Little Platoons

Steve Waters’s new play at the Bush is a real treat. It’s part of the Bush’s ‘School Season’ which has also featured John Donnelly’s The Knowledge. Both have been very well reviewed.

Rachel and Martin are splitting up because Martin’s met someone else. They are both concerned about their son, Sam, and how he is faring in the west London comprehensive where Rachel also teaches music. Martin thinks they might move him to an ex-grammar in Bicester. Rachel, though initially sceptical, becomes drawn into a group who are planning a Free School. Led by the charismatic rogue, Nick Orme and his wife Lara, the project appeals to Rachel when Nick outlines a school with music at its heart. She accepts the role of future head. A year later and the project is underway, about to receive state approval from the Coalition. But there are divisions within the team - is this a school with a traditional curriculum? Should it favour middle-class values? And when the team are to make a presentation to the relevant representative of the Department of Education, Martin appears and rails against the plan. The kids from Mandela they’ve brought in aren’t strictly on-message and Lara seems to have walked out on her husband. The school will go ahead but probably without Rachel.

Steve Waters writes, in the best sense, slightly old-fashioned plays. By which I mean, he writes plays that very squarely wear their issues on their sleeve. The Contingency Plan was unmistakeably about climate change; Fast Labour is undisputably about migrant labour in Britain; World Music is about third world aid and The Unthinkable skewers New Labour. Little Platoons is very precisely about the ‘free school’ movement and, insofar as a play can do, it debates the pros and cons of the scheme and even - very nostalgic, this - has a rallying speech towards the end, evidently expressing the author’s views:

I want us to get off our knees, I want to fight for what we fought form, our parents fought for, I want to defend every benefit and every extra year of school and every free place at uni and every bit of social housing and every park and public holiday, all of the things that almost made the world a little more just, all those things they say we can’t pay for, that we don’t deserve, all the things they tell us don’t belong to us - and this, all this is just a massive diversion from that - I want you to wake up (p. 84)

It’s unfashionably direct and the play is unfashionably specific about what it is discussing, but it is none the worse for that. (A rather more ‘editorial’ final speech has been - wisely I think - cut from this production.) Waters writes with enormous wit, warmth and elegance. The characters are plausible, rounded, rich and complicated; rarely do we feel - as we sometimes feel in other issue-based plays - that a character has been brought before us purely to exemplify a point. No character really exemplifies a single point here. The Free School movement, certainly in the first half, is given all the best arguments; it acknowledges the number of different idealisms that might come together to found a Free School. There are no saints and no demons in this play. Toby Young has apparently co-written an answer-play to this for the Bush; I’d be amazed if he can be more persuasive of the values of the Free School idea than Waters is before the interval.

And, of course, it’s fascinating. Like many people I suppose I’ve thought a bit about the policy, decided I don’t like it and not thought much more about it. It’s just very interesting to really go through the arguments and in such detail and with such an intelligent guide, always, of course, refracted through plausibly real lives and real dilemmas.

It’s very funny too. First, he creates a barnstorming role in Nick, which Andrew Woodall seizes with relish, swaggering around the stage with all the intelligent loucheness of Bill Nighy. He’s outrageous, idealistic, unreliable, brilliant and finally inept. And then there is Polly, charged by the Coalition to make the Free Schools happen. Hers is a brilliantly funny role; clipped, precise, efficient, relentlessly bright (‘We’re certainly mad keen on - grass roots’ p. 74). She’s also authoritative and powerful and Waters keeps us beautifully balanced between derision and awe. And there is a brilliant little exchange about the tiny niggles that conspire to destroy a happy relationship (pp. 69-70).

There are one or two moments where I’d have liked to see a different kind of finesse in the telling. The dramatist’s clumsy short-cut, the character wandering in through an inexplicably open door happens not once but twice (pp. 15, 68). I felt the puppeteer pulling Rachel’s strings once or twice: a dramaturgically convenient tearful breakdown (p. 22), a slightly over-neat plot pivot at the end of Act One, and I found it puzzling that she executed such a swift change of mood between her fury at commercial partnerships and then a sudden impassioned speech in favour of selectivity in admissions policy (in a lovely speech though, about how tired she was of saying ‘no’ and how she’d decided to say ‘yes’, which recalled Bradshaw’s similar speech in Howard Barker’s Victory). I did not wholly believe the way that she spoke to the kids towards the end - unless the idea was to suggest that she’s actually a rather poor communicator - though also I didn’t really find the kids that believable (would they really know who Michael Gove was and what he looked it? Would the excluded Brandon really know what Free Schools were for?).

