Issue 06 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
A colleague was talking tangentially at a press night a while back about the theatre reviewer's emotional equivalent of Murphy's Law: that the first show you see after suffering a bereavement, and probably several after that as well, will inevitably involve gloom, grief and terminal illness aplenty. Obviously, the reality is that one's simply more likely to register such things feelingly in such a sensitive state. (Though it gets hard to keep believing that: as J. Edgar Hoover remarked, "Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action.") When it comes down to it, after all, pretty much every drama boils down in the end to love/sex, death or both.
Or so I thought until last month's run of shows focused on power of one kind or another. True, power can itself be analysed in terms of sex and/or death, but often that's not really the point. For instance, the sexual abuse, whether real or imagined, in the back-story of When The Night Begins is just the catalyst; the fuel that drives Hanif Kureishi's play is the switchback of dominance and submission between Cecil and Jane. That's the fuel, but the engine's missing several crucial parts and my God, how it splutters. Kureishi has no idea what he really wants to say, and no discipline about saying it plausibly. He fancies blue-collar Cecil (blue-collar Cecil!) coming out with a lapidary phrase in the middle of all his demotic? Out it pops. And Anthony Clark's direction does nothing to smooth out such blips, or to give an organic flow to the back-and-forth shift in the power balance. I've been loath to jump on the Hampstead-bashing bandwagon, believing that such a comprehensive change in the theatre's character and approach needs time to bed down. But sometimes it gets damn hard to stay perched on this fence, and frankly, sod it, this inchoate muddle had no business being produced there.
Lack of brilliance
At the time of writing, I have just exited from a student production which at one point featured a dominatrix and her leather-masked slave performing scenes from Macbeth. A full report on the National Student Drama Festival, plus samples of the writing of the winners of its student criticism awards, will follow in Issue 07. For the moment, it's simply relevant to note that this conceit may not be viable at any length, but it pinpoints the sense that even the central couple's relationship is one which eroticises power rather than politicising sex. As for Dominic Cooke's RSC production, it's hard to find specific fault: the problem lies more in a generalised lack of brilliance. Greg Hicks is not a man for all roles, but Macbeth is one of those for which he is best suited; and he acquits himself honourably, though not extraordinarily. Likewise Sian Thomas as Lady M. The underrated Louis Hilyer makes a surprisingly fine Banquo, bluff and martial without becoming Brian Blessed. And yet, and yet, and yet. As the first stage of artistic director Michael Boyd's plan to rattle through the tragedies as a step towards reinvigorating the RSC's core ethos, it feels worryingly like a production for the set-text market. The truest phase is in the latter acts, when Hicks' Macbeth feelingly conveys the fatigue and emptiness he feels now that even his villainy is a matter of routine rather than enormity.
How to fill that kind of void if not with wickedness? Leigh, played excellently by Fiona Bell, finds one answer in Georgia Fitch's Adrenalin.Heart, deservedly given another airing at the Bush after its brief première some eighteen months ago. Not a terribly articulate answer: fill it with something, anything - love/lust for Angel, then for the drugs he peddles in his small, desultory way. But to say Leigh isn't articulate is absolutely not to make the same accusation of Fitch; the writer gets both of her characters' thoughts and feelings unobtrusively spot-on, while also keeping the play bobbing above the swamp of grim linear directness by playing with notions of soliloquy, storytelling and memory drama. And Bell's performance is unobtrusively remarkable: without leaving the stage during the 70 minutes of the play, she manages physically to transform from pert and perky to haggard. In some ways this is a converse to Macbeth, in that it's quite hard to put your finger on what's so impressively right about this first play, other than simply a comprehensive absence of wrongness, if you see what I mean.
Overblown oratory
Ah, wrongness. Bite the bullet, Shuttleworth, and come right out with it: the Barbican outing of David Edgar's diptych Continental Divide was pretty much six hours of wrong moves. For as much as thirty or forty minutes into the first play, Mothers Against (although they can be watched in either order), I tried to consider the possibility that director Tony Taccone had chosen to marshal his cast into an orotund, "public" style of delivery in order to bring off some kind of Verfremdungseffekt : divorce us from the human action so that we can focus on the ideological aspect. But no, because this kind of delivery makes it harder rather than easier to tune past the style into the content. In Mothers Against, which is essentially an extended-family drama, Taccone could and should have gone for American stage naturalism rather than this overblown oratory.
