As You Like It – National Theatre, London

[seen 09/11/15]

I’m not sure I really *got* Polly Findlay and Liz Clachan’s As You Like It. [and I certainly didn’t enjoy writing this review one bit.] I think maybe by the end I’d warmed to it, or got into it; or maybe it’s that the ending is yet another gear change in a production of gear-changes, and the final one was the most readily comprehensible.

It opens, wittily, in at sort of modern-but-eighties stock brokers. “As You Like I.T.” perhaps. Or Enron van Hove – a mash-up of Goold’s Prebble with the latter’s Roman Tragedies. As an opening setting it’s fine. It gets the job done. The “wrestling match” is the first time it really comes alive and they could probably cut everything before that, since it’s all set-up that gets reiterated upteen further times anyway. Maybe keep the scene before with Orlando’s brother telling Charles the Wrestler that he’s welcome to do Orlando in, but otherwise bin it. (Let’s be honest, it’s a shit set-up: woman fancies bloke she sees at wrestling match; bloke and woman and woman’s mate get thrown out of the place they are in after wrestling match. They fuck off to a forest...)

The opening set is doubtless saying something quite obvious about how we might not like capitalism terribly much at the moment. Then...

[VERY STAGING-SPOILER ALERT – not that everyone else hasn’t already spoilered it already...]

...the low back wall and ceiling of the brokers’ office lifts into the flies, AND DRAGS ALL THE CHAIRS AND DESKS WITH IT. It is proper bloody fantastic. Good. The net result is that the Forest of Arden looks like Cornelia Parker’s s Cold Dark Matter meeting Gisele Vienne’s This is How You Will Disappear.

And, well, THE REST OF A PLAY IS SET IN THE LANDSCAPE MADE OUT OF WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A STOCK MARKET GOES KAPUT. DID ANYONE REALLY NEED THIS EXPLAINING? [But if this the intention, I kinda of wish it had been more thoroughly or legibly pursued in the production itself.]

So, yes, the set is very good as an artwork or installation. The lighting of it (Jon Clark) is more various. It looks bloody wonderful in its night-time aspect, with cold moonlight filtering through the smoke and branches. In its various daylight aspects – and I think we get several different times of day, and sorts of daylight across the play – it varies. The best are good, but the worst almost have the effect of creating a sort of jagged camouflage of shadows and bright light in both backdrop and foreground, so that actors’ whole bodies seem to blend suddenly into the shards of shadows. It’s quite and interesting effect, but it does take some getting used to/tuning in to while trying to work out what you’re meant to be looking at.

But the main thing that takes some tuning in to is the wealth and variety of acting styles on display. I *loved* Joe Hill-Gibbins’s Measure For Measure for the way that each character quite rightly seemed to occupy their own walk of life, both theatrically and somehow *locally*. Here it seems a bit less certain than that. There are many different styles, but several of them are styles of which I am not fond. I’m afraid I didn’t warm to Joe Bannister’s Orlando one bit. I mean, yes, As You Like It is a comedy, but Bannister’s affable performance made Rosalind’s love-at-first-sight for him fully incomprehensible, then ongoingly mystifying, and, well, I dunno, he was kind of a nice-but-dim posh boy with a loud voice. A kind of background figure from a Richard Curtis film. In a jumper. God knows. I sure the actor is a nice bloke and a lot more dynamic in real life, but on stage we were asked for a lot of investment for no discernible return.

Rosalie Craig’s Rosalind was apparently a late(?) substitution for Andrea Riseborough. And I kind of wish I hadn’t known that. Because I spent a bunch of time wondering what that meant, and why, and how that would have changed the production and so on. Craig, I think, is actually one of the better things in this production, acting-wise. Possibly. I mean, she’s doing something entirely different to anything I’ve seen anyone do with Shakespeare before, which is to treat it precisely as if it is a musical theatre script. (Ok, I might have thought this partly because I know she also does musicals very successfully, but it’s true.) Now, you might think this means I thought she was bad. But I absolutely promise it doesn’t mean that. Craig is putting in a performance that would be 100% expected in thousands of other contexts, and, moreover, is doing it very well. She’s totally on top of the lines. You completely see what her character’s about. She has a much better, more robust, chippy take on Rosalind’s “Ganymede” than many actors in the role (and without panto thigh-slapping, thank Christ). But, yes, sometimes when she has a real run up at a long sentence, it sounds like we should expect a song to strike up when the line ends. But that’s not really a bad way of doing Shakespeare. It’s kind of fun. It gets us though. At the other end of the good things, Alan Williams, as the morose (and partly made-up/other-character(s?) folded-in) shepherd Corin, inhabits a kind of Beckettian universe where taking all day with one line would seem perfectly ok. I reckon I could have taken even more long pauses and disgusted silences. Patsy Ferran plays Celia – as Maddy Costa (literally the same cardigans, I think) – and is probably the best at making Shakespeare’s language her own. No one else in this production really holds a candle to her. And that sort of feels like a problem too.

But, well, here’s the real thing, I saw this a week after press night, and a week and a half after my friend and colleague Holger Syme saw it in preview. And, well, Holger and I had disagreed about Measure For Measure (or rather, I probably saw all his points, but still loved it anyway), but he said one thing that I just couldn’t shake out of my head, and it was this:

“Why can’t English actors move at the same time that they’re speaking?”

And that’s it. Once you’ve heard that, you’re fucked. Look at them. Standing there, standing still and speaking. Occasionally in this production they have a bit of a stab at sidling while they talk. Maybe. But mostly it feels like there’s a lot of striding or strolling to the next stop, so they can say their next thing. Now, Obviously I’m as English as the next person, and I did quite like this production by the end, but it was also hard to drown out the fact that THIS IS A SHOW THAT DIVIDES OPINION!

Up to this point, I haven’t read any of the reviews. But, my God, even unread reviews don’t half make a lot of noise.

I shall now go and read some of them.

Holger Syme – “Visual magic; artistic bankruptcy” is harsher and more strict than I’d be, but it’s a brilliant review. (By a real German, Michael)

Matt Trueman: “It is, in short, one for the history books” – if history begins in 2010 (or is exclusively English.)

Michael Billington: “Our march towards a Germanic directors’ theatre continues apace.” – if you’ve only seen half a dozen shows by “Germanic” directors in the last decade and have no idea what any of them were doing or why, this probably seems true.

Susannah Clapp: “not as it has been seen before. Polly Findlay has blown winter winds through the Forest of Arden...” – like, for example, Sam Mendes’s properly dreadful Old Vic production did in 2010.

Quentin Letts: not read – if we start actually reading his ridiculous reviews it’d be like his opinion mattered, which it simply doesn't.

So: in short, I don’t think the performances gelled. Not with each other, nor fully with the play, or the set. It feels like you could take the set out and replace it with trees and you’d have quite a traditional version of AYLI, albeit with a more interesting Rosalind. (Somehow, Celia’s been interesting for longer hasn’t she? Because fewer lines?)  So I don’t get the reactionary grumbling about the set *spoiling* the play.  It doesn’t.

Perhaps the reason this production maybe feels annoying (when it does, if it does) is because it feels like there’s all sorts of good thinking here, but it hasn’t been allowed to go far enough. The ideas feel hampered by the fact they’re still being railroaded by the the play. Intellectual energy has been diverted from making ideas communicate and flow to simple stage-problem solving.

I can’t ever hear a forest sound-scape made by the actors without thinking of Excalibur by Bad News (from about 3.30. “Flap flap flap flap...”). Could everyone just agree not to do those? (In truth, I’ve never liked them, but post- The Encounter, I think the world has categorically moved on.)

All that said, I quite liked it. It’s not the revolution it’s being painted as in some quarters, nor is it the sacrilege others have claimed. It’s a modern British production with some uneven acting, some lighting that didn’t really work for me, but a nice enough spirit (even if all the leads are unnecessarily white).

