"Blue/Orange" (Young Vic, May 28)

It was a smart decision on the part of the production team to make all of us walk through a replica NHS waiting room on the way in to see this--I felt my usual hospital anxiety flaring up for the first fifteen minutes or so. The script itself, however, concerning a young black patient's potential sectioning for schizophrenia, swiftly removed this feeling, as it became clear that the patient was a remote case: poor, unemployed, without any meaningful connections in the world. This isn't to say that such people might never attend theatres, and certainly not that they don't exist; however, the comfortably middle-class audience that is the mainstay of smart-set London theatres is made to feel closer to the two doctors debating the patient's case. A basic staging decision makes this clear: while the patient sees onstage oranges as blue, we--like the doctors, and (it's implied) as in reality--see them as, well, orange. 

And of course this is part of the point: how hospitals deal with those at society's margins, whose pain and trauma we easily miss. Yet this was one of those well-made scenarios, in which everything is a bit too spring-loaded to produce melodrama. That the senior consultant, in some ways the "bad" of the two doctors, needs the patient to complete his book seems a bit off: can medical case-studies, much less a possible "cure for black psychosis," be based off one patient? Moreover, the script required the younger doctor, out of frustration, to become angry enough to say some career-ending things--it was all a bit "A Few Good Men," past a particular point. 

There's a lot in here that is compelling. Anyone who works in a British institution--maybe in any institution--dreads what happens over the course of the play, as reports recontextualize things said in damning new contexts. I think I've had a version of an early conversation where my lifestyle (place to live, taste in food and wine, social position) are subtly shredded by some cleverboots with thirty years on me. The parts were meaty and actorly, and universally well-performed. And there was much to think about in terms of race and mental illness. But at heart this felt like a real fantasy of institutions: that they produce situations where the "real person" comes out, in anger and anguish and difficulty. But it seemed that a real institution would have prevented anything like such confrontations from taking place; although I can imagine (maybe) a senior doctor lecturing a junior in front of a patient, it seems unlikely that a young doctor would have kept pushing, to the point of destroying their career. This was a scenario that might have played itself out in committee minutes, patient notes, and backroom dealings between colleagues; only the exigencies of the drama (the patient is getting out today! the committee met this mroning!) kept everything locked in one room.

And, of course, from anything I've read recently, cuts and a different health regime mean that this sort of hours-long confrontation over a single patient might now be as much as an anachronism as consultants smoking in an examining room. Add this to the pile of Blair-era dilemmas that now seem like luxuries. 

"Dea" (Seacombe Theatre, 26 May)

The story of how Edward Bond's most recent play--directed by Himself--wound up being performed in a suburban theatre in Sutton (named for Harry Seacombe no less) is at least as interesting as anything that happens in this play itself. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Saved (1965), Bond's most famous play, with its humans-are-apes-innit prolesploitation aesthetic: the kind of philosophy better shrugged off with a weary sigh than taken seriously by anyone over fifteen, and (I fear) partly to blame for the end of any collective will to construct social housing. From interviews, Bond fifty years on is still doing that angry-male-playwright-dickhead thing: all the theatre you like is rubbish, the National won't stage my plays, War Horse is worse than invading Iraq, bourgeois pig-dogs etc. The end result felt like a student play given a better production than it deserved without quite the level of professional stagecraft it intended, down to bits of furniture being bonked into the set during scene changes. 

Script-wise, this was the worst sort of objectionable masculinist stodge: a big bag of parts that never came together. The motivations of the central character--of any character, really--were at best opaque. At worst, this read like the writing of a fourteen-year-old who had read a bunch of Jacobean tragedy, but needed to spend more time in mixed-gender company. Babies are murdered with all of the ceremony of answered telephones; rapes duly handed out by male stereotypes to impassive female sufferers. (Is the world made better because a woman is raped onstage?) This is that familiar grab-bag of stage grot that Bond himself stands somewhat responsible for; and as often this sort of thing leaves the audience with nothing to do--no way in, no place for critique. To that growing pile of terrible, dreadful parts for women that I have seen recently, I might particularly cite the unnamed female character in act two, who spends the entire sequence with a cloth bag over her head, is duly shot, and then placed at the receiving end of a necrophile gang rape. Indeed a literal summary of what happens onstage gets pretty Pythonesque pretty quickly. The symbolic elements also became exhausted--and incontinent--pretty quickly: a field of children appears and disappears offstage; for some reason a table collapses, and is then unsuccessfully put back together. 

