you'll see me (sailing in antarctica)

The show really starts when you buy a ticket. No, before that.

The show begins when you read the title. you'll see [me sailing in antarctica] asks the audience to imagine what they will see; it promises a sight which we never see, but lives [only] in the imagination. Since I bought my ticket six weeks ago, I've carried around an image of someone unspecified in a small sailing vessel in the blue whiteness of the antarctic.

non zero one's new show is somewhat site-specific and somewhat interactive. The audience gathers in the circle foyer of the Olivier Theatre and then we're led outside to a roof area at the south-east edge of the National almost between the Lyttelton and Olivier fly towers. There are 23 of us, including five members of the company, seated around a circular table. Above us is a large white hydrogen balloon, tethered in position but bobbing in the wind, with a bright light inside. It looks like a blob of light hanging milkily above us. We're wearing coats and scarves and plastic ponchos. Around us is London: the Shard, the Eye, the Houses of Parliament, the Hayward. But before we get to this place, we've imagined it. We've imagined it because a member of the company has asked us to imagine it; she's described the walk to the roof, the shape of the table, the height of the platform, the rope lights along the walkway, the headsets that we all put on. The first collision of the performance is the gap, however slender, between the mental image we've got in our heads and the reality that we encounter two minutes later.

This becomes the apparent central concern of the show. The troubled relationship between mental and optical images, the work the brain does in selecting, transforming, discarding parts of our experience, through placing objects under categories, the optics of focus and attention, and the work of memory. We're asked to reflect on the gaps between what we see and what we expect, the uniqueness of the event we're taking part in and how it will change in the memory, the way we fill in gaps in our mental pictures, and the way we construct mental images to guide our way through our futures. The company playfully introduce us to a number of concepts - philosophical, scientific, psychological - about perception, though always with a rather delightful sense of being only vaguely acquainted with the idea and not wholly sold on it.

Later in the show, we do some focusing exercises, limber up our eye muscles; on screens we are given words in various colours and we have to say what the colour is, though because the words themselves are names of colours we find that the semantic content interferes with our ability to just ‘see’. Then rise from our seats and face outwards. SPOILER ALERT The platform then starts to revolve and we are asked to say what we are seeing into the microphones on our headsets. Immediately you become aware of the necessity to select. It is impossible in language to render the fine detail of vision but perversely the work of turning what we see into language makes us (well - made me) seek out things I might not ordinarily have looked at. The South Bank of London is so familiar to me; I grew up near there I must have seen it - what? - 10,000 times? Do I even ‘see’ it any more?

And then we’re asked to project forward to imagine a future for ourselves, to imagine a sight we would like to see, and then to picture our own deaths. The show is quirky, playful, amusing, riddling, but at this moment it starts to become sombre and reflective. The gap between what we experience and what we imagine takes on a very different feeling when projected into the future. There is a shocking vividness to what you can imagine but this is laced with the uncertainty of whether what you imagine will ever be realised. Even the most modest ambition (to drink tea and eat a crumpet) might not transpire. I was surprised at my willingness to dig into my hope and shocked by how moved I was by both holding that hope vividly in my imagination and by the aching recognition that this hope might never be realised. As I left the space and walked back down into the National Theatre, I was surprised at how weak with feeling I had become. The performance had taken me emotionally by surprise.

Academics have a tendency, when working on a project or a problem, to see it everywhere. You're working on a puzzle in epistemology and suddenly every news story seems to ask this question again and again in perverse and complicated ways. You're struggling with a project on political economy and suddenly the contradictions of capitalism are visible in every last pixel of lived experience. It's both what is creative and transforming about research and a danger: the danger is that you end up losing the boundaries of your research, becoming an obsessive, seeing everything as some kind of emanation of your intellectual activity, like you've been down there and discovered the meaning of life.

I mention this because I wrote an article a few years ago about theatre and its relationship to mental images. I’ve given talks on it, lectures based on it, and think about it a lot, to the extent that I rarely see a piece of theatre without returning to the puzzles in the processes of ordinary theatrical perception. But this show really really really is working in that area, asking questions about what we are looking at and its relationship with what is imagined. Here the difference with the theatre I was discussing is that there’s virtually no fiction involved: the company really are the company, sitting and talking to us. There’s very little pretence involved, except that of course, in the absence of a capacity to by wholly objective, we’re always seeing fictions, in a sense.

