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issue 04 - 2004

Prompt Corner

"We may admire political theatre," I wrote in an essay last year in Prospect magazine, "but it works, when at all, through the theatrical rather than the political component."  In other words, no matter how engaged we are, we don't go to the theatre for politics, not even if we're Bertolt Brecht.  And so, to make sufficient drama out of a line of political argument, a writer needs to push certain other thematic or narrative buttons.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

This should preferably be done with a degree of subtlety.  For instance, Andy de la Tour's Question Time at the Arcola seemed to be shaping up quite nicely throughout its first half, then at a stroke it set me seething so much I had to spend most of the interval walking my semi-coherent rage off around the streets of Dalston.

De la Tour's principal thrust is an intelligent excoriation of the apostasy of Blairism from any meaningful mainstream of Labour thinking, and of the insidious lure of careerism in party and parliamentary politics of this kind; the family drama is really a pretext for the ideological debate.  But he makes it work, as far as it goes.  The problem is that, in order to ratchet up the dramatic content even further, in the final seconds of Act One he simultaneously presses the buttons marked "Children", "Sex" and "Computers".  It's simple, it's crass and it's like letting off a psychological stinkbomb.  It doesn't matter precisely what flavour of child-sex-computer business is thereby introduced, nor that he rows frantically (or cynically) back from it in the second half; once you press those three buttons - the Ctrl-Alt-Del of contemporary societal hysteria - you've forced a reboot of the entire operating system, as it were, and the session simply can't continue as before.

Consequently, de la Tour lost me.  However sympathetic I might have been to his political thesis, his desperation to make it dramatically sexy was utterly alienating.  Even after I'd stopped fuming, I'd become too occupied with trying to figure out why writers resort to such blatant tactics to be bothered following the play anything like as closely.  Which is a pity, because Mary Jo Randle and the esteemed Bernard Kay were doing a fine job of putting human faces on to a play of ideas.  What reduced them to two dimensions was not after all the politics, but the sensationalism.

Space to reverberate

Altogether more discreet in this respect is Steve Waters in World Music.  His M.E.P. protagonist does not fall into bed with an African refugee; he is cajoled into it because, to him, she and the experience constitute a rediscovery of his ideals and his vitality.  We, of course, can see that what in fact are being fuelled are his illusions about his own especial connection with and insight into The Issues in the region in question.

That kind of metaphor works, because it allows for a complexity beyond what's written, either on the face of it or perhaps even in terms of intention: Waters leaves space for matters to reverberate in ways that even he might not have explicitly envisaged.  It's for this reason that I feel better disposed towards World Music than a number of the reviewers in this issue.  Why, it's been argued, go to within an inch of spelling out that this is about Rwanda , and then stop short?  On the contrary, my feeling is, well, what's in a name?

The target of the dramatic indictment is a variety of western attitudes, in the entangled areas of charity and politics; the identity of the Africans in question is largely incidental to this.  That, in itself, is disquieting - perhaps outright horrifying - and part of the point.  Even near-genocide can be grist to the mill of petty party machinations, or simply of an individual's mid-life crisis.  As the working title of TV newsroom satire Drop The Dead Donkey put it, dead Belgians don't count.

A universal given

Obviously, they do if you're Belgian.  Dead people closer to home naturally count for much more.  This, in turn, is part of the reason why I conversely felt (and continue to feel) quite lukewarm about David Hare's The Permanent Way: it goes about things the other way round.  (I know there's no reason to write about this play in this issue, but it both fits in with the train of thought, no pun intended, and seems particularly apt as I write this on a delayed Great Western rail service, currently stationary at Reading.)

Hare indicts on the specifics: the shattered nature of rail privatisation, and the litany of fatal incidents in the years since.  But he doesn't address our responses, whether as an audience or a community, to any significant degree.  Rather, he takes our shared outrage and despair as a universal given.  His opening scene, staged by Max Stafford-Clark as a parody of 1970s agitprop, exemplifies this point: it's playful, but its playfulness works because we're all already onside, and have been from the start.  In this respect, The Permanent Way articulates a deeply held attitude, and one which probably is almost as common as the play assumes, but it doesn't actually tell us anything, much less show us anything new.  Let's hope that Hare's forthcoming play about Gulf War II, Stuff Happens, doesn't operate from a similar standpoint of preaching to the converted.

