Neighbors, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Neighbors, by Brooklyn playwright Jacobs-Jenkins, uses theatrical language to explore race issues in contemporary America (and, by extension, Britain). A mixed-race couple, the Pattersons, move into a suburban neighbourhood so he (Richard) can start climbing the academic ladder as a lecturer (on tragedy, it would seem) at a nearby university. Occupying another stage are their neighbours, the Crows, a troupe of negro entertainers disturbingly got up in the blackface minstrelsy look popular a hundred years ago (I still have vague memories of the Black and White Minstrel show on British TV). Through the interaction of these two families we get a look at identity politics (it is Richard who uses the 'n' word of his neighbours and distrusts them viscerally), sexual attractions and cultural taboos. The vaudeville show put on by the Crows plays up to all the negro stereotypes of another age (for example, Big Mammy lactating two white babies enacts ideas of black fecundity). In my case it also agitated long-dormant mental furniture from the novels of Enid Blyton, the Tom and Jerry cartoons (the unseen black housemaid) and beyond. Performances were powerful throughout: the scenes between Jean Patterson (Clare Calbraith) and Zip Coon (Craig Stein) particularly stuck in the mind for their unlayering of Jean's anxieties.

As a play, Neighbors tried everything, placing domestic turmoil (fracturing marriage, troubled daughter) alongside grand historical issues, and throwing in some Brechtian meta-theatre as well (applauding the Crows, we become the audience the minstrels were exploited by). There wasn't space for it all to be worked out: the strand on classical tragedy didn't seem to develop, and the relationship between the daughter and son of the two families didn't have any point to get to after it ignited Patterson's fury. The strange songs and routines of the Crows burned themselves into the mind. I had no idea what minstrel shows actually consisted off - a chapter of American theatrical history not much dwelt upon, I imagine. The ending was powerfully disconcerting. It was rather remarkable to read in the programme that there was debate over whether to go ahead with a production of this work, given its 'outrageousness'. Inventive theatricality, intelligent text and a work that leaves us feeling uneasy is surely just what the contemporary stage needs. A co-production of the Nuffield and High Tide Theatre. Good to see a decent-sized and appreciative house at the Nuffield for this.

Radio drama

Radio is an extremely satisfying medium for drama. No annoying sweet papers, mobile phones and other sundry molestations from the herd, no problems with the view, no directorial concepts to ignore, no travel, no expenses of any kind in fact, just actors bringing the text to life and leaving the rest to the imagination. Just a round-up here of radio plays that have stick in the mind over the last few weeks. I liked all of the plays 'curated' (why not 'chosen'?) by playwright Mark Ravenhill on the Drama on Radio 3 slot: Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire on the moment when Crowell's Revolution seemed to open the door to radical new ideas of freedom and election and then shut it; Dion Boucicault's Victorian melodrama set in the American South, The Octoroon, performed to a booing and cheering audience, with dialogue over music, was novel and exciting; Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities perhaps broke the generalisations above, being well nigh impossible to follow without some visual aids, but it was a fascinating introduction to a Brecht Chicago play besides the better-known Arturo Ui. Mark Ravenhill himself recently gave us Imo and Ben. This was a three-hander on Imogen Holst's assistance of Britten in the composition of Gloriana, the opera commissioned to mark Elizabeth II's coronation. The opera had a disastrous reception. The focus of the play, however, was on the creative process, Britten's mood swings and his manipulation and at one point horrifying abuse of amanuensis Holst. Gripping stuff. With her clipped fifties cultured accent, Amanda Root as Imogen sounded remarkably like Honeysuckle Weeks in Foyle's War. Going further back, English touring Theatre's The Misanthrope came over very well on radio in Roger McGough's version (see other blog on the stage production), and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen was given a mighty outing by the stellar cast of Benedict Cumberbatch, Greta Scacchi and Simon Russell Beale. Mention of Beale brings to mind John Hodges' Collaborators, in which SRB played Stalin alongside Alex Jennings as Bulgakov. David Pownall's Tennyson and Edison riffed nicely on the ideas suggested by Tennyson making a cylinder recording of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade': the old world and the new, love, loss and memory. Craig Warner, Tosca's Kiss was a convincing variation on the story of the opera, with a chilling performance by Stephen Dillane. Shorter pieces: James Lees-Milne: What England Owes on L-M's meetings with English composer and eccentric Lord Berners; Michael Symmons Roberts, The Flea on the disastrous love affair of English poet John Donne; Sam Soko, The New Bwana; and Catherine Johnson, Fresh Berries, on the sadly topical subject of the grooming of girls for prostitution. There's a website where you can read radio drama done far better justice than I've managed here:
http://www.radiodramareviews.com/

