Review: The Fahrenheit Twins, Barbican

Written for Culture Wars


Stationed on a remote arctic island, celebrated anthropologists Boris and Una Fahrenheit are knee-deep in research when two little bundles of fur arrive unexpectedly. They are, of course, the titular twins, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain. While their parents head off to daily observe the local indigenous tribe, the Gui Inuit, the twins are left to handle their own entertainment and, it follows, education. With their questions bouncing unanswered off the ice, the worldview that emerges is skeletal, born of assumptions, around which there spring a series of primitive rituals.

“How are we going to stop time?” they ask like two miniature Canutes attempting to stem the tide. Only, of course, time cannot be stilled and, as their biblical monikers suggest, their loss of innocence is only a matter thereof, here catalysed by their mother’s death and a corpse-laden pilgrimage across the icy planes.

Michael Faber’s narrative is the stuff of fairy tales: epic, dark and knowing. It encompasses both the ever-sunny family and the neglected childhood whittled away before culminating in a rite of passage and betrayal. For all that Told by an Idiot’s founding members, Paul Hunter and Hayley Carmichael – here switching swiftly between parents and children, huskies, tribesmen and arctic foxes – mine the twins’ tribulations for Faber’s intelligence, their treatment is covered in a mawkish layer of fluff.

Quite literally, in fact. Their arctic setting is a woolly wonderland, forged of a faux-fur covered disc with a centrepiece of a stiletto-shaped slide, on which Hunter and Carmichael goof around for all their worth. Only there’s an unwillingness to infuse this tomfoolery – whereby dogs browse National Geographic whilst defecating and romancing foxes chink champagne flutes – with anything more profound. Instead, the two layers are immiscible: one guffawing at itself, the other determinedly po-faced.

Whether serious or silly, though, Told by an Idiot’s adaptation is always on thin ice, as it teeters on the edge of patronising. The language tossed between the twins retains the oversimplicity of children’s theatre. At times, it purifies, as, for example, when they say of their dead mother, “her skin is the colour of peeled apple.” Elsewhere, it becomes a cloying, babyish gargle, as in, “this book was once a tree.” It is a struggle inherited from the original text, the mythic tone of which, when embodied, disintegrates from bestowed wisdom to mollycoddling.

That said, there is much to admire. The economic staging concocts a great sense of location, conjuring baths, bedrooms and a craggy, never-ending landscape from very little. Hunter and Carmichael’s handling of the extinction of innocence is canny, as they sit on the stage’s edge glum, balding and paunchy: middle-aged before their time.

Overall, The Fahrenheit Twins could use more punch. Were it classified solely as children’s theatre, it would be near faultless, but the decision to aim at an adult market – there were only two or three kids in when I caught it – brings with it different standards and the hurdle of not patronising. It’s one that Told by an Idiot only half clear with this cute staging of a superb tale.

Ever tried.

On a roundabout journey through the dusty corners of the internet, I stumbled across the following youtube clip. In many ways, its just another piece of web trash: a clip from America's Dumbest Whatevers or Anti-heroes of CCTV. It's an excuse to laugh at idiocy, to point at stupidity, at sub-humanity. It's infectious. It's parasitic. It's sort of funny.

But forget that. Disable the sound. Stop his lips and look again.



More than anything it reminds me of contemporary dance. Perhaps of DV8's Cost of Living or Lotte van der Berg's Stillen or a Pina Bausch piece loosed from the stage. There's pain and total, tortured inability in there. There's a real encounter with the body as a conjoined series of component parts. There's true, truthful failure.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about the need for an integrity of failure to replace the aesthetic of failure. In this - particularly in the second half - it is the concertedness of the attempt than lends the failure its purity and its honesty. You just know that he could contract and contort forever and still remain on the floor; fixed and transfixing in equal measure.

Review: Hall, Hornsey Town Hall

Written for Culture Wars

Looming over you, Hornsey Town Hall pierces a dark and gloomy dusk sky. For the most part its windows are unlit. From one, a spectacled figure peers down on you, perhaps monitoring your presence, perhaps innocently questioning it. At the main entrance thick-set iron gates lurch half-open, not so much inviting as coercive: the gravitational pull of curiosity overpowering trepidation. Inside your head, a voice – female, calm, headstrong – urges you and your mp3 player forward.

