Knight of the Burning Pestle

A grocer’s apprentice, pressed into unwilling knighthood with his pestle as his weapon and emblem, blunders into a courtly romance, intent on slaying a (never materialising) lion as its baffled actors pout or play on. Breaking down the fourth wall when indoor theatres had only just put it up, Francis Beaumont’s 1607 parodic play is one of those history-baffling texts that’s most easily compared to products of cultures that are miles or centuries apart; Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the similarly frame-breaking novel Tristram Shandy, or the similarly anarchic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sumptuous with candlelight and laced with satirical bite, Adele Thomas’s ingenious direction brings a work that’s more often studied than seen into roaring, battling life.

The title’s Knight Rafe is only half-hero of this would-be picaresque. He’s the fragile receptacle of Citizen and Citizen’s Wife’s vulnerabilities and hopes for what an ordinary person can or should be – they become quarrelsome puppet masters as they push him onstage to dominate the planned courtly performance with an ill-defined, chaotic quest, while still retaining their incongruous authority over the play. Part of the reason this works so well is that they’re such an endearing pair; Pauline McLynn as Wife has all the bolshy, clucky charisma of anyone’s favourite auntie, while Phil Daniels’ Citizen slips from didactic people’s hero to loving husband, eager to fulfil the every whim of his beloved “mousie”. Their commentary ensures that the action onstage seldom escapes satirical slapstick, however much its actors try to wrest back control and the Wife’s rustling bags of sweets. Wooing Humphrey comes off the worst – the gloriously puffed-up Dickon Tyrell pronounces couplets that rhyme “clasp her” and “Jasper” like polished epigrams, while his breeches are voluminous enough to become characters of their own. He and Jasper alike have no hope of getting the girl – Luce, a baffled and defiantly ordinary Sarah MacRae – while the marauding Rafe is egged on to joust, slash and romance away in high courtly style.

But the candles are important, too, for the way they shape the text. Their wicks must be trimmed and tended during four musical intervals designed for the purpose, while the Boy (Samuel Hargreaves) lights up the stage to the accompaniment of surprisingly ribald period songs from the gallery above – his oak tree dance is especially hilarious, as he sheds his leaves, then poutily pranced between intruding stage hands sweeping them, and eventually him offstage with brooms.  These interludes are a chance for the merchant and his wife natter and flirt with the audience – buying beer from basket-bearing ushers like un-briefed social ambassadors from another era. But there are also moments of high style and drama, with Hannah Clark’s rich, intelligent design allowing for both unobstrusive playfulness, and glimmering apparitions like the gold-clad Moldovian princess. And the play’s showpiece, a spectacular battle with the giant Barbarossa – more a thinning goatee on stilts – makes heart-stopping use of the theatre’s ceiling trapdoor.This production uses every inch, every cunningly-designed quirk of the newly built, Jacobean-style Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The pre-show is a gentle, witty induction into the space’s capabilities. Two clownish figures – one dopey and cerebral, the other portly and threateningly agile – light the candles on six chandeliers, which are lowered or raised by their shouts. Every possible mishap, from the softest murmur of laughter that greets a chandelier, raised too quickly, having all its flames extinguished, to the roaring hilarity of trousers accidentally set alight, is explored in loving, gradually unfolding detail – these (authentic, beeswax) candles are important. The introduction of candlelight in the new indoor spaces allowed for the first rudimentary lighting effects – the chandeliers are literally lowered in a solemn burial scene to produce a sepulchural flicker, or raised up high to imitate darkness.

The prevailing theme of period accuracy is periodically jolted away from slavishness by surreal, grim touches – their approach reminiscient of Joe Hill-Gibbon’s The Changeling at the Young Vic, which turned Jacobean noir into fat-suited, dog-food pounding horror, and used a strange alchemy to turn bowls of jelly into trembling viscera. Here, the alchemy finds its fullest expression in the character of Merrythought (Paul Rider), whose relentless hedonism is given a nasty, sweaty undercurrent – the full cast danced to his Bacchan hymn to drinking in soiled long underwear, combinations of childish glee and bottom-wiggling sexual predators menacing an unready audience.

