Issue 24, 2010
Prompt Corner
It's been heartening to receive unsolicited tributes from subscribers such as "Reading your magazine is one of the great joys of my life" and "I just want to say how very valuable THEATRE RECORD is for me – enjoyable to me as a theatre-goer, and absolutely indispensable for my work as a teacher and scholar." I recently received a backhanded compliment at a party, when someone noted how theatrical agents must hate us: every fortnight we publish our detailed lists of forthcoming productions, and agents are immediately besieged by phone calls and emails from their actor clients asking them to secure auditions for these shows!
One reader renewed their subscription as follows: "I have pleasure in enclosing my cheque... I always enjoy reading the reviews... I do hope that financial difficulties will not lead to the RECORD being discontinued." Well, it has been so secret that, like many other enterprises, we have not been financially secure over the past year. We're not out of danger yet, either. However, we are in the midst of reincorporating as a charity, and intend to continue publication for the foreseeable future... all contributions, of course, most welcome! But thank you, above all, for your good wishes and your continuing support. They are what makes the whole thing possible.
As usual, the next two issues of THEATRE RECORD will be double numbers: Issue 25–26 of 2010 and Issue 01–02 of 2011 will each cover four weeks. Don't, therefore, be surprised when no issue arrives in your mailbox in a mere fortnight. And let me take this opportunity to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year... which will seeTR's 30th anniversary.
Robin Thornber, 7.4.1944–5.12.2010
For almost 30 years until he retired in 1996, Robin Thornber, who has died of cancer aged 66, wandered the north and a fair bit of the Midlands to write immaculately crafted theatre reviews for the Guardian and tell of significant dramatic stirrings. He did not confine himself to traditional playhouses; theatre mattered, and he went wherever it was happening – in Liverpool, Sheffield, Stoke, Hull, Scarborough, Manchester and elsewhere.
Robin's reviews, often composed in half an hour after the final curtain and written, in pre-laptop days, in neat black ink in a neat black notebook, gave unflashy but insightful accounts of what Alan Bleasdale or Alan Ayckbourn were up to, or what musical documentary Peter Cheeseman had conjured up, in the round, in the Potteries. "We, out there in far-flung regional theatre, will always be grateful to Robin – one of the first national critics to take us and our work seriously and draw it to wider attention," said Ayckbourn.
Robin was a smiling chuckler, the most distinctive character among a dwindling but close-knit band of Guardian journalists in Manchester as the paper's balance tipped inexorably in the direction of London from the mid-70s on. He was always affable but also very private and he never gave much away: those of us who worked with him were allowed to know little of the inner man. But we relished his fascinating combination of sharp intellect and personal chaos, and we admired the respect he commanded. "I'll always remember those (usually slightly late) entrances into the office, hair following a moment or two later, shoulder bag swinging with interest and energy; a generous greeting and that sense of penetrating intellect worn as lightly and casually as the inevitable leather jacket and absence of a tie," said Martyn Halsall, one of the Manchester Few. [ ... ]
He was at the world premieres of many Ayckbourn plays in Scarborough. "Who else has the nerve, the assurance, and the accomplishment to leave us on such a downbeat of despair, by way of such merriment?" he wrote in 1985 after the first night of Season's Greetings. A year later, he was at the Liverpool Everyman when Willy Russell, replacing an actor in ill health, took over the role of Shirley Valentine in his own play: "It may sound absurd but when this tall bearded bloke talks about getting his husband's tea ready, even though he ducks doing the business with the egg and chips, it's totally believable."
He had been at the Everyman in 1975 to give a glowing review to Bleasdale's first play, Fat Harold and the Last 26. "He described me as a cult figure in Liverpool,'' said Bleasdale. "When I tried to send him a telegram saying 'How dare you call me a cult?' the telephonist refused to send it. Needless to say, over the years not all Robin's reviews were as glowing as the first one, but they were always wickedly funny and above all written by someone who knew the difference between pretending and pretension." [ ... ]
His departure from the Guardian was unhappy. He was both angry and heartbroken at the paper's cuts in regional arts coverage and used his redundancy money to launch an arts magazine, Buzz,from his home in Glossop; it was a heroic failure.
— excerpted from obituary by David Ward, Guardian, 12.12.10
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Tokyo?
Tokyo seems to have more than its fair share of festivals. As well as the Tokyo International Festival, events devoted to both Ibsen and Chekhov were running when I paid an all too brief visit to the city in late November. I was there for a forum on Asian theatre organised by the Japanese section of the International Association of Theatre Critics, where I felt something of a colonialist invader. Fortunate, perhaps, that among the countries represented in the forum (including China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) our hosts from Japan had almost as much embarrassing colonial history to swallow. I've always naively felt that the benefits brought by British imperialism were not negligible, but here I was forcibly reminded that in the cultural sphere our colonial forbears had a poor record in recognising local art forms, which were often put down as "primitive". My colleagues from India and Singapore made great play of this.
