Theatre Record

 

This Edition

 

Issue 14, 2009

Prompt Corner

Once again, events have accelerated beyond this magazine’s ability to keep pace with them. Last issue, in passing, I praised Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem at the Royal Court, the reviews of which would not be reprinted until this issue. (I was so impressed by it that I sought Butterworth out in the interval and, alluding to his response to the critical reception meted out to his The Winterling three years ago, thanked him for not giving up on the theatre as he had threatened.) Most of us seemed to assume that Butterworth and Mark Rylance would be shoo-ins for major awards come the next season for distributing such gewgaws.

Yet scarcely had Jerusalem opened when Chichester unveiled Lucy Prebble’s Enron, which had most reviewers in even greater raptures. You, alas, won’t be able to compare our opinions until next issue’s reprints of the Enron reviews. Either way, though, the Royal Court wins: Rupert Goold’s production of Enron moves to the Court in September. And at the other extreme – and also not covered in this issue – the first reviews of John Robinson’s musical Too Close To the Sun were sufficient to provoke its early closure on August 8; the closure notices went up before some opinions (my own in the Financial Times included) had even made it into print, and the show will have closed before Theatre Record reprints those reviews. And summer is normally a slow season theatrically...!

Communality

Another event not covered in this issue is Marina Abramovic Presents... in which, as part of the Manchester International Festival, Abramovic curated a gallery-ful of durational pieces by a dozen or so performance artists. I took the editorial decision not to include this in our Manchester reprints, as it seems to me that the kind of performance art in evidence here was sufficiently distinct from theatre. Nevertheless, it did provoke in me some fundamental questioning of my own approach. Why do I respond differently to performance art than to theatre? Is it a matter of my personal preferences, or of a difference in the nature and modes of the work? I think it’s the latter. I’ve written before about the communal audience element as being central to the theatrical experience. Obviously each individual’s nuances and details of response will be entirely subjective, but there is a core of communality to the matter and, more, the very fact of being physically in the same time and space both as the performers and as a significant number of other spectators is itself of the essence of that experience. The communality of the audience is the medium, and in some way also constitutes signification of what goes on.

It seems to me that performance art largely eschews this status for the collective audience, and that it operates instead from the artist to the individual perceiver. Coming as I do from a perspective of theatre, I found myself responding more to those works in Abramovic’s collection which had more of a defined space for the perceiver, such as Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich’s The Temple Of Vitaly Titov, performed in a lecture theatre so that a number of people could sit and watch it together, but also a work in which individual “supplicants” were asked to approach a seemingly disembodied mouth and perform actions such as feeding it and brushing its teeth, so that there was a significant degree of interaction, not simply a movement or event or configuration being fired off and the perceiver then being left to process it in whatever way they wanted or were able. To me, communal or communally licensed response is qualitatively different from, and more satisfying than, individually determined response. It seems to me that for a work of performance art rather than theatre to authorise a plurality of individual, perhaps simultaneous, but certainly autonomous responses, there must be a similar status of autonomy to the performance itself – in other words, performance art does not need an audience the way theatre does. It seems to me that the autonomy of such performances tends towards hermeticism. But surely, whatever else it may or may not be, art is something that has meaning? And surely, as a matter of phenomenology, meaning is ultimately determined at the level of the perceiver? Then how can something be art if it exists autonomously of a role for the perceiver?

Engagement

Certainly, the most satisfying of the works on show, for me, was Eunhye Hwang’s The Road. It seemed, when I first entered the space in which she was performing, a minor curio. Hwang was lying on her back on the floor, a couple of speakers beneath her, slowly twitching her body as the white noise from them seemed to change in volume and tone. I was one of, I think, only two or three viewers at that point. Later, however, when there were nine or ten of us, it became apparent that the speakers were transistor radios tuned between channels and that her bodily movements earlier had been controlling the character of the sound rather than vice versa. Now, she began to approach individual members of the audience, putting the radios to our ears. The piece had become interactive, had become a communication. Our level of interactivity grew until we found ourselves dancing along with her, and were even presented with radios to manipulate ourselves. The energy level in the room had risen phenomenally, it seemed as a simple result of engagement between performer and audience, and also of a collective engagement amongst us as an audience, even such a small audience. The experience seemed to bear out my thoughts about the role of the audience in theatre as distinct from performance art, and the crucial element of the theatrical experience constituted by a communal audience presence. As the advertising slogan says, we’re better connected.

Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com

At the Back

Can You Hear Me In Gyula?

Three miles from Hungary’s border with Romania lies the spa town of Gyula, its thirty-five thousand inhabitants boosted in the summer by the many tourists who come to take its waters. In landlocked Hungary, Gyula is a major holiday resort, and its huge spa complex, mostly open-air, makes a wonderful playground for young and old. In the same leafy park as the spa is the last remaining brick castle in central Europe, a solid square construction, small enough to be picturesque rather than threatening. Its courtyard resembles the inns where the Elizabethan players performed, and it is no great surprise to learn that Shakespeare has been regularly staged there over the years. In the castle grounds there is another open-air theatre, by a lake, where operettas (a Hungarian speciality) are also staged in summer. The town now boasts a fully fledged two-week Shakespeare Festival, which has been going for five seasons and deserves to be better known in Hungary and beyond. During its short life, many of the major companies of Europe have brought Shakespeare productions to the town’s stages, indoors and out, and visitors have been able to take part in a fortnight of gentle Bardolatry, with workshops, films and other events to support the plays. There are concerts, too – the King’s Singers were a hit in 2006, as was Emma Kirkby this year.

Relevance

2009’s opening theatre event was no less than Peter Brook’s latest, Love Is My Sin, in which Natasha Parry and Bruce Myers performed a programme from the Sonnets. Next up was an As You Like It in the castle, directed by Attila Vidnyanski, who made his reputation developing a Hungarian minority theatre in the Ukraine and now runs the theatre in Debrecen. A Macbeth from Armenia was followed by a production by one of Hungary’s leading directors, Sandor Zsoter, of The Merchant of Venice. I’m told Zsoter’s reading laid its emphasis on the play’s examination of homophobia as well as anti-Semitism, which gave it a sadly contemporary relevance to Hungarian society.

Sycophants

I arrived in time for The Taming Of The Shrew, performed by the Wybrzeze theatre of Gdansk, under the direction of the very young Szymon Kaczmarek. It came garlanded as the best Shakespeare performance in Poland’s 2008-9 season. Kaczmarek’s version leans heavily on the play-within-a-play idea, from the moment when Christopher Sly, dozing in front of his TV, is set up as a lord by a group of young revellers, who proceed to perform their take on the Shrew for him. This enables the “actors” to indulge in freewheeling, often hilarious improvisation, and to step easily in and out of character in a play which is in any case full of people imitating someone else. The young intruder given the part of Petruchio is clearly unhappy with his role, and his chief effort at “taming” is a series of half-hearted attempts to get Katherina, a modern girl with a will of her own but certainly no shrew, to put on a dress discarded by her Barbie-doll sister, Bianca. It is Katherina’s no-nonsense normality, rather than any shrewishness, that is contrasted with the empty-headed fashionista Bianca and her gawping admirers, with the result that that she can deliver the difficult closing speech of submission almost without irony. Some fine acting from a young company could not remove a nagging question: why perform the play at all if you refuse to address its central problem, Petruchio and Katherina’s relationship?

There was some adjustment to the text in the next offering, Andras Almasi-Toth’s production of Richard II for the Budapest Chamber Theatre. By omitting Richard’s sycophants, the old law firm of Bushy, Bagot and Green, it reduced considerably the audience’s necessary perception of Richard as a weak king. For the first half of the play he appeared perfectly competent, with the smooth running of the truncated plot only occasionally interrupted by the incursions of a zany death’s head. Matters took far better shape in the second half, where the text’s bewildering shifts of location were glossed over in a fair account of Richard’s fall and death. The two protagonists, Atilla Dolmany as Richard and Tamas Lengyel as Bolingbroke, emerged as worthy rivals, with Edit Majzik supporting them in a remarkable series of cross-gender performances including both Northumberland and the Duchess of York. Andrea Foldi’s modern dress costumes were cleverly augmented by fragments of armour, while the production’s other nods to postmodernism included one of the more tiresome clichés of European theatre, the incessant use of a pair of stand microphones for emphasis. I believe the director was making a comment on media manipulation in modern politics. He succeeded only in reminding us that an actor shouting into a microphone is unlikely to give a performance of any nuance or subtlety.

