ophelia’s zimmer (d. katie mitchell)

I’m going to assume that you, the reader, are unlikely to see this show. It had a four day run in London and finished tonight. If you’re in Berlin I guess you might. The show’s in German. It was surtitled, although it didn’t really need to be. 

Zimmer means room in german. The whole play takes place in the hypothetical bedroom of Ophelia. It’s an unremarkable space: a bed, a chair, a cupboard, a side table. The re-imagining of a Shakespeare play from another character’s point of view is not radical. Stoppard did it famously with Hamlet. In Montevideo, Percovich recently did it with the same character as Mitchell chooses here. Ophelia is fertile territory for this kind of project. She’s one of most underwritten characters in literary history. Her tragic denouement is somewhat thrown away by the original author.

The play is split into five sequences, each one announced by a projected sign which denotes the five stages of drowning. Each of these scenes, or sequences, is composed of a myriad of tiny, fractured scene-lets. They are denoted by a sound cue, always the same, and a change of lights. This is the play’s punctuation. 

We are, assuredly, in the territory of deconstruction. Deconstruction of Hamlet, deconstruction of drowning. And deconstruction of the process of creating a work of theatre.

There is very little dialogue. Which is not to say there is none. There are three registers of dialogue. Firstly, a voiceover from a woman, perhaps Ophelia’s mother, perhaps just the voice in her head, instructing her how to behave. How to make herself small and fit in the cracks. Secondly, there is the voice of Hamlet, on tapes which he supplies, as letters, to Ophelia. Hamlet’s voice is playful, lewd, tender, manic, crazy. Ophelia fasts forwards and rewinds these tapes. (They are not the only Beckettian aspect of the play). At one point the tape has Hamlet’s voice say: To be or… Ophelia abruptly fast forwards. That moment got the biggest laugh of the night. The final register is the dialogue of Ophelia herself and four other characters who appear, including, explosively, Hamlet. Mostly she is spoken to by a maid. But the maid’s lines are as repetitive as her actions. She brings flowers, presumably sent by Hamlet. Ophelia and her exchange a few words about the flowers. She tells her she has to go and see a play, or that Hamlet is downstairs and wants to see her. The maid’s role is essentially that of messenger, a mechanism which helps the offstage action to be communicated.

This is a technical theatre where the lighting and the sound have just as much weight as the writing and the acting. It’s highly cinematic. In fact, the way the stage is set up, in part in order to permit the water to enter at the end, means that those in the stalls would have seen a different play to the one I saw in the circle. There’s a raised black section which cuts off the view from the stalls, suggesting the widescreen of cinema. Added to this is another mechanism taken from film. Three of the actors perform foley in a booth in the corner. They create the sound of the outside world. Feet on stairs, doors opening and shutting, keys in locks, feet running. The diagetic world is visibly deconstructed before our eyes.

Once again, this process of deconstruction. As a director of a play, you are aware of every moment, every beat. Moments which apparently have little importance are all part of the mechanics of the machine you are creating. Mitchell reveals this process to the audience. There is no seamlessness. It is all seams. (She has Ophelia doing crochet at times.) The play, like Ophelia’s descent towards suicide (the madness of suicide) is an accumulation of moments. Normally a director tries to hide this process. So that the audience lose themselves in the ‘story’. Mitchell does the opposite here. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s just as hypnotic as a conventionally-told narrative. Once you adjust to the sparse, staccato, rhythm of the piece, you become sucked into the story. A move from one side of the stage to the other has meaning. (Here again, the echo of Beckett, especially late Beckett.) The action is transparent and part of an elaborately constructed journey. A journey towards both madness and the end of the play.

Maybe for some, this becomes tedious. It might be seen as a purist’s theatre. Maybe in Germany it’s ten-a-penny, old hat. For me, it felt like a vision of the theatre freed from the tyranny of the word. I’ve never seen a show that did away as magisterially with the need for a playwright as this one (with all due respect to Alice Birch, credited in the program for “text” ) or, perhaps, which succeeded in showing how rich a non-writer-lead theatre could become. Which doesn’t mean to say that language is not important. Much of Birch’s ‘text’ has a poeticism which contrasts wittily or movingly with the austereness of the room and the staging. Whilst riffing off the untouchable original. A jazz score, if you like. But the point here, in this deconstructed theatre, is that the actions of the actors, the lighting designer, the composer, the set designer, have as much weight as the language. 

