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.