Blood and Gifts

Blood and Gifts is the second play I’ve seen by American playwright JT Rogers. He’s also had Madagascar on at Theatre 503 and this play began as a 25-minute play as part of The Great Game. However, all I’d seen before was The Overwhelming, a play about the beginnings of the Rwandan genocide, done by Out of Joint in the Cottesloe.

This is about the covert US intervention in 1980s war in Afghanistan war. It takes us from the decision to put CIA operatives into Pakistan in 1981 to aid the Mujahideen and ends with the 1991 decision to close the book on US operations over there. It focuses on Jim Warnock, the CIA guy looking after operations there, but we also see a Soviet spy, a British MI6 figure and of course many figures from the Pakistan ISI and one rebel group. We watch the war turn from a battle for supremacy and territory between covert superpowers to a religious war. Of course it’s partly a history play, but mainly a history of the present. To anyone who wonders how the Taliban and a Mujahideen and maybe al-Qaeda come to be fighting allied and NATO forces as they are, this play shows us.

It’s pretty good. It is written in a structural style that feels a little dated - Edgar, Hare that sort of play - and there is a frankly manifested desire to educate us about the war that I never find edifying. But that’s all I have to fault it with. It is educating; but it’s also a bit of a thriller, with twists and  good characters and some terrific jokes. The play finds absurd laughter in the situation: the Mujahideen soldiers are desperate for US weapons, but almost equally desperate for Tina Turner cassettes. The Pakistani ISI Colonel has a Clerk who offers jarringly funny moments of sycophancy. The play captures very well the difference between British and American policy and British and American senses of humour. There is a refreshing sense that no one is just mocked, everyone is treated seriously. Rogers has done his homework but also his heartwork properly trying to let his characters stand on their own two feet.

I must say, though it’s been admired by most of the critics, I didn’t take to Howard Davies’s production. Mostly scene changes were effected by whizzing in side panels to create new backgrounds - which is a good thing, kept the thing moving and allowed a sense of the ‘runaway train’ aspect of this war - but there was a horribly taupe and foursquare set that had very little magic to it. There was a little too much of the main character looking out craggily to the audience as the lights went down on a scene. It all felt clunky and stolid and self-important. Some terrific performances though.

In short: not my sort of thing really, but vigorously written and I learned a lot.

Earthquakes in London

I’m late to this party. It’s been getting great reviews and even better word-of-mouth through August. Anyway, thanks to Tom Goodman-Hill, I got a couple of tickets on Friday. Mike Bartlett’s an interesting figure. I guess he has that Next Big Thing status in British playwriting; his Cock was huge at the Royal Court, missus, and this is a tie-up with Rupert Goold, whose company Headlong are widely admired.

What’s Earthquakes in London doing? It’s a panoramic play that stretches from 1968 through the present to an imagined future, and skitters across London to the Scottish Highlands. It seems initially like a multistrand piece following a lot of different stories but in fact we realise fairly soon that the characters are all interconnected. There are three sisters: one a Lib Dem MP in the new ConDem government; the youngest is a failing student who dances burlesque at the weekends, and the middle is, well, pregnant and unhappy about it. Their mother died young; their father is an environmental scientist who demonstrated the damaging effect of aviation on the planet. All daughters hate their father for his misanthropy (he told the middle daughter that she should have an abortion because the world is overpopulated). Everyone is going through a crisis: the youngest is being thrown out of Uni, the MP’s marriage is going through a thing and she’s thinking of joining the private sector; the middle sister is having a crisis about the pregnancy and goes on a quest for answers across London. She encounters young rich mums, and her own daughter, and ends up on Waterloo Bridge where she jumps. Her husband meanwhile has gone to visit her father - we see the long story of his research, in which he is bought by the airline industries and his discoveries were (voluntarily?) suppressed - though eventually, thirty years later, he published to acclaim. The Lib Dem MP’s husband has a sort of midlife crisis and goes on a minor rampage across London. In the last act, the pregnant woman is in a coma where she meets her mother and gives birth by surgical intervention.

