Review: Continuous City, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

About a year and a half ago, I renewed my mobile phone contract. Aiming to save a few pennies, I opted against an internet package. And yet, over that time, things have changed. There’s an expectation of instantaneous online communication. We’re obliged to have constant access to one another via the internet housed in our pockets and handbags. It’s ended up costing me a small fortune.

But what was it Bob Hoskins said? It’s good to talk, right? What with the rise of communicative technology, that’s never been easier. Yet Continuous City lays out the prosecuting case against the technologies that keep us connected. As convenient as communication has become, we’re no better at actually communicating. Arguably – and The Builders Association argue just this – we’re losing the ability to do so in any real or meaningful way.

To that end, we centre on an emergent social networking site called Xubu, designed to house and express more of your personality than a mere profile by the use of video-blogging. It provides a chance to speak to the world and forge connections without the obstruction of distance. Its chairman Mike is spreading the word around the globe, hopping between far off cities and landscapes, keeping in regular – almost constant – video contact with his daughter in London. Meanwhile the technological genius behind Xubu, JV is sat at his desk, window swapping between various shallow and dishonest conversations with family members, business partners and flirtatious women.

To dismiss Continuous City as a rant, however, would be unfair. The density of ideas contained within means that it sits somewhere between invective and treatise. It is carefully spun, examining the nature of the world given this newfound ability for permanent connection. It asks what location, separation and distance mean when no longer obstructions to experience and communication. Onscreen characters introduce themselves according to their current city, home town or their place of origin and yet that reflects only an abstract notion, offset by a sense of bland ubiquity. Even cities themselves have started succumbing to the copy-and-paste mirroring of globalisation, with Eiffel Towers in Beirut, Las Vegas and Yanam, India. Places conform to one’s preconceptions: Mike’s hired help Deb tells the internet that she knew London before arriving through Absolutely Fabulous and other cultural citations. Icons and images – holiday snapshots taken by others – stand in for actual experiences, even for reality itself.

But the suggestion is that such effects are not merely confined to the virtual or personal perception, but actually cause fissures in the world at large. After all, what is reality but our perception of it? And in this, Continuous City suggests a breakdown, as if reality has not just been supplanted, but eroded. The images that appear on screens – and most of the narrative is told via conversations held with onscreen faces – are regularly disrupted, spread across multiple screen and broken up by gaps, as if the world is somehow lost in transmission. It looks a shattered pane now fragmented and mid-explosion.

My reservation is that, for all that I found the exposition fascinating, I’m not sure that it’s best served by theatre as a medium. Or rather, I’m not sure whether The Builders Association have played to the medium’s strengths, let alone using theatre to its maximum capacity.

The prime difficulty its faces is that its main thrust is about saying nothing of import and, unless its treated with ingenuity or playing with the way in which nothing is said, that makes for unswervingly flat drama. The problem is that, despite looking like its storytelling techniques have been contorted into something radical, Continuous City takes a more or less straightforwardly linear path. We see Xubu’s gradual development and near-collapse, we see a father’s various almost indistinguishable video-phone conversations with his daughter, we see a nanny build a relationship with a child and eventually drag her away from the screen.

The reason its narrative looks unfamiliar, both jagged and fragmented, is because the staging reflects the interface of the computer screen, splitting our concentration with multiple tabs and windows. That has two results: first, a clash between the live and the mediatised and second, a blandness of imagery. The vast majority of content as seen consists of a conversation stitched together from a video playing on one or other of the screens and a performer addressing a webcam, which is in turn fed live to another screen. Around that there are too few moments where an image is constructed onstage. The two exceptions are when the daughter lies beneath her computer desk, almost snail-like, suggesting the virtual as a home and when she falls asleep, camera in hand, permanently (and physically) connected much as the Na’vi plug into nature in James Cameron’s Avatar.

Admittedly, there are some enthralling questions around their use of media. One can never be entirely sure whether the videos are exclusively pre-recorded or actually performed ‘live’ and transmitted into the theatre. Some could only be pre-recorded, given the variety of global locations in which the same person (Mike) appears. Most seem scripted but a few are genuine webcam recordings by non-involved individuals, which have been framed as semi-fictional by being stamped with the Xubu logo. Again the question of distorted reality arises. However, where The Builders Association err is in mediatising the live by using microphones, which – though it perhaps emphasises the irreversible melding of worlds – softens the conflict.

Essentially, I suppose, they have tried to turn the media and technology against itself. I can’t help feeling, however, that this weakens their argument by confusing it. There is something hypocritical about dismissing communication via technology as a newfangled novelty whilst relying on its allure to do so. In other words, Continuous City is crying out for something more present (even though it conscious rearranges its content to be time and place specific, discussing the World Cup and setting itself in London, even referencing the Southbank Centre itself) and its subject matter is in desperate need of a distorted form.

