Simon Stephens’ two fingers up to youth-culture-according-to-Skins November 13, 2009

THEATRE REVIEW- Punkrock @ Royal Exchange, Manchester, Thursday 22^nd October 2009

Standing in the foyer waiting to go into Simon Stephens’ latest play Punkrock really put paid to those naysayers who bleat that theatre never attracts a youthful audience. It also put paid to the opening line I’d been mentally penning all the way from Piccadilly Gardens. For as soon as I stepped foot in the place, it became plain that my planned musings about the Royal Exchange not being a particularly ‘punk rock’ kind of theatre (its clientele tending to be more ‘daytrip to Blackpool to buy rock’) had been woefully undermined by the presence of several coach loads of fresh faced teens.  

And how glad I was to be undermined. It would have been a huge waste had Punkrock, with its sixth-form age characters and thrashing soundtrack, had to play to a huddle of octogenarians who would have secretly preferred Noel Coward. Set in the upper school library of a Stockport private college, Punkrock is a heady clash of teenage philosophy- and no, not just the school of iPod there I am. The play is crafted from the kind of conversations you can only have when you’re 17 – from grandiose meanderings on the nature of humanity to angst-filled panic over mock exams. Love, loss, identity, sexuality and class are all given a hearing. Particularly compelling are the musings of disturbed teen William (Tom Sturridge), who rails against the limits of his suburban hometown.

Helped along by uniformly (no pun intended) excellent, nuanced performances from the young cast, Stephen’s script motors along smoothly and before you know it just another morning break time morphs seamlessly into a Columbine-style atrocity.

Many hands have been wrung over whether Punkrock adds anything new. Comparisons to everything from Lord of the Flies to The History Boys have been flung at the play, yet look at the play closely and none of these should stick. Stephens’ script effectively offers a rebuttal to youth-culture-according-to-Skins, despite the bleak climax of the play (which is as jolting as the bursts of Big Black and Sonic Youth et al. that punctuate each scene) Punkrock remains a play suffused in the importance of normality. 

How refreshing that Lilly (Jessica Raine) is permitted to describe losing her virginity as “lovely”. How significant that Stephens doesn’t insist on framing it in terms of teen pregnancy or angst or pain, rather he just allows it to happen; sensibly, premeditated and with enjoyment. How un-Skins. Likewise, the final scene of the play, for all its odd, purgatorial overtones, set in a psychiatrist’s office, serves to remind us that even after the unthinkable has happened, normality prevails.

Classic Review: A Time to Kill September 23, 2009

Don’t be fooled by the opening few chapters of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill. Or, for that matter, by the pithy gobbets from the critics that invariably grace its covers. For A Time to Kill is not quite the über-thriller you might expect from Grisham, the king of the legal-drama, whose status thus is secured in perpetuity by the purchase power of an army of businessmen and holidaymakers alike. While the early pages of the novel bombard you with scenes of near-unbearable violence and their brutal repercussions – a young girl is raped by two rednecks, her father guns them down- what ensues is a far more measured, often painstaking portrait of a small town in Mississippi and the nuances of legal proceedings in a capital murder trial.
To accommodate this level of legal detail, Grisham’s passages are short and he frequently switches location or adds new characters. This stretches the flabby plot to the point of exhaustion. However, Grisham does just about manage to hang his digressions and vignettes upon central protagonist, upstart defence lawyer Jake Brigance. Brigance is suitably distasteful so as to be compelling.

Yet while the book makes for a flawed thriller, what nudges it towards status as a classic is arguably its portrayal of racial tension.

Almost (and I stress almost) more shocking than the initial scenes of violence is the novel’s deployment of a language of racial divide. Grisham’s frequent and near gratuitous use of a particular word, the worst of racial slurs, a word that has both killed careers and been embraced by Gangsta rap, is an interesting call for a white author to have made. On the one hand it may be necessary for verisimilitude, many of his characters are meant to be unequivocally racist. On the other it could be seen as perpetuating a certain cycle of representation, not least when Grisham’s black characters themselves use it self-referentially.
Ultimately, it is part and parcel of an impression that the novel is set in a town whose attitudes are lagging behind the times. Indeed perhaps the most inappropriate words in the English language are in this instance the most appropriate. After all, race (and racism) determines class in the novel, it determines social standing and it may even determine whether vigilante father Carl Lee Hailey lives or dies. Maybe it is inevitable, if not necessary, that it, too, determines the novel’s vocabulary.

