Like a Fishbone

There are two playwrights that I sometimes, jokingly, claim to have discovered. One is Paul Godfrey, because when I read plays for the Bristol Old Vic, they gave me his play Inventing a New Colour to read and I loved it and they put it on. The other is Anthony Weigh, because I was external examiner for the University of Birmingham MPhil in Playwriting Studies and gave his play a good mark. In fact, the Bristol Old Vic were always going to put on Paul’s play and if anything they were testing me; and Steve Waters had already spotted Anthony’s talent and I was no more than rubber-stamping it.

Anthony was working on his play, 2000 Feet Away, at the National Theatre Studio when I was there, working on Longship. It was a big success at the Bush two years ago and this play is his follow up.

He specialises in sustained, edgy, even handed duologue scenes that firmly but elegantly debate a point: the prisoner and the sheriff in 2000 Feet Away, and, here, an architect who has designed a memorial after a rural schoolhouse massacre and the mother of one of the dead children. This play is on the night the architect is due to present the design to the town. The design will be a perfect preservation of the school as it was on the day of the murder, except for the eerie absence of children. But the mother, who is blind, has appeared. She wants the school razed to the ground. The mother has a simple but rather fanatical faith (it was a church school) and seems confused by the architect’s atheism. The architect, meanwhile, is rather awkwardly unconcerned by the woman’s situation and more than a little concerned for her own prestige. The two build to a confrontation where it is revealed that the architect’s design expresses something of her contempt for the town.

It’s got a couple of good meaty parts, which Deborah Findlay and Sarah Smart tear into. The latter maybe slightly more than the former, since the architect is given rather a lot of lines that condemn her out of her own mouth which is awkward to play. There’s also a fabulously funny smaller part for an intern in the architect’s office which Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays beautifully. The arguments that drive the play are between reason and faith, art and religion, town and country. These are all pretty well ventilated over the course of the play’s 80 minutes. What I was less convinced of was the architect’s atheism being shaken. I didn’t see much that made that happen, though it was interesting to see a devoted religious person on stage not being presented as a figure of fun or hate. Four years ago, Nick Hytner said he wanted to explore religion at the National, and that year saw Paul, Two Thousand Years, and The Life of Galileo. Even Complicite’s Measure for Measure might be considered to contribute to that debate. Since then religion’s been a pretty frequent topic for the stage, with Love the Sinner being a recent addition to the roll-call.

Here, though, I was reminded firmly of David Greig’s The Architect, particularly the scenes where Leo Black is confronted by Sheena Mackie about Eden Court, the estate he designed and in which she is living. I guess I prefer David’s play because it’s more sprawling; it ranges across Edinburgh, onto the roofs of buildings, out into the motorway network. Its characters are ghosts of each other, phantoms, and archetypes. But of course, Anthony Weigh benefits from the pressure-cooker environment of Like a Fishbone. Leo Black is never forced into a confession; the play is too cool for that and besides, for Greig, you sense that the characters are mysteries, even to him. These characters are confident and articulate and when they break, we know where they’ve broken.

The play has a number of classic dramaturgical devices: the ticking clock (they have to make a meeting in town to present the designs), the locked room (it’s raining outside but hot in here and they can’t get the windows open). In a particularly smart move, he has the mother grab the model of the schoolhouse from the model of the area; it’s because it’s such a delicate piece of work that the architect must keep talking to her and cannot lunge to get the thing back. It keeps her in the room (which is the classic problem with pressure-cooker plays - if things are heating up that much, why not get the hell out?). All of this does require some messy and perplexing business with taxis that get hired but then just leave and finally, when the architect decides she can’t go and they won’t be able to show the designs, one wonders what all the fuss was about. (A squandering of another clever moment, when a cup of tea is spilled near the model box: the extremity of the response is what tells us the importance of the object and the event.)

Where I had most problems - and was also most full of admiration - was with the dialogue. He’s written it in a kind of  repetitive, halting, overlapping, stichomythic dialogue that has become a contemporary trope. The patterning of repetition didn’t seem right for this play: it’s a psychological drama, basically. There are bigger themes, but if you’re going to put people in a room with big emotions, backstories, revelations and outbursts, it’s a psychological play. But sometimes it’s hard to square the dialogue with a plausible psychology.