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

Apparently in his later years, occupied with ever-more minimalist statements of his preoccupations, Beckett regarded Godot as far too long and verbose. It is certainly in quite a different key to dramaticules like Catastrophe and Come and Go, but that very sense of space and elasticity allows it to trace the currents of human companionship in ways the stricter later work cannot. Miracle Theatre, a company specialising in outdoor productions in the summer, did justice to this marvellous piece in a production which hit both the comic and tragic keys at the right moment. Steve Jacobs and Angus Brown played off each other as Estragon and Vladimir, and Ben Dyson was a remarkable Pozzo, whose voice had something of Minder about it. Ciaran Clarke was Lucky, delivering the famous monologue with a tentative air, as if this was indeed the last 'thinking' he would ever do. The raised area - presumably for touring purposes - brought out the isolation of this Everyman pair, and the beautiful poetry towards the end did its work even on an audience more geared, it seemed, for laughter than tears. It was good that during the production money was raised for a worthy cause, but I can't approve of a great work like this being interrupted by a half-hour interval with a raffle (I saw it at the Theatre Roytal, Winchester). What is the play about? By the day I grow more antagonistic towards academic interpretation, which is often simply a way of pulling something strange into something more familiar. And I cite Beckett as my witness: 'As for wanting to find in all that a broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with the program and the Eskimo pie, I cannot see the point of it. But it must be possible ...' (Eskimo pie??)

The Amen Corner, James Baldwin

Rufus Norris's revival of James Baldwin's 1955 play has been a great summer hit for the National. That is in part owing to the wonderful music, with the London Community Gospel Choir led by the Rev Bazil Meade belting out a succession of hymns (could a Harlem community church have been that good?) and a jazz trio playing a through-composed jazz score by Tim Sutton. But The Amen Corner is a play with music, not a musical, and the drama was played with great strength and subtlety. Marianne Jean-Baptiste played Sister Margaret, dominant pastor of her church, who is confronted by the return of a prodigal and terminally ill husband and the departure of a wayward musical son. Her position in the community, meanwhile, is threatened by a rebellious congregation stirred up by a rival elder (Cecilia Noble). A two-tier set brought out the two parts of Sister Margaret's life effectively. The jazz musicians in the space above perhaps made the church hall somewhat less than  realistic (especially when you can see the red light on the digital keyboard - surely it could be covered up with a bit of masking tape), and the Olivier's cosmic space was filled out with tenement scenes that were unnecessary but added atmosphere. Three-act plays are a challenge in a theatre where the convention is to have just one interval, and it was perhaps inevitable that the first half (ie two acts) felt rather long. But the third act took us to an enormously affecting conclusion, with text and music in perfect balance. And all accessible for £12, thanks to those amazing Travelex folk.

The Petrarchan Sonnet

Here's a brief guide to the form of sonnet known as the Petrarchan. Of interest, perhaps, to students of poetry and the general reader.

Like many poetic forms and terms, the sonnet is Italian in origin. It was used by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch (1304-74), and introduced to England in the sixteenth century by the poets Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)and Surrey (full name Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, ?1517-47). They made translations of Petrarch and wrote English sonnets which employed his rhyme scheme.

Basic form

The basic shape of the Petrarchan sonnet is 8 lines (the octave or octet) + 6 lines (the sestet). The octave is composed of two quatrains, closely linked by just two rhyme sounds: abbaabba. The sestet has various rhyme forms, using either two or three rhyme sounds: cdcdcd, cde cde  etc. Many variations are permitted, but the sonnet should not end with a couplet. The English iambic pentameter line is the standard metre. In graphic form, here is the rhyme scheme of a sonnet divided into octave and a sestet, the setet itself divided into two tercets liniked by rhyme.

1. ___________ a
2. ___________ b
3. ___________ b
4. ___________ a
5. ___________ a
6. ___________ b
7. ___________ b
8. ___________ a

     9. ____________ c
     10. ___________ d
     11. ___________ c

     12. ___________ d
     13. ___________ c
     14. ___________ d

One thing to look out for in a sonnet is the turn (Italian volta), the point between the octave and sestet, where the sonnet moves from one rhyme group to another.  With the change in rhyme scheme may come a change in subject  matter.  So in the second, shorter half, the poet may change register, comment on the first half (perhaps presenting it as an analogy), answer it, resolve its tensions or heighten them, or reverse  the feeling altogether, among many other strategies.

