Review: Make Better Please, West Yorkshire Playhouse

Seen during the Transform Festival 2012

On the afternoon of Saturday 8th May 2010 – almost exactly two years ago – I saw a scratch of Make Better Please at Battersea Arts Centre. Its final incarnation is largely as I remember it being then. It’s refined a bit, both as an event and in its production values, but, broadly speaking, nothing much has changed.

Except, at the same time, everything has changed, and Make Better Please is all the better for it. Not that it wasn’t impressive first time around: it has absolutely stayed with me since and retains its shuddering power even second time around. But now – given cuts and riots, given James Murdoch and Jeremy Hunt, given 2.6 million unemployed and a double dip recession, given Lybia and Syria and North Korea, given Osbourne, given Clegg, given fucking Cameron – now, it’s necessary.

If I didn’t know that they’d been busy touring Love Letters Straight From Your Heart – of which Make Better Please is very consciously the inverse; pitch where once was butter – I’d think that Uninvited Guests (Richard Dufty, Jessica Hoffmann and Paul Clarke; joined here by Lewis Gibson) had been watching and waiting for the right moment to unleash it. That is, for things to get this bad. I picture them peering conspiratorially over the Guardian each day: Not yet. Not quite yet. Ok, now. Go. Go. Go.

Make Better Please is a ritual intervention for a misguided society in a world of wrong turnings. It’s theatre as last resort; a show for end times.

It’s the scream you yell when words won’t cut it. It’s the ‘cunt’ when ‘fuck’ won’t do. It’s the glass you break in an emergency; the door you punch straight through.

And it is as beautifully constructed as it is conceived; elegant and visceral, not to mention fearless, hilarious, totally horrifying and immensely uplifting. At the same time, it’s performed with a level of commitment I’ve rarely seen equalled.

Essentially, Make Better Please is a purely cathartic cycle that, in the process, changes the way you look at the world. It starts civil and everyday, with a tea party or round-table discussion, but slowly brings itself – and us – to the boil. It builds from round-table to role-play, from role-play to ritual and from ritual to release.

(Warning: here be spoilers.)

We start sat around small coffee tables, on each of which is a spread of tea, biscuits and the day’s newspapers – both national and local. We’re asked to start reading, searching for a story, any story, that makes us (even a little bit) angry. Initially, you play along, as you might in a similar school exercise. Leafing through, thumbing the pages.

As you do, however, you realise that almost every other story might fit, be it about celebrity, class, corporations, war, politics and so on. Besides, it’s all so lightweight, so unquestioning, so skewed, even positively sick in places. By the time we come to share and discuss our findings, the frustration, if not even anger, has become genuine and heartfelt. Slowly, you start to simmer.

In itself, this first and longest section, seems fairly workaday as a result of its casualness. There’s not much of a break between non-show and show; it’s a gradual bleeding from one, a shift from one foot to the other. In this way, it can shape itself to fit both audience and moment. In the decompression from life to art, the framework itself gets revealed as well as the content. Standard terms and conditions, the mode of the media that we take for granted, appears suddenly constructed and contingent, the result of ulterior motives. (We know all this, yet still we accept it.) Even at this early stage, the seed is planted: ‘Things don’t have to be like this.’ Rather than dwelling on alternatives, however, Uninvited Guests keep your focus on that this, riling you up and stoking the fire.

“I am James Murdoch,” announces Dufty from the centre the circle, “Is there anything you want to ask me?” On the afternoon of Sunday 22nd April, he is also James Cameron, the film-director turned wannabe asteroid miner, and a doctor performing female circumcisions in the UK, he’s David Cameron and Anders Behring Breivik in court.

One by one, stand in for the cast of the international news. We are the hacked and the hackers, the judges and the media moguls. We are Panamanian fishermen adrift, passengers raising alarms and captains not taking action. We are Norwegian teenagers taking shelter or paralysed with fear. We are lawyers listening in and journalists silently weeping. We are Monica Bossei asking that he point the gun away from us.

We are, in other words, no longer just names in newsprint. As such, you see the images quite differently. They’re suddenly first person, films shot in POV. Not something that happened, but something somehow happening. You feel the echoes of fear and horror, the tremors of shame, and know they don’t even come close. Eye contact becomes uncomfortable. The room temperature rises. Pressure builds and builds.

Until something pops and Dufty starts screaming in short, sharp bursts: a piercing human car alarm. Gibson hammers at the piano. It’s absurd, it’s unexpected and it’s loud. And it’s extremely awkward. Eye contact is now impossible. You want to laugh, but know you shouldn’t; the sort of sensation that catches you in church, in minute silences, at funerals. Something runs down your spine. Until, as soon as all this started, it all stops.

This rupture is unnerving, but the sensation only grows as masks of the recently deceased – photocopied and blown up from the obituary pages – are calmly passed around. Gibson’s head is wrapped in newspaper, leaving only one ear free. He’s spun and gropes around. Eventually, he sits at the piano, which now has newspaper stuffed between hammers and strings. The notes he plays are like musical raindrops hitting the surface of puddles. They have an additional patter, a percussive quality. The image is of a typewriter. One by one, we whisper the name of our death mask into his ear. The sensation is the bristle of breaking taboo. Gibson’s playing grows louder and more discordant with each name, until he’s using his elbows to slam the whole keyboard. A gong is run around the outside of the circle. It feels like a head-swirl. Dizziness.

In the middle of the circle, Dufty starts chanting; letting his mouth lead, forming warped half-words out of sounds. D-d-d-day-day-d-d-d-dDayvid-Dayvid-DayvidCam-Cam-Cameron-Cameroon-d-d-DayvidCamerooon. Cl-Cl-Cle-Clar-Clar-Cleggi-Clegg-Clegg-Cleggi.

He struts about like a chicken, clucking these noises. His face contorts, lips pursed, sucking at the words toothlessly; at once, mocking those named and distorting himself. It’s hysterical but no-one’s laughing. It’s clear he’s trying to break out of rationality and into impulse, towards trance.

