Deep into the mesmerising maze that is Philip Ridley’s, Shivered, Ryan tries to appease his seriously rattled older brother, Alec. Soldier, Alec, has returned home to Essex, on leave, and is prone to violent outbursts. Ryan reassures him: ‘You’ve seen stuff…it’s made you…’ But Ryan cannot complete this sentence and it is this enigma – how we are affected by the things we choose to see – that burns at the centre of Ridley’s fiery new play.

Although Ridley’s play spans twelve years and the chronology is as jumpy as a rabbit on heat, it is an exceptionally coherent piece. Shivered is ram-packed with characters who spend their lives searching for, or living within, alternative realities. There is Ryan’s mother, Lyn, who has been so twisted by tragedy, that she must use role play in order to be herself. Her son, Ryan, is equally absorbed in another world and spends most of his time, with mate Jack, searching for monsters. Ryan’s dad, Mikey, is obsessed with UFOs although, in a typical Ridleyesque (if that isn’t a word, it should be) double twist, this extraterrestrial pursuit is really a cover for a reality Mikey - or, at least everyone else – cannot accept: his homosexuality.

There’s more. Ryan’s pal, Jack (an equally repellent and endearing Josh Williams), is so transfixed by YouTube that his life has become a horrifically dark episode of You’ve Been Framed; his everyday experiences, a disappointingly blood-free version of the internet atrocities he greedily seeks out. Jack’s mum, ‘guru for the google age’ Evie, is so enthralled by the dead that she’s all but a corpse herself and fairground worker, Gordy, has made a living out of people’s desire to believe in his shoddy, optical illusions.

Finally, there’s Alex, who on returning from the war, claims: ‘My eyes have been sandblasted clean’. Ours is a world and time, Ridley seems to say, where only unthinkable horror forces us to seek out, or recognise, the truth. Ours is a world, which makes us want to be someone else and live somewhere else. Ours is a world where danger is the only light we seek. Director Russell Bolam emphasises this lurking danger, by abruptly closing most scenes with a thundering noise and a jolt of light. This bold motif clarifies the idea that the only themes which connect these scenes – and which make sense of today’s world – are danger and fear. 

The acting is superb and all the performers wriggle restlessly within the endless confines of their complex roles. Olivia Poulet, as royally messed up mother Lyn, is incredibly hostile but occasionally tender. She might snap her son’s pencils but she also ruffles his hair, affectionately, when he carries on regardless. Simon Lenagan digs even deeper with his role, even if does initially appear a solid and straightforward father. His cheery facade drops only a few times but, when it does, there’s maggots and madness crawling underneath: ‘We will wake up every day for the rest of our lives and we will breathe razor blades and we will swim through bleach’.’

No matter where these characters look – or how much they invest in otherworldly pursuits - reality eventually catches up with them. It’s as if life has become a terrible death force, stalking its prey. This sensation is heightened by Ridley’s skewed chronology, which enforces the idea of a hunt – as if the plot is crawling around for its victims. It’s not a question of if the darkness will reach Ridley’s characters – only when.

Till 14 April 2012

There is something fitting about a piece challenging censorship and the degraded state of free speech in the UK opening in the same week that a 19-year-old was arrested in Yorkshire for an ill-judged Facebook status update. As one commentator observed, the claim that Azhar Ahmed’s remarks about British soldiers dying in Afghanistan were ‘racially aggravated’ suited the logic of extremists such as Anjem Choudary – who view the conflict as part of an ethno-religious war by the West on Islam - rather than the West Yorkshire police. While DV8 have been praised for their bravery in staging a work which is critical of Islamic fundamentalism, in a climate where police officers feel entitled to lock up citizens for not making their points very well, perhaps reading from a script in a theatre is the safest place to be.

Can We Talk About This? is the new production by Lloyd Newson and DV8, who for 25 years have built an international reputation in marrying provocative subject matter to the more rarefied world of physical theatre and dance. The title comes from the words Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh is said to have shouted as he was being butchered in the street by a Dutch-born Muslim for being critical of Islam. For 80 minutes we are treated to a brief history of the tension between tolerance and identity across the West, from Ray Honeyford’s public hounding for criticising the divisiveness of state multiculturalism in Bradford schools during the 1980s through to the recent attempt by 56 Muslim-majority nations to have a ‘defamation of Islam’ resolution pass through the UN’s Human Rights Council, via the Rushdie affair and the Danish cartoons controversy.

It is, especially to many likely theatre-goers, familiar territory, and Newson isn’t likely to shake up too many apple carts in today’s ‘muscular liberal’ climate with the claim that the West has too often self-censored in combating Islamic extremism. As the piece takes the form of transcripts of interviews recited by dancers as they provide a physical expression of the words, there is hardly any new material in here: Martin Amis on feeling morally superior to the Taliban, Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the threats to her life made as a female ex-Muslim critical of Islam’s treatment of women, Shirley Williams and Christopher Hitchens locking horns over Rushdie’s knighthood…

Still, the purpose of Can We Talk About This? is to observe, rather than agitate: the dancers write the names of key characters and events on a wall at the back of the stage. Ironically, for a work which makes much of its bravery and iconoclasm, contributions serve to undercut its thesis: the only figures likely to be upset by the views expressed are either deranged Islamists or cowardly apologists, neither of whom make particularly sympathetic cases post 9/11, 7/7 or Brevik.

There can be no faulting the research that has gone into putting it together, and overall works as an efficient primer to the strange politics of multiculturalism. It is, however, somewhat more lacking in the tougher questions around the issue: if the culture of offence is problematic for making a handful of Islamist radicals untouchable, do we extend the principle of free speech to other walks of life? To homophobes, racists, misogynists and the like who don’t operate under religious justifications? As Kenan Malik – a contributor here - has noted recently, a warping conception of ‘tolerance’ in the West is still as likely to criminalise ‘Islamic dissent’ as much as less overtly dangerous, if unpleasant, opinions.

Yet, while Can We Talk About This? falls short as polemic or lecture, it is arguably much more successful artistically. The choreography is sublime, with the dancers contorting themselves and crawling over each other as they try to reconcile liberal ideals and rhetoric with today’s politics of pragmatism and technocratic managerialism, of which state-enforced multiculturalism was merely an early expression. While Williams comes across as the archetypal toadying liberal in criticising Rushdie’s knighthood her twitchy mannerisms serve as a neat visual gag, but a reminder that a complex debate – over the literary merits of Rushdie, over the rights and wrongs of cultural diplomacy, over the purpose of knighting writers at all – is suddenly reduced to a frustrating ‘which side are you on?’ question. While righteous liberals and angry Muslims encircle a martyred Honeyford, they do so nodding their heads and moving their arms as a reminder of the racist caricatures and the political struggle of immigration and the denial of equal rights which underpinned the debate at the time, and the unhappy compromise which multiculturalism served as.

