Sideways Glance Outwards

“Enough already,” I can hear you shouting, “What’s with the navel-gazing?” Well, yes, quite.

The final days of the calendar year may be primetime for personal reflection, but they are also a time of endless, infinite lists of top tens, twenties, fifties and ever afters. (None better, of course, than the irreverence of those West End Whingers, which make for obligatory seasonal reading and can be found here.) Given also that this year is fortunate to end in a nine, the media has been struck down with a severe case of list-lust and delivered unto us a thousand of the decade’s best and worst whatevers. Not that I’m complaining too much, of course!

So anyway, I suppose I ought to follow suit and offer up my own theatrical highlights, so in no particular order and with no particular angle or agenda, here’s something of a larger round up.

I’ve enjoyed making proper acquaintance with several companies and individuals this year. That’s pretty much the stage I’m at, I suppose: still shaking hands and exchanging formalities. The result is that there are some fairly old hands in this group of fresh faces.

Prime among them was the chance to get to know Chris Goode’s work. Having been a faithful visitor at Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire for some time, it was a real pleasure to see Chris’s practice in, um, practice on four separate occasions: the effortlessly charming Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley; the icily beautiful and multifarious Glass House; The Forest and the Field, a performance lecture that I thoroughly intended to write about but never got round to; and my personal favourite, his ticklish, yet tragic, travel guide to a dusty corner of the internet, Hippo World Guest Book.

I also loved my first encounters with Robin Deacon (Prototypes), Inspector Sands & Stomping Ground, the amazing Gob Squad, Simon Stephens (both Punk Rock and Pornography), Le Navet Bête (Zemblanity), Phillip Ridley (Fastest Clock), Iron Shoes (Crush), playmakers Coney, Tinned Fingers and Stefan Golaszewski.

Elsewhere, it’s been fun to chart the progress of a couple of more familiar faces. It was a pleasure to see the rise and rise of Action Hero in 2009. Watch Me Fall, which I had first caught as a work-in-progress at Forest Fringe 2008, developed into something quite special, furthering the Lilliputian nature of A Western and gathering a new sense of density along the way. Beyond that my peak into their process for their forthcoming Frontman, which saw James Stenhouse transformed into a whirling dervish of inevitable shortfall in an attempt to “lose control”, proved two of the most exhilarating minutes of pure theatre this year.

Great, also, to catch up with Rotozaza after a couple of years apart. For my money they really are pioneering a form in autotheatro and audio-based instructional performance that has extraordinary potential. No other company that I’ve come across is interrogating it with as keen an eye and as critical a brain. Instead, the crucial questions Ant et al are asking too often go unasked. And, in the the emerging company stakes, Dancing Brick just pip Little Bulb. More than most young companies, The Bulbs have a really strong sense of identity, which was bolstered by the unpretentious exuberance of their epic-folk opera Sporadical. Moreover they are becoming ever more productive, tossing out theatrical morsels (such as their entrancing Sight Reading at the Shunt Vaults) willy nilly. However, the development of Dancing Brick is a real source of pleasure. Both Hannah & Ike (again, at the Shunt Vaults) and Heap & Pebble burst the seams of their debut, 21:13, by being shaped into a whole rather than a mind-map. The unexpected tragedy that emerged from the iceless dancers was one of my highlights at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe (which was, in any case, a pretty spectacular year.)

But enough of school report style stuff, let’s move from effort to attainment: that is, onto the individual theatrics that blew me away for one reason or another.

Seeking Oedipus, Purcell Rooms, as part of the London International Mime Festival

Over There, Royal Court
Sadly neglected in the summations of the Royal Court’s annus mirabilis, Ravenhill’s study of a divided family within the divided Berlin that it encapsulated was a fearsome mix of reality and fiction. Brilliantly directed by Ramin Gray and Ravenhill himself with a superbly clinical and lucid design from Johannes Schütz, Over There extended the in-yer-face shock-tactics, for which the Royal Court is easily ridiculed, into the grit of live art. The real treat, though, was the power of the Treadaway twins – more as performers, or rather, objects of both fascination and repulsion, than as actors per se. Terribly bold, feisty and, at times, stomach-churning.

Inferno, Barbican Centre

Monsters, Arcola Theatre

Pictures from an Exhibition, Young Vic
This dance-theatre exploration of Modest Mussorgsk’s life and work, a co-production with Sadler’s Wells, was a sumptuous affair. Boldly colourful and giddily surrealist without ever losing sight of the ardours of the artist’s internal wrangling.

Jerusalem, Royal Court
What more can I add to the praise heaped on Butterworth’s text and Rylance’s performance? Packed as much with humanity as with humour, Jerusalem single-handedly refuelled my enjoyment of the play.

Internal, Ontroerend Goed & the Traverse

Land Without Words, English Theatre Berlin

Trilogy, Nic Green & The Arches

Iris Brunette, Melanie Wilson & FUEL Theatre
Proved to be just what I need after two Edinburgh festival weeks crammed to bursting with performance. I didn’t so much watch or experience Iris Brunette as absorb it. The darkness, the warm-glow and the melted husk of Wilson’s voice has the same effect on me as a weekend at Champneys. Gloriously golden slumbers with as luxuriant a quality as Calvino’s writing (yes, him again) as it journeyed through a city half-destroyed and unfamiliar.

