A Raisin in the Sun

At the centre of Western theatre is the family. The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus are essentially family dramas, and the same is true of most of Shakespeare, the Jacobean canon and the twentieth century too: Shaw, Rattigan, Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, Miller... Again and again a family, with is tensions, fractures and subterranean bonds, serves as a distillation of wider issues. Great reckonings in small rooms. In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, it is the black family of the Youngers whose journey we share for the two hours traffic of the stage; and, through them, we come to learn something of the situation of black people at that point in history, relegated by reason of their colour to an inferior status, on the margins of respectable white society in late fifties America: " Never before, in the entire history of theatre, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage" said writer James Baldwin. The Youngers live in a cramped rented apartment in Chicago in 1959: matriarch Lena, son Walter, his sister Beneatha, wife Ruth and son Travis, who has to sleep on the couch. Walter is a chauffeur with dreams of going into business, Ruth does occasional household work while Beneatha has aspirations to train as a doctor, but appears to be drifting from one hobby to another and is in the grip of an identity crisis. A life insurance policy on Lena's husband comes through, and the action of the play is concerned with the family's decisions on what to do with this money.

Over the evening, I felt a growing awareness of the nature of the Youngers' condition. Beneatha's boyfriends represent - perhaps a little obviously - the avenues available to her: return to Africa and the adoption of a clear ancestral identity; or assimilation into modern American life. Her intellectual questioning attitude leads her into trouble with her mother and her men. The dangers of free-thinking youth is not a race-restricted problem, needless to say. Meanwhile Walter is driven to distraction by his condition of servitude but lacks the savviness and education needed to make a go of business. His lack of preparation and tendency to fantasise make him dangerously vulnerable to exploitation. When Lena spends a portion of the insurance money on a down payment for a house, it looks as though a door has been opened for the Youngers. But the house is in a white neighbourhood, and the purchase leads to a visit from a representative of the 'Clayborne Park' community attempting to buy them out. 'Racial prejudice doesn't come into it,' of course.


It was a delight to see a traditional well-made play, introducing the characters then setting the spinning wheel going and leading us through their purgatory to a fateful decision, which takes them into a future full of risk - including, it is broadly hinted, actual physical risk. Hansberry wrote Raisin at the young age of 28 and it was, apparently, the first play by a black writer on Broadway, where it was produced in 1959. At that point, the question of what would happen to the Youngers after the final curtain was a question to the audience. Not that it has gone away, of course. Eclipse Theatre Company, who are taking their fine production on tour, is committed to drama and theatre-based projects which raise awareness of inequality and other race-related issues. Uneasily, I recalled I had been at a rather grand establishment dinner the evening before and I don't remember seeing a single black face there. And then there is the furore over this year's Oscars... So the work of Eclipse Company and other similar outfits is as necessary as ever.


This production was satisfyingly true to the work's origins: a drab single-room set, simple lighting plot, clear characterisation and full-blooded attack on the climactic speeches which may seem a little melodramatic now, but were part of the dramatic rhetoric of the time. It was entirely respectful to the aesthetics of the work, as conceived by the author. No production razzmatazz or modernising was needed to help us understand or feel the ideas and passions of the play. I must say it came as a refreshing relief after the National's ostentatiously lavish As You Like It to be reminded what can be done with a standard fourth wall set-up without a battery of special effects.  The play itself is a tremendous work of social theatre: Walter Younger should be as well-known to English audiences as Willy Loman. Indeed they are similar in several ways: dreamers, victims of society but with enough flaws to make us edgy and stop the flow of easy sentiment. The whole ensemble worked beautifully together to create a gripping and moving evening of theatre. Fine work from the smaller parts along with the leads. This was another great night at the Nuffield, Southampton. We feel so lucky to be within easy distance of this venue, showing some of the best work currently being done on the British stage. It brought back memories of Jacobs-Jenkins Neighbors, another remarkable play about the black experience in America, which I also saw at the Nuffield. If you happen to come on this post and are considering getting a ticket to A Raisin in the Sun, don't hesitate!

