Just happened to catch (lie. My significant other strong-armed me into watching (lie. I was happy to watch it)) the beginning of one of ITV's most recent shameless bandwagon-jumping exercises - Dancing on Ice - where various B-list soap actors, has-been pop stars and faintly-embarassed sportsmen are hauled forth from the Gladiator pit in which I'm convinced they keep these people, in order to dance... on ice. A sensation, as you can imagine.
Anyway, the opening of this weeks fiasco was a performance by Take That accompanied by Torville and Dean ice dancing around them. I think it was the point at which Mark Owen stood on top of Gary Barlow's white piano alongside Jane Torville, while Jason Orange and Christopher Dean sunk to their knees and gripped each other's hands emphatically that I realised that this was the gayest spectacle ever to not include Liza Minelli or Elton John. Another plaudit to hang on the broad creative shoulders of ITV.
In all honesty, if more TV had this sense of cheeky glamour - we'd all be richer for it.
Feb 24, 2007
Feb 23, 2007
A Voyage
Without giving too much away I would recommend that anyone reading this who finds themselves in the London area take a little trip out to Cheshire street in Shoreditch (just off Brick Lane). From the Brick Lane end, keep walking down the street until you come to a rather tatter black on white sign on your right hand side that states 'hotel' and has a telephone number underneath it. Ring on the buzzer and wait to be let in.
What awaits you is a haunting, enigmatic experience with a particularly magical heart if you (literally) dig deep enough. The elephant in the room writ large.
If all this sounds a little vague and mysterious, that is precisely the point.
What awaits you is a haunting, enigmatic experience with a particularly magical heart if you (literally) dig deep enough. The elephant in the room writ large.
If all this sounds a little vague and mysterious, that is precisely the point.
Feb 22, 2007
Dreams
For those with an interest in my unconscious, a series of dreams that I have tentatively titled 'Andy re-imagines average films' continued last night with a new version of The China Syndrome, a film I saw the end of over four years ago and had to find the title of this morning by wikipedia-ing the films of Jack Lemon.
In all honesty despite the title I have given this series of dreams, The China Syndrome a rather spiffy film about a possible meltdown in an American nuclear plant, and amazingly the Three Mile Island scare occured only 12 days after the film was released. You just can't buy that kind of publicity. As for my version of this late 70s political thriller, it was reasonably faithful to the original, with Jack Lemon taking a leading role, though for some reason my unconscious saw it as necessary to tag on a rather gruitous and unpleasant revenge sequence at the end - pandering to the teenage market no doubt.
This particular series of dreams was instigated about about a fortnight ago by my utterly prosaic recreation of the underwhelming mid-nineties sequel The Mighty Ducks 2.
Although I do find it somewhat alarming that my sleeping brain seems to have turned into Channel 5 I am nonetheless intruiged. Clearly our generation, or maybe just me, spend so long watching films, television, theatre etc that we've unconsciously become observers even in our own imagination. Either that or revolution is trying to warn me of an impending Nuclear catastrophe when a stray duck flies into the reactor at the Sizewell B.
In all honesty despite the title I have given this series of dreams, The China Syndrome a rather spiffy film about a possible meltdown in an American nuclear plant, and amazingly the Three Mile Island scare occured only 12 days after the film was released. You just can't buy that kind of publicity. As for my version of this late 70s political thriller, it was reasonably faithful to the original, with Jack Lemon taking a leading role, though for some reason my unconscious saw it as necessary to tag on a rather gruitous and unpleasant revenge sequence at the end - pandering to the teenage market no doubt.
This particular series of dreams was instigated about about a fortnight ago by my utterly prosaic recreation of the underwhelming mid-nineties sequel The Mighty Ducks 2.
Although I do find it somewhat alarming that my sleeping brain seems to have turned into Channel 5 I am nonetheless intruiged. Clearly our generation, or maybe just me, spend so long watching films, television, theatre etc that we've unconsciously become observers even in our own imagination. Either that or revolution is trying to warn me of an impending Nuclear catastrophe when a stray duck flies into the reactor at the Sizewell B.
Feb 20, 2007
Seven Sins
On monday night I had the absolute pleasure of spending a couple of hours watching and discussing (in equal measure) a staged reading of 7 (or should that be Se7en...) short plays, each dealing with one of the seven deadly sins, and each written by a different writer (including the delightful Ben Yeoh - who it is always nice to see).
Despite the utterly tepid atmosphere in the sinister white room we were gathered in at the top of the Soho Theatre and the propensity of the air conditioning unit to give an attention-seeking judder just as each of the ten minute pieces got going, it was a fascinating evening.
As I believe someone on the night pointed out the best plays were those where the writers had taken what this fairly formulaic concept as merely a jumping off point for a clever, exciting, and utterly unique series of explorations. The director had managed, by hook or by crook, to get a wonderfully contradictory and diverse muddle of writers involved whose contrary styles complemented each other beautifully. Each sin in turn became an intruiging opportunity to see a talented young playwright grappling with an all-too-familiar topic.
It reminded me of a similar evening at the BAC (now a step closer to securing its ticket on the subsidy bandwagon for a few more years - for some interesting thoughts on this see Chris Goode's typically detailed post on the subject) in which a series of groups tackled the subject of the Fire of London in a pick and mix of weird, wonderful and utterly rubbish pieces. The sense of fun and adventure (with just a light seasoning of quiet rivalry) that such gloriously silly and ambitious projects foster is always infectious.
I believe the plan is for this seven deadly sin project to go through some more development and then be performed as a whole piece. Keep your eyes peeled for it - the quality of a lot of the writing makes it a worthwhile spot.
And for those of you not wondering I think if I had had the choice I personally would have plumped for Pride as I feel that it alone has been to a large degree co-opted by the forces of good, while for the most part (and despite the best attempts of a few lecherous Monarchs) our morals have remained depressingly tepid. Speaking of which - did you realise that for each of the Sins there was a corresponding Virtue?
Don't here so much about those, do we? I would imagine its because chastity, temeperance, generosity, zeal, patience, charity and humility would make an utterly, utterly dull piece of collaborative theatre/critically acclaimed late nineties noir thriller. "Restraint is the keystone of the seven holy virtues" - no wonder the devil has all the best songs...
Despite the utterly tepid atmosphere in the sinister white room we were gathered in at the top of the Soho Theatre and the propensity of the air conditioning unit to give an attention-seeking judder just as each of the ten minute pieces got going, it was a fascinating evening.
As I believe someone on the night pointed out the best plays were those where the writers had taken what this fairly formulaic concept as merely a jumping off point for a clever, exciting, and utterly unique series of explorations. The director had managed, by hook or by crook, to get a wonderfully contradictory and diverse muddle of writers involved whose contrary styles complemented each other beautifully. Each sin in turn became an intruiging opportunity to see a talented young playwright grappling with an all-too-familiar topic.
It reminded me of a similar evening at the BAC (now a step closer to securing its ticket on the subsidy bandwagon for a few more years - for some interesting thoughts on this see Chris Goode's typically detailed post on the subject) in which a series of groups tackled the subject of the Fire of London in a pick and mix of weird, wonderful and utterly rubbish pieces. The sense of fun and adventure (with just a light seasoning of quiet rivalry) that such gloriously silly and ambitious projects foster is always infectious.
I believe the plan is for this seven deadly sin project to go through some more development and then be performed as a whole piece. Keep your eyes peeled for it - the quality of a lot of the writing makes it a worthwhile spot.
And for those of you not wondering I think if I had had the choice I personally would have plumped for Pride as I feel that it alone has been to a large degree co-opted by the forces of good, while for the most part (and despite the best attempts of a few lecherous Monarchs) our morals have remained depressingly tepid. Speaking of which - did you realise that for each of the Sins there was a corresponding Virtue?
| Sin | Virtue |
|---|---|
| Lust (inappropriate desire) | Chastity (purity) |
| Gluttony (over-indulgence) | Temperance (self-restraint) |
| Greed (avarice) | Generosity (vigilance) |
| Sloth (laziness) | Zeal (enthusiasm) |
| Wrath (anger) | Patience (composure) |
| Envy (jealousy) | Charity (giving) |
| Pride (vanity) | Humility (humbleness) |
Don't here so much about those, do we? I would imagine its because chastity, temeperance, generosity, zeal, patience, charity and humility would make an utterly, utterly dull piece of collaborative theatre/critically acclaimed late nineties noir thriller. "Restraint is the keystone of the seven holy virtues" - no wonder the devil has all the best songs...
The Return.
And with more of a whimper than a bang, I return, having been gone some time.
I am, it must be said, even by the theatre communities languid standards, a hopeless blogger, posts coming with what can only be described as Vashti Bunyan-like regularity. Forgive me. From now on I will be posting on a very regular basis, even if there is very little to say. I swear by almighty god that be it the last thing I do I shall turn this blog around and where once there was the sporadic and diverting there shall be the regular and tedious - I promise you, this geyser shall become a canal.
I am, it must be said, even by the theatre communities languid standards, a hopeless blogger, posts coming with what can only be described as Vashti Bunyan-like regularity. Forgive me. From now on I will be posting on a very regular basis, even if there is very little to say. I swear by almighty god that be it the last thing I do I shall turn this blog around and where once there was the sporadic and diverting there shall be the regular and tedious - I promise you, this geyser shall become a canal.
