Issue 22, 2007
Prompt Corner 
Everyone seems to have been talking about race during these two weeks. A remarkably batty article on the Guardian's blog site manages to suggest that Roy Williams, of all people, is an Uncle Tom, "simply part of a trend picked up by the white men in power, in which non-white men are 'in' for the time being"... conveniently ignoring that the "white man in power" who commissioned Williams' Joe Guy is, er, Femi Elufowoju Jr of Tiata Fahodzi. Quentin Letts treats the black-on-black prejudice so acutely indicted in Joe Guy with equanimity but recoils at what he mistakenly considers to be black-on-white racism in not just some characters' attitudes but the play's own; then, in the following day's review, he thinks nothing of describing a black character in Hairspray as "a hot-pumping Mama". It's the capital letter, I think, that does it, taking the word within a hair's-breadth of "Mammy". I can't help remembering a moment during this year's Edinburgh Fringe when former MP Neil Hamilton, during his and his wife Christine's daily chat show, remarked to African-American performer Jonelle Allen that he believed in plain speech and calling a spade a spade. She, with admirable presence of mind, quickly went into a parody of outrage and so turned the matter into a joke, perhaps showing rather more tact than was deserved, and certainly more diplomacy than the erstwhile government minister himself.
Tripe
Another interesting Lettsism is his presumption that "the point of [Kebab at the Royal Court] is to tell us that illegal immigrants, wherever they are, have a jolly hard time of things". Kebab is about some Romanians in Ireland. Both countries are members of the European Union. Therefore, freedom of movement exists without visa, and the characters by definition cannot be illegal migrants. But there's a strain of political discourse in Britain that can't help prefixing "immigrants" with "illegal", or "asylum seekers" with "bogus", as if they were part of the same compound noun. Such people may even in the same breath praise our enlightened values.
Myself, I watched Kebab with a deep ambivalence. Only days earlier I had, in one of my night raids on a theatrical blog, commented: "Shouldn't 'cultural diversity' now also take into account the eastern-European communities [in Britain]? How many arts venues are doing so? I genuinely don't know." To which blogger Andrew Haydon replied, "By 'reflecting cultural diversity', do you mean theatres that are getting young Eastern Europeans and making them write kitchen-sink dramas about what it's like being Eastern European in London? I'm kidding, of course, but only slightly." And there I was, sitting with Andrew in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, watching precisely that kind of work (all right, with the substitution of Dublin for London). It's almost a self-parody of "the Royal Court play"; I don't know whether to praise Aleks Sierz for bucking the trend and finding substance and excitement in it, or to hoot that of course he would because his compulsive championing of "in-yer-face theatre" (C) A Sierz) probably in large part drew the template for it. Still, writer Gianina Carbunariu unintentionally supplied a perfect emblem for her play: when the characters begin to wax nostalgic about home cooking, the first dish they sigh about is ciorba de burta, which my phrasebook describes sardonically as a soup made with "a small amount of vegetables and a large amount of beef tripe". Tripe soup: that, I'm afraid, is Kebab. (That sentence looks like a mixed metaphor, but I'm pretty sure it isn't one.)
Perverseness
Sometimes, of course, we can be over-eager in our desire to be on the right side of the race issue. Sam Marlowe, in her review of You Can't Take It With You, finds something suspect in a description of a black maid as "awfully cute, like Porgy and Bess". No doubt Hart & Kaufman were being a little blithe by today's standards, but primarily they were being topical: their play premiered barely a year after Gershwin's opera.
And then there's the perverseness of yours truly. Given the choice between Race and Fat in my review of Hairspray, I went for Fat. Ifs not that I insist that the subject of obesity be treated with gravity (and I use the ten advisedly), or think that the musical is anything but a piece of fun... and an excellent one. I was just noting that when you have two aspects, and portray them equally in one respect, then it looks puts you in an awkward position when the merest shift of angle reveals that, in another way, you're treating the same two topics in almost diametrically opposite ways. It's a testimony to the show's strengths that it sails past such a contradiction, not just with no-one minding, but with scarcely anyone even noticing. (Caroline McGinn also mentions it in passing. But did nobody think to spell out that the very fact that the black kids are in Special Ed. is itself a manifestation of racism? Anyway...) And it's certainly a good thing that my FT editors excised several (though not all) references in my review to my own physical status, as the Jabba the Hutt of British theatre criticism.
