Women at the NT – some facts

[guest post, mostly]

Denys Lasdun putting the finishing touches to his south bank NT

In the last week since the National Theatre’s interesting two hour NT50 extravaganza on BBC2 there’s been a gradual accumulation of criticism for the lack of representation of women writers, culminating in Sam Potter’s piece for the Guardian.

As is now inevitable with this sort of issue, I spent most of the week discussing it behind relatively closed doors on Facebook*. However, my friend, the writer and director James Morris, happened to have a spreadsheet which contained details of every production the NT had done, so he did a bit of number crunching. The below results are mostly copied and pasted directly, and reproduced here with permission.

We started out with conjecture:

“If you sort the data in that spreadsheet by playwright it makes for depressing reading. You’ll find that you probably have more productions of Shakespeare (up to and including Peter Hall’s latest Twelfth Night, to which you can add Othello and Timon of Athens since) than you do plays written by women.

“In fact, I’d go so far as to say if you added David Hare, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard together, then you’d probably have about the same number of plays by those three men alone as there are plays by all women in the NT’s history, and I’m being generous and counting plays that Katie Mitchell devised/developed from source material (e.g. Waves or some trace of her) as being ‘written’ by her.

Then James checked it out:

“Okay, I did the math: if you only take into account the Old Vic, Olivier, Lyttelton, and Cottesloe (no Shed, no Paintframe, no Loft, no Shunt, etc.) then you have 67 shows that were either written or co-written by women and 726 that were written by men. When shows were devised I generally grouped them under the gender of whoever was leading the process - whatever I did here would be flawed in some way. That makes for about 91% of shows on the National’s main stages being written by men. 31 of those 67 shows were under Hytner, along with 192 by men, meaning he’s above average at about 13% written or co-written by women.”

For all that 13% per cent is a pretty uninspiring figure, let’s at least note that ALMOST HALF of everything written by a woman to be staged at the NT was staged under Hytner’s regime. Let’s also remember that many of the men tipping this balance are “dead white males,” to use a strangely familiar phrase.

During Hytner’s time, if you discounted plays by playwrights who are dead [I count 54], you’d still have a gender imbalance, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.

No. It goes up to 23% – so, of commissions of living playwrights, we got up to almost a quarter in the last decade. Annoyingly, of course, that figure goes down again when one takes into account the fact that virtually every *version* of a foreign playwright, alive or dead (and entirely male, I think), was undertaken by a male playwright.

Of those 67 plays by women in the NT’s entire history, 42 were in the Cottesloe (14% of 291 Cottesloe productions), 16 were in the Lyttelton (5% of 214 Lyttelton productions), 6 were in the Olivier (3% of 199 Olivier productions), 3 were at the Old Vic (3% of 89 Old Vic productions)

For comparison: there have been 68 productions of plays by Shakespeare.

[NOTE: this includes duplicates with revivals and also things like the Animals & Children Took to the Streets. This information is for all productions from the first performance of Hamlet up through all announced shows for the rest of 2013.]

Re: my suggestion (made first on Facebook and then as a comment on the Guardian blog) that for the next fifty years we should just reverse these figures, James pointed out:

The NT probably does more plays in a year now than it used to, even after transferring to the South Bank. At the moment they probably do circa 22-25 shows a year. Back in the late 70s and early 80s it was more like 15-18.

So, the good news for male playwrights is that the NT can probably start commissioning more work from them again (at a rate of 50%, equal to the rate with which women will also be being commissioned and produced) sooner than 2063

***

After this, we turned our attention to directors.

Directors who have directed the most plays by women/co-written by women: Katie Mitchell (7, including several of her own workings) and John Burgess (5). Howard Davies has directed 2 plays by women and 33 by men, Hytner now has 37 productions (more than anybody else) and they were all written by men. Peter Hall has 30, all by men. Trevor Nunn has 20, all by men. Laurence Olivier has 8, all by men. Richard Eyre is the only Artistic Director of the National Theatre ever to direct a play written by a woman on one of its stages and that was more than fifteen years after he stepped down: Welcome to Thebes, by Moira Buffini. He has directed 32 productions at the National, 31 by men.

[update: see comment below from John Burgess, who adds to his five: "two Studio Nights in the Cottesloe Theatre – The Women by Clare Booth Luce (co-directed with Peter Gill) in March 1986 and Travelling Time by Rosemary Wilton in March 1987"]

There have been 7 productions co-directed by men and women, 106 directed by women, and 678 directed by men.

The number of shows directed by men whose first name is Peter is 76.

(I couldn't find details of who directed a couple of shows like Inua Ellams’ Black T-Shirt Collection [update: it was a man] and Daniel Kitson’s show the other year)

Katie Mitchell is the most regular female director with 18 productions, followed by Marianne Elliot with 11 (+ 2 co-directions), Deborah Warner and Di Trevis with 7 each, then Melly Still and Phyllida Lloyd with 5 each.

The first woman to direct for the National Theatre was Joan Plowright in 1969 - she directed Rites by Maureen Duffy and co-directed The Travails of Sancho Panza with Donald MacKechnie.

The first woman to direct an NT production on the South Bank was Nancy Meckler in 1981. Between 1969 and 1981, not a single National Theatre production was directed by a woman. In the entirety of Hall's time as Artistic Director (1973 to 1988), there were 8 productions directed by 5 different women: Nancy Meckler, Sheila Hancock, Cicely Berry, Di Trevis, and Sarah Pia Anderson.

By contrast: in 2007 alone, there were 9 productions directed by 7 different women: Anna Mackmin, Deborah Warner, Emma Rice, Katie Mitchell, Marianne Elliot, Sarah Frankcom, and Thea Sharrock.

Of those 9 productions, only one show was (co-)written by a woman: director Emma Rice's version of A Matter of Life and Death.

Of the 113 productions in which a woman was involved as director, 30 (26%) were written - or co-written - by women. Of the 678 productions directed solely by men, 37 (5%) were written - or co-written - by women.

ENDS

* As a side issue; it’s interesting how much writing-about-theatre now takes place entirely on these “unofficial” social networking sites. It still feels that between Twitter and Facebook half the impetus for blogging was totally removed when they arrived, and also that a significant amount of time was also taken off the table. This is, I suppose, my “first-wave blogger” reactionary grumble akin to Michael Billington’s bemoaning the passing of “the kind of prolonged argument about the arts that once took place in the correspondence columns of newspapers”.

Landscape II – BAC

[seen 06/11/13]

“During my time here, I thought to draw myself closer to places I knew, that the small peace and revelations of the land were the treasures of kindness. But they were reflections. Drawing me in so I may turn and see outwards.”


Melanie Wilson’s Landscape II is an extraordinary piece of theatre. Extraordinary, and possibly nigh-on impossible to write about satisfactorily.

[I tried to write a non-spoilery review, but it didn’t work, so this one might get a bit blow-by-blow because I think I’m going to need to write down everything that happened just to work it out for myself. So, y’know, go and see it first if that sort of thing annoys you. It’s also very First Person-subjective, so maybe skip it if that annoys you too.]

As well as being a writer and performer extraordinaire – I’ve been a massive fan since Simple Girl in 2007 – Wilson is also a virtuoso sound designer. Most notably, beyond her own shows, for Katie Mitchell’s recent German outings Die Gelbe Tapete and Reise Durch die Nacht. I mention this, because I think it is crucial to the way this piece operates.

The only thing I knew going in was the vague recollection of the first line of the flyer: “Three women separated by a hundred years start a conversation across time.” That’s also a useful thing to know.

