Genre, ecology and economy

[was going to be a short, then it got longer]

Over at Exeunt, playwright Duncan Gates has published an interesting essay about genre in theatre. Interesting, but with some deep flaws, I would say. Gates’s contention is this:

“theatre[’s] assumption that the consumer is driven by the form, rather than the story, is why anyone ever struggled to sell any art they ever made. It unhelpfully sets theatre up as a genre against other art forms in a ‘fight’ that quite simply it’s not capable of winning because its reach is so much less. 

“To me, the ‘What’s On’ page of most producing theatre buildings or companies reads like a massive piece of horizontal marketing, identifying fans of ‘the genre of theatre’ and targeting them – to the exclusion of those who don’t like the genre.”

Gates’s point of comparison here is film, with its many genres. What Gates unhelpfully fails to note is that the film industry is pretty much just as rubbish at identifying the “genres” that cover most of what we see in theatre. I mean, any industry which has as a category “World Cinema” needs to have a bit of a look at itself, right? Even breaking “World Cinema” down by country or continent is pretty bloody meaningless, unless “Japan” is actually a genre, rather than a country. And a country capable of creating comedies, thrillers, horror films, and some very slow productions of Shakespeare, at that.  Moreover, most of the films that are most like plays, or even ones that originally were plays (interesting discussion under the link from the Chicago Tribune complaining about film reviewers saying “the film exposes the flaws in the play” when they didn’t see the play), get classified as “Drama” anyway. Which is what most (straight) plays that aren’t comedies, tragedies, or art-house, get classified as.

It strikes me that Gates’s wider gripe is really a bemoaning of the loss of other genres in theatre. And, while it might not be a gripe that especially irks me (although I did say in 2008 that I’d like to see more good Sci-Fi plays), it’s certainly a case that can be made. The commercial theatre of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s pretty much existed on a staple of murder mysteries and country house comedies or melodramas. Miss Marple, Midsomer Murders and Downton Abbey on revolve, I imagine. And there’s not so much harm in wanting bit more variety, maybe a bit more lightness, maybe some more genre-stuff and lightness. Probably. I guess.

There’s an interesting bit in Michael Blakemore’s Stage Blood where he’s talking about Peter Hall’s plans to simply play Pinter’s No Man’s Land in the NT at the Old Vic for one booking period only and then transfer it straight to the West End. Blakemore is aghast, noting that under Olivier, because of the rep company, a production that was doing well could extend indefinitely before transferring to the West End:

“My mind was racing. If the author of a new play knew that by giving his script to the National Theatre... if it succeeded it would move in no time to the West End, why would he be offering his play to anyone but the National Theatre? Would the West End now wither away? Or be forced to become something else – a purveyor of down-market entertainment.”

Writing with the benefit of forty-odd years hindsight, Blakemore’s prophetic soul (assuming you agree with his analysis of the current West End) might be taken with a pinch of salt. Although, Sir Peter Hall’s West-End-only production of Simon Gray’s Japes in 2001 remains one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life, upmarket or otherwise. But, cheating at prophecy or not, it’s a startling paragraph just because it is so much now the status quo (ok, add in the Royal Court, the Almeida, the Chichester Festival Theatre, and the private Menier Chocolate Factory and you’ve got a clearer view of the last decade, but...). No one blinks twice at the automatic West End transfer of anything successful that will sell. And sell at vastly inflated prices. And for the personal enrichment of a few individuals, as well as the NT itself.

By coincidence, a piece from August 2012 by Lyn Gardner has been being re-circulating recently on Facebook and Twitter. It is garishly titled: Why major theatre institutions should be left to die – which isn’t really what it argues – but it does wonder if Arts Funding might be better spent at a more grassroots level. It’s an interesting question, sharpened, perhaps, by the fact of one West End Theatre being in such a state of disrepair that its ceiling fell down on the people watching (the National Theatre-generated) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

At the same time, the government has just announced an inquiry into the work of the Arts Council (England), reported by The Stage as an investigation into London funding bias as a follow-up to the “rebalancing our cultural capital” report last year.

The problem with this government having anything to do with public spending is its comprehensive failure to grasp that money can be spent on things other than subsidising tax cuts for the enormously wealthy, and making Britain a nicer place for the enormously wealthy to live. The idea that Britain is something in which the conservative Party might invest seems an anathema, even while it sees Germany consistently beat us in every available measure of civilisation, and fails to understand it’s because they spend on education and culture.

If I thought for one moment that the Tory solution was going to be anything other than cutting funding, I’d totally support it. As it is, I suspect the “rebalancing” will just involve chopping off a lot of London funding to make things “more equal”. Yes, under a progressive, left-wing government, or even one that just understood arts funding, this would be an important and useful exercise. Conducted by the current lot, it will only result in yet more vandalism, and probably selling off the fucking NT to property developers, as if it was theirs to sell. Like the Royal Mail. (If you want an excellent summary of how the Tories deal with public assets Aditya Chakrabortty’s piece on North Sea oil from the Guardian two days ago should probably tell you everything you need to know).

Which brings us back to Peter Hall, Michael Blakemore and then to Duncan. Thanks to Peter Hall, we do have a slightly funny situation with the National, and one which has been continued under Nicholas Hytner. That funny situation is: the National has a lot of resources, and it can use those resources to create shows which do incredibly well, and transfer not only to the West End, but to Broadway and even to the boulevard theatres of West Berlin. I should say, I don’t have any particular personal animus against War Horse. Indeed, I liked it very much when I saw it, but I also think War Horse is atypical. Certainly the version of its making that has passed into legend is that everyone was terrified before previews (even during) that is was going to bomb horrifically. And it was made by Tom Morris and Marianne Elliot. And used “alternative theatre” techniques from Morris’s old BAC days (indeed, Morris’s move to the NT and transfer of all that old BAC learning could be seen to be the point where it was proved that “form” is in no way actually “political” at all...). But, similar successes seem more deliberate: One Man, Two Guvnors; The History Boys; Curious Incident...

And, in the rubric we’ve come to accept about theatre, these have tended to be trumpeted as massive successes, vindications of public funding of the arts, and proof of the popularity of theatre. And, in many, many ways, I don’t think I’d especially dispute that. But I’d also argue that none of them have anything whatsoever to do with art. And I think the biggest argument now facing British Theatre is about Art versus Entertainment.

I think Duncan’s article essentially calls for much more entertainment-based theatre. He doesn’t, for example, talk about the cinema or Lars von Trier, Jean-Luc Godard or Tarkovsky (go on, what “genre” are they?). He just talks about different sorts of films that should be grouped together under “entertainment”.
Britain has an intensely conflicted relationship with Art vs Entertainment. We’re pretty much taught to hate, fear and mistrust art. And the one defence usually left open to theatre-makers is that they’re being entertaining. But this plays right into the hands of those who would seek to cut funding to the arts. If it *can* pay for itself (largely by turning out to be entertaining), then it doesn’t need funding. If it can’t, then: well, look at all that stuff that can – this just clearly isn’t very good. Seems to be their circular argument.

Now is probably a bad time to propose anything – given that Britain is hurtling backwards into the middle ages, and we’ll be lucky to emerge from the next general election with anything left of modern Britain to save – but if we ever do get a left-wing government and proper arts funding to continental levels, I think we might need to go right back to the drawing board and work out what that funding really should be used for.

Arts Council money for *art*, not entertainment, I might provocatively suggest.

Shorts: on (US) criticism

[]

There’s a really interesting heated exchanged of opinions running back and forth across several American blogs at the moment.

I first came across it summarised on George Hunka’s blog a week ago, here. Probably better to click through and read in full, but it opens: “A spectre is haunting the continent of North America: The spectre of … well, I don’t know. Niceness, perhaps?” Hunka is commenting on a piece written for the US site Howlround written by Polly Carl – a kind of five-point plan for improving writing-about-theatre for 2014 – which in turn cites Jill Dolan’s article “Critical Generosity”.

The argument has now entered a second round, with Dolan responding to Hunka’s first piece about the argument in a longer piece on her own blog, The Feminist Spectator. And yesterday Hunka responded (albeit briefly) to that. She says: “Any critic also has a perspective, a way of looking that guides their engagement. I would propose that ways of looking are always ideological, never objective (see John Berger’s foundational series and book, Ways of Seeing). But then, I’m a feminist. I don’t think power is equally distributed...

Arts critics’ positions are also being reduced or de-funded at daily papers all over the country, a trend that will certainly affect the discourse about arts in this country. How can we proactively reimagine, then, how we stage our conversations about theatre and performance?

