Louis Armstrong is a Big Fat Liar.

"We have all the time in the world" Louis Armstrong once famously sung on the soundtrack to the much-maligned post-Connery Bondathon On Her Majesty's Secret Service (So, George Lazenby isn't a good Bond, but you try following Sean Connery - you'll feel like Barry Island after a weekend at Disney World.) Armstrong was obviously a big fat liar. There is no time and so much to comment on.

First off there's Jay Rayner's scandalously rubbish article in the Observer this weekend. I mean what is it about Food Critics and knowing absolutely nothing about theatre, or indeed Britain.

We can argue long and hard about the political hue of New Labour's economics, but only those on the very fringes of the debate could deny that the establishment is now both liberal and left of centre. Even the Tories have been drawn towards the consensus, with an increasingly touchy-feely social policy which makes the old Conservative grandees look like bigots (which is what too many of them were). Yet where is the theatre that challenges that liberal consensus, which makes those of us who consider ourselves a part of it think a little? Where is the theatre of the right?

He opines, marvelling at his own contrariness - look at me, he seems to say, an outsider looking in at theatre and seeing what none of them can see.

It brought to mind, for me, Stephen Colbert's staggering brilliant (and almost Shakespearean in its tragedy - Lear's Fool, jigging and joking hopelessly while the lords carry on regardless) performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, in which he intoned "We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

That seems to be about the extent of Rayner's piercing inquiry into the state of theatre in this country. Bravely seeking an imbalance in reportage where none exists. Enslaved to the redundant notion of a binary politics that he understood when he was fresh out of University in the 80s. Everyone in theatre has certain liberal standards (namely tolerance, a dislike of racism/sexism/our Labour government lying to us), so this must be a conspiracy? People are no longer illiberal (bigoted, intolerant...) and this is a bad thing? While he's about it, drunk on his anachronistic, oppositional, red/blue notions of politics, how about he takes on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another product of this famed false liberal consensus. Where are those voices raised against that piece of boring, predictable consensus thought? You don't need an opposite to make people think. Often, as Crossfire in the US has undoubtedly proved, this is the very worst way of asking people to think.

And what is the one fig leaf he keeps raising to conceal the modesty of his flaccid argument? Where is the play saying that Multiculturalism is a bad thing? I'm sorry, what - you want a play that isn't racist, yet criticises the embrassing (or indeed, just the tolerance) of a myriad of cultural groups within British society? How would this work - sure, you could critic the way that multiculturalism possibly breeds a culture of oppositional, close-knit communities, that can frequently become hostile towards one another, but how is this an argument of the right? What else can he want - Enoch Powell: The Musical ("They're stealing our work/the Pole and the Turk/and the rivers of blood run deeper every day...")?

And as too many people to mention have already pointed out - there's a 'right wing politics' (individualist, conservative... even capitalist?) latent in the form of so many of the musicals that litter our stages that simply because there aren't angry young things demanding tighter controls on abortion and the sanctity of marriage from the stages of our studio theatres, that doesn't mean that theatre is shameless a red-wash going on under our snooty, liberal (spat out - like Fox news does) noses.

Anyway. I'm not the only one that feels like a whinge, Chris Goode has churned out this fascinating interrogation of Michael Billington's latest attempt to prove the old Nazi adage about a lie repeated often enough.

theatre, at the moment, is in an extraordinarily fluid state. But there has to be some way of combining the kind of interactive experience that young audiences crave with the emotional resonance of a writer's vision: otherwise, all you get is sensory titillation.

This is, it must be noted, is the third time that Billington has repeated this very same adage in print about the last month, all with particular reference to Punchdrunk (who Chris eruditely points out, he enjoys using as a stick to beat a particular mode of theatre of which they are entirely unrepresentative). Here he is in his review ofPunchdrunk's The Masque of the Red Death:

I still see this kind of magical mystery tour as an alternative to, rather than a substitute for, conventional drama.

And here he is, popping up a week later in an article about his own book:

It's like being invited to a mad party but, while I found it fascinating, it strikes me as a pleasurable diversion from the main business of theatre, which is to grapple with social reality and change our perspective of the world.

Now, I've taken a couple of swipes at his dismissal of any theatre that isn't overtly political as lacking content, but Chris gets really stuck in to some far bigger and more difficult questions raised by Billington and Cooke's conversation. It's pointless quoting - you'll just have to go and read the whole thing through.

