[written for CultureWars]
[With shows like The Man, there’s a massive advantage to not being a “proper” critic. For a start, I was under no compulsion to go, see the play, and then file my review by midnight, one in the morning, or half nine the following day (which was fortunate, since I was also keen to catch Mike Bartlett’s Bull, of which more another time, perhaps). Second, it meant I didn’t feel as embargoed from talking to The Man’s author James Graham about a few details of the show’s construction. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it meant I could go and see the show a second time (after I came back from Pulse).
Of course, all these factors modify my experience of the piece, and in ways that “proper” critics aren’t really supposed to modify their experiences, but I think there’s a pretty compelling argument for approaching Graham’s piece in this way [is the British school of critics trying to preserve the purity if their perceptions against external (often useful) information necessarily *best*?]. It also means I don’t feel obliged to start the review: “Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes. The Man is a monologue about both...”]
The big thing with The Man is its liveness. The piece is being performed by a rotating, or, rather, fluctuating cast of four actors. But, more excitingly, despite there being a printed text of the play, the piece is different every night of its run. The premise of this monologue is its narrator, Ben, going through his receipts for the last year as he attempts to fill out his first tax return form. As the audience enters, each member is handed a receipt. The order in which any given audience hears the narrative depends entirely on the order in which these receipts are given to the performer.
At the conclusion of my first viewing of the show, I was more or less convinced that this “live” element was actually a bit of a cheat. I thought there was probably a certain amount of forward planning, or perhaps Derren Brown-style trickery so that we the audience *thought* we were feeding the performer receipts entirely at random, but in fact were just handing precisely the props he needed when he needed them. There isn’t.
Talking to Graham, consulting the script, chatting to other actors doing the show, and then seeing the piece for a second time – with the narrative delivered in an entirely different order – it’s entirely true: the order is complete chance. Which makes the show, a) a bugger to review (how to avoid “giving away the ending” when you don’t know which section is going to end any given performance?), and b) a pretty impressive testament to Graham’s strength as a writer.
On first viewing, you experience the unfolding narrative as completely logical. More than this, it feels as if the order you’re hearing it in makes *most sense*. Yes, it jumps about chronologically – first you hear about something from quite late on in the year, then a new receipt takes you back ten months, then forward five and so on – but it feels completely natural for it to do so. Like when someone is telling you an anecdote and then realises that you need a bit of context about their relationship to the person in the anecdote, and so they go back and tell you a bit about how they know that person, which in turn leads to another anecdote...
The way that the randomised order of the receipts appears to prompt these “memories” is about as unforced a way of achieving this effect as I can imagine. It also reveals something about the way in which we in the audience construct links between events and anecdotes ourselves. Perhaps the first order we hear the monologue in will always feel more definitive to us than it ever will to anyone involved in the production, because we’ve just heard the stories for the first time and have therefore forged all the information around it and the pictures it has created for us into a cohesive whole. It’s interesting that people I saw the show with on both nights swore that their (entirely different) orders of the script seemed like the ideal order to hear the play in.
Importantly, the randomised order doesn’t just feel like a gimmick. In fact, it seems like a beautifully judged way of owning up to the way that the audience and performer share the space. At the same time doesn’t seek to introduce some spurious notion that we’re “controlling” the action – the effect on the show’s order would be exactly the same if the performer just picked the receipts out of a hat, but it does make the whole experience feel much more “shared”.
It’s tempting to say that the narrative itself (or rather the events that are covered in the piece) is “classic Graham”. Except that looking back at the reviews of the other two plays by James Graham (Little Madam and Sons of York) I happen to have reviewed, that claim seems a little hard to back up. Where previous plays (see also: Eden’s Empire and Tory Boyz) have worried hard at Britain’s class-based politics, The Man, while touching on political themes (not least the question of taxation, which lies at the heart of every British election), is unashamedly personal. It deals primarily with attempts at love and coping with death. It’s also a smartingly funny snapshot of what it’s like being a non-native, twentysomething Londoner, living on precious little money in the early 21st century.
The first performance of The Man that I saw had James Graham himself playing the protagonist. This fact, coupled with the myriad receipts we had been handed, did make me wonder if the show might be a clever way for a writer to recycle the clutter of their tax receipts. But, no, in fact all the receipts are worryingly perfect forgeries – even the train tickets and Sainsbury’s receipts. Indeed, the receipts from iTunes (a clever way of seamlessly providing the show with a soundtrack) even have the character’s name and address on them.
Graham’s performance initially struck me as something of an essay of the part: the author gamely stepping up to undertake the same pretty difficult task of learning an hour an a half’s worth of material and then delivering it in a random order every night that he'd inflicted on his actors. By “essay”, I suppose mean I thought that Graham wasn’t really doing “proper acting”. Sure he was a hugely likeable presence on stage, but if anything he seemed a bit too “live”, somehow. Like he wasn’t really “pretending” enough to be “acting”.
His delivery of the emotional bits, for example, was somehow a bit too much like how someone really would brush away the actual emotional content of what he was saying with one too many silly jokes (which were, of course, in the script anyway) and nervous laughs. At which point, you realise that this really is an incredible performance. Graham really has a talent for stage-delivery. He captures the character perfectly, completely blurring the boundaries between himself and the person he’d made up; to the extent that, aside from the more writerly touches, you’d be happy to believe at the end of the show that he’d been talking about himself. Except without the self-indulgence that this would imply.
Seeing Samuel Barnett’s performance only six days later was perhaps a bit unfair (on Barnett) – not least for the reasons mentioned above about the extent of the relationship one builds with the first version of the story you hear. Barnett’s is an excellent performance, but one which feels much more assured and controlled in comparison with Graham’s. But then, I also knew the twists and was enjoying comparing the delivery of the jokes, rather than just laughing at them as I had done in the first version of show I’d seen.
That said, having four actors rotating in the part feels like an excellent idea for a new play, as it offers four different takes on the material in an way that new plays are hardly ever afforded. Granted it’s only got one director (the excellent Kate Wasserberg) and one “staging”, but it feels like the actors here – clearly with the two I saw (and I haven’t ruled out trying to catch more) – haven’t been shoe-horned into a role “created” by another actor, but are each offering their personal interpretation of the part.
So, what does one get out of the whole experience? I’ve rabbited on at unhelpful length mostly about the theatrical properties of this production – because that’s kind of what I like about theatre: its theatreyness. But actually, The Man is also a lovely, big-hearted, very funny story about getting round to growing up a bit. It’s really sweet and it leaves you feeling generally cheered up and the better for having seen it. Which isn’t a bad result for an impressive exploration of the relationship between audience and performer, performer and text, and text and audience.
Monday, 7 June 2010
Saturday, 5 June 2010
Lonely is an Eyesore* (Pulse ’10)
Like the Barker day at Riverside Studios I’ve posted this strand of reviews top-to-bottom chronologically, thus posting the last review first so that the weekend can be read downwards (if you see what I mean).
Roughly half the shows I saw at the opening weekend of this year’s Pulse Festival were one-person shows. The stated reason for press being invited to the first weekend was that there was an emphasis on local, or local-ish, acts (which, if nothing else, made me feel jolly smug about being “in the regions” while that particular row raged on the Guardian Theatre Blog). There were also scratch performances generated at/by the New Wolsey Theatre and the East Anglia leg of Paines Plough’s excellent (on this showing) Come to Where I’m From initiative, while lot of the rest of the weekend showcased stuff that will be going to Edinburgh under the Escalator East to Edinburgh umbrella.
This partly accounts for the one-person-ness of many of the shows. One person shows are, after all, cheaper to transport and set up than a fully cast production of Les Miserables. The Edinburgh effect doesn’t, however, account for why so many of the one-person shows were first person “me-monologues” (I’m not counting Bunny among these. Bunny was at least written by a writer and performed by an actor. And Jack Thorne isn’t an 18-year-old schoolgirl from Luton. So even if there are biographical elements in there, they’re certainly not first person).
I’ve got a confession to make: I don’t really like “confessional” shows. I don’t like the idea of them at all, and I rarely like the actuality. In fact, if there is a solo performer on stage, I’d much rather they were talking about anything other than themselves. There have been major, shattering exceptions to this (notably by Lucy Ellison). Ordinarily, though, when it’s just a solo performer telling a story about themselves in the first person, particularly when you suspect it’s a very one-sided version of a completely “true” story, well, it almost always smacks of solipsism, doesn’t it? As an artist there are all the stories in the world you could choose to tell, and the one you choose is about yourself?
As a result, the following write-ups seem to become an assessment of how well the performers manage to look beyond their personal experience, or how much they manage to bury the origins of the source material for their shows. Or simply whether they manage through good writing, charm, great performances, artistry or insights, to lift the experience beyond someone forcing you to listen to them tell you stuff about their life that you haven’t wittingly asked to hear.
[There are some more upbeat accounts of other stuff seen at Pulse on the way, btw, but rather than wait until I’d finished writing everything, I just wanted to get these pieces filed and out of the way to clear the decks a bit... Seriously, Poland 3 – Iran 2 was one of the best things I’ve seen this year, the Paines Plough thing was lovely, and there were also some scratch things I’m not allowed to write about properly, but will try to cover in some way…]
* Blog title taken from the 4AD album of the same name which in turn takes its from a line in this song, which is on the album...
Roughly half the shows I saw at the opening weekend of this year’s Pulse Festival were one-person shows. The stated reason for press being invited to the first weekend was that there was an emphasis on local, or local-ish, acts (which, if nothing else, made me feel jolly smug about being “in the regions” while that particular row raged on the Guardian Theatre Blog). There were also scratch performances generated at/by the New Wolsey Theatre and the East Anglia leg of Paines Plough’s excellent (on this showing) Come to Where I’m From initiative, while lot of the rest of the weekend showcased stuff that will be going to Edinburgh under the Escalator East to Edinburgh umbrella.
This partly accounts for the one-person-ness of many of the shows. One person shows are, after all, cheaper to transport and set up than a fully cast production of Les Miserables. The Edinburgh effect doesn’t, however, account for why so many of the one-person shows were first person “me-monologues” (I’m not counting Bunny among these. Bunny was at least written by a writer and performed by an actor. And Jack Thorne isn’t an 18-year-old schoolgirl from Luton. So even if there are biographical elements in there, they’re certainly not first person).
I’ve got a confession to make: I don’t really like “confessional” shows. I don’t like the idea of them at all, and I rarely like the actuality. In fact, if there is a solo performer on stage, I’d much rather they were talking about anything other than themselves. There have been major, shattering exceptions to this (notably by Lucy Ellison). Ordinarily, though, when it’s just a solo performer telling a story about themselves in the first person, particularly when you suspect it’s a very one-sided version of a completely “true” story, well, it almost always smacks of solipsism, doesn’t it? As an artist there are all the stories in the world you could choose to tell, and the one you choose is about yourself?
As a result, the following write-ups seem to become an assessment of how well the performers manage to look beyond their personal experience, or how much they manage to bury the origins of the source material for their shows. Or simply whether they manage through good writing, charm, great performances, artistry or insights, to lift the experience beyond someone forcing you to listen to them tell you stuff about their life that you haven’t wittingly asked to hear.
[There are some more upbeat accounts of other stuff seen at Pulse on the way, btw, but rather than wait until I’d finished writing everything, I just wanted to get these pieces filed and out of the way to clear the decks a bit... Seriously, Poland 3 – Iran 2 was one of the best things I’ve seen this year, the Paines Plough thing was lovely, and there were also some scratch things I’m not allowed to write about properly, but will try to cover in some way…]
* Blog title taken from the 4AD album of the same name which in turn takes its from a line in this song, which is on the album...
Bryony Kimmings - Sex Idiot - New Wolsey Studio (Pulse '10)
[Edit: since this review, Sex Idiot has won a Total Theatre Award, gained a perfectly respectable review from Lyn Gardner and become the toast of the Forest Fringe. I have no idea whether the show has changed from what I saw, or whether I'm in a humourless minority, but it's probably worth reading a few other reviews beyond this one]
There’s a problem with Sex Idiot, namely that it’s unclear whether it’s the most rubbish “performance art” you’ve ever seen or an unfunny character comedy pastiche of the worst “performance art” “Bryony Kimmings” has ever seen.
It doesn’t matter, though, since it’s excruciating either way.
The basic premise of the show is “Bryony Kimmings” talking about herself (I'm going to keep her in quotation marks for a bit, because I'm not at all convinced she's actually a real person). Or, rather, roughly the last decade of her sexual history, occasioned by the discovery that she recently caught Chlamydia, and that she'd broken up with a boyfriend, had to move house, and so ended up going through boxes of old emails and letters from ex-partners. It later transpires that she caught Chlamydia off her new partner, so all the “soul”-searching turns out to have been unnecessary. But, here it all is anyway.
Her sexual history is wholly unremarkable for someone of her age. She's had a four “serious” boyfriends and slept with some other people in between or during them. She takes an hour to tell us about this.
There is the alternative that none of this is specifically true (or at least it is based on nothing more than the entirely predictable relationships and break-ups that a vast majority of people have in their twenties). Which would beg the question: why go to these lengths to make up and talk about something so utterly, utterly trite?
Except that these banalities are the peg from which she hangs the puzzling “performance art” dimension of the show. This is the element which could qualify the piece as “character comedy” – a kind of mini-narrative satirising this “artist” who creates these “performances” to mark “significant” emotional episodes in her life (“I call this the dance of the lost baby” – Really. I shit you not. And the “dance” itself is terrible. Unwatchably terrible. And not even in a “it would be funny if a “performance artist” *said* that” kind of car-crash, comedy-of-cruelty sort of a way. Instead, it’s just terrible.)
The show’s one real achievement is that it achieves a kind of anti-catharsis. Instead of cheering you up, making you laugh, moving you, or reminding you of the astonishing feats of talent, imagination, generosity and nobility of which the human animal is capable, this show really does make you feel the sheer pointlessness of it all. More than Kafka, more than Camus, more than Beckett, "Bryony Kimmings" is the “artist” who most makes you feel the grinding, grating, relentless banality of human existence.
Even all this might be excusable if there were a scintilla of wit. There isn’t.
Oh, but there are songs. She can't sing, but there are songs. That might be a joke too, either because the songs are meant to be funny, or because it’s meant to be funny that this made-up “performance artist” is singing them. In the event, they aren't funny on either level. By way of example, one song is a list of words for vagina set to the tune of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, complete with Kimmings doing the words-on-pieces-of-paper video. It’s an ok concept, if just about the most hackneyed imaginable – and one that feels like pre-existing material being crow-barred into an already ramshackle structure. She then adds ineptitude to unoriginality by having all the words written onto piece of cardboard which are too thick to hold many of. So she writes words on both sides. And then has to rotate the pieces of card rather than coolly dropping them as Dylan does. Perhaps that’s a visual gag too. It just looks like someone not really knowing what they’re doing. Oh, and she runs out of words and phrases for vagina about halfway through verse two and has to start repeating them or making them up. Again, maybe that’s part of the complex matrix of humour.
The fact that you can’t tell if it’s meant to be a satire of “performance art” (which itself could be a satire of the sort of satire that people who know nothing about performance art make when satirising performance art) or if she really means these things to be comic pieces of performances in their own right is pretty indicative of the level of total failure we’re looking at here.
In short, all the jokes are rubbish, and if that’s the joke, then this a particularly rubbish example of that one-joke joke.
There’s a problem with Sex Idiot, namely that it’s unclear whether it’s the most rubbish “performance art” you’ve ever seen or an unfunny character comedy pastiche of the worst “performance art” “Bryony Kimmings” has ever seen.
It doesn’t matter, though, since it’s excruciating either way.
The basic premise of the show is “Bryony Kimmings” talking about herself (I'm going to keep her in quotation marks for a bit, because I'm not at all convinced she's actually a real person). Or, rather, roughly the last decade of her sexual history, occasioned by the discovery that she recently caught Chlamydia, and that she'd broken up with a boyfriend, had to move house, and so ended up going through boxes of old emails and letters from ex-partners. It later transpires that she caught Chlamydia off her new partner, so all the “soul”-searching turns out to have been unnecessary. But, here it all is anyway.
Her sexual history is wholly unremarkable for someone of her age. She's had a four “serious” boyfriends and slept with some other people in between or during them. She takes an hour to tell us about this.
There is the alternative that none of this is specifically true (or at least it is based on nothing more than the entirely predictable relationships and break-ups that a vast majority of people have in their twenties). Which would beg the question: why go to these lengths to make up and talk about something so utterly, utterly trite?
