Intimacy. It’s an oft-used word. It’s an oft mis-used word. People talk about intimate gigs and intimate theatres. But in those contexts what they essentially mean is small.
I feel that genuine intimacy is something more complicated. Yes, it is about closeness. But closeness both in its literal sense and in a messier one; it’s about desire, honesty and reciprocity. There were undoubtedly two shows at Edinburgh this year that had these qualities in spades and, in the midst of the festival’s increasingly unbearable whirligig of hype and tat and superficial spectacle, utterly stopped me in my tracks.
Rotozaza’s Etiquette is sweetly mesmerising little show, perfectly combining high-concept happening-inspired participation with a charmingly simple story borrowed from Jean Luc Godard. Two people sit opposite each other at a café table scattered with props. Through instructions relayed to them via headphones they begin to talk to each other; a conversation, a story and a discrete private universe follow.
Whether it would pass Chris’ cat-test is debatable and technology-wise the show is dictated almost entirely by a pre-recorded score. And yet in the stumbling intimacy of the words that you and your partner speak, the show is remade every time, entirely singular, unpredictable, meaningful and resolutely intimate. Its joy lies in the fragile relationship conjured between two friends. Gazing into the eyes of your partner you are at once staring at a friend and a character; locations shimmer in and out of being. And buried somewhere in lines you feed each other, and the actions you carry out, there is a wonderful, liberating honesty.
The same could absolutely be said of Melanie Wilson’s Simple Girl, a similarly fragile and self-consciously fictional little show, full of gentle sadness and fading romance. Dressed in a long black coat and looking like something that had slipped unnoticed out of a cold war spy thriller, Mel told a series of increasingly meandering stories into an old radio microphone, gazing longingly out at the audience in front of her. Her conversations with the them in between these stories had exactly the kind of stumbling intimacy of Etiquette, drawing us into her melancholy little world.
Together these shows (along with Chris’ own Hippo World Guest Book) absolutely made my festival. All three had a subtle, unspectacular beauty to them. They may not have been important, they may not have happened in big rooms and (indeed) none of them were particularly financially successful (or at least that’s what I’ve heard from the people who made them). And yet, lost as they have been in the Edinburgh scrum, they nonetheless sparkled with humour, warmth and ideas. And though none could be called explicitly political, to me they all seemed to throb with a sadness; a loss of hope in people’s ability to communicate with each other and to love each other. But rather than just saying this, they all seemed in their own ways to be doing something really meaningful about it.
And with that it’s back down to London. Although, after a year and a half I still feel like I’m searching for a purchase on where things actual happen down here. Beyond the usual suspects (National, Young Vic, BAC etc) I’m somewhat lost. Unsurprisingly then the two shows that really stood out for me were both at major theatres.
Again, it won’t surprise people to know that one of them was Attempts on Her Life. Before we even get to Katie Mitchell, it’s absolutely worth saying that Martin Crimp’s text is an example of the best, most tantalising, most theatrical writing for theatre that you can imagine; a spectral, poetic, complex bundle of character-less lines of dialogue, longing to be realised in some specific, local way.
It’s little wonder then Crimp and Mitchell seem to enjoy each other so much. This year they have had numerous collaborations at the National and the Young Vic (on a translation of a short Brecht play) and next year they are off to the court for Crimp’s new play The City. Unperturbed by the catcalls of critics demanding she honour a text by rendering it tepid and utterly bland, untainted by direction, Mitchell resolutely re-interprets a text for her, unencumbered by any claim to universality or definiteness (certainly you could never accuse her of creating the definitive version of anything).
Though far from perfect, Attempts was brave, it was ambitious, it was thoughtful, it was thrilling. More than any other show I have seen it demonstrated the potential for video technology in theatre. Not as some kind of dynamic backdrop but as a way of conjuring two competing worlds. Losing oneself in the fractured unreality of both, it became impossible to say which was a simulacrum of the other. The swirling figures in red dresses seemed hopeless, lost ghosts in a world so permeated and dictated by cinema, television and digital spectacle that it had written itself out of existence.
If the Edinburgh shows underlined the importance of an intimate, personal, local engagement, of people coming together in a room and looking at each and talking to each other (telling stories together), then Attempts undoubtedly spoke of the hopeless alternative.
