Issue 23 - 2005
Prompt Corner 
Winter draws on (as a matter of fact I have, though I don't see how it's any business of yours), a whole clutch of major religious festivals rolls around again... it must be time for another brouhaha about censorship.
Inflammatory
It has been reported - first in The Times, I believe - that David Farr's adaptation and abridgement of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, whose Barbican run is reviewed in this issue, involved the excision of lines in which Tamburlaine orders the burning of the Koran and scorns Mohammed for taking no preventative or retributive action, railing against him as a false god [sic]: "Now, Casane, where's the Turkish Alcoran,/And all the heaps of superstitious books/Found in the temples of that Mahomet/ Whom I have thought a god? They shall be bumt [...] Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,/ Come down thyself and work a miracle./Thou art not worthy to be worshipped/That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ/Wherein the sum of thy religion rests..."
Farr has said, "The choices I made in the adaptation were personal about the focus I wanted to put on the main character and had nothing to do with modem politics." However, Simon Reade, artistic director of Bristol Old Vic (a position which, until a few months ago, he held jointly with Farr), where the production premiered, is reported to have stated that the lines were cut as they "would have
unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world's great religions". The burning of the Koran was "smoothed over", Reade has apparently said, and made into a more unspecific destruction of "a load of books" possibly relating to any culture or religion; burning the Koran "would have been unnecessarily inflammatory." (Simon surely can't have been unaware of the connotations of that turn of phrase.) And folk are up in arms. Allegedly. Well, some certainly are: John Mortimer spluttered at some length in the Daily Mail of November 25, despite apparently knowing neither who had produced the play (he kept referring to the RSC) nor that it had in fact already happened (he wrote of it as "to be produced"). But beyond the shock-horror brigade...?
Factitious
I find myself wondering why, when I was so fervent about the cancellation of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti less than a year ago, I feel this is a very different and almost completely factitious case.
Let's begin with Park Honan, the Marlowe biographer(!) who has said "It is wrong to tamper with the play, wrong to shorten it and wrong to leave out the burning of the Koran..." Here's the first point: the excision, such as it was, took place as part of an overall project of abridgement in order to make Marlowe's two sprawling plays performable in one ordinary evening. Cuts for performance are made all the time; to argue against them entirely, as Honan has (perhaps inadvertently) done, is to take a stance as rigorous and dogmatic as that of the Samuel Beckett estate regarding variations in staging that author's works... but to take it about the entire dramatic corpus. Or is it simply Tamburlaine which is so sacrosanct? For pity's sake, even Hamlet and King Lear get cut for performance. It's simply no big deal: only two of the eleven reviews of Tamburlaine reprinted here allude even vaguely to its having been abridged.
For cuts and changes are also made to aid comprehensibility. I've never known anyone get het up when, say, Lodovico's response to Othello's suicide is edited out: at the time of writing, the three words he utters meant that this was a sad and gory final full-stop to the chain of misprision and violence portrayed, but today, the phrase "0, bloody period!" usually gets nothing but sniggers, quite understandably, so out it goes and no-one bats an eyelid. Now, I'm worried that applying this point to Farr's cut of Tamburlaine may be sophistical, but nevertheless... It's not by any means as if all criticism of "Mahomet" and "Alcoran" was cut, so it isn't the case that sensibilities are being cravenly pandered to. It could be argued that, by "smoothing over" the most egregious of those references, the others are more likely to be heard and taken on board within the context of the play by otherwise sensitive parties, where so specific an immolation scene might have elicited a uniform, dogmatic condemnation of both it and the other allusions which in the event passed unremarked.
Whether that was a genuine factor in Farr's reasoning, I don't know. But in the context of the cuts as a whole to make this playing text, how would we know what the motive was in any individual instance? Answer, because Reade and/or Farr has been honest about it, and quite possibly more fool at least one of them for doing so. (Though I'm not entirely sure how they can both have been honest. Why such an apparent contradiction between the accounts of two men who until so recently worked together with remarkable success? Can there be some ulterior theatrical-political agenda at work?) However, they each have premises to protect: in Reade's case, the Old Vic's Theatre Royal is a Grade I listed building, and in Farr's, the Lyric Hammersmith (where he is now artistic director) boasts one of Frank Matcham's finest surviving interiors. These are factors to be borne in mind in a situation which is, as Reade rightly remarks, potentially inflammatory.
