Review: And the Rain Falls Down, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars

Despite its preoccupation with precipitation, there’s nothing wet about Fevered Sleep’s latest show for pre-schoolers. And the Rain Falls Down is a beautifully crisp and giddily enthusiastic little piece that will leave you beaming.

In front of cotton wool clouds that hang from a washing line, Karina Garnett and Carl Patrick frolic in various jets of water. Sometimes they catch single drips, sending smaller droplets splattering off like glimmering splinters; sometimes, they withstand a torrent, laughing as water clatters off their heads. At one point, totally unexpectedly, a fountain spouts from a plughole on the floor.

There’s less substance to And the Rain Falls Down than could be found in Brilliant, the second in the company’s trilogy exploring everyday childhood rituals. Here, springing out of bathtime, there’s just play for play’s sake, but it looks like such fun that, by the time the sprinklers start, you’re itching to whip your shoes and socks off and join them in the downpour. The consolation for adults is that a stage full of knee-high children, all under umbrellas, soaked and splashing is a pleasure to watch.

Most commendable is Fevered Sleep’s commitment to their actual audience, rather than those watching over them. This is not merely theatre for children, but children’s theatre in the fullest sense. The specially made auditorium is child-sized, meaning that adult knees almost reach adult shoulders. Stepping in feels rather like striding into Lilliput. But the scale certainly shifts the dynamic; there is none of the imposing architecture that can scar early theatrical experiences.

If that indicates attention paid, Sam Butler’s production is mindful at every point. Each moment is presented to its fullest potential. A rubber duck swimming across the stage, later returning with a string of rubber ducklings in tow, is given time and space enough to mystify and delight. Ali Beale and David Harradine’s design is bright and breezy, getting right underneath the weather’s effect on moods. There’s a rainbow of umbrellas and an egg-yolk sun. At one point huge droplets, like meteorological symbols, glide slowly down suggesting a shower in slow-motion. Add in David Leahy’s cello score, lurching and bouncing jauntily, and the whole thing clicks together perfectly.

Image: Fevered Sleep/FUEL

Review: Jonah non Grata, ICA Theatre

If that really is the question, the answer may well be, “Meh.” After Simon Kane’s solo show, an attempt “to fashion as one a perfect model of the human condition,” it all seems much of a muchness.

What Kane serves up is an existential crisis with all the associated anguish and terror removed. It makes for an unexpectedly pleasurable panic attack. He stands before us, awkward and cack-handed, but also oddly secure, and preaches the meaninglessness of life. Existence, as Kane portrays it, entails nothing but suffering in a cruel toy world, a process leading inexorably to its own end. Far from putting a full stop to that misery, however, that end only serves to increase the anxiety of life’s struggle. After death, after all, we know neither pain nor its absence. Yet beforehand, we quake in anticipation.

In the face of all this, Kane is a man absolutely come to terms with his own insignificance, futility and arbitrariness. In a world that constantly affirms your significance – where what you buy, how you vote, who you fuck are all spun into importance – Jonah non Grata breaches the ultimate taboo by suggesting otherwise. Kane flouts the system, inviting us, perhaps even urging us, to opt out. It is at once deeply troubling and deeply comforting. Kane confronts us with an overwhelming crisis, in the face of which, one’s niggling everyday troubles no longer seem worth the worry.

Having been birthed from a laundry bag, Kane hops, quite haphazardly, between several different strands. He guides us through a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, plays a language training tape and leads us in a religious service of sorts. He belts out his own version of O Fortuna over a ukele backing and later leads us in a hymn of his own making, which neatly distills and parodies the impulses of wonder and awe that serve as the foundations of worship. In religion, Kane implies, we seek naught but comfort. There is inconsequential, rambling talk of death and love; there are botched magic tricks and bungled showmanship. Initially, it’s like a sermon delivered by a priest who has recently lost his faith, but can’t let on.

With his jagged half-smile, there’s something about Kane that seems to strain for a semblance of ease. His speech has the rhythm, pace and timbre of a sermon or common prayer, but lacks the accompanying authority. His top button is done up, furthering a priestly appearance, but also adding a certain stiffness and discomfort. As he goes on, this man seems to grow in confidence and, with it, honesty. He gives up the ghost and lets us in on the secret – that, maybe, probably, almost certainly, there is no secret.

