Drama Online

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

And finally for this week a potentially groundbreaking new resource for theatre students and teachers called Drama Online. It says about itself:

Drama Online introduces new writers alongside the most iconic names in playwriting history, providing contextual and critical background through scholarly works and practical guides.

Currently it is in BETA development but there is already so much on there. To get to the plays, you will have to have a subscription, but a lot of the areas, such as the Playwrights & Practitioners and Genres pages are accessible to all users. If this continues to grow it will become a key resource for theatre students everywhere.

Words Are Louder Than Actions

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

All aspects of culture have their trends – art, music, architecture and so on – and theatre is no different. Current trends in theatre seem to be that of the immersive performance but also that of verbatim theatre (VT), which appears to be very popular at the moment across the globe. Essentially VT is a form of documentary theatre in which plays are created/written from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic.

Perhaps one of the most famous pieces of VT is The Laramie Project which is a play by the Tectonic Theater Project about the reaction to the 1998 murder of a gay student in Laramie, Wyoming, in the US. The murder was denounced as a hate crime and brought attention to the lack of hate crimes laws in various US states. The play draws on hundreds of interviews conducted by the theatre company with inhabitants of the town, company members’ own journal entries, and published news reports. Arguably it is one of the most performed plays in The States. The company have just followed up the original with a new work called The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later which returns to Laramie to see how attitudes have changed in the intervening years.

There is a sense that VT is something new, but this is in fact mistaken. This kind of theatre has been around since the early 20th Century, one of the pioneers being Erwin Piscator and his living newspapers. In Drama Online Dr Tom Cantrell, Lecturer in Drama, University of York, gives a great outline and history of VT

Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre which is based on the spoken words of real people. In its strictest form, verbatim theatre-makers use real people’s words exclusively, and take this testimony from recorded interviews. However, the form is more malleable than this, and writers have frequently combined interview material with invented scenes, or used reported and remembered speech rather than recorded testimony. There is an overlap between verbatim theatre and documentary theatre, and other kinds of fact-based drama, such as testimonial theatre (in which an individual works with a writer to tell their own story) and tribunal theatre (edited from court transcripts). In the United Kingdom, the term ‘verbatim’ specifically relates to the use of spoken testimony, whereas ‘documentary’ encompasses other found sources, such as newspaper articles, diaries and letters. However, in America ‘verbatim’ is not used, with ‘documentary’ being the preferred term. When looking for verbatim playtexts, the reader will often find them conflated with other documentary forms.

Documentary theatre has a rich heritage in comparison to the relative infancy of verbatim theatre. Erwin Piscator’s Trotz alledem! (In Spite of Everything! Berlin, 1925) is widely acknowledged as the first stage documentary. The play was a revue about the Communist Party and Piscator utilised new technologies which included creating montages using projected newsreel footage. Trotz alledem!also featured recorded speeches, news-extracts, photographs and film sequences from the First World War. Piscator went on to direct some of the most respected German documentary plays such as Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Representative, known in America as The Deputy), which premiered in West Berlin in 1963, Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964), and Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965). These German documentary productions had a great influence on British documentary theatre, particularly the work of Joan Littlewood. Her production, Oh What a Lovely War! chronicled the First World War through songs and documents of the period. Its importance was immediately recognised, with the production hailed by the Observer as ‘The most important theatrical event of the decade’.

The development of verbatim theatre, rather like Piscator’s use of new film projection technologies, is closely linked to a simple technological development – the invention of the portable cassette recorder. This enabled the voices of individuals to be recorded in their own environment. Mobile interviews could take place which extended the dramatic possibilities of verbatim theatre. The first verbatim productions were directed by Peter Cheeseman who was artistic director of the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent from 1962 – 1984. Cheeseman’s verbatim work at Stoke was not only influenced by the left-wing documentary theatre of Joan Littlewood, but also by the radio documentary tradition, particularly the radio ballads of Charles Parker. Central to Parker’s work was the prominence of working class voices in the broadcasts. One of Cheeseman’s most notable productions, which can be regarded the first verbatim play, was Fight for Shelton Bar (1974), which was part of a campaign fighting against the closure of a major steelworks in the heart of Stoke, and was performed in the city to an audience of many of the ex-workers.

Over the past two decades verbatim theatre has come to occupy a central place on the British stage, and is seen as one of the most incisive forms of political theatre. It has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, with some of the highest profile theatres staging verbatim plays. Particularly noteworthy exponents of the form include David Hare, whose verbatim (or at least part-verbatim) plays The Permanent Way (2003), Stuff Happens (2004) andThe Power of Yes (2009) were all performed at the National Theatre; director Max Stafford-Clark and writer Robin Soans, who have collaborated on A State Affair (2000), Talking to Terrorists (2005) andMixed Up North (2009); and in particular the campaigning work of director Nicholas Kent and theGuardian journalist Richard Norton Taylor at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, North London. Kent and Norton-Taylor’s work has included a series of tribunal plays, including Nuremberg (1996), Bloody Sunday (2005), and perhaps their most successful production: The Colour of Justice: The Stephen Lawrence Enquiry (1999). All these were edited scenes from court cases. Kent has also collaborated with Gillian Slovo on Guantanamo: ‘Honour Bound to Defend Freedom’ (with Victoria Brittain, 2004) and most recently on The Riots (2011), which was the first theatrical response to the riots in the summer of 2011.

Verbatim theatre has arisen as the medium chosen to depict major societal issues. For example, army deaths in Philip Ralph’s Deep Cut (2008) and Fiona Evans’s Geoff Dead: Disco for Sale (2008); prostitution in Esther Wilson’s Unprotected (2006), Alecky Blythe’s The Girlfriend Experience (2008); murder in Tanika Gupta’s Gladiator Games (2005) and London Road (2012) and perhaps most predominantly, a surge of work on the continuing issue of the war in Iraq: Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War (2003), Called to Account (2007) and Tactical Questioning (2011), Gregory Burke’s Black Watch(2007) and Steve Gilroy’s The Motherland (2008).

Verbatim theatre has also proliferated internationally. Interested readers should explore American plays such as Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997) and in particularThe Laramie Project (2000) and The Laramie Project Ten Years Later (2009). Anna Deavere Smith is also one of the most high profile documentary makers. Her work includes Building Bridges, Not Walls(1985) and Fires in the Mirror (1992). Similarly important is Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s celebrated play The Exonerated (2002), composed of interviews with individuals who have been released from death row. Australia has also experienced a boom in verbatim productions. The first verbatim production was Paul Brown’sAftershocks (1993), featuring interviews in the aftermath of the devastating Newcastle earthquake. Works by Alana Valentine including Run Rabbit Run(2004) and Parramatta Girls (2007) have also raised the profile of Australian verbatim theatre.

VT should be powerful and is obviously all about theatre that provokes, informs and seeks social and cultural change. Michael Billington wrote an article for The Guardian that also talks about its current popularity and you can read that here.

In an article for ideastap, playwright Alecky Blythe outlines her process:

I start with either an interesting event, or interesting character. That might be a story that I read in the paper or it might be an ongoing story, like women bishops. Then I’ll take myself off to interview people in a very journalistic way.

You have to be quite upfront from the beginning. Even if you don’t know where your project will end up – if it’ll even get used – you need to let people know that you’re going to record them and that an actor might portray them on stage. And you have to get their permission to do that.

Some people have said ‘no’. You have to judge if that really is a ‘no’ or if you just haven’t explained yourself properly. If it’s a matter of them being identifiable, I will go into how I can make them anonymous….

Some people have both [of the] things you’re looking for: interesting characters and the potential to be developed narratively. Some people are brilliant, likeable and accessible straight away, but they might not have much forward story; all their best stories have already happened to them. The best verbatim theatre is as much present tense as possible – it’s about capturing things as they happen.

