Blurred Lines, National Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

blurred-lines-600x374

Originally written for Exeunt.

Back in November of last year, myself and others were questioning the underrepresentation of female playwrights in the National Theatre’s 50th anniversary gala – and in its programming more broadly. Now, only a couple of months later, the fierce final scene of a new show with an all-female cast and a majority female creative team boldly critiques the venue’s gender inequalities from within its very walls. It’s nowhere near a solution, and one self-reflexive show in the theatre’s smallest, most risk-friendly space is no reason to get complacent, but it feels like a start.

The context for Carrie Cracknell and Nick Payne’s new show is right there in the title. Robin Thicke’s misogynistic song and accompanying video were just the most visible tip of the iceberg in a year that outdid itself in terms of casual sexism and media objectification of women. But 2013 was also a year in which feminism was very much part of the public discourse, a discourse that Blurred Lines continues. It is less a play than a theatrical conversation; an ongoing discussion about insidious, background sexism in its many mutating forms.

The show, devised by the company with Cracknell and Payne, promises to interrogate all areas of gender politics, from the media to the workplace to the home. It’s a big ask. To tackle these myriad forms of sexism, the piece deploys what are perhaps best described as a series of sketches. We see, for instance, a conversation between a married couple about the husband’s visits to prostitutes; the repeated shooting of a television scene in which a woman is assaulted; an office confrontation in which it is made clear that success for a few individuals does not translate into equality for the many. Given the force with which that latter point was made in Top Girls in 1982, it’s telling that it still needs to be reiterated.

These swift, punchy scenes, punctuated with performances of songs that cheekily and sometimes explosively critique the depiction of women in popular music, are all played out on the huge white staircase of Bunny Christie’s design. This installation, complete with colour-changing lights, boldly thrusts out into the Shed’s modest performance space, itself acting as a sort of intervention. It frames the female performers in ways that at times reflect the objectifying aesthetics of music videos and advertisements, but at others set up an uncomfortably close confrontation with the audience, while the steps themselves are suggestive of the distance that we still have to climb.

But what Blurred Lines is perhaps most successful at exposing is the sexism that remains rife within theatre itself. The piece opens with a series of statements spoken in turn by the performers: “girl next door”, “single mum”, “Northern blonde, bubbly”. It soon becomes clear that these are roles, referring at once to casting types, dominant cultural perceptions and the desperately restrictive boxes that women are expected to fit into in everyday life. This critique of what roles women are allowed to play remains implicit throughout, coming to a head in the final scene. While this powerful conclusion risks being something of a theatrical in-joke, alienating those who might not catch its shrewd self-referential nods, it is an important move towards theatre owning up to its own failings when it comes to gender (in)equality.

Representation is also at stake in other ways. Throwing together a cacophony of female voices, the piece is careful never to directly speak for or represent any one woman. When an individual’s story is told, as in the narrative of a teenage girl who is sexually assaulted by her partner, it is transmitted through multiple voices and in a fragmented structure. Straightforward portrayal of anyone who might be construed as a victim – perhaps most prominent among the roles available to women – is deliberately avoided. This also points, though obliquely, at the persistent tendency to take one woman as a representative for her entire sex, a tendency that the company stubbornly refuse.

On another, simpler level, the very fact of an all-female cast does interesting things to the staging of sexism. Every male character in the piece is, necessarily, played by a woman. This inversion makes an intriguing contrast with, say, Three Kingdoms, which despite sharply skewering misogyny, still placed it – potentially problematically – in the mouths of men. In this production, the exchange of misogynistic expressions between an all-female cast furiously underlines them, while managing to subtly subvert these views at the same time as reproducing them.

Yet women are still, with unsettling frequency, seen as victims here. That ranges from victims of violence to victims of workplace prejudice, but time and again they are rendered voiceless and frustrated. The intention is understandable; like the Everyday Sexism project, the piece attempts to unmask the latent sexism that pervades our society, often going unnoticed and unremarked upon. The bitter familiarity of many of these scenes provokes both recognition and discomfort, but it leaves us mired in our current situation rather than looking towards any solutions.

Of course, the very existence of this production and its team of talented women is a form of action in itself, and perhaps it is apt that we are left to continue the conversation and fight ongoing injustices. To downplay the scale of inequality and let the audience off the hook would be irresponsible. Nonetheless, there is something a little disheartening about a piece of theatre with such fire in its belly that insists on simply presenting and representing all too familiar portraits of sexism and victimhood.

