Issue 19 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
A positively bumper issue after two, shall we say, svelte ones. By the 'eck, but the fellowship has been writing a lot of late. And not just them. I have the honour to be one of a mere handful of people in the western world not to have been asked by the Guardian to write a few hundred words about David Hare's Iraq-war play Stuff Happens. But hey, we're only theatre critics - what would we know about it?
You'll find over a dozen pages about Stuff Happens in this issue, and around 40% of the pieces are not written by regular theatre reviewers. The vast majority of these were commissioned by the Guardian, who managed to get first-preview tickets for a raft of folk from former weapons inspector Scott Ritter to ex-BBC chairman Gavyn Davies and Tory harridan Ann Widdecombe, as temperate as ever in her judgement of the play.
I know it looks like sour grapes and just trying to protect one's own territory, to get all het up about the ethics of asking gratuitous celebrities to review theatre. because these people may be mostly politicians or otherwise once-interested parties, but in terms of theatre, they're civilians. (The Independent sent former Beirut hostage Charles Glass instead of, not as well as, Paul Taylor to review both Stuff Happens and Embedded; Glass, though, has a family involvement in theatre through his son - I remember seeing a strong student production a few years ago of Frank McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch Over Me which Glass Jr directed as a way of coming to terms with his father's experience.)
News
The rationale, as far as the editors are concerned, is that the play is news. Well, fine: rather than marginalize your theatre coverage (or tear it in pieces as The Times has just done once more, now running occasional lead reviews on the news pages of the main section of the paper whilst relegating the routine coverage to the compact T2 section), why not trust the reviewers you employ to be the ones who actually pass opinions on plays in your pages?
Ah, but that would have entailed waiting until the official press night. Stuff Happens officially opened on 10 September. Its first preview was on 1 September. The Guardian's jury were in print on 3 September. What's that all about, then?
Deplorable
Again: it's news. Once in a blue moon, theatre is important enough for the main hierarchy of the papers and magazines to pay attention to it, and at that point, the people they pay to specialise in that area are suddenly worse than worthless, because they're hamstrung by protocols about official press nights. And news won't wait. Really? "If we didn't do it, all the others would"? Not if someone set a retributive example: if, say, the National Theatre banned the papers in question from covering any of their productions for a period afterwards, pour encourager les autres. Ah, but that would entail the NT cutting off their own nose to spite their face.
We're not above that kind of mutilation ourselves, of course. When
the Guardian's conduct caused a kerfuffle, Michael
Billington was called upon to write a defence (not reprinted
here) of the very behaviour which had so trivialised him
and his work... before, mark you, he had had the chance to
review the play himself! He did his best to sidestep the
matter, and turn his article into a broadside against the
very convention of extended preview runs. (His argument,
though, is suspect: the policy he advocates of staging one
or perhaps two preview performances in front of "friends" of
the theatre, firstly, would give those involved in the show
no sense of appearing before an ordinary audience, and secondly,
it simply wouldn't fly in terms of the vast majority of theatres
in the UK, not least the entirety of the West End where the
most protracted preview runs tend to take place. It might
work in an American culture with a far stronger tradition
of theatre subscription. yet, in the event, preview runs
in the States are routinely even more extended than here.) But
he never managed to dispel the sensation that here was perhaps
the
Useful idiot
What? The play? Hadn't we established that that's incidental? Oh, very well, then. It works, both as theatre - despite its talky structure - and as argument. Notwithstanding la Widdecombe's fulminations, it's noticeable that Hare does give airtime to both sides of the argument, albeit that he also perceptibly allots the most powerful "slots" in the evening to the leftward, anti-war position. Hare's writing, and Alex Jennings' portrayal, of George W Bush as more gnomic and resolute than we normally think may change the opinions of a number of Britons. Over here - and, to TR's American readers, please don't shoot the messenger at this point - there's a view of Bush as what Lenin would call a "useful idiot", a not-entirely-knowing front for the neocon axis led by Dick Cheney. The Bush of Stuff Happens - again, please forgive me - is less a fool than a knave.
Hare's writing and Joe Morton's excellent performance (the first star of Terminator 2 I've ever seen on stage) make Colin Powell a kind of tragic hero, his flaw being conscientiousness. I do hope that, when he leaves the upper echelons of government next month (as he surely will, one way or the other), Powell manages to overcome his soldier's reverence for the chain of command and writes a memoir as revealing as it could surely be. And a final, trivial observation: as he appears here, actor Ian Gelder really does bear a remarkable resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld. what a pity he's playing Paul Wolfowitz.
