Issue 18, 2007

Prompt Corner

Can drama schools please start teaching how to make an ending? I seldom see a devised show with fewer than three stabs at it, one after the other, and Mark Rylance and Matthew Warchus's The BIG Secret Live 1 Am Shakespeare" Webcam Daytime Chat-Room Show (perhaps a mosule in titling wouldn't go amiss, either) is no exception; it also has at least two Act One finales. Mind you, with an engaged audience the final final ending here can be exhilarating, in an explicitly and shamelessly Spartacus style.

Wacky

The preceding two and a half hours (cut down from three during a hastily extended preview run, and still 10-15 minutes on the flabby side) also fall prey to the twin pitfalls of the devising process and unwieldy subject matter. For "the authorship question" surrounding the works attributed to William Shakespeare does not immediately strike one as being prime dramatic material in itself. Rylance deploys some agreeably wacky tactics, casting himself as an obsessive running a tenth-rate Internet webcast on the issue from his garage and then conjuring up (thanks to a lightning storm and a malfunctioning wi-fl link) several of the main candidates to tussle it out. But as Shakspar [sic] of Stratford, Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and the Countess of Pembroke debate with Rylance's Frank, his sidekick Barry and a gratuitous police sergeant, they cannot help but periodically descend into lecture. John Michell's excellent tour d'hodzon book Who Wrote Shakespeare? seems to have been used as a source for brief synopses of the various theories, by no means all of which are represented onstage. (For instance, I'm rather fond of the candidature of William Stanley, 6^thEarl of Derby and hereditary King of Man, as in the Isle of Man.)

Rylance is a talented comic actor, but Warchus needs to subject him to more of the discipline that so paid off when rylance played in the first cast of Warchus's current revival of Boeing-Boeing. It is also an unalloyed delight to see Sean Foley of The Right Size back on target as Barry after his misfire directing the revue Pinter's People (though altogether more worrying that his programme biography refers to The Right Size in the past tense). Roddy Maude-Roxby is shaky on lines but strong on doublet-and-hose suavity as Bacon, Colin Hurley nicely no-nonsense as Shakspar and Rylance's daughter Juliet persuasive as Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. (Unsurprisingly, the family arrangement is completed with a score by Juliet's mother Claire van Kampen.) The unsurprising conclusion is that we each of us create the Shakespeare we need to inform our own lives. But it's a bit rich to include a disparaging reference to "jolly dances at the end of Macbeth" in a show created by the man whose policy when running Shakespeare's Globe was precisely that.

Dorks

From one set of family connections to another, albeit one which simply hung pregnant in the air rather than being present in the production. James McLure's 1979 diptych of Vietnam-vet three-handers, as currently revived at the King's Head, is decent enough fare; Pvt. Wars, in particular, gets revived every few years on the London fringe. But to be candid, this outing is obviously intended as a vehicle, since two-thirds of the cast consist of actor and comedian Shane Richie and James Jagger, son of Sir Mick. In such circumstances, the surprise is that Henry Mason's production really doesn't stink at all.

Jagger especially confounds expectations, not just with a brace of more than creditable performances but by his very willingness to play a couple of dorks. Of course, it could simply be astute casting... not in the sense that he is a dork, but that his particular frame and acting style lend themselves to such characterisations. But they're hardly blatant. In Lone Star he commandeers his mother Jerry Hall's Texan accent as Cletis, a small-town nobody whose casual clothes are slightly too well pressedand who (a nicely unshowy bit of physicality on Jagger's part) stands in an S-shaped slouch; his mere presence seems to lead to a drunken reckoning between Viet vet Roy (still a layabout after two years back Stateside) and his younger brother Ray. In Pvt. Wars, a kind of military-hospital One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Jagger is the spectacularly prissy Natwick, who wears aquamarine silk pyjamas instead of standard-issue hospital fatigues and who finds it incredible that his new friend has probably never read the New Yorker.