I've mentioned in the past the ways in which Site-Specific is a term simplified by the press for their own not-necessarily malicious (but not necessarily-not-malicious) ends.

The prefix site-specific allows people to maintain the notion that the resurgence of a myriad of theatrical forms that break with the conventions of the (predominantly Victorian) auditorium is merely another new-fangled and eminently bracketable subdivision of straight theatre. A gimmick that will no doubt pass, allowing them to get on with the important task of complaining about the arrangement of the deck chairs on the titanic.

But as Chris points out, what this mis-labelling also does, is obscure both artists and audiences from what would be constituted by a piece that was genuinely site-specific. A piece that was a specific product of the site (or environment) in which it was created; the conjuring of a theatrical ghost out of the landscape the artists have chosen to engage with.

Stripped of this imperative, we are instead presented with groups such as Punchdrunk being constantly heralded as the torch holders for site-specific theatre when their decidely un-specific work takes pre-existing classic texts or stories and constructs a world for them that bears little or no relation to environment chosen to house them. Indeed the company go out of their way to obscure anything real that shatters their immersive world. I reiterate, this is no bad thing. It just isn't site-specific. And while they are heralded, criticised and imitated in equal measure (while those fathers of site specific theatre like Mike Pearson struggle to get their staggeringly brilliant work published by any academic publisher) for a crime (or a genre) they didn't commit, no wonder the 'revolutionary potential' of the genre has rarely been fulfilled. As Chris states:

So no wonder Cooke can welcome -- and has welcomed -- with open-arms the notion of site-specificity; in the state in which it comes to him, there's absolutely no reason why site-specific work should disturb the status quo as regards the sacrosanct power of the single author.

Or, I would add, (coming back to my earlier post on site-specificity) the power of the Theatre Industry to churn out centralised, mass-marketable, long-running theatrical spectaculars that stagnate theatre within buildings and forms that are becoming increasingly out-dated.

But when haven't the superficial signifiers of 'upstream' work been appropriated for conservative, consumable mainstream forms? From Dada and Surrealism we are left with a bric-a-brac of fashionable outsider paraphenalia (old poscards, broken dolls, lace, vintage patterned fabric...) that adorns the covers of major-label indie albums and popular Hollywood films and seemed wearily nostalgic and meaningless to people like Allan Kaprow in the 60s. And yet the whole of the hip, trend-setting areas of East London are still in thrawl to this kind of dated, dirty-bourgeois aesthetic. While this detritus floated downstream, those people upstream (like Kaprow) started rebuilding and restructuring - Site-specific Art was born out of Minimalism. And Happenings were born out of site-specific Art and site-specific theatre... I think you can see where I'm going with this.

At present then we may feel like we are clutching at those hopeful fragments like site-specific theatre that are floating eagerly into the awaiting arms of Billington and Cooke, but possibly we're just between moments, desperately seeking an impetus (or a funding body) that will re-animate the upstream elements in theatre and render those forms that the mainstream is busy playing with (or, more accurately, playing with the box it came in), if not an irrelevance, then, at least, not as important as it still feels at the moment.

I also just want to flag up Chris' response to another oft-repeated untruth closely related to Billington's sensory titillation - that which states that 'devised theatre' is always flabby and self indulgent:

I agree that a lot of "devised" work is unsatisfactory, but actually it's most often unsatisfactory for exactly the same reasons that a piece of conventional literary theatre made with the same lack of analytical rigour would be unsatisfactory. There is a real problem with devising becoming a set of orthodoxies, as it now is; it's badly and vaguely taught, and groups who aren't aware of the different aesthetic and ideological parameters of devising as a practice will inevitably end up replicating the synthetic vanilla ghastliness of third-rate literary performance. It's not devising that's at fault there, it's badness.

Amen.

Oh! The Horror...

‘le Grand-Guignol devient le théâtre de Montmartre. Il représente un quartier, ses habitants, son esprit’ (Guy Sabatier)

The Union Theatre has created a line-up of terror plays to coincide this most peculiarly ghoulish time of the year (because as if a night derived from a peculiar pagan ceremony where small children stalk the dark streets of our cities threatening innocent passers-by, we have a celebration of burning catholics to look forward to...), the foremost amongst them written by the terrifyingly prolific Mark Ravenhill, who clearly doesn't have enough to do writing the Guardian, collecting other people's awards, and being had for breakfast.

