The best description of Simon Vincenzi’s Luxuriant I can offer is that it is far too much of not nearly enough. And vice versa.
I intend this as a compliment: this is spare, stark, arresting work.
If you want a cheap visual shorthand, imagine David Lynch trying to knock up a cabaret at some point after an apocalypse using only shell-shocked transvestites. That’s kind of how it feels and how it looks.
There is almost painful, potentially infinite iteration of just a tiny sequence of opaque movements. At the same time, there is something sumptuous, almost decadent about just how much it refuses to tell us, about the sheer quality and attention to the detail of this opacity.
The piece opens with a group of men. Jittery. Scampering. They’re on the huge stage of the newly reopened People’s Palace Theatre. They’re clustered round a video camera, skittering this way and that, dressed in tight black t-shirts, pink tights, and, what? Mickey Mouse ears? One of the troupe – with his genitals bound up in shiny black gaffa tape – trembles and preens before the camera, as if making some kind of off-kilter porno.
Then there’s a woman on the stage. She’s dressed in some sort of futuristic tent, or carapace. She speaks, or sings, or screeches, into a concealed microphone, which delays, distorts, flanges and reverberates her voice. Her falsetto Throbbing Gristle-isms echo around the hall.
The audience are stood, scattered about the vast hall of the newly refurbished and re-opened “People’s Palace” hall in the grounds of QMUL. The hall is in near darkness and filled with smoke-machine smoke. The men – Troupe Mabuse, I think we’re encouraged to think of them as – are off the stage now and skittering about the floor in their strange tribal patterns. As a result, there’s a fair amount of shuffling, or sudden getting-the-fuck-out-of-the-way on the part of the audience, lest we be suddenly entangled with six ft of skittering PVC Mickey Mouse.
The piece lasts, what? an hour? an hour and half?
It isn’t “immersive” in the crap sense of the word. There’s no real pretence – or indeed set-up – suggesting that we’re anywhere other than right where we know we are. As a result, it’s strange that at the same time as quite revelling in the sheer copious strangeness of what we’re seeing, we are (or at least I was) inventing sort of “other locations” and “other times” where we might plausibly be watching this work. Perhaps because it is so unlikely that this is precisely what we are doing right now, on a Friday night, in a hall on Mile End Road, with a nice new refurbished bar on the other side of the doors. So we (I) reach for words like “post-apocalyptic” and “Lynchian”.
I’m not sure that’s the whole story, though. Troupe Mabuse’s apparent stated intention or goal or mission is a performance of The Gold Diggers, a 1930s film which I’ve never seen, but which I’m pretty prepared to bet doesn’t look anything like this *at all*.
I kept on being reminded what Nicholas Ridout, who curated this piece, as part of the Peopling The Palace events [a couple of months back, now] at QMUL, wrote as the conclusion of his excellent book Theatre & Ethics. In it, he describes Maria Donata D’Urso performing In Pezzo at the Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisbon in 2002. She: “is visible, naked, in low light, surrounded by an insect-like scratch and crackle of electronic sound. As she moves her limbs slowly in the subdued and tightly focused pool of light, it soon becomes impossible to make out the relationships between surfaces and volumes... This effect of an apparent separation of the evidence of a human mind (intention) and the actions and organisation of a human body is profoundly unsettling as well as very beautiful.”
Ridout is using this description of her performance to illustrate a key part of his thesis:
“The performance appears, at least, to have no interest other than the meticulous presentation of the surfaces of the body to the light. In this regard it may be regarded as having nothing other than aesthetic content. It contains no proposition about the nature of the world, offers no narrative or dramatic encounter or anything that might solicit from an audience any ethical response. There is nothing to be ethical about here.”
This above passage felt crucial as a possible way into understanding Luxuriant. It also felt as if something like the below was also taking place:
“The challenge issued by this work, from the place of the other, is to our conception of what it is to be or have a human body, and to have intentions that make it do things. The human figure, so often the luminous centre of the aesthetic experience and the presence with which the spectator may easily identify, is here shadowed and obscured in such a way as to render it utterly strange to all those human figures who sit in the dark and watch it.”
Ridout’s conclusion from this, citing Levinas and Hans Theis Lehmann among others, is that:
“the event of theatre [should be] approached with uncertainty, with a view to the possibility of surprise, challenge or affront...
… that theatre [currently, normally] justif[ies] itself in terms of its contribution to an ethical life, might be the very thing that prevents any theatre from meeting such a demand. Theatre’s greatest ethical potential may be found precisely at the moment when theatre abandons ethics.”
Reading Theatre & Ethics back in 2009, I remember finding it difficult to imagine such a piece of theatre (I proposed Andy Field’sthe other night i dreamt the world had fallen over as an early working example). I think Luxuriant went a lot further toward perhaps making me appreciate what Ridout is talking about. During the performance itself we’re in a kind of imaginative and ethical freefall (and free-for-all). It is disconcerting, without ever really explicitly making it clear what it is you could, should, or might be disconcerted by.
The sheer oddness of that situation alone – certainly when compared to, say, being spoonfed an easily understood and digested moral dilemma at the Royal Court – feels like some faculty of reason, curiosity, or sheer puzzlement that most theatre feels like it is actively seeking to keep sedated is suddenly, violently being reawoken.
As such, even when flailing around failing to pin the piece down, even just enough to describe and reflect on it, the piece still feels urgent and strange.
[watching the trailer won't help much, but here you are:
["Vi kommer til å trenge en større filtrering enhet"*]
You want more acting? THIS MUCH MORE ACTING?
The heart of Ibsen’s En Folkefiende is a MASSIVE FUCKING PLOT-HOLE. This is made especially clear and galling by Richard Jones’s new production for the Young Vic. The key issue of Isben’s drama – not changed one iota in David Harrower’s “version”, which then oddly finds itself put into a clunking Norway-in-the-Seventies setting – is that a small town has styled itself as a bathing resort, only for the town’s maverick Doctor Stockmann to discover that these baths are full of toxic bacteria.
It’s a pity for the town, sure, but it’s also an open and shut case. Stockmann has the scientific evidence. However, the town mayor (who also happens to be Stockmann’s brother), seems to reckon it’s just a matter of hushing up these findings and carrying on as if nothing had happened. The reasons given for Not Doing Anything tend to focus on the damage that publicising the problem would have on the town’s economy and the significant costs of cleaning up the problem (which is here presented as totally do-able, but just prohibitively expensive). All this seems to rather ignore that fact that, given Stockmann is right (we must presume, and it wouldn’t hurt the characters to at least consider) the alternative the town is choosing to face instead is *at the very best* half a successful season, followed by a mountain of corpses and some very difficult questions being asked.
I’m just about prepared to go along with the idea that the idea of lawsuits for corporate manslaughter were an underdeveloped phenomena in 1882 Norway, and even that health and safety checks on bathing water were not routine... But, probably *after* the bodies start piling up, and given that the science exists enough for Dr Stockmann to have discovered the toxic properties, surely someone else would also be able to also put two and two together. At which point, even if the town successfully en masse manages to deny any prior knowledge of the toxicity of its deathtrap resort, the ongoing success of the resort is still totally shafted, with the added stigma of having its name forever linked to the deaths of hundreds of holidaymakers.
It’s just silly.
Which rather short-circuits the first three acts of the play, since no one once addresses this glaring omission.
Of course we can all still think in the modern world of examples of local councils, or companies, or governments, or global corporations who have flouted health and safety, who have put the lives of workers, or even populations at risk. On the other hand, the way that this town is painted – small, economically precarious – suggests that they are hardly in a position to be able to take risks.
Yes, I know we’re meant to see it as, y’know, a metaphor for a wider tendency toward a corrosive, damaging self-interest of a community. But when – sitting in the stalls – you could fill the holes in their arguments with water and call them another bathing resort, but no one on stage even addresses them, then the whole debate feels stupid and redundant.
However, this is only the first three acts. Ibsen has another trick up his sleeve for Act Four, in which Stockmann is to address the town over his findings and is supposed to plead with them to see reason. Instead of sensibly pointing out to them that if they don’t clean up their bathing resort, then they will have a massive lawsuit on their hands, Stockmann opts to denounce the entire town as fools, and proceed to give a lengthy rant about the primacy of the intellectual individual over the stupid masses like some kind of proto-Ayn Rand.
In 2013, we can see this speech for what it is – seductive fascistic nonsense. We have perhaps, for example, read John Carey’s forensic examination of this sort of thinking in The Intellectuals and The Masses (which I happen to be re-reading now), which draws a detailed picture of the emergence of this sort of post-Nietzschean thinking, traces it through the intellectuals and artists of the 1880s through to the 1930s, where it found its logical conclusion in Hitler’s rise to power. So, yes, liberal humanism had its problems back then. And, sure, the rhetoric in David Harrower’s version certainly makes it clear that you can knock up a modern-sounding version of the same which sounds very familiar, cf. the humorous columns of, say, Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell, or anyone else who makes a living despairing at the stupidity of the majority of other people (I would have included Richard Littlejohn or Quentin Letts, except, strangely for humourists, they make their fun picking on minorities, not masses).
