Review: Get Stuff, Break Free, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Up on the roof of the National Theatre, with one of the world’s leading cities stretched out below, Made In China are staging a protest poem of sorts.

Sorry, sorry: a celebration. There are coloured bulbs strung around the concrete, a table full of cucumber sandwiches and pitcher upon pitcher of Pimms. What’s more, if you hang around long enough, there’ll be fireworks.

Because, fuck it, we deserve it, don’t we? We deserve a sodding pat on the back. Look at what we’ve all done. Look at the city around us. This summer, it’s the centre of the whole fucking world. We Brits did that. We plucky little Brits.

In style and spirit at least, Get Stuff Break Free is more or less identical to Made In China’s last piece, We Hope That You’re Happy (Why Would We Lie?). If that piece, with its chugged Buds and chomped ices, had America in its crosshairs, their latest is certainly aimed at us Brits. On the one hand, its accusation is more direct. On the other, the parched sarcasm loses some of its sting second time around.

Again, the four performers speak Tim Cowbury’s liturgical text at breakneck speed. Again, they break off into half-committed dances. And again they gorge themselves to illustrate the sated, smiling compliance of consumerist culture. This time, however, these elements feel rather more inert this time around, largely because they pose less of a challenge to the performer. The brain freeze remain, but the belching has gone. A faceful of sandwiches is less a form of torture than a stint in the stocks as village idiot. It’s a far cry from the champagne swilled from an exercise bike in Stationary Excess.

What you lose is any sense of forward momentum. Where previously that ingestion has become harder as the show continues, as stomachs grow fuller, heads, tipsier and the tempo, more and more furious. Get Stuff Break Free works through repetition and, at the end of each cycle, one performer drops out. The trouble is that, when we realise the pattern, we pre-empt the whole, and making the same point for an hour does nothing to increase its forcefulness. Once we’ve twigged the impetus, there’s little extra to be gained. For a repetitive structure to work, it needs disrupting and breaking.

If it struggles as theatrical event, it really flounders into futility and naivety in terms of content. There’s great pleasure in twigging what its up to – namely an attack on the impossibility of meaningful dissent in this country.

Mostly, the four performers speak as if a four-strong band, recounting the history of the group. It becomes apparent, as Cowbury’s text drops in savvy references to civil wars and colonialism (“We were massive in India”), that their history is that of Britain refracted. They invoke the spirit of the riots, rustled up against the million that marched against the Iraq war. They talk of analogy and euphemisms and examples, of indirect speech that skirts the real issue. They light sparklers and throw confetti and smile these increasingly unconvincing smiles. When problematic stats crop up, those embarrassing socio-political zits like inequality, they’re circumnagivated. Because here, in London, in Britain, in this Olympic, Jubilee, bumper leap year, we’re so very fortunate. The questions they invited early on, dwindle until – sadly, regrettably, a tad unfortunately – there’s just no time.

Or, as Bill Hicks might have put it, in 34 short sharp seconds: “Go back to bed United Kingdom. Your government has figured it out…You are free. To do as we tell you.”

What’s interesting is that tone of absolute cynicism, which allows Made In China to say one thing and mean the opposite. It’s a fruitful mode that might be called heartfelt irony.

However, despite attempts to acknowledge its own problems as an event (“On behalf of the National Theatre/American Express…”), it winds up snagging as you try to swallow it. It’s very hard to criticise the establishment for pacifying techniques from the roof of its largest subsidised theatre or to target analogy using an artform that relies on it.

As the fireworks finally launch – smaller than usual display fireworks because, as the nanny state and health and safety have decreed, we can’t be trusted – our gaze is drawn skywards. We look at the pretty colours and, by the time we look back to the stage, the last performer – a lone voice of cynicism – has disappeared. It’s the best moment by some distance; full of quiet dignity and the sort of potency that need not explain itself.

Photograph: Made In China

Review: Motor Show, Greenwich Pennisula

Written for Culture Wars

A patch of gravelly urban outland, ringed with wire-fencing, serves as a stage in Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg’s latest dance and soundscape piece. Cars become characters, peeping out from a graffitied wall of corrugated iron or turning reckless donut rings that send clouds of dust drifting in the wind. Motor Show is a Monster Truck spectacular with Nissan Multis for protagonists and David Lynch at the helm.

As in Electric Hotel, we watch at one remove – here distance rather than glass – with sounds fed through wireless headphones to collapse the distance. As a car pulls up, we hear its stereo blaring. We hear each window winding down and each key in the ignition. The experience remains disjointed, slightly out of sync but always close enough to pass. Volume and tone feels artifical and pristine, and the pre-recorded mode gives reality the slick post-production gloss of cinema.

Behind this disused car lot, silhouetted against a baby blue and streaky peach sunset, are the corporate towers of Canary Wharf. They are imposing and swish, conceited and conservative; a world away from this vaguely lawless, vaguely romantic dirt-track.

It exists outside of the clutches of compliant capitalism that rules the nearby city and it draws those who need its shadows to exist. More than the Electric Hotel before it, this is a non-space governed by anonymity. We know its workings because we’ve seen it in a thousand movies.

It’s the spot where you’re spat out of John Malkovich and the stretch of desert road where break downs are inevitable. It’s No Country for Old Men and the canal banks of A Clockwork Orange. It’s the Elephant Graveyard and Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island. It’s the ideal location for shallow graves. It’s a dogger’s paradise.

What Requardt and Rosenberg do so well is amplify the heartbeat of this site. Through a series of fuzzy and surreal vignettes, they draw out its menace and its own peculiar bliss. Here, where the usual social structures can’t get you, there’s both freedom and fear. You’re outside the reach of the law, but also outside its protection. The atmosphere created is extraordinary: it’s Americana on tap, but blended with the dystopian Londons of J.G. Ballard and Philip Ridley, which themselves nod towards Hollywood tropes.

Two teenage lovers, perfectly naïve, pull up in a car and pash, twisting over each other in the front seats and springing out of the windows. They’re followed by two identical cars and couples; echoes perhaps or an identikit generation? A gang screeches in and bundles out, hoodlums that take pipes to abandoned cars. A schoolgirl hops out of a boot – a latter day Red Riding Hood in her own little world – watched by a predatory suited loner. A limo, ambassadorial flags flickering on the bonnet, parades down, unfurling a fleet of feathered showgirl types. A deer carcass stands up and takes its revenge.

Over an hour, these costume characters and more pass each other by, occasionally entwining in one combination or another. It’s transfixing and hallucinogenic and ticklish, but the whole lacks a sense of progression or development. Its images suggest story, but steer clear of narrative. Hypnotic and humorous though it is, Motor Show struggles to sustain itself for an hour as anything more than a swirling screensaver. The refusal to ever confirm the relationships between its various fictions – that schoolgirl goes with deer seems happenstance before well-matched inevitability – isn’t so much frustrating as deflating. Eventually, the whole just loses its novelty.

