2005 draws to a close
2005 draws to a close and I seem to have missed (yet again) a raft of good plays. I missed most of the Ibsen this year as well as the new Mike Leigh (although I was never going to be organised to get a ticket.
Susannah Clapp at the Observer offers her review of the year which includes:
Most disconcerting drama: Neil LaBute’s incisively acted This is How it Goes at the Donmar
Most interesting new subject: Agriculture, explored in Nell Leyshon’s Comfort Me With Apples and Richard Bean’s Harvest
Most spectacular vomit: The projectile version in And Then There Were None at the Gielgud
Turkey: Romance, David Mamet’s unfunny courtroom comedy at the Almeida
I think for me, Death of a Salesman was all I expected and more. Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, in a very different way, was also more than I expected. I shall have to think of other shows which made an impact this year. Dragon’s trilogy comes to mind.
Thinking back on the year…
I had a reading of a new play at the Soho Theatre, went on a Royal Court course, got some ideas through to the final rounds at BBC radio, received funding for YELLOW GENTLEMEN and managed to keep on writing while working – so not a bad year, all in all. Hoping 2006 will bring more good things.
Ken Campbell says “yes”
Ken Campbell argues not saying “no” can bring about great improv.
Decor Without Production, his series of late-night shows scheduled for the Jerwood Theatre from March 2006, is in part a tribute to the improvisation and mask work led by George Devine and Keith Johnstone in the 1960s and 1970s.
Campbell says he has begun to wonder “whether it isn’t time to disband the Royal Court as a writers’ theatre. I don’t understand the worship of writers in this country,” he says, “since none of them are much good.”
… Last weekend saw the inaugural Improvathon, a 36-hour play hatched on the spot at Ladbroke Grove’s Inn on the Green between 10am on Saturday and 10pm on Sunday, with only one or two five-minute breaks in the action.
I didn’t know it was on, but supposedly it was based on the idea:
‘Don’t ever say no. Work round it. Do not say the word no … Saying yes will often bring surprises and will dig you deeper. Yes will make the world open up.’”
This is much like the Yes-man book of Danny Wallace. I think there might be something to this notion of always saying yes…
Danny said: ‘I, Danny Wallace, being of sound mind and body, do hereby write this manifesto for my life. I swear I will be more open to opportunity. I swear I will live my life taking every available chance. I swear I will say Yes to every favour, request, suggestion and invitation. I SWEAR I WILL SAY YES WHERE ONCE I WOULD HAVE SAID NO.’
… With this modus operandi making a really extended improvisation possible, the really interesting point comes about 30 hours in, says Campbell. “The lizard brain is the key,” he says, explaining that at this point in the improvathon, the performers gain full access to some of the supposedly primitive but very useful areas of the human mind.
“After hour 30, people I hadn’t thought were anything in particular became brilliant. Hours 26 to 30 were the most uniformly abysmal, but they were followed by six hours of sensations.”
I’m looking forward to seeing some stuff next year although I’m not sure I can yet quite agree with his assertion that writers here aren‘t much good. His assertion though rhymes with what Mark Ravenhill was saying about new writing….
Mamet argues poetry in plays is not enough
Playwriting is a young man’s – and, of late, a young woman’s – game. It requires the courage of youth still inspired by rejection and as yet unperverted by success. Most playwrights’ best work is probably their earliest. Those prejudices of anger, outrage and heartbreak the writer brings to his early work will be fuelled by a passionate sense of injustice. In the later work, this will in the main have been transformed by the desire for retribution.
Then he argues
1. Plays are written to be performed. This may seem a tautology, but consider: description of the character’s eye colour, hair colour, history and rationale cannot be performed. An actor can perform only a physical action. Any stage description more abstract than “she takes out a revolver” cannot be performed. Try it.
2. In a good play, the character’s intentions are conveyed to the actor, through him to his antagonist, and through them, to the audience, through the words he speaks. Any dialogue that is not calculated to advance the intentions of the character (in the case of Othello, for instance, to find out if his wife is cheating on him) is pointless. If the dialogue does not advance the objective of the character, then why would he say it?
