Six Characters in Search of an Author @Oxford Playhouse BT Studio

(seen 3rd November 2009)

During its opening run at a Rome opera house in 1921, Pirandello’s edgy enquiry into the art of theatre cut into audiences’ sense of decorum so trenchantly that they shouted things in protest. From today’s point of view, Six Characters in Search of an Author is rather mild-mannered, a whimsical investigation into theatre’s identity that’s gently challenging to the student of humanities and frightfully boring for everyone else.

Six fictional characters, transcending their reality, rock up to a drama rehearsal with a curious request for an impatient director whose cast are late. They say they’re characters in a possible story needing to be realised by a dramatist. The director is comically appalled by their indecent intrusion onto his set to begin with, but is gradually proselytised by the pithy tragedy they forcibly (re)present to him. The main point being made – deep breath – is that characters in a play are meaningless until they’re mediated by actors, but that once mediated they become necessarily distanced from their essence, and so ultimately characters in a play are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The moral of the story is theatre is a place for illusion and anyone striving for realism on stage is kidding themselves. Which is why this play should be hammed up with lots of artifice and pomp, like it was in Mark Thomson and David Harrower’s colourfully comedic production last year.

Of course, Oxford University undergraduates have nothing like the kind of resources that the National Theatre of Scotland has and it wouldn’t be fair to penalise this production for its frugality. The price of admission patently reflects this- for a conveniently located and fit-for-purpose venue like this £5 is the closest we’re going to get to free, and what we ought to expect is a modest but insightful production based on an astute reading of a difficult play by thoughtful students who have spent time mulling over the detail. But that’s not what we get in this rendition by Pint Flusher Productions. If this student clique did get to grips with this play, it doesn’t show, and we get no helping hand in understanding what the playwright’s getting at and why what he’s saying is interesting.

This version is apparently a new translation. It’s by second-year classicist Chiara Crean who spent a summer working on it, and, frankly, I can’t fault it. Nor can I comment on where the nuances are, what’s remarkable about it, or why it needed a new translation, but it seemed good. Director Madeline Wright’s contribution is inconspicuous with the actors running amok in wild competition with each other. Mickey Down, in particular, is overbearing in the role of the energetic ‘Director’, and he should never have been allowed on stage with that ridiculous cobra staff which hyperactively slides up and down his grip when he speaks. It’s like a spasm, and very distracting. Hillary Stevens is poignantly tearful as ‘Mother’ and Joshua Hall is commendably controlled in his role as the conflicted ‘Son’. Both performances are humiliated in the raucous farrago of the ensemble. The lighting scheme is effective in conveying the different levels of reality in the play whilst the decision to stage this in the round is trivial and boggling. Surely a play about drama is best off with a traditional proscenium arrangement?

American Pilot @North Wall Arts Centre

(seen 29th October 2009)

I attended this for leisure and don’t intend to work on a long and structured review but feel I need to make a brief comment having browsed the local reviews. American Pilot is a play by the prolific David Greig, first performed in 2005, and here reincarnated by the reputable amateur company Oxford Theatre Guild. An American soldier crashes his plane in an unnamed, politically fraught foreign land and, recovering in a remote barn, finds himself at the mercy of a local militia. It’s a play that investigates the meaning of America to the world through the responses of the bemused local community who have candidly deified the superpower for its omnipresence (the farmer smokes Camel and recognises Daffy Duck) and its inaccessibility (they know America mythically through television broadcasts and consumer brands). The pilot, then, is either a son of god or a fallen angel. What do we do with him?

I don’t want to pontificate about the themes as it’s coming up to one o’clock and I want to go to sleep, and really all I wanted to do was congratulate James Silk who plays the part of  ‘the translator’, and who has unreasonably been left out of other reviewers’ roll-calls of praise. Perhaps it’s because he plays an overeducated, bookish, and generally unlikeable type? Well, frankly I think it’s an injustice he hasn’t had a mention yet, because his was a particularly intelligent performance that made his character the most believable in the play in spite of the often overreaching lines he has to deal with. And judging from the overarching theme of the play surely his character is the allegorical protagonist? Why hasn’t anyone flagged this guy up?

Separately, one reviewer says that the production is “agreeably rough around the edges.” If by that he means quaint, then this is another injustice. This isn’t a school play, it stands on its own two feet, and doesn’t require a compassionate pat on the back, thank you very much. The set is limited but resourceful, the acting is good to memorable, and the production should be seen, not because it does the local culture a service but because it tells a thought-provoking, multi-layered story tremendously well.