In a particularly impressive sequence, former Labour MP Ann Cryer complains about the growing problems of fearful politicians confronting increasingly hostile and alienated constituents while her chair moves her around: a perfect illustration of a contemporary political class growing increasingly alienated from their public, clinging desperately to whatever principles or ideas can steady the ship.

Above all, it is this sense of perpetual motion and fluidity which sticks with you. As a metaphor for how we all operate under the politics of offence, forced into becoming increasingly careful of our words while our material reality travel in different directions - it’s difficult not to feel as though the obsession with young Muslim women lacking autonomy in forced marriages is something of a displacement activity for a denuded sense of agency across the West – DV8’s physical theatre offers a genuine insight. Can We Talk About This? may sound like a weak plea for dialogue and mutual understanding but, if Jonathan Turley is right in his warning that what comes next for free speech in the West ‘is not sharia, but silence’, it is at least a start.

Till 28 March 2012

Good as new

This week on CW, Sam Burt reviews Chinese artist Song Dong’s installation ‘Waste Not’ at the Barbican in London, finding unexpected insights into contemporary Chinese culture. Paul Kilbey reviews the current ‘radical’ production of Dvořák’s Rusalka at the Royal Opera, and wonders why it’s been so much more controversial than the ENO’s recent The Death of Klinghoffer. And in London theatre, Miriam Gillinson reviews the enigmatically audience-focused Going Dark at the Young Vic, and Ishy Din’s refreshingly unusual Snookered at the Bush.

12 March 2012

Many profound changes have taken place on the Chinese contemporary art scene in the last two decades, as China’s society and economy have gradually opened up to the rest of the world. The record-breaking boom in demand for Chinese contemporary art in international markets seems to have attracted the most attention. Less obvious but equally important change is also occurring in the fundamental ways that art is thought about and valued within China. Perhaps the greatest insight that ‘Waste Not’, Song Dong’s current installation at the Barbican, offers us is that this lofty process of artistic revaluation is grounded in changes at the most basic level of everyday material existence.

Song Dong is a conceptual artist best known for his esoteric and transient performance pieces. In ‘Breathing’ (1996) he exhaled onto the ground in Tiananmen Square and on the surface of the frozen Lake Houhai, creating a patch of ice one the former, but not the latter. It symbolised how our capability to transform the world through our actions depends on having a strategy that is sensitive to context, but it could also be read as a criticism of the uncompromising nature of the more radical pro-democracy activists and intellectuals of his generation, and a metaphor for the limits of unreflective idealism.

Song Dong graduated in Visual Arts in the seminal year of 1989, and his output is typical of what the critic Gao Minglu has called ‘apartment art’, that is, art made using basic resources by artists who were the first to wean themselves from dependency on the state, and who have remained at the margins of ‘official’ culture. Many avant-garde artists from this ‘New Wave’ generation first achieved fame and success overseas, even after the Communist Party started to realise that it might pay to be more relaxed when confronted with the shock of the new. Political liberalisation by itself does not explain the rising esteem of conceptual art in China; traditional concepts of artistic worth have also evolved.

The official culture of Imperial China was predominantly literary, with poetry and philosophy regarded as the highest art forms, and with painting deriving its value by association with calligraphy. Sculpture and other art forms were valued for the technical prowess that they embodied, but they were still regarded as crafts and not as ‘high art’. Crucially, this hierarchy of artistic value was not simply aesthetic, but had a moral dimension. Since the mastery of a script consisting of 80,000 characters required extensive practice, the quality of an artist’s brushstrokes determined how accessible the message would be and, in turn, was believed to offer a glimpse into the artist’s soul (at least in terms of who the artist considered as standing inside or outside of ‘China’ – a nation defined by culture not ethnicity). By contrast, a purely pictorial representation was held to be universally and uniformly accessible to all Chinese, a belief underpinned by a confidence in the unifying power of a common Chinese culture.

Such elite ideas survived the twentieth-century, which is one reason why until quite recently the Chinese contemporary artists who have achieved most recognition within China have been those working in paint and related media. Partly from a desire for a space for creative freedom, Song Dong abandoned painting early in his career and turned to conceptual art. ‘Waste Not’ (from a Chinese adage: wu jin qi yong) is a sprawling assemblage of possessions that Song’s mother Zhao Xiangyuan accumulated over her lifetime. The installation consists of all manner of bric-a-brac, from bottle-tops to old newspapers, cereal boxes to antiquated durables, snakes around the zig-zag exhibition space, climaxing with the skeleton of the wooden outhouse in which she stored the flotsam and jetsam of her oftentimes precarious existence.

In the first place it is a powerful reminder of how the trajectory of Chinese art reflects the great upheavals and traumas that touched the lives of over a billion people since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The reality of living with material insecurity is made concrete in the preamble to the exhibit, in which Mrs Zhao describes how she was dependent on the organs of the state – represented at the local level by her work unit (danwei) - for all the necessities of life. But she also knew that as a woman of ‘bad’ class background (her father had been a state employee under the previous regime) she was especially vulnerable to persecution from frequent and vitriolic political campaigns. Her habit of hoarding thus began as insurance against the CPC denying her access to subsistence.

According to Song Dong, the traditional Chinese virtue of frugality (wu) means that ‘anything that can somehow be of use should be used as much as possible’. Given China’s historic problem of managing high population density relative to available arable land, the stigmatisation of waste is understandable. But the Communists also co-opted the virtue of frugality in their propaganda, with a twist. Thrift now meant that some (mostly rural) people should forego all but the most bare material necessities in order that the surplus can be used by other people (mostly urban workers and cadres) to experiment in the hope of generating material abundance, and thus self-sufficiency. Such grand experiments could be hugely wasteful, but they embodied a radically modern ideal. Although Imperial China is famed for its feats of using large-scale technology to tame the forces of nature, it was the Communists who married this to the belief that traditional hierarchies in society were not objective, fixed laws of nature but malleable constructs that can also be re-ordered in pursuit of development.