Stillen, Sadler’s Wells

Punk Rock, Lyric Hammersmith
Another text to turn me back onto plays was this Columbine-on-Stockport-on-Sea imagining from Simon Stephens. A genuine thriller with a careful eye – by turns cradling and wounding – on a generation placed too readily in the stocks by a stone-throwing media. A superb performance of ticks and dark anti-charisma from Tom Sturridge (totally unexpected after the wetness of the Boat that Rocked) culminated in a chilling sense of horrific inevitability at his rigidly unemotional warning not to come into school tomorrow.

The Author, Royal Court
Fantastically interesting in terms of form, experience and content. Andrew Haydon’s dissection over at Postcards is worth more than any speedy summation I would offer here.

Raoul, Barbican Centre

Cock, Royal Court
Another thrilling theatrical implosion from the Royal Court about which one ought again turn over to Postcards from the Gods.

Kim Noble Will Die, Soho Theatre
In some ways, Kim Noble could be considered a slight deviation from my norm, having been classified (admittedly loosely) as stand-up comedy. Well, it’s much more than that. It’s performance art, it’s a horror show, it’s a damning indictment of a pop culture that has festered like mould over the past decade and, more than any of this, it is one of the most destructively poignant performances I’ve ever seen. I came out resolutely determined to snatch at life’s every opportunity and simultaneously submerged beneath the pointlessness of it all. A gripping dissection of what it means to be, not to be and to have been.

As for the worst, well without dwelling too long: thanks only to its commendable openness to experimentation, the BAC had a couple in Ann Liv Young’s carrot-fuelled orgies and Blind Summit’s 1984 (which, for me, ties with The Habit of Art in the overpraised stakes); Precarious’s shambolic Anomie and the pointless and witless Stand By Your Van in Edinburgh; Slung Low’s They Only Come at Night, Fireflies at the Manchester Lowry and Fiona Shaw’s torturous Mother Courage at the National.

Others worth mentioning, not actively bad in themselves, but frustrating in one way or another include The Pitmen Painters, which, by lacking the charm of Billy Elliot, seemed to me an exercise in patronising the little coal-faced miners and Our Class, which everyone else seemed to find terribly affective, but left me cold.

Finally, a couple of gongs for the critics. From the thousands of words penned, my two favourite lines of 2009 were these:

Brian Logan on Michael McIntyre: “There are traffic islands that spend less time in the middle of the road than McIntyre.”

Charles Spencer blistering attack on Brecht: “Here she comes again, Mother Courage and her bloody cart, condemning audiences to three-and-a-quarter hours of hectoring lectures, unrepentant Marxism, tiresome alienation devices and a bucketful of condensed misery.” Quite.

Critic of the year and – thanks to a stint off – a new discovery for me is Paul Taylor of The Independent, who never fails to spin a review into a fascinating thing of titbits and perambulation. He does, perhaps, delight in theatre a little too easily but then, having looked back at my own like to dislike ratio, I can’t claim Hugh Grant standards of miserliness myself. Working my way once again through Tynan’s writings, however, I’m gearing myself up for a host of reckless skirmishes in 2010.

Until then, thanks for reading and Happy New Year.

Sideways Glance Backwards

Well that, as they say, was the year that was. The tolling of midnight on Thursday will signal the end of my first calendar year of reviewing on a regular basis. Technically, I marked my year anniversary back in September, but somehow those first four months seem now like a warm-up to a different phase. They were a particularly transitional time, during which I went through something of a crisis (post-Edinburgh, of course) and gave up first acting and later theatremaking in toto. At the time, that felt like something extraordinary: not just a change of lanes, but one of destination. Now, it feels just about right.

Only in the past few months could I call myself settled. That initial rupture caused reverberations that took some time to calm: a new job, a new set of daily hours, a new set of time constraints. For those that don’t know – and there’s really no reason that you should – I spend my days working as an agent’s assistant at Curtis Brown, before donning my critical cap when daylight fades. Aside from affording me financial stability, the day-job has brought with it certain other benefits – in particular a far stronger working knowledge of ‘The Industry’s’ populace and processes – that will, I’m sure, prove enormously fruitful down the line.

However, this particular dusty corner of the internet is not about an agent’s assistant’s existence, but that of an aspiring critic and, if you’ll excuse the self-indulgence (what, after all, are blogs for), I will reflect accordingly.

In fact, the word ‘critic’ is one that I’ve been struggling with for a while. A few months ago, I read a reflexive piece by Ian Shuttleworth (though I can’t remember where to find it) about a particular Edinburgh festival in which he felt that he had graduated to the moniker of critic from that of reviewer. In other words, the simple act of reviewing does not a critic make. Where, I keep wondering, does that leave me?

Other people have used the c-word (settle down...) when referring to me, but in truth I still feel like a reviewer. A while back I wrote about the situation facing young critics and latched onto the notion of authority as key. The critic writes with authority, his or her individual view – though entirely subjective – comes with weight of experience and expertise. As such, it approaches that mythical, impossible thing that Hume termed the Standard of Taste. Quite simply, I don’t feel that I’ve yet got to that point.

I guess it’s worth toting up some figures: over the past twelve months, I’ve seen 176 productions – across a fairly wide range of forms – racking up, in the process, over seventy reviews and a handful of opinion pieces and musings both here and at the Guardian’s Theatre Blog. That’s a great deal more than I’ve experienced in any previous year, and it certainly elevates me above the average punter, but it nonetheless pales in comparison to the full-time critics. Shuttleworth himself recently noted on Facebook that his yearly total was 310, so I still fall quite some way short. Multiply that figure by the number of years that he’s been on the block and it’s going to be quite some time before I feel that I’ve achieved the grounding to believe in my own authority.

