The Christians – Traverse, Edinburgh

[seen 09/08/15]

It’s interesting. I didn’t really go for Lucas Hnath’s Death Tax, playing as part of Vicky Featherstone’s inaugural Open Court season, directed by John Tiffany. I snarkily suggested it was the work of a guy who had “read Oleanna until he’d absorbed more-or-less everything you could learn about playwriting from it.”

I’ve no idea if The Christians is an earlier or later play, but whichever it is, in Chris Haydon’s splendid UK première production, without stinting on specifics or tightly constructed characters and arguments, it achieves something close to the universality of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (which is probably the single best “proper” American play ever written).

The set up of The Christians is as follows: We’re in a church. An American “Mega-Church”. The pastor, Paul (William Ganimara), is thanking us and giving a sermon. The large choir behind him sings. He recalls how we’ve built this church up from nothing. How *our* money has finally paid off the debt for this huge building we’re sitting in. And, now, he wants to deal with “a crack in the foundation of this church”. Not a literal crack, but a metaphysical one. Paul is worried about Hell. Paul is worried about the concept of Hell. Paul basically explains that the concept of Hell is inimical to his idea of Christ’s love. He recounts a story told by a missionary at a conference he attended in which a young man who wasn’t a Christian saved his sister from a burning building and died in the attempt. The missionary was saddened that he had not converted that young man thereby saving him from the fires of hell. In Paul’s scheme of things, that is not how God works. Nor is it what Christ says. Or what the bible says. (It’s a great speech, by the way. Properly moving.) It expresses a faith – evidently heretical in parts of America – that Christ didn’t die so that 21st Century Preachers would have something to threaten “sinners” with. Quite the reverse: that, as Paul puts it, God is unimaginable; God doesn’t think like a a small-minded man. It is, in short, about a believe in goodness. Pure goodness, even. An attempt to believe beyond vengeance, and malice, and judgement, and to actually believe in fairness, equality and God’s infinite love. It is A Good Idea. Period.

Almost immediately there’s a counter argument. Paul’s Associate Pastor, Joshua (Stefan Adegbola), *does* believe in Hell. Hell is part of what he’d been believing up until now, and Paul can’t just take it away. Hell is even part of *why* he believes. Joshua leaves and takes fifty congregation members with him. I won’t go through the whole plot now, but you get the point. Later there’s another exchange where a congregant called Jenny (Lucy Ellinson) puts the point again, not only that she’d donated to the funds to pay off the cost of getting the church built on the basis that there was a Hell, but also that isn’t it a bit convenient that Paul didn’t mention this radical change in the church’s direction until after that debt was paid off? And this is perhaps the trickiest part of the play; that Paul has, despite the goodness of his idea, behaved with pragmatism and disingenuity as well. There is a certain amount of bad faith in his good faith, so to speak.

Watching the play, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Labour Leadership election. And the idea of Socialism generally. The play offers one of the most simple, striking images of Conservatism you are ever likely to hear: that a lot of people are happier paying for Hell, and that the Hell they are paying for is for other people. Here they are, this congregation, presented with the watertight, convincing, Biblically backed-up, absolutely supportable suggestion that God loves us all so much that we have all already been redeemed through the blood of His son. And some people prefer the idea that other people – who maybe haven’t worked as hard as them, or made the sacrifices they’ve made, or been as “good” as them – will be eternally damned. They need their “sinners” to suffer.

But it’s not simple. Obviously believing in anything comes with a cost, or at least with a very deep breath. The problem of evil is still a huge theological debate. The hypothetical man who murders their son, or Hitler... Where does God draw the line with this new (to this congregation) forgiveness we’re talking about? Similarly, Associate Pastor Joshua’s own mother was not a Christian. By his absolute, unwavering vision of there being a Hell for unbelievers, he puts his own mother into it.

In short, one possible reading of the play is a study of bad faith, of most people being generally lousy. Of a good man’s good idea being rejected *because* people are either vindictive, or because they lack the imagination for something better. This is the version where Pastor Paul is Jeremy Corbyn (a reading made all the more plausible by William Ganimara’s white hair and short beard – although his folksy American accent and mild manner reminded me of a likeable version of Reagan). However, against this is the idea that he’s prepared to haemorrhage church members, and maybe even sacrifice his marriage for his beliefs. Certainly, as far as the member-haemorrhaging goes, this also could be seen to be a terrible warning re: Corbyn.

It’s interesting that the play – running time 1hr20 – stops where it does. The narrative, though by no means cut and pasted, does echo the story of Carlton Pearson, the Pastor of precisely such an American mega-church who did indeed decide that Hell is what is around us, not some burny afterlife dimension, and that all people are saved. Apparently his story does indeed see him excommunicated from his former church, but subsequently begin a new, successful ministry with a different constituency who found his teachings more plausible and compassionate. That is to say, stopping the narrative where Hnath does, does make this tight, plausible, dramatic and really a very fine study of almost any disagreement between leaders of men – as much Julius Caesar as the Labour Leadership Contest or The Crucible. I was also reminded of the God of Chris Goode’s God/Head, which I don’t think I’ve actually thought nearly enough about.

Haydon’s production is bloody good proper theatre, but actually, it’s also got a lot more avant garde-y oomph than you first suspect. Oliver Townshend’s set is – as required – a big old front end of a church, and Pastor Paul and Associate Pastor Joshua address us through microphones. But then, there are scenes where Paul and his wife Elizabeth (Ha! I knew there was a reason I kept thinking of the Crucible) (played by Jaye Griffiths) are in bed, in their home, and they’re *still* talking to us through microphones from the front end of the church. This strikes me as good and interesting.

So, yes, The Christians is a properly good play. This is a properly good production of it (bleugh, consumer guide-y), but what’s best about it, is the fact that it feels like quite an unusual beast in modern theatre: a play about a good man with (what I’d say is) a(n indisputably) good idea/point, and what happens to good ideas when they go out into the world. That said, seeing the play like that, I wish it could have had a more unapologetically upbeat conclusion. It’d be nice to see the good guys actually win on stage once in a while, wouldn’t it? God knows we see precious little of it in the real world.

Some People Talk About Violence – Summerhall, Edinburgh

[seen 09/08015]

Some People Talk About Violence is great.

I went along knowing only that I *really liked* the company’s last show. To be honest, that is as much as I’d want to know before I went, so – the fact that criticism isn’t a consumer guide notwithstanding – I’d say: go and see Some People Talk About Violence now and then read about it afterwards.

[continues after picture...]

Some People Talk About Violence is a properly brilliant piece of theatre. Barrel Organ (in this instance) are (nominally, on the programme,) a company of one writer, six performers, one director, two dramaturgs, and a technical manager (and many thankees). Only four of the show’s six possible performers appear in any one performance of Some People Talk About Violence, and none of them know which part they are going to play until they are handed an envelope with one of the four parts at the start of the show. The programme goes on to say they don’t know “which sections of the show they would perform” either.

Some People Talk About Violence is a brilliant title.

What you get with Some People Talk About Violence is a real sense of a company who have sat down and had a good, long, proper think about what they want to mean with a show called “Some People Talk About Violence”; a company who have sat down and had a think about what “violence” means, what they want to mean by it, what they want people to think about when they talk about violence.

What’s remarkable about Some People Talk About Violence is that, in Some People Talk About Violence it is actually very rare that anyone actually names an overtly violent action, let alone talks about it. To the best of my recollection – or at least in the sections I saw today – no one is describing some punching, or some kicking, or a beating, or a sexual assault, or something. Or wars, or genocides, or ethnic cleansing, or rape camps, or the A-bomb.

This might be a wild misreading, but I think the strategy of Some People Talk About Violence is – using a series of monologues, sometimes interspersed with a series of games that practically reinvent the V-Effekt before your very eyes – is to make us think about a much wider sense of what violence really is; what even is a violent action? And, beyond this, to think about the idea of structural violence. While watching it, I found myself thinking back to James Graham’s The Angry Brigade *a lot*. When I reviewed it, I think I was quite harsh on the effectiveness of the production. It turns out that actually *so much* of it has stayed with me, especially in the way that the ideas of the organisation were unpacked and explained in the first half. I think Barrel Organ have really thought about what violence really is. Where it starts. What makes people violent, but also where violence stems from, and what is violent without ever even being acknowledged as such.