The Theatre have called this 'a festival of Horror and Grand Guignol' which is all well and good except that, as I have said before about Grand Guignol, I think they're rather missing the true spirit of it all; or at least, what I see as the very best things about it. See, the terror in Grand Guignol was not merely about the plays - there's a reason that the name of the theatre itself came to represent the whole genre.

As most people know, Pigalle is not a nice part of Paris. In the theatre's golden years between the wars, the audience exiting the Pigalle Metro would stumble out into the dark narrow streets, passing smokey, tempting doorways, salacious posters advertising the seedy, erotic cabaret of the Moulin Rouge and its like. Prostitutes and the other sinister hangers-on of the city's thriving sex-industry loitered on the dirty cobbles. In short, as Richard Hand and Michael Wilson argue, the streets around the theatre throbbed with the exact cocktail of the erotic and the dangerous that made a night at the Grand Guignol so alluring.

The theatre itself was situated at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac (a point of no return); squat and dark and threatening, it was a deconsecrated convent - again that peculiarly French combination of sex, religion and death. The audience, already tingling, would be ushered in to the auditorium, Paris' smallest, which was still filled with the remnants of its previous religious incarnation. Audiences in the boxes were trapped behind iron bars and in the ceiling of the convent, two giant angels stared down at the horrors before them. As if not atmospheric enough, the theatre's most famous master Max Maurey had a doctor on standby, rushing back and forth through the crowded grotty stalls, ensuring that the audience were medically prepared for the chilling experience awaiting them.

This was the true theatre of the Grand Guignol. A rich, disturbing combination of its seedy location, its perverted religious architecture and the brilliant theatrical flair of the theatre's director. The audience was titillated and terrified before it got anywhere near the plays, which were of course, written specifically for this unique venue (or site-specific, as we might have it today). A night out at the Grand Guignol was dark and tempting voyage into the unknown, a libidinous journey through the wrong district of Paris; full of sex and death, where even an old convent had become a temple to the cheap and gory and forbidden.

Now, as wonderful a place as the Union Theatre (and I genuinely do mean that - it is a fantastic little venue) its location, tucked away in a quiet part of Southwark, is about 400 years to late for that particular district to retain the needed atmosphere of lusty spookiness. And although the 'warm wood-burning stove... eclectic selection of furniture... and a wonderful, vibrant display of artwork' in the theatre's cafe bar is undoubtedly a delight the other 11 months of the year it does little to instigate the necessary sense of danger to elevate the horrors inside above the level of the cosily gruesome.

Indeed, as I said in the last past on the subject, and has been undoubtedly confirmed by their more recent show, The spirit of Grand Guignol is alive and kicking not at Terror 2007 but in the form of the now-much-lauded Punchdrunk.

In Faust last year, the audience arrived out in an unknown, daunting area of town. Heading out of a rundown tube station they ducked through a council estate, arriving finally at a derelict and abandoned looking warehouse, looming above them - already the geography of the city is working to their advantage before you even start the convoluted conveyor belt of characters, lifts and corridors that you are required to traverse before you arrive at anything approaching narrative.

The same is true, though to a lesser extent, in their more recent show - demonstrating that a showman's sense of the theatrical, and a commitment to creating a truly all-encompassing theatrical environment can elevate the silly melodramatics of gothic horror to something tinglingly macabre.

The Curious Dichotomies of Mr Billington

Its just Us and Them
Over and over again
Us v. Them
Over and over again
(LCD Soundsystem)

Africa, many, many years ago, before Doctor Livingstone had been presumed or anyone had decided it was a Heart of Darkness, was a continent constantly in motion. The tribes scattered across its unbordered lands were not static entities, defined by race or geography. You were not the member of a single group. Instead your collective identity was plural; you at once belonged to families, neighborhoods, communities, tribes; first comers were only defined in opposition to late comers, who, once someone else new arrived, were amalgamated into the first comers. Which is not to say this was paradise, people fought and people died. But it was an elegant, and universally understood system. That was, until white people arrived, with their flags and their guns, and their 'evolved' ideas about nationhood. And they didn't have a clue how this old system worked. And did they ever mess it up.