Gibson and Hoffman don newspaper versions of shamanic grass costumes. They wear photocopied masks of the queen’s face. Dufty takes off his clothes, throws tea over himself and implores us to do likewise. The lights dim and turn to red. The gong gets louder and faster. Bit by bit, Dufty becomes ‘Bad News.’ A newsprint phallus and pregnant belly are taped to him. Gibson is at the drums, smashing a cymbal repeatedly. Hoffman shouts throatily into a microphone, summoning 'Bad News', goading him, cheering him on. The volume on a bass guitar is turned up and we’re into a full-blown ritual cum rock-concert – the same conflation of properties as in Harminder Judge’s Do What Thou Wilt; entertainment and exorcism at once.

We’re wearing our death masks and the room feels positively dangerous. Now, we’re hardly playing. We’re toying with something, dicing with it. It’s charged and it’s taboo and you’re sat on the knife-edge of your seat, nervous and uncertain about what’s coming next. It’s crashing symbols, flashing lights and the whoosh of thick white stage smoke. And Dufty – simultaneously shaman and effigy, terrifying and ridiculous, completely unhuman and yet still just a man dressed up in newspapers, grunting – is taking on the world’s problems and absorbing them, inhaling them, digesting them. It’s completely disorientating. The gong is still going. A fire extinguisher is fired at his feet. There’s a rush of white steam; cold carbon dioxide, and Dufty is chased from the circle, from the stage and from the room – screaming as he goes.

And then there’s quiet. Uncomfortable, jittery, adrenaline-thumping silence. You’re holding your breath. You have been for a while. There’s a laugh caught in your throat, unsure whether to burst out or swallow itself.

Hoffman, panting, slowly walks back to the circle. Everyone waits and watches. She walks to a door at the back of the stage and throws it open, letting light and air rush in. The temperature drops. The dust settles and the stage smoke We exhale, almost collectively, and unclench. She invites us to sit in silence for a while, before offering up memories, stories and thoughts of hope. It’s moving and it’s calming and people listen with conscious intentness. What’s more, something feels newly possible.

We leave together, some softly wailing air-raid siren in the distance. Outside, the three performers read the headlines we’ve personally selected at the start and set them alight with the words: "Make better please."

And at that point in time – despite knowing it absurd and recognising it’s preposterous pretence – you genuinely feel as if it might just work. There is a genuine transformation here. You enter in one state of mind, unexamined but entangled, and leave in another altogether. You’re more questioning, perhaps; (re)activated and (re)energised, ready to take on the world.

Not that you should relinquish your inner-sceptic. Make Better Please also functions in reverse; it revives empty ritual techniques, hollowed because detached from belief, and shows their power nonetheless. These actions, mystifying and terrifying as they are, retain their resonance and effectiveness. They are thoroughly convincing and charged, even though we are aware of their pretence and preposterousness. We are sceptics pushing at taboos; teenagers toying with a Ouija board, as terrified as we are disbelieving. There is a tension in the way we watch, a push and pull that is at once detached and thoroughly suckered in. And this duality is crucial.

After all, the figures the performers represent, even almost become – the shamans and witch-doctors – were the powerful elite of their time. The media moguls, oligarchs and politicians are no less manipulative and no less the beneficiaries of circumstance. The ground on which they stand is no less fragile; the terms they rely on no less solid. And by the end of Make Better Please, you feel we could just storm their safeguards.

Photographs: Ben Dowden

9, West Yorkshire Playhouse

Seen during the Transform Festival 2012Critics sometimes talk about the white heat of the playhouse, referring to the energy of a show carrying into the writing process that follows it. It’s sort of the holy grail of criticism. It involves pinning down the experience of watching a particular performance on a particular night in a particular theatre. It’s a phrase used to convey a review that seems to have been marinated in the atmosphere of the moment itself. It’s also used to excuse a heartfelt opinion solidified in print that has been cooled by the cold light of day.

More than any piece of theatre I can remember, 9 needs and exists in that white heat. Outside of the moment, at room temperature, its individual elements could be fairly inert, but in performance, with an audience to act as Bunsen burner, it erupts into the most tremendous chemical reaction.

That makes writing about 9 six days on rather difficult. It would have been difficult by the next day, because 9 doesn’t really work on paper. Judged as staged content, as one might an RSC production or even another of Chris Goode and Company’s shows, it could easily be dismissed as mediocre. It is not. Quite the opposite, in fact; it is extraordinary and watching it has completely changed my understanding of what theatre is capable of.

However, that will not come across in a witness statement of what happened onstage. Translating 9 into bald descriptive prose – and then, and then, and then – would be like serving a fondue after it has had time to cool. Served cold, it’s not really a fondue anymore; it’s just cheese.

(Actually, now I’ve come back to that line to edit this, I can see what was underneath that analogy. Like 9, a fondue is process as much as product. Judged as content alone, 9 looks naïve; but as an event or process that naivety is not only integral but, arguably, pivotal. As such, there is a degree of relativity in the mix. It’s quality hinges on the people involved. That’s not a usual state of affairs for criticism and the risk is that any praise looks patronising. However, no standards have been lowered in the making of this review; they have just had a wider scope.)

Nonetheless: 9 consists of nine solo performances* by nine members of the public. Nine non-professional performers. By nine participants drawn from the local community.

Actually, let’s just call them people. That’s what they are and that’s exactly how 9 treats them. Not, as so often in participation projects, as examples of a particular species of person. Not as charity cases or quota-ticking devices. But as people, in and of themselves.

Together, they do represent a species, but it is all-encompassing: people. Maybe ordinary people, but each one of them seems both extraordinary and extra ordinary at the same time.

So, 9 consists of nine solo performances by nine people. Each performance is a self-portrait of sorts. They are absolutely individual, ranging from a self-penned song sung to an abstract movement piece moved to an autobiographical monologue spoken. In each case, the verb is as integral as the noun; the performing is essential to the performance. Only one – the last, in which Emi Neilson performs a flamenco dance – attempts anything remotely virtuosic.

