POSH
Posted: May 30, 2012 Filed under: theatre | Tags: Laura Wade, Lindsey Turner, politics, Royal Court, West end transfer Leave a comment »Duke of York’ s Theatre
Written for Artsdesk
Transferred from the Royal Court to the West End, this is a very tight staging of a very messy evening. Ten members of the Riot Club come together for a celebratory meal after “two terms out in the cold”. In a modest pub on the outskirts of Oxfordshire, they hang a bin bag on each chair, down their wine by the bottle and start on a 10-bird roast. The plan: to get “absolutely chateauxed” and trash the place in the traditional manner of their aristocratic ancestors.
When Laura Wade’s play first opened, polling day for the 2010 General Election fell in the middle of its run, and reviews mused over whether this was a glimpse of our Conservative future. Two years later, she has gently re-worked it to include references to the Coalition, and the Greek member of the club is mocked for his country’s bankruptcy. Not meant as an exercise in toff bashing, Wade explores the idea of a group of people “having to stick together in a world that doesn’t want or understand them any more”. However, revived in Cameron’s austerity Britain, the events carry a far more political resonance.
The set design by Anthony Ward is spot on – a Farrow and Ball, gastropub version of posh dining – while the musical interludes are hilarious: the British tradition of the beatboxing trustafarians is used to great effect, the boys posturing like hip hop stars in three-piece suits. The all but colonial desire of the public schoolboy to win ownership over ghetto style is powerfully enacted.
David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were all members of the Bullingdon Club when they were at Oxford and here we get a sense of the kind of behaviuor that may have shaped our current government. At the start of the meal, peevish and unlikeable Toby (Jolyon Coy) wears “the wig of shame” for past misdemeanours that yielded an unflattering Daily Mail front page. His letter of apology, read out to howling peers, is strikingly similar to the various post-scandal acts of contrition witnessed in parliament.
A criticism originally levelled at the play was that the characters were too uniformly awful and lacked any moral shades of grey. Subtle alterations have been made and while Leo Bill’s Alistair remains bitterly intense and resolutely unloveable, the others squirm ambivalently at his more outrageous suggestions. It is impossible to tell whether the occasional moments of gentlemanly decency are felt or learnt. From Riot Club chairman James Leighton-Masters down (Tom Mison, pictured right), these boys understand the necessity of adaption and disguise and are very skilled at it. The actors achieve perfectly the veneer of expensively honed charm that an Old Etonian can summon. The talent is crucial to their survival and indeed to the success of the play itself, which can work only if we find ourselves occasionally liking some of them and even feeling for them. Luckily, frighteningly, we do.
But the drunker they become, the more their charm recedes. Tired of being forced to hide and apologise, they search for ways to re-assert their authority. Alistair’s announcement that “I hate poor people” sends the audience off into the interval with the tension ratcheted up. The object of their hatred is pub landlord Chris, played to perfection by Steffan Rhodri. His daughter Rachel (Jessica Ransom, pictured above), their mildly contemptuous waitress for the evening, has ridden Blair’s wave of meritocracy (or as the boys see it, mediocrity), social mobility giving her access to university and a first-class degree from Newcastle. Like the prostitute the boys sneak in through the window, she is fully aware of her rights and has no intention of being pushed around by a bunch of poshies.
The play which is written and directed (Lyndsey Turner) by women locates in its female characters the new world the boys fear, a world wich neither respects nor needs them. And yet while mayhem ensues, the simmering class and gender conflicts never really explode; the awaited confrontation never quite happens and the room trashing doesn’t carry the required cathartic power. In this sharp, intelligent and original production we hover so close to a place where this timely and important subject could be taken into uncharted territory that a descent into random violence, however extreme, somehow doesn’t seem enough.
Globe to Globe: Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2,
Posted: May 30, 2012 Filed under: theatre | Tags: Shakespeare, Latin america, Globe, Foreign language theatre Leave a comment »
Enrique IV, primera parte was performed by the National Theatre of Mexico,Enrique IV Segunda parte by Argentinian company Elkafka Espacio Teatral. The two pieces covered similar ground but were handled very differently. Young Mexican director, Hugo Arrevillaga, concentrated on bawdy wit, portraying Hal as an emerging hero and Falstaff as buffoon, while Argentine director Ruben Szuchmacher’s darker perspective had the conspiring court shown as faceless secret service men and Hal as a spoilt, overgrown public schoolboy.
As in much of this season, where the surtitles are synopses rather than translations and the audience may not speak the language of the performance, much work was done through costume design. The medieval style of the Mexican production harked back to the era of the play’s first recorded performances: men in tunics and ragged layers, the king in a golden cloak. The twist was that these gypsies were also tattooed and tie-dyed. The set consisted of wooden ramps and platforms arranged in different configurations for each scene. As they interacted the men ran and jumped off these, creating an energy and dynamism that brought urgency to the political manoeuvrings. Constantino Moran played Hal with a well-judged smug elegance while Claudio Lafarga’s Poins and David Calderon’s Hotspur gave the work a wonderfully raw physicality.
