Encore Theatre Magazine

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

2007-02-13T13:21:00.000Z

Change of Address

We're on the move - please update your bookmarks to http://www.encoretheatremagazine.co.uk/

Blogger's reduced its functionality; we got bored of the look; a friend showed us how to get our own domain name; and we decided wanna go posh.

We'll bring over all the content over the next few months, but from TODAY this site is no longer functional and Encore is now master of its domain...

Racist Culture

2007-01-21T23:43:00.000Z

Racist Culture

The year’s barely three weeks old and our culture’s been rocked by racism from top to bottom. From the hallowed heights of the ballet came the uncomfortable revelation that Simone Clark, principal dancer at the English National Ballet, has joined the far-right British National Party; soon followed the spectacle of Celebrity Big brother, in which Jade Goody (pictured), aided and abetted by her boyfriend Jack Tweed, model Danielle Lloyd, and ex-S Club member, Jo O’Meara, connived in the racist bullying of Bollywood star, Shilpa Shetty.

The BNP have tried to exploit this new addition to their ranks which led to the bizarre spectacle of 30 racists fighting for the right to go the ballet past a group of 50 anti-racist protestors. The left in the meantime has been up in arms about the affair. A similarly surreal non-event greeted Jade Goody when she was overwhelmingly voted out of the Big Brother house with 82% wanting her out. Fearing violent scenes, Channel 4 decided to hold a public eviction, so Jade bathetically tottered out to be met by Devina McColl (who, deprived of her audience and unsure how to play it, did her best to look both excited and grave at the same time).

It’s a weird situation when the tabloids, who have so often whipped up racist fears about immigrants and asylum seekers, sitting astride their very highest horse over loudmouth Jade. The Mail for example published a very sympathetic interview with Shetty’s parents, bemoaning ‘the poisonous atmosphere of the Big Brother house’ and the horrifying ‘reality of modern Britain’. In an interview with Simone Clarke, on the other hand, the same paper, after some cursory criticisms of the BNP (mainly about how uncouth they are), all but endorsed her decision to join. Her reasons for joining ‘cannot be brushed aside as a foolish error, let alone ignored’ and indeed her worries about immigration reveal not her own ignorance and prejudice but ‘that something has gone badly wrong with democratic British politics’. Because, they insist ‘crime and immigration are real and understandable fears’ (how did ‘crime’ get in here?) and indeed ‘immigrants are arriving in Britain and the rate of one a minute’.

In both instances, the arguments reveal our confusion as a culture about racism. While Clarke (pictured) is obviously fantastically naive and, frankly, a bit thick if she didn’t know that the BNP are holocaust-deniers, favour forcible repatriation, and various other policies she doesn’t believe in, it’s also disturbing to see how ignorant and demagogic the arguments have been against her and Jade Goody.

For one thing, does it matter what the private opinions are of a ballet dancer? The sad fact about the ballet world is that these men and women are trained from a very early age precisely not to express themselves, to evacuate their creativity, to become machine-like and merely to to execute - perfectly and beautifully - the steps assigned to them by the choreographer. In fact, they merely obey orders. (The perfect follower of fascism, in fact.) The idea that Clarke will be given a platform to express her racist views on the stage of the Colisseum is absurd. You don’t become principal dancer of a national ballet company by using the stage as a platform to express yourself. She only got a platform in the press because she was exposed. There is little evidence that she intended to make a public stand at all. And if it’s a legal political party - ah but that’s another debate - why can’t she join it? Is joining the BNP a notifiable act? If not, then we shouldn’t really have found out. It annoyed me to read that Peter Hall and Harold Pinter voted Tory in 1979. It doesn’t make me respect Frank Lampard very much to know that he supports David Cameron. But, hey, I don’t go to the theatre just to see myself on stage, I go to encounter other people, different people, to extend the limits of my experience and so of myself.

Which leads us directly to Big Brother. In 1978, Germaine Greer wrote ‘Eternal War’, a brilliant article about August Strindberg. One might have imagined that Greer, the most famous feminist of the twentieth century might have little positive to say about the most famous misogynist in theatre history. But the article is a eulogy. Some men, she says, claim to be feminists, to understand what women want; they are soft, and caring, in touch with their feminine side. Bollocks to that, says Greer. This is just the co-option of feminism and nothing has changed underneath. Strindberg is the greatest playwright about the battle of the sexes because, she argues scarily, he is the only playwright who genuinely reveals what men really think about women. Implicit in the article is the belief that it’s better to face the horror of the world than to hide it.

And if this is true, and we think it is, what’s wrong with Celebrity Big Brother? What that programme revealed starkly and clearly was what racism is like. We saw - as David Eldridge has pointed out - the way that racism intersects with class envy and class hatred; we saw the way it expresses itself in crude paranoid fantasies (the housemates unbelievably believe that Shilpa Shetty is trying to poison them), its coded expression in sexist language (Shilpa has been called a ‘dog’ and a ‘cunt’), and the casual, ambiguous joking that can terrorise without exposing itself (’What’s her name? Shilpa Poppadom?’ quipped Jade; ‘I think she should fuck off home’ opined Danielle).

Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, has demanded that Channel 4 admit that it mishandled the situation and called for its chairman, Luke Johnson, to be censured. It’s true that the episode has revealed some murky things about the relationship between TV programmes and the big celebrity agents but this isn’t what Trevor Phillips is talking about. So why censure C4? Because it showed racism? Because it brought some nasty people together and showed the result? Racism is a feature of current Britain. This sort of attitude is about two things (a) making you feel better about your own latent prejudices by identifying someone more racist than yourself, (b) a belief that if you ignore it and pretend it isn’t happening, racism will go away. The first is dishonest; it suggests that London Theatre Blog may be right when it claims that under the radical protest lies a rather more conservative view that everything’s really alright; the second claim is not true and has never been true.

If you believe that racism thrives in the oxygen of publicity - and perhaps it would - would it not be better to ask what there is in our atmosphere that could give life to such a hateful belief? Otherwise it’s like locking up teenage junkies for possession without stopping to ask why they are taking smack in the first place. Oh, hold on, we do that.

The media and the performing arts are venues in which we can ask questions about the sources of human hatred, the forms of our ignorance, how we become the worst of ourselves. And the thread that runs through both of these unpleasant episodes is not so much race as class. Why is it so horrifying that Simone Clarke’s a neo-Nazi? Because she’s a ballet dancer. She’s in contact with high art, she’s probably middle class, she’s one of us… which is why it’s expressed as puzzlement, shock, confusion. Whereas Jade, the unacceptable face of the white working class, is a repository for the bourgeoisie’s hatreds and fears. Usually middle class liberal can’t admit that he or she is disgusted and terrified by the working class, so moments like this represent rare relief. Thank God she’s said something racist, and to such an emblem of cosmopolitan middle-class refinement, because now we can happily hate her and all of her chav scum kind!

It’s nastily ironic that what we saw here was a lynch-mob mentality. And if you believe, with Encore, that racism feeds on irrationalism and ignorance, that the arts are at their best when they are fearlessly imagining the worst and the best that we can be, this has been a bad week for all of us.

Jack Bradley

2007-01-17T19:27:00.000Z

Jack Bradley

A kind friend forwarded Jack's email announcing the sad news of his retirement from the post of Literary Manager of the National Theatre.

After twelve very happy years at the National pontificating about playwriting, offering unwanted and sometimes unwarranted advice, I’ve decided to stop telling people how to write plays and I’m going to try and write some more of my own. Whether or not this will be for the greater good of Dramatic Literature, I suspect this humbling next step will be very good for my soul, not to mention the hapless victims of my more wayward views. All I can say is that I feel I have been privileged to read and learn from the work of my friends and peers. I believe the last decade will be remembered as a halcyon time. Not since the turn of the 16^th Century has the South Bank and London Theatre seen such an explosion of talent. Long may it continue and I’ll see you in a theatre foyer soon!

Jack has been one of the major positives of the last decade. In fact since 1994, he's nurtured countless playwrights, whether by offering them commissions, reading their work, meeting them, passing their plays to other theatres, getting them into the building, pairing them up with directors and actors. The National's always been a bit of a director's theatre, certainly after Olivier's departure. It's never been a writer's theatre; when it's tried to be, as in the mid-eighties, it's usually just succeeded in turning writers into directors. But the National has championed many important new writers in the last decade - Moira Buffini, Patrick Marber, Gregory Burke, Mark Ravenhill, Owen McCafferty, Shelagh Stevenson, Joe Penhall, David Eldridge, Nick Darke, Nick Dear, Samuel Adamson, Roy Williams, Conor McPherson, Simon Stephens, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Martin McDonagh, Gary Owen, Tanika Gupta, and many others - and most of them were seen on the National's stages directly or indirectly because of Jack's influence. The National has been much more of a writer's theatre during Jack's time. He reads a lot, goes to see new work a lot, and is very approachable. He likes a wide range of stuff, from Crimp to J T Rogers, from Stephens to Dear. He's been good news and Encore contemplates the future of the National's literary department with some anxiety.

Fortunately he's going back to playwriting. He rather nobly suspended his playwriting when he took on the literary manager role, believing that he couldn't really be critiquing other people's work when he was focused on his own. We wish him good luck.

Now. Who's your top tip to take over?

Happy Days Are Here Again

2007-01-12T23:46:00.000Z

Happy Days Are Here Again

Back in the early 1990s, Deborah Warner decided to have a fresh look at Footfalls. She and Fiona Shaw (both pictured), reconceived the play, usually performed in a thin strip of light, around the auditorium of the dark Garrick Theatre, the voices coming at us from strange angles and we sat backwards on the old theatre seats and heard this curious theatre ghost haunting the old spaces. The Beckett Estate were outraged. It is, admittedly, annoying for writers when directors treat stage directions as ignorable but Beckett's work is often enough revived in faithful, even reverential productions (viz. the recent Gate Beckett festival), that a bit of theatrical reinvention would seem like a good idea. Indeed, if his work is to survive, one might think exploring its edges and folds and corners essential. But the Estate did not think so and banned Deborah Warner from ever getting another crack at Sam's Holy work.

But they've clearly kissed and made up. The Beckett Estate had become, largely because of that incident (though there have been others), a by-word for authorial tyranny, and Deborah Warner has hardly been damaged by the controversy. So Warner and Shaw are back in favour again and have been given permission to do Beckett's Happy Days. In return, one imagines, this won't be a total reinvention of the play, so all sides will be, more or less, happy.

The National seem oddly keen that you see it and have sent us two offers to pass on to you. We told them what a lot of ruffians and philistines you were but they wouldn't listen. So: if you are a student then you can see the play for a fiver and they throw in a bottle of Corona. The wedge of lime costs £35 though. (Only joking about the lime.) If you're sadly not a student, but you're a friend of Beckett you can still get in for £15. Not a personal friend, I presume. Just, you know, someone who likes Beckett. Not that you have to prove that. You don't have to recite Not I or anything to get the cheap ticket. Details of how to claim are below. Students to the left, friends to the right. Click on the thumbnails to bring them up full size.

We're guessing that if you mention that you came across this offer on Encore Theatre Magazine, they might do this again, so dropping our name can't hurt us or you.

Let's just hope it's good.

Anonymity or Cowardice?

2007-01-12T16:23:00.000Z

Anonymity or Cowardice?

David Eldridge (pictured, with Marla Rubin) has recently been the subject of a bruising encounter on the blogosphere. Not his own very wonderful blog but on Fin Kennedy’s (also very wonderful) site. An anonymous contributor made some very aggressive and personal remarks which David responded to in a characteristically forthright and pugnacious tone. This escalated until Fin was forced to suspend comments on the site. For a while, it seems, David contemplated giving up his blog.

This set us thinking at Encore because anonymity is part of the problem. Most people are ruder about others behind their backs than they would be to their faces. If they are sure it won’t get back to them, they are ruder still. Internet comment-posting allows complete anonymity and some people have taken the opportunity it affords to be very rude to people, like David, who stick their neck out and write about themselves online.

Of course, so do we. Encore has been very rude about certain people in the past. We doubt that Sheridan Morley or Toby Young or Sir David Hare are fans of our site. In a couple of weeks we think it likely that Quentin Letts will go right off us. We are also anonymous and this latest flare-up has made us ask again about the value of anonymity and examine our motives.

We have always maintained anonymity because we want to be able to criticise institutions we may work in and people we may work with. We also want to praise these institutions and people without it looking like social climbing. If the objects of our praise don’t know who we are, we can’t benefit, which is important. Our independence is important to us. Theatre companies have written to us wondering if we could write about some show of theirs. We always say we might do but we won’t ever promise a puff-piece. Anonymity allows us to maintain that independence without consequence.

Glyn Cannon, or someone pretending to be Glyn Cannon, once argued, very interestingly, that without authorship, comments have no authority. As we said at the time:

It depends on the judgment; if I announce that Michael Frayn has a headache, the
value of that claim is devalued unless I am Michael Frayn. But if I announce
that Michael Frayn earned £2m last year and draw your attention to his public
accounts, does it matter to the judgement who I am? You might start wondering
why someone would want to reveal Frayn's financial situation. But you might also
wonder that if I named myself.

We also feel passionately that ideas and debates don’t always have to be dragged down into interpersonal rivalry. As David Eldridge has put on his blog recently, responding to us,

I thoroughly loathe the inane modern certainties [...] that any action must be
motivated by reasons of ego, selfishness, emotional-indulgence or materialistic
gain and perceive them as such.

We hope ideas can be appreciated in themselves and we don’t hope to gain personally from any of this. In fact, writing for this blog takes up time that probably should be spent on other things.

What ‘Anonymous’ said about David on Fin’s blog was personal and irrelevant to artistic judgment and that's the difference. Maybe we’ve stepped over the line once or twice. We did mock Sheridan Morley’s beard a couple of times, which is probably not really at the heart of what is so objectionable about the old buffoon. But looking back over the various things we've written, we feel fairly happy that what we've written may have been written very savagely (and, no, we wouldn't enjoy reading such things about ourselves) but they are also usually argued.

Also - and does this need saying? - this is all the product of love. In the theatre, we ironclad ourselves against disappointment and failure, and from the horror and sadness that these rich and intense and joyful experiences pass and are over, the cast scattering to other shows, the sets dismantled, the attention dwindling, the show fading into the monchrome of distant memory. We harden our hearts and talk about making work, having a job, getting a gig, to disguise from ourselves the terrible joy of all this. If we didn't care about this work and - whisper it softly - deep down genuinely believe that the experiences that we make and witness are among the most important and profound experiences in our lives, we would not express our criticisms with such passion. So we are inclined to maintain our anonymity, risk crossing the line, and continue to honour and denounce with all the force at our disposal.

Fortunately for the blogosphere, David Eldridge seems to have been persuaded to continue with his blog. So we can continue to follow the fortunes of his writing career, West Ham, and, of course, his dog. And hopefully soon we will find out what was in the letter he received before Christmas that made him weep tears of joy.

Billington's Blair

2007-01-10T02:13:00.000Z

Billington's Blair

Michael Billington's put up a more than usually will-this-do?-ish piece on the Guardian's theatre blog. Titled, for no very good reason, 'How do you solve a problem like Blair?' he uses the announcements of two 'Tony Blair on Trial' plays, one on C4 and one at the Tricycle, to observe that Blair so far 'has been seen on stage largely as a buffoon'. Instead, Michael longs for a play that 'takes Blair seriously'.

Well, there is something to be said for this point. The kind of lampooning you get in The Madness of George Dubya or Follow My Leader makes those of us who opposed the Iraq occupation feel good but it doesn't add to our understanding. Nor, one might add, were they really meant to.

But what does Billington mean by taking Blair seriously? He offers two definitions: one 'that examines Blair in all his psychological complexity' or 'one that even portrays him as a tragic figure'. What does this mean? Here Billington pads the article out with some very meandering thoughts but he seems to believe that Blair's tragedy is that he did the wrong thing for the right reasons, at least in his own eyes. By 'the wrong thing' he means enter into this murderous war (is that what he means by the reference to 'the accumulating corpses'? It was a war, Michael...). But it's utterly mysterious what he could mean by 'the right reasons'.

Why did we go to war? Blair is fond now of claiming that he did so in order to depose the tyrant, Saddam Hussein. But this is a rereading of history. Blair took us into war on the basis of the WMD Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed and was seeking to develop. There is much l;ess talk about his oppression of his own people. If you look at the two main dossiers of information released to the press and public, the February ('dodgy') dossier and the September dossier, the great preponderance and primary focus of both is on the WMD intelligence. In the February dossier, only three pages directly refer to the oppression of the Iraqi people; the long second section outlining the structure of the internal security apparatus seems largely informative and as much talking about, say, the role of the Republican Guard in defeating the weapons inspectors as in discussing the security's role in repressing dissidence. In the September dossier, the one directly made available to the public, Blair's introduction comprises 29 sentences, 15 of which relate directly to the threat posed by the WMD. In contrast, there is one reference to Saddam Hussein's 'dictatorial' behaviour. It is clear that it was the imminent threat to Britain posed by Saddam Hussein, not that of his own people, that was Blair's central argument in support of military action.

This makes a difference because the kinds of questions you ask someone claiming self-defence (even anticipatory self-defence) are quite different from those claiming humanitarian intervention. If Iraq had posed a direct threat to the West, we would have been quite right to intervene militarily - once diplomatic routes had broken down. Few other questions would have been asked. If we had claimed it was a humanitarian intervention, other questions come into the picture: why now? (the September dossier lists human rights abuses going back twenty years) and why Iraq? (rather than, say, Zimbabwe, or North Korea, or any one of several oppressive regimes). By claiming the first ground, he avoids the second set of questions, and so he cannot change position now. It is a central plank of any 'just war' that you declare, beforehand, why you are embarking upon it. This Blair did not do.

So if Billington means that for the right reasons (deposing Saddam Hussein) Blair did the wrong thing (went to war), he's seriously misled. And in any case, why would this be illuminated by presenting a rounded pictrure of Blair in all his psychological complexity? Answer: it wouldn't. It would be a distraction from the real forces that are at work here, and these are not psychological. They are an embedded Foreign Office doctrine that will not let us break with America, in a mistaken belief that we hold a balance of forces between the US, Europe and the Commonwealth. They are an ideological programme called Project for the New American Century. It's our addiction to air travel, America's addiction to fuck-off cars, the emerging economies of China and India, and the need to stabilise the diminishing oil supply because the US presidency is bought by the oil companies.

Yes, I think there is some kind of tragic story here. Blair over-reached himself in believing that he could persuade the UN to get behind military action in Iraq. But he couldn't, because they didn't believe he had them, didn't really think he was obstructing the weapons inspectors, and saw the American aggression for what it was. Naked self-interest, a neo-neo strategy, the revival of Kissingerism, and that was never going to be good for the world. But to claim that his story is the one we need to see is to buy into Blair's own self-importance and a UK foreign office view of the world.

To understand what has happened in Iraq, we must resist Blair: The Tragedy.

Encore Review of the Year 2006

2006-12-31T15:48:00.000Z

Encore Review of the Year 2006

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with their suggestions for plays, productions, and theatre work in general that deserved recognition in 2006. This was an interesting year for the theatre with some of the most interesting new plays for a while, almost (dare we trendspot?) looking like a pattern, some radical new work at some very mainstream venues. It was also a pretty bad year for the critics who overruled their linesmen to ignore offsides, award penalties where there were none, and showed evidence bias to the home side.

The plays that caught Encore's eye this year took some brave risks with form. What was truly depressing about the critical response to Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough To Say I Love You? (title of the year, by the way) was the way that most critics, whether they liked it or not, discussed the play as if it were a simple broadside against US foreign policy and the moral compromises that underpinned the 'special relationship' with Britain. That is the description of a newspaper article, not a play, particularly not a play which squeezed this story through a domestic relationship, told it through shards of incomplete dialogue fragments, depicted it (in James Macdonald's beautiful production) in a light-bulb-framed showbiz-mirror, wherein we (and the Public Theatre audience to come) see ourselves and the darkness around us. We don't yet feel we have understood or properly felt the force of those formal devices and this is a play that will haunt Encore's imagination for some time to come. Ravenhill's bold two steps into new ground, The Cut and pool (no water) were treated very roughly by the theatre critics, though the latter play fared better with the more adventurous dance and performance art reviewers who are evidently better attuned to what new theatre is than the content-spotting first-stringers. Both texts were major achievements by one of our major writers and the critics really need to catch up. Simon Stephens dropped his trademark gentleness by showing us, in Motortown (pictured), Britain through the hellish eyes of a returning soldier and in doing so allowed us to imagine ourselves as others see us; the sociological accuracy of the play is far less significant that the political and ethical importance of such an act of fearless imagination, in these times of all times. Anthony Neilson's Realism at the Edinburgh International Festival did not perhaps have the weight and force of Dissocia (finally coming to the Court, thank you Dominic Cooke), but showed further evidence of the vigorous, restless talent of this writer and the creative ensemble he has gathered around him. It was hard to watch Catch without spotting the lurching changes of style, but principally because we all knew it was cowritten. The subject was fascinating and resonant, Kathryn Drysdale as the precocious girl on work experience was a great discovery, but the play didn't seem to amount ot very much, and some of its plotting was shaky (why does Claire tell her fuck-buddy it's her on the video? why keep the bloody database on a chain round her neck, rather than, say, in a safe? At least put a bloody password on it...). Elsewhere at the Court there was less to be excited about. The Winterling was entertaining but a rushed first draft. Rainbow Kiss showed promise more than achievement. Sugar Mummies, O Go My Man, and Piano/Forte were stinkers, unfortunately. Rock 'n' Roll we have already covered extensively.

