Issue 22, 2006
Prompt Corner
Paul Taylor recently wrote a space-filling feature in the Independent to the effect that "The West End is alive with the sound of musicals... [this is] a golden period". Yes, even Dirty Dancing: his review contains a number of wicked parodies, but that's an indicator that Paul is enjoying himself. And I was frankly surprised how many reviewers bought into the feelgood of the show and gave it the thumbs-up. For as Mark Shenton points out in his What's On review, this is a combination of two arguably pernicious recent genres: the jukebox musical and the hit movie adapted for stage. But its principal innovation (for want of a more pejorative word) takes it further down the road still.
Paul and Quentin Letts each notice half of it. Around one-third of the show's songs are original 1960s recordings simply played over the PA, and the rest are sung by peripheral characters standing on the periphery of the stage. Now, the birth of the modern musical, with narrative-related and character-driven songs, is usually dated to Show Boat in 1927. It could be argued, then, that Dirty Dancing is turning the clock back 80 years or so. But no, for even the previous era made a production out of the singing of numbers, whatever their integrity to the show's book. That's entirely missing here. In jukebox musicals we've grown used to the convention of the pretend-concert. Dirty Dancing invents an entirely new phenomenon: the pretend-incidental score, in the sense of "pretend the singers aren't there at all". And I think that would be frightening, if I were through being just plain puzzled by it.
Meat puppets
Not that it bothered the audience one bit, since they were there to see the movie, enacted by (in the great phrase of author William Gibson) "meat puppets". No point worrying about the ways in which a show is deficient in theatricality when theatre isn't what you actually want. People around me were such devotees of the picture that they were singing along with the communal anthem of the holiday resort. Those behind me debated in detail and at length what they might do about suddenly having restricted-view seats, without it occurring to them for an instant that they might say anything to me, ask me to slouch down in my seat or whatever; the live element of the show, even of the folk next to them in the auditorium, didn't seem to register in the slightest.
Nor did the ambitions of writer Eleanor Bergstein, who explained in a briefing note to the show's original creative team (a remarkably purple communiqué reproduced in the London programme) that it was her intention to give the audience more than just the movie: different angles, interpolated scenes... at times it read as if she thought theatre was basically a DVD's Extras menu. Of her most grandiose statement of intent - "we plan to light the whole theatre. The audience will sit under starry summer skies, amid the smells and sensations of summer storms, breezes, rainbows..." -there was mercifully no sign in the actual production. Not that it would have been a bad thing, if it had worked, but it would have been if it hadn't worked, and it wouldn't have worked. If you see what I mean. And all indications were that the audience wouldn't have wanted it anyway.
And, as a number of reviews have pointed out, this fundamentally untheatrical affair has generated the largest advance box-office in West End history. Still loving it, Paul?
I'm aware that my remarks above probably look like sneering at audience tastes. Not at all: people have a perfect right to like whatever they like to like, so to speak. But if what they like isn't theatre, what should be done? Time was when the answer would have been to bombard them with good real theatre until they "discovered" their "proper" tastes. This might even have been couched in terms of "educating" the audience. But that kind of approach strikes us as disagreeably de haut en bas now, and paternalism isn't really a vote-winner any more. So instead we redefine what they do want to see as theatre. And sometimes, as with Dirty Dancing, this gets damn close to outright lying (remember, I'm not saying it's bad, just that it isn't theatre as we know it.)
Reaffirming
This is in contrast to bringing in multimedia, multi-disciplinary elements without losing the core theatrical experience, even sometimes reaffirming and strengthening it. In the mid- to late '90s, Frantic Assembly were seen by many as the future (or one of the futures) of theatre, combining conventional performance core with heightened visuals, music and in particular physicality. But the Frantics' moment seems to have passed. When they choreograph sequences for insertion into a play like Black Watch, the results look obtrusive and almost parodic.
