1984 at BAC

Though the creative use of puppetry is what theatre company Blind Summit is known for, puppets don’t dominate their new production of 1984 – they don’t need to. In George Orwell’s terrifying vision of life in a totalitarian state, every aspect of life is subject to control.

The company’s previous work includes the Charles Bukowski influenced Low Life and they also provided the puppets for Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly, but here the puppets are only part of the fabric of a witty, sinister production.

A neat framing device sees the story of the thought criminal Winston Smith and ‘his whore’ Julia being performed by a travelling community theatre group as a lesson on what happens when you defy Big Brother. Winston is a worker in the Ministry of Truth, where he spends his days rewriting old news reports in order to bolster Big Brother’s omnipotence and erase the very existence of dissenters. He has been harbouring doubts about the regime for some time and embarks on a furtive relationship with the similarly disillusioned Julia. When they are together, they are human – living, loving individuals – not simply cogs in a vast grinding machine (it is fitting that the production visually references King Vidor’s The Crowd).

Winston and Julia rent a shabby room in the Prole District, where they believe they will be safe from prying eyes, at least in the short term, but Big Brother sees everything and it is with a degree of inevitability that Winston finds himself facing the harrowing prospect of Room 101 in the Ministry of Love.

Mark Down’s production draws out the comedy of the situation, something that was admittedly not particular evident in Orwell’s text, and enthuses every scene with visual ingenuity. There are some wonderful executed moments and a scattering of chairs and some pieces of cardboard are all that’s required to recreate the various scenes of the novel. A particular highlight is the staging of the rebel text The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism using a white bed sheet and some cardboard signs; it’s a fast, funny and very inventive scene. And of course there are the puppets, simple yet emotive things. There are puppet birds and bunnies and a spindly child threatened by falling bombs. These are stringless puppets, each limb manipulated by a performer and the connotations of this within the context of the narrative are clear (though the company spell things out for those not paying attention).

The ensemble cast work well together and Simon Scardifield, as Winston, and Julia Innocenti, as Julia, convey a strong sense of being normal people in an abnormal world. The balance falters a little towards the end and, perhaps as a result of the framing device, the final scenes of torture suffer from being too stylized – the full horror of Orwell’s denouement is diluted.

Despite that, this remains a potent, engaging and highly inventive rendering of a novel that has lost none of its edge or resonance over the decades.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Enjoyment of show enhanced on spotting this in the bar afterwards:

Wherever I Lay My Hat…

Another year, another West End Whingers party. As is my wont in such situations I drank more gin than was prudent, and then preceded to ramble repetitively at a variety of people including City Slicker, Ben Yeoh, Helen Smith and her lovely daughter Lauren, Andrew Haydon and possibly some others. David Eldridge was particularly patient and kind, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him in person.

As with last year, my friend Jeinsen came along, (though, for reasons known only to him, introduced himself as Barry to anyone who asked) more faces were put to names and a ridiculous amount of organisational effort appeared to have been put in to everything by the Whingers.

I particularly enjoyed the hat-centric dress code and, in a method touch, wore my borrowed cloche-type thing for most of the day, including an afternoon trip to catch the matinee of The Lover and The Collection at the Comedy Theatre. I got two flattering comments – though admittedly both from ladies in their seventies bemoaning the lack of hat wearing these days. Still I may have to hang on to it for a little while longer.

The Drugs Don't Work

Does a banana muffin and a coffee make for a balanced dinner? I think not. But it’s all I had time to grab as I headed over to Notting Hill after work yesterday to see the Gate Theatre’s production of The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents.

I had some problems with this one I must admit. It’s a play designed to unsettle – and it does, but not I suspect, always in the ways intended. The play is about a girl called Dora who has learning disabilities and has been on medication since she was a child. Her mother decides to take her off the pills, which have kept her docile, to lift the ‘pharmaceutical curtain’ and rediscover who her daughter is inside. This device is used to explore Dora’s sudden sexualisation. Off the pills, she becomes increasingly uninhibited and fascinated with the physical.

It wasn’t the subject matter that made me feel a little squirmy, rather the play itself, which felt primarily as if it were out to press buttons, to provoke a response, which is fine to a point, but I thought here it was trying a little too hard. It had this overly slick quality, making it near-impossible to get an emotional hook on the action or the characters.

The set appears to have been designed to make the characters look like part of an installation or an experiment, with the audience looking down on them from either side of the stage. The space is filled with a number of black blocks, which the cast shift around as the scene changes require. These scene changes are denoted by little bursts of music (triggered by the actors pressing a buzzer in the corner), during which they dance around, lifting one another up or occasionally jumping over one of the black blocks. There is even a little paper screen that they jump through at the start and I must admit when this happened I did jot the words ‘Legz Akimbo!’ down in my notepad (a reference to the 'educational' theatre troupe in The League Of Gentlemen, if that needs to be clarified).

That’s perhaps a bit harsh, I think I could see what was trying to be achieved, I just thought all these little theatrical devices worked against the material – in fact, I thought the main problem here was the material itself, I just don’t think it was a very good play to start with, too obvious, too button-pushy, as I said. The girl playing Dora, Cath Whitefield, was very good though, pitching the role just right I thought, giving the play a necessary human centre. The play was only ninety minutes long but I felt more than a little fidgety towards the end, though I concede this may have something to do with the twin-pronged sugar and caffeine attack on my system. I should really learn to stick with the gin.

