Issue 19, 2009
Prompt Corner
Readers will have noticed that Theatre Record has been paying more and more attention to the new media sector. We still don’t think it our place to begin reprinting material from reviews web sites, but we do sometimes include reviews that have appeared only in the online versions of major papers, and the Quote of the Fortnight box and this column are often informed by goings-on in the blogosphere. (Also, as of this month, you can renew your subscription to TR or take out a new onefrom our web site, paying via Paypal – you don’t have to have a Paypal account, just click the payment buttons and follow instructions.) It’s undeniable that the Internet has changed, not just our attitude to the publication of material, but our sense of how the whole discourse is conducted. We can engage in much greater dialogue, reviewers, practitioners and interested observers alike, on effectively equal terms.
Or can we? I’ve recently been criticised on a web site for publishing my opinion of a play, and publishing it in blunt terms, before my review appeared either in print or on the Financial Times web site. I was, my interlocutor argued, abusing my status as a critic by seeming to make a formal pronouncement, even on an informal site such as Facebook, in a place where my remarks would be seen only by my friends and the friends of the person to whom I commented. My critic seemed to think that there was an element of de haut en bas in my behaving like this, or at any rate that I wasn’t taking responsibility for the way my remarks might – to use an Einsteinian analogy – slightly “bend” the space of the discussion because of my professional status.
Candour
I don’t think this is true. I think that online discussion has matured at least to the point where participants see each other as equal... in terms of status if not of value: the immaturity of tone that characterises much online discussion isn’t absent from arts sites, either. I’m sometimes amused, more often annoyed, most frequently of all bored by the number and regularity of comments portraying critics as arrogant and contemptuous, and almost always – here’s the bit that get me – doing so in far more virulent terms than anything they’re taking exception to. But that’s just my pet peeve; the main point is that these discussions might be confrontational, but they’re not hierarchical, and that’s fine. I think perhaps my critic on this occasion, Phelim McDermott of Improbable Theatre, was a little too attached to the modes of the Open Space approach his company use in their Devoted & Disgruntled discussion events, and was perhaps believing that a degree of discipline could be brought to online discussions comparable to that in face-to-face encounters.
Yet in some ways this added edge can be to the benefit of the discussion, if not always for all its participants then quite often for readers. An approach that may seem flippant and trivialising when printed in a national broadsheet can be zesty and zingy when it’s filtered through the keyboards of bloggers the West End Whingers. The occasional laziness or coarseness we see when people post online is a by-product of a candour that’s almost always refreshing.
Gothic
Being held to account by posterity can be a chastening thing. My personal web site, www.shutters.org.uk, hosts around 15 years’ worth of my old reviews, some of which do me no favours. For instance, when I reviewed the 1992 premiere of Philip Ridley’s the Fastest Clock In The Universe, I was so unimpressed by the young actor in the ingénue role that I did not think him worth name-checking: Jude Law. No such danger, though, with the last in Hampstead’s series of revivals to celebrate its golden jubilee, as pre-publicity had loudly trumpeted the stage debut of Jaime Winstone (daughter of Ray) in the role of Sherbet Gravel.
As you can see from the reviews elsewhere in this issue, opinions differ on la Winstone’s success in the role. For me, she incarnated not just the character but her very name: brashly fizzy yet stony and abrasive underneath. The Sherbet persona made a number of superficially innocent remarks, querying for instance why all Cougar Glass’s birthday cards were inscribed with the same pen, whilst the underlying Gravel knew that she wais engaged in a contest with Cougar for the attentions of her young fiancé Foxtrot Darling. (In context Sherbet Gravel isn’t such an outrageous name.) Some reviews also criticise Ridley’s debt to earlier works such as Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? I do think there’s a slight excess of shapeliness in Ridley’s play; in his subsequent work, he has learned to give the material its own head, to let it shape and pace itself. Nevertheless, this still stands up as a strong early indicator of his “East End Gothic” skills, which led to him being identified as one of the progenitors of “in-yer-face” theatre. Hampstead’s celebrations have not been as happy as hoped, to the extent that artistic director Anthony Clark is in the midst of leaving the venue; this, however, is an unsettling highlight of the season.
