Issue 8, 2007
Prompt Corner 
Apologies once more for this issue's arrival a week or so late. Much of the delay was due to unforeseen knock-on effects from the one thing we did know about, Ian Herbert's and my attendance at the Europe Theatre Prize beano in Thessaloniki. You can read the other Ian's account of this on the next page (yes, he's at the front for a change). All I have to say is that if Angela Winkler was impressively bolshie at the final ceremony, then her display of Marxisme, tendance Groucho was superbly complemented by Mr Herbert in the unwitting role of Margaret Dumont.
Although the Thessaloniki trip took place after the fortnight covered by this issue, I didn't have much of a chance to see shows other than in a formal Financial Times capacity. It's now been confirmed that Sarah Hemming and I are to be joint successors to Alastair Macaulay as the FTs senior theatre critic. This should not affect my work for Theatre Record except to reduce the number of evenings available for me to see non-FT-assigned shows. In consequence, I think we may expect one-page Prompt Comer columns to become ever more the rule rather than the exception. Apologies yet again.
Enthusiasm
One thing to note is my surprise at the lack of enthusiasm which greeted Ronnie Burkett's latest visit to the UK with 10 Days On Earth. It follows Darrel, a middle-aged man with learning difficulties, in the period immediately after his mother's death (possibly by suicide). It's created and performed by one man. He is the former bad boy of Canadian puppetry. The show lacks the formal experimentation of some of Burkett's other recent work. It lasts 110 minutes without an interval. Every one of those preceding sentences is likely to make the heart sink (except the one about Canadian puppetry, which may instead elicit an incredulous giggle). So why could I not imagine an evening better spent in the theatre in London during those weeks?
Partly it's the craft. There's the material craftsmanship: more than three dozen marionettes, individually carved and dressed, right down to the holes punched in brogue shoes, and a "set" which, while simple by Burkett's standards, is a huge, broad pulpit with sliding panels and a roller-drum cyclorama. And there is Burkett's mastery of marionette technique: watch Lloyd, a street bum who thinks he's God, slowly and uncertainly get back on his feet after collapsing in the gutter, or Darrel's beloved storybook character Honeydog, a hound in a cranberry-coloured coat, making "grass angels" in one of the fantasy scenes which alternate with Darrel's ten days and flashbacks to his and his single mothers earlier lives... these are wonders of manipulation. Partly it's the purity of technique: Burkett's last show to visit Britain, Provenance in 2004, used a variety of kinds of puppetry, some of which required him to become more overtly an actor; here, everything is straightforward marionette work, yet I felt no sense of restriction or retrenchment.
Partly it's Burkett's touch as a writer. He always tackles topics of deepest human emotion – here, musing upon what it is to be alone and/or to be lonely – but does it with a phenomenal blend of thought, sensitivity and openness. In the past, I have felt some passages overwritten: here, not one iota. I'm not surprised that many (even most) reviewers found the Honeydog scenes twee, their commentary upon Darrel's own life too obvious; but as far as I'm concerned, that's their loss. Everyone should be able tot count up to twee. In Darrel's and Honeydog's preferred expression, "simply simply" there was no show in London at the time that could tell us more about being human than did those assemblages of clay and string.
Dearth
Compare and contrast the dearth of connection offered by Charley's Aunt, even in terms of simple enjoyment. There are two crucial requirements for the performance of farce. One is that the physical business, the ballet of increasing frenzy and absurdity, be executed with flair and precision. On this score Mel Smith's second production of Brandon Thomas's 1892 play (he directed a fondly remembered version in 1983 with Griff Rhys Jones in the cross-dressing title role) scores highly. When Lord Fancourt Babberley attempts to borrow several bottles of his friends' champagne, the business with the bottle-filled bag is as crisp and complex as a vaudeville hat-swapping routine; when Babberley is prevailed upon to don a dress and act as chaperone to his pals' respective beloveds, Smith and Stephen Tompkinson get great mileage out of his relish in their displays of girlish affection.
The other vital ingredient is that actors should seem to believe in their characters and situations. Obviously, one can't play Thomas's piece as if it were Strandberg, but if all words and actions are cartooned even when the immediate action does not licence it, then all we are left with is, to use the argot of the play, a lot of chaps acting the giddy ass. My heart sank when the curtain rose to reveal David Partridge's Jack Chesney in amorous soliloquy, already saucer-eyed and speaking straight out to the audience. (At several moments, too, one or more actors "clock" the audience knowingly, with the worst kind of it's all-just-pretend-really smugness.)