But, like I say, when lit right, what a gorgeous thing to look at:

Lines – The Yard, Hackney

[seen 28/10/15]

I love The Yard. Have you been to The Yard? The Yard Theatre, just by Hackney Wick station, is literally in one obscure corner of what looks like a builder’s yard. Sure, across that yard there’s also the White Building, which houses the Live Art Development Agency and a nice-looking pizza place. And beyond that there is a canal and then the Olympic Park. One day soon, it’ll all be fully gentrified and cleaned up and won’t be any fun any more. At the moment, though, around The Yard, the buildings are still grubby, crumbling, and covered in graffiti. There’s overgrown plantlife and barbed wire that looks like it still means business. The theatre itself is an auditorium built of out MDF (I’m guessing) at one end of a long low shed with a corrugated iron ceiling. There’s no wing space. There’s no fly tower or “backstage”. There’s just raked seats (plundered from everywhere and nailed down) facing a wall and, in between the seats and the wall, an expanse of concrete floor constituting the stage.

The programme of work shown at The Yard is massively varied and incredibly astutely programmed. Most of the year (it feels), is given over to double bills of scratch performances, works in progress; put on with – I imagine – minimal risk to performers’ financial wellbeing.

What you don’t tend to see there, on the whole, is things that self-describe as “plays”. Now, obviously we’ve written about how this isn’t a value judgement, we’ve recognised that there might be *text* in a not-a-“play”, and have rejected the critical tribalism presumed around such demarcations. And my impression might be wrong. But that’s my abiding impression of The Yard’s programming.

But there’s still some value in saying what sort of thing a thing is, right? (Or is that where people start freighting every term with loaded agendas?). What I found interesting – properly fascinating, in fact – about Lines (which I saw in preview, but loved, but still didn’t manage to write-up until now, so Christ knows how that works with The Rules; it might have got a bit better?) is that on the face of it it walks like “a play” and quacks like “a play”, (ok, like a specific sort of social realist contemporary play), but I don’t think it is one of those at all. Or, rather, you *could* equally view it as an installation with a lot of dialogue and acting. Or, in terms of the text, something more like a staging of a poem.

Pamela Carter’s writing is brilliant. Crisp, funny and contemporary as dialogue, it also seems (I’ve not read it, only seen the production, so am guessing) to contain an architecture that forces non-naturalism. Lines’s 90 minutes are divided into two wildly uneven parts with a short interval. The first part shows a series of snapshot-quick scenes in which four new army recruits in their barracks bond and bicker while learning the ropes, barked at occasionally by an unseen (voiceover) sergeant. Put reductively, one is black, one is gay, one is northern, and the last one, well, the last one is the weak link who might have a problem with all those things. He also seems to be a bit lazy, a bit disorganised, a bit distracted. In dramatic terms it’s of course interesting to see the normal expectations of plays-about-soldiers subverted and rather than being about racist or homophobic bullying, it’s about a lovely diverse group of soldiers turning violently on the bigot in their midst. Weirdly, you could bring Quentin Letts to see this, and he wouldn’t be entirely mad to be able to discern a parable about the “violent forces of political correctness” or something. I don’t think it’s a point the play is making, but it certainly gives lazy liberals like me who hate militarism something different to chew on. Whether it’s likely or real, researched or imagined, the insight that an army is primarily about killing an army as a tightly functioning unit is powerfully made. These soldiers are less worried by constructions of masculinity, race or sexuality, as the efficiency of the guy who’s got your back. It’s not about like or dislike, it’s about not getting killed. There’s a fair bit of shirt-offery, and some (pants-on, weirdly) showers, and, well, I imagine it’s fairly homoerotic. I happened to see it the same night as Chris Goode, whose Ponyboy Curtis at The Yard I sadly missed. But, having read the latter’s reviews, I was curious about what consonances/departures there were between this play about aggressive, weaponised “men”, and PBC’s attempt to rethink masculinity.

The performances here are excellent, I thought. Still English acting rather than what we might call “Live Art *being*” but very good acting, nonetheless; but, interestingly, along with the intensity of the performances, the thing that really raises the game of Jay Miller’s production is the sound design by Josh Grigg . [edit: when originally scanning the programming I credited the sound design to Manni Dee who was the composer on the piece. What I said next still stands, though: "Actually, it’s credited as “composition” and I’d agree".]  They should have CDs of the Lines soundtrack on sale at the exit. It’s this urgent, thumping, slightly-too-fast throb that hardly ever fully goes away. And it transforms the piece from *just a play* to a full-on collaborative work of art. The sound is a fully-realised-in-its-own-right element that when placed alongside the performances of the text and the lighting and the design – stark pale blocks of lockers and beds on a low bare platform.

Then there’s the second part. Now, personally, I’d wouldn’t have had an interval but a lighting/loud-music intervention as a kind of “palette cleanser”, but the interval serves the same purpose roughly, and feels in keeping with the Yard’s rough and ready aesthetic. It works, so why worry? The second part is different to the first. The first part ends in incredible tension. I don’t think it’s referred to once in the second. Instead, three of the soldiers just describe deaths. Deaths from films? Their own deaths in combat? Some combination of the two? This could, esp. given the interval, have gone on for about an hour and I’ve still have loved it. Instead it’s pretty short. But, blimey. Clever. And evocative. Really evocative. It somehow moves your mind expertly from considering these soldiers as people to being, well, multiple symbolic tragedies. Soldiers keep on getting killed. It’s almost like something from Kipling. The clear-eyed imperialist wryly observing, “A scrimmage in a Border Station / A canter down some dark defile / Two thousand pounds of education / Drops to a ten-rupee jezail”. 

Hopefully, as a postmodern audience, we’re a bit less bothered about the nationality of those being killed so much as the fact of there being killing at all, and I think, in a funny way, even though these soldiers are apparently British, the piece achieves that. You’d have to be a pretty stern bigot not to see parallels between those trained by the British Army and those trained by IS/al Qaeda/Taliban/Republican Guard. It’s very good on not asking its questions too directly. And it’s always difficult to pin-point how much of what one thinks about during a show is directional sleight-of-hand and how much personal preoccupation (not to mention confirmation bias and seeing what you want/expect to see), but for my money this is powerful, intelligent, evocative work that contains just the right mixture of force and space. A powerful achievement all round.

Pomona – Royal Exchange, Manchester

[seen 04/11/15]

[intro after review]

Pomona is a difficult play to write *about*. It’s a bloody gift to write *around*, but a nightmare to describe. This is because, in essence, it describes a nightmare. The scenes occur as if shuffled from their “proper” order. You get a sense that there is a linear narrative in there somewhere, but you’re just not being fast enough. And then things happen. Characters you’d presumed were figments of another character’s imagination suddenly meet other characters whom you’d assumed were real. The lights all go off. We see brief tableaux in strobe flashes. Charlie (Sam Swann) is talking Keaton (Sarah Middleton) through a role-playing game (RPG) about Cthulu, except the next minute it’s Zeppo (Guy Rhys) talking to Ollie (Nadia Clifford).

The basic plot – yeah, I’ll give it a stab – is that Ollie is looking for her twin sister in Manchester. In flashbacks (?) we see her sister start work at a brothel, chatting to Fay (Rebecca Humphries). When she (the sister, also played by Clifford) disappears, Fay starts asking awkward question of the brothel’s owner(?), Gale (Rochenda Sandall). Gale is then in trouble with her boss, Keaton.

Or: Charlie and Moe (Sean Rigby) work on Pomona guarding the only road entrance; their boss, Gale, orders them to murder a woman. In their private lives Charlie is meeting Keaton who’s responded to his advert to play an RPG with him; Joe goes to visit a woman working as a prostitute, Fay, because – thanks to his anger management – he’s been finding it difficult to just have human contact. The woman they’ve been ordered to murder is Fay. Gale’s boss is Keaton. Ollie is almost invisible.

Or. Or. Or...

The plot feels slippery, illusory. It could all be in the minds of any one of the myriad characters, Ollie might not have a sister, or she could *be* the sister. “Ollie” could be made up. Keaton’s role as a master criminal could be role-play fantasy or deadly reality. And Zeppo – the most fleeting figure of the piece – he might really own most of the city and “not get involved,” or he could really be a seagull talking to a dead girl all along.