The Body of an American, Gate Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

body1-600x399

At the time I saw Chimerica last year, I found myself preoccupied with the idea of the photographic image. A play that promised – in its very title, no less – to be about the relationship between China and America struck me as having many more interesting things to say about the nature of the image and the knotty ethics of photojournalism. Not long after, I read both Susan Sontag’s essays on photography and Vivienne Franzmann’s 2012 play The Witness, which also folds its dramatic possibilities outwards from an image taken in the midst of violence. All ask interconnected questions. What is the currency – both economic and political – of images? What does it mean to bear witness? And is to observe to also and inevitably turn away from intervention?

Repeating those questions, The Body of an American might now be added to Chimerica and The Witness to form a fascinating trio of twenty-first-century plays with photojournalists at their hearts. Like the other two shows, Dan O’Brien’s tense, muscular play is concerned with the haunting legacy of a famous image – as well as much else besides. Taking as its starting point the long email correspondence between the playwright and his subject, Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson, the play painfully dissects the psychological damage of Watson’s work and the personal demons of both men. While there’s certainly something to be written about the relationship between this, Chimerica and The Witness (and indeed the renewed interest that might have provoked all three plays), The Body of an American alone offers so much to process that it feels necessary to narrow the lens for the time being. So where to start?

There is, first of all, an intriguing relationship with authenticity that is persistently pointed to by the Gate’s production. Even before the performance begins, The Body of an American prompts us to engage with questions of veracity. On filing into the claustrophobic, snow-lined bunker that designer Alex Lowde has constructed inside the Gate’s already intimate theatre, our attention is immediately drawn to the two screens bookending the space, both projected with the same statement that everything we are about to see and hear was produced or captured by O’Brien or Watson. At the outset, the show very deliberately announces both its truth and the vantage points from which that truth is to be told.

What becomes clear as the piece unfolds is that the play has been constructed from a combination of the two men’s words, drawing on their long email correspondence, their eventual meeting in the Arctic, and other documentary materials. This is all compellingly delivered by just two performers: William Gaminara as “Paul” and Damien Molony as “Dan”, with both also standing in as the large cast of supporting characters (although Gaminara and Molony effectively portray Watson and O’Brien respectively, they are of course distanced representations of real people, so let’s just assume the quotation marks from here on in). The Body of an American is, essentially, a verbatim show.

And yet O’Brien has sculpted his own form of documentary theatre from these many fragments. The story he originally wanted to tell was that of Watson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who has documented atrocities across the world. O’Brien was drawn to Watson while attempting to write a play about ghosts; Watson, the haunted man, became his new subject. What The Body of an American has turned into, however, is a play documenting the process of documentary theatre, jumping frenetically between emails, conversations, recordings and reflections. The text is lyrical but dense, its restless movement demanding total concentration from an audience.

As well as continually hopping about, the whole thing constantly gestures to its own construction, telling its audience as much about O’Brien’s efforts to write it as it does about the life of the man he has attempted to put on stage. In this way, The Body of an American deftly sidesteps the more problematic elements of verbatim theatre. Despite that initial declaration of authenticity – which I suspect is as much to train the audience’s minds on the idea of authenticity as it is to reassure us of the show’s truth – there is no question of obscuring the process of editing in an effort to pretend to absolute, unmediated truth. The play is, unapologetically, just one version of reality.

The same might be said, rather aptly, of a photograph. Photographic images purport to be snapshots of the truth, images of reality, but someone always has to frame them, to isolate that particular moment in time and decide that it is worth capturing. Paul’s words even refer to this. The most important photograph in the play is the one that sealed his success and his torment, both winning him the Pulitzer Prize and haunting him for life. In the moment of taking the infamous image, which shows a US soldier’s battered corpse on a street in Mogadishu, he talks about framing it better, about getting the right shot. Part of what tortures Paul throughout, perhaps, is the disconnect between the truth he endlessly seeks and the artificiality of how he tries to capture it.

For all that the show’s content is dark, disturbing and infected with a pervasive sense of melancholy, James Dacre’s production delivers this difficult material with a sharp kick of adrenaline. The pace rattles furiously along, sweeping its audience up in the same addictive thrill that keeps Paul doing what he does. In this way, the production is very good at complicatedly recognising both the compulsive excitement of Paul’s work and the gnawing depression that is, the piece implies, both a symptom and a cause of his chosen career. As the show goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the same deadening sorrow eats away at Dan; there are moments when a chilling, identical look of desolation pours out of both Gaminara’s and Molony’s eyes.

