Rocket to the Moon

Famously, in the Seinfeld writer’s room was a sign ‘No hugging, no learning’, a necessary corrective to American sitcom’s addiction to redemptive endings. It’s not just the sitcom either; American drama in the mid-century period was often famous for its closing lines that sum up the play and offer a clear statement of the improving message that it’s been trying to convey. This is the way we were. Attention must be paid.

Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon is no different. The journey the hero has to go on is curious but it is plainly meant to deliver a moral to the audience when Ben Stark declares ‘I’ll never take things for granted ever again’.

It’s a simple plot. Dr Stark is a dentist who lacks drive and ambition. His marriage has flatlined, his work barely pays the rent. Then he employs Cleo Singer, a ravishing young woman with whom he begins an affair. He was encouraged in this by his father in law, who is estranged from his daughter. In the event, the father in law falls for Cleo too, as does the rapacious theatre producer Mr Wax. In a final confrontation, she rejects them all and Dr Stark vows never to take anything for granted again.

What’s interesting is to have an essentially passive hero; everyone walks over him, he is hectored by his wife, doctors on the same corridor walk in and out of his waiting room without knocking. He’s offered funding by his father in law to set up a new high-class specialist clinic but he turns it down thinking that half a loaf is better than none. The rocket to the moon of the title is an affair; aged 40, maybe this is a make-or-break moment. Will he settle for his loveless marriage and his middling career or will he change everything, take risks, make something new of his life?

It’s got the same problem as Separate Tables. In the latter, the Major’s offence is to furtively grope women in the cinema. I think we’re inclined to be much less forgiving of him now that audiences would have been in 1954. We’d be likely to think that there might be more to it than groping (check his basement! check under the patio!). Here we are invited to think that having an affair is a bold and sympathetic action. The problem with the play - and with the new National Theatre production - is that it has to persuade us that the marriage really is in a bad way. In fact, in Keeley Hawes’s performance - but also in the text - Belle Stark is a gorgeous, sexy, funny, smart woman who is a little bossy but fundamentally more interesting than Cleo. Cleo is basically a bit of a bimbo (though brilliantly played, full of wit and detail, by Jessica Raine). As a result, the play asks us to take seriously a bored man shagging his bubbly young secretary and therefore cheating on his lovely wife as a supreme act of self-realization. I didn’t really buy that.

I’m not sure Odets had fully decided what sort of play to write. It’s a romance (particularly in Act 2). But it’s also a wisecracking comedy (particularly in Act 1). It’s also a realist drama (particularly in Act 3). There are traces of Odets’s earlier more directly political work in the continual talk of money and in the sensational scene where his fellow dentist Dr Phil Cooper returns having sold his blood for money - and also in the near-agitprop names: Stark, Singer, Wax all suggest something about their attitudes and situations. What I’m hugely understating is how funny the play is; it’s full of laughter, generous and cynical, all in character and often pitching the thing into realms of wonderful absurdity (‘Do you know something? I can’t read Shakespeare - the type is too small’). 

The humour itself causes problems. The father in law is a wisecracking character, full of New York Jewish schtick; but then we have to undergo a crunching gear change as he declares his love for Cleo. To be sure, this gives him perhaps the most heartfelt speech in the play: ‘There are seven fundamental words in life, and one of these is love, and I didn’t have it! And another one is love, and I don’t have it! And the third of these is love, and I shall have it!’ But I remained unmoved by his love for Cleo, which seemed like an old man’s infatuation rather than anything more interesting.

There’s not a whole lot of plot either. The entire first act is set up. The second act only gets interesting when Ben exposes Cleo’s lies about herself, when suddenly, at last, you felt the air move, and here was a play about people with desires and aspirations and delusions and false fronts. The affair itself seems somewhat unconsummated and it’s only the third act where things really seem to matter. The short exchange between Joseph Millson’s Ben and Keeley Hawes’s Belle when she realises about the affair (‘It was only a thing of the moment, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Do you hear me - wasn’t it?’) was beautifully played, tender and awkward, Belle’s assurance momentarily crumbling. Odets’s stage direction says that at this moment Belle is ‘wavering, a spout of water’ and we got that. But even then the act dissolves into a series of conversations, with the cynical doctor Frenchy, with the father, then the decision that Cleo has to make.