In theory, the piece tells the story of a young woman (the number of times they call her “a girl”, let’s maybe think about the violence of that). She is unemployed, she breaks into a house, she is arrested, she calls her brother who lives in Thailand with his boyfriend, he calls their mother, he agrees to come home. These events are told in fractured first person sections (three of the cast randomly assigned play Brother, Sister, Mother – maybe these names are violent? – the last cast member is the Narrator). Different bits of experience are related to us. Some work-interview at the Job Centre. The imagined responses of the career officer person. The imaginary worlds the siblings created. The mother’s relationship with her daughter. We essentially look at these relationships and she how *violent* they are without a single blow ever being thrown. And above and around them, the violent structures, the unannounced, unarticulated, unidentifiable state violence that makes these personal relationships violent.

I *think* that’s the content.

But, Christ the form, too. Bloody hell.

Of course the form here can’t be divorced from the content, and as is clear from the above, one can’t be described without reference to the other. But, bloody hell, this is some thoroughgoing stuff. And also, like, the best grab-bag of influences going. The three most obvious are (again, interestingly) Forced Entertainment (but this time Quizoola, Speak Bitterness, etc.), Martin Crimp, and most excitingly, Secret Theatre’s Show Five (reviewed here by one of Barrel Organ’s dramaturgs). I find the possibility of this influence especially joyful. Barrel Organ were already smart; they were smart back in May 2013 when they first did Nothing as phone calls [I think that’s when], seeming to be influenced by Show 5 doesn’t feel like plagiarism. It feels like a cross between a tribute, an acknowledgement and a nod. Sure, I had a tiny bit of Difficult Second Album fear for them. But, if anything, Some People Talk About Violence is even better. It’s smarter, more difficult, more assured, more clever and more political. It feels like a company picking up Brecht’s ideas about political theatre, inspecting them scientifically for veracity, effortlessly working out how that could work in a modern UK context, and then just making this incredibly astute, searching, honest, raw artwork, but presented in such a way as to never once draw attention to either cleverness or difficulty. It’s just as entertaining and fun as it is entirely serious and political. I basically love Some People Talk About Violence.

And, seeing it again, it’ll be *really different*.

I am so seeing it again. ASAP.

[Info bit: 10.40am, until 23rd, £10.50 It plays CPT for the first two weeks in December.
No tour dates announced yet.]

Picture credit: Aenne Pallasca

[Meta-bit: Critics are terrible people – as we already know, right? – but one of the MOST ANNOYING THINGS THAT CRITICS DO is to give things names and make movements, where before there were individual (and unrelated) acts of creation, and MOST ANNOYING OF ALL: PUT THINGS INTO THREES AND CALL THEM “A TRILOGY”. Some People Talk About Violence is the third part of the Warwick Trilogy (the other two bits being Lemonsx5, and The Beanfield). Formally they’re really pretty different (although I reckon I could write a whole essay about the common influences on Beanfield and Violence), but I think thematically they’re *really close*. It stands to reason too. The systematic, institutional violence deployed by the University of Warwick against its own students – while Walrus, Breach and Barrel Organ were studying there – is disgusting. Even in the abstract. In the concrete, it must have a really profound effect on a person. And that is why all three pieces each deal with feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and attempts at resistance in the face of an absolute, unwavering, institutional power. If Warwick University has given these students one thing, it’s a sharpened sense of what Austerity Britain feels like at the business end of a fucking taser. And unstoppable, endless, creative rage.  Which, ironically, is probably the best education we could hope for for our theatremakers.

I wrote that paragraph first before the rest of the review to get it out of my system, but frankly I’ll hunt down anyone I catch nicking it as a thesis. These companies are Much Too Good to be cursed with Trilogification...]

Tadeusz Kantor: Inbetween Structures – Summerhall, Edinburgh

[seen 07/08/15]

[I should say, that this is REALLY NOT A REVIEW. It’s an expression of interest, enjoyment and support, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE SOMEONE SEND AN EXPERT SO I CAN READ ABOUT IT...]

As well as the enviable programme of live performances at Summerhall, it is also well worth making the time to check out their small exhibitions of art-art. In between Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons and 17 Border Crossings, I set aside some time specifically to see the Inbetween Structures.

Tadeusz Kantor is pretty much unarguably one of Poland’s two most important theatre directors of the 20th Century (the other being Jerzy Grotowski). I had absolutely no idea that he was also a visual artist (I apologise for that distinction, and indeed for my ignorance of his work in general, which is pretty limitless).

There are four small-ish rooms of the stuff, here. And, especially in amongst all the noisiness and bustle of the Fringe, it feels incredibly valuable to just wander quietly round and see some really rather well curated original artworks – drawings, paintings, film – being displayed for apparently no reason other than someone thought it would be a good thing to do.

I’ll freely admit here that I don’t know even remotely enough context to talk authoritatively about the pieces, but there is one piece – a kind of poem for an exhibition – translated from Polish which I found incredibly striking:

A work of art,
an isolated
panelled piece,
bought to a deadlock
and closed up
in a structure and within a system,
unable to change or survive,
forms an illusion of creation.

What is essential for creation,
is fluidity
change
frailty
transitoriness,
like life itself...

There is also the film, Attention....Painting! from 1958 also feels somehow incredibly moving. I don’t know what Kantor’s status was in Poland in 1958, or whether the communist authorities there had a more relaxed attitude to abstract art than their Soviet overlords. The film apparently won a prize at the Venice Biennale in ‘58, so I’m guessing it wasn’t fatal. But, it is fascinating nonetheless to sit and watch the film as a document, over half a decade old, and as art in its own right, that is simultaneously itself and so steeped in history and context.

[Info bit: it’s FREE, open daily, and hidden right at the back of Summerhall’s second courtyard, behind the Paines Plough Roundabout thingy, and up some stairs...]

The Beanfield – TheSpace on the Mile, Edinburgh

[seen 08/08/15]

It’s far too early in the day to declare Breach Theatre’s The Beanfield “The Most Important Piece of Political Theatre on The Fringe” but, by God it’s tempting.

The form of the piece is deceptively simple. The company – recent graduates of Warwick University – set out to create a “reconstruction” of “The Battle of the Beanfield” in which armed members of British police force attacked a peaceful convoy of travellers on their way to the Summer Solstice festival at Stonehenge. (“Battle” is a misnomer, but I can’t think of the pithy expression for and the unrestrained violent charging by armed thugs at peaceful people minding their own business.)

They video interviews with the journalist Nick Davies, who happened to be one of the only journalists who witnessed the violence first hand; a woman who was one of the travellers, and a man who was one of the policemen. They also video themselves talking to members of a medieval historical battle reenactment society on Skype, and their own rehearsals, as they practice, well, fake-fighting.

Intercut with these elelments is a highly narrative-ised account of going along to the Summer Solstice in June 2015. It’s told in the second person (“*You* do this, *you* have this thought...” etc.) and delivered in fractured chorus by the whole company.

There are so many aspects of the piece that are properly brilliant. The whole concept of six performers trying to recreate a “battle,” involving roughly five hundred travellers and five hundred police, is – on the face of it – clearly futile. Almost comically so. (although as the cover photo, top, proves, not impossible.)  I was reminded of a lot of what Tim Etchells said ahead of Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works – “We certainly work with frameworks that guarantee a certain amount of “failure”... On the one hand, the tabletop is pathetically small and the objects are ‘dramatically unpromising’, but the interesting thing is that if you do the work in the right way, something happens; something dramatic happens”. This feels at least related to the strategy here: the good intentions and sincerity of the company aren’t enough in themselves, so they have acknowledged this and foregrounded the problem.

At the same time, the narrative part feels like, in a different production, it could easily pass as something by Martin Crimp. It’s got that same musical, pinpoint-sharp, nihilist’s eye for disappointing details of the real world. That same ear for just how awful the things people say and think are.

