Issue 21, 2007
Prompt Corner 
It's a very British characteristic to look down on nationalism, or even mild patriotism, when it's used as the basis for a particular point of view. But it does seem to infect us all now and again when we write... and not just the Brits. The International Herald Tribune column in which Matt Wolf addressed both Shadowlands and War Horse is a fine barbed example of what has made the Anglo-American "special relationship" what it is today. Surely we can do better than arguing "my sentimentality's better than your sentimentality"? Then there's Quentin Letts, also on Shadowlands, also disparaging other nations' temperaments in terms ("emotional incontinent'?) that tend to corroborate my occasional suspicions about English emotional repression being a by-product of excessively severe toilet training in infancy. He also praises "a repressed, bookish Englishman of the 1950s", C S Lewis, who as a matter of fact was Northern Irish... and that's my nationalism coming out.
Demotic
Similar transatlantic pushing and shoving is visible in the reviews of Glengarry Glen Ross and Rent. With the David Mamet play, the prosecutor-in-chief is Christopher Hart, but by the time he comes to back his claims up he has stopped listening attentively enough. "The dialogue strains to sound naturalistic," writes Christopher, citing the line "He couldn't find his own dick with two hands and a map". The actual line, as written by Mamet and delivered by Matthew Marsh, is "Cop couldn't find his dick two hands and a map." Those differences may not look much on the page, but when spoken they result in an entirely different rhythm, pitch and demotic feel, which Marsh gets and Christopher misses. I'm familiar with the rhythms of these lines from having acted in a production (since you ask, I played the no-hoper Aaronow), and I could detect none of the hesitation in dialogue that Christopher remarks on, although (as I've written) one or two characters occasionally mis-steer their lines. But Mamet is a poet of spoken rhythms in the same way as Pinter and, in music, David Byrne.
With Rent, it's the respective champions of Englishness and Americana again. Matt says there's a lot to commend this revival, without actually citing anything, whilst Quentin is once again exercised by blasphemy and imagined leftieness. Frankly, there's more than enough to damn the show on its own terms. To be sure, many of us were less than wild about the show on its previous London outings (I always felt the lyrics strained, without success, to find the same tone as the successfully rocky score), but we can still compare those favourably with this polished, sanitised, meaningless razzle-dazzle. I know I've already let bullets fly at this production in my FT review, but Rent is the second of the two shows I mentioned in last issue's Prompt Corner as having enraged me by the rank insensitivity with which they commandeered the memory of the dead, in this case by use of a scrolling LED display of AIDS victims. This revival's creative team are, we are repeatedly reminded, the people behind the current success of Kylie Minogue. One might have thought that their closeness to her during her recent battle with breast cancer would have given them some appreciation of how a potentially fatal illness may, and far more to the point may not, be referred to in media and commercial contexts.
Bookish
In case it seems as if I'm only pointing the finger at others here, look at the reviews of How To Curse and its pretty clear which of the reviewers remembers their own adolescence as bookish and emotionally crippled. Yes, I plead guilty, and that's no doubt why the play resonated so strongly with me. But I don't disavow my opinion of it. I also don't remember being particularly alone in that precious kind of teenagerdom, so I refuse to buy the complaints in other reviews that Ian McHugh's 17-year-old characters are too given to allusion. (Their age is mentioned in the text, contrary to Fiona Mountford's claim, though it is done obliquely: when Miranda protests that she's old enough to hold a driving licence –17 in the UK – it's implied that she is no older than that since she has no further legal rights to boast of.) I'm also surprised that I was the only one to register a feeling of Philip Ridley in this world where grime and magic meet and stories are virtually holy.
