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. 

Jenufa (ENO, 25 June)

Suspension of disbelief is the opera-goer's best friend, and a persistent problem when it fails to work out. Here, it was a male lead, lusted after by all onstage, who nevertheless looked like Guy Fieri and bounced around like Tigger. I'm also still not convinced by opera sung in English, although there were moments where I felt myself--I mean, it couldn't have been--but maybe liking the immediacy this granted.

This was a bit of a laundry-list of stuff I've seen elsewhere in London opera and am now getting sick of. Our opera designers are at the moment still besotted with GDR-ish, somewhere-in-the-Eastern-Bloc settings. In the past year alone I've seen an ROH Flying Dutchman (where it worked), a kinda-sorta ROH Tannhäuser (where it didn't work at all)--and of course that Carmen set in a Bulgarian fish-gutting plant. (I might have made one of those up.)

I'm not saying opera needs to be sumptuous, or even necessarily staged on a set not visibly giving the singers mesothelioma. I'm wondering however if London's designers went en masse to the same three Berlin productions somewhere around the milennium and never got over the thrill of seeing opera sung in shitty sweaters and coveralls. Were there not even a few years, under Communism, when there was paint? This was maybe the grimmest series of sets I've seen at a professional production in London, with the highlight the arc of peeling wallpaper that dominated the second and third acts; in the thrilling first act, the designers went all-out by placing both a table and a small booth on a slightly different set. Around the vast stage of the Coliseum, I assume whoever was in charge told the singers simply to ACT--I remember particularly the lead kind of shaking her firsts against the brightly-lit white backdrop, as though willing actual sets to come into existence. For much of the opera the singers sort of waggled themselves about in space.

Speaking of waggling: could I request a six-month moratorium for mimed copulation--for, forgive me, dry-humping--on opera stages? Or maybe limit it to special performances for the subtext-challenged? This happens everywhere now, as directors indicate that operas mean sex when they mention sex. At the Harlot's Progress in Vienna a few years back a few enthusiasts were humping a coffin; nothing that egregious happens here. But Jenufa is, after all, an opera in which the lead delivers a child between acts one and two. I of course thank the designer for bringing to our attention that this happened through sexual intercourse, but might have liked piecing together the details myself.

With all of that said: a dreary first and second act were redeemed by a genuinely thrilling third, as vast chilly apartment set is broken up by an infanticide-maddened mob. The decision to break that big, crappy set open to let this mob storm in seemed to genuinely menace the main characters, whose isolation at the corners of the set in the previous act was brought into stark relief. Everyone sung beautifully, despite the occasionally banal English libretto. This really hammered home to me how opera could be a popular form. Good for the ENO risking terrible attendance to put this on.

Barbu (London Wonderground, 23 June)

As I casually name-drop sophisticated entertainments, may I add "Quebecois alt-circus."

This was really fun. Sexy, bearded men (and a couple of women) dance around doing circusy things. Indeed there's beard fetishism throughout: a healthy and worthwhile thing. And the beards are really good at those circusy things: definitely the best metal cups I've seen thrown onstage in a good long while. Plus at the end the dude I assume was the company director stripped totally naked and waved his dick at us, which is something I'd like to see (say) the Kenneth Branagh Company adopt as standard practice.

I'm not, like, a circus devotee; and sometimes I wondered if such a devotee might dislike the loud music and video screens, with their potential to take emphasis away from (I guess) circus fundamentals. It felt like one of the female company members, the one who did the acrobatic stuff, was like twice as talented as the men in the company--kind of a Hillary Clinton thing. And I left feeling like those theatre reviewers you see in free newspapers distributed on subways: "high-energy entertainment," that sort of thing. But, damn it: it was high-energy entertainment. Plus the rare piece I've seen recently where the number of exposed penises (2) outnumbered the number of fully exposed female nipples. London really is the center of the universe.

Threepenny Opera (NT, 9 June)

A swing and a miss. The whole Brecht "thing"--the self-conscious acting, the sets labeled SET, that kind of business--was oddly mannered, as though repeating other Brecht performances seen elsewhere. There's a famous NY Everything Goes that superimposed Cole Porter's giant head over the stage and, so, the production; I don't know that the Brechtiness here was any more thoughtful. The effect was less "actors performing in a play, while remaining recognizably people with a life independent of their parts" than "actors doing Brecht." However fascinating this is from a critical perspective--theater professors, you may add another layer, "REIFIEID DE-REIFICATION," to your a-effect charts!--in person this was mostly dull, as setpiece after setpiece failed to come together. But not, you know, in that interesting not-coming-together way. This made me long for hipster Brecht in Chicago, where the actors' lack of prepation and the companies' lack of resources, relative to the mighty NT, kept everything from getting so rote. 

