National Theatre doing well?
Hytner revealed that his second financial year as director of the National was even more rudely healthy than the first. The three theatres, the Olivier, the Lyttleton and the Cottesloe, were 94% full in the year ended April 2005, compared with 91% the previous year.
I guess this shows the NT is putting on plays people want to see, but I wonder how its audience demogrpahic is shaping up – is refelctive of the couuntry or London? Is it getting younger or more socially mixed? Does that matter?
Robert LePage’s Dragon Trilogy
I am very excited about the Dragon Trilogy coming to the Barbican.
I believe it is fair to say that Lepage’s work and particularly this key piece has deeply influenced modern theatre.
One can see it in works from Improbable and Complicite, although Complicite was first formed before the Dragon Trilogy was performed.
First staged around 1985, when stil in his 20′s. It’s a six-hour play divided into three acts, spanning over three decades, three Canadian cities and three languages. The play follows the lives of two Quebec girls, centring on themes of war, exile and cultural identity.
It’s almost “monsterism-plus” !
From Lepage’s site:
In the beginning, there was nothing – or almost nothing. Six actors (including the director who had brought them together), two set designers and a producer, looking for the road to the Orient. A vacant lot turned into a parking, where imagination and memory would have to start digging.
In the beginning, there were three Chinatowns : one in Quebec City, in the 1930s, the backdrop to the Green Dragon symbolizing Springtime and Water; another in mid-20th Century Toronto, backdrop to the Red Dragon of Earth and Fire; a third, flourishing in Vancouver in the 1980s, where the autumnal and aerial White Dragon would deploy. There was an imaginary China, made of myth and a mess of miscellaneous rubbish : Tao, Yi King, Mah Jong, Tai Chi, Chinese laundries and Chinese Food, Tintin and the Blue Lotus, ying, yang, ” chin chin “, and Made in Hong Kong. There was the story of aunt Marie-Paule, married to a Chinese man, a mother who had served in the CWACs, a parking watchman in his booth, and a glass sphere that played a Japanese melody.
In the beginning, there are Françoise and Jeanne. They are twelve and they are inseparable. They play shop with shoeboxes, using them to build a whole street, with boutiques and all. There is Lépine, the undertaker… There is Jeanne’s father’s barber shop, where she becomes fascinated with young Bédard’s red head, and where their eyes meet… There is old Wong’s laundry, where, on a cold night, William S. Crawford arrives, an Englishman hoping to set up shop in Quebec City…
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
Mike Leigh’s 2000 years
Tonight should have seen the unveiling of Mike Leigh’s new play however audiences are going to have to wait another two nights to see the new play by Mike Leigh at the National Theatre – because he hasn’t finished it yet!
The 16,000 tickets for the entire run of the play sold out weeks ago, despite the fact no one except the cast and the crew had a clue what it was about. Indeed, it was only at the weekend that the play was publicly given the title 2000 Years.
Famously he devises the script and work. I wish I could be given the leeway of delaying the first night, if my script wasn’t up to scratch yet! But that’s being Leigh. Hope it is good.
Early Works of Playwrights
RLN disagreed with my suggestion that playwrights in the 20-30 age range are unlikely to be ‘doing their best work.’
It’s true that many writers did good work young.
To this cause David lan and the Young Vic and the Barbican are staging some early work of your writers/directors.
‘Everything young is beautiful,’ says director David Lan.
From Robert Lepage’s Dragon’s Trilogy, written when he was 27, to Wole Soyinka’s classic The Lion and the Jewel, which the Nigerian writer produced aged 23.
Dragon’s Trilogy from 16 September, Barbican, London EC2 (0207 638 4141). The Lion and the Jewel, from 28 September, Barbican. For details of other productions, including plays by Marlowe and Buchner. See http://www.barbican.org.uk/bite or here
Love
“love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problems of existence”
so said Erich Fromm, the post-Freudian psychologist, in his conlcusion to The Art of Loving (1957)
Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans
I don’t have much to add that is not being said better or more eloquently elsewhere.
After being in Manhatten over 9/11 and missing the tsunami by minutes, I’ve come close to my fair share of disasters. However, so much seems to have gone (and is going) wrong in new Orleans.
