dogs of europe (belarus free theatre, d. nicolai khalezin & natalia kaliada)

When is a work of art more than a work of art? When does its very existence transcend the macrame of the critical reaction or the aesthetic judgement?

Dogs of Europe is a play about the expansionist tactics of Putin’s greater Russia. I booked to see it a month or so ago, when the makers of this play knew exactly what to expect, but the rest of the world did not.

Now we do.

I thought that there is within the dark matter of Eastern European art, or perhaps that should be Mittel European art, a hard conceptual muscle. It’s there in Kafka or Havel (even Stoppard) or Gospodinov, or Bela Tarr, among those I know. As though the world is so volatile and precarious that regular human emotions are almost on loan, to be used sparingly in their art, as these societies are susceptible to the power block plays of forces beyond their control. Dogs of Europe embraces a meta fictional scenario of Greater Russia confronting Western Europe, a scenario that places Belarus, as well as Ukraine, on the border of this schism. The acuity of this theory has been born out to devastating effect. The play was conceived and up and running ahead of history meaning that, in a tragically Benjaminesque turn, history is playing catch-up with art.

All of which is to in no way communicate the comings and goings of Dogs of War, which seemed to marry the search for a poet of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives with the pan-European delirium of Three Kingdoms and the earthy truths of a folk tale.

Nor is it to communicate that sensation of inadvertently stumbling into history. The director came on stage at the end to give a brief speech, wherein she informed the audience that the designer of the graphics that had graced the stage was Ukrainian and was there now, fighting for his country. It is wrong, as well, to focus on Ukraine at the expense of Belarus, as this is a work of art carved out of the resistance to oppression, the need for art to speak to power, both the power within and the power without.

Perhaps that sentence should be broken down. ‘The need to speak’ alone is enough. The articulation of the existence of an idea gives that idea existence, even if only in those fleeting moments that it has been articulated. The idea is complex and simple. It is to do with Belarus and Ukraine, but it is also to do with the importance, as humans, of our right and capacity to say things others don’t want us to say. Without being sent to prison or killed. In the theatre, as has happened time after time, the transgressive is given word, the world is reconvened, the dictators do not rule. 

the encounter (w&d simon mcburney, d kirsty housley)

This is one of those, on the one hand, and then again, on the other hand, shows.

On the one hand:

McBurney weaves a sterling theatrical tale, adapted from Loren McIntyre’s account of his journey to the Amazon, where he experienced a profound and intoxicating encounter with a native tribe. An encounter wherein he flirted with death and was forced to face up to the meaning of his values, as he became engaged with the tribe’s anti-materialistic theology/ philosophy. The story is told via the use of headphones and dazzling technological manipulation of the theatrical space. Light, sound and little else are used to turn the vast Barbican stage into a convincing jungle, alien, terrifying and wondrous. McBurney pulls off a redoubtable one-man performance, taking the reins as the narrator himself, then slipping into the character of McIntyre, and alternating between the two with confidence and aplomb. 

On the other hand:

This is a piece of theatre which appears to be about the problems of materialism. At one point, the tribe which McIntyre is visiting destroy all their possessions. McBurney, as himself, then goes on a Lear-esque rant, wherein he proposes that we destroy all our possessions too. Or at least contemplate the possibility. Clearly it’s not going to happen, and much less as a result of a show which chooses to tell its story through the use of technology. Western theatre returns to its essential paradox of telling people who can afford to pay 50 quid for a seat a message which, no matter how worthy, is completely redundant. There’s something vaguely unsatisfying about the process, an itch being scratched which maybe only makes the rash worse. 

However, this might be to quibble in the face of history. Because at the end of the day, what McBurney pulls off is something which has a life and dynamism which you don’t always encounter in the theatre, and no matter the ins and outs of the context or the message, as a theatrical experience it feels radical and remarkable. Special mention should be made to the technical team, Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin who explore the potential of sound in the theatre with flair, as well as the design of Michael Levine and the lighting of Paul Anderson. 

