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

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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A little boy lurks in a shadowy doorway. A row of knives glints amidst a spotless kitchen. Spooky music tingles in the background and a giant tarantula crawls about upstairs. All the signs suggest that Nancy Harris’, Our New Girl, is going to be a strange and unsettling show.

Indeed, when nanny Annie turns up unannounced in heavily-pregnant Hazel’s kitchen, there is a dangerous gleam to Harris’ pared down dialogue. Harris throws in just enough sinister hints about this new nanny, and her oddly intimate knowledge of Hazel’s family,  to keep these early encounters fizzing nicely. But despite these Ortonesque overtones, the atmosphere gradually flattens and the over-defined characters, with little room to develop, hit a dead end.

Harris seems unsure where to focus the nervous energy of her play. At first, the emphasis is on Annie (Denise Gough), as she subtly unbalances this family’s already dysfunctional routine. Yet the focus soon shifts to Hazel’s troubled relationship with her son, Daniel, who she neither likes nor understands. It all get a bit, We Need to Talk About Kevin, only without the mystery of the original novel. The plot works on overtime, as a somewhat predictable affair is thrown into the mix, Hazel’s home-business begins to implode and divorce hovers on the horizon.

All the subtle intrigue of the opening scenes is lost in a deluge of action. It’s simply not possible to maintain the slow-burning tension in the midst of some increasingly over-blown drama. Director Charlotte Gwinner could have have corralled this show a little more tightly, picking one plot thread to pull out above all others. It is hard for things to unravel convincingly, when there are so many threads knotted, awkwardly, together.

Kate Fleetwood, as under-stimulated but overstressed mum Hazel, is the only one to find real texture in her role. She is brittle but not thin, vicious but still sympathetic. The same cannot be said of husband, Richard (Mark Bazeley) whose blatant flirting and barking insults are so overdone that the audience can only laugh. 

Till 11 February 2012

A good prop can be the making of a clown. So, when I say that a stepladder is the star of Pss Pss, I mean no slight on Camilla Pessi and Simone Fassari, who go together under the name Baccala Clowns.

When a trapeze plummets from the flies, the two stand shoulder to shoulder, gaping upwards. The ladder, handily placed by a stagehand at the back of the stalls, is hauled through the audience, fast-ducking as it swishes overhead. Placed upside down, apparently unwittingly, it becomes an object so unusual that it is capable of surprising us just as much as them. They blow tunes through its rungs, spring it open and shut with their jaws and, finally, climb it in spectacularly awkward style.

The ladder – like the less everyday trapeze, on which they later sprawl and clamber over on another precariously – unlocks their play in a way that the staple objects that precede it can’t. Instead these generally give rise to standard clowning games of status and (happy) accident. There’s a touch of teacher-pupil to their relationship, with Fassari as the prissy parent, prudishly tucking his chin, to Pessi’s fidgety child, her pigtails frayed and frazzled.

Until 2010, Pessi and Fassari largely played circuses and cabarets, before turning their hand to theatre-based clowning. That might explain the turn-based structure of Pss Pss, which trots through a series of individual routines without attempting any broader coherence.

Even so, these are cute and ticklish with a nice line in feigned ineptitude. They greet the unremarkable with astonishment – bowing after ‘juggling’ a single apple – and the impressive with unaffected nonchalance. Yet all this is the clown’s meat and veg and its only when the ladder breaks the mould that you feel Pessi and Fassari really own Pss Pss. The rest is standard-issue perambulatory tomfoolery by the book.

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Migraine-inducing, heart-palpitating, epilepsy-triggering, ball-dropping, but above all, extraordinary, Hiroaki Umeda’s double bill of minimalist movement and scenic design is a sensory overload. Were either to last longer than half an hour, your ears might well expel steam and your eyes pop out like champagne corks.

The stage – a white floor and backdrop that, together, resemble an open book – is used as a canvas for technical aspects. In Haptic, it is splashed with vibrant and vibrating colours, strips and washes. Holistic Stratauses it as a projection screen for a universe of white dots that whizz head-swirlingly past in every direction. In both, Umeda himself blends into (or stands out from) the overall composition, as one element among many. The performer becomes a fixed focal point with which to stave off motion sickness.

