THE ARCADES PROJECT

Bye bye

2008-07-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

For a variety of reasons Arcades is going to take a little holiday for a few months.

It may be back come the Autumn, though possibly in a slightly different form.

In the meantime if you're interested, I'll be blogging regularly at the blog for Forest Fringe, the venue I've been programming for Edinburgh.

Thanks everybody.

Forest Fringe Profiles: Action Hero

2008-07-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

[The first of the company profiles I mentioned about three seconds ago for the Forest Fringe Blog on the wonderful Action Hero from Bristol]

Action Hero

I first saw Gemma and James from Action Hero at I Am Still Your Worst Nightmare, a weekend-long live art spectacular at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The whole event was great in its openness; with a completely uncurated collection of work things swung from the brilliant to the kind of awfulness that takes you to a very sad place inside. Action Hero (along with Ed Rapley and Emma Bennett from These Horses) were probably the best thing about the whole weekend.

For their short piece they did a recreation of Evel Knievel's 1969 Caesar's Palace jump that left him in a coma for over three weeks. It was a simple and beautiful idea, playing lovingly with the difference in scale between the theirs and the original jump while retaining some really tangible trace of the original's sense of euphoria and fear. Here we all were staring at a guy on pedalling towards a ramp on a little red bicycle and yet, there was real pause, a real breath held, an authentic moment of danger. The really beautiful thing about the piece however was its loving attention to detail; it wasn't just a good idea. It was done so thoughtfully, borrowing text from a number of sources to create something that already at this early stage was already subtly questioning and undermining the collective excitement that it so effortlessly generated.

Anyway, it was a beautiful piece and I was super excited when we agreed to have them come do the next stage of development at Forest Fringe. In the meantime I also got the chance to see a version of possibly their most popular show A Western, which has toured across the country. It's a wonderful little show; a show that demonstrates that the act of playing (because they are always playing at being in a Western, covering themselves in Ketchup, riding on another little bike) can be as meaningful as doing anything for real. What struck me this time however was that both pieces were slightly in love with and slightly nervous of this kind of deeply Midwestern American mythology that seemed so familiar to me.

I grew up listening to my parents record collection, getting lost in the world of a collection of denim-wearing, guitar twanging lovesick bearded men roaming dusty open roads in big American cars and staring out at an ocean I'd never even seen. The Eagles and the Allman Brothers (and everything from Steven Spielgberg to Perry Mason Investigates) were the nearest I came to a cultural heritage. Despite my resolutely, awkward, humdrum Britishness there's part of me that feels in some weird way American. But a kind of imagined, mythic American.

And this is another reason I love the Action Hero - that they seem too to have this strange pull. They wear their Englishness on their sleeves and yet there's a longing for freeway pancake houses and lonely towns called things like Splitwater Falls and the faded yellow colour of any American TV show from the 70s. It's strange and its sad and its familiar and I think they tap into something really meaningful for a whole generation of suburban English kids who's parents were big fans of Christopher Cross or who spent their childhood watching movies like and Capricorn One and Earthquake, a beautiful, bizarre film that coincidentally features its own desperate daredevil hero.

Forests, critics, arts centres, fights and hide and seek

2008-07-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

Another breathless burst of thoughts in between other things - sorry if that's become the norm in this town (which seems to have taken on the shape of some Western outpost with one guy left sitting on his porch watching bemusedly as I hustle occasionally across the only street in town from the Saloon to the workhouse) but alas turns out the summer is a busy time of year.

And Summer it definitely now is with Wimbledon bringing out the quaintly middle-class hat wearer in all of us and the Edinburgh Festival drawing mighty close. As you may know I'm co-running a venue this year called Forest Fringe with my delightful Canadian friend Debbie Pearson (and it was Canada Day yesterday so up the cannucks once more).

We've pretty much managed to haul the programme over the finish line now and the whole thing is up on the venue's beautiful new website. We also have a blog which I thought it worth me starting to try and write a bit for so with that in mind I've decided to revive the idea of the company profiles I did for Aurora Nova last year to give people a better idea of who some of the people that will be performing at Forest are. So hopefully I'll start writing those over the course of the next couple of weeks and they'll start appearing here.

For the purpose of trying to focus more on this (and on Exposures in Dublin in September) I've also (rather terrifyingly) finished working for BAC and am now 100% freelance (or 100% unemployed if you wanted to look at things more bleakly). It's been a completely lovely (and relatively life-changing) year working for them and I'm sure I'll probably continue to do things with them so BAC-relate will continue to be kept to a minimum round here for fear of appearing biased.

There's also another article by me up at the Guardian where I'm rather scathing about a night I went to a little while ago at the Southwark playhouse. At the time I was left completely incensed by the entire experience but now (about a week later when the post finally bobbed to the surface at the Guardian) I'm feeling a lot more torn. Is it really necessary to be so vicious about something, especially if it's not a review? Probably not is the answer and its just childish petulance on my part to write such things and the comments have pretty much born this out.

But then other the other hand I did receive an email from a writer saying that he agreed with me and that it was about time that someone blew the whistle on their particular brand of superficial and relatively smug political engagement.

Since I've been writing this quite a few people have said to me that they think its brave/foolhardly/downright stupid and childish and self important (delete as appropriate) to write so much publicly about theatre when at the same time trying to make it. And there is a part of me that every time one of these articles goes up does sink a little thinking that possibly that's another several column inches down in the grave I'm so tirelessly digging for myself. But at a time when people won't stop going on about the importance of peer review, surely we should be able to take a bit of criticism from each other? Of course I guess the difficulty comes in the arena of the internet where those personal criticisms swim dangerously close to what feels like solid statement-of-fact reviewing, especially on the Guardian Blog.

I've seen bloody and fascinating arguments that have flown back and forth between people such as Chris Goode, Simon Kane, David Eldridge, Tassos Stevens and myself and I think that bruised and bemused though we may have been by them we're all probably better for it. But for the most part those conversations have remained in areas that are decidedly more personal than the Guardian Theatre Blog and perhaps that's where I overstepped the mark this time.

Either way, this whole episode combined with Helen Smith's description of me as passionate-to-the-point-of-appearing-angry has left me thinking that perhaps I should try and adopt a somewhat mellower tone from now on. We'll see how that works out.

In the meantime please do go have a read of this utterly lovely review of Checkpoint, the game I created for the Hide + Seek Festival at the South Bank centre. It was a glorious day and I hope there are many more like it soon.

Some things that will happen.

2008-06-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

Well things have been somewhat horrifyingly busy round here recently but here's a quick heads up on a few things going on soon.

First off I'm hugely excited about Infinite Lives at the North Wall in Oxford on July 10. It's written by Chris Goode and features the Jon Spooner and is (apparently) a charmingly filthy/beautiful story about quitting a job to write gay sci-fi. Lovely.

Before that you should definitely head down to SHUNT on Friday for The Last Dance, a beautiful installation by Abigail Conway involving dozens of people dancing to their favourite songs in the long, dark corridor by the entrance. Mass participation and end-of-the-night school disco classics - what's not to love? My five choices, by the by, were:

Nothing Matters When We're Dancing - Magnetic Fields
Everything I do (I do it for you) - Bryan Adams
Massive Nights - The Hold Steady
Naked as we Came - Iron and Wine
Freefalling - Tom Petty

Don't ask me why.

And on the subject of mass participation events I was pleased to discover that Anthony Gormley's plan to have someone standing on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square 24 hours a day for 100 days has been accepted in the latest round proposals. Apparently the incumbents (who will each stand for an hour) will be chosen randomly by Internet lottery. And frankly I think its lovely - the juxtaposition of something so delicate and uncontrollable and ridiculous with the icon symbols of power and History around it will be truly fascinating.

And also if you happen to be around on Saturday there's a couple of outdoor events that I'm involved in as part of the Hide and Seek Festival on the South Bank. First off I'm running a game called Checkpoint (which I've already scribbled a bit about) at 1pm and although its all filled up feel free to come down and have a look at what's going on. And then why not get an ice cream have a gentle stroll and then come back for MPT at 6pm, a marvellous vague event involving freezing, moving and a number of other tantalising activities (if you're intrigued you should email start@mpt01.com).

Beyond that you should all have already gone to see ...Sisters at the Gate and if not, then by god, go now. More on that when I have some time, which, alas, is not right now...

In the meantime all I can offer you is this from the delightfully sunny Cut Copy - who's album In Ghost Colours is a glorious burst of buoyant synthesised goodness that I can't recommend highly enough:

The Last Walk of Carlow Man: Audio Tracks

2008-06-18T03:09:00.000-07:00

Here are the audio tracks for The Last Walk of Carlow Man, a show I created for the Carlow Arts festival in Southern Ireland:

Here I slept while over me time rumbled on
John Tyndall's Blue Sky
I don't need no cryogenics
We're going to write this town like a book

As I explained in the earlier post, each audience member would have all four of these tracks on an MP3 player, which would then (unbeknown to them) be electronically shuffled to produce an entirely different order for each person.

They would then all walk together through the streets of the town, possibly catching glimpses of the figure they were listening to, traces of him left across the city. As they went they would make their own connections between what they were hearing and what they were seeing, writing their own relationship between the two, constructing their own history.

At the end of the show the audience gathered at a hill in the centre of the town, where there was a small wrapped present that they opened to reveal a tiny figure made of mud in a glass jar and a note that said:

So this is it. This is me. This is all that's left of me.

Carefully show this jar to everyone, then shake it up and scatter the remains back into the ground. Back into Carlow.

And that is the End.

Harrison Ford's Face and the Remembrance of Things Past

2008-06-15T04:45:00.000-07:00

I went to see the new Indiana Jones recently. I don't want to get much into reviewing it but as a product it had everything required of it – one-liners, dubious treasure-chasing side-kicks, ravishing locations, spear shaking natives, ludicrously evil freedom-hating foreigners… all held together by Spielberg’s loving and playful understanding of American mythology, genre filmmaking and his own cinematic legacy.

The opening scene (and indeed the whole first half of the movie) have such a knowing assuredness to them you can’t help but be carried along, from the self-deprecatingly silly reference to the first movie in the cross fade from the Paramount logo to a gofer mound through to the perfectly judged introduction of cinema’s favourite archaeologist himself. And then suddenly with a confident jolt in perspective we're skipping lightly past a panorama of 50s America; from area 51, the Manhattan Project, the house of un-American activities and the paranoia-laden infancy of the Cold War in the shadow of WWII. While Spielberg is scrawling Sunday Afternoon adventure cartoons on the landscape of 20st century America he is literally and figuratively in his element. He is his generation’s greatest moviemaker; playfulness without showiness, cleverness without smugness, entertainment without condescension.

Where all this goes to when they get on a plane to South America I don’t know. Perhaps there was a mix up at the airport as it seems by the time they arrived all they had with them were the brainlessly bombastic CGI stunts of The Mummy movies and a beardy John Hurt pretending to be possessed.

All of which is fundamentally beside the point. The whole thing was fine, efficient, great even in places. But something about it left me feeling decidedly, well, sad.

Up to this point it’s probably noticeable that I’ve been talking exclusively about Movies rather than films. For me the two are not the same thing. A movie is a very specific kind of film. The product of a Hollywood system forged in the burgeoning USA of the early 20th century. The Movie is a curiously self-referential thing; isolationist, parasitical, reliant on limited set of genres and conventions (the Western, the War Movie, the Period Movie, The Biopic, the Rom-Com, the Blockbuster), its lifeblood is borrowing, appropriation, referencing, playing with itself, as such its as much about structures and themes as it is about characterisation or the telling of a good story. The movie is about escapism, but not in the sense of disappearing into the world of the movie, it’s about disappearing into the world of Movies. It’s no surprise that the studios themselves became tourist attractions, theme parks; they are the promised land, the thrilling heart of this self-quoting, meta-filmic dreamworld.

The best movie moments are always for me those that revel in this. Like Singing in the Rain, a movie made in order to use the best of MGM’s back catalogue and set within the movie world, where characters float across the studio from set to set. Like the end of Back to the Future II, located within the end of the original film, the stars frantically rushing around earlier versions of themselves. Like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, simultaneously driven by and undermining the conventions of the Western and the Detective movie respectively.

And like the movies they inhabit movie stars are not just actors (some of the best are not really actors at all) they are Stars. Their presence transcends their performance in any particular movie. When you see them on screen the character they play is always knowingly transparent, the Star showing through, their face and their voice imbued with the accumulated memory of every movie you’ve previously seen them in. It’s pretty much a cliché these days to point out that in a Cary Grant film the character is always Cary Grant, the creation of a mysterious man called Archie from Bristol. Similarly the reason Henry Fonda is so devastating as the bad guy in Once Upon a Time in the West is because when you seem him massacring an innocent family, its not just an attractive blue-eyed psychopath that’s killing those children, its Abraham Lincoln , it’s Wyatt Earp, it’s frigging Henry Fonda.

But I think it goes even further than this. I grew up with The Movies. I used to sit with my mum and dad nearly every Sunday evening, watching a movie. Movies are a series of interruptions that punctuate my everyday existence, that mark it. They are both something to remember and a way of remembering. Unlike Prufrock I have undoubtedly measured out my life in Tom Hanks films.

Take Jurassic Park for example, I remember the cinema in Cambridge, I remember it was Elizabeth Dale’s birthday party, I remember the fake coloured footprints that covered the floor and walls of the restaurant we ate in before hand. I remember the front cover of the video we bought later. I remember the first time I went to Universal Studios, being filled with wonder by a giant animatronic triceratops and hearing that familiar soundtrack pumping out of speakers hidden deep in the giant green ferns. Because of the omnipresence of the Movies, because it always sought to exist beyond the limits of any two hours of screen time, that particular film has come to have a presence in my life, to exist as a series of memories and feelings and places; it has come to be a part of my childhood.

And so when I see the Stars of that film, reappearing essentially as themselves in some new movie, I am always carried back to Jurassic Park and to the childhood I associate with it. Like Proust’s little Madeline dipped in tea, the tired lines on Sam Neil’s permanently weary face will always remind me of Elizabeth Dale’s Birthday party, of my front room when I was seven, of the smell of the humid Florida air. I could never dislike a Sam Neill movie however bad it is because they will always have Sam Neill in and Sam Neill makes me think of happy things; and that, fundamentally is the logic of the Star system.

Anyway, back to Harrison Ford. By this logic it should surely be a nice thing to experience the familiar rush of memory on hearing the opening bars of Indiana Jones. Like Jurassic Park it holds many similarly fond childhood memories.

And besides this is a film that consciously wallows in nostalgia. Not merely the nostalgia for the earlier films in the series, but the nostalgia on which those films were founded, for a kind of Sunday Afternoon adventure serial and a wholesome boys action comic that had long since disappeared. Even nostalgia for a kind of filmmaking that was already dying out, and nostalgia for an America before Vietnam and Watergate and everything that has followed. This movie wants you to think fondly of earlier times.

And yet, there was something about this coming back together of all the old elements, the music, the settings, the costume, the stars (and it was in fact the presence of Karen Allen that really got to me), that only made it crushingly apparent that regardless of the circumstances that past could not be recaptured, that time was forever lost.

Although for Proust a single taste can bring the past flooding back, if the entire scene (the table, the house, his aging mother) had been reconfigured, it only would have led to an overwhelming sadness. Only in the fleetingness of these memories can they be sustained, once they are recreated they are destroyed. And looking into the aging faces of Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, was for me like the idea of my parents forever trying to recreate the same joyous holidays we once had, going to the same places, wearing the same clothes, doing the same things. It is futile and hopeless and just plain sad.

So rather than that give me a glimpse of Indiana Jones’ smile glimpsed some terrible new Harrison Ford film, or a few bars of John William’s score misheard in some other piece of music, that for me is the best way to remember Indiana Jones.

The Last Walk of Carlow Man

2008-06-15T04:29:00.000-07:00

[n.b. This is, I’ve just realised, an alarmingly long post, the product of sitting in a bed in a rented apartment in a small town in Ireland while it rains outside. Kind of like Jack Nicholson in The Shining but without the charm, or the imaginary friends (yet). For those who’s time is clearly more precious than mine, this basically a meandering think through a show I recently created for the Carlow Arts Festival called The Last Walk of Carlow Man, a show that mainly consisted of an audio track that I'll upload later, if you like that kind of thing.]

As the constitution of a proper place, scientific writing ceaselessly reduces time, that fugitive element, to the normality of an observable and readable system. In this way, surprises are averted. Proper maintenance of the place eliminates these criminal tricks.

But they return, not only surreptitiously and silently in this scientific activity itself and not only in daily practises which, though they no longer have a discourse, are nonetheless extant, but also in rambling wily everyday stories.
(Michel de Certeau, The Practise of Everyday Life)

We’re going to write this town like a bookTo tell our own story
To make our own history
By god
Cos we’ve had enough of theirs.
(Carlow Man)

When I lived in Edinburgh I used to work as a costumed guide at a place called The Real Mary King’s Close. This was a living museum style tourist attraction based in the original 16th century streets of Edinburgh that now lie buried beneath the royal mile. A catacomb of narrow alleyways and tenement houses once open to the air, once overcrowded slums throbbing with life, now only a ruined memory, a ghost of a city hidden like a dirty secret beneath the gift shops and restaurants of Edinburgh’s ‘Historic Old Town’.

From the beginning the creators of Mary King’s Close attempted to distance themselves from the numerous grubbier, lower budget ghost tours that cluttered up the city. They were slicker, flashier, and actually had a proper historic site, rather than a series of dark spaces lit relatively atmospherically. Fundamentally though, they distances themselves through recourse to the science of History. Unlike the urban myths and gruesome details being touted proudly by various swarthy guides in the back alleyways of the Old Town, Mary King’s Close claimed that it only dealt in fact. They had Historians, researchers, archaeologists who had studied this space and produced case histories of the lives these people led. The management were notoriously rigorous in enforcing this historical accuracy. We had to stick to the facts.

Each guide was assigned one of four characters to play, all real people; a wealthy merchant, a lady, a maid, and, for scruff like me, a plague cleaner called Walter King.

Yet once we were down in this bizarre world of waxworks, flickering candlelight and a soundtrack of half-heard voices echoing through decaying streets, something else went on. In between the facts a little theatrical universe developed. Guides, characters, interacted with each other as they passed in the hallways, invented histories, relationships, stories; the maid who’s been leading you on for years, the merchant in his fine outfit who always gives you a good kicking, your cousin who you helped escape from the clutches of the law. In these informal, improvised little moments a world was created, out of all this History stories formed; ineluctably fiction and memory seeped in. And unsurprisingly this was undoubtedly the audience’s favourite part, these brief chunks of interaction, the little chat as you meet on a corridor, the tiny scene as a character appears in a doorway and disappears off into another corner of the site, suddenly turning these old ruins into something alive, something real.

History on its own, is not to be trusted. It is science’s attempt to pillage everyday experience an place it in the hands of experts. Dressed up in footnotes and date and facts and citations, it claims for itself a position of objectivity through verifiability. History claims to look at the evidence and says what it sees, to be a window onto the past.

Yet history (like all sciences according to De Certeau) is innately flawed. History isolates chunks of the past (moments or characters or phases), removes them from the vast, uncontrollable, indescribable continuum of time and places them in historian’s laboratory, where they can be detailed, and dissected and explained. Yet the instant these particular points are amputated they stop being what they are and become something else. They become merely facets of a historical theory, rewritten in the artificial language of the scientist. And the historian, the expert, uses these nuggets of newly isolated and identified historical fact to tell his (and it is usually his) own truth.

As an example look at history’s use of dates. Dates which appear the most transparent and factual part of the historian’s language. And yet the isolation of a date, pulled from infinite eddy of things happening around it and attached to a single event, is as political as you can imagine. The ultimate example of this is of course September 11th, a date appropriated as the name of an event, silencing other events around it, silencing even other events backwards through time, (September 11th 1973, for example); through the process of isolating this single event in time, it tells a very specific story about foreign aggression and America’s right to defend itself.

Time is reduced to a series of points through which a line can be drawn, telling a very particular, narrow story with all the dictatorial force of scientific fact. The true victors don’t need to do anything as crass as rewrite history, the merely need to hand it over to historians, to science. They will fish moments from the reservoir of time and memory, carve them up, season them with footnotes and primary sources, and serve them back the people as something that no longer belongs to them, something they must swallow because its good for them. As Walter Benjamin said:

The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Which brings us (eventually) to The Last Walk of Carlow Man, a show commissioned from me by Eigse, an arts festival in the small Irish town of Carlow, about an hours drive south of Dublin. At the point at which I was asked to do a show I had no idea what to do, something as terrifying as it is exciting.

Instinctively I felt I wanted to create something that was site-specific in the original meaning of the term; a show that was authentically a product of that specific location, of that specific town. And in order to do this as a one-time History student at University, my first thought is to rush to the history books (and, well, Wikipedia).

I read about wars, revolutions, uprisings, massacres, great figures of science and literature, all of which had drifted through this town, leaving little in their wake today but a scattering of plaques and one wall of a ruined Norman castle. And that was essentially the problem – all this history didn’t reflect the town today. It had been dislocated from the town, translated into the language of science, estranged from Carlow.

And so without me ever really meaning it to be, the show became an attempt to counteract that. It became an anti-history, what Walter Benjamin might call a tiger’s leap into the past, tearing up history as written. It was an attempt at least to rewrite the history of Carlow as a ‘rambling wily, everyday story’. Like the stories we invented at Mary King’s Close, I wanted to allow the fictional, the personal, the anecdotal, the rhetorical flourishes, the myths, the lies, the jokes to permeate the science of history; to turn it back into something belonging to everyday life.

The way this happened was through the creation of a character who saw history the way we see our own past, as half-remembered things that actually happened to us. I invented a bog man. Preserved in the peat. Someone 5000 years old, who had listened to time rumbling on above him, who knew everything with the force of memory; as scraps, fragments, bits and pieces all jumbled together. And I wrote for him a series of rambling stories that he would tell as he wondered through the modern day streets of the city, the audience listening on headphones and catches glimpses of him as they went; a pair of muddy handprints on a shop window, a figure disappearing glimpsed in the distance on the far bank of a river, a pair of muddy shoes abandoned by a park bench.

Right from the get-go I didn’t want there to be any specific linear relationship between what the audience was hearing and what they were seeing. I didn’t want him to be commenting specifically on what he was seeing, as is essentially the purpose of a historical audio guide. I wanted the audience to be given the freedom to make their own connections. I wanted them to forge their own history, through the relationship between the rambling stories they were listening to and the landscape they were walking through. And then halfway through the process, around the time I started writing some ridiculous article for the Guardian about how brilliant the shuffle function on an ipod is, I suddenly stumbled upon a way to make this sense of personal ownership even more foregrounded. The rambling monologue would be divided into a series of sections, all of which could be fitted together in any order, so that by simply turning on the shuffle function on the MP3 player each audience member would have a totally unique experience of the show, their own story, that they could fit to the world around them. These half true half fictional stories of the past would be entirely detached from historical fact, given to the audience to write back over the town as they saw it; to create their own map of the town and of the past.

So that was the idea, and if you’ve managed to make it this far you’re hopefully wondering how it worked out. Well, it’s Saturday [n.b. at least it was when I wrote this] and I have one night left, after a week in my own head I’m dreaming of getting back to London. I need the grime and the irritatingly knowing irony of someone who’s able to wear horrid plastic sunglasses indoors and know they get can get away with it because they’re so damn pretty. I need its thrilling messiness and the careless conversation of people I care about. I need cinemas and book shops and theatres, not necessarily to go to them but just to be reassured that they’re there. Suffice to say, I’m about ready to go home.

In terms of the show I think probably in the haste of having to put together the little installations hidden along the route in just a few days I relied too heavily on the kind of lazy whimsy that has been site-specific theatre’s stock-in-trade since time began; mysterious figures moving slowly and enigmatically in the distance, birthday candles and red balloons and party hats and little notes pinned in incongruous places. As far the text however, I was generally pretty pleased. It’s been a while since I’ve actually tried to write something quite so self-contained and complete and, well, playlike and I think it went ok. Chris, who performed it, was able to get something that felt relatively authentic out of my lame attempts at some kind of Irishness and with only that audio track and my mix tape of possible musical ideas, Stephen Dobbie created a beautiful, perfectly judged musical score that, as so often, turned the whole thing into something a little magical.

