Karagula, Styx

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Often, Philip Ridley’s work treads a fine line between reality and fantasy. Monsters dwell in bedsits and the strange erupts from the mundane. In his latest play, though, he abandons himself entirely to the fantastical. Karagula is a messy, sprawling sci-fi epic, spanning hundreds of years and dozens of characters. It’s a long way from the contained, claustrophobic oddness and horror that Ridley is perhaps best known for.

We start, at least, in familiar territory. A young couple kiss in the dusk, talking about the upcoming prom. Soon, though, this hackneyed scenario is subverted. Dean, tipped for prom king that year, is afraid about what happens after he’s crowned. His girlfriend, Libby, romanticises the glory of his forthcoming sacrifice. There’s talk of bullets and blood. Then, while we’re still digesting the sudden change of tone, the play wrenches us somewhere and somewhen else. And somewhere and somewhen else again.

As with his earlier play, Shivered, in Karagula Ridley takes a hammer to his narrative, piecing its splinters back together in non-linear form. To begin with, scenes share little to no relation to one another. We’re dazzled with a baffling array of characters and places and conflicts. Gradually, though, connections appear between what seem like completely different worlds. What looms into view, as we assemble it piece by piece, is a jigsaw puzzle of vast proportions, following one imagined civilisation through upheavals, revolutions and brutal civil wars.

This is ambitious stuff to put on a stage. Sci-fi of this scope tends to be reserved for films, high-budget TV and hefty novels. It’s especially ambitious on a fringe theatre scale (and budget), which is what theatre company PIGDOG have – albeit somewhat wonkily – achieved. There are a huge number of scenes and settings to race through, a feat managed with impressive fluidity thanks to canny use of lighting, sound and space in Max Barton’s production. In a former ambulance depot in Tottenham Hale, the audience are seated along two sides of the action, our attention being dragged swiftly from one end of the space to the other with a dynamism that matches the energy of the fast-moving script. Only after the interval, when the seating switches to an end-on configuration, does it begin to drag a little.

Faith – often misguided – is a recurring theme throughout. In Mareka, the uncanny, pink-tinged replica of 1950s/60s American suburbia where prom kings and queens are annual sacrificial offerings, the worship of milkshakes is an incitement to murder. In other fractured, fragile societies, belief latches onto whatever it can find. I’m reminded more than once of Mr Burns, which traced the post-apocalyptic elevation of fragmented pop culture to semi-religious idol. If Karagula as a whole is “about” anything, then it’s about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world and the lengths those stories can lead us to. Narratives create meaning, but they can also sow the seeds of destruction.

As for Karagula’s narrative, it’s as bloated and baggy as it is ambitious. For every scene that builds the intrigue and increases the tension, there’s another that’s wildly superfluous. The second half, while shorter than the first, feels drawn out – especially a scrappy bunker scene that long outstays its welcome. PIGDOG do their best with it, chucking in a TARDIS-full of visual sci-fi references and pluckily making the best of the budget Doctor Who aesthetic, but what Ridley’s play really needs is streamlining. Epic and ambitious, yes, but not half as haunting as the confined nastiness that Ridley specialises in.

Photo: Lara Genovese.

Without Blood, The Place

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Without Blood is a show of contrasts. War and peace. Revenge and forgiveness. Sound and silence. Light and darkness. White chalk footprints on a smooth black floor.

Yet for all those contrasts, all that black and white, it’s essentially a piece about grey areas. It inhabits those murky moral zones that expand during times of conflict, when murder is recruited to the cause of the greater good and the lines between right and wrong look increasingly shaky. A group of men kill in cold blood. A child is caught up helplessly in the violence. The cycle of pain and retribution goes round and round.

Inne Goris’s production is an adaptation of Alessandro Baricco’s novella of the same name, which tells a story of war and its consequences that is deliberately blurred at the edges. The catalytic events – never seen, always heard or described – have taken place during a four-year war, but neither nations nor sides are named. We’re left wondering where this is and what was being fought for, forced to decipher the unravelling narrative with patchy guesswork.