To skim through the individual performances from my notes made at the time, they are, in order:

• Fabiana Kvam, an Italian mother, dressed in an Anne Boleyn-style dress, charting her life in shoes: youth’s carefree colourful heels; a bride’s dainty white heels; two toppled black shoes for a death; and a trail of gold and silver killer heels, a second youth, even more carefree than the first. Intermittently interrupted by recordings of her daughter on the phone, talking about events in her own life.

• Oliver Scarth, 23, born with a hair lip cleft palate. Talks about the condition with honesty and humour, from his family’s initial reaction (Grandmother: ‘Oh my God, he’s got foot and mouth.’) to their support that gave him such self-confidence. Paints on a screen, removes a stencil, leaving the words: ‘Thank you Mum.’

Shelia Howarth

• Sheila Howarth, whose parents arrived from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush in 1948. A nurse – ‘I remember the first time I saw a dead body’ – with a hearty sense of humour. Survived a heart attack and cancer. And tells us about it, intermittently interrupted by phone calls.

• Benjamin Fisk, 27 (I think), a social worker armed with a soap box and a trombone. Talks passionate and levelly about the coalition and their cuts and emits angry squawks on the trombone. “It allows us to see one another. It allows us to really see one another and to think we’re not alone,” he says.

• Marg Greenwood, sings a song with a verse for each of the five best bits of her life. The lyrics are tiny fragments, a list individual words, shards that piece together a time and a place.

• Sahzia Ashraf, early thirties, dressed in a maestro’s tails. Bows and moves to grand piano. Gets up. “I was about to play Chopin” Opts for something edgier: Shostakovich. No Classical Indian to reflect roots. No, own composition: Nine Shades of Shazia. “I wish I could play piano,” she says, “then you’d understand how hard I’ve worked, how hard I’m still working.”

• Natasha Canfer, walks towards a cot, but door shuts before she reaches it. There is recorded text – obscure but the fragments you grasp sound heartbreaking – that could be about a lost child or a failed donor conception process. When it repeats, you realises it’s the latter. She is surrounded by (projected) ticking clocks a sound she hates. There’s a Charles Darwin quotation: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive.”

• Anne Cockrem, sits herself down on a bench and starts a meandering monologue about dumplings which weaves into childhood nostalgia and first homes. A chorus of young performers appear and mirror her hand actions – usually something mocking and derogatory, here playful and mischievous; a shared joke that exists in creeping smiles. Is the movement finely choreographed? “I came to Leeds when things went wrong, but then I meet my husband.”

• Emi Neilson, in a grey trouser suit (bold green lining) at an oversized desk. Shreds paper, quietly answers the telephone (this time within the fiction), shreds more paper, folds paper airplane then erupts into throwing paper and emptying shredder before dancing a fierce, loud stomped flamenco.

On one level, you can watch 9 as a showcase. Nine individual pieces to be watched distinctly, each on its own particular terms. In between each one, as soothing music plays and sketches from the rehearsal room are projected onto the floor, you swipe the etch-a-sketch, cleanse the palette and start again. This is how reviews have tended to approach it, comparing one piece to another and selecting particular highlights within the whole. Seen like this, 9 becomes a variety show.

And it is. But it’s also not.

You can also watch 9 as a series of character studies. Each performance is, basically, a theatrical introduction by which we learn about the person onstage and their personal history. Take a visual art metaphor and it’s a gallery of (self-)portraits. Take one from theatre and it’s a postmodern, post-verbatim twist on Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues, only with real people and without judgement.

And it is. But it’s also not.

But we’ll come back to all that in a bit.

****************

There is a film called Nine. I haven’t seen it, but at some point while writing this, I recalled seeing a trailer for it before some other film. As I remember, it was a showy, sexy trailer with lots of famous actresses dressed in suspenders. IMDB tells me Daniel Day-Lewis was in it. And Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren, Marion Cotillard and Penelope Cruz. Yes, I remember Penelope Cruz in the trailer. (How could anyone forget?)

Anyway, IMDB also tells me that Nine is about a world-famous film director called Guido Contini, who gets writer’s block and, when the time comes to start making his next film, doesn’t know what it’s going to be about. Eventually, after a lot of soul searching with a lot of beautiful women, he ends up making a film about himself.

Benjamin Fisk

This 9 is absolutely the opposite. The directors – Chris Goode, Jamie Wood and Kirsty Housley – are essentially invisible. I don’t even know – and we’re not told – who directed each individual piece. It’s not important. Their project is, at one level, not their project at all. It’s certainly not about them. They become facilitators, there for the sake of the performers. Their skills and expertise are not used for self-expression, but entirely to aid and abet the self-expression of others.

In fact, watching 9, you get the impression of an entire theatre doing likewise. All its facilities and equipment, its artists and administrators and technicians, possibly even its audience as well, have been placed at the disposal of and devoted to these nine individuals. That’s a major regional theatre with a £1.5 million annual government subsidy turned over for the sake and service of its constituents in a way I have never seen anywhere else ever. (Now go and read Alan Lane’s blog on why this is so important.)

This – and I know it sounds crass – is the magic ingredient. This is 9’s white heat. Because performing in 9 so obviously means an enormous amount to each of those nine people. And not only are they performing, they are performing something of their own making, for their own ends and expression. You can see the thrill, the relish, the mischief every one of them takes in holding an audience and in simply being heard. 9 is made by that spirit of joy and achievement and, second, by the spirit of generosity that made all of that possible.

In the stalls, tingle follows tingle and goosebumps grow on goosebumps. Frogs hop into throats, butterflies swarm in your stomach and your chest swells and swells like a hot air balloon inflating. At moments, you find yourself crying. At others, you just smile and nod. The ideal criticism would be that feeling; my sending you a pill that replicates those effects. The optimism, pride and admiration of it all. The empathy that makes 9 intensely human.