In Szuchmacher’s Shakespeare the actors were much more still. Sharply suited and expressionless behind sunglasses, the king’s men calmly and ruthlessly met in the corridors of power to fight over control the country. The styling throughout was ingenious: Falstaff’s motley crew wore rolled-up Adidas tracksuit bottoms, studded denim waistcoats and baseball caps and even the prostitutes were fabulously dressed with Mistress Quickly’s pink punk hair almost stealing the show.
In both productions, the fat knight Falstaff came across as a boastful, overdressed pendejo gordo. While in part one, Roberto Soto didn’t really move past playing the character for laughs (pictured above right), the Argentinian Falstaff elicited far more sympathy, showing an aging man forced to face rejection and decline. He also used the realpolitik of the court to deliver more of a satirical punch and as we watched the young prince’s pranking, for the English in the audience echoes of our own leaders’ antics in the Bullingdon Club were never far away.
Written for Artsdesk.
A Slow Air
Posted: May 30, 2012 Filed under: theatre | Tags: David Harrower, Lewis Howden, Scottish Theatre, Susan Vidler Leave a comment »
Despite being almost set-less and containing almost no onstage action, A Slow Air is enormously engaging. It unfolds like a melody. A gentle exploration of the ordinary, its rhythm is built around the consolations of memory and music. Written and directed by the Scottish playwright, David Harrower, this set of intertwining monologues is a way for him to explore the Edinburgh he remembers: “I wanted to write something about people I know, voices I grew up with,” he says. “I just got into the language and these people just wouldn’t stop talking.”
Not unlike a radio play, space is gifted to the listener to create images to match the sound effects. Thinking back on the events that middle-aged siblings Morna and Athol describe, an hour and a half full of interactions and landscape are conjured, yet non of these things actually occur on stage. The two actors simply take it in turns to stand spotlit and talk to the audience, yet it never feels static or lacking.
A combination of misread intentions, fierce paranoia and the distorted effects of the past create a touchingly accurate portrayal of sibling relationships. Morna and Athol have not spoken for over fourteen years. Athol is is reliable and settled with a gruff sense of humour and a sensitivity he tries to keep hidden; Morna, a cleaner of posh houses, is scathingly self depreciating with the hard wild wit of a woman who has suffered in her life but is determined to come out on top. As her son Josh prepares to celebrate his twenty first birthday all three are about to meet again.
The events of the play take place against the backdrop of the 2007 Glasgow International Airport attack. One of the bomb makers lived in Athol’s village and he and his nephew visit the terrorist’s now abandoned house. The attack has brought the community together in a way that is life-changing for Athol and as they walk around the silent rooms, grand ideology is carefully held against the minutiae of life with a wonderful sense of scale; the epic event is dealt with at a determinedly local level, the momentous and the insignificant occurring side by side, without explanation.
Harrower’s direction is gentle and he writes with a great confidence in his audience. The play is concerned with everyday moments - with dog walking, sketching, and listening to unheard music - yet there is a fierce intensity throughout. Josh is an aspiring comic book artist and the piece id paced like that of a certain kind of graphic novel, perhaps something drawn by Jimmy Corrigan or Daniel Clowes. The kindness of neighbors, the fragility of belonging and the deep need to be seen are told as layering tableaux. Slow and elegant, these images are precisely detailed and simply composed.
Actors Lewis Howden and Susan Vidler speak with voices are rich and real. Tension is built from little more than the winding and unwinding of resentment, but when added to the weight of lives lived but not understood, the result is deeply moving.
Curious Directive
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: features, performance, theatre | Tags: Curious Directive, Hexagon, Jack Lowe, Latitude Festival, Performance, Pleasance Theatre, science, Your Last Breath Leave a comment »Only three years old, Curious Directive are already receiving acclaim. Since their foundation in 2008 this prolific ensemble have created fourteen pieces of devised work. Curious about everything and intent on finding new ways to explore concepts that do not often find their way onto the stage, they are experimenting with ways to “let scientific ideas breath in a beautiful way.”
I met up with artistic director Jack Lowe, as the group were about to begin the opening show of their Hexagon season. This will be the first collection of their work and throughout spring and summer will combine six innovative projects that contemplate our future. I ask Jack to tell me a little about their process. Their approach, he tells me, is different every time. “The way a new writing company might serve the playwright’s thoughts, we serve the scientific text. That is always the heart beat for me.”
