Issue 19 - 2006
Prompt Corner 
Normally, in this column I take my cue from the shows covered (or, sometimes, conspicuously not covered) during the period in question. I very seldom set about collecting material for this page with malice aforethought, so to speak. But I have to admit that for most of September - as far as pressures of time and house move permitted - I have been keeping watch in one particular quarter, with a view to reporting my conclusions.
Distorted
It's often been said - usually without much thought behind it - that reviewers offer a distorted view of the plays they write about: we get in free, so we're not beholden to the show, and we're paid to write about what we think rather than how everybody else in the audience seemed to respond. To which I say: on the first count, damned right, we shouldn't be obliged to productions; and on the second, any conscientious reviewer will note audience mood as well, and will consider his or her own response in relation to it. Nevertheless, it's sometimes suggested that getting ordinary punters to write reviews will somehow give a "truer" picture.
Well, this was tried in the early 1990s by the late, lamented Plays & Players magazine. Indeed, it was one of the steps on the road to P&P's demise: by that point in their decline they simply couldn't afford to pay pros, so tried to make a virtue out of necessity, with results that were patchy at best. And for the past few months, the Independent has run a spot entitled You write the reviews... (underlining and ellipsis marks included in the title), in which "civilians" review plays, concerts etc. Out of curiosity, I started keeping tabs on these reviews throughout September. I had a hunch...
Mathematical
Now, whatever the rights and wrongs of including star ratings on reviews (and as you know, Theatre Record does not include such ratings when it reprints reviews), when considered in bulk they can serve as a handy, albeit rough, arithmetical indicator of critical mood. This is despite the fact that different titles, and even reviewers, have their own methods of calculating star ratings. When they were introduced in the Financial Times, I put forward a rather recondite mathematical argument that, assuming a statistically normal distribution around the mid-point of the scale (i.e. three stars on a scale of 1 to 5, or two and a half on a scale of 0 to 5), one should expect around half or even more of the shows one sees to merit that middle mark - three stars, say, with maybe 20% each gathering two or four stars and only the occasional one or five. Basically, extremes are rare; far more often you'll see stuff that's not especially distinguished one way or the other.
So, if that theory is valid, if you take a sizeable sample of reviews and average their ratings, the mean value should be around 3, or a little under. The Independent's September theatre reviews bore out that hypothesis. The punter-written reviews, however, averaged out at over four stars.
Self-selecting
There are two main reasons for this, I think. The first is fairly obvious: as with any newspaper, TV or radio poll or debate where the public writes or phones in, the data is based on what market researchers call a self-selecting sample - people record their opinions because they feel strongly enough to do so. Few but the most dedicated are going to feel driven to go to the effort of saying something is not really worth getting excited about either way. So, unlike my statistical theory, the input from reader reviews will tend towards the extremes rather than the middle, the opposite of the standard of work on view overall. The second reason is less conspicuous, but still simple. Paying punters have, well, paid. And they want to get their money's worth. They will have bought their tickets in the first place because they expect to like what they see, and having laid out money, they will be even more keen to like it. And so they do. If I had the time (and were sad enough) to conduct further and deeper study of the subject, I wouldn't be surprised if average star rating from paying audience members rose more or less in proportion to average price paid.
In any case, the conclusion is plain. The ordinary reader may feel more inclined to trust a similar reader's opinion, as being the same species of viewer rather than the exotic, plumed criticus opinionatus gittus... but in fact the opposite is the case. Detachment is a positive advantage in a reviewer. It should go without saying, really, that an impartial judgement is more reliable than a biased one; but strangely, it's an idea that simply won't take root.
Misrepresentation
One other thing about the Independent's reader review column: on one or two occasions, a reader has reviewed a show which is still in preview and therefore on which the paper's own reviewer has not yet been allowed to pass an opinion. Quite apart from the way this marginalises the paper's own writer (as I wrote in 2004 with regard to the Guardian's coverage of David Hare's Stuff Happens and the ludicrous position into which Michael Billington was thrust), there is other fallout. Possibly that particular column's editor doesn't know about these embargos and is breaking them through ignorance rather than active disregard, but the end result is the same: that paper gets to steal a march on the competition. I'm sure that if the editors have noticed this, they're not against it. Then, of course, if it's a conspicuously positive review (as most of them are, remember), the producers of the show can paste up quotations as being from the Independent. There's a "gentlemen's agreement" in force between the Critics' Circle and the Society of London Theatre that, whenever a quote from a paper is not from its main critic, the writer's name should be displayed as well as that of the publication. Sadly, not all producers are gentlemen (or -women). I'm not by any means suggesting that the Indie is tacitly conniving at such misrepresentation, but it would be nicer still if the opportunity didn't even arise. Reviewing works best when it's done by reviewers: do the maths!
lan Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Cán You Hear Me In Nitra ?
