Terror 2012, Soho Theatre

This year’s instalment of The Sticking Place’s annual Terror season – the ninth in total, the second at Soho Theatre – purportedly puts the emphasis on psychological horror, fears and phobias, the things that make our skin creep, our stomachs lurch, and the hairs on the back of our neck stand to attention.

The line-up consists of four short plays, by Robert Farquhar, Alex Jones, Mike McShane and Mark Ravenhill. The latter’s contribution, The Experiment, was previously seen during the 2009 Terror season and has been resurrected here as a last minute replacement for Darren Ormandy’s Horror Show – based on the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs murders in Ukraine – which has been dropped from the bill due to “issues with bringing the play to fruition.”

The plays are interspersed with cabaret sequences care of Sarah-Louise Young and Desmond O’Connor, and their rapport and engaging nature as hosts is the glue which holds this otherwise patchy collection together, creating some superficial sense of connection between the assembled plays.

Despite the ‘All in the Mind’ sub-header, the production relies on generous gouts of the red stuff to jolt a response out of the audience and there’s little here to really unsettle or unnerve despite a little bit of dabbling with an Ouija board. Of the plays, Robert Farquhar’s No Place Like is a shoulder-shrug of a thing about a man’s desire to erase his cluttered, middle class life along with his shrill blinkered wife, but it’s neither particularly tense nor angry and feels criminally stretched despite its short length. Mike McShane’s The Representative, a satirical skit set in a Los Angeles coffee shop, is more satisfying as a stand-alone piece: a washed up actor meets the ideal agent, a woman immune to the movie industry’s faddish and fickle nature, old Hollywood incarnate. While it builds to an all too easy punch-line, it’s still enjoyable.

Ravenhill’s The Experiment is probably the strongest piece of writing – evoking the full horror of animal experimentation via an intriguingly slip-slidey method of story-telling, like a half-recalled dream, the details dripping slowly forth – but because of its late addition to the bill, it’s performed script-in-hand, and while Oliver Senton’s delivery is decent, this dilutes its potential potency.

The programme also includes, somewhat randomly, a vaguely Louise Bourgeois-esque puppet spider sequence set to Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy – the work of Boris and Sergey creators, Flabbergast – which while visually striking feels as if it’s been stitched in, Frankenstein-style, from a completely different production.

The last play on the bill, Alex Jones’ Fifty Shades of Black, provides a neat commentary on the sudden vogue for S&M – thanks to that book – albeit in its most glossy and sanitised form, all Agent Provacateur undies and artful spanking. While the pay-off is predictable, it includes the most grisly and genuinely nasty moment of the evening, and the play itself – a two-hander which shifts nimbly from comedy to a more disturbing place – at least allows O’Connor and Young room to demonstrate their considerable range as performers.

In fact if it wasn’t for these two, the whole thing would be in danger of collapse. Their easy way with an audience, general quickness and wit compensate for the tonal wobbliness of the format. As a comedy cabaret the production has its moments, but otherwise it’s a timid affair and, despite all that puddling crimson, disappointingly bloodless.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Theatre Uncut

Theatre Uncut is a refusal to lie down and be silent. As the project’s co-ordinator, Hannah Price of Reclaim, has explained, it’s about theatre contributing to the discussion and “joining our voice with the voices that are already out there.” This is not just a response to the cuts in the arts, rather a broader response to the spending cuts in general; an attempt to spark debate and stir feelings.

The project consists of eight short plays by Mark Ravenhill, Lucy Kirkwood, David Grieg, Jack Thorne, Dennis Kelly, Laura Lomas, Anders Lustgarten and Clara Brennan. The plays have been made available rights-free to anyone who wants to stage them. On the 19th March, they will performed by an eclectic array of theatre groups – including am-dram groups and student groups – across the UK (as well as in New York, Chicago and Berlin) with the resulting productions linked together by online networking and video conferencing.

