Review: I guess if the stage exploded, SPILL Festival

Written for Culture Wars

Slyvia Rimat’s attempt to create an absolutely unforgettable performance is more interesting conceptually than it is in practice. Given the elegant purity of the central idea, I suspect it was always going to be.

Rimat is faced with two options: either to maximise the memorability of the event – hence the piece’s title – or else, to maximise our capacity to remember. By opting for the latter, she presents a low-key piece of anti-spectacle, which uses a series of memory techniques and excerises to brand itself irrevocably into our minds.

At base, then, it is a circularly purposeless act: an event that exists solely to leave traces of its own existence. Its an act that, at first glance, seems destined to fail. Though it is arguably conceivable, total recall is practically impossible. In fact, if you allow a slight softening of terms, the reverse is true: we can only know of its success. To be unforgettable a performance need not involve total recall. All it requires is a shard of memory, a recollection of the event. Should Rimat fail and the performance be forgotten, we will not be able to recognise as such, having retained no idea of it. The moment we remember it in order to mark its having been forgotten, it is no longer forgotten.

The trouble is that Rimat’s content is largely illustrative. Rather than an actual and concerted effort to make us remember, using the memory techniques with genuine rigour, she demonstrates them. Yes, by design, they retain some of their ability, but in not committing to the attempt wholeheartedly, Rimat almost fatally undermines her concept. While she may repeat the names of audience participants three times, providing a tagline to remember them by, she doesn’t fully ensure success. The overall impression is of a splattering of tricks; a restless magic show.

Admittedly, that repertoire has some brilliant moments. Rimat’s use of neuro-lingistic programming to attach an image of herself to an item passed on the everyday journey between your bedroom and bathroom is superb. It almost feels criminal, like she’s broken into your memory and left her tag in permanent ink.

However, it feels like we’re doing all the work or that our responsibility to remember outweighs Rimat’s efforts to make us. The show’s hypothesis requires an element of passivity, of inescapability. Rimat needs to hogtie us and impose herself upon us. Watching must feel like the Ludivico Technique of A Clockwork Orange, an enforced rewiring. It must stuff our heads to bursting like, the stomachs of foie gras geese.

Instead, our strain to absorb is left to highlight the slippery evasiveness of the present. Rimat’s show becomes a meditation on memory, rather than the attempt at an unforgettable show itself. It is about, not of. In those terms, her apparatus is strong: owls, footprints and scribbled notes. There are also some lovely observations delightfully executed – in Sydney, ten hours ahead, a party celebrates an audience member, setting up in the present a past memory of a future – but none of this can fully compensate for the breaking of express intentions. What could have been uniquely unforgettable ends up over-familiar and unmemorable.

Photograph: Laura Montag

Review: On the Concept of the Face, SPILL Festival

Written for Culture Wars

An old man repeatedly losing control of his bowels in front of a vast portrait of Christ, which eventually ‘cries’ shit, Romeo Castellucci’s latest UK presentation was always going to draw out the reactionaries. Those inclined to scorn will sensationalise and dismiss it; those willing to engage with it will find much to admire. It was always going to be the case. Haters gonna hate; aficionados gonna a-fish for meaning, capish?

Actually, On the Concept of the Face… ends up being both brilliant and throughly overblown. The overall impression left behind is of a distorted beauty and an intelligent concept later scuppered by laziness and hyperbolic iconoclasm.

Castellucci’s first half works because it is so effortlessly and strikingly ambiguous. In it, an old man repeatedly soils his nappy and his son attempts to clear up the mess. Before he can do so, however, his father has suffered another bout of diarrhoea. Clinical is constantly battling against contagion. Always the same, but always different, the routine wheels through cycles of nonchalance and frustration, shame and mischief, love and hate, tragedy and farce. Poignant though it is, it’s also absurd. One can’t help but think of Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy. It’s Tartarean and yet also all-too-familiar; an image of existential anguish. It’s Waiting for Godot if Godot had popped out for some Immodium Plus.

Taken alone, this not only metaphorically portrays an essential image of human existence, it also serves a picture of our own futures. Each of us will be the son. Each of us will be the father. For that reason, the real horror (as opposed to disgust, which is a more pressing and immediate emotion; horror is concerned with the future) comes not from the shit, which we know to be synthetic, but the father’s bottom. Weathered and limp, it is so out of shape that it’s almost unrecognisable as a bottom. This eroded state of degradation awaits us all.

With the use of smell – and, my, what a smell – Castellucci also manages to implicate us in the actual event. The scent catches you off-guard. It’s not overwhelming, but noticeably present; an itch of disgust. Not gut-wrenching, but stomach-churning. Slowly. Like an ice-cream maker. After a while, you catch a hint of its taste at the back of your mouth. Two days later, it still recurs momentarily. In part, this serves as commupence, seeming to say, ‘What did you think would happen? Why did you come?’ But it also forces upon us an analogous situation to that of the son: we must, in some reflected way, endure as he does. To walk out, uncomfortable and disgusting though it is, is to admit defeat. It would not in itself be not a selfish act, but it sure would feel like an abstract one.

However this scene, naturalistic and hopeless, is heightened by taking place in front of a vast portrait of Christ’s face. Essentially, Castellucci is presenting two images that seem, initially, diametrically opposed: one is absolutely base and unholy, the other equally and oppositely graceful and infinitely good. Castellucci’s stage functions as Large Hadron Collider, slamming together the seemingly incompatible in search of seemingly unreachable answers. He asks us not merely to consider incontinence, but to consider it in theological terms. Each of us must, therefore, attempt to reconcile the two.

