Issue 14, 2008
Prompt Corner
This column is being composed in a hotel room in Bath during the press-opening phase of the Peter Hall Company's annual season here; by the time it reaches you, I will be packing for (or perhaps already departed on) this year's Edinburgh season (it seems Lyn Gardner of The Guardian and I are now the only national press representatives to remain in Edinburgh for more or less the duration, and even we knock off before the very end of the International Festival) and am recently returned from the first batch of presentations at this year's Teatro a Corte festival in Turin. Plenty of scope for musing about festival and season programming.
Danny Moar of the Theatre Royal, Bath is one of the canniest programmers in British theatre. With the Hall season each summer and various productions through the rest of the year, he has one eye on national tours and West End transfers as sources of additional revenue and profile for his own theatre. Jonathan Mills is showing himself far more disposed than his Edinburgh predecessor Brian McMaster to strike out beyond the usual international-festival-circuit suspects in his theatrical programming; however, Edinburgh's theme this year, "Artists Without Borders"; seems a little tenuous – how much of the work is actually, consciously musing on frontiers and differences of identification, and how much this is simply a fancy way of saying, "We have shows from lots of countries", remains to be seen.
Adjuncts
Beppe Navello of Teatro a Corte, too, talks it more impressively than he walks it, at least on the evidence of the first week's offerings in and around Turin. "Theatre at Court" is the second year in which the former Teatro Europeo festival is programmed in and around the former residences of the Piedmontese royal House of Savoy. Thus, during my visit; performance venues included the piazzetta in front of the royal palace in Turin and the former barracks of the Piedmontese cavalry as well as more conventional spaces such as the Teatro Gobetti and Teatro Astra and also the town square of nearby Moncalieri (the original Savoyard venue there having been damaged by fire). Public statements about the festival include resolutions that "for us theatre means words as well as shapes, gestures, figure, dance, visuals, lights, music, video, fire, water, clowns, nouveau cirque, plastic art" and that it "wants to be the meeting point of the new European creativity, where prose talks to dance, mime. music, circus, street theatre and new technologies". The reality during my stay was an almost complete absence of words, prose, talking, except as decorative adjuncts to visual performances. By the end, I was thirsting for the kind of theatre that involves people speaking to each other onstage.
I'm aware that this sounds like an unhelpfully conservative, and characteristically English, attitude (not to say an ungrateful one after an expenses-paid trip, though that shouldn't be relevant). It's certainly all too easy for British critics (of whom I was the only one present) to fall prey to such reactionism, but in this case the nature and quality of the work reinforced it strongly. Two of the ten events on offer during the period were street-theatre spectacles: Pi-Leau by the Dutch company Close-Act was a visually arresting but thematically incomprehensible piece about man's relationship with the oceans which seemed to boil down to "two legs bad, four fins good"; and I'm afraid that I simply couldn't be bothered to get close enough to see Alma Candela, Ca/orHumano by Alkimia 130 from Spain.
Trundling
My negligence was because I had by now seen two further underwhelming performances in the same piazzetta. Démodés by Spanish trio La Tal Con Leandre misfired because its casual early-evening street audience expected conventional clowning rather than a moderately thoughtful deconstruction of it – it seemed possible to tell which moments were intentionally failing to get laughs and which were just failing. Macadam Piano was merely a sideshow, too insubstantial to merit crediting as a spectacle in itself (though entered as such in the festival programme): Jean-Louis Cartes simply tinkled some cocktail-lounge piano tunes on a bay grand which – OK – happened to be motorised and trundling around the square. But really, a piece without substance.
Similarly, Nuovo Cinema Circo in the cavalry stables attempted to dress itself up with a clutch of references to and analogies with film, but in essence was simply a showing – and not even a graduation showing, but a work-in-progress outing – by the students of Turin's Vertigo circus school. Some of my colleagues admired the skills exhibited by these students, but for me they just weren't ready; none of the evening's performances showed a fraction of the ability, commitment or intensity of the Keith Jarrett piano improvisation played to accompany a tight-rope sequence. (Jarrett, coincidentally, played a concert in the city the evening after I left.) Again, it seems rather pompous to say that these shows have no place in an international festival, but I felt that a certain disregard was shown also to the student performers by pushing them in at the deep end like that.
