Love album, which, as a friend pointed out, would actually be better if only it was what they had been trying to do. Instead, we have to deal with the fact that this mess seems to think it’s being profound.

There’s also the upsetting matter of Lepage’s much-vaunted way with stage craft. Certainly there’s some impressive machinery on show. The circular stage at the centre of the Roundhouse’s cavernous interior has a middle section that can rise and fall, revealing hidden interiors or delineating sunken rooms. There are also a load of fold-up trapdoors, from which characters can emerge, or stand waist-high in, creating the impression of hotel bars, casino tables and so on. The problem is, while these “scene changes” are neat enough in themselves, the scenes that they actually create are no more impressive that your average student production of Dealer’s Choice. They’re fine, they’re functional, but they’re hardly visually exciting. This would of course be forgiveable if anything that took place within these uninspiring environs was of any interest whatsoever. Instead, wanker talks to wanker until we’d pay actual money for them to stop.

On the night I saw it – maybe a week or two after press night – by the end the sparse audience was openly, almost aggressively laughing at the worse lines. There were plenty of walk-outs too. It was wretched; a state of open contempt between audience and stage. “Oblige us to sit here for two and a half hours by all means” the audience, slumped in its seats seemed to hiss, “But don’t think we’re not going to fight back.”

This was theatre at its absolute worst. A passive-aggressive audience and, I would imagine, deeply unhappy performers, all stuck in an interminable nightmare of a “play” made by someone with a disgustingly inflated sense of their own importance.

narrative about Narrative – Royal Court

[apologies for prolonged absence. I’ve been doing a bunch of writing for other places and it got in the way of writing here]

If “The experience of an event begins for its audience when they first hear about it and only finishes when they stop thinking and talking about it.”, then I suspect Narrative might wind up having a much longer run than One Man, Two Guvnors.

For me, Narrative began on the 5th November 2012 with a press release from the Royal Court. It was called “A New Play” then. The press release blurb read as follows:

“Why no title?

“Because I want to write from passion, not obligation.

Because I want to write for the actors I’ve cast, not cast for the parts I’ve written.

Because I want to be stupid enough to do the wrong thing when it’s right.

Because risk is everything.

Because everything is changing.

Because I'm doing something else right now.

Because I want to surprise myself.

Because I want to surprise you.

That’s why.”

Anthony Neilson”

Which I thought was good.

Narrative continued as an argument on Twitter, perhaps later that day, with a young director who thought that the above was “pretentious” or “shit” or something like that. I disagreed. I liked the spirit. I particularly liked that Neilson had said “Because I’m doing something else right now”. (although quite a lot of the rest of it reminded me mostly of this song from the Fight Club soundtrack)

Narrative continued when I bumped into Anthony at the bar of the Soho Theatre and we had a chat about it, and about his production of Marat/Sade, and about his views on some of the critics, with which I agreed.

Or perhaps bumping into Anthony happened before the press release. Something Simon Stephens said recently when I interviewed him as part of the All Change festival, was – quoting his son, Oscar – that we don’t remember our lives, our histories, stories, in a strictly linear fashion. This seems relevant, both to my recollection of these events, and to the piece itself.

Narrative continued with a conversation with Matt Trueman, who had just interviewed Anthony. This was before the interview had been published. Perhaps even before it had been written. Matt had spent a day or so watching the rehearsals. He showed me his note book, in which he’d drawn a kind of diagram of the play’s structure. It was a picture of a box criss-crossed with incomplete lines, some crossing, some unrelated to anything else in the box. I remember being intrigued and excited by this as the proposition of a piece of theatre.

Then (I think this is next), unrelated at the time to my experience of Narrative, I spent from 12am on Saturday April to 12am on Sunday April watching the live-stream of Forced Entertainment’s show Quizoola. It was at the Barbican. I was at my parents’ house in Shrewsbury. For 24 hours on and off, I watched Quizoola, chatted to my friends who were also watching it on Twitter. It was the best bit of performance/theatre that I’d seen all year.

My next experience of Narrative was getting an email from Trueman, post press-night, expressing his irritation at some of the reviews which Narrative had received. Matt framed Narrative as an important theatrical event and critical fight. This year’s Three Kingdoms, in fact. I should confess, I felt a small amount of scepticism. The main difference for me was that Narrative had already sold out its entire run, whereas with Three Kingdoms the reviews had impacted directly on attendance, and the counter-reviews and the buzz of conversations of Twitter had significantly turned that around and sold out the final few performances as *everyone* suddenly wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Nothing anyone writes about Narrative will actually alter ticket sales.

Nevertheless, I put in a late request to the Royal Court’s press office for them to hold one of the day seats for me (so, yes, I actually paid twenty pounds of actual money to see this) on the only night I was in London before flying to Zagreb last week.

Another thing that had been happening a bit before seeing the show, was reading a variety of tweets – some by friends, some retweeted by the Royal Court – the tenor of which was largely “Woah! WFT? Amazeballs!”.