My friend Hana, is closer to what it is like and writes here on her blog.
Director’s obsessions on writers
Intriguing article in the Guardian about certain directors and their obsession with writers.
Joe Orton, Ibsen, David Mamet, Charlotte Jones and August Wilson provide the obsessions for
David Grindley, Stephen Unwin, Lindsay Posner, Anna Mackmin and Paulette Randall.
Good quotes include:
“when you are working on any play, all you need to realise is that which is absolutely essential to the action. Any embellishment is a mistake. Whether it is Mamet, Wesker or Shakespeare, it is about doing the bare bones.”
“[Wilson] has made me realise how few playwrights allow the characters to really tell the story, but he does.”
“Orton has taught me that whatever you are directing – even if it’s essentially a conversation piece – you mustn’t be afraid of invigorating every moment.”
“That’s the hard thing as a director – not just to show the tip of the iceberg but also to create the great seething mass underneath, to show the hidden present in everyday actions.”
Urban magic
On the way to hear Zadie Smith, I passed through some urban magic.
Besuited, untied, Thursday working week bedraggled
I stutter up out of Euston Square into the hazy light
Stepping not lightly down Gower Street fading into the worker
Ant mass I realise I am travelling the wrong road
Not just the wrong road of working life simply
Just the wrong road to the Bloomsbury theatre
I turn left. University College London. Graduation day.
Besuited students. Smiling in their family best. Fathers, mothers
Grandfather, grandmother, grand-everyone always
on the edge of embarrassment on the edge of tipsy
set against the forbidding old architecture of UCL; the pretty little
gardens, the absurd magicalness of obtaining a degree – I step
through this, down the stairs to the left of the garden, through the
wasteland of a basement and building detritus up some stairs into
a foyer full of readers, books and people waiting in anticipation of Zadie.
Strange, contradictory and somehow very magical slice of urban London.
Zadie Smith
I re-found Nick Laird the other day (see future post) and went to hear Zadie Smith read (at the Bloomsbury theatre) this week.
I didn’t particularly have any expectations either high or low (although my friend Nadia was very excited) but I found Zadie to be very erudite, witty and intriguing to listen to. She came across as first and foremost a reader of books and I felt kinship with that sentiment.
I also came face to face with the potential horror of the “book tour”.
A queue of constant strangers asking all sorts of questions, wanting all sorts of requests and seeking all sorts of dedications and signatures.
Out came a yellow post-it, where we respectively wrote a dedication or name, which Zadie dutifully filled out and finished with a flourish of a beautiful signature (do novelists practise it? They must obtain enough practice on tour).
Yet, I found myself sinking into the book queue mire. I had this instinct to find out more about the Zadie in front of me. Particularly her preface in her new book On Beauty. It said, more or less:
“time is how you spend your love”
Which reminded me of “love is how you spend your time”
Which reminded me of
“It is the time you have spent* for your rose that makes your rose so important.” From the Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Which reminded me of Jon Swain in a River of Time (reporter in Vietnam, part of the story evoked in the film the Killing Fields
He speaks with his love, and their relationship is ending and she reminds him of it, in my blurred memory this suggests
It is the time that you waste that makes someone important
It is the time that you waste with someone that shows you love them.
I wonder, whimsically if Zadie had come across this. But mostly, I wish her luck on her book tour trials. (see here).
* the original French uses perdre which is more literally to lose or waste (as in some translations) but probably has a slightly different sense
Paris & theatre spaces
I’ve been to Paris not for anything theatrical, I mainly ate good food and talked drugs, but it did remind me of my trip to Peter Brook’s Theatre, Bouffe du Nord to see Caryl Churchill’s Far Away.
To quote the Sunday Times, it is “an apocalyptic play, a play of an Armageddon created by its victims. …a question of silent consent, of turning a blind eye, of not standing up for anybody until, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, there is nobody left to stand up for you.”
The play is more abstruse, in my opinion, than that but good none the less. However, my first sensory experience was of the theatre itself.
Site specific, in many ways is all the rage – what site specific does is emphasise the power of a place. (Not that there’s anything new in the use of found space. The modern theatre evolved from galleried Jacobean inn-courtyards and their continental equivalents.) The Bouffe du Nord does exactly that.
