Review: Love Love Love, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

Mike Bartlett takes his title from a Beatles song, but his play is best characterised by another: I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Bartlett wants to tell us something and he makes damn sure we’ll understand.

Eighteen months have passed since Love Love Love premiered at the Manchester Royal Exchange and Bartlett’s central argument – an almighty cry of j’accuse towards the baby-boomers that sought to change the world and, instead, sold it out – has become pretty much an accepted truism.

Given that Bartlett must have started writing a fair whack earlier, it’s hard to fault him for popular opinion catching up. In fact, he was among the first playwrights to raise the topic.

However, there’s something rather limp about it’s appearance at the Royal Court now. In last week’s Sunday Times, Dominic Cooke justified his theatre against recent accusations that it has become a rather safe place in recent years. His argument (which you can find here if you can peak behind the paywall) looks a little like sleight of hand. In defence, he turns to plays like Jerusalem, Enron and Clybourne Park – none of which were deemed safe or took place in the last couple of years.

In the Sunday Times piece, Cooke writes: “At the Royal Court, we programme according to two criteria: the quality of the writing, and whether the play, in either form or content, breaks new ground.”

Love Love Love completely fails the second of these criteria. At least it does now, in 2012. It didn’t when it was written, but if ‘having broken new ground’ counts, then Cooke might as well just programme Look Back in Anger and Blasted on a loop. “When I programmed Butterworth’s as-yet-unfinished Jerusalem in late 2008, it seemed anything but safe,” Cooke continues. Surely he can’t say the same about Love Love Love?

Nonetheless, Bartlett’s writing is genuinely quality. It’s certainly enjoyable. Really enjoyable, in fact: funny; moving; cleverly plotted with rewarding payoffs and intriguing characters. It trades on the 7Up model (documentary not drink) and revisits its characters at definitive moments of their lives and we play spot the difference. It’s a story told partly through pop music, technology and fashion.

First we see a 19 year-old Kenneth (Ben Miles) in 1967, getting off with the girl – Sandra (Victoria Hamilton) – that his squarer brother has brought home. By Act 2 and 1990, they’ve had two teenage children, at least two affairs and, it seems, countless rows. Finally, 2011, Kenneth is divorced and retired. His son’s brain seems to have frazzled and his 37 year-old daughter demands that he buy her a house.

My problem, however, is that Bartlett achieves such rounded satisfaction by sanding down any unseemly edges. In doing so, he almost loses sight of the truth.

At one level, Bartlett’s writing is smart. He plants seeds and sows rewards with a careful pick-up or echo later on. Everywhere you turn there’s irony. While Ken lounges around on his student grant in 1967, his father “works like a dog.” By 2011, his daughter Rose, a musician, is earning a third as much as him, even after his retirement. There’s a satisfying neatness running throughout and James Grieve’s direction makes the utmost of it.

He’s also careful not to let anyone off the hook. Kenneth and Sandra, as the incriminated baby-boomers, bear the brunt, but their kids seem spoilt and incapable of looking after themselves. Rose castigates her parents for encouraging her into music. It looks brattish to curse such fortunes, but at 16 she was discounting music because “the pay’s really bad.”

Of course, as a 27 year-old aboard a similar ship, that looks to me like a case of nurture over nature, but it will doubtless give an older, more sympathetic audience a get-out clause. And they need one because Love Love Love’s central point, its social criticism, rings true to the point of rankling.

However, in trying to make a point, Bartlett has over-simplified. By boiling down a generation into individuals, not so much reflecting the shifting state of the nation and just plonking it onstage, he makes it easy for us and, worse than that, he writes history as the record books show it. Truthfulness is dropped for thesis and, satisfying though its neatness might be, Love Love Love always feels slogan-heavy and manipulative.

In fact, it gets Bartlett into trouble and he ends up with a 37 year old expressing problems more acutely felt by twenty-somethings. That neither George Rainsford nor Claire Foy look old enough suggests a production that’s trying to have it both ways. To get the ages right, however, would have required primary school children in Act 2, which presumably sit somewhere outside of either Rainsford or Foy’s range.

Grieve’s production is also guilty of patronising the past, by both opting for the worst sides of bygone fashions and over-played playing-down. Only Foy, invests a character significantly younger than herself with real credibility, playing the teenage Rosie as a mixture of incredibility and injustice. Elsewhere, Miles relies on a naïve, quavering tenor, Hamilton overdoes the wispy-voiced AQI and Rainsford giggles and huffs to play a 14 year old.

All this neatness is one thing with a fresh point to make and another when it ends up preaching to the converted. (Even when the converted are also the accused.) If we needed our hands held to grasp the point in 2010, in 2012, it suddenly feels terribly patronising. This is not Bartlett’s fault. In this instance, though it gives London the chance to see the play, Cooke has missed the boat. Today Love Love Love belongs in the West End and, as Dan Rebellato has already pointed out, it is directed as such. Contradictory though it may seem, it’s presence in Sloane Square is as damning of the commercial sector that failed to back it as of the Royal Court that stepped in to do just that.

Review: The Hard Boiled Egg and the Wasp, Lion and Unicorn Theatre

Written for Time Out

Dan Leno, one of the all-time great dames of the Victorian music hall, was committed to an insane asylum in 1903. Not content with the ample drama in his actual life, Jonathan Kydd and Andy Street's pudding-headed musical seriously oversteps the mark of poetic licence: Kydd and Street make Leno bisexual - apparently in order to show the crudity of Victorian attitudes to homosexuality and medicine - and change his cause of death - he is bumped off here by a somewhat anachronistic bungled lobotomy.

Even on its own terms, this musical is cackhanded. Comic songs are mirthless - unless sausage gags (wink wink) are your thing. And the straight numbers are risible ('Amelia/I feel for ya/If I had a rod/I'd reel for ya'). Kudos to the cast for brave faces, but this is rotten.

Review: The Suit, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars

Is Brookian an adjective? You know, in line with Brechtian or Stanislavskian? Perhaps it’s better to say Brookist or Brookite. Brookish?

Whatever the word, for better and worse, The Suit is perfectly, absolutely, unconditionally it.

A revised and translated version of Le Costume, seen at the Young Vic in 2001, it aims for simplicity in everything it does. These days Brook’s theatre is a sort of ur-theatre, a deliberate return to a more primitive form. It strips out the conventions and shorthand that have accumulated in search of genuine communication between these performers and this audience.

Instead, Brook and his co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne build a stage language from scratch, reliant on play and recognition. There is no ego here. Whatever works best is used. Other directors would reject Summertime as cliché. Brook accepts it as powerful and clear.

It’s instructive to compare Brook to Sebastian Nübling, because both want the same thing: to make each moment as effective as possible. However, they set about that task in opposite ways. Where Nübling adds, Brook takes away. One is composite, the other triple-filtered to remove any trace of impurity. The Suit wants nothing more (and nothing less) than to tell you a story as best it can.

That story – fable is probably more precise – is one by South African writer Can Themba and in it, a husband discovers his wife’s adultery and subsequently forces her to treat her lover’s abandoned suit as a human being. It is a story, we’re told, that couldn’t happen in a community that didn’t live “under the iron first of oppression.” Here, that’s is the black community just west of Johannesberg, who are increasingly squished into a cramped township.

Brook doesn’t stress the point – there is never a flagged moment to say ‘this is key’ – but Philemon consistently finds others in his place. Bursting for the toilet, he finds it occupied. Waiting for the bus, two pass without stopping – either full or on account of his colour – and when the third finally stops, it’s rammed. Trains home are so full that, each payday, men return home having lost their earnings to pickpockets. Then, of course, there is the other man in his bed.

It is out of this enforced routine of sardines that Philemon’s act of punishment springs. It is an echo of the social order, whereby one can demand obedience from another. It is learned behaviour, though it springs from nature.

William Nadylam’s Philemon recognises this fully. He addresses us when delivering his sentence and, though chiefly serving to maintain distance between actor and character, he seems unable to look his wife in the eye. As if he knows the cruelty of his action – and yet, each time, he cannot stop himself. His face becomes a neutral mask that suggests both shame and relish at once.

Brook even manages to make the punishment seem, at times, noble, even merciful. When Philemon forces Matilda for a stroll with the suit on her arm, the humiliation she feels is real, but it is also imagined, since no-one else is any the wiser. It is a private shame between them and yet – and this is perhaps the crux – Philemon cannot remain entirely detached forever. He must, inevitably, overstep his mark. No man or woman has the right nor the constitution, it seems, to stand in judgement over any other.

This is all well and good, but the Young Vic is not the right context for it. Without wanting to sound snobbish, though inevitably immediately doing so, the fable lacks the sophistication that this particular audience (I generalise, of course) craves. Yet Brook aims to provide, as best as possible, just the story. He aims to do away with the game of hide and seek, of coding and decoding that characterises most theatre. He wants to tell us straight so that we won’t miss the point.