In many ways, the finest of the month's war plays is Frank McGuinness's version of Euripides' Hecuba. Some reviewers have felt that it lacked the overwhelming power they looked for. I found no such lack. McGuinness has rendered a spare, sheer rock-face of verse: not jutty and difficult in the sense of complexity (he's candid that his approach was simply to cut out everything he didn't understand immediately, on the grounds that most spectators wouldn't either), but in that it gives no respite. I read a draft of the script as preparation for an interview with the writer: the verse is composed of short, simple lines, but it absolutely refuses to be skimmed or speed-read - every syllable demands to be given its full marmoreal weight.
Middle-youthers
Contrast with Embedded, which had an even rougher critical ride here than in New York. I don't see a lot to disagree with in its reviews (although, for instance, it's a pleasant surprise that even though the masked scenes between the neocon cabal are written as political panto, their performance elicits some surprisingly adept mask-work from the actors). I found it often hilarious. Not intentionally, of course; nor for the sentimentality of the "human interest" plot strands. which adopt exactly the same tone-over-content emotional strategy that the play claims to decry in its thinly fictionalised version of the Pvt Jessica Lynch story.
What I found amusing was the production's subconscious, puppyish desperation to push the right buttons. Plainly, it's not setting out to preach to anyone other than the converted, but it does want to shape its audience's thoughts and attitudes, and it wants to do that by assuming a kind of generational authority. The demographic it aims to connect with is that of the thirty- and fortysomething opinion-formers: the middle-youthers. the generation in power in Hollywood, in fact: ironic for such an ostensible Tinseltown maverick as Robbins.
Forgive me for approaching from such an unwonted angle, but this eagerness is indicated most tellingly by the evening's use of music. Yes, the hell of the battlefield might be signified (unsuccessfully) by using hardcore, thrash-metal and a token blast of Public Enemy. But this is a production that calculatedly programs its pre-show music to include Bob Marley's Redemption Song, The Clash's Know Your Rights (and how ironic is it when the Riverside make their no-photos-no-phones announcement over that!) and the like. And, with deep and entirely unintentional irony, Bob Dylan's Masters Of War is deployed in exactly the po-faced way that Robbins himself satirised a dozen years ago in his film Bob Roberts. This production is explicitly dedicated to the late Joe Strummer, and the musical programming leaves no doubt that it's not the folk-punk activist of Strummer's final-years renaissance, but the spiky Clash icon. Robbins has written a gout of teenage spleen. Unfortunately, he's done it at the age of 48: old enough to know better, and far enough to the left in his own political culture for him to indulge in the comforting illusion that people are criticising it because they're evil rightists rather than because it's just poor work.
Ill-advised
As regards the culture of film pervading our theatre, a remarkable but easily-missed example is thrown up by The Woman In White. I don't intend to address the writing or performances (except to note that playing guess-the-rhyme with David Zippel's lyrics is a game that quickly palls, because one always wins effortlessly). It's the design that pulled me up short.
Part of me regrets having been so eager to tell my "designed to buggery by William Dudley" story several Prompt Corners ago, as this is clearly its perfect context. I'm pretty sure, though, that what Bill Dudley did here was mostly just react with ill-advised enthusiasm when some "consultants" came along to suggest that most of the work here be done by computer graphics. The physical set consists simply of a curved, rigid cyclorama with a section which trucks forward on occasion; against these are projected a series of high-grade but still only almost-real CGI vistas. (Only almost? Put it this way: when the opening scene revealed a signalman's cabin and a railway tunnel - though no actual tracks - I looked at the graphics and thought, "Ah, the Hogwarts Express'll be along in a minute.") And, unless Mr Dudley is far more skilled and versatile than I give him credit for, I doubt he did much of the actual coding and rendering himself.
No, the odd thing (apart from the regular and irritating flaw in synchronizing the projected images with the movement of the physical objects; you'd think that after all those previews[!] they'd have had enough opportunity to correct that fault. and if it can't be corrected, then why knowingly adopt such an imperfect technique in the first place?) is the way the graphics are used. Almost every scene begins with a bird's-eye view or a mock crane shot, closing in over 15-30 seconds on the immediate location where the scene itself is to take place. We often note when young authors who have grown up on TV and movies write plays with too many, too short scenes and an excess of blackouts and set changes - in other words, with a screen-oriented structure, which betrays an ignorance of the differences necessitated by a physically immediate medium such as theatre. However, what we have here, for the first time in my experience, is the habitual use on stage of the "establishing shot". And they're very nice pictures, but they're unnecessary and downright suspicious on stage. They suggest either a director who doesn't know how to work in theatre (which I rather doubt is the case with Trevor Nunn), a deliberate desire to distract us from shortcomings elsewhere, or a straightforwardly cynical never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width approach to wham-bam spectacle.
