fuenteovejuna (lope de vega)

Fuenteovejuna is a story about citizens who take a terrible, courageous risk. In the face of oppression, they chose to unite and fight back, killing the oppressor. In the seventeenth century, this kind of action rarely ended well. I don’t know enough about Spanish history but Shakespeare’s take on the Peasant’s Revolt in Henry VI, and rebellion in general, makes clear the price that anyone who went against the established rule had to be prepared to pay. (Of course it is not so very different today.) So, how should this affect the staging of the play? Clearly the element of risk is fundamental. Lope’s play incorporates what they call in modern screenwriting terms, ‘jeopardy’. How should jeopardy be introduced into the staging? There must be a million ways, this is the beauty of staging a classic text, but one thing that has to happen is that the contract of the play, which is between those staging it and those watching it, should not be too cosy. To get to the heart of the play’s intentions and communicate this with the public, in other words to honour the writer, involves being prepared to incomodar the audience - to make them uncomfortable. This isn’t a cute classic comedy, it’s a cry of defiance and courage.

Watching a recent staging made me think about what radical risk takers the Golden Age theatre practitioners were, in both Spain and Britain. The plays repeatedly engage with stories, characters and perspectives which questioned the established social and political order at a time when theatres could be arbitrarily shut, when playwrights died in duels, when the very action of participating in theatre implied positioning oneself on a crepuscular margin of society. With luck, you made money and retired to Warwickshire. Without luck, you died in a ditch.

The trouble with the staging of classics, something the RSC also struggles with in my experience, is that there is a desire to tell the audience: don’t worry, we know this is a challenging watch, but we’re going to hold your hand and make sure you don’t suffer too much. When what is essential to the process of the play is a sense of danger, or unease, of uncertainty. Will the villagers be hanged for their valour? Will the forces of law and order bulldoze them in a pit? How scared are they? How scared are we for them? Without this tension, the play becomes an exercise in speaking verse, no more than an archeological process. How to achieve these ends is the great challenge the director faces. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb: better to fail valiantly than to anaesthetise the play’s radical premise.

Juan Rojo: So what do you think the town should do?

Alderman: The town should die, or kill these tyrants. We are many, they are few. 

the hills of california (w. butterworth, d. mendes)

My brother said, do you want to go to the theatre, and I said why not. When in London, sometimes it feels like there’s no time to go to theatre: it takes up a whole evening and there are people to see and places to haunt. But as a night out with el hermano, it seemed ideal. And what better than that doyen of British theatre, Jez Butterworth’s latest.

I read nothing about the play beforehand. My expectations, as ever, were not high. The set had a polished, conservative feel. A meticulously rendered front room of a rundown Blackpool hotel. Emblematic, perhaps, but doggedly naturalistic. It declared: “You have arrived in a British theatre, do not expect to witness anything radical.” The audience didn’t look as though they had any desire to witness anything radical, so they were not going to be disappointed. We were up in the gods. I had actually checked out these tickets on-line earlier, and they cost around £70. My bother, as is his wont, had an app, so we got them for £15. The theatre was full. The show is a success.

What unfolded over the course of the next three hours was indeed an exemplary rendition of British theatre. The play is beautifully written, directed and acted. It has humour and pathos, The Andrews Sisters and the Rolling Stones. It is seemingly written for Butterworth’s wife, Laura Donnelly, who gives a grandstanding performance in a female-lead play. There’s a sniff of Chekhov, a faint hint of Pinter in the set-up, a dollop of Osbourne and a whole backlog of British (and Irish) playwriting. It’s one of those things that people in the arts, both here and abroad, will note that we ‘do well’. There’s next to no politics, nothing formally challenging, not even all that much emotion. But it all works like a cuckoo clock. 