And concludes
Without intention, vehement intention, there is no drama, in life or on the stage. And so, even if the speech were poetry, to what purpose?
Maybe Mamet is right and every line has to drive the action in the well made play, but I can’t help but think there are some times room for other things. Things which show us or the characters that we are human and perhaps that some times includes poetry, as well as song, music or other uniquely human attributes.
To write a play
What do you need to start a play?
This can’t have a right answer.
I’m trying to sort out my ingredients before writing a first draft of some thing I’m thinking about. I’m prevaricating.
It could mean I’m not ready. Or a bit lazy. Or it’s part of my process.
So, I decided to pontificate more and see if I had enough ingredients.
All you probably need is character. Perhaps just one. Some would argue for a “theme”.
Craig Mazin argues
1. The theme.
2. The plot.
3. The characters and their arcs.
4. The key sequences and their purpose within the plot and theme.
5. The temporal structure of the story (what happens when and how far along).
are the ingredients needed.
Someone argued to me, all you need is emotional beats and arcs. Quite how you get them without everything else, I’m not sure.
Some times I have a key image or phrase.
Anyone have any key ingredients for them?
Bruntwood Playwriting Competition: major prizes!
I’ve mentioned this before, but the details are now out about the The Bruntwood Playwriting Competition for the Royal Exchange.
It’s an amazing opportunity for budding playwrights. It’s completely anonymous so you’ve got just as good (or bad) as chance as anyone else.
There are a few rules eg piece original and unperformed, you have to be over 18 and living in the UK/Ireland, but not many.
£15,000 as a First Prize, a Second Prize of £10,000 and Third Prize of £5000. There is also a Regional Award for those living in the North West (£5000), an Under 26 Award (£5000), and a bursary for a promising writer to have a year’s residency at the Royal Exchange Theatre. In addition to the prize money, the winning play or plays should be produced as part of the Manchester International Festival.
Download the application form here.
Download the playwriting pack here.
I hope to enter something. If you’ve needed some incentive to get writing, this could be it.
The deadline is 30 April 2006.
Cleansed: Review
Treat old plays like new and new plays like old.
I think treating new writing with the same critical respect as Ibsen or Shakespeare and treating Ibsen with the same freshness as a new work, will generally pay dividends in a production.
Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, directed by Sean Holmes, at the Arcola has been treated with respect. A very concerted effort to get to the heart and soul of the play.
Still, Billington can not be reconciled to Kane’s vision.
Where as Maxie Szalwinska thinks it “comes close to achieving the cathartic effect of Greek tragedy….” and “it’s about the capacity to feel, gnawing need and the annihilating power of love”
It’s an ambiguous institution and the shadowy “doctor” Tinker seems to be running “cures” and experiments. Torturing people. Testing the bounds of what people will and won’t do for love.
In the power of the nameless institution, Tinker scissors off tongues, chops off limbs, mutilates genitals and causes his subjects no end of pain, embarrassment, cruelty and boredom. This is reflected in what the audience feels viscerally. I saw cringing. I saw yawns. [Slowly making someone eat a box of chocolates intended for their loved one becomes almost visual art – painful, embarrassing, cruel, boring].
Yet, juxtaposed and intertwined with these sanctioned acts of violence are moments of love and tenderness. All the characters have their moment of tenderness; kisses, touches, sex, dancing, all the things which can rebel against cruelty.
Kane writes in to her play, a moment where flowers are meant to blossom on stage. The projected images are pale imitations of the power of that image.
Imagine: this dark, tortuous institution suddenly ablaze with blooming flowers.
That for me is the central image of the play.
Where there’s darkness and violence and torture and cruelty, there’s still love and tenderness and dancing and reaching out.
“I love you now. I’m with you now. I’ll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you. Now. That’s it. No more. Don’t make me lie to you.”
Kane does not explain it. She simply shows this vision. The actors and director perform brilliantly to bring this vision to life.