For all that, the ideas contained within make this an extraordinary piece of theatre, albeit more as thesis than theatre. Its polemical nature, battering exhaustively at the stronghold of technology, is violently affecting. It seems to stand around warning of impending apocalypse, a mode made all the more hard-hitting by grounding what seems slightly futuristic (at least, in this country; is it different in American or Japan?) as entirely of the present moment. What struck me – once again – was this sense of the living inferno. That technology, created by man for man’s needs, to comfort us, is steering us towards a dystopian era of inhumanity. We are, it yells, sliding towards anaesthesia, slowly morphing and distorting into androids. Admittedly, I could have done with some balance – a single, tiny nod to the positive side of all this, one moment of genuine connection that would have been impossible – but to ask for that is probably to undermine the force of the tirade’s aggression.

All in all, as theatre Continuous City is problematic, but I’ve rarely left a theatre with such a bleak prognosis ringing so forcefully in my ears and such angry dismay rising in my gut.

Review: Stairway to Heaven, Blue Elephant Theatre

Written for Time Out

A simple morality tale simply told, Stairway to Heaven explores basic proletariat politics through the pyramid builders of Ancient Eygpt. Newly enlisted Makhthon (James Ronan) arrives full of admiration for the Pharoah, only to find that his new job consists of endless exhaustion and savagery. Having caught the eye of his slave-driving superior Merab, Makhthon is subjected to regular violence and rape, soon learning to take comfort in the austere pleasures of bread, beer and the company of his peers: the cynical, profiteering Hiksos and sweet-natured Geb. It doesn't take long, however, for his head to pop above the paraphet once too often with fatal consequences.

Curiously, Steve Hennessy lends his workforce the language of a Simon Stephens East End boozer - all 'f-ing Pharoahs' and 'bastard capstones' - but spins little imagery out of the coarseness. His script is both well-structured and well-seasoned with joviality, but archetypes can only do so much. More layered complexity wouldn't go amiss.

As it is, Chris Loveless directs unfussily, weaning a few nice images out of the daily grind, but could make braver, bolder choices. Though Ronan slightly overdoes the clean-cut of Makhthon's jib, there's good work from James French as Merab and Matthew Ward as a doltish, good-hearted Geb.

Review: Revolution Now!, ICA

Written (without much coherence) for Culture Wars


Anarchy in the ICA, where Gob Squad have bound the doors shut, occupied the building and called out the instigators. They don’t know what they want, but they know how to get it. Action alone is no longer enough; presentation is everything in this cosmeticised coup of manicured misrule. They might not have a real solution, but it’s time for a-changing times.

Sure, we’ve been taken hostage in the name of the cause – whatever that might be – but it’s not long before Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and everybody’s talking ‘bout revolution, evolution, um, masturbation... Anyway. We are become the children thereof and we’re not coming out until our demands are met. Or, at least, until one person stops to throw a flaming bottle of champagne against a wall. Complying with health and safety legislation, of course.

Revolution Now! is charged with Gob Squad’s inimitable high-octane freneticism and characteristic brash cynicism. They tear about the stage and the seating rake, urging us into action and sculpting us into a presentable rabble. They strip chunks of resonant pop culture bare like carnivorous magpies, vandalising the iconic like the Chapman Brothers on Nitrous Oxide. They orchestrate us into cheering and cheerlead us into orchestrated aggression. They make us read protest poetry and pose gun-toting and peace-signing for the camera.

All this is to create the image of a revolutionary force, ripe for broadcast to a lone television placed on the street outside, through which they attempt to ignite a genuine act of insurgency. Bemused passers-by stare back blank-faced, resolutely oblivious to rules by which the event is operating, by which they’re being asked to play. No, it’s more serious than that, isn’t it? To act. To revolt.

By turns it’s brattish, riotous, vaudevillian, clever, stupid, coarse and tech-savvy. And it’s all extraordinarily good fun.

But it’s also surprisingly shallow. Overarchingly, I suppose, Revolution Now! is a lament for political activism and people power. In taking such an extreme stance of enthusiasm and generating such support for an empty, meaningless cry for change, Gob Squad show up the apathy of a stagnant and docile society. More than that, the implication is that genuine revolution has become impossible in a world governed by its media. Perhaps the best any public outrage can hope to muster is a Twitter campaign or a Facebook petition. And what do they choose to achieve? A festive chart-topper for Rage Against the Machine. It’s hardly Tiananmen Square.

I suppose one could read into this a diatribe against the infectious irony amongst digital natives, if only Gob Squad didn’t seem so caught up in that themselves. In fact, they stubbornly refuse to take anything, including themselves, seriously. What that means is that, for all that we get caught up in the excitement of persuading the public to take arms, there’s very little at stake. Rather than genuinely trying to incite an uprising, Gob Squad seem content to see what they can get away with. There’s more than a touch of Trigger Happy TV about it, a sense of mocking the uninitiated and excluded.