I started this blog... because I wanted a place for a counter-discourse, one in which I could participate in a different kind of conversation about the theatre and performance to which I’m committed. My writing isn’t beholden to editors, word counts, or advertisers; I have that beautiful freedom and leisure. My writing is political and ideological; but then, because I’m a feminist, I believe all writing is marked by position and power, that all writing is rhetorical and wants to persuade. Why else would we write?”

Hunka, meanwhile, picks up on another strand of the argument: “there is a point of disagreement that remains. Dolan writes that: ‘Sometimes, when I read [Brantley’s and Isherwood’s] work, I don’t sense much concern for what their criticism might do to the artists whose work they’re evaluating.’ I frankly don’t think that critics should concern themselves with this; certainly none of the writers of the negative reviews I’ve received seemed to be concerned with it. If as an artist you are personally offended by a negative review, you yourself are lending to the critic more power over your work and yourself than he or she has any reasonable claim to. Whether a critic feels the need to pull punches or not is up to the individual critic.”

Joshua Ruebl, linked to by Hunka, tables a third problem, in the angriest, most direct blog piece I’ve read in an aeon, which you should definitely read in full: “When you look around at different non-profits who have a pretence toward putting on new plays that consider themselves art, all we are seeing are plays that have aesthetic qualities similar to these three dramatists: Paula Vogel, Christopher Durang, and Arthur Miller. All three of these dramatists are dreadfully mediocre as they represent the marriage between the bluntly political and the basely entertaining...

What I’m trying to say with all of this is that criticising this work is pointless as all of it is just a step above vaudeville or the Socialist dramas of the Soviet Union. History will erase this work. We live in a culture that prefers the disposable over the enduring and to hope for better criticism is sort of a pipe-dream. We need quality work to analyse, and much of this work is so beneath even attention, that perhaps the wisest course of action is to ignore it and hope it will go away.”

Between the three pieces I think you get a fresh, renewed insight into the ethical questions that surround writing about theatre. The questions of how best to engage with the work, the questions about the power dynamic between critic and artist, the question of where the artform is even going, and what critics can or should in engage with and how.

Bracing stuff, I think. And stuff we should definitely be thinking about in relation to our own practice here, too.

The Day Shall Declare It – 35 Marylebone High St

[Site-dance recession Williams]

Hosted by site-something property guardians Theatre Delicatessen, what new Anglo-American company Wilderness are offering is a kind of mash-up of some bits of Tennessee Williams shorts interspersed with some bits of on-the-spot reporting by Pulitzer Prize-winning American broadcaster Studs Terkel themed around the great depression. The style of presentation is basically site-(un)sympathetic dance theatre. That is to say, we all stand around in three (very cold) rooms, decked out to look like the rooms where the characters are, and the performers run the lines while performing elaborate dance-theatre routines: imagine Frantic Assembly in your living room, when the boiler’s gone out, basically. Or a tenement block Punchdrunk.

In theory, it’s a pretty great idea. It strikes me as interesting that Tennessee Williams seems to be enjoying a new lease of life as a go-to destination for more experimental theatremakers – see also: The Hotel Plays, Secret Theatre #Show2, presumably Benedict Andrews’s forthcoming Streetcar and of course Sebastian Nübling’s not-experimental-at-all-in-German-terms Orpheus Descending.

Wilderness’s justification – that Williams speaks to a similarly economically bleak age – makes a lot of sense. Thing is, what actually happens in Williams’s plays (or here playlets) never really feel like consequences of economic circumstance so much as of extremes of madness, alcohol abuse and repressed sexuality. Of course the characters do have their economic circumstances, theur money worries, their class – it is interesting that in the first section here the male character (played/danced by Chris Polick) is almost a proto-Stanley in both the way his new wife describes him, and the way he reacts – but really, you get the feeling that many of Williams’s characters could have all the money in the world and it wouldn’t help them with their problems one bit. Blanche would still be getting older, drinking more and getting madder, no matter how many posh homes she owned.

Here, there’s also the added distraction that it proves (at least in these instances) surprisingly difficult to follow the emotional through-lines of the scenes at the same time as absorbing the – actually rather impressive – choreography. I think I more-or-less followed the first scene, totally lost the thread of the second, and am not sure I even began to get a handle on the third. There is something about the way in which the scenes have been fractured (and I *like* fracture. *A lot*) that makes them ‘theoretically great’ a lot more than ‘actually watchable’. I wonder if some of that feeling is slightly down to my vague antipathy both to being cold and to standing up to watch theatre, though. If so, I apologise. I’m plainly not the ideal audience member and a lot of other people might get a lot more from this if they are more warm-blooded and not-sitting-friendly.

There is much to admire here, in the abstract, though. Beata Csikmak’s scenic design is interesting and varied – especially in the last, most “abstract” room, in which a pair of lovers (Anthony Nikolchev and Wilderness artistic director Annie Saunders) dance more of their desolation, echoed by roughly painted blue walls, a marooned roll-top bathtub and hundreds of jam-jars half filled with sand. That said, there is also something oddly reminiscent of Natalie Abrahami’s similar text-and-choreography show Unbroken, although The Day... does take the dance-text relationship to a much higher level.

Even if not an unqualified success, it does feel like the company were actually attempting a much more complex relationship between speech and movement than I remember seeing attempted before. There is a tendency in British dance-theatre for it, at any given moment, to be *either* the dance bit *or* the speaking bit. Possibly for the simple reason demonstrated here, that it’s intensely difficult to be both brilliantly at the same time. However, this attempt convinced me that this is certainly an experiment worth pursuing further.

À Bas Bruit – Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House

[London International Mime Festival]

As I’ve already noted, the main thing I took away from À Bas Bruit ("at low noise") was a whole lot of thoughts about representations of gender on stage. But before we get back to that in this review, let’s have a look at what the show actually is, what happens, how it operates, what happens. You know, the stuff it’s useful to know before analysing things.

As we walk in, the stage of ÀBB is set with a raised wooden platform on the left hand side: a giant hamster wheel on top and a load of machinery underneath. On the right hand side, set at a jaunty angle to the platform, is a kind of low, raiseded raft with a metal sail and a long treadmill running through its centre. Behind this hangs a pair of wooden Venetian blinds.

Two blokes dressed in loose casual contemporary clothes appear to the strains of something that sounds like Penguin Café Orchestra being played on rubber bands (if they didn’t do that themselves). They do a bunch of movement. It’s part contemporary dance and part acrobatics (maybe even “circus-skills”). It is, as we might expect, deft and thrillingly executed.

[In a recent conversation with Tom Parkinson, who did the music for Bryony Kimmings’s Credible Likeable Superstar Role-Model, he advanced the view that non-textual elements of theatre/performance suffer for not being like-for-like with the medium in which they’re generally discussed – i.e. more text. He was thinking particularly of music and sound (although conceded that he’d read a lot of music journalism where the writing had described music much better than the music itself turned out to be – which is another interesting, difficult problem of criticism), but I think it applies equally to *movement*. And the more acrobatic it is, the more it suffers. It’s a bit like trying to write about car chases in films or sex. A blow-by-blow account of the actual movements taking place will usually fail to communicate the actual excitement generated, and impressionistic treatments quickly become too vague to communicate.]

Interestingly, here it does feel like there is a definite lean toward some sort of narrative impulse. But where those impulses are leading, what that narrative is, is still pretty opaque. There is a sense that the whole could be entirely episodic. That each section of different sorts of movement, done by different performers on different bits of the set, are each their own self-contained stories. Is there meant to be a wider arc? Given the two guys, one woman set-up the most obvious readings tend toward a kind of Men Behaving Badly, crossed with Betrayal, crossed with Jules et Jim kinda thing. And there certainly seems to be something about that. Do the men share a physical space are are they unknown to each other? Are they both vying for the attentions of the same women, or is the sole female performer playing more than one woman? Is it a tragedy or a comedy? Are they even always playing their own gender? When a light-hearted physical sequence on the treadmill sees one male-female pairing go from her kind of playfully attacking him to him beating and then apparently strangling her under lights which change from “outdoors” to *under red lights with a massive sharp strobe effect* (surprising shades of Secret Theatre #ShowOne), is the audience really still meant to be laughing? (in the event. As soon as she’s “died”, *he* goes off, and then she wakes up, does a head-stand, and the lighting state changes to suggest it’s morning in her bedroom or something).

