Reviews – Page 24 – Catherine Love

Pomona, Orange Tree Theatre

Posted on November 17, 2014December 5, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

Alistair McDowall has written an Escher staircase of a play. Or perhaps a spiral, looping around to almost but not quite the same point. Or perhaps it’s the M60 ring road at night, circling the city under the orange glow of the streetlights. Round and round.

Pomona is a nightmare. A thriller. A game. A mystery. A trip down the rabbit hole. A journey into the desert of the real.

Ollie is looking for her sister. She hopes to find her in Pomona – a desolate concrete wasteland just minutes from the centre of Manchester, a yawning void at the heart of the city. This place is also at the heart of McDowall’s tangled plot, the shadowy secret it hides offering the answer – or at least an answer – to his characters’ fearful questioning. Whether they want to see it, however, is another matter.

Layered on top of and bleeding into the real Pomona and the horrors it contains is another world, one of imagination and gameplay. Somewhere else in the city, sweetly enthusiastic nerd Charlie has found an unlikely friend in Keaton, the mysterious girl who joins in with the game of his own invention. Only the game has terrifying echoes of reality. Or is it the other way round?

Both McDowall’s writing and Ned Bennett’s adrenalin-pumped production are soaked in popular culture, further blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Indiana Jones. H. P. Lovecraft. Dungeons and Dragons. Horror movies and internet detritus. Chicken nuggets. It’s all distraction, all surface, as fleeting as the flash of the lights that flicker on and off between scenes.

This is theatre that worms its way inside the 21st-century state of mind, nestling itself amid internet memes and junk food. Pomona depicts a world where we can find out anything at the swipe of a finger. Information is endless, as one character articulates, so we have to choose. And if we choose what to know, then we also choose what not to know.

Pomona is about what we choose not to know. It is a play populated by all the things that lurk beneath: the monsters under the bed, the ghosts hiding in the shadows, and the murky, underground world that we all wilfully ignore. The dark, rising tide of urban myths.

Everything about Bennett’s production heightens the lingering sense of unease. In designer Georgia Lowe’s sunken playing space, transforming (together with Elliot Grigg’s eerie lighting) the Orange Tree Theatre into a grimy subterranean landscape, the inhabitants of McDowall’s play scrabble around in the gutter, sucked inexorably towards the drain at its centre. There is no escape.

The characters, meanwhile, all have hints of the uncanny. Guy Rhys’ Zeppo, a man with an approach of studied ignorance towards the shady figures he deals with, leaps out of the show with cartoon-like detail, stealing the first scene with his lengthy, animated retelling of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ollie, played by the shape-shifting Nadia Clifford, seems not to be what she first appears. Even endearing, innocuous Charlie, getting most of the laughs in the capable hands of Sam Swann, has a murkier aspect. And most unsettling of all is Sarah Middleton’s precise, controlled Keaton – sometime girl, sometime monster.

But the terrifying thing is not the fiction, not the squid-headed creatures from the deep. The truly monstrous side of Pomona is to be found in the ugly, urgent truth its many tentacles prod at. As Zeppo puts it, “you go deep enough, you’ll find all this stuff, the detritus of our lives, it’s all built on this foundation of pain and shit and suffering”. That foundation usually sits, festering, at the edges of our consciousness; McDowall drags it to the centre. And when we find ourselves inside the game once again, there is a queasy feeling that this is a container for the all the things we can’t quite look in the eye. We need places to dump all the nastiness, places like Pomona.

We’re back to where we began. But wait – not quite. Is this game or reality now? Where are we? Haven’t we been here before?

Round and round. Round and round.

Photo: Manuel Harlan.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It)

Posted on November 17, 2014December 2, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

In Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Nicholas Ridout writes about the moments when theatre breaks down. His book investigates all those glitches – the stutter, the laugh, the unexpected interruption of a creature on stage – when the theatrical machinery temporarily halts and we see the true nature of the event unfolding before us. In Ridout’s words, “something of our relationship to labour and to leisure is felt every time the theatre undoes itself around the encounter between worker and consumer”.