If you want to check out the health of European theatre, there are big festivals everywhere showing today's hot hits. But if you want to be a step or two ahead of the game, you need to go to Nitra , in Slovakia , a small but concentrated event with a fine record for talent-spotting. This year's fifteenth edition saw a fascinating variety of shows from eleven countries. There were abject failures as well as brilliant successes, but what you see as a failure may well be someone else's idea of a success. Last time I visited, two years ago, too many directors were distorting European classics to show how much more they knew than the works' unfortunate authors, a tendency still present this year but to less disastrous effect. Maja Kleczewska from Poland , for instance, took Büchner's Woyzeck and gave it a harsh modern twist, with the anti-hero now a put-upon hairdresser, his victim an assistant in a bridal shop, and their oppressors either drunken lowlifes or voyeuristic tormentors from a higher, pleasure-seeking class. The essence of Büchner remains, but within an almost soap-opera setting (plus the obligatory foul language) that would place Woyzeck not as an idiot outsider, but as modern man in the grip of society's destructive forces. Since this is a Polish production, the Church is added, somewhat gratuitously, to the cast of destroyers, with a huge Baroque altarpiece, sometimes populated by writhing Bosch-like figures, looming behind Katarzyna Borkowska's extravagant metal and glass set, and providing the scene of the final, inevitable murder.
Half audibly
Two directors with fine reputations at home did little to enhance them in Nitra . Nikolai Kolyada, better known as a provocative dramatist, brought his semi-professional company all the way from Ekaterinburg to present an apparently very folksy version of The Government Inspector. Those in tune with modern provincial Russia could see it as a condemnation of the petty corruption that has not changed since Gogol's time. More detached observers might baulk at the long musical digressions, the lack of vitality in the show's cocaine-addict Khlestakov (now chalk-white in complexion, now covered in so symbolic mud) and the tyro director's poor use of a stepped stage that seemed to have been constructed deliberately to make movement difficult. Hungary's Sandor Zsoter erred in the opposite direction, with a production for Budapest's National Theatre of Kleist's Penthesilea which asked its badly costumed actors (kilts for the Greeks, smart cocktail dresses for the Amazons), marooned on Maria Ambrus's very attractive diorama of a battle scene, to ignore the audience, eschew the declamatory style that Kleist demands, move almost at random and chat half audibly among themselves for what seemed an eternity.
Another National Theatre, the Czech, arrived with a Richard Ill that turned the clock back to pre-glasnost days. Think Lyubimov for its rock star lead, think almost everyone else for the all-pervading leather coats, with bowler hats and dark glasses - or even full clown costume - for the sinister minor characters. David Marek offered an ambitious multi-level set, complete with a working lift to take Richard's victims below stage to a visible Tower dungeon, and Michal Docekal consistently failed to make use of it, creating instead a series of tedious waits for its focus to change between scenes. The Nitra audience, perhaps in gratitude for the Prague company's first ever visit, cheered this mediocre production to the echo.
Roman Polak has just been put in charge of the Slovak National Theatre, shortly to open its new building in Bratislava after a twenty-year wait, but was in Nitra with a production for his old home, the chamber theatre in Martin. You can almost see the thought process behind his Ivanov "Let's foreground the psychology: Ivanov's demons can be life-sized puppets. We can use bunraku handlers to move them. No, that doesn't give them enough to do - let's have them handle the actors too."
That, plus Vladimir Cap's yin-yang set of black and white semicircular screens, gave events a slightly oriental air, but Peter Canecky's absurdist costumes anchored them in Western modernity. Polak's cast - and puppeteers - delivered plenty of laughs, which would probably have pleased the author, but almost completely missed the core of the play, Ivanov's battle with himself and the depths of despair plumbed in his persecution of his Jewish wife.