We, in turn, end up admiring that technique – the how rather than the what – and it precisely the transparency and the purity of The Suit that proves distracting. Brook has, in effect, made the simple storytelling show par excellence and we end up marvelling at the excellent simplicity of the telling rather than the story itself.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Guest Post: A Leap in the Dark by David Lan

David Lan, the Young Vic’s Artistic Director, has very kindly agreed to let me host his recent speech to the Goethe-Institut in London as a guest post. It’s a first for this blog, and I’m delighted to be able to share it with a wider audience because, when I first read it a fortnight ago, I found it’s passion and artful eloquence thoroughly inspiring. When I got to the end of the piece, I immediately turned the page and started again. I hope that you’ll do likewise.

A LEAP IN THE DARK

by David Lan, 17th May 2012

A few weeks after I was asked to give this talk, a large cardboard box arrived on my desk. When I opened it, I discovered it was packed to the brim with brochures, each beautifully designed, all issued by the Goethe Institute announcing hundreds, maybe thousands, of events the Institute has sponsored, arranged, underwritten, endorsed or enabled over recent years. Performances, conferences, exhibitions, readings – each a carefully constructed bridge (some wide, some narrow) linking a conversation taking place somewhere in Germany about fine art, about philosophy, about theatre, aboutliterature with similarly lively conversations taking place in other parts of the world.

The theatre I run, the Young Vic, appears on some of those pages. The Institute has supported us most generously. It has enabled us to bring to London leading theatre designers, celebrated in Germany though unknown in the UK, to work with us in my theatre. It has enabled two groups of my young directors to visit the many exceptional theatres of Berlin (once in 2006, once in 2009) seeing shows, talking to their directors, meeting younger German directors and so on.

When I invite young colleagues of mine to visit Berlin, I have one intention and one only. This is, to use a phrase associated with the 1960s, to blow their minds. There is a more vulgar version of this phrase, inappropriate to these august surroundings. I want to suggest that vulgarism even if I don’t actually say it because I want to convey my intention to shock these young people. I want to thoroughly unsettle them and shake them up with the discovery of what extraordinary things it is possible to do on a stage.

Until you experience Berlin theatre you can’t imagine it – a production of Moliere where it snows non-stop for 6 hours, or another which involves the lead actor plastering himself with a whole picnic’s worth of food while wearing a scooped-out watermelon skin as a helmet. I offer just two typical examples. And when you do experience this theatre, you become a little bit more free as an artist, and consequently a little bit more capable of communicating through art the complexity of your own special and individual experience of living in the world.

I know that when I say Berlin I could as well say Germany more generally - Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne - I could refer to the magnificent Three Kingdoms, a co-production between our own Lyric Theatre Hammersmith and Munich’s Kammerspiele (as well as Tallinn’s Theatre No99) now playing in London until the end of this week.

Why are the minds of these young directors blown? Well, they’re impressed by the strength and subtlety of the acting. They’re overwhelmed by the exuberance and expressiveness of the design. But those are symptoms, I think, and not the underlying cause.

The cliché is to say of the work of the Schaubuhne or the Volksbuhne, for example: ‘this is directors’ theatre’ whereas our theatre is a ‘writers’ theatre’. For decades the English theatre has closed its eyes – or, more accurately perhaps, held its nose - at this theatre, aghast at the arrogance, the egotism with which German directors rethink and remake plays which, amongst us respectful, tactful English, are considered sacred in conception as well as in detail.

But disdain gets us no distance. Is it possible to say anything enlightening about what these apparent butchers and blasphemers are trying to achieve?

Well, they’re all individuals, and each no doubt believes all others are sheisters with similar generosity of spirit to that which English directors display when they talk about each other. All the same, I want to generalise a little and try to describe what I think is going on. I’m sure I won’t get very far but this event this evening celebrating Anglo-German collaboration seems, paradoxically, an opportunity to try to give a sense of where, in my opinion, the difference begins.

That’s one paradox. Here’s another.

Despite the fact that the Goethe Institute has been at work in the UK with energy and success for 50 years, Britons barely know the work of Goethe at all. Perhaps we know Faust Part 1. But Part 2? Or his other plays such as Tasso or Goetz von Berlichingen? We know some of the poems because Schubert transformed them into songs – but the novels? How many non-German speakers in the room have read Elective Affinities – or even that global best-seller of its day The Sorrows of Young Werther?

The same is true of me. I know Faust Part 1 and that’s about it - but the reason I know Faust Part 1 is particular.

I grew up in Cape Town. While I was at school – I think I was about 16 – the drama teacher of a girls’ school down the road decided to direct Goethe’s Faust, an imaginative choice, you might say, but an odd one as it contains very few women’s parts– two, in fact, if you except sprites and witches. Having decided, for reasons I can only guess at, not to offer the men’s parts to her students to play en travesti, she looked to neighboring boys’ schools. I was invited to give my Mephistopheles. Which, I must admit, I was delighted to do. Skin tight black leotards and a pair of nifty red horns. I must have looked ridiculous, though people were, as I remember, kind enough not to point that out to my face - my heavily bearded and mustachioed face, that is. Anyway …

Whenever I think about Goethe, whenever I think about Faust, one line of dialogue always comes back to me over the now more than 40 years. At some early point in the play Mephistopheles describes himself like this:

‘I am he who wills evil but who does good.’

What on earth did that mean? I’m sure that even then I was aware that getting to the bottom of this most ambiguous of plays was asking rather a lot of a bunch of adolescents. Even so, to play the part I had to speak this line and it puzzled me.

It’s a paradox, a contradiction. He wills evil but he does good. But if he knows that by doing some particular kind of evil he is, ultimately, doing good, why doesn’t he find some more effectively evil sort of evil to do? How can the Devil consciously do good? Thinking about this - to recycle a phrase I used earlier – blows your mind.

Of course, you remember the story.

When we first meet Faust, he is profoundly bored. He has studied and mastered all legitimate forms of knowledge:

Philosophy have I digested
The whole of Law and Medicine.
From each its secrets I have wrested,
Theology as well thrown in.
Poor fool, despite this sweated lore
I am no wiser than before.

So - new idea - he decides to explore illegitimate knowledge, secret science, the dark arts. In doing so he inadvertently conjures up Mephistopheles.

What Faust doesn’t know is that, in a prologue, Mephistopheles, whose job it is to corrupt human souls and win them over to the dark side, complains to God that human beings are such a push-over, are so easy to corrupt that he, like Faust, is bored to tears. God, knowing Faust to be an inherently good man, sets Mephistopheles the challenge of trying to corrupt him.

So the Devil offers Faust the famous bargain. He offers Faust secret knowledge – in fact, omniscience. Faust, if he agrees to follow the Devil’s path, will lead a uniquely privileged existence. He will solve all the mysteries of the universe. But, if he is ever so enthralled by any part of this experience that he loses his cynicism and his ennui and begs for time to come to a stop, if he finds even one experience so enthralling that he longs for it to last forever, then his soul will be damned to hell. In that case, game over: Mephistopheles 1, God zero.

However, however, however - and here’s the paradox – it is Faust’s character that in everything he does he pushes himself to the utmost limits. He can do nothing half-heartedly. He’s not that kind of guy. In the very act of sinning, of breaking God’s laws, he is exploring and discovering his true God-given nature. Yes, he is bad. But he is so thoroughly, rigorously bad that in being bad he is giving expression to his essence. And so, in the end, even though he sins he is saved.

Which is why Mephistopheles ‘wills evil but does good’.

I can’t be sure I quite saw all the way into this, in some ways, quite conventional argument of enlightenment theology while wearing my skin-tightblack leotard. But, as Isay, the paradox bothered me and I have never able to quite let it go.

What is the paradox exactly? That to find yourself, you have to lose yourself? Or perhaps, better, to save yourself you have to be willing to lose yourself forever. You must be prepared to risk eternal damnation. Faust had no idea, after all, that in the prologue God had decided to take time out from all his other duties and keep a close eye on how his story panned out, that God was standing by, like a doting nanny with an infant, ready to catch him should he fall.

No, Faust has to blindly risk the lot, absolutely the lot. He has to take a leap in the dark.

Thinking of my young directors tempted by me to set out for Berlin, I find it interesting that, as soon as the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles is signed, at once the Devil invites Faust to go on a journey, to fly over oceans, to cross many borders in order to see the old world in a new way.

Faust: Whither away?

Mephistopheles: By any route you please To see both high and low, by lands and seas.

Faust: What means of travelling do you intend? Where are your servants, coaches, horses?

Mephistopheles: I only have to spread this cloak, my friend,
To bear us both, at will, on airy courses.
To questions of your luggage pay no heed
On this bold trip there’s no such paltry need.
A little jet of fire I have in store
To lift us from the earth. With strength to soar,
We’ll mount the quicker, being light of gear.
Congratulations on your new career.

And off they fly. Whether they delayed a day or two to make an application to the Goethe Institute for a travel grant is not recorded.

Ok – what do I take from this?