This play moves to a disconcerting rhythm of its own. Atmospheres build, then are whisked away. The narrative pricks all over the plain like a knight who’s so errant he’s downright lost. The plots sometimes intersect with farcical energy, and sometimes miss each other altogether. Accordingly, this ragbag show can feel longer than its three hours. But such a magical, memorable, menacing pile of jagged pieces was never going slot neatly into one compact form – this production has lavished enough care on each fascinating protrusion to polish a historical curiosity into something gleaming and glorious.

First published on Exeunt

A Small Family Business

Flashes of exquisite nastiness. Photo; Alistair Muir

Is stealing a human foible, or an ethical failure? Alan Ayckbourn’s protagonist Jack McCracken, and on this play’s evidence his author too, fall into the latter camp. The National’s revival of his 1987 play is a burlesque on Thatcherite capitalism that combines sequinned and thigh-high-booted camp with deep moral seriousness. A small family business literally, as well as metaphorically, has its house thrown wide open, and no one, from doddery patriarch to teenage granddaughter, comes out unscathed.

Jack McCracken has given up his career in frozen foods to come and work for his wife’s family firm Heirs & Graces, built from modest, British-manufactured furniture. His ambitions start out modest — at a family party, he makes an inspiring speech about the need to stop skimming pencils and paper clips off the office supplies, and only slightly undermines it with his closing note of “sorry”. But after a meeting with his father-in-law Ken Ayres (a convincingly batty Gawn Grainger), he realises that crooks somewhere in the supply chain are stealing the firm’s designs, and selling them at a 20% mark-up. With the investigative powers of the monumentally creepy Mr Hough (played with a sepulchral sliminess by Matthew Cottle), he sniffs out a scam of industrial proportions, and dust-raising potential. Together, the family business is set with putting its filthy house in order.

At first, the dividing lines are clear. Jack McCracken is honest to a fault. The Italian mafiosos his brother-in-law’s wife takes out for dinner, romances, then hides in closets, are corrupt to the bone. There are some hilarious set pieces — particularly Jack McCracken’s deeply implausible alter ego as a Viking lover, Amy Marston’s sparklingly wan Harriet’s desperate helplessness at a party that leaves her clutching an empty ice bucket like a sacred icon, and forceful Anita’s splendid appearance clad in black pleather with a junior mafioso on a lead. But Ayckbourn’s moral universe is of a far dingier hue than its characters’ bright new dresses and cheery furniture, and it muddies them, one by one.

The whole piece is shot through with a deep distaste for capitalism and money – the very act of wanting is suspect, a chink through which corruption can seep. The character of Samantha, Jack’s hollow-eyed, sullen 16 year old daughter,  buckles the most under Ayckbourn’s moralising pressures. She succumbs to first medicated shampoo, then hi-fis, the twin gateways to unspecified “drugs”. These “drugs” are symptomatic of Ayckbourn’s very innocent kind of darkness – he doesn’t know what kind of books or music a teenager might reach for to escape the suburban doldrums, or what “bad” people might do, beyond shagging Italian gangsters indiscriminately and wearing lurid clothes.

A Small Family Business was originally written for this space, its artfully dismembered semi designed to fill it to the lighting rig. Tim Hatley’s set feels like a 1987 design with the brightness turned up in cheery post-millennial style – self-consciously artificial, thin and flimsy. It works, but is still “one house”, whereas this play is set in several. As the action accelerates into farce, the different families play out their stories on one set, and this one isn’t quite universal or adaptable enough to handle this spark-plug break from reality.

Nor is Adam Penford’s direction, which is more solid than electric. There are flashes of exquisite nastiness, but other scenes drag into slow alienation. The play’s moral message is both emotive and muddled – Jack McCracken is unlikeably priggish, and his wife unhappy, before they sink into corrupting cronyism. But their journey into capitalist hell doesn’t quite have the seductive glitter that selling your soul to the devil ought to. This production is more naughty than wicked, more heavy-handed than fleet of foot – a down-to-earth grocer’s daughter’s take on a surreal farce on Thatcherism.