The surface tension between Christ and incontinence results in an almightly chemistry. They seem two shirehorses pulling against one another with all their strength. Or else, two van der Graaf generators stirring up an electrical storm. The charge is extraordinary. The two illuminate each other brilliantly. Its as if Castellucci has given us a specific vocabulary with which to consider the action, that of Christian theology. We see it in all sorts of terms: suffering and sacrifice, nappies and loincloths, sanctity and taboo, Sons and Fathers.

All that, however, is obliterated when the action moves to the portrait itself. Beneath the face, skeletal forms appear like parasites under the skin. Slashes tear through its surface and the now-familiar slurry streams down cheeks, until the face is entirely eradicated. Behind it, illuminated bright and stark, is the phrase, ‘The Lord is (not) my Shepherd.’ All that was slippery and multiple is reduced to a single too-too-solid slogan. It is caught between faith and doubt, begging only a single question: ‘Is the game worth the candle?’

If Castellucci intended primarily to raise Pascal’s dilemma, he could have done so more artfully. Indeed, he has already done so more artfully in the first half, which raises the thought as one of many. When stated so unequivocally, however, the whole evaporates. What was complex, full of subtle strains, hints and notes, is irrevocably punctured by Castellucci’s tendency for self-aggrandisement. This is performance as billboard. It uses shit less for its connotations and whispered implications than its immediate effects; its strength, its stench and its shock. In that, an overall spirit is revealed: On the Concept of the Face… sets out to disarm, where it could have served to fortify.

Photograph: www.spillfestival.co.uk

Review: Do What Thou Wilt, SPILL Festival

Written for Culture Wars

About sixty of us have just watched a nude man, drenched in some sort of bitumen-like substance, wrenched upwards through a pentagram of red lasers. As we leave the smoke-filled room, a jaunty accordion starts up over the speaker system; the sort that immediately calls to mind a Parisian café with rattan chairs and marble-top tables outside. It makes a marked difference from the croaks, groans and ‘Hail Satans’ that have preceded it.

In this cheery snatch of music, there’s a note of chastisement. It highlights the bourgeois nature of Harminder Judge’s Do What Thou Wilt. We have, after all, just freely witnessed a mock Satanic ritual of sorts. The accordion, then, asks why. It accuses us of bourgeois bohemianism and, perhaps, hubris. Weren’t we curious, intellectually and aesthetically, in the notion of the event? Wasn’t there a part of us testing ourselves against a supposedly powerful occurrence and its symbols? By implication, Judge might similarly indict the ‘real’ counterparts of his ritual.

In fact, the question of authenticity is the greatest strength of Do What Thou Wilt. Essentially, Judge has done to the occult ritual what Heston Blumenthal has done to traditional Fish and Chips, that is to say, he has reconstituted it. His materials – lasers, smoke machines and the sort of ‘gunge’ that defined by nineties childhood – are broadly synthetic. The colours are artificial: nuclear greens and e-number reds. The whole event openly signifies its own contrivance, which is nonetheless defied by component parts. The pentagram through which Judge is drawn is still a pentagram and the words in Rob Glover’s soundscore, which includes preaching form occultist Aleister Cowley and Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, invoke the devil in spite of being recordings. How fake, one has to ask, is this? The niggling idea that it’s symbolism and conjury retain their potency.

In fact, the piece is carried by Judge’s canny use of his materials. That one can’t escape the connotations of entertainment and, in particular, stage spectaculars and showmanship further reinforce the slight queasy discomfort of our presence. In fact, it works both ways. Not only does Judge highlight the showmanship within religious, he also draws out the appropriation of religious imagery in culture. Here, the recordings merge with Norwegian death metal and there are moments in Judge’s ascent that could pass for the stadium-rock wire-work. You know, the point at which the lead singer suddenly levitates, throwing his arms and head back Christ-like. We are not, in other words, the only audience under inspection.

However, Judge’s act is difficult to distill into its component parts in the moments. One can’t, for example, readily distinguish the various elements of Glover’s score, which meld into a mass of generic darkness. The same goes for Judge’s descent, writhe and ascent: its neat circularity combined with its slowness make it a rather uninteresting watch. Once one has considered the various elements, both the materials and the act itself, one is left with time to kill. As spectacle (and as experience), it simple doesn’t have the elegance, scale or mystery to spellbound us.

Yet, this is not a piece watched for narrative progression. It is simply takes place and is lived through or alongside, witnessed. In that, Judge makes his points with considerable acumen, if not with comparable flair.

Review: datamatics [ver 2.0], SPILL Festival

Written for Culture Wars

It feels, at times, like being tasered. The fierce walls of sound – some low and heavy blows, others high, stabbing jabs – hit your chest as hard as your eardrums. Often, you find yourself braced; pinned back in your seat, arms wrapped around your chest just as an airplane emergency leaflet instructs. The air is knocked out of your lungs a little. Your throat tightens. A muscle in your chest starts to spasm. You start to wonder whether it’s all quite safe, what this might be doing to your insides, to your pulse rate.

And, then – mercifully – it relents. A moment of relative calm, a single note or silence, in which your body can unwind and fall out.

In his datamatics series, Ryoji Ikeda’s music is composed entirely from data. I say ‘music’ and, while I do mean it, it does take me a while to accept it as such. Ikeda distils complex trains of code down into their binary equivalents and sets them to electronic sounds, turning them on and off accordingly. A symphony in Morse Code. It’s often densely layered, parts flickering with rampant speed as others creep by. Beeps, ticks and deep electronic groans combine. It sounds like R2D2 having an aneurism.