What’s utterly brilliant is that while the structure glides and shimmers in front of us, it neither stops us caring about the characters, nor about the story. Think: those David Lynch films where some twist halfway through essentially makes the story impossible in a linear sense. But, Christ almighty, what a journey it is. It feels – something reflected in Georgia Lowe’s design, echoed and enhanced by Elliot Griggs’s lighting design – like you’re being sucked into a vortex. The structure of the play, the feelings of the characters, even the shape of the Exchange, contrive to make it feel like everything is spiralling into this central plughole in the middle of the city, in the middle of the stage.

A big black hole in the middle of the city.

Along the way, the play also manages to feel like one of the best metaphors for life in late-capitalism ever written. (Having done the programme interview, I happen to know this isn’t entirely coincidence. But, well, hats off to McDowall, it totally fucking works.) The characters have a way of saying things that are not only true in the moment or to their reality, but also refract a far wider sense of what something is like. So much of each of their situations reflects some vile facet of life in our economy. The opening is at once once a brilliant comic aria on Indiana Jones and McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, a key describing the themes of the play, and a kind of horrible warning about how we live now akin to Ten Billion. The whole is both a brilliant joke that it’s possible to take entirely seriously, and an incredibly sobering analysis that you’d have to try very hard not to find gripping and exciting. Moreover, Pomona is (hold the quotes slot) PROBABLY THE BEST PLAY ABOUT MANCHESTER EVER WRITTEN. Beyond this, the performances are blistering good; proper barnstorming rhetoric in authentic Manc accents offset with subtle, emotional moments, beautiful “reaction shots” (watching in-the-round, you get to really focus on someone just listening sometimes, and the cast pull it off perfectly). And Christ, the look of the thing, and the sound of the thing (Giles Thomas – absolutely outstanding work as composer and sound designer)...

So, yeah. Go see Pomona.


[Forgive the personal intro: When I first saw Pomona last year at the Orange Tree I had never heard of the titular place. Now, just under a year later, I live so close to it that I receive letters from Manchester City Council when people put in planning applications on it. (And, fuck those planning applications, frankly. What kind of demented cunt thinks those buildings would be good anywhere?) Pomona is now almost literally my back garden. I won’t say that the show actually played a part in my moving from London to Manchester. And, really, the location of my flat is basically just a coincidence. But it certainly didn’t hurt my decision-making process when I found out where it was in relation to Pomona, and it’s a coincidence of which I’m incredibly fond.]

So, last night Pomona came home.

I really wish I’d reviewed the production when I’d first seen it at the Orange Tree a year ago.

I’ve still got the start of that review on my laptop:

Pomona – AT THE FUCKING ORANGE TREE, FFS 

Once in a while a play comes along that is so good that the first three lines etch a grin onto your face that you just don’t lose for the next 1hr45 (no interval). Ali McDowall’s Pomona is one of those plays. It’s one of those plays that’s almost embarrassing to write about, it’s so good. I mean, Jesus Christ, who expected *THE ORANGE TREE OF ALL PLACES* to put on what is possibly the best new play this year?...

Clearly after scribbling that down I must have [and this joke only makes sense if you’ve seen the play] jizzed over everything in the city and then gone to sleep for millions of years.

What’s annoying [apart from how many brackets there are in this review] for me, as “a critic”, is that it would have been nice to have had more record of what I first thought to compare to what I thought last night. Because, as my TMI intro makes clear, I now have an entirely different relationship to almost everything in this play.

You know how when you watch a play, only half of what you “see” – especially in something like Ned Bennett’s production here – is actually on stage. The other half (maybe more) are the things you picture in your mind’s eye as characters describe them.

What’s absolutely fascinating for me is that when I first saw Pomona I had no mental picture of Pomona. Or of Manchester in general, really, save for the walk from Piccadilly station to the Royal Exchange. That situation is now entirely altered. So, last night, when someone described Pomona, or the city, or the M60 my original mental pictures were completely updated. I could imagine the cine-realist version in my head, rather than making something up according to the available information. I wonder what that sort of disruption does to your relationship with a work of art.

Still, this is all so much navel gazing (“Pomona, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Po-mo-na...”), and some of you might actually want to read about the play...

[return to top]

Shorts: critical tribalism

[addressing a misconception]

Earlier today [now a few days ago] a colleague sent me a message saying “I liked the new David Hare, I must be off the team now, right?” Of course, he was joking. There aren’t really teams in criticism, even if Matt Trueman did once propose the appealing idea that there should be (almost exactly a year before suggesting theatre fans should be more like sports fans, weirdly). That said, *obviously* my colleague’s joke refers to a more widespread perception (in theatre terms; so, like, thirty people) or it wouldn’t work.

This perception of critical “teams” – at least in its current incarnation – goes back to that Nicholas Hytner comment in 2007 when he called the then “top rank” of British theatre critics “Dead White Males”. Back then, everyone was also publishing “Bloggers versus Critics” articles every other sodding minute. If you left aside nearly all the facts you could come up with quite a plausible sense of two “sides” in conflict. Although even this claim dates me as a critic. Far more people would perhaps date the current division of “teams” from Three Kingdoms in 2012. And, again, if you ignore enough facts, that’ll also do nicely. Doubtless older critics can name even more ancient largely illusory schisms between one sort of critic and another – young against old, men against women, whoever against whatever – over some even older then-new thing in theatre... It’s also interesting to note in passing that this false Team/Off-the-team binary seems to be echoed by that other hoary old binary of served-texts and every-other-fucking-thing on a stage, with liking a served-text being a sure-fire route to off-the-team-dom(s).

Insofar as anything in criticism is “really important”, I think it’s really important that we keep on rubbishing these sort of lazy lumpings-in. I still remember (nine years on, Christ!) my intense irritation at this early blogpost by Michael Billington (boo! Hiss!) in which, while trying to ascertain whether “audiences” have “forgotten how to think”, he argued: “ audiences today adopt one of two postures: collective reverence or atomised selfishness. Alan Bennett is the person who has best pinned down the former. In Untold Stories he recalls going to a matinee of Complicite’s Street of Crocodiles and finding himself surrounded by worshipping acolytes.” Billington went on:

My experience coincides exactly with Bennett’s. As our theatre has become more sectionalised, so audiences have increasingly turned into clannish fans... [A]udience partisanship is equally prominent amongst supposedly progressive groups like Kneehigh, Improbable or Frantic Assembly. Watching Kneehigh’s current production of Cymbeline – which retains Shakespeare’s barmy narrative while junking his sublime poetry – I couldn’t believe that intelligent adults were happily sitting through this faux-naif nonsense. But I was, of course, missing the point: I was surrounded by rapt fans for whom Kneehigh are the Man U of avant-garde theatre.

Now, if you’ve read Simon Stephens’s Twitter feed – like, ever – you’ll have noticed that supporting Manchester United is very far from a process of “uncritical acceptance”. But that point is probably true of theatre (and everything else) too. The “fan” is not uncritically accepting, full stop. [I should say right now that “Fandom” isn’t really my area and I don’t really like the word, or self-identify as a “fan”. Irrespective of that, though, even the quickest look at Meg Vaughan’s writings on fandom (which I now can’t find) confirm that “the fan” is hardly an identity that precludes critique.]

Instead, all we have  – all any of us have – is our taste. And it’s an inexplicable thing. I’ve never found a book that explains where it comes from, why it exists, or what having it achieves. I suppose there are hints in Chris Thorpe’s Confirmation (scroll down for current tour dates) about how societies/communities construct themselves around shared values, and maybe even “tastes”. After all, where would youth subcultures be without shared tastes in trousers and tunes? (Bloody nowhere, that’s where.) So, while it’s galling to read Billington paint the people who happen to like something he doesn’t are unthinking sheep-like masses, it is at least understandable. After all, people who don’t share my exact tastes are utter morons, and it’s the work of criticism to tell them so repeatedly. (Lol/jk)

All of which is a meandering way of saying that, on one hand, lumping people together and assuming you know what they’re going to think of something – either because someone in a superficially similar demographic thought it, or because they’ve liked something different by the same people in the past – is pretty stupid. And yet, on the other hand, what we’ve liked before and suggested affinities are pretty much what we base our decision making processes on.