And now, with pool (no water), the backlash seems in full spate. In fact, most of the backlash is directed at writer Mark Ravenhill. (Quentin Letts even finds space to decry the absence of initial capitals from the title, after only a century or so of modernism from e e cummings to debbie tucker green.) I didn't find it as thin as some; my view was basically that of Moon in Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound - "Derivative, of course. But quite sound." (And no, since you ask, in my school production in 1982 I played Birdboot.) Ravenhill may not be saying anything new about jealousy, but he is saying something about it, and doing so with both emotional and dramatic cogency.
Tepid
However, the review I found most telling was Alastair Macaulay's. Alastair came to theatre reviewing from dance, and somehow managed not to see Frantic Assembly during their first decade and more. I would describe the staging of pool (no water) as bog-standard Frantics, but I, like most of us, lack the precise vocabulary to describe it as Alastair does. (I'm still not sure what he means by "tepid use of the spine": is it about lack of precision/vigour/rigour, or the fact that they're given to flopping about a lot?) But he pins it.
I found it disappointing for other reasons, that such an unadventurous, by-humbers staging should be the occasion of the return to the Frantics fold of Cait Davis, who had always been the most interesting of the original quartet of performers, and also the company debut of Mark Rice-Oxley, towards whom I've felt slightly proprietorial since his student days but who sadly could find little on this occasion to bring to a shallowly written character. With a tepid spine, probably. I must admit, as Quentin said about Dirty Dancing, that the highlight of the evening for me was the end... no, because I suddenly got a mental image of the entire audience applauding Frantcally, as if choreographed by the company: clap, clap clap, arm shoots off around head, flop into lap of person on your right...
It's been a fortnight of... if not failure, then underachievement. Few shows even achieved the feat of attracting significant numbers of reviewers: this issue contains reviews of five more shows than last (and that's counting a multiple bill such as Terror 2006 as a single show, of course), but in 12 fewer pages. Apart from Dirty Dancing and pool (no water), the only other show to bring in a sizeable proportion of the corps was A Number in Sheffield.
Pity porn
I am, though, in a distinct minority as regards the lack of success of one production. I think the Financial Times arts page sub-editors must have been feeling particularly puckish when they put my five-star review of Faustus at Hampstead - which ended "it told me more about our individual response to the enormity of war than the entire evening of plays and discussion about Darfur that I had seen 24 hours earlier" - right next to Alastair Macaulay's five-star review of How Long Is Never? Itself. Kieron Quirke dares to criticise the plays as plays rather than exercises in conscience - "pity porn" is a terrific phrase, which I fully intend to steal from him - but even he ends by remarking that "The discussion afterwards [... ] fills in the details the plays skirt over." I felt progressively more disheartened throughout the discussion on the night I attended. It seemed to me to consist principally of people defending their own particular approaches to the situation in Darfur, all of which in one way or another had led to the almighty mess the region is in today. No-one seemed ready to acknowledge that whatever has been done has been too little, too late, or that galvanising the international will to act decisively will be all but impossible.
One contribution from the audience was from a man praising his Amnesty International group's letter campaigns. I'm a member of Amnesty myself, and have worked at its International Secretariat, but I'm afraid that on this occasion I was reminded of nothing so much as the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore exchange: "World War Two... terrible business. I was dead against it, you know" - "Well, I believe we all were" - "Yes, but I wrote a letter!" Unlike Alastair, I was grumbling a lot on my way home. It seemed to me that the function of the evening had been not to focus our minds on how we need, individually and collectively, to act in this instance. Rather, I thought it had served to enable us to live, within generally accepted liberal-guilt limits, with the knowledge that we in that audience have done and can do nothing of significance. I don't think this was the conscious purpose of the evening,by any means, but it was the least energising Tricycle political evening I can recall attending. It was so dispiriting, in fact, as to make me wonder whether I was having one of those conversion experiences that suddenly flip people in middle-age some way over to the political right. But reading some of my, er, favourite reviewers on various productions reassured me on that score...
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me Out East?
It probably doesn't matter much to you that the International Association of Theatre Critics is fifty years old this year. It matters more to me, since it gave me a very enjoyable week in Seoul celebrating it. The Korean Theatre Critics' Association organised a superb congress for a hundred critics from thirty countries (IATC now has members in twice as many countries as that), featuring hard work, serious debate and a choice selection of theatre to chew over, the last thanks partly to the Seoul Performing Arts Festival.