First published on Exeunt

  

Building Nests: Interview with Joanna Scotcher

Joanna Scotcher “didn’t really come to theatre through being taken to see plays as a kid; I came at it through making really ridiculous sculptures that were suddenly big enough to dance in.” And although she’s an RSC-trained designer, she still leaps far beyond the world of traditional theatre. When we spoke, she’d just come from working on an early-morning fashion photo-shoot in a hotel room. To date, she’s also created a “giant game” of installations in Kensington Palace, charmed theatre and railway buffs alike with a production of The Railway Children staged in Waterloo Station, designed caravans and time-travelling promenades as associate designer for intimate devised and verbatim theatre company Look Left, Look Right, and, most recently, worked on more traditionally theatrical productions for Clean Break, a company dedicated to producing work by, about and for women prisoners.

Her varied portfolio means that she’s used to working in unconventional spaces; “every now and then I get to work in a theatre that has a fly bar, which seems like quite an amazing novelty to me – someone else will lift your stuff up for you!” She explains that “odd spaces and new spaces have always excited me, because I get so much inspiration from having solved challenges and problems that arise. For me they goes very much hand in hand with developed and devised work.  I’ve always felt quite comfortable in the new writing, new spaces camp, so sometimes having a script in a traditional venue feels slightly odd to me. Although that said, if someone wants me to do a huge West End show, I’m also available for that, too!”

Her work on House of Cards at Kensington Palace involved filling the space with installations from giant paper silhouettes of kings and queens to tiny dolls in suspended glass cases – “I was very much a co-conceiver, and it’s riveting to be involved in that stage. I think a lot of directors are realising that there’s a growing role for a visual artist who can exchange their own visual language with verbal language, and are getting comfortable with what must be quite an unnerving thing, even if you’ve read every contemporary playwright. It’s about finding directors you can have a genuine collaboration or meeting of storytelling languages with.”

House of Cards. Photo: Coney

Scotcher’s also been involved in devising work with Look Left, Look Right from the company’s very beginnings. She enjoys the challenge of site-specific work where “it’s about seeing through the closed door and around the corner, and flirting with your audience about what they’re going to see and what they’re not, and where they’re allowed to go.” She explains that “whereas in a traditional theatre space, you control what the audience see, information in immersive work is received in a different way. As a visual artist you’re dealing with a whole different spectrum of inputs to play with – when people aren’t pointed in one direction, what they see is as much as about what they feel, and the temperature and the lighting change and who’s coming into the space.” This means walking the route of promenade shows with the productions’ writers, and coming up with ways to “convey shifts in time through the semiotics of what someone’s wearing, and having a really filmic, immersive understanding of storytelling from all angles.”

Although her work with Clean Break might not embroil writers, actors and audience in a giant game, she’s still found that playful collaboration working with director Lucy Morrison, its head of artistic programme – ever since continuing an intense discussion about the company’s production of Billy the Girl last autumn right onto the director’s school run.

Scotcher finds that “it’s always wonderful to have an ongoing relationship with a director because you’ve already created a language or a bank of ideas. People sometimes say it’s a shorthand, but it’s more that you can settle into a depth earlier, so you can really burrow into an idea and scrutinise it to a much greater extent.”

Billy The Girl. Photo: Alistair Muir

Working with Morrison on Pests, Vivienne Franzmann’s new play, has involved plenty of burrowing; she describes it as “a rat’s nest of ideas and social comment and spoken languages. The text is so deeply rich with imagery, both in the stage directions and within the minds of the characters, that we spent a long time just plotting our way through its rich, tangled visual world. My design has really sprung out of [the character of] Pink’s mind; she’s suffering mental ill-health and is self-medicating with street drugs so there’s a real temperature of emotional highs and lows to the piece.” Part of the challenge of the piece is that Pink sees and hears things that her sister Rolly doesn’t. To express this, “what we’ve done is essentially like mapping, or storyboarding a film; it’s a static set but we’ve created mini canvases with projections which reflect the imagery of her emotional journey mapped out on top.”