Right from the start, from this initial encounter with the building itself, Hall is soaked in atmosphere. Its cocktail of classical gothic imagery and urban menace sets you on edge and keeps you there. Inside the forsaken municipal shell, dead leaves litter the floors and elongated shadows creep up the walls. Decay and damp have usurped purpose and people. Those that remain, stalking its corridors still, seem civic waifs serving a long gone public. As they pass silently by, you tingle – as much with the excitement of the unseen voyeur as with the chill of goosebumps.

However, simple spookiness is not sustenance enough. Nor does it require much skill. Couch a long-disused, musty building in darkness, send an audience to navigate it alone and the site does the work itself. What matters is how you populate that space: the images concocted, the stories unearthed and the journeys charted.

Sadly, in this respect Hall cannot wholly match the promise of its location. It feels half-baked – not dim-witted, but under-interrogated. Certainly, you can’t accuse 19:29 of lacking ambition – for a company of recent graduates to attempt something on this scale is impressive – but the further into the hour you get the more it looks like foolhardiness. Though there are some vivid images along the way – a banquet festering under layers of mould, a lone pianist in a grand hall – Hall is let down by a dramaturgy as unkempt as the building itself.

Prime among the resultant potholes is that nothing really comes to fruition. Characters encountered seem to have no bearing on one another and often never recur en route. The young, bucolic lovers and the malevolent architect belong to totally distinct worlds without any confirmation of deliberately parallel existences. Then there is the problem of promises left unfulfilled. The prologue (a separate mp3 to be listened to en route to Crouch End) advises buying biscuits, but no opportunity to use them arises. We are asked, at one point, to don black rubber gloves, only for them to be handed back moments later without use. The only discernible thread running through the piece is the rumour of a secret room unmentioned in architectural plans and yet, there is no point of its discovery. Or, at least, if there is it goes unannounced.

Our own presence in the space is treated with similar inconsistency. At times, we are activated – instructed to interact in meetings, dance or play trick on lovers – at others, we are observed but let alone and elsewhere still we seem to acquire invisibility.

Often, it feels as if we are being asked to overlook, to be forgiving. The size of the site and the logistics entailed – getting the timings right and maintaining the conveyor belt of audience members – have clearly derailed the attention to detail and we are politely requested to turn a blind eye. The audio-guide orders your gaze one way in order that the mechanics of the piece can slip by unnoticed behind you. Only, of course, they don’t.

Nonetheless Hall remains an enjoyable experience, but this is less the result of 19:29’s efforts than the nature of Hornsey Town Hall itself. The pleasure of the content comes largely from its puzzling disparities, which beg questions and demand interpretation. However, the beauty of its mysteries exists only insofar as you are prepared to accept their obscurity as intentional. The deeper into the building one goes, the more the suspicion grows that no linkage actually exists, that the company have thrown together a series of images without shared foundations. When that happens, even the building itself loses its atmospheric power. Approach gently.

Theatre's Presumptions

Given that I got up at a ridiculous hour this morning to rejig this piece for the Guardian, I thought I post the new version here for those of you that stop by.

*****

Right: embarrassing confession time. To my shame, before Friday night I hadn’t realised that Gone With The Wind was a novel. In fact, having not seen the film, the sum total of my knowledge consisted of Vivien Leigh and “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Beyond that, I could recognise the poster at a hundred paces, given that it hung pretentiously on the wall of my student bedsit for three years in a desperate bid to project a sense of artsy, retro cool. Hardly the stuff of a Mastermind champion, I think you’ll agree.

But, until Friday night, I’ve never felt guilty about it. After all, I’m only twenty-four and there are an awful lot of books I’m yet to read and films to see. In fact, I strongly suspect this will be the case for the rest of my life. However, watching Architecting at the Barbican last Friday, my lack of knowledge felt like a deficiency.

