:: Encore Theatre Magazine ::

Encore Theatre Magazine

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::Front Page::

:: Thursday, December 30, 2004 ::

Behzti Letters

Several responses to the cancellation of Behzti (Dishonour) have kept consciousness of this outrage alive over the festive period. As Paul Miller points out on his blog Clare Cochrane's letter in today's Guardian is really excellent and cuts through some of the weasel words expressed elsewhere. Principally she's responding to a letter from John Adams, of Bristol University, who rightly thinks that theatre companies should engage in debate with their communities, but wrongly thinks this in any sense lessens the injustice of what happened the Bhatti's play.

His letter contains some very shoddy thinking. He begins with a meaningless claim that it is "disturbing and unhealthy" to find "unanimity on the part of an essentially anarchic group of creative practitioners". Whether theatre workers are essentially anarchic or essentially anything else has not, to Encore's knowledge, yet been settled to everyone's satisfaction so we can only interpret that as an opening statement that wishes to defend theatre's radicalism in an even more radical way: a type of ultra-leftism that leads to an idiotic nowhere, as anyone who's spent time in left-wing meetings will recognise. He then claims that "artistic freedom" and "censorship" are crude terms to throw about. No they're not: freedom is a particular indivisible value and censorship in this case is undeniable. It is clear that John Adams has no real understanding of what freedom means when he urges the Birmingham Rep to consider "the extent to which the right to stage certain works in a certain context has been earned rather than assumed". But this is preposterous. Rights don't have to be earned; they are rights and they pertain to us as human beings.

In an article by Harriet Swain, Yasmine Wilde, who played the put-upon Min in Behzti (Dishonour), describes how the Rep's decision to consult with members of the Sikh community perhaps gave the impression that they could veto any aspect of the play. This may be correct though we should be careful to remember that nothing the Rep did could have given the impression that it was acceptable to terrorize staff and audience, and smash windows in the theatre. Towards the end of the article, Wilde is quoted saying that "the play was misunderstood and was in fact 'very religious'. very 'pro-God', and written by 'a good Sikh'". She also rebuked criticisms of the play by the Bishop of Birmingham, asserting that "The message of the play isn't 'isn't religion awful'. It's about how human frailty can take you away from what's true about your religion". This may be true, and certainly a play that is prefaced by the dedication "I thank God for the gift of your soul, my beloved, most treasured friend" seems unlikely to be embracing deliberate, mischievous impiety.

But, forgive us, that's not the point. If Behzti had sought to criticize religion as a whole, condemn believers as dupes and priests as charlatans, if it had described God as a con, and piety as a cloak to hide vice, exploitation, and criminality, it should also be defended. It would sit within a wholly honourable tradition of anti-religious writings, including a long line of savagely impious plays. That the play may have been misunderstood is important - and we'd urge all our Encore readers to get hold of the text to read - but there is no reason why one particular set of beliefs, e.g. religious faith, should be any more protected than any other from criticism. As Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters argues in her brilliant letter, protecting religion from criticism will do nothing to protect those who are oppressed by religion within those faith communities.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Thursday, December 30, 2004

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Dishonoured

The Birmingham Rep has announced the cancellation of the rest of the run of Behzti. This is very bleak news. Stuart Rogers, the executive director, is quoted by The Guardian online as saying "It is now clear that we cannot guarantee the safety of our audiences. Very reluctantly, therefore, we have decided to end the current run of the play purely on safety grounds."

So the protestors have closed a show, because of the threat of violence. Is this tolerable? Councillor Chaman Lal, a spokesman for the Sikh community in Birmingham, has told the BBC News website, that "The theatre has made the right decision in response to a peaceful protest. There are no winners or losers - common sense has prevailed."

This was not a peaceful protest: three police officers were injured, windows were smashed, equipment was broken backstage. There are winners and losers; the protestors have triumphed over the theatre and over free speech. Common sense has not prevailed; religion has triumphed over reason and freedom. Although we understand why it may have been made, this is emphatically the wrong decision. If you fancy emailing Chaman Lal to express your view, you can email him here.

It's a sign of how far the authorities are prepared to go to defend civil liberties. No distance at all. Creative freedom is a kind of freedom, no less and no more important than anyone's freedom to exercise their autonomous judgment. But that is the most important moral freedom we have. The protestors claim that "we have nothing against freedom of speech, but you do not make a mockery of someone's faith or beliefs. That is oppression." (a) No it isn't, and (b) Bezhti does not mock their beliefs. It is arguing that some features of the culture around Sikhism can provide opportunities for oppression and exploitation. This may offend but that's different from being offensive. Be clear: this is a matter of freedom of speech - whatever the protestors say - and this freedom has been trampled on today.

The playwright Ash Kotak is cited in The Guardian Online saying "The idea that whole [Asian] communities are homogenised is bollocks, especially as we go through the generations. The people who are campaigning are the ones who have oppressed us in the first place: the very people we are writing against. These are issues which have to be highlighted." This is exactly the point and this episode has only emphasised its importance.