In short: I’ve disagreed with each and every one of my contemporaries about one show or another in the past month alone. (And, in each case, I’ve been right while they’ve gone suddenly, inexplicably mad...)

Or, to quote the Late Review pastiche in Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life, “Theatre has nothing to do with this and I bitterly resent the implication that I'm some kind of Nazi.”


[cover photo: Dimiter Gotscheff and friend in A Midsummer Night’s Dream]

Boat – Theatre N16, Balham (SW12)

[seen 26/10/15]

Have you ever wondered what Life of Pi crossed with Blasted would be like? No. Of course you haven’t. Why would you? Why would anyone? Nevertheless, I think that’s basically what Boat is.

And... Well, it’s 1hr25, it’s not perfect, there are bits of the script I’d definitely cut, and not *every single second of every performance is perfect*. But, blimey, there’s a fuck load in Max Barton’s production that’s just great too. Really great.

[I think “ultimate verdicts” (bleugh anyway) will probably vary depending on individuals’ tolerance for twee, and on trusting writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s walk down the fine line of gender presentation. (This is a fascinating example of a script that, if it had been written by a bloke, could kind of have fucked off, you know? (I watched it not knowing) I do wonder what that means for theatre generally, or for me as a critic, or for members of the modern world as audiences...)]

Have you seen The Encounter yet? Boat kicks off with a very gentle audience participation version of that! It’s pretty inspired. The sound guy (Jethro Cooke) is just perched on a shelf at the back of the playing area with his keyboard and his Mac in plain sight. He just talks to us and records us doing some sounds that he can pitch-shift and loop. To be honest, I could live with that happening in every show I ever see. It was a bit of a shame that lighting guy wasn’t sat next to him, in fact (doubtless for good practical reasons, like the size of lighting desks, rather than sudden half-assed squeamishness about realism).

Pia Laborde Noguez plays “Girl” – 14 according to the play – who is standing alone in the titular boat. It’s a rough structure here, composed of white-painted wooden pallets and surrounded by a sea of cellophane under which a bunch of tatty living room furniture sits. This kinda-abstract, kinda-not set meant I’d pretty much correctly guessed the wider trajectory of the story within about two minutes of the thing starting. But that honestly doesn’t matter; it’s the getting there and where there is and why that’s at stake here. [side note: it’s interesting, isn’t it though, how, because something’s theatre and we’ve suspended our disbelief or our literalism anyway, we can simultaneously believe her fantasy that she’s in a boat, and our fantasy that she’s *really* in her bedroom?]

The rest of the cast crop up to populate Girl’s bizarre dream-world, with two blokes taking the roles of a seagull (Grabriele Lombardo) and a slightly pushy turtle with sexual undertones (Matthew Coulton). Cristina Catalina plays Girl’s twin sister Twin [Bechdel Test fail right there. Silly Bechdel Test].

I’ll try not to spoiler the thing – not least because a) I’m not sure I could accurately, and b) because it actually does seem to exist in a strange dramatic hinterland where an entirely logical explanation is never fully offered. Things that get mentioned or hinted at – so tangentially as to all feel optionally real – are: an environmental catastrophe, the wiping out of most other life on earth, fighting outside, a kind of war outside, some sort of abusive relationship, a murder, a death, blokes actually pretending to be these funny sea creatures, the blokes pretending to be sea creatures being figments of the girl’s imagination, the blokes being real, all the pretence being theatricalised imagination.

The script has a kind of Beckettian sense of urgency, which is to say; none at all. Instead, it builds up allusion by accretion. More and more stuff gets said. Not always in English. I guess it does gradually increase our understanding of the situation and the problem. But, as – arguably – a memory play, we’re already at the end. It’s also a bit like After The End (the Dennis Kelly play). There’s a sense that we might gradually be breaking out of the fantasy layers protectively woven around a terrible incident (cf. the dreadul fairy tale of Can I Start Again Please?), but we never quite break the surface. Nothing ever becomes explicit. On balance I think I’m glad about that.

Something that occurred to me watching this was that, while written by someone whose day-job is poet and novelist, in this production the most dispensable element was the language. Or rather, because Barton creates such a rich physical and theatrical world for the performance – there’s a particularly good bit with some clay covering a person’s face (just trust me on that) – that I think I could have watched this performed entirely in Slovenian (for example) and probably got *more* out of it for not having all the *writing* happening at me as well. It seems a perverse thing to say, but, to echo that Simon Stephens quote “language is noise”, I think what is properly remarkable about this script is that it entirely works *as music*, as a score for performance, and give-or-take as a fine dramatic template; a map of the peaks and troughs. What it seemed not to need, in the playing, was the actual words.

The Notebook – (Forced Entertainment) Contact, Manchester

[seen 22/10/15]

Two identically-dressed men walk onto a flat wooden rectangle. They each bring a chair and a book. They sit on the chairs, nod at each other, open the books and begin to read.

The Notebook is a short book by Agota Kristóf about two pre-pubescent twin boys who are sent to live in the countryside with their grandmother.

Forced Entertainment’s version is the second adaptation of The Notebook we’ve seen this year (the link is to a review of first). Kristóf is Hungarian, but the country in which it is set could be any number of Nazi-occupied countries in Eastern Europe.

One of the first things that happens in the story is that the boys acquire themselves a notebook and set themselves rules for writing about things they see and do. One of the rules they make for themselves regarding their writing is to ban their own value judgements. They can observe the reactions of others, but do not add their own. They also only use the first person plural to talk about what they do. Perhaps sometimes “one of us does (a) and one of us does (b)” but the one always relates to the *us*.

[it was also hilarious to me that I first saw The Notebook the night after my piece for the Guardian about staging books was published, since it pretty much exactly does what I suggest is a brilliant idea, brilliantly.]

We wanted to know how some information about the piece so we asked the piece’s director Tim Etchells three or four questions. These are his [off-the-cuff] answers:

“We started with the whole text but that ran to four hours. So we cut around 40%, but the architecture remains exactly the same. Nothing added at all no - didn’t feel any desire to do that. A few translation improvements. The only ‘addition’ is at the very end where we added a few lines because it's otherwise so abrupt*. So we ‘added’ a few lines just a small small space of decompression. There were many many bits** that we were forced to cut. Given the minimalism of our approach we wanted to keep it tight time-wise.".

“I think we recognised something in her style - this language as picture-making strategy. Or language as virtual theatre/cinema. The bluntness and simplicity that's in fact really complex and dynamic.*** So it connected to things we’d been working on. I think it was same with out only other adaptation – Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain. No urge to dramatise. Just to put the act of narration into a public space; to socialise its problem, so to speak.”

[In line with my attempt to follow the rules of the notebook/The Notebook, I’ve removed the three emotional value judgements here and put them at the bottom, as indicated.]

The audience is impressed by the way Richard Lowdon and Robin Arthur speak in chorus together. It is plainly a difficult trick and to do it for 90+ minutes (though not solidly) and to make it look so easy pleases the audience.

[But there is complexity too. Why are they twins? What does it symbolise? I was reminded of the twins of Mark Ravenhill’s (also East European-exploring) Over There. I was reminded of the fearsome choruses of Karin Beier’s Das Werk. Even without being offered specific answers, it communicates a certain unplaceable feeling. In terms of literature (the source is a European novel after all) I was also reminded of the pregnant-but-unplaceable, menacing symbolism of Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum.]

What is strange about the piece – something that I’ve realised, trying to mirror the form with this content so far – is that there’s a real disconnect between the apparent minimalism of the production, plus the apparently blank tone of the observations, and the actual effect that the whole has. *Of course* there’s the small matter of The Notebook being a work of literature which will have been written and re-written until perfected, and I’m just dashing this off. And there’s the fact that Kristóf gets to shape her narrative, where I am reporting facts. But, in terms of writing alone, the spark here comes from precisely the disjuncture (and knowing “innocence”) between the boys’ observations and the things they observe. The boys harden themselves against physical pain, against emotional pain, against shock. Not with complete success: the inhumanity of the Holocaust defeats even these detached observers of bestiality: but that is their attempt.

