Once in a Lifetime (Young Vic, 19 Dember)

What is it with farce timing in London? Over and over again I see things where you can feel the script sort of fighting the production--funny lines go by without a pause or anyone acknowledging them; unfunny things get pauses. I wonder if I'm maybe just too sitcom-y in my tastes for comedy. And yet, oh, when this production gets going later on, it is powerfully funny. It just takes a while to get there. Honestly the accents in the first scene sounded off; either they got better, or I grew into them.

This was better as a physical production--striking and lovely--than overall as an acted comedy. One of the main female characters, a columnist, was more reliably funny for their costumes than for anything she said. This is a fine and intricate script, and those intricacies often got missed; I would have traded two or three of the scenes that whizz by across the stage for a tad more rehearsal among the actors. I was roaring with laughter towards the end, but for the first 1/3 everything felt a bit off. I'm probably over-sensitive about American accents, but there was more too it than that: as with middling Shakespeare, neither actors nor production really attacked the script.

This play was an influence over the Cohen Brothers, and here the influence of the Cohens sort of comes back at the play. Only the chilliness they manage in their films doesn't really work on stage: the off rhythms of dialogue in their movies are deliberately off, while here the production just didn't really grasp them. Again as with Shakespeare, there is just a basic debt to language that needed to be paid before anything else could happen; I roared in parts, but was disappointed at least half the time.

Sleeping Beauty (Hackney Empire, 15 December)

I took someone who had never seen panto before--who had no idea what they were doing--which is I think pretty much the ideal way to interrogate one's own reason for going to something like this. I mean I'm literally a theatre historian; this is one of the last living nineteenth-century forms, and I'm sort of professionally required to go to things like this. My friend lasted 'til interval; I had a really fantastic time all the way through. It was great watching professionals who were completely committed to fucking around on stage do so. Plus everything was (to my admittedly sort of middle-of-the-road judgment) completely, laudably progressive: Sleeping Beauty is revived by a kiss from the dame, then straps it on and rescues her prince; there's a sweet dragon-on-magical-fairy-type romance. As a unit of this kind of entertainment, it was entirely satisfying.

Love (NT, 15 December)

I'm genuinely of two minds about this, with no sense of how to reconcile them--and that's something, right? Firstly, whatever I think, it is absolutely the sort of thing the National Theatre should be doing. I thought a lot about last year's Here We Go: a basically futile, occasionally almost stupid theatrical risk that absolutely needed to be taken. Assembling us all around the Dorfman stage, this put most of us inside a social housing center, recreated down to the munge on the skylights. We were down admidst the foodbank-level desperation of the characters themselves. In fact I think for the no-longer-gonna-even-complain-about-it theatre audience--white, older, middle class--on this Thursday afternoon, I assume this play sounded as a clarion shudder: dear Christ, don't let it be me. In this regard putting what read imprecisely to me as a middle-class family front and center was a masterstroke: they meant that an audience from another class absolutely could not look away. I thought of something I had not thought of in eons, a video game level from the early 1990s: Claustrophobopolis. We were all stuck here, sharing this situation.

And yet, what to say: we weren't. And although there was nothing titilating about anything, this was poverty porn in the very particular scene of pornography's focus on small bits of unadorned quotidian action. I was a bit dismayed with my fellow audience members' gasps at one character using Fairy liquid to wash his mother's hair--all the more so in light of the Syrian and Sudanese characters who all-too-briefly appeared onstage. Indeed, these were the happiest characters in the play--or, at least, those visibly keeping it together the best.

And yet and yet and yet. All of this had to be in there--I admired the gestures. That the play was about how bad it is in Britain, while acknowledging it's worse elsewhere--the play did that. That the play made clear that middle-class people have it better than others, even in shelter--the play did that. That the lives of poor people are inexpressible sad--I dunno. I have a hard time commenting. That's not a reason not to try. Even the play's last gesture--people in the theatre sobbed--gave just the right amount of edge, of inflection, to the play's realism: no, you really have to fucking care about these people, it said, in exactly the right way.

The fact is that right now theatre is predominantly an elite form, and the lack of social housing is an un-elite problem. But this play knew that; indeed it bounced up against the bars of that like a wild thing. This playwright's earlier zero-hours play, Beyond Caring, annoyed me, particularly with its reliance on unexpected sex between two of the characters to provide whatever that was meant to provide. This worked. It really did some of those things I mark my students down for saying in essays about plays without offering supporting evidence: appealed to a common humanity, implicated the audience in what it was displaying. I feel clenched and pissy for murmuring the word problematic to myself as I wandered out. And yet and yet and yet.

Oreste (Wilton's Music Hall/ROH, 8 November)

I actually had to check with other publications that this was a professional production, so terrible--really, just awful--was the staging here. I mean awful in the sense of people bouncing off shaking sets, actors awkwardly jumping up and down a set, that kind of thing--church-basement stuff. As an undergraduate production this would have been fine; as something with the ROH imprimatur, this was almost barely recognizable as professional opera. The aesthetic for the production seemed to be the old Splatterhouse game for the Sega Genesis: one character in a Jason jumpsuit, blood spattering over a window in the prelude. At the end all of the cast took turns whacking someone with a hammer, emerging covered in blood.

If you closed your eyes, it was totally different: this was sung beautifully throughout. The poor performers had to act in this thing, though, and I'll say they did their best. But what are you supposed to do, as Oreste did, when you spend most of the third act chained to a radiator, and the entirety of three hours twitching like someone with severe PTSD?

There's this game of chicken, yeah, with modish opera stagings? If you blink--if you think it's garbage--you're unsophisticated; if you play along, you're in. Well, I'm calling bullshit on this whole production, save for the (beautiful) singing. This was less regietheater than Reggietheatre: like, done by your cousin Reggie, who works in pizza delivery and collects knives. An edgy production is not as such a valuable intervention--it can still suck, like this one did.

The Libertine (Theatre Royal Haymarket, 7 November)

Okay, so, fine: I was looking for something trashy. Actor from Mama Mia + role originated by John Malkovich + seemingly pointless West End revival + warning about adult content--I mean, my hopes were pretty high. And then it was...pretty good? Maybe too good for this script? First Shopping and Fucking, and now this: I'm starting to think actors don't have any right to disappointment me like this, taking something I was hoping would be a bit camp and a bit dreadful and approaching it with a workmanlike sense of seriousness.

As with so many things (Brexit, neoliberalism), I think Johnny Depp was partially to blame. I'd seen the movie version, where Depp is in full "I found these scarves and also my accent in a car boot sale" mode, and Rochester's nose falls off, and there are nipples a'plenty. And, clearly, this production looked at that, and then did what any human would do and went in exactly the opposite direction. So there's nary nose nor nipple tweaked here. If anything, everyone involved takes the material a bit too seriously. Dominic Cooper played Rochester like he was auditioning for the lead in some interchangeable historical series; judging from his performance, he could play anything from Cromwell to Francis Bacon to Jack the Ripper to Christopher Marlowe. He was definitely one (1) unit of Convincing Handsome British Man, with just enough of a suggestion of inner turmoil. At times what he really reminded me of was Roman Atkinson in Blackadder, only less detached from his situation, and with less ridiculousness (at least as staged) going on around him. And, again, he was fine--just never as interesting as in Rochester's prologue, where he genuinely got to be a bit loose and raucous and sort of ready for anything.

And this was the problem, really: who wants just enough debauchery? Everything was judicious and well-staged and orderly, but the play itself involved (among other things) the Earl of Rochester having a conversation with Charles II while both are in mid-coitus. If someone could puncture this play's self-seriousness with its own self-seriousness, hilarious things could be mined from the heritage industries. The conceit that Rochester was a sort of existential hero, not really enjoying his routine debauches because philosophy, inoculates this script from being trashy--and, often, fun. At least Johnny Depp--and that is such a sad way to begin a sentence, "At least Johnny Depp"--brought a whiff of the outre, however faint and dismal that whiff was. There was nothing weird here: Charles II was shrewd, Rochester was played like the mopiest member of his rugby team; everyone, guttersnipes to monarchs, played their parts sturdily, as if auditioning for the next Pirates sequel. The dead hand of the culture industries sort of patted my hopes of a camp spectacular to a worthy sleep--not a terrible way to spend a Monday, but what a frantic dashing of hopes. More than anything else, this was worthy: like converting a Rochester couplet (whether I fucked the boy, or the boy you) into an exam answer ("bisexuality was an accepted part of eighteenth-century masculinity.")