Before that the pieces are being staged in London’s Southwark Playhouse to allow all eight to be seen together. Each writers response has been different; some take a more opaque approach while others aim for the throat – or rather the heart in the case of the first play in the showcase, Laura Lomas’ Open Heart Surgery, a raw allegorical monologue delivered by a woman by a hospital bedside, trying to put a brave face on the fact that something she loves has had its heart ripped out. Dennis Kelly’s Things That Make No Sense is a spikier piece of writing, a Kafka-esque skit in which a man is punished for a crime he didn’t commit, his protests ignored by a pair of smiling police officers.

David Grieg’s piece Fragile is a two-hander in which, in a nod to austerity, the audience is required to play one of the parts, reading their lines en masse from projections on the back of the stage. It takes the form of a conversation between a young man with mental health issues and his case worker; light-hearted at first it becomes increasingly taut as Greig makes the audience think about those at the hard-edge who stand to lose the most as well as the people in between, the people whose jobs are going to become an awful lot harder (that is if they still have jobs)

Both Jack Thorne and Lucy Kirkwood, in Whiff Whaff and Housekeeping, take slightly slanted paths towards the subject at hand. Thorne’s play depicts a cheerful middle class couple who describe how they believe that providing support for the disabled or ailing is somehow defeatist: “The thing is with crutches, they’re crutches.” In Kirkwood’s piece, which has more of a poetic intensity than its premise would suggest, a woman sells off her grandmother to help clear her debts. The grandmother, played by Marlene Sidaway, eyes Zawe Ashton’s brisk, business-like accountant with recognition. She’s marched from Jarrow, debated at Putney; she’s been here before.

Anders Lustgarten’s contribution is not a character piece at all rather a polemic delivered by the playwright himself, in which he neatly explains the economics of the Greek bailout before urging the audience to get angry, to lose their rag, to wake up to the changes they can exert collectively if they try; to, as he puts it, “fuck the fat man” of capitalism.

Mark Ravenhill’s piece, A Bigger Banner, written in response to and in honour of the recent student protests, employs a time-slip set-up in which a student at a university sit-in encounters her 1950s counterpart and ends up reassuring her that the future she’s fighting for so passionately will indeed come to pass. Interestingly it is Ravenhill and Lustgarten’s pieces that have proved most popular with younger groups, perhaps because of their clarity of message, their undiluted call to activism.

The evening concludes with Clara Brennan’s moving monologue Hi Vis, featuring Lisa Palfrey as a mother of a severely disabled daughter, describing her child with love and humour. Each play has its own particularly potency, and though some are blunter instruments than others, together they succeed in their intention to stir, to connect, to create an engagement that spills beyond the theatre walls.

Reviewed for Exeunt I'd also recommend reading Aliki Chapple's account of staging the plays in Lancaster, here.

For further information about the project, visit Theatre Uncut

A little link

More on Over There over here.

Over There at the Royal Court

The Royal Court’s Off the Wall season of plays about Germany continues with Mark Ravenhill’s unsettling Over There.

The play is a strongly allegorical piece about two brothers, identical twins, who grow up on separate sides of the Wall.

Though they live apart - Franz lives with his mother in the West while Karl has remained in the East his socialist father - they are still connected by the filaments of their twin-ness, they can feel each other’s pain, each other’s joy.

When the Wall falls the brothers are reunited and Karl comes to stay with Franz in what was the West.

He is initially excited by this prospect, by this opportunity to binge on things, but he also still clings to his Eastern way of thinking. He can’t marry the two, and a divide remains in his mind.
In a delicious piece of casting, the brothers are played by identical twins Luke and Harry Treadaway, with only a slight difference in hairstyle and different coloured underwear to mark them apart; so when they face each other on stage and joke about it being like looking in a mirror, it is indeed so.

Once they start living together, the relationship between the two brothers quickly starts to deteriorate. Karl finds his new life a struggle and starts to imitate his brother, to wear his (shiny, shiny) suits and to teach Franz’s young son Russian, to blur the line between himself and his twin. Ravenhill uses this device to convey the crisis of a country trying to create a new vision for itself, one of a united future, and the cultural and ideological divisions that remain even after the wall has been torn down.

