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.