Review: Antigone, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Time Out

In theory, Tom Littler's decision to set Antigone in a generic Middle Eastern country is brilliant. It's a contemporary setting that meets the challenges of antiquity: its holy crimes and barbaric punishments, its burial rituals and sexual inequality. Against the Arab Spring, its portrayal of a tyrant stamping out dissent at all costs resonates strongly.

However, the setting makes more sense of Sophocles's play than vice versa. First, because location never becomes more than an idea. We get Arabic trimmings - hijabs, incense and wailing muezzin - but no one actually behaves accordingly. Vowels are lum; feet shoulder-width apart. It's more Middleton than Middle Eastern.

Second, it's painfully polite, putting cadence before cruelty like an old-school RSC production. Jamie Glover's Kreon speaks with a lion's purr, smooth and sonorous, but never actually threatens. His soldiers manhandle their prisoners as if on a tentative first date. Littler soothes where he ought to assault.

Timberlake Wertenbaker's complex text is handled with admirable clarity, but this is the catharsis of reflexology, not of pity and fear. As Kreon himself says, "I hate it when those caught in the act of evil want to turn it into something beautiful."

Review: The Winterling, White Bear Theatre

Written for Time Out

A halfway house between his most famous plays, Mojo and Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth's The Winterling throws East End ne'er-do-wells into the deepest, darkest English countryside. Sebastian Blanc's top-quality ringe revival hangs on the coattails of recent Broadway success, but it more than delivers in its own right.

Here, Dartmoor becomes the Siberia of the south-west. Len West, an exiled gangster turfed out for untrustworthiness, gradually claims his territory off local badger-fighting hobo Draycott (Luke Trebilcock). However, the past comes a-knocking when Wally, West's former associate, turns up with new recruit Patsy in tow. The choice is between two communities, neither of which society would condone.

If hasn't the scope or satisfaction of Butterworth's best, but The Winterling is characteristically moreish thanks to its high-definition misfits and clash of casual domesticity and menace.

Despite a tendency to rush and shot, Blanc refuses to fill the blanks and so controls the atmosphere perfectly. Like dirt under the fingernails of a corpse, it's both repulsive and puzzling.

Andrew Taylor works hard to imbue West with danger, stalking the stage with a glacial slowness, but the supporting cast are superb. Mario Demetriou's Wally becomes all the more troubling for his constant joviality and Tommy Vine's Patsy treads deftly between knowingness and naivety.

Review: EPIC, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Ostensibly, Lucy Foster and Chloe Déchery’s devised piece concerns the 20th Century. Using video footage of interviews with the performers’ family members, grandparents mostly, they tap into a number of globally significant pivots in time: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the Parisian student revolt, the miners’ strikes of Thatcher’s Britain, the fall of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. Some of these we might know from school, some from hearsay. Some are completely unfamiliar.

In actual fact, EPIC pretty quickly careers into a wall of its own impossibility. If its starting point is within history, it ends up on the outside, paralyzed and unable, or perhaps unwilling, to connect any two events together, no matter how clear the link. This is the paralysis of postmodernism. Examined this closely, history crumbles. Accepted narratives come to seem fictions spun from unreliable witness statements. Finally, one of the performers, Ed Rapley, the last person to be struck by lightning in the twentieth century (so he tells us), steps forward to announce: “I am not historically significant.”

It’s a brave moment, admirable in following theory through into practice. It’s charged, almost taboo in the way it seems to cut through the base meaning of an individual, through the reason for continuing to exist. And it reverberates around the auditorium. By this point, uncomfortable as it may seem, none of us can say otherwise.

EPIC’s strength is the manner in which it gets to this point. Its central argument is a slow unravelling, like a woolly jumper caught on a nail. From its initial position of well-meaning naivety, EPIC becomes aware of its own contrivance. It suggests the seductiveness of the present manifested in the belief that we are living through special times: the uniqueness of the here and now. It posits history and, with it, current affairs, as mere entertainment, fulfilling a basic human need for narrative. The macro cannot be mined from the micro. History becomes an empty vessel. Or, as Rapley emphatically puts it, “a wrinkled old women dressed as a young seductress wearing too much make up.”

More problematic, however, is the piece’s patchwork quilt style, which displays a lack of a wholly overarching vocabulary and softens the force of the argument. It’s a missed opportunity, as several interrelated vocabularies within are punctured by additional, arbitrarily shaped material. Much of it, for example, is direct address: personal stories about the personal stories of those that appear onscreen. These sit well alongside attempts at objectivity and re-enactment: the po-faced delivery of facts in order. Here, EPIC borrows from (and critiques) Brecht – a recurrent figure, albeit irregularly so – by bleaching history of emotion and personal affinities, stripping it to its skeletal certainties. Neither seems a sufficient tool.

There’s a similar friction between the iconic and the arbitrary. Revolutionary posturing – all clenched fists and distant gazes – rubs up against a physical vocabulary in which a movement is almost surgically attached to a label. Dancer Pedro Inês adopts a series of stances in response to Rapley’s descriptions of action – any other posture would have sufficed - which are then grown into homespun dances and, within the context of the piece, approach an iconography.

It’s indicative of the intelligence behind EPIC, which proves to be that rarest of theatrical works: one that actually fertilizes new thoughts, rather than temporarily bringing old ones to the fore. Though it occasionally slips into easy sentimentality, it is a piquant piece of philosophy that manages to be both rigorous and comforting in its frankness.

Photograph: Manuel Vason

Assorted thoughts on Quizoola

A great deal has been written about Quizoola, Forced Entertainment’s epic game of Q&A first performed sixteen years ago. Step into whatever space happens to be housing it and the piece feels curiously familiar, like you’ve not only seen it played before, but already rehearsed the various inner-monologues that bounce around your head throughout.

You scan the two performers, their clown make up blotchy and smeared, for the signs of mental exhaustion and boredom that Tim Etchells has written of so exquisitely and exhaustively. You pick up on questions that you’ve heard asked in the same context, albeit on a grainy video on some website or other. You spot the performers’ modes, their traits and preferences within the format: a keenness for gags, for example, or a tendency to interrogate. After a while, you get a bit bored, but you know that’s alright because you’ve read that boredom is an expected and encouraged response, so you notice your boredom and you smile to yourself and carry on regardless.

With all that in mind, I’m not going to attempt anything remotely comprehensive here. Instead, I’ll offer a few thoughts that occurred to me en route and off-piste, as it were – things that I’ve not read, that I’m not regurgitating – knowing there’s so much more. A few little personal surprises; freckles noticed on an old friend’s face.

(I should also add that, on account of having a second show to review last Saturday, I only saw the first half of the recent performance at the Camden Roundhouse. Obviously that makes this a limited account, as the six-hour duration is essential to Quizoola. This, then, might be considered a match report from someone who missed the second-half, but could make a reasonable stab at predicting what was going to happen. All I can do is extrapolate.)

