Issue 20 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
If the cover of this issue hadn't gone to Primo (of which more later), it would have been Cloaca. A friend even supplied the punning caption to be used: "Yes, but is it Art?" It's simply impossible to avoid making the association with Yasmina Reza's breakthrough play when watching the opening production of Kevin Spacey's tenure at the helm of The Old Vic. Blokes, friendships, paintings, money - all the points are there for a close mapping. All except the quality.
Maria Goos hasn't written a bad play, just a poor one. I can't recall greater unanimity of critics since I took over the editorship here. Even Murderous Instincts had its halfway-defenders (though not enough to stop it closing more than an issue's duration before we reprint its reviews), but really, everyone - with the exception of the more vigorously damning Charles Spencer - has remarked on Cloaca's general deficiency, and wondered why Spacey chose it to kick off his directorial stint. I have come across one intriguing suggestion (I wish I could remember where, in order to give due credit: possibly David Lister's arts column in the Independent) about the play's selection, namely that the prime mover in this instance wasn't Spacey but his producer, David Liddiment. Prior to the Old Vic job, Liddiment's career has been exclusively in television, peaking as director of programmes for the ITV network 1997-2002.
Shiny middlebrow
The more one thinks about Cloaca in that light, the more persuasive the theory becomes. It has the kind of shiny middlebrow feel that would appeal to an ITV exec looking for a one-off drama that wouldn't be too alienating to the channel's audience. The thing is that The Old Vic's audience demographic is not the same as ITV's. and, to judge from accounts of post-press night performances, the Spacey Old Vic's demographic for Cloaca is different again. Nice idea to get Condé Nast involved as publisher of The Old Vic Magazine - a kind of up-market up-yours to the Really Useful group's Theatregoer - but as Baz Bamigboye pointed out in the Daily Mail, people bridle at paying three quid for a programme, never mind a fiver, no matter how much "added value" is in there. Or maybe the target audience is precisely that kind of person. which, to me at least, would suggest not a great deal of market research. Multiply the number of seats in The Old Vic by the number of performances in the play's run. are there over 100,000 such people to be tempted to come and see this show? If not, then make sure you don't lose too much of your existing audience in pursuit of the new.
Of course, part of the reason for the Liddiment theory's attractiveness is that we don't want to lay the blame at Spacey's door. Much as the British media enjoys knocking people down, what we want even more is for his commitment and belief to pay off, that we may see The Old Vic once again become a consistently viable venue with a strong individual identity. We've had enough of its years of hit-and-miss floundering under successive managements and artistic regimes, hopeful though some of them initially looked. And so, for once, we refrain from rushing to judgement on the basis of one play (how very different from the case, earlier this year, of Sam Mendes' Scamp production company and Fuddy Meers), and even try not to draw too much attention to the minimal, anodyne directorial feel Spacey also gave to the production. Please, we whisper into our pillows like lovestruck teenagers, after so many heartbreaks let this man be The One. Time will tell.
American Gothic
To continue the teen metaphor, our walls are already bedecked with posters of Nicholas Hytner. The National just keeps riding the crest of that wave, with this issue featuring two strong openings on successive nights: the 1995 revised version of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, and Antony Sher in his own adaptation Primo.
I'm with Jane Edwardes as regards Shepard's plays, and a little more so: not only do I often wonder what they're actually on about, but I suspect he doesn't know either (indeed, a quotation from him in the programme to this production also suggests as much), and that there's actually less to their black absurdity than meets the eye. In this respect, I find him better served by his full-length pieces set in something closer to the "real" world. Buried Child is one such play. I don't know the original version, so I can't judge how much it's benefited from its revision. Nevertheless, it feels as if on this occasion he has a focused idea of what he wants to show, and shows it. It's also noticeable that all the plays it seems to various reviewers to echo - Beckett's Endgame, Pinter's The Homecoming, Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - are each in some ways the offspring of absurdism; and Shepard's play blends humour and horror, striking the notes of these predecessors along with those of Eugene O'Neill's and the author's own particular brands of American Gothic.