Of course you’re looking for emotional effect, but at other points in the story you’ll be looking for plot and facts, which means asking slightly dry questions – where they are, what they’re doing, who they’re waiting for etc. Those things are key to the highs and lows of the story.

Legally I don’t know whether it’s different to journalism. If someone says something that is highly contentious, as I am finalising the edit I’ll also go over exactly what they said with them. I want to check they remember, in case it could lead to any kind of back lash for them, and that they are ok with that. Some people say things in the heat of the moment that they might forget; sometimes the show is produced at least a year after they said it.

I don’t transcribe anything. I make a first edit, and of that edit I’ll log the timecode and who said what. That means that further down the line I can pick up specific moments – someone talking about sunglasses, for instance – by reading back through my notes rather than listening to 15 hours of recording.

I don’t write any lines; I give the actors the audio recordings. Although on the first day of rehearsal they get a running order; the names of the characters, titles of the tracks and who’s playing what part…..

…One of the strengths of verbatim is the sort of rich text you just couldn’t make up. So if you’re doing a verbatim play, put some of those quotes on the flyer or poster. It can just be a tiny soundbite.

I’ve always gone out and followed stories before anybody’s put any money on the table. That’s still the case. Even if a company says they want to work with you, by the time the paperwork’s gone through and the contract is signed, you might have missed a month’s worth of collecting material. Sometimes you are living on a breadline and taking gambles. But luckily my process isn’t too expensive – apart from the initial cost of a dictaphone, it’s just batteries and travel.

The popularity of VT is wide and I share two examples here that give you an idea about its power – Home, about life in a hostel for young homeless people in London and My Name is Rachel Corrie a play based on the diaries and emails of Rachel Corrie, an American student who was killed while protesting against the destruction of a house by the Israeli Defence Force in the Gaza Strip in 2003.

I should say (and proudly) that Shannon Murphy is an ex student of mine.

And finally a great article from Australian Writers Guild Magazine, by playwright Alana Valentine titled The tune of the spoken voice.

Power To The People?

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

A quick post from me today, a longer one coming tomorrow. You need to read my previous post, Worlds Apart, to make sense of this one. It is fascinating to read Lyn Gardner’s take on The Tragedy of Coriolanus by Beijing People’s Art theatre given what Lin Zhaohua has to say about his direction and why he does Shakespeare in China. A real East versus West cultural conundrum, I think. The review was published in The Guardian this week.

Beijing People’s Art Theatre go for bombast, but slack pacing and an underused chorus leave it more mediocre than menacing

It sure is big, and – with no less than two Chinese rock bands on stage – it’s full of sound and fury, but while Beijing People’s Art Theatre pump up the volume on Shakespeare’s tragedy of power and violence, the result is oddly muted. With its themes of arrogance, leadership, a discontented mob and democracy, this should be a fascinating choice of play for a company hailing from a country where there is no political opposition, human rights are regularly abused and protest is frequently stamped out.

But this production remains mysteriously opaque, offering empty spectacle in the place of nuanced political comment and metaphor. Unlike the Shakespeare that came out of Romania and Poland during their communist eras, it seems determined to offer no comment upon the society that spawned it. Maybe it says something about the contempt in which the mass of the people are held by the country’s political leadership that the mob here have a desultory feel, wandering around looking vaguely hippyish, waving their arms unconvincingly and muttering the Chinese equivalent of “rhubarb, rhubarb”. They are so under-energised that they are never a real threat to anyone, except perhaps to their own health and safety in getting on and off the stage without tripping over each other.

The slackness of the crowd scenes is reflected in a production which was first performed in 2007 – and which often looks in need of a jolly good dust-down. Even the aesthetic is inconsistent, at times pared down and stripped back, and at others including cumbersome sofas and carts. Like a great deal in this production, the ladders at the back of the stage are there for effect only, and serve no purpose.

It’s not all mediocre flashiness. Pu Cunxin’s arrogant Coriolanus enters with a rock-star assurance and has a rumbling power, like a capped volcano. The scenes between him and his mother (Li Zhen) have genuine power and tension, particularly in their final encounter, which seals Coriolanus’s fate. But overall an evening which is epic, but not in a good way.

Other critics took different views and raised interesting questions. You can read them here, here and here.

Worlds Apart

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

Over the course of the summer I have written about Shakespeare a couple of times. Today I am going to share two articles about two plays currently in production from opposite sides of the world. Firstly, Coriolanus directed by Lin Zhaohua for the People’s Art Theatre in Beijing in Mandarin and Hamlet, by The Wooster Group in New York. Both are currently on at The Edinburgh Festival.

The first is by Andrew Dixon for the Guardian, entitled

Guitar hero: Coriolanus goes rock

China’s most controversial director is bringing Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to Edinburgh – with two heavy-metal bands in tow

It’s 45 minutes to showtime at the People’s Art Theatre in Beijing. Backstage, actors in civvies are padding around, studiously avoiding the clock. Behind a dressing-room door, someone is making heavy weather of their warmup. Suddenly, the strangulated squeal of an electric guitar shakes the building, like a crack of thunder. No one bats an eyelid.

The closest most British stagings of Shakespeare get to guitars is the occasional lute. But in China, it seems, they prefer their Bard a little gnarlier. This is The Tragedy of Coriolanus by Lin Zhaohua, routinely described as China’s most controversial theatre director. First performed in 2007, it is big in every sense: there’s a cast of more than 100, and the action takes place on a near-empty stage against a vast, blood-red brick wall.

But the real surprise is the soundtrack: two live heavy-metal bands, going under the colourful names of Miserable Faith and Suffocated, who slide in periodically from the wings and punctuate the action with frenzied surges of nu-metal. This might be the only version of Shakespeare’s tragedy – the story of a hot-headed general who goes to war against his own people – that turns it into a battle of the bands.

The director is hiding in a cloud of cigarette smoke in the theatre cafe. Were it not for the translator hovering at his elbow, you’d mistake Lin for an elderly caretaker: a slight, somewhat caved-in figure, his jacket hanging absent-mindedly off one shoulder. But, behind neat spectacles, his dark eyes are pin-sharp. He claps me on the shoulder as I sit down; I sense I’m being sized up.

First things first: why the heavy metal? “I wanted to use rock music to display the fierceness of the war, and the rioting of the citizens,” he says. “At first I wanted bands from Germany … I listened to a lot of them, but I didn’t like their electronic sounds. So Yi Liming, my designer, showed me around different parts of Beijing. I chose two of the bands I saw.”

The music certainly adds a volcanic energy. The text has been translated into contemporary Mandarin, and here in Beijing (unlike at the Edinburgh international festival, where the show will open later this month) there are no surtitles. The scalding force of Shakespeare’s verse, though, is echoed in the roaring guitars and pulsing bass. It’s a high-voltage experience, particularly when the Roman mob, dressed in semi-druidic robes, rush onstage brandishing wooden staffs – like a cross between a scene from Star Wars and Reading festival. In the interval, the musicians entertain the crowd, a flock of teenagers pressing close, clicking away with their cameraphones.

Lin smiles. “Some dramatists and critics don’t like the idea of using rock music, and they criticise my way of doing productions.” How does he feel about that? A shrug. “I don’t care.”

Combing the city’s nightspots for musical accompaniment sounds energetic for a director now in his late 70s. But Lin has never done things by the book. After graduating from the Beijing Central Academy of Drama in 1961, he joined the People’s Art Theatre (BPAT) – China’s equivalent of the RSC – as an actor, only to find his career stymied by the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards, he joined forces with the dissident writer Gao Xingjian, who would later win the Nobel prize. A trio of plays, beginning with 1982’s Absolute Signal, all but launched experimental theatre in China, with a confrontational, often absurdist style that unnerved the communist authorities.

