The incest tragedy? “King Lear”, Citizens’ Theatre, 27/4/12

David Hayman, “King Lear”

My second King Lear in just over a year, after 2011′s fantastic Derek Jacobi version.  That was a very traditional take, all pagan standing stones and a venerable king thrown on the mercy of Dark Age gods.  This is something else.

It’s a sign of Hayman’s ambition as an actor that he felt ready to tackle a part most others shy away from until they are in their 70s.  Hayman is 64, ten years younger than Jacobi, and was therefore never going to be able to play Lear as the  petulant old man on the verge of dodderiness.  In keeping with Hayman’s oeuvre, this is a much more dangerous beast.  And that, I think, is the problem I have with this.

It’s a memorable production, a way of doing the play I’ve never seen before.  That’s the thing about Shakespeare: with stage directions that consist of “a heath” or “a tempest”, you can do much anything you want with it.  That has validated some absolute shite over the years that usually entails a company digging around in its military uniform box to come up with a mish-mash of all sorts of periods; the Citz’  ”Macbeth” of a couple of decades ago which was set in a post-apocalyptic world complete with enormous wind machines blowing actors across the stage and a Lady Macbeth who ate Duncan’s heart springs to mind.  I’ve never seen Lear tackled this way, though, so off the straight and narrow.  Generally, it works, largely because of Hayman, and, though I’m not quite sure I loved it, I certainly applaud its verve and intelligence.

The problem is that Lear scares me.  This is a king who is a Glasgow gangster, a hard-drinking, fur-wearing, sexually abusive  ned who has been elevated to the crown because he is the badass of the country.  His treatment of Goneril (a voluptuous Kathryn Howden) is actually completely  repellent, and the revelation of his hundred knights as the drunkenly obnoxious, arrogant squad of utter yobs that would make you walk out of any pub they happened to be in (a decision, I feel, is a directorial error), means that, quite frankly, I actually have no sympathy for this guy.  His rantings against his daughters that, in any other production, are the techy ravings of a foolish old man 0n the verge of senility are here the explicit, chilly threats of a psychopath.  As such, I don’t care if he’s murdered by exposure on the heath or shot up the arse in a car outside an east end pub.  And what that does is it legitimises Regan’s and Goneril’s complaints against him and makes you wonder just what sexual abuse he has delivered on Cordelia that makes her so in thrall of him and what dark contracts he has made with Kent to earn his loyalty.

But there are big plusses.  Hayman is always fantastic and does what he does impeccably.  There are some great moments, and he is capable of making himself appear so much less than he is as madness descends; I have to say, though, I find his fractured, nasal delivery of many of those lines of madness curiously old-fashioned.  Paul Higgins as Kent is solid and generally convincing (though, again, his onstage suicide at the end is, I think, a mistake, pulling attention away from the death of Lear).  I liked Ewan Donald as Edgar (a great part for any actor) and Kieran Hill, while unconvincing as Edmund, is terrific as Poor Tom.

Shauna Macdonald as Regan is red hot sexy in a way that becomes outrageously vampish, the inappropriate fondlings of a child who has experienced crossed boundaries that befits the rampant sexuality of the whole production, and her death performance is something else.  As well as oodles of sex, there’s also buckets of blood, arterial spray soaking the stage; the blinding scene is torture porn aesthetic, Regan taking out Gloucester’s second eye with the heel of her stiletto shoe.  Lastly, the final image of Lear piled on top of all his dead daughters and wheeled out on a hospital bed is inspired: just what has this total bastard done to these girls to bring the whole family to this?  I’d never noticed before, but there is no mention of a mother in King Lear.  Where is his Queen?  And how did those girls replace her in this chilling man’s life?

I don’t quite warm to Lynn Kennedy as Cordelia, feeling she lacks the necessary gravitas to stand up to her father and sisters, but it was a stroke of genius to have her pregnant in the final act.  It occurred to me a full day after seeing the play.   Lear demands that he spend one month with Reagan and Goneril each.  The crisis comes before even a month has passed, since he has not had time to visit Reagan for the first time.  Given that France accepts Cordelia after Burgundy rejects her, and has therefore had only a few weeks with her, how then does she appear heavily pregnant?  Who is the father?  If it can’t be France (who we do not see again) – then who?

I’ve never read the play like this before.  Is it a sexual abuser’s tale?  Is this a take on Shakespeare in the mould of Tim Roth’s “The War Zone”?