Future Perfect August 17, 2009

EDINBURGH FRINGE PREVIEW: Stitches @ The Martin Harris Centre, Manchester, Thursday 13^th August 2009

Order hangs by a thread in Claire Urwin’s play. Bel, Liby, Web and Nettie are charged with remembering the world as it was “before the firefloods came”. And so in the Department of Flora and Fauna (“conscription’s three years but many do stay longer”) they methodically piece together impressions of what the world might have been like, recording their findings in the form of quilts. If only they could stitch their own fragile identities back together so easily.

In her latest play, Claire Urwin offers us a post-apocalyptic future and in doing so, as in all good dystopias, manages to spotlight the fears present in, well, our present.

Pangs of recognition should set in as the female conscripts spend their recesses gazing myopically at their “flaws” in tiny mirrors. And I challenge even Sarah Palin to sit through Stitches and not feel the slightest squirm of climate-change related anxiety as the conscripts describe their perma-fogged world. (Actually, any chance anyone could get Palin along? It could bring some much appreciated publicity to this talented troupe in an over-saturated Fringe market. She could even visit the Lothian NHS while she’s at it…)

Likewise, the delicately wrought conflict between Bel (“the very very rich”) and Nettie (“the not quite so rich”) should register with a recession-logged audience like pinpricks on skin.

This is not to say that Urwin’s play is a polemic. Far from it. Gently teased into dramaturgical life by director Rajiv Nathwani, the plays never shores itself up against any one character. Even posturing, upper-class Bel (Vanessa Fogarty) remains warm and engaging. This is in part down to the dexterity of Urwin’s writing- with timely interjections of comic relief- and in part a testament to Fogarty’s performance, which, frankly, could charm the proverbial pants off the birds in the proverbial trees.

Occasionally moments of tension between characters lump together too stolidly, but you will forgive these if your eye is caught by the feral new girl Amy (Elisabeth Hopper) who says little but observes much.

Stitches is a triumphant answer to those who wondered what Urwin would do next. The luxurious poetic language remains, as do some stunning monologues, but Stitches proves that Urwin is capable not just of writing character, but of playing her characters off against each other.  Such is the enormous dramatic potential of the final moments of the play, as Amy’s presence- and the dawning realisation that she was one of those left behind while the earth burned- threatens to destroy everything the other conscripts have so painstakingly patchworked together, that it will surely have a life after the Fringe. Preferably with the welcome addition of a second act.

In short, Stitches is a lyrical, meticulously performed swansong to today’s world, just filtered back to us through the acrid smog of tomorrow.

Stitches is on at The Spaces on the Mile @ The Radisson (Fringe Venue 39),  4pm, Monday 17th August until Saturday 29^th August.

No, I couldn’t afford the Manchester International Festival! August 17, 2009

Last Sunday, some friends and I took to the streets of Manchester for the festival. We soaked up the afternoon sun, swigged cider and enjoyed a slice of Mancunian life. Oh yes – and we completely managed to miss Jeremy Deller’s Procession.

Perhaps I should clarify. We weren’t in central Manchester at all, but at the Beech Road festival in leafy Chorlton. We’re pretty sure the international festival didn’t miss us. Especially as not one of us, a bunch of new graduates, happens to be in possession of a ticket to one of its events. My friend from Failsworth’s verdict? “It’s fine if you’re middle-class and from Didsbury. But crap if you’re young and/or skint… cont’d at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/jul/09/manchester-international-festival

“Must we all be lesbians, Caryl?” June 4, 2009

A lovely feminist

REVIEW: Cloud Nine @ Capitol Theatre, Manchester, Thursday 21st May 2009

Not to sound like a Victorian matriarch, but I do so find Cloud Nine a wholly objectionable play. I should adore it. It is, in principle, the kind of politically and theatrically radical piece that I should want to hug until its clever little feminist conceits fall right off.  So why so churlish? Well, it just doesn’t quite work does it? Churchill’s instructions for cross-casting (male as female/ white as black/ adult male as female child) are ideologically brilliant yet in performance they fall flat- like an undercooked, anti-patriarchal soufflé.