Maybe this was, in part, about the direction. Rather as with Nick Grosso’s play, earlier in the week, the rhythm of the dialogue really gave no room for a sense of thought process; you were just hearing people speaking the lines to bring out the rhythm. Sometimes I don’t think I believed they had heard what the other person had said and were responding.

But sometimes it really is the writing. Take this:

ARCHITECT. Yes. No. Look. It’s like. You know what it’s like? It’s like a Venus flytrap.
​MOTHER. Venus? (p. 50)

Why does the mother say ‘Venus’? It’s not ‘Venus...’ like she’s struggling to keep up. It’s ‘Venus?’ which suggests she’s querying that word. But that doesn’t make sense, because anyone, even if they don’t know what a Venus flytrap is, can hear that it’s part of a phrase. You don’t pull a word out and query it. It’s not like there are many other, more common flytraps that she might be thinking of and querying this unusual Venusian attribution. I think it’s just about maintaining the pattern of call-and-response, of statement-and-echo, the pattern of the dialogue.

I’m picking on a tiny moment and I’m not intending to flog it to death, but in several places in this play I caught the slight sense that it was too much a product of someone enamoured with his facility for dialogue and that damaged my engagement with some of the really meaty, exciting things he was trying to do in bringing these characters together.

On a broader note, I was struck by two, maybe opposed, by interestingly so, tendencies in contemporary dialogue writing. One is the Martin Crimp school, which Weigh is attending in this play: hesitations, interruptions, overlaps, stuttering, capturing the patterns of specifically middle-class (and upper-middle-class) speech, in all its vainglorious failure to achieve what it wants to achieve. And then there’s the Simon Stephens school, in which people can sometimes come out with extraordinary eloquence, without embarrassment, without excessive concern for the unreliability of language, instead speaking from a powerful utopian sense that, despite everything, you can touch each other with words, reach from one person to another, simply by saying what you believe and what you think to be true. Simon Stephens’s is the more generous approach; perhaps Crimp’s is the more intellectually rigorous and formally interesting. This evening I felt like I wanted more Stephens and less Crimp.

Ingredient X

Nick Grosso’s new play upstairs at the Court is, as always, an intriguing bit of writing. His plays are always different, there’s always a sense that something new is being tried. Peaches was unlike Real Classy Affair which was very different from Kosher Harry which has not much to do with Ingredient X. This is a very exciting thing in any playwright and it’s why I always look forward to Nick’s plays - even if I’m not completely satisfied by them.

This one features four fortysomethings spending an evening together half-watching The X Factor on TV, but mainly reflecting - in some cases increasingly drunkenly - on the corrosive role that addiction has played in their lives. Frank is a recovering drug addict; Katie seems to be drawn compulsively to addictive personalities; Deanne is an alcoholic on the border of admitting it; Rosanna seems to be addicted to confronting people with the truth of their lives, as she sees it, like a downmarket Gregers Werle.

The formula is, I guess, familiar; thrown together in a room, a group of friends uncover secrets about each other and themselves. What sparkles here is the dialogue. Nick Grosso always does interesting stuff with dialogue: Real Classy Affair was a somewhat heightened realist dialogue play, with Pinteresque edges, into which strange rhymes and rhythms would erupt. Here the dialogue is heavily patterned, and the speed of the interchanges between people suggests that rhythm more than psychology is the driving force. There are a couple of formal motifs: in the first half of the play, whatever the arguments raging between the character, whenever they mention Katie’s baby, the three women all coo over her, using exactly the same sentimental formulations. Rosanna, too, has a strange habit of beginning a stock phrase or epigram but letting it peter out, as if she’s lost confidence in it, or maybe just forgotten it.

There’s more story to it than I’m making out. A lot of tension in the first half derives from Frank leaving to get ice from next door and being gone a while. Rosanna and Deanne tease Katie with visions of him backsliding into drug abuse. In the second half, four of the characters make discoveries or reveal secrets: Deanne’s son, just out of prison, has been arrested; her other son has been diagnosed with diabetes; Katie reveals that her former partner cheated on her; Rosanna discovers that her estranged husband has been videoed fucking a 20-year-old; and Frank discovers that a fellow addict has died suddenly of a heart attack.