Romp

The same small theatre was converted the following night into an in-the-round performance area for More Than A Woman, a short, energetic Shakespearean collage from Plucked Pigeon, a group of recent graduates from London Metropolitan University. One wouldn’t expect a student romp to come anywhere near the standards set by the two preceding professional companies, but their full frontal assault on the audience reaped rewards of immediacy not available to their betters. By a useful coincidence, the largest chunk of their Bard-borrowing was the very scenes from Shrew that the Polish company had ducked – performed with an unashamedly brutal gusto that probably came close to the spirit of the original performance.

Mercurial

Far and away the most thrilling show of the festival was Romeo And Juliet, directed by Oskaras Korsunovas for his Vilnius City Theatre. An earlier work by this company, Midsummer Night’s Dream, has visited festivals all over Europe, including Britain, but after six years and two hundred or so performances we have yet to see this one. The Dream relied on a gimmick, the creative use of the ten-foot planks which each actor carried, and while immensely enjoyable it inevitably lost some of the play’s greater subtleties. This Romeo And Juliet has a gimmick, too, in that it appears to chronicle a feud between rival Verona pizza bakeries, but its rich store of props (a great deal of dough is thrown) is put entirely to the service of Shakespeare’s story. I always think of it as a riotous, youthful comedy that goes horribly wrong, with the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio the break that will propel the rest of the action into tragedy. Such is the view of Korsunovas, too, so that I was able to delight in the amazing invention of his actors’ clowning before descending with the young lovers to the tomb. An absolutely brilliant Mercutio, as mercurial as his name suggests, is nevertheless able to work as a team player with his mates Romeo and Benvolio, while the Nurse and Friar Laurence (the latter a newcomer to the company, his predecessor having gone off to become Lithuania’s Minister of Culture) extract every ounce of comedy from their roles before negotiating the tricky transition to the pathos of the final scenes. There’s not a weak link in this splendid cast, in a production which is a real must-see.

