From Morning to Midnight

This will be my last blog of 2013. Is that the heels of my dwindling following I see before me? Come back! I still have things to say! Those of you who have followed me from the start – Hi! Mum! – will know that in response to some faint praise from the Arts Council I have set myself the task of tracking down genuinely cutting edge theatre companies working today. The breakers of barriers!  The non-conformists who knock me back in my seat! Alas, as yet I have to report that, despite a fair bit of enjoyment, I have found not a single one. Way out in front is Kate Tempest who moved me deeply, but so stripped back was ‘Brand New Ancients’ to one or two ingredients in the cake, I feel I cannot count it, wonderful though it was (and I will be going back to The Royal Court). I want ‘total theatre’! Flat out, story-making, mind stirring, character driven, actor centred, all round physical theatre! 

So where better to find it than the National Theatre. After all that is what it was set up for and, what with a budget of probably a quarter of a million per production just for some of the sets, you would think I was on to a pretty hot bet. We were reminded a few weeks ago when its first fifty years were celebrated just what beauty, what devastating beauty, there has been, but what of now? Well I have two shows to report.

They have a handy little studio theatre, a sort of red prefab thing; well that’s what it looks like. It’s called ‘The Shed’, ‘a temporary venue celebrating new theatre that is adventurous, ambitious and unexpected’, according to the NT website. I went to see a play there, 'Nut', by debbie tucker green (which you annoyingly have to explain - like e.e.cumming - is how she spells it). The story centres on a young black woman, Elayne, whose obsessive neurosis finds her making endless lists, including a guest list for her own funeral, and then on a separated couple who argue bitterly about access to their child. Through it all there grows a feeling that something has been lost, innocence, a childhood, something robbed by growing up into a pathetically inadequate adult world. Finally, the constant smoking begins to make sense as Elayne reveals the cigarette burns on her arms. It was beautifully acted as far as it went and there was a pared back beauty, even poetry, in the language. But it didn’t move me. It should have done. Kate Tempest moved me at the first word she spoke.  Maybe it was because I knew in her case it was real. She really had suffered. Whereas this was yet another piece of theatre being ‘relevant’. Of course, in its own way it was brilliant. Michael Billington gave it 4 stars in The Guardian. So why was I not moved?

I think it was the feeling that the content was the thing and the form only needed to be ‘good enough’. It was well acted. All of them were good young modern pros – including the child in it, who moved about silently like a ghost until he sang with a haunting little voice. But you don’t have to ask of a diamond that it be brilliant. It just is. In the cut. In the lustre. And, for me, the acting was good, but didn’t sparkle. It didn’t sing. It talked. Just like on the telly (as usual with so much contemporary acting). Oddly, too, when it ended nobody seemed to know it had. People were looking round at each other to check. Rule 1: The ending must be clear if all else fails. Well, this aside it was well done, but is that enough? Just because it is about self-harming or child abuse (It wasn’t that clear as Michael Billington acknowledged) and is just ‘well done’, does that make it cutting edge? It felt like ambulance-chasing to me and, however, sympathetic I was to the cause, I really couldn’t be bothered to chase.

So I went back to the National for another go last week. Maybe this time the best resourced theatre company in the country would come up trumps? I knew the play this time and it wasn’t new. Written in fact way back in 1912, which begs the question: Can plays still be cutting edge if they are a hundred years old? If they can, maybe we should also ask: Have we learnt anything since? It was Georg Kaiser’s ‘From Morning to Midnight’ (a piece of German Expressionism. This I should like!) in a new version by Dennis Kelly and directed by Melly Still. With so much money to spend, it knocked Chimerica out of the water with its contraptions, back projections and front projections and Buster Keaton type collapsing houses and rows of antique bicycles. The main difference was that from the very outset, despite all this, it was about acting. Of course, being a piece of Expressionism, all naturalistic movement was out of the window, which was a great start for me.

Let me clarify that. I don’t need actors to hold a mirror up to nature. You don’t see nature anyway – just mirrors. So why not go the whole hog? Don’t bother about nature and ask the feet to do what feet can do and the hands what hands can do? So much drama is in the surprise and it’s no surprise that feet can walk and hands can hold. What else can they do? They can point and glide and twist and turn. The body can make shapes and represent as well as just ‘do’, and it can just ‘do’ as well. The fun is in the discovery – in just what can be said. All this applies just as much to the voice. There is so much that can be said with the body. (As I hope we shall see at the London Mime Festival soon.)