It’s not an easy play. Most won’t “like” it. Probably many wouldn’t enjoy it. However it offers a vision of the world and our place in it that makes us stop and think. Some will leave the play, somehow different than before the play began and I suppose that’s what good art does.
At the Arcola Theatre until Dec 3rd – 020 7503 16 46 (box office)
World’s Biggest Diamond
Saw the World’s Biggest Diamond by Gregory Motton [more famous in France than here] at the Royal Court, this week.
A 73 year old writer is dying. He is visited by a 60 year old former lover and her third husband. Over the course of the next couple of days, they pick apart their affair of 30 years ago – with some of the flickering passion perhaps still lingering.
Michael Billington suggests the play is frustrating but that
the acting at the Theatre Upstairs, under Simon Usher’s direction, is wonderful. Neither Jane Asher nor Michael Feast look nearly old enough for the characters.
But Asher beautifully shows the woman’s glacial facade slowly thawing out of concern for her dying lover and from memories of lost happiness: her sudden smile on the recollection of ice cream getting into her eye hints at her long-suppressed tenderness. And Feast lends the solipsistic old recluse, who feels we are “all alone with God in this nasty dead universe”, a neo-Beckettian bitterness. Acting as good as this makes me forgive the hermetic nature of Motton’s writing.
I wasn’t moved by the play or the acting. Part of this was the fact the actors did not to me embody a 60 year old woman or a 73 year old man dying, as Billington also points out, they look far too young.
The play lacked detail in its writing. Not only detail in the present eg who are her children? What does he write? But also in the past, what were any of the details of the events that made them fall in love? I only came away with the sense of the abstract and nothing concrete like the details of the first day they met, or slept together or the last time they spoke.
Perhaps, I wasn’t concentrating enough, but I wasn’t drawn into the play, and not drawn into the characters. Others may think the acting was good, having not been drawn in, I’m not sure I can judge although my companion for the night didn’t like the acting either. I wouldn’t put this high up my list to see but as an attempt to tell the story of two people meeting 30 years after their affair has ended it does hold some interest.
Royal Court Until November 26. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
Gladiator Games & Prison
Went to see Gladiator Games dramatised by Tanika Gupta at Stratford Royal East. It’s a superb piece of verbatim theatre. See earlier post. It’s about Zahid Mubarek, who was an Asian teenager sentenced to 90 days in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institute for stealing £6’s worth of razor blades and interfering with a car. On 20 March 2000, the day he was due for release, he was attacked and killed by his violently racist cell-mate, with a chair leg in his sleep. Lyn Gardner review here.
Verbatim theatre can lapse into dullness very easily, but this play doesn’t. Not only is the story very compelling but the unpicking of the problems with the prison system and the situation which led to the death of Zahid.
The short description reveals some of the problems.
1. Ziad was sent down for stealing razors and interfering with a car. To be fair, he also had a drug problem and had missed two meetings with a probation officer. However, I believe, this to any reasonable person is an extreme over reaction. The problem is, the system demands prison. As Ben Bowling, Crimonologist at the panel discussion after, argues prison is not the answer for the vast majority of youths. Neil Gerrard, MP, believes sentencing needs to be changed.
2. Mental health. Zahid’s violent and racist cell mate, was mentally ill. This was not only obvious with hind sight but should have been picked up many times through the system. However, many people in jail suffer from mental health problems. One panel member suggested is was about 75% of prisoners.
3. It costs about £35,000 a year to maintain an adult prisoner in jail. £50,000 or more for a youth. Yet, what are the gaining in prison? Nothing except an education in crime and hate. Bowling believes, money has to be spent in rehabilitation and not in sending youths down. The arguments don’t stack up either economically or for society.
However, politicians are aiming for more sentencing and less freedoms (eg ASBOs, new terror laws) seemingly as this wins votes from society. I would conjecture, however, that society at large doesn’t realise the economic and social harm being done by this new sentencing regime. Certainly, I didn’t.