Earlier this year BBC 3 caved in to pressure from the Catholic Church who objected to its comic series Popetown depicting - irreverently - working life in the Vatican. Protestors in Scotland have recently objected to a production of Terence McNally's Corpus Christi and apparently lodged a complaint with the police. Why should religion be treated on its own terms? Why should we be faithful to faith, religious about religion? We've seen what happens when religious fanaticism takes over a country - America has just re-elected a fundamentalist president. Censorship by religion dogma is deepening in America (see this article for further evidence). The fact that in Birmingham it's a Sikh protest and not a Christian one should not mask that this is another shot fired in a British version of the culture wars.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Monday, December 20, 2004 :: 0 comments ::

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Dishonour



Last night, protestors stopped the performance of Behzti (Dishonour) by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti at the Birmingham Rep. Most of the 400-plus protestors tried to storm the building, breaking windows and bringing the area around the theatre to a standstill. The protestors were from the Sikh community, protesting against the play's representation of sexual abuse and other irreligious activities in a Gurdwara, a Sikh temple. It comes after a week of smaller-scale protests outside the building and yesterday's escalation seems to be due to significant numbers of Sikhs joining the protest from around the country.

A leading protestor and community leader, Mohan Singh, president of the Guru Nanak Gudwara in Birmingham, has made a series of claims:

• that they have no objection to depicting immoral acts, as the play does, even if those are being performed by Sikh characters. Their objection is the setting of the play in a Gurdwara. "We are not bothered about rape scenes or paedophiles - we know that there are good and bad people from every background and religion. The problem is having these things take place in a temple. Any religion would not take such a slur." (BBC Website)
• they also believe this will promote religious hatred: "people out there who don't know anything about Sikhs will see this and what sort of a picture will they have in their mind? They will paint all Sikhs with the same brush." (BBC Website)
• the protestors also seem suspicious of the motives of those involved. "We don't like you doing a play about a Sikh Gudwara which you don't know nothing about" (BBC News)

It's hard to work out what these protestors are objecting to. If they don't object to depictions of Sikhs engaged in immoral acts, then they can't really be objecting on the grounds of 'promoting religious hatred'. It's unclear whether it's the depiction of a Gudwara or the depiction of a Gudwara being morally defiled that's causing offence. It is the case that Gudwaras are all equally holy spaces, sites where Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, can be installed and read from. But Sikhism is not an iconoclastic religion, indeed is famous for its elaborate iconography and ceremonial representations, so it is unclear what the real objection is here. And the final claim seems irrelevant to the first two (besides which, the playwright is herself a Sikh). Are they claiming that no immoral act has ever taken place in a Sikh Temple?

It seems that the theatre has worked hard to inform the Sikh community of its project and to reassure them of its intentions. The production's programme contains positive statements about the values of Sikhism. It is possible that more could be done to assuage local concerns but we have to decide: does theatre have the right to offend? Or is this right something that can be curtailed by religious protest?

Let's not forget the most shameful episode in the Royal Court's history, the cancellation of Jim Allen's play Perdition at the Royal Court in 1987. That play repeated well-documented claims that Hungarian Zionists contributed to hiding the truth of the Holocaust - mindeed acquiesced in some of its mechanisms - because they knew it would make their case for the establishment of Israel in Palestine irresistible. It was scheduled in a production by Ken Loach, but pulled after an orchestrated campaign of resistance from the press and other influential figures. A wholly disgaraceful connection was made (and is still, of course, being made) between Zionism and Judaism, between the Jewish faith and the state of Israel. If you criticize the foundation of the state of Israel, it seemed and seems, you are an anti-Semite.

Obviously this is not true. It is the same concern for human freedoms and human rights that would lead one to condemn the Holocaust as to condemn the action of the Israeli military in the occupied territories. It's the defence of liberty that is fundamental, not one particular version of the liberty. Behzti (Dishonour) does not inhibit anyone's liberty and we should be very firm in its defence.

However, religion befuddles people. Is it racist to criticise religion? (No.) Is someone's religious belief worthy of more respect than any other belief? (No.) If someone venerates a place, an event, an object, a text as sacred, should we yield to that veneration? (No.)

No one should offend anyone else for the sake of it - there's nothing ethically fine or politically valuable about doing that. Indeed, it's reprehensible. But a play that is trying to engage with a community, question it, hold it up to scrutiny, needs to be defended. The community leader's confusing tangle of arguments points to something else, a more alarming political pattern that is being established. This is another sign of a rising neo-conservative movement in Britain that is consciously modelling itself on the Evangelical coalitions in the US. There, curious alliances have been formed (between, for example, the Evangelicals and the hardline pro-Israel lobby).

And now the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols, has denounced the play: "such a deliberate, even if fictional, violation of the sacred place of the Sikh religion demeans the sacred places of every religion". Does it? How does it? Has the play - in any meaningful sense - violated the Gudwara? Has he, in fact, seen the play?

