A heavy, wooden structure, with countless windows, peepholes and doors, stretches across the Barbican’s Pit stage. Endless arms poke through tiny spaces and carefully place down props. A metronome starts ticking. Every movement is, in the opening moments of Improbable’s The Devil and Mister Punch, measured and precise. But then Punch appears and this divine order is turned upside down and, what begins as a children’s show, slowly transforms into a deliciously grotesque musical medley.

It’s perhaps not surprising that this warped re-imagining of the infamous children’s puppet, Punch (who first performed in 1662), is so full of twisted images, strange senses of scale and oddly meshed genres. Punch was always a fairly screwed up children’s hero – a puppet who murdered his family in cold blood, punctuating each act with a triumphant cry of, ‘That’s the way to do it!’ He’s not what you’d call an ideal role model. But, in Improbable’s wildly amped up exploration of this ‘family friendly’ show, Punch is scarier than the devil himself.

Director Julian Crouch releases these dark undercurrents ever so gradually. Just as the show begins with some semblance of control – with puppet masters, Harvey and Hovey, firmly in charge – so too is it initially rather innocent. The curtains open to reveal fluffy clouds, against which various objects dance. Two musicians enter and play a warm little love song at the piano. Punch, although he kills his baby and wife, sticks close to his script, as he desperately flees from PC plod. It is only when Punch is chucked into jail – and his future performances, as well as those of Harvey and Hovey, are put at risk – that this children’s show starts to curdle.

Master Harvey (Nick Haverson) breaks free from his wooden framework and paces frantically across the front stage, manically arguing Punch’s case. ‘Murder, murder, murder!’ he screams and, in pointing out its ubiquity, tries to diminish its importance. When he asks the Judge – and us – to take a closer look at Punch, a massive papier-mâché Punch appears at another window, freakishly scaled up. It is very funny but is also one of many jolting shifts in scale, that remind us that perhaps Punch – often lifesize - isn’t just a puppet after all.

But Punch is not released and is, instead, chucked into the depths of Hell. Hell, in the land of puppets, is a world piled up with discarded wooden limbs; ‘They’re the ones we don’t use anymore, Punch’. They are also fantastically fucked-up creatures. A puppet with a penis for a head lurches, lazily, towards Punch. It’s an absurd image, like a Dali painting that’s learned to walk, but it is affecting and frightening too. Puppets might not have souls but, by God, do some of them look evil.

As Punch attempts to outwit the devil and escape his penis prison, the two puppet masters become embroiled in his world and the divide between puppet and human blurs. Harvey and Hovey (Rob Thirtle) burst onto stage, wearing huge Punch-heads and chase each other’s tales. For one frightening flash, lifesize versions of Punch’s murdered family appear on stage. The dead come back to life and the puppets start to out-grow the humans. Finally, Harvey and Hovey appear as golden knights (earlier on represented as puppets) and stab each other to death. Only Punch remains and that, perhaps, is how it should be. He will, after all, outlive us all. 

Till 25 February 2012

In The Bible Now, Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky seek to bring the insights of their academic field, critical Bible scholarship, to bear on contemporary debates in which the authority of the Bible is regularly invoked or assumed. The book is both fascinating and infuriating: fascinating because of the light the authors are able to shed on sometimes obscure and ambiguous passages from the scriptures, and infuriating because of their haughty dismissal of anyone else who ‘feels qualified to interpret the scriptures’ without sharing the authors’ learning, and in particular their knowledge of Hebrew.

In fact, the book is misleadingly titled, since it is solely concerned with the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament; Jesus Christ doesn’t even make the index. That need not have been a problem – the Hebrew Bible is plenty to be getting on with - except that it rather undermines some of the authors’ posturing. At one point they rail against those who read Genesis or just a passage from it and imagine they understand the whole Bible (p174). But the very question of what constitutes ‘the whole Bible’ cannot be answered by a close reading, however accomplished, of the Hebrew text. From a Jewish perspective, perhaps it makes sense to see the Hebrew scriptures as the whole Bible, but from a Christian perspective it certainly does not.

This matters to non-Christians too, because the authority of the Bible derives not from the text itself but largely from its place in the Christian religion, which, like it or not, helped shape the modern world. Friedman and Dolansky can help us understand what the text does and does not say. But the importance of that text rests on its religious significance, so academics can hardly have the last word. Since the Reformation, the idea that even hoi polloi who need to have the Bible translated for them can fruitfully engage with it has been central to Christian and humanist culture. So too has the understanding that there is ultimately no substitute for the original sources. Between them, demands for vernacular translation and for fidelity to the original text ate away at the dominance of the Roman Church’s Latin Vulgate, which was inaccessible to most people and unreliable anyway.

Where religious leaders and commentators simply misrepresent the Bible, scholars can and should call them on it. But when it comes to nuance and questions of emphasis, believers – those who care most about what the Bible says - are always going to prefer the faith-infused interpretation of other believers to that of a couple of Hebrew nerds. Nonetheless, as accomplished scholars, Friedman and Dolansky have plenty to contribute to our understanding of the scriptures, whatever our beliefs. In The Bible Now, they take five controversial issues and look in turn at what the Hebrew Bible’s law, poetry and prose have to say about them.

What exactly is an abomination?

The first chapter, and by far the best, deals with homosexuality. The strength of the authors’ approach to this issue is not in fact linguistic precision so much as historical awareness. They acknowledge that there is no denying homosexuality is condemned in the Bible, most clearly in Leviticus 18 and 20. Notoriously, many other things are condemned here and in similar passages, from sex during menstruation to mixing fibres, that Christians today tend not to worry about. Nonetheless, Friedman and Dolansky want to understand the text in its own terms, rather than dismissing its condemnation of homosexuality as an irrational prejudice, as secular critics typically do.

The crucial verses, in the most familiar King James Version, are these:

‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination’ (18:22)
‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them’ (20:13).

In Friedman’s and Dolansky’s own more precise translation, what’s proscribed is ‘laying a male the layings of a woman’, but the sense is the same. What they usefully challenge is our implicit assumptions about what this means culturally. The problem is that when we think of a man having sex with a woman today, we tend to assume an equal relationship, whether a loving one or a merely hedonistic one. And that being so, why shouldn’t two men enjoy the same kind of thing if that’s what they prefer (or two women, not something condemned in the Bible)?

In fact, heterosexual relationships in Biblical times, and indeed for much of human history, were not equal. Women were considered inferior. To treat a man as one would a woman, then, was not simply different or abnormal, but degrading to the man in question. As Friedman and Dolansky put it, ‘What the authors of Leviticus 18 and 20 may be prohibiting is not homosexuality as we would construe the category today, but rather, an act that they understood to rob another man of his social status by feminizing him’ (p34). In modern terms, what’s condemned is perhaps closer to prison rape than gay love.

They back up this suggestion with a fascinating comparison with rules and customs in other, neighbouring cultures at the same time. Both ancient Greek and Assyrian moral codes allowed men to have sex with other men of a lower social status, such as slaves, adolescents and foreigners. But it was not acceptable for an adult male citizen to be taken ‘like a woman’. The Hebrew Bible extends this courtesy to all men. Rather than being uniquely ‘homophobic’ in the ancient Near East, then, the Bible shows a unique concern for the equal dignity of all men (though not of course women).

Friedman and Dolansky spend more time than seems necessary dismissing the idea that homosexuality is the definitive sin of the Sodomites. When a baying mob besieges Lot’s house in Genesis 19, demanding that he bring out his guests (who happen to be angels) to be raped, it seems perverse to assume the mob’s ‘sexuality’ is the issue. The point is that it is precisely because homosexuality is associated in the scriptures with violent degradation and defilement (as well as pagan ritual) that it is regarded as sinful. Of course, many people continue to object to homosexuality for a variety of reasons, some of which may find support elsewhere in the Bible. Fundamentally, though, modern attitudes to heterosexuality – our basic belief in gender equality - arguably render the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality meaningless for us.

Is gender equality un-Biblical?

That brings us to the status of women in the Hebrew Bible, the subject of another chapter, though as Friedman and Dolansky acknowledge, there is more than enough material for several whole books. Again, there is no doubt that women have a subordinate role in much of the Bible. The authors highlight certain ambiguities, however, and emphasise that the scriptures are not a manifesto or a simple set of instructions (the interminable DIY instructions in Exodus excepted). They conclude their account of the story of David and Bathsheba by noting that women can be the downfall of men as well as their conquests, and warn: ‘It’s a man’s world – but not so fast, dear reader. It is complex. Subtle, artistic, nuanced, realistic, savvy great literature is like that’ (p98).

