Review: Much Ado About Nothing, Noel Coward Theatre

Written for Time Out

Iqbal Khan's India-set RSC production of 'Much Ado…' is a fine note to finish this year's phenomenal World Shakespeare Festival on: a heartfelt cry that some things need to be taken seriously.

Here Dehli is almost entirely ado; a city of car horns and bustle. Kahn makes it a colour-splashed jumble of old and new, tradition and technology. A tree is tangled with telephone wires. Saris sit alongside iPads.

Usually played as proud and pompous, here sparring flirts Beatrice and Benedick become incessant comedians, incapable of sincerity. Meera Syal tenderly suggests a spinsterish sadness beneath Beatrice, but by dropping Benedick's grandiosity, Paul Bhattacharjee somewhat undoes the comedy of his being fooled into love.

Some contrived set-pieces mean the first half underwhelms, but the second surges into scorched melancholy as Benedick's comrade Claudio aborts his marriage to sweetheart Hero, believing her unfaithful. Khan really draws out the play's heartache and rancour. Flippancy and love don't mix, and Benedick's eventual, earnest declaration buckles Beatrice's knees. A smart reading, given the language grows spiritual, and one that comes to soar.

Great work, too, from Gary Pillai as a scorned Don John, while Sagar Arya and Amara Karan make Claudio and Hero far more than bland saps.

Review: One Day When We Were Young, Roundabout Season

Written for Culture Wars

Time runs away. Life catches up. We must be slowing down.

British playwrights have taken to time-travel recently. Mike Bartlett whizzed from ’67 to ’90 to 2011 in Love Love Love, while Earthquakes in London spanned a whopping 557 years. Abi Morgan’s Lovesong flashed back half a century and, another of the Roundabout Season plays, Duncan MacMillan’s Lungs jump-cuts through a lifetime. There have been others: In Basildon’s final rewind, Shivered's cut-up chronology, and, at a push, the past memories in Kieran Hurley’s Beats. It’s nothing new, of course: J.B. Priestley was doing this shit in the ‘30s.

Aesthetically, this is a way of telling big stories without maxing out on plot; a sort of Butterfly Effect approach to Aristotlean tragedy. Politically and socially, it’s explained by uncertainty and fragility. Sometimes, it’s about explaining the present through the past. Elsewhere, it involves a cautionary glance forwards. These plays force audiences on Scrooge-like adventures, hoping to shake us out of our catastrophic habits. Or else, maybe, they seek some stability in the wide-angle lens that the tumultuous present can’t offer.

The latest timey-hopper is Nick Payne, who having already skipped between universes this year, now hauls us through the decades. Why? Well, probably because it’s a wee-tle bit sad and a wee-tle bit sweet. Sort of like this: :’-).

One Day When We Were Young starts in 1942, in a Bath hotel in middle of the Blitz. Leonard (Andrew Sheridan) leaves for war tomorrow, so he and girlfriend Violet (Maia Alexander) are spending the night together. She’s brought him presents: Bournville and a book and one they don’t get to before, well, you know. Bow-chick-a-wow-wow. Unless that’s the third present…

Leonard’s brought her one as well: his grandmother’s watch, given to her in lieu of an engagement ring. Now Leonard’s giving it likewise. As a pre-proposal promise. “Keeps very good time,” he says, and asks her – in a nervy, roundabout fashion – to wait for him. So far, so We’ll Meet Again.

And they do. In 1963. A rendezvous in Royal Victoria Path. Back in Bath. Only Violet hasn’t waited. Leonard became a Japanese prisoner of war – a fact Payne swishly glances off, though, by doing so, misses an opportunity to really delve into the meaning of time. She thought that was it and so married Jack, a comparatively well-off academic.

Their meeting is charred with regret and bitterness, explanations that don’t quite cut it. Time has moved on – there are washing machines and televisions and expressos and Wimpys now – but Leonard hasn’t. Nor, really, has Violet. Sheridan and Alexander age up, but their faces remain the same. “I had an image of you in my mind,” says Leonard, “I clung to you.” To each other, they have remained perfectly preserved, encased in amber memories. Yet both have changed in the intervening years.

On the way to Shoreditch, I read a short story by Marcel Ayme, Tickets In Time, in which people deemed not to sufficiently contribute to society are forced to spend a certain portion of every month in limbo. One day they disappear into temporary non-existence, re-appearing at the start of the next month. Crucially, at this point, they don’t feel the gap in time. They don’t experience their absence. Like when you roll over in bed and roll back, having slept six hours in the interim. Only the world has moved on. Time has run away.

This is Violet and Leonard’s relationship: after 21 years of relative non-existence, they have to relearn everything about one another. Whether she still plays the piano. (She does.) Whether he still lives in London. (He doesn’t.) It’s an awkward trodden-toed encounter that culminates in an accusation, a shared cigarette and a melancholic parting.

They meet again again, in the present. Between each act, both change clothes and age themselves up with a new hairdo and accessories. (Apparently, everything changes but underwear.) Time has healed old wounds. Leonard has “moved on.” But life has caught up with them. Leonard’s smoking has left him coughing up blood – as his grandmother did before him.

After niceties, Violet hands him a photo of a 59-year old woman. He takes an age to twig that’s she’s their daughter. It’s a super moment that comes in waves: first, a gentle happiness that, despite their non-existence, there was always something between them – that the relationship wasn’t fruitless; then, an electric shock of anger – what gave Violet the right not to have told him until now? Sure, Payne tips into sentiment with an over-cooked sparklers-in-a-powercut moment, but generally he’s pretty delicate and restrained.

This is a really polished piece of writing, and Payne’s empathetic and diligent with his characters. Clare Lizzimore’s production is accomplished with delicate, tender performances from Sheridan and Alexander, both of whom negotiate the aging process deftly. (They’re helped by the production’s openness about it’s contrivance.) All of which, ensures that you watch with a lump in your throat and a wistful smile.