But what the show does is ask questions about our own relationship to theatregoing itself as a fictional act. The show has already shifted and warped in my mind. When I described the end, I passed directly from that private projection of our future selves to the ending. I didn’t mention the glorious moment where the balloon is illuminated and we hear our own collective voices speaking the skyline of London. The show erases itself; it is a show about the failure we will all experience to imagine the show beforehand, to fully take it in at the time, and to remember it properly afterwards. And it’s a celebration of what that means for us as individuals and for the power of the mind. It’s a show about itself in a certain way.

It’s a very powerful and immensely enjoyable piece of work. The personas that the company present are very likeable, modest, and suggest no sense of superiority (we’re going to explain things to you) or flattery (we’re so pleased you’re here) or tiresome challenge (everything you think is wrong). They hit just the right note of clarity, pleasure, and reassurance. Is it perfect? Probably not, but what is? I guess I thought the ideas were perhaps thrown around a bit casually which sometimes seemed unselective. I thought the move to asking us to imagine our own deaths was a little obvious and maybe a bit cheap. (I should say the person I went with was much crosser about this than I was.) But it was so strong in so many ways: the reimagining of the National, than shape-shifting, organic white sphere above us contrasting with the brutalist rectilinearity of the flytowers. The sense of fleeting community. The wit and warmth of the company.

I spent much of the performance with the Hayward Gallery in my eyeline, where this show is currently on. you’ll see [me sailing in antarctica] is like a companion piece to an exhibition of invisible art, because it’s a show that you can go to but never see.

GATZ

There are no rules - at least, no sufficient ones - to making a good artwork. What this means is that any good work at art has a profound kind of originality about it. It emerges from the world but it brings something new to it, something that was not predicted by it or entirely contained within it. Art is in a certain restricted sense otherworldly. What this also perhaps means is that any really good piece of theatre is unimaginable to its audience.

I had a specific instance of this with GATZ, which is a show I’ve found very hard to imagine. I think I first heard about the show five years ago and ever since have  had two equal but somewhat contradictory responses to it: first, I’ve really wanted to see it; second, whichever way people describe it, it sounded to me really boring. The show comprises the complete text of The Great Gatsby, read aloud by what appears to be an office worker, with colleagues occasionally joining in to stand in for (not quite ‘play’) other characters. It’s around six hours long plus three intervals and a dinner break.

Why might I find it boring? Because it sounded like there’s not much to look at. Because it sounded like it might be reverential in a classic. Because I sometimes try to listen to audiobooks and always get distracted, miss my place and give up. Because I might find myself thinking, I’d rather just read it. Because it just might be long.

So why did I want to see it? Because people were raving about it. I was intrigued by it. Because I also thought of it as a kind of footnote to verbatim, sharing both that claim of unmediated fidelity (‘every printed word in the 9 chapters of the novel’ boasts the website) and a kind of hostility to fiction and theatricality; I thought I’d read an interview where the company had claimed that it was impossible to ‘adapt’ The Great Gatsby. Actually, I despair of that attitude and it was another reason why I thought I might find it boring. Nonetheless, it seemed something working through contradiction which is a state in which interesting work is often made and, hey, I reasoned, at least I’d get reacquainted with The Great Gatsby.

On all counts, I couldn’t have been more wrong. First, it’s never boring. Amazingly, it just never is. The Great Gatsby, obvious though this is to say, is a terrific book: zips along, is often very funny, brims with feeling, and digs into a mysterious failure in the heart of success, finds the sadness in being who we are. I read the book when I was 15; liked it, kind of didn’t get it, but found the plot, such as I formed it, enjoyable. I don’t know if my vague recollection of the story 24 hours ago reflected just the decay of memory or the contours of the story that affected me at the time. Until reacquainting myself with the novel in the theatre yesterday, I recalled a story about a rich man with a troubled soul who held big parties; I also remembered a garage off a highway and a car accident. Weirdly I hadn’t remembered that Gatsby dies, nor that he was a fraud (or bootlegger, or fantasist, or criminal, or whatever ultimately we think he is). His sad, sad funeral (‘All the mourners travelled in one car’ as Lambchop sung on another occasion) seems to have passed me by. But the idea of an empty man, hollowed out by deception and loss, either didn’t touch me as a teenager or spoke to me so much I swerved to avoid it as it ran out into the road.