In this play the central character, a bank clerk, just called ‘clerk’ – immediately universalising him – spontaneously steals 60,000 marks and, pursued by the police, undertakes to find, to buy in effect, ‘the one meaningful thing in this world that could be worth the sacrifice of my life….A reason for being alive. A reason for actually drawing breath’. Is it in the purchase of art? Is it through philanthropy and the sponsoring of a great cycle race? Is it through downright pleasure and sex? Everything disappoints plunging him into further disillusionment. Finally at a Salvation Army hall he finds reflections among the penitents of all the sins in his own life and following their example finally eschews them, flinging his money into the air so that it falls like snow. But, rather than eschewing money as he has, instead the penitents and even the Salvation Army major herself, scramble on their knees, not to pray, but to stuff their pockets with the cash. In despair the clerk, with the police bursting through the doors, electrocutes himself in the shape of Christ on the cross.

It is a fantastically evocative piece in its constantly shifting imagery, the spare existentialism of the language and the huge imagination of Melly’s direction and the play really was cutting edge in its time – and feels as though it should be cutting edge even now. But I was disappointed. I know I am so hard to please! But at the end there was a feeling of anti-climax. Unlike the end of Propellor’s  ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ where the audience erupted with applause, here the applause was weak and, embarrassingly, the audience had stopped clapping when the cast came on for a second bow. Of course, it may be that the Expressionism wasn’t understood, given the shallowness of telly, the common diet, and the expectations of West End tourists that the National Theatre is bound to be good – and ‘good’ has to create a degree of common ground. For me it was just a technical thing. There were about five or six penitents in the final scene each reflecting a part of the clerk’s psyche and it took an age to get through them all, losing its pace. I would have pruned it right back. I don’t speak German so don’t know how well the translation reflected the original. But here’s a second example of a National Theatre production not paying proper attention to the ending. There was also a feeling that: We can do what we like because we have the resources - and they can't. But it did give a glimpse of what can be done.

 

Maybe the failures of my current search are just about the way the world is now, or England at least? Shallow. My one attempt at tweeting just said: Why is the world so shallow? I don’t have many followers! I wonder why? But I might have a point. This week I read that one of the few pieces of moderately decent television drama, 'Ripper Street', has had its next series cut, because it’s not attracting a big enough audience. No doubt it doesn’t meet the normal standards of the BBC, that is, on interest values, compared to the fascinating consumption of grubs in jungles by minor celebrities, or the foul mouths of chefs, or who is not talking to who this week. Ah, well. We almost found the cutting edge this time.

Speak again after the Winter Festival. Have a good one! 

A rainbow of theatres

The brochure for the London International Mime Festival dropped on my doormat last week, as it has every year more or less since ‘I don’t know when’ – and, of course, I shall be going, as I have been for most years since.  As almost all of the programme will involve devised shows, you may wonder why I am so keen, given my recent diatribe on the limitations of devising. The clue is in the word ‘mime’. My focus has been text, because that is one of the things that interest me most about theatre. But LIMF reminds me, in case I had forgotten, that there isn’t one ‘theatre’: there is a rainbow of theatres.

Not that text and script are exclusive of each other; for example, my own company, The Rudes, are both a mime and a text based company. Mime isn’t about the lack of words, but the abundance and richness of physical movement. What the LIMF mainly programmes and embraces is non-verbal ‘theatre’. It reminds us, therefore, that theatre has a pallet from which we practitioners can choose. What I liked about Kate Tempest’s ‘Brand New Ancients’ was just how rooted among the ancients it was. Among witch doctors and adepts of the tribe. It focused on the core process of theatre.

