Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will

Moving house

2010-07-22T10:55:00.002+01:00

I'm now here.

Blogging will continue there, at approximately the current frequency of one post per year.

A Thesis on Synthesis

2010-05-18T17:41:00.009+01:00

In two digressions

(and an excess of parenthesis)

By day I'm rehearsing Road by Jim Cartwright. The cast are graduating BA Acting students at the University of Northampton, and it's going on in the Theatre Royal at the end of the month. Here are all of the reasons it should be doomed to disaster:

- We get one night only: there are two casts of about twenty; each gets a single performance.

- Both casts have their own director, but the design is shared.

- The production budget across both shows is just under £500.

- With this we need to make a set that won't look cheap or exposed in a theatre that's expensive and big.

- We get a total of seven hours in the theatre, including the performance.

- This means there's no possibility of a dress rehearsal before (did I mention this) the only performance.

- Not much of a cue-to-cue, if any.

- Is it even possible to focus lights?

- Fucking hell.

Those are all of the reasons it should be doomed to disaster. Buried below are some of the reasons it will go one better than Oedipus, defy its fate, and enjoy a happy, prosperous existence with a nice family and a wife who isn't a blood relation.

Buried, that is, in a blog post that's mostly about a schism I've exaggerated because it's rhetorically useful to me.

FIRST DIGRESSION:

WARNING: the following contains sickening generalisations.

Cicely Berry and Philippe Gaulier have become twin poles for me. Instinct instructs that they're radically distinct: Berry all about the voice, Gaulier the body. Berry about speaking beautiful language beautifully, Gaulier falling flat on your nose - with flair! Yes?

Well, not really. I spent a fortnight with Cic Berry in November, and was staggered by the extent to which her approach fit Gaulier's, like those siamese twins, struggling apart but ineluctably together. The voice is rooted in the body; is best released by means physical, not analytical. And she delights in anarchy, sometimes to near-mental and downright dangerous extent. One of the most memorable moments of a memorable fortnight was of watching a scene from Lear played as though Goneril and Regan's main action was to strip their father of his worldly weeds (several scenes before he wilfully does the same). This poor old man was completely infantilised, his exposed fury impotent in the face of medically efficient care. And by God you see actors fight. It's one thing writing "resisting" in the margin next to a line, quite another thing translating that action into action. Cis seems to shortcircuit the thinking bit of rehearsals and get straight into the doing bit, responding to the text physically with little need to interpose the brain - except in order to understand what just happened.

This was the advanced stuff. More basic physical exercises allow the exposure and revelation of a character's thought process without any of that bloody analysis. (Cis's mantra for the fortnight quickly became "just fucking do it, darling"; this woman who's been at the RSC since ten years before I was born.) Some of the exercises I'd come across before without knowing they were Cis's. Many of them were new to me. But coming across them all here, at source, I was swimming in mineral springs, unpissed-in by acolytes.

SECOND DIGRESSION:

(in which is developed the main theme)

I've written before that the completion of my shows Man Across the Way and Can of Worms in August 2007 represented for me the culmination of twin projects. (That's projects in the sense of "developing bodies of work": grandly like Picasso's or Brecht's, rather than blandly like the sort you did for Mrs Richards in Art.) Let's be glib and parody these projects as Slick Contemporary New Writing (SCNWP) and Clown-Based Physical Comedy Project (CBPCP). I'm happy to run these acronyms as political parties in the next election, in an attempt to beat the May 2010 low score of 17 votes.

It turns out, of course, that I hadn't nearly finished either project. Monday for Red Ladder and The Buzz for Box Clever were both slick as you like. With "explosive Frantic-style movement sequences" ((C) the press offices of both companies). Play Up, Play Up!, a comedy with songs with Chumbawumba in West Leeds, and Full of Noises, a sequel to The Tempest for the West Yorkshire Playhouse weren't both clown-based, but they were both primarily motivated by comedy, usually physical.

The main developments: Movement work in text-based theatre (Monday and The Buzz), a definite step forward although no different from what plenty of people are doing. Starting with a text to make physical comedy (Play Up, Play Up!). Producing a text while devising physical comedy (Full of Noises, which I wrote). The massive importance of live music (the latter two). Both projects keep moving, but on opposite shores. Can they ever meet?

I'm an instinctive synthesiser. My MA dissertation argued that Brecht and Artaud ain't so incommensurable as you reckon; my PhD was about the massive influence of cheekie chappie Charlie Chaplin on supposed grim teutonic Marxist Bertolt Brecht. Last year I wrote an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast which definitely started trying to build a bridge between the shores. But there are some things you just can't do in a family Christmas show. Fab though, to work on that show as movement director, with a super director firmly from the text side of the tracks, in the shape of my wife, Sarah Punshon. Also ace to have loads of live music and keep exploring that avenue. Road's daily riddled with more music, all live. I don't want to do another show that isn't.

THE INTERACTIVE BIT:

Is there a word for the bit of land that connects two landmasses? I've just asked Twitter and Facebook; I'd thought of "land bridge" but that's shit.

Twitter and Facebook have come up trumps. I'm going to go with "isthmus", no matter how monstrous that is to say four times quickly. Hat tip: @DanRebellato; close seconds, thirds, etc with the same answer: @swaddicor, Anna Burnside and Fergus McGlynn. Hon mensh: @AlexanderKelly for "promontory").

This isn't so much the interactive bit as a report on the interactive bit. Apologies.

BACK TO THE MAIN DIGRESSION:

One of my first sights of the possibility of this isthmus (was it worth it?) came when I noticed that Katie Mitchell and John Wright, notwithstanding the gulf between them (see what I did there?), are often describing something very similar. Bear with me. Big for Wright, or at least my version of Wright, is the "reversal", the moment when "yes" becomes "no" for one performer, or more usually, simultaneously for several. The moment of reversal usually (let's take "usually" as read) comes at the "hotspot" of the scene, where the "yes" really can't be pursued any further. It's often marked by a "fixed point", a few moments of stillness in which "yes" is suspended but "no" hasn't started yet. Those aren't scare quotes, they're quotes. Katie Mitchell, meanwhile, describes the "event", the moment when the intentions of all the characters on stage change. It's always and by definition a moment of increased physical tension, constricting the muscles and often arresting movement. You don't have to be a genius to spot similarities, which is lucky for me.

It would be glib, also idiotic, to say this means Mitchell and Wright are similar artists. Course they're not. What it does mean is they've made very similar observations about human behaviour. They apply these in radically different ways. Mitchell is analytical, Wright instinctive. They apply them to radically different work. Mitchell's is controlled, Wright's is boisterous. But the observations are similar. There is agreement. The languages differ across the gulf, but the objects described in them are related.

It would be once more glib to say this represents a nice little illustration of two key landmasses in British theatre today, not to mention the two of my own practice. It would be even glibber to say that the schism between these two landmasses can be dated to early 1599, when Will Shakespeare parted company with Will Kempe. It would be glib, but I've said it before, so I might as well say it again: that was the point when the literary and the spontaneous parted company. Which isn't to say that never again the twain did meet, but simply to suggest that at that point they became twain rather than wain.

So is there an isthmus? An intermediate language? It's too rare (though not unheard of) that work made in the analytical, text-based tradition contains that zest, that anarchy, that is the mark of genuine life. It doesn't express joy very well. And it's too rare (though not unheard of) that work made in the boisterous physical tradition plumbs beyond pathos to those genuine depths of tragedy. (This work is also too often simply thick-headed and lacking a worldview.) MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: there's a whole bunch of exceptions. To quote another easily-misunderstood statement of intent: "this represents not oppositions but differences of emphasis". All these shortcomings in both languages despite the bleeding obvious: to plumb the depths, you've got to scale the heights. Can't we have both? My heart is in the instinctive approach, my head in the analytical. Can't I have both?

Yes, I can. How?

Well, I'm not going to tell you. What a tease: I'm still figuring it out. I expect to be doing so for the rest of my career. Anticipate staging posts over the coming years.

DIGRESSIONS OVER:

That brings us back to Road. (Fangyuverimuch. A'llbe'ereallweek.)

How do you prepare a cast for the ridiculous constrictions described above? Obvious innit. Create a process that's about improvising within the strictures of text. About finding the new impulse while honouring the underlying one. Responding to the unexpected situation to generate the one secured in rehearsal. Easy.

Ipso facto, it can't possibly fail. Getcherticketsnow. 31 May, Theatre Royal, Northampton.

This is a really flimsy lattice of theses. Your thoughts, objections and counterexamples, please. Then I can do a "but yes" post, followed by a "yes, but".

A Form of Return, but by no means A Return to Form

2009-05-20T13:13:00.003+01:00

I'm back.

Did you miss me?

I never intended to be away this long. But after a couple of months I realised I'd have to post something spectacular to re-announce myself. Otherwise I'd have to renounce myself. Now it's been a year and a half, I no longer feel any pressure to be good; merely to be here is all I crave. I'll ease myself back in with a little light posting and see where it leads us. Hopes are high chez Pessimism of my being back in full querulous-garrulous mode by autumn. Though no doubt it'll be over by Christmas, just like last time.

What have I been up to?

I thought you'd never ask. Polite of you. Don't worry, I won't answer in full. Here's a precis:

I've written some theatre and directed some theatre. I ill-advisedly appeared on the stage for ten performances of a solo show. I've completed a PhD (scoff not). I've run a lot of workshops and, due to ongoing knee trouble, no marathons. I've watched Middlesbrough Football Club sink into the mire, a spectacle more demanding of blind optimism than I can will. I've spent more time travelling than stationary, more time home alone than with my wife. And despite all of that, I remain fairly cheery, ta. You?

This being by way of a re-introductory post, I won't rabbit on about all the projects I currently have simmering. Some of same have been on the boil since last time we met. I expect in the fullness of time they'll come up here, even if not in the world made flesh.

I'll leave you with two thoughts and a trailer, to elevate this beyond mere chat.

Thought One. In theatre, the profession and the academy aren't great pals. In medicine, there's barely a distinction, but in theatre the former is bloody suspicious of the latter. My declaration of interest: despite the aforementioned PhD, which is just about worth the paper it's written on, but certainly not the scholarship it's written thanks to, I'm much more a creature of the profession than the academy. But I think the width and depth of this schism a shame. And I think it might be slowly changing.

That was me whetting your appetite for something I might, but by no means will, talk about now I'm back.

Thought Two. I suspect I'm writing this because I've got a first draft deadline in nine days, I'm away for the rest of the week, and I'm stuck. So am I worried once I've met the deadline, or not, I'll no longer crave your attention as a pretense I'm doing something constructive? A little. But perhaps by the sheer virtue of posting this, I'll feel shamed into saying at least a little more.

And the trailer: in a couple of weeks I'm doing the National Theatre Studio directors' course. That should give me something to talk about. And I hereby promise that this blog will be second only to the pub as a forum for processing my thoughts. We've been asked to learn a poem. Suggestions?

NSDF

2007-12-15T09:21:00.001Z

The bevy of blogs responding to Arts Council England, Yorkshire's decision to cut funding for the National Student Drama Festival has occasioned a fair amount of personal soul-searching.

Like everyone else, I had some of my most important formative experiences at NSDF. Hell, I trump everyone else's stories: I met my wife there. Future generations will owe their lives to the Festival.

Unlike everyone else, I live and work in Yorkshire. I rely, to put it rather cruelly, on some organisations not getting funding in order that I might eat. For me to sign the petition would send to ACE Yorkshire - and my name would be noticed among the signatories - a very peculiar message: "don't fund me, fund them."

Nevertheless, I say, in full knowledge of the peculiar personal position this puts me in: Don't fund me, fund them.

Everything everyone else has said about how NSDF contributes more to the future of theatre for £52k than any of the region's producing theatres do for several times that figure is so obviously right that I don't need to rehash their arguments here: follow the links in the first sentence. I'll give you one more NSDF alumnus to be going on with: Alan Lane, winner, with his excellent company Slung Low, of this year's Samuel Beckett Award. By his own account everyone hated his two shows at NSDF. I'm guessing that's not quite true, but the work he makes now is fantastic and I've been proud to be involved in some of it (now that I think about it, that probably constitutes a declaration of interest. But honestly, I'm never deliberately nice about work I don't like, even when I like the people who made it).

But there is one key sticking point that no-one addresses and is, I think, worth looking at.

ACE Yorkshire's remit is, in large part, to support the arts infrastructure in its region. Producing theatres undoubtedly do that. Touring theatre companies do that not only by developing and producing work in the region, but also by becoming known as, e.g. "Leeds-based Unlimited Theatre", or "Sheffield-based Third Angel" or "Sheffield-based Forced Entertainment". I could go on, but you get the point: these companies bring kudos back to the region's arts scene.

Yet NSDF is a peculiar anomaly: it does very little for the region. Almost none of its alumni goes on to work here: they all go to London. Lane, my wife and myself are very rare exceptions. The work is not seen primarily by people from the region. It makes no dent on the regional media: when I was working as a journalist I repeatedly pitched articles on NSDF to the Northern Echo and the Yorkshire Post, but they weren't interested; it wasn't a story for them. Funding NSDF doesn't actually hit any of ACE Yorkshire's direct funding priorities.

Still, it should be funded. It's a unique organisation and like any unique organisation, it falls between gaps left by more conventional models. A stunning number of people from every individual festival go on to work professionally in the industry. Maybe they would have done so anyway - but almost every single one of them will cite NSDF as a huge influence, a turning point. There are fifty-two years worth of stories like Lane's. It's important. Its funding should be a national priority.

Hot Salt

2007-12-14T11:36:00.001Z

I don't cry much in the theatre, and I'm fairly tough to crack in the cinema, too. But this really got me.

Doin' it for the Kids #2

2007-12-14T10:06:00.000Z

It's that time again, when the year, ebbing away into its life support, is prematurely euthanased by endless end-of-the-year reviews. Let it be known, therefore that there will be no end of year summary from Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will, until the year is good and dead.

The end of the year summary, incidentally, provides an excellent illustration of the founding temperament of this blog, viz, last year was a bit disappointing but here are all the reasons to be excited about next year. You'll get that from me on January 1, as I'm trying to emphasise the optimist. Call it a new year's resolution, but not til a fortnight Tuesday.

With which in mind, today I'm going to talk about children, whom Molly Flatt thinks should be seen and not heard at the theatre. Except that's probably not what she thinks, as that header is no doubt the work of a scurrilous sub-editor.

Anyway. Obviously it's a real pain if you're watching Shaw or Much Ado and there's a school group restively stirring their crisps, texting each other along the row and chatting about how fit Claudio is. But I put it to you: if your audience is that bored, you simply ought to be doing better work. It doesn't matter how old they are: don't ask them to be more polite, physician, heal thyself! and be less earnestly dull. I absolutely refuse to accept that there are groups who simply cannot behave in the theatre. The fifth comment on that Guardian blog derives entirely from class prejudice and is the sort of thing that makes me really quite cross.

An equivalent to Chris Goode's cat test might be the child test. It works like this: you do a show with some kids, of any age, in your audience. If they get a bit restive and you ignore them, you are not live. If you can weave their restiveness into your action, even just by acknowledging they're there, then you are. The first kind of show sees people getting more and more restive. The second infallibly quells their restiveness. Better still: be live enough, and good enough, to keep them from getting restive in the first place. It really is that simple.

It works on exactly the same principle I use when running workshops containing rowdy elements. If someone's talking while I'm talking, I look at them for the next few words, with no accusation or criticism, just to make it clear that I am talking to them, not just talking. And they listen. Teachers and workshop leaders who talk without making any eye contact at all invariably lose everyone's interest in seconds. Whenever I go for interviews for this sort of work I'm always asked the same question about how I deal with seriously disruptive children. My honest answer is that I've never had any in my groups. Maybe this is why.

Shows which are specifically designed for children make a virtue of audience interaction, as does pantomime. As we get older and we "learn to shut up", we learn to tolerate a certain amount of boredom because "it's good for us", so the work we see is allowed to shut itself off. But I do an awful lot of work with teenagers and, I promise you, they're just as capable of concentrating as you or I. They are also a lot happier to admit they're bored. Any show which is not capable of keeping teenagers interested is not live enough, not good enough, not fit for purpose.

There's a perception, because of its association with panto and childrens' theatre, that talking to the audience is somehow lowbrow and infantile. I give you as counterexamples: the theatre of Brecht and Shakespeare. No writer has surpassed those two in their ability to mix seriousness and fun. When they're produced, of course, people tend to emphasise the seriousness and we get the worst kind of deadly theatre. Emphasise the fun, though, and the seriousness will look after itself.

While I'm about it, there is no virtue in "forgetting yourself" in the theatre. That's what Hollywood rom-coms are for.

This is going to sound like a personal diatribe. It's not. I think Flatt's writing is excellent and I recommend her blog, particularly this post on the genius that is Seth Lakeman (my own long-promised post on folk clubs is on its way, I promise).

____________________________________

Regular readers will notice that, in a mild fit of redesign, I've moved myself further to the left and my thoughts further to the right. Read into that what you will.

One's Company

2007-12-07T09:58:00.000Z

Natasha Tripney has a pop at the monologue over at the Guardian blog, and it's true that such shows can make for rather anaemic theatrical experiences. But not always.

The key to Tripney's argument is that in monologue "the writing is inevitably foregrounded" and that in the end this can make the whole process "a bit anti-theatre". This is possibly true. So let's consider the distinction between "monologue" and "solo show".

A monologue implies an actor talking some words and not much else going on. My heart stops, bored, at the thought of this, although I suppose it's probably salvageable as a form. Maybe we'll even get to some examples.

A solo show is a lone performer in front of an audience, doing their thing. This includes stand-up, violin recitals and the Vin Garbutt gig I went to on Tuesday (of which, more in the next couple of days). It also includes, for example, the solo work of Chris Goode which, though scripted, does not foreground the writing so much as the performance. This is what should happen in a solo show.

As soon as there's a second performer on-stage, the actors can engage in the collective delusion that there's no audience present. This is foolish, but comprehensible, and it's possible to rehearse their interactions in such a way as to make them credible.

A solo performer has no-one to talk to but the audience and no possibility of hiding from them. For interactions with that audience to be credible, they have to be real. If you, up there on stage, pretend I'm reacting in a certain way, or just pretend you're making eye contact with me when you're not, then I quickly start to lose interest in you. You're lying to me. The more contact you make and the more that contact is genuine, the more live your show is.

It's true that there is little more exposing than the solo show, but not because weaknesses in the text are more likely to be exposed. A weak text is weak however you say it. No, a solo show is exposing for the performer. It's exposing because you can't hide from the audience. And if you try to, you might get a bit of a safety net from a strong text, but ultimately you're going to hit the floor, hard. In our theatre, where so much futile sweat is put into trying to pretend the audience isn't there, this is peculiarly difficult to get hold of. So many actors pretend to be talking to the audience when they're not. We can tell. Don't pretend I'm not here. I haven't paid ten pounds to be sat in the dark and ignored for an hour. That's just rude.

A couple of examples from recent memory. I saw Limbo, which Natasha mentions, here in York. It's an extraordinary, fully-realised example of the sort of theatre I'm mostly not particularly interested in: the level of naturalistic detail is so overwhelming I even almost suspended my disbelief for possibly the first time in my life. Director Dan Sherer teaches at the Strasberg Centre in New York, and you can tell. Everything is subjugated to verisimilitude: rhythm, tempo, nailing the laughs. Nothing is more important in this production than truth. Nothing is important in this production but truth.

I really enjoyed it. It was fascinating to watch a show in which almost every single decision taken was different to the equivalent decision I'd have taken, and to see a really convincing case made for each of those decisions. If you're interested in finding truth in theatre, you have to go this far or not bother, otherwise you're just saying it. And the one decision I'd have shared was that the performer spoke to the audience throughout. She didn't fake it one iota. A bit neglectful of the crap seats, maybe, but it was real communication between performer and audience. The company would perhaps prefer me to say real communication between character and audience, but I'm not going to. Oh, and the declaration of interest: Dan's a mate. You should meet him. He's top.

Limbo possibly comes under the category "monologue", but I'd say that because it's theatrically so interesting it's more of a solo show. I think I've just realised that I'm simply going to call bad solo shows monologues as a term of abuse from now on. Oh well.

Another reason solo performances are tough is because the introduction of a second and a third voice make it much easier to vary the music of the piece. Finding a high rhythm is incredibly difficult when you've only got one performer, and finding a new note is, too. You need to be a virtuoso, otherwise listening to your voice all evening is going to become tiresome for us. There was a solo show in Edinburgh a few years ago called Basic Training, in which the performer played about seven different characters and flipped between them with bewildering pace and dexterity. It was quite a flimsy piece of gusty All-Americanism, but as an example of solo performance it was sensational. Your man on stage Khalil Ashanti was a virtuoso.

Chris Goode's solo work slips this leash a bit, though. I hope he'd forgive me for describing him as not a virtuoso actor. Nonetheless, his solo shows really work, because he has a very simple and honest way of being with an audience, in this room, today. His relationship with his material is not that of an actor relating to a character by attempting to convince us that he is that character, rather that of a performer presenting a story, or some websites, that he reckons we might find as amazing as he does. He finds them amazing, and he hopes we will too. And the honesty of his amazement, coupled with the fact that he's got a lovely, idiosyncratic way with words and a magical ability to weave together images, communicates to us, directly, and this roomful of people shares something, now.