I’m done.

REVIEW: Deep Cut @Oxford Playhouse

(seen 30th September 2009, written for Culture Wars)

Between 1995 and 2002, four army cadets training at Surrey’s Princess Royal (Deepcut) Barracks died in circumstances that have remained ambiguous to this day. Mired in military bureaucracy, the cases saw little light of day until an investigation by BBC Frontline Scotland lifted the lid in May 2002. The ensuing media furore and the snowballing scandal culminated in the Armed Forces minister ordering a 15-month examination into what went wrong. What came out the other end in March 2006 – and the entire thing was carried out behind closed doors – was a forbidding document that ran to over 2000 pages and a press conference in which Nicholas Blake QC who conducted the review announced his conclusion that the deaths probably were self-inflicted. It was a sobering anticlimax.

The eagerly awaited conclusion reached headlines but that was where the buck stopped. Faced with all the heavy reading, journalists could do little more than relay the summary to the expectant public, and it was only weeks later when the saga was already a lesson learnt that the most engaged journalists were able to come to their own conclusions. Writing for the British Journalism Review, Brian Cathcart’s was that journalists were outmanoeuvred by the government. It knew the workings of the media and adroitly doused the flames of public excitement with a brick-like mass of information that the press couldn’t possibly penetrate in time. By the time Cathcart managed to go through it all and publish his thoughts, Deepcut was no longer news. “Journalism,” says this play, “dropped the ball.”

Not that journalists were given nothing to chew on. The review stressed that there was a lot to be desired from the way things were run at Deepcut, confirming accusations that bullying had become rife in the institution. It shed light on further aspects of negligence and profligacy which we could shake our heads at, and recommended in no uncertain terms that management needed to be tightened up- and of course it was, promptly and visibly. Then in January 2008, when the media storm had ostensibly calmed, the Armed Forces announced its plans to close Deepcut and put its land on the market for residential development. Mission accomplished.

But for the bereaved parents who continue to campaign for an independent public inquiry the problem extends far beyond the perimeters of a poorly run training ground. Their children died there for reasons that have never been fully clarified, and those in charge have relentlessly buffered their concern, first with a bureaucratic wall and then with a dead-end review undertaken in the shadows. What this affair has revealed is just how inaccessible the system is and just how difficult it is to hold the military to account. That much we saw and that much we mustn’t forget, cries out this play, and on leaving the theatre we are handed print-outs urging us to fight for transparency.

Deep Cut is an example of verbatim theatre. The script is a selection of interview excerpts, documented speeches and press items reproduced word for word and strung together into a narrative. The characters on stage are the cited individuals and feature Nicholas Blake, Brian Cathcart, and Private Cheryl James’ (1977-1995) parents whose long quest for answers forms the story’s backbone.

A verbatim script is a label of the playwright’s commitment to impartiality in approaching a contentious political subject they wish to discuss, and is driven by the ethos that the truth is shocking enough, that there’s no need for invention. Here there’s a third element. This verbatim script is an emblem of Philip Ralph’s support for Des and Doreen James who have said that after all these years their persisting distress is less about their daughter’s death than about the government’s thievish attitude towards the truth. In the play’s subdued denouement we hear their wistful pleas for a government that can tell the unembellished truth, and the unembellished truth is what Ralph’s script presents, symbolically at least. And by extension we get a play whose very format is a criticism of the way the government responded to Deepcut.

It is, of course, ridiculous to suppose that any piece of theatre can be entirely objective and ‘unembellished’. The very act of staging confers nuance and, besides, Deep Cut is a markedly dramatic play, propelled in this production by a fast tempo, exuberant acting, and a handsome set design. A play could never simply ‘tell the truth’, and the Cardiff-based Sherman Cymru are right not to hold back on theatricality. The aim here is to promote a cause using all the tools of persuasion drama has in store, and dramatic is what it has every right to be (just as court proceedings are).

Deep Cut’s setting is the dour but comfortable James family living room, aka ‘an ordinary household’. An irrelevant but thoughtful Christmas tree sits unobtrusively in the corner – glowing mellowly for Britain’s fragile integrity, shall we say – near a photo of the late Cheryl in uniform. The characters, who generally address their lines to the audience and rarely interact with one another, occupy the James home figuratively. The set is non-essential to the action and adjectival to the play- we could have had, say, an army barracks instead and the script would have kept its coherence for the most part. But Deep Cut is ultimately about the reality of the relationship between Britain’s government and Britain’s governed, and home sweet home is where the heart of the matter lies, where Deepcut hurts most, and where the message of this play is most pertinent. As the plot progresses, stacks of boxes and paperwork gradually pile up on set in an oppressive, tetris-like mess, overwhelming the living room as the affair overwhelms their lives. They need our help to tidy it up.