Given the critical mass around Quizoola, its somewhat surprising how, experienced in real time, it approaches meaninglessness. With questions and statements pinging back and forth so constantly, sense rather falls out of the content. Though they fit the question, actual answers lose their import. At the point of asking, just as the question mark is reached, there exist a huge number of potential replies. You can’t help but answer the question yourself, silently and inwardly and, as such, recognise that others in the room have probably done the same. Several alternatives probably bounce around the performer’s head, but there are many more potential answers, possibly an infinite amount, that won’t occur to any of us in the room. The eventual actual answer, then, is just one of many. It feels arbitrary – more so than reports or transcripts suggest. Even beneath general meaning, the actual expression, the particular words in which sense is carried, are exchangeable. Over time, this arbitrariness, the sense that any given answer could easily have been other, serves to drain or bleach statements of real meaning. As it goes on, Quizoola hollows itself out.

The same, I suppose, is true of the questions, which pile up over time in much the same way. If that’s to a lesser degree, it’s because – within the context of the performance or game – we know where they come from: namely, the list held by the questioner. They are, mostly, preconceived and scripted, albeit delivered in an arbitrary order and, therefore, open-ended. In turn, these have been dreamt up, equally arbitrarily, at some previous point. Nor do they seem any less arbitrary at the given point of asking: any other question would do to continue the performance or game. What matters is not what gets asked, but that something gets asked.

In this way, Quizoola steadily boils down to its basic linguistic forms: questions and answers. We see the language game according to its rules. A question needs an answer. An answer needs a question. What better blueprint for human interaction? With this endless repetition, we begin to appreciate both not for their particular meanings, but as bare structures, onto which are hung a babble of words. Gradually, Quizoola simmers itself away. It reduces itself to nothing.

It does so, somewhat paradoxically, as it grows. Quizoola is a process of accumulation. As more and more questions and more and more answers are chucked into a skip, they become a single mass. We glimpse them alone only momentarily before they are subsumed into the conglomeration, replaced by another glimpsed fleetingly in its own right. Each utterance, question or answer, is ephemeral. It might leave a stain on the memory, but it dissolves, and this disappearing act is central to Quizoola’s meaninglessness. In and of themselves, the overwhelming majority of both questions and answers serve no purpose and have no meaningful effect. The whole thing is self-contained, such that the only effect of a given answer is to gently, almost untraceably influence the future ebb and flow of future questions and answers, not to mention the way they resonate for individual audience members, echoing or contradicting one another.

In fact, the only moments when one feels any direct and intrinsic effect – and these too are only within the system itself – are when a performer asks, ‘Do you want to stop?’ If the response is ‘yes’, the performers switch roles; if ‘no’, they continue as they were. Here the answer’s effects are immediate and obvious, but they are no less arbitrary. It is binary rather than complex, opening up two possible paths, one of which is instantly cut off, the other of which is followed. Yet the game continues either way. The questioning continues and so to, in turn, does the answering.

Alongside this, then, is the sense of being forced to continue. It rolls onwards for the whole six-hour duration. Once Quizoola is set in motion, there’s no stopping it. No matter how hard you scream, the rollercoaster continues until its natural end.

Further to this, the performer being questioned is forced into answering. It’s hardly surprising that, amongst the myriad of situations that Quizoola makes manifest (first dates, job interviews, television interviews, chats between friends, amateur philosophizing, quizzes), a sense of interrogation recurs particularly strongly. Every time a questioner raises his or her voice or repeats a question several times, as if rejecting a given answer, we see an interrogation.

It’s interesting then that the questions repeatedly return to sex. Even in the three hours that I was there, there were questions about the loss of virginity, lights on versus lights off and the strangest things to be stuck up cunts or into which dicks have been poked. Though the answers need not be true – and often, are so far-fetched to be obviously false – the impulse is to humiliate, to make a public spectacle of the other. It’s the same impulse that crops up in games of ‘Yes’ or ‘Sausages,’ where a particular answer is forced upon the player. In Quizoola, it finds an odd counterpart with the ignorance. Questions of general knowledge expose the player, forcing them to hazard a guess or admit defeat with a ridiculous response. It is a vulnerable position, given that we may well know the answer or expect them to know the answer. On this particular instance, Cathy was unable to list more than two people to have stepped on the moon, but she was also unable to offer a favourite verse of the Koran. As such Quizoola has a knack of puncturing pretension. There is nowhere to hide.

Moments that lack an answer, however, might be opposed by another form of vulnerability: those that (seem to) spark a genuine moment of reflection, that cause the player to pause and consider something really meaningful. Cathy is asked: “What are you going to do with the next forty-one years?” It takes her aback. It deserves proper thought and a proper answer. We see her mind turning the question over. The game has punctured through. Or perhaps it has been punctured. Or punctured itself.

Quizoola, then, hovers on the edge of meaning and meaninglessness. It is a restless night spent drifting in and out of light sleep, full of nagging concerns, in which dreams interweave with waking thoughts. And it goes on until morning.

Photograph: Presumably Forced Entertainment, found on this website

Review: The Acid Test, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

This review was meant to be a tirade. It set out to skewer, to burst the bubble of acclaim that surrounds Anya Reiss. As it so happens, it hasn’t turned out that way. While sharpening the knives, it occurred to me that Anya Reiss might just be the next Alan Ayckbourn.

The question, which I will leave you to answer for yourselves, is do we need another Ayckbourn?

First though, let’s go back a bit. Allow me to explain my initial impulse to make a sacrificial lamb of a sacred cow. Let me, in other words, copy and paste some of my first draft:

We all know Anya Reiss by now, right? The nineteen year-old product of the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme deemed more promising than Nick Clegg in a student union. Her first play, Spur of the Moment, picked up Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle and TMA awards, despite being little more than a Daily Mail editorial dressed up as a play.

Now, I should admit to only having read Spur of the Moment, so I can’t really judge it from all angles. Nor, I should stress, would I wish to dismiss it out of hand. The play achieves a lurking unease; the slow queasiness that accompanies transgression and taboo. It demonstrates a magpie’s instinct for the rhythms and disguises of everyday speech and subtextual currents.

Yet it strikes me that those falling over themselves with praise were blinded by Reiss’s youth. (She was seventeen at the time of writing.) These praiseworthy qualities are technical and technique alone does not an artist make. Polly Stenham – a comparison that, for both age and subject matter, cannot go unmentioned – broke the mould with her debut play That Face. By 2010, Reiss was swimming in chartered waters. If Spur of the Moment marked the emergence of a new voice, it was one that said nothing that we hadn’t already heard. Albeit it rather well.