Still, Stockmann’s basic schoolboy error is the same as that of Coriolanus and Gerald Ratner: he tells the people that he thinks they’re idiots to their face. Which tends to be a poor way of winning round an audience.
Irritation with Ibsen’s 131-year-old story aside, time should also be taken to wonder what the hell Richard Jones thinks he is doing. David Harrower’s “version” of the play is a curiously colourless object. Just about speakable, it does feel rather that Harrower has let himself be steamrollered a bit by the literal translation provided for him to do his version. As such, there’s no real point in this having been done by a playwright at all. As with his clunking version of Woyzeck, you could probably get any half-intelligent actor to paraphrase a better version of the text from the literal.
Jones, in collaboration with designer Miriam Buether, the contrives to make the blandness of the tranlsation even stranger by setting the the production in a remarkably ugly room in 1970s Norway. The back wall is knowingly appalling orange 70s wallpaper, the rest of the the shallow stage, a varnished wooden cabin. A window, stage right, inexplicably gives onto a glittery kitsch picture of a fjord. Despite the half-assed presence of a – clichéd – “revolutionary” stencil later, none of the language is especially that of seventies European left-wingers.
Indeed, one spends the first three Acts wondering what on earth could possibly have made Jones pick this period. Does he just like actors in scratchy-looking nylon clothes? Is this Norway at its most recently quintessential? Is this the last possible point in European history that anyone seriously considered social change? The whole thing feels like someone being glib and embarrassed by the earnestness of their material and attempting to defuse any possible seriousness with a kitschy, ironic, knowing, hipster set. Great.
Also, what the hell happened to the acting? There are some seriously good actors in this play. And there is also Darrell D’Silva, but you can’t have everything. But even the good actors (notably Nick Fletcher and Bryan Dick) seem to have been directed into doing a bunch of very odd shouting. Elsewhere there is woodenness that puts the log cabin to shame. Indeed, the style is so strange that I honestly wondered if I was missing the point of a particularly significant stylistic choice. It feels as if the whole thing might have taken its cue from a a 70s farce, or else some strange stylised form of acting deployed by New York or German avant gardists.
Perhaps the most galling part of this largely galling staging, however, is the totally bogus use of direct audience address. This scene which – like Mark Antony’s also famously problematic-to-stage funeral oration – can be played either to an onstage audience or to the actual audience, is here played out to the audience.
Except, being British theatre, we know exactly what is expected of us: nothing.
But, no. We are emphatically not expected to speak. I was briefly excited that something vaguely radical might have been about to happen, but it didn’t. Granted, this part of the staging is still far and away the most successful part of the play. Apart from anything else suddenly makes total sense of the reconfigured Young Vic auditorium – which is set up a bit like a small public meeting in a town hall might be – but by doing so, it also stops the whole rest of the staging making any sense at all. And the fact during the scene we’re both *there* (our applause is the applause in the hall) and *not there* (what would have happened if any of us *had* asked a question? I wanted to ask about what year it was. I had a bunch of smart arse questions; I was ready to go. But at the same time, I kind of got the impression that wasn’t the game, and I didn’t want to spoil the evening for everyone else) – how does that work? Does it work? And who are we when we’re watching the stuff before and after the meeting? Is the wooden acting intended to indicate that we’re seeing part of a kind of pre- and post-town hall meeting burlesque?
Actually, to an extent, the slipping-between-modes-thing can be fine (it isn’t here, but it can be). The being co-opted without being co-opted is less good. Not least because the audience in the theatre could have probably turned the course of the play around. After all, Stockmann’s vanity shouldn’t really be allowed to trump the life and death matter of the poisoned water. And science isn’t a democracy.
Ironically, I should note that the performance was well-attended, with a laudable spread of people, and received an enthusiastic response when it finished. At which point, on first glance, to dismiss these diverse peoples enjoyment of the show would seem like a massive bit of Stockmannism.
However, I think this distinction can be drawn – there is nothing wrong with any of the people who enjoyed Public Enemy last night. However, I think there is a better production of the play – one with fewer internal contradictions and a greater willingness to work out why the hell it is staging the play in the first place – that they could have enjoyed more. One doesn’t have to be a snob or a dangerous Ayn Rand-alike to believe that we could all be being given something better.
Postscript:
What is with the publicity image? (see above) It’s perhaps the most confusing part of the production. It seems to almost suggest that the version the Young Vic wanted was more to do with Malcolm X and methamphetamine. Now *that* would be a production:
Mayor: But our community needs the money!
Malcolm X: But I’ve done some tests and it turns out this methamphetamine you’ve been selling everyone is really bad for them!
Mayor: The game’s the game.
Etc.
Post-post script: I am blaming the fact I saw this almost entirely on Henry Hitchings (well, him and the fact it’s still kind of my job). He wrote a perfectly fair-minded three-star review for the Standard, which I happened to read on the Tube. Sadly, it contained the words: “The use of strobe lights is one of several conceits that are too abrasive”. And it put me in mind of Hitchings’s three-star review of Three Kingdoms (“the symbolism becomes overwrought. Strenuous attention is paid to the seemingly trivial... The results are disorientating — sometimes in a good way, sometimes not... The spectacle can be cloying,”) and so I had to check for myself.
FWIW, I didn’t think there were nearly enough conceits, and the strobe lights weren’t nearly abrasive enough. If only there could have been more moments like that.
[* "We're going to need a bigger water-filtration unit"]
[in which I abuse the privileges of a press ticket to breaking point]
[In the spirit of full disclosure: I’ve known John Donnelly since his A Short Play About Sex and Death at Leeds Uni was the reason I first went to the National Student Drama Festival in 1997. And we’ve been mates ever since. And since that NSDF is pretty much the single reason I’m where I am today (in a pub writing a review. Thanks a bunch). The first thing I ever directed was a short play by John Donnelly (starring Lucy Ellinson. Yes, that Lucy Ellinson). And, on the night I saw this Seagull in Watford, the actor John Hopkins (currently rehearsing with the RSC), who’d starred in A Short Play About Sex and Death, was also there (which in itself says something about the loyalty of university theatre friends). And we all went for a drink after and I was introduced to director Blanche McIntyre and half the sodding cast. So, yeah. This is about as compromised a review as it’s possible to imagine.]
Further, coming to The Seagull roughly a week after its press night in Southampton seems to have been another error (see also: Narrative). The reviews have been pretty unavoidable on social media. And, well, there’s nothing like having your expectations managed, and this was nothing like having your expectations managed. From Matt Trueman’s five-star rave in his Torygraph début downwards, the only person who apparently didn’t love Headlong’s new Seagull was the Salisbury Journal’s Elizabeth Kemble (like “a bad school production, made by rebelling teenagers who wanted to shock their audience by sticking in a sex scene, a bit of nudity and littering the dialogue with the F word”). And even Kemble sagely concedes that these things are “always a matter of opinion”.
A couple of the reviews (notably Lyn’s and Matt’s, ironically) suggest that the crux of this production is a battle of youth versus age. For my money, it breaks down into a much more undeclared war between the sexes. In the staging of Konstantin’s play, it is predominantly the hostility of his mother, Arkadina, and the nerviness of his would-be actress, Nina, that derail the project. The kindly, elderly(-ish) doctor, Dorn, is actually rather encouraging. Where men fight – most obviously Konstantin and his mother’s lover, and his inamorata’s seducer, Trigorin – it is because of women. Obviously, as an essay in gender politics, this isn’t a super way of looking at it. Director McIntyre (and probably Chekhov) get around this by at least crediting the women with a respectable amount of agency of their own. These are not merely simpering playthings stuck into the play to facillitate the Big Important Feelings of some guys.
There are no winners in Chekhov. Only different sorts of loser. Here it doesn’t feel implausible to suggest that in Donnelly/McIntyre’s version the women do finish up ahead, if only on points. Abigail Cruttenden’s Irina and Pearl Chanda’s Nina are, by the end, slightly less broken than their respective lovers. Even Jenny Rainsford’s booze-soaked, bitter, pragmatic Masha with her solution: “It's what you do isn’t it when something makes you miserable? Find something else to make you even more miserable” somehow seems to come out on top of her situation, albeit in the worst way imaginable.
The men here, at least, the younger men, seem much more mad and neurotic. Alexander Cobb’s Konstantin is convincingly young, gauche and embarrassingly petulant. He’s not been glossed or smoothed into a tragic hero, instead, he’s horribly accurate as precisely the sort of precocious teenage nightmare we all wish we’d never been. It’s a pity he kills himself, since, in a few years he’d have probably have graduated to becoming the (also uncannily accurate) desperate mix of cynicism and fear displayed by Gyuri Sarossy’s Trigorin. Rather than playing him as a louche seducer, Trigorin here seems pretty much at the mercy not only of his career as a writer, but of his attachment to Arkadina and Nina’s subsequent attachment to him. Yes, he still behaves like an utter shit, but remarkably he comes off looking like a victim of circumstance – someone just a bit to immature to actually be relied on for anything by anyone ever. You don’t get the impression that this Trigorin is ever really enjoying himself any more than Konstantin isn’t. Or Nina isn’t. Or Arkadina isn’t. Indeed, if anything, this production makes a strong case for never aspiring to artistry of any sort whatsoever in your life. Or, at least, making damn sure you prefer labour and settling down with whomever is closest.
