Enter Tainment

​The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar is very, very funny. It has a stellar cast without a weak link. Tobias Menzies as Plume is a roguish, swaggering, handsome lead and Mackenzie Crook excellent as his devious sidekick, especially in the perfectly-judged fortune-teller scene. Rachael Stirling is gorgeous and hilarious as Melinda, teetering like a weeble in her hooped skirt. Aimee-Ffion Edwards is perky and flirty and earthy and Nancy Carroll is perfect in the breeches role. And when Mark Gatiss comes in as Brazen, all wig and m’dears, the evening reaches a pitch of hysterical comedy that it maintains thereafter. Its a robust, brilliant debut from Josie Rourke, which beautifully rethinks the relations - actorly and design - between stage and auditorium - and brings the play to vigorous life.

I want to start with that hymn of praise because it’s important to say how hugely entertaining it is before I note a sound of caution.

It reminded me of the evening I spent a couple of weeks before at She Stoops to Conquer at the National. The same high comedy, the same brilliant use of music and the ensemble, huge colourful sets, bright costumes, some moments of good, dirty humour and a tremendous sense of brio.

That show reminded me of the evening last year I spent watching One Man, Two Guvnors. All the same things: music, high comedy, audience participation, big laughs, physical humour, and great, great reviews.

The cautionary thought that occurred to me, watching these plays, is whether I was watching theatre for an age of austerity. Is there nothing else in The Recruiting Officer and She Stoops to Conquer than a sex farce? Is anything lost from Goldoni in his transposition to 60s London? I don’t mean that these comedies should be treated as ponderous theses on social mores. I have absolutely no problem with laughter; I love laughing and I hugely enjoyed these productions. Mark Gatiss’s Brazen brought me to squealing tearful laughter with his first scene (‘he married the daughter of old Tongue-Pad, the Master in Chancery, a very pretty woman, only squinted a little’). It’s just that I felt I was seeing a new style of production that was about light, speed and colour, a kind of production aesthetic that gave you no time to think, to reflect, even to savour. It was performance as distraction, sumptuous riches on the stage to delight the eye, acting to feast on, and the plays, on the whole, chosen for their slightness, all the easier to gussy up with the production’s own jewels. At bottom, there seemed to me something rather conservative about these shows.

​That said, how wonderful to have so many genuinely funny theatre shows on at the same time - and, note, all coming out of the subsidised sector. And these casts, too; wonderful to see actors like Rachael Stirling and Tobias Menzies making - apparently - so effortless a transition into comedy. Mackenzie Crooke continues to prove himself a wonderful stage actor, growing in confidence every time I see him. And I may just queue to see once more Mark Gatiss arrest the action of the play for a full 20 seconds as Brazen struggles to recall if his friend’s daughter ‘twas called Margaret or Marjorie.

Criticism

I have a lot of time for critics, good ones anyway, but I did laugh to read this passage from the memoir of nineteenth-century playwright Henry Becque:

When my friends and I were young, passionate starstruck artists, naturally we had dreams of doing something. Poetry, I should say, was our first temptation and, no doubt, the most practical. After poetry came the novel, the analysis of that poor human heart that we barely knew. We also used to think about the theatre, although the theatre, with all its barriers and restrictions, put us off somewhat. Amongst all these areas which attracted us equally, criticism never came up; we just didn’t consider it. Passing judgement on other people’s work and never showing your own seemed to us the height of impudence. If one of us, in a moment of mad enthusiasm, had clapped his hand to his head and said, ‘I want to be a great critic’, how we would have laughed.

Henry Becque Souvenirs d’un Auteur Dramatique in: Oeuvres Complètes Vol, 6. Paris: Crès, 1926, p. 70. My translation.

The Trial of Ubu

This has been a pretty great theatre year so far and we’re only a month in. Nick Payne’s tremendous Constellations, about which I must write, is a thoughtful, precise, funny and exuberantly melancholy piece of work. Nancy Harris’s Our New Girl isn’t perfect but she’s got a really strong voice and keeps us guessing and switching. I loved 1927‘s Animals and Children Take to the Streets and now we have the wonderful thing that is The Trial of Ubu.