But it’s all so sodding certain. It knows exactly how it wants you to feel. Payne shoehorns loaded but arbitrary echoes and repetitions, so as to knit the pair together, destined for one another despite life deciding otherwise. Were there something to really chew over, that mightn’t be such a problem, but One Day When We Were Young little more than a vague consideration of time’s passing and life’s course. It’s not after anything per se. In that, yeah, alright, it works, but, my god, it could use an injection of ambition and grit. After all, the most interesting thing about Leonard are his year’s in internment and yet, when one really thinks about it, they have no more effect on the play than would a postal service cock-up. Payne's sidestepped the hard stuff for a spot of gentle meditation and emotional manipulation. Pity.

Photograph: Elyse Marks

Review: Mudlarks, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

A dead end in a dead end town – and what better dead end for "a generation stuck in quicksand" than the boggy banks of the River Thames?

Three Essex teenagers, on the run from the police after an act of brain-dead vandalism, settle for a marshland hideout. They can’t stay here forever – not with the tide coming in – and going back would almost certainly mean facing the consequences.

“This,” says the snarling bully Charlie, “is a temporary situation.” Only it’s not. Not really. Certainly not for Charlie. Theirs is a generation scuppered by its place in history. Charlie, Wayne and Jake have been screwed by the happenstances of their births. Given time, the country – indeed, the world – should recover, but, for them, the damage is done and it’s irreversible. So it was even before the paving slab they threw from a flyover, careered through the windscreen of an oncoming lorry. Only Jake, about to take up a place at college, a hard-earned lifeline, looked back and saw the pile-up below.

Vickie Donoghue’s debut, first seen at the HighTide Festival in May, is a taut, tense three-hander that follows the logic of its particular scenario with patience and diligence. Donoghue shows a great capacity for empathy; her writing throbs as the three boys’ pulses quicken and, later, sobs on their behalf. It’s given a fantastically tight production by Will Wrightson, in which you can really sense the world beyond the action; the small town bathed in flashing blue lights. Credit needs sharing with Amy Jane Cook’s detailed and atmospheric design and the nuanced conviction of the young cast: Mike Noble, Scott Hazell and, in particular, James Marchant, all itchy insecure aggression as Charlie.

However, it’s also pretty archetypal stuff. You could dress the three boys in any decade’s clothing, give them any non-London accent without significant loss. There’s little specificity in Donoghue’s diagnosis of this generation, beyond a single – stunning – line: Jake’s “I have so many dreams that when I wake up I can’t remember them.” In that, she captures the crisis of those taught that anything’s possible, who find, on reaching adulthood, that it’s not. Otherwise, teenage boys have always been capable of mindless destruction, of naïve, chest-puffed violence and of near-total disconnects from reality.

That’s furthered by the play’s perfect triangle – bully, blockhead and bright spark; almost id, ego and superego – which is too convenient to convince. They all feel like creatures of the stage, a fact not helped by a certain over-insistence in the writing. Donoghue returns to the same contrived, symbolic dreams – of masculinity (Wayne), of a metal detector (Jake) – once or twice too often, and her lurch into imagination sits oddly with the social realism. The tint of optimism is just too forced and the dead end, just too dead.

Review: Big Hits, Soho Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Big Hits certainly doesn’t pull its punches. It swells, over 90 minutes, into a full-blast lambast; a roar of disgust at the world’s hollow frivolity and, moreover, our complicit tolerance – no, our eager, pants-down acceptance – of it.

It starts with two women onstage: one, Lucy McCormick, dolled-up and overtly sexual, a magician’s assistant with a Playboy smirk; the other, Jennifer Pick, in a fluffy rabbit costume and a Bunnygirl’s lace lingerie beneath. McCormick, we’re told, represents us and Pick, everything that makes us safe and secure; the sugar on the pill, if you like, or the photographer’s cutesy glove-puppet of distraction. “Have we got a show for you?” they enthuse. “Yes, um, yes, we have.”

At this point, the show looks like so much Forced Entertainment-style posturing; all flustered amateurism and self-conscious shambles. This was my overriding problem with GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN’s first show, External: its contentedness to regurgitate the Forced Entz glossary wholesale. Given time, however, Big Hits gets beyond it, both with super-smart dramaturgical connections and a willingness to push its terms to an extra level of logical conclusion.

Big Hits plays out to a soundtrack stuck on repeat, as MacCormick trills her way through Hallelujah over and over again. Here she’s breathily seductive, there all showy vibrato. On one occasion, she doesn’t sing at all, leaving this bland synthetised musak to hum away on its own.

It’s a clever, brassy song-choice, bleached as it’s been of meaning. We’re a long way from Leonard Cohen these days. First, John Cale “just picked out the cheeky verses.” Jeff Buckley twisted it into “a hallelujah to the orgasm,” before it was bastardised by X Factor’s Alexandra Burke with a warbled cover that sold 576,000 copies in its first week. The biblical references – to Samson, to Bathsheba – have become empty lines on a karaoke machine, churned through simply to fill the notes with synthetic emotion. “Listen to the song,” McCormick yells, “Listen to it.” It’s nothing but a big hit these days, downgraded to the lowest common denominator and repackaged for commercial purposes.

Behind the two women, acting as downtrodden stage-hand, is Craig Hamblyn, bare-chested and drenched in stage blood. (He has a tendency to play the victim, apparently.) Hamblyn acquiesces to their barked commands – clean this, move that, hold these – with a genial, no-nonsense demeanour. He rattles off corny punning jokes on demand, all as empty and meaningless, as base and one-dimensional, as Hallelujah. As the women phlegm and belch, the belittled and overstretched, Hamblyn gets not a shred of sympathy, even when his outstretched arms quiver under the weight of two speakers. “Less like Christ,” yells McCormick, as if rapping a disciplinary cane against the backs of his knees.

