Issue 20, 2006
Prompt Corner 
I don't think I've ever seen such a diversity of opinion about a show as there has been about Wicked. As I keep saying, Theatre Record does not reprint star ratings on reviews, but consider this: on the same day, the Sunday Telegraph gave Stephen Schwartz's Oz musical five stars, the Mail on Sunday none at all. That's an even greater disagreement than I got in the reviews for my own 1998 Edinburgh Fringe show (when "You can't survive the Festival without seeing this show" contrasted starkly with "Like a dog returning to its own vomit").
I must admit I loathed the event of Wicked's opening night: the artificial generation of a jostling crowd by the possibly downright illegal means of locking several of the theatre's doors, the whooping, glitzy audience (and not just because I naturally tend towards the slovenly myself). The woman sitting next to me was so heavily perfumed that my mild, occasional allergy reactivated with some strength: I had to turn my head away at the end of each number, knowing that her fervent applause would send another cloud of pongy allergens wafting over me.
Unashamed
And yet, the more I've considered the show itself, the more favourably I have found myself thinking of it. It may be true, as Nicholas de Jongh and Alastair Macaulay remark, that the music is the least vital part of this musical. But I felt decently refreshed by Schwartz's unashamed tendency towards the idioms of pop rather than those of the contemporary stage musical. (I find that the imitators and successors of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, unlike the men themselves, seldom have much of a way with a tune.)
To those who find the script's message of tolerance and liberal niceness too obvious to need repeating, I can only ask: if not now, when? Britain has all but followed the United States into a climate of political discourse in which "liberal" is a smear-word, and the recent "debate" about the Muslim veil shows that we, too, are in the process of accepting a manufactured "Them" to contrast with "Us". And surely the character of the Wizard himself - a well-meaning man, but so convinced of his own rightness that he can never even hear other points of view properly as he smilingly imposes far too extreme measures - resonates more deeply in the UK right now than anywhere else.
Infernal
My ambivalence about The Seafarer leans in the opposite direction. (Before I start, I probably need to explain the rather obscure tag-line on this issue's cover: "the Devil's buttermilk" is the Rev. Ian Paisley's phrase to describe strong drink.) With every new play he writes, Conor McPherson grows more confident in having his characters interact dialogically... as he should, because his dialogue is as perfectly pitched as his trademark set-piece story speeches. As a director, he brilliantly captures the boozy, down-at-heel nothing-in-particular-ness of the kind of holiday gathering he has written, and his cast is, as Mr Macaulay notes, to die for.
And yet (take 2) I can't shake the suspicion that perhaps this time McPherson's story is the merest old tripe. I think that perhaps in part this is due to a contemporary shift in contemplating (for want of a better word) the supernatural: that, New Agey and all as we have been getting, we can cope with the idea of ghosts, spirits, whatever, without any problems (so McPherson's The Weir and Shining City are fine), but an overt religious dimension is a dose too big to swallow now - with Jesus in Kate Betts' On The Third Day as with the infernal Mr Lockhart here in The Seafarer. Possibly.
Emphatic
This is also an opportunity to acknowledge that, when I took over editing this magazine, I used to read Toby Young's reviews with only half an eye on the page, and the rest of my attention on my blood pressure monitoring apparatus, but more and more now I find myself saying an out-loud, emphatic "Yes!' (albeit through gritted teeth) to points he makes. In considering Lockhart's magnificent speech about Hell, Toby is the only reviewer to compare it explicitly with the other great modem description of that realm, in Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. But then, as he admitted in a piece written when he thought the new editor of the Spectator was going to drop him as its theatre critic, Toby has rather "gone native" during his time in the job. Perhaps he began to realise what plays had to offer once he started staying for the second half...
Slight surprise that David Farr and Gisli Örn Garďarsson's adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis not only dispenses with that classic opening sentence, but never in fact explicitly states what has happened to its protagonist. Mind you, I remember several years ago seeing an instance of brain-short-circuit when a reviewer meant to name the story's most famous stage adaptor, Steven Berkoff, but his fingers typed another B-name and the play accidentally became "Beckett's Metamorphosis". Imagine it: "One morning Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect. Nothing had changed." And if you think that's a fearsome prospect, try to picture a version by Howard Barker...