Admittedly, this seems rather mean-spirited. After all, the ability to write well is probably more than enough to justify celebrating a writer’s promise. As I say, I set out to damn and, with that in mind, I wrote the following:

I’ll start by admitting to scepticism and, as such, will attempt to balance any criticism of The Acid Test, Reiss’s highly anticipated tricky second album, with comparison elsewhere. You see, I intend to begin harshly on two counts. First, that The Acid Test has no more to say than Spur of the Moment, and second, that it survives largely on account of its superficial aspects and sleight of hand.

Though my stance has softened, I stand by both statements. However, while the second represents problems inherent in the play itself, I will temper the first with an admission of preference. In other words, Anya Reiss simply hasn’t written *that* kind of play. She’s written an Alan Ayckbourn kind of play and maybe, just maybe, that’s ok.

The Acid Test shows us three girls in their early twenties – Ruth, Dana and Jessica, points on a personality triangle – who live together in London. They clearly all come from the same affluent middle-class background that allows them to co-habit in comfortable poverty. Their flat is a generic grad-pad; a long way from discomfort, but equally far from those of their childhood. They have a flatscreen TV, but its only small. Their sofa is standard-issue Ikea and fairylights serve as moodlighting. The drinks cabinet, however, is well-stocked – Raspberry Absolut and mini-cans of tonic water – which is rather useful since The Acid Test centres on an impromptu drinking session.

Into this room, which any middle-class mother would term a bombsite, steps Jim, Jessica’s father, freshly turfed out of the family home on account of his wife’s affair with their roofer. Far from interrupting proceedings, however, he rather enlivens them, joining in with the navel-gazing and guzzling to the point that you fully expect him to cop off with one or other of his daughter’s mates.

There is, in all this, plenty of contemporary concern. Reiss looks at class, for starters, and, in throwing a Babyboomer into a roomful of Echo Boomers, generational difference – my favourite topic du jour. Mostly, she addresses the predicament of youth, both as a perennial and more specifically, whereby the world seems stacked in favour of the older and already established. She flags up particular prejudices, aspirations and anxieties.

However, The Acid Test is not *about* any of these things. If it is about anything, we might refer to the blurb’s reductive description – “An unruly new comedy asking if age equals maturity.” – which, in itself, is just not particularly interesting: “That click moment and you always think it’s just around the corner…” Blah, blah, blah.

Rather, The Acid Test is not *about* a particular issue because it never really hankers after anything. Unlike the vast majority of young(er) writers – James Graham, Mike Bartlett, Ella Hickson, Nick Payne, say – there’s no itch to Reiss’s work. She doesn’t refract her words or ideas through a particular vocabulary, as Graham does with The Man or The Whisky Taster. (See also – and primarily – Simon Stephens) Instead, she just has people talk. Inevitably, they touch on such issues, but none of these ever becomes a dominant strain. Rather than attack a specific issue or idea, Reiss grazes a number of them. It’s almost like she checks them off, touching base and flitting elsewhere. The upshot, however, is that The Acid Test (and, it now seems, Spur of the Moment before it) reflects a portion of our society rather than commenting on it. In short, just as Acykbourn did, Riess is showing us a species in its (almost) natural environment. She writes without moralising and without judging her characters.

Reiss writes people, rather than symptoms. They are neither a warning nor an example to us. Rather, they are us: frustrating and fragile but sympathetic. At times we want to slap them, but we understand why they behave as they do. That’s reflected in her sparkling dialogue, which is, more often than not, very funny and very heartfelt.

It does, however, mask a deeper problem: plot. The Acid Test doesn’t so much lack a plot as have one imposed upon it. It’s striking that almost every turning point is spurred by an offstage event: the attempted suicide of Ruth’s ex-boyfriend Twix, Dana’s one-night stand with her boss, Jim’s roof collapsing. The last of these, which allows Jim to leave the no man’s land of the girls’ flat and demonstrate maturity, is forced to the point of resembling a deus ex machina. All Reiss needed to do was have him head to work, leaving the girls to their unemployment. These events do not come from the situation presented; they knock it off course. As such, The Acid Test entirely lacks centrifugal force and eventually wears itself out.

What keeps it alive is the phenomenal work by both cast and director Simon Godwin. Between them, they have injected a huge sense of play into Reiss’s text. The three girls – Phoebe Fox, Vanessa Kirby and Lydia Wilson, all giving fantastically gregarious performances – twist their lines into something unexpected, exploiting odd rhythms and tones. They have created a vocabulary of in jokes and play to each other, sometimes mockingly, sometimes self-parodically. The sense is of constant performance to one another. Fox, in particular, loses none of the humour despite never lazily signposting gags; she throws punch-lines away with a slurred mumble in favour of a deep-rooted character comedy. Wilson, the best young British actress onstage at the moment, manages to find something unattractive in the absolutely sympathetic and grounded Jessica. Its as if she’s calcium-deficient, brittle and malnourished, in spite of her worthiness. Godwin and his cast deliver a masterclass in playing against a text. It is to their credit that, in spite of being a series of concurrent and melodramatic events, The Acid Test fizzes along for as long as it does.

Photograph: Royal Court website

Review: One Man, Two Guvnors, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Proper end of the pier stuff at the National Theatre, where Richard Bean has transposed Carlo Goldoni’s commedia del’arte classic Servant to Two Masters to 1960’s Brighton. The result is an old-fashioned cocktail of wordplay and slapstick given enough of a contemporary twist to survive today’s standard-issue cynicism. Just.

Bean has stuck faithfully to Goldoni’s plot, managing to retain credibility in a long-lost system of service by using enduring hierarchies of both gangland and class. So harlequin’s hip replacement, Francis Henshall (James Corden), a failed skiffle player turned opportunistic odd-job man, winds up both as minder to miniature mobster Rosco Crabbe and fag to former public schoolboy Stanley Stubbers. Only Rosco is, of course, Stanley’s beau Rachel, disguised as her brother in order to claim the dowry he was due before his death, thus interrupts the engagement of Charlie ‘The Duck” Clench’s daughter to local amateur thesp Alan Dangle and spreading confusion through the seaside town.

Commedia is, like end of the pier, essentially a structured series of turns (here, we get front-curtain musical numbers from each of the cast) and Goldoni’s servant will always be best when pulled in two directions by conflicting and easily confusable tasks. Corden, then, is perfectly cast as the hapless go-between. Here, he’s doing what he does best: showing off. Only he’s doing it within a framework that not only gives him permission and encouragement, but also places him at the bottom of the social heap. Suddenly, he’s all winning charm; mischievous cheek and pluck sits where we’re used to bare-faced arrogance and puffery. In fact, it’s enough to gloss over his unexpected mistiming: on press night, his slow turns were a tad too quick, his snap-backs, a touch sluggish.

The same might be said of Nicholas Hytner’s production, which can’t always conjure the requisite anarchic momentum of truly great farce, where everything seems to teeter precariously on the brink of chaos and collapse.