It is hard to describe the quality the space gives you. On the one hand it is a stripped down, bare grand theatre of old. On the other hand it still evokes everything a theatre should be:
The experience of theatre should be both magical and challenging.
“The only purpose of a theatre is to reinforce the relationship between audience and performer,” Tompkins of Howarth Tompkins declares (rebuilder of the Royal Court and Young Vic, in progress). “We’re post-black-box, but pre-the next orthodoxy.”
I believe he is also influenced by the late Michael Elliott, celebrated artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre (see links) , who was on the building committee of the National Theatre.
Live theatre is a shifting rainbow and a conventional theatre is a heavy, inert piece of real estate. They don’t really belong together. “Isn’t it time we stopped lumbering our grandchildren with our mistakes?” he wrote in 1973. “In future shouldn’t we try to retain a certain lightness and sense of improvisation, and sometimes build in materials that do not require a bomb to move them? In short shouldn’t we stop building for posterity?”
Bouffe du Nord straddles that somewhat, being an abandoned theatre, refound and so lighter than a lumbering place. However, Elliot has a point and theatre and thus theatre spaces should at best always be a shifting rainbow and as a writer I try and remember that.
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
Aristocrats & Harvest & Monsterists
Saw Friel’s Aristocrats at the National. Left feeling slightly perplexed. I wasn’t particularly moved by the play and the pacing seemed slow but perhaps I simply just wasn’t engaging it on its level. I shall dwell on it. It certainly is meant to deal with “big” intergenerational themes of the “aristocratic” roman-catholic Irish seen through the conflicted children.
Richard Bean, writes on a big theme at the Royal Court from beginning of Sep in his new play Harvest: Yorkshire rural life from 1914 to 2005, as seen through four generations of the same family. Wilson Milam directs. There are at least 12 in the cast. Wow. As a relatively new writer, I don’t think I’d get away with 12 in the cast but maybe that’s why we have monsterists trying to change that…
Hull-born, Bean’s trademark at first was gritty work plays – Toast (Royal Court, 1999) and Under the Whaleback (Royal Court, 2003) – but he also writes politically incorrect black comedy: The Mentalists (National, 2002), The God Botherers (Bush, 2003) and Honeymoon Suite (Roayl Court, 2004).
He’s known for being a “monsterist” and was involved in the Monster Day Out at the Hampstead this year.
A group of writers who originally met during Trevor Nunn’s valedictory Transformations season at the National in 2002. Practitioners such as Richard Bean, Simon Bowen, Moira Buffini, David Eldridge, Tanika Gupta, Jonathan Lewis, Colin Teevan and Roy Williams issued the Monsterist manifesto ‘to promote new writing of large-scale work in the British theatre’.
The idea is to see new work that is large in theme and large in ambition (not necessarily large in cast size?!)
It’s interesting to ask what is a big play? how long should it be Michael Billington thinks he knows.
But “small plays” or rather small scale can actually turn out to have amazing “big ideas” in them, like Pinter, I wonder if these would fit the monsterist ideal. Probably not quite as they are aiming for large scale. More in another post.
Prometheus Bound, review & Aeschylus discussion
Prometheus Bound is a rarely performed Aeschylus [disputed] play.
It’s a tragedy and is the first in a trilogy. Unfortunately the two sequels, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus the Fire Bringer are ‘lost’.
The play is set after the Olympian gods, led by Zeus, have overthrown the Titans, the older race of gods led by Kronos (Cronus), Zeus’ father, who had overthrown his own father Ouranos (Uranus). Prometheus and his mother were the only Titans on Zeus’ side. Zeus is now consolidating his power, and, like any new ruler, is busy crushing all dissenters.
Prometheus despite having helped Zeus come to power is now being punished for helping mankind survive by giving them fire. This however seems a bit of a cover for the fact that Zeus wants Prometheus to tell him his prophecies [Prometheus knows a lot about the future] the play introduces the bound Prometheus and tells the story of why he is bound.
