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I wrote a report for the Bush Theatre at the end of last year on ways in which it could expand and develop its relationship with young artists of all kinds from the age of 16 up. Called Bush Futures, the first shoots of growth from this are already appearing. The Bush has launched a mentoring scheme for a company taking a new play to this year’s Edinburgh Festival and the invitation to apply for this has just gone up on the Bush’s website. It’s a really good pilot scheme and I hope there’s a lot of interest. It’s a very generous-minded initiative by the Bush and could make a huge difference to a new company.
As to the rest of the report, I can’t really go into any detail about what was in it. It was quite big and had a lot of specific ideas but was also deliberately quite subjective in many ways. The Bush has eagerly accepted it and is coming up with its own imaginative responses to it already. It’s pleasing to me because I’d never written a consultative document like that before and I was incredibly daunted. I’m now looking forward to seeing what else happens and hopefully being there to support it all. Watch that space…
In the last ten days or so I have seen Motortown by Simon Stephens at the Court, Crooked by Catherine Trieschmann at the Bush and Chatroom by Enda Walsh at the NT. Admirably pithy titles all.
Motortown and Crooked made an oddly contrasting pair. I was reminded again of the proposition (by Keith Johnstone, I think) that our present taboos were in fact tenderness and benevolence. Qualities much in evidence at the Bush and not at all at the Court, on these two occasions at least, making one evening culturally surprising, the other not.
Chatroom is the third play of the Connections trio at the Cottesloe. Dryly droll yet potentially gougingly upsetting, its unexpectedly heart-melting ending then spectacularly busts the above taboos. Six actors on some plastic chairs in an empty space talking as if to each other in a chatroom – it couldn’t be less “theatrical”. Yet it couldn’t be more alive, in reality. A pocket masterpiece and a restorative.
There’s a piece by Jeremy Seabrook on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site which is well worth a look. Basically a re-view of the historic post-war compromise between capital and the people which brought us consumerist social democracy, I found it cast a whole new perspective on the Blair/Brown/Cameron inanities about the ‘work/life balance’. Tellingly, too, it draws some very interesting and positive comment on it from the otherwise routinely rancorous people who post at Comment is Free.
I haven’t quite worked out, though, what bearing it has on my own, badly skewed, work/life balance…
Last night was the drinks do to mark the closure of the National Theatre Studio prior to its refurbishment. So the rackety, charming, smart, unpretentious, oddly cool 1950s building in which I spent perhaps rather too much time over the past 18 years will change forever. So much has happened since I first walked down its rather scary main corridor aged 20 – and finished working there two years ago – that it is surprisingly easy not to be sentimental about it now.
The wall separating the antechamber from the main studio.
The main corridor. The Head of Studio’s room is on the left, on the right is the blackboard where the week’s activities are chalked up. Ahead is the tea-and-coffee area and the place where the directors etc hang out, arena for quite a lot of terse argument, a little competitive pretension, some anxious showing off and much laughter.
Meanwhile, 6000 miles away, the A Life in the Theatre cast take their final curtain call in Osaka. This weekend it’s in Sendai, then at Niigata from Tuesday.
(This photo is lifted from the official blog).
The last week or two I’ve spent re-adjusting to London life and re-decorating my little flat. My painting skills aren’t great and my patience for the famously essential preparation etc is nil. So the results are scrappy at best, the bathroom especially late-de-Kooning-esque.
On rare, paint-splattered excursions I have seen Waiting for Godot at the Barbican (ponderous but good to see the play again); Brokeback Mountain (much less of a fairy tale than I had expected); The Voysey Inheritance and Burn/Citizenship at the NT and Blackbird at the Albery (it becomes the Noel Coward Theatre shortly).