Perhaps he made the choice in view of the latter phase of the other play, Daughters Of The Revolution. Now, there's no reason why a British playwright such as Edgar shouldn't address himself to American political culture and generational questions such as those here; in this case, he had clearly done his research so well that I spent much of Daughters' back-story about the 1960s New Left radicals identifying particular individual members of the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground who had been diaphanously fictionalised in this account. But as matters crawled past the quaggy New Age tree-hugging phase, Edgar became less and less able to rein in the passion of his sympathies with those standard-bearers of his own generation of radicalism. You could feel his heart in the position the viewpoint characters espoused. Then, conscientious writer that he is, he felt obliged to raise the game of the antagonists as well, just to be fair. By the final scenes, characters were basically delivering stump speeches at each other. This is the kind of writing that demands to be delivered as from a soapbox. As Verdi remarked of the Ring cycle, Continental Divide has its wonderful moments, but also its awful quarter-hours.
Peeling off
If you're going to mythologise, do it with a David Rudkinesque rigour. A whole generation now of reviewers as well as theatregoers knows Rudkin, if at all, merely from the Young Vic's 2001 revival of his early Afore Night Come. There's no sense abroad of his delight in deep history, in archetype, in peeling off the epidermis of the present day to reveal attitudes and appetites unmediated and almost atavistic. So when, in Red Sun, he serves up a story that's part Golem legend, part creation myth, with hints of corporate planet-rape and/or Holocaust in the background and even a whiff of Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Circular Ruins, it's unsurprising that younger, unacclimatised critics respond like the schoolboy in the Gary Larson cartoon: "Please, sir, may I be excused? My head is full."
Rudkin's core theme can be summed up in a reference to another cartoon, The Amazing Spiderman: "With great power comes great responsibility." In the case of Wana-Apu, the shaman who makes a man out of clay, it is accepting the risk that his creation may not simply be his passive creature, and also taking on himself the burden of a kind of murder when the new being grows transgressive; in the case of the created Adamu, it is the moral consequences of setting himself up as a tyrant in succession to the wicked regime he was called into being to crush. And yes, this is dense stuff, particularly when written largely in a kind of pidgin (those who have encountered Ken Campbell's enthusiasms for authentic Pidgin are at a distinct advantage here, in terms of both patience and lateral thinking). And yes, there are a good twenty minutes in the first act that are dramatically and atmospherically necessary but in themselves constitute a serious longueur. And yes above all, ajtc's [sic] staging is sparse and simple, so that there's nothing in the presentation to distract (or provide relief) from the substance of the piece. But dammit, we should just be glad that such a morally and intellectually improving writer is still turning stuff out.
(If I were the sort of person to go over and over the same territory - instead of the sort who discreetly but smugly points you towards where I said it the first time - this would be the point at which I mention Peter Flannery's Singer at the Tricycle. Likewise, Continental Divide would be more or less twinned with Homage To Catalonia. But my individual reviews of those shows are elsewhere in this issue, so 'nuff said.)
Us and Them
Almost the diametrical opposite view of power and responsibility pervades Charlotte Jones's The Dark : every character in three adjoining houses is impotent in the face of grinding reality. Even fourteen-year-old Josh, who breaks into his neighbours' houses, masked, and terrorises them until they frankly admit to their fear of him, is creating a fiction to try to disguise his true status as just another undistinguished dweller in that urban terrace, amid the arguments, secrets, infidelities, insecurities and despairs.
Most reviews of Jones's play ranged from lukewarm to disappointed, but I would go further: it made me morally angry. I think she's ended up writing precisely the opposite kind of piece from that which she intended: instead of a play about Us, she's written a play about Them. Instead of saying, "Well, it can be fairly grim, and we're all a bit put-upon and have our unreasonable episodes, but we can in the end still communicate with one another," I think she's quite inadvertently said, "My God, the Daily Mail headlines are true: they [i.e. everyone but you and me, and I'm not too sure about you] really are all evil and depraved, or at best just insane, and you're not even safe in your own home!" And I think that's both ideologically and factually wrong, and I think it's dangerous.
