Theatre Record

 

This Edition

 

Issue 07 - 2004

Prompt Corner

A truncated Prompt Corner this issue, even by the standards of slacker Shuttleworth.  In fact, I saw even more shows than usual during the two weeks in question, but fifteen of the nineteen were at the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough, the subject of a separate report at the back of the magazine.  Also back there you'll find samples of the writing of the two young reviewers who won TR subscriptions as a result of their writing at that Festival: Owen Kingston, winner of the Theatre Record Young Critic's Award, And Chris Wilkinson, last year's TR award-winner who this year secured the Sunday Times Harold Hobson Student Drama Critic Award.

Of the remaining four shows, one, Doña Rosita The Spinster, is reviewed with my Financial Times hat on in the body of this issue.  That leaves me holding a trey, which even a non-poker-player like me knows is an impossibly low hand.  So I fold.

Dishearteningly truistic

Luckily, they're all decent, substantial bits of work, in their various ways... even if that way is simply catching a historical moment.  The Arcola's revival of Sam Shepard's States Of Shock reverberates powerfully across the thirteen years between the "first" Gulf War, to which the play is a dramatic response, and the current, stubbornly persistent imbroglio.  But I'm with Lyn Gardner on this one: there's not actually that much to the play.  It's an example of that strain in Shepard's writing where you gee yourself up to assume there must be something there that's profound yet opaque, because otherwise he's just using all the gratuitous weirdness to make a bunch of dishearteningly truistic points.

Director Nathan Osgood economically uses striped drapes to remake the Arcola space into an in-the-round auditorium with, I suspect, deliberate overtones of the big top.  In this he is both helped and hindered by one of the Arcola's great central beams; it makes a useful central pillar/pole, but also obscures views for various small groups in the audience, and Osgood's blocking only goes so far to overcoming the problem.  I know that Lola Rafique's character isn't a major figure in the drama, and she probably isn't called upon to do much subtle facial acting, but hell, it would have been nice to have actually seen her face at some point, however briefly.

Unfussy but precise

As for subtle facial acting, Gillian Anderson turns in one of the finest performances of same that you'll see for many a day, in The Sweetest Swing In Baseball at the Royal Court.  (Imagine, though, what must have been the expression on the former Agent Scully's face when she first opened the script to find she was being asked to play another mysterious Dana.)  Susannah Clapp's paragraph in her Observer review sums it up excellently: this is television facial acting, which somehow manages to focus your own vision so that your brain translates it into extreme close-up.  For me, Anderson's vocal performance in the first phase of the play is similarly economical: you can hear her character's determined bleakness of perspective in the unfussy but precise weight she gives each word, the ever so slightly self-conscious cadence patterns of banal phrases.  It's a pinpoint identification of the depressive's "talent" (and, like Paul Taylor, I write from experience) which is somewhat grossly parodied in the final scenes.

I don't find Gilman's play quite as diaphanous as some other reviewers, but it does begin to take some rather easy choices as it progresses.  Compare, if you can find a copy, an episode of 1970s BBC TV war drama Colditz entitled Tweedledum, in which Michael Bryant played a psychiatrist who began feigning insanity in order to fool the Germans into repatriating him, but fell genuine prey to the condition before he was released.  Thirty years on, that performance still haunts me.  Altogether more bizarre is another televisual association: when Dana is impersonating Darryl Strawberry, a baseball player about whom she knows virtually nothing, Anderson reminds me oddly of comedienne Ellen DeGeneres when trying to stop her wacky schemes falling wackily apart.  Speaking of wackiness, I see that among those thanked in the programme is Michael Craig-Martin, the man responsible for the 1973 conceptual art piece An Oak Tree consisting of a glass of water on a shelf, which can be seen in Tate Modern.  That's my cue to reiterate that although Anderson's performance is often wonderful, the play itself might not be everyone's cup of larch.