Ian Herbert ian@herbertknott.com

Reviewed in issue 14, 2009:
London
Adventures In Movement Dance season (see review pages for full details)	Arcola	6 Jul	2 Aug	752
AS YOU LIKE IT Revival of play by Shakespeare (Principal TC)	Forty Hall	10 Jul	18 Jul	765
BASSLINE Installation by Graeme Miller	Barbican Centre	9 Jul	26 Jul	765
CALL ME MADAM Revival of musical by Irving Berlin	Upstairs at the Gatehouse	14 Jul	16 Aug	766
DAMAGES Revival of play by Steve Thompson	Old Red Lion	7 Jul	24 Jul	745
DEATH OF LONG PIG New play by Nigel Planer	Finborough	9 Jul	1 Aug	763
DR KORCZAK'S EXAMPLE Revival of play by David Greig (Manchester Royal Exchange)	Arcola	2 Jul	18 Jul	746
EIGHT New monologues by Ella Hickson (Tantrums Prods)	Trafalgar Studio 2	6 Jul	25 Jul	753
FORBIDDEN BROADWAY Revival of musical comedy revue by Gerard Alessandrini	Menier Chocolate Factory	2 Jul	13 Sep	748
FRANK’S CLOSET New musical by Stuart Wood	Hoxton Hall	8 Jul	25 Jul	754
FUCKING MEN Transfer of play by Joe DiPietro	Arts	10 Jul	765
HERE I'LL STAY: KURT WEILL IN AMERICA New play by Peter Scott-Presland, music by Kurt Weill	Rosemary Branch	9 Jul	26 Jul	771
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Revival of play by Oscar Wilde	Open Air	8 Jul	25 Jul	757
JERUSALEM New play by Jez Butterworth	Royal Court	15 Jul	22 Aug	767
JORDY PORDY New piece by Jordan Herskowitz	New End	9 Jul	2 Aug	752
A LAMENT FOR MEDEA New piece by Zecora Ura	Arcola	7 Jul	25 Jul	747
LAST SEEN Three new plays (see review pages for full details) (Slung Low)	Almeida	8 Jul	12 Jul	761
NAKED BOYS SINGING Transfer of musical revue	Arts	9 Jul	752
NT New Connections Mini-festival of new plays from youth companies (see review pages for full details)	Cottesloe / Olivier	1 Jul	7 Jul	744
THE ODYSSEY New play by Simon Startin based on the Greek myth (London Bubble)	Sydenham wells / touring	5 Jul	12 Jul	760
PEDAL PUSHER New play by Roland Smith	Cavendish Gate	14 Jul	1 Aug	766
THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE Revival of Gilbert & Sullivan operetta	Union SE1	15 Jul	8 Aug	766
THE ROVER Revival of play by Aphra Behn	Southwark Playhouse	3 Jul	18 Jul	751
WE'RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT Adaptation from book by Michael Rosen	Duchess	8 Jul	16 Aug	762
WHAT’S WRONG WITH ANGRY? Revival of play by Patrick Wilde (Hartshorn-Hook Prods)	King’s Head	9 Jul	15 Aug	762
Regions
THE APPLE CART Revival of play by George Bernard Shaw (Peter Hall Co)	Bath, Theatre Royal	14 Jul	1 Aug	792
COOKING WITH ELVIS Revival of play by Lee Hall	Glasgow, Tron	14 Jul	25 Jul	774
END OF THE ROAD New musical piece by No Theater / Young@Heart Chorus (Manchester Int’l Festival)	Manchester, RNCM	11 Jul	18 Jul	783
EVERYBODY LOVES A WINNER New play by Neil Bartlett (Manchester International Festival)	Manchester, Royal Exchange	3 Jul	18 Jul	777
A FUNNY VALENTINE; THE STORY AND MUSIC OF CHET BAKER New piece by Mike Maran	Musselburgh, Brunton / touring	4 Jul	4 Jul	773
GETTING HERE New play by Ivan Cutting (Eastern Angles)	Ipswich, Isaac’s Bar / touring	2 Jul	12 Jul	783
HOME Revival of play by David Storey (Peter Hall Co)	Bath, Theatre Royal	14 Jul	1 Aug	791
IT FELT LIKE A KISS New piece by Adam Curtis and Punchdrunk (Manchester International Festival)	Manchester, Hardman Square	2 Jul	19 Jul	775
JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS New adaptation by Kevin Dyer	Lancaster, Williamson Park	3 Jul	8 Aug	784
NEW WORKS/NEW WORLDS Season of new pieces (see review pages for full details)	Glasgow, Arches	1 Jul	4 Jul	772
THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE Revival of Gilbert & Sullivan operetta in adaptation by Chris Monks	Scarborough, Stephen Joseph	7 Jul	22 Aug	784
PRIMA DONNA New opera by Rufus Wainwright (Manchester International Festival)	Manchester, Palace	10 Jul	19 Jul	780
SOMETHING IN THE AIR New play by Tim Webb and Ockham’s Razor (Manchester International Festival) Manchester, Contact	6 Jul	12 Jul		780
SPEND SPEND SPEND! Revival of musical by Steve Brown from book by Viv Nicholson	Newbury, Watermill	13 Jul	29 Aug	787
SWANSONG / THE BROWNING VERSION Revivals by Anton Chekhov / Terence Rattigan (Peter Hall Co) Bath, Theatre Royal	13 Jul	1 Aug		789
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare (Creation TC)	Oxford, Saïd Business School	14 Jul	5 Sep	788
THE WICKED LADY New adaptation by Bryony Lavery from novel by Magdalen King-Hall	Newcastle-under-Lyme, New Vic	7 Jul	25 Jul	787