That the Devil, because he is a devil, tries to do a bad thing despite the fact that he knows – and tells us at the first moment we meet him – that it’s all going to go wrong, in other words it’s all going to go right, in the end.

And Faust, likewise, is totally committed to doing bad things but -provided he does these bad things enough, with total conviction, 100%, then he’s really doing a good thing and will end up in heaven.

In sum: if you are by nature a sinner, sin can be your salvation.

As this evening is a celebration of Germany in England and England in Germany, I’m going straight from Goethe to a writer that, famously, had a profound influence on him: Shakespeare.

Another memory from my childhood.

My father’s family came from a town in southern Lithuania now called Kaunas, then – when it was part of Russia – known as Kovna. They lived in the Jewish ghetto called Slobotka. It was right on the border with Poland, a border that over the centuries was constantly fought over. Sometimes Slobotka was Russian, sometimes it was Polish.

Here’s my grandmother’s favourite joke:

One Lithuanian Jew to another: Oh Mottel, how I wish the Poles would invade.

Second Lithuanian Jew: Are you crazy? Why do you wish the Poles would invade?

First Lithuanian Jew: Because I can’t stand another terrible Russian winter.

My grandparents were intellectuals and Trotskyites. In the late 1920s they escaped poverty and pogroms and crossed many borders and oceans to arrive in Cape Town. There they joined a cultural organization called the Lenin Club where they listened to Brahams on 78 rpm records and read Shakespeare. My father acquired the habit and when I was a kid he used to read Shakespeare to me. You may say that the LeninClub has much to answer for.

I remember particularly his analysis of Polonius’ speech to his son Laertes. Hamlet Act One, Scene Three. Laertes is leaving Elsinore and heading back to France. Before they part, Polonius gives him all sorts of advice and, as everyone knows, ends up like this:

To thine own self be true
And it must follow as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

This to my father was wisdom. ‘To thine own self be true.’

And so it seemed to me. Until, when I was a bit older, I saw a production of the play and realized that, when you see the play in action, Polonius is undoubtedly, to put it simply, a fool. So as soon as I could I said to my father: ‘You tell me that what Polonius says is wisdom but even Hamlet says of him: ‘These tedious old fools.’

But my father, of course, quick as a flash, had the answer: ‘It doesn’t matter what else he says in other parts of the play. Here in this speech he is talking to his son who is about to leave him.’ (This is my father speaking to his son who, he knows, will soon leave him.) ‘In that moment,’ said my dad, ‘Polonius speaks from the deepest part of his heart and tells his son the very best he knows. When he does that, trust me, he knows what he’s talking about.'

Game, set – but not quite match.

Years and years later, I read an insightful piece in the New York Review of Books by the very brilliant Zadie Smith. She was writing, as I remember, in the context of the current widespread criticism of so-called ‘multi-culturalism’. Her point was how easily this brave social experiment can be misunderstood when it is assumed that each individual has only one identity.

Let’s pick an example at random. Pakistani Muslims. If such people choose to live in a closed community of similar people and consequently fail to assimilate - to become English in England and French in France and so on - this is held by certain critics to be a bad thing, a social experiment that has failed.

But it is too easily assumed by these critics that Pakistani Muslims living, say, in East London are Pakistani Muslims and nothing but. Whereas, and here I’m paraphrasing Zadie Smith, don’t we know that a person may be a Pakistani Muslim in their parents’ home speaking Bengali to them but work, say, for Goldman Sacks - or the Green Party - speaking a distinctive dialect of English in that context and go clubbing at the weekends speaking yet another lingo there? And read chick-lit and the London Review of Books and Noam Chomsky and the Motor Bike News. And be gay and in love with a Maori and vote Lib Dem and store on their iPod Bob Marley, Stephen Sondheim, Lady Gaga and Shubert’s setting of Der Erlkoning. (I had to bring Goethe back in somewhere.)

Polonius is a fool, she says, writing of this same speech of a father’s advice to his son, because no human being has a single self to be true to. We all have many selves, multiple selves.

You may be a Jewish intellectual and the son of a Lithuanian Trotskyist who was sometimes a Russian and sometimes a Pole but you’re also a small time businessman and a South African, a white South African at that, and so on and so on. Or son of same.

So here’s the gospel according to Zadie Smith: accept and inhabit the paradox of having a complex social existence. Be a devout Jew or Muslim or Christian at home, a socialist agitator at work and sing karaoke on Thursday nights in a Dalston pub. And live these contradictions each to the nth degree, totally, irresolvably.

This is the theme of Hamlet – ‘I am this but I am also that’. It’s not, as it is sometimes crudely expressed, that he is a man who can’t make up his mind. Rather he is a man of many minds which contradict each other. ‘I am entirely this kind of person but I am also entirely that kind of person.’ At the start of Act Five he has given up trying to resolve it all: is my mother good or evil? Is my dead father an angel or a demon? As he puts it: ‘The readiness is all.’

And at his death he is, like Faust, found acceptable to God, if only in the eyes of his best friend, Horatio, who knows him well in all his contradictoriness:

Good night, sweet prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

But as soon as he’s dead, folks start trying to simplify him and sum him up. Enter Fortinbras:

Bare Hamlet like a soldier to the stage

For he was likely, had he been put on

To have proved most royal.

How the hell does he know what Hamlet might likely have proved to be? He doesn’t know him from Adam, he’s only just entered the room - but Hamlet can’t speak for himself and everyone who’s left alive is too upset to tell Fortinbras to shut up and Shakespeare lets this bunch of cliches end the play.

I remember somewhere Claude Levi-Strauss writing that a human being is like a species. When someone dies it is like a whole species has been wiped out.

How do you know which species you are? As the great Polish adventurer and journalist Ryszard Kapuchinski will tell you, you discover who you are by discovering who you are not. And you do that by encountering ‘the other’ – whatever or whoever that other may be. If you’re black maybe it’s white – if you’re English maybe it’s German. And in that way you discover that what you are not may actually be merely what you are not – yet.

The readiness is all.

Or - to bring in a third wise man, F. Scott Fitzgerald:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

This is what I love about the Berlin theatre. It is a theatre of unresolved paradox, of multiple selves, of salvation through sinning.

It is authentically Shakespeare’s Hamlet - here I am thinking of Thomas Ostermeier’s Schaubuhne production recently seen at the Barbican – but every rule we take for granted is broken. It is set on a muddy field of battle - or is it actually (or also?) a rain-drenched Glastonbury-like rock festival? One actress plays Ophelia but also at the same time Gertrude. The electronic score was written yesterday. Hamlet improvises, swears, abuses the audience as he wanders round the auditorium. And, by some miracle, one’s impression is that everything Shakespeare knew about being human and everything the director and actors and designer can tell you about what being human means to them is intermingled in real time. We are knee-deep in renaissance Denmark but up to our eyes in the present instant. The show is profoundly this and profoundly that. And inside and because of that paradox it is intoxicatingly alive.

Or the Schaubuhne’s current Misanthrope directed by Ivo van Hove. As you’d expect, Alceste is full of bile, a man exceptionally depressed by and disgusted with mankind. That’s what one expects of this character. But what is thrilling is that at the same time he is a man overwhelmingly in love, literally floored by crazy, romantic, sensual adoration – and this wild, rubbish strewn, extravagantly trashed up performance tells you as much about what love is like as you’re ever likely to discover from any stage.

It is only rarely that I find this quality, this ability to express the violently paradoxical nature of human psychology and society - the profoundly irresolvable contradictoriness of it all - in English theatre. To try to sum it up, what I miss is a theatre in which the human mind and human heart are pushed as far, as far, as far - to their furthest possible extent, until just before they snap - and in which they are as alive as anyone can be before they die.

We English editorialise, we rationalise, we explain.

The English theatre is a place where, by and large, one leaves in the cloak room one’s deepest, most adult understanding of what it is to be human alongside one’s umbrella.

Does it matter?

Yes. Because there is a truth about ourselves which we are not telling, perhaps that we are not equipped to tell. Or perhaps we do not really believe that the theatre is a place where it can be told.

If I were to be harsh, I would say that we English, like Faust in Act One Scene One, think we already know it all. Or that we English, like Polonius, are under the delusion that to be true to oneself is a simple, straightforward thing.

And, in case my English colleagues feel I am ungenerous towards their achievements of which there are indeed many, let me be clear that I am not suggesting, though I may seem to be, that British theatre should become like German theatre or, indeed, like any other particular kind of theatre. How could it be? It has to be intensely itself – that’s the point. But I am asking a simple thing: how can we know what we are except by encountering others?

Which is why I am so thrilled that the Goethe Institute made it possible to send my bands of young directors off to Berlin. Later this year another group will spend some time in Munich.

What will they come back with? I have no idea. Honestly, I’m not bothered. My job is just to say: travel the globe, study the rules and then break them, find out who you are. Take a leap in the dark.