As much as anything, it occurs to me about halfway through, The Body of an American is about relationships between men. The strange yet moving central friendship between Dan and Paul is the most obvious of these, but their respective relationships with the men in their families loom large, as does Paul’s unbreakable link with the ghost of the man he ironically immortalised. It is often the damage of these male relationships that binds Dan and Paul closer together, linked by their common losses and their struggle with normative ideas of masculinity. In their depression, their loneliness and their retreat from society, the two men seem more and more alike; two broken individuals in a broken world.

On reflection, it strikes me that the photojournalists in Chimerica and The Witness are also male – perhaps not without reason. All three photojournalists, real and fictional, are observing from a position of white male privilege; their gaze is especially problematic because of the troubling power balance between watcher and watched. In his review, Andrew Haydon brilliantly articulates the significance of choice in the situations depicted by the play, which he argues is a central characteristic of privilege itself. The privileged choose to look on wars and atrocities, to seek them out and capture them for the eyes of people living on the other side of the world. Those caught up in the midst of conflict or disaster simply have nowhere else to look.

The tight, intelligent layout of Dacre’s production also makes an audience’s gaze loaded. Those all-important screens at either end of the performance space play host to projections throughout the show, showing harrowing selections from Paul’s back catalogue of warzone horrors. Because of their positioning, these images never directly confront us, meaning that – like Paul – we have to very deliberately look if we want to comprehend the images in question. Though, actually, this isn’t quite true. There is a choice involved in looking at the photographs full-on, in all their horror, but the haunting fact of their presence is unavoidable, flickering away at the peripheries of our vision. Like the tightly packed ideas in the play, they dance around the edges, framing the electrifying action at the centre of the piece.

As well as the obvious comparisons to be made with Chimerica and The Witness, Andrew links The Body of an American with Grounded, another Gate show that was equally electric, equally intelligent and equally concerned with America. I’d argue that it also demands to be considered alongside No Place to Go, the third production in a season that the theatre pointedly framed with ideas of work and modern American identity. Despite their differences (and No Place to Go is in most respects very different to the other two productions), what I found myself taking away from all three shows was their deep sense of loss – a loss often stained with bitter disillusionment. Which, taken as a collective statement, seems to say a lot about the USA, our external perspective on it and the modern world more widely. A grim image indeed.

P.S. I will, one day, write the essay I have simmering away about photography, photojournalism and the ethics of the image in The Body of an American, Chimerica and The Witness …

Photo: Tristram Kenton.

The Pass, Royal Court

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

pass-600x398

Originally written for Exeunt.

Following Thomas Hitzlsperger’s decision to publicly come out, renewed focus has fallen on the prejudice still faced by gay footballers, bestowing something of a mixed blessing on the Royal Court’s latest offering. On the surface of it, John Donnelly’s play is “about” a premiership footballer struggling with his sexuality, which he stubbornly refuses to define or discuss. But it also touches on lots of other things – fame, money, friendship, competition –which get slightly elided in the wake of its sudden topicality.

The play, following a familiar trajectory, traces the journey of footballer Jason (the ever-excellent Russell Tovey) from early promise through to the giddy zenith of fame, plotted out via three pivotal moments in three different hotel rooms. Its first scene, while slow to develop, offers plenty to relish. Jason and best mate Ade (Gary Carr) are killing time on the night before the biggest match of their lives – two tensely coiled springs in close proximity. Their relationship and its silent undercurrent of mutual attraction are believably and wittily sketched, as laddish banter gradually gives way to compelling tenderness.

Cut to seven years later, when Jason has gained fame and fortune but lost the puppylike glimmer of mischief that so animated him on his first appearance. This is where the piece begins to slacken its initially confident grip, taking a long time to get anywhere. The scene’s encounter between Jason and table dancer Lyndsey (Lisa McGrillis), though enjoyable, feels convoluted and contrived for the sake of a plot point that could be achieved with much less meandering. The swagger returns after the interval, as Jason and Ade are reunited for a hedonistic night that crackles with danger and desire, but it’s hard to shake the suspicion that this is a script in need of some tightening.

Alongside the main thrust of the plot, there are also some more ambitious shots which – though on target – rarely hit the back of the net. Buried within the classic tale of fame’s empty promises is an implicit critique of the parameters of success in modern society, most of which rest on money. Competition, in life as in sport, also receives a bit of a battering; the sense is that this, more than anything else, is what drives a wedge between Jason and Ade, while Jason’s desire to win leaves him cripplingly lonely. But these avenues are left frustratingly underexplored.