Lest that sounds like angling for reassurance, I ought to qualify. First, by saying that I believe I’m on the right track and second, by flagging up an admission of Charles Spencer made in conversation with Mark Shenton for The Stage’s podcast on criticism, during which he confessed to a frequent anxiety about having “got it wrong.” Perhaps it’s the arrogance and naivety of youth, or perhaps the negligible scale of the ripples that might emanate from my writing, but I don’t really share that concern. (I’ll admit to one such blip in the past year, having over-praised The Overcoat by Gecko, which turned out to fade from the memory far quicker than anticipated. A five star show should, I feel, burn itself irrevocably into one’s mind. That said, there have been a couple of very wayward blogs along the way.) But then, I suppose, that’s the thing about reviewing: if you can transcribe, or rather translate, your experiences of a piece with honesty and accuracy you’re bound to believe that what you’ve written is spot on. At least you do at the time of writing.

I came across this piece over at a blog called Time and Space (I think the author’s name is Chris Dupuis, but I’m not sure) and it got me thinking about my critical identity from a different perspective. In it, the author writes:

“Writing a piece that tells someone whether or not they should spend money to take in a piece of art is not criticism and the people who pen these articles are not critics, despite the fact that the publications that they work for, in an attempt to grant them some level of legitimacy, assign them this title. While reviews can be humorous, insightful, and (especially when they are scathing) quite fun to read, they do not constitute critical writing and including them in this category diminishes the value and importance of actual theatre criticism.

“Criticism, whether written about theatre or any other art form, is writing which is designed to accompany the work, NOT writing designed to tell people whether or not they should see it in the first place. True criticism is written under the assumption that your reading audience has seen or plans to see the work you are talking about and should inform the viewer's experience of the work, not to place a value judgement on the work itself. That doesn't mean that everything a critic has to say about a work is going to be positive, however the minute a critic starts telling their reader that they should or should not see a work, it ceases to become criticism and becomes a review.”

The question, following the rationale of the blog, is about the nature of what I write? Am I writing reviews or critiques? In that, I think I’m somewhere between the two. Certainly some of the pieces that I’ve written along the way – particularly more detailed enquiries into, for example, Internal or autotheatro – fall into the bracket of criticism, as do my writings for the Guardian’s blog. (In fact, in these terms the Guardian blog might be taken as the most important critical forum in the UK.) By contrast, most of my writings about individual shows are, according to the above definition, reviews. These pieces are not written for a readership that “has seen or plans to see the work” in question. Nor, however, are they intended as mere recommendations.

The truth is that I find this distinction unhelpful. To delineate between the review as consumer guide and criticism as support material is over simplistic. At its best, journalistic (as opposed to academic) criticism, conveys a sense of whether a show is worth seeing – for any given reader and their individual tastes – without aiming directly or solely at such ends. Even ignoring the enforced, emblazoned star-rating, the critic’s enthusiasm for a show shines through the writing about. In other words, in the hands of a passionate critic, any writing will serve both as a (re)commendation and as a guide. The value judgement nestles inseparably within the description. It will mix information, personal preference, context (artistic and historical), intentions, results, quirks and much more beside. It is an easy ideal to uphold, but always just that: an ideal. And, given the constraints of space, time, inescapable subjectivity and ignorance, an impossible one at that.

And so, I find myself returning to some words that Alison Croggon posted as a comment beneath an entry about critics reviewing critics:

“On the question of subjective experience, I take a rather robust view: I think critics are there as professional audients, and their job is to be, first of all, interesting, to respond as honestly and articulately to the work at hand as possible. Whether one agrees with a critic or not is immaterial; there are critics I adore whom I argue with all the way. The point is to be a catalyst for thinking.”

Rather wonderfully, this makes the status of critic quite relative and, accordingly, allows for – or better ensures, for it shouldn’t be a chore – a never-ending need to become more authoritative. I hope that my writing is worthy of interest, but even if it is, I feel I’ve a long way to go in the experience and expertise stakes. But then, that’s fine as well, no?

Review: 1984, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

The future, according to George Orwell, is best encapsulated by “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” Should that prove true, then Blind Summit’s adaption of his futurist novel is well ahead of its time. Its two and a half hours felt to me a searing migraine, soothed only by the sporadic presence of the puppetry for which the company is known.

It is a cliché to say that puppets steal the show, but Blind Summit’s cardboard companions – their flat-pack faces reminiscent of cubist paintings come to life – offer blessed respite. Elsewhere, the production is scuppered by a staunch literalism that saps it of real imagination. Instead of thinking of its subject matter as source material, the devising process seems only to have asked, “How can we stage this bit?” There is no careful concern for the overall plot or for the density of ideas beneath it. The pace is slow, the rhythm as staccato as a sewing machine. It’s as if no-one thought to think dramaturgically. Winston’s fear of rats, for example, is first mentioned as the rodents hurtle down cardboard pipes towards him in Room 101.

Blind Summit’s concept is to stage the story as if a piece of agit-prop theatre delivered by a troupe brainwashed by the regime. Around Winston Smith’s relationship with his co-worker-turned-revolutionary Julia, a five-strong chorus portrays the sterilized world and its populace. However, Orwell’s dystopian society, which is so vivid on the page, disintegrates into a series of demonstrative devices, most of which feel derivative, if not totally hackneyed. I mean, how many times has the Ministry of Truth been reduced to rows of people behind badly mimed typewriters? Nor are the grotesque characters played with any more originality or detail. As O’Brien, for example, Gergo Danko has a serious case of the Doctor Strangeloves.