I’ve uploaded the four tracks and I'll put them up here later, so please do go and have a listen and if (for any reason) you might want a transcript let me know and I’m happy to send you one over.

So generally I’m happy. A good week, which, Irish border control notwithstanding, should leave me with a whole bunch of MP3 players to continue to experiment with. So, as always, watch this space.

"They haven't put a plaque up yet, but they will do"

2008-06-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

[From The Last Walk of Carlow Man, at Eigse next week, if anyone happens to find themselves in Southern Ireland. I'll explain more about the ideas behind it once the whole thing is done - but for now take a read of this and this and this]

Here
Look around you
Here
Here it was
On this spot
Here it happened
Right here
Here’s where it went down
Here’s where we they did the deed
Here’s where the west was won
Oh yes
This is it
Or was it over there?
No
No it was here
This is definitely the place
Definitely
Down here’s where they hid the body
And here’s where he told her he loved her
Here’s where they said goodbye
Here’s where it first began
That’s where it finally ended
Here’s where they built that fucking awful statue
Here’s where they built that fort that burnt down
Here’s where there was a lake
And the town they named after a lake
Here’s where he found out
Here’s where they chained him up
Here’s where they strung him up and 20, 000 watched them
Here’s where they ran to
Here
Here it is
Here’s where the war started
Over there’s where the peace was signed
In that corner the saviour was born
Down that street the massacre happened
In that alleyway he was conceived on a dark night but they were just kids and they didn’t know any better
That street there ran with blood for two days
Ran with blood
Rivers of it
Rivers
And Here’s where the fire started
Here’s where the soldiers hid
Here’s where the prisoners hid
Here’s where the children hid
Here’s where there be monsters
Here’s where I dropped my hat
No
Here’s where they stole my hat
Here’s where I spilt my drink
Over there’s where I realised I’d left something at home and would have to go back and get it even though I didn’t have time
Here’s where I killed him
Here’s where I saved her
Here
Here is definitely where it happened
This
This
This is definitely the place

They haven’t put a plaque up yet
But they will do
They will do

T - 61 Days and counting

2008-06-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

So today the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Programme was released. In a break with tradition, this year the powers that be (probably directed by their brand new lord and master) have done without the usual attractive-woman-doing-something-stupid-and-grinning-stupidly cover shot, replaced instead with a few piercingly mediocre computer generated images on a sea green background you could positively drown in.

The largest of these images is interestingly a camera surrounded by stars. What could the designers be trying to tell us? Is this the first inclings of the Fringe's inevitable moment of anagnorisis? A realisation that it has bartered away any sense of integrity in its fame-thirsty scramble for bigger sponsors, bigger stars and higher prices, fostering a fetid atmosphere of hype and self-promotion that values the disposable and the gimmicky over the difficult and delicate, the flash and the glib and the loud over the small and the thoughtful and the quiet? Is this the moment at which the Fringe catches a glimpse of itself in the mirrored face of one its Scotsman sponsored awards and sees in a moment of excruitating sadness (like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, like Ricky Gervais in the Christmas special of Extras) what it has truly become?

Probably not:

There are 2,088 shows this year, only slightly higher than last year's 2,050

I also want to just quickly comment on this from the New Director Jon Morgan:

Because it's not programmed and not curated, performers can say what they like. It's democratic and so you get a much better reflection of what's going on in the world and what issues are preoccupying performers. So in that sense, it's a litmus test of what's happening in the world.

There's little that's truly democratic about the fringe.

The fringe is the kind of democracy that you buy into. It's creative freedom available only to those who can afford their place in a venue, a hostel, the venue programme and the fringe programme along with trifling little things like props, costumes, publicity and, well, actors. And while it may avoid what Morgan seems to be suggesting are the dangerous whims of artistic directors or programmers, it doesn't replace them with a Utopia of creative freedom but with the laws of the market; if you can buy your place you're in. And its a rare kind of performer or artist who can ride the crest of this particular late capitalist wave.

It's actually a very narrow band of voices that you'll find at the festival (even narrower following the departure of Aurora Nova). And you can almost guarantee that large percentage of the most exciting will be funded through either by a regional producing house or by the Arts Council or an international equivalent; as important a form of selection as any directorial curation.

And this is all before you take into account that the Edinburgh model is certainly conducive to only a very limited spectrum of theatrical forms and styles. That being crammed into a small sweaty black box space, having to perform for at least a week consistently to get a spot, that being on at 3 in the afternoon and being watched by an audience who are cramming you in between Paul Merton's Impro All Stars and Appalling Acts of Genocide: The Musical, that all of this might inhibit a whole panoply of voices in Morgan's Democracy from wanting to ride this particular train.

And certainly what I've seen in programming for the Forest are the extraordinary number of companies who would never dream of going to Edinburgh, especially those that have been once and been burnt badly.

What the presence of an artistic director allows you to do is to select and support work from a far broader spectrum of potential companies and artists than that dictated by Edinburgh's big fat bottom line. It allows you to give companies the space and circumstances they need to have their voices heard. It's fighting against the survival of the fittest, against he who shouts the loudest wins; because who says that the fittest or the loudest have the most to say?

Curation gives a leg up, and a platform and a microphone to those that need it. And that may not be the kind of morally bankrupt libertarian notion of democracy that we all seem inured to, but I think in the arts at least that's a good thing.

And at their launch the fringe did manage to find two young (you guessed it) women to clad stupidly and make do stupid things, so not much has really changed after all.

Invite

2008-05-23T03:03:00.000-07:00

Just a very quick one to say I'm running a discussion down at BAC today about the BURST festival. It's completely free so if you fancy a free glass of wine and a bit of a chat do pop down and say hi.

6.30 today (Friday).

BURST Festival: The Grand Hall

2008-05-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

[A piece I wrote for BAC BURST Blog about the building's Grand Hall, for those who know it and those who don't]

Pull open the small wooden doors into the grand hall and the first thing that strikes you is the bigness.

The Grand Hall is vast

This feeling only grows as you step echoingly out into its emptiness. You pull away from the safety of the low ceilinged entrance into the full hugeness of the main hall, cast adrift in an ocean of space.

The Grand Hall is really fucking vast.

It is shiny wooden floorboads racing off into the distance. It is arches rearing up into the sky. It is a crane your neck your neck up up upwards vaulted ceiling. It is a pipe organ stolen from the gods. It is door after door after door after door. It is window after window after window. It is dizzying. Vertigo-inducing. It is symphonic.

It is vulgar in its bigness. Bigness is all it seems to strive for. Look closer and it is tattered and sad around the edges. Cracked panes of glass. Peeling paint. Smashed ceiling panels revealing the gaping blackness of the attic above. Discarded wires and microphones and out of date sound equipment litter its corners. It is not quite nice enough to be grand or regal or majestic, not quite derelict enough to be eerie or resonant or atmospheric. It is more cumbersome than it is colossal. More sad than melancholic. More injured than ruined. It is the girl with the hunched shoulders forced to play netball against her will. It is Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in history, with his glasses, and his hand-made shoes and his quiet, lonely smile staring out from an old black and white photo.

The Grand Hall is almost apologetically big. Cumbersome. And though we are dwarfed by it, tiny and child-like and insignificant, you can’t help but have a tenderness towards this gentle giant. This fragile, elephantine creature.

These are some of the things I remember:

I have seen the severed arm of a polystyrene angel bathed in dusty white light in front of a lighting rig hanging in the darkness

I have watched an army of tiny well dressed children jumping up and down in front of row upon row upon row of empty chairs

I have seen cycled across its squeaking, whirring floor in great glorious circles in an otherwise empty building

I have stood at its centre, staring out at nothing, listening to music

Here are some things I’d like to see:

A ladder made of white bed sheets dropping gently to the ground from one of the holes in high, high up in the ceiling

Two people standing at opposite ends of the hall, in almost total darkness, watching each other, listening quietly to the same piece of music played on headphones

A giant game of tag

A bed to lie on in the middle of the empty hall and listen to the story of Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in history

BURST Festival: Love Song Dedication (Rosie Dennis)

2008-05-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

How fucking romantic. All the stars are out. Twinkling, twinkling, twinkling. Fluttering about.

Stephen Merritt’s low drawl is a bruised apple wrapped in a thick hard layer of treacly sarcasm. At its heart it’s soft and wounded and desperate for love.

Rosie Dennis stands in an empty spotlight in a shiny green top. She moves, not in time to the music but with it. She is hard and definite and sharp and precise, but this jagged physicality is only the outward display of something gentler, something softer, something hearbreakingly familiar.

Someone once did a study that showed that the things we are most disturbed by are the things most like ourselves. Zombies, aliens, robots, ghosts - things that are like us but not quite us. Things ever so slightly estranged. Unreal.

This is I think why Rosie Dennis unique style is so utterly engaging. Her movements are so familiar. The ticks, the shakes, the tension, the moments of sudden release, like someone on the verge of a suffocating panic attack, like Ian Curtis on the verge of a seizure, like anyone swallowing their anger and their pain and their frustration and carrying on with what they were doing. The same could be said of her words, a looping, repetitive anxious chatter, she stutters through words and sentences with an all-too-familiar mixture of fear and confidence; so very sure you want to say something, not sure exactly how to say it, not sure if anyone will want to listen. Words get repeated, fragments of sentences appear and reappear; the whole thing feels like a sea of half explained ideas, washing relentlessly against the shore.

All of this everyday anxiety, uncertainty, tension, sadness is caught mid flight - wrapped in the rigid confines of Rosie’s unerringly exact performance. All that loose, messy, human chaos replicated delicately and precisely. Despite the crystallized beauty of her carefully constructed movements and her finely crafted text, we can see through this polished exterior to the soft, tender, bruised emotions at its heart. It is our own sadness, our own yearnings, our own loves, just made ever so slightly estranged. Unreal.

This show, like Hitting a Brick Wall (the other part of this double bill) is a show that presents its heartbreaking, life-affirming honesty with a care and a thoughtfulness and a distance that is almost irresistible.

I don’t remember what exactly Rosie sang at the end of this show, her own song, her own love song dedication, I just remember that in its tender, trusting, openness (a little bit beautiful, a little bit rubbish, but totally brutally open) it felt like anything I’ve ever done for someone I truly love.

To Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting

2008-05-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Sadiq Khan,

I am writing regarding the vote in the commons on the human fertilisation and embryology bill tomorrow. I'd urge you to support the opinion of the British Medical Association, The royal college of obstetrics and gynaecology, the royal college of nurses and the commons own Science and technology committee by voting against any reduction in the week limit for late-term abortions.

The Tory MP Nadine Dorries has led a horribly dishonest campaign, supported by the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, that has distorted facts, made baseless appeals to emotion and outright lied in order to convince people of the need for a reduction. As numerous articles (including one in the Guardian today) and online at websites such as bloggerheads and rhetorically speaking have demonstrated, this campaign has utterly failed to come up with any decent reason for a reduction of any length and is led and funded by people who's interest in a reduction to 20 or 22 weeks is fundamentally undermined by their support of greater reductions (some who support the abolition of abortion altogether).

This minority campaign cannot be allowed to succeed, for the sake of women's right to choose and to demonstrate that this kind of malicious, dishonest lobbying will not prosper. I hope that you will be in parliament to vote against reduction in the 24 week limit.

Yours sincerely,

Andy Field

[If you agree please do the same and email your MP. It takes no more than a couple of minutes.]

BURST Festival: Und

2008-05-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

[once again, this a show from BAC's BURST festival and I work at BAC. So approach me with due caution, like an untrustworthy llama.]

I came to this show with a nervous trepidation, prepared to be sat anxiously bored, longing to love it but ultimately failing.

This is a show about aging. This is a show about growing old, about being old. This is a show made by old people. And I like being young.

I like being young and naive and hopeful and filled with nervous energy. I like being lost in daydreams of the future. I like to be child. I like to pretend. I like fall in love too often and too easily. I like to play run or jump or dance to the point of exhilarating, euphoric exhaustion. I like to imagine that I still have most of my life to lead. And behind all of this there’s probably a crushingly, suffocating fear that one day I’ll die and it’ll be all over. And the thought of being old, of knowing that you’ve had your shot at most things, that you’re body won’t move like that again, that you’re not going to be a footballer or a 400 metre runner or an Oscar winning director, that terrifies me.

And so I’ve generally tried to avoid thinking about being old. I’ve never watched Harold and Maud. I’ve imagined that one day I’ll undergo some evolution into someone who is old and happy and suddenly nothing will please me more than a good book and the remembering all the things I once did. And so I try to imagine old people are like another species, The Elderly.

All of which was the baggage I trawled behind me as I took my seat meekly in the audience for Und.

And initially things looked like they were panning out as grimly anticipated. There was a man, an old man, with a face set into a cartoon grimmace, a caricature of a person (an Elderly, in its natural habitat), walking slowly, solemnly in a square across the bare stage. But then something changed. In a moment of spectacular, staggering beauty he began to skip. His face never moved a muscle and yet everything was different. Now that same grimmace was the knowing disguise of an entirely different person, no longer a hollow vision of An Old Person, but someone.

In a moment of marvellous (and long, long overdue) epiphany I suddenly realised that in 20, 30, 40 years time I will exactly as I do now. I am still, fundamentally, the same anxious, passionate, arrogant person I was 20 years ago, sitting in Class 2 longing for the teacher to ask me a question. I will always be that person. When I am 60 I will want to skip and fall in love too easily and become a rock star and I’ll still think I’m right about everything and I’ll still be hugely daunted by anyone who seems righter than me. One day I’ll wake up and it’ll be my sixtieth birthday and I’ll wonder how the hell I got here. And it’ll be terrifying and wonderful in equal measure.

That’s what this show is full of. People like me. Proud people, fragile people, funny people, sexy people. People full of wit and joy and life, moving across a bare stage, looking us in the eye and being who they are.

Like Jerome Bel, the beauty of it comes from their everydayness. From a simplicity, a transparency, that allows us to gaze out at a group of people not unlike ourselves, doing something we could do, marvelling at the sameness of all of us. At the delicacy and grace and wit that we are all able to conjure.

On the day of the first day of the show we also had a Tea Dance here. A lot of the cast from Und went along. One of the women from the show was asked if she was going to be there and she responded with a look of horror and asked why would she want to come all the way to England to hang out with a bunch of old people. That’ll be me. For better or for worse that’s who I’ll always be.

Things that should be banned in theatre part the ninth

2008-05-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

Masks that look like this.

BURST

2008-05-15T06:54:00.001-07:00

[A couple of reviews from BAC's BURST festival, probably a few more to follow. Please note as always that I work for BAC, so my otherwise cast iron objectivity, crystal clear thinking and sparkling prose count for absolutely nothing.]

Astronaut (Tim Atack)

This show begins in darkness. A thick velvety darkness, comforting and suffocating in equal measure; its the kind of darkness you can get lost in. That’s what space looks like from the moon. The whiteness of the dusty surface meaning the stars aren’t visible and so everything is enveloped in an unending blanket of utter blackness, punctured only by a tiny blue and white marble hanging in the emptiness like some kind of marvellous, absurd jewel.

This is the landscape of Tim Atack’s fragile, gentle little show. This hinterland of staggeringly beautiful emptiness. A place that’s only ever been occupied by a handful of lonely Americans.

With a precise simplicity Astronaut delicately summons this twilight zone precariously balanced between life and death. Without any sense of bombast or drama (aware that the stories are big enough already) Tim asks one simple question - if you were stranded out there, waiting less than half an hour to die in a place further away than anyone has ever died before, cut off from anybody else, what would you do? What would you sing? It’s a question as simple, beautiful and profound as its telling.

I suppose though, as someone pointed out to me, the one flaw with this show is one I didn’t even really think about at the time. That, as the show itself points out, there were always two men on the moon, and the question of how you would die when someone else was around is a very different one, and perhaps not the one Tim is interested in. And though that incongruity does undermine slightly the transparent simplicity of the set-up, this is nonetheless a completely beguiling little show.

The Smile Off Your Face (Ontroerend Goed)

Like Rotozaza’s Etiquette, one of the nicest things you can do with this show is simply watch people participating. Sit in the lobby and you can watch person after person (at regular 5 minute intervals) wheeled back into the lobby, hands tied in front of them, melting in the seat of their wheelchair. They get up woozily, smiling with swooning embarassment; trying to hold on to the memory of what’s just happened, trying not to let it all slip away.

In almost all of them, there’s definitely a reluctance for this show to end. I certainly did’t want to leave its bizarre, beautiful world and the person I went with came out and wanted to go buy a ticket to go straight back in again.

I don’t think this reaction is simply because there is something completely wonderful about being blindfolded and wheeled through a series of tantalisingly intimate, sensous encounters; being thrown against a wall, having your face stroked by a stranger, the smell of cinnamon and the sound of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game. All of this is almost relentlessly lovely but I think there’s something darker to it too. At the heart of all this touching and talking and tasting is a heartbreaking sadness that you don’t want to have to confront.

Throughout every delicate embrace and every whispered laugh and every longing gaze, you are aware you are but another anonymous figure in a relentless conveyor belt - something that is made startling apparent in the show’s cinematically majestic final image. We are consumers, desperately longing for an intimacy we can’t have - falling through space, reaching out for a hand to hold as we go. And so despite falling for the voice whispering questions to you as you lie together, legs tangled, on a bed, a niggling thorn somewhere at the back of your head tells you that there is terrible hollow sadness to this encounter.

And yet perhaps in our awareness of this fact something else is created. You know there is a falseness to this intimacy, and they know you know. And so for a few minutes you can escape from everything else and indulge in this wonderful lie. At that point it becomes something other than theatre, something other than therapy, something that’s just gloriously, deliriously other. And maybe that’s a good description of almost all the best theatre.

My Own Post-Election Blues

2008-05-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

There have been an accumulating series of things that have led me to be here typing this at quarter past one in the morning. It's like the scene in the movie where fate's warnings grow increasingly transparent as our beloved hero continues to blunder aimlessly on in spite of the growing sense of foreboding and the no-doubt tension-laden string music accompanying him. Either that or the adage about needing to see the same thing three times before acting on it is in my case completely accurate and I am but more statistical fodder for communications departments up and down the country demanding bigger marketing budgets. Either way, I am here.

It started like this: the other day London had an election you might have heard about - a big one they say, the biggest yet - and I didn't vote. I read the papers and the blogs, I joined in vigorously with various people venting their incredulity that Johnson (don't mention the B word) might win, I admired the clever advertising on the tube, I grew increasingly, despairingly, hopelessly frustrated by the poisonous partisan bullshit and hyperbole churned out on an industrial scale by the Evening Standard papers and clustered bombed into Greater London... and yet when it came to it I did nothing. I didn't even register - I didn't even look into it to see how hard it would be (the answer I would imagine being 'not very, you lazy little turd').

Now I could try and justify this in a series of ways: I could talk about a feeling of despair, of a sense of futility in the fact that both sides had once essentially chosen to field the only politician they have left with what might have once been considered character, in the shameless hope that some superficial appeal to personality might conceal the negligible differences between them. I could mention my unease at the crass, unthinking response of so many people on the left to even the idea of Boris Johnson becoming Mayor (fuelled by uncontextualised quotes, exaggerated claims of wrongdoing and naked class prejudice); which is not to say that I am by any means his biggest fan (his stance on gay marriage is frankly archaic) but merely that it makes me hugely uncomfortable when people adopt any attitude based almost entirely on wilful ignorance and instinctive dislike of plummy toffs.

I wish also that I could talk about red devils and shallow blue seas. About having nothing but contempt for Cameron's more New Labour than New Labour style with a spot of shameless playing to the old right galleries. About my seething, incredulous anger at the contempt, the shambolic, two-faced, I-did-what-I-thought-was-right arrogance of a New Labour government willing at every stage to directly contradict themselves, to avoid any responsibility for their actions, to cannibalise any last vestiges of respect for their own ideals or the people who elected them in the hope of squeezing a few more votes out of middle England and a few more pounds out of a handful of people who are wealthy beyond any conceivable sense of human decency. I wish I could talk about my frustration that regardless of the depths that they are willing to sink to, the shamefacedness with which they will change their spots in front of our eyes, the number of poorly armoured British soldiers wandering around sandy parts of the world being shot at, they know that a sizeable chunk of the British population will vote for them anyway because they're not the tories - what do you think the tories are? The Nazgul? Margaret Thatcher's cabinet from the 1980s just waiting to unzip their costumes and tear the miners a new arsehole? And how could either situation be worse than the 'labour' government that we have now; a government that takes money from the working single mothers, that conjoins itself like some enfeebled twin to the most right-wing government the US has seen in the last 50 years, that tightens drug laws against legal and medical advice to 'send a message', that forces the serious fraud office to drop investigations because it might upset Saudi Arabia.

I could talk about all this and more but if I'm brutally, crushingly honest this is reasoned despair is much of a muchness. In the end I didn't vote because I was apathetic, self-involved and had seemingly more important things on my mind. Now from all of the above you'd think (hell, I'd think) I'm someone who gives a damn. I can spend 8 weeks completing an almost endless series of funding applications but I can't even rouse myself to type 'voter registration UK' into google when I sit in front of a computer for 10 hours a day.

As I consumed the results flying in all this began to gnaw away at me slightly. What is it that I'm doing exactly? Beyond an almost sociopathic level of personal ambition what is it all for? (earnest questions I know but it's now 2 in the morning and, unlike Bill Hicks, I can't guarantee there will be dick jokes ensuing to break up all the well-meaning introspection. Sorry)

Politics was a subject not discussed in our house. At university I treated anyone who wanted to go into student politics in much the same way you might treat someone if you'd just found out they watched the film Saw II 17 times. I was all for the kind of cynical posturing that comes from almost having understood everyone from Walter Benjamin to Judith Butler but at the end of the day I was all delicate sneer and no trousers. And certainly I know more now. More about a lot of things. I'm sure I can certainly talk a good outrage but always without really doing much about it.

Which is where we've got to with all the opening talk about messages and signposts.

First up I recently went to see Laurie Anderson's Homeland. I was all kinds of things during this show. I was bored. I was tired. I was transfixed. I was impressed. I was heartbroken. It is a show fizzing with so much honesty and life and scale and ambition and wit and power it can barely contain it; it's like an overfilled sack, ideas escaping all the time, leaking out into the crowded rows of the auditorium faster than you can get a hold of them. Yet there was one thing that stuck. That hit me like bowling ball square in my gut. At one point, in a heavily synthesised 'male' voice that shivered frustration and cynicism and hope and despair she said (something along the lines of):

Remember that scene in the old movie, in the saloon. Someone runs in, the doors swinging behind them; everything stop, the barman stops polishing, the poker plays pause mid hand. And he shouts 'There's trouble at the mine!' And everyone leaves. Everyone rushes out to help. Well, there's trouble at the mine! There's trouble at the mine!

Now obviously my butchering of her words is doing her no favours (in fact there's probably a crack team of libel lawyers assembling in the driveway as we speak) but there was something in that cry (in its pleading, hopelessly desperation) and the wall of stillness that greeted it that skewered me. It was like watching someone run into a brick wall in the hope that eventually it might fall down. It was every shot we've seen of an Iraqi mother screaming into the face of a soldier who doesn't understand her. It was over a million people marching on London against the war. It was everyone that didn't. It was the six people who continue to sit with Brian Haw in Parliament Square. It was Kitty Genovese. It was every time I've lied to someone who's asked me for change because I don't want to just tell them I don't want to give them anything. It was, in short, an accusation that went through me like a carving knife; I felt filleted.

And then tonight, while I'm still carrying the memory of that around like an open wound, I watched Taking Liberties. Now it's not necessarily a great film. Or even a really good one. But you should all absolutely watch it. As a simple, effective summation of the liberties poached from us over the last 10 years its utterly effective. What's equally effective however are the various figures who litter the film. The young sisters arrested on a disused runway at an airport in the midlands. The women who visit people under house arrest. The jurors from the scandalously false ricin plot trial who still visit and talk with one of those people who's life was ruined by being accused of involvement. The handful of protesters in Brighton picketing a US arms manufacturer every Wednesday. Mark Thomas and his motley crew of solo protesters... it goes on.

These are the people. This is what its going to take to achieve anywhere near what we need to. Not necessarily through their means but through their attitude. Through a courageous, relentless, meaningful sense of agency. Not through writing posts about conceptual protests on one's sparsely read website.

