Set In Aspic

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

Helen McCrory as Medea, National Theatre

A gnarly little piece today I came across in The Independent, Why are theatre directors messing with the classics? Written by journalist Adrain Hamilton, he bemoans (British) theatre directors who play with the text and/or original intent of the playwright. Has it ever been thus. Now far be it from me to suggest that Mr Hamilton (who is not a theatre critic or in any way connected professionally with the theatre) is simply whining because he may have witnessed a production of one of his favourite classic plays that he didn’t like (although I suspect there might be something in this). It’s not that I disagree with him totally. Indeed he makes some decent observations, but theatre is an interpretive art form, especially when dealing with the more classic/historical texts. There has to be a relevancy for a contemporary audience and it the director’s job to make that so. Of course it doesn’t always work, but that is theatre for you.

Why are theatre directors messing with the classics?

There are no more dreaded words in the English theatre today than “in a version by”. Whether it’s Ibsen’s Ghosts, Euripides’ Medea or Sophocles’ Electra, nothing will do but that the international giants of the stage be taken by an English writer and refashioned for the English audience in their own words.No one should doubt the theatricality of these “versions”. Greek tragedians, as indeed Ibsen, created great parts for female actors and this is what the British directors have seized on with such fervour today. Kristin Scott Thomas as Electra, Helen McCrory as Medea and Lesley Manville as Ibsen’s Mrs Alving have all been successively hailed as the new divas of drama for their anguished performances of tortured, wracked women.

Just as we perform Chekhov as the supreme English ironist, rather than the caustic writer of near farces, which is the way the Russians do, so our directors and dramatists rework the classics as studies in angst and high emotion, women on the edge not just of a nervous breakdown but of infanticidal self-destruction.

Lesley Manville in Richard Eyre’s production of Ghosts

Only that is not what these dramas are actually about, or not as their authors intended. The great classical dramatists didn’t set out to present psychiatric studies of individuals and their torments. They wrote about the human condition through the dilemmas and fates of individuals. The same goes for Henrik Ibsen. A would-be poet himself, he wanted to express what he saw as the societal truth of his times.

Sir Richard Eyre’s reworking of Ghosts, and his earlier Hedda Gabler, at the Almeida, are finely crafted works of domestic drama in which events speed their way to a horrifying conclusion, impelled by revelations which strip their heroines of all illusion. It’s Chekhov on speed, even to the point of climaxing the play with Mrs Alving administering the medicines with which to aid her son’s death.

But Ibsen didn’t write that. He left his heroine gripped by indecision whether to carry out her son’s desire to die or to refuse such an unnatural maternal act. Sir Richard’s version makes for a more melodramatic finish; Ibsen’s for a more troubling one. Which is how he saw his play, a very carefully modulated study through the dialogue of human evasion of how we are all made by our past and convention.

If you want to see the difference between the way that the British domesticate drama and other countries seize on the ideas behind a play, then the Barbican’s current series of international productions of Ibsen should be a revelation. The Berlin Schaubühne ensemble’s An Enemy of the People, the play he wrote in anger at the way Ghosts had been dismissed by the critics, is an interpretation full of the urgency that this angry assault on bourgeois conformity requires. Switching the time to now, it has all of Ibsen’s weight and weariness with the society about him but also his sense of the human part within it. If the production stuttered in London it was in trying, in the middle, to involve the audience in the debate. It apparently worked in performances elsewhere but not here. The English don’t go in for direct confrontation, let alone over ideas.

The Berlin Schaubühne ensemble’s An Enemy of the People

It gets worse with Greek tragedy. With a deeply affecting central performance, the National’s Medea wrung every emotion out of the story of an abandoned woman who wreaks revenge by killing her own children and dragging their bodies into exile in an end reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht. Only Euripides is not Brecht and he didn’t write Medea as a story of a wronged woman wrestling with her conflicting emotions. The Medea of Greek legend is a witch woman of terrifying force. The tragedy is one of anger and vengeance which cannot be constrained. At the end you feel not pity but horror and fear.

You don’t have to do Greek tragedy on a bare stage and skimped costumes. The poet Caroline Bird’s version of Euripides’ Trojan Women at the Gate Theatre in 2012 was one of the most intense theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. Moving the scene to a maternity hospital, it worked because it remained true to Euripides’ vision of captured women, turning in on themselves as they await their fate. But you can’t do what Frank McGuinness, whose adaptation of Electra is now playing at the Old Vic, did in the opera of the Theban Plays and mess around with the order at will. At least you can’t do it and still leave Sophocles on the credits.