Compared to Electric Hotel’s verticality, it suffers from its horizontal layout. Rather than towering over you, it stretches out before you and so shrinks into a model village. Again, that serves to elevate the cinematic, but it also dilutes the atmosphere. Nothing’s as romantic or troubling in miniature.

Yet, there’s real originality here too; not least formally. You can quite happily spend an hour lost in Requardt and Rosenberg’s world, as it twists into new combinations. You just emerge with very little to show for it beyond a vague sense of delight.

Photograph: Susanne Dietz

Review: The Coming Storm, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

The Coming Storm starts on solid ground, with the sort of list that Forced Entertainment can keep up for the best part of a year. Terri O’Connor churns through all the various things – from beginnings, middles and endings to twists and turns and tribes in conflict – needed for a good story.

Of course, this being Forced Entertainment, they then proceed to break those rules. It’s an old technique of theirs: set the bar, take a run up and hurtle into it, breaking the bar in the process.

What makes The Coming Storm quite so clever is that it goes a level further. We know with Forced Entertainment that we ought to keep an eye on the story of the show itself, the path of that breakdown. The Coming Storm refuses even to break with a satisfactory dramaturgy. Even the story of the show itself is a meandering and confused narrative, that staggers step by step like a concussed drunkard until eventually it just finds a place to stop.

That takes a while to emerge and, in the early stages, I rather hated The Coming Storm. It looked like a classic case of their characteristic chaos and sabotage masquerading as failure. It all felt rather contrived and not a little tired. By the end, I rather fell in love with it. In fact, I’d argue that, though it’s a slow-burner, it’s destined to become one of their seminal pieces, precisely because it attacks the neatness of their previous attacks on theatrical convention.

After that first prescriptive list, they immediately set about telling stories that don’t conform. Absurdly implausible stories about IT specialists, Somali pirates and dragon battles. Banal stories about the standard working days of branch librarians. Hackneyed stories, distracted tangential stories, stories that qualify every detail, stories that can’t get going and so on. As each narrative breaks down, another performer grabs the microphone with a sarky or half-hearted ‘Thanks’ and starts another of their own.

And, of course, we all get it. We’ve all studied Forced Entertainment at university. We know about And on the Thousandth Night and Void Story. We understand the company’s mistrust of narrative and linearity. We get the humour and we laugh a little too loudly and knowingly. So far, so Forced Entz. (Hell, we even call them by a loving nickname. We’re all friends here.)

As these stories – the who, what, where, why of which is pretty much arbitrary – continue, other performers draw the attention away. They start to set things up and put on bits of costume: the usual shoddy wigs and crumpled masks. Someone starts to play a drumbeat. It looks like a standard case of the company’s one-upmanship, of undermining what ought to be central and so ‘breaking’ the theatrical event.

Actually, though, it leaves the conventions just intact enough to survive, so that various elements – words, music, costume, actions – start to chime with one another and entwine. Stories attach themselves to things onstage. They gain atmosphere from the music. Characters seem to be embodied. Our minds make connections and assume significance, reading the one in terms of other. Labels start to stick, so that a bare-chested man in a Freddie Kruger mask could be the killer, a woman shimmying in a gold dress a seaside showgirl and so on.

Yet, as the story switches those same beats and ‘characters’ stick around. One story’s killer now seems another’s love-interest. A sentimental piano score is underpinning a chase sequence.

There’s no denying the skill and delicacy with which all this is achieved: a tiny turn of the head can ‘accidentally’ attract a label, a certain arrangement of two bickering performers makes them suddenly lovers and so on. In fact, the effect has parallels with the techniques in Gatz, where labels can attach themselves to a seemingly inappropriate signifier due to some shared quality.

Stories, sights and sound slip out of sync, like a one-armed bandit coming up lemon, bell, pistols and still paying out. Robin Arthur, by now dressed in a black flame-edged shirt and a boyish blonde wig, having assumed this character named Killer, keeps stopping the speaker mid-flow, asking to be included in the story somehow.

Where Void Story broke its story’s back by pumping it so full of plot that it bloated and burst, The Coming Storm overloads itself with signification until the bronco bucks. It looks to attack the ways we tell stories; their reliance on familiar tropes and singularity, whereby villains are one thing and lovers another; but also the coerciveness of narrative neatness, momentum and satisfaction, the way the story starts to dictate its own terms.

Every now and then Cathy pops up and asks the speaker, so that we might better visualise the story, which Hollywood actor might play each role. At one point Richard Lowdon’s critically-ill mother, who looks like (and therefore somehow is) a pirate, is also Elizabeth Taylor and Brad Pitt his friend, so they end up at Brad Pitt’s house. Stories distort themselves into lies, you realise, and ultimately confuse where they’re supposed to carry ideas. In fact, you might even ask why stories exist and why we don’t merely express those ideas directly.

However – and this is where I really started to buy into it – The Coming Storm doesn’t merely shatter something else, namely story, it starts to unravel on its own terms. This isn’t simply a neat hatchet job that arrives uninvited, breaks conventions and leaves them for dead. It starts that way, but begings to confuse itself, meandering from bit to bit and scene to scene in a drunken zigzag. It makes you lose your bearings. You know where you started. That was definite, but now Cathy’s exhausting her knowledge of Russian and Richard’s dressed as an old man and there’s a full-blown band and a crocodile gnawing on Richard’s leg and Robin’s just wondering around the stage as if trying to find a place to fit in.

We’re used to finding the story of the show itself in Forced Entertainment’s work; the narrative of the theatrical event as it breaks down. Brilliantly, here even that story bamboozles itself; any ordinary sense of dramaturgy, whereby elements recur and illuminate one another, slips away and the whole frustrates our sense of story precisely by not conforming to those rules laid out at the start. It’s like theatre with Slowly Progressive Dementia.

The Coming Storm is dizzying, but only retrospectively so. Each sequence emerges quite cohesively from its antecedent, but the overall just meanders. It’s rather like a word puzzle where you start with one word and, by changing one letter at a time, end up at another.

Of course, in spite of this, your mind still clutches for meaning and, in trying to impose something like narrative, you start chucking out the square pegs and ignoring any irritating exceptions. For me, the central recurring motif was about age and aging and death – a thought that I’d carried into the auditorium myself. It began to look like the company were struggling with their own process, that they were too old for this shit and too bogged down by their own history, as seen in the constant reflexivity of The Coming Storm’s references (Bloody Mess, Void Story, And on the Thousandth Night, 12am Awake and Looking Down, Who Will Sing a Song... etc etc). As the real world starts to bleed in there’s a morose, defeated quality, a sense that the socio-political situation of 27 years ago has returned with a vengeance. There’s also a concern with legacy, with their own story as a company and the singularity of that definition.