All credit, again, to the actors, who did about as much with this dialogue as I think could be done. The ensemble of soldiers in act 2 were particularly strong; however ridiculous as a concept, watching them being goaded into a rape by their commanding officer was as harrowing as anything I've seen on stage this year. There was a moment when an actor walked off stage to detonate himself with an IED where I felt, for a queer moment, as though I was myself about to be blown to bits; this despite the IED itself being pretty clearly composed of those energy-saving halogen bulbs we're all being encouraged to use. (Does this sound like a strange evening? It was a strange evening.)

The whole event unfolded as a singular vision, in the worst possible way. This did not feel as though it had been developed in collaboration with anyone else--someone who might, say, have pointed out that a dying character can only go offstage and then spring back onstage twice before it seems ridiculous; who might have helped bring any symbolic unity whatsoever to the piece; who might, finally, have pointed out that this was violent pornography absent of even the most basic insight into what women--called every terrible name in the book--are like. There was no social vision here, no particular depiction of any recognizable human life. It felt more like masturbatory rape pornography responding to the preoccupations of the far left under New Labour--not just a blinkered worldview, but an out-of-date one.

When Bond started ranting in the 60s about the entire theatre industry playing to a pacified audience, who needed to be shocked out of their complacency, this critique might have been more necessary. Since then, however, the theater has rather retreated as a mass entertainment. This play's punishment of those who sit through it, however, raises profound questions about audience: who, exactly, might be imagined voyaging an hour out of Saint Pancras to see a play about (as I remember it) rape, rape, incest, necrophile rape, and more incest? Are we complacent theatergoers? I've rarely felt prouder to be in an audience, actually, than this one: judging from everyone I spoke to at interval, everyone was the right kind of bored with this. 

This play was the waste it lamented: of time, of energy, of youth. This production, these actors--even the Methuen edition of the play sold at the box office--were the sort of opportunity that a young writer could have used to establish themselves, to have done something new. Instead, this was a sour evening spent indulging an exhausted perspective on the world. I feel angriest about my generation's lot--politically, economically, and culturally--when I see things like this, as the political arguments of the 60s are brought endlessly to life. (This was necrophilia on and offstage--but not clever enough to realize it.) It's time to get angry: this is an older generation squeezing the life out of several younger ones, on and offstage. My congratulations to the NT, the Royal Court, and to all of the other rejecting playhouses mentioned in Bond's interviews: whatever you were putting on last night, you fulfilled your duty to the nation by ignoring this. 

The Suicide (NT, 25 May)

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4:48 Psychosis (Lyric Hammersmith/ROH, 24 May)

"An opera version of Sarah Kane" already sounds like a punchline--a description in the abstract of the sort of thing Guardian readers go to. And, judging by the audience, not an inaccurate description. This was one of those things you go to and everyone in the audience looks like Someone--like, a distinguished textile historian, or a hat designer who stumped for Jeremy Corbyn. (I mean I assume most of England was at home watching a reality series about meat pies, so my social indexing is still a bit off.)
4:48 Psychosis is already one of those things that barely stands as a play: were Sarah Kane not a defining playwright of her era, I'm curious if this would be performed. It reads, as I think Michael Billington noted, like a suicide note, which to many intents and purposes it was. Clean typography and a Methuen edition do as much to make this a play, I fear, as dramatic content. How many such notes, I wonder, exist all around us, lacking this sort of audience and production?
That evocation of wider sympathy is just the sort of thing this material lacks. More so even than Kane's other plays, this piece exists nearly on a flat grid of extreme, if narcissistic, pain. There aren't characters in Kane's play; this production decides to make one actress a sort of central stand-in for Kane's personality, splitting her out into a chorus of I believe six other women. This led to some effective moments: I recall particularly an attending doctor overwhelmed on stage by these six women giving force to the central figure's urge towards self-destruction. I admired the actors more than I liked their performances: their ability to commit to this material, and to its collective presentation, was in its way a refutation of the play's interior hopelessness.
For the most part, though, this was not great theatre--it never really came together. I cede to my colleague Liz the entirely apt observation that this was far too reverent of Kane's text, such as this text even exists. Everyone was dressed in dark khakis and cardigans, as in the world's saddest Gap commercial, and there was a great deal of wailing over irresolute music. Worse, the decision to recreate some of Kane's words as drumming added little to what script there was. Many bog-standard contemporary opera tropes were present: amplification, parodic snippets of circus and religious music giving ironic commentary so rote it could be wrapped in plastic and sold on Virgin trains. A day on I'm struggling to remember anything else about the music, which was not so much bad as uninteresting--at its best sounding like one of those orchestras that do improved live accompaniments to silent films. There were random curlicues of odd noise-making--a sawed log, a little binging bell for projected question marks--but these we're just little binging distractions amidst the underwhelming gloom. I'm not exaggerating or trying to be clever in the least when I said that I spent a solid two minutes thinking about Jimmy Buffet, sucking on parrothead solace. I don't know where I developed this kind of shit-culture defence mechanism--Buffet, ZZ Top, Ludacris, the goofiest Springsteen--but it springs out at moments like this in England, when a seemingly hopeless day (I'm writing a manuscript introduction at approximately the pace that lizards evolve) is brought to an end by an evening of life-denying culture.
Oh, and the idiot next to me kept laughing at what I think he imagined as little world-weary jokes. In its way, this weird ironic drama of London up-its-assness, of someone finding this suicide dirge kind of lifelessly giggly, was more interesting than anything on stage.