Undoubtedly these three or four shows stood out for me. They were the first that sprung into mind when I began thinking about this list. The last took a little longer. I’d almost completely forgotten it, and yet, in its own way it was every bit as wonderful as the previous shows.
It’s not entirely my fault, Debbie Tucker Green’s Generations at Young Vic was only 40 minutes long. It was a seemingly simple piece of writing, presented fairly realistically in the round; a bustling extended family cooking in an African kitchen while a chorus of singers stood with the audience crammed around the edges. And yet, as I think I said at the time, I have rarely seen a show that resonated with so much loss.
As a simple six or seven minute kitchen was repeated each time with a new member of the family missing, until the same once-crowded joyful scene was played out with only two mourning grandparents left, lines took on new sadness, spoke of new absences. It was a simple, hauntingly effective technique beautifully executed; you could feel the silences in the air. And again it was a show that in its intricate form, without mention of wars or famines or AIDS epidemics, said something profoundly political. Debbie Tucker Green, like Crimp, is undoubtedly a writer for theatre, with breathtaking love for and understanding of her medium.
And that’s it really. I also enjoyed Australian company Back to Back’s Small Metal Objects, Katie Mitchell’s Women of Troy and puppeteers Blind Summit’s loving homage to Charles Bukowski, Low Life. I wish I’d seen Uninvited Guest’s It is Like it Ought to be, Chris Goode’s Speed Death of the Radiant Child and Third Angel's Presumption but try as I might I was utterly useless at doing so.
Music-wise Jens Lekman, Andrew Bird and the National all released beautiful melancholy albums, full of lovely turns of phrase, sweet, simple melodies and some gorgeously lush arrangements. LCD Soundsystem were once again effortlessly catchy and clever, and Of Montreal, Animal Collective and Battles created amazing albums; bouncy, dense, infectious and utterly awesome.
And undoubtedly my favourite film of the year was David Fincher’s Zodiac; a grand, rambling saga following a series of gruesome murders in San Francisco. Masquerading as a simple detective thriller it slowly teased itself into a psychological study of obsession, it’s unstructured, sprawling style mimicking the futile attempts to ensnare the killer.
And in the New Year I’m mainly looking forward to the chance to actually stop boring people endlessly with the shows that I’m going to do and actually get up and do them. Hopefully we have a couple of things lined up in various corners of the South Coast and maybe one in London as well. We’ll see. It’s all very exciting and undoubtedly you lovely people will be the first to know when anything’s confirmed.
Happy Christmas.
Showing posts with label Katie Mitchell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Katie Mitchell. Show all posts
Dec 13, 2007
Nov 29, 2007
Let Sleeping Playwrights Lie.
How much do we owe to dead playwrights?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
We cannot seek to revive them. We cannot divine their intentions, their thoughts, their hopes and dreams. We cannot know if they wrote their plays to communicate a very definite and personal message, or whether it was knocked together in a fit of desperation to pay the bills.
By all means honour them but do not revere them. And do not, under any circumstances, try to do them justice. In attempting to do them justice you do the very opposite.
Shakespeare was an innovator, a wild card, an 'upstart crow', a populist who honoured his audience by challenging them. If we pickle his plays in some spurious half-preserved form, like a decaying limb festering in formaldehyde, we do nothing but desecrate the excitement, the danger and the unpredictability that they once represented.
'What matter who's speaking?' Someone once famously said. Ironic then that that person's estate should be the worst perpetrators when it comes to the necrophiliac pursuit of some ghostly, bastardized figure of the author haunting every ensuing production. Did Beckett become the writer he became by obeying convention? How would he feel about the innovators, the exciting young artists, being denied access to his work under the spurious grounds of maintaining some museum authenticity. These hangers on, these preservers, these authenticators - they come to bury Beckett, not to praise him.
Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
So said Walter Benjamin. Any play by a dead writer does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It is a ruin, an image of the past existing in the present. You can preserve it as a ruin but that is what it will remain - useless, anachronistic, tired, empty. Or you can accept it as belong to a new time, as being remade - 'seized up at a moment of danger'.
That is what Katie Mitchell is doing. Seizing a dead text at at a moment of crisis. Remaking it for the present. This is the only way that dead texts can be anything other than museum pieces.