For me, I think the realisation is that its all about joining the dots. It's about channelling everything that I have come to start truly believing in over the last few years into the work that I am creating in some meaningful sense. That doesn't mean creating pieces of verbatim drama or choreographed protests. I still believe absolutely in the forms I want theatre to take. But I think its about finding ways for those forms to convey myself more fully - morally, politically, emotionally. For them to feel like they mean something valuable, that they are doing something valuable. It's about forgoing any sense of work/life balance, because the two should be kind of the same thing.

It also means I'm going to get off my ass and start voting. And start protesting the things I think deserve protesting. And it also means doing some other things, that I shall endeavour to start doing.

In short this is somewhat of a long overdue epiphany, mainly about focus. About what I believe in and what I intend to do about that. All of which was clarified rather neatly (all too neatly really and I'm not at all proud that this has any part to play in anything I'm boldly daring to call an epiphany) by the final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which the ever-brilliant Bradley Whitford says this:

I just stood in Jack's office and said, "Screw friendship, screw honor, screw patriotism." That's how I talked about myself. And then I added, "We just lost the franchise." That's how I talked about Matt, who would stand in front of a train for any of us, including you while you're screwing Luke. He's been threatened by the Network, compromised by me, brow-beaten by you, heart-broken by Wes, and he's still standing up. Why am I quitting? Cause they're gonna start shooting at him and I'm gonna be standing next to him when they do. You're a talented girl, have a good show this week.

And what struck me about this was not Aaron Sorkin's unending ability to be able phone in an empassioned, barnstorming morality speech in his sleep. It was that I'd like to create theatre or at least do something that might put me in a situation where I am given the choice to stand up for something I believe in. That what I do might be meaningful enough (and courageous enough) that I might be given the opportunity to prove honorable. Today I found myself almost threatening to quit over which desk I had in the office and there is absolutely zero honorable about that.

I want to be doing something that I feel really means something. To create work that, like Homeland, genuinely tries to say everything that I think. That isn't just nice or clever or a good idea. Because I don't want theatre to be an occupation; I want my theatre to be a politics, a way of living, a version of myself existing out in the world that deserves standing up for. But more than this, I want to actually live in a way that is a part of the same thing; that is an extension of the morals or the politics that I espouse and the theatre that I make. And as worthy as all that may sound, I really mean it. And hopefully from now on I can begin to do something about it.

That was the season that was - Winter edition

2008-04-09T00:37:00.000-07:00

Time.

My goodness.

It was on the rolling stones side. It was Dylan's enemy. It was the name of a computer company who's mid 90s television jingle is at present stampeding round my head causing untold damage to better memories.

Time, they say, travels like an arrow - in my case that arrow is definitely fired from a high-powered crossbow held in the delicate hands of an 8 year old South African girl killing her first warthog while her father looks on admiringly. Which is as much as to say that I have been alarmingly busy.

Our show (and the plural in that is now consecrated by a beautifully designed website (not by us I hasten to add)) in Brighton is now but a few weeks away. Everything is looking good - the response to the hours spent trawling from shop to shop asking people if they wanted to be involved were largely life-affirmingly enthusiastic with the one magnificent exception of a huge, leather jacketed guy who owned a punk clothing store who let me natter my nervous introduction before cutting me in two with a resigned sigh and the line 'to be honest mate, I fucking hate the Brighton festival'. Can't say fairer than that. Apparently someone wants to interview us in a bath, which I'm not entirely sure about - festival or no festival that's the kind of try-hard wackiness I'm not sure I can get on board with.

Meanwhile I've been working on a couple of smaller things in London. Monday we did a Scratch of a new idea at BAC that involved the audience writing each other letters. In some ways its an extension of some of the reasoning behind using disposable cameras in the Brighton show - the fascination with finding ways to render the experience of the show lingeringly incomplete. To leave a thin thread of inbetween time trailing off into your real life; a letter from a stranger landing on your door almost after you've forgotten the whole experience. I wrote some text for it so I'll stick that up a bit later.

I'm also heading down to SHUNT Vaults next Wednesday for the Hide+Seek Sandpit. I'm creating a game that came about from the thought of how I could create a show that took advantage of the narrow footbridge linking the South Bank and Embankment and the memory that brought plopping to the surface of visiting the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin at the age of about 15. Despite not have eaten for about a week through a potent combination of staggering cheapness and horror at the youth hostel gunk served up each night (food that rightly deserved the to be described rather terrifyingly as ambiguous), I remember being completely mesmerised by the little private museum - bowled over by the life-affirming, creative brilliance of the ways in which people found of smuggling themselves and others from one side of the divided city to the other. Disguised as car seats, in home-made hand-gliders, in tunnels built over months of relentless work - this all to me feels like a kind of art or theatre more profound and meaningful than most of the stale and self important political theatre I've sat through. So anyway, do come along next Wednesday - it should be fun at the very least, involving various fragments of an installation being dismantled and smuggled across the artfully lit interior of SHUNT to be reassembled elsewhere, avoiding accusing eyes of an army of checkpoint guards out to stop you.

I've also been continuing to work on the Forest Fringe for August (we have a few very exciting companies lined up to do very exciting things now but are always looking for anyone else that has a good idea) and a show for the Carlow Arts Festival in May about a 5000 year old bog man on his birthday. In between that I managed to spend a fascinating day with Chris Goode and various other delightful people exploring ideas of space - at which it occurred to me that one of the strangest things about the internet is the fact that we seem to remain so utterly inept at describing, mangling metaphors in our attempts to stretch them over the top of something too large and indescribable to be contained by them. You know when people will quite contentedly talk about surfing the web (or is it net) that we're still struggling with a language for this thing we call the internet. (Meanwhile the internet (or teh internets) has quietly began creating its own language.)

I've also had the chance to see some (though not enough) theatre as well so, very quickly... Random by Debbie Tucker Green was sadly somewhat of a disappointment after the staggeringly brilliant Generations, it started beautifully - a simply-delivered joyously dissonant assortment of characters all voiced by a single actress - but quickly seemed to slide towards something much more linear and much less interesting as the tragedy of the narrative overwhelmed the excitement of its telling.

On the other hand, Mel Wilson's new show* (her last being another one of my absolute favourite things last year) is in some ways already in its very early stages even more brilliant and exciting than Simple Girl. Like that earlier show, Enter the Dame revels in the discordance between a strange, almost romantic, almost dreamlike (and in this case kind of dystopian) otherness and the delicate, honest and utterly mundane details of our own everyday existence. Like few other people Mel seems aware of what's possible in combining the rich, literary beauty of good writing with a kind of messy, fragmented and authentic liveness; no one can describe squeezing up against a packet of frozen scampi to let someone pass you in the narrow aisle of a supermarket with the rich, alluring beauty that Mel does. But in Enter the Dame she seems to go further (or at least be trying to) than the last show - inviting the audience themselves to exist in this mesmerising liminal space between desperately romatic and the utterly mundane. Set out as an intimate circle of tables and chairs, the lighting turns us into evocative half-lit shadows in a smokey bar; there's also some lovely moments of participation that can undoubtedly be explored more as the show develops. All in all a lovely, lovely piece that I can't wait to see again.

So yes, it's all been a little, well, deliriously busy - but in a good way, and accompanied by a soundtrack of effortlessly brilliant pop from a band called the Wave Pictures who are my new favourite thing. A divinely simple three-piece, they sing songs full of delicate beautiful stories that meander their way under your skin before whiplashing back into a fiercely churning chorus or an magnificently delivered punchline. They're like Sunday afternoon as a thirteen year old in music-form, or the band Hanson after they've been locked in a basement with Morrissey for five years. They are in short utterly wonderful and as they're on tour at the moment I urge you to go find them - or for those in London wait till May when I've persuaded BAC to give them a free gig in the cafe, which I have to say I am looking forward to like little else.

So that's about it for now - more soon though. I promise.

[*probably at this stage I need what I think is this sites very first disclaimer in that Mel's show was a scratch at BAC which, I think most people seem to know, is where I work]

Just when you thought that your ability to be staggered by the absurdity of humanity had been destroyed by life in London something comes along and...

2008-03-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

Back soon with some real content but just wanted to highlight this after six months of the inquest into the death of princess Diana:

[ Coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker] said that he and the jury - plus one Diana fan who sat through all the proceedings with the words "Diana" and "Dodi" painted on his face - were the only ones to hear every word of evidence.

The Little Venue that Could.

2008-03-08T14:29:00.000-08:00

For eleven months of the year Edinburgh is a quiet place to live – for a capital city its almost suspiciously tranquil (as long as you avoid the half a mile of hen nights and gell-haired, liquored up Ben Shermanators that shuffle and stumble along the Cowgate into the Grassmaket, braying loudly and urinating at will, much as their bovine predecessors did before them). Even in the summer I remember only long days spent lying on the meadows and easy strolls along the bracingly beautiful crags, gazing out over a mess of roof tops, the castle floating off in the distance.

Come August however, things change. Quiet student union rooms accustomed only to well-organised fantasy wargaming and the occasional illicit sex act are suddenly bristling with chairs and wires and staff in gaudy matching t-shirts hastily taping everything to the floor. Churches that are almost conspicuously empty for the rest of the year suddenly find themselves plastered with sponsorship signs and MDF black boards. The royal mile wakes up one morning to find a series of grotesque plastic columns have been grafted to its cobbles, already being bandaged with brightly coloured posters by early-bird students filled with hope and a blind belief in the power of traditional advertising. Birds fly south, Scots fly north. The Festival has begun.

Every year the BBC and the national newspapers, in between shots of the same relentlessly irritating gold-covered man holding his bloody stupid bicycle, trip over each to point out the obvious misnomer in the title Edinburgh Fringe Festival – that 61 years and several thousand productions of John Godber’s Bouncers after it first strutted scruffily into the city there is very little that is fringe about this festival. It is, it grandly declares, the Largest Arts Festival in the world.

However, no one as yet however seems to have demonstrated that this is a good thing, and it feels to me at least that every year the emphasis falls more on the ‘festival’ and less on the ‘arts’.

Walking through the streets of the city during August, you can’t help but wonder if Edinburgh (the city, its festival) has lost its soul – or at least has misplaced it and rather rashly replaced it with a giant upside-down purple cow filled with C-list celebrities and gymnastic routines. And its all just so, well, relentless – a miniature Las Vegas, a month long New Year’s Eve party, a panic-eyed, half-exhausted reveller rasping out into the night ‘everybody, EV’RYBODY! Can’t you see how mega this is? CAN’T YOU SEE HOW MUCH FUN WE’RE HAVING!?!1!’

You just want to sit the whole thing down and give it a blanket and a hot drink.

And almost inevitably such an environment only benefits certain kinds of shows. As Chris Goode has remarked – the shows of his that have proved most successful at Edinburgh have been those that offer some form of immediate clossure – or at least who’s challenge to the audience is to some degree finalised by the time they leave the sweaty little room they’ve just been sharing for an hour. Open-ended, inconclusive, awkward, subtle and delicate rarely do well at the festival – they can be difficult to get excited about at the best of times and Edinburgh is all about people getting excited.

In Edinburgh an hour is all you get – once they’ve stepped blinking into the streets of Edinburgh you’ve lost them; emotionally and physically the audience is on to the next thing. It’s the theatre equivalent of speed dating – breathless and thrilling but littered with awkward pauses, faces already forgotten, opportunities missed and conversations left incomplete.

All too frequently wonderful theatre can and does drown in this turbulent sea, while other more superficially interesting shows are carried along on a wave of hyperbole and spat out like Jonah safely at the other end – tours booked, careers made.

And drowning in Edinburgh can be expensive business. Edinburgh is sustained on the backs of broken artists paying extortionate amounts for everything from accommodation, to transport, to food, to having their meagre 30 words printed in the Biblically huge Fringe Programme. Meanwhile their supermarket venues, with all the morals and integrity of PT Barnum, blackmail them for space in their own brochures, screw them for every minute they spend in their poorly equipped studio space, ignore them for a month and then virtually disappear off the face of the planet when it comes to paying up. Virtually no one I know hasn’t at some stage been burnt by the festival, and many have sworn they would never go back.

And yet, and yet…

There is something there. Just in the almost tangible presence of that much hope and excitement and unashamed enthusiasm – it hangs in the air, chokes the city like a sugary, intoxicating fog. Bars spill over with people talking about shows, about theatre, unselfconsciously and drunkenly talking about what they believe in. The place is full of people genuinely open to experimentation – people positively thrilling at the opportunity to try something new, something different. I love the fact that you can’t walk five metres without finding someone who really wants to tell you all about their show – someone who fiercely, wonderfully believes in what they are doing. I love that the entire city feels like some kind of carnivalesque playground – bracing itself gamely (and with just enough of an undercurrent of cynicism) for anything that might come along.

I love what Edinburgh can do for a good idea. I love that Ian Shuttleworth and Lyn Gardner and a raft of over-excited promoters will just up and see something solely on the basis that it sounds quite good, because why the hell not its just 3 minutes away and I’ve got a break now before 4.48 Psychosis and who actually needs dinner anyway? I know how much this has meant for my fledgling career and I'm sure plenty of others. A few years ago Stewart Lee wrote a wonderful little column on a show he’d happened to see by a guy no one had heard of called Will Adamsdale that was only supposed to be on for 10 days and it ended up winning the Perrier. There’s still something to Edinburgh, something worth treasuring, something worth fighting for.

All of which was already swilling around somewhere in my head when a friend of mine, a playwright called Deborah Pearson, asked me to co-programme the Forest Fringe with her. And for the reasons described above I absolutely leapt at the chance.

The Forest Fringe is an offshoot of a place called The Forest Café, a volunteer-run not-for-profit haven near Bristo Square. The Forest is a scribbly, messy, wonderfully original space, filled with bizarre drawings and earnest flyers, always full of people just relaxing and reading a good book; the whole place smells of organic humus and second hand sofas. It is, frankly, lovely.

Alongside a small stage in the café it has a gallery and upstairs a beautiful old church hall, all old wood and optimism. Last year Deborah was asked to programme this upstairs space during the festival; not as part of it, or even as an official venue as they had no theatre licence, but just to provide a place that was, philosophically and theatrically, an alternative to the Underbelly and the rest. Brilliantly she chose not to charge anyone to perform at the venue but just simply asked them to give some time to help staff for other shows. It was undoubtedly a huge success – Lyn Gardner described it as ‘a magnet for young artists wanting to try things out’ – I had the chance to do Exposures there for all of £40 spent on disposable cameras and brown envelopes – it got me two commissions and a lovely write up on the Guardian website. Now we’re back, with a theatre licence this time, new black out curtains, a full head of steam and renewed confidence that we’re not the only ones seeking somewhere with a slightly different mentality.

To me the place is an incredible chance to create a new model for how an Edinburgh venue can function. One that embraces the things I believe are really good about the festival and tries to avoid those elements that make it faintly unbearable.

We’re not going to be part of the official fringe. We’re not going to charge artists anything to perform. All shows are going to be ‘pay what you can’. We’re going to have to a wonderful mix of established fringe veterans and younger artists who’ve never performed at the venue before. No one is going to have more than a couple of performances. Everyone is going to have ample rehearsal time. Everyone is going to be asked to give some of their time back to the place, either by staffing the bar or Front of House or by mentoring a younger artist – just spending a couple of hours watching their show and then talking to them about it.

We want to create a venue that cherishes the idea that you can go up to Edinburgh with barely more than a good idea. A place that doesn’t bleed you dry; that doesn’t demand three weeks of performances on the off chance that the Guardian will like your show. A place that genuinely encourages risk and play and experimentation. A place surrounded by about the most open, excited and enormous prospective audience you’ll ever have, by national critics and venue directors; a place that realises this and says, if you come up with something good they will come – so why the hell not.

We want to foster a different kind of Edinburgh experience, for audience and performers. The best thing about the Forest is that it’s there all year round, staffed by the same people, still smelling of humus and sofa. The place is like a quiet bubble of calm. We want it to become an island, a retreat from the crowds; a place of reflection and community. We want you to go and see a show upstairs and then come and sit in the café and have a bit of a think. We want to see artists sitting down and talking with each other. We want interested people with nowhere else to go to come and hang out for a bit, for faces to become familiar – for an audience to become a community.

We have a church hall, a café, some black-out curtains and a couple of lanterns and we’re going to change the world. And if you’ve actually managed to make it this far through this post and have agreed with more than about 55% then I want you to join us.

At the moment we’re beginning to confirm our line-up and I want to hear from anyone who might be interested – in performing or just in helping out. If you’re already doing a show at another venue and fancy the chance to try something else out. If you have a beautiful little show and absolutely no money. Anything really.

Let me know.

Just leave a comment or drop me an email to andy (dot) t (dot) field (at) gmail (dot) com. And please do spread the word.

Wouldn't it be nice to be Dorian Gray, just for one day?

2008-02-21T08:35:00.000-08:00

A little all about me this brief misif but that's largely so that it can act as some means of justification as to why its been a little quiet round here recently.

Rather brilliantly everything has suddenly got delightfully busy on the actually making some theatre front. Our show in Brighton is getting tantalisingly close and I'm quite excited about it. Although it's nominally an extension of the Exposures show I did in Edinburgh last summer it's actually taken on a faintly uncontrollable life of its own and (much like the baby in overlooked Disney sequel Honey, I Blew Up the Kid) keeps wondering off in unforseen directions, while I run in circles around it panicking, trying to let it blossom without losing those things that people seemed to so enjoy first time round. It's a careful balance; fundamentally I want to offer this audience more than I offered to those in Edinburgh in the frantic 14 hours I spent coming up with the idea and the putting it together, without losing the show's initial simple charm.

Fundamentally, I want the audience to be invited to create not just a series of discrete images but a narrative; I want the photographs to have a larger coherency - through taking these shots I want the audience to transform the landscape around them (the sights (or sites) of Brighton) into a place (of invented history, of fictional community, a place of stories). I want them to think about the difference between looking and seeing. I want them to see a fictional world of their own creation shimmer in the streets in front of them. I want them to get lost in this world; and with the involvement of hidden local performers I want the borders between this world and the real one to blur, Brighton transforming into a site where place and theatrical space collapse into each other.

Yet at the same time, as Tough time, nice time displayed beautifully, narrative can be overbearing to the point of totalitarian; it can subsume freedom or the potential for originality within its familiar arcs. And possibly part of the piece's original joy came from its incoherency; that in refusing a predetermined narrative the participants didn't feel manipulated into any particular response to the questions that I posed of them. Like the figures in The Hour we Knew Nothing of Each Other, each question was in itself a beginning (a signifier of a potential story) that they were offered the opportunity to complete for themselves. If the questions had been too obviously connected together into an overarching narrative the locus of creativity would have been wrested from them and remain with me, the theatremaker, who was merely asking them to jump through a series of meaningless hoops in pursuit of one inevitable conclusion that was never in doubt; like leafing apathetically through the multiple-choice answers of a Choose-Your-Own Adventure book.

So all the time that we are conjuring this narrative, this gloriously seedy, intoxicating underworld to Brighton (telescoping everything from Brighton Rock to the second summer of love in one long relentless grey-tinted binge of counter-cultural excess) I'm constantly hauling it back from the point of coherency, constantly attempting to undermine any narrative super-structure, keeping each of the photographic instructions as a single unfinished moment; a question, or a challenge or a hint - leading the audience off in unexpected directions.

Anyway - it should be an exciting experiment and I hope you'll all be able to venture down for any weekend in May. And, as with The Day Trip, if you know anyone in Brighton who might be interested in being involved - please do let me know, there's room for everyone...

I'm also off to Ireland next week to start work on the next instalment of Exposures which'll be hitting the streets of Dublin in September. And, rather excitingly, I'm also there to begin a brand new project that I'm creating specifically for a festival in June (but more on that later).

And if that weren't enough I'm also beginning work on the programme for the Forest Fringe in Edinburgh this summer, which Debbie Pearson (who ran it last year) has very kindly asked me to co-direct with her. It looks like it's going to be an incredibly exciting project and, again, there will be more on this anon!

For now however I can look up just long enough to direct you towards Chris Goode's exhilirating, inspiring and down-right brilliant post at Dennis Cooper's blog. Let it consume you.

Being Harold Pinter at the Soho Theatre

2008-02-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

For CultureWars.org.uk

In the run up to this production all the attention has been focussed on its context rather than its content. Here is a company banned in their own country, frequently imprisoned, performing shows in front rooms and secret locations; uniting political dissidents and private citizens in their opposition to an oppressive political regime. And there is, as you might imagine, a cathartic sense of anguish to Being Harold Pinter. This is a show bristling with images of frustration, anger and despair – a lone figure scrambling desperately under a suffocating tarpaulin, a broken old man huddled on the floor, screaming in impotent fury.

Yet while they may be very much a consequence of particular (depressingly omnipresent) political circumstances, the company never limit themselves to narrow agitprop declarations. Rather the show seems very much the consequence of an entire century of anguished false starts and flawed reconstructions; the political theatre of a continent almost irreparably scarred. Rather than demand any trite political transformations the piece reaches for a larger universality, stitching together the entire career of Harold Pinter, the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Belarus' own contemporary trauma.

This scope is apparent in the careful, intelligent way that Pinter’s work is used, borrowing slithers of dialogue from a variety of plays, early pieces like The Homecoming through to more explicitly political shows such as Mountain Language, a one-act written in the late 80s. What is conjured is a fascinating through line highlighting the relationship between the bullying and brutality we experience every day and the political atrocities that we normally see only on the news or in films.

The company telescope these disparate threads together through a visceral, powerful physicality. Speaking (often shouting) in a foreign language, the company are brilliantly adept at creating big, hauntingly powerful images out of meagre materials; an apple crushed to pieces under a boot, accusing torch beams peering out at the audience and a single burning paper aeroplane floating across the blackness. This violent imagery is used to telescope these scenes of domestic and political atrocity into a single horror in a manner reminiscent of Fassbinder’s brutal Pre-Paradise Sorry Now with its juxtaposition of the Moors murderers and the petty fascisms of everyday life. Indeed, in one particularly memorable image an enraged lover screams out at the audience, his arm shooting up in a Nazi salute so sickeningly familiar from the footage of Hitler at his Nuremburg Rallies. Thus the show powerfully suggest that we are never far from censor or oppression, whether it be personal or political.

In response to this omnipresent danger the show, through Pinter’s words, demands renewed rigour in what we say and how we say it. A quest for an unreachable truth. A theatre that rises to challenging of balancing political activism with theatrical subjectivity. With particular reference to their own society the company seem to demand not merely a change of leadership but a change of mentality. They demand a society constantly questioning its own truths and its own principals. A society that embraces dissent and celebrates political rigour. At the end of the show the closing lines of Pinter’s speech echo in our ears:

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

Yet in the audience’s fulsome response to this cri de coeur I felt an unsettling air of self-congratulation at merely being present at this event; the company lauded almost as a prized curiosity. Which is a shame because beyond the deafening focus on their sad yet valiant circumstances, the company have created a show that says as much about their audience as it does about their political overlords. It is a show that doesn’t discriminate between private and public cruelty, between being actively involved in something and passively allowing it to happen.

Consequently it seems to point a scathing finger at the invisible atrocities in faraway (and not so faraway) places that we are tacitly implicated in merely be deign of doing nothing, while our freedoms are slowly stripped away one by one. As both Pinter and the Belarus Free Theatre assert, simply going to the theatre and clapping vigorously is never going to be enough to instigate the kind of transformation both our countries require.

Tough Time, Nice Time at The Barbican

2008-02-16T05:18:00.000-08:00

For CultureWars.org.uk

Two lithe, well-groomed middle-aged men sit naked in a sleek white bath, whispy spa vapours drifting across the blackness all around them. As the lights rise and fall in delicate, subtle patterns the two men each nurse a single Heineken, sweat slowly glazing their bodies as they wriggle and stretch in their luxurious confinement. They babble flippantly, incessantly, in soft German accents. Literally nothing else happens. Time slips by unnoticed. After 70 minutes the show ends as suddenly as it began and the audience reels back into reality having seen one of the most simple, effortlessly brilliant pieces of theatre they will see all year.