Gabriel Gawin’s recent revival (part of Manchester Metropolitan’s graduate showcase) did little to exorcise my inner schoolmarm. It’s easy to feel lost in this play, which sprawls itself before you spanning Colonial-era Africa and 1979 London, and this sensation isn’t aided by the vast black-box space of the Capitol Theatre. Pale wooden shutter-blinds, slats out of place, hang jauntily from the ceiling, sharing airspace with a grey-scale Union Jack flag and several antique birdcages.  I’ll admit I didn’t get the metaphor.

And metaphors are a problem in this play. In the first half Betty, the wife of tyrannical patriarch Clive, is played by a man. We must (must!) therefore infer that every thought in Betty’s pretty little head is enforced by a man. We must consider how Betty is forced into a constricting gender role despite being equal to a man (heck, she IS a man!). Yet Gawin’s Betty (Ryan Cerenko) is more pantomime dame than anything else. Cerenko camps it up royally, squealing and swooning all over the shop (presumably for feminists everywhere…)

It is all very enjoyable, but what about when the irony falls away? Are we supposed to feel sorry for Betty Twankey when she describes the extent of her sexual participation as ‘just keeping still’? Can we possibly reflect upon the inequality of the sexes (bygone and enduring) when Betty too easily elicits laughter?

Gawin’s staging of the second half is also problematic. Written for a park in the ’70s, Gawin is meticulous in a recreation of the period. Yet, dressing up the speeches of this second act in achingly retro clothing confines the emerging tensions safely to 1979. And I resent any implication that we are somehow post-feminist.

I am, of course, being grossly unfair to lay all of this at Gawin’s door. Churchill’s feminist figures in the second act have not aged well. One character is a lesbian who declares she hates men (at least wardrobe had the sense not to put her in dungarees is all I can say). A sexually frustrated, married woman for whom the answer is not economic equality but a lesbian lover. An effeminate gay man who announces ‘I think I’m a lesbian’. Must we all be lesbians, Caryl?

This leads me to my final big fat problem. It stems from my desire for positive representations in a play that is so politically charged. The second act of the play naively leaves its colonial past in, well, the past rather than address its legacy. The initial casting of a female actor as Edward sanitizes any homosexual encounters. The women in act two seek salvation in sexuality.

Yes, Churchill wrote the script, but nearly 30 years since its debut performance I wished for more from a revival. I want a production that makes the audience ask why, three decades on, we haven’t yet found the answers to Churchill’s questions. Or is that more Cloud Cuckooland than Cloud Nine?

Review: Never Enough and Return to the Silence April 13, 2009

Physical Theatre makes my head hurt. A lot. Thinking about it… Writing about it… How do you reconcile this semantically flaccid term, used to describe the work of everyone from DV8 to Shared Experience? How do you produce a piece of so-called Physical Theatre that doesn’t inspire unimaginative jokes about poncing about and pretending to be trees?

Some reasons for my physical theatre-induced migraines are illuminated by Manchester-based sketch troupe Lady Garden. These six female performers never fail to make me giggle with their unabashed lampoonery of embarrassing student fantasies of self-expression. Their opening skit sees the Lady-Gardeners slither on stage in tight, black leotards, trailing red ribbons behind them and crying out such inanities as “Ejaculation” in their best “I trained at RADA” voices. Yet despite this cautionary tale, the lure of the physical for student practitioners is palpable at the NSDF. So I will persist, headache be damned. 