887 (w&d robert lepage)

887 opens in a disarming fashion, with the writer/ director informing that the play will start shortly, but beforehand he just wants to explain his reasons for creating this piece. Which leads us seamlessly into the night’s first piece of theatre magic, as a miniature version of his childhood block of flats in Quebec City appears and he talks us through the various inhabitants. In chocolate box size, little fragments of life from the flats, barely visible, appear in video: a barking dog, or children bouncing on a bed. The style of the play is revealed to be both representational and imagistic at the same time. There is a representation of the narrator’s description, but that representation remains so opaque that it could almost be something abstract, out of an 80s Brook play. The audience is still compelled to become active. It has to work to decipher or interpret the images that are being presented. There’s a ludic quality to the staging, never more so than when Lepage films with his phone the contents of boxes which represent the interior of a flat at Christmas. Tiny details which the naked eye could never see are picked out on a screen, as Lepage’s face hovers beside them. We are made into children once again, exploring the content of the Doll’s House. 

Lepage has always liked to let his work play out over time. In essence, 887 is a memoir of his childhood, gradually revealed with all the urgency of a baggy novel. This memoir incorporates the political history of Quebec, as well as the structure of the brain, and the nature of memory itself. At times, the play rambles, but it rambles in the way a well-told story is allowed to. There are blind alleys and illustrative moments. We, in the audience, know that there will always be magical moments of stagecraft round the corner. This is a picaresque evening, shaped by moments, rather than any great dramatic narrative. Which means that we are blessed with a different fashion of receiving the story. There’s no need for narrative twists or high jinks. Our participation is shaped by enjoyment rather than any kind of dramatic tension. Reminding us that theatre is, above all, spectacle. A point emphasised when Lepage indulges in a brief sequence of shadow play, which, he suggests, might have represented the very origins of theatre.

The play’s denouement, of a kind, is the recital of a poem, Speak White, by the Quebecois author,  Michèle Lalonde. All through the play there has been the running thread that Lepage has been having problems memorising this poem, which he is supposed to recite at a special TV gala. When it comes to the moment, his delivery is faultless and passionate. It’s another kind of spectacle. The poem is a fierce dissertation on the issue of language, and the way in which language is controlled by the powerful. However, it’s also a complex piece of writing. The logic of the poem isn’t easy to follow. In keeping with its content, it rubs up against our notions of ‘coherence’. As though to suggest that “the coherent whole” is a myth, an idea imposed by the powerful on the powerless. Lepage’s play adheres to this thinking. it doesn’t seek to fabricate a work of clarity and complete coherence. It has rough edges, loose strands, it lacks a guaranteed narrative motor. It uses magic rather than argument; it postulates that memory is fragmentary, elusive, incoherent. That these qualities can also be true of theatre. That the notion of the perfect play is ridiculous. That we should learn to watch theatre with the simple delight of children observing the world with eyes anew. His work makes you fall in love with theatre all over again. 

marat/ sade [d peter brook; w peter weiss, adrian mitchell)

This is a film of a stage play. The play takes place in a single room. It is not inherently cinematic. Watching it offers a partial, exacavatory experience of one of the most significant European theatre productions of the last century. Far from a satisfying experience, it is nevertheless compelling, and offers a fascinating insight into the career of Brook himself, the fate of British theatre, and the destiny of theatre per se. And if theatre be a mirror to the times, then it tells us a great deal about the way our society has evolved in the past fifty years.

Firstly, the play itself, is a minor masterpiece. Whilst it's well known that it deals with the French revolution, notably the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday, and it's also well known that the play is an enactment staged by the Marquis de Sade within the madhouse of Charenton, what is perhaps less well known is that it's set fifteen years or so after the events of the play have taken place, during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. As such, Weiss not only creates a play within a play, but the temporal shift allows him to play with varying perspectives on the violence that the revolution generated. In 1964, when Brook staged the play, the issue of the role of violence as a tool to transform society was still one that could at least be contemplated; not least in a world where colonialism was still an oppressive force. Whilst we know that the French revolution was the cause of bloodshed, war and suffering, it was also the mechanism by which, in theory at least, France began the process of transformation into its modern state.

