Issue 21, 2008
Prompt Corner 
Sometimes the more powerful dramas take place offstage; I type this on American election night, with half an eye on the ritual that is the BBC’s fascinated, space-filling, rolling TV coverage. What differences President-elect Obama’s tenure (oh, look, I’m risking a prediction) will bring in the relationship between political and artistic cultures remain to be seen.
Coruscating
It does seem significant that the closest to a direct comment on the political and cultural climate during the 21 months(!) of the campaign, Christopher Shinn’s Now Or Later, premièred across the Atlantic at the Royal Court. Shinn has garnered a nomination for Best Play in the just-published longlist of candidates for the Evening Standard awards, although I am bitterly disappointed that Eddie Redmayne has not similarly been recognised for his coruscating performance in the central rôle.
In fact, every work in contention for the Best Play award has a significant political dimension. Gregory Burke’s Black Watch serves partly as an indictment of government policy both on Gulf War II and on the disbandment and merger of historic regiments; Roy Williams’ Days Of Significance likewise comments about the war and its exploitation of a generation of young people with few expectations or options; Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters is a moving hymn to an all-but-dead ethos of self-improvement embodied in the Workers’ Educational Association; Rebeccas Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin parallels political suffragism and sexual awakening; and Howard Brenton’s Never So Good uses a biographical drama of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to shame the impoverishment of the entire political discourse over the past 20–30 years.
Towering
In such a context, it is easier to bear in mind that theatre’s first great flowering was as a tool of the state: the tragedies submitted for performance at the Great Dionysia either implicitly or explicitly reinforced the values of the Athenian polis. In this issue, of course, are contained reviews of one of the earliest surviving plays, and to my mind still perhaps the greatest drama ever written. Oedipus is a kind of Citizen Kane of theatre: a towering achievement almost at the very beginning of the form and one which the next 2400 years have been spent trying to match.
Frank McGuinness’s version shows it unadorned. A number of reviews find a banal or colloquial note in some of McGuinness’s phrases here, but it seems to me that he is deliberately denuding the language of poetry so that the drama and images themselves stand more starkly forth. The Chorus sums up the plague on the city: “God is on fire.” Creon, announcing the Delphic oracle’s ruling on the matter, declares simply, “Blood will have blood.” The final distich, usually rendered along the lines of “Call no man fortunate until he is dead”, is here the even more starkly fatalistic “Turn to dust, and be contented.”
Resonances
And of course, we regularly attempt to descry profound social significance in the merest coincidences of programming. Is it because of the credit crunch that alt.variety show La Clique has finally seized its moment to come into London’s West End after years of success in Edinburgh and around the world? Is it heck – they just happened to find an appropriate venue for the show. (Alas, that venue will not last: permission has been given in the past few days for the Hippodrome to be converted into a designer casino.) Do we find especial resonances between our current state and the rising inflation and unemployment of the early 1970s which form the background to Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests? No, we do not – that social/economic fabric isn’t perceptibly present in the plays; we bring the association along ourselves.
Note, too, the mishap reported in one or two reviews on the press night of the Normans,when an over-enthusiastic hug from Kevin Spacey sent Air Alan sprawling. Crikey, all that comedy and a masterclass in pratfall as well. Perhaps Spacey was carried away by a wave of fellow-feeling, since he seems to have gained his position at the Old Vic by replying to a similar newspaper advertisement to the one Ayckbourn envisaged for his own successor: “Director prepared to work for nothing and put in several tens of thousands of pounds per year wanted...”
Escapism
It does seem to be the case, though, that escapism is more prized in arts and entertainment in times of hardship. Hence, perhaps, the welcome for Peepolykus’ Spyski!, which manages to play both sides at once by combining fantastical silliness with a far-fetched but true inspiration, the poisoning of former KGB agent Vladimir Litvinenko in London by means of radioactive sushi. One of Ruth’s inspired layout juxtapositions puts Charles Spencer’s Spyski! review, with its speculation that the show “will, I suspect, appeal far more strongly to men than women”, immediately before Lyn Gardner’s dismissal of it as “lameski”. (Interestingly, Fiona Mountford and Claire Allfree were more even-handed in their assessments.)
