Going, Going, Gone

Chekhov in Hell finished its run at Soho Theatre last night. I’ve got a slight feeling of post-show blues, but mainly just a feeling of tremendous satisfaction. I loved the production; I love the cast; I love the design; it was the right theatre for the show and we had healthy audiences throughout and great responses.

It was different in London than it was in Plymouth. Soho strong-armed us into providing a 90-minute, rather than 100-minute, play and so we decided to cut one whole scene (‘Positive Flows of Energy’) rather than nip and tuck. That worked hugely to the benefit of the play which raced forward at that key moment. The whole thing felt pacier and less lingering (that was a long scene). On Thursday I saw a production of the play performed by CertHE students at East 15 Acting School. It was a terrific performance, full of youthful energy and got a wonderful response from the audience. I was struck though that with the extra scene in the pace of the show is kind of wrong. By that point we need to be moving forward and that scene lingers in the satire; by then we’ve got the point.

1. The reviews were interesting. We had a very curious mix - from the Guardian and the Times raving about it and giving us four stars to the Independent and Time Out damning it with two stars. Bad reviews are momentarily winding but not that psychologically damaging, I’m finding. Obviously, one would love to get those across-the-board raves, not least for the box office, but we did fine. Very good word-of-mouth too. Two things perversely pleased me about the reviews: The good reviews described the play in the way I’d describe it. This hasn’t always happened; I’ve had good reviews where I’m pleased they like it but it’s not the play I conceived of. This suggests that what we wanted to do works. The bad reviews don’t describe the play in a way I recognise. Fiona Mountford’s amazingly damning review in the Standard and Michael Coveney’s in the Independent both describe it without giving any indication that it’s funny or even noting that the audience were laughing (even if these particular critics were not). They really didn’t ‘get it’. It’s much more worrying when critics ‘get it’ and hate it too. 
2. The criticisms are very varied. Some found it boring; some found it too slight; some found it offensive. Some have seen it as a satire, some as a melancholic and nihilistic statement. At least one person has seen it as a vaguely religious play. Some have criticised it for pessimism, others for being too affectionate towards its targets. One blogger thought it was racist. The Morning Star (who knew they had theatre critics?) thought we had contempt for the working class. Time Out thought we delighted in the degradation of women. Some of these accusations are demonstrable nonsense, but together they make up an interesting picture of the play, namely its political illegibility. At least, its illegibility to a set of fixed and familiar positions in political theatre. Michel Foucault said in an interview once, ‘I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean’. I rather like what the reviews mean, because it’s a play that is trying to do political theatre differently.

Part of the problem, I think, is that if you’re having to write a review, you inevitably start thinking about the review as you’re watching it - and this play doesn’t explain itself too readily so I sense that some of the critics foreclosed on the play, made crass decisions about what it meant too early, and therefore produced ludicrous conclusions. But hey, all responses are fine. It’s a difficult thing to respond to a new play.

I’m also encouraged by the stirrings of interest from a variety of places. A Broadway producer liked it; a German agent liked it; a director in New Zealand and another in Australia liked it. There’s a school in Somerset keen to do it and at least two acting schools interested in it. It seems like a play that speaks to people and I’m proud of us all for managing to do that.

Moonlight

I was drunk when I saw Moonlight. Not under the table, not by a long chalk. I was never a man of that stamp. I had passed the time of day with an old friend. You probably know him. He was known to imbibe the finest wines without breaking step, a game at which I was strictly the amateur.

It’s true. Weak Pinter pastiche aside, I saw the first production of Moonlight at the Almeida in 1993 after a day of drinking with a friend so its memory is very hazy. I do remember Ian Holm, bedridden and misanthropic, and Anna Massey, extremely chilly as his scornfully suffering wife. At the time, the scenes I most relished were the two brothers, played by Douglas Hodge and Michael Sheen (what a cast that was), whose bantering role play seemed a thin crust over two hollow selves, hollowed out by loss and the imminence of death.

It’s a play that defies summary but broadly a dying man taking his mortality out on his stoic, unloving wife. Elsewhere their two sons banter and replay imagined episodes of their life. Two family friends - remembered? actual? imagined? - engage in vapid bourgeois chit-chat while elsewhere, through the wreckage of these lives, wanders Bridget, a lost daughter, a ghost, recalling a life lived at moonlight.