Shameless
A confession, though: sometimes, when a review of mine appears neither in print nor online, I cannibalise it a little later for this column. The above remarks on Fastest Clock are an example of this. So were my comments on the Gate’s Vanya last issue... except that that review subsequently was published, and my brazen recycling can be seen by comparing last issue’s Prompt Corner with this issue’s More On Previous Productions pages. Oops. But you can still be pretty certain that, if my review of Howard Barker’s Found In The Ground – the play I was being so frank about when Phelim pulled me up – then much of that, too, will find its way on to this page next issue. Shameless, shameless.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.comAt the Back - Issue 19, 2009
Can You Hear Me In Tartu?
From the hugely detailed book of Estonian theatre statistics presented to visitors to the showcase festival, Draama, held in Tartu this September, one figure stands out: there were 943,185 theatre visits in 2008, down from the previous year’s million-plus. In a population of less than 1.5 million, this is still quite a figure. My six colleagues and I on the festival jury “visited” fifteen Estonian productions. The method of their original selection was simple but flawed: each of the country’s producing theatres and theatre groups was asked to present their best production of the last two years, meaning that a large repertory theatre might be choosing from a couple of dozen shows, where an experimental group might be choosing from only one or two. Even for the big theatres there were no doubt considerations of actor availability and sheer feasibility of transfer, which may explain some of the stranger choices we saw in our week’s theatregoing.
Oblivion
Let me come straight out and say that this was not a very impressive view of the current state of Estonian theatre, something that was reflected in the fact that less than half of the shows presented figured finally among the ten awards we were asked to present. To be positive, however, the week was a reminder that Estonia, unlike its Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania (and even Russia) has a strong tradition of new theatre writing, in part the result of an annual playwriting competition whose 2009 results were announced during this year’s festival. Martin Algus was again among the winners, as he was last year with his first play, Thirst. Endla Theatre from Parnu presented it in a strong production marked by some well designed lighting. The story concerns a high-flyer’s descent into alcoholic oblivion, but bucks a European trend by offering its victim the chance of redemption in a relatively happy, at least hopeful ending.
A similarly hopeful message came in another first play, by the equally young Uku Uusberg. Close inspection reveals Stopover to be a sentimental version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: a young girl wanders into a house occupied by three young men in various states of mental breakdown and by her innocent concern enables all of them to face the world again, defeating her own demons in the process. What marked out the production was the performances of its three actors, from Talinn City Theatre, who whirled through the challenges of Uusberg’s hypermanic wordplay with gusto. The author-director’s second play, Head-Change, was performed off-festival and proved to be quite a step forward, not least because it was able to include a full chamber orchestra among its characters.
Awkward
There was yet another happy ending in Mr And Mrs Stock Exchange, written and directed by 29-year-old Ott Aardam for Ugala Theatre in the small town of Viljandi. Here was a complete surprise – a well rounded, highly entertaining rom-com in the best tradition of Richard Curtis, in which two awkward losers find one another through the genre’s requisite number of reversals and embarrassments. It would be easy to dismiss this as trivial pap, but it succeeds, almost incidentally and not without serious insight, in touching on many important questions, with the Ugala company giving a very professional account of what is really a film script, moving effortlessly through a succession of locations on Jaanus Lagriküll’s clever set and adding the theatrical bonus of some accomplished doubling.
Those who wondered what Aardam’s bonne bouche was doing in a serious theatre festival were similarly dismissive of another regional theatre, that from Kuressaare, which offered Yasmina Reza’s God Of Carnage. I was happy to catch up with this boulevard success, which again manages to deal with serious issues in a light way, and was well done in Jaak Allik’s lively staging. Productions like these two bring out the dichotomy between commercial and art theatre, where in the former polish is all, in the latter some rough edges can be forgiven in the sacred name of artistic progress.
Pissing
This very issue was raised in what was probably the most popular show of the festival, No99 Theatre’s How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare. The title is taken from an installation by Josef Beuys, but is also an allusion to the country’s current Minister of Culture, whose surname happens to translate as Hare. No99’s highly disciplined company makes good use of Beuys’ absurdist attitude to art, in a series of longish scenes from inside and outside the rehearsal room which deal honestly and entertainingly with the true avant-garde artist’s constant risk of failure. An actress who strongly resembles Mrs Hare wanders in and out of their exercises, moving from baffled tolerance to total humiliation as she is inveigled into a final pissing competition in which she is, inevitably, pissed on – and from a great height. I have spoken of the company’s discipline – would that its writer-director-designers Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper had exercised similar discipline over the show as a whole, which was twice its optimum length. You don’t have to show that making a creative work can be boring by being boring.
