Issue 11, 2008

Prompt Corner

It's a little embarrassing to have spent so much time in recent Prompt Corners going on about authority, and then fall prey myself to one of the most conspicuous pitfalls of all: being blinded by a big name. Or rather, several. I seem to recall that when Peter Hall revived Shaw's Heartbreak House in the early 1990s, the marquee outside the Haymarket had no fewer than eight actors' names above the title. My head was similarly tumed at The Cherry Orchard in Chichester, as you can see on the reviews pages of this issue; I spent more time revelling in seeing so many notables sharing the same stage that I too blithely dismissed the fact that what they were doing on that stage was nothing special. A good journalistic critic would have paid more even-handed attention to both aspects of the production; on this occasion, I'm afraid I was more journalist than critic.

Well, nobody's perfect, and Lord knows, it's been an intense season of late. During the month of May I saw 30 shows, and that was with several others dropping out of my schedule. (The Financial Times decided its readership could live without coverage of Never Forget, the Take That compilation musical; I love my arts editor!) The volume of openings has eased off somewhat as I write, but there's still a phenomenal amount of theatre out there: this issue's A to Z listings are in smaller print than ever in order to fit all the shows on to a single page, and that too has a number of items (festivals, short runs, one or two children's productions) omitted. Events are moving so rapidly in some quarters that, when our last issue went to press, the early closure of Gone WithThe Wind hadn't been announced, and it was listed in the A to Z without an end date; by this issue, it has already vanished from the listings altogether. Ron Hutchinson's Moonlight And Magnolias – about the frenzied writing of the movie version's screenplay – deserves its forthcoming return to the Tricycle, but it would have been so much more enjoyably mordant if the stage musical were still running a few miles away.

Gibberish

One or two shows have divided opinion sharply. The Common Pursuit seems to have split reviewers principally along generational and/or Oxbridge lines. (Maddy Costa, a female thirtysomething Cambridge graduate, is the conspicuous exception to this tendency; although compare the review of Simon Edge, who was at least as much of an initiate to the culture portrayed.) Possibly the play and its author simply belong to another era. A few weeks ago at the West End opening of That Face, I noticed a number of young media folk shouting cheery greetings of "Simon!" to a chap sitting a few seats along from me; I presume he was one of the directors of Skins on Channel 4, or something. And at each shout, the man in the seat in front of me would half-turn and then subside back as he realised that it wasn't him they were greeting, because that evening's crowd was a demographic that wouldn't have recognised, or perhaps even heard of, Simon Gray.

Philip Ridley's Piranha Heights is the issue's other hot potato of a show. Some readers may remember that a few years ago when his Mercury Fur opened, I wrote a long and involved comment about it in this column which, unusually, drew comment from the playwright himself. I'm not so exercised this time. As almost always with Ridley, it's the concept of story which is paramount: characters craft their own narratives, and exercise power by bending others to conform to their version of things. But there are worlds outside the play as well as within it; a world, for instance, where a character spouting vaguely Middle-Eastern gibberish which is meant to be Arabic prayer is going to be seen with some justification as insulting – not because we're living in sensitive times and need to be politically correct or whatever, but simply because it has all the unsubtlety and laziness of those 1970s TV sitcoms where Europeans or Mexicans were inherently funny simply because they sounded different, and any stereotypical different sounds would do. That character has a point inside the play, but also has implications beyond; and I think it's too easy to give the writer a free pass because of claims that he's being bold or challenging. Challenges can still fail, or be wildly misdirected. I wonder whether I'm facing up to Ridley's challenge, or wimping out before it, when I say that often he doesn't know when to stop. I suspect he'd say I was failing, but in the words of James Thurber, I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it. (Simply on a practical staging matter, too, I'd bet it didn't occur to writer, director or actor before dress rehearsal that delivering a long monologue whilst wearing a niqab means the veil is going to be dripping with spit by the end.)