And yet, even at this sensory level, there’s something rather joyful about it. At each pause, a single voice to the left of the auditorium lets out a pristine whoop. Ironic, perhaps, but oddly appropriate, resembling as it does the sort of noise a thrillseeker might make as adrenaline overcomes nervous tension. To my right, someone’s nodding their head to a rhythm I can’t even make out.

Ride through the initial oddity, however, and it starts to twist and contort. You can make out crickets and gunfire, scratchily at first, but increasingly familiar. Then rain, a torrential downpour hammering at a roof. A vast flock of birds. The melting cracks at end of an ice-age. Applause. Crackling vinyl. Aggressive fridges. From these rigid rhythmic patterns, something natural and imperfect emerges. The density overreaches the system’s perfection, or else, any system fades from view, too complex for perception.

On a screen, a series of computerised graphics accompany the sound. There are barograph charts and constellations, running lines and webs of numbers, mostly in black and white. Perhaps they represent the noise, perhaps they cause it. One can’t be sure.

Again the urge to seek narrative or likeness is strong. The data contained therein is itself unrecognisable. We have no key and, even if we had, we would like be none the wiser. Instead we see galaxies or drag races, the imagery of computer hacking. Atomic structures from which emerge stick figures, ballerinas and free-runners and gymnasts.

More often, though, you see black and white. Patterns of movement that catch the eye and drag it one way or the other. Lines seem to change direction. Circles throb. Nothing is quite solid or still and, as such, the optical illusion so often consumes the image. The effect is quite dizzying and, eventually, one falls into it’s flicker. For me, it induced a light trance, semi-conscious (no-one could sleep through the noise) of the thoughts and images thrown together, but in a hazy dreamspace, governed by the subconscious. An overload of information here short-circuits the brain.

Who, then, are we, the audience? Why have we come to listen and glaze over? It still feels thrillseeking, but also paradoxically serene, flipping inside out like a mobius loop. There is something cultish about our collective presence, but we remain an audience, connected to every audience that has come before. Isn’t datamatics the logical extension – perhaps the end of the line – for audio and visual material? It is reduced to the barest of essentials, a cacophony of single threads that are either on or off. Sensory material construction not to express anything, but as the result of arbitrary selection. The original codes from which Ikeda builds these sequences are musical readymades. This, you sense, is the work of a thousand monkeys punching holes in the electronic equivalent of a player piano score. And it is intensely exciting.

The Quiet Volume, Hackney Central Library

Written for Culture Wars

Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton’s The Quiet Volume strikes me as the best piece of audio-based autoteatro to date. It marks a return to simplicity for the form, or an application of things learnt, rather than an experiment pushing at its edges. As such, there is a confidence and control that has, at times, evaded this embryonic form.

A travelling installation, The Quiet Volume perches in the corners of libraries, tucked, perhaps, into the reference section, or else, maybe folded amidst the non-fiction shelves. It consists of a table with two places marked, each facing outwards to allow a view of one’s environment. Two piles of books sit aside a single book. Two people, most likely friends, side aside one another.

The Quiet Volume offers a fresh perspective, initially, on the library as an environment or species of space, but, increasingly, on the reading experience itself. Really that perspective is more refreshed than fresh, as The Quiet Volume operates almost as a palette cleanser, erasing the habitual mode of seeing that has become cluttered with everyday assumptions. That’s achieved by breaking the perceived whole down into its constituent parts and enabling individual elements to be considered in turn. First, the symphony of different noises that pass for silence: scraping chairs, spluttering throats, swishing pages, singular ringtones, airy whispers and the occasional bang that breaks of the peace. Later, the book as object rather than text: we notice, in turn, its texture, weight, patterns and shapes. The excess information one has suppressed for everyday purposes is here highlighted.

More than any other medium the audio guide has the ability to get inside your head. Its content is formed of implanted thoughts. They may not be your own, but they exist in the same mental space; they feel the same. It is as if the artist is working with fluffy thought bubbles.

For that reason the audio guide is the ideal format for refocusing one’s perspective of normality. It enables the artist’s carefully-considered cogitations to feel like the spectator’s casual inspirations. Here, that’s pitched rather perfectly, given that it deals in the sort of hazy half-thoughts that bug you in the bath: ‘How does a system of language start?’ or ‘Backwards, the word ‘lived’ spells ‘devil.’ The text, however, crystallizes them exquisitely. They talk of reharvesting the ink from all the books around you. Or else of sorting the individual words into individual drawers, some vast and unopenable, some like matchboxes.

It’s biggest strength, however, is the manner in which all this introspection so aptly matches the reading experience itself. The increased presence needed to keep up with the audiotrack reflects back onto reading as an activity. Word by word, each is taken in turn. Fingers scan pages, images are constructed and forgotten, focus drifts or gets dragged elsewhere. A book, you realize, occurs in time.

That time is, of course, your time and, once again, the audio guide as form replicates reading. Both are, essentially, private mediums. The audio guide, like the book, functions as an alternative frequency. Bodily, one might remain in the everyday sphere, but mentally, one is elsewhere, tuned out. Readers, as the track puts it, are dreaming in public. So, in a funny way, are those of us in headphones. Only more alertly than sleepily.

