Chinese whispers

This week on CW, Sam Burt reflects on the controversy surrounding the recent London Book Fair, and argues we can best help Chinese writers by fostering a global market for Chinese writing, regardless of state censorship in China. Miriam Gillinson reviews the National Theatre of China’s production of Richard III, part of Globe to Globe at Shakespeare’s Globe, and finds much is lost in translation.

8 May 2012

Their own beautiful mess

Three Kingdoms, Lyric Theatre, London

Don’t look at the front of the stage, they seem to be screaming silently. Don’t look for the obvious. Maybe, just maybe, if you look beyond the surface, you might get a little closer to understanding us and discovering the truth.

‘Dialogue is the objective of dialogue.’

Chinese writers and controversy at the London Book Fair

If the exclusion of authors disliked by the Chinese government was a necessary condition for the British Council’s programme to go ahead, so be it. Whether it in fact was necessary is a separate discussion to have; what matters is that some established writers visited from China to exchange ideas about new literary genres, globalisation and e-publishing, and to search for commercial opportunities.

More bewildered than bedazzled

Make Better Please, BAC, London

The actor’s painful catharsis feels too much, though, and a gap opens between the audience and the action. This gap widens, as the warped music envelops us and the actors crack up completely, storming around with strange props, including a massive penis, attached to their flailing bodies.

A foghorn of despair

'Richard III, Globe Theatre, London

Mandarin is quite a hard-hitting language – packed with monosyllabic words – and the cast’s delivery sounds a little monotonous. It’s hard to make out those elegant swoops, dips and swerves in Shakespeare’s text.

Wispy and blank

The Chair Plays, Lyric Theatre, London

It all feels frustratingly and wilfully dry. Bond’s desire to write a highly stylised and starkly symbolic piece has ripped the guts out of his writing. ‘The Under Room’ never throbs with the kind of thick danger that wraps its way around his other, better and meatier plays.

From knock-kneed sweetness to knees-up knockabout

Chalet Lines, Bush Theatre, London

Lee Mattinson’s characters and events are larger than life. Its gags are slick and its sentiment is unabashed. Characters often voice the themes of the play. All this smacks of a writer siding for flair and entertainment over truthfulness. That’s fine; there are good plays like that. But they can’t make nuanced, near-contradictory sociological points.

An attic full of life’s flotsam

Autobiographer, Toynbee Studios, London

Melanie Wilson makes theatre as spa-treatment. Her work seeps through you, washes over you and leaves you refreshed. You exist alongside it, surfing moment by moment, completely outside out of everyday time. Autobiographer is experienced entirely in the present, just as the Floras (and the rest of us) live life.

The thumping excitement only theatre can muster

Misterman, National Theatre (Lyttleton), London

Rain pours from the ceiling. Odd little crucifixes flash up, initially comforting but quickly threatening. Thunder rumbles, lightning flashes and music, outside of Magill’s control, envelops everything. The effects grow bigger, madder and wilder, as Magill loses his grip on his story and his sanity.

Dead inside and deeply frustrated

Long Day's Journey Into Night, Apollo Theatre, London

Many reviews of this show have included the slippy caveat: ‘This is not an easy viewing experience’. This phrase is often slipped in as an afterthought, following a careful exploration of all the cerebral pleasures, to be mined from said misery fest. And yet, what this phrase really means is: most of the audience will not enjoy this.

The ultimate take on pop culture

Polyphonia/Sweet Violets/Carbon Life, Royal Opera House, London

McGregor’s pieces are known for overpowering the audience but, if the works he created so far for the Royal Ballet were oozing with energy, ‘Carbon Life’ bursts with it.

Permanent psychological damage

Big and Small (Gross and Klein), Barbican, London

Cate Blanchett is an incredible force on stage and the production would be so much less without her. She manages to make her character, Lotte (wearing pastel pink, Alice in Wonderland-themed costumes), both bafflingly innocent and wearingly knowing.

‘There have been fights in here’

30 Cecil Street, Forest Fringe at the Gate Theatre, London

Canham prowls, thoughtfully, around the stage, placing scraps of masking tape on the floor and across the walls, as stolen conversations rumble around him. A blueprint of the theatre gradually emerges, breaking up the space into three distinct areas. Now all that is needed, is to colour in between those white lines: that’s where the dancing comes in.

A pathetic little word

Jimmy Stewart, An Anthropologist from Mars, Analyses Love and Happiness in Humans (And Rabbits), Forest Fringe at the Gate Theatre, London

Tassos Stevens is a storyteller and, as he narrates the tale of Jimmy wandering across the earth and wondering about human feeling, he uses every opportunity he can to crack open the concept of love and examine its individual parts.

A saggy miracle

Made Up, Soho Theatre, London

The trio - Brian Logan, Alex Murdoch and Neil Haigh - also makes clever, comical use of their own limitations. Often, the most pathetic, ant-climatic lines are the funniest. It is the pause, as an actor attempts to summon up a sharp quip and finds himself wanting, that creates the biggest laughs

‘They’ll expect everyone to work as hard as they do.’

China: Triumph and Turmoil, Channel 4 television, March 2012

Ferguson’s familiar political agenda of ‘free market, strong state’ dovetails nicely with his rather static view of political culture as the determinant of Chinese society-state relations. And yet a moment’s reflection on the arguments he presents over the course of this series reveals just how unnecessarily confined are the horizons of this historian’s gaze when he looks to the future.