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Nb - To be present in the Harold Pinter theatre, formerly known as the Comedy Theatre, is an event in itself. The Victorians had money and they had a grand, claustrophobic vision for how to spend it. The theatre is as intimate a cave, a cave with ledges and crannies and a religious focus on the event of the stage. The social complexity of the Victorian world is still functioning here, with the gods and the stalls, the balcony and the boxes. Even if your seat is half way to Piccadilly Circus, you will still get enough of an immersive view to feel like you are part of this great theatre machine, which is part of this splendiferous empire, a place of plush velvet and ornate ceilings. Just to be there is to belong to the victors. The quality of the show is entirely incidental. 

judgement day (ödön von horváth, tr christoher hampton)

Horváth play comes from a recognisable Mitteleuropean tradition. Dürrenmatt, Kafka, and many more. It’s a tale of a small town whose society becomes corrupted. Hampton’s useful introduction notes how Horváth, having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, then returned with the aim, according to Hampton, of documenting through theatre the effects of fascism on society. Judgement Day takes place in a rural town where a succession of minor disturbances in the fabric of the community leads to a fatal industrial accident, when a train crashes, killing seventeen people. In this sense the play feels highly prophetic. So often in an industrial society the small tears in the fabric can lead to tragedy. (In the UK alone, Grenfell, King’s Cross, Hillsborough etcetera). These accident don’t come from nowhere, they have their roots in how society is structured, and the opening scene, where the accident happens, makes it clear that the stationmaster, Hudetz, who will become the anti-hero of the story, has been over-burdened due to cuts or “rationalising, they’re going to keep going until there aren’t any trains left at all.”

The playwright then uses this tragedy as a way of examining the mores of the small town, the fickle way in which the residents change their allegiances, depending on how the news is reported, another feature of the play that feels all too contemporary (twas ever thus). However, the play takes a sudden turn when it gets to the last of its seven scenes. Here, Horváth veers off towards more metaphysical territory. At this point the narrative embraces what might now be called horror. The use of stage elements, sound, lighting, is employed to the full and this final scene is devastating both in its judgement of the society and its theatrical originality. 

the conquest of spain (mary pix)

 In a conversation about classic British theatre texts, C upbraided me for not being more disposed to include female writers in the conversation. Which seemed upon reflection, a completely reasonable complaint. Aside from Aphra Behn, there are no female writers in the British theatre cannon pre twentieth century (and precious few post.) And to mention Aphra Behn is something of a false lead, as we were never given Aphra Behn to study. All of which lead to some more investigation and the discovery that there have been far more female writers of theatre than we are given to realise. Amongst whom, the name Mary Pix and the title, The Conquest of Spain, stood out.

The Conquest of Spain, first performed in 1705, is a tragedy in five acts, which contrasts the fate of two female characters, Jacincta and Margaretta, both victims of duplicitous male behaviour. Jacincta, daughter of the noble warrior, Julianus, is raped by the King whilst his forces are waging a war against the invading Moors, his army lead by Julianus. Margaretta’s betrothed, Antonio, is part of that army,  but Antonio’s right hand man, Alvarez, has designs on her. Much of this feels, in story terms, quite conventional. There are plenty of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays where the female characters own the stage just as much as the male characters. Pix gives her characters agency, but they are passive characters and the play doesn’t feel as though it is breaking any feminist ground.

What is most curious about the play, relates to another element in the culture wars of today, which we can see spiralling out of the bedrock of history. The enemy the Spanish forces are confronting is the Moors, who they initially defeat. But because of the king’s moral decadence, Antonio and Jacincta’s former lover ally themselves with the defeated army to turn on the king. The Moorish leader, Mullymumen, joins them and together they prevail against the king’s forces. When Antonio asks him to return to North Africa, Mullymumen refuses, announcing the conquest of Spain. Jacincta and Julianus both die, but Margaretta and Antonio are permitted to flee and live out their lives. (“Fly you beauteous mourners”).

There is another moment when Jacincta appears disguised, wearing the veil. These cross-cultural allusions and representations feel surprising to the modern reader, accustomed to an inherited idea regarding racial and religious stereotypes from this era. Not only is Pix representing the Muslim Moors on stage, she is also portraying them as having greater moral integrity than a European king; and there is nothing in the denouement to suggest that Mullymumen will not make a far better ruler than the man he has vanquished. Our inherited understanding of how people saw the world pre twentieth century seems suspiciously limited, when one starts to scratch the surface. 

