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

The Threepenny Opera

I was up at the National Theatre at the weekend for the New Views teachers' course, and a trip to The Threepenny Opera was thrown in. Never one to turn down an evening with Brecht and Weill featuring gangsters, beggars and prostitutes, I happily grabbed the ticket, realizing I'd only ever heard, but never seen, this Weimar masterpiece. Once, when the earth was in an earlier stage of its development, I wrote an A Level thesis, unpretentiously entitled 'Art in the Weimar Republic: Development and Dissemination'. Memories flooded in of the Bauhaus, of the Expressionists, and of those merry souls Beckmann, Grosz and Dix. The designers had clearly been looking at the same images: the look of Celia Peachum here, for example, was clearly modelled on Dix's portrait of Anita Berber, and Peachum's hairpiece was the exact same style as sported by Dix's wife Martha. Although the piece had been transposed in the script to London (not, perhaps, such a leap from the festering rancour of 20s Berlin to modern hard-Brexiting  Britain), it was a German twenties visual we saw, and all the stronger for it.

As for the work itself, it's hard to get a grip on. Taking off from Gay's A Beggar's Opera, which parodied the operatic conventions of the day with a story featuring a highwayman as hero and a medley of popular songs, The Threepenny Opera is a satire based on satire. It's very very knowing and self-conscious about what it's doing.  Over its own genesis the work turned from being mainly a musical to a play with musical numbers, the main credit shifting from Weill to Brecht. What is it now? An anti-musical, perhaps one might call it, a feel-bad show (as MacHeath reminded us, verfremdungheitingly out of character, when we dutifully came back for the second half). It promises at the outset that no moral ending is envisaged, and throughout laughs knowingly at its own operatic formulae. Choruses, duos, arias are all poured out in a thick tar of  cabaret songs, delivered with a snarl, and rendered naughtily delightful by an exhilarating set of obscene lyrics provided by translator / adapter Simon Stephens. And at the end, a deus ex machina and a parting moral are provided, the first for a laugh and the second for, perhaps, real. Brechtian alienation is a more dynamic thing than we are sometimes told, I think: instead of keeping us at a kind of arm's length from emotional engagement, it draws us in and then pushes us away again. Passages of bleak realism are undercut with a caustic joke or piece of knowing stage action; a storyline involves us then calls attention to its unreality.


The production itself made full use of the Olivier space, building up from a backstage look of platforms and flats to some clever designs, which quickly assemble and equally quickly collapse. Rory Kinnear was a suitably seductive MacHeath, who we can't hate as much as we know we should (I hear what he did at Kandahar and I still want him to escape - what's wrong with me? Aha! thus is the Brechtian mirror held up to my self-contradicting little mind). That's partly because those after him are if anything even worse, and because the world of sewers can, logically, only produce the sewer-dwelling rodent. There is a problem, though, in hammering on at length about how squalid and corrupt the world is and I must admit, by the end of the very long first half the songs were starting to sound pretty much the same as each other and to say the same things over and over again. Powerfully delivered, though. Nice - by which I mean not nice - movement work, neat differentiation of characters among MacHeath's gang, some fine choreography in, for example, the arrest of our vile yet strangely dashing hero. Still, that first half did feel long. The second was tighter,  the story coiling  around us. There was no escaping the sense of the play's bold, blustery bigness by the end. Great programme essay, too, by Dan Rebellato, on why we need Brecht today. His first reason is that Brecht is fun - it's the fun of kicking over a sandcastle and making, say, a sand abattoir instead. That sort of fun. But what was left after the fun, that evening? A sense of self-satisfaction at having seen a European classic at the National? Is the socially probing mischief lost among the well-heeled theatregoers of today's London theatre? Has the anti-classic simply joined the dinner party as another member of the canon? Well, Brecht would want me to be leaving with that kind of question, I suppose, hastening down the tunnel past Imax to catch the 10.35, developing and disseminating as I go.

Dedication

Southampton's Nuffield Theatre is staging the premiere of Nick Dear's new play, Dedication.  This work gives us a speculative exploration of the possible relationship(s) between Shakespeare and his patron Henry Wriothesley (pronounced 'Rizzley'), the Third Earl of Southampton. The play is constructed on a slender basis of known facts. It's historically likely that when the theatres closed for plague in 1592-3, Shakespeare turned to writing narrative poetry, Venus and Adonis (by far and away his most popular work during his lifetime), then the more austere The Rape of Lucrece. These poems are dedicated in fulsome flattering terms to Southampton, but nothing can really be read into that language, since gushing dedications were the convention of the time, like long acknowledgements pages in academic books today. Beyond the dedications nothing is known of the nature of the relationship between these two men. There is a theory that the sonnets may have been commissioned by Wriothesley's family to encourage him to marry, and the play includes an enjoyable joke for the cognoscenti about the first seventeen sonnets all being basically the same. Henry Wriothesley (HW) has even been proposed as a candidate for the mysterious Mr WH, to whom the sonnets are dedicated by the printer.

The Essex Rebellion, which Southampton was drawn into, is certainly historical fact, as is the curious detail that one of Essex's followers persuaded Shakespeare's company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, to take the mothballed Richard II play and put it on, presumably because it showed an ineffective monarch being usurped. (It's not absolutely certain this was the Shakespeare play.) The company was questioned over this, but Shakespeare was not interrogated by Star Chamber, as he is at the start of Dedication. This is, of course, the play playing with notions of history and reality. As a dramatic opening device, the interrogation of the bard provides a neat entry point into the substance of the play, which shows various parallel scenarios for how WS and HW may have known each other: these range from Shakespeare being hired to help HW brand himself as a cultivated aristocrat among his circle (for my money, the least sexy and most likely option), across a spectrum of intimacy to the two men being passionate lovers (not impossible). The alternative scenarios reminded me of Nick Payne's Constellations, which I also saw at the Nuffield, and Kurosawa's film Rashomon, where the same event is narrated differently by those involved in it. This approach to playmaking is certainly licensed by Shakespeare's own use of  invention in his historical dramas, and his assertion, as a character in Dedication, that history is largely a matter of imagination anyway. And we have an instinct to fill in the gaps which, in this instance, are many. Memory, as WS says at one point in the piece, dies with us. If you don't record what happened, it's gone forever.


I found Dedication an intriguing play. It presents Shakespeare as rather a low-key figure, in his lack of dazzle not unlike the portrait given in Edward Bond's Bingo. It is as if the exuberant wordsmith has been left on the pages of his writings, leaving behind an enigmatic cipher, who could be anyone and anything. HW is of course a spoiled Riot Club sort of brat, at his most compelling when he recounts the horrors of the Irish expedition, which, in real history, he undertook under Essex. The production is directed in the round by Sam Hodges, on a simple rotating set with a central platform (which goes up and down). With no furniture and minimal props, this simple space turned from court to chamber to a street in Shoreditch to a prison cell - a nod to Shakespeare's own theatrical world. Music was provided by four cowled singers (recalling the recent RSC Richard II), but to speak over these the actors were amplified, which shouldn't really have been necessary in a small space. I'd have liked to see a real actor as the Star Chamber judge, whose voice was recorded. Perhaps it was felt this would blur the focus on the duologue. The two actors, Tom McKay (WS) and Tom Rhys-Harries (HW) covered with great skill the script's emotional range, from light-hearted banter to the intensities of love and anger (there is even a swordfight!). A strong work by Nick Dear, and another evening well spent in the Nuffield leaving one with a memorable theatrical meditation on history, memory and art. Looking among the blank spaces of historical record, we ask, what do we know, after all, even of ourselves and one another?