Second, I also never stopped giving it my attention. It takes a while, maybe 20 minutes, to adjust to the experience. We are looking at a mundane office. Racks of document boxes to the right, a private office to the left, a table in the middle, sofa towards the back. Doors right and left. An office worker comes in with a coffee, takes off his coat, settles himself down, taps a key on his keyboard but his computer does not respond. He tries again. Turns it off, counts to ten, turns it back on again. It still does not respond. He turns it off and on again. No response. He tries once more. Nothing. Other office workers have come in. Roaming around his desk for something more analogue to work on, he opens his Rolodex and there, oddly, sitting up and begging, is a worn copy of The Great Gatsby.

He opens the book and reads aloud the first sentence: ‘In my younger and more vulnerable days my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since...’ The office worker (Scott Shepherd) looks bemused at the page, as if he’s never seen the words before, but also as if he’s startled by what it feels like to say those words aloud, to hear his own voice uttering those words in the low-level banality of the office. So he carries on. Scott speaks the words slowly - wait, no he doesn’t, because it never feels slow. He gives the words space in the mouth and he gives us time to enjoy them but also to enjoy him enjoying them, or being puzzled by them, being excited by them. Initially, the colleagues seem tolerantly amused by his curious project; there are moments where, serendipitously, as they go about their mundane office work, they seem to be echoing images, moments, attitudes from the story, phones go off, magazines are read, someone stands at a certain moment. Then one of them starts to join in, mockingly; another speaks the words of Tom Buchanan - maybe he knows the book, maybe he was in a school play version; everyone is intrigued, perplexed, but delighted. Soon, whole scenes are being created in the office. Then the office seems to recede from our attention and we appear to be on Long Island. In the very final phase, the attention returns to the lone office worker, who closes the book and now recites the words directly to us and from memory, leading to that extraordinary final paragraph. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’. What all of this does is give a compelling but oddly restful shape to the day. You’re given clear, simple stage pictures that anchor the situations, underpin the emotional shape of the novel, and, increasingly, ask complicated questions about the novel.

Because, third, this is the key thing: it’s absolutely not a production that is hostile to fiction or theatricality. It’s very theatrical and it’s very fictional. The office is not a neutral, perfunctory space, except that it performs perfunctoriness. The office is specifically placed in the 1980s, I’m guessing at a moment of transition from paper documents to digital documents, in which the quixotic project of reading a novel aloud becomes fraught with historical meaning. When Scott ‘finds’ The Great Gatsby he has just been doing battle with a computer; he finds the book and he looks at it as though at an alien object. He handles it with amusement, this clumsy analogue, linear object, with its rudimentary operating system, negligible data capacity, lack of compression and unwriteability. When he reads the first lines of the book, his startled response is almost that of someone with an iMac managing to get data off a 5” floppy. The office also amplifies and places the life of the narrator, who observes at one moment:

Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.
   Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust.

It enriches our sense of Nick as, in his way, as much of an adventurer as Gatsby, finding romances, conspiracies and thrillers in his lunch breaks and after work. It keeps in your retina the dull everyday of New York and the East Coast from which the parties, the adulteries, the rumours and escapades are on a doomed mission to escape.

But then - and this is where it became so interesting in its play with text - it’s not sneaking a conventional adaptation on us. Nothing could be cheesier than an adaptation of a novel where someone starts reading it aloud and, as if under an enchantment, the actors find themselves magically transformed into the characters. There’s no transformation here. As the reading starts to unfold, I found myself unsure whether I was making the connections between the book and the events onstage, so slight, so glancing were they. It feels purposeful but not rigid. And this tone is maintained throughout. Often we are tripped up by the failure of the stage image to reflect the book; when Klipspringer is summoned from his bed to play piano for Gatsby’s guests, we hear him described as ‘an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair’. Some of this is borne out in the figure we see before us, but he has thick medium-length straight dark hair. Early in his acquaintance with Gatsby, Nick describes ‘his short hair [which] looked as though it were trimmed every day’. In the private office, behind glass, our Gatsby stand-in, Jim Fletcher, stands with his back to us, looking up, showing off his bald crown.