A further symptom of this is its dilettantism, which really prevents Revolution Now! from being anything more than a cursory exploration of activism. That we should remain onside and entertained, playing along and partying in the aisles, seems more important than really getting to grips with the subject in hand. As a result, a wide range of ideas are picked up and tossed away without interrogation.

It’s a shame, really, because the revolution itself is a real pleasure. Only afterwards do you realise how little it all meant.


Photographs by Thomas Aurin

Review: Food Court, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Food Court wants to have its cake and eat it. Which, given that it shows two fat women abusing a far slimmer one for being obsese, is all rather ironic.

Allow me to explain. The five performers that step onto the Barbican stage are all visibly disabled. Two of the women (Sonia Teuben and Nicki Holland) are grossly overweight, though one is never sure whether their size has to do with obesity or disability (or both). Both are squeezed into sparkling gold lycra suits that give them an impression of circus strongmen, albeit ridiculous and clownish. Together they subject a third (Sarah Mainwaring) – spindly by comparison – to a torrent of verbal abuse about her weight. They bark at her, berating her (absurdly) for being fat. They talk about her from the opposite side of the stage as if she wasn’t there. They get in her face. They tower over her. They force her to shake hands, even though her arms are bent awkwardly at the elbows and wrists and her hands shake intermittently and uncontrollably. (It’s worth mentioning, at this point, that it’s sometimes funny; that the text has a blunt directness that makes it clumsy, almost like a distorted high school movie, Mean Girls perhaps.) Mainwaring, by now a picture of vulnerability, sits more or less unresponsive (silent or incapable or speech?) and allows the cruelty to continue. Two men, like a little and large double act, stage manage proceedings, moving chairs and holding boom mics to catch the verbal abuse and the breathy silence, presumably for our benefit.

In the second half (perhaps movement is more appropriate) all this gets more extreme. Behind a misty sellophane screen, back lit by dizzying, swirling, almost nauseating projections that imply woodland, Mainwaring is forced to strip – first to her underwear, then entirely – and then to dance. More and more blurred silhouettes arrive, pointing and staring, before leaving Mainwaring alone with the two women, who mime beating her almost to death with a self-conscious fakeness. (It’s worth mentioning that it’s no longer funny.)

Where the double standard comes in, then, is that Food Court confronts our initial assumptions about and reactions to disability and yet simultaneously relies on them to achieve any emotional punch. When Teuben and Holland step through the curtain our response is invariably, inevitably and automatically a sympathetic one; to pity and think their public presence a beautiful act of bravery or a brave act of beauty. In other words, our starting point is prejudiced. We sanctify these women on the basis of appearance, projecting the status of victim, and we’re wrong-footed by their subsequent actions.

The thing is that our response to the abuse of Mainwaring is also subject to such projections. Her status as victim within the piece is amplified by the same projected status as inherent victim. Isn’t it harder to watch her being forced to strip than a.n. other able-bodied actress? Doesn’t her plight seem all the more undignified?

I suspect that in this I’m problematizing the piece’s internal paradox; that it intends to raise exactly this question (amongst others), that it’s us that want it both ways. That proposition is, in itself, quite interesting, but I found that the paradox stripped the piece of emotional weight – particularly given the freedom of Mainwaring’s actions. For all that the piece infers her to be forced, we know that she chooses, at some level, to stand naked before us. (Not that the piece doesn’t admit of its own failure in this regard, highlighting the pretence of her subsequent ‘murder’ by detaching the image of beating from the sounds produced by the stage managing performers.)

What Food Court has – and this is an elusive and admirable quality – is ‘simplexity’, by which I mean two things. First, that its content has, in and of itself, a certain simplicity. There is a plain unfussiness to its actions, objects, texts and onstage persons. They are presented openly and frankly, very much admitting of themselves. And yet, due to the nature of those people onstage, our reactions are incredibly complex; both multifarious and knotty.

Second, I also intend the opposite of complicity (comp[lex-simpl]licity?), for what happens – both in terms of onstage action/narrative and the assumptions that spring to mind – seem to occur without our permission. Because the bullying onstage cannot be rationally condoned in any way, because it feels like motiveless malignity, it happens at one remove from us. I never imagined myself behaving in the same manner. Perhaps that’s down to the absurd hypocrisy involved. If the piece intends to accuse us of (indirect) complicity through non-interference – much as Niklas Radstrom’s Monsters made explicit – then it is undermined by its own contrivance.

