Kiddies' History

In her Observer TV review on Sunday Kathryn Flett echoed something Adrian Slatcher and I were saying recently over a drink:

From Life on Mars to the recent Red Riding our screens are now regularly suffused with 1970s Hovis-coloured shades of greige ... where were the men in tightly fitting polycotton shirts repeat-patterened with drawings of vintage Rolls Royces? You never see them on TV, but they were all over men's backs like a virulent strain of psoriasis.

Yes, and what about the pinks shirts too, and the purple trousers and the red-and-yellow tartans, the hippy multicolours, and, towards the end of the decade, the womens' orange jumpsuits?

It's more than interesting, this tendency to turn the past to sepia, as we've discussed before. There's a parallel paradoxical tendency to paint the past in brighter-than-suitable colours, which I feel however comes from the same, somewhat worrying cultural impulse, and which I found in the programme notes for the production of Macbeth I saw at the Royal Exchange last week:

In Britain we have a very clear idea of what childhood during wartime is like: the excitement of air raids and hiding in shelters; hearing and being able to identify a dozen different models of aeroplane as they pass by; playing around in the debris and finding souvenirs; proudly boasting about fathers and older brothers in the armed services, smart and heroic in uniforms; being herded off into the countryside as evacuees and finding imaginary countries in wardrobes.

I got that far and I thought: 'Tell that to the seventy-odd-year-olds in the audience!' In fact, it seems on reading further that the author is agreeing with me: his point is that this is an illusion, and he goes on to state that 'writers in particular have given us a skewed picture of childhood during wartime' (and there is of course that dig at C S Lewis). But the piece here is sloppy and muddled and indeed colludes with that rosy picture of life for children in wartime Britain. As a point of fact, the falsely rosy view he describes is mainly derived from postwar children's comics, though he doesn't say so. He says: 'The softening filter of nostalgia has meant that whole generations of wartime children grew up remembering 'the good old days' and the Blitz spirit.' Who is he referring to here? There was only one generation of wartime children, after all, and it is 'whole generations' who have followed. He must therefore mean the latter: we generations who were brought up on the myths. But he muddies this by his use of the word 'remembering' (we can't remember what we haven't actually experienced) and of the phrase 'wartime children'. Thus a reader not seeing the flaws in this sentence (and indeed reading quickly at the theatre, as one does) will come away with the impression that wartime Britain was not so traumatic for children as to prevent them forgetting that it was bad at all - which was enough to make my companion, who was born during the war, throw down the programme in disgust and indeed some upset. But then perhaps that is indeed what the author of this piece is saying, since he then goes on to conclude:

Compare this to children living through wars elsewhere and... well, there's no comparison.

Well, it's just a theatre programme, you might say, and the standard of those is often pretty dubious, but when you consider that this production would be aimed at the scores of schoolchildren studying Macbeth for exams, you'd think a little more responsibility was in order. And I'd say the same for the production itself. This was a production screaming RELEVANCE - to Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia, with the soldiers in modern combat gear and operating modern warfare technology, and to the schoolchildren themselves, with the witches transformed into the demonic wraiths of female children raped and murdered in war. This last, by which a subsidiary theme of the original, that of the effect of war on innocents, is made a central one, is not the only way that the production radically skews the play. I'm getting pretty sick of Shakespeare productions in which actors say their speeches as if they have no idea what they mean and simply can't wait to get to the end, and compensate by shouting them, and, with the exception of a beautifully judged performance by John MacMillan as Malcolm and a (less satisfactory) one by Hilary Maclean as Lady Macbeth, this happens here. But it's made much worse by the fact that the complex psychology of the main characters is subsumed in this production's pursuit of spectacle. Macbeth is a deeply psychological play about the pull between personal ambition and guilt, which both of the Macbeths suffer, but not here: the coke-sniffing Lady Macbeth takes one frenetic angry note throughout, and Macbeth's conversion from coward to tyrant to troubled soul is, well, laughable - and the audience did indeed laugh at him at one moment during the scene where Banquo's ghost appears at the feast.

Honestly, I know this play through and through - I've studied it, I've taught it in schools (even so, I'm not precious about it, I'm always up for new insights) - but I just couldn't follow, so distracted was I by working out the modern parallels, and the flashing lights (which as a migraine sufferer I had to close my eyes to, missing some crucial moments), and the weird experience of listening to apparently garbled (shouted) speeches ringing with phrases which were so familiar to me and the meaning of which I thought I knew...

