Issue 10, 2007
Prompt Corner 
I predicted last issue that the kerfuffle over Nicholas Hytner's remarks (reprinted opposite) would have died down by the time I got around to offering my twopenn'orth, and I was right. But I don't intend to let that stop me. I thought the matter could more profitably be addressed in the context of the apparent catalyst for his hissy fit, the allegedly poor reviews given to A Matter Of Life And Death, which are collected in this issue.
Shake
First let me have my say on the production itself. My responses to it at the time were not so much complex as tangled, and I haven't really been able to tease them out in the interim. We are now, belatedly, familiar enough with Kneehigh's way with a story that it comes neither as a surprise nor an exhilaration in itself to see them take an extant tale by the scruff of the neck and give it a vigorous shake. Its the artistry of the shake, and what gets newly shaken out, that matter. And there is a lot of artistry and a lot of freshness in this production. There are also one or two moments at which the company have taken their eye off the ping-pong ball... and, to be fair, one or two moments at which reviewers have done likewise.
I have two admissions to make with regard to watching A Matter of Life And Death. The first is that I found myself reflexively responding with a knee-jerk conservatism: "This is different from the film, therefore it must be bad." At least I realised at the time that this was both nonsensical and dangerous. The opening sequence - "This is the universe; big, isn't it?" - fails precisely because it is retained from the film, without an effective stage analogue for the cosmic camerawork which originally accompanied the initial voiceover. Conversely, in the climactic courtroom scene, when I looked around and realised that the Olivier broadly fitted the same amphitheatrical pattern which was such a motif in the film, I enjoyed a moment of wonder all my own, as the staging itself made no such allusion.
Inventiveness
Other touches prove dubious not because they differ from the film in themselves, but because they so obviously pander to the exigencies of the company. For instance, once you decide you're going to use aerialism, you naturally enrol Gisli Öm Garòarsson, and since he can't convincingly play a pre-Revolutionary French aristocrat, you have to turn the character of Conductor 71 into something commensurately wacky. I'm a great admirer of Garöarsson's, but when the story has to change to fit him, I can't help thinking that he may have delighted us enough for a little while. Similarly with the invented character of Conductor 72, worked up from a cameo in the film largely, as far as I can see, because Kneehigh's company director Mike Shepherd enjoys wearing absurd costumes. (At least this one wasn't drag.) I have no problems whatever with Emma Rice and the company's visual inventiveness as applied here: not with the bicycling nurses, nor the swinging coital bed, and the ping-pong game seemed to me a perfect moment of Kneehighification of the original scene.
Having got over my initial reactionism to changes of tone or substance, I came to greatly admire the way in which the "trial in heaven" sequence was both psychologically and emotionally repositioned. We always go on about the exuberance with which Kneehigh stage stories, but we tend not to notice that the other side of this coin is a fascination with the melancholy, the minor-key, the complications and frustrations of those stories. Converting the propagandistic Anglo-American love-in of the film into a far more complex meditation on the exigencies of war is a masterstroke. One or two reviewers object that the treatment seems to place a moral equivalence on the bombings of Coventry and Dresden; well, yes, the big picture is one thing, but on the individual human level of the scene, it doesn't make the victims any more or less innocent or any more or less dead in comparison with one another.
Aleatory
And then the moment that swept my feet out from under me (or would have if I hadn't been sitting down). They changed the ending. This is my second admission: neither from any advance word, nor from the visual leitmotiv of a spinning coin used throughout the evening, did I twig that the ending of this production is aleatory. (Nor did at least one reviewer, who shall remain Nicholas de Jongh; others seem cautiously to have avoided mentioning it.)
Even having eventually grasped this point, there seems to me to be a fundamental question here: with such a diametrical change of a core element of the original, to what extent can this still be called an adaptation? Is this - uncomfortable word - any less honourable an operation than Nahum Tate giving King Lear a happy ending? And if the ending can be changed so utterly at random, this may make a comment about the casualness of war and death, but what point does it also make about the unity and integrity of a narrative? However, I've seen no word on this matter in any review or comment on the production, so maybe this is just me getting carried away with arcana again.