Under the microscope

Getting admirably away from its screen associations is David Eldridge's adaptation, and Rufus Norris's production, of the Dogme film Festen.  This would have slotted perfectly into my meditations on power in the last Prompt Corner.  (Indeed, I began writing about it at that time, only to discover that the play opened one day too late for the issue.)  It puts under the microscope not just the tyrannical aspect of child sexual abuse (in which, psychologists tell us, power is often a greater motivating factor than attraction toward the young victim), but various dynamics of sibling rivalry, vectors within the family and between them and outsiders, and an indictment of an entire class, with its formal-etiquette complacency masking the kind of odiousness that can sing racist rhymes to a black man's face and then condemn him for not joining in the fun.  Norris's production deserves to be praised at greater length than this, but as so often, what it boils down to is a matter of being awesomely meticulous in every respect, ensuring that everything falls together just so; Paul Taylor's review delightfully captures that "Is it just me?" puzzlement when, all too rarely, it strikes in a positive direction.

Ian Shuttleworth

At the Back

Can You Hear Me At The Bolshoi?

Russia's Golden Mask awards have just been presented, in a glitzy ceremony in the Bolshoi theatre - like the Oliviers with class, except that the Moscow public gets the chance to make its own mind up about the nominees, whose shows are performed over a six-week period in the city's theatres before the final jury decisions are made.

Overseas visitors get a condensed look at some of the Golden Mask's highlights in a special showcase weekend. Two years ago the Russian Case had special interest as a platform for new writing, although what it actually demonstrated was how little new writing is reaching the stages of a country which can boast nearly four hundred state-subsidised theatres and a metropolitan theatre scene almost as big as that of London or Paris. This year's choice, by Marina Davydova of Izvestia, was broader in scope.

New work from young writers is still thin on the ground. The Russian Case featured two pieces by the whimsical Yevgeny Grishkoviets, writing for others now but still unable to escape from what are beginning to seem his private obsessions. But Moscow has yet to see the new Sigarev, Ladybird (though I guess it can stand the wait), while the Presnyakovs' latest, Captive Spirits, is a rather sophomoric study of the three-way marriage of the symbolist playwright Alexander Blok. A subject which might be expected to evoke thoughts of passion and poetry conveyed neither to this non-Russian-speaker; instead, the local audience laughed long and loud. The same authors' more substantial Terrorism was up for a Mask, but it was the Blok bio-revue, directed by the up-and-coming Vladimir Ageev, which won an award as the Spectators' Favourite. The Mask for most innovative production went to Ivan Vyrypayev's Oxygen, a two-hander with "pornojazz" soundtrack from an onstage DJ, which goes to Vienna next month, as do the Presnyakovs.

Camps rather than gulags

Another example of new writing, for the Moscow audience at any rate, was the Russian premiere of  Vladimir Sorokin's Honeymoon, originally produced some years ago in a typical blood-and-sperm staging by Germany's Frank Castorf, but seen here very differently in an elegant directing debut by the Golden Mask's producer, Eduard Boyakov (with Ilze Rudzite). Sorokin's bizarre love story of the relationship between the masochistic son of an SS man and the feisty Jewish daughter of a KGB official was milked here for its holocaust associations, with superimposed film of the camps rather than the gulags, just as Kama Ginkas's students' production on the life of Marc Chagall, Dreams of Exile, harped on the Nazi persecution which Chagall largely observed from the comfort of New York, rather than the Soviet horrors he watched more closely as a commissar. At a lively meeting with their overseas counterparts, the Moscow critics (all of whom have PhDs in Theatrology, and almost all of whom for some strange reason are called Marina) were scathing about the unqualified status of London and New York critics, but worried about their own closeness to the local theatre community - it's commonplace for critics to share a drink with the director and his team after a first night. This may explain why Boyakov's directing debut was coldly received, and Ginkas's sprawling effort highly praised: the former was perceived as doing something for which he wasn't qualified, the latter was known to have direct family experience of Nazi persecution, of which he was speaking on stage for the first time.

