You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2005.
On face value the Turner report into pensions seems quite sensible – getting away from means testing towards a higher basic universal pension, with us all working longer (which we probably would anyway) and trying to get us all to save more. But it’s an odd world where we have a former head of the CBI – the CBI – trying to get a Labour government to revive SERPS – the earnings related scheme which the Callaghan cabinet invented, the Thatcher one destroyed and which Barbara Castle fought in vain to restore. Gordon Brown is thought to be especially resistant to this. And he’s supposed to be our best hope, post-Blair.
Two pieces of note in The Guardian over the past day or two: Lyn Gardner on Mick Gordon and Dominic Dromgoole on touring. Both of them old colleagues of mine moving on.
Spent the weekend at Bath leading a workshop on Lin Coghlan’s new play for the Shell Connections scheme, The Miracle. Each year 10 playwrights are commissioned by the National to write a one hour play for teenagers. These are then produced and performed by youth theatres and within schools from all over the British Isles [I'm not at all sure that 'British Isles' is an allowable phrase any more, but there are groups from Ireland]. This annual weekend retreat is a chance for the directors of these productions to encounter the playwright and focus for a short period on the play, away from the normal pressures of day to day life.
Lin’s play has turned out to be very popular indeed and no less than 60 groups have chosen to do it. What with co-directors etc it meant that there were 100 people in my workshop. I took Tim Stark along to co-lead it with me. We started all together as a group for the first four hours or so on Friday afternoon, then split up into two groups for most of Saturday before having a plenary session. Exhausting, trying to keep the focused attention of that many people (in a freezing gymnasium) all with differing needs and expectations.
The play is astonishing and beautiful. A picture of a whole town is conjured impressionistically through the story of a 19 year old’s return from fighting in Iraq and the bond he eventually forms with the 12 year old Veronica who uses her ’special powers’ to help address his emotional crisis. The tone is fantastic – funny and sweet and lyrical – and characters and relationships are vividly sketched with the lightest of touches.
As usual (this was my fourth of these) the key issue seemed to be how hard it is simply to embody and realise the play moment by moment as indicated by the writer in all its sensual, emotional, realist detail (though it’s by no means a naturalistic play) without thinking that it will somehow take care of itself. That’s your imaginative, interpretative task as directors, not overlaying something else; your role is to show us what’s there, not what it reminds you of.
The Monsterists should really be writing for this scheme: Lin’s play has a cast list of something like 30 characters and will be played by cast sizes ranging from 9 to 30 in its various productions, and will be performed in front of large audiences.
It was a nice weekend – the group were lively and skilled and the social life of the retreat is part of the event. Of the playwrights, I caught up with Gregory Burke, Doug Lucie and Sharman Macdonald, whom I’d not seen for ages, and I met Ursula Rani Sarma. It’s also very good to see many of the same youth theatre directors returning year after year to the scheme – you sense a kind of life and sophistication in theatre for young people which was certainly not around when I was in Oliver at my school in 1983. (Though that was a good show. I played the grandfather.)
Shell Connections is a terrific scheme and some of the best new plays are being written for it, just like last year’s Burn, Chatroom and Citizenship which will now be done again in the Cottesloe next year.
In a flurry of activity and energy in the last few days I have made huge strides with the Bush Theatre report which I’m writing, replied to emails, sorted out (some of) my finances, and written and posted my application to be the Artistic Director of a theatre (more on this, perhaps, in the course of things). The great mystery if you’re freelance is where do these surges come from? At other times it’s hard enough to get out of bed of a morning thinking that no-one would mind or even notice if you didn’t.
The most exciting event though is that I have bought new swimming goggles. The first pair in 25 years, I think. They’ve changed! These are marvellous, don’t let in the water, don’t fog up and generally have improved the swimming experience so much that I did an extra 10 lengths today.
Mind you, I haven’t really recovered from reading this yesterday whilst simultaneously watching the news about Bush wanting to bomb Al-Jazeera. Plus ca change…
At the weekend I go to Bath for the Shell Connections retreat, where I lead a workshop on Lin Coghlan’s new play The Miracle. It is hugely popular – I think 58 groups want to perform it – so there will around 90 youth theatre directors and teachers coming to find out something about the play. I’ve done four of these weekends before now so shouldn’t be quiet so nervy. Should I.
I am reading Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, which is raw and idiosyncratic and topical given the fact the new licensing laws come into effect tomorrow. People go on about the new later closing hours of pubs, but I am conscious of the severe cases who currently regulate their drinking by the, to them, relatively late opening hour of 11am. They’re going to be starting earlier now – I saw one pub near me in Fulham which will be opening at 9.30am.
