Fauna – Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon

[seen 12/07/14]

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday I posted my review of Argentine writer-director Romina Paula’s O Tempo Todo Inteiro, and attached to it a fairly stream-of-consciousness monolgue about my worries that thanks to my taste in theatre I was turning into some sort of unarmed Anders Brevik-style Northern European supremacist.

After posting it I went to meet a Portuguese theatre friend unconnected to the Festival. It turned out to be an incredibly useful way of spending the time for me, as he’d read all the stuff I’d posted and was able to fill in a lot of context and tell me where my suspicions and feelings had been correct and where I could have done with a bit more insight. If nothing else, it felt like a real vindication of what appears to be my current policy of saying as honestly as possible whatever it is I’m thinking and letting that be the start of a conversation rather than the end. (My intractable views on L’Architecture de la Paix [forthcoming] notwithstanding.) Perhaps naturally, the piece we ended up discussing most was the review of O Tempo Todo Inteiro. Not least because it was the first show by Romina Paula, whose secosnd show we were going to see after having our coffee. The contextual stuff he explained about “Argentinian Theatre” (scare quotes, because obviously it’s actually pretty diverse) was especially helpful. Yes, he conceded, it might look like dull naturalism (and that’s not his thing either), but what doesn’t come across in just looking at it is the special sort of minimalism, that the Argentinians have developed. Like, super-pared-back naturalism. Ultra-minimalism. Lorca without the poetry, just stripped down to bare essentials. Paula had taken the Williams text and carved it down to just one event. Put like that, it sounds a lot more exciting. So I was refreshed and quite up for having another stab at *getting* Paula’s work.

As it happened, I’d already accidentally had a look at the publicity photos for the piece (I’ve been trying to go in blind on that score) and, as you can see above and below, they’re pretty promising, right? (“Yes, Andrew, they do look a bit German...” “Fuck off.” “Rightio.”), but it was reading the intro-cum-director’s note in the programme before the show started that really got me interested. It’s worth reproducing in full:

“Fauna is the third work by the Argentine company El Silencio, formed in 2006. When comparing El Tiempo Todo Entero, the second play from the company’s original repertoire (which is also being performed in this year’s Festival), Romina Paula acknowledges that “Fauna is less simple, has more layers and is more literary. I don’t know how far it can get.” Where did it come from is something that author and stage director also cannot tell: “I do not know where Fauna came from. I remember having asked for the name of a street: Conceptión Arenal. A street that I had gotten use to refer without thing that it was the name of someone with enough credit to have a street named after her. I started searching on Conceptión Arenal and realized that she was a feminist writer of the late nineteenth century who, among other things, dressed as a man to be able to attend university and poetry circles, so as to access public cultural life. This image moves me, the presence of this unknown woman among men opens a door to many others like her. How many of these men and boys were in fact women pretending?

“Fauna is born out of this will to blur the boundaries between genres, a mythical character, a woman both strong and vulnerable, wild and erudite, who finds in male attire an entry to a world she cannot enter. An actress and a film director go on a search for her with the intention to make a film about her. But how do you tell a life story? Specially about someone who’s gone and whose true story intersects in many instances with the fiction that was built upon her? In this sense, Fauna also corresponds to the meta-theatrical reflection that focuses on the problems of representation – rehearsing a play within another – and of truth – thus showing a big, little or no concern at all with the biography of the depicted figure. It also sets out to meet the words of authors like Rilke or Calderón de la Barca, motivated by Romina Paula’s love of literature and a deliberate attempt through quoting to “animate the words of others and give them back a body.”


And I was thinking: blimey, that’s some synchronicity. This is basically Argentinian Adler and Gibb, right? In the event, at least to look at, it’s not half so meta-. But, blimey, from the get-go I was a whole lot more into it than O Tempo... Sure, this could ultimately be down to any number of extraneous factors (nice day, good food, good conversation, decent travel – getting a boat, rather than taking a car over the bridge, etc.) but I think mostly it was down to the design, conception, and even subject of the show.

This piece is played on a large wooden stage-on-a-stage. The rough boards seem to suggest a landscape, rather than an indoors, or if indoors, then perhaps vast, hangar-like studios, rather than a suburban domestic interior. (Having just met the Scottish critic and Howard Barker expert, Mark Brown, who was here until Thursday, I was reminded of one of the many things Barker said that made me love him as a playwright when I first came across him: that at a certain point in his career he vowed he was never going to write another scene set indoors, or, if indoors, never in a normal room.)

And, yes, there is something transformational that happens to the stage when rough wooden boards are perhaps being asked to play a vast open plain or industrial size interior. The whole auditorium suddenly feels charged with this more exploratory, speculative atmosphere. That idea that suddenly anything *is* possible. (As the recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on The Motion of Light in Water has it: “We’re always being told that theatre is this amazingly malleable form where you can do anything, become anything, the only limit is your imagination – and then you go to see another play about a white middle-class family”.)

Now, all this is essentially a big preamble to me still not having the fainting fucking idea what anyone was actually saying on the stage [I’ll ask over dinner tonight], or at least not much. It opens with (I presume) the actress playing the actress playing Conceptión Arenal reciting Rilke. And later there’s a discussion of Shakespeare. But, I suspect this might be a play worth getting a rough translation made of and sharpish. I don’t *know* – obviously – but clearly, thematically it seems to occupy a weirdly contemporary/synchronic position, and, hell, how much contemporary Argentinian theatre do we ever get on see on mainstream UK stages? (Apols in advance if the script turns out not to have legs.) But, yeah, on this showing, can I imagine Lucy Ellinson or Denise Gough leading a production at the Gate next year? Está certo.

La Réunification des Deux Corées – Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite

[seen 10/07/14]

Having exorcised, or at least confessed, a load of my worries about my fit-for-purpose-ness in terms of me covering this festival yesterday, it was a relief to come across a show where none of those misgiving were really remotely relevant.

This is the first thing I’ve seen by Joël Pommerat, but the fleeting presence of Young Vic artistic director, David Lan, at the festival – just to see this show – gives you some idea of the sort of level of European/international talent we’re talking about here. And I also thought it was pretty good.

La Réunification... is played on a very long, narrow, black traverse stage – here constructed on the stage of Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite’s main house (like Blackwatch at the Barbican, but thinner). And, my God, Éric Soyer (both lighting and set, interestingly) could teach everyone who’s ever lit a British show in traverse a thing or too. You could barely see the opposite bank of audience despite the fact that they were only a few metres away. The whole piece is played in striking levels of darkness – the blackouts themselves really are black, brief, and whole sofas, large armchairs, and even beds silently appear and disppear within seconds. (Apparently the company made night-vision films of themselves doing the scene changes to learn how thy could get them faster and now they’re pretty much just muscle memory. Ordinarily I think blackouts – especially furniture-moving blackouts – are the worst thing since traverse staging: here they acquire the interest of a conjuring trick.) So, yes, the look of the thing is essentially stark, slick, modern, and often involves a few chic pieces of Heals-looking furniture magically turning up.

Onto this stage spill successive, unrelated scenes. In fact, it’s like nothing so much as a very French Love and Information, albeit with longer scenes and fewer of them. Even the milieu feels similar – largely middle class couples playing out stock scenes from romantic comedies or tragedies (a bride in her wedding dress gradually discovers that her husband-to-be has been intimate with pretty much her entire family; a sex-worker offers not to charge a man for sex, then does; a teacher argues with two parents that nothing happened when he shared a bed with their child, and so on...). Of course, the accretion of such scenes creates a feeling of investigation, or deconstruction. By and large, I understood what was happening in each scene and what everyone was saying (my French is much better than I thought it was. Phew). What my French doesn’t run to is spotting the literary merit and the moments within the show where suddenly the register would shift and in the midst of the trite truisms and stock phrases of courtship or break-up something – according to one of my Portuguese colleagues – shining, breathtaking and true would suddenly turn up and flatten everything.