Jim Fletcher’s Gatsby is one of the most fascinating things about this production. First, because he’s not playing Gatsby. He is strikingly unlike Gatsby; he has little of the charm of Gatsby. Nick refers often to his seductive smile - ‘one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life’, ‘people liked him when he smiled’, ‘that radiant and understanding smile’ - but Fletcher’s smile is a wintry and sinister grimace. Gatsby impresses everyone with his elegance of dress, his shirts sent over from England, his  pink suit. Jim Fletcher’s gaudy chain-store shirts and awkwardly-cut, mismatching pink jacket and trousers raise a laugh when he first appears and signals to us the failed aspirations and delusions of the man before the plot stumbles upon them. His performance asks questions about what acting is, because the best way I can think of describing the show’s attitude to performance as that Jim Fletcher is ‘standing in for’ Gatsby. But even that is not right. First, because he’s ‘playing’ another office worker, standing in for Gatsby, Gatsby held at two fastidious removes from the actor. But second because I know Jim Fletcher from various New York City Players shows like Boxing 2000, Showcase, and The End of Reality, where his tall, ungainly presence is both broodingly mysterious and absurd. He brings a preposterous enigma to Gatsby, the actor lending some of his own persona to the part, as do all actors. But he does so without seeming to do so physically, even visible or audibly. His voice, slightly clotted, thickly-accented suggests someone who’d struggle to appear a jazz-age sophisticate, though here he doesn’t struggle because he isn’t trying. He is Gatsby without acting him.

If there’s anything anti-theatrical about this deeply theatrical production, it’s something akin to that worry people have when a favourite novel is adapted: it’s not like the pictures in my head. This production does not try to replace the pictures in your head or in your memory. If your Gatsby is Robert Redford or Leonardo di Caprio or an imagined fantasy casting of Orson Welles or some indeterminate mental image, that figure remains in play. What the show does is ask questions about is what a novel is, what theatrical representation is, what a mental image is, and how these three things converge on The Great Gatsby. The novel is about a world of hollow desperate barely-maintained pretence, this production gives us this world in all its thinness. The title GATZ refers to Jay Gatsby’s name before he changed it in a moment of theatrical reinvention and performance. This is Gatsby before Gatsby, theatre not bringing the expected shallow facade out of the novel, but the opposite.

I’ve made it sound like a rather more conceptual experience than it is. It doesn’t feel like a particularly experimental show and you could just sit there and enjoy the novel. The day is sumptuously enjoyable. To a very great extent it’s because Scott Shepherd holds the narrative with mischievous authority; we feel supremely confident in this storyteller; we share, to an extent, in his endurance test. And we relax into the arms of an extraordinary novel and experience that great pleasure of having a great story told to us expertly. But there’s something very rich about this type of telling that means my memories of the show are already uncertain, caught between stage image and mental image, neither complete, both gesturing towards the novel, always out of reach.

Birthday

Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie is, on one level, a brutal reflection of masculine fears of women’s bodies, specifically of impregnation and childbirth. The Alien perpetuates itself through a kind of grotesque insemination; a phallic organ penetrates the body through the mouth and down the throat, planting an embyro in the stomach where it incubates until mature, eventually bursting out through the stomach wall, in a nightmarish parody of parturition. This initiates a pattern of sexualised imagery that runs through the movie, from the Alien itself, a phallic mother, producing eggs but also unsheathing a long toothed phallus with which it kills. The murderous penis is echoed in the cyborg Ash’s attack on Ripley, pushing a rolled-up pornographic magazine down her throat, a sexualised form of attack that echoes the Alien’s own rape-attack.

Joe Penhall’s new play, Birthday, is in the same territory. We are in a counterfactual world in which men can bear children. The play takes place in hospital, where Ed has come to be induced and have a caesarian section. His partner, Lisa, seems unable to have children after complications associated with the birth of their first child. We watch them through the day, their middle-class sense of entitlement losing them patience with the nursing staff, Ed enduring a series of humiliating procedures to ensure the baby is in the right position. The baby is delivered but is running a temperature requiring urgent treatment, which tips Ed into bleak post-natal depression. But eventually the baby’s condition stabilises and the couple prepare to go home. Six of the play’s seven scenes take place over around 30 hours from late afternoon on Friday to Saturday evening. The final scene takes place a few days later.

It’s a good, simple idea, well realised and thought out in some detail. The medical procedures seem to me plausibly thought through and Ed’s sense of righteous indignation and righteous indignity are really well written. The interplay with the hospital staff - Joyce and Natasha - is both very funny and very recognisable; the polite submissiveness of the nurse and registrar a clear mask over their officious power.

