Theatre Record

 

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Issue 6, 2009

And so the controversy about controversy rages on... “rages” being the operative word. For a few years now I’ve been meaning to put together and hawk around publishers a proposal for a book to be entitled Shut Up And Listen: The Decline And Fall Of The Other Fellow’s Point Of View. Because it seems to me that socially, politically and to an extent even artistically, we have lost (or, worse, discarded) the ability to accept that there may be more than one valid perspective on any issue. Just look, as I’ve suggested, at the comments posted online to Mark Ravenhill’s article from which the Quote of the Fortnight is extracted; you can find them at http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/apr/06/caryl-churchill-seven-jewish-children.

It seems that the most complex notion we can manage now (not that any of those commenters do manage it) is the wildly fallacious one that, because everyone has an equal right to an opinion, all opinions have an equal validity and an equal right to be treated as valid. This results in some people howling about censorship or oppression at any whiff of criticism of their personal views. But that’s the thing about freedom of expression: it applies just as much to people we don’t like, and to people who may not like us or our views, as it does to us. People who criticise our criticisms are doing no more than we are doing ourselves; to wish to deny them their rights, or to elevate ourselves and play the noble martyr merely because someone has said “Boo!” to us, is both arrogant and ludicrous, and whenever we behave like that, we deserve everything we get in response.

Progressive

There are signs of hope, though. I’m just back from this year’s National Student Drama Festival (full review coverage next issue). Now, in the past I used to gird my loins against almost annual outbreaks of, at best, prickly opposition in the daily discussions and the pages of the daily Festival magazine Noises Off, at worst outright witch-hunts. These were usually sparked by one or two outbreaks of forthright criticism, and usually consisted of hysterical proscriptions against anything but “constructive criticism” (i.e., implicitly, “criticism we’re prepared to listen to” – it’s effectively a circular definition). Over the past couple of years, however, an altogether more open and progressive spirit has manifested itself in the Festival community as a whole. Festivalgoers, whether involved in a production staged during the week or not, seem on the one hand much readier to offer criticism that is engaged rather than opinionated, and on the other to accept and even embrace and seek such criticism. The result has been a much more joyous week as well as a much more productive one.
In these pages, Aleks Sierz’s review of Trumbo strikes a similar note of complexity by pointing out apparent inconsistencies in Dalton Trumbo’s own behaviour. Of course, one man’s complexity is another man’s hypocrisy, but let’s be charitable and remember Walt Whitman’s lines: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Integrity

However, simplification seems more and more to be the order of the day. Compare the film and the stage musical versions of (The Adventures Of) Priscilla, Queen of The Desert. The latter has gained a clutch of warm reviews for, as far as I can see, flattening and sometimes downright traducing the former. The odd thing is that, as Mark Shenton has noted on his blog on The Stage newspaper’s web site, press advertisements for the show have been engaging in a little flattening of their own: not just the usual business of selective quoting (including a phrase from Michael Coveney’s two-star Independent review, but a batch of ads inexplicably downgraded Simon Edge’s (itself inexplicable, for me) five-star rating in the Express to a mere four!

Finally, an item of correction and clarification. In my Financial Times review of The Last Cigarette, I note that the decision to have the three actors playing unrepentant smoker Simon Gray only pretend to smoke cigarettes themselves is “problematic”. (The word was an editorial choice; originally I had used the same word as Charles Spencer, “cowardly”.) I’ve since heard – though without confirmation – that the no-smoking decision was imposed by the venue authorities at Chichester, much to the displeasure of director Richard Eyre and the cast. The Health Act 2006 allows an exemption from no-smoking regulations for stage performers where “the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for them to smoke”; surely if ever there were such an instance, this is it; and surely, too, other health and safety regulations can’t have changed so much in the last two years to justify Chichester imposing a smoking ban even on a stage adaptation of The Smoking Diaries. I shall be interested to see what happens in this regard on the show’s London transfer at the end of April...

Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com

At the Back

Can You Hear Me In Wroclaw?

Issue 6, 2009

The city of Wroclaw has a turbulent history. Fought over for centuries, it finally passed after World War II to Poland from Germany, where it had been the country’s third largest city, Breslau. Emptied of its population, its bomb-damaged housing stock was quickly filled by Poles similarly evicted from Lvov, on the other side of the country, when that became part of the Ukraine. Today it is a young town, crammed with students, its historic centre and many fine churches lovingly restored or rebuilt, a welcoming venue for many festivals. The big one for 2009 is a year-long celebration of a legendary local and international figure, the guru director Jerzy Grotowski, whose major theatre works were developed there in his Theatre Laboratory.