Jan 28, 2007
Film/Theatre
I recently went to see the show Love Song at the New Ambassadors theatre. The first thing to say about the play is that it was without question, a play. It had a cast of actors performing a script on a proscenium stage, while the audience watched in darkness from the stalls and the circle. There was little remarkable about any of this and the audience left, as it almost always does, relatively unfulfilled.
And yet, there was something different about this show. It did not feel like other shows going on around it. Down the road The Mousetrap is playing, London’s longest running show, the butler still murdering guests night after night. Just round the corner Waiting for Godot has just closed, a show very unlike The Mousetrap in many ways, and yet the two seemed to share something that Love Song did not. They seemed to share, at least, an upbringing. Agatha Christie and Samuel Beckett, though hardly the most natural of bedfellows, shared the experience of theatre as a medium; when they came to write plays, theatre was their frame of reference. And this is where Love Song felt different. The play did not feel comfortable in the theatre, it felt like a stranger, a tourist from somewhere else. And that strange, foreign land from whence it came was apparent before a word had been uttered.
In the first scene a character sits at the back of the stage in silence as the ceiling descends towards him before the lights turn out altogether. In the darkness the words ‘Love Song’ are scrawled, one on top of the other, in 3 feet high letters across the proscenium space. Suddenly the audience is in another darkened space, watching not a stage but a screen – a screen on which the opening credits of a film are beginning. From this moment on the familiar tropes of cinema surround us; the crashing popular music at moments of emotional crescendo, the popular Hollywood stars who, without exception, fill the central roles, the 90 minute running time without an interval, the focused manifestation of the central character’s point of view.
Love Song is a product of the culture of film in which its young creators and its young target audience have grown up. We now live in an era in which film is the dominant artistic medium, its tentacles extending out into every living room. We are drowning in film. For the generation now reaching maturity this has always been the case and they will have undoubtedly, like myself, seen dozens of films (and watched hours of television) before they see a single play. Thus for these theatre makers their frame of reference when coming to write or stage a play has inevitably been irreparably breached by this colossal other medium; consequently cinema’s familiar conventions begin to leak out on to the theatre stage.
Of course, in its early days it was cinema that relied on the conventions of theatre to sustain it; the results where frequently a pale imitation of the older medium. Yet there were those, such as George Melies, who almost instantaneously saw the unique potential of this new medium. It had power to leave the audience spellbound by the laborious construction of seemingly fluent grand visual illusions; a feature of film that is the central foundation of the big Hollywood blockbuster. As these blockbusters demonstrate, in its second century, filmmakers now know their medium well. Cinema has grown up, and is now bigger than anyone could have predicted, while theatre has, comparatively dwindled. Consequently it is important that theatre does not become, as I feel was the case with Love Song, a pale imitation of its younger cousin; staging what are essentially ‘live’ films in the hope of appealing to generations saturated by the screen.
It is notable that George Melies was a magician before he moved to the cinema to stage tricks in a new medium. Theatre, to prosper alongside the cinema, must remember the power of the spectacle of live magic, un-transferable to other mediums. What makes magic stale on the screen is its immediacy, the ephemeral atmosphere in which an illusion takes place – in short, spectre of the live performance and the live performer. Samuel Beckett was more than aware of this; indeed, it is the spectre of the live performer (and what a live performer) that makes Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw’s Happy Days an electrifying, glorious spectacle. On film the production would be almost unbearable.
Let’s hope that surrounded by so much cinema, we can remember what it is that makes theatre so vital.
Jan 24, 2007
Memoire De La Nuit - Phillip Boe, ICA (London International Mime Festival)
It is an image familiar to most people - an anonymous figure in a black bowler hat gazes vacantly through an open window at a serenely blue sky dotted with thick white clouds. In his one-man hymn to the work of Rene Magritte, Memoire De La Nuit, playing at the ICA as part of the London International Mime Festival, Phillip Boe is able to gracefully conjure not only this famous icon but an entire Magritte-inspired universe, in all its surreal and melancholy lyricism.
Boe uses this haunting, beautiful landscape to tell a tantalisingly bizarre detective story; a young girl has gone missing in a wood and Boe’s unnamed protagonist is on the case. In some parts dancing, in others simply moving to his own staccato rhythm, Boe begins to search for clues, growing in the process almost as confused as the dazzled audience.
Starting with just a window frame and a chest of drawers covered in dustsheets, Boe subtly builds Magritte’s striking, familiar images through his ingenious and seamlessly performed slight of hand; an egg, a glass, even a telephone, appear unremarked in Boe’s hand from out of the ether. However, Unlike the ego-maniacal theatrics of David Blaine or even Paul Daniels, Boe’s clever little tricks are truly magical; suggesting not the presence of a remarkable person in an ordinary world, but an entirely ordinary person in a remarkable alternative reality. Through these understated little illusions Boe remains truly faithful to Magritte’s comically surreal paintings, creating a universe at once very mundane and utterly bewildering.
Yet if Boe is gloriously successful in transporting his audience to another world, his reasons for taking them there remain frustratingly unfulfilling. Boe seems to want to construct his noir-ish detective story in a similar manner to Paul Auster’s wonderful New York Trilogy, tantalising the audience with the possibility of a logical conclusion that will set the world to rights before skipping off again into the impossible. Yet Boe’s confusing tale is never engaging enough to truly interest; its various plot twists feel only like a rather superficial excuse for the performer to craft his undoubtedly stunning environment.
Such an impressive performance deserves a narrative of equal strength. I’m convinced, however, that with a little more work this talented performer is capable of delivering just that.
Boe uses this haunting, beautiful landscape to tell a tantalisingly bizarre detective story; a young girl has gone missing in a wood and Boe’s unnamed protagonist is on the case. In some parts dancing, in others simply moving to his own staccato rhythm, Boe begins to search for clues, growing in the process almost as confused as the dazzled audience.
Starting with just a window frame and a chest of drawers covered in dustsheets, Boe subtly builds Magritte’s striking, familiar images through his ingenious and seamlessly performed slight of hand; an egg, a glass, even a telephone, appear unremarked in Boe’s hand from out of the ether. However, Unlike the ego-maniacal theatrics of David Blaine or even Paul Daniels, Boe’s clever little tricks are truly magical; suggesting not the presence of a remarkable person in an ordinary world, but an entirely ordinary person in a remarkable alternative reality. Through these understated little illusions Boe remains truly faithful to Magritte’s comically surreal paintings, creating a universe at once very mundane and utterly bewildering.
Yet if Boe is gloriously successful in transporting his audience to another world, his reasons for taking them there remain frustratingly unfulfilling. Boe seems to want to construct his noir-ish detective story in a similar manner to Paul Auster’s wonderful New York Trilogy, tantalising the audience with the possibility of a logical conclusion that will set the world to rights before skipping off again into the impossible. Yet Boe’s confusing tale is never engaging enough to truly interest; its various plot twists feel only like a rather superficial excuse for the performer to craft his undoubtedly stunning environment.
Such an impressive performance deserves a narrative of equal strength. I’m convinced, however, that with a little more work this talented performer is capable of delivering just that.
Jan 19, 2007
BAC.
There are few places in London that I enjoy an evening more than at the Battersea Arts Centre, surrounded by both staff and public who are unpretentious, enthusiastic and share a real love of theatre. Some of my happiest times in the brief period I've been in this smoggy metropolis have been drinking an overpriced Magners (something I can forgive them for as it would seem at present the potential for a reasonably priced Magners remains firmly untapped) in the BAC bar, chatting with actors, staff and assorted other utterly lovely people. It seems to attract them, probably something to do with the effort required in making it to this pleasantly quiet corner of South West London.
And this is before I ever mention the startling, exciting, gloriously naive and ambitious theatre that you can see there. From an evening of 5 minute sketches based around the fire of London in for the which the entire building was filled with smoke and Firemen, to the utterly magnificent Particularly in the Heartland you can always be guaranteed something interesting.
Which is why this news from Lyn Gardner has me postively foaming at the mouth with frustration:
£100,000. Probably the amount that the Tory led council spent on pens last year. Surely, you don't have to be involved in theatre in any way (even in watching) to realise that this is an absurd situation. As Lyn says:
It's by no means cut and dried however hence this post is not a memorium but a call to arms. The head of Wandsworth council is Edward Lister, and here's a spiffy idea - email him. Really let off some steam and put all those hours of typing practise to some really good use. And for those people who might chance upon this and have a few more readers than my mere trickle. Please do spread the word.
And this is before I ever mention the startling, exciting, gloriously naive and ambitious theatre that you can see there. From an evening of 5 minute sketches based around the fire of London in for the which the entire building was filled with smoke and Firemen, to the utterly magnificent Particularly in the Heartland you can always be guaranteed something interesting.
Which is why this news from Lyn Gardner has me postively foaming at the mouth with frustration:
Last week BAC's local council, Tory-governed Wandsworth, gave notice that from April 1 it intends to cut BAC's annual grant from £100,000 to zero and simultaneously start charging a commercial rent for the Lavender Hill building of more than £270,000 per annum. If this was to go ahead, BAC could not survive and would have to close.