Ian Shuttleworth : ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me At The Back?
Advice to those contemplating bringing theatre to London from abroad: don't. Dance and opera - no problem. There will be queues around the block for visiting companies at Sadler's Wells, and you will have trouble getting tickets for the Maryinsky or the Bolshoi on their increasingly frequent visits, but theatre is another matter.
Valiant
Why should this be? London audiences are surprisingly conservative when it comes to theatre, and struggle with anything from a different theatre tradition that needs a bit of explaining. The critics themselves tend to shy away from work with which they are not familiar ("No, surely this is one for our dance critic?"), and can be very cruel at times when they don't understand what's on offer, let alone when they do.
One major problem is that of venue: years ago those who wanted to see boundaries being crossed by foreign companies and directors would gravitate naturally to Riverside or the ICA, where David Gothard and Mike Morris were programming some of the most exciting work around. Now the ICA has been making valiant efforts to renew its overseas theatre programme, and nobody, neither critics nor audience, has shown much interest. At Riverside, too, there have been efforts to show foreign work, few of which have drawn the town. It's very difficult to get attention, when the standard London programme is so full.
Readers of this column will know that I'm spending more time watching foreign theatre than domestic these days. I can sit in an overcrowded theatre in Tokyo or Slovakia beside a local theatre community eager to discover what's going on in Britain - usually some fledgling mime troupe that the British Council can afford, rather than the National or the RSC - but there is little of the same enthusiasm when a Japanese or Slovak group comes to London. Over the last couple of months, in preparation for a trip to the Far East, I've sought out companies visiting London. True, the experience can be a dispiriting one, but at least I try.
Ancient and modern
Did you know, for example, that 2006 is Korea-UK Mutual Visit Year, with a programme of cultural events around the country under the banner of "Think Korea 2006"? In September a traditional musical, Baudeogi, came for a couple of days, followed by the performing art group of the Cultural Foundation of the National Museum of Korea at the Bloomsbury with a programme called Fantasia. There's something for our own Theatre Museum to envy in the museum's idea of having its own performance troupe to perform national traditional dance and theatre, in a dedicated space within the museum, as well as touring the results of their enterprise. The programme of Fantasia was a selection of traditional dances, with the expected skilful drumming, but Kang Mi-sun's choreography brought a clever blend of ancient and modem to the repertoire - these colourful episodes were no museum pieces.
The Korean community in London is interested enough to support ventures like Think Korea, but there were few English members of the audience at the Bloomsbury. One might likewise have expected a good Chinese turn-out at Riverside for Border Crossings' Dis-Orientations, but neither community came in any numbers. This must have been a great disappointment for the company, who have conducted extensive research and spent two years developing the piece, with the cooperation of the Shanghai Yue Opera Company, one of whose leading singers, Zhang Ruihong, appears in the play. You'll see from our last issue (p1009) that the two critics who got there didn't think much of it, and to be honest neither did I: it was a very good-looking production, a story told in a style which Robert Lepage would recognise, with parallel plots helped along by exciting multi-media effects, but the material was thin and the text too self-consciously "literary" to succeed in its very ambitious aims. Nevertheless, there was more to be found in this ambitious failure than in a dozen workaday plays with lower expectations.
Over at the Lyric Studio another hybrid company was exploring the politics of early twentieth-century Iran. Mehrdad Seyfs 30 Bird Productions have been going for ten years now, and The Persian Revolution showed his Anglo-lranian cast in a favourable light they moved beautifully over Leslie Travers' clever set, and switched effortlessly in and out of multiple characters. But for all its wit and honest emotion, Seyf's text tells a story which, let's face it, is of marginal interest to an English audience and perhaps even an Iranian one, although the exile contingent in a fairly full Lyric Studio seemed well pleased.