Michael Billington may wish theatre to be a dead art, pickling old ghosts for the gentile pleasure of the comfortable and the safe. But anyone who cares about theatre, or indeed the world, should applaud Mitchell's attempts to make it completely relevant and completely vital.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
We cannot seek to revive them. We cannot divine their intentions, their thoughts, their hopes and dreams. We cannot know if they wrote their plays to communicate a very definite and personal message, or whether it was knocked together in a fit of desperation to pay the bills.
By all means honour them but do not revere them. And do not, under any circumstances, try to do them justice. In attempting to do them justice you do the very opposite.
Shakespeare was an innovator, a wild card, an 'upstart crow', a populist who honoured his audience by challenging them. If we pickle his plays in some spurious half-preserved form, like a decaying limb festering in formaldehyde, we do nothing but desecrate the excitement, the danger and the unpredictability that they once represented.
'What matter who's speaking?' Someone once famously said. Ironic then that that person's estate should be the worst perpetrators when it comes to the necrophiliac pursuit of some ghostly, bastardized figure of the author haunting every ensuing production. Did Beckett become the writer he became by obeying convention? How would he feel about the innovators, the exciting young artists, being denied access to his work under the spurious grounds of maintaining some museum authenticity. These hangers on, these preservers, these authenticators - they come to bury Beckett, not to praise him.
Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
So said Walter Benjamin. Any play by a dead writer does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It is a ruin, an image of the past existing in the present. You can preserve it as a ruin but that is what it will remain - useless, anachronistic, tired, empty. Or you can accept it as belong to a new time, as being remade - 'seized up at a moment of danger'.
That is what Katie Mitchell is doing. Seizing a dead text at at a moment of crisis. Remaking it for the present. This is the only way that dead texts can be anything other than museum pieces.
Michael Billington may wish theatre to be a dead art, pickling old ghosts for the gentile pleasure of the comfortable and the safe. But anyone who cares about theatre, or indeed the world, should applaud Mitchell's attempts to make it completely relevant and completely vital.
Nov 28, 2007
Women of Troy at the National
The Canadian author Douglas Coupland used to be obsessed with the idea of Armageddon arriving while you were in the supermarket, this most mundane and modern of rituals abruptly interrupted by nuclear apocalypse; finding ourselves eviscerated in the tinned foods aisle, while shelves of baked beans and Kraft Dinner melted around us. This was the image that came to mind as I reached the end of Katie Mitchell’s dark, jarring, magnificent production of Women of Troy; these hauntingly mundane rituals stripped of all importance in a world where life is always more fragile and meaningless than we appreciate.
Euripides' play is, unsurprisingly, about the women of Troy, led by the royal family of Hecuba, her daughter Cassandra and her son’s wife Andromache, in the fallout from their defeat in the Trojan wars. In this production they find themselves in an anonymous coastal warehouse, their glamorous evening dresses hanging awkwardly from their hunched, anxious frames. There’s something decidedly feral about them; about the way they scatter across the stage at a noise from outside, about the way they hold the seam of their dresses in their mouth to climb the steel ladders on either side of the stage. Their Greek captors are seen fleetingly, rushing in and out in an uncomfortably repetitive frenzy of locking and unlocking doors; a beautiful and well-maintained conceit that begins to wear the audience down with sense captivity as much as it does the pack of startled, scared women huddled on the cavernous Lyttleton stage.
Trapped in this uncomfortable prison, awaiting their removal to whichever of the Greek leaders has won their slavery, the women in Mitchell’s production survive on a messy orgy of half destroyed rituals. Fire rituals, mourning rituals and burial rituals rub up against more familiar rituals; the women are constantly ferreting in their glittering purses for make-up or a cigarette, their shaking hands going through the motions of reassuringly familiar actions.
And then there is the dancing - a strange, mesmerising quick step; sometimes at full speed sometimes in slow motion, sometimes with partners, sometimes alone. Often the characters who have already left, even their Greek captors, rush back onstage to take part in the dance; at one beautiful, absurd moment, Helen, naked but for a pair of heels, dances across the stage in the arms of Menelaus, the husband she left to begin the conflict and who has just assured us of the inevitability of her execution.