Astounding
In any case, I on some level enjoyed the complexity, ambivalence, even inconsistency of my responses to the production. And - again, with the exception of Nicholas de Jongh - most of the daily reviews I saw were ambivalent in much the same way. Which made Nicholas Hytner's remarks all the more astounding. It seems to me that he's actually being rather more guilty of the things he's inveighing against than are those he is accusing (as is often the case when one flings around accusations of category- or label-based prejudice).
For instance, I see little fundamental disagreement, little difference in opinion on balance, between the review by Michael Billington, supposedly a dead white male par excellence, and fresh-faced filly Kate Bassett, whose openness has been explicitly hailed in other quarters as forming an exemplary contrast to the DWMs. (This was a moment when the blogosphere really came into its own, with both professional commentators such as Lyn Gardner and Mark Shenton addressing the issue at length and an energising flurry of contributions from numerous "civilians" on various blog sites.) Kate, in an article for the media section of the Independent, also repudiates Hytner's claim that this is a matter on which she for one has ever been voluble in private, and most tellingly of all makes a point I alluded to in my own 2005 rehearsal for this row: that DWM reviewers are less likely to be replaced by younger, more open theatre writers than by unqualified celebs or staff hacks who will be devoid even of such allegedly outmoded ideas as those of the old guard. And how do we define "old guard"? One blog comment has argued that Mr H's accusations only begin to sound to sound plausible coming from him because his own generation has succeeded in re-branding 50 as the new 30 and marketing the concept of "middle youth".
Accusations of misogyny seem similarly mote-and-beam: who is it, here, who's being sexist and throwing about accusations based entirely on labels? It both amazes and amuses me that otherwise sane and rational people, who grumble rightly about the extent to which, say, politics is being reduced to a beauty contest and a matter of labelling, will then vigorously indulge in precisely the same kind of reductivism on an issue that happens to raise their own hackles. (At one point Hytner appears to imply that Katie Mitchell is a lesbian; I neither know nor care, but as regards it being an issue, those comments have now introduced the matter into discourse where previously it simply had not been. Well done, Nick.)
Representation
There is a kernel of real substance here, as regards the extent to which reviewers can be expected to be representative of either their readers or theatregoers as a whole. But it's very easy, again, to move from a substantive to a merely cosmetic sense of "representation". Yes, it's a pity that there are virtually no non-Caucasian reviewers, not just in senior positions, but virtually anywhere of
significance. (Of those whose names appear in these pages with any frequency, I can think of only Tamara Gausi and Zena Alkayat.) Again, though, surely this is not a writer's fault for being of the background and heritage they happen to be, but the responsibility of those in editorial positions who, frankly, tend to appoint people broadly like themselves. It seems to me that this is a change that will be effected primarily from the top down.
And as regards being "representative" of theatregoers as a whole... well, yes, all very well for Nick Hytner to point out how the National Theatre's audience is growing younger and more stylistically adventurous, but in theatreland as a whole a "representative" reviewer would be one who loved musical spectaculars, going to see the same ones again and again, fervently following reality-N casting series for forthcoming productions and voting for their favourite new talent, and was occasionally lured to a straight play by the prospect of a big-name scalp. I'm sorry, but there it is. Even the NT's own greatest success during Hytner's tenure has been The History Boys, a production which is both overtly and covertly nostalgic (i.e. it pretends to hark back to the 1980s when its values and mode of banter are closer to the 1950s) and relies on a shared conservatism of values allied with a vein of discreet camp to carry us over its shortcomings, written by a man who is five years older than the oldest of the DWMs. Its director: Nicholas "When I become a dead white male I will only be hired to do dead white male theatre" Hytner.
