Strictly Ballroom

Film Four has started on Freeview and last night was Lost in Translation which was hugely nostalgic for me because of the Tokyo settings. Tonight they’ve just shown Strictly Ballroom. This film always makes me cry, right from the beginning. There’s an exuberent redemptive spirit at work not unlike Shakespearean comedy. I don’t think the comparison too fanciful. Like Billy Elliot, it also has an obvious appeal to all people trying to carve their creative identity whilst coming from an unlikely background and working in an unsympathetic and constricting milieu. It was enormously successful and made the career of Baz Luhrman of course but somehow Billy Elliot (also about the young using dance as a means of self-expression and emancipation) gets more kudos. Why? This is clearly superior in every way, not so stiff and pompous and arch; wonderfully shot, incredibly danced, not hitching its wagon to anyone else’s cause. It has genuine vivacity and belief in itself; Billy Elliot feels so earnest and drab and manipulative. And that triumphing-over-the-unions stuff so suspect. Next to it Strictly Ballroom just looks original and witty and free. I love it.

Yet another ten day absence from posting here. Really quite shockingly lazy. I plead muddle-headedness due to age and this extreme heat.

The headlines in brief: three evenings of Connections plays in the Cottesloe and Olivier Theatres at the NT plus chairing the final Platform of all the writers on Tuesday; seeing a preview of Under the Black Flag by Simon Bent at the Globe Theatre; casting a playreading taking place at Hampstead Theatre next Friday; casting for the play I’m doing at the Arcola Theatre in September; attending the swishest birthday party ever (sit down dinner for 200 plus cabaret including a turn by Earl Okin, a “musical genius and sex symbol”: his bossa nova version of Teenage Dirtbag eerily sublime); finding out that my mobile phone wasn’t telling me that I had voicemail and when I did at last get through the voice saying “you have nineteen new messages”, some five days old.

The five plays I saw at the NT were Pass It On by Doug Lucie, The Spidermen by Ursula Rani Sarma, The Miracle by Lin Coghlan, School Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Daisy and Ken Campbell and Liar by Gregory Burke. What a blast of fresh air into the building that scheme represents. Having facilitated the workshop on Lin’s play (see November) I will unabashedly say that I thought it quite the best. A redemptive story taking place in a deftly evoked urban landscape, her tone has a charm and a particular humour I find very winning.

Under the Black Flag was also something I worked on at the NT Studio three years ago. (There seems to be a pattern here.) I’m terribly fond of it: it wraps up democracy and Islam, sex and intrigue, free-spirits and obsession in a wonderful tapestry. The Globe is ideal for it in some ways. But I always find that the space there is very hard to focus. Somehow the proportions just don’t seem right, everything feeling 10% larger than it should. And those pillars. And the wretched painting of the stage. Tellingly, a single figure cannot dominate the space and focus all our attention on a moment. Coupled with this, the audience is somehow encouraged to participate in some silly notion of a medieval event, all plays there falling into this pit of low comedy which they try unsuccessfully to scrabble out of. This one is no exception to these two structural problems. Only being a new play, the writer gets the blame this time, having read some of the reviews.

Meanwhile, casting, casting, casting. What a slog it all is when you have to do it all on your own! How spoilt I’ve been to have had such infrastructure in the past. Agents aren’t exactly any more charming when faced with the prospect of a mere play than they ever were. One thing is different: they all seem to want the script emailed now, rather than trusting to the post. This of course speeds things up in one way, and saves enormously on printing and postage. But surely it must be a bit of a pain for their clients, having to print off these scripts and assemble them?

Today I enter my fortieth year. With all the above going on, and in this heat too, it feels like my ninetieth.

Just a quick bulletin to say that Peter’s article on playwrights and dramaturgy (“Theatre by Diktat”) is in The Guardian this morning, along with a good piece on Simon Bent’s new play about Long John Silver at the Globe, Under the Black Flag. Both well worth a look…

As I start to write this (at 9.36pm on Sunday) the screams and jeers coming from the local posh pub testify to the large number of French and Italians who live in Chelsea. They and their immense child buggies and their Chelsea tractors clog the King’s Road.