The Nose (ROH, 1 November)

A headache. A lot of my excitement about twentieth-century opera comes from Alex Ross' book; and in theory this is the sort of thing I really like. And I'm absolutely, absolutely convinced that this was performed to within an inch of its life. But, again: a headache. I'm not entirely sure how you write satire in the early years of a totalitarian state, as Russia of the 1930s was. I mean A for effort, really. But this was all one anxious, clenched satirical muscle without anything to sort of hurl itself against, accompanied by music that gave me an actual near panic attack. (Career-related, incidentally.) Some of the images will stick with me for a while, particularly the ring of noses on legs. But this was the sort of thing I find I appreciate more than like; and this turned out to be the wrong night for appreciating things.

Cymbeline review (RSC/Barbican, 31 October)

Well, the Victorians liked it: adultery and English national self-determination. Maybe if it had dogging, or the Bake-Off, we'd like it more now?

I actually walked out of Imogen, the half-witted "reclamation" of Cymbeline that played at the Globe a few months ago. And there was, happily, nary a tracksuit in sight here. What there was was, well, Cymbeline, which is frankly a bit of a melancholy mess. The RSC continues its love for this kind of very D&G "Italian" mode, familiar to anyone who has seen their productions these last few seasons (The White Devil, or particularly Two Gentlemen--where the Italian bits were longer, more fun, and there was a dog.) Did a bunch of designer menswear fall off a truck in the Midlands a couple of years ago? The song that introduced the scenes in Italy was maybe the energetic high point of the production.

England, frankly, came off less well--as a bit duller, a bit messier, a bit more post-apocalyptic-y (but with less sort of Mad Max energy) than Italy. And this is fine, if anything interesting could be found to do with it. But nothing happened, particularly: England was this sort of place of ruins, with one torture-y dungeon (presumably where they keep the citizens of the world), and that was it. I think the production's heart was still in Italy.

And, oh, the gimmicks. Bits of the production were done in Italian, French, and (heavens) Latin, with projected subtitles. I know I for one am fucking sick of going to Shakespeare for, like, the language, so glad to have replaced that with pidgin "Romanes eunt dominus" stuff--I'm sure the three people in the audience over the course of the production's run who could understand spoken Latin probably appreciated it.

This production was no doubt designed pre-Brexit, and has spend its time in the world in this new reality, in which no doubt England is going to suck for a while. I wanted to cheer when the English enthusiastically reaffirmed their support for Roman taxation--the happiest of happy endings--but otherwise this went past agreeably enough, never anywhere particularly excelling. Oliver Johnson as Jachimo was so, so good that he distorted the play, his seduction of Imogen far more interesting than what felt like the half-odd-hour of battle scenes done in irritating slow-and-regular motion. This is almost certainly my thick load of personal prejudices, but compared to the fancy Italians and their sick continental beats the English wildlings--dreadlocks and war-whoops--had all the vigor of those animated animals they have at Rainforest Cafe. Even what happens to Cloten feels sort of dull, violence and boredom one particular vision of how post-Brexit life will unfold in Milford Haven. This was a painless way to cross off another of Shakespeare's plays in performance; but only Jachimo pointed towards the wonderfully meta joyride this might have been.

King Lear review (Old Vic, 28 October)

It’s a remarkable and even powerful thing to be part of an audience slowly turning on a production. You make a shrugging motion with your hands--lord, not this again--and the person next to you, emboldened, makes an elaborate shrug; at the interval, random strangers complain, and you make empathetic noises, or even agree out loud. I find most theatergoing a very interior sort of experience, overall, and this one really got me outside of myself more than usual.

Occasionally with celeb-packed productions, which this certainly is, one senses that schedules meant the whole thing was rehearsed without the full cast being together very much. This one seemed not to have been rehearsed not so much in different rooms as on different drugs. Depending on the scene the mood shifted from panto--one of Gloucester’s eyes got thrown into the audience--to Culture Industry solemnity to “everyone a bit on edge because we’re showing Iraq War footage” in the blink of an eye.

This company never gelled. In particular, Harry Melling, playing Edgar, gave a performance that seemed tonally adrift from everyone in the performance. When an actor, forsaking all humanity to cast himself into the wild as Poor Tom, strips naked on stage, your dominant thought should not be “Huh. Gentile.” A truly unhinged performance--one might say, a balls-out one--if well-managed can break through a production, revealing idiosyncratic layers in a text or part. Here this character’s oddness was more like a balloon being let loose, finally sort of withering as it shot around the stage. Rhys Ifahns as the Fool was much, much better, even if he seemed disconnected from Lear himself--for me his recitation of the Merlin speech in what seemed to be a Luchador mask was the highlight of the evening. But what these performances meant as part of a coherent anything I could not say: most of the performers acted like well-off Londoners at the sort of dinner party where everyone talks about house prices. In person that’s actually scarier than having one’s eyes plucked out; on stage, I must say I’m getting tired of seeing the universality of human experience represented to me as limited to Zone 2 of the Piccadilly and Northern lines, near good schools.

For the life of me I could not figure out what this production was trying to do. The pointless modernist set, moving blank walls and projections, kept noting what scene it was--we’re quite alienated already, thanks--and the stage crew figured prominently as “characters.” I think they were trying to establish that King Lear is theatrical? I have a recurring fascination with the stagey way that productions have their non-characters--stage crew, “directors,” that sort of thing--act as though they’re not acting. This is usually established through exaggerated normalcy: POINTING at clipboards, ADJUSTING headsets, LISTENING attentively through totally naturalistic motions that can nevertheless be observed by everyone in the theatre. But what this all meant I could not say. Like a lot of things in this production, these stage characters were inflected--were singled out as having a particular presence--but to no particular end. This felt, as a lot of productions here to, like effective elements from other productions that in their native habitat had had a purpose, but had now been imported to no particular effect.

The physical production often got in the way. The storm scene overwhelmed the actors, even when they were miked up. For the most part everyone was dressed in what I think of as Margaret Howell Window modernism, meant to suggest the deep historical resonance of ultra-contemporary life--that old thing--without anyone trying too hard or thinking too much. The second act felt even baggier than the first. Simon Mayonda’s Edmond was probably the best thing here, although overwhelmed (somehow) when the baggy second act went all Aaron Sorkin dialogue fast. And in the midst of that, moments of unexpected power--the merlin speech, the sudden appearance of an Anonymous mask--fizzled, contextless, like unexploded bombs.

In the midst of this, Glenda Jackson as Lear was tremendous at everything this production didn’t seem interested in: endlessly sharp at language, overwhelmed by sets and spectacle and undisciplined tonal anarchy. I wish the production had been kept clearer to simply give us more time with her--the second-act scene of Lear carousing felt organically whole in a way most of the rest of this production didn’t. (Or was it Act One? Should have been reading the surtitles.) As the production failed mostly to cohere, I found myself becoming closer with the rest of the audience, united in our common confusion and less stage-managed denim.

Matmos: Robert Ashley, TV Operas (Barbican, Manor Court, 23 October)

An unexpectedly lovely thing: some buoyant Midwestern metaphysical minimalism, expertly-performed. The operas themselves I found reassuring in the way that I find, say, the conclusion of Einstein on the Beach. It all might be a bit sappy, but I lived long enough in the Midwest to see a hardscrabble intelligence behind it. In this interpretation, the pieces really swung--I find the original a bit less purely enjoyable than this performance was. All credit to the performers.

Performed in London--in the densest part of the city, history-wise--this performance made me, very particularly, want to spend a year in Indianapolis, or somewhere else a bit more spare and Cartesian.

Shopping and Fucking (Lyric Hammersmith, 15 October)

The Lyric Hammersmith specialises in children's theatre, and in contemporary stuff. So: "One ticket," the nice lady at the counter said, "for..." And her voice trailed off. "Well, you're not here for Chicken Licken." 

In grad school, we were all told to make our course titles sexy if we wanted the students to take our classes. So it dutifully says on my CV that I have taught a course called Shopping and Fornicating, which ended--predictably--with Mark Ravenhill's play. (Years later, I discovered that my students' transcripts now bear this course title, rather than what they were supposed to get, the more anodyne The City Comedy and the City of London.) This is as close to being the cool lecturer--That Guy--as I will ever be; every subsequent course I have taught has included the words phenomenology, epistemology, and/or the political philosophy of John Locke. There was only one problem: the play at the centre of this course kind of sucked.