In extremis, making a virtue of frugality can easily blur into making a vice of experimentation and risk-taking, since the possibility of expending inputs on a process that yields an unanticipated, and perhaps useless, outcome is intrinsic to experimentation, whether in science or in society. The Qing dynasty, the last to rule China, was trapped by this kind of hostility even to modest reforms designed to catch-up with Western science and technology. To break out of this rigid impasse, the logic of frugality needed to be extended to people, conceived of as resources in themselves. If an assessment of material abundance or scarcity depends on how we perceive the human potential for creativity and innovation, then any such assessment contains a political judgment. Consequently, policies that restrict freedom of choice and purport to be predicated solely on an assessment of established facts effectively impose a particular, naturalised political idea; such restrictions are not just material, they are also ideological.

It was this insight that lay behind Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators in the 1980s, who believed that the CPC was prolonging the burden of rationing (as recently as 1984 a worker would need to save up several years’ worth of danwei coupons to buy a bicycle) not because of any objective necessity but as part of an anti-democratic effort to preserve an outdated ideology that had lost so much of the loyalty it could formerly command.

In the period since then – the so-called era of ‘Reform and Opening-Up’ – frugality has undergone a further transformation. Although many of the older generation in China bemoan the relentless forward march of consumerism, Mrs Zhao does not appear to be amongst them. In her written introduction to the installation, she acknowledges the differences in attitudes towards material belongings between the generations. But instead of asserting that one generation is more ‘correct’ in its aspirations and values than the other, she simply hopes the installation will help China’s youth to appreciate their own situation by better understanding where they have come from. It is possible to read the work as a message to those who have grown up in a richer, freer and more stable China, reminding them that it was not always thus and that the present must not be taken as given. It looks to the past to illuminate the opportunities of the present, and the moral duty we have to not waste them.

In this spirit it would be a mistake to interpret ‘Waste Not’ as a straightforward critique of the materialist ethos of consumer culture, or as drawing a parallel between the drab uniformity of the Maoist era and the homogeneity of globalised consumerism. More profoundly, it hints at the possibility that material abundance can free us from the kind of tyranny that possessions have over us in times of scarcity. At the same time it reminds us that realising this liberating potential requires that we actively participate in the productive process of pushing back boundaries to human development, because it is only by being free to discover our own boundaries that we can freely consent to propositions about finitude, and to the legitimacy of political authority grounded in such propositions.

‘Waste Not’ is an injunction targeted not only at people who can’t be bothered with squeezing toothpaste tubes to the bitter end. It is a moving and evocative meditation on the importance of not wasting human potential, and why material development is a necessary but insufficient condition for living by this moral rule. It also suggests that traditional values – like frugality itself - may contain untapped potential, and that through free experiments in different modes of living we can discover new and valuable reinterpretations that retain what was valuable in the old for making sense of the world as we find it. The two interpretations of using ‘resources’ wisely are mutually dependent because the ability to autonomously choose our own values and way of life requires a degree of material independence, which in turn requires a measure of political liberty – there is no ‘steady-state’ or natural endpoint at which prosperity can be permanently traded-off for civil rights, or vice versa. Song Dong’s work raises pertinent questions for contemporary China, where political and judicial reform lags behind economic reforms that have delivered extraordinary gains in living standards.

And in doing so, he helps us to make sense of changing trends in Chinese contemporary art, because we can see that the social, political, and economic turbulence in China in the twentieth-century (implicit in the pathos of this ‘life raft’ of possessions) shattered conventional ideas that all Chinese share a homogenous cultural compass. During periods such as the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (1966-76), there was an unprecedented outburst of bottom-up activity and expression, which resulted in some of the most violent civil conflicts of the entire Mao era, and which deeply fractured the persistent idea of a common cultural ‘core’. These events impressed on many Chinese cultural elites that, when it comes to putting words into action, people that have used the same Chinese words for thousands of years discovered that they mean many different things to many different people living in different circumstances. Recognising the true extent of this cultural diversity has reduced the aforementioned gap between literary and other art forms, since paintings, sculptures and other forms are increasingly recognised within China as having a comparably rich plurality of interpretations. It is to Song Dong’s credit that ‘Waste Not’ tells us so much about the causes and effects of this ongoing revolution.

Till 12 June 2012

Antonín Dvořák and Jaroslav Kvapil’s 1901 opera Rusalka is the story of a water-nymph who falls in love with a prince. Granted the ability to interact with humans at the cost of her voice, Rusalka is quickly spurned by her prince and the rest of human society, and she returns home destined to float between worlds for eternity. The prince, too, is cursed through his rejection of her, and the opera ends with his death. It is, essentially, a fairy tale.

John Adams and Alice Goodman’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer is the story of the murder of a disabled Jewish tourist aboard a cruise ship at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. It is a true story.

Rusalka was given its Royal Opera House premiere two weeks ago, and ENO’s Klinghoffer was new to London (in its staged form) days earlier. And presumably it wasn’t just me who was surprised that it was the one about the water-nymph whose production fuelled the headlines.

With a hyperbolical one-star review from the Independent, and a no-less hyperbolical five-star one from the Financial Times, the Rusalka controversy revolved around its being set in a brothel rather than wherever it is water-nymphs are meant to live. At the opening night curtain call, directors Sergio Morabito and Jossi Wieler were booed, which excited the Telegraph so much that it was no surprise when they sourced some video footage of the incident – or indeed when, on actually watching this footage, it became clear that reports of the extent and significance of the booing had been somewhat exaggerated.

The whole fracas, in other words, was something of a storm in a teacup, seized upon by reporters and readers all the more given the lack of a convincing Klinghoffer controversy. But it still happened, and it is remarkable that it did.

The production itself, for what it’s worth, is a highly Germanic, conceptual one which was originally performed at the edgier-than-ROH Salzburg Festival in 2008. To be fair to the nay-sayers, the brothel setting is far from the only shocking or bewildering aspect to it. There is a scene in which a giant cat appears to rape Rusalka, and the two scenes which feature the minor characters ‘The Gamekeeper’ and ‘The Kitchen Boy’ are both arbitrarily peppered with sex in a way that suggests the directors were getting a bit bored of all the singing at those points. When they aren’t being unnecessarily crude, furthermore, they are often being either wilfully opaque (the pervasive Christian symbolism) or slightly annoying (the stupid projections of massive fish which get in the way a bit in the opening scene).