Gaze
I wish I had had the chance to write at some length about Small Metal Objects, which – although dramatically ifs no big deal – strikes me as full of resonance in the relationship between audience, company and presentation. Tamara Gausi refers to Back To Back as an "integrated theatre company", in the sense of working with people with learning disabilities. But with this show, what they have produced is a piece of theatre integrated with a busy everyday environment – in the case of its London outing, Stratford rail and underground station in east London just after evening rush hour. In putting the audience on display for the hundreds of travellers passing through during the performance, it reverses the usual theatrical gaze, and does so far more intensely than conventional devices such as traverse staging, when the only people watching us are ourselves. Here, the actors are among the crowd; it is we who are on display. And, whatever the eccentricities of characters Gary and Steve, it is we, sitting in our ranks with our headphones on in the middle of a transport hub, who are the oddities.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Lithuania?
If you can't hear me in Lithuania it may be just as well. David Cameron, leader of her Majesty's Opposition, got into some trouble recently for a casual reference to one-Legged Lithuanian dance troupes. I've just been exposed in Russia to a two-legged Lithuanian theatre troupe, and may be risking the same angry reactions from that delightful Baltic state.
Metaphors
The Baltic House in St Petersburg has an annual festival which seeks to bring together the best theatre of the region. Usually, it covers several countries, but this year it was entirely devoted to the work of Eimuntas Nekrosius, who has led a raiding party of Lithuanians, including Oskaras Korsunovas, Rimas Tuminas and Jonas Vaitkus in a concerted attack on the theatres of Europe in recent years. Both Nekrosius and Korsunovas have been honoured with the New Theatre Realities Prize of the European Community.
Nekrosius has run his Meno Fortas theatre since 1998 and before that was with the Vilnius Youth Theatre, where his 1977 debut was, of all things, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste Of Honey. His speciality is works based on the classics, of inordinate length, using strong metaphors and a very physical troupe of actors. His 1997 Hamlet was the first of three attempts on Shakespeare, the others being Macbeth (1999) and Othello (2000). All three were played at Baltic House, as well as his 2003 version of a Lithuanian classic poem, The Seasons: Autumn, the 2004 Song Of Songs and his most recent drama piece, the 2006 version of Goethe's Faust. Other Nekrosius productions were shown on film, and the first thing I must confess is that the performances I saw played to dangerously packed houses (with students filling the asiles and hanging from the rafters) and were universally praised, to prolonged applause which went further than the traditional Russian curtain call, itself quite long enough.
Metal
The second thing I must confess is that I just don't get Nekrosius. I have seen his symbol-heavy Hamlet two and a half times and detested it, and found the other half of The Seasons, the Spring one, unbearably overflowing with folksy kitsch. I had hopes that seeing three of these commemorative productions would bring me into the fold of Nekrosians, but they just increased my anger at his wilful refusal to listen to what his authors are telling him. Yes, he makes wonderful stage pictures, but they are the wrong pictures. Let me offer you an example from Hamlet, which is full of elemental fire and ice, good symbols for a Lithuanian director who wants to make a stir, but not so good if you want to make sense of a vacillating Danish prince. In the Mousetrap scene, the centrepeice is a socking great lump of iron, put there entirely so that Hamlet can embrace it when Gertrude suggests he sit beside her. Instead of laying his head in Ophelia's lap, he clutches the iron with a cry of "Here's metal more attractive." Fortunately, my timetable meant that I could only brave three of the shows this year, and avoid further meetings with the Dane or the kitsch. That was quite enough.
Macbeth
Thanks to a late plane, I arrived a little after the start of Macbeth to find a load of peasants dressed as if for an early Ingmar Bergman film (remember all those snoods?) clumping about the stage. Later three attractive young women appeared, definitely the witches. Lady Macbeth was easy enough to pick out, too, although not so different from her spell-casting colleagues. Macbeth was pretty obvious as well. The only other characters credited are Banquo and Duncan, plus a group (the snoods) listed as "soldiers and others". Now I admit that I watched this production, like the others, in Lithuanian without surtitles (the hiss of Russian simultaneous translation in a thousand earphones was no great help). But I'd reckon to know the play quite
well, so recognised Lady Mac talking about the messenger as "the raven himself is hoarse" and so forth. But I couldn't pick out Duncan's murder, nor Banquo's: the Banquo banquet seemed to arrive very quickly – you knew who Banquo was because he had a large axe sticking out of his back. The disintegration of Lady Macbeth took quite a while. That of Macbeth himself was less obvious, perhaps because there is no Macduff (and no killing of his children), no Malcolm and above all no visual fulfilment of the witches' prophecies, strange in a very visual production. Instead of Birnam wood, we got a number of chutes suspended above the stage, from which some near-lethal rocks dropped around the actors at various points.