Director Matthew Dunster made some interesting revelations to Kevin Bourke in the Manchester Evening News:

It’s not, I put to Matthew, a play any director undertakes lightly.

“I probably did, actually,” he replies, confoundingly. “I was asked to do it and I said I’d love to do it, just because I wanted to have a go at it. I wanted to have a go at it in a very populist, contemporary, theatrical way ... one of the problems with Macbeth is that people do tend to come at it with this heavy weight and one of my bugbears with Shakespeare is it carries so much intellectual baggage with it. I thought, ‘I just want to make a really good show'.

"I’ve taken not scissors but a big pair of garden shears to it!,” he laughs... Where we think [Shakespeare] would benefit from our contemporary eyes saying ‘we don’t need that, that’s no use to us’, we’ve just got rid of it."

That would be the complex psychology of the tyrant, then. And, er, that's not relevant to Iraq...?

Not so much a case of teaching Granny to suck eggs, I'd say, but of teaching Granny to suck eggs when you don't even know what eggs are...

Anonymity as Obscurity

Mark Ravenhill responds thus to John Mullan's new book on authorial anonymity (discussed below here and here):

I'd like to think my work has an inherent quality that will be recognised whatever name is on it, and that I'd be offered productions in all the same theatres. But then what if I slide right back down the literary ladders and receive a pile of rejection letters?

Mm, quite. If his play were even read, this is what might happen.

Dressed-Up Theatre

What do you conclude when everyone comes out of a play and says, 'Weren't the costumes fantastic?' (as so many people said to me on Monday night after the Royal Exchange production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband)?

Who Needs Angst?

Never averse to stretching an argument in order to push his own agenda, Mark Ravenhill asserted earlier this week that while TV and cinema are dying in the face of the media, theatre will always live on, due to people's desire to experience live performance.

Come again?

Last night I went to the Royal Exchange to see A Conversation by Australian David Williamson, one of a trilogy he's written around the format of a Community Conference, the central process of what is known as Transformative Justice - practised in Australia - whereby victims and perpetrators are brought together in dialogue as a way of moving them on respectively from their pain or grief and to face up to what they have done.

This play has moved on to the main stage from the studio, a process which the Royal Exchange, newly committed to new writing, it seems, has apparently taken to its heart. Great, absolutely marvellous. And to my mind this play definitely deserved such treatment. Brilliant. In spite of being harrowing (it deals with a particularly horrific murder) and, by virtue of its format, not very theatrical, it was utterly enthralling and wonderfully acted.

But. But, what about this audience in which Ravenhill places such faith for the continuance of theatre?

As I came up the steps with The Partner, a woman standing at the top waved some tickets at us. 'Free tickets? Would you like some free tickets?' (Her friends had presumably failed to show.) 'No thanks,' said The Partner, 'We've already got comps.' 'Oh, dear,' said the woman, 'so has everyone, it seems, I simply can't give them away!' So the house was having to be papered.

Even so, there weren't all that many people milling around, and one of the two bars was, unusually, closed. And, as happens when it's desperate, whatever they'd paid the audience was allowed to fill up the more expensive seats at stage level. And the majority of that audience was - yet again - over fifty.

And yet look what all those young people, and those who'd stayed at home or weren't prepared to fork out the price of a ticket, were missing: for once the play began, that audience was rapt for every moment of the play's uninterrupted ninety minutes, right to the end.

It's hard in such a situation not to agree with the media moguls that everyone just wants 'entertainment' nowadays, and the easier and more accessible the better. Not that artists, writers and literary and theatrical professionals shouldn't be fighting this, which I guess is the true motive behind Ravenhill's somewhat specious argument.

Is It the Writers' Fault?

Ms Baroque puts her mind to answering Henry Porter's question, Where are our Orwell and Dickens? and comes down to the view that we writers had better start getting our political act together. In today's Guardian, however, playwright Anthony Neilson bemoans the fact that much of our theatre is downright boring due to a contemporary playwriting concern with issues at the expense of story-telling. Like Porter he seems to be blaming the writers themselves, but, as I have said on my other, writer blog, my hunch is that a lot of this is down to the pressures on playwrights from theatre policies. As I indicated in my last post here, writers are now under such marketing pressure - whether of the populist variety predominant in the publishing industry and our larger theatres, or the bureaucratic mission-statement sort still holding sway in our alternative theatres - that they are no longer always in control of subject matter or even of style.

I went to the theatre last night and when I lit this morning on Neilson's statement that theatres are too often failing in their unique task of providing 'live magic', I thought: Funny he should say that...

