Issue 20, 2009
Prompt Corner
I’ve often remarked on the phenomenon whereby supposedly major West End productions close before we have the chance to reprint their reviews, but a much sadder analogue of that event has occurred in this issue. By the time you read the reviews of Prick Up Your Ears, Matt Lucas has left the role of Kenneth Halliwell. Bill Hagerty had time to note and explain this in his Sun review: Lucas, playing the role of a man who murdered his lover Joe Orton and then committed suicide, was distressed following the suicide of his own former civil partner Kevin McGee. It’s difficult to remark on this connection without seeming ghoulish.
Disagreeable
Lucas’s departure is unfortunate not just on the level of his personal life, but because he was making a fine fist of his dramatic role. Well, it’s obvious from the reviews that opinions differ on this score, but I am in the positive camp. Having long admired Lucas as a performer but found much of the Little Britain TV series unpleasant rather than funny, I felt perversely vindicated to see him using many of the same behavioural devices towards an intentionally disagreeable end. He at first got to use several of his character tics as Halliwell engaged in various fantasies alone and with Orton (such as recording a pornographic version of radio soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary); but as Orton’s success grew and Halliwell became more unremittingly prescription-pill-popping, semi-agoraphobic and pathologically jealous, Lucas began to show his capabilities beyond comedy. Chris New as Orton cannot find a comparable savagery even for the few moments when he needs to display it; his Orton is always a little too reasonable. Their landlady Mrs Corden has been written as a pastiche of an Orton character, with Gwen Taylor getting lines such as “A play on the radio, a play in the West End and he probably studied woodwork!”
This is the kind of material which suits Daniel Kramer’s directorial style, at once florid and strident, although he goes overboard with added reverb during Halliwell’s fugue scenes. Nevertheless, a three-hander about a stifling gay relationship is hardly the most bankable West End fare, and for some reason Simon Bent’s play does not spark. I suspect it’s simply that when John Lahr’s biography of him was published in 1978 and filmed nine years later, Orton had not yet settled into literary history. It’s now half a lifetime since Halliwell bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer in 1967, and the Islington flat in which they had lived is marked by a commemorative plaque. The events have lost most of their living-memory frisson, and Orton’s plays feel far less transgressive today than at the time of their writing. Consequently Bent’s bioplay needs to find an alternative source of electricity. It doesn’t, and so, although a stout piece of work, it doesn’t thrill like those previous versions.
Astringency
Another thrill-free zone was Howard Barker’s Found In The Ground. Barker, of course, has long been out of critical favour in his homeland, and boasts in the programme to this latest production by The Wrestling School, the company dedicated to his plays, that it’s currently celebrating 21 years of existence “in the teeth of critical and bureaucratic hostility”. (In the teeth, also, of diminishing non-Barker involvement: it’s not generally known how many production jobs he’s doing under various pseudonyms – see the production details.) However, it’s been a few years since I last crossed paths with the company, and on this showing he has refined his approach almost out of existence. The trademarks are all present: visual and aural astringency, a world in shards (usually during or after a grisly war), an enclosed environment with a number of vicious and irresolvable personal discords within it. But beyond that, nothing: no events, no dilemmas, nothing except the unremitting condition of devalued desire, articulated depravity and a kind of elegant apocalypse. The (wonderful) mechanical dogs, (curiously coy) quartet of urinating nurses and (challengingly low-key) late appearance of Hitler neither relieve matters nor add any kind of form or shape to them.
There are numerous lapidary pronouncements on life, art and culture, and a whole raft of Nazi imagery and allusions, but none of them seem to connect with anything either within the world of the play or beyond it. Barker seems increasingly to believe that the more dissatisfaction he elicits, the more he must be doing something right; but when even Andrew Haydon, who is almost certainly the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic of current critics as regards Barker, finds the production profoundly dissatisfying, the playwright might do well to recollect that this isn’t especially valid as a general principle and to question why he thinks he might be an exceptional case.
Dull
And not even Anna Friel in the buff could thrill me during Breakfast At Tiffany’s, to the extent that I actually left at the interval. It’s not a bad play or production as such, just a terribly dull one which I didn’t think likely to show me anything in the second half that I hadn’t already seen. (I’m speaking dramatically, not anatomically.) The pedant in me had already noted the presence of a Japanese-Californian character curiously uninterned in 1943; of Holly Golightly soulfully singing “In The Pines” a year before even the blues giant Leadbelly recorded it and practically half a century before any of us heard it, as covered by Nirvana; and most dispiritingly, a number of tea-chests in the stage set conspicuously stencilled “Belfast via Felixstowe”, which must have gone well astray to have made it to New York.
