First Rehearsal

The first day of rehearsal for Chekhov in Hell.

Apart from the director’s opening address and the presentation of the model box, the centrepiece is the first read-through. It’s in an interesting moment to sense who your actors are. Some attack the part(s), trying accents, investing moments with feeling and warmth, giving you a clear sense of what they can do and perhaps what they want to do. Some do the opposite, barely doing more than reading aloud. These actors, I think, are holding their cards to their chest, not wanting to give out too early, pacing themselves across the four weeks. Then others try things out, sometimes different things in consecutive lines; for them, we’re already starting to experiment, and the read-through is not about hearing the play together for the first time, it’s about seeing into its corners, assessing its flexibility, where it will give and where it will break.

We had all three in that readthrough. Everyone held something back - of course - and no one (thank God) damaged the play with a wildly eccentric reading; though I know that can happen. It was a very enthusiastic and intuitively right reading of the play. Often the rhythms were caught beautifully; some accents and interactions were found with deftness and subtlety. The play was certainly heard and it seems to me that it’s holding up well. It’s certainly funny and it surprised me with the turns that it does on a sixpence, moments suddenly sucking the warmth from the room.

The set is going to be bloody lovely, I must say. Unless they change it, it looks to me like a rather classical French set, enormously tall flat at the back and angled sides with floorboards running down towards the audience. It’s a presentational stage, it offers the play to the audience; it will be a stage to enjoy stepping onto. At the same time it’s going to be excitingly bare; the design of the walls will suggest a circuit diagram or an architect’s faded groundplan. Hints of The Matrix, hints of the ruins of world destroyed in some catastophe, walks among the ruins.

Single Spies

I feel torn about Alan Bennett. On the plus side, he is of course part-responsible for the rebirth of British comedy in Beyond the Fringe. His diaries are truly wonderful; always something to look forward to in the London Review of Books in the beginning of the year and when published together are a pleasure to relish. His plays have always been somehow subversive; he manages to talk about middle-aged women, about women with dementia, about homosexuality and more in a way that audiences adore, but without patronising them. He has even managed to present sympathetic portraits of paedophiles - not, of course, recommending pederasty, but showing sympathy to them as people, as human beings - in a couple of shows, including, of course, the huge hit The History Boys. His drift leftwards is very reassuring and, given his National Treasure status, coming out was quite brave. And I genuinely love some of his writing: I had the Patricia Routledge performance of A Woman of No Importance on tape and listened to it over and over as a teenager. I even followed Alan Bennett out of a train and down the street so I could tell him so. His jokes are often as funny as anything written in post-war theatre. More wholeheartedly funny than anything in Stoppard. Better at gags than Ayckbourn.

On the negative side, there’s an awkwardness in the middle of the writing that I find unappetizing. The determination to make his work ‘serious’ and ‘meaningful’ sometimes leads him to plonk characters on chairs chatting about serious and meaningful things leaving their characters at the door. He is drawn to somewhat academic subjects - not philosophical discussion but ‘subjects’ (art, poetry, etc.) - and there is a High Table quality to some of the discussions. Alas, I’m afraid that in The Habit of Art, it was that quality that led me to quit the habit at the interval. Also, though this can’t really be laid at his door, but he has spawned a huge number of imitators (well, they’re imitating him and/or Victoria Wood), for whom it is sufficient to say ‘Cheadle Hulme’ or ‘Freeman Hardy and Willis’ for comedy to ensue. The BBC did a terrible series called Single Voices which displayed this vice lavishly. The imitators also somehow patronise their subjects. I recently saw a student monologue about an elderly woman which basically just screamed out the student’s lack of interest or understanding of an older woman, just contempt and derision.

I think about this because of Single Spies which I saw at the Watermill in Newbury. A decent production, which a terrific performance by David Yelland as Anthony Blunt and an enjoyable HMQ from Melanie Jessop. The first play, An Englishman Abroad, is very thin; basically Guy Burgess camping it up and a rather sketchy notion of the persistence of Englishness. The second, A Question of Attribution, is much better, looking at Blunt’s time as curator of the Royal Collection and paralleling questions about authenticity and forgery in art and in life. The discovery in a painting by the Titian School of a shadowy third figure - and then a fourth, fifth and sixth - behind the paint is an elegant counterpoint to the position in the 60s and 70s when Blunt had been ‘outed’ as a spy to the secret services but not to the world. Yelland played the thing with great dignity and wit, wholly in character.

