Red Bud

The Court’s latest opening is Red Bud by Brett Neveu. Well, actually, it hasn’t opened; I saw the first preview.

Red Bud is a Motocross rally in Southern Michigan to which four friends have been coming since high school. They drink, they build fires, they eat, they smoke weed, they listen to loud music, they generally hang out like teenagers do. Except they’re not teenagers any more. Greg’s wife, Jen, is pregnant; Bill’s got a very young new girlfriend, Jana; everyone is older, slower, more receding. As the group assembles, perhaps pushed to it by the foxy presence of the young and irresponsible Jana, they becomes drunker, stupider and more stoned than before. Their games becomes violent and competitive. Greg and Jen have an almighty, humiliating falling-out and the boys really start to harm each other, let by the wild aggression of Greg. Eventually, the latter reveals a death wish, reporting in fond terms a near-fatal accident at work. He produces a knife but somehow doesn’t cut his own throat. Jana flees in horror.

It’s a Lord of the Flies play (vaguely similar are the more English and middle-class examples, Neville’s Island and Way Upstream), in which a group of people go away from the urban world and ‘revert’ to savagery. In that sense, it’s not a very original play. In the first half, the fun of the guys assembling, the amiable idiocy of some of them, the subtle and not-so-subtle competing to look good in front of Jana, this is all quite well observed.

The second half is a problem for me, because the descent into savagery is so quick and pretty unmotivated. It’s a play in real time, taking around 70 minutes to go from setting up tents to the brink of murder and suicide. Obviously the constant drinking helps, but even so, it felt to me that Greg’s death wish, which remains mysterious in its source, wasn’t enough. I filled in something about his anxiety about his marriage or the imminent birth of his child (there are some spiteful words aimed at the unborn kid), but I also had the nagging feeling that things were being thrown wildly and randomly at the play to force it up a gear.

Great production though. Real turf, a big pick-up truck in the corner (which provided the lighting for the last third), and a terrific ensemble.

Enlightenment

Shelagh Stephenson’s play at Hampstead Theatre, which also saw her Experiment with an Air Pump and Memory of Water, has just opened and I saw it last night. I like Shelagh’s work; she’s ambitious, serious, thoughtful and daring. She thinks big; she thinks about the world we’re in and tries to tell new stories. This play had its first (?) showing at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin five years ago and London’s only getting it now.

In Enlightenment, a young man, travelling on his gap year, has gone missing and his parents have endured six painful months with no idea what has happened to him. Horrifyingly, he disappeared around the time of a terrorist attack on a tourist bar. When, out of the blue, they received a phonecall from a British consulate in the far East, they rush to meet him from the airport. But that boy who greets them as mum and dad is unknown to them. Who is this amnesiac boy? They uncertainly take him into their lives but it seems he is playing games with them, cruelly toying with their feelings, while working out his own self-destructive pathology. Through the final violent confrontation between this boy and the mother, the couple seem finally to begin to move on.

The play is generous in its thought and feeling. It’s about grief, but it’s also about global travel, the ‘clash of civilisations’, the way people exploit one another, reason vs. superstition, private lives lived in the public eye, the complex motives that lay hidden in the slightest transaction. The end of the first act is a nicely plotted twist and the complications of the second pull you into the story.

For all that, I found it oddly hard to engage with. I think the main thing is that the ideas were right on the surface of the play. When people thought things, they said them. This meant that the scenes and characters didn’t seem to have much depth or complexity; there was no subtext to keep us tugging along. True, there’s a bit more in the second half where we’re kept guessing about the boy’s motives, but actually I sensed - correctly as it turned out - that we weren’t ever going to know quite why the boy was acting the way he was, so even then I wasn’t prepared to get stuck into the mystery. (The boy says a number of horrible things to them - none of which appeared particularly true: when he claims to have fucked their son, they flinch and he goes into a rant about their liberalism not allowing them to picture the homosexual act. I don’t particularly relish thinking about my parents having sex; doesn’t mean I am secretly disgusted with heterosexuality. He also cuts himself, which felt, if I’m honest, more about a strong visual image than anything lucid about the kid’s problems or motives.) At one point, Joyce says ‘It’s an English thing. Never say what you mean’ and I found myself wishing that was more of that English thing here.