Rory Kinnear, of whom I expected the moon, was entirely adequate; Rosalie Craig an order of magnitude better than anyone else in the production. The presence of a disabled actor interesting, and the production didn't shy away from having characters mock his disability or ride his wheelchair around the stage; this was probably the thing that most consistently broke through the overall roteness, although I leave to others what particular morality, ethics, or even notion this was meant to convey.

Updated to the present in the most lazy manner possible; to be a London theatergoer is to be reminded umpteen times a week that the rent is too damn high, which isn't exactly a revelation. I don't think Bertie wanted us to think "gosh, those sets must have been expensive to rough up," yet that remains among my dominant memories of the production.

Brecht productions suffer at the moment from some of the the values of his theater having become basically normal for anyone whose theatergoing doesn't primarily consist of The Lion King. (Although I'd be first in line for the Berliner Ensemble Mamma Mia!) That Brechtian cynicism and weariness--or rather than post-Brecht, post-Bond, post-Kane, post-Everything descendent of it--informs our theater's default setting. I'm not saying the NT can't do Brecht--I treasure the memory of the Simon Russell Beale Life of Galileo of a few years back, however closely it hewed to realism. In fact I think that any kind of dynamic shift away from this kind of oddly commodified Brecht might be the most intriguing way to mount his work right now--at least in London, at least at the moment. Do it like a Tyler Perry film, do it in a trapeeze--just don't write LID on a lid and think you're shocking us.

"Without Blood" (The Place, 6 June)

Two people talk, listlessly and in wall-to-wall cliches. They are sitting at a table. A child walks slowly around a room. Occasionally, the child sings. Performed by the cast as though on thorazine--and who could blame them, given dialogue indistinguishable from the inner life of a coma patient? So slow as to produce waves of recuperative thinking: sometimes I thought the dullness meant something; most of the time, I assumed it was just dullness. The audience has much time to imagine the parade of brutalist performance venues this will dutifully tread through: the Brussels Municipal Theatre! The Prague Annex for Culture and Community Development! Your university's Arts Centre! 

A dense slab of ponderous Euro theatre--exquisitely dull without being, you know, exquisitely dull. I'm a huge proponent of grant-supported art, but occasionally the utter disdain for audience or interest produces something like this: something with no conceivable life outside of subsidy and enforced attendance. It looked as though someone had made their performance class attend, and I could pretty much imagine the class discussion by theme: violence (bad), sex (potentially redemptive), footprints on stage (blandly symbolic). Funny old world, innit, where someone who once shot someone's father and that someone can sit down together and talk stiltedly to one another? And all of this narrated in the third person by the characters, lest anything happen.

In fact, let's talk about the sex. Say you're a woman whose father is shot in front of her; who then hides in a tunnel; who is then given to a pedophile pharmacist; who is then sold in a poker game to a Count; who is then made to produce three sons; who then takes the father-shooter out for wine and cake (the play is oddly insistent that there is cake, although this drama is too intellectually serious to put said cake on stage.) What, basically, are your odds of wanting to fuck him after you talk about it? Is the dating pool really that limited? "But we're old," the man--in his sixties?--says; clearly this the chief implausibility. 

This was in all seriousness about as boring an evening as I have spent in a theatre. In an interview, the playwright-dramaturg-whatever claims a universal relevance to this piece, mentioning even its relevance to the Syrians--a people who have suffered enough. I fled before the Q&A. Australians on bus home about a million times more engaging--one of them had just bought a kayak. 

"Stella" (Hoxton Hall, 2 June)

This didn't so much transcend as apothesise what had previously seemed to me cliches about Victorian homosexuality. A play about a nineteenth-century trans performer dying of cancer, this piece did about what you would think it would do: depict the fleeting glories and shattering late-life choices available to sexual minorities in a rigidly conformist society. And yet I think this was more-or-less perfect: consistently startling, whether in its choice of language (comparing a shattering face with the sound of feet on snow) or in its thematic invocation of furniture-clogged, heavily interior nineteenth-century domestic life. Days on, I still feel faintly claustrophobic. 

That this piece was set in an extant music hall was also, essentially, perfect, putting as it did queer nineteenth-century private life on stage in what would have been this most surface-heavy of nineteenth-century environments. This is how we understand the nineteenth century now: as a surface we no longer really believe in, underneath which is what we understand as "real" nineteenth-century life, buried sexuality, pain, and violence against minorities. Without in any sense diminishing the heavy horror of that world, "Stella" showed its fleeting (its hard, gem-like?) pleasures. Again, a cliche--but a cliche given startling life by tremendous acting, stagecraft--and, yes, research. 

I was reminded of Alison Winter's History of Science class, eons ago at Chicago, and a discussion of the way anaesthetic opened up the body for exploration, even as the pre-germ theory state of things made such explorations potentially horrific. The piece's exploration of the metaphysics of being in other bodies was, again, maybe nothing new--but perfectly executed, echoing with startling contrasts. A body on stage, heading for a Victorian cancer surgery it had no expectation of surviving, will survive in my memory for a long time.