The play’s a bit fuzzy, I think. The gender-swap thought experiment seems to want to have it both ways. At times, we’re enjoying the incongruity of a man saying and doing things we might usually associate with women: the first minute has him complaining that Lisa hasn’t bought him his raspberry leaf tea. At these moments, the play is in the comic territory of George Kaufman’s If Men Played Cards As Women Do which draws its comic energy on the preposterousness of men behaving like women. Wittily, the registrar has a tendency to defer to Lisa over Ed’s head, in a reversal of the standard sexist tendency of so many professional’s to tacitly assume that the husband really makes the decisions in a relationship. But at other times, the play’s asking how men would behave if they could give birth. Would we put up with the kinds of things we expect women to put up with? How would we mythologise male birth pain? How would we expect hospital staff to behave towards us?

The first of these, in a sense, relies on the stability of gender roles, the thought experiment only confirming the security of who we currently think we are in gender terms. The second is much subtler, opening up and interrogating gender behaviour and asking how far the world is built around particular attitudes to sex and identity. The play’s at its best when it pushes at this second question. It doesn’t push very far at it, particularly because I think it gets distracted by a satire on the NHS, in particular the strange mixture of care and neglect you find in a ward, the maddening lack of information, the seemingly arbitrary decisions beings taken on your behalf. This is well captured, very recognisable, wittily done, but it has a cost in the incisiveness of the play. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem as if anything much would be different if men could get pregnant. Of course, had he really followed the thought through and created the wholly counterfactual world, perhaps one in which pregnancy is suddenly seen as noble and masculine rather than bovine and feminine, and the health system had comprehensively changed as a result, we’d be even more in the realms of science fiction with perhaps a consequent lack of engagement and recognition.

The ambiguity is crucial though, because if it’s the first sort of play, it’s basically a rather conservative piece of work; if it’s the second, it has the capacity to be much more questioning and thoughtful. So politically, the play remains a curate’s egg: radical in parts.

Put another way, the play doesn’t know whether it wants to be sexist. I’m not the first person to say that Joe Penhall seems much more interested in women than men; his early plays are built beautifully around male-male friendships; his most successful play, the brilliant Blue/Orange, is all-male. Landscape with Weapon is set in a very male world, its single woman character passing as male very convincingly. In Dumb Show, the woman journalist uses her gender as a weapon, but remains herself something of a cypher. In last year’s Haunted Child, we’re watching a marriage in deep spiritual and emotional crisis, but it’s Douglas who makes all the moves and has all the best lines, while Julie is left to do little more than cope. Here, despite a witty and honest performance by the wonderful Lisa Dillon, Lisa is much less vividly realised than Ed. We know what Lisa says; we know how Ed feels.

But what Ed feels is fiercely interesting. The strongest bit of writing in the play is Ed’s horrified recollection of watching Lisa give birth to their first child:

You didn’t have to stand there listening to the ear-splitting screams while one congenital fuckwit after another came in, rummages around inside you and then fucked off for a smoke. No epidural. No doctors. You didn’t see them at the end, stitching you back together, legs akimbo, marinating in your own blood and shit, great strings of blood like drool. I don’t know why they invited me to watch - why do they do that? They kept showing me your vagina as if it were a holy relic. (Staring into space) men are visually stimulated. It’s our worst nightmare. Suddenly this blissful, heavenly organ, this ravishing jewel you’ve been obsessively petting and tending and eyeing with rapture all those years becomes the most alarming, harrowing thing you’ve ever seen in your life [...] I’m telling you, as a man, once you’ve had a child, once you’ve watched a live human emerge from your wife’s vagina, by God you need a change of scenery. (p. 36)

It’s strong because it has the stink of honesty, without adornment, without apology. It’s made dramatically possible by Ed’s depleted, agonised state, and it expresses the Alien feeling; that childbirth is a kind of body horror, an individual, separate human being, with its own will, comes out of another human. It’s the normal uncanny.

At one level, I don’t think Joe Penhall quite decided what play he wanted to write. Certain key choices were kind of fudged. Because what he’s really interested in exploring is the psychology of men in all of its horrors, irrationalities, prejudices and contradictions. This picture only appears in glimmers, but those glimmers alone make Birthday worth seeing.