Aeschylus [note there's debate as to whether this is an Aeschylus play for several reasons, which I won't go into here but see the wiki] likes the themes that made Athens great. In the Agamemnon trilogy, he focuses on the institution of law, which replaced blood feuds. In “The Persians”, he cheers free Athens’s victory over Persian despotism. And in Prometheus [if it is Aeschylus] he celebrates resistance to tyranny.
It is in this resistance to tyranny, and refusal to give in that strikes a note to modern happenings – Nelson Mandela comes to mind.
There’s also a parallel in the use of restriction, constriction (like Beckett see my other recent post) and isolation which seems a very modern topic.
James Kerr translated and directed and at times it was brilliant but I can’t honestly say it was consistently so, perhaps this has to do with the difficulties of a relatively “back story narrated”, mono-paced, no action ‘Aeschylus’ style and also the lack of humour [that’s how the Greeks liked their tragedy?]. Occasionally the direction lacked a touch of clarity, in my mind. However, I think these are all difficulties in trying to stage Aeschlyus’ tragedy and I would not really fault the director. Further, the translation seemed lively.
The actors gave great performances. David Oyelowo was amazing in articulating the internal and physical struggle of Prometheus. He also looked beautiful as did the rest of the cast.
I also liked Io’s performance by Hayley Atwell.
(Zeus fancied Io and jealous Hera, Zeus’s wife, has turned her into a cow and tormented her with a magic stinging insect [giving her gangrene]. She’s delirious with pain but wants to know her future
“speak the truth; the worst thing a person can do is give false comfort”)
Atwell has a great physical presence and her performance was compelling or as compelling as people portraying cows get!
Also, it’s worth noting the Sound Theatre is a great new venue.
The play is a should see for interested in tragedy but could drag for those who need instant gratification or humour from their theatre.
New writing at Edinburgh Fringe, Lyn Gardner
Lyn Gardner makes the point that new writing with poor directing and poor production can damage the writing/writer beyond repair (See Here). Equally, good writing can certainly be helped and nurtured by good directors and theatres. I agree, exposure too early on or too harshly can ruin promising writers and writing.
Most writers take a while, usually many many years, before they find their voice and their best work. Exposure early on can be enormously helpful but it is unlikely that a 20-something or even 30-something is going to produce their best work.
We need directors to nurture them and we need high production values to inspire them onwards and we need constructive criticism too.
So, I think Lyn makes a good point about supportive directors and theatres. But new writing (despite James Agate’s arguments on the same guardain blog) needs support (and time to develop, eg Ibsen wrote many rubbish plays before hitting his stride) and the Edinborough fringe is not necessarily the place to get it.
Theatre of Blood, dir by L Simpson & P McDermott
Theatre of Blood
by Lee Simpson and Phelim McDermott of Improbable
Until Sep 10 at the National Theatre
The blurb: Seven self-regarding critics assemble at a disused theatre in response to a mysterious invitation. Too late they discover its gruesome purpose as Edward Lionheart, an actor frenzied by a lifetime of sneering reviews, hacks his revengeful way through the bloody works of Shakespeare, assisted by a gang of murderous tramps.
Previously a film, the Improbable team give the show a “visual theatre” makeover.
I like Improbable (the last show I saw of theirs was a re-run of Animo an intimate improvised puppet piece and it was brilliant) and they have created a very fun piece. Visually much more interesting then an average National Theatre production (but not as stunning as Complicite and others have been recently, in my opinion).
However, once through the surface fun there’s not so much substance to the play. There’s a nod or two to the role of the critic and the symbiotic role they can play. There’s the motives for revenge and the ham side of acting but aside from that it’s an episodic tale of murdering a critic each scene in an inventive manner.
On the other hand, the ensemble acting and visual fun is great. Jim Broadbent hams it up as required and is ably supported. The scene changes and theatrical manipulation are very inventive and smooth.
In the end, personally, I wanted more from the play. Either the intimate totally inventive style of Animo, or the spectacular visual nature of Complicite / Robert Wilson / Lepage. Or something with a more driving narrative and deeper themes, not just several inventive ways of watching a critic die to the background of Shakepeare.
But that’s just me, there are many others, for who, some frivolous fun is just what they want. And I do too but Theatre of Blood didn’t quite do it for me. Perhaps, I was just in a more cerebral mood.