Blackbird got to London this year in a stupid production with immeasurably coarsened performances; that the play's daring and beauty still came across is a tribute to the hidden robustness of this delicate and evanescent work. The Seafarer on the other hand had a sublime production that more or less entirely hid the silliness of the play. But why discount acting? This was some of the best around. The same might be said of Black Watch; a great evening, but in its toying with verbatim form it seemed gorged on having its cake and eating it. 2006 was a great year for Peter Morgan with superb drama-docs on TV (Longford), film (The Queen), and stage (Frost/Nixon), the latter making a wholly deserved push into the West End, one of the few decent shows there all year. Brenton's In Extremis was a more certain return to the stage than Paul, with more blood and spunk in the intellectual sinews. The Bush did not set Encore alight this year, even Steve Thompson's much-praised Whipping it Up seeming too boxed in by its narrative conventionalities. David Hare's new one, The Vertical Hour, opened on Broadway to mixed reviews - mainly at the expense of Julianne Moore - but in its pitting of British anti-war cynicism against American pro-war idealism, Hare seems to have hit upon an elegant structure to dramatise and complicate its audience's likely preconceptions. The play that excited us the most this year was probably Dennis Kelly's Love and Money, a full audit of the way we live and finding us morally bankrupt. The beautiful, spare, sympathetic production by Matthew Dunster (when are you going to write us another play, by the way?) was a perfect vehicle for Kelly's flinty, hilarious, edgy dialogue, his deep sense of moral decay, and the horror of how we are to each other. We hope, and if we prayed we'd pray, that this play will demonstrate to the critics that we don't have to be literal to write keenly and alertly about the world.

There were some excellent revivals this year. London finally saw Zerbombt (pictured), Ostermeier's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, a masterpiece of subtle observation, real time aesthetics, and then a spectacular and gorgeous transformation into another world, a world of light and emptiness, the kind of death-world into which the characters at the end of Crave gratefully fall. It was a good year for Blasted, with a terrific touring revival by Graeae (pictured) in the early part of the year, about to begin a deserved London residency at the Soho. The Voysey Inheritance, under Peter Gill's direction, was a spectacular redicovery for those of us who not already made it. The opening, with its Crimp-like interrupted dialogue, was stunning enough, but then one could only watch in horrified admiration through Granville Barker's remorseless eye fixed open on the beast that erupts within us when money enters our mutual relations. The Orange Tree's The Madras House was similarly admirable. Dominic Cooke's RSC Crucible was as good as this very over-rated play could ever get, unfussy, needle-sharp, and urgent. Encore hears good things about the RSC Complete Works season, though only saw the Indian Dream, which it faintly admired. Cheek by Jowl's The Changeling was oustanding at the Barbican . Moon for the Misbegotten was unbelievably, staggeringly dull, utterly without pertinence, resonance, or interest. The set, however, was very pretty with a rich blue in the surrounding cyc that suggests a new process. We must look into that. Cabaret was idiotic; Rufus Norris, brilliant though he is, has made a tit of himself by trying to bring out the politics of this musical: that Cabaret is actually about the rise of German fascism. Oh, you think? It is worrying that this must have been, at some point, a revelation to Norris himself. The crass evocations of Nazi thuggery and a particularly egregious Auschwitz routine were grandly patronising tautologies. The sixth-form moment where a humourless Nazi pushes over some concrete Kabarett letters actually inspired giggles around us. Other damp squibs included The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Tom and Viv, the ETT Mother Courage and the Sheffield Caretaker.

There were some wonderful romps this year. See How They Run was note-perfect, a great reminder that farce, when it is done properly, is unique and sublime. The Chichester Nicholas Nickleby was romptastic, but more, it reminded us of an era of grand, generous, ambitious socialist playmaking and the final moments where the boy is rescued from the snow would stir any left-wing heart. The Life of Galileo was nothing to do with Brecht, but hell it's a good story and if you hire David Hare what are you going to get? Apart from the deeply embarrassing second-half opener (urban decadence created by people who take taxis to work), it was a good and vivid story. Patrick Barlow's retread of The 39 Steps is much funnier than the dour publicity leads you to expect. Dick Whittington was new and old at the same time and set a good tone for what will hopefully be an annual event at the Barbican.

Therese Raquin was kind of a revival, kind of a new adaptation, and for us entirely failed. The set was totally misconceived; the room is supposed to be cramped with material from the shop - the 'dull compulsion of the economic' defining and distorting the bourgeois marriage. That really kinda is the point, isn't it? Instead we got the cavernous mansion-like upstairs quarters of the Raquins and the pressure wasn't there. The attempt to make the relationship really sexy was intermittent and it takes more than passionate clinches to make us believe that two people would kill for love. Mostly one flinched at the embarassment of someone trying to hard to emulate Katie Mitchell - her favourite designer, her favourite lighting designer, her favourite leading man, a gratuitous movement sequence - when the latter would never have allowed the horrible stageyness of Grivet and Michaud, the psychological flimsiness, the sense that people were acting the way they were because that's how we do things on stage, rather than in life. We saw quite the opposite in Mitchell's own astonishing reinvention of The Seagull which got the critics' knickers in a right twist for its supposed vandalising of the text. Sadly the critics don't know their Chekhov well enough, despite having had a chance to shoot down at least five seagulls in the last few years; this was a wholly faithful rediscovery of the play, given the awkward and slightly juvenile work that it can seem in some hands, this was a rich, mature and deeply serious work, stripped of its accumulated archaisms, coming up fresh and clean and achingly true, this was one of the great highlights of Encore's year.

New and experimental performance work was thin on the ground for us. The most exciting single performance we saw was a strange, adolescent, scurrilous and immature piece called Hitler Wrote 20 Pop Songs... Have You Heard Them? (pictured) by a theatre company with the unlovely name Theatre de Cunt. A savage political satire of a kind we have to call politically incorrect, though actually just seemed fearless. None of the pieties that throttle political discourse were observed here; the show was shapeless and overlong, the jokes were uneven, the suggestion that Tony Blair is somehow secretly in league with Adolf Hitler is absurd, but the show had energy and an iconoclastic joy that swept aside these criticisms. Punchdrunk's Faust was well realised but perhaps a bit overextended. Duckie's The Class Club was a strange event; was it really an exposé of class or just a reinforcement of it? Having wider seats in first class train compartments or the tiered pricing in most West End theatres would seem to expose and comment on class just as well. Though perhaps less enjoyably. Richard Maxwell's company had a welcome return to BITE with The End of Reality, adding stiffly awkward fighting to their repertoire of estrangement. Robert Lepage's The Andersen Project was breathtaking and full of heart as well as profound cleverness. The strangest evening of the year, as well as one of the best, was Katie Mitchell's Waves - strange only because it was so odd to see something so daring and experimental on a National Theatre stage, with a National Theatre kind of budget. This was one of the most beautiful experiences of the year.

The performers who most stood out this year were young. We've mentioned Kathryn Drysdale in Catch, and the same show's Niamh Webb had a fiery intensity as the conscience-stricken fury. Pippa Bennett-Warner was a stunning revelation in the National's Caroline or Change claiming the stage with wit and verve like an experienced Broadway hoofer though the programme notes only that she's just finished her A-Levels. The great breakthrough was probably Daniel Mays in The Winterling and Motortown, playing a pair of British misfits. The first, Patsy, a city boy lost in the country, was a strutting Pete Doherty, all flash cash, mouth and skank. The second, Danny, was a hollow-souled Iraq veteran, sickened by the moral emptiness of the country he returns to. This was an awkward and defiantly unshapely play and it was given its moral authority by Daniel Mays's haunting performance.

The great arrival of the year was the National Theatre of Scotland, which despite one or two stumbles, has planted its standard on the firmament of Scottish theatre, and, by turning down Hytner's appeal for Black Watch, has demonstrated a lively independence of spirit. Its misses (Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, The Crucible) have been more than made up for by its hits (Black Watch, Gobbo (pictured), Realism, Roam, Home). It has pushed theatre right to the forefront of the culture and in England we can only watch its creativity and imagination with envious eyes. The Young Vic returned in style, with a gorgeous new building and great bar to hang out in. We said hello to Dominic Dromgoole at the Globe, who has made some impact, and wrote one of the most bizarre books of the year. We said goodbye to August Wilson, Clive Perry, Paul Ableman, Tom Bell, Julian Slade, Benno Besson, Mary O'Malley, Maureen Stapleton, Moira Shearer and David Halliwell. We also seem likely to lose the Theatre Museum.

Nothing changed decisively in 2006 though there are signs perhaps that the vogue for verbatim is waning, that we are regaining confidence in using theatrical form, and not just content, to express our political engagement and ask our political questions. We saw a greater confidence with making connections between dance and theatre, art and theatre, radio and theatre, performance art and theatre. The writing was bold and imaginative as ever; it felt as though we have begun to find our way to take the temperature of the 21st century in the shape and texture of our theatre nights.

That was Encore's 2006. And look, we even said something nice about David Hare. We're having a facelift in 2007 but obviously we'll keep you all informed. In the meantime, why don't you tell us about your 2006?

Christmas Comes Early

2006-12-08T00:51:00.000Z

Christmas Comes Early

Toby Young - arse, philistine and talent-free dramatist - is ending his foray into theatre criticism. Such as it was. Young is apparently going to spend more time at home in the evenings - his wife is expecting a third baby - though Encore can reveal that the real reason is injured pride. The crown of Worst Critic of the Century, an honour for which Young has fought so valiantly, has been decisively snatched by Quentin Letts. Young has plainly realised that, philistine halfwit though he is, he never stood a chance of getting his pole position back while Letts was on the grid.

Surprise Surfuckingprise

2006-11-29T12:47:00.000Z

Surprise Surfuckingprise

Yes, the Evening Standard new play award went to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll. It's a terrible mess of a play - hell, it's not even a good Stoppard play; and why did Motortown and The Cut not even get nominated? Of course everyone - yes yes yes - is entitled to their own opinion. Maybe the panel just didn't like it. But there are patterns here.

Slightly less incredibly, Nina Raine won best newcomer for Rabbit, which was okay, part of a miniature contemporary genre of plays by women trying to revive and rework the bourgeois drawing room comedy (think Moira Buffini's Dinner, Charlotte Jones's The Lightning Play). Raine's play is nicely waspish and the repulsiveness of the characters is balanced by the force of the revelations.

But Stoppard, for fuck's sake? There is a real problem with our critics. Encore senses a change in the air, the feeble literalism of much of what has passed for political theatre in the last few years seems to be in retreat. Playwrights are using metaphor and aesthetic disruption not as evasion of contemporary realities but as a recognition that the nature of contemporary reality needs new forms, new experiences, new structures and plays. But the critics, almost uniformly, beg to differ. They prefer clarity of content, inconspicuity of form. And their vengeance against plays that break their rules. We've alredy mentioned the reviews of The Cut; the same happened to pool (no water); look at the response to Waves ('the production is a sterile piece of theatre about theatre' - Billington), Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? ('This is far too fancy to succeed as a political play' - Clapp), and there are many more examples. If it engages in dialogue with theatre rather than just in dialogue with the world, they hate it. Plays with no artistic merit but which clearly delineate some important themes - like (sorry but) Ryan Craig's awful The Glass Room - they are endlessly tolerant ('confirms that big issues make for fascinating plays' Billington on The Glass Room, which got 3 stars to the sublime Waves's 2).

The one glorious exception is Love and Money (pictured), which has had almost miraculously positive reviews. But let's be clear, those reviews come at a cost. Perhaps misled by the programme notes which stress our debt society, some of the critics seem only happy to praise the play if they think it is a sociological snapshot of contemporary Britain, rather than the metaphorical, metaphysical play about belief, power and obligations to one another that the rest of us could see. The same happened with Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (pictured); whether they liked it or not, the critics have tended to write about the play as if it were a simple statement of opposition to US Imperialism. Well, maybe it is partly that but to say so involves blanking out the complexities of the form of that play, the disjunctions on the language, the delicacy of the relationship depicted, and the visual and spatial organisation of the production, and simply summarise what they feel is the content. This position damages these delicate plays in the rush to find a review-friendly 'theme' that can be captured in a paragraph. Such a position does not understand the play; it pays no attention to what is actually happening in front of them. And that, one might think, is key to the role of the critic.

The battle lines are drawn. On one side we have the literalists like Billington and Hare, proponents of the creeping hegemony of verbatim theatre, the people who like their plays to be foursquare and clear, who want similes but not metaphors, who like neatly defined topics, and plays that are 'about' things (preferably important social problems). And on the other side we have the metaphysicals: the artists, the modernists, the experimentalists, the lovers of language and ethics and metaphor and image, the examiners of the roots of politics and love and power and the way we live together.

There's a major skirmish on the horizon: in the Spring, the National is reviving Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, directed by Katie Mitchell. This play is a rallying flag for the artists; it's not literal, it's wholly ambiguous, it unusually shares creative responsibility between writer, director, designer and actor. It's one of the great turning points in British playwriting, one of those moments when playwrights woke up, saw not just how they could write but how they had to write - because yes yes, the world was different, and Crimp had seen that, and he saw that our pens and keyboards have to move differently.

What is that difference? What is the reason? Encore is not sure. It's something about the need to write plays that are not just about the world they see around them, that see beyond the way things are, that implicitly therefore do not share what Duncan in Love and Money celebrates as 'the absolute conviction that all this is right'. That represent the world in an alienated and formally distorted form that allow us to recognise but also to see as if for the first time, to see the world in its strangeness, not in its utter recognisability. Plays that do not engage in the tautologies of realism, that offer up a gap into which pours love and danger and difficulty and ambiguity and morality and metaphor and something other and beyond money and beyond politics and beyond all this all this all this.

Standards

2006-11-13T12:29:00.000Z

Whose Standard?

The Evening Standard Award nominations are out. Most of the categories are uncontroversial enough. But the Best New Play nominations are:

Frost/Nixon by Peter Morgan
Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard
The Seafarer by Conor McPherson

Frost/Nixon is fair enough. It's a very artful distillation of that famous encounter which gives the material weight and substance. The Seafarer is much harder to defend. It features, without doubt, some of the most utterly delicious acting this year. Jim Norton (pictured on the left) alone was worth the price of admission - a rich, wholly imagined, endlessly inventive comic performance. The wonderful sequence where Nicky arrives and is put in charge of the whiskey bottle is fantastic. Norton as Richard, amused by the anecdote that Nicky tells, gets increasingly desperate for a drop of the strong stuff, and his smile fixed on his face while he blindly and surreptitiously sticks a finger in his glass to see if it has been filled. Karl Johnson's long-suffering Sharky gives emotional weight to the show, his discomfort and genuine concern for his brother making a perfect foil for Norton's blind braggart. It's a hugely enjoyable evening. As a play though, the Faust plot that gives the evening its shape is a dreadful load of old cobblers; totally meretricious, a plot off the shelf, completely meaningless and vulgar. A flashily unthought-out piece of playmaking. The rest of the play is so enjoyable, we wish he'd found some other principle of construction than reaching for a hand-me-down myth.

But why is Rock 'n' Roll here? Well, it's obvious: because it's by Tom Stoppard and the critics are all in awe. But, Jesus, can't they see? It's such a bloody awful, boring evening. It's so wordy and pompous and half-baked. The ludicrous notion that rock 'n' roll is the real spirit of revolution: how on earth are we supposed to take that seriously faced with 'Welcome to the Machine' and 'Welcome to the Jungle'? With the horrible corporate rock of a 1990s Stones tour. Aren't we all bored now with Stoppard's utterly undigested research being spun out to us? The absurd subplot of the wife, purely and nakedly a function of Stoppard's etiolated intellectual structure. The pitiful mystification of Syd Barrett as Pan. Encore liked Syd as much as the next man (as long as that next man isn't Stoppard) but let's get a sense of perspective here. He made good music for a couple of years, and his decline was as sharp and total as Stoppard's musical taste.

The problem is that our critics have developed a very bad habit. Everyone understands that it must be hard to be a critic; you need to write your review, based on a single viewing, within an hour. And of course, we need them to do that, because a review needs to come out early in the run. But this means that many reviewers clearly spend the evening thinking how to write the review rather than watching the play. The more waspish of them - yes we're talking about you, de Jongh - sit thinking of witty ways of using the play against the company. But all of them look for messages and subjects that they can expend a paragraph or two on. Billington is the biggest culprit here, usually spending more time on the fucking social problem that he has detected in the play's subject matter than he does on the design and lighting about which he rearely has anything to say. But it's universal. And what this means is (a) plays like Rock 'n' Roll which drone on and on and on about a range of topics (what is revolution? how have we mistranslated Sappho? what is the history of the British left?) get full marks because basically they have half-written the review for them; (b) plays that do not have clearly identifiable social issues, or are deliberately ambiguous in their references get very bad ones.

The obvious example of the latter - and it's the most astonishing omission from the list - is Mark Ravenhill's The Cut (pictured). The play was slammed by the critics, absolutely hammered. And why? Because - outrageously - Ravenhill refuses to explain exactly what he is saying. He doesn't spell it out for the benefit of the critic who fancies an early night. In fact it is pellucid, clear, beautiful and haunting. It displays a new vigour and precision in Ravenhill's use of language. It sets out a political scenario with insight, wit and vigour. Who can forget McKellen's state torturer, eating his evening meal in the emotional cool of his marital home, asserting, with unconscious irony, 'I'm a good man. At the end of the day I'm a good man'. But The Cut is not on the list of nominations. A major play by one of our most important writers is ignored because it doesn't pander to the critics' working conditions and refuses to compromise its artistry just to make their lives easier. It is an extraordinary situation, since it is the play of the year so far, and will, Encore predicts, be considered one the plays of the decade. There are countless other examples of critics demolishing plays because they can't reduce their complexity to a single banal propositional sentence. After a week in which it took Berlin's Schaubühne to give London its first proper vision of Blasted on a main stage (the Court 2001 revival was a sorry affair), we should be reminded that the play lack of a single, obvious, stitch-it-on-a-cushion-cover, give-it-to-a-character-to-say message is what lay behind the critics' original ridicule of the play. It's a shameful situation.

Posters at the National

2006-10-07T17:10:00.000+01:00

Posters at the National

The National's decision to make available a generous selection of its past theatre posters (at, let's just point out, scandalous cost) unfortunately reveals rather plainly the sharp decline of the design work recently. Look at the difference between these images.

The poster on the left isn't all that imaginative. But it's a modern image, which already makes the connection Brecht is making with the technology of our age, and it is estranging in a certain sense: the earth seen from elsewhere, the earth displaced from the centre of vision, suggesting the object of Galileo's own struggle. The colours are muted but strong the lunar surface contrasting with the partially shadowed earth, struggling perhaps to emerge. The earth's vulnerability is suggested as is, faintly, an atomic structure that underscores the nuclear politics against which Brecht wrote his crucial second draft. Tonally, subtly, the poster suggests the dark polarities of the play. What does the 2006 poster tell us? It tells us that Simon Russell Beale is in the production and that's it.

The National has through-branded itself across all its print material. The sans-serif font, emphasising and varying the letter design only with emboldening. It looks modern, and the diagonal arrangement is a subtle nod to a period of design from the late 1960s. Look at this poster:

It's actually from 1968, though it could easily have been used at any time over the past three years. The diagnonal lettering suggests a modernist era of design though the colour palette is contemporary. The starkness and clarity of the font is both accessible and imposing. These things are all appropriate to the theatre they represent.

But some less exciting principles also appear to inform the new designs. They almost all have human figures on them. Often the figures are looking at the camera and the viewer. Perhaps this is designed to make us feel connected to the image (if we are simpletons). Otherwise the images are very noise-free; no castlists as in the Galileo image, colour restricted to the lettering, the only non-essential detail being the names of the sponsors, which is a clear sign of the difference between then and now. While images from an earlier era show action, the body in motion, a moment of emotional intensity, conflict or abandon, the new human figures are usually in repose, not in the midst of some moment of, well, drama as in Edward II. The effect is to rebrand the image of modern, efficient, cool, streamlined, and very very boring. Look at these:

The left is full of drama, life, colour. It tells us about the design of the show, that elegant metal loop linking the jaunty title to the comic image below. The sense of a plot, the absurdities of the alchemical processes are all captured. We know the kind of play it'll be and we have a sense of the production and vaguely of the kind of story. What do we know about The Alchemist in 2006? We know that it has Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale in it. Admittedly the whispering motif tells us something about the fraud plot that structure the play but this is rather cancelled out by Alex Jennings's steady gaze at the camera which seems faintly amused but is otherwise expressionless, an effect enhanced by the cool monochromaticism of the image. While 1996's poster could be accused of being too busy, ten years later we seem to have gone in entirely the opposite direction, the poster aggressively refusing to tell us anything about the show at all.