Ridiculusmus (or Jon Haynes and David Woods) reference Beckett in their programme notes and undoubtedly his dark, absurd intelligence pokes through in a lot of places. There is definitely something very Beckettian in the aimless, nihilistic repartee of the these two wealthy Germans enjoying an expensive Bangkok bath; their sparky, needling conversation subtly looping back on itself, meandering indefinitely through barely-defined time. You feel this pointless banter could last forever, all of us waiting here in this chic abyss, biding our time until death finally arrives in all its anti-climactic, meaningless finality.

And like Beckett what makes this joyously transfixing and eminently theatrical is the beautifully observed dialogue and the brilliance of the brittle, flinty relationship that it conjures. A lawyer with a penchant for young Thai boys, attempts to tell his story (or stories) to a darkly charismatic and fundamentally disinterested publicist fascinated by atrocities and his own half-invented past. This basic context is constantly undermined by interruptions, interjections, non-sequiturs, and a seemingly endless litany of recent Hollywood films; Blood Diamond, Munich, Walk the Line, Syriana, Michael Clayton, One Day in September and The Constant Gardner. Especially The Constant Gardner, endlessly The Constant Gardner, a nagging thought that won’t go away.

It is in this that the show makes a decisive leap away from Beckett and towards something decided more (post)modern. In this world (in our world) the whole of human history, every story, every epic tragedy, every personal anecdote has been appropriated by cinema. Anything that was once truthful has been borrowed and structured and given its own manipulatively emotive soundtrack. Even the most brutal, the most astoundingly awful genocides and holocausts have been appropriated and turned into a familiar narrative arc. Anything that once might have meant something to us has been taken from us and rendered meaningless by imposing on it a story we (fundamentally) already know.

It is this world that these characters are seeped in. Where we know atrocities through the films that have been made of them and dictators through the celebrities who have played them. And so these nonchalant German sex-tourists flit unconsciously from Auschwitz to Hollywood without a second thought because the two are now fundamentally the same thing (an idea beautifully, hilariously typified by a joke about Sharon Osbourne and Ariel Sharon that I won’t give away here as I pretty much demand that you go and see this show for yourself). Indeed, so soaked in the narrative structures of American cinema are they that their own lives are unconsciously constructed as a series of potential screenplays, rendering their own existence nothing but a potential commodity – a simulacrum of living that we can only consider as possible pitch (to a new partner, to a biographer).

In this context the show itself could be seen as a very conscious other to this process of narrativisation. It is an anti-story – devoid of any discernable structure, plot, character development or tension. It refuses any attempt to turn itself into a story, and in doing so offers a glimmer of hope amidst all this second-hand barbarism; that we can still create something new, something meaningful and something authentic. And so despite the casual horror and the flippant nihilism of the characters sweating away in their bath, I left the auditorium with the nagging hope that possibly we’re still not totally doomed; a hope that theatre like this still offers the potential for ways of telling that are meaningful and vital.

Reasons to love London #1

2008-02-10T15:34:00.001-08:00

[In case you missed the story]

The Arcades Project #2: Westminster

2008-02-05T17:35:00.000-08:00

[The Second part of a new project to map various parts of London, if you have any recommendations of places I should make a visit to please do let me know]

Victoria Tower Gardens is a peculiarly unprepossessing kind of a place, especially for Westminster. An anaemic slither of green between the river and the road, a thin wedge of almost-park tapering off into nothing. Unlike most of London’s other parks it isn’t big enough to revel in its own marvellous green expansiveness, instead the whole of this apologetic triangle of land seems in thrall to the great wall of Westminster palace that rises like a threat behind it. Gazing up at its smug gothic grandeur you’re liable to miss the crowded plinth that squats by its base until its right on top of you.

Rodin’s flurry of haunting dark-grey figures, The Burghers of Calais, seem every bit as clumsily placed as the park itself. What are they doing here, these abject French nobleman, cluttering up a park so close to centre of English power?

Edward III laid siege to Calais and let it devour itself from the inside out – starvation, disease. Fear. Finally the city came crawling. Edward offered to save the city if six of its leaders would present themselves to him. Inside the desolate walls six wealthy leaders came forward, stripping themselves down to their underclothes, thick Hessian nooses hung on their necks in preparation for what they assumed must happen to them now. Out of the city they traipsed towards the waiting armies, somewhere between the outfoxed, ridiculous rich men of early Chaplin films and the ashen-faced wraiths in the dock at Nuremberg.

Rodin didn’t want his figures placed on a plinth. In truth they’re imposing enough anyway, their enormous hands and their theatrical expressions of anguish and defiance dragging them away from portraiture and into myth. To stick them on a plinth anyway seems a strange thing to do. They stand there almost meekly, cast into shadow by the Palace, such a bombastic symbol of power. It’s as if the Westminster holds them up delicately in the palm of its thick gothic hand, this little band of figures a tiny example of the powerlessness of defeat, the spoils of victory. Jean d’Aire’s look of rigid defiance hardly seems to matter in the face of such smug indifference.

The same could be said of Brian Haw. His little caravan of affordable dome tents and charred baby posters seems at first almost pathetically hopeless, Haw himself sat there in the middle of it all, his jaw set firm in exactly the same way as Jean D’Aire’s. This Technicolor monstrosity and its earnest slogans seem to be treated with the same embarrassed smirks as Greenpeace protesters in dinghies trapping themselves between whaling ships, and earnest middle-aged socialists marching through the streets of London. As an anachronism. As politically naive. As a joke. As a waste of time. I have stood nonchalantly outside a theatre in Edinburgh laughing with the crowd as protesters in matching T-shirts march against the G8 through the streets of the city.

When did caring about things go out of fashion? When did not giving a shit about anything become a position of strength?

Its now of course illegal to protest outside our own parliament, unless you have a licence – effectively transforming protest into theatre, as comedian Mark Thomas has shown with a series of theatrical satires more potent than anything dreamt up at the big theatre just across the river. We have been banned from protesting in front of our own parliament – only Brian Haw left, a designated mourner for a disappearing movement.

The politicians would have us believe we are have turned from besiegers to the besieged. That there is an invisible army ever encroaching on London, on the country. An entity so terrifying our laws are not capable of coping. We need identity cards, and terror warning systems, and more time to question suspects (90 days or 42 days or whatever the government can bargain themselves into… their protestations for the importance of one figure forgotten in their acceptance of the next). We need stricter stop and search powers and less need for explanation of why someone is stopped (to cut down on the paperwork). We are facing the threat of a legion of freedom-haters (except for those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who are invited to walk with Princes and dine at number 10). Yet who will be accountable for all this? Who will walk out of the gates of Westminster Palace with the noose around the thick noose hung around the neck? Not Tony Blair as he waltzes off to become a peace envoy to the region he declared war on.

Blueprint for a Show

I want this to be something incredibly simple. Something that could be done without a licence in Parliament Square. Something that slips fuzzily into the grey area between the government’s Anti-terror legislation and its obsession with its own public image – after all, half the reason for introducing the protest zone in the first place was an attempt to evict Brian Haw for largely aesthetic reasons.

I also want something that slips between the public and the protester, something that implicates the apathetic public. The protest equivalent of the opt-out organ donor system - something that turns an everyday act into an act of protest. What is the one thing (other than Brian Haw) that you can guarantee to see in Parliament Square? People taking photos.

The idea is very simple, possibly too simple - possibly still too much protest and not enough theatre. Maybe on this occasion that’s a good thing. For one day, on the hour, every hour from one in the morning, people will be invited to come to Parliament Square and as Big Ben strikes they will take a photo of the Houses of Parliament. Then they will disappear. They can come only once or they can continue to return throughout the day. What they absolutely must do is convince as many people to come with them. As many as possible. This would only ever work in large numbers.

Hopefully as the day progressed people around Parliament Square would begin to acknowledge that something strange was happening. Police would have little ability to arrest or question such a nebulous and fluctuating mass and besides, anyone can claim simply to be a tourist. It would also hopefully with enough people begin to have the same effect as those scavenging groups of Paparazzi do outside expensive London restaurants. Luring in the inquisitive and the nosy, tantalised by the fact that something is happening here and they don’t know what it is. Their attention is drawn to the object of everyone’s fascination– the houses of Parliament, implicating them in this invisible protest. More people are drawn through curiosity, each hour the crowd returning stronger, word of mouth spreading. And what stares back at them every time. Nothing.

Parliament in its own haughty indifference is a more than adequate political statement.

You've got to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time...

2008-02-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

Still feeling slightly guilty after last night's tirade (and the ensuing Guardian blog on the misappropriation of the term Site-Specific Theatre that should hopefully be up in the next couple of days or so) I feel I should try and glaze my fruit-cake of negativity with a sugary coating of theatrical hope. So, here are some of the things I'm looking forward to soon:

- On Saturday I'm off to Jerome Bel at Sadler's Wells for The Show Must Go On. This is mainly a consequence of Alison Croggan's dramatic yet mysterious recommendation over here. Beyond that (and because of that) I've tried to avoid reading anything else about this show so that I can go and be shocked and surprised and confused and delighted and all those other things we all hope for. (n.b. if any of the previously mentioned emotions fail to materialise Alison will be exclusively to blame and the poison pen letters will begin in earnest...).

Again, as with Small Metal Objets, there's something very lovely about being able to share thoughts and ideas with someone who is about two seasons away from us (suffering through an unrelenting antipodean summer - though that having been said I saw a ski show about Australia the other day, who knew they had mountains? I have so much to learn - and to think I thought I Bill Bryson's help I already had them sussed).

- Next Tuesday you should all head over to the Dana Centre for the second part of Coney's Rubbish Game. And while on the subject of playing around while almost unconsciously assisting in the betterment of the entire world - you should all have a looksy at this game. Free Rice for the needy! An improved vocabularly! The almost absolute certainty that all the people I know are likely to trump my puny 45 and reveal me for the snivelling macroverbumsciolist that I am (dig yourself out of the irony heaped at the end of that sentence, sports fans)

- Then finally on Wednesday or Thursday you should then siddle over to The Shunt Vaults for Rotozaza's Five in the Morning. They remain completely brilliant. I haven't seen this show yet and its becoming a little like the theatrical equivalent of the film Don't Look Now, just disappearing at every opportunity I think I have of finally catching it. I only hope then when I finally get into the auditorium I'm not assaulted by a pscyopathic axe wielding venetian midgit (speaking of which, the clear take home message from that film: The dangers of mass produced off-the-rail winter wear... damn you Gap Kids!).

So that's about it. Maybe I'll see you there.

UPDATE:

The promised Guardian piece has now arrived.

Dido: Queen of Carthage at Kensington Palace Gardens

2008-02-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

For CultureWars.org.uk

Rarely have I left a piece of theatre so utterly disappointed as I was by this crushingly mediocre production, a laboured and clichéd renaissance restaging drowning in the borrowed robes of a form it superficially appropriates and barely understands.

Beyond the fact that they had a cute Paul Simon lyric all lined up for a name, I can think of little reason why Angels in the Architecture have chosen to label themselves a ‘site-specific’ company, seemingly having little interest or ability in the form they purport to utilize. In this cack-handed production there is little to no delicacy or sensitivity shown to the relationship between the performance and its environment, almost a complete absence of awareness of the spatial possibilities of the site and a frankly contemptuous attitude to an audience herded interminably from stopping point to stopping point with even less decorum or theatricality than the most overcrowded museum fodder.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that there seemed such a fascinating potential in this piece. So much potential for a delicate and playful relationship between the over-preserved Regality of Kensington Palace (its waxy portraits and its tabloid ghosts) and the troubled questions of queenship raised by Marlowe’s (relatively rubbish) play, which although hardly The Duchess of Malfi does have some interesting things to say about the troubled relationship between greatness and womanhood, sex and power. Indeed as I wandered down the palace’s tranquil and needlessly majestic driveway I was bristling with excitement at what might be done with such a self-consciously theatrical location; how its grand halls and its carefully trimmed gardens might be highlighted or subverted by the lightest of touches (discarded coronation mugs or almost-overhead flirtations – like some of the best of Alison Jackson’s faked royal photographs).

Yet almost immediately I began to feel a nagging sense of deflation, finally arriving at the end of the temptingly long drive to be confronted by only the most perfunctory of vignettes, a silhouetted figure at a window, a man telling me his name was Hermes and that I should got and get a drink before the show starts.

Once the show proper begins the specificity of this site appears to be nothing but a burden, the production crudely superimposed over the elaborate rooms with an almost criminal absence of thought. Although seemingly chosen for its appropriateness, the potential immersion in the grandeur of the palace was completely undermined by the series of self-consciously industrial lighting stands that adorned the centre of almost every scene. Outdoor scenes were conjured in these pampered little rooms by the crude application of a flashlight or the prerecorded sounds of foxes yelping, while the full extent of the Palace’s grounds lingered dark and inviting through the latticed windows. At one point the characters gestured towards the paintings on the wall, declaring them (as the script suggested) to be ‘all of kings’, when even a cursory glance would tell you they were almost all crowded biblical scenes.

I’m not suggesting for a second that I wanted a naturalistic realisation of the world of the show, merely that the theatrical ghost conjured by the company seemed to stand in such obstinate opposition to the site they had chosen that it rendered any relationship between the two almost null and void, the show being no more specific to this site than it would be to a series of offices or a lay bay on a major city ring road. ‘Site-specificity’ was reduced to a hazy ambiance lazily stolen from the imposing stairways and wooden-panelled grandeur of the Palace itself – a superficial aesthetic barren of meaning that bore no relation to the show itself.

Within this context the audience was dragged from room to room with barely any sense of why; without any motivation to move other than that the scene had come to an end and no discernable reason for the next scene to be in the following room other than the architecture of the space had dictated that it had to be. Even the one moment where it looked like something more interesting might be happen as the audience was asked to choose between one route and another was quickly discovered to be nothing but the showiest of window dressing, the audience soon reforming into one passive anonymous lump without anything of significance (or even interest) having happened in the interim.

Even within the fairly well-acknowledged conventions of this kind of promenade theatre the production failed miserably. Either through negligence or greed the show was vastly too crowded and the audience shuffled irritably between spaces that required too long to get into for too little reward once you got there – the show dissolving into fragmentary moments of almost-theatre. Even the walk-bys (the little scenes on loops complementing movement from location to location that are normally the most shamelessly charming feature of a good promenade show) were about as uninspired as you can imagine – no fleeting glimpses, no almost-missable little flourishes, no clever moments of atmospheric brilliance (like the sinister figure in GridIron’s The Bloody Chamber glimpsed through a low window hammering a dead rabbit, or the angelic airport cleaners in Roam, dirty red overalls and wings, sitting on the railings outside having a fag). Instead we got simply got characters standing, characters lolling around looking miserable, characters getting dressed.

Buried somewhere in this confused, superficial and poorly realised aesthetic was a very traditional production of Marlowe’s Dido. Sadly this was not even a particularly good production. It came across more like a litany of clichés for the restaging of classic texts that should have been banned long ago:

- Working class soldiers being the only characters speaking with broad Sheffield/Leeds accents
- Characters in love holding hands and spinning each other round while laughing
- Men in sharp black suits and women in elegant shiny dresses
- Madrigal-like dirges sung or hum whenever the atmosphere is running a little dry

Beyond that there was the part of Iambus being played by a Derek Jacobi look-a-like with the most overdone limp since Herr Flick, an incredibly irritating attempt at a creepy child voice, and a faintly bemusing bit-part player who appears in the very last scene only to mumble a couple of lines and disappear again. There was lots of unconvincing Shakespeare-acting knocked off from too many nights spent watching the RSC and a pretty reliable line in taking the absolute most predictable and choreographed road at any given junction. In one dining scene there was an incongruous little set of steps set up against the dining room table so that at the appropriate moment in the scene a character could step easily up on to the table top to make their grand speech. Something about this seemed to some up the whole evening for me.

I feel like I’ve gone on about this too long now. Far, far too long. These are not bad people. They are not doing terrible things. I admire them for getting the permission to stage this play at this site. I admire them for wanting to do so. I have heard very good things from people I respect a lot about their previous work. I do not mean to be smug and I do not enjoy being able to write about how much I’ve disliked something.

But this show seemed to suffer from such an absence of care, an absence of thought, an absence of research, an absence of sensitivity, an absence of imagination – everything that I think can and should make site-specific work completely vital and compelling and undoubtedly one of the forms most bubbling over with radicality and real meaningful political and social engagement. And maybe this is why I had such an extreme reaction to a show that was by no means as bad as a lot of work I have seen. It left me angry and defeated because I felt that if this piece and those like it become are what the mainstream is willing to acknowledge as ‘site-specific’ work and set space aside for, then our theatrical landscape will be a lot poorer for it.

The Arcades Project #1: The Docklands

2008-01-24T16:11:00.000-08:00

[As promised, the first part of a new project to map various parts of London]

Map

This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. (Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea)

I arrived at the docklands early Sunday morning, stepping off the Jubilee line at Canary Wharf tube station. The train was disappointingly busy. Where I’d quite self-consciously gone looking for an almost sinister emptiness the train was actually relatively full. Mainly with people who looked like they were going sailing.

Canary Wharf tube station is a self-consciously bombastic, the proclamations of its own importance (a half-cut city trader on a late night booty call) echoing noisily across its cavernous interior. At one end a bank of escalators tower out of the gloom, their destination bathed in sunlight. Like an irritating acquaintance at a costume party the escalators demand you acknowledge what they look like – the the stairway to heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, the gleaming tasteful edifices of Gattaca, something from that movie that you can’t quite place.

Like everything in this particular part of the docklands they feel unreal, borrowed from fiction. As you walk past 6ft high electronic billboards screen displaying CNN, the DLR glides overhead on thick, smooth rails, crunching into the station like a state-of-the-art rollercoaster. From the centre of canary Wharf you gaze out at a cinematic landscape, an anonymous near future all-too-familiar for anyone with a childhood as wasted on over-hyped movies as mine was.

In one of his books (I can't remember which) Douglas Coupland explains away the ridiculous number of mediocre action films made in Vancouver as being a consequence of its anonymous familiarity – its generically imposing skyscrapers and its cultured lawns and its city monuments that could be anywhere important. Signifiers of the flashy urbanity of New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Metropolis. The Docklands however seems to come at film from entirely the opposite angle. As it scrambles breathlessly into existence it seems desperate to quote cinema, rather than be quoted by it. It stitches itself into the shape of a finely tailored business district from an infinite patchwork of Hollywood films made between about 1985 and 2002.

It speaks of its own importance through the language of big budget multiplex cinema – a language its prospective inhabitants implicitly understand. And thus it constructs itself as a singularly modern image of aspiration. This is where you could work, this is where you could live, this is what you could become, like something from the movies.

When I was growing up, the sortof-town next to our tiny village was just about big enough to have its own miniature business park. Every time we drove into Cambridge we would pass one office that seemed to be made entirely of a glistening, sky blue glass. I was always transfixed. Imagine, I thought to myself, imagine working in a place like that; imagine staring out through a window of tinted glass at the world around you – that’s the life. As impressed as I was by a miserable-looking two story office in a meek little business park just north of Cambridge, I can barely imagine what I would have thought, at the age of about five, of the Docklands. It would have struck me with all the wonder of Disney’s tomorrowland; a freshly moulded simulacrum of what Hollywood told us the future would look like.

But of course, at that point I couldn’t have visited the Docklands. Not in the sense that it exists today. It was at that time a half-started building site. Once the biggest docks in the world. Then eight square miles of wasteland for around twenty years. Then, in complete contrast to the organic jungle described by Joseph Conrad, it was resurrected; carefully planned and consciously remade by a government-funded Quango. Born around 1980, the new docklands is only as old those people they are desperately trying to populate it with, aspiring city-workers in their late twenties. Like them it is rising fast, relaxing its still slightly awkward frame into expensive new habits. But like them it is barely even half-completed.

To my quiet delight, once you strike out a few streets away from Canary Wharf you are quickly engulfed by building sites and cranes, tarpaulin flapping eerily on an otherwise empty street – a different kind of movie. The docklands are still endearingly tatty round the edges, their naked, fevered ambition showing through the cracks. Black and white photos of imagined dockside complexes are plastered up in front of looming skeletal frames. I found myself walking through a shopping centre-like complex consisting entirely of estate agents, all of them decked out in dynamic, tastefully complementing primary colours – like a series of Microsoft Powerpoint templates. All of them offering for sale grown-up looking pencil drawings of expensive apartments. Ready to be snapped up by aspiring young graduates from Liverpool, Leeds, Sussex, small villages north of Cambridge; buying unbuilt houses with the six figure salaries they’re soon to be earning.

There’s something incredibly endearing for me about the docklands. As well as feeling like a 1000 films I sat and watched with my parents on a Sunday evening with a gluttonous plate of roast dinner piled on a tray in front of me, it reminds me of how I felt then. Of the reassuring vision of my elderly parents slowly coasting down a row of houses in the car, an address gripped in my mum’s hand – no, surely it couldn’t be this one, goodness – the admiring beams on their faces as I lounge in the doorway of my make-believe hollywoodised superhome. My parents who grew up in council houses or in their grandparent's terrace house in Croydon. It reminds me of the stinging ambition that used drive me to the point of distraction. That still does if I’m honest though converted by a force of will from the glossy apartments of the docklands to the nominally more worthy accolades of academia and theatre. But I still remember wandering round the motorshow at the NEC, dreaming of the car I would use to go and visit my parents.

Blueprint for a Show

Get a little way from the centre of the docklands and it still has the feel of an edgeland, as if you’ve stumbled into a half-finished makeover, revealing something authentic and endearing disappearing fast under a sea of simulated sophistication.

I found that on a Sunday morning you could wonder along empty quaysides, only seeing maybe a distant figure on the opposite side of the water. I like this. I also like that the awkwardly placed bridges make it impossible to get to that person with any great haste.

Perhaps you could create something a little like Small Metal Objects, taking advantage of the discontinuity between the great distance and the intimacy of a spoken voice. But more desolate. Not in a crowd. Perhaps you and another are connected by telephone. But with hands free headsets (a gadget that still gives me that same frisson of grown-up futuristic excitement that I once got from a cheap glass office block).

Across an empty wharf littered with building works and static cranes, you can see a figure. In your ear you can hear their fevered talking. They are looking for something.

They are a representation of everything around them. A product of bad Hollywood films. A little like Mel Wilson’s wonderful solo show Simple Girl, they are attempting to live out a borrowed ideal and are failing. But rather than longing for wistful European romance, this is the universe of the mediocre Hollywood action thriller. Demolition Man keeps springing to mind, I don’t know why. Die Hard and its imposing LA skyscraper. Yippee ki-ay motherfucker. The character's language is a patchwork of Americanisms (not even… Hollywoodisms). There is a frenzied ambition to this pulpy dream and like the docklands itself it is pretty tatty and half-formed round the edges.

What were those films always about? Saving a city from bombs or terrorists. Appropriately docklands has its own rather messy history of that. Perhaps this character, a young over-eager city boy of some kind, believes himself to be the only one able to solve an imminent threat. And here he is rushing around full of bluster and slightly hopeless Hollywood bombast, the trappings of his young success quickly sacrificed at the alter of this increasingly obsessive action plot.

Of course if it was a direct telephone link between you and this person, you’d be able to talk back. The audience member would have to be implicated in this world somehow. Maybe they see you as the cowardly side-kick, or the evil mastermind, or a love interest. Perhaps we could have all three – some kind of conference call, with three audience members co-opted into this story played out on the enormous movie set that is the docklands. In some way all three are needed to validate this absurd narrative, and their failure to live up to their roles makes this fiction increasingly fractured.

I’d like it if it ended in a very public place, with a very public scene. Lots of shouting. And in which the audience could implicate themselves – in front of the unknowing general public – with some big cinematic display fitting of their ‘character’, or from which they could quietly back away, leaving our hopelessly protagonist all the more ridiculous, a tragic broken figure lost in his own fantasy.

Dead Wedding at the Barbican (London International Mime Festival)

2008-01-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

For CultureWars.org.uk

Dead Wedding, the latest show by the staggeringly brilliant puppeteers Faulty Optic, is a startlingly uncomfortable experience. Draining, desolate and riddled with off-kilter melancholy, this is a brooding, lyrically bleak hour and a half of netherworldy puppetry.