The Permanent Way will not endure as a play.  It's not written that way; it's of its time.  Hare's grand trilogy might seem more lasting, but even there...  In 1999, I saw a student production of The Absence Of War which has stuck in my mind not because of the quality of the show itself, but for what it indicated about the fluidity of political culture.  A mere six years after that play had premièred, the young people who revived it simply couldn't conceive of the world it was describing.  They portrayed fictional Labour leader George Jones not as a man who repudiated media manipulation in favour of honestly expressed conviction only to find it a terrible misjudgement, but as a ditherer who was simply incompetent at letting himself be moulded.  To these students, spin was a given; it didn't occur to them that there might have been a real choice in the matter but a little while ago.  The dreadful "Lolita" business aside, this is the same point Andy de la Tour is making in Question Time, albeit from the other side: by now, his retired union leader Eric Hargreaves (as played by Kay) is clearly a man out of time, and the change is to be deplored.  It's similarly a play for today, not for the ages.

Sentimentality dominates

But what happens when a work outlives its political component?  Dickens was a fiery critic of social injustice, and Oliver Twist aimed in particular at the systematic depredations of the Poor Law of 1834.  Without that keen relevance, the masterly storytelling and character sketches survive, but to what end?  Neil Bartlett opts (I think rightly) to retain or regain as much of the Victorian shadow as possible in his Lyric Hammersmith production.  Even better, he works largely through suggestion rather than explicit portrayal, with Rae Smith's dimly lit peepshow box of a set (which also gives the show a Polish air at times: the opening tableau reminded me forcefully of Wisniewski), and the grisliest moments taking place offstage, or half-obscured, or being covered by freezing the action.  And yet it's still the sentimentality that dominates.  Paul Hunter's Beadle Bumble does not terrify as a parish despot; he's a cuddly hen-pecked wobble-belly.  Despite the coda detailing various unhappy fates, including that of the Artful Dodger, it still feels like a happy ending because little tow-headed Oliver is safe in the bosom of his comfortable family.  It's easier for us to shake off the bleakness and horror, because at such a remove they operate only on an aesthetic level, rather than being powered by immediate and palpable social iniquity.  It's all pretend.

(I wonder whether the same is true in its own way of a show I didn't see last month, Jarman Garden.  Derek Jarman used his burgeoning status to become an increasingly stroppy queen -didn't there use to be a T-shirt with that as its slogan? - on the important issues.  However, what survives of him has come to assume the iconic quality he sought to capture in much of his work.  There's the Dungeness garden, and the man canonised as Saint Derek by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and the work itself, including a film shot in Latin decades before Mel Gibson got all passionate.  But the iconic is also simplistic.  Does Jarman Garden locate the sense of what drove its subject?  See Ian Herbert's verdict at the back of this issue.)

Equanimous

Moreover, as another saying from the era of my infancy has it, the personal is political.  At this point it's worth revisiting another play covered in a previous issue: what Edward Albee does in The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is precisely to foreground the pushing of those buttons I mentioned earlier, and to make us interrogate our own reflex attitudes.  Why, indeed, draw the line at goats?  (See John Gross's review in Issue 03 for a precise demarcation of the case of Sylvia from less disturbing forms of zoöphilia.)  The untroubled response which some critics perceived here is the obverse of what was apparently a discernible element of the New York reception.  There, a number of people went to the show in order to be, within acceptable limits, shocked; in Islington, it's alleged, the problem is people being equanimous.  (Yes, it is a proper word.)  Each response misses the point.  It's not how you answer that matters; it's how you question yourself.

What, then, to make of Charles Spencer's review of On Blindness?  It reads as if he got out of bed on the wrong side that morning, to find furthermore that someone had widdled on his cornflakes.  Glyn Cannon's play about perception, lust and the male gaze, like The Goat, asks questions, but this piece does so in a variety of languages.  With its simultaneous signing, captions, voice descriptions and multimedia components, it asks us to watch and listen in different ways, to pay different kinds of attention... and because language informs thought at least as much as vice versa, we may therefore approach the content and concerns differently also.

It would be dreadful form to indulge in armchair psychoanalysis, besides which I both admire Charlie as a reviewer and value him as a friend.  Nevertheless, his review is so out of kilter with other critical evaluations of the piece as to constitute, for whatever reason, an entirely different genus of response.  I'll restrict myself to hoping that, if he ever meets Mat Fraser socially (described in his review as "a chap with very little in the way of arms"), I might be fortunate enough to be a spectator.  Not to wish any ill on a comrade, but it could be interesting: I'm told that Mat has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do...

Ian Shuttleworth

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At the Back

Sidestepping the other Ian's concern with political theatre in this issue for the moment, I think I'd like to talk first about production values. I've had my share of political works in these two weeks, but my more narrow-minded concern here is with the politics of theatre.

One implication behind many of the critics' reviews is that the subsidised theatre has better values than the commercial, and that the fringe, inevitably, has even less concern with visual excellence. My viewing has included a subsidised show with dodgy values, a West End< show with the look of a far Fringe try-out, and a couple of completely unsubsidised shows that looked terrific.