It’s been a strange week. Starting to cast the play at the Arcola. Continuing minor efforts to help the Bush and ETT with their work. Feeling strung out by the heat and by lack of money. Not one but at least three conversations which meant my mental map of the world needed re-drawing. Brigid Larmour is appointed at Watford (a job I had applied for). Lots of reasons to feel out of joint, in short.

I went to the Bush Theatre summer party on Thursday. It was held at a garden centre in Fulham and was beautifully catered and prepared. A mixture of patrons and ‘friends’ of the Bush, it was a combination of fund-raiser and morale-booster I guess. High point has to be a terrific party magician making Daniel Radcliffe’s eyes pop out on stalks at finding the ten pound note of mine which he’d signed being cut out of a kiwi fruit that a third person had been asked to hold. Dan plays student wizard Harry Potter in the films so his enchantment was a thing of wonder. Next only to Shoji Kokami’s, in fact, when I pointed out who this boy was who was so enthusiastically recruiting patrons. Shoji wrote Trance which I directed the reading of at the Bush in February. Harry Potter is huge in Japan (so is Shoji, mind you); Shoji had come over especially for the party but hadn’t expected to see this…

The good news is that Encore Theatre Magazine is back. This is a very welcome development. Apparently a group (a director? a writer? a designer? an actor? we aren’t to know) they set out to enliven the theatre scene with some much needed polemic, fierce opinion, terse analysis and not a little pure hair pulling. All anonymous, naturally. I’ve had so much to disagree with them about in the past, but never with the essential tone which is intelligent, well-informed, funny and gloriously venomous when occasion demands. Today they have pieces about See How They Run (described as a guilty pleasure); The Seagull (they have always been staunch Mitchellites, and here leap to the defence of her production of the play at the NT as if it had been savaged – I hadn’t quite read the reviews like that: I’ve been savaged); Toby Young’s new play (I will break with convention here and say that I turned it down – I’m damned sure I wasn’t the first and quite likely not the last: you’ve never read anything like it); and the naming of two new spaces at the Young Vic ‘The Clare’ and ‘The Maria’ after Venables and Bjornson respectively. I agree with them that it strikes a note of whimsy which seems odd; neither had much to do with the Young Vic, and they are denied the dignity of their surnames, a privilege reserved for the chaps, it seems.

Peter Gill has written a piece about playwriting and dramaturgy which will appear in The Guardian at some point very soon. It has certain themes which readers of this blog may recognise (he’s a good friend and I helped in a minor way to draft it with him – the good ideas are all his, though). I think it will stir the pot in quite a helpful way…

I should have mentioned before that amongst many nice communications from Japan comes the traditional “ooiri bukuro”. I had this last year, too, after Democracy. Ooiri means ‘full’, bukuro means ‘bag’. It’s a specially printed envelope, usually containing a 100 yen coin. This time it was a 500 yen one to mark the fact that the show was such a success. Yuzo (one of the producers at Horipro, who took care of me so phenomenally well) also enclosed a piece of the A Life in the Theatre merchandise:

A mobile phone screen wiper, it has a soft underside for cleaning your screen of fingerprints etc and comes with handy attachment to most phones. Marvellous stuff. Who knew we needed that? The combination of tradition and commerce in Japan shames ham-fisted British attempts.

Meanwhile I carry on in this weird half-working, half-not kind of way. One of the original purposes of this blog was to show that directors are in just the same position essentially as everyone else in the theatre: bobbing along on a sea controlled (apparently) by some other force. We are not the inspired masters of destiny which popular myth depicts. Well I’m not anyway. On the one hand expected to clamour for attention like a mixture of the dockhands in On the Waterfront and Max Bialystock, on the other to be these discriminating, scrupulous and sensitive artists, no wonder most are hopeless.