Dead wedding takes as its starting point the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a story that seems to returning with a troubling regularity; as if there is something about it, the doomed attempts at overcoming death, the inevitability of human weakness, that nags at us. In Faulty Optic’s retelling the story has an almost political resonance to it, the feel of a show created while war reports blare from the television in the background. Indeed, we begin like something out of a piece of scathing anti-Neo Con agitprop, with bloated half naked Pluto, god of the underworld, sat squatly over a grave stone that he is ringing like a slot machine, sending coins fountaining up around him to his obvious glee.

From the start the myth, as far as we know it, has run its course. We are already in the underworld. A post-apocalyptic scrapheap Hades of rusting tin drums and salvaged bric-a-brac. Eurydice washes her memory away repetitively in a crude industrial shower and an amputee Orpheus, like a ghoulish down-and-out Vietnam veteran, scuttles around on a tiny wooden cart, unable to find the legs ripped away by the frenzied Bacchae. This Hades is a desolate, listless place, bathed in palid green light and echoing to a soundscape half-heard sentences drowned in dissonant blending of electronica and live string music.

In this post-traumatic universe Orpheus struggles to grasp the normality of his previous life, setting up Kodak moment dates with the distracted Eurydice that feel distorted, dangerous and hollow. Playing his lyre (and with two crude puppet masks made from Jiffy bags) he tries to recapture normality, his tiny erratic gestures bristling with a fierce, doomed hopefulness.

There is a haunting absence of humanity in this disturbing little world, even the faces of the puppeteers are concealed behind sinister black vales. The smooth, near-perfecct manipulation of the puppets is a striking contrast to the halting, juddery movement of their creations – crawling in stylised bursts across their tattered landscape.

This unworldly movement is brilliantly effective when it serves the company’s most punchy and disturbing scenes, crudely metaphorical vignettes that touch the dark absurdity of Terry Gilliam. Possibly the best of the of them all is a beautiful scene in which the dainty figures of Orpheus and Eurydice dance jaggedly on the top of great white wedding cake, slowly however a giant sinister creature (like a winged Cerberus) hovers into the scene pecking Eurydice to pieces in front of the tiny devastated figure of Orpheus. While he still grasps at her headless torso Pluto blusters in, threatening Orpheus with a long knife before brutally slicing the cake in two, amputating the lovers from each other, and scoffing from its centre. Almost Punch and Judyish in its absurd cruelty, the scene is beautiful, macabre and effortlessly haunting.

At times though the relentless inhumanity of this scarred universe does become almost unbearable. Mira Calix mesmerising and deafening loud musical score writhes under your skin with a prikly jerkiness that perfectly matches the small figures cavorting across the stage. By the end of ninety minutes there is little surprise, indeed only a crushing inevitability, in the bleakness of the show’s ending, as Orpheus abandons his futile attempts to reclaim love, the past and normality, instead cutting the strings of his Lyre and drowning himself in his own forgetting; a cruel reflection of our own listless response to a world mired in tragedy.

Maps

2008-01-21T12:58:00.000-08:00

April is the cruelest month, an American once said. He was wrong, of course. It's undoubtedly January.

Today was fittingly the day on which you are most likely to commit suicide, the brief respite of Christmas and fast-abandoned New Year's Resolutions giving way to the unremitting greyness of an extended English Winter.

Self-immolation appears to be all the rage in this barren corner of the internet these days, with the theatrical blogosphere fast becoming an e-version of the Wisconsin Death Trip, the dusty corpses of once devoted scribblings slowly flaking into oblivion. Even the Guardian blog, in all its professionally maintained glory, is drowning in a quagmire of inanity and mindless vultures chewing on the bones of the increasingly puerile Arts Council debate.

Apologies if this all comes off a trifle glum but, well, I am left wondering what it is I'm doing here these days.

I worry that my thoughts are switftly moving beyond crystalized to a sort of mindless litany, where words like intimacy and liveness are unthinkingly regurgitated as a response to almost anything. It may be as a consequence of banging my head against the mercilessly unresponsive wall of theatres and funders who claim interest in your work and then disappear for several months without even the courtesy of fake out-of-office autoreplies, but I am feeling a little, well, stale.

Maybe I'm just getting slowly suckered in to the desolately brilliant Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton - an endless round of suffocating drinking and desperation played out across London and Brighton in the restless year prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. It's a wonderful book, though its bleakness is as intoxicating as the endless rounds of whiskies and beers that its characters survive on.

Anyway, not wanting to go gently into that good night, I've been thinking a little about what I can, or indeed, should do about it. And after a Christmas of deliberation, I needed, I decided, a project.

For Christmas I got myself a copy of London: City of Disappearances and I've been enjoy it ever since. It is a brilliant, discordant, breathtakingly wide-ranging collection of essays and stories and poems and anecdotes by people including Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Will Self amongst others. Peeling back endless layers of skin from across the length and breadth of the city, the book is a meandering encyclopedia of forgotten characters, unremarkable streets, grubby metropolitan histories and magnificent impossible mythical bullshit. It also made me realise that a passing knowledge of three bus routes a couple of decent bars does not really make a city a home.

So here is my plan. In some long-delayed attempt to live up to my stolen name I am going to try and make my own map of the city in which I have been squatting for the last year and a half. It will be a map of walks, of places I find interesting or frightening or wonderful. I am going to try and get out more. Out of the house. Out of Zones 1 and 2. So if you have any recommendations please do let me know. (And if anyone enjoys an early morning walk of a weekend, ditto.)

And for each I am going to write something. But more than this. With the same incessant mumbling as Chris suffers ringing in my eyes ("How is this like theatre? How can I make use of this?") I want to map the city as an endless series of theatrical possibilities. Borrowing from Mike Pearson's completely brilliant book In Comes I, for each location or walk or point of interest I want to suggest a piece of theatre; or rather, a few half collected thoughts that could with time become a piece of theatre. I want to think about how theatre can reflect the city, how theatre can use it as a playground, and how it can change it, or change our relationship with it.

Each post should be hopefully be a map, a story, a few semi-coherent ramblings and an open invitation to collaboration, all sweetened by a few pretty pictures.

So that's the plan. We'll see how it works out. Hoepfully the first one should be up in a couple of days or so...

[UPDATE: Turns out I completely unfairly slandered the good Mr Billington here, who I had heard was reviewing Paso Doble but in fact didn't. So Apologies and have removed the offending segment.]

The Day Today

2008-01-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

This pleased me.

CHRIS MORRIS, the satirist whose television act features jokes about paedophilia, drugs, incest and rape, is to make a movie intended to show the funny side of terrorism.

[...]

It will use some real absurdities around Islamist terrorism as its basis. It cites Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks, who, after inviting a journalist to a secret location in Pakistan to record a tell-all interview about 9/11, spent two hours trying to select clothes that would avoid making him looking fat.
At terror training camps, young jihadists argue about honey, accidentally shoot off one another’s feet or get thrown out for smoking. Back in Britain, they spend evenings having rows over whose turn it is to do the washing-up.

As someone in the comments of the article points out it's a fairly brainless summation of the work of a comedian who has been fearlessly brilliant for over a decade. The Day Today not only continues to be some kind of comedic Nostradamus predicting the increasingly absurd lengths that television news is willing to go to to remain 'accessible', not only launched the magnificently incongruent careers of Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber, not only pretty much invented the faux docu-drama format that Ricky Gervais would be so lauded for later, but it also produced what I still find one of the funniest things in the world.

That is all. (for now.)

Paso Doble at the Barbican

2008-01-17T02:43:00.000-08:00

Review for CultureWars.org.uk

The Barbican’s cavernous auditorium is an imposing beast; a cathedral of expensive greys, acres of lavish shiny surfaces disappearing upwards towards the distant gods. Someone’s hopeful (but misguided) idea of a theatre for the future. All of which makes a wonderful contrast to the simple set (if it can be called a set) that adorns the empty stage at the beginning of Paso Doble, part of this year’s London International Mime Festival. Sat squat and solid in the middle of the stage are two giant flat chunks of wet clay, one horizontal and one vertical, earthy and hand made and glistening in the lights. Over the next hour they will be used by Miquel Barcelo and Josef Nadj (a Paris based artist and dancer respectively) to create an epic absurd monster of a production; a show that is at once art, performance, theatre and, almost, myth, smudging those narrow definitions in a visceral, visual feast of flying clay.

At the beginning however the clay is static and pure. Perfect - a fresh jar of peanut butter or satisfyingly thick layer of snow. It is an alien landscape, barren and desolate. That is until it begins to move, the unseen performers thumping the back of the upright wall of clay to force thick bubbles into its surface. Suddenly it becomes strangely alive, imbued with a fleshly malleability. It is squelchy, soft and thick – undeniably sensual. You can hear it slurping, you can feel its texture and its weight as it bends in the performers’ hands. As this primordial skin continues to blister and burst, hands can be seen appearing of it stretching open gaps in the clay. The audience giggles with delight.

When the two performers finally appear it is not, as might be predicted by bursting through this wall of clay but calmly walking out from behind it, dressed in pristine black suits and carrying huge sinister looking tools. Striking a pose and staring out at the audience they look like a bizarre version Grant Wood’s American Gothic, po-faced homesteaders ready to set to work on this barren landscape.

When they do begin to carve the clay however it is with a startling ferocity that absolutely took me by surprise. Thumping, slapping, pummelling, flaying – thick chunks of fleshy clay ripped away by huge metal tipped instruments, a spray of wet clay glinting in the light like blood spatter every time another blow is landed. At first the audience is giggling along but after a while the savagery becomes almost unbearable. Delivered with an exhausting impassiveness it reminded me at once of Jackson Pollock’s expressionistic assault on his canvas, Mel Gibson’s pornographically masochistic torture scenes in The Passion of the Christ and of the relentless toil of hacking away at the earth during a long summer spent farming in the muddy Fens. During this slow but relentless savagery the show becomes a mesmerising ritual, a telescoping of the creation of art, earth and man into a single dance of exhausting violence.

The interludes of silence during this attack, when the artists disappear behind the wall of clay, feel like much needed relief, both from their breathless work and Alain Mahe’s discordant musical accompaniment. As the lights dim slightly the audience is left gazing in dazzled wonder at the brutalized clay, scarred and beautiful.

If this all makes the show sound horribly earnest it absolutely isn’t. Both performers certainly have their tongues firmly stuck in their respective cheeks and their deadly serious personas come across like delightfully absurd Cohen brothers caricatures. This comic seriousness becomes more pronounced as the show goes on, the performers straight-facedly squashing a series of soft clay pots over their own heads and moulding them into ridiculous masks, resembling pigs and bulls and variety of appropriately mythic looking monsters. All the while the artists are increasingly becoming engulfed by their creation. The white and red clay splattering across their dark suits.

Slowly this repetitious comedy act builds into something far more disturbing. One of the performers becomes suffocatingly engulfed by the masks, with pot after pot squelching over his head and his arms and finally (magnificently) he is sprayed with wet clay until entirely engulfed by his creation. In a single haunting image he collapses into the fleshy wall behind him, all the while the spray of clay raining down over the scene to an almost deafening soundtrack. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. It is a beautiful, viscerally physical vignette – god absorbed by man, man engulfed by nature, the artist subsumed by his creation. A fitting climax to a magically unreal show.

For me this is what the Mime festival is all about. A confrontation with something startling and barely explicable (I have undoubtedly failed here). An absurd and hugely enjoyable spectacle that does not announce its meaning like a political address, but haunts you with a series of mesmerising movements and images and ideas. It is at once universal and abstract and yet ephemeral and immediate – in the smell of the clay, the whirling physicality of bodies in motion and the random shapes and images that they fleetingly create. Rarely have I seen a show that can bring such a sense of epic near-mythical spectacle and make it feel so very viscerally in the room with you.

This is a wonderful show – a ritualistic visual feast that only left me yearning that we couldn’t all skip over the Barbican’s plush seats and throw ourselves into this sublimely ridiculous act of creation.

The Tedious Hour

2008-01-13T04:46:00.000-08:00

For a truly disturbing experience this weekend you needn't look any further than AA Gill's interview with David Hare in the Sunday Times today.

Apparently David Hare asked for AA Gill specifically - 'I'm only doing one piece of publicity for the play, so I thought it might as well be The Sunday Times, and it should be you.' In a staggeringly unconvincing display of the modesty he is famed for failing to possess, AA Gill claims to assume this is because Hare will consider him a 'soft touch'. It seems more likely however that both believe Hare was demanding a journalist of the imagined standard that he believed he deserved, as he begins with mundane and predictable side-swipe at The Critics, his main criticism being that they don't talk enough about David Hare any more - AA Gill to the rescue.

As part of his ongoing crusade to prove that AA Gill is better than all of theatre, AA Gill has taken this opportunity to attempt to best David Hare, an icon of what Gill sees as the theatre establishment and a man almost as pompous as he is. And so Gill ends every quotation from Hare with a snide rejoinder and finishes with a sneering affirmation of the fact that (like much of Hare's drama) when you are the one doing the writing, you can always come out looking cleverest. AA Gill must have poured himself a large glass of expensive but difficult wine and given himself a firm pat on the back when he finally emailed this of to the editor - another job well done, another mountain conquered.

In reality though, the whole thing comes across far more like too bald men fighting over an aphorism - and despite his belief in the importance of entertaining, the funniest and most insightful things Gill can muster are quotes from Stephen Fry and Michael Gambon, gentlemen who you can be sure would never feel the need to indulge in such an embarassing display of smug dick measuring.

The whole sad affair feels rather like rubber necking a car accident with egos. You end up swinging to and fro as to what's worse - Hare's tired theatrical binaries ("There are two sorts of playwright: those that use events and the real world, and those that just write out of their head" - so where do Kane/Crimp/Barker fit into this facile dichotomy?) and Gill's equally brainless put downs ("Theatre director is a new profession and, with a few exceptions, the ones we've got at the moment are pretty desperate."). Apparently the two are friends - the long nights of cigars on the veranda must absolutely fly by...

So where to next for the self-designated saviour of British Theatre. Perhaps AA Gill to direct a West End Revival of George Bernard Shaw? AA Gill to chair a live primetime debate on the future of theatre on BBC4?

I've heard it rumored that Arts Council England might need a spot of restructuring - anyone have a number for the Sunday Times?

My Inevitable Two Cents on the Arts Council Hootenanny

2008-01-10T04:51:00.000-08:00

Well.

Arts Council England.

Where do we start?

It’s not been a good week. Following several bouts of preparatory sparring, the theatre community yesterday were able to give executive director Peter Hewitt the bloodthirsty pummelling that they so wanted to – huing and crying and soapboxing and sound biting and generally performing a faintly repulsive and entirely unhelpful pantomime of aphoristic declamations, neatly rounded off by a headline grabbing and debate-suffocating ‘vote of no confidence’. Well done, well done all of you.

The problem for me is that arts community is now ostensibly holding a knife to its own nose and threatening to cut it off. Everything, everything, should be done to salvage the Arts Council. The alternatives are frankly terrifying – money handed out directly by a government who, in a couple of years time, are likely to be run by a man who has already demonstrated his contemptuous and smugly populist attitude towards theatre and the arts. A party and an ideology that fundamentally questions why theatre that is not able to make a profit should receive government funding to allow ‘artists’ to ponce around enjoying themselves.

Without the Arts Council what’s going to happen when funding quickly begins to be cut funding altogether, or to be channelled into what Mr Cameron terms ‘right[or should that be Right] causes’? Are we going to wheel out Sir Ian McKellan and Kevin Spacey again, to complain about our livelihoods being taken away? Will they be greeted with anything more than the disinterestedly amused tone of Mark Brown’s article (in The Guardian, for Christ’s sake, heaven forbid what the Daily Mail or The Telegraph would say)?

The Arts Council must be saved. This for me is a first principal – good theatre in this country (of any stripe) will not survive without it. Which is why I look at events like yesterday’s, and comments like Christine Payne’s (suggesting the ACE are "fundamentally and possibly irreparably damaged") as being almost as damaging to theatre as anything the arts council is doing. It’s all well and good rich Actors and Artistic Directors making melodramatic votes of no confidence in the ACE – it’s not their careers that are staked on its survival.

What we need is to begin to lobby for practical steps that can be taken to help revive an Arts Council who desperately need it. A new Chairman is about to be installed. Let’s prepare a series of positive changes to suggest to him (that may include reference to specific cuts) rather than machine gunning his predecessor – a man, who, frankly, is in no position to make concessions about the future of the ACE when he’s clearing his desk out in a couple of weeks time.

At Devoted and Disgruntled the two things that came up repeatedly from both those who were being supported by the arts council and those who were being cut, was more transparency and the inclusion of more peer review. Boom. There you go. That’s a start (one that the ever valiant Lyn Gardner has continues to trumpet on the Guardian Blog repeatedly, seeming ever more like an increasingly desperate Cassandra, watching the predicted disaster unfold in front of her).

There are two many agendas swilling around at the moment. People are too freely using ACE’s obvious failings as a stick with which to beat them for the decisions they have come to. People are all too quick to fly from these specific failings into a wholesale battle for the soul of theatre. I don’t support the idea of an arts council because I think it is likely to promote the kind of theatre I want, I don’t criticise it because it isn’t; I do both because with an Arts Council I simply won’t have the opportunity to make work, period. Or at least, it’ll be an awful lot harder. In this unreasoned maelstrom the claims of those with perfectly valid reasons to complain are diluted and misappropriated.

Look at the Bush for example. The Bush has my unqualified support in its attempts to reinstate its funding. It is an institution that continues to discover and support wonderful, talented theatre makers. It is unashamedly a small theatre and all the better for it. For a theatre to have so much influence and so much scope and such a legacy when it has less than 90 seats is a cause for celebration not for punishment. It is exactly the kind of place that can’t sustain itself on turnover and deserves the ACE’s support. That is all there is to it. Now how about we stop using this to draw a spurious line in the sand between modes of practise that, like some petty-minded War of the Roses, asks us to pick between two arbitrary constructs that relate nothing to the actual production of work.

Who’s voices are missing in all of this? Most of the time it’s the young companies. Those companies that don’t have a voice yet but in a few years (with the support of the Arts Council) might be doing some of the most exciting, wonderful, relevant things in theatre. For now, they remain obscured. They are the flipside to these cuts. They are the reason for these cuts. And though I don’t begrudge anyone failing to go gently into that sweet night, it’s important to remember that they must be given an opportunity to blossom, and that that opportunity will come at someone else’s expense. It’s tough. Brutal, in fact. And almost anyone making theatre must feel that their work is vital and significant and deserving of the ACE’s support, but there will never be enough to go round. While the water continues to be muddied between what the arts council has done and how they’ve done it, it is these young companies that will essentially suffer.

Or rather, it is everyone who will eventually suffer, for not cherishing a flawed, vital concept enough. For reaching for the knife when everybody else was, for joining a confused legion of conflicting agendas and collectively delivering ACE a vindictive death blow. If we don’t watch out, in the sweltering heat of this year’s messy protestations, we’ll do more harm than any ACE Chief Executive ever did.

[For the record, although I have worked for a variety of institutions that have been well-supported by ACE, in my capacity as a theatre maker I have had work directly funded by them]

Glasses (Half-Full/Half-Empty)

2008-01-07T04:36:00.000-08:00

Well, the year is nary a week old and already I've been accused of harbouring a world weary cynicism (he says, while sinking back into a rich upholstered chair and taking pointed drags on a decaying Gauloises). So attempting to recapture the twinkling hopefulness of my ailing youth, I've written a relentlessly upbeat article for the Guardian, praising the Brave New World of the internet.

Through this burgeoning little network of writers and theatre makers, people can start to find the shows, the companies and the performers they might otherwise have missed; secrets that might have remained the domain of those shadowy people referred to as "in the know". People can be connected with those tiny, wonderful experiences that make theatre a place of magical possibilities.

I also recommend a few things that I'm looking forward to in the next month or so, from Rotozoza to the mighty Chris Goode (he of the most sparkling music reviews you can possibly imagine). But now, dear reader, I'm calling on you to prove me right - what can you recommend that I should see in the coming months? I'm handing my (purely metaphorical as I'm utterly incapable of maintaining one) diary to you and asking you to scribble all over it. So please, do your worst.

Future Perfect.

2007-12-29T10:47:00.000-08:00

As 2007 lies waxily on its death bed, coughing quietly and trying not to make a fuss, I thought it might be interesting to look to the year ahead - what excitements might it hold? What glorious adventures await? Who will I end up needlessly and foolishly offending in 2008? Let's gaze into the tea leaves briefly, shall we...

January
The London International Mime Festival opens. No one notices.

February
Following news that the Old Vic’s star studded Speed-the-Plow is not selling well enough, Kevin Spacey jumps to rescue in the only way he knows how. A poorly proofed Old Vic press release lands on in our inboxes proudly announcing that Hollywood sweetheart Denise Richards has become Assistant Stage Manager on the production, while the role of Audience Member Who Has Left His Mobile Phone On will be played by Jonny Lee Miller, with Dakota Fanning putting in a cameo has his embarrassed daughter. No news yet on who will be taking the part of Artistic Director.

March
Jersey Boys opens. The Bergerac Fan Club leave at the interval, crushingly disappointed.

April
Struggling for anything else to write, the critics decide to begin a new debate about theatre blogging by suggesting that in an environment where ‘everyone’s a critic’ our theatre culture loses its rigour. Meanwhile in an attempt to devote more space to adverts, newspaper critics are asked if it would be possible to reduce the length of their reviews slightly, replacing the tradition 300 words with a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

May
Still with nothing to write about, the critics are getting desperate – regularly calling Nick Hytner begging him to say something incendiary. Finally Martin Crimp’s The City opens at the Royal Court, directed by Katie Mitchell. Critics dine out on condescension for the rest of the month.

June
Black Watch finally lands in London, to a collective critical orgasm from the first stringers. Billington, Spencer and De Jongh trip over each other to claim that the production demonstrates the perfect alliance between formal experiment and the political content, conclusively (I said conclusively) proving that the Future of Theatre™ is much the same as the Present of Theatre, with a bit more dancing.

July
Nothing happens in July. Literally nothing.

August
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival arrives to a maelstrom of complaints on the Guardian website from irritated people in London bored of hearing people talk about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These whingers are quickly repelled by a second wave of commenters highlighting how obsessed people are with London the rest of the year. However, in a haunting echo of the Spanish Civil War, this second group quickly becomes riven by infighting over the issue of whether Edinburgh gives more attention to theatre in the regions or is a distraction from it. Following an article by Lyn Gardner claiming that this was a return to form for the festival the debate grows so large that, unable to retain coherency or structure, it collapses, leaking irately polite comments across the Guardian Website.

September
Slung Low’s Helium, winner of the Samuel Beckett Trust Award 2008, opens at the Barbican. Despite being a wonderful production, the makers quickly realise that the awfulness of previous winners has opened up a critical vacuum in the Pit Theatre, sucking in positive adjectives and review stars, rendering the show tragically luke warm.

October
Michael Grandage announces his new season at the Donmar, which will include a half week long run for a production of A View from the Bridge, starring Prince William and the body of John Gielgud. Tickets sell out so fast they actually rupture time, throwing some ticket buyers back in time several years to the moment at which the Donmar last did something interesting.

November
Guardian critic Michael Billington becomes so obsessed by his dislike of sensory titillation he makes the surprising demand that he hears, smells and sees nothing at the theatre. If only, he asserts, there was some way of imbibing political drama as a purely abstract concept, without the lights and the sounds and the theatre to distract us from the serious business of theatre.

December
Michael Billington is bought a book for Christmas. He retires happy.

Have a Happy New Year.*

(Thought let's get a few things straight about New Year. It's a horrible celebration. As a consequence of the fact that everyone is required to celebrate at precisely the same time, it has somehow become this grotesque fun-off, in which bands of anxious revellers are pitted against each other in some kind of joy-sucking battle to identify the coolest people. Why is it that this party, more than any other is required to represent us - who our friends are, what we like doing, how much fun we are capable of having. I simply can't have fun under all this pressure. Anyway, enough of that or Woody Allen will be round demanding royalties.)

2007-12-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

Andy's Christmas Presents #1:

Michael Billington's State of the Nation

(Nothing makes Christmas like a father with a wry sense of humour.)

National Student Drama Festival Crisis

2007-12-14T07:08:00.000-08:00

When I was younger I never went to the theatre. We were more of the Clint Eastwood Thriller on a Sunday night kind of a family. Not that I'm scorning this - there's nothing I love more than a gratuitous overdose of CSI of an evening... there's something comforting about naked exposition, the feeling of pure undiluted plot coursing through your veins.

