Imagine Form as Content

In her 2007 review of Presumption, currently playing at The Southwark Playhouse, Lyn Gardner picked up on the perfect marriage of its form and content. Third Angel's exploration of the humdrums of a loving relationship, after the passion and peacock feathers have settled, is repeatedly interrupted by the absence of necessary items of set. The piece almost questions whether it should or can proceed and battles through, just as its characters question their own relationship’s worth. As Beth and Tom's situation unfolds slowly and laboriously, so too does their shared living-room. The form serves as a fitting metaphor for the content, such that what is being presented cannot be separated from the very act of presentation itself.

On seeing Imagine This at the New London Theatre on Monday night, I couldn't help but agree with Michael Billington's assessment that the two were entirely at odds. Content, it seemed, had been well and truly battered into shape, much to the detriment of both elements. As a musical, Imagine This is overburdened by its subject, even as its subject is undermined precisely by its being a musical. As Billington says: "the romantic sentiment and uplift inherent in the musical sit uneasily with a story of not just heroic resistance but starvation, suffering and the death of more than 100,000 Polish Jews."

If fiction is to concern itself with the realities and atrocities of war, it must do so by implication. Either it must focus on the scale while implying each life lost to be a tragedy in and of itself, or else, it must do the reverse: use individual tragedy to point towards the magnitude. To lay focus on both seems impossible. By way of example, Saving Private Ryan’s first scene attempts the former while Life Is Beautiful and The Pianist achieve the opposite. If theatre, film or literature about war relies on mere facts and figures it becomes history. Instead, it must assume its audience already know or understand such things and use them to its advantage.

Theatre, as Imagine This proves so convincingly, cannot compete with film for scale. The stage is too small: it can no more fit an army than it can include a fight to the death. Instead, we must contend with ten pike-wielding Nazi uniforms standing in for the mass rallies of Nuremberg or a clump of bedraggled Jews and a handcart representing the entirety of relocation into the ghettos. Theatre’s hand is forced – it must rely on the individual story to reach the overall picture. War must provide the setting and not the story. It must intrude into and affect the narrative, but it cannot itself be the narrative. We glimpse it momentarily in the rubble and in the rations, in a death but not in constant death, and also as a filter through which we can see everything in between: from cups of tea to bedtime stories.

However, as a form the musical struggles to cope with this. It cannot rely on the minutiae, whether material or emotional, that anchors a story to reality and truth. Instead, musicals tend to magnify. They make stories grander, glossier and more global at the expense of the personal. They prefer spectacle. Musicals are inhabited by archetypes, rather than individuals – their characters are more recognisable than they are real. While Joseph or Guys and Dolls might survive its form, Imagine This feels like misrepresentation of each individual caught up in the history behind it.

(As I’ve been writing this, Imogen Russell Williams has posted a similar blog on warfare in theatre at Guardian Unlimited: here.)

But, I digress. Over the past half-century, theatre has played with form more than ever before. The experimentation that has come from treating theatre as a question posed, rather than a set of conventions, has grown exponentially. In asking, “What can theatre possibly be? What can we get away with? How do we break this?”, theatre has carved out the possibility of being anything it wants. We can clump Punchdrunk and the Globe, Forced Entertainment and Peter Hall, Shunt and A Chorus Line together in the same category. As such, it has become unacceptable merely to tolerate conventions and, in doing so, subordinate form to content.

Form must be equal to content, because form is content. Like a pair of glasses, it is the means by which we see everything onstage and, at the same time, it is always within our field of vision. It’s the reason Third Angel write: “We will make what interests us in whatever format is appropriate, rather than being tied to one distinct art form.” It’s the reason that Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, the Wooster Group and many others boast such a diverse canon of work. It’s also the reason why, having seen Punchdrunk’s Faust, I got so bored during The Masque of the Red Death.

To assume form is to neglect content and the sooner that theatre across the board realises it, the better.

Review: Daedalus & Icarus, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars


If Mungu Theatre Company’s chirpy retelling of Greek mythology is anything to go by, Iranian theatre is in good health. Playing in the Barbican Pit as part of the Iran: New Voices season, their Daedalus and Icarus is a fittingly inventive reimagination of Ovid’s epic poem that lies somewhere between Beckett and Hannah-Barbera.

Writer-director Homayun Ghanizadeh casts the aviators as wacky Wright Brothers, complete with goggles and ear-flaps, and gives a touch of Odd Couple dynamics in drawing on the oppositions between father and son to highlight the chasm between playful child and responsible adult. Nodding to clowning, but nearer to the goofiness of a live action cartoon, performers Javad Namaki and Hamidreza Naeimi Jegarlouei whizz and whir around the stage hammering on metal and baring blow torches. As they work noisily, Icarus is a bundle of distraction constantly wrist-slapped by his father’s piercing whistles, which enforce a rigid schedule. “There three types of people in the world,” Daedalus scolds - the third is always “those that blow whistles.”

