Issue 15 - 2006
Prompt Corner 
In last issue's Prompt Comer I explained that, due to the sudden illness of Ruth Keeley (the one person who really knows how the magazine works), this issue would appear at least a week late, and very likely more. The fact that it has been produced within the more stringent of those deadlines is a testimony to Ruth's dedication and determination. Whilst still convalescent, she has worked above and beyond the call of duty, not to say of reason, on the main part of the magazine, including the bumper section of late reviews missed out from Issue 14. All shortcomings in this issue are once again entirely my fault for having gone off to Edinburgh (where I am writing this column) without ensuring that alternative procedures were in place to get the magazine out. Some of those alternatives have been provided by Ian Herbert and Hannah Field, but most by the one person who should have had to do least: Ruth. I'm profoundly grateful to her for having done so, and just as deeply guilty that I hadn't made it sufficiently impossible for her to take up the reins again so soon.
Events
From this northern fastness, it's easy to miss goings-on in the rest of the world. During previous Edinburgh festival seasons, I almost failed to notice the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the attempted Soviet coup the following year. I might have remained oblivious to the arrest of two dozen alleged would-be plane-bombers this month had I not been due to travel by air that day. Obviously it verges on the ridiculous that such major events might fail to penetrate our Festival goldfish bowl. Any reviewer worth his salt has to be aware of the wider world, and where required to judge a work against that background. But when is it required, and conversely when might it be counter-productive to introduce it?
Quentin Letts' review of The Last Five Years is surprising and in many ways admirable. From someone who more usually inveighs against what he sees as modish and politically correct contemporary political and/or social considerations, it comes as a bolt from the blue to read a piece opining that at a time when so many serious events are happening in the world it simply feels inappropriate to be watching an American relationship musical.
Integration
This works, I think, because Quentin makes no bones about his subjectivity. He seldom does, but he is more tentative here than usual. He is feeling out a relationship between theatre reviewing and the contents of the rest of the paper, which is normally taken for granted: for most papers, there is no sense of integration or obligation whatever, whereas in the Daily Mail it can often feel as if Quentin's reviews (unlike his predecessors') are prosecuting the paper's main British political agenda by other means. But there are occasions when comment is called for by a work's position within the social or political vista.
I don't think this is such an occasion, to be honest. I think The Last Five Years can be faulted on its own terms in a number of ways: its characters, and by implication its audience, are drawn from a particular New York cultural milieu (the sort that relishes lyrics such as "I left Columbia and don't regreddit/I wrote a book and Sonny Mehta read it", Mehta being editor-in-chief of Alfred A Knopf and a NY cultural icon) which does not translate well to London, never mind in the context of Middle Eastern tensions and so on. It's a self-regarding, culturally introspective piece of work in absolute terms, not simply relative to the headlines of the moment. I think the first duty of a reviewer is to try to pin a work down on its own terms. Those terms will include social and historical contexts which it explicitly or consciously links with, not necessarily contexts foisted upon it by events. After all, escapism is always permissible to a certain degree. The point isn't that the escapism of The Last Five Years is made culpable by current events, it's that it is successful only to a limited degree even at the best of times. Once you've sorted that out, you can then go on to note that this is probably not the best of times.
Connections
Nevertheless, it is as I say a pleasant surprise to find such connections being made in the Mail of all papers. Now, I wonder whether in the next issue we'll be carrying a review of Medea in the light of the abolition of the Child Support Agency?
Ian Shuttleworth || ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Did You Hear me FIRT?
Two years ago (At the Back 11/2004) I last wrote about the activities of FIRT, the International Federation for Theatre Research, when they held a conference in St Petersburg. This year they met for their big event, their 15th World Congress, in Helsinki, which offered an opportunity to take another look at this noteworthy organisation.
Steadfastly indoors
It's made up of institutional and individual members, but most of the members who came to Helsinki (over 500 of them) were taking part as individual academics, though no doubt supported in their not inconsiderable costs by their institutions. For a week they delivered and listened to one another's papers, took part in round tables, got together in working groups, swapped professional gossip and, just occasionally, went to the theatre. The week's heatwave, in which most of the local population seemed to be enjoying the outdoor life of street cafes and restaurants, was stoically resisted by most delegates, who remained steadfastly indoors.
