Issue 08 - 2005
Prompt Corner 
Sometimes West End theatre can be a real pain in the backside. Literally. I'd seen the repeated assertions that the West End's seating needs upgrading to the standards of the 20th century (let's not get carried away and expect it to keep pace with the calendar!), but I'd not felt qualified to comment, since I'm, well, rather broad in the beam, and so most seats feel on the snug side to me. Last month, though, I realised that it's not simply a matter of botty room. Thanks to cramped leg-room (to which my fatness is irrelevant), I emerged literally bruised from the circle of a major theatre. I was forced throughout the evening to alternate between injuring my knees by jamming them up against the seat in front, or injuring my hips (and incurring the grave suspicion of the person sitting next to me) by splaying my legs out so as to allow my knees breathing space. Arguably, it made me feel more immediately part of the situation onstage, since the play in question was Frank McGuinness's hostage drama Someone Who'll Watch Over Me. Mostly, though, what it made me feel was pain, and for days afterwards; when I found myself allocated in the even more constricted space of the Shaftesbury's circle a couple of nights later, I was physically unable to contort myself in such a way as to fit, so asked to be assigned alternative seating. Luckily, a bare week after its opening, The Far Pavilions was far from packed in the stalls.
Absurdity
I disagree with most of the reviewers about The Far Pavilions: I think that it frequently is bad enough to be enjoyable for that very reason. I not only scored consistently high in my mental games of guess-the-rhyme, but sometimes was even able to sing along to a couplet I'd never heard before. Sometimes, to be sure, Stephen Clark is being deliberately camp in his lyrics, as when the denizens of the British compound at Rawalpindi sing, "She's skittish/He's British". But it's often hard to draw the line between intentional and inadvertent absurdity.
It's as well to find enjoyment where one can in the show, for it is
just as possible to find offence. Mollie Kaye's novel is clear in its
condemnation of the casual racism of the British in
Reportage
Despite those ramifications, though, The Far Pavilions was almost the least political show I saw during the fortnight in question. The more I think about it, for instance, the more I think history will bear out Alastair Macaulay's claim that the most significant development in theatre in recent years has not been "in-yer-face" writing (which was never more than a convenient umbrella term to allow Aleks Sierz to lump together a generation of playwrights in one book-length study) but the growth of verbatim drama, from the personal of Alecky Blythe's recorded-delivery work to the public of Richard Norton-Taylor's edited tribunal transcripts... indeed, the personal and political often intertwine more challengingly in such dramatic reportage than in any amount of fictional extremity.
Even in the Northern Irish Unionist culture in which I grew up, it was unquestioned by any thinking person within a few very years of the event that the victims of Bloody Sunday had almost certainly all been innocent, and that the actions of the British army had either been the result of an immense cock-up or a staggering miscalculation in policy. Norton-Taylor's edit of the Saville Inquiry transcripts bears out that much, but goes further. My parents, God rest them, would be utterly unable to believe that there could be such a thing as sympathy for, or identification with, the ultimate Republican bogey-figure of that era, Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin). Yet, in Norton-Taylor's script and Sorcha Cusack's performance, I could for the first time begin to see that even such an unflinching hardline position as McAliskey's could have an understandable foundation in events. The play's achievement is the more impressive in that it eschews the big-name cachet of including any of the testimony of Martin McGuinness.
Manipulation
Conversely, that other McGuinness's play has always been less political than it looked. Those reviews which lament that it has "dated" since the routine of hostage-taking in the Middle East has changed in the dozen years' interim miss the point. It has always been a chamber piece, just one in an unusually dank chamber. Even the national stereotypes (overplayed for too much of the play's duration by David Threlfall, I feel) are merely means to an end; they are complexly subverted and reinforced at once as the central issue is explored: what it is to be a man, stripped of social structures and conventions but still intelligent, articulate and many notches above mere atavism. (And having said all that, sometimes the immediate circumstances are still relevant. A few months after September 11th 2001, I saw a student production of the play in which, I discovered several days later, the Irish hostage had been played by the son of Charles Glass, the real-life American Beirut hostage of that time; this had been Ed Glass's way of trying to understand at least a fraction of what his father had gone through.)