It’s interesting that Monsters should spring to mind in that way, since I couldn’t shake off thoughts of the Bulger case. Perhaps that’s the result of the setting implied by the title, or the walk into isolation (here, the forest). Perhaps it’s to do with the dark fairytale aesthetic that implies a leading astray a la Hansel and Gretel and the stalking of a vulnerable naïf a la Red Riding Hood. Perhaps it’s simply two against one, large against small.

Two further things need mentioning. First, the music composed and played live by The Necks, which has ethereal fuzziness and often feels like low-level whimsical tinnitus. Present but unobtrusive, it serves to enhance the aesthetic quality of the presented action, making it self-conscious (not negatively so) and, in that, also more palatable than one might have expected. Second, Mainwaring’s final monologue, in which she struggles through Caliban’s speech: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises.” As she grapples with the formulation of sounds into words, the projected letters jangle about on the screen. It’s a neat idea, further complicating the way in which we read the whole, but also a genuinely heartfelt moment that overstepped the contrivance around it. Indeed, it made that contrivance seem all the more evident. The same is true of the curtain call, which felt honest in a way the piece had not. Haphazard, perhaps, but playful and warm and, most importantly, pleased to be in front of/with us. For the first time, collaborative not confrontational.

Really one watches Food Court by watching oneself watching it. Its chief success is to enforce self-reflection, to make us monitor and interrogate our own responses to its individual elements. The thing is, I suppose – and there is probably a certain bourgeois desire for guilty self-flagellation in this – I don’t feel complicit in or responsible for the assumptions in question. I have no choice but to see things – people – in a certain way and it’s certainly not done from spite or visciousness. I can’t control the connotations. I can only register them and perhaps change them for next time. The upshot is that, for me, Food Court became an intellectual conundrum but never a visceral experience and, even in that, it is a dilemma of ethics more than it is a moral problem acutely felt.

Review: Wild Horses, Theatre 503

Written for Time Out

Judging from the shoulders pads and vintage assortments modelled by the teenagers of Nimer Rashed's debut play, today's youth deem the past ripe for reappropriation. These bitches of Eastbourne, their heads full of possibilities, sneer down at their elders, stuck in their reliable jobs with their loving relationships and small-town responsibilities. They want the world and, like their fast food, they want it their way.

Having dragged herself, tail between her legs, back to her parents' home after a misguided relationship with an older man, 17-year-old Ellie spends her time sulking, shelf-stacking and swigging Malibu, waiting for the choicest lifestyle to fall into place. Sure, it's a touch Channel 4, but Rashed underpines sharp dialogue with something pertinent and disparaging.

Rather than gently coercing loose ends together, however, he attempts a clever twists. It's a shame, since his disintegration of reality proves naively impatient - more 'Crossroads' than Kaufman.

Jessica Clark's Ellie is touchingly heartfelt, striking a tidy balance between self-conscious insecurity and unwitting inelegance, and there's comic flair from Jade Anouka and John Trindle as her peers. For all that Nadia Latif's direction handles the veneer of teenage irony, there's nothing she can do to prevent this self-destructive script from going off the rails.

Summer House

Like many an MP, I'm getting a second home. For the next few weeks, I'll be blogging my way through the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) over at their website for the British Council and the festival itself.

The aim, just like Andy Field's blog alongside the British Council's Connected programme in Tokyo, is to stir up dialogue around the LIFT programme, which kicks off in earnest on Wednesday and runs until 18th July. As festivals go, it looks like an especially exciting one and I'm sure it will throw up some fascinating issues, particularly around the incorporation of digital principles into theatre.

So, basically, pop over and have a look at the LIFT blog. There are some great titbits there already. Think of it not as a series of articles and notes, but as a space for discussion and dialogue. Without engagement, its just me sounding off into another dusty corner of the internet, so, as always, feel free - no, feel duty-bound - to comment and polemicize.

www.liftfestival.com/blog

Review: Everything Must Go, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Everything Must Go (or the Voluntary Attempt to Overcome Unnecessary Objects) was initially intended as Kristin Fredricksson’s celebration of her elderly father, Karl Fredricksson. At its end, after archival home-video footage and photographic slide-shows, father would join daughter on the stage, put on a blue dress, orange wig and red lipstick, and dance with her. Sadly, that’s no longer possible, since Karl Fredricksson died of pancreatic cancer on the 2nd June 2009. They had performed the piece together three times.

What was celebratory, albeit also somewhat anticipatory, has become commemorative. It retains some of the uplifting qualities, but the overwhelming sense is one of absence. The problem, however – and I don’t wish to deny Fredricksson her loss, by any means – is that the passage of time has changed Everything Must Go. Where, in August of last year, it must have felt charged with bravery, honesty and defiance, now, almost a year on, it feels overly nostalgic and incapable of moving on. (Not, of course, that Fredricksson should have to; just that the work has lost its immediacy and, with it, its forcefulness.) It has become merely personal, even to the point of coming across as self-indulgent.