At the centre of the week was a colloquium on New Theatricality and Criticism. I don't much like the word theatricality - it is symptomatic of the tendency in academic circles to find a new word for something rather than attempt to describe it - but what most of us were talking about was the kind of performance which stubbornly refuses to follow Aristotle's absurd rules and dispense with plot, maybe, or text, or even character. I've heard some more interesting attempts to define it lately, such as "metaphysical theatre", or (my favourite) "scenic poetry", but the term on most lips was Hans-Thies Lehmann's "Postdramatic Theatre". How is the critic to respond to this often puzzling, sometimes brilliantly touching way of making theatre?
We had three sessions in which the question was tackled by critics from the Americas, Europe and Asia . You can find most of the papers on the IATC website www.aict-iatc.org if you're interested. What was very noticeable was that the Asian critics weren't very concerned about post-dramatic theatre, since their own traditions already had plenty of room for non-textual, non-Aristotelian drama. We had some striking examples of this during our week in Seoul , to which I shall return. For the moment, let me remark that, because of this variation, "new theatricality" can have very different meanings in Asia . For the critic from mainland China, it meant interesting new theatre, if anything moving away from the "post-dramatic" Beijing opera to more Western styles; for the slightly out-of-touch professor from India, it meant street theatre of protest as witnessed in the '80s. For the critic from Singapore, it meant the hybrid theatre of Ok Ken Seng, a prophet with little honour, it would appear, in his own country.
Shamanic
A common characteristic of much Asian theatre, noted by our Korean keynote speaker, Bang-Ock Kim, is its use of energy, gyee in Korean, chi in Chinese. That energy comes not only from the performer but from the audience in return. An immediate example came in the congress's opening ceremony, when the effect of one of the country's leading groups of ritual drummers was to galvanise the hall. More mutual energy was released in the congress's closing event, a full-scale shamanic ritual (a gut) carried out in the open air setting of an island dangerously close to the border with North Korea by Ms Kim Kumhwa, a 76 year old "National Treasure". After much chanting, dancing and distribution of food and drink (we didn't have time to tuck in to the sacrificial pig), the shaman's dancing on a couple of very sharp knives was followed by a manic all-in dance session, in which normally reticent critics donned robes and masks to release a considerable amount of gyee.
In between these two moments came a number of performances reflecting the more modem face of Korean theatre. Young-Woong Lim has been staging Waiting For Godot since 1969 and has been able to build a theatre on the proceeds. The production we saw was his 22nd attempt, and to Western eyes it might appear that he still hasn't got it right. What has probably happened is that he has encouraged his actors to put a more and more Korean slant on the performance, with the result that the piece is now overloaded with skilled slapstick but underweighted with Beckett's own grimmer world view. That Vladimir and Estragon could spend the first five minutes of the performance mugging at the audience without exchanging a single glance suggests that they have gone too far in this direction.
Curious
Seoung-Noh Kim offered a remarkable solo performance in A Ghost In The Wall (officially and rather unfortunately translated as Fairy In The Closet), an adaptation of a story first heard in the Spanish Civil War but now firmly Korean in its account of a young girl's close but curious relationship with her father, whom her mother kept in hiding throughout her growing up because he had allied himself with the communists of the North. Ms Seoung effortlessly populated the stage with several dozen characters, as her own narrative voice aged from four to fifty. It was at first jarring to find her interrupting her tale with some rather kitschy pop songs, but her delivery soon overcame any stylistic doubts. The bare staging, relying on the performance, is typical of the work of director Sohn Jin-Chaek.