“The starting point is often something that intrigues me, that makes me ask what it is. And true stories are always a really interesting starting point.” Scientific case studies are in many ways a collection of true stories, and it was here that the company began. At Warwick University, Jack led and directed their first show; Return To The Silence took Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat as a starting point and a group of twenty-three students worked together to develop these tales of neuroscience into a piece of theatre.
Multimedia theatre.
Science and art are often held up as disciplines in opposition to one another but Jack simply sees them as “different filters and lenses” by which to view life. Both areas of thought involve being curious about the world and finding ways to communicate our discoveries. With his father a biology teacher and his mother an actress, this interdisciplinary outlook comes naturally to him. “It sounds a bit twee, but our house was full of arguments about science and art. On the bookshelves, books on ornithology and aircraft mixed with volumes of plays.”
Jack came across the idea for their current show- a 2011 Fringe First Winner- while browsing Wikipedia. Your Last Breath is built around the true story of an extreme skier, who freezes under the ice in the Norwegian mountains; her heart stops for over three hours, yet she makes a full recovery. Beginning with the basic poetic seed of a life somehow suspended, the group have woven in the science behind this tale and added other story lines in order to create something that can be watched on stage. They have no set process yet, but often work from a storyboard rather than a script, threading together sound, video and movement until the piece is “buoyant enough to survive as a play.”
The ensemble changes from show to show but collaboration is key. Jack likes everyone to “build into the very architecture of what the show is.” The people he works with, although they have their specific areas, are multi-skilled. For example, Your Last Breath’s video designer, Jasmine Robinson studied fine art at Ruskin School of Art, specialising in anatomical drawings, while sound designer, Jo Walker, is very involved in character development. The composer and live pianist, Adam Alston uses the story building process to inform his music; different reverberating heart beats form the rhythm of his score developing a key motif for the piece and making it much more than a soundtrack.
Yet Jack is aware that all devising together is a luxury that may become less plausible as they begin to work on a bigger scale. He is, however, determined to “fight for the best process.” Touring Your Last Breath has given the group the chance to rehearse and refine the work, but they do not want to lose the spontaneity and openness they have learned in the devising room. While tightly choreographed and structured, space is always kept for elements to change from night to night. “The story is told mostly through movement, so characters are on stage speaking to one another in the traditional way for a very small amount time. When they do land in a scene it is a good opportunity to play.”
This changeability is harder some than for others. Jack feels that he and Gareth Taylor, who both studied at L’Ecole Jaques Lecoq in Paris find this style of performance liberating, while Karina Sugden and Russel Woodhead, who were trained at Oxford School of Drama are less used to it. “At Lecoq nobody talks about acting, it’s all about space, oppositions and craft. But at other schools the focus is more on techniques of originating character and building depth. This can sometimes make such improvisation more difficult”
However, Jack is certain that a collaborative theatre requires many different outlooks and recently delivered a workshop on the nine personality types indispensable in a devising ensemble; from the Fish-out-of-water, to the Joker, having a variety of perspectives is crucial. He is aware that all the members of Curious Directive are presently in their mid twenties and keen to work with more actors of different generations. The group often ask parents and younger siblings for advice and “it would be great to get these different generational voices into the devising room.”
He also hopes their work can appeal to a cross-generational audience. “Perhaps it is our technically experimental side that attracts a younger audience who are drawn to the sound and video design and our focus on deep, contextually rich stories, that appeals to an older crowd.” He insists that discoveries in neuroscience or biology are about things that matter to everyone; “We all have brains, we all have organs and in talking about these things we are talking about what are.”
Scientific threads.
Explore everything on so many levels and pulling these ideas together to form new and satisfying forms of theatre is an intense experience; “I ask so much of the cast and creatives. They are all superheroes! Not only are they originating their own roles, they are thinking as theatre makers as well.” As their diverse collection of projects- taking in anesthetics, epigenetics, marine biology, meteorology, myrmecology, perfumery and zoology- begin to crop up around the country, Jack is feeling good. “Its fun going to work,” He smiles. “Its like taking your brain out for a jog.”
To find out more about Curious Directive’s Hexagon Season click here.
Cartoon de Salvo
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: features, performance, theatre | Tags: Alex Murdoch, Cartoon de Salvo, Improvisation, Made Up, Soho Theatre, The Irish Giant Leave a comment »
Cartoon de Salvo are making it up on the spot. The three-man company don’t have any props or set to aid them in their improvisation; what they do have is a band equipped with a harp, a double bass and a steel pan. They don’t use Whose Line?techniques; they are not out to create a series of skits or sight gags – instead they build a story together, creating characters as they go along, sweeping up the whole room into their game of make believe.
Prompted by audience suggestions for ‘a film that hasn’t been made yet,’ with no conferring and no time to plan things out, they begin to create a 90 minute play. This is long form improv and it’s pretty exciting to watch. I found myself thinking: there must be a trick here. Surely they have some strategy to remove some of the risk from the situation?