Where the Russian meeting was something of an organisational shambles, the Finns had planned this event very professionally, with its enormous programme happening on time and in the places where it was expected to happen - the lecture rooms of Helsinki University. Plenary sessions were held in the University's Great Hall, an imposing neo-classical auditorium with a semi-circular seating plan that had echoes of an Athenian theatre, or an Olivier backed by Pearl and Dean columns.
Global vs Local
The increasing availability of technical aids made many of the papers more attractive than previously, with plenty of slides and video clips to keep audiences awake, although inevitably there were still old-school speakers droning a dense text into their lectern with no sense of performance or presentation. Sadly and surprisingly, many commentators on theatre seem completely unaware of the need for their own public appearances to reflect the vitality of the medium they are researching. An object lesson was given by Lois Weaver (of Split Britches fame) in her keynote speech: herself an accomplished performer, she both entertained and instructed her audience with a lecture-performance that described her own work in some detail while reaching out powerfully to address wider, controversial issues.
The theme of the Congress was Global vs Local, a topic rich in possibilities that were actually addressed in a pleasantly large number of the contributions. No fewer than 58 panels, each comprising three or four speakers, gave the researchers a chance to talk about their work in this context, and there were not too many who simply gave the paper they would have given at any conference (Poles on Mickiewicz, Portuguese on Gil Vicente, Greeks on Sophocles, New Yorkers on Queer Theatre ...). Of course it was impossible to hear all of them - they were scheduled to happen in batches of eight - and I deeply regretted not having had time to scan the abstracts in advance and make a coherent selection. The organisers themselves had had enough difficulty in grouping the speakers, so that, for example, the four Irish papers on Marina Carr (a hot topic this year) were scattered at random, and some panels were composed of very strange bedfellows. On the other hand, the international nature and preferred specialities of the participants meant that we could have panels specifically dedicated to Arab or Japanese theatre, or to Ibsen, or theatre architecture - there was even a panel of four star acts, all from Sheffield University, talking about their closely related British theatre research.
New Scholars
The Federation has a very strong Anglo-American core, with the British Isles and North America each supplying a hundred delegates, but it is reaching scholars almost everywhere. This year saw strong representation from Nigeria, from India and from Australasia, although there was a rather surprising absence of Russian participants. The next conference will be in Stellenbosch, reflecting FIRT's desire to expand further geographically - the one after that will be in Seoul.
A section of the conference which is growing in importance is the New Scholars' Forum, where research students can present their
work at an early stage. The forums I attended were every bit as interesting as the established researchers' panels, even if some of the older generation tended to treat the students' papers as dissertations to be defended, something they would never presume to do to their peers.
Hobby-Horses
The real pulse of the Federation is beating away from the gaze of the casual observer, in its Working Groups. These keep up their relationships between meetings, coming together at conferences like this one to present themed papers, many of them destined to appear collected into a book. From the groups' titles you can deduce some of the prevailing interests in the world of theatre research today: as well as old hobby-horses and sectional interests like 'Feminist Research', 'Political Performance' and 'Jewish Intercultural Performance' you will find "(Post) Dramatic Text in Theatrical Context' and 'Theatre and Intermediality', the latter not to be confused with the proposed group on 'Digital Technologies, Visualisation and New Media in Performance'. Unfortunately, although these groups' sessions are technically open, it takes persistence to penetrate the cosy (and sometimes highly contentious) circles that run them.
All this makes the researchers sound rather dry. What impressed me about them was that their papers, while often fiendishly learned, were usually laced with welcome humour and self-deprecation. It's easy to think of them slaving away over dusty old texts, but the reality is that most of today's research is into hot current issues, with performance usually of greater interest than plays. They do go to the theatre, too, and are better informed on a world scale than many working critics about what is going on - it was an Egyptian researcher who tipped me off about a recent workshop in our National Theatre Studio.
Juicier Gems
All the same, there is more than enough jargon to satisfy the connoisseur: I leamed a lot about liminality, hybridisation and essentialism in Helsinki, and will end with a quick selection of the juicier gems from the 400-odd abstracts gathered in the congress handbook:
- This might lead to a reassessment of the traditional superstructure and re-evaluate both the concept of meaning and the embedded hierarchical system which underpins much theatre praxis.