Theatre directors might have their philosophical streak, but they are also, by inclination, showmen. Brook takes the implicit agendas of Weiss' play and creates a vivid, non-stop carnival of theatricality. The stage is littered with the bodies of madmen and women who at any given moment might choose to lay their claim to dramatic attention. The film perhaps does not do full justice to the latent anarchy, save for the explosive final scene, (reminiscent of the end of that other great radical sixties work, Zabriskie Point), when chaos is allowed to reign. Brook's showmanship, and the rigourous brilliance of his cast, honed as a group within the RSC over the course of various productions, offers Weiss' intellectualism all the flesh and blood it needs to confront the audience with the consequences of the issues the script addresses; the limits of libertarianism, the inevitability of governmental constraint, the madness that underpins utopia. Whilst Marat/ Sade is perhaps conceived as something of a hymn to European radicalism, it would be easy to present the counter case, that Weiss and Brook are arguing for the importance of societal control over our more anarchic instincts which lead towards violence. Violence will always have a part to play in the ordering of society, and the question then becomes one of how that violence is managed. A Foucaultian thesis which is strengthened by the fact that De Sade's reference to the savage execution of a prisoner in Royalist pre-revolution France sounds identical to the example used by Foucault at the opening of Discipline and Punish.

Whatever the politico-philosophical arguments, what's clear is that at this point in its history, as it backed its greatest director, the RSC was an organisation prepared to engage with a kind of daring, neo-intellectual theatre, one that sought to examine and comment on its times. In retrospect, it might be seen to be the high point of its existence as a cultural body. It's not entirely the RSC's fault that it has subsequently become something of a factory, producing work which is primarily there to keep the tourists happy as they pitch up at Stratford for their dose of Shakespeare. It's more a reflection of the way British society has evolved, a country trading on its past in order to earn a living in the future, an attitude that is inherently conservative. Within this context, the notion of theatre being a medium for examining the philosophical framework of the culture/ society still survives, but within carefully demarcated zones. The madness has been placed under control, allowed to parade itself from time to time, but on the whole a policy of stability is pursued, in a bid to minimise risk and ensure steady if unspectacular returns.

C.I.C.T. (d. peter brook)

I recently had a go at reading Moonlight, Pinter's last play. It had its moments, but I couldn't engage with it. There's something strange about the last work of those who might be genii. The ghost of what has gone before, allied to the constant desire to convey. I also wondered if art isn't, to some extent, age specific. Things that appeal in youth perhaps pall in middle age. If this logic is valid, then those works aimed at old age are the ones least likely to be understood, both because the elderly remain marginalised within our culture, but also because old age still seems so distant to this writer, even if it's not as distant as it once was. To phrase a truism.

Brook's new play, the first of his I've seen, deals with Colonialism and its attitudes, faith, and, to a certain extent, the meaning of life. Although many of the all male cast are youthful, at the heart is the notion of the legacy or inheritance a prophet leaves behind.

The stagecraft has the light touch one would expect from the master of the empty space. Yet, it's also obvious that imaginative gestures which were breathtaking thirty or forty years ago, have now become commonplace. The simplicity that Brook unearthed has become integrated into a mainstream, if not always at the level of the big budget theatres, certainly within any T.I.E. show, or international touring piece. The likes of Cheek by Jowl, Goold, Meckler to name but a few, have all taken on board Brook's ability to play with realism and space, creating an alternative theatrical universe, and what was once new is no longer.