At the Back
The two countries that were Czechoslovakia both hold festivals at this time of year - the Czechs in Pilsen, celebrated for its lager, the Slovaks in Nitra, celebrated, I suppose, for not being Bratislava. Each provides something of an overview of its country's theatre strengths, with a good sprinkling of visiting companies for independent comparison.
The Czechs showed not only conventional and relatively avant-garde local work (not to mention a sub-repertoire from socially deprived companies), but puppetry and even opera - indeed, Jiri Herman's production of Wagner's Flying Dutchman for Pilsen's own opera company, played (at 11 in the morning) in its beautifully restored 440-seater J K Tyl theatre, was a highlight. With input from young designer Pavel Svoboda, Herman put the Dutchman's two choruses on an almost bare stage, where they created magical effects by imaginative manipulation of the standard-issue municipal deckchairs that each carried, waved as sails or simply sat upon.
More nautical pleasure came from Crimson Sails, the first venture into narrative theatre by the brothers Forman, sons of Milos the film-maker. Previously they have presided over wild evenings of puppetry, soup-making and gypsy cabaret both on their theatre boat and on its land-based version, the demountable shed theatre which has (like the boat) been seen in many parts of Europe. For Crimson Sails, a simple story of a young girl who dreams of being carried away by a sailor lover, they recreated the atmosphere of the theatre boat as background to the seaborne and seaside setting of their story, by means of some ingenious effects, once again demonstrating their ability to offer an unique brand of gently participatory theatre pleasure, now with added storyline.
Off the rails
Much of the rest of the programme, both Czechs and visitors, was interesting rather than exciting. To offer two all-puppet shows on top of those cleverly used as extras in Crimson Sails is a little excessive, and neither Rocky 9, a slight, cynical sequel to Mr Stallone's own never-ending series, nor a cod-Italian Romeo And Juliet, with (fairly) live actors competing with some vigorous marionettes, seemed worth their place.
There was a chance to see the latest work of some leading Czech directors: Vladimir Moravek's Prince Myshkin Is An Idiot, one of a series of Dostoevsky adaptations he is doing for the main theatre in Brno, got off to a robust start with a collectively improvised train journey, but quickly came off the rails. Jiri Pokorny's tenure has brought life back to Prague's Theatre On The Balustrade, but his fifties transposition of Gabriela Preissova's classic proto-feminist drama Gazdina Roba (The Farmer's Wench, seen also in Nitra) also slowed fatally after a lively start, a dance hall scene that might have come out of a Jiri Menzel film.
Koffe Kwahulé's The Shameless is, apparently, the first play by a black African to be produced in Czech, and its Eva Salzmannova/Milos Horansky production was very well acted by students from the Academy in Prague. There was superlative acting, too, in Jan Antonin Pitinsky's site-specific staging of another modernised Ibsen Nora, far more subtle than Ostermeier's meretricious Berlin version and here played in the narrow, grubby (but superbly lit) corridor of a railway station. Pitinsky is the most musical of directors, and his little-known Brno cast shone in a production remarkable for its varied but always appropriate rhythms.
Naïve
Overseas companies included the St Petersburg Alexandrinsky with Valery Fokin's acclaimed but immensely disappointing Meyerhold-style staging of The Government Inspector - it may be Meyerhold but it certainly ain't Gogol - and Hungary's Bela Pinter with a through-sung slice of coarse acting, The Peasant Opera. Eimuntas Nekrosius's Meno Fortas had to replace their promised Othello with a much shorter but numbingly naïve adaptation of the Spring section of a threatened four play series based on a Lithuianian folk cycle. Cahin-Caha from France brought circus to the programme with their Grimm, an overlong but colourful cross between Archaos and Soleil lacking the serious skills of either. It was left to the Polish-based but international Goat's Song company to provide real excitement with their short Chronicles - A Lamentation, a punishingly efficient demonstration of song, dance and physical theatre skills already much admired in Edinburgh.
Pride of place in Pilsen was given to Martin Cicvak's staging for the Slovak National Theatre of Roland Schimmelpfennig's Arabian Night, which went on to open the programme in Nitra the following week. The Slovaks gave it the best production, best direction and best design prizes in their annual awards ceremony immediately after the Nitra performance, which might lead tetchy outsiders to wonder what depths the rest of the season can have plumbed (the acting awards went to another Cicvak show, Albee's The Goat). This Arabian Night held little of the magic and fantasy of the original, and none of its social commentary - I suppose it takes guts to give a direction award to a production in which the entire cast spends its final ten minutes in a straight line downstage of the set, addressing the audience directly.