In the decades since, Lin has been prolific, flitting between new drama, stylised Peking Opera and ambitious reworkings of western classics. According to Li Ruru, an academic who has written extensively on Chinese theatre, Lin is “a major voice. He’s been doing experimental theatre for more than 30 years, at the absolute vanguard of Chinese spoken drama.” But his approach hasn’t always done him favours: one critic described him and Gao as “harbingers of strangeness” for their efforts to release drama from the straitjacket of Soviet-era social realism. The director refuses even this pigeonholing: “I have no style,” he has repeatedly told interviewers.

Anyone expecting peony-strewn chinoiserie – like that offered by the National Ballet of China two festivals ago – will be in for a shock. This is a Coriolanus of muscular clashes and brutal comedowns; of a leader always itching to administer the hair-dryer treatment, and who does nothing to disguise his detestation of the masses.

In the lead role is one of China’s most famous stage actors, Pu Cunxin: a disconcertingly polite figure who apologies for his sore throat – the consequence of competing with two metal groups. “It is an unusual way of performing,” he admits. “We don’t normally have this kind of collaboration in China. The noise is just so powerful on stage, but we need the rock music to express these emotions. It parallels Shakespeare’s ideas.”

I’m struck by one moment in particular, where Coriolanus’s arch-rival Aufidius grabs a microphone during a battle scene, looking half like a wannabe rock god, half like a politician channelling the energy of the crowd. Politics are everywhere in Coriolanus: the play has been claimed both by leftwing critics as a primer on the dangers of demagoguery, and by the right as a lesson in the fickleness of the masses (the Roman citizens at first swoon over their apparently invincible general, then later turn on him). Given these paradoxes, it feels an oddly appropriate play for present-day China, a country nominally communist, but with an economy many capitalists would trade their copies of Milton Friedman for. On the short walk from my hotel to the theatre, two blocks from the Forbidden City, I drift through a shopping district crammed with western luxury brands; one window of a photography shop is jewelled with glittering Japanese cameras, the other with portraits of Mao and Deng Xiaoping. It would be harder to find a clearer image of Deng’s infamous”socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

What does Lin see in Shakespeare’s text? “The relations between the hero and the common citizens,” he replies. “In ancient Rome, people admired heroes. From my point of view, Coriolanus is a hero.” Is there a resonance with contemporary China? “It’s a good phenomenon if the play refers to current events. Those in power like to control citizens, and some common citizens are foolish.”

I want to find out about a previous Shakespeare production, Lin’s Beckettian staging of Hamlet, first seen in 1989. Performed in a rehearsal room at BPAT, the only prop a barber’s chair, it had three actors (one of them Pu) sharing the roles of Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius. Depending on your perspective, it captured either capitalist alienation, or the disillusion that followed the collapse of the student protests at Tiananmen Square. The parallels were cloudy – theatrical censorship is vigorously alive in the People’s Republic – but there to be seen.

Lin freely admits the show was unusual: in contrast to the traditional Chinese way of presenting Shakespeare, with wigs and western-style makeup (sometimes even prosthetic noses), his actors wore their own clothes, in a conscious decision to show the student prince as just another guy. But he is reluctant to open up on the wider issues. “I hate politics,” he says stoutly. “Hamlet has nothing to do with politics. It’s just about a person’s situation.” I can’t tell whether he’s genuinely uninterested, or unwilling to be frank with a British journalist. “I never discuss politics. I don’t think you can direct a production just from politics.” He isn’t even convinced, he says, he’s avant-garde. “I don’t have that concept. I just direct the production from my interests and from the needs of the play.”

Our time is nearly up; his lighter is snapping impatiently. Last question: does he like being called a rebel? “I don’t have preconceptions about what I’m going to create,” he stonewalls. “I just follow my instincts.”

I realise as I’m rushed out that I’ve forgotten to ask one thing – why direct Shakespeare in the first place? Why stage reach for a playwright four centuries old? When I email, the answer comes back quicker than I expect. It reads: “It gives me the freedom to say what I want.”

Interestingly, the Lin Zhaohua Theatre Studio has it’s own Facebook page which is where all the above images came from.

There is a fantastic outline of him and his work here where he is described as a very controversial drama director in China…one of the most significant figures in Chinese drama history you can’t ignore – whether you love him or not.

The second article today is also from the Guardian, by Hermione Hoby, exploring with the Wooster Group why, after all these years of experimental theatre, they decided to ‘do’ Shakespeare.

Wooster Group take on Shakespeare with Hamlet remix

Before Punchdrunk, or Complicite, or Forced Entertainment, or any other experimental theatre company you can name, there was New York’s Wooster Group, an avant-garde ensemble legendary not just for the work it has made since the 1970s, but also for the love affairs and betrayals that have coloured its history. As former member Willem Dafoe has put it: “You become accomplices in life. There’s a terrific power in that. The other side is, there’s no place to run.”

Since 1974 the company has worked out of the Performing Garage in Soho – a Manhattan neighbourhood once characterised by derelict lofts and heroin dealers and now given over to Prada boutiques and cupcake-centric cafes. This year they’re bringing one of their most successful shows ever – a remixed Hamlet devised from a filmed 1964 production starring Richard Burton – to the Edinburgh international festival.

I meet company members Scott Shepherd and Kate Valk in the big empty black box of their theatre and, seated on the steps of the auditorium, Shepherd explains that he directed the play years ago as a student at Brown University. Ever since, he says, he’s had it stuck in his head. That’s not, it turns out, a figure of speech. “He has a photographic memory,” Valk explains, mock-wearily. “It’s kind of obnoxious at times.”

The skill is what enabled him, for example, to memorise all 49,000 words of The Great Gatsby for Elevator Repair Service’s acclaimed stage adaptation, Gatz. Hamlet though, was rooted even deeper. Eventually, with speeches still running through his head, it began to feel “like something that needed to be exorcised”.

And so he persuaded Valk, who claims to have suffered from what she calls “Shakespeare deficit disorder”, to join him in after-hours work on the text. From that moment in 2006, very slowly, their production began to take shape.

It began with the two of them, but the woman who continues to hold the company together – the matriarch, you might say – is the quietly formidable 69-year-old Elizabeth LeCompte. The Wooster Group emerged amid the creative ferment of 70s downtown New York, but it was her relationship with Spalding Gray, the late actor and writer, that dynamised the company. After graduating from Skidmore College she got together with Gray – as well as Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Ron Vawter, Peyton Smith and Dafoe – with whom she went on to have a son and a 27-year relationship. Dafoe ended it abruptly in 2004, the same year Gray took his own life by throwing himself from the Staten Island ferry. Miraculously, she weathered it with the company intact.

Before she met Gray in the mid 60s, LeCompte had little interest in theatre and had studied art, thinking she might become an architect like her father. “I think maybe,” she says, “it was just a mistake – I got together with Spalding not because I thought I was going to get involved with theatre but when Richard Schechner [the group’s original artistic director] hired me, I realised that it was really a good place.”

By 1975 she was staging Gray’s famous Rhode Island Trilogy, an autobiographical work that details his childhood and the suicide of his mother through monologue as well as personal materials such as letters and photographs. In 1980, Schechner left, LeCompte became artistic director and they changed their name from the Performing Group to the Wooster Group. What drove them then, I ask. She inhales. “It’s hard to know … I don’t know whether it was just youth, because it wasn’t exactly idealism. We weren’t afraid of anybody. We had a certain kind of feeling of the world was ours, so we could do what we wanted.”

The company seems to retain that sense of boundlessness, I suggest.