This version of the play has disquieted me, and dammit that’s a good thing.  I’m not sure, though, if I can forgive it for not letting me weep at the awakening scene, or when Lear carries his hanged daughter onstage (here, he drags her like some piece of meat).  I’m not sure I want to notice just how self-centred all Lear’s madness is, how possessive he is of what he is to and has had with his daughters.  But, hell, do you know, maybe Hayman and artistic director Dominic Hill are just showing me what’s in the text.

And that is undoubtedly a good thing.  Shakespeare would surely have wanted that:  I’m just not sure I do.

ps  By the way, I have to say thanks to my lovely PGDE English class, who took me along on their night out.  In twelve years of working with student teachers, this is the first time that’s happened; sweeties every one, especially fetchingly floppy-haired Scott  who organised it all.  Thanks, guys, I had a lovely time.

“The Kreutzer Sonata:, The Gate Theatre, 6/2/12

Hilton McCrae, "The Kreutzer Sonata"

Nancy Harris’ adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novella  of jealousy and murder is a wee tour de force by Hilton McCrae, probably best known recently for his chilling portrayal of Gary Glitter in “The Execution of Gary Glitter”.  Playing Pozdynyshev, a civil servant just cleared of murdering his beautiful wife,  he delivers eighty minutes of absolutely convincing monologue.  On a train, he shares the story of his marriage with the audience, the conceit being that people reveal themselves to total strangers on trains.

And it’s a thoroughly recognisable story.  Pozdynyshev lacks the ability to emotionally engage – as many men do – and so decides to fall in love with his wife, resolves to propose to her simply because she is somehow objectively  better than the many women he has had before. This reckoning up continues until he is consumed by disgust for her and for the minutiae of married life with her, from the way she taps a spoon to the noise of her swallowing.  Freed from the burden of child-bearing, she blossoms and takes up the piano, a gift he gave her eight years previously and which has lain dormant throughout their marriage, a constant rebuke to his sexual demands.

The arrival of Pozdynyshev’s old friend, the violinist Trukhachevski, prompts him to set in motion the events which will result in tragedy.  Pozdynyshev virtually throws them together, nurturing and at the same time resenting the sexual attraction which is obvious between them.  Torturing himself with visions of their affair, he travels back from business unexpectedly to catch them together.

What is so convincing – it is Tolstoy, after all – is the complicity  of Pozdynyshev in the whole story.  He engineers his escape from a marriage he has obviously grown tired of, and yet his jealous fury is utterly real.  It’s a  terrific psychological premise, and McCrae delivers it beautifully.

The set in the tiny Gate theatre works well too, the 19th century railway carriage realised with just a couple of button-backed bench seats and opaque windows through which violinist Tobias Beer and pianist Sophie Scott are backlit to provide the sound and the images which haunt Pozdynyshev from the glass he stares into.  It’s thoughtful and thought-provoking, tense and intriguing:  a terrific achievement for such a tiny company, especially from McCrae.  A very satisfying evening.

“Missing”, Tristan Bates Theatre, 5/2/12

Missing

A very effective mini family saga, “Missing” tells the story of two brothers, Luke (Rob Heaps) and Andy (Joe Robertson) as they attempt to find their way into adulthood in the 19080s.  Bright, confident and supercilious, Luke has little time for his younger brother, Andy, a lonely, limited  boy who feels his only escape from his damaged mother is to enlist in the Army.   It works well, particularly in the claustrophobia of the one shared bedroom which simply seems to drive the boys apart.  Their tragedy is their total lack of a common narrative.  Luke, an obsessive taper of chart shows from the radio and about to leave the family home for university, has nothing to say to Andy, a boy who latches on to friends at school who may or may not have plans for a band.  The depth of Andy’s worship of his bad tempered brother is only revealed when, years later, Luke discovers Andy has continued to make the tapes as a penance for an earlier argument.

Both Heaps and Robertson portray the warring brothers very well, the latter giving the subtlest of hints through  looks and shrugs that hint at the dark turmoil beneath the surface.  The banter is good too, the cheekier Andy besting his more cerebral brother with a “whatever” attitude that always has the right answer.  The play ends on a heart-rending note as Luke realises too late just how little he knows the boy he has shared a room with all his life, a feeling I’m sure most brothers will recognise.