In this dance, which takes the position of some kind of bizarre mourning ritual carried out every time a woman is torn from the throng and forced off stage, all these absurd, meaningless rituals come together. Ancient Greece melts into Mitchell’s modern setting, religious mourning bleeds into the glamour and decadence of secular society; it’s a disorderly, beautiful, haunting, meaningless ritual, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This production must surely put paid to Brecht’s ideas about the reassuringly cathartic quality of Greek drama. Euripides’ play is undoubtedly that of an outsider, bristling with fury at the oppressive brutality nestling at the heart of Grecian history and society. The play slips under the skin of the Homer’s mythic history and tears it apart from the inside out. Status, religion, war and history are rendered meaningless in an apocalyptic vision of suffering.
Mitchell’s play flits awkwardly between messy realism, song, dance, and choral proclamation; jarring the audience from any sense of continuity. It’s alienating in a very Brechtian sense, Hecuba’s assertions about the emptiness of God and Power flying from the stage like soap box aphorisms, spat out into the audience. Indeed, Hecuba is just cruel and aloof enough to render any hope of comfortable sympathy null and void.
This is not about the suffering of these women, it is undoubtedly about the meaningless suffering of anyone in the face of god, history, power, and empire. In this sense it is resonantly political; not in a patronisingly limited way that might have the women running around in orange jumpsuits, but in a way that opens up the whole of human history to criticism. And in the final few bombastically apocalyptical moments, as the sirens and the helicopters whirr behind the black safety curtain, you cannot but realise the desolate pointlessness of the endless war and suffering on which our comfortable lives are built. And hidden in there somewhere is the additional nagging feeling that someday it will be our turn to suffer.
Euripides' play is, unsurprisingly, about the women of Troy, led by the royal family of Hecuba, her daughter Cassandra and her son’s wife Andromache, in the fallout from their defeat in the Trojan wars. In this production they find themselves in an anonymous coastal warehouse, their glamorous evening dresses hanging awkwardly from their hunched, anxious frames. There’s something decidedly feral about them; about the way they scatter across the stage at a noise from outside, about the way they hold the seam of their dresses in their mouth to climb the steel ladders on either side of the stage. Their Greek captors are seen fleetingly, rushing in and out in an uncomfortably repetitive frenzy of locking and unlocking doors; a beautiful and well-maintained conceit that begins to wear the audience down with sense captivity as much as it does the pack of startled, scared women huddled on the cavernous Lyttleton stage.
Trapped in this uncomfortable prison, awaiting their removal to whichever of the Greek leaders has won their slavery, the women in Mitchell’s production survive on a messy orgy of half destroyed rituals. Fire rituals, mourning rituals and burial rituals rub up against more familiar rituals; the women are constantly ferreting in their glittering purses for make-up or a cigarette, their shaking hands going through the motions of reassuringly familiar actions.
And then there is the dancing - a strange, mesmerising quick step; sometimes at full speed sometimes in slow motion, sometimes with partners, sometimes alone. Often the characters who have already left, even their Greek captors, rush back onstage to take part in the dance; at one beautiful, absurd moment, Helen, naked but for a pair of heels, dances across the stage in the arms of Menelaus, the husband she left to begin the conflict and who has just assured us of the inevitability of her execution.
In this dance, which takes the position of some kind of bizarre mourning ritual carried out every time a woman is torn from the throng and forced off stage, all these absurd, meaningless rituals come together. Ancient Greece melts into Mitchell’s modern setting, religious mourning bleeds into the glamour and decadence of secular society; it’s a disorderly, beautiful, haunting, meaningless ritual, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This production must surely put paid to Brecht’s ideas about the reassuringly cathartic quality of Greek drama. Euripides’ play is undoubtedly that of an outsider, bristling with fury at the oppressive brutality nestling at the heart of Grecian history and society. The play slips under the skin of the Homer’s mythic history and tears it apart from the inside out. Status, religion, war and history are rendered meaningless in an apocalyptic vision of suffering.
Mitchell’s play flits awkwardly between messy realism, song, dance, and choral proclamation; jarring the audience from any sense of continuity. It’s alienating in a very Brechtian sense, Hecuba’s assertions about the emptiness of God and Power flying from the stage like soap box aphorisms, spat out into the audience. Indeed, Hecuba is just cruel and aloof enough to render any hope of comfortable sympathy null and void.