This information certainly allayed my main reservation while watching the piece: that it might all be a bit middle class. And I do wonder, if the emphasis is so much more on “love” than, well, ideology, I suppose, whether I mightn’t still have had a tiny reservation about it. But, without it being in English (I’m not sure if even surtitles would have done the job here), then it’s impossible to say. It might contain those critiques too. [edit: another Portuguese colleague who saw it last night just expressed a lot of reservations about how “manipulative” he thought the show potentially was, in terms of it’s use of music and situation to create a kind of tear-jerk effect. I’m not sure I fully believe that either, but it’s interesting to hear such a contrasting perspective.]

In terms of plotting the piece on the international scene, it seemed to me to be like how you might imagine a particularly stylish, French, auteurial take on Attempts on her Life could feel. It has “international festival circuit” written all over it, and is absolutely no worse for it. Indeed, there was something hugely reassuring about the brio with which bold choices had been confidently made.

The acting is good, too. Although, basically just really raw, truthful accounts of often heightened emotions. So: French, basically; perhaps. More striking, although perhaps already something of a visual cliché, is the kind-of androgynous Elvis figure who sings, unaccompanied, in a couple of inter-scene breaks. I have no idea off-hand if s/he was played by a man or a woman, or the costume was used by more than one performer. The first “song” is deep, haunting, like a pitch-shifted Anthony and the Johnsons, perhaps. Another more alto, but similarly husky and tortured. (These bits, btw, if they had words, I didn’t pick up on them).

Although hard work without surtitles, this is imaginative, intriguing work. You could totally imagine it turning up a the Barbican (it’s quite new, so probably in about five years or something, given the Barbican’s current ability to effect up-to-date programming) and everyone quite liking it. Beyond “quite liking” and recognition of an undeniable level of quality I think it’ll be down to individual tastes how much beyond that the appreciation goes. One thing I will say, though, as far as theatre goes, Žižek’s characterisations of European nations according to toilet-design and philosophy seems to be totally off- as far as French theatre goes. Perhaps there is a certain statement-led violence about the language that I’m missing, but on the whole this feels far more cool and contemplative than violent and revolutionary.

Would be interested to hear just how wrong (or right) these perceptions are. Hmm.

O Tempo Todo Inteiro – Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon

[seen 09/07/14 – also: On National Styles II]

Argentine writer-director Romina Paula’s O Tempo Todo Inteiro is the auteur’s “dialogues with” Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. The rationale for creating it is apparently because, at least in part, “copyrights are expensive”. Which strikes me in equal parts as brilliant, hilarious and foolhardy: massive hubris as a cost-cutting exercise. In the event, my Portuguese-speaking colleagues tell me that it was actually a pretty awesome script/play. However, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, THERE’S NO WAY I CAN POSSIBLY KNOW THIS WITHOUT SURTITLES.

To look at, O Tempo Todo Inteiro is about as purgatorial a thing as you could wish not to see, however. To keep myself amused, after the first twenty minutes or so I started keeping a note of every single visually interesting thing that happened on the stage. There were literally five. The piece was an hour an a half long.

Alicia Leoutre and Matías Sendón’s set did the production’s visual appeal no favours. Basically playing on a poor man’s Thomas Ostermeier set – a big living room delineated by a large metal frame describing the side and back walls, a door, and a cupboard – it also suffered here from playing on the stage of a large concert hall, replete with a lovely warm-coloured wooden wall. As such, the “intended” effect – certainly the effect in all the press photos provided to the festival which show it bleak on a black box stage – was supplanted by something altogether cosier and more reassuring.

On one level, it feels like a crying shame to be reviewing an apparently beautiful play – delicately saying something about everything; about the point of life, or lack of it, with everything submerged beneath surface conversations – by just talking about what I could see. On the other hand, I think my Portuguese interlocutors might be a bit (a lot) less hardline than me about regie and the visual (great band name). This was naturalism gone mad and limp. People who looked like the people they were play standing in a room filled with the furniture that room would be filled with, talking to each other like people do. Obviously that’s fine. Obviously. But none of it looked even remotely interesting. Really. I’ve seen David Hare plays with more visual interest and incident. It really was spectacularly uneventful, even by the often stultifying visual standards of naturalism. (But of course, I have no way of really knowing how I’d deal with this in a British context. What, for example would I really have made of Wastwater if I hadn’t understood a word. A lot more, I think, but it’s hard to know for sure.)

So, yeah. Not really much I can do with this. Apparently it’s a really careful, subtle play. I’d say it’s a catastrophically dull staging, even if you do know what’s going on, but on its own terms the acting seems good, committed, even watchable to a point (a point curtailed by the compounded pointlessness of watching without comprehension).

A rare moment of visual interest in O Tiempo...

As a result of this, and not having anything to distract me during the play, I did find myself having a bit of a think about other things I’d seen without surtitles in languages I didn’t understand. This includes all the stuff I saw early on in Germany and a whole edition of the year’s best Polish theatre at Warsaw Theatre Meetings (crucially, a national showcase, never billed a “international”). And I was stuck by the fact that, going by those pieces, I actually liked (even loved in some instances) watching theatre in a language I didn’t speak. (Another reason, other than assuming there would be surtitles, that I accept this commission.) And yet here none of the Portuguese or Argentinian work I’ve seen so far has made anything like the same impression. (Granted, I found Circle Mirror Transformation fascinating, but...)

I’ve found this interesting. And I’m having a hard think about it.

I think it’s fair to say that both German and Polish theatre is very different from the majority of Portuguese/Spanish-language theatre being presented here (which I emphatically won’t presume to be representative of *all* Spanish- or Portuguese-language theatre). The former tends to have whole extra dimensions beyond the text. The staging and performing have a significant dramaturgical impact on the whole. In the case of several productions here (including a few I shan’t be writing about), there’s a real sense that all that’s been thought about is the most literal way to present the script. Actors who “look like the characters” in rooms that “look like the room” saying the words in the script “convincingly”. And, in the worst cases, without even a decent stage-design in evidence.

Back when I went to the Swedish Theatre Meetings festival in 2008, I wrote an “ask the stupidest question you can think of” piece for the Guardian wondering about the extent to which an entire country’s theatrical output might not appeal to a specific individual (me). I was pretty convinced at the time, at least on the showing of that festival, that Sweden had nothing of interest to offer me. I now wonder if that might not have been more sensibly framed as being a problem of the tastes of the selection panel combined with their own dumb insistence on pieces being “nationally representative”. After all, the next thing I saw in Sweden (Ingenting av Mig, five years later) was awesome.

But, despite it’s curious social structures and superficial lack of conflict, Sweden is at least a Northern European country. And, in my head, in some weird thumbnail-sketch way, I feel like I like Northern and Eastern Europe. On some stupid level, it feels like I at least slightly *get* them. I get the landscapes. I love the sound of the languages. The whole thing feels like *home* on some inexplicable level. I admit that, on the same thumbnail-sketch level, feel almost entirely the opposite about South-Western Europe (Southern France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal), let alone South America. I *really* don’t get the climate and I wonder if that has a bearing on a the culture.

It was my desire to confront this idea, which feels like a ridiculous prejudice, is most of the reason I’m here. And I’m willing myself to be won round. And, finding out more and more about the country’s history and culture are certainly helping me understand more about the place. But history, culture and politics haven’t signalled a shift in aesthetic appreciation yet. While everything’s been *fine* at the level of design, *nothing* South-Western European or South American has yet really connected with me on the gut level of say a bare-stage, modern-dress Polish Three Sisters or Andreas Kriegenburg’s Der Prozess. My favourite aesthetic experience so far has been Ivica Buljan’s Macbeth, a Slovenian show on a bare stage with some LX tape on the floor.

Lisbon is obviously absolutely gorgeous, and the more I find out about Portugal’s history – the strange “in Europe but not *in Europe*” narrative: a right-wing dictatorship from the 1930s, sitting out the war, and finally being overthrown and losing its empire in 1974 – the more I find to relate to, and yet the actual plays, so far, that I happen to have seen, seem strangely too naturalistic and *too relaxed*. Of course, all this keeps coming with the massive health warning that reads “I NEED SURTITLES BEFORE I CAN REALLY SAY FOR SURE” (even a synopsis would help), but in terms of the purely visual, and listening only at the level of sound-rather-than-comprehension, I find myself missing the total dramaturgy of Northern and Eastern European theatre, where, even if totally lost, I find myself continually astonished and enthralled rather than irritable and dismissive.