The obscurity and restlessness of Kane’s material makes Jonah non Grata puzzling, but also adds to its potency. Here he’s covered himself in rice pudding; there he’s blindfolded himself. There are repeated references to ‘the scourge’ and (I think) the Marriot, presumably the hotel. Watching, one is forever scrabbling to understand the piece’s rules, it’s logic and motives. The more slippery and evasive it proves, the harder we grapple to follow. Amongst the audience, there’s an atmosphere of both reverence and boisterousness. We are at once an intent congregation, diligently listening, and a rowdy crowd, baying for spectacle and mischief. The longer it goes on, however – this string of baffling images – the more an overall philosophy comes into view.

In all this, what is said seems less important than how it is said; what we choose less important than that we choose. Language and free will, the two principles conventionally turned to in order to elevate ourselves above animals, are rendered clunky and constrained. Ultimately, they just come to seem a bit shit, barely worth having and certainly no recompense for the hardships of continuing survival.

Before you dismiss Jonah non Grata as mere nihilist nonsense (or nonsensical nihilism), its worth saying that it changes the world – if only for a short while. It may feel bleak, but it’s also brilliantly permissive. Walking away from the ICA, up Regents Street, far more felt possible. The pressures of the city, of public expectation, of etiquette and society had lost their stranglehold. Other people seemed less relevant; their judgement, inconsequential. Life, for a while, felt like an edition of Deal or No Deal: it’s my game to do with as I please. The world reduced to my portion of it, a bubble of experience that moves as I move. This is the whale’s belly. It may not be the whole world, but it’s warm. And there’s a minibar. And a television.

So, far from depressing – though if you let it (better a philosopher unsatisfied, crawling out of the cave etc), it’s got the scope to do so – Jonah non Grata lifts a weight. Sure, we can do no right, but, by the same reasoning, we can just as easily do no wrong. It’s all one.

Photograph: ICA website

Review: Reading Hebron, Orange Tree

Written for Time Out

By concluding with an admission of the immense comlpexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, writer Jason Sherman runs the risk of saying in two hours what the comedian Tim Minchin mangaed in two words: 'Palestine, eh?' But he dramatises these clashes, both actual and abstract, with tremendous skill.

The 1994 Hebron massacre, in which Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims during Ramadan prayers, is no longer the headline it was when Reading Hebron premiered. It remains a strong point from which to illuminate the ongoing conflict. As Sherman's fictional protagonist, Nathan Abramowitz (David Antrobus), delves deeper into the issues, his growing understanding furthers his confusion. Each book brings several more to his bedside table and we follow him down the rabbit hole.

Sam Waters's staging is gripping, fast-paced and admirably functional, but there's a more ambitious production suggested in Sherman's play, one that builds on its flashes between fantasy and reality, obsession and frustation - perhaps with a sprinkling of Rupert Goold-dust. Even so, this is a clear and robust handling of a topic that remains as urgent and as unresolved as ever.

Review: The Blue Dragon, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

For all its intelligence, there’s something uncomfortable about The Blue Dragon, Robert Lepage’s return to China. Picking up the story, twenty-years on, of Pierre Lamontagne, the conceptual artist who left Quebec for Shanghai in The Dragon’s Trilogy, it has beneath it a melancholy that laments a changing China. It comes close to scolding in its portrayal of a nation whitewashing over its heritage. True though that may be, the thought niggles: what right has Robert Lepage, what right have we, to criticise the shifts of a culture that is not our own?

China here is spluttering as it sprints to catch up. The capitalist ideals to which it now aspires are making it ill. Cities are flattening entire neighbourhoods, driving people from their homes by cutting off water and electricity, to make way for banks and shopping centres. Adverts for KFC co-opt Chinese history to flog chicken burgers. Elsewhere, its culture is slowly bleaching, losing its specificity and its identity in order to replicate ours. Not for nothing does the promising Chinese artist Xiao Ling (Tai Wei Foo), Pierre’s partner, end up knocking out twelve van Gogh self-portraits in a day: expressionism reduced to the copyist’s conveyor belt.

So where in all this is the criticism of Western values in and of themselves, rather than merely relative to whosoever holds them? It is in the jaded Pierre, who cares only for his own situation and treats his partner as a collector’s item or project. It is in the washed-up alcoholic Claire (Marie Michaud), who comes to China to buy herself a child. Lepage doesn’t do state of a nation. He does state of the globe.