The Galiasgar Kamal State Academic Theatre of the Tatarstan Republic, which claims to have been the first professional theatre in the Muslim world, is celebrating its centenary this year. What better moment to show off their skills with a visit to London? They brought three plays ancient and modern to Riverside, and unfortunately my choice was the ancient, a short interlude written not long after 1906 by the theatre's eponymous playwright, entitled First Performance. Viewed charitably, it is possible to believe that the amateurish exaggeration of the acting was a deliberate part of the play's setting, since it shows the reactions of a Kazan family to the news that a professional theatre performance is to take place in their city for the first time. But both play and performance were impossibly naïve for a London audience, even if the Tatars in a sparse house laughed quite a lot.
Energy
For First Performance a translation was offered on headphones. At Theatro Technis the Japanese group Mugensha used any number of ingenious devices to make sure they were understood: an on-stage "ghost" and an off-stage voice shared the narration, while the ten actors themselves produced scrolls, placards, and all manner of signs to help the words along, occasionally breaking into English themselves. We needed all the help we could get, for their piece, Madmen In The Courtyard, gathers together a clutch of noted Japanese authors and proceeds to satirise their styles as they muse on death and suicide - for most of us it was rather like watching The Frogs without knowing who Aeschylus and Euripides were. But it was all performed by its young cast with a winning energy, on a first-rate set. We even got a staged reading of one of Chikamatsu's love-suicide bunraku plays thrown in. This is Mugensha's third visit to London, and they are obviously beginning to build up an English audience - but it must be hard work.
Clumsy
The one place in London where foreign groups can expect a real welcome - and an audience - is the Barbican, where the BITE programme ensures that we once again have a focus for visiting theatre. Lev Dodin's Maly Theatre Company from St Petersburg has become a firm favourite here, but they may have lost some ground with King Lear, their first venture into Shakespeare. Well received in Russia, this production is unlikely to satisfy audiences who know the richness and subtlety of the original. It starts promisingly, in a minor key, with a youngish Lear arriving through the audience on to David Borovsky's spare set. Dodin's intimate, family reading of the text can without difficulty lose Lear's knights, and even the sometimes tedious battle scenes that close the play. It is less forgivable, however, to offer a Gloucester who seems from the outset more distracted than Lear, whose blinding is passed over with less reaction than the death of the servant who tries to prevent it, whose sons resolve their quarrel with one quick knife-thrust from Edgar and very little confrontation. Lear's own descent into madness is diminished by the absence of the storm, which blows only momentarily into the rather comfortable hovel he shares with his fellow outcasts. What is completely unacceptable is some clumsy rewriting that would have Edmund seduce Regan and Goneril in exactly the same terms ("Yours in the ranks of death"), intoning chunks of his "gods stand up for bastards" speech as innuendo while they lie with legs apart moaning, "Father, father in a crass attempt to suggest that Lear's abuse of them was sexual. You don't need to add a psychological, pseudo-Chekhovian dimension to King Lear. Ifs there already for anyone who will trust the text enough to explore it, not rewrite it.
Next month sees the second Festival of Central and East European Arts - FEEAST - which will bring work from Russia, Romania and the Czech Republic, including the Edinburgh hit Sciavi and a hotly tipped mime piece, Sir Vantes Donky Khot, to London. Let's hope it finds a responsive audience, ready to embrace new, strange work.
