Best Before

I love the idea of Rimini Protokoll, the German theatre company who have dispensed almost entirely with trained actors and use, instead, experts: people who talk about their own expertise, whether that’s as a journalist, lorry driver, call centre operator. Their shows strive to remove the fiction from theatricality, perhaps, in part, to see what irreducible fictionality inhabits the basic relations of theatrical production. They are intrigued by exploring how interesting it is just having knowledgeable people telling you what they know, the interplay between objective knowledge and subjective experience, the sense that the acquiring of knowledge and understanding is part of a life lived, variously and not without affect, desire and defeat.

The subject and form of Best Before is the virtual world: computer gaming, online avatars, Second Life, the Sims. The five main people on stage are a computer programmer, a game tester, a guy who works judging what age rating to give computer games, a flagger (that is, a woman who redirects traffic around construction works - in her case, near the Vancouver offices in which the other two work) and a mysterious cowboy figure who plays country-folk guitar through most of the show. After about fifteen minutes we are introduced to the game. Each of us has a games controller and a small onscreen avatar, like a squidgy, two-colour pebble. We make some decisions about our avatars - whether they study or play games, whether they are militaristic or pacifist, their attitudes to drugs and immigration - and slowly we build up a personality with which we face obstacles, seize opportunities, and slowly grow through life from birth to age 100. This game is interspersed with personal recollections and sarcastic commentary from the experts on stage, who compare our responses with those in other cities where this show has toured.

It’s not just trained actors that Rimini Protokoll seek to do without; obviously, they have no need for the playwright. This interests me, in part because playwrights have been shedding parts of the playwriting role; using found text, leaving gaps for collaborators to finish the play, and so on. It’s a process that brings somewhat experimental writers like Crimp, Ravenhill, Kane and Stephens together with Verbatim theatre and Rimini Protokoll’s brand of ‘Theater der Zeit’. Despite rumour, playwrights aren’t the only people who handle dramaturgy (though I think playwrights are, or should be, very good at that), so I watched this, somewhat perversely, looking at the dramaturgy of the event.

What do I mean by dramaturgy? Heck, not sure. I think I mean a satisfying design and organisation of a theatrical experience through time. So it’s not about the acting as such, or stage design; it’s about narrative in its broadest sense. But of course acting and stage design will sometimes contribute to the temporal experience. I’m not laying down the law here.

The shape is given by the journey of a life - or rather of all our virtual lives as played out on screen. And the work of the show is to allow us to invest emotionally in the blobs on screen. This is does sneakily but effectively through mapping the questions into the conventional sequence of a life (drugs and sex early on, political commitments, career, then family and home, old age and death). I watched the show with Lilla, my lovely wife, who comically took the whole thing very seriously (was very shocked when I decided my avatar wanted to take heroin; was very anxious that we should ‘bond’ as soon as possible and made it very clear that a divorce would not go down well). As a result, I got that feedback where I wasn’t just thinking about myself but found myself moved to watch me and Lilla growing old together, knowing that Lilla beside me was thinking about that too, feeding imaginatively, sympathetically and associatively off one another’s feelings.

One of the things that happens in other shows by Rimini Protokoll that they have talked about is that the experts become actors. That is, they start being interesting because they are awkward and unvarnished, but through dint of repetition and, to some measure, the lure of performance, they start to sharpen up their act - stories get polished, jokes get refined, they start to develop a rapport with the audience. In this show, it was Duff, the games tester, who was most ‘guilty’ of that. (I say guilty, but RP’s attitude is that watching that happen is as interesting as stage 1.) He had developed a series of sardonic put-downs, which were actually a little harsh for the occasion and just every so often a little uncomfortable (he outed the computer programmer as an advocate of the death penalty, oddly, and the moment froze awkwardly on stage. The flagger was nicely ungainly and straightforward in her performance; the programmer had a teutonic lack of affect, which worked. The age-rater (must be a better term) was more confident but was unflashily so.

What we were confronted with in the very rudimentary nature of the screen world was something about our ability to invest very primitive imagery with significance and emotion. As such it stimulated a good deal of thinking about the nature of our mutual engagements on the virtual world. This was paralleled with the stories of the experts, discussing, for example, their experiences of politics, or life-changing decisions which sat alongside their more inaccessible computer expertise.

Quite honestly, as a piece of performance, I felt the device had diminishing returns. The old age period was quite moving, but that was almost two hours later, and we’d sat through quite a lot of more prosaic decisions. The use of the game-controller handset was a novelty and I couldn’t really feel it was anything more than that. As such, in narrative terms, it lagged quite a bit in the middle, and by the time the moving bit happened at the end, I was ready to go. This perhaps may be a bit like life.

I’m yet to experience this directly interactive theatre in a way that makes me feel I’ve seen the future or would want to go back. (There’s a one-to-one theatre season at BAC at the moment which I want to try. Basically, though, this kind of thing makes me feel uncomfortable and I’m not sure I should feel bad about that.) I suppose I still feel that all theatre is interactive - or can be - and this kind of novelty has picked on the most superficial aspects of that potential. That’s not to condemn this show which I enjoyed and never wanted to walk out of, but I think I’ve seen more interesting work by Rimini and the project of rediscovering theatre’s power to engage its audience is not really to be found here.

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.