****************

There is more to it than that, however, because 9 hangs together as a constructed whole as well. That is, as a piece of theatre – without the qualification of participation or community or whatever. There are repeated motifs and patterns within that add up to a coherent, thoroughly uplifting dramaturgy, which is just as responsible for the above emotional response. Those taking part are both specific and abstract, individuals and members of the (whole) species: that is, they are people and they are ‘people.’

Oliver Scarth

Here, it helps to return to the variety show model, because 9 is the antidote to Britain’s Got Talent. It is not, in itself, a variety show (though, as I say, it can be seen as such), but it borrows the form of variety.

At the start of each individual performance, two swing doors at the back of the stage rush open. (They are plain; the sort you see in public institutions or at swimming pools, only black and without portholes.) The stage itself is dark and the backstage, undressed and very much part of the real world, is lit, meaning the performers stands momentarily framed and silhouetted. It’s a ‘Tonight, Matthew…’ moment; an X-Factor entrance; almost a Jerry Springer moment. And it knows it.

And, moreover, it subverts it. 9 refuses to reduce people as such reality television does. It never defines them in terms of a single quality – be it a talent, a sob-story, a dispute, a perversion, whatever. It lets them be whoever they want to be and to be different things at the same time. In a single person. It celebrates them as individuals, as rounded individuals, and, in doing so, celebrates the species, all of us that don’t usually receive such celebration.

****************

“It allows us to see one another. It allows us to really see one another and to think we’re not alone.”

“I wish I could play piano, then you’d understand how hard I’ve worked, how hard I’m still working.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive.”

“I came to Leeds when things went wrong, but then I meet my husband.”

“Thank you Mum.”

****************

Really, the talent on show here is simply survival itself. Its offshoots are seen in many forms: motherhood, humour, overcoming illness and so on.

That three of the pieces (Fabiana Kvam, Sheila Howarth and Emi Neilson) include telephone calls suggests the intrusion of real life into the sphere of performance. It seems to say that we can’t all live life on stage and, by extension, we can’t all do everything we might want to do. There simply isn’t enough time or money or opportunity or ‘talent’ (in the most conventional sense of the word) for that. For those lucky enough to do so, it’s a luxury, but it’s not a right over others. Neilson’s angry, trance-like flamenco, bursting out of a monotonous desk job, is proof that life is dictated by circumstance as much as anything. 9 is a passionate demonstration that, contrary to celebrity culture and ‘the way the world works™’, no one life, no one person, is more intrinsically worthy of celebration than any other.

This raised my one misgiving with 9, namely its own selection process. The nine performers were selected from 130 applicants on the back of an interview process. They were chosen for some reason by the artists responsible. I asked Chris Goode about this afterwards and he maintains that they could have picked any nine people and made the same – and simultaneously a completely different – piece. Nonetheless, I can’t help thinking that the process needs some degree of arbitrariness to wholly commit to its inherent utopian philosophy. Is that practical? I couldn’t say, but I imagine it would raise real challenges of its own in terms of the process and any final performances.

Each time the double doors swing open, they seem to pluck the particular performer out of the world outside the theatre. It’s like the human equivalent of one of those weak-gripped grabbing machines in arcades, stuffed with cuddly toys. It’s as if anyone could find themselves suddenly in the door framed, invited to step onto the stage.

That stage is a dream space of sorts. Its aquamarine floor and it’s single bulb with a white loop of wire like thought-bubbles give it an unworldly quality. It seems a space of possibility, a chance to re-imagine oneself away from the accumulations of day to day life. A moment to say: "Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be…"

…white heat.

Emi Neilson

*One of these involves a pianist playing an accompaniment, another involves a chorus of performers moving as an accompaniment, but they are nonetheless essentially solo performances.

Photographs:Richard Davenport

Review: Have I None / The Under Room, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Whatsonstage.com

To say that Edward Bond sits outside of the theatrical mainstream is to underestimate the distance between Moscow and Siberia. His most significant work is still revived and revered – witness recent high-profile outings for Saved and Bingo – but his new writing has been given a consistently wide berth.

Watching the first two of this newly collected trilogy of one-act plays, it’s not hard to see why. In speaking their harsh truths harshly, they are stylistically unfashionable. As bald, unrepentant and confrontational as Bond himself. Their drama is made of bare essentials – husband, wife, stranger or victim, aggressor, mediator – and their language is direct and undressed. Big abstract statements are served neat. The plays are like bones with the meat boiled off.

Both are set in a dystopian future – 2077 to be precise – in which humanity has been deemed its own worst enemy. However, the restrictions imposed from above are far more destructive.

Have I None shows a post-consumerist society, cooped into blank identikit flats and stripped of personal belongings. Even here, a husband and wife fight each other to retain possession of their pumice-grey chairs. A stranger knocks, in flight from a nearby suicide outbreak, claiming family ties. He’s a sudden throwback to the past.

Sean Holmes draws the brutality out of this sparseness, as Aidan Kelly and Naomi Frederick bark at one another; their voices stinging like acid reflux. There’s a real sense of outside threat, always undefined, which leaves behind a residue of fraught desperation.

Holmes’ approach is to play against the text’s plainness. Bond directs The Under Room himself and does the opposite. The result is excruciating. He gives the text such reverence that 33 pages stretch to 105 minutes. Everything exists on the stage precisely as it does on the page. The result is a constant portentousness, rather than the itchy, spluttered urgency that makes Have I None crackle. As it is, this tale of human trafficking is lifeless and its twisted society feels contrived rather than inhuman.

Review: Reunion, Jermyn Street Theatre

Written for Time Out

Two years after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease, Raymond wants to end his life. However, doing so requires the co-operation of his wife Antonia, a committed Catholic.

Reunion's impact comes from its subject rather than John Caine's script. His two-hander mostly consists of ping pong debate during a single day, at the end of which (spoiler alert) Antonia capitulates. Presumably her head gives way to her heart, but her U-turn is implausibly sudden.

Real-life husband and wife Peter Guinness and Roberta Taylor play against the text to save it from sentimentality and clunkiness. It's to their great credit - and that of director Anthony Biggs - that this is relatively watchable.

