Issue 21, 2009
Prompt Corner
That Quote of the Fortnight opposite will no doubt be read by some people as Charles Spencer’s gleeful endorsement of critical savagery. It’s amazing how many people think that the default mode of a reviewer is to sneer; I was berated about this at length a few days ago by a taxi driver (“No offence intended,” he said; “Very little taken,” I replied). I tried to explain to him how and why he was mistaken, but it just didn’t penetrate. Some targets are just too cherished to give up.
I must admit to something of the same feeling myself – as well as some of the pleasure in writing knocking copy – in this column. Last issue I crowed about Tim Walker not knowing how recently Inherit The Wind had been staged on Broadway. This time I ‘m surprised by his declaration that only Michael Grandage could consider staging Life Is A Dream; if this is true, then Michael’s been moonlighting a heck of a lot under various pseudonyms, such as when he put the same play on at the Blue Elephant in 2004, the White Bear in 2002, Camden People’s Theatre in 2000, almost simultaneously at the Old Red Lion and the Grace (now Theatre 503) in 1997 and even at the Barbican in 1999 (when he seems to have used the unlikely alias of “Calixto Bieito”). Tim also remarks how predictable protagonist Segismundo’s bad behaviour is, without remarking at all on his subsequent redemption or its roots in his bewilderment about what constitutes reality and its values, a bewilderment which is not his own but is foisted on him by his situation and the deceit of those around him. Some things, as Tim observes, “one need hardly add”, but some other things one does need to. Such as, for instance, that The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice is not merely “Terry Johnson’s version of the 1998 film”, but his revival as director of Jim Cartwright’s 1992 play. One might almost think Tim hadn’t realised that it began as a stage work.
Loathsome
Elsewhere in this issue, though, Tim has said something much more serious. His review of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians – or at any rate of the two of its three acts that he saw, having left before the final scene which puts the foregoing into sharper focus – calls for the production to be closed. This strikes me as an astounding relationship between a reviewer and the material reviewed. Tim admits that he cannot tell the difference between the portrayal of regressive attitudes and the attitudes themselves; presumably he can tell the difference between the sharpshooting in Annie Get Your Gun and the discharge of real firearms, between Hara Yannas in It Felt Empty... and an actual prostitute, or between Diana Vickers’ portrayal of an introverted teenager in Little Voice and the real thing. What’s different here?
Ah: people are laughing at loathsome jokes, he says. (Evidently he wasn’t sitting near Patrick Marmion, who remarks in his review on how unfunny the gags in question are.) Tim doesn’t seem to consider the fact that one can have a complex response to a joke, laughing at the craft of a punchline even as one abhors the values behind it – “scowling at themselves as they chortle”, as Susannah Clapp puts it in her review– or that the laughter is actually at the failure of the whole comic enterprise, the “debased sensibility [which] is the butt of our mirthful condescension”, in Lloyd Evans’s words. No such complexities exist, apparently, for the people Tim saw – “a peculiarly primitive audience”, he writes, including one whose laugh “sounded like a dog whimpering”. There’s a deep dramatic irony in his deploring racist and sexist jokes whilst employing the rhetoric of subhumanity to describe those who laugh at them.
Brutality
I feel slightly proprietorial about Comedians, having myself played the role of George McBrain, the Northern Irishman who attains success by throwing out his principles in mid-act. And in agreement with Tim’s basic position, it’s certainly true that in defiance of its title, the most crucial moments of the play depend on the utter absence of laughter. During the second act, when the five acts from Eddie Waters’ comedy class face try-out spots in a Mancunian club, Gethin Price’s final piece must be all brutality and menace, and the third-act post-mortem discussion between Price and Waters needs likewise to ensure that the audience are given no opportunity to relieve themselves with even an inappropriate giggle. Perhaps if Tim had seen the latter he might have appreciated how David Dawson and Matthew Kelly play the latter sequence masterfully: not a snigger in evidence, and scarcely even a wince at Price’s enumeration of what “truth” means (very Trevor Griffiths, very 1970s earnest socialist-realist). Kelly has left his days as a TV presenter far behind: he may not be an actor of Chekhovian nuance, but he is one who unfailingly applies himself with assiduity and conviction to whatever his role might be. Dawson is less consistent. His Gethin is a malevolent elf, which at times reminds us that the true elves of folklore are beautiful, shimmering sadists, but at others takes the form of a feyness that lets us off the hook too easily. Even the two or three muted laughs during his spot are too many.