Look at these images; it's hard to imagine a duller series of posters, less inclined to give you the slightest sense of what the show is about:

The posters don't always simply advertise the cast. There are more abstract or intriguing images. But another constraint prevents these from being truly effective. The National recently signed a deal with Getty Images and most of the non-cast images are taken from the Getty archive. This is, no doubt, an extensive library. But since they can only use non-recognisable images, with that cool, affectless sheen, their choices are much reduced, and some of the matches of image to play are flimsy. For Iphigenia in Aulis (pictured) they used an image of a young girl, gazing vacantly into the camera. This is quite meaningless unless you already know the play, and even then it doesn't declare very much. For The UN Inspector (pictured), they used a rather more striking image, an almost Pythonesque bureaucrat with a suitcase on his shoulder, obscuring his head. This is a good image, nicely surreal and appealing. It sort of picks up the theme that the inspector is more a figure of their guilty imaginations than a real person. But it says little about the style or tone of the show. You might realise it was a comedy, but not that it was a farce. In fact nothing about the image suggests anything about period, genre, subject or style. When you compare it with the impishly witty poster for The Government Inspector (pictured below), it's clear how vague and imprecise the more recent poster is.

I suppose the role of the poster has changed. They used to be flyposted around the area. There's less passing trade now and the sources of information are much broader than they were twenty years ago. You rarely see a National Theatre poster anywhere except in and around the building. So it's largely to advertise what's on to people who have already made a commitment to the National by being there. Branding helps clarify the National's profile across all media. But it's a pity that the imagination that went into the posters has so dramatically dwindled. It places disproportionate significance on the actor; yes, everyone wants theatres to be full but if people are there to see the actor rather than the play, something will get lost from the experience. At their best, posters are a way of leading audiences into the imaginative experience of the theatre; just advertising who's going to be in it does not lead to any act of imagination at all, just to the experiencing of looking at a famous actor.

What's disappointing is that so much else at the National has changed for the better in the last three or four years. It's become a genuinely exciting place to go. Ultimately perhaps, the quality of the posters does not matter so much - maybe it's as trivial as worrying about the poor standard of the adverts on TV - but the posters do have a function of preparing an audience for the event they may wish to see, and in representing the National Theatre to the world and to memory. They impress themselves upon history and it would be a shame if the sheen of bland star-shots is allowed to characterise the National's current era. It also suggests that somewhere along the line, the National's marketing department has developed an attitude to its audience that is condescending to the point of contempt. It's a kind of virus and needs to be stopped before it spreads.

Two Marias

2006-09-24T15:37:00.000+01:00

Two Marias

...is the title of an old play by Bryony Lavery, about two girls killed in a car crash. Eerily appropriate for the continuing high-speed disaster that is How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? Having spent a month denying that there was an alternative Maria waiting in the wings to play at least half the performances, Andrew Lloyd Webber's company has announced that Emma Williams (pictured - and who we named six weeks ago as the ringer) is withdrawing from the production, allegedly because she didn't want to be limited to two performances a week. So what was the deal? Emma Williams, let's face it, was never going to take a job as understudy. And now, of course, the callers are asking to see the one off the telly, so they reduced her role and she's backed out.

It reveals, as clearly as you could imagine, that everything we have said all along is correct: that Lloyd Webber and the egregious Ian David always knew who they wanted and did everything to ensure she won. Last week The Independent published allegations that the show was rigged in other ways:

There were rumours that the producers had hired a 'plant' to infiltrate the
show. Then there were claims of favouritism from two unsuccessful contestants after they learnt that Fisher was recording a CD to accompany the show before the final. Claims were made that the show, watched by 10 million viewers, was edited to put certain contestants in a bad light, and that some performers benefited from the choice of songs they had to sing.

Which makes sense, because it would be crazy not to ensure that you cast the person you want - but, if that's what you're going to do, don't pretend that the public are in charge. The cash that this ludicrous and sordid show will put in the producers' pockets is precisely matched by the bad taste is leaves in our mouths.

Sunday Plays

2006-09-14T16:47:00.000+01:00

Something for the Weekend

Nick Hytner has announced that he'd like the National to open on Sundays. Or rather he still would like the National to open on Sundays, since he also declared this in June. For someone who is so keen to open his theatre on a Sunday, he seems to be doing surprisingly little about it, as BECTU claim that they have had no official approach. And BECTU are the only ones likely to drive a hard bargain since most theatre workers are contracted according to a set number of performances and it won't mean a contractual change as such.

The Telegraph earlier this year reported that the National are offering themselves as a battering ram on behalf of the regional theatres who don't feel strong enough to argue it through with BECTU themselves. At an Arts Council meeting in October 2005 the National offered to spend eighteen months gathering information and costing out the proposal before introducing the scheme. The National, of course, has a very particular reason for wanting Sunday opening since it has an almost guaranteed audience; the redevelopment of the South Bank over the last few years means that there is now an established tourist walk that takes in the whole South Bank complex, from the London Eye, to Tate Modern and The Globe and then on past the Clink and off to Tower Bridge. The National, since its 90s redesign, is beautifully placed to become a stop along the way, but on a Sunday its eyes are closed. It is hard to imagine that the National wouldn't be able to fill at least a mid-afternoon matinee, perhaps a lunchtime and a late-afternoon matinee on a Sunday. Would most regional theatres have the same clear benefit from Sunday opening. You would expect double time, perhaps time and a half, on a Sunday. Are the audiences there to make that worthwhile?

The union's scepticism is understandable but a scheme that allows days off in lieu, an either/or for Saturdays or Sundays, a healthy overtime rate, or some combination of the three, should put most fears at rest. Given that shopping is universal on a Sunday and that most galleries and museums are available, that the cinemas are open and football is now as likely on Sunday as Saturday, it seems hard to justify the theatre's six-day week. The old proposal has always been to trade it off against Mondays, traditionally a hard day to sell, though the cheap deals that have been Monday inducements (notably at the Court) would disappear under such a scheme.

Of course, there have been some less sensible worries. John Roberts of the Lord's Day Observance Society (no, there really is one), has expressed the comments of his members with great clarity, pondering, 'It is fine going to see entertainment on a Sunday but what about the people working on the stage, backstage?' Which sounds like a humanitarian, even socialist concern. 'We are in danger of losing the concept of the family unit,' he added, as he carefully bolted the stable door.

Why can't families go to the theatre together, one would like to know. One suspects that Christians hide behind the idea of the family get-together because even they are not brazen enough to complain that it'll stop people going to church. Because if the family unit is a relic, mass church attendance isn't even in living memory.

There is something to be said for the communitas and sense of communal identity that comes from a shared day off, but this battle was lost a long time ago. The flexible working and 24-hour culture that we have been creeping towards over the last fifteen years mean that people find different ways of connecting, whether that be nongeographical forms of connectivity, virtual communities, or other ways of slicing one's identity to make connections that aren't mere accidents of birth. The theatre is, if anything, one of the more robust forms of collective cultural experience. More self-conscious and particular than cinema, less competitively-focused than football.

Which is why Encore supports Sunday opening.

STOP PRESS: Christian Hypocrite Arrested

2006-09-05T10:14:00.000+01:00

STOP PRESS: Christian Hypocrite Arrested

Encore readers will, I am sure, be delighted by the news that Stephen Green has been arrested at the gay Mardi Gras event in Bute Park, Cardiff, after refusing to stop handing out leaflets condemning homosexuality on the theologically dubious grounds of its condemnation in Leviticus (officially the most ludicrous book of the Bible).

Green, you will remember, organised a letter-writing compaign and pickets outside the BBC to stop the broadcast of Jerry Springer the Opera. He organised pickets outside the Cambridge Theatre to intimidate audience members from going in. He sent threatening letters around the country's regional theatres to intimidate them out of booking the tour of the show, with success in some places.

So it is delightful to see that he has undergone his own road to Damascus moment.

Speaking about righteousness, morality, sin, repentance and the forgiveness sinners can find in the cross of Jesus Christ may well offend the fragile sensibilities of homosexuals, but should the police have a partisan unit whose job is to round up Christian dissidents, treat them like thought criminals and trample on freedom of speech?

It would be kindest to ignore his silly remarks about the police (who have, of course, never remotely targeted homosexuals to bump up their arrest figures...). That would be churlish. It is delightful to see that Green is now such a firm believer in freedom of speech. We look forward to seeing Christian Voice pursue its new policy with vigour and verve.

God, Theatre, and Match-Fixing

2006-09-04T00:13:00.000+01:00

God, Theatre and Match-Fixing

Stephen Green (pictured) is the head of Christian Voice, the organisation who largely failed to get Jerry Springer barred from regional theatres across the land. His arguments were non-existent, as you can see from the disgraceful letter that he sent to regional theatres last March. What does he say?

Having seen [Jerry Springer: The Opera], I can say with some feeling that the show is crude, offensive and blasphemous in the extreme. At the very least, it is not a family show and will damage the reputation of any theatre which puts it on.

The first sentence is an assertion without evidence, beefed up only by an appeal to emotion. The second is a non sequitur (I can think of several theatres whose reputations would be damaged by putting on a family show). On this firm foundation, Green darkly reported his 'success' in London and demanded to know whether the theatre managers were planning to host Jerry Springer. Sadly, some theatres did respond to the intimidation: basically, the threat that lots of ghastly Christian nutjobs would be standing outside their theatre bothering paying customers. But only some: some of the responses like that of national treasure Gwenda Hughes of the New Victoria Theatre, Stoke on Trent, were much better:

For the attention of Stephen Green

Sir,

I have received your letter concerning JERRY SPRINGER, THE OPERA.

Future programming is a confidential matter between employees and our Trustees until a season is announced and our brochure distributed. Details of our current season are available on our website. Should you wish to receive our brochure, published three times a year, please ring the Box Office number and we will put you on our mailing list.

It is my responsibility to decide what plays, concerts and events are programmed at this theatre, subject to ratification by the Trustees.

I will continue to programme as I see fit and appropriate for the organisation. Neither I, nor the Trustees, will change the programme or the programming policy as a result of threats, bullying or intimidation from any outside body.

I hope this makes the situation quite clear.

Yours faithfully,

Gwenda Hughes

Of course, all that fuss was a long time ago. But he's still around, and it might interest Encore's readers to get a glimpse of some of the things he's been saying since the tour ended.

Responding to Hurricane Katrina, he observed that New Orleans was due to host the 'Southern Decadence' event, an annual lesbian and gay culture and arts festival. He argued:

Most would say a hurricane is an 'Act of God'. Hurricanes are named by a
system of rotating boy/girl/boy/girl names after the letters of the alphabet. By one of those co-incidences which only Almighty God can manufacture, the name 'Katrina' means 'purity'. A version of the name 'Catherine', it comes from the same root as a 'cathartic' or 'purifying' experience. Purity blew into New Orleans and purity broke the levees and flooded the city. When a hurricane has been particularly devastating, the name is retired. There will never be another 'Katrina' and that may mean that New Orleans may only have this single opportunity to respond to the awesome purity of God. God often gives only one warning.

Unfortunately for this ambulance-chasing halfwit, the French Quarter, the centre of the festival and site for the festival's climactic parade, was the least affected by the disaster. The burden of the press release is that, by finding the strength to continue with the festival, even though scaled down and elsewhere, these survivors of a natural disaster were showing great disrespect for the dead. As someone once said, let he who is without sin, Stephen, cast the first stone. Or put another way, shut the fuck up, you stupid hypocrite.

All of this is based on some very selective Biblical citations. No doubt even more fiendish is the exegesis that entitles Christian Voice to rail against plans for road-pricing, not a topic that casual readers will have noticed Jesus making much of. He's on more conventional ground when he reports on the prayer vigils that attended the first civil partnerships, noting, strangely, that

Ordinary people would be revolted by the sight of two men or two women kissing in a parody of a marital embrace

Intriguing. Encore is not quite sure what a 'parody of a marital embrace' looks like. Is it mouth-closed, both partners looking away and wanting to get it over with? Perhaps Stephen Green and John Beyer, Mary Whitehouse's successor as head of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, now rebranded Mediawatch, could demonstrate?

Last week, though, Stephen Green really ramped up the hilarious craziness of his proclamations. Watching the recent Cricket Test between England and Pakistan, Green was disturbed at what he calls 'the way in which Pakistan were giving it large about Islam'. (What this means is members of the team talking about their Islamic faith. The swines!) So he did what any normal, ordinary, right-thinking Christian loo-lah would do. He prayed. Oh lord - we imagine it went - smite down these infidels, bringing their false religion into this Christian country. And lo, the Lord, according to Green, did indeed smite them down, with 'the sort of unexpected event which only Almighty God can bring about'. Getting Darrell Hair to detect ball-tampering by the Pakistan bowlers. Man, that really is moving in a mysterious way.

What God is saying, says Green confidently, is that 'if we Christians place all our trust in Him, show Him our prayer is serious by doing the simple and obvious things which only we can do, we can safely leave the miraculous to Him. God will never fail to surprise us'.

The utter, utter fuckwit.

No Smoking

2006-08-20T16:19:00.000+01:00

No Smoking

In Edinburgh, Mel Smith make a big song and dance about his 'right' to smoke cigars while performing a monologue about Winston Churchill, suggesting that the Scottish Parliament's ban would have 'delighted Adolf Hitler'. He declared his intention to defy the ban and light up a Havana during a performance of
Allegiance at the Assembly, though, after hearing that William Burdett-Coutts who manages the venue, would have been fined £1000, the venue closed down and most likely not relicensed for performance, he backed down.

Encore does think it is strange that you can't smoke fake cigars and cigarettes under the terms of the Scottish Parliament's ban, and thus refuses to see a distinction between fiction and reality that is crucial to the theatre's working, but Mel Smith's posturing is indefensible.

The reason for the ban is to prevent workers being forced to inhale smoke. The ushers, technicians and cleaners at the Assembly Rooms would have to have inhaled Mel Smith's cigar smoke for the duration of the run. This is not reasonable and it doesn't do anything for Mel Smith's case and credibility that he did not acknowledge this point. At no point as far as we could see did he make the case for being allowed to smoke a fake cigar. It came across, finally, as though he simply felt he should be allowed to smoke a cigar whenever he fancied it, an impression reinforced by his post-show puffs out of the window (for which there was of course no justification). Insofar as he did make an 'artistic' defence of smoking cigars, it was that cigar smoking is essential to a portrait of the man Churchill. But this is a weak defence for several reasons: first, Churchill did many things, including, by some accounts, farting constantly in cabinet during the 1950s; I didn't see the show but I doubt that Mel Smith would have cultivated farts with the same enthusiasm he reserves for his Romeo y Julietta; the director of the show, Brian Gilbert, protested, 'I am all for a smoking ban in bars but not to have an actor smoking while he represents a character in history who did smoke is absurd' But that argument is hopeless - the same argument would allow anyone playing Brutus to actually kill Julius Caesar; second, a real cigar is not essential to a portrait of Churchill. Look, here's a portrait of Churchill:

He's got a cigar, but it's not a real one. It's an image created out of paint. No one who understands anything about theatre can say that a production in which the props (including, therefore, the cigars) are mimed is any less accurate a portrait of Churchill than one that cleaves to naturalism as its method; third, is a cigar essential to a performance of Churchill? Is it absolutely central to any portrait? More important than a jowly face, lugubrious speech, and a body of Mel Smith proportions? Because, look, here's a portrait of Churchill that adorns the front page of the Churchill Society's website.

At least, I think it's Churchill. But he has no cigar so maybe Mel Smith would tell us it could be anybody.

Encore think the arts need defending, and defending against a blanket ban that does not respect the particularity of theatrical representation, but let's remember that the smoking ban was introduced in the name of public health, a cause as important as the health of the theatre. This kind of campaign does nobody any good.

Encore Heroes # 5: Simon Stephens

2006-08-13T13:39:00.000+01:00

Encore Heroes # 5:
Simon Stephens

One of the fifty readings that the Royal Court organised to celebrate its 50th birthday at the beginning of this year was of Robert Holman’s Rafts and Dreams. Near the front row, having a whale of a time was Simon Stephens. At the end of the play, as Simon sauntered out of the auditorium in high spirits, he joked with former colleagues from the Court that all he’s ever written has just been 'nicked' from Robert Holman.

Looking at Stephens’ work, you might notice some plays being more Holmanesque than others (Port and Herons for example). They are often more drink-sodden and more violent and there are many other influences running alongside. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver haunts his first Royal Court play Bluebird and his latest Motortown in equal measure. There are other film influences. There is Chekhov (particularly in Christmas and On the Shore of the Wide World) and there are Peter Gill and Tom Murphy. But Holman always comes through. In the bleak landscape of Motortown, the only hope comes from the relationship between Danny and Lee, a relationship that appears to be, for a moment at least, incestuous. This echoes the juxtaposition between the brutality of Kerry’s background and the harmony of Freya and Joachim’s existence in Holman’s Holes in the Skin.

As T.S. Eliot would say, Stephens steals rather than borrows and he soaks up his influences to make them his own. He absorbs them like a punk or country band rather than name-checking them like a hip-hop MC or Tom Stoppard. There is a great deal of Robert Holman about him, both in the depth and delicacy of the writing - there's an intense fragility in some of the relationships he offers us, and sometimes the daring of that is what is so moving - but also in the unexpected extremity of the action. Motortown begins as an Edmondesque satire on contemporary Britain, but it turns much darker in the central torture scene. It tears a hole in the play in many ways; the blank irony of the previous scenes does not prepare us for what we see and the sheer lack of authorial commentary (nothing in the scene hints to us what we 'should' be thinking or feeling) gives the horror a first-person directness. So searing is the sequence that perhaps it takes us time to adjust to the rest of the play. It's an astonishing formal rendering of cultural disgust and in its way is as daring as Holman's flood and ape and lightning. Without the delicacy of the relationships and affirmation of friendship and love, this could seem flashy and modish, but this writing goes a long way down.

Right now, Simon Stephens rocks. He is writer-in-residence at the National Theatre and is writing a musical with Mark Eitzel from American Music Club. He arrived on the scene at the end of the 'In-Yer-Face' period and took a while gaining the recognition he deserved but has over the last two years started moving out of studio spaces. He now has the opportunity to make the sort of impact on the modern theatre that Holman has not succeeded in doing for various reasons. He is, along with David Greig, David Harrower and David Eldridge at their best, among the most talented playwrights of his generation.

It's a shame that Motortown was not seen by more people, but it has toured to Vienna where it was received very well. Let us hope that the British theatre can hold on to Stephens and doesn’t let him become one of the many talented playwrights (Bond, Barker, Motton, Kane) who are lauded on the continent but sinfully neglected in their own country.

Selected Plays

1998 Bluebird (Royal Court)
2001 Herons (Royal Court)
2002 Port (Royal Exchange)
2003 One Minute (ATC Tour)
2003 Christmas (Bush and Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton)
2004 Country Music (Royal Court)
2005 On the Shore of the Wide World (Royal Exchange and National)
2006 Motortown (Royal Court)

Reader Meets Author

2006-08-08T18:18:00.000+01:00

Reader Meets Author

Strange days on the Whatsonstage.com messageboards, usually one of the best discussion sites on theatre, where a well-informed and articulate group of regulars go at their theatregoing experiences with blood and fire. A recent scalping of the National's Market Boy by 'Carl Linden' (it transpires that this is a pseudonym) for stereotyping and inauthenticity of the working-class traders of Romford market brought the author himself, David Eldridge (pictured), into the fray. Eldridge defended the authentic basis of the play, while insisting that it was never intended to be a documentary. His cheeky sign-off accused 'Carl' of 'bitterness and bile' which provoked a flurry of aggrieved replies from this critic, who added to his accusation of inauthenticity the assertion that it was 'a complete mess as a play' and accused the whole of being the one-dimensional world seen by the 'Liberal elite'. So, clearly handbags at dawn. Eldridge returned to the battle less to defend his play as to condemn the attitude of his would-be critic. Things spiral out of control fairly quickly as 'Carl' compares Eldridge to Pol Pot (how did we get here from there?).

It's refreshing to see a playwright answering his critics, and there's no reason for believing critics should not be held to account whoever they are. But it's also not easy to see who gains by this. As in the Guardian's (rather pompously fanfared) 'right of reply' section, no matter how dignified the expression, restrained the style, even-handed and fair-minded the approach, answering a critic back so easily seems like special pleading. Eldridge is rigorously restrained and dignified, well certainly in his first posting, but somehow he still seems to lessen himself. Now, his case is more complicated, because it seems that 'Carl Linden' is the pseudonym for a playwright, or ex-playwright, who does not identify him or herself. (Nothing wrong with anonymity; at Encore, we're quite partial to it ourselves.) Debate between theatre workers is usually more productive than debate between theatre workers and critics, though even here the intelligent and sensitive David Eldridge seems to get dragged into a conflict from which there can be no winners.