The overall feel of the production is far from dour or comfortable. It’s a punchy 75 minutes, paced like a rolling news channel during a crisis, with each speech urgently taking over from the last in a raucous fiesta of opinions. The actors drive the play like jet engines, pumping the polemic with fiery vigour. Amy Morgan puts on a wonderfully jubilant performance as Cheryl’s hyperactive best friend at Deepcut, speaking volumes about the happy-go-lucky atmosphere at the barracks in the few lines she has, whilst Pip Donaghy and Janice Cramer in the symbiotic roles of Des and Doreen James keep the play rooted in a poignant family tragedy without ever turning to blatant pathos. Tremors from Derek Hutchinson’s virtuosic turn of the ‘passionate investigative journalist’ archetype as Brian Cathcart could be felt in the Netherlands.

Deep Cut has been widely praised for its hard-hitting journalistic qualities, and scooped a number of awards during its Edinburgh Fringe debut run, including the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. It has since had a run at London’s verbatim stronghold Tricycle Theatre, and been picked up by Revolution Films (The Road to Guantanamo, A Mighty Heart) for a possible adaptation. As long as Deep Cut tours on, Deepcut blazes on, and Des and Doreen’s campaign for justice continues at http://www.deepcutfamiliesfightforjustice.co.uk.

REVIEW: Dial M for Murder @Oxford Playhouse

(seen 6th October 2009, written for Culture Wars)

Best known for its 1954 Hitchcock treatment starring Grace Kelly, Dial M for Murder is an iconic number that many will be familiar with. Retired tennis player Tony Wendice knows that his wife Sheila is having an affair, but rather than getting too worked up about it he decides that this gives him some splendid moral leeway to murder her for her inheritance. So he spends a year laying down the pieces of his devious stratagem, dapper as ever in his day job as “professional husband”, until there’s just one thing left to do- pick up the phone and dial her death sentence.

But what he hears down the line on the fateful night isn’t exactly what he had in mind. Blast! It’s all gone wrong, and now he’s going to have to be extra devilishly clever to clear up the mess he’s made. But with Inspector Hubbard on the prowl, can he continue to be so insouciant?

This is a genre piece written over 50 years ago, and it goes without saying that the genre’s moved on somewhat since then. M would rather stand for mentally unstable – or how about mutilation? – in contemporary crime drama, and Dial M for Murder, in all its earnest attention to suspense, feels quaintly amicable by today’s standards. Besides, everyone’s seen and talked about the Hitchcock; the very phrase Dial M for… has a sort of proverbial ring to it. This is a play with vintage, and what it means to us now is something very different from what it would have meant to its contemporary audiences. You can’t just pull it off the shelf and say ‘here you go.’

Thankfully, director Lucy Bailey knows this and has rather spectacularly played up the kitsch in this production by West Yorkshire Playhouse. She’s painted the set lipstick-red with a danger-red telephone as its centrepiece. A viscous sense of malice oozes seductively from the stage throughout, with heartbeat and tinnitus sound effects punctuating some of the more wicked moments, and a revolve constantly turning the set – sometimes imperceptibly slowly – to shift and distort our perspective à la Hitchcock. The effects used in the climactic murder scene sent me into orbit.

With the whole murder plot explained by the plotter in the opening act of the play, and with no twists in the pipeline to speak of, Dial M for Murder is never a guessing game. So when the inspector turns up in the second half smelling something dastardly in the air, we find ourselves idly waiting for the penny to drop, privy as we already are to the mystery. The play’s writer (Frederick Knott) is going through the painstaking ritual of restoring justice to the world in line with the genre’s stipulations, and frankly the plot gets pretty dull at this stage.

But Dial M for Murder is all about suspense, about building tension, and the reason why we’re forewarned about the murder at the beginning to the detriment of mystery is so that we can nervously anticipate it. It’s an exercise in form, and one which West Yorkshire Playhouse pulls off tremendously well, with suave acting, innovative stagecraft and a playful direction that fondly celebrates a loved classic with a great sense of fun.

Fern Brady faking it as a comedian

What entitles critics to judge a comedian’s set? All they do is criticise, criticise, criticise, but can they do any better than the comedians?