Hamblyn’s punning is an extension of the double-entendres that lace McCormick’s every other line. To start, she flirts with the front row and cackles derangedly in our faces. McCormick is a phenomenally watchable performer with an unhinged quality that lays a turbo-charge. She is dangerous because she has no shame – which is very different from shamelessness. With McCormick, anything is a possibility. She floats on the present moment, and there’s no knowing how far she’ll go.

McCormick basically pawns off her dignity to please us. She whores herself out onstage. As the bunny dry humps her leg, she collapses into giggles. By the time, she’s turned round and fucked, she’s in hysterics that only grow, until her choices seems to bypass all rationality. Everything is done to satisfy our smiles, until suddenly, she’s wopped out a tit, jiggling it comically, squeezing it awkwardly and licking it with an ungainly pornographic relish. Soon, she’s demanding that Craig spank her, really spank her, none of this stage fakery. She starts to demonstrate; her pants hauled down, a mark reddening on her buttocks as we wince in reflex response. Any eroticism of the initial pose – her high heels are still on, her legs cocked seductively – has shattered. There’s only the bitter distaste.

Yet, still she goes further: kneeling skirt-down in the yogic child’s position, her arse splayed open. It’s almost unwatchable, largely because its so freely chosen. The others stand joking to the side; more of these incessant gigglish stupid puns about bum notes or butts of jokes or whatever. Eventually, they give up on wit: “There’s a bit of shit on your arse.” It’s demeaning, but McCormick does whatever is demanded of her. She subjects herself to our viewing pleasure, just as Hamblyn does to her. It’s easy to forget that she’s representing us tonight; that her willing degradation is ours. She’ll do anything for stardom, for commercial success, for an audience.

True, it could do with the final winding-down coda and one wonders if everything onstage is strictly necessary, but this is a show that shouts itself hoarse and shows us up as sell-outs in a scabrous society. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Photograph: GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN

Review: Thom Pain, Print Room

Written for Time Out

Life is short and life is shit. Both sentiments can seem like truisms on stage, but they're rarely so carefully sewn together as in Will Eno's searching little monologue. For an hour, it purrs bald truths and existential crises - that life is pain and solitude - but somehow still sends you away keen to carpe that diem.

Thom Pain seems a man spat out by the spin cycle of contemporary life. His black suit is slick, but dishevelled: top button undone, tie loosened, unshaven. There's an air of insomnia about him, or of post-going postal calm. He speaks to us in parables: of a bee sting, a dead dog and a lost love. Pain's heart isn't broken - his life goes on - but it is bruised beyond repair.

In Simon Evans's restrained revival, performer John Light is totally in tune with the precision of Eno's writing, which is always gentle, always blunt and thoroughly self-aware. He uses the situation of stage and audience to great effect without tipping into navel-gazing. Light chews on big ideas and toys with us mischievously. Imagine a university lecturer abandoning his notes for impromptu home-truths or a best man's speech at a funeral. It's desolate, sure, but strangely inspiring.

Review: Love and Information, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

Love and Information sets out to overload. Fifty-one scenes – playlets really – come thick and fast, each firing data our way, until somewhere around the halfway mark, your frazzled brain can take no more. Which is basically a really neat way of saying something bleeding obvious; namely, that the Information Age has bombarded and bamboozled us.

It’s absolutely true, but we live and lament it every single day. It’s impossible not to be aware of it. We’re reminded with every beep of every blackberry, with every YouTube video shared around every pub table, with every empty status update and every time we get distracted by Twitter. Or Tumblr. Or Wikipedia. Or whatever. I’m not convinced we needed Caryl Churchill to tell us as much.

In fairness, she tells us much more besides. Each of those scenes – many of them sculpted with the sort of precision-honed minimalism that only a master could muster – revolves around some notion of knowledge. There are secrets and censuses, fingers itching for laptops and hearts battling with heads, brains that can’t remember, brains that can’t forget and brains that have never known. Churchill has written a crash course in epistemology; only it doesn’t so much feel like you’re learning, as downloading the syllabus over two hours.

In all this, the thread of love weaves in and out, less obviously, but no less present. It’s there in the simple fact of humanity, of human relations. In families sat on sofas gawping at home movies and in two women chuckling over a silly joke. In a man and woman arguing at the gym over his relationship with a computer and in the teenage fans rolling facts about their particular pop idol to prove their dedication.

Form matches content superbly, not only with the onslaught, but also with the introduction of a random scene that disrupts the neat seven by seven structure. Love, to mis-use Gilbert Ryle’s depiction of mind-body dualism, is “the ghost in the machine.”

Yet, at the same time, that form makes the play – or rather plays – somewhat wearying. Just as many look trite and arbitrary, beginning with the sort of punchy, kooky opener one finds in Whose Line Is It Anyway?, while others can come across as clever-clever – a little ‘They don’t know that we know they know we know.’

In between each scene, to add to the decoding demanded, James MacDonald’s production plays a stock sound – a telephone or laptop, birdsong and aeroplanes, snippets of pop music – as the set changes so slickly you marvel. Individual scenes have been carefully thought through, drawing out ambiguity and red herrings, and are never less than carefully played by a strong and dynamic cast, who convey a raft of characters without incessant shapeshifting.

Review: The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Playhouse Theatre

Written for Time Out

Simon Callow has built himself a tidy sideline as a Charles Dickens tribute act, so the great Victorian novelist's bicentenary has kept him busy. We've had the biography ('Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World'), the one-man 'Christmas Carol' (back soon) and now this revival of this effusive lecture about Dickens's life and work, written by Peter Ackroyd.

The script looks to locate Dickens in his books, flicking from biography to gobbets of his fiction, but gradually reversing that balance. After going a little doolally at 40, he increasingly resembles his oddball characters, until his famous reading tours eventually straighten out his head. Dickens, the frustrated actor who, at 20, missed a West End audition because of illness, finally gets his chance on stage.