Dmitry Krymov’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream – or more accurately, on its play within a play, Pyramus and Thisbe – looks a lot like Ridout’s thesis writ large. This is not really about love or fairies or Shakespeare; this is about theatre. Theatre in all its pretending, its failure, its illusion, its beauty, its exquisite silliness.

It is also theatre as work. It is more than just comedy that has drawn Krymov and his company to the Mechanicals in Shakespeare’s play; they also represent, as their collective title suggests, the labour that goes into stage illusion. In a programme note, Krymov says that he couldn’t see himself in either the courtly or the magical worlds of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I am not a fairy,” he explains, “I am a craftsman.” Theatre is not magic conjured from thin air – it is craft.

And yet …

Recently, while interviewing playwright Alistair McDowall, we talked about the idea of theatre as magic trick. We agreed that the reason this particular analogy works so well is that it suggests both the thrill of illusion and the strings that make everything work. As audience members, we at once want to see the workings – the workings that we know to be there in the background – and to be taken in by what we see before us. To contradict myself, theatre is magical, but magical in the sense of a magic trick; we know that skill and work goes into it.

As in the usual staging of the play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Krymov’s production positions us both as the audience of Pyramus and Thisbe and as external observers of another audience: the courtiers the Mechanicals have been charged with entertaining. In this imagining they are haughty and distracted, checking messages on their smartphones and interjecting with their derision, disapproval and occasional outrage. If we see a picture of ourselves, it’s not a flattering one.

As for the players, they’re a suitably ragtag bunch, trussed up in scruffy black tie like children playing dress-up. Their set and props, meanwhile, are crudely thrown together, even down to the sawdust coated scaffold on which their audience are directed to sit. There’s no forgetting that these are labourers and that the show they (eventually) present is as much a construction as their wonky, makeshift auditorium.

So it’s all the more extraordinary when we do, by some strange theatrical alchemy, get drawn into the tale being told. After a lengthy introduction, lightly touching on ideas of art, entertainment and intention, Krymov’s Mechanicals finally get around to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, who take the form of two towering, mismatched puppets. Pyramus has a portrait for a head; Thisbe balances precariously on one ballet shoe and one boot. They are fragile and ridiculous – not all that different from their human operators, then, or the theatrical event itself.

At first, what charm us are the tricks. Acrobats balance and somersault; the Mechanicals’ dog – the indisputable star of the show – even turns a backflip. We are at the circus, operating in an economy of gasps and giggles, occasionally ruptured by an interjection that causes a stumble, a mistake. Then something unexpected happens. Under just the right light, with just the right musical accompaniment, there is something incredibly tender about this pair of ungainly figures, and something happens that pretty much never happens in other Dreams: we feel for these star-crossed lovers. But these moments are brittle – easily snapped.

One sequence from a long procession of images stands out. In the glow of their initial ardour, Pyramus and Thisbe dance. This is no effortless waltz; the meeting of the two puppets’ bodies is a frenetic feat of manoeuvring, requiring a large team of performers. Watching the rickety figures spin around the stage, two opposing things become simultaneously true: the moment is both beautiful and oddly moving, and at the same time conspicuous in its feverish craft. Labour and illusion at once – the magic trick.

“This is the nature of theatre,” Krymov states elsewhere in the programme, “this is how theatre is created.” Precisely.

Photo: Ellie Kurttz.

Jonah and Otto, Park Theatre

Posted on November 17, 2014November 27, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

– Robert Holman’s plays are conversations.

– That’s an obvious thing to say. Aren’t all plays conversations?

– Well, yes; they’re a conversation between characters, between the artist and the audience, between sets of ideas. But in Holman’s plays you get the sense that people – often strangers – are reallytalking to one another. So often we don’t really talk to other people; we speak, but we don’t communicate. Holman’s plays, or at least the ones I’ve encountered, tend to put individuals on a journey towards genuine communication.

– And as you say, they’re usually individuals who have no pre-existing relationship, people who simply encounter one another and discover, often via antagonism, an incredible shared intimacy and honesty. At the beginning ofJonah and Otto it certainly feels like it could go somewhere else, somewhere more aggressive – there’s a definite taste of danger there – and what’s so startling is the dissolving of all that aggression into tenderness.