---

Exercise: basically, reconcile

with:

Argentinia's A Verdade, which won't be getting a review...

Shorts: In praise of... Synonyms For Churlish

[long-overdue]

“Is this it? Is this what we meant two years ago? Two years ago, when we were drunk on Three Kingdoms, doodling Sebastian Nübling’s name all over our jotters. Is this the beginning of the future that we imagined Three Kingdoms had started for us?”

“...You can imagine them, can’t you - on some critics’ away day, methodically recording Scrabble scores in a long-abandoned tournament while everyone else uses the letters to spell out TITWANK and CUMSHOT...”

---

“I’ve been thinking about Hepworth’s 1971 thing a fair bit during the last couple of days, because it’s dawned on me that when I’m 60 (in, ahem, 40-45 years or thereabouts…) I’m going to be sitting on my front step in a panama hat, shouting at passers-by that June 2014 was the best, the most consistent, the most visually and intellectually interesting 30 days of theatre London has ever seen... [And that’s] not including the panel discussion at the ICA in which Matt Trueman flew the flag for a generation of theatre critics that make my heart expand and pupils dilate and tears of love and excitement well up in my eyes.”

---

“My god. MY GOD.

Christopher Brett Bailey is Allan Ginsberg and Hunter S Thompson and Saul Williams and that big red-lipped mouth from Beckett’s Not I. He’s Josef K and Gregor Samsa. He’s Christian Slater in Heathers, he’s Tim Roth in Pulp Fiction, he’s Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers. He’s cinematic drugs like mescaline and peyote. He’s cigarettes. He’s the taste of cigarettes on a kiss. He’s the revolution that will not be televised. He’s your most fucked-up dream where it turns out the guy you’re fucking is made out of cold tapas meats. He’s Godspeed You Black Emperor. He’s Nine Inch Nails. He’s Aphex Twin in a bikini. He’s everything ever released on Sonic Cathedral. He’s a circular saw, blood spatter, crumbling teeth. He’s diabetes and a thyroid problem. He’s the sound of breaking bones.

He’s written a show about dying, in which he sits at a desk and talks for an hour, and which is absolutely positively what dying actually must really be like.

And let me tell you it is fucking incredible.”

---

I could keep quoting for some time. Those are just the recent ones. Her Three Kingdoms review deserves the same status as Tynan’s Look Back in Anger. Higher, actually, since it’s also fun to read.

And, not that theatre criticism’s a competition or anything, but if it was, I think Megan Vaughan would have us all beat. Sure, the rest of us might offer a bit more by way of penetrating analysis, but how many reviews actually give you an impression of the adrenaline rush of actually falling fucking in love with a piece of theatre? Moreover, recently she’s started to become far and away the best chronicler of what’s turning into an extraordinary year for British theatre. I don’t always agree with her, but, Christ, it’s vital stuff.

So, yeah, voice of a generation, I reckon.

Círculo de Transformação em Espelho – Sala Experimental, Teatro Muncial Joaquim Benite

[seen 09/07/14]

Publicity image -- will swap for production photo is any materialise

More or less exactly this time last year (13/07/13) Britain was in the grip of a heat-wave, the Royal Court had just got a new artistic director, and I was writing 2963 words about why I didn’t really like James MacDonald and Chloe Lamford’s production of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, which I had watched in matinee at the Royal Court’s not-even-remotely-air-conditioned off-site space in Haggerston.

Fast forward a year and I’m sat in the Almada Festival’s tented club having just watched a semi-immersive, 1hr45, Portuguese-language version of the same play (and the temperatures outdoors here make Britain’s “heat-wave” feel like a Berlin winter. Mercifully, though, there’s air-con indoors). And finding myself more or less infinitely more charmed here than I was by the British première.

Two things stick out for me in that original review about what’s changed here. In my original review I noted:

“The level of textual fidelity here is quite remarkable. The author’s note, addressed ‘To anyone interested in putting on a production of this play’ is normally the sort of thing I find compellingly hideous. However, Baker’s note seems to come from almost exactly the opposite direction [to a comparable row featuring Bruce Norris]. Where Norris says ‘don’t question my play’, Baker’s note is more like a plea for people to understand her good faith.”

And: “the acting here really is very good. But it is still acting. Even quite demonstrative acting at times...”

I really loved seeing a production that *wasn’t* textually faithful. Firstly, I think it must have been cut. Secondly, while the pauses that Baker was imploring directors not to cut have probably pretty much disappeared, in this context, that’s good. Those pauses in the British version, I now realise, felt like horribly sign-posted emotional blackmail in a broad comedy. Baker writes it funny, writes pathetic characters (at least as the British version had it), and then tells us that we must, at all costs, be precious with them. No one in the audience is really laughing at anyone here. But I suspect that in translation, the odd cruelties that the text does to the characters have been erased. It’s probably too much to suggest that Portuguese is a more sincere, innocent language than English, but that’s sure how it felt. Everyone in this version of CMT seemed really on the level and would say the stuff about themselves that the script demands with complete sincerity and it was taken as such. But, as I say (often at the moment), I don’t speak Portuguese, so I also don’t know how much has been cut.

Other textual infidelities are as follows: I think the company presenting this must be some sort of young company. I don’t think anyone in that production was even as old as me (38), which, for a production where the oldest character is 60 and the youngest is 16, was kind of interesting. Annoyingly, I can’t tell if they were still playing the characters as those ages, just without “old person acting”, or whether we were expected to believe that these bright young things had had children and divorces, or, indeed, whether those details had been cut [I’ll ask]. (And, yes, bloody hell, once again English surtitles would have been useful.)

Semi-immersion! Yup. Rather than watching the play from a raked auditorium, we watched sat round the – alternately blackboard and mirrored-panelled – walls. On garden chairs (again!) or cushions/beanbags. *And* we could join in with *some* of the exercises. Again, thanks to the lack of any handle on the language (– don’t blame me, they invited me. Romania (and every other International Festival I’ve ever been to) has had English surtitles. I thought I’d be fine. Portuguese just isn’t a European language I speak. Understanding what felt like 85% of She She Pop’s show in German has at least stopped me feeling like a monolingual English thug –) I have no idea how this affected the painstakingly crafted original text, but I think we’ve established now that this production was way more robust, and less precious, than either the script or the British première. And, for my money, the “immersion” really worked. Or at least, it made the whole thing really interesting and different. It did also rebound badly on the actors, however. If they hadn’t used real people *as well* in the exercises, I think I’d have come away from this performance saying it was *really* well acted. As soon as you put people being real on the stage with the actors (shades of Tim Crouch’s Adler and Gibb. Again.) you suddenly see what laboured tricks and heavy underlining passes for credible acting. Oddly, it made me think more about the contrast with the British première (“...still acting. Quite demonstrative...”), with the thought, a) Jesus, our naturalism is *really* unnatural and overdone, and, b) Christ, could our casting have been any more signposty? On that score, even overlooking the fact that the cast were radically the “wrong” ages, they did at least just look like some people who had turned up rather than radiating the feeling of being deliberately hand-picked oddballs.

I guess the last thing that endeared this production to me more than the Brit.Prem. was the fact I couldn’t actually understand the small gripes about their lives that the characters spend their time letting slip. I think there was a sense in which the Portuguese cast also took the problems on board at a really different level to the one adopted by their British counterparts. Perhaps it’s cultural, but rather than being studies in embarrassment and crapness, the Portuguese characters seemed like straight-forward people who might actually be invested in their feelings without any ironic detachment. It made the whole thing feel infinitely less like an elaborate exercise in being told not to laugh at characters who have been written as comic caricatures. It’s interesting, by virtue of the translation, Baker’s script achieves the sincerity that it doesn’t actually contain in English.

Al Pantalone – Escola d. António da Costa

[seen 08/07/14]

At what other programmed/curated Festival can you go from seeing a genius Slovenian production of Heiner Müller to a pure museum piece of Commedia dell’Arte? As I type this, the director of the piece (I think/assume) is behind me in the open air Festival club talking at some length about the political import behind the piece. I think. (Obviously he’s doing it in Portuguese, so your guess is as good as mine, but the words “political” and “theatre” are coming up at a right old rate.) On the political import of the piece, I have this observation to make: at one point, someone said the word “Capitalism!” and rubbed their hands together. Another observation I can make is that my French and German colleagues here snuck out of the production early.

