Exeunt – Page 34 – Catherine Love

God’s Property, Soho Theatre

Posted on March 10, 2013October 11, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Through the door in the back wall of Ellen Cairns’ set, visible in brief, snatched glances as performers slam it open and closed, the world is all askew. The outer walls of a Deptford housing estate unsettlingly loom, threatening and out of kilter, yet at the same time oddly flat. It’s a fitting metaphor for the crooked, broken realm of Arinze Kene’s play, where identities are doubled and conflicted and the world of the protagonists teeters dangerously on a precipice. But despite rapidly rising stakes and an imposed sense of urgency, the play too exists on something of a level plane, never quite achieving the texture that its early scenes tantalisingly promise.

Kene’s premise revolves around the reunion of two mixed-race brothers in 1980s Deptford, at the height of local tensions. Chima returns home from ten years in prison to a cold, aggressive greeting from Onochie, the younger sibling who neither knows nor welcomes him and who stubbornly seeks to reject his own Nigerian heritage. The initial conflict over racial identity that wedges itself between the estranged brothers is quickly joined by the divisive ghosts of Chima’s past, a past whose consequences gradually smash their way into the kitchen where the siblings haltingly renegotiate their relationship.

As the brittle, wary Onochie, Ash Hunter is all youthful bravado and prickly contradiction, a moody wannabe skinhead not yet grown into his bovver boots. Explosions of wounded anger are offset by moments of startling tenderness, particularly when bouncing off girlfriend Holly, the local white girl whose entanglement in the crime for which Chima was accused acts as a catalyst for escalating revelations. Unwittingly caught in the eye of this storm, Ria Zimtrowicz’s Holly is a lightning bolt of teenage attitude and optimism, precisely and hilariously capturing the naivety, awkwardness and bolshily faked confidence of adolescence.

Michael Buffong’s production is at its best when continuing in this observational vein, hitting delicately and often poetically on truths about both human relationships and the knotty process of defining one’s own identity. Through the contrasting experiences of Onochie and Kingsley Ben-Adir’s older, battle-scarred Chima, the question of whether it’s ever possible to choose one’s racial identity is probingly posed. The piece’s structure and characters begin to unravel, however, as the reality of the situation and of Chima’s past is delivered in a series of unnecessarily heavy punches – a blurted name, the discovery of a letter, a furious outpouring of truth.

Throughout this heightened drama, the family kitchen is a room under siege from all angles, on the point of collapsing from the weight of external pressure. It’s a pressure that is reflected in Cairns’ design, a detailed domestic space that crumbles away unevenly at the edges, giving way to a city ruptured by violence. This is the London of mass unemployment and the Brixton riots, an almost apocalyptic urban environment that the production repeatedly reminds us of. The contemporary parallels and resonances are never pointed at, but are ever hauntingly present.

The grim familiarities of this environment also mouth the unspoken question of whether anything has really changed. Onochie may be, as he proudly declares, “made in England”, but Kene’s recurring references to blood – both its inheritance and its spilling – suggest that it’s what runs in the veins that continues to matter in our society. Just as its conclusion remains suspended, the question of change is one that this production decides not to answer, but still it seems to hang in the air, as unresolved and off-centre as the world outside. While the piece as a whole may lose its way, the view framed by Cairns through the doorway says it all.

Photo: Helen Maybanks

Pausing the Playlist: Reflections on D&D8

Posted on February 8, 2013April 4, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

This is a column that almost didn’t happen. Stepping out of the pub far later than intended after my first experience of Devoted & Disgruntled, head full to the brim with provocations and projects, the weekend struck me as impossible to write about. The very set-up of the event, cultivating an atmosphere of gentle, creative anarchy, resists being wrestled into any kind of structure. But one suggestion, voiced in the dying moments of the second day as a microphone slowly passed around the wide circle of people gathered in York Hall, seems a fittingly optimistic place to start. Theatremaker Tom Spencer had the idea of a D&D playlist: a collectively assembled set of songs that inspire us, motivate us, make us want to make things. The spirit of D&D captured and set to a beat.