The opportunity to respond that the Guardian offers has been taken up almost exclusively by theatre workers. There are a couple of film makers, a dance impresario, a curator and a composer, but two-thirds of all the replies are by theatre makers. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: theatre shows usually have limited runs and the temptation to draw the poison of a bad review quickly is very strong. If we get our rebuttal in before the weekend, it seems to say, we can neutralise the impact of that two-star notice. The reason why no novelist has written a rebuttal for The Guardian is that they know their book has a couple of years to make its impact.
It's less obvious why it never works. But here's Encore's view. Is it perhaps because it feels beneath an artist's dignity to engage with a critic? Of course we know that reviews are very important, but why are they important? I think we all yearn for a critical response that recognises the nature of the creative work you're engaged in, the context you're responding to, a response that can genuinely open up a debate that feels interior to the project of work. But critics hardly ever supply that, especially in their - let's be fair - one hour deadline and 400 words. Responding genuinely and openly to creative work is very difficult, which is why many critics don't bother and either review something else, like Billington (pictured) forever turning plays into sociology, or allow personal judgments to harden into a bunker mentality. It can be aggravating when the critics - en masse - misunderstand a show and set its reputation off in quite the wrong direction, causing puzzlement to audiences who've read the papers and creating the conditions for the backlash later on. But there is usually time for that impression to be changed, and it is pointless trying to shift that view within three days of the press night.

The truth is that the critics' only practical significance is that they get the word out, more effectively than most advertising, that the play is on. Anyone who's worked in theatre knows the strange phenomenon that even after quite poor reviews, audiences generally go up. Engaging with what they say, therefore, is simply giving the critics more significance than they deserve. And because of that, when you see that an artist has bothered respond, the reader thinks, 'they must be desperate', which demeans the artist and gives curious credence to the original criticism. So the right of reply never works.

When we're there, on a first night, watching the critics filing in, don't most of us think, 'if I just met you at a party, I wouldn't like you; I don't respect your opinions, nor your ability to articulate them; why should I care what you think'? Let them write their reviews, but please, please, let's not waste time answering them back.

Don't Cry For Him

2006-08-04T10:06:00.000+01:00

Don't Cry for Him

Most people develop opinions because the world presents them with options. Lord Lloyd Webber seems to have opinions only when he's got a new show on. His latest off-the-peg rant is about the state of the West End. Yes, you heard me right, the state of the West End. The man whose horrible shows squatted a sizeable portion of it for the last twenty years and still owns seven theatres (including Drury Lane, The Palace, and the Palladium) think it's all up the spout.

First, he says in an interview in the Radio Times to publicise his naff and slightly fraudulent reality TV show, that only Billy Elliot, The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera are making money. First, as is well known, The Lion King probably isn't making money: its presence as a stage show is a loss leader designed to encourage us to buy other Disney^TM products . Second, surely there are other shows that are making money. What's the point of Mamma Mia! if it's not making money? What about Les Mis? And, ahem, Andrew, haven't you just opened Evita?

The problem, says Lord Webber, is the lack of innovative new shows. What like Evita? Or The Sound of Music? He wants shows with a feelgood factor. Presumably he hankers after the old days of the musical when it was referred to as musical comedy with the emphasis on comedy. There are too many shows that pass almost the entire evening without a good joke, relying on ponderous adaptations of old novels, the score filled with unhummable pastiches of Puccini to show that you're a 'serious' composer. Woman in White anyone?

But then he gets to the nub of the matter. The West End is not commercially viable. Why? Because many of them are listed buildings. TheTheatre Royal, Drury Lane, which he owns, needs airconditioning as part of an extensive renovation. Because it is a Grade I listed building, it will cost £20 million. 'If it wasn’t listed we could do that for £1million. No commercial person can find that sort of money and the theatre could never generate it, so what’s the future?'

Listing a building is intended to preserve that building for all of us. So all of us are entitled to wonder why you bought the Theatre Royal if you were unprepared to maintain it. Last year, when he was in the process of selling four of his theatres, he insisted that

I have always been keenly aware of the responsibility that comes with ownership of such valuable national assets, and throughout this process, have taken great pains to persuade my partner, Bridgepoint Capital, that we must sell only to someone who understands the particular nature of theatre and who will protect and preserve these very special buildings.

What's the point of the private sector running theatres - and boring us endlessly with the rigours of the box office - if it's going to bleat on and on about how expensive the whole business is. You basically want the buildings delisted and probably some kind of grant from Westminster council or the Historical Buildings and Monument Commission. In other words, the private sector, as always, wants the laws changed and a handout - so you can make more money. Because in fact how far have you 'protected and preserved these very special buildings'? The Palace got a nice refit, but Drury Lane and The Palladium are a shambles. What you did to the Adelphi was hardly about protection or preservation. The Duchess, The Apollo, the Lyric and Garrick hardly flourished under your care did they?

Any in any case, why should we bail you out? May we remind you, Lord Webber, that you're a very very rich man. According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2006, you are the 87= richest person in Britain. You are apparently worth £700 million. If you love these theatres so much, put your hand in your bloody pocket.

Nurse? Simon Reade's Out Of Bed Again!

2006-08-02T16:59:00.000+01:00

Nurse? Simon Reade's Out Of Bed Again!

His second career as a columnist has gone to Simon Reade's head. Fresh from his peroration on the work-life balance, he has now announced that he is contemplating voting Tory. And just like one of those fucking awful Sunday columnist who sit next to someone at a dinner party who also has a Latvian nanny and therefore writes a column about how the whole of Britain has gone crazy for Latvian nannies, he thinks his political wobble is being replicated across the country.

Unlikely, I would think, unless the whole of the arts world has had an attack of the stupids. Because what's his argument? Here he is, cutely addressing Tony Blair.

When I voted for you nine years ago, you seemed keen, eager, enlightened. You were the right man to lead us in a liberal, secular age. You listened to your children when they told you to champion green issues. My children loved you for that. You were a pioneer of the work/life balance by bringing your family to live with you at the office. You encouraged ethical foreign policies. You were pro-European. You brought in the Human Rights Act. You were an inspiration.

Right, well, I certainly remember the exhilaration of kicking out the Tories, and there were good things about the incoming Labour Government, but did we ever think Tony Blair was a genuinely progressive politician? The attachment to green issues seemed paper-thin (where was the evidence? where were the policies?); the encouragement of ethical foreign policies was more associated with Robin Cook than Tony Blair; his role as a champion of maintaining a good work/life balance is a Reade bugbear so let's not be detained; and if you thought he was 'secular', you weren't paying attention.

And you settled a great deal on the arts in exchange for access and participation, cultural diversity, education and equality, ideals we all cherish and foster and champion in our non-partisan way.

Fair enough. New Labour was partly about cultural renewal and he wanted the cultural industries (death to the inventor of that term) on side. Indeed, let's not be grudging: Labour after 1997 was financially good for the arts. Let's be even less grudging and note that the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994, under the previous government, helped too.

But then you rapidly went rightwing - on university fees, on the NHS, on pensions, on civil liberties and so on - reneging on all the trust we gave you.

You put trust in him not to be a hardline ideological free-marketeer? Some people can't be trusted to place their trust wisely.

You may call it cross-dressing, but I call it neo-conservatism in disguise.

Does Tony Blair call it cross-dressing? I think it's unlikely. 'I'm going to part-privatise the NHS; don't think of it as a drift to the right, just think that your prime minister is slipping into a pair of frilly pants'. Hardly sounds like an effective political strategy. And while we're at it, why do you think it's neoconservatism in disguise? What disguise? But now he moves onto the main burden of his argument:

Although I have voted for other parties, I have never voted conservative in all my 40 years. But I fear I may have to consider following the route pursued by Peter Hall and others who voted for Thatcher in 1979. He believed that, if he didn't, "our present decline into a land without opportunity will continue". I am not blaming Sir Peter. I admire the honesty of his May 1979 entries in his seminal Diaries. The arts world voted Tory for all sorts of reasons - and later regretted what was unleashed on the nation for the next 18 years.

Can you follow the logic of this? Try reading the sections of this backwards and you'll see how pitiful the logic:

Lots of people in the Arts regretted voting Tory in 1979.
I don't blame them.
I'm thinking of doing the same.

People like Peter Hall did not turn against Labour because they were too right-wing. If anything, they wanted the smack of firm leadership; they wanted a more authoritarian government to deal with the unions (Sir Peter's diaries are full of his troubles with the highly unionised National Theatre technical team - though it would be interesting to read their diaries of the same period. ). So what is the relevance of quoting Peter Hall's silly lament for a country without opportunity? But he recognises the differences:

the late 70s were different after all. In our present land of opportunity it is easy to forget the challenge Thatcher had in crawling out of an era of three-day weeks, of blackouts, of Murdoch toughing it out with the unions at Wapping, and of Peter Hall himself facing action from staff at the National Theatre.

Excuse me? Are you saying Thatcher saved Britain? So should we in the arts regret voting for her or not? Hold on, let's calm down, he can't really think that Thatcher was a good thing.

Oh, hold on, he can.

Callaghan had been weak, taking over from Wilson mid-term, never elected as prime minister in his own right. But maybe you have morphed into Callaghan from your own Wilson, Tony - metamorphosed into a Major when once you were a Thatcher.

If you once thought he was a Thatcher, why are you surprised when he appears to be very right wing?

Your politics are retreating into the refuge of the reactionary.

Is it just me or is this turning into internal monologue?

Your apparent lack of interest in the arts makes me sad.

(By now Tony will be sobbing into his cornflakes.)

I know you have appreciated music, theatre, poetry in the past. So are you really going to squander nine years of investment and growth in the arts with a measly spending review settlement that threatens all the economic and social benefits of the UK's artistic renaissance?

Aha, at last, a good point. And now would be the moment to draw a line in the sand between the right-wing bean-counting utilitarian approach to the arts and something more stirring, bolder, more visionary.

Many of these benefits are quantifiable.

I said - oh, forget it.

But you of all people ought to be able to understand the added value of people having a good time, of the intrinsic, spiritual value of the arts.

The 'added value' of 'having a good time'. Is that seriously the best you can do? And precisely what the fuck does 'intrinsic, spiritual value of the arts' mean? Do we do ourselves any favours by draping ourselves in this kind of woolly crap?

And the rest of your current agenda is unnerving. Nuclear power? Iraq? Criminal justice? No wonder Cameron upstages you when he entreats us all to care for hoodies or to go green. He is an opportunist and yet, crucially, he captures the public mood.

It doesn't help Simon's case that he is so inarticulate about these things. Nuclear power may unnerve you, but are you actually aware that 20% of your current electricity use comes from it? What aspect of criminal justice unnerves you? Could you say more than 'Iraq'? With such banalities on the tip of your tongue, it's not surprising that hug-a-hoodie seemed like serious policymaking.

Since we know you're going, please go. The longer you stay, the longer you strengthen Cameron

This is turning into The Lord of the Rings. Remove the ring of power, Blair, the longer you wear it the greater in strength grows the Dark Lord...

But before you go, Tony, you've got a chance to redeem yourself. Do the arts a small favour: don't let the well-being of society flounder by disinvesting after all that's been achieved.

The problem here, Simon, is that you're falling into the same trap with Brown that you fell into with Blair. Who do you think ordered the spending review? Brown. Who supported the Iraq war? Brown. Who has been championing Public-Private Partnerships in health, education and transport? Brown. Who is the economic architect of New Labour? Brown. Who has been standing up in defence of civil liberties, against nuclear power, and in favour of high levels of arts subsidy? Erm, certainly not Gordon Brown.

Then do the world a big favour - and this is my personal view

...does this mean that the rest of this article is official policy of the Bristol Old Vic?...

stop kowtowing to Bush's isolationist foreign policy.

Isolationist? Bush? What are you talking about? Bush is anything but isolationist. His foreign policy is neo-realist and interventionist. Iraq? Afghanistan? Syria? Iran? Cuba? Have you been following?

Then you can go. Because if you carry on the way you are, I and others like me, might be seduced into voting for someone who could unleash who-knows-what over the next 18 years.

But if you know that you're being seduced into it, if you recognise that they could unleash who-knows-what, then don't do it. There are other parties if you want to express a protest vote. Above all, Simon, let us make this very clear: if you are cross at having a right-wing government, it makes no fucking sense to vote Tory. Is that clear enough for you?

A Con-Trick Called Maria

2006-08-02T10:40:00.000+01:00

A Con-Trick Called Maria

Fifteen years ago, David Bowie announced that the playlist for his upcoming tour would be chosen by the fans and he opened up a special phoneline for people to request songs from his back catalogue. Naturally, this was abused, the NME running a campaign to get people to phone in for 'The Laughing Gnome'.

Surely How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria is ripe for the same treatment. The producers of the show claim that the public is going to be permitted to choose the actress who'll play Maria in Andrew Lloyd Webber's forthcoming revival of The Sound of Music. Really? What if the public get a fit of mischievousness and decide to vote in large numbers for a totally inappropriate candidate? Let's face it, with these shows, there is a high level of caprice visible in the voting. Throughout the various series of Big Brother anyone who looks likely to get a shag gets eliminated with the same puritan ruthlessness of Jason in the Friday the 13th franchise. Other shows have had similar peculiarities; the singing vicar who stayed in for ages, the tone-deaf Indie kid on Fame Academy, Michelle McManus, etc. In fact, it would be rather wonderful if How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria were merged with the current Big Brother, since surely - surely - we'd all like to see a Maria with Tourettes: 'Doe - a deer ('e's a man!), a female deer (hoo hoo wankers!)'. If, as is likely, Lloyd Webber and the ghastly Ian David allow only twelve interchangeable Marias into the final rounds, the public won't have much to watch. There must be televisual pressure to put a couple of eccentric figures into the finals and if that happens bets are off.

But it seems that the producers have thought of this. Because this Maria, chosen by the public, is barely going to be in it at all. Recent reports are that Scarlet Johansson was offered the role but the negotiations foundered on the Hollywood star's 'excessive demands'. Who knows what really went on but we enjoyed the report that her management team: 'couldn't understand why she would want to appear in the West End for $18,500 a week when she could be earning $10 million for a movie'. Among the demands, her representatives wanted two minders backstage at all times. Now, this is hardly a requirement of the J-Lo school (who demanded three personal chefs, a white microphone and stand, coffee stirred anti-clockwise only, the smell of gardenias everywhere she went, Egyptian cotton 250 thread count sheets, and ten rooms all decorated in white for her sixty staff - and this for her performance on Top of the Pops!). A major star probably does need a minder to keep the nutters away (though on just under £10,000 a week, you'd think she could pay for them herself). But, if we are to believe the producers, the failure of these negotiations led to the brainwave of publically auditioning for an unknown. They announced this scheme in November 2005, so why are they raking up this old story (Hollywood Actress Not Cast In Show - Exclusive!). Publicity for the show? It seems pretty rank to try to muddy Scarlet Johansson's reputation just for some free publicity, especially since it appears from the stories that the real reason that she couldn't do it was a prior filming commitment.

Unless those negotiations were more recent and Johansson was being lined up as the real star of the production. Because this is what they're doing anyway: casting a professional musical theatre actress in the part. The latest rumour is Emma Williams who opened the current production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as Truly Scrumptious and that she'll play two of the performances each week. This makes no sense. Why would Emma Williams take it? - unless you assume that the slated two performances for Williams and six for the unknown will quickly switch around if the public vote for the 'wrong' person. And who will do it on press night? Why would an established actress not want to do press night and get the reviews? On the other hand the producers are bound to be weighing the extra publicity and news value of having an unknown preparing for her opening night at the Palladium. Perhaps they'll do a split version for the critics: unknown in the first half, Williams in the second.

So, what do we have here? The search for an unknown is simply a publicity stunt; they're going to eliminate any wild cards in the first round; the producers are using executive privilege to put people into the next rounds who have been rejected by the judging panel; they've got a professional standing by in case it all goes Pete Tong. This is a sham, innit?

But then, to be fair, despite thousands of phone calls, on his world tour Bowie never sang 'The Laughing Gnome'.

Max Stafford-Clark

2006-08-01T18:34:00.000+01:00

Max Stafford-Clark

What's On Stage is reporting that Max Stafford-Clark has suffered a stroke and is recovering in North London's Whittington hospital after being fitted with a pacemaker. He recently directed The Overwhelming by J T Rogers for the Cottesloe followed by a National tour. He is still expected to direct King of Hearts, Alistair Beaton's new comedy about the royal family, in the late autumn. We would like to send him, his friends and family all best wishes for a quick and trouble-free recovery.

Photo by Graham Michael.

Playwrights and Playwrongs

2006-08-01T10:39:00.000+01:00

Playwrights and Playwrongs

There's a very good and intelligent piece by Philip Hensher in The Guardian, talking about the difficulties that novelists have writing good plays and that playwrights have writing novels. Hensher's a critic, a novelist, a journalist and a librettist, and so when Encore saw the opening, we feared the worst.
There's a daft view around that's been voiced by people as diverse as Bryan Appleyard and Martin Amis that (a) plays are easier to write than novels, (b) playwrights are therefore lesser writers than novelists. I remember Appleyard claiming this on the rather stupid basis that there were far fewer words in the average play (which is an argument that should startle most lyric poets). Martin Amis, meanwhile, in his 1995 novel The Information, offered an acerbic guide to the field:

Richard was obliged to review, one after the other, the fiery mediocrities of the London stage. No famished bard, no myopic storyteller. Instead, an elaborately quenched Marxist in black leather trousers. Richard had hated all the poets and novelists too, but the playwrights, the playwrights . . . With Nabokov, and others, Richard regarded the drama as a primitive and long-exhausted form. The drama boasted Shakespeare (which was an excellent cosmic joke), and Chekhov, and a couple of sepulchral Scandinavians. Then where were you? Deep in the second division. As for the dramatists of today: town criers, toting leper bells, they gauged the sickness of society by the number of unsold seats at their subsidized Globes. They were soul doctors demanding applause for the pitilessness of their prognoses. And also, presumably, and crucially, they made a lot of money and splashed their way through all the actresses (p. 360).

Now, of course, as theatre workers, and obviously very alert to the differences between author, narrator and character, Encore assumed that Amis could be talking in character, and that the ignorance and prejudice expressed by the text at this point was part of Amis's attempt to sketch the character of a minor and resentful novelist. However, Amis has said much the same sort of thing in interviews. Fortunately for us all, Amis hasn't attempted to raise the level of the stage by writing for it - one can just imagine what his overheated prose and prissy literary hardboiledism would sound like in the mouths of actors.

Hensher's piece, though, is commendably even-handed. He observes that the intensity and immediacy of stage dialogue can sometimes seem flat and meretricious in a novel. Somehow, the stage places such intense scrutiny on language that good writers learn to effect a dense economy in stage terms that becomes overheated and clotted when read at a novel's pace. But he also observes the long history of novelists failing in the theatre, with Henry James's Guy Domville being the most glittering example. These novelists failed because they could not live without their prose descriptions, their access to the internal spaces of their characters, their ability to cut around the action. While Hensher perhaps understates the stolidity of contemporary playmaking, his basic point is sound and well expressed:

A novelist and a playwright might seem to be doing similar things. In fact, the tasks are quite different. Dialogue and external action are only two of the novelist's tasks; they have to flesh out the world with evocations of place, of physical appearance, the sense of time passing. A playwright's task is more austere. There's no alluding to people's thoughts in the lazy way of novelists: playwrights have to do everything through the way their people talk, and the way they move and act in tangible ways. A playwright venturing into the novel won't necessarily know how to write a description, where you can usefully allude to something unseen, or how to move from place to place. A playwright's tools are more refined; a novelist's toolbox is bigger.

Given the abject place the theatre has in the affections of most people writing in the literary pages of our broadsheets, this is a surprisingly smart and sympathetic piece.

On the other hand, we're not quite sure what Mark Ravenhill's on about in his latest piece. To be fair to him, it has been subedited, on the front page of the website anyway, with the title 'Mark Ravenhill on why teaching playwriting is a waste of time' - an assertion that, to his credit, Mark doesn't ever quite make. Of course, some kinds of playwriting teaching is a waste of time; much of that McKee-inspired structural stuff seemed designed to suck the joy out of any would-be playwright turning writing into a kind of feng-shui. (Sadly, this seems to be very widespread in the US.) But all? Midway through his confessional, Ravenhill declares:

The trouble is, the more I write, the less I feel I know about writing - certainly, the less I feel I can articulate what is going on when I'm doing it. And the more suspicious I become of anything that pretends to be a rule of playwriting. But tell a workshop participant that there are no rules, that they need to discover what a play means to them and write something that is unique to their sense of the world, and you are likely to be faced with a sullen customer who feels they aren't getting their money's worth.