“You really don’t really know where you’re going to end up when you start,” she agrees. “And there’s something very exhilarating about that, but it’s also very difficult. In most theatres the director has to know what’s there so the other people involved can rely on her. I don’t afford anyone that comfort. I’m as confused as everybody else a lot of the time.”

When LeCompte began working on Hamlet, “I didn’t really think I was working on Shakespeare, I thought I was working out on figuring outabout Shakespeare. I kind of came in a side door.” That’s often the best way. “Well,” she says drily, “it’s the only way I can do most things.”

She remembered seeing the Burton production, which was directed by John Gielgud – himself a famous Hamlet – and thinking of it as experimental purely because the actor playing Gertrude wore not a bodiced dress and ruff, but a mink coat. “That’s what experimental was then!” she laughs. More exciting though was Burton’s futuristically named “Electronovision”, an innovation that used 17 cameras to film and broadcast the performance for two days in 1,000 cinemas across the US . In the Wooster production, that grainy 1964 film is projected above the set, forming a ghostly backdrop of a past Hamlet. The New York Times described the Woosters’ show as “an aching tribute to the ephemerality of greatness in theatre”.

Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos in Hamlet

“The whole metaphor to using the film is the ghost,” Kate Valk enthuses. “The ghost of all those performances!”

Scott Shepherd is a performer who invariably attracts adjectives like “indefatigable” and “tireless”; those seem entirely deserved when it emerges that he edited the entire Burton film into Shakespearean meter, in other words, painstakingly cutting the performers’ pauses so that the iambic pentameter is duly honoured with beats and stresses in the right places.

“This was an arduous task, yeah,” he admits. “To go in and cut pauses if they came in the middle of a verse line and then move them to the end of the verse line.”

It’s Shepherd-as-Hamlet’s imagination, so the premise goes, that creates the onstage action, in which live performers mirror the movements and speech of the actors in the 1964 projection. For all the visual innovations though, LeCompte insists that the text itself remains sacrosanct, and, “on a par with the visual”.

She says: “What I was doing, I realised, was trying to take this shard of what I could get from the past, from that production, and to reinterpolate it into something that made sense to me, in the future.” A brief pause, then: “But I just wanted to delight myself, frankly!”

Despite three decades of making work this is the first Shakespeare the company has ever done. (They’ve since added Troilus and Cressida, a collaboration with the RSC, to their repertoire.)

“I was not hip to the Shakespeare idea at all,” says Ari Fliakos, who plays Claudius and Marcellus, among other roles. Why? “I don’t know,” he says, “maybe it comes out of my allergy to theatre.”

Professing not to be a “theatre person” seems to be a common Wooster trait. Even Valk, who’s been described as “the Meryl Streep of downtown”, has claimed that acting is not among her skills.

When I mention this tendency to LeCompte she laughs. “I like theatre people!” she protests. “But the process of making theatre in the commercial world I don’t like because it’s too formulaic. I really like to ramble for quite a while,” – and then she corrects herself: “I don’t like to, I have to. I wish I was faster, frankly – we’d be making a little more money.”

Like most members, LeCompte included, Fliakos came to the group through a side door, after hanging around there in 1996, answering phones and fetching coffee. “Everything was stimulating, everything resonated,” he recalls. “It seemed like experimenting with drugs all over again, it was a whole new experience I wouldn’t have expected in any kind of live performance.” He sighs: “The minute you try to describe it, not unlike a trip, it begins to dissipate.”

Every member I talk to about the Wooster Group speaks with this kind of ecstatic devotion. Nonetheless, the creative world of 2013 is a very different one to 1974 – financially and ideologically. LeCompte admits that, “in order to be able to keep the company together I have to be more aware of money, ways of living and ideas. It’s the terrible thing that it’s not hip anymore to not have money, or to be on the outside. It’s much harder for people to give up things that have money and status.”

But there are gains, Shepherd explains: “Most people who are in acting are going from one job to the next, and it’s quite hard to develop a sense of continuity, that you’re engaged in building a body of work. And here that’s all you do. One piece bleeds into the other so you’re creating sort of an oeuvre and making something larger than a particular production, you know? This is about developing a philosophy of working, a way of working with a group of people.”

“It feels,” he says finally, “substantial.”

Again the reviews will be out soon for both shows so it will be interesting to see what the critics make of these two very different, culturally and artistically diverse reworkings of Shakespeare. However, according to one critic who Tweeted a few hours ago, the opening night of Hamlet didn’t go well:

It happens to the best of us, it seems.

We Need Dreamers

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

It doesn’t matter where I am in the world at this time of year, I quietly and occasionally wish I was somewhere else. This has nothing to do with the fact that school is about to restart (well, not much) but the fact that the largest arts festival in the world is taking place half a world away. August is the month of The Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe Festival which draws artists and audiences from across the globe. It is truly an incredible event that lasts about 4 weeks and takes over the whole city. Virtually everyone I follow on Twitter, be they actors, directors, critics and so on – all seem to be there. The streets are full of street performers and any space that can possibly squeeze in an audience seems to do so. You want to see examples of world theatre – you can see it in Edinburgh. The performers range from seasoned and world-famous professionals to high school students. The statistics are almost unbelievable. In 2012 for the Fringe Festival alone:

2695 shows were staged.
There were 42,096 performances in 279 venues, featuring 22,457 performers from 2,304 companies and 47 countries.
1,418 performances were world premieres.

If you ever find yourself in the UK during August, you should go, but make sure you have somewhere to stay – hotels are booked up months in advance.

Now the reason for my post today is not about the festival itself, but rather about the opening address, which was this year made by the well know playwright, Mark Ravenhill and which has caused quite a stir in the theatre world. The thrust of his speech was about whether the arts could continue to thrive with reduced government funding in the current economic climate. He made some strong claims and I have to say I know what he means. It sent me off on a trail looking at to what extent the arts are supported by government money around the world and it has thrown up some interesting facts. Comparative statistics are hard to come by, but here are a few:

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In India, the government funds the arts heavily as there is little private support for
performing arts
In Italy, it is the opposite with relatively little public funding.
In South Africa, the arts rely almost solely on private funding.
In China there is huge investment, but it is largely in centrepiece building projects, rather than supporting emerging artists.
In the Arab States, funding for the arts is increasing as it is seen as vital for creating ‘world class’ status.
Australia has a wide-ranging grant system for the arts.
One example from the UK stated that for every £1 invested by government subsidy £7 was returned to the state.

I am writing about this because I think it is something that is generally missing from theatre courses, unless they have a vocational element and I think it is important that theatre students understand the reality of making art in the outside world.

Ravenhill’s speech is below and really does cause pause for thought. Whilst his arguments tend to centre around the UK, there is a definite universality in what he is conjecturing.

Inaugural Opening Address of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by Mark Ravenhill

Yesterday I woke up, checked my Facebook feed first off as I always do and read this status update from a young playwright:

“Dreamt I was arriving at a dinner with a family where the husband had arranged to have the wife killed. She knew it and had chosen to accept it. I was the only other person at the table who knew. But if I let on, I’d die too. Plus, the man had an empire of van rentals and I’d been told I could have one for the Edinburgh Festival really cheap. I woke up before I’d decided what to do. But it wasn’t looking good for the wife. I feel so bad knowing that the offer of a cheap van could weaken me to that point”.

Welcome to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This is a unique performing arts festival. Nowhere in the world is there such an enormous range of work performed in one city in a few weeks. And nowhere is there such an open festival: if you can find a space, anyone can perform here at the Fringe. In this way, it’s a democratic festival. And yet like all democracies, it’s incredibly hard work – enormously costly to be here, to find a space to perform in and live in and to promote your performance.

And so I’m sure the young writer is not alone in dreaming about the dilemma of a choice between murder or a van. And in your waking hours I’m sure you’ve faced – not maybe not the possibility of murder – but some pretty sharp practice to make sure that the show goes on.

