Issue 11 - 2006
Prompt Corner 
Earlier in the evening on which I am writing this column, a fellow critic displayed surprise that I didn't know there's some kind of football match happening tomorrow. Quite apart from the facts that football isn't my sport (in fact, no sport is - it's all against my religion: I'm a devout slob) nor England my country, I found it disheartening that, say, I was considered unusual for knowing details of the songs used in Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll (for that was the show we had just seen - of which, more next issue), and unusual again for not knowing (and worse, not caring) about a sporting event, and both of these by a member of the arts/culture fraternity.
Now, I don't want to set arts and sport up in opposition to one another, nor outdated notions of high and low culture. And I certainly don't want to argue for the rarefied against the mass experience. After all, to the best of my knowledge it remains true that more people visit the theatre each year than go to a football match: it's certainly the case that more visit an arts/cultural event or establishment than a sporting one. But imagine the outrage there would be if a similar amount of newsprint and airtime were to be devoted to a month-long theatre festival. Edinburgh doesn't quite count as it's not exclusively theatrical, but in any case let's make the comparison. We're lucky to get 45 minutes a week of Edinburgh coverage on the minority "highbrow" television and radio channels, except for those programmes dedicated to stand-up comedy. In print the imbalance isn't quite as gross, but nevertheless, the totality of any paper's arts coverage is almost certain to be dwarfed by the totality of its sports coverage even during the largest arts festival in the world and when nothing special is going on in the sporting arena.
Dichotomy
The media suppliers, of course, argue that such an imbalance is what the market demands. They may even be right. Yet this is the same market in which the number of cultural visitors consistently exceeds their sporting counterparts. There exists a social climate in which the arts are perceived almost as a matter of course as being marginal and/or exclusive, despite the numbers telling a different story. This wood/trees dichotomy is all too prevalent in many areas of life: compare the skyrocketing fear of crime with the generally falling crime figures.
A non-arts-related example: several years ago, I happened to be staying with my mother when a chap called carrying out a government survey - a great omnium-gatherum affair covering everything from rubbish collection to sentencing policy, and which took around an hour and a half for my mum to answer in full. The section on crime and sentencing began with a number of general questions: do you think that the sentences generally handed down for [a given offence] are too severe, about right or too lenient? My mother, like most people, generally answered "too lenient". Then followed a section consisting of specific hypotheticals: this is the offence, this is the perpetrator, it's a first offence (or whatever), here is the range of sentencing options available (from conditional discharge through various fines and community service penalties up to differing lengths of prison terms)... which range of punishments do you think appropriate? And I watched while my mum - again, I believe, in common with the majority - chose sentencing ranges which, if anything, were gentler than those on average handed down by the courts, and in some cases gentler than the court were allowed to hand down. Because she knew the headline stories of light sentencing, but not the reality of the overall situation.
Responsibility
It's a matter of presentation, and the media have to take their share of the responsibility for creating and sustaining this social climate by means of their presentation of matters. And not just "the media" as an abstract, faceless Them: we reviewers are, after all, part of this sector. We are Them. In conversation recently about our respective viewing schedules, another reviewer remarked that he wasn't going to see a certain show as he didn't think it was the kind of thing the readers of his paper would be interested in. Surely it's part of our job to try to interest them in what we think is worth their interest rather than simply accepting their attitudes. Even the Sun, the best-selling paper in the UK, may devote its front pages to soap-opera or reality-TV names more often than to big political or economic stories, but its editors don't get repressive when Bill Hagerty reviews an un-Sun-like show such as The Winterling or The Overwhelming in its pages.
But try and argue that such coverage might occasionally obtrude outside its little assigned box, or even that the box might be bigger, and you're at best patronised as a dreamer, at worst slapped down as arrogant and over-demanding (even when it's only a polite suggestion). There's a wild astigmatism at work here. Look at this issue's Quote of the Fortnight: it comes from The Times, but titles further downmarket devoted much more space to much more vexed coverage of this notion of rewriting Shakespeare in current yoof argot. This is an outrage, they cry; why can't our young people handle the Bard's work as he (or whoever) wrote it? Who is responsible for turning out this generation of idiots with diminished attention spans and atrophied linguistic skills? To which the most succinct response is likewise in teen-speak: "Well, DUH!"