And it all adds up to Dr Stark’s epiphany: ‘for an hour my life was in the spotlight... I saw myself clearly, realized who and what I was’ and makes that pledge: ‘I’ll never take things for granted again’. This is the problem with hugging and learning, an awful lot of stress has to be placed on the things peoplesay about what they do. But we know from life that when people promise to change their ways, that’s just words and it’s just the start. It’s their actions we want to see if we’ll believe them. And this case seems particularly suspicious. Is he really never going to take things for granted again? The existence of Kentucky? How about gravity? The airy vapidity of the announcement would, in life, communicate more about the speaker’s immaturity, their windy self-regard, than about any real intentions.

The Catastrophe Trilogy

What happens when you tell a story? What do stories do, in theatre and in our lives? The Catastrophe Trilogy - Alice Bell (2006), Daniel Hit By A Train (2008), and The Festival (2010) - are some kind of an answer. They are the flowering of Lone Twin Theatre, a step away from Lone Twin’s more purely performance and conceptual work and a step towards theatre, or at least towards an engagement with narrative and character. The first and third shows follow singular stories; the middle show presents us with 53 capsule narratives, stories on the edge being story.

It’s a beautiful trio of shows, each one having its own distinctive identity and theatrical language, but with pulses and echoes that ripple across all three. The catastrophes are so different in each show that I wondered whether the title wasn’t a sly joke about the pompous tradition of the playwriterly trilogy (Wesker, Hare, et al.). I strained to find a catastrophe in The Festival (is a missed opportunity catastrophic?) and Daniel Hit By A Train asks rather profound questions about the meaning and possibility of representing catastrophe. Each show is punctuated by songs, often accompanied on the ukulele, and the whole trilogy has a popular-theatre energy.

Alice Bell tells the story of a young woman living in a country divided by a civil war. She is sent away to boarding school but she runs away. She is standing on a bridge when it is bombed by the rebel army but rescued by the bomber. Since Alice is believed to be dead, she changes her name to Clara Day but her identity is revealed when a schoolfriend sees her in the street. She is forced to carry a bomb into town and while she yells at everyone to get out of her way, she is killed in the explosion.

To give the story of this show is partly to miss the point, though. It does have a narrative but it’s also asking questions about narrative, the way that narrative organises a theatrical encounter, the tension between the over-arching narrative and the micronarrative encounters that punctuate our daily lives. The dramaturgy of the show disrupts some of the features of that narrative arc; some features of the story (and of the show) are given to us at the beginning, both in Alice’s early monologue and a strange moment where her brother gets visions of her future (including her singing a country and western song). Soon after Alice becomes Clara, the show hurriedly tells us about her unmasking in an eerie flashforward, moving this narrative turning point ahead of its chronological sequence; the whole story is then recapitulated up to her death in a rousing country and western song played on ukuleles. These have an effect of suppressing our breathless engagement with the twists and turns of the story, while still presenting the story to us as an object to be observed, handled, tested.

There are references to Oxford Street and Denmark Street which would seem to place the action in London, though the civil war and the reference to the bombed bridge suggested to me the old bridge in Mostar, destroyed by Croatian bombardment in 1993. In fact, these accidents of place and time don’t seem especially significant to these stories; time and place were picked up and discarded as required. The bridge in Mostar was a graceful arc and its destruction seemed a resonant echo of the show’s bombardment of its own narrative arc, the fragments of Alice’s story coming apart gracefully under fire.