There are, though, moments of directorial wit as well, and their characterisation of Rusalka – adorably played by Camilla Nylund – is delightful, as she struggles in her high-heels and gets her wedding outfit wrong. Up until the rape bit, the giant cat’s a laugh too. At times, this is an engaging take on the work, knowingly contemporary and actively engaged with its dramatic action. At other times, it isn’t, and it is never a convincing fit with Dvořák’s excellent but unpolemic score. All in all, it is an attention-grabbing staging, to be sure, but not a genuinely exceptional one in any sense.

I had assumed before going to see Rusalka that the broadsheets’ uniformly glowing praise for conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra and singers had mostly been a result of not having enough words left in their reviews, once they’d attacked the production, to mount a detailed critique of the music. Not so: this was a musical knockout, with the orchestra on spectacular form and a strong cast all round. Bryn Hymel as the Prince was the pick, and he paced his role with perfection up to a scintillating final duet with Rusalka.

Indeed, this final scene was by far the production’s most engrossing. It may, possibly, be a coincidence that this was also the scene in which the direction was least obtrusive. But anyhow, I was engrossed by the sheer beauty of the wondrously impassioned melodies, of the strength of Hymel’s high notes, of the drama, as they waved their arms around and embraced. This was a reminder that everything that’s great about this opera also makes it a decidedly traditional piece. As Rusalka drew to its gentle, tuneful close I wondered whether it was really worth overthinking it as much as Morabito and Wieler obviously had done.

The question which remains is what the point of ‘radicalising’ this opera really is. With the absolute core canon – late Mozart, some Verdi and Puccini, Wagner – the situation seems much as it is with Shakespeare: substantial reinvention and reimagination are inevitable and actually quite helpful in renewing a familiar tale. The substance of the work, one can assume, will stand the test. Rusalka, of course, does not fall into this category, and it can only remain perplexing that the work has been introduced to Covent Garden in a form so starkly odd. On the other hand, there were plenty of moments during the production when it struck me how irredeemably naff a completely straight version of this very nymph-heavy period piece would surely be. Trying something new is no bad thing, and this isn’t a terrible job: just one which is often insensitive.

But talking of sensitivity, I continue to be amazed that any version of a placid fairy-tale opera can rile people more than any version of The Death of Klinghoffer. Tom Morris’s production did an excellent job of letting the Klinghoffer story speak for itself, and this only heightened its emotional clout and sense of moral ambiguity. Any controversy Rusalka sparked, Klinghoffer deserved ten times over.

In his one-star Rusalka review, Edward Seckerson wrote of an ‘inexplicable disconnect between what we see and what we hear’ in the production. What is yet less explicable is the disconnect between these two operas’ substance and the reactions they provoked. A spot more concern – from all involved – for what these works are actually about would go a long way.

Final performance on Wednesday 14 March 2012

You’lll be hard pushed to find a company more aware of its audience – and more in tune with the spectators’ senses - than Sound and Fury. Indeed, the audience’s stumbling entry into a pitch black studio is effectively the first scene of Going Dark. This is a play about going blind and, as we gingerly creep towards our seats, we represent the beginning of protagonist Max’s journey, as he attempts to navigate a strange and dark new world.

It is a thoughtful way to create an immediately empathetic audience. And yet, as contradictory as this might sound, this clever opening also creates a distance between the audience and the play. The opening ‘scene’, and the overall production, are so concerned with ‘our’ experience that it sometimes neglects Max and his own painful journey. There’s no doubt this audience-focused approach allows for some overwhelmingly effective moments - particularly when one longs, with such a fierce terror, for the darkness to end. Nevertheless, this focus on the spectators’ senses also creates a slightly selfish and adrift audience. As much I appreciated this production, I also felt strangely detached from proceedings; trapped in my own little world, rather than drawn into the character’s experience on stage.

This distancing effect is enhanced by Hattie Naylor’s script which, although brilliantly structured, is actually a little too tight. I could have done with a bit more breathing space, to allow Max’s emotions to settle and spread. Instead, the snaps between the gentle, domestic scenes and Max’s astronomy lectures, feel abrupt. That’s not to say these lectures, aided by a projection of the night sky, are not fascinating in their own right. They’re packed with boggling facts that stop your brain and breath in its tracks and they’re visually persuasive, too. But, again, this star-gazing is really for the audience’s benefit and I’m not sure how much these episodes, despite their thematic relevance, help the play. No matter how pleasurable it is to see the super novas explode, and to connect the dots between the dancing stars, it does begin to take us away from Max’s story.

It is the scenes between Max (John Mackay) and his son, which really connect the ideas about the cosmos, with the heart of this play. You can understand what Sound and Fury were trying to do here and why discussions about the stars’ strange alignments, the origin of the universe and our own, insignificant standing within it, could thicken out an exploration of blindness. And yet, it is the seemingly random chats between father and son that force us out of our private revelries and back into the production. The son’s voice is recorded and, as his questions crowd in from all corners of the theatre, it is as if he has become the son, around which this father will now revolve.

Till 24 March 2012

Often, exciting new writers are described as possessing ‘distinctive and fresh voices.’ Yet, what excites me about Ishy Din, is that I cannot hear his voice. Instead, Snookered presents a rich range of new voices, as four Muslim lads meet in a pool hall ‘up North’, to mark their friend’s death. Each character is surprising and each has his own, deeply personal idiom. The result is a play that feels refreshingly humble, generous and open, spurred on by the characters’ credible swings in emotion rather than the playwright’s political agenda or preeningly complex structure.

Ishy Din is not your usual Royal Court Programme playwright and has, in his time, worked in video shops and restaurants and driven mini cabs. This unusual background shows. Although Ishy Din’s straightforward plotting might lack the tricksy ambition of a more polished writer, this is a playwright with a natural ear for dialogue, alternately comic and touching, and an instinctive feel for emotional arcs.

Snookered does, with its unassuming structure, take a little time to warm up. The four friends are initially awkward together and their chat stilted. But as the drinks are downed, the dialogue loosens up. The lightly-bruising banter is peppered with unfamiliar lingo. The lads refer to each other as ‘chicken’, ‘giraffe’, ‘coconut’ or ‘cabbage’. This might sound like a modest achievement but to create four characters who share a common, but varied and lifelike language, is no mean feat.

Director Iqbal Khan keeps things suitably low-key and, for much of the time, we’re simply hanging out with the lads. One begins to feel part of their crowd, involved and not distinct. This is helped by the near-mute barman whose subtle reactions to the lads’ increasingly strained reunion, mirror our own. We are watching and learning together.