Much of this is right, about the lawlessness of creativity and the consumerist mentality of students, but he's confusing teaching with teaching rules. It may be a value to teach the very things that Ravenhill passionately presents here as key to writing.

It turns out that his article isn't actually about whether you can teach playwriting. It's about the workshop culture created by funding arrangements. Whether Rose Fenton is right in the article to be so supine before the funders -'It's not us who wants the workshops. It's the funders. They demand them, so what can you do?' (as if she hadn't put a programme of workshops on the application form in the first place) is unclear. Certainly workshops, as it seems in Mark's case, whether the workshop leader doesn't know why they're doing it and has no faith in the point of doing it, are doomed to failure. But Encore isn't sure we needed an article in the Guardian to tell us that.

Philip Hensher's article, in fact, seems to me to express some simple and important truths about writing for the stage. I wonder if he does workshops?

The Stoppard Debate # 3

2006-07-30T19:32:00.000+01:00

The Stoppard Debate # 3

Merry Hell

The two-tier tradition of the Court that the previous correspondent identifies is a massive oversimplification. The Court has changed enormously depending on the artistic directors it has had over the years. One of the defining aspects of the Rickson era has been the complete lack of revivals of any sort. The only revivals in the 50th Programme are not by the English Stage Company but drama school or NYT productions. Because of this there has (financially) been a greater need than ever before to stage a commercially successful new play once or twice a year. In the 50th Anniversary year, these are Rock 'n' Roll and, to a lesser extent, Terry Johnson’s Piano Forte. What is significant about Rock 'n' Roll is that it is both written and directed by Royal Court outsiders in the form of Tom Stoppard and Trevor Nunn. While it is difficult to define what makes a Royal Court writer, Stoppard is certainly not that. In the cases of Hampton, Elyot, Johnson and even O’Brien, their plays were (and are still) staged partly because the Court felt a sense of loyalty to them and partly because they were expected to produce hits. In some cases, this didn’t happen: Kevin Elyot’s Forty Winks, was a tremendous box office flop despite a strong production by Katie Mitchell. But the Court has no reason to feel any loyalty to Stoppard or Nunn because they have absolutely nothing to do with the Court.

That Rock 'n' Roll is a very different play to Motortown is something of a no-brainer. That Motortown is a quintessentially Royal Court play is also quite obvious to anyone who has seen it (taking nothing away from a fantastic play). But what is striking about seeing something like Rock 'n' Roll at the Royal Court is that it is firmly placed within the drawing room comedy tradition of the British theatre that takes in Coward and Rattigan – precisely the tradition which prompted the rebellion upon which the Court’s very foundations rest. It is possible that one might come out of this play with a greater understanding of Czech politics and the respective roles that intellectuals like Havel and rock bands like the Plastic People of the Universe had within the counter-culture, but is a play the best place for finding these things out? Surely, you could become more thoroughly informed by reading a historical account, Havel’s prose or watching a documentary on the subject. What a play can do far better than a television documentary is to tell you something about yourself you didn’t know and Rock 'n' Roll fundamentally fails to do this.

'The incongruous merry laughter' that echoed through the austere home of the English Stage Company was certainly not of the type that has ever been heard at the Court before. Why? Because it was 'Tom Stoppard laughter' – a rare breed (though not unrelated to Michael Frayn laughter). It is not an instinctive, visceral reaction to a situation or a turn of phrase but the sound of someone letting everyone else in the audience know that they got a joke. It is like some massive free-for-all of oneupmanship.

There were also moments of merriment brought about by misunderstanding, such as Candida’s comment that in the late 1960s, her boyfriend was 'a Black Dwarf cartoonist'. Why do the audience think this is funny? Because they think her boyfriend was a black dwarf who also happened to be a cartoonist? There is also merriment brought about by snobbishness, such as the hilarity induced at the idea of the uneducated Esme harbouring an ambition to be a lecturer on Swann Hellenic Cruises – that really brought down the house.

There are good moments in the play, though I would argue that Pete Sullivan as Ferdinand was the real star of the show. Sewell is good but uneven and Cox just spends his whole time bellowing at everyone. The best scenes in the play by some way were between Sullivan and Sewell. The first few scenes, including the interrogation, are too short and of little dramatic interest and the dinner party scene is appalling. Very little sense of the relationship between Esme and Jan is built up, so the final twist in the story has very little power despite the fact that it comes at the end of a three-hour play. It is not a terrible play, but it is not a great one nor a particularly good one and, if it had been written by an unknown, they would probably have been asked to do a fair bit of rewriting, but presumably because it was Stoppard everyone was terrified of not getting something and looking stupid – the fear of not having got the joke!

Rock on Tommy!

2006-07-27T08:29:00.000+01:00

The Stoppard Debate # 2

Rock on Tommy!

It took me many years to realise that actually I greatly dislike the Royal Court Theatre. On the face of it, this is somewhat paradoxical, as many of the plays and careers that I love and admire from the last fifty years of British theatre have come from the Royal Court. I also have always found the staff of the Royal Court to have been unerringly friendly and helpful over the hundreds of times that I have been there, and it has even provided gainful employment to several individuals whom I would consider friends.

And yet, I now realise that it is an institution that positively discourages the sensation of pleasure. It is there in the very fabric of the building, the stripped and exposed beams and bricks of the place, the stark and underlit colour sheme of black and grey. Kenneth Tynan once wrote of there being Roundhead and Cavalier theatres, and throughout the last fifty years the Court has positioned itself on the side of the republic. The mythical history of the Court is one of urgency and unfussiness- from Osborne's ironing board to Saved to Blasted. Yet this tradition has always co-existed with a pragmatic periodical need to stage a hit that tends not to feature so greatly in the narrative; later Osborne after George Devine had died, Richard O'Brien's T-Z, Christopher Hampton's Treats, the American co-productions of the eighties, the continued place of Kevin Elyot and Terry Johnson in the repertoire.

Rock'n'Roll must be seen as part of this tradition, which has bought us both good and bad plays, rather than as some uncharacteristic abberation in the Court's history. While admittedly not one of the great Stoppards like Arcadia or The Invention of Love, neither is it one of his occasional muddles such as Hapgood or Indian Ink nor a play that collapses under the weight of its own research as did The Coast of Utopia. It is emphatically not, as has been suggested, an empty play about nothing. It touches upon many themes, but addresses them lightly and through inference and paradox, unlike, say, the startling directness of Motortown or the - much less interesting - journalistic approach of Talking to Terrorists or My Name Is Rachael Corrie. Each argument and idea about liberty, freedom of expression and ecstacy is reflected in the other themes and scenes in the play. This non-didactic approach requires a certain open-mindedness and imaginative playfullness on the part of the audience.

The play's greatest achievement is that it places the rock music of the sixties away from its usual home as a form of nostalgia and recreation, and right back in the fulcrum of arguments about counter-culture that it occupied at the time. It achieves this through questioning various notions of dissidence, including rock music and playing them off against each other in the communist Czechoslovakia of the period. Unlike the previous correspondent (who must presumably be some kind of authority on Czech counter-culture of the seventies) I did learn a great deal about The Plastic People of the Universe and their supression by the communist state and, through this well-chosen illustration, much about society and oppression. To complain that the play ignores punk rock and hip-hop is churlish in the extreme. In the case of punk, the years between 1977 and 1987 are not depicted, and Rock'n'Roll must be seen as a play, not as a reference book on the history of popular music. It's hardly surprising that the music featured in the second act becomes more conservative, as the characters have become middle-aged. It really would feel incongrous for them to be listening to, say, Niggaz With Attitude or The Young Gods in 1989.

It has also been claimed that Rock'n'Roll is a play without incident. The worst thing that happens to somebody - they get their records smashed - is ,within the context of the play and with the symbolic weight that the records carry, actually an event of some touchingness and importance - more so than some of the rapes and disembowlings in some of the lesser plays of the in-yer-face school that the Court has presented. The interrogation scene is both funny and unnerving - not all interrogations climax in bloodbaths, but all require some compromise of the notion of truth, a point that the scene illustrates admirably. Like many great plays, Rock'n'Roll achieves its effects and explores its ideas through a balance of showing and telling.

The play also presents its audience with the welcome return to the London stage of Rufus Sewell, who gives a performance of rare sensitivity and irony. His depictions of innocence, knowingness, compromise and suffering are continously interesting and intelligent and prevent the character of Jan from becoming the saintly hero that a lesser play would make him.

The audience at the Court were rather atypical, but not the worthless rabble that the previous correspondant rather alarmingly damns them as, and certainly no more or less irritating to be sat amongst than the usual Royal Court crowd of middle-aged Time Out readers and drama students. Anyway, ticket prices were the same for Rock'n'Roll as they were for everything else at the Court. What certainly was incongrous to that theatre was the sound of merry laughter coming from the audience and the prospect of a play there offering pleasure to them. For a few weeks this summer The Royal Court was transformed into a Cavalier theatre, a place of wit and sunshine, a moment that one hopes will occur again sometime soon, but one that bitter experience has taught one certainly not to expect from the institution.

Of course, it is possible that I could be wrong, and that the next offering downstairs - a play by Tanika Gupta about sex tourism - might continue Stoppard's good works in presenting us with genuinely funny and original jokes, interesting characters, moral force and intellect.

We shall see.

You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun

2006-07-26T08:42:00.000+01:00

The Stoppard Debate # 1

You're No Rock 'n' Roll Fun

Rock'n'Roll - 'Tom Stoppard's astonishing new play' (Guardian), 'Stoppard's complex and moving new play' (Independent), 'Stoppard's extraordinary, epic drama of politics, persecution and protest' (Evening Standard) - is repulsive.

It is as if nothing in the world of theatre or music has happened for the last thirty years. There is nothing rock 'n' roll about it. The Royal Court used to be the rock 'n' roll theatre, the theatre of anarchy and rebellion, of counter-culture and fuck the system. It was the theatre that broke the law to stage Saved. It was the theatre that staged Blasted. In a year that should be celebrating its place as the one true forum for challenging, provocative, polemical and experimental writing and its commitment to art over commerce, it has whored itself to secure the financial security of a West End run and is currently opening its doors to the most pampered and patronised audience in the country. It's as if someone’s grandfather had been invited to perform with his folk band at an underground rave. This must not be tolerated. What is worse is that the critics do not know how to review it. Every review says in various ways 'Tom Stoppard is very clever. More clever than I am. His play is about lots of things...'

Here are a few things they should have said:

The play is NOT about lots of things. lots of things are mentioned (cancer, Czechoslovakia, the mind versus the soul, rock 'n' roll as a more powerful instrument of revolution than communism, etc.) but mentioning something does not mean that is what a play is about. Also, nothing said by anyone is any richer or more spiritually nourishing than reading the back of a self-help book or an encyclopedia of cod philosophy. (That's right. Philosophy written by fish.) The conversations and observations are banal beyond reason.
Even though the play takes place over several decades and has many characters, nothing seems to happen to any of them. Ever. They just have some conversations. The worst thing to happen to anyone is that they get their records broken. Big wup.
Rock 'n' roll has no impact on the plot. Not that there actually is a plot. If you were to take out the guy's vague interest in music (and let's face it, he's hardly on a par with most of the record obsessives I know), it would have no impact.
The music starts well (Velvet Underground, vintage Pink Floyd, etc). by the second half however, we have U2 and Guns 'n' Roses. Those bands are fine, but you can't really get more middle of the road. For a play that is about the counter cultural power of subversive music as a tool of revolution and should be celebrating the importance of rebellious music, there is nothing in the form of the play, the characters, the plot or the music that is anything other than comfortable. This play is as safe and as middle-of-the-road as you can possibly get, to the point of vomiting bile, if it didn't make you too bored to puke.
I learnt nothing. nothing about myself, about Czechoslovakia, about theatre. nothing.
It's more than three hours long.
The set (maybe I'm nit-picking here) - why spend thousands and thousands on putting a revolve in to help keep the action swift in between scene changes, if you're going to bring a curtain down every six minutes and play half of Stoppard's very dull record collection?
Every time you hear about the plastic people band, you'll wish you were watching a play about them. You know, one in which something happens.
This play had more than two weeks of previews. All other Royal Court plays have what? Four days?
The play was booked into the West End before it even opened at the Court. the arrogance of this is so fucking overwhelming it is almost funny. It also begs the question - why bother? Surely the only thing that should define the Court's artistic policy is that you do plays that couldn't be done anywhere else. Particularly when it has meant the postponement of the young writers' festival, thereby postponing six or seven new careers by a year, by which time many opportunities will have passed them by. Angry yet?
Nobody knows fucking anything about fucking anything. It is astounding that people who are intelligent enough to dress themselves and turn up to a theatre are not intelligent enough to clamber out of their seats and attack Stoppard and Nunn with their shoes. Worse than that, people are creaming over this play in the press. It's bad enough we have to sit through three-plus hours of Stoppard self-pleasuring without intellectually retarded reviewers who want to lube up and join in.
Shamefully, I was actually looking forward to it. I thought it would have to be pretty fucking special, or at least a little bit interesting.
The Royal Court is going to smell of anais anais until the end of the run, and be overrun by public schoolboys with upturned collars and too much hair and their toothy girlfriends.
Punk is not mentioned. This is a play about counter-cultural music doesn't acknowledge punk. Or electronic music (there is a disdainful comment about Kraftwerk). Or hip hop. Or drum and bass, the only real underground dance music to emerge from London.
It is totally fucking irrelevant to anything.
There is the most excruciatingly embarrassing scene in which Stoppard tries to write Pinter. if you're going to do that, particularly at the Royal Court, you better be really fucking sure of yourself. It will make you want to kill someone just to get the memory of how woefully misjudged it was out of your mind. An interrogation scene in which the worst thing that happens is that Rufus Sewell eats part of a slightly stale biscuit.
The climax is a dinner party in Cambridge where someone is hit with a newspaper. Yep. Read that again. That's the climax. After three hours and several decades of British and Czech history, it comes down to that. Oh, and a plate gets smashed, helping to wake up the husbands in the audience in time for the end.
There is no irony in a devout communist mouthing off whilst opening a bottle of chilled Chateau Petrus in his stately Cambridgeshire home.
It is one of the ugliest, worst lit sets you will ever see.
Most depressing of all is that the play makes you wonder at what age we stop listening, stop questioning, stop learning. This is a man who writes plays as if the last few decades never happened, and who thinks U2 are a counter-cultural force. Doesn't it make you want to die in your sleep?

Brian Cox and Rufus Sewell are very good though.

The Play's the Thing

2006-07-22T12:19:00.000+01:00

The Play's Not The Thing

No one should be pleased to hear that The Play's the Thing winner, On the Third Day by Kate Betts (pictured), has posted closing notices. If anything, it demonstrates the case that Sonia Friedman seemed, occasionally, to have thought she was making: that new plays have no place in the West End. Friedman's attempt to turn this failure into a success by arguing that 51% houses for seven weeks at the New Ambassadors would be a huge success at the Court. Actually, according to those figures, the number of people who saw it was 12,681, which would comfortably fit into the Royal Court downstairs running the same number of performances for a month.
Which would be a success, but had happened several times without the benefit of a reality TV show behind it. The fact is that even with that strange, funny, engaging, enraging TV series, not enough people were persuaded to go to see Kate Betts's play.

Maybe the original question is misconceived. Why aren't new plays opening in the West End? Because it's not the best place for them. The last time new plays opened in large numbers in the West End was probably fifty years ago, before the idea of 'new writing' theatres existed, and certainly were not subsidised by the public money. Then a new play would have to appeal to thousands. This produced some wonderfully interesting work - Rattigan, Coward, Ackland, Priestley and many others, produced durable work that had depth as well as popular appeal - but undoubtedly closed off avenues of creativity in those writers. Priestley, for example, rarely seems wholly comfortable as he tries to import narrative experimentalism into his drawing room dramas. Ackland's moral disgust ran foul of the conservative critics, and pleasing the audience gave way to a longing to be liked that finally blunted Rattigan's and Coward's gifts.

And now we have an enviable network of theatres who either exclusively or regularly produce new plays. And these are almost exclusively publically funded. Perhaps it is true that this breeds the opposite quality - a contempt for the audience - immunised against their dislike, though this would be a dubious claim - what playwright of merit despises the audience? All the immediate names that come to mind - Osborne, Kane - are actually classicists of form, who draw in the audience with humour and structural grace, even as they outrage against the proprieties of form. There are writers like Martin Crimp whose coolness can be icy, but this is an iciness that we have come to enjoy (perhaps supremely) and it is a profound pleasure that the commercial theatre would not have discovered.

What lurks behind this quest for the West End play is a desire for a new generation that will follow Ayckbourn and Stoppard as names that can themselves sell a play, people whose acidity is sweetened by humour, who unfailingly know what a public can take and give them that and a zingy bit more.

But this won't happen. At least it won't happen by trying to get playwrights to write differently. The West End audience is like the membership of the conservative party; ageing, and therefore, sadly, also dying. The current production styles in the West End, the acting, the design, the style of the programmes, the decor, the bars, the timings, are all designed for that audience. (Of course, they are the ones who come, after all.) But these are rather unattractive to most people under the age of fifty. There is a different sensibility at work, which finds character clumsy, theatrical stories laborious, and the ponderous one-eye-on-the-audience cheat-it-out-front acting, Wendy-house sets, lame jokes, cramped bars, waistcoated ice-cream sellers, smelly auditoria, and inconvenient curtain times (when do you eat??) entirely offputting.

Trying to encourage new commercially-minded playwrights is tinkering, a classic instance of rearranging the deckchairs. The buildings need a complete overhaul, not the kitschy makeovers that some of them (see picture) have had. Some of them will need to acquire expensive surrounding buildings to tunnel into. Others will need to close. The theatre owners can barely afford to keep most of these buildings open, which leaves only the option that Encore has canvassed before. Nationalise the West End.

Photos by Tristram Kenton and Christopher Holt.

Mobile Phones & Theatre

2006-07-19T08:24:00.000+01:00

Teatro Mobile

Two items of near-news concern mobile phones this week. Following Richard Griffiths's much-publicised campaign against - against what? People accidentally forgetting to put their phones on silent? - The Stage is canvassing opinion on the subject. For what it's worth, Encore thinks those recorded and other messages at the beginning of the show are quite good enough. Yes, sometimes you'll sit there and think it's already on silent and then get a nasty surprise, but this happens. As long as you don't answer it and just turn it off quickly, it's fine, and Griffiths et al. should probably lighten up. What is he suggesting? Fining people? Checking your phone in at the cloakroom? Lining the auditoriums of our theatres with lead? Let's also remember, when Griffiths harangued some poor woman out of the theatre, it was that fatuous piece of drama-lite, Heroes. It's not as if he were giving his Lear. Griffiths reputedly ordered the woman out with the words,

"Could the person whose mobile phone it is please leave? The 750 people here would be fully justified in suing you for ruining their afternoon."

As if an actor coming out of character and haranguing a member of the audience were smoothly part of the afternoon's show. In fact, the only way a ringtone spoils the experience of Heroes is by reminding them of the 21st century and that this old-fashioned crap has nothing to do with our lives.

Speaking of crap, apparently the Blue Man Group are going to make available clips of their show that can be sent to and played on mobile phones. At the end of each show the audience will be invited to turn on their phones, at which point, by the magic of bluetooth, clips will be send to their handhelds. According to James Charrington, one of the show's UK producers:

"People see our show and love it but they find it almost impossible to describe it properly to their friends. Now they will have a great way of sharing their experience and a free souvenir of an unforgettable night."

Let's pass over the question of why you would need a 'souvenir' of an 'unforgettable' night. What this is actually about is trying to start a viral advertising campaign where people send the clips to their friends and word of mouth becomes word of MMS.

However, Encore thinks this is unnecessary. It's perfectly possible to describe the Blue Man Group properly. Here goes:

The Blue Man Group is a piece of vacuous franchise theatre in which some anonymous drummers get painted blue and play banal rhythms while splashing the audience with paint; the music sounds like some 80s ad-man's idea of a crazy part-ay, the dance looks like Hot Gossip in macs, and the evening is completely empty - it has to be because this show is being done all over the world in exactly the same way and so can't connect too much to any audience. It is theatre for people who never go to the theatre, music for people who don't care about music, and dance for people who don't understand dance. It has nothing to say about anything; it is not remotely entertaining; it is the wacky act at the Eurovision Song Contest stretched out to fill an evening. If you feel nostalgic for Level 42 you might enjoy it. If you think effort is good enough and volume is its own entertainment, go along. If the very thought of someone with blue make up on their face is sufficient to hold you for over an hour, tickets are available online. Otherwise, if anyone messages a clip from this show to you, they are insulting you. Do not waste your time with the Blue Man Group.

