Issue 05 - 2005
Prompt Corner 
Well, everybody else has had their twopenn'orth on Mercury Fur, so I'm not going to be left out. I don't care that it leaves no space for me to pontificate on the likes of Breathing Corpses (much better than most people say), The Lunatic Queen (much worse: even my own FT review was cut to be more charitable) or Insignificance (another solid piece of directorial work by Sam West, but one which suggests that the real spark in his Sheffield tenure may lie in programming rather than in helming individual productions). This is my space, and I'm going to be monomaniacal. Hey, at least this time the connection with matters theatrical isn't tenuous...
Responses
Miranda Sawyer's column seemed more pertinent as a Quote of the Fortnight than the online interview with author Philip Ridley I mentioned last issue, but I still recommend listening to the streamed audio version of it at www.theatrevoice.com.
There seem to me to be two main issues raised by Ridley's play, and both have as much to do with responses to it as to the play itself. The first aspect is one that I need to approach from a personal perspective, which is this: watching it, I suddenly felt old. Not because of the events portrayed, or because of my own response to them, or because I did or didn't "get" the play... but because of the rest of the audience's response to it. It has been, in effect, the occasion of a possible flip to the
right as regards my stance on the issue of fictional portrayals of extreme material and their possible desensitising effect on their audience, in particular their younger audience.
Ridley has a clear and passionate belief in the (for want of a better term) redemptive value of story, which shows through in numerous instances here as it does in various of his other works. Telling each other stories is how brothers Elliot and Darren manifest their love for each other in a world where more normal expressions thereof have died. Elliot and his gender-bending boygirlfriend Lola reconnect with their feelings for each other by recounting the tale of how they met. Darren more or less seduces newcomer Naz by telling him a drug- and memory-warped story of the JFK assassination. And, of course, the Party Guest's ultimate turn-on involves an entire fantasy narrative about the Vietnam war and torturing a child-Elvis-informer. All of these moments show the value of story to our inner lives — not always to ennobling, but certainly to intensifying effect.
At one remove
Or is it? I'm fumbling a little here, but I think that this faith in the power of story works at one remove from the story itself. As Ridley depicts their effect, the sub-stories recounted are the catalysts for the deepest human emotions which may be otherwise lost or repressed, but they're not in themselves the location of those emotions: they remind characters of their own lives and experiences, but don't excite responses towards the recounted events or figures themselves... whereas, say, the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear seems to me to operate on both those levels at once, as we respond to both the event depicted and to our individual associations with that event.
Indeed, I worry that in order to work in this catalytic way, the stories in Mercury Fur (not unlike some parts of the work of Sarah Kane) in fact require an absence of direct response: that the bigger story of the play as a whole only works if the subordinate tales don't excite such a response in themselves. This is the nub of my sudden qualms about desensitisation. I saw and heard a number of audience members who continued to chuckle not simply through the subsidiary stories but through some of the climactic enacted events as well; and this didn't strike me as wildly aberrant in the circumstances, such that I could write off those people and their responses.
I don't think John Tiffany's staging of the play in traverse is with a view to making us confront our desensitisation. Nor do I think that this is an example of a sophistication in modern, or postmodern, responses to a work, that it can be taken straight and "ironically" at once; I don't think those chuckles, at those points, leave room for arguing that there's a direct response going on at the same time. Ridley seems to think differently in that Theatrevoice interview, he contrasts some vintage anti-critic invective (of which more later) with assertions that younger, less crusty 'n' fusty theatregoers grasp his approach more instinctively.
Narrative
I don't believe that this argument — what Jim Morrison of The Doors once summed up in song as "the men don't know but the little girls understand" — holds true as regards the content of a work. It may have some validity as regards style or form (e.g. the non-linear, physical-energy-based experiences of the likes of Frantic Assembly, whose Steven Hoggett was sitting opposite me at the Chocolate Factory). But Mercury Fur is structurally conventional — it's a linear narrative — so Ridley can only be referring to the actual content. Surely that interpretative ground is much, much more common to us all. We know almost instinctively how narrative drama works, and we surely understand the events in a narrative such as this one in largely the same way as one another. That way may often be figurative, but surely we always perceive narrative firstly as narrative.