The lack of proper dramaturgy, or at any rate a serious unwillingness to cut over-length material, was a feature of many of the festival’s productions, even those I have singled out for praise above. This was especially the case with Lives, a series of monologues drawn from a book of interviews with prostitutes. Its redeeming feature was authentic personal accounts from its three actors of their own harrowing personal experiences but the production itself showed a distressing lack of theatricality.
Descent
Three competent productions of fairly recent new Russian drama, the Presnyakovs’ Playing The Victim, Venedikt Erofeev’s MoscowPetushki and most of all Evgeni Grishkoviets’ Town, suffered from the same problem of over-writing. At least this was not present in two adaptations from Gogol: the Estonian Puppet Theatre offered a rumbustious Gamblers, in which different sizes of puppet were used for maximum perspective effect, beautifully handled by a large squad of puppeteers, while Talinn’s Russian Theatre, which I had thought of as a bastion of conservatism, let the promising young Russian director Anton Lovalenko loose on Diary Of A Madman. The protagonist’s schizoid descent into delirium and death was shared, appropriately, between two actors, with fine support from the rest of the company in a production which used strong design and contained acting to achieve a series of powerful images. Another more extravagant attempt at grotesquerie, the local Vanemuine Theatre’s version of Kafka’s Castle, was far less successful – if successful at all.
The closing production of the festival was an invited performance from the New Riga Theatre of Alvis Hermanis’ delightful Sounds Of Silence, which uses the music of Simon and Garfunkel to evoke the evolving hippy happiness of a group of Latvian students in 1968. It makes a fascinating prequel to some of the same actors’ tour de force as elderly rejects, in the same setting, for Long Life.
Before that I saw what for me was the Estonian highlight, even if I am alone in this opinion. Since 1991 the Estonian Drama Theatre has presented a series of complex, multi-layered plays by Madis Köiv, a physicist by training, a polymath by inclination. His 1998 Endless Coffee Gossip, set in a Tartu café, has echoes of both Eugene O’Neill and Karl Kraus, but remains quintessentially Estonian as its large cast of universal characters gossip their way to and fro in almost a century of their turbulent history. Pedajaas’ meticulous direction fills this huge canvas with colour, and in its very localism produces moments when it touches the global soul.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Reviewed Issue 19, 2009
| London | ||||
| Production | Venue | Opened | Closed | Page |
| BEDTIME SOLOS UK première of play by Jakob Holder (Across The Pond TC) | Old Red Lion | 10 Sep | 26 Sep | 961 |
| BEN HUR LIVE New adaptation by Shaun McKenna from novel by Lew Wallace | O2 Arena | 17 Sep | 20 Sep | 978 |
| CROCOSMIA Return of play by Little Bulb Th | BAC | 10 Sep | 26 Sep | 995 |
| DOUBLE SENTENCE New play by Andrew Muir (Deafinitely Th) | Soho | 21 Sep | 26 Sep | 986 |
| ENRON Transfer of new play by Lucy Prebble (R Ct / Chichester / Headlong) | Royal Court | 22 Sep | 31 Oct | 984 |
| THE FASTEST CLOCK IN THE UNIVERSE Revival of play by Philip Ridley | Hampstead | 22 Sep | 17 Oct | 987 |
| JUDGMENT DAY New version by Christopher Hampton of play by Ödön von Horvâth | Almeida | 10 Sep | 17 Oct | 956 |
| KURT & SID New play by Roy Smiles | Trafalgar Studio 2 | 14 Sep | 3 Oct | 973 |
| LAST NIGHT OF THE POMS Revival of show by Barry Humphries | Royal Albert Hall | 15 Sep | 15 Sep | 960 |