Fest reviewer Fern Brady who’s been award-nominated in the past for her TV columns has written up an exhilarating account of trying out stand-up to get under their skin and understand their point of view. I shivered in nervousness as I read her build-up to the night and breathed out loudly in relief when it was all over. And I loved reading about the camaraderie demonstrated by comedians she sought advice from. It’s the best thing I’ve read about the Fringe festival, and makes those ubiquitous interview features feel trivial and shallow.

Just so I don’t come across as disingenuous to those who know me, yes, I did something similar last year, but frankly this takes more balls and it’s just so agitatingly well written!

http://fest.theskinny.co.uk/article/96863-faking-it

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: Crave

Sarah Kane is a compass point in the world of edgy student theatre, and this year students from London’s Royal Holloway boldly go where many have gone before.

Crave is Kane’s second last play. It was premiered at the Fringe in 1998, just a few months before her suicide aged 28, and has since been obstinately reappearing in Edinburgh year after year like an angry ghost. Typically considered her most mature work, it’s an unflinching, anarchic projection of her disturbed psyche, told through the morbid mutterings of four strangers in a bar. They are the fragmented voices of one shattered mind despairing over sexual and familial rejection. Together they paint the portrait of a nervous breakdown.

Essentially Crave is a meaningless play, valued for its wild uniqueness and bolstered by the premium of its writer’s death. It has been staged to great effect in some triumphantly creative productions in the past and there will be more good productions in the future, but this particular one is a dud. Crave needs a thoughtful and enterprising director to interpret it in their own way and play around with it. Here, there’s no added value.

It’s a lacklustre narration of a shallow script handled by actors who look cheerfully drama-school, who look smug about putting on a Sarah Kane play, who look like they’re laughing when they grimace in Kane’s incurable agony.

Crave is a blank canvas and a blank canvas is what Royal Holloway Theatre has brought along to the Fringe. Where’s the imagination? What are they trying to achieve?

(Originally featured in Festmag)

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: Boy in Darkness

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy has been described as a fantasy of manners. It depicts a world governed by an absurd yet ironically familiar internal logic akin to Candide’s or Gulliver’s where barons and earls and heirs quarrel and sulk interminably over nothing.

Boy in Darkness is a short story based in the same world but written separately from the iconic trilogy as an off-beat supplement. Since the author’s premature death in 1968 it largely remained out-of-print until it was rereleased in 2007 as part of a motley Mervyn Peake compendium and follows the down-the-rabbit-hole adventure of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, as he escapes the banal safety of his castle on his 14th birthday.

Curious Directive’s adaptation has the qualities of a purring cat. It’s a hypnotically serene and enchantingly peculiar cross-breed of physical theatre and puppet show which brings to mind children’s fantasy fiction. In this capacity it’s perhaps a little misplaced in its late evening timeslot, but its softness is endearing, comforting even, and walking out of the show at the end feels a bit like leaving a hot bath after exercise.

At a glance the performers come across as young and inexperienced, but on closer inspection their movements are elegantly economical, accurately animalistic when they need to be, and the lines they speak don’t feel overeducated like they so often do in the hands of drama students. Yann Allsopp is unassumingly good in the lead role, with Fiona Mikel bringing tons of charm to the more demanding part she plays.

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: The Lamplighter’s Lament

There’s an Italian expression that often features in long descriptions of certain Renaissance paintings: chiaroscuro, or literally, light-dark. The theory is that bright, vibrant colours contrasted with thick, dark shadows create a striking, majestic beauty, such as in a Caravaggio painting.

Rich Rusk and Gomito Theatre Company’s The Lamplighter’s Lament is, for lack of better words, an exploration of chiaroscuro. Its story is vague like a distant memory, open to interpretation and limited only by your imagination. Three performers who uniformly look like the Mad Hatter mix puppetry, music and tricks of light to paint the picture of a windswept seaside town, and the lonely existence of a lamplighter.

Throughout the show the stage remains as dark as the depths of the lamplighter’s soul. Firefly-like wisps of light, at once the lamplighter’s torch and his ardent spirit, dance constantly in the shadows in a curious ritual that gently brings life to the puppetry, the ghostly stage lights and the myth.

Bedlam Theatre’s acoustics lend much to the invaluable music and sound effects, without which the play would have undoubtedly felt dour. The pre-recorded accompaniment brings something more profound to the puppetry’s whimsy, segueing from softly poignant piano tunes to Celtic folksongs to the caressing sounds of surf.