Co-directed by Ravenhill and Ramin Grey, the production has a pared down aesthetic. Johannes Schutz’s set is a stark white box filled with further boxes: brands haphazardly stacked, a jumble of plastic condiment bottles and serial packets, all labelled with familiar names, the detritus of the West.

This spare way of presenting things extends to the performances, and to the very texture of the piece. The Treadaways, frequently speaking in unison, deliver their dialogue in an oddly detached fashion. That is not to say their delivery is empty of emotion, but what emotion there is feels intentionally askew. There is a flatness to their line readings, sentences end bluntly, rather than trailing off naturally, and when they speak in foreign languages – Franz in English or Karl in Russian – we hear a string of nonsense words instead. This manner of staging, playful, teasing and stripped of the unessential, is reminiscent of the Court’s recent productions of work by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, The Ugly One and The Stone, which began the Off The Wall season.

As the play proceeds, this notion of things being ‘stripped down’ is taking to its logical conclusion and the final scenes see the two men utterly exposed, their skin smeared with food, with sauces and condiments, the contents of tubs and bottles and packets.

There is a pleasing absurdity to some earlier scenes. A yellow sponge stands in for Franz’s son (appropriate since he is not a character, not a person, but a thing, a pawn between them), while a bag of flour temporarily becomes their father’s ashes, and, in a brief prologue set in California, an American waitress is played by Luke in a blonde wig and heels. But this lightness of tone is replaced by something altogether more disquieting in the play’s later moments.

There is something quite repellent about the mess they make, writhing in gunk, skin sticky and slick: it speaks of all manner of fluids spilled and is, at times I found, difficult to watch (literally - I became acutely interested in my shoes at one point). As a metaphor it is not unsuccessful, for the brothers’ relationship is far from tidy, nor is the path of the reunited country free of debris – you can’t stitch a wound that deep overnight. “Your world can’t exist,” Franz tells Karl. “There’s only my world.” And, seeing this, Karl starts to sink, to lose his grip.

Both actors, onstage throughout, throw themselves into demanding roles, and there is an undeniable potency to proceedings. But in the end Ravenhill's approach is too heavy-handed and obvious, it hits its audience over the head, yells in their faces: West eats East. Point made. We get it.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

A double booking error meant that at one point it seemed as if I might have to watch the show sitting on Charles Spencer's lap - but fortuntaley an usher was able to find me a spare speat seconds before the play started.

Shot/Got Treasure

I caught my first of the Ravenhills last night at the Royal Court.

I had actually intended to see some of the previous shows in the Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat cycle, specifically the Saturday morning performances at the National, but the, ahem, excesses of the evening before ended up proving incompatible with the early start time. Fortunately the Court's offering was being staged at a more agreeable 9.30pm.

Staged in the downstairs theatre, Birth of A Nation was a satirical piece about a group of artists gathered in an unnamed war-scarred city, there to rebuild and repair through the medium of their art workshops. It was staged very simply: no set, just four chairs placed on the bare stage, the actors addressing the audience directly as if we were citizens of said city.

This is a sharp and cynical playlet that neatly skewers the familiar, righteousness platitudes of the left when it comes to war – and particularly the war in Iraq. The artists are full of patronising admiration for the 'once-great culture' of this once-beautiful city and full of impotent derision for the government that went against their wishes. Yet their own agendas clearly take precedence and their contempt soon seeps through.

If it rather hammered its point home in its final minutes, it was still very funny stuff, elevated by an excellent cast. Pearce Quigley, in particular, has one of those voices that is just innately amusing.

The plays are scattered throughout the city, at various venues, and at various times of day, so you'd have to be pretty committed to the cause (like say, Maxie Szalwinska, who is blogging the plays for the Guardian) to catch them all, however it is only in doing so that all the recurring devices and themes become apparent. This one stood up on its own though, and I hope to see some of the others if I can. The treasure hunt quality of the exercise is certainly very appealing. One thing that struck me though, the audience at the play I saw was made up of a good number of journalists and theatre types, including Mr Ravenhill himself, I think I must have recognised a good third of the people in there, making me pause and wonder if this whole enterprise, while undoubtedly exciting, is something of a case of the theatre world feeding itself.