And, against all this, are the recollections of the violence and the brutality and the sheer hellish reality of what the police did. Beating unarmed men, women, and children. Burning people’s homes. Kicking their animals to death.

Something crucial about this piece, a small fact detailed in the programme, and mentioned only once in the show, is that members of the company were also involved in the *very heavy-handed* police break-up of a peaceful student protest at Warwick University late last year. An actual sound recording of that is played close the the start of the show, and, Christ, it’s pretty self-evidently horrible. The repeated crackling of a Taser, a girl screaming and crying, some people further off being all “WTF?” in disbelief.

It’s fascinating. I almost worried that there were bits where there company were just dicking about on video, and you think, “Is this ok?”. But, at the same time, there was the point where the former-policeman describes how the police that day would be larking about and having banter with each other, and then as soon as a traveller came within earshot they would switch entirely to dehumanising him or her, being vile, violent, and then, later, snapping back into friendly banter.

It’s chilling. It’s chilling not least because *of course* it reminds you of this. And, in a way, that occasional lack of solemnity on the part of the company echoes both this “schizophrenia” (the interviewee’s misapplication) on the police’s part, and the problem of “only pretending”. *Obviously* the company could have cut the bits where they laugh. That they didn’t I think deserves to be treated as an interesting artistic decision and *read* as such. There is another point in the video of the making of the “re-enactment” where one of the company breaks off and is actually upset. It’s a moment which is strangely incredibly affecting.

Primarily this is a brilliant bit of documentary making, reminding a whole new generation of something appalling that happened thirty years ago. But, beyond that, and far more urgent, is the unflinching implication that this isn’t one of those events that we can look back on and complacently imagine that “things were very different then,” and “it couldn’t happen now”. It absolutely can and does still happen.

Most of the hundreds of people beaten up by the police at the “Beanfield” were never charged with a crime. The handful who were charged were not convicted.

There was never an inquiry into the behaviour of the police.

[interestingly, the law was changed the next year, and two of the three Warwick protestors arrested last year were successfully convicted of “Breach of the peace”.]

You leave The Beanfield feeling shaken, absolutely furious, and entirely powerless. Yet, with a strong conviction that at least the future is in the hands of some seriously smart, seriously politically committed theatremaker/activists.

[Times, Dates, Tickets, etc.]

Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons – Zoo Southside, Edinburgh

[seen 07/08/15]

[140] Sam Steiner’s debut play Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons imagines a world in the near future where the government has restricted the number of words people can say to 140 per day. Bernadette and Oliver are a young couple who meet shortly before the limit is imposed – he is a musician and activist, she a lawyer.

[71] Metaphor for both austerity and social media. Real sense of futility of protest. Also, genuinely touching love story. Steiner wise beyond years, great writer.

[59] Director Ed Franklin: beautiful, simple production; Beth Holmes and Euan Kitson: gorgeous, touching, truthful, heartbreaking.

[44] Play reminds from Caryl Churchill Blue Heart to Sarah Kane Four Forty-Eight plus Stoppard and Marber at best. Desperation of trying to say everything to person love within limit plus impossibilty of social change when government control.

[7] Most moving: gives up; just says: Lemons...

[0]


[Time, Dates, Tickets, etc.]

Shorts: Wretched, rash intruding fools

[985 words]

According to Forbes: “the year’s most eagerly-awaited London stage performance may well have sounded the death-knell for that most revered, loathed and – let’s be honest – egotistical of all journalists. The theatre critic.”

Sensationalism aside, it is a claim worth investigating.

If we accept Mark Shenton of The Stage’s oft-repeated maxim that “[c]ritics are, first and foremost, a consumer guide to the theatre” then what place does a critic have at a production that sold out on the day tickets were released; where people camp outside the theatre overnight for the chance to buy one of the £10 day seats? So, yes; in terms of the popular misconception of what a critic’s job is – to say whether a production is good or bad so people can decide whether or not to buy tickets – it is clear, at least in the case of this Hamlet, that the game is up.

Mercifully, that isn’t the job at all. The point of criticism is, yes, to describe the event, but also to offer context and elucidation, to share the experience of the critics’ theatregoing in such a way that the reader who sees the play feels additionally enriched for having read about it too, and that the reader who can’t see the play feels at least adequately briefed, not only on whether it’s good or bad, but also about how a production speaks to our culture, and what it’s saying.

More than this, as Walter Benjamin observes, “The critic is the strategist in the literary battle.” Criticism is political. If you don’t believe me, have a look at Kate Maltby’s star-rated review of the first preview of Lyndsey Turner’s Hamlet at the Barbican for The Times.

[For the avoidance of doubt: I HAVEN’T SEEN THE SHOW YET (apart from anything else, it hasn't opened). The following is based on *reading* and *prior knowledge*.]

On the face of it, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Times – in an effort to have their cake and eat it – have simply hung out a young, inexperienced, very right-wing freelancer to dry, protecting their chief critic Dominic Maxwell from breaking the embargo, but at the same time generating a vast amount of publicity for themselves with a review of the preview so remarkably stupid that *everyone* is talking about it.

But really, her review is much worse than simply an idiot looking at a thing and failing to understand what it is. “This is Hamlet for kids raised on Moulin Rouge” she asserts, on the basis that Hamlet is shown listening to Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy. Seriously? Does director Lyndsay Turner’s work as Katie Mitchell’s dramaturg in Cologne, the presence of Sergo Vares from perhaps the most celebrated European collaboration ever seen in the UK, Three Kingdoms, and Leo Bill, also from the Secret Theatre company (not to mention Turner’s own Posh), Katie Mitchell regular Anastasia Hille, and Rudi Dharmalingam of The Orestia, The Events and The Seagull, not suggest that what’s she’s up to deserves a bit more thinking about than writing off as a Hamlet for infant Luhrmanphiles? Of course it does, but Maltby’s purpose is to belittle the very idea of a director interpreting a play, and instead make the entire thing sound like a series of cheap tricks, mistakes, and misunderstandings.

“The production is squarely aimed at those Cumber-fans, right down the the indefensible decision to open with Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’...” Why “Cumber-fans” would want an “indefensible decision” at the beginning of this production is not explained, and Maltby’s bold assertion that Hamlet isn’t thinking about killing himself at the beginning of the play is rather undermined by the fact that the first time he speaks directly to the audience in the play (as written), within three lines he’s telling us that he wished “the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter”. Much more stupid, though, is the idea that moving “To be or not to be” is even unusual. In Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Hamlet – also seen at the Barbican; only three and a half years ago – the soliloquy recurs throughout the play. In Lithuanian Oskaras Korsunovas’s production “To be or not to be” comes only at the end. Across Europe – including the UK – the text of Hamlet is cut, reshaped, and rearranged, to create a best possible version of the play for its time. It is *extremely rare* to see the full text. But, moving a key soliloquy, especially one which is now so famous that it virtually dissolves the meaning of the production around it when it is spoken, sounds to me like a characteristically intelligent strategy on Turner’s part.

Maltby’s conclusion – “It’s a wasted opportunity: pure theatrical self-indulgence” – even contradicts the rest of the review, which repeatedly claims that it is the fans who are being indulged. It also deliberately invokes that famous time when Telegraph critic and misogynist Charles Spencer reduced Nicole Kidman to her ability to give impotent old men erections.

If the Times review is useful at all, it is as an object lesson in how criticism is political. As a Conservative, Maltby is stuck between despising the public – repeatedly implying that this Hamlet has somehow been cheapened in order to appeal to the degraded sensibilities of the great unwashed – and a traditionalism which sees recent innovations as innocuous as playing a pop song and shifting a bit of text as “indefensible”.

So has this Hamlet sounded the death-knell for criticism? I’d say quite the reverse. Just as the production has created a vast interest around one of our language’s greatest plays, so too has it created the best opportunity for our critics to prove that they are better than mere star-ratings; that at their best they can make productions vivid for those absent, offer interpretations and arguments for those present, and most important, keep culture as a fight worth having.