I think I would have liked more of a sense of the hinterland that lies outside the room – just why is it so important that this takes place in Thatcher’s Britain isn’t all that clear, and I would have liked to have heard the mother’s voice as she seems to drive the drama – but writer Barney Norris (a charming young guy who I chat to before the show) has an obvious talent for capturing the dynamic of an intimate two-hander.

Sex on Stage Weekend I: Glue Boy Blues, Tron Theatre, 12/11/2011

Derek McLuckie, "Glue Boy Blues"

Derek McLuckie was a contemporary of mine in the fabulous Paisley Writers’ Group of the 1990s.  This was a weekly meeting of some of the most talented writers I’ve ever worked with, including Suhayl Saadi (a good friend whose “Psychoraag” is one of the most imaginative Scottish novels of the last 15 years), Graham Fulton (more of him later), Margaret Fulton Cook, Marion Arnott (A Silver Dagger winner) and Alasdair MacKinnon (one of the most elegant poets I’ve read).

Led by Agnes Owens, Gerrie Fellows, Kathryn Heyman and, finally, Ajay Close, it was an absolute hot-house of intense productivity.  Work was torn apart, fought over, picked to pieces – and always came out the other end of that process  at least twice as good.  I’d never have written what I have written if it wasn’t for their influence, and I’ve never found a group like it since.  Truly exciting times.

Derek appeared in the mid-90′s.  He brought a different twist to the group perspective, which was pretty much embedded in a brutalist realism.  Derek’s was a world of violence and sweat and sex that was unflinching and vivid.  It was so out there, so in your face, and Derek’s dramatic core simply emphasised that.  Gay orgies, casual sex followed by casual beatings, grubby rites of passage, industrial quantities of illegal substances: nothing was beyond him.  I always thought I was an honest, frank writer:  Derek took the biscuit, shoved it into his gob, chewed it up and spat it back out at you.  He was a fantastically promising talent.

I haven’t seen him for over ten years, so it was with huge interest I accidentally discovered this performance at the Tron. It covers many of the issues he dealt with in his writing back then, developed into a powerhouse monologue that was his trademark style when I was on the same bill as him.  Nowadays, every writer who can read from a sheet of paper advertises themselves as a “performer”:  I’ve always considered myself a pretty good reader, and Derek, as a trained actor, just wiped the floor with me because he knows what performance is all about.

This is a terrific hallucinogenic roller-coaster ride, full of wild buzzing involving Greek myths, religious iconography and a fair dash of  Barbie.  The adolescent pull of glue is really well done, not so much an escape as a heightening.  There are lots of real laughs that point to real truths, as well as blood in bucketfuls.  Of course, though, it’s all about sex, the gay teen tortured by desire for his pals; it’s not the glue that woos the narrator away from the Evangelical religion of his family, it’s the boys.

That is the source of the greatest poignancy in the performance.  A teenage pyjamaed fumbling with the one pal he truly loves is genuinely touching, while the other – more dangerous and full of testosterone – attempts to rape him using Germoline as a lubricant.  The final minutes of the performance, as the narrator sits torn and bleeding in a bus shelter and invokes the spirit of  Judy Garland as his saviour, are quite something.

Good to see Derek in fine form, as ever.

Edwin Morgan’s Dreams And Other Nightmares, Tron Theatre, 5/11/11

Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochead

I’ve written about Edwin Morgan before,  one of Scotland’s greatest writers, and one of humanity’s most humane men.  This new play about his last days in a Glasgow nursing home is written by his friend and successor as Makar, Liz Lochead, herself a great poet and quite brilliant dramatist.

It centres on Morgan’s final days in a Glasgow care home and his relationship with his biographer / friend James McGonigal.  As the physical and mental frailty take hold, Morgan is tortured by fears that he is losing the ability to write and by constant nightmares.  In a life-affirming act of artistic defiance, McGonigal and Morgan shape and beat those terrible symptoms into a final triumphant collection of poetry, “Dreams and Other Nightmares.”

It’s a bit of a curate’s egg of  a play (although it is described in the programme as a “new piece for theatre”, which suggests it isn’t meant to be looked at in any traditional sense).  As Morgan’s past unravels before us, there are undeniably poignant moments: Morgan’s brief encounter on a bus with a half-drunk tough which promises so much but has to end after fifteen minutes because his ticket won’t take him past the next stop; watching “The Golden Shot” with his long-time lover, John Scott; the utterly bereft grief he suffers when he learns of Scott’s death a year after they had separated (again).  Many of these moments are built around Morgan’s poetry (“Strawberries” features heavily in a scene with Scott), as are those moments when we glimpse the risk-taking Morgan, the man who trawled gay meeting places like Green’s Playhouse or Glasgow Green;  “I couldn’t not  take risks,” he says, even after the nightmare of the rape scene which sent shock waves through Scottish society when it was published forty years ago.  You can see Morgan reading it to  secondary students here:  Glasgow Green.