Technically, The Quiet Volume is superb. The throughline of its audiotrack is the smoothest yet. Etchells and Hampton direct your awareness gently between distinct elements. The track segues softly from ear to eye, the voice that you heard suddenly, seamlessly picked up by the page that you’ve turned. Or else it sweeps from deep introspection to a consideration of those around you. Foreground blurs into background, just as a camera shifts focus. This motion, forward and backwards like a the smooth jerks of a jellyfish, provides a vital sense of journey. From our position, seated and still, we are allowed to roam: a sendentary safari of a municipal space.

The Quiet Volume feels to me both a treasure and a tool. It will leave you desperate to fall into a good book. Its celebration of libraries, though initially atmospheric, is wholly related to their purpose as houses of books. For that reason, rather than anything anecdotal or circumstantial, they feel special. And yet, one realizes that they are an endangered species. Not only as a result of the Conservative-led cuts to social services, but – more damagingly – the process of migration that is converting information into digital and virtual formats. Before long, none of this will exist and The Quiet Volume will make little sense. It will be archeological evidence for a future puzzle. What, they will ask a thousand years hence, was a book?

Electra, Gate Theatre

Written for Time Out

The House of Atreus becomes a house of horrors in Nick Payne’s condensed Electra. There are moments of primal fear, guttural screams that hit you smack in the coccyx, but Carrie Cracknell’s production is largely torpid and over-wrought.

Cracknell is aiming for Sophocles by flashes of lightning, cramming together ninety minutes of snatched, stark images. We see Cath Whitefield's Electra compulsively scrubbing at bloodstained tiles or tearing up floorboards, always haunted by her younger self. It’s brilliantly atmospheric: claustrophobic and sickly, almost asthmatic. Underscored by a tribal pulse, it has the tingle and thrill of a movie trailer.

Accordingly, it’s all scars, no connective tissue; all scares, no suspense. Payne’s is not Electra complex, but Electra pure and raw. His rhythmic text is unembellished, full of visceral and elemental refrains. Blood and earth recur.

To harness its power, however, one needs to push against the writing, either underplaying it with mumbled realism or refusing literalism altogether. Instead, Cracknell’s cast just emote. You’re unlikely to see better eyebrow-and-nostril acting all year – with one credible (and contemporary) exception is Alex Price’s activist Orestes.

Photograph: Simon Kane

This Little Piggy Went To Market

Within the confines of the work they see, the major critics are – in taste, if not so much in terms of cultural or ethnic diversity – a pretty varied bunch. OK, so the range could be far, far broader were there a greater reach beyond the most mainstream work, but their schedules are, inevitably, dictated by newsworthiness, as seen from a certain perspective. That said, I think it fair to say that, given those constrictions, it’s rare that an overwhelming consensus is reached about the quality (or otherwise) of a particular piece of theatre.

Sometimes, however, something uncanny happens. Sometimes, the reviews of a particular show will parrot one another almost exactly, as if the same lightbulb had pinged on in several heads at once. When a single phrase or twist of words recurs in this way, it becomes a bit of a curiosity. On the one hand, it gains the weight of authority that comes from agreement, i.e. if all these people are describing something thus, therefore it must be pretty appropriate/accurate. At the same time, however, it can also indicate imprecision, whereby a stock phrase has been selected as broadly representative and the review is hammered into shape accordingly. Personally, when it comes to writing styles, I’m a sucker for a good gag, but I also know that it undermines precision and specificity. It makes for entertaining writing, but – and I hold my hands up absolutely – it also signifies a element of ego, whereby one’s turn of phrase gets in the way of the most precise or honest response. (Tynan’s remarkable linguistic showboating, memorable though it is, so often feels contrived. One feels that he’s adopting a stance, brilliantly but forcedly. Perhaps, its just a mix of passion and self-assurance.) The critic’s treasure hunt, I suppose, involves seeking both at once.

Such a moment of critical synchronicity was sparked by Betty Blue Eyes, the Cameron Mackintosh-produced musical that opened at the Novello Theatre in the West End last Wednesday. What’s interesting in this instance is the specific choice of phrase. Consider, momentarily, the number of porcine puns that could have recurred. The star rating system itself could have run from ‘Pig’s Ear’ to ‘Crackling’ (or as the Daily Mail’s headline writer might have had it, from 'Porker' to 'Corker'). We could – quite justifiably, given the piece’s style – have had any number of versions of ‘hamming it up.’ All these crop up here and there and we did get a couple of variations on silk purses emerging from sow’s ears, but the main serialised offender was ‘Bringing Home the Bacon.’

Michael Billington, Mark Shenton and Charles Spencer all used it – for better or worse – as their closing remark, probably the strongest point in any piece of journalistic criticism, headlines excepted. The Evening Standard ran with it as a headline (it was, presumably, be the work of a subeditor, rather than Henry Hitchings).

The telling thing about this phrase is that it is not, in itself, an expression of quality. Its value judgement is monetary, rather than aesthetic. In fact, it is rather crudely fiscal. To bring home the bacon is the achievement of particular financial success. One imagines a family treated to a meaty breakfast, as opposed to cereal and toast. The children beaming as fat dribbles down their chins. Father smugly smiling as the proud provider.

For a phrase to recur, occurring to several different people simultaneously, it must have a certain obviousness about it. It must, in other words, mark the major story. So, I find it rather interesting that the central story of Betty Blue Eyes, is not its artistic merit, but its commercial chances. Implicit in ‘bringing home the bacon’ as a phrase is the hit-or-flop culture. The critic has presumed that the reader wants to know not just whether the musical holds up, but whether it will prove a popular success. Will it become a fixture of the West End, a la Les Mis?