It’s hard to describe Pests, or to visualise it; it’s an intense two-hander between two sisters with a dense, playful, and sometimes impenetrable language of their own. Fortunately, as Scotcher explains, “I’m kind of seduced by the obscure. That’s what so seductive about the initial conversation with the director, where you’re scrutinising your gut reaction to the text and you can go to the most incredible recesses of your mind. For Pests, Morrison mentioned the inside of a cushion cover that she remembered from when she was a child and instantly it took me back into the gym cupboard at school and the places I’d been where the insides had fallen out of soft things, and that’s kind of when inspiration struck. It was from the odd bank of emotion and visuals that as a designer you store in these crevices of your brain, then it just takes a director to say something to ignite that little idea and it finds it way out. Then suddenly you’re responsible for building it 10 metres across, so it’s able to come apart in sections and tour round the country and be seen by people. You have to be a very practical person to be a designer, and I love that technical side to it too. I’m a huge geek and sometimes I get as excited talking to a technician about a valve that can release blood from a fuse huge box as I am sketching a picture when I first read a script.”

In Pests, this geeky, practical side is being exercised both by “sticking foam to pillows to create a huge, nesty mound – it’ll be quite tempting to have a snooze on the set!” and by working closely with Kim Beveridge, the production’s projection designer. Scotcher feels that “working with projection is like being let into a whole new language game that you can sort of flirt around with onstage, like another colour to your palette – it’s fascinating learning about all the new technologies we’re using. But it’s got to be integral. I’m not happy with people just throwing projections over my set when it doesn’t work with the language I’m using. And I don’t like empty projection screens; it makes me feel uncomfortable and it makes me think of a turned off TV. One of the most ingenious pieces of projection I’ve ever seen was a show where a man pulled a handkerchief out from his suit, and as he unfolded it a projection appeared on it and grew to the size he unfolded the handkerchief to. When the projection finished he just folded the handkerchief up and put it back in his pocket, and it wasn’t there, and there wasn’t a screen. It worked within the story rather than laying on top of it. So that’s what I strive to do when I try to use projection.”

Hopelessly Devoted. Photo: Richard Davenport

There was a similar mix of emotional depth and robust practicality at play in Scotcher’s work on Hopelessly Devoted by Kate Tempest –  “I’m interested in construction techniques and what that means when you’re telling a story. We drew as much from graphic designers, we were looking at kind of structuralist work and lighting installations, and then ended up building a light-up ceiling panel which was inspired by the front of a drum machine.”

Scotcher’s first job out of her RSC apprenticeship was still more technical, but also substantially more naturalistic. Her design for The Railway Children involved working with a real train and platforms at Waterloo Station – “I was so utterly swept up in it that I didn’t have time to be daunted, but it was absolutely a huge engineering challenge.” The production combined picturesque research “ going round Yorkshire looking at all the stations, and researching uniforms and goods wagons” with the “real challenge raising my game to get the rest of what I could call the supporting scenery to hold its own against this incredibly majestic, 40-tonne train as it rolled into the middle of the stage every night.” What focused attention away from the great smoke-breathing beast was the “choreography of four moving platforms, as they and the characters on them met and parted again. In amongst all the Edwardian paraphernalia of the railway, there are the key emotional journeys locked into the mechanism of travelling – the excitement of travel, the sadness of losing someone, and the joy of meeting someone at a station.”

Like The Railway Children, the set for Katie Hims’ Billy the Girl had a strong naturalistic element – “the furthest into naturalism I’ve ever ventured”, it’s ripe with the kind of realistic detail that a lot of Scotcher’s work moves away from. She explains that “the joy of that kind of work is getting to open the doors on either these incredible historical worlds, or on the private, hidden little worlds you see walking past windows as you go down the road.” Working on the play, which dealt with a woman named Billy’s return to her family after prison, meant being “very gentle and supportive of the tone of the work, and its subtle kind of language. Early on our initial ideas swung it out into a very abstracted space but on further reading it felt we had to find a parallel between the naturalism of the language we were using and the naturalism of the materials, albeit in a very odd kind of way. The ease with which Billy’s mother wrapped things up in a comment and put them to bed is what started to stick in my visual throat, and that came out in this tidal wave of boxes and detritus.”

Ellie Kendrick and Sinéad Matthews in Pests

Scotcher talks a lot about the different visual vernaculars she uses, about aesthetic languages and semiotics, but in more verbal forms of communication, she admits that “I can be a little erratic! Given the avenues my brain takes, I don’t know what I’d do rather than apply them to storytelling and theatre. I’m lucky to have found a profession that sort of relies on having that weird tangent quality to your sort of visual mind.”