As for me, I always feel rather pompous reviewing Peepolykus shows, trying to describe, explicate and evaluate their humour when primarily they’re just being silly. When I try to explain why they are merely very good rather than great, I find myself using phrases like “not crisp enough”, which makes them sound like lettuce. They are growing ever closer to the magic zone, though: the coarse acting of the opening Oscar Wilde parody extract is all energy rather than precision, but during the spy sequences they commit themselves to the story, which makes it all the funnier. Charlie is on the money once again when he writes about John Nicholson’s “sweaty panic”; one of the factors which so elevated the company’s last show was the addition of Jason Thorpe, who lends a physical intensity to his clowning which has to an extent rubbed off on Nicholson and Javier Marzan. They have perhaps realised the vital importance of being earnest.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Nitra?
Last time I visited Nitra, two years ago, I marked it down as a good festival for spotting the hits ahead of their time, and my vanity was suitably touched to find this remark at the head of the quotes in Nitra’s recently published history of its first sixteen editions. I have to step back a little in writing about the 2008 festival, which had its moments but can’t be rated as its finest year. Where it did score was perhaps more with the local than the international audience, in giving them a quick tour of genres and movements alongside some Slovak successes. Certainly, there is no shame in putting up local work beside the international visitors: the opening performance, by the national company from Bratislava, was a disappointment, but two other Slovak pieces more than held their own.
Heavy-handed
That first show was Bűchner’s Leonce And Lena, directed by Martin Cicvak, using all the resources of a big theatre: big chorus, live pit band, expensive set. The play is the antithesis of the same author’s Woyzeck, an absurdist fairy story liberally laced with songs, but Cicvak’s heavy-handed treatment stifled laughter. Another hot young Slovak director, Michal Vajdicka, had more success with the local Nitra company in Everything For The Nation, Ondrej Sulaj’s stage adaptation of a classic Slovak novel by Bozena Timrava. Its tale of three daughters of the manse in search of husbands is pitched half way between Jane Austen and Chekhov, and Vajdicka’s production, in Jana Hurtigova’s creamy costumes on Pavol Andrusko’s earthy traverse set, created a strong atmosphere of idyllic rusticity. Sadly, too much reverence for the original made for a long evening, which would have benefited from more stringent cutting, but the performances of a well-matched cast carried us with them for much of the time. Dance is not something one associates particularly with the Slovak theatre scene, but a new Bratislava company, ElleDanse, deservedly carried away several of the season’s awards with Canto Hondo, a wistfully evocative story of a family broken by the father’s too close attention to his daughter. Clever doubling mingled past with present, aided by the comings and goings of a couple of on-stage musicians.
Sprawling
The international offerings gave Nitra a good road map of European trends good and bad. Three main stage productions showed off three very different directors. Holland’s Alize Zandwyck brought a lazy, directionless revival for Rotterdam’s RoTheater of Brecht’s Baal, casting the actress Fania Sorel in the title role. Sorel got off to a swaggering start, painting a penis on her belly and proceeding literally to piss on the Berlin art establishment in a very masculine way. Yet as her Baal wandered about Thomas Rupert’s messy, unhelpful set, destroying all that was good around him/her and finally him/herself, an increasing femininity in her performance weakened both the character and the play. From Wroclaw in Poland the versatile Jan Klata came with a revival of Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s The Danton Case, which might almost be an adaptation of Büchner’s better known treatment of the same events. Clever use of Mirek Kaczmarek’s sprawling cardboard city of a set made the play’s complex series of alliances and betrayals among the French revolutionaries very clear, while the occasional sexually charged encounter with one of the underwritten women characters added spice. All of this added up to a demonstration of a skilled director at work on somewhat intractable material, with the benefit of a well integrated ensemble. Finally, Sebastian Nübling and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, showed their premiere presentation of Simon Stephens’ Pornography. This was a fine example of how a festival showing can shed light on a play and its meaning in production. Reading the flat, directionless text of Stephens’ sketches of London life around the 7/7 atrocities, which he says can be played by any actor in any order, gives little hint of the riches within. Nübling’s production chose to present the scenes in the order in which they are printed, revealing in the process that they follow Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man. He also made one change to the gender of his performers, subtly improving the texture of the performance by giving us one male-on-male scene and one male-on-female rather than two male-on-female. Finally, Muriel Gerstner’s set concept, in which the cast remain on stage throughout, constructing a backdrop of the Tower of Babel from 1” tiles, swings the whole downbeat lack of human contact which infuses the text into positive territory, when after the fatal explosion at its core the actors get back to their collaboration on rebuilding the picture. Discussing the performance the following day, Simon Stephens was at pains to praise both director and designer for the dimensions they had added to his work.