It's an approach that also suits Matthew Warchus as a director. He's sometimes judged good on external business but less sure on introspection. (I said it myself in Issue 05, about his own production of Endgame.) This play suits him, and he it, because more or less everything - all the family tension, all the torment - is externalised. Even the mystery of the play's title isn't a mystery in that respect: we're told several times, directly, there's a buried child out the back of Dodge's family's house. It's only the details and the background that are exhumed in the course of the play. Lastly, it's immensely welcome to see Sam Troughton finally given a role such as Vince where he can deliver what he's been capable of. This is the performance that establishes him in his own right rather than as the perpetually-promising son-of-David-and-grandson-of-Patrick.
Matter-of-fact
As for Primo, I'm with Benedict Nightingale: "really, this is an evening beyond criticism." There are those who note Antony Sher's usual tendency towards bravura acting and contrast it with his restraint here, and those also who feel he wasn't restrained enough. In each case, the reining-in seems to be attributed to director Richard Wilson. It's as if Sher the actor were entirely unrelated to the Antony Sher who did the adaptation of Primo Levi's Auschwitz testimony If This Is A Man. A couple of times, quite early on during the press performance, I thought I just detected a catch in his voice, and I thought I realised what was going on. Fifteen years ago, as a student, I had performed a kind of samizdat production of Spalding Gray's monologue Swimming To Cambodia, and I remembered that, when reciting Gray's account of the Khmer Rouge's programme of slaughter (the line that sticks with me is "If you wore glasses, you were killed"), I had to adopt a matter-of-fact delivery, not to get the words across, but to get them out at all. That's what I think Sher was doing: the only way to face such enormity is to drop the pretence and just be.
Indeed, Levi's work is at its core an affirmation of humanity, but not an affirmation in the cosy sense. Humanity can entail undergoing such inconceivable horrors, can entail living with them afterwards. and can also entail perpetrating them. The minds behind the Endlösung were not alien, were not other: they were human, too. We did it. And whatever our relation to those events - even simply watching a theatre adaptation - we have to face both those facts and our humanity.
A couple of personal illustrations from that evening. As usual on press nights, we reviewers were first out of our seats and through the doors, which hadn't yet been fixed open. We were a trickle, though, several seconds apart, too far apart to comfortably hold the doors open each for the next. But we did. I think we just needed, even on so banal a level, to connect with other individual human beings. Then, walking to the Tube station, I fell in with another critic. He said one sentence, I said one, and we walked on in silence. Again, it was a matter of simple, existential company. I'm aware how risibly precious this looks on the page. In a perverse way, I think that means the production worked: if we could report on it dispassionately, it would have failed. Or we would have.
Misguided
Existential angst and horror in the face of the absolute: key ingredients of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, if viewed through a Catholic prism of sin and redemption. And almost entirely absent from the musical version at the Almeida. Not the fault of Giles Havergal's book, which covers the narrative and the psychological ground efficiently. (Nicholas de Jongh upbraids him for supplying a "falsely upbeat finale", which is in fact taken directly from the 1947 film - screenplay by Terence Rattigan and, er, Graham Greene.) I think it was simply a misguided project. I'm afraid I nearly laughed out loud at the very first bars of John Barry's score: they were just so archetypally John Barry - twangy, suspenseful minor-key guitar and all. Unfortunately, the rest of the score had no such individuality, nor was it helped by Don Black's workaday lyrics or the necessity of finding something for a chorus to do onstage (whirling deckchairs around, indeed!).
Almost every reviewer remarks that director Michael Attenborough is the son of Richard Attenborough, who played the murderous cherub Pinkie in John Boulting's film; no-one, however, dares venture beyond that into what such a lineage might signify. No-one, either, comments that the show is produced in association with Bill Kenwright, who was presumably looking for a West End transfer and will presumably not be committing himself to one after the batch of limp reviews collected here.