In addition, the language was rather dry in places; written, rather than spoken. Symptomatic of this was the vocabulary of the characters that suggested to me the lexicon of an academic more than the kind of words that people ordinarily use - perceptible, conjecture, hypothetical, surrepetitious are just some examples - and they came out at moments where I wanted more of a sense of their pain than their nuanced reading of the situation.

The partner of that dryness was the play’s stasis. In Act I, the characters are, naturally enough, stuck and unmoving. But their eloquence somehow undermined that. The first scene has the family - she enthusiastically, he reluctantly - consulting a psychic (sorry ‘sensitive’) to find her son. Curiously, when you might have expected a sense of expectation, tension, the mother daring to hope for a breakthrough but also steeled for disappointment, caught between belief and scepticism, and so on, all of that potential is squandered in words. The mother doesn’t even shut up when Joyce is trying to listen to the voices.

There are other odd moments like this, characters seeming to drift away from the urgency of the situation to reflect on the world. Most bizarrely this happens in the last scene; there’s a boy with a hospitalisable injury on the floor and while the scene begins with an ambulance being called and some anxiety for his wellbeing, the couple start chatting away almost forgetting the bleeding youth on their floor. Explanations could be given for that, though I was quite baffled by the choreography of the end of Act I. They’re waiting in a private room for Adam. The boy’s grandfather has asked his girlfriend (maybe) to meet the boy off the plane and bring him to them. Apparently this is because they don’t want to be reunited on camera (but why the girlfriend? We’ve already established that the mother hates her). Then it gets weirder. The girlfriend has a sign with his name on and leaves. Then a few minutes later, she has apparently met him but rushes in alone, saying he’s coming. What happened? She said hello, pointed at the door then ran off ahead of him? Didn’t make sense to me, nor could I see what dramaturgical convenience it served.

Finally, it’s a class thing. The characters were very wealthy, very bourgeois. Now I have no problem with the upper-middle classes being shown on stage and I guess there’s an image here of the guilty rich looking fearfully at the rest of the world, wondering if they are admired or envied, aspired to or hated; but this production certainly made them seem like a right pair of cunts, insufferable, snooty, pleased with themselves, self-involved. There’s something that annoys me about wine on stage; it’s often a sign of something, always a class indicator, suggesting a bit of bohemianism, especially if it’s red, especially if somebody mentions the grape. Wine on stage seems to be stuck in 1972. I suppose I felt that this play, which is asking about the kind of world we live in, wondering about the permanence and relevance of western values, the continuation of the Enlightenment Project perhaps, seemed myopically trapped within its own class bubble, really not seeing anything beyond it. Fine if that were just the couple, less good when it feels like the play too.

I haven’t read the play and it may be that I’ve been led astray by a curiously unsympathetic production - the set rather sterile, the acting rather disengaged I felt - and the play’s better than it could be. Certainly there were some aberrant line readings. I like Shelagh’s plays; this one didn’t do it for me.

The Aliens

Just back from seeing Annie Baker’s The Aliens at the Bush.

KJ and Jasper are two wasters who hang out in the private backyard of a coffee shop. Jasper is writing a novel; KJ writes songs and drinks shroom tea. Evan, a seventeen-year-old who works in the coffee shop, befriends them. Jasper dies in a drug overdose (at least, so says KJ) and Evan inherits his guitar.

Yes, that’s about all there is to it. It’s not a plotty play; it’s a play about stagnation, and two guys reaching the age when dreams start to disappear. It’s about Evan’s coming of age and it’s perhaps, once again, about a mythical America of Going West and finding oneself.