Touchy subject
Jewish persecution is still a touchy subject in a Slovakia which has an extreme right-wing party in its coalition government, and Slovak theatre is only just beginning, albeit tangentially, to address this legacy. Nitra's large Jewish minority were sent to the camps in 1942, so it was a piquant choice on the part of the festival to stage Juraj Nvota's production, for Bratislava's Astorka-Korko 90 company, of Thomas Bernhard's anti-Nazi rant Before Retirement in the town's beautifully restored synagogue. Unfortunately, its poor acoustics defeated a strong trio of older Slovak actors, reducing a powerful indictment of hate-based nationalism to trite melodrama.
An experimental Czech approach to a similar if opposite problem, The Consolation Of The Country Path, had even less success. It seems that Miroslav Bambusek and his actors thoroughly researched the murky facts surrounding the enforced expulsion of Brno's German population in 1945, before inexplicably using them as the launch-pad for an evening of noisy, pointless trash-theatre, involving a great deal of shouting and running about but very little communication with its bewildered audience. Other experiments in the festival were both more modest and more satisfying, with the Portuguese SWAP project offering a light-show duet for dancer and computer-generated image, and Norway 's Heine Rosdal Avdal challenging the imagination of his audience one-to-one over a Box With Holes.
Peaks
The peaks of the festival came in three visiting productions: Emma Dante from Palermo explored Sicilian attitudes to death in the playful Vita Mia, with four young actors energetically circling the funeral bed. Latvia 's Alvis Hermanis followed his Edinburgh hit Long Life with another amazing piece, Sonja, which retained Long Life's attention to minute detail but used startlingly different means to affect its audience. Two thieves who burgle a deserted flat become narrator and heroine of a story (by Tolstoy's granddaughter) about a fat, ugly woman tricked into a doomed, epistolary love affair. At the end of' the story, the young man playing Sonja, who is in real life mentally disabled and completely untrained, takes off his make-up and dons his burglar kit again, leaving the audience quite stunned by his performance. Johan Simons used the actors of another National Theatre, from Ghent in Belgium , to stage his second Michel Houellebecq adaptation, Platform. It starts with a remarkable coup de théâtre, when a bomb explodes and the wreckage of the entire set falls to the stage from the flies. Simons has taken considerable liberties with the original, turning the sexual tourists at the novel's centre into a much more loving couple and letting the terrorist who finally detonates the bomb lurk throughout on the edge of the action like some avenging angel. But Houellebecq's harsh contrast between godless Western hedonism and the purity of fundamentalist fanaticism comes across even more sharply. It made a far more penetrating contribution to the debate on terror than Mark Ravenhill's jokey, solipsistic solo Product, which has gained half an hour since its Edinburgh debut but lost some precision in the process. And finally, if one may judge from the four young actors giving very truthful performances in a fine local staging of Neil LaBute's The Shape Of Things, the future of Slovak theatre seems in good hands.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
THE ALCHEMIST Revival of play by Ben Jonson (NT) |
Olivier |
14 Sep |
21 Nov |
1010 |
AMADEUS Revival of play by Peter Shaffer |
Wilton 's Music Hall |
19 Sep |
14 Oct |
1019 |
BETWEEN WORLDS New play by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt , translated by John Clifford (Melmoth Prods) |
Union , SE1 |
7 Sep |
30 Sep |
1022 |
BRUISES Revival of play by Judy Upton (Lookatme Prods) |
Etcetera |
12 Sep |
1 Oct |
1039 |
DADDY COOL New musical by Boney M and Frank Farian, book by Stephen Plaice and Amani Naphtali |
Shaftesbury |
21 Sep |
|
1030 |
DIS-ORIENTATIONS new devised piece by Michael Walling and Border Crossings |
Riverside |
14 Sep |
7 Oct |
1009 |