This is where I began to lose confidence in the play. Partly, it felt that these revelations were a bit bloody weird - the unluckiest Saturday night in history. It almost felt like the play was injecting incident into it, to keep momentum, like having another coffee to keep awake in an all-night writing session. The interesting tension around Frank’s lengthy disappearance was dissipated when he turned out not to have slid back into addiction at all. This is part of the point: addiction is a serious illness and people need to be actively committed to working to free themselves from it, rather than trusting fatalistically to character or the inevitable.

And here’s the thing. The play reminded me of Doug Lucie’s Love You Too, another play by a really interesting, restless, challenging writer; but like that play this seemed like some personal issues and obsessions had taken the place of really writing a play conceived as a public experience. Nick Grosso seems to have become very interested in addiction - I don’t know whether that’s from personal experience or what - and the last third of the play emerges as a rather hectoring thesis about the role it plays in all our lives. I’m sure the point is sound, but wasn’t sure the play was.

I noted that where the script deviated most from the performed text was in the last ten minutes where the ending has been radically cut back. That suggests to me that they found the play difficult to land. Maybe Nick overwrote trying to find the ending; maybe the rhythms of the theatre didn’t allow for the gentle descent that he wanted. I need to read the original ending.

Of course, what I haven’t mentioned is that the play is fucking funny. Nick Grosso is one of the surest hands at constructing jokes, at generating enormous comic momentum and there were lots of laugh-out-loud moments. I had a very good time watching it.

One final quibble: they claimed to be obsessed with X Factor but they barely watched it... okay #nerdalert

Marxism

Very smart review of G A Cohen’s last book, Why Not Socialism?, in London Review of Books by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In it, she raises to issues that gave me pause for thought.

First, she revisits Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History. This is probably the single book that most influenced my interpretation of Marx, with its elegant and (as they say) ‘no-bullshit’ version of Marx’s theory of history. It is austere Marxism in its most sternly technological, offering a view of history as developing systemically and inevitably through technological development; each form of technology (the forces of production) eventually outgrows the form of society put in place to support it (the relations of production), hence the succession of slave societies, feudalism, capitalism and then, no doubt, communism. In this version, characteristic of the late Marx, morality, politics, culture and so on are mere epiphenomena, produced by the happenstance of historical development but with no more power to affect the  course of history than flotsam and jetsam have to command the waves to rise and fall.

What Wood smartly observes is that Cohen’s argument - and possibly Marx’s too - has a residual ahistoricism in its belief in technological development. It had struck me that this amount to a theory of human nature: we are creative people who keep finding better ways of doing things. What Wood points out is that this determination to develop technologically is characteristic of capitalism but of other forms of society... not so much. It may be that Cohen/Marx is illegitimately extending the conditions of capitalism to a theory of history altogether. Now, this is not to tear up the whole Marxian project, but rather to ask a revision of the historical scheme to take this observation into account - and perhaps also to allow that some ahistorical forces may exist within a Marxist analysis. For me, with my Kantian leanings, I am persuaded that there is an intrinsic rational mechanism that produces ethical judgment and even if that always has to play out in particular historical situations and therefore can be wildly variable this is not something produced, at bottom, by historical processes.

Marx seems to have also believed that at certain points. His early writing is full of moral condemnation. The later Marx liked to say that moral condemnation of capitalism was idle though it’s hard to believe, even there, that he really believed. To think it is neutral to describe capital as ‘dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Capital, I.10.1) suggests Marx had unusual views of vampires.

Where Wood’s piece gets its fire is trying to arbitrate between the earlier and later Cohen. The later Cohen abandoned the strict Marxism - indeed abandoned Marxism as such - in favour of a more general socialism that talked much more freely about justice and equality. In this new book, Cohen notes that capitalism employs base motives (greed, selfishness, will to power, etc.) for socially good ends: general prosperity, diversity of products, etc. Of course, the problem is that it also has a series of dreadful social outcomes some of which I outlined in my book Theatre & Globalization (pp. 30-39), but Wood takes him to task in a different way. Is it right to say that it is driven by base motives? Or are base motives the product of the system?