Despite its weaknesses, however, Tovey holds the piece together in a remarkable central performance. From his first youthful grimaces of self-congratulation, furiously skipping to the imagined roars of the crowd, to the hunched husk of a form that he becomes in the final scene as he bends determinedly over his exercise bike, Tovey’s every last muscle is employed in fleshing out the character of Jason. Astonishingly, he seems to age physically as well as emotionally, subtly transfiguring himself before our eyes as he progresses from enthusiastic newcomer to hardened veteran. One imagines that he behaves on the football pitch as he does in life – dodging, sprinting, pulling off slick manoeuvres without breaking a sweat, yet all underscored with a faint attitude of desperation.

This is reflected in John Tiffany’s production, which marries polish with uncertainty, machismo with vulnerability. There are also brilliant outbursts of playfulness, Jason and Ade’s gleeful trashing of the hotel room in the final scene being one of the most entertaining, though these do not always sit comfortably with the rest of the action. More could perhaps be made of Laura Hopkins’ clean, slick design, capturing both the attraction and the cold impersonality of the hotel room setting. It’s a canny choice of location, at once encapsulating glamour, escape and loneliness. I’m particularly struck by Lyndsey’s loaded observation that “tomorrow someone will come in and clean this all away”; a simple factual statement that resonates deeply with Jason’s transitory, unfulfilled existence.

As the piece closes, however, it leaves the nagging sense of something lacking. Ultimately, the main disappointment of The Pass is that it fails to add anything significantly new to the discussion it engages with, leaving my opinions on its subject matter little altered or challenged at the end of two and a bit hours, in spite of many intriguing turns along the way. But this is, perhaps, less a failure on its own terms than on the terms of the media discourse surrounding it. Timeliness, it seems, is something of a double-edged sword.

Hippo World Guest Book, Caryl Churchill Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

HIPPO-WORLD

It’s a bit of a bold statement, but I think Chris Goode’s Hippo World Guest Book might just be the best piece of theatre to be made about the internet to date. Except, strictly speaking, it’s not actually about the internet at all – at least, not in any straightforward sense. As Goode tells us at the beginning of the show, none of the words in the main body of the piece are his; apart from the pre-recorded introduction, he has not written any of what is about to be performed. Instead of sitting down at a blank word document and trying to tackle the unruly behemoth that is our online world, Goode has borrowed from it. He doesn’t comment on the internet as much as comment from it.

The vast majority of the text in the show comes from the eponymous Hippo World Guest Book, which is exactly what it sounds like: an online guest book on a website for (surprisingly vociferous) hippo fans. Left unmoderated, this web page is a fascinating microcosm of online commenting culture, beginning in a spirit of giddy optimism but quickly beginning to sour. Goode has edited down hundreds of pages worth of comments into a one hour slice of highlights, though he’s clear that each individual comment has not been meddled with in any way. What we hear is exactly how the commenters wanted to express themselves – a thought that is, as Goode points out, quite extraordinary to reflect on at certain points.

In his little preamble – the introduction to the introduction, if you will – Goode tells us that he stumbled across Hippo World and its oddly compelling guest book by accident, but the subject of the comments he goes on to read feels significant. Or rather, it is significant because of its insignificance. I can think of few things more innocuous than a fan site for, on the face of it, a pretty uncontroversial animal. Because of this innocuousness, the subsequent bile of the trolls who begin to occupy the site is all the more startling, while the lack of any meaningful connection to politics or world events makes it a strikingly pure metaphor for internet behaviour. Where Theatre State’s choice of forum topic (arts funding) in A Lesson on the Benefits of Being a Troll felt a little manipulative, the benign indifference that I suspect most audiences feel towards hippos functions to focus attention on the intent of the comments rather than their specific content (I may be wrong here; my fellow audience members might have had extremely strong opinions about hippos).

The arrangement of the space and Goode’s performance within it also feel important. There’s a very low-fi aesthetic to the piece – so low-fi, in fact, that it would be easy not to think of it as an aesthetic at all, just to accept it as a man reading from a stand. To the side of where Goode reads from the guest book, there is a small table arrayed with a hippo stuffed toy, a candle and a framed photo of Hippo World’s founder. These are all produced, along with the guest book (actual printed pages slotted into a plastic file), from a pretty unassuming Morrisons bag. The candle is lit at the start of the performance, as the recorded, storybook style introduction outlines the utopian beginnings of Hippo World, and remains gently flickering away until the guest book finally becomes a neglected wasteland of casino spam.