And yet, these seem almost gentle by comparison to image on image of China’s own selling out. Claire might say that “adoption from China is a long and expensive process,” but the same holds true for the reverse process. After all, Xiao Ling is quite happy to get into bed with Pierre, but refuses any proposal of something more permanent and committed. She also proves a neglectful mother incapable of caring for the child that she can’t get rid of. Perhaps it’s the context of watching in London, with an inescapably Western perspective, but the balance seems rigged against China. There’s an uncomfortable sense that it’s one thing for us to behave in a certain way and another thing for them to do so.

However, Lepage is attuned to the inauthenticity of The Blue Dragon, to his own status as outside observer, and approaches it with a careful and brilliant management of form, presenting the story as staged cinema. On the stage is a structure – not dissimilar to the skene of a Greek Theatre – that is framed and shallow. This is not the world, but a window on it, deliberately defined by its edges and confined to its frame. Within we get various locations – Pierre’s apartments, cityscapes, planes, bars and galleries and slums, interiors and exteriors – all of which appear and disappear without a trace of stage management, allowing jump-cuts and split-screens.

In using the cinema, Lepage not only manages to admit to a Western perspective, thereby to some extent neutering the pull of this inevitable shortfall, but also to frame China in terms of its capitalist ambitions. After all, the silver screen has always reflected our aspirational fantasies and here it serves to further divorce China from itself, serving it up in archly Western terms.

Even if Lepage can’t wholly circumnavigate the problem of cultural relativity, however, his craft is par excellence. Handling such global currents in such a compact and domestic three-hander is quite an astonishing achievement and Lepage’s composition is characteristically taut. One might accuse him of overloading the story such that the personal collapses under the weight of signification rather than standing on its own significance. Here everything stands for something far greater and, though his metaphors are finely tuned, they are also overt. The density of ideas overwhelms the narrative itself. Every character stands for not just a country, but a whole hemisphere and heritage, all of which means The Blue Dragon is more read than watched. While that’s fine, you can’t help but feel that a bigger story, one with more mystery and ambiguity that must be mined for its depths, would be more satisfying.

Review: Snake in the Grass, The Print Room

The tennis court at the bottom of the garden is unkempt. Its wire fencing has been invaded by ivy and its scuffed surface is unplayable. The net, a tangled knot left on the floor, has become a spider’s nest. You suspect that it has not been tended to for years, perhaps decades, and in those unchecked years it has festered inexorably.

The same is true of the two middle-aged sisters, whose demons surface in the wake of their father’s death.

Annabel returns from Austrailia to find her inheritance threatened by murderous accusations and blackmail against her sister Miriam, who had been acting as their father’s carer. In a bid to escape these threats, Miriam drugs her accuser, Alice (Mossie Smith), and disposes of her down the estate’s well. The ensuing clear-up operation, however, beats the dust from history and unsettles their respective ghosts.

Hitchcock once differentiated between surprise, when dinner is interrupted by a bomb, and suspense, when dinner is preceded by the setting of a bomb’s timer. Convention turns Snake in the Grass into the latter, but it is masterfully conducted by both Ayckbourn and director Lucy Bailey. While we’re braced against a watery return, Miriam and Annabel reveal abuses suffered at the hands of fathers and partners, such that they become all the more harrowing.

Bottled secrets and untended traumas have the unhealthiest of effects. Like the tennis court, the painted lines of which call to mind a pagan ritual circle, regular attention makes the better solution. Instead, we get a full on confessional, excruciating but ultimately cathartic.

Though there are some over-deliberate moments, Bailey’s production excels with clear-headed handling of its unearthed psychological disorder. Susan Wooldridge finds a crumbling solidity in Annabel, a woman too stubborn and self-absorbed to admit defeat, while Sarah Woodward manages the opposite as the freshly resolute Miriam, more used to total appeasement.

Woodward is, in fact, superb. Not only does she find a manageable mania in Miriam, she allows it to develop into Ayckbourn’s trademark comedy of class, frantically tidying evidence and brandishing spiked wine with an awkward impression of a born hostess. More often though, class goes unexplored in Bailey’s production, who glosses over the exploitation of the working class Alice, even as she’s doing the exploiting herself.

In truth, Ayckbourn serves up one spin too many with a final unnecessary twist aiming for surprise, but only deflating. It’s like watching a body in the throes of death, awaiting a final spasm with diminishing returns. Until that point, however, Snake in the Grass coils itself increasingly tightly. Only its not the tension that chokes, but the tears.