Working with Morrison and Clean Break is something she’s drawn to partly for the company’s “nurturing, ethical culture for women playwrights and directors, with so much respect and dedication ploughed into creating these pieces.” But it’s also an opportunity to find a supportive creative environment outside the lively, looser culture of immersive performance and installations. “The process of collaboration is a term that’s often thrown around to mean that the director and the designer might have coffee, but it’s so much more complex than that. When you do find a director who wants that input and is excited by looking at the pictures and saying ‘Yes, we could do that’, and is open to being as playful as I think most designers are, it’s a hugely rewarding position to be in.”

Pests is at the Royal Court from 27th March – 3rd May. For more on Joanna Scotcher’s work, visit her website.

Sochi 2014: Interview with Tess Berry-Hart

We Do Not Have Them in Our City

By Alice Saville

28 January 2014

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“We do not have them in our city,” said Sochi’s mayor, Anatoly Pakhomov, of gay people. Behind the incredulous sighs of a media that’s closely watching Russia in the run up to the 2014 Winter Olympics, fascinated in turn by the country’s suppression of LGBT freedoms, the rumbling threat of terrorism, and the unveiling of the event’s in-no-way-misleadingly rainbow-hued volunteer uniforms, Tess Berry-Hart is probably frantically adding this latest colourful arc in her narrative. As the writer of the King’s Head Theatre’s verbatim response piece to the furore over Russian LGBT rights in the run up to the games, she’s committed to “do my best to incorporate all the various goings on as they happen – the play starts with the federal anti-gay propaganda law being announced, and it ends at the present day at whatever new event has just happened.”

Her involvement started with a phone call from the theatre; “there were all those awful stories coming out of Russia, when the artistic director Adam [Spreadbury-Maher] rang up and said ‘I think there’s a play in here – could you find some Russians and create a rapid response piece?’ This was in August and my first thought was ‘how am I going to do this, I only know a few Russians and I’m eight months pregnant so I can’t really get on a plane and go and find any.’” After an awkward start where “the people I found were very reluctant to talk to me. The law had just been passed and they didn’t really know who this strange person on the other end of the telephone was,” Berry-Hart circulated questionnaires through activist organisations in Russia, and then rang or Skyped anyone with stories that particularly stood out. From then on, “it was a question of who wanted to stand up and be counted and add their voices, anonymously or under their own names. Word spread and I ended up with more stories than I ever could have actually used. As we saw each other across the computer screen a relationship of trust built itself, I suppose. They started to feel that someone outside Russia wanted to help them, and to hear their voices.”

The resulting play features five actors playing 50 characters in “a kind of Brechtian epic, it’s almost the voice of the people” – my conversation with Berry-Hart was scattered with names and stories, of well known players in the story like Stephen Fry, as well as Pussy Riot, straight-washed national heroes like Tchaikovsky, Russian civil rights activists, and of the momentous, terrible events influencing ordinary people. It must have been a gruelling process, so many interviews over such a short space of time, with a new baby – “all of them had a real resonance and a real pathos because when people are trusting you with their stories, you don’t feel one of them is more important that another.”

Activist Masha Geesen

Still, she particularly highlighted the powerful experience of speaking to the activist Masha Gessen, who “as part of one of the very few out families in Russia was specifically targeted by anti gay politicians in order to bring in a new law of actually taking gay families’ children away. And so she had to get her oldest son who was adopted out of the country very quickly, then make arrangements for the rest of the family to flee. I didn’t want it to come across as exploitation theatre, but as a mother myself and a bisexual myself I can’t imagine how frightening that feeling must be, that someone’s coming after you to take your children away because of your private life, that’s just absurd.” Other stories include that of a young gay man who goes on an internet date only to discover it’s a trap by a neo-fascist group, and is beaten, then blackmailed by the police he goes to for help.