But then, there are several matters this issue where I could use that beloved "I'm amazed that no-one else..." gambit. For instance, amidst all the praise for the vigorous language of The Country Wife, I'm amazed that no-one registered the extent to which it has been modernised for Jonathan Kent's revival. True, the double entendre of "he is coming in to you the back way' is original Wycherley, but so many other expressions had been updated, and so unsubtly, that the little bell in my head whenever I heard such tonal dissonance was ringing so constantly that I thought I was developing tinnitus. Now, there's nothing wrong with updating a text per se – in the West End at the moment, Rupert Goold has discreetly revised a few of the more arcane terms and references in Macbeth – but in this case it was, as I say, so frequent that I feel it's a little naughty not to acknowledge it with at least a passing remark somewhere in the programme.
Howler
Oh, I Was Amazed at one more thing: that only one person – eagle-eyed, impish Aleks Sierz – noticed the howler in last issue's picture credits, when I wrote that Rough Crossings was adapted by Caryl Churchill instead of Caryl Phillips. I'd love to behave like Captain Mainwaring of Dad's Army here and bluster, "Ali, yes, well done... I was wondering who'd be the first to spot that." But the truth is I just messed up. Apologies to all concerned.
At the Back
Can You Hear Me Grumbling?
Wroclaw, Poland's third largest city, has recovered from its wartime destruction and is once more a beautiful collection of waterways and churches. Its fine historic centre has been carefully restored. Sadly, this beauty is marred by the most pervasive and ugly graffiti. Something of the same problem was apparent in the city's Dialog festival, organised by the redoubtable Krystyna Meissner with the declared intention to provoke. It certainly provoked me.
Pretenszus Krep
Many years ago, I invented a Polish director to embody all that I, in my ignorance, thought was worst about art theatre. His name was Pretenszus Krep, and on this week's theatregoing I can assure you that he still stalks the back passages of European theatre. True, I missed what were said to be two fine productions in the festival's first two days, Johan Simons' Life Is A Dream for the National Theatre of Ghent and Krzysztof Warlikowski's Angels In America for Warsaw's Teatr Rozmaitosci, the second of which seemed more attractive to those who had not seen previous versions. My first show was a Krep special, a version of the Oresteia directed by Jan Klata for, of all places, Krakow's Stary Teatr, most of which took place in a mercifully thick fog, which only cleared to show us a sleek Apollo performing a Robbie Williams number, watched by a TV hostess Athena in a backless dress and the Furies lounging in deck chairs. To use Aeschylus' seminal drama of family feuds and a primitive search for justice as a means of commenting on our personality-obsessed society suggests that the director has simply not grasped what it is about. (Yet I'm told Klata is one of Poland's brightest – his Transfer, about the forced evacuation of Germans from Wroclaw itself – has won much praise).
Far more interesting, and not merely as a historical rarity, was the same theatre's production, with a different company, of Jan Kochanowski's The Dismissal Of The Greek Envoys. Here is a mature and gripping play, first performed in 1578, when Shakespeare and Marlowe were both fourteen, which uses the conventions of Greek tragedy to examine one of its central myths, the abduction of Helen. Michael Zadara's stylish, well spoken and crystal-clear modem dress production makes the theatre auditorium a clever backdrop to what audience and actors share on its stage, and succeeds in imparting a sharp contemporary relevance that respects the play's archaic text.
Zadara was much in evidence in Wroclaw: off-Festival he has dared to stage Witold Gombrowicz's modern classic Operetka as a (fairly) lavish musical, and in a commercial theatre to boot – sadly the music is a disappointment, as well as the staging. He also had another modern Polish classic in the festival, local boy Tadeusz Rozewicz's 1958 The Card Index, an offering from the home company. I saw a baffling but very effective version of this absurd commentary on life under both Nazism and Communism in London a few years back. Zadara's answer to the play's considerable challenge was to make an energetic cast run up, down and among the audience, shouting with and without the aid of microphones and repeating the text until either cast or audience were ground into silence. The cast were still grinding when I left after ninety noisy and not very helpful minutes.
