Quizoola! (Forced Entertainment/BITEF Festival Belgrade, 22 September 2017)

Seeing theatre outside of its country of origin is often illuminating. Some of the self-evidence, the obviousness, of certain things is stripped away. Seeing Robert Lepage recapitulate the same Canadian problems—the FLQ crisis, Bill 101, etc.—at the Barbican felt like looking at them from a spaceship hovering overhead. Similarly, seeing Forced Entertainment’s Quizoola! in Serbia made its particular sort of grumbly Englishness feel a bit smaller and more limited. Here’s liberal England basically, as it came bubbling up from the performers: it’s damp and cold; life’s a bit shit but there’s no god and we’re scared of death; we like to fuck and drink; we’re sad and angry about Brexit.

The premise of the thing is simple. Two performers in clown makeup ask each other questions, from a list of allegedly around 2,000. This list is a major prop: it looks increasingly ragged, as befitting a show that has been run in one form or another since 1996. (The performers remarked on this during the performance.) The stage is surrounded by lightbulbs. They take turns: one asks, one answers. The questions run all over the place: do you imagine you’ll live to be eighty? Why did you become a prostitute? How big is your house?  Is your cunt tight? (This asked to a male performer, this evening.) Whorls of stories, of no particular veracity, emerge from the answers: of being happy about their genetic prospects for long life, but sad about what their lifestyle might do to it; of meeting a stranger on the plane the previous night, and having slept with them. Patterns emerge: Etchells, for example, kept saying little kitty cat in a particular intonation, stretching this out across questions. Performers keep asking each other why they’re lying, again to no particular effect. Many of the questions involve university: Etchells talks about what he learned there; the other performers, mostly, claim not to have learned anything. I left my pen behind, and wish I’d taken better notes—but I’m not sure what importance these notes of individual moments might have had. The important thing, if anything was important, seemed to be the rhythms: the way the performers settled into a back-and-forth, which they then disrupted; the way the two performer switches that happened during the six hours took on immense significance. For a while the lights failed, and the performers continued while stagehands sorted out the lighting onstage; nothing, particularly, changed. Some cell phones went off. We got older.

The show is well-established: 24-hour versions have been run, and the questions are all published, available for sale from the company’s website even. Etchells himself teaches at Sheffield, and this work is as I understand it duly canonized within discussions of this kind of semi-theatre, semi-performance-art.

It’s almost required if you’re a cleverboots writing about this sort of thing that you mention things around the edges of the performance. For me this meant noticing how your attention also switches to the other audience members. In part this was because, this evening, someone who had not figured out how to turn the beep noise on her DSLR off took questions, approximately every ten seconds, for almost the entirety of the six hours. If I hadn’t been sure she was with the performance I might have hissed something at her; in retrospect this felt as much a part of the performance as anything else. People entering and exiting drew everyone’s attention from the performers; we then drifted back to the performers. They didn’t seem to want to be there, but they didn’t seem not to, either. I was reminded of Beckett: it would pass the time, and it did. It felt like the saddest parts of living in provincial England, in Lemaington Spa: like the sun was dying, and I might just lie down in a field and die--but first a hangover and some thoughts about sex.

The Tempest (RSC/Barbican, 10 August)

I had a bad feeling about this from the very beginning. The Tempest begins with a shipwreck--mariners shouting as their ship falls apart. I'm not sure if the director of this production played the Bosun in school or something, but by god: if you've ever thought the people shouting at the beginning of The Tempest don't get their due, this is the production for you. Of course, that scene is usually run through quickly because it's not particularly interesting unless run through quickly. Here, it's sort of stately--mostly, boring.

This would continue. I saw this quite late in its run, and maybe the cast was having a bad night or something. But I've never seen a Shakespeare production that felt more like a long road trip--Dad, are we there yet? The Old Vic King Lear last year put running act and scene numbers at the top, which I thought was a mistake: Lear's a long play, and you sometime's looked up to see, oh god, we're only at III.2. The Tempest is a much shorter play, but this one went on endlessly, distended by a tendency to mistake pauses in dialogue for interpretation. There were just pauses throughout. Politely I would say that there was something democratic in making sure that every single scene got its due. But just slowing something down is not excuse for actually understanding it. I was spoiled by the Andrew Scott Hamlet earlier this summer--and his was in no sense a quick performance--but some of the scenes heere were just deadly. I dreaded every time Stefano opened his mouth: James Hayes spoke slowly and made sure that every dick joke--even those the play itself repeats several times--was telegraphed to the audience through a range of unsubtle businesses. 