For long swathes, he stands stationary, but when he moves, each action chimes perfectly with its surroundings. Despite the fact that Umeda could teach Peter Crouch a thing or two about ‘the robot,’ he rejects the virtuosic for the maximum effect. Sometimes its as simple as shifting his weight from one foot to another.

Larger movements are rarely human; sometimes he’s mechanical, sometimes elemental and sometimes animal. At various points, he pulsates as if buzzed with an electric current, ripples like a series of connected joints and undulates with the utmost of fluidity. Once or twice, he flails his limbs and cracks his neck, looking like a zombie fast-forwarded into elegance

Nevertheless, there comes a point where your mind stops seeking analogies. Such are the sensory qualities of Umeda’s work that you’re too overwhelmed by stimulus to engage certain, more rational and linguistic, faculties. ‘What I want,’ Umeda says in programme notes, ‘is to transmit sensations, rather than messages, to the audience. Therefore there are no conceptual themes in my shows, which I empty of everything that might constitute a meaning’.

He’s certainly achieved that. At its best, Haptic throbs like the dance equivalent of a Rothko painting, even if, in blander sequences, it’s more like a Dulux colour chart. Nonetheless, there are two spectacular moments: one in which seems to refract his shadow into a rainbow of multiples, and another that recreates the gilt-edged effect of looking at the world through 3D glasses.

Holistic Stratais the more effective. A moving magic eye, it fires dizzying collections of dots until your eyes cross. Sometimes, Umeda seems a man in a snowstorm; elsewhere, when the dots cover his body, he seems the snowstorm itself. It looks as if light is escaping inside him, as if he’s breaking up on re-entry. Holistic Strataneeds to be seen to be believed.

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On 30 July 2007 the world of cinema lost one of its most ingenious sons – Ingmar Bergman – a filmmaker who transferred the dramatics of the stage to the screen, creating engaging masterpieces that appeal to our imaginations.  With a conscious understanding of aesthetics, akin to that of Renoir or Van Gogh, he illustrated significant stories of life, love and death, resisting the desire to lace his films with irrelevant narratives and ephemeral surprises. Bergman’s prodigious legacy gave the world some of the most outstanding films in European cinema, with an influence that reached far beyond his native Sweden. Just like Bergman, the soaraway Almodóvar is a god on the stage of European cinema, whose experimentations with aesthetics and melodrama delight and enthral. With a boundless enthusiasm for the art of cinema and an eye for colour and dialect, he has written, produced and directed a wealth of films which have become an integral part of popular culture.

A celebration of both the outré and the everyday, exploring themes such as family, desire, and homosexuality etc, Almodóvar has adapted the cinematic language first used by the likes of Fellini, Hitchcock and Fassbinder, to create a style all of his own, rich in colour and sophistication. There is much within Almodóvar’s ebullient oeuvre that echoes the greats of cinemas past, none more so than Ingmar Bergman; for example, as Bergman had a love of theatre and wanted to emulate that unique theatrical expression, in the hope of transforming the moving image into a more respected art form, so to do we see the same process undertaken by Almodóvar. From Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980) onwards, his approach to dialogue, imagery and so on has played a part in enhancing the cinematic experience; to sit through an Almodóvar film is never exhausting, because there are so many facets, his level of concentration and near obsession over his subject makes for a feast of visual intoxication.

Another similarity between Almodóvar and Bergman is the confidence to experiment and not confine himself to one specific audience, in Law of Desire (1986) he dealt with homosexuality and the tentative subject of transvestism, exploring the interplay between love and sexual desire, skip forward to The Flower of My Secret (1996) and we see a much deeper level of thematic exploration, dealing with personal identity and the preservation of falsehoods. In his notes Strauss remarks on Almodóvar’s complete control over his work and how this effects his view of the audience ‘his control does not denote a desire to manipulate an audience,’ he says,

‘an audience which the filmmaker himself says he cannot conceive of except in the abstract, an audience he risked losing with the slow and discursive High Heels and most of all with the fast furious Kika. His goal, through a consciously elaborated mise-en-scène, is intensity: a saturation of colour and passion which releases pure, visual, physical and visceral emotion. Though profoundly crafted, this emotion is, in the final analysis, neither artificial nor intellectual, but delivers itself rawly on to the screen, leaving the audience the choice of either accepting or rejecting it.’