As it goes, I was actually reasonably charmed. Al Pantalone was tightly performed and executed with ease by a clearly talented ensemble. It was also nicely designed, and communicated surprisingly well from the large, outdoor stage where it played. I’m surprised that the director is pontificating so hard over there, though. It struck me as an enjoyable piece of fluff, with some less enjoyable crappy gender essentialism thrown in because tradition. I obviously failed to notice whatever the hell it was doing that was political.

Regular readers will have recently re-familiarised themselves with what I think about clowns. And, on one hand, I’d happily see all commedia dell’arte wiped from the face of the world; on the other hand, though, this is variously the genre that succeeds Plautus [and Shakespeare?], and inspires Goldoni, Moliere, The Magic Flute, and probably some other things that are nearly worth hanging on to (halfway through that sentence, I realise I’m also not mad keen on the Magic Flute or Goldoni, but you get my point: it’s a big old tradition thing, and is at the very least ripe for subversion, critique, and appropriation, so seeing quite a reverential is at least of interest to theatre trainspotters).

In this instance, if it was being subverted, then the subversion was very much at the level of the text, rather than any observable changes to the visual proceedings which saw two older men, one young man, and only one (young) woman, charging slowly about playing what seemed like a pretty standard “rom-com” about a young woman being molested by old blokes and falling in love with a young idiot. Still, the characterisation of the old blokes was quite funny. Zanni set my teeth on edge like nothing else, and the woman’s part amounted to: “Love-interest in low-cut top. Simpers”.

Not sure there’s much else I can usefully say about it really. I liked it, but found it politically objectionable. I’d be interested to know how it was politcal to the director, because, without words, it looked like a sexist car-crash. I wonder if that’s a new Best Acid Test for sexism – one which defeats the “we were being ironic” defence in a single stroke.

No. Just no. Teeth-on-edge infuriating.

Chap on left oddly reminiscent of N. Farage, I thought...

Macbeth after Shakespeare – Incrível de Almadense

[seen 08/07/14]

Novo Kazalište, Zagreb and Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana’s co-production of Heiner Müller’s “adaptation” of Macbeth is something of a puzzle. And the puzzle is this: the reason that this is Müller’s “adaptation” or *version* of Macbeth doesn’t come from the playwright’s 30-year-obsession with the play and “desire to destroy it”, as it does with Hamletmaschine. It simply comes from the fact that the play is written in English and Müller was directing it in German. To this end, he simply made a translation and several edits. Edits of much the same sort that any British director doing the play might make. Müller’s big thing is apparently the de-witchification of the play. He worried that the witches spell pre-determinism, and wanted his version of Macbeth to reflect instead the endless cycle of violence begetting violence, and how this is initiated by a ruling class, mostly at the expense of the lives of their working class soldiers. “The piece offers no utopian belief in a revolution that might change the world” the programme concludes. I think I’m right in saying that he has also wordlessly inserted a final moment at the end, where, having killed Macbeth, McDuff hails Malcolm as King, and Malcolm promptly has him killed; echoes of Stalin’s way of periodically killing off all those who in his inner circle who had got closest to him, as they presented the clearest successional challenge to his absolute authority. It’s a sharp point and a nice invention, but not more so, really, than Sam Mendes’s idea of having Lear batter his Fool to death in his recent NT production. The puzzle, then, is why a Slovenian company, working almost two decades after Müller’s death, would choose to stage (faithfully, I assume) a version of a German translation of an English play, rather than simply translate the play for themselves and make exactly the version they need/want. Ivica Buljan’s production makes an incredibly strong and clear case for the reasons.

What’s most fascinating about this staging (and, I have to say, because it was in Slovenian, I have no idea of the extent to which Müller “adapted” Shakespeare’s actual lines) is the way in which, just as Müller de-Shakespeared Shakespeare, Buljan re-Shakespeares Müller. Or at least, the text is played the least like any staging of Heiner Müller I have ever seen, and at the same time makes a pretty recognisable Macbeth. Of course, part of this comes from the fact that the text is no longer in German. Even when translated into English, Müller’s poetry retains a certain chilly rigidity. Rendered into Slovenian, it gains a violence and heat that I’ve never heard in his work before. As with Damned Be The Traitor of His Homeland (also Slovenians directed by a Croatian, interestingly) you notice the capacity for the Slovenian language to sustain violent outbursts, or prolonged shouting, in ways that English (or Portuguese, I’d say) simply doesn’t. Added to this is – again, particularly noticeable in the wake of Damned... – the enviable physicality of the performers.

It’s also fascinating to see this production of Buljan’s *after* the arguably unsuccessful experiment of having him transpose his working methods onto a Portuguese cast. Here, with a comparatively local cast (sorry, I honestly don’t know enough about the differences in performance styles between ex-Yugoslav countries to be able to make any useful comparison between Croatian and Slovenian actors), his aesthetic really flies. The piece is played in-the-round, a format which I pretty much detest. Here, “the round” is made up of white plastic beach/garden chairs, forming a relatively small square stage in the middle of Incrível de Almadense’s much larger auditorium (one which, ordinarily, would be dominated by the large pros. arch stage that I’ve got my back to). The two tiers of balconies and the stage are all made use of, raced round, stamped on, climbed up and sung from, but the real meat of the relentless, kinetic action takes place on the floor right in front of us – “off-stage” for the cast are several front row chairs with “reserved” signs sellotaped to them; they even do their costume changes sat there. And I loved it.

This is the most violent, physical, pounding Macbeth I’ve ever seen (and the third foreign one I’ve seen in a row – previously: Poland and Germany – Rupert Goold’s “proper” Stalin-era West End one with Patrick Stewart seems but a distant memory now). It opens with the whole cast (minus Lady Macbeth – Milena Zupančič, 67) in combat trousers and vests (an old aesthetic, but one seldom pulled off as convincingly as here – if anything this company looks more credible as fighting unit of irregulars than of actors; not the skinny, pampered, vain thing you usually see when British companies try it) basically fighting each other. Like, really. (Apparently after this performance one actor actually was hospitalised. I’m not really surprised. None of the fighting is fake, or even choreographed as far as I could see). It’s established that Macbeth has won, Duncan is pleased, and the scene shifts into a stage bathed in red light and the men all kinda getting it on. As with Macbeth’s wife being played by an actress old enough to be his mother (just about), I have literally no idea what this homo-erotica intended to signify. Most likely a kind of Spartan/Athenian warrior society where men have wives, but also seem pretty comfy with bloke-to-bloke action. Other tropes are more legible. Like Damned... it has a sequence in which corpses dressed only in their pants are dragged by their arms into a line, like a line of so many ribcages, recalling not only photos from Auschwitz, but also of those mass graves, or not-even-graves, in ex-Yugoslavia. Similarly, the point where Macbeth seems to be graphically gang-raped by soldiers also feels horribly familiar from stories coming from the ex-Yugoslav conflicts. The banquet at which Banquo’s ghost appears (oh yes, they’ve de-witched, but there are still ghosts), has turned into a violent turbo-folk charged vodka or slivovec (or is it šljivovica?) party.

I’m not entirely sure what (Shakespeare) scene it is, but, post-rape, Macbeth gets a long solo spot on stage (originally: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...”, perhaps?), during which Marko Mandić (Macbeth. Stunning) works himself into an actual frenzy and is, by then end of the scene, naked, pumped, and covered in sweat. He lies still for a minute and then goes round the audience front row offering his armpits to them to smell. The other quite brilliant bit of audience interaction is when a soldier has just been killed another soldier turns to a woman in the audience and abruptly commands: “This is your part. He is your husband. Scream.”

So, without ever feeling like it’s labouring a point, Buljan’s production here feels like it at once presents as effective a Macbeth as you’re ever likely to see, and at the same time drags it, horrifyingly into the recent present conjuring the ghosts and still-present horrors of the ex-Yugoslavian conflicts. And, at once honours both Shakespeare and his interpreter and theoirst, Müller. I imagine some of my ex-Yugoslavian and Eastern-European friends might find/have found this production a little “normal”. And, without wanting to disparage British Shakespeare – which is pretty much an entirely different creature – if this was our baseline for “a bit ordinary” that would be no bad thing either.