Double bind

Of course, it depends on where you're sitting. The consensus on All's Well that Ends Well is that it's a sombre masterpiece. My opinion is coloured by the fact that I saw it from the top of the theatre with a group of students, but it might be worth bringing you the view from the gallery.

For a start, the opening scene was almost inaudible up there. Still, you did have a good view of the crummy, tilting flats that masked the wings, of some excellent gobo work on the stagecloth from Paul Pyant, and some very ugly reflections off what may have looked from the stalls like a clever mirror effect upstage. The whole evening dragged alarmingly, with Claudie Blakley especially off-colour and only one or two performances reaching up to our eyrie - let's name Guy Henry and the spirited Jane Maud. I've seen four  All's Wells now, and this was the worst.

This presents a double bind: the subsidised RSC production started (and no doubt succeeded) in the Swan, a completely different space, catering for an audience half the size of the Gielgud's. Because the RSC has massive debts, which strangely seem to spring from not presenting their work in London while still receiving subsidy as if they were, London saw this production only as a result of the generosity of the commercial sector. So it seems cruel to knock Bill Kenwright and Thelma Holt for giving space to what has become a second-rate show.

New direction

More exciting things were happening on the unsubsidised end of the Fringe, where a classic revival and a visionary new work showed just how much can be achieved on shoestrings.  Ryan McBride's Rogue State production of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (which I last saw fifty years ago) made a virtue out of its small-space, small-cast necessities at the Courtyard, with some very clever pop-up designs from Jo Cronin and a set of smooth performances from a young cast that gave Rice's parable a strong contemporary relevance without for a moment sacrificing its Thirties style.

The continuing success of the tiny Courtyard (their previous excellent Country Wife had queues round the block) signals a new direction for the Fringe. With the decline of new writing, and fewer mainstage opportunities to see work from the classical theatre canon (no RSC, a National devoted to trendy spectacle and - admittedly - great new work), some Fringe companies have seen the benefit of tapping the large market of theatre studies pupils and visiting instant-culture American groups. If they serve up work as good as the Courtyard's they will do well, to everyone's benefit.

Not that original work on the Fringe is dead: Ben Gove's Jarman Garden, devised with the actors of Flaming Theatre, was a piece of total theatre to delight the senses, beautifully integrating mime, film, music and horticulture to present a very affectionate tribute to the iconic gay film-maker. My only worry about the evening was that it was impossible to be outraged by such a witty and wonderful evocation of one who saw it as his vocation to cause trouble. Here, art displaced politics. Huge credit to the design team of Erik Rehl, Mark Jonathan and Adrienne Quartly, who took a budget that could probably be counted in hundreds rather than thousands and achieved miracles with it.

Equally impressive in its own way was the more sombre second outing of And All the Children Cried, Judith Jones and Bea Campbell's study of child murder. Gillian Wright's performance as the abused Gail, who killed her children to save them from a similar fate, was quite stunningly convincing, while Sharon Maughan's Myra, a more shadowy figure, unselfishly gave her the limelight.

Richly textured

On the slightly more prosperous end of the Fringe, Glyn Cannon's On Blindness could afford four directors, which resulted in a richly textured Graeae/Frantic Assembly/Paines Plough production of constant invention, marred only by the occasional interludes of meaningless hand-jive contributed by the lads from Frantic, who offered much more as straight actors. I read the script beforehand, a script which suggests that the play could have worked equally well (and got through to the strangely unsympathetic Charlie Spencer) without all the interpretative overlay. With refreshing simplicity, it examines and challenges our attitudes to sex and its expression through art and pornography.

What fun to set the young hopefuls of On Blindness beside their Thirties counterparts (including another blind girl) in Rodney Ackland's  Strange Orchestra, revived with loving care by Ellie Jones at the Orange Tree. Ackland's success lies in making us feel deeply about a set of pretty trivial people - or is it pretty, trivial people? Self-absorbed, shallow, selfish - it's Chekhov in Fair Isles and flannels. Someone criticised the play's lack of plot. If the onset of blindness, a comically failed suicide pact, a rampaging conman and a whole series of thwarted love stories aren't plot, what is? It has no plot in exactly the manner of Anton Pavlovich.

Finally, a surprising low-budget treat in the West End. Hershey Felder's  George Gershwin Alone doesn't feature much more than one man, some drapes and a piano. But what a piano! I didn't warm for a long while to Mr Felder, a dry music teacher who seemed far too remote and over-fond of himself as he told George Gershwin's story and made fair attempts to sing the great numbers, but his piano playing was irresistible from the start, a lush, concert grand sound that reverberated warmly around the comfortable Duchess theatre. Only after the show's official ending did Mr Felder let his real warmth shine through, when what could have been a toe-curling session of induced audience participation turned into a real singalong party, with its enthusiastic host encouraging solos from the stalls and making mature matrons sound like smoky torch singers with that piano to accompany them.