No matter how much foreknowledge one brings to Architecting, it remains a tricky piece of high intellect. The company behind Architecting, The TEAM or Theatre of the Emerging American Moment, do to the American national psyche what medical students do to cadavers. Architecting weaves around post-Katrina New Orleans and Margaret Mitchell’s novel, which it examines from a number of perspectives: the author’s own voice, a racially-revised remake of the film, several Scarlett O’Hara obsessives and the recreation of scenes from the novel itself.

Watching it, I felt its intelligence. I could sense the scalpel’s presence, ripping into American culture and holding up the innards for scrutiny, but I couldn’t identify anything. Being totally unversed in the iconography used and its connotations, I couldn’t find an entry point for understanding. The experience was like reading a doctoral thesis in a subject that I stopped studying at thirteen: frustrating, baffling and, eventually, isolating.

Behind all this lies the question of how much knowledge theatremakers can expect us to arrive with. Ought their work to presume nothing and explain everything? Ought it to treat us like idiots or infants by catering for the lowest common denominator, spoon-feeding and spelling out as it goes? Of course not. To insist on such mollycoddling would be to outlaw anything that seeks to do more than scratch surfaces or explain the basics. This, in turn, patronizes and excludes those audience members that come with a degree of specialist knowledge. I know several people who left Enron at the interval for exactly that reason.

However, this does not absolve theatre of a responsibility to be accessible. But where does that responsibility lie if not with the work itself? Do theatres have a duty to prep their audiences in advance, providing glossaries and bibliographies in a colourful education pack? Or, perhaps, we should be conscientiously devouring the programme notes beforehand and whipping out our i-phones in the interval to google key terms?

In truth, we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. We want an intelligent, investigative theatre, but one in which no one gets left behind.

What’s needed is a different approach: a permissive theatre. Rather than making singular assertions, which require a minimum level of foreknowledge, the permissive theatre embraces the multiplicity of its audience and allows itself to be read in different ways and at different levels. It allows us to make our own connections and find our own course through by becoming a proposition, permitting and provoking many possible responses. That’s not to suggest that it means whatever you want it to mean, but rather that we get from it whatever we get from it. The permissive theatre can, indeed must, still have something to say, but it must also recognise its own failure to do so absolutely.

Review: The Spanish Tragedy, Arcola Theatre

Written for Time Out

An eye for an eye may make the whole world blind, but fuzziness of vision is not an affliction suffered by director Mitchell Moreno. He handles Thomas Kyd’s original revenge tragedy with both care and flair, such that its knotty narrative untangles with a compelling brutality.

Following a war with Portugal, the repercussions of a soldier’s death ripple through the Spanish court. The similar dispatching of his romantic replacement Horatio (Hassan Dixon) sparks a chain of retaliatory violence that sees off disloyal servants, mothers and murderers before finally resulting in the suicides of grieving Bel’Imperia (Charlie Covell) and Hieronimo (Dominic Rowan).

Whittled down to a snappy two hours, there are echoes of Rupert Goold’s Macbeth in Moreno’s claustrophobic, contemporary staging. Helen Goddard’s bunker-like design invokes a similar bolted-up paranoia and there is the same sense of a very domestic violence, as upstanding suburbanites, unaccustomed to homicide, grapple to rationalize their primitive passions. The strong ensemble is well led by Dominic Rowan as the indignant Hieronimo, who becomes a square civil servant swallowing his revulsion with a single malt.

Crammed with sharp, potent images – bodies hanging like butchered meat and blood inching across tabletops – this Spanish Tragedy displays a savvy approach to its modernization, though Moreno does overplay his hand with a final play within a play too well-versed in post-dramatic theory to convince in context. Nonetheless, this is as clear and gripping a production of Kyd’s forgotten classic as you’re likely to find.

Review: Rust, Pleasance Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

A silhouetted pipeline projectile vomits waste into the sea. Ships and submarines are coated in a layer of their own decay and a two-headed mutant fish with savage predatory gnashers leaps ungraciously through waves an air. Rust often looks like it has environmental concerns at its heart.

In actual fact, global effluence is merely the aesthetic background for a fairly traditional tale of personal epiphany and free-thinking individual versus corporate machine.

