All Back to Bowie's

At the Brit Awards in February 2014, David Bowie, speaking through Kate Moss, made a four-word intervention in the Scottish Independence debate: 'Scotland, stay with us'. Inspired and amused, a group of key figures in Scottish arts, politics and academia have got together to host a series of discussions and interventions on the subject of Scotland's future at the Edinburgh Festival this year, under the title All Back to Bowie's.

David Greig, a prime mover in this project, asked me to contribute to one of the events:

WEDNESDAY 13 AUGUST, 12.20pm
From Ibiza to The Norfolk Broads – We Need To Talk about England
With Kieran Hurley, David Greig, Leo Glaister, Dan Rebellato, Loki.

12.20pm daily
£8 (£6)
Stand in the Square
St Andrew Square, EH2 2AD
(Venue 372)

My contribution is a video in which I suggest a radical new relationship between Scotland and England. 

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Ballyturk

I'm interviewing the great Enda Walsh about his new play and production, Ballyturk, for a Platform at the National on 19 September 2014 at 6.00pm. Tickets available here. I'm particularly looking forward to this, not just because Enda Walsh is a rather brilliant writer and producer of extraordinary evenings of theatre but he's a great interviewee. I interviewed a couple of times about his play Chatroom and then did a Platform about Mister Man (oh, which you can listen to here) and he has a wired enthusiasm and energy that makes him an inspiring figure to talk to. See you there.

Keeping it Real

I've written an article about the Royal Court and realism. It's for Contemporary Theatre Review's companion website. Vicky Angelaki and I ran a day-conference at the Royal Court on the work of Martin Crimp to concede with the production of his In the Republic of Happiness and now a selection of essays has emerged from that day in a special issue of CTR. There are some companion pieces on the website, including a witty pastiche essay by Aleks Sierz, something on translation by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and a video of Crimp and George Benjamin discussing the opera, Written on Skin.

My piece tries to argue that the Court's supposed realism is poorly understood. First, because it has a very strong counter-tradition of formally experimental work. Second, because realism is a slippery word - and I try to specify the nature of its commitment to realism.

You can read it here. 

Many thanks to Elyssa Livergant and Theron Schmidt for their sensitive editorial work.

Critical Mass

Last year I was given a grant - as part of the British Theatre Consortium - to investigate theatre audiences, what they do, how and why they value theatre, and the roles it plays, if any, in their lives.  The principal investigator was Janelle Reinelt at Warwick University, and Chris Megson (Royal Holloway), Julie Wilkinson and I were co-investigators, with playwright David Edgar as consultant and Jane Woddis (Warwick) as project manager. We partnered with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Young Vic, and Drum Theatre, Plymouth taking nine shows from their 2013-14 seasons and exploring audiences responses to these shows by a series of questionnaires, interviews and workshops. 

The findings are necessarily provisional and offer, more than anything, suggestions for new directions of research. What is clear from all the research is that the theatre is highly valued by its audience and that its value is entwined in its audience's lives: we had evidence of people using the theatre as an opportunity to inform and articulate their political views of the world, to reflect on their lives and relationships, and to come to terms with ageing, mortality and loss. We suggest also that theatre spectatorship might be fruitfully considered as a long-term activity, in two senses: first, there is evidence that the memory of a single show matures and changes over time, beginning with an appreciation of the theatre's sensuous immediacy and then, within a couple of months, becoming a more reflective, cognitive memory; second, there is plenty of evidence that theatregoing is something that enriches a person to the extent that it may be considered a key part of life-long learning.

You can read the report by clicking on the cover (above) and David Edgar wrote a valuable article for The Guardian about it, which you can read here. There are some more commentaries on the report here and here.

Copenhagen

I've just given a talk on theatre and globalisation as part of the Nordic Performing Arts Days season and specifically the CPH Stage theatre festival in Copenhagen. One of themes this year is globalisation and I was invited by Jesper Pedersen, Creative Adviser at Teater Grob to give a talk on theatre, globalisation and cosmopolitanism, which I did on Saturday 21 June 2014. The theatre are ⅓ of the way through 6 Continents, an ambitious cycle of six plays looking at Danish identity in a globalised world. 

Jesper invited me because he'd read my Theatre & Globalization and some of the argument chimed with his thinking about the role of the imagination and its relation to cosmopolitanism in theatre. My talk rehearsed some of the arguments in my book but framed it with a discussion of football. Given that, the day before, England had been knocked out of the tournament at the group stage and Denmark didn't qualify, it felt like neutral territory. I began with the fallout from Ahn Jung Hwan's golden goal in the 2002 World Cup, which knocked out Italy, and led to his being sacked from his domestic football in Perugia, Italy. I suggest that in this we see two rival models of geo-political organisation - tightly-regulated regional identity and unconstrained international flows of labour - and from there I talked about the Bosman ruling, the Lisbon Lions, catenaccio, and the Gre-No-Li strike force. I ended with a discussion of the dematerialisation of the artwork, looking at Three Kingdoms, Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The Author and Adler & Gibb. If I'd had time, I'd have looked at The Events, but hey, you can't have everything.