Riche, too, is a pleasant surprise at least in Lone Star. You can see the arsenal of casual attention-grabbing chops he deploys as Roy, but he is working in the service of his character, even during a couple of brief misjudgements towards the end of the play. The humour of his role in Pvt. Wars is broader, but still not quite as broad as he plays it; his Silvio, a Tiggerish psychotic whose genitals were shot off in 'Nam, is all shambling, bug eyes and Brooklyn-Eyetie accent. And it should be noted that the finest performances of all come from the sole non-name in the company: as Ray and Gately respectively, William Meredith drops McLure's bathetic punchlines delicately over the net and then pretends modestly that the resultant laughs are nothing to do with him. There are no great wonders here, but as prospective West End transfers go, I've seen a lot worse and a lot more often.

Capital Q

Finally, a brief apology to Neil Bartlett on behalf of the Financial Times sub-editors. In my copy as submitted to the paper, I described Bartlett as "one of Britain's most thoughtful Queer directors", implicitly referring to the Queer aesthetic of romanticism/decadence/defiance; someone in SE1 seems to have thought that I was simply using a no-longer-approved term, and no doubt with the best will in the world altered the phrase to the banal, gratuitous "one of Britain's most thoughtful gay directors". Ho hum.

Ian Shuttleworth | Ian@theatrrecord.com

At the Back

Can You Hear Me In Santiago?

Chile is indeed a strangely shaped country, a thin strip of land that goes from sheer desert in the north to tundra in the south. In the middle of it all is Santiago, a huge and determinedly modern city sprawling under the Andes. Every year it plays host to a festival of contemporary European plays, the seventh of which has just finished. The set-up is an interesting one: the prime movers are a group of European embassies and cultural centres, who make the first selection of new or recent plays from their country. A local panel then chooses two plays from each country to be translated and given either a reading or a semi-staged performance by Chilean professionals. "Semi-staged" means that the actors will have learned their lines and worked with a director, over a short rehearsal period, but the sets and costumes will be minimal. The seven nations taking part this year were Croatia, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Germany's Goethe Institute and Spain's Cultural Centre provided the venue for the semi-stagings, while the Italian Institute hosted the readings. Because the performances were free, the evenings saw crowds of students and theatre professionals (Chile's equivalent of Equity has only 1200 members) queuing up to get a glimpse of theatre in other countries, albeit refracted through a Chilean lens.

Full-out

It may seem strange to cross the world to find out what is happening in European drama, but it is in part a reflection of how little new European theatre we see in Britain. The Gate struggles gamely to present foreign work, and this autumn we have a bold season Upstairs at the Royal Court which will introduce playwrights from Sweden, Ukraine and India as well as Romania and Germany (and on the basis of its Bucharest production I'd commend Gianina Carbunariu's Kebab to you), but the fact remains that we're not really very interested in what is going on elsewhere. It would be foolish, too, to make any sweeping statements about what's hot in, say, Holland from the sight of a Chilean attempt to interpret one play; if anything, one was more likely to get some impression of what's up in Chile itself. The first couple of semi-staged shows were characterised by some very full-out acting, and rather too much shouting in what were intimate spaces. My Chilean friends claimed stoutly that this was not typical, but the one fully-staged local show that I had the chance to see tended to reinforce this impression.

Feast of filth

Alfredo Castro's company, Teatro la Memoria, has just opened its new theatre in Santiago's Soho, the Bellavista district. It's not unlike our own Soho theatre in its 200-seat end-stage configuration, and is about the normal size for Santiago's small collection of theatre spaces. The piece playing there (from Thursday to Saturday, which seems to be the normal theatre week for "art" theatres in Santiago) is an adaptation by Castro and others of a popular Chilean novel, Mano De Obra (Working Hand) by Diamela Eltit. It tells of the life of a group of employees of a supermarket, living in a communal hostel in conditions which contrast sharply with the clean, bright atmosphere of the shop itself. The novel is obviously a commentary on that contrast, and a serious plea against the terrible exploitation of supermarket workers, but the play seems to have taken only the most violent elements of the book and staged them with malevolent glee – a sort of in-yer-face Diana Of Dobson's. Casual couplings, food fights, buckets of blood, much of it menstrual, are the stuff of a very noisy evening, broken occasionally by monologues set in the store itself. Apart from those irritating noise levels, it is very well acted: but it was a surprise to hear the ecstatic reaction of the local audience to what could justly be described, to borrow the Daily Mail headline for Blasted, as a disgusting feast of filth.