Another significant point about the play and its revival today is glanced at by Dominic Maxwell (himself a reviewer of comedy as well as theatre) when he alludes to “the recent reintroduction of ‘ironic’ sexism, racism and homophobia into comedy”. There have been a number of news stories in recent weeks about supposedly inappropriate jokes, and I can’t help feeling that maybe we do once again need reminding of the vital importance of humour that subverts our prejudices rather than indulging them.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back Issue 21, 2009
Can You Hear Me In Tbilisi?
Barely a year after its disastrous five-day war with giant neighbour Russia, Georgia has decided on a more peaceful way to make headlines: the first Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre has just taken place, offering a mix of invited companies and a local showcase. Not to be confused with GIFT, the Georgian International Festival of Theatre, which the charismatic actress Keti Dolidze ran for many years, TIFT has the support of Georgia’s local and central government, who have supplied a useful budget of some $350,000.
The international section got off to an auspicious start with visits from Lithuania’s Oskaras Korsunovas (Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Eimuntas Nekrosius (Faust), both shows which I have reported on elsewhere, plus an Edinburgh Fringe favourite, Poland’s Janusz Visniewski, with The Tempest. I arrived in time for a rather less interesting show from the National Theatre of Azerbaijan, The Mask, in which three male actors and a rather more talented woman dancer acted out a simple fable about the difficulties of romantic love, using three geometric symbols – a cube, a pyramid and a sphere – as their only props, apart from the mask of the title. With an effort one could read into it a searing critique of male-dominated Azeri society, but that might be to go too far.
Rummaging
Determined festival-goers suffered from the fact that the full programme book didn’t arrive until well into the event, which did not make it easy to see what was behind So-So, a meditation on the work of the noted French writer and photographer, Sophie (So-So) Calle. Catherine Duflot, its adaptor and leading lady, set the piece in a hotel room where the audience sat around to watch overlapping extracts from two Calle stories, an account of a doomed, fractious marriage and the diary of a stalking exercise in Venice. The action, amplified by slides and video, was fragmentary, intended less to tell the stories than to demonstrate Calle’s habit of rummaging in the drawers of memory to create visual and verbal images, and on this level it succeeded beautifully. First staged ten years ago, the piece offered time to reflect on the different impact a younger Mme Duflot might have made in the original staging. Here, she brought an older and wiser woman’s experience to her text, yet was not afraid to strip to her underwear to do so.
Another French text being revisited was Philippe Genty’s Zigmund Follies, a Freudian vaudeville – as its title suggests – from 1984, derived from M. Genty’s origins as a puppeteer, which might surprise those accustomed to his dreamy, large-scale works. Here a life-sized actor who happens to be carrying his head around in a box (Eric de Sarria, playing the role created by the author), shrinks himself down to begin a Monty Python meets Alice in Wonderland odyssey of delicious verbal and visual puns, through a dream world populated by a series of adorable and sometimes violent finger puppets. Genty’s images remain as rich, colourful and disturbing as ever on this tiny stage, and his puppets’ adventures, as skilfully manipulated by de Sarria and an associate, are vastly more than a children’s entertainment. In fact they would appear to relate the author’s emergence from a nervous breakdown, and his apparently simple moral, “you have to love yourself before you can love others”, is shown in some depth to be the key to his recovery.
The final international show I caught was from an Armenian group, whose And A Decent Prison played to an appreciative, largely Armenian audience. It showed Hamlet confined to a modern madhouse, re-running some of the events in Elsinore, but without synopsis or surtitles remained a mystery to me, even if its principal characters were still recognisable. In particular I’m still wondering why Polonius should have been dressed as Santa Claus...
Parallel universe
I had to pass on the rest of the international programme, which included Britain’s Gecko, who had a huge success with The Overcoat, and couple of Korean shows, including a favourite of mine, Do-Wan Im’s chair-wielding Woyzeck. Instead I turned my attention to the Georgian Showcase, a three-day marathon for which the organisers had generously thrown open their doors to any Georgian company, with the result that visitors had to choose from 27 productions, some of them performed outside the city itself (Tbilisi alone has seventeen theatres). Future showcases will no doubt be a little more selective, and make more effort to fulfil the promise of surtitles or simultaneous translation which was seldom kept this year.
Out of this came a feeling that in many cases Georgian theatre is living in a parallel universe, where styles and genres long abandoned to the west of the Caucasus still thrive. Pantomime (in the sense of wordless storytelling), puppetry (in many forms) and shadow theatre were all on display, while you could visit the monumental Soviet-era municipal theatre in the steel town of Rustavi and see a perfectly preserved domestic comedy of pre-Soviet times, by Georgia’s leading playwright of the period, performed exactly as it might have been when it was written. In many of the shows, shouting was taken as proof that we were watching genuine actors, and their actions were often presented with a deliberateness of pace or multiple repetitions that suggested their directors were unsure of their audience’s ability to take in fairly simple propositions. In their turn, those audiences offered prolonged applause – and often standing ovations – regardless of the quality of the work, and for what they judged to be exceptional efforts would break into rounds of applause in the manner of an opera audience, or Kabuki fans in Japan.