All this is in its wending on beyond breakdown to exasperation. “That was inevitable,” snaps Cathy as a wig is smacked on her head. Robin’s still wondering around, trying to find a way in. Elton and Brad and Nicole have set the agenda, while those who have sought to tell the truth are resigned: “This doesn’t matter,” someone says, before the trump off the stage, leaving two women playing the piano with “a kind of optimistic melancholy.”

Of course, the show ultimately disproves that jadedness. Just when you think you’ve got Forced Entertainment pinned, they find somewhere new to go.

Photograph: Hugo Glendinning

Review: Gatz & The Rest Is Silence, LIFT Festival

Written for the New Statesman

Literary butchery to start the London International Festival of Theatre, which gets underway with a filleted Hamlet and a nose to tail, word-for-word staging of The Great Gatsby.

They share a concern with public appearances. Jay Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald’s mysterious personification of the American dream (real name: James Gatz), is a man constructed for show; living proof of “the unreality of reality". dreamthinkspeak’s Hamlet, meanwhile, knows not seems. What you see is largely what you get, even though those around him wear skin-deep smiles.

Hang on: a word for word staging of The Great Gatsby? Over the eight hours of Gatz, including two intervals and 90 minutes for dinner, New York’s Elevator Repair Service get through every one of Fitzgerald’s 48,891 choice words – every "he said, she said" – until, at around 10.45pm, those famous boats finally beat on against the current.

Inevitably, there are peaks and troughs, but it’s nonetheless an extraordinary and transcendent piece of theatre: ticklish, absorbing, intricate and epic.

It works like this: a man (Scott Shepherd) walks into a downbeat office and turns on his computer. It crashes. Waiting for a reboot, he chances upon a well-thumbed copy of Fitzgerald’s text in his Rolodex and, with nothing better to do, starts to read aloud: “In my younger and more vulnerable years…”

As he grows increasingly engrossed, his workplace slowly starts to conform to the narrative. A phone rings on cue, a colleague chips in with dialogue and Shepherd doubles up as the book’s narrator Nick Carraway. His inscrutable boss sat opposite (Jim Fletcher) becomes Gatsby himself, the wealthy neighbour whose parties light up Long Island. The two worlds bleed into one another until jazz-age joie de vivre fills the workplace.

That collision is often wryly funny – ERS handle the text with an awkward literalism – but also immensely fruitful. It underscores the novel’s effervescence with glum graft and business – a word that Fitzgerald ties to shady deals, debt and death - and thoroughly exposes the great lie of the American dream; that it is built on the inequality of the great American drudge.

This tension between words and image often tips into outright contradiction. In place of Fitzgerald’s resplendent social butterflies are washed-out, middle-aged workers. Lucy Taylor’s Daisy, Gatsby’s lost love, is bleached and bloodless; her athletic husband Tom (Robert Cucuzza) corresponds to a security guard with a spare tyre. Often, if the text describes a nod of the head, an actor will shake theirs. Smiles are replaced with hostile stares.

Not only does this brilliantly stress Nick’s narratorial unreliability, it allows everything a contradictory double. Even Fletcher’s Gatsby is a bald, ungainly Lurch-like figure with a rumbling sotto bass voice. He is always still his former self: the college dropout, ex-janitor and former soldier with few prospects, James Gatz. You can’t but watch critically and, in the process, all possibilities exist at once. Even Gatsby’s pink suit is made of three different shades: jaded strawberry ice-cream, suave raspberry and a gauche neon.

In this way, Gatz is a celebration of reading and the pleasure of sinking into an exquisite story. Every now and then, Shepherd checks the stopped office clock, shrugs and reburies himself. In performance, the book truly comes alive. Fitzgerald’s writing gets an extra gloss. It gains dramaturgy and rhythm: more hollow moments linger like hangovers, a soundtrack of screeching brakes makes crashes (both mechanical and financial) seem inevitable. Words that are dully uniform on the page become a symphony and Shepherd seems to underline and italicse as he goes. For all his memory and delivery is astounding though, Fitzgerald’s prose, sparkling with detail, is the true star of Gatz.

If ERS take textual reverence to the extreme, dreamthinkspeak approach Shakespeare’s text with iconoclastic relish. The more famous the line, the less likely it is to survive intact. Gertrude’s commanded to a nunnery. “To be or not to be” comes shuffled into nonsense.

Director Tristan Sharps makes a reptile house of Elsinore, with each character "caged" behind glass in their own room. In his bathroom, Claudius practices his public address. Gertrude sits at her dressing table. Ed Hogg’s emo Hamlet plays assassin in his bedroom. There’s the gloss of Cruel Intentions herein.

Sharps centres on invasions of privacy. Hamlet’s room is repeatedly searched and his diary, full of suicidal poetry, becomes public knowledge. Ophelia invades her father’s office. Sharps reminds us of the whispered conspiracies behind Elsinore’s closed doors and the fixed smiles worn in public.

However, he loses as much as he gains, reducing Hamlet to a comic strip of its telltale tableaux. Worse still, by glossing over royalty and cutting Fortinbras, Sharps loses the sense of a nation hanging in the balance, and deflates the stakes to that of a family affair. In laying bare the entrails, Sharps goes a cut too far.

Review: 66 Minutes in Damascus, Shoreditch Town Hall

Written for Culture Wars

As you follow your guide towards the tour bus that is due to cart the group around Damascus for a day of activities, you know what’s coming. At some point, round some corner or down some steps, you will be jumped by the Syrian Secret Police and arrested. You tread gingerly – a faint braced uncertainty in each step – but gamely, even excitedly.

Yet still, when it happens, in a blur of Arabic and English at high volume, it sends your adrenaline shooting up. You stand facing the wall as ordered – palms flat against it, arms outstretched – and you spin around when told. You passively allow these men to place a hood over your head. One by one, you’re walked into a vehicle, which darts off, driving not as London drivers do, but with the bunny-hopping jerks, splutters of speed and heaving brakes of elsewhere and urgency.

What does it mean for theatre to simulate an arrest at the hands of the Syrian Secret Police in a similar way that paintballing might simulate a warzone? At one level, this is how Lebanese director Lucien Bourjeily’s 66 Minutes in Damascus works. It’s an adrenal thrill; an RPG that’s closer to reality – or what you image a particular reality to be like – than a first person computer game. In these terms, it’s somewhat problematic.