Varied

Neither I nor the other Ian have touched many of the shows in a varied issue, so I hope you've spent good time on them in the intervening pages. For myself, I'd love to know whether Notes On Falling Leaves is "beyond awful" (Robert Gore-Langton) or just "devastating" (Nicholas de Jongh and Roger Foss).

Finally, hats off to Lloyd Evans, who not only sat through the whole of  When Harry Met Sally, in spite of practically knowing the movie by heart, but went against almost the whole troop of full-time critics by loving the stage version. Let's hope the experience will encourage him to stay for more curtain calls.   

Ian Herbert

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Contents / Reviews

London
THE ADDING MACHINE Revival of the play by Elmer Rice	Courtyard	19 Feb	07 Mar	202
AGE-SEX-LOCATION New play by Marcus Marcou	Riverside	12 Feb	28 Feb	197
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL Revival of the play by William Shakespeare	Gielgud	19 Feb	24 Apr	219
AND ALL THE CHILDREN CRIED Revival of the play by Judith Jones, Beatrix Campbell and Annie Castledine	BAC	17 Feb	07 Mar	237
BAKING TIME Play by Tim Webb	BAC/Lyric Studio/touring	14 Feb	21 Feb	238
THE DREAM KILLERS Solo piece by Angela Clerkin	Drill Hall 2	18 Feb	07 Mar	210
GEORGE GERSHWIN ALONE Tribute by Hershey Felder	Duchess	17 Feb	17 Apr	215
GOOD AND TRUE / BE PROUD OF ME Two plays by Stan's Café TC	Lyric Studio	24 Feb	06 Mar	236
HEY THERE, BOY WITH THE BEBOP New play by Abi Bown	Polka	12 Feb	15 Mar	214
JARMAN GARDEN Devised performance by Flaming Theatre	Riverside 3	19 Feb	06 Mar	238
MACBETH Revival of Shakespeare play by en masse theatre [sic]	Union	19 Feb	06 Mar	222
NOTES ON FALLING LEAVES New play by Ayub Khan-Din	Royal Court	12 Feb	20 Feb	199
OF MICE AND MEN Return of John Steinbeck revival (Birmingham Rep)	Old Vic	12 Feb	03 Apr	207
OLIVER TWIST Adapted and directed by Neil Bartlett from the novel by Charles Dickens	Lyric Hammersmith	25 Feb	27 Mar	229
ON BLINDNESS New play by Glyn Cannon	Soho	16 Feb	13 Mar	208
LA PUCELLE Devised and presented by PowderMonkey	Oval House	12 Feb	28 Feb	217
QUESTION TIME New play by Andy de la Tour	Arcola	25 Feb	20 Mar	234
THE ROUND DANCE Revival of the play by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Charles Osborne	Undercroft at the Roundhouse	17 Feb	12 Mar	235
STRANGE ORCHESTRA  Revival of the play by Rodney Ackland	Orange Tree	13 Feb	20 Mar	205
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY Adapted by Marcy Kahan from the movie script by Nora Ephron	T R Haymarket	20 Feb	01 Jan	223
THE WONDERFUL LIFE AND MSERABLE DEATH OF THE RENOWNED DR FAUSTUS Adapted by Rebecca Gould, Carl Grose and Mervyn Millar from Christopher Marlowe and German puppet plays	Cottesloe	10 Feb	25 Feb	218
WORLD MUSIC Transfer of play by Steve Waters	Donmar	16 Feb	13 Mar	211
Regions
BEOWULF Devised by Andy Arnold from the translation by Seamus Heaney	Glasgow, Arches	12 Feb	21 Feb	252
THE DUMB WAITER and other pieces by Harold Pinter	Oxford Playhouse	17 Feb	28 Feb	248
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Revival of the play by Oscar Wilde	Bath, Theatre Royal	16 Feb	28 Feb	250
THE MAYOR OF ZALAMEA Revival of the play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, adapted by Adrian Mitchell	Liverpool, Everyman	18 Feb	06 Mar	249
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Revival of the play by William Shakespeare	Halifax, Viaduct	18 Feb	21 Feb	250
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Revival by Dale Wasserman from the novel by Ken Kesey	Mold, Clwyd Theatr Cymru	12 Feb	06 Mar	243
OTHELLO Revival of the play by William Shakespeare	Stratford, Swan	18 Feb	03 Apr	239
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL Adapted by Martin McCardie from the book by Mark Steel	Dundee Rep	25 Feb	28 Feb	255
SOUL PILOTS Piece by ek performance [sic]	Glasgow, Tramway	12 Feb	13 Feb	255
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER Revival of the play by Tennessee Williams	Sheffield, Lyceum	12 Feb	27 Feb	244

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