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. 

chacabuco (d roberto suárez)

Suárez is the maverick genio of the Rio Platense stage. Roberto Arlt meets David Lynch. HIs characters are oddballs, wackos, weirdos, but bizarrely loveable. They’re loveable because they all belong to the same family. Literally, in so far as all the characters in Chacabuco are related, metaphorically, in so far as they are all off the spectrum somewhere, and theatrically, in that Suárez takes several years to develop, rehearse and produce his shows, meaning his band of actors become as tight and incestuous as a family unit. Sometimes this kind of process might not pay off, but in Chacabuco it does so, spectacularly. The players interact like a finely honed machine, aware of every look, every nuance of their companions' behaviour. It’s a play where it’s just as compelling observing those who aren’t speaking as those who are. The word is shared around between the company, something to be usurped or exchanged or held on to sometimes, as a character makes a bid for the attention they believe they, as a character in this unlikely tale, deserve. However, above and beyond the word, the feature which defines Chacabuco is the quality of the silences. A silence speaks as much if not more than words. Silence is that moment of strange uncertainty on stage, as though the characters and the audience are given pause to think: where are we going? Are we on the right course or are we completely fucked? The spectators, like the characters, are never really sure. In fact we’re not even sure if we’re living in the present or some other, parallel Borgesian time. There are about fifteen endings to Chacabuco, which is normally not a good sign. But when you’ve worked on a play for several centuries, you can get away with it. The wonder is that each ending is an advance or improvement on the last one, until we finally get to the last delirious end, which blows the mind and then comes back to stroke the mind with a send-off full of strange tenderness.  

tijuana (d. gabino rodríguez, lagartijas tiradas al sol)

A man with a moustache is already on stage as the play opens. He has his back to us. There is a large TV screen on set and a small neat pile of bricks. Behind is a large painted canvas with a representation of Tijuana. The man proceeds to explain that he is an actor who decided to go to Tijuana and work in a maquillardora (a sweatshop factory) near the border for six months as an investigative project. He tells us that he filmed secretly and badly and also recorded audio. This is the story of his time in Tijuana. 

What follows over the course of the next hour or so is his account of his stay, punctuated by a recorded interview of the same actor somewhere else, (DF), giving an interview about his experiences. We, the audience, know that we are part of a theatrical game: the account being given is partial and not particularly trustworthy. In the end the actor says that he had to cut his time short, because he was scared of being found out. In the neighbourhood where he is staying, a poor neighbourhood, he has heard a story of a lynching. There are codes in the barrio, and he doesn’t want to fall awry of them. 

As such, dramatically, not a lot happens. Nevertheless, the piece remains compelling. This is in part because of the dramatic suspense inherent in the set-up, but also because the story offers a window on a world from which few stories have emerged. Pace Humbolt, in an age where the geographical world has been charted, then the uncharted waters are the urban no-go areas where the majority of the world’s population now lives. What is it really like to live in a barrio where the police won’t enter on the California border? The actor makes clear in the play, repeatedly, that he doesn’t want to romanticise poverty. He wants to communicate what it’s like to live there on a subsistence wage, making the goods which the Western world consumes, at the hard end of the neo-liberal machine. 

Inevitably, the portrait is partial. As the actor observes, he knows it’s not for life. But there are moments in the play, - the sad disco, the classical music loving political activist, family meals, the social codes - that register on the audience’s consciousness above and beyond the confines of the theatre. For a while, we walk in the actor’s footsteps, through the alleyways of Tijuana. 

ps - There is a more detailed and scholarly debate to be had (which was touched upon in the post-show discussion) about “documentary theatre” as well as the wave of quasi-biographical theatre (“auto-ficcion”) which is sweeping Latin America (Sergio Blanco, Lola Arias etc.). The ethics and the effectiveness of this re-imagining of theatre. However, that debate, discussion could perhaps wait for another moment.

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. 

trust (w. falk richter, tr. maja zade, d. jude christian)

There’s a lot that might be said about the Gate’s production of Trust, a German play with a strong directorial input provided by Jude Christian, an English director, who also acts in the play. You could talk about the success or otherwise of its critique of modern society, which might be astute, or might be a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it. Or you could comment on the play’s influences, a dash of Crimp, a soupçon of Fosse, a flavouring of Ostermeier. You could start to talk about the way in which the staging explores notions of presentation; with the elongated stage itself turned into an evolving installation. Just as Richter’s text explores the way in which narrative ‘presents’ or ‘represents’ its themes, characters, story. Then there’s the whole issue of the fourth wall, the way the writing and the direction plays with it, sometimes putting it up, sometimes taking it down. There’s a whole Hare-ian debate possible about the relationship between the text and the staging.  Even if the text would appear to be willing the director into an appropriation of its words, something Christian has no hesitation in doing, throwing in a whole section on Brexit which can’t have been there in the original German production.