I have to admit that, in the moment, I found the beginning pretty hard going. Yes, it was beautifully executed: Wilson sits very still at a wooden table, housing the necessary detritus of sound-operation – there’s a laptop, a little board of lighted switches and a small sound-desk volume control board. This is placed on a set (designed by Wilson and lighting designer Ben Pacey) suggesting the whitewashed plaster walls and floorboards of a remote cottage: the remote cottage where one of her characters seems to be now, and where one was 100 years ago. The long back wall of the cottage doubles as a vast video projection screen. It’s worth saying that this is possibly the most impressive, integrated use of video I’ve ever seen. The whole wall just unfussily lights up. There are no visible joins, no slight shudders or static; just perfect crisp, clear pictures – beautifully filmed (and projected) by Will Duke.

But, yes, hard going. The piece starts quietly, slowly: incredibly still. And, while the words, images and sound are beautiful, they’re also incredibly slow and fractured. I felt like my body and mind were operating at the wrong speed; like I really needed to have slowed down before entering. On top of this, I was conscious of Thinking Too Hard. Because of the fractures, and the space between the words, I felt like I was both overthinking everything I was hearing and at the same time not quite managing to piece everything together, and missing some of what was being said because I was too lost in my own mind listening to my overthinking – all the while thinking, this is really beautifully done, why aren’t I following it better? (Possibly because I was very tired, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.) At the same time, the piece continues to command complete attention and respect. At no point during this phase of disorientation did I feel irritable or like I wanted to leave. Exactly the opposite: I wanted to concentrate even harder, to find a way of existing comfortably in the piece.

When I said that I think the piece operates like sound design, I suppose I really meant more “like music”. Quite quickly you become aware of subtle shifts in the lighting, in the words, and in the timbre of Wilson’s voice. These tiny, subtle changes work like the leitmotifs in Wagner. I think every character, perhaps even each significant aspect of the narrative had shifts in sound, light and wordsound to designate their arrival. More concentration needed.

Then, at around the halfway point there’s a bit that makes you pretty much jump out of your skin. Tending to avoid “horror” theatre and plays designed to “shock”, it’s been absolute age since something’s made me jump in a theatre in the way that thrillers do in the cinema.

This single moment completely changed the entire game for me. Up until that point, the beauty and the meandering, while lovely to look at and listen to, hadn’t really been connecting with me. This moment of visceral shock not only connected, but also made retrospective sense of the lulling first part – like someone soothing you into a state of relaxation the better to make you jump unexpectedly. From here on in it felt more like I was fighting a battle between being very wired with adrenaline and still back to being soothed over.

Closer to the end, there is a bigger, more profound, more political shift. I won’t say what it is here/now, but strangely, it confirmed the strangest impression I’d had at the first shock*. And what this second piece of information, I suppose, does is to comprehensively re-wire your understanding of everything that has gone before – or at least it did for me. It absolutely abolishes the impression of this being perhaps a floaty, pretty-pretty, pastoral piece and makes it about something very real, urgent, and pressing. It also wires all that back into the importance of the natural beauty of the landscapes we had been previously considering. It makes the piece into a meditation not only on beauty but Art and Politics.

The quote at the top of this review for me absolutely nails the core of the whole thing, and gave me a way to retrospectively understand and appreciate it all.

Something else that is phenomenal about the piece is the severity of the disorientation it causes for a good while after it ends. The word “hallucinatory” gets used a bit too much to describe pieces of theatre, but leaving the Council Chamber space at the BAC (unrecognisable, even after having only been there the previous Friday), I felt completely spaced and wrung out for a good quarter of an hour afterwards. The conversation I had with friends afterwards was less “wasn’t that great?” (it was), but “what the hell just happened?”

Landscape II feels like a spectacular, extraordinary intelligent and, importantly, feminist achievement of the thing.

* The first shock immediately made me think of this scene from this film which I’m linking to, but clicking it will be a total spoiler. Also, it’s quite a harrowing scene.

[all the pictures used are screen-shots from the Landscape II trailer using Will Duke's film]

In Eldersfield, Chapter Two: Monument to Charlie Chaplin – Whitechapel Gallery

[seen 04/11/13]

Kings of England’s In Eldersfield, Chapter Two: Monument to Charlie Chaplin is a short 16mm black and white film made by Rosie Carr with music by Nick Gill. In the same way that Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree is a glass of water. Or, to put it another way, the film is the monument. As a film, it plays with the idea of its monumentality. It is also a documentary of a performance, but the performance exists solely for the camera. Although the fact that the performance took place in reality is also significant.

Kings of England is an umbrella term for projects convened by Simon Bowes (here working with John Pinder (co-concept development and co-direction with Bowes), Rhiannon Armstrong (interviews, field recordings and violin), Alex Eisenberg (documentation, website and print)). In Eldersfield is a project – he explained, introducing the piece – which is taking place over the course of a decade and will consist of ten Chapters. A decade is not necessarily a length of time, he added. Eldersfield is a made-up name for a place that is about history, ancestry, and the project is about commemorating and reclaiming items from the 20th Century. Chapter One – described beautifully here by Matt Trueman – was a live performance concerning the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, and a twenty minute silence he once took before replying to a question he had been asked.

Chapter Two is nominally about Charlie Chaplin. The monument, however, is as much to the National Picture Theatre in Hull (a strikingly resonant title for a cinema, particularly in these days after NT50). On 18 March, 1941, it was bombed while 150 people were inside watching Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator. Miraculously, no one was injured, but the building still stands empty and ruined on Beverley Road and is about to be knocked down. Monument, then, preserves these facts, and captures images of the building. On top of that it creates an abstract performance and evocation of them.

To this end, the film follows five children/young people (10-14) from them brushing their teeth and eating breakfast to a point where they are gathered in the studio theatre in the Hull Truck building.
[Coming to the performance straight after posting Monday’s piece on Nic Green, I was amused to remember I had once said to Bowes that his own folk music blood and soil aesthetic had also kind of troubled me. Something he wryly acknowledged.]
But, Kings of England have created a rather profoundly brilliant sort of local patriotism against nationalism: warmth, but also self-criticism.

The film looks a lot like a 1940s newsreel, or the sort of archive footage we see of new towns in the 1930s or 1950s. This is partially supported by fact the houses in which most of the children are introduced were built in this period, but there’s something more about the film stock that makes it look like it’s vintage even while they’re fastening velcro trainers and adjusting their smart phone. These images in particular feel incredibly astutely picked. We at once have this sense of “our reality”, the here-and-now, but at the same time a very familiar aesthetic of “heritage”.

What the children are bringing to the film, beyond some useful and necessary movement, is an abstracted-to-the-nth degree, almost cubist rendering of that scene from The Great Dictator in which Chaplin-as-not-actually-Adolf bounces that large inflatable globe around to the prelude from Lohengrin (which is effectively just the instrumental version of In Fernem Land, which I first happened to see in Meine Faire Dame).

For Chapter Two, the excellent writer and musician Nick Gill (over whom I’ve already fawned quite enough this year), has re-written, or re-imagined this music into a harsher, less straightforward outwardly lyrical form. A kind of angular version of the Lohengrin prelude, using (as Nick put it) about two phrases and some of the same notes, while remarkably keeping something of the feel of the original and a kind of de-problematised Wagner. Actually, (and really I’d need to hear the whole thing through a few more times before committing to this as a judgement), I think what Nick’s done is by isolating the phrases and repeating them many more times than happens in the original. And with gaps. – Making them sound much more like something that his band Monroe Transfer might have come up with on their own, and a bit like those bits of Michael Nyman where he does minimalism to Mozart or Purcell – he’s taken out that problematic unchallenged Romanticism that so appealled to the almost kitsch, chocolate box aesthetics of the Nazi party. (Interesting thing about Nazi aesthetics: the architecture and fashion tended to be pretty forward-looking, the art and thinking really didn’t.)

And that is part of the wider genius of this short film. It takes, plays with, and interrogates even these most problematic aspects of monumentalism, goes close to an artistic edge by deploying such strong symbolism as Wagner and Hitler, while concurrently offering a comment on the monumentalism of capitalism (the film cleverly tracks the children both marching through a park, past an old Victorian statue, past a town centre war memorial, and then through a shopping mall with a massive Tesco that might as well have been designed by Albert Speer), treading an intricate, intelligent path between reactionary yearning for The Good Old Days™ and palpable disgust at the corporatisation of Britain. In the best possible way, it has its cake and eats it.