Three things strike me about this. Firstly, that it rules out a middle ground. Either a show thrives or it flounders. There is no room for a show to simply survive, since survival must be deemed commercial success. The minute such a venture stops earning a profit, it will suffer the fate of closure. Rating a show’s financial prospects leaves one without the equivalent of a three-star review.

Second, that critics are wary of being deemed out of sync with popular opinion. Consider We Will Rock You or Les Mis, both of which received critical maulings on opening, but have proved longstanding commercial successes. That success is then held up as evidence against the critic, who is dubbed an unreliable guide for the audiences they are supposedly representing. In order to guard against such accusations, then, the critic pretty much suspends judgement (at least those based on personal taste) and judges a show according to its popularist credentials.

In turn, this can grow into a dishonest judgement of artistic merit, whereby the tagline affects the rest of the review. To denigrate a show and then grudgingly admit that it will likely prove popular feels like holding one’s readership in contempt. It is to say, “I think its dross, but you lot no doubt love that sort of thing.” The critic is admitting irrelevance and simultaneously inviting accusations of elitism. Instead, then, the rest of the review falls into line, often with a slight discomfort about the writing style. Artistic judgement thus falls into line with the financial judgement. To do otherwise, involves slaughtering the sacred cow (or, in this case, the sacred sow).

If judgement is suspended, then, criticism becomes mere reportage – albeit dressed up in the language of criticism. The critic attends like any other reporter: not to judge critically, but to bear witness and pass on information. The question to be answered is, ‘Has Cameron Mackintosh got another hit on his hands or not?’ In the case of Betty Blue Eyes, there is an interesting second side to this, namely the way the puff-press preview pieces focused on the same thing. This story was set up – rather cleverly – by Mackintosh’s PR team, who focused journalists attention on Mackintosh’s involvement as producer. We got interviews with Mackintosh and comment on the cost of the animatronic pig. Beyond one Daily Mail interview with Sarah Lancashire and an appearance on This Morning by Lancashire and Reece Shearsmith, all the publicity was about Mackintosh himself. What other show has so doggedly ignored its stars, writers and subject in its bid to entice audiences? With Betty Blue Eyes, the story was never the show’s content or form, but its fate. Betty Blue Eyes set itself up to be judged not aesthetically, but financially.

Thirdly, however, the critic does not simply report on a show’s chances of success from the outside. They are, themselves, a huge part of that story. In other words, a show’s reviews to some degree affect its fate. The review itself has performative elements. When a review pronounces a show a hit, in part, it brings about those circumstances itself. Accordingly, the critic is, in effect, declaring a show a hit or a flop, just as the Queen can declare a subject a Knight of the Realm or a B-list celebrity can declare a supermarket open. With such a commercial venture as Betty Blue Eyes, then, the critic is, in effect, writing their own story and, in some small way, bringing about the accuracy of their own statement.

As a further note, it’s worth pointing out that content, quality and good notices are not the only route to success. Audiences can be enticed by clever marketing and momentum, which can reach a terminal velocity, at which point the show becomes an ever-present. For this reason, it’s always safer for the critic to declare a show a hit. Should it fail to prove so – as in the case of The Drowsy Chaperone in 2007 – factors beyond quality can be blamed. To damn a show is to risk being at odds with public opinion, since when a show succeeds in spite of negative reviews, its will always be held against the critic, even if its subsequent survival is unrelated to its own intrinsic merits.

The question, then, is whether a major commercial venture can ever be judged artistically. If we are to judge popular entertainment on its own terms, we can ask only two things. First, is it entertaining? Second, will it prove popular? A legitimate critical judgement answers the first without reference to the second. To do so, however, is to miss the main story – something no journalist can afford to do. When it comes to determinedly commercial theatre, then, the journalistic critic is nothing but a pig in a poke.

Review: Baby Jesus Freak / Stage Kiss, The Space

Written for Time Out

Here's a curiosity: new writing that comes incredibly close to being pro-life and pro-faith. Playwright Ian Winterton's adamant refusal to silmply commend or condemn gives this dilemma-heavy piece its promise. Where he resists a tendency towards navel-gazing and nostalgia, Baby Jesus Freak really tussles with its complexities.

Its spark is a drunken post-funeral fuck that leaves twentysomething Lauren pregnant by the ardently Christian Daniel, brother of her teenage sweetheart and son of the deceased. Lauren's pro-choice stance doesn't itself constitute a decision and, as all of us navigate life without a full map, unknowable consequences nag. To choose at all, Winterton argues, takes faith, religious or otherwise.

That a daisy-chain of ritutals passes for structure (birth follows death; marriage follows divorce) suggests Winterton's ambition is unmatched by nuance and director Matthew Gould and his cast do well to preserve credibility.

It's not worth sticking around for Stage Kiss. Andrew Jones's 'luvvie' comedy is paper-thin. Gould tries to save it with flippancy, but really he should have left well alone.

Review: Hotel Confessions, Bermondsey Square Hotel

Written for Culture Wars

A staple amongst literary settings, largely on account of their inherent placelessness and urban ubiquity, the hotel marks a confusion of public and private. In this, their essence is the kernel of discomfort that all the complimentary biscuits and lotions, the excess cushions and pointed toilet rolls seek to disguise.