You could talk about all these things, when you talk about Trust, but more than anything i think it’s worth pointing out what a barmily enjoyable show it is. In a world where notions of pleasure, in the theatre and elsewhere, are up for grabs, Trust offers a new way to please old masters. The Barthesian delight in never knowing what’s going to come next: whether the play, with its tenuous narrative, is going to evolve or atrophy, and if it does so, (either), what form will this take and how do we get to the end? Trust reminds us that theatre is an experience which employs a text, rather than being contingent on a text; that theatre has so much more to offer than words (without in any way negating the value of words). 

One suspects that in Germany this kind of production would have none of the novelty that it possesses on a British stage. Which just goes to show the theatrical pleasures we’re missing out on, and emphasises how welcome Trust is, a play that encourages its audience to think about love, society, the importance of dramaturgy, whilst re-calibrating notions of theatrical enjoyment.

feos (w guillermo calderon, d aline kuppenheim)

Feos (which means “the uglies” in English) is a featherweight theatre piece which nevertheless punches hard. It recounts the story of two hideously disfigured people who meet at the cinema, go for a coffee, then go back to his and make love. The majority of the 50 minute play is taken up by the conversation in the cafe. The action cuts in and  out of their conversation as they gradually get to know one another. It’s a love story, but a love story between two people who believe themselves fundamentally unloveable. They feel this way because of their disfigurement. Part of the skill of the piece is that this disfigurement has a metaphysical edge, as everyone feels themselves to be unloveable, in their own secret fashion. The beauty of love is that it succeeds in overcoming this innate, common instinct, no matter what you look like. Calderon again reveals his exactitude as a dramatist, burrowing away at this scene in order to extract every nuance, every tragic-comic detail. Calderon writes like a dog with a bone it’s in love with: he won’t leave a scene until every last scrap of meat is off that bone. It’s an intense but affecting style, whose potency gets its pay-off in the last scene, when the lovers go back to his flat and decide that, in spite of the fact they are so unloveable, they will commit to love each other. 

There is a twist to the show. Which is that these two “people”, are actually puppets, manipulated by no less than five puppeteers (who received a great reception when they came out to take a bow). The effect of this is that it acts as a distancing device, which allows us as an audience to disengage sufficiently from the action to not feel as though we are being voyeuristic as we observe the intimacy of these two damaged characters. It also means we don’t gawp; this isn’t a freak show. In some way, knowing that these characters aren’t actually human, allows us to engage more with their feelings. We don’t need to feel pity for them, because we know they’re not “real”. Rather we engage with our own experiences of meeting someone who helps to make our own stay upon this sometimes painful earth make sense.

We saw the play on the night that Guillermo Calderon’s play opened at the Royal Court in London. He’s a writer who always takes the high road, never the low. Which sometimes makes him challenging, but the work is all the richer for that. His writing makes you acutely aware of the possibilities of theatre, in a way which few contemporary playwrights are capable of. Feos is a bold, beautiful piece which celebrates the importance of seeing, being seen, and also not being seen, the darkness. It’s also a piece whose many words reinforce, when they reach a quietus, the value of silence and the way in which these opposites nurture each other. 

aquellos dos (compañía luna lunera)

Four men come on stage and start to warm up. They stop and talk to the audience. The house lights stay on. Has the play started? Has it not? Will it ever? What's it about? The men move about the stage. There's a fluidity to everything. A story starts to emerge. Two men work in a Kafkaesque office. One day they start to talk about films over coffee. They will become friends. They might become lovers. They might not. They are sacked. They are released. 

This is an exercise in loose-limbed storytelling, even though the story is little more than a Macguffin for the company’s stagecraft. The stage is cut to ribbons by the four bodies, then it's reconstructed and cut to ribbons again. Life is captured in all its repetitive glory. Days become weeks become months become a story. We remember what it's like to work somewhere, how long it takes to make a friendship, how complex a friendship can be. The show, adapted from a novel by Caio Fernando Abreu, is part narrative, part dance. It restructures reality in its own image and makes us wonder how we would tell the story of our lives. Not the show of the highlights, but the show of the mundane in-between bits. How all those ephemeral moments might be captured, documented, celebrated. All the moments we have lived and already forgotten. 