As You Like It, National Theatre

The National Theatre's new production (the first in over 30 years, forsooth) of As You Like It opens in a modern office space, where Orlando is employed in the lowly capacity of plant-sprayer. During the day, the office fills with workers doing things at PCs and having choreographed snacks and, as is common in office life these days, enjoying breaks for wrestling matches featuring the Duke's Champion, staged with all the bling and zing of the WWF. When the scene moves to Arden the chairs and desks are hauled up in an ingenious whoosh and dangle mid-air, forming an expressionist forest, like a gigantic installation sculpture - visually suggesting, perhaps, that Arden is the world of court / office turned inside out and topsy-turvy.  Backlight is splintered through this remarkable creation, shadows flicker, and there is an accompanying sculpture of sounds from animal noises to (beautiful, in Orlando Gough's score) a capella humming. As couples couple and the wafer-thin 'plot' resolves we are released from dimness into primary colours, dancing and happiness.

I start with Lizzie Clachan's set because this is what really lodges in the memory. The Olivier certainly invites such huge design-led productions, and the NT economics presumably make it possible. Perhaps West End expectations make it necessary. Every play I have seen in this space recently has had a staging hugely in excess of what the text actually requires. You start to wonder how the price of a ticket is divided: how much of a £40 seat goes to superfluous non-speaking actors who, in this case, sit first at a desk, then among the trees or pad around as sheep? (Or how about the policemen in Man and Superman who appeared for 1 minute of a 3-hour play?) How much then goes to the machinery which makes such a colossal mechanism work? Or to the creative team of 13 (what does an 'Artistic Collaborator' do?)?  We are getting close to the point where the directors outnumber the speaking actors, like the physios and psychs on a test cricket tour.


Well, all this extravagance could have overwhelmed the play itself, but the acting was thankfully strong enough to distract us from the set and its population of extras. Actually, this was a particularly clearly delivered production: every sentence was doing some work and made sense of. Joe Bannister was a likeable Orlando, Rosalie Craig a feisty Rosalind. The complicated stage business around the wrestling smothered their initial meeting, and this Rosalind was always more in control than she was giddy with Cupid's dart. Orlando's 'I can no longer live by thinking' rang out with a pathos I had not felt in it before. Celia (Patsy Ferran) and Oliver (Phillip Arditti) were miraculously convincing in their love-at-first-sight moment and generally a delight to behold. Touchstone (Mark Benton) wasn't funny, but I defy anyone to find this character funny, whoever plays him. Sixteenth-century logic-chopping wit is as dead as a Monty Python parrot. But I'm glad this rather unpleasant fool got a clonk on the nose from William at the end of that horrid little scene. Jaques (Paul Chahidi) was done interestingly, with the seven ages speech delivered as a kind of improvisation upon an idea, bringing refreshing spontaneity to this tired set piece. Much facial expression suggested some kind of condition explaining the character's melancholy. The production ended by working its charms, with no attempt to disguise the preposterous ending, and a full-scale all-singing-all-dancing finale in gorgeous costumes.


Briefly mentioned among the padding with which NT surrounds its live screenings was the fact that this was a 1599 play - that astonishing year which saw this, Julius Caesar and most likely the beginning of work on Hamlet, as Shak and Co. moved across the river and into the Globe. A feature on the history of performance in the NT was really nothing more than a few reminiscences of how awesome it is to play that space by whoever they could round up. More on 1599 would have been instructive. Mighty things were on hand at this point in Will Shak's life - meta-theatre (we need to see a production where boys are playing girls playing boys seducing men to see what got Puritans hot under the collar), fluidity of character - you are who you decide to be in the given moment - and forays across and around the frontiers of serious and comic. As for stunning sets, if we have clever people to make them and the London crowd are happy to pay pretty prices to be wowed by them, then I suppose they will continue. You can always go the Globe or Sam Wanamaker for something barer.  As you like it, indeed. But I remember warmly a recent workshop at the National itself on 'simple, effective' design and I would like to see something there soon in the Olivier or Lyttleton using a couple of tables and a chair or two. Go on, NT creatives, I dare you.