Thinking about it over the past week, the contribution I’ve finally found myself settling on is ‘This Is Radio Clash’. Partly because I nurture a fierce and long-held love for The Clash, partly because it’s the song that nudges me out of the house in the early morning, blaring through my earphones as I negotiate the commuter-clogged Overground. But also partly for the line that always shouts out loudest: “can we get that world to listen?” Because it feels as though that’s what D&D is about: listening. An exchange in which our opinions on theatre are not simply stated, but involved in a true dialogue, a back and forth that involves as much listening as speaking; more listening, sometimes, for those like me perched sponge-like at the edge of discussions, absorbing different perspectives and ideas.

Beginning with this playlist feels doubly apt, because music repeatedly and perhaps surprisingly interweaved with theatre across the two days that I attended. With dozens of sessions called (the event’s Open Space format allows for anyone to propose a subject for discussion) it’s somewhat futile to trace journeys through the event, as these will differ vastly from individual to individual, each beating their own track. Even to fully retread my own track would take much more than the space I have here. Yet music felt like a recurring comparison, making a refreshingly outward looking reference point against which we in theatre might measure what we’re doing. It’s sometimes vital to remember, equally in practice and in criticism, that theatre exists alongside and in a horizontal relation to other art forms, from which it might feed and learn.

From parallels with the heady joy of discovery on the music scene and how this might be reflected in the variety of the fringe, to touring models and performing at festivals, the comparison became a repeatedly fruitful one over the weekend. Witnessing the crossover with other live culture in this way, it strikes me that it’s worth giving greater thought to the space in which these live encounters take place. As Maddy Costa pointed out in one session, we’re good at shouting about why people should come to the theatre, but we rarely try taking it to them; perhaps we should look instead to the model of live music (and comedy) in pubs and bars, inhabiting a recognisable social space. There was also the appealing suggestion that, in the same way that bands have supporting acts, theatre shows might open with snippets or scratches from emerging companies – though the problematic label of “emerging” was itself a matter of debate elsewhere, as we collectively tussled with the definitions we deploy and the effects these have.

While mired in these and other knotty thoughts from the first day, I happened on Saturday night to read Andrew Haydon’s blog on Marxism and Theatre, in which he too points to a connection with music, specifically in terms of the classlessness implied by the gig. In doing so, he mentions Simon Stephens, whose writing is so often drenched in music, and who spoke in a recent interview about how his love for theatre was born from a realisation that it could incorporate the “edgy live-ness of a gig”. I have my reservations about this idea of “liveness” – it’s a word that we all throw around a lot without really interrogating what we mean by it and that has gained an extra fetishised appeal in a digital world that so often eschews the live, real life encounter – but I can’t help feeling there’s the grain of something truthful in it.

There is, after all, something undeniably appealing about the live, something thrilling enough to entice music fans to part with their money when they could just as easily listen to the same tracks at home for free. What we buy into when we go to a gig is the idea of the unpredictable and the unique, the idea that no other performance will ever be quite like this, that this exact group of people will never again be gathered in the same room together – that there’s something special about simply being there. The best gigs – those not in massive, soulless arenas – also have something of a levelling effect, an effect that I think can be exaggerated and romanticised, but that does go much further in eroding divisions than auditoriums where it’s clear who has paid the most to be there.

Which all sounds a lot like the most exciting and inspiring theatre I go to see. And which also, incidentally, sounds quite a bit like D&D itself; the lack of structure and hierarchy, the element of unpredictability, the mantra that whoever comes are the right people.