But these are quibbles and largely occurred to me afterwards. It’s good for me who tends to bang on about metaphor and indirection and theatricality to see how enormously satisfying and enriching plays can be that consider a significant part of their role to educate and debate.

Tiger Country

Hampstead latest opening in a new play by Nina Raine. I had mixed feelings about her last play, Tribes, though enjoyed (reading) her first, Rabbit. It turns out Tiger Country is completely unlike the other two. I think I like it more than either of the first.

Tiger Country is a hospital drama. It has a large cast and many characters but the main stories we follow are those of Vashti, a registrar whose brittle arrogant manner may get in the way of her promotion, and Emily a new Senior House Officer in A&E, who is distressed that her wish to keep people alive must be replaced by an acceptance that people will die.

It’s flamboyantly well-researched, both in the sense of restless energy that floods the stage, and in the linguistic detail. There are great lines that surely must come from doctor’s conversations: a boot up the arse is described as a ‘leather suppository’ for example. The black humour and general contempt for their patients rings true and so too does the backbiting, the bullying, the steep hierarchies, the sexism and the flashes of idealism.

The play occasionally gets a bit overwhelmed by its research and it can seem as if you’re watching a documentary play, though there’s too much else to tell you that you’re not so the play is, on one level, a bit uncertain of its focus. But I think it’s about death, really, and the way we fight against its inevitability, sometimes in panic, sometimes full of idealism. It’s also about institutional life, with a fine eye to the way women, in high-pressure, adrenalin-rich professions, are caught between being scorned by men if they don’t behave like men, and scorned by men for being unfeminine. It’s good about the frustration of institutional inertia and then, in a couple of slower-paced intimate scene, it also shows doctors working well, speaking with care and sensitivity.

There are many stories it has to set going so the first half felt like it was rather slow. The second half whips along though and the stories all seem to come to a plausible pitch. The production - also directed by Raine - asks us to join in an implacable acceptance of death. A person dies on the table; Emily decides to stop treatment; the body is removed and the final image is a hospital orderly, with a v-sweeper, removing the last debris from the stage as the light dies. It’s a very moving moment as the restless energy of the production is replaced by emptiness.

The Rivals

I went to this with some apprehension since the last time I saw it was in 1983, when I was 15, in the National Theatre’s production that starred Geraldine McEwen, Michael Horden, Tim Curry, Fiona Shaw and Edward Petherbridge. I remembered John Bury’s huge sweeping Bath crescent set, and of course I remember laughing and laughing and laughing.

Well the good news is that this production is very funny. Mainly, I think, it’s because The Rivals really is a very funny play. The production is mixed - the costumes are lovely, the set is rather drab and uncertain. There is strange variation in acting styles and abilities. Some are excellent, others are weak; some are in period, others are contemporary; some are detailed and meticulous, others are broad-brush and out-front. I didn’t really get much of a sense of a director’s hand and where it worked it was always the actors (and the play) you had to thank, not the director.

For me the great revelation of the production was Tony Gardner’s performance as Faulkland. Gardner’s spoke the words beautifully but inflected the performance with a superb contemporary comic style, so that this awkward subplot about a jealous lover testing his relationship to death emerged as both hilarious and terribly sad. I was reminded of another of my favourite comic actors, Mark Heap, though Gardner has a richer voice. It’s a subplot in a rather classical sense though it emerged for me far the most interesting story. The moment where Faulkland is left alone in his chair, staring rejection in the face, realising that his love really has gone, his mind it seems reeling, his emotions inadequate to the loss, was wretchedly funny.

Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles were enjoyable as Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute, though the writing seemed to me to be doing the funny more than the actors. It was weird to feel the ripple of pleasure that ran through the audience as the To The Manor Born actors were reunited on stage. This was a nostalgic murmur in a rather nostalgic evening of theatre, redeemed by some inventive actors.

As You Like It

I didn’t know this play at all. Never seen it, never read it. Of course, I kind of know it, because the Rosalind/Ganymede story is widely discussed and Touchstone and Jaques famous Shakespearean characters. And its scree is embedded in the language ‘thereby hangs a tale’, ‘laid on with a trowel’, and of course ‘all the world’s a stage’. But, no, I didn’t really know it.

What do I think of the play? Who cares! I’m an ignoramus and. hey, it’s As You Fucking Like It. But anyway.

Many things startled me about this play. First, it takes a very long time for the story to get going. The first two acts are all set-up, sending most of the cast into the Forest of Arden. It’s all rather delightful and the banishments are variously enjoyable, cruel, funny, bleak and so on. But it’s only when Orlando meets ‘Ganymede’ (3.2) that one feels the set-up is beginning to pay off.