Theatre & the Free Market

[part two]

In yesterday’s piece, Theatre & Privatization, I presented a short, simplified case against sponsorship, private patronage, and the reliance on “philanthropic giving” in state theatre. This piece is essentially about the problems of the “other side”; about “independent theatre”.  It is a less conclusive, less certain piece than ...& Privatization, not least because I don’t really know what I believe in this context.

At the moment, I’m sitting in Edinburgh where the Fringe Festival is about to start. And – name-the-elephant-in-the-room time – the Edinburgh Fringe is the single largest expression of faith of the free market that theatre has (possibly in the world). As as Lyn Gardner identifies in her thorough piece about the economics of the Fringe in the Guardian yesterday: “For three weeks of the year, Edinburgh is where the UK theatre industry can be found en masse, those hard-to-arrange meetings magically materialise, and shows that nobody has had the time to see (despite repeated invites) suddenly attract programmers...” And it’s the blackmail of this promise/possibility that continues to attract the youngest and poorest artists to the hyper-inflated rents and venue charges of the Scottish capital. (And, *of course* the younger and less established you are, the more you’ll likely have to pay to perform.)

Yes, there are of course anomalies, in what is, after all, a festival of anomalies. As Pleasance Theatre artistic director Anthony Alderson points out in Lyn’s piece, one of the main financial beneficiaries of the Fringe is Edinburgh University, which still provides a free education for Scottish students. On the other hand, last year’s most popular venue, Summerhall, is, as far as I’m aware, privately owned by one man, and registered – perfectly legally – in an offshore tax haven. Ironically, this year its (brilliantly) curated programme there includes the British Council Showcase piece Islands by Caroline Horton. But, like with much capitalism, you find yourself kind of shrugging and thinking, “Well, maybe it’s better that an arts venue is offshored, so its profits aren’t handed over to the government to be spent on Trident, or something.” Maybe you think that, or maybe you think, “Well, yeah, it *is* a shame that this lovely venue is ultimately making one person much richer than everyone else, but, y’know, it’s not being done *obnoxiously*, is it? And the work here *is* really good...”

And this is rather the problem in a nutshell: British theatre is mostly built on the hugely likable but ideologically-unsound basis that people will just find a way to do what they want. As I say in Theatre & Privilege (mine) it’s pretty much what I’ve done, so who am I to lecture anyone else?

***

In Theatre & Privatization I set out a fairly grand vision of state sponsored theatre and talked about my dislike of the new breed of private theatre. But what separates a “private theatre” from an independent theatre, or an as yet unfunded fringe theatre, or a scratch/pop-up venue? In other words, how is The Yard (which I like very much) really any different to The Print Room (which I don’t)? Yes, the size of the backers’ bank balances and the audiences being chased are different, but, really, in ideological terms, isn’t to condemn one to at least throw shade on the other?

The problem with wanting everything to be state-funded is the state. Granted, we could all wish for a much better state on every conceivable level already. But, I find it difficult to imagine – even in a perfect world – a state that could take democratic, informed, fair decisions as quickly as a person can just take matters into their own hands and impatiently set something up.

The early histories of some of our best, most progressive theatres almost always seem to be some small group of friends who – tired of waiting for recognition, or a slot in a state theatre, of for their work to even be understood/recognised as theatre – take matters into their own hands and set something up themselves. This model of self-starting is pretty prevalent even amongst our best known and most-loved publicly funded theatres – from Forced Entertainment, Complicite, and Frantic Assembly to the Almeida, the Yard, and, well, basically the Royal Court and the NT (maybe the NT secured the funding first, can’t remember).

Perhaps the real question doesn’t arise then, but when the embryonic theatre or company that has been created develops: whether they chose public money or private profit. Of course, I’m not so naïve as to believe that choice is necessarily one that they get to make themselves, nor that the successful outcomes we know today don’t represent some hard struggles in the past. Nonetheless, the model of the private enterprise that gains state subsidy is clearly the only model we seem to have in Britain. It is perhaps worth briefly looking at why this is.

As I suggest above, Britain’s main model for anything at all happening in theatre these days is small groups or individuals persisting with their own thing. It is depressingly Thatcherite. But, I think we’d really struggle as a country with the external authority of the alternative. As we all know, Germany’s theatres enjoy much, much higher subsidies than British theatres. On the other hand, their state theatres really do enjoy a near monopoly on theatre production in Deutschland. I’ll freely admit I know much less about Germany’s freie szene (independent theatre scene), but I'm pretty certain it’s much smaller than it is in Britain. Perhaps this is in part because of the excellence of the main houses, but I think it’s perhaps also partly to do with it’s almost complete and continued separateness.

In Britain, yes, there are definitely different types of theatre, and, God knows, we’re fond of our taxonomy (although trying to find names to describe what sort of a thing a thing is isn’t a bad thing in itself), but I’d argue that the different types of theatre do exist on a sort of continuum. Or at least, a a few sets of continuums, and with a bit of crossover between the sets too. What I mean is, in Britain, you can, without training, pretty much bomb your way into work by putting on great work in unsubsidised venues, until subsidised venues give you work. And in those unsubsidised venues, you will often find cheaper/smaller-scale versions of pretty much exactly the same sort of work as you’ll get picked up to do in the subsidised houses, made largely by people attempting to get work in the bigger theatres.  Fringe work, in short, need not be a different genre, but rather is often a self-funded (or crowd-funded audition). That option seems much more rare in Germany.

The other major difference, is that in Britain we stupidly over-supply/over-train actors (and, similarly, with the above-described situation with the directors, we effectively have an open door policy there too).  I don’t know the actual figures (four articles – here, here, here, and here – all fail to give a concrete number, which must be available somewhere) but let’s call it 3,000 newly graduated trained actors a year. Are there an additional 3,000 new parts every year? (because all the previous generations don’t suddenly want to give up, do they?). And, as with directing, absolutely no training doesn’t mean absolutely no work, anyway. In Germany, actors and directors get paid very well, but this happens because they work in stable employment in rep in a state theatre, and only a tiny number of extra actors and directors are trained each year. And very, very few directors or actors who haven’t been trained get anywhere near a theatre (is my understanding).

So, another question facing Britain is, having arrived at the stupid situation we’re in now – where actors and directors will presumably fight tooth and nail for their right to exploit themselves until they either start to get enough professional work to live, or give up – would anyone voluntarily see it reformed, so that we only train, maybe 100 new actors each year, and an extra one or two new directors? They will – guaranteed – all be brilliant. They will all get work all the time. And they will all have to be paid properly.  But does this appeal to anyone at all?

The problems seem to me to be: on one hand, we’re addicted to the gamble, the lottery chance that it might be you who gets to be the next Andrew Scott or James McAvoy; and on the other hand, more optimistically, we recognise that it’s easier to revolutionise, to force change – at least aesthetic change – by doing things ourselves. Unpaid, perhaps. But somehow making enough waves that we change the ecosystem, are invited to the table...  This also stems, I think, from Britain’s comparatively anti-authority culture. Something I’ve often been struck by in Germany is the respect in which older directors are held. In Britain, it might be fair to say reverence is the exception rather than the rule.

We have, in other words, a culture (even in theatre) that is completely soaked and saturated in assumptions that make it the perfect breeding ground for capitalism, for free-marketeering, for near-Ayn Rand-like levels of individualism.  Of course there are a load of lefties in theatre, I don’t deny it. But, problematically, while theatre itself continues to exist in the middle of a hyper-individualist, free-market, it seems likely that while people make themselves the one exception they will allow, the entire self-serving enterprise will be impregnable.

The same is (of course) true of criticism. There is no better way for me to increase the access of working-class, BAME, female, or disabled critics than simply retiring right now. And for nearly everyone fitting my broad description (white, male, privileged, etc.) to do likewise. Obviously, at the moment, this not being an equal society, that scenario would as likely result in *almost no theatre critics left* as a sudden magical flourishing of a fully diverse rank of critics to take our place. We can work on addressing that, but, FFS, it’s 2015. Why hasn’t it already been addressed?