There’s something deeply melancholy about this journey from optimism to antagonism to a void occupied only by advertising. It is, of course, a metaphor for the web – and a particularly powerful one in the midst of renewed concerns about Twitter abuse – but it also feels like something of a sad allegory for all of our utopian endeavours. This sense of melancholy is underlined throughout by Goode’s extraordinary performance; even as it is properly laugh-out-loud, tears-streaming-down-the-face funny (and it is very, very funny), there is a subtle underlying layer of sadness, a heavy knowledge of what is to come. Goode takes on the sighing character of a god watching his creations rip one another to shreds, as if he knew all along that it could only end this way. But then there is also such gentle care in the presentation of passion and hope – even if it comes in the form of “I LOVE HIPPOS!!” – hinting that perhaps things could be different, perhaps there is something in the attempt to carve a space for shared enthusiasm and love.

As Matt Trueman reflected in a great piece for the Guardian a while back, exploring the internet in the space of the theatre is extraordinarily difficult, and any show that attempts to do so runs the risk of appearing dated almost as soon as it appears. Online developments simply move too fast, so therefore anything that attempts to be technologically innovative and of the moment is almost bound to fail. Instead, what Hippo World Guest Book does so brilliantly is to acknowledge the mechanics of theatre as much as the mechanics of the internet. Rather than attempting to evoke the sleek, digital anonymity of the internet, Goode makes a point of the analogue intimacy of his surroundings. Attention is deliberately drawn to the simplicity of the props, the physical presence of the pieces of paper from which Goode reads, the co-presence of performer and audience members in the same room.

I would suggest that all the best pieces of theatre about (or touching on) the internet – those that really capture something of its spirit, its complexity, its effects on human thought and behaviour – are those that recycle its habits with a simultaneous awareness of the context of the theatre. I’m thinking of the multiple-tab structure of Narrative; the short, sharp bites of theatrical data in Love and Information; the riotous clash of diet tips, “likes” and cat videos in Vivienne Franzmann’s bonkers piece for Open Court’s Collaboration project. Because while perhaps theatre is ill-equipped to deal with the technological intricacies of the networked society, it is perfectly positioned to explore the predicament of individuals and communities within it.

By way of a postscript, I have to say that I’m intrigued (if not also a little horrified) by the idea of a durational performance reading out every single one of Hippo World’s comments …

The Duchess of Malfi, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

If there’s one thing a new theatre building is capable of doing, as I noted in a blog earlier this week, it’s to refocus our attention on the space in which performance takes place. We’re all too apt to comment on site only when it is accompanied with the word “specific”, ignoring the fact that every piece of theatre is inflected by its surroundings. In considering the first production at the Globe’s new indoor Jacobean theatre, therefore, I’m inevitably going to end up discussing the venue as much as – if not more than – the show. Here, I’m comforted and encouraged by Matt Trueman’s idea of theatre criticism as a team sport; you’ll doubtless be able to read better commentaries on the play and the performances elsewhere, allowing me to happily riff on architecture, candlelight and acoustics.

On stepping inside the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the first thing you notice is the wood. From seats to stage to pillars, the whole place is fashioned from the stuff. Other than the beautifully painted ceiling, it’s mostly left bare, immediately drawing attention to the materials used. What is also striking upon entering the space is its intimacy. In stark contrast with the Globe’s 1,500 capacity, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has seats for just 340, all of which – right up to the top gallery – feel thrillingly close to the compact stage. Under the dim, shimmering illumination of candlelight, the shadowy auditorium is claustrophobic, sometimes almost oppressively so. The closeness is at once exciting and unsettling.

All of which makes John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi the perfect play to open this space. This is a play in which notions of dark and light, concealment and illumination, are central to both action and themes. It is a play in which closeness of all kinds recurs throughout the plot, and which features a series of enclosed spaces, from the locked chambers of the Duchess and Antonio’s secret marriage to the rooms where the Duchess is later imprisoned and tormented by her brothers. It is also known that The Duchess of Malfi was originally performed indoors, in the Blackfriars theatre on which the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is partially modelled, and was in all likelihood written for an indoor space. Watching it by the flickering light of candles, this makes perfect sense.