The most obvious touchstone for this production for other reviewers seems to have been Benedict Andrews’s revelatory Three Sisters seen at the Young Vic last year. It is also interesting to note, in passing, that no one as seen fit to compare it with Anya Reiss’s recent (largely unpopular) modernised Seagull set on the Isle of Man (snigger), seen late last year (though not by me) at the Southwark Playhouse.
For my money it unwittingly owed a good deal more to Dimiter Gottscheff’s Volksbühne Iwanow. Here, as with the Gottscheff, the staging is essentially played on a bare stage with a stark concrete wall at the back and a smoke machine. By sheer coincidence the back wall is also graffitied on during the progress of the play. Unlike Gottscheff’s production, the stage is not totally empty. McIntyre’s designer Laura Hopkins (who also designed Rupert Goold’s astonishing break-out (at least to me, having missed The Tempest) Faustus) has plonked a massive, rough wooden see-saw on the stage. It’s a glorious, bold gesture (which goes some way to mitigating the slightly odd – and presumably touring-practical – decision to have the concrete-looking back wall only a couple of metres high) and it works beautifully as a simple, adaptable piece of set. In act one it is a kind of jetty, in two a kind of almost not-really-real metaphorical see-saw, in three and four a simple table pointing first up- and down-stage and then finally left and right. Of course, niether McIntyre nor Donnelly have Gottscheff's stern contempt for the idea that we might be seduced by the bourgeois comfort of identifying with the characters, but this is not entirely a bad thing. What the production lacks in Marxist rigour, it makes up for in excellent jokes and painfully acute characterisations.
The biggest difference that Donnelly has made to the script [at least: a) I think it’s a change, and b) I think it’s one made by Donnelly rather than McIntyre – at least in the first instance] is that there are moments of direct audience address. The first of these feels genuinely shocking. You are taken completely by surprise when a character from Chekhov speaks directly to you, a member of the audience. In its own way it’s probably the most iconoclastic gesture you can imagine someone making with a Chekhov play, what with all the Stanislavskian baggage that it’s accrued (certainly in Britain, anyway). That said, it does feel slightly like this playfulness could have been more extended into the way that the stage is treated the rest of the time. Granted, what with the big see-saw and the modern dress costumes, the production *does* go further with it, but I suppose I’d have been happy for it to have gone further still. [take out the words, replace with animal heads and proper nudity, etc.] But, yes, this works. This is a good, solid, intelligent, British take on how to do Chekhov in the 21st century. If it feels to me more like the start of an important process rather than its end-zone, then that probably say more about me than about the production. But this if this is the shape of things to come, then I very much look forward to what comes next, and to Elizabeth Kemble’s ongoing, deepening despair
[sat on my hands on this one too. Rather wish I hadn’t now]
There a mismatch between Anders Lustgarten’s rhetoric and the latest play he’s written. Having read the recent interview in the Evening Standard, I went in expecting (and hoping for) the theatrical equivalent of a Crass album. In the event, the play Lustgarden has written is deeply conservative, both formally and politically. Similarly, Simon Godwin’s “production without decor” rather undermines itself: firstly by having décor, and secondly by feeling more like a sulk than a production:“If you don’t give me a play, I won’t make a production” it seems to shrug.
The play is divided into two parts. The first, of ten scenes, might be subtitled: Scenes From Our Undoing, and features a series of One-Dimensional Men and Women bluntly explaining their miseries to even less developed secondary characters in a privatised near-future Britain. The second, which could be titled: Scenes From Our Redemption, is a single 32 page scene set in an “activist” “Court of Public Opinion”, in which several activist characters explain everything that Anders Lustgarten thinks through the clever dramatic device of being several characters who all think the same things that Anders Lustgarten thinks, saying those things to each other: excitedly and earnestly.
There are more problems though: while Lustgarten’s politics may be serious and unimpeachable, his imagination isn’t. Lettuce Dream attempts to be a dystopian satire, but its inventions just aren’t sharp enough. As Stewart Pringle has already pointed out, given that the situation *right now* is an obscenity, why bother making up badly thought-out extras? But if you’re going to make-up extras, then they should be better than these: a government dept. called:“Department of Home and Business Affairs”, a hedge fund called “Empathy Capital”, a private security/prison service called “Competitive Confinement”, a new tax called “Debt Tax”.
Then there are the characters. Who have no interior lives whatsoever. They exist solely to illustrate their bit of the social milieu. There are the aforementioned business types, who wear suits and talk about business. There is Joan, who explains to “Workman” that she was “42 years a nurse. Looking after people”, who refuses to pay her debt tax because she “didn’t cause it” and remembers “Fought a war for this. Fought a war for our rights... Not the Germans. After that. A war against our lot. The elite.” Yes. Those words were actually spoken – without irony – in a British theatre this year.
There’s Ryan, a student who seems to have been caught up in some looting, to whom “Man” is explaining a bunch of stuff about how privatised justice works and, y’know, being a cardboard cut-out nasty police explaining man. Then there are Jason and Ross, two of Ryan’s friends in “A Wetherspoon’s in a satellite town” (*a* satellite town. They could be anyone. Those places. You know.) who spend four pages articulating why young unemployed white men might think racist things.
So, there’s a choice between nameless functionary of the state, or named functionary of Lustgarten’s social analysis. I don’t remember giving the slightest fuck about any of them, and I didn’t get the impression Lustgarten wanted me to (or Godwin either for that matter). Not for Brechtian reasons of Verfremsdung-ing, nor to refuse the bourgeois comforts of identification, but simply because he doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck about these people either. Or rather, he cares about their plights, and so it is just their plights that are articulated. Which doesn’t really amount to drama. Indeed, it barely amounts to the level of characterisation present in a corporate training video. And there are too few jokes, and zero poetry to leaven this deadness.
Given these meagre scraps to work with, the cast actually put up a sterling defence, at least of their own abilities to act. We come away with credible performances of unspeakable lines. And, yes, as other commentators have noted, it’s nice to see Ferdy Roberts playing another policeman.
Presumably Simon Godwin can take some of the credit for that, which is a good job, as the rest of the “without decor” concept is about a sloppily handled as it is possible to imagine. For a start, a massive scaffolding tower which I think at one point even has a door attached to it, isn’t “without decor”. Ramin Grey’s The Ugly One, designed by Jeremy Herbert, did “decor without decor” beautifully, and actually taking everything away also counts, but having the stage strewn with costumes and the other stuff of naturalism isn’t really “without decor” is it? Also, why have the Royal Court flagged up the "without decor" thing so much? Do Sloane Sqaure audiences now regularly demand their money back if there isn’t a lovingly-crafted naturalistic replica of the inside of some posho’s house? Plausibly some, I suppose. It’s bad enough for them that there’s this “playwright” telling them all to go fuck themselves, without having to suffer the additional indignity of having to imagine the rooms in which the characters who are telling them to go fuck themselves are standing.
So I was bored, yes. But worse, I was deeply irritated. I was irritated by the way that we the audience were being sold all this as “insight” as “a revelation”. As if Anders Lustgarten believes he’s the first person who’s written a play suggesting that capitalism isn’t the way forward – indeed, Lustgarten removes all trace of doubt that this is his opinion in his unbelievably condescending three page intro to the script, which concludes: “I wrote it to make you feel, and therefore think. I hope it worked.” As is evident from this review, I *felt* irritated, therefore *thought* it wasn’t a great play. But, flippancy aside, what a monstrously arrogant thing to say about one’s audience. To have a baseline assumption that, in our day-to-day lives, we are unfeeling and unthinking, and need fucking Lustgarten to show us some stuff we couldn’t have ever possibly felt or therefore thought for ourselves.
There’s a near-constant accusation that political theatre preaches to the choir. This commits a worse sin – of assuming that the choir has never even been to church before. There is *nothing* in this play for anyone with the slightest social conscience or feeling of opposition to the current government. There are a few factoids thrown into the Activist Saviours section, but even these are familiar. There are the portraits of the country on its knees, which we already live in.
But it’s the fact that it’s so dramatically meagre that really grates. Not only are we being told nothing new – or, if it is new to some audience members, being presented with it in such an unconvincing form that they’d be well within their rights to shoot the messenger – but that it’s being told in such a way as to play right into the hands of anyone who does assert that explicitly political theatre is A Bad Thing or that it preaches to the choir, or that it won’t change a single mind will have all their prejudices confirmed here.