The linchpin is the actor playing Babberley. Tompkinson (who's evidently a mature student at this fictitious Oxford college) throws himself into the business, but hurls his voice and face around to a similar degree. A few years ago when he appeared in Arsenic And Old Lace, I thought his performance wildly misjudged; I'm afraid that this outing confirms my impression that he simply does not understand farce, mistakenly thinking that size is all that's important. He can wring ten or fifteen seconds out of a pause before the mock-aunt's catchphrase about being from Brazil, "Where the nuts come from", and one of the earliest occurrences is already so huge as to make "A handbag?!" sound like Gregorian chant. You get a lot of bang for your buck, to be sure, but without any targeting, it amounts to a comedic scorched-earth operation.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me On The Podium?
Ian Herbert | ian@ herrbertknott.com
The Europe Theatre Prize has always been quite a bunfight. This year, sadly, the emphasis was on fight – though it must be said that our Greek hosts provided a very satisfactory supply of buns. In previous years the €60,000 main prize has been presented in Taormina, where critics flocked to bask in the Sicilian sun with other theatre professionals – and even watch a show or two. Some of the Taormina ceremonies were accompanied by displays of grovelling acclaim that would put a North Korean youth rally to shame, but the best of them saw sober and detailed examination of the work of the winners. The proceedings devoted to Peter Brook, Pina Bausch and Lev Dodin have even been published as useful books. (The embarrassing effusions devoted in the Bausch volume to the redoubtable Pina are fortunately balanced by a hundred sensible pages on the work of the Royal Court, which in the same year won the "most promising" award, the Europe Prize for New Theatre Realities, for their discovery of the KaneRavenhill-Butterworth school of in-yer-facers.)
Last year, after a gap caused by the withdrawal of support from the city fathers of Taormina, the Prize came to life again in Turin, where Harold Pinter, in fact chosen as winner some years before his Nobel Prize, braved the severe ill-health which had prevented him attending the Nobel ceremony to come and lambast US foreign policy and listen to the likes of Roger Planchon and Jeremy Irons performing his work (see At the Back 2007/05). So successful was this event that there was plenty of competition to stage this year's ceremony. The winners were the National Theatre of Northern Greece, in Thessaloniki, who were able in a very short time to make superb arrangements for the world's theatre press to salute the winners, Robert Lepage and Peter Zadek sharing the major prize, Alvis Hermanis and Biljana Srbljanovic picking up €1 0,000 each for their New Realities.
Publicity
My lot, the International Association of Theatre Critics, started the proceedings by biting the hand that was so amply feeding them, with a colloquium entitled Prizes – Who Needs Them? in which members from Korea, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the USA (yes, we're that international) spoke of the situation in their country and attempted to draw some general conclusions. We came to the fairly obvious one that in spite of all the stupid and unnecessary hype, theatre prizes can benefit the theatre community, and critics in particular, by bringing much needed publicity at a time when space for theatre in the big media is decreasing. (A couple of dozen photographers turned up at the Theatre Museum just before I left for Thessaloniki, not because John Heilpern's biography John Osborne: A Patriot For Us won the Theatre Book Prize but because Daniel Radcliffe was announcing iit.) My Korean colleague, Yun-Cheol Kim, remarked that he was now getting more newspaper space for his verdicts as a member of numerous theatre prize juries than for his reviews of the shows themselves.
Humanity
The celebration proper consisted of four days of talks, interviews and performances. Alvis Hermanis brought along two productions, the intimate Long Life which has been such a hit at many festivals including Edinburgh, and a new piece, Fathers, which has only just been premiered at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Long Life was not well served by the space in which it was performed. Seen from a distance it simply looks like a long-shot of a day in the life of five old people fending for themselves. Normally, the audience enter through the corridor that links their memento-laden apartments, and watches their struggles in close‑
up. Most of the Thessaloniki audience therefore missed the careful build-up of these relationships, which enabled those closer to the action to share fully in the old peoples' lives. Fathers was less dependent on space, though its structure of three interweaving monologues, delivered by actors who were gradually made up to resemble the parents whose lives they have been describing, also depended on the slow development of the audience-actor relationship, which put off some of the audience. The majority who stayed after the interval were rewarded once more with the Latvian director's ability to take us from the personal to the universal in his meticulously worked documentary style. His description, in interview, of his working method, which has changed significantly in recent years, was full of the humanity which marks his shows.