A sonnet is a little too long for simple lyrical expression, but too short to tell a complex narrative. It therefore suits short argument, and the representation of an internal mental / emotional experience, often involving conflicting feelings.  This figuring of an internal passage of thought invites metaphorical language. Originally, the predominant theme was love, with the Petrarchan lover in joy and agony, burning and freezing at the sight of his beautiful / remote beloved. Wyatt and Surrey were courtly poets, writing about the delicate sensitivities of the courtly lover. Later writers have adopted the form for a wide range of subjects. Rhyming is harder in English than Italian, so the form also represents a formidable technical challenge to the poet. The discipline of the form seems to be an effective way of presenting strong emotional content.

Here are some examples of English sonnets using the Petrarchan form.

Wyatt

The long love that in my heart doth harbor

And in mine heart doth keep his residence,

Into my face presseth with bold pretense,

And there campeth, displaying his banner.

She that me learneth to love and to suffer,

And wills that my trust and lust's negligence

Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence,

With his hardiness taketh displeasure.

Wherewith love to the heart's forest he fleeth,

Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,

And there him hideth and not appeareth.

What may I do when my master feareth

But in the field with him to live and die?

For good is the life ending faithfully.

Let's look at this without reference to the Italian model. It stands or falls as a poem in English, after all. I like the way it gets on with telling its story straightaway. Each line in the first quatrain tells us about a new event, an internal experience figured in imagery. 'Long love' - the length is felt through the double stress, which lengthens the vowels and gives the liquid 'l' sound its full value ('l' does seem to have an erotic feel to it: the lovely long-legged lady whiplash; Nabokov comments on this at the start of Lolita). The poet / lover is talking about love felt for a long time, and along with this temporal sense we get a spatial one: we see a long ship in harbour (inactive, frustrated). Like a royal visitor, Love takes up residence in the heart, which we might see in line 2 as a country house (nobles were supposed to keep these vast houses just in case the monarch decided to honour them by living there with the attendant swarm of court locusts; is there a passing echo of a castle keep?). But then, in lines three to four, something happens. Bored of harbouring and residing - a passive, skulking state - Love announces himself. He presses into the lover's face: he must have made some sign (A smile? A blush? A leer? Can I buy you a drink?) to the Lady. Love is out in the open, exposed, displaying his banner like an army in its camp.

Huge faux pas! The second quatrain looks at the Lady's reaction to this boldness. She's not pleased. He should have been a proper English gentleman, reserved and repressed. She has been teaching him to love in painful discretion ('to love and to suffer') int he best traditions of courtly love, where love is a debilitating illness which can drive you crazy. The phrase 'trust and lust's negligence' doesn't quite work for me: the double rhyme is an awkward jingle, and I can see how he has neglected his 'trust' (she trusted him to keep quiet), but not his lust, whatever sense of 'lust' we take (at that time it could mean vigorous and healthy). Maybe the 'r' allteration is a little overdone, too. But the great debate with Wyatt is how much this rough metre and sound is deliberate, and how much a sign of apprenticeship. we've seen how he departs from iambic opentameter right at the start with 'The long love', and the jingly-jangly sound of these lines could possibly convey some of the nervousness of the lover. We notice, anyway, that the second quatrain, like the first, is a complete sentence; but while the first quatrain had a fresh clause in each line, each with its precise verb (harbour ... keep), this has just one. The whole construction builds to that tremendous disapproval: 'taketh displeasure'.