So, to recap: this sort of thing – in principle – could be good. But this is a very bad example of a potentially good thing. Just don't ever do it this badly again, please.
[unaccountably, I thought I'd leave a cooling-off period before posting this]
Apparently the famous Canadian auteur Robert Lepage used to be good. I have to take this on trust as he’s one of those parties I turned up late for. I saw his enormously long, and far-from-finishedLipsynch in 2008 at the Barbican and thought it was flashy, cold, horribly over-long, vain and only sporadically interesting. But it had a certain chuztpah to it. I liked that Lepage was happy just to sling on his half-finished devised piece and make us pay money to watch his glorified scratch night.
I’ve got no idea if he thinks “Spades” is finished or not. (The title alludes to the unhappy prospect that he’s planning on doing a quartet of these pieces, each tenuously based on the apparent properties of a different suit in a pack of playing cards.) It’s two and a half hours long and very little really happens.
The big deal about Lepage was apparently his way with a mise-en-scene. In his prime he could apparently knock-up a half-decent stage picture. No more. Spades at the Roundhouse is playing in-the-round, which of course means that there’s no way to create a single unified spectacle for the whole audience, who are all looking at it from different angles. So, things that in-the-round theatre is good for are: things in which either the drama is compelling, or else: things where the quality of the image is not dependent on the angle from which it’s viewed. Lepage opts to side-step either option and presents only one spectacle (a “sandstorm” at the end, which consists of a smoke machine, some extractor fans, someone spinning round in the middle to make it swirly, and a lot of red light) and next to no drama at all, compelling or otherwise.
There are stabs at drama. There are a range of characters, but they are undone by the fact that they speak some of the worst dialogue you will hear spoken on the London stage this year, and the fact that they are all wankers. I say that. Actually, all the male characters are wankers. None of the female characters get enough stage-time to really develop beyond “very irritating” (and "wearing bikinis" mostly). But there we go, that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
There are themes too. The main themes of Spades are The War In Iraq and Gambling in Nevada, near a military base, where some soldiers are, who are going to go to Iraq. I think there’s also some sort of shamanistic elemental mythical cowboy bullshit stirred into the mix, which only serves to make the whole thing feel like someone’s tried to make an Iraq play out of The Cult’s Love album, which, as a friend pointed out, would actually be better if only it was what they had been trying to do. Instead, we have to deal with the fact that this mess seems to think it’s being profound.
There’s also the upsetting matter of Lepage’s much-vaunted way with stage craft. Certainly there’s some impressive machinery on show. The circular stage at the centre of the Roundhouse’s cavernous interior has a middle section that can rise and fall, revealing hidden interiors or delineating sunken rooms. There are also a load of fold-up trapdoors, from which characters can emerge, or stand waist-high in, creating the impression of hotel bars, casino tables and so on. The problem is, while these “scene changes” are neat enough in themselves, the scenes that they actually create are no more impressive that your average student production of Dealer’s Choice. They’re fine, they’re functional, but they’re hardly visually exciting. This would of course be forgiveable if anything that took place within these uninspiring environs was of any interest whatsoever. Instead, wanker talks to wanker until we’d pay actual money for them to stop.
On the night I saw it – maybe a week or two after press night – by the end the sparse audience was openly, almost aggressively laughing at the worse lines. There were plenty of walk-outs too. It was wretched; a state of open contempt between audience and stage. “Oblige us to sit here for two and a half hours by all means” the audience, slumped in its seats seemed to hiss, “But don’t think we’re not going to fight back.”
This was theatre at its absolute worst. A passive-aggressive audience and, I would imagine, deeply unhappy performers, all stuck in an interminable nightmare of a “play” made by someone with a disgustingly inflated sense of their own importance.
For me, Narrative began on the 5th November 2012 with a press release from the Royal Court. It was called “A New Play” then. The press release blurb read as follows:
“Why no title?
“Because I want to write from passion, not obligation.
Because I want to write for the actors I’ve cast, not cast for the parts I’ve written.
Because I want to be stupid enough to do the wrong thing when it’s right.
Because risk is everything.
Because everything is changing.
Because I'm doing something else right now.
Because I want to surprise myself.
Because I want to surprise you.
That’s why.”
Anthony Neilson”
Which I thought was good.
Narrative continued as an argument on Twitter, perhaps later that day, with a young director who thought that the above was “pretentious” or “shit” or something like that. I disagreed. I liked the spirit. I particularly liked that Neilson had said “Because I’m doing something else right now”. (although quite a lot of the rest of it reminded me mostly of this song from the Fight Club soundtrack)
Narrative continued when I bumped into Anthony at the bar of the Soho Theatre and we had a chat about it, and about his production of Marat/Sade, and about his views on some of the critics, with which I agreed.
Or perhaps bumping into Anthony happened before the press release. Something Simon Stephens said recently when I interviewed him as part of the All Change festival, was – quoting his son, Oscar – that we don’t remember our lives, our histories, stories, in a strictly linear fashion. This seems relevant, both to my recollection of these events, and to the piece itself.
Narrative continued with a conversation with Matt Trueman, who had just interviewed Anthony. This was before the interview had been published. Perhaps even before it had been written. Matt had spent a day or so watching the rehearsals. He showed me his note book, in which he’d drawn a kind of diagram of the play’s structure. It was a picture of a box criss-crossed with incomplete lines, some crossing, some unrelated to anything else in the box. I remember being intrigued and excited by this as the proposition of a piece of theatre.
Then (I think this is next), unrelated at the time to my experience of Narrative, I spent from 12am on Saturday April to 12am on Sunday April watching the live-stream of Forced Entertainment’s show Quizoola. It was at the Barbican. I was at my parents’ house in Shrewsbury. For 24 hours on and off, I watched Quizoola, chatted to my friends who were also watching it on Twitter. It was the best bit of performance/theatre that I’d seen all year.
My next experience of Narrative was getting an email from Trueman, post press-night, expressing his irritation at some of the reviews which Narrative had received. Matt framed Narrative as an important theatrical event and critical fight. This year’s Three Kingdoms, in fact. I should confess, I felt a small amount of scepticism. The main difference for me was that Narrative had already sold out its entire run, whereas with Three Kingdoms the reviews had impacted directly on attendance, and the counter-reviews and the buzz of conversations of Twitter had significantly turned that around and sold out the final few performances as *everyone* suddenly wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Nothing anyone writes about Narrative will actually alter ticket sales.
Nevertheless, I put in a late request to the Royal Court’s press office for them to hold one of the day seats for me (so, yes, I actually paid twenty pounds of actual money to see this) on the only night I was in London before flying to Zagreb last week.
Another thing that had been happening a bit before seeing the show, was reading a variety of tweets – some by friends, some retweeted by the Royal Court – the tenor of which was largely “Woah! WFT? Amazeballs!”.
So, there you have a rough account of the mental landscape with which I had no choice but to enter the piece. I’d not read “the reviews” (but had read Matt’s interview with Anthony), but nevertheless, basic exposure to social media and a general professional interest had already given me a load of unverifiable, unmediated and largely-unprocessed-by-me information.
So, annoyingly, part of my experience of the show was a reaction to all this information. Perhaps this is always partly going to be the case for anything, especially anything seen post- press night, even if one hasn’t read the reviews. Or perhaps even post first-preview, now that some blogs (even if you don’t read them yourself) are in the business of routine financially expedient or cynical embargo busting. Either way, information seems to seep into the world.
Consequently, my first reaction after seeing the show was ‘That wasn’t “difficult” AT. ALL. What’s everyone going on about?’ Annoyingly, this was by far my strongest immediate reaction. I just felt irritable that a lot of people had gone on about “difficulty” when, to my mind, Narrative was the easiest thing in the world to follow. Which seemed to be what everyone was talking about. “Woah. What just happened?” people seemed to wonder as we left the auditorium. “Did you understand that?” another asked their friend, cautiously.
Well, what had/has just happened is, on a superficial level, quite simple. Over the 1hr50 running time, we get a cross section of little narratives. Mostly linear, naturalistic, and about as difficult to process as dipping into four consecutive episodes of a television soap opera – i.e. it feels a bit tricky at first because at the beginning characters hurtle from out of nowhere and you immediately have to start collecting information about them. But it’s no harder than that.
There are some slightly more random elements. The piece begins with a description of “the first example of narrative art”. A picture of a bison with its intestines hanging out killing/goring/knocking over the prehistoric huntsman – armed with a spear and a hard-on, dressed apparently in a bird-mask. To be honest, I was surprised that this was classed as “narrative”. It’s a freeze frame. The narrator (ha ha!) imposes a story onto the picture – some things have happened before the moment the picture depicts, some things will happen afterwards, but I was intrigued by the idea that the picture itself constituted a narrative at all.