Because that’s the curious paradox about being an artist, particularly one who decides to do something as reckless and rewarding as bringing a show to the Fringe Festival. At the same time, to be a good artist you have to be the person who walks in to a space with integrity and tells the truth. That’s what marks you out from the audience and why they’re sitting over there and you’re standing up there: you are the most truthful person in that room.

And how do you get to be there? Chances are by being a liar, a vagabond and a thief. Now, maybe as you get to be a bigger name, you can subcontract out the shadier aspects of the job. Liar? That’s what my publicist does for me. Vagabond? That’s what my agent’s there for. Thief? What else does a producer do?

But certainly at the beginning of your career you’re going to have to be – to use a well worn but suitably Edinburgh based metaphor – DR Jekyll (I’m the one who tells the truth) and MR Hyde (yes, damn it, kill your wife if it means that I get that deal on the van).

It’s a schizophrenic existence. If you allow any of the hucksterism, fakery and swindling to seep in to what happens on the stage then your work as an artist is compromised and so then why frankly bother doing the thing at all? But if you allow any of the honesty and integrity from the stage to enter in to real life then chances are you’re not getting that van, that venue, that audience.

The performing artist, I’d like to suggest, has got to slice their personality as neatly as they can right down the middle, just like a Bertolt Becht heroine. In Brecht’s play Shen Te, The Good Person of Szechuan, was only able to do good in the world because she was also able to disguise herself as Shui Ta who collected the debts owed to her and saw off her rivals I business. And Anna 1 was only able to survive in the world (and send her family in Louisiana the money to build a new home) because her sister Anna 2 inverted the seven deadly sins and insisted that each of them were necessary virtues for survival in the modern world. Although Brecht didn’t set out to write a survival guide for performers at the Fringe Festival, I’d suggest that you could do a lot worse than read The Good Person of Szechuan and The Seven Deadly Sins and use them as your inspiration for how to conduct your affairs.

Because there’s little doubt that the Mr Hyde – the dark killer – aspect of our natures are going to have to be working even harder in the years to come if the shows are going to carry on going on.

Let’s say it again – because still it somehow doesn’t seem quite real in our bubble of existence – capitalism has experienced its biggest economic crisis since the 1930s depression, a depression which brought us genocidal dictatorships and world war. Our world, in ways that we can’t yet understand, is totally different from the one we were living in six or seven years ago. The paradigm has shifted and new ways of living and behaving are going to be needed if we’re going to make our way forward. There’s no possibility of pressing a restart button and going back to – when exactly? What about 2005? When it was all really lovely and that nice New Labour were in power and the economy seemed to doing splendidly and the arts were really, you know, valued. That’s a false memory of course and we’re not going back there. Any party that gets in to power in Westminster at the next election will be committed to the ideology (and plain wrong mathematics) of austerity. So we’re going to be making our art in increasingly tough times for at least a decade or more. We’re going to have to be complicit in more metaphorical wife murdering if we’re going to get the metaphorical van for our show.

But let’s look on this as a good thing. Didn’t the arts become safe and well behaved during the New Labour years? I think they did. I think they weren’t telling the truth – the dirty, dangerous, hilarious, upsetting, disruptive, noisy, beautiful truth – as often as often as they should have done. Why? Because most artists are decent, liberal, if only everyone were nicer to each other and let’s heal it with a hug sort of folk and so voted New Labour. And when New Labour came in to power there was much Gallagher brother greeting and talk of ‘creative industries’ and after a while for a few years a modest but real terms increase in government funding for the arts. And we artists were so grateful for that relatively modest bit of attention and money that we changed substantially what and who we were as artists.

Suddenly, we were talking about working in the creative industries, about the parts that the arts could play in urban renewal, about business plans and strategic thinking, about sponsorship relationships with the corporate sector that would allow us to fund educational work with our developing audiences, about the role that the arts could play in social inclusion.

What were you doing Mummy in the decade before the world hit the biggest economic crisis in almost a century?

Well, darling, I was learning not to talk and think like a grungy, angry artist but think and act more like New Labour cultural commissars and their friends in the banking sector.

Mummy, would they be the ones who got us in to the whole mess that I’m going to be dealing with for my whole life time?

Well, now you put it like that darling, yes I suppose they rather were.

And you spent a decade trying to be more like them, Mummy?

Well yes I rather did.

And wasn’t that a rather stupid thing to do?
Well, not at the time, darling, no; because you see I thought it would get me some funding and then I could build a career path for myself in the creative industries.

And did that work out for you Mummy?

Shut up and go a nick a can of beans for your tea.

In short, I think the arts sector as a whole went astray during the last couple of decades. Just as the Titanic was heading towards the iceberg, we were attending seminars and workshops, learning how to facilitate more effective refrigeration in our sector of the cultural industry when we could have been looking through the telescope and plotting an entirely different course. The bankers and the politicians weren’t looking ahead to spot the approaching iceberg. But neither were we: we were entertaining the same bankers and politicians at our latest gala, corporate sector friendly, socially inclusive performance evening.

As we were heading towards systemic collapse, the arts sector were teaching themselves to think and talk and act the language of the problem and not the solution.

Of course none of us were blessed with supernatural foresight – although there were plenty of signs that the economy that we were living in in the last decade of the old millennium and the first decade of the new was an unsustainable bubble. But let’s not regret what we did wrong then. But let’s look at where we are now. A moment in time when the political vocabulary is bereft of any other ideas than the barren path of austerity, with no major attempt to change the way the banking system or housing market or any other part of the system which proved itself to be so at fault. Politicians and a large part of the electorate are still playing that ‘bit of local difficulty, hang on for a couple more years then we can get back to 2005 again’ game.

Which is why the artists are needed more now than ever before. You’re the ones who have the freedom if you choose to use it to think of new possibilities, crazy ideas, bold, idealistic, irrational, counter-intuitive, disruptive, naughty, angry words and deeds. Because these are the only things that can adequately respond to such a huge meltdown in capitalism and the only way that we might find a way forward in to a different future.

Now is the time to ask the impossible questions and try out the wildest answers. What really is the value of love, of friendship, of work, of sex, of education, of gender, of ownership? Question them, destroy them, rebuild them. What is the value of money? And is capitalism as both practice and ideology the best way to live? The least worst way to live? The terrible but only thing we can come up with way to live? Something that we need to dismantle and start all over again to save ourselves and our planet?

Questions, questions. No easy answers. But we have to think that big if we’re going to catch up after the lost years of cosying up to bankers and politicians.

So thank god we’ve got a government in Westminster that we can properly hate and whole-heartedly attack. Because anger and hatred are some of the best fuel for the artist – strong enough fuel to maybe take us all the way in to imagining totally different ways of living our lives.

I said the freedom to think the impossible but of course the freedom to choose what to think is a difficult place to get to and often an economically costly one. The challenges before us all – particularly new, young artists from who we so desperately need our new ideas and new ways forward – are massive.

For a start there’s the real possibility that in the next decade we may see the end of all public investment in the arts – maybe not in Scotland if it goes its own way – but in the rest of the UK. I feel it’s worth saying this. There are lots of people I work with in the arts who won’t even think that thought ‘the possible end of all public investment in the arts’, as though if you don’t allow yourself to think it then that somehow makes it less likely to happen. But I feel we need to say it if we are going to come up with a full blooded concerted defense of public money for the arts.

But also I think we need to have a Plan B. What if the public funding of the arts, which has earned itself an unassailable position in some other countries, was a passing moment in British life? After all, it didn’t even begin until the 1940s, had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and has been eroded and shrinking since the 1980s. Historically, that’s a very short period of time. Business as usual would be the arts operating entirely within the marketplace with patrons and sponsors. Can you in any way see yourself making your work and speaking to an audience in that context? Or is that so abhorrent to you that you will enter in to a massive fight for public investment in the arts over the next few years? And if you are going to enter in to that fight – what are you really saying art is for to your community?

