Issue 18 - 2006
Prompt Corner 
It has to be said that theatre has not always been uppermost in my mind recently. No sooner was Ruth on the road to recovery than my attention has been taken up with an imminent home-move. The positive side of this is that I shall have enough space to co-exist peacefully with the prodigious quantities of gubbins this magazine generates; the negative side is that you, dear reader, have to take account of the second TR address change in barely two years. (Details are overleaf; to all intents and purposes, we shall have moved by the time you read this.) At any rate, on a number of occasions in recent weeks I have had to spend evenings pondering matters not so much of thematic coherence and rounded characterisation as, say, how on earth I can provide proof of address in the form of invoices when this is not the invoicing address of the magazine, and why in heaven's name P.O. Box numbers aren't portable between delivery offices in the same city.
Efficacious
However, one doesn't always need to delve deep in order to give the most efficacious impression of what a production is like. Look at Tim Walker's Sunday Telegraph review, towards the back of this issue, of the current touring revival of Me And My Girl. He finds the production's most noteworthy factor - indeed, for him perhaps its one saving grace (no pun intended) - to be a single performance, and from an unexpected source. So he spends about half his review describing what Trevor Bannister is like now, for those of us who remember him principally or only from the thirtyyear-old TV sitcom Are You Being Served? And it paints a telling picture.
It's not always necessary to give an account of every significant aspect of a show in order to make you feel you're there. Alastair Macaulay has a gift for describing voices; one can hear a line as one reads his account of its delivery. Charles Spencer also has a keen eye for detail, even if he is unjustly remembered for one occasion when he couldn't tear it away from a particular female form. Yet if you go back and read his review of The Blue Room (coverage of which begins on 1998 p1231, as you can find in your 25-year Theatre Record title index), you'll see that, contrary to popular legend, Charlie does not refer to Nicole Kidman as "pure theatrical Viagra": in fact, he's alluding to the production's atmosphere of eroticism as a whole. Yes, he describes the vision of la Kidman at some length, but as one factor among several, each of which swims into vision as you read his account of it. More than once here I've quoted Michael Coveney's description of the job of a theatre critic as being "to explain culture to itself". This is so, certainly, but theatre is not just part of a social and cultural discourse: it is, first and foremost, an experience. Sometimes we do best when we simply try, as it might be, to oblige the request of the protagonist's blind father in John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father. "Be my eyes."
Bends
And sometimes the visibility varies radically in different atmospheres. It's that time of year to start considering transfers from Edinburgh. Fiona Mountford alludes to this phenomenon in her review of Particularly In The Heartland, as do I in mine of Shamlet - neither of us having seen the piece in question when it played north of the border. I did see Heartland up there (though not in London), and I think Fiona may be too quick to ascribe its reception to the syndrome known to some joumos as "Edinburgh bends", that critical equivalent of oxygen-starvation to the brain which can result in torrents of praise for a Hungarian woman in a Perspex box, or whatever. Heartland's problems were apparent to me first time; indeed, they have been common to all the shows by young American company The TEAM that I have seen, and to a number of other companies besides.
In The TEAM I see a keen and questing intelligence, vibrant creativity, delightful playfulness and adventurousness, and of course performance skills galore as well. Every time I've seen them I've wanted to be as enthused as others. But what I don't see is focus. They have something to say, and they know what it is, and they have the nous and the articulacy to say it compellingly... but, as it were, they don't put it into sentences. I'm not saying that theatre needs to be linear and explicit, God forbid... just that, when appropriate, it could do with being a bit more so than this. Shamlet is in some way the opposite: a potentially interesting idea (perhaps) that has been hideously overdeveloped, specifically to fill a London main-show slot. Be your eyes, for this show? No, really, you wouldn't thank me for it.
Integrating
Too many ideas, or not enough... those are the pitfalls on either side of the tightrope that most theatre walks. It's rare to be able to fall on both sides at once, as Toby Young alleges of Nina Raine's Rabbit on its transfer to Trafalgar Studio 2. He has a point, though I think Raine could have solved it as well by integrating the more sombre family/memory drama with the fizzy chat as she could by ditching the former altogether. For Raine certainly has a keen ear for believable, ordinary
speech - in terms both of individual turns of phrase and the directions conversations take as a whole. She also has significant ability as a director... enough, as director of Liverpool Playhouse and Everyman's verbatim drama Unprotected, to have persuaded the judging panel of the Amnesty International Award on this years Edinburgh Fringe of the play's "refreshing lack of victimhood", when in fact victimhood is the play's whole raison d'être.
(Current plans - health, relocation and technology permitting - are to publish this year's Theatre Record Edinburgh supplement along with Issue 20. This will contain the Edinburgh reviews of Particularly In The Heartland, (I Am) Nobody's Lunch, Troilus And Cressida, Unprotected and a couple of dozen more shows. It seemed better to publish Edinburgh reviews together where possible than to publish as early as possible, even if that meant running August write-ups under the rubric of a subsequent transfer. Sorry about the delay in getting the supplement out, but at least we have been improving over the last two years...)
Astute
And it's also - as I suggested in the case of Heartland - a matter of deciding how best those ideas can be put across. Ifs important, for instance, that someone - Robert Shore, as it happens - recognises that Howard Brenton's best known work in the UK now is not The Romans In Britain, Pravda or any of his other stage work, but four seasons of screenplays (ordinarily uncredited, for some unexplained reason) of the TV spy series Spooks. And very astute work it is, too, using the standard variations on plot and character to explore contemporary issues of surveillance, civil liberties, interference in private life, state over-reaction and the like. (In much the same way, G.F. Newman made headlines in the 1970s with the mini-series Law And Order, and followed it up with a number of hard-hitting TV dramas about injustice, but his greatest success in making such televisual-dramatic indictments has been since he created the dashing, heroic figure of Judge John Deed, as played by Martin Shaw, to do the investigating on the author's behalf.)