Liberals and the Left are too often riven with misplaced qualms on occasions like this. But the argument is clear, the route of the Left obvious. It is not racist to disagree with the protestors. It is not even disrespectful of the humanity of that community to allow this play to be staged; we all know that communities have multiple voices and we must remember which voices are not being represented by these protestors: often it's the victims of a community, the people whose story this play is trying to stage. The Birmingham Rep's freedom must be defended.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Sunday, December 19, 2004

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So, the Future Will Be Like This

George W. Bush has been elected for another term. Somehow this reckless and imperialist government that has done more to inspire suicide bombers and terrorists everywhere managed to persuade the American people of the opposite: that there could be such a thing as a war on terror, that such a war could be winnable, and that Bush is the man to win it. The Republicans mobilised the evangelicals, and in the process somehow managed to articulate its mean, prejudiced, fearful values as 'values'. As if screaming abuse at women seeking abortions is any kind of morality. Karl Rove's cynical strategy of holding votes on banning gay marriage in swing states seems to have encouraged this false equation between moral fear and moral value. Bush has the chance decisively to alter the political tenor of the Supreme Court. Is it possible that this new government might manage to reverse Roe vs. Wade? Hopeful friends talk about Bush standing up to this lobby, but it's not at all clear that he would want to. The country's split down the middle; he's never going to win the coastal states and the Democrats are not likely to make inroads in the Midwest. If the Evangelicals were decisive, and it looks like they were in Ohio, Bush has everything to lose by standing up to them and nothing to gain. The US is heading deeper into its experiment in Government based on religious fundamentalism. It's the West's Sharia.

But even more importantly, what new horror will Bush unleash on the world? Iran's uranium enrichment programme is openly underway. In the Shahab ballistioc missile, they have a delivery system far superior to anything Iraq possessed. Bush is contemptuous of the delicate balances in the region; his talk of an axis of evil has already managed to unite the reformers and the hard-liners in the country who have split Iranian politics and culture for at least the last eight years. Jack Straw thinks it is 'inconceivable' that Bush could bomb Tehran. This sounds less like analysis and more like pleading. (Or is it sly? Bush may not have to bomb Tehran; he could just turn a blind eye if Israel does.)

We read that there has been a revival of political theatre in the shadow of the Bush presidency and the fallout after September 11 and the occupation of Iraq. Certainly there has been a revival of Aristophanic satire (The Madness of George Dubya, Follow My Leader, A Weapons Inspector Calls, Embedded), of sober documentary-dramas on the preparations for and prosection of the war (Justifying War, Guantanamo, Stuff Happens [above]), and a slew of revivals interpretively shaped by the ongoing conflict (Henry V, Iphigenia at Aulis, Hecuba, and Cruel and Tender, Martin Crimp and Luc Bondy's reinvention of Sophocles's Trachiniai).

Some of these have been very exciting evenings. Iphigenia at Aulis (left) was a devastating, wholly convincing rediscovery of Euripides's satirical venom, his bitter contempt for political rhetoric and military expediency. It was terribly moving in Justifying War to watch the unfolding story of Dr David Kelly's slow subsidence into suicide, and the country sank into its Faustian alliance with the US. Encore's no great fan of David Hare, but Stuff Happens was history as tragedy and farce and told its story with care, urgency and wit. Alex Jennings's George W. Bush was a masterly combination of impersonation and creation, beautifully observed but full-blooded with authority and actorly intelligence. It reminded us - as we should be reminded - that Bush didn't get to that position by being dumb. His inscrutable responses to the anguished phone calls of Nicholas Farrell's handwringing Blair showed us a smart political operator running circles around his ally.

But are they enough? In the rush to satire, some theatrical graces have been lost. While Justin Butcher's The Madness of George Dubya (right) had a knockabout vitality, Alistair Beaton's Follow My Leader was a luke-warm, slap-dash horror whose analysis was pitiful, theatrical energy entirely confected, and earned its laughs by recycling half-witted untruths from the left's unthinking wing. While Iphigenia managed to respect the original while reinventing it for us, Hecuba at the Donmar, though it's still previewing, seems awkwardly overdetermined by its rush to forge links with the contemporary world.

And this fad for verbatim theatre. Although it can be exciting, it can also feel like a negation of theatre. It treats our cherished theatricality as something that must be made transparent; we look through these windows into the real world. The Tricycle's tribunal plays are sometimes, we suspect, deliberately written to be a little boring, as if this will place us more accurately in the court room and give us the monotonous flavour of real life.

Is this the only choice available to political theatre? To travesty theatricality, or to efface it? Doesn't our theatrical tradition have anything else to offer? Where is metaphor in all this? Where is transformation and imagination? Where is intense focus on language? Where is the passionate presence of human bodies and the nascent collectivity stirring in all theatre audiences? It feels frivolous to insist on what they used to call the theatre theatrical when matters are so urgent, but we should hold our nerve and ask the questions, because to bite them back is to despair of the theatre when we should be exploring its most political contours.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Saturday, November 06, 2004

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As they say at the end of Brenton's The Churchill Play...

Don't Let The Future Be Like This!


To all our American readers, please, for the sake of all of us, for the love of the world, do what's right. Kick Bush out.