| A LIFE IN THREE ACTS: BETTE BOURNE & MARK RAVENHILL New piece | Soho | 21 Sep | 27 Sep | 977 |
| THE MYSTERIES – YIIMIMANGALISO Return of musical adaptation of the Chester Mystery Plays | Garrick | 15 Sep | 3 Oct | 975 |
| NEGATIVE SPACE New play by Rachel Sternberg and Jemma Wayne (The Fyzz) | New End | 17 Sep | 11 Oct | 983 |
| ROSS NOBLE: THINGS Comedy show | Apollo | 14 Sep | 26 Oct | 964 |
| THE ONES THAT FLUTTER New play by Sylvia Reed | Theatre 503 | 18 Sep | 10 Oct | 989 |
| ORESTES: RE-EXAMINED New adaptation by Emma Gersch from Aescylus (Full Tilt TC) | Southwark Playhouse | 17 Sep | 3 Oct | 989 |
| OTHELLO Revival of play by Shakespeare (Northern Broadsides) | Trafalgar Studio 1 | 18 Sep | 12 Dec | 980 |
| OUR CLASS New play by Tadeusz Slobodzianek (NT) | Cottesloe | 23 Sep | 990 | |
| 2ND MAY 1997 New play by Jack Thorne | Bush | 14 Sep | 10 Oct | 969 |
| THE SHAWL Revival of play by David Mamet | Arcola | 11 Sep | 3 Oct | 963 |
| THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION New adaptation by Owen O'Neill and Dave Johns from Stephen King | Wyndham's | 13 Sep | 965 | |
| STOCKWELL: THE INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES Transfer by Kieron Barry | Tricycle | 10 Sep | 20 Sep | 962 |
| TALENT Revival of play by Victoria Wood | Menier Chocolate Factory | 23 Sep | 14 Nov | 993 |
| TILL I DIE New play by Benjamin Cooper | Old Red Lion | 10 sep | 26 Sep | 961 |
| THE YORK REALIST Revival of play by Peter Gill | Riverside | 23 Sep | 11 Oct | 996 |
| Regions | ||||
| THE BEGGAR’S OPERA New version by Alasdair Macrae of play by John Gay (Vanishing Point) | Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum | 15 Sep | 3 Oct | 1008 |
| BRIGHT BLACK New piece by Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds (Vox Motus) | Edinburgh, Traverse / touring | 15 Sep | 19 Sep | 1009 |
| DESPERATE TO BE DORIS New play by Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding (Lip Service) | Manchester, Library | 24 Sep | 3 Oct | 1006 |
| DIAL M FOR MURDER Revival of play by Frederick Knott | Leeds, WYP Courtyard | 16 Sep | 3 Oct | 1004 |
| HARE AND TORTOISE Adapted by Deborah Arnott and Virginia Radcliffe from Aesop’s fable (Licketysplit) | Musselburgh, Brunton / touring | 12 Sep | 12 Sep | 1006 |
| THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA New version by Rona Munro from play by Federico Garcia Lorca | (NTS) Glasgow, Citizens | 17 Sep | 3 Oct | 1010 |
| IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE New musical by Steve Brown from the film by Frank Capra | Ipswich, New Wolsey | 17 Sep | 3 Oct | 1003 |
| KES Revival of adaptation by Lawrence Till from novel by Barry Hines | Liverpool Playhouse | 22 Sep | 10 Oct | 1006 |
| A LITTLE NECK New play by Ali Taylor (Goat & Monkey) | Hampton Court | 14 Sep | 4 Oct | 1002 |
| PUB QUIZ IS LIFE New play by Richard Bean | Hull Truck | 11 Sep | 3 Oct | 1001 |
| RUTHERFORD AND SON Revival of play by Githa Sowerby | Newcastle, Northern Stage | 22 Sep | 3 Oct | 1005 |
| SEPARATE TABLES Revival of double bill by Terence Rattigan | Chichester Festival | 17 Sep | 3 Oct | 999 |
| SPYMONKEY’S MOBY DICK New play by Jos Houben | Northampton, Royal | 21 Sep | 26 Sep | 1005 |
| THE SUN, THE MOON AND A BOY CALLED RIVER New play by Iain Johnstone & Andy Cannon (Wee Stories) | Edinburgh, Traverse / touring | 23 Sep | 26 Sep | 1011 |
| THE STEAMIE Revival of play by Tony Roper | Perth | 12 Sep | 26 Sep | 1007 |
| THE WINTER’S TALE revival of play by Shakespeare (Schtanhaus / Headlong) | Southampton, Nuffield | 15 Sep | 26 Sep | 1004 |