On a completely different scale was Lee Youn-Taek's Three Beautiful Soulmates, performed by his Street Theatre Troupe in the fine modern amphitheatre of the Namsan Drama Centre. The piece uses the full resources of traditional Korean theatre, music, drumming and acrobatic dance (it starts with a traditional mask-drama). Yet with energetic doubling from its cast of two dozen, it achieves an epic Western, almost Boublil and Schonberg effect with the broad sweep of its narrative, which explores a key moment in Korean history through the different paths taken by a trio of monks. Highlights of a most ambitious production were the performance of actress Kim So-Hee and the lighting of Cho In-Gon. It's no surprise that this production carried off most of last year's theatre awards. Lee YounTaek is perhaps best known for his 1989 play Ogu: A Ritual Of Death, which continues to play to full houses in Seoul .
Young director-playwright Park Keun-Hyung, another regular award-winner, has had success with a more domestic play, Kyung-Suk's Father, a tragic-comic study of a common Korean problem, the absentee paterfamilias. By setting the story in and around the Korean War, Park gives the play a not completely earned political resonance, but much of the audience's pleasure comes from its comic elements, with some particularly fine supporting performances. The moment when the Holy Ghost arrives to sort out the muddle of Kyung-Suk's family, which has by now acquired two fathers and two wives, suggests a certain desperation on the part of the author, but the slapstick realist style of the production, something I am beginning to recognise as particularly Korean, just about covered it.
Bright ideas
In the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, apart from Three Beautiful Soulmates, Korean productions included versions of Mother Courage and 4.48 Psychosis. On the international side there was Russia's Formalny Theatre (of School For Fools fame) with Between Dog And Wolf, another piece of scenic poetry. I caught Tel Aviv's Cameri Theatre with a bold devised piece, Plonter, which translates roughly as Tangle. Its mixed cast of Jewish and Arab actors, directed by Yael Ronen, found rich dramatic material in the irreconcilable problems facing their country. Our Iranian delegation seemed to take special pleasure in the show.
And that is part of the richness of a meeting like this, where many views of theatre and the world can come together, not always in harmony but usually with respect as a guiding principle. We worked hard, too, setting up the mechanism for a world exchange of theatre journals, and forming the IATC's first Asian members' board. A feisty group of new critics, graduates of our seminar programme, came up with some bright ideas on how the Association might develop in its next fifty years, and at the other end of the scale Eric Bentley, who at the age of ninety had travelled from New York to receive our first Thalia Prize, given for the impact on critics of his writings, was still full of provocation and pizzazz. You should have been there, really you should.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST Revival of play by Dario Fo (Ashkhan Candey) |
Hackney Empire, Acorn |
2 Nov |
9 Dec |
1294 |
ACQUAINTANCES/NATIONAL AMNESTY Double bill of plays by Dominic Mitchell |
Pleasance |
24 Oct |
12 Nov |
1300 |
ARTEMIS FOWL - FAIRIES, FIENDS AND FLATULENCE Solo show by Eoin Coffer |
Trafalgar Studio 1 |
22 Oct |
29 Oct |
1282 |
DIRTY DANCING - THE CLASSIC STORY ON STAGE New musical by Eleanor Bergstein |
Aldwych |
24 Oct |
|
1277 |
FAILED STATES Transfer of new musical by Andrew Taylor and Desmond O'Connor |
Pleasance |
25 Oct |
12 Nov |
1282 |
THE FATHER Revival of play by August Strindberg in new version by Harry G Carlson (Borealis Prods) |