So, in revising In Extremis, Brenton has taken on board not simply the demands and tastes of a modem audience, but in particular the kind of play that works well in the space of Shakespeare's Globe. And he's just as canny in this regard; I think Benedict Nightingale and Dominic Cavendish (the dactylic reviewers!) are ungenerous in their responses to Brenton's balancing act. Would that Harley Granville Barker had learned similar skills almost a century ago, and we would have in The Madras House a play that goes somewhere resolutely enough to deserve Sam Walters' skilful revival of it.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
No "At the Back" this issue
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
100 WORDS Series of plays by various new writers (National Youth Th) |
Soho |
28 Aug |
2 Sep |
969 |
93.2FM New play by Levi David Addai |
Royal Court Upstairs |
8 Sep |
16 Sep |
976 |
BLUE/ORANGE Revival of play by Joe Penhall (Fervent Th) |
Courtyard at Covent Garden |
5 Sep |
23 Sep |
962 |
BRIXTON STORIES Revised revival of play by Biyi Bandele |
Lyric Studio |
6 Sep |
23 Sep |
963 |
CURFEW New musical by Michael Holgate |
Hackney, Empire |
5 Sep |
16 Sep |
978 |
EDEN'S EMPIRE New play by James Graham |
Finborough |
8 Sep |
30 Sep |
972 |
FAILED STATES New musical by Desmond O'Connor and Andrew Taylor |
Barons Court |
29 Aug |
10 Sep |
971 |
HITLER WROTE 20 POP SONGS... HAVE YOU HEARD THEM? New play by Theatre de Cunt |
BAC |
31 Aug |
17 Sep |
960 |
(I AM) NOBODY'S LUNCH New piece by The Civilians |
Soho |
7 Sep |
23 Sep |
964 |
IN EXTREMIS: THE STORY OF ABELARD AND HELOISE New play by Howard Brenton |
Globe |
1 Sep |
7 Oct |
957 |
THE MADRAS HOUSE Revival of play by Harley Granville-Barker |
Orange Tree |
8 Sep |
14 Oct |
974 |
NO OBVIOUS TRAUMA New play presented by Unpacked |
Warehouse Croydon |
8 Sep |
24 Sep |
978 |
PARTICULARLY IN THE HEARTLAND New play by The TEAM |
BAC |
5 Sep |
17 Sep |
979 |
RABBIT Transfer of new play by Nina Raine |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
7 Sep |
7 Oct |
967 |
SHAMLET New play by Andrew Doyle |
King's Head |
31 Aug |
24 Sep |
973 |
THE TROUBLE WITH ASIAN MEN Return of new verbatim drama by Louise Wallinger (Tamasha) |
Soho |
7 Sep |
23 Sep |
970 |
WHEN FIVE YEARS PASS Revival of play by Federico Garcia Lorca |
Arcola |
4 Sep |
23 Sep |
961 |
Regions |
||||
THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW Revival of play by D H Lawrence |
Watford Palace |
4 Sep |
23 Sep |
984 |
GOBBO New play by David Greig and Wils Wilson, from a story by Greig (NTS Ensemble) |
N Edinburgh Arts Ctr / touring |
9 Sep |
9 Sep |
992 |
HAMLET: THE ACTOR'S CUT Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Pitlochry |
23 Aug |
19 Oct |
991 |
IT'S A FINE LIFE! New (compilation) musical by Chris Bond, based on the life and work of Lionel Bart |
Homchurch, Queen's |
29 Aug |
16 Sep |
982 |
JULIE New adaptation by Zinnie Harris from play by August Strindberg (NTS Ensemble) |
N Edinburgh Arts Ctr / touring |
8 Sep |
8 Sep |
992 |
THE KINGFISHER Revival of play by William Douglas Home |
Brighton, Th Royal 1 touring |
29 Aug |
2 Sep |
984 |
LOSING LOUIS Revival of play by Simon Mendes Da Costa |
St Andrews, Byre |
8 Sep |
16 Sep |
994 |
THE MAN WITH TWO GAFFERS New adaptation by Blake Morrison, from Goldoni (Northern Broadsides) |
York, Th Royal I touring |
26 Aug |
16 Sep |
980 |
MANCUB Revival of play by Douglas Maxwell, based on book by John LeVert (NTS Ensemble) |
N Edinburgh Arts Ctr / touring |
7 Sep |
7 Sep |
992 |
ME AND MY GIRL Revival of musical by Noel Gay, L Arthur Rose, Douglas Furber |
Plymouth, Th Royal / touring |
4 Sep |
9 Sep |
985 |
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Dundee Rep |
28 Aug |
16 Sep |
990 |
PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES Revival of play by Alan Ayckboum |
Manchester, Library |
4 Sep |
30 Sep |
986 |
TRACY BEAKER GETS REAL New play by Mary Morris, based on book by Jacqueline Wilson |
Nottingham Playhouse 1 touring |
29 Aug |
9 Sep |
983 |
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA Revival of play by Shakespeare (RSC/Edinburgh International Ffestival) |
Stratford, Royal Shakespeare |
5 Sep |
9 Sep |
980 |
TWO CITIES New musical by Howard Goodall and Joanna Read |
Salisbury Playhouse |
8 Sep |
30 Sep |
989 |
UNLEASHED Revival of play by John Godber |
Hull Truck |
31 Aug |
23 Sep |
984 |