Communicate
The point is not to be representative either of the theatregoers as a whole or even of one's readership, not in the sense of sharing their taste or even necessarily their aesthetic or cultural context. The point is to understand what is going on both on and offstage, and to communicate with people. Again and again I come back to that favourite quote, that theatre isn't about getting to the right sort of people - it's about getting to the wrong sort and turning them into the right sort. Cybernetics, the quasi-scientific study of communication, defines information as the amount of unpredictability in a message: the more you say what someone wants or expects to hear, the less you're actually saying in any meaningful sense. This, ultimately, is the grey area in which the burden of Hytner's remarks is located. Clearly, we as critics need to occupy sufficient linguistic and conceptual common ground with the people we're speaking to, in order that we may communicate effectively with them. But it is all too easy to sound as if one is calling for total congruence, where significant communication would in practice fall to zero and criticism would be no more than a kind of semiotic feedback loop. The secondary question, then, is: how reliable an indicator of this kind of engagement is the nexus of age/sex/back-ground/etc labels? Compare matters like speed limits, age of consent and so on: on the one hand, these are convenient ways of plotting a line that we know has to be drawn somewhere; on the other, they're reductive means which take no account of individual circumstances and become oppressive when (as they almost inevitably are) one attempts to apply them uniformly.
Is it at least useful that Nick Hytner's remarks opened up a debate? Well, no, because it wasn't a debate: it was a brief blizzard of chatter which generated more heat than light and became a creature of the media rather than an exchange of ideas of substance. Nice try, though. And it surely was such a try, because the alternative would be that he actually believed the tosh he was saying, and I'm far too charitable to contemplate that for a moment.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Athens?
Back in Greece after so short an absence that my partner is convinced I have a girlfriend there, I find myself being spoilt rotten by the Hellenic Centre of the International Theatre Institute. They have set up Athens System 2007, a showcase of contemporary Greek theatre, and their guests in Athens are a handful of critics and festival directors It's a pilot for what is hoped will be a fully-fledged festival of new theatre in 2008. On offer were eight shows in four days, no heavy burden for hardened veterans of Edinburgh or Avignon - and indeed the overall impression was of an amiable but not spectacular couple of days on the Fringe.
Sweaty
My first visit was to the Chororoes theatre, a sweaty shed in the newly fashionable Gazi district (on the site of the old gasworks). It was a suitable venue for Dora Lelouda's staging of Dejan Dukovski's Other Side. Dejan Dukovski is the playwright from ex-Yugoslavia (I nearly caused an international incident by describing him to a Greek audience as Macedonian) whose Powder Keg made a deep impression on stage and as a film. Other Side is another nihilistic study of Balkan post-war angst, set in what might be described as the nightclub at the end of the universe - indeed, I think I used this description when not very favourably reviewing Dukovski's own original production. A distillery-load of vodka, a couple of practical toilets and a rather endearing pair of puppets play major roles in this in-yer face take on Huis Clos, but where I found the original mannered and frankly rather tedious, this terrific Greek cast brought out all the longing that the play unearths - a longing for something better than the oblivion its war-weary principals seek in drugs and alcohol, prostitution and casual coupling.
This good start was diminished by the evening's second offering, an amazingly pretentious "postmodern" revival of Racine's Britannicus which squandered an imaginative two-tier set to deliver what can only be explained as a textbook demonstration of hubris, not in the play but from all concerned in its execution. Projected slides suggested that this Roman tragedy was taking pla in a ruined Gothic cathedral, and there was a similar aesthetic confusion in its eclectic props and costumes - Nero pumping iron on an exercise machine is but one ludicrous example. Racine's play is crystal clear, monumentally deliberate and hugely dramatic. All the "improvements" foisted on it by the Altera Pars company succeeded in totally dissipating its power.
Charming
The second evening was more Greek in character. The young company Passepartout gave us On A Cargo Ship, a charming anthology of life at sea, with its narrative thread provided by a series of real letters exchanged over decades by a ship's captain and his fiancée. This was supplemented by seafaring songs and poems from the rich local repertoire, with the only jarring note a final nautical horror story from Edgar Allen Poe, whose high melodrama sat uncomfortably with the day-to-day adventures of the real-life sailors - even if these included their almost obligatory encounters with tarts and magistrates. The actors moved easily through a jumble of found materials which neatly created the settings for their stories and songs.