The show was purposeful fragmented, sections of the story delivered in distinct stylistic sequences. Nicholas - the rebel leader - was introduced as a man who will harm you and he’s given a virtuoso, and very funny, speech where he lists the various people and things he will harm, from Ringo Starr to Eskimos (‘Eskimos, you can run but you can’t hide,’ he warned). Alice’s transformation in Clara Day was effected in a brilliant sequence where Patrick, her lover, trains her to answer questions according to her new personality, the two of them on either side of a table, which danced slowly down the length of the traverse, marking her slow progress from one identity to another. Physical sequences - performers pretending to be dogs, a schoolgirl’s trick with her arms, Alice’s hobbies - were sharp and witty, not difficult, just expressive and smart; sometimes they had emotional pull, as when we see Alice and Patrick’s relationship in him bending forward, supporting Alice who lies sideways across his back.

Daniel Hit By A Train is inspired by the 53 plaques in Postman’s Park in the City of London, commemorating acts of impetuous, doomed courage. Each story is told, usually with the same minimalism as the plaque. The stories begin to collide with each other as the performance goes on some stories told at greater length, the acts seeming sometimes brave, often foolhardy, occasionally comic, often meaningless.

Here narrative is offered in its most minuscule form as fact. We are given bare information: a name, an act - ‘Elizabeth, who died of injuries received in trying to save a child from a runaway horse’ - followed by some tiny physical performance of that act. Often these physical performances are provocatively inarticulate. ‘Here’s me aged 8,’ announces Guy Dartnell taking on the persona of another of our doomed heroes; we watch as he stands doing nothing.

Nothing is what this show is composed of. We know next to nothing about these lives and the company don’t seem to have found out any more. There is no real effort of impersonation. The stage is bare - a sheet of red vinyl, a door frame. Yet, we’re constantly invited to look at things: ‘Here’s me’ say the performers one after another. ‘This is...’ says Paul Gazzola, the ringmaster, introducing his characters, also asking us to ‘regard the drum’ that’s he’s wearing, to ‘regard its power’ as if this power were visible, to regard the burning house, the runaway horse, the sinking ship and all the other unseen forces of late-Victorian destruction. The remnants on Victorian popular culture - bit of melodrama, a fair bit of circus, a lot of music hall - strained through more contemporary pop culture (I was continually and pleasurably reminded of Vic Reeves' Big Night Out) remind us that in a way this is all theatre, which creates vast offstage - and sometimes onstage - worlds with a word or a gesture.

After each mini-performance, the actors gaze steadily at us; it’s a flat look, not inviting, not challenging, not really engaging. It holds out looking as an object to be observed. This whole show is looking at looking.

Because somehow these stories compel us to fill them out. Knowing nothing but the headline, we seem to invest in these stories, flooding the nothing with our own sentiments. And it is sentiments that the show deals in initially, ripe old Victorian sentiments, as in the song ‘Hey Mamma, Me Solomon’ telling the tale of a boy who ‘saved my brother but I could not save myself’. I was struck that the musical language was definitely pre-1920s, from the era before recording, when popular songs had to be instantly memorable, strong melodies, insistent rhythms. To couple these horrible deaths with such nagging jingles is a moral challenge, but the show wants to know why it’s so easy to tell stories, why we so easily want to weep for ‘Elizabeth, who died of injuries received in trying to save a child from a runaway horse’.

This all comes to a head in the (repeated?) representation of a girl who doesn’t want to be saved. (Perhaps the ‘lunatic woman’ at Woolwich Station that Frederick Alfred Croft saved at the cost of his own life.) The entire structure of sentiments - bravery, heroism, failure, saved, help, sacrifice - collapses if there’s someone who doesn’t want to be saved. Is this all just sentiment then? Perhaps, but then it’s also utopian in some way. In a funny but emotional sequence, two-thirds of the way in, Guy Dartnell is a would-be Samaritan, running desperately between rival claimants to his aid, in a frenzied desire to save everybody. (Remember the final episode of series 1 of the new Dr Who when Russell T Davies had Rose absorb the power of the Tardis and come back to bring everyone back to life - ‘everybody lives’ she said, her eyes shining like a god.) The celebration of this heroism is an affirmation of mortality, as if death can be avoided; it can’t, of course, as this show both makes clear and laments.