It is almost universally acknowledged that there’s too much overcrowding in prisons and that it is not the best way. However, as Suresh Grover of Monitoring Group said, we have to believe we can make a difference. Unfortunately on such a large problem, I don’t know if I believe I can. I can keep writing. Make some people aware. But actual change? I understand why so many young people no longer vote.
Free Speech
David Edgar writes about defending free speech in the performing arts. I didn’t think it was so under attack, still Edgar writes convincingly:
“…Behind all of this is the idea that there are subjects too important, too profound, too dangerous for writing (and painting, and performing, and even reporting) to touch. Behind that is an assumption that fiction writing in particular has no positive value, that it is a trivial pursuit, a luxury pastime which if it proves to be dangerous to its consumers should be suppressed for the greater good, like high-risk sports, keeping attack dogs, or eating meat off the bone.
We have been intimidated by such accusations – aided and abetted as they have been by post-modern critics in the universities – to ignore or devalue the positive role of art in our lives.
The telling and hearing of stories (in whatever medium) is not an optional extra or a trivial pursuit. It is central to our being as humans. Indeed, certain crucial aspects of humanness could not exist without it.
The most obvious is our ability to imagine other worlds and other times through stories told either from or about them.
The second is our capacity to plan, which relies on the ability to imagine a series of actions and their consequences and, on the basis of that speculation, to choose between them.
But third, fiction teaches us to empathise….”
Bruntwood Royal Exchange playwriting prize
Article in Guardian annoucing the “Booker prize for Playwrights”
The Manchester Royal Exchange theatre announces the Bruntwood Playwriting Competition, a “national contest to discover and celebrate Britain’s best writers for the theatre”. Launching next month, the competition has a prize fund of £45,000 and offers the winner a fully staged production in the Royal Exchange’s 750 main house theatre. A runner-up play will be staged at the theatre’s smaller, 120-seat studio.
Entry to the contest is anonymous.
The only criteria is that submitted plays must not have been produced already.
The final panel has: former culture secretary Chris Smith, Nicholas Hytner, actor Brenda Blethyn and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah.
The winning playwright receives £15,000, while runners-up get £10,000 and £5,000. T
This is an amazing opportunity. I better keep at my next play. It being anonymous gives unknowns a really big chance…
What We did to Weinstein
This has split the critics.
Well, I’ve only read two reviews but Benedict Nightingale of the Times gives it 4 stars and Lyn Gardner of the Guardian gives it 1 star and a very scathing review.
They both make valid points. Lyn argues Ryan Craig is writing “inept string of cliches, stereotypes and bad Jewish jokes” although concedes “There is potential here, but Craig’s play is complicated rather than complex and treats both Jews and Muslims as tabloid stereotypes rather than real characters”
Benedict argues Craig is is using “intelligent exploration” and is writing about the here-and-now
“A dramatist can’t do anything more here-and-now than write a piece in which an Israeli soldier called Josh captures a suspected suicide bomber, and a Muslim fanatic called Tariq asks his sister, who is afraid of taking the Tube, why she “bleeds for a handful of white people” and leaves London for jihad training.”
I have sympathy for both points of view. The issue tackled, the crisis of faith, religious conflict and Israel-Palestine are complex. The extrememist battle, I think is one of the three major problems facing the world, which won’t go away [rich-poor gap and global migration my other two] as it’s a cycle which now has no end, an ill-defined beginning and an unending string of possible (mis)intrepretations.
It’s important that Craig explores these arguments as personified by his characters. Josh who leaves England to become an Israeli and fight and Sara, who wrties and argues against the use of Israeli force.
But, they do often stray into well-rehearsed arguments that have the touch of the sterotype about them. So I can see why Lyn would get so annoyed.
Still, the play does provke thinking, the relationship between the older actors is quite touching, and the directing is paced well.
I think people will bring their own biases to the play and will either be stimulated by the debate or feel it’s been too stereotyped.
Lyn points to Mike Leigh’s new play (see earlier post) as being a much better investigation into the crisis of faith. David Hare’s Via Dolorosa is a much more personal perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But this play, even with its well-rehearsed arguments has a place too.
