Fix

Fix was the third of my three-shows-in-three-nights experience and, rather appropriately, about addiction: already I was feeling the neurotransmitters charging up at the ritual of picking up a ticket, taking a seat, watching another world in front of me. It's devised and performed by Worklight Theatre, and on an overnight trip to Exeter I took the chance to see it at the Bike Shed Theatre - my first visit to this atmospheric, cavern-like space in Fore Street. I'd already been to a couple of shows at the pop-up Boat Shed Theatre at the quay, and was glad to get acquainted with the permanent version.

Anyway, Fix is based on two years of research into addiction, which was distilled here into a three-hander, switching rapidly between scenes with musical interludes. Rianna Dearden played a counsellor (researching for a PhD), and we followed, in glimpses, the story of two addictions: a gambling addict named Zach (played by Finley Cormack), who is distracted from looking after his infant daughter by a gambling app; and Maggie (Fiona Whitelaw), wife of a porn addict. The stories are interleaved with information about the biochemistry of addiction, delivered at terrific pace and with terrific energy (so terrific I struggled to keep up at times). The music was delivered on two guitars with all three of the cast singing, and the songs recast the language of addiction study in a beguiling way. The opening number celebrated the powers of dopamine. One turned phrases from a porn site into a kind of rap, and another told us about the number of licensed betting shops in the UK ('There are 8700 casinos ...' it started, but I'm afraid an internal switch turned on Katie Melua, 'There are Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing'). The company made great use of the small space, sitting on small wooden crates also used for percussion, and presented a fast-moving hour of emotional rollercoaster from hilarity to despair. It seemed just the right kind of space for this sort of punchy info-drama. I'll look forward to more from Worklight and more visits to the Bike Shed. What a pleasure, too, to meet Mumbai theatre practitioner Sapan Saran, who is embarking on a tour of small theatre spaces in the West Country - an inspirational project, indeed, and I trust an enjoyable one.

Betrayal

'Jerry is a literary agent; Emma runs an art gallery; Robert is a publisher. Emma and Robert are married and Jerry is Robert's best friend, but Emma and Jerry have a seven-year affair and Robert has secrets of his own.'

Thus the flyer for Pinter's Betrayal, at Salisbury Playhouse, and it's all too easy to imagine a terrible play based on it, a middle-class soap opera involving arty people in Hampstead getting in and out of bed with each other. But it's a fascinatingly involving piece, not least for its technique of telling the story backwards, at each regressive step throwing everything into further doubt. What is this love story we are being shown? By the end we see it starts as a drunken declaration and fizzles out in boredom. Was there love along the way? Maybe, yet we are increasingly aware that behind every statement there is an evasion, or a deception. There was certainly desire, with Emma escaping from something and Jerry perhaps avoiding a disconnect  in his own marriage he does not want to address (or perhaps just arrogant enough to think he can have everything). Passion is surrounded by puzzle. Who knew what when? What further deceptions are taking place behind the scenes? Is Emma really just having drinks with Casey? Is Jerry's wife really just friends with her doctor colleague?In whose kitchen was a child thrown and caught? Pinter's trademark silences and pauses are filled with the sound of people searching for a foothold in an emotional landscape of ice and fog.

A capable cast found the drama of the words,  and the gaps between them. Emma (played by Kirsty Besterman - lovely to see her again here after Separate Tables) found a convincing spectrum from cool and controlling to utterly disconsolate. There was a real hint at something nasty not quite being shown in her marriage to Robert (Robert Hands), who seems to accept her affair with icy insouciance and yet exudes real menace. A brooding violence is internalised and expressed in insinuating verbal attack. His speech about squash had the effect of a brutal attack, while the Venice hotel scene projected a palpable tension. Jerry (Robert Mountford) played the lover, pinging like a squash ball between the other two. The Salisbury Playhouse has a very wide stage, and the production made full use of it: this might be thought to work against the intimate nature of the drama, but I thought it actually worked well, the spaces between the actors  bringing out the emotional distances between them, enhanced by ambient sound effects.