There is, thanks to this deliberate vagueness, something of the allegory to Without Blood. At times in Goris’s version it even seems like a dark fairytale, with its odd, occasionally almost fantastical, storytelling and the haunting presence of a child clad in red. This child is a young girl whose father and brother were killed by soldiers while she hid under the floorboards. Now, 52 years later, her older self sits across the table from one of those soldiers – the one who found her and quietly let her live. Many years after a war that never really ended for either of them, they stare across at one another and tell their stories.

Goris’s approach is all tell, no show. Speaking about themselves in the third person, at one remove from their own traumatic experiences, the two characters narrate the past that we are denied access to. Only in the opening minutes, under cover of darkness, do we get a glimpse of the events that knitted together the lives of the two protagonists, and even then it is through the abstracted forms of music and minimal projected text. There is a sense that war is not something that can be straightforwardly represented.

It ends up feeling, though, like the novella has been simply placed on stage, rather than having been adapted into a distinct theatrical idiom. With so much of the show consumed by slow, static speech, it’s a struggle to maintain the concentration that would be held rapt by the same words in prose. The stories themselves are compelling, but their telling lacks any dynamism.

That’s not to deny that there are some striking touches. Dominique Pauwels’ music opens the show with a jolt of horror, its aftershocks ringing periodically through the quiet conversation that follows. The outline of chalk around the table where the two characters sit, meanwhile, lightly suggests the division of past from present – a division made ever more permeable as the ghostly figure of that girl under the floorboards walks across and through it, trailing white dust.

“You have an odd way of telling things,” says the former soldier to the little girl grown old. The same could be said of this production, whose strangeness and stillness become increasingly frustrating. The pain of war might persist, but Goris and her team never make us feel the sting.

Photo: Koen Broos.

“Theatre is always about together”

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

“I could watch them do this all day,” director Alexander Zeldin leans over to say to me. In a large, bright rehearsal room at Birmingham Rep, we are sat observing a group of young actors attempt an impossible task. The members of the Foundry actors’ group are walking an imaginary tightrope, concentrating fiercely on feeling the fictional rope beneath their feet and responding to the minute movements of their fellow performers. It’s all about establishing trust and sensitivity, forging an environment from which creativity can spring.

Launched in October 2015, this strand of the Foundry programme was established to offer free training and support for local actors aged between 18 and 30. The project, run by Zeldin, has deliberately targeted performers who have relatively little experience and for whom drama school is not an affordable option. While this is an experiment in collaboration on a small scale, Zeldin – whose ultimate goal is to establish a permanent company of actors – is partly inspired by the principles of ensemble theatre-making.

Ensemble seems to be having its moment. As part of the growing interest in continental European theatre, there is a fascination among many British theatre-makers with ensembles operating across the Channel. This is then reflected in experiments like the Foundry actors’ group and the Secret Theatre project, which brought together a company of actors, writers, directors, designers and dramaturgs to make work collaboratively over two years at the Lyric Hammersmith. Perhaps, though, ’twas ever thus. “It’s always come and gone, and it’s always been an idea which is about to have its moment again,” says academic, director and dramaturg Tom Cornford. “That’s been a repeated pattern.”

The question of what precisely ensemble is, though, is harder to answer. As Peter Brook put it, “We can all instantly feel what it isn’t. No one can say what it is.” In his book Encountering Ensemble, John Britton suggests a number of ways in which it is possible to understand the idea of ensemble: in terms of organisational structure, of a company’s longevity, of training principles, of a sense of common purpose and togetherness.

Historically, Cornford tells me, there are two competing accounts of ensemble theatre. One comes from Stanislavsky, arriving in the UK about a century ago via Harley Granville-Barker, and is centred on the actor. The other, which was introduced into British theatre by Komisarjevsky at around the same time, is more focused on the visionary director or auteur who, in Cornford’s words, “brings everyone together and makes everyone more creative in a way that they weren’t under normal, conventional rehearsal room circumstances”.