That said, there is a point at which Caine's script threatens to become really interesting. Dredging through their past, Antonia recalls her abortion and his affair, and suddenly her motives become unclear. Is religion a cover? Is her refusal punishment or penance? What a shame Caine drops such specificity for lazy, surefire sentiment.

Review: Wild Swans, Young Vic

Wild Swans, the opening production of World Stages London, is a bit of a lame duck. Jung Chang’s memoir takes 700 odd pages to span three generations of a Chinese family over the course of a century. Alexandra Wood’s adaptation lasts just 85 minutes and covers only 30 years. There’s a joke about that duck being crisp and shredded as well, but I’m damned if I going to commit to it fully.

I’ve not read the original, but it surprises me that a story generally defined as that of three women has been transformed into one about a single man. Wood makes Shou-Yu (Orion Lee) the protagonist and focuses on his absolutely uncompromising resistance in the face of Chairman Mao’s communist regime.

That’s not to say that Wood has lost the moral ambiguity of Shou-Yu’s conscientious objection. He and his wife De-Hong (Ka-Ling Cheung) are active members of the communist party, often to their own detriment. They follow Mao’s leadership until it’s directives contort and betray the party's own basic principles, causing a vast famine. Shou-Yu stands up to the regime and, for the rest of his life, refuses to back down. Not only does it cost him his freedom, it costs De-Hong’s as well – and, in time, the black mark sticks to their daughter Er-Hong (Katie Leung). Shou-Yu remains resolute and his family are repeatedly impacted.

In these terms, the dramaturgical skeleton is very strong, but Wood has not written a theatrical adaptation so much as a staged précis. Her script has all the fat of Jack Spratt’s supper and Chang’s account is reduced to its bare bones. We see the steel supports, but not the building itself. Accordingly dialogue is strained beyond credibility: “Don’t you know there’s a new directive?” sort of thing. Almost everything is illustrative or demonstrative, and as such, only convinces when the narrative portrays some ritual or other.

Any narrative art is a matter of handling symbols, whether they be words or images or something else. The component parts of a story resonate beneath the story itself and carry the meaning. In good narrative art, these will be significant and, crucially, unobtrusive. They must exist beneath the surface without puncturing it.

Different forms require different methods. A novel can disguise a significant detail amongst a mass of others. Theatre cannot, especially when in such a reduced form as this. Its significant symbols must be thoroughly knitted into the main narrative; they cannot be inessential. Wood falls foul of the trap time and again. Give a copy of A Doll’s House as a wedding present in a novel, for example, and it can be a fleeting reference, gently glanced. Do so on stage and it lands with a thudding clunk, screaming ‘CHECK OUT THE SYMBOLISM, GUYS,’ as it does.

However, Wood’s approach can still work onstage, but it needs a completely different mode than the one director Sacha Wares attempts.

Wood could have committed to a four hour adaptation, fully fleshing out every stage of the original, scene by scene, in a manner that corresponds to the way people speak and act. She hasn’t. She has written a playtext that knows it’s a playtext; her adaptation is a piece of storytelling – even if it doesn’t directly acknowledge itself as such. Essentially, it is a purely Brechtian tale, told starkly and at one remove. To play it as naturalistically as possible, as Wares does, is frankly embarrassing. It makes the actors look terrible, through no fault of their own, as they desperately try to instil life in two-dimensional stiffs, and it makes the writing looking atrocious. What this needs is a definite sense of stage and a company of actors working together to tell a story for an audience. Wares tries to give us the story alone.

Ironically, it is Miriam Buether’s design – the single element that really makes an impact – that must harbour a good deal of the blame. Buether’s stage is a cinematic strip; a shallow panorama that, as China springs up into its modern high-rise form, gains depth and complexity and changes from straw and mud to metal and mirrors and projection. It carries the course of history at the heart of the play effortlessly, but completely upends the playing of it.

Buether opts to set each scene in its intended location. We get strips of farms, hospitals and labour camps. We know each is a theatrical construction, because we’ve seen the cast frantically working to change the scene – sometimes for as long as five minutes – but we are still, ultimately, asked to see the setting rather than the stage. However, the text as it is, can only exist on stage, not on location. It’s no coincidence that Wild Swans is best when wordless or during its scene-changes and set-pieces. The move is from gross pretence (the farming acting is particularly cringeworthy) to some level of reality.

As it is everything – text, direction, acting, design – is pulling in different directions. No production can afford to do that, least of all one that sets its stall by the Marxist ideal.

Photograph: Chris Nash

Review: Autobiographer, Toynbee Studios

Written for Culture Wars

The philosopher John Locke devised a problem to demonstrate the non-equivalence of memory and personal identity. He wrote about a child stealing apples, who as a young soldier on the battlefield remembers that earlier theft. As an old man, he can remember leading troops into battle, but can’t remember stealing apples as a child.

Melanie Wilson’s Autobiographer shows a life in four such segments. Flora, a woman in her late seventies (Janet Henfry) looks back on her life. She’s surrounded by three former selves, each played by a different actress. We see her in her early fifties (Penelope McGhie), mid thirties (Wilson herself) and late teenage years (Alice Lamb).

Autobiographer is framed as an attempt to address dementia, but it needn’t be seen directly as such. It feels more universal than that: not a specific medical condition, but the standardterms and conditions of life. It reads about aging and memory, about life and identity as processes. Given that the programme notes – and we don’t get a programme until after the event – point out that “dementia is not an inevitable consequence of aging,” the possibility of universality feels like an oversight. It makes dementia, a topic it seeks to separate, blend into ordinary experience.

Because the three younger women don’t feel like memories “refracted through the lens of dementia,” as the playtext blurb puts it. Instead, each seems in tact, untouched by the erosion of memory loss, and therefore to exist more fully in their own right. Perhaps each self remembers its immediate predecessor into existence onstage – making Autobiographer a series of subsets; memories within memories like Inception’s dreams within dreams or Locke’s aging apple thief – but the different Floras seem to exist more independently than that.