Except that these banalities are the peg from which she hangs the puzzling “performance art” dimension of the show. This is the element which could qualify the piece as “character comedy” – a kind of mini-narrative satirising this “artist” who creates these “performances” to mark “significant” emotional episodes in her life (“I call this the dance of the lost baby” – Really. I shit you not. And the “dance” itself is terrible. Unwatchably terrible. And not even in a “it would be funny if a “performance artist” *said* that” kind of car-crash, comedy-of-cruelty sort of a way. Instead, it’s just terrible.)
The show’s one real achievement is that it achieves a kind of anti-catharsis. Instead of cheering you up, making you laugh, moving you, or reminding you of the astonishing feats of talent, imagination, generosity and nobility of which the human animal is capable, this show really does make you feel the sheer pointlessness of it all. More than Kafka, more than Camus, more than Beckett, "Bryony Kimmings" is the “artist” who most makes you feel the grinding, grating, relentless banality of human existence.
Even all this might be excusable if there were a scintilla of wit. There isn’t.
Oh, but there are songs. She can't sing, but there are songs. That might be a joke too, either because the songs are meant to be funny, or because it’s meant to be funny that this made-up “performance artist” is singing them. In the event, they aren't funny on either level. By way of example, one song is a list of words for vagina set to the tune of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, complete with Kimmings doing the words-on-pieces-of-paper video. It’s an ok concept, if just about the most hackneyed imaginable – and one that feels like pre-existing material being crow-barred into an already ramshackle structure. She then adds ineptitude to unoriginality by having all the words written onto piece of cardboard which are too thick to hold many of. So she writes words on both sides. And then has to rotate the pieces of card rather than coolly dropping them as Dylan does. Perhaps that’s a visual gag too. It just looks like someone not really knowing what they’re doing. Oh, and she runs out of words and phrases for vagina about halfway through verse two and has to start repeating them or making them up. Again, maybe that’s part of the complex matrix of humour.
The fact that you can’t tell if it’s meant to be a satire of “performance art” (which itself could be a satire of the sort of satire that people who know nothing about performance art make when satirising performance art) or if she really means these things to be comic pieces of performances in their own right is pretty indicative of the level of total failure we’re looking at here.
In short, all the jokes are rubbish, and if that’s the joke, then this a particularly rubbish example of that one-joke joke.
Reykjavík - Old Town Hall Galleries (Pulse '10)
Jonathan Young’s Reykjavík is at least well made. It suffers from all-in-white, floaty, wanting-to-be-Complicité-ness (there really should be a single noun), but it’s well designed, well lit, nicely thought-out and well executed.
The problem is, the title of the show might as well be “my failed gap-year romance (in Reykjavík)”. Not knowing Young personally, it’s impossible to tell how much of the narrative is fictionalised, romanticised, or just plain made-up. Not very made-up, one suspects, given that his programme biog puts him in the same places at the same time as the narrator (reading the Pulse programme blurb, it claims Reykjavík asks: “how far can we trust our own memory.” We might be better off asking how far we can trust Mr Young's).
Even these needn’t have been a problem had the subject been different. But one suspects that this really is the true story of how Jonathan Young went to Lecoq, or Gaulier, or wherever in Paris, met an unhappily-married Icelander with two children, had an affair, and then went to live with her for a few years in Reykjavík.
In fairness, the piece does demonstrate a desire to look outward. It tries for same sort of fairy tale of experience that Milan Kundera writes, crossed with the sort of meditations on internationality that Complicite’s more John Berger-influenced stuff does. But while it keeps coming back to the performer’s own relationship, it feels like it’s never really going to free itself from the shackles of solipsism.
Partly,perhaps, it’s because it refuses one of fiction’s chief pleasures: guilt-free moral judgement. With fiction we can assess a character’s successes and failings quite bluntly. It is more awkward to do so when the “character” is standing in the room with you, smiling at you ingratiatingly. Similarly, fiction allows a writer to create characters and situations for us; just telling an audience your side of events which actually took place doesn’t, no matter how much you dress it up with the books you’ve read or the places you’ve been.
The whole dynamic throws theatre’s usual cosy boundaries slightly off-kilter. And instead of being given permission to be charmed by actors’ performances of characters, you’re basically being asked to actually like and engage with the actual person who, at many points in this promenade performance, is actually standing just a couple of feet away.
The piece doesn’t ask “how far can we trust our own memory?” half so much as “how much of Jonathan Young can you tolerate?” I’m sure he’s a nice bloke and everything, but it seems like a failure of theatre that I feel the need to even say as much. Except that everything here seems so manifestly personal, that it’s impossible not to get the feeling you’re reviewing the bloke, not the show.
And after a while, I (and *I* resent all these personal pronouns that this sort of show ends up making *me* use) started to find Young pretty suspect. After all, there’s nothing especially admirable about embarking on an affair with a married mother-of-two, having a foreign girlfriend, or sincerely believing nothing is ever your fault, which is pretty much what the contents boil down to. Stir in some infuriating nods to Buddhism, stuff about the I Ching and a lot of godawful, earnest, singer-songwriter, acoustic guitar music and you’ve got a recipe for spending a very long hour with someone who I suspect I’d tolerate for about three minutes if I met them at a party. And in Reykjavík, one isn’t even given the vodka which presumably got the Icelanders through it all.
Ordinarily I’d be wary of offering such a blunt personal response, but the show is so bluntly personal, that it seems somehow unavoidable. Partly it’s the insufferable egotism of it all. I’m pretty sure in the hands of another performer (the one I thought of was Unlimited’s Chris Thorpe), the writing might acquire a much more likeable edge. And there are some nice touches in the staging. The audience is dressed in white overalls to watch the piece/wander round the installation, and at one point is required to don frosted-glass goggles to experience aurora borealis style lighting effects. As well as having a pleasing ambient lightshow, mingled with that mildly frightening sensation of standing in the middle of the room and not being able to see a thing, this has the welcome effect of not being able to see Jonathan Young smiling at you for a few minutes.
The problem is, the title of the show might as well be “my failed gap-year romance (in Reykjavík)”. Not knowing Young personally, it’s impossible to tell how much of the narrative is fictionalised, romanticised, or just plain made-up. Not very made-up, one suspects, given that his programme biog puts him in the same places at the same time as the narrator (reading the Pulse programme blurb, it claims Reykjavík asks: “how far can we trust our own memory.” We might be better off asking how far we can trust Mr Young's).
Even these needn’t have been a problem had the subject been different. But one suspects that this really is the true story of how Jonathan Young went to Lecoq, or Gaulier, or wherever in Paris, met an unhappily-married Icelander with two children, had an affair, and then went to live with her for a few years in Reykjavík.
In fairness, the piece does demonstrate a desire to look outward. It tries for same sort of fairy tale of experience that Milan Kundera writes, crossed with the sort of meditations on internationality that Complicite’s more John Berger-influenced stuff does. But while it keeps coming back to the performer’s own relationship, it feels like it’s never really going to free itself from the shackles of solipsism.
Partly,perhaps, it’s because it refuses one of fiction’s chief pleasures: guilt-free moral judgement. With fiction we can assess a character’s successes and failings quite bluntly. It is more awkward to do so when the “character” is standing in the room with you, smiling at you ingratiatingly. Similarly, fiction allows a writer to create characters and situations for us; just telling an audience your side of events which actually took place doesn’t, no matter how much you dress it up with the books you’ve read or the places you’ve been.
The whole dynamic throws theatre’s usual cosy boundaries slightly off-kilter. And instead of being given permission to be charmed by actors’ performances of characters, you’re basically being asked to actually like and engage with the actual person who, at many points in this promenade performance, is actually standing just a couple of feet away.
The piece doesn’t ask “how far can we trust our own memory?” half so much as “how much of Jonathan Young can you tolerate?” I’m sure he’s a nice bloke and everything, but it seems like a failure of theatre that I feel the need to even say as much. Except that everything here seems so manifestly personal, that it’s impossible not to get the feeling you’re reviewing the bloke, not the show.
And after a while, I (and *I* resent all these personal pronouns that this sort of show ends up making *me* use) started to find Young pretty suspect. After all, there’s nothing especially admirable about embarking on an affair with a married mother-of-two, having a foreign girlfriend, or sincerely believing nothing is ever your fault, which is pretty much what the contents boil down to. Stir in some infuriating nods to Buddhism, stuff about the I Ching and a lot of godawful, earnest, singer-songwriter, acoustic guitar music and you’ve got a recipe for spending a very long hour with someone who I suspect I’d tolerate for about three minutes if I met them at a party. And in Reykjavík, one isn’t even given the vodka which presumably got the Icelanders through it all.
Ordinarily I’d be wary of offering such a blunt personal response, but the show is so bluntly personal, that it seems somehow unavoidable. Partly it’s the insufferable egotism of it all. I’m pretty sure in the hands of another performer (the one I thought of was Unlimited’s Chris Thorpe), the writing might acquire a much more likeable edge. And there are some nice touches in the staging. The audience is dressed in white overalls to watch the piece/wander round the installation, and at one point is required to don frosted-glass goggles to experience aurora borealis style lighting effects. As well as having a pleasing ambient lightshow, mingled with that mildly frightening sensation of standing in the middle of the room and not being able to see a thing, this has the welcome effect of not being able to see Jonathan Young smiling at you for a few minutes.
Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You - New Wolsey Studio (Pulse '10)
If I felt bad for not being charmed by Jonathan Young in Reykjavík, I was positively mortified to discover I didn’t especially care about Molly Naylor. Ms Naylor happened to be on one of the tube trains which was blown up in the 7/7 attacks on London. She escaped without apparent physical injury, but it seems her ability to say anything straightforwardly was irreparably damaged.
The ghastly fact at the centre of Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You is that being at the centre of horrible carnage doesn’t make you any more able to write or perform.
Naylor’s chosen style for her (again, entirely solipsistic) monologue is a kind of twee poetry-of-the-streets. She is a mistress of the misplaced simile. For every thing she names, she seems compelled to find half a dozen examples of things that aren’t in the least bit evocative of the first thing to liken it to. Her metaphors sound like they’ve all been stolen from Massive Attack records and reapplied at random to whatever she happens to come across. Her delivery is faltering, mostly lifeless, and labours the “poetry” of the piece so much that it probably sounds a lot worse than it is.
The story itself isn’t without interest – of course we’re ghoulishly drawn to tales of what happened to the people who were on the tubes that were blown up. But by dint of forgoing reportage, having absolutely no eye for what about her situation is interesting, and dressing it all up in this twee poetry the overall effect is (on a Far Lesser Scale) as if Primo Levi had written Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats instead of If This is a Man.
The pity is that Whenever I Get Blown Up... (and, yes, the title’s in the show) lessens what happened on 7/7, reducing it to a twee narrative of a flaky twentysomething who was “on a quest to make her life just like the movies”, who had “encountered a series of reality checks epitomised by dead-end jobs, disillusioned characters and the immeasurable cynicism of her generation” (thanks, programme blurb), just getting out of Stoke Newington after the explosions, moving to Wales for a bit, breaking up with her boyfriend and then going back to live at her parents’ house.
Yes, that’s probably exactly what happened. But, if anything, this show puts any degree of empathy or understanding further from out grasp at the end than it was when we entered the theatre. The fact of the matter is, unclear writing and poor poetry can distort the attempt to transmit information, meaning and emotion. No matter how real and urgent the creator’s subject is, if they fudge the medium, then the message will never materialise.
The ghastly fact at the centre of Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You is that being at the centre of horrible carnage doesn’t make you any more able to write or perform.
Naylor’s chosen style for her (again, entirely solipsistic) monologue is a kind of twee poetry-of-the-streets. She is a mistress of the misplaced simile. For every thing she names, she seems compelled to find half a dozen examples of things that aren’t in the least bit evocative of the first thing to liken it to. Her metaphors sound like they’ve all been stolen from Massive Attack records and reapplied at random to whatever she happens to come across. Her delivery is faltering, mostly lifeless, and labours the “poetry” of the piece so much that it probably sounds a lot worse than it is.
The story itself isn’t without interest – of course we’re ghoulishly drawn to tales of what happened to the people who were on the tubes that were blown up. But by dint of forgoing reportage, having absolutely no eye for what about her situation is interesting, and dressing it all up in this twee poetry the overall effect is (on a Far Lesser Scale) as if Primo Levi had written Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats instead of If This is a Man.
The pity is that Whenever I Get Blown Up... (and, yes, the title’s in the show) lessens what happened on 7/7, reducing it to a twee narrative of a flaky twentysomething who was “on a quest to make her life just like the movies”, who had “encountered a series of reality checks epitomised by dead-end jobs, disillusioned characters and the immeasurable cynicism of her generation” (thanks, programme blurb), just getting out of Stoke Newington after the explosions, moving to Wales for a bit, breaking up with her boyfriend and then going back to live at her parents’ house.
Yes, that’s probably exactly what happened. But, if anything, this show puts any degree of empathy or understanding further from out grasp at the end than it was when we entered the theatre. The fact of the matter is, unclear writing and poor poetry can distort the attempt to transmit information, meaning and emotion. No matter how real and urgent the creator’s subject is, if they fudge the medium, then the message will never materialise.
The Three Stigmata of Pac-Man - Sir John Mills Theatre (Pulse '10)
Ross Sutherland’s The Three Stigmata of Pac-Man could have suffered from sharing a less sensational version of exactly the same plot as Whenever I Get Blown Up... were it not for a couple of saving graces; firstly, Sutherland, while a founder member (a decade ago!) of performance poetry schticksters Aisle 16, is basically a stand-up comedian who chucks in a few “poems” for good measure, which happily avoids another hour of trying to untangle the narrative from forced rhymes and unhappy similes. Secondly, he doesn’t present himself shielded by the irreproachable seriousness of his subject or enormous self-regard. Instead he’s just quite a funny bloke taking the piss out of himself. He’s not half as clever as it might have been nice for him to have been, but that’s hardly the point. And by this stage in the weekend, I’m just grateful that he’s competent and funny.
When his story starts, he’s working as a music journalist for the Manchester edition of Metro, which shares an office with the Daily Mail (I assume this is all true). He’s (lazily) writing music previews while his opposite number across a cardboard partition is writing terrifying predictions of how Britain is being swamped by gypsies who will lower the value of your house. He speculates that journalism has now become the practice of writing possible futures. It’s a neat observation. Then he loses his job, largely because a bunch of people in America whose job it is to trade in “futures" quite spectacularly cock it up, and all the money in the world suddenly contracts. Sutherland doesn’t make this link between the sale of futures on global markets and his own contribution to the craft of selling the future explicitly (although he’s welcome to nick it), but it’s roughly around this nexus that the shows baggy contents revolve.
There’s an amusing digression about a reviewer pronouncing Sutherland a racist, which is turned into a prose poem in which the reviewer in question sees everything in the world as fascistic. Elsewhere, toward the end, there’s an extended passage describing a humiliating return to the parental home and a near-breakdown. That this is all delivered as amusing, blokey self-effacement says a lot more about his talents as a writer and comic performer than might occur at the time. At no stage does this feel either particularly self-important or -indulgent. Rather than pleading a case for his specialness, “Ross Sutherland” seems to effortlessly describe things happening to himself as if they could be happening to anyone, or even to you. There’s also the fact he’s clearly making some stuff up – unless he really can travel in space and time and repeat events again and again in different genres.
Ultimately, this is a likeable, though not profound show. Worryingly, it is made all the more likeable by the simple facts of the performer's charm and good humour. "Worryingly", because, I'm not sure I especially want my “theatre” – and I’m not sure many of the above shows would want to be categorised as “theatre” – to win me over with charm and some nice jokes. But then I suppose [and this is a pretty sudden hypothesis] when you impose that much reality into a performance, perhaps different criteria for assessment suddenly kick in. After all, if the story isn’t made up, if the people really are real, if it’s not “acting” but, well, what? being? – if the co-ordinates have been re-set to such an extent, then perhaps the way one responds is also altered.
When his story starts, he’s working as a music journalist for the Manchester edition of Metro, which shares an office with the Daily Mail (I assume this is all true). He’s (lazily) writing music previews while his opposite number across a cardboard partition is writing terrifying predictions of how Britain is being swamped by gypsies who will lower the value of your house. He speculates that journalism has now become the practice of writing possible futures. It’s a neat observation. Then he loses his job, largely because a bunch of people in America whose job it is to trade in “futures" quite spectacularly cock it up, and all the money in the world suddenly contracts. Sutherland doesn’t make this link between the sale of futures on global markets and his own contribution to the craft of selling the future explicitly (although he’s welcome to nick it), but it’s roughly around this nexus that the shows baggy contents revolve.