Hot topic
I remain deeply uncomfortable with the concept of self-censorship, and I have a nasty taste in my mouth even as I rehearse these arguments for pragmatism over principle. But really, this seems to me to be a non-story, sharked up because artistic censorship is currently a hot topic and with little or no regard to the realities of the situation.
One final point occurs to me. It strikes me that the outrage here from the commentariat has been rather greater than that about Behzfi - remember government minister Fiona Mactaggart arguing that such plays often ended up getting a much wider exposure as a result of, er, having their exposure curtailed? And I can't help wondering whether the more sizeable hoo-hah in this case is partly because Christopher Marlowe is a dead white European male, and Farr and Reade likewise of the culturally dominant ethnicity; whether those manufacturing a story out of this matter feel, probably subconsciously, that Marlowe is more textually sacred than a new work by an Asian British woman, and that these directors were more obliged to stand firm for "real" culture. Conservatism is often extremely accomplished at dressing itself up in a facsimile of liberal arguments for its own ends. The Devil can quote scripture. Let's listen for these same voices of shock and condemnation, shall we, next time a work from outside the cultural mainstream is censored?
Zeal
Compare and contrast the howls of protest which signally failed to greet the opening of Howard Brenton's Paul at the Cottesloe. (Perhaps they'd booked the coaches for its originally scheduled press night in October and then found they couldn't get the deposit back.) Although Nicholas Hytner received a couple of hundred letters opposing the National Theatre's staging of Brenton's work, these were received before it had even begun playing in preview, and so were possibly not the most informed critiques of the play's content.
Nevertheless, I was surprised that the reviews were relatively muted about that content. Quentin Letts is being no more than succinct when he says that, from a Christian standpoint, it is "without doubt blasphemous and sacrilegious". That said, there was nothing in the play that I personally hadn't encountered up to 25 years earlier. However, for me its central argument is neither religious nor historical. It struck me as being not so much about the allure of faith per se as about the more specific conflict between personal conviction and institutionalised structures. We see the Jerusalem congregation claiming authority on grounds of precedence and tradition - to be blunt, they knew Jesus first - and attempting to neutralise Paul's evangelical zeal by sending him off on a futile mission in which, to their amazement and frustration, he succeeds spectacularly. Towards the end of the play, the real chill conjured up by Nero has nothing to do with his absolute power or evident insanity, but rather with the plausibility of his prophecy that Christianity would become the religion of the empire: its revolutionary potential would be defused through assimilation into the establishment.
Revolutionaries
This perspective, in turn, throws fresh light on Howard Davies' decision to stage the play in modem dress. Almost all the instability in the world today is the result of opposition between established forms and institutions on the one hand and those outside such structures but possessed of zealous individual or small-group fervour. (This analysis may apply equally to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists and to neocons pursuing their own agenda from within the upper tiers of the current American government.) What make revolutions are revolutionaries.
Of course we shall never know what Paul Rhys would have been like in the title role, but we can speculate. My reckoning is that he would have had rather more charisma as a preacher than does Adam Godley, but less ability to indicate those areas in which Paul did have doubts - principally, about his worthiness or ability to fulfil his ministry adequately. I also think that Paul's remark about being "ugly" would be more generally seen as palpably absurd in Rhys's case, whereas Godley at least has the gangle and the lugholes to make it plausible as a harsh self-opinion. (I intend no insult by this; in fact, to me, Godley continues at certain moments to recall Peter O'Toole.) All told, I think Godley may well be a better fit for Brenton's Paul, since what we see in his case is an otherwise ordinary man propelled by nothing but his own certainty and fervour.
Sinister
There have been one or two calls for censorship, or after-the-fact censure, regarding Charles Spencer's review of Scrooge. I think these calls are mistaken. Charlie may have begun his review indecorously, but his focus exclusively on Tommy Steele was precisely what the production and Steele's own performance demanded. This is a show whose greatest technical feat is not any of Paul Kieve's illusions, but lighting designer Nick Richings' achievement in conjuring up a Victorian gloom over most of the stage on a number of occasions whilst still allowing Steele to be lit gloriously. I could not discern a single moment when Steele was on stage without a follow-spot trained on him. Charlie was well within his rights to take such a concentrated line and on that basis to call the show a load of little white bull.