£100,000. Probably the amount that the Tory led council spent on pens last year. Surely, you don't have to be involved in theatre in any way (even in watching) to realise that this is an absurd situation. As Lyn says:
You might think local councillors would be thrilled and proud to be the custodians of such a local and national treasure; delighted by the 220,000 visitors that BAC receives each year and the positive impact that those visitors have on the local economy (about £2m-a-year, the centre estimates). But you would think wrong.
It's by no means cut and dried however hence this post is not a memorium but a call to arms. The head of Wandsworth council is Edward Lister, and here's a spiffy idea - email him. Really let off some steam and put all those hours of typing practise to some really good use. And for those people who might chance upon this and have a few more readers than my mere trickle. Please do spread the word.
Jan 17, 2007
iTheatre
yoOver the break I had the pleasure of celebrating my birthday which never fails to fall as inconveniently as it possibly can two days after Christmas. Never one to be bitter (and aware that a long line of great people have similarly lived the lives in Jesus's shadow... John the Baptist, Brian, Anubis god of the dead, Jesus Jones) I always make the most of unfortunate circumstances and spend a quiet one with the family field, while toying with Christmas treats. And this year I had the treatiest of all treats as my parents, shot to brimming with Christmas spirit, went that extra fiscal mile and gifted me with an ipod nano.
My deep, deep love of music in the past always tempered by my broad, broad propensity for cheapness, this was the first time that I had experienced such a device and for those yet to visit the promised land, it is a life-defining experience. And this is no hyperbole, I assure you. Let me explain...
What makes the ipod and its variants such an epochal device is that at its tiny electronic heart sit dedication and chance in blissfully perfect symetry. For the true glory of the ipod is not how many albums it can hold (there are others than can do the same), nor its undeniable sexiness, but the option at the bottom of the main menue simply entitled "shuffle songs".
Here all our careful planning, our hours of meticulous listening and selecting, uploading and downloading, the whole glorious gamut of our music-loving history is whisked from its musty throne and danced back to life by serendipity. The shuffle re-engages us with our music. Like an empty metapor, grown stale and meaningless through repetition, our music is rendered unlistenable by habit and familiarity. Enter the shuffle, mixing, juxtaposing, messing around; through our engagement with its abitrary selections we create new experiences, we give our music new meanings.
We also make this music ours. True there may well be 20,000,000 other people
who also feel a lump rising in their throat at The Beatle's Penny Lane, but no one else is listening to as part of a medley that started with The Arcade Fire's Rebellion (Lies), went through Dylan's 1975 live performance of Romance in Durango and climaxed with Aqua's Dr Jones - this is your glorious chaotic compilation. It is yours alone. You are engaging with this music in a away no one before ever has. And everyone likes to secretly think that their music means more to them than to anyone else who has ever heard it.
In my humble opinion the shuffle should be a template for life. Embracing chance (within a carefully constructed artistic framework) to yield a totally engaging, totally unique relationship to the work (or works) of art.
And what medium has the potential to embrace chance as much as theatre? Look, for example, at the power of site-specific theatre, taking theatre outside the confines of the nominally neutral, nominally 'empty' space. In doing so it embraces chance, forging an intimate, personal relationship to the work.
When I saw Punchdrunk's Faust I found myself in a small room on my own with a dancer throwing himself against the wall, lit only by a swinging bare lightbulb, the next minute I followed him into a space with several other actors and dozens of saudience members, this was suddenly a very public spectacle; though we were now all together, our relationships to this space and this event were completely different, it meant something unique to all of us. I saw this public scene in the light of the intimate solo dance I had just scene, others saw it from the perspective of their own chance encounters.
It is in this way that theatre can become (or remain depending on who you speak to) the most adventurous and appropriate mode of art for a generation of shufflers.
My deep, deep love of music in the past always tempered by my broad, broad propensity for cheapness, this was the first time that I had experienced such a device and for those yet to visit the promised land, it is a life-defining experience. And this is no hyperbole, I assure you. Let me explain...
What makes the ipod and its variants such an epochal device is that at its tiny electronic heart sit dedication and chance in blissfully perfect symetry. For the true glory of the ipod is not how many albums it can hold (there are others than can do the same), nor its undeniable sexiness, but the option at the bottom of the main menue simply entitled "shuffle songs".
Here all our careful planning, our hours of meticulous listening and selecting, uploading and downloading, the whole glorious gamut of our music-loving history is whisked from its musty throne and danced back to life by serendipity. The shuffle re-engages us with our music. Like an empty metapor, grown stale and meaningless through repetition, our music is rendered unlistenable by habit and familiarity. Enter the shuffle, mixing, juxtaposing, messing around; through our engagement with its abitrary selections we create new experiences, we give our music new meanings.
We also make this music ours. True there may well be 20,000,000 other people
who also feel a lump rising in their throat at The Beatle's Penny Lane, but no one else is listening to as part of a medley that started with The Arcade Fire's Rebellion (Lies), went through Dylan's 1975 live performance of Romance in Durango and climaxed with Aqua's Dr Jones - this is your glorious chaotic compilation. It is yours alone. You are engaging with this music in a away no one before ever has. And everyone likes to secretly think that their music means more to them than to anyone else who has ever heard it.
In my humble opinion the shuffle should be a template for life. Embracing chance (within a carefully constructed artistic framework) to yield a totally engaging, totally unique relationship to the work (or works) of art.
And what medium has the potential to embrace chance as much as theatre? Look, for example, at the power of site-specific theatre, taking theatre outside the confines of the nominally neutral, nominally 'empty' space. In doing so it embraces chance, forging an intimate, personal relationship to the work.
When I saw Punchdrunk's Faust I found myself in a small room on my own with a dancer throwing himself against the wall, lit only by a swinging bare lightbulb, the next minute I followed him into a space with several other actors and dozens of saudience members, this was suddenly a very public spectacle; though we were now all together, our relationships to this space and this event were completely different, it meant something unique to all of us. I saw this public scene in the light of the intimate solo dance I had just scene, others saw it from the perspective of their own chance encounters.
It is in this way that theatre can become (or remain depending on who you speak to) the most adventurous and appropriate mode of art for a generation of shufflers.
Jan 15, 2007
Back.
Never fear, beloved reader, I have returned from an extended Christmas break (and the ensuing snowballing heap of work (possible collective noun... a catastrophe of deadlines)) and hence the steady trickle of blogging will continue, like a barely noticed spring dribbling down the side of Mount Doom.
To look forward to:
Reviews (Much Ado About Nothing! Don Juan in Soho! My Christmas!)
Thoughts (on everything!)
Developments in the world of theatre (our first semi-professional production!)
Consider this a trailer. Stay tuned folks.
To look forward to:
Reviews (Much Ado About Nothing! Don Juan in Soho! My Christmas!)
Thoughts (on everything!)
Developments in the world of theatre (our first semi-professional production!)
Consider this a trailer. Stay tuned folks.
Back.
Never fear, beloved reader, I have returned from an extended Christmas break (and the ensuing snowballing heap of work (possible collective noun... a catastrophe of deadlines)) and hence the steady trickle of blogging will continue, like a barely noticed spring dribbling down the side of Mount Doom.
To look forward to:
Reviews (Much Ado About Nothing! Don Juan in Soho! My Christmas!)
Thoughts (on everything!)
Developments in the world of theatre (our first semi-professional production!)
Consider this a trailer. Stay tuned folks.
To look forward to:
Reviews (Much Ado About Nothing! Don Juan in Soho! My Christmas!)
Thoughts (on everything!)
Developments in the world of theatre (our first semi-professional production!)
Consider this a trailer. Stay tuned folks.
Dec 4, 2006
That was the year that was
A confession: I love lists. So its a Christmas treat as much for me as for anyone who may read this to offer up my favourites of the year, some of which I hope may serve as present suggestions to the desperate. Who am I kidding, this is pretty much all about me wanting to tell you what I liked, in glorious, wonderful List Form. So without further ado...
Music:
Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
A magnificent odyssey of an album that finds its 20 year-old creator burying himself in history and the sounds of Eastern Europe like a young boy wrapped up in his grandmother's musty fur coat. It is a gorgeous, sentimental, nostalgic and ethereal exploration of an imaginary European landscape that haunts from the first note to the last.
The Islands - Return to the Sea
A boyant, clever little album from the most self-destructive band of the 21st century. Formerly the Unicorns (and now also, sadly, formerly The Islands), Nick Diamonds and J'aime Tambeur come together to create complex but infectious pop songs that seem to encompass (and in some ways surpass) all the best things in Canadian music at the moment, from Broken Social Scene to Wolf Parade.
The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
A glorious, anarchic, self-destructive romp through the underside of American teenagerdom - drugs and sex and drugs and sex and suicide and apathy and vomit. The opening lines of the album tell you everything you need to know:
The best album of the year.
Theatre:
Particularly in the Heartland (The TEAM) - Traverse/BAC
An heartbreaking little play that engulfs you in a beautiful kaleidoscope of Americana. A gentle but intruiging exploration of the mythology of the American heartland by an exciting, challenging young company and possible the only time I've felt myself choking up in the theatre.
Roam (Gridiron) - Edinburgh Airport
In the top three almost on the grounds of ambition alone - Gridiron didn't so much take over edinburgh airport as slip into it, surrounded by genuine travellers too-ing and fro-ing, to explore the transitory otherness of air travel. The beautiful, subtle glimpses of angel-winged cleaners wandering across the terminal almost made the show on their own.
