You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2004.
Body clock gone mad. Awake til 6am. Dozed til 10am. Got up. Felt dreadful. Went for a swim. Returned lots of phone calls from last week. Failed to work on the introduction to Bean: Plays One. Failed to clear up or do washing. Bought some sushi from Waitrose. Ate it. Felt weird. Went to Waterstones. German history begins with Hitler’s Slaves and ends with Gitta Sereny on the Holocaust. So much for Bismark, the Kaiser, Adenauer, Brandt or anyone else. Ordered biography of Willy Brandt from Abebooks.com (great site). Wish you could blog lying down. Must investigate light laptop.
Landed on time, out of Heathrow in an hour and home by six. Amazing. I really didn’t want to leave Tokyo – I wanted to just get on with it. Certainly it seems strange to think that I’ll be getting a model sent to me by Yukio Horio after just the one meeting.
Amongst the messages when I turn my phone back on is one from Mark Straker, Anna Keaveney’s partner. I ring him straight away and he says that Anna died last week. Well this is very shocking. She was no age at all. It was lung cancer, and it took her terribly quickly. She was utterly brilliant in Simon Bent’s Accomplices at Sheffield as an over-protective, neurotic mother whose son is killed while her husband watches, impotent. I rang the boys who were in the play to tell them. It’s very hard to believe that in my jet-lag I haven’t made it up. The funeral is on Tuesday at Golders Green, so I’ll be going to that.
The hands on my body-clock are spinning round out of control. I slept from 10pm to 4am, then was wide awake, then slept again from 7am to noon.
There is a sense in which travelling round to the other side of the world, to a completely non-western culture, meeting an entirely new set of people and starting work on a production in an alien language is about as difficult a situation as the theatre is going to throw at me. And I’m very relieved to say that I can do it.
I crashed out at about 9pm last night and slept until 5am this morning. I checked out and Madoka picked me up and took me to the airport. I fly at noon – it’s now 10.40 and I’m typing this at the Yahoo cafe.
It’s been a fantastically successful trip. Everyone has been kindness itself, without being cloyingly polite to the foreigner. Horio-san and I effectively designed a whole production in an hour and half yesterday afternoon around a committee table with eight other people watching – theatre design as spectator sport. But it worked.
I am nervous about the two leading actors – I thought I might have met them on this trip, but they are filming. I’ll have to take them as I find them in January.
I’m also nervous about fending for myself when I come back in January. This week I was shepherded around with someone with me all the time. Will I be able to buy my lunch? Or a glass of wine at the end of the day?
I shall be studying the phrase book carefully over the next month.
Had the big ‘technical meeting’ this afternoon with all the design team. It actually went very well and wasn’t as much like designing by committee as I’d feared. Yukio Horio and I had had very similar ideas, and I think we’ve come up with something with a lot of potential: a two-tiered set held together with a spiral staircase, all in glass (perspex). A sculpted glass island which the actors never leave. Two platforms – the main lower one appearing to float.*
I am completely exhausted now, and hysterical. The information overload of the week has finally got to me. Everyone has been tremendously nice and courteous and looked after me well. But every second has been a new sensation, every hour a new experience. Like being in a never-ending exhibition for four days.
Hiroyo says that Natasha (my agent) had said in an email that I was “very visual”. All the girls in the office had taken this to mean that I was devastatingly handsome. No wonder they looked puzzled when I appeared. I explained that it meant I was anxious about the design…
*Needless to mention that this potty idea we concocted together to get through the meeting was not how it turned out to be. Horio-san came up with something much cleverer and apropos.
I saw a Kabuki play last night. As stylised as one would expect (though perhaps no more so in essence than some of our forms). Very expensive costumes and then very cheap set, which I can’t understand. There is some bravo-ing from the audience during the show which is apparently all worked out in advance too, and paid for by the actors. Very wide stage and low proscenium. The fights are funny as they don’t actually touch. It’s all as removed from real life as… well, name a knighted actor.
Woke up wide awake at 5am. Got up at 6am. Had breakfast (standard international language of institutional hysteria – bacon, sausage, fruit, croissant, coffee, fruit juice etc).
To kill time I popped next door to the Shinto temple. Rather beautiful. But the priorities of the theatre soon reasserted themselves: I found myself remembering that I had to correct my biog for the programme…
Went to Theatre 1010 which is quite a nice 750 seat theatre where the play will open. Like the new Hampstead Theatre only with bleached wood and purple seat covers. Much better than the place it will go on to (yesterday’s Aoyama Theatre).
Had a marvellous tempuri and sushi lunch (more octopus, more tuna…) in Ginza, which is like Madison Ave. I even found a Margaret Howell store (she’s my new favourite designer).
Then went to La Theatre Ginza which is quite frightful: like the Marlowe Theatre at Canterbury only without the pizazz (sp?).
I raise the point that I will be having a technical meeting tomorrow with the stage manager/production manager, the lighting designer, the sound designer and the producer – having met the designer for the first time then, too. I tried to say that it was like having a first date with all your friends there too.
It turns out that a previous British director/designer team (I have to chew my fingers not to type their names…) arrived with a fait accompli and refused to budge when faced with the budget. Therefore they want it done this way, which is more usual in Japan anyway. I don’t blame them. Thus do the incompetent fuck it up – not just for themselves and their audience, but for artists in the future.
