Saturday, 26 October 2013

Three Shakespeare plays

For the October issue of Auditorium - out now! - I braved the West End for two attacks on Shakespeare. In retrospect, I was probably slightly harsh on one, and generous with the other, but although they both lacked a particularly dazzling interpretation, in terms of the quality and polish of the experience they provided, they were worlds apart. Neither of them rivalled Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth in Manchester, though, which was so memorable that even months later it feels more recent - a dusty trudge through industrial wastelands followed by an intense and bloody spell.

Originally published in Auditorium magazine, October 2013.



Wot? No Fish!!

I felt affectionately towards this show from the moment I got handed its flyer at Edinburgh, collaged with delicate pen and ink drawings, not splash quotes. I only felt more fond after a first encounter with Summerhall, an antiseptic breath of fresh air after the beer-soaked soggy postered crush of the big main venues – it felt un-theatrey, part of a more fluid kind of Fringe. Danny Braverman is following his residence in Summerhall’s lecture theatre with shows at festivals and community centres, in the parts of North and East London that saturate his family’s story, and his own carefully crafted performance.


Shows coming up:  Jewish Community Centre, Finchley Road, October 26th at 7.30pm, 27th at 4.30pm.

Originally published on exeuntmagazine.com, August 2013, at http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/wot-no-fish/


Sketches of the past. Photo: Malwina Comoloveo.
A battered old shoebox full of, not secrets exactly, but definitely a more private kind of treasure, is the fragile source matter for this delicately judged piece, half lecture, half performance. Danny Braverman’s great-uncle Ab drew cartoons on every wage packet he handed over to his wife Celie, decorating her housekeeping allowance as an act of love, penance for his failings, and for the sheer, evident joy he found in art. His great-nephew tells the couple’s story, as well as tracing his own path to and through this treasure; with archive-gloved hands, he sorts the mounds of envelopes into loose narrative lines, sketched over a period of sixty years.
The drawings themselves are full of character, and lose none of their strength in their amplification from three-inch high relics to bright, screen-filling projected icons. At one point, Danny describes them as outsider art, but although Ab was untrained, there’s nothing naive or fantastical about his style; his drawings start with a classic 1920s look, slim, pert and stylish, which rounds out into naturalism over the decades, before the joyous addition of colour when their author retires. They’re like newspaper cartoons for Ab and Celie’s marriage, documenting and commenting on the minutae of family life, as politics and war rumble in the background – when Hitler pops up, its to nix their annual trip to the seaside.
Danny’s approach is part thematic, part chronological. He carefully paces his own discoveries, the revelations about his shared past, as he moves from the first 1920s envelopes into the present, but also uses groups of linked envelopes to pull out broad themes like disability, aspiration, and the Jewish migration from Dalston to Golders Green. There are also smaller, quirkier motifs — like the family love of fishballs, and its male members’ inability to look like anything but a schmuck in a suit — which poke a cartoon finger at Danny’s own foibles, as well as pointing to a much wider Jewish experience, and its shifts and schizsms through the twentieth century.
Danny is an incredibly likeable storyteller – with Nick Philippou’s direction, he manages to feel like a fishball offering family friend, desperate to tell you about something great he’s just found. Every unfolding suprise feels like its fresh to him, too, still exciting. His interpretation of the pictures is precise without ever feeling didactic, but you can’t help learning a bit about looking as he points out easily-missed details, slumped shoulders here, a missing Sunday suit there, and offers gentle speculation on what Ab was trying to say.
The images aren’t postcards from a seaside holiday of a life; the pair’s annual trip to Westcliff was forever rained off. Instead, they shift from love letters to war dispatches to subtle digs to memorials to messages to Celie that, built on an emotional context we can’t dig up like old newspapers, can never be deciphered.
This brilliant performance has the same shifting feeling, sifting through crackling masses of paper to find grains of truth, and golden flashes of insight
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The GB Project

The GB Project was one of my favourite shows this Edinburgh, so I'm thrilled that it's found a London home at Calm Down Dear, the Camden People’s Theatre’s festival of feminism, on the 29th and 30th October. Definitely worth a trip.

Originally published on exeuntmagazine.com, August 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-gb-project/