Our behaviour as guests differs from our everyday façade. We are either on our best or at our worst. Some will, as David Hare observes in The Breath of Life, clean before the cleaner comes round. Others trash and upturn. Encouraging extremity and abnormality as they do, the suite proves a hotbed (and breakfast) for drama. One thinks, immediately, of Blasted and the various shorts of Tennessee Williams, who himself was resident at New York’s Hotel Elysee for fifteen years, before dying in its Sunset Suite.

Hotel Confessions takes place in the Bermondsey Square Hotel, mostly in Room 509. Given both title and location, then, it beggars belief that its two shorts should make so little effort to interrogate the hotel as a species of place. In fact, the hotel room is used for little more than its layout: two twin beds side by side to be climbed across or lain in, a bathroom to be occupied and bedside tables to hold significant personal items. All of which could be achieved by replicating the hotel room onstage. This is site-specificity used as expedient alternative to a set, an entirely self-defeating notion. You’d think it a labour-saving device employed to circumnavigate the demands of carpentry. Can’t build a hotel room onstage? No bother, why not just book one for a couple of weeks?

What’s missing is any exploitation of its specificity, either functional or in terms of atmosphere. At no point does director Anouke Brook turn our attention to the smells and sounds of the urban hotel. We barely take in the blank wallpaper and the identi-kit furnishings, let alone smaller details. Instead, she sets up an end-on-ish space that happens to be in a hotel room. Behind us sits a sound technician with sound-system. It screams pretence. We are an ordinary audience watching an ordinary play.

It doesn’t even make a particularly good set. Given that the first, Brook’s own adaptation of Siegfried Lenz’s short story Die Nacht im Hotel (The Night in the Hotel), is a period piece, in which both men wear trilbies and stauch-shouldered suits, the Travelodge-style fittings seem completely out of place. They talk of Brooklyn, but they might as well mean Leatherhead. The same is just as true of Freya & Mr Mushroom. The remnants of baguette on the sideboard and the beret suggest France. The room does not. Wouldn’t a set have been more adaptable?

Taken sympathetically, The Night in the Hotel is the better of the two pieces. It starts in the hotel’s reception, with a snow-dusted traveller seeking a room. With no vacancies, he is eventually offered a bed in an occupied twin room. In room 509, the half-sleeping stranger breathes like a clogged exhaust, as Mr Sponge scrabbles around in the dark trying not to disturb, but failing.

Lenz’s story hinges their remaining strangers throughout the night. They must converse without knowing anything of the other beyond what is revealed. That, say, the stranger uses crutches and Mr Sponge is in town solely to catch the train in order to wave to his son. When Mr Sponge oversleeps, the stranger carries out his act. It is precisely his anonymity, his absolute untraceability, that makes his actions so touching. Brooks’s direction, however, is too afraid of the dark to manage that. A shame, really, because both Andrew Glen and Mark Carlisle are blessed with the sort of entrancing voices more than capable of carrying the piece through the darkness.

Nessah Aisha Muthy’s Freya & Mr Mushroom, in which an eight year-old girl invades a travelling salesman’s room, manages little of interest. It rings false, not only Hatty Jones’s armoury of act-a-child techniques, but also in the hackneyed swings between the barbed and the playful.

Review: Iolanthe, Wilton's Music Hall

Written for Time Out

Gilbert and Sullivan's fairytale fits Wilton's Music Hall like a glass slipper, thanks to Sasha Regan's impish all-male production. Like the building itself, it puts a contemporary spin on something classically twee. With arched eyebrows, knowing nods and a gloss of high camp, the whole thing is as intoxicating and mischievous as moonshine.

Not that this is a simple spoof, however. The production, which sold out at the Union Theatre before transferring here, is founded on affection and attention, without which it would be both mean-spirited and cheap.

As in Propeller's all-male 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', the aesthetic is dusty attic chic, and Jean Gray's inventive costumes are gorgeously eclectic. Bunting, net curtains and badminton nets make fairy-wings; hockey sticks and umbrellas make canes.

Framed as the post-curfew play of a group of schoolboy explorers well met by torchlight, this 'Iolanthe' ripples with illicit pleasure. Even if she opts not to fully grapple with the sexual politics within, Regan's fairyland is like a chaste Molly House, its puritanical regime enforced by Alex Weatherhill's priggish Fairy Queen.

Accompanied by a single piano, this isn't the most pristinely handled of scores, but it is made beautifully strange by male falsettos, particularly Christopher Shinn's eponymous fairy and Alan Richardson's hysterical Phyllis.

What it lacks in finesse, Regan's Iolanthe more than makes up for with raucous irreverence.

Review: Cause Célèbre, Old Vic

Written for Culture Wars

The year of the Rattigan continues as another of his forgotten fineries gets dusted off by Thea Sharrock, whose exquisite National Theatre production of After the Dance kick-started the centenary celebrations. If Sharrock falls short of repeating her previous alchemy, however, the Old Vic itself must take a portion of the blame. It simply cannot hold the play.

Oddly, one of the most striking things about Cause Célèbre is the way it defies the Rattigan archetype. You can easily imagine Aunt Edna choking on her boiled sweets, given its raw, panting sexuality and heated aggression. Cause Célèbre is no tamed three-acter, confined to drawing-room civility. In the way it wriggles around time and space, it’s jagged and complex, fidgety and ambitious. First produced in 1977, it rather debunks received wisdom that, post-1956, Rattigan was left unfashionably twiddling his thumbs, while the rest of the world clenched its fist.

