Catherine Love-Smith

Home is Where the Art Is

Posted on April 17, 2014April 22, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for the Guardian Culture Professionals Network.

What value do you attach to a community art exhibition? How do you assess a conversation on a funding application? Is it possible to put a price tag on a space that allows young people to feel that the art inside belongs to them?

Responding to Arts Council England’s recent report on arts funding,Towards Plan A, some commentators suggested that arts organisations might be better off formulating a funding plan B. It’s clear that pleading the economic case for the arts is failing to have the desired impact with the government, while equally failing to take into account the many other, less tangible ways in which the arts produce value.

The alternative proposed by a recent article on the Guardian is to transform cultural organisations into vital, cherished hubs of their local community, making their disappearance unthinkable. This is not a new idea; many organisations are already buzzing hives of community activity – think of the local classes and workshops at Battersea Arts Centre, or the Albany’s commitment to open its doors to the people of south east London.

But it’s beyond London, where the funding climate is harsher, that such initiatives might have the greatest impact. This is certainly the hope of Annabel Turpin, chief executive of the ARC in Stockton, who insists that “arts centres have a much bigger part to play in the lives of local people”.

It’s her aim to open up the organisation as much as possible to its community: “giving people permission to come in and use the building.” Alongside its artistic programme, the ARC hosts activities that cover all demographics, from children’s dance classes to an extensive programme for older people. “It’s a very broad spectrum, and that allows us to attract people from right across the community,” Turpin explains.

The same discovery has been made by mac Birmingham, which can boast high levels of engagement with its local community. “What’s important is the range of what we do because we are a multi-artform centre,” stresses artistic director and chief executive Dorothy Wilson. The centre aims to take visitors on a journey, offering various points of entry and leading them to unexpected destinations, be that a contemporary theatre show or a craft workshop. Its mantra is that the community are all artists. As Wilson puts it: “We encourage people to feel that this is a place for them.”

One of the greatest assets held by arts centres is their space. This is something that has been recognised by Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff and Farnham Maltings in Surrey, the latter of which has offered much of its space over to its local community. “For us to thrive – to be truly popular – we needed to become relevant to more people and improve our usefulness,” says director Gavin Stride.

The difficulty, however, can be getting people over the threshold. “I don’t think we make enough of the fact that it’s free to come into an arts centre,” suggests Turpin. As public space shrinks, arts centres remain some of the only places that can be enjoyed without necessarily having to buy anything, a fact of which local people are not always aware. It is for this reason that mac Birmingham, for example, invests heavily in “free at the point of access opportunities” for those who might just stumble across the venue.

As well as throwing their doors open, some venues have gone further in their attempts to hand ownership over to local people. Matt Fenton is a passionate advocate for involving audiences in programming, an idea that he first tried out at the Nuffield Theatre in Lancaster and has now taken to Contact, Manchester, where a group of young people from the area have a key role in how the venue is run. He argues that audiences today expect more of a “two way conversation” and that the best way to target new, more diverse audiences is to represent their voice from within an organisation’s decision making structures.

“If arts organisations are genuine about a desire not just to reach more people but more broadly across the spectrum of their communities, then they’re going to need to think about how open they are, how engaged they are, as organisations,” Fenton insists.

The anecdotal support for these approaches is backed up by some compelling statistics. Contact’s commitment to young people has resulted in audiences that are 70% under 35, while mac Birmingham achieves 30-65% crossover audiences across its arts programme. Chapter boasted 800,000 visits in 2013, two-thirds of whom attended non-core activities and, as all of these organisations are keen to emphasise, none of this is at the expense of making great art.

Convincing as this model may be, however, the organisations that have committed to it all stress that such changes cannot be made purely in the service of self-preservation during difficult times. As Fenton puts it: “Arts organisations, especially publicly funded ones, should be doing this anyway.”

Photo: Chapter Arts Centre.