The show took around three hours, which is pretty long for a Macbeth shorn of most of its incident – and, by the way, of most of its lethal magic and mystery.
Military
Othello next: and it did offer a solution to our own problem of whether a blacked-up Moor is permissible by giving us a very white Othello. Again, what Nekrosius offers is a series of visual reflections on Shakespeare, most of which suggest he has not understood the text, or looked for the riches within. It opens with a group of Venetian military in barracks, with lago the life and soul of the party. lago, more comedian than villain, doesn't relate much to Othello when he appears, but then Othello doesn't relate much to anybody. There is a great visual moment when he overturns a set of basins which have been getting in people's way centre-stage, and drags them around on ropes, suggesting that he is taking the whole Venetian fleet on his shoulders. On the way to Cyprus, we get a lot of jolly shipboard scenes, none of them Shakespeare's. Desdemona is more than ever a victim: our first sight of her comes as she appears dragging a door behind her, which Othello breaks down. We don't see a lot of intimacy between them, and by the end of the first act we have Othello dragging her around the stage pretty violently in a stranglehold, waving the strawberry handkerchief. This didn't seem to leave the play with anywhere much to go in the next few hours, so I left.
Mercifully
My final encounter with Nekrosius was Faust. Where he manages to spin Shakespeare out to enormous length, he mercifully gets Goethe's epic two-parter down to a mere four hours. Vladas Bagdonas (who has worked with Nekrosius from his earliest Youth Theatre days) is calmer in the lead than he was as Othello, and confirms himself, let me admit, as an actor of great stature. Goethe's story is cut heavily, to concentrate on the Gretchen scenes – their courtship is a ravishing ballet of breath and tentative bodily contact. But first comes a long prologue in Heaven (with my poor Lithuanian, I had thought it was Hell) which involves God apparently having to work a treadmill. Big visual statements of no great meaning abound, including a giant bone suspended above the stage, perhaps to draw the attention of the character listed in the programme as "Dog". Half a dozen metal cones decorate the stage, alluding, I'd guess, to Faust's alchemy. Once again, I missed what might seem fairly obvious moments like the hero's pact with the devil, but did enjoy long episodes of snood-wearers doing a great deal of running about the stage, though to what end I never discovered. Faust contains eleven thousand lines of great epic poetry, or so I'm told. That was not obvious.
So there you have it. Long evenings, full of powerful but not very relevant imagery, backed by an intrusive and almost continuous soundtrack, usually on a piano borrowed from Steve Reich, which suggests a lack of confidence in the text. Little sign of understanding of the text, either, with fairly major characters and plot moments mercilessly cut. And audiences absolutely ecstatic at it all. I give up.