Notes
A feature of much of the festival was members of the Pretenszus Krep school of direction scribbling their graffiti over perfectly playable texts. The noisy hyperactivity of The Card Index was nothing compared to Andreas Kriegenburg's frenzied attack on Three Sisters. I have seen, even enjoyed, some iconoclastic visits to the Prozorovs in my time, but this was the most serious insult to my (and worse still, Chekhov's) intelligence I have yet endured. Kriegenburg has had the curious idea of staging not the play but his director's notes on it; they are hurled at us by a screaming, shouting, hyperactive Munich Kammerspiele cast, who put on masks, play musical instruments and explain all that poor Anton Pavlovich left unsaid, at tedious length. The grand finale has them joining in a chorus of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Most of the audience loved it. I cringed.
Even more insulting to cast, playwright and audience was Lee Breuer's cheap shot at Ibsen, Mabou Mines' DOLLhouse. Its main cultural influence seems to have been the Muppets, since the play is spoken throughout in cod (sorry) Nordic accents worthy of their Swedish Chef, and the step-change musical finale takes place before an entire wall of Waldorfs and Astors in plush red theatre boxes. Nora is unfeasibly tall, while all the male roles are given to actors of diminished stature – what we would call dwarfs, were it not for the insufferably smug air of political correctness that pervades the production. These gentle little men are -set to give head to one actress, and strip naked for sex with another. See what I mean about graffiti?
Questioning
Beside these travesties, Nikolai Kolyada's semi-pro company from Ekaterinburg in a mud-splattered, folksy mess of Gogol's General Inspector seemed positively reverent. Yet there were shows that proved it is possible to take a new look at a play without mocking or destroying it, like Pawel Miskiewicz's production for the Dramatyczny Teatr, Warsaw, of sketches from Peer Gynt, which started near the end of Ibsen's sprawling epic poem, in Egypt, where the play's philosophy begins to appear in earnest, and used its calm questioning of man's (and Peer's) purpose on earth to frame both the wilder earlier scenes and the touching later ones, for which the action transferred from a cramped lecture hall to a huge space populated by twelve life-sized stuffed reindeer. Likewise, Gatis Smits' staging for Latvia's Dailes Theatre did not give us all of David Harrower's Knives In Hens, but it did give us an intense, visually and verbally economical study of Harrower's tongue-tied love triangle, marked by three fine performances.
Wunderkind
Once hailed as a Polish wunderkind, Grzegorz Jarzyna is pushing forty now, younger than Warlikowski and Miskiewicz but older than the "new rebels' Klata and Zadara. For his ceremonial homecoming with the Vienna Burgtheater, he showed hubris greater than anything in his stylish but empty new take on the Greeks, [mede:a], by dragging the audience on an hour's journey to see it in a fine old ruined monastery, simply because its setting (well enough recreated in the Burgtheater's studio, it would appear) is in one, where Jason has his lush converted pad. His Medea is no sorceress, just a bored Georgian exile, and the whole story comes across as a glossy potential film rather than a searing stage tragedy. Mind you, when the film does get made they'll have to tidy up the new plot, which bears all the marks of enthusiastic but undisciplined improvisation.