Once, Phoenix Theatre

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Once is a quiet revelation of a film. Running at a brisk 86 minutes, it is a shimmering sliver of a thing, played out in muted, almost documentary style naturalism. While very little happens and even less is said, it quickly but gently grasps at the emotions, stubbornly refusing to let go.

Replicating this subdued and intimate experience on a big proscenium arch stage would be an impossible, thankless task, and it is one that adapters John Tiffany and Enda Walsh have wisely avoided. Instead, delicate watercolours are traded in for broader, brighter brushstrokes, in a production that adds plenty of colour – perhaps too much – to John Carney’s film. Staged entirely in a pub, this bittersweet tale is subjected to lively and occasionally raucous storytelling, helped along by a skilled chorus of actor-musicians.

The plot is simple enough. A Guy and Girl – we never learn their names – meet on the streets of Dublin. He’s a busker and hoover repair man on the point of giving up his music, while she’s a Czech immigrant who plays a mean tune on the piano. In exchange for fixing her broken vacuum cleaner, the Girl prevents the Guy from throwing in the towel, injecting both his music and his life with fresh energy. Inevitably, the two begin to fall for one another, in spite of the Guy’s unfinished business with an ex-girlfriend in New York and the Girl’s daughter and absent husband. In other words, it’s complicated.

While Markéta Irglová in the film was a quietly enigmatic, inscrutable figure, Walsh’s book has added new, vivid lines to the female character, transforming her into the driving motor of the story. Zrinka Cvitešić is an electric presence, charging the Girl with an overflowing, infectious energy, but this new characterisation has more than a touch of Manic Pixie Dream Girl about it. Cvitešić is the kind of kooky romantic interest that has become a Hollywood staple: mysterious, intelligent, daydreamy, and ultimately inserted to enable the male lead to discover his purpose in life. This now feels less like their story, and more like his.

This irritating niggle aside, Tiffany and Walsh’s adaptation makes clever, playful use of the conventions of the stage. The Irish pub, a setting that is also proving effective down the road in The Weir, creates an instantly convivial environment, even inviting audience members on stage with the musicians for a pre-show pint. Smartly embracing the simplicity of the storytelling form, it never pretends that it is anything other than theatre, having fun with the juggling of basic props to transport us from scene to scene. Steven Hoggett’s movement, meanwhile, explores a tender physical language that begins to communicate some of the many things left unsaid in the film, though Walsh’s script still succumbs to the urge to spell things out more explicitly than the quietly reserved original.

One of the main attractions of this particular incarnation of the show is Arthur Darvill, of Doctor Who fame, who has taken over the role of the Guy after a stint in the Broadway production. He makes an expressively awkward male lead, hands frequently stuffed in pockets, packing layers of meaning into a single shrug of the shoulders. And there’s no doubt he can sing, belting out the opening number with the kind of furious intent that instantly dispels any reservations.

Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s Oscar-winning music translates comfortably onto the stage, with some charming, unobtrusive added orchestrations by Martin Lowe. It is still the poignant and rousing “Falling Slowly” that dominates the score, with many of the other folksy, Mumford and Sons-esque tunes fading quickly from the memory. There is a fresh musical highlight, however, in the gorgeous a capella rendering of “Gold”, which weaves a haunting choral tapestry in the second half. As in the film, it is through the music that emotion is most simply and powerfully communicated, with little need for added frills.

And it is the few frills and flourishes that have been added which, for me, let the piece down a little. The need to flesh out the supporting characters is justified enough, but the humorous edges added by Walsh have a tendency to feel forced, while joviality occasionally threatens to smother emotion. It’s hard to protest against Once‘s intoxicating charm, but I could have done with a little more of the film’s sighing wistfulness.

Little Bulb

Posted on April 17, 2014April 24, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for The Stage.

Novelty has become something of a raison d’être for Little Bulb. Since forming at the University of Kent and making their name with Crocosmia, a sweetly ingenious tale of three orphaned siblings, the theatre company have pursued fresh challenges for each successive production. Be it mounting a gypsy jazz opera from scratch in Orpheus or learning to dance for Squally Showers, they are always seeking new skills.