They also explain that, while the traditional belief is that Genesis and the other first five books of the Bible were written by Moses, critical Bible scholarship indicates that even the opening few chapters of Genesis derive from two separate sources, known as P and J. The first says simply that God created humans in his own image, both male and female (1:27), before the second tells the story of God making Adam first, and Eve later from one of his ribs, as what’s traditionally translated as a helper (2:20-23). By drawing attention to the human composition of the scriptures and their internal differences, Friedman and Dolansky encourage a more sceptical reading; they also suggest the Hebrew word translated as a ‘helper’ for Adam could just as easily mean ‘a strength corresponding to him’ (p78). Barbra Streisand fans might remember a similar argument about the word rib in the musical Yentl.

The most interesting section in this chapter, though, concerns the pivotal moment in Genesis when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit and God announces their punishments. The authors note that this story includes a series of ‘etiologies’, explaining variously why snakes have no legs and why we have to work the ground for food, as well as why women are dominated by men. The crucial verse is 3.16: (in the authors’ own translation) ‘To the woman He said, “I’ll make your suffering and your labour pain great. You’ll have children in pain. And your desire will be for your man, and he’ll dominate you“‘. But Friedman and Dolansky point out that these are all punishments, bad things. In the Garden of Eden before the Fall, Eve was not subordinate to Adam (pp81-82).

Moreover, they consider various Biblical constraints on men’s authority over women, and discuss numerous female heroines of the Bible like the warrior-prophetess and judge Deborah, undermining any sense that women are supposed to be passive or submissive. Overall, they argue that the lower status of women in the scriptures is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and conclude that while it certainly doesn’t prescribe equality either, ‘The Bible opens various doors that point to an eventual return to balance between women and men’ (p125).

One issue on which religion in general is often pitted against women’s rights today is abortion. In their chapter on this question, Friedman and Dolansky conclude that there is simply no basis in the Hebrew Bible for the prohibition of abortion. The commandment most often invoked by anti-abortionists (‘Thou shalt not kill’) in fact more specifically proscribes murder, certainly not killing in war or judicial killing, for example, and whether either is murder or not is a matter for debate on which the Bible is silent. Characteristically, the authors are at pains to stress that this does not mean people cannot or should not be opposed to abortion on religious or other grounds, but it is nonetheless significant that the Bible has nothing to say about what is such a heated religious controversy today. Meanwhile, Friedman and Dolansky are uncharacteristically unambivalent at the end of their chapter on capital punishment, concluding that while the Bible doesn’t give a definitive answer, human beings are simply not mature enough to make such a momentous decision (p148).

What is dominion, and is the world full up?

The final chapter concerns the Earth, and it is here that the Bible scholars’ judgement is most clearly influenced by non-scholarly preoccupations. They are at pains to reject claims by some right-wing American Christians that humans are licensed to exploit the Earth ruthlessly by the famous verse from Genesis: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and dominate the fish of the sea and the birds of the skies and every animal that creeps on the earth’ (1:28). The problem is that the authors see the debate as one between crazies who want to ‘rape’ the Earth, and sensible people who care about our environment. Pointing to various Biblical rules concerning agriculture and other dealings with the natural world, they repeatedly insist that dominion doesn’t mean humans ‘can do whatever we want’.

In fact, we do not want to destroy the conditions of our own existence, so care for our own environment is surely consistent with the idea of dominion, without qualification. Modern environmentalism often goes much further, however, attributing intrinsic value to the natural world, even deifying it, in a way that is clearly un-Biblical. This matters, and not just to believers, because some environmentalist thinking is positively anti-human. Those who seek to minimise ‘the human footprint’ on the Earth, for example, typically demand reduced consumption in the West and the curtailment of material development in the rest of the world. One of the most pernicious environmentalist prejudices is that the Earth is ‘overpopulated’ by humans, and this is enthusiastically endorsed by Friedman and Dolansky.

Naturally, then, the authors have a particular problem with that little phrase, ‘be fruitful and multiply’. Their solution is nothing if not audacious. ‘The filling of the earth has now been reached and surpassed,’ we are told. ‘To increase the population of the earth now would be to add to that command, to overdo it’ (p151). This is an extraordinary claim, all the more so when you realise the authors are not talking about the massive expansion of the world population since Thomas Malthus claimed in 1798 that the world was full up then. No, for Friedman and Dolansky, ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is another etiology, explaining to readers in the first millennium BC how the world had already got to be so full way back then (p150). Now, it is estimated that over that millennium, the world population rose from less than a hundred million to perhaps a few hundred million. Last year it passed seven billion.  According to the authors of The Bible Now, the Earth was already full with no more than five percent of its current population.

They go on to cite a commandment from Deuteronomy: ‘You shall not add onto the thing that I command you, and you shall not subtract from it’ (4:2). So ‘overpopulation’ is a positive violation of a Biblical commandment! The only problem is Friedman and Dolansky are unable to offer any evidence from the scriptures of God’s intended population for the Earth. There’s just that nagging ‘be fruitful and multiply’, which would seem to suggest more is better. They do make the point that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, and raise the prospect of humans being ‘shoulder to shoulder all over the earth’ (p153). But even at seven billion we are nowhere near physical capacity. Yes, there are people starving in the world, but that was true even at a fraction of the current population: social and material development – divinely ordained or otherwise - have made it possible for the Earth to sustain numbers that were unthinkable in Malthus’ time, never mind Adam’s.

Ultimately it can only be sympathy for modern environmentalism that leads Friedman and Dolansky to interpret the Hebrew Bible as they do on this point. This is a pity, because in scholarly mode, they make a much more interesting point about that troublesome phrase. In fact, they maintain that ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is not a ‘commandment’ at all, but a ‘blessing’, and make a persuasive case for this with reference to several further passages (pp151-152). One consequence is that we are not all individually obliged to reproduce, which will be a relief to some, but in fact the recasting of human multiplication as a blessing actually undermines the authors’ case for population restraint. Even if a commandment can be, a blessing is surely not something that is fulfilled and then consigned to history. Most people consider it a blessing every time a baby is born to loving parents, or a grandparent beams with joy at a lapful of progeny, making a plain reading of ‘be fruitful and multiply’ far more convincing than Friedman’s and Dolansky’s tortured accommodation of modern secular ideas about overpopulation.

The authors end their book with an almost comical restatement of their concerns about unsupervised Bible-reading: ‘We have warned about doing Bible when one is not trained in it. It is a bad thing to do in general’ (p177). Have they learned nothing about forbidden fruit? Of course, the real danger, as Friedman and Dolansky acknowledge, is when people allow others to ‘do Bible’ on their behalf and accept their interpretations uncritically, but in fact this is only truly dangerous for those who believe the scriptures have divine authority. That is a matter of faith, and the idea that you can separate faith in the authority of the Bible from interpretation of it is surely vain. As the authors themselves demonstrate, no interpretation is ever absolutely free from the influence of the reader’s pre-existing ideas and beliefs.

Naturally, scholars should be as objective and faithful to the text as possible, but as long as people see the Hebrew Bible as more than a curious collection of writings from an ancient civilisation, they will want to argue over its meaning, and bring their own beliefs to bear on the text. Like Roman Catholic clergy before them, critical Bible scholars will have to learn to live with that.

‘How you were, how you are… no-one knows it’. Young Octavian is full of the mystery of first love as Der Rosenkavalier opens in the Marschallin’s bedroom, where the golden light of morning streams across the rumpled bedlinen. It’s not just the rush of physical pleasure, but the intimacy of knowing somebody privately.

Though it’s set in 18th century Vienna, there’s a very 20th century nostalgia about the piece. The tradition of courtly love, in which the aristocratic bridegroom sends a knight with a rose to his betrothed, is already a social relic. When the Marschallin’s boorish cousin Baron Ochs needs such a Rosenkavalier for his nouveau-riche fiancée, the Marschallin offers her secret teenage lover, Octavian.

Ochs’ pursuit of the cross-dressed Octavian, a female singer playing a youth in female guise, played to full flat-footed comic effect by Sarah Connolly, is funny in the broad tradition of farce. But it’s also a decadent, degraded counterpoint to Octavian’s innocent, romantic love. And yet the Marschallin spends much of the first act telling Octavian – and us – and herself - that sooner or later he will leave her for a younger lover. For what’s supposed to be a romantic comedy, it has a serious and even tragic streak. If you’d asked French writer Colette to write a farce, or Chekhov to reinvent The Marriage of Figaro, you’d get something rather like Rosenkavalier.

It could be a cynical debunking of the romantic dream of love. But it isn’t. The music alone defies cynicism, carrying the young lovers’ theme on a silvery ribbon of flutes, high strings and tinkling percussion. If you wanted to take Rosenkavalier at face value as a tale of young love you could, just about, with eyes half shut. But with eyes wide open the tragedy of the Marschallin, engineering the very abandonment she foretold, adds depth to the story. Amanda Roocroft’s performance brings out the combined vulnerability and strength of experience, that puts more distance between her and Octavian than the difference in their ages.