And Caliban. The Tempest nearly becomes a problem play in some interpretations, and in its way I was happy to see a colonial reading not be The Issue of the play. At the same time, making Caliban into a green, vaguely H.R. Geigery Santa Claus was the oddest punting of this issue I could imagine. (Did Sycorax fuck the Grinch or something?) I get that productions might not want to distend themselves with an issue that has informed Tempest productions for forty-odd years; however, I expected better than the vague insinuation that it wasn't easy being green. 

Might as well deal with the special effects. I have no particular antipathy towards video projection. However, as someone young enough to play video games, I also sort of need video effects not to suck. This production's frequent moments of black magic were dominated by the sort of effects (the cracking of the earth, the summoning up of demons) I remember from video games in about 2007. Having paid for the Barbican, they might have sprung for better than an XBox 360. 

The more positive visions, in contrast, reminded me of nothing so much as the video in Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games, minus a unicorn or two. A long projection effect filled the stage with peacocky things coalescing into vaguely rectal whorls. 

And yeah, a few of these effects were great--although I'll note that the best tended to be slightly more traditional things, like the glowing effects built into the stage. I will modestly note that the colour saturation of video projection still isn't all that fantastic, yet--until this gets sorted, overly-pictorial productions will need to be careful lest they seem like giant screen savers or the background effects at a Sigur Ros concert. (At one point Propsero is surrounded by a swirling yellow ring, as though you had clicked on him in Warcraft.) I still think the most effective stage device was Trinculo's bicycle horn, which might have cost £6. And they seemingly couldn't afford a curtain for the discovery scene, which truly broke my heart: the actors just came on with a chessboard that then lit up, like in the video for One Night in Bangkok. I never, ever thought I'd hear myself saying this, but I missed the faint energy of those generic Dolce and Gabannish things the RSC were doing last year.  

Oh, but the Telegraph liked the effects, if not so much the structure of an English sentence:

I couldn't tell if Simon Russell Beale was accessing his not particularly great dementia-addled Lear or was simply sort of sleepwalking grumpily through the end of his time in this production. He was somehow convinced to give a shit in exactly two scenes, and it nearly cracked the play open. Responding to Ariel's "If I were human," he seemed genuinely to pause; in the next scene, overcome by rage in the middle of his daughter's vision of happiness, his angry sadness tore the undersaturated onstage pageant to shreds. This made me angry in turn--it pointed towards what the production might have been. By the conclusion he was back to seeming a bit bored. The final soliloquy, which (real talk) I think is basically holy, again substituted pauses for interpretation: he'd say a few lines, wait for a bit, then say a few more. He practically shrugged, by the end. Around him were some non-decision interpretations. Miranda was played like Gabrielle, Xena's wan but spunky lifetime companion; I remember one moment of Antonio fixing his hair more than any other aspect of his performance. Ceres sang like Enya; the music sounded like Yanni. Sail away, sail away. 

Maybe it's the shitty time and the shitty politics, but I noticed that this was a very obedient production. Prospero's manfeels about getting old tear up his child's happiness, without anything really happening as a result--Gabrielle doesn't even get to look sad about it. Ariel's team of sprites curtsey when they put on his Milanese cloak--indeed it takes four young people, working as a team, to remove his garment. This was an uncritical Prospero for the Trump White House, with his overtanned daughter, evident fear of aging, and undersaturated dreams of flame and terror. 

Not that this has anything to do with the production, but on the way out one of the young men behind me--exactly the sort of bored posh accent you'd expect--said, to his ghastly friends, "One of them couldn't act. The black dude, the older one." (Joseph Mydell was in fact fine as Gonzalo, the definition of an unforgiving Shakespearean part: this sort of island Polonius, well-meaning and repetitive.) I grant no particular importance to the opinions of my younger social superiors; a man could go mad. But at the end of this particular evening, I was furious, all the way back to Moorgate Station. I'm not saying audiences need to be awed into silence by a noble Caliban, every time; but this points towards the essential frivolity with which this play addressed most of the play's potential issues. 

Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (NT/Duke of York's Theatre, 7 June)

Of course the problem with taking this sort of thing seriously is that you're not supposed to: this was at heart something like an ELO jukebox musical, for heaven's sake, playing across the street from Bat Out of Hell: The Musical at the ENO. Yet if I had to think of a paradigm for class immobility, it would be something like this performance. That's not in any sense to knock the quality of acting, script, production, musicianship, or anything else: this was a talented cast and production, the result of a lot of time and craft.

And in a sense that's my problem with this, an account of a rollicking day in the life of a number of sexually omnivorous but by all accounts future-deprived Scottish schoolgirls. These certainly are not characters in need of a lecture of mindfulness: their moment is everything. One seems to be dying of cancer, while the others seem fated to what happens to the unpensioned classes under late capitalism. Even the most conventionally middle-class character, the lone fated university-goer, seems (not to give anything away) fated for at the very least turbulence on the way there. I worry that I'll wind up sounding like David Brooks, or Matthew Arnold or somewhere: less fornicating, gels, and more books, and you too can ascend the declining heights of middle-class stability!