• Street theatre
• Satirical activism
• More satirical activism
• A game
• Monitoring Bush
• Monitoring the right-wing press
• Reasons to impeach Bush
• Political shopping
• A guide to American democracy

And just so we all know what this is all about:

• The project for a new American century

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Friday, October 29, 2004 :: 1 comments ::

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National Theatres

We got a couple of emails from people who weren't sure we were joking at the end of the piece on Matt Fraser's comments. But we're serious. Why not nationalise the West End? These theatres need extensive renovation; some of them are glorious and need to be restored; some of them are hideous and need to be rebuilt. The only theatres that make profits are the ones with bit fat long runs in and can't therefore be rebuilt. The small cabal of businesspeople who own these buildings have shown very little interest in seriously addressing its problems, and they're always moaning about the difficulty of making any money. Last year's Theatres Trust report estimated that £17m needed to be spent annually until 2018 to make the West End viable in the long term as public performance spaces. The Disability Discrimination Act only makes this claim more urgent. The owners insist they can't afford these changes.

So let's nationalise the theatres. Since the buildings make them so little money, the theatre-owners won't need much compensating. Usually they say they carry on running them through love of the theatre; if so, they could be invited to join a small number of new public boards - because a little competition's undoubtedly healthy - that will run the theatres in the public interest.

Each board will look after, say, five theatres and would be expected to plan for the renovation of each of these theatres over the next 7 - 10 years. These boards will also have artistic representation and it would be valuable to have input from the National Trust. Some negotiation will be necessary to balance the needs of preserving their architectural interest and meeting the needs of twenty-first century theatregoers. There should be public funds made available to co-fund the rebuilding of these spaces, but much income will derive from the box office. But successful transfers from the subsidised sector - at more favourable rates than are usually offered - will help greatly here. Something similar could be put in place to renovate what used to be called the 'no. 1 touring circuit': the grand but fading network of regional theatres. The Hippodromes, the Grands, the Empires.

Having put so much public money in, it is reasonable that the public should keep control of these theatres, and they should not be returned to private ownership only to run, once more, into neglect. It would create a new kind of National Theatre, a dispersed, decentralised network of national theatres. It's something akin to what Scotland are about to embark on and it will help save the West End from itself.

The theatre is irresistable! Nationalise the theatres!

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Sunday, October 10, 2004 :: 0 comments ::

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Reasonable Adjustments

Mat Fraser (pictured) has been kicking up a storm by daring to suggest that the Disability Discrimination Act (2004) should apply to theatres. Encore knows of a number of West End theatre owners who are hoping to shelter behind the listing of their buildings and the grey areas implied by the act's requirement for 'reasonable adjustments'. In fact, they just don't want to spend money if they can avoid it.

As we all know - unless we're unlucky enough to be excluded from these buildings because of an impairment - no serious work has been done across the West End since these theatres were built. Occasional adjustments to the seatings have been required by fire regulations and occasionally the bar get a lick of paint, but it remains the case that most West End theatres are cramped, unpleasant, tatty and nasty places to spend an evening. We know well how reluctant the theatre owners are to spend money.

Now Fraser is threatening that a raft of court actions will be launched against non-compliant theatres. We want to raise our voice in support of his case. It is obvious: to exclude anyone from the theatre because of their impairment is unjust and immoral. It's right that these theatres should be forced to change. The Royal Court is an excellent example of how a theatre of the nineteenth century can be remodelled as a theatre for the twenty-first. The Whitehall's Trafalgar Studios show how a dynamic contemporary space can be carved out of one of the worst theatres in London. The single rake that the National created in the Lyttelton auditorium for their experimental season two years ago is another great example of how bad theatres can be transformed.

The theatre owners will undoubtedly cry penury. They barely make a profit; conversions to these listed buildings will be ruinously expensive; it is only through their goodwill, financial acumen, and love of the bricks and mortar that these temples of thespis can stay open.

Encore is sure that is true. And that is why we need to revive a fifty-year-old aspiration of the left and nationalise the theatres.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Friday, October 01, 2004

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Shunt's Tropicana
where strangers take you by the hand
And welcome you to wonderland...

One of Encore's first actions after the mania of Edinburgh was to see Tropicana, Shunt's new performance installation in their new premises in the vaults of London Bridge station.

It's a remarkable event. You are led through an access door through a service area into a smart panelled corridor, and then via a lift to the vaults themselves.

There's darkness everywhere. People - or things - scuttle past. Occasionally you glimpse showgirls, sometimes preening themselves, sometimes dragging sacks that drip blood, feathered nocturnal creatures. At another moment, a series of saturated flashes illuminate scenes of horror, torture, panic, revenge. A figure in a cage cranks by, an ambulance turns into a hearse. The smell of cool damp is inescapable. It's Stephen Sondheim's Follies performed in an end-of-the-world air raid bunker.

The company are working beautifully with the space. The darkness is used exquisitely; in a small group, like the survivors of some obscure apocalypse, you have to follow a set of cryptic and baleful instructions through these dank bricked arches. In one of the sections in which you feel able to walk around and explore, the half light means that performers walk right past you without you noticing. You enter the vaults in small groups and for a while are kept separated; it is thrillingly unnerving suddenly to hear scared laughter from a crowd in another room. The fear created bonded little communities; at one point we nick some whisky left by a performer (because in Tropicana, drinks are free) and share it out giggling like children.

