Issue 22 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
We are, we Brit-critics, predominantly white, middle-aged, middle-class and male. A number of us - meaning no disparagement to their femininity - are to all intents and purposes honorary males; a number of us are flatteringly still referred to as middle-aged despite the advances of Father Time; some of us (myself included) are "scholarship boys", not middle-class by background though firmly so by acculturation. In terms of perspective, though, we come pretty much from the same mould.
How, then, do we react to work which is outside our more accustomed province? It's an interesting matter to consider, in a fortnight when we're presented with new pieces by both Forced Entertainment and Shunt, each a collective dedicated to presenting non-scripted, non-linear work. Forced Ents marked their twentieth anniversary with a mini-season in which their main show Bloody Mess was shown in parallel with a number of other pieces from their history; Shunt have just made the transition to a new phase of semi-permanence with Tropicana, the opening presentation in their semi-subterranean home for the next three years.
Compare the reviews given to each, and evaluate these twin hypotheses: 1) A greater number of reviewers turn out for Shunt because they carry the imprimatur of the National Theatre, 2) Forced Ents get more respectful write-ups because they've been going longer.
Point
To take the second theory first: every review of Bloody Mess takes pains to aver that it does have a point; none, however, identifies that point. (Dominic Cavendish speculates upon it, but also hedges his bets by means of a conditional; much virtue in "if".) The press night also had an astoundingly high proportion of college-age people in the audience, on their own bat or in organised parties; Tim Etchells & Co may in general be prophets without honour in their own country, but it seems that in a certain constituency they've been elevated to the kind of pantheon that they profess to have no time for. What was also noticeable was that, some fifteen minutes before the end of the piece, the biggest of these student parties - some 40 to 60 people - walked out. It's possible, I suppose, that they had a 10.30pm curfew, but there was little or no discernible reluctance or regret from any of the departing.
I do seem currently to be in a phase of blunt intolerance for the "It means whatever you want it to mean" school of cop-out pseudo-justification. Certainly, as the Forced Ents company cavorted to the sounds of Hawkwind's Silver Machine, what it primarily meant to me was that they weren't in fact as wacky on stage as space-rockers Hawkwind had been some thirty years earlier, without any pretence to performance radicalism - Lemmy et al. had simply been off their tits on acid.
Yet, despite this oppositional streak in me, I responded positively for the first half or so of Shunt's Tropicana, largely as a result of what I was bringing to the table myself. I appreciated the cheeky games the company played with claustrophobia in the opening phases of the piece; during the main central sequence, as we sat in the dark and various fleeting actions were vouchsafed to us through brief, partial shafts of light, I felt we were being shown a new way of seeing things, where the bizarre (sideways lift-shafts, exotic dancers scuttling like startled fauna) and the banal (a pineapple being hammered to pulp) could turn out to be equally intriguing. This, I suspect, is the kind of experience described in those reviews which compare Tropicana unfavourably to John Berger and Simon McBurney's 1999 The Vertical Line, which I didn't see; if I had, possibly I'd likewise feel that the insights offered by the Shunt show were slim in comparison.
Vague
Curiously, the more demonstrative Shunt's material grew (from a steampunk voodoo funeral sequence through to a mock-autopsy), the more my interest declined. The evening seemed to diminish from a mystery into a puzzle, or possibly a pseudo-puzzle designed to be insoluble. Rather than the simple cop-out of "It means whatever you want it to mean", this seemed to indicate that sometimes it's better to leave things entirely unexplained than to make vague gestures that never cohere.
And so the more opaque elder statesmen of Forced Entertainment were indulged more in review: surely, the reasoning seems to have run, they must know what they're doing by now, and therefore we can take that as read. Yes, but what if what they're doing is in fact lazy noodling? I'm not saying it is; a fortnight after seeing the show, I'm still bewildered. But it does seem to me to be a real possibility.
