Prompt Corner
Issue 1/2, 2009
Sincerity, we are told, is the great thing: once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. And fakery has been much on our minds this January, or at least something not entirely unrelated to it. As most reviews mention in one form or another, the opening of Complicit at The Old Vic was postponed for over a week, and throughout previews and even after it had opened, actor Richard Dreyfuss was visibly wearing an earpiece through which he was rumoured to be receiving frequent prompts.
Speechifying
This is another instance in which the blogosphere proves its worth. Bloggers such as the West End Whingers, not being constrained by press-night embargoes, can report on earlier performances and give us a fuller picture of what’s been going on. (Supposedly professional reviewers such as Tim Walker, on the other hand, are so constrained, and are simply fouling their own nest and ours by flouting such embargoes.) Mind you, this story made the news pages as well. Reports emerged of Dreyfuss prowling around the stage as if lost, repeating lines several times until the next one came out (perhaps via the radio prompt). Now, I didn’t see the production until the Saturday matinee after its rescheduled opening, but I can’t help wondering whether the folk behind those accounts simply aren’t all that familiar with Dreyfuss’s acting style. I saw him doing nothing he hadn’t been doing since, say, the movie of The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz in 1974. Nevertheless, it’s possible that he had been that unsure of his lines; the earpiece had to be there for a reason. (One panellist on BBC’s Newsnight Review blithely compared it to the presence of a prompter in the wings; the difference, of course, is that a prompter is there in case, whereas such an earpiece – like the autocue used by Bruce Myers in his performances of The Grand Inquisitor in 2006 – can only be there because.)
I disagree, however, with those who dismiss Joe Sutton’s play entirely. It had clearly been subjected to major revision: the version I saw ran for 25 minutes less than the programme claimed, and two entire characters in the cast list, the Interrogators, did not appear at all. But the play I saw was not a dreadful piece of work. What it was, is a poor choice for The Old Vic or for anywhere in Britain. We tend to watch it in terms of Dreyfuss’s protagonist and what he thinks and feels, whereas this is secondary. What one critic described as the “passable speechifying” of the play is its real point. It's America, stoopid. This isn't a conflict, as it may seem to be, between the protagonist’s liberalism and his neoconservatism. It's about the more basic subversion of core American values... more, of American identity. This becomes much clearer in the second half, where there are several uses of the term “un-American”. This isn't loading the term in an ideological debate within the framework of the American polity; it's addressing the ethical and moral basis of that polity itself, and how it was subverted or simply trampled by the Bush government. And because we in Britain don't have that deeply conditioned perspective about such pervasive values that define our country and us as citizens, it doesn't connect with us. It rests on a sense of nation and civics that we don't share; consequently, when its concerns are all bounded by and defined within that sense, we miss the basic definition and see only the detail, the trees and not the wood. Arguably it's a fault that the play takes so much as read, but it is only arguable. I think the most we can say from where we stand is that it hasn’t travelled well at all.
Plonking
Still, we shouldn’t be afraid of stating our opinions bluntly. I remember (no doubt incorrectly) a story about an early 20th-century critic who was pathologically unwilling to risk a forceful declaration but, after much chivvying, finally stated categorically that Sarah Bern hardt was the finest one-legged female Hamlet of the age… only to receive a letter from the writer Frank Harris stating that several years earlier, in an opera house somewhere in Brazil, he had seen a remarkable woman…
I’ve been reminded of this because of my own review of the Ian Dury play Hit Me!, in which I remark that writer Jeff Merrifield has written some fairly plonking lines. I singled out one in particular. Earlier this evening I bumped into Jeff, who told me with some glee that that line came word for word from Dury himself. As for me, I hopped it.
Ian Shuttleworth ian@theatrerecord. com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me Miming?