At the end of the first half, the showgirls, now changed into respectful black hotpants and headdresses, their legs bruised and grimy, perform trapeze acts above a hearse with rock guitar riffs chugging out deafeningly around them. It's like Reggie Kray's erotic nightmare. In the second we watch a hilarious lecture and a bizarre autopsy; the showgirls are never far away and nor is the threat of violence; pneumatic bursts of blood are left on the walls.

It's still in preview, which shows because there's an unfinished feel to some of the sequences, and I think the second half slackens the tension off rather by being much lighter in tone and not offering enough coherence to the various ideas on offer. But it's great and it'll get even better. The full price tickets are £20 but the previews are cheaper and if you phone the national and quote 'Time Out subs offer' you can get them for £10. The show will shift and resolve over the year it is supposed to be running but why wait? See it now and see it later. They reckon it's for 12 year olds and upwards, and I guess some younger kids might be freaked out, but adults will be too, in the best possible way. It's hysterical in every sense, unsettling, transformative and roaring with confidence.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Monday, September 20, 2004

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Less Control Freakery (we think)

In a bid to be more open, you can now add your comments to our posts. We think. It's an old template and we're not completely sure it works, but we've given it a go. I think you click on the [+] symbol which takes you to another version of the article and at the bottom of that you can click to add a comment. But democracy's a tricky thing. If it doesn't work, email us and we'll try again...

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Sunday, September 19, 2004 :: 0 comments ::

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My London Life

This is a terrific new blog by Paul Miller, the director who gave us Lin Coghlan's very exciting Mercy earlier in the summer and has had close working relationships with several writers of promise, including Richard Bean and Simon Bent, and writers of achievement and grace, like Peter Gill. It's a great blog; he writes regularly (ahem) and the blog's got a really lovely tone to it: it's intelligent without being pompous; political without grandstanding; personal without being mawkish.

His close professional connection with Peter Gill gives us a great insight into that foundational moment of British theatre practice, the glory days of the Court in the sixties. There are fascinating accounts of seeing that first and second generation of theatre pioneers gathered together. Why do people keep blogs? Perhaps its therapeutic, perhaps it's an urge to preserve and record, to bear witness in a way. This, My London Life does remarkably well, finding passion and wit and a concern for others that is often extremely moving.

We note that in his profile he lists Tony Benn's Diaries among his favourite books. They are great great diaries, but Encore remembers a section in the mid-seventies volumes when Benn's cabinet colleagues got very scared that their colleague was keeping such a comprehensive record. Paul, if you're listening, it will be interesting to see if people talk differently to you now they know you're public diarist...

The last few days of his blog have been heartbreaking, caught up with the death of Andy Phillips, the great lighting designer whose work in the late sixties at the Court and then with those great Dexter productions at the National is part of the visual texture of post-war British theatre.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Saturday, September 18, 2004 :: 1 comments ::

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Vicky Featherstone to be NToS Artistic Director
 
Today at 14.00 GMT, at a press conference at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Scottish Culture Minister Frank McAveety will announce that Vicky Featherstone (right) has been appointed Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Scotland.

This is wonderful news! There have been many names thrown into the ring over the last ten months. Encore kicked a few of them around itself. Some pointed to Ian McDiarmid, others to Richard Wilson; sometimes it seemed David McVicar was in the frame, at others the smart money seemed to be favouring Giles Havergal. Encore favoured Neil Murray or David Greig. Only Kenny Ireland made public his desire for the job.

It’s a great pleasure to report that we were all wrong. Vicky Featherstone, 37, the artistic director of Paines Plough since 1997, will be an excellent choice for this new job.

• The appointment recognises that Featherstone is not just a good theatre director but that her real strength is making good work happen. Since her appointment at Paines Plough she’s thrown her energies into locating and developing distinctive new writers. The ‘Wild Lunch’ series of short play readings has run more or less annually since 1997, producing work from writers like Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Gary Owen, Glyn Cannon, Katie Hims, Amy Rosenthal, Chris O’Connell, Steve Waters, Debbie Tucker Green, Rebecca Prichard… and the list goes on. And on. And on. Many of these writers have been taken on to full production, even more of them have subsequently been produced to great acclaim elsewhere. Paines Plough has produced some of the most important work of the last ten years. Crave, The Cosmonaut’s Last Message…, Splendour, Riddance: this is quite a haul for a small-scale touring company.



• It’s widely believed that the choice finally came down to Featherstone and Kenny Ireland. If so, this was the point at which the path forked for the National Theatre project. Kenny Ireland would have brought a pugnacious flamboyance to the role, experience of solid financial management running the Lyceum, a wealth of experience in Scottish Theatre. But under his management it’s hard not believe that the project would have drifted towards being a traditional building-based National Theatre. Vicky Featherstone is tough-minded and thick-skinned enough to insist on quality, but she has shown a decisive commitment to touring and has resisted the blandishments of bricks and mortar. She is the ideal person to take the huge virtual network that is the NToS project and develop a vital artistic identity through it.