As a work of art, I’d say it is one of the most intelligently critical, searching pieces I have seen this year, or in a long while, actually. I have no idea how anyone else will get to see it, but I hope conditions exist to enable a far wider constituency than Monday’s invited audience to experience this work.

Fatherland – BAC

[seen 02/11/13]

It’s astonishing how little the aesthetics of fascism have changed since the 1920s.

Nic Green’s new piece, Fatherland – wittingly or unwittingly – has the most far-right aesthetics that I have ever seen deployed in a theatre. I am curious to know the extent to which that is deliberate, and the extent to which it is unconscious. And, if conscious, what the effect that this exploration and use of fascist, Nazi, and neo-Nazi iconography is supposed to be.

The Council Chamber room of the BAC is a perfect choice for Fatherland. It is a comforting old hall: high whitewashed ceiling, crumbling plaster-work, and wooden panels. It feels like the essence of a proud, strong history gone to seed – a crucial foundation stone for fascism.

The audience is placed in four banks of seating all facing a single figure in the centre. We are flanked by three drummers on podiums, with short hair, side-partings, and tight fitting military shirts with rolled-up sleeves.

The first, what? fifteen or so minutes of the show feel quite gentle. Green recruits some men from the audience who stand in the opposite corner of the space to her and read some words about “space” (which is here defined as being dependent on there being things for space to be the space between). The piece is apparently, nominally about Green’s meeting with her father, and her interest in her (invisible, inaudible) Scottish ancestry.

She recites the words of a patriotic Scottish song and the speaks in what I assume is Gaelic.

Then the drums kick in.

Fans of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of The Will will recognise the aesthetic immediately. And it has been slavishly copied by bands wishing to invoke neo-Nazi imagery ever since (see: appendix).

Suddenly Fatherland seems a much more loaded title than I think any other reviewer thus far seems to have given credit for. So what is Green really exploring here? Is the piece deliberately drawing parallels between Scottish nationalism and National Socialism? If so, it’s a gesture as provocative as it is overlooked-by-everyone-who-has-seen-it.

What I find more disturbing is the extent to which other reviews have simply, happily bought into the sight and sound of the pounding drums, despite the fact that, minus the half-naked feminist hopping about in the centre of the stage, it feels like sitting in the midst of Anders Brevik’s wettest dreams.

Of course, on one level, it can be simply explained. Drums were pretty much a feature of most militaries – including the Scottish – from a time long before fascism became the word to define this sort of nationalism and militarism. However, since we all noticed that fascism was without exception the greatest evil ever imagined by the human mind, people tend to have been more shy about directly evoking its memory unless it is to make a very specific point, or else to directly flirt with that evil. I am not confident Green wishes to do either. Which makes responding to her Fatherland feel nigh-on impossible in a sensible way.  All I saw was fascism slightly disguised by the presence of a topless Live-Artist. How do you respond to that?


Appendix:

You think I’m kidding about just how neo-Nazi it looks? Check out...

Death in June’s We Drive East (from about a minute in):




NON’s Total War (also starts about a minute in):




And, if you’re ever not sure if someone’s using a Nazi aesthetic or not, then a good rule of thumb is: if it resembles Laibach's pastiche of it, then it’s pretty much a yes – cf. their cover of Queen’s One Vision – in German – Geburt Einer Nation (the lyrics, directly translated from Queen into German become: “Ein Fleisch, ein Blut, ein wahrer Glaube. / Ein Ruf, ein Traum, ein starker Wille” – suddenly a chilling echo of “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” – the title being a reference to that famous American bit of Ku Klux Klan-endorsing cinema history Birth of a Nation):



Similarly, it was Irwin, the art wing of NSK, of which Laibach was also a part, who managed to embarrass the Yugoslavian government by winning a competition to design a poster for a youth event based on precisely the same Nazi image as the one appropriated by Joy Division (today’s cover picture).

Post script: annoyingly, there’s no actual footage of Fatherland on YouTube, nor are there any full-stage photos which include the drummers (although I’m pretty certain I’m not just writing a review of some weird nightmare I’ve had). What there is, interestingly, is a video by Nic Green called Motherland:

The National Theatre in the 2000s

[A short extract from my chapter in Modern British Playwriting: 2000-2009]

[Given that it’s the National’s 50th Birthday, and that my chapter on the last decade in British Theatre has just been published, and given the number of competing histories that are vying for our attention, I figured rather than knock up a specific response to last night’s Live from the National Theatre: 50 Years on Stage on BBC2 last night, I’d just put this edited extract out there. It comes from a point quite close to the end of the chapter, and thanks to the way I’ve ordered the rest of the thing, other really significant stuff (Shunt, Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, the work of Katie Mitchell) is covered elsewhere. But, well, hopefully this fills in a few of the gaps that might have been left by other recent versions of the last ten years...]

‘What director of the National Theatre wouldn't merit a place on a “most influential people in theatre” list, for heaven's sake? (Answers on a postcard marked ‘Trevor Nunn Competition’ to the usual address, please.)’ – Chris Goode

History has not been kind to Trevor Nunn’s time as artistic director of the National Theatre. Taking over from Richard Eyre in 1997, and being relieved by Nicholas Hytner in 2003, he is now remembered chiefly for putting on a lot of musicals. In the last three-and-a-bit years of his tenure, the part with which this chapter is concerned, he did at the very least hold the reins while some good and/or interesting work passed through the building. David Edgar’s Albert Speer, Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clapp’s Molly House all premièred. Visionary Canadian director Robert LePage’s The Far Side of The Moon visited, and the runaway success that was Gregory Burke’s first play Gagarin Way also transferred from the Traverse Theatre. And there were solid, popular revivals of Gorky’s Summerfolk and, well, some musicals.

Encore Theatre Magazine took a less charitable view: ‘plays like Mutabilitie, or Battle Royal, or Remember This, or The Villain’s Opera look like the work of a theatre has lost any sense of what it wants to do. They were ill-matched to their theatres, underdeveloped, did not appear to have emerged from any sharpening dialogue with the theatre... At Sir Trevor’s National Theatre there seemed to be no real policy for new writing. Jack Bradley is a good man but he has evidently struggled with an artistic directorship with no instinctive sympathy for the new play.’

More important, and certainly more indicative of the shape of things to come was the Transformation season. In 2002 Nunn hit on the bright idea of constructing two new slightly different “Loft”-style spaces somehow interposed on the Lyttleton. Ticket prices were brought down and the programming was explicitly aimed at grabbing the attention of a younger audience. Former artistic director of the Gate, Mick Gordon, was put in charge as artistic director of these two new spaces. In retrospect Gordon’s programming looks inspired. A great mixture of urgent, sinuous, topical new writing from great emerging playwrights (Roy Williams, Richard Bean, Moira Buffini) alongside an astute mixture of physical, visual and dance theatre (Kathryn Hunter, DV8, Matthew Bourne), and some slightly less successful good-ideas-on-paper (Jeanette Winterson and Deborah Warner’s Power Book and any play by Tanika Gupta).

Looking back over the season at the time Michael Billington grudgingly accounts it only a partial success:

Judging by the National’s own statistics, it would seem to have had some success. The 13 shows have played to about 70% capacity. (Intriguingly, one of the most popular was the critically assailed version of The Birds.) More importantly, just over half the total audience has been under 35. 

But has the season, under Mick Gordon's direction, been an artistic success? Here the results have been more mixed... my impression has been of a dominance of style over content. I remember images from the shows I saw rather than emotions or ideas; my eyes were consistently dazzled, but I left spiritually untransformed.

