Theatre Record

This Edition

Issue 13, 2010

Prompt Corner

I often remark here on the subjectivity of criticism: the way we consciously filter those aspects of a production that we consider worth writing about, and unconsciously filter what we actually see and hear in the first place. Does this mean that reviewers are unreliable, no more to be trusted than anyone else? No, it doesn’t: our filters are based on a wider range of experience, probably also on experience built up over a longer period; we are aware of our subjectivity and work to minimise it where we realise it may amount to prejudice, and to acknowledge it in lesser cases. At least, that’s what we do if we understand our work and our duty to readers, and take them seriously.

Sometimes these filters are the product of culture and conditioning. I recently discussed Jamie Lloyd’s production of Salome with a friend; I, whilst not championing it fervently, noted (as I do in my FT review) that it was in keeping with the usual Headlong aesthetic of radical re-envisioning of a classic text, much to her amusement. She is German, and works in a theatre culture which not only feels free to re-interpret works with much greater latitude but tends to feel that not to do so is cowardly. (Indeed, she recently found that in a staging of one of her own plays, the director had decided that one of the two characters was to be played by an alpaca. That’s right, the llama- like South American camelid Vicugna pacos, live onstage, playing a New Yorker. She hardly batted an eyelid... the writer, that is, at this staging choice; neither of us saw the alpaca’s performance.) And sometimes they are the result of a simple slip of memory or association, such as Quentin Letts hearing in The Comedy Of Errors “an echo from” Richard II, which according to most Shakespeare chronologies was written between one years and seven years later.

Comparative

But if you really want to see subjectivity in action, look for a batch of comparative reviews like those of The Bridge Project’s second year offerings As You Like It and The Tempest. Almost all of us agree that neither of these is among director Sam Mendes’ more sensational productions... but when it comes to which of the two is better, we grow fractious. Is As You Like It a more meritorious production because it does not shy away from the chills running through the play, especially its earlier acts... or is it doing the play a disservice because in emphasising the shadows it compromises the work’s comic, affirmative core? Is The Tempest more to be admired for staging it explicitly as a series of Prospero’s invocations and manipulations in his magic circle, or reproved for cutting and unbalancing the original text? (I am sure that neither of these dimensions – the darkness of one play, the selectivity of the other – would be an issue for my German friend.) Two other points, however, were pretty much beyond dispute: we didn’t find convincing Mendes’ use of Ted Hughes’ argument that The Tempest consciously recapitulates As You Like It’s themes of father/daughter exile and usurpation, and we found Stephen Dillane frequently inaudible. Disdaining stagy oratory is one thing, but disdaining making oneself heard is something else again.

It all comes down, one way or another, to the question of what does and doesn’t count. That also applies to editorial decisions regarding what we do and don’t include in Theatre Record. In this issue, for instance, the NT Live transmission of London Assurance into numerous cinemas is included (albeit under “More on Previous Productions”); we have even included the latest Secret Cinema event, since it seems to be significantly a live performance related to the chosen film rather than simply a screening of the film itself. So into these pages it goes... even if we can’t find any production details for it!

Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com

At the Back

Can You Hear Me In Hungary?

The last time I reported on Hungarian theatre, a couple of years ago, it was to describe a theatre in transition. The National Theatre in Budapest was settling in under its new director, the charismatic but erratic Robert Alfoldi. The two young directors making the most international waves, Arpad Schilling and Viktor Bodo, were out of the mainstream, the former having dissolved his hugely successful Kretakor company and the latter setting up an experimental group, the Sputnik Shipping Company, while Katona Jozsef, the capital’s senior theatre, looked to be treading water.

Under fire

Hungarian theatre now does not appear to have moved much further forward – indeed the transition is even more evident in the number of theatres and institutions about to change direction. This is what I discovered on a short visit to the country’s national drama festival, Poszt, which is held every year in the charming city of Pecs. (Poszt itself is due for change, since its director, Tamas Jordan, is stepping down after ten years in charge). There was a decided tension in the air as a result of the election of a government led by the right-wing Fidesz party, which can have serious consequences in a country where artistic appointments are often in the gift of central or local government. Alfoldi’s own position at the National may be under fire, since in spite of successfully restoring the theatre’s shaky artistic fortunes he is regarded as a man of the left.