So, there you have a rough account of the mental landscape with which I had no choice but to enter the piece. I’d not read “the reviews” (but had read Matt’s interview with Anthony), but nevertheless, basic exposure to social media and a general professional interest had already given me a load of unverifiable, unmediated and largely-unprocessed-by-me information.

So, annoyingly, part of my experience of the show was a reaction to all this information. Perhaps this is always partly going to be the case for anything, especially anything seen post- press night, even if one hasn’t read the reviews. Or perhaps even post first-preview, now that some blogs (even if you don’t read them yourself) are in the business of routine financially expedient or cynical embargo busting. Either way, information seems to seep into the world.

Consequently, my first reaction after seeing the show was ‘That wasn’t “difficult” AT. ALL. What’s everyone going on about?’ Annoyingly, this was by far my strongest immediate reaction. I just felt irritable that a lot of people had gone on about “difficulty” when, to my mind, Narrative was the easiest thing in the world to follow. Which seemed to be what everyone was talking about. “Woah. What just happened?” people seemed to wonder as we left the auditorium. “Did you understand that?” another asked their friend, cautiously. Well, what had/has just happened is, on a superficial level, quite simple. Over the 1hr50 running time, we get a cross section of little narratives. Mostly linear, naturalistic, and about as difficult to process as dipping into four consecutive episodes of a television soap opera – i.e. it feels a bit tricky at first because at the beginning characters hurtle from out of nowhere and you immediately have to start collecting information about them. But it’s no harder than that.

There are some slightly more random elements. The piece begins with a description of “the first example of narrative art”. A picture of a bison with its intestines hanging out killing/goring/knocking over the prehistoric huntsman – armed with a spear and a hard-on, dressed apparently in a bird-mask. To be honest, I was surprised that this was classed as “narrative”. It’s a freeze frame. The narrator (ha ha!) imposes a story onto the picture – some things have happened before the moment the picture depicts, some things will happen afterwards, but I was intrigued by the idea that the picture itself constituted a narrative at all.

This bison seems to crop up a couple more times in the piece. One of the characters, having stabbed her mate by mistake, appears to grow a pair of bison-like horns, which, given the way her story goes, appear to symbolise her guilt, and/or her relationship to death. Her story intersects with that of a mother who is blaming the suicide of her teenage son on some medical drugs that he was meant to be taking. When she discovers he wasn’t actually taking the drugs which she supposes to have caused his suicide, she also grows a pair of these horns (I think. It’s almost a week since I saw the thing and the details – perhaps thanks to the non-linearity of the thing – feel a little hazy). One of the final images of the show (again, I think) is a film of a modern-day bison running into a man and knocking him flying. Perhaps again fatally. Perhaps not. We’re not told. The oldest story, we might infer, is a story of death. Of mankind’s attempts to make sense of death. Indeed, for a piece showing us so many lives (or perhaps *because*), death casts a particularly long shadow over the whole piece.

The early use of Bowie’s "Where Are We Now?" partly echoes this as well as neatly framing one of the play’s/production’s constant questions. But, just as with the Bowie song, there’s a hint of the ersatz about the question. We quickly pick up where we are at most points during Narrative, and there’s a slight sense that if we don’t then it doesn’t especially matter, something new will be along any second anyway.

At one point – around the introduction of two characters who are actors sharing a flat – I wondered if every scene contained a hidden reference to a pop song. One of the two actors is about to play “Elastic Man” in a new Hollywood movie. "How I Wrote Elastic Man" is, of course, a song by The Fall. I now can’t remember the other couple of songs that I thought might have been obscurely hinted at, but you get the idea. There was a sense that there might well have been a bunch of semi-obscured “clues”, but ones which could only possibly have hinted at some sort of deeper personal set of resonances for either Neilson or another member of the cast with whom he devised the piece, rather than a set of outward facing clues, which, if correctly identified and assembled would have spelled out some larger meaning of the piece.

Actually, it is this whole question of “a devising process” which most interested me about Narrative. Matt Trueman’s interview with Neilson already describes the process itself in plenty of detail. But what is interesting is the blur of those boundaries. For instance, the cast are using their own names, but are plainly not *really* playing themselves, and yet they are wearing T-shirts with photos of their younger selves printed on them. (Later, in the final scene, apparently set after death, they are wearing plain T-shirts.)

For Dan Hutton, this raised the question of whether the performers were perhaps, in part, “fictionalising” their own experiences. The best-observed bit of comedy in the evening does, after all, hinge on Zawe Ashton’s very real height – in one scene she complains about feeling too tall. In the next scene, clad in some heel-less high heels, she totters across the stage almost bent double in paroxysms of trying to make herself and her height disappear, as if failing her urge to combat some particularly preposterous aversion therapy.