Defiant
Havergal has at the same time been appearing onstage at the Lyric Hammersmith as the father of Don Juan. With the bizarre, crucial exception of James Wilby's chilly, unappealing Don Juan, it's a fitting farewell to Neil Bartlett as artistic director. When he took on the job ten years ago, giving the director of the Queer-with-a-capital-Q company Gloria such a building to run seemed audacious both for him and for the Lyric's board. He has been a success not only for the Lyric, but has integrated into this country's theatrical mainstream the kind of aesthetic he prefers: at once sumptuous and grimy, sparklingly romantic and midnight-dark, and always defiant in its transgression. His own adaptation of Molière's bleakest work recapitulates this perspective once more with skill and potency, let down by the aforementioned Wilby-shaped hole at its centre but bolstered by the likes of Paul Ritter as the Don's manservant Sganarelle. Every time you think Ritter has given the scabrously cynical-comic performance of his career, he tops it.
I regret not being given the opportunity for a conceptual heckle during The Solid Gold Cadillac. Roy Hudd stops the show in order to recite at length the monologue about the rebel Roman gladiator which his hard-bitten character remembers fondly from his school-days and which led him to cherish hopes of a career on the stage. I whispered to my companion, "I will if you will." Sadly, Hudd never gave us a useful cue on which to leap up and declare, "No! I'm Spartacus!"
At the Back
Can You Hear Me At The Back of beyond?
The Lonely Planet website will tell you that Armenia has three and a half million inhabitants. Morose locals put the present figure as low as a million, as emigration drains this landlocked, embattled country of its best and brightest. There's a similar vagueness about the extent of the genocide which the Turks inflicted in 1915-6, with Turkey 's figure, not surprisingly, much lower than that given by Armenia . After the country gained independence from the Soviet Union, it still had to survive years of blockade, the result of a strength-sapping dispute with neighbouring Azerbaijan : the power supply came on for an hour a day.
Not your first choice for a theatre festival, then - yet Highfest, in Yerevan, has just completed its second edition, doubled in size from the first and already recognised as the major festival of the Caucasus region. For one intensive week, the capital city's theatres were buzzing with local and foreign groups, and a predominantly young audience was fighting to see them. Many of these young people will have come from Armenia 's national institute of theatre and cinema, which has an astonishing roll of 1500 students.
Acrobatic
They didn't get to see Declan Donnellan or Bob Wilson, but (as with the Czechs and Slovaks I talked about last time), they saw material from a wide range of genres, albeit at somewhat lower levels of achievement. British representation was high: I saw a student exercise from the London Arts University, using animation and puppetry to present Gogol's The Overcoat, but left before Nouritsa Matossian gave her solo, Black Angel, based on her life of the painter Arshile Gorky, and the Clod Ensemble offered their slick silent-movie Greed.
The very first show I saw offered immense promise: a couple of dozen local teenagers enacted an adaptation of Richard Bach's hippie tract, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. These youngsters were clearly amateur, with untrained voices showing a natural tendency to recite rather than speak their lines, but when they moved on stage in director Vahan Badalyan's complicated, acrobatic choreography they literally and figuratively took off, and Bach's moral tale found worthy interpreters. Their success provided an embarrassing contrast to another young group, who presented the myth of creation in a series of increasingly ghastly tableaux.
Pleasure
What Badalyan's youngsters emphasised was one of the joys of visits such as this: it is possible to sit in a theatre watching a production in a totally foreign language and yet receive the directly communicated pleasure of seeing a job well done. This was even more evident in a production whose author is still unknown to me, 44 degrees, directed by Zohrab Bek-Gasparents at the Hamazgain (national) Theatre. It's a simple but all too topical story in Armenia : a young couple have returned from living in the USA to settle in their native village, but one by one the original inhabitants leave until only their neighbour remains. We watch the three of them over a couple of ordinary days, talking, drinking, beekeeping, until the neighbour, too, can stand it no longer and also leaves the village, at which point there is nothing for the couple to do but pack up themselves. The three actors performed on a terrible, thoroughly unhelpful set, yet for more than two hours held me spellbound by the unexaggerated truth of their performances. The Armenian members of the audience, who knew a little more about what was going on, were deeply moved by the event.