Tripney's right that solo shows are rarely seen beyond the Fringe. So it's difficult to resist the idea that economics is the driver behind their being put on. Thus as the economy tightens, perhaps we can expect to see an awful lot more of them over the next few years. All the more important then that we pay some proper attention to what makes them work.

-----------------------------------------

After all of the above, it now seems to me particularly foolish that I'm about to embark on making my own solo show, an adaptation of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I make no claim to being a virtuoso performer, either. Hey ho. I'm young, I'll learn. It'll be finished around March/April. Anyone want to book it?

Pretending to be Other People

2007-12-06T10:49:00.000Z

Andrew Field is, as usual, right, when he tells the world to stop getting so het up about perceived pretensions. (Andrew and I have got to stop cross-referencing each other so much, or people will start to talk.) For my money, though, he misses one major reason pretension is a good thing in the theatre.

The basis of almost all theatre is people pretending to be other people. Pretension is written into its very nature.

It gets very complicated, though, this pretending to be other people, when we start to think about it professionally. I'm not sure it was like that for the Elizabethans. I'm pretty sure they just got up and did their lines in a manner they hoped would prevent the audience, as far as possible, from throwing pies, starting fights, or shouting too much during the quiet bits. Stanislavski put paid to all that, if it wasn't on its way out already. From that point it became necessary, in order to pretend to be another person, to try to have a good idea of what it would be like to actually be that person.

And not just a good idea. Research. Truth. The Actual Objective Facts About People, even when those people and those "facts" are made up. Certainly in the British drama schools, this is the method of training which obtains today, a method heavily predicated on the assumption that there is a truth that can be got at, a truth that is usually considered to be inscribed in the text. There is a character in there, if only I can get it out. Like those weird guys with metal detectors, you may be looking for the treasure of the Sierra Madre, but you're mostly finding old Coke cans. Pretension is problematic when you tell us that what you've found is of value and most of us believe you.

This isn't acting, it's voodoo. When did pretending to be other people turn into trying to become other people? The search for truth seriously limits our options; isn't the credible much more interesting and broad than the true? Theatre is a space where we can make stuff up, where we can indulge in a collective let's pretend, where it's all a big fun game. Yet so much of the time we see shows, if you follow, pretending that they aren't pretending. Pretending it's actually real. As if somehow this will dignify the practice of let's pretend. You're chasing shadows, doing this. You'll never succeed in convincing me that something that's not real is real, because I know it's not. I'm not an idiot. I've got ten GCSEs, and that's more than I need to see through this one. Stop wasting your energy, and instead try to convince me that something incredible is credible. Ask me "what if...?"

I'm not saying that the act of pretending should be foregrounded the whole time, like with Forced Entertainment's gorilla suits and the Wooster Group's blackface. (Incidentally, if you're interested in the Woosters, you simply must check out George Hunka's excellent essay Ghosts in the Text and - another Field plug - Andrew Field's stuff on the Woosters' Hamlet in the blog linked to above.) I've greatly enjoyed work by both companies, but a theatrical diet based exclusively on such post-structuralist struggles with subjectivity would be thin gruel indeed. If all theatre were simply about theatre, I'd be too bored with it to bother thinking of an end to thi

If there's a problem endemic in contemporary theatre, if there's a problem with this culture of literary management that people seem to get worked up about, it's a different kind of earnestness. Much of comptemporary work is obsessed with telling stories. No bad thing in itself. But it doesn't tell them, it exhibits them - an artist exhibiting a painting doesn't actually need to be in the same room as those appreciating it, but an actor does. Why pretend otherwise? We should give back some primacy to the simple pleasure of pretending. Pretending to be other people is fun and watching people pretending to be other people is fun, too.

Brecht felt that by stopping bothering to pretend that what's going on in the theatre is real, the reality of what the play referred to would be felt all the more. It's a bit pat to suggest that by pulling away the scales of theatrical illusion, our eyes also learn to correct for the distortions of that other great deceiver, capitalism. But it's certainly true that if all our interpretive energy is directed towards trying to catch people out in a lie or an inconsistency, then our attention might more productively be directed elsewhere.

I leave you with Sir Ian McKellen on the subject:

Our Friends in the North #2

2007-12-05T09:12:00.000Z

Or,

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will Goes Investigative

OK, listen up. You know that canoeist, the chap who disappeared five years ago off Seaton Carew beach and turned up this week at a London police station? Well.

A source close to Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will, who happens to live in Seaton Carew, was talking to this blogger on the phone last night. Amid talk of Christmas presents and free beer, the topic of the canoeist came up, partly because our source had the news on in the background, and there were pictures of Seaton Carew beach being shown thereon. I said I thought there might be a play in there (although actually, Fin Kennedy's written it). But as it turns out, real life is sometimes just as interesting as plays.

"Yeah, I thought he'd turn up", said our source. "A couple of days after his disappearance I had a couple of pints with him in the Staincliffe."

When I had recovered from my astonishment sufficiently to pick up my shopping, I pushed further. There was more.

This chap, name of Darwin, had not only not actually "disappeared", in the strictest sense of the word, but this non-disappearance was fairly well-known among the Seaton Carew community. The list of those in the know includes more than one police officer and the staff of at least one hotel.

Shortly before his "disappearance", Darwin bought two very large sea-front properties (total value: around £600,000, very possibly more). It is not known precisely when he took out his life insurance policy, but adding these properties to his portfolio can't have done that policy any harm.

Yet he was a prison officer. Where did he get that kind of money? Well, the fellow he bought the houses from was the local cigarette smuggler, who'd recently been sent down for nine months. Did they change hands for well below the market rate, to avoid an uncomfortable meeting between the Inland Revenue and a convicted smuggler? You may very well think that: I, of course, couldn't possibly comment.

Since he was declared dead in 2003, his wife has been living in Panama. Where has he been? Do you want to know my guess? Panama. As reported in the Daily Mirror, a photo of the couple was taken there last year. The BBC says it hasn't been independently verified, but this is me, verifying it, now.

So why has he come back? Again, pure playwright's speculation, but I'm betting: he's fallen out with his wife and, since she holds the purse strings on his life insurance policy, he's getting back at her the only way he can.

And now he's been arrested, which never happened to that pianist they found. We know not on what charge, but I'm guessing insurance fraud is only the top of the list.

Now there's a story.

DISCLAIMER: the above is mostly either single-sourced or speculative. Take it with a pinch of salt. Personally, I trust the source, but this should not be taken as a guarantee of fact or even a reliable allegation. It's speculation. I like stories, that's all.

-----------------------------------------

Seaton Carew, by the way, is the only place in the world where I've ever attended a funeral with a Mob presence. That's Mob, organised crime, not mob, gang of yobs. Even though, for once, everyone's wearing the same kind of suit, you can still tell who's who.

Who the hell am I?

2007-12-04T12:13:00.000Z

Last time I was cited on the Guardian blog I was "director Dan Bye". I've just been cited again, by the excellent George Hunka, one of the top bloggers in the sphere (thanks, George!), this time as "blogger and playwright Daniel Bye".

If you write for the Guardian blog and you're reading this, could you cite me as something entirely different, just to add to my collection? "Long-distance runner D.N. Bye", for example. Or "Middlesbrough supporter and deviser Daniel Bryne". (After this last review my friend Will sent me the following message on Facebook: "I just saw a show called Can of Worms, directed by this guy Daniel Bryne. It was really good. You should do something like that.") Or perhaps "academic and drunkard David Bip".

I'm collecting identities and I shall wear them like so many hats. Who would you like me to be?

UPDATE: Thanks, Kelly!

You

2007-12-04T09:25:00.000Z

While drinking my breakfast coffee, I found this procrastination aid at the wonderful Soho the Dog:

1. Put your iTunes/ music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT

CAPITAL LETTERS! I MUST OBEY!

1. If someone says ‘Is this OK?’ you say?
I Can’t Stand It – James Brown
I have a low threshold

2. What would best describe your personality?
Ulcragyceptimol – The Associates
This word seems to have no use in the world apart from in the title of this song. In a way this is the most perfect use of this meme: the song sums up my personality, not just its title. Worrying if so.

3. What do you like in a girl?
Grace - Jeff Buckley
My wife is serene.

4. How do you feel today?
Crime and Punishment - Fun Lovin' Criminals
And I only had two pints last night

5. What is your life’s purpose?
Personality Goes a Long Way - Pulp Fiction Soundtrack
Hear hear

6. What is your motto?
Motorcade - Magazine
Ooh, cryptic.

7. What do your friends think of you?
Versus - Avail
Mostly, my friends are against me. Maybe this is because I really like Avail.

8. What do you think of your parents?
Carcassi 7 - David Tanenbaum
hm.

9. What do you think about very often?
Waggy - Blink 182.
By this point I'm starting to think that the compilers of this meme thought songs had more meaning in their titles.

10. What does 2+2=?
Part One - Ben Grove, Man Across the Way soundtrack
I've got a GCSE in maths, you know.

11. What do you think of your best friend?
Instant Karma - John Lennon
He's a good guy

12. What do you think of the person you like?
Five Guys Named Moe - Joe Jackson
I can't narrow it down

13. What is your life story?
Poe-Naw-Grah-Fee - Bill Hicks
Oh dear.

14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Heart of Glass - Blondie
I want to get smashed.

15. What do you think when you see the person you like?
Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll - The Killers
This has actually been true, on occasion.

16. What do your parents think of you?
Stain - Nirvana (from Incesticide, obviously)
I should have remembered the sorts of things that are in my music collection before I embarked on this exercise.

17. What will you dance to at your wedding?
Love Dance (Act One) - Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet
Doesn't bode well for my marriage.

18. What will they play at your funeral?
Grey Gardens - Rufus Wainwright
I want everyone to be really miserable

19. What is your hobby/interest?
A Hard Day's Night - The Beatles
I really like working unsociable hours.

20. What is your biggest secret?
Wonderlust King - Gogol Bordello
That's what they call me. They just don't tell anyone.

21. What do you think of your friends?
Half-Empty Bottle - A.F.I.
They're disappointing.

22. What should you post this as?
You - Avail again.

An Ululation

2007-12-01T08:36:00.000Z

Have a listen to this bizarre interview with Katie Mitchell, from yesterday's Woman's Hour. Among other things, Jane thingy asks her if the actors secretly think she's rubbish, and admits she's not earnest because she appears to like cake.

Most notably, there's a lot of the usual stuff asking Mitchell about whether she likes dividing the critics. This is a peculiar notion people have when they don't make work themselves. Of course people don't want to divide the critics. They want undivided adulation. But if they're making work honestly, as Mitchell undoubtedly is, they simply have to make the best work they can according to their own instincts, and hope critics and audiences share those instincts.

Jane Whatsit cites this review by Charles Spencer, considering it typical of the sniffier responses to Mitchell's work in its accusations of "arrogance", its decryal of her "smashing up the classics", its despair that her "primary aim isn't to serve the dead author". My feeling is that Euripides' reputation will survive Mitchell's degredations, if such they are. And if he thinks she's cut too much, he should see my production. I think we've got about five lines that derive from Euripides.

But seriously folks. Is the director's first responsibility really to the unknown whims of dead people? Not to the audience? Not to their artform? To a guy who died 2500 years ago? That's 500 years before Jesus, for crying out loud. God's bread, it makes me mad. And then the very next day, Spencer writes this even more egregious assault on the idea or possibility of art in the theatre - and that's just when talking about Trevor Nunn. When he demands plays be allowed to speak for themselves, what can he mean? If that's what he wants, why does anyone direct them at all? Why not just sit around and have a reading? Or better still, why not *$%* off home and let those of us who actually like theatre carry on making and watching it?

The Women of Troy

2007-11-29T10:23:00.000Z

I'm not going to get to Katie Mitchell's much-blogged-on production of Euripides' The Women of Troy, partly because tonight I'm opening a production of Euripides' The Trojan Women. Bloody National Theatre, always nicking all my best ideas.

Writing the adaptation has been one of the toughest writes I've ever had to do. For seventy minutes (eighty in Mitchell's production, but she's added lots of dancing while I've just put in a song), nothing much happens on stage, relationships change very little and there's almost no drama in our understanding of the term. It's an exercise in sustained tension, almost never driven by the characters on stage, almost always driven by the sudden arrival of Greeks. Andrew Field is right to use it to challenge the notion that Greek plays end in catharsis, although it's worth pointing out that the notion comes from Aristotle, not Brecht. Beyond Antigone, Brecht didn't display much interest in Greek drama and used Aristotle's theory not to engage with the Greeks but to elucidate the ways his work was different from - in his mind - pretty much all drama that predated him.

And yet there is something Brechtian about the givens of much Greek drama. Early in his career he commends the young Helene Weigel, to whom he is not at this point married, for her performance as the servant in (I think) Oedipus. She enters and proclaims the death of Jocasta in a perfectly controlled and measured way, and the young Brecht is struck by this (all-too-rare in the theatre of Weimar Germany) avoidance of histrionics. It's easy to imagine that this led to his formulation of the much-ruined-at-A-level conception of the "street scene", in which eyewitnesses report a road accident while bracketing off their statements with "he said" and "she said" and so on, putting them at a critical distance from their own observations. Yet it's my experience when devising or running workshops that develop work out of stories from life, that people rarely give in to histrionics when reporting real events. They are calm, and they are measured, and they look for laughs however grisly the matter, in many ways just like in that performance of Helene Weigel. The reportage of offstage events onstage, it seems to me, lends itself to sachlichkeit.

Now that I think about it, I realise we've shat on this somewhat in my adaptation, through the way we've deployed Cassandra. In the spirit of the democratic apportionment of stage time, I've got most of the major Trojan women on stage most of the time, rather than having them pass through on coaches or whatever (reading between the lines of some reviews, it sounds like Mitchell may have done the same thing). So most of the reportage is done by Cassandra, who with her "gift" of second sight is able to witness these events as if they were happening in front of her. So she's pretty histrionic. No critical distance there, then, except in so far as, however compelling the evidence, she is cursed never to be believed by the other women, which is on occasion quite funny; Cassandra going loudly nuts and everyone else looking at one another wondering who's going to address the elephant in the room and tell her to shut up.

And as my PhD thesis hypothesises, the further you get into a Brecht show which isn't a comedy, the more prominent becomes a kind of comic verfremdungseffekt. There's nothing like laughter to remind us we're in an audience. It's not out of a conscious adhesion to my reading of Brecht so much as out of the same instinct that makes me read Brecht in that way, but the grimmer the situation in this production, the funnier the show gets. The second half starts with a game of grandmother's footsteps and ten minutes from the end Hecuba, who's on her last legs by this point, tells a no shit actual joke.

---------------

I hope to regale you further with my thoughts on Greek drama, but frankly it's unlikely. I've been planning to blog about this show since we started making it, but the aforementioned PhD thesis is causing a bottleneck of all other output. If I don't finish and hand in by December 31st I'll be shot, so it'll be slim pickings from me for a while longer. Now I'm going to go and knock out 3,000 words before I go to the theatre at teatime. Wish us luck!

Mud Unslinging

2007-11-24T08:37:00.000Z

I'm not one to sling mud without cause. Not much, anyway. So if I sling mud like I did here and the victim then removes the provocation like she has here, I unsling the mud. Lyn Gardner is no longer a metropolist. That is all.

Quotation Competition

2007-11-19T16:41:00.000Z

"A theatre that can't be laughed in is a theatre to be laughed at."

Answers on a postcard. Winner gets a beer next time they're in York. Or next time I'm wherever they are.

Metropolist!

2007-11-19T10:22:00.000Z

I've said before that the extent to which I usually agree with Lyn Gardner is a little giddying. Some people like a critic who's a reliable barometer of their own tastes. Some like to stand proudly aside from the whole hubbub. I'm in the latter, smug contrarian, camp. But Gardner consistently hits the mark.

All of which is prelude to a rare but impassioned quarrel with her most recent post on the Guardian blog. I don't disagree with anything she says in her "tips on the best drama around the country". The shows in there I've seen are great, the ones I haven't I want to. So what's up?

The clue is in that phrase "around the country". Let's do some sums. By my count, seventeen events are recommended. Of those, thirteen will take place in London. Of the other four - or, to look at it another way, of the shows mentioned in the one paragraph that looks outside the M25 - two are by London-based companies, and a third (A Play a Pie and a Pint) is noteworthy because someone in London (Paines Plough) borrowed the idea. Tim Crouch lives and works in Brighton. Gardner even goes so far, in her mention of Gecko's new show, as to say "if you want a sneak preview [...] before it arrives at the Lyric in January", thus managing to imply that anyone watching theatre outside London must be a Londoner looking to get ahead of the game.

I'm not seeking to deny that much of the country's best theatre is originated and/or performed in London. Obviously it is, and I frequently go to London to catch up on new work. But not all of it is. And if you're going to give us a column on the best theatre around the country, then tell your readers beyond the orbital something they don't know, or stick to London and be done with it; and get Hickling to blog on the north.

I'm Gonna Live Forever

2007-11-15T10:44:00.000Z

I've been namechecked on the Guardian blog. At a time when the Guardian is contractually obliged to source two-thirds of its blog contributions from amongst my friendship group, perhaps all that's surprising is that it took this long for me to find this fame. More dedicated readers, however, will simply find themselves wondering why I haven't been asked to contribute myself. But I'm afraid I can't decide which of the available flippant answers to give to that question, so they'll have to continue wondering.

So instead I'll direct you to Andy Field, Guardian blogger extraordinaire (one n? one r? it doesn't look right), who has a bit more to say on the history of a conversation that, were it to take place in a pub, would look for all the world like a clique of bloggers. For the record, I've never actually met Andy F and were it not for his byline photo on the Graun, wouldn't know him from Adam. But I've known Andrew H for nearly ten years and Alex F was at university with my wife.

I'd also like to point out my favourite irony of recent months, in the photo selected by the Guardian subs to adorn Andy's post. To illustrate an article comparing theatre's audience engagement unfavourably with that of sport, the photo shows a sparse audience dozing off at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre (I'd know those orange seats anywhere). But they're not dozing off during the current production of Amadeus, directed by the splendid Nikolai Foster, oh no. They're dozing off during the snooker.

Nonetheless, everything Andy says is entirely right.

--------

In other news, Glasgow's Tron Theatre is advertising for a new artistic director, barely a year after the appointment of the current incumbent Gregory Thompson and little more than six months since his first production there. Now I've met Greg; he's a top man and a triffik director, but it's fair to say that his work there has not been popular. But a little year? Are we seeing in theatre the disease that infects football (McClaren Must Go!), whereby managers get a couple of dozen games to prove themselves before speculation breeds that they're facing the boot? Or did he jump? Either way, McClaren must go.

Before Greg, the Tron's artistic director was an Irishwoman whose name escapes me (Abigail something, I think),* and she, also, was there for little more than a year. And before that the building was run for ten years with phenomenal success by Neil Murray, a splendid fellow who's now Chief Executive of the National Theatre of Scotland. Michael Billington recently wrote an article of rare good sense arguing, inter less uncontroversial alia that the current spate of appointments of producers to helm theatres cannot be to the good: "theatre is too serious a business to be left to the suits". Neil Murray is the most powerful counter-argument that statement could have.

I recently met Mark Feakins, who's co-helming Sheffield Theatres during their post-Sam West dark period (pun intended?), during which they're presumably replacing the orange seats, not to mention the extraordinary carpet, a local talking point, which somehow manages to clash with itself. Mark reminded me of Neil Murray in several ways: grounded, fun and stuffed with good sense. I don't want to talk my sort out of jobs, but Billington's view is rather Manichean. Directors have run theatres badly and made appalling artistic choices, just as producers have run them boldly and well. Who'd've thought Avram Grant would be doing so well at Chelsea?

* Postscipt: it was Ali Curran

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: one or two of you have asked if my gruntles have been dissed by my not having been asked to contribute to the Guardian blog. Set your minds at ease. Assuming journalism hasn't changed in the five or six years since I practised it, it would be necessary for me to ask them if I wanted to contribute, not the other way about. I was merely being tart without cause.

Music

2007-11-12T16:48:00.000Z

To the West Yorkshire Playhouse to see Kneehigh's Brief Encounter, a more expensive business than usual: I missed the numerous performances to which they were prepared to give me comps, and now that I've moved to York I have to pay nine quid just to get to the right city. My penury has dimished slightly since I last moaned about it, thanks to the excellence of the Peggy Ramsay Foundation, who are backing The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, but still. Upwards of twenty quid for a theatre ticket? It had better be good. I don't usually pay anything. Do you know who I am?

But if there's a good bet, it's Kneehigh, right? The makers of Cymbeline and Tristan and Yseult, two of my favouritest shows since, well, ever, can always (or almost always) be relied upon to come up with the goods.

And it's quite good. In terms of fun, life and sheer chutzpah, it still defectates precipitously on just about everything else that gets put on these days, G-G-G-Granville. Sadly, Kneehigh are just about the only company who can produce something that's in so many ways exemplary and still nevertheless find themselves drowing in the sea of "slightly disappointing"s. The trouble is, after huge mythic narratives like Cymbeline and Tristan, to move onto a story about an unhappy love affair between two members of the upper middle classes is a bit anticlimactic. The fact is that the leads are the only people in the show who are almost no fun to watch; the stage consistently flattens slightly whenever they're on it. This isn't because they're giving poor performances, it's because I'm not interested in angsty repressed near-adulterers. Not only am I a happily-married man, I also have a serious weakness for plays where things actually happen. Yeah, Godot's ok, but it's an exception.