This was followed by more storytelling in the elegant setting of the Poria Theatre, from the equally elegant Dolichos company. Under the direction of the Lithuanian Cezaris Grauzinis they illustrated Daphnis And Chloe, turning it into a series of storytelling games for a group of four bored couples from the beau monde. Longus wrote the story around 150 AD, with the claim that "This work also offers healing and especially education, rousing the memories of those who have loved, and teaching those who have not." Grauzinis's staging cleverly showed the workings of the early pastoral romance on his present-day actors and came close to achieving this aim. Unfortunately he shares the tendency of Oskaras Korsunovas, whose work this closely resembles, to assume a low level of intelligence in his audience, so that a good stage moment is hammered endlessly home until it loses its value. A well-paced first half set the mood and intention of the piece; a repetitive second half killed it.
Manga
The pastoral tradition in Greek literature continued well into the nineteenth century, and in 1893 Spiros Peressiadis wrote a play with strong echoes of Daphnis And Chloe which was to become a staple of the amateur and touring movement of the time. Now the Thessaloniki company Horos have taken his Golfo and cheekily updated it, while losing none of its innocent, amateurish charm. The three masked protagonists, who play a number of parts, are introduced (in English, for the benefit of us visitors) by an engaging warm-up act, Clownski and Clownski, much in the way old travelling troupes would garner their audiences, but this duo's approach is also what one might expect in a TV studio before the main act is filmed. Likewise, the masks are not those of classic Greek theatre, but based on Japanese manga cartoons, as are the costumes. The scenery is animated computer projections. By thus adapting traditional forms to modern idioms Horos achieve a strong rapport with a young modern audience, who will not notice the considerable research that has gone into the show.
This was followed by an equally exuberant piece of company-devised theatre, Ex Animo's Nosferatu Didonticus, a surprisingly faithful retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula in the affectionately debunking manner of British groups such as Rejects' Revenge or Peepolykus. Like Golfo, it possessed more energy than professional sophistication, but its five physically gifted actors (and skilful piano accompanist) acquitted themselves very well, not least the truly Transylvanian-looking Count - very undead, very white, very male. And they offered the best surtitles of the week, in strict silent cinema style.
Shoutfest
The first show of the final day was from the National Theatre, a revival of Camus' Caligula, in one of the outlying theatres it occupies while its main building is being restored. Unlike the other productions, which started almost traditionally late, this one began on time, which was somewhat unfortunate for me since I'd taken thirty minutes to find a taxi; worse still, there was no way to get in, since the entrance to the theatre was also the entrance to the play's claustrophobic set. I did catch the most dramatic moment, when the actor playing Caligula genuinely severed an artery on the set and came rushing out of the theatre, dripping blood, followed anxiously by the rest of the cast, while the audience inside wondered why there was no curtain call. My colleagues tell me that this camped-up shoutfest was the worst thing they have seen in a long while. I could not possibly comment.
The last performance of this Athens System was from the well-established Praxi theatre company, in the studio space of their well-appointed theatre. They chose the German three-hander, Mr Haarman's Skills, which in a manner slightly reminiscent of Anthony Neilson's Normal examined a celebrated real-life serial killer, this time sticking closely to the transcripts of his interviews by a psychiatrist trying to unfathom his motives. We were treated to a fine display of acting, not least from the almost silent stenographer, and to some gruesome details of how Mr Haarman exercised his skills to dispose of his victims, but I for one was left wondering whether this finely executed (oh, dear) piece was really anything more than an excuse for some gratuitous if subtle audience exploitation.