And why, if the indoctrinated players are denouncing the evils of thought-crime, is the regime portrayed with such stark negativity?

Much of this has to do with indecision about whether to simply tell the story or send it’s very telling up a la Fiery Angel’s theatrical spoofs. Generally, Blind Summit opt for the latter, but do so with a lack of conviction that precludes comic momentum and invention.

It’s not all bad. As Winston and Julia, Simon Scardifield and Giulia Innocenti turn in strong, if mismatched, performances. Innocenti, in particular, flits between playing it straight and her superb knack for clowning, as if she’s uncertain whether to belong with the protagonist or chorus. Meanwhile, the staging of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is handled with fun and flair.

I must admit to being adrift in an enthusiastic audience with a heavy contingent of youth. I can see that 1984 would work as an introduction to theatre that dares to defy fourth-wall realism without resorting to pantomime, but it sorely lacks the self-reflexivity and all-questioning attitude that has helped the BAC to thrive. By being content to make do, to accept the success of its devices unthinkingly, Blind Summit proved a source of aching frustration.

On the plus side, I know what to expect from Room 101.

Review: The Stefan Golaszewski Plays, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Stefan Golaszewski is the sort of man who hopes to fall in love on public transport, who soaks in the city dreamily at night, who looks out of windows in moving vehicles and imagines himself to be in a music video. I know all this because I relate to him enormously. I absolutely recognize myself in his whimsical, misty-eyed monologues. Hell, if we’re honest, we all do.

Because, unfashionable though it may be, Stefan Golaszewski is a male romantic. He writes honest fantasies cluttered up with mundanities: emotional porn for men. It is a world teeming with serendipitous moments, in which women are beautiful, forward and unairbrushed, consistently droll and a little bit dirty. His stories chime with our classified daydreams – inadmissible because they clash with preconceptions of brusque masculinity. They function through private identification, blending quixotic sighs with beery banter, like strange permutations of Mills & Boon and Gavin & Stacey.

The two tales presented in tandem at The Bush, which premiered separately at successive Edinburgh Fringes, are the direct inverse of one another. In Stefan Golaszewski Talks About a Girl He Once Loved, he looks back to his gap-year at the start of the millennium and a fleeting but full-bodied romantic encounter. Stefan Golaszewski is a Widower imagines the author in 2056 as a sixty-nine year old recounting two lives entwined through a passionate, plodding marriage. Director Phillip Breen cleverly elevates this connection through design, reversing the colour scheme as in photographic negatives. However, there is perhaps a sense of overkill. It feels a touch forced. The two pieces seem to fit together like an Airfix model: you can see the joints but they could do with smoothing down.

This is, perhaps, symptomatic of Golaszewski’s chronology of process. Talks About a Girl... is an inspired original. It is beadily acute in its observations. The manner in which pop culture of the early millennium slips in almost unnoticed is exemplary. At one point, Golaszewski returns from the bar by saying “something funny like ‘only me’ or ‘this week I have been mostly eating crisps’.” More than this, it feels heartfelt: his words perfectly capturing the awkward naivety, the gawkiness of the late teenager. It’s not that Is a Widower... fails; rather that it cannot match its predecessor. Though the future history emerges wittily – The Bill, in which he lands a plum role, becomes the most watched series of the 2020’s, by which time everyone is fitted with an iChip and went through a brief phase of wearing sunglasses inappropriately – you feel that the world hasn’t been fully rounded off. You feel the gaps in history.

The second piece is so consciously fictitious, so obviously concocted, that it makes for a tricksy bedfellow. Talks About a Girl... thrives on its honesty, its self-deprecation and mockery, by making a fool of its author-performer. The details jump into life because they seem sharp recollections delicately spun. When Golaszewski talks about this first tumbling love, you don’t just sense he means it, you know he does. When he talks of marriage, adultery, fatherhood, devastating grief, reconciliation and unfathomable success – no matter how sharp the writing or how convincing the performance – you wonder how he knows. You cannot shake off the fantasy.

To be fair, though, Golaszewski understands love. Or, at least, he makes you understand love. The absence of those around him – perfect Betty, with her FHM arse and toothy smile, and near-perfect life-partner Pudding – means that we fall for his partners too. They exist as our ideals. His words leap through our ears, swish around our brains and set our hearts aflicker. We instinctively empathize with the suitcase full of paper yeses or the multi-coloured presents plonked down seeking absolution. We feel the explosions of eye-contact and lust after the kinky routines – and, credit where credit’s due, Golaszewski writes about sex exquisitely (keep an eye out for his filthy, hilarious sitcom-to-be Young, Unemployed and Lazy). But, Hollywood this is not. Heartbreak is never too far away.

Though, in hindsight, the two monologues may not twin as well as one might have imagined – certainly, Golaszewski’s writing style begins to gnaw after a full two hours, never missing a list, embellishment or flourish (sound familiar?) – he has created something a little bit special. Heartwarmingly whimsical, it is two sets of initials, framed by a heart, carved wonkily into a tree. I ♥ SG.

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.