– It feels significant as well that the relationship in this play is between two men, two men of different ages. The play offers these men a space to be vulnerable, their toughened edges sanded down, while at the same time constantly switching the power dynamic between this ageing, lonely clergyman (Otto) and the spiky but bruised not-quite-boy-not-quite-man he runs into on the street (Jonah). Both haunted; one overwhelmed by what has passed, the other by what is ahead. And somehow, in just 24 hours, they come to truly know one another. It’s easy to feel that Holman’s characters exist in a bubble of ideas and emotions, sealed off from the world, but there’s a sort of insistent politics to the presentation of this surprising and ultimately gentle male friendship. Particularly at this moment in time, the simple foregrounding of care, of taking notice of the human beings around you, can’t help but be political.

– You talk about how gentle the relationship between the two men is, but there’s also something slightly strange about it. Not strange bad, just … odd. But odd in a compelling way.

– I think that compelling quality has a lot to do with the performances. Peter Egan brings a sort of comforting gravity to Otto, an appropriately priestlike – vicar-like? – quality, with a wounded, desperate energy writhing just under that composed outer skin. But it’s Alex Waldmann as Jonah who claws at the heart, bringing both unpredictable danger and trembling anxiety to the role. The simple restlessness of his performance reveals so much about this character, the world that has shaped him and the relationship that quietly transforms him.

– But it’s just talking, isn’t it? Gentle, thoughtful, expansive talking, but talking nonetheless. Nothing really happens.

– What do you want, a fucking firework show?

– Well, maybe. Or something, something to make us all sit up and pay attention.

– “Love is paying attention”.

– Huh?

– That’s what Otto says: “love is paying attention”. And Holman asks us to do the same, doesn’t he? We have to slow down, listen, tune in. Pay attention. The whole point is that it’s quiet. No fireworks.

– Like that other one they did at the Donmar a couple of years ago, Making Noise Quietly.

– Yes. That seems to me what Holman’s plays specialise in: making noise quietly. There’s something muted and tender about them, something unobtrusive, yet they have this cumulative emotional volume. They deal in what Otto calls the “drip, drip” of life, in people and relationships, but with an injection of something else – magic, maybe?

– Well Jonah is a magician. In some ways his whole presence in the play, the way in which he interrupts the deadening loneliness of Otto’s existence, feels like a sort of conjuring act. There Otto is, feeling the bricks in the wall – grasping not for real warmth, but the residue it leaves after the sun has already disappeared – and this man materialises like a genie from a bottle.

– And isn’t theatre itself something of a magic trick? A collective conjuring, making something from nothing. It’s one of my favourite ways of thinking about performance, because it suggests that same paradox that theatre entertains. We’re desperate to know how the trick works, to see the strings, but at the same time we want to be taken in and enchanted by the magic. Tim Stark’s production begins to touch lightly on that tension, occasionally reminding us that we are experiencing this together in the space of the theatre, but it allows the two men at the centre of the show to be its simple, singular focus.

– If it is just about these two people and their encounter with one another, then couldn’t the staging be even more spare?

– I thought you wanted fireworks?

– OK, but forget that. If there’s something strange about this space, something isolated from the rest of the world, something almost quietly fantastical, then why do they need all those objects? There’s a hint of the abstract to this world, but then it’s full of these all too solid things. Are the accessories of life really important?

–

– Maybe they’re a reminder, a vestige of the real world they’re escaping, the real world they have to return to. I just think that if it’s really about this relationship and about the possibility of revealing yourself more fully to a stranger than to those closest to you, then surely all we need is them. We don’t need the stuff.

– Except the apple. The apple’s good.

– That’s true. And the clothes feel important – as well as allowing for perhaps the most playfully elaborate undressing ever staged. But really, what matters is the two of them.

– Absolutely. There’s something else Otto says that struck me: “If you weren’t here, I’d have to invent you”. It’s a line that speaks so simply to our need for contact and also to our capacity for imagination. Is that why we invent things to believe in? The conversations of Holman’s plays, like that between Jonah and Otto, allow human beings to believe in one another and to speak aloud those fears, anxieties, dreams, guilts that we bury under layers of small talk and distraction. People truly come together. And the coming together has to be followed by a pulling apart; the characters are ultimately left, transformed, hopeful yet sad, to confront the world alone. What do you think?