Callow gets ample opportunity to showcase his talent for caricature, as the piece slides into shuffle mode. There's Miss Havisham, Mr Bumble, Cratchit and Copperfield; a different face and voice for each. The better you know the work, the more you'll get, but unfamiliarity isn't an obstacle.

However, technique can get in the way of communication. Callow is so intent on sculpting each word in sound, squeezing syllables out of his accordion lungs, that clarity sometimes drops out. Even so, his infatuation is infectious and leaves a flickering impulse to dive in to the books themselves.

Review: King Lear, Almeida Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

In the middle of that wind-wracked heath, a sapling sprouts; a shoot of green in a barren wasteland. It troubles you all through the interval and, by the time you’ve returned refreshed, so too is the stage. Grass has sprung through the brickwork of Tom Scutt’s labyrinthine castle. There’s an edge of Chenobyl, of nature creeping back in after man has plumbed the depths.

Lear reborn? Surely not? Well, um, yes, actually. Madness is the making of Jonathan Pryce’s king; it swipes humility into vanity’s place. Surrounded by those “men of stone,” all costumed in the tones of lichen and limescale, Pryce softens. Many Lears spend the second half glazed and distant, frazzled and out of their minds, so that you see symptoms and abstract frailty above all else. Not Pryce; he scales back after the (admittedly underpowered) episode on the heath, growing steadily more human and never so loopy that he might be dismissed. There’s always connection and, with it, newfound compassion, both to Clive Wood’s Gloucester and Phoebe Fox’s Cordelia.

However, Michael Attenborough’s production does very little beyond that. Indeed, it looks and feels mostly like an abstact, noncomittal Lear that could, thanks to Scutt’s warped futurish-medieval costumes (caught between Game of Thrones and Star Wars), date from any point in the last 40 years. Attenborough’s direction – all entrances, tableaux and exits – is becomes rather stilted and repetitious.

What comes out of this, however, is a real sense of the play’s patterns; the double-acts that run through it. Trevor Fox’s gruff Northern Fool, deadpan to the end, clings to Lear’s back as the stormclouds gather; a soul or shadow. Edmund and Edgar battle like clones. Goneril (Zoe Waites) and Regan (Jenny Jules) have an equal share of their father’s flintiness. The stone set, hexagonal and symmetrical, has something of Alice and Wonderland’s hall of doors, as if life were nothing but a sequence of infinite, identical chambers and choice a meaningless concept.

The only other revelation is Fox’s Cordelia. No eye-lash batting innocent, she is absolutely her father’s daughter and her sisters’ sister, matching their mettle whenever necessary. Fox can be stand-offish and sharp-tongued, where Cordelia so often simply wilts. I couldn’t help but wish for more of the same invention and invigoration elsewhere.

Review: Choir Boy, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars

Patience is not a virtue one generally associates with new writing; particularly today, given a development culture that values nimble efficiency so highly. The cry of the dramaturg – ‘Whittle. Whittle.’ – can be heard beneath every play that strains its vocabulary through a particular theme that we might spot its territory, if not its purposes from the off.

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s never been one for gut-busting slogan-heavy plays, but his latest is positively saintly. Bit by bit, scene by scene, it kneads away at its situation, adding layer upon layer and warming to its several themes.

Set in an all-black, all-boys American prep school, Choir Boy gently probes at the notion of meaning and the tension between fitting in and standing out.

At first, it looks weighed down by school-set dramas that have gone before. It takes a while for the Charles R. Drew School choristers shake off the shadow of Glee, particularly newly-elected choir leader Pharus; gay, bright and intent on turning his pariah-status into an advantage. He’s bullied by Bobby as much for the preferential treatment he’s afforded as his sexuality.

Later, there are strong echoes of Dead Poet’s Society and The History Boys, when a quietly inspirational unorthodox teacher, Mr Pendleton, turns up. McCraney finally moves into Another Country territory with the blossoming of a delicate, surprising love.

However, McCraney moves beyond archetypes and stock narratives, gently unpicking how these boys see themselves in relation to one another and to history. Overseen by David Burke’s soft-edged Pendleton, a classroom discussion on gospel music, its traditions, contemporary resonance and undercurrents of meaning is particularly intricate. McCraney manages to make every interaction thoroughly political, both within the play’s own narrative and beyond.

But it’s his storytelling that’s particularly adept. Time and again, McCraney seeds an idea two or three scenes before bringing it to fruition, allowing each plot device to bed in and become integral, before twisting the tale. By the time his whodunit arises – as Pharus is physically assaulted – he has fishy tales and red herrings lined up and waiting. A Drew boy never tells. He allows others the honour of coming clean. The second half grows is finely poised and poignant.

Dominic Cooke’s production boasts the finest young ensemble since The History Boys, too good to be dismissed as ensemble acting. Dominic Smith is a tender Machiavellian as Pharus; Khali Best a well-balanced best friend and Eric Kofi Abrefa conveys the bruises beneath the bully. Throw in some gorgeous gospel-singing and Choir Boy lets us sit back and chew on its complexities.

Photograph: Simon Kane

Review: Three Sisters, Young Vic

Written for Time Out

"You ain't going to Moscow, baby," quips a minor character in auteur director Benedict Andrews's iconoclastic take on Chekhov's stuck-in-the-mud siblings. His retelling of the melancholic story of Olya, Masha and Irina - the trio of provinical spinsters who dream of escape to the big city - is so blunt that, by the end, it borders on Beckett. The Andrews' sisters end the play huddled on a mound of earth, utterly futureless.

They start as dilettante debutantes, bright-eyed and flushed with the invulnerable certainty of youth. 'My God,' says Masha to the 43-year-old Major Vershinin, 'you're so old.' Stuck out in the Russian countryside, they seize each day by grabbing the bottle; vodka-soaked parties end in raucous rounds of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit.