The later stages of Dialog swung towards true physical theatre, led by Horos from Thessaloniki in a mask-and-manga take on Golfo, a nineteenth-century Greek pastoral melodrama, which offered light relief from the festival's more serious Greek-derived offerings. Next up were Korea's Sadari Movement Laboratory, with a superbly choreographed and lit approach to Woyzeck, using a dozen chairs as its ever-shifting set. Like the Latvian Harrower, it may not have been quite what its author intended (if we'll ever know), but it scored heavily with its own clear production values. Sweden's Cirkus Cirkor collaborated with a Danish company to produce a circus-theatre version of Andersen's Little Mermaid, which didn't quite manage to be either circus or theatre, while the festival's grand finale, Barbican actor-dancers Fabulous Beast in a revival of Giselle, their tale of death, child abuse and buggery in the Irish Bogs, loosely based on the original and not very imaginatively choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan, proved to be not quite actors, not quite dancers in a raunchy show that everyone but me seemed to adore.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
Reviewed in this issue: |
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London |
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ALEX New play by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, based on their cartoon strip |
Arts |
18 Oct |
8 Dec |
1264 |
|
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA New piece by 1927 |
BAC |
17 Oct |
3 Nov |
1246 |
|
BLACK LIGHT New play by Alvaro Men& Desleal (CASA Festival) |
St Andrew's Crypt |
9 Oct |
3 Nov |
1269 |
|
THE BLACKS Revival of play by Jean Genet |
T R Stratford E15 |
18 Oct |
10 Nov |
1270 |
|
THE COUNTRY WIFE Revival of play by William Wycherley |
Haymarket |
9 Oct |
12 Jan |
1232 |
|
DOUBLE NEGATIVE New play by Dorcas Webster (ChoppedLogic) |
Oval House |
18 Oct |
3 Nov |
1269 |
|
EMERGENCE-SEE! New piece by Daniel Beaty |
Riverside |
10 Oct |
2 Nov |
1275 |
|
THE FINAL SHOT New play by Ben Ellis |
Theatre 503 |
12 Oct |
27 Oct |
1239 |
|
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS Revival of play by David Mamet |
Apollo |
10 Oct |
1 Jan |
1240 |
|
HEARD IT ON THE WIRELESS New music cabaret piece by The Kransky Sisters |
Pit |
16 Oct |
20 Oct |
1237 |
|
HOW TO CURSE New play by Ian McHugh |
Bush |
16 Oct |
10 Nov |
1251 |
|
JENUFA New adaptation by Timberlake Wertenbaker from "Her Stepdaughter' by Gabriela Preissova |
Arcola |
19 Oct |
17 Nov |
1274 |
|
MEETINGS Revival of play by Mustapha Matura (Blue Hug TC) |
Arcola |
8 Oct |
20 Oct |
1257 |
|
ONCE WE WERE MOTHERS New play by Lisa Evans |
Orange Tree |
12 Oct |
10 Nov |
1271 |
|
RENT Revival of musical by Jonathan Larson |
Duke of York's |
15 Oct |
1 Jan |
1247 |
|
RIDER SPOKE New interactive piece by Blast Theory |
Barbican Centre |
11 Oct |
21 Oct |
1238 |
|
SHADOWLANDS Revival of play by William Nicholson |
Wyndhams |
8 Oct |
14 Dec |
1228 |
|
SWIMMING WITH SHARKS New play by Michael Lesslie, based on screenplay by George Huang |
Vaudeville |
16 Oct |
19 Jan |
1253 |
|
TERROR 2007 Season of plays by various writers |
Union SE1 |
16 Oct |
10 Nov |
1263 |
|
UNCLE BARRY New play by Sam Thomas (Grey Light Prods) |
Blue Elephant |
4 Oct |
20 Oct |
1250 |
|
WAR HORSE New adaptation by Nick Stafford from book by Michael Morpurgo |
Olivier |
17 Oct |
1 Jan |
1258 |
|
WATER New piece by Filter |
Lyric Hammersmith |
18 Oct |
3 Nov |
1272 |
|
Region |
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ALL THE FUN OF THE FIGHT New play by Jane Thornton |
Wakefield, Theatre Royal |
12 Oct |
20 Oct |
1277 |
|
ANTIGONE Revival of play by Sophocles in new version by David Levin |
Glasgow, Tron |
12 Oct |
27 Oct |
1278 |
|
THE CHERRY ORCHARD Revival of play by Anton Chekhov in new version by Mike Poulton |
Mold, Clwyd Theatr Cymru |
16 Oct |
10 Nov |
1277 |
|
DELIRIUM New circus piece created by Michel Lemieux & Victor Pilon (Cirque du Soleil) |
Manchester, Evening News Arena |
8 Oct |
9 Oct |
1276 |
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THE SWING OF THINGS New play by Torben Betts |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
9 Oct |
27 Oct |
1276 |
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THE WATER BABIES New adaptation by Andrew Pollard from Charles Kingsley (Northern Broadsides) |
Halifax, Viaduct / touring |
17 Oct |
20 Oct |
1277 |