This is not about the suffering of these women, it is undoubtedly about the meaningless suffering of anyone in the face of god, history, power, and empire. In this sense it is resonantly political; not in a patronisingly limited way that might have the women running around in orange jumpsuits, but in a way that opens up the whole of human history to criticism. And in the final few bombastically apocalyptical moments, as the sirens and the helicopters whirr behind the black safety curtain, you cannot but realise the desolate pointlessness of the endless war and suffering on which our comfortable lives are built. And hidden in there somewhere is the additional nagging feeling that someday it will be our turn to suffer.
Nov 9, 2007
King of the Court
Dominic Cooke's latest programme at the Royal Court is receiving a healthy dose of press attention at the moment, and justifiably so, as I think its about the most dynamic and exciting programme that the place has had in years and, regardless of how you might feel about the limited scope of the typewriter totalitarianism of traditional playwriting, one of the most mouth-wateringly ambitious programmes I've seen since I've been in London.
The most interesting thing about the programme is watching Cooke gracefully balancing the fulfillment of the expectations of the Court's traditional audience with elements that subtly challenge or even undermine those expectations. Or, put more simply, after throwing the State of the Nation brigade a juicy slab of David Hare, he has the them eating out of his hand.
And so with the old school pacified those with a more adventurous bent get a new Katie Mitchell/Martin Crimp collaboration and a new (and as-yet entirely un-started) piece by Anthony Neilson. Add to that an intruiging french-canadian play translated by Caryl Churchill and new work by Mike Bartlett and the astounding Debbie Tucker Green (whose Generations was about the best defence of the power and depth and subtlty of the short play (or indeed the playscript itself) you are likely to see) and what you have is a programme that is unashamedly pawing at the limits of traditional playwriting; experimenting with form, location and structure in myriad of fascinating ways.
And no element of the programme represents this better than the Rough Cuts season, a forum for theatrical experimentation that I feel, far from being a new feather in the Court's
much admired hat, harks back to those misty eyed golden years of the 50s and 60s in terms of the scope that it gives young artists to play not just with ways of writing theatre, but ways of making it. After all, as I have said before, when Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker and the like were hanging around the place like a bad smell in the post-Look Back in Anger days, they weren't sitting in conference rooms learning how to create characters or write pithy well-structured dialogues, they were up on their feet, playing with masks, reading Brecht, exploring theatre as a medium rather than merely as a platform for their own literary virtuosity.
And in that sense this programme is truly in the spirit of those much cooed-over years, throwing off the albatross that has hung around the theatre's neck for so long and genuinely living up to what Cooke calls 'tradition of innovation and experimentation which is at the heart of the Royal Court’s mission.'
The most interesting thing about the programme is watching Cooke gracefully balancing the fulfillment of the expectations of the Court's traditional audience with elements that subtly challenge or even undermine those expectations. Or, put more simply, after throwing the State of the Nation brigade a juicy slab of David Hare, he has the them eating out of his hand.
And so with the old school pacified those with a more adventurous bent get a new Katie Mitchell/Martin Crimp collaboration and a new (and as-yet entirely un-started) piece by Anthony Neilson. Add to that an intruiging french-canadian play translated by Caryl Churchill and new work by Mike Bartlett and the astounding Debbie Tucker Green (whose Generations was about the best defence of the power and depth and subtlty of the short play (or indeed the playscript itself) you are likely to see) and what you have is a programme that is unashamedly pawing at the limits of traditional playwriting; experimenting with form, location and structure in myriad of fascinating ways.
And no element of the programme represents this better than the Rough Cuts season, a forum for theatrical experimentation that I feel, far from being a new feather in the Court's
much admired hat, harks back to those misty eyed golden years of the 50s and 60s in terms of the scope that it gives young artists to play not just with ways of writing theatre, but ways of making it. After all, as I have said before, when Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker and the like were hanging around the place like a bad smell in the post-Look Back in Anger days, they weren't sitting in conference rooms learning how to create characters or write pithy well-structured dialogues, they were up on their feet, playing with masks, reading Brecht, exploring theatre as a medium rather than merely as a platform for their own literary virtuosity.
And in that sense this programme is truly in the spirit of those much cooed-over years, throwing off the albatross that has hung around the theatre's neck for so long and genuinely living up to what Cooke calls 'tradition of innovation and experimentation which is at the heart of the Royal Court’s mission.'
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