Review: Henry VI: Parts 1, 2 & 3, Shakespeare’s Globe

Written for The Guardian

The Balkan states get a bum deal with Shakespeare's trio of Henry VI plays. Not only do they have to contend with the muddle of various dukes, their families and their shifting allegiances – a difficult enough feat even without a language barrier – each has to do so from scratch. By splitting the trilogy up between three companies, the Globe might get three languages into one narrative, but they diminish the epic sweep of its history, whereby sons settle scores started by their fathers.

This is a shame, because as the trilogy progresses, the crown, perversely, seems to grow less important. Each play begins with a throne on stage, which shrinks in each case from a gilded hulk to a wooden cross-frame and finally, a lowly stool more suited to milkmaids than majesty. Rivalry overtakes the impulse to rule. Hatred forgets its first cause. The flip side is a real sense of the inter-generational conflict that runs throughout. This is, after all, a time when fathers battle against their sons and vice versa. Youth repeatedly disrespects its elders and another set of grey-haired wrinklies gets bumped off. After more than a hundred years of war with France, Henry VI’s England is a country desperately trying to rebirth itself. The National Theatre Belgrade open the trilogy with a stageful of dead bodies unfurling themselves back into life.

Curiously, the Serbs ensure this remains very much English history. Their codpieces and leather jerkins could easily have come from a raid on Sherwood Forest, and an Arthurian-style round table dominates the stage, breaking up as the conflict with France wears on to its fractured conclusion and England turns against itself.

Nikita Milivojević directs a physically illustrative production with a sense of humour and, though the continual charades to convey details sometimes feel unnecessary, real clarity. Declaring allegiances as civil war kicks off, the dukes streak their foreheads with red and white war paint. As Henry, a chipper Hadži Nenad Maričić, spiritedly reconciles the two sides, but after a handshake as grudging as any by Luis Suárez, there's little sense of the seething resentment beneath this precarious coalition. Too often, narrative momentum is sacrificed in favour of individual stage images – though the last of these, a scene in which two bickering messengers frantically try to scoop Henry V's spilled ashes back into their urn, is telling.

It's ancient history, too, for the National Theatre of Albania doing Part 2, albeit in its own national garb of bejewelled cloaks and fustanellas. Static and statesmanlike in their purple robes, Henry's court looks the spit of Caesar's senate. Given the murmurs of conspiracy around Indrit Çobani's insipid school-prefect of a Henry, that's not inappropriate, but it is unfeasibly dull. It's far too reliant on the text, forgetting that barely half of the audience can keep up.

Bujar Asqeriu's rebel Jack Cade, a bucolic Rambo of a man, provides a much-needed shot in the arm, but the effect is spoiled by the acting of his rioting followers. We're "treated" to the full gamut of disabled stereotypes: one actor playing a one-armed character with a limb inside a jumper, someone else attempting to be blind, and an assortment of apparent learning difficulties. It's all a bit too 1950s for comfort.

Thank goodness, then, that Macedonia's National Theatre of Bitola brings things up to date in the final part of the Henriad with a bold, cartoonish production played in an assortment of military uniforms that feels somewhat reminiscent of theatre company Propeller. The American director John Blondell's staging is the first to capture the brutality of war – Clifford dies with a stake through his throat – but also the nuances of individual characters.

Petar Gorko's King Henry initially plays the tyrant. He has all the trappings, including a waggish Queen Margaret in killer heels (Gabriela Petrushevska), but relinquishes them for a life free from politics. His successor, Ognen Drangovski's Edward, is every inch the playboy prince, hoiking Lady Gray offstage. Martin Mirchevski and Filip Mirchevski are superb as his two squat, envious brothers; proper little Yorkshire terrors both.

Blondell's masterstroke is to recast two roles, Warwick and King Louis of France, as women. While the men fight for their own egos, dwelling on past enmities and personal ambition, Queen Margaret and these women think only of the future and whose children will sit upon the throne in the years ahead.

Review: Denial, King’s Head Theatre

Written for Time Out

Last year's major revivals of Arnold Wesker's early plays have started to correct his work's overlong absence from London stages.

Denial - a clenched, guttural family drama - proves that there is plenty more where that came from. First seen in Bristol 15 years ago, its London premiere is inexcusably late.

Aged 30, Jenny (Clare Cameron) accuses her father and grandfather of sexual abuse. She's newly divorced and her therapist Valerie coaxes a repressed memory out of her. The denials of Jenny's family, however, suggest that her memories have no basis in reality. Wesker tracks down the culture of blame that scoffs at personal responsbility with ferocious determination, avoiding simplistic distinctions of victim and violator.

However, Adam Spreadbury-Maher's production is too judgemental, undermining the play's central ambiguity. Nonetheless, there's real power here, thanks to gutsy performances, particularly from Cameron, and the nicely reconfigured space in the round: twenty times as effective as the venue's traditional end-on set-up.

Review: Detroit, National Theatre

They make cars in Detroit. Loads of them. Or, at least, they did until around 2008, which left the city’s manufacturing industry in tatters. Around 100,000 jobs disappeared with the closure of 35 manufacturing plants in the area, as car sales slumped after the financial crash.

Lisa D’Amour’s play, first staged in Chichago by Steppenwolf Theatre in 2010, isn’t necessarily set in Detroit. However, it takes place in the heart of the depression that so crippled the city.

And it makes damn sure that you know it. The first fifteen minutes, as it introduces us to middle-aged, middle-class Ben and Mary, are so loaded with see-through symbols of financial decay that I almost lost patience. First, their sunshade collapses. Then, their sliding doors jar. Everyone talks about doing things on the cheap and Mary winces as the pain of her plantar wart: “a really nasty, yes, wart, that grows upward into your foot, slowly so it takes you a while to notice it, and when you finally do it hurts hurts hurts…” Can you see what sort of play it is yet?

In case there’s a sliver of doubt, all this is a metaphor for – as JFK would have said – not having fixed the roof when the sun was shining. Ben (Stuart McQuarrie, channelling Peter Griffin) is a newly-unemployed former-banker. He’s building a website to start his own financial consultancy. His wife’s nerves are shot to pieces. They’re a couple on a downwards trajectory.

So when their new young neighbours, Kenny and Sharon, move in next door, D’Amour makes it quite obvious that we ought to expect a social status switcheroo. For starters, Kenny and Sharon look perfect by comparison. They don’t drink. They work in honest, low-end jobs; in a warehouse and call-centre respectively. They believe in substance over appearance; not for them ‘heirloom tomatoes’ and “special pink salt.”

This must be a play, you think, about the new generation uprooting everything the old-guard have stood for, right? After all, Kenny and Sharon’s house, inherited from a great aunt, is built of brick, to Ben and Mary’s wood. Within fifteen minutes you’re able to confidently predict a shift of riches. Someone’s going to huff and puff and blow a house down and presumably, Ben and Mary’s swish garden furniture will gradually migrate to Kenny and Sharon’s adjacent back yard.

(SPOILER ALERT. AVERT YOUR EYES. RUN FOR THE HILLS. etc etc)

To a certain extent you’d be right. What you don’t anticipate is that the furniture – not to mention Ben and Mary’s marriage – will have been smashed to pieces by the time it gets there. Nor that their house will have been torched to the ground with it, after the four friends celebrate their new-age rejection of all things staid and seize the day with a back yard party. Kenny and Sharon (who met in rehab, by the way) turn out to be modern-day versions of Max Frisch’s Fire Raisers.

Essentially, D’Amour is counselling against the absolute radicalism that handles a crisis with fresh start. She’s warning against throwing baby and bathwater out together and points back forebodingly to the sixties. However, while I admire the conception of this misdirection, she steers in screeching swerves that wreck the play’s suspension. You might be surprised by the narrative’s turns, but you’re unlikely to give a hoot either way.

The problem is that to prime us for her trap, D’Amour has to go so heavy on the symbolism that the play almost becomes a parody of a recession-and-class play. She never misses an opportunity to mirror one character with another – and the impression is of see-through semiotics. Director Austin Pendleton follows suit, dressing Sharon and Mary in similar florals to ensure legibility at all times. That the two women end up kissing is both gratuitous and blandly inevitable.

There’s very little for the cast to do beyond conform to various stage stereotypes. McQuarrie is perfectly genteel and docile, while Justine Mitchell makes Mary a full-beaming neurotic. Clare Dunne and Will Adamsdale are more interesting as the younger couple; starting out totally in touch and communicative before unleashing a whirling wildness.

Ultimately, for all that Detroit’s message makes sense, it feels like a playwright demonstrating rather than doing. Everything exists on its surface, but there’s nothing much to make you pay attention.

Further reflections on Three Kingdoms

On Monday, I went back to the Lyric for a second helping of Three Kingdoms; my fourth, fifth and sixth kingdoms, if you like.

From this point on, there are probably going to be some fairly crucial spoilers.