The Rest is Silence

dreamthinkspeak are best known for their site-specific theatrical installations that take buildings and spaces and transform them magically. Unlike Punchdrunk whose pieces are grittily surreal, detailed and material, dreamthinkspeak work tends to be mercurial, ethereal, poetic. They’ve often worked with texts but usually literary ones, like The Divine Comedy or Crime and Punishment. But this time they’ve created something in dialogue with a play, perhaps the most famous play in the world: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

What is the form of this piece? The audience enters in a large square black space. The walls are dark windows. There is something that looks vaguely like a skylight in the centre of the ceiling. As the performance begins, these dark windows are illuminated: either elegant projections play on their surfaces, or the lights reveal them in three dimensions as rooms in the family home of Hamlet. There are around ten rooms in all, some of which transform into other rooms. Many of the rooms connect and we see characters move from space to space. The actors are always behind perspex. When they speak they are amplified. Sometimes their images are captured on video and projected on other walls. The audience stands, walks around, some people sat on the floor. Scenes are reflected in the other walls. Occasionally, images are projected down onto the skylight.

What have they done with Hamlet? Like almost everyone, they’ve cut the text. As this show runs around 90 minutes, they have gone obviously further than most. Indeed, they’ve transposed scenes, spliced others together (notably Hamlet’s renunciation of Ophelia with the scene in Gertrude’s bedchamber). The most radical transformation occurs with the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenes; they begin, as in the original, briefed by Claudius to make an assessment of Hamlet’s behaviour. But we don’t see that encounter; instead we see them return with copious notes of his strange comments which they repeat to each other with hilarity. Later they come across Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech, ripped up, as if it is a destroyed diary entry. They spend much of the rest of the play trying to put it back together. Eventually, on the fatal boat to England, they think they have done so successfully. Instead they have inadvertently created a hymn to death which prepares them for their own demise. Apparently, every word spoken in this production comes from the Shakespeare.

The setting is modern, hypercontemporary. Polonius’s office desk has an iMac and a Flos Arco lamp. Hamlet’s bedside table has Jo Nesbo novels on it. There’s a feeling of stark, clinical minimalism about the interior designs, which contrast with the wistful, organic shapes of the garden whose image we see, now and again, projected on windows. This modern transposition reflects the approach to the text. The supernatural is downplayed; tough to do in a play that hinges on the appearance of the ghost, but in this version Hamlet does not seem to see the ghost - it is left to us to assume that he has imagined or hallucinated a vision of his father’s murder. The ghost appears to Claudius, but this may be drunkenness. Act 4 is almost entirely omitted, interestingly. There is no Yorick either, no graveyard scene, and no Fortinbras. All of this suggests a somewhat depoliticised Hamlet and, yes, it kind of is, because it’s an internal Hamlet, a Hamlet about the prison of the self. The panoply of perspex boxes disorganise the stage such that no scene has priority over another; often I was led to wonder if the events in one box were being imagined by the inhabitants of another. The production is trying to get into the heads of these characters, though which heads we are in remains in question.

What works? The appearance of scenes, rising or flickering out of the dark, is never anything other than magical. The dead darkness of the box-sets means that characters suddenly appear in new rooms, creating moments of shock and disorientation, which helps create a sense of time out of joint, and a royal palace disturbed and spying. Placing the characters behind perspex paradoxically allows for very close inspection (you can press your nose against the glass) and imposes distance (you don’t feel quite as if you’re breathing the same air). This is sometimes a frustrating dynamic, but sometimes it enhances the frustration of the characters: for around 20 minutes, Hamlet sat alone in a lounge area, silently and blankly facing out, the isolation in the staging enhancing our sense of his social loneliness and mental imprisonment. I felt that Ophelia’s story, too, was made more vivid and more moving because her inability to get through to Hamlet were picked up and reinforced by the barriers between him and us.

There are some very witty transpositions of the Shakespeare. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spend a long sequence hysterically reading out things that Hamlet has said; many of these things (‘quintessence of dust’, ‘the king of infinite space’, etc.) are some of the greatest moments of stage poetry ever written, but here they suggest madness, a kind of poetic logorrhoea. This serves not only as a commentary on Hamlet, but also a commentary on Hamlet, and asks questions about our relation to the play, so venerated that maybe it’s not properly read or listened to. I’ve seen four Hamlets in the last four years, know the play very well, but still heard whole speeches I could have sworn were grafted in from another play.