David McVicar’s revived production leaves the period setting intact, only letting a stained and faded finish evoke an aristocracy that is living on borrowed time. If you expect physical comedy, you won’t be disappointed in the onstage rumpus underscored by folkish waltz. If it’s the romance between Octavian and young Sophie you want, that is tender and passionate. But the deeper questions that run through libretto and music have room to breathe too. ‘You know me how I am,’ the Marschallin tells Octavian, and it’s a recurring theme. To be oneself, by being truly known by another, is the contrast to the comedies of disguise that surround Baron Ochs. But time passes, and the past self is gone. ‘How can this come to pass?’ asks the Marschallin.

Rosenkavalier is sometimes seen as a flawed attempt by late-career Strauss to turn out a crowdpleasing confection. But the very disjuncture between the sugary tunes and the messy, inconclusive human story means it works as well today as when it was written a century ago. The hummable Viennese melodies and witty orchestration slide in and out of darker, unsettling harmonies and discords. The boy gets the girl. But it’s not the woman that he woke up with in Act 1. Rosenkavalier speaks to our own uncertainties as well as it did to 1911 Germany. How do we find our own way in the world, now our romantic traditions are revealed to be empty, a joke? And yet, somehow, there is still love, still hope…

Remaining dates: 11, 17, 24 and 27 February 2012

A new book by Braham Murray, the fruits of his many years as a successful theatre director not least at The Royal Exchange in Manchester, is relevant to the interests of a number of groups: student dramatists, aspiring directors, designers, stage managers, in fact anyone directly involved in theatre; teachers of drama as a performance subject, teachers and lecturers and students of plays as texts both in school and university; and, most importantly, anyone who loves theatre and who loves reading a well-written narrative.

It is witty, anecdotal, informed, informative, intimate and frank. This is the work of a professional expert and Braham Murray’s account of ways to approach Shakespeare as a director (followed by a discussion of producing and directing Greek drama) is one of the best practical discussions of how to approach a Shakespeare play both as text and performance that one could find today. The book is not a bible in how to direct a play; it is one man’s account of what has, and has not, worked for him – a passionate, dedicated, lived and lively statement of what can happen when theatre is performing powerfully; and Murray believes deeply in the importance of theatre for the world beyond the stage.

Braham Murray is well known not just in Manchester, but also nationally and internationally, for memorable productions first at the Century Theatre as Artistic Director and then as Founding Director of the ’69 Theatre Company, the University of Manchester’s resident professional Company. He has been responsible for major productions at The Royal Exchange, nurturing his Company through the traumas of the IRA bombing of Manchester in 1996 and achieving international recognition for major productions with some of the greatest actors and actresses of recent decades: The Rivals with Tom Courtenay (1976), The Winter’s Tale with James Maxwell (1978), famously Waiting for Godot with Max Wall and Trevor Peacock (1980), a production still fresh in people’s minds to this day, and recorded hilariously in the book, then Hamlet (1983) with Robert Lindsay, more recently The Glass Menagerie (2008) with Brenda Blethyn. If he is leaving The Royal Exchange, he is going to be greatly missed even though he leaves the marvellous enterprise on very firm foundations.

How to Direct a Play is a testament to a prolific, very experienced and demanding master of his craft and profession. It has the tenor of a person who has always aimed for the highest possible standards in his work, expecting as much of himself as of others in production and performance, but equally, like all those who are expert in what they do in life, marked with a significant humility in his frankness, honesty, admissions of failure and disappointment and aspirations where every situation is turned into a search for even more achievement on stage. This book has its frequent moments of adrenalin-filled excitement at witty anecdotes of working with egomaniacs but equally a huge compassion for those who depend upon theatre for their livelihoods, especially the actors and actresses approaching previews and first nights. The book is characterised by a creative tension between this restless search for perfection and the realisation that the task is never done. The writing is shot through with humour, self-mockery, admissions of failure, words of wisdom for any aspiring director (equally relevant to an aspiring artist in any medium, in fact), fully aware of the pitfalls when personal expectation and idea, rehearsal, performance, audience reaction all fail to materialise as he had hoped.

One of the values of this book for the practitioner of theatre is the meticulous manner in which every aspect of the director’s role is itemised and discussed chapter by chapter, including the importance of the costume department. Murray acknowledges that every director will have their own method of working; but his analysis is valuable because it arises out of an almost confessional self-analysis of how he has developed his own working practices and dealt with the pitfalls, dilemmas and inevitable frustrations of producing major stage events. In early chapters he considers each element in the director’s process, from choosing a play and a team, through casting and auditions, to working the script. There then follows an illuminating analysis, revealing the early influence of Stanislavski on Murray, of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and it is here that we discover the detail that shapes so much of the experience behind this readable book. The analysis of the significant dramatic moments (beats) and moves in the script, followed by a similarly close analysis of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, is a central part of Stanislavsky’s own methodology but, when seen through the eyes of a director like Murray, it emphasises the importance of every movement in the language of a text. It has its parallels in the way LC Knights, in a wonderful essay How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933), analysed some of Macbeth’s language in order to focus upon precisely the tensions and drama in the language that give depth to a play’s key concerns.

In the first half of Murray’s writing we enter the mind of a man entirely committed to his craft, the Artistic Director opening a door upon his own methodology in the production and performance of a play. The subtitle of the book is so appropriate here: we are given a ‘masterclass’, like the student being coached by the maestro; and it is rare, outside of the performing arts, to have that kind of experience. Early in the book he describes his role as akin to the conductor of an orchestra, an interpretive artist. Whatever sense the book gives of being in touch with a totally focused, self-acknowledged power-crazed artistic director – and it does give that sense sometimes – it also frequently reminds us of just how firmly grounded it is on the humanity that drives the enterprise. There is a section on “Fear”, the fear the director and the performers feel, the fear of the opening night, the fear of the possibility of failure; and it marks the distinguishing quality of the writing as a whole that the challenge to achieve perfection is rooted in the aspirations, achievements and limitations of a human being.

Of course, such intensity of control – Murray admits “the director is a megalomaniac” – suggests an intolerance of views that do not match the standard he has set himself throughout his working life. There are many illuminating, sometimes tantalising glimpses, into a world where egos are not in short supply. The relationship between playwright and director is, perhaps, the most revealing section for many in the discussion of “New Plays”. At best a relationship between the writer and the ‘interpreter’/professional reader/director can be a creative tension, at worst it can become a war. There are visions of tormented souls lurking behind some of the accounts, when the playwright is banned from rehearsals, or possibly found distributing clandestine stage-notes to performers without consulting the director. Devastation in pre-production and rehearsal encounters may be hidden beneath the actual performance. This book is not short on the warts of theatre production.

So what about Shakespeare? Murray acknowledges the seminal influence of Neville Coghill at Oxford upon his reading of Shakespeare. The chapter dealing with Shakespeare’s plays appears in the second part of the book, a section which provides discussions of comedy, tragedy, farce, new plays, opera and musicals as well as Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy as a separate genre. This second half of his book has a much wider appeal to students and lovers of theatre. Murray’s purposes are, of course, distinct, based upon production and performance but, ultimately, anyone approaching drama would do well to be aware of what Braham Murray has written here. In his discussion of Shakespeare he dismisses a brand of theatre that became popular in the 1960s with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the direction it was taking when Jan Kott’s book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (publ. 1964,; now by Norton Library), appeared. Kott was a Polish academic; and his work came to the attention of university English Departments, university drama groups and workshops, and the RSC among others. Murray’s riposte is illuminating to an understanding of his motivations as an artistic director.

In a chapter on Shakespeare’s King Lear Jan Kott had considered the play as an ‘absurd’ drama in the style of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Kott was motivated by his political activism within the then Communist state of Poland, at a time when radical political debate and action was influencing much student activity, worker protests and civil rights movements in Europe and America. It influenced approaches to many art forms. There was a Brechtian type of challenge sweeping theatre, the audience challenged by the unexpected on the stage to rethink their own realities. In fairness to Kott, I do not believe he actually created the vogue for, and the authority given to, the idea of ‘contemporary relevance’ for a play but that was the emphasis adopted in key productions of Shakespeare which followed in England and it is this to which Murray objects.

One can understand why Murray was impatient with the new standardisation of dramatic production, however, and particularly with the idea that there was a new and authoritative ‘relevant contemporary’ way to produce Shakespeare. English playwrights, and some directors up to that point, did not have a strong theatrical tradition on which to approach Theatre of the Absurd and had been resistant to the type of absurdism found in German, Irish and American theatre, where, in part, Kott, found his inspiration. English philosophy, for example, was in the treadmill of logical positivism and remote from the activism of Sartre and such like abroad. English art had lost a strong tradition of portraying absurdity as a cultural or political statement about the absurdities of life more widely since the eighteenth century with the work of Swift and, in the nineteenth century, with the novelist Dickens. So the RSC produced King Lear and Hamlet in ways that seemed to pander to a woolly kind of ‘contemporary’ 1960s cultural and political relevance’. Peter Hall’s production of Hamlet in 1965 produced a young university-type undergraduate complete with long, wrap-around flowing scarf, trying to look a middle/upper class bohemian, genteelly and intelligently hippy, with a Ghost for a father so outlandish that it was risible: absurd, but not absurdist. The Ghost appeared like some gargantuan pantomime troglodyte at the left rear of the stage and at least one in the audience fell apart with laughter. It certainly made sense, unintentionally, of Hamlet’s dithering. How on earth could he take his Dad seriously appearing in that guise? And in the case of King Lear that play above all others never needed twentieth century absurdism to bring out the play’s innate ability to alienate, challenge and disturbingly reconfigure any audience. The ‘nothing’ and ‘never’ of this play say it all.