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. 

richard 3 (d. ostermeier)

A few thoughts, no mas. There’s been a lot written about this show and deservedly so. I read a comment the other day by someone reading it who, whilst praising the show, stated that it helped to show that British theatre is fucked. This isn’t the place and I’m not the person to comment on the British theatre debate. The point is that every now and again a show comes along, usually from the continent, (more often than not Germany), which shows up the limitations of the artistic parameters mainstream British theatre (MST(?)) chooses to operate under. Ostermeier’s R3, perhaps like Brecht’s visiting shows, or more recently, Nubling’s Three Kingdoms, would appear to be that show for early 2017.  

Richard 3, for all it’s fame, is a difficult play to stage. It’s a paradoxical play. The protagonist is dazzling and charismatic and the rest of the play is stodgy, save for the odd moment of needless violence. The more one watches it the more it seems like the template for the far more sophisticated later tragedy, Macbeth. Richard dominates the play in a way that’s unhealthy. The play will live or die on the lead actor’s performance.

It doesn’t take a theatrical genius to realise this. Ostermeier gives Lars Eidinger’s Richard free rein to make the stage his own. With its sandy surface, it’s more like his playground. He’s given a hanging microphone as a prop, which doubles as a kind of swing. At one point, Eidinger goes flying out over the audience. This is what director and star do brilliantly. The fourth wall is not a wall. (A phrase that could probably be trademarked in this day and age.) The audience is another prop for Richard to employ. Not only does he swing over their heads, he climbs in to the auditorium, he ad-libs, he treats the audience like his followers. 

There’s nothing new in breaking the fourth wall. Richard is also given clowns’ shoes, making a none-too-subtle point. Clowning, an art that might pre-date theatre, is all about exploring and bridging the gap between the audience and the stage. According to Shapiro, Shakespeare got rid of Kemp, the company’s best clown, because he was mucking around with the text too much, playing with the audience at the expense of the play. This sort of behaviour is also known as irreverent, and this, it seems to me, is the tonal note which audiences have enjoyed so much, and which British theatre so rarely succeeds in achieving. It’s an immensely enjoyable theatrical experience, from an audience point of view, to feel oneself included in a great work, rather than excluded.  To visit the Barbican to soak up culture and discover that this process can be funny and inclusive.

Because, aside from all this, there’s nothing particularly radical about Ostermeier’s staging. The set, sandpit aside, is prosaic. There’s a drummer in public view, off-stage, but whilst this is a nice touch, it’s not ground-breaking. The scenes which lack Richard actually begin to plod, something that’s almost inevitable in this doughy play. (Although the curse of Lady Margaret is nicely subverted). This isn’t a radical staging. What it is a radical re-connect, reconnecting Shakespeare to its pantomimic roots, and doing so without fear of shame or ridicule. When Richard paints his face for the denouement, it reminded me of two things. Brando in Apocalypse Now; and comedia del arte. Rather than soaring into the future, Ostermeier takes Richard back towards his origins, which also happen to be the origins of performance on the European stage. And audiences love it. 

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(Also worth noting the following observation from Chris Goode in reaction to one critical reaction to the play, suggesting Ostermeier undercooks the play’s political content: “The politics is in the form, chaps, not the content.” In the theatre, content can only ever be political up to a point. It is the form in which that content is presented, the way in which it questions the relationship between audience and stage, which defines the play’s political intentions. An idea which some of the more lauded political playwrights of the contemporary British stage sometimes seem reluctant to engage with.)

the taming of the shrew (d. caroline byrne)

a trip to the globe

There’s inevitably something of the heritage experience about visiting the Globe, just as there is when you visit Sutton Hoo or Stonehenge. It’s on the tourist circuit. Lots of people probably go not because they want to see the play, but because they want to experience the theatre. And a wonderful thing it is to experience too. Within its Wooden O, you get a sense of the role the theatre played in Elizabethan society. A space to be seen and a space to see. A space which is both profoundly democratic and hierarchical at the same time. A space possessing an energy within a small town that must have been incalculable. (No matter how similar the Globe is to its forefather, the society and the city have changed beyond compare.) It’s an exciting experience to step into the Globe, cherish its intimacy, cherish the power that the theatre possesses. A power which the black box has done so much to nullify. 