But as Berry-Hart points out, there’s some “unintentional humour in the play too; when you read some of the anti-gay rhetoric they use it’s quite horrifying, but in a way quite hilarious as well.” A recent Vice documentary, alongside sobering and brutal footage of police and vigilante treatment of LGBT people, featured a politician explaining, in equally serious terms, that the tolerance of homosexuality had led to a surge in “zoo brothels” in the West. Berry-Hart feels that this humour comes out of a sense in Russia “that they have the moral high ground – they’re subject to such a big right wing conversative push at the moment, and there’s always been a drive to see russia as the antidote to the decadent West. This stance on gay rights is just another facet of that.”

Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

Her first experience of Russia was on a school trip when the walls had just come down. It was all very drab – there was no light, no cars, and hardly any people in the streets. They took us to an ice cream parlour which was effectively someone’s kitchen with a big basin of semi-melted ice cream in it. People had market stalls and were selling items of clothing that we wouldn’t even give to a jumble sale – odd socks and ripped old jeans and that kind of thing.” Returning 16 years later, “it was unrecognisable, just transformed – new arcades, shopping centres, roads packed with traffic.” Maybe some part of the humour comes from the jarring disjunct between this glitzy new Russia and its preservation, or resuscitation, of older modes of living – the same divide that means Russia can host a world sporting event, even as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has exposed its prisons as little removed from the old gulags, and the country moves closer back to the Soviet intolerance that imprisoned hundreds of gay men each year.

This play’s latest incarnation – it’s been rewritten on the basis of new interviews since its scratch performance at the King’s Head in September – has a new section on this complex, heavily politicised history of homophobia in Russia. Given that Russia decriminalised homosexuality in 1993, the reasons behind the recent series of government laws designed to limit homosexual behaviour by outlawing so-called propaganda and demonstrations of more than one person seems a bit surprising.

To Berry-Hart, “it’s to do with the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox church, but it’s also because they never had the sexual revolution and the feminist movement we had in the West, and socially talking women and men aren’t equal. Without gender equality you can’t have gay rights.” I wondered how easy it was, as a writer confronted with so many different viewpoints – some of her sources felt Russia post-propaganda law was an impossible place to live, others saw no change – to come down into one, strongly held political interpretation.

She’s recently taken part in a Cambridge Union debate on whether we should boycott the Winter Olympics, but agrees that “it’s tough, because as a writer you’re trained to see all sides of the debate, and I enter into all the different points of view of my characters – taking a stance is alien to me. But even if I don’t consider myself an overly political person it does seem to come out in verbatim theatre. My last piece was exposing the problems in the criminal justice system, and here I felt it was very important to maintain the spotlight on treatment of LGBT people in Russia, I don’t know if I would feel so moved if it didn’t have a tiny bit of a political nature. It’s lovely to feel, as an artist, that you’re actually making a difference, as opposed to just sitting in your room, typing your fantasies.”

Talking so much about the politics, I realised that my sense of all this research as a play was getting buried. These interviews feel as though they could be turned into anything – why not a documentary, or an article, or a book? Berry-Hart was conscious of “the challenge of trying to make verbatim theatre theatrical, as opposed to a series of talking heads – I’ve tried to make this a theatrical experience, as opposed to an article, or a documentary, by thinking of the characters as embued by the circumstances in which we interviewed them. We [she’s worked closely in rehearsals with her partner David Mercatali, the play’s director] are using a lot of creativity in how the actors transform into each other – we’d like it to be an enjoyable piece of theatre and not just a living testament of voices. Some of the stories they told me about were quite graphic or violent so I’ve tried to express those on stage, and others have turned out as incredibly powerful monologues or meditations on how the new laws had made them feel.”

Another, slenderer incentive to stage these stories is that “the publishing world is having a bit of a dip at the moment, but the theatre world has never had any money and we’re just used to making things happen – the rest of the world has yet to catch up on that. I’d love to take it to Russia – imagine doing it in the Kremlin – but obviously that won’t happen, or not in my lifetime. At the moment the definitions of gay propaganda are so nebulous that simply looking gay, or attractively gay according to some versions of the law, is enough to get you in trouble.” Although this play can’t necessarily bring its sources the help they need, it’s verbatim approach means that “the audience don’t have that fourth wall effect where they switch off and think ‘Ahh this is a lovely story’ or ‘Ooohh that’s a bit violent but it’s not real, it’s just actors on a stage.’ If you know that humans have really said or experienced those things you have to work really hard to not let it affect you. It had that effect on us – you think ‘Oh my god that really happened’, and that shakes you up a bit.”