So I liked this production a whole hell of a lot more than I thought I was going to. Ravenhill's play has become the sort of cultural artefact of its time duly taught in theatre surveys, where it plays out as Sarah Kane's easier, gayer, vastly more superficial twin, holding down the fort for the "In-Yer-Face" theatre of the 1990s. And for theatre teaching, S&F presents something like a feedback loop. Ravenhill famously did his undergrad in theatre and literature at Bristol, with Kane and others. And this play says in its dialogue the sorts of things we tell our students to notice: characters actually say things like "All human transactions are now based in money"--I paraphrase, but only just. The play is full of things that were provocative in their time, but got done to death in the ensuing twenty years: anilingus, bodily fluids everywhere, supermarket ready meals.This still is not my favourite play.

And yet and yet. All credit to the actors, all of whom were tremendous. I almost think that the personalities they brought to their roles goes against the personality of the play; or, it might be more accurate to say, these parts got a better cast than they deserved. All of the actors go on my list of people I will seek out in future productions, making commanding performances, and even actual people, out of Ravenhill's fluff.

This production also grew on me. Like all theatregoers, really, I hate being sat on stage, made an inadvertent spectacle of, etcetera. And staging this thing as a game show initially didn't really make any sense. And yet as the play went on I found the production's desire to stand slightly apart from the material--to alienate the already alienated script--really worked. I realized I had been reading Ravenhill, against the more-or-less explicit instructions of the text, too naturalistically. This even seemed aware of how tired and cliche the theatre of the 90's had become: characters dance robotically while "Ebeneezer Goode" plays and "ECSTASY INTERLUDE" flashes on the monitors. (This is basically how I imagine life in the UK in 1995.)

The Lyric was treating Ravenhill's play as what it has become: a part of the cultural firmament that we all kind of grin at, despite not really liking--which might mean that we do kind of sneakily like it. Towards the end, a group of what appeared to be local high school students came on stage, wearing Shopping and Fucking t-shirts, and did a dance to the Take That song that brought everything to a close. It was like the dance that ended a Renaissance comedy: rather than a breach in the social fabric, a sign of Ravenhill's play warmly knitting the culture back together, sending us dancing out into the gentrified streets of Hammersmith.

The poster that you see in the subways--and really, all credit to whomever designed this--sort of says it all. The cast looks vaguely like the cast of Trainspotting, more camp counsellors than drug users. Everyone looks energised and even a bit athletic, ready to tackle Ravenhill's script as an athletic challenge. Reflecting this, the bodily fluids that appear on stage seem more You Can't Do That on TV (Canada reference, sorry) than the products of an epidemic. I don't know that Ravenhill's play deserves more than what it has become: a CV item for local youth and the defused embodiment of Sorted for E's and Wizz-era Blairite culture. Like Tracy Emin's condoms, Ravenhill's play has become something you visit in school--like Stonehenge, or the Magna Carta. The AIDS crisis as occasionally-jarring panto. There was no real power or horror here for me; but the play emerged as smarter than I thought about how modern pop culture recycles and repurposes even the most extreme of bodily acts and functions. The playwright was in the bar afterwards, and I shall spend the rest of my teaching life--which will no doubt involve teaching this play--telling him all of this. I might have, you know, made a human connection. Instead I bought a t-shirt.

Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, and 3) (Royal Court, 9 October)

Reading theater's demographic: an audience that had been watching literal plantation slaves for an hour and a half gasped when one of them unwrapped two dead rabbits. Late capitalism, folks: the representation of slavery is matter-of-fact; I hope the rabbits were organic.

There's one passage in Suzan Lori-Parks' mostly excellent, always thought-provoking play that nevertheless just about killed it for me. You'll know it if you see it: it's the one where characters talk about their "place in the marketplace," in a weird, stilted mode of dialogue. A couple of days on, the stiltedness makes me wonder if there was something about that I didn't get; if it was maybe a deliberate awkwardness, the play gesturing towards the necessarily heavy-handed ways in which it will be interpreted. At the time, though, it felt like a kludge: a way of shoehorning the play into contemporary relevance. And, a few days on, I duly remember: just ending slavery hasn't solved the economic problem of race. It didn't need to do this: there was elsewhere a gracefulness of point, a subtlety to message, that this scene basically betrayed. Again, it might be the play simply refusing to let the audience miss a point. But what elsewhere made this play so great was its willingness to be less doctrinaire--to put it another way, to let itself be weirder, as it showed the filiations between slaves, their owners, culture, music, and what-have-you.

My favorite bit of askew: the performance started with a solo performer on blues guitar, who got there a few minutes early. He played a couple of songs; the audience applauded, and the play started. But throughout the performers not only acknowledged this performer--onstage the whole time--but also looked to him for encouragement. It was as though what was said on stage, the statements made by the various characters, wasn't entirely sufficient to persuade them: they needed affirmation, and maybe even another cultural register, to feel OK with what they were experiencing. They--and maybe we?--wanted black music to tell us that things were OK.

As I try to make sense of this, I have started to think of it as a piece about characters, unrooted from history, performing slavery, in the sense of reflecting on the choices they must make in living in the midst of an impossible situation. I came across the following, an image of the first production of A Doll's House, a while ago on an Internet search. And I kept thinking of this image, and this set, through this play. The flatness of the set, its representation of the three-dimensional domestic interior, reminds us of the relatively narrow range of choices daily life actually offers us; it brings the characters closer to one another, and visually emphasizes the comparisons between them. This piece uses a similar visual register. A small house was center stage for the first and third parts of this play, and hovered over the action of the second. Elements of the performance made and broke frames, made and broke frames. The characters wore costumes taken throughout American history: contemporary-seeming streetwear,  a Negro Leagues jersey, a gifted Confederate uniform. The characters used present-day speech. All of this enhanced the frequent matter-of-factness of how the slave characters spoke: they were offered choices that allowed them to talk about their lives as though they had meaningful choices, which would lead them to a better arrangement within the domestic life this house gestures towards.



The point seemed not historical or even literal realism: that historical slavery routinely offered such choices, or even that all of the characters onstage could fit in this house. Rather it was to leave the play's context open, unfixed, imprecise: this was an attempt to show some of the dynamics of a slave society, but also to suggest how those dynamics repeat themselves in our society. It also showed slave characters grasping for what Ibsen's characters want, some place in a society and in a home, amidst conditions of domestic instability. The problem of slavery is not, then, just that slaves are beaten or dehumanised; but almost worst, that slaves are kept in a state of wanting universally-recognisable human things--home, family, possessions--that can be taken from them at any moment. The characters try to act rationally--indeed, experience themselves as economic actors. So this was a play about how people play broken games.

The central dilemma for Hero, the main character of this arc of plays, is whether to accompany his master to war or not. He's been promised freedom if he does so; but the choice is compromised by previous offers of freedom on which his master has reneged. At another moment, this master--a slightly camp figure, wonderfully played--offers to give Hero to a Union soldier, on the condition that the soldier guess Hero's current market value. The games are of course impossible, and the contracts fungible at the master's whim; still, Hero plays along. He finds himself affectively drawn to his master--or at least to the notion that he could have killed him, and failed to--as well as drawn into economic agency. He brings presents home for his fellow slaves--they've been sold or died, but no matter; he struggles mightily with the choice of whether to go to war (and win freedom) or not, but seemingly more concerned with this ethical choice as such than he is particularly convinced that his master will actually follow through with it.

There's a lot to this play--I'd like to try to see it again, and work some more of it out. I sometimes use "teachable" as a negative epithet; and, indeed, that play-disrupting discussion of the "marketplace" does nearly give the game away. But I'm already conniving to go through this with a group of undergraduates, in some context. Essential viewing in any event.

No's Knife (Old Vic, 29 September)

Do we grade Beckett's plays on a curve? I teach Beckett--have done so off and on for years--and run into a basic problem: that I feel I can explain what's going on in about an hour's class, and then am left bereft of other things to say about it. This isn't really a criticism. I will watch Godot over and over again, although what I find myself telling people who don't know the playwright is that you go for things that have nothing to do with why you go to the theatre much of the time. You go to be bored; you go to zone in and out of focus, while nothing happens; you go to have a few doofy laughs, as trousers fall down and hats are exchanged. No-one, whether they realize it or not, starts with Beckett fresh. Beckett looks and sounds like what parodic drama in a sitcom, say, looks like: the bare stage, the opacity, the willed difficulty. Teaching it, you hear yourself saying Little Mr. Professor things: you spend a lot of time talking about the thinginess of the thing--the theatricality of the theatre--rather than, you know, actually describing anything. The ad copy for this falls into the same mode, calling it "an extraordinary journey into the heart of Beckett, unlocking his contemporary relevance to gender, identity and the human condition." Fair enough--but you could say that about Eat, Pray, Love, too. What, as it were, does this give you to hold on your mental fork?  