The next morning when I met up with director and company co-founder Alex Murdoch (who I had last night played both a remarkably believable monkey and a gay sailor) I tried to find out what this secret was. When I asked her to tell me about the rules of long-form improv, she laughed. This was a question she’d been asked a few times before. “There is only one rule,” she told me. “Accept every single new idea that happens” In improv there is a concept called “Yes, And”; you accept what is suggested and then you build on it. There are, she insisted, no structural safety nets beyond that.
- Cartoon de Salvo’s Made Up at Soho Theatre. Photo: Edmund Collier
Putting themselves in this situation night after night, an immense amount of trust has built up between the company’s three members. Brian Logan and Alex Murdoch founded Cartoon de Salvo together and Neil Haigh is their first associate artist. For their current show, the aptly titled Made Up, they have collaborated with Brighton band The Adventurists to create a performance that moves away from the showy and competitive style that improv often takes and instead sees them striving to create characters they can really get their teeth into.
It was during an earlier show, Hard-Hearted Hannah - where the audience chose the songs which the group then had to incorporate into their stories- that Murdoch realised how great it would be to work in collaboration with a band. In a frequently requested song- The Smiths’ ‘Please, please let me get what I want’ – she was responsible for the mandolin solo. With nothing to do musically until the end of the song, she continued performing and found that improvising to music felt wonderful. “With music playing, it felt like everything I did was the right choice. It felt supported. The most fearful thing about improv is that you put idea out into the unknown and you can’t help but ask- is that a good idea? With music, you somehow feel that it is.”
Murdoch speaks eloquently about the company’s craft. Improv, she tells me, is all about offers. People make verbal emotional offers- such as ‘I’m in love with you.’ or ‘why are you so jumpy?’ – but music makes abstract emotional offers. And these are more complex- they don’t say exactly what you have to do with them and this opens things up in a very exciting way.
The Adventurists are more than up to the challenge of creating a musical score on the hoof; they are multi-talented and seemingly capable of pulling off any musical style. Their timing is perfect and their contributions help shape the story into something structured. Having a full band to play with is something the company are enjoying very much. Murdoch worries that improv can sometimes be a bit scratch-like, a bit rough around the edges, and as “a very theatrical theatre company” they want more than this. “I want it to feel like a ‘proper show’ and this band make it feel like it is.”
While humor will always be inherent in the nature of their work- this element of risk, the tension and the pauses where nobody knows what’s going to happen next is where much of funny comes from. They want their shows to be far more than just a string of gags. The group might use self reflexive joking to impress upon the audience that they really are making this up as they go along, but they take the idea of story-making very seriously too.
“We always reserve the right to go serious and commit to the integrity of the story if we want to. We like mucking about and having fun- our shows are a wheeze- but I always like to surprise the audience with tenderness, simplicity and heart. What I enjoy about long form is that, if it needs to get serious, it needs to get serious. We try and do that stuff properly.”
But how do they do it? How do they make a story come together, and seemingly resolve itself, when they don’t know what’s coming next?
Murdoch quotes Phelim McDermot, explaining that improv is like: “walking backwards into the future looking at where you’ve been.” Planning is counter-productive: you just look at what has happened so far and take another step. Training together at TheatreSports in the San Francisco Bay area, the group worked on improvisation techniques developed by Keith Johnstone. The process taught them that “understanding story is very innate. We are told stories from the moment we are born and every single one of us has a really highly developed idea of what comes next. It’s hard-wired.” This belief gives them the confidence to trust themselves and each other and to let their story, whatever it is, develop. Yet, as all stories cannot help but create meaning, do they ever worry about what kind of message they are growing on stage?
Murdoch admits that this is something they’ve discussed, but they try to be relaxed about it. “We can’t write a paper on morality and ethics while creating a story, but we do sometimes find ourselves thinking What did we just say?!”
She tells me about a show where the audience’s suggested title was ‘Cowboys and Indians’. Set in a pioneer environment, they found themselves saying things like “Those Darn Injuns” and worrying about how it sounded. Luckily the story developed on from these awkward moments and built into something the group were happier with, culminating in a spontaneous folk song. Ultimately, when things get dark or complicated on stage, she welcomes it; it is when characters are challenged that they are forced to change and this is what good stories are all about.
How, though, do they deal with the rabbit-in-the-headlights fear of being up there on stage and totally unprepared? Well, the fear, it seems is nothing compared to the buzz. “We are addicted to the buzz. To the infinite possibilities and to not knowing where it is going.” The opportunity to play any character in any situation in the known universe is a deeply attractive one. Murdoch herself has been, to name just a few, a Native American queen, a dead sheep, a mollusc and an ancient king of England. With a new show every night, the potential for this buzz is infinite. “We have no way of knowing what we are going to be called upon to play, but every night, we have to go out there and give it our all.”