I was beautifully looked after in Copenhagen, hugely impressed with Teater Grob and the vitality of the Danish theatre culture, and after my talk they served talk-themed cocktails: cosmopolitans. That's got to be good.

I gather the talk will be podcast, at which point I'll add it here.

Chekhov in Sussex

Chekhov in Hell has had another outing, this time by students of Bede's Senior School in East Sussex under the guidance of Richard Waring. I couldn't make the show (in early May), but I've seen a DVD of it and it's a strong, bold, intelligently cartoonish production around a strong central performance. The play was trimmed and reordered - the most interesting thought being to place the 'Northern Lights' scene at the end, during which the very first scene - Chekhov's death - is gradually recreated, making the events of the play seem to be the fevered dreams of a dying man. Good to see Chekhov still out in the world.

Polish Publication

My essay on the work of Katie Mitchell from a book I co-edited, Contemporary European Theatre Directors, seems to have been published, translated into Polish, in the theatre journal Didaskalia. In English it's 'Katie Mitchell: Learning from Europe'. It's now:

'Katie Mitchell. Uczenie Się Od Europy.' Didaskalia Gazeta Teatralia 119 (2014): 84-92. Print.

Good fun.

David Greig Paper

The University of Lincoln hold an annual festival and symposium dedicated to a different playwright. They've done Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane. This year it was David Greig's turn and I was asked, by the conference organiser Jackie Bolton, to give a keynote. My paper was on the place of place in Greig's work, particularly thinking about his distinctive contribution to the Scottish Independence debates. As is rather well known, he once declared that you can't be a good writer and a good nationalist. I suggest that he's presenting good nationalism and good writing, but by presenting a non-territorial notion of Scotland's independence, founded in imagination and possibility rather than glen and byre. I suggest we might think of this as localism under erasure and nationalism without nation. The paper gets its title and a starting point for its thinking from Bill Forsyth's lovely 1983 movie, Local Hero.

You can read my rough draft of the paper, typos and annotations and all, here.

It Takes Two

I can't begin to imagine how excited you will be to hear the news that I have a new article out. 'Two: Duologues and the Differend' is a chapter in a new collection, Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre, edited by Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte of the University of Barcelona, two of the very loveliest people I have ever met in academia. 

The collection brings together various people looking at ethical debates and dimensions in contemporary British theatre. My piece looks at the prevalence of the 'duologue' or 'two-hander' in contemporary playwriting and offers some thoughts about how it might be interpreted. The argument also looks at Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the 'different' which occurs when there is an incommensurable dispute between two parties who share no common language game in which to resolve the dispute. I suggest that this does and doesn't explain the vogue for the duologue and offer an alternative account.

A Taste of Honey Panel

I'm chairing a panel about the National Theatre's current production of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey. I'll be talking to the director and designer of the production, Bijan Sheibani and Hildegard Bechtler. I've interviewed Bijan before, about Our Class and The Kitchen. I've not met Hildegard before, though I've adored her sets for years...

This is a superb production, by the way, an extraordinary revelation, even if you think (as I did) that you know the play really well. The performances by Lesley Sharp and Kate O'Flynn are simply out of this world. Rich, funny, complex, sad, and wise. The rhythm and shifts of tone are astonishing and the set is just a whirl of movement and life. I can't wait to talk to them about it.

It's on 20 February 2014 at 6.00 in the Lyttelton.

Inaugural Lecture

When you get made professor, you have to give an 'inaugural lecture', which is a big public lecture on you and your research. I managed to give that the slip for eight years, but they finally caught up with me.

So I inaugurated. My talk was on the new project, Naturalist Theatre. The title was Theatre, Sex and Zombies: The Strange Case of Naturalist Theatre. You can listen to it and to Mark Ravenhill's very lovely vote of thanks afterwards here. But if you'd rather do things the traditional way, you can read it here and look at the slides here.

Quorum Zombies

I'm giving a paper at Quorum, the post-graduate seminar series at Queen Mary, University of London. It's entitled 'Is the Theatre a Zombie?' I gave a much earlier (and briefer) version of that paper at TaPRA last September, but this is a significant development of that material. The way this one has turned out, I'm talking a great deal about neuroscience, trying to offer a dose of scepticism about some of its wilder claims. I rehearse the clash between physicalists and anti-physicalists in philosophy and connect it to Naturalism via what is called 'the zombie problem'. I'm always impressed when I meet Queen Mary postgraduates so it'll be an exciting, challenging opportunity to rehearse some of the ideas I've been developing over the last year.

12 February, 5.30pm, RR1, Arts1, Mile End Campus, QMUL. Maybe see you there.

Blindsided Panel

I'm chairing a pre-show discussion at the Royal Exchange with Simon Stephens and Sarah Frankcom, respectively the writer and director of Blindsided, a new production at the theatre. Blindsided is set in Manchester in 1979 and depicts a relationship, its rise and fall, and the terrible consequences that follow it. The discussion is on Saturday 1 February at 1.00 in the theatre. Free entry but ticketed, call, the box office on 0161 833 9833.