Review: The Heretic, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

Perched upright on the green sofa for the latest edition of The Review Show to discuss Greenland, Mark Ravenhill suggested that theatre thrives on taboo. “Most of world drama,” Ravenhill said, “is based on stuff that we haven’t quite talked about, that we haven’t quite acknowledged, something that’s a bit taboo.” It invokes the unsayable in a very public forum.

When it comes to global warming, then, Ravenhill suggests theatre loses a major role, since everything is out in the open. We already know and we already feel and yet, we still don’t act. Hence the repeated accusation that such work is just hectoring lecturing. At the bidding of holier-than-thou preachers, the converted self-inflict forty lashes, before returning home for a fossil fuel bonfire.

All of which might explain why, in The Heretic, Richard Bean approaches the subject from the opposite angle. The heresy in question is that of climate change denial – or, to be more precise, scientific scepticism. After all, isn’t that the great taboo of our times, in which greenery has sprouted in the most unlikely of places? It is, as Dr Diane Cassell (Juliet Stevenson) puts it, “the perfect religion for the narcissistic age. It provides a clear definition of sin. Drive to work – sinful. Cycle – righteous.”

An earth scientist at York University, Dr Cassell has started receiving death threats off the back of her research, which shows the stability of sea levels in the Maldives. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s sacked for publishing without permission in a culture where fearmongering brings funding. That her head of department is an old flame slowly rekindling and her daughter, Phoebe, an aggressive anorexic only serve as additional hindrances.

The one positive is her newest pupil, gawky eco-absolutist Ben (Johnny Flynn), who opted for her course “to save the planet innit,” but soon finds himself won over by the rigour of her scientific scepticism.

Bean is not out to deny climate change himself, else he would not couch his arguments in fiction. There is no escaping the fact that, although he bases narrative on a particular instance of falsified scientific research, the so-called Climategate scandal of 2009, Bean is free to concoct his own evidence. To offer a credible stance of opposition, he would have to embark upon documentary theatre a la David Hare.

Rather than taking aim at the science, then, Bean is concerned with people. Underpinning The Heretic is the idea that you can prove anything with facts. His interest lies in the motivations – mostly financial and social – behind the science and the actions and attitudes that stem from it. Intriguing to note that where evidence gets called, the subjective position is often called into question. “What have you got against carbon dioxide?” Diane demands, only half-jokingly, of Ben and, when lamenting an unverified theory, her senior Kevin notes, “Unfortunately for me, millions didn’t die.” Though no one’s actually fiddling the figures, they’re spun into cyclones to conform to or falsify theories. At the root of which, more often than not, is found money, power, reputation and pride. No one approaches the subject with neutrality.

In many ways, then, Bean has discovered in climate change all the ingredients for crack drama. He’s particularly astute on the matter of hubris. Kevin rattles off the ill-fates that befell other academic disciplines – psychology, sociology, media studies (almost sicking up the words, such is his disdain) – over the past fifty years, before earth sciences took up its rightful place at the top of the pile: “We are the kings of the castle. Let’s not fuck it up eh!”

In fact, that misplaced hubris is echoed by humanity as a whole. Bean fills his play with images of the food-chain. People bite the heads off squirrels, run over cats and gut fish. Where Kevin orders a pizza, it’s no coincidence that he opts for a meat feast. This is not living off the land, as gorging on it and yet, come the play’s end, still we’re standing tall, admiring our reflection in the water: kings of the earth. “We,” preaches Kevin to the converted gathered round, “are the miracle.”

That position ignores the natural ebb and flow of ecosystems. As much as Earth Sciences will be succumb to another voguish discipline, so too, in all likelihood, will humanity as a whole. That’s evolution, baby. It’s a process that recurs in Bean’s generational mirroring, whereby Ben and Phoebe mirror Diane and Kevin’s nostalgic reflections of their youthful selves. Humans are as prone to weathering processes as the earth itself, such that IRA activists can wind up working in Milletts. Bean’s play proves a meditation on aging as much as enviroment.

In fact, I suspect that Bean has found too many ingredients. The Heretic is far less tightly coiled than we’ve come to expect from The Royal Court of late and that prevents it reaching dramatic velocity. It’s as if he’s kept adding strands in the hope of tying things together, only to discover further frayed ends. That he has to toss a cardiac arrest into the middle of a kidnap attempt shows the bagginess of his plot. Its dramatic thrust is quite inorganic, which dilutes its potency.