Though perhaps not as far astray as Tim Walker when he speculates that the Old Vic’s production of Inherit The Wind is unlikely to make it to Broadway because of the strength of fundamentalist and creationist views in the U.S. A more probable reason is the fact that it’s barely been two years since the play’s last Broadway outing.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Belgrade?
This year's BITEF (Belgrade International Theatre Experimental Festival), the 43rd, had as its title “The Crisis Of Capital – The Art Of Crisis”. The crisis was evident in the festival itself, which had a much reduced programme and was forced to cut out the Serbian showcase which has usually accompanied the international productions. In a long weekend I was able to see five of the main programme's nine shows, and came away sharing some of the disappointment that was evident around me. The disappointment has varied roots. I heard one theatre boss complaining that even the reduced budget for BITEF was much better than the cuts he was facing, evidence of a growing malaise in the country's theatre community which could lead to some unpleasant infighting. Likely losers will be new writing and those smaller companies who cannot make a strong case for extra cash. BITEF itself had to cope with the appointment of a new director only a few months before it opened, who managed heroically to put a lot of sponsorship in place at very short notice. But my chief disappointment was with the shows I saw, however much they might relate to this year's challenging title. BITEF's own title means that it is a place for experiment, and over its proud history it has brought the avant-gardes of forty years to the world. But as Richard Schechner says, true avant-garde is by definition likely to be raw and hesitant as it seeks new definitions of theatre and theatricality, while former avant-gardes will easily subside in time into the commonplace.
Vacuous
This year's jury was headed by the eminent theorist Patrice Pavis, who joined such luminaries as Hans-Thies Lehmann and Elinor Fuchs in a parallel conference discussing “Dramatic And Post-Dramatic Theatre: Ten Years After”, it being a full decade since we first heard of post-dramatic theatre in a big way with the publication of Lehmann's book of that name. The book performed a very useful function in its attempt to define much of the well-nigh indefinable parade of experimental work that has emerged over the 40-year history of BITEF. In that time we have seen the rise and fall of postmodernism on the wider cultural stage, and many attempts to apply its specious and vacuous tenets to theatre. Only now are theatremakers beginning to repair the huge damage wrought by the movement, with its rejection of text and denial of plot in favour of superficial style and sensation – a triumph of matter over mind. M Pavis's jury stayed firmly in the postmodern (though not necessarily the postdramatic) backwater by choosing as its prizewinner a production by the local Jugoslav Drama Theatre of The Dreamers, also translated as The Enthusiasts, a play by the Austrian Robert Musil, best known for his unfinished and impenetrable cult novel The Man Without Qualities.
What happens in The Dreamers? Not a lot, in Milos Lolic's mannered production, although Musil's text, which Lolic has quite arbitrarily cut by a third, seems full of melodramatic reversals and emotional shocks. We face two elegantly coiffed and costumed actresses and two rather scruffier actors, placed in front of stand microphones on a bare pine box of a set which looks like an Ikea version of a radio studio. Upstage a pianist supplies a silent-movie accompaniment, while the actors gabble the first few pages of text into their microphones, with no attempt at characterisation. As the piece proceeds, the protagonists, who are apparently involved in a cats' cradle of intertwined, sometimes incestuous relationships, are joined from time to time by four subsidiary characters, carrying their own microphones, who add some colour to the drab proceedings by various forms of overacting. Gradually the central four tire of being mere microphone fodder, and start to do interesting, occasionally mildly erotic things with their cables. By the end, both relationships and microphones have been rearranged several times. (Which crazy German was it who first decided that stand microphones have any place in theatre? They are now the most depressing of clichés.) In a post-show discussion, both director and actors confessed that they had little or no idea of what Musil's play (winner of the Kleist Prize in 1921) was about. They were expecting audiences to walk out. Presumably they were not expecting the jury prize for BITEF 2009.
Sentimental
Another BITEF jury awards a prize on behalf of the local newspaper, Politika. Their choice was the latest production by Robert Lepage, making his début in Belgrade. The Blue Dragon picks up twenty years later on two of the characters in his superb Dragons Trilogy, in fact those played by the present authors, Lepage and Marie Michaud. Set in present-day China, it uses a clever set of moving screens and travelator tracks to tell a simple, rather sentimental story of love lost and found through the unwanted pregnancy of the play's third character, played by the dancer Tai Wei Foo. This was hardly vintage Lepage, merely a polished piece which must be anathema to the postdramatic brigade with its clear story, well-defined characters and straightforward plot – even if it did offer multiple endings.