Looked at unquestioningly, 66 Minutes in Damascus offers an audience safe environment to experience something that would, were it to happen us in real life, be life-threatening and traumatic. Something you definitely wouldn’t want to undergo. That experience is – both inevitably and knowingly – a pale imitation of its real-world counterpart. There’s certainly a game being played between performers and audience, but the production exists first and foremost not to thrill or entertain, as theatrical fairground ride. Like the Medal of Honour that’s set in Iraq, it runs the real risk of cheapening and disrespecting those genuinely involved and in danger. However, its intentions are good. (They must be, right?) It exists primarily to instil empathy for those undergoing the experience for real, to raise awareness and understanding of that reality in visceral terms.

When your hood is eventually removed, you are lined up in a makeshift office underground. An army official sits behind a desk eating a tomato, another trace of this exotic elsewhere. He asks our names and what we’re doing in Syria; what we know about Syria. He corrects our answers with the Assad government line, stressing the country’s free health services and education. Little wonder that 97% of the population voted for him at the last election, he says, blithely. Why are we here? One of us must be the reporter that’s been sending missives back to London. He and his men will find out and, from here, we’re marched around, ordered against more walls, threatened and locked in rooms with various other prisoners.

Given the thrill factor, I couldn’t help but remember BADAC’s 2008 Edinburgh Fringe offering The Factory (also known as 'The Show That Damn Near Broke Immersive Theatre'). For the benefit of those lucky enough to have avoided this seminal travesty, it was essentially a holocaust-themed walkthrough that attempted to evoke the experiences of concentration camp internees for its audience. Cast as the incarcerated, we were barked at, ordered to “fucking move,” and shepherded into a small room that stood in for a gas chamber. Basically, it was unutterably naïve, but that didn’t prevent it from also being unforgivably offensive.

Bourjeily’s piece looks equivalent – a crass mock-up of a moment in peril for those unlikely to have experienced anything like it in reality – but it’s not quite. For starters, unlike the unreachable trauma of the holocaust, the events being simulated in 66 Minutes are ongoing. The Factory was really an exercise in indulgent sentimentality. (Its director said at the time: “The only thing that matters is that they’ve felt something.” And it’s not like anyone was on the fence about the holocaust.) Bourjeily’s piece can at least justify itself as a sort of awareness-raising activism. It can conceivably have an effect beyond dead-end self-flagellation.

Beyond that, however, the dramaturgy in 66 Minutes is actually more complicated than mere simulation. It’s self-aware; knowing even. It relies on feeling like an RPG or multisensory first-person camera shot. In fact, its very success hinges on its own fakeness. It functions half-in and half-out of its dramatic situation, so that it can treat us as captives and theatregoers simultaneously. “What are the Syrian people to you?” the army official demands of us, “A night at the theatre?” Well, yes. There’s an implicit criticism of our even playing the game, of the thrill the show induces.

That blurring of our role allows Bourjeily his best hand. He manages to equate the rules of the guard-prisoner relationship with those of performer-audience. So just as the prisoner is expected to comply with the guard, the audience member is expected to do as the performers require. At the same time, Bourjeily leaves us enough room to feel like we are pushing against the edges of the piece and, in the process, rebelling against our guards.

First, in the office, his cast let us laugh at the contrivance of the event. Rather than immediately shouting down any such transgressions and therefore increasing resistance, as BADAC’s piece did, the guard patiently asks what’s funny and waits for us to take it – and him (event and character) – seriously. Later, when we are left unattended, ordered to remain with our hands against the wall, we start to tentatively explore our new surroundings, be they corridor or cell. Nonetheless, every time we think we hear a guard’s approach, we spring back into line, rank and file and absolutely compliant. There’s an uncertainty about what might happen and an unwillingness to find out. Finally, we are in some way broken: hooded and led back into the real world, we are left standing against a wall. It takes a while before we realise that we are ‘free' once more.

Bourjeily’s comfort with – even reliance on – this duality actually makes his production far more robust. We stop laughing at its contrivances and accept its improbabilities, such as the prisoner who claims to be the first protestor in Syria, having spent twenty years imprisoned in the dark. Moreover, it allows Bourjeily the right to include more theatrical modes of presentation, monologues designed to pass on socio-political information in character. Yet, there is also an astonishing authenticity here: when audience members ask questions in Arabic, actors reply in kind and happily improvise answers, while veering gently back to the meat of their particular scene. It’s remarkably flexible as theatrical event.

What the form can’t do, of course, is arm you with the necessary stats, figures and case-studies to offer a cogent evaluation of the situation in Syria. Instead it confronts. What it does rather well is confront you with your own assumptions and received opinions. It forces you to be honest with yourself about it and to consider Syria at both micro and macro levels, zoomed in to its streets and against a wider global context. Perhaps the visceral experience – even watered down thus – is harder to shake off than the stats of verbatim theatre and the sentiment of staged stories, in which case, it might just push you into action when the simulation stops.

Review: The Comedy of Errors, London Roundhouse

Written for Time Out

With two sets of twins unwittingly chasing each others' tails, the biggest hurdle for a director of The Comedy of Errors is making its confusion of identities convincing. Palestinian director Amir Nizar Zuabi's production leaps that hurdle better than any I've seen, driving the play with a blind panic that makes headless chickens of its central characters.

This Ephesus is a corrupt police state, also patrolled by a zealous cult of religious vigilantes led by Jonathan Slinger's sadistic Dr Pinch. Waterboarding looks like the national sport. Industrial electrodes and scorched crotches are routine. So it's no surprise that Antipholus of Syracuse (Jonathan McGuinness) and his servant Dromio, who arrive in Ephesus illegally, immediately start running for their lives. This is no light-hearted Benny Hill chase, but farce, frazzled, panting and adrenal.

Zuabi is blessed with some of the most interesting RSC casting in yonks. His Dromios in particular - Bruce Mackinnon and Felix Hayes - are wonderful hollow-headed clowns, both stupidly sympathetic. As they confuse their shiny-suited masters, the play morphs into 'Two Men, Two Guvnors'. Kirsty Bushell's batty confused wife, Adrianna, and her husband, Stephen Hagan's slick Antipholus of Ephesus, are just as joyous.

Individuality is prized over technique and pacey pandemonium leaves loose ends. However, this is so turbo charged and hysterical that you can happily sacrifice some of that RSC nuanced polish.

Review: MEAT, Theatre503

Written for Time Out

Vincent cuts carotid arteries for a living. He’s slaughtered hundreds of thousands of carcasses over the years and no one has batted an eyelid. However, when 17-year-old Rob, a local disrespectful nuisance, is killed, only Vincent (Graham Turner, brilliant) refuses to join the hysteria. With the killer still at large, the rest of the town pours out its collective grief and thinks of vengeance.