The four women pick up one another’s sentences without conversing between themselves. They mirror each other’s thoughts: facing one another “from the other end of the…telescope.” For me, they read as entities separated in time. Wilson shows us a life carved up like Damien Hirst’s sliced cow: only viewable as a whole from the outside.

I don’t think this diminishes anything. Autobiographer remains a beautiful composition, tender and warm and humane. Seen from this angle, it becomes an interesting companion piece to Nick Payne’s Constellations. Rather than flicking through parallel presents, it shows four points on a single thread.

At each stage, Flora is a different person – certainly in terms of the way we read character on stage according to the symptoms (or symbols) of their state of mind. They all wear the same cocktail dress: a deep emerald; elegantly simply. Beneath it are different shoes: trendy brogues, serious straps, practical flats, comfortable suedes. Zoom out and the impression is of a continual present and constant regeneration.

Wilson’s practice suits this perfectly. Autobiographer plays in the round, in a space constructed to allow 360° surround sound. It’s a disorientating swirl of footsteps, muffled voices, snippets of songs and other sounds. It’s a blur of half-memories; an attic full of life’s flotsam. Because we are inside the sound, rather than listening in, the effect is like immersion. Add in Wilson’s poetic and sensual text, not quite onomatopoeic, but imagistic, textural and flavourful, almost entirely natural (dandelion clocks and individual feathers, rustling leaves, stone walls and birdsong) and her voice – down-soft, 95% just breath (her fellow performers follow suit) – and Autobiographer seems designed to disappear almost instantly, as if to negate itself. Words pass from one ear to the other, tickling your brain on the way through. Any sense of narrative, of certainty, is impossible. Individual images fade from view, sequences shrink in the rear view mirror.

Wilson makes theatre as spa-treatment. Her work seeps through you, washes over you and leaves you refreshed. You exist alongside it, surfing moment by moment, completely outside out of everyday time. Autobiographer is experienced entirely in the present, just as the Floras (and the rest of us) live life.

However, by the same token, it leaves only a vague, wispy residue behind. Rather than piercing through the vagaries of the ideas contained, it matches them and, as such, Autobiographer can feel like an entrancing mobile to be gawped at unthinkingly. The piece is passed through without significant lasting impact or transformation.

And yet, there is continuity. “I am a dress pattern,” says the 70 year-old Flora, a phrase repeated in different permutations by the other selves. The pattern is always the same, but the difference is in the way it sees itself, its position relative to the world: “I am a dress pattern of a mother;” “I am the dress pattern. My mother made me;” “The pattern of a dress my mother made.” (Emphasis my own.) It’s not just the continuity of an individual life, but that life as part of a larger cycle, one that will continue without us. A life might be lived as a process, but its effects knock on. Wilson’s work, less so.

Photograph: Monika Chmielarz

Review: Chalet Lines, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Chalet Lines takes you by surprise. It takes time to confirm exactly what sort of play it wants to be and, by the time you realise, it’s very nearly too late.

At first, it looks like a broad, hearty comedy about working class women in the north of Great Britain. We’re at Butlin’s. There’s a 70th birthday in the process of going tits up. There’s plenty of cheap plonk and an undercurrent of familial friction. Characters catch each other with the sort of gruff Geordie sarcasm that lashes lovingly. Tonally, it’s not a million miles from one half of Stags and Hens.

A couple of flashbacks later, however, and Lee Mattinson’s play has turned into a wistful whizz through the generations.

Mattinson guides us through four generations of the Walker family. Barbara (Gillian Hanna), the birthday girl of the first scene, has two daughters: Loretta (Monica Dolan, a supporting beam), who’s cocked up the restaurant reservation, and her favourite Paula, who hasn’t even turned up. Loretta’s daughters, Jolene (Robyn Addison) and the awkward Abigail (Laura Elphinstone, superb) are also along for the cava-fuelled palava.

From there, it’s back to 1996, where the Spice Girls blare out over preparations for Paula’s hen do. Neither Loretta nor Barbara have been invited; not that that stops them bursting in and putting their own boozy stamp on proceedings. Then, zap, further back. 1961. The night before a nineteen year-old Barbara’s shotgun wedding to a man she doesn’t love. She’s pregnant (presumably with Paula, though Sian Breckin is at least a decade too young) with another man’s child.

Chalet Lines isn’t a state of the nation play. The women are too culturally specific for that. Nonetheless, it’s trying to work along similar lines, showing the currents of change over fifty-odd years for a certain section of British society. It’s worth noting that Butlin’s sold off almost all of its post-war camps in 1998, with the remainder bought out by a corporation two years later. The run-down chalet becomes a symbol of something that has struggled to stand the winds of time. The wallpaper is the same throughout: pallid blue and sour cream.

Women and class are definitely up for discussion. What’s less certain is Mattinson’s point. It’s left ambiguous – almost to the point of contradiction – as to what he’s lamenting. Is it the endless and vicious cycle of inherited values? Or is it the moral decay of the past half-century? In other words, with regards the three eras sat side by side, should we be looking at the differences or the similarities?

However Chalet Lines pretty much tells you not to bother looking at all. Mattinson’s characters and events are larger than life. Its gags are slick and its sentiment is unabashed. Characters often voice the themes of the play. All this smacks of a writer siding for flair and entertainment over truthfulness. That’s fine; there are good plays like that. But they can’t make nuanced, near-contradictory sociological points. Mattinson obscures his astute and subtle ideas with surface currents. He promises to come to you, but whispers long words from afar. Chalet Lines is too light to carry its weight.

Mattinson’s writing is concerned with patterns rather than people and he finds really elegant notes of synchronicity between the different periods. However, his surfing of history and its gaps is less convincing. It’s never clear how Barbara went from knock-kneed sweetness to knees-up knockabout.

Loveless marriages recur throughout. Abigail’s is just as enforced as Barbara’s. Aged 16, awkward and dysmorphophobic, she’s dolled up by her mother and marched out of an unsuitable date. Loretta’s marriage is equally tragic: by 96, she’s submitting herself to anal sex just to keep hold of her unfaithful husband. She’s still subservient fifteen years on, serving tea every day and suggesting Abigail “spend more time on her knees in the bedroom than the bathroom.” The implication is that Jolene, who’s newly engaged – at last – to a redcoat she meet two days ago, will follow suit.