This is an important issue of course. The New Right in the eighties tried to claim that capitalism was natural because we are naturally competitive, greedy creatures. But if greed were produced in us by a system, because otherwise we couldn’t survive, that would suggest that if the mode of production changed, so would our apparent nature. This is pertinent for Cohen because, in his abandonment of thoroughgoing Marxism, he has also abandoned this vision and so imagines a ‘market socialism’ in which base motives still drive the system but they are contained by new features of the system. Wood asks whether any substantial change to the system might lead to a change in our experience of ourselves.

What do I think? I suppose, with the Kantian side of me to the fore, I think that we are in battle with somewhat atavistic parts of ourselves and we struggle to master that. So we have tendencies towards selfishness but equally we have tendencies towards altruism and, with the Marxist side to the fore, in certain historical circumstances it is easier or more difficult to master these base motives. In that sense, it does seem to me that a change in society will change the nature of our fundamental behaviour and attitudes. And so, as Wood remarks towards the end, we must not purely personalise our critique of the system - in talk of greedy bankers and so on - but always observe what there is in the system that has generated and permitted such behaviours.

Love the Sinner

This is a fluent, engaging play about the relation between faith and life; is faith the foundation of a life or a bandage on it? This is worked out at the personal level through Michael, who is a Church volunteer who has a sexual encounter with a young African man while working for a delegation in Africa. He attempts to smooth over the contradictions between his private homosexuality and barely-manageable public heterosexuality by lurching further into evangelical Christianity which displeases his wife, his colleagues, and, it seems, the Church. Through him, the play’s asking whether faith guides us in how to act or whether it is a means of personal self-oppression.

On the geo-political level, the play begins with related questions being asked at a meeting of a delegation, trying to draft a statement on homosexuality on behalf of the worldwide Anglican communion that can satisfy both the liberals in the American church and the traditionalists in the African church. The scene asks whether any faith can possibly smooth over these fundamental contradictions of belief.

It’s a good topical issue. I’m not sure what the play is saying, precisely, because there are some lurches of character development that left me a bit confused. Michael initially seemed fairly practised at anonymous sexual encounters though he was so quickly rattled that I presumed this may have been a first time. He is unnerved - who wouldn’t be? - to discover that Joseph (the young African guy) has literally turned up on his doorstep but a scene later he is bringing him food and encouraging him to live in the church basement. At the end of the play, Michael has refused to go and testify with Joseph and Joseph goes up alone; why, I’m not sure.

The star of the show is the dialogue which is overlapping, interrupting, often very funny, and capturing some of the energy in these debates. He’s generated some new typography to indicate this which actually makes the page very hard to read: a welter of columned text, /, *, **, and ^. The production team seem to have figured it out though because the effect is mainly seamless. Just once or twice a choreographed uproar seems rehearsed because of the lack of any similar interventions before it.

In fact, the actual star of the show is Jonathan Cullen as Michael who I remember vividly from Robert Holman’s Rafts and Dreams at the Theatre Upstairs twenty years ago, where he was performing a similarly halting and hypernaturalistic role. (I remember thinking as I watched it that I’d never seen such naturalistic acting in my life.) Here he’s stammering, awkward, given to bursts of messianic enthusiasm, cringing postcolonial fear, and, at one memorable moment, desperately failed attempt at arousal. Fiston Barek’s Joseph is impressive too, switching in a moment between charming gracefulness and vengeful threats.

The structure of the play is 5 scenes. The first is a large ensemble scene. Scenes 2 and 3 are largely two-handers. Scene 4 is a small ensemble that becomes a two-hander. Scene five is mainly a 4-hander. The scenes are located in a conference room in a posh African hotel; a bedroom in the same hotel; Michael’s living room with his wife Shelly; an office in Michael’s workplace; and the basement of Michael’s local church. I would the events cover around six months but I’m not sure.

There are a couple of clunky bits of plotting. When Joseph comes in to deliver coffee in scene one, the delegates are told to close their eyes becomes they are supposed to be sequestered and have no contact with outsiders during their discussions. This principle is followed to the letter but not the spirit since at least two of the characters engage in fairly substantial conversation with Joseph. It seems more likely that it’s there so that the characters won’t immediately recognise him in scene 5 though that itself doesn’t really seem necessary. (Who’d necessarily recognise a hotel porter, six months later?)