Agendas
It's a climate, too, in which governments follow media agendas rather than setting their own. Pandering to people's worries, preferences and prejudices serves no worthwhile purpose; far better to explain to the people that their beliefs may be ill-grounded... but there aren't any votes in telling folk they're wrong. So, since Britain began to bid for the 2012 Olympics and more so since it won,
government funds and Lottery revenues (which were supposed to be additional to government money but have increasingly come to replace it) have skewed perceptibly away from arts and culture and towards sport. The new dawn of only a couple of years ago, with all those great arts funding rises, has proven false. And the Olympics, let it not be forgotten, was envisaged as and continues nominally to be a festival not just of sport, but also of arts and culture. Yet read the interview with Jude Kelly, Chair of the Arts, Culture and Education Committee at London 2012, on the web site of the Department for Education and Skills, and what concrete artistic initiatives are there so far beneath all the mission-statement gobbledegook? Er, there's going to be a big boat.
Indeed, consider how the artistic and cultural programme is framed within education - it's on the DfES web site, not that of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport; the implication is that any such programme must yield useful results rather than being a good in itself. But cultural values are not merely a means to an end. They are not just another brick in the wall; they are among the foundations on which our character as a society is built. If we starve of attention the artistic expressions of those values, we will have only ourselves to blame when a future generation tells us, "Leave it out, big nose."
Reinvention
Such values, though, are sometimes longer-lasting and more portable than they may appear. Lucy Bailey's production of Titus Andronicus, for instance, cast light for me on the aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino, rather than vice versa. I understood the film director's taste for seemingly inappropriate responses to ultraviolence: not just black humour, but affectlessness. Those reviews that find fault with Douglas Hodges treatment of Titus' response to grief or horror are missing the point: when such things happen to us, we seek a response which is our own, which works for us. Among the forms that may are sick jokes (I've been guilty of the same myself on losing a loved one) and a seeming emotional shutdown until an appropriate outlet does present itself. Hodge's talent for comedy works with his characterisation here, not against it.
I'm less sure about William Dudley's design, which wraps the Globe stage in black and throws a semi-opaque canopy over the top of the roofless arena. It testifies to adventurousness and innovation, and suggests that the Dromgoole regime will not be shackled to a narrow range of options. Yet there comes a point when the reinvention of a theatrical space's configuration begins to take on characteristics of denial, as if a production is no longer working in original ways with the fabric of the venue but is trying to suppress some of its features and create others more convenient. The Globe was created with a certain kind of experience in mind; I'm not sure which side of the line Bailey's staging and Dudley's design fall on - whether they negotiate with that expected experience, or whether they cudgel it a wee bit so it fits what they want.
Authentic
Sadler's Wells was fairly efficiently remade in the appropriate configuration for its Kabuki double bill, with the traditional entrance gangway down one side. It was an intriguing experience on press night to have one or two Japanese punters in the galleries shouting spontaneous remarks of (I presume) approbation... certainly a more authentic feeling than the headphone commentary's notso-discreet prompting, "The artist might appreciate your applause at this point." I agree with those reviewers who found the onnagata performance of Kamejiro Ichikawa II more impressive than those of the ostensible star Ebizo Ichikawa Xl.
And finallly: on the wall beside one of the escalators at London Bridge Underground station are posters for no fewer than 21 stage productions. (All right: 20 stage productions plus the recent The Sultan's Elephant.) Is this a record?
At the Back
Can you hear me in Novi Sad?
I suppose I'd better tell you about this year's Sterijino Pozorje. It is the festival which hosted the symposium I described last issue, and is made up of a competition to find the year's best in Serbian theatre, together with a broader international programme, Circles. This year was the 200th anniversary of the birth and the 150th anniversary of the death of the Serbian playwright, Jovan Sterija Popovic, who gives his name to both the festival and the National Theatre of Novi Sad where it is held. Sterija wrote satirical comedies about the bourgeoisie of his time, much loved in Serbia but little known outside the country. One turned up in the festival, but only after I'd left, along with a revival of a play about another national hero enjoying an anniversary, the scientific genius Nicola Tesla. While I was there we had three pictures of Serbian life today, two describing that bourgeoisie which many Serbs will claim to have disappeared long ago but still appears to be thriving, one about the disaffected youth that have populated European stages to an almost insufferable degree over the last decade: Filip Vujosevic's Halflife is Serb-specific in that it takes place in a vast unfinished metro terminus in Belgrade that can be seen as a symbol of thwarted national ambition, but its pinball-playing kids are universal.