Defining
It would be novel to see what the most disjunct of reviewers make of such productions. Compare others' trouble tolerating even a play like Kevin Elyot's Forty Winks: "You can get away with this sort of thing in subsidised theatre, I suppose," writes one reviewer, thus dismissing both the play and an entire sector of theatre which includes the country's flagship companies. I find that Elyot's piece has grown on me in the week and a half since I saw it: what at first seemed slight, brooding but ultimately inconsequential, has grown softly eloquent about its subject, the way one's life can spiral back in upon a defining moment unrealised at the time. Whether this is worth the repeated recapitulations that Elyot has made of it in various plays may be open to debate, but it's a common enough sensation, even on a subconscious level. This week it was announced that the school-reunion website Friends Reunited has more than eleven million active members; no-one's going to persuade me that this is a result of mild curiosity or vague nostalgia. It's also heartening to see Dominic Rowan continue to show what first became undeniable in last year's Mourning Becomes Electra, that his early strengths as a deadpan comic actor have now been more than complemented with a quiet gravitas that perfectly suits roles such as he has here. Wait a minute, though: Elyot's play is a slow, silent grower. and he keeps re-stating the message in play after play. it's not just a play, is it? It's a practical demonstration of this thesis as well.
Leonard Cohen
Nick Stafford's Love Me Tonight (to which you can see on the main reviews pages I was better disposed than most) I think tried for similarly understated power - Stafford has great skills as a forensic writer about events which evoke major human emotions - but kept slipping up on its own excessive polish: overwritten lines, over-neat characterisations. However, I found that it proved the better when considered as part of a diptych on grief together with Howard Barker's Dead Hands. Barker, as usual, approaches from the other end: extreme over-articulation of both situation and dialogue, in the hope not so much of illuminating thoughts and feelings as of pinning and mounting them like dead butterflies. However, Dead Hands is unusually light going for Barker. Coming as it does after the similarly not-unrelenting 13 Objects, it leads me to speculate that perhaps Howard Barker is now at the kind of position Leonard Cohen found himself in around fifteen years ago: the rest of the world has gradually come to realise that the bleak figure of popular legend is only part of the picture, and that there's a lot of discreet humour in there too, which the artist in turn feels readier to allow overt manifestation to. I certainly found myself responding to the play in the same way I do to the music of laughing Lenny: appreciating the self-deprecating chuckles, realising that they add to the more profound concerns rather than distracting from them.
Homoeroticism
Chuckles aren't thick on the ground in John Caird's revival of Anouilh's Becket at the Haymarket. I've nothing to add to the main substance of the reviews on these pages, apart from a couple of observations. I recall a pre-publicity interview in which Jasper Britton fulminated that anyone who played homoeroticism as the defining feature of Henry II's relationship with Thomas à Becket was stupid, lazy and generally wrong; lo and behold, how little of significance is discerned in Britton's performance beyond that single note. And I wonder whether Frederic and Stephen Raphael were trying to make a point with their translation, accurately fingered by Charles Spencer as downright vulgar: since Anouilh invents an ethnic tension between the Norman Henry and the Saxon Becket, are the Raphaels trying to imply the deeper victory of Becket by putting so many Anglo-Saxon turns of phrase - not just the expletives, but virtually all the modern colloquialisms - into the Norman's mouth? In all honesty, probably not, but it would be nice if that had been the case. The show's early closure has already been announced; it will have run for seven weeks.
Little space left to join in the chorus of delight at the return of Josette Bushell-Mingo's production of Simply Heavenly to the Trafalgar Studios, featuring the awesome coupling of Clive Rowe and Ruby Turner. (And that's not just an expression of solidarity amongst the generously-built.) Still less to praise Roy Smiles' Ying Tong, which seems to begin in the mould of the current Round The Horne show then splinters into an imaginative examination of Spike Milligan's relationship with The Goons and his terrible nervous breakdown of 1960. It's co-produced by Michael Codron, though, so if there's any justice I'll be able to muse on it at greater length on a West End transfer next year. Such transfers, paradoxically, are one way of establishing the profile of a smaller originating venue. Producer David Babani early spotted the potential of the Menier in Southwark, as have Paines Plough with their arrangement for a residency there next year; but what marks it indisputably on the map is the transfer to the Arts of Mark Setlock's whirlwind solo piece Fully Committed.