In short, this piece feels like it could *really* have done with a good dramaturg. There was a cheat-sheet supplied at the beginning of the show. I haven’t read it yet. I wanted to watch the show and see what I got from it without the leading prompts of a number of quotations.

[I still have quite a conflicted view of these things. Some have totally made a show for me, others have irritated me out of liking a piece which I’d actually quite enjoed until I read the silly rationales behind the thing I’d enjoyed. It’s tricky, isn’t it? But maybe it’s self-indulgent to want your own interpretation to stand over and above a director’s explanation of what it is they think they’ve made. Ok, I’m going to read the thing...]

The cheat-sheet is interesting. It divides the piece into four movements. Each movement is described by (or perhaps was inspired by) a different paragraph-long quotation. Interestingly/excitingly, the quotations themselves did more to remind me of specific moments in the show than just thinking about what happened in the show. The passage: “This fable begins in a deserted place. It is a very large living room, large enough to make any escape from it impossible. The other character is he who paces up and down the room, he who walks. He walks endlessly...”

It also reminded me of how indebted to Pierre Rigal’s Press parts of the piece felt (video trailer of that remarkable show here). Which in turn reminds me of the sequence that reminded me of a kind of high-octane version of that sequence of the woman throwing herself repeatedly into the man’s arms from Café Müller.

So, yes – to recap: I found it brilliantly executed. I think I found quite a large amount of *what* was well-executed surprisingly familiar. I found it much more episodic than *Four sections*. And I personally found the reduced stage-time and role of the woman in the piece suggestively problematic. That said, in her only significant solo routine – around a pole in the hamster wheel – which I dreaded turning into some sort of protracted pole-dance, it really didn’t. Instead Elise Legros’s solo looked more like a series of stills alternating between Soviet victory posters and Renaissance paintings of martyrs as the wheel slowly revolved changing the axis of the pole and her relationship to it.

In the spirit of team-criticism, I should direct you to Lyn Gardner’s four-star appreciation of the piece. I’m quite envious that she’s got form with the company, and so is able to put the work more into context in that way. And she’s just tweeted at me to say:
“Gosh. didn't see show in terms of gender politics at all. thought she was on completely equal terms. Physically very much so.”
and “Didn't see it as a romantic relationship. And thought she did fair share of slam dunking...”.
Both of which are, of course, equally fair perceptions. And I’m quite pleased to have someone to quote to balance mine out. It makes me worry slightly that my feminism has gone a bit hair-trigger, but I have talked to a couple of other women who said they did see what I saw.
So, no definitive conclusion, but at least I know I’m not just mad or trying to make difficulties unnecessarily.

A thought-provoking show in many ways.

Shorts: a modest proposal

[feminism and theatre in 2014]

What changed your thinking about theatre most in 2013? For me it was Britain’s astonishing renaissance of feminism as a live, active campaign. Only yesterday, for example, The Daily Telegraph (The Telegraph, FFS!) published a (well, in journalistic terms, lazy; but every bit helps, right?) cut and paste feature on the Casting Call Woe Tumblr and Twitter account. This from the same paper which only last August came up with probably the dumbest feature about “Women in Theatre” that I read last year.

I was made to think about this again last night watching À Bas Bruit at the London International Mime Festival (review forthcoming). For the first 17 minutes I was perfectly contentedly watching an all-male two-hander. Then “a woman” turned up. From there on in being impressed by the acrobatic feats took a back seat to just worrying about the piece’s gender-politics: she had less stage-time, seemed to display less agency, existed largely in relation to the male “characters’” romantic interest in her, and at one point was “comically” battered and the strangled to death. (It was kind of a clown show, though, so that makes antediluvian gender politics, what? Ok? Also, they were French. Is there even any point in trying to teach the French not to be sexist?)  But I really couldn’t watch it any other way.

Being a Mime-Fest show, it also left me enough head-space to think about sex and gender in theatre. And I came up with a thought/plan: I am going to try to see work made by an equal balance of men and women this year.

Mostly I am just curious to know if it is possible. My instinct is that if I’m careful, it will be. Of course, it will mean probably tactically avoiding quite a few shows – any trad. Shakespeare I see is going to necessitate about 15 one-woman shows to balance it out, for example, so that’s going to have to be treated sparingly.

It also raise the question of where we stop valuing people who work in theatre. Or rather, what roles am I going to count? In mainstream work: writer, director, actors, obviously. Designer? Yes. Lighting, and sound though? Stage-management? Should the gender of the artistic director of every building in which you see work count?

I think all these things should count. And I think it’s something we should all be thinking about. Because the more acutely conscious of inequality we are, the more likely it is that it will become something that everyone’s thinking will address.

I am also going to have a think about how I can do something similar about adequate representation of race and disability on stage.

Yes, I am fully aware that I am white, male, middle-class, middle-aged and heterosexual (checking my privileges takes just ages because there are so many). And I know no one *needs* my help. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because there’s a campaign to make us think about this stuff and now I can’t stop thinking about it.

And because I believe in equality.  

L’Apres Midi d’Un Foehn – Platform Theatre, Kings Cross

[part of London International Mime Festival]

“Aimai-je un rêve?” asks the horny, disgruntled faun in the poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, which constitutes the Ur-text of this performance. And it’s a good question. Basically, the poem inspires piece of music by Debussy – Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune – which in turn inspires a controversial ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky: part of the same 1913 programme at the Théâtre du Châtelet, for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, as the first performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps; with which Prélude seems to share a near-identical opening passage.

The key to this production is in the title’s punning use of “Foehn”, which, out of curiosity, I looked up on Wikipedia: it turns out to be “a type of dry, warm, down-slope wind”. Which works as well as anything for a place to start to describe what actually happens here.

L’Apres Midi d’Un Foehn is possibly destined to be forever described as “the plastic bag ballet”. And that’s exactly what it is. Woman kneels on stage. Soundscape of slow bleeps plays. She slowly constructs a flat little figure out of two plastic bags and some sellotape (she cuts the second bag to make arms and a head). Figure constructed, she crumples him (I’m not sure why I thought “him”, but I really did) into a ball and leaves him centre stage. The then walks round the circle turning on a number of the very large floor fans which surround the raised, circular stage.

And then the amazing thing happens. Basically, the bag-chap remains centre stage and gradually inflates. “He” then “stands up”, and thus stood begins to pirouette in the winds, blown this way and that, gently and then not so gently, tossed and buffeted between fans “he” appears to dance. The woman throws another bag onto the circular stage which almost instantly inflates and appears to begin to “dance” with the first bag-person.

What we’re looking at here is something that – assuming you’re in an amenable frame of mind – you basically greet with delight and wonderment. I mean, it is just a really, really neat trick. And gradually, you go from appreciating its neatness to being pretty astonished at just how clever I actually is.

I think the company – Compagnie Non Nova, Phia Ménard – must have a couple of people dedicated to almost “playing” the fans; speeding them up and slowing them down remotely, since the level of control they seem to be able to exercise of over these inflated, almost parachute-like people is quite uncanny. At one stage all the little bag-people (oh, yes, there are tonnes at one point) all seem to leap into an upturned umbrella that the woman puts on the stage. The figure of the woman herself is enigmatic and serves both as a puppeteer and then later a possible protagonist.

To say this is a show which resists analysis isn’t entirely either true or fair – I should probably just have taken notes. There are definite “movements”. No mean feat since the piece is only half an hour long, and Debussy’s original music only about ten minutes. But, yes, after the initial solo, pas de deux, and quartet, there are then sequences with many different coloured dancers/figures (these are all bags, btw), a section with only white ones, a section where a golden flying serpent or dragon thing menaces a solo bag-person, and then a somewhat dubious section at the end where the woman and a sole pink bag-person are overwhelmed ina cloud of black bags. Not even black bags made to look like people, just bags. Which did feel a bit BNP (and no, I don’t mean Banque Nationale de Paris). Someone might want to have a look at the symbolism there a bit, maybe.

So what to say about it? Well, it’s definitely gorgeous; totally charming; a delight from start to finish. It’s somehow poignant ad “magical” while retaining just enough cleverness and wit to keep it from ever tipping into anything trite or Disneyfied. At the same time, perhaps because of the lightness, and the gradually expanding sense of what was possible within the compass of this new genre, I kept seeing things and wishing they were pressed into the service of something going somewhere a bit more defined. And also thinking “this would be really great as part of something else”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great at it is, and I guess part of its pleasure is that thing about leaving an audience wanting more. But, yes, I did want more.