The truth is that Beckett isn't new, isn't unlike everything on stage, any more; and hasn't been for much longer than I've been alive. He's one of those writers who has become so much a part of the plumbing of the theatre that he seems not just incomprehensible and boring, but rather incomprehensible and boring in exactly the way everyone expects "difficult" theatre to seem. So I do my little spiel--notice the leaves on the trees, notice the hats, notice the differences with Pozzo--and then I sort of end. I have a harder time making distinctions within his drama: with saying for example what happens, minute to minute, in Godot, beyond the merely factual. The space of this repetition, the time it takes in performance, is part of what seems to me the point; and of course you can't directly teach that time, but can only sort of gesture towards it. So Beckett's plays are a bit like rituals, then? A set of repetitions, pointing to the human love of repetition. My cat's breath smells like cat's food.  

This was a new adaptation to the stage of some of Beckett's prose works, delivered amidst Big Startling Sets. And this did indeed sound like more Beckett: you wouldn't mistake this for any other writer. I spent the first couple of pieces sort of fighting to interpret it, as though this were Ibsen or something: is the first piece about an undead body, buried in the ground, as the set (sort of) suggests? Well, fair enough--but then what on earth is the second piece, amidst a bunch of scattered rocks? The production baffled the sort of questions one wants to act about plays: why have four of these pieces--why not two, or seven? The actor's body, bleeding from the waist down, suggested (you can see my desire to say anything non-obvious here) embodiment; the third piece (or was it the second?) suggested a not-yet-incarnated soul thinking about what it would be like to have a body. That seemed to be a consistent concern running throughout the evening. Several of the speakers referred to the passing of seasons--there is, as often in Beckett, the cycling of nature standing as possible progress, but also (perhaps) totally disinterested in human life or our attempts to order it with speech. I swam in and out of being able to follow what was going on, in a sort of meditative fashion. 

Many of Beckett's most famous prose pieces--the novels in particular--preset this sort of extreme close focus on characters with little control over their lives, who gradually reveal little crumbs of their surroundings. An unsympathetic reading of this would say that, by taking these prose pieces out of these little madhouse cells, this presentation was doing something mostly needless--indeed, harmful to the material, in the manner of Molloy on Ice. This did indeed wrench Beckett's characters out of their trapped settings and, again, put them up on a great big stage, being delivered by a dynamic performer amidst giant rocks. I don't quite know what to think about this. Certainly, this gave an opportunity for a female performer, something that Beckett's plays are not exactly replete with. I'm just not sure I could finally pull, or start to pull, all of this together; at moments this felt like endless monologues into the void, but only that. This is again one of my points about Beckett that I'm tired about making, since it sounds like back-of-book copy: Beckett's plays are about the hopelessness--but also the necessity--of hope; his characters all speak into emptiness, but he values that speaking; can you guys make sure you only take ten minutes for break? 

So, I'm still not what I thought about this. The effect it produced on me afterwards, when I stepped out of the theatre, was to make me feel like all human speech was a bit arbitrary: like we're just sort of saying these things to make conversation, but that it's all (speech? existence?) a bit imprecise and banal. So that's something. At the same time, this also felt, god help me, a bit boring: not good-Beckett-boring, hinting at profundities, but just kind of dull. What was the purpose of the exterior voice in the third piece? Why did the pieces take the amount of time they did, and not less or more time? I was intriguingly, and even agreeably, baffled; but no more. 

Doctor Faustus (RSC, Barbican, 28 September)

Less there there than I had wanted. The idea of two actors gaming at the beginning to trade off Faust and Mephistopheles is interesting, but in practice doesn't really yield anything; neither portrayal was particularly distinctive, save that one had a Scottish accent and one didn't. I had read reviews, and so was expecting the box thing at the beginning--maybe without them, this would have seemed odder. But this production only seemed truly strange or powerful during the Helen sequence, when the two characters' motions suggested presences in the grip of something truly odd and powerful. On the train to work the next morning, this slip of a character registers with me nearly as much as either of the two principals. 

For much of its run, this reminded me of last year's Everyman at the NT--another play that reaches back to the pagaent drama, and another production uncertain of what to do with its spectacle sequences. I regard that Everyman as one of the great wasted opportunities of recent Lodon theatre; this was nothing like as epic a fail. But many of the sequences that made up the running of the play--the delights, or demonstrations of power, that Mephistopheles brings to Faust--just kind of sat there. The Seven Deadly Sins sang an awkward, faintly Brecht-y--Contemporary London Brecht--song. The Pope's friars did an absolutely witless, vaguely Sound of Music dance. One of these sequences puts actors in these elaborate, bloated caricature costumes; but then another, unrelated one does as well, exhausting the not-all-that-great-in-the-first-instance effect. Some of this exhaustion seemed to be the point: the play is suggesting pretty strongly that these presences are simply stage illusions conjured up by Faustus. And fair enough. But the play throughout also registers a lack of interest in stage illusions: a trip throughout Europe, for example, registered by Mephistopheles writing out the names of European cities in chalk, finishing with "Etc." as Faustus' demands for travel continue. As in Everyman, we wind up in a posture familiar on the post-everything London stage: we're clearly not taking the material seriously, but we don't have anything else to justify what we're doing. Maybe we should have been doing the Goethe version--but, like, dude: it's your production.

There was powerful stuff here. The pentagram that Faust draws, and its gradual accretion of matter from the various sequences that follow, is striking--although I think it says something that I'm remembering a drawing on the stage more clearly than some of the elaborate dance sequences. Faustus' acting in the first few minutes, when the actor accepted the part and matter-of-factly started speaking, pointed towards a much more engaging production: more streamlined, more focused on Faustus, more psychologically pure. What followed--not helped by the cavernous Barbican stage--was unfocused and mostly exhausted. 

Wasted (King's Head Theatre, 24 September)

Some British theatre grimness hilarity: I went to this thinking it was Kate Tempest's Wasted (2012), a play about young people wasting their lives in substance abuse that played at Edinburgh. Instead, this Wasted (2015) was by someone named Kat Woods, and involved young people wasting their lives in substance abuse and--in this case--going through the process of barely-consensual sex and a subsequent rape investigation. Plus, according to the program, the lead actor has a first-class degree in philosophy from Edinburgh. Together that's almost certainly a better joke than I could write about some of the new perennials of the post-everything British stage: the grimness of post-working-class life, post-work, delivered by our well-credentialed young men and women.

With that said: I didn't hate this. This was a very, very on-the-nose script, down to the football-injury-that-ended-my-proleterian-hopes-for-life-ah-well sustained by the male lead. But its use of the forensic details of a rape investigation in present-day UK gave real force to the characters' predicament: the play itself refused to assign blame to anyone--or exculpate anyone--but showed the legal process, thoughtfully and thoroughly, leading to some terrifying places. The actors were asked to do to much--too many accents, too many characters, too many scene shifts and mimed props--but did it well. And the tiny-room dynamics of a pub theatre were perfect for this. It felt like being present for the room's collective shame and guilt--there but for the grace of god written in every face. So another cheerful night out at the theatre! But powerful in its way--even if this set of topics seemingly less a well-trodden path than a highway, of late.

Young Chekov: Platonov (NT, 23 September)

Pleasantly balls-out. To my shame I thought I was a bit bored, or at least over-familiar, with Chekhov; this ticket sort of fell into my lap. And so I’m happy I went to Chekhov's satyr play of a first drama--grinning at the memory of it, really. 

Everything in this production hinged on the title character, and on the actor’s decision to play him as a fun Scott--like Ewan McGregor before he stopped getting offered fun parts. "Fucks everything that moves" is something that can be said of too few characters in the nineteenth-century drama, but in this case the shoe fits. The character was played in a near-pantomime mode, but with no ironic distance or fourth-wall-breaking: this Platonov was a man genuinely surprised at what is happening to him, and with no sense that he is causing it. And so, the ethical puzzle typical of late-century drama--"yes I want you, but I want you to want me to want you"--is played instead as cheerful hysteria. Why shouldn't Platonov love everyone? Aside from the husbands of the women he's sleeping with, and his wife. But, yeah: why not? 

What a fun bit of early-career throat-clearing. Characters throughout say that they’re not like people in novels or plays. Platonov in particular wants to be, I think, in improv, where everyone has to say yes. Short of maybe Richard III, I can't think of another play where I enjoyed everything hinging on one character. (As opposed to plays that are in love with a dickhead male character; these are of course a dime a dozen.) When Platonov was away everyone went stagey and flat; near him everyone was loose-limbed and experimental, curious about what the hell was going to happen next. Early on one character says they thought the young Platonov would be like Byron, and this is how he winds up: as Byron before he leaves England, half-heartedly keeping his mistress apart from his half-sister but (one imagines) contemplating the possibilities.

