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.