I enjoy the transitory nature of theatre. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. When Ophelia’s Zimmer finished, with a wrong-footing flair, (she doesn’t drown), I didn’t want to leave the theatre. I wanted to linger in the play’s strange, hypnotic space. This space which had deconstructed everything and then put it back together again. A kind of clinical madness. Or a clinical kind of madness. Which might be another way of describing the process of staging a play. 

So I cycled back across Hyde Park, Serpentine winking seductively, at me, at Ophelia, at Shakespeare’s ghost, and because I didn’t want to let the play go just yet, I put the bread on to cook and sat down to write these words. 

love & information (w. caryl churchill, d. james macdonald)

Someone said: this is a play for the twitter generation.
The strangest thing was that this was not an insult.
It is. It is not.
Short works.
Short sharp shocks.
Precision. So that. Each word. Has its own weight.
Mathematics. Love. Sex. Death. Colour. Memory.
A box of treats.
Or perhaps.
A load of off-cuts.
Trimmed and pared and turned into a pot au feu. Or a guiso. Or a box of treats.
Borges. Pinter. Bishop Berkeley. And all the ones you've missed.
Ignorance is not bliss.
Where is the story arc?
Where is the character journey?
Thankfully, jettisoned. Or never even contemplated.
Unnecessary.
The pleasure of the text.
A bricolage.
A proper mash-up.
All the world contained. And all the other worlds too.
In which the play is also occurring.
And has been since before it was written.
Gracias. Merci. Arigato. etc
All mean the same thing.
We should be.
For small mercies.
And this is such a one.

haunted child (w. joe penhall, d. jeremy herrin)

Somewhere in this production is a really fine play trying to get out. I saw it in the preview week, with the actors still clearly finding their feet. No doubt they will get there. The key issue regarding its success relates to how this carefully calibrated tale is directed: exactly what is the correct pitch for what is essentially a two-hander about marriage and mental illness, with the title something of a red herring.

The play’s premise, established in the opening scene, is that Douglas has walked out on his family and his wife. Julie and their son, Thomas, have no idea where he is or when he’s coming back. In contrast to the set design’s rigorous (and predictable) naturalism, the play retains an almost absurdist opaqueness. We’re never told exactly how long Douglas has been missing. When he does re-appear, the details of his time away are revealed gradually, piece by piece. Is the marginal world he claims to have joined real? Or is it just an invention of his troubled (haunted) mind?

Penhall’s most famous play, Blue/Orange dealt astutely with mental illness. As Haunted Child unfolds, the degree of Douglas’s un-hingedness becomes ever clearer. The writing handles this beautifully; the layers are peeled away over the course of a couple of days. Douglas hovers on the brink of normality, the normality of marriage and fatherhood. In a Europe where despair seems to be nagging at the heels of whole swathes of society, having a good job and a nice home is no longer sufficient to ward off the demons, and Penhall’s portrayal of Douglas feels frighteningly prescient.

It’s the exploration of this tension within Douglas, between the lure of a kind of asocial madness and the comforts of societal norms, which should elevate the play beyond being merely an enjoyable, entertaining piece of storytelling. However, at times it feels as though the direction is working against the play’s subtler instincts. Whilst there’s a great deal of humour in the text, it felt as though there was a tendency to overplay the laughs, thereby dissipating the play’s tension and undercutting its power. Like his son, the audience needs to be genuinely spooked by the transformation in this strange, sad man. He’s Banquo’s ghost writ large, the spectre in our never-ending festival of consumer delights, the man who would renounce the world and all its ersatz, earthly pleasures.

truth and reconciliation (w&d debbie tucker green)

The upstairs space in the Court has been transformed into a large theatre in the round. The chairs are wooden and plain. Several have signs on them advising they are delegated for family members. On stage are more chairs, lots of them, some laid out in neat rows, others scattered randomly. The show starts when a South African family walk on stage, a mother, her mother, and her two children. The mother refuses to sit down. The rest of the family tell her to, but she refuses. A Zimbabwean couple join them on stage. They are bickering. We don't really understand why. A Rwandan family appears. They too are arguing. Later, two men and two women from both Bosnia and Northern Ireland will appear. All these actors are participating in a process of truth and reconciliation.