Brazen
The Czech-Slovak section of Nitra was struck by ill-luck (this was the 13th festival) which deprived us of a Prague version of Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters and a Pitinsly staging for the local Andreja Bagar theatre of the Czech classic Marisha. The latter was replaced at very short notice by resident director Svetosar Sprusansky's efficient, well-designed staging of The Anaerobes, a quartet of short plays (of decreasing interest as they progressed, alas) by Poland's Ingmar Vilquist. The most interesting local work I saw was an off-festival street theatre staging by the National Theatre of The Story Of St Dorothea, a well-structured romp which held the a mixed crowd of skateboarders and passers-by in the big square outside the Andreja Bagar entranced
The visitors were a more impressive crowd than those in Pilsen. I missed Pawel Miskiewicz's five-hour production for the Stary, Krakow of Dea Loher's Innocence, but was thrilled by Dimiter Gotscheff's adaptation for the Berlin Volksbühne of Bernard-Marie Koltès's Black Battles With Dogs, which used brazen political incorrectness (the Black of the title is played by a white actor, who in the course of the play dons first a gorilla suit and later full minstrel make-up) to bring home the play's serious point about white exploitation of Africa in a series of brilliantly funny riffs on the original text. Funny Germans playing funny Koltès - whatever next? A strong feature of this strong production was Katrin Brack's design, which consisted of a continuous stream of falling confetti, transformed by Henning Streck's lighting into leaves, insects, fireworks and a host of other possibilities as the play progressed.
Childish
The Argentinian director Rodrigo Garcia led his Spanish company, La Carniceria, in more childish assault on exploitation in The History Of Ronald, The Clown Of McDonald's, an act of butchery which went so far over the top as to meet itself on the way back. Vast amounts of comestibles were swashed about the stage in a huge food fight between three half-naked actors, who paused occasionally to say how awful the hamburger chain and its multinational allies were, or pass comment (by stuffing one of their fellows with food) on the torture of victims by dictator states, or simulate gay sex, watched impassively for some of the time by a mother and two small children. The deeply felt emotions of a director who had fled from Galtieri and los desparecidos only to see his country collapse economically were all too apparent, but Argentina is also the land that gave us corned beef and - one assumes -much of the filling for the average Big Mac. By the end of this farrago I was desperate for a quarter pounder with fries.
There were two very different shots at Chekhov. Romania's Radu Afrim quite literally took the piss out of Three Sisters, with a ga-ga Chebutykin drinking what a desperate Natasha had deposited in a handy samovar. Other gags found more of Chekhov's own comedy, but too often the young cast and director's exuberance went way outside the text for its fun - Natasha later gave birth on stage to a score of doll-babies. In complete contrast, Arpad Schilling's Kretakör company (recently at the ICA with a very different Misanthrope) played The Seagull in a small, elegant room, with minimal lighting, no set, few props and the actors in street clothes, achieving a miracle of close-up emotion in the process.
From Russia itself came a hot festival property, Ivan Vyrypaev delivering his stark urban rap in Oxygen, accompanied this time by his wife and a girl DJ. The words may be impressive, but the Vyrypaevs' performance was as monotonous and anti-theatrical as only rap can be.
