Issue 11 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
All right; I was wrong. Now can it stop, please? The succession of rapid West End closures claimed Rattle Of A Simple Man just after the last issue of Theatre Record went to press. This issue it's Fuddy Meers which has bowed out, just under three weeks after its press night. Even Thoroughly Modern Millie is to bring down its final curtain towards the end of June. For once it looks as if the annual early-silly-season stories of Theatreland crisis are more than just crying wolf. Or are they? Leaving aside Millie (which has enjoyed a respectable eight-month run), then as I've already remarked, none of these blink-and-you-miss-them productions are crippling losses to the cultural life of the capital. Some only arrived when they did, or at all, due to misplaced opportunism when a theatre became suddenly dark after an earlier unexpected closure. We need not grieve overly about any of them.
Cruddy sneers
Except Fuddy Meers. I'm astounded by the critical mauling given to David Lindsay-Abaire's deceptively thoughtful play. Only Sheridan Morley in the Express and Victoria Segal in the Sunday Times seemed to have a good word for it, and neither of them quite put their finger on what for me was its strength. For the rest of the pack, it was a matter of cruddy sneers. They saw it as an unsuccessful comedy. (And by the way, if the gag of "fuddy meers" being aphasic stroke-speak for "funny mirrors" is so limp, why do at least half a dozen reviews recycle it with a comment about the play not being fuddy? It doesn't become any fuddier just because it's one of us saying it.) On the contrary, I'd argue that in some ways it was too successful for its own good.
Lindsay-Abaire seems to me to have used a classic bait-and-switch strategy: set up a particular tone and emotional register in the first act, then subvert it radically in the second. The keynote of his second act is not the encroaching sentiment (which there's nothing wrong with, in any case, if deployed properly). Nor is he simply saying, ah, we're all of us a bit odd, aren't we? Go back to that title. The funny mirrors in a carnival sideshow aren't just funny ha-ha: the images they reflect can alternate between, and sometimes be simultaneously, amusing and sinister, even frightening. Every secret revealed in the play's second act is a dark one; rather than fuelling sympathy and driving the play towards sentimentality, they remove compassion even as they force us to identify with the characters by showing us that everyone, the audience as well as the figures onstage, harbours unpleasantnesses... and that everyone, not just the stroke-stricken mother in the play, sometimes speaks skew-whiff to reality and/or hard for others to understand.
Wrong-footed
Look in the reviews for any of this, and you'll look in vain. It's possible, I suppose, that everyone noticed but no-one thought it worth mentioning (apart from Victoria, obliquely). But it doesn't feel that way; it feels as if everyone had suddenly become Toby Young and left at the interval. Fair enough, the humour in the first act was patchy and often laboured, and that might discourage one from paying attention through the second half. But damn it, it's our job. I remember years ago getting an iffy review of a book I'd written from someone who had evidently read the first 60 or so pages and extrapolated from there. What rankled wasn't that it was slighting to me or lazy of the reviewer, but that it was just unprofessional.
I know that sounds unbelievably priggish, and I'm sorry to come on so sanctimonious. God knows, it's impossible to stay engaged through every moment of every show, and in that respect I'm no better than the next man (unless the next man is the aforementioned Mr Young). And, in its way, wandering attention is a valid critical response. But there's always that risk of being wrong-footed, and I think the case of Fuddy Meers shows an entire critical chorus-line caught on the hop. Which is a pity, because if a few people had remarked upon what was only half-hidden in there, it might just have run for a few more weeks and thus prevented the headline-hungry hacks in the front pages from playing the old set-'em-up, knock-'em-down game with Sam Mendes and his new production outfit Scamp.