To me – and I should, at this point, admit to being in a minority that remained seated at her curtain call – Fredricksson has created the mixed-media equivalent of a ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ mug.

That’s not to say that her father doesn’t merit the commemoration. He is/was an extraordinary specimen, seemingly intent on playfulness to the last. Videos of him trotting around the garden in high-heels and minks or developing facial dance routines demonstrate a boundless enthusiasm for miniature exploration. Photographs of him dressed and posing as invented characters – which later clutter the stage as cardboard cut-outs – show a keen interest in the subversion of identity. He was, undoubtedly, an artist; albeit one content playing to a reflected audience of one. His actions have a sense of filling time and entertaining oneself; the action being more important than its product or documentation. The emphasis is on discovery over dissemination.

If there is a nagging feeling of self-indulgence, it’s not because this ragbag eulogy is not deserved or fitting, but because Kristen Fredricksson is overkeen to eulogise. She repeatedly makes it clear how much she looked up to him, how interesting she found him, how much she loved and worshipped him. Only the story, however harsh this might seem, is not about her, but him. Simplicity would serve it far better: I kept wishing she’d just tell me about her dad or let the archive material speak for itself. Instead, however, Fredricksson builds routines out of his eccentricities, scattering them with punchlines and physical comedy. Accordingly, there’s a prescriptiveness that points our reaction rather than allowing us to react freely. We’re asked to chuckle at this and sigh at that. Nowhere is it more obvious than in her choice of music – particularly when she overlays Avro Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel on a video of them dancing together onstage at an earlier performance. It becomes so emotionally manipulative that we see through the manipulation and it fails. Were it less obvious in its intended outcome, there could be no failure, only responses, but Fredricksson is intent on raising lumps in our throats and drawing tears.

The same problem of effects too directly sought scuppers her performance, particularly her clowning, which falls far short of her father's. Where he played, perhaps pointlessly, she seems too aware of our presence and her ridiculousness. Everything is cut short, rather than committed. (In itself, there’s something interesting about the quality of approximation and the impossibility of recreating the impulsivity of truly playful activity onstage, but I suspect that to be an unintentional side-effect.)

In all of this, I never once thought of my own father and his increasing age. Without that leap towards universality, Everything Must Go doesn’t earn its own title. It becomes an examination of a loss, of Kristin Fredricksson’s loss, but (and again I’ll admit to feeling mean-spirited) never loss itself.

Review: The Tempest, Grays Inn Walk

Written for Time Out

Mick Gordon's open-air production for the Oxford Shakespeare Company cores out Shakespeare's swansong into a light and breezy piece of comic whimsy. The result might more aptly be titled 'The Temp-ish'.

Despite the production's lightning quickness, Gordon has managed to condense the breadth of themes neatly by offering a collage of clashes. Here shipwrecked aristocrats are cocked-hatted colonials, Michael Hadley's gently officious Prospero is biblically cloaked, while Sophie Franklin's Miranda is a punkette in pink meringue.

Clever doubling sees a seven-strong cast navigate the play's concurrent plots, but also emphasises the oft-underplayed critique of masculinity.

Nick Lloyd Webber's music and a weighting towards the play's comic elements keep this fun and folksy, but there's a sense that individual endings aren't deserved. Ariel no more earns his freedom than the villainous Antonio warrants his punishment or the lovers their marital bliss.

Review: Electric Hotel, Sadlers Wells Off-site

Written for Culture Wars

David Rosenberg has (almost) cracked the formula. Two years ago, in Contains Violence, he placed us on the balcony of the Lyric Hammersmith, equipped with headphones and binoculars, to watch a contemporary Hitchcockian hostage thriller take place in offices across the square. His influence worked its way into Shunt’s Money – on which he collaborated – which had us peer down with a bird’s eye view on a sauna and a cluttered breakfast room through two layers of thick perspex. In both, the sense of distance and separation that this division of space caused overwhelmed the possibility of connection. We watched from afar, illicit voyeurs always unregistered, but also always unsure of what we were really witnessing. Through the glass, it could barely make half-sense. The whole remained perplexing. Questions of identity, motive and relationship were left hanging and unanswerable, even before one attempted to reconcile the inexplicably surreal. Interesting – and, indeed, well-tested by writers since Beckett and Pinter – though that is, the division left an already ambiguous score impossibly out of reach.

Electric Hotel maintains all the mystery enforced by the glass partition by refusing us a closer inspection and keeping up at arms length, but its chief success is to make the barrier seem semi-permeable. This time Rosenberg, co-directing with choreographer Frauke Requardt, manages to draw us in. Or even: through. Simultaneously invested (even if still not quite empathetically) and utterly outside, our perspective multiplies: we’re within and without, attached but adrift.