But is everything changing, as William Houston's enigmatic Vershinin believes? Or is everyone destined to forever follow suit, generation on generation, as his fuddy-duddy junior, Tuzenbach, insists?

Just as you think Andrews is damning a wholly Epicurean existence, however, he blasts everything apart for an apocalyptic second half. After a fire ravages the nearest town, the tables that form Johannes Schütz's stage are removed, one by one, from underneath the characters. Their world disintegrates - I read a metaphor for climate change - and the “glorious" future, on which all their hopes are pinned, collapses entirely. Only nihilism and love remain.

Andrews, who directed Big and Small with Cate Blanchett in April, habitually explodes classic texts. While his staging - simultaneously clinical and elemental - has the odd pat excess (animal masks are already tiresome), it's surprisingly unobtrusitve. The contrast is turned up, but Chekhov's play remains intact, its existential clout maxed out disturbingly.

It's further proof, too, of how deliciously Continental-style design/direction and good old British acting combine. In a super cast given licence to shine, Vanessa Kirby stands out as Masha, moving from diva to devastation, with Houston, Michael Feast (Chebutykin) and Danny Kirane (Andrey) also on top, top form.

Photograph: Simon Annand

Review: Motor Vehicle Sundown, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

The passenger seat of a Skoda Fabia is an unlikely place to realise you’re in the same boat as Willy Loman. However, Andy Field’s dinky audio-piece reminds you that Battersea backstreets and Brooklyn backyards aren’t as different as we might like to think.

Loman and his like – the antiheroes of the American dream – are too easily watched as figures in fables, as mythical suckers, men that fell for sugar-coated horseshit. Motor Vehicle Sundown makes you realise that it’s not so much a fall, as something none of us can avoid or escape. It is a process of mental re-wiring that means our every idea about the world is coloured by implanted connotations. The world has tilted on its access; the simulations of ad-men have taken on a potent reality of their own.

It starts with the choice between driver or passenger; one role active and pioneering, the other passive and readily-led. In our ears, delivered through an MP3 player, comes a female flight-simulator of a voice, pointing us towards the car: a grey, mundane thing, clumpy and practical. A cardboard pine tree hangs from the rearview mirror, oozing a chemical-freshness through the cubicle. After the tone, we get into the back seat.

Field’s piece consists of nothing but words, sounds and – crucially – a tone of voice. It’s that bourbon-soaked, smooth American baritone; a George Clooney kind of voice, a Dean Martin unsung croon. Deeply paternal and soothing, it turns us to putty immediately.

In the back seat, we sit side by side, our heads perhaps leaning against the window. In your mind’s eye, you cannot but play back that generic movie, that all-purpose music video, in which a constant roadside landscape swishes by, partially reflected in the window-pane. You’re eight, the voice says. Mum and dad are in the front. You don’t know where you’re going. It doesn’t really matter. Your brother’s beside you. The family unit in the family car. You reach your hand out into the mid-ground of that middle seat, and your fingertips brush together.

For the second part, you’re in the front seat, adult now. Yet still the images conjured are glossy and cordial. They are of pretty, preppy girls and handsome, controlled men and convertibles. There are drive-in movies and roadside diners and white clouds on blue skies, all caught with that instagrammed jaded intensity. This is happiness, free and idealised. Open to anything. Yet, its all spun out of words, unembroidered and bland, that nonetheless trigger those ingrained associations of automobiles, transfused into personal experience; soldered on and pimped up.

It’s amazing how quickly they fade, though. Field’s writing switches track quite suddenly. The pitter of raindrops and the drawn-out squeal of windscreen-wipers snap you back to long, grey drives, heavy and irritable, down clogged British motorways. The rhythmic squeak-creak of plastic on glass forms a pulse in your head. Then, in the background, your ears attune to something familiar: live news commentary about planes and buildings and billowing smoke. The images come just as easily, just as vividly. That same instagram blue sky. The day the American Dream turned sour. These two layers somehow fuse together, both bleak and tragic and grim.

Afterwards, when I was returning the headphones, Field explained that the two tracks start in sync and diverge, until you’re hearing different things. Motor Vehicle Sundown (at least my experience of it; Maddy Costa’s seems slightly different) never confirms that switch, leaving you side by side in different headspaces, on separate tracks. However, there’s no way of knowing, especially as the whole track rather blends together, so the specific differences are unlikely to emerge in conversation afterwards.

Review: Brand New Ancients, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Spoken word rarely really fires me up. I can sit alongside it perfectly happily and leave, at the end, with an appreciative smile and nod, earth unshaken. Not so with Kate Tempest. Not so with Brand New Ancients.

Tempest’s mode is one of unprepossessing passion and flair. Her writing has all the casualness of conversation, only to turn a trickshot every so often that lets the rhymes and rhythms of the rest fall perfectly into place. It’s the mode of a swimmer tumble-turning at the end of a length, with a sudden, almost unexpected, burst of speed and agility. Or a pedestrian flicking her heels into a quick burst of tap. The result is two kinds of ease on the ear at once. There’s just enough tongue-twisting to tickle as her words slip down your ear canal.

Partly that’s down to the skill of her storytelling. Brand New Ancients is a graphic novel conjured with words alone. Two half-brothers, Tommy and Clive, unknown to one another, walk on opposite sides of the tracks. They are a latterday Loki and Thor, “a two-man nation.”

Tempest is interested the possibility of a modern and mundane mythology. She invokes X-Men alongside the Greek Gods and upholds the idea that all of us are somehow superhuman or godly, even as we stalk supermarket aisles and tinker on our iphones. Underneath all this is a sense of constancy – something primordial without being primitive. Students permanently talk change, the jukebox playlists unchanging. It’s located in human nature and, crucially, in community; a pub where regulars end their orders with “and one for yourself.”