I had some doubts in the writing. An early joke was about Blunt’s failure to put some early Poussins in correct chronological order. ‘Which came first?’ muses Blunt. The joke - poussin being French for chicken, so the sentence suggesting ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg’ - is very abstruse and rather self-congratulatory. I suppose Blunt might have had that High Table manner though I’m not convinced it was a joke that placed him right in the situation he was in. The secret service interrogator conveniently is self-educating about the history of art, which allows him to fence verbally with Blunt about various matters of attribution and painterly signature, in a way that was frankly quite unbelievable. It felt like it wore its ideas too flashily on the surface and had no interest in embedding the ideas in relations between people.

That is said, the scene between Blunt and HMQ is just wonderful. Of paintings of the Annunciation, she remarks on having seen quite a few in Florence ‘I won’t say they were exactly two a penny, but they were certainly rather thick on the ground’. It’s a fiercely witty and rather steely scene, not what you expect when it starts.

Legally Blonde

Eight months behind the rest of London, we got to see Legally Blonde at the Savoy last week. My word, it’s a wonderful musical. And the reason it’s a wonderful musical is that it’s dumb and fun and stupid.

There’s a sort of mythological history of the musical that tells a tale of gradual artistic unification and sophistication. From the compendium of specialty acts in the nineteenth century to the monodramas of George M Cohan, past the strong books of the Princess shows and the historical-cultural ambitions of Showboat, into the greatly widened subject matter discovered in the 1930s, through the absolute integration of book, song and dance in the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, into the narrative and lyrical sophistication of Sondheim, to the quasi-operatic through-sung musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. I’m simplifying but not very much.

It’s a terrible story. Not because any of these moments weren’t good. I adore those Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. What I know of the Princess shows seem to be exuberant fun. I yield to no one in my appreciation of Showboat and I concur with the common view that Sondheim wrote some of the most brilliant musicals of the century. But it’s the teleology of it all that annoys me. The idea that a musical being more integrated means it’s more artistic and means it’s better.

Musicals aren’t meant to be artistically-integrated sophisticated experiences, goddammit. Musicals, more than any other genre in theatre histories, are pleasure-machines, intricate mechanisms for giving delight of the most intense and joyful kind. Better than any other form of entertainment I know, they are devoted to offering pleasure. The intense, ecstatic pleasures of the musical are in brilliant lyrics, memorable tunes, human virtuosity, fun stories, extraordinary dancing and preposterous sets. And the pleasure is having a free-playing abundance of them all. Brilliant though Carousel is, the enslavement of all other elements to narrative is not the joy of the musical.

In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes proposes a distinction between pleasures: plaisir which is the pleasure of familiarity, of having your expectations exactly met, of orderliness and neatness and fulfilment - and jouissance the pleasure that comes for disorderliness, the unexpected, everything that overflows conventional boundaries and limits, the uncategorizable, the signifier somehow loosed from structure. The musical - despite its reputation for conservatism and conventionality - is about jouissance not plaisir... unless you try to integrate it at which point it actually becomes about narrative expectations and linearity and moral convention.

When the musical was still pretty unintegrated, in the thirties, all the elements jostled with each other. I wrote an article about this.) There was pleasure in the disunity. When Cole Porter wrote his 30s musicals, he would allow the plot to be interrupted by a great song. If performers had a particular skill, the show would accommodate them. The plots didn’t have to make sense, because the pleasure was not about the confirmation of narrative expectation; it was about plot development and turn and the intensity of that pleasure. The end was not meant to justify the means. The means were the end.

Janice Radway in Reading the Romance studied mid-western American housewives and their habits when reading romantic novels. Perhaps we might think that is the exemplary instance of the conservative, ideologically-interpolated, dumbed-down audience; the absurd fantasies of taming are there to mentally enslave the women who read them. Instead, Radway found many extraordinary things. First, many women, when choosing these books, would read the last page first to be sure of the ending. So the ending was not a surprise, was not a sneakily introduced narrative sealant. Instead, these women read these books for the content., Perhaps the pleasure was in the rebellion, the feistiness before the heroine finds her prince. Second, these women read these books as an interruption of their daily life. These books weren’t continuous with their life as housewives, they disrupted it. Women turned off the hoover, delayed doing the washing-up, to have 15 minutes of the book.