The recurring accusation of ‘self-indulgence’ thrown at Three Kingdoms continues to rile me up. Watching the production for a second time only underlined how wrongheaded the notion is. Everything in Sebastian Nübling’s production is born out of Simon Stephens’s text. It may not always correspond directly or even obviously to it, but every decision resonates with it. At the very least it poses a challenge. The viewer must attempt to reconcile everything he or she sees into some coherent whole. Given how much Nübling packs into the production, the challenge is rather to find a route through, to connect individual elements and make your own personal sense, even if its not as singular as the sentence above suggests.

While I felt like I had a pretty good handle on things after one viewing, my thoughts were pretty blurry. After a second shot they are far, far crisper and, quite often, confound everything I got from the first time.

**********

First, though a separate note or two about structure.

The moment that has come to stand for the indulgence is Steffen Dresner’s rendition of The Beatles song Rocky Raccoon, which goes on for ages in a rather dreadful tone. Its detractors say that it’s unnecessary. Actually, I realised second time around that it’s rather key to the production’s overall structure.

It’s quite easy to grasp that each act is an echo of the others. However, it’s less obvious at first how strict and far reaching the reflections are. Not only do the same actors play the same role within the narrative of each act (wife, witness, hunted etc), they take the same positions onstage and, moreover, continually, repeat the same dynamics. Rocky Raccoon comes early on in the second act, in Germany. It corresponds almost exactly with the translator in Act One, where he and Stone say ‘OK’ back and forth. In the third act, the equivalent is Stone and Pieker’s exchange over the pronunciation of Rebane (or rather Rrrrebaneh).

Stephens is a notorious planner – he says so himself in this video about Robert Holman – and one can often spot the key to his plays in the repetitions that run through them, whether they be words or images. Here, however, pretty much everything recurs, albeit loosely and discreetly, as form rather than content. The structure of each act is pretty rigid; it needs filling in with content and its gaps need bridging. Three Kingdoms, then, is kind of like Oulipo Literature, in that it sets itself constraints and abides by them.

I only realised halfway through the second run that the white-suited figure played by Risto Kübar, and referred to in the programme as Trickster isn’t actually a part of the play that Stephens has written. At no point does he say anything in relation to the plot. In fact, his only verbal interaction comes in Act Three, when Stone turns to him and says, “Do you have a nickname?” and he replies, “No.” Sure enough, in the script, Eleanor – the prostitute Rübar also plays – is only mentioned as an incidental, offstage character.

The Trickster is there purely as a decoy. He disrupts the clear lines of the detective thriller and fucks with the production’s dramaturgical clarity. He is dummy coding, designed to throw you off on the wrong scent. He looks like he might be The White Bird and he behaves like The White Bird might, but – as we discover at the end – there is no White Bird beyond Stone himself, and by implication, us. He even tells us as much: “Do you have a nickname?” “No.”

**********

Second-time around, in an emptier theatre, I wasn’t quite so blasted by the physical impact of Nübling’s production. That meant I could read both Stephens’s text and the production a bit clearer. As a result, it finally fell into place.

One thing you can’t miss are the deer and the wolves. The prostitutes, wide-eyed, demure and vulnerable, are the deer; the pimps and traffickers, predatory and ravenous, are the wolves. Both images – as well as that of detectives on the trail of criminals – fit with Stephens’s insistence on the importance of smell.

What’s less obvious as a symbol is the grass being eaten. You know it’s there, and you can’t miss it in the third act, when it escalates to the point where everyone’s binging on it and Stone becomes a bail of hay. However, I realised second time around that this is absolutely key. It’s all there in the text: Stone was a botanist and the whole investigation relies on witnesses “grassing.” There’s another line: “The human race is like weed.”

The play’s not just about predators and their prey, but the entire food cycle. It’s the ecology, stupid.

We know, by the end, that Stone proves the very thing he’s hunting. In fact, we’re all every part of that cycle simultaneously: wolves, deer and grass.

Fast-forward to Estonia and the third act. The first scene shows a trafficking gang keeping a woman captive. One of them, Rudie Pieker nicknamed Fredo, is an undercover cop. Like Fredo Corleone, Pieker betrays the rest of the gang. He’s working with Steffen Dresner, the German detective who we discover is a corrupt cop. Pieker is a corrupt cop as well. They both entrap Stone together at the end.

When the three policemen set a sting for Andres Rebane in an empty flat, he asks: “Are you fucking police, Fredo? Fredo, are you fucking police, man?” There is enough ambiguity here to suggest that he could be asking one of two things: a) are you an undercover cop? or b) are you a corrupt cop? We’ve got to look at that first gang again: what if, rather than traffickers, they were the police? Certainly, as Stone disintegrates, the same actors in the same costumes (sheeny suits all round) are the men that interrogate Stone in exactly the same way he and his partner interrogated Tommy White.

What was it Lee and Stone say in the first act? “We’re the biggest gang in London.” / “We’re the biggest gang in Europe.”

By the time, we reach Estonia, there’s no distinction between the two. The whole country is so corrupt that they two are equivalent. Stone has, the whole way through believed in heroes and villains. It’s a peculiarly British way of looking at the world and it seems naïve. Stone, after all, is portrayed as a child – it’s even said outright at the end – he sits on tiny suitcases and looks small; he sits behind a desk and raises his hand to ask a question.

This is Stone’s realisation: there are no cops and no robbers; no good guys and bad guys; no good-cop, bad-cop; no right, no wrong; no good, no bad. There are only people and, in the free market, they are wolves, deer and grass at once.

P.S. Looking back, almost everything in Nübling’s production conforms to this. Characters say one thing, as if they’re saying the opposite. Tommy almost shouts in frustration: “I quite like the Beatles.” Then, when he’s shown the photograph of the decapitated head, he’s calmly matter of fact: “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. No. No. No. No. No. You’re lying. You’re fucking. That’s sick. That’s horrible. That’s. Please fuck. No. No. no.”

I can’t help but thing that Germany comes out of this best. Yes, there people make porn on an industrial scale and slide baseball bats in and out of their anuses, but at least, they make no bones about it.

P.P.S. There’s another image that takes place in Germany that relates to this, but differs slightly. Dresner has stuffed his pockets with crossaint. One is in the right breast pocket of his leather jacket. When he eats it, he does so in a way that looks like a bird feeding its infant, vomiting up food for its child to digest. Dresner, at this point, is feeding and eating the crossaint. Moments later, the prostitue witness – Christina – produces an egg (hard-boiled) and eats the yoke. She births it and destroys it. Isn’t eating one’s own children the ultimate in consumerism?

Photograph: Ene-Liis Semper

On disappointment and Three Kingdoms

On Monday, I went back to the Lyric for a second helping of Three Kingdoms; my fourth, fifth and sixth kingdoms, if you like.

The stalls can’t have been more than a third full. I don’t know what the circle was like, but there didn’t seem to be that many people streaming down the steps after each act. That is an enormous shame.

What was interesting, however, was quite how many practitioners – mostly young – were in the audience. There were directors, actors and designers all over the place. That’s only taking into account the faces that I recognised. (This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I’m still sure that Three Kingdoms will have an impact on British theatre, but it deserves a wider, non-insular audience.) Afterwards – in fact, even in the interval – you could feel the same buzz that’s been buzzing around Twitter all week. You could hear the sound of eyes popping and minds blowing.

(This is also reflected in those reviews that describe the struggle of writing about Three Kingdoms and talk about the need for a new language or form to do so, particularly Jake Orr’s at A Younger Theatre and Catherine Love’s reflections.)

Last week, if not for the first time then certainly with unprecedented universality and vehemence, internecine warfare broke out amongst critics. In the blue corner, yawning, the mainstream, print critics; in the red, spitting rage, those of us writing online. That so many of the pieces online castigated mainstream criticism for its failure to champion something that their writers believed in is both telling and unusual. (UPDATE: Maddy Costa has written a Guardian blog on exactly this subject, which was published almost simultaneously.)

Now I don’t really go in for the whole ‘dead white males’ thing. For starters, it’s not nearly as true as it once might have been, and beyond that I think that the vast majority of critics worth their salt take their roles very seriously. But, the dividing line – with a couple of honourable exception – is related not to publication or politics as so often, but to age. Broadly speaking, the two camps fall either side of 40. A group that goes up to 40 is too wide to be dismissed as youth. If mainstream criticism hopes to have speak to and for the majority of its readers, then – to quote Stephen Sondheim at the most inappropriate of moments – “something just broke.”

Here is a piece of theatre that needed recognition; that needed some backing that comes with a degree of profile, backing capable of making an impact and, basically, persuading people that it might be worth their time and money. As the very vocally positive responses have proved, there is most definitely an audience in this country for this kind of theatre. More than that, I’d hazard that it’s the kind of theatre that could break through theatre’s identity problem. You know, the one we all witter on about; the ‘why don’t young people go to the theatre?’ one. More than this, it deserved some credit on a platform where that credit might really count, where it stood a chance of connecting with the unconverted.