To that end: having a drink at the bar afterwards, I found myself listening to the opening-night thank-yous, blander and more witless than the platitudes offered onstage by Kane's doctors. This felt like a blacker joke even than those in the play. If there is an afterlife, I hope she didn't have to watch the lame opera of her suicide note being described as "powerful" by someone whose name, unless I am grievously mistaken, was Hansel. Sarah, dear: it's five o'clock somewhere.

Oedipe (ROH, 23 May)

Opera's hit-or-miss ratio--minute-to-minute, and production-by-production--is higher than any other art form that I know of. When it works, and all of the parts of a production come together, it can be amazing; often, though, operas feel like a whole bunch of stagey bits sort of orbiting each other without interacting meaningfully. This, coupled with the genre's tendency towards being pokey, makes for some boring nights out--I don't know what it would take to experience pure pleasure at an entire season's worth of opera, but that substance probably isn't legal.
Oedipe at the Royal Opera tonight was one of those amazing experiences where everything really does come together--singing, staging, score, costumes. In fact this is maybe the most purely dramatically effective staging of an opera I've ever seen. La Fura dels Baus, the company who designed this opera, simply made a series of luminous, intelligent staging choices, never setting a foot wrong. The acts of the opera each had a distinct aesthetic: the first like a medieval painting or bas-relief sculpture; the second a sort of 1920s interior, with Oedipus (wonderfully) on the couch, his mother as analyst. The Phocis scene, where Oedipus kills his father, was set on a contemporary highway, with flickering signs counter pointing the murder. Indeed even the fight scenes worked, which is to say looked like a decent contemporary stage setting of a fight; I can close my eyes and remember Oedipus with his shovel. The scenes in plague-ridden Thebes recalled J-Horror films. For once this wasn't just what-the-hell eclecticism, but--it seemed to me--an attempt to do something with the universality of the Oedipus story. I even liked the giant airplane--last season's giant fish, you are forgiven.
Lord, even the plot and lyrics were genuinely intriguing, these not always (shall we say) opera high points. I think particularly of a dying girl in the plague being told "soon you will be ash," as poetic a moment of horror as I have recently seen on stage; and of the intelligent existentialist reframing of the whole Oedipus story, with a rejiggered Sphinx question and a new ending.
Nothing makes me feel stupider than talking about music--anyone with any background in musical theory should probably go back to Playing Clash of Clans. But I will say that the score was perfectly matched to the story it was telling: mysterious and dread-laden (there's that advanced critical vocabulary) when necessary, breaking off into lovely textures to dramatize thought and inquiry, and suitably melodic to offer a fanfare resolving everything and send the punters home happy.  Indeed this is an Oedipus story with a happy ending, with Oedipus as a figure for human experience and endurance.
Again, opera-going often feels like an exercise in compromises: we put up with most things not working (somnolent pacing, pointless repetition, someone's decision to stage "Salome" in the toilets) because, every few minutes, the elements of what opera presents line up and we really do have moments of what Wagner called for: total drama. And last night the 7s kept lining up, over and over again. My £6 Upper Slips ticket might have been the best theatrical value in London last night.