When I started at University I knew almost nothing. I would sit for an unsociable number of hours in the Drama section of James Thin attempting to read plays and invariably failing to find anything that could hold me for longer than a handful of pages. I must've read the first page of almost every canonical drama text there is. I am the undisputed Michael Billington of openings. Yet I felt no closer to knowing anything. I had all of this unchannelled enthusiasm and nowhere to put it.

And then, as a wide eyed first year who looked closer to 14 than 18, I was lucky enough to get cast in a play called Like Skinnydipping by a guy called Chris Perkin. And with this play, we went to the National Student Drama Festival. And undoubtedly, nothing (no play, no performance, no person, no opportunity) has had more of an effect on me than that festival.

Simply being surrounded by this bubbling, intoxicating enthusiasm was incredible. Surrounded by people desperate to learn, desperate to prove themselves. Young people in love with theatre. How exciting is that?

Not all of the shows were great. In fact some were awful. But others were still some of the most memorable shows I've seen. I remember a company called Deer Park from Dartington who did a beautiful, haunting piece with nothing but several potted plants a handful of school uniforms - a melodic, lyrical mesmerising show. We left the theatre and could barely speak for the next half an hour. I remember a show called the Freudian Slip (by a company that have now become Pegabovine) - still one of the wittiest, most surreal and brilliant comic shows I've ever seen. I remember a production of Enda Walsh's Bedbound, that was evisceratingly painful to watch, in the best possible way. I remember seeing all these things and being staggered, astounded by what theatre could be.

But the festival is so much more than its programming. There was a workshop in which Richard Hurst manage to somehow make me humiliatingly aware that I am utterly incapable of working with actors. There was a magazine, written daily by a pale faced, underslept battalion of inspired writers. A totally open forum in which anyone could drop in and write something, which has spawned some of the best young writers around.

And then I remember being introduced to Mark Ravenhill in the bar, to vomitting questions on this playwright who I'd heard of but who's work I had never seen. Asking him how he got to know plays, what should I read, what should I do? I remember talking to him for almost an hour. Him recommending to me Howard Barker, who's play Victory was the first major show I directed and who's inspiring writings I devoured throughout the rest of university and ended up writing my dissertation on.

I remember the spirit of the place. I remember how perfect a location Scarborough was. It's own intimate melting pot, a quiet seaside town suddenly infused with faintly drunken excitement.

And I know that the place has had the same effect on dozens of other people. And that thousands of the people creating work today do so as a direct consequence of having a chance to partake in this joyous week-long experience on the Yorkshire coast.

And now Yorkshire Arts Council have withdrawn its funding, choosing to focus on regional producing houses and companies. And I cannot stress how bad a decision I think this is. In an industry where people are constantly talking about the need to get young people involved, to interest young people, to make theatre relevent and exciting. Nowhere does this better than NSDF, nowhere is as challenging and exciting and enlightening for the next generation of theatre makers. And there are few better services for Scarborough than the bevvy of theatre makers, and school groups and press that descend on the town for a week in the Spring.

So please do sign the petition set up to help protest this decision, which must be done before 15th January.

2007 (Part the Second)

2007-12-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

Intimacy. It’s an oft-used word. It’s an oft mis-used word. People talk about intimate gigs and intimate theatres. But in those contexts what they essentially mean is small.

I feel that genuine intimacy is something more complicated. Yes, it is about closeness. But closeness both in its literal sense and in a messier one; it’s about desire, honesty and reciprocity. There were undoubtedly two shows at Edinburgh this year that had these qualities in spades and, in the midst of the festival’s increasingly unbearable whirligig of hype and tat and superficial spectacle, utterly stopped me in my tracks.

Rotozaza’s Etiquette is sweetly mesmerising little show, perfectly combining high-concept happening-inspired participation with a charmingly simple story borrowed from Jean Luc Godard. Two people sit opposite each other at a café table scattered with props. Through instructions relayed to them via headphones they begin to talk to each other; a conversation, a story and a discrete private universe follow.

Whether it would pass Chris’ cat-test is debatable and technology-wise the show is dictated almost entirely by a pre-recorded score. And yet in the stumbling intimacy of the words that you and your partner speak, the show is remade every time, entirely singular, unpredictable, meaningful and resolutely intimate. Its joy lies in the fragile relationship conjured between two friends. Gazing into the eyes of your partner you are at once staring at a friend and a character; locations shimmer in and out of being. And buried somewhere in lines you feed each other, and the actions you carry out, there is a wonderful, liberating honesty.

The same could absolutely be said of Melanie Wilson’s Simple Girl, a similarly fragile and self-consciously fictional little show, full of gentle sadness and fading romance. Dressed in a long black coat and looking like something that had slipped unnoticed out of a cold war spy thriller, Mel told a series of increasingly meandering stories into an old radio microphone, gazing longingly out at the audience in front of her. Her conversations with the them in between these stories had exactly the kind of stumbling intimacy of Etiquette, drawing us into her melancholy little world.

Together these shows (along with Chris’ own Hippo World Guest Book) absolutely made my festival. All three had a subtle, unspectacular beauty to them. They may not have been important, they may not have happened in big rooms and (indeed) none of them were particularly financially successful (or at least that’s what I’ve heard from the people who made them). And yet, lost as they have been in the Edinburgh scrum, they nonetheless sparkled with humour, warmth and ideas. And though none could be called explicitly political, to me they all seemed to throb with a sadness; a loss of hope in people’s ability to communicate with each other and to love each other. But rather than just saying this, they all seemed in their own ways to be doing something really meaningful about it.

And with that it’s back down to London. Although, after a year and a half I still feel like I’m searching for a purchase on where things actual happen down here. Beyond the usual suspects (National, Young Vic, BAC etc) I’m somewhat lost. Unsurprisingly then the two shows that really stood out for me were both at major theatres.

Again, it won’t surprise people to know that one of them was Attempts on Her Life. Before we even get to Katie Mitchell, it’s absolutely worth saying that Martin Crimp’s text is an example of the best, most tantalising, most theatrical writing for theatre that you can imagine; a spectral, poetic, complex bundle of character-less lines of dialogue, longing to be realised in some specific, local way.

It’s little wonder then Crimp and Mitchell seem to enjoy each other so much. This year they have had numerous collaborations at the National and the Young Vic (on a translation of a short Brecht play) and next year they are off to the court for Crimp’s new play The City. Unperturbed by the catcalls of critics demanding she honour a text by rendering it tepid and utterly bland, untainted by direction, Mitchell resolutely re-interprets a text for her, unencumbered by any claim to universality or definiteness (certainly you could never accuse her of creating the definitive version of anything).

Though far from perfect, Attempts was brave, it was ambitious, it was thoughtful, it was thrilling. More than any other show I have seen it demonstrated the potential for video technology in theatre. Not as some kind of dynamic backdrop but as a way of conjuring two competing worlds. Losing oneself in the fractured unreality of both, it became impossible to say which was a simulacrum of the other. The swirling figures in red dresses seemed hopeless, lost ghosts in a world so permeated and dictated by cinema, television and digital spectacle that it had written itself out of existence.

If the Edinburgh shows underlined the importance of an intimate, personal, local engagement, of people coming together in a room and looking at each and talking to each other (telling stories together), then Attempts undoubtedly spoke of the hopeless alternative.

Undoubtedly these three or four shows stood out for me. They were the first that sprung into mind when I began thinking about this list. The last took a little longer. I’d almost completely forgotten it, and yet, in its own way it was every bit as wonderful as the previous shows.

It’s not entirely my fault, Debbie Tucker Green’s Generations at Young Vic was only 40 minutes long. It was a seemingly simple piece of writing, presented fairly realistically in the round; a bustling extended family cooking in an African kitchen while a chorus of singers stood with the audience crammed around the edges. And yet, as I think I said at the time, I have rarely seen a show that resonated with so much loss.

As a simple six or seven minute kitchen was repeated each time with a new member of the family missing, until the same once-crowded joyful scene was played out with only two mourning grandparents left, lines took on new sadness, spoke of new absences. It was a simple, hauntingly effective technique beautifully executed; you could feel the silences in the air. And again it was a show that in its intricate form, without mention of wars or famines or AIDS epidemics, said something profoundly political. Debbie Tucker Green, like Crimp, is undoubtedly a writer for theatre, with breathtaking love for and understanding of her medium.

And that’s it really. I also enjoyed Australian company Back to Back’s Small Metal Objects, Katie Mitchell’s Women of Troy and puppeteers Blind Summit’s loving homage to Charles Bukowski, Low Life. I wish I’d seen Uninvited Guest’s It is Like it Ought to be, Chris Goode’s Speed Death of the Radiant Child and Third Angel's Presumption but try as I might I was utterly useless at doing so.

Music-wise Jens Lekman, Andrew Bird and the National all released beautiful melancholy albums, full of lovely turns of phrase, sweet, simple melodies and some gorgeously lush arrangements. LCD Soundsystem were once again effortlessly catchy and clever, and Of Montreal, Animal Collective and Battles created amazing albums; bouncy, dense, infectious and utterly awesome.

And undoubtedly my favourite film of the year was David Fincher’s Zodiac; a grand, rambling saga following a series of gruesome murders in San Francisco. Masquerading as a simple detective thriller it slowly teased itself into a psychological study of obsession, it’s unstructured, sprawling style mimicking the futile attempts to ensnare the killer.

And in the New Year I’m mainly looking forward to the chance to actually stop boring people endlessly with the shows that I’m going to do and actually get up and do them. Hopefully we have a couple of things lined up in various corners of the South Coast and maybe one in London as well. We’ll see. It’s all very exciting and undoubtedly you lovely people will be the first to know when anything’s confirmed.

Happy Christmas.

God in Ruins

2007-12-13T04:17:00.000-08:00

(For CultureWars.org.uk)

As I took my seat in the characterless and sanitised Soho Theatre auditorium, I was in the strange position of knowing more about the process that went into making this show than the show itself. Tales of nineteen painful weeks of devising with a cast of male RSC actors who happened to find themselves between Shakespeares had been aired extensively in preview pieces. Anthony Neilson, the writer/director, seemed faintly ambivalent and the some of the cast openly frustrated. Distracted by this intriguing collision between a vast traditional institution and the messy, unpredictable methods of Neilson, I’d rather managed to forget that there was an actual show at the heart of it all. And so it was a rather nice surprise to be able to sit down without a clue what was to follow.

What did follow was, in the end, as frustrating as it was enjoyable. A grotesque, deliciously sordid, incoherent montage of metropolitan Christmas clichés slung loosely over the season’s most inevitable narrative, that of the fallen man and his redemption.

The opening sets the scene perfectly. In front of an incongruously chic modern apartment set, littered with expensive spirits and knowing pop culture artefacts, a familiar Dickensian Bob Cratchit character sits working at a wooden desk. Scrooge enters bubbling over with the kind of relentlessly annoying Christmas spirit normally reserved for local news reporters and Americans. It is three years on from A Christmas Carol and Cratchit is absolutely sick of his redeemed master; painfully aware that a damascene conversion is for life, not just for Christmas. The scene works beautifully, a one note gag dragged out into painful realism; a comic skit tortured into tragedy. It’s a hugely funny dissection of the superficial myths and aphorisms that fuel our intoxicating relationship with this anachronistic celebration.

Following this prologue we are launched into the main story, of a typical anguished London TV producer, drunk, miserable, estranged from his wife and the daughter he has let down. There is never any doubt that he is our modern day Scrooge, a man so pathetic he didn’t even manage to do anything particularly bad; just usher some barrel-scraping reality TV into the world and post naked photos of his wife on the internet. Over the course of an hour or so he takes the road most travelled towards a Christmas redemption and the inevitable meeting with his daughter.

So far so utterly predictable, but what makes Neilson’s show watchable, even enjoyable (and at points absolutely hilarious) is the chaotic, meandering, seedy journey to this inevitable conclusion. The show, and the Christmassy London it conjures, is beguilingly charmless. A sickly cocktail of addiction groups, festive pizzas, shamelessly low-concept television shows, drink, drugs, internet sex, and the most truculent ghost of a dead father since Hamlet with a mouth like a fucking sewer. In possibly the show’s best scene the stage is slowly flooded by festival dressed men signing carols and chugging obscene amounts of various drugs, as the space becomes a whirling, raucous melee of coke, pills, booze and songs the scene is suddenly interrupted by a figure in white carrying a baby Jesus. All the actors begin to gather like carol singers at the front of the stage before the baby’s head is ripped off to reveal a stash of pills and the orgy of drug taking and out of tune singing continues.

With seedy, effortless élan Neilson tears tradition and convention to pieces, revelling in a nihilistic excess that reminds us how shallow and meaningless have become the affectations of spirituality and good will that Christmas is supposed to be about. Neilson is clever. His gags are frequently brilliant. He has a turn of phrase that is as poetic as it is stinging and cruel. It feels appropriate that the RSC should be putting on his show because at his best, his relentless wordplay is as witty and as rude as any of the crowd pleasing dick jokes that Shakespeare used to churn out.

And if anything this show was further proof that Neilson is at his best when he is writer/director – giving him the freedom to mercilessly disrupt the form of the show in the same way that he chews to pieces the narrative. It’s just a shame that what could have been this show’s most meaningful and powerful moment, as the auditorium is invaded by a homeless man, was almost entirely deflated by the fact that the actor had already been seen on stage. Nevertheless his presence was brutal, uncomfortable and intimidating; a soldier and a beggar, the two characters we’d rather not think about when we’re trying to be festive.

And yet I never felt like there was enough beyond all these tricks and turns of phrase, through the sludge of nastiness and excess. The structure on which it all lay felt trite and mechanical. I never felt convinced that Neilson gave a shit about our stereotypically guilt-ridden TV producer or his inevitable redemption when it finally came. Unlike Wonderful World of Dissocia, Neilson’s last show, there was nothing haunting or honest or meaningful beating at the heart of all this chaos. I stepped out into the cold streets of Soho with the ending almost entirely forgotten, left only with the slurry of shameful, seedy excesses that had proceeded it. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we need a shot of sourness at this time of year, to counter the sugary sentimentality that coats everything like a thick layer of snow.

2007 (Part The First)

2007-12-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

Well, that's it then. We've scrambled another year onwards, almost all accounted for.

As much as I agree with Andrew that it's been a year stuffed with an exhilarating, exhausting series of conversations, arguments and, well, some actual theatre, I can't help feeling that the suggestion that we've solved everything and have run out of things to talk about is somewhat premature.

There's surely plenty of thinking and talking needed to be done, for example, on the relationship between the mainstream and the, umm, not-mainstream (upstream, alternative, experimental... pay your money and take your choice). Only today Brian Logan has an interesting article up at the Guardian about another fractured attempt at amalgamating alternatives modes of practise into the turgid British theatrical tradition. And I'm sure that anyone reading this is already aware of Chris Goode's fascinating ramble on the means by which the adherents of that same tradition are already peeling the skin off experimental theatre and draping themselves in it like a grotesque theatrical version of Silence of the Lambs (an idea that, surprisingly, no one at Tristan Baker has come up with... yet).

Indeed, just today in his round-up of the theatrical year Michael Billington reiterated his spurious claim that the only thing experiemental theatre was missing was a decent playwright. Chris has already aptly demonstrated the ways in which this assertion misses the fundamentals of alternative theatrical forms, taking its aesthetic to be its essence. Fixated on the hip location or the dazzling technology you miss the unpredictability, the intimacy, the risk, the authentic sense of participation that is what absolutely constitutes exciting experimental theatre. When Billington cites Complicite's clinical and uninspiring A Disappearing Number as a sign of the proper way that mainstream theatre can diversify, you know that there's a long way to go.

Yet although we (or indeed Chris) may have thoroughly dissected this problematic appropriation, surely this conversation is only half-done. Where do we go from here? How do we forge a more meaningful relationship between mainstream and the 'upstream'? How can the Royal Court or the National or the RSC accomodate ways of working that are incompatible with their complex technical apparatus and their play-making philosophy?

Indeed, should they? There's a piece I still mean to write about a localness that is missing from a theatre world that is still built around events; can any theatre that is as singularly located claim to be a National Theatre? Rather than worrying about the quality of this particular show or that, should we not instead be building a localised theatre, a dispersed series of events and happenings, that does not pretend to the universal but is instead focused on its immediate context and its individual participants?

And while we're on it, let's talk a little about the internet's favourite pinata, Mr Michael Billington. Surely a lot of the frustration vented at this generous and passionate elder statesmen is a product of the fact that somewhat stupefyingly he is still in the forefront of forging the theatrical agenda after 30 years in the same job. His attitude to what theatre can or should be, relatively unchanged after everything that has happened to the world (the internet, the end of the cold war, the rise of postmodernism, 9/11, the continued existence of Simon Cowell) in the intervening years, is still the orthodoxy in theatre. And as we're well aware, he's not the only one. So while our tiny internet pot may be bubbling over with exciting new ideas, its hardly like we're forging a brave new world quite yet.

One of the things I have enjoyed so much about writing for the Guardian is that it has required me to go back and repeatedly explain, justify and underline those points of presumed knowledge that are essentially givens in our online discourse. Because for all that our little community forges an exciting collective theatrical vision (primarily by enthusiastically agreeing with each other), it's not necessarily having that much impact on the wider theatre community yet. I know from personal experience that some artists are beginning to be informed by the subjects thrown about on the internet, but what of the Dominic Cookes and the Nick Hytners - are they avid readers?

What is the relationship between theatre and criticism anyway - there's a chicken and an egg really should throw together for a while. Especially as one thing the internet riotously does is blur the boundaries between the two - how many of those who so passionately write about what they feel theatre should be are at the same time creating (either writing or directing or, very often, both) their own work? The majority, I'd say.

The Guardian website is a fascinating entity in all this. There's now a wee bevvy of wonderfully talented people writing there and already it's surely beginning to challenge the orthodoxy suggested above - if only in that for every painfully inevitable Billington tirade, Lyn G is able to provide a refreshing counter narrative to absolutely cheer.

How though might we take this further? And if, as Andrew suggests, we are already running out of topics for your typical several hundred word blog post how might we begin to forge a more dynamic dialogue in the infinite spaces of the internet? If the internet is the future of theatre criticism, we who are here in the early days have an opportunity to try and construct that criticism as something meaningful and radical and new - but what and how?

I've enjoyed immensly reading everything that has been written over the past 12 months. I've been exhilerated, challenged, confused. I've felt jealous, awed and faintly inadequate in equal measure. And I'm undoubtedly looking forward to what happens in the 2008.

Coming up in part II later this week I'll try and write a little about some of the actual theatre that I've seen and enjoyed this year along with music/films and other such cultural bric-a-brac.

Guardian

2007-12-05T10:19:00.000-08:00

... and on the subject of things over there at the Guardian, I have a new post up about the (mis)use of the word Pretentious, and Andrew Haydon has a lovely bit about theatre in school.

On the subject of which. I went to my first ever show at the age of 17, when our sixth form drama teacher took us down to London to see Deborah Warner's Medea with Fiona Shaw. Which was, frankly, staggering. That same English teacher also had us studying The Duchess of Malfi, Bond's Lear and (unrelatedly) the wonderful 100 Years of Solitude. Needless to says eyes were opened, career goals hastily rewritten, parent's hopes dashed etc etc.

And the moral of this story? I don't know - English teachers should like better theatre? Maybe there's some kind of training programme they can go on - I can hear the fresh gurgles of a newborn government job on the horizon Mr Haydon...

A Poor Man's Art

2007-12-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

I feel that Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's esteemed film critic (whose review of Sleuth was one of the most glorious, passionate pieces of critical bile you will read this year), may have just unleashed an avalanche of vitriol on himself. At present the comment count stands at one but with that trademark sub-ed subtlety the headline is likely to cause a bit of a stir.

The Donmar's Othello Should be a Movie.

Now, Bradshaw had my hackles up almost immediately with this statement:

I'm sure the production is great, but the coverage has caused my old, bad feelings of rage and loathing for the theatre to surface once again, like a recurrence of malaria. More than the grandest event at the grandest opera house in Europe, it seems to me, the Donmar production effectively announces: this is a pastime for rich people.

However, the more I actually think about it, the more I have a great deal of sympathy with his position. It was something I felt myself while watching The Wooster Group's Hamlet in Paris earlier this year.

The Wooster Group being, well, the Wooster Group, rather than their version of Hamlet being based on the reasonably well known W. Shakespeare text, they set out with the intent of remaking a stage version from the 1960s featuring Richard Burton as everyones favourite angst-ridden 3o year old. And this is where my problems with the piece began.

Burton's Hamlet was a staggeringly ambitious show for its time and its location. Not only was the show performed on a minimal set with rehearsal room costumes, but the entire thing was filmed by 19 cameras and edited together into a cinematic experience sent out to cinemas across the country, being screened only once before all copies were to be destroyed (though invariably at least one survived). The idea was that the residents of Des Moines and Jacksonville would have a unique experience, once-in-a-lifetime chance to see this show, just like in the theatre.

What an ambitous, hopelessly misguided but gloriously honourable mission. To bring Broadway to the masses. To appropriate the immediacy, the liveness of theatre in the cinema. A nationwide experiment in poking at the permeable membrane dividing theatre from film. A chance to send East Coast high culture flooding out across the barren plains of 60s America. Its everything that was once magnificently, naively, bombastically optomistic about the US of A.

And here we were, 4o years and too many wars later, sitting in a room in Paris, watching the country's most acclaimed theatre company perform for an exclusive audience of well-educated, English speaking French people and well-connected people like us able to make it as far as Paris. Teasing out an elegantly strangled Hamlet that, in some ways, attempted to reclaim this performance from the masses. Although beautiful, and provacative, there was something uncomfortable about this Hamlet, and something uncomfortable about its audience.

It should also be apparent by now that I am unlikely to add my voice to those who will hold up some spurious magical quality in live theatre that means it is implicitly untranslatable to any other medium. Liveness has to be fought for and hard earned. In a theatre that increasingly relies upon effects and microphones there is often little to separate it from a cinematic experience than than the superficial thrill of attending The Theatre. That having been said this Othello does appear to be a production that retains at least traces of a authentically live experience. Michael Billington (what, not taken in vain? Is the world still turning?) comments on the unfussy, musicality of the verse - something I think is important in good Shakespeare; that in the auditorium, as with all good poetry, you are feeling the words as much as you understanding them.

And I do like Bradshaw's idea that the theatre could have open performances, like Wimbledon. Perhaps the atmosphere at such events would have a similarly reviving effect as those days always do at the aforementioned tennis tournament; a vast improvement on the smugly contented hum that otherwise prevails.

However, I think that in some ways Bradshaw fundamentally misses the point of theatre, understandably considering his job seeing it as some kind of antiquated live cinema.

Theatre is not a 'product' for consumption in the same way that cinema is. Theatre is an experience, a participatory event. A theatre ticket is a contract, not a receipt. To this end theatre is as much about the making as it is about the watching. And in that respect it's a fundamentally more socially levelling experience than cinema will ever be. As I said recently, theatre can happen in a power cut. It can happen in an empty room. It can happen on a street. It can be made by anyone and watched by anyone. Cinema can not. Notwithstanding the jaw-breakingly exhuberant costs involved in the meaningless, purile, decadent nonsense spewed out by Hollywood (and I mean everyone from Wes Anderson to Paul Anderson), on the simplest level to be able to make a film you need to be able to afford a camera. And to then actually have that film then seen by anyone you need a lot more than that.

Cinema and television may reach more people but its not just about the reaching. It's what you do with that audience.

Theatre is about intimacy not spectacle. It is exclusive, eclectic, obscure and, well, special. Theatre can be an experience for two people. Hell, it can be an experience for one. It's not about everyone getting 'the same experience', as Bradshaw says, in fact it's quite the opposite.

Spectacle washes through us, it overlooks us, it shouts at us. It tells us.

Intimacy invites us, it looks at us, it listens to us. It asks us.

And intimacy isn't necessarily about small numbers. You can have an intimate crowd, indeed the company Grid Iron often refer to their work as intimate spectacle. Intimacy is about an attitude. It is about collective understanding of the particular group of people in this particular place (the audience, the actors, whoever) being part of something unique, something, well, intimate. You can have intimacy in an auditorium. You can be without it in a room with one person (I certainly have been during some so called one-on-one experience that felt more like soulless conveyor belt titillation than any sense of genuine intimacy).