In this article, as much as in the programming on which it comments, we see seeds of a conflict that was to flare up around the NT again during Nicholas Hytner’s time as artistic director.

***

Writing in the Guardian in early July 2002, Tom Morris, responding to the question “is this an exciting time for British theatre?”, replied:

In a way, the most exciting time for theatre is when there is the least going on. Radical invention requires a clean slate... So the more tired, conservative and celebrity-driven you think theatre has become, the better the opportunity to make it buzz. The extraordinary thing is that for the first time in 25 years, there is new Arts Council money available to do it with. If I were Nick Hytner taking over the National... I would be leaping with excitement at the opportunities to create something new: not something poised, snappy and chic - as some seem to think the best new theatre is - but something dirty, passionate and wild. If you see Improbable Theatre, Richard Thomas, Frantic Assembly, Complicité and Tom Waits being commissioned to make new work in these spaces, you'll know they're on the right track.

Less than a year after the article was printed, Nicholas Hytner had made Tom Morris an associate director at the National Theatre, and Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera – originally seen as a scratch at Morris’s BAC – had transferred to the Lyttleton; to a riotous chorus of approval:

There could be no clearer sign that the National Theatre is under new management than the arrival of Jerry Springer: the Opera. It’s filthy, it’s funny, it’s brilliantly original and, taken all in all, about as much fun as you are likely to have with your clothes on. (Telegraph)

Within a couple of years, Improbable and Complicité had also produced shows there. Hytner’s own first production at the National as artistic director was also a calculated bit of iconoclasm; dressed in modern British army fatigues, opening only weeks after the US/UK invasion of Iraq, the brilliant black actor Adrian Lester played Henry V to yet more acclaim. Even if the production itself was a little ordinary it was an important statement of intent; here was an NT regime with its sights clearly trained on the 21st century. It is likely, looking back over these first six years of Nick Hytner’s time as Artistic Director of the National Theatre, everyone will choose different highlights, but part of the brilliance of Hytner’s regime was its fleet ability to cover all the things people thought a national theatre should be covering, and at the same time introduce new things no one had realised were essential until they arrived, all combined with a commitment to artistic excellence and experimentation.

As well as work by writers, companies and directors already discussed in greater detail in this chapter/book [Shunt, Punchdrunk, Katie Mitchell, Kneehigh, Simon Stephens, Roy Williams, etc.], there was also excellent work from Marianne Elliot, who won a Best Director Evening Standard Award for her production of Ibsen’s Pillars Of The Community (2005) and who, with her production of St Joan in the Olivier (2007), went on to spearhead the National’s move to reclaim the works of George Bernard Shaw for the 21st century; proving plays which had long been regarded as fusty and too wordy could not only be brought back to life, but could prove fascinating mirrors of our own times. Similarly, Nicholas Hytner’s revivals of classic plays, most notably in Man of Mode (2006), demonstrated for a play to reflect modern society it need not have been newly written. Indeed, Hytner had a particularly flair for reflecting contemporary mores in old texts seen again in his productions of The Alchemist (2006) and Major Barbara (2008). Beyond this, alongside Katie Mitchell’s Chekhovs, the National also looked to Russia with Howard Davies’s fine revivals of Gorki’s Philistines (2007), Peter Flannery’s adaptation of the Russian film set in the era of Stalin’s purges, Burnt By The Sun (2009), and Bulgakov’s The White Guard (2010), and Africa for Rufus Norris’s imaginative production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horsemen (2009).

Although curiously overlooked as a new writing building, the National did in fact stage numerous new plays throughout the decade, as well as works previously discussed elsewhere in the chapter, it had enormous artistic and/or critical successes with Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen (2003), Simon Stephens’s On the Shore of the Wide World (2005) and Harper Regan (2008), and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003).

And then there was Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004), which was a phenomenon all of its own. Nominally about a group of boys studying for their Oxbridge exams in Sheffield in the eighties, it was plainly set in a romanticised vision of Bennett’s own youth, with the updated setting thrown in so Bennett could make amusing mischief at the expense of contrarian television historians. Hardly even a play, so much as a set of extended, and gently funny sketches, some songs, and a slight plot playing a younger, more cynical teacher off against an older, more idealistic one. , something about it’s diffident comedy captured the country’s imagination and it sold out the National, then the West End, and then national tours, before becoming a film.

In 2005, a short way into Hytner’s time at the NT, a group of writers calling themselves The Monsterists, including David Eldridge, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Richard Bean and Moira Buffini, formed an artistic pressure group for theatres to start letting living writers write “big plays”. They demanded: ‘The elevation of new theatre writing from the ghetto of the studio “black box” to the main stage; Equal access to financial resources for plays being produced by a living writer (ie equal with dead writers); Use of the very best directors for new plays; Use of the very best actors for new plays.’(Guardian )

Plainly Hytner was listening carefully, as over the next five years, all opening on the National Theatre largest stage, with excellent casts, directors and resources behind them, came the remarkably varied fruits of the Monsterists: David Eldridge’s Market Boy (2006), Rebecca Lenkiewicz Her Naked Skin (2008), Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice (2009) and Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes (2010) – a play about Romford market in the 1980s; a play about the suffragette movement; a history of multicultural Britain focusing on London’s East End, and a mash-up of Greek classical tragedies re-imagined in contemporary Africa.

Alongside these diverse and quirky new commissions, the NT also did sterling work with adaptations of children’s books as Christmas Shows. No consideration of the decade’s theatre would be complete without noting the sheer verve of commissioning a (two-part) adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, replete with giant puppet armoured polar bears and daemons, or the immensely popular follow-up adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy (2005). But it was in 2007 that this strand of commissioning went global. Adapted by Nick Stafford, directed by Tom Morris, Marianne Elliot and in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Theatre Company the National Theatre’s version of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse is the most widely seen, and surely one of the best-loved, theatre shows of the decade. Telling the story of a young boy and his quest to find his horse after it is pressed into military service in World War One, the real triumph of War Horse was its revelatory use of puppetry to depict the horses. Review after review rhapsodised about the skill of the – visible throughout – puppeteers, and how you somehow forgot they were even there.

 This marriage of what had been, only a few years earlier, deemed “alternative theatre” techniques with mass audience appeal was Tom Morris’s finest hour at the National, confirming his desire for ‘the opportunity to create something new: not something poised, snappy and chic’ had been entirely correct.

***

[That's pretty much the tidiest place to leave that section. There is lots more in the book...]

[and, just for old times’ sake: here’s the best trailer the NT have ever made, for the thing that is still one of the best shows I’ve ever seen there...

Arc Hive

Something I’ve been meaning to do for ages is stick up my entire back-catalogue of stuff somewhere online. Obviously I could have done it here, but then it would obviously all turn up in late 2013 and make the chronology incredibly weird. Happily, Wordpress has a facility whereby you can edit the date of an article. So, that’s what I’ve done.

There is now a *very Beta-* version, which so far includes the vast majority of my reviews for Time Out – most of which have now not been available for a while now, thanks to Time Out’s appalling web-keeping during the period I wrote for them.

So here it is: the AH archive – beta version

I might at some point write a short piece about how I feel about these reviews, and maybe pick out a couple of the best and worst, but for the moment – not least because I’ve got to head out in a bit to see tonight’s performance – I’ll make do with sticking this up here. Not least so I have an excuse to use...

[...cover picture: Gerhard Richter’s 2. Nov. 2008]

TV review – Arena: The National Theatre

Thank God for the National Theatre having a 50th birthday and thank God for BBC4; otherwise we would never see anything about theatre on the telly whatsoever. Of course, in this brave new world of multi-platform this, and webcast that, I daresay we wouldn’t notice or even mind that much. Except, once the BBC does go and do something like screening Arena: The National Theatre – The Dream, we all remember how bloody good the BBC can be. And how nice it is to have our favourite artform paid a bit of attention by people with some serious resources. Put simply, it’s unlikely you’re going to see a better documentary about theatre than part one of this two part Arena programme this year. And not only because there is no competition whatsoever.