This may sound harsh, but time and again my notes on a Georgian show would read “too loud”, “too long”, “too detailed” – and it can be very frustrating to sit for a couple of hours watching a performance that is heavily reliant on text with only a paragraph of synopsis to go on.
Surtitle-free
Nonetheless, a couple of text-heavy, surtitle-free performances did catch my interest. I don’t know whether I’d have enjoyed Yukio Mishima’s My Friend Hitler if I’d had the text (or if I’d stayed for the full performance), but David Mghebrishvili’s production at the Royal District Theatre (interesting in itself as a converted caravanserai) used Ana Ninua’s fine set well and featured some excellent restraint in its performers, notably Nato Murvanidze, the actress (yes!) playing the Führer. Equally restrained, very well acted and for me well worth a couple of hours of incomprehensible dialogue was Gosha Gorgoshadze’s production for the Rustaveli Theatre of Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt’s The Visitor, in which Freud’s escape from Nazi Vienna is held up by a mysterious arrival, who claims to be God.
A less satisfactory Rustaveli production on its main stage was Robert Sturua’s latest, a circus version of Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers that seemed to last for ever, so laden was it with unnecessary tricks. Its insistent score gave the impression that it wanted to be a musical, except that no musical numbers arrived, apart from a few desultory verses from the chorus of firemen. The actual circus show on offer, performed outdoors by The Movement Theatre of Kakha Bakuradze, was full of enthusiasm but woefully short of any circus skills, relying rather on some splendid music in the manner of Cirque du Soleil.
Persistence
I missed most of the small sample of new Georgian writing on display, but shared the appreciation of an enthusiastic audience for Irakli Samsonadze’s The Bedstead Of Ex-Lovers, directed on the Rustaveli’s smallest stage by Nino Lipartiari. In it an ill-matched couple find themselves locked in a container returning from London to Georgia. As their relationship grows they discover that the container is returning their dead bodies, while a final twist reveals that the spouses awaiting them have been having an affair. I’m eagerly awaiting a translation of the lively text, in which Nanuka Khushkivadze gave a stand-out performance, even if she did fall prey to the Georgian habit of overemphasis.
The last night of the showcase saw a clash between Robert Sturua’s fine Rustaveli Hamlet and the premiere of a Macbeth directed by David Doiashvili. Those like me who chose the Scottish Play were rewarded with a spectacular production, making the most creative use of light and sound and foregrounding the witches in a manner which I think the great Sturua himself would have appreciated, leaving them on stage for most of the play and using them for some surprising doubling, from the Porter to Lady Macduff. The Macbeths played off one another superbly, and one quickly forgot that the actor playing the husband was still a student at the Academy. Yet for all the production’s showy acrobatics, video projections and amazing moving lights – even real fireworks to show the fall of Dunsinane – one can’t help feeling that a director who closes the play with the murderous couple in an amorous dying clinch may not have completely grasped its meaning. Still, the fact that this technically complex production had to be played in the foyer of Tbilisi’s Music and Comedy Theatre, while the main house is under reconstruction, is a tribute to Georgian persistence and ingenuity – as indeed was the whole festival, which may have made a shaky start but gives promise of developing into a major event in the European festival calendar. And there is always the legendary Georgian hospitality, which was much in evidence throughout.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Reviewed in issue 21, 2009:
London
| Production | Venue | Opened | Closed | Page |