Tempest also spins, almost freewheels, into asides and footnotes. Simon Cowell comes in for particular criticism in an offshoot slamming fakery and fame. You realise that this, for Tempest, is the opposition: an individualism that would elevate itself above all the other gods, that would float like a giant, helium-filled icon in a Macy’s Parade.

I don’t know how old Tempest is, but she’s certainly sager than her age should allow. What’s more, she’s a thoroughly captivating performer. There’s something of the sportsman to her, the way her feet flicker and twitch with the barely-contained energy of a boxer pre-bout or her habit of stepping back from the mic in lulls as if returning to her corner to recuperate. When she speaks, she turns a trance, overtaken by the sort jerky percussive movements brought on by itching powder, but here dictated by words.

But its those words that really seal it. Tempest’s popping candy phrases and silken soundbites are bliss, but that they never get in the way marks her out as a prodigious talent.

Photograph: Katherine Leedale

Review: Yours for the Asking, Orange Tree

Written for Time Out

Four adverts fit to make Sophie Dahl blush hang around the Orange Tree, threatening to turn it blue. Susi Roman (Mia Austen) has been plucked from gogo-dancing obscurity to become the face of She perfume. But person and product become so interlinked that, when its deadly toxicity is revealed, it's Susi who bears the public anger.

Disconcertingly, Ana Diosdado's allegory about General Franco's fascism works almost at face-value today, 40 years on, unpicking the grip of consumer capitalism. While its critique of advertising feels naive (we're wise to such tricks and swallow them anyway), the question of its ubiquity is more potently topical.

This is raised through the figure of journalist Juan (Steven Elder), whose cynicism and quiet complicity stops short of any attempt to spark change. When he's sent to interview Susi, the two embark on a week-long affair. Holed up in her flat, they build a personal utopia that can't last.

Sam Walters's production is undeniably nifty, overlapping locations and tricksy time-shifts with real ease, but little of Diosdado's plot really convinces. The real problem rests with the plausibility of Roman's fate - after all, no-one's hounding today's models for the immoralities of the fashion industry.

Review: Head of a Woman Double Bill, Chelsea Theatre

Love theatre, love liveness, right? Well, yeah, I guess, but so often liveness isn’t really that at all. Lyn Gardner has her mantra about being able to see, to all intents and purposes, the same show on any night of the week, indeed, at any point in its run. Chris Goode has his cat test, which measures genuine liveness according to the ability to accommodate the unexpected entrance of a cat into the very fabric of an event. Me, I prattle on about Liveness 2.0.

Alright, I know it’s a dumbass phrase, nicked wholesale from a digitised vocabulary that really wants to talk about user-generated content, but I like it anyway. Besides, it connects: interactive theatre – truly interactive theatre, as opposed to some X Factor mock-up like Scissor Happy (a shoddy 1997 West End whodunit with audience voting on the culprit and so triggering one of several alternate endings) – would definitely fit, but theatre needn’t be interactive to do so. It need only reinvent itself anew each night, to step onstage without knowing how tonight is going to pan out.

When I was working with Present Attempt, we used to call it ‘live-devising,’ and it owes a real debt to the durational, rule-based performances of Forced Entertainment: shows like Quizoola, 12am: Awake and Looking Down and And on the Thousandth Night. Chris Goode’s Sisters, though I didn’t see it, sounds very similar. As does Cadavre Exquis – a game of theatrical consequences – coming up this week at Sadler’s Wells. Greyscale’s Me and Mr C, brought to the Fringe as part of Northern Stage’s programme, had some of its spirit, albeit stemming out of the specific tradition of improv comedy.

Liveness 2.0 thrives on rules, tasks and games, all played out or negotiated live and for real in the moment, so that every show finds its own route.

Judging by their first two shows, Head of a Woman are right up my street. They’re a young company, newly graduated from Central’s MAATP course, and came recommended by my old course leader Nick Wood.

Grey Matters: A Play for Six Brains

Six anonymous bodies, paper bags over their heads, run through a series of movements: jogging on the spot, stretching, beating the floor with clenched fists. They are faceless, but also blind to one another; even if they were capable of facial expressions, no one would be able to even attempt to read them. They are bodies, almost avatars dragged out of The Sims and onto a stage.

Together, the six performers remove the bags and place them, evenly-spaced, nice and neatly (Head of a Woman clearly abhor mess and broken patterns) on the stage, looking down into the bags at their feet; into, it becomes clear in due course, their own heads. Then the performers jumble themselves, until each is behind someone else’s bag/head, peering down.

“If I had the brain of X…” says one. It turns out to be a game – and a brilliant game at that – whereby A reveals things about B in that second sub-clause. By way of a very simple and mundane example: “If I had the brain of X, I’d know what it feels to be a man.”

Now, according to the programme notes, all this is to interrogate the possibility of empathy, of getting inside other people’s heads, of seeing through someone else’s eyes. That’s certainly in there, sure it is; it’s in the constant presence of the word I in those statements: ‘If I had the brain of X, I’d remember…” Would having the brain of X be enough to make you X or would that I, the speaker’s, still remain in tact somehow? Regardless, each statement is a projection, an act of imagining that cannot but be anchored in guesswork and approximation.

However, for me, the game functioned first and foremost as a self-contained entity. Essentially, the company have already made up their minds that without direct experience of something we can’t fully comprehend it; the game itself doesn’t actually test the theory, it sets out its preconceptions again and again. No bother though; the game is plenty enough in itself and, in its playing, another element of interaction emerges.

For starters, no one has control over the way they are portrayed onstage. They cannot chose how they come across, because someone else always determines precisely what information – be it a characteristic or piece of personal history – is revealed to the audience. Nor, since the rules don’t allow right of reply, can we be sure whether all of the information fed to us is entirely true. They reveal abortions and track marks, as well as using the game to snipe at one another’s particular habits: self-regard, for instance, or ditziness.