Thoughts On Theatre Blogging

Blogging about blogging can often result in the worst kind of online onanism, so you’re going to have to bear with me for a bit here. Because today I participated in a panel discussion at the British Shakespeare Assocation’s annual conference at the University of Warwick. The topic was Blogging The Bard, though it actually encompassed a much broader debate about the nature of blogging and theatre criticism in general – what are reviews for, what role does traditional theatre criticism serve and what does blogging bring to that dialogue.

The panel was chaired by Andrew Dickson, the arts editor of Guardian Unlimited, and also featured Peter Kirwan, who, in his excellent Bardathon blog, details his experiences of attending the entire RSC Complete Works Season in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Patricia Tatspaugh, a contributor to Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Quarterly – and very much a non-blogger.

It was a fascinating experience, with questions posed that I’m still mulling over. I know why I blog. I blog because I enjoy the process, both as a creative exercise and as a way of ordering my thoughts; if it happens to entertain other people, well, then that’s a bonus. Blogging at its best can open up discussion, it can create an evolving conversation – in a way that a straightforward review often doesn’t. And while I don’t have the decades of theatre-going experience of a Michael Billington, I, and the people behind all the theatre blogs that I read, have a palpable passion for the medium and its possibilities – and that really comes across in the writing (even if there is whinging involved).

Bloggers have the space and lack of constrictions (no overnight deadlines, no press night hoopla) to focus on the nuances of a production, the details and the small moments that make a production linger long in the memory or pick you up and smack you in the gut. They can bring some necessary shade to the sometimes black and white world of theatre criticism and, in cases like that of the recent RSC Lear, where the press where held off from attending until Frances Barber recovered from a knee injury, while the paying public watched an understudy in her role, provide information unavailable elsewhere.

I think that academic analysis, theatre criticism and blogging are all part of the same discourse, the words all flow in the same direction ultimately, and while I know my blog can veer towards the trivial and flippant sometimes, there’s plenty of people out there who write considered, thoughtful pieces on matters theatrical with more eloquence than I’m capable of (him for instance, and him), and anyway I think there’s space in amongst all that for a little flippancy now and then (insert predictable gin reference here).

Anyway the discussion went well, and it was a nice being back at Warwick, where I did my MA, if only for a short while. I hung around for the plenary lecture by Philip Davis on The Shakespeared Brain an interesting look at the way the brain processes language, particularly the syntactically adventurous language of Shakespeare, before heading back to London in the afternoon eager to get my hands on a copy of Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound after Andrew quoted from it in his introduction.

Next week looking very theatre-heavy indeed, which I’m really looking forward to after such a comparatively quiet August.

Heaven Can Wait, Gin On The Other Hand...

Two hours and ten minutes without an interval! Not a good sign. It’s not that I need that half-time gin, but, hey, this thing ain’t called Interval Drinks for nothing. So it wasn’t in the best of moods that I entered the Olivier in the National to see what Emma Rice’s Kneehigh theatre company had done to one of my favourite ever films, the classic 1946 Powell & Pressburger movie, A Matter Of Life And Death.

The film tells the tale of RAF pilot Peter who is forced to bale out from his burning plane without a parachute. To do so will mean his certain death, something both he and the American air control girl he is speaking to over his radio, know. This opening scene has me weeping every time I watch it. “You’re life and I’m leaving you.” Fantastic stuff.

So, in fairness, I was always going to be difficult to please with this one, but I’ve liked Kneehigh’s work in the past, and I was more than willing to give it a chance. Indeed, both Lisa and I thought their take on Nights At The Circus was one of the best things we saw last year. However in that show, their particular brand of theatre – cluttered stages, aerial stunts and rather ramshackle live musical accompaniment – gelled perfectly with the source material. Here almost identical techniques are trotted out with little thought given to how they might enhance (or overpower) the story. So we get cycling nurses and flying beds and small explosions and annoying Scandinavian chappies and some really quite bad music. Just far too much stuff. I quickly began to regret not smuggling in a hip flask. Then remembered I didn’t own one, a huge oversight on my part, I wonder how much they cost?

Anyway, sorry, distracted there, back to theatre stuff.

I’ll admit the production delivered a couple of visually striking set pieces (I enjoyed the slo-mo table tennis game and the camera obscura scene), but that wasn’t nearly enough to save this production from its own excessive approach. Plus they’ve tampered with the ending. When Peter takes his case to heaven’s version of an appeal court, to argue that – having fallen in love during the extra time on earth mistakenly awarded to him – he deserves to stay alive, he is now confronted not only by his dead father, but by the victims of the Coventry and Dresden bombings.

The production hits you about the head with the message that love, however pure, rarely triumphs over the indiscriminate brutality of war. Yes, War is Bad, and good people die and, yes in this respect, war in 1945 has much in common with war in 2007. It’s not exactly a message you can argue with, but surely there were other ways of making this resonate with modern audiences, by giving the play a contemporary setting, or, I don’t know, creating an original work that didn’t involve pissing all over one of the best British films ever made?

Putting Faces To Names

So these chaps had a party on Saturday, attended by a number of theatre bloggers, and very entertaining it was. I tend to get a bit nervous in these situations, so I hit the gin with more enthusiasm than was prudent, but fortunately I had brought along a friend to back me up (and to hold me up for that matter.) This chap was there and this one too. Oh and him also, and several more I suspect, though those are the ones I talked at/to the most. And now all these virtual voices have form and shape and faces, which is a trifle odd but on the whole a delightful development.