We're now at the volta, the turning point between the octave and the sestet, and sure enough we get a dramatic development. Love, abashed at the beloved's displeasure, flees 'into the heart's forest' (giving us the millionth pun on heart and 'hart' (deer), the Elizabethan equivalent of rhyming 'love' and 'stars above'). It's a remarkable figuring forth of an internal seizure, the actual experience of turning inwards in shame. (And it reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons, in which Lisa disappoints a suitor on camera: 'Freeze it there,' says Bart. 'You can see the exact moment when his heart breaks!'). 'Pain and cry' is the image of the internal wound, the freeze frame instant where the lover gives up. Wyatt has a cdccdd rhyme going on here, making the sestet a compact merging of triple rhymes. In the last lines Love transmutes again (Love has been a ship, a royal visitor, a herald or king displaying his banner, a hunted quarry), this time into a master whom the lover, faithful servant, must follow even unto death, as Kent follows Lear. The Lover is loyal, and with this stoical virtue, huddled under the bedclothes, a pitiful wreck, he leaves us. The poem is an elaborate game of codes, all based on the court: the visitation, battle campaigns, the accepted code of practice of courtly love, the hunt, the duty of service. All translated into the poetic code of the sonnet, which puts it all togetehr in a little drama of love and rejection. What is remarkable is that through all the elaborateness, the rhymes and alliterations and witty double senses, we do feel something real going on: the poem gets at the psychology of love in a way that reaches beyond the Renaissance community of understanding: love can take over us, be a bore even. It can be martial and predatory - a ship, a herald of war - but it can be awfully embarrassing, too, and, when dismissed, takes us over in self-pity and absurd self-dramatisation. The artifice of the sonnet is a gateway to the genuine.

Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
     Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
     And that one talent which is death to hide
     Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
     My true account, lest he returning chide,
     "Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
     I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
     Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
     Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
     And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
     They also serve who only stand and wait."

Wordsworth, "London, 1802"

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

Amy Lowell ‘A Fixed Idea’

What torture lurks within a single thought When grown too constant, and however kind, However welcome still, the weary mind Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught Remembers on unceasingly; unsought The old delight is with us but to find That all recurring joy is pain refined, Become a habit, and we struggle, caught. You lie upon my heart as on a nest, Folded in peace, for you can never know How crushed I am with having you at rest Heavy upon my life. I love you so You bind my freedom from its rightful quest. In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

R B Kitaj, Pallant House

Looking at Kitaj at Pallant House I was reminded of T S Eliot’s  ‘dissociation of sensibility’ - the idea, roughly speaking,  that somewhere in our cultural history feeling and intellect became uncoupled. For a poet like Donne, an emotional experience could take the form of an intellectual adventure: the search for religious truth, for example, occupies mind and heart symbiotically, and we feel that in the pulse of the verse rhythms.  But now emotion goes one way – prompted by the stimulus of the quick hit – and intellect is left to find its own dessicated form elsewhere. Kitaj’s paintings represent a new synthesis of brain and emotion. Take ‘The Killer-Critic Assasinated by his Widower, Even’ (1997) – the work prompted by the recent death from an aneurism of Kitaj’s wife Sandra, which Kitaj blamed on the negative critical reactions to his Tate Retrospective of 1994. Clashing colour, gestural scrawl and grotesque imagery communicate a tactile, trembling fury. Yet it’s a fury felt through a dense web of association: the title alludes to Duchamp, the central image to Manet’s 'Assassination of Maximilian' (while the victim’s hands surely point to Goya’s 3^rd May – Kitaj had a long and intense immersion in Spanish culture). Modernist collage points us in further directions, to revenge tragedy, to Erasmus and Gogol and their subjects of fools and madmen. The heart’s passion quickens the mind’s dance. It’s a language we are more used to in literature, in particular in Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, at once the scrapbook of a hyper-educated memory and the verbal reflex of mental disintegration. Densely allusive art requires time to unpack in the mind, but like Eliot, Kitaj can deploy his art to convey sudden sensuous beauty. ‘Degas’ (1980), shown in a room devoted to Kitaj’s figurative pastels, is a moving and beautiful work showing the hand and eye of an Old Master. Some excerpts of John Ashbery’s essay on the artist are reproduced in Paris Review:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/03/07/r-b-kitaj/

Andrew Greig, Dunsinane (Radio 3 Drama)