The Festival follows Jennifer who goes to a music festival at Crescent Point, a place where as a child she was taken, unwillingly, to watch migrating schools of humpbacked whales. This time she fleetingly meets an older man and they agree to meet there next year. She spends the year thinking about this man but doing so has so changed her that when they meet again, she doesn’t wish to take their friendship any further.

This is a step much closer to conventional theatre. There’s even some acting, not all of it ironized or placed in quotation marks. There’s interior psychological space and a sort of set (chairs and tables). This is all deceptive, of course, because in a different way from the first two shows, this too is exploring performance. First, while the story is a good one and holds a certain narrative interest, much of the acting isn’t in any sense naturalistic (the scene in which Jennifer’s mother, a secret smoker, deflects her daughter from coming down to the bottom of the garden is conveyed by Nina Tecklenburg, hopping from foot to foot, percussively delivering her lines between exhalations). Second, there are devices - like omniscient narration, non-realist physical sequences - that partake of different performance traditions. And third, probably the most exhilaratingly memorable moments are where the ensemble recreate the improbable headliners at the music festival: we get U2 singing ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’. Elsewhere there’s a snatch of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ ‘By The Way’, a recreation that cannot in any sense be ‘realistic’, since it calls attention to the iconic non-presence of these rock stars.

Also, the dialogue is often perfunctory, knowingly empty, entirely generic and lacking in content. Friends talking in a cafe, executives at Nokia, parents dragging a child on holiday, lab technicians, the situations are carefully presented to give us only what we knew already and not to individualise: ‘I could run upstairs and get the figures,’ offers a Nokia employee. ‘From all accounts I think we’re pretty much exactly where we should be,’ comes a reply both drained of specificity and archly commenting on the precise conventionality of the response.

But also at work within the story is a story about acting. Jennifer spends the year between Festivals thinking of Oliver, a man she barely knows, just as we barely know Jennifer (and barely knew the doomed heroes of Postman’s Park) and this in turn triggers reflections on herself, just as, in imaginative engagement with these fictions, our own performances and fantasies are engaged. Once again, the mystery - if that’s not to strong a word - of acting and theatre-watching assert themselves in a picture of a life changed entirely by a quasi-theatrical engagement with quasi-fiction.

And again there’s something utopian about the affirmation, the way we can connect so simply an immediately with people who don’t exist - and with the actors who do. There’s a long physical sequence 40 minutes in, which the actors perform to exhaustion. It’s hard to watch partly because it asks questions about the limits of watching, marks plainly that we are in the same space with similar responsibilities to each other. It makes thick and bright the connections we are making in the room. And then there are the songs; cheesy, over-familiar maybe, but sung with enormous enjoyment, and collective enjoyment - a picture of friends singing together, the communitas overwhelming any fastidious distaste you might have for U2, or the boredom triggered like a smoke alarm by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And this underscores the sentiment expressed through this show - and, one remembers, throughout the trilogy - of a simple, unadorned, unironic wish that everyone will be okay.

The show reminds me hugely of Suspect Culture’s Timeless, one of the landmark shows in my life, though I’m sure entirely unknown to Lone Twin. University friends meeting after several years, trying to recapture the excitement of a night where they all went to the beach and lit a fire and ate pakoras, their awkwardness and their yearning, their regret and longing, the wish for the things they could say expressed in beautiful words, but also in song and gesture.

What rich, beautiful work.

Fen

Hard to believe it, but Caryl Churchill’s Fen has never had a professional London production since its premiere in 1983. Consequently, though I’ve read and taught the play a number of times, I’ve never seen it. It may be my favourite unseen play.

But now I have - and in style. Ria Parry’s production at the Finborough is exquisitely judged. The multiple characters are played by six actors on a small traverse of earth, with a wooden bridge at one end and the battered cupboards of a Fenland home at the other.

The sure decisions here are about the reality of things. Onions in a crate, potatoes in a pail, stones on the earth. Fen is about a life lived in the materiality of things, from which the characters struggle to lift themselves - high on a tractor, elevated by money, lifted on stilts. The production caught that beautifully.