Murray goes close to the heart of understanding Shakespeare, indeed any play well written or edited, by emphasising that the cue to meaning and interpretation lies in the language. There are, he admits, textual problems (there are just a few in this book which could have been proofread one more time) and, even once a text is established for production, not all Elizabethan words retain their ‘meaning’ for an audience today. He acknowledges the almost insurmountable gulf between the wisdom, richness, poetry and drama (his words) of Shakespeare and the stage reality today in attempting to convey that wealth of understanding. Hamlet, for example, is, as Murray recognises, too long for any production unless it is edited; some plays resolve dilemmas in a convenient marriage. The Royal Exchange, of course, as a theatre completely ‘in the round’, can reduce problems with ‘period’ settings to an extent because props are minimalist and the actor/audience relationship is central to any production which really means that the language of the play is foregrounded.

The reader can best judge the success of the solutions to this dilemma offered, but Murray raises the perennial concerns that divide audiences of Shakespeare’s plays in the light of his own experiences: how to make the plays ‘relevant’ without sacrificing the integrity of the text, once established, for the production. Does shifting the time, the dress, even the language help or hinder in this process? Audiences still want the language of Shakespeare: it is sacrosanct. Editing is a very tricky business. Interpretation can be mesmerising as the production of Measure for Measure (directed by John Neville in 1965 at Nottingham Playhouse) with Judi Dench as a powerful Isabella, demonstrated. Lucio and his motley crew as bit-actors in a seedy jazz/night club/bordello played to the gallery against traditional period costume for the principals. Murray in a very different play achieved a corresponding balance between truth to the text and reinventing the context when, in 1988, he directed Macbeth and set it in a concentration camp connecting with the horrors of the twentieth century holocaust and the figure of the crazed dictator. He refers to this performance in his book. That production captured the essential evil which the play Macbeth explores hauntingly.

What is central in all this is Murray’s invaluable insight into the importance of Shakespeare for us today, for any age: that Shakespeare in his own age was so in touch with the key issues of his age, political, religious, cultural and individual, so in touch with the richness and diversity of the language of his age, and so able to bring these two drives together visually, imagistically through language, that he has left an indelible understanding of where the artist of calibre exists within any period – at the forefront of the most important perceptions and expressions of his or her age. We have a firm sense that no Shakespeare play, no play in fact, is ever complete: it is part of a growing corpus of ever-unfolding richness, not a static ‘staged’ entity, like a heritage symbol, but a lived, performed experience, like a musical score forever modified by the interpretation; and that is what Murray emphasises and why this book is so important. For reasons such as this, where theatre is central to the life of a people, a nation, a culture, Murray reassuringly is wary of ‘project’, themed productions that can also be built around a director’s fantasies or, worse still, personal issues.

Braham Murray as the artistic director here draws upon over forty years’ experience of directing some of the greatest plays of the western world, spanning two thousand five hundred years of drama, including opera, musicals, comedy and farce, to offer students and practitioners of theatre a profoundly honest, humorous and informed study that can only help theatre and the creation of drama to grow. Murray himself emphasises that it is not a dogmatic assertion of ‘how to produce a play’, more the account of one important director’s journey through his own work in theatre as director, conductor, manager, inspiration, and, for the cast, above all as artist. As with theatre reviews and audiences, there will always be dissenting voices; but this is a voice that should not be ignored.

This is a short, very readable, focused book, written out of a deep almost messianic commitment to theatre, which only helps to emphasise the truth and complexity of the idea that, in the end, ‘the play’s the thing’.

Originally published on the website of the Manchester Salon.

It is tempting to consider the concept of design as being one of the defining features of the 1980s, up there with synthesiser bands and Joan Collins’ shoulder pads. For the designer was one of the decade’s big beasts, with cropped hair, bow tie and an office in regenerated Covent Garden. But long before this creature entered the public consciousness, a much more important figure had been around, setting the pace. He’s still doing so, and now we have this exhibition to mark his eightieth birthday. Who is he?

The answer is, of course, Sir Terence Conran. And if seeing his name in print awakens memories of what we’ve heard of him, we shouldn’t think it’s sufficient simply to leave him with a nod of recognition at his place in the history of design. His work - and his achievements - should be revisited, and this exhibition is an opportunity to do so.

In Britain, the 1950s weren’t just the era of rock and roll and Angry Young Men strutting their stuff on page, stage and screen. They were also a period of post-war austerity and drabness: the young JG Ballard, returning to his homeland after internment under the Japanese, felt that Britain looked as if it had lost, not won, the war. Attlee’s New Jerusalem seemed decidedly tatty. Recovery from the war was sluggish. But not everyone was prepared to be submerged in the post-war spirit of ‘mustn’t grumble’. Terence Conran, born in 1931, a one-time textile design student at London’s Central School of Art before going on to establish a workshop with artist and print-maker Eduardo Paolozzi where he concentrated on designing furniture, ceramics and fabrics - had the revelatory experience of travelling in France. Seeing delicious food, country markets and simple kitchenware inspired him to introduce this attractive lifestyle to the land of ration-books and bomb sites.

After working on the 1951 Festival of Britain, he opened his first restaurant - The Soup Kitchen - off the Strand in London, selling exotica such as espresso coffee, French breads and cheeses and, of course, soup. Meanwhile, the urge to design hadn’t left him, and we see a simple but eye-catching textile from 1952 showing what look like upside-down red and black umbrellas on a white background. We also see a basket-weave cone chair from 1953. Though it doesn’t look very comfortable to sit in, it givest he impression of being an attempt to introduce a fresh, light-hearted spirit to furniture design.

In 1956, Conran launched his eponymous Design Group, covering interiors, graphic design and furniture, and from the following year we see a ceramic tureen which is symbolic of the way he meant to go on: it has a circular lid, a four-cornered bowl and a criss-cross design in yellow, green and blue. It’s pretty, yet practical: it’s attractive but won’t empty its contents in your lap. In 1964 he opened Habitat, the shop where the denizens of ‘Swinging London’ could get furniture which was both bright and business-like, a world away from the dark, heavy stuff on offer in the average store. The products looked good whether they were in a bedsit, a suburban semi or a Victorian house being done-up by pioneering (and, eventually, profitable) gentrifiers in the backstreets of inner London’s tougher areas.

Some have said Conran’s work has been influenced by Modernism. This view is understandable: when he started-out, Modernism was still the god before whom the arts establishment bowed-down. Its beliefs and achievements were yet to be given a good roughing-up by the likes of Sir John Betjeman and architectural historian David Watkin. Even now, in some circles, criticising Modernism has to be done with a certain amount of nervous, apologetic throat clearing. In its architectural incarnation Modernism was a paternalistic, secular version of German Protestant Puritanism dusted with a coating of Victorian progressivism.

When Conran was establishing himself, its practical application within post-war British reconstruction was yet to foist onto the public (with, allegedly, the aid of mutually-beneficial relationships between builders and local government planning departments) the tower-blocks which would blight inner cities and housing estates. But did he follow this ethos slavishly? We only need to look at such things in the exhibition as the fabrics by Susan Collierand Sarah Campbell with Native North American-style patterns, the Habitat blue and white floral teapot from the 1960s, the blue jug with thin yellow bands by David Phillips, who worked with Conran during the period 1967-1975, and the red coffee pot with its manageable size and hand-comfortable handle from 1971-1980, to see that Conran - arguably- used Modernism’s simplicity but rejected its stylistic austerity. He made – to adapt Tom Wolfe’s famous book title - the work of the Bauhaus look presentable in our house. Later on, this domestic flair would be evident in the chain of successful restaurants Conran established, and we see plates and cutlery from his eatery empire such as Bluebird, Quaglino’s, Albion, Lutyens and, from Paris, Alcazar.)

The exhibition has significance, not only in its individual exhibits, but in its venue. For the Design Museum is the latest phase in Conran’s drive to spread the gospel of good design. In the 1980s he established the Conran Foundation, an educational charity focused on promoting a better understanding of design. The Boilerhouse Project - based in a gallery under the Victoria and Albert Museum - was its first undertaking. Under the directorship of design guru Stephen Bayley, exhibitions took place there. In 1989, Conran and Bayley opened the Design Museum at its present site in Bermondsey. At both locations, Conran has attempted to educate people to see that design and business go together, have a mutually beneficial, not exclusive, relationship.