This bison seems to crop up a couple more times in the piece. One of the characters, having stabbed her mate by mistake, appears to grow a pair of bison-like horns, which, given the way her story goes, appear to symbolise her guilt, and/or her relationship to death. Her story intersects with that of a mother who is blaming the suicide of her teenage son on some medical drugs that he was meant to be taking. When she discovers he wasn’t actually taking the drugs which she supposes to have caused his suicide, she also grows a pair of these horns (I think. It’s almost a week since I saw the thing and the details – perhaps thanks to the non-linearity of the thing – feel a little hazy). One of the final images of the show (again, I think) is a film of a modern-day bison running into a man and knocking him flying. Perhaps again fatally. Perhaps not. We’re not told. The oldest story, we might infer, is a story of death. Of mankind’s attempts to make sense of death. Indeed, for a piece showing us so many lives (or perhaps *because*), death casts a particularly long shadow over the whole piece.
The early use of Bowie’s "Where Are We Now?" partly echoes this as well as neatly framing one of the play’s/production’s constant questions. But, just as with the Bowie song, there’s a hint of the ersatz about the question. We quickly pick up where we are at most points during Narrative, and there’s a slight sense that if we don’t then it doesn’t especially matter, something new will be along any second anyway.
At one point – around the introduction of two characters who are actors sharing a flat – I wondered if every scene contained a hidden reference to a pop song. One of the two actors is about to play “Elastic Man” in a new Hollywood movie. "How I Wrote Elastic Man" is, of course, a song by The Fall. I now can’t remember the other couple of songs that I thought might have been obscurely hinted at, but you get the idea. There was a sense that there might well have been a bunch of semi-obscured “clues”, but ones which could only possibly have hinted at some sort of deeper personal set of resonances for either Neilson or another member of the cast with whom he devised the piece, rather than a set of outward facing clues, which, if correctly identified and assembled would have spelled out some larger meaning of the piece.
Actually, it is this whole question of “a devising process” which most interested me about Narrative. Matt Trueman’s interview with Neilson already describes the process itself in plenty of detail. But what is interesting is the blur of those boundaries. For instance, the cast are using their own names, but are plainly not *really* playing themselves, and yet they are wearing T-shirts with photos of their younger selves printed on them. (Later, in the final scene, apparently set after death, they are wearing plain T-shirts.)
For Dan Hutton, this raised the question of whether the performers were perhaps, in part, “fictionalising” their own experiences. The best-observed bit of comedy in the evening does, after all, hinge on Zawe Ashton’s very real height – in one scene she complains about feeling too tall. In the next scene, clad in some heel-less high heels, she totters across the stage almost bent double in paroxysms of trying to make herself and her height disappear, as if failing her urge to combat some particularly preposterous aversion therapy.
The question this process of (structured?) improvisation, countered?/supplemented? by Neilson going away and writing new material at night, made me wonder something more fundamental –
...It all folds back to the question of the title, and perhaps the marketing image (see top). If the piece had been called something else (Shit Happens springs to mind as a possible alternative) and didn’t have an picture claiming “form is dead” then perhaps I wouldn’t feel such an urge to put the whole thing through some sort of post-structuralist autopsy, but it is called Narrative. So it’s asking for it, frankly...
– so, you've got actors in to improvise. The question which occurred to me – and this sprang very much from watching the piece rather than theorising – was “Aren’t these stories that they’re telling *absolutely* reliant on *very old-fashioned* narrative structures?” Perhaps that’s the point, but why claim “form is dead”. I think without exception the stories in Narrative are deeply, almost primally formal. It’s not a “well-made-play”, but that’s never been the only formal option for theatre.
So what are we getting out of Narrative? Well, there are a lot of jokes – and I think Anthony Neilson and I have quite different senses of humour, so I’m not really qualified to comment on those. Love and Hutton both say it was very funny.
And there are the stories themselves: interestingly, what’s perhaps annoying about these is that they’re *not* schematic. You don’t get neat pat-on-the-back examples of different narratives so clearly laid out that you can spot them and pat yourself on the back for *getting it*.
Instead, they seem quite random, diffuse tales. While on one hand that’s quite laudable – the unexpectedness, the randomness – it’s also kind of annoying. It’s a bit like the sort of annoyance that you get when faced with infinite choice in a restaurant. Why this? Why these stories, in particular? You wonder. I mean, if they really are this random, might they not have been some totally different stories? This feeling of total artistic free-fall is disconcerting. Alternatively, they’re not random stories. In which case, then perhaps the mechanisms justifying *these* stories as against any others, are perhaps a little too submerged. We don’t know why we’re seeing, but more oddly, it feels like we *should* understand. After all, I’ve seen plenty of things where I’ve had no idea why one thing has followed the previous (see my last review of Pina Bausch, for example) but it hasn’t bothered me, so I’m curious why it bothered me so much here. I think partly because of the title (It’s a terrible pity debbie tucker green got to the title Random first).
And this is where we get to The Problem of Quizoola:
I’m going to write a proper review of Q. at some point, so I won’t go on about it too much here. The basic set-up is very effectively described here. One of the things I found really interesting about Quizoola was the way the two performers on stage would lapse into actually playing out little dramatic scenes, or scenes from dramatic tropes: the jealous lover, the sadistic interrogation, the failing relationship. This trope-hoping – which was only one small and occasional element of Q. – is sort of the whole of Narrative. But where Quizoola was fleet, nimble, unanchored to a set-text, totally negotiable; Narrative, by sheer bad luck of timing, turned up like its clumsy ancestor. You can see the ambition behind Narrative, but I’m not fully convinced that it really paid dividends. In the end, Narrative felt completely safe, completely conservative. Only the deepest reactionary could find Narrative’s polite prodding at a sequence of events even remotely troubling.
Of course, it is unfair to assume the claims a thing is making for itself and then behave grumpily and ungratefully when it doesn’t fulfil these claims, but in this case, I do think the claims were made, and I don’t think the radical solution hoped for materialised.
I think Quizoola online might, without trying, have inadvertently shown us one possible manifestation – something intriguingly allied to the place we go to watch something continual that Chris Goode speaks about in The Forest and The Field (another review I owe you, dear reader – the link is to C-Love’s excellent write-up) – of what theatre/performance dealing with the online world might look like.
However, in the context of “writing more experimental texts” I think there is an urgent necessity to flag up that fact that, aside perhaps from the process by which it came into being (which ultimately still seems mysterious, with actors providing we-know-not-what, and a sole author disappearing into the night, squirrelling away these ideas and returning like Moses from the mountain with a script) there wasn’t much either unfamiliar or experimental about Narrative. Not. At. All. The means and process may have been, but these elements didn’t seem to manifest themselves in the final product.
Moreover – and this is a general point, much more than one aimed at this particular production – the problem with Britain’s new writing lies, I would argue, with neutered, muzzled, discouraged or just deeply unimaginative directors than with the writers – although things like the Writers’ Guild’s new guidelines and Fin Kennedy’s laudable-only-in-spirit re-Balkanisation of the whole theatre landscape, In Battalions, Really Don’t Help.
Yes, it’s unfair to dump all this extraneous stuff down at the end of what is not even really a review of Narrative. And it would be idiotic to pre-judge the results of Vicki Featherstone’s forthcoming regime at the Court in a piece looking at a commission from the tail-end of Dominic Cooke’s time there. However, to return to the point with which I started this article: “The experience of an event begins for its audience when they first hear about it and only finishes when they stop thinking and talking about it.” As such, Narrative will continue to run, and will bleed into the Featherstone regime. And experiences of that regime will be experienced through the prism of Narrative, just as Narrative couldn’t escape being experienced through other prisms.
[another occasion where writing is completely unequal and unsuited to the task at hand]
This is the first time I’ve seen a Pina Bausch show in the flesh. It comes four years after her death and 28 years after she made this show. That Thursday night was the British première of Two Cigarettes in the Dark, which was made in West Germany in 1985 only makes me feel slightly better about the whole thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel like I’ve seen tonnes of Pina Bausch. I’ve watched Café Müller and Frühlingsopfer over and over on YouTube. I’ve seen the Wim Wenders film. I’ve seen Alain Platel’s Out of Context – For Pina. Hell, I’ve seen enough work by Katie Mitchell and every choreographer Bausch has ever influenced (which often feels like every choreographer) to feel like I hardly stop seeing her work, and yet this is the first time I’ve really seen some of it. And what’s most surprising is how *unlike* “Pina Bausch” a lot of Two Cigarettes in the Dark feels.
For a start, it’s actually a lot funnier than anyone ever talks about. I don’t know the canon of her work well enough to say whether this is a total one-off, in a minority, or whether her work and her reputation has been massively misrepresented by a posterity keen to concentrate on the beauty and tortured-soul stuff, but whatever is it, Two Cigarettes in the Dark is surprisingly wry and absurd to the extent that at times it resembles nothing so much as a choreographic tribute to Monty Python. It also recalls the sort of straight-faced silliness of Marthaler – especially his Meine Faire Dame, which I hadn’t expected.