It does create one of a series of telling images that centre each scene. In scene 1 it’s all the churchmen and women standing with their eyes closed; in scene 3 a Bible is thrown across a room; in scene 4 Michael attempts to have sex with Shelly on a table covered in religious printwork; in scene 5, Joseph and three churchmen sit around a nursery school table on nursery school chairs. In 1 and 5, there’s something witty about the unsuitedness of the church to the present world. In 3 & 4, it’s a clash between faith and desire.

I was intrigued to see how sympathetic Michael was. You might have thought that the atmosphere of colonialist exploitation, his being a rather fervent Christian, and a businessman, and a closeted gay man would be enough to make him a figure of derision but, helped by Cullen’s strong performance, you feel for him for the most part.

Oh, of course

I have passed over the Rubicon. I have crossed the floor. Depending on your own allegiances, I have seen the light or I have joined the dark side. I own, not before time, a Mac.

This has been a very long time coming. Indeed, a couple of my friends that I’ve mentioned my new Mac to (who am I kidding? I’ve told everybody) have been surprised I don’t have one already. It’s true that a lot of people in theatre have them. I guess this is because of the look - beautiful - and the operating system - intuitive - and the reliability - high.

It’s quite a big deal for me. I got my first PC in 1990, a Packard Bell desktop which, despite the legendary reputation of that company, was certainly the most reliable computer I’ve ever owned. I had it for around five years until I could no longer run new software. Even so, as I passed it onto the computer technician for scrap, he mused, ‘no it’s not very up-to-date but it is still many times more powerful than the computer that powered the Moon landing’.

My mum always worked in computers and often brought computers home. I word-processed our school annual (orange flickering letters on a black screen, the monitor moulded into a single unit that contained the hard drive and keyboard - man, it was futuristic). I also had a typewriter in my room so have always typed and I think at the speed I type, not the speed I write, with the result that I’ve never written anything substantial in longhand.

As a result when I got my PC in 1990, I was a quick study. I learned WordPerfect - for which I still have fondness but no longer the will to keep up with - and became expert in pretty much everything it did. In fact, that was pretty much all I used the computer for; a Word Processor and filing system. On subsequent computers and laptops (I think my MacBook Pro one is something like my eighth regular computer?) I branched into Excel, PowerPoint and of course email. The internet arrived in the mid 90s and games and graphics in the late 90s. I use my computer all day every day, pretty much. I write on it, I learn on it, I listen to radio and watch TV on it, I communicate on it, I shop on it. When I don’t shop on it, I have been known to write shopping lists on it.

So I’m very learned-intuitive with Windows and MS Office. I have found my computer annoying but those bits of software seem fine to me. I know where everything goes and how to do whatever I want. I expected the step into the MacWorld to be a wrench regardless of what everyone said.

But what I’m finding is that each time I discover the new way of doing something familiar, my instinctive reaction is ‘oh of course’. Almost everything in the Mac that’s new to me feels like somehow I knew it already. How do you put pictures into a single event in iPhoto? You drag one on top of another. Oh of course. How do you add a photo in iWeb? Just drag it onto the placeholder and it automatically fits. Oh of course. How do you scroll down in Safari. You stroke the trackpad downward with two fingers, sensuously beckoning the rest of the page. Oh of course, of course.

I’m stunned to find myself adjusting to quickly and enthusiastically to the new machine. I knew I’d love it; I knew I’d find it beautiful. I’d technoperved over Mac products before and I still regard my first-generation iPhone one of the loveliest things I have ever seen. And some of the way I found myself ‘naturally’ pinching in, swiping from side to side, pushing and prodding the screen around prepared me for the step over to Mac. It does seem to be a machine designed for kinetic learners, for people who enjoy a sensuous interaction with the world.

Oh and for what it’s worth it’s a 17” MacBook Pro, with a 2.53GHz Core i5 processor, 8GB 1066MHz memory, and a 500GB hard disk. It’s lovely.