Faust (Punchdrunk) - Wapping
A very different non-theatrical experience to that of Gridiron, more site-sympathetic than site-specific, punchdrunk took over a disused warehouse in East London to transport you to another reality. A breathtaking, life-changing absorbsion in the intoxication and temptation of Goethe's fable. The most startling, ambitious visual spectacle I have ever seen. It has now extended through to March '07 so make sure you catch it before then.
Film:
The Squid and the Whale
A whimsical but achingly sad little film from the Wes Anderson stable about the break up of a marriage from the perspective of the children. Best performance of the year from Jeff Daniels as the arrogant academic father struggling with his wife's success and his relative failure.
Brick
A gorgeously shot high-school film noir that is about as cinematic a film as you will see, fiddling with genre to joyous effect.
Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog's film on Bear lover/attack victim Timoth Treadwell is about the most perfectly balanced documentary you'll see. He slowly and carefully explores in a highly personal but never egotistical fashion this most bizare of stories, peeling away the comic absurdity of Treadwell to reveal the aching sadness buried in the reels and reels of hand-recorded grizzly bear film he left behind after his death. The kind of intimate, beautiful true story cinema so rarely achieves.
Books:
Hello Americans - Simon Callow
How do you tell the real story of someone as large (in every sense) and mythical as Orson Welles? In three volumes apparently, this being the second, charting the chaotic, fascinating and in the end disasterous period from Kane to Macebeth in which he went from boy wonder to Hollywood joke. Callow's feat is to make so much research and mythbusting so endlessly entertaining, and even, frequently, tragic.
District and Circle - Seamus Heaney
A simply beautiful collection of poetry - dark and haunting with a scope that spans the ages.
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
I may be sucker for this book in that it seems to have been written entirely for me - so much if it everything that I never knew I felt when I was 13. But then, maybe that's its power, its a genuinely grown-up, thoughtful and intimate novel about being a teenager by someone accomplished enough to deliver that but young enough to still remember. There is something undoubtedly magical about it all.
So now its over to you, whoever you may be (I'm looking at you Tsquared)... any favourites from the last 12 months?
Music:
Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
A magnificent odyssey of an album that finds its 20 year-old creator burying himself in history and the sounds of Eastern Europe like a young boy wrapped up in his grandmother's musty fur coat. It is a gorgeous, sentimental, nostalgic and ethereal exploration of an imaginary European landscape that haunts from the first note to the last.
The Islands - Return to the Sea
A boyant, clever little album from the most self-destructive band of the 21st century. Formerly the Unicorns (and now also, sadly, formerly The Islands), Nick Diamonds and J'aime Tambeur come together to create complex but infectious pop songs that seem to encompass (and in some ways surpass) all the best things in Canadian music at the moment, from Broken Social Scene to Wolf Parade.
The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
A glorious, anarchic, self-destructive romp through the underside of American teenagerdom - drugs and sex and drugs and sex and suicide and apathy and vomit. The opening lines of the album tell you everything you need to know:
there are nights when i think that sal paradise was right. boys and girls in america have such a sad time together.
sucking off each other at the demonstrations.
making sure their makeup's straight.
crushing one another with collossal expectations.
dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late.
Theatre:
Particularly in the Heartland (The TEAM) - Traverse/BAC
An heartbreaking little play that engulfs you in a beautiful kaleidoscope of Americana. A gentle but intruiging exploration of the mythology of the American heartland by an exciting, challenging young company and possible the only time I've felt myself choking up in the theatre.
Roam (Gridiron) - Edinburgh Airport
In the top three almost on the grounds of ambition alone - Gridiron didn't so much take over edinburgh airport as slip into it, surrounded by genuine travellers too-ing and fro-ing, to explore the transitory otherness of air travel. The beautiful, subtle glimpses of angel-winged cleaners wandering across the terminal almost made the show on their own.
Faust (Punchdrunk) - Wapping
A very different non-theatrical experience to that of Gridiron, more site-sympathetic than site-specific, punchdrunk took over a disused warehouse in East London to transport you to another reality. A breathtaking, life-changing absorbsion in the intoxication and temptation of Goethe's fable. The most startling, ambitious visual spectacle I have ever seen. It has now extended through to March '07 so make sure you catch it before then.
Film:
The Squid and the Whale
A whimsical but achingly sad little film from the Wes Anderson stable about the break up of a marriage from the perspective of the children. Best performance of the year from Jeff Daniels as the arrogant academic father struggling with his wife's success and his relative failure.
Brick
A gorgeously shot high-school film noir that is about as cinematic a film as you will see, fiddling with genre to joyous effect.
Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog's film on Bear lover/attack victim Timoth Treadwell is about the most perfectly balanced documentary you'll see. He slowly and carefully explores in a highly personal but never egotistical fashion this most bizare of stories, peeling away the comic absurdity of Treadwell to reveal the aching sadness buried in the reels and reels of hand-recorded grizzly bear film he left behind after his death. The kind of intimate, beautiful true story cinema so rarely achieves.
Books:
Hello Americans - Simon Callow
How do you tell the real story of someone as large (in every sense) and mythical as Orson Welles? In three volumes apparently, this being the second, charting the chaotic, fascinating and in the end disasterous period from Kane to Macebeth in which he went from boy wonder to Hollywood joke. Callow's feat is to make so much research and mythbusting so endlessly entertaining, and even, frequently, tragic.
District and Circle - Seamus Heaney
A simply beautiful collection of poetry - dark and haunting with a scope that spans the ages.
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
I may be sucker for this book in that it seems to have been written entirely for me - so much if it everything that I never knew I felt when I was 13. But then, maybe that's its power, its a genuinely grown-up, thoughtful and intimate novel about being a teenager by someone accomplished enough to deliver that but young enough to still remember. There is something undoubtedly magical about it all.
So now its over to you, whoever you may be (I'm looking at you Tsquared)... any favourites from the last 12 months?
Dec 1, 2006
The sound of music (no not that one...)
In a Hamlet workshop today the director asserted the importance of feeling the metre in Shakespeare. Nor merely of being aware of it or utilizing it but of feeling it in a very physical sense. When an actor speaks Shakespeare well, he said, it will chime somewhere inside them.
Whereas language touches the mind it seems music touches the body in a very real sense. Last week we spoke to a performance artist who works with materials and the most startling and interesting thing she suggested was that there were only really two senses, seeing and touching. Smell is the product of particles of a material touching the insides of our noses and, more interestingly, hearing is the result of the waves of sound buffeting our ear in a very literal sense. Hence when we hear a piece of music it quite literally touches us. It is pre-cognitive. It moves our body first and the feeling it produces in the body (sadness, joy, pity, fear) is then translated into something the mind can comprehend. When language and music are combined then, there is the potential for the most powerful of experiences – in which the mind and the body are both simultaneously transformed.
The most obvious example of such an effect would seem to be opera. However, I feel that in this medium the balance between language and music is almost always tipped towards the latter – indeed even the frequency of a split between language and music in terms of a composer and librettist attests to an uneasy relationship between the two. The Rake’s Progress for example is always Brittan’s Opera, Auden and his words, regardless of their stature elsewhere, are required to hide somewhere in the shadows.
And this brings us back to Shakespeare and the chiming of his language. Ezra Pound suggested that ‘all good poetry aspires to the condition of music’. That it is in poetry, with its rhythm and metre, that you find the most perfect synthesis of thought and feeling. Shakespeare’s verse has the potential to physically transform an audience through its musicality. Othello’s rage, or Romeo’s love or Hamlet’s frustration are experienced by the audience physically – when performed well they should be chiming in the spectator’s gut almost before they have considered what is actually being said.
Thus the physical experience of Shakespeare onstage transforms the audience from spectator to participator. In a very literal sense they feel the characters, they do not merely watch them. This is why, for me, it is important that Shakespearean rhythm and metre are honoured. I have been taught how to speak verse since I was eleven years old and I love it. I adore this powerful transformative quality that it has. I recently played Romeo in the echoing grandeur of Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh. I found that the very musicality of the verse was the most powerful tool allowing me to really experience Romeo rather than simply imitate him.
Whereas language touches the mind it seems music touches the body in a very real sense. Last week we spoke to a performance artist who works with materials and the most startling and interesting thing she suggested was that there were only really two senses, seeing and touching. Smell is the product of particles of a material touching the insides of our noses and, more interestingly, hearing is the result of the waves of sound buffeting our ear in a very literal sense. Hence when we hear a piece of music it quite literally touches us. It is pre-cognitive. It moves our body first and the feeling it produces in the body (sadness, joy, pity, fear) is then translated into something the mind can comprehend. When language and music are combined then, there is the potential for the most powerful of experiences – in which the mind and the body are both simultaneously transformed.
The most obvious example of such an effect would seem to be opera. However, I feel that in this medium the balance between language and music is almost always tipped towards the latter – indeed even the frequency of a split between language and music in terms of a composer and librettist attests to an uneasy relationship between the two. The Rake’s Progress for example is always Brittan’s Opera, Auden and his words, regardless of their stature elsewhere, are required to hide somewhere in the shadows.