Yukio Ninagawa, arguably the greatest theatre director of our times, who directed an electrifying Medea in Japanese, will only work with line-by-line translation. Presenting Shakespeare’s Cymbeline recently the Barbican (he’s back there with Hamlet next year), he apologised for changing a word in making a cedar into a pine for visual reasons. If only British directors would pay foreign dramatists the same respect when they turn them into English.

I went in search of the reviews of some of the plays that Hamilton vilifies as domestic. The same paper that carried his article, The Independent, gave the production of Euripides’ Medea he mentions 4 stars, calling it unforgettable and horribly gripping, as did The Telegraph who said it was thrilling and merciless. Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, meanwhile was given 5 stars in The Independent – A spellbinding production – as it was in The Telegraph, with the final line of the review observing that Theatre seldom, if ever, comes greater than this. Finally, the production of Sophocles’ Electra was again given 5 stars by The Independent, calling it an evening of unalloyed magnificence; The Telegraph said it was Theatre at its best with The Guardian undermining Hamilton’s whole premise in the final paragraph of its 4 star review.

Theatre cannot be preserved in aspic, perhaps more so today than ever. I’m looking forward to reading how other less conservative commentators react to Hamilton’s views

Dancing Revolution

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

Sometimes a trip to the theatre can be truly exhilarating, confronting and prescient. Last night I went with my friend Sara to see Political Mother by British based Israeli choreographer, Hofesh Shechter, and it was indeed all of those things – and a lot more besides. In essence, it is a piece that explores the relationship between society and state, duty and service and brutalisation by a repressive power. The staging is epic – and very loud (being issued with ear plugs by the theatre was a first for us, although they remained unused). Political Mother has had a few incarnations and we witnessed another one, with it being re-worked a little for the festival it was part of and the addition of young, local musicians, largely drummers, to an already significant cast of dancers and musicians.

It has toured significantly around the world and I am delighted to have had the opportunity to see something I had been reading about with envy – the reviews have been almost uniformly outstanding. You can see for yourself here and here.

However, it wasn’t simply the piece that was so enthralling, it was also the context in which it was being performed. The monolith of a building in which it was staged, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, was commissioned and built under British colonial rule and is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary. Ten minutes walk away is the commercial district of Mong Kok, where protests for universal suffrage continue. Across Victoria Harbour from the theatre is the other site of protest, with roads closed and a growing tent city springing up. It was palpable that the irony of a governmental sponsored festival hosting Political Mother was not lost on the majority of the audience. We were left wondering what the performers thought about the timeliness of their work in Hong Kong.

Dance and politics have never been far apart. One of the founders of contemporary dance, Martha Graham was no stranger to this fact, as this short documentary shows:

Soviet By Design

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

My first share today was published this week in The Guardian. Written by Oliver Wainwright, it explores theatre design in the Soviet Union in the early 20th Century, which is currently the focus of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

A critical period in the development of stage design, Wainwright’s article, Russia’s stage revolution: when theatre was a hotbed for impossibly space-age design talks about how artists created radical sets and costumes for a futuristic new era of theatre that are said to have inspired Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

A square-headed figure stands in a jagged harlequin costume, like a toddler’s drawing of a Christmas tree, beside a red-clothed character with black spines emerging from his limbs. There is a portly green-skinned man bursting out of a tight red vest, while another figure’s body swells from a triangular skirt in a big blue bulge.

Set against a mysterious monochrome backdrop of triangles and squares, these were the costume designs of then little-known Kazimir Malevich for the world’s first “futurist opera,” Victory Over the Sun, produced in St Petersburg in 1913. Complete with a libretto in the experimental “zaum” language – a kind of primeval Slavic mother-tongue, mixed with birdsong and cosmic utterances – it infuriated audiences, who reacted with violent outrage.

Malevich was not deterred. The stage sets formed the basis for his first Black Square painting, and the foundations for his fractured visual language of suprematism, one of the defining movements of the period. It was here in these gnomic theatre designs that he began his urgent pursuit of the “supremacy of pure artistic feeling”, of geometric splinters flying through limitless space, fuelled by the impending trauma of revolution.

These striking drawings form the opening to a new free exhibition in the V&A’s theatre and performance galleries, which traces the effect of war and revolution on Russian avant-garde theatre design, from 1913–33, a period that saw an earthquake of artistic transformation.

Comprising 160 works by 45 designers, much of what’s on show has been unearthed from the dusty depths of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum archive in Moscow, some exhibited in public here in London for the first time – and it is a thrilling hoard.