The show represents a consolidation of the aesthetic shift made in A Matter of Life and Death, both shows exploring a more distinct social world than the previous mythic work; that world being that of WW2. It's a well-realised world that manages to incorporate the usual Kneehigh-isms we all know and love, like the aerialist bit and the chorus (this time of cinema ushers testily waving their torches and pleading for quiet) into an MGM aesthetic, blending in some lovely video at the top and tail of each half for good measure. There's also a music hall strand which sits a little oddly alongside the cinematic, and also alongside Coward's urbanity for that matter, but helps thread in Kneehigh's popular roots and works, in the end, rather nicely.

There's also Stu Barker's music. Pretty much since Emma Rice's tenure as artistic director began, Barker has provided terrific music, played live, that manages to blend theatrical sensitivity with a sort of parka-wearing indie swagger that gives the whole thing a super edge. Rice's loyalty to the regular faces is a wonderful thing - Kneehigh's constant activity make them just about the closest thing we've got to a rep. system - but in this case it's a cockup.

Music is such an important facet in the creation of any show's atmosphere, and the atmosphere of this show is constantly unseated by music that doesn't quite fit. There's an argument to be made that the quality of not-quite-fitting is in its own way a worthwhile one to pursue, that it provides a sort of temporal Verfremdungseffekt. I'm not having it. It just gets in the way. It's neither MGM nor music hall, and its not being either of these things is felt never more keenly than when it's trying to be. In pastiche, in tribute, and in abeyance of these influences, it remains stubbornly Stu Barker. It's great stuff in and of itself, but it's just plain wrong. Sorry.

So I've never felt more keenly the need to use period instruments in the Kemp show. We'll do it irreverently, perhaps we'll play modern songs on them. But before we can upend that aesthetic world, we have to get inside it.

Do not adjust your set

2007-10-26T10:25:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the radio silence, pessimism watchers. I moved house at the weekend and my life is slowly emerging from its boxes and black plastic bags, like a very slow audit of my existence.

And we haven't got internet in the new place yet, so here I am posting from Starbucks, where it costs a thousand pounds an hour (only payable by credit card) plus the cost of a bucket of green tea that's not as nice as the one I'd have had at home.

But I want to plug you before I disappear back to the horror of bill payments and transferring of direct debits: I'm doing a show! A week from today!

Sanctuary is a new ten minute play for two performers and a church. It can be seen five or six times during the course of next Friday evening, in the Holy Trinity Church on Goodramgate, York. For those of you who are in the area, come. For those of you not, come to the area. It's an extravagantly ambitious piece about global warming and the nature of faith and stuff like that, and it really oughtn't to be missed, not least because I've succumbed to hubris and am "writing" it as well as directing it. Writing is in inverted commas because more than half of it will be done in the rehearsal room. With which in mind: keep your eyes peeled next week, once BT have pulled their fingers out, for a nice long post about combining directing with other activities in the same process.

Back to the binbags.

Dear Will Kemp,

2007-10-17T19:34:00.000+01:00

Someone got here recently by googling "Shakespeare's relationship with Will Kemp", a subject I addressed here. I bet you wondered if people would remember you after Shakespeare booted you out, and here you are being googled.

Regular readers will know that the next Strange Bedfellows show is going to be about you, and your relationship with Mr WS will certainly obtrude, painful though that may be. That show is well over a year away, so this being no doubt the first of many missives I'll keep it to one thought:

It can't have helped your relationship with Shakespeare when, in one of the first plays to be presented after your ejection from his company (Hamlet), the main character experiences a significant life moment while clutching the skull of a dead clown:

"I knew him, Horatio. A fellow
Of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath
Borne me on his back a thousand times. And now, how
Abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rims at
It."

For many years you bore him on your back, and this is how he repays you. My gorge rims at it.

Our Friends in the North #1: Sheffield, 21:35, Monday

2007-10-16T09:30:00.000+01:00

(The first in an occasional series)

It's always alarming, that moment when a drunk starts bearing down on you in the city centre at night. This one was no different. Mid forties, hoodie, bald as a snooker ball and lugging a Lidl bag presumably stuffed with the booze that's causing the lurch.

I have this terrible habit of making eye contact with people. Once that's done, you have to smile. And who knows where that might lead?

He nods. "Alright, fella."

"Alright."

"How you doing?"

(I'm going to miss my train.) "Really good, thanks. Yourself?"

He's unmistakeably lunging towards me now.

"I shouldn't be drinking," he slurs. No shit.

"Night in tonight, then?" No chance.

"I'm going to the pub." He points to the pub in question. I doubt they'll let him in with his goodie bag, even if his demeanour doesn't put them off. He's definitely swaying and spit comes out when he talks. He's going to carry on talking to me first, though.

"What you up to?"

"I've just been working at the theatre." Please god don't make me have to explain a physical comedy workshop. This guy is a physical comedy workshop.

"I went to the theatre once."

"Oh yeah?" I hope this doesn't sound as sceptical as it looks in type.

"Just once in my life I went to the theatre. What do you think I saw?"

Cinderella? Babes in the Wood? I hazard no guesses and just ask him what he saw, but he's drifted back to the sotten world in his head. I ask again and he tells me.

"Swan Lake." That was unexpected. He continues: "Swan Lake. And do you know what it made me do?"

I definitely don't want to know the answer to this, but I figure he's going to tell me. I wait for him to negotiate his way through whatever thought process allows him to speak.

"It made me cry." Now that was unexpected. Then with a lurch of logic to match his gait, "how old are you?"

I tell him, and he reciprocates by asking me to guess how old he is. Why do people insist on doing this? There's no way of coming out of it well. I once worked at a drama group peopled by asylum seekers and I guessed the age of an Afghan called Khan at 45. He was 28. I don't think booze has quite the same effect as war, but I decide to play it safe anyway.

"36"

"I'm 45. You've got everything, Dan" (when did I introduce myself? I suppose I must have done. Come to think of it, that explains why he's got hold of my hand at this point.) "You've got everything. I've got my dinner here. Bread, baked beans and sweetcorn. You've got everything. Go out there and give 'em hell."

He shows me the contents of his bag. Wholemeal bread, baked beans and sweetcorn it is, multiple cans of Stones it isn't.

"Go out there and give 'em hell."

"Um. Cheers. Have a good night." And I go off to catch my train.

For the five years I've been going there regularly, Sheffield has maintained a minimum of 90% building site. It's looked like someone's lost a tenner and is systematically uprooting the whole city in its pursuit. But now it's finished and a light show of mirrored steel and waterfalls illuminates the walk from the theatre all the way back to the station. It's not always what you would expect.

Are you starting, like?

2007-10-15T14:37:00.000+01:00

I just can't stay away, can I?

The occasion for my precipitate return is the announcement by Channel 4 that my hometown is the worst place to live in the UK.

Difficult to know how to respond to that sort of abuse, really, except with a dignified silence.

My Friends in the North

2007-10-15T09:38:00.001+01:00

Just back from a weekend in Newcastle. I went up to see Our Friends in the North at Northern Stage, and The Pitmen Painters at Live. Both have had excellent reviews (Our Friends in the North; The Pitmen Painters). It's nice to see my native Northeast riding so high in the regional theatre stakes.

All the more disappointing, then, that I didn't see either show. Saturday night's performance of Our Friends in the North was cancelled because a bit of set had fallen on an actor. And Live put the tickets for their Sunday matinees on sale from noon the day before, and when I phoned at twelve thirty they'd sold out.

Still, not an entirely wasted weekend. Stayed with a friend who's a qualified physiotherapist, so he had a look at my knee. He reckons I've irritated the bursar, which sounds like something one might do in an episode of Porterhouse Blue. Fortunately it's not too serious and another few days rest ought to see it usable again. The even better news is that it turns out that Benet, who I've known for ten years, also does a bit of running and has similar times and goals to me. So we're going to work as virtual training partners and target Paris in 2009 as our sub-3 marathon. Buy your tickets now.

Otherwise, it might be a quiet week for me online. I've a lot of words to write this week, as well as some very ugly accounts to sort out and a couple of small projects to start casting. Also, I'm moving house on Saturday. We're gradually edging closer to my spiritual (and, I suppose, actual) home, by moving thirty miles further north, to York. After nine years almost entirely living in Leeds, it's time for a change of scene. York is a very pleasant scene, especially if you like very old buildings, real ale and easy access to some of Britain's most beautiful countryside. I like all of these things, so expect to be hearing from a contented Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will in the not too distant future.

Good News?

2007-10-13T08:11:00.001+01:00

Good news, I think. It's always difficult to penetrate the minutiae of Government funding strategies, and judging by the slapdash grammar the BBC writer hasn't spent a great deal of time doing so either. But it appears that, despite DCMS receiving only an inflation-level increase in its budget, the department has been able to announce a slightly above-inflation increase in the budget for ACE. It's not whooping and tossing of hats into the air stuff, but it's good news - not least because it goes some way to proving the thesis that James Purnell is a genuine friend to the arts.

Of course, a fair chunk of that money must go into funding the Cultural Olympiad. But artists needn't feel particularly threatened, as it seems increasingly likely that those responsbile for disbursing the cash will use it to fund the sorts of projects that would have got funded anyway. And I predict that in the next round of ACE policy reviews, the criteria will be re-adapted to place a much bigger focus on excellence. Call it a hunch.

But we're not in the sunlit uplands yet, because there'll be an election in 2009 which, the way Brown's going, the Tories are in serious danger of winning. And how do you think they'll fund their massive cut in inheritance tax?

The Dreaded Accordion

2007-10-12T20:59:00.000+01:00

The music in devised theatre is always the same, isn't it? I went to some of the Light Night entertainment in Leeds library and art gallery earlier this evening, and there was a super burlesque-cabaret-bunch of stuff going on. But I've heard it all before. Chris Goode's mooted moratorium, mentioned earlier today by Andrew Haydon really ought to incorporate the whole musical aesthetic implied by the dreaded accordion.

Don't get me wrong. There are episodes of The West Wing that I've seen a dozen times or more without my geekery thinning out. I like this stuff. But will someone please create a piece of devised physical theatre using something else?

Who's to blame? Brecht? Shockheaded Peter? Answers on a postcard.

It must be possible to create a piece of theatre using a different musical tradition as its pulse. I'd like to see a show soundtracked by Vin Garbutt, if it has to be folksy, or maybe, radically, something involving neither guitar nor accordion. My next show for Strange Bedfellows is going to be a sort of life of Will Kemp. Part of its artistic mission, I've now decided, is to make the lute cool.

Staring at the Coalface

2007-10-11T12:07:00.000+01:00

There was a time when novels were written predominantly for those with sufficient time on their hands to read them. Tolstoy might have been an emancipator in spirit, but do you think War and Peace was read by even one of the 80% of Russians who ploughed out their existence in the serf-and-peasant-ry? Alright, maybe one. But not many. And as literacy started to climb, so more and more novels were written in instalments, in a generous acknowledgement that the idle rich were thinning out and the not-so-idle middle-classes who formed your boom market didn't have time to gobble down all eight hundred pages of Bleak House in one sitting.

When did that start to change? When did it become de rigeur to deliver your novel all neatly packaged between conclusive covers, as if we can be trusted to read responsibly and not let it interfere with our other responsibilities? There's a point, maybe a hundred or two hundred pages into a really good novel, when the world of that novel permeates the real world utterly, and the only way to resolve or collapse the resulting confusion is to get the damn thing finished. This is fine when the novel's only three or four hundred pages, you can usually knock it on the head on a Sunday, but when it's War and Peace you're saying goodbye to anything constructive being achieved for the best part of a month, assuming you're still obliged to clock in and out and can't just plant yourself on the sofa and guzzle it down like Mr Creosote. Instalments, like rationing, would keep everything under control if, like me, you can't be trusted to behave responsibly when caught in the magnetic field of a good book.

Aside: just because The West Wing was released in weekly instalments doesn't mean that I haven't lost weekends - weeks! - tearing through the DVD box sets of seasons I didn't see the first time round.

I'm currently devouring John Banville's The Sea which, though short, has the added problem of being the sort of book whose sentences you frequently want to read again. It has no chapter breaks. Putting it down is almost impossible, so giddy are the pleasures it affords. I succeed in manfully tearing myself away to do some work, write 500 words or so, then find I'm stuck in a terrain determined by Banville, attempting to write a thesis on his terms, when who knows, he may never have read any Brecht and certainly has little interest in clowns. So I've come here instead to get some of it off my chest.

The range of temptations the modern world offers to put dents in one's productivity are endless. I'm in the midst of endless games of scrabble on Facebook and have somehow also got embroiled in three games of chess, a game I've no taste for. I regularly check some twenty or so blogs on theatre and politics, not to mention actively participating in the Runner's World forum.

I've written about productivity before, and I suppose by most external measures I count as a fairly productive person. Inventory: I just had two new shows on in Edinburgh, both of which I produced as well as directed. I'm currently running projects in Oldham, Sheffield and York, alongside various one-off freelance engagements in Leeds, York and elsewhere. I'm writing two plays and a PhD thesis, I'm going to Newcastle this weekend for meetings and to see two shows and I'm moving house next weekend. Meanwhile I'm trying to get and stay fit and yet today I'm sitting around reading novels and writing a blog on the internet for the benefit of a readership the majority of whom I'll never even meet. What am I playing at?

I have a fantasy life in which, yes, I'm creatively busy and fulfilled, making work in various media as and when it takes my fancy, but in which I am perfectly able to keep up with my reading. The defining question of each day is "what do you want to do today?", not "what must be done today?" Yes, my life's ambition, as a chippy working-class boy from Teesside, is to be a gentleman of leisure.

I also notice that I've been more positively productive and taken more pleasure in my work in the last couple of weeks than for much of the past couple of years. Sure, I've done work in that period and some of that work has been good, but the pleasure of it has been drowned out by the grind. A brief look at the balance sheet quickly reveals what's been missing for the last couple of years: regular running. And the reason I feel a slowdown this week is because a knee twinge prevents me from pounding the trail of a morning. There's nothing like flushing the system with oxygen before getting on with one's work, there really isn't. The resultant rise in energy levels and productivity is astonishing. I haven't been out since Sunday, no wonder I'm languishing.

Go running, people. It's the only way to create time to read more novels.

A Gloria Gaynor moment

2007-10-10T14:57:00.000+01:00

I've occasionally been the among the first in the theatrical blogosphere to bemoan the latest degredation to arts funding, but I have to say Lyn Gardner's trounced me this time. There was me still plashing about in the shallows of what information I could find. Meanwhile Lyn's waded right in to the deep and said everything I was going to say. But with less semantic gallimaufry.

In my earlier post (below) I urged Brown to be bold. I expect he's pondering my words as we speak, wondering how best to take my medicine. What I didn't mention then was the arts, which are, quite frankly, skint. A bold move would be to give them a huge booster injection of cash and see if it's true that we stimulate the economy like Will Hutton says. Even I don't expect that to happen.

As Jon Spooner says in his comment at the bottom of Lyn's blog, it's going to be an interesting month. Guaranteed, though, is that the emerging companies, the ones you haven't heard of yet, will be the losers. I emerged at just the right time, in a period of unprecedented feast between one biblical famine and the coming period of Herodesque child murder. The big organisations currently receive the sort of funding they could only dream of ten years ago, and rightly so: we need healthy standard-bearers, and I don't propose to advocate redistribution. But if we want the bold artists of today to be the standard-bearers of tomorrow, we need to support them, and that's what standstill funding (especially as it's standing still having been cut back) doesn't do.

So it's going to be an interesting few years. Companies who are just starting to establish themselves, companies who are just out of college, even some more well-established companies, are going to fall off.

Unless we are bold. To survive, companies are going to have to estalish new models, new frameworks in which to create work. They are going to have to form partnerships with universities, schools, corporations. One of the more idiotic statements made in that Work Foundation report (linked to above) is that "Shakespeare required no subsidy; his work was self-supporting and arguably the stronger for it." No it wasn't. His company was The Lord Chamberlain's Men and subsequently The King's Men because the gentleman in question paid handsomely for the company to perform for him; the equivalent of a benefit gig or a testimonial. On top of that, Shakespeare wasn't alone in anonymously penning doggerel for mooning lovers desperate to impress their beaux. Of course he needed subsidy. It just wasn't paid for by income tax, which wasn't invented for another two hundred years.

I predict that companies working in intelligent partnerships with larger institutions, and with one another, is going to be the future. Witness the wonderful things being done between the Bolton Octagon and Bolton University. Masses of students are gaining experience in all departments of the theatre, the theatre has become an increasing part of its community, and audiences are up. Thanks to a generous initial investment from the University, the Octagon has been able to upscale its ambitions, and thanks to the spirit of friendship between the two the University has been able to trumpet all sorts of successes.

On a much smaller scale, touring companies can bring great kudos and valuable expertise to any number of institutions, and those institutions can be a valuable life-support machine to the companies even without pumping in the sort of cash Bolton University gave the Octagon. The lowering of the overheads alone would be enough to keep some from going to the wall. But of course, the worry is that this affects the kind of work done by the companies: if Unlimited were to suddenly take up residency in a hospital, wouldn't they end up making a moribund series of shows warning us to give up smoking?

Of course it will affect the work. If the partnership is the right one, it will affect it for the better. I for one can imagine Unlimited, whose previous shows have tackled teleportation, quantum physics and the science of coincidence, making some magnificent, provocative work about the ethics and sociology of human health. It'd be a farsighted PCT that took them in, for sure, but the opportunity to have a theatre company working with its patients could benefit everyone. Surely it would be healthy, and not just financially, for any number of companies to plant good firm roots in any number of community settings?

And if there's not enough money to go around from the central pot, it's in our interests to go out and make the case that we can really bring something of value to whatever institution we happen to find ourselves in. Because yes, art does stimulate the economy, and yes, art needs money to survive. But no, art is not reducible to economics. There is another way through.

Brown is the new Yellow

2007-10-10T12:29:00.000+01:00

So Brown blinked first. I fear that if he wanted to win, it was now or never. Let's assume he wanted to win.

David Cameron played his first good hand in months by saying "bring it on" and making us believe it. In folding when he did, Brown lands himself with a hatful of "bottler" tags and ends up on the back foot. If he'd played out the hand and called an election, he'd have had to hold on through fearfully gritted teeth, unless he'd managed to find a way of re-raising Cameron. But how could he have got the stakes any higher? He'd've had to declare that the election would be decided by unarmed combat.

So he has to convince us all that he's not a ditherer or a bottler, and the first thing he does is present us with a grab-bag of diluted Tory fiscal policies. That trick worked for a couple of months, when he could steal Tory policies simply because no-one noticed they'd had them (and that, in any case, "policies" was a bit strong). But when a massive part of the Tory turnaround is based on their "policy" of taking less money in tax from those who've loads of money anyway, then stealing that might be a bit obvious. It's all very well me nicking your new jumper, but if I do it just after you've said to everyone "do you like my new jumper?", they're going to notice.

What's Brown's tactic to be, then? When we've noticed that he was the chief architect of New Labour so can't dissociate himself all that much with the last ten years, when we've noticed that his (delightful) injections of cash into ailing institutions like the NHS have been fatally compromised by PFIs swallowing that cash, when we've noticed that he voted for all of Blair's most hated activities and has ceased, um, none of them, that his famous stability just led to the first run on a British bank in 130 years and that he might not even be the strong leader we all thought he was, what can he do?

He has to be bold. Tactically and strategically he has no other option; politically a change of personality is not proving sufficiently refreshing; and crucially the country's governance needs a rethink.

He says he's a conviction politician but he's not prepared to tell us what his convictions are. Conviction politicians risk their popularity on their convictions. Lincoln risked losing half the country. Brown's only conviction is that the people want a conviction politician.

So why not do something that will actually make a difference, instead of Ranieri-esque tinkering? Why not renationalise the trains or knock PFIs dead and have the NHS run by an independent trust like the Bank of England? Why not abolish grammar schools and introduce a whole new practical and vocational pathway in secondary education? Hell, why not re-introduce the death penalty or have a troop surge in Iraq, declare war on France rather than face them in the rugby or just abolish democracy altogether? Why not do something that will wake us all up?

Why do you think?

Sound familiar?

2007-10-09T16:29:00.000+01:00

And just in passing let me add: If anyone’s
Not for me he’s against me and has only
Himself to blame for anything that happens.
Now you may vote.

- Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Time for Blogging

2007-10-08T14:40:00.000+01:00

So, where the hell have I been for the last six weeks? At least George Hunka told us all he was going away.

Well, like Alex Ferguson I spent a while feeling a bit down and like I didn't have much to say, and like Chris Goode I am unutterably, spectacularly, broke (although unlike Chris my album collection is too much like everyone else's to be able to sell any of it). All of these things are, of course, down to Edinburgh, which was a great success, but when you follow it with a three-week London transfer and subsequent Yorkshire tour, it went on too long and I was tired. Fortunately the indefatigable Andrew Haydon has been posting enough for the lot of us.

So I've spent the last few weeks trying to get body, mind and credit card back in serviceable shape. I'll tell you about that in a bit, but like Bill Hicks with social comment and dick jokes, I'll butter you up with some thoughts about European theatre first of all. So.

European Theatre

If you're interested in European theatre, you must go to see Don Quixote at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. You may hate it - a shuddering majority has done exactly that - but you must see it. Why?

There's a lot of guff spouted about European theatre on these shores, some of it on this blog. The broad argument, which I endorse, runs like this: ours is too much of a text-bound tradition and we could benefit from a more imaginative approach to space, visual effects. We can, in short, be a bit more crazy.