So, no great discoveries, and sadly no evidence of what is happening among contemporary Greek playwrights, but a fascinating glimpse into a theatre scene which is growing almost daily, as new fringe theatres open around Athens to showcase young, usually talented groups. I hope to learn more next year.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
Reviewed in this issue: |
||||
London |
||||
AGRESTE (DRYLANDS) Play by Newton Moreno (Dende Collective) |
Lyric Studio |
10 May |
26 May |
579 |
BARNSTORM New play by Michael Holland |
Union SE1 |
17 May |
2 Jun |
594 |
BIG WHITE FOG European première of play by Theodore Ward |
Almeida |
17 May |
30 Jun |
588 |
BILLY THE KID New adaptation from story by Michael Morpurgo |
Unicorn (Weston) |
19 May |
10 Jun |
592 |
FAME Return of Jacques Levy/Stephen Margoshes musical after thefilm |
Shaftesbury |
8 May |
|
557 |
I MAY FLY New play by Felicity Jurd |
Camden People's |
5 May |
26 May |
579 |
IN EXTREMIS: THE STORY OF ABELARD AND HELOISE Return of new play by Howard Brenton |
Globe |
18 May |
26 May |
593 |
LEAVES OF GLASS New play by Philip Ridley |
Soho |
8 May |
26 May |
559 |
THE LOWER DEPTHS: Scenes From Russian Life New adaptation by Phil Willmott from Maxim Gorky |
Finborough |
17 May |
9 Jun |
558 |
MACBETH Revival of play by Shakespeare (Dancing Shadows TC) |
Pleasance |
14 May |
2 Jun |
573 |
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH New adaptation by Torn Moms and Emma Rice, from film |
Olivier |
10 May |
30 Jun |
574 |
MY CHILD New play by Mike Bartlett |
Royal Court |
9 May |
2 Jun |
566 |
NIGHTFALL New play by Joanna Murray-Smith (London Classic Th) |
Tristan Bates / touring |
8 May |
12 May |
561 |
POPRYGUNYA New adaptation by Linnie Reedman from The Grasshopper by Anton Chekhov |
Greenwich Playhouse |
10 May |
27 May |
586 |
SALT MEETS WOUND New play by Tom Morton-Smith |
Theatre 503 |
11 May |
26 May |
587 |
17.5 New play by Jason Cadieux (Essential Collective Th) |
Etcetera |
8 May |
27 May |
565 |
SILVER BIRCH HOUSE New play by Leyla Nazli |
Arcola |
11 May |
9 Jun |
582 |
SIZWE BANZI IS DEAD Revival of play by John Kani, Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard |
Pit |
9 May |
26 May |
571 |
TERRE HAUTE New play by Edmund White (Nabokov) |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
10 May |
2 Jun |
580 |
35 CENTS New play by Paul Anthony Morris |
Blue Elephant |
10 May |
26 May |
586 |
THREE SISTERS Revival of play by Anton Chekhov (Chekhov International Th. Festival / Cheek By Jowl) |
Barbican |
15 May |
19 May |
583 |
VERNON GOD LITTLE New adaptation by Tanya Ronder from novel by DBC Pierre |
Young Vic |
8 May |
23 Jun |
562 |
Regions |
||||
ALPHABETICAL ORDER Revival of play by Michael Frayn |
Reading. Mill At Sonning |
15 May |
16 Jun |
603 |
THE BAD DRIVE WELL / TONGUE LIE LIGHT New plays by Alan McKendrick / Megan Barker |
Glasgow, Arches |
17 May |
19 May |
606 |
CYRANO DE BERGERAC Revival of play by Edmond Rostand in new translation by Ranjit Bolt |
Bristol Old Vic |
9 May |
2 Jun |
600 |
THE LAST CONFESSION New play by Roger Crane |
Chichester Festival |
8 May |
19 May |
597 |
THE MAIDS revival of play by Jean Genet in new translation by Neil Bartlett |
Brighton, Old Ship Hotel |
11 May |
26 May |
603 |
THE MAY QUEEN New play by Stephen Sharkey |
Liverpool Everyman |
9 May |
26 May |
601 |
THE NEW WORLD ORDER and other short plays by Harold Pinter |
Brighton, Town Hall |
9 May |
19 May |
603 |
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE Revival of adap'n by Patrick Prior from R L Stevenson |
Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio |
15 May |
19 May |
606 |
TCHAIKOVSKY AND THE QUEEN OF SPADES Revival of play by John Clifford from story by Pushkin |
Southampton, Nuffield |
10 May |
26 May |
602 |
TOM CREAN: ANTARCTIC EXPLORER New solo play by Aidan Dooley |
Brighton, Pavilion |
8 May |
12 May |
605 |