It seems to me, therefore, that when Ridley says what he says about understanding his play, all he can be referring to is the aspect of desensitisation... of, if you like, a kind of partial and selective flippancy towards enormities. But how selective, how truly conscious a process, is it? Or how much, on the contrary, is it a subconscious process that has been gradually conditioned in us and is therefore neither as partial nor as intellectually informed as we might like to claim? As events in the play move to a climax, maybe Ridley's point is intended to be that such a one-remove response, such desensitisation, can't be maintained, that you have to enter the tale itself... but I think the audience response rebuts that, and its seeing that response that has worried me. (Indeed, I think even the dedication of the published playscript is problematic: For Rod Hall — I love you so much I could burst into flames". The last line is from one of Elliot and Darren's brotherly rituals in the play, the culmination of an escalating series of declarations such as "I love you so much I could kill you and kill you"; Rod Hall was Ridley's agent. But to couple such a reference to love and violent death with a dedication to a man who was murdered last year in a frenzied knife attack... well, either Ridley didn't make the connection, or he did, and neither option strikes me as especially savoury.)
I desperately don't want to embrace the argument that, for instance, the proliferation of screen violence has a causal relationship to the increase in societal violence. But suddenly it seems to me to be a disquietingly more persuasive case, and repudiating it appears to be more of a matter of faith than hitherto: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And that awareness that the Puritans may have a case makes me feel old, and Tory, and Paul Johnson, and all kinds of things that I don't want to be. But what if they are right?
Fogey
This leads on to the second main strand of "matters arising". This one is more directly related to Miranda Sawyer's quotation. Ridley, on Theatrevoice, is impressively bilious about critics as a whole ("blinder than a bagful of moles"), and also crassly malicious: yes, all very well to laugh about Charlie Spencer tripping over a sofa, but after having been led in through an unaccustomed entrance and directed by flashlight through a labyrinth of passages which turn out to be part of the set, then out on to a main playing area which is in semi-darkness and represents a derelict, ° '. furniture-strewn flat, the odd caught toe doesn't exactly represent egregious myopia, does it? Sawyer puts the matter of alleged fogeyness more succinctly and less pugnaciously: "Where are the theatre critics that speak for me and those like me?"
She both does and doesn't have a point. Where she doesn't is in implying that the problem is generational. Look at the coverage of Mercury Fur in this issue, and you'll see that among its defenders are the mature voices of Carole Woddis, John Peter, Paul Taylor and (though he won't thank me for such a categorisation) Alastair Macaulay; some of those least persuaded, such as Kate Bassett, Matthew Sweet, Brian Logan and (at the upper limit age-wise) myself, are from the same generation as Sawyer. Nor could it be argued that we relative youngsters picked up our fogey manuals on the way in... well, the other three of us may lapse occasionally, but only occasionally, and Brian is surely free from all taint on that score.
Ramifications
But that phrase "relative youngsters" alludes to what will shortly be a serious problem, if it isn't already. We, the bunch of us in our mid-thirties through to early forties, have been plugging away for years, and with the exception of Kate, any of us has yet to land a spot as principal reviewer. The number-ones, meanwhile, have been around now for a fair old time. In his recent public lecture on the history of Theatre Record, my esteemed colleague and predecessor Ian Herbert pointed out that our very first issue in 1981 contained reviews by Michael Billington, Michael Coveney, Nicholas de Jongh, Sheridan Morley and Benedict Nightingale. While Michael B. is the only one still writing for the same publication, the point stands: room is simply not being made for the next generation to come through, in a way that did happen more often for our predecessors.