Gradually the situations of the individual groups become clearer. But the process remains opaque. On occasions it's hard to tell who's done what to whom. Everything is messy and complicated. Every aspect of the process assumes a significance. Who sits where. Who talks to whom. Who looks at whom. These are not situations that require any ramping up of the dramatic stakes. The drama, conflict, call it will you will, is there, tangible in every instant of the play's brief 65 minutes. The writing doesn't try and capture the full horror of what has gone before in these countries, although it offers hints. It doesn't pretend to be all-encompassing. And is all the stronger for it. This is about the aftermath of conflict. The awkward, fiddly, painful process of trying to find the words with which to speak to the enemy.

Green's language is as precise as her staging. Sometimes the dialogue is machine-gun; sometimes hesitant. Every word has a weight. The characters try to resist becoming photofit images of victims. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. A Rwandan widow betrays herself through her breathing; the South African mother continues to refuse to sit down. At the end the ghosts come out to play.

This is neither a "well worked play" nor an experimental piece. It is simply hypnotic writing which offers the viewer an insight into how history works. Debbie Tucker Green captures the speech patterns of five nations; she also captures the speech patterns of grief, anger and obstinacy. At a time when plays which try to look at the "big picture" seem to be back in vogue, her precision makes every moment seem to count tenfold, packing more into an hour than most do in three. Kudos as well to the Court for letting her direct her own work: writing this good needs a director who understands the value of every word.

villa [guillermo calderon]

The upstairs theatre at the Royal Court was more or less full for the reading of the first of Calderon's double bill, the penultimate event in the theatre's Latin American season. Which means about a hundred people witnessed what is likely to be one of the finest piece's of playwriting to be seen in a London theatre this, or any other year.

Three women sit on the stage, scripts in hand, and vote. We don't know what they're voting for. We don't know who they are. We don't have a clue what this is all about. Gradually it becomes apparent that the play, Villa, takes its title from the debate conducted by the women about what kind of memorial should be created to mark the spot within Santiago where Pinochet's torturers conducted some of the most heinous crimes. Each one has her own idea, which she promotes. They vote again. Democracy seems flawed. They can't decide. A spoilt vote has as much value as an 'actual' vote.

On Saturday, at a seminar about Latin America, Calderon stated that for him, theatre had to be prepared to be a reminder of the bad things within society, something which in a supposedly booming post-dictatorship Chile is all the more important. The job of theatre, whether it likes it or not, is to be both the bearer of bad tidings as well as a medium that ensures the past is not forgotten.

Whilst this sounds like a grim remit, what Calderon's own words did not reveal, but his play does, is that the bringing of bad tidings is also an act of seduction. There's no point alienating people if you want them to engage. Villa, somehow, almost mysteriously, succeeds in infiltrating the full horror not only of what has gone before, but of our society's desperate attempts to find a flawed reconciliation with what has gone before, into a text which is funny, charming and has you on the edge of your seat. To such an extent that, in a play which examines the contradictions of using art to commemorate acts of political violence, the viewer doesn't know if they should not feel some latent guilt in the pleasure to be derived from the playwright's brilliance, as the text lays bare the full extent of the Pinochet regime's inhumanity.