Like the characters, Mungu’s production takes a long while to get off the ground, but having finally taken off, it soars. The metal structures form a swinging cockpit-like contraption, equipped with an industrial fan and four black-clad stagehands, and the two seem to genuinely take flight. They corkscrew, loop-the-loop and burst through shaving foam snowstorms in front of you. Suddenly, there is an electric fascination, edging on danger, and the journey becomes a whole narrative in and of itself, twisting and turning through the skies.

However, Ghanizadeh’s production struggles to wrap up the myth’s main function. Rather than melting the wax of wings by flying to near the sun, here Icarus turns joyrider once Daedalus has parachuted. While it works to modernize the story, the theatre of the moment falls out in comparison to the jubilant freewheeling of the flight. It all feels slightly anti-climactic.

Daedalus and Icarus delivers physical invention, witty and playful, well balanced by a tightly wound script (delivered in Persian with English surtitles). It might crash-land towards the end, but the flight itself is theatre at first class.

Review: You, Me, Bum Bum Train, Cordy House

Written for WhatsOnStage.com

In the heart of Shoreditch is a theatrical experience sure to leave you Dazed and Confused. For the twenty minutes of You, Me, Bum Bum Train, life whizzes towards you, towers over you and nestles momentarily in your periphery vision before disappearing. Like a cinematic dream sequence or drug trip filmed in POV, nothing is quite within your grasp or without distortion. The result is an exhilarating headspin of dizzying escapism.

Charged with rum and karoke, you are seated in a rickety wheelchair before being hurtled through a series of interactive situations – from bobsleigh runs to boxing rings – populated by a cast of seventy performers.

Crucially, everything is about you. The Bum Bum Train takes you to places where everybody not only knows your name, but cheers it to the rafters. Sick children ask for your autograph; admirers take your arm; paparazzi capture your image. This is a carousel of fantasies that treats you to a flavour of heroism and, then, before you can grow accustomed to it, whisks you off elsewhere.

It does, however, leave you in each moment just long enough to demand a real response. Do you throw a punch? Or pose for the cameras? What comes out of your mouth when asked to translate into Swahili? At such velocities, impulse and reflex become your masters. Your actions are as genuine as they are unthinking and, accordingly, consistently take you by surprise.

Yet there also lurks something altogether darker. In the midst of all this frenetic fun, regular suggestions that you might be ill barely register. At times, you are frisked, manhandled and mollycoddled. Even as you bask in your newfound celebrity, it leaves you questioning which fiction to believe.

While You, Me, Bum Bum Train is breathlessly exciting, there are flaws. Its brevity makes £15 seem steep. The stock situations portrayed means content falls short of form in terms of invention and more could be done to involve all the senses. Most damaging, however, is the slightest of suspicions that the joke might just be on you.

Nonetheless, as it treats you the experiences of someone else’s lifetime, You, Me, Bum Bum Train is a rollercoaster as entertaining as it is eye-popping.

Review: Presumption, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

Love is in the air at the Southwark Playhouse – only not the sort of love that takes your breath away. Rather the sort that, like breathing itself, has become a staple function of existence. With a doting attention to mundane minutiae, Third Angel celebrate a love seldom seen on stage or screen and, in doing so, sway any aspirations from perfection to contented, humdrum humanity.

Presumption explores a relationship, seven-years in, once the passion and peacock feathers have settled. Beth and Tom have both independently realised that things have changed. The question is whether for better or worse. Sure, they have become knotted together, with shared possessions and comfortable silences, but that knot seems inextricable, surrounded by hypothetical affairs and possible alternatives.

The strength of the piece lies in Third Angel’s refusal to paint in black and white. As such, Presumption is at once feel-good and melancholy; the union within both robust and frail. Beth and Tom’s relationship is a seismograph of constant tremors without earthquakes or a field of molehills ready to be made mountainous. Through them Third Angel ask, “Is this all there is” whilst simultaneously suggesting that a cup of tea and a welcoming kiss are all anyone could ever need.

Yet, it’s also extremely well-considered, whereby form and content are perfectly entwined. Throughout the piece performers Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe construct a clutter-filled living-room according to the markings on a bare stage. As they build it together, the effort, teamwork and compromise that the relationship has required becomes touchingly clear. Everything has its proper place; everything has significance and history. Accordingly, Presumption gets right underneath the notion of your entire world falling apart.

Ellinson and Thorpe perform with dazzling openness – utterly convincing as characters yet also allowing something of themselves to slip through. Whether playing with finely-tuned details, such as their shared head-tilts, or the broad comedy of struggling under furniture, they remain engaging, empathetic and extremely likeable.