Burn by Deborah Gearing and Citizenship by Mark Ravenhill are two of the three plays for and about young people which are currently playing in rep in the Cottesloe. I’m seeing the third, Enda Walsh’s Chatroom, soon. I had seen all three when I was assessing for the Shell Connections scheme they were commissioned for and they seemed then to be amongst the best new plays I’d come across. I suggested this way of presenting them to the NT then and they eagerly took up the idea. A year on and they seem as fresh as paint – this old cliché has new reality for me now. Formally playful (a teacher walks through a bedroom wall to chat to a confused pupil before his first fuck; the baby which is conceived that night tells us what happens next) these plays are also vividly about life as it’s lived now. As I’d imagined, here was a nap hand of the best young actors around, all new to the NT, and an audience largely of young people intensely engaged then roaring appreciation. Alive and eloquent, it felt like an event.
Harley Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance and David Harrower’s Blackbird offer the most instructive contrast in direction I think I’ve ever seen. Two Peters: Gill and Stein. Two very different plays.
Voysey is a handsome piece of Edwardian construction, apparently Ibsenite but linguistically more sophisticated than anything then (1905) on the English stage. Had he read Chekhov? We’re not sure. The Cherry Orchard was 1904; the first productions in England weren’t until the 20s. But word must have reached cultivated theatre artists sooner. The submerged subtexts, the abruptions and hesitations, the filigree excavation of a whole micro-society all feel Russian in influence, not Norwegian. And the sidelined elderly mother reading intellectual pamphlets (“What an interesting article. The Chinese empire must be in a shocking state”) is lifted direct from Vanya, surely?
Harrower’s Blackbird is fine too. It has the same delicately laced surface concealing violent undercurrents which his other plays have (I once directed a semi-staged performance of his Knives in Hens for the Buenos Aires Festival with wonderful Argentine actors and had a great experience).
But it’s the contrast in directorial approach which fascinates. Peter G makes it his task to tune in with perfect pitch to the tone and intent of the writing in all its scope and details; Peter S takes the play as a jumping off point to make an event which describes to the audience what they should feel about what they are watching. Gill (and his designer Alison Chitty) understand how theatrical authentically lived actions are on stage; Stein (and his designer Ferdinand Wogerbauer) emphasise the artificial in the setting to create a sense of strangeness which is separate to the play’s incidents. Gill’s actors uncannily catch and embody the nuances of class, power and gender positions as they ripple through the play; Stein’s actors, though gifted, are crudely cast and thus have to put on odd accents to imitate the social background indicated in the play. In Voysey the appearance of the domestic staff to clear the grand dining table is poetic and real, casting a perspective on the upper-middle class family they serve and is in itself a perfect miniature piece of textured physical theatre; in Blackbird various people ostensibly working in the factory where the play is set peer and leer through the window at the back every few minutes, conveying nothing true about working life and shattering what drama there is on stage with bathos.
Peter Gill of course is an old friend and colleague of mine, so I would say all this wouldn’t I? Well, not really. I honestly found the difference in sensual experience presented by the two directors amazing. And though Gill’s production has had excellent notices, there’s a peculiarly starry-eyed fervour to Stein’s acclaim from the reviewers which I find embarrassing. (See here, here and here…)
Nor is it xenophobia on my part. I’ve found the whole business about the deportation of foreign prisoners enraging. The basic premise of that ‘discussion’, which no-one seems to dissent from, is that it is obviously better for the world if people who have served time for a crime and been released at the end of their sentence are sent abroad. The very same people who are vehemently opposed to economic protectionism are entirely sanguine about enforcing the social equivalent. So we’re all supposed to be happy about sending rapists to France or wherever as long as they’re not doing it here. What happened to internationalism, the global village, ‘one world’? And the notion of having served your time has evidently gone out the window, too, while I wasn’t looking. What about the many thousands of British passport holders released at the end of their sentence? They, too, are roaming about the country untraceably, free to commit whatever crime they want without the Home Secretary having to be sacked. Not, of course, that any of this is actually about what passport you hold. It’s about skin colour. And at the end of a few weeks of this kind of hysteria they wonder why the BNP’s vote rises.
So I’m not against these ‘ere foreigners with their fancy ideas. How could I be when the same things are probably being said in Tokyo about me as we speak? But let’s be a little less provincial in our reactions.