Elsewhere, Gabor Zsambeki is due to step down after a couple of decades at the flagship Katona Jozsef; Janos Mohacsi, long-time director of the controversial theatre in Kaposvar (where Zsambeki and Tamas Ascher launched their careers before moving to Budapest) has finally fallen foul of the local authority and lost his post, although he still teaches at the local University. In Pecs itself, the National Theatre’s director is at the end of his mandate. On the bright side, Arpad Schilling is back to theatre work, directing students from the French national circus school, and Viktor Bodo continues with Sputnik while forging a more conventional reputation abroad.

Rumour and gossip

The Poszt Festival is a great gathering point for the Hungarian theatre community, and in these circumstances a buzzing centre of rumour and gossip. Until now its programme has been chosen by individual selectors, this year’s being Miklos Fay, an opera critic, whose choices were the subject of some comment. They did not include anything from Katona Jozsef, nor work by established names such as Bela Pinter or the popular Ukrainian director of the theatre in Debrecen, Attila Vidnyanszky. Debrecen did win the jury’s prize for best production, however, for the Russian Victor Rysakov’s staging of The Hairdresser by his compatriot Sergei Medvedev. The handful of shows I saw in the festival were something of a trial, since as a local festival Poszt makes few concessions to visiting non-Hungarian speakers. I had to rely more than usual on visual impressions, with only the occasional synopsis to aid me. The three members of the international jury, who included the Royal Court’s new literary manager, Christopher Campbell, did at least have aides to whisper the occasional line in their ear.

I would certainly support the production which gained their award, Viktor Bodo’s adaptation of Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man. The last Sputnik show I saw was an overlength piece of improvised theatre, Council House Stories 0.1, which seemed horribly self-indulgent and very much in need of editing. Dice Man showed a return to form, with Bodo leading his company from the front in an inventive and highly energetic study of a man descending into the grip of obsession, even madness, while promoting the subversive anti-psychiatry of Rhinehart’s book.

Enough is enough

Something of the same spirit, but little of the same skill, was evident in Call Me, devised by the Geza Gardonyi theatre of Eger and directed by Gabor Maté, a series of more and less amusing sketches built around today’s mania for the mobile phone. Lasting more than three hours, it was symptomatic of a major Hungarian theatre problem, that of not knowing when enough is enough. It’s always been the problem for Janos Mohacsi, and was exemplified here by his overemphatic four-hour (count them) production for the Szatmarnemeti theatre company of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. Even his far more sophisticated production, for the Pecs theatre, of The Lost Letter, an enjoyable adaptation of a play by the Romanian Pinero, Ion Luca Caragiale, had the same tendency to give us a good joke and then repeat it until it staled.

Drastic editing

My impatience with the length of shows is no doubt partly due to a lack of language, but two more seemed in need of drastic editing. The KoMa company from Budapest brought SZJ9231, or The End Of Art Work Act, another devised piece based on the odd premise that in a post-oil world there would be no call for actors. After a rather well made setting of the scene on film, where the company celebrated a first night in their favourite bar, we had to follow their fortunes on a bare stage as they learned to live off the land in a series of bleak, loosely connected scenes that made the end of the world – or at least the show – an event to be welcomed. Far more stylish but no less unbearable in length was the National Theatre of Szeged’s adaptation of Gogol’s Marriage, which hammered home its grotesqueness in a series of interminable tableaux, linked, most incongruously, by a blacked-up maid-narrator, who launched the show with a striptease that revealed her breasts to be the only part of her body not subjected to this politically incorrect treatment.

I was sorry to miss some of the better shows in the official programme, such as an Arturo Ui which warned of the rise of far-right nationalism not in Berlin but in Budapest, and an Ubu Roi from Zoltan Balazs’s exciting Maladype company. It was good, however, to see Katona Jozsef refusing to accept their non-invitation and turning up in the busy Off programme with The Two-Headed Beast, a picaresque play about religious intolerance by Hungary’s great twentieth century poet-playwright Sandor Weores, previously deemed unplayable but here given a fine and topical staging by Gabor Maté, who is likely to be the next director of the theatre. It should prove a popular appointment – almost as popular, maybe, as the new government’s man responsible for culture, who is allegedly a skilled embezzler.

Adventurous

On the way home I stopped off in Budapest to see a magnificent semi-staged Walkûre, part of a Ring cycle performed on successive days in the Bela Bartok concert hall in the city’s Palace of Arts. Acoustically perfect, dramatically adventurous, with the top-class soloists performing against a backdrop of video screens, the seasoned Bayreuth conductor Adam Fischer seems to have found here a new and valuable approach to Wagner presentation, which could easily transfer to acclaim in our Prom season.

Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com

Reviewed Issue 13, 2010