I saw the first night of Jack Thorne’s When You Cure Me at the Bush on Friday evening. It’s a very sensitive and funny depiction of the reaction of those around her to a 17 year old girl’s rape. She is bedridden throughout – her legs have stopped working due to some sort of psycho-somatic shock. Her boyfriend particularly has to grow up fast and his halting, sometimes inadequate, attempts to do this are conveyed particularly well by Samuel Barnett (late of The History Boys – when will he not be in school uniform?). Mike Bradwell, who runs the Bush, has directed it with especial tenderness. Thorne is a new voice and that’s the point really, pace David Farr; the author as truth teller.
And another thing about that Guardian piece. I forgot to respond to the rather scathing bit about the sacredness of the “writer’s integrity”. It’s not that that is sacred, it’s the integrity of the piece which is at issue. This applies to plays old and new. As Lawrence says somewhere, “trust the tale, not the teller”. The writer as a person is not someone about whom I am in the least sentimental…
Quite why I feel uneasy about David Farr’s Guardian piece this morning, I’m not sure. His tone is equable, his proposals modest. And it’s not as if playwrights aren’t readily able to speak for themselves on these matters. [And indeed they have - see here and here.] My experience of collaborating with writers is that they are by and large a cussedly individual lot who will go on unbiddably ploughing their furrows regardless of the chatter of directors like me and David. And yet…
He argues for more large-scale works to be put together collaboratively, the writer or writers subsumed into a wider pool of creative artists. I don’t mind the idea of this in principle, and I’ve enjoyed most (if not all) of the work that I’ve seen of the groups he cites as examples. “I’ve seen some painful evenings when a… playwright, having been encouraged to “think big”, ended up writing a series of rambling pseudo-naturalistic scenes that masqueraded as a large-scale play”, he says, and God knows I might have been sat next to him on those evenings (’til the interval anyway). But I’ve had equally painful evenings where the style of a particular company or group has calcified over a number of shows to the point where its noisy self-referencing crowded out any material or subject matter they’d chosen to work on. But like a star actor’s mannerisms, it’s what the punters have paid to see. Their idol is more often than not Peter Brook, and in this I tend to sympathise with David Hare when he said that Brook “set about draining plays of any specific meaning or context to a point where each became the same play – a universal hippy babbling which represents nothing but fright of commitment.”
But the principle doesn’t hold anyway, because Farr goes on to say that the kind of collaborative work he has in mind is where “the director is boss.” This will send a shiver down the spines of many actors of my acquaintance who have worked with auteur directors – their accounts of such ‘collaborative’ processes would make your ears bleed. (One said that he realised after a while that he and the rest of the company were really just “warm props” to that particular auteur).
“My feeling is that those artists who need a bigger canvas naturally gravitate to collaborative processes, and away from Shelley’s “airy cell” of solitary creation.” There’s a rhetorical trick here which masks an elision in the argument. On the one hand there are these plays written by solitary geniuses which require “literary sophistication” to be appreciated (and, evidently, no collaborative effort to stage…) whilst on the other there are these inventive, visual, physical shows which are broad in scope, infinitely accessible and profound in insight. But this simple opposition presents a false picture of the true process of putting on a play.
Paying someone imaginative to go home and think up the script for a play which can then be used as the blueprint for a performance was a masterstroke of invention of which the Greek theatre should be proud. Apart from producing pungent, urgent and idiosyncratic work it is fantastically practical and supremely cost-effective. The rehearsal-based explorations which are argued for in the article are risky, time consuming and labour-intensive. And the risks are that it will be stylistically repetitive from one show to the next, lack an original focus on the subject (unless, like Brecht, you all have an engrained-over-time political standpoint) and be void of authentic emotion. (And if you prefer a joke to university whimsy, well…)
He closes by describing the work coming up next year at the Lyric Hammersmith and it’s a really inventive programme. I guess that the Manichaean way in which the point is put is to engender some discussion. Like this. But wouldn’t the article have been better written by a group of writers? Seriously, I know David and he’s a thoughtful artist with catholic taste; I don’t sense that he and I would disagree over much when faced with the actual work. But there are others less sophisticated than him who like to give the impression that ‘devised’, ‘physical’, ‘visual’ theatre (the code words change periodically) is somehow the real thing, to put on a mere play somehow shaming.
In fact, I think that David’s specific idea of pairing writers on a project – he cites Hare and Brenton’s work – is a really good one, and possibly the answer to the Monsterists’ problems. What about Bean and Buffini? Roy Williams and Ryan Craig? The yin and yang, Morecambe and Wise combinations are endless… Suggestions please.