In the midst of an urban wasteland, crowded with jagged, thick-set metal cast-offs, there sits a chunk of elsewhere. Announcing itself as the Electric Hotel is a four-storey, glass-fronted building bejewelled with the sort of winking neon signs that entice passing tourists, preying on their naivety with glitter and dazzle. It’s almost as if the structure has been wrenched from its Costa del Sol or Copacabana foundations. A sliver of Americana, of Tropicana in a gloomy industrial dystopia. Yet, for all that it’s out of place – an exotic asteroid more accustomed to palm trees than this balmy breeze – it fits: perfectly trashy; an eyesore rightly tucked out of sight.

Sitting at its base, looking up, the sensory experience is not dissimilar to a drive-in movie, the sort that all-American characters visit in all-American films. First – foremost – you’re struck by the verticality. Looming large above you, the structure is similarly imposing. It’s grander than you’d expect. We’re used to peering across a stage, watching through, yet here we crane our necks and look up at. I say ‘at’ on account of the flatness caused by the glass. We know the spaces behind to be three-dimensional, but we can’t feel them as such. Instead, they seem to be oddly framed and in perspective. Half-and-half. When performers appear on balaconies the difference is noticeable; they’re suddenly sharing the same space as us and breathing the same air. It feels less claustrophic, more real. Add to that the effect of its lighting, glowing synthetically against the cloud-filled dusky sky, and it seems attractive and hypnotic, seducing us like moths and standing out a mile. Cleverly, Börkur Jónsson’s design and Natasha Chivers’s lighting seem aware of this screen-like pull. At one point a rectangle of familiar proportions appears, electric blue and framed in white, nodding to the reflection of the screen.

Then there’s the conscious mediatisation of the soundtrack, which we receive through (very comfortable) headphones. Again, I use the word ‘soundtrack’ carefully, as it sits entirely aside and on top of the action, rather than emanating from it as we usually expect of live work. When we see taut calves in red stilettos almost frogmarching down the hall, we hear footsteps echoing; when we hear this saliva-churning click of tongue and cheek, we see a maid turning gum around in her mouth. Swimmer’s splash, phones ring, guitars break out into song. And yet, they don’t. The disruption of the relationship between sound and image is constant. Synchronised, yes, but disjointed. Like a film’s score, Ben and Max Ringham’s soundtrack sits on top of the action as a separate entity.

The remarkable thing about Electric Hotel – what makes it both distancing and enticing, half-and-half – is it’s wielding together of sensations caused by different media, as if Rosenberg has had opportunity to cherry-pick the choicest effects of various art-forms. First, there’s the astonishment of its actual occurrence, live and in the moment. We marvel at the miracle of its precision in synchronicity, both between performers themselves and with the pre-recorded soundtrack. Then, there are more mediatised effects: the distortion of things and the controlled (but consciously registered) pull on our focus, the awareness of one’s panning gaze, zooming-in and zooming-out. The combined design is also able to make use of trickery, manipulating the confusion of vision caused by the glass screen such that the live seems specially effected or edited into the impossible. Often characters skip through space, exiting through one door and appearing instantaneously in another.

The result is a wealth of cultural resonances. In its amplification of monotony, there’s David Lynch. In the compartmentalisation of individual narratives, there’s Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. There’s Charlie Kaufman in the fantastical, physics-defying landscapes and Harold Pinter in the menace of the unexplained. Running alongside these (at least, for me) are echoes of Lars von Trier, Matthew Bourne, Darran Aronofsky, Sofia Coppola and Jeff Koons, not to mention a performance lineage of Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, the Wooster Group and Shunt itself.

Electric Hotel works – where Contains Violence and Money struggled – because Rosenberg has understood the limitations of this format and turned them to his advantage. Behind the glass, nuanced psychology and character gets lost – flattened, even. Here Rosenberg gives us archetypes, characters as costumes: surly maids, pregnant women, chain-smoking neurotics and an awkward (possibly disabled) child imprisoned by an extravagant dental brace. His menacing, Pinteresque intruders are not simply men in suits, but piranha-jawed creatures. He paints not in watercolours, but in marker pens. It’s vivid, emboldened and darkly cartoonish. Beside that is the realisation that any hope of naturalism, even when infused with brash surrealism, doesn’t read. The choreography, though it is built out of everyday actions, allows an abstract expressionism that echoes his characters.