Of course you can’t – that’s what mime’s about, isn’t it? Well no, times have changed in the mime world, and while the London International Mime Festival, now in its 31st edition (in last year’s report I referred to it as the twentieth, a serious underestimate of an event that began in 1977) still clings to the word in its title, it is nowadays a far broader celebration of mask work, puppetry, clowning, mechanical toys (Eduard Bersudsky’s amazing intricate Sharmanka), dance, juggling and yes, mime. Four of this year’s sixteen shows included some speech – with clown Tomas Kubinek using a non-stop running commentary to prop up his series of tiny turns. Having dipped my toes in the water last year, I decided on total immersion for 2009 and booked, as I thought, for all the shows. In fact I missed one, and may never know whether Ali, a one-nighter from yet another team of French juggler-acrobats, was better than its companions.
Full houses
As before, the Festival brought out a varied audience, with rather fewer eccentric members this time in what were consistently full houses. Wide-eyed children enjoyed the family shows, hip youngsters crammed the Shunt Vaults, members of London’s expatriate communities were much in evidence for the French shows in particular, though surprisingly absent from the first Chinese show to visit. The organisers tell me that this year’s festival, working on a budget of around £300,000, was the most successful ever – which means, after the recent drop in the value of sterling (thank you, Gordon – this will have serious repercussions for other cultural importers), that it washed its face.
In artistic terms I would not call this the most successful festival ever, since its choices were rather more timid than usual, the small-scale taking precedence over big blockbusters like the Philippe Gentys of the past. Old friends returned with greater and lesser success, new discoveries were thin on the ground. But to see (almost) all of the shows was to be reminded of the richness of the field.
Exotic
First off were the returning Collectif Petit Travers, who had not impressed me last year. This time the two jugglers, Nicolas Mathis and Denis Fargeton, left their acrobat companion of 2008 behind and brought their very first creation, Le Petit Travers itself. This was a much tighter and funnier show, with the traditional comedian/stooge relationship expressed in some fine juggling with a plethora of balls that in some cases possessed a comic will of their own. The couple’s musical skills, on cello and accordion, added a richness to their material. “Do you have to practise night and day to get these results?” asked a member of the audience. “Not now we’ve done the show a couple of hundred times,” was the response.
Live music was also one of the greater charms of Figurentheater Tübingen’s Salto.Lamento, as the two formally clad members of rat’n’x, Johannes Frisch and Stefan Mertin, provided a physical as well as musical accompaniment to Frank Soehnle’s manipulations of his curious creations, lifesize and miniature, that popped out of drawers or stalked the stage in a decidedly abstract but never tiring dance of death. These three unsmiling German gentlemen brought humour as well as the occasional chill to their tidy performance.
Even more exotic puppetry appeared in the Jarry tribute offered by Büchinger’s Boot Marionettes, an international group based in Marseilles. The Armature Of The Absolute, I suppose appropriately, was an amiable mess, with some bright ideas offset by a too casual lighting plot and some rather amateur manipulation of the imaginatively constructed, again differently proportioned puppets. Jarry’s merdre arrived in magnificent dollops from two half-donkeys in tutus, but like Ubu itself this show quickly became tiresome after an arresting start.
Tangram
Russian clowns Akhe Engineering Theatre demonstrated well how hit and miss their shows can be, with two contrasting shows. Their anarchically funny cabaret, Plug’n’Play, completely captivated the clubbers of Shunt Vaults with its mix of explosions, lethal cocktail mixing and manic percussion from their smallest member, who finished the evening stripped to the buff, pelted with fruit from the audience and his colleagues, still drumming furiously. An attempt to be more “artistic” with their abbreviated Faust: 2360 Words fell horribly flat, not helped by the fact that those 2360 words were in half-audible Russian. This year’s biggie was Les Sept Planches de la Ruse (The Seven Boards Of Skill), a brilliant collaboration between Aurélien Bory, a Mimefest veteran, and a group of Beijing Opera players from Dalian in China. Little operatics here, just a series of increasingly complex movements of a set of seven huge blocks made up in the rectangular form of the classic Chinese tangram. There is a riveting, inexorable development in the piece, with a lone violinist first popping up between the blocks as they are moved from their single flat shape, when they become first parts of an imaginary urban landscape, then sheer geometrical poetry as they progress to a vertical reconstruction of the original tangram. Magic.