It was the Library Theatre press night for Chapter Two by Neil Simon. The lights went up on an immaculately designed set: the living rooms of two flats. Nineteen-seventies? New York? - don't ask, I neither really know or care: in spite of the suggestion of surrealism in the two simultaneous locations, it was so rigidly (and yet somehow surreally) naturalistic and indicating so ominously what was to come that the Bitch's heart sank and her mind stopped focussing right from the start. And it came. A long silence while the audience 'appreciated' the set and its emptiness of people and developed an expectation. And then, just as we had expected (no surprise, no magic) a middle-aged man came in with a suitcase, put it down, and laboriously went through the usual, only-to-be expected rituals of someone returning from holiday.

The Bitch's partner yawned noisily. The Bitch, furious, biffed him in the ribs. As an occasional actor, the Bitch knows only too well how attuned an actor is to the responses of the audience and its tiniest sounds, most particularly in those first moments on that first night... The Bitch's partner hissed: 'But it's so boring!' and the Bitch wanted to crawl under her seat.

But he was right: as Anthony Neilson says, Boring an audience is the one true sin in theatre. Neilson is talking in the main about over-consciously political or 'poetic' theatre, but the same objection can be applied to hackneyed naturalistic theatre. OK, so this was a period piece, you could say, and OK, much of last night's audience - which, at the risk of sounding ageist and classist, was middle-aged, even elderly, and middle class - seemed to enjoy this play a lot better than did the Bitch and her partner. But I'd say that the laughter was too comfortable, and far too automatic, and one could ask why a present-day theatre wants to put on such an unchallenging piece.

What Neilson is saying is pretty important: we do need to challenge, as Henry Porter has said, but we need to do it in ways that first and foremost transport and entertain. But then what do you do when the first priority of publishers and producers is to pander to the market which wishes not to be challenged?

To Be Green or Not to Be

Oh dear. I knew there was something scratching at the back of my brain when I wrote yesterday about the new, more convivial atmosphere at Manchester's Library Theatre, and it did hit me later in the day: what was I doing, thrilling about the use of PLASTIC CUPS?!!! And here today in the Guardian is Mark Fisher, my eco-conscience personified, asking how green our theatres are.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Library Theatre

Last time I went to the Library Theatre I moaned about the institutional ambience, and the way it can affect one's enjoyment of a play. Last night I went again. Well, I don't know what's happened, but what a transformation!

We were there to see Chris Honer's production of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead. Press Night was inevitably going to be crowded for such a famous play, and there were actors I knew to gab to, but there was something more creating the sense of excitement which previously I'd been missing. Why did the air seem more charged with expectancy? Why did the foyer lights, and the lights in the bar, seem brighter? Was it warmer? Yes it was! I had worn an extra jumper in readiness, but I had to take it off! And when we ordered our pre-show and interval drinks, we were told that it would be cheaper to buy a bottle, which came with a dish of mixed spiced olives (and which they kept corked for us during Act 1), and someone came round offering us plastic cups so that we didn't have to gulp our unfinished drinks but could TAKE THEM INTO THE SHOW!

But I don't think it was just this convivial atmosphere which made me enjoy a play which I have seen twice before without any such enjoyment. I have always had the oddest feelings about R&G, and about Stoppard plays in general. Stoppard ought to be my hero, since I'm always being pulled up by theatre script readers for employing those very techniques for which Stoppard is lauded - non-naturalistic dialogue, long speeches in which characters engage with ideas - and I have complained elsewhere about the insistence on naturalism in contemporary theatre. But Stoppard's plays have always seemed to me to justify those naturalist objections, since they have always come over to me as cold metaphysical exercises.

But it wasn't like that last night. For the first time for me, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, played by Leigh Symonds and Graeme Hawley, were utterly, comically and tragically human in their plight as pawns in a greater game they don't understand. Other productions I've seen have been consciously stark and modernistic, but this one, done more fittingly in Shakespearean dress, was rich in all ways: visually and choreographically and thus emotionally, as well as metaphysically, and I'm telling you, my mind has been changed about this play.

It's a hard thing for a writer to say, this, but you're nothing without a good director, in the end.

What Is Theatre For?

Bit off my usual agenda for this particular blog (ie not prose fiction), but sometimes I really wonder: What is contemporary theatre FOR? (In connection with this, on my other blog today I ask what playwriting schemes are for.)