It's just that everything that brought everyone to the moment of performance, cast and crew, is precisely the sort of thing none of the characters in this play are allowed: study, focus, and time to develop. These are all characters who would likely have had difficulty attending a West End show, and no chance at all of performing in one. Or, at the least, this is what the play seems to suggest: even those characters with future plans, of one sort of another, see those fall apart over the course of the events described.

It also feels supremely odd--at this moment in British culture's frankly leery focus on guarding the sexuality of pre-adults--to watch a play about middle teenagers constantly having sex, to the frequent peril of their future lives. If you go to the theatre enough in London you'll see the world sort of array itself before you to perform: Argentines, Cubans, and now it seems precariat Scots, all affirming how often they get laid. This feels unsatisfactory somehow as the narrative of a shared global future. Moreover it feels like bad politics: we affirm the orgasms we share with the characters onstage--indeed, maybe we even envy them--but then go back to our more stable lives.

This performance felt faintly allegorical for society as it now exists. The theater-affording classes watch this sort of thing, and get to really enjoy it--and, indeed, this was an enjoyable performance. (You could buy sugary drinks in the lobby, to go with the on-stage sambucas.) The classes depicted, meanwhile, get the moment of performance, but no future; and the training necessary to get a performer to the West End level keeps any too-intrusive elements of actual post-working class life from getting into the mix.

There's a particular sort of rickety British theatre of the 1960s that tried to show alternatives, or at least a space of critique, of these sorts of things: Arnold Wesker's Roots does a lot of working in my thinking, as does Shelagh Delaney. And these plays are full of ham-handed moments of class transcendence or the failure thereof. But the very slickness of this play made me honestly nostalgic for that sort of thing: for the gesture, hewn out of a 1950s entertainment industry every bit as hostile to class critique as this one, towards lamenting and acknowledging structural problems. There are astonishing moments in this--it is a very fine production, and you should definitely go see it if you like this sort of thing. But a week on I feel queasy about this in a way I hadn't anticipated.

Deposit (Hampstead Theatre, 3 June)

If Brecht teaches us anything, it's to feel sympathy for actors as people. And oh, the poor creatures on the Hampstead basement stage, made to do representative rhythmic gymnastics through this terrible, terrible play. If Aldi sold Shaw scripts, like by the pound, they'd read like this.

"Generation Rent, innit?" Like imagine a play based around that being written on a napkin, and you more-or-less have the idea here. In a move that would please a particular sort of Russian Formalist, this is the kind of play where no-one has a personality beyond their representative function to the plot, which is to say: two couples onstage, saving for--wait for it--the deposit on a mortgage. Between this and having my work visa renewed at My Country, I did feel very relevant this past week--and I watched both nearly in the fetal position. However, whatever force this might have had was blunted by the script. I suppose--if I were inclined to be charitable--I would say that some of these liabilities were the point: that the housing situation so compromises people to the point where they no longer have interests or recognizable humanity. And yet: humanity does rather poke through. Someone likes waffles; another, Pokemon Go. Of such things is recognizable humanity made. No-one is actually as dreary as the characters in this play are. And woe betide the problem playwright whose jokes fall flat--whose moments of levity clunk like horseshoes, amidst the general discussion of Fucked,  How We Are. There are the elements of a truly epic Grand Guignol script here--certainly, at least half of the characters were in desperate need of a disembowelling. But this was too close to a Shelter press release given a barely fictional gloss.

When I saw this, of a Saturday evening, I was the youngest person in the audience. The man directly in front of me seemed to be a property developer, recommending that his friends invest in property. On the way out, I heard some of the fiftysomethings say "Thank god we don't need to buy again." As an immersive theatrical effect, this was somehow more impressive than anything I've yet experienced: the fourth wall, right down! But as an index of typical London depressingness, this was typically depressing. Still, if we're all fucked, let's have some better plays.

The White Devil (Sam Wanamaker, 13 March)

In Vienna, you'll be accosted by these sort of fake classical music troupes--aimed at tourists, clearly not really for the locals--who put on shows aimed at people who just want to see some Beethoven in an old church. The Wannamaker needs to do better than that, y'know?