This is understandable because what really struck me was the remarkable number of stories that Shakespeare establishes and manages to keep going. There’s Orlando and his brother; there’s Orlando and Rosalind; there’s the Duke and his Court; there’s the exiled former Duke and his merry men; there’s Jaques; there’s Silvius and Phoebe. There are no less than six love stories, requited and unrequited. As the friend I went with noted, there are two fools, perhaps because, with all this love and all this foolish authority, there is much to make fun of.

It’s massively enjoyable. Orlando distributing his love letters through the forest, some genuinely funny stuff with the fools, a beautiful little double act with Rosalind and Celia, the subplots with the Phoebe, with Audrey, and more, all giving the play tremendous vigour and muscularity. The production by Michael Boyd for the RSC is frothy but not escapist and Katy Stephens’s confident, sexy Rosalind has great support from Mariah Gale’s Celia. Forbes Masson’s sweet-voiced Jaques is balanced by Richard Katz’s crazy, wild-haired, unkempt Touchstone.

The ending puzzles me. First, because the way Rosalind tricks Phoebe into marrying Silvius seems a bit heartless. Second, the wider political story is solved in such a ludicrous way. A messenger enters to explain that the Duke was on his way to the Forest to have his exiled brother killed but met a holy man, converted to the religious life and has abdicated so he can live in a monastery. How would a turn-of-the-century audience have responded to this? What was Shakespeare meaning?

Were they supposed to enjoy it, panto-like, as one of the magical, absurd, fun things happen in this enchanted Forest and this enchanted play? Was plausibility a far lesser consideration than neatness and closure? Would they recognise this as a kind of classical touch; the last-minute messenger explaining the intervention of the Gods (think of Phaedrus, Iphigenia and so on)? Did that express a world view, something about the capriciousness of fate and chance, the constant possibility of redemption? Maybe the title is knowingly reassuring: everything will turn out as you like it to do.

One masterstroke was to have the epilogue sung rather than sententiously spoken to the audience. This made it feel as if we were at a celebration of love rather than being ticked off in some obscure sixteenth-century way. I wondered if there was an influence of the Rylance-era Shakespeare’s Globe which was forever blending the curtain call with a merry jig and a bit of a sing. If so, good for Michael Boyd. 

None of this spoiled my enjoyment of the play, I might say. There’s quite a lot of incomprehensible comic satire in here (Touchstone’s description of a quarrel and the various kinds of justice invoked is typical), but somehow the performance carries you through. The characters and actors are all so massively likeable. There are so many changes of focus and story. It’s like electrified froth.

David Bradby

My friend and colleague, David Bradby, died this morning. Caridad Svich asked me to write something for Contemporary Theatre Review, the journal that he took over - with Maria Delgado - and asked me to join as associate editor. I was of course happy to write something; well, no, not happy. I’d rather not have had to write anything like this, but this is what I wrote.

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David Bradby, our friend and colleague, died this morning.

I wouldn’t have had a career without David Bradby. He interviewed me for my PhD, advised on it, helped me to get my job, mentored me through some of my early attempts at lecturing. He was even external examiner for my undergraduate degree. More broadly, he has encouraged me and others to think that an academic stance of almost geekish enthusiasm for the obscurest corners of a theatre culture is no bad thing.

Enthusiasm. That’s what David had in such boundless quantities. He studied at Oxford in the 1950s and was very much of the John Osborne generation which is probably why whenever I hear that speech from Look Back in Anger, I think of David: ‘Oh, heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm—that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out “Hallelujah! Hallelujah. I'm alive!”’ His enthusiasm was infectious. In classes, he had a spirit of youthful play. I’ll never forget observing his Ubu Roi class and watching him demonstrate Jarry’s anarchic impulse by chasing a room full of students, most of them a third his age, with a rolled-up newspaper, trying to whack them on the arse.

In staff meetings he had a devil-may-care attitude that was immensely reassuring. I still laugh to recall the misjudged memo that came down from on high and was passed round from worried hand to worried hand. When it reached David, he glanced at its contents and, without a beat, tore the thing up. He sat there beaming at us all – that’s what makes me laugh to think of it, the beaming smile – and the proposal was never heard of again.

As a colleague, enthusiasm reigned. He was forever passing me new French plays he’d read: the austere L’Arche volumes, the sepia covers of Actes-Sud editions, the white uniformity of Éditions de Minuit (the Frenchest-looking books I’ve ever seen). Sometimes he would stop me in the departmental office to read aloud some sweary bit of French monologue, chuckling at the profanity. One Friday in 1997 he mentioned he was popping over on the Eurostar to see M(o)uettes a radical rewrite of Chekhov’s The Seagull by his great friend Patrice Pavis in Paris-Marly and he insisted that I came along. The next morning there I was with my travelbag full of French phrasebooks and confused changes of clothing. I won’t say David exactly had a knotted handkerchief on a stick but he certainly travelled light and, to this anxious traveller, seemed enviably at home wandering onto trains, taking in the landscape, sitting outside French bars with a glass of beer.