That’s a long plot description and it doesn’t even have it all. But this play is an epic with lots going on. In fact the main turning points are (a) the discovery that the father advised Freya to have an abortion (b) Colin’s recognition of how unsatisfactory his life is and (c) Sarah’s decision where or not to join the private sector.

But it’s complicated and it’s muddied - and sometimes brought exuberantly to life - by Rupert Goold’s production. I’ll be honest; most of the time, I think Rupert Goold fucks about with plays to no good purpose. Macbeth was stupid and Six Characters dreadful. King Lear, which I didn’t see, was reputedly a shambles. Time and the Conways was a production wildly out of sympathy with the play. Enron was fine but a lot of the fireworks were there in the play. Here, though, he imparts some extraordinary energy to the production that powers us through these many broken scenes. In particular he picks up on the musical cues in the play to create some outstanding moments of - what? - not musical theatre, but of music in theatre, pop music in theatre, really: at Colin’s key moment he drunkenly and stonedly sings and dances along with Arcade Fire’s ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ which picks up not just the sense of desperate mistrust in the lyrics but the restless anxiety of the music; there’s a burlesque sequence to Nick Cave’s wonderful ‘There She Goes My Beautiful World’ which is just about on this side of embarassing; and there’s a bravura song and dance sequence to Marina & The Diamonds’ ‘I Am Not a Robot’ which almost stops the show. Thankfully, he’s not gone with the script’s direction to end the play with REM’s ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), which would have been as subtle and tasteful as a car park.

What’s going on in the play though? I think Mike Bartlett is part of an interesting wave of writers interested in moving entirely away from irony and instead being interested in speaking sincerely and urgently, even if - and perhaps rescued because they are - gauche and awkward and naive. In their different ways Dennis Kelly, Simon Stephens and Duncan Macmillan seem to be in this group. (With Duncan, I think of this more in things like his Every Brilliant Thing Facebook group and in his characters’ - and his - tumbling articulacy). It’s more welcome news that we’ve got past the awful postmodern moment which was clearly now just about moral and emotional fear than a genuinely new vision of the world.

Here the urgency is environmental. It’s a play that urges attention. The end of the first act is a bleakly anti-humanist vision of the world’s revolt against its population. The MP’s story suggests something of the cynicism and timidity of MPs. The last Act-and-a-half is boldly utopian, visionary, magical, stupid, wonderful and strange. The end of Act 4 - which actually he previewed or tried out in Fear and Misery in the Third Term, which I curated for Paines Plough - is the moment where he brutally confronts the awful people we have become and cries into the wilderness.

It felt, in short, like The Way We Write Now. It’s a very - self-consciously? - contemporary bit of writing. The dialogue is fractured and witty; the sentiments are heartfelt in amongst the chaos and the mess and the urban numbness; the stories are multiple; the stories morally unresolved; the time is out of joint and we’re dancing. In its mixture of horror and laughter at the world, I think it’s close in spirit to my own play opening in a few months, though my play is perhaps more focused and bleak, his is more epic and contemporary.

But but but it’s kind of nothingy in places. The writing is SO determined not to style itself - perhaps because it wants to capture a snapshot of now - that it risks being inconsequential. The plot is really exciting but is very unresolved (hey, I don’t mind an unresolved plot, but this seemed to excite certain narrative pleasures and then not follow through; it’s a plot-tease) - why do the sisters hate their father? What actually does happen in the last act? And then, the production is SO energetic, so flashy, that it really doesn’t illuminate the play at all; it’s not necessarily a job of a production to ‘illuminate the play’ but it is very hard to tell whether it’s a good play or a good starting point.

This is pickiness and probably jealousy because I enjoyed almost every minute of the play, but I still feel this theatre of small honesties has yet to find its feet.

Oh and Tom Goodman-Hill is fucking wonderful in this play.