The play itself explored both the notions of faith and French colonialism in early 20th century West Africa. The seeds of key conflicts of today are apparent within the text as it probes a localised, pre-emptive clash between mystical Islam and Western values. The audience at the Barbican seemed only barely engaged. All of us had come to pay homage; listening to the play's words was a secondary exercise. Some of the dialogues about the nature of faith and the meaning of life became abstract, and hard to follow. More than one punter dozed.

At the end, the actors left the stage. The lone musician, surrounded by his tools, let the music still. The audience sat in silence. No one knew if there was another trick up the director's sleeve, or if this silence was all that remained. The silence held. No one knew what to do. The uncertainty contained a kind of magic. It's the simplest of devices but all the same, after treading water for an hour and a half, suddenly we were in at the deep end, having to take responsibility.

The applause, when it arrived, was fulsome.

the seventh seal (dir bergman)

I called the Bergman aficionado from the Barbican. He said, a little sniffily, so you're going to see it for the ninetieth time. Not being a Bergman aficionado myself, I muttered that I remembered seeing it once on TV when I was 19, but even this was a distortion. I'd seen the opening frames, nothing more.

Max Von Sydow sitting on a Swedish beach playing chess with Mr De'ath himself. Horses up to their fetlocks in whippy Northern waters. An eerie, intellectual gloss permeating the scene.

During these first few frames, imposing though they are, I feared that The Seventh Seal was going to prove too austere, too like a Calvinesque cathedral. Beautiful yet far from heart-warming. Which is the preconceived model of a Bergman film, a filmmaker most know more through Woody Allen's failed attempts to become him than his work itself.

The screen was disappointingly small and the print far from great. I girded my loins and prepared to bathe worthily in the great auteur's gloom, as Max Von Sydow set off with his page to avoid the plague.

If the reader wants to retain the Bergmanesque myth, stop here. Because the film itself fails to honour it. Strange things start to happen. A couple, she beautiful, he a quirky fool, awake in a meadow, play with their child, clown around. A blacksmith loses his wife to a knavish actor, then wins her back in scenes of knockabout comedy. The tone of the film becomes warm, comic, charming.

In a way The Seventh Seal can be summarised as a Black Death Road Movie. Which might have a Tarantino/ Rodriguez ring to it. Bergman's sensibility seems populist. He creates characters who are lovable, and exposes them to danger. The audience roots for their survival. Death seems more of a vengeful sprite than a macabre ghoul. The heavy handed costume and make-up worn by Bengt Ekerot loses any taint of horror, as he plots and plans. This is a character from a medieval morality play, a villain and a rogue, whose gleeful sense of humour is revealed in the film's theatrical closing shot.

The wider philosophical and psychological context of the movie passed me by. No doubt there were things that I missed. Yet, like Beckett, another author whose work is categorised as much by its reputation as its actuality, it would be easy to lose sight of the manifest entertainer at work, were one to dwell too ornately on the significance of the imagery. The title, The Seventh Seal has a portentous ring to it, which the film does not shy away from, but Bergman has been careful to root his fatalism within a kernel of earthy joy. So when Von Sydow is asked by Death at the end whether his stay of execution has been worth while, we, the audience know exactly what he means when he replies that it certainly has.

+++

Note: Less than an hour after writing this I learn that Mr De'ath has caught up with Ingmar Bergman, who shall be playing chess no more.

fanny and alexander (dir bergman)

The Bergman fan summoned me from weekend indolence to come and watch this late epic with him, urging me to book before it sold out. I hadn't seen it in twenty years. The friend had once given me or my wife, he's not quite sure which, the full-length video of the extended version of the film, which was apparently shown on Swedish TV. It sat on a dusty shelf and was never watched.

Sitting down in a half-empty Barbican cinema, I was increasingly glad of that. You can watch a film on TV and the narrative will come across; but not the spectacle. Fanny & Alexander is a big film, in length and detail, and much of that would be lost on a TV screen. The opening sequence, set around an early twentieth century Christmas day in a slightly bohemian Swedish family, lasts for over an hour. It's like watching a tapestry take shape: a stitch here, a stitch there, and gradually the complete vision of Alexander's family comes to life, in all it's bawdy, colourful glory.