One production which I might wish had been censored was the London opening of the Blue Man Group. This takes us back to the territory of evangelical fervour, except that in this case it's entirely artificial and engineered by a single-minded organisation. As front-of-house staff, uniformed in the show's T-shirts, whipped the audience into fervour, I couldn't help but think of the mass psychology of fascism. I know that sounds like a grotesquely exaggerated response: the Blue Men don't, for instance, identify an outsider group and urge their persecution... no, they casually do that to members of their own following, the audience 'marks". But I always find manufactured hysteria sinister, and the regimentation in this show begins before the Blue Men even take to the stage, with messages on LED arrays calculated to get the audience responding en masse with Pavlovian efficiency. It's the Blue Man Group's boast that wherever their show has opened - New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Berlin, Toronto and now London - it has not yet closed. I think it may yet become London's boast that this is where that record gets stymied.
At the Back
My first excursion on my return from a lot of foreign travel was to a conference called by the Theatre Projects Trust and the Theatres Trust on The Future of West End Theatres. Note the plural - we were to be concerned with the buildings rather than what goes on dramatically inside them. The day arose from several points of impetus. Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph has written damning the state of the West End, blaming inadequate and old-fashioned theatres for its decline as much as the surrounding streets strewn with litter (and worse). lain Mackintosh of Theatre Projects wrote a polemic in the Theatres Trust's magazine, suggesting that unqualified conservation of the existing stock might not be the best way to serve London theatre. And Anthony Field, of the Theatre Projects Trust, pops up regularly in The Stage saying 'something must be done'. Behind all these stirrings lies the Trust's own report Act Now, which called for £250 million to be spent bringing the West End's theatres up to an acceptable standard.
All three were present in the Delfont Room of the Prince of Wales, itself a glorious example of what sympathetic restoration (and Cameron Mackintosh's personal generosity) can do. They were joined by what turned out to be a most usefully representative group, skewed inevitably towards the theatre architects and consultants but including voices from every part of the theatre, from the dressing room to the auditorium itself.
Reserves
Peter Longman of the Theatres Trust, introducing the day, gave the latest news on the results of Act Now. The required millions are likely to be delivered over the next fifteen years, half by the much-maligned theatre managers themselves, the rest in equal chunks by two lottery funds (Arts Council and Heritage) and the London Development Board. Now was our chance to suggest how the money might be spent. Obviously, said Peter, we couldn't recreate the original theatres, nor would wish to, with their minimum legroom, their social divisiveness, their narrow get-in access designed for flat scenery. And their dark interiors, chipped in lain Mackintosh - it's no use slavishly copying the original colour schemes if they are to be shown in double the intensity of light. Listing of a building, lain went on, should not be a restraint on imaginative make-overs. While Anthony Field, as an ex-accountant, was concerned that there should be reserves for future refurbishment.
Charles Spencer chaired the first formal session, which was supposed to be devoted to the views of playwrights, directors, playwrights and composers. It was hijacked early on by cries for better backstage facilities, from actress Marilyn Cutts and stage manager Sylvia Carter: there is totally inadequate provision for the needs of wigs, wardrobe and stage management. On a more general note, critic John Elsom pointed out that "chocolate box" theatres were not the most suitable homes for stark modern productions. Richard Pulford of SOLT/TMA, however, made the case for the proscenium arch, recalling that a survey of the Royal Court's users had shown a strong desire to keep it. Producer Greg Ripley-Duggan made the important distinction between subsidised buildings, like the Royal Court, and the West End houses under discussion, that have to return money. The playhouses are becoming less viable and the investor base is seriously diminishing. Theatre owners have spent too much in amassing their property portfolios, with the result that their assets are seriously over-valued. Refurbishing or converting them will only add to their problems.
Rearrangement
Not all conversions need be expensive: Tim Foster talked about what he has done for ATG in creating the Trafalgar Studios out of the old 650-seater art deco Whitehall, a low-cost solution based on temporary planning permission, given for five years. The 380-seater single-raked Studio One cost around £400,000, the 92-seater adaptable "fringe" Studio 2 beneath it about half that. Another theatre architect, Nick Thompson, described what he was doing in the Gielgud and the Queen's. Not a lot in the case of the former, but clever rearrangement of the latter will bring a couple of hundred more seats and yet leave room for the 500-seater Sondheim on top, with a single foyer and box office for all three. Nick's advice on restoration was to avoid involvement with the meddlers of English Heritage as far as possible. We need a body with theatre knowledge like the ABTT theatre planning committee. A spirited contribution from director David Grindley reminded us that tastes differ - he loves to direct in the far from popular Comedy, for instance. He offered his theory that the economic balance of Chichester had been damaged when the tent used for its "fringe shows became the well-equipped Minerva - killing the audience for the 1400-seat main house in the process. He also referred to the problem of attracting actors to play in the West End. There were several suggestions that West End theatres be used more outside show time - with this conference as an example - but is unrealistic to expect much extra usage of buildings which do not know from month to month what the requirements of their main offering will be. Producer Hugh Borthwick suggested that the dark periods would be better used to get on with the improvements all the houses so desperately needed, and Paul Gane, a former theatre owner, had some interesting ideas on using VAT to fund them.