But, somewhere between the boys’ attempt, the staging of it, and the reception of this by the audience, a kind of alchemy takes place whereby we become all the more engaged and involved in just the simple progress of the story itself. And it is a beautifully, beautifully crafted story. It feels pregnant with allegory. I’m perhaps not familiar enough with Hungarian history to understand the wider points of the allegory, if there is one, but there is enough just in the story and the depths that explores to make this a compelling two hours viewing. And the sense that there’s more underneath it all, if only you keep digging at it and thinking about it is also somehow incredibly rewarding.



* it works brilliantly in the novel but in run-throughs it was always so so so abrupt.

** we loved

*** For me also the very performative thing of the impossible ‘two as one’ – you feel that in the book. But I just wanted to make it happen in real time on real bodies. That impossible narration.

And Now: The World! – The Edge, Chorlton

[seen 23/10/15]

Yeah. It’s pretty good. Go see it...

There we go, there’s the boring bit of theatre criticism despatched.

Right. This is really interesting. And Now: The World! is a text for theatre by Sibylle Berg. It’s the second time I’ve seen it. The first was in 2013 at the Gorki Theatre in Berlin, directed by Sebastian Nübling.

I say it’s the second time I’ve seen it, but this version is so different both in tone and style that it might almost have been a completely different play. While the story was essentially the same – at least one young woman tells us about herself; her life before now; her life now – the way it is told more or less entirely changed its meaning. The first time: four women; tough, nonchalant, aggressive, moody, streetwise; this time: one woman; English, apologetic, hyperactive, neurotic. Is it the same story if the perspective is so different?

The text is a tough, rough thing. It’s ironic. Deeply so. But I get a sense that the way the irony functioned in the two productions actually tells us a lot more about our respective cultures than the actual words. Or the cultures of England and the German language (not *Germany* because the Gorki production was in collaboration with the Junges Theater, Basel, although I think the performers were from the Gorki company? I dunno). Anyway, there are lots of different varieties of English. It felt like this register – nice, unthreatening, middle class, but not posh-middle-class – might have positioned the story in a place that made it seem different to how it could have seemed. Some people tell me Germany’s class thing is different to ours. Others say not so much. Whatever. They’re *a lot less* obsessed with it than we are. But it’s not just about class, there’s also a thing about attitude here. Where, Nübling’s production is multi-ethnic (and for all I know, multi-regional), Graham’s production is white and southern/midlandsy accent-wise (I thought, although I wouldn’t swear to it). None of these things are criticisms. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. But they do read differently, and it’s that surprise that I’m negotiating here. That social position can so alter how one understands a text.

Then there’s the productions. In this, Abigail Graham’s production, the performer, Jennifer Jackson, is placed on a nicely designed shiny white floor and back wall. It’s – aptly – a bit like she’s standing in an open MacBook. But it’s got all these suggestions of furniture too; a table, a shelf, a chest, maybe a slim wardrobe. These mean she can leap about the set, almost like a monkey in a zoo, swinging off bars on the wall and hopping from platform to platform. This is also apt. In this version of the monologue, she’s on the phone, on skype, texting, her mum’s calling on the landline... there’s time-urgency, compulsion, near-hysteria. Compare Jackson with the four young women in Sebastian Nübling’s version who pace the empty stage listlessly, and whose phone calls and skype chats seem to be spread across months rather than one anxious real-time-compressed day. The gulf of difference is genuinely unsettling. (And, it’s worth repeating, neither version feels either “better” or “wrong”. Just radically, radically different.)

Perhaps because of what I’ve been working on/thinking about recently, something occurred to me watching this: in Germany, there’s not quite the same vast tradition of stand-up, or live comedy as there is in the UK.

And the effect on how you think about this show is startling when you do consider it. Because, as a text, it’s quite unlike anything anyone’s written here, *as theatre*. Yes, Graham’s production makes it into something that we’re more familiar with in Britain – it’s properly fascinating that the brilliant writer Clara Brennan (Spine) is the dramaturg on it – really the text itself is rangy, diffuse, hardly telling “a story” at all (in the way that, say, Spine does). Instead, if you dressed it up the same, I think it would make all sorts of sense as stand up (although there aren’t many jokes, but I wonder if it would have more laughs just if presented in that way): just the performer, a mic, a raised stage. And, thinking back, in a lot of ways, that’s almost what Nübling’s production did do. But, obviously, because it doesn’t read like that in Germany, and of course because there were four people on stage. But, still, it was interesting to think about. The way we signal modes of performance... I think this also has something to say about signals of “liveness”. It’s a kind of crucial key to seeing how *rehearsed* our performers often seem. Even when signalling “liveness”, as Jackson sometimes does.

I’ve not said much about the subject matter yet. And I’ll admit, I was slightly thrown by it here. The central character here felt almost like she was interestingly played *against* some of the naturalistic conclusions of the words, whereas her characters’ self-irony seemed to function differently again. I’ve speculated fruitlessly on some sort of national difference in uses of irony between Britian and Germany before (yes, yes, I know Sibylle Berg lives in Zurich now and was granted Swiss citizenship in 2012, but...), but I think this piece gets close to demonstrating where we locate our irony, in contrast to where else it can be located. For example, the number of times the character seems to complain about the compulsion toward political correctness. I mean, in Britain complaining about “PC” is the province of UKIP. See Stewart Lee, etc. etc. Like, are we meant to take this seriously? IS the character proposing a notion we’re invited to agree with, or is it a facet of her character that we might view with irony? It’s hard to tell, but perhaps such anxieties themselves are also located in England’s own peculiar relationship to saying anything straightforwardly.

In a best case analysis of the text, it might be like a cross between Josie Long and a Bikini Kill record, at worst it might almost be blogpost by a nascent teenage Jan Moir or Katie Hopkins. Of course, that Berg is a 50-something woman writing a twentysomething character complicates this further. What are we to make of her take on this person? Is the author ironic *through* or *about* this person? (Or both?) Or is that not even a thing?

[Yesterday,] I also read this (brilliant) interview with Dennis Cooper, which reminded me to question my (recently lazy) attitude to *content* and characters, and what an author might mean by them. But also, raises that question again of the extent to which any author (be it writer, director, dramaturg, or performer) has a final say-so over *meaning*, compared with the individual audience member.

[and obviously my relationship with this position is extra complicated by the fact that I then have to recount my experience of being an audience member to another audience: you readers – who then have the final say over what I’ve said/meant.]

So, yeah. Stuff to think about.

Exeunt: Ali McDowall Interview – B-sides and rarities

[written for Exeunt]

As someone writing about theatre you sometimes get asked to do an interview with a playwright for the programme of a production of their play. The requirement for the programme tends to be about 1,500 words or so. Depending on the speaker, the average person seems to say roughly five times that (or more) in an hour. And, well, when the whole hour is really interesting, it seems silly not to put it out. The “Ali McDowall: The Greatest Hits” interview is in the programme for Pomona at the Manchester Royal Exchange, playing 29th October to 21st November.

This is a lot of the rest of that interview...

Guardian: Joy of Text

[written for the Guardian]

I wrote a thing about not-adapting books for stage for the Guardian.

Measure For Measure – Young Vic, London

[seen 21/10/15]

Fuck.

I don't know the last time I left a home-grown piece of theatre feeling quite so electrified.*

Joe Hill-Gibbins takes Measure For Measure and knocks it out of the park. And he does it by making the play as much like itself as it's possible to imagine.

There’s no “concept” here, as such – although there’s clearly a lot of thinking about what the play means, how it operates, and the ways it can *mean* now – just unfussy modern dress, a brilliant design and one of the best companies of actors currently gathered in England.

Miriam Buether’s design brilliantly steals/suggests Robert Borgmann's design for his Burgtheater production of Die Unverheiratet (Measure For Measure is set in Vienna, after all), but adds to it a large, bare backroom of the Young Vic’s unadorned breezeblocks. The other main design elements include video-live-feed-projection (cf. my notes on Joe H-G’s Edward II), projected images of medieval religious allegorical paintings, pastiches of Gilbert and George pictures, early ‘90s rap videos, and a really huge pile of inflatable sex-dolls.