Apart from the conclusion, which introduces an unnecessarily amped up plot twist, the play’s high-points are touchingly mediocre. As the lads share stories about their relative successes, it becomes clear that Shaf – who is struggling with his ample kids and meagre career prospects – believes he has found his golden ticket. After much needling, he reveals his dream: he wants to open a fried chicken shop. As Shaf excitedly discusses his hopeless fantasy, his friends laugh at him. It is painful to watch this modest dream batted away and to see Shaf, temporarily vulnerable and hopeful, beaten back down by his friends.

Similarly compromised crescendos emerge elsewhere. Mo works at his dad’s butchers and, despite his friends’ teasing, seems fairly happy with his lot. His prevailing optimism is later crushed, though, when his friends reveal his snooker cue is not so special after all. It sure as hell didn’t belong to Stephen Hendry. Mo is forced to accept the banality of his most treasured possessions, just as Shaf was forced to drop his chicken shop dream. Perhaps, Din seems to be saying, it isn’t location or religion that defines us but the reality, which we allow ourselves – and our friends allow us – to believe in.

Till 24 March 2012

It starts with a chorus, slow and measured. Black-robed women sing of the family house, now demolished, and of their memories of the tree in the courtyard, under which cool drinks were served to visitors in the heat of the day. Their consonants, particularly Cs and Ts, are sometimes soft, sometimes hard as an obscenity spat out in hatred. And gradually the mood shifts from melancholy nostalgia to present rage, a funeral procession turns into a demonstration, the back of the stage becomes a concrete slab wall and the chorus spits out, ‘Let the supplanter look upon his work. Our faith will take the stones he broke and break his teeth’.

When John Adams and Alice Goodman began work on The Death of Klinghoffer, the real life events on which it is based were less than five years old. Now, the hijacking of a cruise ship and the death of an elderly, disabled passenger have receded from our consciousness. More recent events, such as suicide bombings and 9/11, the building of Israel’s Wall, and the Arab Spring, are more salient in our minds. Director Tom Morris has chosen to bring in some of these directly – the recurring appearance of the Wall that fills the stage, or the use of green flags for the Arab demonstrations – and to leave others to resonate in our minds.

For an opera about a hijacking that ends in murder, it’s not a dramatic work. Nor does it use the fact that we know the eventual outcome (it’s in the title) to play with suspense. In one way, it’s not even about the events on board the Achille Lauro in 1985, but about the way those events were seen around the world. It’s consciously modelled as much on oratorio as opera, with its seven structuring choruses (one sadly removed from this production). The first chorus, of the supplanted Arabs, is followed by a chorus of Jews in 1948: ‘When I paid off the taxi I had no money left, And, of course, no luggage’. They bring in trees and plant them in the stony stage. It’s another slow, lyrical choral passage and, like the first, is poetic and allusive, not discursive.

If Adams and Goodman intended to enlighten their audiences on the history of the Middle East, they fail. But if they’d intended that, surely the dates and narrative events would not be relegated to projected captions? The strength of the libretto, which gives structure to the rich, expressive music, is in the poetic, evocative elements: the recurring references to birds, endlessly migrating and seeking places to nest, to perch for a while; to water flowing, a motif echoed in the projected waves rocking behind the scenes, and the ship’s wake unfurling behind like time passing.

Nevertheless, the very lack of dramatic structure, the long scenes of waiting, of the Captain endlessly listening – to the musings of hijacker Mamoud, to the frail human chatter of Marilyn Klinghoffer – do give an impression of the whole hijacking episode as a confused attack met with passivity and a keen desire to turn a blind eye. It’s interesting that one of the passengers whose first-person account is featured is an Austrian woman who locks herself into her cabin and remains there, undiscovered, throughout.

And in that sense, it is a truthful account of the Achille Lauro hijacking. Because the whole incident unwinds not with a horrible inevitability, or as a conflict of wills between actors with political and personal goals, but with a dangerous lack of direction, couched in frustration and a sense of grievance but politically naive and tactically hopeless.

A solitary man stood outside the Coliseum on opening night, with a small placard that read, ‘Disabled man murdered by terrorists. Murdered for being Jewish. Enjoy your evening at ENO’. Out of context, that is bizarre. Should we boycott all works of art based on tragic or horrible events, or events of which we disapprove? Demand that Picasso’s Guernica be removed from display, or refuse to read Wilfred Owen’s First World War poetry? It reflects the controversial origins of the opera, which Adams wrote deliberately to confront American response to Leon Klinghoffer’s death. He sought consciously to include both sides of the conflict that gave rise to the events, and this has outraged ever since those who see it as somehow justifying the murder.

The opera does no such thing, and neither does this production. To the extent that it invokes contemporary events – the Banksy-style graffiti on the concrete wall, for example – it invites us to make connections. But it’s much stronger when it leaves room for the work to unfurl the emotions of the situation and leave us to make up our own mind. It’s a postmodern approach. Bring in a variety of viewpoints and leave the audience to make up our own mind. But it’s better than agitprop. Mamoud’s horrific story of losing his brother, as a child in a refugee camp, does not diminish the humanity of Leon Klinghoffer, comforting his wife as she leaves him – as it turns out, for the last time. Nor does it detract from the heartrending pain of her last aria, which ends the opera, a sorrowful oboe echoing her grief, jagged strings underscoring her anger at the captain who embraced the hijackers.

You could see the Captain, indecisive (or decisively passive) and wanting to empathise with all sides, as a proxy for this postmodern approach. He hopes that by co-operating with the hijackers, everything will turn out all right. He believes that if only people could talk about how they felt, what they had suffered, conflicts would be resolved. But the work also seems critical of his refusal to make a stand.

As a contemporary work, it expresses a dilemma of our time. Do I take sides, or do I invite everyone in to have their say? Do I tell the story my way, or present the audience with fragments and let them make up their own narrative? And Tom Morris’s production grapples with this too, the blatant references to recent history suggesting a desire to take sides, the use of dance and visuals a way of breaking out of the literal, and the simplicity of the solo or two-person scenes, letting the human stories speak for themselves.

It’s uncluttered, not too intoxicated with technical gimmickry, and focused on the human scale. It works, but for me, it’s strongest when it steps back from the political. The projected historical captions are distracting and add a tendentious, didactic air.

This is not Brecht – if there is a lesson in The Death of Klinghoffer, it’s that we shouldn’t try to draw glib lessons from real events. The music, and the libretto that draws on natural speech and ancient texts, are beautiful in their own right, and all the performers here do it full justice.  The only question it answers is, ‘How should an artist respond to the death of Leon Klinghoffer?’ And the answer is a wonderful work of art.