Throughout this collection of interviews, which took place of a series of months, Almodóvar exudes a well balanced streak of eccentricity, coupled with a sense of professionalism that is rooted in formality and devotion to his work. He explains in-depth the many disparate influences which inspired his earliest films, from Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe to the varied iconography of popular culture. Born in a small Spanish village during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco; he was a child of strong character yet of a solitary and observational nature, he explains, ‘children develop great strength in solitude; they can also become very neurotic. Luckily, that wasn’t the case with me. I’m sure of that because I was a very good observer of other people’s lives, and a happy one, pleased with what I saw. But always an observer, never a participant’.

His teenage years as well as his adolescence proved to be a time of self discovery and artistic blossoming; his atavistic love for the arts began to form into a more functional passion, and his goals for a future career as a filmmaker were now firmly set. As the years progressed he feathered his nest of cultural influences, by devouring copious amounts of television, literature, film, music and theatre. Almodóvar’s many years of differing artistic endeavours have proved felicitous, in moulding him into a master story teller, who possesses the ability to touch our deepest emotions. With films that do not drag at a funereal pace, neither surge ahead at break-neck speed, leaving the mind dizzy and anaesthetic, instead steadily unfolding and maturing.

Emblematic of a generation that sought to experiment with cinema, mixing together artistic forms to create something deep and resonant, without the temptation of CGI and other diluting confectionary, Almodóvar is a paragon who, with creativity and humour, continues to surpass expectations. Creating provocative and thought provoking films that unashamedly entertain us; this collection of interviews sheds light on the thoughts and feelings of cinema’s most treasured artisan.

Huge yellow blocks line the back of the Lyric stage. Sometimes, these blocks represent the walls of Billy’s and Maggie’s long-time marital home. At other times, various dreams or memories are projected against them. These are the walls and shared moments that have held this couple together for so long. But in between these blocks sprawls an endless blackness, hinting at the memories that are beginning to fade and the death that wife, Maggie, will be embracing all too soon.

Memory plays are often clunky, over-sentimental affairs, and Abi Morgan’s, Love Song, created in collaboration with Frantic Assembly, does initially feel a tad manufactured. Following a projected title sequence, a now old Billy wistfully remarks, ‘In my sleep, I’m young again’, as his younger self sweeps on stage. But this isn’t a jolting and predictable flashback play. Instead, the past and present are fused fluently and imaginatively together, creating some tremendously rich moments. 

As Billy (Sam Cox) and Maggie (Sian Phillips) tip toe around each other, skeletons – younger and prettier versions of themselves – emerge from the couple’s closet. And bed. And floorboards. Everywhere these two look, they find their younger selves staring back at them. When Billy calls out to Maggie, who is frequently stooped over in pain, a lither version of his wife slides into his arms. And when Billy reaches into the fridge, covered in post-it notes for the time when Maggie is gone, he is embraced by her younger self.

It isn’t only the transformation of this couple’s physical appearance that causes the breath to catch in one’s throat. This switch from sprightly to stumbling is painful enough – but it is the change in the way these two communicate that really impresses. The past is all noise and bustle, as the couple flirt, fight and tussle together. The present, in contrast, is painfully quiet and still, as the two slide around like strangers, too proud and too frightened to confront the truth.

There are only a few precious moments in which the couple really connect, and they are magical. Asleep in bed, having tried on her old high heels, Maggie dreams of dancing. Young William (Edward Bennet) sweeps into view and suddenly, Maggie is young again. The two glide across the stage together and Maggie blazes with happiness, as her body is released and she is reunited with her husband once more.

Till 4 February 2012

Curtain up

This week on CW, Matt Trueman and Miriam Gillinson review the New Year offerings in London theatre, including The Kreutzer Sonata at the Gate Theatre, Fog at the Finborough, and The Table at Soho Theatre. Meanwhile, Maahwish Mirza reviews Ali Rattansi’s Very Short Introduction to Multiculturalism, arguing for a more nuanced debate, and Paul Kilbey reflects on what the BBC’s Symphony programme says about our attitude to classical music today.

14 January 2012

The BBC has rightly been praised for its ambitious four-part Symphony series, broadcast in November. It was unabashed in its traditionalism, and sincere in its commitment to telling an old story in a new way. In a sense, it took on a lot of the virtues of the symphony itself: it was long, detailed, and asked a lot of its audience in terms of concentration and patience.