Growing commercialism

Critics and directors alike are having to come terms with a very ambivalent world. On the grand scale, the country has just elected (by a huge majority) a KGB-trained President, whose style of government has been compared kindly to that of the Tsars, less kindly to that of his former bosses. Although he has recently raised civil servants' salaries, I was assured by theatre friends that no Russian who owns a new car, or is putting their kids through college, can be doing so on money that has been honestly earned.

In theatre, the new situation is breeding a growing commercialism - Witches of Eastwick is a fairly hot ticket (though no Golden Mask was awarded in the musicals category), the Moscow Arts has a Ray Cooney in its repertoire, and some successful directors are being criticised for their crowd-pleasing approach; but there is also a remarkable resilience in the more serious sector: enterprising director Valery Fokin (winner of this year's Mask for best large-scale production, for a Government Inspector he directed for the Maryinsky in St Petersburg) has tapped private money to establish a well-equipped modern theatre on the top floor of a Moscow commercial building, the Meyerhold Centre, while the city's Mayor has given the guru-like Anatoly Vassiliev a fantastic $27 million theatre-cum-temple where he performs his sacred research and occasional theatre without a care for the bottom line. How long this can last is open to question: the most likely future for Vassiliev's centre, if he should lose favour, would be as an upmarket nightclub - few other theatre directors would want to battle against the esoterically defined sightlines of its playing spaces.

Directors' theatre

Russian theatre remains above all a director's theatre - no fewer than fifteen of them were Mask nominees in that category. Distinguished foreign visitors to the festival were Eimuntas Nekrosius with a five-hour Cherry Orchard and Declan Donnellan with an all-male  Twelfth Night, both using crack local casts, both clearly for export. Nekrosius got a special prize from the critics, while Donnellan (whose production seemed to me a tired rehash of well-worn Cheek By Jowl tricks) was rapturously received by the audience.  A better demonstration for me of the supremacy of Russian actors (recognised also by the jury with a special award) came from Sergei Zhenovach's Moscow Maly production of an Ostrovsky comedy,  Truth Is Good But Happiness Is Better,  in what appeared to be a very traditional reading but was, I was told, actually quite ground-breaking.

Slightly shakier in performance, but fascinating in concept, was Nora, Mikhail Bychkov's silent-movie (and therefore, one could say, in-period) treatment of A Doll's House for St Petersburg's White Theatre, which was a darn sight more convincing than Thomas Ostermeier's recent Yuppie shoot-out. It highlighted Krogstad as an eye-rolling melodrama villain (with Rank more of a cheery old soul), which created interesting new perspectives. A similar result was achieved by Lev Dodin's foregrounding of the Professor and Yelena in his austere Uncle Vanya for St Petersburg's Maly, a most rewarding return to actor-led production after some of his recent design-heavy efforts. Again, those in the know may have appreciated that the director, a noted hypochondriac, was back at work after a period of serious self-doubt. In any event, he deservedly won the best director award, with his rather weak Vanya more surprisingly named best actor.

But the real news from the Golden Mask is that the political and social situation that I have mentioned has led Russian theatre back to what it does best, talking in code. A fascinating example was the talented young Dmitri Chernyakov's staging of The Double Inconstancy  for an equally young company from Novosibirsk, in which Marivaux's aristocratic social manipulators become video-wielding men in suits. A literally smashing conclusion to the play, which we have seen through a plate glass screen, suggests that it is cocking a snook at television reality shows like  Big Brother, but Orwell's original is never far from our minds. It won the Mask for best small show, and its superbly vital leading actress, Olga Tsink, picked up another special award from the jury.
Ian Herbert