Literary
Three small-scale shows examined the use of non-traditional stage media. Orthographe from Ravenna showed some Attempts At Flight, using camera obscura technique to project a few fuzzy images on to a screen and prompt the question whether the performance gained at all from being live. Russia’s Ivan Vyrypaev, of Oxygen fame, directed his actress wife Polina Agureyeva in July, a savage short story about a crazed serial killer, leading us to ask what was gained by having her recite a very literary work on stage; and Hungarian film director Kornel Mundruczo set his very own slash movie, The Frankenstein Project, in a claustrophobic container, to ask whether film technique has its place in theatre. The last was the most interesting of the three, creating a powerfully realistic and increasingly sinister atmosphere until the demands of its ever more preposterous plot destroyed what had been a very willing suspension of the audience’s disbelief. Still, the director ingeniously ensured that every detail could be seen – a treat.
Claustrophobic
Finally, two pieces from neighbouring Prague showed how lively Czech theatre has become. Dusan Parizek directed his Comedy Theatre troupe in a suitably intense treatment of Kafka’s The Trial, helped by his deceptively simple stage set, a half cube which K breaks open to reveal only that it is part of a larger cube. Best of all, Jiri Nekvasil directed a brilliant chamber opera with music by Ales Brezina, Tomorrow There Will Be... a harrowing account of a real show trial, for two soloists and two choirs, undoubtedly the highlight of the week.
Ian Herbert ! ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
Reviewed in issue 21, 2008: |
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London |
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AUGUSTA New play by Alan Franks |
New End |
10 Oct |
2 Nov |
1173 |
JUSTIN BOND: LUSTRE New cabaret show |
Soho |
14 Oct |
1 Nov |
1187 |
THE BROTHERS SIZE Return of play by Tarell Alvin McCraney (ATC) |
Young Vic, Maria |
13 Oct |
8 Nov |
1162 |
CLICHÉ New play by Dani Carbery (Silent Announcement) |
Etcetera |
9 Oct |
26 Oct |
1187 |
LA CLIQUE New cabaret show |
Hippodrome |
10 Oct |
1 Feb |
1169 |
DANIEL HIT BY A TRAIN New piece by Lone Twin |
Chelsea |
16 Oct |
17 Oct |
1171 |
A DISAPPEARING NUMBER Return of piece by Complicité |
Barbican |
15 Oct |
1 Nov |
1174 |
ELIZABETH AND RALEIGH: LATE BUT LIVE New play by Stewart Lee |
Bloomsbury |
14 Oct |
14 Oct |
1163 |
FRENCH & SAUNDERS: STILL ALIVE! New comedy hsow by Dawn French & Jennifer Saunders |
T R Drury Lane |
16 Oct |
8 Nov |
1186 |
HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY AND NEVER BE FOUND London première of play by Fin Kennedy |
Southwark Playhouse |
10 Oct |
1 Nov |
1156 |
IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER New play by Tarell Alvin McCraney |
Young Vic |
9 Oct |
8 Nov |