The only pollution given real attention is that of the airwaves, as Brummie cannery-worker Spike is snatched from the factory line and whisked aboard the submarine home of pirate radio station, Mutant FM. Here, spinning vinyl with the conjoined Limpet Brothers or cooking up a storm with Linseed – a one armed hybrid of unspecific gender – Spike stumbles into a battle for the minds of the drone-like workers. In the liberal corner, the undersea punk of Mutant FM, while, in the fascist-capitalist corner, the Orwellian brainwashing of the Revered Jellichoe.

We’ve been here before, of course, the little tribe antagonising and eventually overcoming the dominant malign forces that turn out to have more commonalities than first glances suggest. Add a tacked on love story between well-knit social misfits and an unexpected death right on cue and it all begins to fall into the instinctively familiar pattern of the blockbuster. Essentially, it’s a puppetry mash-up of The Mutant Chronicles and The Boat that Rocked with a dash of the socio-political setting of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

However, Green Ginger succeeds in diverting attention with a lusciously dark, cartoon aesthetic. Their puppets are gorgeous, lumpy creatures carrying more than a hint of Viz magazine’s crudeness – both in appearance and behaviour. A stubborn turd, for example, eventually gives in to repeated flushing and finds itself free to weave fish-like beneath the waves.

The charm of the aesthetic and manipulation, however, cannot make up for Rust’s narrative deficiencies. Its humour often feels clunky, caught somewhere between an audience of children and puerile adults, and there is a desperate need for pace. Though their manipulation is superb, the three puppeteers have too much to do between them. Rather than a slick, well-oiled machine, Rust feels like a skulking hulk weighed down at the bottom of the sea. It’s no shipwreck, but it’s a far cry from unsinkable.

On another note, I found out yesterday that Culture Wars has been named one of the top 25 online resources for arts and culture in the UK by Creative Tourist. So that's nice.

Liveness: On Vanity and In Vain

As you might have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about liveness of late. You might also have spotted that I attach a great deal of importance to it as a property, but it’s hard to define quite why. Reading Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, I came round to his view that liveness itself as a property has no inherent, intrinsic, ontological value. That is to say, perhaps, that liveness just is. No more, nothing less. All our reasons for elevating it above the mediatised are historically relative. However, something inside me stills chimes as if to disagree: a feeling that personally – in the here and now – I do choose to place value of liveness over the mediatised. That’s why I spend my evenings in theatres, rather than cinemas or in front of televisions. In general, the live does more for me than the mediatised. (Of course, by that I mean ‘in general’. There’s no point in being absolutist about it.) It resonates more for me. Or, rather, I resonate more when confronted with the live.

Anyway, as I was reading Auslander, I happened also to be reading Calvino, as (regular readers will know) I am want to do. More specifically, I was reading Difficult Loves, a collection of his short stories. More specifically still, I was reading The Adventure of a Photographer and I came across the following:

“The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. If you take a picture of Pierluca because he’s building a sand-castle, there is no reason not to take his picture while he’s crying because the castle has collapsed, and then while the nurse consoles him by helping him find a sea-shell in the sand. You only have to start saying of something: “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness.”

And also, this:

“For the person who wants to capture everything that passes before his eyes,” Antonio would explain, even if nobody was listening to him any more, “the only coherent way he can act is to snap at least one picture a minute, from the moment he opens his eyes in the morning to when he goes to sleep. This is the only way the rolls of exposed film will represent a faithful diary of our days, with nothing left out. If I were to start taking pictures, I’d see this thing through, even if it meant losing my mind. The rest of you, on the contrary, still insist on making a choice. What sort of choice? A choice in the idyllic sense, apologetic, consolatory, at peace with nature, the fatherland, the family. Your choice isn’t only photographic, it is a choice of life, which leads you to exclude dramatic conflicts, the knots of contradiction, the great tensions of will, passion, aversion. So you thinking you are saving yourselves from madness, but you are falling into mediocrity, into hebetude.”