So, what’s Two Cigarettes in the Dark got? What does it do? Well, it’s set in a very large white room with large windows set into each wall. The window at the back gives onto a bunch of large tropical plants in an adjoining black room. The rooms on either side are white, and led up-to with staircases. There is a row of fishtanks placed against th window on the audience’s left.
There are eleven performers. I think slightly more women than men. Unfussily multi-national, as dance companies tend to be. And mostly middle-aged. Not having seen the piece before, I don’t know if this is because it’s the original company performing the piece 28 years on (cf. Ostermeier’s Craveor that never-ending production of Arturo Ui at the Berliner Ensemble which has outlived its director Heiner Müller by 18 years). I rather suspect that here it was always middle-aged dancers. Bausch, after all, is famous for having worked with a far richer, more varied palette of performers than your bog-standard choreographer. And here, there’s not so very much of yer actual *dancing*.
The piece does start with a frenzied explosion of repeated, compulsive arm flailing as one woman stands downstage rehearsing some sort of outward expression of inner torment. She is dressed in a low-cut beige ballgown. This seems like the sort of trademark Bausch thing that we’re expecting. Then (or was it before this) a portly woman dressed in a kitsch bathrobe wanders to the front of the stage and confides in a loud theatrical whisper that her husband is out. She then waddles the entire length of the stage back to the door at the rear and exits. Which is less expected.
From here the stage is peopled by various ball-gowned or dinner jacketed visions of elegance, or aged elegance, or, in one repeated case, punctured dignity undermined by childish glee and/or senile dementia and eventually with diver’s flippers. There seems to be some repetition of patterns of domestic violence, but this is offset with sweet or amused tableaux – at one point a woman curled on the floor offers her partner a leg to hold in order that her entire body might be lifted up and used to break peanut shells. There is occasional talk of- or movement to suggest- angels.
The use of music is no less intelligent than you’d expect. High-classical choral music – like the Bach used in Café Müller – recurs here, but perhaps with its sheer weightiness used against itself; its sheer over-wroughtness being deftly punctured by the pathos of the scenes it scores. Perhaps a joke by the artist against herself. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how much, despite a total lack of any discernible narrative, it is possible to just keep watching, amused, entertained, sometimes moved and occasionally baffled for two and a half hours (plus interval).
The evening – well, I was going to say “builds”, but it doesn’t really build, it just arrives – to a frenetic conclusion and then plauteaus out with a solitary performer slumped against a wall spray-painting himself white, with a pair of giant angel wings strapped to his back.
I’d love to be able to suddenly pull and explanation out of the bag, and perhaps 28 years ago, all these symbols *read* a bit more intensely than they do now. One notices, for example, that the piece precedes Wenders’s own effort on angels Der Himmel über Berlin (or Wings of Desire as we have it) by only two years. Perhaps there was something in the West German water back then. But I’m afraid that’s not how I watched it. I was delighted and engrossed, but felt more-or-less entirely let of from having to really pin it down. Watching felt experiential rather than philosophical. I was more intrigued by the “how?” of the dramaturgy than the whys and wherefores. In other circumstances this might be accounted a failure. Here it felt precisely right.
__________
Looking for images for the top of the article, I came across some older ones which, perhaps only because they're in grainy black and white, but I don't think it's just that, suggest the thing used to look a lot edgier...
It’s exciting that the Print Room has given over a slot in its programming to a piece of newly commissioned contemporary choreography. Sadly, that’s pretty much where the excitement stops. I don’t deny that there’s a fair amount of talent sloshing around in Flow. The young choreographer Hubert Essakow has an impressively long CV as a ballet dancer, though his choreographic credits are noticeably thinner on the ground. Designer Tom Dixon by contrast has a whole OBE for his services to furniture design and apparently he even launched his own name as “a brand” in 2002. His contribution to Flow is a neatly made sort of Roman iceberg – that is to say, a four-sided, white material structure hung in the middle of the dancefloor that can be raised up into itself and lowered again.
The piece begins. Slowly. With a hippy trapped inside this fabric iceberg, rolling a giant white glowstick around. Very. Slowly (see above). He is dressed in a simple off-white long-sleeve top and loose trousers. I immediately realise that I have a very real prejudice against light clothing and slow movement in dance.
Composer Peter Gregson’s Music is also remarkably bland, consisting of a lot of over-processed piano notes, and (I think) some treated strings, as well as an atmosphere evoking the rain-sticks and pan pipes of a new-age store. It’s slow and mostly sounds like offcuts from Michael Nyman’s soundtrack to The Piano.
Any one of these elements could have been bland – the slow-motion shape-throwing, the set and costume, the sonic backdrop – but all three is too much for my tastes. (And I readily concede this is a taste thing. I’m just not that into dance pieces that aspire to the condition of a scented bath with candles). But I’m not really qualified to talk about dance. The movement is all very proficiently executed. And you'll have seen it all before, I promise.
Dramaturgy, on the other hand, I do understand. And the dramaturgy here is roughly as developed as one brain-storming session and a resultant spider-diagram. The theme of Flow is “Water”. Essakow’s programme notes sagely observe that on meeting the designer “after a few discussions by the sea we came up with the idea of exploring the cycle of water as a metaphor for the cycle of life. Water is essential to life – it’s everywhere and affects everybody. The three states of water – liquid, ice and vapour – offered good starting points to develop and explore a range of movement ideas.”
I am being slightly unfair. I mean, the thing is completely watchable. It’s simple-minded beyond belief, but the execution itself is pretty (and you could well like the music a good deal more than I did, which would improve your enjoyment about 70%). There is also some rather nice work with a smoke machine (but nothing on that of Fujiko Nakaya in Gisele Vienne’s This is How You Will Disappear), and the – surprisingly brief – section with *actual water!* at the end is also pleasingly exuberant (but, again, nothing on Dave St Pierre’s Un Peu de Tendresse: Bordel de Merde or, I suspect, De La Guarda).
As such, given the limitations of the size of the space (and presumably budget), it strikes me that the piece’s only option for being A Good Thing – beyond the basic excellence of existing in the first place – would have been for it to be strikingly intelligent. And it just isn’t. I mean, it even goes and puts the men in long sleeved tops and baggy trousers of rough material and the women in floaty, diaphanous dresses of a much finer, thinner material. And there are only two women to three men. And this isn’t even a piece about gender; these are just someone’s ideas about how men and women differ and what they wear. Really not even slightly intelligent or progressive. Indeed, the whole production team is male except for the person credited with creating the brief video projections (a video of some water, and, later, some sentences about water and the names of some water-bourne diseases, and then some static projected directly onto the performers later still).
The Print Room has created an enviable reputation for itself as somewhere where you can see cutting-edge, intelligent work that might not embarrass us in Europe. On this showing, it would embarrass us at the degree show of any contemporary dance academy. Still, I do hope the lukewarm responses all round don’t deter them from searching out a different, better production team and trying again soon.
[Resolution is the title of the whole season. The below review is of the 12/02/13 edition]
Shame on me for coming to this so late. For the majority of January and the first half of February The Place runs Resolution!; a staggering number of one-off showings of the work of young/emerging choreographers/dance companies. They’re also running the “Resolution Review” programme, with professional dance critics mentoring emerging writers. I can’t help feeling that we “theatre people” ought to have been all over this from the get-go (the tyranny of the different mailing lists). Now there are only about three left. Ah well. Something to do next year on our nights off from MimeFest...
Last night offered a programme of three short (15 mins, 18 mins and 22 mins – if the programme is to be believed. It sounds about right) pieces, plus intervals, for which £14 (£11 concs) seems maybe a bit steep, but it’s almost worth paying for the number of fag-breaks alone. So, ironically, emerging contemporary dance turns out to be the ideal artform for the chronic smoker.
The brevity of the pieces also works in their favour. It’s one of those cases where it feels far more satisfying to be left wanting to see more of all three pieces, and to be surprised when each finishes.
Of the three the first, Company Ben Abbes’s White Room is perhaps the least successful – four white clad women and one white clad man throw a series of not-especially new and slightly wobbly shapes purporting to explore life after death. Does the deceased soul gradually get used to being dead, they ask? Apparently yes, if accepting death is represented by finding a male dance partner. Still, the company seemed very young, and I’m probably being crushingly unfair. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the piece, just that – perhaps largely thanks to the choice of wallpaper music and white costumes – it felt a bit bland.
Much more interesting was Tamar Daly and Nicolette Corcoran’s Decode This. [Full disclosure, I know Tamar a bit from Devoted & Disgruntled, but rest assured I still wouldn’t say I liked something if I didn’t.] I liked this very much. Tamar is the dancer/choreographer and Nicolette is a musician – on this showing, “musician” translates as (startlingly good) singer with one of those delay/loop/sampler thingies on a table in front of her. (At some point, someone really needs to write the long essay about the felicity of these delay/loop/sampler thingies for the solo performer conjuring the babble of modern communication technologies.) This is movement appearing to respond to new-minted sound. There’s a qualitative difference between this and dancing to recorded music. Here Corcoran conjures everything from deadpan morse code to a kind of ‘90s Bristol trip-hop, while Daly describes suitably twisty shapes around it. There’s also talking – almost in the style of stand-up – about finding a message on your mobile phone after a drunk-night-out. Dances About The Internet/Cellphones tend to be unsuccessful, so it’s a tribute to Daly/Corcoran that their attempts to dance a winky-face and the kisses at the end of a text are charming and witty. Stand-up choreography had never occurred to me as a genre before, but it’s a dead good one.