The day we went, we were lucky enough to experience not just Caroline Byrne’s version of Taming of the Shrew, but also a brief piece by Jess Thom, a performer with Tourette’s, and a Q&A with the audience. Thom’s piece was short, sharp and incisive, describing a visit to another London theatre to see a Mark Thomas show about segregation in Palestine, where she had ended up being asked to move to the sound booth because of her disability. The inclusiveness of the Globe as a theatre was made all the more evident by Thom’s brief performance. It’s a space which allows for all manner of performance. all kinds of performers and as diverse an audience as you could wish for. A space which works for a circus or a one-woman show (a soliloquy or a masque). The power of the space was underlined by the Q&A with Thom and members of the Shrew cast. One member of the audience threw out a contentious remark about Byrne’s version of the Shrew being overloaded with theatrical devices, at the expense of Shakespeare’s verse. For a second you could sense the bear pit beneath the stage. It didn’t quite all kick off, but the cast’s response suggested the potential for tension that a space so intimate is capable of generating.

The audience member’s observation helps to pinpoint the difficulties of staging Shakespeare in the Globe. The new artistic director has been chosen because she’s a believer in making Shakespeare accessible. The more classically minded audience might feel this is a populist approach which fails to reveal the true glory of the text. Byrne’s direction of the Shrew is a rumbunctious, entertaining affair. The cast in the Q&A mentioned that they spent the first week of rehearsals exploring the physicality of the play. There are set piece moments, including the wedding, where the choreography supersedes the letter. From this audience member’s POV, this is all to the good. A play which has a reputation for being almost impossible to stage due to its un-PC approach to marriage somehow succeeds in this production in suggesting a neo-feminist subtext. This is in part down to a steely performance from Aoife Duffin, but also down the imaginative and successful feminisation of the casting. Although the Easter Rising 1916 setting in many ways passed me by, it clearly worked as device to lend unity to the Irish cast’s vision of a play which they regard as subversive rather than reactionary. I’m the last person to argue for populism over intellectual content, but not only does it feel to me as though the ethos of the space demands an inclusive vision, I’d also far rather see Shakespeare performed in a fashion that provokes through a willingness to use the imagination rather than a belief in the sacrosanct nature of the bard’s language. 

woyzeck (w. büchner, d. leander haußmann)

A visit to the Berliner Ensemble

It’s a warm Sunday evening. The square in front of the theatre is adorned by a statue of Bertolt Brecht. He looks almost too content with his legacy, an intriguing issue in a unified Berlin. The theatre itself is a baroque jewel, which always has half a dozen works of the maestro in rep. 

It's hard to assess a show critically when you know the culture it emerges from on little more than a superficial level. I guess that is part of the reason critics garner respect. By paying their dues. The Berliner Ensemble had a reputation for innovation which has since, perhaps, been overtaken by the Schaubuhne or the Volksbuhne. I have little idea what to expect. We are there to watch Woyzeck, which one imagines has become a kind of ur-text in Germany (and beyond). A tabula rasa upon which a director can weave his or her magic. 

Leander Haußmann’s version is immediately, resolutely modern. The most arresting facet of the show is its squadron of soldiers. Woyzeck is one of a band of about 25 brothers, whose erratic discipline, sometimes marching in step, sometimes acting as mocking chorus, sometimes jiving, gives the staging texture and depth. Marie is a spirited, flighty fun-loving figure who jitterbugs whilst Woyzeck is being tortured in a sadistic military hazing ritual. 

The military uniform suggests the soldiers are from the US, something which is reinforced by the use of American music. At any moment a dance might break out, a dance which transforms into a battle. The fairground scene uses the revolve to create a beguiling ad hoc merry-go-round, as the soldiers “ride” helium-filled animal balloons. It’s a beautiful, virtuoso scene, one matched by the appearance of a real-life ape-man who struggles with a chair and then drinks a beer; ‘poor theatre’ with a philosophical punch. The play never uses any constructed scenery as such: the stage remains bare, defined by a vigorous use of lighting and the number of bodies which populate it. At one point a dozen pop-up tents appear; on another occasion an apparent verdant mound turns out to be made out of camouflaged soldiers.