A thought-provoking, tender and, at times, tragic look at normality, Presumption will leave you longing to get home for all the right reasons. It is a warm bath, run by another – no candles, no rose petals – but just right nonetheless.

Just Dandy

Like Maxie Szalwinska, I spent Saturday afternoon at The Riverside indulging in a spot of Peachy Coochy, a mischievous event led by the impish David Gale. Though I was aware of its monthly existence at Toynbee Studios, this was my first experience of the form. It wasn’t entirely as I had expected it to be, but nonetheless, I found it thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Peachy Coochy derives from a Japanese practice (pecha kucha) of limiting architectural design pitches to a strict form. Each presenter must work under the constraint of having precisely twenty slides, each of which appears for only twenty seconds, to give a presentation lasting six minutes and forty seconds. No more, no less; endless possibility.

What I had expected was a more immediately responsive form, whereby the presenter has not seen the images and must find inspiration from them to give twenty seconds of unplanned insight. In such a form, the struggle to articulate and the rigour of expiring time would push failure to the forefront and enforce genuine liveness.

What surprised me was how unwilling many of the artists were to submit to the whims of passing time. Gary Winters of Lone Twin counted out the seconds. Tim Etchells took a stopwatch with him onto stage. Rotazaza’s Ant Hampton left ample space, by creating a minimal text to fit comfortably into each twenty second demarcation. It seemed that no one wanted to play with vulnerability, to empower chance and risk failure.

That said, had my expectations been the case, the event would have strong similarities to a game-show. While this adds risk, it also becomes a great leveller, with little room for possible interpretation and play with the form. After a while, game-shows begin to blur into one – the difference between individual editions is eradicated. The individual attempt gets lost in the repeated framework. Regardless of questions, players and outcomes, The Weakest Link boils down to Anne Robinson swivelling on a pedestal. Watch too much Blankety Blank and each edition reduces to the a row of famous faces cracking funnies. Too much emphasis on the form and the liveness becomes irrelevant through a process of abstraction.

It was the radical differences between presentations – the stamping of personality onto the formal constraints – that captured me on Saturday. It enabled Gary Winter to measure out the time with a metronomic style and Lois Keidan to cram it full at breakneck pace. It allowed Ursula Martinez to sway towards stand-up and Adrian Heathfield to swing into intellectualism. It allowed wispy artiness and concrete polemic; stillness and movement; silliness, sentiment and sense.

But, Peachy Coochy also allows for that failure, for the dislocation of pictures and words, for one person to take control of each element, for a presentation about this presentation with photos of itself and its audience. Because, therein is the joy of Peachy Coochy – it is whatever you want it to be.

Exeunt Into Reality

At one o’clock on Monday morning, as I turned onto my road, there was a middle-aged man, wrapped up and tracksuited, running. An unusual sight for that time of night, made all the more interesting in its echoes of The Long Road, which I had seen a week before at the Soho Theatre. In Shelagh Stevenson’s play, the father talks of endlessly jogging to escape the pain of his son’s murder. On my road, seeing this nocturnal runner, an entire fiction presented itself. Like Kafka’s short on two men running past, an array of questions sprung to mind. From what was he running? Why at this time? What was so repelling at home?

I love those moments in real life that seem to step off the stage and into reality. Here, for a second, parallel possibilities co-exist, both equally fictitious. Multiplicity reigns supreme and characters linger on long after the curtain to mingle amongst the audience in the bar and beyond. How many Hamlets are wistfully wondering around London at this moment?

A while back, on the Jubilee Line platform at Baker Street station, I saw a man in a gorilla costume. I could not but think of Claire Marshall similarly suited in Bloody Mess. It goes to show that anything can belong onstage, because, no matter how obscure or theatrical, it doubtless exists in real life.

Further along the platform, appropriately, was a poster that quoted David Lynch: “Life can be complicated so art should be allowed to be complicated too.”

Review: Footsbarn's Midsummer Night's Dream, Victoria Park

Written for Culture Wars

So otherworldly is Footsbarn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, that it conjures thoughts of another dimension altogether. Two dimensions to be precise, for it has all the qualities of a BBC animated adaptation aimed at schools: low-tech, low-brow and lowly. Larger than life yet utterly without boldness, theirs is a homespun Dream simply told; its eye firmly fixed upon the groundlings. In stubbornly refusing to engage intellect or emotions, it proves an evening to surpass “the bounds of maidens’ patience.”

Footsbarn are a travelling theatre company approaching forty years of madcap, populist performance and not seen on these shores in a quarter century. Accordingly, for all the shortcomings of the drama itself, there is a quaint charm at play. Underneath their masks, Footsbarn’s players become intriguing specimens, a throwback to simple, roaming antiquity. They live entirely for performance. While their big-top, erected in a clearing in Victoria Park, promises a dark, eerie magic, Footsbarn exude warmth, generosity and a fondness for the people of the world.