And this brings us back to Shakespeare and the chiming of his language. Ezra Pound suggested that ‘all good poetry aspires to the condition of music’. That it is in poetry, with its rhythm and metre, that you find the most perfect synthesis of thought and feeling. Shakespeare’s verse has the potential to physically transform an audience through its musicality. Othello’s rage, or Romeo’s love or Hamlet’s frustration are experienced by the audience physically – when performed well they should be chiming in the spectator’s gut almost before they have considered what is actually being said.
Thus the physical experience of Shakespeare onstage transforms the audience from spectator to participator. In a very literal sense they feel the characters, they do not merely watch them. This is why, for me, it is important that Shakespearean rhythm and metre are honoured. I have been taught how to speak verse since I was eleven years old and I love it. I adore this powerful transformative quality that it has. I recently played Romeo in the echoing grandeur of Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh. I found that the very musicality of the verse was the most powerful tool allowing me to really experience Romeo rather than simply imitate him.
Nov 23, 2006
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You at the Royal Court
Before I left for the brutal north I had a chance to see Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You with Ben Yeoh (a stupidly talented man who I hope to be seeing a lot more of in the future), amongst others - his more coherent and well informed opinions on the piece can be found over here, for those who like that sort of thing...
As for me, I was tantalised more than I was impressed. There were hints of the greatness in there that make Churchill the most important British playwright alive to day (Pinter can shove it up his Krapp-hole).
The play's a two hander about the US-UK 'special relationship' played out as a gay romance in which (union) Jack will do anything for (uncle) Sam. At its best the play toys beautifully with the surreal synthesis of the political and the personal as the lovers flirt, fight and fondle over points of international diplomacy (who to invade, who to support). The names of enemy combatants (North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq) are flippantly tossed out as the couple nuzzle on the sofa and Vietnam, Kyoto and 911 are handled like lovers tiffs - that time you got drunk and kissed someone else, or the fact that you never put the lid on the toothpaste.
In so doing Churchill begins to conjure the absurdity of a world in which tabloid newspapers split every double page evenly between politics and celebrity gossip. Is it any surprise within such an environment that our relationship with the US is as schizophrenic as it is, aghast as we watch their actions on the news, then laughing along with Friends or Frasier as it comes on afterwards. Appalled by Guantanamo Bay but still taking our children to Disneyworld on Holliday.
America is the most dangerous, aggresive, powerful country in the world and yet still attempts to perceive itself as the home of freedom, innocence and the sit-com. It is this absurd dichotomy that Churchill seems to suggest, allows us to perceive the UK's 'special relationship' with the US within the personal narrative of a relationship (with undertones of the homosexual) between Bush and Blair.
It is when this schizophrenia is at its most absurd that the play really chimes. As Sam refuses to budge on Kyoto protocols only to cattily demand that Jack put his cigarette out. The laughter in the auditorium was as hollow and ironic as you will find.
As for me, I was tantalised more than I was impressed. There were hints of the greatness in there that make Churchill the most important British playwright alive to day (Pinter can shove it up his Krapp-hole).
The play's a two hander about the US-UK 'special relationship' played out as a gay romance in which (union) Jack will do anything for (uncle) Sam. At its best the play toys beautifully with the surreal synthesis of the political and the personal as the lovers flirt, fight and fondle over points of international diplomacy (who to invade, who to support). The names of enemy combatants (North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq) are flippantly tossed out as the couple nuzzle on the sofa and Vietnam, Kyoto and 911 are handled like lovers tiffs - that time you got drunk and kissed someone else, or the fact that you never put the lid on the toothpaste.
In so doing Churchill begins to conjure the absurdity of a world in which tabloid newspapers split every double page evenly between politics and celebrity gossip. Is it any surprise within such an environment that our relationship with the US is as schizophrenic as it is, aghast as we watch their actions on the news, then laughing along with Friends or Frasier as it comes on afterwards. Appalled by Guantanamo Bay but still taking our children to Disneyworld on Holliday.
America is the most dangerous, aggresive, powerful country in the world and yet still attempts to perceive itself as the home of freedom, innocence and the sit-com. It is this absurd dichotomy that Churchill seems to suggest, allows us to perceive the UK's 'special relationship' with the US within the personal narrative of a relationship (with undertones of the homosexual) between Bush and Blair.
It is when this schizophrenia is at its most absurd that the play really chimes. As Sam refuses to budge on Kyoto protocols only to cattily demand that Jack put his cigarette out. The laughter in the auditorium was as hollow and ironic as you will find.
Episode 4 (wherein I return to our nation's capital and appologise to William Carlos Williams)
This is just to say
I am back from
Scotland
where it is
an icebox
and where
I was probably too
frozen
for posting
Forgive me
it was just vicious
so wet
and so cold
---
Although I have spent the last four years living either in Edinburgh or places much colder I was still left pretty gobsmacked by quite how miserable weather-wise Scotland was for the entire five days I was there. I think maybe it was the wetness that really got to me, though this is my own damn fault for only bringing a pair of shoes notable only for their numerous holes. After several days of the kind of intense puddles that you only get in cities with 600 years of cobbles and no sense of purpose I think I was pretty close to developing trenchfoot.
As I failed to mention it before I left I should probably say that I have spent the last few days flitting between Scotland's grand old dame and her slightly younger, slightly trendier sister Glasgow (the Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret of metropolises (metropoli?)), directing a scratch night at the Arches. For those unfamiliar, the Arches is a theatre venue that stretches out under the railway arches of central station (you can hear the sound of the trains occasionally shuffling to and fro above). Its a spiffy, exciting space run by a whole bunch of truly lovely people so if you happen to be in the area do check it out.
The scratch itself went stupidly well and from being the pretty much entirely unknown wildcard on the bill that the organisers confessed they were worried could be (for all they knew) cornea-tearingly awful, by the end they were all really keen to help us develop the piece into a full show. We may also get a chance to do some work at the BAC out of this as well, so all in all the wind and rain were definitely worth it.
I also discovered rather delightfully that this blog has a reader (albeit a friend of mine) - so hello to you.
I am back from
Scotland
where it is
an icebox
and where
I was probably too
frozen
for posting
Forgive me
it was just vicious
so wet
and so cold
---
Although I have spent the last four years living either in Edinburgh or places much colder I was still left pretty gobsmacked by quite how miserable weather-wise Scotland was for the entire five days I was there. I think maybe it was the wetness that really got to me, though this is my own damn fault for only bringing a pair of shoes notable only for their numerous holes. After several days of the kind of intense puddles that you only get in cities with 600 years of cobbles and no sense of purpose I think I was pretty close to developing trenchfoot.
As I failed to mention it before I left I should probably say that I have spent the last few days flitting between Scotland's grand old dame and her slightly younger, slightly trendier sister Glasgow (the Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret of metropolises (metropoli?)), directing a scratch night at the Arches. For those unfamiliar, the Arches is a theatre venue that stretches out under the railway arches of central station (you can hear the sound of the trains occasionally shuffling to and fro above). Its a spiffy, exciting space run by a whole bunch of truly lovely people so if you happen to be in the area do check it out.
The scratch itself went stupidly well and from being the pretty much entirely unknown wildcard on the bill that the organisers confessed they were worried could be (for all they knew) cornea-tearingly awful, by the end they were all really keen to help us develop the piece into a full show. We may also get a chance to do some work at the BAC out of this as well, so all in all the wind and rain were definitely worth it.
I also discovered rather delightfully that this blog has a reader (albeit a friend of mine) - so hello to you.
Nov 11, 2006
Blasted at the Barbican
For me the problem with Sarah Kane is the idea of Sarah Kane. At the age of 23, her debut Blasted became the first play that people really tried to be self-righteously scandalised by since the 60s. Five years later she killed herself and the hard work of manufacturing a myth entirely incongruous with her body of work could begin. She became the manic depressive, writing her pain in ever more shocking, ever more outrageous ways. And thus a generation of budding young things imagined the path to posterity to be paved with outrageous sex and violence and unrelenting misery. Problem is, without the thought, care, ambiguity, intelligence and hope beautifully laced through Kane's ethereal writing, the entirely artificial 'shock' over Blasted would have faded quickly and left nothing behind.
This German production, at the Barbican as part of its impressive Bite '06 season, goes back to Kane's first play and takes pains to point out everything that was missed just over a decade ago. The infamous scenes of sex and violence are downplayed, hidden behind sofas and beds and coats, played out in darkness or half light. There are no loud and angry shocks here; even the blast between the Acts is a lyrical dream, the set slowly and smoothly seperating as a heavy rain of rubble pours gently onto the stage.
The play consequently becomes a quiet, slow, achingly painful dissection of the potential for inhumanity. It is the timing that is most startling in this production. Every silence, from Cate's first entrance and her long, careful examination of the glossy hotel room to magnificent last few moments, is teased out to perfection. Most startling of all is Thomas Thiem as the anonymous soldier. He describes his own horrifying atrocities and carries out brutal acts of violence onstage with a quiet, calm melancholy that is as terrifying as it is achingly sad.
Like Fassbinder's Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, Blasted explores the cruelty and a brutality latent in the everyday and its manifestation in the torture and genocide of war. However, in contrast to Fassbinder's unrelenting bleakness, Blasted, like Cleansed, its pseudo-sequel, is a play of hope. Here, as with everything in this production, the final image of humanity amidst the devastation of war is played slowly, carefully and, it must be said, beautifully. This is a production by a company that truly understands Kane, and in eschewing shock and awe for a deliberately slow naturalism they honour the complexity and the beauty of her writing.