And the books kept coming; he was an early advocate of Arthur Adamov, then a partisan for Vinaver and a zealot for Koltès. He got me into Durringer, Pellet, and Lagarce and others. How did he persuade Methuen to publish two volumes each of Vinaver and Koltès? A collection of plays by Eric-Emmanel Schmitt? These were improbable miracles of publishing. He tirelessly translated and wrote about new writers, new directors, new productions. His Modern French Theatre 1940-1990 is rigorous and elegant. In his books on Planchon and Vinaver he writes like someone thrilled that he got to bring you the news. I can’t bear the thought that he won’t be bringing me the news any more.

His books were terrific but he had a much broader sense of the responsibilities of an academic. As a public advocate for our discipline, as a giver of papers and chairer of panels, he had a commitment to clarity, lucidity, of inviting everyone to join the broadest possible conversation about the theatre and its relation to the world. I don’t think he was ever completely convinced of the value of theory as it swept through our discipline in the 1990s, but he loved the conversation. ‘I’m hoping to be told I’m an old fart!’ he used to roar delightedly. He was one of the founders of the modern discipline, in so many ways, but not least with his small but admirably punchy Director’s Theatre, written with David Williams, making the case with typical energy and verve that the work of the director is as vital to theatre studies as the work of the writer. He borrowed a term from Planchon (in whose company he briefly performed): ‘écriture scénique’. As the playwright writes on the page, so the director writes on the stage. I would debate this with him: does the metaphor of writing not betray a persistent reverence for a literary theatre? I would ask. Is there not some lurking conservatism in this call for directors to have the same canonical systems and status as the playwright? He would disagree and then agree and disagree again, thoughts and memories of vivid productions tumbling from him.

He had quite an appetite for politics. Not for departmental politics – he saw no point to that and happily managed to spread this spirit of benign collegiality to the rest of us. But as a young man his political consciousness was raised by reports of French atrocities – massacres, the use of torture – in the French-Algerian War and then again by les événements of May 1968, in particular their theatricality, their pataphysicality, their playfulness. He was one of the first academics to celebrate the work of Joint Stock, inviting them to a conference at Kent University, whose Drama Department he co-founded.  He wrote on popular theatre, political theatre, with energy and commitment but never finger-wagging sententiousness. He remained loyal to a vision of a theatre that mattered, that changed things, that spoke to the world and let the world speak to it. He had an enthusiasm for justice. An exuberance at the fun of protest. ‘Quelle connerie la guerre!’ wrote poet Jacques Prévert towards the end of the Second World War, a line that became a slogan for the pacifist left in France and which David was fond of quoting during the first and second Gulf Wars.

A few years ago, Maria Delgado approached me to see if I’d like to co-edit a festschrift to mark David’s retirement. Of course I accepted, but it became clear to us that the usual dry and unread academic volume would not be a fitting tribute to David’s many contributions to our field. We agreed quickly that this should be a book that would be used, that students would want to buy and read and keep. We wanted it to be a book that lived in the hand and the mind, not on a shelf. It’s a measure of the affection in which David is held that everyone we asked to contribute to the book responded with tremendous enthusiasm; even if they could not contribute, they conveyed their warmest wishes to David. Contributors voluntarily refused payment for the volume, allowing Contemporary European Theatre Directors to be lavishly illustrated, generously laid out, and compendious in scope.  He was delighted with the book, which pleased me immensely.

At the launch we held to mark its publication, David was, naturally, centre of attention. We were anxious that he would be too weak, that he would find the event a strain. Instead, he bounced, he positively bounced, renewed by appreciative company, starting by sitting down, then standing, and eventually rushing from friend to friend in his enthusiasm for friendship and theatre and fine things. Enthusiasm again.

I last heard from him three weeks ago. I’d sent him a newsy message, telling him some of the things I’d been up to. He responded, as he always did, with generosity, fascination, and an eye for the absurd. He seemed so sharp and energetic I dared to hope he was rallying, turning a corner. It’s a metaphor, of course, to say that someone is ‘full of life’. But David would have had no time for any pious anglo-scepticism about metaphors. David was full of life, which makes his passing even more incomprehensible, even more meaningless.

David Bradby, my friend and colleague, was a huge presence in my life, in the life of the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, and in the life of our discipline. I am so lucky to have known him and, however I do, to carry an imprint of him and his endless, magnificent enthusiasms.  

Dan Rebellato
17 January 2011