Memory

There’s a view that your memory gets worse as you get older. Maybe that’s true. But at least part of that must be an increasing awareness of the fallibility of memory. In other words, one feels that one’s memory is getting worse becomes one becomes increasingly aware that it cannot be relied upon. That’s not the same thing of course.

This evening we watched Midnight Lace, a 1960 thriller set in London. Doris Day, a newly-married heiress living in London with her industrialist husband (Rex Harrison), is being plagued by increasingly threatening phone calls in a sinister voice. No one else seems to hear them, which leads her to feel panicked and isolated. When the killer calls on the phone to say that he is coming to keep their appointment, the husband calls the police who suggest that he allow himself to be seen leaving, then come back in the back door and apprehend the killer. A man does break in and Rex returns and kills him in a struggle. But it’s not the killer, because the killer is Rex. He explains that he’s planned to kill her making it look that she threw herself from the balcony when the balance of her mind was disturbed.

It’s a pretty decent thriller, a period piece but pretty effective. The thing that struck me, though, was that I saw it when I was 12 or so. I vividly remember the moment when Doris Day is alone and terrified in the dark; there are billowing curtains; she is sure the killer is coming to do his worst; a figure is seen in the French window... and it’s her husband. With relief she grasps him, sobbing into his shoulder. But he begins to speak, and is doing so in the thin, metallic voice on the phone, thus revealing it’s him. It’s a brilliant moment, misdirection, reversal, shock, imminent threat, the perfect twist.

Except it doesn’t happen like that. We see the two men struggle. A shot rings out. We don’t know who is hit. We see a tape recorder on the floor and a man stands and picks it up; he presses play and that eerie voice echoes in the room. Doris Day sees that it’s her husband and is overjoyed. She embraces him and then runs to the phone to call the police (surely they should be here by now?). Rex Harrison puts his finger down on the buttons, cutting her off, and so begins his explanation.

What’s weird is that my version is better. It’s certainly a more economical twist, done through a moment of horror and, to be Aristotelian for a moment, anagnorisis and peripateia, rather than through the rather leaden exposition. (Seriously, if you were going to kill your wife, would you talk her through the plan?)

I’m reminded that one of my principles of adapting a novel is to not read it. That is, leave a long gap and then try to remember the plot; the memory rather neatly patches up plot holes, cuts off dangling and extraneous loose ends, and delivers you back a much sleeker version of the original. In this instance, what’s doubly weird is that I always remember remembering my version of the ending. I don’t have any sense that my memory has shifted. I have a strong visual memory of that moment. Doris Day’s back to us, Rex Harrison’s face over her shoulder, the French windows behind, the billowing net curtains, and him starting to speak, sinister as you like, in her ear.

Another curious version of this happened with Casting the Runes. This was a 1979 TV adaptation of the M R James short story. One scene that has always stayed with me is the moment when the wizard Mr Karswell conjures a monstrously huge spider to appear in his enemy’s bed. I remember the scene vividly. Pillow at the right of the screen, blanket, foot of the bed to the left, and the man getting into bed and the scream of horror and the ghastly thing’s legs jabbing out the side. I was so terrified, I took a torch to bed and checked in it to ensure there were no spiders. Any stray feeling at my feet made me jump with fear.

When a DVD of the programme was released a couple of years ago, I bought it. Mainly for nostalgic reasons.

The scene was exactly as I remembered it but the bed was the other way around. The pillow at the left, the foot at the right of the screen. It was my bed that had the pillow on the right and the foot on the left. Somehow, in that vivid memory, I had taken the features of the TV image and reversed them to fit into the image of my own bed. Of course, that’s the process I was going through on that sleepless night of 24 April 1979.

I’ve also noted in some academic writing about mental imagery, the way that we can - dreamlike - transpose, condense and fuse multiple real images in our mental images. Just as it’s understandable and normal to be able to say ‘In my dream I was in Rome but it was also the Moon’, in our remembered visual images - because in these two examples it’s intensely remembered visual images we’re discussing - I can fuse two entirely separate images. I’m not sure what other image I’m fusing with Midnight Lace but it’s still strange to me that 3 hours ago I sat down the watch the film, confidently anticipating seeing again that vivid memory from my childhood and being oddly disappointed that my memory was a better dramaturg than the film’s screenwriters.