But of course, if theatre doesn't do these things, if it is merely an exclusive spectacle, what does that mean? Unlike there earlier work, there was nothing intimate or engaging about The Wooster Group's hollow spectacle. Their knowing simulacrum of both liveness and film was clever, but it was also empty.

This I think is where Bradshaw's rage justifiably arrives. Because here the frisson of excitement you feel, that magic quality people talk so often about, is not to do with theatre its to do with exclusivity. It's that same box ticking satisfaction that people have at the Mona Lisa. And it is at these moments that theatre feels anachronistic and outdated; the poor man's hand-made art absurdly dressed up in suffocating velvet.

Sunday Sun

2007-12-04T12:28:00.000-08:00

The inestimable Daniel Bryne (The Guardian's own Keyser Soze) has drawn my attention to this delightful way of wasting my time.

1. Put your iTunes/ music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT

1. If someone says ‘Is this OK?’ you say?
Spec Bebop – Yo La Tengo
Turns out I'm actually Robin Williams' Mork

2. What would best describe your personality?
Seventeen – Forward Russia
Seventeen was, as I believe someone else once said, a very good year, I'd like to think I'd moved on just a tad in the intervening *mumble* years...

3. What do you like in a girl?
It's the Sun - Polyphonic Spree
Someone radiant? Someone gaseous?

4. How do you feel today?
Teenage Labotomy - The Ramones
No comment.

5. What is your life’s purpose?
Evil Bee - Menomena
Absolutely.

6. What is your motto?
Cello Song - Nick Drake
A little unecessarily ambiguous methinks...

7. What do your friends think of you?
A Cautionary Song - The Decemberists
"I knew this one guy... went into theatre... last someone heard of him he was scavenging for out of date readymeals behind a Tesco in Tooting Broadway"

8. What do you think of your parents?
The Water - Feist
I have nothing for this.

9. What do you think about very often?
From Here to Fame - Aim
Ha. Nary a truer word said in meme.

10. What does 2+2=?
Easier - Grizzly Bear
Oh yes.

11. What do you think of your best friend?
Remember Me as a Time of Day - Explosions in the Sky
If he were a time of day, he'd probably be about seven thirty. Don't look for meaning in that.

12. What do you think of the person you like?
The Beatles - Devendra Banhart
Baby you can drive my car? Anyone? Bueller?

13. What is your life story?
A Night at the Hip Hopera - The Kleptones
Boom!

14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Domine Jesu - Mozart
Wow.

15. What do you think when you see the person you like?
On Your Way - The Album Leaf
Whose on their way? Her or me?

16. What do your parents think of you?
Fireworks - The Animal Collective
Disapointing and expensive.

17. What will you dance to at your wedding?
Fight! - Art Brut
It's going to be a good one...

18. What will they play at your funeral?
Sweet and Dandy - Toots and the Maytals
Now that would be a funeral.

19. What is your hobby/interest?
Shankill Butchers - The Decemberists
That's right, when I'm not writing for the Guardian or working for a popular London theatre, I torture and murder catholics to take the edge off.

20. What is your biggest secret?
Another Day - Air
Well aren't I just a tease...

21. What do you think of your friends?
In My Life - The Beatles
Ah. Well that's just lovely.

22. What should you post this as?
Sunday Sun - Beck

Desperate

2007-12-02T07:54:00.000-08:00

And the award for this week's least surprising piece of news goes to the closure of Desperately Seeking an Audience after one horrifying month. Who knew a mediocre Madonna film with the music of Blondie superficially grafted on top of it would be an abysmal failure? Oh wait, everybody.

Perhaps the staggering failure of this abortion of a musical will finally put an end to the West End's desperate pop-cultural barrel-scraping, pillaging music, film and television to equally shameless degrees in a hopeless scramble for audiences; dressing themselves with borrowed success and secondhand glamour. Filling our stages with trumped up tribute concerts and meaningless nostalgia-fests that are only a few thousand pounds and a stage manager away from sing-along-a-Sound of Music.

Probably not, though.

That having been said I'm by no means getting on the 'we're all doomed, captain' death-of-the-West-End bandwagon. In fact, there are some very creditable things going on. Look at The Theatre Royal Haymarket, where Edward Bond's fascinating play The Sea will be arriving at the end of January, a far braver, more exciting piece of programming than most of the Donmar's showy star-orgy at the Wyndhams. If either of those ventures is deemed enough of a success maybe there's even the giddy possibility of producers flocking to the theatre bookshop rather than HMV for their next big idea.

Like Hollywood in the early 70s, we could be on the verge of something very exciting.

Of course there is a downside to all of this. I think that the failure of Desperately Seeking some Dignity will probably mean a very early demise for the new genre of pop music/film crossover musicals. Which is a crying shame. There's mileage there... I was looking forward to Saving Private Ryan the stage show, featuring the music of Status Quo.

Let Sleeping Playwrights Lie.

2007-11-29T04:13:00.000-08:00

How much do we owe to dead playwrights?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

We cannot seek to revive them. We cannot divine their intentions, their thoughts, their hopes and dreams. We cannot know if they wrote their plays to communicate a very definite and personal message, or whether it was knocked together in a fit of desperation to pay the bills.

By all means honour them but do not revere them. And do not, under any circumstances, try to do them justice. In attempting to do them justice you do the very opposite.

Shakespeare was an innovator, a wild card, an 'upstart crow', a populist who honoured his audience by challenging them. If we pickle his plays in some spurious half-preserved form, like a decaying limb festering in formaldehyde, we do nothing but desecrate the excitement, the danger and the unpredictability that they once represented.

'What matter who's speaking?' Someone once famously said. Ironic then that that person's estate should be the worst perpetrators when it comes to the necrophiliac pursuit of some ghostly, bastardized figure of the author haunting every ensuing production. Did Beckett become the writer he became by obeying convention? How would he feel about the innovators, the exciting young artists, being denied access to his work under the spurious grounds of maintaining some museum authenticity. These hangers on, these preservers, these authenticators - they come to bury Beckett, not to praise him.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

So said Walter Benjamin. Any play by a dead writer does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It is a ruin, an image of the past existing in the present. You can preserve it as a ruin but that is what it will remain - useless, anachronistic, tired, empty. Or you can accept it as belong to a new time, as being remade - 'seized up at a moment of danger'.

That is what Katie Mitchell is doing. Seizing a dead text at at a moment of crisis. Remaking it for the present. This is the only way that dead texts can be anything other than museum pieces.

Michael Billington may wish theatre to be a dead art, pickling old ghosts for the gentile pleasure of the comfortable and the safe. But anyone who cares about theatre, or indeed the world, should applaud Mitchell's attempts to make it completely relevant and completely vital.

Women of Troy at the National

2007-11-28T02:37:00.000-08:00

The Canadian author Douglas Coupland used to be obsessed with the idea of Armageddon arriving while you were in the supermarket, this most mundane and modern of rituals abruptly interrupted by nuclear apocalypse; finding ourselves eviscerated in the tinned foods aisle, while shelves of baked beans and Kraft Dinner melted around us. This was the image that came to mind as I reached the end of Katie Mitchell’s dark, jarring, magnificent production of Women of Troy; these hauntingly mundane rituals stripped of all importance in a world where life is always more fragile and meaningless than we appreciate.

Euripides' play is, unsurprisingly, about the women of Troy, led by the royal family of Hecuba, her daughter Cassandra and her son’s wife Andromache, in the fallout from their defeat in the Trojan wars. In this production they find themselves in an anonymous coastal warehouse, their glamorous evening dresses hanging awkwardly from their hunched, anxious frames. There’s something decidedly feral about them; about the way they scatter across the stage at a noise from outside, about the way they hold the seam of their dresses in their mouth to climb the steel ladders on either side of the stage. Their Greek captors are seen fleetingly, rushing in and out in an uncomfortably repetitive frenzy of locking and unlocking doors; a beautiful and well-maintained conceit that begins to wear the audience down with sense captivity as much as it does the pack of startled, scared women huddled on the cavernous Lyttleton stage.

Trapped in this uncomfortable prison, awaiting their removal to whichever of the Greek leaders has won their slavery, the women in Mitchell’s production survive on a messy orgy of half destroyed rituals. Fire rituals, mourning rituals and burial rituals rub up against more familiar rituals; the women are constantly ferreting in their glittering purses for make-up or a cigarette, their shaking hands going through the motions of reassuringly familiar actions.

And then there is the dancing - a strange, mesmerising quick step; sometimes at full speed sometimes in slow motion, sometimes with partners, sometimes alone. Often the characters who have already left, even their Greek captors, rush back onstage to take part in the dance; at one beautiful, absurd moment, Helen, naked but for a pair of heels, dances across the stage in the arms of Menelaus, the husband she left to begin the conflict and who has just assured us of the inevitability of her execution.

In this dance, which takes the position of some kind of bizarre mourning ritual carried out every time a woman is torn from the throng and forced off stage, all these absurd, meaningless rituals come together. Ancient Greece melts into Mitchell’s modern setting, religious mourning bleeds into the glamour and decadence of secular society; it’s a disorderly, beautiful, haunting, meaningless ritual, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

This production must surely put paid to Brecht’s ideas about the reassuringly cathartic quality of Greek drama. Euripides’ play is undoubtedly that of an outsider, bristling with fury at the oppressive brutality nestling at the heart of Grecian history and society. The play slips under the skin of the Homer’s mythic history and tears it apart from the inside out. Status, religion, war and history are rendered meaningless in an apocalyptic vision of suffering.

Mitchell’s play flits awkwardly between messy realism, song, dance, and choral proclamation; jarring the audience from any sense of continuity. It’s alienating in a very Brechtian sense, Hecuba’s assertions about the emptiness of God and Power flying from the stage like soap box aphorisms, spat out into the audience. Indeed, Hecuba is just cruel and aloof enough to render any hope of comfortable sympathy null and void.

This is not about the suffering of these women, it is undoubtedly about the meaningless suffering of anyone in the face of god, history, power, and empire. In this sense it is resonantly political; not in a patronisingly limited way that might have the women running around in orange jumpsuits, but in a way that opens up the whole of human history to criticism. And in the final few bombastically apocalyptical moments, as the sirens and the helicopters whirr behind the black safety curtain, you cannot but realise the desolate pointlessness of the endless war and suffering on which our comfortable lives are built. And hidden in there somewhere is the additional nagging feeling that someday it will be our turn to suffer.

A Photo-message to anyone who has suggested there is a lack of balanced reporting in the media.

2007-11-24T15:16:00.000-08:00

Caption competition?

My Two Cents on the 'Martin Amis is racist' non-story.

2007-11-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

He may not be a racist, but he's still an arse.

You've got to Need it.

2007-11-20T15:07:00.000-08:00

I heard an interesting thing the other day.

A friend of mine who works in the tantalisingly mysterious world of alternate reality games (ARGs) was describing the nuts and bolts of how exactly they are put together. These events are beautifully logical fictitious stories involving scenarios, puzzles, false businesses and fake characters all played out across real locations, phone, video, letters and, of course, the wide open spaces of the internet. For my friend however the most interesting, the most exciting and the most enjoyable elements were always those moments of live performance (of theatre) that occurred as part of the game. He also noted that these elements weren't just thrilling in the context of the game but, indeed, were simply thrilling moments of theatre, more so than most of what goes on onstage and suggested that this might be a consequence of the fact that these people came to theatre (or, indeed, live performance) only when it most suited what they had, or needed to say.

And this is what interests me, this need for theatre, as the absolute only way in which we can do what it is we want to do.

Looking back a little, the same might be said of the group of Artists in the US and Europe in the 60s who were involved in the development of what became known as happenings. Beginning with art that simply transcended the pictoral (art that wasn't of something), they moved first towards art that was either in some ways a document of performance (Pollock wading through his canvases brush in hand) or incorporated real world objects (Rauschenberg and his assemblages) towards installations and then finally into live performance, through a desire or a need to explore to its fullest the 'give and take between art and the physical world'.

In performance they found the possibility for an art that could properly embrace chance and unpredictability and in doing so refer to (and be a part of) the real world. And it is apparent simply looking around at a lot of the most interesting work that is happening today (from the sweaty huddled archetypes of Particularly in the Heartland and their relationship with ClaesOldenburg's Ray Gun Theatre, to the programmed performances of Rotozaza or, even Chris Goode's Homemade and their relationship to John Cage and Allan Kaprow's work) that this moment in art history has had a radical and thrilling impact on theatre.

The point being (and there is one but its late so you'll forgive me if its hazy), that some of the time the most interesting people making theatre arrive at live performance from somewhere else entirely. And the reason for this I believe is that these people, a lot of the time, are chasing something that those in theatre absolutely take for granted. That immediacy, that unpredictability, that hand-made, visceral, unrepeatable, interactive quality that is theatre at its essence. Theatre that, in Tim Etchell's words, is an 'invitation to be here and be now, to feel exactly what it is to be in this and this time.'

When these people therefore arrive at theatre frequently (though not all the time) it is these qualities that their work absolutely revels in, joyously embracing those qualities of liveness that previously weren't open to them - that heart-jammed-in-your-throat excitement of being caught up in an event, of being a part of it. That visceral quality of being close enough to someone to see their flaws, to smell them, to see them fuck something up, to know that they are present in front of you - that you can talk back and they will hear, and can respond.

Without coming to theatre looking for these qualities it is too easy to assume theatre as your default mode of engagement - without asking yourself why that is. How many people on young writer's courses up and down the country ask themselves why they're writing a play rather than a book or a movie or a poem or a diary (other than that as they are indeed, on writer's programme it stands a much better chance of actually being seen by someone and produced than any of the others)? How often when a writer is sitting on her laptop is she thinking about the bodies that will be sharing the same air for a few hours at some point in the future?

Not that this is all about writers by any means. God knows how many directors get trigger happy when they've been giving a few pennies to spend and lavish it on microphones and video-players and complicated stage mechanics and possibly forget why it was they were making theatre not movies in the first place.

So long live those interlopers (the gamers, the artists, the craftsmen, the sportsmen) for reminding us what makes theatre such a damned desirable medium, fizzing with possibilities.

Guardian Blog

2007-11-14T04:31:00.000-08:00

I've got a new post up at the Guardian's website, which, as Alison has identified, is a pretty exciting place at the moment.

This one's about the length of shows and builds, to some degree, on the things that Dan Bye and Alex F had to say about Sport back here. Personally, my dream is still to get hold of a remote island somewhere (possibly somewhere like the delightfully remote Colonsay off the coast of West Scotland) and for three months or so have a theatrical event of some kind taking place, part instalation, part interactive experience, part festival that people could arrive at and stay for as long as they like, becoming as much or as little a part of the experience as they wanted.

The whole thing would be based around the marvellously doomed attempts of various utopian thinkers to found their own perfect communities - at once both an incredibly long show about these gloriously hopeless, magnificently naive utopias and (in some small way) a little society of its own, growing its own rules out of the infinite possibilities of theatre. Well, that's the theory at any rate - though, Lord of the Flies II is always a possibility...

Small Metal Objects at Stratford East Station

2007-11-13T02:26:00.000-08:00

It's been a little while since there's been anything approaching a review around here.

Maybe its a consequence of the 'near civil war' footing that I've been on for the last while, rattling around in the basement in a confederate bandanna, naming rifles after old girlfriends and whistling The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Happy Times.

I did, however, find the time to bustle my way across East London to Stratford station for Australian company Back to Back's Small Metal Objects, part of the fascinating Ozmosis season at the Barbican celebrating some of the exciting work from our antipodean friends that Alison waxes so magnificently lyrically about at Theatrenotes.

First thing to state is that this show is almost as fascinating before anyone has arrived as it is once the theatre nominally begins. Quick stepping into the grand airport-like terminal of Stratford station with my standard flustered overpunctuality, I gazed around confusedly at the sheer wall of windows, the commuters spilling through each other across the off-white floors, the un-moving silverlink trains jutting out into the centre of this showy modern edifice. I searched in vain for some sign of theatre - there must be a show round here somewhere... and then I saw it. Up on the balcony, a perfectly ridiculous, utterly conspicuous bank of bright red plastic seats, gazing down on nothing in particular.

It's a gloriously absurd piece of installation art in its own right, that I could quite happily imagine touring to various unexpected places. A frame around reality, a command to look, either at the magnificence of the world we daily overlook or the absurdity of the rituals and routines that make up our every day lives. It's fair to say traditionally I'm not a big fan of auditoriums, but this one I absolutely loved.

And then of course, the show begins. And it begins awfully well. The audience each puts on a set of headphones through which to hear the show, there are a few preliminary checks and then suddenly a shimmering few bars of echoing piano play, scoring beautifully the ebbs and flows of the people flocking through the station turnstiles beneath you. It's a wonderful moment - with a genuine, grand yet fragile magnificence to it that truly transcends theatre. Suddenly two Australian voices begin to interrupt this reverie, a plodding, naively profound conversation between a wise squeaky voice and a deeper, slower more ponderous one.

Where were these disembodied figures? The audience scanned the busy station, noting huddled figures in various corners, suddenly imbued with a sense of mystery and fascination - a life-size, living, breathing Where's Wally book. And then, amidst the confusion and the mess and the commuters flowing ceaslessly through it all, I picked out at the back of the station two stationary figures, no more than colourful, delicate smudges, taking in the whole view. It was the third startling moment in this show already, as the intimacy of the conversation suddenly slotted into the context of this overbearingly grand and busy station. There was something incredibly powerful in the image of these tiny figures, so distant and yet so close; so alien and unknown and yet so intimate and familiar - forcing us to hold in our heads at once our own local, personal world and the impossibly vast, overpopulated, bustling world that surrounds it.

Understandably after beginning with such force, the gentle, brittle story (if story is really the right word) that unfolds, while touching in a slight way, never regains these heights.

Having constructed such a fascinating form, I wanted them to explore it just a little more. There was one delightful moment as the characters moved closer and I suddenly realised that the voices that I had instinctively put to the actors' physiques were in fact reversed, but beyond that there was little surprise. And indeed, some of the ambiguity of the event was removed (as it was at GridIron's Roam) by the necessity for the actors to have their radio mics prominently taped to the side of their faces - leaving you in no doubt who was acting and, more frustratingly, who wasn't.

GridIron's Roam, performed around Edinburgh airport in 2006 (imagine the government allowing that to happen any more...) is indeed, an interesting show to bring up at this point. The company's director Ben Harrison recently left a comment on my article at the Guardian where he described the show as attempting to

interact with the world and connect intimately with the its theme, the emotions and politics of air travel. The two audiences, our paying audience which encircled the performers like a bubble, and the 'accidental' but omnipresent audience of air travellers using the airport, added to the layering of the piece and its social and political relevance.

And with Roam this was undoubtedly the case. Groups of travellers joined the formal audience, watching along with them, occasionally walking through the action, becoming (to a degree) performers in the show. The event felt fluid and open, generously inviting passers-by to engage with it, to follow the show and become a part of it.

The same could not be said about Small Metal Objects, although the headphones gave the show a powerful intimacy, they certainly excluded passers-by from anything other than a passive, unknowing involvement in the event. At one point one character asks commuters if their name is Gary, to the delighted snorts of the audience, while at the end as the actors clapped the commuters moving around them, with the same reaction. Both moments seemed to move alarmingly close to a smug elitism - a joke at the expense of the passers-by - like a candid camera show. Such a feeling was only compounded by the make-up of the audience and the cast (almost exclusively white) when compared to the rest of the station; like a little corner of the Barbican had been transported to the East End, to use it's station and its people like a dynamic, living cinematic Green Screen, without any attempt to include them in our spectacle.

And yet without this exclusivity there wouldn't be the anonymity for the actors that allows the show to reach moments of positively magical beauty; particularly the very last image - of two figures, lost in the crowds, standing on the balcony staring silently out across the station. It's an interesting conundrum raised by a fascinating show - I just would have liked to have seen them attempting to resolve it.

Louis Armstrong is a Big Fat Liar.

2007-11-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

King of the Court

2007-11-09T03:29:00.001-08:00

Dominic Cooke's latest programme at the Royal Court is receiving a healthy dose of press attention at the moment, and justifiably so, as I think its about the most dynamic and exciting programme that the place has had in years and, regardless of how you might feel about the limited scope of the typewriter totalitarianism of traditional playwriting, one of the most mouth-wateringly ambitious programmes I've seen since I've been in London.

The most interesting thing about the programme is watching Cooke gracefully balancing the fulfillment of the expectations of the Court's traditional audience with elements that subtly challenge or even undermine those expectations. Or, put more simply, after throwing the State of the Nation brigade a juicy slab of David Hare, he has the them eating out of his hand.

And so with the old school pacified those with a more adventurous bent get a new Katie Mitchell/Martin Crimp collaboration and a new (and as-yet entirely un-started) piece by Anthony Neilson. Add to that an intruiging french-canadian play translated by Caryl Churchill and new work by Mike Bartlett and the astounding Debbie Tucker Green (whose Generations was about the best defence of the power and depth and subtlty of the short play (or indeed the playscript itself) you are likely to see) and what you have is a programme that is unashamedly pawing at the limits of traditional playwriting; experimenting with form, location and structure in myriad of fascinating ways.

And no element of the programme represents this better than the Rough Cuts season, a forum for theatrical experimentation that I feel, far from being a new feather in the Court's
much admired hat, harks back to those misty eyed golden years of the 50s and 60s in terms of the scope that it gives young artists to play not just with ways of writing theatre, but ways of making it. After all, as I have said before, when Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker and the like were hanging around the place like a bad smell in the post-Look Back in Anger days, they weren't sitting in conference rooms learning how to create characters or write pithy well-structured dialogues, they were up on their feet, playing with masks, reading Brecht, exploring theatre as a medium rather than merely as a platform for their own literary virtuosity.

And in that sense this programme is truly in the spirit of those much cooed-over years, throwing off the albatross that has hung around the theatre's neck for so long and genuinely living up to what Cooke calls 'tradition of innovation and experimentation which is at the heart of the Royal Court’s mission.'

Jean Charles de Menezes

2007-11-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

I don't really have much to say that hasn't already been said as regards the jaw-dropping ineptitude and shameless face-saving of London's police force in the case of Jean Charles de Menezes except to reiterate the simple fact that an innocent man was shot dead in public and no one has been called to account.

That cannot be said enough times. An innocent man was shot in the head several times. 19 seperate 'catatrophic' errors led to his death. And our police force has propogated lies, half-truths and vicious rumours to try to conceal those flagrant errors that led to this man's death. They have done everything in their power to avoid responsibility for the fact that they murdered an innocent man on a tube train in the middle of London.

That they can get out of bed in the morning and look themselves in the mirror is beyond me, let alone how they can continue go to work, or even award themselves a £25,000 performance related bonus.

I urge you to go and read all of these articles on the subject. Everyone should be staggered by this.

Oh! The Horror...

2007-11-02T14:07:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving up in the World

2007-11-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

My inaugeral post at The Guardian blog is now up.

Not a word in it will be particularly new for anyone who is a regular reader of this place - it's more of a statement of intent and, even more so thanks to a sub-eds (unconsciously I imagine) provocative hyperlink to a Michael Billington article, a thinly veiled criticism of a certain modes of thinking when it comes to political theatre:

In a time when we are saturated by political messages I think theatre needs to realise that the form in which we say something can be as political as what it is that's being said. And this is where theatre can be a more effective vehicle for change than film or television. Because theatre is about doing as much as it is about describing. It's about being somewhere in time and space, being part of an event. Theatre that embraces this liveness and this localness can really achieve something.

As I said, it's an oft-repeated view amongst some of the most interesting people writing about theatre today (and in fact, funnily enough after I finished it off the other day I chanced upon a far denser and more interesting debate on the same subject over at Alison's site), but I felt it was one that deserved an airing in its boldest, simplest terms.

With that as a basis, hopefully there will be more interesting things to come in future weeks.

Halloween

2007-11-01T02:21:00.000-07:00

The transformation of All Hallow's Eve from an often somber, quiet, pagan festival to a kitsch explosion of tacky ghosts and pop culture horror, I think represents an interesting shift in our perception not only of what we are afraid of but what fear is.