It’s easy to see the influence of these two contrasting yet related approaches in twenty-first-century British theatre. Theatre-makers in the UK – and particularly those from younger generations – are often in thrall to directors whose work is acclaimed across Europe and who are typically described as auteurs: Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, Katie Mitchell. The spirit of the actor-focused ensemble, meanwhile, can be seen in recent collaborative endeavours such as Secret Theatre or Michael Boyd’s attempt to install an “ensemble way of working” during his time at the helm of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

So what does ensemble mean to Zeldin? Its essence, he suggests, is there in all theatre. “Ensemble means ‘together’ in French,” Zeldin observes. “Theatre is always about together, whether it’s the audience and the performer or the group of people that are making the work or the wider community that the work is connected to in some way.”

Zeldin admits, despite his long-term ambitions, that “ensembleis a very big word for what we have here”. The ensemble, though, is crucial to Zeldin’s approach to theatre-making – in theory, if not quite in practice. His eventual dream is to work with one group of actors for an extended period of years, perhaps even decades. For now, though, ensemble principles structure his work as a director within the constraints of more limited artistic processes, be that in Beyond Caring (on which he worked with a group of actors over an extended period), the Foundry actors’ group or Love, his new show for the National Theatre and Birmingham Rep. At the core of Zeldin’s methodology is a series of questions.

“What do we have to say together?” he asks. “What is the need for us to use theatre to think about our own reality, our own social situation, our own social environment and our own inner life? How can we use the theatre to understand the world we live in better? That’s always the question I’m asking at every moment. What is it specific to the theatre that allows us to think about the world? Because to do theatre is a way of thinking about the world.”

There can, however, be a tendency to mythologise and mysticise the idea of ensemble. Cornford offers the example of Boyd, who claimed that his ensemble at the RSC had a “deep voodoo”. To quote Cornford, “what the hell is that?” Yes, groups of theatre-makers who work with one another over extended periods undoubtedly form deeper connections than those who are together for a limited rehearsal period, but when does that become a genuine ensemble?

“Ensemble, I think, is something that happens,” says Cornford. “It’s not a steady state, it’s a process. It’s something which always is happening and is going to at some point run out, because people move on.” Think of some of the most prominent and successful British ensembles – Complicite, say, or Kneehigh – and it quickly becomes clear that these now consist of small core creative teams with changing sets of collaborators. When, then, does an ensemble stop being an ensemble? “It’s a bit like a band, isn’t it?” Cornford suggests. “You have to take a view, don’t you, on whether if a band has now replaced all of their players, are they really still that band?”

Another source for ideas of ensemble, which forms the subject of Cornford’s current research, is the studio, which sits somewhere between drama schools and producing theatres. Cornford elaborates: “It’s not primarily dedicated to training people and giving them a certificate and putting them out in the world, it isn’t primarily dedicated to producing plays, it’s primarily dedicated to producing a company of people who will go on to produce work.” The examples he’s looking at include Michael Chekhov’s work at Dartington, Michel Saint Denis at London Theatre Studio and the Old Vic, the RSC in the mid-1960s, and Joan Littlewood with Theatre Workshop.

One final and much more recent example that Cornford is exploring is Secret Theatre. Launching the project, the Lyric’s artistic director Sean Holmes described it as “an attempt to create a new structure that might lead to a new type of work”, yet he also acknowledged “the example of the European ensemble” as a key inspiration. Deliberately – and here lies the connection with the studio – the ten actors in the company were all young, creating an ethos that was as much about training, development and experimentation as about artistic creation.

The Foundry actors’ group, too, shares more in common with the studio than with European ensembles such as Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Zeldin, though, has an uneasy relationship with the idea of training. “We never suggested at any point that it was a kind of alternative drama school,” he clarifies. “It’s not a drama school, it’s a group which is starting to touch on and question this idea of training and to ask what it means to work together with a group of people who haven’t got very much experience. What is that for them? What is that for the artist leading it?”

What eventually emerges in the Birmingham Rep’s rehearsal room is a delicate yet oddly absorbing environment. During one characteristically simple scene, I find myself completely sucked in and surrounded by the funeral scenario that the performers are unfussily playing out. It’s natural, unaffected, ordinary. Zeldin explains to me that there was no material at the start of this process other than the people in the room; everything they have created has been created together from their own impulses and experiences. “That’s something that for me is really crucial,” he says, “that everything I’m doing is always emerging from who the people are, what they carry.” As one of the participants succinctly puts it, “we take our stories and make them into stories that are not our own”.