Then, finally, this:

“What drives you two girls to cut from the mobile continuum of your day these temporal slices, the thickness of a second? Tossing the ball back and forth, you are living in the present, but the moment the scansion of the frames is insinuated between your acts it is no longer the pleasure of the game that motivates you but rather that of seeing yourselves again in the future, of rediscovering yourselves in twenty years’ time, on a piece of yellowed paper (yellowed emotionally, even if modern printing procedures will preserve it unchanged). The taste for the spontaneous, natural lifelike snapshot kills spontaneity, drives away the present. Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative character, even if the picture was taken [the] day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”

I always find it exciting when two very different, altogether distinct texts reverberate with one another. When unexpected parallels appear and causes a new level of clarity that you never saw coming.

Anyway, here I got to wondering about the difference between performance on screen and on stage. For the former, one’s concern must rest with the image. It is always about appearances. On stage, or rather, live, one cannot think so singularly in terms of image. Image multiplies depending on audience perspective – and by that, of course, I mean not only the angle of perspective, but in terms of distractions and attractions. The eye roams and finds its own frame. As such, I have been wondering whether it is this lack (or rather, lesser presence) of vanity that I like about live performance.

The live cannot preen in the same way, since one cannot guard against every possible perspective on the work. It cannot airbrush itself, because it allows the multiplicity of appearance and reality equal weight. Where it does, it does so openly and honestly. Moreover, it cannot perfect itself. Or retrospectively attempt to do so. There is no opportunity to go back and redo, to tweak and change. Once it is in motion, it continues on apace in the same temporal direction. The live marks itself down as history, it testifies to itself and allows us to stand as witnesses. It just is. And once it has been, it cannot be erased.

Live humanity is real humanity. It is a humanity away from the Edward Cullens, the icily frozen foreheads and the size zeros that impact from the screen onto the world, setting up new paradigms for impossible beauty. Live humanity wobbles, stumbles and falls. It is a graceless beast attempting to conjure some dignity and, more often than not, failing. There’s beauty in that; real beauty, living beauty.

***

On a slightly related note, I spent a day last week browsing through the synoptic highlights of Gob Squad’s backcatalogue on youtube and came across the following video entitled Why We Make Performance, which really is quite succinct and eloquent.

Review: They Only Come At Night: Visions, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Horror is a funny genre. In order to succeed – that is, to afright – it must almost transcend its chosen medium. It must, in some small way, trick us into forgetting ourselves. The slightest trace of cynicism – a refusal to become immersed – will always prove fatal. It is, after all, near impossible to scare someone prepared for and guarded against scare tactics. Horror must persuade us to leave ourselves defenceless or else circumnavigate those fortifications with something utterly unexpected.

Slung Low’s latest sets out to scare. It does so not by presenting a distinct fictive world and sucking us through a portal, but by weaving an alternate reality into this one. The need for investment remains, but the company ask us to remain entirely present rather than entering a state of semi-dissociation. That the joins between fiction and reality, the mechanics of the piece, are so evident, so clunky, however, prevents any real commitment to the fiction spun. Resistance is not so much futile as inevitable.

From the start we are told that the event we were expecting has been cancelled, replaced instead with a night-time tour of the city. “Oh, yeah!” we think, “Really?” – before being bundled into a car and driven around the block to the entrance of a dark tunnel, lined with white plastic sheeting. Through headphones, two competing voices – one advisory and caring, the other throatily malevolent – explain the scientific reality of vampiric myths through the crackle of interference. Sillhouettes stalk the dark: some shiftily appearing behind you, others sprinting past, blood-soaked. Pools of blood mingle with the salt path you tread. Gutted cars and carcasses are scattered around the confined space.

Admittedly, the experience sets your pulse aflutter and has you glancing over your shoulder. However, the overall is too consciously constructed for us to really succumb. The space – an underground car-park with a fear-factor of its own – is overdressed and the fictive circumstances forcibly imposed. Both the mechanics and motivations of They Only Come at Night are too evident and justifications too flimsy. The white sheeting, for example, is apparently in place to prevent unwanted radio communications.