Here, the famous dinner scene serves as an example of perfection. With Corden whipping back and forth like Willow Smith’s hair, Bean introduces an eighty-seven year old waiter, Alfie, to get caught in the culinary crossfire. Looking like Michael Heseltine escaped from a retirement home, Tom Edden steals the scene, if not the show; repeatedly plummeting down the stairs, only to return with ever more wobbly dishes. Without Alfie and his various conditions (Edden seems to have added dementia, Bells-Palsey and Parkinsons to Alfie’s pacemaker), however, Corden’s conundrums are too straightforward, even if ingeniously solved.

Were the humour of a different ilk, pace might not be such an issue, but Bean is trading on the obvious and occasionally groan-worthy. It’s vintage stuff, a naughty seaside postcard or Punch cartoon; all fisticuffs and innuendo. The cast, too, find themselves returning to a particular trick: as Stanley, Oliver Chris must blast out idiosyncratic exclamations in a Hugh Laurie/Rik Mayall tone, where Daniel Rigby’s Alan gazes middle distance, squeaks his cod-Shakespeare and mangles his metaphors. Time and again, Bean takes us down the flowery language of the original, only to undercut it with a crudely modern idiom: I wondered lonely as a twat, sort of thing. It’s classily done, Bean’s choice phrases have enough panache to keep us laughing, but he comes dangerously close to letting us get one step. As such, laughter is as often given as it is forced out of us.

That vintage quality is embraced and enhanced by Mark Thompson’s toybox theatre, which occasionally transcends its own (deliberate) flimsiness for a crisp, cartoonish snapshot of Brighton’s piers or the Cricketers’ Arms (the pub that pops up in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock).

Incidentally, beneath all the humour, there are shades of something cleverer going on, though admittedly not enough to count as anything more than window dressing. By giving his harlequin or zanni figure, Truffaldino, a shot at happiness alongside his supposed betters, Goldoni went some way to revolutionizing commedia. Bean follows suit with his sixties setting: not only do we get constant class friction and a new racial diversity, Suzie Toase’s book-keeper Dolly (the very spit of Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks) harps on about post-war sexual equality, predicting world peace when the first female PM takes power, just as Rigby’s Alan casts an eye towards aesthetic overhaul. “It’s 1963,” he says, “and there’s a bloody revolution in the theatre and angry young men are writing plays about Alans.”

This, of course, isn’t one of them, but it’s an absolute peach, sure to Brighton up your day. Eh? Eh? You can have that one for nowt.

Review: Total Football, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

For over half a century, the British stage has been characterised as feverishly hankering after the state of the nation. It is, arguably, the Holy Grail of our subsidised theatres and, in itself, that says a great deal about our national character.

Judging from Total Football, a softly scornful exploration of the notion of national identity, Ridiculusmus find the base terms absurd, futile and superfluous. For Jon Haynes and David Wood (the spit of Italian referee Pierluigi Collina), who twist the traditional double act into something robust and rigorous without losing the humour, national identity is nonsense:

“An almond croissant,” Haynes begins, shooting words out like a semi-automatic, “wasted down with a cappuccino made from Morroccan beans by a Canadian coffee chain….a Chinese take away sitting on Swedish furniture as you watch an American cop drama. This is what it means to be British today.”

So, when we cheer on twenty-two millionaires kicking a ball about a patch of grass, what exactly are we cheering? What does it mean to cheer Wayne Rooney’s name in unison from the terraces and the pubs, from the factory floors and the rooftops?

Haynes plays a civil servant charged with organising a British soccer team for the 2012 Olympics: a task that grows increasingly impossible. Rivalries prove ever more irreconcilable and national identity slides towards arbitrariness. In fact, thanks to a heavy dose of cynicism – Beckham and Rooney as scapegoats to soften the blow of elimination, anyone - the whole effort becomes entirely meaningless, “a cycle of grief” without any real rationale.

Total Football’s humour comes from awkwardness and surrealism, all doused with scepticism. Its wordplay is sharp, often drifting into looping, sentimental asides or reliant on a novice mis-opining on someone else’s specialism, but physically it scores highest: two British delegates celebrate the Olympic announcement like inelegant Teletubbies; two FA suits hop through training exercises that morph into dubstep dance moves.

However, it is the sincerity that makes Total Football worthwhile. What Ridiculusmus deplore is the need to pigeon-hole and delineate. The British citzenship test comes in for particular scorn as nationality by multiple choice and an outmoded and absolutist concept of British identity. Total Football tackles its subject like a tricksy winger up against a bulky defending, dumbfounding it with nifty trickery, until finally delivering the ultimate humiliation of a nutmeg through the legs.

Photograph: Ridiculusmus

Review: The Cherry Orchard, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

For all its historical specificity to the final strains of Tsarist Russia, The Cherry Orchard’s endurance lies in the permanence of change. There will always be old orders on the wane and new ones, full of vaulting ambition, snapping at their heels. Chekhov’s play can offer a rather bleak perspective, however. Rather than the radical visions imagined by idealists like Trofimov, he can seem to suggest that new worlds are made of the same stuff as old ones.

Howard Davies’ finely tuned production taps into this inevitability exquisitely. In Bunny Christie’s design, the Ranyevskayas’ wooden palace is a constant reminder of what came before. Their home is built from someone else’s trees, just as their beloved orchard will eventually make way for Lopakhin’s holiday homes. Davies deals us a warning against unsustainability that chimes ominously with our current crisis. What it lacks, however, is the harshness and anguish of Ranyevskaya’s downfall. Davies has worked so brilliantly with ideas that the emotional punch of Chekhov’s play becomes muted. Though it amuses en route, Chekhov should frustrate and exhaust. We should be grinning and gurning throughout, but drained empty by curtain down. Here, we are left concerned for ourselves but less for those onstage. The plummet never reaches terminal velocity.

The sense is of a family throwing fuel on the fire to keep the party going by any means. It is a world of complacency, concerned only with the present, in which entertainment and leisure come first. This Zoe Wannamaker conveys beautifully as a chuckling Ranevskaya, tipping her jesters for their mirth. Her home becomes a monarch’s court; survival in it depends on amusement provided. James Laurenson’s jovial Gaev, Tim McMullan’s sozzled Pishchik and Susan Woolward’s loopy Charlotta become children’s entertainers, always ready with a routine or a trick to wile time away with a smile. Even Trofimov and Lopakhin’s central debate is here reframed as pastime, passing over the Ranevskayas’ heads while they lounge in the sun, barely half-listening.

If theirs seems a carefree existence, Davies makes sure that we remain acutely aware of its cost, both material and human. Underneath the frolics are those devotedly fanning the flames. Claudie Blakley’s drawn, stoical Varya furtively keeps behaviour in check, scolding misdemeanours like a frazzled nanny, while Kenneth Cranham’s Firs seems a toy with flat batteries, run down to the cusp of narcolepsy by a lifetime in service. Doting has led directly to his dotage. The system depends on its imbalance and exploitation. When resources dry up, so too do the consumers. Again, Christie’s design is at the fore: her costumes make the bourgeois seem moss against the wood, moist at first, but gradually dehydrating until, finally, they resemble parched, parasitical lichen.