Three Kingdoms is undeniably ambitious, it is undeniably astute and it is undeniably powerful. It is also undeniably different. (In fairness, it is also undeniably difficult. It was only second time round that I felt like I grasped it’s ending and mechanics with genuine precision.)

Given how many easy comparisons its possible to make (from Peter Brook to Filter Theatre), the snub by mainstream criticism looks increasingly like stubbornness and a statement of intent. It leaves the sense that we know what the theatrical ideal looks like and Three Kingdoms isn’t it. The irony, of course, is that Three Kingdoms entirely anticipates that – and, in fact, that’s what I set out to write about here, but I seem to have become distracted.

I’ll say this: Mainstream criticism is close to falling out of kilter with too great a swathe of its readership. It is growing old and, as such, is on the verge of betraying both its readership and its form.

Theatre exists in a consumerist structure. It needs to sell seats in order to remain feasible. To do so, it often needs good responses with a high-enough profile to have an impact. Reviews still have a further reach than any individual piece of word of mouth, on or offline, despite the fact that the overall probably outweighs them for influence. Theatres need good reviews. The critical culture inevitably has an impact on the programming of culture. Where that critical culture retains such fixed ideals, it limits and indeed stultifies the artform it exists alongside.

Criticism must adapt. At present it is struggling to do so. It must be both one step ahead and one step behind its subject. This is how critics – whether embedded in process, and I’m still not entirely converted to that, or not – can become collaborators. It must spur its chosen artform onwards by whatever means possible. It must be both carrot and stick. Criticism must demand more and demand better of its chosen artform, even if it is not the critic’s job to identify precisely or concretely how. Whenever a concrete ‘more’ or ‘better’ is achieved, however, criticism must recognise it with all its might.

Last week mainsteam theatre criticism had the best chance to do so in a very long while and, taken as an entire species, entirely failed to do so. More’s the pity.

Photograph: Ene Liis-Semper

Review: Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s Globe

Written for The Guardian

Unsurprisingly, after almost three decades of civil war, this is a Cymbeline that sides with its underdogs. It cheers "the fledgling nation of Britain", as the production's initial synopsis puts it, against the might of imperial Rome. Not that the South Sudan Theatre Company champion Cymbeline's Churchillian resistance out of deference to their hosts; his subsequent police force come dressed in the pressed khakis of British imperialism. It's power in general that's under suspicion here.

As the Roman armies invade, King Cymbeline's plucky Brits – dressed in zebra skins to the Romans' tiger print – march into battle with an unorchestrated, arrhythmic clatter. They resemble nothing more than Captain Mainwaring's Dad's Army, defending their land with purpose, but none of their enemy's poise. Such is their spirited amateurism, they might as well have saucepans for helmets.

In fact, the whole thing is played with the same quality of dressing-up box tomfoolery, sending itself up wherever possible. Weapons are made of tin foil. Ghosts are played in white sheets. Tears of grief come in hammy, high-pitched wails. Horror is shrieked and victory erupts in foolish dances. Everything is make-believe and mess-about.

Tonally, it's not dissimilar to a Kneehigh romp or even, in its willingness to puncture its own drama with ridicule, the work of Forced Entertainment. We understand the tragedy, even as we laugh at its portrayal. Waking next to the decapitated corpse she believes to be her exiled lover Posthumus, Imogen nearly trips over the crudely stuffed dummy, before collapsing into overblown shrieks of grief. The more we laugh, the more she implores us to take it seriously.

Most of the play's individual villainy is similarly undermined: Imogen's stepbrother Cloten – usually bitter, tormented and desperate for the throne – becomes a bumptious fool seeking a playmate and a play fight. Iachimo's attempts at seducing her after a bet with Posthumus aren't sleazy, but clumsily persistent. He creeps into her bedroom – dastardly, not devilish – and steals her bracelet as proof to resounding pantomime boos, then leaves with a broad cackle. This might flatten the swirling narrative, but it's so utterly infectious that it hardly matters.

All fits neatly with the language used. Juba Arabic is the street slang developed when British imperialists banned Arabic. It brings the high and mighty right down to Earth, since courtiers and shepherds share the same language. It's also the neutral lingua franca among South Sudan's various tribes and this is whole-hearted, full-bodied populist theatre that sides with people over state. Cymbeline's final cry of peace is followed by an eruption of the national anthem and the genuine jubiliation that spreads from cast to audience encapsulates the whole.

Review: Mother Adam, Jermyn Street Theatre

Written for Time Out

Adam and his 'Mammles' - that's mother, to those of us with less severe Oedipal afflictions - are confined to their cramped studio bedsit. She has crippling arthritis that has left her bedridden; he can hardly leave her, because he's her carer and because he's terrified of the world, despite his threats to exit into it. Inside the room, he can be anything he wants to be - admiral, judge, headmaster - providing she allows it.

The last in Charles Dyer's Lonely Trilogy, not significantly revived in nearly 40 years, Mother Adam is a strangely transfixing oddity. Not least because Dyer's linguistic flair puts contemporary playwrights to shame. His text, much of which strays into a concocted pidgin English, is both muscular and balletic. It's a real treat for the ears.

And Jasper Britton, giving one of the best performances in London, matches it for flamboyance, but also cuts through to the source of Adam's pain. Linda Marlowe finds a sweetness in his gnarled mother, and Gene David Kirk's production provides the best showcase for a play that might otherwise have gone another 40 years unseen.

Review: Three Kingdoms, Lyric Hammersmith

About halfway through the first half of Three Kingdoms on Tuesday night, probably an hour and fifteen minutes in or so, I scrawled the following in my notebook:

“Stop everything. Storm the National Theatre. Tear down the Donmar Warehouse. Torch the Royal Court. Redact the entire history of the RSC and fetch me Trevor Nunn’s head on a plate.”

In retrospect, this was probably an over-reaction born in the heat of the moment. Not because it over-praises, but because it does the great work at those theatres a disservice. Let’s blame the adrenaline flooding my bloodstream. Let’s blame the breathlessness and the dizziness; the disbelief and the sheer fucking thrill. I was putty. I was windswept. I was in love.

Three Kingdoms is a joyride.

And like any joyride, it’s possible to jump into the back seat or stand on the pavement and disapprove. So let’s not get carried away too quickly. It’s not helpful. Far better to take a step back and assess, than scream in your faces until you’re spittle-flecked and angry.

It’s true that, next to most British theatre – and it’s very consciously aimed at a British audience; more of which later – Three Kingdoms looks like an enfant terrible. It’s behaving badly and it knows it. However, there’s nothing so radical that you’ll sit there baffled and cursing its pretentions. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s actually pretty conventional, even if it looks unfamiliar. It’s certainly not inaccessible. Whatever the mainstream critics say, you know exactly how to watch this. You just need to jump in the back seat.

Co-produced by the Lyric Hammersmith, the Munich Kammerspiele and Estonian company NO99, Three Kingdoms brings together a British playwright, a German director and an Estonia designer in a head-on collision. Simon Stephens has written a play. Its narrative is, more or less, linear. Sebastian Nübling has directed it, using a blend of techniques adopted from Peter Brook, Pina Bausch and – without wanting to scare you off – live art. Ene-Liis Semper has designed it. Boldly, but certainly not uncomfortably so. No more so than a Richard Jones directed opera or a West End musical. No more than one might Alice in Wonderland. It’s just that the Wonderland in Stephens’s play is not an imaginative space, but mainland Europe. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Since I’m trying to ease you in, the relationship between these elements is not dissimilar to that of Mike Bartlett, Rupert Goold and Miriam Buether for Earthquakes in London. It just goes further: the text doesn’t demand such a theatrical approach, though it leaves room for it. Stephens’s text is characteristically muscular. Nübling and Semper run a massive charge through it and, rather than disintegrating, it comes thrillingly to life.

Admittedly, the production’s spirit is one of excess, but only insofar as Nübling and Semper have turned Three Kingdoms up to 11. Call that self-indulgence if you will – and almost every mainstream critic has – but really it’s a matter of making every moment count to its fullest. It’s about maximising its theatricality. I’ve been watching a lot of Great British Menu recently and Three Kingdoms reminds me of some of the cooking techniques. This week, one of the chefs made a spherification of some pea puree. That involves making semi-solid spheres of a liquid and the end result looked rather like peas, but with an intense pea flavour. Another chef infused lobster meat with lobster stock, doubling the taste. Sebastian Nübling – generally dubbed a maverick, but I’m not so sure – and Ene-Liis Semper have done the equivalent to Simon Stephens’ play.

That play looks like a detective thriller, but it’s not. It’s a journey narrative and a loss of innocence play. It just so happens that the journey in question is that of DI Ignatius Stone (Nicolas Tennant, brilliant), a detective in the Metropolitan police, and it runs in parallel with an investigation he’s conducting. The difference is that the former is all about the investigation itself (the detective is basically a flavoursome cipher), while the latter is all about character.