–

– Hello?

–

– Are you still there?

Photo: Jack Sain.

The Wild Duck, Barbican

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

Originally written for Exeunt.

Confession time. Two Friday evenings in a row now I’ve seen “radical”, 21st-century takes on classic plays. These are plays by well-known writers, plays that get studied in school. And on both occasions, I had no idea what was going to happen.

First up was David Cromer’s absorbing, stripped back version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a familiar text in the States but one that is performed less frequently over here. This was followed seven days later by Belvoir Sydney’s production of The Wild Duck, in a contemporary reimagining by Simon Stone and Chris Ryan “after Henrik Ibsen”. Both – in different ways – were utterly compelling.

When approaching classics, it’s easy to forget that these were once pieces crafted to surprise and delight audiences rather than to numb them with their familiarity. It’s also easy to forget that for many theatregoers these well-worn texts are a complete novelty at the point of stepping into the auditorium. It is still possible to arrive at Hamlet not knowing the fate of the famous Dane, or to sit through A Doll’s House without queasily anticipating that final, shuddering door slam. And if Our Town and The Wild Duck are anything to go by, they’re probably all the more thrilling for the lack of foresight.

In the case of The Wild Duck, the experience of watching is set at another remove from the classic status of the text, which has essentially been adapted by Stone and Ryan. Were it not for Ibsen’s name plastered over the poster, it would be easy to come away from their production with the impression of having just seen a piece of new Australian writing – a fact likely to irk some theatregoers, but one that points to the mutable nature of theatre’s written components. Times change and texts inevitably change with them, even if not streamlined and modernised as thoroughly as Stone and Ryan’s version.

The other thing to know about this Wild Duck is that it does, in fact, contain a duck. A real, living, breathing, wing-flapping duck. Belvoir’s production opens with said creature alone on the stage, spreading its wings to a joyful chorus of cooing delight; there are few more unifying audience experiences than collectively ‘awww’-ing over an animal.

With that out of the way, the show can begin to move relentlessly towards the domestic tragedy that clouds it from the beginning, blotting out its initial, duck-shaped image of freedom and innocence. This is a dark piece in every way, from Ralph Myers’ spare, pitch black design to the shadows steadily collecting around the characters. Scenes too are bookended with deep plunges into darkness, often at the height of their dramatic action. Part of what makes the production so horribly compelling is that the svelte slices of narrative we are given seem to be hacked out of the middle of conversations, leaving just enough unsaid on either side.

The duck who so confidently opens the show belongs to the Ekdal family, a group of fragile yet content individuals who find an escape from the hostile world in the home they have made together. Simple domestic happiness has a particularly warm glow here, as Hjalmar, his wife Gina and their teenage daughter Hedvig all affectionately nag and tease one another. Their precarious bliss is soon toppled, however, by the malign truth-telling of Hjalmar’s old friend Gregars, who produces one hell of a skeleton from the Ekdals’ cupboard. The subsequent fall is swift and shattering.

Not content with the invisible fourth wall of Ibsen’s naturalistic drama, Myers’ design translates that into a perspex box inside which the increasingly devastating scenes play out, each signalled by its date and time on a screen above the performers. Stage time acquires that compressed and dizzying quality that tends to follow disaster, as scenes start to overlap and dramatic logic, like the family, splinters apart. We in the audience peer down all the while – emotionally pummelled voyeurs made witness to a family’s rapid breakdown.

Perhaps it fails to do justice to Ibsen’s original. Perhaps by sanding that play down to its exposed raw materials it loses some of the texture that had been layered on top. I don’t know. What I do know is that this version is mercilessly affecting, tuning the emotional response of its audience as expertly as it modulates the music between scenes, from ominous strings to a furious snarl of electric guitar. It’s at once heartbreaking and breathlessly exciting.