Don't misinterpret this as advocating mass enforced retirements. It's hardly blameworthy, after all, that these people have written so cogently for so long. I'm just saying that it has, ahem, deleterious ramifications. And it's now having a knock-on effect in that, as we the early-middle-aged await our turn, there are hardly any junior-level openings for those who are younger than us. How many others like Kieron Quirke are getting significant exposure? Precious few. There's a risk that my generation will come to look like Prince Charles, too old and generally too shop-soiled to be seen as palatable successors to our respective thrones when they become available... with the added complication that, in our cases, there are no Prince Williams around for the argument that the crown should skip a generation. In ten to twenty years, there could be a profound crisis in criticism.
Short-termism
Not that that's likely to matter a jot to the editors. Appointments to major theatre review seats in the past year or so have included an eclipsed politico, a parliamentary sketch writer and an Oxford chum of the editor. What these three have in common is not a keen theatrical insight, but that they are names to entice their respective organs' readership. Even the appointment of Sheridan Morley to the Daily Express seems to have been not so much due to his experience and acuity (not to belittle those in any way), but to his simply being Sheridan Morley; I think the way that paper has pratted about with his daily and weekly coverage over the past year bears grim testimony to this view. This kind of short-termism is simply bringing about a situation in which, in years to come, newspaper theatre reviewing's life support system can be switched off with equanimity. And editors will think that they're only being realistic, or even merciful, not acknowledging that it's their negligent treatment that brought about the decline in the first place.
In the meantime, where are the theatre critics that speak for Miranda Sawyer and those like her? We're here, speaking to you in the hope of establishing a dynamic dialogue rather than simply being expected to conform to your own views, which after all you already know. Isn't it more interesting to be challenged occasionally than to agree all the time? Look at those Mercury Fur reviews, and see whether they're merely dismissive or whether they argue their point. Argue back on the same substantive basis. That's what makes it fun. And it'll also, if we're lucky, keep the activity of criticism alive for longer.
Ian Shuttleworth : ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Canada?
With the music-assisted Lord of the Rings now due for a Toronto premiere, and Quebec's finest, Robert Lepage, taking time out from Las Vegas to make his Covent Garden debut in May, Canadian theatre is casting aside its traditional modesty and backing into the limelight.
Its not quite that simple: the French end of Canadian theatre has always been ready to cry its wares, and when those wares consisted almost entirely of Robert Lepage, Cirque du Soleil and the playwright Michel Tremblay that wasn't going to stop them. Lepage's early masterpiece, The Dragons' Trilogy, is retuming to the Barbican this Autumn, and should on no account be missed. Tremblay is still very much in action, though it's a while since we saw anything new from him over here.
Quiet Ones
Ws the Anglo-Canadians who are the quiet ones. Good work will occasionally turn up on the Fringe, and now we have a new Morris (Auntie and Me, The Overcoat) Panych in Sheffield, with Carol Shields' adaptation (completed by her daughter) of her novel Unless due in Scarborough next month. Unless was doing well in Toronto, where I made a brief visit last week, but the big straight play hit there is Half Life, by John Mighton, which is, I believe, coming to the Tron later this year. It starts in the scientific vein of Mighton's earlier success, the spooky thriller Possible Worlds, then changes direction to tell the touching love story of two residents of an old people's home who want to marry. For all its sympathetically realistic treatment of the fading faculties of the old, Mighton's short play doesn't take the situation quite as far as one might wish, eschewing any development of the possible relationship between the old couple's heirs, who are left in dramatic limbo. Daniel Brooks' Toronto production was well acted and assured, although Dany Lyne's minimalist settings could have given it more sense of place.