However, Three Kingdoms is still a detective thriller by proxy. It starts with a police interrogation; a standard good-cop, bad-cop affair. We’ve seen a thousand before. Stone is bellowing into the ear of a young local lad in an empty warehouse. His partner DS Charlie Lee (a professorial Ferdy Roberts) looks on coolly. We know what happens in these scenes and we know the narrative patterns they fit into. The first scene conforms and Stephens tricks us into watching Three Kingdoms as a detective thriller. But it’s not. That detective thriller stops conforming; it breaks apart and fragments. Yet the core character-driven play retains the pulse of a whodunit.

A head has washed up on the Chiswick Eyot in a rucksack. It belonged to a prostitute, who, it turns out, had been trafficked into this country. It was removed with a hacksaw. There’s a video on the internet. We’re told her head was held in a vice while a man masturbated into her hair before decapitating her with some difficulty. We hear the screams screeching from a digital camera. (The gore is always kept from us; proper In-Yer-Head theatre, but, boy, does it retain its impact.)

Setting out to solve a murder, Stone and Lee find themselves chasing down a sex trafficking ring run by a man known as ‘The White Bird.’ They track him first to Germany, meeting Detective Steffen Dresner (Steven Scharf) and visiting the industrial porn factory that produced the incriminating video. From there, Stone and Dresner go to Estonia, seeking the root of the trafficking gang.

Structurally, the play does much the same as Wastwater, only using a single narrative rather than three distinct scenes. It grows increasingly violent, dragging us into the depths. The first act hums with menace; the second pulsates, and, by the third, the play has reached Richter Scale forces. The joyride screeches out of control and careers off the road.

It’s also worth nothing that Three Kingdoms is the inverse of most sex trafficking narratives. It runs backwards: retracing the victim’s journey, rather than travelling it. As a result, it also looks wider than most such narratives and is not confined to the tragic experience of one individual (like, say, Roadkill) that only starts halfway down the causal chain. It heads towards the root cause, rather than the end effect. It doesn’t exemplify the whole. It goes after it directly.

In fact, it looks wider still, at the entire cultural system into which trafficking fits. Three Kingdoms is largely not a play about sex trafficking at all. It is about globalisation. Its just that the products being shipped around are people and, as such, the play hits home in a way that one about coffee beans or bananas simple couldn’t manage.

Stephens is basically accusing us, to borrow a phrase, of wilful ignorance. We are entirely complicit in propping up the system. He shows us it’s unseen side-effects; both those that exist underneath our noses – the hyper-local narrative starts across the road, in the William Morris pub opposite the Lyric Hammersmith – and its far off effects.

Nübling plays with the first of these themes particularly elegantly. Early on, a white-suited man (Risto Kübar), whom we presume to be the White Bird, squeezes through a crack in the wall, darts across the stage and disappears in similar fashion. It’s as if London’s underworld exists in two-dimensions, only visible from a certain angle. That world is also chameleonic. Still in the first act, Stone and Lee are cramped into a train compartment with the killer they’re seeking.

As for the second strand, as the Estonian detective puts it to Stone: “When you go to the toilet, you think your shit just disappears…Shit doesn’t disappear.” It winds up, apparently, in Estonia; London’s sewage system. Of course, this is not a revelatory point, particularly not in theatre, but it’s rarely said with so much force and elan.

First, Stephens takes us to Germany, where the porn our 12 year olds watch, according to the Daily Mail, is made. Nübling makes Germany into a conveyor belt of porn. Men and women in strap-ons stride around, lubeing one another up and joylessly sucking each other off. They masturbate coffee containers and straddle baseball bats. The occasional casual cry of ‘cam-er-a’ goes up to catch the imminent money shot. Shit and squirty cream and KY jelly goes everywhere. It’s repulsive. (It’s also - guiltily - the opposite.)

Stone starts to fray, and feel – as Lee puts it, in one of Stephens’s characteristic linguistic pointers – “a little dislocated.” The girl he meets at his hotel looks disarmingly like his wife in England and they have a frisson of sexual chemistry. Nübling plays one of their conversations in an exploded scene, such that Stone seems to swirl in and out of the actual conversation and his headspace. He also captures the sensation of feeling utterly alone and adrift in a foreign city. It’s somewhere between Lost In Translation and that Simpsons sequence in which Bart and Millhouse overdo the All-Sryup Squishies. Stone seems to reel drunkenly, unable to speak the language and tempted by the repercussion-free sleaze on offer. (Interestingly, David Lan told me beforehand that deep beneath Three Kingdoms is Christ in the Wilderness.)

By the time we reach Estonia with Stone, this has – in keeping with the Wastwater model – the ante has been well and truly upped. Semper makes Estonia a grey world of sheeny suits and rampant, savage misogyny. So noxious are its fumes (smell is key to the script and Nübling draws it out further, hence the deer and wolf masks for prostitutes and pimps) that DI Stone – who seems more bumptiously naïve than ever – unravels. The play does likewise, and it’s often hard to keep track. Are we the White Bird? Is Dresner? The Estonian gang wear boxing gloves and pound the walls with a barrage of punches. Speaking about the shift of global economic power Eastwards, imagining a world where Western Europe girls are trafficked into Asia, the trafficking gang turn slowly, terrifyingly, our way.

In all this, our experience mirrors Stone’s journey. As he travels Eastwards, Stone becomes increasingly disorientated. As we travel alongside him, what we see gets wilder, more fantastical and more extreme, particularly in its violence. Stone unravels and so do we. There are scales tumbling from eyes all over the place. (This is why I feel that Stephens is writing for a British audience, and Nübling is following suit, by gradually moving from naturalism to uncaged metaphor. It is about the Little Englander complex; and that applies to our theatre as much as it does to our wider worldview. Here, the play becomess an accusation of its audience, in a way that elsewhere, it is aimed, to a certain extent, at an absent party.)

However, Stephens makes clear that Estonia is not the Soviet hangover we might presume it to be with our English island mentality blinkers on. Like any of us, it survives by whatever means are its disposal. Stephens carefully structures each act as an echo of the others, moving through the same pattern with actors doubling in the same role (romantic interest, key lead, hunted) each time. It’s quite amazing; the same choice can both disorientate and suggest parity.

However, in the two messages, Stephens comes awfully close to having his cake and eating it. He suggests we’re completely to blame for their situation and also that we’re all ultimately the same. Yet, the production – whether from Stephens’s text or Nübling’s direction – is fully aware of this. Its coda – in which Kübar challenges Tennant to make a swan out of origami, scrunches his own paper and shakes his head when Tennant does likewise – admits the two-sided coin and the (near) impossibility of our own situation. Head it wins, tails we lose. It’s also quite possible to argue that the production, at some point, becomes the very thing it sets out to critique, and it exploits its subject matter for its voyeuristic charge. This, however, seems an unavoidable byproduct of its scoring its hits so powerfully and, for me, the ends wholly justify the means.

As for Nübling’s direction, it’s just unbelievably good. Nübling is not a maverick. He’s a master. As I suggested above, he has a tonal control that I’ve never seen rivalled. In the main, he employs Peter Brook’s theory of ‘empty space’ – that theatre’s representational system is analogical, not literal – but with a fiercely contemporary approach. So, individual signifiers work not simply as signifiers, but as real objects and actions with their own charge independent of the fiction they create. It’s a question of focus and he draws out the essential information, about character or location or action, with an intense minimalism.

He can bring out the brutality behind clincal post-mortem results in the slicing, dicing and juicing of an apple. He’ll stretch the luridity of pornography with synthetic strap-ons and squirty cream. After moments of heart-thumping tension and speed, he slams on the breaks with a soft, soothing, breathy lullaby. He makes a concertina of Stephens’s text expanding some moments and contracting others, trusting us to get the plot and adjusting the colour filter to bring out embedded themes.

In fact, it’s worth looking at Three Kingdoms as an supped up equivalent of Brook’s 1970 (!) RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For Sally Jacob’s white box, we’ve got Semper’s grey one, which has a more complex layout that enables a more layered staging. Where Brook used spinning plates and diabolos, Nübling uses knives and dildos. Where Brook kept the playing fairly straight, Nübling brings in textual layers of dance and song, which carry both information and tone. (In fact, the mainstream rejection of Three Kingdoms starts to look all the more inexcusable in this light.)

Nübling might be auteurial, but not one of his decisions detracts from Stephens’s text at all. Rather they bring it thrillingly, vividly to life, while drawing out its essential, underlying contents with a stunning clarity.

I could go on and on, but essentially, I’m saying this: Three Kingdoms will change the course of British theatre. It comes at a time when certain young directors – Bijan Sheibani, Polly Findlay, Joe Hill-Gibbins among them, but plenty more further down, are starting to look to Europe for a clinical viscerality – and it goes much further. If you have any interest in theatre, in its potential and in its future, you must see Three Kingdoms. It is an extraordinary, powerful, rapturous combination of theatrical spectacle and dramatic intensity. You have one week.