Last night I went to Manchester Library Theatre to see Too Close to Home by Rani Moorthy, produced by Rani's own theatre company Rasa, in association with the Library Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith. Now I like the Library Theatre, if only for old times' sake, and but there is a bit of a corporate dead hand over it all - the theatre space is often slightly cold (conjuring unmagical images, even as you seat yourself for the hoped-for magical experience, of the council boffins sending out memos about the heating to the poor old creatives) and the white wine is frankly crap. (God, I'm getting old. Time was when I dismissed people who cared about the wine as small-minded old lushes.)

I shouldn't moan though: more often than you'd expect in this ambience, the productions are inspired (last year's Much Ado, directed by Chris Honer, for instance), and there is something really homey about the way Chris, the theatre's Artistic Director, always mingles with the audience in his baggy trousers and pale jackets and with his truly twinkly smile. And I get free tickets to Press Night, for godssake (I'm not sure why: maybe because I was once a member of the Theatre Writers' Union, but more likely, in these more commercially-corporate times, because I once edited a glossy-looking magazine).

Rasa have become best known for Curry Tales, also co-produced with the Library Theatre, the one-woman show in which Rani told global stories while actually cooking on stage, and which was also apparently broadcast on Radio 4 (I'm not quite sure how that would have worked, but then they do it on The Food Programme all the time,) and for their on-stage fusion of western-style dialogue with Asian music and dance. In view of all this, and the fact that the advance publicity indicated that the play would portray the family of a young suicide bomber, Too Close to Home promised to be explosive in more senses than one.

Well, firstly, though I am accustomed to seeing plenty of theatre people I know at Press Night, THERE WAS ONLY ONE: playwright Rina Silverman, and she had paid. What did that mean? That all the others were so uninterested in this burning issue that they couldn't get up off their arses even for a free ticket? That usually they only come to see their friends on stage (few of them are Asian)? And WHAT DID IT MEAN ABOUT THE POWER, OR OTHERWISE, OF THEATRE, TO REACH ACROSS A CULTURAL DIVIDE?

And as for the play. Oh well. Groan. I am going to have to say it: it left me cold. COLD, COLD, about this BURNING ISSUE!!! Oh, did I get weary with the wordy, wordy, 'western-style' dialogue, and I couldn't hear a fair bit of it (either the blocking was poor or the actors were occasionally swallowing their words), and, because so much of it was relating and recalling and telling, this really mattered, and, although I was meant to I didn't find it funny, and oh god, I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND. I never felt that I had any real insight into the mind of the young suicide bomber, and if this was the point, that, just like the real families of suicide bombers, the family didn't either, then it JUST WASN'T ENOUGH FOR ME, not in a two-and-a-half hour play with all that investment of creativity and time and attention, and BECAUSE IT SEEMS TO ME THIS IS THE BIG THING WE REALLY ALL DO NEED TO UNDERSTAND. But even allowing for this, acknowledging, say, that the focus of the play was the emotional effect on the family, well, I didn't understand the family either: I didn't find that the religious passion of the elder brother resonated (and believe me, I know about religious passion), I had no idea why the father had gone mad, either in terms of fact/plot or in terms of the theme of the play (except, as the Partner of the Bitch said, in order to become sane at the end), I was completely stymied by the sexual attraction between the elder brother and his aunt, and as for the mother, the main part played by Rani herself: I just didn't get her, crying one minute, grinning her head off and playing the clown the next - the whole family, in fact, quarrelling then hugging and joking in a way which seems borrowed from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - but with nothing like the same conviction or forward momentum beneath the emotional see-sawing.

Hardly for one moment was I able to forget that these were actors acting on a stage. It's the worst criticism. Plays are meant to transport you, to take you into their worlds, and this play, with this subject matter, needed to do that especially. In one 'comic' moment, the mother is shouting at a neighbour for putting pork into her dustbin. She storms out to him, and in order to facilitate her exit, the huge fridge door becomes briefly an outside door. A line of Asian schoolgirls with their teachers gave a great spurt of laughter, a response I don't think was intended, and it was the only outright laugh the play got.

Oh dear. Was it me, was it the play, was it the theatre: I was physically cold, too, and had to put my leather jacket back on. All I know is, I wasn't transported, and that's what theatre has to do if it's to affect people's minds. We left the theatre quickly, as one does when one has been disappointed in a play, slightly deflated. When we got outside, the streets were glossy with rain and reflected lights, the Partner remarking with satisfaction, 'Typical Manc', and it lifted our spirits. We had already forgotten the leaflet for the play, featuring an intent young man carrying a rucksack through exactly the same night-time Westernised scene.

Oh, and half-way through the play The Partner of The Bitch fell asleep.