Sadly, all the goodness of spirit in the world cannot elevate their makeshift Midsummer Night’s Dream, which increasingly grates as it fades from mirth to monotony. Footsbarn display little faith in the play itself, overburdening it to breaking point with convoluted additions, slapstick clowning routines and bizarre character choices.

Lysander and Demitrius (Paddy Hayter and Vincent Gracieux) are so aged that they more closely resemble a pair of Richard IIIs than young lovers. As such, their joint pursuit of Hermia (a sweet Caroline Piette) and Helena (Muriel Piquart) takes on a perturbing quality of unwanted attention. As Titania, Akemi Yamauchi moves with an airy elegance but is utterly incomprehensible when tackling the text, while Mas Soegeng’s Puck is a force of aggravation, as he squeals pig-like throughout.

The mechanicals fair little better. Overplayed and under-thought, they finally produce a pageant-like Pyrramus and Thisbe of surprising sophistication but little laughter. It is left to the delightful Piquart, a marvellous clown possessed of remarkable stillness, to garner any form of original comedy as she springs into Helena’s broad emotional extremes.

Footsbarn’s Dream might serve as an easy introduction for the uninitiated, but in harking back to a time before directorial vision and literary interpretation it offers little more than a glimpse of curious antiquity.

One of life's brighter days

I have an interview with Tim Etchells in The Stage this week. Haven't seen it yet, but when I do I'll post it up here - should be later today. Might even get round to posting some thoughts on Spectacular, which I saw last Thursday at the Riverside, by the weekend.
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Exploring Existence

Forced Entertainment’s previous production The World in Pictures – a brisk and brusque retelling of history in its entirety – glosses over the major events of the past few decades in a rattle of et ceteras and blah, blah, blahs. “This stuff,” explains Terry O’Connor to the audience, “is stuff that you know anyway. Since you all lived through it, we can afford to go quickly.”

It is an intriguing but loving dismissal of the present from the Sheffield-based collective, who for almost 25 years have remained utterly fixated by the messy complexities of contemporary existence. Under the artistic direction of Tim Etchells the company have always aimed to dissect the act of living as it is right here, right now, with all its postmodern and existential trappings. Neat facts and tidy narratives simply don’t tell the whole story.

“When you go twenty-four, twenty-five years, as we have done,” says Etchells, “it becomes clear that you’re circling various topics and chasing things. You do it one way and then you go back a few years later and do it another way. Nothing’s final, is it?”

No surprises, then, that their new show Spectacular, a two-hander around death that receives its UK premiere recently at the Warwick Arts Centre, resuscitates some recurring motifs. Followers of the company will recognize the skeleton costume and enacted deaths, both of which have cropped up intermittently since 1986. “In some ways it’s a distillation or pushing on of a set of things that have been in the work for some time. I’m not obsessive that things are brand new.”

Despite this assertion, Forced Entertainment has never been content to settle for safe regurgitation of endlessly similar products. In treating theatre as a question posed, they have remained perched on the form’s edges, picking at its seams and pushing its limits.

Formed in 1984 by a group of Exeter University graduates, the experimental outfit now comprises of a core of six artists – Robin Arthur, Ricard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Etchells. In two and a half decades, the group have created an expansive and multifarious canon of over 50 projects, spanning theatre, visual art, film, text and digital media.

Throughout the eighties, the company’s work was characterised by a desperate, riotous freneticism, playing on the conflict between Hollywood adrenaline and the desolation of Thatcher’s Britain. Influences such as Impact Theatre and Pina Bausch combined as minimalist choreography gave way to ragged, visceral scores populated with kidnappings, cowboys and Elvis impersonators.

“Maybe at one point we were governed by this idea that a show ought to be X, Y and Z,” Etchells admits, “It ought to have some running around, it ought to have some music – and that was what we did. Over the years, that sense of what a show might be has loosened. We became more interested in liveness and in contact with the audience, flirting with the possibilities of having a hundred, two hundred or three hundred people sat watching.”

Out of the relative comfort of the nineties grew a more minimal style of work. Speak Bitterness, first performed in 1994, consisted of a row of seven suited performers continuously confessing sins over six hours, from eating the last biscuit, to forgery and fraud, to genocide.

“Everyone was used to us putting on mad costumes and wrecking everything about the stage, covered in beer – that was normal. When we came out and sat down to chat, that was surprising, because nobody really anticipated the work would go in that direction.”

Since then, their performances have often explored the failure of theatre itself. First Night presented an am-dram vaudevillian disaster of fixed smiles and missed cues, while 2005’s Bloody Mess collapsed inwards under clashing genres and a menagerie of theatrical personas – actresses, clowns, roadies and a woman in a gorilla suit – wrestling for centre stage status.