A trio of incredibly bendy performers from the University of Hull did their level best to challenge perceptions of physical theatre this week. Never Enough, a devised tale of fear and self-loathing, manages to arabesque its way through a myriad of cultural references that attack the heart of a postmodern consumer society. Its three characters, thrown together by a narrative reminiscent of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, show the audience that no amount of shopping and fucking can ever be enough. Rothko-inspired paintings hang at the back of the stage, their vivid colours cheapened by the contrasting black box-space; IKEA imitations of fine art. At the fateful dinner party held by Rebecca (played impeccably by a tightly-wound Helen Goalen) tinny jazz music is piped in. Later, Lizzi (Abbi Greenland) comments that listening to jazz makes her feel “posh”— more than a nod in the direction of Adorno & Horkheimer’s theories of cultural commoditisation. Even the vision of domestic bliss voiced by Will (Marc Graham) is constructed from fantasies of what he would buy. Evidently, RashDash productions’ thematic concept is as tight as their choreography (and Lady Garden’s lycra).

The second pleasant surprise in Never Enough is the frequent deference to comedy. Much has been made of the glorious dancing cup-cake (Helen Goalen again, with unwavering conviction) and it is interludes like this, which lend the show energy when the script falters.

A similar dose of irreverence wouldn’t go amiss in Curious Directive’s Return to the Silence. A clinical piece, in more ways than one, Return to the Silence use movement, multi-media, some chords lifted from a Coldplay album and “unconventional seating” to tell the tale of a neurologist who suffers a stroke.  Amid a visual and aural cacophony designed to mimic the many functions of the human brain Curious Directive’s large chorus wheel several small seating banks back and forth through the auditorium. When they say this production will move you, they mean it. Literally.

Whether you will be affected by Return to the Silence is less certain. The parade of neurological disorders in the show is distinctly sterile and staid. Especially, when you consider that the narrating neurologist is supposed to have gained new insight into what it means to have your head fucked. Sadly, the crashing, sentimental piano music is no substitute for emotional interrogation. The devised dialogue falls flat on more than one occasion and repeats clinical information that has already been projected for us via the film screens at either end of the theatre.

So half-way through the week and half-way through a packet of Nurofen, what can be concluded about physical theatre at the NSDF? It probably amounts to more than Bacchae-inspired baked goods and swivelling seating. But I can’t be sure. I would hazard that it might boil down to whether or not getting physical actually serves your story. Try and do it without the maudlin facial expressions.  And that a balletic prance when moving a piece of scenery is always unnecessary.  

Absolutely Bang On April 13, 2009

Clive Judd’s Herons starts with a bang. Literally. Fragile looking teenager Billy Russell (Simon Longman) — huddled inside a navy blue hoody— holds two fingers out to the audience. “Bang.” Blackout.

Simon Longman and Mark Weinman

 

 

Troubled teens are well-trodden territory for stage and screen. In a post-Skins age the mouthy, over-sexualised ‘kidult’ is made a cipher for our grubbiest urges. Not so in Herons.

In this play, where it is near impossible to discern the join between acting and directing, the teenage residents of an East London estate are painfully well observed.  Not for us the furtive gropes and snogs of teenage lust.

Instead, Herons is stark and sharp like a broken bottle. Its characters rarely touch except to threaten or strike one another.  And these gaping emotional voids are echoed by the sparse set; just bricks, discarded beer bottles and acres of black wall.

The performances are taut and polished. Edward Franklin portrays vengeful bully Scott Cooper with unnerving conviction. Franklin is hypnotic as he torments Billy; he is coiled like a viper ready to strike, with the occasional jerk and unblinking stare hinting at the violence to come.     

Occasionally the staging is slack. Several long dualogues veer from understated to catatonic. But, that said, stillness is important to the piece.  The cast do not shy away from pauses and silence, letting their own beautifully played intentions and subtexts speak for their selves. Even playwright Simon Stephens, upon seeing the show, commented that he felt he’d given the actors too many words. Just the thrust of Scott Cooper’s jaw or the tilt of Charlie Russell’s head hold the power to make the audience recoil in horror or erupt into peals of laughter.