• It will undoubtedly ruffle some feathers that the board have not appointed a Scottish artistic director. But Featherstone has worked extensively with Scottish writers (Gregory Burke, Linda McLean, David Greig, to name but three), made Paines Plough virtually resident at the Traverse for the Festival, brought John Tiffany into Paines Plough as Associate Director, and has worked extensively with Scottish actors. She is a familiar name and face in Scottish theatre circles. Furthermore, her artistic priorities are defiantly not London-centred. The work that Paines Plough has championed since 1997 is not the voyeuristic, naturalist mundanity of the Court; the work has been lyrical, poetic, drawing on fantasy, speculation, mystery and grace. In other words, her tastes have always been much more in line with the Scottish theatre renaissance than with Ricksonian realism.



• It’s very exciting that they’ve appointed a young woman. Most of the names bandied about were middle-aged men. How many national theatres have been run by women? It’s another promising sign of the board’s commitment to maintaining the NToS as visionary, innovative and iconoclastic. It reminds us that the promise of the NToS is to be a question, not a statement.



• She’s not afraid of other people’s talents. You’d be surprised how rare this is. There was the work with Frantic Assembly, producing, in Tiny Dynamite, their best work in five years; the ambitious collaboration with Graeae; her invitation to John Tiffany; the Wild Lunch, Ticket to Write, and This Other England projects…



• These last three endeavours show not only a desire to bring more and more people into the company, but also an intense desire to explore what theatre might mean to a changing nation. All three of those writing projects share a determination to address place and geography, but also to reimagine it. This kind of imaginative collaboration will be vital if the NToS is to be what it could be: a blueprint for national theatres in the 21st century.

It's a brilliant, daring appointment and the best cause for British theatre to celebrate all year.

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Thursday, July 29, 2004 :: 0 comments ::

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Why Go To The Theatre?

Lynn Barber's obviously a bit short on ideas, because she's had to write the theatre-knocking article that every broadsheet columnist feels duty-bound to offer at some point. (Anyone remember Brian Appleyard's similar piece a few years ago? Didn't think so.) She made some daft comment in an interview with Simon Gray that no straight men willingly go to the theatre and, by her own account, was required to back this up by some visits.

Let's not make a big deal of this because who really cares what Lynn Barber thinks? However, before her article becomes landfill, we should just note some particular howlers:

• Challenged by her editor, she admits that the last two things she saw were Mamma Mia and Jerry Springer - The Opera and that she hasn't seen a play for years.
• She went to The Woman in Black believing it was The Woman in White. I thought the point was to go and see plays, so neither evening would have been particularly appropriate. But, soft, she explains; she went for the Lloyd Webber because it was recommended to her by that paragon of theatrical taste, Michael Winner.
• She saw Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe but left at the interval because the seat was uncomfortable.
• She found Democracy dull and The Old Masters (right) duller, which is fair enough because they are (but hasn't she got any friends? anyone who could have told her that?). Meanwhile, she adored The History Boys.
• She adds that the programmes are excessively expensive (true) and that actors sometimes shout too much (they do). And from this comprehensive survey she diagnoses the theatre's problem in the fact that 'the plays are all such crap'.

Imagine someone who said they disliked rock music. You ask them why and they explain that they have only bought a Steps and a Gareth Gates album in the last five years. So you send them off to educate themselves and they come back and tell you that (a) they accidentally bought REO Speedwagon instead of REM, (b) that they gave up on Exile on Main Street halfway through, (c) that they find Coldplay and Keane bland but they adore Travis, and (d) they think the mark-up on CDs is excessive and they wish those Emo bands didn't whine so much. From this, they lament that 'rock music is all such crap'.

Would you take this person seriously? For a second?

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Sunday, July 18, 2004 :: 1 comments ::

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Criticwatch # 3: Sheridan Morley (again)

Has Sheridan Morley no shame? In this week's The Stage, under the headline 'Banished to the back pages', Sherry ponders on the marginalisation of British theatre critics. His attempts to explain this mystery and to celebrate what the great critics of our recent past are nakedly self-serving. In his delineation of the ideal critic he is once again feathering his nest.

Sherry, who evidently fancies himself as a raconteur, outspoken opinion-shaper, and all-round man of the theatre, declares that the main reason for the critics' withdrawal from the cultural spotlight is that they aren't flamboyant characters any more. The soundness of this judgment is very suspect. Kenneth Tynan certainly was a dandy of a man but his reputation hangs on his theatre criticism, not his decreasingly effective attempts to work in theatre. Tynan's greatness lay in his reviews, not his revues. If he hadn't written like a dream - a dream of passion, wit and daring - no one would have cared a hoot for his polka dot handkerchiefs, nor his bright purple suits. Sherry, who writes like a nightmare, mistakes, as he always does, sheen for lustre.

His next exemplar is Jack Tinker (pictured below), 'the last', Sherry solemnly pronounces, 'of the great showbiz drama critics'. What a sorry epitaph that is and what a token of Sherry's sunken intellectual ambitions. Throughout the article Sherry is careful to insist that critics must not aspire to be 'professors of theatre or social reformers'. No, there should be no acuity of analysis and knowledge, nor any ethical fire. Just the tinkling of tiny minds dazzled before the altars of showbiz. As we've already demonstrated, Sherry is no thinker himself and this piece of projection is designed to justify and defend his bland recycling of received ideas and empty commonplace. Let's be clear. Jack Tinker's criticism is utterly unmemorable and surely his only lasting distinction will be that his savaging of Sarah Kane's first play got him immortalised as a sadistic doctor and torturer in her later play, Cleansed.