Penny Arcade: Longing Lasts Longer (Soho Theatre, 23 September)

Can the boomers just fucking die?, I found myself thinking, or retire or something? For lo, did the performer inflinct calumny upon my generation--specifically, those born in 1980 or later, precisely when my overly-mediated self entered the world. The performer, a Warhold type with a longer history in performance art, efficiently filled in the Bingo card of 60s cliches: you can't get good drugs now, people had better sex back then, kids and their cell phones. If New York apartments had yards, she'd be telling us to get off them. This is the generation that made everyone want to move to New York claiming that New York is now unaffordable; someone who talks about being repeatedly assaulted complaining about the city becoming too safe. And, surprise, she shares a lot of concerns with Bill O'Reilly: trigger warnings, queer theory, the safening of the American mind. 

This played out in like a less cerebral TED talk about self-actualization, complete with references to bullshit neuroscience and jokes about iPhones. "I appreciated the performer's energy" is the sort of thing you say when you have nothing nice to say about something, but I really did: this is an old pro at Warholian post-everything performance, playing to a room that clearly appreciated her. And the message that one's life does not end at 25 needs to be heard more often. But goddamnit: this was too much reverence, disavowal and all, for the 60s and 70s for me. I wanted to buy, like, seven Skrillex albums while floating in virtual reality. The belief that the 60s were more--her word--"authentic," coming from one who worked for Saint Andy Himself, was too much for me to bear. I spent long parts of the show in that complicated sort of shame that only the semi-anonymity of live performance can provide, and fled grateful that it was over. 

Shakespeare: The Complete Deaths (Spymonkey, Shoreditch Town Hall, 22 September)

Kunst, the dour leader of the company announces, is what the Germans call "living art." Yes, he intones, solemnly: "We are all kunst."

You can gauge how much you're going to like this from how funny you found that. Me, I actualized a new cliche: I actually did laugh myself hoarse. In this anniversary year--we're going both births and deaths now, to double up on the heritage occasions--this was everything I wanted to see: people with foam maces bashing each other to do the rando minor deaths in, like, 3 Henry VI; a woman with a strap-on doing Macbeth; and three men dressed as a snake for the Cleopatra bit. 

It says something about my year in theatergoing that this was the first time I've seen the jamming of things in rectums played for laughs. All of the other times--I'm looking at you, Herons--have been deadly serious, Balinese cockfight, tell-us-about-our-society-oh-it's-bad-innit violations. (For prospective students, I Hardly Knew 'Em: The Epistemology of the Rectum on the British Stage, 1999-2016 is a grimly viable dissertation topic.) Here it was two men with skewers and red paint doing something sort of jolly to each other. I came in not knowing there was an adult clown scene in England; I left maybe wanting to follow it. 

Sort-of related: Shoreditch remains my favorite living-joke part of London, where everything is exactly what you would expect it to be. Before the production, someone at the next table was showing a friend her new tattoo: a death's head inside of a jar. At the interval, a family of aging culture-vultures were describing how often their daughter was traveling to Ghana (alert: it may be the new Prague), and how all the clubs were closing, because of course they were. Kunst indeed. 

1984 (Playhouse Theatre, 22 September)

A masterclass in the uncomfortable-making features of technical theatrecraft, attached to about as dumb a take on the material as might be imagined. I was consistently amazed by the production's making characters appear and disappear from the stage; things I'd only read about in Victorian extravaganzas seemed to be happening here. Some of the louder, janglier effects were crudely effective, but at this point I've seen torture onstage so much in London that I felt like a jaded conoisseur--yes, yes, the take-your-fingers-off-machine again, like in Cleansed; how blase. I'm starting to see why the Grand Guignol had such a variety of implements of bleeding: twice exactly seems to be the number of times you can see a torture method onstage without finding it sort of dull. And may this be the last production (it will not be the last production) to abuse projected video.

But oh, the take on the material. This seemed to be a production of the play Big Brother might have loved: relentlessly uninterested in sex, or indeed in private moments of any kind; heavily invested in torture, video, and in jangling us out of any kind of interiority of our own. A cleverer production might have made something of this; this one just propped the original's reverence for the printed word amidst a set of technical stage exercises that made books, print, and thinking irrelevant. The production displayed a headlong interest in getting the rats onstage, and by god they got 'em, amidst the loudest and most extended of the technical exercises. Maybe this was the point: that modern media are so overwhelming that books are on the way out. But then why show barely a minute of writing, and fifteen glorious moments of torture? Why, additionally, does Big Brother seem obsessed with having Winston read something, given that there's apparently video evidence of him doing everything else? I realized that the last thing I had seen at this theatre was Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games; at about the midway point in this, I longed for the holographic Flatleys. 

And then some characters appear at the beginning and end, who are: a book club? In the future of this future? Reading the text of 1984 like it was a diary? Only sometimes Winston can hear them? And the nice older lady was talking about her feelings. If only one of them could have had a flash bulb in their head, or spoken via a megaphone, or transformed into a giant robot or something, they might have found their place amidst the general pandemonium. As it stands this was Bambi vs. Godzilla: five nice people having a chat are as nothing next to the man-sized flashbulbs. 

No actor in this production stood out to me as much as the effect of having a character suddenly appear and then disappear, like a ghost, in the background; no emotion stood out at all. Winston Smith seemed, before he seemed like a man having his teeth pulled out, like a man having a bad day at work; granted this is true, but still. I fear, now, the future of theatergoing: a video screen projecting a human face on a giant wall in the West End, forever. 

God knows what this actually is: the late, late West End undeath of a production that started at the Almeida two years ago, has toured the world, and is now back to rake in money from the sort of people who think any mention of Orwell's name is Important. (The person in front of me gave this a standing ovation.) But this production had by this point drifted so far into theme-park territory that, again, I thought it of the devil's party. What if Big Brother won out because spectacle is awesome?

The Plough and the Stars (National Theatre, 5 September)

I'm in my seat at the Lyttleton and I'm thinking This is it. You're going to be the only person in the audience shrieking in laughter, and everyone's going to see you, and you're going to ruin their nice evening out at their Easter Uprising drama, and then afterwards someone named Padraig is going to beat the shit out of you. And it serves you right, you ghoul. A woman just nursed another woman back to health after childbirth--crossed religious lines to do so--and now she's dying from a gunshot--dying like A LOT--and you think it's funny. How would Velma Murray, your literal grandmother's actual maiden name, find you now? I just--just--held it together. But, friends, rest assured: there is nothing funnier in London right now than the last tennish minutes of this play, when the death machine really gets rolling.

Full confession: I have one of those vaguely Irish backgrounds--3/17 or somesuch--that many Canadians have. There was Irish memorabilia in the house where I grew up, if not much. I am not the ideal person to take things Irish seriously. And I was very tired, and quite loopy, when I saw this--no sleep and about three pots of coffee, all of which wore off right as this started.

I honestly couldn't tell you what happened in the first act--"oirish oirish oirish," it sounded like, for seventy hours. Someone threw a hat across the stage. The second act was in a bar, because Ireland. The third act had shooting, and a "choking the chicken" reference. I was trucking along, admiring the flat caps, seeing this as another dutiful box ticked: Irish, early twentieth century, note-how-this-author-addresses-themes-of-nationalism. Up until the deaths, this was an eminently forgettable night out at the theatre; for whole stretches of oirish I found myself staring at the clothes, thinking idly about John Lewis.

But THEN. Oh my then, the fourth act.

I have no recollection of the names of the two female characters, so I shall call them Fiona and Aoife, because those in my memory are Irish names. (Update: I have looked up the script, and one of them is actually named Fiona.) Fiona's husband has just died offstage, but not to worry, because she's gone this particular sort of mad that only people in drama go, where bleeding to death from a stillbirth causes you to make tea for your absent husband while shouting at people. And, I mean, Fiona really gets into it--she looks healthier, more vigorous, than she did during the first act, when she was healthy and everyone was alive. Congratulations to the actor for deciding to augment cask-strength Ophelia with a tic visible from the other side of the Thames. She looked like one of our Olympians, Bell Jarring for England.

Aoife, playing the shrewish Protestant, pulls Fiona away from the window; there are snipers about. Aoife, naturally, gets shot--with a cannon ball, given her bodily movements. "I'VE BEEN SHOT," she announces, which is helpful. This, reader, is where I start to lose it. This actor now sounds like Michael Palin doing a dying Irishwoman--doing several, really.