On an intellectual level. Well, I think it definitely had some smarts about it. I don’t think it was trying to achieve some sort of Foucauldian exegesis of anything, or if it was, I missed it because dancing plastic bags. Something interesting I did notice watching it was how hard it was to stop anthropomorphising these bags. Once one had a bit of air in it and its little arms and head were inflated, it was pretty much impossible to start seeing it as a plastic bag again. Which I found curious.

But, look what the Mime Festival has made me do. I’m trying to analyse some plastic bags being blown up and down by a collection of fans. This is surely the beginning of madness. Have we fallen in love with a dream, like the faun of the poem? Perhaps it is something like that after all.

Photocredit Jean-Luc Beaujault

Shorts: Dispositio

[new series, I hope]

Having written yesterday about how “if you go back to early Postcards posts, you see some stuff that basically amounts to a Facebook Status Update and possibly, at times, A Tweet”, I find myself this morning thinking, that might not be such a bad thing to reintroduce. So, I guess the deal will be something like this: I’ll try to write short things as well as long things (no *way* am I going to commit to saying I’ll do it on a daily basis, but...). Doubtless as my beginning-of-year energy wears off, they’ll become more and more infrequent, but it’s nice to have goals, right? And it’s nice for you to have something to read over breakfast.

Today’s Short is to introduce my new favourite blogger, Holger Syme (I guess this is also partly a sort of blackmail to encourage him to post *loads more stuff*). I’m not actually sure how I came across him, or how he came across me, but we’re friends on Facebook now, despite never having actually met IRL.

What I love about Holger’s blog is partly to do with his position: he’s a German, educated at Oxford and Harvard, teaching Shakespeare at Toronto University. As a result, he offers the best possible perspective on Canadian and American theatre, usefully filtered through a practical knowledge of the British scene, so you end up with (I would say) a German cultural perspective, but one with infinitely more recognisable reference points. I kind of wish he’d become a full time online critic.

The most recent post is a brilliant example. A short analysis of the New York/Broadway theatre programme, expressing frank bemusement at the anti-intellectualism they display:

“What they suggest is a pervasive sense that interpretation, let alone creative engagement, intellectual dissection, directorial and actorly experimentation — all of the things that make theatre such an exciting and present force — are largely negligible, that plays speak for themselves, that all an audience might want to hear more about are the performers and possibly the visuals.”

Well worth a read in full.

His recent review of Julie Taymor’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is likewise the best analysis of any American production I’ve read. It’s got the detail, passion and analysis, coupled with a cultural standpoint able to locate the massive black hole at the heart of the production:

“For all the creative investment in the visual aspects of this show, at its heart is a rather stunning absence of any kind of serious interpretative investment. It’s perhaps indicative that the program offer no director’s note of any kind — only a set of “perspectives” firmly anchored in the most commonplace and unchallenging takes on Shakespeare’s play... In German reviews, Taymor’s production would be described as “attitude-free.” The phrase would not be a compliment.”

So there you go. New to stuff read, which plausibly wasn’t on your radar before. And writing this has made me realise there’s a sizable archive I haven’t actually read yet. So I might go and do that too...

[cover photo by NYC-based photographer Arian Camilleri, who mostly seems to do fashion photography of a pretty vacuous sort, but I like this series of photos of smoke and light, which seemed fittingly insubstantial as elements to illustrate these short pieces...]

Don Quijote – Camden People’s Theatre

[contains a certain amount of blow-by-blow account. If you’re going to see it (which you should, I think) maybe read after]

I can’t remember the last time I felt this grateful to a piece of theatre. Tom Frankland and Keir Cooper (in association with Último Comboio, also starring Carlos Otero, with Anton Coimnra and Cis O’Boyle as creative collaborators)’s “adaptation” of Don Quixote is pretty much the perfect start to the year a blast of dark light and hopeful hopelessness in the January cold. It’s basically an hour-long, lowest of lo-fi, punk performance lecture on themes suggested by Miguel de Cervantes’s groundbreaking two-part novel. (A novel I have never read, and, given its doorstop-like qualities, probably never will.) In fact, more than “performance lecture” this is really “performance literary criticism”, albeit enacted by three blokes (plus, last night, Hannah Nicklin as the “Guest Quijote”) with a drum kit, distorted guitar, a bagful of “doing-it-crappily” effects.

The thing opens with torch-made shadow puppetry – or rather, a torch panning across a mostly static landscape. Buildings, people, knights on horseback, monsters and windmills – obviously windmills – move across the walls; like your shadow on a dark road when a car drives past.

Frankland then introduces the book. Literally introduces us to a physical copy of the book. Of which he then saws the spine with a circular saw. And, my God, I react badly to seeing books mutilated. There is something actually properly dangerous-feeling about this sort of treatment of literature. Of course that’s largely just an old commodity fetishist speaking, but then ill-treatment of books has a pretty distinct history and no one who’s done it has ever been progressive before, so the company are deliberately deploying one of the only shock-tactics likely to make a left-liberal audience feel shock. And it’s kinda great.

This literal “de-construction” of the book – Frankland then hands round the pages – takes place as he explains the novel’s brilliantly weird history: Cervantes wrote the first book, and then promised a second, which it seems likely he wouldn’t have written if other people hadn’t started writing their own “Part Two”s. Oddly, this whole story was told to me for the first time at a party in Zagreb late last year, so this bit had the weirdest possible resonance for me, connecting a damp basement in North London (Don Quijote is playing in the CPT’s cellar, rather than its conventional studio space), to a flat in the north of ex-Yugoslavia. That’s one of the hidden things that’s brilliant about this show: that is it taking a work of *world* literature, rather than parochial Eng.Lit; a book understood, loved and studied across the globe; a book that, on many levels, couldn’t speak less directly to our times and condition. It takes the book and makes it about precisely the thing that the company need it to be about.

What the company need Don Quixote to be about is – and forgive how basic this is – acts of rebellion. It’s no coincidence that Don Q. is opening CPT’s Hard To Resist season (which, following hard on the heals of the feminist Calm Down, Dear season, marks Jenny Paton and Brian Logan out as some of the canniest programmers on the alt.fringe right now). So their thesis is this: Don Quijote is a figure defined by the purity of his gesture and perhaps even his understanding of its inevitable failure. They talk about how Cervantes was captured and imprisoned or enslaved by pirates for five years, and had lost the use in his left arm. This, they tell us, is a book made from ridiculous amounts of human suffering. A book about a madman who is determined to prove a valiant knight, without a hope in hell of succeeding. They tell us about how the novel claims to be a history translated from original Arabic.

Anton tells us a story about how, just before he came over the the UK to do the show, he had been working in a primary school with children, and how, on the last day, he had bought 20kg of flower petals and had showered them over the children’s playground with the help of a massive fan as a farewell gesture, and had told the woman he loved that he loved her as they stood on the school roof watching children running around madly in the falling petals.

And then, of course, the real Anton turns up on Skype – projected onto the opposite wall – and tells us that he’s not sure about this actor (Otero) who is playing him. It’s a brilliant way of illustrating another strand of the book – the inauthenticity, the lie, at the the heart of it. And also a perfect example of why the inauthenticity itself is part of the fun, and not a lie at all, so much as a better way of revealing something true. And, oh, it’s clever, right? So you sit there enjoying both the stories, and the fact of the way that they’re being told cleverly reflects *as theatre* other important aspects of the book itself. (In a related, but completely different way to what Mitchell did with Waves/The Waves, thinking about it.)

The cmpany share with us some individuals who they’ve nominated as modern-day Quijotes, these start off with a guy who’s built a working space rocket in his back garden and keeps applying to NASA for a licence to launch it, and get progressively darker. People who have been imprisoned for their beliefs, for their naked rambling, to people who have been beaten up for how they dressed. There’s an unmistakeable left-leaning agenda, which is at least as inspiring as it is slightly over-stated. But it’s no less powerful for being blunt. The companies question to us is something like: wouldn’t we all be better off if we did exactly what we needed or wanted to do, no matter how against society and doomed to certain failure it was. Wouldn’t that be a better, or at least a possible way of trying to change the world – by changing our worlds. TBH, my inner Žižek (yes, I actually have one) recoiled slightly at this. What, I/inner-Žižek wondered, was the difference between this and rampant Rand-ianism? Isn’t Howard Rourke about as Quixotic as it gets? IS this the way we should interpret the book? What about communalism, and, well, socialism? But then this is anarchism, not communism, isn’t it?