Unnecessarily suggestive
Half Life was one of a raft of Canadian plays considered for a season of readings just given at the Old Vic under the unnecessarily suggestive title of 4play Canada. As you might guess, four were read; a further nine get descriptions (and author biographies) in the useful brochure that accompanied the event, produced by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. (Dramaturgs: I suggest you ask for a copy of this from www.4playcanada.co.uk – it's got a useful supplement of contacts for Canadian playwriting in general)
The three I saw on my return from Toronto were all well mounted under the necessary restrictions of the staged reading convention, with some star names like Cheryl Campbell and Cathy Tyson lending their presence. They give some indication of the variety available on stage in Canada at the moment, where in the subsidised theatre there seems to be quite an upsurge. All three featured large casts and ambitious changes of setting.
Complete Inconsequentiality
Kevin Kerr's Unity (1918) is the most 'Canadian' of the three, a gentle story set in a small prairie town awaiting the return of its war heroes and the arrival of the devastating 'flu epidemic that follt3wed them. But just as Robert Chafe's hugely undervalued Tempting Providence, seen at the Traverse last Fringe, managed to touch on some important (and perhaps just as undervalued) universal truths in its small, Newfoundland compass, this well constructed study of four young women's initiation into the demands of life and death, selfishness and service speaks simply, eloquently and directly to us all.
Michael Healey is very popular in Canada and the US for his The Drawer Boy, another farmland piece showing the impact of a young actor's arrival on a closed rural community; on show here was his more urban Rune Arlidge, which features the women of a comically dysfunctional family – mother, two daughters, granddaughter – over 25 years. The title character, one of the daughters, is a woman of strength in her work who is fatally unable to express herself in her personal life. Much of the play's enjoyment comes from the complete inconsequentiality of several of its characters: the mother in the first act is forever diving off into scatty non-sequiturs, and her other, casually nymphomaniac daughter shows her inherited characteristics in the third. In between comes the irruption of a suitor for Rune, a monumental slob whose stories offend and amuse in equal measure. At the still centre is Rune, whose emotional inertia brings a quietly understated but none the less devastating outcome. Set as it is, in and around 'the worst cottage in Ontario', beside a leech-infested lake, the play is rich in local colour, much of it gloriously off-colour.
Totally Wacky
The third reading was of a play translated from the French of Wajdi Mouawad, who will before long be right up there in the Quebecois intemational pantheon with Lepage and Tremblay. I first met him some years ago as the author of the remarkably named Willy Protagoras Is Shut In The Toilets, a slice of tenement life that brims with vitality; I next encountered him as the director of a totally wacky Three Sisters, again notable for its energy, that managed to take enormous liberties with Chekhov while remaining totally true to the work, something observable in the late, great Czech director Peter Lebl.
Mouawad, born in Lebanon, has already established himself as a major playwright and a controversial director in his adopted country. In Scorched (Incendies) he looks back at events in the country of his birth, to tell a huge story with a positively epic sweep, in which a pair of very Canadian twins, of Lebanese birth, find out some terrible truths about their origins in the barbaric conflict which tore their homeland apart. Braham Murray had the services of a fine group of readers to energise it at the Old Vic, and I really hope that it will have a continuing life over here, best of all in Mr Murray's own Royal Exchange.
Grisly Climax
Scorched shares with the other two plays a welcome ability to find peaceful resolution in the most harsh of stories, something one might see as a connecting thread with another play I caught in Toronto, Gina Wilkinson's My Mother's Feet, a product of the same development process at the Canadian Stage Company as the Carol Shields Unless. If I'd read beforehand the damning review it received in the Globe and Mail the next day, I might not have bothered to go. I'm glad I did, because this first-time playwright (but experienced actress and director) has really got something. Ms Wilkinson deals with the seldom touched topic of child abuse by a mother, something of which one only gradually becomes aware as this at first rather comic tale of a father's obsessive love for his son emerges. The writer's skill is apparent in the way the play gathers inexorable momentum, with every scene adding new emotional layers until a grisly climax which is almost too hard to believe, yet has been foreshadowed throughout. I found it far superior to Half Life, to some extent because of the tremendously sure staging it received, with a fine set from Dieter Schurig and direction from Micheline Chevrier that brought out all the nuances of pace and level that so distinguish the piece. It's almost a two-hander, since the third actor, Jerry Franken, is not given much to do in supporting roles, but Tom Rooney as the narrator makes a splendid joumey from diffidence to paranoia – and back (there's the peaceful resolution), while Jane Spidell is stunning in the fatefully dual role of his wife and his mother.