Impalpável – Fórum Romeu Correia

[seen 07/07/14]

Argentinian company Cine-Teatro Constantino Nery’s Impalpável (translated in the programme as “impalpable”), is as fascinating an experience (for me) of cross-cultural incomprehension and otherwise as it’s possible to imagine.

Based on the works of Manuel Puig (of which I’m dimly aware at best; he wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman, right?), it’s described in the Festival programme as a “hidden gem of alternative theatre”. And, having seen it, I can kind of see what they’re driving at. The piece is squarely situated in “devised, fringe-theatre -land”. What’s interesting is to see such a show – imagine anything with a single-wallpapered-flat-with-two-doors-in-it-as-back-wall (anything from the Old Red Lion will do) – put in the centre of the stage in the Lyttleton (ok, the main house at Fórum Romeu Correia is slightly smaller than the Lyttleton, but you get the picture). So, I have to start by saying straight-up congratulations to the company for not just getting lost in the space with a show that I can only presume is used to playing venues roughly an 8th of this size. Credit then to performers Elisa Bressán, Malena Schnitzer, and Paula Manzone.

Just before the show, I happened to have been reading Doon MacKichan’s violent Hay Festival lecture on feminism in the New Statesman, so I was in a bit of a funny mood. I was also thinking a lot about the representation of women on stage (and screen). As such, three women coming on stage dressed in the costumes of archetypal fifties housewives sat oddly with how I was feeling. That the piece is directed by two men (Ignacio de Santis and Sergio Calvo), based on the writing of a third man, initially did precious little to offset this unease. On the other hand, the programme seems to gloss over Puig’s homosexuality in terms so euphemistic (“Puig said he took refuge in the cinema to escape from a reality that was not suitable for him... judgements made by others about his way of life”), that you could almost miss the fact that it’s probably the point of the stories, if not this use of them.

So we end up in this weird place where heavily encoded stories by a dissident gay Argentinian writer are used by a group of three women (directed by two men), to make a piece which seems merely to celebrate the actual narratives of the stories – ideas of escapism from conformist fifties housewife-dom, either by actually going off and living the dream of trying to become a film star, or by watching films in between a load of domestic chores. A lot of the stage time is taken up with two of the women, competitively rolling out dough, greasing baking tins, a whole load of domestic stuff.

Tbh, without surtitles, it was impossible to get more out of it than that. The company performed with sufficient charisma to make the hour pass without too much discomfort, even if they were employing a stage-language of such resolute literal-mindedness, it’d have looked staid at the Old Vic. I dunno. Ultimately it *looked* more reactionary than not. But then they could have been reciting Das Kapital while doing it as far as I know, so...

Testament – Culturgest, Lisboa

[seen 06/07/14]

I loved Testament, but it turns out to be one of the hardest things I’ve had a stab at in a long while. As a result, he following is possibly a bit of an experiment in form-following-form postmodernism.

I first came across Germany’s She She Pop at the 2008 Baltoscandal festival in Rakvere Estonia, where they were doing their 2004 show Why Don’t You Dance? (Warum Tanz Ihr Nicht?). I can hardly remember it at all: it didn’t make a big impression on me at all. Testament premièred in 2010 at the HAU theatres in Berlin. I was living roughly 10 minutes cycle-ride away from the theatre at the time, and yet it has taken me four years to actually get around to seeing it (including missing it in London last month thanks to being in Romania).

(Other nice contextual information: She She Pop are apparently from the University of Gießen, where Hans Thies Lehmann teaches, and where Rimini Protokoll and my mate Anna Teuwen from FIT also trained; an apparently magical place like QMUL, Dartington and Goldsmiths all combined with the effect of completely re-wiring of one’s sense of theatre forever.)

Testament is She She Pop’s take on König Lear. It consists of four members of the group (three female, one male) being on stage with three of their fathers. The piece semi-methodically works through the scenes of Shakespeare that include both Lear and his daughters – of which there aren’t many, given that they’re necessarily apart for most of the play. Indeed, the running time here (2hrs) is probably significantly longer than the scenes under discussion, but still – mercifully – half the length of Lear itself.

On FB yesterday, after I’d posted an update wondering what a particular song was, the following discussion took place:

Peter Boenisch: “Re: the song – it's a different one for every performance, just as the performance exists is different permutations of performers and their fathers. It depends on the availability of fathers and daughters. No idea whether the same pairings travelled to London than to Portugal, or where you are. Many general segments are the same but some are between the individual daughter and father, quite obviously, so the girl with the Greek background has a different 'dad's favourite song' than others.”

Holger Syme: “To add to Peter's point above: they have also staged the show with actors (or at least one actor) standing in for daughters, which I find both intriguing and problematic (especially as they didn't announce the fact when they performed it this way in Toronto). The fathers are always the fathers. “

Francisco Frazão: “I'd find it very odd if they really used an actor in Toronto. I imagine they did the same thing there as they were forced to do in Lisbon: because one of the announced fathers (Manfred) wasn't well enough to travel, he was replaced by another father (Peter); and the daughter who was already coming (Mieke) played Peter's daughter (Fanni). This was all decided the week before the show, and we had to change a lot in the surtitles because of it. Actually, the performance allows for this, when it discusses the difference between a character and a "position": Peter isn't being Peter onstage, but he can perform the position of "Peter" better than an actor; and Mieke was able to do the same with ‘Fanni’. ”

HS: “Well, by 'actor' I do mean another member of the company, but not (as in Mieke's case) another daughter -- as far as I know, the performer joined She She Pop after Testament had been created (I'd have to dig out my program from two years ago to check). But while I think you're right that 'Peter' isn't Peter, literally, he is always played by Peter (right?); whereas 'Mieke' or 'Fanni' or whoever can apparently be played by other members of the company. (And if I remember what Mieke told me correctly, there are passages of the script where one child's conflict with a father is switched to another -- I think there's a section where what she and her father are acting out is actually a problem between Sebastian and his father. Does that sound familiar?)”

FF: “I would be curious to know what was the solution in Toronto, and I also think that there is a difference between the performers, in that a father wouldn't explicitly play a different father - something that has happened with the daughters. But I know for instance that the speech about the three ways of leaving an inheritance, with the accompanying graph, can be made by either Manfred (who's a physicist and does a more elaborate version of it) and Peter (who is an architect) - so in a way Peter would be playing "Manfred"... And I'm sure, like you say, they need to switch around other sections, like the ones where they repeat the dialogue in rehearsal, depending on who is on stage. What helps me interpret these permutations is their statement that they use autobiography not as content but as a method - for reading King Lear, for instance. An entirely different kind of 'method' acting! ”

Even if the details seem obscure if you haven’t seen the piece (and hell, it feels like quite an obscure discussion to me and I have), it gives you an idea of the the level of complex “reality” at which the piece functions.

Rather than trying to “stage the play”, the scenes created by the group explore their own relationships with their fathers through a series of what might almost be called exercises or illustrations. As we see from above, the fathers are “really” the fathers of the regular performers in the company, but they don’t always necessarily “play” the father of their own child. Get that? Got that? Good. They also read from the (German version of) the play. (And, yes, it’s true; Shakespeare does sound better and make more sense in German.) There’s a lovely bit, married up to the point in the play where Lear turns up at Regan’s house (or Goneril’s can’t be bothered to look it up) with 100 of his men and asks to stay, where one of the group shows what would happen if all the bookcases in her father’s four-floor West German house were moved into her (not small) Berlin apartment.

At another point a father delicately, falteringly sings “I Will Always Love You”. To be honest, its one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen on a stage. The quiet attempt to maintain dignity by this small German man singing as quietly as possible into a very loud mic, perhaps partly milking the effect deliberately, but also – because shown in live-feed camera, also focussed on to such a degree that we can see every tiny tremble and flicker across his face – somehow all the more real for it, all while doing something ostensibly comical and silly... And, at the same time it seems to manage to say everything about both parental love and the death of Cordelia (which I think was the section it was attached to). So, yes, blimey.