Perversely, and perhaps connected both to that Pollesch quote about capitalists and love stories and to an excellent thing Tim Crouch quotes in the “documents” section at the end of Modern British Playwriting: 2000-2009: “For art to exist, the idea of one thing must be given by another thing” (Etienne Decroux). Because this was obviously art, but stating its political agenda quite bluntly, I ended up reading the piece as a terrific vindication of glorious failed attempts at love affairs. Which, y’know, worked for me. I think there are about as many other ways of relating to the piece as it has audience members.

There’s a final sequence where Nicklin returns from her own Quixotic quest with her audience-member Sancho Panza and starts shredding pages of the book. (More violence-against-text! Still shocking.) She then blows it at us using the fan – already a windmill stand-in – and in a blizzard paperstorm that follows you find yourself thinking: Yeah. Ok. I’ll take that. The inevitable failure is part of why makes a thing wonderful and romantic in the first place. And, yeah; I’m a terrible romantic.

This is also why revolutions shouldn’t be run as a romance.

Brave New

[Stock-take]

“The theatre blogosphere feels quietly buzzy again, after a couple of years of unmistakeable doldrums. By 2011 it all seemed a bit depleted: a dwindling faux-community of tired commentators all jogging round the same block nattering to themselves about cramp while the real conversations seemed to be happening elsewhere. It doesn't feel that way at all right now, to me – though that may be a trick of the light, I suppose: I might just be doing a better job of paying attention. But even so, the decisive impulse seems to be, simply, a deepening – and/or broadening – understanding that Twitter, in particular, won't satisfactorily contain many of the important conversations that need to be had in the sector: not just for nuance but for developed argument, it's necessary to migrate back to the longer-form, and perhaps the sense is stronger now that those conversations have to be had, that we have much to say to each other, much to learn and much to share; that we are not simply free-floating pixels in an atomised making-culture, whose principal mode of engagement is a cheerful, acquisitive networking behaviour of the sort that Twitter and Facebook foster so excellently: but that we need the means to express more powerfully and more ardently our sense of being with each other, of working not in secretive competition but in open concert and continuous dialogue.”

So began 2014, with some of the best news imaginable (at least in the niche world that is theatre/writing-about-theatre). Chris Goode restarted his blog.

Thinking about how to phrase this next bit, it seems grotesquely self-absorbed to discuss Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire largely in terms of how influential it was for me, but. It’s probably fair to say that it was reading the complete Thompsons in 2007 (I copied and pasted and printed the whole thing out so I could read it on the bus to and from work – even then, when it was only a year old, on 28 May 2007 “The Complete” ran to 183 pages of 12pt Times New Roman) that laid more than half the foundation stones for Postcards. (Credit also due to Andy Field, Alex F, George Hunka, Alison Croggon and David Eldridge), which actually started as an “everything but reviews” blog. Which seems strange now. But it also brings me to the sad news that the first online place I ever wrote for, CultureWars, shut up shop on the same day Thompson’s reopened. Starting in 2000 in Edinburgh as the Review Section for The Institute of Ideas (formerly Living Marxism), CultureWars was pretty much the proto-Exeunt of its day (insofar as it was online and run by Marxists), and, well, they could probably argue I owed them my entire career if Noises Off hadn’t got there first.

What’s interesting (and bloody terrifying, frankly), is that we’re now talking about a 14 year history of “online reviewing” in the UK – my whole “career”, in fact – kicking off with British Theatre Guide and CultureWars and winding up, well, here. Now. It’s something I’m going to be thinking a lot about over the next few months, as I’m due to write a chapter on it for Duška Radosavljevic’s forthcoming book on Theatre Criticism...

What I think is most interesting about the period, especially the latter half that Postcards and Thompson’s span, is the way that the very function of these blogs has been imperceptibly (at least to this author, at the time) changed by the way that the rest of their internet environment has changed.

Put simply, if you go back to early Postcards posts, you see some stuff that basically amounts to a Facebook Status Update. And possibly, at times, A Tweet. I think I had only just joined FB when I started Postcards. And Twitter didn’t exist (and I didn’t even join it until I lived in Berlin). There was a lot more commenting *in the comment threads themselves*. (If you want the best example, go and look at the comment thread for my review of Seven Jewish Children. It’s probably about seventeen separate blogs all on its own.) It now feels like that sort of sustained, long-form discussion normally takes place on the author’s own Facebook page, but mostly has been replaced by short tweets and retweets.

Similarly, it feels more unusual for someone to write a whole blog post in response to another whole blogpost. Things feel a bit more fast-paced now. I have to say, I quite miss that sustained long-form argument. (And, my God, don’t I just feel like Michael Billington mourning the passing of the Newspaper Letters Page argument in saying so.)

The positive result of this it that it has actually freed up blogs to become what they seem to currently be: homes for a serious, alternatives way of writing about theatre. Of course, this viewpoint has its dissenters. Megan Vaughan makes a neat point in her piece Criticism: some thoughts that “long-form blog thinkpieces are not new or groundbreaking. They are simply preserving a culture of theatre criticism that the printed press can no longer sustain.”

Having thought about this for a while, I think I’d say that where a lot of theatre blogs are now at is a place that print has *never* sustained. I’d be surprised if even Tynan would have been allowed 3,000 words on American Psycho, and certainly not in that way. That said, anyone with eyes and a red pen could also tell you that my piece could have probably been 1,000 words shorter without losing an ounce of substance. The advantage of of having infinite space comes with the disadvantage of sometimes not self-editing nearly as much as would be polite. However, I do think Vaughan’s accusation that blogs still “follow the standard form of some-words-with-some-pictures-provided-by-the-theatre’s-PR-team” is kind of nonsense as a problem.

While I also admire Vaughan’s heroine Eve Nicol for her various experiments with totally different media, I found her end-of-year “what worked, what didn’t?” blog refreshingly candid about their success. Call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I’m not fully convinced that pictures of cats are really ever going to be as much use to an archivist. Not least because cats are notoriously difficult to interpret. And we don’t want to be agonising over reviews wondering if the slightly anthropomorphised smile that we think we can see on a particular cat’s face is the reason the critic included that particular cat. (What I mean is, having read those cat reviews, I wasn’t actually sure what Eve had thought of half the shows. Or what happened in them. Or what they were. Fun though pictures of cats are to look at.)

The sorts of things that some blogs are now doing with “some words” now are increasingly streets away from anything that any mainstream theatre criticism I’ve ever read has ever done. I wonder if, in part, it’s the net result of the sort of “team sport” approach that Matt Trueman was talking about. I’ll be honest, I like team sports about as much as Maddy Costa likes militarism (oh, that was a private email so I can’t link to it, but it was her reservation about the term “embedded criticism”) but I think the premise is an excellent one. The fact that you know someone else has got your back in critical terms (that someone else might have covered the plot, or someone else focussed really hard on the design) means that it’s no longer irresponsible – as an online critic who is part of a constellation – to not cover everything. At the same time, it’s amusing that actually, given the amount of space we have, we can give a far better and more detailed account of every aspect of a show than any mainstream writer doing it “properly” has space to. Or we can just choose to do every aspect that interests us. I am still rubbish at writing about what actors actually spend their time doing on stage, for example.

But, yes. 2013, probably the best year yet for coverage. And there’s an optimistic sense that things really might keep improving.

[And now I’m going to stop this here because I’ve a review to write, and also because George Hunka has published this interesting piece on the critical scene Stateside, to which I want to write a response after writing the review...]

2013

[life goes on]

UK (in order of appearance)

Illusions

Quizoola

The Seagull

There Has Possibly Been An Incident

Fleabag (review by Matt Trueman)

Dust // In The Valley // Commonwealth

Grounded

The Events

Oh My Irma

The Future Show

#ShowOne (review by Dan Hutton)

Gorge Mastromas

Henry the Fifth


Outside UK (also in order of appearance)

Die Troerinnen

Quartet with Microphone

Ruhr Triennale

Capitalista, Baby!

Oh My Irma

Schwarze Augen, Maria

Die Brüder Karamasow

Orlando

Alles weitere kennen sie aus dem kino

Die Gelbe Tapete

Atmen

Trojanski Kolektiv (review forthcoming)


Other stuff

Art: The Settlement – I don’t know why, but I totally fell in love with this piece; part of the EmscherKunst initiative

Film: In Eldersfield chapter two
– do you know, I don’t think I actually saw a single new film this year. Even so, I like to think this short, art-house offering from Kings of England would have won even if I had.