Left Field
So there you have it: there's more going on in Canadian theatre than might meet the jaundiced London eye. 4play Canada brought four new works (the one I didn't see was The Adventures Of A Black Girl In Search Of God, by Djanet Sears – not GBS) to a total audience of a few hundred people, hopefully including some who might take them further; it also produced a handy pamphlet to encourage further exploration, describing such resources as the on-line Encyclopaedia of Canadian Theatre (www. Canadiantheatre.com) which is well worth exploring. Have a look at some of the playwrights we haven't met here, such as Carole Fréchette, whose Helen's Necklace, which I loved in French, has been translated by playwright John Murrell, or David S Young, whose work sounds particularly ambitious, including his latest, an adaptation of Alistair Macleod's historical novel No Great Mischief.
And from left field: a huge hit in Toronto, where its season at the Princess of Wales, future home of Lord of the Rings, has been extended, is a piece by Trey Anthony which started out on the Toronto Fringe: in Da Kink In My Hair, six Caribbean women in a local hairdressing salon celebrate their lives in speech, song and dance – and the public reaction has been tremendous.
Ian Herbert : ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
BABY WITH THE BATHWATER Revival of the play by Christopher Durang Bbig Wheel TC) |
Clerkenwell |
3 Mar |
19 Mar |
305 |
BREAK AWAY New play by Dameon Garnett |
Finborough |
3 Mar |
26 Mar |
293 |
BREATHING CORPSES New play by Laura Wade |
Royal Court Upstairs |
28 Feb |
19 Mar |
267 |
DOCTOR FAUSTUS Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe (Lord Strange's Men) |
Rosemary Branch |
1 Mar |
20 Mar |
306 |
THE DRESSER Revival of play by Ronald Harwood |
Duke of York's |
28 Feb |
14 May |
270 |
FANNY Revival of musical by Harold Rome/Joshua Logan/SN Behrman, adapted from Marcel Pagnol |
Lilian Baylis |
6 Mar |
27 Mar |
286 |
THE FOURTH WALL New play by Chris Leicester (Storm TC) |
Old Red Lion |
8 Mar |
26 Mar |
275 |
I LOVE YOU, YOU'RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE Revival of musical by Jimmy Roberts and Joe DiPietro |
Jermyn Street |
1 Mar |
26 Mar |
305 |
JOE by Richard Maxwell (New York City Players/BITE:05) |
The Pit |
2 Mar |
12 Mar |
303 |
KEEP ON RUNNING New musical by John Burrows |
White Bear |
8 Mar |
20 Mar |
302 |
LOSING LOUIS New play by Simon Mendes da Costa (transfer) |
Trafalgar Studios |
1 Mar |
|
67 |
THE LUNATIC QUEEN New play by Torben Betts |
Riverside |
2 Mar |
27 Mar |
276 |
MERCURY FUR New play by Philip Ridley (Paines Plough) |
Chocolate Factory |
2 Mar |
27 Mar |
279 |
MIDWINTER New play by Zinnie Harris (RSC) |
Soho |
9 Mar |
19 Mar |
291 |
THE MOST HUMANE WAY TO KILL A LOBSTER New play by Duncan Macmillan |
Theatre 503 |
3 Mar |
19 Mar |
287 |
NIRVANA New play by Konstantin Iliev, translated by Anna Karabinska |
Riverside |
3 Mar |
20 Mar |
285 |
NOWHERE TO BELONG New solo by Yasmin Alibhai Brown (RSC) |
Soho |