Cancelled
Biljana Srbljanovic's interview was also quite revelatory. Famous for her blogs from Belgrade during the NATO bombings, she now lives in Paris but returns regularly to her own country and is passionate about it. She told us that she would now disown several of her plays, including Supermarket. For me, the Serbian production of her latest, Locusts (better translated here as Grasshoppers) didn't do a lot to enhance her reputation, though it usefully continued the theme of our lack of concern for the elderly where Hermanis left off.
Robert Lepage couldn't bring along a complete production, but put together a rich selection of excerpts from recent and current work, including Lipsynch, which has just been seen in development at Northern Stage. Typically, he was happy to understudy minor roles in the ensemble pieces as well as reprising his laundromat moon-walk from The Far Side Of The Moon and a story from The Andersen Project. A large group of colleagues and admirers were there to put Lepage's work in context, which was just as well since the day-long conference that was due to be devoted to his co-winner, Peter Zadek, had to be cancelled when Zadek announced that he was not turning up to get his prize or attend his conference. His stated reason was that he was rehearsing, but some put it down to fear of flying, which made the organisers wonder why he had originally insisted on first class air travel for himself and three companions. It was Zadek's demands, too, which meant that the Berliner Ensemble were not due to perform his three-hour-plus Peer Gynt until after the final award ceremony, before the celebration party.
Superfluous
As in Turin, the award ceremony was interminable. A string of long and quite superfluous speeches (including one from me, which was at least brief, but just as superfluous) preceded the handover of the first three prizes themselves. Then – guess who had to explain why Mr Zadek was not getting his €30,000. I was in the middle of reading out his insultingly flippant no-show letter when I heard a voice behind me and turned to see what I thought was the theatre's cleaning lady. It turned out to be Angela Winkler, Germany's Judi Dench, made up and costumed as Aase for Peer Gynt. She asked, rather tersely, how much longer the Berliners would have to hang around, at which point I was thankfully able to ditch the reading of the organisers' sober, correct but awfully long explanation of the rule that to get the Europe Prize you had to be there. The jury shuffled off, the show went on. And it was spectacularly successful – a far better demonstration of the edgy Mr Zadek's talent than any amount of fawning speeches.
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
AALST New play by Pol Heyveart (NTSNictoria/Tramway) |
Soho |
18 Apr |
28 Apr |
434 |
THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN New play by Mukul Ahmed |
Tara Arts Studio |
17 Apr |
22 Apr |
445 |
BASIC New play by Lynn Greenwood (Stonecrabs) |
Hackney Empire, Studio |
19 Apr |
1 May |
447 |
A BLOODLESS FIELD Two new plays by Ellen Hughes (Metal And Bone) |
Old Operating Th |
10 Apr |
28 Apr |
426 |
BREAK OUT! New piece by Yegam TC |
Peacock |
19 Apr |
22 Apr |
450 |
COCOA New play by George Gotts |
Theatre 503 |
20 Apr |
5 May |
453 |
CRUNCH! New play by Daniel Goldman |
Arts |
28 Mar |
14 Apr |
425 |
DEATH OF AN ELEPHANT Revival of play by Trevor Preston |
Landor |
18 Apr |
5 May |
453 |
DUBLIN BY LAMPLIGHT New play by Michael West (The Corn Exchange) |
Riverside |
19 Apr |
5 May |
452 |
EXQUISITE PAIN Return of new piece with text by Sophie Calle (Forced Entertainment) |
Soho |
10 Apr |
14 Apr |
451 |
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Revival of musical by Jerry Bock (National Youth Music Th) |