Seasons Greetings

Ayckbourn at the National, stuffed with TV comedy actors, and a Christmas show to boot. It’s not at the radical end of Nick Hytner’s programming, certainly. But I’ve always had a soft spot for this play, since seeing the BBC’s 1986 production of the play with Nicky Henson, Anna Massey, Geoffrey Palmer and Peter Vaughan. It was one of the bleakest Christmas shows I’d seen.

The story unfolds over the Christmas period, taking us from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day and Boxing Day, ending early on 27 December. We’re at the home of Neville and Belinda Bunker and they’ve invited Neville’s sister, Phyllis, and her husband Bernard; Belinda’s sister Rachel, and her friend, Clive, a novelist. Neville’s mate Eddie and his wife, Pattie, and Neville’s uncle, Harvey. They always spend Christmas together and are used to Rachel’s failure to get a man, Pattie’s perpetual pregnancy, Phyllis’s drunkenness and Bernard’s staggeringly dull puppet shows. All goes according to plan, though Clive’s appearance is a catalyst for chaos when he and Belinda are discovered having a noisy shag under the tree early on Boxing Day morning. Harvey destroys the puppet play and, later, shoots Clive, believing him to be a thief.

It’s a very funny play and it becomes emotionally more demanding as it goes on. What Ayckbourn does so well is capture the mixture of ridiculousness and despair in these ordinary lives. In Harvey, he’s created another of those quasi-fascist suburban tyrants like Vince in Way Upstream and Sidney Hopcroft in Absurd Person Singular. The play leads up to the devastating moment when Harvey gleefully smashes up the puppet show; we’ve been laughing at it the whole way through the play but Ayckbourn turns our feelings on a sixpence. Bernard’s heartfelt rage against Harvey isn’t much on the page but it’s definitive in performance; the small man standing up to the bully, and, of course, the artist standing up to the philistine:

You are a loathsome man, Harvey, you really are. You’re almost totally negative, do you know that? And that’s such an easy thing to be, isn’t it? So long as you stay negative, you’re absolutely safe from laughter or criticism because you’ve never made anything or done anything that people can criticise.

Bernard’s a man hemmed in by his awkwardness in the family, his patience, his politesse. Here he lets rip - petulantly, to be sure, but compared to his usual small talk, this is an aria.

What you immediately see on stage is that it’s an ensemble piece. Ayckbourn had spend years choreographing his characters around a theatre-in-the-round, sometimes, as in The Norman Conquests, across multiple plays. Here we see several rooms, lots of simultaneous action, and plenty of room for very truthful acting. Nicola Walker and Neil Stuke are particularly good (I spent a couple of minutes just watching Neil Stuke fix a toy racing car and it’s a lovely, detailed performance, full of detail and precision). Nicola, as Rachel, is an alienated soul who we first see pretending that Clive’s non-appearance is of absolutely no concern or interest to her and persuading us of the exact opposite; later she has a rather awkward bit of verbal comedy as she tortuously tries to give Clive up and then tries to offer herself to him, without ever really saying what she means; Nicola Walker somehow invests that with real feeling and meaning. Neil Stuke pulls off one of Ayckbourn’s most audacious handbrake turns; he’s spent the whole play oblivious to his marriage and the chaos around him and has been dismissing the discovery of his wife and Clive as a drunken mistake. Clive tries to protest that he wasn’t drunk:

NEVILLE (quietly and pleasantly) Let’s put it this way. If I thought for one moment that you’d been down there on my floor in my hall under my Christmas tree, trying to screw my wife while you were both stone-cold sober, that would put a very different complexion of things. because in that case, I promise you I would start to take you to pieces bit by bit. And as for her, she’d find herself back on the Social Security before she had time time to pull her knickers up.