Compare and contrast Joe Penhall's 1994 play Some Voices, in which pretty much everyone is indeed mad, bad and/or dangerous to know, trying in vain to find a corner that they can control for themselves in a too-brutal world. Reviewers have noted both the quality of Penhall's unjudgemental view and the extent to which this piece can now be seen as a pre-echo of his Blue/Orange, and they're right. What I think merits lengthier mention is the quality of Matthew Dunster's production. In much the same way as Mike Bradwell with Adrenalin . Heart, Dunster simply did not a thing wrong. His vision of the production was both complex and precise in its detail, right down to the selection and timing of soundtrack numbers that commented upon the action, and he succeeded in realising that vision to a remarkable degree. Dunster has for a while been making interesting choices as an actor (he can currently be seen on stage at the National in The Permanent Way), and latterly been making forays as a writer that I'm told (I'm afraid I haven't seen any) are adventurous if only erratically successful. But on the showing of this, his first outing out of the Young Vic's scheme for young directors, he has more than mere talent in terms of helming a production. He seems to have an intuitive knowledge of what works. And knowledge is power.
Ian Shuttleworth
At the Back
Did you hear me at the back of the 2003 Theatre Index, which should have reached you recently? There you'll find my Invisible Ten for 2003, all the way from Dende's The Piranha Lounge to Lars Noren's Blood, a personal selection of rather special shows which either didn't get much reviewing (like Piranha Lounge, which still couldn't attract critics to its reincarnation at the Lyric Studio in this issue) or got all too much, in the shape of killer reviews (like Blood).
It's still difficult to send reviewers to every show that opens - even the listings weeklies don't have infinite space or contributors - and while intrepid explorers like Lyn Gardner are still bringing back reports of shows that haven't even turned up in Theatre Record's advance listings, some gems are bound to go unreported. I doubt whether I'll have the same luck in future, but it so happens that (in my capacity as Mr Shuttleworth's junior critic) I saw two shows in this issue which have received no reviews at all.
Sadly dwindling
It's not been easy for Hilary Strong, taking on Greenwich after it lost its producing status. In the circumstances it's very impressive that she has been able to give the theatre some continuing sense of identity, both with her much-needed new musicals initiatives, and with fun events like Sex Week, coming up next week. She's also in a good position to attract the sadly dwindling number of middle scale touring companies. So that Greenwich gets the only London date for Northern Broadsides, with their Merchant (this issue), and welcomes Salisbury's Jamaica Inn in June. Presumably we can hope to see Hull Truck there again, and other ambitious regional theatres who want to showcase for a week in London (are you listening Colchester? Northampton?) could do worse than look at Greenwich as a possibility.
The fascinating thing is that they may do better for box office than for visiting critics. I went there to see Neil Sissons' Compass production of The Rivals, and for the first time in a long while found myself in a full house, packed with the good burghers of SE10 and only lightly salted with school parties. And no critics.
They missed a great show. I have to confess to a snobbish avoidance of Compass in the past - set-text touring from Sheffield, indeed - which probably deprived me of much pleasure, if this one is anything to go by. Robert Austin and Carol Macready were quite outstanding as Sir Anthony and Mrs Malaprop, and their young colleagues gave excellent support (including a remarkable piece of doubling from Simon Hepworth). It was perhaps too generous of Mr Sissons to give us the text uncut - three hours is a touch too long for a comedy today - but there was no shortage of well-earned laughs, and Ms Macready gave a whole new, almost tragic dimension to Malaprop by making her ponderous and deeply serious, rather than superficial and scatty.
Better vehicle
The other show at which I seemed to be the lone critical presence also marks a small renaissance. The ICA is back in business, albeit in a modest way, as an importer of foreign groups. Last month saw some Slovenes with Roland Schimmelpfennig's lovely Arabian Night, and now we have Teatro Clandestino from Italy with Madre e Asassina. Note again, that the theatre was completely full, mostly of expat Italians - their grapevine must be good.
This, too, was well worth seeing, not so much for its plot, a rather hysterical, shallow investigation of a news story about a woman who quite suddenly takes a carving knife to her two young children, as for its mechanics. The front of the stage is covered by a see-through screen, on which captions and occasional chunks of grainy film are projected. Behind it is a raised stage on which the action takes place. You wonder at the speed of the company's complex set changes, which can bring two real cars on stage in separate scenes. There is action in front of the containing screen, first when a tacky TV interviewer asks the murderess about her motivation, and finally when the woman herself makes a sobbing exit along the wall of the auditorium. Only at the curtain call do we realise that the elaborate 'on-stage' scenes were pre-recorded video, with the occasional 'real' prop added by black-clad operators. A clever piece of trickery, which needed a better vehicle for its cleverness.