Because I think the message in the last couple of decades has been very mixed, in many ways downright confusing: we are a place that offers luxury, go on spoil yourself evenings where in new buildings paid for by a national lottery (a voluntary regressive tax) you can mingle with our wealthy donors and sponsors from the corporate sector and treat yourself to that extra glass of champagne but we are also a place that cares deeply about social justice and exclusion as the wonderful work of our outreach and education teams show. So we’re the best friends of the super-rich and the most disadvantaged at the same time? That’s a confusing message and the public has been smelling a rat. If the arts are for something, who are they for? And what are they doing for them? Does the Westminster government’s attack on the very poorest in our society amount to a class war? Might an artist have to choose what side she is on? In a society which has reached such a wipe gap between the rich and the poor as ours – as wide a gap as almost a century ago – then the artist can’t I suggest be for everyone and if we don’t do something pretty brave then we will be by default for the super-rich.

So it’s at least worth thinking: ‘no public money’. Would that mean all of the performing arts becoming safer and duller? Would I be able to choose to ask the impossible questions without public investment? Or maybe even would I be more able to ask the impossible questions without it? Maybe the artist free of any relationship with any public funding body is freest of all? If I didn’t have to fill in forms, tick boxes, prove how good, nice, worthy me and my project are to a well meaning gatekeeper maybe I’d make something better – more truthful, more radical? Anything and everything is worth thinking about and questioning.

But I would suggest that if anyone tells you to think and act more like the business sector, laugh at them and tell them that we tried that and it didn’t work and it meant us colluding with a system in collapse. And if you meet young artists here who use the words ‘this industry’ or ‘my career path’ or ‘ working on our policy document so that it fulfils all the criteria for the next funding round’ smile at them with sympathy for they are speaking a language that became redundant some five years ago.

Because the truth is that you are already fantastic entrepreneurs but you just find that word for what you is a bit naff and rightly so. Who wants to be like some wanker off Dragon’s Den? You’re much better than those tossers who line up and try to get themselves a mentor for their business plan. You have raised, begged, borrowed, stolen the money to get your work here, you are pounding the streets day and night with your flyers in your hand talking your audience one at a time to come and see your show, you are sharing overcrowded vans and flats and working out how to build the most incredible teams to get your shows on. And you do all this using your own ways of doing things, using your own vocabulary. You don’t need to be more like those in the corporate sector. They need to be more like you: your inventiveness, your imagination, your ability to co-operate, to promote yourselves, to genuinely engage with the people who come to see your show.

You are artists. You are making art. You have your own language. You have your own unique way of doing things. You are making your own rules. You don’t want to put yourself in front of a panel of people who’ve been successful in this ‘industry’, who will turn their chair around if they like the sound of your voice, who will mentor you to do things in the same way that they did them. Do you want to be like the X Factorrunner up who speaks in today’s Guardian about his delight at being invited to perform at the Walmart shareholder’s convention? Delighted to sing cover versions for a bunch of arseholes who profit from scandalously low paid workers on zero hours contracts? Do you want to be doing your stand up routine at next year’s Wonga.com debt collector of the year awards ceremony? Sure, it might pay a few bills but it will another step deeper in to the shit when you could be finding a way that all of us might get out of it.

Don’t look for mentors, I would suggest, who are decades older than you. People like me – ignore us. Don’t look for business models from last year. Make it up as you go along. Do everything as if for the first time. As one of the most beautiful men who Scotland ever produced once sang: ‘Rip it up and start again’.

Because the audience here isn’t going to pay money to see you seeking a consensus, avoiding conflict, making do with the way things are right now, being nice and obedient, ticking the boxes that someone else has defined for you. The audience are paying money to see you be new, a freak, challenging, disruptive, naughty, angry, irresponsibly playful – whatever form telling the truth takes in your act. But always telling the truth.

So in a dream you’re sitting there knowing a man will kill his wife but you don’t want to stop him because then he won’t cut you a deal on your van for the Fringe Festival. What are the possible solutions? Yes, collude in the wife’s murder is an option and get your van. Stop the murder and lose the van and so carry your set by foot all the way to Edinburgh is another. That’s surely the most morally correct thing to do and like most morally correct things it’s incredibly hard to do. But if year after year you stop the murders and carry your sets for hundreds of miles you will have a free conscience and maybe that will allow you to make the best art. Or maybe all those hundreds of miles of set carrying will knacker you so much that you’ll produce terrible art. Are there any other solutions? I suppose become rich enough yourself that you own the van company or socialize van ownership so that we all own the van and share its use equally. Or carry a gun at all times and shoot the man before he can murder his wife and then steal the van and ask the wife to join you for an adventurous few weeks in Edinburgh. Many possibilities, many choices. But you’re artists – and the wonderful thing about being an artist is that any of those choices and many many more are choices that you can make. You’re our dreamers, our explorers of new possibilities and we’ve never needed you more than we do today.

Have a great festival.

I’ll leave you make your own mind up.

Body Talk

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

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I thought a while before posting today. I read an article in the New York Times yesterday about a play touring in China. It is inspired by Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues which has become a cornerstone for a global movement to end violence against women and girls, V DAY. I only hesitated because the article is very frank, then decided that the power of theatre wins out against possible embarrassment. It is written by Didi Kirsten Tatlow:

Play Tests China’s Sexual Limits

BEIJING — There is a moment in the play “Our Vaginas, Ourselves” — a frank and funny exploration of feminism with Chinese characteristics — when the audience freezes in embarrassment. It is right after the actress Xiao Meili asks, “Do you masturbate?”

“It’s so hard getting people to answer that question!” Ms. Xiao, a 20-something with a razor-sharp black bob, exclaimed in an interview. “A lot of the time I had to answer myself,” she said of her scene, in which she plays a teacher.

During a recent performance in Beijing, Ms. Xiao paced in front of a white board demanding answers of her “students” — in reality a standing-room-only crowd of college-age women, some older women and several men. “A former professor of mine who attended told me she was terrified I’d ask her,” she said. Yet at one performance, “a woman yelled ‘Yes, it’s relaxing!”’ Ms. Xiao said, relishing the moment. “Totally spontaneous!”

Inspired by Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” with an English title that makes reference to the feminist classic “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — its Chinese title translates as “The Way of the Vagina” — the taboo-busting “Our Vaginas, Ourselves” was first staged in January at an L.G.B.T. center in Beijing before an audience of 50, said its producer, Ji Hang.

Written by four women, it is based on the life experiences of about a dozen contributors who gathered last autumn at Yiyuan Gongshe, a nongovernmental organization in Beijing, where they sat on cushions in a circle and talked.

“Writing this play was really just getting it down,” said Ai Ke, 29, one of the writers, who by day works for the publishing house of a major social science research institute.

It has been a hit. Since January, the amateur actresses and playwrights have performed it about 10 times in Beijing, Tianjin and Xiamen, to enthusiastic audiences numbering up to 150, who squeeze into small venues, sharing chairs and fanning themselves, as on a recent evening in the MOMA arts district of Beijing. But their performances have been limited in scale. The play has only been staged in unofficial venues because it was unlikely to get the necessary script approval from the authorities to show in official theaters, said Ms. Ji, the producer.

“We really want to enter the mainstream theater scene, but it’s impossible because the scripts would have to be censored,” she said. The subject matter is far too edgy to pass, she said.