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
BENT Revival of play by Martin Sherman |
Trafalgar Studio 1 |
5 Oct |
13 Jan |
1178 |
BIG LOVE New play by Charles L Mee from Aeschylus' The Suppliants |
Gate |
28 Sep |
21 Oct |
1158 |
GERTRUDE'S SECRET New collection of monologues by Benedick West |
King's Head |
27 Sep |
15 Oct |
1170 |
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITIES Première of 1828 play by Eugène Scribe, in new version by Anthony Curtis |
Warehouse Croydon |
29 Sep |
22 Oct |
1169 |
HARD TIMES Revival of adaptation by Stephen Jeffreys from novel by Charles Dickens (Compass TC) |
Greenwich |
4 Oct |
7 Oct |
1168 |
THE HO-HO CLUB New play by Roy Smiles |
King's Head |
3 Oct |
5 Nov |
1161 |
HOMESTEAD New play by Steven Dykes, from Federico Garcia Lorca (Shady Dolls TC) |
Courtyard |
27 Sep |
15 Oct |
1166 |
LITTLE BRITAIN LIVE Comedy shoe by Matt Lucas and David Walliams |
Hammersmith Apollo |
3 Oct |
11 Nov |
1171 |
MEET ME IN THE WOODS New play by D D Thomas |
Old Red Lion |
3 Oct |
21 Oct |
1166 |
THE MEMORY OF WATER Revival of play by Shelagh Stephenson (Catlix Prods) |
Hen & Chickens |
26 Sep |
14 Oct |
1161 |
METAMORPHOSIS New play by David Farr and Gisli Örn Garöarsson, from Franz Kafka (LyricNesturport) |
Lyric Hammersmith |
4 Oct |
28 Oct |
1173 |
A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN Revival of play by Eugene O'Neill |
Old Vic |
26 Sep |
23 Dec |
1146 |
NOT ANY MORE New play by Katherine Kingsford |
Etcetera |
26 Sep |
15 Oct |
1157 |
NOT THE LOVE I CRY FOR New play by Robin Hooper |
Arcola |
26 Sep |
14 Oct |
1152 |
ON INSOMNIA AND MIDNIGHT New play by Edgar Chias |
Royal Court Upstairs |
25 Sep |
7 Oct |
1144 |
THE PERSIAN REVOLUTION New play by Mehrdad Seyf (30 Bird) |
Lyric Studio |
28 Sep |
14 Oct |
1151 |
RHYMES, REASONS AND BOMB ASS BEATZ New solo piece by Harold Finley |
Oval House |
5 Oct |
21 Oct |
1182 |
THE SEAFARER New play by Conor McPherson (NT) |
Cottesloe |
28 Sep |
|
1162 |
SEDUCED New play by Michael Kingsbury |
Finborough |
6 Oct |
28 Oct |
1170 |
TATAR NATIONAL THEATRE Plays by Galiaskar Kamal / Zulfat Zhakim / Ravi! Bukharaev |
Riverside |
3 Oct |
8 Oct |
1177 |
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare (Clockhouse TC) |
Greenwich Playhouse |
5 Oct |
29 Oct |
1176 |
WHITE OPEN SPACES New monologues by Francesca Beard et al. (Pentabus) |
Soho |
28 Sep |
14 Oct |
1167 |
WICKED New musical by Stephen Schwartz |
Apollo Victoria |
27 Sep |
|
1153 |
Regions |
||||
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY Revival of play by Harold Pinter |
Bristol Old Vic |
26 Sep |
14 Oct |
1183 |
DRENCHED New play by Gary Young (Boilerhouse) |
Glasgow, Tron i touring |
21 Sep |
23 Sep |
1188 |
FIFTEEN YEARS, TWO FINGERS Works by various, to celebrate 15 years of the Arches |
Glasgow, Arches |
21 Sep |
30 Sep |
1193 |
HOW MANY MILES TO BASRA? New play by Colin Teevan |
Leeds, WYP Courtyard |
28 Sep |
21 Oct |
1184 |
MARY STUART Revival of play by Friedrich Schiller in new version by David Harrower (NTS) |
Glasgow, Citizens |
3 Oct |
21 Oct |
1189 |
MISS JULIE Revival of play by August Strindberg, in new version by Helen Cooper |
Colchester, Mercury |
2 oct |
14 Oct |
1183 |
SING YER HEART OUT FOR THE LADS Revival of play by Roy Williams (Pilot TC) |
York, Theatre Royal |
27 Sep |
7 Oct |
1183 |
SPEND A PENNY Series of short plays based on an idea by Andy Arnold |
Glasgow, Arches |
26 Sep |
7 Oct |
1192 |
THREE MEN IN A BOAT New adaptation by Clive Francis, from book by Jerome K Jerome |
Guildford, Yvonne Amaud / touring |
2 Oct |
7 Oct |
1187 |
YELLOW MOON (THE BALLAD OF LEILA AND LEE) New play by David Greig (TAG TC) |
Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio |
29 Sep |
14 Oct |
1188 |