Go, if interested in visual theatre, or want some fun where you don’t have to thinkvery hard. Don’t go expecting an intellectual challenge.
Play/Not I by Beckett dir Natalie Abrahami
Natalie Abrahami (see Stage profile here) has won the James Menzies-Kitchen directing award and her production of Beckett’s Play/Not I recieved good reviews at the BAC.
I have to declare a possible bias as she’s directed a reading of one my plays, Yellow Men and I think she is an intelligent, thoughtful and sharp director with vision and importantly is lovely as well. In my opinion, the writer-director relationship works best with an intelligent director who you get along with. Vision is a plus but is perhaps less important with a living writer to help out than it is for, let’s say Greek tragedy.
Abrahami directed Beckett’s Play / Not I very elegantly. Both pieces involve restriction. The first, three characters stuck in urns and mired in a ménage. The second, a pair of lips or more accurately “mouth” as Beckett describes it.
This constriction forces sharp direction if the performances are to be successful. The smallest actions noted. I observed the moments of blinking. The lack of expression except at crucial moments. The lifting or not of heads. All very precise and the good direction obvious for being subtle. The only aspect that I was indifferent too, was the (in my view) slight overuse of smoke/dry ice at the start.
I hope and expect to see Natalie Abrahami to go on to direct more brilliant productions in the future.
a smith
It’s no surprise to me that Tim Crouch had co-directing from a smith – Andy Smith. This type of work would appeal to Andy, I think. See here for Tim’s article in the Guardian on his thoughts on Oak Tree.
In the programme, it says
“a smith is an artist who attempts to make accessible and poetic work. Most often employing forms of performance, writing and installation, this practice uses ideas of the everyday and social as its base, and build itself from there”
I’ve not seen that much of Smith’s work but have had occasion to chat to him a couple of times. There was one particular performance that sticks in my mind. It was part of his series on London and we were both showing work at the Gate Theatre, as part of the ROAR season.
I think his piece was called “London Calling”. There were about 40 in the space and and it started with Andy singing the song, then Andy made us write down a description of an image that we thought of as our London. When we had finished, he read them all out. Our descriptions juxtaposed to weave a personal portrait of London – lyrical, funny, weird, sometimes disturbing; it was utterly brilliant.
I think it might have been some sub-conscience influence on my performance piece, Confessions that also persuades the audience to write down their confessions.
An Oak Tree (by Tim Crouch) & modern art -I
This play teases with transforming nature of art, belief and imagination while at the same time produces a moving observation on the different facets of grief.
Quite a few years ago, I wandered into the Tate Modern. I didn’t have a purpose. No specific exhibition or anything to see.
I passed a glass of water on a shelf. I looked away. Looked around. Looked back. There was a label and some text.
An Oak Tree, 1973 by Michael Craig-Martin
Q. To begin with, could you describe this work?
A. Yes, of course. What I’ve done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water.
Q. The accidents?
A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size…
Q. Do you mean that the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?
A. No. It’s not a symbol. I’ve changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.
Q. It looks like a glass of water.
A. Of course it does. I didn’t change its appearance. But it’s not a glass of water, it’s an oak tree.
Q. Can you prove what you’ve claimed to have done?
A. Well, yes and no. I claim to have maintained the physical form of the glass of water and, as you can see, I have. However, as one normally looks for evidence of physical change in terms of altered form, no such proof exists.
Q. Haven’t you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?
A. Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree.
Q. Isn’t this just a case of the emperor’s new clothes?
A. No. With the emperor’s new clothes people claimed to see something that wasn’t there because they felt they should. I would be very surprised if anyone told me they saw an oak tree.
Q. Was it difficult to effect the change?
A. No effort at all. But it took me years of work before I realised I could do it.
[...]
Q. Do you consider that changing the glass of water into an oak tree constitutes an art work?
A. Yes.
Q. What precisely is the art work? The glass of water?
A. There is no glass of water anymore.
[...]
I’ve always liked the piece because it strikes at the heart of both the playfulness and seriousness of how artists are trying to re-examine the world we live in. Ridiculous, profound, funny and sad.
A bit like Tim Crouch’s piece. See here for more on Tim’s company.
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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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