It’s a very beautiful play and oddly uncharacteristic in some ways. It’s a play whose meaning is relatively clear; it’s a play about death, approaching death, our fear of death. The title, probably, suggests an image of fading life struggling against the darkness of the grave. The family are living not only with the father, Andy, and his impending demise, but also in the shadow of the daughter’s disappearance or death. In this fine production, Fred, one of the two sons, is pale and sickening, lying on his death bed. Their jokes are desperate improvisations, it seems, to evade the horror of life ending.

There's a thing almost all playwrights do where we write a speech which is meant to express some core meaning of the play. Often it takes a more lyrical or more strident tone than the rest of the play, signalling out, trying to have an effect. It can be rather moving, a yearning that rolls out over the footlights. But it's always - isn't it? - an admission of defeat, a moment of thinking that the means of production, the techniques and processes of dramaturgy, aren't working for us, can't be trusted. So this desperate new course is pursued, trying to have a direct effect, opening a wound to the audience.

Pinter never does that. His words are always actions; they are blunt and complex, harsh and lyrical. They do things onstage without any desire to please. This is no doubt connected to the personality of Harold Pinter himself, apparently blunt, uncompromising, not placing a great priority on being liked. In his interviews, well some of them, there’s a grouchy, piss-taking, passive-aggressive refusal to comply with the questions. I remember reading an hilarious interview with Peter Hall po-facedly explaining the indigenous cockney custom of ‘taking the piss’ and how he adapted this obscure native custom to his production of The Homecoming. Here we get a disquisition on ‘taking the piss’ which in itself takes the piss. There’s an aggressive relish in language here, rolling the cliches around the tongue, allowing them to bump into each other to startling, comic, alienating effect. There are lurches between register and tone. There are moments of luxurious verbal excess, parodic literary style, crudity and aggression. Always there’s a fluency and rhythmic, prosodic expertise that was always Pinter’s great gift. Listen to this speech Bel’s (the wife):

Yes, it’s quite true that all your life in all your personal and social attachments the language you employed was mainly coarse, crude, vacuous, puerile, obscene and brutal to a degree. Most people were ready to vomit after no more than ten minutes in your company. But this is not to say that beneath this vicious some would say demented exterior there did not exist a delicate even poetic sensibility, the sensibility of a young horse in the golden age, in the golden past of our forefathers.

With the sense of someone reviewing their life, the play is haunted by earlier Pinter plays. Bridget’s speeches remind me of Ruth’s in The Homecoming (‘And there’s lots of insects there’). Late Pinter is increasingly drawn to these monologues to find bursts of something poetically other to the brutality of his scenes. The last speech of Party Time for example (‘When everything is quiet I hear my heart’) or Rebecca’s recollection (imagination?) of seeing a refugee (?) woman (‘She listened to the baby’s heartbeat. The baby’s heart was beating’). It has some affinities with the weird bourgeois roleplaying and chilly mental landscape of No Man’s Land, too, but it is its own play.

In 1993, I was most transfixed by the young men. But then I was a young man. Now it’s Andy and Bel, the love and regrets, the anger and affection, that seems to speak so eloquently. I liked this production very much. A stage and rear wall in Yves Klein blue, edged in white light; the characters disposed across the stage; and the girl, Bridget, in her underwear, wandering through the ruins. It may be lesser Pinter, but lesser Pinter is better than most.

#No2PD

This Thursday, we are to vote on a reform to our electoral system: the introduction of the Alternative Vote. The No2AV campaign have offered a number of striking arguments against this change.

Always keen on the long view, I have dug out a political pamphlet from 1689, the year of the Bill of Rights and therefore the birth of Parliamentary Democracy and I publish the full text below.

---

Sirs, th’unruly MOB hath lately fulminat’d for CHANGE to the POLITICK of this NATION & certain BILLS are presently laid before the HOUSE offering provision for ELECKTIONS unto PARLIAMENT & limitations o’er the power of the MONARCH. It is our settled VIEW that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is a naughty doctrine & would be resist’d by all good MEN. We do venture to set forth our REASONS below.

ONE, we do declare that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is expensive, demanding much of the publick PURSE in the nature of BALLOT BOXES, PAPERS & sundry PENCILS. The vulgar OPINION of the people will needs be carried by HORSE and ERRAND-BOY at further expense. Who is to bear the EXCESS COST of this frivolity popularly nam’d VOTING? DECISIONS made by the King & agree’d by such hereditary MEMBERS as whimsickally choose t’attend at the HOUSE cost naught to the PUBLICK who ergo may go about their lives spending their BAUBLES on BREAD and SOIL, &c.