Don Quixote is utterly bat-shit crazy. If a book falls from the sky, the relief at such a normal thing having happened is palpable. There's a scene on space-hoppers. There's a bit where they do a cover of Natalie Imbruglia's Torn, with a bloke dressed as a wizard among the assorted finger-snapping backing vocalists. If you want to see Greg Hicks gyrating to Madonna's Like a Prayer, this is the show for you. It's nuts.

And this is what European theatre looks like. I've seen contemporary theatre on main stages in Austria, France and the Netherlands, and read texts from a good handful more countries. This is what it looks like. It's properly mental. It is not about storytelling. It is not about sustaining dramatic action or tension. It is about a quasi-choreographic agglomeration of more-or-less surprising coups-de-theatre.

I saw a show in Austria, which I later directed in an English translation. There was a bit in the Graz production where everyone threw noodles at each other for a bit, and a bit where they projected some cartoon porn for a few minutes. When I was studying the text for my own version I was trying to remember when all this had happened. The cartoon porn was easily discoverable, as there was a bit where some porn comes on the telly (if only for a few seconds) by mistake. But the noodles were nowhere. All I could figure was that it must have been one of the bits where everyone shouted at one another. Fine. But I'm not sure that was reason enough to leave one of the characters festooned in noodles for the remainder of the show.

Every time someone complimented me on the craziness of my own production, with its gradually inflating airbeds and repeated duckings in various buckets of water, I giggled inwardly at how much less bats it was than the premiere in German: at least all of my stuff was inspired by an image or occurrence in the text. Don Quixote is as crazy as the stuff you get over there, and we've no stomach for it over here.

I quite liked it.

So hurrah to the Royal Court for its current season of European plays. Due to the aforementioned credit card situation, I won't get down to London to see any of them. But I like the sound of The Ugly One, and I like the sound of Ramin Gray's production. But I bet they didn't do it anything like that in Germany.

Credit Card

If you're not interested in what's going on in my life, in those thoughts of mine which don't look for the wider issue, stop reading now.

In by far the worst state of my body, my mind, and my credit card, is the latter, which has taken some hammer since I last earned in early July. Compounding that is my bank account being well over its overdraft limit. No, not well overdrawn: well over its overdraft limit. I went to give blood a couple of weeks ago and they had to stop, because my BMI is so low I don't have any blood to spare. That's what my financial situation was like about a month ago, and they haven't stopped the pump and given me a biscuit.

It didn't help that my car died last week, or that I'm moving house in a fortnight.

So I'm working every hour god sends, in order to pistol whip my accounts into shape. I spent last week running endless workshops on The Merchant of Venice. I'm running a weekly devising class in Sheffield and a writing class in Oldham. I started work at the weekend on my latest show with my fantastic youth theatre in York, a new adaptation of The Trojan Women. It doesn't leave much time for blogging.

Mind

I'm also trying to finish my PhD. It'll be news to lots of you that I've even started one, as I don't tend to advertise the fact very widely. Lots of the blogosphere during my hiatus has been preoccupied with discussion of the relationship between bloggers and critics, which itself grew out of a discussion about the proper relationship between critics and practitioners. I've a post brewing on the relationship between academia and practice in the theatre and it's going to be a humdinger.

So there'll be a good deal more on this subject over the next few weeks: if I don't finish the thing by the turn of 2008, I'll be shot, so I'm trying to get a serviceable first draft done for the end of this month. There, I've said it in public, I'll have to do it now.

And with the help of that, I'm starting to feel mentally fresh for the first time in - I don't know - over a year. I've been on a bit of a treadmill hurtling past one major production and the next for some time now and I've not been able to really capitalise on any of them as a result. Having given myself permission to slow down for a wee while and plan some bespoke productions, rather than setting everything up along the same lines as the last one, you can expect a quiet couple of years from me in terms of big splash - just a few pebbles tossed in the pond here and there - before I empty it of water completely sometime in late '08/early '09.

And the freedom afforded by not being a producer means I'm writing again, developing a few little bits and pieces which will constitute the abovementioned pebbles. It doesn't leave much time for blogging.

Body

And finally, if that diet of post-Edinburgh restoratives makes me look like I'm slacking, I'm trying to get into shape again. Before a nasty injury in 2005 that finally got operated on in February, I was doing some pretty good times on the old pins: 37:40 at 10k and 85:51 at 1/2M, for example. I had a feeling there was plenty more in the tank, but then my leg burst open in a game of football and I had rather a long enforced absence. So I'm now following a long, slow training programme to build up my mileage again over the winter before starting some serious training in the spring. Last week I managed just over 30 miles, with a long run of 9, which is peanuts when you consider Paula was doing 140 in the buildup to her GNR comeback last weekend. So I'm gunning for 50/week by January.

But now my knee feels a bit dicky, so I'm going to be doing all this week's miles on the bike (at a ratio of about 4:1 that means I need to cycle about 120 miles this week) to make sure it doesn't get any worse. It's a long, long road back. But Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will feels cocky today, so considers it appropriate to set some targets in public, so as to remove the possibility of somewhere to hide:

In 2008 the 10k time will go under 35 minutes and the 1/2M time under 80. In 2009 a marathon will be run in under 3 hours and 2 1/2 more minutes and five minutes more will come off the other two respectively, at the very least.

For the moment, though, I'll settle for not getting injured again immediately. It doesn't leave much time for blogging. But I'll try not to neglect y'all so badly in the future.

Back to Earth

2007-08-24T10:16:00.000+01:00

Being deeply pre-occupied with one's Edinburgh ventures cloaks out the real world. It's one reason I'm glad the Festival takes place in August, when there's very little news anyway. Then every so often something happens to pull one forcibly back to earth, to remind one that, actually, all this preoccupation with reviews and run-times is pretty trivial.

Something in the papers? No. I got a call from the Anthony Nolan Trust. I've been found to be a partial match for someone in need of life-saving surgery, and can I come in for some further tests? So I'm going in next week when Man Across the Way is in London and I'm there too. "How will you fit it in?" asked my mother. Yes, I'm pretty busy - and I've a fun-packed autumn lined up that I'll tell you all about soon. But the opportunity to prevent someone from becoming dead is worth putting a show temporarily on hold, no? Surely a far far better thing I do today, etc?

Reviewing and Criticism

2007-08-23T10:09:00.000+01:00

Leo Benedictus, writing on today's Guardian blog, makes a distinction between "reviewing" and "criticism". I've a terrible cold and a billion things to do for next week's London transfer, so I'm going to do little more than applaud the distinction: "A review is a practical tool designed to help people choose a show. Criticism is an attempt to describe the way a show works and analyse why it works well." Yes. But a review without criticism is like a frame without a painting.

2007-08-15T10:56:00.001+01:00

Andrew Haydon kindly commends me for my director's eye view on this year's Festival. That's very nice of him, but unfortunately that's not really what I'm doing. I've a couple of posts brewing on the different processes of keeping my two shows pinging away at full power - or trying to. But I'm not going to post them. I'm a slightly different director for every actor, which makes me six different directors at this Festival. That's a pretty delicate balance to strike, and posting on it in public and in detail would only make my job harder. Maybe when the dust has settled...

So instead, I'm going to engage in the time-honoured tradition of whinging about the critics. We've had some lovely reviews for both shows, but they really mean not a jot. Let me tell you why.

The top review for either is probably this lovely one from the Scotsman. Of course, we were very pleased, especially when we learned that the estimable Sally J Stott had further honoured us with a Fringe First nomination (which, unless Joyce McMillan has the best poker face in the business, we won't win). But already the clues were there. For a start, she gets my name totally wrong despite it being quite clearly written in the programme. Then comes her final sentence: "if you only feel you can cope with one show on torture and terrorism this festival season, this is probably going to be the funniest." Well, if you only see one, it certainly will be the funniest. These are tiny quibbles, perhaps, but along with a few other clunky sentences and a lack of any sort of penetration beneath the surface (it's not a difficult show to penetrate), one starts to lose trust.

Then came her review of Man Across the Way. Having swapped around characters and events in the plot recitation that dominates the review, she concludes that the play "ends cryptically". Certainly it does: if you aren't paying enough attention to get the character names the right way around, then teasing out ambiguities won't be your cup of tea. Then one backtracks this even more egregious lack of penetration to the Can of Worms review, and loses what little trust one had.

Let me get this straight: I don't at all mind having bad reviews. I've had much, much worse reviews than this humdrum three-starring (Can of Worms has had worse this festival, of which more soon) and I've even agreed with some of them. What I mind is presenting my work for assessment to someone who's not up to the job. Every audience response is valid, and she's not the first to find the play a bit too elusive to grasp. But it would be nice to be reviewed by someone for whom it's not such a strain. Should our reviewers be a member of the audience picked at random? Or should they qualify for their authority status with a minimum level of knowledge, penetration and ability to articulate those qualities?

Our best review for Man Across the Way came from the Metro, for whom we're also Pick of the Day today. And gratifyingly, he seems to have got it. So why do I also not trust that review?

I wasn't looking forward to seeing the Metro review. As a director I may be absurdly critical of my own work and certainly I'm rarely completely satisfied. But that show was the worst we've had. It was the day before everything clicked into place and the actors got a sense of the space and the tech and how everything fitted together. That day, it was low-key, it dragged and the audience shuffled. So did the guy from the Metro, who was sitting in front of me. So I'm glad he was nice about the show - and certainly, he was right to not really say anything at all about the production, if he was so determined to make a good show out of it - but it doesn't gratify me as a review does when it's earned.

And his review of Can of Worms was a real stinker. This doesn't invalidate his response to Man Across the Way (if it needs invalidating), but whereas Sally J Stott failed to engage with Man Across the Way, Christopher Collett flat refuses to even accept the premise of Can of Worms. Given that the press release promises a show that clowns around the subject of torture, surely they should have sent a reviewer who was, at the very least, prepared to engage with that? The first paragraph could have been written before he even saw the show.

Again, I don't mind that he didn't like the show - we knew some people would take against it, and we knew some of them would have pens - but it's a little galling, for example, that he doesn't even address whether or not it's funny. As it happens, the day he was there, there were gales of whole-audience belly laughter and I would have counted that performance a success. No audience is totally unanimous and I'm keen to hear from people who don't like the show. If they've something constructive to add.

Perhaps having intuited my irritation on this point, in his latest review, of Cal McCrystal's Callate! at the Assembly Rooms, he graciously acknowledges that "a section of the audience was clearly enjoying itself" before concluding that "it was hard to see what was so funny". Bullshit. It's your job to figure out what was so funny. And if you don't agree with those who thought it was funny, it's your job to figure out why, and to articulate that.

As I've perhaps neglected to say on these pages before, I'm as happy with both shows as I've ever been with anything, and it's exciting to run two such utterly different shows back-to-back. Like Chris Goode, who's been much more badly-done by than me this year, I feel I deserve a bit more effort at engagement on the part of my critics. It's also frustrating that people keep sending the same reviewer to both shows, when they've only any interest in one sort of show. Surely people should be sent to see the sort of work they like, so they can assess it on its own terms, rather than attacking the terms?

We've a reviewer from The List coming to both shows today. I wonder which one she'll like?

POSTSCRIPT - I'd be interested to know if there's anyone on the planet apart from me who likes both shows. Announce yourselves! And if you liked one and not the other, I'd like to know why.

UPDATE - We've Lyn Gardner coming in to Man Across the Way in the next couple of days. I trust Lyn Gardner. Whether she likes it or not, I'll listen to what she has to say.

There, I've said it now.

AND ALSO - another two reviews for Can of Worms, one four star, one two star. There's something quite satisfying about splitting the critics...

On punctuality

2007-08-08T08:00:00.001+01:00

One spends so much of the Edinburgh Festival waiting.

(Not least for one's favourite bloggers to sharpen their pens and get to work on the whole affair. In the meantime, I'll have to do. UPDATE: about three hours after this post, Chris wrote something. Excellent!)

At the beginning of every show one sits waiting to see if an audience is going to turn up. In Can of Worms yesterday we had seven people, the legendary Fringe average. It was the smallest house yet and a real endorsement of the show when several of them stayed behind to chat afterwards:

WOMAN FROM NEW YORK: Have you guys been to New York?
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: It's our first show, actually. We've not really been anywhere.
WFNY: You should come to New York.
SB: If you book us, we will come. [I know, sorry about that]
WFNY: Have you been on the BBC?
SB: It's our first show. We've been doing it for five days.
WFNY: You should be on the BBC.
SB: Thanks.
WFNY: Have you been on television?
SB: It's our first show. We're a theatre company.

She was very nice, and she made us late for our get-out.

I can't abide unpunctuality. It's rude, plain and simple. It says "I don't care about you sitting on your own in the cold". I also can't abide how nice I am about it when people are, inevitably, late. I somehow make them feel that it's ok, that I'm not annoyed. Note to you all in the future: I am annoyed. I'm just really, really nice.

This also goes for latecomers to the theatre. Would you start a book on page four? Then get there in time for the play to start. If the play's any good, the beginning bit will be there for a reason and missing it will be like missing a few bits of what's probably sky from a jigsaw that's mostly sky. You might be fairly sure it's just some more sky you're missing, but you can't be sure.

I make a slight exception to this for Can of Worms, simply because, being clown, your late arrival provides us with meat. The day before yesterday, someone arrived, magnificently, just as Nick intoned to Paul the line "you're late". "And so are you", he added in the direction of the tardy few. It wasn't at all big or clever, but it got a big laugh. I'll explain why some other time.

Everyone knows that being late professionally is bad. An actor missing their entrance or their cue, even by a fraction of a second, disrupts the whole piece, especially if they do so consistently. Anyone who's seen more than one of my shows will know that pace is an obsession. In my shows, actors need a cast-iron excuse to pause for thought before a line: why can't they say the thing as they think of it? Very often, there's no good reason, apart from to draw attention to the acting, when everyone looks better if the cue-bite is sharp. If I'm bored in the theatre, there's an evens chance that a large part of the reason is that it's "contemplative" or whatever, which is simply another way of saying that the actors let the energy drop between every line. People describe The West Wing as unbelievable because "no-one really talks like that". But I'm not interested in watching drama about people who think and talk at the same speed as me. I want a distillation of what's true, not the truth itself; I want to see people thinking rapidly, performing remarkable feats of emotional and intellectual dexterity. I don't want to watch them torturously arriving at the place where I've already been sitting and tapping my watch for ten minutes.

But the best way of "not being late" is to not say what time you're going to arrive. Which brings me, finally, to the press.

This time last year, and the year before, and all the years before that, I remember being an unspeakable ball of tension, waiting and wondering whether any reviewers were ever going to come. Then about fifty-one weeks ago, and all the years before that, a couple had been in and I spent another week as a ball of tension waiting and wondering whether the reviews were going to be any good. In times like these one holds for succour to stories like Unlimited's: they sold Static averagely for four weeks, then won a Fringe First on the final weekend and succeeded in carrying the momentum into the following Festival.

So this year I feel like someone who's thrown a party to which everyone's turned up at nine on the dot. It's nice, and all the nibbles are ready, but it's not what I've prepared myself for emotionally. We've had the Scotsman, the Metro and some website I've never heard of in to both shows, The Stage in to Can of Worms and Three Weeks in to Man Across the Way. And the good thing about getting them in early is that the delay until publication will hopefully not quite be so long.

So have a look at this, and this, and this. They might not be particularly articulate, and one of them might get my name wrong, but for the time being I'm very happy to have something I can put on the flyer. Then I can get back to waiting for audience members with slightly more optimism.

Grind

2007-08-04T09:18:00.000+01:00

I'd like to do an Edinburgh preview, but I'm still in monomaniac mode and can't really think about anyone's shows but mine just yet. A couple more days and I'll start seeing things and telling you about them. In the meantime:

the dash is over, and the slog begins. Both shows are open and thus commences the daily grind of building an audience, raising press profile and, most importantly, helping both shows to bed in for a long run.

The needs of both shows are completely different. With Can of Worms, it's blowing off the cobwebs accumulated over a couple of weeks in the drawer - and a much longer period since it last squinted into the glare of an audience. The first show was a mite tentative, but yesterday's, kickstarted by the support of a couple of particularly vocal audience members, really took off. There's something about the permission generous laughter gives to the performers to be daring that really helps to transform this show. Yesterday had some really thrilling sections that were completely new to us all, and several of the old sections felt completely new-minted. A couple more good days and the performers will feel sufficiently emboldened to be so daring from the first moments of the show: then that laughter will be theirs by right.

Man Across the Way, on the other hand, sailed with great confidence out of an intensive rehearsal period and is now being buffetted on all sides by the demands of a new space and a fairly complex tech plot. Not to mention a tech/fit-up that ran from 11pm-3am and thoroughly knackered everyone while nonetheless not being quite sufficient. So the show isn't exactly being knocked off course so much as taking a little time to get the wind back into its sails. It's a show with a huge amount of energy, but the space is huge and somewhat echoing, so sucks some of that energy right out again. Added to a couple of tech problems that lead to the odd bit of pausiness, the whole thing still feels just a mite heavy. But it's not so much about energising - the energy's there, it's just not quite coming through - as balancing it. Again, a couple more shows and it should be properly centred.

Ideally I'd like a couple more previews for both; two isn't really enough for them to bed in. But "press night" in Edinburgh is a fairly meaningless term, as the press come whenever they like, and in any case we've none booked in for today. So it's another preview, albeit one for which people are paying full price.

But we do have the Scotsman booked for both shows over the next week. I'm not going to say when, as the actors don't want to know when there's press in and there's a tiny chance one of them might read this. I just wrote several more paragraphs bemoaning the power of one or two pens belonging to people whose authority (a particular problem in Edinburgh, where there are so many rookie reviewers) we have no reason to trust or even recognise. But I realised I was treading the age-old path of lamenting my powerlessness in the face of the press. The shows are good. The press will recognise that. FACT.

On Ambiguity

2007-07-28T08:41:00.000+01:00

When we did Shiver at Theatre503 earlier this year, I was staggered by the range of interpretations audience members brought to it, even at the simple level of plot. Plot is usually the one thing designed to be unambiguously understood, but I was quite pleased. I had my own interpretation, but in directing it I was careful not to cancel out two or three other possibilities of which I was aware. As a result, people came up with all sorts of crackpot theories. It was excellent. Let me tell you why.

The play turns on the arrival of Jacob on the doorstep of Christina one summer evening. She hasn't seen or heard from him for seventeen years, so this sudden descent on her threshold comes as a bit of a shock. And the last time she saw him, she left him for dead. So there are three obvious possibilities right from the outset: a) it's really him; b) he really died and this is an imposter; and c) he really died and this is his ghost. The tricky structure of the piece, in which the action occasionally stops and rewinds to a slightly earlier point, before progressing in a different direction, helps to retain all these possibilities and adds a further level of ambiguity at the level of what's actually going on.

For me and the actors, the truth was unambigously answer a), but we had terrific fun in rehearsals finding ways of maintaining that line consistently while not doing anything that would rebut those drawn to b) or c). Because of course you can't play "ambiguous", you have to play something definite. That something is, in Max Stafford Clark's terms, a series of actions or intentions - to provoke, to remind, to seduce - none of which necessarily give definite answers to the question about what's going on. (One day I'll post more fully on my rehearsal process. For the moment let me say that I emphatically don't, a la MSC, spend a fortnight sitting round a table, actioning. Nonetheless, his ideas can be extremely useful even if, as here, they're nothing more than shorthand.)

More often than not, whatever action an actor is playing will give a subtext that can either enrich or traduce the piece, depending on whether the action is well-chosen. But in Shiver, the plot became the subtext and the subtext became the plot, creating (at its best) a very powerful and productive atmosphere of uncertainty in a piece heavily concerned with memory, its retention and repression. And so uncertainty about precisely what was happening led (at its best) to meditations on the reliability of our perceptions, our memories and the idea that there might be a truth of which we can get to the bottom. None of them new ideas, perhaps, but approached in new ways and resulting in new conversations in the bar afterwards. That's why it was excellent.

But there was a slight problem: it wasn't much fun. Although the characters were likeable and thoroughly three-dimensional the whole carapace tended to get in the way a bit, making the piece seem cold and lacking a point of entry for the audience. There was some fun in there, but people were concentrating so hard on the ideas and the atmosphere that they didn't tend to pick up on it. Some didn't mind at all, but others did and I was one of them. I don't for a moment believe theatre has to be fun, but I do believe it has to let its audience in. My current way in of choice is fun. What happens once the audience are in is another matter.

With Man Across the Way, we also have a thread of ambiguity, but not as driving force, rather as central question, or rather, several questions - about the identity and status of the eponymous "man". Oh, all right, since you're so nice to me I'll tell you. It's not as if the publicity hasn't already. The man may or may not have been involved in a major terrorist attack on the city of Glasgow (much bigger than the recent one which suddenly made the piece - which was written before anyone had heard of John Smeaton - eerily topical). I hope we don't close down either possibility. But we've discovered that the best ways to keep both balls in the air also happen to be the best ways of dynamising the scenes in which he appears: ie, making him tough-willed, almost bolshy, in his exchanges with the cops. So that's handy.

Ideally, then, when it's working, the piece will cause a bit of trouble for the left's easy demonisation of the police and easy sympathy for those bullied by them. I'm not saying I don't think the police are a bunch of fascist bastards, I'm just saying it's not quite that simple. And it's not as if the show comes down firmly on the side of the police and argues vociferously for the extension of maximum detention periods to ninety days. Au contraire. Like all good plays, it gets in between the cracks in everyone's arguments and tries to create room for itself. And at the centre of that process is the fact that we, the public, very often don't know. We don't know why the police raid this house or that bookshop; we don't know why they pick up this doctor or that engineer. We don't know. They probably have their reasons, but are they good enough?