Obscurity
The festival's programming seemed to be trying to straddle the dual bases of populism and high art. If, for me at least, the first of these elements was unsuccessful, the second was no better. Philipp Boë's Memoire De La Nuit was a performance with all the occasional obscurity but none of the frequent delight of its artistic inspiration, René Magritte; Josef Nadj once again demonstrated his own painterly eye with Entracte, but the piece itself (based, apparently, on the / Ching) was so stehle that the Nadj enthusiasts among our party were apologising to the rest of us afterwards.
Patrik Cottet Moine's untitled collection of comedy-mime sketches were skilful and amusing, but again insubstantial; moreover, when a mime artist calls at the end for applause for his sound operator, and when the biggest audience responses are for moments at which the mime interacts with audio gimmicks, there seems to me to be something wrong. Of all the shows I saw (not including Spanish company Senza Tempo's A+, Cosas Que Nunca Te Conte, which we saw in an open rehearsal in the small hours of the morning and so it would be unfair to pass an opinion), only Nola Rae's Exit Napoleon (Pursued By Rabbits) paid requisite attention to both style and content, had something to say and said it articulately and powerfully. That, too, looks like nationalism, but so be it. After a week, I found myself in the absurd position of being relieved to have returned from all that Italian stuff to, er, some Pirandello in Chichester. Ah, but that's another story, which you'll find later in these pages...
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Almada?
This year the Almada Festival celebrated its silver jubilee, the latest instalment in an inspiring story of growth from small beginnings to serious stature. Its founder, Joaquim Benite, came to Almada in 1978 with his then amateur theatre company and has stayed to see it become a professional troupe, now housed in a fine new theatre that opened in 2005. When the festival started in 1984, it was a homely affair, but it has since grown into Portugal's most important international theatre event, visited by major companies from Europe and beyond. It has spilled over into Lisbon, which faces Almada across the Tagus, and several of this year's events took place in one or another of the magnificent historic playhouses that are part of that city's heritage. In spite of this expansion, the festival remains very much a homely, family affair, overseen by Benite's small but dedicated theatre staff. This year's programme was led by the Berliner Ensemble, performing Peter Zadek's version of Peer Gynt – the one which caused such shenanigans at the Europe Prize ceremony last year. But the charm of Almada lies in its variations of scale and setting, so that in parallel with the Berliners in Almada you had the choice of two shows in Lisbon, a newly devised Portuguese work in the modern Maria Matos theatre or a stunning Italian solo piece in the beautifully restored Sâo Luiz, while on other evenings you might take in French classics, Mozambican dance or Brecht songs.
Puppet
Although the new Municipal Theatre, which can seat around 400, is now the heart of the festival (the Berliners were a great hit there), of equal importance is the thousand-seater open air auditorium which is set up annually in the yard of the adjoining school. Here I saw my first show this year, a puppet version of Swift's Gulliver performed by Jaime Lorca's company from Santiago in Chile. This was in fact a return visit, for Lorca's show had won the audience's heart and been declared best production of the 2007 festival. It's not hard to see why: Lorca's Gulliver is a scene-sweeping clown who falls though a hole in the stage and finds himself among the people of what is literally the puppet state of Lilliput. The set is a versatile metal structure reminiscent of the frame for Robert Lepage's Elsinore, which rises and falls to allow Gulliver and his puppet hosts to move fluently between scenes and scales. The whole story is told by two actors and two manipulators, yet it segues rapidly and confidently from the epic to the personal: Gulliver's flirtation with the Queen of Lilliput, growing into a love doomed to remain unfulfilled, is deliciously and unexpectedly sexy, while a concluding tap number for the life-sized Gulliver, his puppet sidekick and a Brobdingnagian giant whose feet are all we can see, is both hilarious and touching.