Values

And one show, for which I wasn't on review duty, made such an impression that I want to testify here and now. Twenty years ago in Cambridge I saw a student production of David Edgar's two-part adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, in it, Nicholas was played by Ian Kelly, who currently takes the role of Robert Lyon in Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, and Smike was played (with fearsome physical dedication) by Hall himself. But my warm glow of nostalgia at seeing the pairing reunited again (after a fashion) is barely a single match's flame compared to the brazier of the play itself. A lot of nonsense is written about a left-wing consensus pervading theatre; liberalism is not left-wing, it's simply a matter of giving a damn. But Hall is proud to be both liberal and leftish, and both in Billy Elliot and here he finds a stirring combination that makes the heart rise in acknowledgement and praise of the values he hymns. Those values are social, political, ideological (which is not the same thing), emotional, intellectual and – in its most human, least abstract sense – spiritual. He cares immensely that people be allowed opportunity, that they be treated with that basic respect, and the case he makes for it in each of his works is unassailable. Quentin Letts asks towards the end of his review, "would a group of young manual labourers today ever plug into art in such a way?" The answer is of course no, but that is because there is no modern equivalent of the Workers' Educational Association – an organisation driven by grass-roots impulses for knowledge and learning – which is in tum because our culture, driven this time by the media for which we both work, has devalued these things as desirable in themselves, preaching instead that money and/or fame are all that matter. I prefer the worlds that Lee Hall writes about, and I'd like to see them back before I die. I've spent years rather proprietodally thinking of Lee as a university contemporary of mine; I m now honoured to think of myself as a contemporary of his.

Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com

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At the Back

Can You Hear Me In Athens?

When I wrote about the Athens System last year the situation in Greek theatre was a hopeful one. Since then the country has had a new Government, albeit of the same right-wing party, a new Minister of Culture and a new Secretary for Culture. (The previous Secretary, poor man, is still in hospital after breaking most of his limbs when he jumped from a fourth floor window last Christmas, as a result of his involvement in a juicy scandal involving explicit videos of him in action with his PR girl. The latter didn't break any limbs, but she's still in prison). For reasons not unconnected with the above, the situation is a little less hopeful now. Last year's Athens System was a pilot project, and its success proved that it was worth while repeating the idea of inviting a number of festival directors and critics to Athens to see some of the year's Greek theatre successes. However, when the organisers went back to the government for support for this year's follow-up, they received not an increase, but a halved budget. Nothing daunted, they went ahead, and it was a reduced number of guests rather than a reduced number of shows that resulted for this year.

Mores

This situation is, I learn, not unusual in Greece. Most theatres get their subsidy well after the period for which it is intended, and on a broader front most university teachers are still owed several months' back pay. Similarly, the mooted Greek answer to our Arts Council, the Hellenic Centre for Theatre and Dance, which I mentioned last time, now has a chairman and a director, even an office, but as yet no funds. So, all credit to Hellenic ITI for putting together a programme of a dozen shows for inspection, and to the companies for being willing to restage their productions in front of what were sometimes sparse invited audiences. In the circumstances it gives me no pleasure to report that what I saw was not exactly a host of thrilling new discoveries. The high quality of sound design was their most distinctive feature.
At least the opening show was a success story from the previous year. Simos Kakalas' young company from Thessaloniki scored a great hit then with Golfo, a cheeky manga adaptation of a nineteenth-century Greek hit that went on to charm several international festivals. They were then taken up by the National Theatre in Athens, and Kakalas was able to cast the two leads of Golfo in an adaptation of Melted Butter by Sakis Serefas. It's a fine piece of theatre, capitalising on the mask work which was such a feature of Golfo to enable its three actors to take on a host of subsidiary roles – Martha Foka's masks themselves make a huge contribution. It is based on the true story of a crime passionel and its investigation, told in a manner reminiscent of early Mike Alfreds and Shared Experience. Where the performance succeeds enormously is in its portrayal of Greek small-town and village mores, with abundant humour. The big question mark it leaves is whether such clowning is appropriate for what is basically a domestic tragedy.