That said, today, its handling of a court case looks rather like solid television drama. In the way it dramatises a real-life case, that of Alma Rattenbury (Anne-Marie Duff) and her 17 year-old lover George Wood, it prefigures Peter Morgan’s historical fictions.

With Alma’s husband murdered, both she and Wood claim responsibility to protect the other from a death sentence. She concocts an implausible story of her killing; he refuses to permit her influence. At sentencing they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, like a married couple at the altar, binding themselves together until death.

Duff, whose pallid colouring and pointed cheekbones recall Myra Hindley, makes Alma a muddle of gauche and louche. In the dock, she is frail, swaying on her feet as if on the point of collapse. Her eyelids hang with deadened disinterested or else her pupils fidget, refusing to settle. Yet, with Wood, all is flirtation: she flutters and her eyes catch the light mischievously. She appears, first of all, at the top of the stairs in patterned silk pyjamas, like a butterfly still on a surface. Beneath both versions is the callous control of Abigail in The Crucible.

Debutant Tommy McDonnell, by contrast, is a thudding clump of a creature as Wood. His arms hang at his sides like dead weights, knuckles occasionally grazing the floor. He speaks with a bark, often strained by emotions that overwhelm intellect. He’s like a Simon Stephens miscreant loosed in Rattigan’s world.

Both are contrasted with Cusack’s Edith Davenport, a juror whose moral absolutism gradually turns into self-imposed sainthood. Like Alma, her gaze is most often fixed on the middle-distance and both seem unworldly as a result.

It is in this ying-yang relationship that Cause Célèbre finds its impetus. Public morality is itself on trial here, given media-interest in the case. Beneath it is the ongoing scuffle between conservatism and liberalism. It is a war that, in spite of individual victories, the former inevitably loses.

On Hildegard Bechtler’s design, Sharrock’s production seems an oil painting. The darkness is often thick and heavy. Specks of light glance off pale faces. However, the playing style lacks the precision to match the vintage delicacy of the play itself (a quality, co-incidentally, found in Trevor Nunn’s production of Flare Path at the Haymarket).

Bechtler’s use of space does most damage. The attempt to meet the challenge of Cause Célèbre’s spatial and temporal discontinuity is clunky and inconstant. Sometimes the ceiling lowers to reveal a second stage, housed as if in a matchbox. Elsewhere, domestic action sometimes hovers in front of the courtroom and sometimes permeates it like a ghostly memory. The impression is of a play thrown at the stage, rather than strategically arranged.

Fading Smiles - A Response to the One on One Festival at BAC

Written for Culture Wars

The word ‘immersive’ makes me think of bathtime. More specifically, it makes me think of the perfect bath. The sort you see in soap commercials. The sort of bath into which smooth-skinned women sink down brilliant-white porcelain, their eyes softly shut, their lips softly smiling. It’s perfectly sculpted bubbles and rising wisps of steam. Immersive, for me, screams spa-style relaxation. (Is ‘whispers’ more fitting? Chants? Calls like whale-song?)

Now, that’s not necessarily the case with immersive theatre, where the word merely describes a perspective. It marks a piece of theatre experienced from within rather than as an outside observer. The work happens around you or to you. You are part of it, rather than looking on fundamentally distinct.

Immersive theatre, then, is not confined to relaxation. It can fright or wrestle just as easily as soothe and stroke, but I think there’s often something comparable at play, particularly with one-on-one situations. Being immersed in a bath involves a consciousness of one’s body. One is aware of being surrounded by water. A massage does likewise. In the same way, the immersive experience involves the sensation (or anticipation) of touch and so, induces an acute awareness of one’s physical edges: the skin is vital.

The conventional relationship in theatre (ie a non-immersed audience) often seeks to make us forget our physical existence, wrapping us up in the onstage action. Where it is keen to remind us of our presence, it engages with us not as physical bodies, but as a conscious presence. It reminds us that we are watching, before it reminds us that we are sitting here watching. The act of perception is more important than the (passive) act of attending.

Immersive theatre makes one’s physical presence inescapable. With no distance between oneself and the work, the edge of one’s body is the beginning of the work’s sphere. An awareness of the work, involves an awareness of one’s body. We perceive it not just through the eyes and ears, but through our whole body, whether by touch or movement, smell or taste. Even when touch is not being involved, we are wary that, at any moment, it could be. Take these factors together and immersive work makes us bristle in a way that traditional theatre, watched from afar, does not. In itself, that sensation is pleasurable. (Why else do we seek physical contact as animals do?)

That very experience of bristling is, I think, central to the enjoyment of immersive work, but it often sneaks by unnoticed. It is the nicotine in the cigarette; barely perceptible, but fiercely seductive. I’ve written before about the inherent flattery of Intimate theatre, suggesting its appeal stems, in part, because it places the individual at its centre rather than the work. What I’m saying here might serve as a similar addendum: that immersive work appeals because it strokes our bodies as much as our egos. In seeking to distinguish between good and bad immersive or intimate work, one must perhaps recognise that the form is innately pleasurable. (Even, I suspect, where it causes painful or unpleasant sensations/emotions. I don’t, however, wish to get into sadomasochistic tendencies. Unlike Kenneth Tynan, by the way, who loved that sort of thing.)

I write this now after visiting the BAC’s One on One Festival, returning after last year’s success. (On the whole, the unruly hairdo that was last year’s festival has been trimmed and tamed. The scheduling has been simplified – understandably, given the algorithms that must have gone into plotting some 10,000 performances – but one might miss the jaunty mania.) While all three of the pieces on my menu – I had opted for Immersive, but might have chosen Technologized, Self-Aware or Intimate amongst others – were greatly enjoyable, I’m not sure any were particularly good. Each is best characterised by a fading smile.

