On Not Writing Reviews

I’ve written comments on plays in this blog. I’m still feeling my way with this but I want to make a distinction between these comments and reviews. I’m not reviewing plays; I’m not a reviewer. The point of these are partly as an aide-memoire for me, partly a way of working through my thoughts about dramaturgy and playwriting. For that reason, the comments on shows I’ve seen comment almost exclusively on the play itself, and not much about the director, actors, designers etc. This of course makes them look like reviews because it’s a notorious failing of many British critics that they review pieces of theatre as if they were rehearsed readings of plays. In my case, I hope I am responding to plays as a peer and colleague, trying to get inside what the plays are doing and, if I have problems with the plays, then using them to think more sharply about what I am doing. (This does not inoculate me against criticism for my comments since, yes, I have chosen to make these dramaturgical notes public - because I think they might be interesting to other people - and I generally write about these plays soon after seeing them so they represent a pretty undigested response to the plays.)

I should also say that I know and like very much some critics - Karen Fricker, Aleks Sierz, Andrew Haydon a bit - and don’t mean any disrespect by distancing myself from their profession, but I don’t like it when playwrights set themselves up as critics. I’ve generally refused Night Waves and Saturday Review and Front Row for that reason.

I'm also uncomfortable as a playwright writing reviews of other playwrights. This is a curious thing since the Saturday review pages are full of novelists writing reviews of other novelists; poets also don't hold back from reviewing poets. But you rarely see playwrights reviewing playwrights. The only major example was George Bernard Shaw and he moved from one to the other. Some critics have written plays - Jeremy KIngston, Nicholas de Jongh - but not with distinction. Is it something about the public nature of the play that makes breaking rank all the more disloyal? Or is theatre, despite all rumours to the contrary, a generally much more supportive and less bitchy place than literature?

The White Guard

Saw The White Guard on Tuesday. It is a solid, maybe even stolid, production of a somewhat interesting play, that wears its censoredness on its sleeve.

The Turbins are a family of White Russians in Kiev during the two months from November 1918 in which the Ukraine under the nationalist Hetman was besieged in turn by the opportunistic Petlyura and then the Bolsheviks. The play follows this family, comprising a woman and her two brothers, and assorted cousins and hangers-on, from the heights of confidence (supported by the Germans, they believe they will repel the challengers). The woman’s husband is the deputy war minister and he flees to Berlin when he discovers that the Germans have decided to pull out. She takes a lover. The Hetman, discovering that the Germans are withdrawing and the army deserting, agrees to a German plan to disguise him and bundle him out of the country. We are given a brief glimpse of the brutality meted out to opponents by Petlyura’s forces, witness the final moments of their attack, and finally, two months forward, see the family, despite losses and injuries and broken relationships, prepare themselves for life under the Bolsheviks.

The play was adapted - though how freely the programme didn’t really say - by Andrew Upton with some skill. In particular, he has a good way with comedy, and brings out sharply the absurdities of the situation (‘Deputy ministers of war do not run away, they are called away’). That said, the dialogue felt a little slack in places and while he’s certainly got it technically into English, I didn’t think he’d wholly got it out of Russian.

Basic stuff: the play is seven scenes: the first three and the last are in the Turbin home; the fourth is in the Hetman’s palace, the fifth in the Petlyura camp, and the sixth in a school which is serving as a temporary base for the beleagured White Guard. The first six scenes cover something like 24 hours. The last scene is eight weeks later.

The best stuff is where he is being satirical at the expense of cowardice - the Deputy Minister, the Hetman - and the scene in the Petlyura camp is excitingly grim. The family scenes are enjoyable, though slow, and long. That familiar Russian trope of moving between laughter and tears in the drop of a teacup is much in evidence. The character of Elena’s lover, Shervinsky, is wittily played by Conleth Hill but I found him a rather implausible character; a large camp man who woos a succession of women with his beautiful singing voice. Well, maybe.