1 Mar |
5 Mar |
308 |
ON THE TOWN Revival of musical by L Bernstein, B Comden, A Green |
Coliseum |
10 Mar |
24 May |
298 |
PROJECT C: ON PRINCIPLE Transfer of new piece by The Work |
BAC |
1 Mar |
13 Mar |
302 |
RHINOCEROS Revival of play by Eguene Ionesco (Kabosh) |
Lyric Hammersmith |
7 Mar |
23 Mar |
288 |
THE ROVER Revival of play by Aphra Behn (Centurion TC) |
Courtyard |
2 Mar |
26 Mar |
308 |
THE SETTLING DUST New play by Ciaran McConville |
Union SE1 |
10 Mar |
24 Mar |
307 |
TEJAS VERDES New play by Fermin Cabal (return) |
Gate |
7 Mar |
26 Mar |
302 |
TRUE STORIES New solo piece by Harold Finley |
Drill Hall |
3 Mar |
20 Mar |
307 |
THE WITCHES Revival of David Wood adaptation of Roald Dahl story (Birmingham Rep) |
Wyndhams |
9 Mar |
2 Apr |
294 |
WOMANLY VOICES: New piece by Lillete Dubey from Tabbassum/Devi/Mehta stories (Primetime TC) |
Watermans |
10 Mar |
20 Mar |
290 |
Regions |
||||
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA Revival of the play by William Shakespeare |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
28 Feb |
9 Apr |
313 |
BEAUTIFUL THING Revival of the play by Jonathan Harvey (Pilot TC) |
Bolton, Octagon/tour |
11 Mar |
2 Apr |
321 |
BECKETT 2: THE BASEMENT TAPES Revivals of Rockabye/Krapp's Last Tape |
Glasgow , Arches |
24 Feb |
19 Mar |
322 |
A HANDFUL OF DUST Revival of the play adapted by Mike Alfreds from the novel by Evelyn Waugh |
Glasgow, Citizens Main |
11 Mar |
2 Apr |
323 |
THE HOLLOW CROWN Revival of the entertainment devised by John Barton (RSC) |
Stratford, Royal Shakespeare |
3 Mar |
19 Mar |
311 |
INSIGNIFICANCE Revival of the play by Terry Johnson |
Sheffield, Lyceum |
1 Mar |
12 Mar |
315 |
THE INVENTION OF LOVE Revival of the play by Tom Stoppard |
Salisbury Playhouse |
4 Mar |
26 Mar |
319 |
LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME Adapted by Trevor Baxter from the book by Oscar Wilde |
Guildford, Yvonne Amaud/tour |
7 Mar |
12 Mar |
318 |
MACBETH Revival of the play by William Shakespeare |
York, Theatre Royal |
2 Mar |
19 Mar |
312 |
MARY STUART Revival of the play by Friedrich Schiller translated R D Macdonald adapted Uzma Hameed |
Derby Playhouse |
10 Mar |
26 Mar |
320 |
MICRO MUSICALS Spittin' Distance/Jonah Boy/C ybershopping: three short new musicals |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
17 Feb |
12 Mar |
313 |
THE NATIONAL REVIEW OF LIVE ART/NEW TERRITORIES Scotland's International Festival of Live Arts |
Glasgow, Arches and Tramway |
7 Feb |
19 Mar |
324 |
PORT AUTHORITY Revival of the play by Conor McPherson |
Liverpool, Everyman |
1 Mar |
19 Mar |
318 |
SATIN'N'STEEL New play by Amanda Whittington |
Nottingham Playhouse |
1 Mar |
12 Mar |
317 |
THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE Revival of the musical by Richard Morris & Dick Scanlan ,Jeanine Tesori |
Bromley, Churchill/tour |
9 Mar |
19 Mar |
321 |
THE TURN OF THE SCREW Revival of the play adapted by Jeffery Hatcher from the book by Henry James |
Oldham Coliseum |
11 Mar |
2 Apr |
321 |