Why is it then, that it has required a German company for such a powerful reading of a very English playwright (the references to Elland Road and Joeys being the only thing that really jars in the German translation). Well for a start they have been doing Kane well for a lot longer than we have. Her work was almost immediately embraced in Germany even while it was still scorned and simplified in this country. And that comes down to what we in this country, and they in Germany, are used to seeing in the theatre.
Kane's fierce, postmodern works are for me far better understood as part of a post-Brechtian German tradition that includes Fassbinder and Heiner Muller, than alongside Ravenhill and Anthony Neilson as some fatuous 'In-Yer-Face' movement deliberately constructed by certain smug tossers in the media to parallel the publicity hungry YBAs. Such a frame of reference does Kane and her work no favours.
This German production, at the Barbican as part of its impressive Bite '06 season, goes back to Kane's first play and takes pains to point out everything that was missed just over a decade ago. The infamous scenes of sex and violence are downplayed, hidden behind sofas and beds and coats, played out in darkness or half light. There are no loud and angry shocks here; even the blast between the Acts is a lyrical dream, the set slowly and smoothly seperating as a heavy rain of rubble pours gently onto the stage.
The play consequently becomes a quiet, slow, achingly painful dissection of the potential for inhumanity. It is the timing that is most startling in this production. Every silence, from Cate's first entrance and her long, careful examination of the glossy hotel room to magnificent last few moments, is teased out to perfection. Most startling of all is Thomas Thiem as the anonymous soldier. He describes his own horrifying atrocities and carries out brutal acts of violence onstage with a quiet, calm melancholy that is as terrifying as it is achingly sad.
Like Fassbinder's Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, Blasted explores the cruelty and a brutality latent in the everyday and its manifestation in the torture and genocide of war. However, in contrast to Fassbinder's unrelenting bleakness, Blasted, like Cleansed, its pseudo-sequel, is a play of hope. Here, as with everything in this production, the final image of humanity amidst the devastation of war is played slowly, carefully and, it must be said, beautifully. This is a production by a company that truly understands Kane, and in eschewing shock and awe for a deliberately slow naturalism they honour the complexity and the beauty of her writing.
Why is it then, that it has required a German company for such a powerful reading of a very English playwright (the references to Elland Road and Joeys being the only thing that really jars in the German translation). Well for a start they have been doing Kane well for a lot longer than we have. Her work was almost immediately embraced in Germany even while it was still scorned and simplified in this country. And that comes down to what we in this country, and they in Germany, are used to seeing in the theatre.
Kane's fierce, postmodern works are for me far better understood as part of a post-Brechtian German tradition that includes Fassbinder and Heiner Muller, than alongside Ravenhill and Anthony Neilson as some fatuous 'In-Yer-Face' movement deliberately constructed by certain smug tossers in the media to parallel the publicity hungry YBAs. Such a frame of reference does Kane and her work no favours.
Nov 7, 2006
Hamlet at the Pompidou Centre, Paris
Hamlet.
Go on, say it to yourself, out loud.
Ham-let.
It is a heavy, magical word, the saying of which instantly conjures a storm of signs and meanings; skulls, and stages, TS Eliot and Laurence Olivier, To Be's and not To Be's. If even to pronounce the word carries with it such a caravan of cultural baggage, then staging a production under this banner must be done in the knowledge that you are reaping the whirlwind.
Rather than keeping this intimidating knowledge somewhere in the back of their minds, The Wooster Group confront it head on. A company not unused to messing with 'The Greats' (their production of Miller's The Crucible, L.S.D, had the playwrite foaming at the mouth with indignation) this is nonetheless the first time the company has retained the original title of a work. Clearly this is set up as a confrontation from the start - Liz Lecompte the plucky David to this most mammoth of all cultural Goliaths.
And yet (as should be expected from the Wooster group) before we have even entered the auditorium the goal posts have been shifted. A slither of white paper insterted in the programme informs us that this is not a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet but a recreation of Richard Burton's 1964 Broadway version (recorded at the time to be screened across the country in thousands of cinemas in groundbreaking scheme known as 'theatrefilm'). Hamlet the play, no longer takes centre stage, the limelight instead shifting to the relationship between this present Hamlet and a past imagining of the text. Here then is Liz Lecompte and her company not as David but as a Matador, tempting the bull into charging then skipping sideways at the last minute. It is this that is the somewhat tantalising yet frequently frustrating game that the show proceeds to play for the next two and a half hours.
What the audience is confronted with is a cast of indisputably talented actors mimicking as exactly as they can the movements and speech of the figures from the 1964 broadway Hamlet that is projected behind them, and on television screens across the stage for them to take their cues from. Every camera change (there were 17 recording the broadway show), close-up, editing malfunction and screen flicker is represented. Closer to a gym work-out than a dance, the actors leap in jagged movements across the stage to change camera angle, arms and heads jerking back and forth as we see the figures on the screen behind do as the aging filmreel flicks and skips.
Meanwhile the film itself as been digitally touched so that Richard Burton and the other actors fade hauntingly, at many moments disapearing entirely to leave nothing but an empty set and the camera focused on an unseen body that the audience can only imagine from the actions of the live actor in front.
This exhausting, constraining exercise becomes the perfect metaphor for Hamlet itself, a narrative play hideously distorted by the weight of cultural reference that both company and audience bring to the show. A weight that means that a speech about suicide is greeted with warm familiarity and the report that two minor characters have been unjustly executed is always accompanied by knowing sniggers. All actors performing Hamlet are bound by the past, here, those chains are made visible, not disguised by gimicry or cod naturalism, but centre stage for all to see.
Within this context, the moments that work most effectively are Shakespeare's own irony-laden comments on theatre. The mousetrap becomes a fascinatingly anarchic experience in which the number of levels of performance taking place are dizzyingly impossible to pin down. Hamlet's famous solilquys are also imbued with a new sense of despair and absence in the production, as the actor jinks and stammers to an alien rhythm, while the ethereal half presence of Richard Burton (part actor, part Hamlet, part ghost) appears and disappears behind him, his famous voice echoing certain lines or even words. In addition the haunting presence of the ghost audience (laughing still from beyond the grave, or at least the end of the show) represent an uncomfortable reminder of the all to brief and transitory nature of all that takes place both inside and outside of the theatre.
And yet, is this clever meta-Hamlet enough to sustain the full length of the show? For all their quick footwork (both metaphorically and literally) the company never tackle the play head on, never attempt to subdue it or dismember it, leaving it respectfully intact. Indeed, by the end it appears that the undoubted power of Shakespeare's text has in fact subdued the company, as, stagefighting and all, the audience is treated to an almost traditional, almost, dare we say, naturalistic, finale.
And then of course, there is still a third Hamlet to consider, Richard Burton's 1964 broadway version. In its time considered revolutionary Broadway material not only for its simple set and its insistence on rehearsal room clothes instead of costumes, but also because in its filming and screening across the country it looked to give theatre to the masses, to democratize the medium by bringing Broadway to Des Moines and Jacksonville. In comparison (and indeed, in comparison with the company's own earlier work) The Wooster Group's knowing dance around the play comes off badly - an all too clever metatheatrical treat for those select few who can make it to the Pompidou centre in Paris.
Go on, say it to yourself, out loud.
Ham-let.
It is a heavy, magical word, the saying of which instantly conjures a storm of signs and meanings; skulls, and stages, TS Eliot and Laurence Olivier, To Be's and not To Be's. If even to pronounce the word carries with it such a caravan of cultural baggage, then staging a production under this banner must be done in the knowledge that you are reaping the whirlwind.
Rather than keeping this intimidating knowledge somewhere in the back of their minds, The Wooster Group confront it head on. A company not unused to messing with 'The Greats' (their production of Miller's The Crucible, L.S.D, had the playwrite foaming at the mouth with indignation) this is nonetheless the first time the company has retained the original title of a work. Clearly this is set up as a confrontation from the start - Liz Lecompte the plucky David to this most mammoth of all cultural Goliaths.
And yet (as should be expected from the Wooster group) before we have even entered the auditorium the goal posts have been shifted. A slither of white paper insterted in the programme informs us that this is not a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet but a recreation of Richard Burton's 1964 Broadway version (recorded at the time to be screened across the country in thousands of cinemas in groundbreaking scheme known as 'theatrefilm'). Hamlet the play, no longer takes centre stage, the limelight instead shifting to the relationship between this present Hamlet and a past imagining of the text. Here then is Liz Lecompte and her company not as David but as a Matador, tempting the bull into charging then skipping sideways at the last minute. It is this that is the somewhat tantalising yet frequently frustrating game that the show proceeds to play for the next two and a half hours.
What the audience is confronted with is a cast of indisputably talented actors mimicking as exactly as they can the movements and speech of the figures from the 1964 broadway Hamlet that is projected behind them, and on television screens across the stage for them to take their cues from. Every camera change (there were 17 recording the broadway show), close-up, editing malfunction and screen flicker is represented. Closer to a gym work-out than a dance, the actors leap in jagged movements across the stage to change camera angle, arms and heads jerking back and forth as we see the figures on the screen behind do as the aging filmreel flicks and skips.