The Dream is an hour-long documentary tracing the foundation of Britain’s National Theatre through to the retirement a decade later of its first artistic director Laurence Olivier. I thought I pretty much knew this narrative, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much detail this documentary threw in to make me feel like I was still learning stuff. What is exceptional, however, is the sheer tonnage of previously unseen (at least by me) footage that they accompany it with. Clips of contemporary interviews, footage of as many plays as humanly possibly (from an age which didn’t tend to point a video camera at everything, for the simple reason that they didn’t exist), audio recording of many more, accompanied by black and white stage photos, and interviews with all the luminaries both historical and newly recorded. From all this you got a real sense of the period, how it felt to be there, how flimsy the entire enterprise often felt from the inside, but also the warmth with which it was remembered. It was also cheering to someone in my profession how much more alive someone talking about a production made it feel than listening to a recording of a performance, looking at pictures of it, or even watching a recording of it. There is something convincing about the power of human testimony that doesn’t quite come across from footage.

What was also exciting about The Dream is the way that it situated that work done at the National. Exciting, and strangely fascinating. Fascinating, because the ecology it described seems at once so familiar and so remote. What struck me was the extent to which the first NT company was repeatedly framed as “taking risks”. Coupled with Tynan’s Europhilia and the company’s absolute adherence to the principle of the ensemble, it feels like a high point of British theatre to which we’re only now gradually beginning to return. At the same time, I was completely intrigued by the way that the opposition between Olivier’s NT and Peter Hall’s RSC was framed. [Someone – check] describes the NT as the Cavaliers to the RSC’s Roundheads, suggesting an aura of high puritan seriousness about Hall in Stratford compared to the flamboyance of the NT. I also found it fascinating that Peter Hall is broadly credited for, well, for apparently inventing or at least popularising the way most modern directors work: that is to say, actually working with the actors on the script. Similarly, it was interesting that Peter Brook is mostly identified with the RSC.

From a modern vantage point, it feels impossible to guess in which direction one might have felt instinctively, tribally pulled. Both organisations have changed beyond recognition now – I don’t suppose for a moment I would describe the NT in its current phase as the more Cavalier than the RSC. But then, I don’t think I’d choose that kind of Oxford/Cambridge dichotomy at all.

Given how much I loved the first, hour-long account of the first decade, I was surprised by just how depressing I found the second, hour-and-a-half long account of the next forty years.

That said, I think the reasons are clear enough. Firstly, the period is infinitely more depressing: from the white heat of hope and promise exemplified by both the period and the personalities of the sixties, both are sapped in the seventies and we wind up with the oleaginous Peter Hall and Mrs Thatcher in charge. Then there is the narrative itself, which suffers the indignity of Peter Hall being made to look quite radical and left-wing by virtue of the fact that he is facing Thatcher’s Conservative government. Of course, one thing that made it all the more depressing was the amount of time it was given. *Obviously* The Dream was a better documentary: it had an hour to cover ten years. War and Peace had thirty more minutes to cover thirty more years. But there was also the addiction to rehashing the old narratives. The familiarity of the stock Rock‘n’Roll Years footage of The Winter of Discontent, Northern Ireland, Punk, The Falklands, Yuppies, The Stock Market, The Eighties... felt desperately hackneyed.

Mostly, though, the problem was that not only were the markers of the period, and the narrative of Hall’s clammy successes, followed by Eyre’s decent stab, Trev’s bunch o’ musicals, through to Hytner’s triumphs all too familiar, but that they were given next to no time, and definitely no back-up. Where in The Dream we had spent time with the people who had been involved – we got to listen to their versions of events, warm, fond memories enlivened by anecdotes and opinions – here it felt mostly like someone explaining everything over a newsreel. And, yes, while it was nice to hear from Lucy Prebble, I couldn’t help wishing the Beeb had had the same courage it had shown in part one and had devoted an hour to each decade. Or it could at least have spent less time dwelling on the main events of the seventies, eighties and nineties until what is essentially my entire lifetime felt like a series of miserable political wrangling interspersed with popular productions of Guys and Dolls. Perhaps this is the truest sense of how it did feel, but it is such a familiar account that I can’t help but think it is time for a new voice to point out other aspects.

Certainly the account of the Hytner years, after an early acknowledgement of his early vitality – at least in the form of Jerry Springer The Opera, Elmina’s Kitchen and Adrian Lester’s “Iraq-invasion” Henry V, but no Punchdrunk or Shunt, and remarkably no mention of Tom Morris; arguably Hytner’s first Tynan – quickly lapses into a list of big-hitting West End Transfers. Of course those matter. Of course. But there was other stuff too. The focus on the big money-spinners at the expense of a lot of other artistic excellence (I don’t say the popular money-spinners aren’t excellent or arty either, I’m on record as having hugely enjoyed both War Horse and Curious Incident...) all rather seemed to suggest just how deeply the Thatcher years had eroded our ability to think artistically rather than financially. And of course, they didn’t and haven’t. But you wouldn’t know it from watching the second part of the Arena doc., which felt curiously slung-together-by-interns-who-didn’t care in comparison to the first one. Oh well; there’ll be another birthday in fifty years time when we can set the record straight...

The episodes are currently on iPlayer until:

The Dream – 7 November

War and Peace – 13 November

Unsent Postcards: Political Mother – Sadler’s Wells

[having now written a proper response to a Hofesh Shechter choreography, I feel less irresponsible posting this frankly thin review of his earlier work which I saw in July. Probably best to read the Sun review first]

I saw Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother – the choreographer’s cut an obscenely long time ago now (4th July, according to my diary). And there were logistical reasons why it didn’t get written up over-night. But the reason that it’s taken until now to really dig into writing about it (and this in the welter of pre-Edinburgh desktop and conscience clearing) is that I wasn’t at all convinced I had anything useful to say. [n.b. this paragraph written at the end of July]

As I’ve often whined before, writing about contemporary dance is harder than writing about theatre. But, when it’s grabbed me by the throat and astonished me, I’ve banged out a response as best I could as quickly as possible. But I’m not sure lack of astonishment was the problem here. I definitely came out singing the praises of Lee Curran’s lighting design to the highest heavens, but I wonder if there’s a slight hitch when you’re most struck by a lighting design at a piece where the pyrotechnics are meant to be taking place under the lights.

The basic deal with Political Mother is that it’s a whacking great gig slapped on top of some – surprisingly episodic and slight – contemporary choreography. The stage is set up so that the dancers are on the floor, in a first tier around them on three sides is a classical string section, and on a platform above these is a several-piece rock band. The lighting and set is such that any section can be completely plunged into darkness and obscured completely from view.

The music is kind of excellent – although not as loud as it could be – but mostly it sounds like a slightly less intricate Godspeed You Black Emperor or the Sisters are their sludgiest. At times the band is joined by a vocalist, singing inaudible/incomprehensible lyrics while throwing Great Dictator shapes. The net effect in these cases is essentially Rage Against The Machine. Nothing more, nothing less. And there’s something a bit Stadium Rock about the whole thing.

Then there’s the problem of the title. I think if it had been called anything which didn’t include the word “Political” in the title (which, as it stands, comes off sounding like a Freudian slip and you wonder what word he meant instead of “Mother”) it would have been less problematic. As it is, it feels like perhaps there ought to be more content. Even without knowing Shechter’s Israeli roots, the combination of vaguely ersatz Middle-Eastern-sounding music and the – perhaps not obviously Jewish/Israeli, perhaps so – Batsheva influence on Shechter’s choreography, combines to put one vaguely in mind of “the Middle East”. Which is quite a, y’know, “Political” place. At the same time, the posturing dictator-like figure most readily recalls the ideologues of mid-C20th fascism – although there’s also perhaps something of a suggestion of later African dictators in the uniforms from Idi Amin to Col. Gaddafi.