Marriage is something done to please one’s parents. It’s regarded as a girl’s sole aim in life and these women are deemed – and often deem themselves – nothing without a husband. (This is despite a disdainful view of men, all described in childish terms. One strips naked to use the toilet, another wears a Daffy Duck T-shirt.) The message of how to win and keep a husband is passed from mother to daughter, just like the (almost imperceptibly) off-white wedding dress first worn by Barbara.

Yet Mattinson blurs the sense of endless continuity by implying a start to the cycle with Barbara in the sixties. It’s a move that lays blame with the baby-boomers and follows the moral decay from there. The odd sherry becomes bottles of Pomange then cheap supermarket cava. Lavatories become loos then shits. “This is what lasses do,” Loretta screams at Abigail in 1996, “They have fun. They talk about lads…Lasses have sex.”

Not in 1961, they didn’t. Those that did got frogmarched down the aisle.

Hardwon freedoms have been taken for granted and abused. Barbara sacrifices love to marry for the promise of “a world of colour.” By 2012, it’s everywhere, but Loretta, in a punchy floral dress, can’t ever see it: “There’s no colour anywhere anymore.”

This is the key to Leslie Travers brilliant cubist set, which has the chalet as if caught mid-blast or mid hurricaine. Walls and ceilings seem to have split apart, splintered under the force. Funfair lightbulbs – red, blue, yellow and green – puncture the walls like a threatening invasion of Triffids. The angular shapes correspond to the ramps of a ride. It’s a brilliant metaphor for the women’s lives: all quick thrills that leave you nauseous.

Because these women, broadly speaking, live not hand-to-mouth but week-to-weekend. Everyone is expected to do likewise: chicken fillets go in, skirts get rolled up and heels ratch up a notch.

Only Paula escapes, moving on to a middle-class life. To do so, she has to face down reverse snobbery and peer pressure that form the vortex of inherited values. Ultimately, she has to leave her unreconstructed family behind. Abigail should have done likewise years ago, but fell foul of the trap.

New artistic director Madani Younis has brought out cracking performances from his cast, but both fall foul of the play’s dual personality. The problem is that by gunning for the brash and crass working class tastes, he turns them into a laughing stock. Actually Mattinson’s play has got a more sympathetic heart than that, but it’s too keen to dress up and sell itself out for laughs.

Photograph: Tim Smith

Review: Black T-Shirt Collection, National Theatre

Written for Time Out

Performance poet Inua Ellams returns to the National with this contemporary fable woven from real world geopolitics. As their fashion line of bespoke black T-shirts expands into mass production, two Nigerian foster brothers find themselves swept around the world by market forces like pollen in the wind.

Muhammed and adopted Matthew are opposites: one a charismatic, business-minded Muslim, the other a reserved Christian artist. When Muhammed's homosexuality is outed, they're forced to leave their home nation - and family - for Egypt. With business blossoming, running away becomes a profit-driven relocation.

It's like Daedalus and Icarus re-imagined in consumer capitalist terms, with their eventual downfall coming in a Chinese fabric factory. However, fables leave little room for substantial interrogation and, without room for qualifications, Ellams's portrait of their world is too broad. Making London a model of multicultural harmony seems particularly problematic.

Nonetheless, you sink into his storytelling, which paints vivid mental images and, thanks to minimal yet eloquent sound, a real sense of location. Ellams has an easy, laid-back charisma and pares poetic flair for narrative with admirable restraint. The wordsmith remains present, though, and his sentences, with their sophisticated flavour and texture combinations, can be something of a Michelin-starred mouthful.

Review: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Apollo Theatre

For five years, Eugene O’Neill’s early work has taken precedence over his later accepted classics in this country. It’s as if, by staging his final play A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2006, the Old Vic reset the cycle. Since then, there have been major productions of his first success, The Emperor Jones, earlier full-length plays like Anna Christie and Beyond the Horizon, as well as a trawl through his inceptive sea-set shorts, but – as far as I can tell - nothing written after 1924.

These are all powerful pieces of drama, such is the skill of a playwright often dubbed America’s Shakespeare. However, towards the end of his career, O’Neill’s arsenal went nuclear, particular when he began to power them with a core of angry autobiography. Long Day’s Journey into Night – his third-last, finished in 1945 – is a juggernaut of a play. It makes his earlier works look like park lake pedalos.

The Tyrone family are the O’Neills by another surname and they smell just as sour. Like the playwright’s own father, James Tyrone (David Suchet) is a brilliant actor, stuck in the commercial quicksands of The Count of Monte Christo. Laurie Metcalf’s Mary, his wife, has just slipped back into the morphine addiction that has plagued her since difficulties during the birth of her newly tuberculitic youngest son Edmund (Kyle Soller). Their eldest, James Jnr (Trevor White), is an ill-disciplined mess of a failed actor, prone to booze and broads.

The collapse of the Tyrone family, like a detonated tower, is awful both in its suddenness and its scale. Between breakfast and bedtime, they suffer an implosion that leaves nothing standing. Yet O’Neill never once relies on an extraneous event to achieve this. The meltdown is inevitable; their self-combustion is inbuilt or pre-programmed; an inescapable fate. It happens after years of corrosive routine. Long Day’s Journey into Night shows the day the dam bursts.

O’Neill’s play is incredible because it works exquisitely in both directions. Watch to see what happens next and the sheer force of momentum is overpowering. Work backwards, playing detective, and it’s arguably even more rewarding. O’Neill has carefully linked together such a careful chain that the root causes of root causes become visible. Anthony Page’s outstanding production possesses absolute psychological – and political – clarity.

