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!