TWO, we do find that PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY is a wretched BURDEN and TOIL to the BRAIN of the ORDINARY MAN, who will perforce be addl’d and confound’d by th’TASK to choose between divers CANDIDATES. Do we consider it a proper USE of publick TIME for each ENGLISH SUBJECT to discover FACTS and OPINIONS and DEBATES in the matter of GOOD GOVERNMENT? Sirs, we venture to say NO. To place an EX in THIS box or THAT is no TASK for an AMATEUR & we do judge it bothersome & unnecessary to rouse the PEOPLE from its BED to demoralyze it with this obscure INTERROGATION. 

THREE, though we have sought in EARNEST, we do find no NATION or KINGDOM in th’entire WORLD that do make USE of this PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY. Our efficacious & belov’d SYSTEM of ROYAL DECREE may be found in fully all DOMAINS save where there be but SAVAGES. Do we not trow if PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY were the SPLENDID FANCY that its FANATICKS pretend, we might have discover’d it OTHERWHERE?

FOUR, PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY do offend agin our TRADITIONS of JUSTICE. Indeed, Sirs, we say it is UNFAIR. Why, its CHAMPIONS themselves judge it possible that the BEST CANDIDATE, plainly judg’d by his WEALTH, PATRIOTISM & sporting PROWESS, may come second or e’en THIRD according to the insensible OPINIONS of the MOB? This KINGDOM already is possess’d of a fine CUSTOM to allow the best of us to come forth & assume AUTHORITY, namely WEALTH, STOCK & PRIMOGENITURE. What NEED hath ENGLAND of the accurs’d VOTE?

FIFTH, we do have it on AUTHORITY that the beliefs of MISS NELL GWYN were oppos’d unto REFORM, which, Sirs, surely settles the MATTER.

ROYAL PREROGATIVE on all CONCERNS works. Sirs, we hereby declare the HEALTH of PARLIAMENT as currently constitut’d & counsel with VIGOUR that it should never be modify’d. As the common PARLANCE tells us, if it be not broke, forbear to FIX it.

On Thursday, please vote YES to AV.

Wastwater

Simon Stephens’s new play is a triptych set around Heathrow Airport. No characters recur between the three scenes and only side-references suggest that there are connections between the people and the stories we see. In that it resembles, formally, Under the Blue Sky by David Eldridge, though while that play goes from horror to redemption, in Wastwater, Stephens takes us steadily into the depths. It also reminded me, vaguely, of another triptych play, Far Away by Caryl Churchill. Partly because this also begins with Linda Bassett gently interrogating a young family member; but also because the three scenes are both disjointed and connected, building a sense of global vision and interpersonal mystery.

In the first scene of Wastwater a young man is saying goodbye to his foster-mother, awaiting his flight to Canada. In the second, a man and a woman meet in a hotel room near the airport for illicit sex; she reveals her secret history as a porn actress and she wants him to hit her, which eventually he does; in the third, a middle-aged man is with a woman who has arranged for him to buy a Filipino girl. The woman mocks him, threatens him, terrorises him; for a while we think he’s bought the girl for sex but it seems that he and his partner have been turned down for adoption. The girl arrives.

There are hints at connections; the woman in the third scene was probably a foster daughter of the woman in the first; the man in the first scene probably lost his job as a teacher for hitting the man in the second. All of them hum the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen: 'l’amour est un oiseau rebelle / Qui nul ne peut apprivoiser'.

Here’s the thing: I really love Simon Stephens’s writing. He’s gone on a fascinating journey from something pretty close to naturalism (Herons) to something very different (Pornography). He taught on the Royal Court Young Writers programme for almost a decade and he knows what he’s doing. But what he’s doing is deliberately writing badly and it’s fascinating.

Badly is too blunt. What I mean is that he does things with dialogue, scene and character that in a lesser writer you’d say are just errors. And, hey, it may turn out that it doesn’t work, looking back on it all. But at the moment, I feel that he’s creating a distinctive, absolutely contemporary vision of the world and is doing so through the reinvention of dramatic form. And I’m a total sucker for that kind of thing.

The thing he does is have people say and do stuff. That doesn’t sound very revolutionary, I know, but what he seems to be working towards is a kind of dramatic expression without subtext. The scenes are psychologically rather blank; the presence of actors performing them give them perforce a kind of presumed psychological coherence and tics and mannerisms (in the best sense) suggest thought processes, but elsewhere things happen, words are said and the psychology in the actions is opaque. A standard piece of dramaturgical advice would be to say that action (including dialogue) should arise out of character and situation. Revelations work well on stage when one feels that they have been forced from a particular character by a particular situation.