Theatre Museum

2006-07-13T23:20:00.000+01:00

Theatre Museum

The announcement last year that the V&A were going to end their support for the Theatre Museum raised howls of protest. We Encoreans were less concerned. A new plan has been hatched by the chairman of National Heritage, James Bishop, to rehouse the Museum's collections in either the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington or a disused power station in Greenwich. It's not yet known what the relationship is between this plan and the ongoing talks with the Royal Opera House to keep the Covent Garden site open but merge its collections with the ROH's archives.

Look, it's a good idea to have a museum dedicated to the performing arts in London, one of the world's great theatre cities. A good idea. But the Theatre Museum itself is a fucking awful museum. It's airless, cluttered, inert; it wanders through theatre history without any sense of why we might want to know about this stuff. You need to be pretty clued up about the main lines of development already to understand what you're looking at. It seems frozen in the 1970s-style of museology. Lots of stuff in glass cabinets, no interactivity, no active engagement of the visitors, no possibility of finding your own routes through it. It's true that the Museum had been campaigning for a total redevelopment. But who ever thought that was realistic, when the current managers of the site seem to have no vision of what to do with what they already have? And the name. There is something about 'theatre museum' as a phrase that makes me cringe; the backward-looking dustiness of 'museum' seems to leave its cobwebbed traces all over the word theatre. If the Theatre Museum is saved, please let it be reopened as the London Theatre Centre or something that makes you feel it's dealing with a living artform.

The museum could be separated from its research collection. You may know the the museum was founded on a bequest by eccentric theatre buff, Gabrielle Enthoven. She kept enormous scrapbooks of theatre cuttings, programmes and other memorabilia which has been supplemented and kept up to date. However, (a) this has not been done in a consistent way, (b) the organisation of the collection is unsystematic and sometimes quixotic, (c) a vast amount of the current collection is uncatalogued, so, for all practical purposes, inaccessible to researchers, actors, writers, anyone who might want to delve into the theatre archive to inform them about contemporary work.

Where the collection is housed is an important question (though, as I understand it, the research collections were never themselves under threat), but real money needs to be found to get in proper curators and cataloguers, who can make those stacks of papers into the precious theatrical resource that they could be.

Plans for the Museum's future are apparently due to be announced in September.

Royal Court 50

2006-07-11T16:38:00.000+01:00

Royal Court 50

It's a sign of how bankrupt the current Royal Court is that it can't even celebrate its own golden jubilee properly. What did we get on that mythical 8 May anniversary? David Hare giving his John Osborne memorial lecture - (a) it's four years old, and (b) it's a pugnacious piece but it's hardly Edward Said, is it? And then there was a gala tribute to Look Back in Anger. This was a compilation of bits from the play interwoven with quotations from Osborne, Richardson and Devine. Sure, Look Back in Anger came across well (this is a play that should only ever be seen in extracts and preferably with David Tennant in the lead). But the quotations were laboured, well-known and performed without any evident understanding. At one surreal moment Corin Redgrave inched onto the stage to recite Kenneth Tynan's review - and got a round of applause. I have nothing against Old Spanky, but it's come to something when a critic gets echoing applause at the Royal Court. The rest of the week was a series of the usual lukewarm panels on the usual unimaginative themes (I exempt Caryl Churchill's environmental panel from this). And otherwise, what? A series of readings. The National did something like this for the Millennium, so that seemed old hat. Otherwise it's been very drab; some half-hearted celebrations of aspects of the Court's history (the productions without decor, the come together festival, etc.) that could only appeal to anoraks like those writing for Encore.

Most significantly, what have they programmed? The best play of the Court's year so far was Motortown by Simon Stephens, and they swept it aside to celebrate the anniversary. Motortown is not a perfect play; it isn't aiming at perfection. It's a brutal, rough, awkward play that steps aside to look at England with fresh eyes and is shocked into savage horror by what it sees. Given how Stephens's work has been tending ever more towards subtle despair and gentle hope, this was a major dramaturgical revolt by one of our key contemporary writers. It was given an excellent, spare, stylish production by Ramin Gray, all contained choreography, waiting to explode. The play builds to a horrifying scene of kidnapping, torture and murder, which the rest of the play barely manages to follow, but what is unmistakeable is a passionate intellect attempting to ask whether we have the society we really deserve. Quite fortuitously it had the inchoate anger of Osborne, careless of form in the desire to connect, connect, connect. It had a production that recalled, in some visual aspects John Dexter's early work at the Court (brick walls and lighting rig exposed, sense of ensemble). It had the state-of-England range of the 1970s, the concern for sexual politics of the 1980s, and the physical violence of the 1990s. It was - unintentionally, I am sure - a miniature summation of the Royal Court's history. This should have been billed as the gemstone in the season.

But it wasn't. Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll was. Stoppard is not a Royal Court writer. He is politically conservative. He flatters his audience. He is a member of the establishment, a theatrical knight. He rarely, if ever, engages with the world. We are not expecting sociology, but he has the kind of aloofness from the present that the Royal Court has always detested. The Court, at its best, stands for political theatre in its richest, broadest, most generous and engaged sense. Non-realist writers at the Court, like the later Churchill or Motton or Crimp or Kane, all have a deep understanding of the tectonic shifts of the imagination, deep tremors of the collective heart that make their plays fiercely contemporary. Living in the post-9/11 world has been somehow easier and better with the knowledge and memory of Churchill's Far Away. Who will take anything away with them from Rock 'n' Roll?

Plans to bring Bill Gaskill - one of the great directors of our theatre - back to the Court foundered when he discovered they had programmed Rock 'n' Roll. Caryl Churchill, so it is said, revoked the rights to revive Cloud 9 for the same reason. There has been widespread disquiet at the news. Of course, the play sold out before it opened. What was the point of the Court again?

The Royal Court is one of the beacons of our theatre and it is being left to wither in the hands of Ian Rickson, who is plainly lining up projects for his post-Royal Court life and, by all accounts, is refusing to take any responsibility in his final year, and Graham Whybrow, a man so in touch with contemporary culture he apparently does not own a CD player or a television. Will Dominic Cooke make a difference there? Let's hope so. One of our great theatres is missing.

Amy's View: Encore's View

2006-07-10T08:37:00.000+01:00

Encore's View

This magazine has often knocked the work of David Hare and not without reason. He must be the most waspish, preening, and overrated playwright currently writing, incapable of making one of his insufferable statements on anything without surreptitiously redesigning and redefining the world in his image and thereby unsubtly bigging himself up.

This is not to say that Sir David has never written anything good. Encore is quite fond of Racing Demon and was once impressed by Fanshen. There are things to admire about Plenty. More recently the pickings have been slimmer, but we had a sneaking admiration for The Permanent Way. But Sir David, if you want to be remembered fondly, or remembered at all, it might be wise to put a discreet block on the lesser moments of your writing life. Banish The Judas Kiss to the wilderness. Let Murmuring Judges join it there. They can play with Map of the World and Skylight, which should join the gang. The Breath of Life can watch over them, while Stuff Happens struts about self-importantly on the perimeter. Oh, and your wretched versions of Brecht and Lorca could also join the Sir David Hare Memorial Landfill Site too.

But of all of your plays, the one which you simply must - if only for reasons of canonical self-preservation - obliterate from the record is Amy's View. Evidently the worst play of the twentieth century, it's a disastrous attempt to write a sentimental hymn to the virtues of theatre, based on the vicissitudes of a grand dame of the stage. As you'll remember it is actionless - though not actually plotless - and as a result very dull. You'll recall with embarassment how on the first night those witty asides about contemporary television just came off as blimpish and smug. You'll remember the awful flaw in the structure that required the audience to sympathise with Esme - for, incredibly, that is what you called your protagonist - because she was a Lloyd's name and faced bankrupcy, as if this revealed her as a tragic figure and not some rich, stupid gambler. We hate to remind you of the jolt you must have felt when you realised that the final sequence, in which Esme puts on her make-up and then goes on stage as the curtain rises, was not the great transcendent climax to the story, but in fact a virtually irrelevant coda that seemed self-absorbed and sentimental and to say nothing about the theatre at all, except to ask questions about its taste and judgment. It will, of course, have been profoundly uncomfortable when it dawned on you that this statement about the changes in basic human feelings that had unfolded over the last quarter-century actually achieved no such grand aims and had turned into a posh soap opera without the attractions of incident or action. It must have been a cruel sensation to sit in the Lyttelton stalls and realise that really this material was unworthy of such fine actors as Judi Dench, Ronald Pickup, Samantha Bond, and that, if anything, it was only their richness of stage presence and generosity with an audience that made the evening watchable at all.

We all have bad nights where we realise that our projects haven't quite come off, that the ideas and passions that animated the writing, the design, or the rehearsals became distorted on their way to the opening, or simply did not emerge at all; some cupidity of spirit, some failure of nerve, an excess of ambition over ability, anxiety and tiredness and finding it just flat impossible to step out and see the whole. We learn from these things and move on. These are important learning experiences. As you said about A Map of the World, 'I know it's not the best thing I've ever written, but I have to see it on stage'. It's refreshing for an artist of your stature to admit they have their crap moments, and yes we all know that sometimes making rubbish is a prelude to making something good.

But you do to move on. Learn from your mistakes, don't keep returning to them. Surely that's obvious. So, Sir David, it is with bewilderment that Encore discovers that you're letting Sir Peter Hall revive Amy's View, with Felicity Kendall as Esme and Jenna Russell as her eponymous daughter, Amy. What is going on? Is this the Theatrical Knight's equivalent of going on Trisha? A hugely public confession of your own failings? Or is there perhaps some Catholic spark in you that feels that you didn't suffer enough, squirming in abjection in the Lyttelton stalls that night? It's true that the critics let you off lightly - they're a craven bunch, of course, mostly your age, and probably identify with you more than is healthy - but most of us saw through that. We know how bad the play was and we're sure that you know it too. So really it's not necessary. Please, Sir David. Call Peter Hall. He's a knight too, he'll take your call. You probably have a special red telephone to communicate between you. Tell him it's all been a ghastly mistake. He can ring round the actors. I promise you, they'll be relieved.

And in the morning - promise you'll do this? - phone up your agent. Please, Sir David, call him up. Tell him, loud and clear, that no one, but no one - you don't care if its Thomas Ostermeier or Peter Brook himself (unlikely I would imagine) NO ONE - is to get the rights to do Amy's View ever again.

We have suffered enough, haven't we?

Janeites at the Young Vic

2006-07-07T17:33:00.000+01:00

Janeites at the Young Vic

It's a curious thing that critics and commentators tend to refer to women in the theatre by their first names and men by their second names. So it would be unusual to read a critic talking about Harold's work, rather than Pinter's, but it's not uncommon to read people referring to Sarah, rather than Kane. The most famous example of this in critical tradition are the Janeites, the fanatical followers of Jane Austen, who refer to their heroine as Jane, rather than Austen. It gives rise to the question: is this patronising or virtuous? Is it that the personalisation is a rather matey intrusiveness, than individualises the author and thereby forbids her entry to the canon of literature (it's Shakespeare, never William)? Or is it that some women remind us of the importance of the personal, the intimate and domestic? Perhaps the literary tradition is too scared of the personal - as in all those male writers who abjure the first name (T. S. Eliot, J. B. Priestley, Lord Byron, e. e. cummings) - and remember how the publisher suggested that Joanne Rowling hide her femininity. Would it be good if Eliot were Tom (or Mary Ann)? Or would it be good if Sarah were always Kane (or Daniels)?

These ruminations on literary politics arise in connection with the Young Vic's press conference, at which they announced that their two new theatres would not be named the Bjornson and the Venables, but the Maria and the Clare. It may be simple pragmatism - their first names are rather more elegant words than the surnames - but there does seem something slightly belittling about this. The other recent newly-named Londoon theatres are not the Noel and the Stephen, but the Noel Coward and the Sondheim.

The new season, on the other hand, looks pretty interesting, though the undoubted high point will be Dennis Kelly's Love and Money, one of the most exciting plays I have ever read. It shows that there is life after Crimp and that Attempts on Her Life is a staging post not the finishing line.

Not you again!

2006-07-07T13:49:00.000+01:00

Not you again!

Forced out of retirement by the steady trickle of emails wondering where we are, we're giving it another go. And what's happened since we were last here? The Hytner backlash! Richard Griffiths' campaign against mobile phones! More nutty Christians! Pinter got the Nobel! The National Theatre of Scotland founded! Dromgoole at the Globe! Goldman at the Soho! Farr at the Lyric Hammersmith! Church at Chichester! Spacey at the Vic! Kavanaugh at the Rep! All change at the Tron! Hello Trafalgar Studios! Goodbye Theatre Museum! Welcome back Roundhouse! Happy fiftieth at the Royal Court! And, of course, The Play's the Thing!

We'll give it a go again, because some of us had a very busy couple of years (lucky us) but now we all fancy something to do rather than try to write our plays, send off our begging letters, draw up directing wishlists, attend casting sessions, come up with design concepts, tear tickets, sell tickets, buy tickets, and everything else that makes up our wonderful wonderful lives.

Anyone fancy contributing? It always helps!

New teeth. Weird.

Guilty Pleasures

2006-07-07T13:19:00.000+01:00

Guilty Pleasures

There's a club night and CD series called Guilty Pleasures that specialises in the kind of music that we are Supposed Not To Like. David Dundas's 'Jeans On', E.L.O.'s magnificent 'Sweet Talkin' Woman', Marshall Hain's 'Dancing in the City'. Oh, the hours of pleasure these CDs can bring, all the more pleasurable for the sinful taboo-breaking qualities they bear.

What's the theatre equivalent? I think it's something like the current delicious production of Philip King's See How They Run, directed by Douglas Hodge at the Duchess Theatre, London. King's farce is unintellectual - this is pre-Orton, remember - and the jokes are worn by time; the plot is stupid; there is a comic cockney maid; the play is set in a vicarage and as the curtain rises we are confronted with the largest pair of French windows you will have seen on a British stage for fifty years.

But it's a joy from beginning to end. It's a joy because (a) the script does exactly what is required, without affectation or guilt; farce is an almost wholly structural narrative form. get the structure right and the dialogue is pretty easy to write and make funny. So some of the best laughs in the play are utterly unexceptional: 'but we don't have a lily pond', 'there is something in anguish in that wardrobe', and the climactic and brilliant line 'sergeant! arrest most of those vicars!' (b) the actors get it absolutely pitch-perfect; they are slightly larger than life, which allows the show to get the energy up for the wilder physical sequences; they perform out to the audience without self-indulgently craving our affection (the most nauseating thing about most West End acting).

And, in case you're concerned, no one involved in Encore is involved in the production. Far too mainstream for us, darling.

Seagull Fight

2006-07-07T12:39:00.000+01:00

Shooting the Seagull

This blog has been out and proud as a Katie Mitchell fan before and she doesn't need us to ride to her defence.

But the critics have made complete fools of themselves this time. Critic after critic has slammed her current production of Chekhov's The Seagull at the National Theatre as a travesty of the original, a piece of shameless 'director's theatre' (the implication being that this is like rabies, a continental disease that we don't want over here, thank you very much). Martin Crimp has come in for a pasting for daring the cut the original (as if cutting a classic were some kind of wildly avant-garde practice). For the staggering bore Michael Billington, 'theatrical effect takes precedence over everything'. Oh my goodness, no, not really? Save us from theatrical theatre! There are repeated claims that the production is inaudible. This, dear friends, is bullshit. The production is very naturalistic in places and sometimes Mitchell has placed conversations out of hearing because it is more important that we see people are talking than that we hear what they are saying. The critics also go on about the lighting as if the production were performed in blackout. In fact Chris Davey's lighting is one of the most rich, subtle and affecting designs that I have seen at the National this decade. These constant complaints about being able to hear and see say more about the advancing age of the critics - and their insistence that everything be made completely obvious to them - than it does about Mitchell's finely judged production.

As for the liberties taken with the text, the critics are hallucinating. At one point, in Crimp's version, Masha tells Medvedenko, 'why don't you just piss off' which elderly spinster Billington declares to be 'Crimp at his coarsest'. If he thinks that's Crimp at his coarsest, he's not seen The Treatment or Attempts on Her Life. More significantly, it's not Crimp at his coarsest, it's Chekhov. The relationship between Masha and Medvedenko degrades to a horrible spectacle of grim, antagonistic failure. This relatively small phrase is a good rendering of the spitting frustration that Masha directs at her unloved husband. The first lines are blurred by the addition of a couple of lines being spoken as Masha and Medvedenko come on. Why is this a crime? 'Why are you always wearing black?'/ 'I'm in mourning for my life. I'm unhappy' is already an approximate rendering of the Russian. And just as Hamlet's dread having to utter 'To be or not to be', it is wise, in a production that tries to reconnect us with the story beyond its theatrically barnacled history, to blur the clangingly famous opening couplet.

Martin Kettle in a quite incomprehensible Guardian article believes that

if there is one thing that today's audience might be expected to know about Russia in those years, it is that there was a Soviet revolution going on. But not even Crimp has the audacity to insinuate verbal or visual references to kulaks, collective farms and five-year plans. So we are left with an updating that floats free of history, and is thus fundamentally misleading. In the ostensible cause of fully connecting with a contemporary audience, Crimp disconnects from reality - and from Chekhov.

He's referring to the fact that the play seems to be updated to the late 1920s or 1930s, but, astonishingly, the characters don't mention the Soviet succession, five year plans, meetings of the Comintern or any of the rest of it. I would be interested if he could pick out in Chekhov's The Seagull the references to contemporary (1896) reality. Does Crimp's adaptation 'float free from history'? Or has the play got its own arm's-length attitude to its historical and cultural context depicting the characters as absorbed in their rural world, their theatrical memories, the stifling and abnormal excitation of the Russian avant-garde, which precisely does not pay attention to the world around it.

What the updating and the stripping away of all those elements which Chekhov, by his next play, had learned to strip away himself (asides, soliloquies, etc.) does is to bring us in touch with the play. Dorn's soliloquy about the value of Konstantin's play, for example, is always fudged in contemporary versions. We have no convention for soliloquy in naturalism, so it's always the rambling of an ageing man, muttering to himself, thinking out loud. Never satisfactory, because (a) that's just an unhappy compromise between naturalism and the conventions Chekhov was fleeing, and (b) Dorn is not a dotty old man. He's a strong and important character. So the lines are cut. It's evident that Dorn did admire the play, so what has been lost? Nothing. What has been gained? We understand the relationships between the characters much more: of course Polina loves Dorn; he's an exciting and attractive man with an eye to a future he'll never see because in Mitchell's production he, like Chekhov, has a chest infection that will kill him. We understand his closeness to Masha because she is undoubtedly his daughter. And the ripples of adulthood spread through the play. Juliet Stevenson's nicely understated Arkadina is not the stupid stage illusion that she is usually played to be. She is a real woman, fighting the ageing process, wrapped up in memories, desperate to keep hold of Trigorin. His betrayal of her with Nina is something she quite understands and is beside herself trying to stop. (It's very like Angus Wright's magnificent reinvention of Kulygin in Mitchell's Three Sisters, as a man whose heart was darkened by his wife's infidelity, not the comic cuckold of British stage tradition.)

Please see it if you can. It's the best Seagull of our generation.

Oh no! He's Back!

2006-07-07T12:36:00.000+01:00

Oh no! Guess who's back!

The Guardian this morning reports some most awful news:

Toby Young has returned to playwriting. A Right Royal Farce depicts the Windsors as a group of sex-crazed egomaniacs engaged in a non-stop game of musical beds. Prince Harry is portrayed not as a dimwit, but as a brilliant Machiavellian operator involved in an elaborate plot to steal the throne. "I'm sure we'll get a bit of flak from the tabloids, but it's not intended to be an anti-royal play," said Young. "Our only agenda is to make people laugh." Young has written it with Lloyd Evans following their collaboration last year on Who's the Daddy, the enjoyable romp about goings on at the Spectator where Young is still drama critic. It will run at the King's Head in Islington, north London, from July 20.

Two questions. a. Why is this news? The worst critic in the world puts pen to paper again. Exclusive. b. Returned? He flatters himself, dear.

Crisis at the ACW

2005-02-05T08:50:00.000Z

Keeping the Dragon at Arm's Length: Crisis at the Arts Council of Wales

In November last year, Alun Pugh, the Welsh Assembly Government’s Culture Minister, made a hotly-anticipated announcement on the future of The Arts Council of Wales. While complete assimilation into government had been preferred, it was decided instead that the Council was going to be stripped of its strategic and policy-making function, remaining a grant-giving body only. Moreover, six organisations were going to be funded directly by government, including Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Welsh National Opera, Diversions – The Dance Company of Wales and Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the new Welsh-language national theatre.) In his main justification for the decision the First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, announced, ‘You can justify the existence of arms-length bodies in government, but there is no such thing as arms-length public money. Ministers are always responsible for its allocation and the Assembly is always responsible for its scrutiny. There is no dodging that responsibility.’ There is no dodging either that this is frighteningly short on considered logic.