I have far more reservations about My Name Is Rachel Corrie. None of them however, are about the bias of its agenda: it's a propaganda piece, and it works powerfully as such, and I have no problems with that. No, my reservations concern the play's emotional rather than its political manipulation. The trouble is simply that, as portrayed in Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner's script, Rachel is too perfect a protagonist for a solo play: a young woman who couldn't walk down her main street without thinking of the salmon run piped beneath her feet, a compulsive listmaker (thus allowing lots of naked information into the play) whose "Five people to hang out with in eternity" are topped by the poet Rilke! I'm not for a moment doubting the genuineness of every word of this assemblage. But this is a case where life is in places too implausible for art. And its emotional manipulation becomes more and more blatant: the e-mail in which Rachel considers her future, which you just know, even without the gradually tightening lighting effects, is going to be the last main segment of the play; her final exit walking (literally) into the light, followed by an audio-taped extract of a colleague's account of her death, and topped off with a winsome video snippet of fifth-grade Rachel making a school speech about ending world hunger. By the end, I was having to remind myself that Rachel Corrie was a real, dead person, not simply an amalgam of dramatic devices. In that respect the piece does her a disservice even as it commemorates her and her beliefs.
Atomisation
I found myself defending Deborah Warner's Julius Caesar against an incandescent young friend who was inveighing that all its modish touches added up to nothing: the crowd being kept behind or let through the crash barriers as proved convenient, the flickering back-projections in the second half suggestive of a media-mediated war (if you see what I mean), and so on. Suddenly I thought that a plausible case can be made out that these things are precisely part of an overarching conception, which is precisely the modern parallel with the atomisation and directionlessness of politics. As democracy shades into empire; as things become a matter of celebrity rotuals for public consumption (such as the festival of Lupercal which begins the play); as members of the crowd are from the first allowed through the barriers in order for the politicos to make points; as those politicos alternately gladhand the people and, in private, demonstrate their utter disconnection from and lack of understanding of the people; as government - even on the battlefield - becomes the obscene combination of wooing and oppressing the people, not by turns but simultaneously... we're shown at every point precisely how much Caesar's world had in common with our own. Such a reading might also explain why I felt so little from the production: not because the play did or didn't draw parallels with the contemporary world offstage, but because it was identical with it to the point where I saw no shakespearean drama there, just everyday life.
One final, passing and digressive thought: those who find Miranda Sawyer's reference to an Aphex Twin video itselfish gratuitous and modish, consider the extent to which popular culture is routinely ignored in reviews. Virtually every review of Tristan And Yseult mentions the obvious Wagner: not one notes that the climactic, half-deapairing romantic pas de deux is performed to the accompaniment of a recording of Nick Cave, who's hardly an obscure or minor figure himself.
Ian Shuttleworth - ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Budapest?
I've just spent a week at the Contemporary Drama Festival in Budapest. If I'd been told beforehand that this would involve scenes of cannibalism, coprophagy, wife-beating, gypsy-baiting and other extreme provocations including an act of fellatio on a clarinet, I might well have stayed at home, but I'm very glad I didn't.
From the Channels playreading series at the National last year, plus another equally vivid reading of Georgy Spiro's Funland soon afterwards at the Orange Tree, it would be easy for a British observer to come away with the impression that today's Hungarian theatre is deep in miserabilist contemplation of the destructive social impact, first of the disappearance of communism, then of the arrival of European Community membership. The Contemporary Drama Festival and its attendant "off"' programme show a bigger picture, less in-yer-face, more off-the-wall, led by some brilliant directing talents and some impressive, large-scale company acting.
Underbelly
It's not a new phenomenon. Four years ago, at the same festival, you could see Arpad Schilling's astonishing Kretakor company in their hi-tech, video-toting mode, shocking us with a TV studio confrontation between two serial killers in Nexxt, or Bela Pinter tickling the Hungarian underbelly in The Gate To Nowhere, or the Mohacsi brothers staging a big-cast, non-linear riot in their provincial outpost of Kaposvar. The same groups were to the fore this year, with similar shows, and of course Katona Josef were back, this time featuring an award winning play (Collision!) from Georgy Spiro rather than one from Kornel Hamvai (Headsman's Holiday).