The evening falls into two parts. Almost as a curtain-raiser, we begin with a cut-down Ubu the King, played as is traditional as a puppet show, in a new version by Simon Stephens. It’s raucous and funny and brutal. It’s very familiar (this is the Ubu we all know) and it’s expertly done and feels fresh and new. But that’s about fifteen minutes of the performance. We then move onto The Trial of Ubu.

The Trial of Ubu follows the proceedings of a war-crimes trial, with Ubu accused of various crimes, asked to account for a mass grave, and so on. We get a little glimpse of Ubu in his cell and the behaviour of the prosecutors.

The play is boring. It’s dull and deliberately, thrilling so. The horror of the events described has been filtered into judicial procedures; the affect has been stripped from them. It’s a matter of evidence and testimony. It is the anti-Ubu. The original play is all outrage and horror and offence and grotesquerie; the events described are foolish, impossible, not to be taken seriously. The Trial of Ubu has none of the outrage and all of the taking-it-seriously. It’s quite brilliantly done. For one thing, of course, by removing the affect from the performance, we are forced to supply it as the audience. The baroque horrors of Ubu’s death pit are chilling because of the normality with which they are described.

But Katie Mitchell has gone a step further. Rather than stage the trial itself, we are watching a pair of translators, simultaneously rendering the proceedings into English. Their job is simply to transfer the semantic contents from one language to another and they add yet another level of flatness, of jarring disaffection to proceedings. The details of the trial also compete with the detail of the translators: their clothes, their relationship, their techniques, their own moods. Indeed, we feel that there is another story being told here: they at times seem to be moved or horrified by what they are translating, having to pass on the baton to the other because of the strength of what they have heard; but also they seem to have some kind of relationship themselves, which goes through some kind of crisis towards the end of the performance. As a result, we experience a kind of profound dislocation, the data about these atrocities at one end of the communicative journey and the corresponding (or possibly corresponding) emotions at the other end. At times, we fast-forward through portions of the testimony and watch the two translators as if on a video, their sitting positions and head movements adjusting abruptly. We are caught - well, I was caught - between both enjoying the rendering of that video experience and finding something emotionally angular in their jerking, flinching movements, as if the air were full of needles.

What this did for me was radically to defamiliarise Ubu. One of the most famous pieces of theatrical outrage, Ubu Roi has softened a bit. I loved the Graeae production in the 1990s, Jamie Beddard’s Ubu a foul, spittle-flecked, roaring tyrant, a real grotesque who raised all sorts of atavistic feelings in me about disability and bodily control that made it an edgy night at Oval House that has stayed with me for years. But that was an exceptions. David Greig’s version for Dundee played BITE a few years ago and while I loved the pugnacious translation, the production seemed a bit panto. It’s lost its power to shock, for me, and the first fifteen minutes were the shocking version that I knew I was comfortable with. But the second half brought everything foul about the play into focus - so that the moment where a screen slides away to show us Ubu in his cell, looking every inch the puppet monster from the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre 110 years ago, was like being introduced to Ratko Mladić at a dinner party.

A stunning start to the year.

Aragonish

Last year, for a memorial event to my dear colleague and friend David Bradby, I did - very free - translations of two poems by the surrealist poet Louis Aragon.

Left Hand Lane

I dance among miracles
A thousand suns come down to earth
A thousand friends
        Two thousand eyes
                A thousand eyeglasses
Guide me now
Tears of petrol on the road
Blood all the way to the airport

So I dance my usual dance
In many-coloured circles, lovelier
Than an archer’s target or inspection    hatch
Whose flame roars like the wind
My life has been a purring car
Watch how dangerously I drive.

I burn
        I will burn
                Like headlights.

Parti pris

Je danse au milieu des miracles
Mille soleils peints sur le sol
Mille amis Mille yeux ou monocles
m‘illuminent de leurs regards
Pleurs du pétrole sur la route
Sang perdu depuis les hangars

Je saute sainsi d’un jour à l’autre
rond polychrome et plus joli
qu’on paillasson de tir ou l’âtre
quand la flamme est couleur du vent
Vie ô paisible automobile
et le joyeux péril de courir au devant

Je brûlerai du feu des phares

Great Big Spectacular Show

Dear friend, without tears or theatre,
I say goodbye
        You always were so light of heart
Or maybe drunk
But addicted to footlights
        And that great room
                Where the fly-ropes dangle.
The performance is dedicated to André Breton

The performance
        will begin
                in one minute

From the wings we see
A golden cloud
A flying-machine
And the great bird takes flight

        But what is this?
                The scene is nowhere
                Nowhere to be seen.