Neil delivers the brutality of it, the leering misogyny, with unmistakeable force, without raising his voice and losing the perpetual wry smile on his face. Mark Gatiss, of the comedians, is by far the best, giving Bernard dignity despite a good deal of absurdity. His outburst is heroic, defiant: Antigone in a cardigan. The weak link is Catherine Tate, who just does funny voices most of the night. Her attempted seduction of Clive is played for laughs and we don’t engage with it, nor do we see what is unsatisfying in her marriage. There’s a short sequence towards the end of scene two when she tries to interest Neville in a discussion of their marriage (‘I mean, maybe love’s too strong a word to use. Perhaps it’s friendship I’m talking about. We’re still friends. That’s what I mean.’) which should be a moment missed, a point of genuinely attempted contact that was not seen; instead it’s played on the surface and the whole picture of the marriage suffers. It shows, really, that when Ayckbourn’s good, as he is here, he really needs acting and truthfulness.

I wonder if we’ll ever see Ayckbourn the way the French sometimes do, as a contemporary naturalist anatomising middle-class pain; instead, despite almost everything he’s written, we seem determined to see him as a boulevardier, as if he hadn’t written anything but clones of Relatively Speaking. Perhaps his theatrical instincts are too sound; maybe he is so good at knowing what pleases an audience, and so smoothly effective at delivering it, that we don’t feel it going down, whereas in translation, where there’s always a burr, a remainder, an adjustment, there’s time and space to feel what is difficult and uncomfortable in his work. It’s possible to be too good a playwright and maybe Ayckbourn’s our eminent example.

Winterlong

The winner of the last Bruntwood Prize, Andrew Sheridan’s Winterlong opened at the Royal Exchange Manchester and is now running in the same production at the Soho Theatre.

The play follows fifteen years in the life of Oscar, born to a teenage mother who abandons him to his grandparents. The world he grows up in is brutal and harsh, the family relations poisoned and twisted. His grandfather hates him. And yet somehow through all of this, Oscar maintains a feeling of openness and love, hope and beauty. Which may not avail him much as the world seems to end with the play.

Andy Sheridan’s previously best known as an actor. This is his first play. It’s promising in lots of ways: the dialogue is flinty and imagistic; the cruelty of the world is vividly and unflinchingly portrayed; the epic span of the play - which leaps forward two years at a time in the first half - is bold and well-handled; the juxtaposition of scenes and episodes, the variety and vigour of them all, gives it a grand feel. Oscar is a great character (performed with extraordinary conviction by Harry McEntire).

It’s unremitting in its horror. The first half in particular does feel a little unmotivated in its brutality; people are so incredibly nasty to each other, again and again, getting fouler just when you thought they’d done their worst, that it never feels quite possible to get a sense of the world he’s depicting - there’s not enough texture there. The scene where Oscar’s mum, Helen, and her partner, Neil, visit the grandparents and Neil humiliates Helen and therefore the grandparents is very hard to watch and to me not particularly illuminating because I didn’t really understand why these events were happening and why we were being shown them. Much more powerful, because subtler, is an encounter between Oscar and a paedophile in the park, the transaction and the sexuality subtler and more ambiguous between them.

Where’s this all come from? I was very struck by similarities between this and A Thousand Stars Explode In The Sky by David Eldridge, Robert Holman and Simon Stephens, which Sheridan performed in. It has a similar familial nastiness and an apocalyptic backdrop. Oscar is very reminiscent of the kind of affectless anti-ironic sincerity that Simon Stephens and Robert Holman particularly go for. (Harry McEntire reminded me of Billy Seymour in Herons and Pornography.) Some critics have spotted Beckett in here, though I didn’t see much of that. Maybe there’s some Kane in the mix.

The writing has many strengths. For me, I didn’t get a very strong sense of voice; and hey it’s a first play, so it will be interesting to see what happens when and if he finds a distinctive style of his own. The play relies a bit on rather strained poeticisms and a few of those wild semi-surreal monologues that are fun to write but dramatically a bit inert because basically they could be anything. I’d be interested to see a stronger sense of drive to the next play and perhaps greater economy. But also I hope he’ll retain the ambition and scale and brutality. Strong debut.