Kate Craddock
Even when there are no dragons to slay, heroes are important. The Bank of England’s recent changing of the guard of historical faces on banknotes, controversial counterparts to Scotland’s images of famous castles, stirred up feeling because of the underlying truths to which it pointed. Female heroes are less likely to emerge, more likely to be submerged, by a history that’s grounded in a firmly male canon of sword-wielding leaders. Kate Craddock’s one woman show unearths the split, fragmented story of Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist,writer, spy and traveller in the Middle East; half inspirational, heart-warming heroine in her North Eastern birthplace, half ambassador/betrayer to the countries she became so deeply enmeshed in.
It’s a journey told through people and memories, starting with her stilted visits to her newly-divorced father’s flat, concrete complexified by a Gertrude Bell memorial plaque. Craddock goes on to seek out the other, more voluntary custodians of Gertrude Bell’s treasures. She stages conversations with her own memories of Tyneside-accented Pat, a gentle and self-deprecating librarian who notes that GB’s adventures are so much wilder than anything she and her colleagues ever get up to, archivists, historians, and a post-doctoral scholar, writing on women and travel without ever venturing further than Paris. These verbatim, regional-accented snippets are spot-on, distinct and charming, like another kind of archive, audio evidence of her trail through paper and sand. Woven together with wonderfully acute observations, context and projected photos, they create a rich sense of the shared, local, female investment that keeps this dead explorer alive at home.
The structure is wittily, neatly managed; a timid foray into Gertrude Bell’s sex-life is book-ended by the more gently sensual offering of china cups of tea and custard creams. Craddock uses dates, emphasised with a step left or right, to mark her symmetrical movements back and forth from past to near-present. The same pieces of documentary evidence are mirrored, first as sweet, slide-show artefacts, then as incriminating evidence, as the analysis of Gertrude Bell’s involvement in the Middle East deepens.
The title seems confusing at first. This piece is about discovering Gertrude Bell, not Great Britain. But as its focus shifts from local to global, we learn that she drew the borders for present-day Iraq, and persuaded tribal leaders to support the British, and helped install a puppet king. The photos show what seems to us a gentle, quaint, china cup-clutching breed of diplomacy, afternoon tea among desert sands. Seen in the context of this diplomacy’s latter-day consequences, they point to a kind of disjunct in colonial self-image; explorers or invaders of territories, guardians or appropriators of cultures. Craddock brings out this disjunct, as the gentle cast of academia and GB’s own cut-glass voice are joined by Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice, whose words use the soft language of conscience and domesticity to justify the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq. By combining the voices past and present, The GB Projectbuilds and gains the power of a political thesis, a passionate through-line through a muddled history.
The GB Project swells from a small, personal engagement to a sprawling trail of people and paper, a huge telescope look at Gertrude Bell’s place among the gentlemen travellers who toyed with and prodded at the Middle East with detached, still lingering entitlement, deposing rulers and redrawing boundaries. Bell is the only woman among men in their sober wool-suited groups, or Lawrence of Arabia horse parties. But as well as drawing attention to her petticoated singularity, Craddock’s piece also finds uniqueness in her humanity, and real love and respect for the leaders and people she won over. Gertrude Bell’s legacy in Iraq, and the National Museum of Iraq she founded, has been sacked and scattered, her diplomacy betrayed. Craddock’s dazzling performance seeks out and brings back the artifacts of her memory, tangible and intangible, and houses them in an intensely personal frame; impossible to forget
.

Staging Middlemarch

This was a great set of interviews to do. I love Middlemarch, and all my cynicism and skepticism about adapting period novels for the stage was worn away at by talking to two people who clearly felt the same way, and were embarking on an immensely complex and carefully planned labour of love.

Originally published on exeuntmagazine.com, 25th October 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/staging-middlemarch/