The current experiment at Birmingham Rep is also part of a wider question about, in Zeldin’s words, “how the theatre sits inside a community”. Throughout all the work that the theatre does through its Foundry programme, artistic director Roxana Silbert is interested in how the venue connects with local artists and residents. It comes back to that simple idea of ensemble as togetherness. Perhaps, as Zeldin suggests, “the ensemble is always at the heart of everything that theatre is”.

YOUARENOWHERE, Shoreditch Town Hall

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

YOUARENOWHERE, all one word, can be read two ways. It can be a statement of certainty, of being decisively placed in the world: you are now here. Or it can be a revelation of nothingness, of uncertainty: you are nowhere.

Andrew Schneider’s glitching mindfuck of a show is sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. It is, in every sense of the word, disorientating. It jolts its audience out of time and space – or maybe it just makes us realise that time and space are one and the same, and that everything is happening all at once.

From the moment we first see Schneider before us, the rules by which we usually order world and stage are violently disrupted. Schneider doesn’t enter; he suddenly materialises. The lights snap on and there he is, shirtless and panting, as if vomited up out of nowhere into this bare white space. In appealing disarray, he begins to talk to us, but the mechanics of the show around him keep interrupting. Coloured lights flash on and off. Huge swells of sound swallow his words. Technology glitches.

You think of time like a line, right? Or like a road, stretching out behind and ahead, you gliding along in the driver’s seat. Wrong. In his quick-fire, cut-up lecture – stories are abruptly truncated, ideas diced up and thrown back together – Schneider rapidly unsettles popular, shared notions of time. The references whizz by so fast it’s almost impossible to grasp them – Einstein’s theory of relativity gets a nod, I’m pretty sure – but the overall sense is of a sudden unmooring from the certainties of seconds, minutes and hours.

It’s about form as much as, if not more than, content. There are moments in the show when we feel time, we note its passage (even if “passage” is just another flawed metaphor for a false, man-made construction). At other points, we can see its signifiers – the clock rapidly counting down, the lights flickering on and off – but feel somehow wrenched out of it. Or at least I do. As Schneider makes clear, different perspectives create different realities.

Death, as well as time, is a constant preoccupation. If there’s any way in which we can individually grasp time, after all, it’s as an inexorable movement towards our eventual demise. What if, Schneider poses, every time you thought about death there was another you, in a parallel reality, who had actually died in that moment? Like a morbid take on Sliding Doors, or a version of Constellations with a rapidly mounting body count.

And there’s more. There’s all this stuff about missed connections, fate, love. The loneliness of being trapped inside your own head, your own existence, trapped outside the perceptions of others. Forever separate. “We exist in each other’s realities,” says Schneider. “But not in the way that we think we do.”

Those words might read as a thesis of sorts, if it were possible to boil YOUARENOWHERE down to anything as simple or straightforward as a thesis. As a demonstration of its own ideas, Schneider’s show refuses to slot into any kind of linear logic, impressing itself on the consciousness as a disconnected series of images and sounds and thoughts. But, whatever physics might say, we humans are meaning-making creatures, and so meaning emerges nonetheless.

Schneider, though, has a few tricks to unsettle that instinctive dot-joining. The second half of the show is a series of dazzling, gasp-out-loud rug pulls, each more audacious than the last. Just as we think we’ve found our footing, Schneider sends us stumbling once again. The last reveal in particular robs me of my breath and makes my stomach fall entirely away. I feel dizzy, discombobulated, as lost as the man on stage.

But what’s really there beyond the trickery? Is it, I ask myself, just a load of superficially clever posturing dressed up in the kind of pulse-raising stagecraft that makes me go giddy? There are definitely bits of YOUARENOWHERE that feel like the “gobbets” Irwin encourages the Oxbridge hopefuls to use in The History Boys: chunks of borrowed cleverness, plundered with little care for their origins. And yet. Whether it’s the startling precision of Schneider’s staging or the cumulative effect of the show’s snippets of physics and philosophy (most likely both), something about YOUARENOWHERE lingers. Days later, its echoes still intermittently rupture the rhythms of the day like a shiver down the spine – or, perhaps, like the unnerving feeling that I’ve been here before.