Within all this lurks a dark, ambiguous comedy. “There’s always been an absurd, playful edge to the work, even when it’s trying to be serious. I think our influences or reference points are half from art and theatre and half from popular entertainment – from Tommy Cooper or Morecombe and Wise, from stand-up or amateur dramatics. We always love to mix things up.”

With their hunger for experimentation and reinvention, Forced Entertainment has become staple fare in academic circles.

In 1999, the company received funding for the development of educational resources, which Etchells feels has added accessibility to the work. However, through their risky interrogation of form, the company remain well beyond mainstream popularity.

“Britain still seems very closed in comparison to mainland Europe. By persistence we’ve got a place that we’re allowed to occupy, but it still feels slightly grudging – not in terms of funding, but in a general sense of the cultural air. If you want to do anything interesting, you have to make space for it yourselves.”

Having already attempted to rewrite history and reshape geography, to confess the world’s sins, ask all its questions and tell all its stories, once cannot help but wonder the sort of space they’ll need. As Etchells has said in the past: “The stage is too small; it isn’t the whole world.”

Review: The Long Road, Soho Theatre

Written for WhatsOnStage.com

Newspapers trot out the facts and figures of knife crime on a seemingly daily basis. What little we see of the people affected by such momentary murders reduces to ill-fitting labels and quotations of despair. Shelagh Stephenson’s The Long Road serves a desperate and poignant reminder that no one is just another statistic; that, while the media is quick to forget, the damage caused stretches far beyond the life lost.

In the aftermath of 18 year-old Danny’s death, his family are in turmoil: a chorus of grief scavenging for meaning. While his father John (Michael Elwyn) turns to the numbness of incessant jogging and whiskey, his mother Mary (Denise Black) seeks some unknown comfort in contacting his killer, Emma Price (Michelle Tate). Their imprisonment is one of confused sorrow, filled with a muddle of retaliation, retribution and small acts of repair.

Stephenson’s script is a deft work elevated by its first-rate cast into something simple, honest and forcefully profound. Her timely use of vulnerable humour takes the edge off its grand statements of grief, grounding every character with a soft pathos. While the text’s directness occasionally tips into an outside perspective, for the most part it is affecting and penetrating.

Director Esther Baker cleverly avoids navel-gazing, rattling through the text at breakneck speed with diligent sensitivity to rhythm. In playing in traverse, she sets a chasm between burdened family and troubled killer, the crossing of which seems both brave and territorially invasive.

Moreover, she coaxes fine performances from a tremendous cast. Black is utterly captivating in her private turbulence, caught in a rational awareness of irrational emotions. Michelle Tate constructs a fortress of quick-fire words around a touching vulnerability and, as Danny’s older brother, Steven Webb is a master of the tear-stained smile; cracking jokes even as he gulps down a lump in the throat.

Powerful, urgent and sincere, The Long Road is a seldom heard voice of vital humanity.

Review: Rank, Tricycle Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

With the world teetering towards debt-ridden recession, Robert Massey's Rank serves a light-hearted reprimand for excessive financial risk. Standing in for big-time bankers is a rag-bag collection of small-town gamblers and gangsters tangled together in a tightly-wound knot of arrears and affairs. While dryly amusing, Massey’s double-crossing plot struggles in the unwinding, abandoning originality in favour of limp familiarity.

On top of overdue mortgage and credit card instalments, cabbie Carl Conway has racked up several grand's worth of gambling debts with local Irish Mafioso, Jack Farrell. Served with a stern warning from Farrell’s dopey son Fred, Conway enlists the help of colleagues – his father-in-law George Kelly and scruffy lothario ‘Two in the Bush’ – in repaying the debt. With a combination of blind luck and bluff, they aim to turn Conway’s hapless situation around.

There are some exceptional performances within. As Carl, Alan King is a wonderfully overgrown child, as down in the mouth as he is on his luck. His first scene with Bryan Murray, who plays Jack with rigid menace, fizzes with comic chemistry. John Lynn is hilarious as ‘Two in the Bush’, gently lilting his way through rambling monologues and precarious situations with Fred Farrell, with whose wife he has recently slept.

Though Massey’s script is full of deliciously bleak witticisms, waxing lyrical on phone sex lines and Aldi, it is ultimately contained by its own linearity. His delicate build of tension in the first half is entirely undermined by the predictability of the outcome. The problem is that theatre played this straight cannot match the grand twists and connections possible in a multi-layered, quick-cut film.

Despite snappy direction and sharpshooting humour, Fishamble’s production ultimately succumbs to ambitions too lofty. Rank is more writers’ block than Lock, Stock.