Lyubov Popova’s fantastic mechanical set for The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922.

Facing off against Malevich are the early costume designs of Vladimir Tatlin, who would go on to dream up the spiralling skeleton of the Monument to the Third International, a plan for a gargantuan double-helix structure that would have loomed 400m above St Petersburg. While Malevich was brewing up a universe of dynamic shards, Tatlin’s designs – for operas with nostalgic titles such as Life for the Tsar and His Disobedient Son Adolf – reveal the beginnings of his constructivist style.

These counterpoints set the tone for a show that reveals the breadth of artistic styles spawned in these tumultuous years, with the theatre proving a hotbed of experimentation and a powerful vehicle of revolutionary propaganda.Women designers loom large, with the dazzling work of Alexandra Exterfeaturing extensively, from her bold reinventions of classics like Romeo and Juliet, to impossibly futuristic costumes for Aelita, one of the first ever sci-fi films, made in 1924. Based on a Tolstoy novel, it tells the story of an engineer who travels to Mars, falls in love with the Queen of the Martians, and organises a revolution. The space-queen was conceived as a Soviet Barbarella, clothed in a swirling dress of orbiting loops, topped with a many-pronged head-dress that gives her the look of a human TV aerial. It exudes the excitement of what the promised revolution would bring, the humble engineer discovering a brave new world through hard work. Utterly groundbreaking for its time, Exter’s alien set designs would go on to inform the dreamy aesthetic of Flash Gordon and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Vladimir Tatlin, costume design for Life for the Tsar, 1913-15.

“I want to burn with the spirit of the times,” declared Vsevolod Meyerhold, another influential figure of the period, and one of most enthusiastic activists of the new Soviet theatre. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1918 and became an official of the theatre division of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, trying to radicalise Russian theatres under Bolshevik control. Developing what he called “biomechanics”, he championed a form of acting in which bodily expression was all, teaching his students gymnastics and circus skills, in a bid to transform the theatre from a place of naturalism and emotion to a full-blown fairground spectacle.

“Meyerhold laid the foundations for modern physical theatre, and groups like Complicite,” says curator Kate Bailey, “as well as a lot of the techniques of projection and moving sets that we take for granted as part of contemporary theatre design.”

The Queen of the Martians, costume design by Alexandra Exter for the 1924 sci-fi film Aelita, based on a Tolstoy novel

A key to realising his vision was Lyubov Popova, the daughter of a textile merchant who had been a member of Malevich’s Supremus art group from 1914-16. She produced a spectacular moving set for his production of The Magnanimous Cuckold in 1922, a model of which takes pride of place in the exhibition. The play follows the trials of a miller who suspects his wife of being unfaithful and pursues her lovers through the village, and Popova transforms the mill into an all-consuming acting machine, a thrilling landscape of rotating cogs and wheels.

Under the influence of Meyerhold, theatrical characters were reduced to types, emotion and psychological experience substituted for the gawp of physical and mechanical prowess. Similar narratives recur, in which “impure” characters of merchants and royalty, capitalists and priesthood, face off against “pure” peasants and sailors, the old order trounced by the newly awoken masses. Costumes of the old world are heavy and clumsy, set against the thrusting, cubo-futurist lines of the new Communist utopia.

It all comes to a satirical climax in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s comedy, The Bedbug, in which the brave Bolshevik protagonist, Prisypkin, is cryogenically frozen in an impossibly modern-looking spacesuit – to designs by Alexander Rodchenko – to be thawed when the ideal Communist world has been attained in 1979. Severely underwhelmed when he awakes, he finds a bedbug on his body, which becomes his only friend.

Alexander Rodchenko costume design for Bedbug, 1929, a comedy by Mayakovsky whose hero is frozen for 50 years to await a Communist paradise

It is an appropriately gloomy end to the exhibition, which concludes with the rise of Stalin, who presided over a return to socialist realism, and the accompanying vicious backlash against the avant-garde. The final piece on show is a miraculous wooden and plaster model for Mayakovsky’s satirical play, Mystery-Bouffe, directed by Meyerhold, which depicts the North Pole, where the earth’s last survivors have voyaged, to be offered the choice between heaven and hell. They decline heaven, in favour of the promised land of the Communist paradise.

It was not to be so for the two leaders of the avant garde under Stalin: disillusioned and driven to despair, Mayakovsky shot himself, while Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and executed. “Theatre is not a mirror, but a magnifying glass,” Mayakovsky once said. And their powerful lens clearly looked a little too closely for the regime’s comfort.