| ALISON'S HOUSE Revival of play by Susan Glaspell | Orange Tree | 9 Oct | 7 Nov | 1124 |
| ANNIE GET YOUR GUN Revival of musical by Irving Berlin | Young Vic | 16 Oct | 9 Jan | 1113 |
| BEDROOM FARCE Revival of play by Alan Ayckbourn | Rose, Kingston | 15 Oct | 28 Nov | 1104 |
| BLOODY POETRY Revival of play by Howard Brenton (Cara Luna Th) | White Bear | 13 Oct | 31 Oct | 1089 |
| CATEGORY B New play by Roy Williams | Tricycle | 12 Oct | 19 Dec | 1090 |
| COMEDIANS Revival of play by Trevor Griffiths | Lyric Hammersmith | 14 Oct | 14 Nov | 1098 |
| ENDGAME Revival of play by Samuel Beckett (Complicité) | Duchess | 15 Oct | 5 Dec | 1107 |
| FERAL New play by Toby Clarke (Sketty Prods) | New Wimbledon Studio | 8 Oct | 24 Oct | 1125 |
| THE GREAT EXTENSION New play by Cosh Omar | T R Stratford E15 | 21 Oct | 14 Nov | 1103 |
| HETTY FEINSTEIN'S WEDDING ANNIVERSARY New musical by Chris Burgess (Forthwrite) | New End | 16 Oct | 6 Dec | 1112 |
| INSIDE OUT New show by Cirkus Cirkör | Peacock | 16 Oct | 31 Oct | 1123 |
| IT FELT EMPTY WHEN THE HEART WENT AT FIRST BUT IT IS ALRIGHT NOW New Play by Lucy Kirkwood | Arcola | 9 Oct | 31 Oct | 1088 |
| LIBERACE LIVE FROM HEAVEN New play with music by Julian Woolford | Leicester Square | 13 Oct | 8 Nov | 1111 |
| LIFE IS A DREAM New version by Helen Edmundson of play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca | Donmar Warehouse | 13 Oct | 28 Nov | 1092 |
| LULU Revival of play by Frank Wedekind, adapted by Nicholas Wright (Rififi TC) | Hackney Empire Studio | 9 Oct | 24 Oct | 1089 |
| MANY ROADS TO PARADISE Transfer of play by Stewart Permutt | Jermyn Street | 8 Oct | 14 Nov | 1091 |
| THE MEETING New play by Jeff Stetson (Nubian Nights / Crying In The Wilderness Prods) | Warehouse, Croydon | 16 Oct | 1 Nov | 1112 |
| MISS JULIE Revival of play by August Strindberg | Rose, Kingston | 15 Oct | 28 Nov | 1104 |
| MOTHERLAND Return of play by Steve Gilroy (Live Th) | Tristan Bates | 19 Oct | 7 Nov | 1122 |
| RAOUL New piece by James Thiérrée (BITE09) | Barbican | 13 Oct | 24 Oct | 1096 |
| THE RISE AND FALL OF LITTLE VOICE Revival of play by Jim Cartwright | Vaudeville | 20 Oct | 1117 | |
| SHOOTING RATS New play by Peter Turrini (Fanshen TC) | Old Lillian Baylis School | 8 Oct | 24 Oct | 1097 |
| THE SPANISH TRAGEDY Revival of play by Thomas Kyd (Doublethink Th) | Arcola | 20 Oct | 14 Nov | 1116 |
| Terror 2009 Four new short plays – see review pages for full details (The Sticking Place) | Southwark Playhouse | 9 Oct | 24 Oct | 1121 |
| THE UNIMPORTANT HISTORY OF BRITAIN New play by Robert Blackwood & Nick Cowell | Above The Stag | 13 Oct | 31 Oct | 1112 |
| YASSER New play by Abdelkader Benali (Studio Dubbelagent) | Arcola | 8 Oct | 24 Oct | 1125 |
Regions |
BEYOND THE FRONT LINE New piece by Slung Low | Salford, Lowry | 8 Oct | 16 Oct | 1132 |
| CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER Adaptation by Mark Thompson from novel by James Hogg | Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum | 17 Oct | 7 Nov | 1136 |
| THE DARK THINGS New play by Ursula Rani Sarma | Edinburgh, Traverse | 8 Oct | 24 Oct | 1134 |
| THE ELEPHANT MAN Revival of play by Bernard Pomerance | Dundee Rep | 21 Oct | 31 Oct | 1137 |
| FIREFLIES New play by Kevin Fegan | Salford, Lwry | 20 Oct | 31 Oct | 1133 |
| HANGING BY A THREAD New piece by The Ding Foundation | Edinburgh, Traverse | 9 Oct | 10 Oct | 1137 |
| MY WONDERFUL DAY New play by Alan Ayckbourn | Scarborough, Stephen Joseph | 13 Oct | 31 Oct | 1131 |
| OUR MAN IN HAVANA Adaptation by Clive Francis from novel by Graham Greene | Nottingham Playhouse | 16 Oct | 24 Oct | 1132 |
| PYGMALION Revival of play by George Bernard Shaw | Mold, Clwyd Theatr Cymru | 13 Oct | 31 Oct | 1133 |
| THAT FACE Revival of play by Polly Stenham | Glasgow, Tron | 8 Oct | 24 Oct | 1133 |
| THAT OLD FEELING New musical by Richard Harris and Denis King | Reading, Mill At Sonning | 10 Oct | 21 Nov | 1130 |
| TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare (RSC) | Stratford-upon-Avon, Courtyard | 21 oct | 21 Nov | 1126 |