It’s a relaxing, charmingly incomprehensible show that brings out the troupe’s bohemian exuberance in rainbow colours. There’s a striking chiaroscuro beauty to the visual effects, but one that becomes banal through repetition, and one that all-too-lazily relies on the sound system and the audience’s generous imagination for sustenance.

(Originally featured in Festmag)

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: The Devoured

“Run from the beast, run from the beast, run from the beast…”

As the audience enters the room, Badac Theatre Company’s Steve Lambert is running on the spot, dressed in a torn and faded prisoner’s frock and staring wide-eyed into the spotlight above. With a coarse voice he is chanting “run from the beast,” the beast of Nazi oppression. As the lights go down we are on the cusp of the Holocaust.

Audiences and critics will divide sharply into two groups over this vicious tour-de-force as they most vociferously did over Badac’s 2008 offering. The Factory was a highly billed situational theatre piece that turned a part of the Pleasance into a network of Auschwitz gas chambers. Badac Theatre Company shaved their heads, armed themselves with bats and bile, and invited audiences on an authentic tour of Jewish persecution inside. Here, the scope is narrowed to a one-man affair and a small venue with seats.

The group will admire Lambert for his wild and reckless energy as he runs, shouts, spits and sweats without a single moment’s respite as the Jewish ghost he incarnates flees in abject terror from the beast. The performance is a single, unbroken climax, an unflinching ode to derangement and dehumanisation.

“Laughter and gunshots, laughter and gunshots, laughter and fucking gunshots” – short, unequivocal descriptions that spray out with his spit like machine gun fire, volley after volley after volley. “Constant, insane, fucking noise, constant, insane, fucking noise”- no time for reflection, no room for reason, just an agonisingly long, visceral imagining of what it might have been like inside the head of a Holocaust victim as the world around him collapsed.

The second group will see Badac’s unrelenting evocations of torture and terror as an obscene and distasteful orgy of aggression. There’s not a single moment of lyricism or melancholy or contemplation. The story is quite unashamedly one-layer deep and excessive in its brutality to the point of absurdity.

In one segment, Lambert describes the beast armed with barbed bats attacking fellow prisoners in his concentration camp, getting closer and ever closer as victims fall limp to the ground around him. A chant is repeated 20 times in a horrific musical frenzy, a maddening factory-line cacophony: “Jewish cunt. Rips the flesh. They scream. Nearer.” It’s pornographically simple, and worse still, it’s easy to imagine that Badac are cheaply exploiting one of the most sensitive of modern historical subjects for dramatic effect.

As a machine running out of power and coming to a grinding halt, The Devoured eventually just stops, and as a ghost phasing out of existence, Steven Lambert just turns around and quietly disappears through the curtains. By this point his prisoner’s frock has changed colour and is weighing heavily on his shoulders – it has been through a lot and absorbed an inordinate amount of Lambert’s sweat, in the most intensely energetic of monologues. It’s a striking reminder of the enormous commitment this actor has made towards Badac’s principles in a production which—notwithstanding difficult moral questions—undoubtedly packs a punch.

(Originally featured in Festmag)

Edinburgh Fringe 2009 review: Luck

Staged in the former Spiegel Tent and by a theatre company called Making Strange, Luck comes labelled with weirdness and whimsy. And true to its vibes, Megan Riordan pulls together a wonderfully capricious multimedia show in which she spills the beans on her peculiar upbringing and the tricks of her father’s trade as a professional gambler.

And the beans go everywhere with her hyperactive discussions flitting from one topic to another like a roulette ball bouncing recklessly between slots without ever settling. Sentences are left unfinished, subjects abandoned without conclusion, always restless, always in a rush to move on, like the impulses of a gambler, like the ephemerality of luck, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!

But it’s not her problem, and that’s because we the audience are in control – sort of. Those in the front row are given dice, coins and whatnot with which to determine the show’s fate every three minutes or so. With a bit of luck—and no two shows are the same—she’ll divulge some fascinating details about how her father’s team of elites gained an advantage on the house at Blackjack.

At other times we get discussions about superstition, a wild dance here and there, and—this may be what her show is really all about—confessions of her insecurities. And thus emerges from all the organised chaos the poignant humanity of an individual terrified by the vertiginous complexities of chance and probability with which she was made to grow up. This, I’ve learned, is something called ‘constitutional luck’.

(As featured in Fest Magazine)