In fact, the more I think about it, the same goes for the majority of such work: pleasurable but of little consequence. Best, in other words, when experienced, but changing very little.

The principal culprit was Lundahl and Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images, a piece I’ve been eager to see for a couple of years after positive (spoiler-free) reports. Again, this is a piece experienced through headphones, through which one hears a sweet, delicate female voice that teases and instructs. It could be a child or it could be a manipulative impersonation of childishness. I’m in a corridor curtain by light, white cloth. The lights go out. A hand finds mine. It’s skin is soft, the contact is almost infinitesimal, but almost electric. It leads me – sometimes slowly, sometimes faster, always uncertainly and imbalanced – in a swirl. When the lights re-emerge, the corridor’s dimensions have changed. Except for me, its empty.

The experience, which repeats with variations and escalates, is both sinister and seductive. When the lights are on, it looks minimally gorgeous. The pleasant submission and the delicate eroticism of the guiding hand combine, in the darkness, with the voice’s discordant edge. I can’t help but conjure flashing images of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. As it continues, three figures appear, dressed in denim ruffs and britches. They lead, I follow; pleasant ghosts, present but not haunting. The whole thing is opaque to the point of cluelessness.

However, the experience itself is a potent one. For fifteen minutes, it delights. I tingle, tipping between calm and trepidation. I tread gingerly and stare intrigued. When I leave, returning to reality, the images remain, but they don’t present a challenge. Their mysteries don’t seem to need solving. At the same time, the sensation dissolves. Its not that one forgets the experience, its just that it leaves no troubling stain behind. The smile fades and the smiler seeks a new thrill.

The same is more or less true of Il Pixel Rosso’s And the Birds Fell From the Sky, a film experienced as first-person role-play. It’s not dissimilar to low-tech virtual reality, only without any element of freedom. One is strapped into headphones and goggles, which house a personal cinema screen that plays a point-of-view film. The game is to follow the instructions in your ears so that your movements fall into sync with the film. Turn your head to the left as the camera pans that way; hold out your hand just as it appears on the screen. At one point, a spray of booze comes your way, co-inciding with a burst of laughter from a drunken clown. Elsewhere, hands place objects in yours or guild you around the space. Again, one becomes very aware of one’s own sphere of sensation.

The film places you in a car with three dishevelled clowns, one of whom seems glumly hangdog, another drunkenly manic. They talk in Spanish with the sort of gravelly voices reserved for Mexican honchos. Driving around a clown-filled downtown on a mischievous rampage, they stop clown prostitutes, scream abuse and shoot passers-by. It’s all a bit Grand Theft Auto, only art-house and warped. Later there’s more serenity: we bob in a lake surrounded by other clowns in brightly coloured rubber-rings or stand on a heath, where another places a bird’s foot in our hand. The whole film is beautifully shot, glazed with the burnt ochre of nostalgia. It’s full of feeling, but barely leaves a residue. Forced to think back now, it’s weird and worrying, but there’s no real compulsion to reconsider the piece. Immediately afterwards, it felt a surreal fairground ride or curious computer game, experienced and discarded soon afterwards. Again, on re-entry to the real world, the smile fades and the smiler moves on.

Several questions spring to mind. First, why is it problematic that such work should leave so little trace? After all, the emphemeral is at the heart of both theatre as event and of experiences. How much of that emphemerality is down to the non-natural quality of sensory experience as opposed to visual image?

Isn’t there an impulse of romanticism beneath experiential work, given that it elevates sensations so categorically? If so, isn’t it enough that it simply makes us feel and that experiencing those feelings (though not necessarily the feelings themselves) is pleasurable. In such terms, experiential work need not really engage with ideas. It can settle into opaqueness or triviality quite happily.

Now, I don’t believe that for a second, but it would explain why I liked The Campinglis Bell-Halls’ Where the Wild Things Sleep so much, despite it’s having next to no consequence whatsoever. It is, essentially, a five-minute distillation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, recently expanded for cinema by Spike Jonze. More than that, it’s one of the cutest, most ticklish pieces I’ve had the pleasure of passing through.

We are cast as Max, the boy lying awake as his bedroom creaks and shadows creep. Every now and then a widened eye peers at us through a hole in the wall. Under the bed, we come face to face with the cuddly monster, brilliantly played by Gemma Brockis in a onesie, committed as anything and growling like a stomach’s rumble. The whole thing left me chuckling helplessly, absolutely charmed and wide-eyed.

Afterwards, as I cradled the cocoa handed me on leaving, I was content just to have been delighted for a short period of time. Moreover, the piece is equally content to do just that. It is a brilliant five minutes that seeks to be nothing more.

What makes me so uncomfortable about this is that if such work need only provide a pleasurable experience, its quality is defined exclusively by that pleasure. That might be judged in accordance with its intensity, timbre or duration. Either way, I worry that – given the relative ease (and so cheapness) of it’s achievement, as detailed above – we arrive at a situation where craft is elevated above artistry. The triumph of Where the Wild Things Sleep, for me, is in being well-crafted, as are both Rotating… & And the Birds… However, the latter two purport to an ‘about’ (if I might use such a clumsy turn of phrase), which never really carries. Their shortcomings are failings of artistry as seen in the fading of a smile.