"The Flick" (NT, 17 May)

I went in forewarned by a colleague that this wouldn't be very good, and came out nearly doing what the Guys and Dolls poster promises: dancing on air. This is play I've seen recently that made maximal use of what theaters specifically can do: in this case, make you spend focused time--hours--with people as they do very little while attempting to communicate vast things. Late in the play there is a reflection on social performance--on trying to be and feel a thing by forcing yourself to perform a thing--as profound as anything on this subject I've read or seen.
I've never seen something that so precisely recreated the feel of working with other people at a sort of low-level job, with a mix of lifers and people doing it temporarily while moving on (or thinking they're moving on) to other things: in particular, the way people use culture--and often crap culture--to set and police hierarchies among themselves. There's a smoothly intersectional discussion of race and class that isn't, you know, a Discussion of Race and Class. And the best monologue--the stage-stopping sort of thing where a character talks for five minutes, while an actor prepares something for his YouTube channel, is from Pulp Fiction. The play is willing to let theater itself stick to the quiet and, often, the devastating. I would happily watch this again (might do, even) just to watch the eyes of the actors on each other.
And speaking of theater, might I say how fantastic, how utterly fantastic, NT stagecraft is? This wouldn't have been the play it was without the precisely-recreated lighting of a small suburban theater. I've never seen anything where the stage space just felt like normal life--if anything, the lighting on the audience started to feel stagey. This has been a great season for fans and fanning at the NT: first the African servant in Les Blancs, and now the endless ceiling fans in this, evoking (for me, in their sad way) a scale of time beyond there merely human. The staging reminded me throughout of that much-cited Woolf quote about what our houses are like when we're not in them.

Unrelated notes: there was one of these amazing mansplaney drone types in the audience at interval, doing that confident speaking-from-the-diaphragm thing that they seem to do here. And dudebro was dutifully flattening the piece into its most obvious themes: "economic uncertainty...working classes...post-industrial," that kind of thing. I had the feeling he could have said the same things about anything: Chekov, Maeve Binchy--Super Mario Bros. 3. (Mario the international precariat; the red turtles indigenous labor trod--literally and figuratively--underfoot.) So buoyant were my feelings, thought, that he made me happy for the play's subtlety.

"After Independence" (Arcola Theatre, 16 May)

If you only see one play this year about Zimbabwean farm redistribution, consider your options carefully.

It's a weird thing what we will and won't accept, symbolism-wise. In the name of subtlety, I think we like a little bit of interference in the signal: we enjoy a little bit of things left unstated, rather than coming down like the helicopter in Miss Saigon. To that end, I will mildly note that the central farm in this play is called "Independence"; and that at one moment a character will exclaim, rather magnificently, "You're taking Independence from me!" For those who enjoy figuring things out at the theater, this is rather the equivalent of a ready-made meal. Symbols even overwhelm their literal counterparts in the world, as with a pair of boots that (allegedly) could not be made clean when first worn, but now sparkle beautifully. These boots needed either to branch out into magic realism--maybe they also sprout a bridge to the moon?--or to have been pruned.

There's a great play to be written on this topic: a well-meaning government official from a corrupt regime arrives to strongarm a white settler family off their land while observing the framework of legality. But the family barely exist as plot points, and are described like the boxes ("farmer who was good to his workers," "daughter who can shoot as well as any man") their characters came in.

I fully expect to see many of the cast members in better things, Stefan Adegbola in particular. But what can actors offer to a play like this, other than professionalism? (I caught Australia and EastEnders in the international assortment of accents mustered--but everyone did seem to be trying.) This is the sort of play where people are dying of cancer--stage 4 plot necessity--but have neglected to inform their children; where chemotherapy is refused because fathers don't care much for doctors. That kind of thing: "it's really a shame I learned of my father's cancer the same weekend that the man came to repossess the farm; oh well, at least mother seems happy..."

And yet, among the banalities, some good things. However strong the inclination to snigger, I defy anyone in a dark room to have a shotgun pointed at them and not feel affected. This aligning of the audience with the violent gangs at the farm's edges, who constantly set these settlers on edge, was an arresting detail from the beginning of the play; it's a pity this never went anywhere, with the gangs becoming more like a weather system moving in or out at the plot's necessity.

The Maids (Trafalgar Studios, 12 May)

A headache, sometimes in ways that were interesting. There is definitely a Jamie Lloyd company schtick: famous actors from the teevee, claustrophobia-inducing music; subtlety hunted down and shouted to death. I think this worked well for The Homecoming a few months ago, since Pinter is never far away from MEN SHOUTING ABOUT THE SHOUTING. Where the Pinter made me feel clenched and terrible for days afterwards, though, here I felt mostly exhausted after about fifteen minutes in. The actors playing the maids--Crazy Eyes from Orange is the New Black is one of them--were forced to run around the stage, often right around the edges, by the decision to place the audience on both sides of them. They really, truly gave it their all in the midst of a set lit for some reason like the last number in Magic Mike: XXL. There were even flickers in the final ten minutes of what might have been--a quiet exploration of self-inflicted service-class brutality--if they’d ever eased the acting down from eleven and let the actors stop running wind sprints.