Meanwhile the film itself as been digitally touched so that Richard Burton and the other actors fade hauntingly, at many moments disapearing entirely to leave nothing but an empty set and the camera focused on an unseen body that the audience can only imagine from the actions of the live actor in front.
This exhausting, constraining exercise becomes the perfect metaphor for Hamlet itself, a narrative play hideously distorted by the weight of cultural reference that both company and audience bring to the show. A weight that means that a speech about suicide is greeted with warm familiarity and the report that two minor characters have been unjustly executed is always accompanied by knowing sniggers. All actors performing Hamlet are bound by the past, here, those chains are made visible, not disguised by gimicry or cod naturalism, but centre stage for all to see.
Within this context, the moments that work most effectively are Shakespeare's own irony-laden comments on theatre. The mousetrap becomes a fascinatingly anarchic experience in which the number of levels of performance taking place are dizzyingly impossible to pin down. Hamlet's famous solilquys are also imbued with a new sense of despair and absence in the production, as the actor jinks and stammers to an alien rhythm, while the ethereal half presence of Richard Burton (part actor, part Hamlet, part ghost) appears and disappears behind him, his famous voice echoing certain lines or even words. In addition the haunting presence of the ghost audience (laughing still from beyond the grave, or at least the end of the show) represent an uncomfortable reminder of the all to brief and transitory nature of all that takes place both inside and outside of the theatre.
And yet, is this clever meta-Hamlet enough to sustain the full length of the show? For all their quick footwork (both metaphorically and literally) the company never tackle the play head on, never attempt to subdue it or dismember it, leaving it respectfully intact. Indeed, by the end it appears that the undoubted power of Shakespeare's text has in fact subdued the company, as, stagefighting and all, the audience is treated to an almost traditional, almost, dare we say, naturalistic, finale.
And then of course, there is still a third Hamlet to consider, Richard Burton's 1964 broadway version. In its time considered revolutionary Broadway material not only for its simple set and its insistence on rehearsal room clothes instead of costumes, but also because in its filming and screening across the country it looked to give theatre to the masses, to democratize the medium by bringing Broadway to Des Moines and Jacksonville. In comparison (and indeed, in comparison with the company's own earlier work) The Wooster Group's knowing dance around the play comes off badly - an all too clever metatheatrical treat for those select few who can make it to the Pompidou centre in Paris.
Nov 2, 2006
Work Theatre Collective at the B.A.C
Last night I nipped on my bicycle and braved the autumn evening (now it would seem, testing its bite again after a long, lazy, slack-jawed summer) to go see Project E: An Explosion at the Battersea Arts Centre.
The show is the latest in a series of alphabeticalised spectaculars by the Work Theatre collective and for this particular piece they had an obscenely tasty £30-something grand from the Samuel Beckett memorial trust (nice to see the great man's name used by someone other than the estate that is so intent on condemning him to the status of a museum curio in the 'faithfullness' they impose on any new production - a batshit crazy notion - how much would still remain unknown about Shakespeare or Johnson if they had only ever been performed unedited, by an all male-company on a thrust stage?)
The show took the explosion as metaphor, image, and cultural artifact in our time - plucking from the either men (and it was just men) from Baudrillard to Alfred Hitchcock to sit alongside their fictional creations. This was when the show was at its most interesting - when Hitchcock's discussion on the nature of suspense nestled snuggly within a very Hitchockian suspense thriller that left us guessing when and where the bangs were going to come. And at its best the charming sunday evening BBC drama narrative was carried along on a heady stew of interesting ideas bubbling beneath it - the explosion as a tool for decentering subjectivity, and (most prominently) the explosion as an image, whether in film, propaganda or as 'a work of art'.
When these ideas didn't complement the central narrative so well it could feel a little like a reasonably acted C-rate thriller with excerpts postmodernism insterted like ad breaks to raise the brow a little higher. But generally it was a thoughtful piece and for that you are willing to forgive it its failings. So go see it.
The show is the latest in a series of alphabeticalised spectaculars by the Work Theatre collective and for this particular piece they had an obscenely tasty £30-something grand from the Samuel Beckett memorial trust (nice to see the great man's name used by someone other than the estate that is so intent on condemning him to the status of a museum curio in the 'faithfullness' they impose on any new production - a batshit crazy notion - how much would still remain unknown about Shakespeare or Johnson if they had only ever been performed unedited, by an all male-company on a thrust stage?)
The show took the explosion as metaphor, image, and cultural artifact in our time - plucking from the either men (and it was just men) from Baudrillard to Alfred Hitchcock to sit alongside their fictional creations. This was when the show was at its most interesting - when Hitchcock's discussion on the nature of suspense nestled snuggly within a very Hitchockian suspense thriller that left us guessing when and where the bangs were going to come. And at its best the charming sunday evening BBC drama narrative was carried along on a heady stew of interesting ideas bubbling beneath it - the explosion as a tool for decentering subjectivity, and (most prominently) the explosion as an image, whether in film, propaganda or as 'a work of art'.
When these ideas didn't complement the central narrative so well it could feel a little like a reasonably acted C-rate thriller with excerpts postmodernism insterted like ad breaks to raise the brow a little higher. But generally it was a thoughtful piece and for that you are willing to forgive it its failings. So go see it.
Oct 31, 2006
High-Coup
A friend has begun to compile a book of brand new haikus. And some of them are rather spiffy. A lot of them however seem to imagine that poetry is the art of organises sentances into lines (in this particular case, organising 14 syllable long sentances into 3 neatly symetrical lines). Alack, if only it were that easy. Where are the turns, the rythms the images conjured in minutae, the 'aspirations to the condition of music'...? As I said though, some a really rather super and below are my favourites thus far.
yellow highlighter.
we used to work together,
before you dried up.
the first cautious move
my skin brushing past your skin
now we're holding hands.
Gravel under tires,
Especially when it wakes you,
Is a friendly sound.
Halloween’s coming.
I used to buy a costume.
Now I go as me.
The half of me that
Sis 'no more' is eatin aw
Ma 'nae-mair' awa.
Four paws, two grey ears
Woke, ate, chased butterfly, slept
I am a kitten
It rains on the old,
The ones left with George Crosses,
Cenotaph-watchers.
I particularly like the last one by a super young chap who was winning captain on University Challenge last night. One of my contributions is hidden in there as well. Any contributions from the floor...?
yellow highlighter.
we used to work together,
before you dried up.
the first cautious move
my skin brushing past your skin
now we're holding hands.
Gravel under tires,
Especially when it wakes you,
Is a friendly sound.
Halloween’s coming.
I used to buy a costume.
Now I go as me.
The half of me that
Sis 'no more' is eatin aw
Ma 'nae-mair' awa.
Four paws, two grey ears
Woke, ate, chased butterfly, slept
I am a kitten
It rains on the old,
The ones left with George Crosses,
Cenotaph-watchers.
I particularly like the last one by a super young chap who was winning captain on University Challenge last night. One of my contributions is hidden in there as well. Any contributions from the floor...?
Something wicked this way comes...
Coming up to Halloween I would like to talk to you about fear. So come my pretties, switch the lights off and snuggle down, are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll... BOO!
Scared? No... Sheesh, tough crowd.
I will say from the outset I am true fan of horror, even of the lowest-common denominator soft-core-porn-actress chased by the dying embers of a movie franchise and collapsing in a stabbing fury of nipples and false blood kind. The reason this form of manipulative awful film is still a pleasure, beyond the irony of its sheer awfullness? Because it can still scare you. It only takes a second, one bright idea or a single moment of tension. Fear is the great leveller. Anyone can scare you and anyone can be scared.
There is no reaction that is more gutteral and immediate than that of fear. It is the crystal meth of the masses - your heart races, time flies, you don't know where you are - all you know is that this thick, hot uneasiness has crept up on you and you want to it to go away.
Paul Arendt thinks fear in the theatre is dead. Which is a shame because it has the potential to be the most populist form of theatre while producing genuinely affecting, unconvential pieces of creative work.
Problem for me is, Arendt has it all wrong. Horror may be 'dead' in the red-seated, circle and stalls auditorium but I would argue it was never there in the first place. The live performance of horror, I can assure you, is alive and kicking and screaming.
Arendt traces his line of horror through Sophocles and Shakespeare to Grand Guignol and the present day. Now for starters its not like we don't get enough of the first two these days. Clearly if Arendt wants to argue that they were once the Hitchcock and Carpenter of their respective days what has changed is the reception or the nature of the performance not the plays themselves.
For the Hellenic audience Gods and monsters were as existant outside of the ampitheatre as in it and the experience of theatre was a great, quasi-religious spectacle communally experienced by the almost all of the polis. In such a heightened environment are stories of pregnant women miscarriaging in fear really so surprising? And as for Shakespeare and the Jacobean revenge tragedians, the audience may have relished the gore and suffering, but is there any evidence that they were scared by it any more than we are when we watch Shakespeare or Webster now?
Which brings us on to Grand Guignol which, far from being the last death throes of a venerable tradition I would site as the instigation of a new form of horror performance.
As Arendt points out, the schtick with the doctor was just that, a theatrical coup by a man with a nose for publicity; but that in itself tells us something vital about Grand Guignol's appeal. In truth the Grand Guignol plays were never that frightening. What was terrifying was the experience of Grand Guignol - it was the manipulation of the performance of going to the theatre that terrified audiences.
