Issue 06 - 2005
Prompt Corner
After an often frustrating week at this year's National Student Drama Festival (of which more in a separate report further on in this issue, and hence the single page of Prompt Corner this time), I've been a little exercised with The Question Of Criticism. As happens every few years, a sharp word or two in that Festival's discussions or daily magazine gave rise to a frenzy of "We've nothing against constructive criticism, but this negative stuff is not just hurtful but improper." And, of course, once stated, the position was deemed proven, so that the list I compiled by way of rebuttal, consisting of choice gouts of vitriol from the most recent issue of TR, may as well not have existed; I felt like Arabella Weir in the Fast Show sketches - "Hello, can any of you actually hear me?"
This delusion persists, even amongst those grown-ups who ought to know better, that theatre reviewing has obligations to theatre and its practitioners. As I've said before, we're simply not in the same profession: we're journalists. Most of us carry on in this line of country precisely because we care, and care passionately, about theatre; we highlight its shortcomings because we want them to be rectified and/or avoided, we inveigh against stinkers because we don't want audiences to be put off theatre altogether by such an egregious experience. (And in extreme cases, of course, it's positively an act of mercy to put a wildly deformed production out of its misery.) We may feel loyalties to theatre, but they're not integral to the work itself - part of the calling, you might say, but not of the job.
Flaccid
Hence, when confronted with poor fare such as The Fortune Club or Four Nights In Knaresborough, it's not with glee or malice that we report its deficiencies. Dolly Dhingra's British-Asian scam/heist play has been very poorly received, with only Aleks Sierz and Helen Chappell finding significantly kind words for it. For once, my natural generosity is incapable of letting me join them. Dhingra spends too long on the narratively flaccid character set-up, and doesn't do it adequately anyway: : "I'm not a type, I'm an individual!" protests one of the protagonists in what one hopes is a moment of authorial irony, but fears it isn't. And one of the characters simply vanishes from the author's sight before the dénouement.
And yet I suspect that the play might have been salvaged by a more vibrant production. Sam Marlowe and Lucy Powell are a little sniffy about Kully Thiarai's direction, but I think it deserves more particular indictment. She elicits performances which are by turns exaggerated cardboard cut-outs and static wooden fixtures. Unnecessary movement sequences (including an anticlimactic Act One finale) are inserted, and surely it should have occurred to someone that using a live mobile phone for the climactic phone conversation might lead to interference with the PA system. (Unless, of course, the noise was deliberately included on the tape, in which case it's a joke that doesn't work but just annoys.) I must, to my shame, admit to being unfamiliar with Thiarai's work; I was astounded to find the long and substantial CV for her in the programme, culminating in her current joint artistic directorship of Leicester Haymarket. I would never have believed that someone so experienced could helm such a weak production.
Disparity
Similarly with Four Nights In Knaresborough. After Piers Ronan and Demetri Alexander went to all the trouble of setting up a production company, and state candidly in the programmes that they did so in order to generate acting work for themselves, it feels cruel to be unsurprised that they find little employment elsewhere. But it's not a vicious observation. Neither is a bad actor; it's just that, in such an oversubscribed profession, there will always be more than enough who are better. Two such are their fellows in the cast, Ken Bradshaw and Peter-Hugo Daly.
The disparity is exacerbated by director Peter Farago allowing each of the central foursome to find his own playing pace and register. Even when a couple of them coincide in pace, they don't as it were march in dramatic step. Ronan delivers every line with the same gung-ho cadence; Alexander gabbles, swallowing entire syllables and rendering the rest into a consonantal stew; Daly is a slow volcano, usually dormant but threatening, occasionally spewing red-hot; Bradshaw alone finds a range of performance to match that of his character's mixture of devious intelligence, martial pragmatism and frustrated longing. This is not individual characterisation; it's lack of focus. Still, one can pay Farago's production the backhanded compliment that it matches the eccentricities of style and pacing in Paul Webb's play.
Dialogue
John Peter accurately anatomises the things that are missing from Howard Davies' NT production of The House Of Bernarda Alba (about which Ian Herbert also writes at the back of this issue); however, not even Michael Billington notices the full extent to which David Hare may simply not have been concerning himself with these quintessentially Lorquista aspects. In the first interval, my companion began fulminating against it for not engaging in a dialogue with the world of 2005 in which it is being staged; a few minutes into the second act, I realised with a start of excitement that of course it was doing precisely that. It's not just the Spanish Civil War that Hare is evoking in his unadorned version of this family drama of imperium and self-determination; it's contemporary geopolitics. His script is the continuation of Stuff Happens by other means.