Till 3 March 2012

Showing flesh

This week in London theatre, Matt Trueman reviews Cheek by Jowl’s contemporary take on John Ford’s revenge tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Barbican and Josie Rourke’s production of George Farquhar’s restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar Warehouse, as well as surprisingly less timely revival of Doug Lucie’s newspaper satire The Shallow End at the Southwark Playhouse, while Miriam Gillinson reviews David Eldridge’s engaging but didactic In Basildon at the Royal Court. Meanwhile, Nicky Charlish reviews Lucian Freud’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.

24 February 2012

We don’t usually associate Lucian Freud with sport, with its connotations of the outdoor life and team spirit, of a healthy mind in a healthy body. Instead, we think of him as an indoors man, forever showing us the dark emotions lurking within all-too-abundantly fleshy human subjects enclosed by four walls. We remember him, too, as the Soho hedonist, the coeval of not only his fellow-painter and bad boy Francis Bacon but also of legendary low life chronicler Jeffrey Bernard. So it might seem a bit of a contrast with these familiar associations when we discover that this exhibition of his work is a countdown event for the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad, which is the largest culture celebration in the history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic Movements. But even if this festive athletic event and its attendant celebrations weren’t on hand to excite and delight us, his death last year would have made this major examination of his output almost inevitable.

Uncovering the human condition by looking at the body and the emotions it contained - showing the feelings and passions lurking under the human skin - was Freud’s lifelong artistic aim. We see his ‘Man with a Feather (Self-portrait)’ (1943) showing the artist shrouded in darkness with a small house behind him. He looks worried: is it because he’s in a wartime blackout, fearful of the dangers of the night? Or because the house (at whose windows can be seen the mysterious figures of a small man and a bird) holds unexplained terrors? Or is it because he is a painterly novice, wondering whether his work willgain him acceptance into the demanding ranks of art? Yet, decades later, ‘Reflection (Self-portrait)’ (1985) shows us the distinguished artist looking bemused, as if wondering why he paints at all and whether his work has been in vain. Meanwhile, ten rooms are devoted in this exhibition to the prestigious amount of work that he produced and to help us judge how successful he was - and the ways he achieved that success. What best captures his attempts?

Freud used a mixture of family, friends and strangers as sitters for his work. ‘Girl in Bed’ (1952) shows his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931-96) looking upwards in bed with a mixture of expectation and a hint of amusement, whilst his ‘Portrait of John Minton’ (1952) shows the face of the painter, art teacher and homosexual habitue of Soho and Fitzrovia worried and fighting back depression (he would go on to commit suicide in 1957).

‘Two Irishmen in W11’ (1984-5) shows a black-suited father and son in a room through the window of which can be seen the skyline of west London. Both have empty faces, possibly reflecting the loss of someone close and which seems supported by their funereal attire: the son rests his hand on the back of the chair on which his father sits, as if he wants to place it on his father’s shoulder but knows that this might be a gesture of intimacy – or consolation - too much. ‘Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau)’ (1981-3) shows a group portrait of Freud’s close friends specially gathered together for the painting, which makes us think instantly of the tensions which exists in any group of friends and which can require only one ill-chosen word to come - unbidden - to sunder the social surface. ‘Man in a Silver Suit’ (1998) shows a man whose depression is evident not only in the expression of hopelessness on his face but in the tension of his wide-splayed fingers.

But Freud also wanted to show us the skin enfolding human emotions. He has used nudes of both sexes to help in this work, but his fascination with, and portrayal of, naked women has - unsurprisingly - landed him within suspiciously puritanical controversy. On one level, this is to be expected, given past PC feminist critiques of the ‘male gaze’. On another level, however, this criticism is surprising - given the current controversies over such things as cosmetic surgery, size zero fashion models and other instances of allegedly prescriptive modes of female body style - as the painter didn’t restrict himself to one particular idealised version of the feminine figure.

Nevertheless, Freud’s depiction of women is not misogynistic and one suspects that, had Freud ignored the human female form altogether, he would have been accused of another form of sexism: excluding women from artistic depiction. His critics seem almost wilfully to ignore the fact that he not only glories in human flesh but that Freud shows naked men - warts and all - too. ‘Naked Portrait’ (1972-3) shows a woman semi-curved on a bed with a faraway expression on her face - or is she simply wondering when she will be able to stop holding her uncomfortable pose? ‘Leigh Bowery (Seated)’ (1990) shows the club entrepreneur and performance artist (his decadent club, Taboo, functioned near the end of the 1980s New Romantic clubbing and fashion scene, and onstage he could dance gracefully despite his bulk - he knew how to bare, and bear, his body to best advantage) parading his plump form - although seated – almost defiantly: he dares usto insult him. ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), one of a series featuring Bowery’s clubbing friend, Sue Tilley (who worked as a benefits supervisor with the Department of Social Security), shows her resting on a couch. This naked civil servant assumes an uncomfortable pose but seems at ease with her form. Meanwhile ‘Freddy Standing (2000-1) shows a naked, dishevelled male, tired but ready for a fight - verbal or physical.

In addition to criticism of his use of the naked form, some of the subject-matter of Freud’s work might also let him in for another accusation - that he was a lover of hanging-out with high society. But any temptation to look on Freud as a social climber is dispelled by ‘Man in a Chair’ (1983-5), showing us industrialist and collector Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza who seems to be reflecting on the ultimate meaning of acquisition. ‘The Brigadier’ (2003-04) gives us Freud’s friend and riding companion Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles in a reflective, almost sad moment as he sits with his jacket unbuttoned. The high life is not, necessarily, a comfortable or carefree world to inhabit, and Freud doesn’t shy from showing this.

Freud kept working as long as he could, but he was too frail to complete his ‘Portrait of the Hound’ (2011), showing us his assistant, David Dawson, with his whippet, Eli. The couple seem in peaceful symbiosis. The outer edges of the painting remain uncompleted, giving us an unintended practical demonstration of how the artist carried-out his work by starting at the centre and working outwards.

Freud’s grandfather, Sigmund, attempted to examine and explain the workings of the human mind and – whatever the faults of his methodology - helped to expand our understanding of them, including their more disturbing aspects. In a sense, his grandson followed in his footsteps. But instead of using the consulting room and couch, the younger Freud employed the studio and the paintbrush. Freud took the trouble to paint his subjects in the way that he did to bring out their full humanity. In doing so he makes us, with fascination, fear and excitement, examine that of others - and our own.