There’s an amusing digression about a reviewer pronouncing Sutherland a racist, which is turned into a prose poem in which the reviewer in question sees everything in the world as fascistic. Elsewhere, toward the end, there’s an extended passage describing a humiliating return to the parental home and a near-breakdown. That this is all delivered as amusing, blokey self-effacement says a lot more about his talents as a writer and comic performer than might occur at the time. At no stage does this feel either particularly self-important or -indulgent. Rather than pleading a case for his specialness, “Ross Sutherland” seems to effortlessly describe things happening to himself as if they could be happening to anyone, or even to you. There’s also the fact he’s clearly making some stuff up – unless he really can travel in space and time and repeat events again and again in different genres.
Ultimately, this is a likeable, though not profound show. Worryingly, it is made all the more likeable by the simple facts of the performer's charm and good humour. "Worryingly", because, I'm not sure I especially want my “theatre” – and I’m not sure many of the above shows would want to be categorised as “theatre” – to win me over with charm and some nice jokes. But then I suppose [and this is a pretty sudden hypothesis] when you impose that much reality into a performance, perhaps different criteria for assessment suddenly kick in. After all, if the story isn’t made up, if the people really are real, if it’s not “acting” but, well, what? being? – if the co-ordinates have been re-set to such an extent, then perhaps the way one responds is also altered.
Friday, 4 June 2010
Ingredient X - Royal Court
[Written for CultureWars]
First things first: Nick Grosso’s new play Ingredient X is terrible.
How and why it is terrible are more interesting questions.
The back of the printed script claims: “Full of piercing dark humour, Ingredient X veils uncompromising truths behind quick-fire banter. This tough, abrasive comedy explores different types of addiction in modern life, from reality television to Class A drugs.”
The main problem with Deborah “Scarborough” Bruce’s production, then, is that it doesn’t seem to realise the play is a comedy. A fair enough oversight: the script isn’t terribly funny. But the extent by which this rag-bag of performances miss the mark suggests there are far deeper problems with both script and production.
The main problems of the production seem to stem from the setting and [God forgive me] casting. Ben Stone’s detailed naturalistic set depicts a fairly desirable open-plan loft-style flat. It could be pretty much anywhere. Meanwhile, “recovering drug-addict writer”, Frank (TV sketch-show stalwart James Lance), his “co-dependent” wife Katie (Indira Varma) and their, what? friends? neighbours? Rosanna (Lesley Sharp) and Deanne (Lisa Palfrey), don’t make any sense as a collection of people whatsoever. You don’t get any idea of where any of them met, how any of them come to be friends and, most damningly, you get absolutely no inkling of why any of them would ever want to speak to each other.
Is the play meant to be a social comedy? If so Grosso has totally failed to indentify a recognisable social milieu, or, if this is a demographic well-known to everyone else, then either he or Bruce has managed to make something real seem like a lazy invention. And yet all this work has gone into the creation of this detailed set. All the characters seem to be wearing very specific costumes and talking with very specific accents. But none of this naturalism adds up to anything natural. Perhaps is a brave theatrical attempt to create a kind of everyBritain, but when clothed in this much naturalism it simply fails to register as such.
But then the tone of the script can’t be asking for naturalistic treatment, anyway. After all, it’d be a misunderstanding of almost farcical proportions to treat a script with such godawful schlocky stock figures seriously. Isn’t what Grosso has written meant to be a kind of live cartoon? That’s surely the only possible explanation for the way that each character seems to keep bursting into a new aria of addiction exposition. There’s Deanne’s alcoholism speech, Rosanna’s one-dimensional anti-addict stance on account of her coke-addict ex-husband, there’s Katie’s apparent addiction to the mantras and buzzwords of therapy and 12-step programme groupspeak, her ability to view both her own and everyone else’s behaviour as somehow pathological, and then there’s Frank’s own recovering-addictspeak.
Playing this as naturalism, even as half-naturalism, just makes it look like the most badly written play imaginable. It might be just about plausible to envisage the play on stage if it had lot of jokes that everyone in the audience were laughing at, but it doesn’t. And, my God, does the silence on our side of the fourth wall (behind the big imaginary telly that the cast spend most of the play watching) leave it looking horribly exposed.
It’s worth looking back to that programme blurb. The claim that …X “explores different types of addiction in modern life, from reality television to Class A drugs” would be true if the word “explore” were substituted for the word “mentions”. For a start, half these “modern addictions” aren’t even painted convincingly as addictions. Saying “Ooh, Rose, your Dan don’t ‘alf watch a lot of telly these days. Blimey, I’m pissed” hardly constitutes a searing indictment of Broken Britain™. And that’s about the level of “exploration” offered.
More worrying is the claim that there are “uncompromising truths... behind [the alledgedly] quick-fire banter”. From where I was sitting it looked much more like several Daily Mail editorials had been made to scream histrionically at each other in a nice loft apartment. On one hand is this hysterical configuring everything that any of the characters do as part of a pathology of addiction, on the other there’s either a pointed satire of the Mail’s bête noir – “therapy-speak” – or else two of the least sympathetically drawn proponents of its ideals and the ideals of 12-step programmes. As a result, Grosso seems to be satirising a tendency for modern Britain to label everything an addiction – while allowing actual addictions to run for years unchallenged – at the same time, taking the piss out of the ways in which some people take steps to deal with their addictions. Granted both tendencies can be incredibly irritating, and the play only depicts a sample of four, but as such it seems a somewhat forlorn hope that the play was ever going to be able to shed much light on the perceived range of “addiction in modern life”.
A further key to the failure of Ingredient X is provided by a quotation from the late Sheridan Morley on the back of the text (no comment on the fact that one has to look so far back to find an approving quote about Grosso’s work, that the critic who wrote it is now dead, or that Morley is using just about the laziest formulation available in critical writing). He suggests “[Grosso’s] style is that of a latter-day Oscar Wilde on speed”. If, to the minds of those who assembled this blurb, that provides the most ready insight into what this play is also meant to be like, it further underlines how both script and production fail it.
If Grosso’s early work was like Wilde on speed, then this is its come-down in rehab.
First things first: Nick Grosso’s new play Ingredient X is terrible.
How and why it is terrible are more interesting questions.
The back of the printed script claims: “Full of piercing dark humour, Ingredient X veils uncompromising truths behind quick-fire banter. This tough, abrasive comedy explores different types of addiction in modern life, from reality television to Class A drugs.”
The main problem with Deborah “Scarborough” Bruce’s production, then, is that it doesn’t seem to realise the play is a comedy. A fair enough oversight: the script isn’t terribly funny. But the extent by which this rag-bag of performances miss the mark suggests there are far deeper problems with both script and production.
The main problems of the production seem to stem from the setting and [God forgive me] casting. Ben Stone’s detailed naturalistic set depicts a fairly desirable open-plan loft-style flat. It could be pretty much anywhere. Meanwhile, “recovering drug-addict writer”, Frank (TV sketch-show stalwart James Lance), his “co-dependent” wife Katie (Indira Varma) and their, what? friends? neighbours? Rosanna (Lesley Sharp) and Deanne (Lisa Palfrey), don’t make any sense as a collection of people whatsoever. You don’t get any idea of where any of them met, how any of them come to be friends and, most damningly, you get absolutely no inkling of why any of them would ever want to speak to each other.
Is the play meant to be a social comedy? If so Grosso has totally failed to indentify a recognisable social milieu, or, if this is a demographic well-known to everyone else, then either he or Bruce has managed to make something real seem like a lazy invention. And yet all this work has gone into the creation of this detailed set. All the characters seem to be wearing very specific costumes and talking with very specific accents. But none of this naturalism adds up to anything natural. Perhaps is a brave theatrical attempt to create a kind of everyBritain, but when clothed in this much naturalism it simply fails to register as such.
But then the tone of the script can’t be asking for naturalistic treatment, anyway. After all, it’d be a misunderstanding of almost farcical proportions to treat a script with such godawful schlocky stock figures seriously. Isn’t what Grosso has written meant to be a kind of live cartoon? That’s surely the only possible explanation for the way that each character seems to keep bursting into a new aria of addiction exposition. There’s Deanne’s alcoholism speech, Rosanna’s one-dimensional anti-addict stance on account of her coke-addict ex-husband, there’s Katie’s apparent addiction to the mantras and buzzwords of therapy and 12-step programme groupspeak, her ability to view both her own and everyone else’s behaviour as somehow pathological, and then there’s Frank’s own recovering-addictspeak.
Playing this as naturalism, even as half-naturalism, just makes it look like the most badly written play imaginable. It might be just about plausible to envisage the play on stage if it had lot of jokes that everyone in the audience were laughing at, but it doesn’t. And, my God, does the silence on our side of the fourth wall (behind the big imaginary telly that the cast spend most of the play watching) leave it looking horribly exposed.
It’s worth looking back to that programme blurb. The claim that …X “explores different types of addiction in modern life, from reality television to Class A drugs” would be true if the word “explore” were substituted for the word “mentions”. For a start, half these “modern addictions” aren’t even painted convincingly as addictions. Saying “Ooh, Rose, your Dan don’t ‘alf watch a lot of telly these days. Blimey, I’m pissed” hardly constitutes a searing indictment of Broken Britain™. And that’s about the level of “exploration” offered.
More worrying is the claim that there are “uncompromising truths... behind [the alledgedly] quick-fire banter”. From where I was sitting it looked much more like several Daily Mail editorials had been made to scream histrionically at each other in a nice loft apartment. On one hand is this hysterical configuring everything that any of the characters do as part of a pathology of addiction, on the other there’s either a pointed satire of the Mail’s bête noir – “therapy-speak” – or else two of the least sympathetically drawn proponents of its ideals and the ideals of 12-step programmes. As a result, Grosso seems to be satirising a tendency for modern Britain to label everything an addiction – while allowing actual addictions to run for years unchallenged – at the same time, taking the piss out of the ways in which some people take steps to deal with their addictions. Granted both tendencies can be incredibly irritating, and the play only depicts a sample of four, but as such it seems a somewhat forlorn hope that the play was ever going to be able to shed much light on the perceived range of “addiction in modern life”.
A further key to the failure of Ingredient X is provided by a quotation from the late Sheridan Morley on the back of the text (no comment on the fact that one has to look so far back to find an approving quote about Grosso’s work, that the critic who wrote it is now dead, or that Morley is using just about the laziest formulation available in critical writing). He suggests “[Grosso’s] style is that of a latter-day Oscar Wilde on speed”. If, to the minds of those who assembled this blurb, that provides the most ready insight into what this play is also meant to be like, it further underlines how both script and production fail it.
If Grosso’s early work was like Wilde on speed, then this is its come-down in rehab.
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Bunny - Sir John Mills Theatre (Pulse '10)
Pulse ’10 kicked off with a rehearsed reading of Jack Thorne’s new Nabokov commission, The Siege. Being a work in progress, the first thing we learn is that The Siege is now called Bunny. Fairy nuff.
Being a rehearsed reading of a work-in-progress, much like with Mike Bartlett’s Bull last night [Weds 26th], it’d be wrong to write something that pretended to the status of “a review”. I mean, it *was* open to the public, charging for entry, and indeed kicking off the Pulse Festival 2010, so it seems fair to write *something* about it. It’s not like it was meant to be a secret. But at the same time it’d be wrong to think of the below as “a review”, more as a note-to-self so I’ve got a record of my original impressions when the finished version materialises (it was very useful to have my first encounter with Laura Wade’s Posh written up when the final version breezed into town). I thought Bunny was good anyway, so I don’t know why I’m apologising so much. Anyway...
Noting that Jack Thorne is a writer whose body of work has underlying themes would be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize for understatement. Throughout his work there’s a preoccupation with sexual violence against women. There’s also an issue about class. And his plays focus on teenagers more often than not.
If I’m honest, I used to find it quite troubling. After all, writing play after play about violence against women is like picking at a particularly nasty scab and it results in a body of work in which bad things kept happening to quite young women.
But then, violence and sexual violence shouldn’t be comfortable subjects. And they are important subjects. I think I used to worry a bit too much about the gender of the protagonists (the female speakers in monologues) compromising the gender of the writer (or vice versa).
As a result, I rather wish I’d seen Bunny in kind of theatrical double-blind trial. On one level, it’d have been quite helpful to have had to assess the writing from scratch, rather than going in confident of a level of quality because I already knew Thorne could write. But much more that this, I’d have been really interested to have known what I’d have guessed about the age and gender of the writer.
Those misgivings aside, I think Bunny represents a real shift for Thorne as a writer – which sounds ludicrously pompous. Actually, scratch that. It represents a tangible widening of scope for Thorne as a playwright/writer-for-theatre. Whereas texts like Special and Stacey seemed much more focused on actual violences against specific women, Bunny – with much less explicitly happening to its narrator – paints a much nastier picture of a world made up of pre-fabricated violences; hand-me-down attitudes and second-hand nastinesses which morph into actual acts of aggression just because they’re already hanging round in the air, in the zeitgeist.
Bunny is a nasty, itchy, scratchy little play. Its subject is nominally Katie (is that her name as well as the name of the actress?), a year thirteen schoolgirl (that’s an upper-sixth former) and what she does on one evening after school.
The trajectory of the monologue is the imperceptible slide from quite a cocky, assured-but-self-deprecating start to a sickening rush into situation that you don’t quite see coming and events which shouldn’t really follow on from each other.
The devil here is as much in the digressions and self-corrections as it is in the details. The rhythm of the whole piece is stop-start, stop-start... The device is the delivery of a simple, bland truism – such as might be tossed out unthinkingly by any sullen teenager – which is then worried to death with endless revisions. Like a hysteric version of the “Well, I say A, but B. Well, I say B, but...” formula. Or a hyper-articulate “yeah, but, no, but”.
As a character, [Katie] is a fascinating creation. She delineates where she fits into the overall scheme of things, into the intricate social hierarchies of the common room and wider world, with an obsessive precision. She knows pretty much exactly where she stands, although this self-knowledge is underscored by a hefty dose of self-doubt, which in turn is underwritten by a certain amount of cynical realism. She’s also interesting for being pretty upfront about sexual desire. She actually articulates some, which – it strikes me – still seems rare for a female character on stage outside the work of Howard Barker.
On one level it adds up to a very precise portrait of one girl’s sexual self-hatred. At the same time, Thorne’s focus isn’t so myopic. There are other issues at play here too. Race, for example: Katie has a black boyfriend (“He’s not that big, so *that*’s a myth...”), and the overarching narrative of the monologue concerns the fallout from said boyfriend getting into a fight with a younger Asian lad.
If anything, even gender and race are overshadowed by place. Thorne’s Luton is perfectly captured imperfection. It exists as a series of small flaws. I don’t think there’s an outright description of a single place, and yet you see it all in the mention of the chipped this or the badly planned that, and the sides of town divided into ethnic groups, and the parts of town that people move out of as soon as they can, and the takeaways on housing estates that are closed mid-week.
It works beautifully as a backdrop for Katie, who seems to hate herself about as much as Luton hates her. She doesn’t like Luton much in return. And isn’t a racist. Because she’s got a black boyfriend. And her parents read the Guardian. Although she does have some residual nasty bits of British culture stuck in her head. When an Asian man she’s been fancying suddenly turns nasty, she in turn whips out a description of him as a greasy kebab shop worker.
This is another of the piece’s strengths – Thorne’s eye for the nasty turn of phrase, for the tiniest bit of suspect thinking. The half-uttered, immediately retracted epithet. All turning and spinning like clockwork keeping the bigger, nastier story running. What’s also fascinating is the way that none of the characters seem to own these thoughts. They just lazily reach for the nearest bit of recycled tabloid nastiness to throw at each other.
In a way, it’s a perfect picture of how England goes wrong. Over-tired, over-worked, anxious, financially insecure people taking out their frustrations on whoever or whatever comes to hand; justifying it with whatever half digested, half-believed bigotry comes to hand.
As a rehearsed reading , it seems silly to spend much time on the “production”, other than to record that [Katie (no programmes) reading/performing the part of (Katie?)] was excellent.
Being a rehearsed reading of a work-in-progress, much like with Mike Bartlett’s Bull last night [Weds 26th], it’d be wrong to write something that pretended to the status of “a review”. I mean, it *was* open to the public, charging for entry, and indeed kicking off the Pulse Festival 2010, so it seems fair to write *something* about it. It’s not like it was meant to be a secret. But at the same time it’d be wrong to think of the below as “a review”, more as a note-to-self so I’ve got a record of my original impressions when the finished version materialises (it was very useful to have my first encounter with Laura Wade’s Posh written up when the final version breezed into town). I thought Bunny was good anyway, so I don’t know why I’m apologising so much. Anyway...
Noting that Jack Thorne is a writer whose body of work has underlying themes would be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize for understatement. Throughout his work there’s a preoccupation with sexual violence against women. There’s also an issue about class. And his plays focus on teenagers more often than not.
If I’m honest, I used to find it quite troubling. After all, writing play after play about violence against women is like picking at a particularly nasty scab and it results in a body of work in which bad things kept happening to quite young women.