Content-wise, the piece’s thrust is the notion of unseen synchronicity; that, across a single hotel let alone a city or the world as a whole, the private actions of individuals mirror and echo. Requardt builds a symphony out of that idea, blending harmony, discord and cacophony with his choreography. Admittedy, it’s a touch Amelie, but the concept that, at any given moment, a thousand phones ring, ten-thousand fists strike and a million orgasms peak remains softly delightful. As the menace swells, however, as the singular narrative of the boy in braces takes over, piranha-men multiplying, the piece becomes harder to follow. While it intensifies in force, the elevation of one strand over others seems arbitrary and, in leaping out of the panorama, one feels a touch ill-equipped to gage its significance. Electric Hotel is better when looping; cycling through repetitions, redirecting focus and allowing distortion to patterns. Perhaps this elongated strand marks the cycle’s breaking point, the overpowering of pattern by distortion, which anticipates the somehow unsatisfying quality of repetition that stops suddenly and arbitrarily. I don’t know.

I’ve jumbled thoughts in the process of writing this over a few days; it’s become untamed and grown messier than I’d hoped, but I’ll end with a challenge to Rosenberg (should he be reading). With all the channelling of different media, the ability to meld together effects from film, literature and live performance, I really missed one aspect of live work: communality. Cocooned in my headset, cut off from the real responses around me, the rest of the audience felt to me a hindrance. I wanted a clearer view and a sense of isolation: just me and the Electric Hotel, alone in a sparse, deserted, urban landscape. Yes, there’s a moment where the soundscape shifts to our space, tunes into our frequency, as if those around you have burst into chatter and shared jokes, causing you to look around and remember their presence, but that is a one-off, almost an interval that makes you remember yourself. It is a snag that shows how remote and lonely the rest has been. How, then, can this format yield a shared experience? Next time. Next time...

Review: Kabuki, Sadlers Wells

Written for Time Out

The title is intriguing. Imagine the Britist equivalents: 'Pantomime', perhaps, or 'Kitchen Sink Drama'. It's not really a show in its own right; more an abstract demonstration of exotic conventions by a crack display team, all constructed with the cultural tourist, rather than the connoisseur, in mind. It's almost a beginner's guide, drawing attention to component parts. As such, it's hard to escape the question of Kabuki's authenticity against its self-referential status as an archetypal export.

In those terms, however, Kabuki is an illuminating experience, made accessible by the informative in-ear running commentary. It tells three sections of the myth of General Yoshitsune, in which he and his lover are repeatedly saved by the supernatural samuria Tadanobi (Ichikawa Ebizo XI). The whole thing reeks of exquisite and exotic technique, from the vibrancy of design to the delicate grace of performance, and there are some genuinely astonishing moments, mainly from Ebizo - a superstar in Japan - who is as captivatingly statuesque in agility as it intense stillness.

Overall, though, it can feel slow and stilted when compared to local, customary tastes, primarily on account of the severance of its individual elements. Fascinating though the experience is, like all tourist attractions, Kabuki leaves feet itching: "Been there. Done that. What's next?"

Review: The Man, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

I should admit to having a personal – and, therefore, entirely subjective – affinity for James Graham’s recent writing. Having made no secret of the way The Whisky Taster chimed with me, I’m inclined to think of him, on the back of The Man, as something of a comrade. No other writer – at least, not that I’ve encountered – comes so close to voicing my own nagging concerns as (repellent though it might sound) a twenty-something, London-based, middle-class, white, male young-professional.

That boils down, in the main, to a blend of frustration, resentment and insecurity. Most damningly of all, there’s a smack of self-pity. It’s struggling to adjust to adulthood and the Real World (capitals strictly necessary). It’s adamant that it should be easier. It looks around at others and feels a little bit shit about itself. It’s hopelessly romantic and naively nostalgic. It’s a confidence thing, a beta-male thing. It’s all a bit pathetic, no?

Perhaps I’m putting words in Graham’s mouth, projecting my own anxieties into his work, but that’s why it resonates so personally. That’s what I get and, to be honest, I’m not sure whether I’m under attack for it or receiving sympathy. I’m hopeful that it’s a bit of both.

The Man, then, is born out of a first tax return, a rite of passage in itself, which also happens to mark the passing of a year. Graham seizes on the collection of assorted receipts as an opportunity for reflection and taking stock. Not simply a record of purchase, each receipt marks a moment of personal history. Each is a particular moment’s lingering stain. As Graham spells it out, each printed slip is “a record of what we buy” from which we can define “who we are, what we value.” It’s a cute idea – almost golden-hued with romanticism – as is the developing relationship with the almost anonymous voice at the other end of the tax helpline: Lisa from Wrexham.

To this Graham adds another device, essentially he puts his text on shuffle. Each receipt is a cue card for a memory or story – first dates, funerals, fumbles and fear – but the order of those narratives shards depends upon the order of the triggers. On entering the Finborough, we receive a receipt, which the actor (four actors play the role over the course of the run – I saw Graham himself, more of which later) retrieves blindly during the show. The open structure echoes the chaos of the actual sorting experience and the way reminders can wrongfoot. It also has the effect of drastically changing the crux of the story and, accordingly, the character.