The V and A exhibition, Russian Avant-Garde Theatre: War, Revolution and Design 1913-1933 has an associated Pintrest Board with some great images, as well as a blog.

Taking To The Streets

Posted on October 12, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

Politics and theatre are, and have always been, inextricably linked. So following on from my previous post, this one explores real theatre on the streets, this time in Nepal. I came across an article in the South Asia Monitor, written by Deepesh Paudal and originally published in The Kantipur Daily, Road Act. Sadak Natak or Street Theatre emerged in Nepal in the 1980s, during the height of monarchial rule, as a way of protesting against the excesses of the ruling royal family. Ashesh Malla, Artistic Director of Sarvanam, a Nepali theatre company, is credited for starting the movement and in a country where many live in rural poverty, street theatre has proved to be an effective way of raising awareness of a host of issues, as well as entertaining people.

However, in his article, Paudal sounds a note of of caution about the continuing existence of Nepalese street theatre:

Fading interest The development of street theatre in Nepal has seen its peaks and troughs. Periodically, some have been critical, raising questions on its objective. Some of them have tagged street drama as a mere developmental play (bikase natak), ‘farming dollars’, while others have sternly criticised it for an absence of aesthetics. Non-governmental organisations’ and other social institutions’ direct or indirect involvement in street theatre s has drawn both positive and negative remarks from stakeholders. The lack of transparency in fund allocation and management has frequently put theatre groups under scrutiny, often exposing their dependency on donors and foreign aids. Additionally, the progress of cyber entertainment and communication has widely overshadowed the essence of street theatre . Even the interest of the pioneers and of those who had been actively performing in street drama s in the past has significantly dropped. Under these circumstances, the sustainability and even the survival of street theatre are increasingly in a vulnerable state. All theatre aficionados need to quickly apprehend that appreciating the contributions of street theatre just as well as that of the commercial theatre will help save this form of art from extinction.

Little is written (in english, anyway) about the history of theatre in Nepal. Even in Jukka O. Miettinen’s wonderful online book Asian Traditional Theatre and Dance, Nepal fails to get a mention. It does, however, get a few pages in The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Asia/Pacific as it does in Ashis Sengupt’s book Mapping South Asia Through Contemporary Theatre (both available through Google Books). You can also read a interesting overview of the history of Nepalese theatre here on HubPages.

Alternative Experiences

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

Today I would like to share two new excellent video documentaries from the American Theatre Wing. The first is about the creation of site-specific theatre. Since I Suppose is a site-specific theatrical experience based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure which allows the audience to travel on an immersive journey through downtown Chicago.

The video follows members of the Melbourne-based theatrical group, one step at a time like this and Chicago Shakespeare Theater who share a behind the scenes look at how the experience was created using digital technology and the architecture and culture of Chicago.

The second explores another visceral theatre experience but this time of the immersive kind. In the documentary Randy Weiner (Producer, Sleep No More), David Korins (Scenic Designer, Here Lies Love) and Zach Morris (Co-Artistic Director of Third Rail Projects) describe the ‘staging environment, the state of heightened theatricality, and the effect of the immersive movement on the audience and its influence on today’s theatre scene.’

If you are a first year IB Theatre Arts student reading this, both of these videos would be superb for your Collaborative Project.

Keeping It Real

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

A week or so ago I had the pleasure of taking part in an acting workshop based on the teachings of Ute Hagen. Having had my own theatre education in Europe, Hagen’s work was largely unknown to me, despite the fact that her approach to naturalistic acting, along side that of Stanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg, is widely taught and respected in North America. It has been something of a revelation and my ignorance of her work rather embarrassing. She died in 2004, but her influence continues to grow. Of her work she said, I teach acting as I approach it – from the human and technical problems I have experienced through living and practice.