There was an equally warm welcome for the very professional actors of the Henrik Malyan Studio in The Tribe Physiology, adaptations of some popular short stories performed with rather more gusto than finesse. Artur Ter-Danielants' Goy theatre company, a less experienced group, presented more challenging material in their short, expressionist account of My Death. My short stay did not allow me further glimpses of local theatre conditions - it would have been interesting to catch the State Chamber Theatre's 80-minute Hamlet, or the Armenian Actors Union in 4.48 Psychosis - but I was left with the impression of a broad-based theatre community beginning to shake off its Stanislavski-heavy heritage and explore the wider dramatic world.
Meaningless
The international visitors were more interesting, it must be admitted, for their breadth than their depth. One questions the worth of inviting two amiable juggler-clowns from Brno for forty minutes of light comedy interrupted only by the regular thud of dropped Indian clubs - four being the maximum these ladies could risk in the air at the same time - or whether all the groups of earnest, elderly puppeteers were really necessary. In the area of children's theatre it was good to see the physical discipline of the pair from the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa in Norman Issa's likeable fable of mutual territorialism, Ach Ach Boom Tracchhh, and I heard good things of the most distant visitors, Cho-In from Seoul in The Train.
There were a couple of ambitious street theatre events, a phenomenon new to Yerevan. Cacahuète from Avignon (seen in the National's outdoor programme this summer) created splendid chaos as their Mama's Funeral procession held up traffic, brought building sites to a halt and baffled the local police in their attempts to restore order, while Antagon theaterAKTion from Frankfurt, also much travelled, brought stilt-walking, fireworks, sado-masochism and heavy rock to their spectacular (and spectacularly meaningless) Time Out. This very competent troupe were very reminiscent of Poland 's Buro Podroszy, but lacking in that group's fiery resonance.
Swiss role-play
Indoors, the Griboyedov State Russian Theatre Company from Tbilisi represented Georgia in a whimsical two-hander, Gentle, based on a Dostoevsky story. Again it was a pleasure to watch two very experienced actors at work, even if the piece chosen was a slight one. The most successful of the festival visitors in terms of audience response were the Markus Zohner Theater Compagnie from Lugano in Switzerland , arriving garlanded with awards and rave reviews from festivals around the world. One has to admire the skills of the company, who turn out to be Markus Zohner himself, a seven-foot clown who probably had to form his own company in order to find anyone to act opposite him, and the suitably short Patrizia Barbuani. Their production was Hamlet, or rather Ha! Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. They performed the piece on two swivelling stools, using much of the original text but lapsing from time to time into German, even Italian. They shared the principal characters between them and delivered two hours of near-Shakespeare, including interval, as sit-down comedy.
Now I have no objection to reduced Shakespeare, from Robert Lepage's high-tech Elsinore to Oddsocks' two-person Richard III. What I found hubristic in the extreme in this Swiss role-play was the actors' obvious conviction that they were delivering a useful commentary on the original. Both showed an impressive ability to change character at the swing of a stool, and there were occasional moments of real pathos, such as the death of Ophelia. But theirs was essentially a comic, superficial rendering of the Danish court, and such a rendering quickly palls for me - a half-hour sketch would have been fine. The show's greatest irony was that all the considerable comedy that exists in Hamlet itself, from the prince's student banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to his gulling of Osric - even the gravediggers - was completely cut.
Girls growing up
Much more interesting and a great deal funnier were my discovery of the festival, the Art & Shock company from Kazakhstan . I'm discovering them a little late, since they have already won praise in innovative festivals like that in Sibiu, Romania . These four young women offered a very funny piece based on improvisation and reminiscent of similar work by Lev Dodin's students. Back In The USSR is a nostalgic look at what it was to be a Young Pioneer in Soviet times, which manages to mine a truly universal sense of girls growing up while giving it a wry, post-communist frame. Look out for Art & Shock.