1159 |
INFORMED CONSENT New play by Richard Brockman |
Jermyn Street |
7 Oct |
25 Oct |
1168 |
IRIS BRUNETTE New piece by Melanie Wilson based on the film La Jetée by Chris Marker |
BAC |
10 Oct |
25 Oct |
1175 |
LAUGHING IN THE DARK New piece by Graeme Messer |
New End |
14 Oct |
2 Nov |
1165 |
MINE New play by Polly Teale (Shared Experience) |
Hampstead |
9 Oct |
25 Oct |
1164 |
NO MAN'S LAND Revival of play by Harold Pinter (Gate, Dublin) |
Duke Of York's |
7 Oct |
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1152 |
THE NORMAN CONQUESTS Revival of trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn |
Old Vic |
6 Oct |
20 Dec |
1144 |
OEDIPUS New version by Frank McGuinness from Sophocles (NT) |
Olivier |
15 Oct |
4 Jan |
1176 |
OVERSPILL New play by Ali Taylor |
Soho |
16 Oct |
1 Nov |
1182 |
RADIO GOLF UK première play by August Wilson |
Tricycle |
6 Oct |
1 Nov |
1149 |
RADIOPLAY Return of piece by Ed Gaughan (Flywheel Prods) |
Lyric Studio |
9 Oct |
25 Oct |
1151 |
RICHARD III Revival of play by Shakespeare (The Faction) |
Brockley Jack |
17 Oct |
8 Nov |
1181 |
SPYSKI! New piece by Peepolykus |
Lyric Hammersmith |
13 Oct |
1 Nov |
1172 |
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Revival of play by Shakespeare (Nós do Morro) |
The Pit |
8 Oct |
18 Oct |
1185 |
THE WHITE DEVIL Revival of play by John Webster |
Menier Chocolate Factory |
9 Oct |
15 Nov |
1166 |
YOU CAN SEE THE HILLS New play by Matthew Dunster |
Young Vic, Clare |
14 Oct |
18 Oct |
1188 |
Regions |
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ABSENT FRIENDS Revival of play by Alan Ayckbourn |
Watford Palace |
7 Oct |
25 Oct |
1193 |
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Revival of adap’n by Robin Kingsland from Erich Maria Remarque |
Nottingham Playhouse / touring |
10 Oct |
18 Oct |
1194 |
AT THE GATES OF GAZA New play by Juliet Gilkes Romero |
Birmingham Rep / touring |
2 Oct |
4 Oct |
1192 |
THE BOMB New play by Kevin Dyer |
Lancaster, Duke’s |
9 Oct |
25 Oct |
1194 |
GEOFF DEAD: DISCO FOR SALE New play by Fiona Evans |
Newcastle, Live |
16 Oct |
8 Nov |
1195 |
HANNAH AND HARVEY New play by Tim Nunn (Reeling & Writhing / Tron / Scottish Touring Th) |
Glasgow, Platform / touring |
10 Oct |
10 Oct |
1195 |
KNIVES IN HENS Revival of play by David Harrower |
Bath, Theatre Royal Ustinov Studio |
8 Oct |
18 Oct |
1194 |
LORD OF THE FLIES revival of adaptation by Nigel Williams from novel by William Golding (Pilot Th) |
Richmond / touring |
6 Oct |
11 Oct |
1192 |
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST Revival of play by Shakespeare (RSC) |
Stratford-upon-Avon, Courtyard |
8 Oct |
15 Nov |
1188 |
IL PANICO DI PANTALONE / IL PANICO DI CAPITANO Two new plays by Clark Crystal (Lung Ha’s) |
Musselburgh, Brunton |
17 Oct |
18 Oct |
1196 |
PROPER CLEVER New play by Frank Cottrell-Boyce |
Liverpool Playhouse |
7 Oct |
25 Oct |
1193 |