Clearly, there are many ways to scrutinise the arts without the direct involvement of government in the decision-making process itself and Morgan has conveniently overlooked forty years of that happening across the UK. However, in the face of strong cross-party opposition and considerable disquiet in the arts community, the measure was enacted without even recourse to a vote, let alone some sense of process. While James Boyle’s Cultural Commission seems to be working inclusively and progressively towards a new settlement for the arts in Scotland, in Wales the move was a case of political expediency.

Some see the background to this as residing in Rhodri Morgan’s awkwardness over The Richard Report. The report was commissioned to look at ways in which The National Assembly could develop its powers. Its recommendations presented Wales’ First Minister with a problem – a demand for law-making powers and an increase in the number of Assembly Ministers. Knowing this would potentially split Welsh Labour with its traditional hostility towards the nationalist agenda of further devolution, Morgan acted – well, like a politician. In July, he made a sudden announcement that the Welsh Development Agency, the Wales Tourist Board and ELWA (the quango for education) were to be assimilated within government by 2006. At a stroke, Morgan had beefed up Welsh government without the need for significant constitutional change. Moreover, it revisited an eight-year-old soundbite of Ron Davies’s that there would be ‘a bonfire of the quangos’ under Labour. So sudden was this particular bonfire that the Chief Executive of the WDA had fifty minutes’ notice of the organisation’s demise.

Speculation quickly moved on to the cultural quangos and the position of The Arts Council of Wales, which has been fragile and vulnerable since the fiasco of its Drama Strategy that was formulated and abandoned in 1999-2000. While The Arts Council struggled to come to terms with the reality of devolved government, it was also being undermined by the relentless lobbying of figures in the arts, such as Terry Hands with his powerbase at Clwyd Theatr Cymru and Michael Bogdanov, who has developed links in Swansea. Within some quarters in the Council, the wearisome campaign for CTC to become ‘the English language national theatre in Wales’ and Michael Bogdanov’s promotion of his own aspirations with his ‘Wales Theatre Company’ have collectively become known as ‘The Hands-Bogdanov Pension Fund.’

However, it was the then Economic Development Minister, Edwina Hart, who may well come to be seen as the critical figure in the abandonment of the arm’s length principle. Apparently, Edwina Hart was once an active member of The National Youth Orchestra of Wales. In 2002, she made the decision to allow £200,000 of Assembly money to direct-fund a chamber orchestra in Swansea that she had links with. In a face-saving deal with the then Liberal Democrat Culture Minister, Jenny Randerson, who had no prior knowledge of this development, the fund was made open to up to five other chamber orchestras and the money administered through the Arts Council of Wales.

Gradually, by stealth, more and more organisations took to lobbying politicians directly with the result that funding was made available to them – a case in point being Clwyd Theatr Cymru’s mobile theatre. So determined is Terry Hands to recreate in Wales his previous vision for the RSC, he has decided that CTC should also have its own mobile theatre to take into leisure centres and municipal halls. Having applied to ACW for lottery funding for the project and failed on numerous criteria, including over-ambitious audience targets, the application was conclusively rejected. When Alun Pugh (in whose constituency CTC are based) became Culture Minister, however, one of his first acts was to make the decision that £150,000 of new funding from the snappily-named ‘Arts Outside of Cardiff Fund’ should go straight to CTC for its mobile theatre. Given that the justification was ‘to bring productions to communities that might otherwise not have ready access to professional theatre’, it was surprising that only five venues were part of the tour, including two that were within twelve miles of CTC itself.

When it came to Rhodri Morgan’s announcement about the Arts Council of Wales in November, therefore, one of the main arguments he deployed was that the Welsh Assembly Government was already directly funding certain arts organisations and the principle of arm’s length funding was irrelevant. Nevertheless, the reality behind the rhetoric was that until a week before the decision was made public, Pugh and Morgan were still working on the assumption that The Council could be completely assimilated. Having taken legal advice, however, they were surprised to discover that the terms of the Royal Charter meant that complete assimilation into government was a non-starter. While the majority of the arts community was rallying behind the Council, Terry Hands was lobbying furiously for it to be dismantled and busy withdrawing from every professional body that expressed reservations about the direction the Assembly Government was heading in. Meanwhile, Michael Bogdanov maintained a public silence on the subject in anticipation of the £50,000 he was due to receive for his Shakespeare trilogy.

The irony of all this lies in the centrality of Clwyd Theatr Cymru to the Council’s strategy during the last seven years. The principal aim of the 1999-2000 Drama Strategy was ‘to fund fewer, better’ by focussing extra funding on CTC, while cutting other companies, including the new writing company Made In Wales. In the aftermath of this period, the ACW was much preoccupied with restructure and a desire to prove to the Assembly that it had learned its lessons. With the Assembly Government focussed on issues around access and community, the Council signed up to these principles championing CTC as one of its main providers of popular and accessible drama. However, many of the central tenets of the Drama Strategy remained, such as the launch of the Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, while small companies and individual artists, responsible for much of the truly significant achievement in Welsh theatre during the last decade continued to suffer. While new writing and new work was under-resourced, Terry Hands pursued a policy of sanitised heritage theatre mixing classic plays with sentimental and crudely old-fashioned appeals to ‘Welshness’ with productions of The Alexander Cordell trilogy, for example, or plays such as Hobson’s Choice meaninglessly adapted to a Welsh setting. As with his tenure of the RSC, his interest in new writing and new work was negligible.

With the appointment of Geraint Talfan Davies as Chair in 2003, the Welsh Arts Council seemed to be opening a new chapter. With a reputation as an establishment operator, Davies bent over backwards to give the impression that he was prepared to be inclusive and open, while personally being very smitten with the kind of work provided by Clwyd Theatr Cymru. Last year, Peter Boyden was commissioned to produce in a short space of time a report into the future of English Language Theatre in Wales. Heartily grateful for any hope of development in the sector, the theatre community was mainly supportive of the initiative, but the report itself was deeply problematic. While offering a comprehensive and balanced diagnosis of the longstanding ills facing theatre in Wales, it was absurd to try and separate English language theatre from provision in other areas, such as Welsh language theatre or the young people’s theatre sector. Even worse, however, was the politically ill-advised attempt to attach a long list of proposals for development, which, in some cases, are poorly thought through, dependent on large injections of new revenue and strangely unbalanced in its attitude towards certain companies and ideas, reflective perhaps of the collection of interests dominating the Steering Group that had been advising Boyden. The major omission, however, was the failure to offer anything tangible to CTC, apart from a downscaling of its touring aspirations. While welcomed by the vast majority of the theatre world, this would have represented the final straw for Terry Hands.

Within weeks of the report, Chief Executive of the ACW, Peter Tyndall, was privately expressing his view that the report was ‘dead.’ With no interest in investing in the report’s proposals, the writing was clearly on the wall for the ACW. Sure enough, Pugh made his announcement and ‘strategy’ for theatre in Wales was now going to be decided by the Minister, his ‘Culture Board’ and ‘external advisers.’ In an attempt to save face, Geraint Talfan Davies has recently been denying that the ACW had been ‘emasculated,’ while showing no apparent willingness to fight the decision, or to resign from his post in protest. Perhaps even more surprising is the lack of vocal opposition to the move within Wales itself, although persistent demoralisation and fear of recrimination is playing its part. One person undoubtedly pleased with the outcome will be Terry Hands. However, there may be plenty of time for him to regret his enthusiasm, especially as Alan Pugh’s majority is under threat at the next election.

Encore Revivals: The Castle

2005-02-03T23:15:00.000Z

Encore Revivals # 4
The Castle by Howard Barker

"There was no government ... does anyone remember ... there was none ... there was none ... there was none"

What would we have done without Howard Barker all these years to incite, offend, and inspire us? His longevity and prodigious output has been such that we risk taking him for advantage. No one writes like him; I dare even say that no one is his equal in sheer, unrelenting theatrical imagination. Churchill is more formally sophisticated; Kane managed without artistic compromise to connect with the mainstream more effectively; Pinter is more influential and important. But does any writer's language sit better in the mouths of actors, and sweep them across stages in the way that Barker's does?

With almost 100 plays to choose from, choosing a play worthy of revival is both child's play and impossible. We've gone back to 1985's The Castle, first performed at the RSC in their Barker at the Pit season, which also included Downchild and Crimes in Hot Countries. It was a crucial season for Barker, the first time he got consistently good reviews since he had abandoned the scabrous satire in which he'd specialised in the 1970s. The towering achievement of that season is The Castle.

We are in late medieval England and the crusaders, under the leadership of their knight, Stucley, have just returned from the Crusades. Expecting to be welcomed back by their faithful wives they are shocked to discover that in their absence their women have transformed the county into a vast lesbian commune. Witchcraft has replaced technology; common ownership has replaced private property; religion is a relic. The region is in thrall to the white witch, Skinner. The response of the soldiery is to reassert their authority by building an enormous castle, under the guidance of the captured Arab mathematician, Krak. With each blow struck against them in this new sex war, the men order the castle to be built bigger, thicker, stronger, its fortifications more elaborate, its defences more ingenious. When Skinner seduces and kills the builder of the Castle, she is tortured and sentenced to carry her victim's rotting body around with her (pictured).

This does not put an end to the strife and, led by Ann, the women of the village, newly impregnated by the returning males, commit suicide by jumping from the walls of the Castle. Furthermore, the presence of the Castle had produced defensive military building in the neighbouring counties; over the hill is the Fortress, far superior to the Castle. Krak has realised the failure of the Castle and becomes obsessed by the rival geometry of the cunt. Skinner meanwhile becomes an object of curious adoration and soon the men decide to throw in their lot with her, hastily rewriting the Bible again as a sentimentally feminist text and offering her the keys to the Castle. Skinner initially accepts but, feeling the thirst for vengeance flooding through her, rejects it. But the Castle has already begun to erode political memory; desperately she tries to retrieve the memory of their utopia without government, without leaders, without war.

Because the Castle gradually dominates everything. It overlooks everything and its presence affects the weather; Batter, Stucley's servant, fears the effect of its looming presence:

And when they throw open the shutters, where's the sky, they'll say, give us back our fucking sky, they will, won't they? All they'll clap eyes on is masonry and arrow slits, it will blot the old blue out and throw long shadows over them, always at the corner of their eye, kissing or clawing, even in bedrooms looking in, and drunken arses falling out of beer houses will search for vain for corners to piss in not overlooked.

For Batter it will become a kind of Big Brother, abolishing privacy, holding everyone and everything in its gaze. For Skinner, its effects will be even more insidious in its eradication of the lesbianfeminist paradise they have built for themselves. She tells her lover, Ann:

Every stone they raise is aimed at us. And things we have not dreamed of yet will come from it. Poems, love and gardening will be - and where you turn your eyes will be - and even the little middle of your heart which you think is your safe and actual self will be - transformed by it. I don't know how but even the way you plait your hair will be determined by it, and what we crop and even the colour of the babies.

I quote these speeches at length because they are just so remarkable. Not for the play - it's full of speeches as good and better - but we haven't had such language since the Jacobeans. It's beautiful, it's rich, it's demotic and it's moving, it's simply astonishing language. Barker sometimes gets marginalised as an eccentric genius, an undisciplined whirlwind of language, whose work badly needs a script editor. But here we have a careful piece of remarkable stagecraft. Batter's speech, placed in the context of the scene, is a still and haunting vision of the future. Skinner's witchwoman prediction seems obscure and mystical - yet much of what she predicts comes true as Ann falls in love with and becomes pregnant by the Palestinian Krak and rebraids her hair.

Some see this as Barker's most explicitly political play. Barker has occasionally ironically referred to it as such himself. At the time it was certainly seen as a sideways comment on the arms race and the military-feminist debates taking place daily at Greenham Common air base. And, of course, in some ways it was: the end of the first act traces a cryptic history of military technology and the end of the play is pounded out by the sound jets streaking overhead; the text's engagement in contemporary feminist debates can partly be seen in its not altogether respectful citation of Ian McEwan's 1983 oratorio, Or Shall We Die, 'Shall there be womanly times or shall we die? Are there men unafraid of gentleness?'

One senses, though, that Barker is less interested in joining in this debate than in ratcheting up the conflict, stripping the last veils of politeness through which it was occasionally conducted, and revealing the beating throbs of desire that animate it. His own epigraph to the play is 'what is politics but the absence of desire?' and one feels that in this play he is raising politics only to abandon it decisively. He would never return to such evidently allegorical material again.

The premiere was at the RSC but in The Pit. This reduced the majestic scale of the Castle to a series of blackened ladders. The Wrestling School produced their own, rather unsatisfactory, production in 1995, which toured similarly cramped venues in Britain. But this is a play that demands the mechanisms of the National Theatre. The Olivier could raise a Castle with a scale to match that of Barker's conception. And this is not an obscure or audience-repelling play; it's hilariously funny ('Never saw a nun do that', 'Reg you have got a bag on your head', 'Don't draw cunt, I'm talking' etc.); its language, well you just have to experience it in a big theatre to discover that it works. It fills space. This language is enormous and full of the body. In our current era where Bezhti and Jerry Springer the Opera are pestered by the simple-minded religious, this would be a great retort, largely due to its astonishingly funny and daring I.iv., in which Stucley, smarting at his sexual rejection, instructs the priest to rewrite the Bible, 'reinstating' the references to Christ's penis which, he surmises, were omitted by 'neutered Bishops'. The Book he thus writes, The Gospel of the Christ Erect, provoked gasps from its unshockable metropolitan London audience in 1985 and would do again.

Last week, the National partly revealed its summer line-up. A play by Howard Brenton is long overdue (we have to save him from Spooks), and David Edgar is probably the man to offer journalistic commentary on the new rise of the far-right in Bradford and Oldham. But even Brenton - a great and neglected writer - is no match for Barker at his best, and The Castle is him at his very best. If Nick Hytner means what he says about the right to shock, here really is a play that demands revival.

The Castle is one of the great plays of our theatre: its poetry is crammed with questions, its story thrills with daring, it is a work of popular theatre, philosophy and holy fiction; it has the dirt of history in its veins, and it has blood in its mouth. Revive it!

Liz Lochhead to the NTS

2005-01-31T01:06:00.000Z

Liz Lochhead appointed Artistic Associate at NToS

More good news coming from Easterhouse. The National Theatre of Scotland has appointed playwright, poet and performer Liz Lochhead as an Artistic Associate.

Lochead emerged in the early seventies from that ferment of Scots literary creativity around Philip Hobsbaum's writers' group, through which also passed James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Tom Leonard. Lochhead's work includes, most famously, Blood and Ice and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, one of those key plays reimagining the nature of Scottish identity from the stage that predated the great revival of Scottish theatre writing of the 1990s. She's worked in a great variety of writing styles, offering comic monologues that she herself has performed, straight drama like Perfect Days which went to the West End a few years ago, and bold adaptations of the classics, including, most recebtly, Medea for Theatre Babel and The Misanthrope, under the title Miseryguts a caustic transplanting of Moliere's play to Holyrood.

Her work is marked by a consistent pressurizing of the roots and sources of identity; she is never afraid of complexity as demonstrated by the deep ambivalence of La Corbie, our birdlike guide through this briary drama. Lochhead is the first of a group of around eight Artistic Associates (I guess something like Hytner's kitchen cabinet at the [English] National Theatre) who will advise and guide the development of this project. The British Theatre Guide reports critic Mark Fisher's recommendation that Greig, Lochhead and Chris Hannan be invited to join the organization. Featherstone's got the first two; let's hope Hannan can be forced back into the limelight. Neil Murray's executive producer role should help - it was under his stewardship of the Tron that the revival of Shining Souls brought Hannan's name back to the front of Scottish theatrical minds, where it should be.

Site Feeds

2005-01-30T23:37:00.000Z

Site Feed

We've been getting some enquiries about whether there's an Encore site feed, so, with some help, we've set them up. A site feed is a way of syndicating Encore's content to your own browser home page, or other feedreader. That way you can see straight away whether there's new content without having to load the actual page. Some of you have already spotted this because we see you've already subscribed. Thank you.

We're offering site feeds in the two main formats, Atom and RSS. Many thanks to Phil Gyford and 'Cog' for their help in navigating me through my ignorance. (We at Encore are technostupid.)

You can subscribe to the feeds using the bar on the left or by clicking one of these self-explanatory buttons:

There are plenty of free RSS and Atom feed-readers available to download. This page has what seems to me a useful guide to some of what's available.

Nationalise the Theatres!

2005-01-27T13:46:00.000Z

West End in Crisis

Not just the Palace Theatre but the whole of the West End is at a crossroads. Last week, reports came out that P. Diddy (formerly known as Puff Daddy, and sometimes Sean "Puffy" Combs) was interested in buying some of the Really Useful Group's West End theatre holdings; the Garrick, the Lyric, the Duchess and the Apollo were all mentioned. This came hard on the heels of the Department of Culture's official response to the Theatres Trust report, published in October 2003, that £250 million was needed to maintain and modernise London's commercial theatre stock. The Department has rather vaguely - through an anomymous spokesperson and not by an official press release - promised to help the sector raise half the money through the public purse. (There's no indication of how they will help and it looks like, to use the old distinction, an aspiration rather than a pledge.) Now a Culture select committee is hearing evidence from a range of bodies, including the Theatres Trust, the Writers' Guild, the Little Theatre Guild, and the National Operatic and Dramatic Association (no, we hadn't heard of them either).

It's good that Lloyd Webber's empire is being broken up, even voluntarily. He was never a good landlord; he spent enormous sums on the Adelphi (pictured) to house Sunset Boulevard but lost interest in the theatre as quickly as audiences lost interest in that show. Most of his other properties have been noticeably neglected; it's always been obvious that Lloyd Webber bought theatres partly on whim and partly as a way of further vertically integrating his industrial processes. He could write, stage, publicise and take in all the ancillary income derived from owning the bricks and mortar. This was of a piece with his invention, with Cameron Mackintosh, of the through-branded musical.

However, it's not yet clear that P. Diddy will be much better. It's true that his performance in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway last April was much admired and he may genuinely have developed a keen love of the stage. It seems more likely that he's thinking of it as an attempt to broaden mature his portfolio. He has previously been speculating in property, reputedly putting down a deposit on an US$8 million mansion in Lower Manhattan. But Manhattan property is not the cert. it was before 9-11 and he's looking for perhaps more secure returns.

The theatre's a funny industry to go into to make your fortune, though, as the theatre owners have always complained. The theatre rarely makes huge sums and usually makes them very slowly with comparatively onerous initial outlays. This is perhaps why rumours are flying that Combs has plans to transform one of the theatres into a nightclub. You'd have thought he'd had enough of nightclubs after the mysterious events of December 1999, but perhaps he recognises that a club is more likely to make money than a theatre. Cameron Mackintosh has recently announced dreary plans for late-night cabaret at the Prince of Wales and perhaps Combs is following in his footsteps, offering something more Barbara Cook than Bada Bing.

The theatres also face pressure from the new Disabilities Discrimination Act (see Encore's comment) which technically makes many West End theatres discriminatory. It remains to be seen how long the landlords can use these buildings' listed status to fend off legal action. It all adds up to a bleak financial picture for the West End's commercial future.

As part of their submission to the select committee report, the National Campaign for the Arts has been arguing that the government commit public money directly to support the commercial theatre sector. Oblivious to the fact that if the commercial sector needs subsidy then it can hardly be called the commercial sector, the argument is framed entirely in terms of the macroeconomic picture: 'As a result of the close links between the different parts, and the well-documented financial problems facing a number of theatres, particularly in the West End, there seems a persuasive argument in favour of making financial allowances for the West End theatres, for example in terms of rates. Not only are they a vital component of the UK theatre sector but they contribute approximately £1.1 billion to the British economy annually', the submission reads. Depressingly, it looks as if Tessa Jowell has implicitly endorsed this analysis, which suggests that her rather more exciting defence of artistic experience as a value in itself (see Encore's comment) has been ignored and abandoned.

What nobody seems to be asking is what the artistic value of these theatres is. Many of them are very beautiful buildings, particularly from the outside. The Vaudeville on the Strand (above), for example, is an elegantly compact space, drawing you into its deep foyer. The Palace, conversely, is a monumentally impressive theatre, whose gently concave facade embraces the traffic junction that it overlooks. Some theatres are ugly and dull: the Palladium is a horror, the Queen's may one day bounce back into architectural fashion but it seems unlikely; the Dominion has all the cosy merit of a warehouse and the Apollo Victoria, is an arrestingly unattractive building. Many of the auditoria are simply unworkable, emotionless barns embodying an entirely different age of theatregoing and unsuitable for current needs.

Many London theatres are listed well beyond their actual architectural value. The current state of affairs is as follows:

Grade I (of exceptional interest)
Drury Lane; Haymarket.

Grade II* (particularly important buildings of more than special interest)
Apollo Victoria, Savoy, Palladium, Lyceum, Coliseum, Wyndham's, Her Majesty's, Palace, Garrick, Lyric, Criterion, Old Vic.