The play’s variety of scenes is interesting and we pass slowly from the family to the White Army to the opposition and back again, making it that three-act ‘into the magical forest and out again’ play, in which things are turned upside down and other things are learned. In this case, the effect is rather spoiled by the third act (in my terms) where the family resolve to learn from their mistakes and embrace Bolshevism, in some measure. This is so obviously there to placate the censors that it may have represented a kind of subversive subtextual critique, but now, 80 years later it seems old hat and rather unsatisfying. In Flight, also by Bulgakov, also at the National, also directed by Howard Davies, and one of my most enchanted theatre experiences (all the more for my having watched the play in a half-empty theatre), the variety of scenes takes us into the realm of magical realism. Here it is just mild satire and broadly we are in over-familiar family drama territory.

There is a great coup de theatre produced by the designer. We spend three scenes in the Turbin apartment, a vast and (because this is Howard Davies) monumental set with doors and windows and fireplace and everything looking solid and permanent. Then the scene ends and the whole apartment trucks slowly upstage, revealing behind it the walls of the Hetman Palace. As it parks far upstage, a rear wall is flown in to complete the space. At the beginning of the second act, we have a wide shallow, short set depicting a cross-section of the trench encampment in which the Petlyura soldiers are running the campaign. This descends in to the earth, revealing the school set. All very impressive but that kind of elaborate transformation does not seem of a piece with this quiet and careful play that walks its way cautiously around a war of attrition.

Oh and Paul Higgins is fucking marvellous in it.

An Apple a Day

I’ve had my MacBook for less than a month now but I do seem to be hooked. It’s not just how intuitive the interface is, not just how wonderful the multi-gesture trackpad is (I can’t believe how easy it is to do without a mouse), it’s not just the beauty of the thing, though it is astonishingly beautiful. It’s also how everything works together, how each application (we mustn’t call them programs, no no) hands on to another. I want to get the new iPhone and I thought I might try to get it today, on the day of launch, more on that story later; but in preparation, I thought I’d copy my phone’s photos to the laptop. I plugged it in and it starts populating iPhoto with them. Immediately, there they are in a beautiful, simple interface, much more easy to handle than they ever were on my desktop or succession of laptops. iTunes just darned works better; the spotlight feature seamlessly and instantaneously finds anything I need anywhere on the machine.

Things I’m still not sure if I like:

1. Photos go into iPhoto. Can they be got out again? If I want to insert a photo onto a WordPress website, for example? Where do I find them?
   

2. If I’m in Excel and I want to open an Excel document, how can I just see Excel documents when I open the file? At the moment it’s an indigestible list of all documents.
   

3. Related to that, can I bring up the folders at the top of the list? (I suspect the answer to both of these is that I should be using Spotlight much more than I am)

4. Still finding navigation around a page tricky. I guess converting from shift, alt, ctrl to the shift, fn, strl, alt, cmd system will take time.
   

There’s also a quirky but good thing Apple do which I noticed on the iPhone. They don’t tell you what it does. It seems weird to say it, but whereas Windows came with loads of documentation, this machine didn’t. I keep discovering things it does. I’m on a train to Manchester and every time we go through a tunnel, or even, as now, pass through a stretch where steep embankments cast shadows over the compartments, the screen dims very slightly and the keyboard backlights start to glow, because - I guess - the machine is sensing that I need less light to see the screen, but I need more to see the keyboard. I guess it preserves that battery and means you don’t have to adjust things yourself.

Why isn’t that a feature they shout about? Similarly, the function keys, pressed in combination with other characters produce some important characters. # for example - vital for twitterers like me - is Alt + 3. é is Alt+e,e.

I’m guessing there are two things at work here. One is that Apple genuinely believe in the intuitiveness of their systems and that you don’t need to tell people how things work, they’ll work it out for themselves, or just stumble across it. I also think it creates a buzz around a product; iPhone 4 is out today and no doubt there will be little features being discovered over the next few weeks which will keep the phone at the head of the technorati’s blogs.