Raw but gutsy, Jimmy Osborne’s full-length debut goes for the jugular and just misses. His gradual exposure of the central mystery of Rob’s death holds our attention, but this play is not taut enough yet. Where it’s bad, it’s hard to stomach. It feels original but large chunks are contrived or unconvincing and some meat-related vocabulary is definitely overcooked. Big ideas and a heartfelt passion help Osborne gets away with it – but Meat needs another run through the mincer.

Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

Written for Time Out

It's bigger, fatter, but not exactly dreamier at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, where Matthew Dunster's downmarket Dream starts promisingly, grows confused and leaves a nasty aftertaste.

It all kicks off with a bare-knuckle brawl: Dunster swaps Shakespeare's magical Athenian woodland for the concrete and caravans of a community of travellers. When courtship involves grabbing, the play's harsh patriachy makes perfect sense. A ripe shiner even suggests that David Birrell's construction kingpin Theseus isn't speaking metaphorically about wooing his fiancée Hippolyta with injuries.

Yet, by the end, nothing much has changed, despite a supposedly transformative night in the enchanted woods for the four young lovers.

When the sequined wedding dresses come out, it looks like misogyny, tastelessness and class have been unquestioningly equated. At least My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding seeks some understanding. This just makes sport.

It's not helped by confused loose ends. Oliver Johnstone's Puck, a masked hoody on a BMX, invokes the spirit of last summer's riots gratuitiously, but doesn't fit in with the nu-age mysticism of other supernatural characters. Elsewhere, there are great performances and neat touches, but as Dunster's concept runs away from him, his Dream unravels, too clever for its own good

Review: The Witness, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

The best play of the year to date, The Witness is a beautifully woven, layered piece of writing with a rare blend of individual and global ethics. In only her second play, Vivienne Franzmann has produced a bona fide contemporary classic.

The first thing you see, on walking into Lizzie Clachan’s domestic set, is a poster for the V&A’s recent Postmodernism exhibition. It sticks out, jarring with the room’s décor and preventing passage to the play’s world like a glitch in the Matrix. However, it serves to say this: watch accordingly.

Sure enough, the bookshelves provide all the clues you need to The Witness’s DNA. The living room is lined with travelogues, art books, war histories and dictionaries. The walls, lined with hanging artefacts and framed tapestries, are those of a cross-cultural magpie.

Joseph is an acclaimed photojournalist, now retired save for the odd wedding. Boxed up in his cellar, organised by crisis, are pictures and negatives of human horrors: Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Israel. One shot has had a particular impact on his life: a young girl in Rwanda reaching out for her dead mother’s hand. That young girl is Alex, Joseph’s adopted daughter. Hearing gunfire, he scooped her up and ran.

On a purely narrative level, Franzmann hits you with revelation after revelation, without ever tilting into schlock. Every other scene springs a major surprise. At least two of them are genuine rug-pulls. (Spoiler warning from here on.)

At its core, then, is a dilemma pure, simple and unsolvable: was Joseph right to intervene in Alex’s – then Frances Mutesi, by the way – life? If that situation looked hopeless, Franzmann then sets about mitigating the circumstances and, essentially, The Witness becomes the dramatic equivalent of an ethical conundrum turned this way and that, inside and out. What if you add a brother, cropped out of the picture as it was published? Joseph claims he could only carry one of them and had to leave the other child for dead. What if that brother was not, as Joseph had claimed, almost certainly killed by returning militia? What if the scene wasn’t simply as Joseph had found it? That Franzmann is able to incorporate all these altered scenarios into a single narrative, allowing each to exist fully before zooming out a little further, goes beyond impressive. It’s ingenious.

Moreover, Franzmann is able to raise a raft of similarly enormous questions in less than two hours of stage time.

Thematically, The Witness is as dense a piece of playwrighting as you’ll find. It’s a masterclass in postmodern playwrighting. Her content is meticulously assembled, doubling up on itself without resorting to such lazy connective tissue as simple repetition or strained vocabulary. Franzmann also writes performatively, yet embeds media snippets – songs or news reports – into the play seamlessly. Kayne West’s Gold Digger rings out from Joseph’s stereo – “You give me money / When I’m in need” – and instantly seeds the notion of both charity and its exploitation, as you suspect of Simon – a Pinteresque mystery-man who purports to be Alex’s brother.

To go back to those books, they’re all represented and fully-fledged. She echoes our relationship with the developing world in Joseph and Alex’s parent-child relationship, which adds another dimension to the onstage characterisation of the baby-boom generation. Joseph, kicking back on the trappings of his success, orders his daughter what’s best for her, demanding that she go back to Cambridge, put some clothes on, turn that crap off and so on. Alex, meanwhile, constantly needs confirmation: “I know it sounds stupid,” she repeats. She echoes the impossibility of cross-cultural communication – Alex tries to explain the Teletubbies to her brother – such that the lived experience seems unbridgeable. As Alex lounges in front of Loose Women, you’re always aware of the alternative avoided. Franzmann’s also careful to use context. Joseph has taken to ordering rare cheeses on the internet. You can get anything online, just want and click. His next-door neighbour Jackie has taken up urban farming, ordering fertilized duck eggs. (This affords Franzmann a corking, if perhaps a little strained, metaphor of returning one of her chickens for it to get mauled by a dog.)

There are echoes too, of The Author’s aesthetic concerns about disturbing material in the notion of Joseph’s forthcoming retrospective at the Imperial War Museum and questions about whether representation can equal reality. Alex’s brother Simon, when he arrives in London, is desperate to have his photograph taken with David Beckham. That he means his Madame Tussauds waxwork is by the by. Asked whether he’s seen an elephant, Simon replies yes, adding: “On television.” What then of Joseph’s photographs? In what way are they equivalent? It’s a question that, like so much of The Witness, bugs and needles. But there are many more: Why does some art and culture shy away from the world’s issues? How does photojournalism function as art? What level of manipulation might be permissible? How many times do we need telling something before it takes effect – and how long should we repeat ourselves?

But it’s biggest idea, the one it chews over and over, is the concept of what it means to witness. For years Joseph has packaged his experiences and survived, yet in unpacking them for the forthcoming retrospective, he unravels, careering into a spiral of drink, sex and chicken theft. His constant dark irony, prodding at cultural taboos, is parched of empathy as the effect of his witnessing. Joseph has, at some level, profited from the pain of others and, in his middle-class Hampstead home, the question finally framed is whether he “took photos” or “bore witness.”

Franzmann’s primary point, however, is that it is the witness that holds the power, that controls the story in its telling. In the end – massive spoiler alert – it is because Simon saw him manipulating the tragic scene, separating mother and child to get the most powerful image, that Joseph leaves him for dead. He attempts to rid himself of witnesses and make himself unaccountable in holding others accountable.