This is not to view the weekend from behind entirely rose-tinted glasses. In a world and an industry so often governed by structure and convention, I’ll admit that the free movement and intellectual curiosity fostered by the respectful chaos of D&D can be oddly bewildering. Despite the signs taped up around the room reminding us of the “law of two feet”, it took me most of the first day to acclimatise to the idea that moving on from a session is not a sign of rudeness, in much the same way as I doubt I’ll ever be able to walk out of a theatre show. The freedom to flit from group to group can also be torturously tantalising, offering too many fascinating discussions to settle on one and throwing up missed or half-heard sessions – like those on the notion of artist as parasiteand the desire for more European theatre – that immediately prompt the wish for a time-turner.

But while some sessions felt frustratingly formless – frustrating for me, that is, hence using my two feet to get more usefully involved elsewhere – the overwhelming atmosphere was one of motivation for change, dismissing criticisms that the event is all talk and no action. Perhaps that has something to do with the enforced urgency of the present moment; whatever the reason, session after session that I sat in on over the weekend resulted in solid commitments to begin driving towards the change that was so passionately discussed. And change is, again, tied up with that vital act of listening, of tuning in to another’s rhythm, pausing as we skip through the playlist. Can we get that world to listen? If theatre is to have any hope of getting others to pay attention, it seems essential that we first find a way of listening to one another.

Feast, Young Vic Theatre

Posted on February 8, 2013April 4, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

“A person who does not know his own ancestors does not know his own grandchildren.” One of many small wisdoms passed from mouth to mouth during this patchwork celebration of Yoruba culture, these words are a fitting epigraph for a piece of theatre deeply concerned with identity and its roots in past, present and future. There is a profound sense that for those who are born into this culture, being aware of one’s past is integral to the hybrid cultural identity one forges in the modern world. Co-written by five playwrights from the USA, Cuba, Brazil, Nigeria and Britain, brought together as part of World Stages London, the creation and structure of the piece is an appropriately diverse and fragmented reflection of the Yoruba diaspora, a culture scattered across and filtered through four different continents. It’s a feast in which flavours clash, complement and blend.

The scraps of scenes from the production’s five writers are loosely stitched together by the recurring presence of four Orishas, Yoruba deities, who appear and reappear in the form of fictional characters from across the past 300 years of Yoruba history. The three female Orishas Yemaja, Oshun and Oya, associated with motherhood, beauty and war respectively, are followed through the ages by Esu, a mischievous, chaos-courting shape-shifter who perpetually straddles the crossroads. Among the snatches we are shown from this huge swathe of history are a vignette on the impact of slave liberation in Brazil, a snapshot of the American civil rights movement and a post-Olympics scene featuring a young British athlete – more fleeting moments than scenes, tiny splinters broken off a story too huge to begin telling.

Conceptually, the shape of the whole is fitting. Any attempt to take a holistic view of a history and a culture that is characterised by its variety would be reductive and misguided; instead this consciously incomplete and fractured image mirrors the dispersed and many times translated and transmuted tradition that it depicts. The resistance to unifying narratives also speaks of a distrust of written history, a history that often – as in the production’s layered projections – writes over its subjects. This project instead attempts to capture something of the oral history that has passed down through generations and across continents, a history focused on storytelling rather than the imposed tyranny of facts. Unfortunately, the delicate fabric of the stories themselves is often not substantial enough to support the ambition of the piece as a whole, with scenes feeling broken or truncated, their jagged edges jammed awkwardly together.

Perhaps because of such difficulties, the production is at its strongest when most reliant on its dazzling visual elements. The slow, mournful dance that narrates the journey of slaves across the Atlantic through the bodies of the performers, upon whose torsos prices are starkly projected and who gradually slip between curtains lit with maps and names, disappearing into their own history, speaks louder than any of the contrived and sometimes clumsy scenes peppered elsewhere. Another powerful moment features a female dancer tugged from side to side, hands snatching at her body and covering her mouth, a physical expression of the violence implicit in being silenced. It is also the visual and aural that lend the show its most joyous moments, offering vivid, celebratory bursts of song and dance.