Presented by Shoreditch Town Hall, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill and LIFT. Part of LIFT 2016.

 

 

Handle With Care, Lighthouse Poole

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Increasingly, we’re losing our sense of home. As Generation Rent moves from houseshare to houseshare, other things start to take on the meaning that was once contained by four walls: people, habits, objects. We have more and more stuff, invested with more and more emotional value, but less and less space in which to house it.

Dante or Die’s new show is interested in all that stuff – the detritus of living, and what it means to us. It’s being performed in some of the many self-storage warehouses that are doing booming business in a nation of space-challenged hoarders. These echoing, artificially cool spaces are odd environments, their impersonal exterior containing sometimes intensely personal artefacts. This contrast is just one of the ideas that Dante or Die play with in Handle With Care, which sees one woman’s life through the things she decides to keep.

We first meet Zoe in 1989, as her brother Miki prepares to go travelling. Together they pack away his belongings and get ready to part ways, a close relationship quickly emerging from this small interaction. Before long, though, Zoe is dashing down the corridor, trailing fragments of her life over the following years: letters, photographs, items of clothing. As unacknowledged flies on the wall, we follow her through other brief yet revealing scenes in this labyrinth of self-storage units. She prepares for new phases in her life, or wades through the debris of failed relationships and stalled adventures. Through reappearing items – a painting, a soft toy, a rucksack – we begin to see what this deliberately ordinary character holds dear.

Handle With Care sits somewhere between narrative-driven theatre and immersive installation, never quite settling on one or the other. The actual moments of packing and unpacking are concrete and usually momentous chunks of life: partings, goodbyes, new starts. But linking these inevitably selective moments (how much of someone’s life can really be spent in a storage unit, after all?) proves more of a challenge. In between the more conventionally dramatic and realistic scenes, we are led through passages and into spaces scattered with more abstract clues to Zoe’s existence. Instead of filling in the narrative blanks between scenes, Dante or Die offer us teasing hints.

This fragmented approach produces some individually striking moments. One room in particular mesmerisingly conveys Zoe’s passage from partying youth to responsibility-filled motherhood, swiftly traversing a number of years. As we walk in, lights and music are pulsing and we are thrust into the middle of a rave. But then, with a slow, hallucinatory progress, our surroundings change their character. The figures dressed in rabbit suits transform from fellow dancers into giant cuddly toys. We begin to notice that the decorations hanging from the ceiling are actually relics of childhood. Disco lights become night-lights. And there’s a beautiful transition from one stage in life to the next, as Amy Dolan’s young Zoe confronts the reflection of her older counterpart, played by Rachael Spence, before the latter seamlessly takes over from the former.

As a whole, though, the theatrical experience of Handle With Care never quite coheres. The scenes themselves are individually engaging, and there’s a certain thrill to exploring this strange, otherwise deserted space, but the audience contract feels confused. For the most part we are steadfastly ignored by the performers, often having to dodge out of their way with stifled giggles. In the sometimes clumsy transitions between scenes, though, Zoe seems to half-acknowledge us, and in the final moments of the show our cloak of invisibility is suddenly removed and we inexplicably become an active (if limited) part of the narrative.

There is, in line with the instruction of the title, a lot of care contained in this production. Zoe’s unremarkable yet moving story is told with tenderness and compassion, giving attention to moments in life that might otherwise be ignored or forgotten. There’s care and precision in the tricky logistics of the show, too, and in the movement of an audience through it. The performers skilfully accommodate spectators without letting them break the fiction, moving playfully close to us – as if to say “we know you’re there really” – but never allowing our two separate worlds to collide. This holds and reassures an audience, who are not intimidated by the possibility that they might be asked to take part in the performance, but it can also maintain a frustrating tension between proximity and distance. What, ultimately, is our role in the performance?

This question is never resolved by Dante or Die, who seem more interested in bringing us close to these scenes than interrogating our presence. Handle With Care is also, ultimately, more caught up in its narrative than in the wider concerns it leaps off from. Perhaps all we can take from Zoe’s story is that stuff is as meaningless as it is meaningful. Without a home or a human to cherish it, it’s all junk in the end.