Political consciousness also helps illuminate Danny Morrison's The Wrong Man, and not just the play and production. Publicist Dan Pursey remarked to me that Morrison, a former Sinn Féin luminary, had taken to referring to him as "P O'Neill"; I couldn't stop giggling as I explained to Dan that that's the standard pseudonym with which the IRA sign all their press statements.
And a final example of how criticism can indeed get things wrong: in last issue's Prompt Corner, I made some unflattering inferences from Philip Ridley's dedication of his play Mercury Fur to his late agent, Rod Hall. Philip has written to point out that the dedication was settled some time before Rod Hall's murder, and indeed referred to one of Rod's favourite lines in the play. I drew entirely the wrong conclusions, and I'm happy to acknowledge my error and to apologise sincerely to Philip Ridley and to anyone who may have been disturbed or offended by my suggestion.
Ian Shuttleworth : ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
He's got influence, the Boss - last issue's Quote of the Fortnight was a thinly disguised job application from Miranda Sawyer, and what happens next? She turns up in John Gross's slot in the Sunday Telegraph, that's what. This produces the interesting situation that, with the exception of the Sunday Express's heavily bearded Mark Shenton, all the London Sunday reviewers are now women, and young women at that.
Having been a little lax in my theatregoing this fortnight, I can use some of this space to add my thoughts to those of the last Prompt Corner, on both the age of critics and the desensitisation of audiences. It has been worrying me, too, that so many of the top posts are held by chaps who have been in them for a long time. I thought at first that this would produce the opposite problem, in that a whole slew of these jobs would come vacant almost at once, but that hasn't happened. John Peter has lost his full page in the Sunday Times, but still reports on half a dozen shows a week; Benedict Nightingale and Michael Billington presumably now use their pensioner's Freedom Pass to get to Shaftesbury Avenue, but there's no sign of them getting off the bus. Nor, in terms of their writing, is there any need for them to alight. Yet, as the other Ian points out, it doesn't make life easy for the next generation, let alone the one after that. The middle generation is quite well ensconced, with Messrs Spencer, Taylor, Macaulay and Letts (two Oxon, two Cantab) continuing the Oxbridge (male) tradition and likely to produce a similar log jam if they stay there until and beyond pension time. As for the next lot, well, here's Ms Sawyer: take a look at her first reviews next issue, and tell me in what way this voice of youth speaks differently from her elders.
Spanker Tynan
That's the real problem. Charles Marowitz has been heard again recently, rumbling from the other side of the Atlantic about the dullness of British critics (subtext: none of them is as good as I was), and while I'd rather read a Billington or a Spencer any day than the erratic Mr Marowitz, there is, let us admit, a sameness about all the writing from male and female, young and old, that you read in these pages. Some may concentrate more on the content of the shows they see, some on the manner of its performance (Ms Sawyer seems to be more interested in performance, but it's early days). All of them write cogently about why you, the reader, should see (or regret not having seen) the play they are reviewing. Seldom do they do so with the panache or the spite of a Tynan or a Shaw.
Not that I'd want to have those two back. What makes them giants of criticism is the passion they brought to their work, but Spanker Tynan did as much harm as good with his enthusiasms, as we can see after half a century, and as for Veggie Shaw, we can be glad that his bile was reserved for musicians rather than theatre people. What I do want back is someone who can write positively with passion, who can be as far over the top in praise of a play as Rhoda Koenig is in damning one. And the harsh truth is that when that someone arrives they will probably be someone we've not seen in these pages before: Victoria Segal, Quentin Letts and now Miranda Sawyer all did their apprenticeships in areas other than theatre before springing upon us.
Museum Pieces
And they will probably be exercising their passion on a different kind of theatre from that beloved by the present lot. Not the blood-and-sperm, in-yer-face theatre of which Mercury Fur is probably one of the last gasps, but a mixed-media theatre of light and colour, maybe dance and puppetry, perhaps reflecting the video-clip, soundbite attention spans of today's popular culture. It will probably respond to the work of directors who can dismiss almost anything on the current London stage as irrelevant museum pieces, directors like Arpad Schilling, Rodrigo Garcia, Romeo Castellucci, Antonio Araujo, Robert Lepage, Radu Afrim, Wadji Mouawad. Not all of these are directors whose work I enjoy, but all make you think again about what theatre can do. Several of them will be showing their talents in the UK this year, Schilling with his conventional but hugely thrilling Seagull in Edinburgh. They (and, one hopes, their English equivalents to come) need their champions. As it stands, practically the only critic actively seeking out those English equivalents is Lyn Gardner, and she is now a self-confessed middle-aged mum, even if she will still admit to the occasional orgasmic moment in the theatre. Someone who might have done the trick is Tom Morris, but he quickly got out of criticism in order to make theatre. And there's a thought: Tynan, Shaw, even Mr Marowitz are as much known for giving up criticism as practising it. Add some other big names (deserving or no): Frank Rich, James Fenton, Bernard Levin . none of them stuck it out for the pension.