This is a diversion, but it seems to me that the really great dramatists are those who understand the curious semiotic of the English word for a work of theatre. We call it a play. When you are lucky enough to come across a writer who really knows what they're doing, the play feels like an act of play, and the theatre feels like a place of play. This is not to say that serious issues are belittled. It means to say that the writer allows his or her audience to re-connect with their capacity to engage with the world on a level removed from the everyday, to re-form it. So that it can be seen anew. Calderon's work has elements of Beckett, Pinter and Pirandello. It re-opens old wounds but does so with a surgeon's precision and brilliance, so much so that it's only when the wound is gaping and the blood is flowing that we, the audience, realise quite what we've got ourselves into. Or what he, the playwright, has got us into.

Calderon himself directed the play and the impeccable work of his three actresses seems like a testament to the director's mastery of his own text. At the end of the play, in amongst all the other questions the play provokes, including whether I should really be typing this on a Mac, and to what extent is architecture fascist, or rather to what extent does modernity tip-toe in the shoes of our fascist past, or, to what extent are the tools we supposedly use to engage with society's ills actually tools which inure us against society's ills or - Well, let's be honest there's so many questions coming out of this play we, the audience are like kids in a sweet shop -

In amongst these questions two more banal ones crossed my mind. What kind of experience will Discurso, Villa's companion piece, which is staged tomorrow, offer? And secondly, why, given their support of this remarkable writer, has the Court not gone further and offered London a full production of the play, rather than just a reading?

our private life (w pedro miguel rozo, d lyndsey turner)

This afternoon the following quote from Cortazar arrived via twittersphere: "pero quién sabe si todo eso lo decía o solamente lo pensaba". Rozo's play deals, ostentatiously, with the division between thought and word, suggesting that in a more modern environment, people become more adept at concealing their thoughts, something which in older times, in more basic communities, were as exposed as the words that people used. This is an engaging, if not completely original idea. Part of the pleasure of watching this English language production was seeing the way British actors, schooled as they are now in naturalism, dealing with the writer's presentation of their characters' thoughts, which are, essentially asides. Asides are a key component of 16th, 17th, and 18th century theatre. The ascendancy of film has lead towards the domination of naturalism, which has no space for the aside. The spoken thought is now consigned to the margin in British theatre.

Not, however in Latin American theatre, or what little I may have seen of it. Rozo's play, in common with the work of Uruguayan authors such as Calderon, Sanguinetti and Morena, revels in the theatricality of the aside, as the actors establish a complicity with the audience. Some of the play's actors seem to have gained more of a grasp of of it than others. Adrian Schiller, in particular, as the devious but charming psychiatrist and Bolano lookalike, seemed to delight in unveiling his hypocrisy, his performance helping to set the tone once the play had got past a slightly stilted opening section.

The family, that cauldron of secrets and lies, is the perfect domain for this style of combative theatre. Rozo investigates the duplicity of a would-be middle class family with some verve. Again, there were moments when the play struggled to engage with the move beyond naturalism. This is a heightened, perhaps expressionist style of theatre (which pays its dues to the telenovelas Rozo also writes). It requires pace, verve and variation in order to be true to the writing's rhythms rather than the search for emotional truth. (Not for nothing is Berkoff one of the more popular British authors in Latin America.) At times the play really hit its stride, whilst at others it seemed to flag, although it's likely that the timing will improve as the play runs.

If Rozo's play doesn't have the theatricality of La Munequita or Ararat, it's still refreshing to see the production engage with a contrasting theatrical style, a reminder perhaps of the flair of London's Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre rhythms. The space between word and thought is so simple to explore in theatre and offers up vast psychological and dramatic potential, something that can counteract the predictable and marry tragedy with bitter humour. So often I left the best productions I saw in Latin America with the feeling that the theatre there contained something more visceral and adventurous than our more studied methods of creating plays. This may well be a romantic and absurd generalisation, but if it has any basis in fact then there are flashes of these differences to be denoted at the Court's upstairs space in its production of Rozo's acerbic play.

jerusalem (w butterworth, d. rickson)

A few general thoughts concerning this play.

Firstly, it's the third good piece of writing I've seen in London in the last month or so, following on from Apologia and Pornography. Which must be some kind of a record.