Every time I see something here Wanamaker, I see what seem to be theatregoers about where I was when I first went. Let's say you're North American; let's say in high school you hear about these Elizabethan outdoor theaters. Maybe your English teacher mentions that they've recreated one, and you're excited. Then you also hear about the Elizabethan indoor theaters--the latey-Shakespeare, Tempest-y ones. You thrill with the fact that you're one of the few people on earth (as you imagine it) who know what Blackfriars is. Or was. And then you go to the Globe--and it's just like your teacher said! Life experience crossed off! And then, you find out about this newer, indoor theater, and you're even more excited! And you go, and it's amazing: candles! Uncomfortable seats! A discovery area! Achievement unlocked.

But then let's say you live in London, or you're here for a while. And then you go a second time, and, it's still exciting--I mean you HAD to go, never mind the ticket prices--and, you know, it's pretty good. You definitely don't try to talk yourself into it because of how much it cost. It's authentic, right? And then you go again. And this time you really notice: parts of this are kind of dull. Like the acting's not very good, and the production is kind of uninspired. Everyone seems to either rant or simper according to type. You've seen more interesting productions of, like, everything. Is it possible that candlelit theatre really isn't as exciting as your little high school heart believed?

Reader, know that it breaks my heart to say this, but: the Wanamaker is a tourist attraction. Every time I go, I see people having what I assume is the first-time experience, and they think it's amazing, or seem to. They look on bright-eyed; they clap and clap.

This was mostly fine, and occasionally dull. Of this and the we-bought-a-truckload-of-D&G-some-time-ago-and-also-music RSC White Devil of last summer, I'd probably go with the RSC--but that production got big and weird and drift-y. This in contrast was smaller, intimate--and mostly ranted. I appreciate the limitations of this singularly limited (and I think for actors, limiting) space--but I wanted a better production. The actors here occasionally fell into the mode of generic, Peanuts adult-y Renaissance speech: I'm not sure I thought they knew what they were saying. This was totally run-of-the-mill Jacobean theater in an expensive box.

An Octoroon (Orange Tree, 26 May)

If I see better theatre this year, I'll be a very happy bear indeed--but I'm not hopeful. Since I've moved to the UK, the Orange Tree has been one of my most consistently happy surprises. I'm near-evangelical about it: this is a proper theatre company, with maybe the most intelligent and interesting selection of plays I've seen presented by one venue in London. To date I've particularly associated them with good minor Shaw and older stuff from the Royal Court--both of which, might I say, are vital to the theatrical conversation in London.

This, however, was a theatrical coup. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' play is--if I may--hugely significant: as an attempt to resurrect the nineteenth-century drama, and in a sense to say that we're all still living in the midst of its heady combination of spectacle and heavy stereotyping. I feel the full weight of the thirty-odd hits this blog gets when I praise actors--it seems silly to do this, like I'm Michael Billington or something. But Ken Nwosu's lead performance, from the (great, won't give it away) first line onwards, was one of the small marvels of the year for me.

Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859) was one of the most popular plays throughout the nineteenth-century world, famous for its slave auctions and exploding boats. Horrifyingly for us today, it is also full of what the melodrama found amusing: blackface, redface, and heavy sentimentality. What can we do with scripts like this? Years ago, I saw the Wooster Group Emperor Jones--which, like this production, dealt with an older script made problematic by changes in how we represent race on stage. And that production--although not without its complexities--struck me as slightly gutless: as an attempt to distance itself from anything not fully bien-pensant, frittering any resonances in the script away into abstract stylization. This did something far more complicated, leaving in enough of Boucicault to let the sentimental drama work in its own terms, without abstracting stylization. I felt like patting myself on the back: these old plays really have something to them! And then one stage effect--which I would not dream of giving away--reminded us what else the nineteenth century found spectacular, and indeed what else still works on us. I felt sickened in the best and most thoughtful possible way.

But, stage effects aside, this was a full-on production--well-thought-out, down to the tiniest details--of a great chamber play, down to the cast pausing to completely disassemble the floor for the famous slave auction scene. After this and Low Level Panic, I've started to admire the Orange Tree for its use of plumbing: for water, heavy sets, and other thoughtful fixtures onstage. They do what great sets do: make the play resonate out between the theatrical space and our world. All praise to the actors for what must have been a formidable job of rehearsal jumping around this set, nearly tripping over the elaborate fixtures and terrifyingly-close audience members alike. I felt terrifyingly complicit in this, in the best possible way--I left wondering what of the things I enjoy will wind up seemingly ghastly in 150 years, hoping that they would make out as well for future spectators as the tap-dancing rabbit did in this production.

This isn't to say that any of this was overwhelmingly heavy--this play is, among other things, a fucking blast, from beginning to end. But no part of that spectacle comes easily. Weeks later I remain unsettled by this. See it.