However, it suffers a little from the same issues I noted in “Hit Me!” last year.  The character of James speaks directly to the audience, revealing biographical details, dates of publication, etc.  that are all interesting but, for me, rather mediate the dramatic experience for the audience: as such, we see Morgan through those eyes and not through our own.  I wanted more of Morgan’s dreams and nightmares, wanted to hear more of his voice, wanted to become better acquainted with his “life force” that tops and tails the script, and I wanted him to speak directly to me.

But it’s a solid, interesting memorial by a fine dramatist.  The production is thoughtful too -  Morgan’s care home room looks more like a Soviet era prison cell – and the actors are well up to the job.  Davie McKay as Morgan brings out an innocence and occasionally irritating vulnerability that no doubt characterised the poet at the end of his life, and there are glimpses of the tetchiness and ego that members of the public like me rarely saw.  It’s also nice to see two actors I’ve worked with.  Lewis Howden, who plays James, has a lovely, authoritative presence on both stage and film:  he played Tulloch in the BBC Education drama I wrote on “The Cone Gatherers”, and I thought he captured the character’s humanity and solidity very well.  You can see him in the programme here.

Great too to see Steven Duffy, who played a central role in “The Practicality of Magnolia”.  Steven was terrific, and the on screen relationship he struck up with Sheila Hancock was utterly convincing.  You can see him in a clip from it here.  Steven and Sheila and the wonderful work of Clara Glynn and the crew created a film that was a hundred times better than I could ever have imagined:  I owe them eternal thanks.  Steven is also a terrific stage actor:  I last saw him playing Biff in “Death of a Salesman”, a hugely difficult part he tackled with ease.  In this play, he multi-tasks various characters – John Scott, Morgan’s final “muse” Mark Smith, various shady men, care home employees – and as such provides the texture necessary to hold the drama together, which means he has a tremendous influence.  It’s no exaggeration to say that the audience watches him whenever he appears, which is evidence of his powerful stage presence.

“The Missing”, The Tramway, 27/9/11

Joe McFadden in "The Missing"

Two excellent innovative theatre productions in a couple of months – and both inspired by a serial killer.

Like “London Road”, “The Missing” – the stage version of Andrew O’Hagen’s seminal award-winning non-fiction bestseller – looks at the effects of horror on those who are peripherally involved.  In the former’s case, it is an ensemble piece that examines the lives of those living in the midst of the Ipswich stranglings; the latter, another ensemble piece, begins with the nightmare of the serial killings by Fred and Rose West and spins off into a meditation on those who are left bereft by disappearances.

There are other similarities. Both are considerations of the relationship between awful events and the journalists who report them.  While the media pack who invade London Road are central to the play, here O’Hagen’s journalistic journey begins after the scrum has dispersed, but is no less an analysis of the relationship between the reporter and the event.  At least in O’Hagen’s case, his story is one of involvement and engagement, of discovery rather than prurience; in the after show discussion, O’Hagen talks of the “pornographic” attitude of the press to sex murders, and we sense a little of that at the beginning of the play, when the O’Hagen-like character – deftly played by Joe McFadden – tortures the mother of Lynda Gough with insensitive questions and thinly veiled accusations of negligence for not having reported her missing.  However, by the end, the character has invested much in the unfolding tales of those left behind, including that of the sister of Helen Puttock, the third victim of Bible John.

The play – and the original book – sensitively explores the notion of “killability”, a phrase offered to O’Hagen by a lone policeman at the West house in Gloucester.  O’Hagen’s persuasive premise is that certain people are more inclined to go missing than the majority of the population, and they are vulnerable in some way; the young, the poor, those in the sex trade, the mentally ill and socially incapable, the itinerant, women.  One baulks at this assignation of victimhood, but, as he points out to an audience member who raises the case of Martin Amis’ cousin Lucy Partington, exceptions do not disprove the rule.  In a society where, especially in the 1980s when the book is set,  “care in the community” has become a euphemism for abnegation of responsibility, it is undeniable that there are many who simply drop off a radar they were barely on in the first place.