You see, in absence of any sense of understanding, and struggling to differentiate themselves from these heathens, they assumed that the tribal system in Africa was merely a less evolved version of our system in the west. They arbitrarily, and tragically/hilariously, assumed tribes were entirely separate entities, with a territory, a race, a past, an identity all of their own. And so, before they placed everyone in shackles, they placed everyone in brackets. You vs. you vs. you. And the massacres begun.

Because whenever you construct an opposition, its a) to simplify things and b) to cause conflict. Because we love dialectics and we love fighting.

Which brings me to Mr Billington. Mr Billington loves dialectics and he loves fighting. Nary a review goes by when he doesn't take the opportunity to point out the categories of theatre he is reinforcing. Take, for example, his review of Water by Filter, at the Lyric Hammersmith, which is begun not by any note on the show, but by this:

Devised theatre, at its worst, often leads to narrative and political flabbiness.

And then there is this from another four star review, this time of The Masque of the Red Death:

I still see this kind of magical mystery tour as an alternative to, rather than a substitute for, conventional drama

And then, earlier this week freed from the straight jacket of actually having to review the shows he has been sent to review, he is allowed to truly mount his soap box in an exclusive tribute to his new book:

although the phrase "text-based theatre" has acquired a ludicrously pejorative ring, I still see the writer as the medium's creative mainspring. Collective research is important. But out of the dramatist's truculent solitude derives our portrait of a nation still struggling, after all these years, to discover its true identity.

Piece by agenda-driven piece Mr Billington is building his brackets. On one side he places "text-based theatre" and the lone writer, tippy tapping her/his way into the annuls of real theatre. And on the other side he has a cartload of "experimental" forms governed and marshaled by that most beloved of umbrella terms "Devised Theatre". But of course, it would be churlish of me to suggest that Mr Billington is forging this dichotomy in truculent solitude. Here is Charlie Spencer from in the Telegraph, on, again, Water:

In a weak year for new plays, devised theatre has led the way, with first Complicite and now a company called Filter coming up with work that dazzles the eye, enchants the ear, and stimulates both the mind and heart.

And you'll notice here that Mr Spencer speaks of these productions with nothing but heartfelt praise to lavish on them (after all, even Mr Billington gave Water a four star review).

No, what is happening here is something far more interesting. Like people have done with so many movements before, they have given to a smorgasbord of shifting, undefinable theatrical forms that they don't understand, a name - Devised Theatre. And in this way they can simplify it, and ghettoise it.

They can dismiss a desire, a need, a gallant attempt by dramatists, directors, writers, actors, artists and theatre makers to challenge the forms in which they are working. They can take universal creative development, an attempt at finding new (more effective) modes of political and personal expression, and reduce it to a movement, a fad, in opposition to (and unable to replace) the static theatrical form with which they are comfortable.

But of course, it isn't as simple as this. People haven't discovered a new trick, learnt a new language - this isn't a theatrical gold rush to mine every last nugget of this novelty form "Devised Theatre" before they shuffle back to real theatre.

No - the term "devised theatre", and the resulting productions it has come to represent, is not something happening in a corner. It is one visible facet of a larger sensibility in theatre, affecting and encompassing a myriad of theatrical forms.

In order to show you what I mean, let's quickly take these terms apart shall we.

Devised Theatre. What does this mean, devised theatre? It's not improvised theatre, so someone must have written it down. Complicite have scripts. Nowadays they are mainly the product (and bear the hallmarks) of the companies artistic director, Simon Mcburney. Water certainly has a very definite script, with echoes of the work of David Greig. So does it mean work that is the product of a devising process?

And this devising process, it has no controller, no transcriber, no editor? Is the script just the vast, unwieldy verbiage of a year or so of thinking, vomitted up on the page? How do playwrights get their ideas. Do they talk to their friends, have read-throughs of scenes - steal from things they've heard, friends and passers by? Is truculent solitude the necessary state? So Brenton and Hare - they're not writers. Or David Eldridge on Market Boy, he's not a writer. Or David Greig, again - sometimes he's a writer and sometimes he's not.

And what about theatre devised from a pre-existing text? Like Inspector Sand's Hysteria, based on TS Eliot's poem. What is the difference between a version of The Wasteland and a version of Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life - both offer a startling ambiguous text, that the director is required to piece together, to devise a show from. One is a poem, one is a play text - so one is devised and the other is not?