Middlemarch 2_OrangeTreeTheatre
Middlemarch, for Virginia Woolf, was “the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Geoffrey Beevers is appropriately mature; steeped in theatre, he’s been turning out sporadic adaptations of George Eliot novels at the Orange Tree for decades – the first of them, Adam Bede (1990) winning a Time Out award. As he explained, he loves and endlessly rereads George Eliot – “she has such an amazingly intelligent compassionate mind, more so than other classical author” – so it was inevitable he’d come to tackle her most famous novel. “I’d always had it in my mind that I’d do Middlemarch – it’s such a wonderful story.” Wonderful, but also bold, comprehensive and precise – a huge challenge for a small space.
Middlemarch isn’t one of those novels seems to be struggling against the restrictions of the page – it feels neatly, meticulously adapted to its classically Victorian three volume format. It’s also polyphonic, with no single melody to be strummed out into a heart-tuggingly operatic stage narrative, soaring from high to low – its perfectly balanced counterpoints march evenly through the middle of provincial life towards mild, contented disappointment. So what will bringing it to the stage add?
Beevers’ passion for the novel is clear, and his aim is to heighten and share its text. He explains: “as a reader you can miss an enormous amount because your eye can dash over the words, and you don’t realise that there’s incredibly subtle wit spun through the whole work. It reveals so much more when you speak it out loud because you’re sharing it with an audience.” He alights on a passage describing the amiable, hapless Mr Brooke; the striking points in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy.” Bursting with enthusiasm, he explains that its genius lies in the contrast between the “striking” politician Brooke will never be, and then the “three really dull mundane things about him, his ordinary face and dull waistcoat which make it such a brilliant sentence – it’s so easy for details like that to get lost.”
Georgina Strawson as Dorothea and Jamie Newall as Casubon
Georgina Strawson as Dorothea and Jamie Newall as Casubon
There’s plenty to get lost in; George Eliot’s novel combines epic length with several neatly balanced plots that interlock and comment on each other. Beevers has divided his adaptation into three plays, each following a single plot strand – “I realised that to do the whole of the novel, I’d need to split it up, so I’ve separated out the main themes.” He aims to offset the risks of losing Middlemarch’s broad narrative sweep, and the comprehensiveness implied in its subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” by producing a cohesive trio of plays that interact as a set – “some parts overlap, so that you have the same scenes from a different angle.” It’s an approach that echoes George Eliot’s own self-conscious shifts in perspective. After a devastating passage on her young heroine’s“moral imprisonment” in a country house mired in unread books and pale pinioned stags, she asks “why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble,” before retelling the situation from her scholarly husband Casaubon’s view, in tones of brutally sustained irony.
This ironic detachment is important in Eliot, and it’s something Beevers is keen to foreground in his approach, which sounds tinged with story theatre – “ the whole cast shares her voice, the narration, and everybody has a bit of her ironic comment on the action in front of us.” He sees Middlemarch as a work where “the great ideals of life are not reflected in people’s achievements. People start out with tremendous idealism and belief in life, and are slowly brought up against the reality – Will thinks he’s a great romantic Goethe-type hero, then he turns out to enjoys practical politics, and Lydgate’s great ambitions get brought down to a narrow compass.” Dorothea’s marriage is similarly crushing, her talents famously, frustratingly spent “in channels which had no great name on earth,” but the novel is no bleak exercise in social realism. George Eliot’s keen observations of the personal and political are leavened with the humour and wit of characters like pragmatic Mary Garth, whose“down-to-earth morality” Geoffrey reads as a solution to the problems of the two other plots. There’s something similarly down-to-earth in Geoffrey’s approach, which aims is to “foreground the dramatic dilemmas” of the novel, in an approach that prizes the theatrical and dramatic over George Eliot’s simmering themes of political and social reform.
I wondered if Beevers’ focus on the text has an element of getting closer to the way in which people used to encounter these novels, through reading aloud from single, prized circulating library volumes. Beevers agreed, and elaborated that “It’s easy to look down on adaptations as heritage drama, but the Victorians themselves – ironically since they lived in a bad age for drama and a great age for novels – loved the theatre. I don’t think they would have objected to these novels being adapted for stage, and I don’t feel bad about adapting George Eliot’s work.” Still, there aren’t likely to be many of the lavish accouterments beloved of the Victorian stage, or of period dramas, as the specific challenges of the piece mean that “it won’t be naturalistic in the way it would be on television, with coaches and horses and all that stuff.” Designer Sam Dowson elaborated that “the watchword is storytelling, and the action just whizzes along, almost like a ballet – we had to design and make a chaise longue ourselves so we could just roll it on and off, and we had to costume for character, as there’s no stopping to change.”
David Ricardo-Pearce as Lydgate, the Doctor. Production photos by Robert Day.
David Ricardo-Pearce as Lydgate, the Doctor. Production photos by Robert Day.
Still, where Adam Bede, which Dowson also designed, “ticked along without any real set,Middlemarch as a novel is grander and more expansive,” demanding the creation of a complex visual system – the stage is divided into a gothic corner, a Neoclassical corner, a library corner and a yewtree corner, each housing a themed group of locations. Light is important, shining on each area in turn, and so is nature; Sam was inspired by “a tiny passage where she talks about a light shone on the random marks on a piece of steel” and, in George Eliot’s words, “the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun…The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.” This sense of reality’s vulnerabilities to the vagaries of individual perspective is exploited by her design’s evolution through the play cycle – what’s bare and sparse to austere Dorothea “fleshes out into an orchard and bowers of flowers as we reach Fred and Mary’s story, which is very much full of love.” The small size of the Orange Tree has its own challenges, but also clear advantages for Sam’s designs – “it’s very intimate, so it’s easy to create oppressive domestic interiors, and a sense of connection between the characters.”
The Orange Tree is a venue that Beevers has always come back to – “I started as an actor almost the first year it opened, in a room above the pub in the 1970s. I was struck by the possibility of enormous themes in very small spaces – we did King Lear, and Caucasian Chalk Circle, and it was wonderfully exciting to have great drama staged with that simplicity. You hear things that you don’t hear on a big stage sometimes, when you don’t have all the big production numbers and elaborate sets.”
For Beevers, “acting is how I make my living,” and that means bigger venues, bigger names, whether on new season Dr Who or, most recently, dancing attendance on Helen Mirren as an equerry in The Audience. He’s found that“it’s been a long time working Middlemarch out, in between various jobs, and finding a way to make each of the three stories self contained. When you’ve seen all three plays you’ve got a vision of the whole book, and although you could see them in any order, I think it’s best to see them in the right order.” As the plays open in staggered style, twenty days apart, bringing Beevers’ vision of Middlemarch to the Orange Tree will be a similarly long process, gently unfolding as the evenings darken from autumn to winter. It seems apt.
Middlemarch: Dorothea’s Story, runs from 23rd October-30th January, Middlemarch: The Doctor’s Story, from 13th November-31st January, and Middlemarch: Fred and Mary from 4th December-1st February, at the Orange Tree Theatre, London. There are trilogy days on 27th and 28th December 2013, and the 4th, 18th and 25th January 2014.