“Each show should be different,” insists director Alex Scott, “either thematically or stylistically.” Their quest for new challenges has led them down unexpected avenues, hopping from intimate character pieces to physical work to musical epics. Scott suggests that while some companies are happy to hone their expertise in one genre, Little Bulb’s members “tend to be a bit flighty”. As founder member Clare Beresford adds, “why should you shut something down just because you’ve become accidentally known for one thing?”

Discovery is embedded in the company’s way of working. “Normally we start with a name,” explains Scott, “and then part of our process is to work out why the show’s got that name and what the plot is. We like having processes where you will find out as the process is developing what’s happening to the characters.”

If any connecting strand has emerged throughout their work, it is music. But even this, it transpires, was something of an accident. While all the founder members were passionate about music, it was only through working together over time that this became a vital ingredient of their productions. “It’s just grown and grown through something almost irresistible,” says company member Dominic Conway, whose instrument of choice is the guitar. “There was never a grand plan and early on music wasn’t really in our mission statement.”

Crocosmia, which was first created as Scott’s end of year project at university before making waves at the Edinburgh Fringe, used a record player as a central prop in the narrative. From there, the company began incorporating live music into their shows, first in sprawling folk opera Sporadical and then in Operation Greenfield, which explored the awkwardness of adolescence through the story of a Christian folk band.

“Music is very powerful,” says Scott. “It’s a way of accessing emotion and portraying emotion in a way that sometimes naturalism struggles to.” In more recent work, this investigation of music as a theatrical tool has been taken even further. Since 2011, the company has taken their music into new territory by performing as a band under the name Goose Party, while Orpheus demanded them to master a completely new genre: gypsy jazz.

The show was born from a “really open” commission from David Jubb at Battersea Arts Centre. “His brief was ‘we’d like you to create a show on a bigger canvas’ and it literally could have been anything,” Scott recalls. Little Bulb hit on the mythical narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice, which they paired with legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt to craft an intricate show within a show. The company recruited additional members, learned new instruments and upgraded to the imposing space of BAC’s Grand Hall.

The show, which is being revived for a second run this spring, offered an opportunity for the company to stretch their ambition beyond the intimate work that had gained them their reputation. They explain that the support of BAC was essential in this jump from small-scale to mid-scale. “Sometimes you do something that you would never do because somebody else has trust in you,” says Beresford. “If somebody has faith in you taking the risk, there’s something very freeing about that. It adds extra pressure, because you don’t want to let people down, but it also gives you the impetus to do something.”

Little Bulb admit that they have been lucky to have this kind of support throughout their career so far, both from BAC and from their producers Farnham Maltings, who “actively support our sort of contrary genre-shifting”. Perhaps their greatest genre shift to date was the one they embarked upon for last year’s Edinburgh Fringe show Squally Showers, which saw them ditch the instruments and put on their dancing shoes.

“We wanted to do something completely without live music,” says Scott, acknowledging the abrupt departure from the style that had won them a faithful following. “Although we never like to disappoint an audience, we just thought this is a challenge that we need to do for ourselves. We wanted to do something that was accessing a physical language rather than a musical language and see where that would take us.”

The resulting show uses dance, movement and a series of long, wordless montage sequences to tell the madcap story of a television news studio in the 1980s, mixing politics and pirouettes. Scott admits that “some audiences were completely confused by it”, but stands by the show as an important creative exploration for the company. Scott intends to take elements of what they have learned forward into future projects, adding, “I don’t think we’d be intimidated by a dance sequence in a show now”.

What has endured through all of Little Bulb’s shows, albeit in varying ways, is their fascination with character. Scott is interested in placing the company’s carefully drawn characters in a world “where it is naturalistic but also anything else is possible, so you’ve got all that potential for dreams and metaphor and all of those things, but they feel like real people”. Beresford agrees: “I find it really freeing that you can use something so solid but in a structure that’s so free”.