Next came two ambitious – nay, pretentious – solo pieces from leaders of the Greek theatre community. Aris Retsos adapted a chapter from Rimbaud's A Season In Hell under the title Bad Blood – and bloody bad it was. A grotesquely made up clown figure in a pink hoodie, Retsos runs about the large open stage for an hour, making fairly meaningless gestures, while his recorded voice declaims the text, against a detailed and rather more interesting sound score. Only at the end of his exertions does he speak his own words direct. While in The Meek Girl, a less attractive title for A Gentle Creature, Lefteris Voyiatsis converses with his own recorded voice to recount Dostoevskÿ s short story. It's a performance of great depth, on a beautiful set by Peter Brook's designer Chloe Obolensky, but as with Mr Retsos' cavortings one is left asking, "Why bother?" All sorts of technical tricks are employed to add interest to a tale that is best left on the page. Deprived of the sight (and sound) of the title character, we are left with the highly unsympathetic narrator, the icy, inadequate pawnbroker husband who has driven the meek girl to suicide.

Frisson

More engaging was One In Ten, performed on the smallest of Neos Kosmos theatre's three stages. Director Laertis Vasiliou has worked with three young actors to make a lively improvised piece about their experiences as part of Greece's large immigrant population. Unfortunately, as with so many devised pieces, the show has no real narrative thread and its succession of sketches lacks the depth of investigation that its serious subject demands.
There was no shortage of narrative in The Dead In Love, an all-out Gothic thriller excitingly adapted and staged by Katerina Evangelistou (a curiously cross-bred product of Middlesex Poly and Moscow's GITIS) from a novel by Théophile Gaultier in a theatre festooned with spooky memorabilia. Again playing multiple roles in Shared Experience mode, her three versatile actors and one attractive actress created a real frisson in their energetic account of a young priest's doomed love for a vampire.

The venue was the most interesting feature of the next piece. The Booze Co-Operative is a very smart bar in the centre of Athens, and in its attic three performers chosen for their lack of attractiveness offered Disgust, a recital based on the absurdist writings of Nikos Gabriil Pentkakis, born a hundred years ago. Their activities involved a lot of parcel tape, much cardboard and various fluids, bodily and other. In their efforts to disgust, they succeeded all too well, while every so often their author's dark, nihilist humour broke through their childish play.

Graphics

I had to leave the showcase before it ended – mercifully in the middle of Disgust, in fact – so am unable to comment on a Miss Julie directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos, perhaps the Greek director most known abroad, and a couple of Chekhovs. The most interesting piece of the week, though not the most successful, was AlphaOmega by Ash Bulayev and Eugenia Tzirtzilaki. Billed as a "Live Cinema Performance", it is basically an impressive set of computer graphics put together, with full orchestral soundtrack, to illustrate and develop a Borges story, The Library Of Babel. Escher-like images of infinite library shelves come and go on a big screen, turning in on themselves, dissolving and reappearing. Books open, and images on their pages dissipate and reform. And in the centre of the library, a number of figures come and go on the giant screen. After a while you realise that these are live actors. The irony is that these actors are partly obscured by the sightlines of the downtown theatre, where the show takes place, whereas the filmed parts are very visible. The Pallas, truly palatial in its fittings, is but one of nine theatres owned by Elliniki Theamaton, the giants of Greek commercial theatre, who have even turned the Olympic badminton hall into a theatre, the Badminton (naturally), where Mamma Mia has just completed a successful run. It is noteworthy that this highly commercial organisation was prepared to lavish a great deal of money on the decidedly avant-garde AlphaOmega and present it in one of their flagship theatres. Truly, Greek theatre is full of surprises.

Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com

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Contents / Reviews

Reviewed in issue 11, 2008:
London
BETWIXT! New musical by Ian McFarlane	King's Head	13 May	2 Jun	596
Burst Festival of dance, theatre and play (see review pages for full details)	BAC	8 May	24 May	608
THE COMMON PURSUIT Revival of play by Simon Gray	Menier Chocolate Factory	27 May	20 Jul	618
THE COUNTRY Revival of play by Martin Crimp	Tabard	29 May	21 Jun	614
FAT PIG New play by Neil LaBute	Trafalgar Studio 1	27 May	6 Sep	621
FUCKING MEN New play by Joe DiPietro	Finborough	16 May	7 Jun	599
HANNAH AND MARTIN New play by Kate Fodor	Courtyard	29 May	22 Jun	605
HARD-HEARTED HANNAH AND OTHER STORIES New piece by Cartoon de Salvo	Lyric Studio	20 May	7 Jun	606
LEAD US INTO TEMPTATION New play by Christopher Hanvey (Tiger Underground TC)	Old Red Lion	27 May	14 Jun	612
LIFE-COACH New play by Nick Reed	Trafalgar Studio 2	22 May	14 Jun	513
THE LONG ROAD New play by Shelagh Stephenson	Soho	19 May	5 Jun	589
MARGUERITE New musical by Alain Boublil/Claude-Michel Schönberg/Michel Legrand et al.	Haymarket	20 May	1 Nov	591
A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare	Globe	21 May	4 Oct	597
NEVER FORGET New musical by Danny Brocklehurst, with the songs of Take That	Savoy	21 May		600
PIRANHA HEIGHTS New play by Philip Ridley	Soho	21 May	14 Jun	607
THE PITMEN PAINTERS New play by Lee Hall (NT/Newcastle Live Th)	Cottesloe	21 May	25 Jun	608
THE QUIZ New play by Richard Crane	Rose, Kingston / touring	28 May	30 May	605
REALITY CHOKES New play by AI Gregg and David Schaal	Pentameters	15 May	31 May	590
ROCK New play by Tim Fountain	Oval House	29 May	21 Jun	629
ROSMERSHOLM Revival of play by Henrik Ibsen, in version by Mike Poulton	Almeida	22 May	5 Jul	615
THE TELECTROSCOPE Installation by Paul St George	South Bank	22 May	15 Jun	614
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA Revival of play by Shakespeare (Cheek By Jowl)	Barbican	28 May	14 Jun	626
THE TWILIGHT RAINBOW New play by Theatre Under Fire	Warehouse Croydon	30 May	15 Jun	625
WOLVES AT THE WINDOW New adaptation by Toby Davies from stories by Saki	Arcola	30 May	21 Jun	630
Regions
ABSOLUTELY FRANK Revival of play by Tim Firth	Hornchurch, Queen's	27 May	14 Jun	639
BREAKING THE SILENCE Revival of play by Stephen Poliakoff	Nottingham Playhouse	20 May	31 May	638
Brighton Festival See review pages for full details of shows covered	Brighton, various	3 May	25 May	633
THE CHERRY ORCHARD Revival of play by Anton Chekhov in version by Mike Poulton	Chichester Festival	23 May	7 Jun	634
THE FIRST TO GO New play by Nabil Shaban (Benchtours / Sinus Pictures)	Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum / touring	24 May	24 May	639
HAUNTING JULIA Revival of play by Alan Ayckbourn	Scarborough, Stephen Joseph	27 May	23 Aug	639
KAFKA'S DICK Revival of play by Alan Bennett	Watford Palace	13 May	31 May	637
LIAR New play by Davey Anderson (TAG ! Sounds Of Progress)	Glasgow, Citizens Circle Studio	27 May	7 Jun	642
LITTLE OTIK New adaptation by Matthew Lenton and the company from film by Jan $vankmajer (NTS)	Glasgow, Citizens! touring	23 May	31 May	641
RIGMAROLE New piece by For We Are Many	Glasgow, Arches	28 May	30 May	643
THE SOUND OF MY VOICE New adaptation by Jeremy Raison from novel by Ron Butlin	Glasgow, Citizens Stalls Studio	22 May	7 Jun	640
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Revival of play by Tennessee Williams	Southampton, Nuffield	20 May	31 May	638

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