Sniping
That's now playing in tandem with the West End performing début of Spectator reviewer Toby Young. I'm afraid I'm not able to pass an opinion on Toby's show, as a result of a) his getting the dates wrong when he phoned to make sure we had the openings properly listed on our Next pages, b) TR never receiving the e-mailed press release from his publicist which would have corrected the dates; c) said publicist accepting with a cheery "No problem!" my request to come along and see the show on a night when there wasn't in fact going to be a performance; d) this only coming to light two working days before the evening in question, by which time I had no other free slots left in my diary. I may not have seen the show, but I do feel that in an intangible way I've had the in-performance experience of How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. In any case, Toby gave himself a glowing review (reprinted in this issue) some time before the show opened. He seems to have expected much more sniping than in fact he received; from my own experiences as a critic-performer, I could have told him that one's fears in that respect are seldom fully realised. Indeed, my 1998 Edinburgh Fringe show garnered the wonderful quote, "You can't survive the Festival without seeing this show!". which I always quote in tandem with the other outspoken verdict: "Like a dog returning to its own vomit."
Ian Shuttleworth - ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
One of the most enjoyable sections of the programme of events organised by the International Association of Theatre Critics is their seminars for young critics. There is one going on in Porto at the moment, alongside the festival of the Union of European Theatres. Earlier this year, similar groups of critics at the beginning of their careers met in Szeged, Hungary, and Gothenburg, Sweden, also in the framework of festivals. The exchange of views can be very dynamic, and the networks created last a long time. What the Association hasn't been so good at lately is organising similar events for those who are well established in the job, but this year we managed to hold two, one in Bursa, Turkey, linked to a festival of theatre for young people, and the other in St Petersburg, during the annual Baltic House festival. Other IATC members were in St Petersburg, too, as part of a jury led by Georges Banu which awarded the UNESCO Prize of $15,000 for "emerging artists of the modern stage" to the maverick Ukrainian director Andrej Zholdak, with a special award of $5000 to local director Klim.
Commandments
The seniors meeting in St Petersburg wrote a letter to their junior colleagues, setting out Ten Commandments for the critic. Some critics' organisations, including the Americans and the French Canadians, have a critics' code of conduct, full of serious exhortations about not falling asleep (just as well our Critics' Circle doesn't have one), but this is a more light-hearted if very handy set of principles. I thought you might like to share it:
"After a five-day theatre marathon (over 14 hours of which came courtesy of Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius), we are exhausted. We have watched, taken notes and slept in the dark. We have stayed up too late and we have woken up far too early for each of our daily discussions. Summoning up a final burst of energy, however, we have sat down to draw a list of the critics' ten commandments especially for you. Please don't repeat our mistakes but rather take note of them."
- Be honest. If you don't understand something, just say so: "This isn't clear to me."
- This isn't the same as revealing your ignorance: don't say King Lear is a terrible play unless you're pretty sure of your argument.
- Preserve and develop the talent to recognise beauty. Sometimes it's better to start a review with the good things before moving on to the bad.
- When you see a bad performance, have the guts to say so. In the short term you might lose friends, but in the long term your honesty will gain you respect.
- Leave your prejudices at the door. Just because you hated the company's last five shows, this doesn't mean the sixth won't be a work of genius.
- Declare your biases. If you always dislike musicals or you always love Ray Cooney farces, it's reasonable for the reader to know.
- You are writing for your readers, not for the theatre profession and not for posterity. You must entertain, amuse, excite, inform and argue just as much as anyone working in the theatre. And you must do it on your own terms.
- Get a life. Just because you spend all your time in theatres doesn't mean your readers do. To be in their world, you must refer to real life. You should know about politics, literature, pop music, reality TV, soap operas, philosophy, art, technology, science, computer games, supermarkets, architecture... in short, everything.
- Never marry an actor. If you can't help it, do so only temporarily, to get some inner knowledge of the theatre.
- There's no recipe for criticism. You'll never know how to do the job. The day you feel you've mastered it is the day you should quit.
Anneli Saro (Estonia) |
Matt Radz (Québec, Canada) |
Freebies
There's one commandment I'd like to add to these ten, which comes from the great Irving Wardle's book on Theatre Criticism: Never write anything in your review which you cannot say to your subject's face. By the way, if you want to know more about IATC and its activities, you can find more information at their website www.aict-iatc.org. I'm prejudiced, as their President, but I reckon they do a very useful job. And I didn't get to any of the meetings I've mentioned, just in case you thought I was sweeping up all the freebies.