It also has jokes. Alright, "jokes" is probably a bit strong (who can think of plays with actual jokes in? Dennis Kelly's After the End springs to mind; what else?), but there are a few good laughs, which come mostly in scenes or on lines which aren't at all ambiguous. I'm realising that ambiguity is not particularly good at creating laughter; it creates a cerebral atmosphere of suspension that earth-bound laughter disappears beneath. Ambiguity can't descend to laughter - but laughter can ascend to ambiguity. The politics of Can of Worms are completely unambiguous, but the laughter becomes increasingly troubling as the piece progresses. Not being a clown show, Man Across the Way dabbles less in the dark art of laughter (I'm still holding back on the Harry Potter references) but when it does it is often of a similarly Janus-faced nature.

I worry that talking too much about what I'm trying to achieve will spoil the shows. Please forget everything I've written when you enter the theatre. Obliviate!

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

2007-07-15T11:15:00.000+01:00

It's time for the traditional blogger's greeting: it's been a while. Sorry about that.

I'm in London rehearsing the Edinburgh shows and generally trying to make things happen blah blah blah and of course that leaves precious little time for those two givens of everyday life at home: blogging and running. The sharp-eyed among you will have read the title and spotted already what direction this post is going in.

Last week I ran in company for the first time in about ten years. When I was at sixth form I used to run with Jonny Biggs, who wasn't quite as quick as me and enabled me to feel good about myself. Last week I ran with William, the younger brother of Nick, the actor from Man Across the Way with whom I stayed the week. William's got a 33 minute 10k time under his belt and he's in pretty good shape right now. I had an operation a couple of months ago and I'm only just starting to get back into it after a layoff of close to two years. Never before has a run left me with stomach pains; I can now see how it's possible to incur vomiting through running.

So now I'm back to running alone. I'm afraid it's slightly higher up my list of priorities than blogging, but then, I'm in control of the whereabouts of my shoes in a way I'm not of wireless internet access provision. And every time I run now, I get more excited about the next show I want to make: a one-man adaptation of (you guessed, right?) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, performed entirely on treadmill. 10k will be covered in the fifty(ish)-minute show.

If I learned anything from my run with William, it's that the unsung muscle of the long-distance runner is the one involved in breathing. (I've done enough voice training to remember its name, but it's better to remain silent and have people think you're stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.) The excellent Runners' World magazine frequently distinguishes between different effort levels by considering what sort of vocal effort you're capable of. Speaking full sentences? That's a fairly light run. Unable to get out more than a syllable? Maximum effort. Hitting the top note in Nessun Dorma? You're just not trying.

So one of the interesting things about making the show will be the attempt to taper the rhythms of the text to fit what I'm capable of as a performer - as a runner - by any given point in an (admittedly fairly gentle) 10k. And to do that as artlessly as possible, to explore the rhythms of speech dictated by a given level of fatigue without trying to disguise that I'm out of breath. It's going to have to be written on the trail. And I don't think I'll be able to perform it six times a week.

We had the movement director in on Man Across the Way rehearsals yesterday and in the course of knocking some ideas about there was a period where the cast were darting about the space at a preposterous level of energy, panting for breath. Genuine fatigue is interesting, along with nudity and juggling, as an example of something which suddenly reveals the performer instead of, or at least as well as, the character. The intelligent show, when dabbling in these dark arts (and that's the only Harry Potter reference you'll get from me today) will figure out a way of acknowledging this, sewing it into the fabric of the piece. Not quite sure how I'm going to do that, but that's just part of the fun I've got planned for the autumn.

Somewhat perverse, I know, to get carried away with this idea when I'm opening two completely separate shows next week, but that's the kind of guy I am. And the other two are coming along nicely, cheers. Can of Worms is now in need of previews; it's gone beyond the point (which always comes, and comes sooner with clown) where rehearsing without an audience is of any use at all. We're ready to sprint for the tape.

And Man Across the Way seems to be shaping up, too. Today we had the lighting designer, the excellent Ben Pacey, in the room trying to figure out solutions to some insoluble problems with a key section at the midpoint of the play, and producing his normal, unusually high, level of genius. Yesterday we had the movement director helping us come up with some suitably mad ideas for the same difficult section (it's a minute long and we've spent the last day and a half working on it). And the day before was one of those lovely days when you ask a series of difficult questions of scenes, to which your answer starts out as "I have no idea", and you wind up making discoveries that transform the competent and workmanlike into the really rather good. It was one of those days when I really felt like I was doing my job. We've still got a lot of miles to cover but we're clocking up the miles at the right pace and we haven't hit the wall yet. Race you to Edinburgh!

Egoism

2007-07-12T13:52:00.000+01:00

In a cafe the other night Sarah and I played a very old and very silly board game called Ego. We never really figured out how the game was supposed to be played, but we had great fun playing around with the "angel" and "devil" cards, on which were solemnly printed "positive" and "negative" attributes. Several of the positives were sufficiently faint to be considered damning, and a fair few of the negatives were attractive at least to some demographics - "decent" springs to mind in the former category, "eccentric" or "naughty" in the latter. I think the game was designed for tipsy thirtysomethings at rebellious tupperware parties.

But anyway. After growing tired of analysing one another, we used the cards to generate characters as one might in an eighties role playing game, and one of them has stayed with me. We drew three cards and the combination that stuck was "enlightened" and "eager". Who is this person? Enlightenment is a state associated with peace, calm, stillness, but I like the idea of reaching a sort of enlightenment and being eager to go further, or perhaps to share it with others. It's nice, that is.

It's Socrates. Maybe Brecht's Galileo, maybe even Buchner's Danton, but it's certainly Socrates. The third card was something like "principled", and that's a direct fit for none of those characters. But "principled, enlightened and eager". That strikes me as a state worth striving for.

4-4-2

2007-07-11T09:18:00.000+01:00

Terry Eagleton reckons that "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." He goes on to demonstrate why Amis, Rushdie, Hare et les autres eminences grises don't fit this category - in the case of the first two, because they've become reactionaries and in the case of Hare, because he's become a tinkerer rather than a radical, the Claudio Ranieri of theatrical-political intervention.

It's a depressing analysis and one instinctively reacts against it. In the theatre, at least, surely we're in the midst of a period of unusually high political commitment? What about all this docudrama; what about the last few plays at the Court, what about the current regime at the Soho? Then, reading between the lines of Eagleton's article, one realises why nobody qualifies as a radical nowadays: it's in the detail of that phrase "question the foundations". In legal terms, today's writers get off on a technicality.

By "the foundations", you see, he means capitalism. As usual, cry the wags. So DH Lawrence qualifies for Eagleton's list of radicals because his work "denounced 'the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition'": i.e., he attacks capitalism from the individualist right rather than the collectivist left. Presumably because Eagleton likes Lawrence, he's able to pick up on the moments he's not just hammering on about sex and find the key moments when he's instead resenting people for wanting money rather than sex. (Just because this is a simplistic reading of Lawrence shouldn't be taken as a dismissal of his work. It's just a dismissal of the idea that he's any kind of radical.)

So no-one's questioning capitalism nowadays. This is really a variation on that old plaint, "the left lost its way after '89". And it's a load of cobblers. No-one's questioning capitalism using the old tools of Marxist dialectic, sure, but is that surprising given the drubbing that dialectic had taken by '89? Look at it this way: in 1989 a discredited and corrupt system fell and many millions of people were liberated as a result. Only at the symbolic level did this in truth have anything to do with left against right, but the symbolism, as so often, was far more powerful than the reality.

Since then the left's battles have been fought on a series of single issues; rather than challenging the system we've sought to mitigate its worst degredations. Taking on Big Pharma, the leading polluters or even PFIs all involve questioning whether the profit motive is the most suitable way of engineering human welfare: the difference is that the argument proceeds by example rather than by doctrine.

But we're not challenging the foundations, so we're not radical. Well, perhaps. But perhaps now is not the time for radicalism, but for small actions with big repercussions. Let the dots be joined gradually, rather than the whole damn thing being inked in by theorists and technocrats in advance of any attempts at action.

This may be symptomatic relief, rather than cure. Fine. You can't cure a guy who's in love with his disease. All you can do is mitigate the symptoms and gently point out their point of origin, until he's prepared to listen. That, my friends, is the sadly reduced role of the "radical" left in modern political discourse. We've the Soviets to blame for that: they had their chance and they handled it atrociously and unforgiveably. Like it or not, we have to live with their lunacy having hardened the right against good sense, with their defeat having accustomed the right to the taste of victory. This is not a time for us to be radical, angry and big. This is a time for us to be good, and right.

As regards the place of literature in all of this: perhaps literature also got pragmatic. Perhaps writers listened to the atrocious self-belief of the world-changers of the sixties and seventies and thought, I can get something done, but went for a more modest goal than the wholesale change of society. Perhaps we live in a time where grand narratives are viewed with too much suspicion to be useful tools for change and perhaps the true radicals are the people whose ideology is unswerving but whose tactics are eminently adaptable. If you're not winning at half-time, you have to make a change.

The Protocols of the Elders of Greenpeace

2007-07-08T10:28:00.000+01:00

When not being the smug snarking git noted earlier, David Baddiel did say one interesting thing, albeit by mistake. Intending to talk about climate change deniers he accidentally said "holocaust deniers", before going on the run from his Freudian slip: of course climate change denial is not as bad as holocaust denial. But is it?

Climate change, at least from the current perspective, is much much less terrible than the holocaust. The holocaust was a planned and systematic extermination of a race of people. Climate change's victims will be drawn essentially at random from throughout humanity. No comparison.

Well, not quite. Climate change's victims will not be randomly distributed: they'll be drawn overwhelmingly from among the world's poor. The exacerbation of climate change, and its denial, is being overwhelmingly carried out by the world's rich. All they have to do to get away with it is buy a house on top of a hill, paid for with the money they made selling the underclasses the means to kill themselves.

But hold on, Dan. There has been no Wansee conference here; there is no intent to kill, no intent to exterminate a race or a class. So Esso and Shell aren't, I suppose, as bad as the Nazis. Through gritted teeth, I'll give you that one. But will that matter when there are six million dead? Or more? I put it to you: not if you lose your family.

Still, there's no equivalence between Hitler and some weasly CEO: he's pretty bad but, I grant you, not quite that bad. Drawn though I am by the call of rhetoric to suggest that he is.

But denial is a different storm altogether. At least holocaust denial, insidious and vile though it is, won't make the holocaust any worse. Climate change deniers effect a deferral of action on climate change, thus ensuring its continuation. Holocaust deniers are apologists; climate change deniers are perpetrators. It's as simple as that. The texts of the "scientists" who, in the pay of Esso and Shell, seek to quibble with the overwhelming evidence that we're hurtling towards disaster are, as far as I'm concerned, morally equivalent to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And that isn't just rhetoric.

The Hips Don't Lie

2007-07-08T09:08:00.000+01:00

Flipping the television last night between The Thick of It and, er, 100 Greatest War Movies, I stumbled upon coverage of the Live Earth concert. There was something exhilirating about switching on prime time TV and finding in progress a semi-serious discussion about climate change. It would have been better if David Baddiel wasn't involved - he's carved such a niche for himself as "the comedian with a degree from Cambridge University" that he's forgotten for several years that he's also supposed to be funny and instead comes across as a smug snarking git - but it was nice that it was happening.

Now obviously, the whole thing was an exercise in hypocrisy and it's immediately clear why it's been dubbed by unkinder souls than myself (oh, alright, sharper-witted ones) "private jets against climate change". But if this discussion between Jonathan Ross, David Baddiel and A Proper Scientist wasn't simply a "put the kettle on" moment, then this exercise will also have fulfilled its objective of doing more to raise awareness and understanding of climate change than any previous PR for good green practice.

Will we do anything about it? When I flipped back later, Shakira was on. Makes you wonder if the planet is worth saving.

Give me a sweetie

2007-07-07T09:49:00.000+01:00

A few days ago on here I was nice about the National Theatre. Yesterday I was nice about Yes Minister.

I've a fundrasing drive going on at the moment in a desperate attempt to compensate for an ACE-shaped hole in my budget for Man Across the way, and as part of it my beautiful wife sent letters to 250 theatre celebrities. Yesterday I got a cheque from Nicholas Hytner, today I got one from Derek Fowlds. It is the policy of this blog, in a spirit of fitting optimism, to be nice about everyone with a chequebook.

Which in a roundabout way includes James Purnell, our new culture secretary, who everyone seems to think is so far doing a good job. What a nice man. I bet he's great with children and animals.

Oh alright, I admit it. I remain to be convinced. Just because a man likes the theatre doesn't necessarily mean he'll do a great job running the whole national cultural infrastructure. I know loads of season ticket holders at Middlesbrough, for example, who'd do a ghastly job of managing the team.

But Purnell has now given a new speech, which might help readers of this blog to forget the one to the IPPR I so cruelly dismantled a week ago. It's much better, almost as happy clappy as Blair's earlier this year, but in this case with something to say. I've had no luck in unearthing the full text, so we'll have to take Charlotte Higgins' word for it and assume she's read the whole thing and not just the press release. It's moderately encouraging.

Excellence, he says, is going to be the main criterion from now on. I'd like so see how he plans on measuring it: peer review seems the only sensible strategy, and there are obvious difficulties even with that. But still. The chances a piece of art has of being good art seems like a very good place to start when formulating an arts funding strategy. He's wrong to say that the access battle has been won, but one of the best ways of widening access is to make really terrific work that people want to see. His example, Punchdrunk's Faust, is a good one.

This brings me to the most surprising news story of the week: Michael Billington in "not talking total arse" shocker. Billington argues fairly persuasively that we do in fact have to continue considering access in the arts world. There's no point in making great work if no more than the same seven people come to see it every time.

This means creating work that will appeal to demographics other theatres can't reach, with all of the attendant problems that brings. Because of course we can't create work in bad faith; that will only lead to bad work. We just have to hope that our beliefs about what is good are shared by the people we manage to get through the door. The root problem then, is not a lack of diversity in the audiences, but a lack of diversity in the directors and theatre managers. There have been massive strides on this in the last ten years or so, but the vast majority of us are still white, middle class and university-educated. In having been working class for about the first fourteen years of my life, I'm mildly divergent from the norm, but not all that much.

So how do we get a real reflection in our profession of the society to whom we profess to speak? I have to come back to youth and community work. As I've said before, this stuff is not a waste of time or money. It's about the future.

But there's an awful lot of bad, tokenist box-tickery going on in this sector, I hear you cry. So there is. And the solution is simple. Put the emphasis on excellence. Inclusion is not a de facto good if what you're included in is rubbish. There's no merit in having been in the Leeds United squad; youth and community work can and should be encouraged to excel. I'm not a believer in entering kids into drama competitions and whatnot; I'm a great believer in doing good work with them and some of my best work is done there. If I ever hear about this bloody job in York (the board meeting to discuss whether they can afford to pay my wages was on Thursday and I'm waiting for the phone to ring: predictions welcome) I hope to continue doing more.

So Purnell may be onto a good thing in putting the emphasis on excellence. But one can't help but feel he's pouring honey into one ear and poison into the other. He's guarded where it most counts: he admits that he doesn't hold the purse strings on this one, and admits it's going to be a tough round. And of course he's right. He can sing the praises of the arts all he likes, but it will only really count when he convinces not us, who are well-known to already have a high enough opinion of our value, but the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. It's all very well telling your child he's a good boy. What he wants to know is: are you going to give him a sweetie?

Nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. Except perhaps my wife. And some of her friends.

2007-07-05T14:32:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was not a good day. From mid-July to mid-September I'll be out of commission working on shows which, thanks to the lack of munificence currently manifest in Grants for the Arts, will not pay me a penny. So this month whatever frugal pittance I scrape together has to last me the next three. And because I'm, like reeeelly good at education and community work, that wasn't looking so far-fetched as it sounds. Those who rail against excessive public expenditure on arts projects in school and community settings forget two things: it's an investment in creating audiences for the future. And more importantly, that money is subsidising artists, who can't really be expected to make work for 365 days solid. And when it's good work, it's good money, and those artists get to take two shows to Edinburgh and live to tell the tale.

So it is desperately frustrating and upsetting when a school decides out of the blue that, no, it doesn't, after all, want an artist to come in to work with its kids for a few days. And they're sure he won't mind if they let him know, via his project manager, in his last week and a bit of potential earning time, on the eve of his attendance on their august institution in the middle of fucking nowhere. And no, he won't be getting the money anyway. So he'll have to sell his car if he wants to survive the summer. That's not the sort of news a chap wants to hear.

I feel like I've been mugged.

So it's in times like these that my thoughts turn to comedy, balm for the soul, or chicken soup, or whatever. I mean, seriously, whoever said comedy could change the world, when it's the first place we all go to get cheered up when the world is getting us down? Whenever I'm a bit gloomful I tend to put on Yes Minister, and the fact that yesterday Sarah somehow persuaded me to watch Panic Room instead probably explains why I didn't manage to get to sleep until I'd followed it up with three episodes of The West Wing. Panic Room's great, by the way. David Fincher is a much undersung director, considerably less well-known than any one of his excellent films, and Panic Room stacks right up alongside Fight Club and Se7en. It's less tricksy than either, and a much smaller story, but it's a brilliant conceit brilliantly executed. And it's got Academy Award Winner Forest Whitaker in it, who's super.

But we were talking about comedy, which doesn't change the world, not IMDB, which has. Just look at the success the Berlin satirical cabarets had in preventing the rise of the Nazi party for illustration of that. Spitting Image only served to egg Thatcher on and what did Beyond the Fringe really achieve aside from revolutionising the haircuts of the young?

But maybe Beyond the Fringe is a bad place to start. It should be fairly obvious that it didn't have a great deal to do with the downfall of the MacMillan government, despite the old sod being at the victim's end of some fairly unkind cuts. But Beyond the Fringe, now that I think about it, actually did achieve something. It achieved the legitimisation of a particular attitude to authority, viz, a disrespectful attitude. Respect for authority wasn't the only sacred cow it took a bite from, but that was the biggie. Consciously or unconsciously, the mainstream arts and particularly comedy had always retained a basic sense of the world as run by decent people for decent people; in its core one could always find affection and optimism. Beyond the Fringe was the beginning of savagery in comedy, the beginning of comedy as a cri de couer about the world, as an outlet for anger.

And as we trust our leaders less and less, we use satire more and more. Blair must be the most satirised Prime Minister in history, more even than Thatcher. Which is cause and which is effect? Or, more likely, is there a feedback loop here?

I should state now that I'm a great lover of satire. Yes Minister is one of my favourite TV shows of all time, Being There is the best film I've seen in ages and my favourite Howard Barker plays are the early ones. I posted about Angels in America the other day; another thing I love about that is the way it imbues satire with magic and sees politically-inspired ire take flight. Yes, I love satire.

I'm even trying to make some. Can of Worms, the clown show I'm making for Edinburgh this year, can very easily be seen as satire: if "engages" is not too strong a word, it engages with the politics of secret interrogations and the official obfuscation of such. It's all performed in the broadest possible clown/physical comedy and is frequently extremely silly, even inane, so those seeking incisive analysis and reasoned engagement should look elsewhere. It is a cri de coeur, in a long tradition of cris de coeur. Is that the right plural?

The show grew from a wish to explore clown's potential for political engagement. I've heard it said that clown cannot possibly engage with political realities because a clown will subvert whatever is put in front of him. Make a clown a socialist and he will fuck it up. The problems with this position are so obvious it seems silly to even bother pointing them out, but people are doctrinaire on issues like this, so point them out I will. A clown is an idiot, so of course he will fuck up whatever is expected of him. If you expect him to hold a political opinion, he will invariably drop it if he sees an opportunity for a laugh. So far, so good. So if you want to make a political clown show, how do you get around this problem? By taking one of two extremely deft yet somehow blindingly obvious steps.

The first and most blindingly obvious possibility is: the clown has no political position, because clowns can't hold political positions. So you put him in a context where his lack of moral engagement is a problem. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. This is the basic strategy of 473, the first scene in Can of Worms: simple, trusting recruit 473 is put through his paces by a maniac torturer, and learns the ropes rather too well... you get the idea. The clown's inability to engage in moral or political thought is the very thing on which the plot turns. It's almost too simple.

The other, slightly more sophisticated possibility, is: you cast your clowns in roles filled by people who, in real life, you're pretty sure are idiots. You think their positions are inconsistent and/or absurd. You think that what they think and do, their very raisons d'etre, are baffling and stupid. And you want to expose this in the most brutally blunt way possible. This is the strategy employed by Civil Servants, the second scene in Can of Worms. Bluff, crass, blustering civil servant Sir Roger is required to present the Government report which attempts to fudge the issues raised by the events of 473. Together with and thanks to his buffoonish deputy, he fucks it all up. Want to suggest the world is run by clowns? What better way to do it than with clowns? It's not subtle, but by God it's effective.

Part of our ongoing quest has been to stay away from the moment where it stops being funny. Pinter said "The Caretaker is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point it ceases to be funny and it was because of that point that I wrote it". Barker also, before he went off laughter altogether, was interested in the point where laughter sticks in your throat. And if you think of any comic treatment of a serious subject in feature films, novels, plays, you'll almost always find that point in there somewhere, the "and now kids, the message" point. It's often considerably more subtle than that makes it sound, and it's repeated use shows how effective it is. But we chose to stay away from it. Why?