Pop-up toilet
A better vehicle might have seen Susannah York and Amanda Boxer safely through their evening at New End, but Alice Virginia proved very rickety indeed. If DMW Greer (whose Burning Blue was so clear and so strong) knew what he was trying to achieve, it certainly didn't reach his director, but Catherine Meister-Petersen, like her actors, can be forgiven for her inability to weld together so many disparate elements - an Arthur Miller memory guilt trip, a Tennessee Williams slice of southern decadence, some Edward Albee infighting and a late-developing sense of black humour which finally suggested Greer was trying to do a small-scale 900 Oneonta (maybe 9 Oneonta?). Nobody was helped by Nicolai Hart Hansen's clever but quite un-negotiable set, complete with pop-up toilet, which made most scenes an obstacle course. (Toilets are a feature of this issue - there are two more on the back cover.)
That was one Fringe show that might have been kept from the critics in its own interests, as work in progress. There are two short-play evenings on p364 which we record without reviews, but these two may well have been better seen as try-outs, too.
Sanitised Rachmanism
Sean Holmes's Oxford Stage revival of Singer produced some very mixed reactions - John Peter absolutely hated it - but I'm with my esteemed editor in finding it very rich and satisfying, though I wasn't clever enough to see its resemblance to Peer Gynt until he pointed it out. Peter Singer (the name is resonantly similar) goes through a similar series of reincarnations, and Ron Cook makes much more of the role than its creator, Antony Sher. Holmes gets a terrific sense of ensemble out of his actors, as he did with his revival of Musgrave. This is a special gift. What was originally a lively anti-Thatcher strip cartoon has become something more lasting: we now live in a society where Rachmanism has been sanitised into buy-to-let exploitation, which has become every new Labour supporter's legitimate ambition.
Twaddle and piffle
I'm not sure I'd share the other Ian's distaste for The Dark, which I didn't see - anything that Nicholas de Jongh can describe as 'twaddle and piffle' (or was that Where the Night Begins?) must be worth a look. But I'm again in sympathy with him on Continental Divide. The half I saw, Mothers Against, made a very tiring evening, and only a careful reading of the text and long discussion of its content afterwards with a class of young Americans (including several ex-interns who praised its accuracy) led me to a grudging acceptance that David Edgar knew what he was doing here, even if I didn't. The production itself, with its Thirties sets and blocking and (come to think of it) Thirties acting, was no great shakes, and I was regularly lost in the torrent of words and hints put into the mouths of people who may be heavily involved in politics, but surely can't have quite such a gift of the impenetrable gab. Yet here is a big playwright tackling a big subject, and we should be grateful at least for the attempt.
Ian Herbert
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
ADRENALIN ... HEART Revival of Georgia Fitch play |
Bush |
12 Mar |
10 Apr |
333 |
ALICE VIRGINIA New play by D.M.W. Greer |
New End |
15 Mar |
10 Apr |
337 |
ANGEL FILTH New play by Kate Maravan |
Tristan Bates |
11 Mar |
3 Apr |
334 |
THE AUTUMN OF MY SPRINGTIME Puppet play by Rezo Gabriadze (Tbilisi Municipal Theatre Studio/BITE) |
The Pit |
16 Mar |
20 Mar |
342 |
BADNUFF New play by Richard Davidson |
Soho |
22 Mar |
17 Apr |
354 |
BIG BOYS DON'T CRY Play by Peter Machen, based on a concept by Rebekah Fortune (Negativequity) |
Pleasance |
16 Mar |
4 Apr |
363 |
THE BUTLER New play by Tom Lister |
Hen & Chickens |
11 Mar |
27 Mar |
341 |
COMEDIANS Revival of the play by Trevor Griffiths |
Union |
11 Mar |
27 Mar |
361 |
CONTINENTAL DIVIDE Two new plays by David Edgar: Daughters of the Revolution and Mothers Against |