Go on, walk out
I wonder what my IATC friends would have made of Forced Ents' Bloody Mess at Riverside? Tim Etchells and his gang are very big overseas, and big enough at home to be having a retrospective here. The new piece is pretty typical, which after all these years is a criticism in itself. There is the trademark dashing about the stage, the confessional line-up, the manic changing of clothes that we have come to expect from the Ents. No marching about carrying labels this time, but a fine moment with two of the actors with their modesty covered only (and not always) by two big silver stars. Etchells is fascinated by life as showbiz, and this is one of his most ordered accounts of this recurrent theme to date. But the word recurrent is also a key word for this lot's work: we have to watch most of their routines slide from bright invention to bang-yer-head-against-the-wall repetition. The bright start achieved by his two clowns fighting to arrange the chairs on stage, followed by the whole (large) cast telling us what they wanted to get from the evening (which mostly seemed to be a good seeing-to) began to fade, and by the end of two and a quarter interval-less hours, after we had been flailed by two actors demonstrating more and more excruciating silences, the group had - quite deliberately, I'm sure - set up a "go on, walk out, we dare you" challenge which more than a few audience members accepted. I would have gladly joined them, but Ian Shuttleworth is not an easy person to walk over.
This is Hell
European critics would probably be enthusiastic about the Rupert Goold/ Ben Power adaptation of Faustus at Northampton. The same pair were praised for their Paradise Lost earlier in the year, and it's very satisfying to see a small theatre with a limited (but very loyal) local audience taking such risks. That it can work was demonstrated by the success of Paradise Lost, and at Faustus's last preview there was an encouragingly full house. It's a "European" production in that it offers a very individual, director/designer take on a classic (with Laura Hopkins responsible for the sets), which I can accept because it doesn't lay claim to be pure. Interwoven with the highlights of Marlowe's play are some very effective contrasting scenes showing the Chapman brothers at work, desecrating Goya's Disasters Of War, so that as well as an Elizabethan meditation on evil and redemption we get a modern ('Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it') view on the responsibilities of the artist. The Chapmans don't come out of it especially well, so all credit to them for letting themselves be put on stage. It is perhaps a little simplistic to confront their artistic horror-story with someone who has witnessed the destruction of life and art at first hand in Afghanistan, but it makes for a strong scene, and the two worlds of the play merge brilliantly, when the seven deadly sins observed by Scott Handy's rather underpowered Faustus are wandering round a Britart vernissage. It's a real shame that Mr Goold and his team will have to spend fourteen months kicking their heels when the Royal and its neighbouring Derngate go dark next spring, but they will return to a theatre restored to all its late nineteenth century glory, with CJ Phipps' designs lovingly recreated by the Arts Team at Renton Howard. Anyone want to buy a chandelier?