The musical is the same. First of all, the effect of narrative convention is that you know the ending. That’s how they work. The endings are happy. And that means you can discount them; they are laughably obvious, enjoyably obvious. When you watch Calamity Jane, who honestly feels that the ending is a logical conclusion to the story? In fact, who even remembers the ending? The fact is that she ends up betrothed to Wild Bill, and wearing a feminised version of her buckskins. But what’s the first thing you think of from that musical? ‘Secret Love’? I bet not. I’l bet you $50 it’s her in the leathers singing the Deadwood Stage or in the bar bragging about her experiences in the Windy City. The narrative is inoperative as a force of teleology and substitution.

And secondly, it’s interesting the musicals are often attended by women taking a break from their husbands? Coach trips down the that London, where the kids or the house and the dinner and the washing have to be looked after by someone else. Musicals interrupt possibly oppressed lives. And if musicals didn’t - if they were to advertise their importance and tame their pleasures in the service of artistic statement - they wouldn’t give us an opportunity to experience a life of sheer pleasure. And that’s not an unradical thing. Imagining a word of sheer pleasurable flow, both differentiated and undifferentiated (okay, I’m sounding like one of those crazy Deleuzians now), respecting no order or structure or boundary, expressed purely in delight and joy, is that not something worth developing as an experience, building up a bank of feeling that might act as a counterweight to a world where the structures may not work for us?

Which brings me to Legally Blonde. It’s dumb. It’s fun. It’s hugely skilled. There are wonderful dances and crazy songs. The story is trashy and the sentiments are knowingly shallow. All of this allows us to enjoy the many systems of creativity at work. The plot takes a back seat when we need to hear a satirical song about Ireland. It delves into the Broadway songbook to find the buck-me-up song at the end of the first half. It scandalously turns teen slang into musical form for ‘Oh My God You Guys’. It’s magnificent. And Sheridan Smith is particularly excellent; sassy, funny, full of song, pretty, dumb and marvellous.

I loved it. And if you haven’t seen it, go and forget all that stuff about the clever musical. This is musical theatre at its very cleverest - fully thoughtful, utterly, dangerously pleasurable. 

Rewrites

I don’t enjoy doing rewrites, to be honest. This is because the way I write is to do a lot of thinking and note-taking (and sometimes research) beforehand and then write the whole thing in a relatively short burst of energy. Starting to write is getting into the right place to do it and then putting my head down and tunnelling.

That makes it sound much more splurgy than it is, because increasingly I will have worked out the skeleton of the plot, and the key moments and turns of the play are in place. But nonetheless, I do write in a long gasp; while I’m in that breath I can tinker and amend and restart and rethink, but once it’s written, it’s written and it’s very hard to change. Sometimes this is just because the rhythm derives from the pressure of producing the words sequentially. But also it’s just the thought, the thought emerging.

Now that I structure much more carefully, I can do structural adjustments ‘cold’, though that’s not actually rewriting. To then actually rewrite I just have to get into the right place and tunnel in the new direction; rarely can I solve the problem of a scene by tinkering. I find actually that I can’t even do the rewrite on the original text; I have to write the new scene in a new file and then paste it into the draft.

This is in my mind because I’ve just been rewriting Chekhov in Hell. I did a rewrite in August and I’ve just done another now. The August rewrite was worse in some ways than what came before. This new one is much, much better. This has been a pattern in the past; first rewrite makes it worse, second rewrite sorts it out. I think this happened with Static and in part with Beachy Head. Why is that?

I think it’s because I hope that the original draft is fine and that I just need to tinker. So I tinker, which solves the problems but leaves the problems in there too. Basically, I’ve just added new material but the play’s become baggy. Then, once it’s been seen by people (the director, say), I feel able to slash and burn. This is a pattern with me; I find it very hard to rewrite unless the draft’s been somehow seen: logged, noted and admired (or not). Then I can move on. At that point - because really I’m writing stuff from scratch - I start enjoying it again, because it’s the pleasure of creating, which is different from the thin pleasure of editing.

I am very pleased with the new draft of Chekhov in Hell, I must say, and greatly enjoyed writing it. There’s an entirely new character - Claire, a police community support officer - who speaks in ‘victim support’ patter but has an awfully good heart. Also, I like having written a play in which a character pulls out an enormous handgun and yells ‘GET DOWN ON THE MUTHAFUCKING GROUND MUTHAFUCKAS’. Who wouldn’t be proud?

Wanderlust

Isabella Laughland and James Musgrave not really getting it on (photo: Sheila Burnett)

How to write about sex? Wanderlust is a new play by young playwright Nick Payne, whose If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, was impressive at the Bush last year, and this piece deals with sex and its confusions.