Elsewhere the various fathers share their own favourite records (I assume favourite, anyway). From one’s pick of a classic bit of German ersatz rock’n’roll, to the Greek immigrant's choice of Ειμαστε Δυο by Μικης Θεοδωρακης this section also feels pretty magical. Especially that Greek song, which seems to magically communicate probably the reason he wound-up in Germany (the song is an anti-dictatorship song from pre-revolution Greece) a much as anything to do with his taste in music.

If I had a small gripe with the piece, its that it contains so many apexes, so many gorgeous crescendos, that it felt like there were several false endings. Small thing, really, but interesting. Nevertheless, I was really content that it just kept on going and expanding. I was also happy because, since nothing at this Festival has English surtitles, here was something that I could actually understand (pretty much entirely. Possibly not subtleties and minor details, but...).

So, yes. Beautiful, tender, intelligent searching piece of work – facts that I fear this review entirely fails to capture.

And here’s that song: Μικης Θεοδωρακης – Ειμαστε Δυο

Cais Oeste – Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite

[seen 05/07/14]

Croatian director Ivica Buljan’s new production of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1985 play Quai Ouest (Quay West) is an odd beast. Commissioned by the Festival on the strength of his production at the festival last year, it’s a Portuguese-language production of a French play using Portuguese actors directed by a Croatian, who directed them speaking French. Got all that? Good.

The results are, well, mixed. Advertised in the Festival programme as being 1hr30, it turned out to be 2hrs20. As a result, I spent the latter half of the production thinking it was probably the longest hour and a half of my life. Which it literally was. If I’d been braced for 2hrs20, I think I might have felt more kindly disposed to it. Similarly, if it had started earlier than 21.30, I might have struggled less with the whole staying-awake-through-it thing (it came after this, this, and this).

So, yes, during the performance I wasn’t feeling very kindly disposed to it. That said, having slept on it, I wondered how I’d have felt about the piece if it was the only show I saw in a day, and it had had English surtitles. Much better, I think. There was still a massive sticking point and it was this: the whole performance started on something like defcon one. Or the second highest level of tension in that John Wright exercise (the highest level there is paralysis. IT definitely wasn’t that). Basically, everyone was hyped-up to the max and screaming their heads off from the get-go.

The (also infinitely long, but strangely watchable) pre-show, had two of the male members of the cast (programme has cast-list but not character names) vigorously exercising, lifting weights, doing push-ups, boxing, and generally looking ripped and topless. It was striking and visceral. If the rest of the show could have managed to communicate this coiled tense energy without the resorting to shouting then it could have been remarkable. At several stages I was recalling Ivo van Hove’s A View From the Bridge, and trying to pin down what it was about that that made virtually the same acting style work so astonishingly there that wasn’t working out here. (Other comparisons to Sebastian Nübling’s work with Junges Theater, Basel or No99 would also be relevant.)

Something else about the production was also fascinating – it had a more-or-less constant musical soundtrack (again, not unlike the van Hove). Here, instead of Faure’s Requiem, however, it played, well, from what I remember it was mostly smoky-sounding jazz, which, along with a (pre-recorded?) voiceover lent the whole thing the air of a modern film noir, crossed, inevitably, with David Lynch. Jean-Guy Lecat’s huge naturalistic hangar/warehouse set adds a Tarantino-like flavour to proceedings.

Not having English surtitles, the absolute intricacies and subtleties of the plot – I already vaguely knew the play from ages ago – eluded me, but didn’t seem too crucial. The relationships, even through the adrenalised yelling, seemed pretty clear. Maria Delgado, writing in ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres, says of Quay West: “[it is] one of Koltès most emblematic works, a brutal interrogation of outsiders entrapped in a hostile urban wasteland, an abandoned warehouse, vestige of a once bustling dock in an unnamed city which we presume to be New York... The play, rejecting clear plot lines, exposition, narrative development and psychological reasoning, revolves around a series of encounters – all governed by commercial motives – which bring the various displaced persons together. All the character are enmeshed in a climate of deals and transactions that bind them in a series of complex and unexpected ways.”

I couldn’t have put it better, even if I did speak Portuguese.

I’m not sure that in this production I’d had automatically assumed it was New York, though. Granted Koltès initial inspiration was this, but here – perhaps because it was played in Portuguese – I didn’t for a moment think about America. (Aside: that’s a strange thought, isn’t it? As a native English speaker, I basically get that something is American normally from the attempt at the accent. Or, in the case of Germany – especially the productions of Frank Castorf – I get that characters are American because they’re wearing cowboy hats, draped in the star-spangled banner, and generally sign-posted to hell and back. Here I don’t have any insight into how they might be thinking. I imagine it might be like a non-English speaker watching a modern dress English production of Chekhov. There’d be no real reason to think what they were watching was “set in Russia” at all).

Throwing the question of Buljan’s general aesthetic out to colleagues – apart from several glowing character references, which make me really want to meet the guy – I got a brilliant response from the Slovenian critic Rok Vevar, which situates his work in a longer/wider context: “As the theatre director he’s mostly loved and adored because people cannot really make up their minds what they are seeing when they are watching his performances.

“The problem is that they are not all good but most of the people that I’ve talked to have a hard time articulating which Buljan is good and which not so much. - I think he’s well off with non-realistic texts or specifically the texts that use highly poetic language to address a certain hidden reality or ‘physically burning issues.’ - What he's doing as a director is supplying a language landscape with some kind of a parallel stage reality that is very corporeal, physical, material or sometimes even animalistic. (That’s why some novels can be useful for him for staging.) What he's doing as a director is that he's searching for a physical stages/ levels of language with his actors/ performers. He does not really know how to or want to make a psychologically consequent representations of characters and he's not interesting in coherency in stage narration. He's making theatre as a kind of praying machine - exorcising something from the language to show its vital aspects. - Basically as a director he’s sculpting language or searching for its proper body/physicality or cry for it. His performances are humorous but in many cases painful as well. I think Koltès is his playwright. - He’s not good with the texts that function as musical score - the ones that he has to compose and conduct in the musical sense.”

Which is about as brilliant an articulation of what I saw as I could wish for – and with the added advantage of knowing more of the oeuvre.

So, yes, that idea of physicality – an actor quoted somewhere else recalls rehearsing with Buljan as non-stop physical training to achieve a kind of trance-like state – is really present here. On one level it feels slightly problematic that it doesn’t immediately become a legible stage language. On the other hand, we’re open to other sorts of ways of theatre working on stage, right? It’s a matter of the stage teaching you how to watch it, or, if not the stage itself, then context, criticism, and colleagues’ explanations. Now I’ve had the conversation, it feels like the thing that was worrying away at my mind – the sense that even though in-the-moment I hadn’t *liked* the show there was something valuable, not-dismissable, about it – has been satisfied.

It’s worth noting that my Romanian colleague Iulia Popovici observed of his Zagreb International Festival: “...mainstream, big names, rather boring. But I'm not Croatian.” Which I can also imagine. Describing the SpielArt Festival in Munich, I found myself saying: “It’s the sort of place where you would see Forced Entertainment, but not, for example, Quay West.” That sort of Big Euro- Regietheater that to the younger generations’ most-forward-looking artists, it the Main House Establishment that they’re kicking against. Since all that stuff is relatively new to me, I certainly don’t have the same level of fatigue, and can recognise the artistry (even if it’s not exactly panning out), but at the same time, even with my unfamiliarity, the feeling that it’s established style rather than experiment still reads – although, here it’s complicated by the fact that this was also a totally new way of working for the Portuguese cast.

Ultimately, what I think I’ll take away from the production was the way in which Buljan used the peripheries. On either side of the huge warehouse set, the characters who weren’t appearing in a particular scene would creep and scuttle around, watching the action in hiding, or simply getting on with some curious, impenetrable task of their own devising. It was perhaps this, the creepiness of the voyeurism, and the fear of the voyeur, that signalled that this was work from a director of some vision, even if the central action of that vision wasn’t quite coming off in this instance.