It's the easiest thing in the world to not be funny. Not making people laugh is something we all achieve almost all of the time, especially when we're trying to make people laugh. And if we're trying to make a serious point and make it really count, we'll almost certainly try to make it in seriousness for fear it will sound snippy.

But what we're trying to do is make people laugh despite themselves, make them laugh a laugh that frightens them a little, that they know is complex and that they know they'll have to examine later, but that they can't examine just now - because they're laughing too much. That's much harder than simply turning off the tap.

So yes, I love satire. I really do. But do I believe in it? Not believe in it the way I might believe in God, but the way I might believe in Middlesbrough Football Club. That is, do I really believe it can work? Can transform the way people think? Can win the battle for hearts and minds?

Howard Brenton described an act of political theatre as like "tapping on the pipes". The message starts small, but if people believe in it it gets bigger and before you know it there's an enormous jailbreak. Like that episode of Doctor Who the other day where everyone on the planet said "Doctor" at the same time, and the Doctor miraculously stopped being a dwarfish wrinkle and turned into a sort of Christ-figure in a manner simultaneously super fun and utter, utter hokum. I like to think of political comedy in the same way (tapping on the pipes, not turning into Christ and being nonsense, although the hazard of excessive self-aggrandisement is ever-present). The message may not get far, but it might get somewhere.

Let's unpack that just a little a bit more. The idea of a "message" is a sicky one for me and many others and I don't want to be found dead in that trap. The message (see how bravely I resist packing that word safely in the cotton wool of inverted commas!) is just as likely to be a question as a call-to-arms. I like a piece of theatre, or comedy, or whatever, to leave me with something unresolved, something I have to deal with later. And I like it to make me mad keen to do so. Even Angels in America ( geek that I am, I keep mistyping that Angles in America) doesn't quite achieve that; all the pieces being neatly put back in their boxes at the end. My Child does; almost none of comedy ever does. Did I mention Can of Worms? Why not come along and let us know if we've managed it?

Plays and Theatre

2007-06-28T21:34:00.000+01:00

There's a real difference between going to see plays and going to see theatre. Plays privilege the literary. Theatre privileges nothing, refuses nothing, denies nothing. Some plays are theatre and some theatre uses plays. What the hell am I talking about, you ask?

As noted in an earlier post, I was terribly excited by Mike Bartlett's My Child at the Royal Court. Not only was it a cracking piece of writing, but it seemed to me to bespeak a new era at the Court, one that might even be called theatrically dynamic. It was a good play, but it was great theatre; the space and the design were as much a part of its success as the text, if not more.

So it was with some disappointment that I left latest Court offering The Pain and the Itch having utterly loathed it. I don't think Michael Billington is wrong when he indicates it's tremendously funny: like the rest of the audience, I laughed a great deal. (Billington watchers: go to the penultimate paragraph of that review, read the second sentence, and tell me he hasn't descended into self-parody.) I just found it completely hateful.

The problem is not the target: the "phoney liberals" who people the play, drowning in their wealth and self-importance, get my goose as much as Norris's. I have no truck with people who talk equality and liberalism before - or even while - engaging in casual racism of the laziest sort. I find such people considerably more ennervating than straight-down-the-line bigots like Bernard Manning or Richard Littlejohn. But in real life, I just avoid such people; and if I for some reason can't, then my fists start to itch. That's exactly what happened at the Royal Court last week. Listening to these terrible people behaving terribly made me terribly, terribly angry. The acting was so good I thought I was watching real people, real, terrible people. I wanted to get up on stage and give them a good kicking. In what way does the inspiration of such feelings make for good art?

And it wasn't at all interesting theatre; it was one of the normallest things I've seen in a very long time, unusual only for the lavishness of its naturalism rather for the one clumsy way in which it pretended to be daring. In a device borrowed from Six Degrees of Separation, the characters broke the frame occasionally in order to narrate the story or comment upon some aspect of it to an almost-silent Arab character, Mr Hadid. But unlike Six Degrees, nothing interesting was done with this device and it took us nowhere; it just provided a convenient way of unravelling the plot at the climax, and of pretending it wasn't just a very dull old-fashioned play.

The Court's peak in the sixties and seventies saw a series of plays of breathtaking theatricality. Bond, Brenton: they even used to let Barker in. Many of these plays and more sprang from the writers' group run by Bill Gaskill, in which he had them participating in mask workshops and movement sessions, experimenting with puppets and doing chorus work. Writers' groups today are all story, inciting incident and character arc, tools borrowed wholesale from film. Those tools are important, for sure, but there's a whole world out there that they don't touch. Why are we afraid to show new playwrights the tools of their own trade? Fin Kennedy's How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found was one of few, of very few plays I've seen recently of any real formal innovation. It took years and a John Whiting Award for it to find a home. "These aren't rules, they're guidelines", I keep hear writers being told. "They're there to be broken." Yet when writers do break them, we very rarely know what to do with the results.

There's a widening fissure between plays and theatre in this country. On another theatregoing night in London I saw Kneehigh's adaptation of A Matter of Life and Death. It's a great sign of the health of alternative approaches to theatremaking that Kneehigh are presenting work on the biggest stage of our National Theatre. But if anything the current strength of companies like Kneehigh serves only to show how far apart are the "alternative" and the "mainstream". It's absurd that an arbitrary line should be drawn. But it consistently is, and it's down to a reluctance on the part of mainstream theatremakers of all types - actors, directors and designers - to engage with this wacky and intimidating world where people play in order to make plays.

I have a madcap theory about this. In 1599, Shakespeare sacked his clown Will Kemp, no doubt irritated by practices such as the jig. What's the jig? It is something no one ever tells you about, which should give you a clue as to whether the institutional sympathies in this country lie with plays or with theatre. It was a twenty- to thirty-minute improvised act, featuring a lot of dancing but also lots of flummery and fun, performed by the clown from the play. So at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Peter the clown (remember him? He's there) takes the stage, sweeps aside the corpses, and buggers about for half an hour. It was phenomenally popular, and audiences would often creep in at the end of the play just to catch the jig. The "nasty, bawdy jig" irritated many a playwright, not least because those creeping in at the end for it avoided paying the price of admission.

So Shakespeare sacked Kemp and took his company off in a new direction. The jig was done away with, and the new clown, Robert something-or-other, was required to perform much more cerebral stuff, the kind of jigging with words seen in V.1 of Hamlet. It was a big artistic risk, but the audiences, seeing that he was doing good work, continued to come.

Shakespeare's was a good artistic decision. It was also the thin end of the wedge. Pretty much since that time "plays" and "theatre" (or perhaps we might say "performance") have existed in two separate traditions - often overlapping and frequently cross-fertilising. But separate all the same. The same fissure never occurred in Italy, whose performance tradition of commedia dell'arte survives in one form or another into the plays of its best-known writers - most obviously Dario Fo, but no less so Pirandello if you read him carefully. Meanwhile, in this country, plays are as close in sympathy to poetry as they are to performance.

Other traditions have related pecularities. I met a French playwright who announced that for him, plays are essentially poetry, explorations of ideas through language. His play was terrible. Utterly inert, undynamic and untheatrical in every respect; more like an arch Socratic dialogue than a dramatic text. Yet both the French and the German playwriting traditions have a superabundance of this sort of thing; plays of situational and linguistic verve but lacking completely for the dramatic. Those playwriting traditions have gone way beyond our own divergence from the theatrical. But they make up for in (after a fashion) with a performance tradition which survives in their utterly (sometimes brilliantly so) batty directors. There is no onus on the playwright to provide dramatic or theatrical spectacle; the directors will do that, and in any case the writers write the sort of thing that seems to get put on. Loads and loads of our writers get done in France, and especially in Germany - and by the time they get performed they look as mad as anything written in the native language. I heard about a Dutch company who commissioned a new play, developed it with the writer, then once the rehearsal period had started (and all publicity had been done), chucked out the text completely and devised something new instead. And David Greig tells a story about going to see a production of his play Europe in the former East Germany, during a particularly poignant scene of which the characters were seen chucking a giant inflatable carrot around the stage. "What did you think of the show?", the director asked him afterwards. "I liked it", David replies, ever polite. "There was one thing though. The carrot? What was that all about?" The director gives him an uncomprehending look. "The carrot: it is communism.

We're lucky to have a tradition in which writing is accorded respect. As Sarah Kane said about the Germanic tradition of mad productions, "it's all very well doing that with Shakespeare: you can't ruin his chances of a second commission." Writers can create theatre with directors and actors, rather than providing material for those people to either fuck about with crazedly, or do the same old thing they always do. But writers are hemmed in at the moment: they're being developed left, right and centre, and the result is the same three plays over and over again. They should go to the theatre more often, rather than just going to see plays.

There are, of course, exceptions. Anthony Neilson has his faults, but he writes theatre, not just plays. Chris Goode not only makes fine work of this sort but also articulates exceptionally well the process by which he does so. It's a shame the first two examples that come to mind happen to be writers who direct their own work; for whom writing and directing are part of the same process. Anyone got any good examples of writers who write the sort of thing I'm talking about, then hand it over to someone else to direct? I hope Man Across the Way fits the bill to an extent, but we haven't finished it yet so now's not the time to push it forward. There must be some, but the mind's a blank.

To end though, an exemplary exception from across the pond. A pair of theatre trips in London saw me taking in Tony Kushner's epochal Angels in America. I have several reservations about the production, about which perhaps more another time. But the play seems to me very near the apotheosis of the playwright's art. Kushner has written into it not just character arcs and inciting incidents and good jokes and invisible exposition. He's written into it theatre, and even in a production that falls short of several markers, it's an extraordinary, exhilirating spectacle and a resounding experience. It's seven hours in total and barely a moment wasted. Reminds you of why you like plays. And theatre.

Business as Usual?

2007-06-28T16:50:00.000+01:00

Another politicky one today, folks. But hey, it's a politicky time, what with a whole new Prime Minister and everything. It's the first change of Prime Minister of my adult life, so if I can't commemorate it with a brace of blog posts, what can I commemorate?

So, Gordon's new cabinet. Surprising? Not really. Most of it was leaked wholesale to the papers over the last couple of days - either that or they're just very good guessers. Milliband as Foreign Secretary might be quite surprising if it hadn't been in the news yesterday. Straw as Justice Secretary was a conclusion likewise foregone, although his bonus post of the Lord Chancellorship is quite surprising, given that he's not a Lord. So with one exception, the surprises mostly take the form of people in the smaller jobs who arrive at unexpectedness by being hitherto unheard of.

The one exception, of course, is Jacqui Smith at the Home Office. Creating the first ever female home secretary neatly gets Brown off the charge of having an excessively male cabinet, especially as he's got rid of four senior women in the reshuffle. It could be observed that one of these senior women, who tried to hold onto her job with her gritted teeth, happened to be the first ever female foreign secretary, but there's no point in trolling so early in a premiership I announced myself optimistic about only yesterday.

So, good old Jacqui Smith, who at 44, is also pretty young for such a senior job. Brown has a history of surrounding himself with Bright Young Things, so it's hardly surprising to see the so-called Primrose Hill set liberally adorning the cabinet table, but I'm a bit sick of not being surprised so I'm going to be surprised. Wow! A really high-profile woman in government! Take that in the teeth, equality-doubters!

Although the cabinet is, with the sole exception of Baroness Scotland as AG, entirely white.

And one has to feel sorry for any new home secretary. However popular they are to start with - and Smith certainly has her lovers on the Labour benches, despite having been Chief Whip - the job inevitably turns them into ravening bigots of the hang 'em and flog 'em sort, usually within a couple of weeks. One must be seen to be tough on crime, and if one is seen to be tough on the causes of crime instead - well, that's just another way of saying "soft". Perhaps this is part of the reasoning behind splitting the Home Office up - Smith might in fact turn out to be the first popular Home Secretary in history. Meanwhile at Justice, Jack Straw gets to be desperately unpopular all over again. Talk about a poisoned chalice.

Speaking of which, what do we think to Alistair Darling as the new Chancellor? He's reckoned by the Guardian to be Brown's "safe pair of hands", but anyone outside of the Westminster village is going to find it hard to judge on that from his wonkish performance at DWP. And I suppose a wonk is exactly what Gordon wants at the Exchequer, so he can drive policy on what is effectively home turf while letting Darling do the detail. Let's not forget that for the last 24 hours Brown very briefly emulated Gladstone by being Chancellor and PM at the same time. I bet he's never been happier. Although I don't suppose he'll follow Gladstone in hoping to abolish the income tax (introduced by Pitt the Younger as "a temporary measure" to help fund the war against France, fact fans).

And peaceniks might be pleased to note the presence of David Milliband at the Foreign Office: he's known to have opposed the war "in private", which means in cabinet. Coupled with the return of John Denham, who resigned over the war, might we see a shift in policy, Iraq-wise?

But it is inevitable on this blog that we finally get to and chew over the real surprise: James Purnell at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. A surprise because I for one have never heard of him. But fear not! Your intrepid reporter has scoured the internet for goodies! Read on, and all will be revealed...

It's a pleasant surprise to note for a start that he lists his interests as "film, music, theatre and football" - and at the time of writing he hasn't even updated the page to include his new job, so at least we know it's not a sudden and recent addition in the light of his new job, like the new Milkybar Kid hastily taking his support of the Nestle boycott off his blog. With the exception of theatre, it might be noted that those are everyone's interests, but then we don't yet know what sort of music he likes; it might be the Arctic Monkeys, it might be Schonberg. Most politicians say jazz, don't they? Let's assume he likes jazz until we learn the sorry truth.

Still, most people don't say theatre, so let's further assume for the time being that he actually does like it. He was, for a time, on the board of the Young Vic, so he probably does. And it'll be nice to have someone at DCMS who actually likes the arts, and his earlier track record, including a stint as Blair's special advisor on Culture, Media, Sport and the Knowledge Economy, suggests that he might not only like them but even actually know something about them. He might even survive the inevitable moment when a radio station throws him unprepared into one of those embarrassing quizzes, asking him who plays up front for Spurs and how much a ticket costs at the Royal Court. He'll get special kudos if he knows about the 10p standing tickets, even more so if he's a regular purchaser thereof.

An aficionado holding the brief hasn't happened since Chris Smith and he's now widely considered to have been A Good Thing, so there may be reasons to be cheerful. And hilariously, Tessa Jowell remains in cabinet as minister for the Olympics, so she'll get all the flak for that and Purnell can get on with doing a proper job. It'd be like having kept Mandelson on, but solely as Minister for the Dome. A hoot. Poor old Tessa.

But hold your horses. His voting record is much less encouraging: pro ID cards, foundation hospitals and bombing Baghdad, against investigating the circumstances leading to war and determinedly agnostic on the transparency of parliament. He's emphatically a partyliner, perhaps due to conviction, perhaps due to his admiration for Chief Whip Jacqui Smith, who's persuaded people to vote for some pretty preposterous things in her time. James Purnell has been one of the persuaded.

But (he says charitably and with gritted optimism) a voting record tells us very little about how a person would adminster a department like this one, and Purnell's administrative record is marginally more encouraging. He brought in the legislation on the relaxation of the licensing laws which, after an appalling hoohah in the conservative press, I think we can all agree hasn't led to the end of civilisation as we know it. If anything what it shows us is that the licensing laws should be relaxed further - and I say this while firmly ensconsed atop the wagon. He is considered, I learn, to have stewarded this legislation, and others, very effectively. But that still doesn't tell us if he's going to get a better deal for the arts, which is, after all, why we're all here.

So perhaps we should listen to what he has to say: try this speech to the IPPR (for whom he used to work) given in 2005. It's a very predictable speech giving the arts the usual instrumentalist support and using some very distasteful examples of British creativity: Coldplay? Reality TV? Euch. But as ever with these things, it's difficult to tell whether he does this in order to get the speech maximum coverage or because he's an idiot. I'd rather it wasn't necessary to look like a philistine idiot in order to get arts funding better priority, but if it works I'm happy so long as I don't have to strike the same pose myself.

There's a great deal of distaste in the arts world for the instrumentalist argument for subsidy - ie, the argument that we stimulate the economy above and beyond any subsidy we receive and so indirectly, we punch our weight or above. And it's right that we should resist this argument to some extent, because that risks the implication that art's purpose is to stimulate the economy, and by extension the implication that art that does not do so should not be supported. Art's purpose is to be good art; the economy is irrelevant. But with that caveat, why not use this argument? As Alan Bennett said in rather a different context, to a man crossing the desert, the question "Perrier or Evian?" is moot. So long as I don't accept funding granted on the condition it stimulates the economy, I don't mind accepting funding won because someone thinks it might. It might. It probably won't, but it might.

But pleasingly, Purnell acknowledges in the speech, once you've got past the really guffy bits, that "not every bit of the value created by Nick Hytner, JK Rowling or Gilles Peterson is captured by the economic transactions that relate to their work. I believe in art for art’s sake, and creativity would still be central to our lives and the role of Government if it didn’t generate any revenue." That's good to know. How are you going to support it?

Well, he hammers on at some length about competition, but he's talking about broadcast and telecommunications by this point (his definition of "creativity" is large), not the arts as supported by the Arts Council. He's got nothing to say about those, and really, it's a rather depressing speech. It's wonkish in a way that might be useful for the chancellor but I'm not sure is so much so for the DCMS. He seems to have unlimited faith in agencies, councils and bureaux. It's New Labour to the core. And it hasn't got a spark of passion or belief anywhere in it, unless you were to count the desperately weak Shaun of the Dead joke.

The stocktake, then: likes theatre, or claims to, but exhibits no discernible love for it apart from serving on a board. Likes music, but it's Alan McGee who makes him tongue-tied, not Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Likes films because every pound invested brought three pounds at the box office. Has Brown only given him the job because [edited on grounds of good sense]?

So it looks like it's going to be business as usual. And this is the only logical conclusion one can reach when one considers that really, no arts minister fails to make an argument for greater arts subsidy. All they fail at is convincing those who need to be convinced: the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. It seems unlikely that Brown will suddenly change his mind now he's moved one door down. We're all just as fucked as before.

But then. Purnell's journalism is regular and fairly appealing. What little I can find on his radio appearances seems very positive about his sharpness and appeal. And given the echoing appearance of the odd phrase "core script", to indicate where the arts aren't quite and should be, in both this IPPR speech and Blair's recent and far superior (if utterly disingenuous) speech to arty types earlier this year, perhaps we can detect the guiding philosophy of one James Purnell, Supporter of the Arts. Perhaps he really does want to see the arts as part of the core script. Perhaps he really does believe in art for art's sake. Perhaps the poverty-stricken language and thinking of the IPPR speech can be diagnosed as wonkishness solely for delivery to an audience of wonks. Perhaps we can give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps. At least until he's done something.

Brown is well known for being utterly intransigent - until at length persuaded, when he becomes utterly intransigent on the flipside. And once he's stuck on something he'll go at it all guns, be it PFI or (perhaps) proper subsidy for the arts. Blair, on the other hand is easily persuaded into saying anything that will please his current audience. If Purnell means it when he says he values the arts, rather than just being a well-informed apparatchik, he might be able to persuade Brown to act on it where he could only persuade Blair to say it. Perhaps.

Let's be optimistic.

UPDATE from a proper journalist

The Arts Under Socialism

2007-06-14T10:48:00.000+01:00

So today's the day. Blair is finally off, and not a minute too soon, to be replaced by a real politician, Gordon Brown. And the last couple of weeks have been excellent demonstrations of the view of politics as a branch of the entertainment industry, with cliffhangers agogo: what will happen next? Will Tony set up his preposterous face-to-faith forum, since he's done so much for the good name of Christianity and good relations with Islam? Will he recover from his "frank" drubbing from Pope Benedict, hardly a moderate himself? Gosh, no, it looks like he's off to bring peace to the middle east. (Surely that's meant as a joke, as though the Fonz disappeared to a monastery?)

Meanwhile we have all the humming and ha-ing about who will compose the first Brown cabinet. Will there be a deputy Prime Minister? How can Jack Straw's loyalty be rewarded without giving him a brief he might fuck up? How to deal with David Milliband, the nearly-challenger? Or Harriet Harman, who one can't help feeling wouldn't have been Brown's first choice as Deputy? (The latter has been neatly dealt with by doubling up the deputy leadership and the party chairmanship: no dangerous cabinet brief for moderately disloyal Harriet.)

And now we have one final twist in the tale: Quentin Davies' splendid resignation of the Tory whip and defection to the government benches. It could hardly be more timely for Brown, or more cutting to Cameron, who is indicted on a bewildering number of charges: vacuity? check. Superficiality? check. Hypocrisy? check. It's lovely, and I hope Blair saves some of it for Brown rather than using up the whole lot in his final PMQs today.

But this resignation is pleasing for more reasons than mere entertainment. It's about time someone stuck it to Cameron or, more to the point, about time people started to realise that being a nice young man with his heart in the right place is not a suitable qualification for the highest office in the land. So he deserves everything he gets and it'll be nice to see the Tories start unravelling again. That is satisfying, in the way it's satisfying to see the judge don his black cap when passing judgement on the man who killed your children.