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
BILLY CONNOLLY: TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG Solo comedy show |
Carling Apollo Hammersmith |
27 Sep |
28 Oct |
1248 |
BRIGHTON ROCK Adapted by Giles Havergal from Graham Greene; songs by John Barry and Don Black |
Almeida |
5 Oct |
13 Nov |
1282 |
BURIED CHILD Revised revival of play by Sam Shepard |
Lyttelton |
29 Sep |
15 Dec |
1262 |
THE CHANGELING Revival of play by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley; Tobacco Factory rep season |
The Pit |
28 Sep |
23 Oct |
1243 |
CARAVAN Play by Paul Newcombe and Nancy Black |
Riverside |
28 Sep |
10 Oct |
1271 |
THE CHEEKY CHAPPIE Revival of play by Dave Simpson |
Union SE1 |
30 Sep |
16 Oct |
1261 |
CLOACA New play by Maria Goos |
Old Vic |
28 Sep |
11 Dec |
1254 |
A COMEDY OF ARIAS Return of operatic comedy by Ian Bloomfield |
New Ambassadors |
4 Oct |
9 Oct |
1272 |
DON JUAN Revival of play by Molière in a new version by Neil Bartlett |
Lyric Hammersmith |
4 Oct |
30 Oct |
1275 |
FESTEN Transfer of David Eldridge's stage adaptation of the film by Thomas Vinterberg et al. |
Lyric |
23 Sep |
1 Jan |
1237 |
FINALLY THE GIRL New play by John Donnelly |
Old Red Lion |
30 Sep |
16 Oct |
1240 |
FREE FROM SORROW New Play by Robin Hooper |
Tristan Bates |
6 Oct |
30 Oct |
1281 |
FUGUE Revival of play by Rona Munro |
Blue Elephant |
23 Sep |
9 Oct |
1278 |
HENHOUSE New play by Kaite O'Reilly |
Arcola |
23 Sep |
9 Oct |
1241 |
HOW LOVE IS SPELT New play by Chloe Moss |
Bush |
1 Oct |
23 Oct |
1273 |
THE LITTLE MERMAID New adaptation by Pam Gems from Hans Christian Andersen |
Greenwich |
27 Sep |
2 Oct |
1253 |
MACBETH Revival of play by William Shakespeare; Tobacco Factory rep season |
The Pit |
23 Sep |
23 Oct |
1242 |
NIGHT JUST BEFORE THE FORESTS Revival of play by Bernard-Marie Koltès |
Arcola |
23 Sep |
9 Oct |
1241 |
PRIMO Adapted by Antony Sher from the book If This Is A Man by Primo Levi |
Cottesloe |
30 Sep |
1 Dec |
1267 |
THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN Revival of play by Sean O'Casey |
Tricycle |
4 Oct |
6 Nov |
1279 |
THE SOLID GOLD CADILLAC Revival of play by George S Kaufman and Howard Teichmann |
Garrick |
27 Sep |
1 Jan |
1249 |
WHAT THE WOMEN DID Revival of short plays by Herbert Tremaine/Gwen John/JM Barrie |
Southwark Playhouse |
23 Sep |
9 Oct |
1247 |
Regions |
||||
THE BACCHAE Revival of play by Euripides in a version by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy |
Leeds, WYP Courtyard |
30 Sep |
16 Oct |
1289 |
A CONVERSATION New play by David Williamson |
Manchester, R Exchange Studio |
23 Sep |
9 Oct |
1288 |
DON CARLOS Revival of the play byFriedrich Schiller in a translation by Mike Poulton |
Sheffield, Crucible |
1 Oct |
6 Nov |
1293 |
4.48 PSYCHOSIS Revival of play by Sarah Kane |
Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio |
23 Sep |
23 Oct |
1296 |
THE KIND NESS OF STRANGERS New play by Tony Green |
Liverpool Everyman |
28 Sep |
16 Oct |
1289 |
THREE BY BECKETT Revival of three short plays by Samuel Beckett; The Godot Company |
Edinburgh, Traverse |
6 Oct |
9 Oct |
1298 |
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by William Shakespeare |
Bolton, Octagon |
24 Sep |
16 Oct |
1288 |
VERNON GOD LITTLE New adaptation by Andrea Hart from novel by DBC Pierre |
Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio |
25 Sep |
23 Oct |
1297 |