My Country: A Work in Progress (NT/Warwick Arts Centre, 25 May)

So my work visa was away being renewed while I watched this, which is not something I would particularly recommend. And I guess I have to hand it to the NT: this is the sort of thing they should be doing, even if I thought it was kind of a failure. The form of the thing would have been recognizable to the Victorians, if not to the Phoenicians: personified representatives of the regions of Britain assemble to talk about Brexit, their reasons for and against it, and--most of the time--their grumbles about life. The poetry bits were rubbish--"the sacrament of listening" remains with me, even as other bits of language have drifted away. But the grumbles: the most powerful of these came early, when a voice from somewhere northern describes the inequity of schooling in their district. This has nothing to do with Brexit but, I think, everything to do with it: these seem to have been the chickens that came home to roost, in the general vague protest that the election engendered.

With that said, as a foreigner (subset: the good type, employer-sponsored visa), I spent the whole thing feeling confused and anxious and--increasingly--furious that no-one from my sub-subset of recent economic migrants was included. The points of similitude, between the regions: shitty food. Heavy drink. Terrible pop music from the 1970s. An Austerity of the mind, it seemed to me. I'm not entirely sure if this is a complaint or not--I don't know if the voices of those fresh off the vehicle of conveyance, as indeed I am, should have a say in things. But I left this chamber of horrors feeling like I did after Brexit: that the cosmopolitan place I thought I had landed in turned out to be parochial AF, as I believe the kids say.

Do echo chambers like what this play depicts even exist anymore, I wonder? This play's voices came from a closed loop, talking to itself; but does anyone, in this international age, spend much of their time in such a loop? I did not feel a part of these conversations, their occasional git-on-git gooniness. But that's the point, right? Genuine props to the NT for making me feel so rootless and heartsick.

Salome (NT, 22 May)

I'll end at the beginning: oh my god, you have to see this.

We misuse terms like "mesmerisingly awful"--or at least I do, when I mean "quite bad." But I could not stop looking at this incredible hot mess of a thing on Monday, and I will admit it's stayed with me since. I can't exactly recommend anyone see this--I mean, this is almost certainly the worst thing I've ever seen at the National Theatre, by a considerable margin. But if anyone wants to go, they'll definitely be entertained. Never have I seen anything so purely Mystery Science Theatre at an actual theatre--so inept, so ham-handed (gevalt), so lazy in thematization yet expensive in set and costume. I will, I fear, be remembering this for a very long time, long after (say) a merely dutiful Beggar's Opera. Friends this is a debacle, a fiasco--a Las Vegas trash fire, visible from low orbit. I think you should go. Believe me, there are still tickets.

Only a female director could have created a female role so remorselessly awful for the actor involved--Cleansed without the dignity. Salome spends the first two thirds of the play being raped, the last third naked, and the whole thing as a metaphor for--I dunno. Something. The Middle East, territory, the environment, women. This means that for most of the play she is spared actually saying the play's dialogue, atrocious throughout. But then she does talk, and--oh, it's just awful. Everything everyone says is awful, in two languages at least. If you miss a point, don't worry, it will be explained again unto you, yea until the seventh repetition. This would have been better as a dance piece: actually, possibly, quite an effective one. Being in this production should be looked back on by all involved as a badge of honour, like being in the Marines, or an arctic expedition.

A lost arctic expedition, even. Oh, the blocking: actors wander the stage, lost and alone, like Scott's sailors. Some very fine actors shout abstractions past each other. John the Baptist walks around like a Charles Atlas hero, speaking his dialogue in a different language from everyone else; but then everyone else responds in English, and a variety of accents. (Salome herself an odd mixture of Semitic, Home Counties, and--ahem--Brazilian.) Sometimes the actors get to ride the Olivier stage around and around. I hope that's kind of fun. There is something like a five-minute debate about bringing aqueducts. Two full-time female wailers are provided, for the audience member in need of convincing that civilian massacres have mournful elements. And all of the easiest possible historical ironies get brought out for a curtsy: the Roman with an Irish accent because Troubles, the Jewish soldiers suddenly having AK-47s because blah, the blah because blah. Derp a derpa derp.

And the script: Charlton Heston Biblical dialogue meets Mills and Boon meets a whole lot of really squicky sexuality. As one intoned vaginal metaphor entered its seeming fourth minute, I thought: maybe this really isn't meant to be metaphoric. Maybe this guy just really, really likes clefts.

So, yeah. People are going to get fired over this, it's that terrible. But maybe you should see it? It will live in the memory.