But then, violence and sexual violence shouldn’t be comfortable subjects. And they are important subjects. I think I used to worry a bit too much about the gender of the protagonists (the female speakers in monologues) compromising the gender of the writer (or vice versa).
As a result, I rather wish I’d seen Bunny in kind of theatrical double-blind trial. On one level, it’d have been quite helpful to have had to assess the writing from scratch, rather than going in confident of a level of quality because I already knew Thorne could write. But much more that this, I’d have been really interested to have known what I’d have guessed about the age and gender of the writer.
Those misgivings aside, I think Bunny represents a real shift for Thorne as a writer – which sounds ludicrously pompous. Actually, scratch that. It represents a tangible widening of scope for Thorne as a playwright/writer-for-theatre. Whereas texts like Special and Stacey seemed much more focused on actual violences against specific women, Bunny – with much less explicitly happening to its narrator – paints a much nastier picture of a world made up of pre-fabricated violences; hand-me-down attitudes and second-hand nastinesses which morph into actual acts of aggression just because they’re already hanging round in the air, in the zeitgeist.
Bunny is a nasty, itchy, scratchy little play. Its subject is nominally Katie (is that her name as well as the name of the actress?), a year thirteen schoolgirl (that’s an upper-sixth former) and what she does on one evening after school.
The trajectory of the monologue is the imperceptible slide from quite a cocky, assured-but-self-deprecating start to a sickening rush into situation that you don’t quite see coming and events which shouldn’t really follow on from each other.
The devil here is as much in the digressions and self-corrections as it is in the details. The rhythm of the whole piece is stop-start, stop-start... The device is the delivery of a simple, bland truism – such as might be tossed out unthinkingly by any sullen teenager – which is then worried to death with endless revisions. Like a hysteric version of the “Well, I say A, but B. Well, I say B, but...” formula. Or a hyper-articulate “yeah, but, no, but”.
As a character, [Katie] is a fascinating creation. She delineates where she fits into the overall scheme of things, into the intricate social hierarchies of the common room and wider world, with an obsessive precision. She knows pretty much exactly where she stands, although this self-knowledge is underscored by a hefty dose of self-doubt, which in turn is underwritten by a certain amount of cynical realism. She’s also interesting for being pretty upfront about sexual desire. She actually articulates some, which – it strikes me – still seems rare for a female character on stage outside the work of Howard Barker.
On one level it adds up to a very precise portrait of one girl’s sexual self-hatred. At the same time, Thorne’s focus isn’t so myopic. There are other issues at play here too. Race, for example: Katie has a black boyfriend (“He’s not that big, so *that*’s a myth...”), and the overarching narrative of the monologue concerns the fallout from said boyfriend getting into a fight with a younger Asian lad.
If anything, even gender and race are overshadowed by place. Thorne’s Luton is perfectly captured imperfection. It exists as a series of small flaws. I don’t think there’s an outright description of a single place, and yet you see it all in the mention of the chipped this or the badly planned that, and the sides of town divided into ethnic groups, and the parts of town that people move out of as soon as they can, and the takeaways on housing estates that are closed mid-week.
It works beautifully as a backdrop for Katie, who seems to hate herself about as much as Luton hates her. She doesn’t like Luton much in return. And isn’t a racist. Because she’s got a black boyfriend. And her parents read the Guardian. Although she does have some residual nasty bits of British culture stuck in her head. When an Asian man she’s been fancying suddenly turns nasty, she in turn whips out a description of him as a greasy kebab shop worker.
This is another of the piece’s strengths – Thorne’s eye for the nasty turn of phrase, for the tiniest bit of suspect thinking. The half-uttered, immediately retracted epithet. All turning and spinning like clockwork keeping the bigger, nastier story running. What’s also fascinating is the way that none of the characters seem to own these thoughts. They just lazily reach for the nearest bit of recycled tabloid nastiness to throw at each other.
In a way, it’s a perfect picture of how England goes wrong. Over-tired, over-worked, anxious, financially insecure people taking out their frustrations on whoever or whatever comes to hand; justifying it with whatever half digested, half-believed bigotry comes to hand.
As a rehearsed reading , it seems silly to spend much time on the “production”, other than to record that [Katie (no programmes) reading/performing the part of (Katie?)] was excellent.
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
On casting, and on meaning on stage
[This is something of a work in progress. It’s also already much too long. It currently stands at 7,500 words and, frankly, that more than I expect anyone to read. So I’m putting it up here now so you can browse it at your leisure and we can continue the thing in the comments thread]
Steinstermeier's Deutsche Betonanstalt production of Tarell Alvin McCraney's Wig Out!*
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a couple of pieces about the “nationality” of plays and perceptions of plays’ “racial origins”.
I’d meant to come back to this topic sooner with a further piece about the way that plays are cast, but writing up a bunch of shows seemed to get in the way.
Since that point casting seems to have become something of a “live” issue, and in rather a silly way.
The version that’s currently [well, when I started this anyway] raging over at the Guardian Blog at the moment was triggered by Matt Trueman’s piece which begins by noting a controversy over criticism of a “gay actor” playing a “straight” character in the U.S..
It’s as good an entry point as any. Trueman’s piece veers off into an area with which I’m not so much concerned. He says: “...we so associate Hayes with a character who is gay... that we cannot shake off that idea and accept him as straight. The fiction presented, therefore, is judged to have failed. We are not *convinced*. The truth is, however, that this happens all the time...” and goes on to discuss the fluffy, unproblematic issue of how memories of actors’ past performances can intrude into current ones.
The thing that interests me about the whole “casting” debate, though, is what people mean by “convinced”. This subject was recently visited by Alexis Soloski. Her piece, while utter rubbish, is worth picking over. Through its unthinking regurgitation of prejudices and received wisdoms, it does a good job of laying out the issues we’re dealing with.
Soloski’s subject is “unconventional casting”. She opens with an account of seeing a performance in which the part of a teenage girl was played by “a 31-year-old actress who resembled not a pimply teen, but a confident woman with an excellent skin care regime.” Soloski suggests that “the piece would have been much more distressing had an adolescent been cast.”
What she seems to be saying is that, a) watching a 31-year-old “have an affair with her mother's boyfriend, flirt with lesbianism, down Quaaludes and dabble in smack” is less “disturbing” to her (flirting with lesbianism is *disturbing*, btw?) and that, b) she doesn’t understand how theatre might differ from television.
Already she doesn’t go far enough: the show might have been even more “disturbing” if a six-year-old had been cast, for example, and I dare say would have been a good deal more unsettling if the teenage girl in question had been played by, say, David Hoyle.
But, Soloski isn’t actually thinking about the stage or how it works. She’s thinking about trying to make things as literal as possible. Which makes perfect sense for a medium like theatre, where there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever not to suspend disbelief and to want everything in front of you to be as true to life as humanly possible.
Soloski goes on to give historical context: “theatre history is replete with examples of unconventional or less-than-ideal casting.” It’s worth noting at this juncture – given that this is a piece in which Soloski is apparently due to “praise” “unconventional” casting – that she’s just lined up “unconventional” as a synonym of “less-than-ideal”. It doesn’t take a genius to spot that this equates The Convention with The Ideal.
Her examples are pretty depressing: “From the Dionysian fests [“fests”!] onwards, men played women, Greeks played Persians, mortals played gods.” But, fear not, all this compromise is now over: “These days we no longer prohibit women on stage and if your script calls for a Persian, it's no trouble to hire an Iraqi thesp with an equity card.” Or you could even get an Iranian. Funny that she drops the bit about the Gods at this point.
Still, she bravely chunters on:
“With a full range of possibilities available, when should a production plump for an actor who resembles the character in age, race, gender, etc and when and why should less conformist casting occur?”
“Less conformist” she now volunteers, apparently forgetting that she’s already equated “convention” with “ideal” and now perhaps hoping to make less-than-ideal casting sound coolly “non-conformist”. But that mild nudge is countered by all those “should”s “When and why?” she asks, still totally married to this “ideal”.
She chucks a couple of the most conservative ideas for “unconventional” casting imaginable around and then retreats back into her laughable comfort zone of uninterrogated terminology.
“In realistic drama, I prefer more traditional casting,” [my emphases]
“...though in the hands of a thoughtful director an irregular choice can often provide a useful commentary on the social world of the play.” [ditto. I don’t really need to spell out my objections, do I?]
“In more stylised works, I'm eager [!] to accept whomever in the role and I think there's something wonderful about surrendering to an actor who looks nothing like the character,”
Who. Looks. Nothing. Like. The. Character.
Astonishing.
But it’s unfair to hold Soloski entirely accountable for airing her ridiculous prejudices. After all, she is using simple, broadly uncontested language to describe uninterrogated phenomena familiar to all Anglophone theatregoers.
She is only describing the status quo. Indeed, tentatively, boringly, she is imagining that her wild fancy to see someone who “looks nothing like the character” play that character is somehow “unconventional”. And in a depressing way, she’s right. She might actually be out on a limb with this one. Maybe lots of people would rather only ever see actors who *do look like the characters* they are playing.
And yet, badly expressed though her point is, I know exactly what she means. Yet, this is the not-properly-debated, or even *-understood*, area from which several of the previous and subsequent debates on the subject have sprung.
The rather prickly issue of writing about performers’ physical appearances was the subject of my first Guardian Blog back in 2007. Re-reading it I’m struck by how few links I included as examples at the time. More striking, though, is how many more examples of this question alone there have been since the piece was published; perhaps most famously Maureen Lipman’s set-to with Charles Spencer over his disobliging comments about her looks. Clearly, *physical appearance* remains a core issue when considering an *actor* on stage.
This question of describing what a performer looks like – or, less exclusively, of how audience members *see* (perhaps “read”) what a performer looks like – is one of the many odd fractures which run through the infinitely problematic (or at least “problematisable”) process of watching theatre.
It’s an issue that Imogen Russell-Williams picks up on part of in 2008 in her blog Big Women on Stage. I responded at the time with the piece When it comes to staging, we play it way too safe.
“Mainstream Anglophone theatre tradition remains so absolutely married to the idea of literal-minded mimesis that there is virtually no hint that anything but the text can invent meaning on stage beyond dumb representation. This is partly why arguments about the “politics” of the physical proportions of actors are possible in the first place. Because a thin woman on stage finds herself representing nothing more than a thin woman, or, by extension, thin women. It’s like we've grasped the idea that something on stage is pregnant with meaning, but, thanks to our abandonment of metaphor and our largely normative, descriptive so-called “political theatre”, this level of representation simply gets plugged into boring complaints about “pretty” girls getting all the jobs.”
Ok, it was a bit of a broad brush, but I still basically stand by it. What’s interesting to me now is the way that – because I was just naïvely excited about mainland Europe’s approach to “unconventional casting” in “realistic theatre” – I didn’t especially engage with the meta-theatrical way in which – in this specific context – the properties of the actual bodies of the performers *were* being enlisted precisely *to* *create* surprise and effect.
But Nübling’s P*rnographie seems to be an exception rather than a rule in that respect, which may account for why I missed it at the time.
Generally speaking, German theatre seems much less concerned with explicitly “naturalistic” (what Soloski myopically calls “conventional”) casting (although, more often than not, men still play men, women women and actors’ ages broadly/loosely correspond to characters’ ages). While I’m not saying that its approach is either better or worse, it does make an incredibly useful alternative model against which we Britons can measure how deeply our attitudes are ingrained.
At the same time, Germany also highlights another – weirdly unaddressed – issue in Anglophone theatre’s tradition of so-called “naturalistic” casting. German theatre tends to be remarkable for the way in which its actors look a bit more like the rest of us. There’s a description of a type of actor in Germany as “too good-looking for theatre”. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it other than in that Guardian blog, but it does strike me as odd that – in British/Anglophone theatre – at the same time as purporting to be “realistic” in its casting (y’know, casting “actors who look like the characters”), most plays seem to end up with preternaturally “good-looking” casts. This goes double for musicals and treble for the West End – assuming, that is, you’re prepared to sign-up to the problematic, uninterrogated use of the term “good-looking” that I just used about five times above without discernibly flinching.
Because, of course, “good-looking” is a rather loaded ideological judgement.
And this is where yet another dimension of this ridiculous “casting” question can be brought in: the way in which theatre/casting/performers relate/s to the wider world. Which brings us (not very) neatly to a previous piece on the subject Trueman wrote following on from Soloski’s about a month ago.
RACE
In the comments on the piece, “JayPeeBee” notes press and audience reactions to the casting of black actor Danny Sapani as Hans Christian Andersen in Sebastian Barry’s play Andersen's English.
The way s/he frames it, the “in favour” comments include: “touchingly and hilariously played by the black actor Danny Sapani as if to emphasise Andersen's outsider status.” in the Telegraph and “Andersen's outsider status is emphasised by the casting of the excellent black actor Danny Sapani” in the Independent
Reviews against the casting: “The creed of ‘colour-blind casting’ insists that a black man can play a white man (it is seldom tried vice-versa) and that audiences, and particularly critics, should not protest, but I’m afraid it’s absurd here” from the Daily Mail and “this troubling reduction and objectification of ethnic difference” in Variety. It’s worth stopping here, and looking a bit more closely at these last two responses.
Karen Fricker’s Variety review has above been particularly unfairly shorn of context. The full paragraph reads: “But the biggest question about the production is Sapani's casting: given that the rest of the actors are white and the costuming and set design are faithful to the Victorian period, it seems that his race is meant to underline the sense of him being an outsider -- a troubling reduction and objectification of ethnic difference.”
Quentin Letts’s Daily Mail review is similarly truncated. The original reads: “Danny Sapani's Andersen is, however, a disaster. First, he is black. The creed of 'colour-blind casting' insists that a black man can play a white man (it is seldom tried vice-versa) and that audiences, and particularly critics, should not protest, but I'm afraid it's absurd here. Why go to all the lengths of making Mr Rintoul such a ringer for Dickens - and then cast chunky, big-voiced, still youthful Mr Sapani as a white, elderly, Danish bore?”
Ian Shuttleworth in his editorial to the relevant edition of Theatre Record (which to the best of my knowledge doesn’t include Variety) suggests: “Quentin is here making a basic error of implicitly equating “should not protest” with “should not notice”; it doesn’t seem to occur to him that we may have been meant to pay attention to the casting of Danny Sapani as Hans Christian Andersen. Aleks Sierz, on the same page of this issue, grasps it entirely and deals with it almost in passing: Andersen’s “Danish otherness”, he notes, is “emphasised by the fact that he is played by a black actor”.
Of course, Letts cocks his objection up by trying to maintain the Daily Mail’s stance as punk rock rebel in the face of The Establishment’s pesky “political correctness” (not such a laughable equation – lest we forget, the Sex Pistols wore Swastikas) and by not knowing much about theatre. Thus, he labels the decision “colour-blind casting”. In fact, as Fricker notes, it’s the opposite. But, unlike Sierz, Spencer and Taylor, Fricker suggests that casting a black man to represent a white character’s “otherness” in what is otherwise a totally naturalistic production of a historical play based on real people, might not be all that clever after all.
It is actually the opposite of “colour-blind”. It is asking the audience to note that specific, physical fact about the performer and to interpret that one physical fact (their skin colour) as symbolic of something. It strikes me, on an intellectual level – I didn’t see the play, so can’t judge the actuality –, that this might be argued to be some pretty dim thinking.
JayPeeBee goes on to note: “In the bar after a performance an audience member was overheard saying “I didn't know that Hans Andersen was black”. Which raises questions as to what people expect of theatre that offers a representation of “real” people and of any factual theatre. Can the appearance of an actor be metaphorical as well as literal?”
This does frame the question pretty much perfectly, but it dodges specifying precisely *what* about the actor might be a metaphor for *what* about the character. Which brings us back to this idea of a performer having “*real world* properties”. It also brings up an interesting question of how these might co-exist simultaneously.
After all, both Letts’s and Fricker’s objections to Danny Sapani’s casting stem from the fact that apparently *nothing* else in the show was being asked to signify anything other than exactly what it “looked like”, and yet Sapani’s skin colour apparently *was* being asked to signify something, yet at the same time to not exist literally in the world on stage.
There was less certainty when the issue blew up over the casting of Jenny Jules in the 2008 Almeida production of Pinter’s The Homecoming. I remember being hugely impressed by Mark Shenton’s unequivocal response at the time, and it still bears re-reading (not least, as well, for its round-up of other critics’ positions). Here, despite Jules (again a black actor) playing another *other* (in this case, the only woman, and, again, the only non-member of a family), it seemed clear to more reviewers either before or after consideration, that the actress had been selected because of her qualities as an actress and that her race had nothing to do with it.