Sarah Kane, Cleansed

'Either love me or kill me, Graham' is one of the longer sentences in Cleansed, echoing Roland Barthes' assertion that 'being in love is like being in Auschwitz', the somewhat tasteless variation on the Petrarchan agonised lover that is said to have inspired playwright Sarah Kane. Cleansed recreates Auschwitz in the form of some kind of hospital-turned-detention camp, in which the commandant figure Tinker and his goons deal with homosexuals and drug addicts by torturing and eventually killing them - presumably cleansing a  society of its deviants, though there is no picture of any wider political or social context. Into this arena comes Grace (the name is a hint) in search of her twin brother Graham, who is killed at the start of the play. Their ghostly sibling affection survives, sort of, though it is apparently all a hallucination; and so in a way does the love of two gays and a romantic attachment which another prisoner forms for Grace herself. Tinker has a stripper in a box onto whom he projects the feelings he has repressed and which Grace arouses. The stripper professes to love Tinker near the end, though that comes over as some kind of hysteria or conditioning. Indeed the whole play is an enactment of various aspects of hysterical psychology. The moments of love, if that is what they are, are rather crudely symbolised by flowers prodding up through the floor. At the end, the flowers, shafts of light and the descent of rain seem to promise a new beginning, humanity having momentarily crawled out from under the Orwellian boot stamping on its face forever.

Like Grace, the play too seems to want to be either loved or killed. It amounts essentially to almost non-stop torture for 105 minutes. Within a couple of minutes Graham's eyeball is injected, and this is followed by acts including a tongue being cut out, limbs chewed up in a torture machine, regular beating up of prisoners, rape, suicide, throat-cutting and shooting. There is also an endless scene involving a box of chocolates. Physical violence is complemented by other items from the vocabulary of shock such as onstage sex, masturbation, book burning and a graft of male genitalia onto our understandably traumatised protagonist. Those who love Cleansed and Kane's work in general admire the lack of compromise, the deconstruction of existing theatrical form, the challenge to theatre's own limits in terms of believable spectacle and the link it gave British theatre to middle European designer-led dramatic aesthetics. Kane handily takes elements of Buchner, Bond, Beckett (the Beckett of What Where, for example, although that places all violence, Greek-style, offstage), Howard Barker, and Pinter, and follows them to a point of extreme visceral violence that could not really be surpassed. Having seem a minor walkout by Hampshire gentry from our own mild production of The Revenger's Tragedy I think I can see the motive for such an enterprise. Sock it to the ghastly comfortable middle classes! Kane must have been following a vision of some kind. There was no guarantee anyone would hail this work, or even go to see it, when it was first put on. It can't just be a matter of épater la bourgeoisie. A nineties play, Cleansed undoubtedly picks up in its imagery on the atrocities of the Bosnian war and refuses even the consolation of intellectual examination of what it is showing, for authorial commentary is nowhere in the stabbing dialogue or periods of wordless cruelty. Perhaps we do need reminding - where we least expect it, in the plush comfort of the stalls - of our darker nature. There is nothing here that is worse than Bartolomé de las Casas on the Europeans' treatment of the unfortunate natives of Hispaniola in 1492, for example, or Goya's Disasters of War. There is an interesting essay by Dan Rebellato in the programme praising Kane's unyielding vision, and I read a warm appreciation of her talents by Mark Ravenhill later.