While the play clearly owes a debt to Western feminism, what is striking — and exciting for the actresses and their audiences — is how thoroughly localized it is, with uniquely Chinese stories and a fast-paced style that at times recalls the xiangsheng, or crosstalk, of traditional Beijing humor, and rich, pun-laden language. Localization was crucial to the artists. “It’s so important to us I can’t even find the words to say it,” Ms. Ai said. “From the beginning we knew that was what we wanted.” The goal? Nothing less than to bring live, theatrical feminism — with its truths and relevance for hundreds of millions of people — to China. And to create an opportunity for personal transformation.

“It was important to us as a consciousness-raising exercise,” Ms. Ai said. “The personal transformation was No. 1.”

The localization is spelled out in the very first scene. “I’ll say it: vagina!” two actresses, called A and B, say in Mandarin, on a stage with minimal props. “I’ll say it in the Shanxi dialect: vagina,” B says. “In the Wenzhou dialect: vagina,” A says. Then it’s the Hubei dialect, and so on until they have uttered the word in 10 dialects, the audience reacting with delight to the shock of the familiar, yet rarely heard word, spoken in their hometown tongues.

Of the play’s 11 scenes, eight consist of original material, while two are Chinese translations of excerpts from Ms. Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” and one is from an earlier Chinese play inspired by the American play, Ms. Ji said. Humor figures highly, as in Ms. Xiao’s scene and another called “The First Night.” Six women identified by the letters A to F chat about how they lost their virginity. “After we got a room,” sighs E, using a Chinese euphemism for having sex, “he got a receipt,” indicating that the man planned to make the encounter tax-deductible. The audience erupted in laughter.

But there is also real tension, notably in scenes that focus on rape, health and abortion. In the final scene, “I Am an Intern in an OB-GYN Ward,” a medical student recounts her experiences at a hospital: An elderly woman embodying the Chinese cultural ideal of the selfless grandmother — who will not seek medical treatment for a gynecological problem — says, “Son, don’t spend the money on me. Spend it on my grandson to go to university.”

The student also describes helping at births; the horror of aborting fetuses because they are female; and young women coming for routine abortions, sometimes several a year. China has a high abortion rate, and as I gazed around the audience, all their laughter gone, I reflected that quite a few women there probably knew precisely what she was talking about.

In 2005 The Vagina Monologues was banned in Shanghai. In the same year it was also banned in Uganda.

The Vagina Monologues challenges India’s taboos

I have seen the play a couple of times and it is indeed a powerful piece. If you are interested you can read the original text here. A little bit of researching later, it became apparent to me just how widely the play has been performed – it has been translated into 22 languages (and counting). It has been running in India for 11 years. Following the awful Delhi rape case that made headlines across the world earlier in the year, it is not surprising that the play took on a greater importance, as this report, Vagina Monologues challenges India’s taboos, from the BBC highlights. Indeed following it, Eve Ensler went to India to support the movement there:

A report from zeenews.com, When art impacts life, makes interesting and thought provoking reading as does a review of the play from the Times of India. Mind you, it has been banned in certain parts of India, as it has, believe it or not, in certain American states.

I was surprised to read that it has been staged in a number of more liberal muslim countries – Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia, but is banned in Malaysia.

And the purpose of my post? Simply to highlight the power of theatre to challenge orthodoxy and repression across the world.

McTheatre

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

I’ve been trying to write this post for a few days, but kept getting lost in what I was trying to say. Now I think I have it – my thoughts are now in order.

There is one theatrical tradition that is sure to polarize theatre folk, The Musical, or to give it its proper title, Musical Theatre. People tend to either love it or hate it. It’s looked down on because its ‘populist’ or its celebrated because it is popular and draws a wide audience. I was reminded of this recently by playwright Howard Brenton when asked in an interview which art form he didn’t relate to, he said

Musical theatre. I love opera – I’ve written a libretto – but I can’t bear show music. Every song sounds the same.

I have always tended to agree with him, but while I was thinking about this I began to question why there are some musicals I do like – Les Miserables, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jerry Springer the Opera, The Threepenny Opera, The Lion King and on film, Moulin Rouge. Now this is an eclectic, if not quite odd, mix and I am aware of that, so what is it that they do that draws me too them? Why these, when I know that there are musicals that I simply don’t like and think are utter garbage (the likes of Starlight Express, for example)? Then I listened to this interview with Robert Gordon, who is Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In it he reflects on the perception of musical theatre as pure entertainment and looks at key productions that have had significant political and social relevance across its history, from the 18th century production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera to new musical Mission Drift. It is well worth a listen. (Incidentally, Brecht and Weill based Threepenny Opera on Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Mission Drift is, and I quote, a pioneering journey west and east across the USA in search of the character of American capitalism).

So I went back to my list. Superstar was a first of its kind, one that embraced a popular musical idiom and appealed, therefore, to my generation. Jerry Springer is outrageous and challenged society’s religious norms (and I loved the howls of outrage it produced as well!). The Lion King is an easy one – the beautiful use of puppets was a first. The Threepenny Opera because again, it was the first of its kind, a socialist critique of a capitalist world and remains hauntingly relevant today. Moulin Rouge, ditto Superstar. That leaves me with Les Mis and I guess its appeal to me lies in its pure expansive theatricality – and I did see it in its original incarnation many years ago.

Be warned of the ‘interesting’ language in the video below!

All of this goes someway to help me understand my diffidence to musicals, but not all the way. Then it struck me that part of my issue is that they don’t tend into fit my modus operandi as a theatre teacher. You are all aware that I see theatre a tool of challenge, change and confrontation – it should make audiences think and reflect. Most musicals simply don’t do this, so in terms of my teaching life I have simply dismissed them. There is another point I’d like to make here, but it is irrelevant at the moment so I will leave for later.

But still I didn’t feel this gave me the full answer I was looking for. A little bit of research got me to look at the numbers of musicals on in London this summer (36) and New York (38). Astonishing! And this is just two cities. The spread of the ‘western’ musical across the globe seems relentless – I refer you back to an early post as a good example, The Gweilos Are Coming. If you compare the two listings you will the same shows again and again. I realised that this irritates me – where is the originality? On the other hand (with my global citizen hat on) why shouldn’t audiences in New York, London, Mumbai, Beijing, Shanghai and Sydney have access to these shows?

Then I read these two articles – Does the mega-musical boom mean theatre’s bust? and Some musical theatre is still on song – and it clicked! The final piece of the puzzle. The phrase McTheatre summed up what I don’t like about the modern mega-musical. It doesn’t matter where in the world you see one of the really big musicals it will look and sound exactly the same (unless you are seeing Cats in Beijing of course, where it will be sung in Chinese). Only the original staging is unique and truly creative – all the others are just a facsimile, a direct copy, that’s how it works! I am a believer in the global village, but this kind of globalisation which strips theatre of its creativity just seems wrong. As Robert Gordon says in his interview and Lyn Gardner in her articles, there are fantastic musical pieces of inspirational social commentary emerging, but they come from small, innovative companies, with small budgets, not the mega-theatrical corporations of Cameron Macintosh and Andrew Lloyd-Webber!

So there you have it. I have managed to explain to myself why I have problems with musicals and the answer is complex. You might not agree but let us beg to differ. However, if you really do like Starlight Express don’t ever speak to me again!

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By way of a post script to this post – I alluded to this earlier – I’d like to say something about the notion of the ‘school musical’. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, there is an expectation that a school will ‘do’ a musical. However, let me be frank here, it is not because they extend or deepen learning, it’s because they are good publicity vehicles for an institution. I don’t really have a problem with this as such (actually that’s a lie, but it is my job). What I do have a problem with is that they are exclusive and limiting. The pool of students who have the skills to perform in a musical is small and excludes a much wider range of students who are excellent actors, but can’t sing. They reduce opportunities for participation. That’s not to say I don’t celebrate the students that can perform in them, because I do, and am humbled by their skills. Our last musical outing was Little Shop of Horrors (pictured above) and it was superb. But, I want public performances to impact in the classroom/drama studio and for me, musicals just don’t do that.