It’s interesting that Shenton mentions white Othellos in his stout defence of colour-blind casting, with the rider that “We imagine we wouldn't countenance a white Othello any more. But when British director Jude Kelly surrounded Patrick Stewart in the title role by an otherwise all-black cast, in Washington DC in 1997, Peter Marks wrote a New York Times review praising how “in the race reversing, the company seeks to shatter stereotypes and remind playgoers of the endlessly adaptive nature of Shakespeare's exploration of otherness”.”
Except, of course, that changing *everyone’s* race so that a black character can be played by a white actor isn’t really “colour-blind” so much as, uh, “negative casting”. By “shatter stereotypes” presumably Marks means “we get to see black actors playing a range of rounded characters rather than people defined by their colour”. But of course we *would* be pretty shocked to see a white man playing Othello here in Britain. Infinitely more so, if he were “blacked-up” to do so. Back once more to Germany, where the question is viewed in almost the exact inverse to the way it’s seen here.
Here are three links to photos of recent productions of Othello in German-speaking theatres:
Stefan Pucher’s production at Schauspielhaus, Hamburg
Luc Perceval’s at Münchner Kammerspiele (you have to scroll down to fotos)
and lastly Jan Bosse at the Burgtheater
I know. It takes a bit of explaining to Anglophone eyes [if you see what I mean].
Ian Shuttleworth has addressed the question of Germany’s stage conventions relating to black characters here. He starts out noting the stage directions to Dea Loher’s Innocence, which had recently been staged at the Arcola:
“I noted that director Helena Kaut-Howson had chosen not to follow author Dea Loher’s suggestion that the two black characters need not be played by black actors. “‘No need for pretence of authenticity,’ notes the stage direction, which is rather less true in a country whose discourse of race and multiculturalism is more complex than that in which the play was written and is set. I do not think a British writer would be allowed to deploy such figures so baldly as emblems of otherness.””
This last point is interesting, in relation to the Andersen’s English debate, where a black actor has been directorially deployed as to symbolise a white character’s “otherness” and the decision has been commented on approvingly. However, I think in the above quoted passage Shuttleworth misunderstands both what Loher means by her note and the convention/culture to which it is addressed.
In Loher’s script two characters are black, but she says they need not be played by black actors. “No need for *pretence* of authenticity” she says. It’s a canny differentiation. What she’s actually saying is: “I, a white, female, German writer, have created these two black characters. Having them played by two black actors, won’t make them any more authentic.”
It comes at the question of “being patronising” or “imperialism” from completely the opposite direction. Instead of thinking that having these characters *played* by black actors, it’s suggesting that it is perhaps more questionable to get a black actor/performer to perform a white writer’s imagination of their race. By this logic, doesn’t a white person playing Othello actually make just as much if not more sense, not least as a comment on precisely the sort of thing that we think we’re not saying by solemnly vowing that from now on only black actors will ever play Othello again?
I certainly see the internal logic of the argument. Although I’m not sure I honestly believe either the German or British position is ultimately *correct*.
But there are other reasons that the conclusion falls this way across the North Sea. Firstly, as I’ve already noted, in Germany an actor’s talent is considered before the way they look, cf. the earlier debate about “conventional” casting, and about physical attractiveness. How much less condescending, again, to give the part to the best actor, rather than whichever actor happens to be the right colour, they might reasonably argue.
Secondly, and more pressingly, one might imagine, Germany has far, far fewer black actors. In this respect, Britain’s desire to ensure that Othello is always played by a black actor (not yet a female black actor, though, to the best of my knowledge), is – given our mostly still “traditional” casting methods – just basic fairness. There are precisely two explicitly black characters in Shakespeare. If everyone’s being cast to “look exactly like the character” then it’s hardly fair to take those two parts away. Instead, the rest of the system needs turning on its head. When the system has been turned on its head, however, there is no logical reason why Othello shouldn’t be played by a white actor.
This argument again turns partly on what we are expected to see of what a performer “brings to the part”. What of them signifies something, and at what level.
SEXUALITY
In Trueman’s later piece, he opens by noting the furore caused by an article which includes a description of an actor Sean Hayes, best known for playing a camp homosexual in the U.S. television series Will and Grace, who recently came out himself, playing a heterosexual character in a play, as a “big pink elephant in the room”.
The original piece starts off in a silly place with the strap-line “Heterosexual actors play gay all the time. Why doesn't it ever work in reverse?” It’s such a big, dumb generalisation that of course the article is going to get a kicking. It further muddies the waters of my argument by mixing film, television and theatre. But its worst problem is that it never really says what it means by “gay”. Does this just mean "camp"?
Well, momentarily leaving aside the question of “acting” for a moment, even in “real life” there are camp heterosexuals and (what’s the non-loaded alternative to this?) not-camp homosexuals.
But the article isn’t really an argument about acting (indeed, it’s barely *about* anything – it certainly fails to follow a coherent through-line). The Sean Hayes thing is a silly place to start, though, since the piece’s main worry is about whether people will suspend their disbelief while watching a film if they know a lead actor playing a straight character to be gay in real life. It’s an argument with its roots buried deep in the oppression of homosexuals and their place in U.S. society even now. But, in part, it’s an argument about what anyone means by “gay”.
As far as I understand it, the gay community is about as united on the idea of what constitutes “being gay” as the Anglican Communion is about what it thinks of them. Put simply (and hopefully succinctly), it’s about wider questions than simply the gender of the people one fancies. For example: is “camp” a doctrine of faith, or an embarrassing relic from the past? Or: should gay couples demand the right to marry, or is aping heterosexual relationship models “selling out” gay culture? I’m far from ideally qualified to comment on the rights and wrongs of any given party’s point of view, so I shan’t. I’ll just note that “gay identity” isn’t a fixed point.
The Newsweek article itself, though, seems to be suggesting is that Sean Hayes is too irrepressibly camp to play a “straight guy”. Leaving aside the hundreds of “straight guys” who are irrepressibly camp across the Atlantic, perhaps the article is less relevant here, because the UK has less of a culture of definitively signalled sexuality – I mean, look at our middle classes; watch an episode of Yes, Minister, for instance, then tell me which, if any of them, are *meant* to be “gay characters”, and for that matter, which of the actors are gay. It simply isn’t the same thing.
Or consider the Carry On films. I mean, seriously, what was going on there? Kenneth Williams playing a series of apparently heterosexual letches, with no discernable lack of camp. Perhaps it was because I was only a kid when I saw them, but I was basically happy to buy into what I was being asked to buy into. I didn’t have pronounced ideas about how men or women should (or even did) behave, so, to me, Kenneth Williams (or Frankie Howerd for that matter) was a man with a particular set of mannerisms (signifying nothing) and a penchant for busty ladies.
Perhaps there’s also the question of the tradition of British Theatre acting. Thanks to Nick de Jongh’s Plague Over England, we’ve recently been reminded of the fact that Sir John Gielgud was homosexual, for example. Is that relevant to a consideration of his stage (or indeed screen) acting? I’d say not. Not least because he is such a stylised actor to begin with that sexuality of any sort barely gets a look in. Much the same is true of most other actors (of either gender) of his vintage.
But this whole question of whether “you can tell that someone is gay” seems to be a particularly weird red-herring. It seems nastily plugged into the idea that it is something that people have to hide; or else is attached to a notion that heterosexuality is a “norm” that gets “deviated from”. As prejudices go, homophobia is particularly strange, in that it seems scared of both visible manifestations of the gay community, and at the same time, deeply paranoid – seeing and seeking homosexuality where there is none. At least racism is simple. No twelve-year-old has ever been bullied on *the suspicion* that they’re black, for instance.
But this all gets us away from the question of how it relates to theatre.
Recently at the National Theatre, I saw London Assurance and Love the Sinner. Both speak interestingly to this question of “being convinced” and of how external knowledge might play a part. In London Assurance Simon Russell-Beale’s character, Sir Harcourt Courtly, becomes enamoured of Fiona Shaw’s character, Lady Gay Spanker (just don’t. it’s not helpful). I think it’s a matter of public record that both actors aren’t especially interested in the opposite sex in “real life”. On stage, it doesn’t matter a jot. Russell-Beale’s performance is, as it happens, ludicrously, exaggeratedly camp, but not in a way that indicates any sort of sexual preference and certainly not because he’s “gay in real life” and thus irrepressibly camp in all his acting. One is content to accept that Sir Harcourt has fallen for Lady Spanker because he tells us so and acts it entertainingly. It’s not about “being convinced” – as if theatre audiences default position is one of extreme scepticism.
On the other hand, in Love the Sinner, Jonathan Cullen’s character Michael is a repressed homosexual who (well, the script is desperately unclear) at the very least has sex with an African man, Joseph (Fiston Barek), and might even have fallen in love with him. Similarly, Joseph might have fallen in love with Michael, or he might just be saying that (it really is a dreadful play). I have no idea whether either actor is “gay in real life”, but on stage (which is what matters), neither was convincingly *attracted to*, let alone “in love with”, the other on stage. Fiston Barek was, however, for the record, convincingly black and Jonathan Cullen convincingly white. I believe both to be so in real life too.
Because Love the Sinner was, nominally at least, a drama of psychological insight, it all started to fall apart at precisely the moment where these two men were meant to have just had sex with each other. They didn’t “look like” they’d just had sex; they didn’t “act like” they’d just had sex. Neither of them “convincingly” portrayed someone who found the other person sexually attractive.
Even encyclopaedic knowledge of their personal lives wouldn’t have made what they were doing on stage any more (or less) convincing (although, it might have distracted just enough to take the edge off the boredom).
Of course, part of their problem seemed to be the script. They weren’t really given any lines to say that made their job any easier. As I’ve discussed before, it is notoriously difficult to ever really know where praise and blame should be apportioned. Perhaps it’s a great script and they just acted this aspect of it very poorly. Or were directed to act it very poorly. Or it was just staged in a way that killed it.
Added to this, there are my own tastes and preferences. Perhaps they were acting a great script excellently, as Michael Coveney appears to believe (although his use of the phrase “putting the jizz into Jesus” seems like a plea for us not to take him seriously).
So where has this got us? Cullen and Barek “looked like the characters” – or how we might reasonably expect a generic middle-class Englishman and a *generic* young “African” (from a totally unspecified and probably made-up part of Africa) to look. But they didn’t “convince” at all.
This question of “casting” seems to keep throwing up more and more abstruse questions of how meaning can and/or “should” be created on stage.
What do we allow to be a signifier? Moreover, what do these elements signify to us, and why? And with what effect? To what end?
REALISM
As I admitted quite close to the beginning of this (now ridiculously over-long) piece for all the scorn I poured on Soloski’s desire to see characters played by “actors who looked like them”, I understood what she meant.
When the decision has been taken to cast a naturalistic play in a naturalistic way, details of the performers’ appearance seem to take on new significance. The audience is almost invited to scrutinise the performer as if they *are* the character. As if whatever they look like, whatever they sound like, is all fair game for *reading* the director’s intentions, are all keys to the piece’s total meaning.
It's not a brilliant idea. It might, for example, encourage us to be horribly judgemental. It perhaps encourages directors to try to find someone with “shifty eyes” to play the villain (are there ‘villains’ in drama any more? Does anyone actually do this?). The worst of it is when Cordelia is almost invariably cast as a youthful “innocent” blonde and Goneril and Regan as “experienced” forty-something brunettes, as if British theatre casting were the allegorical tool of Josef Goebbels.
But beyond an almost comic basic level of how it should be "read", ultra-realism poses other problems.
An interesting case recently was Chris Haydon’s production of Mick Gordon’s Pressure Drop. Haydon (no relation – but a mate, in the interests of full disclosure) scored himself what was, in the abstract, a remarkable cast, headed by Michael Goold, Justin Salinger and David Kennedy. However – with echoes of Matt Trueman’s ...theatre’s “fatal flaw” piece (terrible title. Not his) – I was amused that it was only a few month earlier that I’d last seen Salinger and Goold together on stage in Our Class at the NT (I note with less amusement that my review carries literally no mention of the play’s character’s individual stories whatsoever). In it, Goold and Salinger play Polish gentile and Polish Jew respectively, both in love with the same woman. In Pressure Drop, Goold and Salinger play two brothers (also both in love with the same woman, oddly). Goold’s character has become a potential BNP local councillor, swearing about, among other things (amusingly), Poles stealing British jobs; Salinger’s character has gone off to New York and come back a successful banker. I have no idea if Salinger is Jewish “in real life”, but the way the Our Class casting echoed – in a play full of racial slurs – in the Pressure Drop casting did disturb me.
Prosaically, Goold and Salinger also made for unlikely-looking brothers. Much more important was the impact of David Kennedy as Goold’s character’s best mate Tony. Put simply, Kennedy was “perfect casting” as a Barking-based BNP supporter. Totally, authentically cockney and physically intimidating; he looked and sounded every inch the part. As a result, though, the scene in which he and Salinger are required to have a fight, and Goold is required to pull them apart; well, it’d have been fine if it wasn’t meant to be detailed naturalism. As it was, one did sort of wonder why Salinger wasn’t dead within seconds and how on earth Goold managed to pull them apart and hold Tony back.
ACCENT / NATIONALITY / CLASS
A slightly different angle on this question is provided by comparing the reviews of That Face from Britain, Australia and America. What we’re really looking at here is the question of class – primarily as established and communicated by accent. And also, in the latter two cases, of how accent also establishes or dis-establishes location. And how actors' "real selves" impinge on the fictional "real".
It was the comments thread of Alison Croggan’s review of the Australian production which got me thinking about how this relates to the subject of “casting” and “authenticity” or the impact of “in real life-ness”. Obviously (or at least, nigh-on inevitably), the Australian production casts Australian actors. And they have Australian accents. “Yes, we have class in our society, but it's quite a different deal here.” she says.
“We might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they don't function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently director Sarah Giles's decision to stage That Face with Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian accents.”
Croggan’s inference (or the director’s implication) is that by not “doing the accents”, the play has been totally transposed from London to Australia, which is interesting in itself. Much the same approach is applied to Australian plays here, to the best of my recollection, though. The said, perhaps not so many plays are quite so accent specific as That Face.
Without class it has only half a subject, as Croggan’s review suggests and the New York review seems to confirm, totally lacking any mention of class and not liking the play very much as a result; reviewing a show as a simple drama about a bad mum. Which, I guess it is, if you take away the element of class, which, aside from my prefatory notes, I hardly even bother mentioning explicitly in my own review. Perhaps because at the time I was writing my reviews solely for an English audience, who I figured would all have experience of living in England’s class society.
It’s interesting to imagine Australians playing English characters but not bothering to do the accents. Similarly, it’s interesting to consider that in this instance taking away the accents also transposes the play’s location. The example makes for a useful reminder of the actual leap that we Britons make when doing likewise with Australian plays – the last of which I saw (that I recall) being the West End revival of Andrew Bovell’s Speaking in Tongues, which happened to be one of those plays in which an ensemble of four play lots of different characters. This being Britain, each had a different regional accent for easy, immediate differentiation. Lord knows how any of that impacts on our understanding of the play or the intentions of the playwright. Presumably he never imagined any of his characters were Welsh, but what does it say to us in the audience if one of them suddenly is? Does it matter in this context or is Welshness, unlike class, not necessarily a factor in how we think of someone? Perhaps the character’s Welshness was lessened by our knowledge that Ian Hart isn’t *really* Welsh “in real life.
But – especially in “realist” drama – accent is frequently presented as a vital, intrinsic part of a character – perhaps it is even partially understood as a a key to “understanding” the character’s “personality”. So much so, in the tradition of social realist playwriting, that playwrights will often go out of their way to write dialogue in phonetic form to ensure that the importance (to them) of a particular regional/ethnic accent is not overlooked.
In broader terms, the staging of an actor’s accent and physical appearance (or the accent they’re asked to perform, at least) can also sometimes serve as a useful index of the conscious or unconscious ideology behind a director (or possibly individual actor)’s take on the world. Akin, perhaps, to the way that Max Stafford-Clark’s suggestion of “otherness” by using “blackness” ends up saying more about how Max Stafford-Clark perceives black people in Britain, than about how the Victorians viewed Danes. (I’m not, for the record, trying to suggest that M S-C is racist, per se. He’s clearly got a long track record of trying to be helpful in this respect, but it strikes me that his politics are stuck around 1979 (cf. Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, in which, to make apparently “progressive” political statements, an “effeminate” man is played by a woman, and a black servant who “wishes he was white” is played by “a white”). I just wonder if his depiction of “otherness” really strikes the chord he intends in this day and age). Similarly, it’d be nice to think that the days of “comic” northern or West Country accents were on their way out, but there doesn’t seem much evidence.