Courtyard at Covent Garden |
19 Oct |
12 Nov |
1293 |
FAUSTUS Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe in version by Rupert Goold (Headlong) |
Hampstead |
24 Oct |
18 Nov |
1283 |
FROBISHER'S GOLD New play by Fraser Grace |
Shaw |
25 Oct |
4 Nov |
1293 |
FULL CIRCLE New play by Kobus Moonman |
Oval House |
1 Nov |
18 Nov |
1302 |
HAPPY AS A SANDBAG Revival of play by Ken Lee (Isleworth Actors Co) |
South Street, Isleworth |
25 Oct |
4 Nov |
1281 |
HOW LONG IS NEVER?: A Response To Darfur Short plays by Carlo Gebler, Lynn Nottage et al. |
Tricycle |
24 Oct |
28 Oct |
1287 |
NAYRA New piece by Teatro La Candelaria |
Pit |
31 Oct |
4 Nov |
1295 |
OUT OF BOUNDS: Young Woodley/Tea And Sympathy Revivals by John van Druten / Robert Anderson |
Finborough |
3 Nov |
25 Nov |
1304 |
POOL (NO WATER) New play by Mark Ravenhill (Frantic Assembly) |
Lyric Hammersmith |
1 Nov |
18 Nov |
1297 |
PROJECT E: AN EXPLOSION New piece by The Work Theatre Collective |
BAC |
31 Oct |
18 Nov |
1295 |
SALAD DAYS Revival of musical by Julian Slade |
Greenwich |
23 Oct |
4 Nov |
1282 |
Shortcuts 2006 Season of new plays by various writers |
Union SE1 |
4 Oct |
21 Oct |
1288 |
SOMETHING FISHY New piece by Moonhag |
BAC |
26 Oct |
12 Nov |
1286 |
STIGMATA New piece by Truant |
Drill Hall |
1 Nov |
25 Nov |
1303 |
TAKING THE BLOOD OF BUTTERFLIES New play by sean burn, loosely adapted from Woyzeck |
Oval House |
26 Oct |
11 Nov |
1301 |
Terror 2006 Season of plays by various writers |
Union SE1 |
27 Oct |
25 Nov |
1288 |
TOO CLOSE TO HOME New play by Rani Moorthy |
Lyric Studio |
1 Nov |
11 Nov |
1296 |
2 GRAVES New play by Paul Sellar |
Arts |
3 Nov |
7 Dec |
1301 |
THE UNDERPANTS UK première of Steve Martin adaptation from Carl Stemheim |
Old Red Lion |
26 Oct |
18 Nov |
1290 |
UP FROM THE WASTE New piece by Antonia Franceschi |
Soho |
25 Oct |
11 Nov |
1289 |
THE WONDER! A WOMAN KEEPS A SECRET Revival of play by Susannah Centlivre (The Other TC) |
White Bear |
2 Nov |
26 Nov |
1303 |
Regions |
||||
THE DEEP BLUE SEA Revival of play by Terence Rattigan |
Exeter, Northcott |
2 Nov |
18 Nov |
1315 |
DOCTOR FAUSTUS Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe |
Bristol Old Vic |
31 Oct |
25 Nov |
1313 |
THE DUCHESS OF MALFI Revival of play by John Webster |
Leeds, WYP Quarry |
25 Oct |
11 Nov |
1311 |
FOLLIES Revival of musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman |
Northampton, Royal |
24 Oct |
18 Nov |
1308 |
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN New adaptation by Mark Healy from novel by John Fowles |
Richmond / touring |
23 Oct |
28 Oct |
1305 |
LONG TIME DEAD New play by Rona Munro |
Plymouth, Drum |
30 Oct |
11 Nov |
1315 |
MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM Revival of play by August Wilson |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
23 Oct |
25 Nov |
1312 |
A NUMBER Revival of play by Caryl Churchill |
Sheffield, Crucible Studio |
24 Oct |
11 Nov |
1306 |
THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN Revival of play by Sean O'Casey |
Glasgow, Citizens Main House |
3 Nov |
18 Nov |
1318 |
SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH Revival of play by Tennessee Williams |
Dundee Rep |
25 Oct |
11 Nov |
1316 |
TILT Triple bill of new plays by David Priestley / David lescot (tr. Ian F MacLeod) / Moma Pearson |
Edinburgh, Traverse |
4 Nov |
25 Nov |
1319 |
TIMON OF ATHENS Revival of play by Shakespeare, adapted by Adrian Jackson and Sarah Woods |
Stratford, Shakespeare Centre |
26 Oct |
28 Oct |
1304 |
TOM FOOL New play by Franz Xaver Kroetz, translated by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis |
Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio |
2 Nov |
18 Nov |
1317 |
THE WAY HOME New play by Chloë Moss |
Liverpool Everyman |
25 Oct |
11 Nov |
1312 |