As a surface skewering of the American dream, Long Day Journey into Night is just as swiftly ruthless as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the set-text on the subject. James Tyrone’s endless expansionism, ploughing his money into new (dodgy) real estate, is the reason for his extreme thriftiness. He’d rather squint in the light of a single bulb, than read clearly, and Suchet sends his glance straight to the level of the whisky bottle on every entrance.

Metcalf, meanwhile, catches sneaky glimpses of herself in the mirror, as Mary attempts to keep her visible symptoms in check. Soller does the same with Edmund’s handkerchief after each corrosive cough, ensuring any specks of blood stay secret.

It is at this personal level that O’Neill’s play has its real potency. It is a vicious chain reaction. One character’s best intentions enflame another’s greatest concern. The Tyrones ruin one other. They can’t help it.

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” – Mary Tyrone

Suchet makes you realise the strength of James’s love for his wife. Brusque with his sons, he softens with her, either to joke or to nurse. It is for her sake and security that he’s careful with his money, blind to the actual effects of his actions. “I’ve never felt it was my home,” she says, “Your father would never spend the money to make it right.” Likewise, the more Edmund worries for his mother and her morphine use, the more she worries back and, so, returns to the drug she took up after his birth and for which he’s blamed to the point of breakdown. They drag each other down.

Most of all, though, James is entirely self-made. He started with nothing and provided his children with the opportunity not to have to follow suit. Yet, that also strips his sons of the opportunity to earn his respect. He sees them, like his property portfolio and his whisky (which remains the same level, but weakens over the course of the play), as assets – products of and testimony to his own achievements – rather than people in their own right. Their failures are his shame and the shadow of that shame only furthers their failures. His ultimate flaw is the belief, gained from his own upwards life journey, that the individual is responsible for his or own fate, for better or worse. He is capable of empathy, but never sympathy. He is blind to his own weakness, namely financial ambition, because the culture to which he subscribes (capitalism) decress it a virtue. The tragedy, therefore, is that he can no more change his nature than Edmund can alter the fact of his birth.

Nonetheless, James ruins his family with his meddling, removing their agency by employing his own. Suchet’s James is a puppeteer. He orchestrates his family with glee. “Maybe if you asked your mother now what you said you were going to –“ he says to Edmund, before an almost comically hasty exit, “By God, look at the time.” In the final act, he confesses to his youngest son that he regrets his career path to easy riches over difficult roles. (How many of us can say otherwise?) Not only does Suchet let you glimpse the glisten of potential – if rusty – greatness, he manages to find echoes of both Prospero and Faust in there. In his moss-green dressing gown, he could pass for either.

Then there’s Metcalf, who perhaps overdoes the physical symptoms of Mary’s morphine habit by wheeling and ticking about the stage, but handles the text extraordinarily. She skims over and whizzes through the obvious passages, where O’Neill is a tad too direct, and instead indulgences the trivialities, hovering on inconsequential phrases as if distracted by a secondary thought. Soller is both physically and emotional concave as Edmund, as hollowed by the years of blame as by his illnes. He manages to express a felt fear of death alongside an intellectual dismissal of such fears. White catches the right note of self-loathing in James Jnr’s reproaching bitterness.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night needs nothing but a straight bat. It thrives in the detailed playing and Page’s production offers more than enough to justify the play’s greatness. Possibly more than any play I’ve seen before, I left the theatre with a far greater understanding of how human beings function and how they self-destruct.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Uncle Vanya, Print Room

Written for Time Out

Chekhov famously fell out with Stanislavski when the latter directed The Cherry Orchard as a tragedy. On that basis, he'd have loved Lucy Bailey, whose comic production of his Uncle Vanya makes it seem like a higgledy-piggledy Benny Hill chase sequence.

Deep in rural Russia, bailiff Vanya pursues Yelena, the visiting landowner's wife. So does his friend Dr Astrov, himself chased in turn by Sonya, Yelena's stepdaughter. Bailey's emphasis on comedy suits the men better than the women.

Worlds away from Game of Thrones, Iain Glen's lethargic Vanya and William Houston's Astrov laugh to stave off the ennui of country life. They fight melancholy with mockery and so become clowns. Sometimes, they're as absurd as the Godot boys; sometimes even as woebegone as Withnail.

Yelena and Sonya (Lucinda Millward and Charlotte Emmerson), by contrast, are like trapped birds for ever staring out of their cages, longing for escape. William Dudley's set pours light in on them from the outside.

However, Chekhov's pathos gets scuppered. None of them are really, desperately serious about love. It, too, is about killing dead time; a long summer's idle folly. Whether chased or chasing, they all seem victims of circumstance, rather than truly tragic figures.

Nonetheless, this is a fascinating twist on a classic. Mike Poulton's new version - his fourth - is gruffer than most but still eloquent, and Bailey ensures there are plenty of details to occupy any eagle-eyed psychological detective.

Review: Mercury Fur, Old Red Lion

An edited version of this review appeared in Time Out

Had Magaret Thatcher abandoned Liverpool after the Toxteth Riots, it might have looked like this. Philip Ridley’s 2005 play shows London after a similar tactical withdrawal by government. The city is run-down and lawless. It’s inhabitants, delinquent and desperate.

The British Museum has been looted and torched. London Zoo’s monkeys are shot in their cages. In Brick Lane, a zebra burns and the city’s youth are hooked on hallucinogenic butterflies.

In a decrepit council flat, Elliot (Ciarán Owens) and his brother Darren (Frank C. Keogh) are preparing a private party for a wealthy client. It involves a meat-hook and a sedated pre-pubescent dressed as Elvis Presley, and it doesn’t go to plan.

As always, Ridley’s writing is like a firework display. It is agonisingly lyrical: a Molotov cocktail of blood and starlight. Here, he’s also at his most captivating, and his DayGlo dystopia is as thrilling as it is repulsive.

Ned Bennett’s high-quality Fringe revival loses none of the menace or dazzle and boasts superb performances from Owens, Keogh and Olly Alexander as the frazzled naïf Naz. Henry Lewis makes a disturbing cameo as the city-slick Party Guest, wheezing sadistic laughter, and this Mercury Fur makes you bristle all over.