Non-communication

Back at the festival, the Europeans were offering slightly milder fare. Italy's Spiro Scimone wrote dLa Fiesta in 1999, a couple of years before winning a Lion d'Or at the Venice Film Festival, but it can perhaps be considered contemporary since it is in the 2007 repertoire of the Comèdie Frangaise. It's the tale of a not entirely happy family, with the put-upon mother as go-between for a warring (and non-communicating) layabout father and alcoholic son. The Chilean production, by Hector Noguera, got plenty of gentle fun from their lack of contact, and allowed us to reflect on the play's treatment of southern Italy's two favourite obsessions, food and virginity. Holland's Esther Gerritsen, now apparently more accepted as a (prizewinning) novelist than as a playwright, also treated family matters in The Day, The Night And The Day After The Death. The son, husband and brother of the pivotal character, who has just died, examine their own inability to make contact with their own or each other's emotions in a production (by Sandra Arrigo Nunez) which used more volume than finesse to make its rather trite points. Three talented actresses (two of them also credited as directors) had the chance to show their abilities in the Croatian play, Ivan Vidic's not quite contemporary (1993) Fever, a series of energetic sketches about women without men – the men being otherwise engaged in local military matters. Their performances were matched by some colourful costumes by Rodrigo Claro.

Wistful poetry

The stand-out production of the festival was one which allowed Chilean performers to show that it is possible to inject both light and shade into a performance. The German playwright Martin Heckmanns has had success in his own country with his 2006 play Wörter Und KO' rper (Words And Bodies) but confessed himself even happier with its Chilean semi-staging by Luis Ureta. It's a little like Botho Strauss's Great And Small, which we saw in London in 1983, in that its central figure is a bewildered middle-aged woman who links a series of bleak but often ironically funny pictures of modern city life. Beggars and businessmen, shopgirls and secretaries cross her path in encounters that harp on our inability to reach out to one another in a communication-rich world of computers, credit cards and mobile phones. The whole piece is shot through with a wistful poetry, and its seemingly random events are actually part of a very well organised dramatic structure. There were few complaints that the play went outside the festival's conventional time-scale to last double the set length of one hour. The main British piece (there was also a reading of Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree) suffered from this time convention. To keep within the hour and in doing so avoid an awkward scene-change, Paula Garcia's production of Dennis Kelly's nuclear-bunker drama After The End omitted the crucial final scene which gives the play its name and its raison d'être. Nor was it helped by the casting of a decidedly mature actress to play the victim of the young nerd who has stocked the bunker. At least the presence of the author made it possible to correct the critics' original impression that the play borrowed heavily from John Fowles' The Collector. Dennis Kelly assured us that he has no knowledge of the book, play or film.

Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com

Contents / Reviews

London
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER New adaptation by Samuel Adamson from screenplay by Pedro Almodtivar	Old Vic	4 Sep	24 Nov	988
AWAKE AND SING! Revival of play by Clifford Odets	Almeida	6 Sep	20 Oct	1002
THE BACCHAE New adaptation by David Greig from Euripides (NTS)	Lyric Hammersmith	7 Sep	22 Sep	1010
BLAZE THE MUSICAL New musical by Steven Luke Walker	Bridewell	30 Aug	15 Sep	996
THE BOY FRIEND Return of revival of musical by Sandy Wilson	Open Air	28 Aug	15 Sep	1001
DAVID HOYLE'S MAGAZINE New series of performance pieces by David Hoyle (Duckie)	Royal Vauxhall Tavern	23 Jul	24 Sep	980
DIARY OF A MADMAN New adaptation by Jonathan Heron and Christopher Tester, from Nikolai Gogol	Rosemary Branch	29 Aug	16 Sep	999
THE EMPEROR JONES Transfer of revival of play by Eugene O'Neill (NT)	Olivier	28 Aug	31 Oct	972
FRAGILE New play by Tena Stivicic	Arcola	5 Sep	29 Sep	997
I MISS COMMUNISM New play by Ines Wurth and Mark Soper	Hackney Empire, Studio	29 Aug	23 Sep	1009
IS THERE A DIVA IN THE HOUSE? A new play by Richard Parsons	, Pentameters	29 Aug	9 Sep	993
LITTLE ME Revival of musical by Cy Coleman (National Youth Music Theatre)	UCL Bloomsbury	28 Aug	30 Aug	983
LONE STAR / PVT. WARS Revivals of two plays by James McLure	King's Head	30 Aug	23 Sep	981
MAN ACROSS THE WAY New play by Oliver Emanuel (Silver Tongue)	Theatre 503	30 Aug	15 Sep	995
THE PRIDE OF PARNELL STREET New play by Sebastian Barry (Fishamble TC)	Tricycle	5 Sep	22 Sep	998
REVERENCE: A TALE OF ABELARD AND HELOISE New play by Gillian Clarke (Goat and Monkey)	Southwark Playhouse	30 Aug	22 Sep	984
SATISFACTION New "dansical" by Peter Schaufuss	Apollo	29 Aug	8 Sep	977
THE SEXUAL NEUROSES OF OUR PARENTS New play by Lukas Bârfuss	Gate	4 Sep	29 Sep	994
THE TERRIFIC ELECTRIC New piece by Boileroom	Pit	5 Sep	15 Sep	1000
VENUS AS A BOY New adaptation by Tam Dean Burn from novel by Luke Sutherland (NTS)	Soho	5 Sep	22 Sep	996
WE THE PEOPLE New play by Eric Schlosser	Globe	6 Sep	6 Oct	1007
WHEN MIDNIGHT STRIKES New musical by Charles Miller and Kevin Hammonds	Finborough	7 Sep	29 Sep	1000
THE YEARS BETWEEN Revival of play by Daphne du Maurier	Orange Tree	7 Sep	6 Oct	1006
Regions
ABIGAIL'S PARTY Revival of play by Mike Leight (London Classic Th)	Perth / touring	7 Sep	22 Sep	1024
THE ALGEBRA OF FREEDOM New play by Raman Mundair (7:84 Scotland)	Glasgow, Arches	5 Sep	9 Sep	1023
THE BIG SECRET LIVE "I AM SHAKESPEARE" WEBCAM DAYTIME CHAT-ROOM SHOW by Mark Rylance Chichester, Minerva I touring	31 Aug	8 Sep	1013
CIDER WITH ROSIE Revival of adaptation by Nick Darke from book by Laurie Lee	Newcastle-under-Lyme, New Vic	31 Aug	22 Sep	1020
FROM A JACK TO A KING Revival of musical by Bob Carlton	Hornchurch, Queen's	28 Aug	15 Sep	1018
HALF LIFE New installation / site-specific piece (NVA / National Th of Scotland)	Argyll, Kilmartin Glen	4 Sep	16 Sep	1021
LISA'S SEX STRIKE New adaptation by Blake Morrison from Aristophanes (Northern Broadsides)	Bolton, Octagon I touring	7 Sep	22 Sep	1019
MOON LANDING New musical by Stephen Edwards	Derby Playhouse	6 Sep	6 Oct	1018
NORTHANGER ABBEY revival of adaptation by Tim Luscombe from novel by Jane Austen	Salisbury Playhouse	7 Sep	29 Sep	1020
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare (RSC)	Stratford, Courtyard	5 Sep	6 Oct	1015

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