Plays and Theatre

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.

Doin' it for the Kids

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

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.