Amid the chaos        The marionette sheds wooden tears                Goodbye goodbye
                to say goodbye

Pièce à grand spectacle

L’ami sans coeur ou le théâtre
Adieu
        Celui qui est trop gai
c’est-à-dire trop rouge
pour vivre loin du feu des rampes
De la salle
                ficelles pendantes
Des coulisses
                on ne voit qu’un nuage doré
                                        machine volante
Le Régisseur croyait à l’amour d’André
Les                trois                coups
   L’oiseau            s’envole

On avait oublié de planter le décor
Tintamarre
           Le pantin verse des larmes de bois
                Pour Prendre Congé

Review of the Year 2011

What was 2011 like in the theatre? Okay, British theatre. Okay, London theatre. Okay, just the things I saw.

It was an okay but not amazing new play year. I enjoyed Penelope Skinner’s riotous The Village Bike and debbie tucker green’s Truth and Reconciliation was fierce and precise. A late entry, Written on the Heart, was compelling and vividly current. I liked Steve Waters and John Donnelly’s pair of education plays at the Bush early in the year, Little Platoons and The Knowledge. I loved loved loved Wastwater by Simon Stephens, glacial and savage and yearning. Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs I read but didn’t see and was up there as one of the strongest of the year. The Acid Test, particularly in the first half, had some of the most brilliant and satirically funny dialogue. The two strongest pieces were by established writers. Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm was a sharp new direction for him: just two voices, two bodies in space, creating a world. His settings are usually integral to the action, shaping and determining the characters. Now it’s the other way around. And it was viscerally, compellingly played. And then there was David Eldridge’s Knot of the Heart, an almost overwhelmingly moving and truthful story of someone tearing themselves and their family apart and slowly being put back together.

There were some very fine revivals this year. From the post-war repertoire, I enjoyed the two Weskers, the Donmar’s Moonlight, Butley in the West End, Fen at the Finborough, Saved at the Lyric, and, maybe most of all, Inadmissible Evidence at the Donmar. For the entire length of The Browning Version at Chichester I was convinced that I was watching one of the greatest plays of the last hundred years, a conviction that has not left me. (I enjoyed Flare Path but still am not convinced that the play is all that). I’d never seen the Goldoni behind One Man, Two Guvnors, but the show works very well and is extremely funny. Nor had I seen Schiller’s Luise Miller but I’m glad I have, especially because of its strong version by Mike Poulton. Elsewhere, I’ve just seen the Young Vic’s Hamlet which was a strange but exhilarating experience. Maybe the most beautiful revival was Katie Mitchell’s A Woman Killed With Kindness at the National; stately, frozen, horrified, and shocking.

London Road and Matilda were stunning new musicals which could both - so easily - have been disasters. Probably the show I enjoyed most this year was actually not new this year, just new to me, and it was Lone Twin’s Catastrophe Trilogy, played out all day on a Sunday at the horrible Chelsea Centre, but was a blissful experience.  Also new to me was I Am the Wind, another fine Young Vic experience in a year of ‘experience’ theatre. The Lyric’s Aladdin was comfortably in an excellent groove, a complete delight.

Design-wise, I thought the Young Vic had it. There was Miriam Buether’s delightfully gaudy set for Government Inspector (complemented by Nicky Gillibrand’s wonderful costumes); Richard Peduzzi’s stark tilting raft for I Am the Wind, which, in its simple lifts and tilts in its small lake, created an epic journey for this splintered gem. And then Jeremy Herbert’s set for Hamlet, another pre-show walk-through, like Government Inspector, opened right out, embracing the audience, yet also working on our nerves, our desires to look, our fears. The lighting needs special mention here: Adam Silverman lit the show like nothing else I’ve seen. Stark and beautiful, functional and atmospheric, all at the same time. The most terrifying ghost, the cruellest Elsinore, and sitting in the Young Vic, it didn’t feel like an English theatre experience.

Not a great year, but there’s so much energy and excitement around, one feels there’s something waiting, ready to burst out.