Theatre in Higher Education

Students performing in Royal Holloway's Boilerhouse Theatre

I'm a bit late posting this up, but I was interviewed by Daniel Marc Janes a few months ago for Pod Academy, a site that posts podcast interviews with academics. We met in the basement of the John Calder bookshop on The Cut and discussed, among other things, the history of Drama in the academy, the value of theatre and education, the politics of the imagination, Edward Bond, Immanuel Kant and Twitter. It was, I think, a good interview, gently testing but generous and open.

You can read a transcript or listen to the interview here.

Hong Kong Interviewey

I was in Hong Kong just before Christmas. My first visit to Asia, I'm faintly embarrassed to say, and it was a wonderful introduction, my hosts, including Pat To Yan, Vee Leong, Chan Ping Chiu, Janice Poon and many more. I gave two talks, one at their conference and another, open to the public, at the Cattle DepotTheatre in the Artists Village, Kowloon.

One of the most enjoyably strange things was being interviewed by Winnie Chau for Muse, an online cultural magazine for Hong Kong. The interview series is called '10 Stupid Questions'; in fact the questions weren't stupid, but the title does capture the provocative juxtaposition of topics that we went through.

You can read it here.

Chekhov Returns Again

And another production pops up. Slightly too late for me to publicize it because it's over but third-year students at Middlesex University have put on a production of Chekhov in Hell as part of a five-show festival. Luke Willats was in the title role and the show was produced by a company with the frankly disgusting name 'Meat Factory'. There were three performances at various times 17-19 December.

I like the poster very much. It's over there, look.

Polish Interview

An interview with me, previously published in Polish, has now been published in English. It was conducted on 13 May 2012 at a theatre in Gdansk and followed the playing of my radio play, Cavalry. The questions focused on that play and broadened out into general questions about writing for radio. It slightly amazed me - and still amazes me - that you can get an audience in Gdansk, and a decent audience at that, for the playing of a radio play in English and then a platform interview with the author, also in English, and get good questions, again in English, from the audience. I'm not sure I'd get that audience in London. Anyway, it's a good interview I think and probably useful for anyone interested in radio drama. You can listen to the play via the link above.

Because the journal is open access, you can read it online, here.

'"On the Radio the Pictures Are Better": Dan Rebellato Interviewed by Michał Lachman.' Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 3 (2013): 264-70. 

Chekhov Returns

Are you in New South Wales? My play Chekhov in Hell is having a short run at the Pilgrim Theatre in Sydney, Australia. It opens tonight, 16 December, and runs until 21 December. It's directed by Jason Langley and is cast from the graduating company of the Australian Institute of Music. According to the rather nicely-done production notes, there's nudity, violence and bad language, which I'm all in favour of. They've done a pretty cute trailer for it too. Tickets and more information available here: http://www.aim.edu.au/events/2013/chekhov-in-hell

Second Life

There's a welcome repeat for My Life is a Series of People Saying Goodbye , my radio play from 2011. It's on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday, 6 November 2013, at 2.15pm. If you didn't catch it first time round, it's a tapestry made up of interwoven stories about saying (and not saying) goodbye. Some people have been very generous about the play and found it rather moving. I was very moved when I wrote some of it...

National Theatre's 50th

The National Theatre is 50 this year and to celebrate, they are running a series of platforms and events to reflect on its history and its future. There are three strands: Scene Changes reflects on fifty years of change in the theatre sector; National Histories asks key figures from the National's past and present for their 'Desert Island Discs' of theatre' and Future Questions tries to think where we might be going in the next 50 years. I'm chairing one panel in each strand.

Scene Changes: Theatre Venues: Site specific, found spaces and outdoor

Mon 14 October, 1.05pm (50mins), The Shed

A panel will examine how the use of venues for theatre has evolved over the past 50 years, drawing on their own experiences, and how future technology will affect where art happens. With Punchdrunk Artistic Director Felix Barrett; Director of Forest Fringe, Andy Field; co-founder of ArtsAdmin, Judith Knight; and Jenny Sealey, Co-Director of the Paralympic Opening Ceremony and Artistic Director of Graeae Theatre Company.

National Histories: Charles Kay and Fiona Shaw

Mon 21 October, 6pm (45mins), Olivier

Future Questions: Writing

Wed 30 October, 5.45pm (1hr), Lyttelton

Will theatre continue to inspire writers to produce work for the stage in an increasingly digital age? Will the plays on our stages now be performed in fifty years time? What tone will be set by the next generation of writers?

More details here and you can follow the links to get tickets. 

UPDATE: I will also be chairing the following session: 

Scene Changes - Theatre Criticism: from broadsheet to blog 

Fri 18 October, 1.05-1.55pm, The Shed 

Discussing the changing role of the critic in theatre in the last 50 years, print versus internet, and the use of social media. With Michael Billington of the Guardian; the Arts Editor of the East Anglian Daily Times, Andrew Clarke; blogger and arts journalist Catherine Love; and Mark Shenton of the Sunday Express and The Stage.