Bridewell |
11 Apr |
14 Apr |
456 |
A FINE BALANCE Return of new adaptation from novel by Rohinton Mistry (Tamasha) |
Hampstead |
10 Apr |
21 Apr |
427 |
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES New adaptation by Clive Francis from Arthur Conan Doyle |
Greenwich |
16 Apr |
21 Apr |
430 |
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES New adaptation by Peepolykus and Steven Canny from A C Doyle |
Duchess |
17 Apr |
21 Jul |
431 |
THE ICARUS GIRL New adaptation by Holly Race from novel by Helen Oyeyemi |
Arcola |
17 Apr |
28 Apr |
449 |
THE INHABITANTS OF THE MOON ARE NOSES I DIARY OF A MADMAN Steve Hennessy / Nikolai Gogol |
Blue Elephant |
3 Apr |
28 Apr |
425 |
THE LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING Revival of play by Christopher Fry |
Finborough |
19 Apr |
12 May |
446 |
MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL UK première of musical by Jeanie Linders |
Shaw |
18 Apr |
|
442 |
MY BROTHER AND I ARE PORNSTARS New play by Tim Hunter |
Soho |
11 Apr |
14 Apr |
447 |
NINE HILLS ONE VALLEY New piece by Ratan Thiyam (Chorus Repertory TC) |
Barbican |
18 Apr |
21 Apr |
438 |
ON THE TOWN Revival of musical by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green (ENO) |
Coliseum |
21 Apr |
22 May |
454 |
SEQUINS AND SAWDUST New piece by Cirque Bijou/Circus Space/Bristol Old Vic Th School |
Big Top, South Bank |
16 Apr |
21 Apr |
441 |
SONG OF A FORGOTTEN SUMMER New play by Dimitri Devdariani, from writings of Alexander Grin |
Theatro Technis |
3 Apr |
22 Apr |
425 |
Spill Festival |
various |
7 Apr |
17 Apr |
433 |
SPREAD New piece devised by Andrea Turner, Suzie Lowe and Jenny Maynard (Hourglass) |
Greenwich Playhouse |
12 Apr |
29 Apr |
437 |
STREETLIGHTS AND SHADOWS New play by Becky Prestwich (Box Of Tricks TC) |
White Bear |
10 Apr |
29 Apr |
426 |
10 DAYS ON EARTH New marionette piece by Ronnie Burkett |
Pit |
18 Apr |
5 May |
448 |
TO A SUNLESS SEA New play by Daniel McGowan |
Etcetera |
10 Apr |
29 Apr |
446 |
TWISTED New play by David Dandridge (Iron Hoof Prods) |
Oval House |
19 Apr |
5 May |
448 |
UNPLANNED New piece by Malika Booker |
BAC |
12 Apr |
29 Apr |
429 |
Regions |
||||
Arches Theatre Festival See pages for full details |
Glasgow, Arches |
10 Apr |
21 Apr |
474 |
ARLECCHINO'S REVENGE New piece devised by Lung Ha's TC with Roxana Pope |
Edinburgh, Traverse / touring |
5 Apr |
7 Apr |
471 |
CHARLEY'S AUNT Revival of play by Brandon Thomas |
Richmond / touring |
19 Apr |
21 Apr |
460 |
FUTUROLOGY - A GLOBAL REVUE New piece by Suspect Culture (co-prod with NTS/Brighton Festival) |
Glasgow, SECC / touring |
11 Apr |
14 Apr |
467 |
LADIES DOWN UNDER New play by Amanda Whittington |
Hull Truck |
13 Apr |
5 May |
459 |
MACBETH Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Stratford, Swan |
17 Apr |
21 Jul |
457 |
MAN OF LA MANCHA Revival of musical by Mitch Leigh, Joe Darion, Dale Wasserman from Cervantes |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
21 Apr |
19 May |
473 |
MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG Revival of musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, from Kaufman & Hart |
Derby Playhouse |
19 Apr |
19 May |
462 |
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Liverpool Playhouse |
17 Apr |
5 May |
462 |
OFFICE SUITE Revival of double bill by Alan Bennett |
Chichester, Minerva / touring |
18 Apr |
12 May |
463 |
RE:UNION New plays by Nicola McCartney, Haresh Sharma, Selma Dimitrijevic and Linda McLean (7:84) |
Edinburgh, Traverse / touring |
11 Apr |
14 Apr |
471 |
TUTTI FRUTTI Return of play by John Byrne from his TV series |
Glasgow, King's / touring |
12 Apr |
21 Apr |
470 |