Indeed, watching some productions – Shakespeare seems especially prone to this – it often feels like stereotype after stereotype is trotted out as a kind of desperate short-hand employed by a director terrified that, without telegraphing “the sort of person the character is”, Shakespeare’s language will completely baffle modern audiences. This approach also often plugs into the crudest possible physical castings (think Juliet’s nurse in R&J, the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the gravediggers and Osrick in Hamlet, etc. etc. etc.).
While we’re on this topic of accent/“regional character”, the way that British regional accents, or perhaps actors from those regions (“in real life”), or at least actors *acting* *as if they’re from those regions*, are made to “mean” also needs noting. Beyond the “comic” accent issue, there’s an interesting study to be done of which parts of Britain are most frequently aligned with other parts of the world. What I mean is, the way that particular regions get chosen as the location or accent-of-choice for plays written in other parts of the world (I know, this sounds like a Guardian theatre blog: “Which parts of Britain are most like other parts of the world?”). for example, watching The White Guard at the NT recently, I was struck, not for the first time, that I tend to believe Scots playing Russians get a whole lot closer to behaving at least a bit like Russians than a bunch of impossibly mannered, stiff, upper-middle-class English actors ever do (and, yes, please try to ignore the massive generalisations for the time being. I’ll get to them).
It’s a similar question to the class thing in the three English-language versions of That Face. It’s partly the question of how and at what level we want our “meaning” to be manufactured.
For example, watching Chekhov’s The Seagull played by dainty, polite, ever-so-English actors, you end up imagining a whole set of British values (either modern or antique) (and, yes, obviously what “British values” might be is another big question which I’ll skip for the time being, thanks) onto Russians from another century. Fine. Ish. I suppose. Except that by doing so you often lose the “comedy” bit of the “tragicomedy” that Chekhov says he’s written. Which is kind of fine, too – I’m all for a bit of appropriation when it’s deliberate. But in these instances, it never really seems to be. It just kind of happens because of the disparities between the two cultures and the way that the transitioning between one and the other is realised.
Perhaps, this just partly stems from some rather general ideas I have about Russia and about Scotland, which can, embarrassingly, be boiled down to “they’re both colder than the South of England, and each has a reputation for a lot more spirits being drunk there”. Crass though that may be, though, it strikes me as a better rationale for a “realist” representation than: “Well, these characters are all middle class, so let’s call the Redgraves (this thought goes back to (I think it was) Summerfolk at the NT) and do the whole thing with cut-glass English accents and lots of fine china”.
(as an aside: there’s almost a parallel study that might be done on the casting of alcoholic drinks-of-choice in plays. In Russia – vodka, in Scotland – whisky, in the north of England – bitter, in France – vin rouge, in the south of England – Chardonnay or lager, depending on milieu, etc. and what these intend, connote and perhaps the sorts of drunkenness that are supposed to result from them)
Similarly, I recently saw the British premiere of Romanian Gabriel Pintilei’s Elevator which transposed the action to Stockwell. In an otherwise hugely credible production, this was the one element which really didn’t work. After all, the play was at once an examination of quite specific things about two specifically Romanian teenagers and a metaphor for the way that their society was falling apart. The specific facts about teenagers in Stockwell are quite different as are the ways in which Stockwell/London/Britain might be considered to be falling apart. Given the (unspoken) centrality of Romania’s still hugely culturally influential Catholic church, I wondered – in the interests of “realism” – if the play were to be transposed geographically at all, it might not have been better served with a more Catholic backdrop. Liverpool, perhaps, or maybe Cork or somewhere? Or perhaps this is too literal-minded and needn’t be a consideration. Except in this case, not knowing the play was from Romania might well have wrong-footed some (much, even) of what the teenagers were saying, the rationales behind it, and thus our understanding of the characters.
In that case, however, it was nothing to do with the casting per se, since it was changes to the script which established Stockwell as the location. On the other hand, if the changes to the script had specified Liverpool, Cork or even Romania, it might have felt problematic if the cast had retained their estuary accents.
All this has moved us a bit away from the area I wanted to discuss in relation to accents, and feeding back from accents, to “the right” physical casting.
After all, for the stereotypes I mention some paragraphs above to work, there needs to be some sort of commonly accepted pool of stereotypes for a director to draw on. Annoyingly, if you’re brought up here, a map of Britain matching regional accent to an accepted set of stock characteristics might as well be stamped on your DNA. I won’t list them here, but you’ll have a version if you’re British, and will have probably heard about a few of them if you’re not.
I shan’t bother to point out, either, that the shifting emphases as to how the map functions depending on where on it you come from does much to demonstrate how ludicrously far from being the “objective” document it often seems to be presented as.
In much the same way as only an aging *white* director would think to use a black actor to signify “otherness”, I find it unlikely that a local Birmingham theatre company, for example, would find as much mirth in giving a stock comic figure a Birmingham accent – as much of the rest of the country might (actually, they’re probably give him/her a Black Country accent and find it hilarious, while much of the rest of the country failed to discern the difference, but there we go).
CONCLUSION (of sorts - and I think there's a bit of slippage here, so do comment)
My point then (finally! At last!), is that, rather than by way of any sort of rigorous political/ideological/ethical thinking, much of our way of staging things seems dependent of a widely shared set of crude stereotypes or positionings of class, region, race, sexuality, age and appearance. And that, even more tragically, even in the 21st century, these are still so ingrained in our culture that it’s often seen as “being a bit radical” to “cast against type”. It’s why “regional” playwrights and/or theatres feel the urge to create scripts that specifically dictate accent and location – because otherwise, thanks to the overwhelmingly normative way in which British theatre still seems to stage the world (or at best, that playwrights fear that their plays might be staged), they’d be RP. It’s why “BME” (bleugh, horrible term) writers and theatre companies feel compelled to write stories with *BME* characters and stage them thus.
Perhaps this is also why blogs about casting seem to draw such angry comments: because casting in theatres (theatres, for heaven’s sake) can all too often feel like it takes place on all the faultlines of British society. Where people are valued monetarily on the basis of their appearance, rather than their ability. Where “the regions” are taken to be a divergence from “the norm”, as are non-middle class accents. Where “black” still basically means “other” and where homosexuality still seems to be an issue.
This, in short, is why I find it problematic when an adult who writes about theatre for a living is happy to say “unconventional or less-than-ideal casting”; who is “eager to accept whomever in the role and think there’s something wonderful about surrendering to an actor who looks nothing like the character” only in “more stylised works”. Not least because theatre’s “realism” often looks a lot more prescriptive than reality and because far too much of the time, when someone says “unconventional”, the conventions they seem to be imagining are some of the most right-wing imaginable.
Thoughts?
* (Re: photo) Not really.
Steinstermeier's Deutsche Betonanstalt production of Tarell Alvin McCraney's Wig Out!*A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a couple of pieces about the “nationality” of plays and perceptions of plays’ “racial origins”.
I’d meant to come back to this topic sooner with a further piece about the way that plays are cast, but writing up a bunch of shows seemed to get in the way.
Since that point casting seems to have become something of a “live” issue, and in rather a silly way.
The version that’s currently [well, when I started this anyway] raging over at the Guardian Blog at the moment was triggered by Matt Trueman’s piece which begins by noting a controversy over criticism of a “gay actor” playing a “straight” character in the U.S..
It’s as good an entry point as any. Trueman’s piece veers off into an area with which I’m not so much concerned. He says: “...we so associate Hayes with a character who is gay... that we cannot shake off that idea and accept him as straight. The fiction presented, therefore, is judged to have failed. We are not *convinced*. The truth is, however, that this happens all the time...” and goes on to discuss the fluffy, unproblematic issue of how memories of actors’ past performances can intrude into current ones.
The thing that interests me about the whole “casting” debate, though, is what people mean by “convinced”. This subject was recently visited by Alexis Soloski. Her piece, while utter rubbish, is worth picking over. Through its unthinking regurgitation of prejudices and received wisdoms, it does a good job of laying out the issues we’re dealing with.
Soloski’s subject is “unconventional casting”. She opens with an account of seeing a performance in which the part of a teenage girl was played by “a 31-year-old actress who resembled not a pimply teen, but a confident woman with an excellent skin care regime.” Soloski suggests that “the piece would have been much more distressing had an adolescent been cast.”
What she seems to be saying is that, a) watching a 31-year-old “have an affair with her mother's boyfriend, flirt with lesbianism, down Quaaludes and dabble in smack” is less “disturbing” to her (flirting with lesbianism is *disturbing*, btw?) and that, b) she doesn’t understand how theatre might differ from television.
Already she doesn’t go far enough: the show might have been even more “disturbing” if a six-year-old had been cast, for example, and I dare say would have been a good deal more unsettling if the teenage girl in question had been played by, say, David Hoyle.
But, Soloski isn’t actually thinking about the stage or how it works. She’s thinking about trying to make things as literal as possible. Which makes perfect sense for a medium like theatre, where there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever not to suspend disbelief and to want everything in front of you to be as true to life as humanly possible.
Soloski goes on to give historical context: “theatre history is replete with examples of unconventional or less-than-ideal casting.” It’s worth noting at this juncture – given that this is a piece in which Soloski is apparently due to “praise” “unconventional” casting – that she’s just lined up “unconventional” as a synonym of “less-than-ideal”. It doesn’t take a genius to spot that this equates The Convention with The Ideal.
Her examples are pretty depressing: “From the Dionysian fests [“fests”!] onwards, men played women, Greeks played Persians, mortals played gods.” But, fear not, all this compromise is now over: “These days we no longer prohibit women on stage and if your script calls for a Persian, it's no trouble to hire an Iraqi thesp with an equity card.” Or you could even get an Iranian. Funny that she drops the bit about the Gods at this point.
Still, she bravely chunters on:
“With a full range of possibilities available, when should a production plump for an actor who resembles the character in age, race, gender, etc and when and why should less conformist casting occur?”
“Less conformist” she now volunteers, apparently forgetting that she’s already equated “convention” with “ideal” and now perhaps hoping to make less-than-ideal casting sound coolly “non-conformist”. But that mild nudge is countered by all those “should”s “When and why?” she asks, still totally married to this “ideal”.
She chucks a couple of the most conservative ideas for “unconventional” casting imaginable around and then retreats back into her laughable comfort zone of uninterrogated terminology.
“In realistic drama, I prefer more traditional casting,” [my emphases]
“...though in the hands of a thoughtful director an irregular choice can often provide a useful commentary on the social world of the play.” [ditto. I don’t really need to spell out my objections, do I?]
“In more stylised works, I'm eager [!] to accept whomever in the role and I think there's something wonderful about surrendering to an actor who looks nothing like the character,”
Who. Looks. Nothing. Like. The. Character.
Astonishing.
But it’s unfair to hold Soloski entirely accountable for airing her ridiculous prejudices. After all, she is using simple, broadly uncontested language to describe uninterrogated phenomena familiar to all Anglophone theatregoers.
She is only describing the status quo. Indeed, tentatively, boringly, she is imagining that her wild fancy to see someone who “looks nothing like the character” play that character is somehow “unconventional”. And in a depressing way, she’s right. She might actually be out on a limb with this one. Maybe lots of people would rather only ever see actors who *do look like the characters* they are playing.
And yet, badly expressed though her point is, I know exactly what she means. Yet, this is the not-properly-debated, or even *-understood*, area from which several of the previous and subsequent debates on the subject have sprung.
The rather prickly issue of writing about performers’ physical appearances was the subject of my first Guardian Blog back in 2007. Re-reading it I’m struck by how few links I included as examples at the time. More striking, though, is how many more examples of this question alone there have been since the piece was published; perhaps most famously Maureen Lipman’s set-to with Charles Spencer over his disobliging comments about her looks. Clearly, *physical appearance* remains a core issue when considering an *actor* on stage.
This question of describing what a performer looks like – or, less exclusively, of how audience members *see* (perhaps “read”) what a performer looks like – is one of the many odd fractures which run through the infinitely problematic (or at least “problematisable”) process of watching theatre.
It’s an issue that Imogen Russell-Williams picks up on part of in 2008 in her blog Big Women on Stage. I responded at the time with the piece When it comes to staging, we play it way too safe.
“Mainstream Anglophone theatre tradition remains so absolutely married to the idea of literal-minded mimesis that there is virtually no hint that anything but the text can invent meaning on stage beyond dumb representation. This is partly why arguments about the “politics” of the physical proportions of actors are possible in the first place. Because a thin woman on stage finds herself representing nothing more than a thin woman, or, by extension, thin women. It’s like we've grasped the idea that something on stage is pregnant with meaning, but, thanks to our abandonment of metaphor and our largely normative, descriptive so-called “political theatre”, this level of representation simply gets plugged into boring complaints about “pretty” girls getting all the jobs.”
Ok, it was a bit of a broad brush, but I still basically stand by it. What’s interesting to me now is the way that – because I was just naïvely excited about mainland Europe’s approach to “unconventional casting” in “realistic theatre” – I didn’t especially engage with the meta-theatrical way in which – in this specific context – the properties of the actual bodies of the performers *were* being enlisted precisely *to* *create* surprise and effect.
But Nübling’s P*rnographie seems to be an exception rather than a rule in that respect, which may account for why I missed it at the time.
Generally speaking, German theatre seems much less concerned with explicitly “naturalistic” (what Soloski myopically calls “conventional”) casting (although, more often than not, men still play men, women women and actors’ ages broadly/loosely correspond to characters’ ages). While I’m not saying that its approach is either better or worse, it does make an incredibly useful alternative model against which we Britons can measure how deeply our attitudes are ingrained.
At the same time, Germany also highlights another – weirdly unaddressed – issue in Anglophone theatre’s tradition of so-called “naturalistic” casting. German theatre tends to be remarkable for the way in which its actors look a bit more like the rest of us. There’s a description of a type of actor in Germany as “too good-looking for theatre”. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it other than in that Guardian blog, but it does strike me as odd that – in British/Anglophone theatre – at the same time as purporting to be “realistic” in its casting (y’know, casting “actors who look like the characters”), most plays seem to end up with preternaturally “good-looking” casts. This goes double for musicals and treble for the West End – assuming, that is, you’re prepared to sign-up to the problematic, uninterrogated use of the term “good-looking” that I just used about five times above without discernibly flinching.
Because, of course, “good-looking” is a rather loaded ideological judgement.
And this is where yet another dimension of this ridiculous “casting” question can be brought in: the way in which theatre/casting/performers relate/s to the wider world. Which brings us (not very) neatly to a previous piece on the subject Trueman wrote following on from Soloski’s about a month ago.
RACE
In the comments on the piece, “JayPeeBee” notes press and audience reactions to the casting of black actor Danny Sapani as Hans Christian Andersen in Sebastian Barry’s play Andersen's English.
The way s/he frames it, the “in favour” comments include: “touchingly and hilariously played by the black actor Danny Sapani as if to emphasise Andersen's outsider status.” in the Telegraph and “Andersen's outsider status is emphasised by the casting of the excellent black actor Danny Sapani” in the Independent
Reviews against the casting: “The creed of ‘colour-blind casting’ insists that a black man can play a white man (it is seldom tried vice-versa) and that audiences, and particularly critics, should not protest, but I’m afraid it’s absurd here” from the Daily Mail and “this troubling reduction and objectification of ethnic difference” in Variety. It’s worth stopping here, and looking a bit more closely at these last two responses.
Karen Fricker’s Variety review has above been particularly unfairly shorn of context. The full paragraph reads: “But the biggest question about the production is Sapani's casting: given that the rest of the actors are white and the costuming and set design are faithful to the Victorian period, it seems that his race is meant to underline the sense of him being an outsider -- a troubling reduction and objectification of ethnic difference.”
Quentin Letts’s Daily Mail review is similarly truncated. The original reads: “Danny Sapani's Andersen is, however, a disaster. First, he is black. The creed of 'colour-blind casting' insists that a black man can play a white man (it is seldom tried vice-versa) and that audiences, and particularly critics, should not protest, but I'm afraid it's absurd here. Why go to all the lengths of making Mr Rintoul such a ringer for Dickens - and then cast chunky, big-voiced, still youthful Mr Sapani as a white, elderly, Danish bore?”
Ian Shuttleworth in his editorial to the relevant edition of Theatre Record (which to the best of my knowledge doesn’t include Variety) suggests: “Quentin is here making a basic error of implicitly equating “should not protest” with “should not notice”; it doesn’t seem to occur to him that we may have been meant to pay attention to the casting of Danny Sapani as Hans Christian Andersen. Aleks Sierz, on the same page of this issue, grasps it entirely and deals with it almost in passing: Andersen’s “Danish otherness”, he notes, is “emphasised by the fact that he is played by a black actor”.