In that, then, is the tragedy of The Cherry Orchard today. Their crisis of dwindling reserves is not only set to repeat itself, it leads directly to our own of plundered futures. With hindsight, there is no hope in Lopakhin, given a fascinatingly complex spin here by Conleth Hill. He is, at best, a temporary solution; one that accelerates towards an accentuated disaster. This does, however, run counter to the play’s own paradox, which requires us to lament the loss of the cherry orchard at the same time as welcoming its passing hands. Framing both incumbent and imminent in capitalist terms makes the transition much of a muchness. We might even welcome Ranyevskaya’s loss and, for all that it marks the shattering of old hierarchies, mourn Lopakhin’s gain.

In fact, those terms may shed light on the biggest curiosity of Davies’s production, namely, that Christie’s set brings to mind not Russia, but the Wild West. The family home, its wood distressed as ever damsel was, looks almost like a Playmobil fort. It’s lanterns and swing doors give a twist of the saloon bar and, when it swings open for scene two outside, we get a small-town square on the edge of a grassy prairie. It’s almost a case of: “Trofimov, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kazan anymore.”

It’s an interesting choice, certainly one that poses conundrums for the viewer. After all, America is so often framed as Russia’s polar opposite. Here, Lopakhin reads in light of America’s could-be-president mentality and Trofimov – a hardened Mark Bonnar – seems unusually ineffectual, his communist manifesto becomes dreamy idealism as opposed to ardent realpolitik. It also implies a doggedness to the Ranyevskayas’ being overthrown. Led by Wannamaker’s Ranyevskaya, whose head is either buried in sand or stuck the clouds (at one point she appears in circular sunglasses, looking like a dreamy Yoko Ono), they come to seem complacent landowners under threat from more ruthless, cutthroat types. Lopakhin, Yepihodov and Yasha as outlaws and cowboys? Perhaps there’s something there.

Such potential parallels exist as echoes beneath the surface, however, and only do so because Davis and adaptor Andrew Upton have mined and refined Chekhov’s originals into strong archetypal forms. Much has been made of Upton’s bashing the language into contemporary shape, but, aside from a few clunks that suggest a keenness to make his presence known (‘Bollocks’ and ‘crap-artist’ jar enormously), it mostly works fine. With Davies at the helm and Christie’s astonishingly layered design, however, it becomes a deeply fascinating lit-crit production, even if it softens the power of the story itself.

Photograph: Alistair Muir/The Telegraph

Review: The Madness of Andrea Yates, Etcetera Theatre

Written for Time Out

Well meaning but utterly naive, Cruel Theatre's case study of an infamous infanticide ends up fetishising mental illness by rendering it in crudely simple terms.

In 2001, born-again Christian Andrea Yates drowned her five children. Postnatal depression and psychosis had led her to believe she was possessed by the devil. The Texan mother's plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was later rejected in court.

Taurie Kinoshita's play sets out to find the failings of America's health and legal systems, but its portrait of schizophrenia is recklessly simple, reducing Yates's condition to a battle of cartoon consciences. A surface understanding of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty has a chorus represent writhing devilish voices, while Reason pleads quietly and ineffectively from the sidelines. Kathryn Lewin's portrayal of Yates is earnest but ignores any middle ground. She's either sedately drooling or crookedly insane.

Kinoshita demonstrates no selectivity over her material, simply rolling through a linear litany of facts, though she fails to mention the success of Yates's subsequent appeal. Instead, morbid fascination overwhelms sensitivity and the result is documentary theatre as freak show.

Review: I Am the Wind, Young Vic

Were it not so patently deadpan, I Am The Wind could easily be filed under the catchall term Theatre of the Absurd. It has the same existential strife and frustrations with language as many an absurdist classic. The only thing missing from Jon Fosse’s play, adapted here by Simon Stephens, is the absurdity.

Instead, it comes across as a fable: two men in a boat, perhaps; or better still, two young men and the sea. For all that it appears elusive, seeming to obscure its driving force with metaphor and making you work to keep up, it is actually rather flat-footed. I Am the Wind may not be prescriptive in its meaning – each will find in it their own reflection, an outing for personal concerns and philosophies – but its ambiguity is not matched by multiplicity. It is too purified and, once one has settled into the sparseness of Patrice Chereau’s meditative production, watching it is rather straightforward. Not least because we’ve heard it all before.

Take the two men themselves. They could be strangers thrown together by their shared situation. They could be friends, brothers or even, momentarily, lovers. At base, it doesn’t really matter: they are simply The One and The Other. Whether separate entities or halves of a whole, what matters is that they are two. Just two men. In a Boat.

The One (Tom Brooke) is in the throngs of an existential depression. Both solitude and society, noise and silence, are unbearable to him. He speaks of intolerable heaviness, the burden of existence. He feels, he says, like a rock and longs for the true freedom of the wind. Life is paralysis, always terrifyingly uncertain: “I’m alive,” he says, “so I’ve got to say something.” From that paralysis comes a death-impulse, a draw to the edge of the raft, which, in turn, increases his terror and guilt. Death might be an end, but to die is an act, subject to the same neuroses as any other.

The Other (Jack Laskey) functions as both questioner and as comfort. He prevents absolute isolation without becoming a cacophony: he is company but never a crowd. He is the calm, caring voice that takes the edge off a ledge. Together they reach moments of equilibrium and the boat steadies itself.

Only ever, however, for a while. The tide always changes. The secluded spot always grows tiresome. In a world of motion, peace is never permanent. Fosse’s work tackles these rhythms of life: tension and stasis, calm and tumult. The struggle of existence is not the world itself but the window on it, the mind that ties itself in knots, the brain freezes and head fucks, the rising panic. Like The One, each of us seeks release from (self-)awareness and that can come from both stillness and occupation. Either way, it will snag, the mind will glitch and the dread will return.

All this is well and good, but its also rather well-trodden territory, especially since I Am the Wind wrings existentialism through an old mangle: the boat has long served as a distillation of existence. It cuts man off from society and pits him against his environment. “An image,” says The Other, “should say how something is…But in the end it always says something else.” In the case of the boat, for all the metaphor’s robustness, I’m not convinced it can.

Nor am I convinced that Stephens’s chosen writing style suits such a narrow metaphor. His words here are simple, often elemental, and blunt. Their lyricism is unflowery and rhythmic, almost liturgical. With it’s echoing repetition and bluntness it is beautiful on the ear, as questions and answers thud back and forth, but less on the mind. As Dan Rebellato has recently pointed out, Stephens’s dialogue is often direct and acutely self-aware. Given a broadly naturalistic situation (even one not played naturalistically) that offsets the action, making it distorted and counter-intuitive. Here, however, the narrative is already so staunchly metaphorical that the text’s falling into line further flattens the whole.