Striptease
When Ex Machina of Athens promised a mime version of the Theban myth in Seeking Oedipus, I feared the worst – and didn’t get it. Aspasia Kralli’s troupe of clever mimes tells their story clearly and with plenty of inventive touches – not least a shower of rags to represent the fatal plague - on a simple climbing-wall set that serves them well.
Familie Flöz returned with another Trestle-like mask show, the black comedy Hotel Paradiso, not quite as funny as some of their other work but still remarkable for their swift changes of (masked) character; Adrian Schvartzstein’s Spanish Circus Klezmer offered a great family show, managing to hang a series of nimble turns (including a hilarious cod striptease from mumsy acrobat Cristina Solé) on the simple but effective story thread of a Jewish wedding, the excuse for a constant, well-played klezmer accompaniment.
Disappointment
Neither of the other French-based shows seemed quite good enough for an international festival. Les Apostrophés were a fine musician, Michel Bismut, acting as foil (and useful distraction) for juggler Martin Schweitzke, who on the night I saw him was neither inventive nor very competent as ball after ball hit the floor. A final sequence with a large balloon was even less inspiring. Five balls in the air was the maximum for Schweitzke, and there was little more complexity from Un Loup pour l’Hommne, acrobats Frédéric Arsenault and Alexandre Fray. Their gimmick was a strange, sado-masochistic relationship, which opened with one artist giving the other a thorough kicking and went on to be expressed in some gymnastic tramplings that were hardly in the Olympic range. Another disappointment was our own Faulty Optic, whose version of the Orpheus myth was one of last year’s highlights. Fish Clay Perspex, from Liz Walker and Sarah Wright, was three miniatures of not much more than work-in-progress status, unfinished and not very well performed. More interesting, and comsiderably more polished, was the piece by young company RedCape, a discovery from last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. The three actresses had the considerable benefit of direction from MTP’s Andrew Dawson, who knitted together The Idiot Colony, Lisle Turner’s script based on the disturbing results of their research into the treatment of female mental patients, some of them patently sane, in the not so recent past. Not a lot happens in this short piece, and there is no great revelation of acting talent, but the lyrical, touching whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Ian Herbert ian@herbertknott.com
Reviewed in issue 1/2, 2009: |
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London |
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| BE NEAR ME New adaptation by Ian McDiarmid from novel by Andrew O'Hagan (NTS) | Donmar Warehouse | 26 Jan | 14 Mar | 55 |
| CAPTAIN OATES' LEFT SOCK Revival of play by John Antrobus | Finborough | 9 Jan | 31 Jan | 20 |
| COMPLICIT New play by Joe Sutton | Old Vic | 19 Jan | 21 Feb | 50 |
| THE DICE HOUSE Revival of play by Paul Lucas (Silver Thread Prods) | Hen & Chickens | 13 Jan | 31 Jan | 19 |
| DORIAN GRAY New adaptation from story by Oscar Wilde (Ruby In The Dust) | Leicester Square | 9 Jan | 1 Feb | 15 |
| EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR Revival of play with music by Tom Stoppard and André Previn | Olivier | 16 Jan | 25 Feb | 39 |
| FOLLOW ME Revival of play by Ross Gurney-Randall & Dave Mounfield | Riverside | 20 Jan | 1 Feb | 43 |