In developing the compelling character dynamics that drive their narratives, it helps that Little Bulb are extraordinarily close-knit as an ensemble. The group all live together while making their work, an arrangement which, as Conway explains, allows the creative process to be as flexible as possible. “Sometimes you really crack an element of the show lying in bed at night having a bit of a chat, or you hit upon a really good idea over breakfast,” he says. “It’s great if you can just turn up at 10, do the work, have a lunch break and come back, but in practice you never know when the good ideas are going to come.”

“We like working as a group of friends,” Scott adds. “Even if you’re just chatting and becoming closer as people, then that shows on stage that the ensemble is very close.” But this practice of spending every minute of the day together does also have its drawbacks. “On the flipside, it’s hard to turn off, which has its own dangers as well,” Beresford warns. “Where does work end and life begin?”

For now, work and life are once again blurring, as the company’s hobby of playing gigs as a band is about to become even more central to their work. Little Bulb are just starting work on their first album, rekindling some of the ambitions that inspired Goose Party. “We’re just doing it for the love of experimentation and to see what comes out of it,” says Conway, while Scott laughs, “it may not reach the higher end of the charts”. If nothing else, it’s a new challenge.

Photo: James Allan.

Mark Heap: Mr Zany Buttons Up

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for The Guardian.

Mark Heap is wryly recalling an online comment describing his bizarre turn in Channel 4’s Green Wing. It ran: “Mark Heap doing his usual mad thing, but slightly fatter.” “Which I thought was brilliant,” he says, “but it’s kind of true.”

Heap has become television’s go-to oddball, best known for the roles of otherworldly conceptual artist Brian in Spaced and Green Wing’s outlandish and obsessive Dr Alan Statham. More recently, he’s been stealing scenes in Friday Night Dinner as an over-friendly neighbour. Now he is returning to the stage after a 20-year hiatus. Next week he takes over from Matthew Macfadyen as PG Wodehouse‘s famously unflappable butler in the Jeeves and Wooster comedy Perfect Nonsense, alongside Peep Show star Robert Webb (replacing Stephen Mangan) as his foolhardy employer.

When we speak at the Duke of York’s theatre in the West End, at the end of a long day of rehearsals, Heap confesses that throughout his years of TV work, he was rarely tempted by theatre roles. Jeeves, however, was a part he could not turn down. “It came along and I found it difficult, nigh-on impossible, to say no to.”

It was the appeal of PG Wodehouse’s fiction that clinched it. “It’s just a joy to read,” Heap says simply. “They make such a mountain out of nothing – there’s high farce over a teapot or an ashtray.” Heap also revels in Wodehouse’s distinctive, elaborate use of language. “On the one hand you’re saying a thousand words with two words, like ‘indeed sir’, or you’re saying one word using 30 – it’s brilliant. There’s so much implied.”

Heap was particularly impressed by the way Robert and David Goodale’s stage adaptation manages to retain the memorable prose of Bertie Wooster’s narration. The action is framed within a play put on by the protagonist – with only his aunt’s servant Seppings, and Jeeves, to assist him. Cue chaos, confusion and quick changes. “There are two levels,” says Heap. “The Wodehouse meat and the froth of watching people struggling to double up and play with all the theatrical conventions.”

Does Wodehouse’s distant world of buttoned-up butlers and fearsome aunts have anything to say to us today? Heap suggests that it is precisely because Wodehouse’s characters are so of their time that they continue to tickle audiences, tapping into a very British brand of nostalgia. Unlike Shakespeare, whose works have been relocated to every era and setting imaginable, Wodehouse’s stories demand to remain firmly in the early 20th century; any attempt to update them, Heap argues, “would be hopeless”.