The net effect seems to imply something like “Well, there are a lot of politics in the world”; maybe even something like: “all politicians are the same”; perhaps a hint of “if voting changed anything they’d make it illegal”. Perhaps it’s the music. Perhaps it’s the circular dances; and the raised hands of the dancers: as if in worship, or in the thrall to an analogy of another political cult that demanded raised hands. Of perhaps it’s a gesture of surrender.

(as an aside, it still strikes me as remarkable that no one took a decent photo of what the WHOLE STAGE looked like)

Sun – Sadler’s Wells

[an edited version of this piece was written for Culturewars.org]

When Hofesh Shechter’s new choreography, Sun, opened at the Melbourne Festival recently, I posted my friend Jana Perkovic’s review for the Guardian on Twitter, hailing it as excellent. There followed an interesting exchange with Shechter’s lighting designer Lee Curran, who was annoyed by the way that the review “spoilered” various bits of the show.

I mention this because I ended up watching the show with half a mind on this idea of “spoiler-ing” dance moments and what one can write instead. I think I’ve concluded that I am going to spoiler the hell out the piece, but thought I would flag it up first.

For anyone who doesn’t want to know any of the stuff that happens, but does want some sort of indication of what I thought before I go off and intellectualise it to bits (the “consumer guide bit”, if you will), then I’d say go if you can. The piece is 1hr13 long, tickets are available for as little as £12 [at time of writing], and if you’ve never seen any of Shechter’s work before, a) this gives a pretty good impression what it’s like, and b) I think there’s a lot of it that is really great. Saying why it’s great (and the few bits with which I took issue), much less saying what it does and what I think it’s “about”; well, for that I think I need to explain what happens and to discuss it with concrete examples. So this review continues under the next picture...

Ironically, given the above, Sun opens with a spoiler. Over the blacked out stage, a (cute-accented, foreign, male) voice comes over the theatre’s PA welcoming us to the show and telling us that, so we can enjoy the rest of the show without worrying, they’re going to show us a bit from the end first, so we know it’s all going to be ok in the end. Which they then duly do.

The cleverness of this is that, as well as being quite funny, it immediately makes us think about the idea that whatever happens from the “real” beginning until this point at the end is going to perhaps involve some sort of situation snowballing out of control.

“Oh, and no animals were hurt in the making of this piece.” The voice ominously adds.

So we’ve already had a brief burst of the dancers – clad in light, colonial-looking clothing, with a couple of them maybe dressed as Pierrots. They look almost exactly like the cast of a production of The Tempest set in maybe 18th or 19th century Italy (a production which I’m pretty sure I must have seen at some point, though off-hand I can’t think where or when. But you know the sort of thing I mean, right?). They are dancing to the Arrival of the Guests at Wartburg from Wagner’s Tannhauser. We see maybe thirty seconds to a minute of this.

There is a black out (the first of several. And while I don’t hate them when they’re part of a complex lighting plan and choreography which really makes them work, they do still sap pace slightly).

When the lights return, there is a single large cardboard cut-out of a sheep centre stage. Slowly, gradually it is joined by other cardboard cut-out sheep. This sequence is repeated a few times across the show, so I couldn’t say with any certainty which time it is that the cardboard cut-out wolf first appears. A woman seated in the front row of the audience stands up and screams, pointing at the wolf cut-out.

Later, this sequence is repeated with a life-size card-board cut-out drawing of a native African (or possibly an aborigine – is that still a word we use? It sounds a bit racist now). The “wolf” to this “sheep” is a cardboard cut-out drawing of a typical white Victorian colonist.

Much later, a lone “hoodie” (looking like a cardboard cut-out by Banksy) makes an appearance, but this thought is not followed up. Similarly, close to the end, a lone banker on a mobile appears. We do not know if he is the natural predator of the hoodie or vice versa.

These faintly humorous sequences are interspersed with a lot more of the main event – namely the dancing. Shechter’s famous signature style is a kind of three-way collision between Jewish folk dancing, the more classical structures and shapes of ballet, and the sort of dancing to dance music that was popular when I was about fifteen – a sort of professional version of an SL2 video or old Prodigy videos (or maybe Hear The Drummer Get Wicked). It’s also reminiscent of the sort of dancing you maybe saw native Americans doing in some old and probably racist cowboys and “Indians” films.

The soundtrack to this tends to be new, original music by Shechter himself. The choreographer originally trained as a percussionist before switching to dance, which is immediately apparent from the enormous reliance placed on rhythm in the music (here, recorded, rather than live as it was in Political Mother). Both strings and guitars are pretty much also used as additional percussive, rhythmic elements much more than for their properties as vehicles for melody. In my (still as yet unpublished) review of Political Mother, I suggested that a vast majority of this music sounded a bit like a middle-eastern inflected version of Rage Against The Machine. Here, the use of the riff from RATM’s Bomb Track seems to confirm this diagnosis.

As suggested by the costumes and the cardboard cut-out pictures (even before the aborigine turns up 27 minutes in), the theme of the piece seems clearly to be that of colonialism. The cluster of dancers seems to variously take the roles of natives and then split to also enact invaders. There is a sense throughout of a growing history: a sense of the inexorable tide of colonialism. This is lent poignancy by the make-up of Shechter’s company being so remarkably international. Without this colonialism, we might reflect, would there ever have been such a diverse dance company. On the other hand, should we really view it as inevitable just because it did take place? The thesis being presented here (insofar as any dance really “presents a thesis” any more than it simply reflects a viewer’s prejudices or preoccupations) seemed to me to be suggesting that conquest and subjugation are (or at least were) a fairly essential and basic human condition. There is the thought that just as the native exercises dominion over the sheep that they find, then the colonialist whites simply applied the same policy to the indigenous peoples they “discovered”. That this is played out underscored by music played at real volume suggest that we should view this as a catastrophe (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I did anyway).

On a simplistic level, the fact that this apparent “march of history” culminates in the troupe goose-stepping (though possibly more Greek than German) and then the final reel, after a merry-go-round of sheeps, wolf, natives, colonials, hoodie and banker, dancing with apparent happiness to some Wagner... Well, you can infer what you like. There’s a darker moment before this where one of the dancers breaks off and screams into the auditorium “It’s behind you!” and then, “The wolf is behind you!”. Now, you could choose to interpret this as saying either that these bad old days are behind us. Or that it’s all just coiled like a spring and ready to pounce on us – that history is already ready to bite us again.

For my money, it reads as if Shechter is suggesting that while we all dance about in a slightly fluffy “post-ideological age”, his reassurance at the beginning, that it all ends fine was the heavily ironic statement I suspected from the get-go.

I should say that I was much more convinced by Sun than I was by the bombastic enormity of Political Mother, which I took to perhaps be saying a similar variety of things, but perhaps in a more non-commital way, and with more telegraphing. Where the name of a piece is “Political Mother” a choreographer perhaps wants to bring a bit more moral or ideological philosophy to the table than what felt like a sort of Russell Brand-y plague on all their houses. Here it felt like we the audience were expected to do a bit more “reading” to identify what it was that is being proposed. That said, I’m not entirely sure Shechter’s politics and my own entirely meet. If I were to try to explain the divergence, I might say it feels (and only *feels* and only to me) that he takes a slightly more detached, amused, ironic view of humanity and history – although the crimes perpetrated against the Jewish peoples dignifies that standpoint with a non-transferable depth and weight, so perhaps it’s not my place to judge it.

Less satisfactory, however, is a small blip of what Nicholas Ridout (talking about an entirely different dance piece by a totally separate choreographer) aptly described as “hateful gender essentialism”. That is to say, in Sun, there is a short sequence in which there are only women. And it is the only section where anyone removes any clothes. And it is the only section to feature any overt sexuality/sexualisation. I mean, the clothes the three women strip down to are functional pants and sports bras, and the sexuality exuded may just as well be their own as something dreamt in the mind of a male choreographer. But since there’s no comparable sequence with men or male sexuality it seems a point worth drawing attention to. Also, I had no idea how it fitted into the wider narrative. “There’s history, now, let’s see how the women are doing” it appeared to briefly suggest.