The cast is excellent.  McFadden is charming, and it’s nice to see Brigit Forsyth (of “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads”) performing so powerfully.  Myra McFadyen, in her introduction to the final song (The Cocteau Twins’ gorgeous “Song to the Siren”, perhaps a little clumsily used since it featured in the similarly themed “The Lovely Bones”), reveals the most beautiful voice imaginable.

This is terrific theatre; it is short (90 minutes) but wholly gripping, and leaves one wanting more.  It’s another notable success for the National Theatre of Scotland.  Bless it

“London Road”, Cottesloe Theatre, 16/7/11

The Ipswich stranglings around Christmas 2006 were a shocking insight into the dangers faced by vulnerable young women who work the streets as well as a media event unparalleled since the Yorkshire Ripper. That it scarred those touched by the case is beyond doubt; in 2010, there was an outcry when the BBC broadcast “Five Daughters”, a drama about the victims and their families that may well have been “too soon”, but was nonetheless the best, most humane, most heart rending television drama I’ve seen in the last twenty years.

You can imagine the furore when the National Theatre announced they were putting on a musical about the case. A musical? Surely nothing could be more distasteful than making a frothy singalong about such real life horrors?

Well, it isn’t really about Steve Wright, nor about the girls, though of course they loom large. The “stars” of this show are the forgotten chorus of the tragedy, the residents who saw their street demonised every night as a “red light district” by the media circus that trampled over their gardens and their sensibilities for the sake of yet another shot of number 79, where the murderer lived.  The drama charts their various projects – raffles, quiz nights, garden competitions – that they hope will restore their fractured community.  The libretto really is their words; all the speeches and songs are verbatim transcripts gathered by playwright Alecky Blythe, who has burnished and beaten the base metal of”ums” and “ermms” into a script that shines with the rhythms of real language.

First, the problems.  I feel a little uncomfortable about the representation of ordinary working class Suffolk folk to a spruced up, sophisticated  London theatre audience. There are lots of genuine laughs, but some border on the way we used to mock The Beverly Hillbillies.  In addition, other than one brilliantly excruciating extended silence when three street girls peer out from the freezing fog to challenge the audience’s cosiness, there’s no voice for the people who really lived at the heart of the terror, leaving everything to be said by the understandably hostile people they plied their trade around.

Other than that, this is undeniably wonderful theatre, and I loved it.  It’s an ensemble piece, and some of the ensemble singing is astonishing, such as in complex songs with catchy titles like “London Road in Bloom” and “Everyone is Very, Very Nervous”.   With over sixty characters, there’s a lot of doubling (even quintupling) up, yet the actors manage to invest each and every one with individuality and humanity.  However, there are some standout individuals on stage, and they are all women.  Among the best for me is Kate Fleetwood, who I saw play  Lady Macbeth opposite Patrick Stewart a few years ago.  She is fantastic, especially as Neighbourhood Watch Events Organiser Julie, who chills the blood with the key speech of the whole play when she talks of shaking hands with Wright to thank him for ridding London Road of the prostitutes.  A Lady Macbeth moment, she nevertheless manages to invest such a horrific sentiment with something touching.  Neck and neck with Fleetwood in the charisma stakes is Clare Burt, whose face beams out loss and confusion as Jan, carer for the elderly, incompetent gardener and motormouth wife.  Both actresses are wonderful.

Others catch the eye, such as Rosalie Craig, uptight as a retired teacher, zizzy as a teenage girl and heart wrenchingly vulnerable as a street girl.  Nicola Sloan has a number of stunning moments, and Nick Holder is a genial giant who gathers the community around him.

Honestly, it’s great.  I have never been into musicals, but this is so much more.  It’s ground breaking theatre at it’s very, very best.  There’s a CD of a cast recording available – I’m seriously thinking of getting it.  If you have any chance of getting to see it, do so; hopefully, it’ll be an NT Live broadcast next season.

At the end of the performance, cast members are in the lobby collecting donations for the Iceni Project, which aims to help sex workers off the street and off heroin.  A lovely thought, and for that reason, this review has to end with a recognition of the girls who died.  This production made me sorry for the loss of  Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Annette Nicholls and Paula Clennell.

Hey, Chekhov, where are the nuclear wessels? “The Cherry Orchard”, NT live broadcast, GFT, 30/6/10

Conleth Hill, Zoe Wanamaker

Good play.  Just not my cup of tea.