And laughter is surprisingly frequent in the show. It seems Judd pinpoints the glimmers of hope that bounce off the River Thames and has his cast cling to them for dear life. Herons could be utterly bleak but isn’t. Mark Weinman as Charlie Russell is particularly relentless in extracting laughs from the audience with a flick of his doleful eyes.

Exacting direction and some electric performances successfully ignite the touch paper provided by Stephens’ script. Stand well back. “Bang.” Bang on.    

“They Shoot elephants, dont’ they?” April 13, 2009

“People are the ultimate spectacle.” These are the words emblazoned atop the original film poster for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I’d be very interested to know whether Elephant’s Graveyard deliberately set out to disprove this slogan as people are the one thing that their play neglects. There is a town and there is a circus. There are bags of popcorn peeking out from curtains. There are slatted wooden crates, gauze screens and coloured bunting. There is mass hysteria and petit-bourgeois morality and there is elephanticide. There are interlocking monologues and physical set-pieces, choreographed to within an inch of their lives. But there is no characterisation. Meekly established conventions and over-wrought aesthetics don’t help. Mimed dialogue behind the monologues makes a brief appearance before retreating, tail between legs. An over-reliance on profiles and spotlighting washes out the cast’s features and with it any potential empathy.  Having a cast of fourteen repeatedly scratching and worrittin’ in the background on a sand-covered stage proves distracting. Erwin may be a small town that has “forgotten its own name” but it is also a town that has forgotten about people. The characters are victims of the show’s central conceit- repetitively paced monologues dull any sense of individual motivation.  Townspeople are barely distinguishable from the Circus folk. Issues of race, gender and poverty in post-war Tenessee are buried deep with the elephant carcass. They may not shoot the elephant, but they sure do shoot themselves in the foot.      

Vowel Play April 13, 2009

It is easy to be facetious about Vowel Play. The play limits the speech of its characters to just one vowel each. So snarky questions can be mooted over pre and post-show pints such as “Do all the standard vowels make fun of ‘Y’?” Yet quibbling in this way over the central ‘gimmick’ skirts lazily round what’s actually going on in the show.  The salient pub-bound question seemed to be an ominous “How the hell was this going to work?” Maybe what we should have been asking was “Why try to make it work in the first place?” What was the end product of these verbally-peculiar means?   

The curious audience member entering the theatre will be instantly alerted to Vowel Play’s meta-theatrical intentions. Four microphones and a technician walled in by a sound-desk are the obvious visual clues to this. The premise quickly establishes itself as a (radio?) play within a play with the pre-set technician representing Sally, the play’s director. Intimate stories from the four characters’ pasts come to light (quite literally, as a single spotlight makes an increasingly awkward attempt to guide the audience through the oral collage) before the rehearsal/scene ends and the ‘actors’ leave.      

Once you accept the slippery conventions of the play, the characters that emerge are fascinating. The language of the four female speakers is necessarily dominated by the sounds dictated by the script, and so too are their performances and personalities moulded by their assigned vowel. Kim (A) was brusque and declamatory; Hannah (E) the most under-stated and eloquent (verbosity being possible with ubiquitous ‘E’, naturally); Jess (I) brittle and startling; and Beth (O) mirrors the unsettling qualities of her letter, which is sly in its ability to be both soft and hard.  

Belied by the bevy of students crying “Gimmick!” is Vowel Play’s persistent commitment to meta-theatre. The play aesthetically distills key elements of acting and theatre-going. The constraint of the single vowel mirrors the notion of a script in a way that teeters on caricature. And the unexpected focus on the speakers’ private lives serves to remind the viewer of a predisposition in theatre to confession. What is troubling is that this in turn highlights our own voyeuristic pleasure in hearing these confessions. In truth, beyond Vowel Play’s jarring poetic language can be glimpsed some of the most absorbing questions about theatre, voice and story-telling. And it would be a shame if these were overlooked by such banalities as “Yeah, but where was ‘U’?”