And, as I point out in my earlier piece today – and, God knows it’s not an original thought – on one level, the people who will find it easiest to persist in making theatre (or criticism), will be those who have a certain amount of financial security (privilege) already. On the other hand, that it is equally possible to make theatre (or criticism) for next to nothing if everyone accepts that that’s the deal, that they’re not trying to become “professional”, or that they’re happy to understand it as the thing they do additional to/funded-by their day job.

Chris Goode has written about such a model before, and one of the things Nicholas Ridout’s book Passionate Amateurs does is to talk about possible theatres outside a marketised relationship. Similarly, I think both Lyn Gardner’s recent piece about Slung Low, and, in a different way, the ongoing work of Forest Fringe both point to possible ways forward, perhaps slightly related to this shift in the relationship of theatre to money.

*Obviously* one short blog piece isn’t going to be able to fully propose an alternative model for theatre, for the retrenching of how society works, and everything else necessary to stop the model by which most theatre is created being ultimately economically abusive. But, I hope by thinking about it out loud, even in these most stark and obvious of ways, it might at least spur someone else to have a few really good ideas. Because I think we really need some. Urgently.

Theatre & Privilege (mine)

[998 words]

In November 2013 Bryony Kimmings wrote one of the most important blogs on the subject of the money in the arts that I’ve read. It’s called You Show Me Yours. The reason it’s so important, is that it names amounts.

And, unsurprisingly, not many people have felt especially keen to write reciprocal follow-ups.

However, since I’m here banging on about public ownership, theatre and communism, it feels like I should be absolutely honest about my own level of privilege.

[It also serves as my depressing answer to the question “How Do You Make A Living Out of Theatre Criticism,” which I occasionally get asked. The spoiler version is: I don’t, I’m very lucky in that I don’t need to.]

I am nearly 40, white, male, heterosexual, and from a Protestant-Christian background. I am middle-middle class. (If you really need to know: my dad’s parents are northern and working class (fireman and factory worker) and my mum’s dad was quite posh (Clifton College and Cambridge; became a minister of religion) and my mum’s mum is from a Welsh working class background. Both my parents went to university in London (UCL and QMUL/RHUL, I think). I went to a state grammar school, got kicked out, went to two Further Education Colleges, and then a private crammer in Birmingham (for a nominal fee) for two years. I had a full grant when I went to Leeds University and my degree was also free.

For almost the whole of the 00s, what little bits of theatre criticism I did, I did outside my “day job” (although from 2003-2008 that “day job” was a strange week-on, week-off, night-shift job reading newspapers for a cuttings service. Which was either: “Really interesting and not a bad job” or “Hell” depending on when you asked me).

By the end of the 00s all the members of my extended family had died (all four grandparents and my uncle). My brother (who works as a maths teacher in Wakefield) had already bought a house (or rather, had already got a mortgage and was paying it off pretty fast; maths teachers’ salaries apparently go quite a long way in the Leeds housing market). My parents had a house and had retired. So, I ended up getting £195,000 to buy a flat near Caledonian Road tube station (with the proviso that my brother would inherit my parent’s house). I am aware this is an enormous privilege. Ironically, not long after I ended up moving to Berlin, and so I sub-letted (?) the flat. After I came back from Berlin, I kept on renting it out because in 2012 the amount of paid work for theatre critics was suddenly at a pretty low ebb, so I was in the slightly silly situation of owning a flat in London, but needing the rent from it to live on, and to live in a succession of cheaper sub-lets. Obviously, all that is still an enormous privilege too. I am aware of that.

By the end of last year, I’d concluded that it was a bit silly to own a flat I couldn’t afford to live in. We got the flat valued and apparently it had risen in price to over £300,000. And so, to cut a long story short, I sold it and bought two flats in Manchester. One for £145,000 to live in, and one for £130,000 to rent out.

The upshot of this is, I now get £100 a week to live on, plus anything I get paid for writing. And I have a place to live.

So there you go. It’s not a secret.

But, it does all put me in a slightly weird place from which to inveigh against the evils of capitalism. It also puts me in a very difficult place when it comes to arguments for volunteering, versus demanding living wages for all workers. And it puts me in an entirely stupid place when it comes to arguing about refusing paid work on principle (in my case from, say, The Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Express, or the Evening Standard. And I think, after that election front cover, the Independent. Not that any of them have asked (and why would they?). But it’s nice to know I will always be able to tell them to fuck off if they do). But I would say that, I can afford my principles. And can afford them in a way that sort of makes a nonsense of them. I am aware of that.

As I said in yesterday’s piece, Theatre & Privatization, “the most practical way of fighting [the Conservative Party’s] decisions appears to be becoming as successful within their ideology as possible and buying your way out of [their decisions]”.

And that is unfortunately what I’ve done.  I put the above information on the table largely so no one can accuse me of hiding it. If it invalidates anything I think or say, you’ve got all the information you need to call me on it.

I remain committed to increasing equality, increasing opportunities, and trying to popularise “difficult” art, as best I can.  And I blame having two ministers for parents for this tendency I have for “considering the lillies”. (Matthew 6:24).

Theatre & Privatization

[part one]

The first line of the Communist Manifesto conjures the image of a spectre haunting something; the elephant in the room you must describe. The Kevin we need to talk about, if you like. The spectres haunting theatre are privatization, privilege, and selfishness.

In May the UK elected its first majority Conservative government for 18 years.

A recent news story in The Stage reported:

“Arts funding faces dramatic cuts after the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was told to prepare for a budget reduction of up to 40%. Chancellor George Osborne announced that in order to make £20 billion of government savings, unprotected departments – everything aside from health, schools, defence and foreign aid – needed to plan for two scenarios: a 25% cut or a 40% cut. Savings would have to be made over the course of the next five years.
“In a report entitled ‘A country that lives within its means’, the Treasury said it would prioritise spending that achieves the best economic returns, as well as that which promotes innovation, growth, productivity and competition. In addition, it said departments would be asked to look at how they can be managed more effectively, and should consider privatising assets that ‘do not need to be held in the public sector’.”

There’s not much of substance in that report that we didn’t already know, although the naked ideological claim of “assets that do not *need* to be held in the public sector” is remarkable.

The Conservative Party does not believe in the principle of public funding, does not believe that the state is an expression of the people’s will, does not believe in public property, and is a big believer in privatization. More than that, it is observably a party that believes in subsidising the rich; in creating loopholes, waivers and schemes to enable the wealthy to get wealthier; and most of all, it is a big believer in “choice” and “freedom” for the very wealthy.

When “in charge” of the country, the Conservative Party has taken things that were the shared property of the entire country – the railways, the utilities, the telecoms, the post office – and has sold them off – cheaply – to people and companies that can afford them. It then spent the money that the country made from the sale on subsiding tax cuts and more loopholes for the very wealthy.

In the last five years, as the leaders of the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition, the broad thrust of their arts policy has been to cut the use of public money to fund the arts and to encourage the use of private money instead. Now they are in sole control, they are stepping up their ideological programme.

At this stage, I should say something comforting and “fair-minded” about the use of private money to fund the public arts. The problem is, the more I think about it, the more I can’t really think of anything.

In the present ideological climate, what’s “unfair” is to attack people for having too much money, and what’s not unfair is for anyone running a business to make jobs precarious, bring in zero-hours contracts, and pay minimum wages wherever possible, to “maximise profitability”. Never mind that in order to disguise this slide back into some sort of Victorian catastrophe, the government has to pay people with jobs *benefits* just to bring them over the poverty threshold. Which it’s also trying to abolish.

Ironicially, we do have a government that believes in sponsoring the arts with public money, but it does this by spending the public money on topping up the wages of the poorest workers, so that the companies which employ them at bargain basement rates can “stay profitable” (i.e. not do anything so silly as waste money on paying workers), make more money for their shareholders, and pay their CEOs and top executives yet more money. Those lucky individuals at the top of the food chain are then “free” to “choose” to “donate” some fraction of this enormous wealth to a theatre or theatres of their choice.