In person, Heap is unexpectedly straightforward – unassuming, almost – revealing only the occasional glimmer of the strangeness that animates his TV performances. Although he insists his succession of quirky roles was a “total accident”, he admits that “arsing about and being silly” have always appealed to him as a performer. The Green Wing cast had two months together before getting in front of a camera – “you develop little tics”. As for Brian: “he was meant to be quite flamboyant and I found myself, just because I was in the mood that day, thinking: what if he was really uncertain and a bit tortured. It built from there.”

The business can narrow you down, Heap says. “You start off going, ‘I can play anything’, and slowly you get whittled down.” But he shrugs at the happy coincidence of his career: “I’ve always just fuddled along. I do my job and it’s all I’m any good at to be honest.”

A year into university, he ran away from his studies – not with the circus, but with Fools Theatre, a touring company producing Pinter plays and “avant-garde, mime dance-movement things”. From there, he joined his brother Carl’s Medieval Players company, performing all around the world until he and fellow actor Mark Saban splintered off to form a street theatre duo, The Two Marks, which eventually led to television work.

Is it intimidating to return to theatre in a role with as rich a history as Jeeves? Heap concedes that the prospect is “bloody daunting”, but adds: “like any character, you have to bring your own thing to it”. He is still discovering his idiosyncratic take on the character, explaining that his approach tends to be “instinctive” rather than psychological. In a show that takes a sledgehammer to the fourth wall, some elements will remain uncertain until put in front of an audience – the “missing ingredient”.

“I’m hoping, if I live to the first performance and don’t die of exhaustion, that I’ll suddenly realise the joy of theatre – that immediate response and feedback,” Heap says. The show, with its breakneck visual gags and more costume changes than a Lady Gaga gig, is an unforgiving reintroduction to the stage. At the very least, Heap jokes, the punishing pace will keep him fit. “They will say Mark is doing his usual mad thing, but looking a lot thinner.”

Photo: Graham Turner.

Birdland, Royal Court

Posted on April 10, 2014April 22, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

“I don’t believe this,” Andrew Scott cries, gaze directed unwaveringly at the audience. “None of this is real. None of this is really happening. This whole thing is made up.”

Reality and its subjective mutability is a persistent theme throughout Birdland, Simon Stephens’ new play for the Royal Court. So too is liveness and its ever-present flipside, mediation. More audience members at a stadium gig today can see the big screens than the miniscule, far-away figures on stage; fans are more eager to snap selfies with their famous idols than to actually speak to them. Our glowing screens are never far from the edges of Stephens’ play, reminding us that it is not only rock stars who are encouraged to shape and enshrine their own image. We are all constantly sharing, editing, performing for our own personal audiences; blurring the lines between the real and the made up.

Birdland opens in the final stages of an international stadium tour, as its unnamed band stop off in Moscow. Lead singer Paul, reeking of charm and boredom, can have and do anything he wants – and he knows it. Stripped of limits and obstacles, the boundaries of his identity are slowly slipping away from him. He is, in every possible way, losing it. The play traces the escalating carnage of his existence as he careers unstoppably towards a personal and professional car crash, gathering the wreckage of other ruined lives around him on the way.

It’s no great stretch of the imagination to believe that Andrew Scott, charisma oozing from every pore, is a worshipped rock star. From the moment he struts on stage as Paul, he fixes the attention in that way that all the best frontmen do, making it almost impossible to look away. It is this magnetism that makes him ceaselessly compelling, even as he royally fucks over all of those close to him. Jenny, a waitress whom Paul whisks off her feet before spectacularly mistreating her, is generous when she describes him as a cunt; Stephens really has crafted an astonishingly despicable, broken character. Though, as Paul coolly retorts to an accusation that he is a “fucking animal”, he is very much human. That’s the terrifying thing.