When I teach drama, I always tell my students, you know, in a theatre, you don't have to remain silent. You can talk or yell back or whatever--it's the magical coercive force of theatre that keeps you from doing so. And I am sitting there and wondering, What would actually happen if I shout "Somebody shoot her again." Like, seriously: what would literally happen? This is not helpful thinking. I hold it together, I really do. But by the time she's down on the stage gurgling, I think quite seriously three or four minutes later, I have my head in my lap and my teeth are nearly through my gum. I'm hoping--this in all seriousness--that Padraig thinks I am crying.

I do not think I have ever seen anything as ridiculous on a living stage. I cannot possibly recommend seeing this play just for this last act--but if you go, I promise, you'll never forget it.

Extravaganza Macabre (Battersea Arts Centre, 30 August)

Dear Battersea Arts Centre: your "outdoor performance space" is basically an air vent. Nevertheless: this was a strong performance by a great, young, three-person company--all three people reading this blog should seek out Little Spark, immediatley, as I feel they are going to do great things. By the end of the evening they completely owned the air vent. 

Victorian melodrama comes to none of us first-hand, yet we're all aware of its trappings through nine-hand borrowings of people who, at some point, must have seen it. (I'm finishing a book on Victorian theatre, suggesting Snidely Whiplash as one of hte most influential figures of my childhood.) This piece played with the genres conventions, taking them seriously to about a 2/3 panto scale--we were encouraged to laugh, and never genuinely felt scared, but the piece somehow worked, amidst amnesia, an evil lord, demons, and whatnot. They audience was encouraged to participate, passing knives (for example) back and forth to simulate stage effects. This reflected the performance's reaching into our collective memory--again, for none of us first-hand--of what "Victorian London" was like. 

They Drink It in the Congo (Almeida, 27 August)

I'm thrilled that the Almeida dedicated such considerable resources to this sprawling, awkward, difficult play. This was smarter than anything I've seen about the dynamics of international events as their reflections play out in a major city like London. From its title onwards, this announced that it was aware--hyper-aware--of the pitfalls of addressing something like politicized sexual violence in the Congo, and did its best. More and more I think some of the things we say about theater forces what appears on stage into ever-safer shapes. I pick on last year's Almeida Medea a lot, but I see that as sympatomatic of this tendency: if reaching out of North London life is problematic, then by god we'll just stick to that milieu. 

A British aid worker (problem!) tries to create awareness (problem!) about violence in the Congo (problem!) by staging a cultural festival (problem!) that will involve actual Congolese people (problem) living in London (PROBLEM!). And at every stage this doesn't work: the aid worker's boss doesn't care, members of the diaspora are opposed (potentially violently) to the idea, and office politics threaten to kill everything anyway. So this is maybe further out even than the action of Waiting for Godot--rather than watching characters deal directly with an existential situation, we see a team failing to secure funding for the First Annual Godot Festival; we might not be able to fund him, even if he were going to show up. 

Looking at reviews this play got, I see the p-word--problematic--rearing its tawny, GCSE-certified head. Yes, theatre attempting to show a world riddled with conflict can occasionally represent deep, unresolved, ugly conflicts, and occasionally be at cross-purposes with itself. This play, bless it, made this lack of resolution central to its staging: the entire second act took place around the huge hollowed-out pit made at the end of the first act by resource mining. The refusal to let the two worlds be separate forced everyone in the second act to literalize what was figurative in this kind of play: that they were walking around a problem that nothing onstage was going to solve, or even really address systematically, but that was still there. 

There is in the middle of this as shocking a scene as I think I've seen in London theatres, the close before-and-after of a graphic rape scene. Unlike a lot of stylized violence I've seen onstage this past year, however--I'm thinking particularly of that Young Vic Macbeth--the staging suggested that this act never went away, was never resolved by anything, even as the end of the play presented a necessarily half-assed representation. It was perfectly willing to point out the insufficiencies of theatre--a metropolitan middle-class form that plays primarily to white audiences--and then, still, defiantly, did something. This was maybe a play about a gesture, and maybe that gesture was as futile and silly as the Congolese band playing Smiths covers in the final moments. 

This is a big play, and some parts were more slack than others; parts felt slightly under-rehearsed, although I think this may have had more to do with the actors' need to flip rapidly between accents, speech in Lingala being represented (in a stage conceit) as said out loud in neutral English. But these moments of awkwardness were redeemed by the play's ambition. This play did I think something genuinely political, holding open the conditions for everyone who saw it to see a basic element of life in the world as haunted by what happens elsewhere in the world. 

Vamos Cuba! (Sadler's Wells, 11 August)

For something so amiably goofy, this had some really terrible politics. 

We start with revolutionary banners, and fair enough: we're near Corbyn's riding. And there's a group of youth at center stage, in standard youth-group pose--which is to say, in an ensemble like something from a "Step Up" film. But, again, fair enough: these are the Children of the Revolution, waiting for their Place on the World Stage, etc. etc.. 

The revolutionary banners come down, and we're in an airport, facing a departure board for the same places you can fly to from Heathrow (YYZ!). And, wouldn't you know it: we're just in time for a dance stressing the sexual availability of Cuban stewardesses. Cuba is, it seems, open for transnational capitalism, and you're invited--to ogle! I saw heads in the audience wagging at a later segment, where everyone onstage looks longingly at photos of pre-Revolutionary Cuba, these duly followed by a series of recreated dances from that time. I don't mean to imply that everything from Cuba needs to take a Guardian-reading line towards Cuban politics: I defer to Cubans themselves to judge their own politics. But I vaguely seem to recall some issues with Batista-era Cuba, at least outside of the patrons' areas of its nightclubs. COME BACK MEYER LANSKY, ALL IS FORGIVEN seemed to be a theme of the evening.

The weirdest, weirdest, weirdest section had a character dressed in these sort of military fatigues--and, it being this production, high heels--dancing about for the obligatory montage of revolutionary photos. At the moment where Fidel appears, she screamed. So what the production thought about, you know, the substance of Cuban politics for the last sixty years was totally unreadable, but deeply emotional--she either liked or hated it, folks, and you can suit which to your mood. Meanwhile here's some Raggaeton while the stewardesses come out wearing even less.

What unfolded throughout was a very Anglo fantasy of what South American people are like, constantly this side of shagging or fighting. The latter took place randomly among those at this airport, and included a segment of what I believe was foxy boxing. Even one of the principal dancers, identified by her stethoscope as a doctor (SRSLY) got dragged into this. Later, everyone drank from a giant bottle of rum. The production was inclusive of Cuba's racial diversity only insofar as it made everyone engage in this pan-Latin minstresly. 

I felt, in the end, like a nineteenth-century British theatergoer, facing down acts from hot-blooded foreigners from around the world put up on stage for my amusement. (This was at Sadler's Wells, even--a proper Victorian venue.) This account of the rest of the world would have flattered a blushing Mr. Pooter; we generally do better in 2016, although from the giddy audience at the end you'd think this was Mama Mia! set in a place where the Streep-equivalents might come home with you afterwards, you Easyjet lothario. Blech, blech and blech.

Kate Berlant: Communikate (Soho Theatre, 9 August)

There were moments here where I felt the two tectonic plates of humor, American and British, missing each other by a great distance. Basically, Berlant's schtick--not to oversimplify!--is to react improvisationally to the audience in the empty banalities of contemporary LA therapy- and academic-speak. If you are the sort of perosn who would find an offhand and nonsensical reference to "the archive" hilarious--and reader, I am such a person--than this is very much the show for you. Berlant is an amazingly magnetic performer, and her stage persona is extremely well-honed. The mostly British audience was not giving her a lot to work with, but she worked with it; I do wonder if two of the Americans in the audience feeding material were plants, as no-one could possibly sound that flat and North American and doofy. (Which is to say, there's easily a 90% chance they were real.) I found myself somehow on the edge of my seat throughout. This was more alt-comedy than comedy: more funny-weird than funny-haha. But good weird.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New Theatre Dublin, 1 August)

This was a case of mostly-bad things happening to a mostly-good performance. The Irish Community Centre in Camden is, shall we say, kind of a hoot: certainly they don't mess around with the Irish signifiers. Never let it be said that theatregoing doesn't take you interesting places:

Unfortunately, the production had been stuck in a church hall. I write professionally on amateur theatre, and this performance was incredibly instructive for *me*, in terms of what works and what doesn't in such performances. (The loud and booming, yes; the subtle and finicky, often not.) I assume that this was originally put on in a small, intimate, but focused professional space, where I think it would have worked like gangbusters. In a rectangular hall, the focus was off: performers' departures from the stage felt too much like infelicities of production designer, rather than some sort of Schechner-y "the performers are just real people hanging out" vibe. Again, I feel sort of bad criticizing a company for getting stuck in a space they could not possibly have devised--but I think this is a learning opportunity for what sort of spaces suit certain kinds of theatre.