The Apache attached hooks to their bodies and, braced with leather thongs to their totems, wailed and danced into states of delirium. Northern folk listened to stories danced and sung by the shaman among yew groves thick with the vapours of hallucinatory taxus baccata berries. But that’s religion surely, you ask? Well! What’s the difference? Just think about it? The actor/priest/adept/ shaman takes up the empty space. The magical space. Start juggling, or playing, or dancing, or singing in the street and a magical space opens up where all but the witless will not walk. Weird! Try it. Then comes the initiate/votary/congregation/audience divided from the actor/shaman by this invisible barrier, or ‘fourth wall’. As we are drawn magically into the drama, it becomes an issue that: We might be absorbed by it. Will they come through to us? Will we become penitents? Will the wall disappear? Will it take over our minds? At our shows I often hear, ‘I’m not sitting near the front; they might pick on me!’ But they come: half exhilarated, half afraid. We, as audience members,  can sit back and keep it at a distance, or we can let it take over us, take us on a journey. There’s that business about breaking barriers again. The subject matter is: The world and all that walks in it. It is rehearsed for us and we are rehearsed in it – until, if it works for us and the journey takes place, we are somehow purged. This is theatre.

The actor/shaman’s palette, the intoxicating whole, is, in no particular order: the words, or vocal sounds, the music, the magical objects and the swaying of his body, all telling the story – what happens, what happened before, what happens next and how will it end? It is all fundamentally the same, except that practitioners focus on different things.

This year at the LIMF Phia Ménard will cause small plastic bags, kept afloat by currents of air, to dance to the music of Debussy and a storm of beautiful airborne demons will fly and float before our eyes.  Compagnie Philippe Genty will plunge us into ‘a world of dizzying dreams and beautiful landscapes’, with ‘breathtaking optical illusions and ever-changing stage pictures’ and ‘captivating fantasies’. And Gecko will bring us ‘a delicious world of warped imagery and beautiful music’ with ‘stunning design and unusual choreography’. And there will be clowns, and no doubt there will be grummelot, the clown’s glossolalia - sound that imitates speech, and sometimes just vocal noise, the physical manifestation of air through the throat. And there will be acrobatics, and female robots that do all the chores in a male fantasy world, and boxers, and giant puppets and jugglers. Well, all according to the brochure. As I quoted from T.S.Eliot last week, ‘Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same’. 

Is all this cutting edge? Well, I will make my mind up after I’ve seen it, but in a way it often is, because, while they are not pushing the boundaries of the spoken word (my own precious thing), they are trying and trying and trying to explore what can be said by doing without words. As the brochure says of Gecko, they seem ‘to have mastered a new form of communication in which sounds and movement convey meaning more effectively than words’. But... conversely maybe it can just as easily convey, and forgive my language, but you are grown up’s, just so much bollocks. Sometimes just doing anything different is mistaken for art. As Eliot said: Is the past changed by it and is it changed by the past? But I do always keep going back and usually am both elated and disappointed. But it is all about looking – and these artists are always looking. We can look and sometime we find and sometimes we don’t.  

I must finish with something closer to home, Ed Hall’s marvellous company Propellor’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. I saw them a couple of weeks ago. Their palette like our own is both about the words (always in their case Shakespeare’s) and the poetry of movement. Because they choose to play only with men you are forced to think about the movement of women. They don’t put on wigs or padded bras; they don’t pretend to be women. They are just men playing games with the familiar movement of women – and it is very funny. But all the movement is crafted with lovely detail, especially the ensemble work, the feet and hands always as studied as the head and shoulders. Two scenes stood out: The lovers’ enchantment sequence when they fling insults at each other in total abandon, possibly the funniest scene in Shakespeare, and the Pyramus and Thisbe sequence, which was so silly it had pretty well everyone guffawing like donkeys.

Have I found my cutting edge? No, not really. I thought the delivery of the words at time laboured and at best conventional – and it was a total mystery to me that the actor playing Hermia also played Snug the joiner, which meant that Hermia wasn’t present with Lysander to watch the rude mechanicals do their play. But does it matter that it wasn’t perfect and not cutting edge? It was such fun! And the movement like Henry Goodman’s in Arturo Ui a few weeks ago was so exhilarating. 

Creating the sparks

In my recent blogs you may have felt that I was a bit niggardly in my judgments of other companies’ work. I had harsh words to say, for example, about Lucy Kirkwood's ‘gripping thriller’ for Headlong Theatre Co, Chimerica. That it won the best play in The Evening Standard theatre awards and received a five star review by Michael Billington may suggest I might be needing to attend to egg misguidedly delivered to my nostrils instead of my mouth. Let me briefly remind you of my complaint, not that it didn’t have a good story; indeed I was gripped (-ish). What I felt was that the actors’ skills were buried under a scree of ‘newness’, an all singing and dancing set, language so ‘now’, and shot from the hip with such coolness, if words were bullets, Al Capone himself would have struggled to keep up, and a storyline so ‘relevant’ it could have come from the front page of The Guardian (and maybe should have). So wondrously was it all done (And it was! The production values were immaculate) it seems to have carried all before it like a hurricane (except hard to please and niggardly misers like me).