Barbican |
20 Mar |
4 Apr |
347 |
THE DARK New play by Charlotte Jones |
Donmar |
23 Mar |
24 Apr |
356 |
A:GENDER Multimedia performance piece by Joey Hateley |
Oval House |
18 Mar |
3 Apr |
362 |
MADRE E ASSASSINA (Mother And Murderer) Performance piece by Teatro Clandestino, Italy |
ICA |
16 Mar |
18 Mar |
363 |
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Revival of Shakespeare play (Northern Broadsides) |
Greenwich |
23 Mar |
27 Mar |
353 |
OTHER EDENS Triple bill by Steven Lally, Jack Thorne, Chris Kell (Upstart TC ) |
Etcetera |
23 Mar |
28 Mar |
363 |
PHILASTER, or Love Lyes A-Bleeding Revival of play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher |
Courtyard |
16 Mar |
4 Apr |
362 |
THE PIRANHA LOUNGE revival of Mark O'Thomas version of Murilo Rubiao stories (The Dende Collective) |
Lyric Studio |
11 Mar |
27 Mar |
363 |
RED SUN Play by David Rudkin (ajtc) |
Warehouse |
17 Mar |
4 Apr |
343 |
THE RIVALS Revival of play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Compass TC) |
Greenwich |
16 Mar |
20 Mar |
353 |
SINGER Revival of play by Peter Flannery (Oxford Stage) |
Tricycle |
15 Mar |
10 Apr |
338 |
SISTERS, SUCH DEVOTED SISTERS Solo performance piece by Russell Barr |
Drill Hall 2 |
18 Mar |
4 Apr |
362 |
SOME VOICES Revival of play by Joe Penhall |
Young Vic Studio |
17 Mar |
10 Apr |
344 |
TAKING STEPS Revival of play by Alan Ayckbourn |
Upstairs at the Gatehouse |
24 Mar |
17 Apr |
346 |
THEATRE OF THE BANAL Triple bill by Nick Tjaardstra, Katrina Alloway, Judith Batalion |
Rosemary Branch |
18 Mar |
28 Mar |
363 |
WHEN THE NIGHT BEGINS New play by Hanif Kureishi |
Hampstead |
11 Mar |
17 Apr |
329 |
Regions |
||||
THE ASTONISHED HEART/STILL LIFE Revival of two plays by Noel Coward |
Liverpool Playhouse |
23 Mar |
10 Apr |
376 |
Bath Shakespeare Festival including Bremer Shakespeare Co, Forkbeard Fantasy, Sulayman Al-Bassam |
Bath, Theatre Royal |
1 Mar |
13 Mar |
378 |
THE CHANGELING Revival of play by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, additional text Dominic Power |
Bristol, Tobacco Factory |
19 Mar |
24 Apr |
369 |
A DOLL'S HOUSE Revival of the play by Henrik Ibsen (Theatre Babel) |
Perth/tour |
18 Mar |
27 Mar |
386 |
DOUBLE INDEMNITY Revival of the play by David Joss Buckley, adapted from the novel by James M Cain |
Nottingham Playhouse |
16 Mar |
3 Apr |
377 |
DUMBSTRUCK Revival of the play by David Kane |
Dundee Rep |
24 Mar |
17 Apr |
385 |
FLY ME TO THE MOON New play by John Godber (Hull Truck) |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
16 Mar |
27 Mar |
378 |
HOMAGE TO CATALONIA Adapted by Pablo Ley & Allan J Baker from the book by George Orwell |
Leeds, WYP Quarry |
22 Mar |
3 Apr |
375 |
KIDNAPPED Revival of the play adapted by Robert Paterson & Alasdair Mccrone from R L Stevenson |
Glasgow, Citizens |
24 Mar |
3 Apr |
387 |
MACBETH Revival of the play by William Shakespeare (RSC) |
Stratford, Royal Shakespeare |
18 Mar |
364 |
|
PIAF Revival of the play by Pam Gems |
Sheffield, Crucible |
16 Mar |
7 Apr |
370 |
PRIVATE LIVES Revival of the play by Noel Coward |
Derby Playhouse |
11 Mar |
3 Apr |
372 |
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of the play by William Shakespeare |
Hornchurch, Queens |
15 Mar |
3 Apr |
372 |
SAUCHIEHALL STREET New play by Iain Heggie (Vanishing Point) |
Edinburgh, Traverse/tour |
12 Mar |
13 Mar |
380 |
SIX BLACK CANDLES New play by Des dillon |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
13 Mar |
3 Apr |
381 |
TWO LIVES Two plays by Gowan Calder: An Audience with the Lizard Lady/Backstage at the Kit Kat Club |
Edinburgh, Traverse |
18 Mar |
20 Mar |
384 |
VERY LITTLE WOMEN Written / performed by Lip Service: Maggie Fox & Sue Ryding |
Manchester, Library/tour |
16 Mar |
27 Mar |
377 |
WHITE TRASH Written by Kevin Fegan from a concept by Richard Gregory (Quarantine TC) |
Manchester, Contact |
11 Mar |
20 Mar |
371 |