This isn’t really what happens here. In the first scene, the boy, Harry, admits that his bladder sometimes gets very full and he ‘leaks’: basically, he wets himself. His foster-mother is concerned about it but he is not; is he mad? is he contemptuous? is he lying? It’s not clear. In the second act, Lisa suddenly admits to her pornographic past (or is it present?). The speech is very long (two pages in the published text). Is this true? It’s hard to say (when she finds a porn movie on the internet at the end of the scene, the text insists that this is not of her). If it’s true, why does she say it? Is she confessing? Trying to shock? Trying to please and arouse Mark? Impossible to judge. By normal standards the quantity, relation and manner - and maybe quality - of her speech (to use Paul Grice’s terms) are awry. In the final scene, why does Sian bait and haze Jonathan? Is she trying to humiliate him? Terrify him? Is she seriously checking he is a fit foster-father? Is she taking out on him the absence of her own father? Her hatred of foster-parents in general? The scene doesn’t tell us.

Now in ordinary circumstances, this would be a disaster, dramatically. The characters would be opaque, random, arbitrary. Psychological consistency, truth, depth are all valuable assets on stage. Here the revelations are just things that happen, entirely on the surface; like sun splintered and rippling on a deep lake, it repels attempts to see below the surface. This could make the characters seem unengaging, perverse, comic, surreal. There are elements of the last three, but because Stephens writes with such vigour and energy and attention to verbal detail they are always compelling (to me anyway, I see that some ‘critics’ feel rather differently).

More significantly, though, I think in fashioning this strange surface, Simon Stephens is trying to do with sincerity what a previous generation did with irony: explore its complexity and contradictions. On one level though, he is trying to have people speak directly and clearly to each other, to simply see the truth, to be affirmative about the world. This is why I am puzzled by the critics who have found the play bleak and manipulative. It’s true that there are some wintry exchanges and the characters seem uneasy in their skins; but ultimately the play is affirmative about people’s need for each other. And most of all the play is not manipulative at all - well hardly at all. Instead, it’s laying its characters and situations out with virtually no commentary, no irony, allowing us to make our own judgments.

Throughout his plays - and increasingly - he gives us characters simply announcing thoughts and affirming the world. ‘I like this bar. I like the way they’ve screwed the tables to floor. I like it,’ says Nicola in A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, ‘I like train stations as a whole really. I like train travel. It’s my favourite means of transport’. Do you like living alone? asks one character to another in Pornography. ‘I do. You know? I do. I do. I do. I really do. I like shopping for food. I like discovering food shops in odd places and going there. I like eating out occasionally on my own.’ In Harper Regan, Mickey, a man that the eponymous Harper has just met in a pub, suddenly decides to tell her about his hatred of the Jews. In Motortown, Paul rants about the War on Terror, hardcore pornography and the shortcomings of the poor. In neither case are these sudden outbursts evidently emerging from character; in fact, in both cases the outbursts are pretty much the main evidence we have of their character. 

I say he’s exploring the complexity of sincerity. First though I think it’s important just to acknowledge the straight-ahead desire to show people just acting, just speaking, and speaking sincerely, honestly and clearly. At the risk of naivety, of being undramatic. His characters are always referring to things as ‘remarkable’, ‘fantastic’, ‘brilliant’. He likes the word ‘nice’, maybe because of its naivety, its excess of feeling over precision, its gauche affirmativity. (I think of Suspect Culture, whose original company name was ‘Art is Nice TC’.)

And the reason for that might well be a general impatience with irony. The 1990s were dominated by irony; think of the ubiquity of air quotes, of uptalk, of Chandler-speak (‘This is SO not funny’ ‘Oh, you THINK?’) where we don’t just get attitude but an attitude to the attitude. Think of Britpop, all irony and quotation. Compare that with Arcade Fire, all passion and sincerity. And remember that moment in Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London when Colin starts dancing and singing along to ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ and the stage direction dares it to be beautiful and warns us that there should be ‘No ironic moves’. Simon’s at the theatrical headland of this anti-ironic movement. It’s an impatience with irony and in some ways an impatience with fiction and dramaturgy: Pornography has some similarities with Attempts on Her Life (lack of stage directions, lines not assigned to characters, freedom of casting, fragmented structure) but Attempts’ openness only reminds you of the author’s furious precision and control whereas Pornography seems deliberately to give up authorial control altogether. You can do the play in any order. Does that go down to the words themselves? Is it really a grab bag of text? Certainly through all the recent work, there’s a sense you get that Stephens has no time for the elaborate contrivances of formal devices or what David Eldridge once called ‘clunky what’s-round-the-corner plotting’.