Although the Winter Olympics can feel both geographically and emotionally distant to a country that’s only snowy sport expertise is in curling (maybe because only we know the rules), the volcanic mass of problems concealed under their snow-white surface simmer in this country too – the Home Office is notorious for its poor treatment of LGBT asylum seekers, and only released the detained Russian activist Ira Putilova after huge, embarrassing public pressure.  As Berry-Hart emphasises, “a lot of people think the Pussy Riot release and Greenpeace amnesty is Putin doing his best to do a PR job. Protests against the propaganda law during the Sochi Games are only allowed ten miles away from the athlete’s village, whereas in this country under Section 28 we could actually take to the streets and protest about it– the words of this law are similar but the effect is far more draconian.” She comes across as intensely political, whatever she says to the contrary, and this play sounds like a kind of densely populated, close-knit protest, unfurling its banner even further away than Khosta park.

Sochi 2014 is at the Hope Theatre, London, from 4th February to 1st March 2014. 100% of profits from all performances will be donated to SPECTRUM

Ghosts

GHOSTS OF MEMORY

★★★★ 

Ibsen’s Ghosts

Trafalgar Studios | London

adapted & directed by Richard Eyre

Ibsen’s play was written to shock, and succeeded; at the time, the Daily Telegraph christened it “a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publically… literary carrion.” The play’s carnal subversions and frenzies now sound muffled in a way that Nora’s final door slam of A Doll’s House isn’t, quite, but Richard Eyre’s harrowing staging means that these ghosts have lost none of their power to haunt.

Tim Hatley’s set is beautiful and painterly, with perspex panels that mean the shadowed figures in the next room are always close – ready to eavesdrop on the family secrets spilling softly out. The play’s warns that these ghosts can’t stay hidden long, with revelations foreshadowed in quiet confidences, unheard but noticed by the play’s younger characters. Ghosts are dark stains imprinted on memories, that like the holes in a player-piano reel are inevitably fallen into and repeated as time rolls on.

Helene is at the play’s centre – a kind of parallel Nora, but one who stayed with her family and suppressed her pain into quiet, agonised domesticity. As the play starts she’s a widow treasuring up the memory of her dead husband in an orphanage built as, and with, his legacy. But the local priest, Pastor Manders, is chipping away at its unsteady foundations, and her plan to tell her son Oswald the truth about his father threatens to destabilise them altogether.  Meanwhile, the bored and pettish maid Regina tries to slot into this narrow world, and her disreputable father Jacob strings out its tensions to reel in some profit for himself.

The interwoven group are confined to one room as their stories close in together and sicken  – as we do too, compressed together in a play taken in a 90 minute swoop straight through. This is very much Lesley Manville’s show, her performance of Helene the emotional centre – and Richard Eyre’s sharp cuts to Ibsen’s text, which under Stephen Unwin’s direction was a full hour longer, emphasise her central role. Lesley Manville’s performance is brilliantly real, and feels somehow modern too – her alternating rebelling against and submission to convention and Pastor Mander’s demands  is agonising. Against her emotional warmth,  Jack Lowden’s Oswald seems thin and nineteenth-century priggish. His romantic artist’s past in Paris is cut to a ghost, fantastical in comparison to his affected, back home with mother present, and making it hard to empathise with his Utopian dreams of free love.

The atmosphere is unremitting. But there are moments of levity and brilliant subtlety, too. Charlene McKenna as Regina’s deliberately, agonisingly deployed French phrases are gently comic, then gently tragic, as the depth of the hopes resting on them becomes clear. And Pastor Manders and her father Jacob dance the age-old jig of the sanctimonious fool and the wily trickster with deft steps, with Brian McCardie’s liquor-sweet protestations of innocence making him a plausible match for Adam Kotz’s half-holy, half-hypocrite gullibility.