These inflatable bodies are a masterstroke. Co-opted as everything from participants in the opening “orgy” to the inmates of the prison, when they’re in the fore-stage they feel both embarrassing and ludicrous, dividing the audience into Id and Superego responses of Studiedly Not Laughing and openly laughing a bit too much. More fascinating, though, is that when Angelo (I don’t need to tell you the story, do I?) enacts his crackdown on sex-work, and these pathetic feather-light bodies are flung through the air into a heap in the back room, the result looks, just briefly, like a hideous parody of those photos from Belsen. Without the point ever being underlined, you suddenly realise just how not funny police brutality against women working as prostitutes is.

But – and while the lights are great, and the sound design is pretty awesome** – the real genius here is in the performances. Christ they’re good. It feels like each one has been honed within its own precise universe. You know how sometimes it feels like all the actors are in different productions and it’s a problem? Here it feels like a brilliant choice, and seems to speak about class, and expectations, and just attitude generally. Like, Zubin Varla – I bloody love Zubin Varla anyway, but – in this his version of the Duke is almost a kind of madness. His first speech... The way Sarah Malin, as his aide, Escalus, just looks at him dumbstruck – her “listening acting” is almost too compelling – the way he’s tackling his lines; spitting out odd syllables, almost mangling the sense out of revenge against school-taught Shakespeare; or perhaps forensically admonishing some quite shoddy scene-setting. But all the while within a completely realised character as well. The best way to imagine is maybe thinking of the way opera singers do text – dictated by music rather than syntax.

All the other performances seem to exist in a different universe to this and each other. Romola Garai, for example, seems – on one level, particularly at the start – to be living much more in the world of “pure Shakespeare” (all RP and a nice loud posh voice, and indeed *white*; as Sir Trev implies it should be). And, rather than feeling like a limitation, it feels like a very clever choice. Here she is, this Isabella, in her convent/nunnery, talking in this “pure” voice, in these sentences that seem to come from a different universe to the seamy world in which her brother is somehow involved. Garai is brilliant too, btw. They all are. And later, when the arc of the narrative turns against her, she goes all out with tear-soaked, snot-dripping fury like she too is suddenly possessed by Courtney Love. Close up (row F), its a properly visceral thing.

As her brother, Claudio, Iavanno Jeremiah doesn’t actually get to say a lot – he’s stuck in prison and being spoken for a lot of the time – but, blimey, when he does get speak, by Christ he’s good. Really good. It feels like a godawful cliché to invoke “inner calm” or something, but the power of Jeremiah’s Claudio is chiefly this incredibly charismatic silence, and clarity when he does speak.

Against this, John Mackay as his lewd and rambunctious mate Lucio basically recalls a young Ian McDiarmid. Which, when you consider that Ian Mc. was one of the best actors going for a very long time, is no small thing. He’s got that same lean, fox-like kind of intelligence, if that makes any sense at all. While Tom Edden turns the (hitherto mostly overlooked) part of Pompey into what *might* be construed as a kind of stereotypical Jewish American pimp-cum-lawyer from the 70s. It’s *a lot of fun*. And, Christ! How lovely to see Hammed Animashaun from Secret Theatre on stage again too.

Going back to this idea of these characters from different walks of life being from almost dramatically incompatible worlds, it seems entirely fitting then that Paul Ready’s Angelo most readily recalls our hideous Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. Paul Ready, I should emphasise, doesn’t resemble him at all. This is *acting*. But Ready absolutely captures here precisely that soft, pampered, flabby, smirking smile that crosses the idiot Tory’s face every time someone catches him out. But, by God, to do this while pretty much making all the knotty Shakespeare-language sound somehow more like modern English as well is yet more proof that Ready is another of the best actors we’ve got. The only drawback to this approach at all is that, in our more cynical age (and not much more, judging by this play), we’re hardly surprised when prize prigs like this turn out to also be rank hypocrites of the first water.

I’m not sure I’ve ever really *felt* this done before. Certainly not so seamlessly. Not in such a coherent world-of-the-play, which it *of course* happening emphatically *on a stage*, but also in our imaginations. I’ve often felt that the complaint that characters “all seem to be in different plays” should feel more true to life, and here it does. The production is also effortlessly multi-racial in a way that should have Trevor Nunn reaching for a glass of whisky and a revolver***.

So, yes. This is Measure For Measure alright. Turned against itself, and against the world. Mercifully, it doesn’t really underline any particular specious passing similarities with horrible UK in autumn 2015, it just gets on with the story, although, unless you’ve had your head under a rock, thing after thing, resonance after resonance will strike you. And, so, yeah, I think you just come out kind of high on theatre, but kind of fighty. There’s a deftness and a lightness to the way that the just terrible problems of the play’s conclusion are kind of presented gleefully straight. I mean, the ending *is* completely flawed, so staging it as a total WTF car-crash ceremony seems the best solution.

If you happen to be reading this before the production closes (14th November), for God’s sake go and see it. I reckon it’s one of the best stagings by a British director of anything this year. Definitely.

___

* some other electrifying things: Katie Mitchell’s Attempts on Her Life
Gisele Vienne’s I Apologize
Thomas Ostermeier’s Hedda Gabler
Rupert Goold’s King Lear
Sebastian Nübling’s Three Kingdoms
Ivo van Hove’s A View From The Bridge
(maybe Benedict Andrews’s Three Sisters)
...there are other A++ responses aside from electrification, btw. And I’ve almost certainly forgotten some electrifying things here (Alles Weitere... for example).

** The sound *is* good, if a bit underline-y in places. But where Die Unverheiratet chucks in a rabid re-working of DAF’s Tanz Der Mussolini at random, here we get a really on-the-nose use of ALANIS MORRISSETTE FFS. BLEUGH.

*** Ok, I’m manifestly not the person to call this, and it’s only a small hunch, but I did worry that while the play *looks* brilliantly multi-racial and had colour-blind casting, I did worry (like the guilty white leftie that I am), that the characters played by black actors had proportionally fewer lines than white actors, and possibly these had been further slimmed in this particular edit.
And I worried – slightly – about the available symbolism of having “pure, virtuous” Isabella played by a white actor while her naughty brother was played by a black actor. On the other hand, the fact of (black) Claudio being arrested as soon as (white) Angelo came to power also looked like the sort of arrest that is routine in contemporary UK and USA every day. Indeed, actually, without once overselling the idea, that feeling of wildly racist injustice is never far from the surface here, even while the apparent subject is still Angelo’s “moral crusade”. But how fitting, after all, that it should be so. After all, it’s never “because they’re black” that people get arrested in UK or USA either. It’s just an ongoing striking coincidence...
[edit: this is obviously not just a black and white issue, and the largest part in the play, the Duke, is played by Zubin Varla.]
___

I reckon this, not Morrissette, and bingo:




Design mood board:

Exeunt: Stewart Lee Intrerview

[written for Exeunt]

I did a longform interview with Stewart Lee.  Read it here.

Capital – La Raffinerie/Charleroi Danses, Brussels

[seen 20/10/15]

Capital is an adaptation for stage of French economist Thomas Picketty’s recent required-reading book Capital in the 21st Century, by the Croatian director Ivica Buljan (whose Macbeth After Shakespeare by Heiner Müller and Quay West I saw at the Almada Festival in 2013).

I’m not surprised by someone adapting a 1,000-page book of economic theory for the stage. Rimini Protokoll did Marx’s Kapital *years ago* (they’re onto Mein Kampf now, which sounds really interesting. (It goes to HAU in January.)), although I wonder if I’d bridle slightly at calling it “an adaptation”; it's more “a selection of very personal responses to...”. In fact, weirdly, having seen so many “straight” page-to-stage stagings of non-written-for-theatre texts recently, I wonder if I was actually surprised at the extent to which this seemed to contain less *actual text from the book* than I’d expected.

In spirit, Capital isn’t unlike [comparison for UK readers] a youth theatre version of A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts/Show Five (not that Secret Theatre had any older actors either). Sadly, visually, it’s less look at: there’s an empty stage, (apart from) three (underused) tables near the back, the odd chair, and at one point a *really impressive* stack of plastic beakers. I guess my reservation comes more from the fact that the large dance stage of La Raffinerie is totally closed down into an intimate thrust stage by the addition of a single line of chairs right in the middle of the stage creating a little playing space in the middle of the bigger one. (Imagine them doing Show Five like that on the small stage of Sadler’s Wells and with the majority of the audience still in the stalls. But tis is just me deploring thrust stages again. Christ I hate them.)