| FOUR QUARTETS Recitation of poems by T S Eliot | Donmar Warehouse | 14 Jan | 17 Jan | 23 |
| FUCKING MEN Revival of the play by Joe DiPietro (The Steam Industry) | King’s Head | 8 Jan | 7 Mar | 16 |
| HIT ME! THE LIFE AND RHYMES OF IAN DURY Transfer of new play by Jeff Merrifield | Leicester Square | 7 Jan | 14 Feb | 29 |
| IN BLOOD: THE BACCHAE New play by Frances Viner, based on Euripides | Arcola | 9 Jan | 30 Jan | 24 |
| London International Mime Festival See review pages for full details of individual productions | various | 10 Jan | 25 Jan | 4 |
| LOVE IN (3) PARTS New play by John Shaw, music and lyrics by James Dey (Lost Dog Th) | Southwark Playhouse | 15 Jan | 31 Jan | 31 |
| A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare (RSC) | Novello | 20 Jan | 15 Feb | 44 |
| THE MOTHER UK première of the play by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Te Art Project) | Camden People's | 13 Jan | 31 Jan | 19 |
| MRS AFFLECK New play by Samuel Adamson, from Little Eyolf by Henrik Ibsen (NT) | Cottesloe | 27 Jan | 29 Apr | 59 |
| MY BEST FRIEND revival of play by Tamsin Oglesby (Downstageleft) | Courtyard | 20 Jan | 1 Feb | 15 |
| OLIVER! Revival of musical by Lionel Bart | T R Drury Lane | 14 Jan | 32 |
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| MANDY PATINKIN IN CONCERT Solo musical performance | Duke Of York's | 8 Jan | 18 Jan | 17 |
| PLONTER New play by Yael Ronen and the company (Cameri Th, Tel Aviv) | The Pit | 27 Jan | 7 Feb | 68 |
| PRIVATE LIVES Revival of play by Noël Coward | Hampstead | 27 Jan | 28 Feb | 65 |
| QUIDAM Return of circus show (Cirque du Soleil) | Royal Albert Hall | 4 Jan | 15 Feb | 10 |
| THE RECOGNITION OF SAKUNTALA Revival of play by Kalidasa, adapted by Tarek Iskander (Grit Prods) Union | 23 Jan | 7 Feb | 70 |
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| ROARING TRADE New play by Steve Thompson (Paines Plough) | Soho | 12 Jan | 7 Feb | 26 |
| SIMPATICO Revival of play by Sam Shepard (Ronin TC) | Old Red Lion | 15 Jan | 31 Jan | 67 |
| TALES OF THE APOCALYPSE Corcus performance (Airealism) | Shunt Vaults | 21 Jan | 31 jan | 62 |
| THREE WOMEN Revival of play by Sylvia Plath (Inside Intelligence) | Jermyn Street | 7 Jan | 7 Feb | 13 |
| THRILLER – LIVE Compilation musical based on the songs of Michael Jackson and the Jacksons | Lyric | 21 Jan | 29 Mar | 47 |
| WAITING FOR ROMEO New play by Sarah Grochala (Widsith Prods) | Pleasance | 14 Jan | 1 Feb | 12 |
| WHY I DON'T HATE WHITE PEOPLE New piece by Lemn Sissay | Lyric Studio | 28 Jan | 14 Feb | 69 |
Regions |
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| BOUNCERS Revival of play by John Godber | Hull Truck | 16 Jan | 14 Feb | 70 |
| THE CONVICT’S OPERA New play by Stephen Jeffreys, from John Gay (Out Of Joint / Sydney TC) | Salisbury Playhouse / touring | 19 Jan | 24 Jan | 71 |
| Feet First Street performances (see review pages for full details of individual productions) | Edinburgh | 1 Jan | 1 Jan | 74 |
| THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK Revival of play by Arthur Miller | Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum | 17 Jan | 14 Feb | 75 |
| SUB ROSA New piece by David Leddy | Glasgow, Citizens | 20 Jan | 31 Jan | 76 |
| TONS OF MONEY Revival of play by Will Evans and Valentine, adapted by Alan Ayckbourn | Richmond / touring | 19 Jan | 24 Jan | 73 |
| UNDERNEATH THE ARCHES Promenade performance piece | Glasgow, Arches | 17 Jan | 17 Jan | 76 |
| A VOYAGE ROUND MY FATHER New adaptation by Theresa Heskins of play by John Mortimer | Newcastle-under-Lyme, New Vic | 23 Jan | 14 Feb | 72 |