What about Chris Goode and (much as Chris may flinch at this coupling) Anthony Neilson. Writers, devisors, directors... Where is the tribe to put them in?

Text Based Theatre. Is not every show based on a text. Not necessarily a written text, maybe a text written on the body - in movements, or actions. In this context is not every text worked over, slaved over, edited, refined, dreamt on in solitude by one part or another. The work of Derevo - a text in movement undoubtedly written only by the companies head Anton Adasinsky - do they create text-based theatre? For better or for worse he spends years labouring over his pieces, believes them to be incredibly refined, political, exact. Is he writing text-based-theatre, simply in a language that Billington doesn't understand?

What these pieces represent - from people like David Greig, David Eldridge, Martin Crimp, Simon McBurney, Derevo and Filter, is a desire. A desire to find their own language, to explore their medium. What they all represent is mainstream theatre remaining vital. Mainstream theatre moving forward. Because while Mr Billington desperately scratches his line in the sand, theatre makers are waltzing round him in circles. But while they may not notice his line, his readers undoubtedly do. And this is something that must be addressed.

There is another, untouched upon element of this constructed divide. Another reason that Mr Billington seems ever more keen to assert that it is Us vs Them. And that is that the them he constantly posits as 'devised', 'experimental' and 'new' is anything but. Filter and Complicite are hardly cutting edge - in fact remove the label and they are as mainstream as you like, crafting scripted narrative dramas for large proscenium auditoriums. Punchdrunk, with their versions of canonical texts and their largely passive 'masked' audience following (not leading) the action around a contained environment, are hardly representative (and certainly don't claim to be) of most interactive, audience-led or site-specific theatre.

And yet if these companies can be happily positioned as one side traditional/experimental text-based/devised dichotomy that constitutes contemporary theatre, people working beyond and outside of these constructed categories are left in suffocating silence. Because Mr Billington et al. are already confronting (and dismissing) what they have decided is the other side of theatre. Mainstream theatre has had its fill. Their boxes have been ticked and their consciouses are clean. Everything else can be fed to the professors.

(N.B. Slightly edited as written in awful hurry...)

Do you bite your thumb at me sir?

Stage fighting is rubbish.

Really, it is. Awful. And the main reason why it is so awful is because stage fighting (fighting on stage) has become Stage Fighting, a particularly annoying and pointless theatrical sub-industry. You can take courses in Stage Fighting, you can hire Stage Fighting ‘experts’ to come in and teach you how to Stage Fight. You can buy books on it.

And thus stage fighting becomes a skill, a technique in the actor’s repertoire, like juggling or ballet; another needless tool that the drama schools can use to convince theatre that acting is a job that can be taught. Except that stage fighting shouldn’t be like ballet. Stage fighting shouldn’t exist as a thing at all. The moment that stage fighting becomes a thing, with its own rules and techniques, it is instantly divorced from what it is there to represent, which is people fighting.

So unless we're watching a Disney Wild West Show or an Errol Flynn movie made flesh (both of which I assure you I am a huge fan of), when we see those familiar moves we are torn from whatever reality it is that the show is conjuring and treated to five minutes of the work of some mediocre stage combat expert, a peculiarly boring symbolic dance representing the act of fighting that invariably goes on far longer than it need do and adds precisely nothing to the event it parasitically feeds off.

Well, enough I say. Burn the books. Lock up the trainers. Unlearn those pulled punches and those staggering dull sword fighting routines.

But, then, all that done – what’s the alternative? When we stumble upon the words ‘they fight’ what’s to be done?

Well the first alternative is of course actual fighting, which although it does have a certain visceral urgency to it is liable to make long runs somewhat of a trial. And so it becomes the responsibility of directors to invent their own theatrical language. Just look at the choreography of Maxine Doyle, a scandalously overlooked part of what has become known as the Punchdrunk experience. Doyle has created a way of fighting that blends what is essentially dance with something more breathlessly unpredictable and spontaneous, and in doing so she imbues her fights with a dynamism (and a truthfulness) that goes way beyond the laboured faux-realism of so much stage combat. And even without the thrilling young dancers that Doyle so frequently has at her disposal, there is a message to take from this, that fighting on stage (as opposed to Stage Fighting) should be an element of and derived from the rest of the show, not an imported skill dropped into the show to fill a gap in the director’s imagination.

And while we’re about it, I’m not too keen on stage guns either…