After all, Ben Edwards has had an eventful year. He’s been through two deaths, a divorce, two break-ups, one resignation, one new business, one relocation. On the night I saw it the first receipt to emerge was a train ticket; one that took him to his twin brother’s funeral. Suddenly, that particular strand of this person leaps into pole position, it becomes definitive as everything else is seen in relation to it. This, we think, is the year in which Ben Edwards lost his twin brother. Given a different order, it would have seemed a different year.

There’s also the question of omission. At several points, a host of receipts are bundled up and dealt with on the basis of generic type: train tickets, for example, or supermarket receipts. You can’t help but wonder what stories remain undisclosed and how else this year/this person might have been defined. (That said, a peek in the playtext reveals the slight cheat: “The presence of the Sainbuy’s receipts should help to combat the unpredictability of audience numbers in any given show (i.e. once the number of ‘key story’ receipts have been taken up, extraneous Sainsbury’s receipts can be handed out to all additional audience members).” Somehow that seems a shame, like Graham is playing with something without entirely committing to it. The safety net is definitely in place. As he writes in the same section: “It’s easier than it looks.”)

Graham has a knack of spinning connections. He lassoes together the taxman’s tag as 'The Man' with the limbo-like state of being a twenty-something, technically an adult, but seeing oneself as an ill-equipped child. That, in turn, is linked to date etiquette – whether the man ought foot the bill and protect his woman – and the brittleness caused by his twin brother’s bone disease (which, itself, becomes significant at the Natural History Museum: a room full of anciently sturdy bones). As with The Whisky Taster, Graham’s associations here latch onto seemingly trivial pop culture, such that Ant & Dec become a metaphor for twins (they are insured against each other’s deaths: “two halves of the same whole”), Richard Curtis films demonstrate Ben Edwards’ naivety and the X Factor’s over-25’s category becomes a yardstick of his age in a youth-conscious society. It’s smart and witty stuff.

Given the amount crammed in around his chosen skeleton, however, it’s curious that Graham never grapples with recent expenses scandals. While he has a gentle stab at the financial crisis (Ben Edwards, shocked to learn that he’s a company in and of himself, measures his monetary success against the Northern line, rising closer to the Thames and plummeting back towards Morden), it feels as though Graham’s missed a trick by keeping things honesty. Yes, the dilemma as to whether or not a receipt is worthy of claim emerges, but it does so too timidly to make itself a sticking point. After all, don’t we all squeeze and scrimp every penny as we bid a grudging farewell to our hard-earned cash? What does that say about our ideals and corruptions?

Performing, Graham’s fine. He’s an enjoyable presence, affable and meekly jovial, but he never sets his own material alight. Mainly because he approaches Ben too unequivocally, allowing his self-deprecating insecurity to dominate each individual story. I suspect Barnett and the other actors might find more variety and spice along the way.

Graham’s presence also has the peculiar effect of suggesting process. I couldn’t help but jump to from fiction to fact, making the assumption that these receipts – even if not the stories that spring from them – were real and the piece as a whole sat somewhere between traditional play and performance art, a deliberately blurred revelation of self. Was Graham really sat in row K of the Queens Theatre on the 11^th December, 2009, watching Les Mis? Did he really once buy 12 Vienettas and download the Black Beauty theme? (In fact, I overheard the true significance of that track on my way out, but I’ll spare Graham his blushes...) Somehow the totality of the fiction spun seems a pity; separating fact from fiction could have been an interesting additional layer to the piece.

For all its cuteness, which certainly left my fondness for Graham’s work in tact, The Man never fully satisfies. While it’s neatly knit and quick-witted, there’s the feeling that it pulls its punches. It seems to shirk the ardour of The Whisky Taster’s central accusation and shies away hammers home its criticisms. That said, Graham does himself no disservice. The moment he mans up to it, he will send a clattering message on behalf of a younger generation.

Review: Swing, Cock Tavern

Written for Time Out

Rapidity of response has always been one of theatre's advantages. Yet that immediacy is surely undermined when it's up against instant online comment and analysis. While churning out a drama based on the general election so soon is impressive, the arguments in Swing already feel well-worn.

Couples become a metaphor for coalitions here, as two neighbouring families sell out on left-wing beliefs for personal gain. Meanwhile, John, a reformed banker-turned-carpentry apprentic, finds happiness with Emma before revealing the reason behind his transformation: lymphoma.

Likeable performances and an openness of about process keep Swing entertaining, but it's under-interrogated and dramatically clumsy: at times hiked up with a revelatory jerk, at others limply deflated, while individual scenes retain the wooliness of improv.

As with the election itself, this show's problems are largely economic: it needs cutting with the rigour of a George Osbournce.