I&B

I’ve just finished Nicholson Baker’s latest novel, The Anthologist. It’s just wonderful. It makes me so happy. He writes like a dream.

The novel is about a minor American poet, Paul Chowder, who has been asked to compile an anthology of rhyming verse, Only Rhyme. (Chowder, though being a free versifier himself, has recently become a convert to the joys of rhyming poetry.) He has chosen his poems and has only to write the introduction. But he can’t do it. He procrastinates, he allows himself to become distracted, he undertakes unnecessary side-projects, he lets the process of moving his books and papers and setting up an office in which to write overwhelm the introduction. This is the last straw for his partner Roz, who despairs of his lack of drive and commitment and leaves him. The book details his attempts to finish the introduction, or rather his continuing inability to focus on the task. Towards the end of the book he has a crisis of some kind while teaching poetry in Switzerland and returns to finish the introduction, which he does, at great length. It is suggested that this book is perhaps that introduction.

I love Nicholson Baker so much. I got into him right at the start when The Mezzanine came out, and bought it for loads of people. Then Room Temperature, which I saw him read from at Waterstones, Charing Cross Road, RIP. I&U, his strange book about Updike (or rather his ongoing literary relationship with Updike), came next, then a swerve into two very sexual books, Vox and The Fermata, both somewhat pornographic in tone and intention. Beautifully written but I felt that it was a body-swerve that I wasn’t really keen to follow. I dropped him for a bit. I couldn’t whip up enthusiasm for his children’s story or his campaign to save newspaper libraries. But then A Box of Matches came out; beautiful, elegant, minute but exact. Checkpoint was slight but insinuating: a dialogue between two men, one of whom is determined to assassinate George Bush. And now this, certainly his best novel since The Mezzanine.

It’s about writer’s block and sadness and middle age and love and it’s really really about poetry. Really, the character goes on about it, often when he really should be writing his introduction (though finally you realise he has been). Without seeming like a fogey he traces the wrong turning of Marinetti Modernism and reflects on poets he’s loved and the foolishness of prosody and the joy of the four-beat line and of rhyming.

The writer’s block aspect - well, the strange ability of many writers simply to do anything, anything at all, rather than write - is moving and very funny indeed. He likes to emphasise his points about scansion by setting some lines of poetry to music and then sing them. The image of him in his converted barn office singing away while his book remains unwritten and his girlfriend’s patience cools is joyful and awful.

As ever with Baker, the words are so precise. But while earlier novels seemed minutely obsessive, albeit very funny too, this has a carefree quality. The narrator is one of the most insanely delightful literary characters I’ve ever encountered. Less clear-sighted than we are, full of enthusiasm, riddled with distraction, longing for his girlfriend again. There are moments, just tiny ones, where he admits his feelings in a strangely alienated way; noticing them somehow:

What if Roz let me hold her breasts again? Wouldn’t that be incredible? That soft familiar palm-loads of vulnerability - and I get to hold them? That’s simply insane. Inconceivable. (p. 178)

That’s the saddest passage in the book, and it’s not even that sad. He still can’t keep from marvelling, even as he knows what he’s losing and has maybe lost.

It’s an unimportant book. It doesn’t offer a State of the Union address. It doesn’t interweave characters from the full range of American society. It doesn’t say much about globalization, the credit crunch, the environmental catastrophe. It doesn’t launch itself at you with its literary style flashing. It’s just a beautiful, heartfelt, very true book that I had to stop myself gulping down. I’m sad it’s over and I want there to be another Nicholson Baker soon.

The Prince of Homburg

The Donmar’s got a track record of putting on tricky and neglected European classics: Life is a Dream, Caligula, Creditors, Henry IV among others. Now they’ve turned to Kleist and his 1810 play The Prince of Homburg.