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
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AS YOU LIKE IT Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Courtyard |
28 Oct | 21 Nov | 1427 |
BECKET Revival of play by Jean Anouilh in a new version by Frederic and Stephen Raphael |
T R Haymarket |
27 Oct | 1 Jan | 1402 |
THE BELLS Revival of play by Leopold Lewis |
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2 Nov | 6 Nov | 1422 |
BILL BAILEY: PART TROLL Return of solo comedy show |
Apollo |
26 Oct | 18 Dec | 1393 |
BLOODY MESS New piece by Forced Entertainment |
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2 Nov | 5 Nov | 1418 |
THE CHAIRS Revival of play by Eugene Ionesco |
The Pit |
2 Nov | 4 Nov | 1419 |
DEAD HANDS New play by Howard Barker |
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3 Nov | 14 Nov | 1420 |
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER Revival of Steven Berkoff adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe story |
Etcetera |
27 Oct | 7 Nov | 1408 |
FORTY WINKS New play by Kevin Elyot |
Royal Court |
3 Nov | 4 Dec | 1423 |
FULLY COMMITTED Transfer of new solo piece by Mark Setlock and Becky Mode |
Arts |
1 Nov | 1 Jan | 1416 |
H TO HE Return of solo piece by Claire Dowie |
Drill Hall 2 |
21 Oct | 7 Nov | 1419 |
HAMLET Revival of play by Shakespeare, adapted by Helen Tennison |
Rosemary Branch |
27 Oct | 14 Nov | 1415 |
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE Revival of Tim Fountain adaptation from Toby Young |
Arts |
28 Oct | 1 Jan | 1413 |
LIVING PRETTY / THE WEAVE Double bill of play by Ray Brown and devised piece |
Soho |
1 Nov | 6 Nov | 1421 |
LONG GONE LONESOME COWGIRLS New play by Philip Dean |
Old Red Lion |
21 Oct | 13 Nov | 1392 |
LOVE ME TONIGHT New play by Nick Stafford |
Hampstead |
28 Oct | 20 Nov | 1409 |
THE MANDATE Revival of play by Nikolai Erdman, in version by Declan Donnellan |
Cottesloe |
26 Oct | 26 Jan | 1397 |
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare |
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28 Oct | 21 Nov | 1394 |
OPEN HOUSE New play by Helena Thompson |
Warehouse Croydon |
24 Oct | 7 Nov | 1401 |
OWNERS Revival of play by Caryl Churchill |
Etcetera |
2 Nov | 20 Nov | 1421 |
SEED New play by Souad Faress |
Finborough |
29 Oct | 20 Nov | 1417 |
SIMPLY HEAVENLY Revival of Langston Hughes/David Martin musical |
Trafalgar Studios |
25 Oct | 5 Mar | 1389 |
SMOKING GUN / FAMILY HOLD BACK Double bill of monologues by Leslie Hill and Halen Paris |
Drill Hall |
30 Oct | 7 Nov | 1422 |
TERROR 2004 Repertoire of short pieces by various writers/adapters |
Union SE1 |
21 Oct | 12 Nov | 1412 |
TROPICANA New piece by Shunt |
Shunt Vaults |
22 Oct | 16 Jan | 1385 |
Regions
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BAD REPUTATIONS New piece by Penny Arcade |
Glasgow, Tron |
3 Nov | 4 Nov | 1445 |
BEYOND BELIEF: SCENES FROM THE SHIPMAN INQUIRY Edited by Denis Woolf |
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25 Oct | 20 Nov | 1428 |
THE CRUCIBLE Revival of play by Arthur Miller |
Edinburgh, King's |
2 Nov | 6 Nov | 1444 |
FAUSTUS Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe, adapted by Rupert Goold and Ben Power |
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2 Nov | 20 Nov | 1435 |
FIELDS OF GOLD New play by Alex Jones |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
2 ov | 20 Nov | 1440 |
HOME Revival of play by David Storey |
York, Theatre Royal |
29 Oct | 30 Oct | 1434 |
JULIUS CAESAR Revival of play by Shakespeare, adapted by John Godber |
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22 Oct | 12 Nov | 1439 |
LOST ONES New devised piece by Vanishing Point |
Stirling, MacRobert Arts Centre |
21 Oct | 21 Oct | 1440 |
OTHELLO Revival of play by Shakespeare |
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23 Oct | 20 Nov | 1443 |
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Mold, Clwyd Theatr Cymru |
26 Oct | 6 Nov | 1430 |
THE TEMPEST Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Nottingham Playhouse |
2 Nov | 20 Nov | 1439 |
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare |
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26 Oct | 20 Nov | 1431 |
THE UNTHINKABLE New play by Steve Waters |
Sheffield, Crucible Studio |
26 Oct | 13 Nov | 1432 |
VOLPONE revival of play by Ben Jonson |
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25 Oct | 27 Nov | 1429 |
A WHISTLE IN THE DARK Revival of ply by Tom Murphy |
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22 Oct | 13 Nov | 1442 |
THE YELLOW ON THE BROOM New play by Anne Downie based on book by Betsy Whyte |
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21 Oct | 6 Nov | 1441 |
YING TONG New play by Roy Smiles |
Leeds, WYP Quarry |
28 Oct | 20 Nov | 1433 |