I was reminded of the French Symbolist theatre of the 1890s. A particular staging trope of the Symbolists would be to create a proscenium within the proscenium, with a narrator on the outside and, behind a gauze, other-worldly figures. The Symbolists believed, to oversimplify, in the primary reality of a metaphysical world of cosmic harmonies that underlay the mess of everyday appearances. Their beef with theatre was its immutable materiality which, to them, turned everything into Naturalism. The frame-within-a-frame was intended to suggest that we looked through material reality into something more abstract, conceptual, metaphysical, quasi-linguistic (the Symbolists thought language was uniquely able to expressed abstraction and harmonies and correspondences). But though the audience were supposed to be looking from one world into another, different performances differed about which side was the metaphysical one. At the Theatre de l’Oeuvre, the most successful failure in theatre history, the audience were earthbound adventurers being offered a glimpse of the noumenal by the magicians of the Symbolist stage. But in a play like Maurice Maeterlinck’s Interior, we are looking in on a family Who Have Yet To Hear The Dreadful News. We watch them through the windows of their home (another sub-proscenium) and we see a kind of naturalist performance, occasionally broken by the inhabitants intimations of something more as they paw blindly at the windows. We know that one of the daughters has drowned and we watch in helpless pathos in a way that positions us as Gods or metaphysical beings acquainted not just with a piece of gossip but aware more broadly of the terrible omnipresent pathos of Death.

This is what I thought was going on here. The play has been somewhat stripped of its supernatural appurtenances but we supply them instead. We are constituted as witnesses who know the characters, the play, the real history; hell, we even know what is going to happen. We rise like Gods above the action observing what fools these mortals be. The barriers between us and the actors then became a question: is the barrier protecting us from the actors or the actors from us? Are we helpless witnesses or are they helpless victims? At one moment, Hamlet thumped at the perspex in frustration, meanwhile audience members stepped right up to the windows as if in a reptile house. We yearned for each other, I think.

But then the thing started to fall apart a bit. I was enjoying the stripped-down quality of the piece and for a while thought we might not get the deaths of Polonius or Ophelia, the whole trip to England, the King at prayer, and instead a static moment of personal-political crisis, a governing power with a wayward son. But then the plot started crowding back in. Polonius gets killed, Claudius as prayer does not; Ophelia drowns and the hapless Ros & Guil are disposed of in the North Sea. I had a pretty good time, certainly for the first hour, but eventually I felt the play defeated them. Its weight that they tried to lift off our backs, dragged them down. Ten minutes before the end, we see the boat to England: we see Hamlet’s discovery of  Claudius’s attempt to have him done away with; we also see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finally piece the wrong ‘To be or not to be’ speech together. Both events seem to seal their fate and the projection shows us the boat, in the middle of a grey, empty sea. An iris slowly closes on the image, like the end of a silent movie. I longed for this to be the end, the bold end, Hamlet escaped from not just the court, but from his own play too.

But instead it was back to Elsinore. By the time we get to the last act, all invention has gone: in fact, the staging of the sword fight as a fencing match was virtually identical to the National’s Hamlet in 2010. At this point, it felt like a failure of nerve, too great a respect for the text and a desire to tell the story, that in doing so the company abandoned their attempt really to question the play, its priorities, its status in the literary canon and the deforming effect of that on the quality of our attention. Instead we just got some decent Shakespeare behind glass and it ended up as exactly the museum piece it was trying not to be.

This is to say that I admired it for the most part and felt ultimately frustrated that something more rigorous and vigorous hadn’t been pursued right to the end. The show seemed ambivalent about whether it came to bury Hamlet or the praise it. In one superb sequence we see three of the rooms transformed into Hamlet’s bedroom, but, we come to understand, at different times, and we see Claudius, Gertrude, and R&G all variously discovering ‘To be or not to be’. They start to read it, the words cascading over each other, joined by Polonius who has got the message. Does this erase the text, get past the awful iconicity of it, fracture it, break it apart, reduce it to sound, semantemes, phonemes? Or does it become a pure tribute to the glory of the Bard? I wasn’t sure and I’m not sure the production was either. I like ambivalence and ambiguity, but this seemed uncertain, cautious.

I see that dreamthinkspeak have had a go at Hamlet before. I suppose I’d be interested to see their third attempt. Will they have the boldness to take the play further apart?