*Of course* there will be exceptions to this. Sometimes someone just invents something that, in the system we all live in, makes them a lot of money. And instead of spending the lot on big houses, expensive cars, champagne, yachts, and etc. they generously spend their time endowing theatres. And sometimes such people will even have spectacularly good taste. (And if it sounds unnerving to have to rely on the taste of private individuals, I guess we can console ourselves with the thought that even the taste of the state, in the form of the Arts Council, isn’t infallible.)

Radical redistribution and proper arts funding would be preferable, obviously, but under a Tory government it almost feels safer to rely on private philanthropists than on the government redistributing with anything even remotely approaching insight, let alone good taste.

And this is the stroke of genius in the Conservative free-market ideology: that the most practical way of fighting its decisions appears to be becoming as successful within the ideology as possible and buying your way out of them. At which point you have lost the argument entirely, but at least the artform is “saved”.

Tories reading this will perhaps complain that – typical of “the Left” – I am merely being dogmatic and “ideological”. No more so, however, than insisting the opposite: that more and more must be paid for with private money, that *public property* is “assets that do not need to held in the public sector”.

Because, unlike a lot of arts types, I don’t believe that the Tories really want to divest Britain of theatre altogether. Of course they don’t. Sure, they probably don’t want to watch left-wing plays any more than I want to watch right-wing plays, but that’s a different question*. What the Tories do want, and what Britain’s Theatre Industry is sleep-walking into giving them, is an arts sector which serves to herald the glories of “corporate giving”, privatization, and individual wealth, by existing entirely without state subsidy.

Already, private and corporate money is vital to the continued running of our publicly subsidised theatres. But, while they remain publicly subsidised, they do at least have a degree of accountability and a perceived duty to try to serve the widest possible section of society.  It is my belief that, as with the BBC, the Conservative Party would like all public money to them to gradually be replaced by private money.

At the same time, we are seeing the resurgence of the private theatre. I’m thinking here primarily of places like The Park Theatre and The Print Room, which I’m told exist largely because someone with a lot of money decided to buy their son or wife a theatre. That is completely their right, of course, and within the realm of Conservative Party policy, absolutely ideal. Being entirely outside the state sector, these theatres have no degree of accountability whatsoever. That is to say, we already live in a country where someone can just pay to become the artistic director of a London theatre. The theatre community, generous as it is, then lends them enormous amounts of minimum- or unwaged support. The richest get richer, and those much less rich effectively get poorer by helping them. And all for a project which has never had the remotest obligation to even try to be fair.

Of course, it’s not just the Park and the Print Room. The entire West End is privately owned. And despite being privately owned, it is also propped up as often as not with the work of state-subsidised theatres. Put simply, the public investment into things like War Horse, Les Miserables, Curious Incident and Matilda now makes a vast profit for the owners of The New London, Queens, Gielgud and Cambridge Theatres. It does, of course, also feed back to the NT and RSC too, but what a timid government whose arts policy doesn’t see the potential in nationalising the West End and instead looks to sell off “assets which do not need to be held in the public sector”.

Why this animus against privatization? Because it is an ideological trick and theft on a grand scale. Publicly funded theatres can and should be an expression of civic pride. Something a whole city can be proud of. If they are privately owned, or covered in the names of corporate sponsors, then a very different message is sent: “This is not your building. This is being done for you, by us. Be grateful.” (Or, worse: we don’t care if this is for you or not. We’re doing fine without you. You can’t afford a ticket? Not our problem.) Public subsidy is ideological, but so is its rapid and widespread withdrawal, and anyone who tells you it’s not ideological, just “practical” (“assets that do not *need*...”) is either deluded or lying.

The Conservative Party want to take what belongs to the people and sell it to private individuals in the name of “fairness”. It is not fairness. The Conservative Party wants to sell us the idea that public subsidy of the arts is “unfair”, but having the arts paid for by tax-deductible donations from the very wealthy is the best way to make everyone feel included.

It is vital to resist this attack on public property in every way possible.



*If you want a picture of how the current state of Britain’s theatre looks to those on the hard-Right, then you only have to read the reviews of Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail, or Lloyd Evans in the Spectator. Mr Evans even takes the step of writing the things he’d rather see staged. His latest, A History of Feminism (as told by a sexist pig) graces this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Shorts: Edinburgh 2005

[1,061 words]

I have just had a look at my Edinburgh stuff from a decade ago. It’s terrible. Given that I was 29 when I wrote it, I can only apologise, and blame anything from not owning a laptop (and so having to write everything incredibly fast in internet cafés) to, well, not really knowing what the hell I was doing, or why, or for whom.

It’s odd. By August 2005 Raw Talent, the 50-year history of the NSDF, had been published, and at other points that year I managed to turn in passable copy, but during the Edinburgh Fringe, not so much.

In 2005 I was sharing an Edinburgh flat with both Chris Wilkinson (now Haydon – obviously no relation), now artistic director of the Gate, who is up this year with The Christians at the Traverse, and Dan Bye, who this year is up with his latest show Going Viral. Back then – while Dan had his show Bella and the Beautiful Knight (which, a decade on, I think I can admit to having absolutely hated in pretty much every significant respect) by Oliver Emanuel, whose Dragon is at the EIF this year, and Chris had been assistant director on The Found Man at the Traverse, if I remember rightly – both were also working as critics.

Indeed, Wilkinson/Haydon won the Allen Wright Award and discovered New York’s The TEAM who were in Britain for the first time, playing in an easily overlooked attic in C Venues, with Give Up! Start Over! (In the darkest of times I look to Richard Nixon for hope). Wilkinson gave it a four- or five-star review and nominated them for a Scotsman Fringe First; this Autumn they are opening a show at London’s Royal Court.

I mention this, in part, because young theatre people sometimes ask if they can make work and review work at the same time. I’d point to the above as being a pretty perfect example of why I think YES. Indeed Wilkinson only really stopped the theatre journalism for good when Haydon was made artistic director of the Gate. Beyond that, it also demonstrates the value that a good critic has for the wider theatre ecology.

(Of course, it now has the unwelcome extra dimension of showing just how problematic the Scotsman’s scaled-back coverage is. Because, truly, it did also feel as if Give Up! Start Over! was one of only about three good shows of the 70-plus random things Chris was sent to. You have to pay people to do that. And, moreover, you have to be able to trust they’ll recognise what’s good when they see it...)

Of the shows I did write about in my own lamentably spartan coverage, probably the most interesting is Peter Morris’s Guardians, if now mostly because it marks a very early step in Michael Longhurst’s journey to becoming one of Britain’s most acclaimed directors. The most interesting show that I didn’t write about was almost certainly Chris Goode’s Home Made, which, as well as being a lovely piece in and of itself, also marks the first time that Lucy Ellinson (also in The Christians this year) worked with Goode. Perhaps also when her talent was first noted in the national press.

In view of my last blog post I’m also interested by my review of Nowy Teatr Poznań’s Faust, in which I grumble that “[i]t is hard to resist the idea that some critics are acclaiming this just to make themselves look internationalist and clever, and in the process, are doing neither potential audiences nor themselves any favours”. (Which, ten years down the line, sounds like something straight out of Billington’s X is for Xenophobia piece.) As it happens, this wasn’t so much a theory-of-everything, as a direct response to one of Ian Shuttleworth’s semi-regular spats with me, and consequently his review of Faust. Looking back at his review now, it’s hard to deny that he flags up very precisely what it was about the production he liked, but equally, that the star-rating does rather imply that the piece might transcend those specifics. (Which it didn’t.) Remembering that Faust ten years on, I don’t think my greater exposure to Polish theatre in the interim would have necessarily improved my experience of it. Even in 2005 it felt a bit heritage-y, and seen in one of the Assembly Rooms’s vast, unworkable, temporary spaces, it felt more like staring at a UFO marooned on a precipice than theatre.

So, yes, that’s small snapshot of my Edinburgh a decade ago. At that point, I still don’t think I had any intention of becoming any more of a proper critic. I liked editing Noises Off at NSDF, and I liked getting free tickets in exchange for reviews on CultureWars, even if, in 2005 during Edinburgh, I was experimenting with some very low wordcounts. Still, if nothing else, it’s an interesting reminder of that extended period I talked about a couple of weeks ago where I don’t think I really *got* theatre. Or when much theatre didn’t *get* me. Or something.