Icon
National icon Biljana Srbljanovic is so important that her new play, Locusts, was presented by two companies, one Serb, one Croat. I don't know what the Youth Theatre of Zagreb did with it, but the Yugoslav Drama Theatre from Belgrade made heavy weather of it in a superficially slick, jazz-backed series of episodes that moved very slowly and lacked any real drive. The play's characters are mostly media types, selfish and ambitious, apart from one strange young woman who apparently has the power to read minds. The young are almost uniformly indifferent to their older relatives, to the extent that one pair of siblings try to abandon their demented father beside the motorway. Issues of local importance, like the perpetual question of who betrayed whom in the communist era, bubble away near the surface, but the overall impression of the play is of a minor soap opera, blown up by its theme of death and ageing to a significance which it cannot really justify. It's a surprise that so weak a staging should have come from one of the country's most successful directors, Dejan Mijac; his heart did not appear to be in his work. The one worthwhile performance of the evening came from Jasmina Avramovic as a middle-aged daughter, unable to admit her age and anxious to avoid becoming her mother's carer.
Nebojsa Romcevic's The Paradox, in contrast, was a great deal bouncier. Using the language of farce it looks at the inertia of Serb intellectuals in the face of the upheavals that have racked the country - something implied but not really explored by Biljana Srbljanovic. The play, a revival, takes place on one single night, when Milosevic was toppled. Kata has abandoned her thesis for a life of TV-watching and pill-popping, and her husband Leka is her rival in lethargy. They are forced into action, however, by the arrival of the rock icon Superbaby and her lover the Minister, both seeking sanctuary from vengeful crowds. Matters escalate in the best farcical tradition, with Kata dressing up as Superbaby only to be beaten up herself, but the end of the play sees the couple settling back in front of their TV. Romcevic aims at easy targets, but hits them squarely.
Extremes
Three modest plays and a couple of classic revivals posing as the best
of a year's Serbian theatre is a statement in itself. Fortunately, the
visiting companies provided rather more interest. The Circles selections
all came from neighbouring Middle Europe, and reflected some of the ideas
of nationalism that are swirling around the area under the impetus of
EU enlargement and an ongoing consciousness of the holocaust. The two
Hungarian offerings provided a good contrast, Arpad Schilling's Krétakör
company all elegance and sharp, often very offensive satire in their BLACKIand, Bela
Pinter's ex‑
amateurs slopping amiably about the stage in his ironic Peasant Opera. Both
used music very well, with Kretakor mixing deft a capella and
raucous band numbers, while Pinter's company sang deadpan to a mixture
of Bach-like continuo and gypsy orchestra. Between them they offered
a bleak picture of the two extremes of life in present day Hungary, urban
and rural.
To programme Srecko Fiser's Meanwhile, a sprawling odyssey based on Primo Levi's account of his return from Auschwitz, immediately after the short, sharp shocks of BLACKIand did no favours to the Slovenian National theatre from Nova Gorica. An award winner in its own country, the production found difficulty in establishing a satisfactory tone in Novi Sad. Levi's The Truce is full of gallows humour, but a play which starts with the disposal of piles of bodies is doomed to remain overcast, and Janusz Kica's monochrome, intense production did not seem to escape from under this sombre cloud. I gave up half way through - a mistake, since I am assured that the second half was very different.
Collaboration
More holocaust memories were stirred with the Serbian revival of Thomas Bernhardt's Heldenplatz, the play which marked this acerbic writer's final break with his Austrian homeland. Like Paradox it reverberates around one seminal day, this time in 1938, when Hitler addressed a rapturous Viennese crowd in Heroes' Square, but it is recalled in disturbed inner flashback by the widow of a Jewish professor who had returned after wartime exile to live in a house overlooking that fateful scene. A little like the heroine of Miller's Broken Glass, she empathises with a distant but cataclysmic event to the point of mental breakdown. Bernhardt is not an easy writer, even when one has the language to follow his erratic thought-trains, but this long evening in Serbian held the attention throughout, as a result of a series of riveting performances from a cast directed by Dejan Mijac, resoundingly retuming to form. Even in the smallest role, Paulina Manov's flirty housemaid gave meaning to her every movement with hardly a word of text.
A less oblique examination of collaboration, Tiso, written and directed by Rastislav Ballek for Arena Theatre, Bratislava, was even more remarkable. What starts out as a literal act of confession from Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest who as president of the Nazis' puppet state of Slovakia sent that country's Jews to their deaths, becomes a profound study of his motives in a rich performance from Marian Labuda that confirms my view of the older generation of Slovak actors as some of the best in Europe. As the play proceeds he is joined by a black-clad chorus, at first singing rousing patriotic songs, later turning their backs to display the blank masks and yellow stars of Tiso's victims and sound a deeply moving, wordless lament as they board their trains.