Review: Live Long and Prosper, Chelsea Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Knees buckling beneath him, Spock crumples towards death. His hand slides down the glass panel in front of him. Looking into the eyes of his friend and captain, James Kirk, he offers justification for his self-sacrifice: “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.” With a defiant final gesture, an iconic palm with fingers split, he dies. Just outside a pound shop in Berlin.

Meanwhile, across town Frankie Dunn/Clint Eastwood removes the artificial windpipe of his million dollar baby, Maggie Fitzgerald/Hilary Swank in a laundrette and in the same city, next to an ice rink, illuminated by the soft glowing colours of a nearby funfair, Sergeant Keck/Woody Harrelson clutches his stomach and screams in agony, his platoon tending to him as he slips away.

Gob Squad’s twenty-minute film remakes seven such cinematic death sequences in and around Berlin’s public spaces. Playing on two screens, allowing comparison between the original and its everyday echo, it captures the sentiment and simultaneously sends it up: emotion marinated in ridicule.

However, it is the intellectual side of Live Long and Prosper that really thrives. Underneath the humour, there is serious investigation. The film almost turns against its own medium and outs its corruption of reality. The familiarity of these cinematic images – perfect tears rolling down perfect checks, empty eyes towards camera, red circles on white shirts – is here exposed as damning of itself. Life – death – doesn’t work like that. It is not neat; it is not eloquent; it is not tragedy-by-numbers. Yet these deaths, exquisitely framed and formed, feel real because they have come to supplant reality. After all, for most of us, death is only ever directly encountered on screens.

Hence, the very public nature of the space’s Gob Squad chose to invade. Their forcible intrusions of death, albeit fake, into the public sphere makes conspicuous that which is customarily tucked away. And yet, the city whirs on. In the background, suited legs and high heels catch the camera’s attention; shoppers browse shelves, tourists gaze out of windows, escalators climb on. The world is oblivious and, in its oblivion, the world becomes inhumane.

This makes for stark contrast with the figures within the scenes played, where, for the most part, the focus is on the process of dying as much as the moment of death. The majority of the selected scenes involve a degree of self-consciousness. Whether it is in the grandiose monologues to those gather, tearful farewells to a loved one or simply in the eyes of a paralysed, mute fallen champion, there is an awareness of death’s encroachment. Death is the antithesis of the life that surrounds these scenes. It is a certainty always unprepared for, and these final moments of acceptance (or non-acceptance) are a mark of the impassable threshold.

Life always goes on. Where the originals cut off, Gob Squad linger on breathing corpses and those left grieving. This they suggest is the burden of the living – the really living. Films need not mourn. Perhaps they leave tears to be wiped away, but they need not mourn. Death alters life and it does so inexorably. In those contorted faces, those cradling arms, there is a thin thread towards those that pass by the recreations, caught momentarily on camera and it is in death’s permanent effects, its echoes and remnants that drag unseen behind us. For the passer-by, for all of us, oblivion is necessary. Without it, the burden of the living would be too great to bear.

Review: Constellations, Royal Court

As settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations zaps through a number of parallel universes to tell the story of Roland and Marianne’s relationships.

Marianne’s a quantum physicist. Roland’s a beekeeper. They meet at a rain-soaked barbecue. Sometimes they date. Sometimes they don’t. They break up. Sometimes they get back together. Sometimes they don’t.

Review: A Small Town Anywhere, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars


From my pulpit, I am engaged in a slur campaign. For no reason other than his political allegiances, I have written several libellous letters concerning the Mayor to my fellow townsfolk. All are, of course, left unsigned. After all, as the town’s priest, I cannot have suspicion turning my way. The following day, when the town council meet to banish one of this community, two names emerge – mine and his – before a surprising turnaround sees him escorted into the wilderness.

Do I feel guilty? Not a jot. Without the Mayor, my own political party of choice – the rigidly traditional Wrens – walk an easy path to victory and take control of the town. Personally, my own standing in the town increases, leaving me free to turn my slander on a new target: the quiet woodsman. Why? Because I can.

This is A Small Town Anywhere and, in it, suspicion and manipulation, paranoia and self-preservation are our rulers. Part balloon-debate, part role-playing game, part unscripted play, A Small Town Anywhere hands over the reins to its audience of participants, each of whom is given a role within the community, and allows history to be shaped by our decisions and snap judgements. Over two hours, a week passes and a dramatic one, at that, filled with elections, allegiances, coups, blossoming relationships and betrayals.

Ostensibly, we are trying to identify and cast out a figure known as The Raven, who knows a bit too much about each of us. I, for example, cannot have details of my affair with La Chantreuse emerge. Others have their own secrets to hide. However, in the course of proceedings, our individual objectives take over. In other words, as in life, there really is no ultimate, collective end. Instead, we find our own targets and employ tactics towards that end.

That this scope for free choice exists without scuppering the event towards chaos is a credit to how well-designed A Small Town Anywhere is as a game. We are observed and monitored through spyholes in the walls, through this never becomes intrusive, and both the disembodied, calming voice of the Town Cryer and the letters received each day serve to keep the game rumbling on apace. In short, the game can adjust to every possibility, including, on this occasion, a well-intentioned mutiny and a final refusal to sacrifice any member of the town.

The pacing is perfect, such that we are gradually immersed in a fiction to the point of investment. The functional rules are explained succinctly and delicately, though there is neither the possibility for nor the pressure of going wrong. Through email encounters with Henri, the small town historian, you gradually invent your character and a backstory of sorts. Yet, this is no Murder Mystery party; there is no sense of acting. You, yourself, are very much present in the small town. Your decisions remain yours, not those that your character might make. Not only does this remove awkward inhibitions, it allows the piece an ethical and political dimension beyond the bounds of the small town. You feel the weight of betrayals as much as the excitement of transgressions.