The cast is large (20), but staggeringly underused. Mostly the piece consists of solos/monologues, occasionally more, any everyone else sitting assembly-style on the floor. I should just accept it as such, but it is difficult to resist a sense that more could have been done with 20 performers. (But I also don’t know the method by which the piece was assembled. Perhaps separately? Perhaps each performer was allotted a set number of pages/chapter/s to cover in whatever way.)

In fact, despite more or less the whole piece being in English, it still felt like it would have been really useful to have had something more like a roadmap of what was going on. That said, I think part of my discomfort/confusion was just to do with expectation vs actuality. A slight case of, having not known what to expect, filling in some blanks incorrectly and then being surprised when they failed to materialise.


I’ve now spent a few days with the piece knocking about my head to be thought about, and while the detail has consequently evaporated (in a way it didn’t with, say, Ten Billion), I think I’ve got more of a handle on what the piece was up to.

In fact, I *think*, and I could be wrong about this, but *I think* the large, rambling structure (three hours straight through, strangely watchable, never boring) is a response to what is made explicit at the end. That Picketty’s conclusion to Capital is pretty flawed. His faith in a “democratic” Europe just sorting out inequality is no kind of ending for the book at all. Like it points out all the problems, and all the reasons why they’ve grown up, and then imagines they can all be magicked away by pretty much the exact same institutions and organisations that caused them (encouraged them, even) to flourish in the first place. It’s a pretty reasonable analysis. Picketty isn’t a radical, after all. As Wikipedia puts it “the book argues that unless capitalism is reformed, the very democratic order will be threatened..”

It’s interesting, as with the work seen at BITEF this year (also by mostly ex-Yugoslavian directors), it seems that the consensus in leftist circles in mainland Europe is that “democracy” is a joke word now. Perhaps it always was, or at least was, once they started experiencing it as a reality, rather than the idealised, propagandised version sold during the cold war. Of course, this will doubtless sound somewhat “extreme” for many in Britain, to whom the mild left-leaning democratic liberal Jeremy Corbyn is currently being sold as The Most Left-Wing Thing Imaginable. And, indeed, our cultural memory in Britain does seen to be short-circuited; to the extent that it’s almost impossible to remember what Facebook looked like before it’s last redesign, which we all hated for about three days too. Christ knows what level of effort would be needed to remember what an actual spread of different political ideas look like.

So, yes. As a piece of theatre it has definitely grown on me (since I stopped having to sit still and be quiet for three hours. Often the way). And the more I read of and about Capital..., the more I see what parts of the show were driving at. On the other hand, while impossible to condense and deliver 1,000 pages satisfactorily in three hours, it feels like there are many, many more adaptations of Capital in the 21st Century to come, but it feels like they need to come soon, so we’ve all got that down before better books that we can properly get behind come along.

In fact, HA! perhaps this is in fact the staging of the world’s longest bad review of a book rather than the book itself...

The Crucible – Royal Exchange, Manchester

[seen 04/10/15]

The Crucible is a remarkable play. There’s a fair chance it’s the best American play of the 20th Century, which is pretty close to saying it’s the Best American Play Ever, right?

That it’s from Arthur Miller’s same fertile mid-fifties period in his work as A View From The Bridge is probably not coincidental. It is fascinating that the apparent nominal crux of both these plays is a bloke whose dick has got him into trouble shouting that he wants his name back. In the hands of a lesser playwright, this might grate somewhat. Miller, though, precision-tunes the world around a situation so that we somehow empathise with and care about the stresses and strains of a good five or six central characters, their various needs and desires often completely contrary, mutually exclusive, but always horribly understandable.

It’s this sympathy that feels crucial to the Crucible’s success; at least, when performed straight and uncut – as I’d argue Caroline Steinbeis’s production is. And it’s a very, very good production indeed. Max Jones’s design creates a – well, it’s kind of like a real crucible, isn’t it? (see pic) – on stage. A shallow concrete drain, with, again, passing similarity to Benedict Andrews’s Cleansed. We get a real sense of why the play is named as it is.

While the set design essentially offers some slightly loaded/symbolic open spaces on which to perform – perhaps the most intriguing bits of the set are the giant neon cross outside the Exchange’s “module” audiorium on one side and the blasted stumps of the woods out of the opposite exit (I rasther love the idea of having bits of the set performing a sculptural function *outside* the actual stage. How brilliant) – it feels like the main interpretative functions are being performed by the costumes. It is essentially half modern-dress (the men), and half Doctor Who crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale (the women). The blokes are all dressed pretty much as the equivalent of their character might be expected to in modern Britain or America. Farmers wear lumberjack shirts, slightly more hoity-toity/well-to-do citizens wear Barbour jackets, the minister brought in to check for witches wears pretty standard Rev jumper and dog-collar. It works extremely well indeed. The slightly-brighter-than-pastel colours of he women, who all wear one-colour, kind-of science-fiction Victorian dresses – which in themselves are a clever way of suggestion religious and moral conservatism. I’m not sure I *liked* them, as such, but what’s that but a trick of taste? There’s certainly nothing *wrong* with them, and they’re no more or less distracting than rigorously observed historical costumes. Probably better, since they stop the audience just consigning all the evils of the play to its dual pasts of McCarthyism and wacko seventeenth century ideas about religion.

The reason I think it’s such a good play is probably because it takes such a dim view of both individuals and society. We see single persons all seeking to invent or utilise existing structures to their own advantages, and then we see the structure’s incapability of resolving its own contradictions; its inflexibility in the face of momentum. And individuals’ connivance at maintaining the structure, even against their better judgement. It’s a truly horrifying picture of an all too recognisable truth. Hardly anyone *really* “means any harm”. Murder can be signed off as face-saving. No one *really* has to feel responsible. And no one really believes in anything. “Belief” is a handy, cynical fig-leaf for far more selfish desires. “Justice”, let alone “fairness”, is a joke.

What is also interesting, though not foregrounded here, is the way that in a society where women nominally have no power – on one hand second class citizens, but on the other hand, fetishized symbols – one girl with sufficient charisma can basically bring about a small-scale holocaust. I wonder if we should look harder at what Miller ends up implying with this, or perhaps Abigail Williams’s gender isn’t important for the political dimension of the story.

Sorry, I’ve gone a bit off track, worrying about a confirmed classic play when what I should be doing is writing about how bloody good gthe performances are here. I’ve been a big fan of Jonjo O’Neill since (I think) I first saw him, in Rupert Goold’s King Lear, but I think this is the best thing I’ve seen him do yet. It’s kind of a boring thing to note, but the extent to which his Irish accent maps onto Every. Single. Line makes it sound like Miller had written it in dialect for precisely this performance. Which is about as high as compliments go for acting, I hope. The rest of the cast are also great, and also *really well put together* as an ensemble. *Of course* it is effortlessly multi-racial, the Royal Exchange is better at diversity than nearly every single theatre in London (on a par with the Young Vic and the Unicorn), but it is also really good at giving a convincing accont of the span of ages. There are more older actors in this than I remember seeing on stage in a very long time.

Coda:

*Obviously* it’s taken me *ages* to get around to finishing this piece. Mostly it’s been a matter of other work having to take priority, but there’s also a sense that this had already done well critically, was selling well, and it didn’t feel very *urgent*. I mean, it’s a great play done great. What’s the rush?

Then, the other day, I happened to bump into a friend at HOME, and got chatting to their friend about this production, which he’d also seen. He’s a writer in his mid-twenties, and hadn’t seen the rain effect used at the end of the Crucible before. And he had *really loved it*. Not just because it’s pretty, you cynics. Like, really loving it on every level, primarily the symbolic. Evangelically so, more or less. And it made me feel quite ashamed of my seen-it-all-before approach to it. So bloody what if *I’ve* seen it before? He hadn’t. And, as a result, he’d seen it all the more clearly than me. It’s instructive to have someone nearly half your age just simply explain why the rain had come in at precisely the moment that it had, why it hadn’t made them think of A View From The Bridge (because they hadn’t seen it, because London or New York, not Manchester). And why, actually, that approach to watching theatre had yielded him a far richer experience of seeing the play than all my memories of precedents had. I mean, I’d *liked* it, but hearing it talked about and described by someone unencumbered by having seen A View From The Bridge (or Ostermeier’s Hamlet, or half-a-dozen other really great other uses of stage rain) really brought it alive for me.