Finally, a bold experiment saw a new play commissioned by the festival from its resident theatre company. Poet and playwright Milena Markovic adapted a folk tale previously used by Sterija to give us Simeon the Foundling, a faintly Oedipal story of a young man brought up by monks who finds himself sleeping with his own mother. In a production which was not so much kitchen sink as everything but, the young Slovene director Torni Janezic filled a big stage with two carp pools, horses, goats, geese, singing monks, a working toilet and a pretty full orchestra to give the play's first half the teeming rural realism in which our hero grows up. The second presented his maturity in a sparer, greyer light, with a transport theme graduating from the hero's travels on a bike and later a scooter to the arrival of a Mercedes on stage. Janezic is certainly a director to watch: we can only hope that in his next production he will not behave as if he fears it's his last, and put his commendable instinct for the big effect to more profitable use.
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
AFTER HAGGERTY Revival of play by David Mercer |
Finborough |
25 May |
17 Jun |
621 |
CLEVER DICK New play by Crispin Whittell |
Hampstead |
23 May |
24 Jun |
613 |
THE DAUGHTER New play by The Wedding Collective |
Old Truman Brewery |
24 May |
11 Jun |
622 |
DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe (angels in the architecture) |
St Barnabas Chapel |
2 Jun |
24 Jun |
643 |
FAIR Return of play by Joy Wilkinson (Floodtide) |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
26 May |
17 Jun |
626 |
THE FIELD Revival of play by John B Keane |
Tricycle |
31 May |
1 Jul |
635 |
HAMLET, THE OUTSIDER / MALVOLIO AND HIS MASTERS Double-bill based on plays by Shakespeare |
Southwark Playhouse |
23 May |
10 Jun |
627 |
HEAR AND NOW New piece by Lara Foot Newton and Lionel Newton |
Gate |
1 Jun |
24 Jun |
641 |
IMOGEN Return of play by Toby Clarke |
Warehouse Croydon |
26 May |
11 Jun |
642 |
KABUKI Double bill including Fuji Musume and Kasane |
Sadler's Wells |
31 May |
11 Jun |
638 |
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN Revival of play by Oscar Wilde |
Landor |
31 May |
17 Jun |
637 |
PUNCH ME IN THE STOMACH New play by Deb Filler |
Drill Hall |
21 May |
4 Jun |
616 |
RED LADIES New piece by the Clod Ensemble |
Hackney Empire, Bullion |
1 Jun |
10 Jun |
634 |
SCRATCH New play by Zoe Simon |
White Bear |
23 May |
11 Jun |
625 |
SIT AND SHIVER New play by Steven Berkoff |
New End |
29 May |
2 Jul |
628 |
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE Transfer of musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine |
Wyndham's |
23 May |
617 |
|
THIS TO THIS New play by Jackie Kane (London Ensemble) |
Union SE1 |
25 May |
17 Jun |
625 |
TITUS ANDRONICUS Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Globe |
30 May |
6 Oct |
630 |
Regions |
||||
ANIMAL FARM Revival of Peter Hall/Adrian Mitchell/Richard Peaslee musical adap. from George Orwell |
Derby Playhouse |
1 Jun |
24 Jun |
647 |
Bank of Scotland Children's International Theatre Festival, including:The Brave Tin Soldier, A Clean Sweep, A Cloud's Journey, The Giraffe's Journey, Goodbye Mr Muffin, The Little Match Girl, Love, Monkey, Psst!, Scribble, Shopping For Shoes, Them With Tails, Triple Bill |
Edinburgh, various / touring |
23 May |
6 Jun |
653 |
Brighton Festival, including: Evocation Of Papa Mas, The Lost And Found Orchestra, An Oak Tree, Souterrain |
Brighton, various |
6 May |
28 May |
648 |
DON QUIXOTE New adaptation by Martin Danziger from novel by Miguel de Cervantes |
North Edinburgh Arts Ctr / touring |
1 Jun |
1 Jun |
653 |
HOBSON'S CHOICE Revival of play by Harold Brighouse |
Newbury, Watermill |
22 May |
8 Jul |
644 |
THE LADY OF LEISURE Revival of play (The Mollusc) by Hubert Henry Davies |
Liverpool Playhouse |
16 May |
3 Jun |
644 |
POOR MRS PEPYS Revival of play by Vanessa Brooks |
Newcastle-under-Lyme, New Vic |
2 Jun |
17 Jun |
648 |
PYGMALION Revival of play by George Bernard Shaw |
York, Theatre Royal |
31 May |
17 Jun |
647 |
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER Revival of play by Oliver Goldsmith |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
22 May |
1 Jul |
645 |
SPEED-THE-PLOW Revival of play by David Mamet |
Manchester, Library |
22 May |
17 Jun |
646 |