And this is vital: arguably, since the 19th century, science and technology - both intrinsic to design - have been regarded as being somehow inferior to the arts by Britain’s cultural and educational policy-makers. They have been given a bad name by the Romantics (because of the poverty attendant upon the Industrial Revolution) and some greens and feminists (who see science and technology as cold, masculine, not touchy-feely). Britain may have been regarded as the workshop of the world, but little was done by education to strengthen this brand. Public schools concentrated on producing gentlemen rather than scientists and entrepreneurs, grammar schools offered a watered-down version of this ethos, while secondary modern schools churned out fodder for factories little changed since Victorian times. Thus, British industrial planning after the Second World failed because it was carried out by amateurs rather than - as was the case in France and Germany – properly-trained experts. The link between science, manufacturing, and the production and development of the day-to-day technology - such as the internet and computer games, cars and aircraft, which we take for granted and whose loss we would note very quickly, is not widely recognised. Because trade has been regarded in artistic circles as essentially philistine (except when it comes to the art market, of course), its role in driving forward not only science but also design - artistic presentation being a vital ingredient of advertising – has been consistently overlooked.

Conran, with his reputation for artistic and profitable practicality as his calling-card, has a vital role in combating two centuries of neglect. And if he comes over to some as being a bit too pleased with himself to fulfil this role – false amateurishness being a sine quo non for anyone who wishes to be seen as a contender for achieving anything in Britain- well, with his track record he’s entitled to be. Meanwhile, the Design Museum is due to relocate in 2014 to the Commonwealth Centre. Situated in Kensington High Street, this building embodies, in both its architecture and its intentions, aesthetic and socio-political ideals which have proved to have chequered track records. Conran’s ideals seem set to give the place a new sense of relevance.

All this being recognised, it is unfortunate that this exhibition is not without its faults. The layout feels confined, maze-like, and a wider range of exhibits would also have been welcome. But these are minor points when viewed against the larger canvas of what Conran has achieved. Because there is a constant hunger for good design, and a current need for economic revival. This small exhibition is a timely reminder of the work of a man who is a dab hand at contributing to both.

Till 4 March 2012

Philip Ridley has long been heralded as a chief proponent of ‘in yer face theatre’; a playwright who ripped down theatre’s fussy and formal framework and opened up dark and exciting, new places in which poetry could roam, wild and free. But it would be foolish to label Ridley’s plays as thrilling but abstract fantasies. For all that mesmerising obscurity and misdirection, Ridley’s plays address a vast range of prescient ideas.

The Pitchfork Disney, which was first staged at the Bush in 1991, could have been written yesterday. It is a play of our time, written by a playwright who was (and is) ahead of his. Ostensibly, the play tracks two abandoned siblings, Presley and Hayley, whose closed off and chocolate-filled existence is blown apart by the arrival of two very strange strangers. But Edward Dick’s beautifully undulating production, directed with real humility and sensitivity, is about so much more.

Bubbling away in this cauldron of emotion and ideas, is the theme of homosexuality and exclusion.  I have never before extracted such a concrete idea from one of Ridley’s plays, but this theme is impossible to ignore in Edward Dick’s clear-headed but head-spinning production. Presley’s naked desire to be touched by the imposter, Cosmo Disney, and his heartbreaking nightmare, in which his is the ‘last voice in the world’, shows a man whose sexual yearnings have left him utterly alone. His lust for love has cut him off completely from the the dark wasteland beyond his door.

This desire for contact – and the isolation borne from this desire – is just one of a stream of provocative inversions, which flow through Ridley’s play.  Absolutely everything – language, emotions, visuals - is turned inside out. This idea of a topsy turvy world is reflected in Bob Bailey’s striking design, which places the sibling’s floor on a raised platform, lit from below. It feels a bit like the ceiling is beneath Presley and Hayley – or that the sun is beneath them and the light, that they might have drawn from their parents’ love, is trapped underground forever.

These inversions permeate Ridley’s script and lie in wait, like landmines for the brain. The sweet chocolate these two love is, in reality, rotting their teeth. The dummy Hayley uses for comfort is soaked in poison. The release that Hayley (Mariah Gale in a performance so raw she might as well have shed her skin) seeks in sleep, only brings her agonizing nightmares. And the company that Presley longs for in Cosmo, draws him further still from the rest of society.

But it isn’t just the world inside Presley’s flimsy door that Ridley examines with his forensic poetry. This is also a play about public degradation – about society’s widespread and unthinking debasement. When Cosmo suggests the idea of a public execution, one can almost hear the TV producers’ pens twitching with excitement (I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here FOREVER!’). The parallels continue when we discover that Cosmo – a warped Mickey Mouse, dressed in a red, sparkly jacket - reveals that he eats cockroaches for a living. As Cosmo (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) munches on a cockroach, cooing ‘The queasier it gets, the more they pay’, one’s mind inevitably turns, again, to ‘I’m a Celebrity…’ The only difference here is that the deadening crunch, as the cockroach cracks, makes Ridley’s horror show bitingly more realistic than supposed reality-TV.

The allusions to contemporary issues continue to surface in the strangest of places. When Cosmo’s ‘business partner’, Pitchfork, arrives he looks like a galactic creature, wrapped in bacofoil. But even this most outlandish creation still fits into today’s world. As Pitchfork opens his twisted mouth to sing, letting out a stream of strangled sounds, it could be all the ‘comedy’ X Factor auditions rolled into one. It is a tragic song, as if the whole world’s heartbreak has been channelled into one horrific and tuneless melody. 

Till 17 March 2012

Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Emperor Jones, is one of those works that is very easy to misconstrue as simply racist or simple-minded Freudianism. It’s neither, but the 1933 film adaptation of said play, starring Paul Robeson in the role of Brutus Jones, suffers from many of the same misconceptions, as well as a few of its own, due to the breaks the film makes from its source material- both pro and con. And these breaks owe all of their power to the screenplay by DuBose Heyward, and the interpretation of it by film director Dudley Murphy, one of the earliest ‘lost’ avant-garde filmmakers, who films it all in a very quick, modern style, as opposed to the then dominant style of extended master shots.

The film’s narrative does not already start on the unnamed tropical Caribbean Island that the play does; rather the film takes a chronological approach, and fleshes out more of Jones’ background. In this, though, the 76 minute film suffers, for the play is a direct examination of a man’s mind (however stereotyped one may argue it was rendered). The film neuters this innovative approach, but to Heyward’s and Murphy’s credit, the film compensates by expanding the tale of Jones with incidents not in the play. Plus, Murphy allows Robeson to physically change the tenor of scenes with a smile or a wink, or a knowing bow. To those who claim that Robeson was not a great actor, this is true only insofar as his acting style was not naturally cinematic- he was clearly theater and stage trained, but he does make a rather dated play still come alive, as a film, in the 21st century. And, of course, the film has a number of musical interludes that the play lacks because, well, when one has Robeson, one of the three or four greatest male voices ever recorded, you show off the wares.

The credits open with typical African music and scenes, then switches to a Baptist church to parallel the black religion with religions past. Jones is off to the North, to start his Pullman Porter job, and lies to his naïve girlfriend that he will remain faithful. He does not, of course, and soon has whores in every city, the most vicious being Undine (Fredi Washington, a pale black woman forced to wear blackface), the ex-girlfriend of Jeff (Frank Wilson), another porter who has befriended him. The two men end up enemies, and battle over a crap game, when Jeff is caught cheating. He tries to kill Jones with a switchblade, but is overpowered and ends up dead. Here is a typical Dumbest Possible Action trope; the death is clearly self-defence, witnessed by a crowded gambling hall, and black on black, so why would Jones run? This stupid act confers guilt upon him, and it is so perfunctory that Murphy just cuts to scenes of Jones on a chain gang, where his refusal to help beat a sweatbox prisoner leads him to kill the chain gang lead (the actual killing is cut away from, as to not offend white audiences of the day). Jones somehow escapes, hops a ship, and jumps overboard at the first island he can.

Here is where the film tackles not just racism, but colonialism, a far stickier and persistent problem, even in today’s world (which shows the continued relevance of both film and source play). Captured on the beach, Jones is brought before the buffoonish ‘King’ of the island. He is sentenced to jail, but ‘bought’ by Smithers (Dudley Digges), the lone white (British) merchant on the island, who schemes to rip off the King and his people. It is the repeated use of the word ‘nigger,’ by both Smithers and Jones, in many exchanges, that was considered controversial; but Robeson always claimed he had no problem with the word since it was a naturalistic and realistic representation of the realities the play and film portrayed. Jones, meanwhile, schemes to become partners with Smithers, and does. He then schemes to topple the King, and does, claiming he can only be killed with a silver bullet, because he filled the guns of the King’s guard with blanks. He then begins a multi-year rule of exploiting the natives, far worse and more brutally than Smithers or other Europeans have, thus falling into the trap of recreating the Southern white society that abused him, except with himself as the abuser, not the abused. It is this irony, and linkage of Jones with the all too human evils that power brings, where O’Neill’s play was most prescient. The natives then scheme to rid the island of him, and Smithers laughs as Jones flees into the jungle, thus letting the film catch up to the play, which is mainly told in flashbacks. The film then ends with the twenty plus minute sequence of Jones reliving much of what we have seen, his torments and the like, with a few scenes in the play replaced by ones in the film; diluting some of the more provocative charges of racism that the play made. Some of the visual effects are quite lovely, despite the film’s low budget status, even from 1933, its year of creation, mainly due to the excellent cinematography of Ernest Haller. The soundtrack, by Rosamond Johnson, is also first rate, especially considering the early sound era the film was made in. Jones is somehow deranged by the combination of visuals and music, as well as his own past and the voodoo of the natives, as signified by the constant beat of their drums. They end up killing him, and laying his corpse over a stone, as Smithers watches, then returns to his more ‘humane’ exploitation of the natives.