All this begs (on its knees) the question: For something to be cutting edge does it have to be by definition ‘new’. My threat of descending into the scholarly barely touched the surface last week. You may duck now if you wish.

  

T.S.Eliot’s classic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ still has a great deal of relevance. So, Eliot says of the poet, but it applies in my opinion just as much to a new piece of theatre, ‘the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’. So here’s a value to ponder: Newness alone is not enough: creativity should involve the past and the present modifying each other. 

Everything is ‘new as such’ (at some point) as life unfurls, but is it just a cheap imitation of the past or, just as inadequately, an attempt to sever its roots with the past? That thought is helpful to me. When I look at a piece of theatre I am asking myself: in what way has it changed the past and in what way has it learnt from the past? Ok, Chimerica told a good story! Enough said. I give up! But what did it learn? To bury the actors’ skills in fancy toys? And do Forced Entertainment absolutely need to throw out author, plot and character completely?

That is not to say ‘that the material of art’, must always be the same. On the contrary, to quote Eliot again, ‘art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same’ – and part of the cutting edge is in the finding of new tools, or the re-application of old tools. I have no problem with the projection of photo-montage onto revolving cubes, or of actors firing rockets from their backsides if they so wish (and it helps things along) - as long as certain eternal values are maintained: In this case the centrality of the actor and his/her core skills.

If I am to wag my finger (as if anyone would take any notice) it would be to say: Let’s not argue that because something is new it must be breaking barriers. Newness isn’t even half the story.

So if I am so keen on the actor, why did I give devising such a hard time last week? Fair point, given that devising places the actor at the very centre of making theatre. Well, I’m not questioning devising for that reason. I want actors to be at the very centre, too, but first you’ve got to look at what is going on when making a play and in what ways they can be at the centre.

In the Saturday Guardian’s review last weekend of Stanley Crouch’s ‘Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker’, Crouch quotes a colleague of Parker. “The thing I loved about Bird (Parker) is this: he wasn’t one of those who’s got to write something down, go home, study on it, and the next time we meet, we’ll try it out. Anything anyone did that Bird liked, when he found out what it was, he’d do it right away. Instantly. Only once on everything.” So if Charlie Parker can make something straight off without studying, why, potentially at least, can’t actors? The point is, as the reviewer mentions, he could do it because he had already put in the 10,000 hours. Similarly, Keith Jarrett can sit down at a piano, pause, not know what he is going to play and then make something up on the spot that is beautiful. So why am I against devising? I have already answered that last week, so I want to talk about the converse of it: Why I believe working in another way is better.

I like to think of our own work, that is The Rudes’ work, as similar to jazz. Jazz is by definition ensemble; it is the bringing together of specialists. Each has put the work in, done the 10,000 hours; each has accumulated a billion epithets (little bricks or units of construction) to contribute to the whole construction. Then they come together and, sparking off each, they dig deep into themselves and offer something - like each bringing something to a meal, one the pasta and one the wine. Sorry about the mixed metaphors, but what the hell. This is what I have; this is what I want to give – and, knowing what to give and what not to give, the whole is put together and something unique and beautiful is made. Ok, so surely this is devising? Yes it is, but the issue with making theatre is that the actors have their bodies and voices, skills studied over thousands of hours, the writer brings language, equally studied over thousands of hours, and the director brings possible directions, organisation and objectivity. If any one of these three parties tries to do it all, then something is lost. So what appears as spontaneity is in fact an ‘electrical event’ when several already charged particles come together.

 

I want to talk again, another time, about the apparent spontaneous creation of language in the commedia dell’arte tradition of which we are a part and the misunderstandings about all’improvviso, but for the moment in my pursuit of the cutting edge I am looking for: creativity that involves the past and the present modifying each other, the proper distribution of roles within the whole, and each party having done the work so that when it all comes together sparks can fly. I shall talk about Ed Hall’s company Propeller next week and their production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.