E se Nos Metêssemos ao Barulho – Pátio prior do Crato, Almada

[seen 05/07/14]

Et si on s’y Mettait Tous! is about as big a departure from what I gravitate toward seeing in theatre as it’s possible to imagine. Played outdoors – here in what seems to be a residential courtyard, albeit one already fitted with lighting bars and LX plug-sockets: most strange – it is pretty much the Frenchest thing I have ever seen in my life. Four clowns, initially in full mask, looking like so many Mr Potato-Heads rock up in a converted transit van, pop open the side, and explode into gales of laughter at the assembled audience, pointing, shreiking and overdoing it, as clowns are wont to do.

If the show, created by Le Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne (or produced/supported by them), is interesting, and I think it is, then the main points of interest are perhaps the authenticity (or at least highly successful impersonation of authenticity) of this style, the age of the performers (I’d guess all over sixty at least), the method by which it’s been made (a kind of dramaturgical collage of bits from – among others – Shakespeare, Marx, Brecht, Robert Walser (again!) and various songs), and its subject: the financial crisis.

I would argue that French Clowns are probably just about the worst way of dealing with the financial crisis (or anything else, come to think of it), but that’s purely a matter of taste and philosophy. I accept that to other people, it’s the best possible idea. When I aired this view last night, a Portuguese colleague wondered if any theatre was a good way of dealing with the financial crisis. And that’s a fair point. I guess I just mean that there are modes of analysis and interpretation that I find more sympathetic and comprehensible, not to mention amenable to how I already think. (Yes, I’m in the choir that wants preaching to. I’m fine with that. I mean after all, that’s why the members of the choir go to church, right?)

It’s an interesting problem, because I think in a lot of ways that the figure of the audience-bullying, unfunny, cajoling clown is actually a more or less perfect way of illustrating a lot to do with the structural violence of The Crisis, of “socialism for the rich” (state bail-outs for the 1%), and so on. The problem here is that banker and servant are all more or less pressed out of the same cookie cutter, all various shades of the same long-faced, hapless-yet-malicious bouffon. And, here, also, with only my rusty French to guide me, it seemed that whatever the critiques being deployed, they were, at least visually, somewhat hamstrung by the physical comedy to which they were mostly subjected. Smacking capitalism’s arse, or showing Greeks with facefuls of custard pie, only gets us so far in dealing with the savagery of the recession after all.

But, of course, I’m playing some sort of poker-faced clown of my own here. To critique a clown-show – even one dealing with “the crisis” – so straight-facedly is ridiculous. This is a perfectly good example of not-my-thing, and not being my thing rather destroys my ability to offer a more detailed analysis of its real technical achievements and failures. There is something rather joyous to see a company who look like they might have been peddling this sort of agit-prop since Maoism was last fashionable in France in 1968, but if they think their total failure to effect change is invisible then they’re mistaken – it’s etched over their faces and every gesture. Perhaps this gallantry in the face of failure is more the point, and if so, it’s courageous strategy, but also a bloody depressing one.

The look like the living embodiment of that old slogan of Pina Bausch: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”

They also look lost.

Branca de Neve – Fórum Romeu Correia, Almada

[seen 05/07/14]

Companhia de Teatro Contemporânea’s production of German writer Robert Walser’s verse drama Schneewittchen (Snow White) stakes a bold claim to being the most pointlessly static piece of theatre I have ever seen. I’m sure it can’t be, but I’m struggling to come up with a contender. The cast of four are all stood under an apparently pointless wire frame, and attached to it with four bits of elastic/string each, running from their heads or collars up to the frame. The string isn’t taut, but not once do they even strain it. They’re all under spotlights, as are four apples: one dangling near each performer. There are a bunch of other (large, red) apples dotted about on the ground. There’s also a bloke with an electric guitar closer to the front of the stage (and not attached to the frame. Not that it matters. He doesn’t move either).

There is a further problem here, in that I don’t speak a word of Portuguese and there are no surtitles, so I’m denied the chance to at least read Walser’s text, which is presumably quite good. However, even without surtitles, I can recognise vocal patterns, and the ones here are straight from the school of “nice loud voice does ‘acting narration’.” It’s the same school of speaking that people on Radio 4 adopt for reading poetry, or for over-acting badly in radio drama: *too much* voice, too much emphasis, too many sing-song, swoopy vowel sounds. Oh, and they all do “crap sinister laughter” at several points. I can’t imagine Robert Walser would be very pleased either.

Obviously, I can’t say a word about the text, but no matter how brilliantly written it is, this was still a deeply, deeply inadequate staging of, well, anything, frankly. If you’d stuck it on the radio you’d at least only have had to put up with the annoying vocal style, but as a piece of theatre with pretensions to the visual it struck me as a catastrophic misunderstanding of the medium.

[I notice that they’re the only company who don’t have a full-stage image in the press department’s press images collection so far, too.]

Cartões postais de Almada

[introduction and some fascinating arguments about post-crisis funding]

To Portugal for the 31st Almada International Theatre Festival, and it feels like a bit of a departure in all sorts of different ways. First off, this is actually something I pitched to the Guardian *before going*, rather than – as with Sibiu – something I pitched while there as an afterthought. As such, rather than waiting until a story finds me, I have to go and find the story. Secondly, the location: I’ve been to Festivals from Helsinki, through Borås, Rakvere (x2), Riga, Vilnius, Minsk, Lublin, Warsaw, Berlin, the Ruhr, Munich, Prague, Nitra, Ljubljana, Bucharest, Sibiu, to Sulemaniah. If you look at those Festivals on a map (below), you’ll notice a distinct absence of anything west of Brussels outside the UK (I caught – and signally failed to write-up, I now realise – IIPM/Milo Rau’s Civil Wars at this year’s Kunstenfestival) or (Kurdistan excepted), anything south of Bucharest.

Partly it’s just coincidence, of course – I really should have been to Avignon at least once by now – but partly I do think it’s also a fairly ingrained preference and perhaps also prejudice. By and large, I prefer eastern, northern, and cold countries. I think, subconsciously, I don’t trust art that comes from hot places. Which is ridiculous. So I jumped at this chance to come and find out about south-western European (and a lot of South American) theatre.

The first event at the festival I went to was a *very long* panel discussion (I sat out the chance to see (Italian) Pippo Delbono’s godawful Orchids for a second time, having already endured it once in Romania), on Saturday morning. And it was very useful indeed. Having got to Portugal, I realised I knew literally next to nothing about the place. I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen a single piece of Portuguese theatre, and, worse, I know hardly anything of its history.

After a quick read-up on Wikipedia – don’t knock it, it’s an informative and concise piece – I also got to realise why. Thanks to Britain’s Britain-centric way of teaching history, the reason we don’t get to learn much about Portugal is that we’ve barely crossed paths, except when tussling over bits of empire we both quite fancy (apparently also the whole “Spanish Armada” thing also involved Portugal, and there was some fighting around the Napoleonic Wars there, but...). Indeed, thanks to having already acquired itself a far-right military dictatorship in the 1930s, but also having a US naval/air-base on it’s colonial mid-Atlantic outpost the Azores, Portugal sat out WWII and (like Spain and Greece) retained its dictatorship well past 1945. As such, Portugal totally sits outside what I’ve always thought of as the post-WWII European/world narrative. Instead, Portugal’s key date is the revolution of 1974. This is modern Portugal’s year zero. In this it’s perhaps a bit like 1968 – but with a more successful(-ish) outcome for the left. The dictatorship was overthrown, but after a few years of democratic back-and-forth (no doubt heavily sponsored by the CIA), the possibility of a socialist/communist Portugal was shelved in favour of a neo-liberal economy which became an early adopter and advocate for European monetary union. A move which, post-2008, they’re no doubt rueing pretty hard.  But, enough of my flimsy grasp of history, and to the concrete things which were discussed yesterday...

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The discussion was convened by Luis Miguel Cintra – every year the Almada festival is dedicated as a kind of lifetime achievement award to a leading Portuguese theatre artist, and this year he’s it. To this end there’s also a massive retrospective of his career in the lobby of one of the Festival’s two principal venues, the Escola D. António da Costa, of which I took many photos that I’ll post as a separate piece. Cintra is one of the founding members (and continuing artistic director, I think) of Teatro da Cornucópia (whose work, needless to say, I haven’t got the faintest clue about).