Of all the striking images that thread their way through this meandering production, one stubbornly repeats again and again, imprinting itself on the eye. As the trickster Esu guides us through the complex tangle of cultural history, he frequently shifts shape behind sliding panels, a slick bit of stagecraft that is tightly married to the questions of identity that the piece keeps returning to. Because if this show is about anything in the sprawling, amorphous history of Yoruba, it is about shape-shifting, both voluntary and enforced, and about how acts of transformation affect not only a culture or belief system, but also the equally complex individuals within them.

The Faction Rep Season

Posted on February 8, 2013April 4, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Putting to one side the rep system at venues like the National Theatre, which is more a question of scheduling than essential artistic structure, the idea of the repertory theatre company has all but evaporated from London’s theatre ecology. Which makes The Faction’s rep season at the New Diorama Theatre, its second annual season of this kind at the small theatre in Regent’s Place, both a rarity and an oddity. Interviewing the company last year, ahead of their first foray into the rep system that they hope will one day be their staple, they spoke of their desire to create “big, classical, epic theatre”, looking to the model of European ensemble theatres. Ambition is one quality they certainly don’t lack.

Despite The Faction’s aspiration to the “epic”, however, their work gains much of its power through its intimacy. In the black box studio of the New Diorama, where the company are currently presenting the trio of Three Sisters, Blood Wedding and the UK premiere of Schiller’s Fiesco, their muscular take on classic plays is gripping in its proximity. Just as last year’s heart-pumpingly visceral Mary Stuart ripped audible gasps from me as I sat mere metres away, the vibrations of their percussion-fuelled, passion-drenched Blood Wedding can be felt in the very bones. When the company are at their most thrilling, “big” is not one of the words that jumps to mind; instead it’s their attention to the small and their inventive use of the limited resources at their disposal that most impresses.

Thrilling as their work may sometimes be, there are gaps and falters in the company’s emerging aesthetic that become more evident in this second – and in some senses more ambitious – season. While previously the performers’ own bodies were their main material, with twisting limbs conjuring tempests and confining arms acting as unsettling prison bars, the addition of more external elements to their spare staging has produced mixed effects. The European influence makes itself more conspicuously if not always successfully felt, as animal masks take their ubiquitous but not entirely justified place inFiesco and the playing space forms the canvas for accumulating mess throughout Blood Wedding. Also, by widening the repertoire with their first attempts at Chekhov and Lorca, there is the nagging concern that the company’s desire for new challenges is slightly at the expense of the thematic intelligence that informed their previous triptych.

If one thread can be seen to run through the three plays that The Faction have chosen this time round, it might be identified as passion – both in its pulse-racing presence and deadening absence. In Fiesco, a society poised on the brink of rebellion rests on the personal passions of the eponymous duke, a fickle revolutionary leader for whom selfish desire and pursuit of pleasure are tangled up with political convictions. As realised in this version, that knot of personal and political motivations is reflected in an extension of Schiller’s musical metaphor for revolution, casting the euphoric crescendo of democratic triumph as just another form of self-gratification. Rhythm and dance pulse through the piece, harnessing sharply choreographed movement to evoke the frenzied late capitalist dance of hedonism at the gates of potential apocalypse. These resonant echoes cannot be an accident, reinforced by the use of masks depicting modern day leaders and despots alongside the crowd of blindly pleasure-seeking animals, although this metaphor feels at times stretched.

Looked at one way, the stranded siblings of Chekhov’s Three Sisters can be seen as embodying three equally destructive strains of passion. Masha’s is passion fierily, unsustainably realised; Olga’s is passion thwarted, left to wither under the weight of years and work; and Irina’s is passion tragically unfulfilled, an embryonic desire never given the opportunity of birth. This new translation by Ranjit Bolt comes at a tricky time theatrically, dogged by the recent memory of Benedict Andrews’ invigorating injection of vodka and anarchy into the same text, but while not quite chasing away that memory, it does manage to hold its own. Visually, it is spare but striking. The stage is dominated by chairs that are slowly shuffled into new positions between scenes, somehow implying both movement and stasis – progression of time, but not of change. By the end they are upturned, speaking of disarray and upheaval, yet it is significant that they remain. Lighting is also used simply but sensitively, with one particularly evocative shaft of light from offstage hinting at the distant, unreachable, almost mythical Moscow. The overall effect of the production is at once beautiful and banal, recalling Irina’s words: “if life is beautiful, why doesn’t it seem so?”