I think the worst review I wrote in 2005 was of my favourite show that year – Daniel Kitson’s Stories for the Wobbly-Hearted. Which was just gorgeous. And that’s pretty much all the review says. Repeatedly. Although I presume that all the negatives mangling that last line – “it would be impossible for anyone with even only the smallest shreds of humanity not to be utterly seduced” – mean that it too is a dig at someone. Mercifully time has erased the memory of that squabble leaving only my bad prose.

So, if there’s one take-home message from this blog it’s this: use your reviews to talk about the work and not to settle scores; it doesn’t work and the reviews read funnily in the future.

AudioStage: theatre radio – National Identities

[recorded 18/05/14 I think]

This is a kind of interview/conversation I recorded with the Croatian/Australian critic, thinker and all round great human being Jana Percovic. (Croatian/Australian is a rubbish way to describe her, but that will at least help you place her accent and educational/theatrical history a bit better).

HERE

I’ve just listened to it again, and really enjoyed it. I pretty much agree with most of what I say, even if some of the questions catch me unawares, and I might not put my replies perfectly.

I’m interested by how much I refer to “The Book”/“My Chapter”, which now feels a lot more distant as a piece of thinking. (Rightly. We’re half way through the next decade/chapter). Am pleased to hear I was already thinking more about the problems of white privilege, though. Although, on a biographical note, it’s interesting to me to remember that the Manchester move wasn’t even a thought on the horizon in May 2014. And to hear how much not living outside London yet affects the way I discuss “British Theatre” almost entirely in terms of London.

The Shrine of Everyday Things – Contact, Manchester

[seen 23/07/15]

[I’ve hmm-ed and haa-ed about how to write this review, and decided, given the Very Short Run and the fact it was sold out, that Very Straight-Down-The-Line and Describe-y is the way to go.]

The Shrine of Everyday things takes place a short walk away from Contact on a social housing estate that is gradually being de-tenant-ed, and will then be knocked down to make way for a new, private flats.

On the walk from the theatre to the site, the audience wear radio-receiving headphones and listen first to some slow, post-rock music, overlaid with interviews with former residents of the estate talking about anything from their favourite rooms in their old homes to the reputation of the estate in the nineties, back when the cynical media name “Gunchester” was coined. The voices range from an elderly (Scottish?) woman to young black men. There’s a touching moment, given the probable gulf between their two lives, where both elderly woman and one young black man each conclude that the kitchen is their favourite room in their home, and recount anecdotes about nicking food on the sly.

As we near the estate, we first see the odd, lone balloon drift out of the window of one of the flats. Then our attention is caught by picture-perfect advert-style “residents”, standing on the lawn of the first of newly built blocks that are replacing the old estate, waving in slow motion at us. (It’s exactly like that advert for [I can’t remember what it was for] where a car drives slowly through an Americana-y suburb) The blurb for the piece suggests “David Lynch meets Coronation Street” and here they are already completely nailing that Blue Velvet weirdness. As we cross the road we notice a group of young people cycling out of the cemetery dressed in those ubiquitous animal onesies.

Along with these overtly thearical figures – the residents, the cycling human chimps – there are other people too. A youth leans against the wall of the estate staring at us. Is he part of the performance or a resident? There’s a group of young builders too. Are they part of it or actual builders?

There is always something that feels problematic about wandering into someone else’s unambiguously residential neighbourhood as a tourist. But aside from a few askance looks – we are, after all, a small crowd watching young people cycling round in onesies – no one seems very bothered. And the local children seem very taken with the proceedings, happily running around us and playing with members of the company.

It is also crucial that the theatre which commissioned the piece, Contact, is literally only three minutes from the estate, and has a massive, proven track record of attracting very local audiences as well as people from the pool of Greater Manchester Theatregoers. That the performers of this piece are members of that theatre’s Young Company. And that the directors are Rodolfo Amorim of the Brazilian theatre companies Grupo XIX de Teatro, Grupo Manto and Tablado de Arruar, and Manchester/Brazil-based artist Lowri Evans.

The result is great, thought-provoking, often beautiful art, made with and devised with young people who, clearly have a great sense of ownership over the material. A piece by, with and for the place, not one imposed on it.

The format of the piece quickly resolves into the audience who have walked over being sorted into four groups and led off to one of four flats. [I started in with number 47. It’s quite nice to watch knowing that the piece can be viewed in any order at all.] In the first flat (which I think was my favourite), three performers seem to play a series of couples who might have lived in the flat, or the same couple over various points in time. At several points a fourth performer, a neighbour, pops round and asks if he can borrow a cup of sugar, or if they can take his kids (a hobby horse and a Minion), or – back to the original plan – if he can borrow some sugar after all. The couple, switched with the beautiful, unexpected, simple device of having one performer go into the kitchen and another come out, both bicker and offer interior monologues. There’s a sense of thwarted romantic dreams, of mutual acceptance, of relationships gone cold, or routines adopted. And then one brings out tea for the other, and it’s a cup of sugar, then a cake – a plate of sugar – and so on. By the end of the section (maybe twenty minutes or fewer? It felt like about five) all three performers are all in the room, all standing, all speaking their ongoing internal thoughts, and tickles of sugar start pouring onto their heads from previously unseen holes in the ceiling. It is one of the best surprise moments of visual theatre I’ve seen in ages. Totally unexpected. Really simple. And, thanks to the way the piece has been made, hugely evocative of, well, of many things – it’s pretty open to interpretation. The Nouvelle Vague cover of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ plays, and while I’d normally deplore the cliché, standing in a living room in an emptied council estate in Manchester, and after that particular performance, it feels apt, sweet, clever, and earned.

The second flat (pictured), offers a different sort of fragmentation, with several of the lines from the verbatim recordings we heard on the way over being woven into a surreal, Lynchian scene in which three women (played by young people, but as old women?), slightly off-kilter and maybe mildly sinister, like vampires or Gorgons in disguise, inhabit a room full of memories. At one point they’re all listening, glass-to-wall, to their neighbours, another moment they’re offering a charming rationale for the little porcelain ornaments (that each one reminds her of a very specific point in her life – it’s really rather hearkbreaking to imagine someone’s memories being invested in such fragile objects). At its end, a young lad burst into the room, being chased by the father of some kid he’s insulted. The weird sisters cover him in bubble wrap and lead him away for lord knows what sinister or benign purpose.

The third flat [I’m realising if I stick to the above level of painstaking detail we’re never going to finish] feels like almost n entirely different genre, from essentially drama theatre to interactive Live Art Lite – we enter the flat and are asked to write a memory of a dream on the wall in felt tip. Then we go into a “bedroom” (it’s the living room, but blacked-out and with a bed in it), and are asked to sit on the bed, get under a big sheet with our host, and tell each other things in response to questions: who read us bedtime stories? What book is next to our bed? Are we scared of the dark, etc. It’s kinda sweet and relaxing, and there’s some nice writing in what our host says. *Then* there’s a bit where we’re lying on our backs on the bed, and looking at the stars projected on the ceiling, and suddenly a ceiling tile is removed and a head pops up above us and starts off on a whole new monologue. As surprises go – the company have literally cut a hole in the ceiling of a room, after all – it’s quite a coup. And this performer too is very strong.

The fourth room – I should note the little holding bits in between that allow groups to experience each room at their own pace: these too are creative and fun, in one we’re required to drink tea from cups with holes in the bottom, in another someone is conducting an archaeological dig in the future unearthing the modern TVs and vacuum cleaners that could indeed end up buried when the estate is torn down – In the fourth room we first meet a bloke hoarding some rubbish in a cupboard in the flat’s hall (something to do with ecological thinking), and then a guy wading through a sea of bottles in an idiosyncratically decorated room (Man Utd wallpaper, self-adhesive pink plastic covering on the cupboards with pictures of pineapples on it – you kinda hope this was all added by the designers).

So, yes, myriad stuff, and somehow it all knits together to present something that feels at once, comforting, artistic, touching, political and angry. For me there was definitely oblique comment on the present politics of housing in Britain, and at the same time, enough optimism to get us from room to room without breeding murderous anti-government anger.