There is, of course, a different kind of satisfaction to be had from seeing a new take on a familiar text. Each time I see a fresh interpretation of a Chekhov play, for instance, new facets are revealed, new meanings endlessly unfolded. But there is a particular pleasure tied up in the frisson of not-knowing, especially when feeling is deployed with such precision and force. This, I can’t help but suspect, is how such theatre is made to be experienced. Or, as one of my companions put it after the show, “who wants to fucking read a play?”

Here Lies Love, National Theatre

Posted on November 17, 2014November 17, 2014 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

There are two revolutions currently taking place in the National’s refurbished and newly rechristened Dorfman Theatre (previously the Cottesloe). One is the peaceful People Power protest that ousted the Marcos regime in the Philippines in an astonishing four days in 1986. The other is a small revolution in mainstream musical form, as David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s pounding, glitter-encrusted take on the life of Imelda Marcos puts audiences right at its pulsating heart.

Or perhaps revolution is too strong. More accurately, what Here Lies Love does is marry elements of immersive performance and gig-as-theatre to the more usually conventional form of the musical. What that means as an audience member – unless you choose to hide away up in the circle – is being thrust under the disco ball and into the action. Inspired by Imelda’s taste for the New York nightlife, Alex Timbers’ staging and David Korins’ design transform the Dorfman into a club of sorts, in which the dramatic action happens not in front of us but around us.

Taking place on stages, platforms and catwalks on all sides, the show breathlessly – and entirely in song – tells the story of Imelda’s rise and fall. We first see her as a simple country girl, singing dreamily about love, but within the swirl of a skirt she is winning beauty contests and setting her sights on Manila, where she meets and quickly weds rising political star Ferdinand Marcos. The whole thing is swift and relentless, its soundtrack beating out plot point after plot point in a series of murderously catchy songs. There’s no time for the attention to waver, let alone to reflect. This is a noisy, glittering juggernaut of a musical, pausing for no one.

As a result, anyone hoping for political insight or analysis of the Marcos era will inevitably be disappointed. The creative team do an impressive job of speedy storytelling, but the rhythm of the show doesn’t allow for the more intricate nuances of power and influence. There are plenty of unanswered questions, both about the Marcoses themselves and the people they ruled. Poverty, corruption and the tangled international threads woven between the Philippines, the US and a number of dubious world leaders all get mentions and little more.

But neither is Here Lies Love built for this kind of political complexity. This is a show about the excitement and intoxication of power rather than about its particular mechanisms. And in this it undoubtedly succeeds, sweeping us up in its heady, irresistible outpouring of booty-shaking joy. It’s loud, brash and occasionally downright ludicrous, but no less giddily enjoyable for any of its flaws.

Participation is key here. (For me, as it turned out, more participation than I’d bargained for.) Part of what makes Here Lies Love so intensely, well, loveable is the experience of moving and dancing with it, helplessly seduced by the glamour and the music. Like the initially adoring public of the Philippines and the leaders all over the globe who fell in love with this Asian answer to the Kennedys, we are utterly taken in, before our involvement later takes on a more uncomfortable and complicit edge.

There’s a clear parallel too between the allure of a glamorous leader and the adoration heaped on the stars of stage and screen. In the lead role, Natalie Mendoza lightly plays with this analogy, making it easy to imagine how she might inspire such hysterical levels of devotion. Much more than a charismatic stage presence and an impressive set of lungs, Mendoza also visibly toughens as the show lurches forward, transforming from the soft Rose of Tacloban to a diamond-hard politician. In her steely gaze and stiff, proud shoulders, we can begin to understand some of Imelda’s motivations.

Perhaps appropriately, however, the woman at the centre of Here Lies Loveremains somewhat elusive. This is not really about offering a new perspective on Imelda’s experience; this is about shining, seductive symbols of power more than it is about those powerful individuals themselves. Instead of seeing Imelda, we see the outfits, the smile, the endless glamour and extravagance, the continued pretence – or maybe a persistent self-delusion – that everything is done out of love. The show’s strapline declares “power to the party” and that’s exactly it. Here Lies Love invites us all to the sparkling, exhilarating, superficial party of the Marcoses rule, and guiltily we – like Imelda – don’t want the party to stop.