Ticket prices were the subject of much discussion. lain Mackintosh lamented the loss of differential between the cheapest and the most expensive seats. He wanted to see the return of the pit - cheap if uncomfortable seats at the back of the stalls. A genuine audience member (and paid-up fan of Darren Day) came up with several bright ideas, including a loyalty bonus for regulars like her. While Paul Webb argued that ticket prices were far too high, Richard Pulford pointed out that the most expensive seats are usually the easiest to sell - and compared favourably in price with tickets to rock concerts or football matches. This didn't go down well with Barbara Eifler, who wanted to bring her four children to the theatre but couldn't pay £50 a time for them. Someone offered the example of Ryanair, where booking early brought as many rewards as booking at the last minute.
Backstage
The afternoon session started by addressing the needs of backstage workers, who were eager to say more. The picture of life backstage in the West End is not a pretty one: inadequate toilets, limited space further sacrificed to set or lighting storage, no hooks in dressing rooms, no easy access to drinking water... Actor Clinton Greyn told us that the dressing rooms in the Duchess - a listed building, of course - are 65 steps up from the stage. And why is it, asked Sue Buckley from wardrobe, that there is never an electrician around when the lights fuse?
There was a flurry of response from the consultants: what constraints do designers impose, Ken Bennett-Hunter wanted to know. lain Mackintosh warned that there was a difference between poor theatre design and sloppy project management - one Northern theatre had lost most of its backstage facilities in an attempt to keep within budget when the lottery boys started to cut up rough. And sheer lack of footprint would make radical backstage alterations difficult if not impossible for most of the London houses under discussion. Who needs the Green Room, Nick Thompson asked. Everybody, came the reply.
Coffee
Charles Hayes of Hall Systems talked about the new demands of flying systems, which brought up questions about regulations. Richard Pulford stressed how the theatre industry had suffered from rules brought in for other industries - we had to fight our comer here more vigorously. lain Mackintosh pointed out that if the rules on gender equality were rigidly applied there would be no more counterweight flying. A couple of consultants bemoaned the tyranny of lighting and sound designers, with their ever-increasing piles of kit, and Ken Bennett-Hunter recommended the best seat in the house for sound: the one next to the sound console.
In the final session Billy Differ led a discussion on the problems of Front of House. No-one could offer solutions to the labour-intensive fifteen minutes of interval drink dispensation, though it did occur to me that a coffee machine or two might relieve some of the pressure. Billy did reveal that experiments to sell snacks in theatre bars had not been successful. The problems of the disabled were addressed, with Peter Longman pointing out that wheelchair access was still a problem in these elderly buildings. Richard Pulford reminded us that there far more disabilities than those involving mobility - for instance, the signs in the very bar in which we were sitting were almost impossible for the partially sighted to read. Indeed, it took me some time to find and benefit from the well-appointed Prince of Wales gents' before leaving this fascinating and informative event.