Simulacrum of culture
Of course, the problems with castigating reviewers for not doing their job in this respect, i.e. spotting what plays are about and telling people, are manifold. Quite apart from fashioning a rod for my own back, there's the fact that, increasingly, editors don't see that as part of our brief. or don't care about it. or consider it a downright distraction from the business of providing an entertaining simulacrum of culture. The notion of offering a paper's readers consistent, reliable, informed and informative writing on theatre is going out of fashion, and not just at the red-top end of the press. Having ousted the estimable Michael Coveney, the Daily Mail now seems to be partly holding live auditions for possible replacements, partly seeing how much or how little serious theatre coverage it can get away with. One week of the able and of late underused Patrick Marmion; a week of classical and opera reviewer David Gillard getting to grips with crossing the tracks; a week of actor Nichola McAuliffe being articulate and inquisitive but essentially looking through the wrong end of the telescope; another week of Patrick, though a week that consisted of little more than the Friday round-up rather than daily coverage... and so on. The honeymoon between Sheridan Morley and the Express seems to be over, too, as his First Night review spot loses prominence in favour of a Backstage news-and-gossip column, and even that now appears squeezed. You can almost see the middle-manager sitting there, calculating how little coverage a title can get away with before it hurts either circulation or reputation seriously, or how much effect a "name" reviewer such as Sheridan or Ms McAuliffe has. (Although, as Sherry himself notes, the big-name successors on two of his former gigs lasted scarcely any time at all: Toby Young's off after barely a year at the Spectator - and what a joy it is to see an actual theatre reviewer, Rachel Halliburton, engaged to (half?) replace him - and Michael Portillo toughed it out for only a few months at the New Statesman, not even long enough for Theatre Record to secure consent to reprint his reviews.)
Accident of chronology
All of which self-regarding pomposity on my part leaves little space for a whistle-stop tour of shows seen in this fortnight and not already reviewed by me in the body of the issue. The Black Rider, to begin with. It was a show that I felt I should be downright loving rather than merely liking a great deal, and it didn't quite succeed in that. I wonder how much of this is an accident of chronology. The Black Rider came to the Barbican a year after a similar revival of the Robert Wilson/Tom Waits collaboration on Woyzeck, with the risk that it might appear to be coming hard on the heels of that earlier work and ploughing substantially the same furrow: 19th-century German oddity given a sumptuously Expressionist look by Wilson and a Weill-esque sound by Waits. In fact, however, in terms of composition and première, Woyzeck is the later show by fully a decade: 1990/2000.
In any case, the production had its delights: not just the mere appearance of Marianne Faithfull, playing the infernal Pegleg as a portly Cabaret Emcee, but also soi-disant punk/New Romantic cult figure Richard Strange looming in a crazily-angled frame and Mary Margaret O'Hara singing her wonderful Act Two solo like a nightingale with the non-expletive form of Tourette's, all sudden growls, yelps and whoops. The second act itself, though, is largely shapeless, consisting of a great central set-piece scene with several preludes and several codas. Much of the energy and excitement in this phase came from the all-star band, The Magic Bullets, assembled by musical director Bent Clausen. Important enough in their own right for the Guardian to have sent its rock critic Alexis Petridis to review the show as well as Michael Billington, Clausen and his combo brewed up several storms, cutting loose and playing around the score rather than being a well-behaved pit band and following the dots on the paper in front of them. They blew... in the jazz sense rather than that of Bart Simpson.
Altogether some achievement
Measure For Measure is a comparable feat by Simon McBurney. He grasps the problematic nature of the play and embraces it; he sees and acknowledges the potential for up-to-the-minute relevance without seeming to plonk such allusions down coarsely on top of the piece; he uses multimedia elements to rich visual and significatory effect rather than for modish purposes; and, despite all the shadows, still shows that it was actually written as a comedy, getting laughs out of hitherto tired pieces of Shakespearean zany even as he also turns them to his sombre purpose. All this on the less-than-opulent budget of a production in the Olivier's Travelex £10 season. That's altogether some achievement.