Gulliver was a strongly visual show that can succeed anywhere. This was not the case for the clever Spanish clowns of PAI, from Zaragoza, whose En La Lingua Floja (In A Soft Language) was the other production I caught in the schoolyard. The two performers are an unfeasibly lanky mute accordionist and a manically verbose juggler-clown, and their setting, an abandoned circus, the pretext for a series of intriguing tales of its troupe's long-gone members. If you have no Spanish. the word-games of Osvaldo Felipe can pall after the first hour, but you have to admire the assonant, alliterative poetic magic he can create while simultaneously telling a story and juggling half a dozen balls in the air.
At events like this, language can be a snare: the festival programme told us that in Ana Mendes' play 0 Lago "Decadent prostitutes die around a lake; in the farm, a sick couple eat their grapes". The actual cast sheet for the play, however, told us of a play very close to Pinter's The Lover, where a couple invent games to spice up their failing marriage. Having watched the couple without this hint and waited in vain for the flogging of dead whores, I finally read the second description, which made more sense of a well-acted, but very wordy play. By coincidence, an ex-whore was indeed the central and only character in Antonio Tarantino's Stabat Mater, another play where the text (in this case translated from the Italian) is all-important. Here, however, it was at least easy to recognise the power and commitment that won Maria Joâo Luis a Best Actress award from the Portuguese critics.
The Chat!Foin company came from Paris with a small scale puppet show which had also won an award there, that for Young Talent. They had a curious choice of subject, part of an autobiography by a Yorkshire miner, John Dennis. Set just before the valiant but disastrous miners' strike that was quelled by Maggie Thatcher, it told (through a narrator) the story of three lads up to mischief. The sequel, dealing with the strike itself, should be a lot stronger – and I would hope that it will be told with less narration and more puppet action. Another curious choice was made by the noted Cuban company Teatro D'Dos, who presented Abelardo Estorino's 1997 play La Casa Vieja (The Old House), about three siblings facing the death of a demanding father. The stylised formality of their acting on a set composed of three chairs and a coffee set was admirable, but as dated as the play itself.
Devout
Stylisation was far more appropriate to a remarkable piece devised, directed and led by the talented Spaniard Ana Zamora. With the help of an equally talented musician, Alicia Lazaro, she has edited a series of early religious performance texts and songs into Misterio Del Cristo De Los Gascones (Mystery Of The Gascon Christ), which takes as its starting point the existence of a life-sized, articulated medieval figure of Christ in a church near Segovia, in Spain. This is not a museum reconstruction, but a devout and moving play for today, performed with a starkly beautiful simplicity and revolving around a coyly blinking copy of this puppet, hymned by singer-musicians and moved by silent manipulators while Ms Zamora, as the Virgin Mary, relates his life and passion and leads us through a candlelit ritual which reaches out from its medieval origins to a sharp confrontation with our modern age of religious uncertainty.