However, the reason that The Witness works so well as drama is not merely because it is so heavily loaded with symbolism and questions. It is because it thrives on the impossibility of doing all good things. None of the characters, even Joseph in his ultimate crime of manipulation, is acting out of pure malevolence. There are no villains here, only three people trying to navigate the world as best they can. Franzmann plays brilliantly with the impossibility of doing all good things or of all-seeing witnesses (Joseph admits that Mad Men and The Wire have passed him by at the last moment) and with the non-existence of the straightforward, black-white ethical dilemma.

It ends up beautifully in production. Lizzie Clachan’s design, which makes voyeurs of us all by placing us in the walls of a full-scale living room, almost in jury boxes or spectator banks, plays perfectly. The blocking – quite possibly also Clachan’s in its conceptual clarity – repeats and twists itself according to the power dynamics of whose on top at any given moment. Simon Godwin handles the play exquisitely, allowing the intricacies of Franzmann’s texts to land and bounce off one another without stressing them. And he draws superb performances from Danny Webb (apparently incapable of anything less), Pippa Bennett-Warner and David Ajala. Phenomenal.

Photograph: Robert Workman

Review: Caligula, London Coliseum

The curtain rises at the London Coliseum to reveal row upon row upon row of identical yellow plastic seats, arranged rank and file in the rows of an abandoned stadium. Into this, with a laurel on his head, half-muddied and half-clean totters Caligula, like a latterday Lear in this new urban wilderness.

Caligula was among the most tyrannical and ludicrous of all Rome’s emperors. A programme note explains that he had an invasion force collect sea shells on the shore of France and tried to appoint his horse consul. In 1938, Albert Camus turned him into the dramatic protagonist in a play that looks primarily political, but has arguably more philosophical traction. What happens when an individual elevates him or herself above the rest of the species as self-appointed (self-inflicted) deity?

Its plot is truly bizarre; surely far better suited to Detlev Glanert’s opera than straightforward drama. It trumps The Master and Margarita for supernatural scale.

Caligula (Peter Coleman-Wright), missing after the death of his sister and lover Drusila, is begged to return to power by the Roman people. As emperor, he executes rivals and dissenters, raping their wives as he goes, and requesting that his citizens bring him the moon.

Which he later marries. Having been revealed as the goddess Venus and forcing everyone to workship him.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the citizens plot a cout and eventually topple him from power. His last words are: “I am still alive.”

Speaking absolutely truthfully, this was my first opera in a decade, my first ever contemporary opera and my first experience of Detlev Glanert’s music and, I found it rather a trudge as a standard watch: too slow and turgid as plot, too direct and bloated a libretto, too deliberately jarring and jaunty musically. Perhaps it takes some getting used to, but the form seems composed entirely of symbols. Its units of action are not just symbolic, they are themselves symbolised. Nothing is played. Everything is poised.

However, when it comes to the ideas contained within those symbols, Benedict Andrews’ staging is absolutely enthralling. The interplay of ideas and metaphors are incredibly dense and dextrous, enabling the piece to get beyond and beneath standard, received notions of dictatorship. Andrews lets us pick it apart and construct it afresh, shattering the hollow image for something that feels more truthful. In fact, he does so with a single image: one man and a sea of yellow seats.

There are 410 in Ralph Myers set. I counted. I had to. Partly, because of scale – it just looks so impressively monotonous. In fact, it looks bigger. At least, you process it as bigger, because you can’t help but extrapolate – ten-, twenty-, even thirtyfold – to the full stadium-size. The stage outreaches itself and dares to stand in fro something far, far bigger.

We are, of course, reflected back at ourselves by this bank of seats and yet there is an inevitable (and certainly inbuilt) layer of snobbery: our cushioned velvet against their unfussy plastic, the supposedly refined against the crass mass market. There is something passive-aggressive about their emptiness.

With the London Olympics around the corner – and all the connotations of restricted protest and security measures – what could be more potent as a symbol of dictatorship and populace than a sheer bank of stadium seating. They are blank and homogeneous, like a lobotomised, re-programmed army. What Caligula says goes. If he dons a gold wig and a spangled skirt and announces himself Venus, then he’s Venus.

Having established this, however, Andrews starts to play with the concept of the populace. The banks of seating start to fill with pop cultural figures. There are cracked beauty queens and showgirls, drenched in running mascara. It seems to run the gamut of half a century of pin-ups right up until two indentikit Nuts-like glamour models. In amongst them are cartoon characters: a distorted Mickey Mouse, a warped Kermit, He-Man and She-Ra, human junk food, Ninja Turtles, Ronald McDonald. Are they standing in for the people – the flotsam and jetsam of our collective hive mind – or are they colluding with Caligula in some way, keeping us smiling, dribbling and, to cite Bill Hicks overtly, sleeping? We realise our complicity; that of course we, together, could take him. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of us and just one of him. Caligula leads because, at some level, the people allow him to. His tyranny is, somehow, self-imposed.

Yet Caligula is also re-humanised, even as he transmogrifies into a god. “I am not lonely,” he insists, again and again, and yet, sat alone in an empty stadium, purpose-built for crowds, not individuals, he cannot really be otherwise. He has his own reflection for company; in the circular mirror that stands in for the moon and in Drusila, body-painted like a human glitterball as both ghost and reflection of the moon reflecting him in turn. Elsewhere he is entertainment, dancing before the seating bank amidst a quagmire of body bags and bouquets.

Caligula is dictator and depressive, star turn and court jester, sympathetic and monstrous; he contains his own inverse. What’s certain is that this is among the most intricate and open understandings of dictatorship you’ll see onstage. It makes Christopher Eccleston’s starched Blairite Creon at the National Theatre look a cardboard cut-out.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Henry V, Theatre Delicatessen

Written for Culture Wars

“On, on you noblest English,” bellowed Brian Blessed two years ago, paid by the BBC to stoke the fires of patriotism during the last World Cup. With England’s footballers needing a win against Slovenia to make it through the group stages, it was to Henry V they turned: “Cry God for Fabio, England and St George.”

Roland Smith might go easier on the patriotism, but he wants us to see the play in similarly upstanding terms. His immersive production – much more of which later – switches the Hundred Years War for the Falklands, and emphasises the dignity and selflessness of fighting for a noble cause throughout. From Philip Desmeules’s Henry down, the British are always pristinely turned out, as if ready to parade on the banks of the Somme should it be required.

There are two fundamental problems with this. First, the Falklands and 14th Century France are very different situations and it looks rather perverse to equate them. In one, Britain is defending its territory. In the other, it is seeking to expand it. Harder to overlook, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq, is Henry’s rejoicing at the discrepancy between ‘their’ dead and ‘ours’: some 10,000 to 520. That Smith can maintain the nobility of any such lopsided conflict today is faintly gobsmacking. This is a military leader that directly orders every soldier in his command to kill his prisoners.