Pinter works appeared twice in the programme: the first, his Peasant Opera, took the musical path begun in Gate To Nowhere and followed it to become a completely sung-through show, with a fine pastiche score by Benedek Darvas supporting a soap-opera tale of rustic inbreeding, told with the innocent vulgarity that characterises much of Pinter's rough theatre. His other play, the more recent Queen Of The Cookies, is a darker exploration of an abusive father, a policeman in the communist era, and the impact of his drunken brutality on his extended family. Pinter's retreat in time, together with imagistic settings and staging tricks like the almost continuous revolving of his small stage, seem to be an attempt to raise his shocking material above the realistic commonplace (his musical contribution, muted this time, lies in the whole cast providing backing on citherns), but he lets himself down with an off-key ending in which we are led to question the motives of even the well-meaning outsider who blows the whistle on this wretched situation. All three Pinter shows that I have seen suggest a considerable but annoyingly careless talent at work.
High ritual
A new name to me is that of Zoltan Balasz, whose approach to staging is at the opposite pole from Pinter's casualness. Neither of the two pieces presented by his extraordinarily gifted Roma company was easy going: the first, Theomachia, is a dramatic oratorio by the poet Sandor Weores from 1938, based on the Greek myth of Cronos' battle with his children, the second an adaptation, also in oratorio form, of Jean Genet's The Blacks. Both featured powerful percussive scores by Laszlo Sary, rich costumes, wigs and masks by Judit Gombar and tight, precise choreography from Andras Szollosi. All these elements, together with some remarkable singing, were welded by Balasz into two evenings of high ritual in which every inch of two very different but equally stunning stage configurations was used to enormous effect. Without translation, it was difficult to judge exactly what was being said in these two pageants, and I would suspect that the Weores in particular is too wordy for its own good, but both productions stand as evidence of a striking new talent, with a strong style of his own that shows in a complete mastery of the staged event.
Found materials
The strand of ambitious, usually over-long, musically developed work from large ensembles, both rough and polished, was a running thread of the festival, offering fascinating points of contrast and comparison. Most of the groups we saw had worked together for years, yet not all of them exuded the confidence of Balasz's troupe. Eszter Novak, the only woman director represented in the festival, drew hesitant performances from her regional actors in Peter Karpati's The Fourth Gate, a cutesy stitching together of Hassidic folk tales that showed
little attempt to look at the Jewish tradition in any depth. Much
more interesting was the rough but completely disciplined energy shown
by a Hungarian-speaking company from the
Kangaroo court
Coming after the understated hints of Roma persecution in The Blacks, and the naïve but convincing energy of the Beregszasz company, the critical success of Janos and Istvan Mohacsi's succès de scandale about the Roma, Only a Nail, was not so easy to understand. The Mohacsis' company, for all their energy and numbers (there were fifty actors and musicians on stage at Kaposvar), gave a sadly stagey performance, and although hell-bent on shock came out with a somewhat superficial account of millennia of anti-gypsy feeling, in a revue-style montage of disparate scenes, linked by a Tevye-like figure who talks to God between them. The play's five scenes had some of the satirical absurdity of Monty Python, most notably the one in which groups of Jews and Gypsies bicker over the Crucifixion under the supervision of a strutting centurion, and another in which medieval villagers make ever more hyperbolic claims about Gypsy atrocities to a kangaroo court. The comic mayhem is interrupted to great effect by a scene reminding us that the Gypsies, too, were Nazi victims, when the entire cast strips for the gas chamber. Marton Kovacs's fine score, he told us, deliberately avoided any "gypsiness", but in doing so once again called into question the authenticity of the enterprise.
The influence of television comedy is also apparent in Georgy Spiro's Collision!, for which a better title might be Crash! At the Katona Josef, a large cast (again) look at the consequences of a huge jam caused by a motorway pile-up, which offers a chance to satirise everything the author detests about the new European Hungary, most of all its brash, moneygrubbing spirit of entrepreneurialism. Its edge is blunted by Gabor Zsambeki's curious choice to have all his actors play in the most exaggerated comic style. The Hungarian critics divided their 2004 Best Play award between this and Only A Nail, forgiving the fact that the one was crassly over-drawn, the other at least an hour too long.