Early on in the discussion, Cintra pulled a neatly controversial move. He produced a copy of a petition/angry-letter about the state of Portuguese theatre that had been written in 1975, the year following the revolution, that had been signed by a vast majority of the people sitting on the panel, including himself. He asked everyone how they now felt they’ve measured up to the demands of their younger selves. It was an impressive gesture, and obviously one that made all the signatories on the panel look immensely uncomfortable. As a point of comparison, imagine someone like David Hare being confronted with Portable Theatre’s manifesto (if such a thing was every written down).

[The following takes the form of an expanded version the notes I took on my phone as the Festival’s excellent press officer Eduardo Brandão valiantly provided an excellent simultaneous translation for me. As such, it frequently becomes just dialogue.]

For me, what was most fascinating about this discussion was the constant tension between these old men and the young men they had once been. Revolutionaries who have become (and remain) the establishment. “That panel represents pretty much all the recipients of government theatre funding” someone explained to me. There were only about 10 people on the panel. There was also an interesting tension between principle and pragmatism. And the question of whether these guys were now just kidding themselves about the revolutionary potential of their current work.

First up to respond was João Mota, now the director of one of Portugal’s “national theatres” (in common with most European countries, there’s more than one National Theatre, the second here is up the coast in Porto). The Portuguese NT in Lisbon subsists on a pitiful state-subsisdy of €1,400,000 a year (and we Brits thought we had problems). It produces only one in-house production a year, and the rest of the time acts as a kind of subsidy distribution service (a de facto Arts Council project-funding body, in fact) for other, “independent” companies, whose work fills its stage(s). His initial take on the document was to deny that he had really betrayed its central tenets of what it called for. This was patently flannel, as one of the things it called for was annual (?) elections to decide the artistic director of the National Theatre.

Another speaker, João Lourenço, saw no distinction between then and now. He called it a “beautiful document” but argued that it only made sense in the context of the revolution. There was “nothing to miss,” about the fact that we no longer lived in a world where there document made sense, but he felt it was useful to know where the current theatre scene had come from. It’s transitional nature is key, he thought, but “appreciated the surprise” of having been reminded of it.

Cinca pressed him: “This almost happened. What if it had?”

João Mota (yes, there were more people called João on the panel than women): “It is [now?/still?] easier for the older generation to get funding from the state, but everything is a process of change: “We’re witnessing the end of ethics and the dawn of great mediocrity. In 1975, we weren't thinking about age, but about political beliefs. Now I’m 71, I know it’s easier for me to get funding. This is different.”

Back to João Lourenço who argued: “You misunderstand. The current government are terrible, anti-cultural. The people who make decisions are totally out of touch. We should not be a part of this.”

Luis Miguel Cintra: “I wish we could write [the document] again. There a bit in it that says: “we wish to be nationalised.” The relationship with the state (then and now) has totally changed. We still have the right to be subsidised. The state doesn’t believe that. The document is a statement by artists at a time of revolution. And it sets of a vision of that state. I still believe this vision of the state.

LMC then spoke about touring Spain and about the relationship between state and theatre there. The younger generation should realise these things about the state: they see the current state as normal. From what João Mota says, observed Cintra, he’s not following the model we proposed in 1975. It’s not the job of he NT to redistribute funds to companies, even if it does it well, which it does. The funds are also meagre. The parliament does not represent the will of the people, but they are still there are there as representatives of the people.

João Mota: Power is filled with contradiction. I have presented my resignation many times. I am still free. I am conducting a public service...

LMC introduces João Brites, and artist who is making work “outside the market”, as he puts it:

Brites kicks off by criticising LMC and sees document as symbol of moment of fracture. He suggests that there needs to be more dialogue between the artists on this panel, let alone with the government. He contextualises his career. His company used to be a children’s company, he talks about funding, about the trials of trying to make project for today... “I still see myself as an independent company. This is a rapturous text of 40 years ago. We don't want to fight each other but we never talk, and when we do talk we talk about subsidies. Cornucópia used to make the public watch four-hour shows... What happened?”
He continues: “These - we - are the most powerful theatre makers in Portugal... We should argue... We have to fight and get angry...”

LMC: [drily] “I don't think that will be a problem.”

Cintra critiques Brites’s move to countryside as “a privilege”. “It is profoundly different to what I do at Cornucópia – but we were privileged to find a space in the middle of Lisboa. And a great designer. And we adjusted ourselves to the funding criteria.” There follows stuff about funding committees: “You have to find your own money if you are going to make three- or four-hour-long shows for audiences of only 50 people.”

Then another quote I found incredibly striking (in a morning of many striking statements): “Young people today take great pride in having created good relationships with sponsors. This is No Reason For Pride.”

Introduces someone else who talks about the catastrophe of private funding. LMC says that he saw this guy’s show, and agrees that it makes no concessions to the market. But how is it possible? Juggling, apparently... However, the show is a monologue... (with the implication that it could not afford to be more).

No, counters the guy [sorry, note-taking didn’t get his name] “It’s not a solution, it’s an artistic choice [it being a monologue].”

Ana Zamora [Spanish artist]: sees work of Cornucópia as exemplary. This doesn't exist in Spain. There we are just building cultural products – terrible. No process, no research. Zamora has pioneered a previously non-existent path. But now, having pioneered, she finds she has to fight the people who followed her for grants. “I cannot create an eight-person show. Funding is episodic. Now we have to sell shows in order to fight funding cutbacks. Now a tricky time, but we need to keep true to our own artistic visions, or else what’s the point?

Brites: I don’t try to sell shows [unclear if he means “with marketing” or “not taking any money for tickets at all”], instead he opens his rehearsals to public and makes the work more public at different stages in its creation [I’m very much reminded of Chris Goode’s Open House experiments here]. “I’m trying to build complex projects, but making them open to the public. As artists we have anc obligation to integrate things that don’t naturally do so. We need to keep in fighting in total independence: political, economic, aesthetic. Each project is like a war. (When groups fight, we have a common memory of the past). The past is with the people still.”

LMC: In Spain, Cornucópia receive no public funding [fair enough, they’re a Portuguese company]. Instead, there they train young actors, replacing role of publicly-funded theatre schools [because those don’t exist/funding has been cut].

Another striking statement: “You can’t call the public “the audience” or they become an instrument for funding.”

Cornucópia is a group of artists. We gets offer for funding, sponsorship, obviously (!) but we reject them because of the terms...

Next up, Miguel Seabra. He is described as an artist who falls between the generations – no longer “young”, but nowhere near old enough to have signed the 1975 document. And, God bless him, he’s the first to mention that there aren’t enough women on the panel.

Seabra apparently makes “social theatre” – Goes into the countryside and villages and makes pieces which explore the recovery of local pagan traditions...

He tells as story about having a stroke and the doctor treating him telling him that he shouldn’t expect to ever be able to use his right hand again. “We should never take hope from people” he says. “We need to try, to fail... We need determination.” He pays producers, which how he buys “artistic freedom”. His age suddenly seems key. He has absolutely no discernible ideology at all – at least financially, he’s all ruthless pragmatism and

Luis Miguel describes Portugal’s artistic landscape as still “post- revolutionary”, but notes that TV shapes actors now. In theatre, less. But you can feel how actors are being changed by being market-ized – how actors are changing themselves to better conform to commercial and public expectations.

Because there is now less funding, there is more control over the work being made. Public servants who don’t watch theatre are the inspectors. Time is taken out of working to apply for funding, and jump through hoops for inspectors.


[And here, Eduardo and I ran out of steam.]

The above is just the edited highlights of what was variously a fascinating and frustrating conversation, but it felt horribly, pressingly relevant to pretty much anyone making theatre in the current financial climate (so: anyone making theatre).  This could be the shape and sound of panel discussions in the UK in as few as ten years time.  And without anything like the same uncompromising (from some quarters) ideological back-up.  Watching the discussion, even at its most frustrating, it felt like these were arguments we also need to be having. And soon, before it all gets too late.  Not just conversations about funding, but on the meaning of funding, about what money it's actually acceptable to take.

There is literally no way of taking a photo of a panel discussion that makes it look interesting, thank heavens for writing. (Luis Miguel Cintra is centre, the guy with the mic (2nd left) is the NT director João Mota.)