Ibsen’s frank treatment of venereal disease, adultery and sexual morality was hugely controversial at the time. Now, enough has changed – not least since the AIDS iceberg has thawed a little – to soften any analogies drawn with the present day. The nineteenth century fear of both moral and physical contagion is largely gone, meaning that the play’s central image is drained of force, and Helene’s departed husband of horror. But although our capacity to be shocked by a man coercing a woman into taking a glass of wine has waned, and free love is no longer the subject of bilious Daily Telegraph editorials, the suppression of Helene and Regina’s potential is all the more shocking.

Helene has the suffragist pamphlets that Nora, imprisoned in A Doll’s House, never read, but Ghosts pin her so perfectly that she has no hope of ever acting on them. This production feels like her tragedy, as Richard Eyre condenses the machinery of Ibsen’s family drama into a tightly sprung trap, feverishly claustrophobic.

Alice Saville

photos | © Hugo Glendinning

Originally appeared on Auditorium magazine's website at http://auditoriummag.com/mag/portfolio/ghosts-of-memory/

LGBT Christmas theatre calendar

I've been wondering about putting all the LGBT theatre listings I come across in one place for a while now. It's partly as a handy resource, and partly because it feels important to get a sense of how these stories are being put on stage, and by who, and how often. It always feels like a bit of a paradox that so many LGBT people work in theatre, but aren't always represented by what goes on on stage. That said, 2013's been pretty good so far, with brilliant, sensitive representations in The Events, The Pride, The Color Purple, Zhe: Noun Undefined, and Passing By, among others.

 At the tail end of the year, things are getting louder, brasher and ruder. Most of the shows I spotted for December are pantos, and South West London's a particular hotspot for the Fringier end of things. Jack Off The Beanstalk, in new gay venue The Stag in Vauxhall, promises filthy fun and scratch 'n' sniff cards for the audience. Just down the road, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern's Little Orphaned Fannie looks similarly likely to put the pant back in panto, as well as being a great place for a drink and some cabaret all year round. Clapham's Two Brewers is home to another pub pantomime, The Bitches of Oz, although the only info I can find about it is an enigmatic series of photos including some ruby slippers and a sign that says 'Keep Calm And Wish You Were Home' -- gosh, I wonder what the Drama Queens Drag Theatre Company are planning...

 If you want something a bit sweeter, Tom Wells' Jumpers for Goalposts at the Bush Theatre will give you toothache in the nicest possible way. It's a tender look at a Hull five-a-side gay football team with an appropriately skewed ratio of jokes to sportstalk for this soccer sceptic. Unlike anything else so far, you could even risk taking your parents... Camp (on the Estate) advertises itself as "suitable for mums and snowball drinkers", so looks to be similarly family friendly. It's a spectacular-sounding variety showcase (Bryony Kimmings, Scottee, Jonny Woo and more) that's drawing attention to a North London council estate that's made the crucial mistake of inhabiting the path of unlovable transport scheme HS2.

 I don't pretend to know anything about comedy, but Bah Humbuggers (Dyke the Halls) caught my eye in Time Out, and is a token attempt to correct the gender imbalance in this month's calendar. It's a curmudgeonly, unChristmassy night of words and music with VG Lee and Rose Collis. And if you fancy reminiscing about the golden days of lesbian and gay theatre (before the much-missed Drill Hall closed down) Alternative Pantos Revisited is fascinating looking talk on at Ovalhouse, as part of their exhibition celebrating the history of alternative theatre.

NB: I'm pretty sure these listings are not even close to exhaustive, as my criteria/searching methods aren't terribly scientific. If you think something should be on here but isn't, or spot a mistake, let me know.

Review Roundup

My favourites from the last month...

Jumpers for Goalposts, Bush Theatre http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/jumpers-for-goalposts/

Heartache. Heartbreak (Byrony Kimmings' new show) http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/heartache-heartbreak/

And I also saw, and enjoyed...

Emil & The Detectives, National Theatre http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/emil-and-the-detectives/ and an interview with the director, Bijan Sheibani http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/directing-the-detectives/

The Anatomy of Melancholy, Ovalhouse http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-anatomy-of-melancholy/

Lizzie Siddal, Arcola Theatre http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/lizzie-siddal/

Zhe: Noun Undefined http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/zhe-noun-undefined/

Passing By, Tristan Bates http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/passing-by/