The DVD is part of The Criterion Collection’s four disk DVD boxed set, called Paul Robeson: Portraits Of The Artist. The disk that has The Emperor Jones on it also has a 29 minute long documentary by Saul J Turell, called Paul Robeson: Tribute To An Artist. That film is interesting, mainly because of its archival footage explaining how and why, over the years, Robeson changed the Oscar Hammerstein lyrics to ‘Ol’ Man River’, to suit his audiences and the state of life he was in. There is also Robeson On Robeson, in which Paul Robeson, Jr. talks of his father’s significance in the arts and American life; as well as Our Paul: Remembering Paul Robeson, in which friends and colleagues recall the man. The highlight of the disc is the audio commentary for the main film, in which historian Jeffery C Stewart opines on the film. Rather, I should say he tries to opine, and the commentary should be the disc’s highlight. The truth is that should is the operative word; the commentary simply is not compelling which, given Robeson’s stature and life, reflects poorly on Stewart.

Not only is Stewart relentlessly PC (which seems all the more condescending, given the film’s unabashed use of racism, the then reality) in what he says, but, while being scene specific, heonly talks about the scenes in ways he thinks O’Neill or Murphy or Robeson intended something to play out, rather than the import of the scene within the artwork itself, or chiming in with anecdotes about the actors and creators of the film. This myopia damns the listener (and I listened to every second) to a pompous, self-righteous, and obfuscated drone. Rare is the insight provided as nicely as when Stewart explains the social and racial reference to Jack Johnson, in a conversation between Jeff and Jones, about how to con the highest tips from rich white women. Instead, he tries too hard to frame the film into the box he’s created for it, rather than just let the film do that work. Facts and backgrounding are keys to good commentaries, as is a sense of knowing when silence can work. Also, one would have hoped that Criterion would have done some restoration of the original film- numerous scenes are in rough shape. But, ever since the switch to their new semi-C logo, Criterion has been skimping on film restoration and audio commentaries.

Let me return to my opening clam, though, that O’Neill’s play is one of those works that is very easy to misconstrue as simply racist or simple-minded Freudianism. The reason for this is that O’Neill lets some of his own liberal racism slip into his construction of the mind of Jones. O’Neill errs in thinking that by adding flaws to Jones that he adds complexity. Since Jones was apt to be immediately stereotyped by contemporary audiences, depth could only be gained by the attribution of positive qualities. Yes, we do see that Jones is cunning, and what would now be called a ‘playa,’ but he is also a brute, as his name suggests. And the easy way in which Freudian symbolism mucks up the play, and film’s end, does no great service either. Still, Jones is clearly the smartest and most resourceful character in the play, white or black, and the portrayal (attempted, at least) of the subconscious or unconscious mind (individual and/or collectively) does show how ahead of the game O’Neill was. The Emperor Jones is not a great film, and its source play is not a great work of drama, but both are important, and both have small moments of greatness - in the film’s case, mainly through the titanic presence of Robeson subverting some of the well-intended, but ultimately destructive, tendencies of O’Neill’s character portrayal. But, see the film, even if you cringe. Sometimes, even expired medicine can have power, if it does not always work.

Looked at objectively, Shallow Slumber is a bit of a shambles. Nevertheless, playwright Chris Lee handles his gut-wrenching subject, that of child abuse, with such rawness and empathy that the play holds you rapt in spite of clunking flaws. With a strict dramaturgical going-over, it could be shatteringly good.

Inspired by the case of Baby P, Lee works backwards in time, piecing together two disintegrated lives to the explosive moment that blew them apart. Three days out of prison, Dawn (Amy Cudden) turns up unannounced on the doorstep of her former social worker. As Moira, stood in her dressing gown, Alexandra Gilbreath freezes in shock. Her face gives nothing away.

Nor, at this point, does their conversation; Lee has them talk cryptically – unnaturally so – about their shared history, pointedly keeping secrets from us to allow his structure to work. The trouble is that the benefits of hindsight aren’t intricate enough. Lee takes us backwards not to illuminate the past, as in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, but simply because he’s building to a climatic scene that happens to be chronologically earlier. Besides his pained efforts to withhold the nature of Dawn’s crime is undermined by the openness with which the production has marketed itself.

Shallow Slumber subsequently rewinds through Dawn’s stint in prison and prior judicial procedures, until it reaches the fraught confession that led her there. Here, Lee unleashes everything. Dawn’s admission leaves images of stinging cruelty: experimental punches, cigarette-tips burning holes in baby-soft skin, a kettleful of water that finally scalds the life out of her child. The pain reverberates into the auditorium in collective gasps.

Nevertheless, Shallow Slumber is no mere in-yer-face exercise. Beneath it are nuanced social points about class and the co-dependence of the care-system and its clients. Not only is Dawn aware of the injustice behind the assumption that she needs a social worker, deep down she knows that, in her case, it’s a fair one. For all that she might not have done, Dawn needs Moira.

Yet Moira needs Dawn just as much, if not more; a point well-made by Georgia Lowe’s design of a corridor with two ends that reflect one another. Each becomes more fully human through the other. Their relationship is one of mutual gratification; of submission and domination. Moira has to visit Dawn in prison. When she gets up to leave, Dawn slams a knife into her hand. Even in the first scene, with Dawn begging for help, Moira’s gestures push her away as if resisting the temptation of an addiction overcome. Fixing things is Moira’s fix; it’s how she feels secure and superior in her own middle-class, comparatively comfortable existence.

Lee’s writing falls down when it comes to credibility. Though the characters and their relationship are rounded and three-dimensional, their language and actions are often incongruous. Dawn is certainly too eloquent, prone to poetic flourishes that jar, but both behave irrationally. They give up incriminating information too readily and willingly splurge backstories, some of which are too bloated, all suicides and murder. In this way, Lee neglects situation and his characters are self-consciously creatures of the stage; they would work much better in direct address.

Though director Mary Nighy cannot get around these problems, she has nonetheless drawn two stunning performances from Gilbreath and Cudden. Cudden’s Dawn is an open wound, emotions and inner-conflict always babbling to the surface and threatening to drown her. Gilbreath, on the other hand, is externally unflinching. She presents us the blankest of blank canvases, embracing the ambiguous mysteries of the text by forcing us to do the work. Her transformations are fantastic and she can go from fresh to drained in an instant. Hers is a remarkable performance that hints at hidden depths and keeps Shallow Slumber on track throughout.

Till 18 February 2012

Staging history

This week on CW, playwright Barney Norris asks why Margaret Thatcher has become such a popular subject for dramatic treatment today. Matt Trueman reports from the London International Mime festival, and reviews other London theatre including Simon Stephens’ The Trial of Ubu at Hampstead Theatre and Nick Payne’s Constellations at the Royal Court. And Lewis Richards reviews Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum.

27 January 2012

An interesting excavation has been taking place in theatre, on television and in film over the last year – the divisive figure of Margaret Thatcher has returned to our screens and stages, emerging once more at the forefront of the cultural and conversational agenda. Lindsay Duncan, Andrea Riseborough and Meryl Streep have all given readings, investigating the human story behind a woman who, for decades, has stood for so much as a symbol rather than an individual. Thatcher is, in many ways, a character of Shakespearean scale – embodying whole worlds in what she means to different people and dominating the stage of her generation.

Now, Thatcher’s credentials as a Shakespearean figure have been enhanced by a significantly expanded performance history. Streep’s performance in The Iron Lady, in particular, was anticipated in much the same way as David Tennant’s, Jude Law’s, or Michael Sheen’s Hamlets: what would she do with the story? What would she bring to the role? Thatcher, like a character in a play, can’t be viewed in isolation: we have to see her in relation to other people’s visions and revisions.