Of course, Letts cocks his objection up by trying to maintain the Daily Mail’s stance as punk rock rebel in the face of The Establishment’s pesky “political correctness” (not such a laughable equation – lest we forget, the Sex Pistols wore Swastikas) and by not knowing much about theatre. Thus, he labels the decision “colour-blind casting”. In fact, as Fricker notes, it’s the opposite. But, unlike Sierz, Spencer and Taylor, Fricker suggests that casting a black man to represent a white character’s “otherness” in what is otherwise a totally naturalistic production of a historical play based on real people, might not be all that clever after all.
It is actually the opposite of “colour-blind”. It is asking the audience to note that specific, physical fact about the performer and to interpret that one physical fact (their skin colour) as symbolic of something. It strikes me, on an intellectual level – I didn’t see the play, so can’t judge the actuality –, that this might be argued to be some pretty dim thinking.
JayPeeBee goes on to note: “In the bar after a performance an audience member was overheard saying “I didn't know that Hans Andersen was black”. Which raises questions as to what people expect of theatre that offers a representation of “real” people and of any factual theatre. Can the appearance of an actor be metaphorical as well as literal?”
This does frame the question pretty much perfectly, but it dodges specifying precisely *what* about the actor might be a metaphor for *what* about the character. Which brings us back to this idea of a performer having “*real world* properties”. It also brings up an interesting question of how these might co-exist simultaneously.
After all, both Letts’s and Fricker’s objections to Danny Sapani’s casting stem from the fact that apparently *nothing* else in the show was being asked to signify anything other than exactly what it “looked like”, and yet Sapani’s skin colour apparently *was* being asked to signify something, yet at the same time to not exist literally in the world on stage.
There was less certainty when the issue blew up over the casting of Jenny Jules in the 2008 Almeida production of Pinter’s The Homecoming. I remember being hugely impressed by Mark Shenton’s unequivocal response at the time, and it still bears re-reading (not least, as well, for its round-up of other critics’ positions). Here, despite Jules (again a black actor) playing another *other* (in this case, the only woman, and, again, the only non-member of a family), it seemed clear to more reviewers either before or after consideration, that the actress had been selected because of her qualities as an actress and that her race had nothing to do with it.
It’s interesting that Shenton mentions white Othellos in his stout defence of colour-blind casting, with the rider that “We imagine we wouldn't countenance a white Othello any more. But when British director Jude Kelly surrounded Patrick Stewart in the title role by an otherwise all-black cast, in Washington DC in 1997, Peter Marks wrote a New York Times review praising how “in the race reversing, the company seeks to shatter stereotypes and remind playgoers of the endlessly adaptive nature of Shakespeare's exploration of otherness”.”
Except, of course, that changing *everyone’s* race so that a black character can be played by a white actor isn’t really “colour-blind” so much as, uh, “negative casting”. By “shatter stereotypes” presumably Marks means “we get to see black actors playing a range of rounded characters rather than people defined by their colour”. But of course we *would* be pretty shocked to see a white man playing Othello here in Britain. Infinitely more so, if he were “blacked-up” to do so. Back once more to Germany, where the question is viewed in almost the exact inverse to the way it’s seen here.
Here are three links to photos of recent productions of Othello in German-speaking theatres:
Stefan Pucher’s production at Schauspielhaus, Hamburg
Luc Perceval’s at Münchner Kammerspiele (you have to scroll down to fotos)
and lastly Jan Bosse at the Burgtheater
I know. It takes a bit of explaining to Anglophone eyes [if you see what I mean].
Ian Shuttleworth has addressed the question of Germany’s stage conventions relating to black characters here. He starts out noting the stage directions to Dea Loher’s Innocence, which had recently been staged at the Arcola:
“I noted that director Helena Kaut-Howson had chosen not to follow author Dea Loher’s suggestion that the two black characters need not be played by black actors. “‘No need for pretence of authenticity,’ notes the stage direction, which is rather less true in a country whose discourse of race and multiculturalism is more complex than that in which the play was written and is set. I do not think a British writer would be allowed to deploy such figures so baldly as emblems of otherness.””
This last point is interesting, in relation to the Andersen’s English debate, where a black actor has been directorially deployed as to symbolise a white character’s “otherness” and the decision has been commented on approvingly. However, I think in the above quoted passage Shuttleworth misunderstands both what Loher means by her note and the convention/culture to which it is addressed.
In Loher’s script two characters are black, but she says they need not be played by black actors. “No need for *pretence* of authenticity” she says. It’s a canny differentiation. What she’s actually saying is: “I, a white, female, German writer, have created these two black characters. Having them played by two black actors, won’t make them any more authentic.”
It comes at the question of “being patronising” or “imperialism” from completely the opposite direction. Instead of thinking that having these characters *played* by black actors, it’s suggesting that it is perhaps more questionable to get a black actor/performer to perform a white writer’s imagination of their race. By this logic, doesn’t a white person playing Othello actually make just as much if not more sense, not least as a comment on precisely the sort of thing that we think we’re not saying by solemnly vowing that from now on only black actors will ever play Othello again?
I certainly see the internal logic of the argument. Although I’m not sure I honestly believe either the German or British position is ultimately *correct*.
But there are other reasons that the conclusion falls this way across the North Sea. Firstly, as I’ve already noted, in Germany an actor’s talent is considered before the way they look, cf. the earlier debate about “conventional” casting, and about physical attractiveness. How much less condescending, again, to give the part to the best actor, rather than whichever actor happens to be the right colour, they might reasonably argue.
Secondly, and more pressingly, one might imagine, Germany has far, far fewer black actors. In this respect, Britain’s desire to ensure that Othello is always played by a black actor (not yet a female black actor, though, to the best of my knowledge), is – given our mostly still “traditional” casting methods – just basic fairness. There are precisely two explicitly black characters in Shakespeare. If everyone’s being cast to “look exactly like the character” then it’s hardly fair to take those two parts away. Instead, the rest of the system needs turning on its head. When the system has been turned on its head, however, there is no logical reason why Othello shouldn’t be played by a white actor.
This argument again turns partly on what we are expected to see of what a performer “brings to the part”. What of them signifies something, and at what level.
SEXUALITY
In Trueman’s later piece, he opens by noting the furore caused by an article which includes a description of an actor Sean Hayes, best known for playing a camp homosexual in the U.S. television series Will and Grace, who recently came out himself, playing a heterosexual character in a play, as a “big pink elephant in the room”.
The original piece starts off in a silly place with the strap-line “Heterosexual actors play gay all the time. Why doesn't it ever work in reverse?” It’s such a big, dumb generalisation that of course the article is going to get a kicking. It further muddies the waters of my argument by mixing film, television and theatre. But its worst problem is that it never really says what it means by “gay”. Does this just mean "camp"?
Well, momentarily leaving aside the question of “acting” for a moment, even in “real life” there are camp heterosexuals and (what’s the non-loaded alternative to this?) not-camp homosexuals.
But the article isn’t really an argument about acting (indeed, it’s barely *about* anything – it certainly fails to follow a coherent through-line). The Sean Hayes thing is a silly place to start, though, since the piece’s main worry is about whether people will suspend their disbelief while watching a film if they know a lead actor playing a straight character to be gay in real life. It’s an argument with its roots buried deep in the oppression of homosexuals and their place in U.S. society even now. But, in part, it’s an argument about what anyone means by “gay”.
As far as I understand it, the gay community is about as united on the idea of what constitutes “being gay” as the Anglican Communion is about what it thinks of them. Put simply (and hopefully succinctly), it’s about wider questions than simply the gender of the people one fancies. For example: is “camp” a doctrine of faith, or an embarrassing relic from the past? Or: should gay couples demand the right to marry, or is aping heterosexual relationship models “selling out” gay culture? I’m far from ideally qualified to comment on the rights and wrongs of any given party’s point of view, so I shan’t. I’ll just note that “gay identity” isn’t a fixed point.
The Newsweek article itself, though, seems to be suggesting is that Sean Hayes is too irrepressibly camp to play a “straight guy”. Leaving aside the hundreds of “straight guys” who are irrepressibly camp across the Atlantic, perhaps the article is less relevant here, because the UK has less of a culture of definitively signalled sexuality – I mean, look at our middle classes; watch an episode of Yes, Minister, for instance, then tell me which, if any of them, are *meant* to be “gay characters”, and for that matter, which of the actors are gay. It simply isn’t the same thing.
Or consider the Carry On films. I mean, seriously, what was going on there? Kenneth Williams playing a series of apparently heterosexual letches, with no discernable lack of camp. Perhaps it was because I was only a kid when I saw them, but I was basically happy to buy into what I was being asked to buy into. I didn’t have pronounced ideas about how men or women should (or even did) behave, so, to me, Kenneth Williams (or Frankie Howerd for that matter) was a man with a particular set of mannerisms (signifying nothing) and a penchant for busty ladies.
Perhaps there’s also the question of the tradition of British Theatre acting. Thanks to Nick de Jongh’s Plague Over England, we’ve recently been reminded of the fact that Sir John Gielgud was homosexual, for example. Is that relevant to a consideration of his stage (or indeed screen) acting? I’d say not. Not least because he is such a stylised actor to begin with that sexuality of any sort barely gets a look in. Much the same is true of most other actors (of either gender) of his vintage.
But this whole question of whether “you can tell that someone is gay” seems to be a particularly weird red-herring. It seems nastily plugged into the idea that it is something that people have to hide; or else is attached to a notion that heterosexuality is a “norm” that gets “deviated from”. As prejudices go, homophobia is particularly strange, in that it seems scared of both visible manifestations of the gay community, and at the same time, deeply paranoid – seeing and seeking homosexuality where there is none. At least racism is simple. No twelve-year-old has ever been bullied on *the suspicion* that they’re black, for instance.
But this all gets us away from the question of how it relates to theatre.
Recently at the National Theatre, I saw London Assurance and Love the Sinner. Both speak interestingly to this question of “being convinced” and of how external knowledge might play a part. In London Assurance Simon Russell-Beale’s character, Sir Harcourt Courtly, becomes enamoured of Fiona Shaw’s character, Lady Gay Spanker (just don’t. it’s not helpful). I think it’s a matter of public record that both actors aren’t especially interested in the opposite sex in “real life”. On stage, it doesn’t matter a jot. Russell-Beale’s performance is, as it happens, ludicrously, exaggeratedly camp, but not in a way that indicates any sort of sexual preference and certainly not because he’s “gay in real life” and thus irrepressibly camp in all his acting. One is content to accept that Sir Harcourt has fallen for Lady Spanker because he tells us so and acts it entertainingly. It’s not about “being convinced” – as if theatre audiences default position is one of extreme scepticism.
On the other hand, in Love the Sinner, Jonathan Cullen’s character Michael is a repressed homosexual who (well, the script is desperately unclear) at the very least has sex with an African man, Joseph (Fiston Barek), and might even have fallen in love with him. Similarly, Joseph might have fallen in love with Michael, or he might just be saying that (it really is a dreadful play). I have no idea whether either actor is “gay in real life”, but on stage (which is what matters), neither was convincingly *attracted to*, let alone “in love with”, the other on stage. Fiston Barek was, however, for the record, convincingly black and Jonathan Cullen convincingly white. I believe both to be so in real life too.
Because Love the Sinner was, nominally at least, a drama of psychological insight, it all started to fall apart at precisely the moment where these two men were meant to have just had sex with each other. They didn’t “look like” they’d just had sex; they didn’t “act like” they’d just had sex. Neither of them “convincingly” portrayed someone who found the other person sexually attractive.
Even encyclopaedic knowledge of their personal lives wouldn’t have made what they were doing on stage any more (or less) convincing (although, it might have distracted just enough to take the edge off the boredom).
Of course, part of their problem seemed to be the script. They weren’t really given any lines to say that made their job any easier. As I’ve discussed before, it is notoriously difficult to ever really know where praise and blame should be apportioned. Perhaps it’s a great script and they just acted this aspect of it very poorly. Or were directed to act it very poorly. Or it was just staged in a way that killed it.
Added to this, there are my own tastes and preferences. Perhaps they were acting a great script excellently, as Michael Coveney appears to believe (although his use of the phrase “putting the jizz into Jesus” seems like a plea for us not to take him seriously).
So where has this got us? Cullen and Barek “looked like the characters” – or how we might reasonably expect a generic middle-class Englishman and a *generic* young “African” (from a totally unspecified and probably made-up part of Africa) to look. But they didn’t “convince” at all.
This question of “casting” seems to keep throwing up more and more abstruse questions of how meaning can and/or “should” be created on stage.
What do we allow to be a signifier? Moreover, what do these elements signify to us, and why? And with what effect? To what end?
REALISM
As I admitted quite close to the beginning of this (now ridiculously over-long) piece for all the scorn I poured on Soloski’s desire to see characters played by “actors who looked like them”, I understood what she meant.
When the decision has been taken to cast a naturalistic play in a naturalistic way, details of the performers’ appearance seem to take on new significance. The audience is almost invited to scrutinise the performer as if they *are* the character. As if whatever they look like, whatever they sound like, is all fair game for *reading* the director’s intentions, are all keys to the piece’s total meaning.
It's not a brilliant idea. It might, for example, encourage us to be horribly judgemental. It perhaps encourages directors to try to find someone with “shifty eyes” to play the villain (are there ‘villains’ in drama any more? Does anyone actually do this?). The worst of it is when Cordelia is almost invariably cast as a youthful “innocent” blonde and Goneril and Regan as “experienced” forty-something brunettes, as if British theatre casting were the allegorical tool of Josef Goebbels.
But beyond an almost comic basic level of how it should be "read", ultra-realism poses other problems.
An interesting case recently was Chris Haydon’s production of Mick Gordon’s Pressure Drop. Haydon (no relation – but a mate, in the interests of full disclosure) scored himself what was, in the abstract, a remarkable cast, headed by Michael Goold, Justin Salinger and David Kennedy. However – with echoes of Matt Trueman’s ...theatre’s “fatal flaw” piece (terrible title. Not his) – I was amused that it was only a few month earlier that I’d last seen Salinger and Goold together on stage in Our Class at the NT (I note with less amusement that my review carries literally no mention of the play’s character’s individual stories whatsoever). In it, Goold and Salinger play Polish gentile and Polish Jew respectively, both in love with the same woman. In Pressure Drop, Goold and Salinger play two brothers (also both in love with the same woman, oddly). Goold’s character has become a potential BNP local councillor, swearing about, among other things (amusingly), Poles stealing British jobs; Salinger’s character has gone off to New York and come back a successful banker. I have no idea if Salinger is Jewish “in real life”, but the way the Our Class casting echoed – in a play full of racial slurs – in the Pressure Drop casting did disturb me.
Prosaically, Goold and Salinger also made for unlikely-looking brothers. Much more important was the impact of David Kennedy as Goold’s character’s best mate Tony. Put simply, Kennedy was “perfect casting” as a Barking-based BNP supporter. Totally, authentically cockney and physically intimidating; he looked and sounded every inch the part. As a result, though, the scene in which he and Salinger are required to have a fight, and Goold is required to pull them apart; well, it’d have been fine if it wasn’t meant to be detailed naturalism. As it was, one did sort of wonder why Salinger wasn’t dead within seconds and how on earth Goold managed to pull them apart and hold Tony back.
ACCENT / NATIONALITY / CLASS
A slightly different angle on this question is provided by comparing the reviews of That Face from Britain, Australia and America. What we’re really looking at here is the question of class – primarily as established and communicated by accent. And also, in the latter two cases, of how accent also establishes or dis-establishes location. And how actors' "real selves" impinge on the fictional "real".
It was the comments thread of Alison Croggan’s review of the Australian production which got me thinking about how this relates to the subject of “casting” and “authenticity” or the impact of “in real life-ness”. Obviously (or at least, nigh-on inevitably), the Australian production casts Australian actors. And they have Australian accents. “Yes, we have class in our society, but it's quite a different deal here.” she says.
“We might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they don't function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently director Sarah Giles's decision to stage That Face with Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian accents.”
Croggan’s inference (or the director’s implication) is that by not “doing the accents”, the play has been totally transposed from London to Australia, which is interesting in itself. Much the same approach is applied to Australian plays here, to the best of my recollection, though. The said, perhaps not so many plays are quite so accent specific as That Face.
Without class it has only half a subject, as Croggan’s review suggests and the New York review seems to confirm, totally lacking any mention of class and not liking the play very much as a result; reviewing a show as a simple drama about a bad mum. Which, I guess it is, if you take away the element of class, which, aside from my prefatory notes, I hardly even bother mentioning explicitly in my own review. Perhaps because at the time I was writing my reviews solely for an English audience, who I figured would all have experience of living in England’s class society.