Photographs: Ene-Liis Semper

Review: Babel, Caledonian Park

Written for Culture Wars

Only the spirit in which Babel was conceived saves it from being irredeemible. In its execution, it ranks as a failure on all fronts, most significantly on the grounds that it fans the very cynicism that it sets out to counter.

Created by Wildworks, the team behind The Passion of Port Talbot, Babel is a large-scale community project that seeks to draw out the positive message in the biblical narrative that provides its title. The attempt to build a tower to the heavens is usually framed as a hubristic act, punished by God when he scatters humanity around the globe and introduces language. Wildworks reconceive it from a humanist persective; that together we can achieve great things.

To pull off such tardy inspirational banalities one needs to do something inspiring. That’s the secret of Royal de Luxe and their giant urban spectacles. Wildworks know this. Port Talbot’s Passion had it in spades. You can see what they’re trying to do with Babel, but unfortunately it falls a long way short. It’s only fair to chart the unlucky breaks, which include losing Battersea Power Station (for all that the Caledonian Park clocktower looks great, its no iconic landmark), managing only a community cast of around 300 and, on press night at least, weather conditions that ruled out the aerial spectacles. This was not an artistic failure. It was a logistical one.

That Wildworks have never qualified the work is to their credit. However, great artists can make something extraordinary out of the most basic components.

Two things hit you almost as soon as you walk into Caledonian Park. One is the overbearing smell of burning paraffin. The other is the sickly stench of hippyish platitudes and synthetic good will.

The journey is one from individuals to tribles to a whole. It has three phases. First a walk through the park’s paths, lined with individuals engaged in sol activities: reading, writing, singing – always to themselves. Second, group performances, choirs and bands and knitting units (who have created a woollen London) and third, in the shadow of the clocktower, the performance proper.

Here we are the people, gathered at the foot of the tower, which is – apparently – calling to us. The security forces – dressed vaguely like American cops – demand that we move back and disperse. They tear down ‘our’ bamboo houses (made during phase two) and one man – a husband and father – refuses to budge. There’s a sprinkling of Occupy and a dash of Gaze in this and, to be honest, it’s hard not to begrudge it, on account of its heavyhandedness. Everything within is a clunking cipher.

At this level, Babel sits somewhere between a straight play to be watched and immersive theatre. It feels rather like a ritual enactment and, because it never persuades us to invest in that ritual, it remains vaguely risible. There are halfhearted pantomime boos and mock protests, but it cannot be taken seriously. In fact, the closest we get to community is in our shared smirks and rolled eyes. Nothing brings an audience together like bad theatre.


Photograph: Steve Tanner

Review: Einstein on the Beach, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Have you ever felt – and I mean, really felt – the four laws of thermodynamics? What about Snell’s Law of Refraction? Brownian motion?

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s iconic opera, first seen in 1976 and currently being restaged at the Barbican for a belated UK premiere, makes you physically feel Einstein’s theory of relativity. You might emerge with no better explanation of its scientific basis, but, for four and a half hours at least, you live it. It leaves a very different understanding – couched in experience – as to how a single event can occur at different moments for different observers.

True, we aren’t in motion for the duration, but even sat still you fall entirely out of everyday time. It is a headswirling Alice in Wonderland experience that needs its frustrations as much as its delirium. It can be carbonated helium and leaden cement; swimming with dolphins and sinking in quicksand.

Throughout, Einstein – the grey-wisped, tongue-wagging icon – appears at the front of the stage, looping this itchy motif on his violin. This is, one assumes, him on the beach, reminiscing over his life as staged behind him. However, as narrative in any conventional sense, it’s only infinitesimally tangible: there’s a snap of childhood, another of blackboard scribblings, a couple possibly of love, perhaps some dancing molecules. Really, it’s a series of staged sculptures – tableaux doesn’t quite cut it – expressive of his life and work.

For me, the experience divided in two; music and staging. This is curious because the two elements are so entwined, so of the same ilk, that it’s hard to imagine them separated. Yet, while I found Glass’s compositions thrilling – and being frank, I doubt I would have done with the staging – Wilson’s staging felt to me rather jaded. This can only be the result of my experience of the one form and almost total naivety of the other.

To start with the music. It has the rhythms of a scratched DVD, snagging on a sequence, which is almost escapes, only to fall back into another one. It’s as if you anticipate where melody needs to go to satisfy, but each time it turns back, loops in on itself. Imagine a scale with the top and bottom notes left off, played repeatedly for five or more minutes. Numbers are sung rhythmically. Sections grate and frustrate, before you settle into them and, then, most remarkably, they settle into you. Your body takes on the rhythms, your blood starts pumping in time. Then it snags or trips into some other rhythm. Just as one sequence becomes neutral, present but unobtrusive, you have to get used to another. It really is an astonishing experience.

And Wilson’s staging matches it perfectly with its stillness and its ceaslessness. A lifesize cut-out train inches its way across the Barbican’s huge stage. A crowd coalesces, looks up, looks down, and then disperses. Dancers dressed in white spring across the stage like sine waves or a stream of electrons. A vast strip of white light aches its way from horizontal to vertical. Each scene lasts around twenty minutes and each is so constant that it feels like looking at a picture until cross-eyed and blinking to find some subtle detail has changed. Open your eyes and the Mona Lisa’s winking.

The combined effect is not just hypnotic, but mind-draining; a brain enema. The pleasure is in slipping out of time entirely.

That’s partly down to its elusiveness as content as well as its form. The slide is from Einsteinian physic into consumer capitalism, as rolling monologues about air-conditioned supermarkets and such. If we can control the way you experience time, it seems to hint, we can control the things you buy. After all, isn’t time only felt in terms of urges and variations? We live from need to need or change to change.

However, the staging – so very serious at all times – also feels rather passé. It’s repetition before repetition was cool. Arguably, even before it was tried and tested. There are some striking moments of elegant simplicity – a moon that waxes and wanes over the course of a single fleeting yet endless encounter – but the po-faced avant-garde of old hasn’t the playful smirk that keeps it light. Only the last of Christopher Knowles’ text – a gorgeous love-story that serves as an antidote to clinicalism and capitalism – is readily comprehensible.

Truthfully, I stuck with it for four hours and then, so spun by its philosophizing about time, I popped out the other side. From this angle, the blank-faced lack of expression in performance is completely destructive and the whole starts to look like a routine to be churned through. Lucinda Childs dances, like an exercise class. They are chess pieces and dancing monkeys, and the performance drifted into the background and out of focus. Foregrounded instead, was a calculation of the amount of time I spend in a theatre annually.

It’s around twenty days, in case you were wondering. Sometimes it’s like swimming with dolphins. Sometimes it’s like sinking in quicksand.

Photograph: Lucie Jansch

Review: Tenet, Gate Theatre

Written for Time Out

A change of boss at the Gate Theatre has seen the good-looking toppled by the hard-thinking. Christopher Haydon's inaugural season kicks off with Greyscale Theatre's brilliant, dexterous examination of Julian Assange - a show that takes innovation as its subject.

Actually, it's mostly about French mathematician Evariste Galois (Jon Foster), who died in 1832 aged 21. He showed that equations of a certain complexity can't be solved by their roots - also known as radicals. We need a new system. Enter Assange (Lucy Ellinson).

Tenet mixes two radicals - political and mathematical - and it's the best kind of brain-ache. You have to sprint to keep up, but the result is a complexity unrivalled on the London stage. It allows Assange to be both hero and villain and, at the same time, neither. Facing rape allegations in the play, he repeats, 'No comment,' operating by a different system. How is his rejection of judicial authority different from Anders Behring Breivik's rejection of the same?

A patchwork of lecture, storytelling and participation, Lorne Campbell and Sandy Grierson's text is mischievous with its complexities, gentle with its key points and direct in its call for reform. 'Asking questions we know the answer to won't change anything.' Exactly.

Review: Here, Rose Theatre

Written for Time Out

Life, as John Lennon famously put it, is what happens while you're busy making other plans. For Phil and Cath, it's something that takes place during squabbles over the furniture in their first shared flat.

Here is Michael Frayn trying Samuel Beckett's hat on for size with deliberately obscure dialogue, repetitive action and an existential point. Basically, the hat don't fit.

Phil and Cath (Alex Beckett and Zawe Ashton) don't so much make decisions as just stop trying to decide. Small quibbles obscure the big questions in their relationship, and gradually they fall into the same pattern as every set of tenants before them, as described by their intrusive landlady Pat (Alison Steadman).

It's all as wearying as it is contrived. After the initial mixed 1993 reception, Frayn has tweaked for clarity, but he now says everything he has to say within the first 15 minutes.

The cracking cast apply comic gloss to individual moments (Beckett, in particular), but they still feel adrift, scrabbling for rational motivation, and Lisa Spirling's revival can't solve the stiltedness. If anything it's worsened by Polly Sullivan's demonstrative set with its layers of peeling wallpaper and a pot plant that couldn't outgrow the bedsit for all the MiracleGro in Homebase.