Review: Othello, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Culture Wars

In relocating Othello to the blood-red dinge of a run-down Northern pub, Frantic Assembly have transformed it from personal to social tragedy. Here, culpability for the final body-strewn pool table lies not with the individual whims of Iago, but rather the culture of respect in which he is immersed. All is aggression and “reputation, reputation, reputation” in an intelligent and thrilling indictment of machismo malignity.

While, in whittling the play into a brisk two hours, directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett can only nod towards the gradual process of its deception, there is plenty of interpretation to be found in visual details. In The Cypress pub, under the luminescent flicker of a slot machine, men transform into beasts as drink “steals away their brains”. They take pool cues and bottles as swords and daggers, swaggering and aggravating in a battlefield of leisure.

In fact, it is surprising how well the location befits the text. Race remains a constant presence without being bludgeoned into place and the local gang preserves the hierarchy and responsive violence of Shakespeare’s military setting. If anything there is added brutality, without pillows and noble swordsmanship to soften the blows.

What it loses is a sense of tragic downfall, as Jimmy Akingbola’s Othello is only great when viewed from within the culture under attack. He is a picture of hostile masculinity elevated from a pack of dopey shellsuited henchmen, too easily coaxed into irrational suspicion. That Charles Aitken’s Iago is a teenager out of his depth and, increasingly, out of control, points the finger of blame back on Othello himself and the respect he demands. He seems to play at the only adulthood he sees reflected around him.

Amidst the broad, bold adaptation are some deftly subtle touches. Brown ale is spat across the stage, while bottles of WKD are readily ingested. In a nod to his “motiveless malignity”, Iago wears a Nike T-shirt emblazoned with the logo: ‘Just Do It’. Aurally, however, Frantic Assembly miss the target – much of the dialogue flattens to a grating monotone, delivered with the push of aggressive syllables and generic Northern dialects – and just occasionally the dance becomes overly smooth and polished, softening its vicious gall.

However, this is bare-knuckle Shakespeare that you can’t afford to take your eyes off for a second.

Warning: Smoking can seriously damage your fiction

I have two habits: smoking and theatre-going. Like a persistent framing device, a hasty cigarette will immediately precede and follow any performance I attend. Indeed, I spend at least half of a twenty minute interval weighing up the practical and ethical considerations of squeezing in a second. And I know I’m not the only one.

The thing is that the two inevitably conflict. The smoking habit consists of a ticking necessity, a gradually increasing itch that must be scratched. Most performances, having a certain fixed duration, prove an obstacle to satisfying that craving. Sadly, as with a long-haul flight, to step outside of a performance is to bid a world farewell.

However, in the murky depths of a good production, cravings simply don’t enter the picture. To be so wrapped up in a performance that your body forgets its own semblance of imbalance is a wonderful thing. It is to leave your physical body behind, float to the roof of the auditorium and exist as only your senses, imagination and thoughts. It is investment to the extent of forgetting yourself.

Of course, such investment is a greasy and fragile thing, readily broken by the tiniest of intrusions; a sniffle here, a rustle there. One sure-fire way in which to snap through it, however, is to put a cigarette onstage.

Yet a cigarette smoked on screen will not have the same effect. The other week, I watched Brian Cox and Shaun Parks work their way through at least a packet in the television adaptation of Blue/Orange without once becoming distracted by it. The same is true of Marlon Brando. Or Sharon Stone. Or Pinocchio.

But two hours into A Disappearing Number, when Paul Bhattacharajee lit up as Aninda Rao on the banks of the Cooum river near Chennai, I was instantly back in the Barbican. For me, the mere sight of a cigarette was enough to trigger a relapse into reality. Perhaps it’s because of the firm conflict itself; there’s no SkyPlus pause button to turn to for a brief break. Or perhaps it’s something more.

At the start of A Disappearing Number, Complicité go to great lengths to highlight the fictitious: no one is on the other end of this phone, this door leads nowhere in particular, etc. The only real thing, they point out, is the maths. But the cigarette and the response it triggers are equally real, existent in front of you.

The performance goes on, with mathematical sleight of hand, to coax an entire audience of individuals into thinking of the number seven in unison. The same magic happens with the cigarette. Gradually, invisible wisps of tobacco smoke begin to drift through the auditorium, curling into noses and brains. The same trick is repeated, though this time remains unflagged, as swathes of audience members prick up on nicotine alert. I deeply hope it was a conscious decision, perhaps signalling the nearing of the end through unspoken physical response.

Theatre, as Alan Read and many others have pointed out, happens in the air between performers and audience. That air moves, vibrates, contains waves of light, jets of breath and pathways of smoke. Onstage smoking is real in a way that onscreen, it can never be. It doesn’t only remind the brain, it reacts with the body. It makes you remember yourself.