The final piece is the more portentous Fade by the company Kaonashi, an exotic name for what appears to be the pet project of a bloke called Jim Sutton (choreography: Jim Sutton, sound-editing: Jim Sutton, costume coordination: Jim Sutton, etc.). Assembling an admittedly fine soundtrack of modern, clubby music (no, I have no idea about modern, clubby music. It sounded impressively with-it to me, but I’m a middle-aged theatre critic who uses the expression “with-it” seriously). The stage is thick with smoke machine smoke and bathed in nasty disco lighting. The four-strong company (Katerina Toumpa, Akiyo Ishihashi – both excellent, plus Chris Rook, and Jim Sutton(!) – both good) are dressed in an enjoyably preposterous admixture of Shoreditch twattery and Louis Seize-ure. And half white-face which, to their credit, they almost pull off.
The dancing itself is a suggestive mixture of club-dancing, something a bit like the low-to-the-floor loping of Hofesh Shechter, and I think I even spotted a bit of Gangnam Style at one point. What it’s doing, what it’s “about”, is more mystifying. And the costumes don’t help clarify it one bit. There seems to be a recurring motif of thuggery, drunkenness and violence against women (and, at one point, between women). There doesn’t, however, seem to be any immediately obvious wider point or context (dear God, I’ve turned into Billington). It looks brilliant. Stylish, self-aware, and aggressive; but if it only exists to show us some men duff up and drag off some hapless womenfolk, I have an issue with it. On the other hand, it concludes with a fluffy toy penguin hurling across the stage on a radio controlled iceberg, which while not really an atonement for misogyny, does seem to hint at a more playful side to the piece. A piece benefit from a major re-assessment of its gender relations.
Still, a good thing, all in all. I reckon randomly picking one of these every week they’re on next year would do anyone who did so a power of good. It’s good to flex different critical muscles.
[response tothisand hopefully a resource, of sorts]
Despite not having been at D&D this year, I spent some of the weekend reading the reports as they went up online – faster and more readably than ever, I noticed. I’m going to restrict myself to writing about the two or three that really grabbed me (or until I get sidetracked). With sickening inevitability, the one that grabbed me most was the session called by Oliver Lamford of Switchback Productions entitled “Making European theatre HERE”
The introduction alone is a thing of beauty:
We've had some really inspiring and exciting European work appear in the UK over the past few years: Three Kingdoms, Castellucci, Ostermeier, Alain Platel, and many more.
They’ve been big-scale, ambitious works: there have been a lot of other British theatremakers around who’ve seen the work and been really excited by it and talked about there needing to be more work like this being made here.
But, each time, after the shows move on, the energy seems to dissipate.
We’re part of Europe. We make theatre.
How do we make European Theatre happen here?
YES.
Lamford goes on to offer some sensible qualifiers (that, yes, he knows “European Theatre” is a stupidly broad term, etc.), but I think the examples he cites are, crucially, the examples which have excited the most, and they have a through-line of sorts artistically.
Not having attended the discussion, I run the risk of repeating what’s already been said, so apologies to those who did attend the discussion if I do. However, it is in the interests of writing a coherent blog post that I probably cover a bit of the same ground anyway.
[personal bit, feel free to skip...]
This is a subject very dear to my heart. Since going to the SpielArt Festival in Munich in 2007 (blogs on it here and here) as the British member of a “Mobile Lab” on criticism organised by a number of festivals – including LIFT – under the umbrella Festivals In Transition, how I positioned myself as a critic, or even just as a watcher-of-theatre altered immeasurably. If you want a snapshot of where my understanding of European theatre was at before this trip, check out my Anglo-perspective review of Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Blasted. [Ironically, after being utterly infatuated with his production of Hedda Gabler in ‘08, a bit meh about his Hamlet at the Schaubühne in ‘09, and then going out with a German director who couldn’t stand Ostermeier and seeing his fairly ropey Othello in ‘10, I now wonder whether I might have hit a few nails on the head about his style there, albeit from a position of total ignorance.] However, after Munich, through Helsinki, Wiesbaden, Rakevere, Nitra, Vilnius, and finally Ljubljana a year later. And then Berlin, Warsaw, Sweden, and Prague in 2009, and by the end of ‘09 moving to Berlin, I felt I had begun to change from being a British critic who occasionally saw “European theatre” (mostly at the Barbican or in Edinburgh) to a European critic who happened to be from Britain.
[...you can come back now]
Looking back at those blogs I’ve linked to above has actually been quite interesting. Not least as a way of mapping the way various questions I found myself asking evolved, but also for noticing questions I was asking about the way that Britain seemed so far removed from Europe as recently ago as 2007.
Now, granted in theatre as in many things, perhaps every generation needs to re-discover the wheel. Reading The Turning World, Lucy Neal and Rose Fenton’s book about the foundation and subsequent 23 years of the LIFT Festival up to 2003, you see practically the same journey as I’ve described above. Doubtless biographies of Simon McBurney, Declan Donnellan and Katie Mitchell would also trace similar trajectories. If you look at Theatre Record, Ian Herbert’s semi-regular “Can you hear me in...” columns describe attendance of more international festivals than I’ve had heiß Frühstücks. Similarly, Michael Coveney’s surprisingly involved reports from the brilliantly programmed BITEF festival in Belgrade often describe a older, white, male ex-print-critic enjoying the pleasure of being staggered by new European work. And, looking further back, it’s clear from Irving Wardle’s book Theatre Criticism that his generation of critics also “discovered Europe” in their younger days. Looking back further still, my copy of the collection Tynan includes extended sections on visits not only to America, but also to France, East and West Germany and Russia. Indeed, I was reading (probably in A Good Night Out) that it was Tynan’s infatuation with the Berliner Ensemble after they visited the Royal Court in 1958 that really ensured that company’s influence on British theatre stuck.
So, in one sense, I suppose I want to sound a vague warning: that we’re not the first generation to discover Europe, and there’s no sense saying we are. On the other hand, the tone of lofty dismissal that sometimes seems almost deafening from the MSM critics nowadays (and, is it just me, or have they actually improved a bit, post-Three Kingdoms, with A Midsummer Nights Dream as you like it, Three Sisters, and the Russian Vanya all getting something like a fair hearing followed by praise?).
Against this, I do think there are also significant differences. The European Union (God bless it) is one. We are, at this point in our history, legally and legislatively closer to Europe than we have ever been before. This fact is reinforced by both the Eurotunnel and easyJet. There is the simple fact that for less than the price of a return to Leeds or Edinburgh we can now visit almost any major city in Europe overnight or for the weekend. Factor in the lower cost of their tickets, and find a friend on whose sofa you can sleep, and we have the best access to theatre in Europe ever. This makes a massive difference. It means that we don’t have to wait for British "international fesitvals" to bring work to us, we can go and seek it out. Friends can recommend shows, blogs can review them, and thanks to the repertory systems in most European countries, we can go and catch those shows three months later.
The second warning, which is much more important, is the urgent need for us to properly *understand* *why* theatre from the mainland is like it is. I have a theory about the nature of the impact that the Berliner Ensemble’s visit to [edit: London] in 1958 had. It is this: British Theatre got rid of its sets.
C’est tout.
I think the one take-home idea British theatremakers got from the whole of Brecht’s extensive practice in theatre was that they could stage things in a black space with a few bits and pieces suggestively hung about the place to suggest location.
That’s probably unfair. I wasn’t alive in the sixties, so I have no direct experience of British playwrights’ attempts to write Brechtian Epic-style theatre. [Edit: and Mark Ravenhill has just suggested that the RSC's formation was also as a direct result of the ensemble principles of the BE] But if there’s one take-home point I really want this blog to make it’s that I don’t want this brilliant enthusiasm for European Theatre to resolve into some saggy Ersatz Nüblingisms chucked at any text that happens to come a director’s way.
I think, for example, that there’s *a lot* to be said for the practice of ensembles.
I think there is a lot to be said for the design of a lot of modern German theatres – the feeling of classlessness and democracy about them. Their functionality. Their modernity and lack of pretension. Their ticket-pricing. The fact that in many modern auditoria, there is just a single rake of seats and they’re all the same price.