But there is more complexity going on here. First because it demands a different kind of performance, a new settlement between stage and auditorium. John Osborne wrote once that he wrote Look Back in Anger ‘in a language in which is was possible only to tell the truth’. I’ve always wondered what he meant but I think I see something here in the work of Simon Stephens. The excess of language over character and situation creates a kind of speech the speaks across the proscenium. Like Jimmy Porter, it feels as if the audience is being addressed as much as the characters, because the speech only has one foot inside the scene, the narrative. This requires of the actor both realism and a kind of presentational quality; to be both in and outside the fictional world.

Second, what Simon’s work does is portray a picture of the world that is distinct and original. It embraces chaos. Robert Holman - his friend and collaborator - once said that the way he writes is that he starts at 9.30 each morning by writing dialogue. Anything at all. And he does that until one of the characters says something that surprises him. Its a kind of ability to be surprised by randomness, the unconscious, the chaotic synaptic connections of the mind. And by embracing this it creates a vision of a world of chaos, of surprise. It’s a world that both affirms chaos and also free will. It’s a world of renewal and change and possibility.

Third, it renders character both transparent and opaque. Because while these characters reveal themselves they also hide. We know what Lisa is saying about herself but we are unsure why. And this perhaps says something about the puzzles of identity, the ways we can be strangers even to ourselves. It’s a technique that hints at depths, perhaps great depths, like the grey unfathomable depths of Wastwater itself, but leaves us staring only at our own reflections in its glassy surface.

I think this is one of the most remarkable plays of the last few years. Its dismissal by certain critics saddens but doesn’t surprise me. The critics want nice plays and Simon Stephens isn’t ready to make nice.

Cause Célèbre

Terence Rattigan’s last play is also one of his best and one of his most uncharacteristic. Uncharacteristic because it is not domestic and it’s not linear; it’s a dizzying, brutal, time-and-place-jumping, epic piece of work. He’d done a few more epic pieces before - Adventure Story, Ross, Bequest to the Nation - but this is far more effective than those.

The play concerns the true story of Alma Rattenbury who was discovered one night in 1935 standing above the brutally battered body of her husband. During the trial it was revealed that she’d taken a younger lover and both she and her lover initially claimed to have done the deed. Eventually she cracked and claimed her innocence. To a public outcry, she was found not guilty, whereupon she took herself off to a field by a river and stabbed herself three times in the heart. The play is, as so often, about forbidden desire and the British resistance to it. He parallels it with a fictional story of the forewoman of the jury who dislikes sex, has a son who is desperately pursuing it, and a husband who wants her back. She begins by sharing in the mob’s hatred of Alma and her lust but ends up understanding, though losing much.

This is not a good production. There are good things; the second half is much better than the first as the barristers camp it about most enjoyably in the courtroom scenes; Anne-Marie Duff is rather effective as Alma, both innocent and flirtatious, flippant and hurting. But otherwise, the play doesn’t work. Mainly the fault is the building; the Old Vic is so huge that the actors are all turning out and bellowing. It ruins the distinction between the shabby domestic scenes and the grand theatre of the courtroom - and that distinctions is part of the point. And the set and lights by Hildegard Bechtler and Bruno Poet just don’t work at all; visually, the stage is all so dark and drab, which means that we get no distinction between indoors and outdoors, past and present, night and day. It all looks dark and the grimness is flagged up for us. Bechtler’s sets tend towards the monumental and this has a rising and falling ceiling that may, for all I know, be intended to suggest the crushing judgementalism of an unforgiving world, but made everything look machine-like and soulless and this is a play with a lot of soul. The final scene, by the riverbank, should be pastoral and beautiful in horrible contrast to her suicide but in rich amplification of her simple mantra: ‘What a lovely world we are in, if only we would let ourselves see it’. Instead it was bleak, hollow, dark and stagey.

I liked Niamh Cusack as the jurywoman; she had a brittle sexuality about her - much better than playing her as prim and stuck-up. This was an earthy woman and her feeling for her son was very believable. But the son - in fact both the sons in the play - were much too old and much too priggish. I’d accept this is partly in the writing but surely you can get eleven-year-olds who look eleven? The father never seemed sexual, just sententious.

I’m spoiled, of course, because I still remember so vividly Neil Bartlett’s luminous production at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1998. That one was fluid, roguish, sexy and camp; light in a way and then crushingly sad. It’s good to see a production of this play but this won’t have helped its - or Rattigan’s - reputation. This is Rattigan’s most experimental work; it came over last night as his stodgiest.