Cultural Revolutions

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

One of things I enjoy most about writing this blog is that I am always learning. So today I’m going to share something totally new to me, Ache Lhamo, Tibetan Folk Opera.

Lhamo, meaning sister goddess, is a traditional Tibetan folk opera performed through a unique combination of dialogue, dance, chants, pantomime and songs. Based on Buddhist teachings and Tibetan historical figures, Ache Lhamo are traditionally stories of love, devotion, good and evil.

Lhamo has it’s roots in the masked dance-drama tradition of the Tibetan royal dynasty in the 6th to 9th centuries, but the development of Lhamo as it is known today is attributed to the 14th century teacher and self-made engineer, Thangtong Gyalpo. Thangtong Gyalpo developed a performance medium that told moral tales, based on Buddhist philosophy, in the words of the common people

Lhamo is a day long performance played outdoors traditionally under a large circular canvas tent. Music is simple, however the cymbals and drum create remarkable atmosphere. Costumes generally imitate those of the Tibetan aristocracy, and some characters wear masks, which portray their personality with bold symbols.

However, and not surprisingly, Lhamo now has a more political context. The role of China in Tibet over the last 60 years remains one of the biggest human rights tragedies. The suppression or tight control of most of the cultural and religious practices of indigenous Tibetans is well-known. Lhamo only exists in traditional form outside of Tibet where it has been kept alive by exiles. The most famous centre is in Dharamsala, India, and is known as the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA). TIPA was established in August 1959, four months after the Dali Lama fled Tibet. You can watch one of their performances here:

There is a facsinating blog post, The Wandering Goddess, Sustaining the spirit of Ache Lhamo in the Exile Tibetan capital written by Jamyang Norbu, that tells story of the revival of Lhamo following the Chinese occupation. It is clear from all I have read that the practice of Lhamo by the Tibetan refugee community across the world evokes nostalgia for a lost existence and the struggle for a return to the Tibetan Buddhist homeland.

Meanwhile in Tibet itself it has been ‘redeveloped’ by China following the Cultural Revolution and used to support Chinese claims to Tibet. If you want to read more you can do here, in a rather scholarly paper entitled Tibetan Folk Opera: Lhamo in Contemporary Cultural Politics by Syed Jamil Ahmed.

I said earlier, the music that accompanies Lhamo is traditionally played on a drum and cymbols alone – take a look at this dude:

Norbu Tsering, was the TIPA opera master and drummer until he sadly passed away earlier this year. Another link with past traditions lost.

Burying Brecht?

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

I recently came across a great way of sharing audio streams, soundcloud.com. A lot of theatres and practitioners are using it as a way of sharing panel discussions. I have set up a sister site to this one so I can add to the diversity of what I post here. I won’t always duplicate posts or what I subscribe to on soundcloud so check it out occasionally to see what I have re-posted. You can find Theatre Room Asia on soundcloud here.

I am going to share a great one today, which is a panel discussion of German and English theatre practitioners on the relevance of Bertolt Brecht and Brechtian theatre in the modern theatrical landscape.

To coincide with our production of A Life of Galileo, and in collaboration with the Goethe Institute in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) hosted a ‘Brecht Meeting’ of British and German theatre makers in March 2013.
Chaired by Mark Ravenhill (RSC playwright in residence and writer of our new English version of A Life of Galileo), we explored the relevance (if any) that Brecht has for us as contemporary theatre makers.

Has Brecht now become a familiar ‘classic’, who can be produced in the same way that we might play Shakespeare or Schiller?

Does he still present challenges that allow us to ask important questions in the making of new theatre?

Should we bury his work and move on as though he never happened?

And if would like to, you hear an interview with the director of A Life of Galileo, Roxana Silbert, with journalist Paul Allen.

Puppets For Peace

Posted on June 23, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

In another much more serious article, also from The Observer, David Betty writes about a group of puppeteers from Syria who are taking their work on tour in an attempt to bring about a peaceful end to the awful atrocities that are taking place there. If you click on the first image below, you can watch a short documentary made by Betty and Mona Mahmood, about the making of Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator

Syrian satirists take puppet show into war-torn towns to mock Assad regime

Masasit Mati launched the online show Top Goon in 2011 to lampoon Assad. Now they’re taking it to the streets

For a group of anonymous Syrian artists who have mocked Bashar al-Assad and criticised the armed resistance, it is a bold move. Masasit Mati, creators of the YouTube finger-puppet show Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator, have begun to perform the satirical series live inside the war-torn country in an attempt to bolster peaceful protest and spur the revolutionary art movement.

The series, which will be shown in London next month as part of the Shubbak festival of Arab culture, caricatures Assad through the puppet Beeshu, the brutal, childish son of a dictator with a beaky nose and saucer-shaped ears. He is protected by his sinister and unquestioning henchman, The Goon, while ordinary Syrians are portrayed as brave and idealistic.

Speaking via Skype from Lebanon, the show’s director, Jameel, said they decided to use puppets to protect the identities of the 10 artists involved and because their small size “was a good way of lampooning the regime that presents itself as godlike”.

The episodes were filmed in Beirut, with the puppets and props smuggled out by the artists. “We disguised the puppets, especially the one of Beeshu,” said Jameel. “We gave him a moustache and extra hair. Otherwise, everyone would have recognised him.”

The first series, launched in autumn 2011, attracted more than 200,000 views on YouTube and was broadcast on the Dubai-based Syrian opposition channel Orient TV. But escalating violence and power blackouts shrank the domestic audience for the second and third series. So in January the group surreptitiously travelled into the rebel-held town of Manbij in the northern region of Aleppo to perform live in an arts festival organised by local activists. The town had enjoyed relative calm for a month, with no attacks or kidnappings, but on the day they arrived it was bombed by Assad’s forces, leaving 12 dead and dozens more wounded.

“We were very shocked and the organisers of the festival thought it should be delayed,” said Jameel. “We felt we couldn’t wait another week, but we didn’t want to gather people indoors in case there was another air strike. So we performed some of the episodes in the street during a protest [about the bombings].”

Top Goon draws on Assad’s speeches and biased state TV coverage of the uprising to highlight and subvert the regime’s propaganda.

In the episode Prostitute Media, a protester is forced to confess to being a violent criminal on an official news programme, saying: “I held an olive branch in my hand … I mean I was holding an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], a nuclear bomb, pistols, rifles I got from al-Qaida.”

The series has also been critical of the armed resistance. In the episode Monster, Beeshu tortures a protester and taunts him to take his revenge. The prisoner attacks and strangles the dictator, who then gloats: “I told you, you’re a monster, just like me.”

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Jameel said the live performance was “also about testing out the boundaries of the new regime in the liberated areas”. He added: “It’s one of the regions suffering now from the temptations of the Islamists and sectarianism. We were apprehensive about how they would react to one actress – hearing the voice of a lady who was making fun of a famous singer with this kind of sexy voice. But we felt very welcomed and respected.”

The group is preparing for live performances in Aleppo and the northern regions, which it hopes will support local artists. Arts committees and newspapers have been set up in rebel areas, but some have been shut down by hardline elements of the Free Syrian Army.

“There’s a whole civil society that’s being ignored by activists and the estern and Arab media, ” said Jameel. “We’re trying to come up with a concept of street theatre where we’ll go to an area, put on a show, then teach the people how to make puppets and put on shows. What keeps people alive is bringing them hope.”

If you want to read more you can here in The Washington Post, or here in Global Post and there is a fantastic documentary here: Little Dictator – Witness – Al Jazeera English.

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