Oh yes, the iPhone. Almost as if it knows its time is up, my iPhone has been going slow, crashing, not responding. A couple of times this year, it’s even had trouble rebooting, which was always my failsafe. I haven’t upgraded to 3G or 3GS because I guess I just didn’t like the design; too plasticky and the curved back didn’t do it for me. I love the techno-hard feel of the original and was waiting to see if the new iPhone was any better. I loved the look of it when Jobs presented it and the video and camera and all the rest of it look great. I thought I may as well queue up this morning and try to get one.

Holy crap, there are some nerds out there. (This is a desperate attempt to distinguish myself from their number.) I cycled up to the O2 shop on the Strand for 7.20, imagining this would be a safe time for an 8.02 (oh ha ha ha) opening time. There they all were, about 50 of them, mostly playing with their iPhones (what? a fond farewell?) and loudly discussing features of the new phone. I waited in line and actually, if I’d had a free day, could have got the phone, but I  had to get a train to Manchester so I skipped out at 8.30. Heck, I can get it next week. I don’t need to get it on the first day. I am lying, of course. I imagined sitting here now, on this train, playing with the beautiful, Gorilla-glassed, black, flat, shiny, megapixelled, retina screened, FaceTiming, folders bespattered, slim and gorgeous little beast.

It is a cult. It really is. Except I’m the one doing the love bombing. Weird.

National Impact

For those lucky enough not to have to follow these debates, the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework by which academic departments are tested for the quality of their research, will partly assess us for the Impact of our research activities. And what is impact? It’s the demonstrable effect on people outside academia of activities founded on original research.

This has unleashed a storm of protest from from my national colleagues. The best argument against this proposal is that academic research should have the freedom to be for its own sake, that the utilitarianism of wanting to show that it immediately has an impact on the world is to place an intolerable demand on research and may mean the end of blue skies thinking. Einstein’s special theory of relativity had no direct practical application for forty years, so it is said. He would have crashed and burned in a Research Excellence Framework.

This is not as strong an argument against the current proposals as it seems, mainly because it misunderstandings what the proposals are. We are asked, as departments, to present case studies of impact: one case study per 5-10 members of staff. In other words, not everyone and not every piece of work is required to show impact. The great majority of staff and research can continue to be blue skies work. Also, the definition of Impact is very broad, including cultural impact, quality of life and so on. It has to be beneficial and it has to be demonstrated (not proved or calculated) but these seem to me harmless requirements.

Obviously, I’ve been thinking about this, both as an academic but more specifically as Director of Research. It seems to me that, at Royal Holloway, we are particularly good at impact. We do a lot of theatre and performance making, particularly in the Applied area where we are very strong. But there’s also my playwriting, David Williams’s dramaturgical work with Lone Twin, Ali Hodge’s core training, Matthew Cohen’s puppet work, Karen Fricker’s reviewing, and much more. Also, we have a long tradition of interpretive work, writing articles for the press, giving talks at theatres, programme notes, and publishing books for the general reader. In general, I think we can make an accurate and honourable case that we have always written for the general reader; most of the books and articles coming out of our department are (relatively) free of impenetrable jargon.

It’s been in my mind because I did two Platforms at the National this week. One was with Matthew Dunster and Drew Pautz about Love the Sinner and the other was with Thea Sharrock about After the Dance. Individually, they constitute almost no Impact at all, but alongside all the other things I’ve done of this kind, and gathered together with similar activities by my colleagues, they represent a sustained activity of interpretation and communication.

The question is whether they rely on research, whether anyone could do them. Well, clearly, anyone could do them. Do I bring anything extra to it by being ‘expert’? That’s tricky. The point of the events is to give audiences a chance to hear the theatremakers and other experts talking about their work. It’s not to give them a chance to hear my ideas about the theatre, so the questions typically are pretty soft (what drew you to this play? where did the idea for this show come from?).