While such supporters love her, others will kill Cleansed and its creator for much the same reasons: the destruction of form means the removal of character development and plot, with their associated arcs, and leaves us with unchanging tone, exhaustion of compassion and ultimately disinterest in the barely formed characters, repetitive rhythms and a spectacle that continually doubles back and plays variations on its own motifs rather than taking us anywhere. Like punk, it represents an energising nihilism, another kind of cleansing; yet nihilistic language cannot of itself say anything especially interesting or involving. There is no suspense, no shift of perspective, no interesting dialogue, only the thudding predictability of something disgusting about to happen as a piece of apparatus or a chair or gurney are wheeled out yet again. Is there anything transcendent or enriching in such a vision? Goya and de las Casas believed in a concept of humanity that this work appears to dismiss. Maybe we could place Cleansed in a genealogy stretching from Oedipus through, well, The Revenger's Tragedy to Artaud and absurdism, theatre as a quasi-religious expiatory ritual. But another lineage is the gladiators, bear-baiting and snuff movies, an indulgence of the instinct that makes people slow down at car crashes. In renouncing the legacy of humanism and enlightenment, revolutionary art can end up becoming an emblem of the sensation-seeking postmodern consumerism that is busy replacing that intellectual heritage with various kinds of exploitative commodification. In the history of theatre, Cleansed is radical in its formal adventure and piercing pitch. But in the context of the wider entertainment culture, it is worrying close to horror porn.

Beyond such adulation and deprecation, there is another, and sadder, way of regarding Cleansed, which is as the product of a desperately troubled mind. Sarah Kane suffered from severe depression and took her own life at the hideously young age of 28. Of course it is dangerously reductive to read an output of five plays merely in terms of the author's tragic death. Yet while conceding that important point, I admit I find it impossible not to see such work as the expression of a mind working through its own nightmares - cleansing itself, perhaps - by giving them palpable form. The same association of life and art suggests itself in the lyrics and performance of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (much admired by Kane), however much one tries to dissociate the person who suffers and the mind that creates, or whatever it was exactly Eliot said. If this play had been witten by someone I knew, I would certainly be seriously concerned for their health. (I had a similar sensation when pondering Agnes Martin's grids at Tate Modern.)

I didn't love Cleansed, nor do I want, criticially, to kill it. The actors working with director Katie Mitchell certainly pulled off a committed and intense production. Drab design and relentless electro underscoring heightened the Bosch-like visionary feel of the work. It is certainly a young person's creation, bold in ambition, grindingly unsubtle in technique (those flowers!), an unsubtlety matched by the various clangs and beeps and buzzers of the production soundscape. The play is part of the creative career of a particular writer, and if the universe were just it would be seen as an early work. It wasn't her last play. I saw the later Crave a couple of years ago, which is strikingly different, simply four voices speaking across each other (and owing a good deal to Beckett's Play).  It is clear that Kane was setting herself interesting challenges and finding different shapes for the expressionist aesthetic. What could it have led to? Telly, is a likely guess. It's odd how some of this material now seems absorbed into the mainstream in grand guignol series like Luther and Whitechapel. Aficionados of brutality turn to film and television now: Lars von Trier's Nymphomania, Dennis Kelly's Utopia. Kane's theatre, inyerface, brutalist, whatever you want to call it, had to happen, perhaps, just as black canvases and 4'33" had to happen, following lines of enquiry to their natural terminus. But it seems quite a period piece now. It's the art of the dead end, and the problem of dead ends is that they don't go anywhere. There are no doubt special websites for those who like this sort of thing.

Botticelli, Dante's Inferno

The Courtauld is presently exhibiting thirty of Dante's drawings illustrating scenes from Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante wrote his vision of hell, purgatory and heaven when in exile from Florence, between (approximately) 1308 and 1320. Botticelli's drawings are dated to c.1480-1495, by which time the poem was a national Florentine treasure. It is thought that Botticelli's drawings were made for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, who is also thought to have received, variously by gift or direct commission, the same artist's Pallas Athene Training a Centaur, Primavera and Birth of Venus. Fortunate fellow, though as a Medici I suppose you felt entitled to such reminders of your magnificence. In time, the Dante drawings wound up in the collection of the 12th Duke of Hamilton, who was obliged by financial distress to sell them - along with other manuscripts - to a national collection in Berlin in 1882. The Courtauld exhibition brings together drawings and manuscripts, including the sumptuous 'Hamilton Bible', in a show entitled 'Botticelli and Treasures from the Hamilton Collection'.