There’s this thing I’ve seen now some umpteen of times, in London and Stratford, where a play is trying to connote being contemporary and edgy through a weirdly precise shopping list of stage effects. For some reason the archangel of overrated British everything, Alexander McQueen--namechecked twice in this translation--hovers over a lot of these plays. But the recipe loosely includes neon lights in terrible colors and--most irritatingly-- throbbing Simian Mobile Disco-ish music brought on at parts to suggest that THIS IS A REALLY INTENSE PART AND ALSO KIND OF SHOWS YOU THAT THE SYSTEM IS DEHUMANIZING INNIT? It plays in practice like a laugh track indicating unpleasantness. Music that people my age think of as gritty and confrontational and sexy--Peaches, for heaven’s sake--plays at the beginning and end. And it’s nice, as a person of a certain age, to be made to feel like a with-it hedonist. I don’t know why the director didn’t want us to think too much, but heaven knows we didn’t.
And oh, poor Lady Edith: unlucky in voice coaches, as in love. Playing the mistress, she has settled (well, mostly) on a sort of Minnesotan Jewish Princess accent. When I used to live in Chicago, I would wince at the British accents; this was better than that, while still not being precisely how humans talk. Some of that is the point; but the performance overall felt like a technical exercise--like a gynamistics routine in chirpy Midwestern evil--more than anything else. At the end of the play she was made to bow to both sides of the audience in a knicker-revealing outfit; the audience dutifully clapped and, yes, we got to see ‘em twice.

This is some the second Genet piece I’ve seen in the last few weeks, and I’m not sure that London theatre at the moment is really getting him. A strong Deatchwatch at the Coronet was marred by actors who looked like members of the same rugby team; their febrile gaslight masculinity seemed to involve a lot of creatine. Here I confess I thought more about upskirt fetishism--the play is replete--than about the daily ritual of the class system or whatever. There are moments where I felt kind of nauseous at the sheer shouty energy the actors brought; but just feeling uncomfortable doesn't make for a great theatrical outing.

Les Blancs (NT, 10 May)

One senses that actors of colour in the UK are intimately familiar with the “look of noble forebearance.”

This grew on me. The beginning was about as on-the-nose as you would expect a Broadway-intended play from the 1970s about decolonization to be. Positions are stated, views are expressed. I think of this as margin-asterisk drama, intended for the student to note when the Important Exchange (ECONOMICS) has occurred. There’s even a character named “Torvald,” which--spoiler alert--suggests something (IBSEN) might be awry in his house. I left at interval thinking that Hansberry’s mode of household drama was ill-suited to writing this sort of play.

The second half convinced me otherwise. Partially this was just due to great NT production. In particular, I remember one dutiful speech from a world-weary foreign doctor made electric by a supernumerary African maid sweeping loudly--it echoed through the theatre--on the side. But Hansberry’s canny use of the dynamics of the household gave the play the feel of the exploration of a united psychology and an account of the dissolving of a white settler colony. The family elements meant that certain ties within the characters remained powerful even after they were broken--this despite an ending that was a bit playwriting 101 (HE STABS HIS BROTHER). In the end, the play (and this production) suggest, the end of the house may mean the end of our ability to put a representation of a society onstage; what follows is necessary--this house needed to burn down--but also past what can comfortably be put on stage.

This play mostly exceeded its time, a neat trick for anything performed during the 1970s (or, one supposes, any time, ever.) I will confess that I never warmed to the silent spirit of pan-African female something, who strode slowly and nakedly about the stage, waiting to cuddle the protagonist away from his family in England--although she represents a very deliberate creation on Hansberry’s part, and (the more that I think about it) tracks intriguingly with the play’s refusal to show anything past what the house-centric drama could comfortably realize. I like talky plays, and even I felt myself drifting at points--or not so much drifting as wanting to skim, guessing what was going to be said next. Of course that resistance to skipping is one strength of the debate play in performance. I don’t know if I could recommend this in the same way without the universally interesting performances--although I’d probably still rather be one of the people who get to speak, rather than the mostly-naked sprite of the unrealized.

The production was even willing to play slightly lame elements of the script as lame. The American journalist here to write the “truth” of the situation is played as broad, dim, and kind of right-on-brother politically. I think the actor kind of nailed this, bounding like Tigger over the set rather than acting like an adult. And by having everyone tell him, endlessly, that he needed to “write the truth” of the situation--a truth he seems unable even to have gotten near--the play accorded powers to what the theater itself can add to journalistic descriptions of decolonization. Even if it needed to come to an end, the arrangement that the play first shows on stage--with a native chorus watching the events--seemed on certain levels preferable, or at least more stable, to the implied violence that follows.