Grade II (of special interest, warranting every effort to preserve them)
Adelphi, Whitehall, Phoenix, Cambridge, Barbican, Prince of Wales, Dominion, Vaudeville, Fortune, St Martin's, New Ambassadors, Shaftesbury, Victoria Palace, Queen's, Gielgud, Aldwych, Strand, Albery, Apollo, Duke of York's, Playhouse, Comedy.

Fair enough: Drury Lane is a building of overwhelming historical significance. How on earth has the Savoy got on these lists? It's also hard to see what rates the Lyric above the Adelphi or the Garrick above St Martins. The effect of listing means that making any substantial alteration to any of these buildings is illegal without obtaining a 'listed building consent', which is obviously extremely difficult and time-consuming to get, especially at the highest two grades. (At those grades, one can apply for English Heritage grants to complete urgent repairs but this would not include modernisation or the conversion of the buildings to ensure compliance with the DDA.)

Supporters of the theatre have tended to support the listing process, considering it the best way of preserving the theatre against property speculators. It's not clear that this heavy-handed method is the best - councils can ban change of use, which would clearly open up the process of adapting the buildings while preserving the sites for the theatre. As we all know, what we need are not these hulking great 500-1000 seaters, but a proliferation of more mid-size 300-seat auditoria. When they have been carved out of existing West End theatres - the Whitehall Studios, for example, and the forthcoming Sondheim theatre - the results are impressive. Being sentimental about our theatrical heritage is a way of turning our theatre into a museum; we should be unafraid of dramatically reshaping our West End theatre stock.

Of course, this doesn't help the theatre owners who once again will open their empty wallets and plead poverty. So, once again, we'd like to offer our own submission to the select committee. There's an obvious way out of this mess.

Unburden the theatre owners! Let's nationalise the West End!

New Writing Appointments at the NTS

2005-01-25T18:46:00.000Z

New Writing Appointments at the National Theatre of Scotland

Good news reaches Encore that the post of Dramaturg for the new National Theatre of Scotland (NToS) will be filled by David Greig. One of the most prolific and internationally-respected of that glorious generation of new Scottish writers who emerged in the mid-1990s, Greig has experience writing for many kinds of audience: children's theatre, live art, new writing, translation, adaptation, monologue and epic, he's worked successfully in them all. This year he has a high-profile revival of Cosmonaut at the Donmar, and new plays Pyrenees and The American Pilot opening with Paines Plough and the RSC, respectively. His version of Ubu comes to the Barbican later in the year.

His internationalism is also welcome, and adds to the sense that the NToS is shaping up to be a very exciting experiment in Scottish Nationalism, one that takes its cue from the broadest horizons, and widest outlook, not narrowly fixated on a few museum relics of the past. In his work you can see the traces of Vinaver and Koltès, Brecht and Barker. He's produced translations of classical Greek tragedy (Sophocles), early surrealism (Jarry), classic naturalism (Strindberg), and contemporary French drama (Gaudé). It is good news for the NToS.

Greig will work well alongside John Tiffany, newly-appointed Associate Director of New Writing, re-establishing, with Vicky Featherstone, the team that worked so well at Paines Plough and has been responsible for the excitement of their new 'This Other England' season (right), a programme of new work that easily outclasses far more heavily-subsidised new writing institutions in the capital and looks set fair to provide one of the theatregoing highlights of 2005.

It looks likely that the NToS will make an initial announcement of its plans in the late Summer, maybe during the Edinburgh Festival, with perhaps some workshops and other development activities in the Autumn, but commissioning fully-realized work for 2006.

Where Now For The Tron?

2005-01-20T13:26:00.000Z

Where now for the Tron?

In a widely welcomed move, Neil Murray has been appointed executive director of the National Theatre of Scotland. It's also a smart political move by Vicky Featherstone, and consolidates the partnership that is already working on David Greig's Pyrenees, for the Tron and Paines Plough. The National Theatre's gain, though, is the Tron's loss. Murray's reign at the Tron since 2002 has seen it become a producing powerhouse, with Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia (left) and Greig's San Diego being Festival showstoppers and Encore favourites (which, let's say it again, should both have already been on at the Court). Meanwhile the revival of Shining Souls was a popular and critical success which brough Chris Hannan belately out of the shadows. It's a terrific appointment and bodes very well for the NToS.

But whither the Tron? There's been so much shuffling of the pack in Scottish theatre of late that there's almost nobody left in the running for a new job now, certainly not of the necessary calibre. Bringing up directors from the south, pace Featherstone, hasn't been too succesful in the past - Irina Brown's tenure was artistically intriguing but commercially very problematic and Jeremy Raison hasn't exactly set the Citz on fire. Will Kenny Ireland come back to Glasgow? It doesn't seem likely. Maybe Gerry Mulgrew will finally get the organisation his talent deserves.

Surely not. The most obvious and likeliest candidate is Graham Eatough, artistic director of Suspect Culture, who, after ten years of running a small-scale touring company, however successful, may well feel it's time for a change. He has established a wide range of national and international contacts and has worked assiduously to widen the usual remit of his company, organising tours, revivals, collaborations, workshops and conferences. He has already directed for the Tron and Suspect Culture's new show, A Different Language, opens there next month. It would be a bold and exciting appointment and would maintain the Tron's status as an international flagship for the best of Scottish - and British - theatre.

I Never Thought I'd Say This

2005-01-16T22:36:00.000Z

I Never Thought I'd Say This

...but I agree with every word of a Michael Billington review. It's of Tim Fountain's witless Sex Addict show, a piece in which he reports back on the person he shagged last night and then gets the audience to vote, from a shortlist of three, on who he shags tonight. The show is utterly without insight - is Tim Fountain really a sex addict? And, if so, who cares since he seems incapable of revealing anything about the pleasures and miseries of anonymous sex, because he seems too dim to understand its dynamics, its politics, and its complexity. Graham Norton does this sort of stuff on TV, though in milder and funnier form. In the 1970s Marina Abramovic offered a performance in which her body was made available to the public's use and abuse using a whole range of props sitting on a table before her. The table included a loaded gun. The performance was disturbing because of what it revealed about the audience's ability to dehumanise her. Tim Fountain has none of that risk, daring, intelligence and care. Hence our agreeing with Billington's powerful rejecting review, which ends:

If I am angered by the show, it is for two reasons. First, it wastes the time, energy and resources of the Royal Court, supposedly a new writing theatre, and deprives a living dramatist of a crucial January slot. Second, at a period when theatre is under attack on all fronts, the show plays into enemy hands by offering a trivial, dumbed-down event that makes Celebrity Big Brother look like Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Fountain tells us: "I love shagging strangers." But that is his business and not ours. By offering him a public space in which to explore his private compulsions, the Royal Court both degrades its own good name and makes the theatre look an infinitely smaller place.

Who programmed this? What plays have they passed on to programme this crap? The theatre downstairs is dark right now; how could Rickson and Whybrow programme this and turn down Anthony Nielson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia? In any well-managed theatre, someone would have stopped this show.

The Royal Court has one of the proudest histories of any theatre in the world. Someone stop the current artistic team before they sully its name for a decade.

Jerry Springer the Opera on TV

2005-01-09T09:21:00.000Z

Jerry Springer the Opera was on last night. Did civilization crumble?

Dear BBC,

I am writing to complain about the disgusting feast of irrationalism and prejudice broadcast this morning on Radio 4, under the title Sunday Worship (presented live from the St Stephen's Centre, Edinburgh).

Throughout this programme, false, meaningless and unreasoning claims were presented as unquestioned facts: that God is the 'Father of light', is that he is made manifest in precious metals, and is a 'friend of the earth', for example. None of these are possible or true and it is deeply offensive to my profoundly-felt human reason that such nonsense should be pedalled as facts.

Many of the stories were presented using beautiful music, it's true, but I think you can have beautiful music without offending people. People have a right to express themselves, but no one has a right to offend deeply-held beliefs.

The peculiar moral views of 'Christians' are well known - including their repellant views on homosexuality, marriage and the value of unthinking faith - but I don't see why their message of hate should be perpetrated to reasoning licence-payers. Further, it is deeply offensive that these silly prejudices should be wrapped up in pretended compassion for the homeless, victims of the Asian tsunami, and the environment.

I particularly objected to "the Lord's Prayer". What people believe in the privacy of their own home is their own affair, but to hear this patchwork of falsehood repeated 800 times by this large Edinburgh congregation is just a slap in the face to reasoning people.

Yours faithlessly

Theatre Worker

Religion vs Theatre: Round 2

2005-01-07T11:13:00.000Z

Religion vs. The Theatre: Round Two

The BBC has reportedly received 45,000 complaints about its plans to screen Jerry Springer - The Opera this Saturday at 10.00 on BBC2. They have to be resisted.

In our commentary on the Behzti scandal, we remarked that the cancellation of the Birmingham Rep show could be understood in several ways, one of which is one of the first shots in a US-style culture war. This orchestrated attack on the Jerry Springer screening is another. The opera is hugely irreligious and very disrespectful and good thing too; the moment where Christ sings humbly - "Actually I am a bit gay" - will provide great entertainment for anyone angered by the anachronistic authority that the church is allowed to wield over our lives.

The main orchestrators of the complaints, Mediawatch (the renamed National Viewers and Listeners Association, obviously determined to cover up their connection with the loathed and ridiculed Mary Whitehouse) and various churchmen, have urged their members and parishioners to protest by email, letter and in person. The spokesmen for the complainants who have managed to get onto the media all admit that they haven't seen the show. This cannot be borne. No one has any right to criticize any work of art that they haven't seen. Everyone knows that art can only be experienced at first hand - there is no substitute for that and no understanding of that work of art can be gained by any other method.

The ignorance of these critics is clear in their much-repeated claim that there are 8000 swear words in the show. Work it out. The show runs at 120 minutes. That's 7200 seconds. Having seen the show, I can reassure them that there is not more than one swear word every second. It seems that what they've done is that when the chorus of 27 sing "what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucky fucking fuck" they count that not as 5 swear-words, but 135. That they resort these crude distortions says little for the integrity of their argument.

That said, if a programme were made that lasted two hours and included 8000 swear-words, one a second, it might be very good. You can all try to imagine your own songspiel events or sound poems that could use this starting point. The point is that no one can judge whether it's any good or not without seeing it. It might seem as if you can form a judgment about something based on its contents. Sure, you can form a judgment, but it won't be accurate and it will have no validity. If I tell you about a show that involves sexual violence, pornography, drug abuse, and a threat to puncture someone's eyeball with a knife, you might form the opinion that this is a British play of the mid-90s. In fact, I'm talking about Oklahoma! and I don't know anyone who's been offended by the level of sex and violence in that.

This is not just a television matter. Miranda Suit, from Mediawatch, began her comments on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning with these words: "It's bad enough in the theatre but ..." Absolutely. Let's be under no illusion. The BBC's a big target and if they yield to these complaints the theatre will have to follow. The letter from Mediawatch ends with this unbelievable suggestion: "There must be other West End productions that would be more enjoyable and appreciated by a far greater number of licence-fee payers? Why not, for example, screen a seasonal pantomime, with well-known and liked television and radio personalities, currently showing at provincial theatres across the country?" Seriously, that's the world they want for us. They have to be resisted.

The complainants say they will be offended by it. I am offended by the BBC's output every day. This morning, Catherine Pepinster's 'Thought For The Day' included a rank piece of anti-abortion rhetoric, masquerading as legitimate comment on Mike Leigh's Vera Drake. I find this deeply offensive, but I don't object to the BBC broadcasting the opinion. (I do find it bizarre that 'thoughts for the day' are held to be most appropriately religious ones, but that's a different matter.) I do find it deeply, deeply offensive that religious people should try to determine what I can or cannot see. I find it offensive that my television and radio cannot reflect and explore life as it is and might be because it could offend a few people with medieval beliefs about the world.

They think they are the heart of this country. They are not the heart of this country but they are trying to take over anyway as their Evangelical cousins have done in the US. They have to be resisted.

UPDATES 22.1.2005
Apparently the Christian Institute are calling for a judicial review to find whether the BBC 'discriminated against Christians by showing Jerry Springer - The Opera'. It would be rather fun if the results of this review were that the BBC were contractually obliged to offend all other major religious beliefs.
A prayer group, Christian Voice, are trying to bring a private prosecution against the BBC for showing JSTO. They'll find it hard since none of them appear to have seen it: their description of the show is filled with inaccuracies; apparently the show portrays Jesus as a 'coprophiliac sexual deviant' - which is a lovely idea, Christian Voice, even if it isn't what happened in JSTO. Keep those ideas coming though, you're flying! This 'bringing a private prosecution', when you read more closely, turns out to be 'having a meeting with their lawyers'. Which is not quite the same thing.
There's a brilliant analysis of these protests at the excellent Bloggerheads site.

The Year in New Writing

2005-01-04T15:13:00.000Z

2004: The Year in New Writing

2004 was not a hugely memorable year for new writing, but perhaps it contained hints at a change in the air.

New writing at the National Theatre was overwhelmed by the eventness of Stuff Happens. Nick Hytner – still on quite a roll – gave supportive interviews claiming that only David Hare could have written that play. In fact it’s the sort of play a few dozen playwrights could have written and it would have been interesting to see an angrier, rougher play, one that was not written in the same tensile diplomatese as its characters. That said, it was remarkable to sit in a packed Olivier watching such an indisputably political play and indeed to hear an audience applauding some of its sentiments. It was perhaps the high watermark of verbatim theatre. In Guantanamo and Justifying War, powerful evenings of theatre were produced by this approach. But, as we complained in November, it seems an unfortunate comment on our theatre that we seem to think that the theatre can only become political by becoming rather less than theatrical.

Other than Stuff Happens – a one-off – we’re still waiting for Hytner to make good on his promise of big plays for the big stages. Lenkiewicz and Kwei-Armah’s pieces were small, small, small. I had a great time with The History Boys (pictured below) but I can remember how enjoyable I found it much more than I can remember anything about the play, which suggests a thinly conceived, efficient evening, though pickings were not fat enough this year to make me want to dismiss that.

The most exciting new playwright to emerge this year was surely Lin Coghlan with her play Mercy. No, that’s too arrogant, she emerged a while ago and already has a body of work to her name, but she emerged into Encore’s collective consciousness this year with a thrilling play of mood and moral ambition, exploring what appeared to be the aftermath of chemical attack but in fact provided an in-between space for thinking again about the obligations we have to one another. It was rich with character and image and detail. The London critics were largely dismissive, of course, as they were to most of the really good work this year.

More established playwrights were conspicuously inconspicuous this year. Nothing really new from Mark Ravenhill, David Greig, David Harrower, Martin McDonagh – and still nothing from Rebecca Prichard, Chris Hannan, and we know of marvellous plays by Paul Godfrey, Robert Holman, and several others that remain unperformed. Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender, a sort of adaptation of Sophocles’s Trachiniai, was intermittently successful. Encore saw the production very early and it seemed to have little internal shape to it, seeming the stretch the material out, rather than wind it through an evening. It felt rather like Complicite’s The Elephant Vanishes – in that both parties, having produced masterpieces (Attempts on Her Life and Mnemonic, respectively), now seem to be treading water, trying to find where the hell they can go next. Crimp’s text for The False Servant was fine, though the production was pitiful.

Edinburgh threw out nothing spectacular. Encore adored Linda McLean’s Shimmer and detested the production; everything that was evanescent, weightless, shimmering in the play became stolid and mundane in the production. The set appeared to have been put in backwards and the much-ballyhooed water effect just looked like bleak Edinburgh drizzle on the afternoon I attended, but despite this the play – much much more formally daring and innovative in tone than the critics appear to have seen – confirms McLean as a great hope of the theatre. Much the most exciting playwriting event of the festival was Anthony Nielson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia (pictured, right), a beautifully oblique exploration of mental collapse and psychological retreat, winding through an exciting and engaging broken-backed structure and featuring the second talking polar bear Encore saw on a stage in 2004.

In Leeds, Roy Smiles’s Ying-Tong was as good as that curious genre, the stage biopic, gets, though Encore never felt the play became more than that. Steve Waters’s The Unthinkable for Sheffield is slightly disappointing, not encased in as formidable a structure as last year’s World Music, its undeniably important subject matter seemed theatrically undigested. Ed Thomas’s ‘comeback’ play at Clwyd, Stone City Blue, was exhilarating, thrilling to hear that voice again, now with an introspective edge as we explored a mind splintered by four actors. Was it too long? So said some of the critics, but they always do, and Encore would always prefer 15 minutes of meandering Ed Thomas than, well, pretty much anything else. Alan Wilkins’s The Nest at the Traverse was a delightful well-made comedy, given scale and edge by its mountain setting.

In London our major New Writing theatres were patchy. Hampstead continues to be in trouble; its diversion from difficult new writing to star-cast novelty shows may be paying dividends at the box office, I don’t know, but artistically it’s not a good idea. The Court’s policy continues to be rudderless – nothing they produced this year was without serious problems. Conor McPherson’s Shining City was about as good as it got, and that was flawed by its ending; Dumb Show was slick and witty but beneath its Mametisms it seemed emotionally and ethically brittle. Penhall’s writing was too pleased with itself – take a look at the opening lines on the page and you’ll see a play conceived at the computer, over in love with language and lies. Kevin Elyot’s Forty Winks was a beautiful first draft but if we were ever going to believe that this was the spiritual play about love that the play mentions and occasionally gestures towards, it needed robust rethinking. The third scene was unplayable. Blest be the Tie and Notes on Falling Leaves were respectively twee and minor, though the latter showed a welcome move towards more aching personal experience and a tenderness and gentility of vision from Ayub Khan-Din. As usual, all of these plays were elegantly staged, though the Court is showing an alarming predilection for witty but fantastically obstrusive sets. For much of Forty Winks and Dumb Show, the actors were in danger of being pushed into the front row by the design monumentalism.

The Bush never really hit home this year. Dispatches was beautifully constructed but only reminded this viewer how slender the attraction of structural beauty can be. The witty, gripping play never really seemed to become anything more than its story, though that story was well told. Chloe Moss’s How Love is Spelt was more promising, a robustly delicate story about self-reinvention and secrecy. Moss first came to prominence through the Royal Court Young Writer’s season and the heart sank a little to see the Court’s knee-jerk shabby bedsit meticulously recreated at the Bush. But this is a writer to watch. M.A.D. was David Eldridge treading water to some extent, a personal piece, I felt, written with his trademark quiet engagement and feeling.

The best plays at the Court and the Bush had several things in common; neither theatre solely produced the play – in fact both plays were produced by the Actors Touring Company. Even more strangely, both plays were written by the same person. In One Minute and Country Music, Simon Stephens emerged full-throatedly as the most promising playwright of his generation. One Minute is a fragmentary play, somewhat in the style of David Greig’s Cosmonaut, tracing the emotional ripples emanating from the abduction of a child. Despite the spare dialogue and fragmentary narrative, it’s also bold in its conception: an attempt to write a city on stage. Country Music (pictured left)shares with the musical genre of its title an emotional richness and hard-bitten lyricism. The action of the play covers nineteen years and traces a young man nicking a car and running off with his girlfriend, his subsequent imprisonment and then, achingly, his halting first meeting with his daughter. In this scene, surely the most poignant and beautiful of the year, gorgeously played by Lee Ross in one of the performances of the year, we see Jamie Carris in his bedsit awkwardly trying to make his daughter feel at home. The encounter goes wrong, not sensationally so, it just becomes uncomfortable. The daughter has too much stored up, sedimented resentment towards her father, and his years in prison have misshapen his social graces. Despite all that, Lee’s goodness comes through, in some moment of simple, elegant, emotional beauty. Jamie is trying to squeeze the last moments of contact from his daughter:

Jamie Tell me one thing that you want.
Emma I can’t think.
Jamie Please tell me.
Emma I’d like to fly a plane.
Jamie I think that’s brilliant, that. That stops me breathing.

It stopped me breathing too and everyone else in that tiny theatre. The play is not perfect; the final scene, returning us to just before the first, is redundant and risks sentimental neatness but otherwise this play has a delicacy that cuts against its own apparent urban disaffection (something we've all seen way too much of at the Court). That delicacy is something we've seen elsewhere in different forms (Mercy, Shimmer, etc.) and points us to an indefinable elsewhere and perhaps to a new direction for new writing.

Behzti Letters

2004-12-30T13:00:00.000Z

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.

Dishonoured

2004-12-20T16:07:00.000Z

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.

Dishonour

2004-12-19T13:37:00.000Z

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.

The Future Will Be Like This

2004-11-06T18:32:00.000Z

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.

Don't Let The Future Be Like This

2004-10-29T09:15:00.000+01:00

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.

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

The project for a new American century

National Theatres

2004-10-10T23:12:00.000+01:00

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!

2004-10-01T19:38:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-09-20T01:47:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-09-19T01:43:00.000+01:00

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...

2004-09-18T01:51:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-07-29T10:00:00.000+01:00

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.

2004-07-18T17:45:00.000+01:00

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?

2004-07-16T20:09:00.000+01:00

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!

2004-04-29T13:33:00.000+01:00

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!