After the first act, I was a bit perturbed about the wittering blabbering going on that contrasted with the big didactic speeches.  All was explained by one of my pals:  “Well, it’s Russian” made everything clear to me.  Thanks, Jenny.

I liked this.  I just didn’t love it.  Big plusses?  Zoë Wanamaker is a stunningly good actress for one, and her performance as Ranyevskaya is impeccable.  The best bits centred around her, particularly one speech towards the end of the first act when she tries desperately to explain her all-consuming passion for bad boys who use and abuse her to the politically unimaginative and emotionally stultified  Petya, and later when she reveals the horrific burden of inheritance, of having to be responsible for what one’s fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers have built when times have irrevocably changed.  There are some excellent supporting performances too, most notably from Claudie Blakely as Varya and Conleth Hill as Lopakhin.  And the set, recreating Russian wooden houses of the late 19th century, is beautiful.

However… I just didn’t warm to it.  I felt distant from the speechifying, perhaps because of the antiquated politics of it all or the oratorical style or the sometimes irritating performances (Pip Carter as the embarrassingly bumbling Yepihodov and Charity Wakefield as the self-centred Anya didn’t convince me).  Perhaps it’s unimaginative casting (the capitalist Lopakhin played by an Englishman, the stridently socialist Petya played by a Scot, Mark Bonnar).  Perhaps it’s because NT Live has just got too slick at all this, and it felt like watching a DVD at times.  I dunno – a good night though it was, it just wasn’t as great as it could and should have been.

Chekhov is, of course, rightly lauded for the richness of his characters, but it all felt a bit too broad-brush-stroked.  Admirable though it all was, it didn’t surprise and delight enough.

“Dunsinane”, Citizens’ Theatre, 11/6/11

Jonny Phillips and Siobhan Redmond

With a vibrant new National Theatre and wonderful writers like David Greig, David Harrower, Gregory Burke, Liz Lochead and so many others, this is a Golden Age for Scottish theatre, and “Dunsinane” deserves a place at the very top of the tree.  It is stunning.

It tells the story of the aftermath of the overthrow of Macbeth; it borrows from the Shakespeare but aims for a fiction that is more grounded in historical fact.  Macbeth, for instance, is not killed in a duel with Macduff, but is run to ground like a wounded animal; Gruoch, his wife, hasn’t gone bananas and thrown herself off the battlements; it is Gruoch’s line that has claim to the throne, not Macbeth’s; and Malcolm finds himself imposed by the English on a Scotland that had been stable for fifteen years.

The human interest lies in Gruoch, the historical Lady Macbeth.  Now let’s get one thing straight; the programme notes pummel heavily the notion of the Shakespearean Lady M as a monster, and that’s a reading of the play that is almost universal.  I don’t see Lady Macbeth like that; I believe there is much textual evidence to suggest that Shakespeare saw her in a much softer light, subverting the Stuart interpretation in much the same way as he subverted the anti-semitic interpretation of Shylock.  In other words, Lady M is a sweetie, and that’s obvious right from the very first scene when those damnable witches foreground the theme of the whole play; fair is foul and foul is fair.

But that’s just me; if I’d marry Lady Macbeth, then hell mend me.  Greig’s Gruoch is what I believe Shakespeare might have wanted to portray her as; a political survivor, a mother with a son to protect and a queen with a country to govern.  Siobhan Redmond is brilliantly seductive in the part, svelte and spoiled and manipulative.  If her accent occasionally sounds a little too Welsh, it’s a minor fault in what is a great performance.

But the stage belongs to Jonny Phillips as Siward.  Phillips – possibly most famous for causing controversy by shooting passengers and then himself on Kate and Leo’s “Titanic” – is outstanding as the grizzled soldier who begins by trying to do his best and ends by doing the worst things imaginable, including the murder and quartering of a teenage boy.  He has the impeccable delivery of a man who has to choose his words carefully because he is surrounded by those who use them so much better and so much more fluidly, including Brian Ferguson’s venal Malcolm who gives him a lesson on the political power of the word “seems” that is both hilarious and chilling.

The character reminds me of another soldier caught out and dragged down by politics – Pizarro, in Peter Shaffer’s “Royal Hunt of the Sun”.  Indeed, there are many structural similarities, including an occupying force seeking treasure in a hostile land, a captive monarch with whom the soldier forms an unhealthily close relationship, a horrific regicide, and a young soldier / muse.