This detail is reflected in the film's sets. I don't know there's all that much to say about Fanny & Alexander. I told my friend that I tend to book tickets at the side of the cinema, not the middle, in case I feel the need to flee, and he, a lover of the centre, replied: But this is Bergman! He was right. There was no reason to flee at any point during the course of the film's three hours. Just an invitation to sit back and bask in the physchological portrayals, the occasional surrealisms, the deft pacing of an old master.

So the only revelatory thing I have to offer concerns these sets, the full beauty of which can only be guaged on a cinema screen. The home of the bohemian family, captured in such detail during the first hour, seemed fussy, lavish, Victorian, ornate. The screen is packed to the rafters with rich colours and velvety fabrics. This is contrasted with the home of the wicked stepfather, the hidebound bishop who torments Alexander so. The bishop's home is all austere off-whites, stripped bare walls, an antiseptic minimalism. The point of note is that, at the start of the 21st century, it is the cruel bishop's taste which reflects our notions of civilised living - clean Ikea lines, simple colour schemes. The unruly lifestyle of Alexander's father's family, which Bergman celebrates so vigorously, is allied to out-dated notions of domestic taste; it seems fusty and old-fashioned in comparison with the bishop's bleak modernity.

As noted, the best place to apreciate this is on the large screen. So I am glad I never sat down to watch the video, although, were it still there to be watched, I would now sieze the chance to find out what happens in the other three hours which were ruthlessly cut from the shortened narrative of the cinema release.

blasted (zerbombt) [dir thomas ostermeier for berlin schaubühne]

What happens to a writer whose work shocked the establishment and who subsequently committed suicide? Some British writers embroider their authenticity by claiming to be the keepers of her flame. Critics who expurgated this play when they first saw it attend European conferences to analyse her legacy.

Sarah Kane has become an icon. Of what exactly no-one’s quite sure. (More) doomed youth. The person is gradually superseded by a myth. The plays become part of the canon. She will never say anything sardonic ever again, but her words can come back to haunt you.

The actress playing Cate in this production for the Berlin Schaubuhne, directed by Thomas Ostermeier looks a lot like Sarah Kane. This cannot be entirely accidental, and seems initially off-putting. It suggests the play sees itself as the authentic version. The tone of the production is polished, with gravitas. We are offered a sumptuous feast of pickled baby and sautéed cock. The production values put the average subsidised British theatre show to shame. The ceiling really collapses. The stage revolve is employed not once, not twice but four or five times, as though we are watching some grotesque slow-motion carousel. A wheel of immovable cruelty. It’s the most brilliantly integrated use of a revolve I’ve ever seen.

Blasted is, in this production, a lost act from the Book of Revelations; the one where hell descends to our earth because we have brought it upon us with our moral inadequacies and putrid materialism. It’s a hair’s breath away, dirty bombs waiting in the wings, even if the play was originally inspired by the Balkan war.

Nothing has changed, the cruelty is immovable. It’s easy to see why the play possesses what might be described as ‘universal appeal’. As the production comes to the end of a stately two hours, the baby is bitten, the journalist buggered, his eyes Gloucestered. The play enters a death-world which has lost its power to shock (what were all those critics getting so upset about back in the naïve nineties?). We are watching the inevitability of our decline. Suicide will soon seem like the last remaining sensible option.

In its baroque way, the production works. The play’s steel-eyed brilliance shines through. The set and the revolve and white noise TV screen compliment it. Yet it feels to me as though something’s been sacrificed with all this stateliness. The wit in the lines, the black theatrical humour. There aren’t many laughs. It’s all in danger of becoming a bit too literal. Or reverential. Occasionally it felt as though it was the writer as icon whose work was being staged, rather than the writer who used to walk amongst us.