Against this perhaps nit-picking at the dramaturgy or “story”, I should offer a word about Lee Curran’s lighting. I should start by saying, occasional short Twitter conversations notwithstanding, I don’t know him at all; so no interest to declare.

One of the other reasons I never really got around to writing-up Political Mother (I will at some point now, I hope), was that I felt vaguely uneasy about the way I’d pretty much come out whistling the lighting design, as it were. I reckon Curran’s designs for both that and Sun rank in my top five favourite lighting designs ever. There’s a school of thought that says if an audience member notices the lighting then it has failed. Subscribers to that school of thought are, in short, dicks. It’s the same Mamet-y, Wesker-y sort of meglomaniacal thinking that says that anything at all on stage that “distracts” from The Writer’s “vision” must be eliminated. Wordy though they may be, one suspects they have all the visual sense of a Bee-Bat-Mole hybrid, and the talent for art appreciation of a traffic cone.

Here the stage is deliberately shrouded in haze. The haze gives form to every beam of light. This is lighting design made structural. And what a structure. Hung from the flies are 72 lightbulbs (twelve across, six deep) and above those ranks upon ranks of lanterns pointing straight down. Beyond these there are perhaps three bright spots at the front to illuminate faces downstage and perhaps some (maybe as few as two) lights at the side in a greenish colour to give body to the fog at various moments, but mostly the light is made of these straight down columns. Close to the end, there is also an effect not unlike Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate Modern.

What’s interesting here, however, is how the lighting functions not only as a kind of second set – describing and creating new spaces and new ways of perceiving the stage and looking at the people on it. At times early on, you feel almost as if the dancers and the clothes they are wearing might be there largely to show off the lighting, to give the design a change to better accentuate new and different folds in cloth and textures of skin and hair. I am pretty sure I don’t really have the vocabulary or imagination yet to describe a “dramaturgy of lighting”, but it feels like such a thing, such a discssuion, is as central and crucial to the overall meaning of the piece as the movement of the dancers.

Appendix:

Richard Wagner – Tannhauser: Arrival of the Guests at Wartburg



Sigur Rós – Sigur 1 (a.k.a. Vaka)



Rage Against the Machine – Bombtrack

In Absentia – Gebläsehalle, Landsparkshaft, Duisberg-Nord

[seen: 22/09/13]

It’s really is about time I just stuck up whatever stuff I have hanging about from the rest of my Ruhr Triennale visit if only to clear my desktop slightly, and so I can link back to it when I inevitably start boring on about it in other reviews.

As with everything else I saw at the Ruhr Triennale, this wasn’t theatre. I don’t say that as some sort of stuffy English critic who refuses to recognise anything outside a narrow band of stage-bound naturalism as theatre. This was a screening of a film, a string quartet playing, and then the string quartet playing the music to accompany a second film. It wasn’t asking to be categorised as theatre. So, like the perverse fool that I am, that’s precisely how I watched it. (Well, ok, not the film. That was definitely just a film.)

But there is something compellingly theatrical about watching music played live. And in this case – a string quartet almost marooned in the centre of a vast stage, loomed-over by a huge screen – it seemed more theatrical than mere chance. After all, with an orchestra, even in a purpose-built concert hall, there seems slightly too much going on to be able to watch the thing as theatre. With a string quartet it feels more manageable.

Something else I found again – as I’d previously found with Sasha Waltz’s Continu and even, perversely, with the Robert Wilson directed staging of Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern – was that if someone just sits me down in front of a piece of “difficult” modern music and gives me something to look at while I’m doing so, then I tend to really engage with the music in a way that, left to listen to it on my own, I’d probably never quite manage. As such, it strikes me that we all need to see much more of this sort of work live. If the case that theatre makes for itself is its liveness, then I think this goes more than double for contemporary orchestral and chamber music.

Another interesting theatrical invocation was the fact that the third piece – the new Quay Brothers film/animation, a response to Witold Lutosławski’s String Quartet only string quartet, is subtitled “a paraphrase on the Hour When We Knew Nothing of Each Other”, the wordless Peter Handke play from 1992 (which was staged – badly, the more I think about it – by James MacDonald at the NT in 2008).

I’m afraid I don’t really have much by way of reflection or conclusion about these three pieces. Again, the venue in which we watched them was ridiculously beautiful. I loved watching the music. I thought the films were interesting and well made. And I was fascinated to be seeing something which was so “high-art”, with genuinely no discernible “function” whatsoever. You really couldn’t say this performed any of those stupid things that the Arts Council is always using as an excuse for why the arts should be funded. And yet, at the same time, the very fact that it was there, and it was made with public money seemed to justify both the art and the expenditure. It made me think a lot more about “difficulty” and “beauty” and “strangeness” and “awe” as ends in themselves. Ends which deserve public funding.


The programme:

In Absentia (music by Karlheinz Stockhausen: Two Couples and Kwartet Smyczkovy)




Alban Berg – Lyrische Suite




Witold Lutosławski – String Quartet

Crisis, what crisis?

[written for nachtkritik.de]

This entry serves simply to provide a link to the article I wrote about the alleged “crisis in British theatre criticism” for the brilliant German theatre news and reviews website Nachtkritik.de – which, I should add, is well worth bookmarking if you’ve either got Google Translate on your browser or can read German.

I dare say there’ll be more about criticism both on Postcards and on Nachtkritik soon...

“Cover photo” is one of Gerhard Richter’s Elbe pictures from 1957. Apparently the earliest pictures he allows as part of his oeuvre.

1984 – Headlong, Richmond Theatre

[seen 25/10/13]

How do you adapt an appendix? This seems to be the chief question at the heart of the new adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four *created by* Rob Icke and Duncan Macmillan.

I emphasise “created by” since I think it is vital to recognise at the outset that although Icke’s prior credits are primarily those of “director”, and Macmillan’s more usually “playwright”, that is not the stated relationship here.

In a foreword of fierce intelligence, Icke and Macmillan set out their rationale thus:

The ending of George Orwell’s final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is notoriously bleak. ‘If you want a picture of the future’, Winston has been told, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’ Sitting in a café, defeated, drunk and waiting for a bullet, he loves his oppressor. Winston loves Big Brother. As we all know, that’s the end of the story. 

Except it isn’t. 

After ‘THE END’, there is an Appendix. ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, that many of the novel’s readers miss altogether...

Icke and Macmillan go on to point out that this appendix – so vital to the book as a whole, that Orwell refused to allow an American publisher the rights to publish his text without it – is written from a fictional vantage point *beyond* the end of the story. It refers to Newspeak in the past tense and even makes a single glancing reference to Winston Smith. What Orwell says with this fictional appendix is that Big Brother too will fall. The year 2050 is given as the date by which the Party imagines that Newspeak will have been finally adopted: “The final word of the Appendix (and of the novel) is ‘2050’.” And, in a rather neat touch, the foreword ends: “R.I. And D.M. September 2050”.

So, one of the things that Icke and Macmillan are exploring with their new and, let’s be honest, penetrating analysis of the text is what we do with a novel *called* Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948, in 2013. (Happily it has just been announced that it will transfer to The Almeida for Feb 2014 – just in time to hit the West End for a bright cold day in April, one may cynically infer.) Moreover, what do we do with this novel; a novel that has at once given us a vocabulary through which we now partly explain the world (“Orwellian”, “Big Brother”, etc.) and, at the same time, analysis which seems to be all but ignored.