Equally terrifying is the play’s verdict on the world we currently live in. While Birdland is superficially “about” the world of rock and roll and the personal crisis of one of its demigods, it is also about the bankrupt place in which society now finds itself. Paul, in all his power, disorientation and self-destruction, is the apex of rapacious capitalism and the cult of the individual. Whether he is a rock star or a celebrity of any other breed is less important than the fact of his fame and the value pinned to his personality. He is more commodity than person, displayed every night for the public’s consumption while record label executives gamble on his worth. No wonder he is losing a grip on his own identity, when all he can see in the mirror is a price tag.

Carrie Cracknell’s striking production both amplifies and tussles with these ideas about identity, individualism, celebrity and capitalism. From the very beginning, the space in which she locates Paul’s crisis is non-specific, strange and slightly dislocated from reality. Ian MacNeil’s typically stylish set consists of a shimmering golden archway and a row of electric blue chairs, the sleek simplicity hinting at the corporate sameness of hotel lobbies all over the world. Everywhere looks the same. There is, wisely, no attempt at naturalistic representation of the succession of hotel rooms, bars and restaurants in which the action takes place. Instead, everything happens in a knowingly theatrical arena; other performers remain on the stage when not in a scene, occasionally casting arch looks over their shoulders, while Scott takes time to flirt with the audience.

By starting out with such a deliberately odd and disorientating aesthetic, however, Cracknell is in danger of leaving herself with nowhere to go. An obvious but useful comparison is Three Kingdoms, which despite dodging an audience’s expectations from the off (and starting in a decidedly strange place with Risto Kubar’s haunting singing) managed to establish one reality which could then increasingly unravel throughout Ignatius’ journey to Germany and Estonia. There is a gathering momentum to Paul’s mental turmoil, signalled by ever brighter and more frequent photographic flashes and the rising tides of inky liquid seeping in from the sides of the stage, but this is a jerky breakdown, one that comes in sharp bursts, rather than the sense of spiralling out of control that the narrative seems to be asking for.

That said, in other ways Cracknell finds incisive and imaginative visual metaphors for the story Stephens has written. The cartoonish, plastic quality of the people Paul finds himself surrounded with (perhaps with the exception of down-to-earth band mate and best friend Johnny and the aforementioned Jenny, who reminds him of the girls he used to know at home) enhances his alienation from the world around him, which appears unreal and fantastical through his eyes. Meanwhile, the script’s understated yet unsettling preoccupation with bodies – their illness, disfigurement and inevitable decay – is hinted at by the slowly encroaching black liquid, which might as well be the creep of disease.

Given the subject matter, one of the most surprising things about this rendering of Stephens’ script is that we never hear so much as a bar of Paul’s music. In fact, aside from a couple of stylised movement sequences backed with pulsing beats, there is very little music at all in Cracknell’s production. The other exception is a deliberately terrible rendition of Sam Cooke’s ‘Wonderful World’, sung by one of Paul’s fans at his request and elevated to the same sort of scene-breaking moment as Steven Scharf’s memorable performance of ‘Rocky Raccoon’ in Three Kingdoms. The suggestion, perhaps, is that it is not really Paul’s music that matters – it is his fame, his monetary worth. Still, we never get a real sense of the muscular excitement and visceral thrill of a live rock concert, which feels like a shame. Theatre has overwhelmingly proved that it can offer the same intoxicating buzz as a live gig (see Beats or Brand New Ancients), but we don’t get that here. (It’s especially disappointing having heard Stephens speak at length about his own enthusiasm for rock music, little of which is allowed to come through – but perhaps a certain ambivalence about the world of rock and roll is appropriate given the events of the narrative.)

The plays’ surface message, that celebrity can fuck you up, might not be anything new. But there is so much more to Birdland than this familiar, oft-repeated observation. What it manages to do so well is convey the tortured complexities of Paul’s character, whose messy contradictions only make him all the more real, at the same time as making a sharp, implicitly political point about modern society. The production could push this second aspect further, shining a spotlight on us as much as on Paul, but it still stands as a damning critique of our globalised, brutally individualistic, fame-obsessed world.

Photo: Kevin Cummins.

Author: Catherine Love-Smith