Killer (Jamie Lloyd/Shoreditch Town Hall, 11 March)

I think this overstayed its welcome and its defining gimmick. We go into a room with headphones on the chairs; the lights go out, and we get shouted at through the headphones. For the first monologue of the play's three, this is terrifying, and terrifyingly effective. A voice is telling us about joining a violent racist group, and we're totally buying it--by which I mean, I was completely entranced, and not more than a little bit seduced, alone in the dark with a voice. It felt very video game like in a particular way: like that bit in a shooter where you sit there, unable to move your virtual body but able to turn your head around. Being led about the theatre to another set of rooms, with more chairs, through the fog and lights was also in its way extraordinary, building on the idea of being coerced and yelled at. I could feel myself warming to the simultaneous levels the play was working on: coercion, voice, embodiment...

And then I'll admit it all sort of fell to shit, in the last two monologues. I'll give the middle one a pass: oh, polite English stereotype, secretly kind of hateful, repressed homosexuality, brief dystopic elements. But the last one, with its monologue about a Christ-like baby ostrich (SRSLY), was about 70% outright stupid. And, yes, about 30% immensely effective: talking about how animals are slaughtered, standing about in the dark, with a voice speaking directly into your ears, will put the wobble in your eating meat for weeks to come.

I left wishing that this setup had been applied, frankly, to better plays--or that the work (three monologues by Philip Ridley) was more focused and, well, less naff in places. A theatre performance is not a buffet--and I feel like some of the discordant elements will, despite their lack of focus, haunt me for a while. But, even as I admired the technical acumen of the production and the fluid commitment of the actor, I wish this script had spent less time tripping over cliches.

Travesties (Apollo Theatre/Menier Chocolate Factory, 7 March)

Another definitive-as-you-might-wish Stoppard production. I had a nightmare of a time teaching Travesties a couple of years ago to students whose range of cultural reference didn't, for the most part, cover the play's. This meant in effect that I needed to explain all of the jokes, which (naturally) destroyed them as jokes. I basically said, over and over again, "well, if you know who that was, and when this was, and where this is, you'd find this hilarious." Happily, I can report that, for those who get the jokes, everything remains extremely funny here. I recently saw an academic at a conference quote Joyce's line from this play--what did you do in the Great War, Mr. Joyce--as actually said by Joyce. And however historically inaccurate might be, it feels like something we all want Joyce to have said.

Having myself attempted to bake souffles is the only reason I'd call this play souffle-like: that is, potentially light and fluffy, but in the end excruciatingly difficult to pull off. I came to Stoppard myself through student productions--Arcadia will always be seared into my heart. As with Rosencrantz last week, though, this production made me realize how difficult Stoppard actually is to do. For this to work, the actors have to work on at least three levels, and in multiple modes: everyone coming on to dance must do so at least as well as (say) Tzara talking in two accents, one heavily Eastern European and the other entirely in the mode of West End Oscar Wilde. Etcetera, etcetera, and with dancing. Everyone in this production, top to bottom, did everything that was asked of them excellently.

During the performance, what rang with me particularly were the exhortations to traditional European culture. If one were interested in reading list on conservative art, in the non-witless sense of "conservative" we don't get much of at the moment, one might do worse than to stick this play on it. But then the piece is subtler and cleverer than that: Carr, who gets the biggest speech about art, is (at least) a bloody racist; Tzara, whose anti-art musings seemed to get slightly short shrift in this production, is nevertheless also the portrait of a Wildean dandy. Even Lenin's cultural tastes get a few moments of sympathy, in between descriptions of the purges. There is, finally, something immensely generous in the play's attitude towards Joyce. Ulysses is barely in Travesties, but also everywhere alongside it, the greatness of its revolution--unlike most other things in the play--taken for granted. Ulysses, more than the Alps, is the mountain behind Stoppard's Swiss confection; I can think of no lovelier tribute of one artist to another.

Low Level Panic (Orange Tree Theatre, 4 March)

God bless the Orange Tree, really and truly, for consistently the smartest selection of plays I've seen in London. When I recommend them to friends, as I always do, I say that this is a proper theatre: handsomely-mounted, thoughtful productions. Their commitment to interesting but less-performed plays is simply invaluable: I suspect I would never have seen Mustapha Matura's Play Mas, or (in a very different vein) Shaw's Widower's Houses, at least in proper productions, were it not for their interventions.

If I were trying to be provocative, I would say that this play, from 1998, was about the Internet: specifically, about pornography and Internet dating, only before either of these were anything like mainstreamed. It really isn't: it's about relationships among women, and particularly the ubiquity of male desire in a certain kind of straight, pan-middle-class female life.