Joy is a GP, married to Alan, a teacher, for 25 years, and they haven’t had sex for a year. Their son Tim is desperate to start having sex and has found Michelle to practice on. Joy meets an old flame,  through her surgery while Alan enjoys a sexual fling with Clare, a young slutty teacher. As Joy and Alan try to revive the sex in their marriage, things come to a head, missus. Joy finds zipless joy with Stephen. Alan’s dumped by Clare but Tim and Michelle have fallen in love.

The play’s most striking feature are various somewhat explicit sexual acts. Alan fucks Claire over his desk; she gives him an enthusiastic blowjob. Tim fingers, goes down on, and fucks Michelle. Joy dresses as a schoolgirl, though to no great erotic effect on Alan, and strips to her bra and knickers for a wrongly-named ‘naked picnic’ with Stephen. It’s a play with sex on the brain and it’s asking stuff about whether internet pornography has corroded the bond between sex and love; whether men and women see sex differently; the thrill of sex with strangers, and more.

The play is funny, especially at the beginning. An early scene has Stephen visit Joy in her surgery because he thinks he has thrush; his awkwardness is captured very well. There are one or two cringeingly accurate moments where people prefer to hurt each other than make contact. 

Mostly though I felt the writing hadn’t matched up to the ambition of the play. It was too happy to go for the line or the laugh than to really get to the truth of the situation. There’s a rather formalistic tendency in recent Royal Court writing, as I’ve said before that seems to favour the appearance of snappy dialogue than actually capture the thoughts and actions of people.

Here there are three vices that the play falls into: first, it is a bit pleased with its own writing. What I mean by that is that it has moments where you can tell the writer’s come up with a line, likes it and pursues the writing rather than the thought. In the middle of fucking Clare over his desk, Alan says:

I’m going to explode all over you.
​Like a fucking, like a fucking galaxy
​
​Alan kisses Clare.
​
​Like the big fucking bang.

I can go for the first line, of course, because it’s cheesy dirty talk. I can go for the second, because it’s what Alan, who is somewhat unused to this kind of sex, might say by accident. But what about the third? It’s word association by a writer, not a fucker. It’s a joke, because the word ‘bang’ brings it back to sex, but it seems completely implausible that Alan would make a joke here. He’s having his fantasies fulfilled and prefers sex without intimacy - sharing a joke is too intimate for this moment.

Second, it indulges in fine writing. Which really means it sometimes allows itself a literary, elegiac tone that doesn’t work. Joy has a series of monologues where this is most apparent. Monologues are tough anyway and it’s a standard trap for writers to think, aha, these are places I can show my gift for sensitivity and poetry. The thing usually missed is what the actual situation is. So at the end, Joy tells a story about her honeymoon on the beach when the sea came in and took her clothes. It’s a sort of sensual moment, remembering an ease with her body, with her husband, before the rot set in. But it does so in a very uncertain way. My friend said afterwards that he spent most of the speech wondering how she got back to the hotel, and in a way he’s right. You need to think about the real situation in monologues. But more decisively, she says

There’s a bit of me that still hopes, even after all these years, that the tide might still be carrying my clothes, that they might have made it to the other side of the world.

Is there? Really? This may seem like an achingly beautiful conceit when sitting at your computer, late at night, but when spoken by a middle-aged woman it sounds simple-minded.

Finally, there are several moments where a fun scene idea overwhelms any kind of plausibility. I’m fairly certain that almost every man in the world who thought he had thrush would insist on seeing a male doctor, though Steven not only sees a woman but proceeds with the examination even when he realises he knows her. Later, Joy goes to visit Steven and suggests that have a ‘naked picnic’; that this might seem a bit prickteasy doesn’t occur to her and Steven doesn’t comment on it. Most absurd is when Michelle thinks Tim may have made her pregnant, she doesn’t just pop into Boots and get something over the counter; no, she goes to the doctor even though that’s Tim’s mother. (In fact Michelle and Tim’s relationship, cutely though it ends, is a little beyond belief.) I suppose you could work out explanations for these things but they weren’t made manifest in performance.

I’m being very harsh and in fact I enjoyed much of the play, but I’m feeling rather as if the Court’s determination to stage young plays means that it’s overexposing work that isn’t ready yet. They’ve found some good young plays - Leaves for example - but this is a play that would have been just as well served in a small fringe theatre where Nick Payne could have made his mistakes with some degree of privacy.