Bloody “expertise”. What’s it good for, I ask you?

[Fwiw, Benedict Andrews’s Schaubühne Cleansed]

Glass Menagerie – West Yorkshire Playhouse (Headlong), Leeds

[seen 03/10/15]

There’s a brilliant moment in the second half of Ellen McDougall’s new production of Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie. The “gentleman caller” arranged by Tom Wingfield (Tom Mothersdale) to visit his disabled sister Laura (Erin Doherty) has turned up, and their suffocating, godawful mother, Amanda (Greta Scacchti), is grandly telling him about her luxury lifestyle back in the American south. Plantations, servants, etc. The gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor, is played here by Kofi Abrefa. While Amanda is telling Jim all this, I’d say that Kofi Abrefa – crucially *not* Jim O’Connor – looks out into the audience and somehow seems to give us a “are you hearing this?” look.

I could have misinterpreted this moment. The actor might well just be playing the character looking at the pretend fourth wall, and making a face while looking at the photograph of Tom and Laura’s absent father and being talked at by their awful mother. But I reckon it’s very pointed and deliberate. It feels like an otherwise flawless bit of “colour-blind casting” has also here been utilised to add a much needed moment of WTF? to the otherwise unchallenged witterings of a woman who is, to all intents and purposes, precisely the sort of enemy of equality and progress that a more on-the-nose, political playwright might take pains to have put against the wall and executed by the final act.

But here, in this lightest of Brechtian moments, I reckon McDougall rescues the production.

Yes, Doherty and Abrefa go on to absolutely smash their “duet” scene [in a good way], and Tom Mothersdale offers a hugely appealing reading of the play’s “hero”.

But, confession time, I kinda hate Tennessee Williams. Granted, I’ve not seen much, because until very recently the plays looked as godawful in production as they sounded in synopsis. But now he’s being reclaimed by the Germans and decent British directors, so obviously we now have to go and see them. And, blimey, I’m really not sure about them at all.

Ok, there are caveats to this, but...

It feels like McDougall’s version, designed by Fly Davies, does about as much as it’s possible to do with the play without actually altering the text. And, ultimately it’s quite a lovely production. But, Christ, what’s it *for*? (the play). The Glass Menagerie has a pretty whacking central problem as a play, in that the central character of the first half – Amanda – is just insanely annoying. Vicious, self-centred, self-pitying, cruel, suffocating... The more convincing Scacchi is, the more it’s just absolutely no fun at all being in a theatre with her. If anyone can explain what feeling Mr Williams was trying to achieve for his audience here, I’d be very interested. I get the impression that the play is *a bit autobiographical*. So, ok, Tennessee, you didn’t like your mom. Not entirely sure you needed to inflict her on the rest of us. (Amanda, fwiw, is given pretty much no room to either grow or change as a character. She’s been written off by this dramatist as fundamentally vile, it seems, and Scacchi/McDougall certainly don’t seem to seek to redeem her.) I imagine there’s a production which could David Lynchify her, but it’s not this one. Here the study seems to be of unbearable claustrophobia and the casual exercise of callous power. Davies’s set is a too-small black box suspended over a pool. You feel the claustrophobia all the more for its pinched smallness. But, blimey, it isn’t half a tough watch as a result.

This feels almost like textual fidelity as violence to the text. In fact, it’s bloody impressive in its way.

I guess, in a slightly wussy way (and I’m about to do that annoying thing that Michael does of saying what I’d have rather something had done), I ‘d have rather that the stage has given at least the performers a massive pile of room and we’d had to have imagined the claustrophobia from a critical distance, and all that other Marxist stuff. No. I know that’s not what Williams is about, but from that moment that McDougall liberates in Act Two we see the problems of playing his scripts at face value. Taken apart, dissected, and examined as containers of a rubbish ideology made out of questionable psychology, I think we might learn something about ourselves (and our theatre culture) from watching them as such. But the days of seeing them as charming period pieces are clearly numbered now.

Richard III – West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

[seen 03/10/15]

As we see from my Odyssey: Missing, Presumed Dead review, I was having a bit of a rough time watching UK theatre again after Belgrade. However, where with The Odyssey in Liverpool it made me irritable and prone to sarcasm, in the case of this Richard III it made me a bit sad but mostly puzzled.

Because, in theory, there’s really nothing very wrong with this RIII. In theory. As other reviewers have noticed, it opens very hopefully indeed, with some henchmen in wipe-clean aprons hosing the blood away down a drain in a frightening-looking blank room (see above) with high curved walls (of which, more later).

The problem is, that moment is pretty much entirely isolated. As Roger Foss notes (rightly) in his Stage review, “it’s often unclear who’s hating who and why within the hierarchy of interrelated royals and nobles, especially when some characters are missing”. I mean, I’ve seen RIII, what? A dozen times, maybe? I’ve watched the McKellan film a bunch more. I saw it *in German* in May, in a production which achieved near-perfect clarity (if not much else), so it’s kind of an achievement to make a production in English which pretty much completely loses one.

But then, I think part of the reason it kept losing me was that I keep accidentally forgetting to watch. Again, I mean no malice and I’d love this no to be true, but this particular performance, for whatever reasons (and I don’t think the barely 1/5th full auditorium on Saturday night helped with the buzz), really did not hold the attention to the point of seeming to positively repel it at times.

Weirdly (and what do I know?), it felt like *some* of the problem was the continual over-bright lighting. There were a few in-between-scenes states which looked great, but as soon as everyone for the scene had assembled the whole stage was flooded again with brightness. It’s a fine intellectual decision, of course. Equating mediaeval violence to darkness, and castles, and candlelight does feel like it might be the most obvious thing in the world. Bright, shiny, sci-fi/1930s dystopia (like, say, Headlong’s 1984) is a good counter-instinct, but on this set, to my mind, it just doesn’t come off. Which is a pity, but also – while watching – a massive, massive stumbling block.

I similarly wasn’t all that into what Reece Dinsdale was doing with Richard Hitler the III, either. I mean, there didn’t feel like there was anything *wrong* with it, just something not really being my thing. But, at the same time, it also felt like there *was* some sort of technical flaw in the performance; whether be it diction, projection, insufficient energy of the right sort, I couldn’t say. That’s not really my end of things. As with many other critics, I thought my job was to turn up on or after press night – trusting to a general level of competence – to quibble about readings of plays, and give an account of what a director has done with a play, not to diagnose why the acting is a bit awry.

Of course, there’s also the problem with theatre being live that this was just an off night, and so many of these “problems”, as I perceived them, are one-offs; the results of a two-show day at the end of a tough week, on a quiet night. And as such it’s just bad luck for them (and me) that that’s the night I happened to see.

Which is partly why I’ve sat on this review for so long. Because it doesn’t really have much to say.

I didn’t really love the production, but I wasn’t really convinced I was seeing it in ideal conditions (which, given that it was Saturday night in one of the UK’s major cities, is a problem anyway). It felt like the whole enterprise was sound enough intellectually, as far as straight-forward productions of RIII go. I wasn’t big into the Very Bright Lighting and some of the acting/characterisation felt a bit haphazard – not enough sense of who was who.

___

Perhaps the thing I did find most interesting was the first appearance that weekend (3rd/4th Oct) of the curved wall, straight out of the Schaubühne’s smaller stage, memorable from Benedict Andrews’s German-language (première?) production of Cleansed.

Of course, the cyclorama isn’t uncommon in German theatre designs (the Volksbühne has a *massive* one), but I wonder if this scene in Brazil is the ur-text for this?

[Or, was it this loading bay on Manchester’s Oxford Road?

(below: the Schaubuhne RIII set)