About to celebrate their fifteenth birthday, the group now has a new challenge ahead. They have been funded by the Wellcome Trust to develop a new show that opens at Southwark Playhouse in May. Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, The Irish Giant, tells the true-life tale of the giant, Charles Byrne, and the doctor who is prepared to risk all to discover his secret. Far more scripted than any of their previous productions, they are immersing themselves into a world where the truth proves to be stranger than fiction and working with scientists and historians to find new ways of doing what they love; making up (tall!) tales.
Constantly evolving and experimenting, Cartoon de Salvo want the audience and performers to “all go on a journey together,” They are committed to remaining open and vulnerable in the face of chaos and using it in a way that provides enjoyment for all. Despite their determined lack of rules, one idea they try to stick to is “make your partner look good.” This sounds like one hell of a philosophy; not just for making brave and thoroughly entertaining theatre, but for life itself.
Made Up is at Soho Theatre until 21st April 2012. The Irish Giant at Southwark Playhouse from 23rd May 2012.
The Trouble with Television
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: art, exhibitions, features | Tags: ICA, Jaques Peretti, John Cussans, Remote Control, Simon Denny, Television Leave a comment »ICA,
To coincide with the UK’s digital switch over, the ICA presents Remote Control, an exhibition looking at artist engagement with the TV and its changing cultural impact. In the first event in a season of talks to accompany the exhibition, John Cussans chairs a discussion assessing the place of television in a world where Google makes more in advertising than Channel 4 and asks what the move from analogue to digital will bring. He is joined by documentary presenter and television producer, Jaques Peretti and Emeritus Professor of Film and Television at the University of Glasgow, Christine Garaghty.
Peretti is full of fascinating insider gossip and feels that TV, as a medium and an industry, sees itself as being in crisis. The internet is more immediate and responsive than television has ever been and as witnessed during the Arab spring, areas such as news are also becoming unable to compete with Twitter and You Tube. In a highlight of the exhibition, Simon Denny fills the gallery with the remnants of London’s decommissioned broadcasting equipment; a bank of monitors, wires, leads and gaffer tape foregrounds a wall sized diagram that tries to explain how it all works. These once crucial pieces of equipment are now comedic in size and startling in how completely anachronistic they are now.
In the face of the super -fast reaction speed and inclusivity of the web, what can TV now provide? The answer might be the very thing we condemn it for; escapism. TV can provide a respite from the tyranny of choice and this is obviously something still very much sought after, as on average Britons are still watching the box for four hours a day. Peretti speaks of the ‘funnel effect’ as something that acts as a counterfoil to the myriad of perspectives on offer via the internet. As the Murdoch Empire faces investigation our particular funneling choice may be questionable but our interest in having our world view selected and deciphered for us is not declining.
The growth of the second screening phenomenon produces an interesting mix of the two media and recently, for the last episode of Sherlock BBC ran live tweets along bottom of the screen- He is gorgeous (@juliefromColchester), being one of the highlights. This idea of a community of viewers is one that Cussan’s is very interested in. He speaks of TV as having a ‘spectacular immanence’ that we can’t get with any other medium. We are ‘immersed in a collective sense of the immediate moment’. This communality offers us a different kind of live-ness; it is not the event being watched that is live, but the nationwide watching experience itself.
Garghty speaks of the need we still have for TV. As the world around us transforms we want to watch soaps where such change appears to have a logic- we need to see the familiar moving in predictable ways. We still want Coronation Street and Dr Who after all these years because we look to TV for comfort; to repackage and re-tell us the myths we crave. Where the internet offers more and more options, TV’s simplified but graspable sense of certainty can offer respite from the eternally relative.
In some ways, TV seems to know that this is where its strengths lie. Peretti relates the response given by a commissioner at an unnamed channel following a new documentary proposal: “That’s all very well,” he said. “But will a woman ironing with the sound off be able to follow it?”
With its pre-chosen reruns and bite sized simplifications, television’s value is perhaps as an antidote. In its failure to be cutting edge, it fills a hole much like Radio 4’s shipping news followed by the national anthem. It doesn’t really matter what is being said, for it is increasingly meaningless in the modern world. What matters is the conjuring up a picture or a mood; a feeling of a common ground and an idea of an ‘us’ that is still listening and watching together.
Read the Exeunt review of Remote Control at the ICA.
Have I None / The Under Room
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: theatre | Tags: dystopia, Edward Bond, Lyric Theatre, Saved, Sean Holmes, The Chair Plays Leave a comment »
The Chair Plays are a trilogy of short works by Edward Bond. The first two of which, Have I None and The Under Room, are presented by the Lyric in a double bill while the third play, Chair, will open at the theatre in May. Both plays in this opening double bill are set in a dystopian future and both are, in their way, difficult to watch. This is not because they are particularly disturbing or shocking, but because of the way they constantly refuse meaning.