There is no shortage of violence, something the play ironises when Woyzeck kills the sergeant major a dozen times to the music of Mozart's Figaro. The production veers in an increasingly expressionist direction as it nears the denoument. The political references introduced in the opening hour begin to feel slightly contrived as the play appears to fail to develop them in any meaningful fashion. I say “appears to” because the production is, naturlich, in German, a language which I don’t speak. I have no way of knowing if the text was was being adapted or not. I had the impression that it hadn’t been tinkered with much, but this opinion is purely speculative. 

All in all, it could be said that Leander Haußmann’s production delivered what I might have expected. Self-consciously radical, an imagistic theatre, one which uses music and seeks to create a liberation from the word, one that uses violence with a Jacobean glee as a theatrical code, rather than naturalism. It is also a theatre whose use of staging elements: lighting; scenery; music; costume is resolutely anti-naturalistic, something which comes as a relief. There’s a theatrical dexterity which the British stage seems to struggle to emulate; a wilfully radical approach that might sometimes feel contrived but on the other hand ensured that this 2 hour version in a foreign language never felt dull or over-extended. 

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. 

the tempest (d. declan donnellan)

Donnellan & Ormerod’s Tempest is an assured, convincing piece of stagecraft. Using a simple three door stage and occasional projections, they recount Shakespeare’s last play with fluency. There’s many details to savour. The five male Ariels (only 5?) torment the shipwrecked visitors with watering cans. Rather than carrying logs, Ferdinand carries an Ariel. When Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio are accused by Ariel, the projection turns the stage into a Soviet show trial. And the marriage ceremony becomes a paean to kitsch Soviet art, as sickle-wielding farmers line-dance across the stage.

However, in a sense the final two images hint at this production’s Achilles Heel. Cheek by Jowl is working with their sister Russian theatre company. Hence the director and designer’s decision to include various signifiers in their staging which announce a Russian influence, as above. We also get Stefano and Trinculo as materialist oligarchs, hellbent on shopping to oblivion. But the overall impact of these allusions is bitty. It’s unclear what exactly Donnellan is seeking to say about Russian society, or why he is matching this “Russianness” onto The Tempest. (One wonders what Pelevin would have to say.) Is there a deeper theme? Or is it just skilful appropriation of local imagery which goes hand-in-glove with working with a Russian company?

This question felt all the more curious watching the show in Latin America. The role of The Tempest in Latin American culture is well-documented. You’ll meet plenty of people called Ariel here (including the man who watches the cars on our street for pennies). There’s no reason for Donnellan’s staging to refer to this, (it only happens to be on tour here), but what’s apparent watching the play is the extent to which the writer was aware of and infiltrating his text with the geo-political developments of his day. On one level The Tempest can be seen a magical fairytale. But on another it’s a play which is addressing concrete, tangible issues. Donnellan’s use of ‘Russian’ imagery suggests an awareness of the way that the play maps onto a more discursive reading, but ultimately, to this observer at least, that interpretation failed to come through with any clarity.

Instead, the primacy of the magical fairy tale wins through. With regard to this, the director’s handling is deft. The advantages of having worked with Shakespeare’s texts all your working life, and the confidence this gives, is evident. Donnellan teases his audience like a sixth spritely Ariel, interrupting the action, setting up the denoument, in control at every moment. It makes for an enjoyable evening and a notable demonstration of the theatrical benefits of a director and their designer (Nick Ormerod) working as a unit, as they have done for thirty years.

+++

Nb

This is the third Cheek by Jowl Shakespeare I’ve seen (also one Webster). The first, Othello, was I believe, their first ever production, which toured to my school and I watched in the “drama barn” as a teenager. Ten years later, mas o menos, I saw Measure for Measure in the Sala Anglo, and went out for drinks with the cast in the Lobizon afterwards. It’s also worth noting that that Cheek By Jowl have had a unlikely but profound impact on my life, not for artistic reasons, but because a friend of mine once worked for them in their Kennington office. Where, one day, a fax arrived asking if the company knew of any young directors who might be interested in coming to work for a year in a place called Montevideo.

marx in soho (w. howard zinn, d. juan tocchi)

Zinn's text is a curio. He wasn't primarily a playwright. He was a political historian. As such, what the audience watches when they see his play is the work of someone whose ambition is less to create drama than to convey to his audience a didactic understanding of a historical subject. In this case, Karl Marx. The result is a play which is part biography, part philosophical/ historical treatise and part, because the premise of the play is that Marx is far from dead, commentary on our contemporary existence.