Contents / Reviews
London |
|||||
ALICE TRILOGY New play by Tom Murphy |
Royal Court |
16 Nov |
10 Dec |
1517 |
|
BLUE MAN GROUP New piece by Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink |
New London |
14 Nov |
|
1508 |
|
A BRIEF HISTORY OF HELEN OF TROY New play by Mark Schultz (ATC) |
Soho |
8 Nov |
26 Nov |
1485 |
|
CLEANSED Revival of play by Sarah Kane (Oxford Stage Co) |
Arcola |
7 Nov |
3 Dec |
1481 |
|
CORAM BOY New adaptation by Helen Edmundson from book by Jamila Gavin (NT) |
Olivier |
15 Nov |
4 Feb |
1512 |
|
DANNY AND SYLVIANew musical by Robert McElwaine and Bob Bain |
Jermyn Street |
10 Nov |
26 Nov |
1532 |
|
THE HYPOCHONDRIAC New version of Molièreby Richard Bean |
Almeida |
17 Nov |
7 Jan |
1525 |
|
I AM MY OWN WIFE New play by Doug Wright |
Duke Of York's |
10 Nov |
4 Feb |
1500 |
|
JOE & I New play by Laurie Slade |
King's Head |
15 Nov |
10 Dec |
1516 |
|
JUMP New play by Chul-Ki Choi (Ye Gam TC) |
Hackney Empire |
11 Nov |
19 Nov |
1499 |
|
JUST FOR SHOW New piece conceived by Lloyd Newson (DV8) |
Lyttelton |
11 Nov |
19 Nov |
1504 |
|
MERCY FINE New play by Shelley Silas (Clean Break) |
Southwark Playhouse |
10 Nov |
26 Nov |
1511 |
|
PAUL New play by Howard Brenton (NT) |
Cottesloe |
9 Nov |
4 Feb |
1491 |
|
PHAEDRA'S LOVE Revival of play by Sarah Kane (Bristol Old Vic/Young Vic Young Genius) |
The Pit |
16 Nov |
26 Nov |
1523 |
|
THE RECEIPT New piece by Will Adamsdale and Chris Branch |
BAC |
17 Nov |
4 Dec |
1506 |
|
SCROOGE Revival of musical by Leslie Bricusse, from Charles Dickens |
L Palladium |
8 Nov |
14 Jan |
1487 |
|
SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM Revival of compilation by Stephen Sondheim et al., narration by Ned Sherrin Union |
8 Nov |
26 Nov |
|
1490 |
|
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE AS TOLD TO CARL JUNG BY AN INMATE OF |
White Bear |
10 Nov |
4 Dec |
1503 |
|
| BROADMOOR ASYLUM New play by Mark Ryan | |||||
TAMBURLAINE Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe (Bristol Old Vic/Young Vic Young Genius) |
Barbican |
9 Nov |
19 Nov |
1497 |
|
3 IN THE BACK, 2 IN THE HEAD New play by Jason Sherman |
Orange Tree |
11 Nov |
10 Dec |
1507 |
|
TRANSLATIONS Revival of play by Brian Friel (NT) |
Cottesloe |
16 Nov |
1 Dec |
1521 |
|
WHEN YOU CURE ME New play by Jack Thorne |
Bush |
18 Nov |
17 Dec |
1531 |
|
YOU NEVER CAN TELL Revival of play by George Bernard Shaw (Peter Hall Co) |
Garrick |
7 Nov |
|
1483 |
|
Regions |
|||||
THE BURIAL AT THEBES New translation by Seamus Heaney of Antigone by Sophocles |
Nottingham Playhouse |
8 Nov |
19 Nov |
1533 |
|
DEVIL'S ADVOCATE New play by Donald Freed |
Colchester, Mercury |
14 Nov |
19 Nov |
1537 |
|
GREAT EXPECTATIONS Revival of adaptation by John Clifford from novel by Charles Dickens |
Perth |
10 Nov |
26 Nov |
1540 |
|
THE HYPOCHONDRIAC Revival of play by Molièrein new translation by David Johnston |
Coventry, Belgrade |
9 Nov |
19 Nov |
1535 |
|
I WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY New play by lain Finlay MacLeod (Traverse/An Lanntair Arts Centre, Stornoway) Edinburgh, Traverse |
8 Nov |
19 Nov |
|
1538 |
|
JERUSALEM New play by Simon Armitage |
Leeds, WYP Courtyard |
16 Nov |
3 Dec |
1537 |
|
LITTLE JOHNNY'S BIG GAY ADVENTURE New piece by Johnny McKnight (Random Accomplice/Glasgay!) Glasgow, Arches |
8 Nov |
10 Nov |
|
1539 |
|
THE LOVERS New play by Bridget O'Connor |
Newcastle upon Tyne, Live |
12 Nov |
3 Dec |
1535 |
|
ONLY THE LONELY New play by Tamsin Oglesby |
Birmingham rep, Door |
16 Nov |
3 Dec |
1535 |
|
PLAYING FOR TIME UK première of 1981 play by Arthur Miller |
Salisbury Playhouse |
11 Nov |
26 Nov |
1536 |
|
THE SEAGULL revival of play by Anton Chekhov in version by Tom Stoppard |
Bristol Old Vic |
8 Nov |
26 Nov |
1534 |
|