Smith gives us not war, but a childhood dream of it, free from horrors, fear and even death. He shows us commanders and vigilantes, goodies and baddies, and, in the process, almost entirely forgets about the common soldier. Sure, the play focuses on various Earls and Dukes, but there are more clergymen here than there are non-RP squaddies. Pistol and Bardolph are the only examples and the latter – adding a extra, uninterrogated layer to the 1980’s dramaturgy – speaks in a thick Northern Irish accent.

This becomes a story of tacticians, not soldiers; of warcraft, not war itself. It’s rather like watching a CCF training exercise on the fields of some public school and, when Desmeules’s Henry cries, “The game’s afoot,” he could be ordering his employees into a paintballing arena.

This is a problem of performance register; a classic case of ill-thought immersive theatre. Smith and his designer Katharine Heath place us in an impressive barracks setting, perched on sandbags, and then use it as an empty space stage, taking us into the battlefield itself. It defeats the object and uses design as mere frame. Every couple of minutes, one of three stock explosion noises sounds behind us with all the artifice of a bird scarer. It’s a long, long way to Islas Malvinas.

Nor can this afford a cast that recites before it attempts to communicate. Only Liam Smith (Pistol) speaks with enough irreverence to actually convey meaning; breaking rhythm and flow for sense and character. The rest is pickled poetry, worthy of any school declamation trophy, but useless when it comes to drama. “The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.”

Played onstage we might have accepted all these conventions that counteract theatre’s inevitable shortcomings; here, however, the same performances look all the more contrived and, given the subject matter, unacceptably naïve and crass.

Photograph: Lorna Palmer

Review: Boys, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

To get to Neverland, it’s second star on the right and straight on until morning. Alternatively, hop on the M1 Northbound, find a student flat and head through ‘til dawn. Here, Ella Hickson’s lost boys are staving off adulthood as best they can in a pre-graduation flurry of Coco Pops and pill-popping.

This ill-equipped generation of unfortunates – arriving at the Real World™ to find the door slammed shut – is, of course, Hickson’s specialist subject and it would have been easy to greet another such play with a ‘been-there, done-that’ yawn. However, in Boys, she has reached its apotheosis. It is the most multifaceted analysis of that generation’s situation and mental state on stage to date. It makes her previous efforts on the subject, Precious Little Talent and Hot Mess, look like preparatory exercises in an artist’s sketchbook.

The student flat, its kitchen buried underneath pizza boxes and washing up, is “sort of a crèche, sort of a stable, sort of heaven;” a toy-world, in other words, where the party never stops, it just catches its breath.

Mack and Benny, realist and idealist, are on the cusp of graduation. Neither of their flatmates are students: Cam’s a talented violinist, Timp’s coasting through the university of life as a waiter and recreational drug-user. The fifth resident, Benny’s brother, recently committed suicide, hanging himself in the kitchen to escape the seemingly impossible hand of expectation and recession this generation has been dealt.

All of the characters are defined by this dilemma in one way or another. Mack is cutthroat, Benny naïve; Cam is paralysed by pressure while Timp has given up on ambition to be a pig satisfied. Hickson is writing about a zero-sum game that’s ruining those forced to play.

It is this all-or-nothing attitude, born out of the switch from necessity to opportunity charted in Mike Bartlett’s Love Love Love, that Hickson’s after. The heroic action is Benny’s attacking the Tartaran task of eating cereal with a two metre long spoon. Hickson sympathises with the uphill battle, but hasn’t time for those stood stock still staring up at it. When Cam speaks about meeting a nameless photographer who snapped Picasso one sees a solution. To get halfway up is not to fall-short, she suggests. It is not that life rolls downhill from 21, but that society’s view of age and success has warped beyond sanity and, indeed, safety. The key, Hickson suggests, is to come to terms with moderation, marrying contentedness to ambition.

The sense, however, is that the world has grown unscaleable; that, with the exception of the exceptional, individuals cannot succeed. Not for nothing does Chloe Lamford’s artfully constructed bombsite of a student kitchen contain a Coca-Cola fridge and a stolen Barclays sign. The latter smacks of Sherwood Forest student prank, but it has a far more tragic edge.

The main thrust of Boys is driven by the intrusion of that world into the safe haven of the student bubble. Hickson is smart enough to situate her microcosm in the wider world, albeit with a clunk or two that leave it feeling naïve by comparison to the internal politics. A rubbish-collectors’ strike means that rubbish is piling up and, when a riot flickers into life outside, the flatmates end up with a pyramid of refuse bags – some their own, some their neighbours – in their kitchen.

It’s a particularly strong metaphor – almost too strong, in fact, bringing connotations crashing into the room and leaving Hickson wrestling for coherence. In a single image, it shows us society as the nanny state we rely on and as a house of cards that only functions if everyone shares the strain. It speaks of responsibility, both personal and collective, of dumping on others, the absence of altruism and, at its widest, of consequences.

In the end, Hickson stakes her money on community and its in moments of togetherness – not necessarily charging down the riot squad, but cleaning the flat and rounds of tea – that she locates the play’s hopefulness. Occasionally it feels like she’s teetering on the edge of mawkishness, but the reason that Boys works so well is that you can feel her own uncertainty. Each of the Boys boys’ ideologies has its pros and cons; each insecurity, its sympathies and stupidities. Hickson turns a student flat into a Question Time bear-pit without letting the issues break the action.

It is the play’s schematic nature that holds it back, however, and Hickson ends up compensating for transparency by overstuffing. Is the revelation that boys will be boys until they become boyfriends really necessary or just another observation for the pyre? Hickson holds it together – and director Robert Icke and his first-class cast follow with a quickfire ping-ponging rhythm – by skimming along with frivolous banter that’s terrifically entertaining to watch and a couple of skeletons propped up in the kitchen closet that might just force these lost boys to grow up.

Review: Antigone, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Antigone endures because it is both direct and malleable. Its cycle of action – decree, defiance, retaliation, comeuppance – is simple enough to gain specificity without dilution or contortion. Sophocles’ play will resonate somehow, somewhere forever.

Antigone’s burial of her brother, which has been expressly forbidden, can stand for any and every act of principled defiance. Creon’s unwavering decree that she be punished is every instance of affronted retaliation, of leadership elevated above the people it represents.

Polly Findlay’s production manages all this, but the closer you look the more problematic it seems. From a distance, you get a gutsy political thriller with punch enough to grip and nous enough to avoid lazy extremes of good and bad, right and wrong.