Mystification

A highlight of Grotowski Year was April’s presentation of the thirteenth Europe Theatre Prize, which this year went, appropriately but quite coincidentally (I can assure you, as a member of the Prize jury) to a Pole, the distinguished director and teacher Krystian Lupa. Lupa is little known in Britain, his only appearances there having been in Edinburgh, with a three-part adaptation in 1999 of a German novel, The Sleepwalkers, which played to sparse houses and the complete mystification of most British critics, and a Three Sisters in 2006. I’ve had the advantage of seeing several other Lupa stagings in my travels, not all of them successful but all certainly bearing the mark of a great stylist and serious theatre thinker – several of his works derive from philosophical texts, others reveal his fondness for German-speaking literature, both novels and plays. In Wroclaw we saw three Lupa productions, beginning with his very recent, award-winning eight-hour marathon, Factory 2. This is an extraordinarily ambitious – and largely successful – attempt to recreate the mood and the movers in Andy Warhol’s silver-painted ’60s studio. Its hesitant, chaotic start does not bode well, but is in fact part of a carefully devised development which little by little sucks the spectator completely into Warhol’s weird world. At its still centre is Andy himself (played by Lupa’s long-time collaborator and design partner, Pyotr Skiba), a soft-spoken catalyst for the drug-fuelled, often suicidal group of film­makers and self-described superstars that surrounded him. The pretext for the play is a series of “screen tests”, echoing the short monochrome silents that were a Warhol speciality. This gives Lupa the opportunity to set up a fascinating, naturalistic interplay of live and filmed actors, heightened by the use of video cameras on the set. Most of the work was developed from improvisation by the members of Lupa’s own Krakow “Factory”, and if the piece has any weakness it is in the indulgence which has allowed these long improvisations to remain uncut: the piece could be just as effective at half its length. Nevertheless, most of the Europe Prize audience, a demanding one made up almost entirely of critics and theatre professionals, lasted the eight-hour course and stayed to cheer.

Repulsive

The second Lupa production has been in the repertoire of Wroclaw’s Theatr Polski for ten years. Werner Schwab’s The Presidents is a repulsive play, but one with three great parts for actresses, which has ensured its continuing success around Europe. Lupa’s treatment added little to this Austrian example of in-yer-face-theatre. His third offering was a rehearsal of part of a current work in progress for the Dramatyczny theatre in Warsaw, a triptych based on his own text that looks at three very different personalities: Gurdjeff (favourite mentor of Peter Brook), Marilyn Monroe and Simone Weil. We saw the three-hour section devoted to Marilyn, played by Sandra Korzeniak, who made a great impression as the equally fragile Edie Sedgwick in Factory 2. Although she is the only actor besides Piotr Skiba to take part in both productions, the stylistic similarity between Marilyn and its predecessor is strong, but this time it seems likely that unbridled improvisation will not have the same successful outcome – Lupa’s (or his actors’) text appears repetitive and shallow, however lengthily it may talk of death and the inner life.

Clear the decks

The Europe Prize has a little brother, the New Theatrical Realities Prize, which this year went to no less than five theatremakers. I will break the seal of the jury confessional to explain that this choice arose from the fact that a number of directors had received nominations regularly over the years without quite winning, and this was an attempt to clear the decks for new, younger candidates in future. The shows that came to Wroclaw revealed some varied trends in their five countries, and showed (with sometimes painful clarity) how differently theatre, as an art form, is viewed in Europe. Guy Cassiers from Belgium is a superb stylist who uses video and soundscape to enhance his storytelling, demonstrated in a fine solo performance (here in English) by the actor Dirk Roofthooft in Cassiers’ adaptation of a novel, Sunken Red, an often harrowing account by a survivor of a Japanese concentration camp of his relationship with his recently dead mother. France’s François Tanguy eschews narrative, preferring to let his busy actors, the Théâtre du Radeau, create striking stage images from random chunks of prose and verse to a dense musical accompaniment. It’s as if you were at one of those productions where the director’s programme notes consist of lots of quotations relating to the theme of the play – except that they have decided to perform those notes instead of the play itself. Rodrigo Garcia, an Argentinian-born director working in Spain, has thrilled young audiences all over Europe with his trash theatre, apparently peddling a message of anti-globalism. The shows he presented in Wroclaw revealed another, nastier side to Garcia. Accidents is a short, apparently harmless and almost untheatrical piece in which a man cooks and eats a lobster on stage, washing it down with a good glass of white wine. However, its subtitle is Kiling To Eat, and the unfortunate lobster is first suspended in the air from a string before being killed, with a microphone through which the audience hears its dying struggles. I did not see his other piece, Scatter My Ashes Over Mickey, but those who did returned with accounts of frogs being killed, hamsters near-drowned and other atrocities. There was some subdued booing when he received his prize – presented, somewhat ironically, by Mark Ravenhill.

Lurex

Another winner who is vastly popular in his own country and some parts of Europe for reasons that are quite beyond me was Pippo del Bono from Italy. He presented two contrasting but equally vacuous shows. In The Time Of The Assassins, a piece from 1983, he strutted about the stage doing very little but demand applause. This Fierce Darkness from 2006 used the topic of AIDS as a peg for some extravagant tableaux reminiscent of the kitschy, lurex-clad variety spectacles seen on Berlusconi’s degraded Italian television. These were interrupted from time by del Bono’s own appearances, orating and gyrating as a far too healthy victim of the disease and finally dying in a never-ending sequence which made Bottom’s death in Pyramus and Thisbe look like major tragic art. The last winner was the Hungarian director Arpad Schilling, whose string of ever-varied productions with his Kretakor company really do deserve to be hailed as New Realities. From his very first Baal, a sweaty, physical show, through the hip elegance (and brutal satire) of pieces like Nexxt, a TV stand-off between two serial killers, and Blackland, a scabrously funny look at Hungary as a candidate for the New Europe, to his no-set, no-lighting no-costume Seagull, Schilling has never ceased to surprise and excite. Unfortunately, a non-stop schedule of direction and touring took its toll and last year he dissolved his company, to look for new personal directions. At present these seem to be a commendable attempt (shown on video in Wroclaw) to bring his theatre skills to the benefit of dispossessed communities. One can but wish him well.

Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com

Reviewed in issue 6, 2009:
London
THE BACKROOM Revival of play by Adrian Pagan (Good Night Out)	Cock Tavern	13 Mar	2 May	285
BILLY TWINKLE: REQUIEM FOR A GOLDEN BOY New play by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes	Silk Street	19 Mar	28 Mar	286
BREAKFAST WITH EMMA Revival of adaptation by Fay Weldon from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Rosemary Branch	12 Mar	9 Apr		312
COOKING WITH ELVIS Revival of play by Lee Hall	Upstairs at the Gatehouse	17 Mar	19 Apr	291
DAI (ENOUGH) Solo play by Iris Bahr	Shaw	11 Mar	17 Mar	294
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK Revival of adaptation by Wendy Kesselman	Broadway Studio	13 Mar	5 Apr	285
DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE Revival of play by Christopher Marlowe (NT)	Cottesloe	24 Mar	2 Jun	302
DIMETOS Revival of play by Athol Fugard	Donmar Warehouse	25 Mar	9 May	309
GREEN GRASS New play by Andrew Muir	Union SE1	12 Mar	28 Mar	283
HOWIE THE ROOKIE Revival of play by Mark O'Rowe	Old Red Lion	20 Mar	4 Apr	305
INVASION! New play by Jonas Hassen Khemiri	Soho	12 Mar	28 Mar	276
KAFKA'S MONKEY New adaptation by Colin Teevan from A Report To An Academy by Franz Kafka	Young Vic, Maria	19 Mar	9 Apr	289
MADAME DE SADE Revival of play by Yukio Mishima	Wyndhams	18 Mar	23 May	278
THE MURDER GAME New play by James Farwell	King's Head	17 Mar	19 Apr	301
NEW BOY Revival of adaptation by Russell Labey from novel by William Sutcliffe	Trafalgar Studio 2	19 Mar	11 Apr	292
OOHRAH! New play by Bekah Brunstetter	Finborough	23 Mar	6 Apr	312
THE OVERCOAT New adaptation of short story by Nikolai Gogol (Gecko)	Lyric Hammersmith	23 Mar	11 Apr	300
PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT New musical with book by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott	Palace	23 Mar	1 Jan	295
SCAR STORIES New piece by Patrizia Paolini	BAC	13 Mar	28 Mar	305
TRUMBO New play by Christopher Trumbo, from the letters of Dalton Trumbo (Jermyn St / Moving Th)	Jermyn Street	18 Mar	28 Mar	284
TRYING New play by Joanna McClelland Glass	Finborough	19 Mar	11 Apr	306
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare (Yukio Ninagawa / Shochiku Grand Kabuki)	Barbican	24 Mar	28 Mar	307
WALL New solo piece by David Hare	Royal Court	12 Mar	14 Mar	294
WHERE'S MY DESI SOULMATE? New play by Sonia Likhari and Harvey Virdi (Rifco Arts)	T R Stratford E15	12 Mar	29 Mar	277
Regions
BILLY WONDERFUL New play by Nick Leather	Liverpool Everyman	18 Mar	4 Apr	316
BOOK OF BEASTS New adaptation from the story by E Nesbit (Catherine Wheels)	Musselburgh, Brunton / touring	19 Mar	21 Mar	320
CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS Revival of play by Sam Shepard	Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum	21 Mar	11 Apr	321
GATES OF GOLD Revival of play by Frank McGuinness	Manchester, Library	24 Mar	11 Apr	320
JAMAICA HOUSE Revival of play by Paul Sirett	Lancaster, Duke’s	23 Mar	11 Apr	316
THE LAST CIGARETTE new play by Simon Gray and Hugh Whitemore, from Gray’s The Smoking Diaries	Chichester, Minerva	17 Mar	11 Apr	313
THE MAID OF BUTTERMERE New adaptation by Lisa Evans from novel by Melvyn Bragg	Keswick, Theatre by the Lake	20 Mar	18 Apr	319
MEASURE FOR MEASURE Revival of play by Shakespeare	Guildford, Yvonne Arnaud / touring	24 Mar	28 Mar	319
National Review of Live Art See review pages for full production details	Glasgow, Tramway	11 Feb	15 Feb	323
New Territories See review pages for full production details	Glasgow, Tramway	25 Feb	21 Mar	323
SMALL CHANGE Revival of play by Peter Gill	Cardiff, Sherman Cymru	25 Mar	11 Apr	320
A SONG AT TWILIGHT Revival of play by Noël Coward	Guildford, Yvonne Arnaud / touring	9 Mar	14 Mar	316