Singing smut
More state-of-the-nation satire and even more provocation, but with proportionately more polish, came in Arpad Schilling's Kretakor company production of Blackland. With help from the writer Istvan Tasnardi, he built a series of revue sketches based on the news reports sent over a period of time by SMS to his mobile phone. A cast of thirteen in full evening dress deliver them, and the evening's impact comes from the sight of these smart young people singing smut in perfect a capella, or straight-facedly enacting quite vile scenes on Marton Agh's clinically crisp, door-lined white set - a nursery frieze around it emphasising that this is "a children's show for adults only". Always ingeniously inventive, in parts extremely, filthily funny, it also has moments of real bite that point the finger at Hungary's attitude to child molesters, Olympic cheats, gun crime, the homeless, rigged elections and (in one of the most shocking scenes of all) American abuses of Iraqi POWs. It's a stunningly competent production, all the more interesting for showing just one of Arpad Schilling and Kretakor's many styles. (The Seagull coming to Edinburgh is in another vein entirely.) And its final touch is a cod-review by one of the cast - in German - which puts us all in our place.
Schilling made his first impact with another very different production, Brecht's Baal, in which the lead character was played by a darkly charismatic actor, Viktor Bodo. Bodo has now emerged as a fine director in his own right, and his staging in the Katona Josef studio theatre, the Kamra, of Rattled And Disappeared, carefully described as "not an adaptation of Kafka's The Trial ", is a sensation. Many of the same cast who lolloped clumsily round the Katona's big stage as Collision's stereotypes reappear here, transformed into a sinister group of acrobatic psychopaths capable at a moment's notice of becoming a slick song and dance troupe. Levente Bagossy's amazingly inventive set continues the walls of the auditorium back fifty feet until they almost meet, and the play's absurd confrontations, silky seductions and horribly realistic tortures are played out over all its claustrophobic depth. Three hours of untranslated Hungarian (with a few Broadway interpolations) passed in a flash.
From these examples, Hungarian theatre today shines as one of the liveliest in Europe, completely different in scale and bite from our own, and marred only by the tiniest sense of its own satisfaction at how extraordinary it is.
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
AT THE DROP OF A HIPPOPOTAMUS:AN EVENING OF FLANDERS & SWANN Musical comedy tribute |
King's Head |
10 Apr |
25 Apr |
488 |
BELLS New play by Yasmin Whittaker Khan (Kali TC) |
Southwark Playhouse |
22 Apr |
14 May |
498 |
BLOODY SUNDAY: SCENES FROM THE SAVILLE INQUIRY New verbatim drama by Richard Norton-Taylor |
Tricycle |
11 Apr |
30 Apr |
469 |
CHAOS New play by Azma Dar (Kali TC) |
Southwark Playhouse |
20 Apr |
14 May |
498 |
CHASING IBSEN New play by Caroline Summerfield |
Jermyn Street |
14 Apr |
30 Apr |
493 |
THE COSMONAUT'S LAST MESSAGE TO THE WOMAN HE ONCE LOVED... Revival of play by David Greig |
Donmar Warehouse |
12 Apr |
21 May |
474 |
DAZED AND ABUSED Return of play by Kinvara Balfour |
Etcetera |
5 Apr |
24 Apr |
413 |
THE DEVILS New adaptation by Elizabeth Egloff of novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky |
Union SE1 |
21 Apr |
7 May |
518 |
THE EXPERTS Return of piece by Patter |
BAC |
12 Apr |
29 Apr |
499 |
THE FAR PAVILIONS New musical by Stephen Clark from novel by MM Kaye |
Shaftesbury |
14 Apr |
1 Jan |
489 |
HIGH HEEL PARROTFISH! New musical by Christopher Rodriguez |
T R Stratford E15 |
13 Apr |
7 May |
487 |
HOT PROPERTY New play by Brenda Gottsche |
Old Red Lion |
21 Apr |
7 May |
503 |
HYMNS Revival of the play by Chris O'Connell (Frantic Assembly) |