There are a few nagging concerns. The role of The Raven feels underdeveloped and, at times, a certain arbitrariness creeps in, such that targets are chosen simply to chose a target, but this, of course, brings its own implications. Equally, there is a sense that suspicion is often born of no more than prominence. It was interesting to note that those participants that stuck to running personal businesses were less likely to attract mistrust than those given public duties, such as the Mayor or the Publican. Perhaps, also, there is a feeling that the creators learn more than the players by seeing the range of possibilities and charting a wider history of the many different small towns that spring into existence.

Though I suspect that it may happen in due course, A Small Town Anywhere would benefit from sharing the outside perspective. At present, I know that, as the Priest, I acted less than impeccably with a certain relish. However, there is only a soft sense of specific wrongdoings and the effects of actions. Without some record or judgement post-event, one doesn’t become fully accountable for misdeeds committed. Indeed, it becomes far easier to dismiss A Small Town Anywhere as mere play, despite the strong moral, political and social elements that undoubtedly exist therein. All they need is backing up.

But what if it is just play? Would that be so bad? After all, it is in the bar afterwards – swapping stories, exchanging experiences and dissecting the event – that a real community comes into existence. As strangers connect afterwards, A Small Town Anyway grows in import and the game really does begin to matter.

Review: The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Vaudeville Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Aside from the poetic magnetism of its central figure, Jim Cartwright’s 1992 play has little going for it. The entire narrative pivots on a cabaret act of seven or so minutes when the coy little Lancastrian girl reveals the incredible scope of her sound-shifting, chameleonic larynx. All we want to see is Little Voice’s star turn, rattling through the familiar voices of Shirley, Cilla, Edith and Judy. The rest feels like a dragging inconvenience.

Thankfully, Diana Vickers (her off tele) pulls the routine off with aplomb. Though her vocal simulacrums are never quite perfect enough to dumbfound, she consistently catches sufficient likeness to stand in for the greats. Equally, you only get half a sense of vocal chords possessed. The alien voices never quite burst forth intuitively and uncontrollably, but seem instead the result of quite conscious manipulation. The training process of rehearsals is always just about visible and slightly takes the edge of her rawness.

Let’s not get too excited about Vickers, though. Two other monologues – one sung, one ranted – she has to do little more than seek comfort in a baggy brown hoodie, stare at a record-player and be a bit sheepish.

Her casting, however, makes for a curious case. As a role, Little Voice demands a phenomenal vocal performance. Anything less and the entire play collapses, while to just about get away with it is to astound. In effect, we are applauding the talents of the actress for the routine performed and witnessed. It is the feat of cycling through incarnate incantations that impresses. However, the fiction leaves us predisposed to be impressed. We are inclined to applaud because actress and character are spun together. We see before us the reluctant performer that is Little Voice, we know of her father’s death and of her mother’s alcoholic awfulness. The narrative’s purpose is solely to sentimentalize the act and so prejudice us towards applause. In fact, Cartwright’s play is the fictional equivalent of the sob stories that clutter television talent shows.

The confusion, then, comes from Vickers’ own history. As an X Factor graduate herself, we cannot but associate her with Little Voice, as a young girl used to singing into hairbrushes, plucked from everyday life and bunged on a stage. We marvel at the actress, Little Voice and Diana Vickers all at once. The conflated whole strengthened by the mutual support of its constituent parts.

And yet, Vickers’ presence undermines the piece as a whole, given that she is a product of the very industry that Cartwright sets out to attack. Suddenly Ray Say (smartly played as slick as fudge by Marc Warren), the greasy small-town talent agent who ‘spots’ Little Voice on a late night visit to her mother, seems doubly vindicated; astutely ahead of his time, even. To be honest, this seems somehow symptomatic of the production’s true intentions whereby commerce is elevated over statement.

Perhaps, though, that’s fine. After all, Cartwright’s play is something of a fairy tale and, by ignoring the wider socio-political conditions of the time, director Terry Johnson has very deliberately placed the narrative in a bubble. Lesley Sharp meanwhile does her level best to make a pantomime of it all, over-dominating proceedings as LV’s monstrous mother, albeit, admittedly, without ever resorting to stereotype, and there’s strong comic support from James Cartwright and Rachel Lumberg.

Review: Room Temperature Romance, Barbican Pit Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Examining those momentary nothings that, taken together, make up a lifelong friendship, Levantes Dance Theatre misjudge the balance of design and substance and so succumb to a trite tweeness. All girlish giggles and glances, Room Temperature Romance is the dance equivalent of knotted pinkies that promise to be friends forever. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Often it calls to mind a French and Saunders flashback sequence: the sort in which the pair run through fields or bake cakes, only for one to fall foul of a clumsy disposition and fall down a well or become clouded in flour. Then, of course, they turn to one another and laugh, still ‘bezzie mates’ in spite of mismatched natures.

Eleni Edipidi and Bethanie Harrison make a clownish double act. Sharing stark Frida Karlo monobrows drawn on in marker pen, they create flashes of touching comedy but lack a strictly defined hierarchy that would allow their routines to gain momentum. The contrast of Harrison’s flickering eyes and Edipidi’s doltish, empty gaze simply isn’t enough. In fact, the whole piece has a soft focus fuzziness that prevents it from really achieving anything more than a pink and fluffy feel.