I’d be really interested to know what Tim Supple and Ryan Craig would reply to Lyn Gardner with.
At the Menier Chocolate Factory, until Nov 12 : 020 7907 7060
Poetry & ellipses
I find some of my most compelling writing is elliptical and full of surprises and “coincidences”. The words, ideas and fragments loop back and refer to themselves, my life, the piece and the world as I experience or imagine it.
I find this to be true in life as well.
My writing started off in poetry, honed by studying under Forrest Gander, before it got to plays. I still read poetry, not a great deal but probably more than the average person.
I picked up a copy of my Poetry Review that had been sitting around for far too long neglected and took it with me on the Tube. I opened it up to this poem called The Bearhug. The first two stanzas:
It’s not as if I’m intending on spending the rest of my life doing this:
besuited, rebooted, filing to work, this poem a fishbone in my briefcase.
The scaffolding clinging St Paul’s is less urban ivy than skin, peeling off.
A singular sprinkler shaking his head spits at the newsprint of birdshit.
It’s going unread: Gooseberry Poptarts, stale wheaten bread, Nutella and toothpaste.
An open-armed crane offers sexual favours to aeroplanes passing above.
[full poem here – not fully reproduced partially for respect of copyright]
It spoke to me of my own desires “besuited, rebooted, filing to work, this [play] a fishbone in my [rucksack]” and struck a bell in my blood.
It was by Nick Laird. Sounded a very little familiar, but I thought no more of it.
Today, I see who is on the Guardian long list. Nick Laird appears. They note he is married to Zadie Smith. I think of the unstinting pressure of fame and am glad to not have it. Then a note clicks.
I realise we both edited the May Anthologies, once upon a time (the first story Zadie had published was in one) and that a some time city life is not our only coincindence.
More on monsterism
The Monsterists are David Eldridge, Moira Buffini, Richard Bean, Roy Williams, Sarah Woods, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Colin Teevan, Ryan Craig, Shelley Silas and Jonathan Lewis.
Moira Buffini has just had a play on at the Arcola, Silence. Richard Bean has Harvest on at the Court. Silas has Mercy Fine on in November at the Southwark. Lenkiewicz has just had Shoreditch Madonna (see earlier posts) and Eldridge and Williams have also both recently had plays.
Some of our finest playwrights writing in a monsterist vein? I wonder how many are writing what they really want to write, I guess it comes close but I reckon they still want bigger stages to fulfil the monsterist ideal…
More on monsterism here
and see my previous post
Monsterism
This could be critically important for new playwrights over the next few years. We shall see…
Monsterism may have started out as a moan but it is a positive, forward-looking campaign by writers to ask British theatre to raise its game. Moira Buffini says:
“Deluded though I may be, I am an optimist. If we playwrights work together we may effect a change. If we are allowed to give our imaginations free reign, if we have use of the same resources, the spaces, budgets, casts and directors that are usually reserved for the deceased, we may write the kind of plays that will attract a new audience. We all moan about tired old productions and dead theatre. We can only try to bring it back to life.”
Monsterism’s Manifesto
Monsterism is a theatre writers’ campaign to promote new writing in the British theatre. It is a positive, forward looking movement that aims to create opportunities for British theatre writers to create large scale plays, for large stages.
The key aesthetic tenets of a monsterist work are:
• Large scale, large concept and, possibly, large cast
• The primacy of the dramatic (story showing) over storytelling
• Meaning implied by action (not by lecture)
• Characters caught in a drama (not there to facilitate a polemic)
• The exposure of the human condition (not sociology)
• Inspirational and dangerous (not sensationalist)
On a practical level the implications of the manifesto are:
• The elevation of new theatre writing from the ghetto of the studio “black box” to the main stage
• Equal access to financial resources for plays being produced by a living writer (ie equal with dead writers)
• Use of the very best directors for new plays
• Use of the very best actors for new plays
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About me
I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.
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Recent Work
Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).
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Nakamitsu
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Yellow Gentlemen
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