Nonetheless, as a glimpse into a series of connected events, The Heretic offers lashings of wit. A number of its laugh-lines would rival Clybourne Park’s deliberate gags, only here they come skilfully embedded into conversation. They’re well served by one of the most perfectly cast ensembles of recent years. Stevenson finds in Diane the dryness of a desert parched by thirty years of rising temperatures and yet remains likeable. Her brain seems to function with unnatural rhythms, sometimes as agile as a ping-pong pro, sometimes so deep in concentration that she could have slipped beyond meditation and into a coma. James Fleet, our foremost ‘in a band once’ actor, brings a soft-focus sweetness to Kevin’s hopelessness and Lydia Wilson, fast cementing a position amongst the best of the new wave of actors, balances spikiness with the odd tender smile superbly.

But, the most enjoyable and extraordinary creation is Johnny Flynn’s Ben. Jauntily awkward and jittery with uncertainty, Flynn has tapped so astutely into the rhythm of Bean’s writing that almost everything he says comes laced with laughter. He performs Ben’s logical somersaults, counter-intuitive but – to his surprise as much as ours – keenly astute, with a deft instinct for pause and punchline. The Heretic is worth catching for any of these superlative performances alone, but it offers much more besides.

Review: Ordinary Days, Trafalgar Studios

Written for Time Out

Adam Gwon's piquant musical, revived after a successful run at the Finborough in 2008, can't choose between romanticism and cynicism. A portrait of four frustrated but ardent urbanites, whose lives entwine in New York, Ordinary Days suggests that cities create fantasies that they can't fulfil.

It's so sharp on the pressures of city living, when aspiration is so integral that everyone else seems better off, that it's a shame Gwon ends up conforming to feel-good familiarity with a happier-after-all ending. His set-up deserves more than sentiment and saccharin.

The jaunty pop score brilliantly catches the high blood pressure of uptempo life, with lyrics providing a sprinkling of wit. That tone, however, can become relentless, which needs offsetting with a hint of variety to provide some breathing space. Like the city itself, Ordinary Days can feel crowded and compact.

Nonetheless it's neatly directed by Adam Lenson on Alistair Turner's set of cubist shelves, which conjure the New York skyline with minimal fuss. Alexia Kahdime's pent-up grad student, insistent on long-term success, wins the laughs with miniature explosions and sceptical asides. Julie Atherton's Claire deftly blurs tears and smiles, always finding traces of one in the other as her relationship with Jason (Daniel Boys) frays.

Laments for quality new musicals come thick and fast. Ordinary Days comes close.

Review: Vernon God Little, Young Vic

The first rule of showbiz, according to Walt Disney: “Always leave them wanting more.” DBC Pierre’s Booker prize-winning debut, adapted for the stage by Tanya Ronder, holds a similarly cynical view of the world’s workings. It preaches survival of the sycophantic. To get ahead, merely roll over and tell them what they want to hear. Truth doesn’t get a look in. Just put on a show and eat the meek.

In the middle of this materialist society is troubled teen Vernon Gregory Little (Joseph Drake), a purveyor of principles tossed this way and that by the self-serving aims of others. Wrongly arrested for accessory to murder after his best friend Jesus shot and killed 15 of his schoolmates before committing suicide, Vernon gains notoriety as a serialized serial killer, thanks to the careerist efforts of TV reporter Eulalio Ledesma (Lally, played smooth, sweaty and sleazy by Peter de Jersey). The evidence that would clear his name, a stool deposited by the makeshift grave of his murdered father, is too shameful to reveal. So Vernon breaks bail and heads for Mexico, where – after a rush of blood to the, um, head – he confesses. Even the certainty and solitude of Death Row can’t save him from exploitation, having been fashioned into a Reality Television show by Ledesma. Before long Vernon gets voted off the face of the earth.

Entertainment has, in other words, triumphed over absolute values. Pierre’s self-deluding populace are primed for deception and the media delivers what they want. Rufus Norris’s production, somewhat revised since its first outing in 2007, equates all this with the notion of showmanship. Vernon’s trial has more than a hint of Vegas about it. The courtroom is a spangling gold backdrop. Attorneys duel with guitar rifts. Ledesma wows the crowds with an impassioned rendition of the national anthem and Vernon goes down, quietly protesting his innocence. It’s no surprise that Kafka springs to mind. Everyone in Norris’s production heeds the system. All are two-dimensional, more concerned with appearances than with substance.