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
BONE New play by John Donnelly |
Royal Court Upstairs |
13 Sep | 25 Sep | 1164 |
CANCER TIME New play by Gary Owen |
Theatre 503 |
9 Sep | 26 Sep | 1191 |
DARWIN IN MALIBU New play by Crispin Whittell |
Hampstead |
22 Sep | 16 Oct | 1194 |
THE DERANGED MARRIAGE New play by Pravesh Kumar |
Watermans |
15 Sep | 3 Oct | 1189 |
THE ELEPHANT WOMAN Transfer from Edinburgh Fringe of new comedy by Population:3 |
New Ambassadors |
10 Sep | 21 Sep | 1199 |
EMBEDDED New play by Tim Robbins |
Riverside |
9 Sep | 23 Oct | 1145 |
FRACTURES New play by Simon Beyer |
Greenwich Playhouse |
16 Sep | 10 Oct | 1163 |
FULL FRONTAL DIVA New play by Donn Short |
Finborough |
9 Sep | 2 Oct | 1193 |
GONE Transfer of new play by Glyn Cannon, after Sophocles' Antigone |
New Ambassadors |
20 Sep | 2 Oct | 1192 |
HECUBA Revival of play by Euripides in a new version by Frank McGuinness |
Donmar |
14 Sep | 13 Nov | 1168 |
MAKING DICKIE HAPPY New play by Jeremy Kingston |
Rosemary Branch |
13 Sep | 2 Oct | 1166 |
MISSING MARILYN New play by Steve Black |
King's Head |
20 Sep | 17 Oct | 1190 |
NYMPHS AND SHEPHERDS New play by David Hines |
Etcetera |
16 Sep | 3 Oct | 1188 |
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Dale Wasserman revival adapted from novel by Ken Kesey |
Gielgud |
16 Sep | 1181 | |
A PASSAGE TO INDIA Martin Sherman version of E M Forster novel |
Lyric Hammersmith |
16 Sep | 25 Sep | 1186 |
THE SECOND MAIDEN'S TRAGEDY Première (allegedly) of play by Thomas Middleton |
White Bear |
21 Sep | 17 Oct | 1167 |
STUFF HAPPENS New play by David Hare |
Olivier |
10 Sep | 6 Nov | 1151 |
THE TRANSLUCENT FROGS OF QUUUP New musical comedy by Chris Larner |
New Ambassadors |
9 Sep | 17 Sep | 1149 |
TSHEPANG New play by Lara Foot Newton |
Gate |
22 Sep | 16 Oct | 1198 |
THE WOMAN IN WHITE New musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber et al. from the book by Wilkie Collins |
Palace |
15 Sep | 1173 | |
Regions |
||||
THE ANNIVERSARY revival of play by Bill McIlwraith |
Liverpool Playhouse |
14 Sep | 2 Oct | 1206 |
ARCADIA Revival of play by Tom Stoppard |
Bristol Old Vic |
21 Sep | 16 Oct | 1212 |
THE BELLS Revival of play by Leopold Lewis in new version by Deborah McAndrew |
Halifax, Viaduct |
14 Sep | 18 Sep | 1207 |
COMMUNICATING DOORS Revival of play by Alan Ayckbourn |
Perth |
16 Sep | 2 Oct | 1217 |
CONFESSIONS OF A CITY SUPPORTER New play by Alan Plater |
Hull Truck |
17 Sep | 9 Oct | 1209 |
DOCTOR FAUSTUS Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe |
Chichester, Minerva |
9 Sep | 25 Sep | 1202 |
GOOD THINGS new play by Liz Lochhead; Borderline touring production |
Glasgow, Tron |
10 Sep | 15 Sep | 1215 |
KES Adapted by Lawrence Till from novel by Barry Hines |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
13 Sep | 16 Oct | 1205 |
THE LADY AOI / LA MUSICA Yukio Mishima / Marguérite Duras double bill |
Glasgow, Citizens (Circle Studio) |
21 Sep | 21 Oct | 1220 |
MACBETH revival of play by Shakespeare; Out Of Joint touring production |
Batley, Red Brick Mill |
10 Sep | 18 Sep | 1204 |
A MADMAN SINGS TO THE MOON Revival of play by Mark Thomson |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
18 Sep | 9 Oct | 1218 |
PEDRO, THE GREAT PRETENDER Play by Miguel Cervantes in a new version by Philip Osment |
Stratford upon Avon, Swan |
9 Sep | 30 Sep | 1200 |
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE New adap. by Andrew Rattenbury from novel by James M Cain |
Leeds, WYP Quarry |
22 Sep | 16 Oct | 1209 |
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE Adapted by Sue Pomeroy from novel by Jane Austen; Good Company tour |
Guildford, Yvonne Arnaud |
16 Sep | 18 Sep | 1208 |
SEARCHLIGHTS OVER BEMMY Play by Doreen Ramsay, adapted by Dan Danson and Doreen Ramsay |
Bristol, Tobacco Factory |
8 Sep | 2 Oct | 1206 |
SOAP New play by Sarah Woods |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
21 Sep | 19 Oct | 1214 |
THÉRÈSE RAQUIN New adaptation by Jeremy Raison from novel by Émile Zola |
Glasgow, Citizens (Main) |
17 Sep | 9 Oct | 1219 |
THIS IS WHERE WE TRY TO SAY GOODBYE / SUBJECT Highway Diner / Alex Bradley double bill |
Glasgow, Arches |
17 Sep | 18 Sep | 1216 |
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare; English Touring Theatre |
Oxford Playhouse |
16 Sep | 18 Sep | 1205 |
UBU / INTERMISSION Alred Jarry / Julie Brown & Johnny McKnight double bill |
Glasgow, Arches |
13 Sep | 15 Sep | 1216 |