What’s brilliant is the way that these traits reveal themselves in the way each plays the game. While it takes a moment to cotton on to who is actually who, eventually all sorts of information is attached to these six individuals. Some fair, some likely not. Then, however, the statements affect the way the game is played; retaliation, always indirect due to the form’s constraints, creeps in. Sometimes, they gang up on one another; sometimes they defend each other. The rotations of formation, so that performers swap bags/heads to look inside, shuffles the whole, but they also smartly turn the game outwards, bringing the house lights us to guess at our thought processes. There’s also a neatly perfomative quality within, such that “If I were X, I’d be thinking Y” triggers X to think Y or, at least, to think of thinking Y.

Grey Matters... is about manipulation and control of others, more than its about empathy and understanding. Those are rather the first steps towards manipulation, for we cannot control that which we don’t partly understand. It’s very telling that the game is most watchable at its nastiest and most barbed, because empathy here is not an end in and of its self, but a means to another, more cutthroat and, arguably, human end.

Curriculae Vitae

The second piece, Curricula Vitae, fares less well without ever losing interest. It starts with a choral introduction that begins broken and incomplete, before gradually filling in the gaps to reveal itself fully. Each performer has their set of words from a collective text and only when the whole cast is present, do we get the full text. What we eventually learn is that this is a piece concerned with patterns that emerge out of tasks, much as the words just spoken did.

We also discover that the piece will consist of four tasks – though I could only really see three myself – completed by six people. Incidentally, there are also 656 words, 48 songs, 12 minutes of silence and 2 points during which the stage will be empty. This list of apparatus betrays a certain scientific approach, a very head-on approach to experiment, which isn’t, as I’ll explain in due course, entirely satisfying.

The first, entitled ‘To Sing,’ sees the six form a semi-circle and sing a list of countries’ names, turning round, seemingly arbitrarily, to sing. Sometimes one person sings the list. Elsewhere all of them do, just about harmonising. They all turn on England, America and Belgium, all but one on Disneyland. Given their ethnicities and accents – all six are different nationalities – you start to suspect that each is singing just those countries that they’ve visited.

Second, ‘To Dance,’ is more obscure. In fact, it’s impenetrable. A series of pop song snippets play, about seven seconds each, and the six cast members perform a series of dance moves. Early on, for a long while, one woman stands in the Saturday Night Fever pose and no-one else moves. Eventually, a man turns around. Towards the end, there are flashes of synchronicity. Different performers repeat movements seen earlier. You try to lock down a pattern, but it’s just not apparent.

Afterwards, overhearing someone outside, I discovered that the songs all hit number one in the UK on consecutive years. Each movement related to a specific country. It makes sense – particularly given what comes next – but there’s no real way of unlocking the code, especially since the piece never entirely nods to an overlap.

Finally, most clearly, ‘To Walk.’ On the floor are dotted, in six different colours, a series of marks in LX tape. 1965 appears projected on the back wall. Again, the first woman enters, finds a cross - purple, I think – and stands still. The years tick by metronomically. In 1977, the second man enters and stands to her right. Given I know he’s Canadian and she Icelandic after Grey Matters…, the spatial relationship clicks; both are standing in the countries of their birth. The markers make up an incomplete map of the world. As the years continue, all six appear and flutter around on family holidays and gap years, move overseas or stay resolutely still. It’s rather ticklishly ridiculous to watch, but also rather charming. (Perhaps at this point its possible to make sense of the second task, given that one and three so directly relate. As it does with introduction and individual tasks, the overall pattern reveals itself only after a tipping point of information.)

What you get is a portrait of travel over almost half a century. Movement increases, until it becomes a constant flow. It’s impossible not to think of the fuel being burned. I’m reminded of something said during Rimini Protokol’s 100% London, about a single flight producing as much pollution as a year’s car use. One member of the group, tiptoeing around the Carribean on a jolly, seems over-indulgent. Yet, at the same time, there’s also something sad about the repeated trip from Canada to America and back, never straying beyond the Atlantic section of the stage. It conveys a lack of experience, of worldliness. There’s also something moving about their final travels together: from the UK, to Belgium, to Scotland, to Iceland. Finally, we get the statistics; that the average company member, aged 30.3 years, has visited 23.3 countries, travelling some 19,000 air miles and crossing 123 time zones over 280 days in transit. Woah, you think, but this isn’t a condemnation or even a confession; it’s just a report, a curricula.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but miss the humanity of Grey Matters. In the end, Curricula Vitae reduces its performers to nodes, LEDs that switch on and off to convey data and, so, form patterns. The tasks, such as they are, are not really tasks so much as choreography; they can be failed, true, but to no particular effect beyond mess and simple error. Ultimately, I couldn’t shake the feeling that performance is more than a set of programming codes.

Photograph property of Head of a Woman

Review: Troilus and Cressida, Riverside Studios

A play is more than a set of circumstances. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the RSC and Wooster Group’s (dis)joint(ed) production of Troilus and Cressida.

Admittedly, Shakespeare’s play takes place against a rather fascinating situation. For seven years, the Greeks and the Trojans have existed alongside each other, at war, but in a stalemate. Two distinct, opposing cultures, side by side. The process has, of course, mirrored that, with American experimentalists The Wooster Group composing the Trojan scenes independently of the RSC’s Greeks, directed by Mark Ravenhill, so that a famously disjointed play is honoured for its bittiness. I’ve already addressed a lot of that in a preview feature, so here I’m going to concentrate on the experience of watching the production, in particular, how the two halves marry up.