It’s interesting to imagine Australians playing English characters but not bothering to do the accents. Similarly, it’s interesting to consider that in this instance taking away the accents also transposes the play’s location. The example makes for a useful reminder of the actual leap that we Britons make when doing likewise with Australian plays – the last of which I saw (that I recall) being the West End revival of Andrew Bovell’s Speaking in Tongues, which happened to be one of those plays in which an ensemble of four play lots of different characters. This being Britain, each had a different regional accent for easy, immediate differentiation. Lord knows how any of that impacts on our understanding of the play or the intentions of the playwright. Presumably he never imagined any of his characters were Welsh, but what does it say to us in the audience if one of them suddenly is? Does it matter in this context or is Welshness, unlike class, not necessarily a factor in how we think of someone? Perhaps the character’s Welshness was lessened by our knowledge that Ian Hart isn’t *really* Welsh “in real life.
But – especially in “realist” drama – accent is frequently presented as a vital, intrinsic part of a character – perhaps it is even partially understood as a a key to “understanding” the character’s “personality”. So much so, in the tradition of social realist playwriting, that playwrights will often go out of their way to write dialogue in phonetic form to ensure that the importance (to them) of a particular regional/ethnic accent is not overlooked.
In broader terms, the staging of an actor’s accent and physical appearance (or the accent they’re asked to perform, at least) can also sometimes serve as a useful index of the conscious or unconscious ideology behind a director (or possibly individual actor)’s take on the world. Akin, perhaps, to the way that Max Stafford-Clark’s suggestion of “otherness” by using “blackness” ends up saying more about how Max Stafford-Clark perceives black people in Britain, than about how the Victorians viewed Danes. (I’m not, for the record, trying to suggest that M S-C is racist, per se. He’s clearly got a long track record of trying to be helpful in this respect, but it strikes me that his politics are stuck around 1979 (cf. Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, in which, to make apparently “progressive” political statements, an “effeminate” man is played by a woman, and a black servant who “wishes he was white” is played by “a white”). I just wonder if his depiction of “otherness” really strikes the chord he intends in this day and age). Similarly, it’d be nice to think that the days of “comic” northern or West Country accents were on their way out, but there doesn’t seem much evidence.
Indeed, watching some productions – Shakespeare seems especially prone to this – it often feels like stereotype after stereotype is trotted out as a kind of desperate short-hand employed by a director terrified that, without telegraphing “the sort of person the character is”, Shakespeare’s language will completely baffle modern audiences. This approach also often plugs into the crudest possible physical castings (think Juliet’s nurse in R&J, the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the gravediggers and Osrick in Hamlet, etc. etc. etc.).
While we’re on this topic of accent/“regional character”, the way that British regional accents, or perhaps actors from those regions (“in real life”), or at least actors *acting* *as if they’re from those regions*, are made to “mean” also needs noting. Beyond the “comic” accent issue, there’s an interesting study to be done of which parts of Britain are most frequently aligned with other parts of the world. What I mean is, the way that particular regions get chosen as the location or accent-of-choice for plays written in other parts of the world (I know, this sounds like a Guardian theatre blog: “Which parts of Britain are most like other parts of the world?”). for example, watching The White Guard at the NT recently, I was struck, not for the first time, that I tend to believe Scots playing Russians get a whole lot closer to behaving at least a bit like Russians than a bunch of impossibly mannered, stiff, upper-middle-class English actors ever do (and, yes, please try to ignore the massive generalisations for the time being. I’ll get to them).
It’s a similar question to the class thing in the three English-language versions of That Face. It’s partly the question of how and at what level we want our “meaning” to be manufactured.
For example, watching Chekhov’s The Seagull played by dainty, polite, ever-so-English actors, you end up imagining a whole set of British values (either modern or antique) (and, yes, obviously what “British values” might be is another big question which I’ll skip for the time being, thanks) onto Russians from another century. Fine. Ish. I suppose. Except that by doing so you often lose the “comedy” bit of the “tragicomedy” that Chekhov says he’s written. Which is kind of fine, too – I’m all for a bit of appropriation when it’s deliberate. But in these instances, it never really seems to be. It just kind of happens because of the disparities between the two cultures and the way that the transitioning between one and the other is realised.
Perhaps, this just partly stems from some rather general ideas I have about Russia and about Scotland, which can, embarrassingly, be boiled down to “they’re both colder than the South of England, and each has a reputation for a lot more spirits being drunk there”. Crass though that may be, though, it strikes me as a better rationale for a “realist” representation than: “Well, these characters are all middle class, so let’s call the Redgraves (this thought goes back to (I think it was) Summerfolk at the NT) and do the whole thing with cut-glass English accents and lots of fine china”.
(as an aside: there’s almost a parallel study that might be done on the casting of alcoholic drinks-of-choice in plays. In Russia – vodka, in Scotland – whisky, in the north of England – bitter, in France – vin rouge, in the south of England – Chardonnay or lager, depending on milieu, etc. and what these intend, connote and perhaps the sorts of drunkenness that are supposed to result from them)
Similarly, I recently saw the British premiere of Romanian Gabriel Pintilei’s Elevator which transposed the action to Stockwell. In an otherwise hugely credible production, this was the one element which really didn’t work. After all, the play was at once an examination of quite specific things about two specifically Romanian teenagers and a metaphor for the way that their society was falling apart. The specific facts about teenagers in Stockwell are quite different as are the ways in which Stockwell/London/Britain might be considered to be falling apart. Given the (unspoken) centrality of Romania’s still hugely culturally influential Catholic church, I wondered – in the interests of “realism” – if the play were to be transposed geographically at all, it might not have been better served with a more Catholic backdrop. Liverpool, perhaps, or maybe Cork or somewhere? Or perhaps this is too literal-minded and needn’t be a consideration. Except in this case, not knowing the play was from Romania might well have wrong-footed some (much, even) of what the teenagers were saying, the rationales behind it, and thus our understanding of the characters.
In that case, however, it was nothing to do with the casting per se, since it was changes to the script which established Stockwell as the location. On the other hand, if the changes to the script had specified Liverpool, Cork or even Romania, it might have felt problematic if the cast had retained their estuary accents.
All this has moved us a bit away from the area I wanted to discuss in relation to accents, and feeding back from accents, to “the right” physical casting.
After all, for the stereotypes I mention some paragraphs above to work, there needs to be some sort of commonly accepted pool of stereotypes for a director to draw on. Annoyingly, if you’re brought up here, a map of Britain matching regional accent to an accepted set of stock characteristics might as well be stamped on your DNA. I won’t list them here, but you’ll have a version if you’re British, and will have probably heard about a few of them if you’re not.
I shan’t bother to point out, either, that the shifting emphases as to how the map functions depending on where on it you come from does much to demonstrate how ludicrously far from being the “objective” document it often seems to be presented as.
In much the same way as only an aging *white* director would think to use a black actor to signify “otherness”, I find it unlikely that a local Birmingham theatre company, for example, would find as much mirth in giving a stock comic figure a Birmingham accent – as much of the rest of the country might (actually, they’re probably give him/her a Black Country accent and find it hilarious, while much of the rest of the country failed to discern the difference, but there we go).
CONCLUSION (of sorts - and I think there's a bit of slippage here, so do comment)
My point then (finally! At last!), is that, rather than by way of any sort of rigorous political/ideological/ethical thinking, much of our way of staging things seems dependent of a widely shared set of crude stereotypes or positionings of class, region, race, sexuality, age and appearance. And that, even more tragically, even in the 21st century, these are still so ingrained in our culture that it’s often seen as “being a bit radical” to “cast against type”. It’s why “regional” playwrights and/or theatres feel the urge to create scripts that specifically dictate accent and location – because otherwise, thanks to the overwhelmingly normative way in which British theatre still seems to stage the world (or at best, that playwrights fear that their plays might be staged), they’d be RP. It’s why “BME” (bleugh, horrible term) writers and theatre companies feel compelled to write stories with *BME* characters and stage them thus.
Perhaps this is also why blogs about casting seem to draw such angry comments: because casting in theatres (theatres, for heaven’s sake) can all too often feel like it takes place on all the faultlines of British society. Where people are valued monetarily on the basis of their appearance, rather than their ability. Where “the regions” are taken to be a divergence from “the norm”, as are non-middle class accents. Where “black” still basically means “other” and where homosexuality still seems to be an issue.
This, in short, is why I find it problematic when an adult who writes about theatre for a living is happy to say “unconventional or less-than-ideal casting”; who is “eager to accept whomever in the role and think there’s something wonderful about surrendering to an actor who looks nothing like the character” only in “more stylised works”. Not least because theatre’s “realism” often looks a lot more prescriptive than reality and because far too much of the time, when someone says “unconventional”, the conventions they seem to be imagining are some of the most right-wing imaginable.
Thoughts?
* (Re: photo) Not really.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
I, Malvolio - BAC
Despite there being three preceding examples of Tim Crouch doing first-person narrations of Shakespeare stories for children (I, Caliban; I, Peaseblossom; and I, Banquo - all of which I’ve cleverly managed not to see), I, Malvolio somehow sounded like an odd proposition when considering Crouch’s work for “grown-ups”. Then there’s the fact of him “playing” Malvolio. It’s hard to imagine anyone less Malvolio-like than the infinitely sweet-natured Crouch. Indeed, it’s now difficult, despite Crouch’s erstwhile career as a “proper actor”, to imagine him “doing acting”, as what he’s written and performed (My Arm, An Oak Tree, England, The Author) since has been intricately concerned with the very nature of performance, the performer’s relationship to the audience, how meaning is constructed on stages, and so on. So the idea that he’s about to “play a character” (although, of course, that’s sort of what he does in the other pieces too) seems like a step backwards.
Turns out there was no need to worry.
I, Malvolio is incredibly funny, utterly heart-breaking, deeply sophisticated, beguilingly simple, hugely compassionate, completely uncompromising and incredibly intricate. All at the same time.
The set-up is simple. We enter one of the upstairs rooms in the BAC, and Crouch is standing at the other end dressing in a ridiculous costume of stained, one-piece kind of romper suit, red turkey wattle attached to his neck and a pair of horns on his head, trying to retain some level of dignity. Which is pretty much impossible given the costume.
This immediately sets up a brilliantly giggly atmosphere. It’s often observed that one secret of comedy (so, not much of a secret, then) is putting characters who try to appear dignified in undignified situations. This is an object lesson in how this succeeds, almost without effort. Wearing this costume, all Crouch has to do to have the entire room in helpless hysterics is to ask us not to laugh, to try to maintain some sort of dignity, to look hurt by our laughing at him.
“I am not mad” he tells us. Seriously. It is very funny, despite the tone of deep hurt.
This first room revolves mostly on this theme (the piece is in promenade and takes us through three rooms). Crouch/Malvolio talks to us, insults us and pleads for himself. He is not mad; we are insensitive brutes. He is just trying to keep things in order; we are litterers, drinkers, revellers and louts.
Perhaps the funniest line of insult is his repeated satirising of the audience. “This is you” he says (oddly reminiscent of the History Today sketches from the Mary Whitehouse Experience), trotting out accusations which range from the neatly observed (accusing us of taking “Meow Meow” - "aha, the laughter of recognition" he drily observes) to the cleverly acute: stuff about laughing at the “funny man” until he cries.
And this gets us to the real core of the piece. I, Malvolio deals with a lot of complex, conflicting elements. We’ve got Malvolio’s character: Crouch gives him a fair hearing; much fairer than Shakespeare, in fact. Listening Malvolio just recount in simple language the events that befall him through Twelfth Night (with a bit of back-story) from his own perspective is appallingly sad. But at the same time, Crouch doesn’t try to whitewash the difficulty of Malvolio’s Puritanism. You can discern a certain amount of understanding for his position, but the character still goes too far to be fully sympathetic. You do get to imagine how Malvolio might have been backed into the extremity of his position through a combination of simple opposition combined with, well, unrequited desire – a slightly less brutal version of Richard III’s “if I cannot prove a lover, then I am determined to prove a villain” – though.
While all this is going on with Malvolio, there’s also the game that’s being played with the audience. As our sympathies for him slide this way and that, we are also forced to look at ourselves as an audience. Because Malvolio remains utterly, hilariously ridiculous, and keeps making us laugh – theoretically against his will – we are forced to question the ethics of our laughter. Are we just bullies? Is it nice or kind to laugh at someone in distress like this? His distress only gets funnier as we contemplate this. In the second room he’s toying with a noose which he throws over a beam and gets two volunteers to hold, while a third is recruited to kick his chair from under him, for example. It creates a genuine frisson, even while feeling nominally “safe”.
In many ways this insightful, touching, funny piece of children’s theatre is a natural follow-on from The Author. It’s more direct – dealing with actual, personal responses to something immediate rather than questions of a wider more generalised acceptance of a particular theatrical genre, but it does still boil down to questioning what we’re doing when we’re watching something on stage. Like The Author, it asks us “is this alright?” “Are you ok with this?”
So, yes, in an hour Crouch manages to tell the whole story of Twelfth Night, surprisingly rehabilitates one of Shakespeare’s most one-dimensional straw targets and forces his audience to have a good hard think about their ethical responses to comedy at the same time as making them laugh a good deal more than most theatre ever will.
This is a brilliant, brilliant little piece and it’s beyond criminal that it isn’t already booked for an enormous tour to schools and theatres up and down the country already.
Turns out there was no need to worry.
I, Malvolio is incredibly funny, utterly heart-breaking, deeply sophisticated, beguilingly simple, hugely compassionate, completely uncompromising and incredibly intricate. All at the same time.
The set-up is simple. We enter one of the upstairs rooms in the BAC, and Crouch is standing at the other end dressing in a ridiculous costume of stained, one-piece kind of romper suit, red turkey wattle attached to his neck and a pair of horns on his head, trying to retain some level of dignity. Which is pretty much impossible given the costume.
This immediately sets up a brilliantly giggly atmosphere. It’s often observed that one secret of comedy (so, not much of a secret, then) is putting characters who try to appear dignified in undignified situations. This is an object lesson in how this succeeds, almost without effort. Wearing this costume, all Crouch has to do to have the entire room in helpless hysterics is to ask us not to laugh, to try to maintain some sort of dignity, to look hurt by our laughing at him.
“I am not mad” he tells us. Seriously. It is very funny, despite the tone of deep hurt.
This first room revolves mostly on this theme (the piece is in promenade and takes us through three rooms). Crouch/Malvolio talks to us, insults us and pleads for himself. He is not mad; we are insensitive brutes. He is just trying to keep things in order; we are litterers, drinkers, revellers and louts.
Perhaps the funniest line of insult is his repeated satirising of the audience. “This is you” he says (oddly reminiscent of the History Today sketches from the Mary Whitehouse Experience), trotting out accusations which range from the neatly observed (accusing us of taking “Meow Meow” - "aha, the laughter of recognition" he drily observes) to the cleverly acute: stuff about laughing at the “funny man” until he cries.
And this gets us to the real core of the piece. I, Malvolio deals with a lot of complex, conflicting elements. We’ve got Malvolio’s character: Crouch gives him a fair hearing; much fairer than Shakespeare, in fact. Listening Malvolio just recount in simple language the events that befall him through Twelfth Night (with a bit of back-story) from his own perspective is appallingly sad. But at the same time, Crouch doesn’t try to whitewash the difficulty of Malvolio’s Puritanism. You can discern a certain amount of understanding for his position, but the character still goes too far to be fully sympathetic. You do get to imagine how Malvolio might have been backed into the extremity of his position through a combination of simple opposition combined with, well, unrequited desire – a slightly less brutal version of Richard III’s “if I cannot prove a lover, then I am determined to prove a villain” – though.
While all this is going on with Malvolio, there’s also the game that’s being played with the audience. As our sympathies for him slide this way and that, we are also forced to look at ourselves as an audience. Because Malvolio remains utterly, hilariously ridiculous, and keeps making us laugh – theoretically against his will – we are forced to question the ethics of our laughter. Are we just bullies? Is it nice or kind to laugh at someone in distress like this? His distress only gets funnier as we contemplate this. In the second room he’s toying with a noose which he throws over a beam and gets two volunteers to hold, while a third is recruited to kick his chair from under him, for example. It creates a genuine frisson, even while feeling nominally “safe”.
In many ways this insightful, touching, funny piece of children’s theatre is a natural follow-on from The Author. It’s more direct – dealing with actual, personal responses to something immediate rather than questions of a wider more generalised acceptance of a particular theatrical genre, but it does still boil down to questioning what we’re doing when we’re watching something on stage. Like The Author, it asks us “is this alright?” “Are you ok with this?”
So, yes, in an hour Crouch manages to tell the whole story of Twelfth Night, surprisingly rehabilitates one of Shakespeare’s most one-dimensional straw targets and forces his audience to have a good hard think about their ethical responses to comedy at the same time as making them laugh a good deal more than most theatre ever will.
This is a brilliant, brilliant little piece and it’s beyond criminal that it isn’t already booked for an enormous tour to schools and theatres up and down the country already.
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