Macbeth ends with regime change. A foreign army (England) helps to kill a tyrant and installs a new King, Malcolm. But then what? Could the transfer of power really be so smooth? Would the foreign army simply melt away, or would it need to stay to manage the transition to the new power? How much do we know about the new leader – the oddly empty character Malcolm – anyway? These were the questions that occurred to Scottish playwright David Greig when he saw a number of productions of the Scottish play in 2004. Dunsinane is his response. We start with the English under General Siward defeating Macbeth at Dunsinane: immediately our own certainties crumble, as we have a revisionist version of Macbeth’s demise and his wife, the Lady Gruach, turns out to be alive. The bluff certainties of Siward, which are fine in combat, quickly fall apart in this new territory of clan warfare, treachery and spells. Imprisonment, suicide, torture and infanticide follow. Malcolm understands this world, the English do not: conflict, Malcolm explains, is the natural state of things, peace an illusory, momentary calm sea. Greig’s play crystallises the issues of recent British adventures abroad, principally in Iraq and Afghanistan; and it is apposite too in the light of any ideas that, rid of Gaddafi, Libya will turn dutifully to the Western model. Attention is focussed on the bewildered and brutalised English squaddies, and the chief perspective is that of Siward, holding on as long as possible to Blairite sense of mission.  The play did not seem to me entirely consistent: the squaddie humour seemed formulaic, and the ending did not quite have the climactic feel it was looking for: hard to find a climax to a scenario that is all to do with grinding on in a sense of ever greater futility. However, the entire production was gripping. Powerful performances by Jonny Phillips (Siward) and Siobhan Redmond (Gruach) brought out the bare poetry of Grieg’s script. A welcome repeat on Radio 3’s Sunday drama slot.

Barbara Hepworth, Hospital Drawings (Pallant House)

Art and medicine have a long history. From the wounds of Christ to Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp’, from miracle healings to the casualties of war and the faces of the insane, the subjects of art invite us to look with an eye at once compassionate and forensic at the vulnerable body and mind.  In the  series of 70 drawings by Barbara Hepworth of operations in a hospital theatre the artist and the doctor come particularly close . These works originated in the friendship of Hepworth and Exeter orthopaedic surgeon Norman Capener, who in 1944 treated Hepworth’s daughter Sarah, who suffered from osteomyelitis (now treated with antibiotics, but then requiring complex surgery). A lifelong friendship followed. Capener was himself an amateur artist and Hepworth taught him sculpture;  Capener in turn designed some surgical instruments based on Hepworth’s sculpting tools. Between 1947 and 1949 Hepworth witnessed, and drew, operations performed by Capener and colleagues. The drawings bring out the remarkable connections between artist and surgeon: Capener was devising his own ‘philosophy of the hand’ and the drawings show hands in the actions in the actions of praying, blessing, probing, exploring  - each action echoed by the act of drawing, or rather incising, as Hepworth cut her way with a scalpel-like pencil into a board prepared with a gesso layer. This is a technique we associate with Renaissance drawing, and the groups of figures in these works look like the nativities and pietàs of renaissance art: clinical procedures assume the grace and gravitas of spiritual rituals.  The quality of absolute attention – from surgeon to patient, from artist to surgeon - draws in our own gaze, while at the same time the white masked bodies of the doctors appear to us transfigured into the pure shapes of Hepworth’s sculptural forms.

The Captain of Köpenick

The Captain of Köpenick (Olivier, National Theatre), by Carl Zuckmayer. Play based on the  true story of a prisoner, Wilhelm Voigt, who finds himself without papers and to all state intents and purposes thus without identity or even existence. Dressed up in a captain's uniform, however, he is able to lead some passing soldiers on an expedition to seize the contents of the treasury of the town hall. The production was held together by the amazing Anthony Sher. The first half dragged, with satirical society scenes and a sentimental subplot or two, which didn't carry much narrative power. It took off in the second half, though, with the central 'raid' scenes brought off with riotous humour. As so often in the Olivier, design concepts were needed to fill the vast spaces, and so we had huge skyscapes, dancing dummies and so forth. It all looked magnificent but rather over-produced. Somewhere in there amid all the dazzle and choreography was an ensemble play about a venal society and the Prussian reverence for uniform that lay behind the rise of Hitler. But it had the feel of a quintet being played by a symphony orchestra. Best moment was Sher, 'pots and pans'.

Four Victorian Farces

Four Victorian Farces was a touring production by the European Arts Company, who specialise in small-scale work. Each play was 20-30 minutes long, and required only a cast of three, played with great verve by Richard Latham, John O'Connor and Asta Parry. Two of the plays were by John Maddison Morton (1811-1891): Box and Cox (apparently the origin of that expression) and A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion. Curiously, amid all the caperings, misunderstandings and masquerading we associate with farce we found ourselves here in a world only a breath away from absurd drama, Monty Python and surrealism. A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion, where a Mr Snoozle is interrupted by a man who ahs apparently tried to commit suicide in his garden, seemed weirdly close to modern plays like Pinter's A Slight Ache, and even ended with a kind of meta-theatre when the actors address the writer, anticipating the worlds of Pirandello and Ionesco. The other two plays were Wanted, a Young Lady by William E Suter and Duel in the Dark by Joseph Stirling Coyne, both of which suggested that the Victorians weren't as prudish as we might think. I loved the simple staging, the sound effects (scrunching newspaper for the sound of a fire, represented by a sock - it works) and the brio of the whole adventure. How were these one-acters originally staged, I wonder? As part of some kind of variety show, perhaps? There must be an enormous amount of Victorian theatre waiting to be rediscovered. And thanks to the efforts of the University of Worcester, it can be explored here:
http://victorian.worc.ac.uk/modx/