Making Noise Quietly

Robert Holman’s 1986 play, Making Noise Quietly, is one of the mostly subtly influential plays of the last thirty years. Its form is the triptych; it comprises three entirely separate plays without shared characters and only the most fleeting connections between the playlets. Last year’s Wastwater has the same form; so does David Eldridge’s magnificent Under the Blue Sky; Rebecca Prichard’s Essex Girls has the same intentionally broken backed structure, this time a double bill. One might even see it in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, if only in the work the play requires of the audience to find the links between the plays.

I say that the connections between the constituent plays - Being Friends, Lost, Making Noise Quietly - are fleeting, but that’s both true and false. The plays fittingly, all centre on somewhat fleeting and unexpected encounters: a sunbathing Quaker meets an openly gay artist towards the end of the Second World War; a woman is told that her estranged son has died by the dead man’s brother-in-law; and a father and son, holidaying in the Black Forest, encounter a businesswoman, a survivor of Berkenau.

The plays only fleetingly encounter each other as well. There are no shared characters, no shared settings, and - unlike Wastwater or Under the Blue Sky - no shared background characters. There are references that echo each other but they are not the same; a naval officer in one play is echoed by references to soldiers in another. They miss each other darkly, but the air moves because of them. What links the three plays is the notion of the unexpected, transformative encounter. In the first, Oliver, the Quaker, is led to declare his desires to have sex with another man. In the second, a woman discovers something about her estranged son and decides not to tell her husband; in the third, a boy sunk in his traumatised thoughts is brought inchingly back into civility.

What they also share is the shadow of war. The first is set against the Second World War, the second the Falklands War, and the third sits in the long shadow of the Holocaust. The war presses insistently on the characters, even if they ignore it, survive it, refuse to acknowledge it. It reminds me of the 80s and that ever-present fear of nuclear annihilation (well captured in David Eldridge’s M.A.D. [2004] and Gary Owen’s Shadow of a Boy [2005]).

But here, as in virtually all of Holman’s work, what stops the heart are the moments of sudden intensity, the turn in a relationship that seems to come logically from nowhere. In the third play, there is an extraordinary, excruciating sequence, where the older woman Helene is trying to teach the silent young man to say thank you for a gift. She asks close to thirty times for him to say ‘thank you’, patiently enduring his shrieks, his violence, his refusals. And it builds to this:

HELENE. I cannot tell what he say yet.

SAM (clearer still, but it is obvious SAM cannot speak very well, even when he tried). Thank you.

HELENE. No.
SAM (beginning to try). Thank you.
HELENE. Better.
SAM (really trying). Thank you.
HELENE. Come on, Sam.
SAM (really concentrating). Thank you.
HELENE. And again, please.
SAM (really quite clearly). Thank you very much.
HELENE. What?
SAM. Thank you very much. (Methuen, 1987, p. 36)

Bear in mind this boy has uttered virtually nothing but grunts and shrieks in the long scene that precedes this sequence. The scene makes clear the boy’s disturbed mental state, the trauma of his family life, the neglect of his father and absence of his mother. And the sequence zooms in emotionally on this one exchange. Holman beautifully wrong-foots the audience, waiting for the words ‘thank you’ to come more and more into focus so that when we are so close to the woman and boy, that the four words ‘thank you very much’ are an abundance, an excess of communication that fills the theatre with feeling.

Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance (2005) argues that to ‘togetherness’ of audience and performers in theatre offers an experiential rehearsal for political utopia. Moments where we are brought together by our collective attention and the skill and imagination of the theatremakers give us a sense of what a Good Society might feel like. I like the argument very much and it certainly connects with my feelings about theatre. Though she has been criticised for it, I think she is right to revalue notions like faith, hope, longing, utopia in the book as components of a practical materialist politics, not, as the Left has sometimes felt, evasions of it.

It’s a general principle in contemporary theatre, I think. The more fragmented the form, the more it evokes our longing for wholeness. In his programme note to The Bite of the Night (1988), Howard Barker writes ‘the play for an age of fracture is itself fractured and hard to hold, as a broken bottle is hard to hold’. Aged 20 I think I only saw the fracture: I missed that Barker presumes that we are trying to hold the bottle. If we lived happily with fracture, a broken bottle would not be hard to hold.

It’s in plays like Making Noise Quietly that I feel the utopian performative most clearly. In part it is precisely because of the sharp fragmentation of the play - its separate scenes, the characters who don’t meet, the characters who don’t quite understand each other, the omnipresence of fear, trauma and loss - that make the small moments of connection chokingly powerful.