French companies brought two early masterpieces to Almada. I missed Robert Cantarella's production (seen last year in Avignon) of the 1573 Hippolyte, written by Robert Garnier a century before Racine's Phèdre treated the same subject, but took great pleasure in Alain 011ivier's revival of Corneille's Le Cid, originally presented during his direction of the Théâtre Gérard Philippe in St Denis and seen here as part of a highly successful tour in the ideal setting of Lisbon's National Theatre. Apart from Daniel Jeanneteau's concrete façade of a set, which seemed somewhat out of sympathy, the rest of this gimmick-free production was played determinedly in period, from Florence Saudane's elegant costumes to the whole company's careful attention to the rhetoric of the text. Just occasionally, an actor would break free of its formal confines to shout an emphasis or cry their pain, but the overall containment of the production produced an unexpected excitement as its doomed lovers. Rodrigo and Ximene, did verbal – and by implication physical – battle: in one scene where their passion almost escaped the bounds of French classical convention, the atmosphere they created by the slightest touch of hand on arm, head on shoulder was absolutely electric.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
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BRILLIANT New piece by Fevered Sleep |
Polka |
10 Jul |
16 Aug |
824 |
DISNEY'S HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL Stage adaptation of film by Peter Barsocchini et al. |
Hammersmith Apollo |
30 Jun |
9 Aug |
792 |
FANSHEN Revival of play by David Hare (Th Delicatessen) |
295 Regent Street |
8 Jul |
3 Aug |
813 |
FREE OUTGOING Return of play by Anupama Chandrasekhar |
Royal Court |
7 Jul |
19 Jul |
810 |
THE FRONTLINE New play by Che Walker |
Globe |
9 Jul |
17 Aug |
814 |
FROZEN Revival of play by Bryony Lavery (Fresh Glory Prods) |
Riverside |
2 Jul |
20 Jul |
802 |
HANGOVER SQUARE Revival of play by Patrick Hamilton |
Finborough |
11 Jul |
2 Aug |
820 |
IN MY NAME Transfer of play by Steven Hevey |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
3 Jul |
19 Jul |
812 |
JAY JOHNSON: THE TWO AND ONLY Ventriloquism show |
Arts |
2 Jul |
13 Jul |
819 |
LOOK BACK IN ANGER Revival of play by John Osborne (Lone Wolf Prods) |
Jermyn Street |
2 Jul |
26 Jul |
805 |
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Open Air |
12 Jul |
2 Aug |
822 |
MIXED UP NORTH New play by Robin Soans (LAMDA) |
MacOwan |
7 Jul |
15 Jul |
806 |
MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS Return of play by Ron Hutchinson |
Tricycle |
10 Jul |
2 Aug |
818 |
New Connections 2008 Youth companies season; see reviews pages for full details |
Olivier / Cottesloe |
3 Jul |
8 Jul |
808 |
ON THE ROCKS New play by Amy Rosenthal |
Hampstead |
1 Jul |
2 Aug |
797 |
STAR POWER New play by Tony Sportiello |
Landor |
1 Jul |
19 Jul |
801 |
THE TAILOR AND ANSTY Revival of play by Eric Cross |
Old Red Lion |
9 Jul |
3 Aug |
823 |
THYESTES Revival of play by Seneca, adapted by Alexander Williams |
BAC |
1 Jul |
5 Jul |
817 |
UNSTATED New play by Fin Kennedy, devised by Topher Campbell (Red Room) |
Southwark Playhouse |
4 Jul |
12 Jul |
807 |
VINEGAR TOM Revival of play by Caryl Churchill (Gilt & Grime) |
Cobden Club |
2 Jul |
26 Jul |
824 |
Regions |
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BEAUTY AND THE BEAST New adaptation by Kevin Dyer (Dukes Playhouse) |
Lancaster, Williamson Park |
3 Jul |
6 Aug |
829 |
CARAVAN New piece by Giffords Circus |
Cheltenham Racecourse |
26 Jun |
30 Jun |
824 |
THE FLAGS Revival of play by Bridget O'Connor |
Hull Truck |
4 Jul |
26 Jul |
829 |
HAY FEVER Revival of play by Noel Coward |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
7 Jul |
9 Aug |
830 |
ME AND CILLA New play by Lee Mattinson |
Newcastle, Live |
24 Jun |
5 Jul |
827 |
MELA New play by Tajinder Singh Hayer |
Leeds. WYP Courtyard |
2 Jul |
12 Jul |
828 |
THE MUSIC MAN Revival of musical by Meredith Willson |
Chichester Festival |
3 Jul |
30 Aug |
831 |
ONCE UPON A TIME AT THE ADELPHI New musical by Phil Willmott |
Liverpool Playhouse |
2 Jul |
2 Aug |
827 |
REVELATION New play by Patrick Jones (Faction Collective) |
Cardiff, Chapter Arts Centre |
8 Jul |
31 Jul |
830 |
SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR Revival of play by Pirandello, adap. R Goold / B Power |
Chichester, Minerva |
8 Jul |
23 Aug |
834 |