And this is where my reservations about the piece begin. Along with Seventeen, this is the second piece of theatre I saw this week in which no characters exceeded their types--that is, presented no idiosyncrasies, no signs of individual life beyond being twenty-somethings having sexualised, desired, desiring, problematic bodies. I honestly do not know if anyone actually has hourlong conversations with their mates in the bathroom, particularly when one of said mades is naked. But I do know that people tend to be weird in a way that the characters in this play were not. I thought, again, of the Bechdel Test: I don't know that the characters in here were ever free of Talking About Sex and Appearance. And of course this is, I would say somewhat laboriously, the play's point. But, just as the laughs in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern made the core of existential angst seem all the more powerful, some sense of these people as individuals would have heightened the play's stakes. It's hard to mourn lost or abandoned individuality if the play doesn't itself seem very interested in these things.

Everyone appearing in this was great--but they had to put up with a very laboured script and--again--little chance to be more than a type. I particularly felt sorry for Sophie Melville, who had the play the most panicked, most middle-class, most troubled of the three women. This was as I have come to expect from the theatre an all-out, dedicated staging, and I appreciate the seriousness with which the production addressed what was in the script. Having Mary, her character, climb the set at various moments felt appropriate to the character's need to live with the aftermath of a sexual assault. These actions were just set in the midst of a landscape of pretty mundane-seeming concerns: it's easy to get sex, but hard to get a boyfriend; my flatmates keep leaving their stuff in the bathroom. This disjunction is of course on some level the point--and I admired the staging's commitment to showing that, on some level, this was an experience this character could not move past. But I wish more had been there: that they play had itself had a more expansive account of what women's lives might be like.

Seventeen (March 6, Young Vic)

This was a sort-of interesting conceit that got increasingly purposeless as it played out. The play's characters were all suburban teenagers, but played by actors in their 50s. This produced occasional moments of insight, particularly in the early parts of the play, as the actors said extraordinarily heedless, youthful things, playing into the conceit of the thing and seeming a bit disjointed. Then more mature expressions, often regarding the banal matters of everyday life, would, when said by older actors, suddenly sort of snap the characters out of seeming youthful. This was in its way an interesting effect: a reader more interested than I could no doubt do something with the play's multiple languages, showing how the older cast revealed how the language of youth is shot through with the language of age.

And that's about it, upside-wise. I don't know that this succeeds in any sense as a play about teenagers: I don't know if young people talk like this, or (particularly) if they schedule all of the meaningful events of their lives to happen in one evening. And I don't know that having older actors playing young people consistently demonstrated any interest: it felt like the production sort of settled down in its second half, and interesting things stopped getting passed across the different layers of the conceit. Ultimately this felt a bit like a technical exercise: the actors--consistently committed to "youth," at least as it involves running about the stage--stopped having anything non-cliched to do. And the generic "youth" of the characters prevented them from having any particular idiosyncrasies. This is youth as adulthood imagines it: popular music, difficult parents, going off to university or not, having crushes. None of these young people had any interests beyond this; the play as such failed a sort of generational Bechdel test, with no-one involved doing anything beyond being generic types. I think that with younger actors this would have been quite dull; but I'm not sure the against-type casting, age-wise, produced enough of anything to warrant this production.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Old Vic, 28 February)

I suspect that this will be as definitive production of this play as I will ever see. Everyone involved was simply perfect in their parts. Even the minor characters--so Hamlet and the rest--were tremendous; I would happily have watched that staging of Hamlet afterwards, or before. David Haig as the Player King nearly, nearly walked away with the whole piece--he does, after all, get the bulk of the good lines, and doesn't need to bear the weight of the joke essentially being on him. But the central R&G were near-definitive, including (yes) Daniel Radcliffe, sinking perfectly into the slighter of the two parts.

What a sad, sad script this is, all the more so for the near-perfect jokes (and some quite terrible ones) contained within. The last time I read this I must have been in undergrad, and the nods to Beckett--the barrels and whatnot--were lost on me; I'm sure I thought the "gods aspiring to maidenheads" line, here happily glossed over, was hilarious. I think it has aged with me; now at thirty-six, I found its treatment of death properly terrifying, probably because the fissiparous wit made being alive seem comparatively more enjoyable. (This doesn't always happen to me with live Beckett.)

Adriana Lecouvreur (ROH, 27 February)

I started enjoying this a lot more once I gave up trying to understand what was happening minute to minute, plot-wise, and let my mind sort of drift. Do we need opera to provide good plots, or even to make sense minute to minute? The man beside me was talking about the way the mezzo (younger) was challenging the lead soprano (Angela Gheorghiu, obviously a big deal), and the script seems designed to set up these sorts of challenges. Might operas--or some of them--be thought of as structures for providing these sorts of meta-operatic challenges, rather than as anything like realistic entertainments?

David McVicar remains one of my favorite opera designers. Again, leaving the plot aside, this was one of the loveliest minute-to-minute operas that I've seen; in my mind's eye I can still three dancers lined up at the edge of the setting, just watching the principal actors at center stage. I'm not sure that this made a lick of sense, but it was one of the loveliest night's out I've had in a while.