More to the main jury's taste – they gave it a special mention – was a piece by the Croatian group Shadowcasters. Vacation From History is only the first part of a trilogy which concludes with the piece they actually produced first, a video compilation of the complete text and drafts for Kafka's The Trial. In this prequel a small audience, no more than a couple of dozen, is gently ushered one by one into a darkened area, divided by curtains, in which they are tucked up comfortably in bed for an hour of subtle sensory experience. Behind the curtains can just be caught the sounds of outside life – someone getting up and dressing, a football being kicked around, short bursts of music. Figures come and go, sometimes checking on the audience's welfare – at one point my hand was softly kissed. A group gathers to conduct an inaudible conversation. One of the actors reads, just as inaudibly, from what may be a Kafka book. Towards the end the audience is issued with headphones, but since no sound emerged from them at the performance I attended this added little to a soothing but ultimately shallow experience. I'm told that at other performances listeners heard a simple bedtime story. I'm also told that several audience members actually went to sleep. I don't think the Shadowcasters need be ashamed of that result.
Dystopic
Bedtime stories were the focus of a much heralded Serbian production, the latest ambitious work from the bright young writer Milena Markovic. Her previous Simeon The Foundling, a huge spectacle involving various forms of livestock and transport, although not to my taste, was evidence of a huge and poetic individual talent. In The Dol Ship she confirms that talent, using a series of fairy tale characters to take her audience through the life of an everywoman Alice in her own dystopic wonderland. Passing from neglected childhood through abused adolescence to dull marriage, Alice progresses to kept woman, successful artist and finally drunken, voyeuristic old hag in a Hollywood finale with echoes of Sunset Boulevard. A very visible onstage band accompanies this halting journey – indeed at first their presence and a couple of good numbers suggest that we are in for a full-scale musical. But the music, like the piece, fades away into a series of depressingly downbeat scenes in which Jasna Duricic as Alice completes a tour de force in ageing from heavenly child to Hell's granny. Again, I found myself unable to share the raptures of the Belgrade audience, although some of my discomfort came from its festival setting on the stage of the huge Sava Centre, where the first four rows of the audience sat at stage level, making it impossible for many of us to see that part of the action – most of it – which took place at the feet of the first row. That, and an unreadable surtitle system, made comprehension difficult. A subsequent reading of the text, however, did not acquit the piece from my charge of fashionable dramatic slumming.
Amateur
The other piece I saw was no more satisfying. Stefan Kaegi has won a justified reputation with his Rimini Protokoll colleagues (who were also presenting their version of Das Kapital in BITEF) for their use of non-actors (“experts” is their term) to produce strong theatre – his Mnemopark used a group of elderly model railway enthusiasts to present a Bollywood movie while simultaneously commenting drily on the Swiss economy. For Airport Kids, Kaegi has gathered (some would say exploited) a group of youngsters from Lausanne to talk about their lives and aspirations. They emerge from packing cases in a vaguely airport setting, which raises the hope that we will learn something about displaced persons, but most of them are pupils at the international school, children of executives, and their musings are banal in the extreme. Some fun is had with a little girl who will not leave her box, and is revealed as a virtual participant in the piece, but her live co-stars, appearing for their 75th performance in Belgrade, remain resolutely amateur in their efforts, which are not improved by their attempts as a scratch rock band.
Back in London I went to a conference where we were shown a ten-minute clip from Billy Eliot. Those ten minutes of that despised art form, the commercial musical, contained more technical expertise, more invention, more truth, more skill in acting, singing and dancing, more social and political observation, more sheer theatrical magic than my entire weekend of BITEF.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Reviewed in issue 20, 2009.