I think, equally, there’s a lot to be said for the way that the old buildings position themselves in terms of accessibility. The fact that you can go and see, say, Current 93 (a very silly sort-of goth band, m’lud) or see a film at the Volksbühne, as easily as you might go and see Frank Castorf’s version of Three Sisters – Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! – or something by Rene Pollesch, is, I think, absolutely crucial in terms of the local public’s perception of that building as something that’s *theirs*. Something that for my money totally earns it the right to keep the name the People’s Stage. Similarly, look at the HAU generating work like Peaches Does Herself. It’s not only great programming, it’s also massively populist programming that totally breaks into other genres and demographics without even having to try – and, crucially, doesn’t look tokenistic, or sit oddly artistically with the rest of its work.
But most of all, there’s the matter of the culture that the work springs from. Britain isn’t Germany (or Poland, or the Czech Republic, or Slovenia, or Russia, or Georgia). We can import their ideas – indeed, if there’s one thing Britain is astonishingly good at, it’s Magpie-ing other people’s good ideas – but maybe we have to perhaps explain them slightly as we go along. And perhaps there will be some ideas and aspects we can’t naturalise. I think, for example, the German style of acting that involves speaking so non-naturalistically that it sounds almost like the actor is speaking from a musical score is never going to translate. I’d love someone to prove me wrong.
Similarly, part of me wonders about the possibility of just importing a style that has grown out of several very specific historical circumstances – Brecht, post-war de-Nazification, Communism, etc. and a the national culture that developed from Hegel and Kant, Fredrich II and the aftermath of the 30 Years War.
On the other hand, we’re not stupid. We can watch it when it comes over, and be more amazed by it than by (all but?) the very best of our home-grown directorial talent. And, hell, it’s British plays they’re doing half the time... So with the above caveats in mind, why the hell shouldn’t Britain be making properly brilliant Regietheater (it’s German for director’s theatre, let’s use it) to rival anything in Europe?
I can not wait to see it.
Yes.
[picture at the top a screen-cap from this trailer for Hamlet is Dead - No Gravity, which I saw in Wiesbaden in '08 - worth a look. From 2.46 shows one of my favourite directorial interventions with text-speaking ever...]
This is exciting. Just a couple of weeks into the new year and there’s a première in Köln of the newest piece made by Swiss German-language theatre director extraordinaire Christoph Marthaler. As regular readers will know, I came pretty late to this party, first seeing anything he’d done with Meine Faire Dame at the EIF last summer. Since then I also caught his previous latest, Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung, in Berlin, which I didn’t go quite so crazy for, but still admired.
Perhaps more exciting in the event here was the fact that Oh It’s Like Home is also a piece of German new writing. Thinking about it, I’ve seen remarkably few new plays in Germany. Indeed, I think I’ve seen more German première productions of new English plays than I have of German ones. I think it’s fair to say that Germany doesn’t have quite the same sustained concept of a New Writing Industry. There are advantages and disadvantages to this.
One interesting aspect is how much of the work that is generally apportioned to the writer in Britain gets undertaken as a matter of course by directors. A couple of summers ago a director friend was asked to do a stage version of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Which is a novel, not a play. The director in question read the book and put the text that she was going to use on stage together before going into rehearsals. Similarly, that Kriegenburg stage version of Kafka’s Der Prozess that I saw in Prague all those years ago with the incredible set didn’t have a writer credit and was just the director’s cut of the novel plonked on stage and then made magical.
This liberating assumption of directoral literacy is perhaps another key to the much-admired German way of treating a new play, which is much in evidence here. That said, also much in evidence here is the fact that the more you see of Marthaler, the more, well, shticky he looks. It’s a good shtick, sure, but I couldn’t help smirking when I saw that the new set (see top and bottom) was very much from the same palette as the previous two productions I’d seen, for example. [I know; I should research his oeuvre more. Maybe this is just like noticing there’s a lot of blue in Picasso’s blue period.] And the way that the action itself unfolded?Again plenty of similarities. I was briefly reminded of Ian Shuttleworth’s recent comment:
“OK, I know who you are now and what you do... let's face it, you’re not going to tell me or show me anything else and I can carry on quite comfortably without needing a top-up, thanks.”
It’s a comment, which I don’t think I subscribe to one bit, but I do think it’s an interesting reflection of how we might be encouraged to think about theatre in Britain – certainly here by one of our leading critics, it seems. I definitely had to ponder a bit about why I was so amused by the fact that Marthaler seems to have a particular aesthetic that he’s exploring.
If these three productions are entirely representative of the direction that Marthaler’s work is currently taking, then I think I could imagine, for example, the Marthaler production of Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs (which I think might well have been my favourite bit of New Writing last year. Certainly my favourite bit that I didn’t mention in my end-of-year round-up of best-ofs, which is interesting...), for example. On the other hand, in spite of what what we might see as inevitabilities, I think it would be an incredibly rich production. There is, after all, just the sheer fact of the materials that are meeting, for example. Oh It’s Like Home *the production* might look a bit like Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung – or indeed Marthaler’s putative production of Lungs – but I don’t think the three plays could be more different.
I suppose in part, my really picking up on Marthaler’s aesthetic might also be to do with our age difference. The interiors of Marthaler’s sets (Anna Viebrock in Basel and Berlin, here Duri Bischoff) evoke a very specific time period and location. The rebuilt mainland Europe of the 1950s and ‘60s, and this is no different, the interior of a (typically Swiss?) modern wooden walled cabin.
Perhaps to others, Rupert Goold’s settings, which all look totally, readably different to me, all meld into a generalised blur to do with our generation, while Marthaler’s are all deeply, significantly different. Marthaler’s aesthetic also runs the risk of seeming kitsch, and I think would be were it not for its astringency, the care put into it, and the fact that it does genuinely seem to open up both worlds for exploration.
It’s not just the sets, though. And much more interesting is the way that Marthaler almost “arranges” pieces as you might a piece of music, rather than “directing” them. Action feels more choreographed than “blocked”, and the accompanying music – played here live on a single piano – feels carefully chosen to supplement and be a part of the whole. The key-note of this production is its gentleness and humour. The opening moments – the pianist changing the lightbulb of the room’s pendant lamp and then each of the four cast members entering and exiting again up and down the staircase leading up who-knows-where. Throughout the rest of the piece, the four speaking performers plus the pianist create elaborately choreographed interactions, much as you might expect in any play set in a living room with four characters. Except, Sasha Rau’s Oh It’s Like Home is in fact a series of intercut monologues. (I’ve not seen the text, so I don’t know if they’re printed intercut exactly as here, or if that’s been done to them. Let’s presume for the sake of quickness that it’s the former.)
The characters don’t speak to each other, their stories are not inter-related, they are four monologues describing four separate existences in four quite disparate rooms. Egon Richter (Josef Ostendorf) talks about growing up in an orphanage, Hanna Lendi (Bettina Stucky) in a slaughterhouse, Ilse Schafleitner (Silvia Fenz – far and away the most watchable of the three women, a cross between Frances De La Tour and Kathryn Hunter) on some room in East Germany and Gunda Krass (played by Sasha Rau herself) talking about dead butterflies and making surprising Tourettesy outbursts of “Ficken, Ficken, Ficken” at occasional intervals.
There is plenty of wry humour in the piece – in the writing – but there is much more in Marthaler’s gentle but mischievous setting of it. Both Ostendorf and Stucky are quite notably overweight actors and there is a certain extent to which this is capitalised upon. Not cruelly, so much as sympathetically and absurdly. At one point Ostendorf – who physically resembles an older, beardless Daniel Kitson – is revealed sitting in a cupboard with a small girl’s dress hanging next to him; on another occasion he sits in the hidden back room with the pianist mournfully blowing into an absurd trumpet-like instrument. On one occasion Stucky climbs over Ostendorf into the bunk bed, on another occasion they are revealed in the kitchen with a reveal that suggests they have just eaten all the cakes... By contrast, Fenz is all spryness and regretful faraway looks, at one point disappearing into the chimney stack to continue reading her book.
Rau’s play itself I would love to read it English. Apparently the production came about because Rau has worked with Marthaler as an actress and said he would like to direct something she wrote. This production is funded by the KunstSalon-Autorenpreis für das Schauspiel Köln 2012, which I presume means Rau won a writing competition. Whether her winning it was influenced by who she had attached as a directorial name, I don’t know. It seemed a nice, competent, interesting-enough piece, but perhaps not an out-and-out classic of postdramatic literature. I would also be very interested to see how a British director instinctively handled it – trying to let the “text speak for itself” (given that as four monologues, it can’t be “served” per se). The usual solution in the first instance often seems to be the four speakers sat on chairs, route; as exemplified by Vicky Featherstone’s première of Crave (fwiw, Ostermeier’s version is only a bit more jazzy).
So, what to conclude. With my language-understand tied more firmly behind my back than some other times – I could get the gist, but no real impact; although this might be because there wasn’t much impact. Apparently it was quite surreal in German too. There were a surprising number of walk-outs – the main pleasures here were the absurdist visual comedy and more rather gorgeously realised music (by, among others: Max Bruch, Anton Bruckner, John Cage, Frédéric Chopin, Scott Joplin, Eric Satie and Richard Wagner).
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