Compare the slight pointlessness of the all-female casting of the Globe's Much Ado About Nothing and the downright tiresome circus whoop-de-do of Gale Edwards' Chichester Midsummer Night's Dream. Yolanda Vazquez is a first-rate Beatrice at the Globe, the more so for not allowing the character to seem too unevenly matched with Josie Lawrence's effortful, largely undistinguished Benedick. Penelope Beaumont is far and away the finest of the "breeches" actors as Leonato. Otherwise, Tamara Harvey's production mimbles along jovially enough, but without either the historical basis of the Globe's all-male offerings in previous years or any palpable insights of its own. As for the Chichester Dream, well, I'd hoped never to see another production of this play with the fairies clad in blue hair and mismatched Dayglo tights even from a student company, never mind in a major producing house. If you want to make your Athenian wood out of a clutch of large metal hoops suitable for gymnastics and aerialism, fine, but please don't give it that self-conscious alt.circus veneer which keeps us too busy being irritated by your attitude to follow your reading of the story.
Downright filthy
Out Of This World is much more agreeable fare. Not only does it have a perfectly serviceable clutch of songs by Cole Porter's standards (and thus enviable by almost everyone else's), but the book which let the show down on its 1950 opening has been thoroughly overhauled, taking elements from its pre-production drafts, from a 1979 rewrite and from Jeremy Sams' contemporary playfulness. Not to mince words, it's downright filthy, and delightfully so; moreover, it's given the kind of energetically wacky treatment that director Martin Duncan is so adroit at, and which works a treat when, as here, it's justified.
A quick mention, too, for Liberace's Suit: it's hard
to go wrong with a courtroom drama, even one in which the
judge and counsel sing "I'll Be Seeing You (In All The Old
Familiar Places)". And while it's a pleasant surprise to
see that pianist Bobby Crush can act passably well, it's
frankly disturbing to find that he can simper every bit as
relentlessly as his erstwhile role model...
Ian Shuttleworth
At the Back
Can You Hear Me, FIRT ?
The International Federation for Theatre Research, the organisation formally known as FIRT (the Fédération internationale pour la recherche théâtrale) is becoming less bilingual. Most of the abstracts for its latest annual conference (held in St Petersburg from 22-27 May) are in English, and the fat book containing them uses English, with a little Russian, on its cover to announce that its theme is The Director In The Theatre World.
FIRT is a remarkable body. Unlike many other international organisations, it is truly representative of its members. There are not many more than 500 of them, yet at least half of them arrived in St Petersburg, at their own expense, paying a fee to participate for five days of intensive talks, panels and workshops. It is also truly international, with members in more than 60 countries.
The emphasis of the conference is very much on work, with half a dozen activities usually on the go at a time, and little opportunity for networking or gossip apart from a closing dinner and a programme of theatre visits. The newcomer can get the feeling of intruding on a private party, even if this group of friends and colleagues is very welcoming to those bold enough to approach them.
My task in St Petersburg was to explain the role of the International Association of Theatre Critics, as part of a panel with two other international presidents, those of ASSITEJ, the body for young people's theatre, and SIBMAS, which represents libraries and museums. We were honoured by the presence of FIRT's president, and its vice-president chaired the public session. This distinguished group was only just outnumbered by the audience - I had taken the precaution of bringing three friends along.
One might excuse this sparse attendance by the fact that in the programme, conference participants had been invited to meet three acronyms, with no mention of who was speaking for them, what they did, or what would be the topic of the interventions. The truth is that there were many more exciting panels in competition with us. I might have wondered whether my presence was necessary, but I was able to justify the seven hours spent waiting outside the Russian consulate in London for a visa by the very fruitful private meeting of the four presidents that followed our panel, which should produce valuable co-operation between our organisations in the future.
There was also the experience of the conference itself. Each day was led by one or two keynote speeches from the great names of theatre research, and some of their contributions were exemplary. Opening the conference, Herbert Blau was able not only to range over more than half a century in the theatre as director and instructor, but also to offer some frank, almost confessional reflections on what he considered his failure as the first director of Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Erika Fisher-Lichte gave the key image of the director as midwife, urging a cast to push that little bit harder. Nikolai Pesochinsky made a case for the eccentric genius of Anatoli Vassiliev, portraying him as a successor to Meyerhold. Maria Shevtsova added to the virtues of her recent study of Lev Dodin with a well-illustrated account of the St Petersburg director's work in opera. And Dennis Kennedy made an urbane and well structured redefinition of the whole idea of director's theatre, pointing out how its modernist advocates had recruited to the cause a number of great names who were much more eligible for the description actor-manager (including Antoine and even Stanislavski) and suggesting very different, commercially based reasons for the rise of the director than those usually put forward, principally the change from continuing repertory (in the hands of the actors who played it) to one-off, continuous runs (in the hands of the directors who mounted them).