Till 27 May 2012

Any play which includes a character ballsy enough to describe sex as ‘stirring the porridge’ is a winner in my books. David Eldridge is an exceptionally funny writer and, more importantly, he channels his comedy with perfect precision through each of his characters. And yet, despite all the laughs and some searingly tender moments, there is almost always a moment in Eldridge’s plays when I find myself pulling back. His plays are so clever but they are tidy, too, and at some point the play’s blueprint grows a little too clear. Suddenly, and regrettably, I become aware that I am in the theatre and all that wonderful life and colour begins to drain away.

That is not to say there aren’t some brilliant moments in Eldridge’s latest work, In Basildon. Although it is set in 2010, the Essex home in which Len is dying – and his family are gathered – seems trapped in the past. The wallpaper is dreary, the furniture is old and the atmosphere is stale. A lot of the time, it feels like the characters are trying to make their words heard through an air clogged up with glue. That glue is the grudge, which sisters Doreen and Maureen have held onto for so long; the glue that should hold families together, has ripped this one apart.

This anger has grown so strong that it overpowers everything else – often to great comic effect. This is why Act One, pitched to perfection by director Dominic Cooke, is so funny and so strong: the resentment and regret overshadows everything, allowing for wildly inappropriate but bloody amusing brawls. Every so often, though, cracks appear beneath this fossilised fury. As best friend Ken (Peter Wight – an exquisitely soft showman) bulldozes through his gags, he occasionally stumbles across shards of pain and stalls, bowed by his grief. And when Len dies at the end of Act One, all the adults – just for a moment – become children. Standing around the bed, holding hands and singing, they look like kids in a playground. It is a beautiful reminder of the strange reversal that death often brings about; it is a time when adults become children and children become adults and the rumbling order of life is thrown into chaos.

Act One might contain straight-talking characters and bullseye punchlines but it is also brilliantly oblique. But as soon as Act Two begins, and ‘stuck up’ niece Shelley (Jade Williams) and her posh boyfriend, Tom (Max Bennet), join the throng, the bleakness clears and the play, at least for me, becomes too black and white. Not long after arriving, Tom even poses the question: ‘What would you say defines Essex?’ While the arrival of Shelley and Tom does provoke important debate, with ex Captain of Industry Ken growling at delicate, writer Tom – ‘Why do you think we’re apathetic?’ - it is bare and blatant discussion. The play becomes a platform rather than a stage.

The presence of these heightened ‘outsider’ characters also sharpens the edges of the run down Basildon folk. Everyone and everything becomes a touch too defined. This suspicion is compounded with Act Four, which flashes back to 1992 - a time when Maureen and Doreen were supposedly a lot softer and far kinder to each other. What were once beautifully ambiguous creations become a tad simplified. Linda Bassett is brilliant as bulldog sister, Maureen, and in the earlier acts, she straddles so many possibilities. When she quietly declares her love to Ken, it is impossible to tell whether this confession is genuine, or simply a money grabbing ploy. Her open mouthed but silent, gasping sorrow gapes with so many complex but concealed emotions. Yet, once we are shown her dubiously soft-hearted and younger self in Act Four, she feels cruder and less credible. The play, in light of this final act, feels similarly overexposed – as if it has been clawed open to reveal the mechanics, chugging away, inside.

Till 24 March 2012

Let’s start with Bridget Jones; an unlikely counterpoint to John Ford’s brutal revenge tragedy, admittedly, but one that surfaces in Cheek by Jowl’s thrilling revival nonetheless.

Like our Bridge, Annabella is torn between two suitors of opposing parental approval. Jack Hawkins’s Soranzo is the eligible, square-jawed nice-chap; Jack Gordon’s Giovanni, greasy-haired and dressed in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, is the irresistible bad-boy; the intriguing, bookish, chauvinistic social misfit with a magnetic sexual pull. He’s also her brother, and thus comparisons with Hugh Grant – sorry Daniel Cleaver – come to an abrupt halt.

OK, so they’re not like for like, but my point is that Annabella’s lot is, in some ways, a cinematic staple. Think of American Beauty’s Ricky Fitts, James Dean’s rebel without a cause Jim Stark, even Grease’s Danny Zucco. Or, slightly differently, look at the battle for Ryan Phillippe in Cruel Intentions. Were ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore a rom-com it would end in one of two ways. Either with the bad-boy tamed or with the good-at-heart girl’s renouncement of him for the triumphant good-guy. Ford’s play, of course, is anything but (rev-trag?), and ends with Annabella and her unborn child dead and Giovanni brandishing the heart he’s ripped out of her.

In any case, designer Nick Ormerod leaves us no doubt that Hollywood (and, wider, pop cultural aspirations) should be at the forefront of our minds throughout. Annabella’s teenage bedroom – the production is contemporary and youthful, almost ‘in-thy-face’ theatre – is lined with posters: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Gone With the Wind, True Blood. For every iconic ingénue there’s a femme fatale, and Lydia Wilson’s fantastic Annabella aspires to both simultaneously. In fact, she is split like a half-and-half musical hall act. Seen in one profile she’s perfectly demure; in the other, tattooed and shaven-headed. Her voice is just as schizophrenic: prim and clipped politeness interrupted by cavernous growls that burst from her gut. She truly is the ‘double soul’ of which Giovanni speaks.

Donnellan’s production centres on attraction and revulsion, showing the two to be thoroughly connected emotions. Centrestage is Annabella’s bed, to which hopeful lovers – not just Giovanni and Soranza – are drawn. They circle it like hyenas descending on a carcass and call to mind the patrons of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, salivating over Nicole Kidman’s showgirl. Yet, just as often, they spring back in disgust, and pin themselves to the walls, horrified, but nonetheless unable to avert their eyes. After Annabella’s death is revealed, each one in turn walks coolly over to the bloodstained en-suite bathroom and peers in, inexplicably pulled to the murder scene. Some recoil, wretching. Others stand transfixed. All must look, but none can bear to see. Omerod’s design is all lipstick and bile; deep red and chemical green throb discordantly together. The whole things pulsates with sex.