Contents / Reviews

London
ABSENT FRIENDS Revival of the play by Alan Ayckbourn	Greenwich Playhouse	25 Mar	18 Apr	418
AUDIENCE and PROTEST Vaclav Havel double bill of revivals	Etcetera	1 Apr	18 Apr	420
DANGEROUS New version by Tom Smith of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos	Barons Court	30 Mar	18 Apr	420
DEBRIS Play by Dennis Kelly	BAC	30 Mar	25 Apr	406
DONA ROSITA - THE SPINSTER Revival of play by Federico Garcia Lorca	Orange Tree	26 Mar	24 Apr	407
FESTEN Adaptation by David Eldridge of the film by Thomas Vinterberg et al.	Almeida	25 Mar	1 May	396
FIRST LOVE/THE WITCH Double bill from short stories by Samuel Beckett and Anton Chekhov respectively	Lion & Unicorn	30 Mar	11 Apr	432
THE FLATS New play by Darren Murphy	Chelsea	6 Apr	24 Apr	430
HAPPY YET? Adaptation by Linda McLean of four plays by Georges Feydeau	Gate	30 Mar	24 Apr	415
HURRICANE Written and performed by Richard Dormer on the life of Alex Higgins	Arts	30 Mar	8 May	417
JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS Revival of Mort Shuman musical tribute	Landor	25 Mar	17 Apr	403
JEKYLL & HYDE  Adapted by Babayaga from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson	Camden People's	5 Apr	18 Apr	427
KANGAROO VALLEY New play by Toby Farrow	Southwark Playhouse	25 Mar	10 Apr	402
MAJNOUN New play by Mehrdad Seyf	Riverside Studios	1 Apr	18 Apr	419
NIGHT CALLER New play by Joshua Levine	White Bear	30 Mar	17 Apr	432
OPERATION WONDERLAND New play by Liz Tomlin and Steve Jackson	Latchmere	6 Apr	24 Apr	428
OTHELLOPHOBIA Adaptation of the play by Shakespeare	Blue Elephant	26 Mar	10 Apr	416
OUR FATHER New play by Mick Stephens	Pentameters	6 Apr	1 May	429
STATES OF SHOCK Revival of play by Sam Shepard	Arcola	25 Mar	17 Apr	404
THE SWEETEST SWING IN BASEBALL New play by Rebecca Gilman	Royal Court	31 Mar	15 May	421
THREE ON A COUCH New play by Carl Djerassi	King's Head	29 Mar	25 Apr	412
THE VISITATION OF MR COLLIONI Devised, from original short stories by Anna Maria Murphy	Latchmere	30 Mar	4 Apr	411
THE WOODEN FROCK Adapted by Tom Morris and Emma Rice	BAC	7 Apr	25 Apr	431
Regions
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of the play by William Shakespeare	Stratford, Royal Shakespeare	7 Apr	1 Oct	433
FOLLOW MY LEADER New play by Alistair Beaton with music by Richard Blackford	Birmingham Rep	26 Mar	10 Apr	437
TREASURE ISLAND Adapted by Neil Bartlett from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson	Coventry, Belgrade	30 Mar	17 Apr	440
ELECTRICITY New play by Murray Gold	Leeds, WYP Courtyard	30 Mar	24 Apr	441
THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE Revival of the play by Alan Ayckbourn	Harrogate	6 Apr	24 Apr	442
COYOTE ON A FENCE New play by Bruce Graham	Manchester, Royal Exchange	29 Mar	10 Apr	445
THE EDGE OF THE LAND New play by Alan Franks	Ipswich, Sir John Mills/touring	30 Mar	8 Apr	446
HUMBLE BOY Revival of the play by Charlotte Jones	Manchester, Library	5 Apr	1 May	446
DIRTY NETS New play by Karen Laws	Newcastle upon Tyne, Live	31 Mar	8 Apr	446
BEASTS AND BEAUTIES Folk tale, retold by Carol Ann Duffy, adapted by Melly Still and Tim Supple	Bristol Old Vic	6 Apr	1 May	447
49th National Student Drama Festival	Scarborough	31 Mar	7 Apr	450
LOVE LIKE SALT Devised from schools workshops with TAG Theatre	Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio	31 Mar	2 Apr	454
THE TRIAL Based on transcripts of George Galloway's Labour Party hearing	Glasgow, S.T.U.C. Centre	2 Apr	2 Apr	454
THE KERRY MATCHMAKER Adapted by Phyllis Ryan from the novella by John B Keane	Glasgow, Citizens	6 Apr	10 Apr	454