The performance itself justified a stage adaptation of the novel, which to my mind is always a high (and not always attended-to) bar to clear. I've never understood the terror of Stephen's Jesuit retreat more clearly: the long descriptions as hell, which read as a bit camp on the page, seemed utterly convincing. The family argument over Parnell, too, clarified a section of the novel I always found a bit of a slog. Indeed how long it took to read out these speeches really stuck with me: saying that this production helped me see how voluble the Irish are makes it maybe sound like less of a revelation than it was, but this really helped me to see just how long it would take to read a novel--even dialogue sections--out loud. 

The decision to have a female actor play Stephen did interesting things in this section, and I think throughout: s/he came across as a real outsider to every normal situation he was put in, and I think the female casting--and the performance--heightened the sexual fluidity of the Author. (If not, so near as I understand, of the author himself.) I was maybe less in love with Stephen on the cross getting felt up by the female cast members, but hooray for the decision for a female demon to throw urine on Our Hero--something that I think Joyce himself was ready to have happen by the time of Ulysses.

Indeed, the veneration for Stephen missed the ways that I think Joyce himself distanced, well, himself from this figure. Some decisions in this adaptation paid off less well. The play was in love with the idea that Joyce and Stephen are one and the same; and, further, the piece was a bit in love with the idea of "Joyce, the Champion of the World": the bestest, smartest, winningest person ever. That the production dressed him like Harry Potter only highlighted this: this Joyce seemed adrift amidst the muggles. Of course this conflation of Portrait and autobiography elided a lot of the most important presences in Joyce's life, in particular Norah Barnacle: it is the rare account of Joyce these days that seeks to sideline her presences in his life, but this was one of them. Or, I guess, this is an account of Portrait of the Artist taking over Joyce's own autobiography--maybe interesteing on a metatextual level, but a betrayal of much of Joyce's actual life. 

I should also say that this was very much a production for those converted to the cult of Joyce, aware of the great man's greatness. Some of the biographical details mentioned briefly in the production would not at all have been clear to those not familiar with his life story. And I think Joyce's language frankly could have been cut more: there are long swathes of not-very-theatrical text throughout here. Nevertheless, this led me to rethink a novel I know quite well; unusual indeed the stage adaptation that does that. 

Love Steals Us From Loneliness (Camden People's Theatre, 31 July)

Let it never be said that contemporary British theatre lacks for portrayals of regional hopelessness. This play is the document I'd cite for describing a particular sort of British malaise I've noticed of late, the notion that life sort of goes downhill from being a drunk seventeen-year-old. This is the local equivalent, I think, of high school football culture, but without any of the scaling upwards--any of the ambitions that might be transferable into later life. I never thought I'd find myself longing for the corporate spirit, the forward drive of American sports culture--but it would, as Estragon says, pass the time.

This entire play dilates around a kiss between two drunk seventeen-year-olds--in a cemetary, for those of you inclined to mark key moments in the margin with an asterisk. This moment then ruins their lives, and those of their entire small community in Wales. But then was there any hope for this community, ever, anyway? Socially, this play is whatever the opposite of paradigm-breaking is: I'll note that the one character who goes to university to make a life in the fine arts gets sick of this independent path once she has a child, whence she is duly borne back to her community of origin. This trajectory allows those of us in the audience to sustain that middle-class sublime that I notice over and over again in theatre here at the moment: we can watch characters shrug off venturing too far beyond their pubs of origin, winning for a while some densely-knotted profanity in a regional dialect. 

Indeed, what we're left with in between horny crapness (in the first act) and despairing crapness (most of the second) is lyrical speech in heavy dialect. As the previous paragraph suggests, I'm not predisposed to love this kind of thing--saying "minge" hardly feels like an adequate replacement for a paradigm of social change--but this production won me over. This is an actor's play, where everyone gets their due period of expression: a chance for the townies to writhe around beautifully. The acting carried me into liking this, even as the back of my mind railed against all the beautiful purposelessness. We're well past the point where we think theater should provide social uplift or a how-to manual for strivers; I'm not sure if I believe in either of those things myself. But the parade of lives pissed here literally and figuratively away touched the boundary of something socially pernicious--the post-striving classes, put on display like zoo prairie dogs without the strong familial ties. If devolution is to produce ringing art, it needs to produce more than narratives of substance abuse, lest the former union be reunited in pub stories differing only in the local terms for genitalia. 

If I had to say what frustrates me about this mode of culture--see also Kate Tempest, ad infinitum--I would probably start with the depiction of characters repeatedly turning down offers to change their lives--in fact, a suggestion that all such changes are meaningless. Even a dated gigglefest like Arnold Wesker's Roots (1959) showed regional characters struggling to articulate something: that their own lives and aspirations had some sort of livable resiliance. These moments are often a little bit schematic, and a little bit forced; they are the reason we teach these plays. But I also think their somewhat clunky moments, Beatie standing on a chair saying she was going to say her piece, gave them resonance. No character's aspirations for self-articulation received any such resonance here; indeed the lyric expression of love that ends the first act is directly responsible for the terrible things that follow. That these characters speak beyond their local situation only when singing karaoke gives what feels like an equivalently clunky metaphor, only this time with a meaning contrary to Wesker's: these characters voice strong aspirations only when singing others' words, to a voice standardized by the mass media. This felt like a pessimistic take on what theater's liveness can do, the lived moment existing only to show the helplessness of the characters embodying it. By any numerical measure--wealth, access to higher education--these characters are better off than those Wesker depicted. But something in this play--in this playwright--maybe in the culture right now can only think of them as always-already disadvantaged": pre-fucked by alcohol and regional obscurity. This felt like art made by classes who wanted to drift apart: those from the provinces able to articulate themselves only in particularities of language, never in life trajectories. 

The first half of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (Haymarket, 27 July)

(Update: my homeboy Michael Billington was, I assume, tripping balls on press night.)

This is probably the first time I've walked out at the theater. So, in the interests of objectivity: this is a review of the first half of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." For all I know the second half would have made me rethink everything I know about performance and being human. But know that I once sat through the entirety of "Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games."

But, my god, that first half. This version of the story, based on Truman Capote's original story rather than the deathless hot mess of a film, establishes itself as something like a dream play: the narrator reminisces about Holly Golightly, a woman of elegance and dubious morals who lived in his building in a pre-Sex and the City New York, blah blah you know the deal. But at the center of this dream is Pixie Lott, who bravely decides to play the part as a human Fleshlight who can't sing. Lott does everything in her power to strip any doubleness out of the script's many entendres; I fear she may have been trying for Marilyn, but came out closer to Gina Gershon in "Bride of Chucky," less any self-awareness or humor or fun. At one point in the production a trained cat is brought on to walk across the stage; in comparison you really appreciate the cat's calm professionalism. The story's setup also lets Holly sing a few songs--it's a £65 seat, I guess--and there, too, Pixie faltered: I lost my ability to follow the lyrics of one countryfied song, for example, as the cumulative effect of singing, maintaining an accent, and standing upright pretty much defeated her. And the ENTIRE POINT OF THE PLAY is that thingummy, the male lead, is reminiscing about this magical creature he doesn't entirely understand. Pixie's Golightly is about as mysterious as stud farming, and nearly as melodic.

It's not that anyone else is any good, either--but how can you blame actors acting opposite a central garbage fire of a part? Pixie's friend from Arkansas--no force on earth could make me look up her name from a website--had if anything a less recognizably human accent; for whole stretches I gave up trying to figure out what they were saying, and as a functionally monolingual English speaker listening to dialogue in English that's a bit of a thing. 

There were other smaller garbage fires almost obscured by the central one. The production subtly tells us the Captoe-surrogate is gay by, at one point, putting a sailor onstage behind him; as though uncertain that this would be missed, that sailor spends some time with another male sailor friend. An older man has already told Capote to join him in the restroom. It's all just this side of a sandwich-board saying I ENJOY SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH MEN. Next to the lead performance, this seemed like Ibsen. 

(The Japanese photographer, for devotees of the film, spoke English with no accent whatsoever.)

I fear I'm making this all sound more interesting than it was. Like the cat, though, the performances were all coached to within an inch of their lives; what energy there was seemed to be from the people in front of me, who were (justifiably) angry at how awful this was. 