Book: Theatre-making: interplay between text and performance in the 21st century by Duška Radosavljevic. History and theory are pretty much the biggest battlegrounds in any culture war. While barely acknowledging that there’s “an enemy” at all, Duška’s book effortlessly hands recent theatre history to the good guys.

Building: Any and all the venues at the Ruhr Triennale. Just as I would be hard-pressed to name a specific event at the Ruhr Triennale as *best*, it wasn’t so much one particular building as the fact of *all of them* that made the Ruhr so exciting. Also, a phenomenal endorsement of public funding of the arts.

Music: Lohengrin – from Meine Faire Dame in 2012, through Nick Gill’s reworked version for In Eldersfield II through to it turning in Glanz und Elend... it felt like Wagner enjoying a weird sort of renaissance in alt.theatre circles.

Deaths: Patrice Chéreau, Dimeter Gotscheff. There’s no way I can possibly hope to improve on David Lan’s piece on Patrice Chéreau for the Guardian, which is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing about theatre I read all year.


Thoughts:

On the face of it, 2013 wasn’t exactly a vintage year for theatre. At least, not in the UK. But, I feel kind of strange saying that. I spent the first month of the year in Köln. And I was out of London for another at least another four-plus months in Scarborough, Zagreb, Edinburgh, Bucharest, the Ruhr valley, Berlin, Hamburg, Berlin again and Zagreb again.

And yet, London didn’t really seem to grab me much this year. Granted I also missed some stuff. Regretfully: Say It With Flowers downstairs at the Hampstead; This House and Othello at the NT; but that’s about all I can think of.

Mostly it felt like things were ticking along fine, but when I go back and look at the list for 2012... Well, not every year can catch fire like last year, I suppose.

I also spent the longest amount of time since university actually *inside* rehearsal rooms, and in April even directed a rehearsed reading of Hamletmaschine at Theatre 503, the second night of which was pretty excellent, I thought (and I can say that with total modesty since my input was minimal-to-non-existent in the event).

Then I look at the list(s) we have got here, and suddenly I remember that while the overall shape of the year feels fragmented, and the year might have felt like it took more than usually long to warm up, and while Edinburgh felt comparatively flat artistically, this year did actually get better and better.

However, if we look at this list, we also see evidence of what the Conservative Party’s cuts to Britain’s already laughable arts spending are doing. Fewer than half the UK shows really had a design which went beyond: chair, microphone (sure, they did that nicely, but it doesn’t feel as if it was a choice made in the face of several thousand pounds to play with if they’d decided on something else). While the writing, direction, and performances aren’t touched, when you compare these productions to the Outside UK list... That said, of course I might have just missed or not liked many of the domestic Big Production Values shows I saw this year...

It is also interesting that for the first time, several of my favourite shows this year are ones I didn’t even see live. Possibly the best UK thing I saw all year was Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola, which I watched from the comfort of my room in parent’s house in Shrewsbury. I could smoke, go to the loo whenever, eat and drink as I pleased, talk to my friends about what we were watching as we watched on Twitter. It was altogether much nicer than being in a theatre, which is a worry.

I was very struck by Dan Hutton’s sign-off on the Exeunt round-up of the year, however:

“In a year when we’ve had countless ‘regime’ changes at theatrical organisations – from Michael Brazier’s first outing as director of NSDF to the appointment of Rufus Norris as AD of the NT – this is an idea which feels particularly apt. Those little changes in mindset and practice will add up to something far more palpable in output over the following year. In all honesty, I’ve not seen anything that’s truly blown me away in 2013, but the general feeling of a swelling tide has been invigorating. This may be my youthful naivety talking here, but I’ve a feeling we’ll look back on 2013 as the year Things Started To Happen.”

I think I’ll always have that year pencilled into my own account as 2012, and as my own drastic revision of 2000-2009 in the face of Rewriting the Nation and State of the Nation shows, I also have a pretty soft spot for 2006/7-2009. But, Hutton’s right, and I should stop moping. For all that 2013 has felt like a pretty long slog at times, it’s a slog in the right direction, and there’s been much to celebrate. Perhaps history will be kinder to it in the long term...

Cover photo from this, which is just brilliant.

American Psycho – Almeida

[over 3000 words of anxiety and torture for you, dear reader]

The first half of this new musical of American Psycho provokes non-stop anxieties in all the wrong ways. It’s weird, I don’t remember the last time I sat in a theatre worrying about what I thought something thought it was doing so much.

[Let’s get this straight: this is going to be a pretty tough review, but it’s a tough review starting from the following position: *at last* we’re starting to see theatre in the UK which looks like it might belong to the same century as the one in which we live. Sitting with outgone Almeida artistic director Michael Attenborough behind me, I was reminded that whatever I thought of this flagship production from new AD Rupert Goold, I actually wanted to be there and whatever it was it was sure as hell blowing the cobwebs out of the fucking place. And not before time. Reviewing theatre is a dumb thing. Anything less than all out adoration reads badly. Caveats and reservations seem to loom more damningly than they are ever meant to. But, blimey, celebrations for joining the current millennium aside, there are plenty of causes for reservation here.]

It’s interesting to think back and remember quite what an impact Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho had when it was first published in 1991. It was one of about three novels Melody Maker *ever* reviewed. It was a book that achieved a startling level of cultural penetration. Possibly not because anyone actually *got it*, but because, even without *getting it*, there was something persistent and unsettling about it that people couldn’t just dismiss. American Psycho made people sit up and take notice primarily with its spectacular level of violence, and the deadpan, pedantic detail with which it described it. A matter-of-fact account of a broken bottle and dead rat shoved up someone’s cunt tended to be the bit everyone mentioned at the time. They don’t do that bit at the Almeida.

The reason American Psycho got further than the horror section of bookshops was what surrounded the horror – a non-stop, chippy, “inadvertently” camp commentary, listing in anal detail what he, the narrator, Patrick Bateman, was wearing. What everyone around him was wearing. *Where* they were eating. What their business cards looked like. The detail is dead-eyed, brand-led and relentless. Bateman sounds like a man who has memorised and endlessly regurgitates catalogue details, or the brittle prose of fashion magazines.

There are also (italicised? Can’t remember. It’s been a while) about three or four sections where Bateman offers lengthy (a page or two) disquisitions on his favourite music. The two most memorable ones are about Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News. He (Bateman) is totally serious. He discusses the highlights of Phil Collins’s oeuvre like it was Mozart. (Also, do I remember wrongly, or does he also do The Beatles at one point? That would have been very canny if it happens). These bits in the book are inspired. The fashion bits might also be bloody clever and funny if you happened to know all about fashion. Bateman might be absolutely correct, or he might be as laughably off-kilter with his taste in facewash and shirts as he is in music, but no one worth knowing would know – the point, I always hoped, is that name-checking *any* luxury brand approvingly makes you sound like a total cunt with no taste whatsoever.

By virtue of its one-note, relentless, dead, *boring* prose, the book manages to become literature by being so precisely the opposite. It’s art. You have to work at it. It’s not entertainment. It makes no effort to charm. And its point is buried within its pointlessness.

Adapting such a book obviously poses a number of problems; adapting it as *a musical* triply so. At the basic, conceptual level, there’s the problem that it just sounds like “a terrific wheeze”. “American Psycho – The Musical! Ha ha, brilliant!” people say. And, yeah, just the concept has whizzy, postmodern, showbiz chutzpah written all over it. In *ironic* day-glo, probably.

But then, what *are* we meant to be making of it? Sure, on one level it might boil back to that crude binary which I most recently saw raised in Michael Blakemore’s new memoir, Stage Blood: “[The Germans] seemed uneasy with what I regarded as the English-speaking theatre’s greatest strength – its refusal to draw a line between what was entertainment and what was art.” The other way this can be phrased is as the questions asked of the English by mainlanders: “Why are you so keen to pander to the audience?” “Why behave like prostitutes the whole time?” Or even, “why do you always have to make jokes? The people were listening anyway.”

Usually it’s a dichotomy I prefer to ignore (mostly by only ever watching German art theatre. ha ha), but American Psycho – The Musical is so unabashedly “entertainment”-first, that it seems worth inspecting. Except, *is it*? Is it *really* entertainment, or is it “art” *about* entertainment – a fractured sculpture of a musical rather than an actual musical? And if it was, how would you tell?