As dancers, they veer towards the distinctly unvirtuosic. The tatty synchronicity and dumpy clunkiness adds a certain everyday charm, matched by the doddering uncertainty of their older counterparts, who interrupt proceedings to stage manage with an air of fond nostalgia for mischief past. Too often, however, their choreography relies on monotonous call and response. It follows a pattern of withering domination and wilting submission, where Edipidi’s doe-eyed mimicry of Harrison inevitably relies on offering something a bit less good.

This monotony is, however, concealed – at least, on the surface – by the boldness of Room Temperature Romance’s design. The vibrancy of its colours and the cut of its clothes give it a sumptuous visual element. The emphasis on fashion, however, detracts from the bodies themselves, which seem mere motors for swishing hems. The result is to sap the instinctive oomph of movement, to stop us swaying subconsciously along in our seats.

Add to this too much stage business, noticeably overplayed clowning and hackneyed discussions of SMS etiquette and Room Temperature Romance drags.

In its final moments, as the stage fills with miniature mechanical pigs and the pair down Guiness in frosty pink gowns against a deep turquoise background, the piece reveals what might have been. It is a sequence at once surreal, real and fictional, sparking images and ideas of recognisable friendships while also turning an eye on itself.

Instead, Room Temperature Romance takes a widescreen view and fails to find the details that can turn its nothings into something special.

Review: Raoul, The Barbican

Written for Culture Wars

Raoul is not a one man show. If it seems that way it is because its cast of hundreds happen to share a single body. James Thiérée is legion. There are times when each of his limbs seem controlled by a different consciousness: his arm slapping his astonished face whilst the other tears at it like a protective bystander. Elsewhere he genuinely seems to multiply – as if by mitosis – and shapeshift; his body morphs into all manner of animals, objects and even elemental states. To watch him is to be astounded by a fluid being unbounded by its own human limitations.

And yet, as a show, Raoul gains its weight precisely from its humanity. It wrangles with an overwhelming existential crisis, full of fear, loathing and furious exasperation. To belittle is as spectacle alone is to ignore the fact that it is a circus of the self.

On entering we are faced with a jaunty cubist landscape of white sheets that seems a shipwreck of twisted sails or a theatre torn down, its curtain railings come unhinged. Beneath them is a shack of scaffolding poles, itself filled with musky knick-knacks. This is the isolated Raoul’s castle. It protects him from both the world and another figure: a hostile self that lays it siege, charging at the walls and forever gaining entry. The two Raouls are inextricable. No matter how the first tries to escape – hiding in oil drums, cocooning himself in bed, pondering himself in the mirror – the other always catches him unguarded. Raoul’s is an existence stalked by his own self, confronted by an ugly, unwanted doppelganger at every turn as he attempts to fend of crisis with self-definition.

There is a certain tragedy about this first Raoul. He is a man always at odds with himself; a hapless figure forever tying himself in knots. He tries to cross his legs only for them to slip off one another. He tries to play music, but gets only the grainy crackle of scratched vinyl or the final combative blasts of an elusive symphony. His reflexes are unexpectedly reversed and his even his clothes prove evasive. Thiérée’s dazzling skill as physical comedian, his deftness with repetition, never absolves this tragedy. We laugh just as much as we associate with this man, caught as he is in a cycle of unattainable objectives. Ever tried and all that.

Alongside this is Raoul’s crippling self-consciousness, not only in the form of his stalking self, but also in our presence. At several points the house lights bath us in light and he stands at the edge of the stage on show, vulnerable, judged and paralysed.

Yet, Raoul must duel not only with himself, but also his environment. As his house diminishes and decays, the world becomes ever more watery. Oversized creatures, airy elephants and metallic fish – junkyard creations, all very much manmade – approach, sometimes inquisitively, sometimes threatening. His clowning follows a steady pattern. He discovers, shares with us, loses control and moves on, such that the universe seems wondrous but beyond dominion.

I suppose the show hinges on the credit it is given by its audience, whether will look beyond a clown and see a philosopher. For me, the leap was unavoidable, but I can understand how others will see only a man engaged in human origami. Perhaps this is true of all circus or visual theatre. Either way, there can be no doubting the skill of Thiérée’s performance. What does undermine it slightly is the ‘how did they do that factor’ – our need to understand the mechanics of an illusion, such that when the timing is the slightest fraction out, we spot the trapdoors that makes his duplication possible.

But then there is also an honesty to Raoul. At its end, with the white box become black void, he takes flight unexpectedly. Perched at the stage’s edge, he rises slowly, inexplicably, faster and faster, spinning up a cyclone onstage. Then the lighting shifts from illusion to revelation. Our eyes become accustomed to the dark and we make out two stage hands frantically operating a crane. Order is restored. It is as if Thiérée throws us a wink. We know that our eyes have often been tricked, but here is his confession. Even as he flies above our heads, Thiérée admits that the theatre cannot make a man fly, but also – wonderfully – it can.

The stage makes possible and Raoul revels in its own fluid liminality. It is filled with mirth and melancholy, humanity and beauty, small triumphs and inevitable failure. Afterwards, coursing the city and boarding the tube, Raoul’s world of fluctuation lingers. It may take a while to readjust to the tedious solidity of ours.

Review: Constellations, Royal Court

As settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations achieves a concise and clear-headed illustration of the implications of parallel universe theory on our understanding of free will.