If passion can be uncovered in Fiesco and Three Sisters, half-concealed beneath a veil, then it streams in thick, hot rivulets from Blood Wedding. The company take the use of rhythm in Fiesco up by a few notches, weaving pounding percussion and haunting a capella song tightly into the braid of the performance. The pulsing musical heartbeat of the piece is matched by a vivid visual landscape, all scattered sand and red heat. The spreading grains of sand summon Lorca’s world of scorched land, thirsty for blood and tears, while at the same time being used as currency, highlighting the economic dimension of matrimony. The production also presents us with the startling image of the bride wrapped in ropes, a strange enactment of ritual that visualizes the forces that bind and tug her, forces she understandably struggles to free herself from.

As well as inviting thematic connections and reflections, the other immediately evident effect of experiencing the rep season as a whole is on the ensemble itself. With the same company of actors taking on roles in all three plays, comparisons are inevitably drawn and casting decisions are brought more to the fore than might otherwise be expected. It seems apt, for instance, that the compellingly melancholic Derval Mellett take on the roles of Masha in Three Sisters and the bride in Blood Wedding, each time paired with Jonny McPherson as her illicit lover, though elsewhere the choices feel less calculated. There is also something simply and inexplicably satisfying about watching an ensemble across three separate productions, an experience so unusual that it immediately tickles the interest.

The overall picture that is assembled from these three pieces is not quite a complete, persuasive argument for the ensemble rep model, but perhaps its incompleteness is an argument in itself. One of the most appealing aspects of this structure is the breathing room it gives to discovery, allowing a group of artists to work together as a group, rehearsing and performing in rep, learning and building from both continually and simultaneously. For this reason, and for the captivating moments of inventiveness that emerge from The Faction’s process of discovery, the rep model might have some life yet.

Is not Money the Bond of all Bonds?

Posted on February 7, 2013April 4, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

“I really love that they’re the colour of gold.” Writer and director Clare Duffy is speaking about the 10,000 pound coins that she will soon be bravely putting on the stage of the Bush Theatre for MONEY the Gameshow, a piece asking meaty questions about money, the financial crisis and how we understand value. Deliberately eschewing the familiar image of floods of crisp bank notes, Duffy thinks there is something even more profoundly seductive about the materiality of pound coins, something deeply rooted in the way we think about money.

“Why aren’t they purple?” she grins at me across our table in the Bush cafe. “Why aren’t they striped? It’s so interesting how profound that symbolism is, because although we all know it’s not real gold, we like the fact that it’s gold coloured and shiny; it hearkens back to a folk memory of gold standard, when money was directly linked to a standardised value.”

Putting those 10,000 round, shiny objects on stage has a history and a whole host of problems. The idea first arose from an earlier play of Duffy’s, in which a couple put a pound coin in a jar for every day they spend together and are then faced with splitting the amassed sum after their break-up; when it was performed, Duffy placed 500 pound coins in the centre of the playing space, prompting the realisation that this immediately shifted the way in which these objects signify. “What happens when it becomes a prop?” Duffy ponders. “Does it still feel like it has that value? And what kind of performances does it demand from the audience?”

When she won the Arches New Director’s Award in 2011, Duffy identified a way of posing these questions, deciding to put the £6,000 prize on stage and use it to tell the story of the financial crisis. Through the experience of presenting scratches of the piece and developing it again for the Bush, Duffy’s feeling that the environment of the theatre changes the nature of the money on stage has only intensified. While money typically relies on a shared belief in its value, Duffy observes that “when you put it inside a theatre, which is a place of make believe, it sort of becomes something else”. How does an object that is already engaged in a mimetic act – standing in for a value that it does not embody but only represents – transform under another layer of representation?