Chereau rightly follows Stephens’s minimalism with admirable precision, if sparse invention. Richard Peduzzi’s set magnifies a puddle in a playground until it becomes an ocean. Out of the water, unexpectedly, rises a platform on a mechanical pivot, which stands in for the boat without attempting mimesis. It could be a simple raft, but the text speaks of bows and sails. Actually, it’s a rather awkward flight-simulator-esque contraption with a tendency to puncture the fiction with ridiculousness as much as reality. It can trip into resembling a magic carpet or, worse, a bucking bronco.

On it, however, Chereau’s composition of his actors is strong, echoing Renaissance seascapes and Gormley’s cast-iron sillouhettes, but it lacks the layered resonances that might make the whole multiply. Brooke and Laskey give committed, parched performances. Brooke, in particular, makes intelligent choices. His appearance is haunted and malnourished, as it his body were vacuum-packed around his skeleton. His smudges his words as if deaf. When he speaks he almost regurgitates words like a bird feeding its offspring, stopping abruptly as if giving up at the first signs of a stammer. Communication is not just hard, it’s a physical trial. Laskey has less to play with, but makes a sympathetic foil and a caring companion.

I Am the Wind is neither drab nor dreary, it is an honest expression of life’s difficulty. To accuse it of misery-mongering is to ask for rose-tinted specs. The trouble is the sterility of Chereau’s intentionally monochrome production and I found myself longing for shades of grey.

Photograph: Simon Annand

Review: Kingdom of Earth, The Print Room

If you’re going to play with flawed texts, you need to know how to play script doctor. Director Lucy Bailey, whose fringe venture The Print Room looks to be dealing in resuscitations rather than revivals, is more nurse than physician. As with the Acykbourn oddity Snake in the Grass, she’s patched this wonky Tennessee Williams up smartly, even if she hasn’t restored it to full health.

The issue with Kingdom of Earth is its trade in extremes and counterparts. Its characters are less people than humours. They are ideas that, when set in opposition, give the impression of drama by numbers. At its centre are two half-brothers battling over the family’s Mississippi farm. Lot (Joseph Drake) is a frail, fey city-type, an occasional transvestite with tuberculosis, a bleached blonde in a pale suit. David Sturzaker’s Chicken is the inverse: muscular, blunt, simple and mixed-race. He wears a uniform of mud stains and chaps. Were they to work together, they could make a neat Beckettian partnership, serving one another like Hamm and Clov or Lucky and Pozzo. Set against each other, however, they trade blows as inevitably and infinitely as a Newton’s cradle.

The oil between these jammed cogs is Myrtle, the wife Lot has married to prevent the property passing to Chicken after his encroaching death. An escapee of small-town showbiz, she’s breezy, coquettish and firm: bright pastels to the monochrome semi-siblings. There’s an obvious lineage from Blanche Dubois, but her steeliness also lends shades of Ruth in The Homecoming. In terms of narrative, Myrtle is the messenger that gets shot. She ping-pongs between the brothers, instructed by each to obtain a document from the other: Lot needs the deeds to the property, Chicken the marriage licence.

Around this irreconcilable triangle, Williams goes heavy on other diametric forces: darkness and light; savagery and civilisation; colonial and native; winter and spring. The various elements knock against each other like a never-ending game of rock, paper, scissors. Earth is being fought over. The house is threatened by an incoming flood. People are marked by their breathing: Lot wheezes towards death, Mrytle whistles asthmatically and Chicken rumbles with menace.

What can’t be cured must be endured and Bailey’s approach is to embrace the disparities within. It’s as if she’s put the play through fractional distillation, siphoning off its component parts into separate containers. Ruth Sutcliffe’s set explodes the farmhouse into a mound of earth, as if already destroyed by the flood to come (thus highlighting the basic futility beneath the feud). With the trio clambering and stumbling, it gains the look of a Pina Bausch compilation, only with three different dancers and three different tunes. Bailey stretches the play, finding in it isolation and philosophic vastness to counter its dramatic naivety. Mountains and molehills spring to mind.

However, Bailey’s explosion pushes the characters out of one another’s orbit. Had she pushed against the text, in which they already repel each other, she might have found (or concocted) similarities to tether them together and thus, add nuance to enormity. The interesting question is how Lot and Chicken are related, both in terms of family and objective. Just as ying contains yang, we need to spot traces of one in the other.

As such, it’s real interest comes when it moves beyond the brothers’ mudslinging to make Mrytle’s entrapment central. Fiona Glascott is superb, lacing the sexiness that sets Chicken salivating with a gawky vulnerability. Williams has bequeathed her the obstacle of inevitability; from the moment this Southern belle steps into the beast’s lair, it can only end in sexual abuse. Glascott overcomes this with distraction techniques, making the former showgirl’s every move a miniature turn. She’s so captivatingly out of sorts, so raggedy and unaware, that we almost forget that she’s stuck between the devil and the deep, until both come crashing down on her at once.

However, there’s more within worthy of exhumation and it’s only with these last gasps that this Kingdom of Earth really moves.

Photograph: Sheila Burnett

Thoughts on In Eldersfield Chapter 1: Elegy for Paul Dirac, SPILL FESTIVAL

“In Eldersfield is a decade-long, ten chapter cycle of works all for the twentieth century – to which we are no longer beholden, but to which we may always belong.”

Eldersfield. It certainly sounds English. Rural. It’s probably somewhere between village and town; definitely bigger than a hamlet. Bathed in that golden Hovis advert glow. Surrounded by green hills and green trees. Little clouds of white smoke probably rise from chimneys. Buildings are made with local stone. There may even be a fully functioning parish noticeboard. From the sound of the word, you just know it’s idyllic.

As used by Kings of England, a tenderly amorphous collection of multi-disciplinary artists under the influence of Simon Bowes, it is almost more than that. Not just idyll, but somehow ideal, it has about it a note of Elysium.

Often we see the twentieth century in very different terms. We look back on its escalating horrors and its advancing impersonality. We chart the rise of the baby boomers and the manipulation of political and social structures to suit a aggressively capitalist agenda. We see in it the seeds of the post-9/11, web 2.0 world. In Eldersfield displays a hope to move away from that image, harvesting the previous century for instances, moments, people, ideas that might be celebrated. It is as much reclamation of the twentieth century as blueprint for the one just beginning. Bowes and Co. are constructing a manifesto of values – moral, aesthetic, idealistic – that might better serve us in the twenty-first.