Ian Herbert |ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
AU REVOIR PARAPLUIE New piece by James Thierrée |
Sadler's Wells |
31 Oct |
10 Nov |
1313 |
BLAIR ON BROADWAY New musical by lain Hollingshead and Timothy Muller (Third Way Prods) |
Hen & Chickens |
25 Oct |
10 Nov |
1296 |
CLOUD NINE Revival of play by Caryl Churchill |
Almeida |
31 Oct |
8 Dec |
1315 |
THE FACE OF JIZO New play by Hisashi Inoue (Ichiza Th) |
Arcola |
26 Oct |
10 Nov |
1297 |
FIVE TANKS New play by Lab Ky Mo (KaIm Boy Th) |
Hackney Empire Studio |
24 Oct |
10 Nov |
1295 |
FLOWER GIRLS New play by Richard Cameron (Graeae) |
Hampstead |
23 Oct |
27 Oct |
1290 |
HAIRSPRAY New musical by Marc Shaiman/Scott Wittman/Mark O'Donnell/Thomas Meehan |
Shaftesbury |
30 Oct |
1 Jan |
1306 |
THE INVESTIGATION Revival of play by Peter Weiss (Urwintore) |
Young Vic |
1 Nov |
10 Nov |
1320 |
JOE GUY New play by Roy Williams (Tiata Fahodzi) |
Soho |
29 Oct |
24 Nov |
1301 |
JOHN & JEN New musical by Andrew Lippa (McVicar Lane Prods) |
Finborough |
4 Nov |
18 Nov |
1324 |
KEBAB New play by Gianina Carbunariu |
Royal Court Upstairs |
23 Oct |
3 Nov |
1291 |
LOOKING FOR J J New adaptation by Marcus Romer from novel by Anne Cassidy (Pilot Th) |
Unicorn |
24 Oct |
25 Nov |
1294 |
LOTTE'S JOURNEY New play by Candida Cave (Pleasure For Pleasure) |
New End |
29 Oct |
25 Nov |
1293 |
LUCIFER SAVED New play by Peter Oswald |
Finborough |
1 Nov |
24 Nov |
1305 |
MAGIC WAR New piece by Marisa Carnesky (Carnesky Prods) |
Soho |
31 Oct |
10 Nov |
1298 |
A NIGHT IN NOVEMBER Revival of play by Marie Jones |
Trafalgar Studio 1 |
22 Oct |
1 Dec |
1288 |
OF TWO DAYS New play by Natasha James & Richard Jackson (C54 TC) |
Pleasance |
23 Oct |
11 Nov |
1305 |
OLD WORLD Revival of play by Aleksei Arbuzov (Prime Th) |
Courtyard |
23 Oct |
18 Nov |
1314 |
SALSA SAVED THE GIRLS New play by Rose Martula (Three Bird Th) |
Old Red Lion |
25 Oct |
18 Nov |
1312 |
SEPIA DREAMS New play by Fabian Politis, transl. Daniel Goldman (Casa Th Festival) |
St Andrew's Crypt |
15 Oct |
3 Nov |
1303 |
SMALL METAL OBJECTS New play devised by Back To Back Th |
Stratford station |
31 Oct |
10 Nov |
1319 |
SONGS OF GRACE AND REDEMPTION New play by John Donnelly |
Theatre 503 |
2 Nov |
24 Nov |
1322 |
VINCENT RIVER Revival of play by Philip Ridley |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
2 Nov |
17 Nov |
1323 |
YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU Revival of play by George S Kaufman & Moss Hart (Charm Offensive) |
Southwark Playhouse |
29 Oct |
17 Nov |
1304 |
Regions |
||||
CORIOLANUS Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Colchester, Mercury |
22 Oct |
3 Nov |
1328 |
DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS Revival of play by Eugene O'Neill |
Glasgow, Citizens |
26 Oct |
17 Nov |
1331 |
THE DUKE OF HOPE New play by Conor Grimes and Alan McKee (Tinderbox TC; Belfast Festival) |
Belfast, Queen's Drama & Film ar. |
19 Oct |
3 Nov |
1327 |
ENDGAME Revival of play by Samuel Beckett |
Edinburgh, Theatre Workshop |
1 Nov |
7 Nov |
1334 |
LAST EASTER New play by Bryony Lavery |
Birmingham Rep, Door |
22 Oct |
10 Nov |
1328 |
LIVING QUARTERS UK premiere of play by Brian Friel |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
27 Oct |
17 Nov |
1331 |
MACBETH Revival of play by Shakespeare (Replay Prods; Belfast Festival) |
Belfast, Crumlin Road Gaol |
17 Oct |
3 Nov |
1327 |
OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR Revival of entertainment by Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop |
Bolton, Octagon |
26 Oct |
17 Nov |
1330 |
THE PEARLFISHER New play by lain F MacLeod |
Edinburgh, Traverse |
30 Oct |
24 Nov |
1332 |
PLAYHOUSE CREATURES Revival of play by April De Angelis |
Dundee Rep |
31 Oct |
10 Nov |
1333 |
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER Revival of play by Oliver Goldsmith, with new additions by Bryony Lavery |
Birmingham Rep |
26 Oct |
17 Nov |
1330 |
SOLD New play by John Godber and Jane Thornton |
Hull Truck |
26 Oct |
17 Nov |
1329 |
THE WILD PARTY New piece based on poem by Joseph Moncure Marsh (Rosie Kay Dance Co) |
Belfast, Old Museum Arts Centre |
30 Oct |
3 Nov |
1327 |