I have only one minor gripe.  I absolutely understand the change in Siward between Act 1 (when he reins in Malcolm’s murderous tendencies, and restrains his troops for the higher cause of peace) and Act 2  (in which he embarks on a bloody campaign of repression);   his queen has fled to the hills, and the love that he thought might save him has proven to be a betrayal.  However, happening as it does over the interval, it just seems a little too sudden, and the audience has to wait for Siward and Gruoch’s final confrontation in the snow to gain a full realisation of just how deeply she might have hurt him.  Other than that, it is an absolutely emotionally truthful script.

Of course, much of the play’s politics resonates in the age of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the insanity of attempting to make sense of a cold, wet, argumentative and thrawn  Scotland brings a great deal of recognition – and laughs – for the audience.  At almost three hours, it’s a major work of art and undoubtedly a new Scottish classic.

“Cepheus”, The Lowry, Manchester, 18/5/11

February 2012: this post gets far more hits than any other post on my blog, largely, it seems, because of searches for “The Lowry”.   I sincerely hope it’s not  car crash traffic because it’s a bad review:  the theatre company deserves much better than that! 

Cepheus, The Lowry, Manchester

A wonderfully, gob-smackingly, gloriously awful experience.

I’ve always thought two phrases that should never go together are “avant garde” and “political”; in this production, they come together, clash headlong and scream at each other for the evening.

I’m all for theatre in languages I don’t understand; one of my most memorable theatre outings was to a version of “Hamlet” in Russian about 30 years ago, stunningly realised as a spotlit chess game, freeing the drama from the language so that the dynamic of the corrupt court could come to the fore. I’m also all for drama – and music, and art – from around the world coming to our shores, so that audiences realise that western sensibilities aren’t the only way to do it, thank goodness; every community should have its own visiting Croatian experimental theatre group. But there are limits.

Based on a putative student anarchist bomb plot to protest about Austro-Hungarian oppression and bourgeois decadence in Zagreb in 1910 – as far as I can gather – the production is part drama, part lecture, part installation art, part mime, part improv, part musical performance and, I’m sorry to say, wholly a mess.

The set is industrial; there is a metal cabinet which has drawers strung with springs which are plucked; lots of pieces of wooden dowelling are rolled angrily across the floor for several minutes, then teased into place to form radial patterns; there are various tubes and funnels that performers speak lines into or out of, for no discernible reason; there is a metal frame from which these tubes and funnels are hung, along with three metal gratings on springs which may or may not represent prison bars; this frame, rather like a set of goalposts, is pushed forward on rails, and then pulled back, and then pushed forward, and then pulled back, and then pushed forward…

The music, played on everything from a squeezebox to a saxophone to the spoons, is suitably cacophonous for a mid-European Absurdist Theatre company called The House of Extreme Music Theatre, and the performers are suitably serious, especially one bloke who ejects spit at a very loud volume into any available orifice (including a trombone which he obviously cannot play) and grimaces, mimes and dances like an extra from a zombie movie on acid. The mime – oh my goodness, such a lot of mime – is the type of stuff you might do with a Drama class of thirteen year olds for the last ten minutes of a wet Friday afternoon, stretched out to fill 75 minutes (“Be a tree! Be the wind! Be the anarchist echo of reaction against the wretched dignity of the petit bourgeoisie!”).

And all of this I would have accepted freely if there had been one moment, one image that made me gasp in wonder. A pity it didn’t happen.

Look, there may well be – in fact I’m sure there are – people who go away from this marvelling at its experimental nature, its absurd power, its alienation of audience from act; but that is to intellectualise it, and to exclude the natural human reactions necessary for engagement with drama; I may admire the theatrical techniques (I didn’t) but if I just don’t get it, then you’ll lose me. And, much as I fail to appreciate poetry that can only be understood with footnotes, and much as I rebel against art that needs the artist to explain what I should be thinking, drama that assaults the senses without sharing a plot or introducing a character I can feel something about leaves me utterly cold.

The Lowry

Having said that, I’d rather have theatres full of this than bow to the Philistine, profit-led attitude to the arts that prevails in our government, and in those universities which quite happily divest themselves of cultural activity which doesn’t fit with their hellish, technological, research-driven “visions”.

One good thing, though; Manchester’s The Lowry is a strikingly handsome building and a beautiful space for the arts. I’ll be back there.