It is believed that Botticelli originally planned to colour the Dante illustrations, but that at an early stage in the project this scheme was abandoned. Certainly one does not regret the absence of colour in these designs, where the formal qualities of line and composition convey an overwhelmingly vivid impression of Dante's visionary experience and its moral lessons. Often multiple events crowd the same page, as in Inferno 8 (5th Circle of Hell), where Phlegyas rows souls to the underworld, Dante berates one forlorn figure clinging onto the boat, and is subsequently embraced by Virgil, who congratulates him for his virtuous outrage. Around the poet and his guide contorted souls writhe, howl and moan. In the bottom corner, the pair arrive at the city of Dis (Abandon Hope ...), to be met by a group of grinning, winged and horned devils. There is a splendid Disney-like demon smiling straight out at us from another tower. It's hard not to smile back, and to a modern eye the whole infernal scenario has a certain amusing charm. Everywhere, hands and gestures sketch emotional states like members of  the Pina Bausch dance troupe. The Inferno drawings are so crowded with detail that one can only list some of the most memorable figures: the monster Geryon, with a man's head, dragon's body and scorpion's tale; or the terrific drawing of the simonists (Inferno 19) disappearing headfirst into holes in the ground, giving us the bizarre sight of Dante lecturing the splayed legs of Pope Nicholas III. Dante does quite a lot of berating and altogether comes over as quite a bruiser, not the gentle poetic soul of romantic representations. Presiding over this theatre of cruelty - and the Inferno is an intensely mean and cruel book - is the full-page Lucifer, whose three heads crunch up the bodies of Judas and, startlingly for those who come to the story via Shakespeare, Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius. These conspirators annoyed Dante and other medievals for getting in the way of a stable empire under a strong ruler.


In the Purgatory drawings, souls take on more individual characteristics. The devils drift away and there is generally more space on the page. We see the proud weighed down by stones (thus they can't stand proud, another attraction of the drawings is that with a bit of help from the label they are easy to read), and the envious with their eyes sewn shut, among whom Dante receives the metaphysical light of revelation from an angel. Punishments are mirror opposites of the sins committed: thus, the slothful in life become whirling, frenzied mobs stampeding around (Purgatory 18), and gluttons are reborn as emaciated figures resisting the temptations of water and the fruit of an upside-down tree. The Divine Comedy reads as a  legal compendium, covering all possible cases: even in heaven, we meet those who broke their vows, though through no fault of their own, a strange little lawyerly subclause one feels. As Dante enters Paradise, he is accompanied by Beatrice, and the more realized worlds of Inferno and Purgatorio fade out to leave abstract designs of cosmic spheres through which the happy couple glide. There's a lovely fade-out as we leave them, tiny couples on a cloud, disappearing from mortal view.


It's funny how things overlap. I caught this exhibition in a break from the excellent National Theatre Drama Teachers Conference over the river. On the same evening, we were given tickets to Sarah Kane's Cleansed - an updated Inferno, though here the torments and cruelty are unexplained, not drawn into any comprehensible modern scheme; nor was there anything really to recreate the tension between the delicacy of the drawing and the roughness of the content that we find in Botticelli. From faith in art and God to the modern loss of these, je suppose. And the next day, I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by 1927 theatre company. Their work seemed in the tradition of the drawings, too: 1927 combine music, actors and animation in productions which look back to silent film and early cartoons. The expressive, opened out bodies, the eyes, and the interaction between animated and real figures of their works (Golem, for example) are pure Botticelli, pure Dante. A replacement bus service from Basingstoke made the journey through various underworlds complete.

Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art

'Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art' is, as its title implies, a show with a thesis. Delacroix, Old Master of Romanticism, was also a revolutionary artist whose stylistic verve makes him a forefather of the modern movement. At the National Gallery exhibition, we see Delacroix canvases next to works by contemporaries and later artists who picked up on some aspect of the Master's work. Colour, for instance. Delacroix immersed himself in the collours of Rubens and transported this Flemish world to France, where the dominant language was the high finish and sobre harmonies enjoined by the Academy. In this context, a work like 'The Death of Sardanapalus' (1827-8, seen here in a reduced replica made by the artist himself for his own purposes) was truly revolutionary in its energetic swirls of colour, and duly reviled when it was shown at the Salon, making Delacroix, in his own rueful words, 'the abomination of painting'. Yet to a later generation, the array of sensual tones and daring decentred composition were sources of inspiration. A genealogy can be traced from Delacroix to the Impressionists to the Post-Impressionists, at each stage colour detaching itself from realistic depiction on its way to becoming a pure expressive element, the beating heart of the image, while classical composition breaks into a million fragments. As an example of this family tree, the third room argues that Delacroix revived the genre of the floral painting, which had descended into limp decorative prettiness. From his full-blooded delight in fruit and flowers 'tis but a step to the inner world figured in van Gogh's sunflowers or the dream visions of Odilon Redon. Elsewhere we can see how van Gogh recaptured from memory the colouristic schemes of the Master in a glowing Pietà. Links are made to even later artists like Kandinsky, whose formal experiments belong to a narrative in which Delacroix's journals, concerned among many other things with the theory of optics, are a central document.

I learned a great deal from this exhibition. Delacroix looks so much like the summation of old-style grand history painting that it is refreshing to consider  him as a forerunner of later schools, his freedom from tradition underpinned by tributes from Baudelaire, Cézanne and other admirers. The paintings from Africa make a sumptuous mini-display in the second room, where whirling sufis, senatorial menfolk and the lustrous 'Women of Algiers in their Apartment' display a Moroccan experience transmuted through memory into a blazing oriental world, half real half enhanced by imagination. Here was the alternative the artist sought to biblical and ancient historical scenes. Memory, indeed, is a major theme in this exhibition: like Wordsworth, Delacroix insisted on the importance of experience re-collected, and many of the paintings from Africa were executed many years after his brief trip to Morocco in 1832.
There were art-historical detective stories to remind us of the scholarly precision end of the discipline:  A might have seen this painting by B in the private collection of C when he visited X. Such links are a reminder, too, of a now vanished world of transmission and influence. When van Gogh had only a lithograph to copy, he recaptured from memory the arrangement of complementary colours he had seen in Delacroix's other works. This kind of memory must surely be rarer in the age of mechanical reproduction.
I found the argument - Delacroix as the grandfather of modernity - pretty persuasive, although the organisers themselves say that Delacroix's journals are so complex and compendious that you can use them to prove pretty much whatever you like. Put him next to Veronese and other earlier narrative painters and you'd get another story. But both can be true, of course. The visual evidence for moderns doffing their cap to Delacroix is the most compelling, the textual is rather weaker. Despite Cézanne's flamboyant remarks about the nineteenth-century master, his work does seem to be in a very different register, although his rather dotty oil sketch of D being assumed into the heavens while contemporary artists peer up at him is saying something, however wryly, about the handover of revolutionary daring. Over the show Delacroix himself almost disappears, effaced by the storm he helped to create: there is just one painting by him in the flowers room, and in the final room a single tiny copy of a ceiling mural is overwhelmed by the cultural progeny it allegedly helped to spawn. Then there is the question of quality. The great works in the Louvre cannot be lent, and so Delacroix is not represented by many of his his masterpieces here; so the fantastic array of works by the likes of Courbet, Renoir, van Gogh, Gauguin et al. are in may cases more emphatic works than the Master's and take over our attention. The van Gogh painting of olive groves is a simply stunning piece, and doesn't gain much in interest if we consider its somewhat elusive debt to Delacroix's landscape oil sketches from England.
The exhibition is continually interesting, though I confess I didn't spend much time at the film of mural projects. My favourite picture of all was a Kandinsky, on the cusp of abstraction, where the figures and horses gradually revealed themselves after a minute or two of puzzled looking (and profitable listening to the genial audioguide). The exhibition itself also revealed its value over the two hours it took to look round. After being treated to amazing representations of Rembrandt and Goya in the Sainsbury Wing there was perhaps an initial disappointment in not seeing more Delacroix here. But that would be to miss the point of this thought-provoking and stimulating exercise in comparative looking. Baudelaire described Delacroix as a volcano concealed beneath a bouquet of flowers. In this inventive and thoughtful display, we were able to trace the range and direction of that ongoing eruption.