The money on stage is also influenced by the necessary mechanisms that surround it; as the £10,000 used in the show is a loan, the theatre has had to install CCTV cameras and a security guard to ensure that no audience members are sneakily slipping coins into their pockets. Rather than considering it an irritating practicality, however, Duffy has creatively seized on these intrusions, describing them as “both real and not real at the same time”. It is through such external structures, she believes, that the central notion of money is upheld. It follows that perhaps through revealing and disturbing such structures we might be able to interrogate and displace that notion.

This process of interrogation and displacement is just what MONEY the Gameshow sets out to achieve. Led by two hedge fund managers turned performance artists, played by Lucy Ellinson and Brian Ferguson, the audience are divided down the middle and given the piles of pound coins to gamble with, placing bets and competing to win. The purpose of this involvement, Duffy explains, is to draw the audience into the adrenalin-drenched world in which such individuals operate and to make them complicit in that irresistible excitement.

“You’re given a stake in the risk of the story,” Duffy continues, “aligning the risk of the games with the risk of the story. Because that’s what the story is about, it’s about playing a game and winning or losing.” The story that runs alongside these games is the story of both the former hedge fund managers and the entire financial crisis, tracing the factors that led to collapse and the state of extended resuscitation that has followed, stubbornly reviving what Duffy calls a “zombie economy”. We have all played a losing hand, but we’re still trying to hold onto our chips.

Duffy believes, however, that the current crisis is as much of an opportunity as it is a disaster: “What’s exciting about now and about talking about money now is that anything’s possible and the most crazy ideas should be talked about”. Throughout the process of making the show she has spoken to a number of individuals from the world of finance that she is depicting and has been surprised by the openness of some of their attitudes. “Politically we’re probably coming at these things from very different points of view, but there’s a convergence point,” she says, suggesting that this location of convergence is born from our present state of crisis. “Interestingly, it creates a space where people from really radically different points of view and walks of life can actually meet and talk.”

Getting people talking is, as Duffy recognises, the first step towards any change, but there are a number of barriers to that conversation. As Duffy observes, the financial industries are constructed to keep people out, fenced with technical jargon and barbed with complexities. “It seems to be to be so important and yet so little understood,” she says, admitting to her own ignorance prior to the research undertaken for the show. Her hope is that, as well as shifting audiences’ perceptions of money and value, she can simply make them feel more comfortable talking about it.

The idea of talking about money inevitably leads us into the territory of how money is discussed within the arts. This is a thorny subject, particularly in an atmosphere dominated by cuts, where the effort to defend the arts is often weakened by internal disagreements about the rhetoric in which that defence is to be mounted. Duffy is of the opinion that those working in the arts should take up all the arguments at their disposal.

“I think you just have to make the argument every which way you can, as much as you can,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of value in making as watertight an economic argument as you can. There’s an expression: making your argument in your master’s language. Sometimes you have to make the argument in terms that the people in power will understand or accept. However, at the same time you have to realise that you’re seeding power when you do that, so you have to be making that argument in another way. You have to fight on as many fronts as possible.”

The concern, as I say to Duffy, is that the eloquent economic arguments that are being put forward by some will be at the expense of the arts’ intrinsic value. If we succeed in binding the arts to measurable economic outcomes, this monetary worth quickly becomes the only value that can be ascribed to them. Duffy sees it, however, as a distinction between short term and long term solutions. “Short term sometimes it’s worth making that argument, it feels appropriate to make that argument, but at the same time you have to be making the more important point,” she suggests. Proof of economic worth might win the battle, but it is the search for a non-monetary language about value that is key to the longer term struggle.

“And that is what the show is really passionate about,” Duffy persuasively concludes. “It’s about asking the question: what is money?”

Photo: Simon Kane