This is the first of the anxieties thrown up by the first half. You (well, *I*; but not only *I*) spend quite a lot of time worrying what it is you’re even watching. And why. A couple of reasons for this: the “musical” style is not the strange genre of its own that is exactly “musicals music”. Instead it’s mostly pastiche 80s synth pop. Except, actually, it *is* musicals music, just slightly disguised as pastiches of (mostly) Depeche Mode and the like. But then there’s the actual *action*. Light on plot in the first half, the piece mostly takes the form of an extended round of introductions. Bateman is introduced. His voracious consumerist colleagues at work (on Wall Street) are introduced. A bunch of ladies are introduced, who turn out to be mostly defined either by their relationship to Patrick Bateman, or one of his friends. Or by the way that men look at them.

[And, mother of God: God knows presenting a society objectifying women is tricky on stage, but I’m not sure AP–TM has found the solution. At. All. The slight defence for Goold is that a) he plainly knows he’s doing it and flags it up as “problematic” – mostly by doing it some more, and then over-doing it – and also, it’s a pretty equal-opportunities objectification free-for-all, with Matt Smith clearly leading the field (yeah, Matt Smith has his shirt off a whole lot. And Matt Smith looks pretty fucking awesome with his shirt off. (get me and my objectification)).]

The thing settles into a pattern of scene, song; scene, song; etc. pretty quickly. Then, once people have been introduced, it does feel a bit like they then start painstakingly introducing Themes, and Motifs. That the book contains so many “classic bits”, and that the book is now 22 years old, and so what it is also kinda *about* now is “hilarious” retro- fashion and technology (and, sure, iPods make Sony Walkmans look pretty funny *right now*, but...), also feels like a problem addressed but not solved.

But we should talk some more about the music. Leafing through the programme last night, I think I noticed that the writer of the music (Duncan Sheik) thought he was a big fan of Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears. Well, they had a lot of fans, and fandom plainly doesn’t translate into either understanding what makes their music good or how it works. This is yet Another (first half) Anxiety. You really can’t tell at what level you are supposed to be appreciating the music. Is it meant to be ironic? How ironic? Is it meant to actually be good? Suffice it to say, if the original music is aiming for “good” then it gets as far as “passable”/“competent”, but certainly nowhere near “memorable”. Quite a feat, given that it’s meant to be a pastiche of Depeche Mode. Surely the best thing to do would be to write songs with the same insistent, instant-ear-worm qualities, then you’d win both ways. But there’s that question of whether the music is actually meant to be cleverly reflecting the bland, godawful, corporate exterior of capitalism.

However, mercifully, there’s another strand to the music – the cast performing slightly re-orchestrated/new arrangements of popular eighties pop songs. These struck me as much cleverer and more excellent. Turning some Phil Collins into something that sounded more like impassioned soul music feels like a much better “ironic” trick. It also feels like an elegant way of dealing with the fact that this is a musical about someone whose musical tastes are fundamentally fucking awful, and, if they weren’t also a banker, a serial killer, a misogynist and a shit boyfriend, would be categorically the worst thing about them apart from their clothes. But, yes; making whatever Phil Collins (for example) song it is sound better – more “authentic” perhaps – than the original makes for a much more satisfying problematisation of the era, the musicals format, and the novel. Sometimes they also just play the original songs too. Fine. Whatevs.

What’s perhaps most fascinating about the adaptation is the extent and ways in which it conforms to – and differs from – the novel, the film. And expectation. My (dim) recollection of the book, is predominantly the relentlessness of the tone. Like this snide, American voice carping on in your head non-stop. (I imagine a younger Kevin Spacey would have done the perfect audiobook version.) What I don’t remember is it having any sort of a coherent plot, as such. Incidents would happen, sure, but it felt like they only really happened to give Bateman something to talk about. And much of the time, he would either just be telling us about *things*, or else cataloguing his fitful, ongoing murdering and torturing. The first half is a bit like this, but a strange thing happens to the sense of (un)balance. In the book you feel like Bateman is the only present being. Everyone else is only a fleeting impression on his pathological mind. Here, because that’s obviously a tricky impression to give on stage (tho’ I sort of wish they’d tried. Gotscheff’s Ivanov is, I think, the best example ever, although I don’t suggest they should just copy that). Here, *everyone* is as technicolor and *real* as Matt Smith, even if he is most famous (and it’s interesting, while his face is instantly recognisable, and while he remains the astonishing young actor I saw in That Face all those years ago, he’s not actually so very *other-worldly*. I’m reminded that “a bit strange-looking” (cf. all other reviews) though he may be, he’s a great actor precisely because he feels so relatable. It makes him an unusually compassionate Bateman. This might be a problem.).

Also, because of the way this adaptation has been made/written/structured, it feels increasingly like there is a credible plot struggling to emerge in the first half. Possibly a plot involving a 27-year-old investment banker trying to avoid getting married to his girlfriend of whom he’s evidently not all that fond. Perhaps that’s actually true of the book too if you’re a better reader than me, but my impression was of this fog of details with all the other people in it being reduced to yet another list, all so much the same, all so fogged in the pedantic details by which Bateman values things, all *dehumanised* so completely, that you, the reader, end up not seeing them as people either.

It’s a brilliant effect in the novel, but obviously one that’s much harder to reproduce in the theatre, when, as I say, we in the audience – not being psychopaths, and also not being *inside* Matt Smith’s mind as he pretends to be one as our cipher – see everyone as equally real. There’s also that problem of the lead character being unsympathetic and everyone else unsympathetic by virtue of the prose with which they’ve been drawn.

*Of course* Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has tried to negotiate a way out of this, and in the second half I think gets bloody close to succeeding. In the second half there actually is a plot of sorts. The focus shifts slightly and widens to include the crush Bateman’s secretary Jean (Cassandra Compton) has on him. In this storyline, I think Aguirre-Sacasa gets to riff much more successfully with a few tropes of his own. We’re suddenly in recognisable rom-com land, a territory much more recognisable for a musical too, and so Jean gets her torch song, and Bateman gets to have a scene where he lets her leave his apartment without killing her. This is much more interesting, because playing with clichés like these means it’s us in the audience who suddenly start wondering about ourselves (“What am I doing rooting for the guy who crucified a woman with a nail-gun?”). This is a much more profitable line of enquiry than the blunt declarations about capitalism and superficiality delivered in the first half. At last it feels like “The Musical” has swung into its own and is starting to make sense of why it’s there. Then there’s the Three Kingdoms/David Lynchian aspect to the tale, where we’re suddenly not even sure what is “Real” any more (tho’ not in the Lacanian sense, sadly), and it feels even more promising. To be honest, I could have happily taken two second halves (even if the final number is an absolutely perplexing honest-to-God trainwreck of a triple-underline. Irony or no irony. Or both.)

Oh, God. What haven’t I covered yet? More or less everything, it feels. The set, by Es “Chimerica” Devlin is a largev white room with slight false perspective potential, horizontal blinds at the back, two revolving bits of floor while let tables and chairs hove in and out of scenes with minimal(ist) fuss. The ceiling of this room *could be* like looking up at or down on the Twin Towers. But, sadly, I don’t think that’s what it’s aiming for. Unless it’s just a joke for design nerds. Onto this is frequently projected Finn Ross’s not-especially-wonderful video designs.

The cast look like English actors claiming to be “hardbody” rich Americans. They act, sing and dance well enough – in some cases excellently, but in an ensemble it’d be unfair to name names, right? (Holly James is best by a country mile. Then Cassandra Compton is also excellent.) In a piece about superficiality but playing in a theatre, it’s always difficult to know what to do with/say about how people look. Looking at the photos of Tom Hiddleston’s Coriolanus, I was struck by the idea that he might have made a better Bateman, after all, he has his movie-star good looks confirmed by virtue of actually being an actual good-looking movie star. But, y’know, I’m all for making up the shortfall in actuality with imagination. That’s what theatre’s all about, right? Except that here it just makes everything feel that extra bit too cosy. You kind of *want* to feel more angered and terrified by the internal logic of these people’s world. You kind of want the cast to feel like they’re people as vile and superficial in those in the book. They sort of need to look like the Almeida couldn't really afford them. Instead, this feels, well, nice. Friendly. I know it’s only make believe, but this didn’t make me believe it.

Rupert Goold has been really interesting about the show, post press night, on Twitter. He says:

“Surprised by some of the reviews of #americanpsycho wanting more gore, for me the story is far more Hamlet than Titus Andronicus.”

And:

“#Americanpsycho dwells on the artist's inevitable inability to assimilate within society, their perpetual anxiety about presence. Not rats.”