For several years I worked as a ghost tour guide under the streets of Edinburgh, I worked for some wonderful fascinating places and some fabulously tacky horror-fests. I met ghost hunters, Wicca witches, farting dogs and an almost unending stream of ordinary people with personal stories to tell of dark figures, moving objects and slamming doors.

I also got to learn a little about the history of some of the ghost stories in Edinburgh. Stories of ghosts that date as far back as the 17th Century when the streets were said to be haunted by the victims of the plague. Now in this period people spoke with genuine reverential fear of ghosts. Because a ghost represented something other than it does today. Ghosts represented the dark side of the afterlife. In a Christian community that fundamentally believed in heaven (and possibly also hell), ghosts represented a chilling possibility of death gone wrong, dangerous, pitiable spirits trapped between worlds, crying out for help or possible able to drag you down with them.

Today however, in a predominantly secular world, I think something has changed.

The people that came on these tours were almost entirely preoccupied with one thing – were these dark rooms haunted? The spectre of spectres haunted these journeys. Frequently people would come up to me afterwards and ask me if others had seen dark figures following the tour, or they would tell me of other ghosts – I learnt of violent deaths and foggy apparitions from Belfast to New Orleans. Almost all said they were afraid while on the tour. I would disagree.

What the people on my tours experienced was nervous excitement - a tingly, bubbling anticipation. There was nothing sombre about their fear. Like Halloween revelers this was a fear to be savoured, to be enjoyed. When they came to me afterwards they didn’t want comfort, they wanted confirmation. Reassurance that what they really had felt what they so desperately longed to feel. They wanted to know that it wasn’t just their imagination – that something, not God but some spirit of the afterlife had reached out and touched them.

Like the Victorian spiritualists gripping for dear life to the hope of something impossible and magical in an era of reason and science, in our godless world ghosts are no longer a fear but a hope.

Field of Dreams

2007-10-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

I am unashamedly a lover of sport in very nearly all of its myriad forms.

Oh! The feel of damp grass on a Saturday morning. The fizzle of anticipation watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The intoxicating perfume of chlorine hanging on the off-white tiles of a leisure centre swimming pool. The hours idled away with the dulcet tones of Peter Allis shimmering over the emerald greens of Augusta. The sweat! The tears! The glory! The lingering feeling of anti-climax.

I blame my mother, she used to be a PE teacher and her ability to raise me to be competent at every sport it's important for a young boy to be able to play meant my secondary school years were spent as a hardworking if critically ungifted everyman in a variety of school teams. She is also to blame for an addiction to that far (physically if not emotionally) easier role of spectator. I have measured out my life in great sporting events, and now, crippled as I am by an almost insatiable need for competition, I can watch any sport and within a minute have been unconsciously transformed into an utterly partisan supporter. For me there has never been such a thing as neutral spectating.

All of which serves as an interesting contrast to the reams of theatrical bombast that is more the norm hereabouts. In fact I think this is almost the first time I have mentioned this particular fascination.

You see, the relationship between theatre and sport hasn't been a rosy one, less a love story and more Kramer vs. Kramer. In which case sport has definitely been playing the Dustin Hoffman role, ending up with all the exposure, the supporters, the money and the freedom of the cities of first Manchester and now London. All the while theatre is absent, crying in an elevator somewhere.

Sport is the nation's favourite past time, it is The People's diversion of choice. As I have already suggested with myself as a particularly pathetic test case, it is a lifelong commitment and a manufacturer of era-defining events (it is, after all, 1966 and all that, not 1956 that causes (most) people of a certain age to lapse into teary eyed nostalgia).

Primarily theatre's only response to the rise and rise of sport (and not just football but rugby, tennis, cricket and even formula one) as a headline grabbing, nation-captivating glitzy entertainment phenomenon has been staggeringly dull. With its focus on content rather than form, we have had a series of workmanlike plays about how much sport becomes a site of hope and community in the otherwise mediocre lives of (generally working class) men; so we've had Up n Under, An Evening With Gary Lineker and its follow up Breakfast with Jonny Wilkinson, and, of course, Andrew LLoyd Webber's The Beautiful Game. In addition to this, dance and physical theatre have discovered a collection of interesting ways to turn sport into a pale and cloyingly precious series of smug vignettes, most of which end up becoming a part of the opening ceremony of some big sporting event or other. For examples see the utterly silly Kataklo (at Aurora Nova at Edinburgh last year) and the superior (and funnier) though no more interesting Score by French company Au Cul de Loup (at the same venue this year).

Problem with all of these productions is that they borrow all the wrong things from sport. Sport is not about personalities. In all honesty most of those magical stories and marvellous characters involved in sport are utterly cliched and predictable. Sport is not good at telling stories; mainly because it only knows about five of them. The down on their luck losers who (almost) triumph against all odds. The local boy done good. The wisened old master, soaked in drink and full of wise aphorisms and a moments of cuddly misogyny. The victory clutched from the jaws of defeat in the last minute. We know all this. We've seen all this. It offers nothing to us but the same faintly warming glow of familiarity as the Hollywood movie.

People do not play sport or watch sport for these mediocre narratives. What sport offers is actually the complete opposite. It offers chance. A framework in which for people to challenge themselves and each other. When people in sport talk about performance they are referring to something far more dynamic and interesting than the way that most people would use that term in theatre. In sport performance is about a relationship with chance, an acknowledgement of the unrepeatability of this particular moment and this particular action. While the actor rehearses his performance, the sportsman rehearses for his performance; he practises, he trains, he prepares and when the whistle or the gun goes he pitches himself knowingly into the unknown. Hence while most mainstream theatre tends towards the uniform, sport is always tilting at the impossible.

It's no surprise therefore that the one area of theatre that had taken up the form of sport (its language and its structures), rather than merely its detritus, is improvisation. In improv you frequently have games, competitions, exercises - no surprise then that people have been using the term theatresports for a certain kind of improv since the legendary Keith Johnstone coined it in the 70s. And, indeed, most of the improv shows I have been to have more of the feeling of a sporting event about them than the theatre, there is a flavour of something urgent and unrepeatable in the air (normally sadly drowned out by an offensively loud soundtrack of jaunty remixed 80s pop music) and regardless of the quality (which is frequently as terrible as the music) the audience is almost always enthralled.

But what of the potential for borrowing from sport in some other form than a bunch of energised comedians playing games? As much as I love the idea of having two competing productions fighting over stage space for the audience's delightful (The Seagull finally losing out to Sarah Kane's Cleansed when a rat runs off with the former play's titular prop), in practise I can't see it working out. Perhaps what's needed is a sense that of that reaching for the impossible - of theatre not as a product to be honed to perfection but as a unique event to be prepared for and played. What the script needs to represent is less a guideline or blueprint for the production and more a set of boundaries within which to play.

Either that or let's simply turf the Theatre Royal stage, invite Wayne Rooney in and have done with it.

The Curious Dichotomies of Mr Billington

2007-10-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you bite your thumb at me sir?

2007-10-22T02:24:00.000-07:00

Stage fighting is rubbish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Political Theatre

2007-10-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

A few years ago at the Edinburgh Festival comedians John Oliver (he of sitting near John Stewart being English fame) and Andy Zaltzman (he of the big ginger hair) created an event called Political Animal, a late night political stand-up show at The Stand - Edinburgh's premier comedy venue. On its first night featured Perrier nominated Reginald D Hunter and the legendary Mark Thomas. I have rarely seen the place emptier. At one point John Oliver had to ask a friend of mine to laugh less, as it was kind of awkward in the otherwise mood-less room.

The moral of this story is Politics (unlike, say, Hitler or Michael Ball in a dress) does not sell.

I'll be interested, therefore, to see how many people struggle out of bed on a peaceful Sunday morning to attend a debate on Political Theatre - "What is it? Where has it been? Where is it going? Why on earth does it exist?"

I would love to go but alas fear that the only way to get in is by purchasing a ticket to a whole day of other events with dauntingly earnest titles like "what does music mean" and much as I am a sucker for a good debate on the nature of political theatre (especially one involving the omnipresent Andrew Haydon), the thought of spending 10 lunches on it (Unlike Prufrock, I measure out my life in deli sandwiches) does put me off a mite. So maybe someone could just drop them this note (an expansion of something I said to Mr. Haydon at some point but the link fails me):

For me, Political Theatre (or rather, plays about politics, which are what will be being read as part of the debate) is a curious contradiction; a revolutionary fist in a silk glove, a class warrior in a tailored suit. But then considering the grandad (or at least the overbearing uncle) of a lot of modern political theatre was the best kind of fine-dining California Marxist, maybe that's unsurprising.

I believe form is as important as content. And I believe that any radical political message a play might contain is neutered by a form I think is bourgeois and outdated.

Without sounding alarmist, I think we are fast reaching a point where our own complacency is placing democracy in crisis. On the simplest level, no one is voting. A system of government that relies on the the will of a people who aren't willing to engage with their system of government is, implicitly, in crisis. But then, maybe our system of government has always been in crisis - you can certainly draw a line from the rotten boroughs of 200 years ago to a few over-influential swing seats being flooded with millions of pounds of attention by one of the hundred richest men in England to win them for his party. Meanwhile people are being tortured in secret prisons on British soil, we can't protest outside our own parliament and we continue to be joined at the hip to one of the most shamelessly hypocritical and staggeringly inept US governments of all time.

What we need is change, not a change of government - we thought that would work last time but things have turned out pretty much the same. What we need is wholesale change on a local not a national level. We need a re-engagement with our communities, a re-establishment of our own ability to be involved in political change and a renegotiation of how we are governed and by whom (and for whom). We need to stop being told what to think by the omnipresent mouthpieces of dubious moguls. We need to remind people what activity means.

All of which does not need to be done by means of a lecture. Quite the opposite - we've had enough lectures, we've had enough debates - we need to get people on their feet.

Which brings me to theatre. Theatre can do all these things. But often it doesn't. Often theatre isn't about a re-engagement with our surroundings. Its about sitting in a darkened room as cut off from where we are as possible (which is what made the Camera Obscura moment in A Matter of Life and Death so wonderful - it suddenly reminded you exactly where you are and what you are doing). Often theatre isn't about the audience's potential to be active and involved. It's about making them as passive as possible, quiet, anonymous imbibers of whatever the person who wrote/directed the show wants them to see. Often theatre isn't about renegotiation
of anything. It's about one person telling everyone else what they think. The stage is a platform. The stage is a television screen. Michael Wynn says,

It is the interaction between the stage and the audience that makes theatre the perfect medium for political debate, discussion and ideas. It is live and interactive, and in some ways the audience can drive the play.

But I don't see liveness on a lot of stages. And when it comes to politics, when the writer is the major creative force and he's not even in the building, there's not a lot of room for interaction.

Even theatre buildings have their own politics. Most of them are great bastions of bourgeois values, ampitheatres for displaying and admiring, where people are sorted and classed, where the more you pay for your ticket the better view you get of the action.

I find that too often the radicality of a play's message is undermined by the form in which it is delivered. That form should be as dynamic as that which is being said. It's not always about telling. As in dreams (where we believe ourselves to be moving and yet it is all in our head), doing can be a form of thinking. Effective political theatre will have the audience as its central creative force. It will be outside of theatres. It will be engaging with an environment and the people who inhabit it.

Let's not celebrate the mundane politics of the Tricycle or the hollow laughs of the satirist. Look to the work of Augusto Boal, who staged impromptu political debates in restaurants and who later used theatre as a form of government, as a way of working through problems and coming to solutions. Or closer to home, the work of Jeremy Weller and the Grassmarket Project, devising shows with the homeless, the disenfranchised - not as social work but as a means of creating electrifying, inclusive theatre. Look at Brith Gof's incredible site-specific installations, engaging people in a very physical sense with Wales' dying industry. Look at the work of Welfare State International, their incredible all-embracing lantern march through the streets of Glasgow, what Baz Kershaw sees as a model for a reimagined governance; inclusive, flexible, organic, in which the local and the personal can exist and flourish within a larger project.

None of this may necessarily be describable as political but for me it is theatre's most significant and most vital challenge to the way we are governed, and the way we live.

Oh, and in other news, Dumbledore is gay.

Moratorium

2007-10-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

mor·a·to·ri·um n. pl. mor·a·to·ri·ums or mor·a·to·ri·a
1. Law
a. An authorization to a debtor, such as a bank or nation, permitting temporary suspension of payments.
b. An authorized period of delay in the performance of an obligation.
2. A suspension of an ongoing or planned activity

I like the idea of a moratorium. In part because I like the word Moratorium. It's starched and solemn and faintly sinister, like a musty victorian assylum, full of thick leather straps and decaying specimen jars, where ideas are taken by kind but misguided relatives when they stop doing what they're supposed to.

I like the idea of a theatrical moratorium. As I have said before, the best ideas come from friction, discomfort, something gnawing at your peace, as Howard Barker once said. Yawning blank spaces are no good. We should be tied, constricted, challenged - fighting our way to a brilliant solution that would have been lost in the crowds if all our ideas were allowed to roam free.

For me, blank pages, are all awful. Blue sky thinking makes me nautious. I like puzzles and I like solving them. Thinking while running - slamming into problems and scrambling over them. It's messy and its urgent. I don't want to sit under and apple tree and think. In those circumstances I can't think about anything other than that a) I'm hungry b) I want to climb a tree.

Given free reign I will invent myself obstacles. I once had 1 night and a 90 seater auditorium to do what I liked with. I panicked and did nothing for a month. Then I demanded of myself having no set and no tech. Within a week I had a 40 minute monologue, delivered from the velveteen stalls by an unhinged woman in a shabby evening dress, obsessed with a crime she might have overseen, to an audience huddled on the stage clutching torches that lit the action.

There's no such thing as constricting ideas. The potential for ideas is infinite. Infinity minus a few locked rooms is still infinity. So let's lock a few things away for a while and see what happens. Here are my suggestions. I make explanations and no concessions - make of them what you will:

There will be no duologues
-
There will be no plays set indoors
-
Any stage shall have no edges
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There will be nothing that can't be carried by two people
-
There will be nothing based on real events
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Nothing shall be pre-recorded

So that's my contribution - your suggestions?

The Soho Project

2007-10-15T02:19:00.000-07:00

Something is happening in Soho.

Messing about on the river

2007-10-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of helping out with a little piece of agitprop performance art/riverside fun organized by James Erskin and Carrie Craknell of Hush, whose Mobile Thriller was a beautiful little show set in the back of a car chasing through the streets of a city.

In order to add their voices to those raised in protest against the expansion of heathrow, and to highlight the staggering number of flights that this will mean are traversing London's skies every day, the company created a touchingly simple piece of dance and a glorious paper-aeroplane making/throwing extravaganza for anyone who happened to be walking by. Unsurprisingly with the mouth-watering prospect of balloons and paper aeroplanes there were plenty of people (young and old) milling excitedly for the whole of the hour and a half that we were able to be there before being inevitably moved on by bankside security for blocking the pavement.

Beneath the air of delightful silliness surrounding the whole event I think there's something utterly important about this kind of thing. As I've said before, in London we are now living at a time when protest itself has to be sanctioned by government, essentially reducing it to the status of a pantomime, a state-approved dance of opposition, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

In such circumstances we need to find alternatives modes of protest. If the government reduces protest to theatre we must make theatre into a form of protest. Let's harness all of the creativity, dynamism and innovation of modern theatre to create a startlingly political new theatre on the streets of London. With balloons and paper aeroplanes and dance and games we can take to streets with political messages delivered in baffling and marvelous new forms.

Which is not to say that what we need is protest with a few gimmicks attached to throw the authorities of the scent. Instead we should begin with the incredible theatre already flooding the streets of London (from huge spectaculars such as the Sultan's Elephant to companies creating fascinating, intimate interactive projects like Blast Theory, Rabbit, Lone Twin and, of course, Hush themselves) and look at ways in which these forms of work can fill the vacuum of meaningful political process created by the government's protest ban.

Guess Who

2007-10-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

Pop quiz, theatre fans, who said this:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.

Kenneth Tynan maybe? Susannah Clapp or Lyn Gardner? Maybe even one of our own?

Nope, nope and, well, nope.

Find out here.

Rider Spoke at (or indeed around) the Barbican

2007-10-14T04:21:00.000-07:00

What do you get when you combine renowned performance collective Blast Theory with a cutting edge media lab at the University of Nottingham? Ralph McTell's Streets of London on a Bicycle, apparently, or at least a beautiful concept undermined only by the technology required to realise it.

Like Wrights & Sights' Misguides and Forced Entertainment's Nights in this City (as well as my own modest addition to this little family of pieces), Rider Spoke dispatches its audience into the heart of the city, asking them only to look and listen, to acknowledge the stories and the theatre and the people that drench the streets with character.

At twilight on Saturday night I took a bike with a touch screen console strapped across its handlebars and set off into the clean grey expanse of the city. Listening to an appropriately folksy plinky-plonk score fed through a pair of headphones I wove my way through a concrete labrynth of wrought iron gates and cobbled back streets graced only by the occasional streetlight and the gaze of CCTV; a empty paradise trapped somewhere between the 1960s and the end of civilisation. This in itself was a wonderful experience, one entirely devoid of creative input from Blast Theory other than the bike and the music, reminding me once again of Tim Etchell's words; Sometimes it seems as if all we have to do is gesture to the window and ask people to look.

After a little while through my headphones a soft, sad female voice asked me a question, requiring me to find a hiding place and record my answer. Once this was done I could listen to the responses of other players who had been ask different questions nearby. Then I cycled on again, the same process repeated as I weaved my way with aimless glee across London, finding myself inexplicably (as it seemed so many of the players did) at St Paul's, before all too soon being required to return to the Barbican.

On this almost particular empty evening it seemed to me that the questions I was asked and the answers I heard worked best when their startling intimacy was juxtaposed with the grey anonymity of the city -the fuzzy warmth of recalling holding hands with an ex-girlfriend as I stood against a barred security gate; listening to someone describing with stumbling honesty how a secret had ruined their life just a little bit while I gazed into black windows of an empty office block. At these moments the show seemed to be mining the same melancholic seam that has made Postsecret and Found Magazine such a phenomenon; a desperate, sentimental longing for personality and honesty in the bustling, overpopulated, celebrity obsessed western metropolis.

The whole thing seemed a quiet and faintly sad experience; disembodied, lonely voices scattered across a disinterested city.

Yet while conjuring this divide between The City and those individuals that fill it, the technology the show relies on places it awkwardly between the two. Despite the valiant attempts of the company to imbue its chic handsets with a bit of handmade friendliness, the touch screen lit up by cute hand drawn cartoons and patterns and the aforementioned proto-Sufjan-Stevens plinkyplonk, it still felt false; like an orange advert or a innocent smoothie.

The interface is slow, with the music frequently giving way to 'Please Wait...' screens that leave you in a kind of limbo, not cycling around engaging with the city around you and or with the stories we are telling/told. This limbo takes up far too much of this hour long experience; which wouldn't be such a problem if you weren't constrained by such a limited amount of time. And despite the claims for some kind of personal responsiveness from the handsets, which tell you when you have found an appropriate hiding place to record your answers, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a generic timer, arbitrarily informing you that you have found a good place to hide regardless of where you are or what you are doing.

It felt to me like the company wanted this show to be more than the technology,or the logistics of doing a major show at the Barbican would allow. For their to be more engagement with each individual player than their generic devices were capable of. There was a yearning here to create a beautiful journey through the city, a delicate network of small voices listening to each other. To a degree the show achieves this. And yet, the time limitations and the sense of alienation from the technology, make you feel less like a player in a game and more like an audience member consuming a product, spending 60 minutes experiencing something that has the potential to be so much more.

It ain't what you do, it's what it does to you...

2007-10-10T02:17:00.000-07:00

Well, hats off to Andrew Haydon, who has made a gloriously successful transition from lowly theatre blogger to the Guardian’s latest pin-up boy (Get your 2008 calendars now, he’s December, concealing his modesty with nothing but a copy of The Empty Space and some tinsel).

In his most recent post Andrew (or at least his bi-line editor) asserted that Belle de Jour (apparently the scandalous tell-all book on which Billy Piper’s new televisual exercise in barrel-scraping is based) wouldn’t shock onstage, reeling off an impressive medley of plays from the restoration onwards extensively covering the subject of that oldest of professions.

My own feeling is, as I believe some of the comments point out, that the furore over this particularly staggering piece of mediocrity has less to do with its subject and more to do with its presentation. Shows from Kay Mellor’s sublime Band of Gold to the ridiculous Moll Flanders (starring the equally absurd Alex Kingston and a young Daniel Craig) have covered the subject in no small detail with nary a flutter of a coach potato’s eyebrow. The difference with The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is only the jaw dropping cynicism of its slickly packaged, half hour of guilt-free titillation masquerading as some kind of ‘true’ confessional.

Whilst expensive West London hotels remain flooded every night by £60 eastern European hookers and pub philosophers still puff out their chests and suggest that a girl with a short skirt and few drinks in her is asking for trouble, any show that suggests that prostitution is a bit of cheeky, harmless fun has a lot to answer for. I don’t care if one middle class girl managed to make a bit of money and quit the game intact, she’s hardly representative. I’d say she’s the exception that proves the rule in a society in which sex (and the female body) are a commodity, available for purchase 24 hours a day.

But look at me, getting distracted by a passing soap box. The real reason for all this chatter was that young Mr Haydon’s post got me thinking. What is still taboo on stage?

Recently of course, we learned that the word nigger can echo across London’s most prestigious auditorium to nothing but rapturous applause (though perhaps, in a mouth other than Paterson Jospeph’s it would foster a different response). And at no less a prestigious event than the Edinburgh International festival last year, Calixto Bieto’s stage adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s Platform bristled with projections of hard core pornography and throughout featured a disturbingly anonymous, voiceless young women walking around the rotating stage in nothing but a pair of heels. Nearby the Edinburgh fringe (great theatrical cesspool that it is) has been host to shows featuring Hitler, gang rape, torture, paedophilia, Les Dennis, a gay Jesus, Harold Shipman jokes and (of course) terrorism. In poor taste possibly and hopelessly inevitable in their attempts to be edgy and provocative, but genuinely shocking? Hardly.

There is an argument that in the sealed off space of theatre nothing is taboo. Separated as it is from the real world by the edge of the stage and a hearty round of applause, in the bubble of theatre, anything can happen without undermining the values we live by. Hence while transvestism out in the real world is a fabulous and (for many) uncomfortable challenge to our narrow conceptions of male and female, on stage it is the oldest joke in theatre. And it is interesting to note that in Bieto’s Platform, the moment the first few claps signalled the end of the performance, the actress who had remained naked throughout the previous two hours was quickly covered by a robe.

However, as I argued recently, this membrane protecting the world of theatre from the real world is an imperfect barrier. Certain values bleed over the divide. For example, as the Told by an Idiot’s experience on Casanova might suggest, while watching a heterosexual couple simulating sex, it is almost impossible for the woman not to appear to be in a position of weakness or inferiority. Clearly there have been several too many images of the likes of Billy Piper sprawled, doe-eyed and scantly clad, across giant billboards, magazine covers and advertisements and when we see the same on stage its almost impossible to abandon the values that these images implicitly reinforce.

So what else might have this same effect? Or what else might we see on stage that would reach out into the stalls and prick us from our cosy, cosseted safety? What will remind us that actually we’re not so far from the real world after all, and have us squirming with discomfort?

Anything that toys with illegality seems to have the desired effect – jerking the audience into an acknowledgement that the stage is still part of the wider world and (most) of its laws. Someone carefully rolling a joint and that (for most of our present cabinet at least) familiar smell wafting over the stalls would likely have people scanning their row nervously to judge the appropriate response.

Possibly, another alternative, one that similarly undermines that neat division between theatre and the real, might be to see someone genuinely suffering on stage. I was told recently of a solo show in which a performer delivered a monologue while drinking four bottles of whisky, lined up as an almost endless series of shots, glistening across the breadth of the stage. As the show got into its stride there were contented gurgles of laughter as the audience watched the performer slurring and swaying across the space. By three quarters of the way in the guy was unable to stand, collapsing on the floor with a loud, resonant slap. Now the audience were uncomfortable, gazing on helplessly, even desperately at an image of reckless, drunken suffering sprawled on the stage in front of them.

However, as uncomfortable as this may have been, was it really taboo? The audience by the end was exhausted, traumatised but almost universally thankful for the experience.