I was met at noon by Madoka and taken on the subway to Aoyama Theatre, a barn of a place (like a cross between the Barbican and the Lyttelton – only less intimate…) where we will play after the first run at the 1010 Theatre. There I met the interpreter, Miyoko, and the Assistant Director, Tazuko. They seemed surprised that I didn’t want to investigate the technical specifications of the theatre more thoroughly, but a quick look from the back of the stalls tells you what you need to know at this stage.
This afternoon we had a very good four hour meeting on the script with the translator, Keiko Tsuneda. We ironed out some of the misunderstandings (it particularly took a while to get Brandt’s East German jokes right. “Why does the Stasi go round in threes? – One who can read, one who can write, and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals” – this one took a good half hour to tackle). We also tried to cut the play. No-one wants to do it but it is necessary. At this stage it’s impossible of course, as I’ve fallen for the writing and can defend every comma. But we made a few.
This evening I went for a traditional Japanese meal with Hiroyo and Mrs Kanamori. She’s the Japanese Thelma Holt. It was very generous of her. I had sashimi and sushi made up of octopus, flatfish, conga, seaweed, tuna, bluefish, squid (in a liver paste (?!)), sea urchin, sweet shrimp, scallops, ark shell and dried gourd shavings. Washed down with beer, sake, Japanese vodka, green tea and miso soup. Trying to have a sensible conversation while grappling with that little lot took some doing. She gave me very useful background on everything.
Don’t ever – ever – fly anything other than business class if you can possibly help it. The service! And the food! And the champagne! Mind you the novelty and the adrenaline wore off after a few hours and then the sense of the walls shrinking in on me started. It’s now ten o’clock here. Which means it’s one in the afternoon in London. And I haven’t slept since God knows when. The seats supposedly fold out meachanically so that you can lie down. But they leave you at a 15 degree angle to horizontal. So you slide down every 10 mins.
Very interesting for the first time in my 37 years to be in the ethnic minority. Not that there’s any sense of threat or negative discrimination. Just a sense of weird looks. And feeling gauche and maladroit and vaguely vulgar.
Met by Horiyo (the line producer) who is lovely. About my age and used to dealing with strangers from the Western theatre (she even knows Nick Tennant, for crying out loud). We even found we had similar views about the original London production of Democracy so I think we could be OK.
According to the notes I’ve been sent, there seems to be a need to cut or alter all sorts of obscure references to German politicians and places because the audience here won’t get them. Well, I’m pretty sure that the Japanese can’t be less well informed about Germany and its politics than the English-speaking audience with whom it’s been so popular. The point is surely to give local fabric and flavour, and to imply that we perhaps ought to know a little more about this powerful and curious culture. I meet the translator tomorrow. But I know that the pressure’s on for cuts – the nature of the Japanese language means that there’s a nearly 50% inflation to the evening. It’s a measure of my affection for the play, though, that I was audibly protesting on the plane as I read each one of the proposed cuts.
The hotel is great. Evidently it’s the old Hilton (where the Beatles stayed – thank God I didn’t bring any dope or my resemblance to Macca might have triggered memories).
Went out for a pizza with Horiyo and her two assistants. Tokyo is like Birmingham. Only taller.
Big day tomorrow. Seeing the three theatres where it will play. And meeting the translator.
I am in denial about going to Japan tomorrow. I haven’t packed. Or indeed unpacked from Bath. I don’t really know who I’m going to meet or what the programme of events will be. I have a plane ticket and a passport.
I’m daunted. And terribly tired from the Bath weekend. I fly at 7pm from Heathrow and I’m not sure when I’ll next get to a computer (I don’t have a laptop) so I don’t know when I’ll get to post here.
Travelled on Friday afternoon for 48 hours in Bath on the NT Education Dept’s ‘retreat’ for their Shell Connections scheme. Very nice room in the swish Francis Hotel (the scheme has expanded over the years). Did first session (just introductions really) for an hour on Friday night, then a full day on the Saturday.
The group consisted of directors and/or representatives from 23 youth groups or schools from round the country who will be doing a production of Deborah Gearing’s play Burn over the next nine months or so. I ground rather boringly scene by scene through the play, trying to chair the discussion so that people had input but equally so that bad ideas were flushed out and corrected. Deborah was very sweet and helpful and contributed well to the sessions. The directors had bizarre ideas, though. They take it for granted that they can ‘do’ the play as written standing on their heads – their wish is to offer up some new interpretation, a vision, or to ‘build on the kids physical theatre skills’. Why? The play is funny and real and has poetic images from life as it’s lived, including several startling moments: a group of kids land a fish from the river before handing it round and finally throwing it back, dead; a girl decides to shut herself in a fridge. What on earth’s the point of adding your own fancies to all that? I tried to be polite in drawing their attention to the amount of imaginative work they’d have to do just to stand a chance of realising the play as written, but they got bad-tempered in this morning’s session when they felt they were being denied their creativity, and I was a bit fed up.
Dinah Wood was there for the weekend, as was Lindsay Posner, Nick Dear, Max Stafford-Clark, Mark Ravenhill, John Tiffany and many others, so it was obviously convivial too. Very convivial on Saturday night…
Suzy Graham-Adriani and Helen Prosser have built this scheme up over many years and I think it’s made a huge impact on the theatre culture for young people in this country.