*****

Its first is in Paul Dirac, a theoretical physicist born and bred in Bristol. This, Bowes tells us, is an invocation of Dirac. John Pinder, who shares a number of physical attributes with Bowes’s description of Dirac, stands centre stage. (Disclaimer: I used to work alongside John, and Alex Eisenberg, who is also in the cast, in Present Attempt. He has a remarkable otherwordliness and is perfectly cast as Dirac. He has puppet-like physicality, as if his joints are not connected but delicately strung together. His head, in particular, seems to balance on a single pivot point. He seems a human Jenga tower. As Dirac, he reminds me of something I once heard about Wayne Rooney; that he sees the world differently, slower, making his reactions faster than those around him.)

Around him the cast trot through a mildly deferential sequence of movement, cocking knees and bowing heads in ceremonial supplication. The poses are greetings, deferential and welcoming, open and vulnerable. It’s not far from worship or a slow dance of courtship. It serves to transform Pinder into Pinder/Dirac. He represents Dirac not in the sense of ‘playing’ him, but by standing in for him: a substitute effigy in the midst of a gentle séance. (To represent the other scientists at the 1927 Solvay Conference, other cast members, including a number of schoolchildren, wear blackboards with ‘character’ names chalked on. As Dirac, Pinder has no need to do so, since this ritual has made him multiple.)

I go into this level of detail to give a sense of the piece’s style, which seems to me a significant attempt to make theatre with the vocabulary of performance without setting out to undermine or ridicule the former. It is thoroughly sincere in an attempt to combine (rather than distinguish) a definite fiction and reality without resorting to make-believe. I write ‘definite’ to move away from presentations of a real, but ambigious, act that allows multiple possible fictions to (half) form in the audience member’s mind. In that, Kings of England acheive the folksy storytelling of New International Encounter with the modus operandi of Lone Twin. The component parts are individual ritualistic actions that coagulate into fragments of fiction.

What follows is a recreation, not simply as re-enactment, but as re-realisation. This invocation of the past aims to affect the present and, in some way, alter the future.

*****

Asked at the Solvay Conference where he was going on his holidays, Dirac remained silent. Twenty minutes later he replied, “Why do you want to know?” Here, Kings of England retell and then recreate this incident and in doing so set it up as somehow prescriptive. It becomes, at its most basic level, a plea for consideration over knee-jerk response, a campaign for slowness over acceleration towards terminal velocity, a call for precision in communication rather than a reliance on the acceptance of symbols, norms and understanding. In that, it could be the perfect beginning to the whole. One that, like the cynical Natwest adverts, asserts: “There is another way, you know.”

Zoom out and Dirac’s response functions as the most perfect punchline. It is a post-modern Morecambe and Wise gag: a straight question given a goofy response that, unintentionally, belittles the asker. Sit through it in real time, however, and it is variously droll, confrontational, peaceful, unsteady, taught and electric.

It does, of course, recall famous silences of the past. Unsurprisingly, there are immediate echoes of John Cage’s 4.33, in that we become attuned to the sounds of silence. Here, after a certain while, I found myself seeing differently. Not just a black box, but one etched with chalk markings and peeling paint. A room that is defiantly irregular, despite the impression of rectangularity and plain planes. It also calls to mind the “most perfect silences” of Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess.

Because Kings of England have already provided the anecdote, one’s first reaction on hearing the question, “Where are you going on your holidays?” is to wonder what will happen next. It gains a flirtatious edge. For those not already forewarned, the question is whether they will go the whole hog, whether we are facing twenty full minutes of silence. As this question melts into realisation, an odd game of chicken emerges. There is a note of confrontation about it, as if it’s daring us to sit through the silence or else daring us to disrupt it. We in turn are daring them to continue. After all, it must be more uncomfortable up there, out front, on stage. Mustn’t it?

After four minutes or so, someone, a woman to my left, leaves quietly. Not so quietly that she doesn’t break the silence momentarily. For all that she tries, she can’t slip out unnoticed. The room is too still for that. Her action changes the temperature. Behind me, among a group of students, whispers become murmurs become performative coughs. A number of them get up, deliberately, showily, and leave in turn. Perhaps they are too awkward. Perhaps they are unwilling to see anything in this but a blank. An audience seems to be deserting a piece and there’s something rather exciting about that.

But there’s also something unnerving about it. There’s a trickle of doubt as to whether these deserters are not somehow involved, collaborators or co-conspirators. When a scream goes off and some rushes to escape, it almost lets the excess pressure out and, after an initial tingle, the room settles once more.

Momentarily, probably about fifteen minutes in, I thought about hostages and, particularly, about the Moscow theatre taken over by Chechen rebels. Nobody leaves (anymore). Nobody moves (too much). Only it’s less extreme than that: a detention, perhaps, or else an assembly absolutely broken, as if with embarrassment or shame. Nobody speaks. Nobody can.

This, I think, is where Kings of England are driving: the impossibility of meaningful communication. This is, after all, the result of a simple question: “Where are you going on your holidays?” All it seeks is a one-word reply – Brighton, perhaps, or Magaluf – and yet, it has led to a monumental impasse. Unlike Cage’s, this silence is not just silence: it is not an arbitrary segment of time and it has no bearing on the abstract concept. Instead it is a particular. It is defined by its frame: the question and answer; its cause and its endpoint. If you think about it, every question is followed by such a silence and every subsequent answer is preceded by a gap in time. If questions cannot be answered properly, the best a response can do is satisfy. It is a making do, a passable attempt, but nevertheless, inaccurate and incomplete. The whole means of communication slowly breaks down. It realises its own futility. And so we sit in silence.

*****

Later, there is another silence. It is nowhere near as long and it is nowhere near as charged. In fact, it is the absolute opposite of its fraught, neurotic predecessor. It is the silence of peace and comfort.

Pinder/Dirac stands in the middle of the stage. His shirt is unbuttoned slightly, his sleeves are rolled up and his blazer is removed. Onto the stage steps The Parrot That Thinks, a figure we have previously been told about in a neat fable (originally from Farmelo):

“There was a man who went to a pet shop, bought a Parrot and tried to teach it to talk, but without success. The man took the bird back to the shop and asked for another, explaining to the shop manager that he wanted a Parrot that talked. The manager obliged and the man took another Parrot home, but this one also said nothing. So the man went back angrily to the shop manager and said: ‘You promised me a parrot that talks, but this one doesn’t say anything.’ The shop manager paused for a minute and struck his head with his hand, and said: ‘Oh that’s right, you wanted a parrot that talks. Please forgive me. I gave you the Parrot that thinks!’”

The Parrot That Thinks (Bryony Kimmings in a pair of brightly coloured wings/flamenco sleeves) performs a dance that grows increasingly restless. It’s not awkward, but trance-like, increasingly committed and wrapped up in the movement. Her feathers flutter like a cyclone of colour. Pinder/Dirac watches her intently. It’s the first time his eyes have come to rest on anything. When the dance finishes, they make eye contact. It is a clean gaze, very deep and very comfortable. They seem like lovers. It’s the sort of eye contact that comes post-coitally: one that looks inside another, one that smiles without needing to move the lips.