The question this process of (structured?) improvisation, countered?/supplemented? by Neilson going away and writing new material at night, made me wonder something more fundamental –

...It all folds back to the question of the title, and perhaps the marketing image (see top). If the piece had been called something else (Shit Happens springs to mind as a possible alternative) and didn’t have an picture claiming “form is dead” then perhaps I wouldn’t feel such an urge to put the whole thing through some sort of post-structuralist autopsy, but it is called Narrative. So it’s asking for it, frankly...

– so, you've got actors in to improvise. The question which occurred to me – and this sprang very much from watching the piece rather than theorising – was “Aren’t these stories that they’re telling *absolutely* reliant on *very old-fashioned* narrative structures?” Perhaps that’s the point, but why claim “form is dead”. I think without exception the stories in Narrative are deeply, almost primally formal. It’s not a “well-made-play”, but that’s never been the only formal option for theatre.


So what are we getting out of Narrative? Well, there are a lot of jokes – and I think Anthony Neilson and I have quite different senses of humour, so I’m not really qualified to comment on those. Love and Hutton both say it was very funny.

And there are the stories themselves: interestingly, what’s perhaps annoying about these is that they’re *not* schematic. You don’t get neat pat-on-the-back examples of different narratives so clearly laid out that you can spot them and pat yourself on the back for *getting it*.

Instead, they seem quite random, diffuse tales. While on one hand that’s quite laudable – the unexpectedness, the randomness – it’s also kind of annoying. It’s a bit like the sort of annoyance that you get when faced with infinite choice in a restaurant. Why this? Why these stories, in particular? You wonder. I mean, if they really are this random, might they not have been some totally different stories? This feeling of total artistic free-fall is disconcerting. Alternatively, they’re not random stories. In which case, then perhaps the mechanisms justifying *these* stories as against any others, are perhaps a little too submerged. We don’t know why we’re seeing, but more oddly, it feels like we *should* understand. After all, I’ve seen plenty of things where I’ve had no idea why one thing has followed the previous (see my last review of Pina Bausch, for example) but it hasn’t bothered me, so I’m curious why it bothered me so much here. I think partly because of the title (It’s a terrible pity debbie tucker green got to the title Random first).

And this is where we get to The Problem of Quizoola:

I’m going to write a proper review of Q. at some point, so I won’t go on about it too much here. The basic set-up is very effectively described here. One of the things I found really interesting about Quizoola was the way the two performers on stage would lapse into actually playing out little dramatic scenes, or scenes from dramatic tropes: the jealous lover, the sadistic interrogation, the failing relationship. This trope-hoping – which was only one small and occasional element of Q. – is sort of the whole of Narrative. But where Quizoola was fleet, nimble, unanchored to a set-text, totally negotiable; Narrative, by sheer bad luck of timing, turned up like its clumsy ancestor. You can see the ambition behind Narrative, but I’m not fully convinced that it really paid dividends. In the end, Narrative felt completely safe, completely conservative. Only the deepest reactionary could find Narrative’s polite prodding at a sequence of events even remotely troubling.

Of course, it is unfair to assume the claims a thing is making for itself and then behave grumpily and ungratefully when it doesn’t fulfil these claims, but in this case, I do think the claims were made, and I don’t think the radical solution hoped for materialised.

All of which is fine.

That said, I’m afraid I don’t especially share Catherine Love’s optimism that this piece is edging anywhere near to finding (along with Love and Information and In The Republic of Happiness) a theatrical solution to The Information Age.

I think Quizoola online might, without trying, have inadvertently shown us one possible manifestation – something intriguingly allied to the place we go to watch something continual that Chris Goode speaks about in The Forest and The Field (another review I owe you, dear reader – the link is to C-Love’s excellent write-up) – of what theatre/performance dealing with the online world might look like.

However, in the context of “writing more experimental texts” I think there is an urgent necessity to flag up that fact that, aside perhaps from the process by which it came into being (which ultimately still seems mysterious, with actors providing we-know-not-what, and a sole author disappearing into the night, squirrelling away these ideas and returning like Moses from the mountain with a script) there wasn’t much either unfamiliar or experimental about Narrative. Not. At. All. The means and process may have been, but these elements didn’t seem to manifest themselves in the final product.

Moreover – and this is a general point, much more than one aimed at this particular production – the problem with Britain’s new writing lies, I would argue, with neutered, muzzled, discouraged or just deeply unimaginative directors than with the writers – although things like the Writers’ Guild’s new guidelines and Fin Kennedy’s laudable-only-in-spirit re-Balkanisation of the whole theatre landscape, In Battalions, Really Don’t Help.

Yes, it’s unfair to dump all this extraneous stuff down at the end of what is not even really a review of Narrative. And it would be idiotic to pre-judge the results of Vicki Featherstone’s forthcoming regime at the Court in a piece looking at a commission from the tail-end of Dominic Cooke’s time there. However, to return to the point with which I started this article: “The experience of an event begins for its audience when they first hear about it and only finishes when they stop thinking and talking about it.” As such, Narrative will continue to run, and will bleed into the Featherstone regime. And experiences of that regime will be experienced through the prism of Narrative, just as Narrative couldn’t escape being experienced through other prisms.