Realistic Tedium
Let's turn to the other topic - how nasty is today's audience, and how much stage nastiness can it tolerate? My arteries hardened much earlier than Mr Shuttleworth's, and I was calling for self-censorship as early as Anthony Neilson's Penetrator back in 1993. Since then we've had the deification of Sarah Kane (with the blessed Billington very recently recanting to join the hierophants) and an ever more depressing parade of single mums or babyfathers shooting up in ever more ghastly council flats. Storytellers like Martin McDonagh and Philip Ridley relieve the realistic tedium by soaring into tales, but the text of Mercury Fur says that this is a very sick play indeed, with none of the redemption of, say, the wonderful Pillowman. And there are, we are assured, people out there who chuckle at it, including the new drama critic of the Sunday Telegraph, though not, I would suspect, many of its readers. Neilson has riposted with The Censor to po-faced attempts like my own to suppress creativity, and gone on to give us The Wonderful World of Dissocia. Mc Donagh produced the apotheosis of the stage nasty in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, following a path already taken by Jez Butterworth in Mojo, which demands chuckles at the most bloody of events on stage. But most of the rest of the in-yer-face school are desperately lacking in the humour that can distance us from depravity expressed on stage. And I'll say firmly that we must distance ourselves - to chuckle at Mercury Fur is to collude in its violence. It may be the job of theatre to speak out, loud and clear, against violence, even showing examples of it to make the point, which is the charitable view of Sarah Kane's juvenilia. It is not the job of theatre to join in with gleeful, chuckling approval. So there.
Roedean not Rioja
Call me old-fashioned (you're old-fashioned - Ed|) but I still think the Greeks produced more shivers with their offstage horrors than Seneca (imitated in the ridiculous Phaedra's Love) with his on-stage pies. And there's more steamy sex in The House Of Bernarda Alba than in a pile of porno movies, something which Howard Davies brings out splendidly in his Lyttelton revival. He has the same problem as previous English revivals, of creating Spanishness with a cast that will always evoke Roedean more than Rioja. He overcomes it with the creation of bonds and tensions between the Alba sisters which are played with a consummate lights-out-in-the-dorm girlishness, totally English but totally believable. He is aided in this by David Hare's easily spoken, highly colloquial translation, and although it has that benefit I myself would complain that it's too colloquial. The sisters, after all, are firmly placed by Vicky Mortimer's sets and costumes in Lorca's thirties: to hear them coming out with 'whatever' or 'per-lease', the language of Friends or Cheers is jarring.
Morningside Elderlies
Still, it's far easier to suspend disbelief behind Mrs Alba's shutters (beautifully lit, and with restraint, by Paule Constable) than on Sharman Macdonald's beach, the setting for The Girl With Red Hair. If anyone ever sets out to write a Macdonald parody, they could save themselves the trouble, because the author herself has done it here for them. 'Let's have some Morningside elderlies, preferably with Sheila Reid as one of them; let's have some gutsy little girls living out their bedroom fantasies; let's have a long-suffering woman alone who needs a bit of a seeing too (the Macdonald part) let's have the stranger who can supply the need (the Alan Rickman part). And let's have Robin Don knock up one of his all-purpose beaches.' The Don beach may have looked all right on the Royal Lyceum stage, but at Hampstead it's dangerously cramped, with the play's four-generation action overlapping too closely for comfort. And honestly, did you believe any one of the eight ever so symbolic characters thrown together to suit Ms Macdonald's ever so schematic needs? When she gets it right, there are few women playwrights who can touch her. It gives me no pleasure to announce that here, for once, she has got it devastatingly wrong.