But it only becomes apparent towards the end that Norris is using the language of showmanship for good reason, rather than simply putting on a show. That means, for a good deal of Vernon God Little, the whole thing feels oddly hollow, like it’s skimming the surface rather than mining the depths. The pace may ping like a ricocheting bullet, but you wonder what purpose it’s really serving. It’s happier to take a lazy gag – regularly whipping out the bird flipped behind a back – than knead a comedy out of characters and situation. Like an energy drink, it’s lively and vivacious but lacking in real nutrition.

At it’s centre, however, is an assured debut from Joseph Drake, whose eyes seem to chase an answer in the madness until they finally come to rest with blank, empty comprehension as he faces death. There’s a touch of the hapless clown to Drake. Or, to put him in Stoppardian terms, his Vernon is pure Moon – that is, a man to whom things happen. His voice is permanently apologetic, reminiscent of Kermit the Frog, as if a bubble trapped in the throat prevents him from speaking up for himself. Embarrassed and quizzical, his body stiffens and clenches against the whirlwind of events. “Fate pays attention to what you need,” he softly rails against the world, “and then paints a dick on your forehead.”

Sometimes, it takes a teenager to tell it like it is.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Water, Tricycle Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

There is a landslide of environmental theatre in London at the moment. You’d think that, spurred on by its being deemed beyond theatre’s reach, playwrights are aspiring to the topic as a holy grail of sorts. Richard Bean’s The Heretic opens at the Royal Court next week. Before then, though, we’ve had two very different offerings, which, oddly enough, succeed precisely where the other fails: The National’s very deliberate, multi-authored Greenland and, at the Tricycle, a revival of Filter’s Water, first seen at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2008.

Greenland has born the brunt of criticism. Its various narratives and vignettes flap around like flags in heavy winds, never quite tethered too one another. It could easily be accused of bombarding its audience, hectoring them without sufficiently heeding the action and there’s a heavy waft of Enron about it.

Water, on the other hand, is more dramaturgically solid; it has drive and control, offering two stories with four narrative strands wound together to form a single rope. It is coherent and credible, personal and political, and yet, it’s actually pretty bland and unambitious. It’s easy watching. Going against the tide, in spite of all its flaws, I’m siding with the less hospitable terrain of Greenland.

In short, Water is drama by numbers. Its plots are standard issue: one, a selling-out linked with the rejection of inheritance; the other, a romance cut short entwined with an adventure gone wrong. Only, it so happens that each character has some connect to the element in question. Peter Johnson (Ferdy Roberts) is a scientist who predicts the implications of rising water temperatures, but – much like Earthquakes in London’s Robert – drops his concerns for financial gain. His sons, Graham and Chris (Oliver Dimsdale) are, respectively, a frugal environmental officer and a flash DJ at a Vancouver radio station called, ahem, Wail FM (Geddit?). Playing in parallel is the break-up of an ultra-deep diver and a delegate at the Helsinki G8 summit (Victoria Moseley).

The trouble is Water’s transparency. The mind-map of ideas is so close to the surface that none of these connections seem intrinsic to the drama. The connection actually turns out to be an arbitrary additional. Any connective tissue would do. At least, Greenland really takes aim at its chosen subject. It might not win the wrangle, but it’s fighting the right foe.

But all this is harsh on a show that is never less anything but watchable, especially one that oughtn’t necessarily be boxed up as a climate play. It is rather a piece about relationships that glances environmental issues like a stone skimming water.

Filter’s work has an innate theatricality, albeit one heavily indebted to Complicite and Robert LePage. Occasionally, they slip into superfluous flair, employing showy techniques that don’t necessarily enhance or illustrate. That said, it certainly delights, particularly in the company’s signature sound-score constructed live by Tim Phillips. The taps of typing becomes the pitter of rain and various pings on a wine-glass, the drips from a leaking roof into a bucket.

Though that invention isn’t recompense for the dilettantism with which they tackle their subject, it definitely serves to make it palatable. Though Water makes for enjoyable theatre, it does so at the expense of an effect on the world beyond. Almost as if, for fear of challenging, accusing or offending its audience, it absolves us of responsibilities, both past, present and future.

Photograph: Filter Theatre

Review: The Antonioni Project, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Is love a luxury? It’s hard not to think so when these three entwining romances, none of which sail plainly, are suddenly punctured by the world’s harshest realities: landfill and famine and hurricanes and explosions and excruciation. The images rip through the escapist narratives like shrapnel through flesh. Afterwards, it’s almost impossible to return to fantasy.