On stage, we have been reminded of her function as symbol by Out of Joint’s revival of Top Girls, Caryl Churchill’s extraordinary play. In Top Girls, Thatcher becomes an idea, an uncrossable distance between two sisters whose life choices have driven them very far apart. Robert Holman’s play Making Noise Quietly, soon to be directed by Peter Gill at the Donmar Warehouse, also looks at her impact on ordinary lives. And in my new play Missing, which opens next week at the Tristan Bates Theatre, Thatcher plays a similar role – Missing tells the story of two brothers, Luke and Andy, who have been born into empty lives and are growing up sharing a bedroom in 1980s England. As in Top Girls, Thatcher is mentioned only once – but she hangs over the room they share and the place they are looking to escape, the weather of their lives, the force that acts on the brothers. I have set out to explore Thatcher as a symbol, draw on the associations she prompts in people, and examine the atmosphere she brought down on Britain in the 1980s: and at a time when, across the arts, other organisations have been doing the same thing, it is interesting to ask why this is a relevant study to make now.

Investigating the legacy of Margaret Thatcher may seem, at first, to be a retreat from engaging with modern politics, but I believe exactly the opposite is taking place when contemporary artists turn to her. One way of understanding the present is to interrogate the past. In the more objective light of hindsight, patterns can be observed in earlier events which, if we pay them attention, can teach us about our now. I have written a play that happens in the shadow of Thatcher because I hope it can be an effective way of treating the shadow I myself live in – that of recession, social fragmentation, reduced opportunities for ordinary people and a state that is withdrawing from the people who need it like an ebb tide.

By looking at another time when the tide was going our on our society, I hope I can provide new perspective and depth to our experience of what is happening in the world now: not only because Britain under Thatcher suffered similar violence from the state, but because the violence being done to us now is happening itself in the shadow of Thatcher. The politics she espoused, continued by the New Labour project of City-worshipping and brought back into the light by the policies of this present government, are acting on us every day; to examine her influence, the ideas she stands for, therefore seems vitally relevant to me.

Shakespeare recognised the value of history as a way of looking at society. In Hamlet, he examined a man who believed his family were damned because his uncle had married his father’s wife after his father’s death, an act outlawed in the Book of Common Prayer at the time Shakespeare was writing. This was a radical piece of political engagement, when one considers that Henry VIII, father of the monarch in the year of Hamlet’s writing, Elizabeth I, had done exactly the same thing, and it was only possible to make such comments through placing them in another situation. In this light, Margaret Thatcher comes to seem even more like a Shakespearean character: a figure from history, used to say something about our own time, allowing more to be spoken by putting the action at one remove.

Missing runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre from Tuesday 31 January Saturday 25 February 2012. Book online through www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk, email boxoffice@tristanbatestheatre.co.uk or call 020 7240 6283.

Simplicity of premise provides the beauty of Simon Stephens’ The Trial of Ubu, but it also proves the biggest constraint. There’s great satirical potential in wrenching Alfred Jarry’s overblown despot Pa Ubu back into the real world to face the consequences of his grotesque actions in an ICC-style trial. The purity of the central concept is such, however, that with only a basic understanding of the original, one can grasp Stephens’ overarching ambition from brochure copy alone. The risk is one of triteness.

Nevertheless, those who avoid the Hampstead on that basis will miss the craft with which the subject’s surrounding intricacies are explored in Katie Mitchell’s production. Admittedly, The Trial of Ubu has less to chew on than the superior Wastwater, which gave chase to a greasier pig, but there is nonetheless an awful lot to keep one’s mind occupied, both during and after proceedings, if you let it.

For starters, following a Punch and Judy-style synopsis of Jarry’s original, Mitchell presents the trial not as is, but at one remove, through two interpreters, who translate and repeat the words spoken inside the courtroom itself.

There will be those who cry tedium; that the commentary box has nothing on the match itself. They are wrong. This is a chance to engross oneself in the minute details that would otherwise go unseen. By refracting rather than simply representing the trial, Mitchell better reveals its component parts. Her production sees clearer precisely because it does not look directly at the sun. So dazzlingly grotesque is Pa Ubu that his presence would outshine any nuanced reflection.

Certainly, the text is delivered with all the tonal variation of Morse code. Reported back, it is stripped of emotion and, to a certain extent, intention. Punctuation becomes garbled, replaced with a steady, but stuttering, flow of words; pauses are scrapped as they struggle to keep pace; language warps. But do we not learn more from a fingerprint than from the lines on a palm, even though the contours offer less contrast?

Rather than the performative behaviour of a trial, in which everyone is aware of being watched, Mitchell can present genuine – often involuntary – reaction. Words send shivers and draw gasps, but can’t be fully digested or registered, such is the speed of their task. While Nikki Amuka-Bird’s interpreter is ever professional, getting the job done with a stony-faced, machinated aloofness, Kate Duchêne is entirely human. She fits with giggles, wells up with tears and succumbs to a cold. In the contrast – both sides of which are familiar responses – lies the production’s heart.

As such, The Trial of Ubu is not so much about the nature of such regimes themselves – though, of course, it can’t completely sidestep that subject, no matter how broadly Stephens treats it. Rather, it concerns the impossibility of a proper, fitting and just response in the aftermath. How, Stephens and Mitchell combine to ask, can we possibly begin to assign responsibility, let alone conduct a fair trial, given the enormity of expectation, of prejudice (in the strictest sense of the word) and of suffering? How, in other words, can we humanly respond to the categorically inhumane?

Paul McCleary’s Pa Ubu is both intensely human and, at the same time, not at all. He is a frail old man, whose jailor must help him smoke, let alone stand, so the maximum security that surrounds him seems ludicrous. ‘Is the architecture all for me,’ he asks the Judge. Nevertheless, made up with the same soaked clown face as Heath Ledger’s Joker, Ubu becomes cartoon villain. Certainly, he’s tried as such; as a scapegoat, the very opposite of a puppet leader. ‘J’accuse,’ the witnesses cry, shifting the blame from their own shoulders. ‘He told me to.’ ‘He said I’d be killed.’ In punishing him, they absolve themselves of any responsibility. Ubu is their Get Out of Jail Free card.

Interspersed with scenes outside the courtroom – Ubu in his cell, two lawyers in conversation over a cigarette – The Trial of Ubu becomes a fascinating indictment of the international justice system. The neatly packaged narrative belies a web of responsibility and reduces complexities into grim folklore – which perhaps explains the filmic quality of Lizzie Clachan’s individual box sets. Its central case is no less vengeful than the stringing up of Benito Mussolini or the uncivilised disposal of Muammar Gaddafi. If it lacks the horror of such hellish ends, Ubu’s trial is instead purgatorial: ‘I think I’m losing track of time a little bit,’ he says to the judge. For all its criticism, The Trial of Ubu isn’t so perverse as to entirely undermine the system, and endless assessment comes to seem a fitting piece.

Mitchell’s production is characteristically well-drilled and precise, but the masterstroke is to re-invent Stephens’ play for the nuances around its edges than its straightforward centre. As such, The Trial of Ubu needs to be watched from an angle, with a willingness to make connections and grapple, rather than head-on, waiting for answers to be dished out.

Till 25 February 2012

‘Shaped by War’ opens with a young Don McCullin in Beirut during the 1982 conflict. Towering above him are the words, ‘I had an almost magnetic emotional sense of direction pulling me to extraordinary places’. Needless to say, I knew I was going to see some truly hard-hitting photos of war and its impact. Don McCullin’s coverage of a wide range of conflicts and humanitarian disasters is a master class where time and time again, you are shown his bravery, ambition and at many points sheer insanity to ensure that the true picture of the conflict was shown.

A key characteristic of the exhibition is the lack of colour photos used by Don McCullin during his career. McCullin said himself, ‘I thought that black and white images in war were much more powerful,’ and his photos reinforce this statement. Two of the photojournalist’s most powerful images include the 1964 World Press Photo of the Year Award depiction of a Turkish Cypriot wife mourning the death of her husband and being held by emotional loved ones, and the shell-shocked US Marine at the Battle of Hue in 1968 depicted in stark black and white, bring an air of sorrow and shock that would not have been possible without a void of colour.

On its own, the exhibition is an exceptional showcase of a talented photojournalist who has ‘been there’. His talent is undeniable and his Commander of the British Empire was most justified, but the most striking part of the exhibition is Don McCullin himself.

Don McCullin was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park, and was evacuated during the war. He did his National Service with the Royal Air Force as a photographic assistant, which included a stint processing reconnaissance photographs in Suez and Cyprus during the mid 1950s. His first major break in photojournalism was in 1958 when his photos of the ‘Guv’nors’ gang of Seven Sisters Road (which co-incidentally included his school friends) were published in the Observer after a publicised policeman murder. Although he had become a part of the Observer team, his big break came in 1961 where after seeing the infamous Peter Leibing photo of the East German guard jumping the barbed wire that was the Berlin Wall in Paris, he went to Berlin where his photos drew international praise.

His work with the Sunday Times Magazine sent him to war conflicts and natural disasters which often led him to danger and in the case of Cambodia, actual physical damage.  While Don McCullin’s work gave to him a purpose in life, the effects of what he was capturing have had a major effect on his life.