Secondly, have been musing since watching it on Monday whether it isn't a closetly intellectual piece of writing. This said because many of the main tenets of conventional dramatic storytelling aren't really adhered to. Byron doesn't go on much of a journey; he starts as a ribald Falstaffian figure and ends as a ribald, bloodied Falstaffian figure, albeit one moved to rage by his enemies. In a more conventional dramatic text (using the phrase in inverted commas), the interaction of the characters leads to some kind of learning, and whilst one or two of Byron's rats make half-hearted discoveries about themselves, they're still more interested in securing some whizz. In essence, the play functions as a manifesto for Byron's hedonistic Englishness. Rylance's performance is impressive, lending the old soak a demented gravitas, and his (and Butterworth's) vision of some kind of primordial Englishness emerges through a mixture of humour and grandiloquence.

Thirdly, the play, steeped in its Shakesperianism, reminds us of things that sometimes get forgotten. (In an era when scripts can almost be put together using spreadsheets.) Monsters make for great theatre (Byron also probably owes a debt to Tamburlaine). Theatre is about putting on a show, rather than education. Showmen put on the best shows, and a dash of lunacy doesn't go amiss either. In fact, in Jerusalem's genealogy, Marlowe plays as big a role as Shakespeare. The character who can unleash language, and play with it like a rapier or a rubik's cube, who can make language sit up and talk... That's a character people will always want to see, a writer people will always want to listen to.

I have only a vague idea of what Butterworth and Byron's Englishness truly represents - the manifesto wasn't altogether clear - but you kind of know you could listen to Byron spinning his tall tales all night.

The Pain and The Itch (w. Bruce Norris; d. Domininc Cooke)

Whose pain and whose itch? Questions which one suspects the writer and indeed director would like to be at least hovering around the theatre.

There's some very witty dialogue in Bruce Norris's piece. He writes with a sense of un-self-censored freedom, and the lines explode around the stage like little bundles of fun. The laughs are regular, and as the press suggests, infectious. The Pain and the Itch is also an artfully constructed piece, not a scatter-gun attack on modern mores. As the play comes to a conclusion the origins of Kayla's vaginal itch are neatly elaborated; the cause of the taxi driver's persistence succinctly resolved; a kind of family unity achieved. The play's structure is less comedy or farce than Murder Mystery. The taxi driver is a kind of 21st century Poirot, excavating the events of the night to uncover the hidden truth.

All of which is both extremely clever and also highly entertaining. Which might just be the play's Achilles Heel. The director, Dominic Cooke, who generates fine performances and conducts Norris's dialogue with suitable vigour, has been quoted as saying that he wants the Royal Court to move away from a voyeuristic kitchen sink approach and use the stage as a mirror to reflect and discomfort the audience. And one can see how The Pain and The Itch, an apparently scathing attack on liberal-western-upper-middle-mores might fit into this remit.

Yet, I felt, that the very neatness and confidence of the theatrical experience in some way helped to let the audience off the hook. Leaving aside the fact that it's not hard for a liberal British audience to laugh at and feel little connection with the fault-lines of the liberal US - in fact rather satisfying - it seemed as though the play's qualities in themselves may have been working against its intentions. The Pain and The Itch has all the attributes of the modern Western piece, it wears its cleverness on its sleeve, loose ends tied up, a highly efficient work of art. Whether that structure allows the pain that underlies this piece to see the light of day seems questionable. The pain which is not Kayla's itch, but the death of the taxi driver's wife, and by implication, the other needless deaths which US foreign policy has engendered in recent years. The only time this came through was when the taxi driver turned on his wife's de facto killer and said calmly - 'That is why you kill people', a moment when the man had to confront the fact that his whole way of life was tied up in the actions of the democracy he participated in, with the consequences that democracy has imposed on other people in other lands.

The Pain and The Itch is a great piece of writing. It's staged well. It's does a lot of things brilliantly. The question is whether it does all the things it sets itself up to do. If it doesn't, at least it's laying down some kind of road map showing the extent of what a play can do, and the directions it might have to go in if the Court is serious in its intentions to hold the mirror up to the life of its well-heeled audience.