The Misanthrope, Molière

The Misanthrope, Moliere. Roger McGough's translation, produced by the English Touring Theatre. I'd heard this on Radio 3 before seeing it, and loved the energy and colourful characterisation. A lot hinges on what we make of Alceste's demand for authenticity and sincerity in face of the absurd falsehoods of social life. The play gives us enough room to see his stance as a form of romantic egotism, even as we applaud his ridicule of the fops around him. Seeing it was a little disappointing - we were part of a tiny Saturday afternoon audience at the Nuffield, Southampton, and the main actor had mysteriously been replaced by another, valiantly reading from a script. Nonetheless, the production rattled along, and the cast delivered. Alceste's infatuation with the flighty Célimène didn't really convince, partly the effect of  McGough's script, which didn't let all the plot lines make full sense. But there was much to enjoy: great set-pieces (I loved Oronte's warm-up for the delivery of his sonnet); lovely staging and choreography to Peter Coyte's score; and a stunning final tableau. But Southampton's apparent indifference to its theatre does make me worry for its future.

This House, James Graham

This House, James Graham. This was a recent hit, looking at the Labour Party's increasingly desperate machinations to pass legislation in the years between 1974 and 1979, with majorities so tiny that MPs needed to be helicoptered and wheelchaired in to get bills voted through. Graham's original approach was to set it in the Whips' offices: the downstage area was divided into two as we saw the engine rooms of the two parties at work. The minutiae of policy was put aside in favour of a study of the relations between these party managers, who over the years got to know each other extremely well. While the play was largely made up of local episodes - stubborn backbenchers, a member faking suicide and eventually imprisoned for fraud (who was that?), Heseltine seizing the mace - there were over-arching themes such as the changing make-up of the House, and the rise of the modern professional politician. The human dramas at the centre were compelling, and we were drawn into the author's obsession with the workings of this bizarre institution. Behind it all was the rise of Thatcher, but it didn't feel as though we were being invited to hiss at that or yearn for the past. This play transferred from the Cottesloe, and the mighty Olivier space was tackled with a scaffolded walkway, a huge Big Ben and a recreation of the House of Commons. I didn't think that having some audience on green benches worked terribly well, as they simply didn't look like MPs. But the sweep across time and events was exciting, the final scenes were touchingly played, and one had a sense that we were seeing a country in profound transformation, before the Thatcher Revolution had even started.

Beckett, Not I

Not I, Beckett's 10-minute piece for a woman's voice, was delivered over a few evenings at the Royal Court by Lisa Dwan (who got it down to nine minutes). It was a remarkable experience. Dwan's voice stuttered into life through gutturals, into which it faded at the end. The speech itself was delivered at the speed of thought - apparently the author felt it could not be taken too fast - with the effect that images were being scrambled and unscrambled in the mind continuously. It was great to hear it in Dwan's Irish accent  (I'd just been watching the Irish performance of 'Godot' on Beckett on Film and there, too, the expressions and rhythms seemed to find their natural home). It was surprisingly easy to focus on a single mouth, suspended in darkness eight feet above the stage. The performance was followed by a short film of Billie Whitelaw reminiscing about working with Beckett, and a Q & A with Dwan, James Knowlson and Benedict Nightingale, during which the demands on the performer became clear. Quite apart from dealing with breathing and projection at this extreme end of the repertoire, she is blindfolded, and harnessed to a board. Apparently earlier productions included a compassionate listener, who was later removed because of issues with lighting. Beckett said he knew such garrulous women from Ireland, but was apparently inspired also by the sight of someone waiting outside a school in Morocco (I think) and the head of John the Baptist in the painting by Caravaggio. I did wonder if, for £20, the Royal Court could have favoured us with more than ten minutes of actual theatre, but it bought an unrepeatable hour. Outside I caught a glimpse of someone I knew. But we did not speak. Beckett's poetry of absence floated through Sloane Square.