The shorter first play, Have I None, which is directed by the Lyric’s Artistic Director, Sean Holmes, features two characters, Sara and Jams. He is a member of the security forces and she hears strange knockings at the door. When a man arrives at their home claiming to be her brother events grow violent. Their world is evoked through a series of clues; the stranger presents them with a photo: “not allowed,” he is told. “All personal papers were destroyed when they abolished the past.” There has been an outbreak of mass suicide. While this is beautifully described – “Five or six throw themselves in…their overcoats are blown out on top of the water like bladders or big blisters”- these lyrical passages sit uneasily within the structure of the play.
There is a sense of repetition in the couple’s arguments that is clearly meant to develop into a refrain, but instead of subtext, the words resonate with nothing but their own meaninglessness. In a clearly significant moment, Sara enters wearing a floor-length reversible blue coat – spoons clang on one side and bones clatter on the other – but in its absurdity this crucial scene is awkwardly comic. The characters are not developed to the point where we can engage with them, nor are they given sufficient power to enact poetic or intellectual ideas. The play creates a sense of ailenation but one with little social or political context. That Bond’s twenty-two page foreword to introduce the new playtext reads like Deleuze and Guattari sharing a bong, only adds to the overall sense of pretentiousness.
The second play, The Under Room, directed by Bond himself, suffers from similar problems. An illegal immigrant has broken into Joan’s house and instead of calling the authorities she finds she is driven to help him. As a result she becomes sucked into a murky underworld of which she was previously unaware. Ideas about our response to the ‘Other’ are a major theme, as is the concept of human innocence. While there are exchanges that attempt to address some of these issues, the ideas never fully translate into the drama itself.
A cloth dummy is used to represent the immigrant while an actor, Felix Scott, speaks the character’s words from the side of the stage. The reason for this self consciously theatrical device remains unclear and it eventually becomes annoying. If meant as a play on Brechian alienation, it does indeed prevent emotional engagement, yet the situation depicted is so vague and the play fails to fully engage with the issues it touches upon.
The climax, Joan’s epically under-edited descent into madness, has her tearing apart the dummy and stabbing it repeatedly. For an abusrdly long time she sits and rips apart the yellow crepe paper that forms the dummy’s entrails while ranting and raging but this scene, once again, feels more awkward than anything else.
The Lyric achieved something of a coup with their revival of Bond’s most famous play,Saved. This, his first full length work, was written in 1965, but in the more recent years, Bond has had famously difficult relationships with the British directors and theatres with which he has worked. Apart from the Lyric, the only British company he currently works with is Big Brum, a young people’s theatre company in Castle Vale, Birmingham. Interestingly, in an interview with Fringe Review in 2010 he describes how “The Under Room was written for teens in Birmingham (13-15 year olds). You couldn’t put it on at the RSC or the Court.” With cyphers instead of characters and the constant threat of an ominous ‘they’, one can see how the heavy handed symbolism would appeal to adolescents; it is harder to see what it can offer an audience looking for a more subtle exploration of society.
Latitude Festival 2012: Pagan to Occupy
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: features, performance, theatre | Tags: Festival Republic, Latitude Festival, Occupy, Pagan, Tania Harrison Leave a comment »
Tania Harrison, arts programmer for Latitude Festival, tells me that this year’s theme – Pagan to Occupy – came to her while watching Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem at the Royal Court last year. His conception of Englishness showed “how closely it is bound up with rambunctiousness and rebellion. We have a long history of popular social dissent that’s at odds with the Victorian idea of Britain as a land of stiff-lipped cricket players. It made me think how fascinating it would be to put together a programme of live art, theatre and cultural events which reflected that.”
We are in a time of potential revolution and unrest. Across the world many cultural and social changes are taking place and how we understand protest is a timely and relevant issue. Through the hundreds of shows she is curating across Latitude’s arts stages, Harrison’s mission is to create a space in which to discuss things that are important to us all; through history, literature, theatre, music and celebration, the festival “is about finding ways of connecting people.”
She is also keen to explore ideas of psychogeography. Defined by Guy Debord as a “study of the specific effects the geographical environment… [has] on the emotions and behavior of individuals,” the festival site seems a perfect opportunity for her and the artists she has enlisted to experiment with this. Issues of identity and tribe are a common theme throughout the programme and she hopes Henham Park in Suffolk can reflect something about what it is to be English today; to live in “a culture that’s been formed by people of different tribes, origins and ideologies; finding ways to live side by side one another for thousands of years.”
Friday (the 13th) will explore notions of the Pagan, looking at rituals of celebration and festivals from our collective past, taking local customs and traditions as inspiration. Epitomising this, Blake Morrison will read his witchcraft poetry, alluding to the dark history of the area; a site that once played host to ‘Witchfinder’ Matthew Hopkins’ famous 17th-century witch hunt.