I *hate* outdoors theatre. There you go. It’s not a prejudice, I’ve seen it and frequently hated it. I don’t like standing outside watching theatre. Quite aside from the fact that we live in Britain, and so the likelihood is that it’ll be raining, I also like things like sitting down and lighting design.

But recently I also seem to keep seeing pieces of outdoor theatre that I adore. Because it doesn’t always rain. And because you can’t smoke indoors any more. And because, at its best, it’ll take you somewhere you’d never normally go, perhaps somewhere you have no business being otherwise, and will sometimes blow the artistry of the set designer and lighting designer out of the water just by making the real strange, accompanied by the weather Gods chucking in lighting effects that properly surprise you because they are almost entirely random.

The Shrine of Everyday Things is a remarkable piece of work. That it is also site-specific (yes, I mean specific) *and*: devised, and made with the Young Company, and led by international artists, and put in non-traditional theatre spaces, and a part of the community, all just adds to the feeling that this really is a very real part of the future of theatre.

[music from the show:

The Gambit – Waterside Arts, Sale

[seen 23/07/15]


[Or: how to build a ‘proper’ review]

[explanation for time-rich blog reader /cut] Two self-reflexive reviews in one week isn’t good. Everyone will think I’ve come down with a nasty case of incurable metacriticism, but here we are. It just feels like the most helpful way to write this review.

In a 330/440-word review for the Guardian, I can imagine all the sins of shortcutting I’d commit trying to wrangle my feelings about Mark Reid’s The Gambit into a passable shaped piece.

The long and the short of it is: I was confused about The Gambit. I was confused about what precisely it was about. I was confused by what register it was in. And I was confused about whether (not that it matters) I liked it or not.

[context bit /keep] Mark Reid is clearly something of a dynamo on the Manchester Fringe. [I’ve not really met him (except to say hi last night), but from conversations on Social Media, the existence of the Manchester Independent Theatre FB page, and so on,] one could be forgiven for thinking he *is* Manchester Independent Theatre. [I mean this as a compliment to him, and with no disrespect to the myriad other Independent Theatremakers in Manchester. And] I admired the last project he originated, Better Brutality, very much indeed.

The Gambit is a very different beast to Better Brutality...

[self-conscious self-criticism bit /cut] Now, of course, one conclusion that a reader may readily leap to is that I liked Better Brutality more because it was performed in the grungey, squatty environs of Antwerp Mansion[s?], rather than the rather more clean, propose built, wholly nice Waterside Arts Centre in Sale (which is lovely. Right by the tram station. *And*, blimey, Sale’s nice, isn’t it? Like bloody Twickenham or somewhere). I would say that *consciously*, at least, this isn’t the case. I do like lots of different things.

[the wrangling over what The Gambit *is* bit] “The Gambit is a very different beast to Better Brutality...” and here we come to my first problem. For a review of limited word count, I think I’d feel forced to pin my colours to the mast and say: “...much more in the mode of something like, say Frayn’s Democracy or later Stoppard”. And, you see, by asserting this so baldly, I think I set myself up a world of problems for later on. Because, more honestly, I wasn’t *exactly* sure what tone either play or production were aiming for.

The problem of this sort of uncertainty – for a critic, definitely – is that it can also get distracting. And also leads to that most reviled of review-types, the one where the critic acts as uninvited script doctor or backseat director.

Because, if I identify The Gambit as a would be late-Frayn/Stoppard, then what I have to say next is that it doesn’t quite work as this. In reality I’m not at all sure that’s even what it wants to be, but having claimed it is, that’s where I’d have to go next. Something like:

“It has a quality of what you remember from those plays, the unspoken subtexts that you unpack yourself, but here it’s all written down as the dialogue instead of remaining as subtext.”

I think this is a valid enough statement, but it presumes too much about the intention, and then appears to presume to know how to “correct” it (which I don’t, really. I don’t write plays, or running a course on how to do it. I just have the vague feeling that in this mode, if this is the mode that this play is in, that, rather than the characters naming all the things they’re talking about “on-the-nose”, they should mostly talk about immaterial things, details – and in the way that people really speak – and let us in the audience gradually understand the relationship like that. It that right? I think that’s how those plays actually work. How “naturalism” works. By observing the way that people hide and obfuscate, much more than how people argue about an issue head on?).

But, yes: see? Already so prescriptive. Already so many “these are the rules of playwriting”, which a) I don’t believe are set in stone, and b) may not even be from the applicable rulebook.

But perhaps the characters *are* talking round something else. I dunno. The diction of the whole thing feels either like it’s actually incredibly elevated – there were several striking uses of “cannot” and in each case they particularly stood out for me are really idiosyncratic, because they didn’t seem to sit happily in the actors’ mouths, or rush out ‘naturally’. And many other words or lines seemed to exist like that.

At one point someone actually said something like: “You always talk in epigrams when you’re angry.” (I paraphrase. No notebook is a drawback when there’s no printed playtext, I’ll admit.) Now, to me, that exemplifies a few other problems I had both with identifying the mode of the play, and with whatever mode it was. Because that’s more sub-Wilde, isn’t it? (I mean, the effect of the actual line was. My paraphrase is unfair.) And, yes, the whole did have a kind of grandeur to the language, which, to me, seemed to be at odds with how other aspects of the production was working.

On one hand, this could be an experiment; just one whose results I didn’t quite understand, because they don’t fit readily into various patterns I was trying to fit them into, but on the other hand, the production itself might be approaching the text in a way that the director () has quite made work (for me. There are already perfectly glowing reviews elsewhere).

But, to contradict a lot of what I say about the piece being “too on-the-nose” above, something else that bothered me was my sense that I was also missing some REALLY CRUCIAL INFORMATION.

The play seems to be about two men, both Russian (or rather, both from the former-Soviet Union), meeting twenty-five years after a career-defining chess match. I think they are both Chess Grandmasters. One has since gone into politics. Each makes bold statements about the others character. They make bold statements about their own character. And about their relationships. And about the trajectories of their lives.

And my immediate and ongoing reaction to all of this was to worry intensely about whether I should know who they were. Or whether I’d already missed who they were. Or whether they were just made up people. Or, if I should know who they were, whose fault this was? Or worrying about whether I shouldn’t just stop worrying.

But the way the information functions in this piece seems seem be a long way from the most comfortable. All I’ll say by way of prescription, is that it made me personally feel uncomfortable, lost, and unable to just watch the play. All of which are quite unusual feelings for me watching a play. I laugh at MB’s almost self-parodic calls for “more social context”. But, really, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a clanging expository speech saying who people are (if they’re real or imagined), and even what year it is now (is it 2015? They keep saying the cold war ended 25 years ago (1990?). Is this a piece set last year? These tiny details feel so petty to bring up and yet, that was my experience of the thing. Wanting to get my phone out and read the blurb for the play, or look at Wikipedia).

So, yes. I was wrong-footed by the information (or lack of enough of it), by the writing, and also by the pace and style of the performances, which seemed like they were racing through a script that shoulf have taken at least 90 minutes, in order to bring it in at the Fringe’s usual 60 (the show goes to Edinburgh in August).

I don’t know if noting any of this is helpful. It certainly feels more like an audience feedback form from a particularly picky (if hesitant) literary manager than a review. But, as I started by saying, the standard review format seems to encourage assertion and certainty (which can be wrong), which lead to “I’d have done it differently” type statements (which annoy artists more often than not).

The review should report the thing seen and the experience of seeing it.

In a funny way, I think I have at least done that. My experience was concern that I wasn’t getting something, and consequent concern about what you do with that situation as a write-up.

This; apparently.

Obviously in this instance I’ve so far taken 1432-words to say all this. Which is no practical help as “a consumer guide”, but perhaps more help to my ongoing thinking as a critic, and perhaps your ongoing project as a reader-about-theatre (whatever your interest). And also more help than the curt refusal of A Bad Review (or even An Equivocal Review), which is what I worry I’d have have had no choice but to write if I’d have a word-count restriction.
Because form railroads content.

End.