It's perhaps this last aspect which is the most powerful. When the bearded Troncoso talks to the Verdi's audience of how, in spite of capitalism's gizmos, there are still people sleeping on the streets, the inference is crystal clear. Society might be a changing, but too many things remain the same. And, according to the writer's interpretation of Marx, shall continue to do so, so long as we inhabit a capitalist universe. There's so much Zizek in Zinn's Marx that it's almost as though he was conceived by this play, originally written in 1999. For a Londoner abroad, the text also offered a convincing description of that city in its mid nineteenth century guise, when notions of third world and first had yet to be developed.

The play is also an intriguing examination of the dramatic medium. Zinn's Marx tells us that his wife, Jenny, criticised him for not writing in a language the workers could necessarily understand. This past week I've discovered the cinema of the Bolivian filmmaker Sanjines. Who might describe himself as a Marxist, something which Marx in Soho has the philosopher reject as a concept. Sanjines' film, The Courage of The People employs a pared down narrative style, which some might accuse of being overly simplistic. However, he adopted this structure in order to ensure that the people about whom he was making cinema, (the miners and indigenous people of the Bolivian altiplano), felt included as spectators. Interestingly, his 1989 film, La Nacion Clandestina, made largely in Aymarac, employs a narrative structure which is so rooted in the Aymarac philosophy that it overlaps with the outer reaches of innovative modern narrative theory (time becomes non-linear; the past and the present co-exist). The screenplay might have been written by Nolan. At the same time the film still has a highly 'accessible' feel, as it takes the viewer into indigenous Bolivian culture in a way no other film I've seen even begins to.

Zinn's mission was to de-Marxify Marx, to shed him of the historical baggage which Marxism has appended to his work and his name. Whether Marx in Soho entirely succeeds in doing this depends to a large extent on how the play transcends its own origins in order to engage with the audience which Jenny championed, for example. With this in mind, it's a play which seems to come up against the buffers which insulate Western culture. Within the division between high and low culture which helps to consolidate the (capitalist) status quo, Marx in Soho quite clearly pertains to the high end of the spectrum. Quite how the dramatic artist/ writer breaks out of this straightjacket is hard to say, but perhaps the work of Sanjines offers some clues.

velada metafísica de fernando gonzález (d. cristóbal peláez)

The Sala Verdi brings a season of Latin America theatre to Montevideo. First up is Teatro Matacandelas, from Medellin in Colombia. Theirs is a defiantly Brechtian theatre with a Victorian Gothic twinge. I can’t follow all of it. The story deals with a presumably fictional philosopher, Fernando Gonzalez. He stands for mayor and is rejected. He lives on the finca that will later belong to Pablo Escobar. He has a curious affair with a Frenchwoman when he spends time in Marseilles as a counsel.

Above and beyond the quixotic narrative, there’s a makeshift theatre practice at work. In much the same way as last night’s Henry 4/5 in the Solis, a chorus appears at the start urging the audience to use their imagination to convert the empty space into the valleys of Antioquia or a Mediterranean port. Harsh lights isolate spaces on the stage for the performers to inhabit. The acting has a heightened, declaratory hue. The philosopher barks out his thoughts, as do many of those he meets along the way. Scenes shift rapidly. Music starts to punctuate proceedings. About an hour in, things become more and more gothic. A version of the devil appears, bathed in red light, emanating a powdery glow. Later the whole of the Catholic church takes over. The theatre is bathed in incense and smoke. There’s so much smoke that the alarm goes off. But the philosopher’s oratory style drowns it out. There’s a deliberate sense of ramshackle chaos on stage. Jesus makes an appearance and you’ve got no idea what’s going to happen next. 

Teatro Matacandelas create a rough theatre out of nothing which appears to be influenced by Brecht, would be admired by Brook and yet also emanates out of the rhythms and customs of Medellin. It’s vibrant, non-naturalistic and full of the unexpected, even if to the non-native speaker there are moments which are plain baffling. The final words of Fernando González are read out by the whole cast in a hyped up final scene, books being ripped to pieces, like something out of a lost work by Blaise Cendras. 

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.