Also like many a classical symphony, however, the finale was something of a disappointment. Episode 4, which focused on the twentieth century, lost its sense of focus and failed to convince me quite why the symphony really is of relevance to the twenty-first century. Focusing predominantly on Shostakovich, with just a spot of Ives and Copland thrown in, this was an eminently quirky take on twentieth-century music which seemed to want to do the impossible and stick to some sort of twentieth-century symphonic ‘mainstream’. No such mainstream, though, really exists.

To the ambiguous, ironic tones of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, presenter Simon Russell Beale concluded the series with the observation that:

‘The symphony has become for music what Shakespeare is to literature: a cultural monument that is continually redeveloped through new interpretations. It still has the power to enchant, challenge, and move me, and in the twenty-first century a larger and wider audience than ever before.’

The comparison of an entire type of music to the single figure of Shakespeare is maybe not quite as daft as it seems. Symphonies generally do have the same sort of augustness and canonicity as Shakespeare, and are likewise continually subjected to reinterpretation by contemporary performers. The comparison breaks down, of course, when you remember that the symphony isn’t actually literally dead. Unlike with Shakespeare, there are still people writing symphonies – Peter Maxwell Davies, Philip Glass, Hans Werner Henze. And yes, those three are all quite old, but they’re certainly younger than, um, Shakespeare. The difference is that Shakespeare is dead in fact; the symphony is only dead culturally.

It’s a little perverse, then, to accept the basic inherent deadness of the symphony – as Russell Beale’s Shakespeare comparison clearly does – while simultaneously stressing its developing relevance today. Surely a better, clearer claim for the form’s cultural import would emphasise the fact that new symphonies are still being written?

But it’s understandable why the series didn’t take this approach. This wasn’t the story of symphonies; it was the story of symphonic tradition. And that absolutely is dead today. The series went Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven-Berlioz-Brahms-Mahler/Sibelius-Shostakovich, with the occasional extra thrown in for fun, and it stopped squarely there. And, equally inevitably, Beethoven was given pride of place, as king of symphonies both pure (the Fifth) and programmatic (the Sixth), and as both founder and embodiment of the romantic myth of composer as hero. It is, after all, basically Beethoven whose symphonic tradition it actually is.

One principal element of the Beethovenian symphonic tradition is an incredible sense of discomfort with the question of what abstract music is about. This came through strongly in Symphony. Straight after telling us that Beethoven presented his Fifth Symphony ‘as pure music, [with] no clue to its significance or meaning’, Russell Beale gave us a potted biography of Beethoven’s impoverished upbringing and labelled this symphony as ‘The story of a soul struggling against implacable fate and emerging incandescently victorious’. Comprehensively undermining the claim that the symphony doesn’t point towards ‘significance or meaning’, the implication is clear: if we don’t know what a piece of music is about, we should probably interpret it biographically.

The idea of the ‘pure’ symphony, then, is a weirdly tainted one. If the symphony in question doesn’t have any explicit verbal inspiration, then recourse to some story about the composer’s life is all but inevitable. We do this with Mahler too (the Sixth and the Ninth are prime offenders here), and we are alarmingly insistent on it with Shostakovich. Yes, the story of his oppression under Stalin’s rule is gripping, but to interpret his music solely in the light of this story is reductive and unfair to his actual compositional talent. In short, we’re not good at coping with abstraction – however insistent we are on elevating music’s ‘purity’. And it may be this weird enganglement between a desire for transcendence and wordlessness on the one hand and a deep love of stories on the other which resulted in the complete disintegration of symphonic tradition in the twentieth century.

What’s frustrating is that, despite out actual failure to parse the symphony as a properly unverbal form of expression, it is nonetheless this musical type which has established itself as the classical musical ideal. Where is the BBC series on the concerto, or the overture, or the nonet? It is uniquely the symphony that has become culturally elevated to this degree, and this is largely because of its ostensible concern for abstraction and ‘purity’.

And I think it’s essentially this which I found annoying watching Symphony. It wasn’t a bad programme by any means. But I felt that the symphony was being taken – as it often is – to be the ultimate symbol of classical music generally, the highest, purest classical form. If we subscribe to this belief, though, it follows pretty quickly that the best of classical music is firmly confined to the past. Pushing so hard to expand the cultural reach of mainstream symphonic tradition is ultimately a deeply conservative thing to do. Celebrating the past is all very well, but if anyone wants to look forward in classical music, they will have to look beyond the symphony.