Saint Joan (Donmar, 10 February)

So many things didn't work in this production that, in the end, its strength was a testament to how strong the good bits were. The updating, with the various French and English armies as "capital groups," and Joan praying while PowerPoint-esque images of money flowed across the screen, didn't work at all. And I though Our Gemma, although fine, was not particularly great: a "bright spark," as university advertisements tell their students to be, but not really charismatic enough to explain why all of these people suddenly started to agree with her. The male characters--and it never really struck me before, what a male play this is--seemed as much pleased with themselves for pushing on a female apprentice as genuinely wooed by what she was saying. The only part of the modern set that worked was the office table at the center, which focused the play in terms of staging and theme. This has never seemed to me more like a play about how committees not so much make decisions as ratify the pre-existing, using the space of discussion to entertain possibility before thoroughly shutting it down.

There was something basically unfair in having an actor known primarily for film at the center of a cast stocked by stage veterans--or, alternately, a brilliant decision to exploit the unevenness of Shaw's play against Joan and towards everyone else. I'm not overly-inclined to say this of productions, but the glory here was in the male cast, who were up-and-down exceptional. In particular Rory Keenan as the Inquisitor was out-and-out astonishing. I thought his last act, where the modern fripperies were at a minimum, was the most effective: with no distractions, this played out as the best transcription of a high-stakes committee meeting--which is to say, how much of history actually happens--ever recorded. This Joan was so outmatched, from the beginning, that she never really ascended high enough to seem tragic: she is promoted by whim, and beaten back down by the accumulated force of bureaucracy.

But what glories of bureaucratic acting these were! This was, sadly, a Joan for our times: one in which the promise of youth was preordained to be trampled, from the first scene onwards. I've rarely seen suits worn better on stage, and to such effect: to show a world where individual style is possible, but only if the rules are slavishly followed. Putting Joan as the only character in period dress seemed less like admitting history than admitting idiosyncratic individual style--and we all know what happens to individuality when the powers that be are on a consolidating kick. Acting-wise, I don't think I've ever seen Shaw done better, minute to minute: this was impressively focused, showing an establishment elegantly coiled up to put down intrusions. A nugatory staging and a merely decent central performance actually brought the script into focus for me.

Hedda Gabler (NT, 30 January)

You heard it here first: we've hit peak Ivo von Hove.

So, like, look: most of this production of Hedda--one of literature's great lady-dickheads--was just fine. I didn't think anyone was particularly exceptional, save maybe Rafe Spall's psycho-loon Brack or Chukwudi Iwuji's wincing Lovborg. But like it was fine. More Margaret Howell window naturalism, but whatever: jeans and a blazer are our generation's Elizabethan tunic, that's fine. All academics I think curl up a little bit in horror at this tiny world of books and reputation, a hundred-odd years on; I too was terrified about what happens when a promotion doesn't work out. I assume Hedda's husband was given an American accent just for me--really, guys, thanks. The first act for the most part I think worked.

But then, ugh, the second act, and the bit with the tomato sauce. So, towards the end, where Brack tells Hedda how much in his power she is, Ivo and the boys have decided to have Brack sort of ejaculate tomato juice from his mouth all over Hedda. It really is that stupid. As near as I could tell, the point of this was to inform the audience that Hedda is utterly in his power; but of course that's almost literally what he's saying, too. It felt like a bit of off-the-shelf director's theatre, bought a while ago and sort of awkwardly brought into this production--like we bought this truffle oil, and now we're going to shoehorn it into this pizza we're making. Like, amazing that Ibsen was able to convey all of this without a stage direction indicating HE FIRES BRIGHT RED JIZZUM ALL OVER HEDDA'S BACK WHILE SHE LOOKS REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE.

Also, the music: was this just what was on Spotify while they were rehearsing? Some Joni Mitchell indicating anomie; the fucking Matthew Buckley version of "Hallelujah" because, I guess, sometimes people get the sads. (I assume they couldn't get the rights to "Everybody Hurts.") Except I'm not sure Hedda is sad--she's testy and on edge and, yeah, kind of a dickhead. No musical choice made in the production would have been incompatible with an episode of Dawson's Creek. 

So I dunno. Like every resident of London I currently hold tickets to seven other von Hove productions; I assume our many is very busy at the moment. And this felt like the result of that: like a production that had been conceived of and rehearsed while everyone involved was very busy: from the striking (but kind of pointless) set--Hedda plays with the blinds at one point, indicating something really obvious about light and windows and what-the-fuck-ever--to the STRIKING BUT REALLY STUPID BUSINESS WITH THE RED SOUP.