However, with Drew and Matthew, their knowing that I’m a playwright meant that I think they trusted the questions and direction of the conversation in a way they might not have done with a critic, say. With Thea, she knew that I’d written about After the Dance, had read that piece, and referred to it, so I think felt comfortable that it was an informed conversation. As such, in both instances, the conversation was more informed, comfortable and revealing that perhaps it might have been.

It’s worth adding that Thea Sharrock’s decision to offer After the Dance came after reading the play in the version I edited. So the production itself - as well as the platform, programme article, and piece in the Guardian - constitute quite some impact.

After the Dance

My God, this is good. It’s a tremendously sure-footed production that, in my view, pushes the play not just to the front rank of Rattigan’s plays but to the front rank of British plays in the twentieth century.

After the Dance, as is well-known, was only a modest success in 1939 and so excluded by Rattigan from his Collected Plays and not reprinted until 1995, the edition that I edited for Nick Hern. It was produced in a televised version in the early nineties and the Oxford Stage Company produced it within the last decade, though the production didn’t come into London. I saw a drama school production of the play in around 2002, but otherwise the play has been neglected in this country until now.

What Thea Sharrock and her superb cast have completely understood is that Rattigan is undoubtedly an upper-middle class voice but this does not equate either to his values or the strangulated cut-glass accents that actors sometimes effect, which preserve the play in aspic, as a fantasy of someone’s nostalgia, and kill it dead as any sort of comment on the present time.

And of course, it is the most remarkably political play he wrote. The play is in many ways a savage assault on the values of a trivial generation who sleepwalked towards a second World War. The third act, in particular, show the clouds of war gathering over the stage and, despite to onset of spring, the play is decidedly wintry.

That said, it is also very funny, much funnier, indeed, than I had ever realised. The star comic turn is the character of John Reid, the wastrel, drunk, self confessed ‘parasite’ and ‘court jester’ to the Scott-Fowlers. He is the most unapologetic embodiment of the bright young generation, in all its failures. He is its most successful advocate, just as Peter, the cuckolded lover, is its bitterest, most nihilistic critic. John is played sensationally by Adrian Scarborough; it’s hard to imagine this being bettered, especially in the superb sequence where he discusses the Scott-Fowlers’ divorce and fantasises about living for six months in London and six months in the South of France.

The production effortlessly makes the sharp transitions that are so striking about the play, from comedy to romantic intrigue, from farce to tragedy, from wisecracking laughter to bitter political commentary. Housed in a gorgeous and typically monumental set by Hildegard Bechtler, the room, with only it seems cosmetic changes transforms in mood very dramatically.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll make a superb central pairing. Carroll plays Joan as larkish, carefree, riv en with frozen feeling, and trapped, utterly trapped, in a misrecognition of her lover’s feelings. Benedict Cumberbatch has a difficult job, dumping two women, driving one to suicide, yet still keeping our sympathies. He is a witty presence at the beginning, by the end a wild and desperate figure, doomed to loneliness, too late aware of the love that passed him by.

I was very struck how much this is a rehearsal for The Deep Blue Sea: the suicidal woman, the lively sense of a world around the room, the central figure ending the play alone, the social fools, condemning themselves out of their own mouths. The Deep Blue Sea is perhaps more perfect, more finely wrought in its single pursuit of a woman’s battle with loss, but it’s clear that it was the failure of this play that meant he would wait over a decade to try anything like it again.

By then, of course, he has stripped the well-made play of its less useful trappings. If After the Dance has faults, it’s that some of the transitions are a bit sharp; David falling for Helen’s advances is a big ask, almost as big as how quickly he is persuaded to give her up. John becomes the raisonneur figure in Act III rather uncomfortably and even this exemplary production couldn’t avoid him becoming a little sententious. In The Deep Blue Sea, he cleverly makes this figure the Eastern European doctor and his advice is more finely poised between triumph and disaster; here, you feel that it’s just a perverse decision of John to announce the truth. In the later play, he is forcing a woman on the point of suicide to confront the truth of her life, knowing that she might draw back or rush forward all the more decidedly.

I am so glad to have seen this play. And what a dream to have seen such a blistering production.