The emergence of the English Defence League, attacks motivated by a far-right ideology in Norway and a controversial denunciation by Prime Minister David Cameron earlier this year have kept debates on multiculturalism alive and raging. In a post 9/11 world faced with the consequences of globalisation, Ali Rattansi explores the so-called Clash of Civilizations theory and the nature of multiculturalism in modern Europe.

This is a complex issue, and simplistic terminology or essentialist views can transform the multiculturalism debate into empty, but potentially harmful, rhetoric. Multiculturalism is difficult to define, because recent political discourse has offered contradictory and paradoxical definitions. The identification of multiculturalism as a divisive philosophy that encourages people to lead parallel, separate lives is incorrect, however. Rattansi uses several cases, including the Brixton and Bradford riots, usually upheld as an example of ethnic strife, to demonstrate that multiculturalism is the meshing and mixing of cultures and not the creation of various distinct microcosms within one cosmopolitan state. What is needed to counteract the possibility of segregated communities is more multiculturalism, argues Rattansi, and he shows that the creation of ethnic or cultural hubs within Britain may have more to do with racial discrimination during the time of industrial immigration rather than simply an anti-integration sentiment on the part of minority communities.

Multiculturalism is a contentious topic and Rattansi addresses the key issues that should be debated in any discussion of multiculturalism: definitions, ‘integration’, ‘community cohesion’, identity, ‘parallel lives’, belonging and loyalty. Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s comments proclaiming multiculturalism to be ‘dead’ can be dangerous, misleading, and too simplistic in a debate that has repercussions for community relations and can fuel anti-immigrant or anti-minority sentiments and movements. Governmental policy can determine the nature of ‘community relations’ and a French-style refusal to acknowledge, accept and promote multiculturalism can lead to the very segregation that is used to attack the idea of multiculturalism.

Adding to the complexity of the debate are the issues of ‘integration’ and identity. Rattansi identifies this as a vague notion, with attempts by various politicians including Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and David Cameron, to articulate a vision of ‘Britishness’ for immigrants or second-generation immigrants to subscribe to and thus demonstrate ‘integration’. Democracy, tolerance and equality are ‘core values’ that are frequently cited as the cornerstones of a British way of life, but as Rattansi points out, these values are vague, simplistic and not exclusive to Britain, and - especially historically speaking - have not always acted as the uniting undercurrent of British life. To talk of such values as definitive of and somehow exclusive to Britain may encourage a ‘them’ and ‘us’ outlook, especially when looking at what Rattansi calls the ‘Muslim question’. When looked at through the narrow prism of essentialism, the question of whether or not a reconciliation between ‘clashing’ Islamic philosophies and liberal democratic values can ever occur arises. Debates within multiculturalism can be steeped in essentialist terms with the effect of caricaturing cultures with narrow perceptions and stereotypes. The mixing of cultures is not unachievable and multiculturalism’s project is not to cater for the existence of ‘parallel lives’.

Notions of identity also complicate issues and ethnic integration ‘tests’ are again far too simplistic to assess attitudes. True integration cannot mean passing Lord Tebbit’s infamous ‘Cricket Test’ or adhering to David Blunkett’s belief that English must be spoken in the home. The identity of second or third generation immigrants can be multi-layered and multi-faceted, reflected by phrases of identification such as ‘British-Asian’ that demonstrate the possibility of new identities emerging. Questions of integration can again be dangerous, patronising or offensive to ask, as if there is a scale of loyalty that minorities must place themselves on and may be seen as denying immediate identification as ‘British’ to certain citizens.

Rattansi’s book is fundamental to gaining an understanding of the fluctuations and difficulties of the multiculturalism debate. It explores in concise form the nature of multiculturalism as a feature of modernity. Rattansi concludes that we are progressing from ‘multiculturalism’-though this does not mean that multiculturalism has necessarily failed - towards ‘interculturalism’, where a meshing of cultures is the next natural step. Governmental action is necessary to overcoming societal fragmentation, but this must be as bottom-up as it is top-down, and interculturalism, Rattansi argues, will displace Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations theory in an increasingly globalised world.