The Grand Guignol theatre was a tiny 300 seater auditorium at the end of a sinister cul-de-sac in the Pigalle district of Paris. The theatre itself was a poorly converted church that sat squattly in the middle of the road at the far end of the street. An evening of scares at the Grand Guignol started before you reached the theatre. You knew you were going to Paris' most terrifying spectacle, you were ready to be scared, and to get to the theatre you tiptoed down the dark, threatening, Impasse Chaptal, listening to mysterious moans and cries from the brothels and other dens of ill repute that towered around you. Your experience had already begun.
When you entered the theatre, the gloomy auditorium was littered with remnants of the Grand Guignol's religious past, iron railings round the boxes and two large angels hovering above the orchestra pit. The doctor skipped up and down the crowded rows nervously. The smell was the musty oppressive odour of the church (the origonal home of terror) mixed with the thick, pungent odour of the pork offal used for the tricks. This is not 'roller coaster' drama of the ghost train. This is the sinister, claustrophobic terror of the haunted house.
And in such an environment when the genuinely clever special effects of the Grand Guignol caused the gouging eyes and the severing arms to manifest themselves before you, you really didn't know what you were watching. It was not that the Grand Guignol Theatre complemented the drama, the drama complemented the terror of the experience of the Theatre building itself, and that terror wasn't over until you had once more traversed the cul-de-sac and made it home to a nicer, safer part of the world.
This was the true experience of the Grand Guignol, and this terrifying form of site-specific performance is still with us. Next time you find yourself at the Edinburgh fringe, take an hour out to go on a ghost tour. Be guided through dark, damp chambers (chambers that form part of the same underground you were happy to sit in and have a drink when it was 'set-dressed' as a pub or as the 'Underbelly' theatre venue) by a theatrical guide while actors jump out at various appropriate moments.
I myself in my University days used to guide people round these very vaults and I can assure you it is all theatre, the dark chambers were built in the 1800s and have never housed anything more frightening than a tramp or two. The stories we tell are theatre, performed for an audience prepared and expecting to be scared, in a dark, oppressive performance space. These places are the true descendants of the Grand Guignol. Again, the interchangeable stories are irrelevant, it is the performance of this theatrical space that draws such screams and faintings in both cases (and we did have faintings). And again as with the Grand Guignol, these tours are hugely popular with everyone from school parties of scottish teenagers, to American or German or Japanese tourists, to the excitable melee of fringe-going Theatre types.
And for those who stick there nose up at such cheap shocks, again I tell ye, go and see (nay, experience) Punchdrunk Production's Faust. Step out of Shadwell tube station and stalk nervously through the high rise council estate to a derelict looking warehouse. This is as much a part of the performance as anything that takes place inside the venue. And once you are in, when the lift attendant lets a group of four of you out on to an abandoned floor, with nothing in front of you but a barely lit corridor with a single small white statue of the virgin mary left in the middle of it, try telling me that the hairs on your neck aren't reaching for the ceiling and that the same hot, sticky treacle of fear is not dribbling down your throat and welling at the bottom of your stomach.
Far from being dead, terror and fear in Theatre (capital T) are as terrifying and as popular as they ever were. To find them you simply have to step outside the theatre.
Scared? No... Sheesh, tough crowd.
I will say from the outset I am true fan of horror, even of the lowest-common denominator soft-core-porn-actress chased by the dying embers of a movie franchise and collapsing in a stabbing fury of nipples and false blood kind. The reason this form of manipulative awful film is still a pleasure, beyond the irony of its sheer awfullness? Because it can still scare you. It only takes a second, one bright idea or a single moment of tension. Fear is the great leveller. Anyone can scare you and anyone can be scared.
There is no reaction that is more gutteral and immediate than that of fear. It is the crystal meth of the masses - your heart races, time flies, you don't know where you are - all you know is that this thick, hot uneasiness has crept up on you and you want to it to go away.
Paul Arendt thinks fear in the theatre is dead. Which is a shame because it has the potential to be the most populist form of theatre while producing genuinely affecting, unconvential pieces of creative work.
The genre of horror, a wildly popular moneyspinner in other branches of entertainment, is practically absent from the stage…. In fact, there is so little shock and gore available that a tiny fringe theatre in south London can accurately claim to be hosting Britain's only annual festival of horror theatre. It seems theatre has no desire, or indeed ability, to scare.
Problem for me is, Arendt has it all wrong. Horror may be 'dead' in the red-seated, circle and stalls auditorium but I would argue it was never there in the first place. The live performance of horror, I can assure you, is alive and kicking and screaming.
Arendt traces his line of horror through Sophocles and Shakespeare to Grand Guignol and the present day. Now for starters its not like we don't get enough of the first two these days. Clearly if Arendt wants to argue that they were once the Hitchcock and Carpenter of their respective days what has changed is the reception or the nature of the performance not the plays themselves.
For the Hellenic audience Gods and monsters were as existant outside of the ampitheatre as in it and the experience of theatre was a great, quasi-religious spectacle communally experienced by the almost all of the polis. In such a heightened environment are stories of pregnant women miscarriaging in fear really so surprising? And as for Shakespeare and the Jacobean revenge tragedians, the audience may have relished the gore and suffering, but is there any evidence that they were scared by it any more than we are when we watch Shakespeare or Webster now?
Which brings us on to Grand Guignol which, far from being the last death throes of a venerable tradition I would site as the instigation of a new form of horror performance.
In the early 20th century, sophisticated audiences would flock to the smallest theatre in Paris to witness torture, execution, acid slayings and geysers of stage blood, unrestrained by the sniffy considerations of morality. This was drama as a roller-coasting ghost train, breaking taboos for the sheer dirty fun of it. Max Maurey, who ran the theatre in its heyday, would measure each night's success by the number of people who fainted during the show, and kept a doctor on hand in case of fits.
As Arendt points out, the schtick with the doctor was just that, a theatrical coup by a man with a nose for publicity; but that in itself tells us something vital about Grand Guignol's appeal. In truth the Grand Guignol plays were never that frightening. What was terrifying was the experience of Grand Guignol - it was the manipulation of the performance of going to the theatre that terrified audiences.
The Grand Guignol theatre was a tiny 300 seater auditorium at the end of a sinister cul-de-sac in the Pigalle district of Paris. The theatre itself was a poorly converted church that sat squattly in the middle of the road at the far end of the street. An evening of scares at the Grand Guignol started before you reached the theatre. You knew you were going to Paris' most terrifying spectacle, you were ready to be scared, and to get to the theatre you tiptoed down the dark, threatening, Impasse Chaptal, listening to mysterious moans and cries from the brothels and other dens of ill repute that towered around you. Your experience had already begun.
When you entered the theatre, the gloomy auditorium was littered with remnants of the Grand Guignol's religious past, iron railings round the boxes and two large angels hovering above the orchestra pit. The doctor skipped up and down the crowded rows nervously. The smell was the musty oppressive odour of the church (the origonal home of terror) mixed with the thick, pungent odour of the pork offal used for the tricks. This is not 'roller coaster' drama of the ghost train. This is the sinister, claustrophobic terror of the haunted house.
And in such an environment when the genuinely clever special effects of the Grand Guignol caused the gouging eyes and the severing arms to manifest themselves before you, you really didn't know what you were watching. It was not that the Grand Guignol Theatre complemented the drama, the drama complemented the terror of the experience of the Theatre building itself, and that terror wasn't over until you had once more traversed the cul-de-sac and made it home to a nicer, safer part of the world.
This was the true experience of the Grand Guignol, and this terrifying form of site-specific performance is still with us. Next time you find yourself at the Edinburgh fringe, take an hour out to go on a ghost tour. Be guided through dark, damp chambers (chambers that form part of the same underground you were happy to sit in and have a drink when it was 'set-dressed' as a pub or as the 'Underbelly' theatre venue) by a theatrical guide while actors jump out at various appropriate moments.
I myself in my University days used to guide people round these very vaults and I can assure you it is all theatre, the dark chambers were built in the 1800s and have never housed anything more frightening than a tramp or two. The stories we tell are theatre, performed for an audience prepared and expecting to be scared, in a dark, oppressive performance space. These places are the true descendants of the Grand Guignol. Again, the interchangeable stories are irrelevant, it is the performance of this theatrical space that draws such screams and faintings in both cases (and we did have faintings). And again as with the Grand Guignol, these tours are hugely popular with everyone from school parties of scottish teenagers, to American or German or Japanese tourists, to the excitable melee of fringe-going Theatre types.
And for those who stick there nose up at such cheap shocks, again I tell ye, go and see (nay, experience) Punchdrunk Production's Faust. Step out of Shadwell tube station and stalk nervously through the high rise council estate to a derelict looking warehouse. This is as much a part of the performance as anything that takes place inside the venue. And once you are in, when the lift attendant lets a group of four of you out on to an abandoned floor, with nothing in front of you but a barely lit corridor with a single small white statue of the virgin mary left in the middle of it, try telling me that the hairs on your neck aren't reaching for the ceiling and that the same hot, sticky treacle of fear is not dribbling down your throat and welling at the bottom of your stomach.
Far from being dead, terror and fear in Theatre (capital T) are as terrifying and as popular as they ever were. To find them you simply have to step outside the theatre.
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