The last two speakers, in particular, gave splendid demonstrations of how well a lecture can be delivered. Elsewhere in the conference, in some of the panels, there were plenty of examples of how not to lecture: the arrival of video clips, Powerpoint presentation and other technical wonders has not banished the sad stereotype, seen in so many such events, of the speaker who delivers great gobbets of undigested research in a monotone, perhaps in a language over which they do not have full control, never achieving eye contact with their long-suffering audience.
And, oh my dears, the jargon! Let me offer you some of the juicier examples, drawn from the abstracts:
- Type of structure - hardly probable not the only thing, that the director does not invent; he only guesses (or does not guess) what way to think is for him organic. But is farther, there, where he composes, this typology does not disappear.
- My approach based on (X)'s system hopefully elucidates the process of transformation more lucidly than those current critical practices largely engaged in questioning abstruse subjects such as Weltanschauung or cultural difference.
- This inquiry into a reconstruction of the "auteur director" mode points to the influence of women performers in transnational/ intercultural performances, performance art, and the international market of sex workers.
- Among the theories I will employ will be Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, examining the multiple time-space tropes that the actor and character occupy. Into this I will interject Phaedra Bell's concept of "dialogue media" to further interrogate the relationships of the multiple code systems that stage a colloquy of erasure and rewriting.
- On the basis of this corpus the relationship between parameters such as diegetic versus discursive level, prosodic versus linguistic/semantic understanding or the inconsistence of spatio-temporal and figurative perspectives will be investigated.
Even the most dedicated conference-goer may well have been tempted to take a turn around St Petersburg instead of seeking further enlightenment from such as these, and the city was at its beautiful best, its astonishing wealth of architectural masterpieces sharply lit in the long Baltic days, or picked out by subtle floodlight as the White Nights draw in.
And of course there were the performances: the city has an abundance of them, in theatres ranging from grand showcases like the Maryinsky and Alexandrinsky (the latter the venue of the conference, with panels meeting in nooks and alcoves all over the building: we were directed to one in the Dante-esque Seventh Circle. ) to the intimacy of Dodin's Maly or the Liteiny. In these few days I caught up with the Lithuanian Jonas Vaitkus's sprightly (if overlong) adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master And Margarita at the Baltic House, took in a solid Aïda at the Maryinsky, and caught a glimpse of Russian popular theatre in a performance by the Comic Trust company of what they called Antony And Cleopatra. This turned out to be a boisterous show that owed much more to Carry On Cleo than Shakespeare, in which street theatre techniques and vaudeville gags were boosted beyond what they could bear by spectacular staging effects including plenty of fireworks and a military band.
Enormous talent
At the Alexandrinsky itself, delegates could see a variety of work by
its directors, among them Engagement, a fascinating, surprisingly
touching variation on a modern play, Dinamo, whose leading characters
regularly left its downstage set to join the characters of a Seagull,
complete with lake, being played upstage. There were also performances
of Lev Dodin's repertoire, including the Vanya I so admired in
Moscow (Issue 7). By sheer chance I caught Dodin's Elena, Xenia
Rappoport, the day after she had repeated the performance that defines
that production, in something completely different, as Jocasta in a tremendous
three-handed version of Oedipus Rex. Andrey Prikotenko's
version (at the Liteiny) dared to enact the story beforehand in farcical
dumbshow (a sort of pre-satyr play) before telling the Sophocles story
almost straight, with the principals slipping smoothly into the role
of their own chorus to comment on their actions. Ms Rappoport,
who started in both these roles more or less direct from the Academy,
is an enormous talent - in the West she would have been snapped up by
now for movies and probably lost to theatre.