- The paper investigates this transformation from a critical and political, as well as personal and affective perspective, tracing the movement of time and history through the embodied experiences of a white, middle-class, feminist-identified lesbian now living in a world of sexually fluid promiscuous queers.
- Both mediated and performed, new media performance dissolves the boundary between the live and the mediated, synchronically extending the audience's present through sensory immersion.
- In recent years I've become intrigued with the idea of deprivileging the visual in theatrical performance and have begun examining specific instances of aurality in performance.
- The moment of Audience, of gathering to witness, in attestation, is, as instantiation of the subjective ground of all objectivity, essential to consciousness, to knowledge, to being and belonging.
- From a historical perspective, fundamental criterion differentiating the conceptions of French political theatre is the relation bearded to the nation as the level at which problems should be apprehended and resolved.
- As with all boundaries, these thresholds are markers with dual functions: they signal not only the edge of the non-existent, but also the limits of the existent.
- The study involved 60 subjects roleplaying with a teddy-bear in Tunisia using three different communication environments.
Ian Herbert : ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
|
|
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THE BEARD Revival of the play by Michael McClure |
Old Red Lion |
25 Jul |
12 Aug |
846 |
BEAUTIFUL THING Return of the revival of a play by Jonathan Harvey (p46) |
Sound |
25 Jul |
9 Sep |
855 |
BLONDE BOMBSHELLS OF 1943 Revival of the musical play by Alan Plater |
Hampstead |
18 Jul |
12 Aug |
837 |
THE BOY FRIEND Revival of the musical by Sandy Wilson |
Open Air |
20 Jul |
9 Sep |
847 |
CHELINOT New musical by Michael Cryne with book by Daniel Byrne |
Union, SE11 |
26 Jul |
12 Aug |
854 |
DYSFUNCTION New play by Steven Webb (Deafinitely) |
Soho |
21 Jul |
29 Jul |
854 |
THE HUMAN VOICE/THE SOUND OF SILENCE Revival of two short plays by Jean Cocteau |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
20 Jul |
12 Aug |
851 |
IN THE SOLITUDE OF COTTON FIELDS Revival of the play by Bernard-Marie Koltès |
BAC |
26 Jul |
6 Aug |
856 |
THE LAST FIVE YEARS New musical by Jason Robert Brown |
Menier Chocolate Factory |
25 Jul |
9 Aug |
857 |
MARIANA PINEDA Revival of the play by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Gwynne Edwards |
Arcfola |
24 Jul |
19 Aug |
860 |
METAMORPHOSES New adaptation by Simon Startin form the writings of Ovid |
London Bubble (touring) |
29 Jun |
20 Aug |
850 |
ON SECOND THOUGHTS Performed by Marc Salem |
Tricycle |
18 Jul |
5 Aug |
844 |
THE REPRESENTATIVE Revival of the play by Rolf Hochhuth in a translation by Robert David MacDonald |
Finborough |
20 Jul |
12 Aug |
852 |
ROCK'N'ROLL Transfer of the new play by Tom Stoppard (Royal Court: p705) |
Duke of York's |
22 Jul |
|
853 |
SHE LOVES ME Revival of the musical by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Hamick and Joe Masteroff |
Upstairs/Gatehouse |
25 Jul |
12 Aug |
843 |
STAY WITH ME New play by Stuart Draper (South London Youth Theatre) |
Greenhwich Playhouse |
27 Jul |
19 Aug |
861 |
UNDER THE BLACK FLAG New Play by Simon Bent |
Shakespeare's Globe |
18 Jul |
12 Aug |
840 |
Regions |
||||
ABSOLUTELY FRANK New play by Tim Firth |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
18 Jul |
5 Aug |
863 |
HOT MIKADO Revival of the adaptation by David H Bell and Rob Bowman from Gilbert and Sullivan |
Newbury, Watermill |
12 Jul |
2 Sep |
862 |
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY Revival of the adaptation by David Edgar from Charles Dickens's novel |
Chichester, Festival |
20 Jul |
2 Sep |
864 |
TONIGHT AT 8.30 Revival of six short plays from the cycle by Noel Coward |
Chichester, Minerva |
26 Jul |
2 Sep |
868 |