Sherry's third great icon of critical flamboyance is Milton Shulman. This is a man about whom even his recent obituarists found it hard to say wholeheartedly nice things. Perhaps it is true that Shulman spent a few years before the war supporting his legal career by singing in night clubs; to claim that this gave Milt a feel for the theatre is a telling indicator of the value of Sherry's judgments. And let's remember: Milton Shulman was the man who urged the prosecution of the Royal Court for allowing Shopping and Fucking onto its stages, railed in 1993 against a 'plague of pink plays' when Beautiful Thing and My Night with Reg transferred to the West End, and regularly slept through productions that he'd go on to review. Since Sherry himself called for the closing of the Theatre Upstairs to save him from Sarah Kane plays, and is an inveterate theatre snoozer, we can understand his desire to defend the appalling Shulman.

It's not just flamboyance: he also thinks theatre critics have drifted into obscurity by scorning the West End (as we know, Sherry is rarely seen anywhere else, another thing he has in common with Shulman), and he believes that theatre critics nowadays lack experience of making theatre. Both of these claims may be true in themselves, though it's doubtful, but they certainly are irrelevant to the marginalisation of theatre critics.

But the real reason why Sherry is foisting these spurious claims on us is revealed at the end. He's still sore that he was so peremptorily sacked by Punch, The Spectator and the New Statesman and replaced in each case by 'amateurs'. It's true that Toby Young is even worse a critic at the Spectator than Sherry, and perhaps Michael Portillo was a surprising choice for Britain's most prominent left-wing magazine.

However, at least Michael Portillo saw the plays he reviewed, and tried to review them honestly. Sherry's departure from the New Statesman was not purely capricious on their part. His last published column appeared in the 26 May 2003 issue; but this was not the last issue he wrote. In fact, a further column was submitted reviewing Tanita Gupta and Richard Jones's imaginative reworking of Hobson's Choice at the Young Vic in July 2003. But it was turned down by the New Statesman. Why?

Because he hadn't seen the show. Sherry failed to appear at the press night, instead sending his wife, Ruth Leon, in his place, whose view of the piece he passed off as his own. And this was far from the first time. When the theatre got wind of this, they rightly objected and Sherry's "review" was spiked. Not long after, he was fired from the New Statesman who had good reason now to be cool towards their new theatre critic, the same man who now lectures everyone on the high standards he expects of theatre critics in this country.

It is indeed shocking when a respectable theatre critic is ousted in favour of a rank amateur. And this has just happened at the Express. Robert Gore-Langton was the respected critic and Sherry's the amateur. He should go.

In the meantime, would any eagle-eyed Encore reader who spots Sherry sleeping through - or absent from - a show, perhaps with his wife scribbling notes in the next seat, please email to the usual address? Cheers!

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Friday, July 16, 2004

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Criticwatch # 2: Crisis Special!

Oh no! Sheridan Morley's back! Despite being sacked from Punch, the Spectator and the New Statesman in rapid succession, the thrice-dumped old fraud isn't taking the hint, and he’s been aggressively touting for a new job. Finally the Daily Express, that filthy heap of immigrant-baiting claptrap, has ousted Robert Gore-Langton, their critic of six years, to make way for him.

How has this hairy-faced fool lasted so long? What is his attraction? Someone must be impressed by him - there’s a website which claims that to get Sheridan Morley to do an after-dinner speaker you need to offer - wait for it - somewhere between £6,000 and £10,000.

Why? What does he have to say? He’s ignorant and he admits it. He harbours Jurassic views about what theatre should be. He has a Pooterish intellect; go anywhere near an idea and he blunders around in a thicket of cliché and received wisdom. And he’s famous for falling asleep in the theatre, yet still going on to review the plays. Remember Matthew Wright? The Mirror critic who slated the Whitehall’s Dead Monkey without having seen it and got stung for £170,000 in damages? Surely that's a precedent. Next time Sherry dozes through a production and then reviews it, someone should sue.

Mind you, why he’s so tired all the time is anyone’s guess. It’s certainly not through overwork. His biography of John Gielgud is one of the worst biographies Encore has read, and the introduction is extraordinary. He admits that he was given the commission to write Gielgud’s authorised biography - an singular honour, by any yardstick - over a decade earlier, but only when he heard of Sir John’s death did this bloated workshy walrus consider it time to put pen to paper. Anyone reading the book on publication will have had reason to pause: Gielgud died in May 2000; the book was published in May 2001. Even imagining an unusually quick turnaround of subediting and proofs, this official biography can only have been tossed off in a summer. And he tells this story as if it should enhance the book.

He was only at the New Statesman for ten months, and hasn't had a regular review column for nine months so in case anyone's forgotten how awful he is, Encore presents some of the lowlights of that shameful tenure:

16 September 2002: Sherry begins with a ludicrous statement about his socialist credentials (will he do the same for the once-again Tory-supporting Express?), but adds, on a lighter note, ‘I have twice had the irritating misfortune (once at the old Punch and once more recently at the Spectator), of being replaced by writers of breathtaking inexperience and consequent unreadability, but happily they were the exceptions’. Ah, the pathos of reading those words knowing that within a year he’d been replaced by top theatre critic... Michael Portillo.