The new drinking laws are being debated again tonight, with the Tories hoping to have the whole thing put on ice (so to speak). Having seen a few of the big town centres on a Friday or Saturday night, I can see that there is a problem with concentrated areas of these towns effectively no-go areas after a certain point in the evening. As I understand it though, this has arisen relatively recently because of a relaxation of the planning laws. Previously the onus was on the business wanting to open a new bar or club to prove that there was the need for a another one to join the existing ones nearby. Now the onus has switched to the police having to prove that it would be a mistake. Thus accounting for the explosion in new large-scale drinking/dancing dens all next door to other. The idea is to stagger the closing times so that not everyone is tipping out in to the street at 11.20pm. Unfortunately most of the pubs seem to have done the same thing and simply applied for a closing time of one hour later. So the chaos will be put back an hour.
The trouble is that however you alter the opening hours, you will never stop Northern countries like us having a problem with drink. We are moody and violent drunks because we are where we are geographically. We are never going to be suave, relaxed, outdoor drinkers – the so-called ‘Mediterranean’ culture – because we live here in this damp and gloomy place rather than in Crete. Go further north – Russia or Scandinavia, say – and they drink even more than us but keep rather quieter about it. Traditionally we have always been terrible, noisy, angry drunks. And proud of it. It’s seen as part of the Falstaffian, Roast Beef of Old England, not taking life too seriously personality of the country, closely related to our war-mongering abilities. Similarly the moves to curtail smoking in bars have a Freudian feeling of cutting off a manly pleasure. Symbolically, the ban on smoking in the National Theatre’s green room came in the day after Sir Michael Gambon (one of the country’s leading smokers and actors) had finished playing Falstaff. Having stopped myself three years ago it doesn’t directly affect me, though I can see that places are invariably improved by not having smokers.
Back to the drink. It’s all going to be much better for me, of course, and for anyone who likes going to the theatre. There’s always been an awful problem of scrabbling for the bar if your Trevor Nunn production of a Shakespeare play comes down at 10.45pm, leaving just 15 mins for a rushed drink before you have to find somewhere else that’s open to continue the discussion. In London this either means finding some hell-hole or joining one of the expensive private members’ clubs like the Soho House or Century. Now, presumably, this won’t be a problem, providing that some decent bars and pubs serve til later. I remember being in New York ten years ago, where it felt very civilised after an evening out to be able to return to your own neck of the woods and have a quiet nightcap in an ordinary bar round the corner.
So I hope the Tories don’t succeed (on this or anything, frankly) even though I think it will lead to more public drunkeness and debauchery. As an liberal, I have to believe that in the long run people who aren’t infantilised will grow up.
American woman on mobile phone: “I saw the Kevin Spacey play… Yeah, Henry the Second…. Yeah he was in it and he directed it… He was really funny, it was cool… Yeah, really.”
My snobbery aside, what this shows is that the public don’t give a monkey’s about half the things we in the theatre get ourselves worked up about.
Flame-haired Sun editor assaults husband hard-man Ross Kemp after evening comforting disgraced ex-minister David Blunkett. Good grief.
If, as a government, you start to become funny then you’ve had it, it seems to me. Major certainly was on the skids very early after his re-election in 1992 and maybe this is the same now, the bubble of serious credibility burst forever. It’s hard to know what will happen. On the one hand Brown is going to seem older and dourer as time goes on, and I think people will look again at the Conservatives if they remember where the centre ground is. On the other hand David Cameron is beginning to look a little vapid in his recent appearances and one already feels the media have lost some of their previous ardour for him. You can almost sense them thinking that perhaps a David Davis win would be the better story now. I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine the country taking to him. He seems terribly insincere to me, his naked arrogance poking out inescapably from his careful carapace of affability.
By chance I caught Tony Blair on yesterday’s Football Focus (yes, very much by chance…) and though his blokey persona is especially hard to swallow, it was interesting how he fitted in to the conversation and quite clearly knew his premiership football as well as the next boring man in the locker room.
Meanwhile I continue with my presently rather quiet life. I’ve been going round interviewing various people in key London theatres about their education policy and their work with young artists in general for a study I’m preparing. It’s amazing how much terrific work is done at a local level by theatres which never makes the press, theatre being used to stimulate and nourish thousands of young people, this work in turn nourishing the theatres.
The only outing in the last few days was to Hamlet at Richmond Theatre on Friday which was very enjoyable. Cleverly cut so that whilst seeming like the whole play it was only three hours and feeling very intimate in the packed Frank Matcham theatre. Ed Stoppard very watchable and sympathetic and like a witty prince. Patrick Drury an outstanding Ghost.
The X Factor remains unmissable. Quite how The Conway Sisters are still in it after last night’s performance is a mystery to me.