Ian Herbert : ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
THE AMBULANCE CHASERS New play by M.E. Hassell |
Landor |
22 Mar |
16 Apr |
347 |
COCK-A-DOODLE-DANDY Revival of play by Sean O'Casey (Red Mick TC) |
Barons Court |
22 Mar |
17 Apr |
357 |
FOOTSTEPS TO THE MOON New musical by Paul Prescott and Rod Anderson (LangeHill Prods) |
White Bear |
23 Mar |
9 Apr |
355 |
THE FORTUNE CLUB New play by Dolly Dhingra (Leicester Haymarket) |
Tricycle |
14 Mar |
2 Apr |
336 |
FOUR NIGHTS IN KNARESBOROUGH Revival of play by Paul Webb (formerly Paul Corcoran) |
Riverside |
24 Mar |
17 Apr |
370 |
THE GIRL WITH RED HAIR New play by Sharman Macdonald |
Hampstead |
24 Mar |
16 Apr |
360 |
THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER: KARAGOZ & TURKISH DELIGHT New puppet piece by Steve Tiplady |
Little Angel |
12 Mar |
1 May |
363 |
HEDDA GABLER Revival of play by Henrik Ibsen |
Almeida |
16 Mar |
30 Apr |
348 |
THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA Revival of play by Federico Garcia Lorca, in new version by David Hare |
Lyttelton |
15 Mar |
30 Jul |
339 |
I'M A FOOL TO WANT YOU Revival of devised piece conceived by Paul Hunter (Told By An Idiot) |
BAC |
15 Mar |
20 Mar |
359 |
LOVELY EVENING / IN THE BLUE Revivals of two plays by Peter Gill |
Theatre 503 |
23 Mar |
3 Apr |
364 |
MUSIK Revival of play by Frank Wedekind (OSC) |
Arcola |
17 Mar |
7 May |
356 |
POOR BECK New play by Joanna Laurens (RSC) |
Soho |
14 Mar |
19 Mar |
367 |
THE RAILWAY CHILDREN Revival of the adaptation of the book by E Nesbit (Nott. P'house) |
Peacock |
23 Mar |
10 Apr |
368 |
ROSE BERND Revival of play by Gerhart Hauptmann (OSC) |
Arcola |
24 Mar |
7 May |
372 |
SHAKESPEARE 4 KIDZ MACBETH Adaptation by Julian Chenery and Matt Gimblett of play by Shakespeare |
New Players |
22 Mar |
2 Apr |
338 |
SHOWCASE New piece by Richard Maxwell |
Renaissance Chancery Ct Hotel |
14 Mar |
19 Mar |
366 |
VENGEANCE, BLOODLUST & AFTERNOON TEA: ARMAGEDDON, CUPCAKES & THE POISONOUS LOVE OF HEINER MÜLLER'S MEDEAMATERIAL, HEARTPIECE & QUARTET Revivals of three plays by Heiner Müller (iMind) |
Theatro Technis |
24 Mar |
10 Apr |
366 |
VISITING MR GREEN Revival of play by Jeff Baron |
New End |
1 Mar |
3 Apr |
371 |
WILDE TALES New adaptations of stories by Oscar Wilde |
Southwark Playhouse |
18 Mar |
2 Apr |
358 |
THE WRONG MAN New play by Danny Morrison |
Pleasance |
15 Mar |
3 Apr |
345 |
Regions |
||||
ANNA KARENINA Adaptation by John Clifford of novel by Leo Tolstoy |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
19 Mar |
16 Apr |
393 |
BELLS New play by Yasmin Whittaker Khan (Kali TC) |
Birmingham Rep, The Door |
17 Mar |
26 Mar |
381 |
BETRAYAL Revival of play by Harold Pinter |
Lancaster, Duke's |
11 Mar |
2 Apr |
379 |
ELECTRA revival of play by Sophocles, adap. Jo Combes |
Manchester, R Exchange Studio |
24 Mar |
9 Apr |
387 |
GIRL IN THE GOLDFISH BOWL New play by Morris Panych |
Sheffield, Crucible Studio |
22 Mar |
9 Apr |
382 |
HAMLET Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Northampton, Royal |
22 Mar |
3 Apr |
382 |
HEAL! New musical by Forbes Masson and Gordon Dougall |
Cumbernauld |
24 Mar |
24 Mar |
396 |
LEAR Revival of play by Edward Bond |
Sheffield, Crucible |
15 Mar |
2 Apr |
379 |
50th National Student Drama Festival |
Scarborough |
18 Mar |
25 Mar |
388 |
A NEW WAY TO PLEASE YOU, or The Old Law Revival of play by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley |
Stratford, Swan |
24 Mar |
3 Nov |
373 |
ONE DAY ALL THIS WILL COME TO NOTHING New play by Catherine Grosvenor |
Edinburgh, Traverse |
22 Mar |
9 Apr |
395 |
SABINA Revival of play by Chris Dolan |
Perth |
12 Mar |
26 Mar |
391 |
THOMAS MORE Revival of play by Shakespeare, Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle |
Stratford, Swan |
24 Mar |
3 Nov |
373 |
TREASURE ISLAND Adap'n by Andy Cannon and Iain Johnstone of book by R L Stevenson (Wee Stories) |
Richmond |
16 Mar |
19 Mar |
381 |
THE VISIT revival of play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, adap. Maurice Valancy, tr. Peter Arnott |
Dundee Rep |
16 Mar |
2 Apr |
391 |