The Saturday aptly falls on Bastille day and this, “The day of revolution”, delves into the history of protest, from the peasant revolts of the Middle Ages, via the student protests of ’68, to the present day Occupy movements. An ‘Occupy zone’ will recreate the St Paul’s tented protest in the tent city of the festival itself and here, the ex-reverend of St Paul’s, Giles Fraiser and the economist Paul Mason will share their own takes on the cultural ferment of the last year.
The Literary Salon will host talks by Nikesh Shukla and Kieran Yates, authors ofGeneration Vexed, along with Anthony Cartwright, John Pilger and many others. The Poetry Arena will feature more than sixty poets. With over fifty-one hours of live poetry, it has become the largest single poetry event in Europe.
The day of revolution will, of course, also bring more theatre. NT Connections, Sadler’s Wells, Globe Education, Theatre Delicatessen, Forest Fringe and Pentabus are all on the programme along with Theatre Uncut, who will bring a new collection of dramatic responses to the government cuts. Other highlights include The School of Life’s spectacular re-enactment of Plato’s Symposium – ‘”the ultimate thinking and drinking party.” Haircut Before The Party invite us into their pop-up hair salon, where ,instead of asking after your holiday plans, they will inquire about your political beliefs, and boudoir, post peasant revolt. The Painted House are creating a fashion design hub, staged as Marie Antoinette’s boudoir, post-peasant revolt.
The music playing into the night will include Bon Iver, Lana Del Rey, live grime and dub step and the ninety-person-strong Desmond and Leah Tutu Peace Choir. As the sun rises again, Sunday brings the whole community back together to “subvert a few clichés of country life” with alternative versions of the village fete, the celidh and the Hoe Down.
Between dancing to Havana Rumba! and enjoying Sancho Panza’s Cuban carnival,revelers are given the opportunity to ask questions about “how much our sensibilities and our aims and ambitions have changed.” “These are very serious things,” Harrison says. “But, of course, it’s a festival. There’s going to be lots of fun too!”
Latitude Festival 2012 runs from July 12th – 15th at Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk. For more information, please visit the website.
Gillian Wearing
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: art, exhibitions | Tags: Gillian Wearing, Photography, Video Art, Whitechapel Gallery Leave a comment »
If you found an advert in Time Out saying ‘Confess all on video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian’ – would you? Remember, this is back in the early nineties; before Big Brother and the reality TV takeover, before Facebook or YouTube. Way back when it was still possible to be intrigued by such a proposal.
Videos of the people who did respond to Gillian Wearing are now looped in a row of booths in Whitechapel Gallery. In these confessional boxes, with the viewer acting as the unseen priest, the volunteers wear latex masks that, while realistic, are unable to hint at the turmoil within. As ill-fitting voices reveal secrets – a woman who killed her abusive husband; a girl who is no longer in love with her boyfriend; a man who fantasies about cutting off his penis – the eyes of the confessor can be seen through the mask’s eye holes; their lips occasionally glimpsed inside its rubber lips. There is someone inside begging you to save them.
In 2004′s ‘Self Portrait as…’ series, large photos show Wearing in another series of perfect masks, posing as herself at three and seventeen years old, and also as her mother, father and brother. While exploring ideas of transformation and influence these also feel like a meditation on our idea of ‘other people.’ As they are filtered through social media, our memories and knowledge of other people take the form of edited content; people become wittily captioned, glossy masks of airbrushed pixels. Questions about the complexities hidden behind such manipulated images run throughout the show. The most famous example being the frequently replicated ‘Signs that say what you want to say not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say’ showing ordinary people photographed holding handwritten and often unexpected signs.
While some of the stories on offer are extreme, much of the fear people express is about the normal; difficulties in negotiating the everyday and the terror in its contradictions. In a film of two drunk but ordinary couples coming home after a night out, an overlaid soundtrack of desperation and need expresses this contradiction between the felt and the seen perfectly. The words I love you are distorted and repeated, allowing hidden emotions to seep through into the mundane surface of events. In 10-16 adults lip-sync to children’s voices as they reveal their anxieties. The effect is often horribly moving; the child trapped inside the grown up speaking out about their confusion and fear.
While reality TV, cheap parody and copycat advertising campaigns have almost completely re-contextualised the areas Wearing is trying to explore, her work still has a great power to disturb and resonate. Her strikingly simple methods clear a space for us to really see and listen. Insisting on the complex, painful fact that other people are just as real as we are and staging our psychological realities in an almost comical way, she forces us to do a double take. We are made to look at where the obvious and the desperately ignored collide; the place where we perform our lives and our lies.
The Gillian Wearing exhibition is at the Whitechapel Gallery until 17th June 2012. Visit the website for further information.
Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: art, exhibitions | Tags: Freud Museum, Louise Bourgeois, psychoanalysis, sculpture Leave a comment »FREUD MUSEUM
Written for Exeunt
In his study, Freud’s glasses lie on an open book as if he has just popped out to make a cup of tea and was just a moment ago sitting at his desk as a patient free associated. Ghostly and fascinating, the room has been carefully preserved by his daughter, Anna. Hanging over the patient’s couch is a heavy, undifferentiated, organ shaped sculpture, a blob of bronze and steel that is neither abstract nor figurative, but seems like an unformed thought made into a thing. It hovers over the empty couch; a haunting lump that must be deciphered and decoded.
This is Bourgeois’ Janus Fleuri, one of her most famous works. Yet on first entering the room it is almost unnoticeable. The consulting room is the very opposite of the white cube; it is a already very full of objects. From 1890 until his death Freud collected around 2000 artifacts from ancient Egypt, classical Rome and Greece, the Near East and the Orient (including over 20 Phallus’). He called them his ‘old grubby Gods’ and these were, and still are, displayed in vitrines and cabinets in his study and consulting room and in a thick row along the front of the desk where he worked.
When the University of Art at the State University of New York exhibited these artifacts, the show was reviewed by Bourgeois herself in an essay entitled ‘Freud’s Toys.’ She compared them to a collection of pebbles that her father kept on his desk, telling her that “Every time I have a beautiful moment, it proves to me that life is worth living and in gratitude I put a pebble in a box.”
She speaks of Freud’s collection of sculptures also providing him with reassurance and a sense of control. Like her own 1950′s semi-figurative sculptures- Personages- they are reminiscent of African fetish figures, totems to ward off evil spirits. With the hysterical, the psychotic and the returning repressed frequently visiting his at home, Freud’s room must have, indeed been filled with many dark and dangerous energies.
While pebbles, figurines and theories form of defense against the inexplicable, Bourgeois uses thread, pins, fabric and steel machinery to re-create the shapes of her emotions. Literal as well as metaphorical representation of her memories- her parents owned a tapestry studio- she sculpts and arranges these objects to find a way for her raw impulses and subconscious wishes to be expressed. Confessional and autobiographical till the end, at 98 years old Bourgeois was still obsessively re-enacting childhood trauma through her art.
This exhibition came about, in part, due to the discovery of four boxes of Bourgeois’ writings, found after her death. These were notes and diary entries written as a response to her own psychoanalysis in 2004 and 2010. Many are framed; lists of wants and fears, most discussing her father and mother, the language heavy with psychoanalytical jargon.
Among the writings are soft cloth figures, many with multiple breasts and mirrors showing strange mutating faces. Caged sculptures- part of her series entitled Cells- illustrate the repression of these fragile subconscious images. The words themselves also seem to have a caging effect; the repetition, petrified and obsessive, relating everything back through the prism of the Oedipal triangle traps and deadens.
When the objects stand alone- un-indexed to psychoanalytical theory- the beauty of Bourgeois art is its familiar strangeness. Intricate torn towel bound by tight thread is juxtaposed with lumpily welded steel and scratched, brittle half shapes are interrupted by rounded rubber. The joins are visible while the meanings remain opaque and there is something in the forms that we recognise. Deep within us we understand this alphabet, this is the language of thought before thought; the confused texture of our feelings.
As we stand in his study, we imagine Freud moving his toys around while patients like Bourgeois attempt to arrange their minds. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories of play technique suggest that a child moving toys about can have a symbolic meaning analogous to that of speech. Yet she, like Freud, begins with a pre-designed board on which the child and his toy truck must crawl. Displayed in his house, curated among Freud’s sacred objects and theories, it feels as if the cages, vitrines and grids that contain Bourgeois’ strange thought-objects are psychoanalysis itself.
Quoted as saying that the reason she originally studied mathematics and geometry, rather than art, is because she could only find ‘peace of mind through the study of rules nobody could change,’ Bourgeois and Freud seem to share a need for strict systemic order and when their ideas are arranged together the flaws in this concept become apparent. Her sculptures, so idiosyncratic and enigmatic, are stripped of their power by their rigid adherence to his schema and when faced with her work Freud’s theories seem reductive. The overt explanation of every gesture leaves no space for the viewer and no possibility for the evocative shapes to be a point of departure.
So let us try to follow the artist’s wild and wandering dream sequence somewhere else. Through the window we can see a garden and in it, a giant metal spider. Maman is balanced precariously on eight spindly legs and hanging from her underside is a basket-womb carrying a polished white egg. Away from the crowded rooms where all meaning is in the past, the air is fresher. The egg cannot be reduced to a pebble in a box and the spider is poised to jump.
Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed is curated by Philip Larratt-Smith and is on at the Freud Museum until 27th May.