The Wooster Group play the Trojans Native Americans. Or rather as The Wooster Group playing Native Americans. The company’s mode is one of authentic inauthenticity. Once again, they have employed the inherently referential performance style, whereby actors mimic actions and sounds from cinematic representations of native Americans (and, I think, native Inuits) that are played on television screens and fed to them via headphones. Essentially, they are reproducing – and, in the process, extenuating – a received notion of another culture.

The result is consciously other and consciously approximate. They move with a different rhythm, taking tiny brisk steps, keeping a low centre of gravity and running on the spot. Elsewhere, they ape traditional dances, hopping from one foot to the other. Vocally, too, they squeeze Shakespeare’s words through an alternate register: flattening it into a generic high-pitched staccato. It’s not a million miles from an offensively shoddy ‘Ching Chong Chinaman’ accent. (Incidentally, they all blend into, well, not necessarily one, but one or two: performance mode being flatly consistent and overwhelming of any sense of individual character, not least because their behaviour is ‘alien’ first and foremost.)

There is another layer here. Folkert de Jong’s costume and set are traditionally shaped, but obviously synthetic and splashed with neon. The colours, deliberately evoking rave culture, make this a critique of manhandling a culture into an aesthetic. But there’s more: the programme notes explain that his material is Styrofoam: “a material that is fragile, pliable, lightweight and modern and which will never compose.” Meanwhile, the settlement set includes an oil barrel and a tyre. Panderus and Paris have both dropped more traditional garmets for cowboy shirts. It is, in other words, a two-way relationship; the original culture has been corroded by external influences. It’s noteworthy that they use modern lacrosse sticks as weapons, given the sport’s Native American origins. (Incidentally, basketball, which also crops up here, was started in Canada by Scottish immigrants. Also, their armour, which is fashioned out of Ancient Greek statues cast in a malleable plastic, nodding to the play’s own cultural corruption and cooption.)

The same thing has happened in the RSC’s Greek camp. The Greeks are broadly dressed in modern Desert Storm military uniforms, but these have similarly disintegrated after seven years away. Only Danny Webb’s Agamemnon remains parade-ready, albeit with a terribly British umbrella tucked under his arm. The rest are in various states of disarray, after years of accumulation and discarding: Clifford Samuel’s Patroclus is in cargo pants, string tank top and a headscarf, Joe Dixon’s Achilles wonders around in a towel and tattoos and Zubin Varla’s Thersites has taken to transvestism, a pair of plastic Gazza tits hanging off the back of his wheelchair.

All this is borne out in the cultural exchange that goes on between the two sides. Of the two Greeks in the Trojan camp, Scott Handy’s Helen resembles Elizabeth I and trills a very English ditty, while Webb’s Diomedes is a Crocodile Dundee figure (also taken from film), capable of replicating native customs with the correct fishhook-tussle greeting. Towards the end of the play, tokens are exchanged, such that Diomedes walks away with a string of knick-knacks hanging from his neck. Ajax finally chucks out his sword for a discarded tomahawk.

What you’ve got here is a portrait of two cultures rubbing up against one another; mutually exchanging and contorting and eroding each other.

However, as I say, this is the play’s situation, its world, and in foregrounding the ideas that jump out of it so heavily, the RSC and Wooster group have forgotten about – no, obliterated – the play’s narrative. That makes it criminally difficult to watch.

Basically, the RSC might as well be playing against a black hole. By speaking the text so flatly – so otherly – the Wooster Group succeed in reducing it to Morse Code. Because they so refuse to pander to the ears of their audience, they give us no help in keeping track of what’s going on; we hear words as notation, more or less another language, rather than for any sense. The intention to treat Shakespeare’s text as a foreign language might look good on paper; in practice, it’s wilfully obtuse. We get next to no sense of half the characters and half the narrative. It’s so deeply frustrating that you just give up.

As a result, the only element of the plot that really comes out clearly is the battle of reputation between Greek champions Ajax and Achilles over who should fight the Trojan champion Hector. Troilus and Cressida’s obstacle-strewn love story is swallowed, Trojan strategic debates barely register and if you see Cressida’s sacrifice to the Greeks, it’s whys and wherefores are mangled out of comprehension.

Evidently, this is part of the production’s point; setting out to demonstrate the disjointed bittiness of Shakespeare’s play, which shifts in tone and hops from subplot to subplot without really having an overarching narrative drive. It’s notable that form and process both mirror the central motif of cultural exchange by osmosis.

However, I found this just as problematic. Rather than stick to their classical-maestro guns, the RSC’s Greeks seem to have absorbed a fair whack of the Wooster’s sensibilities (Andrew Haydon has smartly pointed out that this is likely down to Ravenhill replacing Rupert Goold, who partly concocted the project before having to withdraw.)  With their WWF wrestlers, olde monarchs and cinematic Aussie croc-killers, they have adopted some of the referential quality of their American collaborators, as well as some of their knowing theatrical fakery. Kelly’s Ajax wears a padded muscle suit – and yet Dixon’s Achilles bares his chest. Honestly, it just looks like they’re trying too hard; awkwardly sporting the newest trainers in the playground. It’s all a bit of a mish-mash, in contradiction with the directness of the Wooster Group’s offering. Additionally, the emphasis on queerness in the Greek scenes distorts the notion of a shifting culture, because it carries such baggage of its own. That’s not to dismiss it as uninteresting. Quite the opposite: it’s too interesting to be merely tossed into the mix.

This is a production with too much going on, one that doesn’t teach you how to watch it. That the Wooster Group get the first scene means you’ve got to pick through the language, the design, the performance practice, all of which are carry some whooping great ideas, as well as the basics of the play. You’re overwhelmed from the off, in spite of the fact that most of the onstage elements that carry meaning are constant rather than shifting; so the thought process is of making sense, but this static, plastic quality is fairly unsatisfying. They are – as I say – picking apart the situation, not the play as a whole and, ultimately, Troilus and Cressida is more than two adjacent, fractious cultures rubbing off on one another.

Photographs: property of The RSC