Again, on Saturday, watching Frantic Assembly’s Othello, a performer smokes. He is in the middle of a dance, half period, half modern. The glow of the cigarette moves about the stage: a firefly in the midst of revels. I can’t take my eyes of it. Will someone get caught with a sharp burn? What happens if it drops to the carpet? Surely that’s a hindrance to the dancer’s fitness? There is suddenly an element, however small, of danger, a heightened sense of risk, a precarious skill on show.

Ever since Mel Smith leaned out of a Scottish window, cigar in hand, vowing to defy the smoking ban, there has been another thought at play. A cigarette onstage must be “artistically justifiable”. This affects the smoker and the non-smoker alike. A cigarette onstage is no longer an arbitrary choice; it must have dramaturgical significance. It must be more than just a cigarette. As such, it cannot be overlooked for other goings on; it needs, nay, craves, being puzzled – a ticking challenge to the audience member that must be answered.

Unless it’s herbal, in which case its very fakeness proves more fatal.

With all this, there can be no such thing as the innocent cigarette onstage. It is the glowing destroyer of fictions and the diverter of attentions.

Let heaven see the pranks...

With the nation moving from barracking to Baracking and the uproar of the Ross/Brand Sachs scandal seemingly forgotten, it seems time to scrutinize the ethics and aesthetics of the prank call in performance. (Actually, it seems rather late but I've been putting this off for a while.)

To summarize, Ross and Brand left a series of slightly obscene, largely unamusing and hugely puerile messages on actor Andrew Sachs’ answering machine. The British public, stirred up by the media, sharpened their pitchforks and fired up their torches, complaining in their thousands. Two resignations and one suspension later, everyone’s happy. (Presumably, none more so than Andrew Sachs’ agent.)

Where Brand and Ross strayed into abusiveness, a good prank call will play on the disruption of reality and fiction. The call always has some degree of reality; it exists in the world as a social interaction between two people. In a prank call, there is an obvious imbalance: the caller and the ‘victim’ have different beliefs about the nature and content of that interaction. When an audience is involved, they are privy to both sides. They understand the true nature of the call, but also see the mistaken belief of the ‘victim’. They can enjoy the confusion, but also empathize with the response.

Without some fiction or false intentions, there is no imbalance of belief. Brand and Ross left messages as themselves – albeit excited playground versions of themselves – and Andrew Sachs heard those messages as truthful. There was nothing for Sachs to fall for, no illusion or deceit to be taken in by. Equally, there was no risk that Brand and Ross would be caught out, partly because, in leaving messages, they did not have to deal with immediate consequences and partly because there was no play on reality. Compare Marc-Antoinne Audette’s recent call to Sarah Palin, in which he posed as President Sarkozy, sang her a song (‘Du Rouges á Levres Sur Une Cochonne’ or ‘Lipstick on a Pig’) and praised political-porno Nailin’ Palin. She fell for it. We laughed and, more importantly, we learnt something about Palin.

More than the simple fact of deception, it is the reality of the response that gives the prank its aesthetic interest. The deceived ‘victim’ does not act as though, they act because or seemingly because.

The recorded media are full of such pranks: Phonejacker, Beadles’ About, Noel Edmonds’ Gotchas. In the nineties, radio shows relied on prank calls for comedy purposes. Such media can, of course, seek permission before broadcast. The ‘victim’ can be informed and their beliefs reconciled with reality, and then allow themselves to become the butt of the joke in public. In live performance, the same is not true. In order for a real response to occur, they must be unknowingly undermined in public.

During the devising process for Life at the Molecular Level, Present Attempt played with telephone calls. We liked the interplay of truth and fiction, the disparity of intention and belief, the intermingling of presence and absence and, most of all, the reality of the response at the other end of the line. We wanted to make friends with call-centre workers, over time. We wanted to play the single, lonely man struggling with ready meal instructions. We wanted more than customer care, we wanted a relationship.

However, we felt uncomfortable putting people onstage without permission. I can only assume The Special Guests had a similar reaction when making The Telephone Game, a durational performance around telephone conversations and behaviour that expanded from a section in This Much I Know (Part One). Though I didn’t see the piece, from what I can gather The Special Guests called each other, family members, friends, but stopped short of calling people unknown to them.

Is it ever ethical to put someone onstage without their knowledge, to enforce a revelation of themselves in public? Perhaps not, but I want to see it nonetheless.

Review: Red Fortress, Unicorn Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

At once admirably and hopelessly idealistic, Carl Miller’s Red Fortress pits three children of different faiths against the tyranny of the Spanish Inquisition. In dreaming of “a city where children learn no hate, a land where no one is an infidel”, Miller might as well take to the stage himself and announce that he has a dream. Nonetheless, his original children’s play tells a captivating story with wit, charm and emotion.