Perhaps through the principle that a change is as good as a rest, I'm feeling oddly optimistic about Gordon Brown. Admittedly you can't put a fag paper between him and Blair in terms of policy. But Brown's a details man, so perhaps he's in a position to make some of the admirably-conceived reforms of the last ten years actually work. (Before you deluge me with comments: not all of the reforms have been admirably-conceived.) And Brown actually believes in them, whereas change the name at the top of Quentin Davies' letter and it could just as well be read to Blair. Let's hope the one thing Cameron doesn't learn from his Labour alter ego is the teflon trick.

The one thing I don't feel particularly optimistic about is the future of arts funding. The comprehensive spending review due later this year is unlikely, whoever the new chancellor turns out to be, to deliver even inflation-level rises to ACE, and nor is it likely to address the losses suffered by the smash-and-grab raid recently effected on behalf of the Olympics. It's these losses that are most damaging for me personally, as they manifest themselves as a 33% cut in Grants for the Arts, the scheme making grants on a project-by-project basis, and through which all of the public funding I've ever had has come.

Brown was recently full of praise for the arts in Britain, almost as fulsome as Blair was earlier this year. But it's utterly meaningless. Screwing the arts is politically low-cost and so it's all too easy to smile, and smile, and be a villain. But no-one will ever resign a whip because of little white lies like these.

-

I've spent the last couple of weeks in London working on Man Across the Way, and trying to watch as many shows as possible, so apologies to my readers (both of you) for the extended absence. I'll fill you in on all my adventures over the next few days. In the meantime, here's one meditation. Finding myself with an hour or two to kill before a show at the Soho Theatre, I wandered into the London Review Bookshop and browsed my way to JB Priestley's essay The Arts Under Socialism. In it he lambasts the confusion between means and ends that he sees as besetting much of left-wing art. Art under capitalism is not a means to the end of socialism; art under socialism is not a means to the end of the maintenance of socialism. Such a view of art impoverishes art immeasurably, as good art is an end in itself, not arguing for this or that case of affairs, but rather pushing us, or dragging us, towards greater understanding or greater awareness of our lack of understanding. Art is good under whatever system of governance and the enlightened system will support it. What do you reckon, Gordon?

Space Cadets

2007-06-08T09:44:00.000+01:00

"Space" is one of those words that's used an awful lot in theatrical discourse, drawing almost no attention. I've used the phrase "a really nice space" countless times to describe theatres I like. I caught myself doing it this evening. And yet if I said it to my mother she'd have no idea what I was talking about. "A really nice space?" A really nice emptiness, one might just as well say. A really nice nothing.

Because what we're actually talking about is the moulding of that space, what surrounds it and what encloses it. The context in which space is found, the angle at which you look at it and how many different places there are to stand, are all-important, but space itself is, well, space. That's it. It's what makes you look at it that counts. A good theatre will make you experience that emptiness and the filling of it with immediacy; a good show will fill it and sculpt its interruption with beauty and dynamism.

In my own practice I'm fairly neurotic about finding plenty to fill the emptiness. In the last week I've seen two things that have made me think about that afresh - neither of them theatre pieces.

First up, Anthony Gormley's Event Horizon, a collection of 31 casts of the artist placed on rooftops in central London. From the south end of Waterloo Bridge, standing alongside the most earthbound of the statues, I could count eighteen. And it has quite a dizzying effect, like the way you feel when seeing something utterly different through a kaleidoscope while knowing that the materials making up the image remain identical. How many of us, even those of us who think ourselves attentive to the city's landscape, have ever really stood and just tried to absorb it all? That's what this piece asks you to do. There's the fun of spot-the-statue, for sure, but added to that is a new sense of awe with each one. "How the hell did he get it up there?" "God, that building's massive." "And I've never even noticed it before."

The attention it demands forces you into a whole new relationship with the cityscape, with its space and with what mediates that space. Every new interruption by one of these bronze men is a fresh and satisfying surprise. And even more impressive is its unforceful but unavoidable insistence on the scale of the human in this city. It's astonishing from how far off you can spot the statues once you've got your eye in, but it's equally astonishing how tiny they are when, for example, on a roof just opposite St Pauls. It sounds banal to say that human beings look insignificant in a city the size of London, or small next to a building the size of St Pauls. But what Gormley has achieved is something that makes the viewer feel that afresh, in a manner akin to Schklovsky's notion of defamiliarisation.

And what's really beautiful about it is the way, in focusing your attention on these distant figures, it suddenly makes individual human beings appear less insignificant. Perhaps that's a trick of the light, but the piece is magnificent, and it's really good fun too. I'm looking forward to catching the rest of the Blind Light exhibition at the Hayward.

But it's fairly average compared to Andy Goldsworthy's new exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This really marks the point where my very limited vocabulary for visual art begins to crumble, if it wasn't already doing so. So first, the facts.

The main part of the new exhibition consists of four large underground rooms, each containing a large-scale installation constructed out of materials found on the site of the sculpture park. Before you even go in, you see three large stone archways each constructed from perhaps thirty individual pieces of stone. Each is a pleasant, almost classical interruption to the landscape, until the moment you realise that each of them is entirely free standing and self-supporting. Suddenly walking through an archway is a terrifying experience and building one an awesome feat. And that's just the start of the warm-up gig: in the entrance to the gallery, but before entering any of the spaces, there's a twelve-foot pine cone constructed from piling and intertwining large logs. Again, it's entirely free-standing, an impressive testament to patient and laborious craftsmanship and a terrifying prospect to stand alongside. What if it falls down? What are the health and safety implications?

There's nothing about the spaces that will sound as impressive as they look and feel, so I'll keep it relatively short and just stick to the best one. The most impressive room has been transformed into a hut, again constructed of free-standing logs; going through the entrance you walk straight into something from the Viking era and the smell of sweet timber grabs you by the nose. The roof curves up smoothly to the centre of the room, where logs give way to twigs, and since the only place light can come in is the way visitors do, it's dark enough to give the sense of dim light flickering in the centre. One thinks of hunter-gatherers clad in animal skins gathered round a fire, giving off more smoke than winter warmth.

And if the giant pine cone was terrifying, this adds to that a sense that, if it were to collapse, one would be buried alive. It's truly awesome, in the Edmund Burke-eighteenth-century sense of the word; terrifying in scale yet also inspiring a delighted astonishment. And somehow the reflections it provokes are not on the great achievements of Andy Goldsworthy (well, not entirely), but on the achievements of Mother Nature (unforgiveable anthropomorphisation purely for rhetorical effect: sorry about that). Because we're never afraid that what she made might just collapse: while marvelling at them, one is simultaneously forced to confront the frailty of human achievements when compared with Scafell Pike, or Derwentwater. Whatever we might think about the awesome nature of these installations, the renewed sense of astonishment at the landscape and its sculpting over the millenia has produced something of considerably greater sublimity. One leaves the gallery into gawping sight of the magnificent vistas afforded by the YSP landscape and it feels as though the whole world is part of the exhibition, that everything has been put there for our delectation.

There is, of course, an extraordinary arrogance about such reflections if we allow them to centre entirely on ourselves; it makes the whole world appear like something from your latest hypomanic episode. But to simply revel anew in the natural landscape strikes me as a very worthwhile thing to do and it's also utterly thrilling. And although I drifted not for a moment to fearing for the future of our planet and its glories, that's something subsequent reflection taken me back to several times. Human figures can have an impact on the landscape, but the landscape is both more beautiful and more terrifying than anything we can muster.

How this relates back to my own practice, I'm not sure. But the question it presents to me is: how can we, in the theatre, most powerfully present to our audiences the sense of human scale in the world, of the fragility and beauty of individual lives against this vastest of backdrops? If we want to present great reckonings in little rooms, how do we compare this prison where we live unto the world?

Doin' it for the Kids

2007-06-06T16:05:00.000+01:00

I'm in a steaming distemper today, which could be for any of a dozen reasons, so let's just discreetly blame the weather. It's oppressive and it needs to rain. It's making me hate.

Yet it's rather ungrateful of me to be in such a foul mood, given that I was rather flatteringly offered a job last night. "Are you going to advertise?", I said. "Not if you want it", they said. Aren't people nice?

The job is as Artistic Director of the youth theatre company with whom I did The Apple Harvest a couple of weeks ago, which is to all intents and purposes a producing theatre with an ensemble company whose performers all just happen to be aged under eighteen. As The Apple Harvest was one of the most enjoyable and satisfying experiences I've had in the theatre for ages, and the show was really rather good (though I do say so myself etc), I'm well minded to take it. It's a part time position so I could carry on with all my other activities and the solid bedrock would save me having to scrabble for other work. What's not to like?

And given that they have their own theatre, there are loads of possibilities for a kind of creative mission creep. Why shouldn't the theatre start receiving really good professional work (funding permitting blah)? Why shouldn't it form a de facto home to Silver Tongue and Strange Bedfellows, and for that matter the handful of other ideas I've been knocking around in my head for yonks but haven't had the opportunity for because of the aforementioned scrabbling about for work - or, more to the point, for cash to fund work? Given I've made a resolution to cease being a producer from this autumn onwards, this could be the beginning of a brave new world.

(Warning: extremely lengthy parenthesis.

I didn't mention that resolution, did I? Well, I'm sick to death of scrabbling around for cash like a beggar looking for the last 34p towards his bed for the night. I was brought up not to go round asking people for money and quite apart from the indignity of it and the fact that, consequent to my perception of it as undignified, it's not my metier, it means I spend considerably less time than I want to thinking creatively about the projects I'm trying to make.

As I said a week or two ago, one of the reasons I was able to enjoy The Apple Harvest so much is that it involved none of the crap usually thrown my way during the making of a production. In the professional theatre that crap is irreducible, but there are people called producers whose jobs it is to deal with it; they do so creatively and with pleasure and they probably shouldn't be the same person as the director if he wants to stay sane and free of a heart condition all the way into his thirties.

So someone else does it, or I retire early. I'm not quite sure who that is yet, but frankly if no-one wants to pick us up after all the work we've done and the successes we've had over the last few years, then we should probably be left to die quietly. Man Across the Way is going to be our calling card to producers. Jolly good news then that it's going to be an extremely fine piece of work. Though I do say so myself, etc. Interested parties, apply here.

I've never believed anyone will go about producing for Silver Tongue with more commitment than I bring to it myself, but I've naively assumed commitment in equals success out. But I've effectively been charging with my head down for four years, and it's time for someone with more finesse to step in. Then I can get on with being a proper theatremaker poncing about making art like I always intended. How the hell did I turn into a producer? I used to be so much fun.)

Even now I get a great deal from working with young performers whose energy and enthusiasm haven't been dimmed by this very sapping profession. Not to mention the fact that the work is very good: there's a prevalent belief that community and education work is consistently second-rate and unartistic, partly because it's encouraged by admittedly unappealing Arts Council priorities and partly because too many people simply think they're above it. But good work can be done in all manner of contexts so long as there are good people doing it. (And yes, I'm trying to smuggle in the implication that I'm good - but if I didn't think that, I wouldn't bother, would I?) Anyone who thinks good work can't be done with youth groups doesn't know how to work with youth groups. If Anthony Neilson can work with untrained performers, why can't I?

The problem is with a funding system - and a theatre culture - that sets up a dichotomy between "art" and "the other stuff artists have to do". But approached properly, the two can enrich each other hugely to the extent that they are at some points identical (I heartily recommend Fin Kennedy's blog for his frequent more temperate thoughts on how so). Because any dynamic theatre is a fully engaged and engaging part of its community and its culture - BAC is, Live Theatre in Newcastle is. The Royal Court suddenly, spectacularly is again: look at how many writers in the new season have suddenly burst out of its young writers programme, speaking directly to precisely the audience Dominic Cooke identified in his opening press conference. This to me bespeaks a sudden refinding of trust in the areas of its operation that aren't dedicated to immediate production. A nervous Royal Court sees the Young Writers' Programme as a way of maintaining certain funding streams, hitting arts council targets and maybe, just maybe, finding some writers who'll maybe one day do something good - but not yet. An adventurous Royal Court, looking for renewal, draws heavily on all this resource, treating it as an integral part of a producing theatre's armoury and - hey presto! - an excellent theatre is born again.

Such young writers' programmes, or community programmes, or whatever, are too often a part of a theatre's programme of work as a result of some funding priority or other. This more or less guarantees that they will be effected in bad faith and thus be half-arsed and yield no fruit. But - whisper it - these priorities exist because enlightened theatres should be doing such work. Not because it's good for those people lucky enough to be selected to participate. Because it's good for the art. Now and forever. Amen.

Think of it as a football club. The short-sighted manager, in fear of his job, wants to buy a Ghanian today, not train fifteen local kids for some distant tomorrow. "You never win anything with kids", said Alan Hansen. But the visionary manager invests in the kids and proves Alan Hansen comprehensively wrong, winning the treble in the process. But more to the point: it shouldn't be one or the other. Sir Alex Ferguson can afford to invest in the kids and buy Owen Hargreaves; why should we in the theatre be denied the same sort of opportunities just because we want our subsidy from the government rather than from some dubious foreign billionaire?

Unfortunately no artistic director in a panic and in search of a quick fix can be forced to believe that the youth set-up is anything more than an expensive lottery, an enforced tax on hope, any more than they can be forced to believe in God the father, the son and the holy spirit. He'll always resort to the safe, to the tried and tested. This, then, is the central idiocy of the fundingocracy: they haven't got their priorities wrong. They just shouldn't be trying to bribe people into sharing them. Chris Goode once said that, when at university, he thought he'd invented devising. As artists, we like to think it's our idea: even if the government body happens to have got it right, they won't make us believe they have. We need to find it out for ourselves.

So I exhort you all: look to the kids! Which in some contexts, includes me!

And apologies for the intemperacy/inarticulacy of all this. It still hasn't rained.

Films

2007-06-04T12:11:00.000+01:00

To Mike Bartlett's My Child at the Royal Court on Saturday. I was particularly amused to note in the programme that "this is Mike's first play for the stage". Well, I was at university with Mike, I saw two or three of his plays then, and I know of several more since. It's odd that whereas actors' programme entries will say "this is x's professional debut", those of writers seek to deny that any work whatever was done before fully-formed arrival in a blaze of professional glory. More than odd, it's rather damaging to all the young writers who read the entry and are thus permitted to believe in the myth of such an arrival without years of student and amateur hard work before it. Mike has worked incredibly hard and deserves his success, which is built on the solid foundations of having learned the lessons of the seven or eight prior plays, rather than on beginner's luck.

And my word, the boy done good. It's a really terrific piece of work, a real statement by Dominic Cooke's new regime at the Royal Court and a real credit to that regime. Mike is only the second or third playwright in Royal Court history to have his debut play on in the main theatre downstairs (Blasted debuted upstairs, for example, which excessively intimate placing of such an expansive play may have had something to do with its lack of success on its first run), and designer Miriam Buether has been given permission to completely remould the space. Entering the theatre, one steps into an upscaled tube carriage, with some seats around all four sides, but mostly with standing room only. It takes the capacity of the venue down from 500ish to about 200, and with a cast of eight and a running time of only forty minutes, it's quite a big call for an Artistic Director to make.

But my word, does it pay off. The configuration of the space makes for a level of immediacy rare even in the smallest studios: you're right on top of the action, a sensation augmented by the way the actors disconcertingly emerge from among the audience and melt back into the throng throughout the action. The pat logic behind this staging decision is that it shows that everyone is complicit in the events shown - during the climactic fight, for example, one could quite easily step in. I hesitate to endorse this interpretation simply because it sounds so pat. But there's a difference between a play saying, and a play making you experience this feeling of complicity. My Child does the latter.

But it's been a long time since my reviewing days: what is the play about, I hear you cry? It's about a guy who finds himself gradually eased out of his son's life and, at his wits' end, winds up in desperation abducting his son, and hunted down by his ex-wife's tough, rich new husband Karl. It's an incredibly taut, driven piece of work that allows very little time for contemplation of the Alfie sort. But the very end widens the lens just enough. Reflecting, bruised by Karl's beating and Karl's greater success as a man in the contemporary world, on the creed of kindness and selflessness he has inherited from his parents, he is forced to conclude, "it doesn't work. Does it?" It's a blast that coruscates the pretence underlying much of contemporary social morality and it's still ringing in my ears two days later. It's really terrifying, and it's a brilliant piece of work.

And one of the things that enables it to be so successful is the way it strips everything to its bare essentials, with no dramatic waste whatever. The pace is blistering. The staging is a part of this, enabling instantaneous cutting from one scene to another by the simple expedient of starting scenes while one or more characters are still in their place among the audience. No unwieldy scene changes, not even a lighting shift, just straight through without time to blink. It's a stylistic choice that, though incredibly theatrical, owes a tremendous amount to cinema.

My generation and those around it are now so steeped in cinema that it's idiotic for theatremakers to ignore its implications and possibilities for our less influential art form. One of those is quite simply that you can't afford to drop the ball, that if you want scene changes you must find ways of doing them as quickly as can cinema, or you must find ways of filling the gaps. Audiences are used to not blinking, so to give them a chance is to give them a chance to get bored.

Way back in 2005, Bella and the Beautiful Knight's cinematic influence manifested itself in short scenes and quick cuts more stylised than those in My Child but equally rapid. It kept the pace and the intensity right up high and allowed the piece to turn on a sixpence from fury one second to strained silence the next in a way that is certainly possible in a more conventional piece, but not so consistently or so often. This among other things led to people occasionally describing the show as filmic, and certainly it took this aspect of film as a conscious influence. But I think both us and Mike found a version of this technique that made our respective shows distinctively theatrical. How so?

At the risk of overlapping too significantly with Alex Ferguson (no relation)'s most recent post, the significance lies in one of the key differences between theatre and film, although one that has nothing to do with the audience. It's the common sense fact that, if you cut to another scene in film all traces of the previous one remain only in memory, whereas an instantaneous cut in theatre must necessarily contain physical and visual traces of the previous one. The guy in the previous scene who's not in this one can't simply disappear in an instant. So his presence becomes part of the new scene, too; a physical memory, a reminder of the previous scene and a haunting of this one. In Bella we used this very deliberately, having the actor who's not in any given scene actively watching it and powerfully present, only cutting people out with light during monologues. My Child does something similar, to the extent of very often having two scenes going on at once. It's a brilliant theatricalisation of a language borrowed from film. Because in the theatre, we can be in two places at once in a way that, as Alex quite rightly says, the concreteness of film forbids.

And we must take that language on board: it's now part of how audiences understand stories. It doesn't reduce theatre to borrow from film. On the contrary, the language of film can be used to augment theatre for contemporary audiences. David Mamet talks about Eisenstein's policy of leaving out all the in-between parts, cutting to the quick. More on this later, but film's great ruthlessness with the chaff is only the beginning of what we can learn.

I had great fun with this on The Apple Harvest in York a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to see if a filmic montage sequence could work in the theatre. The montage is that bit, shortly after the mid-point of the film, where the protagonist is either at his highest or lowest ebb, music plays and we get a sequence of shots of him walking sadly down lonely streets, or joyfully driving a series of expensive cars, or whatever. It's the bit in Karate Kid in the funfair, the bit in Shrek where "Hallelujah" gets played, the suicides sequence in Groundhog Day. In film these bits are often pure emotional candyfloss. But they're useful staging posts and there's no reason they can't be intelligent just because they so often aren't.

So John and I wrote a song broadly in the "Hallelujah" category and made a "dark night of the soul" montage that cut together about eight different short scenes very rapidly. And whereas in film these scenes would rapidly supersede one another, in the theatre we were able to have most of them overlapping, with several running as presences all the way through the sequence and frequently cutting through into whatever else was going on. The traces of all being present in any one part of the whole, it became much richer than these sections ever are on film, an exploration of the creation of atmosphere and the juxtaposition of experience. It was lovely.

And My Child managed to use something from film I've never seen before in the theatre, at least not in quite the same way: the jump cut, that is, a jump ahead in the story that leaves the audience to fill in the gaps. The classic example is: shot of man taking woman by the hand and pulling her up from her chair, followed by shot of man and woman falling along the same plane onto a bed. The audience fills in the whole story in between the meeting and the lovemaking, so the film doesn't need to. This is the bit of Eisenstein Mamet gets so excited about.

In My Child, for example, there's a scene where the man and his son discuss watching a DVD:

CHILD: Let me see it.
MAN: All right. I'll put it on now.
The video comes on.
CHILD: This is shit. It's just a video camera in a cinema.

All the rigamarole of putting in the disc, switching things on, trailers, and all the rest of it, is cut away and we are simply asked to believe that all of this has happened. That's fine. It's not what's interesting or important about the scene, so why should we be shown it? Because that's how it would happen in real life? Well, theatre isn't real life, it's theatre. And by these means My Child tells us a great deal more about real life in its forty minutes than many a two-hour piece of straight-down-the-line naturalism.

There are plenty of other ways in which the theatre can borrow the successful bits of film: the best theatre-makers are always magpies. How do we take on board underscoring, for example, while bearing in mind the demands of our own medium? How do we make rain, or run through the airport, without cheating or resorting to cheap tricks? When watching films, I'm not just looking at what makes for successful film, I'm on the lookout for what I can steal for the theatre.

Music

2007-05-30T10:13:00.000+01:00

In one or other of his collections of collected writings, Alan Bennett tells a story about Dudley Moore comparing the playing of jazz and the playing of comedy. Musical timing, he says, is not about hitting the note at precisely the moment the metronome strikes, but that either side of the strike there's a temporal space, anywhere within which the note can be hit. In classical music, it is expected that the musician will stick fairly closely to the ticking of the imaginary metronome, but jazz is considerably looser. In jazz, says Moore, the challenge is to hit the occasional note as far as possible from the metronome's strike, while still remaining just within the space provided for that note. Whereas in classical form, most of the subversion of expectations that takes place occurs in the selection of the note, in jazz, the moment at which that note gets played is also a major factor.