In the play, a high-ranking officer, the eponymous Prince, has disobeyed an order in battle, leading a charge before receiving instruction to do so, despite being told to wait for the order. Even though the result was a famous victory, he has broken the rules and comes before a Court Martial and is sentenced to death. He’s expecting a pardon but it becomes clear that the Elector plans to carry out the sentence, perhaps to make the Elector’s niece, Natalia, in love with the Prince, available to marry off as part of a peace settlement. The officers are outraged and petition the Elector, as does Natalie. The Elector is moved only to write to the Prince promising that if he can prove the sentence to be unjust he will be pardoned. This stirs the Prince who seems to accept the justice of his execution.

In Kleist’s original, the Prince is led to the execution blindfolded whereupon he is told that he has been pardoned and faints. In Kelly’s version, the sentence is carried out. This has caused all sorts of fuss, with critics as diverse as Michael Billington, Paul Taylor and Ian Shuttleworth sharply criticising Kelly and the production for changing the ending.

First things first: Kelly’s version is very good indeed. It’s free-speaking, rich but lean. He’s found some excellent equivalents for the poetic language of the play but keeps it sharp and minimal so that it doesn’t get - as some Romantic plays can get - puffed up with cod-Shakespeareana. It’s also very funny in places. I particular, Kelly has mined a profitable seam of absurdism in the play; from the play’s beginning in the midst of a dream to the curious oneiric turns of the plot, the positions taken to nightmarish extremes, the play is cruelly funny about the nightmares of a military state, the demands of law and rule, and the problematic place of the individual.

The ending seems to me entirely of a piece with that. Kleist’s original is very cruel. Like the ‘happy endings’ of Iphigenia at Aulis and Patient Griselda in The Clerk’s Tale, the original ending is twisted and hideous. The whole thing revealed as a strange and mysterious trick played on the Prince. But we know this play after the horrors of the Third Reich and it seems just as nightmarish, just as horrifying, but in a sense more logical - in an inexorable and foul way - that the Prince die at the hands of the firing squad.

It’s not at all clear to me why the critics were at the throats of this production. Kelly’s been very faithful to the original. He’s just changed the ending, but in doing so has oddly not changed very much because we don’t take the Prince’s rescue seriously. It seems like a sick joke. Instead he’s pursued the play’s logic and that also seems like a sick joke. It’s nothing like having Romeo and Juliet living happily ever after because the roots of the ending are not deep in the play; the ending is a false ending. We’re probably coming out of a period of false endings, where theatre is continually ironic and narrative to be joked about. Dennis Kelly - like Simon Stephens and Duncan Macmillan - is, if anything, drawn to moments of sudden, gauche, naive articulacy and communication, set within worlds of cruelty and moral collapse. They are typical in some ways of a new cultural mode and the joke ending of Homburg would just have seemed outdated.

Do I think you can change anything? No. I suppose I thought that Katie Mitchell’s A Dream Play crossed a line; not that I didn’t enjoy the production - I did - but I’d have enjoyed it more if I had gone to see a devised show inspired by A Dream Play. I went wanting to see A Dream Play, which I’ve never seen staged, and I was disappointed because I really didn’t. The Restoration rewrites of Shakespeare seem stupid to us now because they clumsily reveal the aesthetic and moral presumptions of the age. Well, maybe this version also rests on clumsy contemporary presumptions, but what show doesn’t? It’s our age and they are our presumptions, and it seems absurd not to let the play be shaped by that climate - especially since the change seems to me entirely within the spirit of the play.

And anyway, the script’s still there. You can read it any time. And it’s not as if the play is completely unknown or unperformed. I saw Neil Bartlett’s version eight years ago and very good it was too (though much more austere and less in tune with the absurdist universe that this is). This is an excellent piece of reclamation that finds in The Prince of Homburg a play of genuine contemporary feeling.