Minority
Still, the matter of the forum was much more forward-looking than recriminatory. We heard a lot about recent collaborations between Japanese theatremakers and those in other parts of the region. Chong Wishing, for instance, is a Japanese playwright of Korean extraction, whose work often features the lives of his minority Korean community in Japan. We heard about his work on Yukiniko Dragon, the story of a family and their run-down Korean barbecue restaurant in rural Japan, which was also successfully mounted in Korea. I also had the pleasure of seeing a more recent work by Chong, Asian Sweets, performed to a packed house in a theatre in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo's new theatre quarter. The 100-seater theatre was no bigger or more comfortable than the average London Fringe venue, but they were able to charge around £45 for tickets.
The story behind Asian Sweets is almost as touching as the play itself. Chong also writes for TV, and when a friend, a popular Japanese sitcom actress, discovered she had a terminal cancer he wrote this play for her. "She had never married," he explained, "so I wrote in a scene where she could wear a wedding dress." Her successor in the revival I saw was another very popular TV star, and she led a very talented company. The story is a simple one, almost sitcom itself in its broad comic treatment of a healthily dysfunctional family living in a poor district of Tokyo, but it was performed with enough skilful bravura to give me, with no subtitles and no Japanese, just as much enjoyment as it did the ecstatic local audience.
Yoji Sakate told the forum about his Rinkogun company, who have been seen frequently abroad, usually in plays he has written. His Epitaph For The Whales was seen in an English version at the Gate in 1998. Sakate is one of the few Japanese playwrights willing to tackle social and political issues head-on, and he has also brought many hard-hitting Western plays on contemporary issues to Japan, including The Laramie Protect, The Exonerated and three of David Hare's recent investigations, Stuff Happens, The Permanent Way and even The Power Of Yes.
Impressive
Another Japanese playwright who has worked a lot abroad is Hideki Noda. Several of his plays — Red Demon, The Bee, The Diver— have been performed with varying success in London, but the collaboration with a Thai company on Red Demon which was described at the forum seems to have been an unqualified hit. Its secret lay in Noda's willingness to collaborate with his local actors and let their own traditions of music and dance set the tone of the production, which looked most impressive on video.
A whole morning of the forum was devoted to accounts of the current Chinese theatre scene. Speakers from Beijing, Hong Kong, Nanjing and Shanghai gave us an idea of the breadth of the work going on in these very different parts of the country. Of particular interest was the news that the authorities have completely changed the set-up of mainland Chinese theatre, converting theatres and troupes into commercial companies responsible to their shareholders. This doesn't mean a completely free theatre system, of course, since the "investors" are likely to be local authorities, who will want to put money into projects which meet their not necessarily artistic aims.
We saw a rehearsal of a Japanese work, Boxes, which is soon to be seen in the Shanghai Festival. Performed by the Store House company, a group of young actors, Shingo Kimura's piece shows nothing but their continual rearrangement of what starts out as a wall of boxes, mostly to the accompaniment of music from American minimalists such as Steve Reich. The relentless energy of the piece is quite hypnotic, and the calm moment towards its end when the actors swap their workaday costumes among themselves before getting back to their ant-like work makes a strong and effective contrast.
One curious contribution to the forum came from Le Hung, director of the Youth Theatre of Vietnam. We had seen his production of A Doll's House as part of the Ibsen Festival being staged in the upmarket Owlspot Theatre. It was an embarrassing evening, in which a competent but somewhat mature Nora was supported by a company that could generously be described as amateur, playing on a wobbly set in costumes that looked decidedly home-made. It was surprising, then, to learn that Mr Hung had trained as a director in Russia for ten years, and that this production had played a couple of hundred very successful performances in its home country, as well as being seen by a television audience estimated at a couple of million.