In 1491, Granada is the last Islamic city holding out against Queen Isabella’s pillaging Christian armies. Among its poverty-stricken residents are the raspily playful Rabia (Géhrane Strehler) and Luis (Jack Blumenau), a Jewish boy with a flair for engineering. The pair, in conjunction with bravado-filled Christian Iago (John Cockerill) and the naive bravery of children, set on an amorphous quest to save their city.

Tony Graham’s lushly atmospheric production treats its young audience without patronizing, conjuring up a delicate exoticism through suspended rugs and the sway of Tunde Jegede’s music. However, while the core plot is gripping and original, too much is crammed in around it. Ideas surrounding science and faith, religious extremism and artistic rebellion – not to mention a tightly squeezed love triangle and a stand-up set from Christopher Columbus – jostle together to overwhelm the narrative.

It’s a shame because Strehler, Blumenau and Cockerill make a marvellous trio at its heart: bickering, joking and dreaming. They play with finesse, balancing the communicative largeness needed in children’s theatre with emotional subtlety superbly.

At times, Graham’s direction is too reliant on the mystery of flying properties in and design, slowing the pace and swamping the action. With refining, defining and clarifying Red Fortress could be lively, intelligent children’s theatre. As it is, Miller’s script emerges from the meandering chaos as a wonderful novel too large for the stage.

Review: Follow, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Like the newborn lumbered on its teenage protagonist, Follow is ill-conceived. Spurious to the point of being spoofish, Dameon Garnett’s clumsy play dithers between gritty drama and hapless comedy, but fails to be either. Indeed, it almost fails to amount to anything whatsoever.

While sixteen year-old scouser Blake (Adam Redmore) struggles to adjust to the shock of fatherhood, best friend Reece (Oliver Gilbert) is babysitting some pills for a local dealer. Needless to say, amidst an endless flow of diaper-related emergencies, the pills disappear, flushed away by Blake’s infuriated father (Paul Regan). What follows is panic, tears and, eventually, happy families.

Essentially, Garnett’s script consists of little more than a series of sleepless nights undermined by a clunky attempt to up the stakes and inject contemporary relevance. Nor is it helped by his tendency to overwrite dialogue and underwrite characters beyond all creditability.

Add to this a fiction-destroying plastic baby and, admittedly, the actors have a raw deal. However, none of the three seem comfortable onstage, reacting with the time delay of a satellite link-up. In panting and ranting throughout, Gilbert and Redmore make unspecific and unconving teenagers and Follow becomes an increasingly tiresome paint-by-numbers drama that achieves tension without ever saying much or surprising.

Review: To Be Straight With You, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Clashing worldviews rarely sit alongside one another in quietly grumbling contrast. Rather, they collide in messy, active and often violent opposition. In To Be Straight With You, contemporary dance-theatre company DV8 turn focus on the deep-set homophobia of strictly religious societies with an equally polemic stance that happens to be more comfortable for its liberal-minded audience. Intolerance, it shouts loudly, is utterly unacceptable. And we, the converted, must nod along unquestioningly.

Using verbatim texts and confessional recordings in conjunction with DV8’s seductive and stylish brand of movement and dance, director Lloyd Newson offers a scattergun argument constructed of individual examples. At times, when the authentic and the artistic sync up, it hits with emotive power, but too often movement and text feel disjointed – like watching a muted television with the radio playing.

With same-sex relationships illegal in eighty-five countries, seven of which employ the death penalty as punishment, DV8 have plenty of evidence at their disposal. However, they fail to shape it into a case or present a sympathetic alternative. Instead we get a stream of solos and duets, victims and perpetrators through which phrases of fire, brimstone and bloody murder recur and recur, clubbing us into flat submission. Moral indignation is the only response available.

However, when the individual segments break free of the diatribe, they become succinct and poignant. The fragile Muslim youth, caught in the blurry bubble of a skipping rope, describes coming out to his family, being cornered in an alley and stabbed by his father. The respectable Indian husband performs a joyous banghra duet with his male lover, also married. Best of all is the seated line-dance – swaying, casual and seemingly harmless – underneath an absurd Christian argument against homosexuality, based on cannibalism and conformity. Gradually, the dance swells in numbers as people subscribe to the logic.

It is no coincidence that these moments are in the hands of Ankhur Bahl and Dan Canham, both of whom are possessed of remarkable fluidity, in storytelling as in dance. Simplicity is the key to the argument and the emotions. Where To Be Straight With You gets carried away with possibilities, particular those of visual projections, it sacrifices impact for technical wizardry. Where the message is left to the words and movements of a talented performer, DV8 create something special and, more importantly, human.

As it is, To Be Straight With You is an important piece of theatre: it needs saying as much as it needs heeding, but it hasn’t the simple vitality to need watching.