London |
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| Production | Venue | Opened | Closed | Page |
| THE AUTHOR New play by Tim Crouch | Royal Court Upstairs | 29 Sep | 24 Oct | 1039 |
| BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S New adaptation by Samuel Adamson from novella by Truman Capote | T R Haymarket | 29 Sep | 9 Jan | 1032 |
| DOUBLE DUTCH ESPRESSO New plays by Punam Ramchurn / Sabina England (Th WaaH! / Kali Th) | Tristan Bates | 29 Sep | 17 Oct | 1024 |
| FOUND IN THE GROUND New play by Howard Barker (The Wrestling School) | Riverside | 1 Oct | 11 Oct | 1060 |
| FRANK, SAMMY AND DEAN – THE RAT PACK LIVE FROM LAS VEGAS Return of musical cabaret | Adelphi | 28 Sep | 21 Nov | 1023 |
| GOSPELS OF CHILDHOOD: THE TRIPTYCH Three pieces by Teatr ZAR | St Giles Church / Pit | 25 Sep | 2 Oct | 1040 |
| INHERIT THE WIND Revival of play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee | Old Vic | 1 Oct | 20 Dec | 1049 |
| AN INSPECTOR CALLS Revival of play by J B Priestley (NT) | Novello | 25 Sep | 14 Nov | 1021 |
| MARKUS THE SADIST A new rap opera by Jonzi D and the company | Artsdepot / touring | 1 Oct | 2 Oct | 1038 |
| MONEY New piece by Shunt, based on novel by Émile Zola | 42-44 Bermondsey Street | 30 Sep | 31 Dec | 1041 |
| MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN Revival of play by Bertolt Brecht, in version by Tony Kushner (NT) | Olivier | 25 Sep | 8 Dec | 1025 |
| MY REAL WAR 1914–? Transfer of play by Tricia Thorns (Two's Company) | Trafalgar Studio 2 | 7 Oct | 31 Oct | 1059 |
| ORPHANS New play by Dennis Kelly (Paines Plough) | Soho | 1 Oct | 24 Oct | 1053 |
| OVER THE THRESHOLD New play by Christopher Hamilton (Jomo Prods / Perfect Pitch) | Jermyn Street | 24 Sep | 3 Oct | 1023 |
| THE POWER OF YES New play by David Hare (NT) | Lyttelton | 6 Oct | 1054 | |
| PRICK UP YOUR EARS New play by Simon Bent, from the book by John Lahr and the diaries of Joe Orton Comedy | 30 Sep | 29 Nov | 1043 | |
| SPEAKING IN TONGUES Revival of play by Andrew Bovell | Duke Of York's | 28 Sep | 1029 | |
| TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' TRIPLE BILL: DREAMERS Revival of three plays by Tennessee Williams | New End | 28 Sep | 10 Oct | 1024 |
| TIMING New play by Alistair McGowan | King's Head | 7 Oct | 8 Nov | 1047 |
| THE TOBACCO MERCHANT'S LAWYER English première of play by Iain Heggie | Finborough | 1 Oct | 24 Oct | 1048 |
| TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare (The Faction) | Brockley Jack / Tabard | 22 Sep | 24 Oct | 1058 |
| WIDE ASLEEP New play by Iain Heggie | Finborough | 5 Oct | 19 Oct | 1038 |
Regions |
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| ALL MY SONS Revival of play by Arthur Miller | Bolton, Octagon | 2 Oct | 24 Oct | 1067 |
| Arches Live! See review pages for full production details | Glasgow, various | 17 Sep | 26 Sep | 1073 |
| THE CARETAKER Revival of play by Harold Pinter | Liverpool Everyman | 7 Oct | 31 Oct | 1068 |
| THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE Revival of play by Bertolt Brecht, in version by Alistair Beaton | Leeds, WYP Quarry | 30 Sep | 17 Oct | 1067 |
| CONFINED HUMAN CONDITION Two new pieces by Cryptic TC | Glasgow, Tron / E’burgh, Traverse | 17 Sep | 26 Sep | 1070 |
| CURSE OF THE DEMETER Play by Robert Forrest, from Dracula by Bram Stoker (Visible Fictions) | Perth / touring | 29 Sep | 30 Sep | 1071 |
| DANGEROUSLY YOURS New play by Lung Ha’s TC | Edinburgh, Queen’s Hall | 23 Sep | 24 Sep | 1072 |
| THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW Revival of play by D H Lawrence | Newcastle-under-Lyme, New Vic | 29 Sep | 10 Oct | 1064 |
| THE DRUNKS New play by Mikhail & Vyacheslav Durnenkov (RSC) | Stratford-upon-Avon, Courtyard | 24 Sep | 1 Oct | 1061 |
| EAST IS EAST Revival of play by Ayub Khan-Din | Birmingham Rep | 29 Sep | 17 Oct | 1064 |
| THE GRAIN STORE New play by Natal’ia Vorozhbit, transl. Sasha Dugdale (RSC) | Stratford-upon-Avon, Courtyard | 24 Sep | 1 Oct | 1061 |
| LEAVE TO REMAIN New piece by Jo Clifford & Suzanne Dance (Teatro) | E’burgh, St John’s Ch. / touring | 1 Oct | 1 Oct | 1072 |
| LONG GONE LONESOME New play by Duncan McLean (NTS) | Dornoch, Carnegie Hall / touring | 7 Oct | 7 Oct | 1073 |
| THE RAGGED LION New play by Allan Massie, from his novel (Rowan Tree TC) | Selkirk, Bowhill / touring | 19 Sep | 19 Sep | 1070 |
| SUPERSTITION MOUNTAIN New play by Carl Grose (O-Region) | Bristol Old Vic Studio | 7 Oct | 10 Oct | 1070 |