That may well sound crude – and, indeed, it is – but these images of pain and hardship also serve to illuminate the self-centric bubble of Michelangelo Antonioni’s world. Its populace are wealthy. They go yachting and clutch champagne flutes. Here, desire boils down to desirability. People are commodities. Women flit coquettishly, their sheeny dresses catching the light like diamonds on display. Across the room, men make eyes like magpies.

Director Ivo van Hove splices together Antonioni’s so-called Alienation Trilogy of films, each of which takes aim at the moral vacuum of this material world. In L’Avventura, a man searches for his absconded partner, falling in love with her best friend en route. La Notte shows a married novelist mid-mid-life crisis, whose head is turned by a pretty young thing at a party. L’Eclisse centres on a rebound relationship between a woman and a flash financier.

It’s as if the three distinct narratives exist in a pressure cooker, forcefully squished together until they become one complex molecule. New bonds are formed between them. The protagonists of one become bit-part players in another. Romantic leads become other women.

Van Hove achieves this by bleaching them of setting. His set is a vast blue screen studio. Cameras swish past and circle overhead, transmitting the action onto a cinema screen above. At first, backdrops are imposed – cityscapes and bobbing sea – but soon all is amorphous block colours. Not only does the world around them gradually fall awar, each couple exists in the same non-space. They move in the same (concentric) circles and go to bed on the same satin sheets.

The camera, then, is used to delineate between narratives that have melded together. It’s purpose is primarily functional and, while it allows van Hove to fiddle with the relationships, it’s usage lacks the artistry to leap into the breathtaking. He’s able to suggest films inside films, whereby an entire fully-fledged narrative can seem the absent thoughts of another’s protagonist, but there’s not the sense of dichotomy between the image and its construction that Katie Mitchell’s onstage camerawork achieves so beautifully. Yes, the gaps inbetween are made concrete – gazing off-screen into middle distance often results in meeting eyes with another gazing back – but its all a bit straightforward. As a photographer is told within: “Everyone can take photos. All you need is a camera.” Van Hove’s cocktail of film and theatre is academic rather than alchemic.

What it does manage is a pure and contemporary alienation effect. That everything is so evidently pretence – not just escapist fantasy, but also remixed and freshly charged – drastically affects our reading of Antonioni’s stories. Like the originals, characters and events seem at once dreamily idealistic and wantonly hollow.

One is never sure to what extent these people are creatures of the screen let loose in three dimensions or aspirants replicating the models of cinema. Again, films exist inside films. Where Antonioni’s vacuum was, perhaps, consumerist distraction, van Hove’s is more absolute and damaging. People become commodities. Marketability is the ultimate goal. Appearance is everything.

In these terms, life becomes a performance and sex, pornography. Being earnest has lost its importance, indeed, it seems a sign of weakness in an ecology of insincerity.

Review: The Art of Dying, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Hell might just be a mediocre clown show seen from an appreciative audience and clowning doesn’t come much more mediocre than The Art of Dying, by Paolo Nani and Kristjan Ingimarsson.

While its central supposition that death is constrictive of living fully is sound in and of itself, I’d question the wisdom of handling it solely in terms of performance. Nani and Ingimarsson play a successful double act. We see their routines onstage and their relationship backstage, the one often following immediately after the other, as they back through the curtains to reappear backwards straightaway to enjoy the applause in private. When the realisation of Nani’s imminent death breaks, their act blossoms. Nani, with his perfect sprig of clown hair, is suddenly able to fool with freedom, without the pressures of the future hanging heavy.

Clowns playing clowns, however, is a tricky proposition. It sends the whole thing spiralling into a meta-tailspin and, worse, brings a level of consciousness that scuppers our perspective on the clown. We become so aware of their art in constructing clumsiness and failure that delighting in their mishaps becomes impossible.

More enjoyable are their inadvertent successes, as, for example, when one nonchalantly lands an apple on the prongs of a fork in the other’s mouth. But surprises such as this are few and far between. Too often Nani and Ingimarsson trundle through tired and predictable pratfalls, their respective statuses inevitably, tiresomely see-sawing.

Admittedly, The Art of Dying did win loud sections of its audience round, but, for me, it was exasperatingly stale and stiff. Still, to quote Rudyard Kipling, if you can keep your head…