The dialogue is really great and very sparky, well observed and prettilessly elegant. It’s an extremely funny play too. Their songs are ridiculous prog-rock nonsense but the moment where they sing ‘The Frogmen’ at the end of Act One was rather adorable.

For me it never quite took off as a play. In the second half - maybe this was just me - I spent so long wondering if KJ was telling the truth about Jasper’s death that I didn’t really tune in to any real sense of grief or loss. The scene at the end where Evan plays ‘If I Had a Hammer’ very badly on Jasper’s guitar was cute but I felt I wanted a bigger outburst by that point.

The star of the evening is the acting. Mackenzie Crook is wonderful as the brooding, grimly serious Jasper; Ralf Little is surprisingly convincing as the psychotropic slacker KJ; Ollie Alexander seemed mannered at first but his perfectly-pitched awkwardness melts your heart. It’s a typically well-judged production from Peter Gill. It was a superb performance of an inessential play, I thought.

Signifiying Nothing

End of the first week of rehearsals. I’m very happy. There are hints already of extraordinary things and it’s still pretty funny. That will drain away through rehearsal until the first night when I hope the shape will be strong enough that it’ll suddenly be funny again. Chekhov’s journey through the play, which is only given through hints and implications, the tiniest of reactions and responses, is emerging very strongly in Simon Gregor’s work. The individual somewhat-satirical scenes are finding their shape and focus slowly and surely. I’m very pleased. Yesterday, we had the director Noah Birksted-Breen, a fluent Russian speaker, come in to teach Ruth Everett how to speak her brief history of the twentieth century.

The thing that’s continuing to torture and torment Simon (the director) and Bob (the designer) is costume. My note on production suggests that the stage should have an arbitrary visual relationship to the fictional world. Men could play women, old play young, black play white, but not systematically. In fact, Simon’s not doing that very much and thinks it will simply ‘baffle’ the audience. I’m not convinced, but hey. More important is the design. We do have a design that suggests a skeletal world, Chekhov seeing through the lavish opulence of an advanced consumer-capitalist world to something sparer, more desperate. So if the actors are being cast to type (sort of), and the setting is not, what of the costume?

My principle for the set was ‘a design, but no set’, in other words you can still do something but it shouldn’t represent an actual place (and shouldn’t, I think, be anything too intricate or built). How does that apply to costume? I had imagined actors wearing their own clothes. At least, you’d need them to wear clothes that are definitely not what the character is wearing. How would that work?

The Prague structuralists in the 1930s had a central principle of theatre semiotics: ‘everything on stage is a sign’.  In other words, by placing anything on stage, before an audience, under the lights, it starts signifying. A plain wooden chair suggests a home, age, comfort, decay, anything. You can’t stop things signifying.

I don’t think that’s true. If an actor stumbles over a line, or even takes a prompt, it doesn’t signify - at least, it doesn’t signify as part of the semiotic project that the show is building. If the actor dries completely, and has to be prompted through the whole show, it might well disrupt or destroy that semiotic project altogether, but it wouldn’t form part of it, because we know what is part of the show and what isn’t. I can, to some extent, discount aspects of the stage picture if I don’t think I’m supposed to be seeing it: the filigree plasterwork on the Lyric Hammersmith’s proscenium for example. I’ve seen it before, I know what it is, if the story being told on stage pays no attention to it, then nor do I. Sometimes it’s there - it was there in Neil Bartlett’s Camille for example as a sign of a doomy nineteenth-century French cultural world - and sometimes it’s not - the set for Simon Stephens’s Punk Rock drew the eye away from it.

The question, can you do something like that for costume? And would you want to? I suppose I don’t want the clothes to be ignored, which would seem odd (pretending the clothes aren’t there? Oo missus), but I don’t want the clothes to signify. They shouldn’t mean anything. They shouldn’t editorialise. It’s going to be an interesting test of the play (and also some of the ideas in my essay ‘When We Talk of Horses’). The structuralist question should be: ‘everything on stage is a sign, but do they have to signify?’

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.