(It's worth noting before we go on that this does happen in classical music, too - check out Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven sonatas - but it's clearly a phenomenon of the last forty years and while classicists might deny it, maybe jazz has played its part in that.)

How does this compare to comedy? Dudley Moore avers that the playing of comedy, unlike for example the playing of Shakespeare, demands a similar rhythmic elasticity. Comic timing is, in part, about hitting the laugh-line when the audience least expect it. To which I would say, that depends on the line. Sometimes the line itself is unexpected enough to require no further gamery. And anyway, Olivier built a whole career on delivering Shakespeare in unexpected ways. Moore's point, I suppose, is about precisely how surprising one can afford to be: too surprising and you become ridiculous and are suddenly playing comedy by mistake. Olivier's much-vaunted 'boldness' as a performer might be susceptible to the re-interpretation 'very close to comedy'. But not too close.

There are some fairly obvious applications of this to theatre more generally. Olly wrote, for his third-year final piece at university, a twenty-minute play called Rhapsody which borrowed its structure from a piece of music by (I think) Philip Glass. It introduced themes and motifs in precisely the way Glass did, broke its story down into movements in the same way, and followed his shape with some precision. Musical shape and dramatic shape clearly bear much comparison, although if I make such comparisons I'm not going to do so just now.

Because unsurprisingly, it's when it comes to directing that this interests me most. To what extent is directing like conducting? Well, in the sense that the conductor sits at the front and the director does not, not at all. While it might be amusing as an experiment to see Peter Hall flapping his arms about throughout the show rather like Simon Rattle (or Sam Allardyce, for that matter), I can't see it catching on.

But I do spend a fair bit of any given rehearsal period, usually in the mid to late section, noticing the musicality of spoken text more powerfully than its sense. This probably coincides with the point in the rehearsal period when I've heard it so many times that sense starts to recede somewhat, but it's always a useful period. Several directors, myself included, have some fairly deep-set 'rules' about the rhythms of the text: keep up the pace, think on the line rather than before, only pause at the end of a beat (a beat is a unit of dramatic action*), that sort of thing. To a very large extent this is just common sense, although it's astonishing how much work you see that breaches it out of sheer tedium-inducing incompetence. Still, I put the word 'rules' in inverted commas because they're rarely if ever rigidly applied - it's just that when something's not working as well as it should, these are often the first port of call and often fix the problem.

And it's not just about rhythm, it's also about tone. There's a very high chance that the beginning of a new beat will play best if it comes in on a note different to the previous beat. A line can be made to stand out within a beat if it strikes a different note again. None of this is particularly astonishing, yet again, it's terrifying how often shows slip into a fixed regularity of rhythm and tone. This is particularly true of classics, whose companies often seem to think they've found the key to speaking that text, before proceeding to speak it in exactly the same way for three interminable hours. And I've heard of directors (European, mostly) who conduct rehearsals by getting the actors to do the scene, then asking them to do it again, but differently - a good way of finding new musicalities, and an equally good way of inducing nervous exhaustion in your actors. (John Wright has an exercise designed to elicit rhythmic elasticity which involves the speaking of one line repeatedly, punctuated by a loud clap, in as many different ways as can be mustered. But he doesn't ask you to do it all day.)

I should stress that this isn't much of a way of making a show. The way a text is spoken can't in practice be separated from the way it's staged or from what it means without disastrous results. But it's a very useful way of looking at something late in rehearsal when sense and blocking are fairly solidified, and giving it a polish. As often as not something physical will be implied by the musical realisation, and as often as not it will happen the other way around. Both of these can then augment or subtly alter the sense. Thinking of a text as music for a period can open it up hugely just when it's starting to be in danger of getting stale. This is the period of fixing the metronome.

So in a sense this does make one somewhat like a conductor, in rehearsals at least. But once the performances get going, the performers become jazz musicians. The metronome has been set in rehearsals and their job is to stay within those boundaries while also keeping the show alive by testing them. Shiver last night fell very much into this category. It was quite different to any previous performance in countless matters of detail, while being very similar by way of content.

The performers were in effect, improvising together. The text was (more or less) fixed, the dramatic action unchanged, but they took every opportunity to find new notes, new rhythms. This is what happens when a show is alive, when the performers are really listening and in tune with one another. It's rather exciting. An audience should always feel - even though they know the contrary to be true - that a show is happening for the first time, that anything could happen. When the performers are bound by the metronome, this isn't possible. When they have internalised it and are able to play with it, anything is possible.

* There's a (probably apocryphal) story about the origin of this term. Stanislavski, giving a workshop in English, occasionally referred to "thees beet here" and "that beet there" when talking about the text. His accent being thick and the English being likewise, the term became accepted.

Curse

2007-05-27T12:18:00.000+01:00

Shiver opens at Theatre 503 tomorrow and the get-in is due to start in an hour and forty minutes. I'm writing this from my father-in-law's house in Leicester, having just finished re-watching the entire first series of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin on DVD. Somewhat lackadaisical, you might think. But no. I'm waiting for the breakdown recovery guy to come back to finish mending the van in which the set is being transported.

The story really begins yesterday morning at 11am, when I receive the expected phone call from my van hire company, telling me not where I should pick up the van, as expected, but instead that they're sorry but they don't have a van after all. The just thought it would be fun to pretend, or something. So at 11am on the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend I start calling round van hire firms to find a 3.5tonne Luton for immediate departure. Having finally found one at a considerably inflated price, I'm on my way.

But this has knocked my schedule slightly, so I'm pushing it to make it to Theatre 503 for the final performance of Salt Meets Wound in the evening. It's do-able though, and Sarah and I manage the load-in in creditable enough time to have time to stop just south of Wakefield to pick up a sandwich with the prognosis looking good. But no.

We return to the van with a bagful of M&S snacks, and the key won't turn in the lock. On the passenger side, the key won't even go into the lock. A fair bit of grunting and swearing later, I call the van hire firm, who promise to send someone out. Cue Stint of Standing around in the Cold and Rain #1. And of course, when the geezer turns up, he proceeds to spend ten minutes trying the key in the lock. "Of course! If only I'd thought of that!"

His ultimate conclusion is that we've got the wrong key for the driver's door and eventually he succeeds in dislodging the bit of key that's stuck in the passenger door. So we can be on our way, although the driver's door is not to be used. But by now Salt Meets Wound is a distant dream and I feel fatigued beyond the limits of human endurance having only done the get-out on The Apple Harvest thirty hours ago and driven seemingly constantly since then without actually getting out of Yorkshire. So I decide the stay the night in Leicester, where I was going to drop Sarah anyway. In another version of my life, I stopped for a cup of tea in Leicester at about two before carrying on for London to have dinner before the show. We got here at about six.

This morning I wanted to leave at ten, to allow time to get to Battersea for lunch before the two o' clock get-in. But the van won't start. I try again. It still won't start. I call the Breakdown Recovery Service, and they promise someone will be with me in ninety minutes. Then the van hire company call and tell me someone will be with me in ninety minutes. Then the Breakdown Recovery Service call to tell me someone will be with me in ninety minutes, and also to check that I'm using the right key.

The one thing that went right this weekend was that the Breakdown Recovery guy was indeed here within ninety minutes; he was here not long after eleven. He diagnosed the problem immediately, then went about fixing it. And in fixing it he broke something else. It's now twenty to one and he's still got his head under the bonnet. Stint of Standing Around in the Cold and Rain #2 was abandoned in favour of this outpouring, some considerable time ago.

More superstitious minds than mine would conclude, on the basis of the last twenty-four hours alone, that this show is cursed. When considered alongside the get-in at the beginning of the tour, when the set that was meant to arrive at 11am for an 8pm show, in fact arrived at 5pm, resulting in our first performance also being the first run on the set and indeed the first tech run, some might consider that proof positive.

But he's just got the van started outside (it's quarter to one) so who knows, maybe things are looking up?

God help us

2007-05-26T09:01:00.000+01:00

It's that time of year again where there's barely any football news in the papers on a Saturday morning. What's a man to do for entertainment but bemoan this case of affairs on the internet?

In the news there is: Beckham is up for an England recall, in a spectacular U-turn by McClaren that would be a good idea if getting rid of Beckham hadn't been his sole and totemic departure from the ancien regime. As it is, it just makes him look desperate. I hope Beckham really is in the form he's reputed to have found.

Meanwhile, Sven Goran Erikson is the likely next manager of Manchester City. I can't help but have a sneaking suspicion he'll actually do OK. Because while undoubtedly part of England's poor problem over the last few years has been managerial ineptitude, plenty of it is to do with the fact that, actually, our players aren't as good as our newspapers seem to suggest. Better use of the available players would help, for sure, and maybe see us in a semi-final rather than perpetually going out in the quarters. But world cup winners? Even European cup winners? I can't see it.

Take Frank Lampard. An extraordinary amount has been made about the right way to fit him and Gerrard into the same team. Why? Gerrard is one of the two or three genuinely world class players we have, while Lampard, er, isn't. He's a pretty good sub to have at international level, but the idea that should be one of those guaranteed a first-team place is absurd. He scores the occasional great goal and always works for the team, but his passing is woefully inconsistent at international level and his involvement tends to be fairly peripheral too. If this is the standard of our Golden Generation, then we're doing well to consistently reach quarter-finals.

Strikers? Rooney is fairly indisputably brilliant, but he's also wildly inconsistent: if the first twenty minutes of a game don't go his way, you won't see him for the next seventy. Sometimes patience is required at international level. And even with that, he's not a genuine 20-goal-a-season striker - nor is anyone claiming it, but for a brilliant support striker to really count, you need a proper, Gary Lineker, nabbing goalscorer to do the business. Who's doing that? Not Peter Crouch, except against Jamaica. And I doubt we'll ever again see the Michael Owen we saw in 1998. Way back then someone told him he needed to bulk up, put on some strength. So he put on some muscle and now he keeps getting injured under the extra weight, while all the time his pace was his silver bullet. Great work.

Bring on Estonia.

Meanwhile, my club's manager Gareth Southgate has figured out that "it's the small details like where the players are on the field that win you matches". In other words, tactics and formation. God help us.

Nowhere more than football (except perhaps ACE funding applications) is the title of this blog more appropriate.

Fascism

2007-05-25T08:54:00.000+01:00

All manner of tangential factors can affect one's enjoyment of a piece of theatre. The more honest critics every so often admit that having a headache or having had to run for the bus (or rather, their expenses-paid cab), does have an impact. Although most of them continue pretending it doesn't.

As a director there's nothing one can really do about Michael Billington's hangover short of cutting off his head, but there are plenty of environmental factors of which one can take an almost fascistic level of control. That's exactly what I'm about to advocate.

At the start of the show, the audience need to be in a receptive mood, and theatregoers, by and large, are. (This is one of the many unexamined ways in which critics's experiences are separate from ordinary theatregoers. I'm not talking about the free wine, but the fact that they generally arrive alone and spend an awful lot of time with their own thoughts. This makes it very easy to resent something that pulls you out of your reverie.) But how do we ensure they're receptive?

The event starts when people enter the space in which it's going to take place, and the pre-state should be used as unscrupulously as possible in order to render the audience receptive. Jaunty, energetic music is the first port of call. It should preferably have some sort of link with the show, but most important is that it's jaunty, energetic, and pretty loud. Loud enough for the audience to have to make a very slight effort to talk to one another, jaunty enough for them to take from it a sense of fun. If there are any laughs in the first few minutes of your show (and there really ought to be, if you ask me, but more on that some other time), they'll be louder as a result of the audience talking over the music for a couple of minutes.

And the lighting is important too, although I haven't quite figured out the optimum yet. Too bright is no good because that completely loses the sense of event, of entering a different space. There should be something exciting about entering a theatre and if everything is brightly lit it's rather harder to effect that. But too dark is no good because it overeggs that sense.

This is of course all very different if you're trying to create an atmosphere. You often see shows that have a churchy feel upon entering the auditorium, seemingly designed to provoke reverence. For me, what this does is make the audience feel awkward, feel as though they don't know how to behave. I want an audience to feel welcome in my theatre, like this is a party to which they're invited.

And despite taking very careful control of the mood of the room before the show has even started, things can still go wrong. Last night I allowed the show to start five minutes late while we waited for VIP audience members to turn up. In the meantime the rest of the audience were in their seats patiently waiting for kickoff. John and I valiantly entertained them with our loud jaunty music, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that we were now nothing more than filler. Before long there was a strong sense of "so what the hell are we waiting for?" pervading the room. When the geriatric VIPs finally turned up they stumbled and fell at some length to their seats, prolonging the agony yet further.

The opening sequence of the show relies quite heavily on the high energy pre-state because it is slow and sombre and its effect comes in large part by contrast. The pre-state having palled, the opening dragged and it was uphill from there to get the audience on board. They managed it, but by god it was a struggle. (Incidentally this is in direct parallel with the bit in yesterday's post about the sequence before the dragon-fight in HP4.) The lesson: don't allow anyone else to control how your show starts. First impressions count.

And don't let in any fucking latecomers. I was once in a production of Howard Barker's Claw in which I opened the second half with a ten-minute monologue. As I started it I could see that audience numbers were considerably down on the first half. Two minutes in, the doors opened and fifty or so people traipsed back in from the bar. This is an extreme example, but if you let one in, you let them all in. The exception to this, as always, comes from Can of Worms. If you're doing clown, latecomers, like every other fuckup, police siren and sudden blast of music from the next auditorium along, are a gift and part of the pleasure comes from seeing the performers take control of things that plainly originated beyond that sphere of control.

This all sounds terribly cynical. "You're trying to manipulate your audience." Yes, I am. It's my job to have an effect on my audience, and the more I'm in control of that effect, the better I'm doing my job. It's no good making a great show and then pissing it away because everyone's in the wrong mood when it starts: one critic with a headache is tolerable, a roomfull of headaches is a problem. To take control is also to take responsbility.

Boredom

2007-05-24T10:01:00.000+01:00

When I watch my own shows, I like to sit at the back, behind the audience. I watch the show through the audience, their reactions become part of the spectacle. This is the only way of telling if a show is really working: if they're still, rapt, laughing in the right places, barely breathing in others, then I know I've done my job. If they're shuffling, coughing, catching laughs late or not at all, then I know it's not working. It's scarcely rocket science, but it's stunning how easy people find it to kid themselves. Or maybe they, like me, are simply consummate liars about any show that's still running, for the sake of the performers and the ticket sales.

There are a thousand reasons a show might not be working, some of them environmental and beyond your control, but the audience never lies. Boring the audience is the only crime and it's very easy to tell when you've done so. Of course, there are degrees of boredom: everything from gawping mental catatonia to momentary remembrance of the fact that your seat is uncomfortable. All of them are to be avoided. And the way boredom works is often counter-intuitive. I met a guy who worked on the most recent Harry Potter film, and he was telling me about editing the section with the dragon chase. For some reason it was a tad boring, and they couldn't for the life of them figure out why - surely this is thrilling stuff? Eventually, they cut a bit out of the sequence directly before the chase - hey presto!- the dragon chase was no longer boring. If you're interested, but not interested enough, you can save up your boredom, and as a result the good bits don't sustain themselves as well as they should. You have to earn your highs.

Peter Brook once said that boredom is the director's most powerful tool. Am I bored? If so, why? Answer that question, the theory goes, and you've fixed the show. But to simply avoid creating boredom is a rather meagre aim in art. There's an episode of the West Wing in which Toby chats to a poet with whom he's a little bit in love. She says that the aim of art is (and I misquote, but you get the drift) "to captivate us for as long as you ask for our attention. That's it." That's more like it.

So my show last night was a difficult one to judge. It simply hadn't occurred to me that by electing to play the guitar live on stage, alongside John on violin, I could watch the show, or the audience, but not both. And watching the audience would likely cause a very odd split of focus, as well as being rather off-putting for them. So I didn't hear any shuffling, and the only coughs came when one of the cast started coughing backstage (like yawning, coughing is contagious). And certainly the performance was a better rendition of the material than they've yet achieved in rehearsal. But I can't be sure it's working unless I see it through the audience.

As a director, that's how I glean my knowledge of a job well done, where I get my ultimate job satisfaction. I'm not going to get that on this show, however much of a blast the show has been.

It's noteworthy that on Can of Worms this process works slightly differently. Because I'm in that, however fleetingly, I again can't see how well it's working. But because the provocation of laughter is so significant a barometer of the piece, it's possible to gauge its success purely from the volume of that laughter. In a show so dominantly comedic, it's not necessary to see if the audience are sitting still; their reaction is audible. We did a scratch performance last week in which I didn't have to be staring at the backs of heads to recognise that it wasn't working: the audience weren't laughing very much. It's as simple as that. At BAC on two nights out of three it clearly worked very well, on the other night fairly well, and in Bradford the first piece, 473, worked well and the rest not so well. How do I know? Because the whole audience laughed when we wanted them to, or because they didn't.

The real trick, having figured out that it's not working, is to figure out why. That's the hard part.

Insanity

2007-05-23T15:33:00.000+01:00

So, tonight is the first night of my new show, which is why I've taken most of the day off to add friends on facebook and create a new blog. Having not had a day off for three weeks, I feel like I've earned the right.

"Wait until after the show before you say that", you cry. Quite. I'm not so much resting on my laurels as struggling to find anything else to do with them. The show is a youth theatre piece, which might cause some of you to conclude that it therefore doesn't matter a great deal. Not so. When there's talent in the room I enjoy making youth theatre pieces just as much as I do working with professionals, not least because so much of the production crap surrounding the professional process is completely cut. But more importantly, working with a group like this one where there is talent in the room, I love the opportunity to do stuff I wouldn't necessarily get away with in the real world, to try out things I don't know if I can do.

So five weeks ago we had a notion that we'd be doing a seventeenth century piece probably about witch-hunts. We had a cast, a director, and a musical director. Now we have a full-length play with a text by me and songs by John (my MD), loosely based on improvisations by the group. We worked Friday nights and Saturday daytimes, a total of about 60 hours rehearsal. As a creative process, that's clearly unworkable, consisting of little more than careering downhill in full knowledge that the brakes don't work. It's an exercise in holding your nerve. No sensible professional would submit themselves to that. It's been one of the most exhilirating rides of my career.

I should point out that the preposterous timescale is not something to which I'd ordinarily subscribe. Work clearly benefits from a period of incubation and this week's performances will undoubtedly reveal several ways in which the script could be improved radically. But in itself it's been a terrific way of incubating work. I undoubtedly would have written nothing at all if I'd not been doing the project, much less something so visually and theatrically alive. It really is the only viable way of producing a first draft. Maybe in the future I'll create work in this way, with the opportunity of redrafting... how did Anthony Nielsen first persuade someone to let him do it?

So along with the fun I'm having developing Can of Worms and the new, improved Silver Tongue development process, I'm becoming less and less interested in working on shows where we have a script before the first day of rehearsals.

If the show turns out to be shit, I'm sure I'll rethink all this. I'm writing a hasty post while I'm still optimistic.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue.

2007-05-23T14:57:00.001+01:00

Many bloggers manage to write regularly and intelligently on a range of subjects. I admire those bloggers.

Most bloggers manage to write irregularly, or unintelligibly on one subject: themselves.

Welcome to my new blog (incorporating Letters to Dead Writers). Let me know if I veer too close to the second sort.

Like, I suspect, a fair majority of casual bloggers, I only ever updated Dead Writers whenever I was bored or frustrated with whatever I was supposed to be doing at the time. Its demise is down to my inability to consistently manufacture a link between what was currently bothering me, and some dead guy with a pen. So the new blog will have the occasional letter to a dead writer, but only when it isn't a real strain to crowbar it into whatever's on my mind. Hopefully the broader format will mean I can muster more regular postings.

So I'm going to be talking about lots of things on here and I can't pretend there'll be an organising principle, since I've set up this blog to get away from one which had a stifling organising principle. There are some things I'm just not interested in, like tractors and desalination. I'm not going to be talking about those. Mostly I'll be talking about theatre and its making, because that's what I do. I'll also talk about everything else that interests me, especially politics, music, films, football and the irritating things people say and do on trains. There will be no principle organising when and why I talk about any or none of these.

The blog will, of course, be a thinly disguised diary. Like most non-philosophers, what occupies my mind is largely dictated by what's actually happening in my actual life. That includes whatever geo-political issues drift through my consciousness or impinge on the material comfort of the people I care about. It also includes football results and my latest running times. But I'll try to make the blog rather less about me and rather more the product of my daily life in theatre and the world. That's as much as I can promise, folks. Obviously, you can skip the posts that are concerned with subjects outwith your comfort zone and if it still sounds unappealing, just go away. You're clearly very unreasonable and I don't want to be seen talking to you.

And the title? It's Gramsci, innit. But I use it here not as an attitude to the possibility of world revolution so much as a general state of being. As it was put by a character in Fin Kennedy's super play How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found, "I don't think I am being paranoid. I think things might genuinely be shit." And he's right, they might. There's lots of evidence to support the contention, for sure and I've no doubt I'll consider a good bit of it on here. Yet one soldiers on, giddy with self-belief and ill-conceived faith in human potential, Middlesbrough Football Club, theatre audiences and oneself. There's no good reason for doing so, but things are nicer that way.