Paradise Lost (Wilton's Music Hall, 19 June)

Five minutes into this, and I was about ready to give up on it. Manchild walks out; manchild tells a lame joke; manchild does a stupid thing with a rope. Some music plays. Christ almighty: seventy-five minutes of this. But the opening twee hipster bullshit is, fortunately, being staged for our benefit. By the end I was totally sold: on the seriousness with which it took the story of Paradise Lost; on the way that it adapted it to the context of a modern relationship, and modern child-having; and finally on the few moments when it directed our imaginations to contemplate Miltonic battle scenes, somehow through one guy standing in the middle of a stage. The initial awkwardness, the cutesy-poo hipsterdom, was a way of bringing us into the production; of disarming us, and also of seeing god's creation of the world--and a parent's creation of a child--as acts of sweaty, awkward, not-sure-this-will-work improvisation. 

I don't think I've ever thought of Milton's god as hurt before: as awkward in creation as a parent with their children, and as devasted as a spouse at the end of a relationship. So this retelling of that story made me take Milton seriously in a way I never had. Similarly, I don't think I've ever seen the terror of being a parent conveyed so effectively; no kids m'self, and I was terrified of losing them. And I felt that opening--that opening I hated--coming back to me relentlessly: that god-the-father and an actual father both work through awkwardly willing something into being, terrified that whatever they imagine watching them will stop it, or not care, or find it stupid. A relentlessly smart script, with some repeated phrases making comparisons between unlike contexts drawn together in brain-explodey ways. Some of the most effective stage effects I've seen in a while; but that introduction opens them up to us, again, as effects willed into being by someone who isn't sure they're going to work. 

They totally did.

House of Burlesque: Straight Up (London Wonderground, 7 July)

Nothing is less erotic than enforced eroticism. (Other than Michael Gove.)

This was a comped ticket, and a longstanding point of curiosity: I'd never been to a burlesque show, but it was the sort of thing that (say) a Rock Hudson character would have taken Doris Day to, while pretending to be an Arkansan neurosurgeon in 1962. And I'm a demon for anything Rock'd do. It's not exactly that burlesque is having its moment--that was surely a while ago, what with the film with Cher or whatever--but that moment seemed to be continuing. I thought, hey, it'd mix sophistication with toplessness. I could deal. In the end, though, this was pretty amateurish. In the manner of a Hooters, this was the sort of spectacle in which the presence of breasts would mitigate a range of mediocrities. I had hoped for sophisticated fun; I got amateur archery and bits waggled in my face. Just next door, at the NT earlier this year, I saw someone get a penis grafted onto their body--against their seeming volition--after an evening of choreographed torture. I hardly know what to do, frankly, with someone waggling about in pasties while Adele plays. 

Cut (Vaults Theatre, 5 July)

I'm getting tired

of plays

Where the dialogue is 

Clearly

Written in little "dramatic"

Bursts 

to

signify

The anomie of modern life or whatever but in practice just sort of 

make the actor

talk spastically

for seventy minutes.

Is there anything in culture less interesting than the idea of the serial killer?

This was a lot of foofaw for the payout that--surprise--someone is, yeah, a serial killer. The foofaw included immersions in total darkness--indeed part of the foofaw was even finding this theater, located (as the name suggests) in a vault under Waterloo Station. There were also points where the lone actor sort of scooooched rolls of cling film back and forth across the performance space, for what felt like quite a while. (You'd be surprised how quickly the sound of cling film becomes monotonous.) This, along with the enclosed space and the darkness, might well have lead to some intense performance effects. But, again, in the end, we're left the problem of this all becoming about a serial killer--like unwrapping a present to find a pair of socks, or just more wrapping paper. What was required to engineer this performance--the actor receiving directions in the dark via earpiece, the work required in setting all of this up in a weird location--was more interesting than most of which happened in the show.

The Truth (Wyndham's Theatre, 31 June)

Whenever your culture-vulture friends say withering things about West End shows, they mean middling stuff like this. I can't remember anyone's name, so I'll just call them by random French ones: Guilliame is having an affair with Fifi, who is married to Tabernacle; but Tabernacle--zut alors--has been laid off, and is Guilliame's best friend. And what of Clothilde, Guilliame's wife? You'll never guess. There was even wan accordian music between the acts, lest we forget that this was taking place in France, a country where (in the English imaginary) affairs are entered into with all the zest of Netflix selections. This wasn't even particularly funny, I think in part because no-one on stage acted convincingly human. I missed The Father last year, but judging from this, Florian Zeller is definitely the new Yasmina Reza: someone whose not-fantastic plays, owing to a certain basic shallowness, do well in translation. And in this global middlebrow, we know it's France because there's adultery and French names; otherwise, this could have been set anywhere in the world, to no particular advantage. 

I mean, let's take a moment to look at that being laid off thing: does that mark this as a subtle inquiry into marital mores under neoliberalism? I guess. And the firm that hires Tabernacle late in the play is Swedish, so we have some point about the contemporary EU and transnationalism. And, then, maybe that's the point: that life under neoliberalism is so crushingly boring that--I dunno? We need shitty light farce? Or, maybe, that we're doomed to it?

So rote and uninspired as to be nearly avant-garde--I'm still half afraid that I missed the subtle point that would indicate this airless hetero farce, which could have been written at any point since about 1905, was in fact some terribly up-to-date inquiry into gender roles. But no: no-one is gay or trans, or even interesting; and the translation seemed only about 95% idiomatic. If someone had told me this script had been generated by computers, I would have been fascinated: they really can do such an amazing job synthesizing genres these days. And the performers did the whole farce-by-numbers thing, acting exactly as you would expect them to; full points there, even as I would assume robots might hit their lines with slightly more accuracy. 

If anyone had ideas here, it was the set designers, from whom I got exactly one idea: that high-end hotels and nice middle-class houses all sort of look the same. That's not exactly Epic Theatre, though.

I fear the audience I was with thought this was fascinating--and, as in (say) reading Foucault translations, I worried that there was some subtle irony (or point of interest altogether) I was missing here. Was I having an off day? Does the Matrix have me?

The Shadow King (Barbican, 29 June)

The King Lear story is brought to a contemporary aboriginal community in Australia, with mixed results. I liked the live band, although I think the production as a whole relied on music to cover up a host of issues with script and acting. The decision to cut between Shakespearean text and aboriginal language worked effectively; the new English text, however, flirted aggressively with banality. 

"World theatre" is somewhat vaguer a category even than "world literature," and poses many problems--several of which were on display here. Moreso than the novel or poetry, theater needs teams of experts; those experts gravitate towards the major centers, either of population or of training or of funding. I think it's harder for theater from the periphery to really manifest itself at full force in a center--in a place like the Barbican, with its role to cherry-pick theater from around the world--given the need of peripheral companies to compete for resources with large, nationally-subsidized companies like the RSC or (say) Peter Brooks or Ivo van Hove or whoever. This isn't just to flatly say that things are better in London, always--one certainly watches enough dull professional exercises in the West End. 

Simply put, this didn't scale well to the Barbican stage and to the level of training evinced by most of hte productions that appear there. Firstly, this had clearly originated in a smaller auditorium than the Barbican's; the solution was to amplify the actors heavily, which tended to flatten the possibility for subtlety among the performers. Indeed the cast seemed, frankly, of varying levels of ability--or maybe just wasn't used to performing in a vast, somewhat clinical space like this theater. This is the kind of theater that puts heavy technical demands on actors and productions; it killed the intimacy between performers and audience that the actors seemed at moments to invite. The staging reminded me of teaching those Richard Schechner-y productions, with their onstage musicians and actors moving in and out of character; a stage like the Barbican's kills this sort of thing dead. This kept reminding me of those West End transfers from smaller theaters, in which a set is kind of awkwardly installed in a huge new space. 

But there were other problems, too. The script was full of the sort of vaguely-stated notions that, I fear, a right-on audience would have expected from an aboriginal setting in a theatre. There were many references to "nature" and "this land" and so forth, but without any new, vigorous language to support or unpack these vagaries: to give them local or revivified meaning. A smaller venue would have played better to this script and actors; indeed I could imagine several moments involving these big--but also, mounted correctly, primal--abstractions working well in another space. But a better script would also have given these actors more to work with in the non-Shakespearean parts: would, in other words, have given them a better bulwark against the Shakespeare. The play as a result seemed textually uncertain to stand on its own, soaring in terms of language only when Shakespeare's language was brought in. I sometimes felt the production inviting a condescending pat on the head from the RSC. 

If there's a lesson here, it's that (I think) to be moved around the world, theater-makers need to be more attentive to reproducing all of the details of a staging in an analogous or similar setting; and need to make allowances for the ways that different tekne play differently in different spaces.