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED Revival of play by Simon Block based on novel by Jonathan Safran Foer |
Hampstead |
19 Sep |
14 Oct |
1023 |
FABULATION, or The Re-education Of Undine Return of play by Lynn Nottage |
Tricycle |
18 Sep |
21 Oct |
1015 |
FAIRY, MONSTER, GHOST Three new plays by Tim Crouch, inspired by Shakespeare (News From Nowhere) |
Unicorn (Weston) |
13 Sep |
8 Oct |
1016 |
FOLLIES Revival of musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman |
Landor |
21 Sep |
14 Oct |
1007 |
HENRY V I MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Revival of plays by Shakespeare, abridged by Arnold Wesker (NYT) |
Hackney Empire |
19 Sep |
23 Sep |
1022 |
HOW TO LIVE Return of piece by Bobby Baker |
Barbican |
20 Sep |
23 Sep |
1039 |
IN YOUR HANDS New play by Natalia Pelevine (First Act Prods) |
New End |
15 Sep |
15 Oct |
1004 |
THE INFANT New play by Oliver Lansley (Les Enfants Terribles) |
Old Red Lion |
12 Sep |
30 Sep |
1016 |
MARCHERS New play by Matt Morrison (New Sounds TC) |
White Bear |
21 Sep |
8 Oct |
1038 |
MARLON BRANDO'S CORSET New play by Guy Jones |
Greenwich |
13 Sep |
30 Sep |
1006 |
PIANO/FORTE New play by Terry Johnson |
Royal Court |
20 Sep |
14 Oct |
1025 |
PUMPGIRL Return of play by Abbie Spalten |
Bush |
13 Sep |
14 Oct |
1008 |
REMODELLED LIVES New play by Jimmy Barr (Jockney Prods) |
Greenwich Playhouse |
5 Sep |
24 Sep |
1029 |
THE 39 STEPS Transfer of revival of play by Patrick Barlow, from John Buchan !Alfred Hitchcock |
Criterion |
20 Sep |
|
1038 |
TOM AND VIV Revival of play by Michael Hastings |
Almeida |
22 Sep |
4 Nov |
1034 |
A VOYAGE ROUND MY FATHER Transfer of revival of play by John Mortimer (Donmar Warehouse) |
Wyndham's |
21 Sep |
|
1005 |
WHO STOLE MEE? Four plays written or inspired by Charles Mee (Collision) |
Canal Café |
13 Sep |
30 Sep |
1033 |
Regions |
||||
ALL MY SONS Revival of play by Arthur Miller |
Liverpool Playhouse |
19 Sep |
7 Oct |
1053 |
AY CARMELA! Revival of play by José Sanchis Sinsterra in new translation by Steve Trafford |
York , Theatre Royal Studio |
14 Sep |
30 Sep |
1050 |
CYMBELINE Revival of play by Shakespeare, adapted by Emma Rice and Carl Grose (Kneehigh) |
Stratford , Swan |
21 Sep |
30 Sep |
1054 |
THE FATHER Revival of play by August Strindberg in new adaptation by Mike Poulton |
Chichester , Minerva |
13 Sep |
30 Sep |
1043 |
FEWER EMERGENCIES Revival of three plays by Martin Crimp (Ankur Prods) |
Glasgow , Citizens Circle Studio |
12 Sep |
16 Sep |
1056 |
THE GRAPES OF WRATH New adaptation by Tim Baker from novel by John Steinbeck |
Mold, Clwyd Theatr Cymru |
14 Sep |
7 Oct |
1051 |
LONGWAVE New play by Chris Goode with songs by Mark Owen (Signal To Noise) |
Newbury, Corn Exchange I touring |
21 Sep |
28 Sep |
1053 |
MARY BARTON New adaptation by Rona Munro from novel by Elizabeth Gaskell |
Manchester , Royal Exchange |
11 Sep |
14 Oct |
1046 |
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Edinburgh , Royal Lyceum |
23 Sep |
21 Oct |
1058 |
MY DARK SKY New play by Tim Nunn (Reeling & Writhing) |
Glasgow , Tramway |
16 Sep |
30 Sep |
1056 |
PRAVDA Revival of play by Howard Brenton and David Hare |
Chichester Festival |
13 Sep |
23 Sep |
1040 |
RESTORATION Revival of play by Edward Bond (Headlong) |
Bristol Old Vic / touring |
13 Sep |
16 Sep |
1049 |
SON OF MAN Revival of play by Dennis Potter |
Newcastle-u-Tyne, Northern Stage |
13 Sep |
23 Sep |
1045 |
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW Revival of play by Shakespeare, adapted by Edward Hall I Roger Warren |
Newbury, Watermill |
18 Sep |
28 Sep |
1052 |
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE A HOME New play by Paul Elliott |
Lincoln, Theatre Royal / touring |
12 Sep |
16 Sep |
1054 |
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD Revival of adaptation by Christopher Serge! from novel by Harper Lee |
Leeds , WYP Quarry |
13 Sep |
7 Oct |
1052 |
TUTTI FRUTTI New adaptation by John Byrne from his television mini-sedes (NTS) |
Aberdeen , His Majesty's |
22 Sep |
30 Sep |
1057 |
TWO Revival of play by Jim Cartwright |
Perth / touring |
13 Sep |
23 Sep |
1057 |