What Icke and Macmillan’s create about as excellent a solution to the problem as I can imagine. They open the piece in a reading group in 2050. It is a popular cliché that “difficult” theatre should teach you how to watch it. This isn’t “difficult theatre”, but here it does present one of the clearest user-guides to how a piece of theatre wants to be read I’ve ever seen. By at once appearing to discuss Winston Smith’s diary, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and indeed Headlong’s 1984 characters explain:

“This is a text which is directly, forcefully attempting to speak to us. Its author imagines a future – imagines us – and asks us to listen” 

“This document occupies a unique place in our collective subconsciousness – even if you’ve never read it.” 

“You’re seeing yourself reflected in it because it’s opaque. It’s a mirror. Every age sees itself reflected.”

Icke and Macmillan are conducting an exercise in historicism, of adaptation and of adoption. One of the most striking things about their adaptation – which, after this opening scene, is actually a pretty straight walk-through of the main plot points as they happen in the book (or at least, as I remember it – which is perhaps another cleverness of their adaptation: that they’ve adapted the memory of the book as much as the book itself) – is the extent to which they’ve happily modernised certain crucial fragments. Where the reading group talks about “Austerity, unpopular politics, perpetual war, uncertainty // oppression, torture, uprisings, revolution” they evoke precisely the world we have been reading about in the newspapers on the train to Richmond. Elsewhere, they completely strike the p-word (“proles”) and in doing so dismantle one of Winston Smith’s most famous lines rather than allowing the shift in our understanding of that word now to unbalance our viewing of their piece. Refusing to let themselves present *1948* through laziness. Although this refusal of a Marxist vocabulary does also re-trench the piece’s politics somewhat.

***

If this first part of my review reads slightly as literary criticism, rather than performance criticism, then consider it primarily an example of form following form. An age-old criticism of British theatre is that our rehearsal rooms all too often resemble the English Literature seminar. Here, that seminar has been taken out of the rehearsal room and has been plonked squarely in the centre of the stage, and I would argue that it makes for a fairly vital night out, intellectually.

However, while it’s a long way from “talk, talk, talk”, I was slightly (and I do mean only slightly) less convinced by the stage-craft. The set (Chloe Lamford) is attractive and serviceable, occupying an exact mid-point between Marthaler’s Glaube, Liebe Hoffnung , Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, and Katie Mitchell’s Reise Durch die Nacht (on which Macmillan also worked) – which as a checklist certainly gets a big thumbs-up from me. I suspect it also looks a lot better when one is not placed half way back in the circle. And designing for touring to myriad different-sized stages must be a nightmare. But the wood-panelled 1950s-looking room (possible hints of East German bureaucracy chic) where the majority of the piece was played didn’t quite do it for me. From where I was sitting. Even though it probably should have.

The Elevator Repair Service observation, by the way, is Trueman’s [edit: although young Hutton got there nine days before us], and I think he’s onto something there. There was certainly a faint hint of Gatziness about the way that the performers’ transition between notional times and spaces, being at once reading group in 2050 and inhabitants of 1984. The piece also made great, unfussy use of the hidden live-video-feed room (cf. Edward II, Gob Squad, Pollesch, Castorf, sort-of Mitchell, et al), although like the top half of the stage-picture being a giant Katie Mitchell video screen, it felt like there was possibly something a bit wonky with the semiotics of its use. Or rather, the videoed room backstage made perfect sense – although I wonder how many of the audience would have just assumed that it was pre-shot footage? Perhaps that assumption was the intention, since there is an excellent theatrical coup later involving the room’s discovery. I suppose I was slightly more perturbed by the way the giant screen was worked into the fabric of the room rather than being allowed to just be a screen. Of course, again, it makes a sort of sense and is possibly just two different, opposing arguments/schools-of-thought, I’m just not sure I fully bought its cunning inclusion personally – by making the screen part of the room when it fizzed to life, it seemed to implicate “2050” as much as “1984”. Had the screen just been a screen, we could have perhaps fitted it however we liked to where it “really” “existed” in relation to the stage instead of being told.

The most interesting performance motif is a repeated sequence of Ministry life in 1984 where the days are demonstrated to be stultifyingly the same, even when people are being disappeared. And when someone is even prepared to sit down at a table which isn’t there, rather than admit anything has changed. Watching this on stage, of course, you take a minute or two longer to catch up to this as a facet of double-think, since that’s what theatre has been asking us all to do since we first started going. Which, of course, makes the arguments about double-think all the more interestingly weird and compelling. Because we’re all sat in this theatre pretending that what’s happening on stage is somehow happening in a different reality, but that it’s really happening all the same.

At the same time, this unreality feedback loop is finely tuned to get us thinking about precisely how this book – these books if you include Smith’s diary – this story, these words resonate today. You’d have to be a sleepwalking idiot to have got through the piece and not thought once about Edward Snowden, the NSA, and Angela Merkel’s phone. In terms of surveillance Nineteen Eighty-Four has got our number. But actually, the most crucial thing about Orwell’s book isn’t really about the surveillance. It never was. The crucial thing is the concept of Thoughtcrime. The real battle the Party is fighting is with ideological dissent. Newspeak has been invented with the aim of making counter-revolutionary thought impossible.

What’s strange about Headlong’s production is the way that by pursuing all these thoughts to their logical end, and capturing them brilliantly on stage, albeit shorn of a lot of Orwell’s almost pedantic precision in matters ideological, what you are left with in the climatic episode of torture – the whole rats-on-face bit – is the realisation of how strange it is (here at least) for a socialist party’s (IngSoc are, after all, a parody of Stalin’s Russia, anticipating all the worst paranoid excesses of Soviet era eastern Europe) solution to dissent is to make Smith into the ultimate Rand-ian superman. In the end he rejects everything and everyone except himself. (“JULIA. JULIA. DO IT TO JULIA...” etc,). The idea that “Winston Smith loves Big Brother” has been toned right down. So, actually, this final scene feels strangely contradictory.

It strikes me that Icke and Macmillan may have bought a bit too hard into what strikes me as Orwell’s least useful suggestion: that love is somehow the ultimate tool of resistance. In this, as in his prediction of an “anti-sex league”, I think Orwell barks up precisely the wrong tree. Perhaps not the wrong tree for satirising Stalinism, but certainly the wrong tree for England and resonance today (in these respects, the hopelessness of Huxley’s Brave New World feels far more attuned). Here, we are reminded (again) of Pollesche’s maxim (I really must find out where he said it and what precisely he said) about wanting to talk to the capitalists about money and them only wanting to talk about love. There’s an interesting counter-example in yesterday’s Guardian where Steve Coogan, a bit like Orwell before him, asserts: “I had this notion that the most radical, avant-garde thing I could do was to talk about love. There's nothing that will make an intellectual's buttocks clench more than to talk about love.” Because obviously “intellectuals” are the real problem. And in no way is he basically picking up precisely the most mainstream, reactionary torch imaginable and running with it in spouting this sort of nonsense. But that’s kind of a whole other argument in itself.

So, to recap, this is – for the most part – an incredibly intelligent appropriation and exploration of the novel, and a first-rate answer about how to adapt it. Watching it, I was slightly surprised by the degree of radicalism that had been claimed for it in other quarters. In the main it struck me visually and acting-wise as quite safe, middle-of-the-road fare; well executed, and with plenty of room to let you consider the intellectual aspects, but rarely spectacular to look at. But, the more I’ve thought about it since watching it, the more the cleverness has stayed with me, and my surprise at the lack of sci-fi stageingness* has faded.



*re: “sci-fi” – it’s the term I’ve been using in my head more and more to describe/categorise/bunch-together the sort of theatre that I most love. I’m thinking of stuff like Katie Mitchell’s Attempts On Her Life, Ramin Gray’s The Ugly One, or Over There, or Illusions, Nübling’s Pornographie and Three Kingdoms, Karin Beier’s Trojan Women, Vicky Featherstone’s The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas; even things like Chris Haydon’s Grounded or Chris Goode’s Hippo World Guest Book.
 It’s not a good term. I should come up with something a bit better.