Betrayal is based on Pinter's own affair with Joan Bakewell. Rather knowingly, it has jokes about authors writing novels based on their own domestic lives. It has a slight period feel to it now, taking us to a time when we used traveller's cheques, and actually wrote letters to each other. And do literary agents earn so much that they can afford to buy, or rent, a flat in Kilburn purely for the occasional adulterous afternoon? Perhaps easier then than now. Yet it remains fresh, as it is not really about a particular affair, or even romantic affairs at all, but the nature of our dealings with each other, where our knowledge of our lives is only ever partial and every ordinary word casts a long and troubling shadow.

Golem

A couple of years ago, I attended a seminar by 1927 theatre company at the National Theatre. They create what might be called mixed media theatre: live acting and music against a background of hand-painted animation and claymation. Interaction between performers and projected animation - for example, an actor waters a plant which then, in projection, blossoms -  requires precise spacing and timing. A curious mixture of hi-tech and play, creating a sense of wonder. I was intrigued by the workshop and so was delighted when I had a chance to see the 1927 show Golem on tour at the Nuffield, Southampton.

A Golem, in Jewish folklore, is a being created entirely from inanimate matter - claymation on a mythical level. The show uses the idea to create a fable about our relationship with helpful artificial gadgets, which soon come to dominate us: another variation on the Frankenstein story.  Tied into this was a theatrical exploration of the corrupting effects of materialism and the culture's injunction to be forever buying into the latest brand: 'Keep up with the times, or you'll be left behind' repeated Golem's mellifluous voice (oddly, it's the exact same voice that tells me all my Tesco points add up). Human relations are sacrificed in the continued urge to look after number one. Human beings are simply marks for the corporations who use the Golem to market their products.

All of which makes it sound preachy. But Golem is a captivating experience, far too lively to become solemn, and often humorous. The animation, inflected by a Weimar Expressionist aesthetic, took us to a distant place which provided a distorted reflection of our own world. The acting style drew on silent cinema's language of gestures and heavy expressions, with striking wardrobe design to match: in his golem-induced quest to look good, the main character, Robbie, initially a shy nerd, ends up looking like a spaceman. But his ascent of fashion is at the cost of rejecting a woman, and the feelings that went with that relationship. Cartoon-style voices, often following exactly marked rhythms, further heighten the effect.

As the show progresses, Golem goes through rebrands, shaping human needs to corporate ends, until there is nothing left of us. The show felt like a dream, mixing the grotesque (the sleazy dance club) and the satirical with wildly inventive imagery (I loved the sequence of the Golem factory), leading us to a terrifying concluding vision of a posthuman world, where man and golem seem to have merged. The servant becomes the master, the inanimate clay has now sucked the soul out of all of us. A technologically masterful show about the dangers of technology.

Twelfth Night: Comprehensive Guide

At the time of writing, there are various productions of Twelfth Night going on: The National, Salisbury, Globe ...  and the Winchester players are taking it to the Minack in Cornwall this summer. And of course thousands of school students have the joy of being examined on it. So, here is my guide to the play, scene-by-scene, published as a downloadable, photocopiable resource by zigzag. Hope someone, somewhere, finds it useful.

https://zigzageducation.co.uk/synopses/7517-twelth-night-comprehensive-guide-as-a-level-english

How to Read a Poem

I'm delighted to be involved in this short guide to reading poetry. It was quite a collaborative effort. I was able to draw on excellent work by Andrew Hodgson, the thoughts of Caroline Moore, and the editorial work of Jon Connell. The result is intended to be accessible for readers from 13 upwards. It's published simultaneously with the snappy, sensible guide How to Write Well by journalist Tim de Lisle. Connell Guides aim to help those facing exams, but to go well beyond exam mentality. If this helps readers young or old find or refresh their confidence and pleasure in poetry, then it will have done its job.

https://www.connellguides.com/products/the-connell-guide-to-how-to-read-a-poem