What’s more, the script is a confusing mixture of religious and scientific waffle that never adds up to understanding. It is altogether reliant on staples of horror – seers and seekers, that sort of thing – without finding an underlying consistency that enables them to stand up to scrutiny. Formulas scratched on walls are as obviously meaningless as the pools of blood are fake. It begins to look like Slung Low are merely begging for our investment, rather than doing anything to cause it. “Ignore that projector,” they seem to say, “it’ll break the illusion. And, whatever you do, don’t turn around and catch the stage-hand re-setting the scene before.”

Perhaps that seems unforgiving, but the truth is that if Slung Low are aiming to catch us out they must expect us to try and catch them first. Instead, the whole experience feels like a conveyor belt of cause and effect. We are over-manipulated and expected to comply placidly; our pace is curtailed to suit their needs.

Yet, at times, this mechanistic effect feels deliberate. Its timing is such that, as you are initially instructed out of the car, a previous party can be seen leaving the tunnel. When you reach the same stage, your tour-guide turned rescuer assures you that “this has never happened before.” Then there’s the newspaper article left in your possession that dismisses the whole story as scaremongering hokum. Slung Low, it seems, can’t decide whether they want to succeed with smoke and mirrors or demonstrate their inevitable failure.

It’s a shame, because there’s evident potential behind the original commission. By doing far less, much more could have been achieved, but it requires the recognition that it is the real circumstances, rather than the fiction spun, that will set us on edge. Credit to the company for trying, but They Only Come at Night is a catalogue of miscalculations.

Review: Made In Russia, Chelsea Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

This is it. Tonight, from the modest stage of the Chelsea Theatre, Andrei Andrianov and Oleg Soulimenko will smash their way into mainstream European cultural consciousness. They’ve planned it: the perfect combination of Western and Eastern culture to ensure success, popularity and fame will follow.

Only, unfortunately, Andrei Arshavin and Mick Jagger couldn’t be here alongside them tonight. Likewise, Fydor Dostoyevsky and Julia Roberts. You see, their funding is modest; their popularity-level not quite high enough to beg favours from the rich and famous. Even Andrianov’s supposed father, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Soulimenko’s former co-star at the Bolshoi, the revered Maya Pliestskaya, couldn’t make it along. So, um, never mind.

Of course, Soulimenko and Andrianov are astute enough to know that familiar, accepted faces alone do not make for accessibility. Made In Russia subverts the very notion of cross-cultural identity against itself, undermining international presentation as a pretentious, even bourgeois, cultural practice. The need to label according to nationality or origin is, they suggest, preposterous and in doing so we seek only to confirm our own preconceptions about other cultures. In other words, we conceal our bigotry with heavy-handed pretences of liberalism. “Of course I understand Russian culture,” we decry, “Why, only the other week I saw a charming little piece of Russian contemporary dance on the South Bank. They even did the low-leg kicking dance. You know, the Cossack one. The Kalinka. The dance of the soldiers. You know. The one Michael Jackson does in the Black or White video.”

Employing ticklish tactics of reductio ad absurdum, Soulimenko and Andrianov pepper a reflexive examination of their artistic practice’s evolution (so conforming to “the Western value given to personal revelation onstage) with clumsy clichés. The stage is littered with analogue technology tarted up with geometric shapes and folksy textiles. They don body stockings and militaristic ballet-costumes. They speak in Russian only so as to sound mysterious and exotic.

As a double-act, there are certainly connections to The Right Size or New Art Club, sending themselves up as they go along. A wonderfully po-faced spoof of contact improvisation is followed by a “male intuitive duet in which two organisms explore a contemporary urban space.” But beneath the seemingly mocking is always the question of labelling. With such a multiplicity of cultural influences forming such an assortment of work, how can we pigeonhole their practice according to nationality alone. The arbitrary nature of such classification seems disrespectful and dismissive. We may laugh, but there is a definite tone of accusation at play.

If we can’t rely on conventional categories, then the question remains as to how to define an artist’s practice. Soulimenko and Andrianov supply no distinct answers. Perhaps they go so far as to dismiss the need for any form of taxonomy. Even their own daughters seem unable to really describe their work, proffering vagaries in a video-interview without seeming to undermine it. What matters are the propositions made, not the system of reference or regimentation. Not Made in Russia, then, but simply made.