Intrigued as I was by the idea of theatre by candlelight, its effects are far more complex and enchanting than I could have anticipated. “Magical” is a word that seems to naturally leap to the lips of those watching, and it’s easy to see why. Candlelight is adjustable, allowing for far more controlled variation than the temperamental daylight that productions have to work with in the Globe, yet it still has an attractively unpredictable quality. Its unstable glow can throw odd shadows or create momentary illusions, making the Playhouse a gloomy palace of the imagination. There’s something dreamlike about the experience of spectatorship in this light, illuminating the dark passions and rich textures of Webster’s play far more effectively than an over-reaching barrage of sophisticated lighting effects.

It’s tempting to focus on appearances, but the acoustics of this space have just as much of an impact on the theatrical experience as all the candles. While the Globe can take on the character of a booming arena, instantly creating epic scale with the addition of heavy drum beats or clamorous trumpet calls, the aural landscape of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is far more delicate, fixing the ear’s attention on all its subtleties. This is in part to do with the enhanced intimacy – there is simply less space for the sound to reverberate around – but it is also an effect of the very fabric of this building. Not knowing a great deal about the workings of sound, it could be the shape of the space, the arrangement of the pillars, or simply all that wood, but whatever it is it creates a wonderfully ghostly soundscape for this production. When the voice of the dead Duchess is heard, echoing Antonio’s words from various positions around the auditorium, it’s easy to believe that these intonations emanate from some supernatural sphere.

So what of the production itself? I’ve touched on some of its effects, combined with those of the space, but it deserves a slightly more thorough assessment. If Dominic Dromgoole’s interpretation has an overall texture it is, in accord with its surroundings, dreamlike, descending increasingly into the nightmarish. In a light that can never really be described as bright and is often reduced to an ominous gloom, Webster’s more outlandish plot devices – the wax figures with which Ferdinand cruelly tricks his sister come to mind – take on the sinister edge that was perhaps originally intended. But this is also a production that is unafraid to highlight the more ridiculous aspects of the play. A grim humour suffuses the piece, while James Garnon’s Cardinal is deliciously, laughably evil, summoning snorts of mirth from the audience even as the corpses fall. Murder, it turns out, is often rather funny.

Gemma Arterton, meanwhile, makes a dignified and deeply feeling Duchess. There is a girlishly rapturous yet vulnerable quality to her doomed passion for Antonio, but when facing imprisonment she is still and stonily composed. The dark, grimy flipside of Arterton’s captivating protagonist is found in her twin brother Ferdinand, here rendered particularly repellent in the able – if sweaty – hands of David Dawson. A quick mention too must go to Alex Waldmann, who I last saw as Orlando in the RSC’s joyous As You Like It, and who here once again offers an earnest, convincing portrait of a man bowled over by love. But what’s really fascinating about watching these performances is their movement through the space, still feeling their way around this new theatrical dynamic, but with a tentative grace. Even the lighting of the lowered chandeliers – a necessary intrusion on the action – has a sort of choreography to it.

The other thing that strikes me is the sheer theatricality of Webster’s play in this context. The playwright’s wit can get forgotten amidst the gore and grotesquerie, but it is present and correct here, presented with a lightly knowing air. I find my attention particularly drawn to small comments in the text that refer to the framework of the theatre, while the simple mechanics of this stage cause performers to implicitly, unfussily acknowledge their doubled status as actor and character, comfortably delivering the potentially awkward asides. This self-awareness feels particularly pronounced in the case of Waldmann’s Antonio, who in the course of a couple of scene changes physically brushes up against the fate that awaits him, casting his eyes towards it with an interesting attitude of resignation.

What most excites scholars about the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, of course, is its identity as a sort of theatrical time machine. It is a space in which to rediscover plays like Webster’s in their original context – or at least as close to that original context as we’re likely to get. Theatremakers can experiment with the use of candlelight, the style of performance, the musical arrangements, all the while making notes against what we already know about Jacobean theatre. For anyone with even the slightest interest in history, this romantic notion of recapturing the past is undeniably appealing.

I’m fascinated to learn, however, that – unlike the Globe – the Playhouse was not built as a direct reconstruction of any one theatre. It is instead intended as representative of indoor Jacobean theatres in general, while at the same time paradoxically representing a fictional building, one that never historically existed. As well as offering the kind of flexibility that the Globe’s association with Shakespeare will never quite allow, this ambiguous identity makes the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse a theatre of the imagination in every possible sense, revealing as much about our contemporary conception of history as it does about the history it attempts to reanimate. It is itself a performance of the past. And what could be more magical than that?

If you fancy some more reading, the Guardian’s features on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by Andrew Dickson and Dominic Dromgoole are both well worth a look, while Dan Hutton’s excellent analysis of space in The Commitments is pretty essential.

Photo: Mark Douet