The multiverse is made up of an infinite number of parallel universes, all of which, when taken together, encompass every possible sequence of events. At every junction that has several possible outcomes, each will occur in a separate parallel universe.

At first glance, it may look as though our actions in any single universe are determined. They must follow a set path in order that every possible outcome can occur. However, it’s possible to reconcile free will by saying that, in the individual moment, we make a free choice, but it also happens that elsewhere, other versions will freely choose otherwise, so that every possibility is exhausted.

Review: The Factory's Hamlet, Arch 635

Written for Culture Wars

Even for the most well-drilled company, Hamlet is no mean feat. Exalted to the point of petrifying, bursting at the seams with iconic lines, lofty philosophy and high emotions, it is a three hour wrestle with the human condition. Imagine, then, being cast as the despairing Dane a mere five minutes before your first entrance, armed with only the text as learnt by rote, in a production that no more knows its course than you do. As if that weren’t enough, someone’s just handed you a giant polystyrene skull as your first prop.

The Factory’s Hamlet, clearly, is a gargantuan task. For the past two years an eclectic collective of actors have been conjuring Hamlet anew in different locations. Sometimes they play on a stage, using whatever set happens to be there. Sometimes in a found space. Tonight, we are in a converted railway arch in Clapham with a bar modishly dressed in black and neon. Passing trains rumble overhead piercing the play with ominous bursts of thunder.

It works thus: having each learnt several parts, actors are pitted against one another in bouts of rock, paper, scissors to determine the casting. Audience members provide the props and move between acts to reconfigure the playing space. After a ten-second countdown, it begins.

So it is that the ghost bursts in with a head of molten armour fashioned from tin-foil, that Prince Fortinbras is crowned with a novelty hippo shower-cap and that Hamlet and Laertes engage in a duel of pulling power, having plucked out two audience members for a tragical snog-off. This is no “sterile promontory,” but a world of waxy surrealism: wayward and stalked by madness.

There are, unsurprisingly, both gains and losses in this mode of presentation.

As an audience, our attention is split. Events multiply. We see both the world of the play and the actual space in which it appears; both characters and actors. We immerse ourselves in the story and simultaneously admire the telling of it at one remove. It is as if a version plays out in our heads to which we become emotionally connected even as we disconnect from the one in front of us, amused by the jarring discrepancies of image and text as, say, Hamlet brandishes a dainty fan in threat or Barnardo cowers beneath a cycle helmet.

But, isn’t this what happens in any theatre? Do we not watch the action behind our eyes whilst that before us fails? This honesty marks The Factory’s house-style. Aware of its own ridiculousness, it seems to observe itself scornfully even as it invests with wholehearted earnestness.

With such emphasis on the imagined narrative, the play becomes clearer than ever before – with the exception, tonight, of a frayed third act, which buckles in the tricksy playing space of the bar and the decision to have two actors share the titular role. With images offering little assistance or correspondence, one’s ear tunes in to the text with unusual diligence, pricking at its nuances and repetitions. An unexpected purity, even faithfulness, emerges whereby we receive the text almost as if reading it at our own pace.

Alongside this, the display of choice somehow distils the play. Given the obviousness of what might have been - that is, the continuous sense of parallel worlds and paths not taken – we receive the play almost as an abstract idea. Each attempt seems to contain every possible production. Absent ideas of characters seem to hover over the heads of those embodying them, almost as if we witness the corruption inherent in the process of actualisation. What we see seems to directly reveal the playwright’s original. There can be no directorial intention, no forced interpretation or imposition, just the play as written and the openly messy particulars on which it is carried.

That said, beyond the refreshed perspective, we learn little that we didn’t already know. The Factory rely on our foreknowledge of the play. We are forced to make our own sense, to complete the jigsaw for ourselves. The form itself offers no comment on the content – any text could be tackled similarly without loss. To watch is to discover anew, but also to clarify, refine and confirm ideas already held.

With this loss of directorial intention comes also a weakening of the narrative arc. Individual scenes may become clarified but the sense of structured development of both characters and plot disappears. The sense of impending tragedy never grows in momentum and both Hamlet’s vengeful desires and his madness seem somewhat scattergun as a result, flashing here and there, but often forgotten. With this, the absence of design, there creeps the slightest hint of monotony.

Does the improvisation become wearisome? Perhaps, but only where it does not fizz with inspiration. As the play proceeds we demand more ingenuity and wit of the actors. Not least because, over time, we spot the presence of preconceived tactics. We begin to doubt the total immediacy as momentary decisions seem born of tactics, as if the company have identified ideal openings for something, anything, to be decided upon and determined that some repeated gesture or other is needed to convey a particular thread of ideas, death, for instance, or madness.

However, given the mammoth nature of the task, such tactics are forgivable by virtue of their necessity. It is harder to excuse the inconsistencies of style. Where at times The Factory seek to play scenes according to naturalistic motivations, at others they play to illustrate and at others still to postulate some concept or other. There is also the sense of opportunities missed in their handling of the audience. After all, part of the joy of improv is our role as challenge-setters. The event could benefit from having even less control over itself.

Nonetheless, it works. It could be improved, but it proves enjoyable, exciting and urgent and demonstrates The Factory as a necessary point on the theatrical landscape. The future development of their practice is worth following with a beady eye, as they are a company underpinned by theatrical enquiry providing a rickety, risky bridge between mainstream and experimentation.