Lyric Hammersmith |
21 Apr |
7 May |
502 |
JACKSON'S WAY Return of solo comedy/performance piece by Will Adamsdale |
BAC |
20 Apr |
6 May |
518 |
JULIUS CAESAR Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Barbican |
20 Apr |
14 May |
504 |
LOVEPLAY Revival of play by Moira Buffini (showdon'ttell) |
Pleasance |
13 Apr |
1 May |
497 |
MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE New play from the writings of Rachel Corrie |
Royal Court Upstairs |
14 Apr |
30 Apr |
494 |
A NIGHT AT THE DOGS New play by Matt Charman |
Soho |
12 Apr |
14 May |
479 |
THE ORPHEUS COMPLEX New piece by Steven Wasson and Corinne Soum (Theatre de l'Ange Fou) |
Pleasance |
14 Apr |
1 May |
501 |
PAINT OVER New play by Antonio Ribeiro |
Blue Elephant |
15 Apr |
7 May |
480 |
A PATCH OF BLUE New stage adaptation by Alexa Asjes from novel by Elizabeth Kata |
King's Head |
18 Apr |
15 May |
516 |
PHALLACY New play by Carl Djerassi |
New End |
15 Apr |
14 May |
517 |
SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME Revival of play by Frank McGuinness |
New Ambassadors |
19 Apr |
18 Jun |
511 |
STATES OF INNOCENCE: Photos Of Religion/A State Of Innocence New plays by Thomas Crowe/Naomi Wallace |
Theatre 503 |
21 Apr |
8 May |
500 |
STONING MARY New play by Debbie Tucker Green |
Royal Court |
5 Apr |
23 Apr |
424 |
TRISTAN AND YSEULT Revival of play by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy (Kneehigh TC) |
Cottesloe |
12 Apr |
7 Jun |
481 |
US Return of solo piece by Tim Miller |
Drill Hall |
21 Apr |
8 May |
473 |
VANISHING POINTS New piece by Anne Michaels and John Berger (Complicité) |
German Gym, King's Cross |
14 Apr |
16 Apr |
478 |
Regions |
||||
BABY DOLL Revival of Lucy Bailey adaptation from screenplay by Tennessee Williams |
Glasgow, Citizens Main |
15 Apr |
17 May |
536 |
CHICKEN SOUP WITH BARLEY Revival of play by Arnold Wesker |
Nottingham Playhouse |
12 Apr |
23 Apr |
526 |
COMPANY Revival of musical by Stephen Sondheim / George Furth |
Derby Playhouse |
21 Apr |
21 May |
530 |
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Hornchurch, Queen's |
18 Apr |
7 May |
527 |
HEDDA GABLER Revival of play by Henrik Ibsen (theatre babel) |
Perth |
27 Apr |
30 Apr |
537 |
IN GOD WE TRUST New play by Avaes Mohammad |
Bolton, Octagon |
12 Apr |
13 Apr |
525 |
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Stratford, Royal Shakespeare |
14 Apr |
519 |
|
MYSTERY OF THE ROSE BOUQUET Revival of play by Manuel Puig, trans. Allan Baker |
Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio |
14 Apr |
7 May |
535 |
ON THE SHORE OF THE WIDE WORLD New play by Simon Stephens |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
18 Apr |
14 May |
528 |
SMILIN' THROUGH New play by Billy Cowan |
Birmingham Rep, Door |
19 Apr |
30 Apr |
529 |
UNLESS Adapted by Carol Shields and Sara Cassidy from the novel by Carol Shirlds |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
12 Apr |
7 May |
526 |
Arches Theatre Festival, including |
Glasgow, Arches |
5 Apr |
17 Apr |
|
BELLS New play by Yasmin Whittaker Khan (Kali TC) |
Glasgow, Arches |
13 Apr |
13 Apr |
533 |
THE BROTHERS VERY GRIMM New piece by Sean Tuan John and Bert van Gorp |
Glasgow, Arches |
15 Apr |
16 Apr |
533 |
CHAOS New play by Azma Dar (Kali TC) |
Glasgow, Arches |
12 Apr |
12 Apr |
533 |
DIG FOR FIRE Revival of play by David Priestley (Laboratorium-33) |
Glasgow, Arches |
15 Apr |
16 Apr |
534 |
DOUBLETHINK New piece by Neil Bennun, Ant Hampton, Silvia Mercuriali (Rotozaza) |
Glasgow, Arches |
12 Apr |
13 Apr |
533 |
KETZAL New piece by Anton Adassinski (Derevo) |
Glasgow, Arches |
16 Apr |
17 Apr |
534 |
A LITTLE LAUGH I LOST SOMEWHERE New piece by Skye Loneragan |
Glasgow, Arches |
5 Apr |
9 Apr |
531 |
SCHLOCK Return of piece by Uninvited Guests |
Glasgow, Arches |
9 Apr |
10 Apr |
532 |
SNUFF New piece by Davey Anderson |
Glasgow, Arches |
5 Apr |
9 Apr |
531 |