A hat is placed on Pinder/Dirac’s head. It is a trucker cap, white at the front. On it, in cartoon lettering, are the words: “I’ll do it tomorrow. Today I’m going fishing.” The two sit at the front of the stage, their sides touching, and they stare out. They could be on a park bench or a porch. The weather is definitely nice. The sun is possibly setting. Or rising. Either way you know the sky looks beautiful and serene. They are silent.

This silence, then, is one that need not speak. It is the sort against which real love is so often defined or measured. It is comfortable. Two people alone together, almost in equilibrium. They are not lonely, but nor do they need each other. They simply are and they are, together.

In relation to the first, it marks an acceptance of the terms of existence, that is, a coming to terms with the impossibility of communication: a Parrot and Physicist both content just to think. Perhaps that’s a saddening thought, the idea that happiness involves a quiet retreat from others. Atomisation as a good thing. Perhaps it’s rather more hopeful, that the awkwardness of the social encounter can be overcome. Atomisation as a comforting possibility. To be honest, I don’t know.

Either way, somewhere in these two silences, Kings of England seem to be setting the ground rules, the base conditions, for a new century. One of reflection and consideration, that thinks before it speaks and does so only when necessary. One as happy to listen as it is to offer an opinion and never, ever speaks for the sake of it; that never wastes words, treating them as a scarce commodity and not as an endless resource. A century that restores the meaning of meaning.

Photograph: www.spillfestival.co.uk

Review: And the Horse You Rode In On, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Screwball comedies aren’t renowned for their intertextuality. Mind you, it’s equally rare to find a fart gag in the middle of a staged thesis. Told By an Idiot’s latest is so brilliantly conceived that it just about does both without too much loss. Its outwardly jocular demeanour delights in slapstick and silly voices, but its core is a passionate reflection on revolution drawn out of a pop-cultural mash-up. In fact, it’s almost a call to arms. If And the Horse You Rode In On weren’t so serious, you wouldn’t be surprised if Monty Python’s irascible colonel popped up demanding an end to such silliness.

A number of independently motivated radicals descend on Grace Brothers, the department store of Are You Being Served. Each is intent on direct action as public spectacle: the phrase ‘enlightenment through demonstration’ runs through the piece like letters through a stick of rock. A student plans to set her dog alight during opening hours. A retired renegade blackmailed into action has his unwitting son deliver a suitcase explosive. Two leather-jacketed Germans, reminiscent of members of the Baader-Meinhoff Complex, sneak in with black bauble-shaped bombs, while Protestant guardsmen kidnap a family of acrobats due to perform for Louis XIV. Meanwhile, Mr Humphries, Mr Lucas and Mrs Slocombe hither and thither and dither around the store.

Each of these activist attempts is drawn from a different cultural source: among them, Hitchcock and Joseph Conrad, Dario Fo and German novelist Günter Grass. In fact, the whole work is peppered with referential asides: one scene deliberately echoes Grusha’s crossing of the bridge in The Caucasian Chalk Circle; another takes place in a cinema showing Bugs Bunny’s encounter with an alien set on blowing up the earth.

If the terrorist has become a cultural staple, Told By an Idiot are determined to chip off the old schlock. Torn from their original settings, these examples no longer seem stock villains. They stop functioning as plot-driving antagonists; those that afford heroes their heroism. This is not to reconfigure the horror of their acts, for this is already at the heart of the cultural bad guy. They are those that would do us harm and undo the workings of our own society. Nor, post 9/11 and the war on terror, do we need reminding of the threat posed by terror. We live it every day in CCTV cameras and quivering threat levels, in suspicious packages and police presence.

Instead, it is to take such acts seriously. Here, their causes gain precedence and their methods become reasonable. In that, And the Horse You Rode in On counters mainstream politics, media and culture that would have us believe terrorism aims only at destruction. In fact, it aims not to maximise pain, but change. It is neither mindless, nor wilful, but a necessary means to an end.

Here, cause is defined by target and Grace Brothers, subtly linked with Louis XIV, is pinpointed for its bourgeois values. Its fineries and haberdasheries seem warped luxuries. Disconcerting disembodied hands line the walls, grabbing at thin air. Its staff smile smarmy Cheshire cat grins; its customers, all with pedigree pups in tow, gorge themselves on cake and cream. It is also definitively British and one cannot help but recall the recent (peaceful) occupation of Fortnum and Mason by UK Uncut. All this is, in other words, an attack on us and it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable. If anything, it doesn’t seem enough by half.

That Mrs Slocombe, her hair a Marie Antoinette bouffant with a patch dyed drapeau tricolore, is reading Brecht’s The Measures Taken further implicates us (and, possibly, the company themselves) for our own armchair-liberalist inaction. We, like the professor shocked to see his theories put into practice, are accused of being “radicals at heart” without much heart. Even as we opine over dinner tables (or on theatrical blogs…) we are as blindly uncomprehending as Bugs Bunny when he asks the alien, “Why would you want to blow up the earth?”

In his Director’s Note, Paul Hunter refers to the structure of Pulp Fiction, as various narratives converge on a single point. The truth is that Tarentino’s characteristic neatness is lacking, which weakens its political thrust. Prone to distraction for the sake of a gag, the piece swerves between goofiness and ardour. Often a relatively serious scene is dressed up with a wacky device; usually, actors dubbing dialogue over the action.

As such it doesn’t quite stand comparison to the madcap satires of the Theatre of the Absurd. Though it has strong parallels with that body of work, particularly Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers (often translated as The Arsonists), And the Horse You Rode In On lacks the tight focus of something taken to its logical conclusions.

Even so, this is a work that deserves celebration for its vast intelligence and willing attempt to say the unspeakable. And the Horse You Rode In On raises a smile even as it raises hell.

Photograph: Told By an Idiot

Review: Cleveland Street The Musical, Above the Stag Theatre

Written for Time Out

With the super-injunction, there's no indiscretion that can't be covered up with cash. 'Twas ever thus, according to Glenn Chandler's musical peek into a Victorian male brothel.

After discovery by the police, the poor telegram boys of 19 Cleveland Street bore the brunt of the new laws against homosexuality, while rich customers - strongly rumoured to include Queen Victoria's grandson - escaped charges. It's a sudden lurch into injustice for a piece that's mostly content to romp.

Chandler leaves out any seediness, making prostitution seem a Boy's Own adventure. Expect double entendres and bottom-slapping a-plenty. But he doesn't quite seem sure of his subject: is it the boys, society scandal or old-timer John Saul (Paul Brangan)?

Strong work from Josh Boyd-Rochford as the self-styled 'madame' and a twist of music hall helps, but for every catchy number there's a bum note.