That finds a contrast in the hollow iconography – both sexual and religious – of the world around them. Annabella is first seen dancing as if in a Beyonce video, surrounded by suited men. She becomes a Vegas virgin Mary in Soranzo’s shrine, mirroring the gauche poster of the Madonna (not the popstar) on her bedroom wall. Here sex is everything and nothing at once, and Donnellan handles it – and the play’s violence, mostly half-glimpsed in back rooms, as elbows lash out and nosebleeds begin – with relished flair. At one point, Soranzo storms towards Annabella with a contorted coathanger; a sharp contrast to the mostly bouyant atmosphere of fiestas and folk-dancing. Nick Powell’s sound design is fantastic, adding to the tone of an Anthony Neilson-style hallucination.

For all this could, ultimately, be in Annabella’s head. Finally, she stands over Giovanni, looking at her own heart. Are these her dark fantasies, urged on by female role models seen onscreen: sexualised pop stars and Hollywood’s array of vixens, vamps and virgins.

Till 10 March 2012

BRAZEN: ‘A privateer may be ill-manned.’
PLUME: ‘And so may a playhouse.’

Not this one. Josie Rourke’s inaugural production at the Donmar Warehouse oozes class. Everything, from the starry ensemble to Lucy Osborne’s gorgeous rustic design, flickering under candlelight, via Michael Bruce’s folksy score, is perfectly pleasing on both the eye and the ear. Until the production’s inspired final coda, however, class is precisely what falls out of George Farquhar’s restoration comedy.

In The Recruiting Officer, the town stomps into the country and grossly exploits its populace for personal gain. Aided by the gnarled Sergeant Kite, Captain Plume (Tobias Menzies) strides into Shropshire and, with devilish cunning, tricks its yokels (male and female alike) into the army.

By having the five-strong house band playing various locals, Rourke loses the sense of a community being raided. This may be intentional, as a means to better sting us with her ending, in which the quintet sings ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ before, one by one, marching off to war. It’s undoubtedly poignant, but the flipside is to lighten the heart of a play that needs a snarl beneath its sniggers.

Even so, the comedy is still too genteel to really score. Admittedly, second night sluggishness seemed to have crept in at the same time as I did – the pace felt groggy and a couple of corpses betrayed hazy focus – but if you’re going to play it up, really play it up. It needs a strong dash of grotesque.

Only Mark Gatiss as Plume’s recruiting rival Captain Brazen – a foppish mix of Captain Hook and Wendy Darling – has the raucousness to raise unfailing laughter. As Kite, Mackenzie Crook manages it when disguised as a German fortune-teller, but elsewhere plays against his own nature by gruffing up for a machismo to which he’s not suited. Menzies’s Plume is standard-issue swagger (a case of the Flashhearts); he holds himself as if sitting for a portrait and hits first syllables with a full-on baseball swing.

Lucy Osborne’s set, which makes a wooden barn of the Donmar’s extraordinary auditorium (once again, the real star), is similarly decorous. All twinkling candles and powder-blue sky, its chocolate box charm only adds to the quaintness and the whole comes across a courtly and civil recreation of the Globe stage. It’s all a bit luxurious and cosy.

In fairness, the women fare better. Nancy Carroll is just delightful as Slyvia, the love Plume is too proud to admit, embracing a mousey vulnerability, while Rachael Stirling finds a neat caricature of new money in Melinda, with her forced elocution and a too-too-tight corset. Aimee-Ffion Edwards’s Rose is consistently amusing as the impudent Rose.

Perhaps all this is too harsh, for The Recruiting Officer is a beautiful production done well, but it’s ornamental appeal – like a oil painting restored – leads it into insipidness whenever it droops. Nevertheless, when the stars align and the playing zings, I’ve no doubt that Rourke’s Recruiting Officer improves immeasurably.

Till 14 April 2012

If, as an aspiring newspaper theatre critic, I didn’t come out of The Shallow End thoroughly depressed, it would be doing something seriously wrong. Doug Lucie’s play, first seen at the Duke of York’s Theatre via the Royal Court, presents the death throes of the newspaper industry. Reader, I’m pleased to tell you that it toe-kicked me into the bluest of blue funks.

Nevertheless, that’s not to say that Stone Junction – the company behind last year’s fringe revival of another Jez Butterworth’s The Winterling – is doing everything right. Lucie’s play, which is crass enough already, needs downplaying before it needs relish, and director Sebastien Blanc fills it with wide-boys, toffs and tarts.

The point, surely, is that the Street of Shame drags its ordinarily reasonable and respectable inhabitants down. In a media culture – indeed any culture – that puts profit above all else, standards of decency are continually eroded. Intelligent men and women choose to sell out, betraying the fundamental of journalism: truth. The noble and the ignoble, who face off in various permutations during each of the four distinct scenes, should not belong to different species.

The Shallow End is, of course, a thinly veiled attack on Rupert Murdoch’s empire. News International is here renamed World News Corp – there’s little more nuanced than that – and its Sunday paper is being reinvented by new editor Malcolm Kirk (Mario Demetriou, replacing the Scottish-accented Andrew Neil-alike with an Essex wide-boy a la Andy Coulson). That means culling his staff – the old and the idealistic – and bringing in new faces, brash and inexpert hacks every one. As Kirk himself says (and you to realise that, whatever the fate of newspapers, he’ll survive elsewhere), ‘So the wheel turns’.

Kirk‘s hiring and firing takes place at the mogul’s daugter’s wedding. Lucie takes us, step by step, towards the inner-sanctum, from the frivolity of arts and features (out with the critic, in with the straight-talking, sexualised columnist), through sport and politics and, finally, holding the whole company over a barrel, maverick foreign correspondent Harry Rees. That means the play can swell, but even where barnstorming conspiracy supplants pettier misdemeanours, it is fatally two-dimensional.

With the Leveson machine rumbling on, Lucie’s bludgeoning attack looks timely from afar. The Shallow End is very much a mid-nineties play, however, and – worse – a product of the very same culture it sets out to satirise. Full of blow, bubbly and banging, it slots quite snugly into the post-Mojo slipstream of men behaving badly. For every moment of Lucie’s lucidity, there’s another dragged under by luridity, and The Shallow End starts to look like the Fleet Street equivalent of Footballers’ Wives. Pravda it is not.

Till 3 March 2012

Art and nature

This week on CW, Nicky Charlish reviews ‘radical realist’ David Hockney’s exhibition of landscapes at the Royal Academy. Mary Paterson reviews a book putting the case against arts institutions accepting sponsorship from oil companies. And in London theatre, Matt Trueman reviews Paper Cinema’s The Odyssey at Battersea Arts Centre, and Acykbourn’s Absent Friends at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

17 February 2012