Christopher Eccleston’s Creon is an elected official whose self-righteous conviction has obliterated his sense of public duty. Three times, he is presented with the opportunity to make a U-Turn and three times he dismisses advice. On one occasion, he’s seems to unchange his mind simply because someone questions him. Meanwhile, Jodie Whittaker’s Antigone is driven by her own interests, rather than the urge to publically protest and martyr herself to a cause.

Findlay sets out to present a modern political machine. She sets the action in Creon’s staff offices (impressively designed by Soutra Gilmour). Her chorus is of military advisors, pollsters and spin doctors, with the aim of always preserving the infallibility of the dear leader. Indeed, Findlay gives us the first chorus as a press release dictated. However that spin has spread to Creon’s head and he believes his own hype. It is telling that his son Haemon precedes his criticisms with cautious flattery: “It is not for me to say you are wrong.”

This Antigone comes via the West Wing. It is full of political intrigue and tactical power-play. There’s certainly urgency and momentum, despite three flatly directed acts that are suddenly enlivened by Jamie Ballard’s chilling and guttural Tiresias, his face melted into a minefield of welts and pustules, and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Messenger. The constant sense of bustle, of people with jobs to do, ferrying papers, chewing pens and chain smoking, ups the ante with a sense of unseen implications.

However, beneath this archetypal political machine, is actually a collage effect. Eccleston’s Creon is a composite creation, first seen with huddled round a television screen with his security team, just like Obama, and later speechifying in the smooth stutter of Tony Blair. Indeed, the actor often seems more concerned with mimicry than emotional truth and thought processes. At the same time, his soldiers, staff and son all quiver before him, wary of his unchecked whims and unilateral decisions. Eccleston handles the part like Mr Potato Head, assembling attributes into a pick’n’mix whole. This Creon is an amalgamation of dictators and democrats.

Of course, there’s political oomph in that – and it’s the likes of Obama and Blair that come off worse than the Assads and Mubaraks – but these moments are broadly tokenistic. They don’t really add up to concrete critique and Findlay still wants to talk in general terms. Any bristle of recognition is an end in itself: neat, but signifying far less than the swirl of accompanying connotations. Findlay risks confusing her critique.

Above all else, Findlay is interested in entertaining with a cracking political thriller. She is, however, so in thrall to the televisual that she ends up referencing references, rather than the world itself. She works with dramatic tropes – Antigone and Ismene plotting while pinned to a concrete wall or interrogated while cuffed back to back – rather than seeking a genuine human truth. Perhaps that’s a good solution to Greek tragedy’s heightened style. Perhaps its an indictment of the media’s total pervasiveness.

Either way, Findlay always seems to be referencing a reference and, onstage, the dramatic world she creates tips into a distraction. The retro seventies aesthetic of cardigans and analogue adds nothing beyond an instagram shabby chic. It avoids the problem of modern technology, but it also makes the innate gender tensions – ruling men, subordinate women etc – seem a thing of the past.

If none of these loose threads snag, Findlay’s production looks impressive – punchy, clear, accessible and, above all, thrilling. However, it just can’t stand up to scrutiny and, in the end, that lack of specificity is fatal.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: Cymbeline, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Most of Shakespeare’s plots fall effortlessly into place. His loose ends tie themselves together almost of their accord. Lovers waltz into one another’s arms. Just deserts are dished out.

In Cymbeline, however, you feel the playwright begin to sweat. He has to wrestle the plot into shape. Each time he pins one flailing narrative strand down, another gets away from him. He cycles through his trusty dramaturgical armoury, chucking in all the usual tricks in the hope that one will unlock the whole. Long-lost children? No. Cross-gender disguise? No. Sleeping potion? Love token? Headless corpse? No, no, no.

Yes, it’s a bit of a pastoral-comical-historical-tragical mish-mash, but Cymbeline’s real problem is that it meanders fairly arbitrarily towards a mawkish conclusion. Yukio Ninagawa can’t solve that, but he has found a thematic link that runs throughout. He reveals Cymbeline as a study of parent-child relationships.

He marks Rome, where Posthumous retreats in exile, with a vast statue of Romulus and Remus, suckling at the she-wolf that raised them. The two orphans are paralleled by Cymbeline’s own lost sons, Avriragus and Guiderius, raised wild in Milford Haven by the banished Belarius.

Cymbeline rules as a tyrant, it seems, because of that loss. Kohtaloh Yoshida enters draped in wolf skins and thrashing his sword left and right; he’s a dervish of a monarch. Even when he stops still, his courtiers stand braced in self-defence, waiting for the next outburst.

Before long, though, Cymbeline has lost his two other children: Imogen, because she has run off in the hope of joining Posthumous, and Cloten, a doltish wolf-cub in white, in pursuit. His identity as a father affects that of the king and his personal grief impacts upon the whole nation. As the Brits and Romans clash swords in battle, the sounds of a crying child and an air raid siren blend; each of these men is someone’s son, many are fathers themselves.

Ninagawa locates the Royal family’s reunion under a single pine, changing the text’s cedar to echo the single tree left standing after last year’s tsunami. It puts a real gloss on the final chink of optimism. In March, a year on, there were still more than 3,000 missing persons in Japan. As the clouds clear, the very absurd improbability of Cymbeline’s plot serves to increase the hopefulness of the final reunion.

However fathers and sons, mothers and daughters are myth’s building blocks and to foreground these archetypal relationships, Ninagawa is forced to simplify. In Tsukasa Nakagoshi’s design, the production drifts towards the fur coats and forged metal of Game of Thrones. That’s only furthered by the twist of superhumanity Ninagawa owes to Manga. Hiroshi Abe’s Posthumous looks nearly 7ft tall and, in battle, strides despite three arrows through his chest. For all that the might of Rome, armed like Medieval Crusaders, looks like a pointedly unstoppable invading force, the shift to fantasy overwhelms both the political and personal in the play. As such, the play only comes together in its latter stages and, though it hits an exquisite final note, Ninagawa’s production struggles in the build-up.

Photograph: Takahiro Watanabe

Review: Leper Colony, Yard Theatre

Written for Time Out

A drama school exercise let loose in the real world, Vaughan Pilikian's devised theatrical leper colony ought never to have had an audience plonked in front of it.

Six performers, surrounded by random junk, improvise madness. They grunt, growl and tic, squabble and smash things. Then they lose interest and do something else, always with scant regard for those watching. An hour in, they pretend to sleep, 'wake up' and act like zombies; deep breathing, bestial rutting and so forth.

Leper Colony is undisciplined, unstructured and, due to its fatal lack of specificity, meaningless. Presumably it concerns repressed savagery and the precariousness of civilisation. Who knows? Who cares? This sort of thing was done in the '70s, and I assume it was just as empty, indulgent and tiresome then.

There is some good news: Leper Colony is intended to mark the Transit of Venus, so we're not due a sequel until 2117.