Ian Herbert
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
BARBARA COOK'S BROADWAY Solo musical performance |
Gielgud |
24 May |
29 May |
681 |
THE BLACK RIDER New musical by Robert Wilson, William Burroughs and Tom Waits |
Barbican |
21 May |
19 Jun |
677 |
COLE Revival of Benny Green/Alan Strachan musical tribute to Cole Porter |
Upstairs at the Gatehouse |
26 May |
20 Jun |
709 |
DON'T LOOK BACK New site-specific piece; dreamthinkspeak |
Somerset House |
28 May |
14 Jun |
712 |
THE FALSE SERVANT Revival of play by Pierre Marivaux, translated by Martin Crimp |
Cottesloe |
1 Jun |
714 |
|
FUDDY MEERS New play by David Lindsay-Abaire |
Arts |
25 May |
12 Jun |
688 |
GUANTANAMO: Honour Bound To Defend Freedom New play compiled by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo |
Tricycle |
24 May |
12 Jun |
683 |
IZ New play by Oliver Emanuel |
Greenwich Playhouse |
20 May |
6 Jun |
687 |
JOURNEY'S END Transfer of R.C. Sherriff revival (from Comedy, p70) |
Playhouse |
20 May |
695 |
|
LIBERACE'S SUIT New play by TK Light |
Jermyn Street |
27 May |
19 Jun |
700 |
MEASURE FOR MEASURE Revival of the play by Shakespeare |
Olivier |
27 May |
31 Jul |
702 |
MINDBENDER Return of devised show by Peepolykus |
Lyric Studio |
20 May |
19 Jun |
713 |
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Shakespeare's Globe |
2 Jun |
25 Sep |
719 |
THREE BY BECKETT: Ohio Impromptu/Rough For Theatre 1 & 2 Revival of short plays by Samuel Beckett |
Southwark Playhouse |
31 May |
19 Jun |
680 |
PERPETUA London première of 1996 play by Fraser Grace |
Latchmere |
20 May |
6 Jun |
682 |
PLAY DEAD: People Show 115 Devised by the company |
People Show Studios |
21 May |
23 May |
687 |
THE PRIVATE ROOM New play by Mark Lee |
New End |
28 May |
26 Jun |
710 |
SIMPATICO Revival of play by Sam Shepard |
White Bear |
2 Jun |
20 Jun |
722 |
WEEPIE London première of 1996 play by Chris Goode |
Camden People's |
20 May |
6 Jun |
701 |
WINNERS / INTERIOR Revival of plays by Brian Friel and Maurice Maeterlinck respectively |
Young Vic |
27 May |
3 Jun |
708 |
YELLOWMAN New play by Dael Orlandersmith |
Hampstead |
26 May |
19 Jun |
696 |
Regions |
||||
CANDIDA Revival of play by George Bernard Shaw |
Exeter, Northcott |
20 May |
29 May |
729 |
COMING AROUND AGAIN New play by Andrew G Marshall |
Leeds, WYP Courtyard |
21 May |
5 Jun |
731 |
FEN/FAR AWAY Revival of two plays by Caryl Churchill |
Sheffield, Crucible |
2 Jun |
19 Jun |
731 |
HUDDERSFIELD New play by Uglijesa Sajtinac, transl. Duska Radosavljevic, English version Chris Thorpe |
Leeds, WYP Courtyard |
20 May |
5 June |
730 |
MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM Revival of the play by August Wilson |
Liverpool Playhouse |
2 Jun |
19 Jun |
732 |
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Chichester Festival |
20 May |
23 Sep |
726 |
NORTHANGER ABBEY Adapted by Tim Luscombe from the novel by Jane Austen |
York, Theatre Royal |
26 May |
12 Jun |
730 |
OUT OF THIS WORLD Revival of Cole Porter musical; book by Dwight Taylor, Reginald Lawrence et al. |
Chichester Festival |
20 May |
25 Sep |
725 |
THE VENETIAN TWINS Revival of the play by Carlo Goldoni, translated by Ranjit Bolt |
Newbury, Watermill |
31 May |
10 Jul |
733 |