Perhaps fearing that New Statesman readers might be daunted by his knowledge and understanding, Sherry reassures us: ‘Critics are not supposed to be professors of drama. We are traffic police, sent out to report on what is happening in certain theatres on certain nights. What was the result? Who got hurt? Who survived and how did they manage it?’. Our mission then is clear: to report on the slow carcrash of Sheridan Morley’s career in theatre journalism.

14 October 2002: Less than a month in and a trip to see A Number prompts Sherry to confess his ignorance: ‘Somehow I always feel I have failed the A-level in Caryl Churchill: I must have been off school the day they handed out the codes, the guides to her work, the crib sheets’.

But this is a familiar rhetorical trick. (a) Start with false modesty, 'maybe it's my fault I didn't understand it', (b) then flamboyantly make a superhuman effort to penetrate its mysteries (which means boiling down the play to some untheatrically abstract truism), (c) and then 'reveal' that it's untheatrical, abstract, and truistic. Because what is A Number trying to express? Why, ‘the victory of the human spirit over all scientific odds,’ announces Sherry portentously, before adding, ‘but I still think this debate might have worked better in a television studio or a science faculty’.

25 November 2002: He’s not enjoyed Shelagh Stephenson’s Mappa Mundi, and once again it’s the ideas thing. ‘Stephenson tries to involve us here in such wider issues as quantum mechanics and parallel universes, but the characters can’t quite stand the weight, and inevitably one begins to think how much better this was done by Arthur Miller in plays such as The Price and Death of a Salesman.’ Sheridan Morley must be a keen deconstructionist to find quantum theory in Death of a Salesman, but explaining his methods would take him into Professor of Drama territory so he keeps a wise silence.

2 December 2002: It’s his last column for a while, and keen Sherry fans will be disappointed throughout December, January and most of February to read that 'Sheridan Morley is unwell'. At least they can console themselves by reading his just-published memoirs, Asking for Trouble (Hodder & Stoughton £20), which he's struggling from his sickbed to publicise. In this last column for a while, Sherry’s proving that he'll go anywhere to seek out theatrical talent; he's just spotted a nice little show at the out-of-the-way Jermyn Street Theatre which he thinks is worth a punt. Typically modest, Sherry does not mention that he’s currently presenting a cabaret based on Asking for Trouble at a small venue where three months ago he’d also revived his nice little earner, Noel and Gertie. The venue, coincidentally, being the Jermyn Street Theatre.

17 February 2003: Refreshed and revitalised, Sheridan Morley is his old self again, reassuring us that he hasn’t wasted his time over the previous ten weeks doing any reading. Reviewing the RSC’s adaptation of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, he rightly observes, ‘Perhaps this is not a good time to admit that I’ve never managed to get through Midnight’s Children.’ But if Sherry can review plays he’s dozed through, not having read the novel shouldn’t daunt him and indeed the review soon finds him authoritatively pronouncing, ‘What made Rushdie’s novel remarkable was the flow of its language, the sweep of its ambition.’

21 April 2003: Sherry’s had a revelation! ‘Even by Chekhovian standards, Three Sisters is light on plot.’ Sensation! However, he shrewdly adds, ‘much is in fact happening (a fatal duel, a huge fire) just offstage’. Not remotely embarrassed to have only just spotted this after forty years of theatregoing, he compounds it by confessing never to have noticed that the servants have comic moments.

What’s that, Sherry? Pinter uses a lot of pauses? You don't think Godot's actually coming?

26 May 2003: Sherry’s in his stride. The new tactic, tried out on Midnight’s Children, is to be big and brazen. ‘The problem with [Lope de Vega] as a playwright, and I write with the confidence of having seen barely half a dozen of his plays, is that his dramas seem to lose the will to live somewhere around the interval.’ (‘Somewhere around the interval’, Encore would respectlessly submit, is rather better than ‘by the middle of the first column’.) In the same column, he is also keen to show that he knows nothing about popular culture. (This too was beta-tested some time ago - on 31 March, he referred to Stephen Gateley of Boyzone as a ‘Rock Star’). This time he’s been to see The Bomb-Itty of Errors; ‘idiotic title, still don’t know what it means’ barks Staff Sergeant Morley.

...And then, as if by magic, he was gone. There's no excuse for Sheridan Morley. He's got lots of experience, seen lots of theatre, got good connections in the theatre world, kept working and writing all this time, but he just can't hack it. Sherry is, to quote him on Moira Buffini's Dinner, 'a sickly stew of all the right ingredients in all the wrong combinations and well past their sell-by date.' But the truth of the matter is that a theatre critic who has failed the A-level in Caryl Churchill should go away and resit it until they pass, because if you don’t get Caryl Churchill, you don’t get anything important about British theatre today.

He lasted some ten years on the Spectator, ten months on the New Statesman. If anyone would like to join Encore in trying to get him sacked within ten weeks, you can email the editor of the Express here (do mention Encore when you write, and preferably sign your email). Let's make it four for Sherry!

:: posted by Theatre Worker at Thursday, April 29, 2004

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