The exhibition includes an interview with Don McCullin by the Imperial War Museum, which drew me to the damaged man McCullin had become. The experience of the Nigerian-Biafran War in 1969 made McCullin shift his focus for the perpetrators of war to the victims as his once optimistic view on his work started to diminish. When recalling his initial steps into the photojournalism profession, McCullin said, ‘I suddenly thought to myself, for once in your life, you have a purpose. Use it. You could turn the minds of certain people and situations’. By 1971 in the Bangladesh Liberation War, witnessing the cholera outbreaks over the displaced refugees, McCullin said, ‘I knew I had an amazing picture, but what a terrible way of earning a living’.

What make this exhibition a must see is the profound mark McCullin’s story leaves on you. A once great photojournalist of wars and humanitarian disasters now focuses on landscapes and commissioned portraits. Why, you ask? To remove the guilt he had growing inside of him after witnessing death, human devastation and sacrifice for a living. The likes of McCullin have shaped our view on warfare by capturing the true nature of combat, but what takes the plaudits from this exhibition, is the ability to show that the likes of McCullin are shaped by war as much as the soldiers who fought the conflict themselves.

Don McCullin sums up his entire career in one sentence of self defeat. ‘I don’t think I ever changed anything….. because Rwanda still occurred….... I’m ashamed of humanity sometimes’. Walking out of the exhibition you get to understand the tragic genius of McCullin, a man on the frontline who has experienced war and believed he did nothing to change it, but in reality has brought life changing photos to generations. Only one thing is certain, he will not be forgotten.

Till 15 April 2012

As dramatic settings go, the multiverse is a damn sight more ambitious than most. Over the course of its 65 minutes, Nick Payne’s Constellations zaps between parallel universes to tell the stories of Roland and Marianne’s relationship. Or perhaps the story of Roland and Marianne’s relationships.

Though it seems time-space-continuum corkscrew of a play, Constellations is, at heart, a rather simply love story fused with a game of consequences. Boy meets girl. Boy rejects girl/dates girl. They break up when boy/girl cheats. Meeting again, they’ve moved on/get back together. A good old fashioned postmodern rom-com, you see?

Rom-coms have their dramatic tension in the question, ‘Will they or won’t they?’ Ultimately, we know that yes, in the end, they will, inevitably, live happily ever after, but the game is in the obstacles that get in the way. Payne’s multiverse allows the possibility for both at the same time. He can take us down dead ends, missed opportunities and vicious break ups, safe in the knowledge that, in another universe, everything is going swimmingly.

Constellations starts at a soggy barbecue, when Marianne, a quantum physicist rolls out an inane chat up line. It doesn’t work. Undeterred, she tries again at another rainy barbecue. While we’re still unsure of his rules, Payne dupes us into thinking that it’s something she says to all the boys – that the men she approaches, played by Rafe Spall, are all different. In fact, they’re all different Rolands at the same barbecue in different patches of the multiverse. One’s married, another too newly single. This one’s too hot, that one too cold until one proves just right.

Going forwards, we see multiple versions of various pivotal moments in their relationship – from first dates through to proposals and beyond. In its constant trial and error, the way it almost erases drafts as it goes, Constellations has echoes of Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire (one half of Blue Kettle).

It’s a clever structure, but one that’s content to be clever rather than explore the possibilities it opens up. Payne never provides a reason for showing us these particular variations as opposed to any other, meaning the relationship’s various courses have a trace of arbitrariness. Compare Alan Acykbourn’s Intimate Exchanges, a play that traces the fallout from a single shift, and you begin to see the way that alternatives need to rub against one another.

Nonetheless, form and content intermingle beautifully to illustrate the implications of quantum physics on free will. Payne isn’t conclusively determinist. His characters still act freely, but their freedom is more limited than either would like to believe. Everything here is contingent: every decision, responsive; every happy ending as sweet and brittle as honeycomb.

In this, language becomes central. Even something as unthinking as word selection, which brings the most minute shift of meaning, can, like the butterfly flapping earthquakes into being, have a significant impact. Not for nothing does Marianne lose the ability to find the right word towards the end. Payne also suggests that we are, to some extent, pre-destined; programmed to suffer certain illnesses or, like the ’umble ‘oney bee, to wind up with the same partner whatever happens.

With this, the present moment becomes central and it’s no accident that Payne ends with a final reprise in which Marianne and Roland meet for the first time after breaking up. Here, they have a past and they seem to have a potential future; the moment is a perfect balance of the known and the unknown. In that stands for all the rest: the past feeds into the present, which will, in turn shape the future. In this way, Payne presents a well-crafted illustration of soft-determinism, which allows for the existence of both free will and determined outcomes.

There’s a neat sideline on science. The more we understand, the more control we gain, but – paradoxically – the less in control we feel. The closer to God we become, the more we realise our own insignificance, that, as one Marianne puts it, we’re nothing but ‘particles governed by a series of very particular laws being knocked the fuck around all over the place’.

Emotionally supple and engaging throughout, Michael Longhurst’s production goes a long way to covering the text’s shortcomings. At its heart are two blissfully easy performances from Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins. Spall is tender, gangly and emotionally bunged up as Roland, while Hawkins is, by her very nature, the perfect rom-com actress. She is just as awkward as we all feel, but still attractive and likeable to the end. Tom Scutt’s elegant design – a honeycomb floor with a cluster of white balloons above – is full of resonance, suggesting everything from thunderclouds to stars, molecules to brain matter, celebrations to dreams.

Smart and delicate, Constellations ultimately falls short of its considerable ambition. It reaches for the stars and, though heavenly, doesn’t quite get there.

Till 11 February 2012

For all its stylish serenity, L’Autre has all the substance of a mirage in the desert. It’s the sort of non-verbal piece that soaks up any interpretation we so chose to project and, while it wears its hazy existentialism lightly, Claudio Stellato’s solo-for-two is ultimately forgettable.

On a red carpet, which seems to scrunch up of its own accord, are two wooden blocks. One is a tall, thin cupboard; the other, a short, squat television stand. Stellato variously climbs over, under and inside each. Here he seems a hermit crab, there a trapdoor spider, and elsewhere an escapologist unconcerned by spectacle.

L’Autre is an advocation of play. Stellato defies the accepted order of things, the one that says square pegs belong in square holes. He encourages us to see with fresh – often quite disbelieving – eyes. At several points, gravity seems to stand back and gift Stellato the floor. He walks a plank that oughtn’t support his weight, until, in a hauntingly tranquil final image, he dissolves into darkness.

The question is, ‘To what end?’ The possibilities of L’Autre are, exactly as the title suggests, simply other. They have no meaning except in relation to the usual state of play. For all it’s quietly mischievous beauty, L’Autre is rarely seems more than a demonstration of Stellato’s imagination and stage trickery infused with the aroma of vague philosophy.

Not one for the faux-naif goofing that wins its laughs by protesting it doesn’t deserve any, Stellato is a stoical, almost sage-like clown. His play is calm and considered, not haphazard tomfoolery and happy accidents. His every move seems to follow logically from the last, even if, ultimately, they are all equally pointless. Or rather, as Stellato would no doubt argue, who’s to say life is any less pointless than L’Autre.

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Mundo Paralelo, a collaboration between NoFitState Circus, National Theatre Wales and Théâtre Tattoo, purports to explore the ‘parallel worlds’ of circus and theatre and to challenge ‘circus artists to find new ways of connecting with their audiences’.

How, then, does it manage to make circus seem so utterly untheatrical? It’s as if, grateful for the opportunity to step onto a proper stage, NoFitState have abandoned all the raucous energy that makes them so watchable for the airs and graces of polite society. Yann Tiersen style piano music twinkles throughout. Gracious courtly bows and dainty curtsies follow each act. Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball was not so mindful of her p’s and q’s.

In trying to make the case for circus’s theatrical credentials indisputable, Mundo Paralelo manages to weaken both elements. The dramaturgy is so confused that it makes no sense as theatre, while, as circus, it never takes the handbrake off, leaving it largely safe, insipid and unspectacular. What’s wrong with creating pure circus that is nonetheless capable of metaphor and resonance, as NoFitState have managed so thrillingly in the past with work like Tabu or The Mill? The former insistently tells you it can do it. The latter just gets on and does.

Mundo Paralelo focuses on theatre’s liminal properties and its ability to step between different worlds. Performers follow one another through portals, vanishing and often appearing elsewhere a second later. As far as I could tell – and it’s such a miscellaneous mess that I can’t be sure – its narrative shows various individuals coming together in a magical forest type of space. Judging from the one audible voiceover section, there’s something about angels and humans in there too, but as for who’s what, I’ve no idea, as everyone seems equally capable of superhuman feats. Presumably, those in period costume are angels, but that rule doesn’t seem to hold fast throughout. Nor does it explain the waistcoated cowboy. (Again, I’m guessing.)

It’s only fair to mention the rapturous applause that followed, but, for me, it commits the cardinal sin of dullness. Circus is certainly capable of gentle tranquillity, but Mundo Paralelo struck me as tranquilised gentility.

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