Ultrasound
Two other performances I caught were part of the Tokyo International festival, which has grown considerably since I last visited it four years ago. Alongside a strong Japanese input, international visitors this year included Christoph Marthaler, Robert Lepage and Jerome Bel, the latter working with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. I drew the short straw: having managed to avoid Rodrigo Garcia in Bucharest a month earlier, I took in his Versus in Tokyo. It's an ambitious work, for once mercifully free of wasted food, and in its journey from birth to death (it starts with ultrasound images of a foetus, ends with one of the company being made up in a coffin by a professional undertaker's cosmetologist) manages to achieve a succession of arresting coups de théätre. Most of them, unfortunately, were little more than continuing evidence of Garcia's rather juvenile insistence on shocking his audience. From the moment when the first actor arrives on stage, to urinate copiously on the books rather attractively arranged in front of him (magic of theatre: he then casually discards the bottle he has been using for the stunt) to the funereal finale, you have a choice of which is the least attractive of Garcia's moments. Is it the rabbit fried in the microwave? The girl forced to drink several bottles of wine? The film of one of Franco's admirals being blown up? The three-way mixed strip-tease? The extended selection of porno clips of people being pissed on? The cartoon monkey offering a scatological diatribe — in English, for some reason — against human intelligence? The filthy lyrics of the all-girl punk band? Those who enjoyed all these attacks on decency would probably have been more offended by the occasional intrusions of a rather good flamenco singer. For me, the most offensive part of the show was its director's assumption that his own thoughts on life, the universe and everything, delivered either in long slide-show texts or even longer droning monologues from his long-suffering actors, had any particular merit. You have to admire Garcia's accomplished cast, and his own very inventive use of a plethora of media, but it would have been worth while only if his show said anything at all worth hearing.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Reviewed in issue 24, 2010
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London
Production |
Venue |
Opened |
Closed |
Page |
| BLACK WATCH Return of play by Gregory Burke (NTS) | Barbican | 30 Nov | 22 Jan | 1350 |
| COALITION Season of collaborations | Theatre 503 | 23 Nov | 5 Dec | 1349 |
| THE CRADLE WILL ROCK Revival of musical by Marc Blitzstein | Arcola | 26 Nov | 18 Dec | 1344 |
| DEAD RECKONING New play Eric Chappell | New Wimbledon Studio | 26 Nov | 27 Nov | 1343 |
| DEAN GIBBONS AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF DEATH New piece by Matt Rudkin and Silvia Mercuriali | Camden People’s | 25 Nov | 11 Dec | 1351 |
| END OF THE RAINBOW Revival of play by Peter Quilter | Trafalgar Studio 1 | 22 Nov | 5 Mar | 1328 |
| GANDHI AND COCONUTS New play by Bettina Gracias (Kali Th) | Arcola | 29 Nov | 18 Dec | 1353 |
| THE GREAT ESCAPE (A BORROWER'S TALE) Revival of piece by Kazuko Hohki based on Mary Norton | BAC | 30 Nov | 31 Dec | 1351 |
| H.M.S. PINAFORE Transfer of revival of the operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan (Charles Court Opera) | King’s Head | 19 Nov | 8 Dec | 1331 |
| THE INVISIBLE MAN Revival of play by Ken Hill | Menier Chocolate Factory | 24 Nov | 13 Feb | 1340 |
| IOLANTHE Revival of operetta by W S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan | Union SE1 | 19 Nov | 11 Dec | 1353 |
| IT HAD TO BE YOU Revival of play by Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna | New End | 25 Nov | 24 Dec | 1360 |
| KIN New play by E V Crowe | Royal Court Upstairs | 24 Nov | 23 Dec | 1335 |
| KRAPP, 39 New play by Michael Laurence | Tristan Bates | 25 Nov | 22 Dec | 1361 |
| MIDSUMMER Return of play with songs by David Greig and Gordon McIntyre | Tricycle | 30 Nov | 29 Jan | 1352 |
| MY DAD'S A BIRDMAN Revival of play by David Almond | Young Vic, Maria | 30 Nov | 1 Jan | 1354 |
| LES PARENTS TERRIBLES Revival of play by Jean Cocteau (Donmar) | Trafalgar Studio 2 | 29 Nov | 18 Dec | 1346 |
| PINS AND NEEDLES Revival of musical revue by Harold Rome | Cock Tavern | 19 Nov | 11 Dec | 1339 |
| QUALITY STREET Revival of play by J M Barrie | Finborough | 2 Dec | 22 Dec | 1345 |
| THE RIVALS Revival of play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Th Royal Bath) | T R Haymarket | 23 Nov | 1332 | |
| ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of play by Shakespeare (RSC) | Roundhouse | 2 Dec | 1 Jan | 1358 |
Regions |
||||
| DAVID COPPERFIELD New adaptation by Deborah McAndrew from novel by Charles Dickens | Bolton, Octagon | 19 Nov | 15 Jan | 1361 |
| THE FREAK AND THE SHOWGIRL New piece by Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser (DaDaFest) | Glasgow, Arches | 27 Nov | 27 Nov | 1364 |
| THE HUNT FOR THE SCROOBIOUS PIP New play by Andrew Pollard from the writings of Edward Lear | Scarborough, Stephen Joseph | 23 Nov | 24 Dec | 1362 |
| THE LITTLE BOY WHO LOST THE MORNING New play by Susan Mulholland | Newcastle, Northern Stage | 27 Nov | 15 Jan | 1363 |
| MASTER CLASS Revival of play by Terrence McNally | Bath, Theatre Royal / touring | 30 Nov | 4 Dec | 1363 |
| MEASURE FOR MEASURE Revival of play by Shakespeare (Sherman Cymru) | Cardiff, Provincial | 24 Nov | 5 Dec | 1362 |
| Note: some productions have been held over for reprinting with the bulk of Christmas shows in Issue 25–26. | ||||