The thing about Hamlet is fascinating. Calling Bateman “an artist” even more so. To be honest, I’ve thought more about these two tweets than the entire production. It’s a shame as I used to feel like I quite *got* where Goold’s sensibility was coming from, *from the production*. Now I’m getting it off Twitter post-fact. Perhaps I’m making the mistake of coming to the production with more preconceptions about the source text than I used to go into his Shakespeares with. But then, perhaps Goold was also trying to direct a vision of the novel onto a book and music which didn’t/doesn’t wholly contain them. Still, Hamlet? An artist? In the abstract these are elegant ideas indeed. But related to Bateman? This is about as radical appropriation of a novel’s text as an attempt to sell Howard Roark as a misunderstood lefty hipster. And, as a thesis, while I think it could be made to fly with spectacular results, I don’t think there’s enough time or clarity available here – I think it’d take an hour just to clear all the baggage we all came in with – to process this thought and make us see or feel it. The idea of a “perpetual anxiety about presence”, while more discernible, I would say is a seriously perverse reading of status anxiety.

What’s fascinating about American Psycho is that it explores one of the strangest fault-lines in American culture, the one that runs jaggedly between “authenticity”, “cool”, and “success”. Bateman’s brother, Sean, is dropped in as a try-hard (and therefore not-cool) spokesperson for authenticity. While Bateman himself is, in one sense, stuck in a world where conspicuous trying-hard (gym, keeping up, fashion, etc.) is prized above all else, and yet, where the supposed prize is “being cool”. Jazz musicians at the birth of cool used to take heroin to appear more relaxed, more effortless; Bateman and co. take coke. Their battle is lost before they even start fighting, would they but know it. Depeche Mode, despite their hilarious name, were never cool, and by never being cool, are pretty cool.

I have no idea whatsoever what American Psycho – The Musical is.

[Depeche Mode’s own searing analysis of free market economics below]

Trout Stanley – Southwark Playhouse

[seen 02/12/13]

Having recently used Stewart Pringle’s excellent review of Satyagraha to offset the effects of my own much more picky review, for Trout Stanley my real spur to writing is Matt Trueman’s strikingly negative review.

In the spirit of full-disclosure, I should say that I was dead excited to see Trout Stanley as soon as I got back from Germany for a number of reasons. Firstly, the excellent Canadian writer Haley McGee, of Oh My Irma fame, had already told me that reading Trout Stanley when she was 20 was pretty much the reason she wrote ...Irma. Which I loved. Secondly, its excellent Canadian director Matt Steinberg was the assistant on the Lyric Hammersmith’s #ShowOne and #ShowTwo – so a) we’d spent a lot of time hanging out, and b) I really rate him as a theatre-brain and was really intrigued to see what he was going to do. Third: I also think Sinéad Matthews is one of the best, most interesting actors we’ve got working in Britain today. Thought so in Women of Troy, thought so in Lulu and thought so again here (I missed a lot of other things due to living in Berlin). I also know her. (Although didn’t when she was in those first two things.)

So, you might argue I was “a bit too invested” in liking this production. But I think that makes for a really interesting relationship to watching a play. Possibly one much more akin to that of the non-“professional theatregoer”. And, in the case of Trout Stanley it was absolutely the right relationship for me to have watching it.

[actually, I’m not sure these qualifiers really make sense, though. After all, I’d also been told Let The Right One In was great by people I like and trust, and I know Jack, John and Steven to varying extents, so...]

However, even while disagreeing, I can understand where Trueman is coming from. There’s something so disconcertingly alien about Trout Stanley that I imagine my default response could also have been to switch off and be annoyed by it. Lucky for me, then, that I had a bunch of reasons to stick with it and work at it. Because I reckon working at this strikingly original piece of writing is the only real solution.

The reason, I think, that Trout Stanley might be construed as “difficult” here (here being London, England), is partly the range of words that we’ve got available with which to misdiagnose its style. Looking across other reviews, words like “kooky” and “zany” abound. They’re reductive words, and I don’t think they’re accurate either. However, for me, what was difficult, was realising that the play operates something much more alien – an unwavering streak of total sincerity. This is difficult for any Englishman to understand. There’s something in the style of the writing that makes us expect it to be being “ironic”. In fact, I don’t think it’s being ironic at all. As such, the default British understanding of what the play might be setting out to achieve is already all at sea. I think we start out looking at it wrong, and then, given that we’re an irritable lot, might just get cross at it for not even delivering what we (wrongly) think it’s set out to deliver.

None of this is, I think, the fault of the production. In fact, I think what might have further made reading the play and tone tricky for reviewers (people with a much more urgent need to pin a thing down than the “casual observer” – as if any theatregoer is really casual – so, rather, the sympathetic reader) is that Steinberg and cast have gotten the tone of the thing so absolutely right. And in getting it right – in playing it totally straight, and inhabiting the characters with every ounce of conviction in their bodies – they make this audacious lack of irony potentially even more unseeable.

What Canadian playwright Claudia Dey’s play does, then, is to show us these two women, the surviving twins of triplets, on the eve of their thirtieth birthday, whose whole world and relationship are a study in finely crafted, totally idiosyncrasy. The scale of linguistic invention here – as with Oh My Irma – is kinda mind-blowing. Rather than leave any sentence, or rather, line of dialogue, to the crude machinations of “how people speak”, Dey has pretty much spiked and polished every carefully chosen word until the whole fairly glistens. Played at some pace by Steinberg’s cast, you find yourself hanging on for dear life as wit and wordplay whizz past your ears with such a speed that daring to laugh will surely rob you of a follow-up piece of brilliance. But there’s something almost loving about this degree of embellishment: like a sort of non-stop banquet that you’ve unwittingly entered. Plays really aren’t normally like this, after all. (cf. that recent Guardian article arguing that operas (and later, plays) need boring bits.) Which is another reason to watch all the harder. There’s also the fact of the imagination at work here. If we get rid of annoying pigeonholes like “kooky”, then actually what you’re looking at is a staggering level of imagination and playfulness. cracked, gothic and grandiose – all intended as compliments.

And then there’s the cast: Matthews, Vinette Robinson and Dylan Smith are – put bluntly – about the sexiest cast on the London stage. That wants *a lot* of qualification. Can we just understand that I’m not talking about “magazine sexy”, but actual, credible sexy-in-the-world-of-the-play?  Thanks.  When the ridiculously named titular hero burst into the sisters’ lives – or, rather, interrupts the heart-breaking suicide attempt of the younger twin, Sugar – and immediately falls flat-out in love with her, there is a violence to the passion between them that is totally, ludicrously tangible.

Steinberg’s production is also genius. And the sort of genius that also takes working out. On the face of it, Shizuka Hariu’s set is kinda plain, but then you notice that it is at once perfectly detailed where it needs to be (the light comes on in the fringe, the sink unit is perfectly populated), but at the same time, this impressionist blank-walled wooden expanse that allows our imaginations to wander as the characters detail the fantastical landscapes of their minds.

There’s a remarkable interview with Dey, which I put off reading until getting this far in the review – I daresay her public persona would already be common knowledge in Canada much as, say, Caryl Churchill’s politics are here – but in a way in this seven-year-old preview of the play’s première sheds about as much useful light on the thinking behind it as I could usefully guess or report from looking at it:

“Before I started writing this play, I was in this period in my life where I’d go to the Vienna Home Bakery, and the man would say, ‘Have a good day,’ and I'd say, ‘You too.’ And honestly what was going through my mind was, ‘I love you.’ This kept creeping up, strangers in different situations. I was going through this world like this little lighted creature, and that was the beginning of Sugar. 

“Life ruptures and reconfigures itself, and often in a much more truthful form,” she says. “That’s the life I'm interested in. It’s that world of unpredictability, where you just see someone and you're blown away. I think that only happens if you're awake to it’.”

It’s about the least British way of thinking imaginable, but there’s something quite startling and spectacular about it, and, if you look hard enough, I think you can see it shining out of this play, and this astonishing production too.

[Edit: after posting this, it occurred to me what the biggest thing that wrong-foots about the play is: effectively, it’s a genre piece in which the man comes to the house where the two sisters live after they hear that a murderer is on the loose. And what happens is, he turns out not to be the murderer. The “twist” is that there is no twist. The twist is that he’s completely honest. 

 It also occurred to me that this play overturns that conventional British wisdom that “to die will be an awfully big adventure”. Here it’s love that is an awfully big adventure. And it’s kind of glorious to see a play say that.]