I was particularly struck by exploring her ways into creating character. One of her obituaries commented that there was a balance in her approach, which was method acting, but not taken to the self-immolating extremes of some of its practitioners. Though she demanded respect, she eschewed pretension. These nine questions, in order, form the core of that character work:

1. Who am I? (All the details about your character including name, age, address, relatives, likes, dislikes, hobbies, career, description of physical traits, opinions, beliefs, religion, education, origins, enemies, loved ones, sociological influences, etc.)
2. What time is it? (Century, season, year, day, minute, significance of time)
3. Where am I? (Country, city, neighborhood, home, room, area of room)
4. What surrounds me? (Animate and inanimate objects-complete details of environment)
5. What are the given circumstances? (Past, present, future and all of the events)
6. What is my relationship? (Relation to total events, other characters, and to things)
7. What do I want? (Character’s needs. The immediate and main objective)
8. What is in my way? (The obstacles which prevent character from getting his/her need)
9. What do I do to get what I want? (The action: physical and verbal, also-action verbs)

She wrote two books, Challenge for the Actor and Respect for Acting, both of which are still in print. There is also a fascinating recording of a series of master classes she gave, of which there is an excerpt here:

With her second husband, Herbert Berghof, who was a protégé of the German realist director Max Reinhardt, she co-founded the HB Studios in New York whose doors are still open today. I would suggest that if you don’t know the work of Ute Hagen or have struggled with Stanislavski or Strasberg, give her a go.

Incidentally, and not unconnected, the day after my workshop I read this article, published in the Slate and written by Marcus Geduld, in which he attempts to answer the question, How Do You Differentiate Good Acting From Bad Acting?

If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends. There are many people who loved Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting. But if you don’t, you’re not wrong. At worst, you’re eccentric.

I’m a director who has been working with actors for almost 30 years, and I’m the son of a film historian. I’ll give you my definition of good acting. But I really want to stress that if I say, “Pacino is great,” and you disagree, my experience does not make me right and you wrong. It just means we have different tastes.

First, for me, an actor is good if he makes me believe he’s actually going through whatever his character is going through. I’m talking somewhat about physical stuff (“He really is getting shot!” “He really is jumping off a moving train!”) but mostly about psychological stuff (“He really is scared!” “He really is in love!”). If an actor seems to be faking it, he’s not doing his job.

You can read the rest of the article here, and I would recommend it.

Too Much Of A Good Thing?

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

If you read Theatre Room regularly, you will know that I have written on a number of occasions about the ever-growing popularity of Immersive theatre, especially in Europe. You also know that I am drawn to this form, especially as a way as bringing new audiences to the theatre and challenging theatre students take risks in their exploration of the possibilities in performance. All things ‘immersive’ are clearly drawing audiences and there is lots of ‘jumping on bandwagons’ at the moment. It was with some interest then that I read Lyn Gardner’s Theatre Blog in The Guardian this week. London-centric, by its nature, but certainly making a point that is worth considering wherever you are:

Immersive theatre: living up to its name, or just an overused gimmick?

Immersive theatre has become ubiquitous, but too often such billing is just a commercial come-on designed to sell tickets

My, there is an awful lot of immersive theatre around at the moment, particularly if you live within reach of London. You can watch Titus Andronicus performed in a car park in Peckham, visit Dorian Gray’s townhouse in Greenwich, pretend you are a spy in CoLab’s London-wide, digitally-augmented Fifth Column or – if you’ve £200 to spare – spend the night in a London hotel and watch the immersive play Backstage Tour.

Some of these shows deserve the tag. But I’m beginning to think that immersive has become one of the most overused terms in British theatre, in similar vein to that other much misused term, site-specific (or site-responsive), which is likewise often bandied about with little or no justification. Standing around watching a show in a room that appears to have been designed by an Oxford Street store window dresser doesn’t magically make the audience experience something immersive, no matter how many stuffed animals you incorporate into the set.

It you want an enjoyably sly swipe at the immersive phenomenon, take a look on the excellent Exeunt site, where Natasha Tripney has cleverly reframed her East Coast trains journey back from the fringe as immersive theatre.

The rise of immersive theatre undoubtedly reflects an interest from audiences – often audiences who may not think that traditional drama in traditional theatre playhouses is for them – in experiencing theatre in a different way, one that allows them to be part of the story and feel as if they have dropped down a rabbit hole into another world like Alice. In some instances where the audience can genuinely roam where they want, the experience is more akin to gaming than traditional theatre.

Some companies – Coney, Lundahl and Seitl, Punchdrunk, Ontroerend Goed and Look Left Look Right among them – have perfected the art, finding ways that make sense of why the audience is present at all and allowing them to play their part. Such companies don’t mistake mere intimacy (lovely though it can be) for immersion, and in some instances give us genuine agency.

But I keep on seeing shows that claim to be immersive, and turn out to be anything but. Performing a show in a car park (Titus) while Southern trains constantly thunder by, so that Rome appears to be situated at a railway junction, or making audiences run away from zombies in an underground space in Edinburgh (Generation of Z on the Fringe), doesn’t make it immersive, it just makes it a show in an unusual – and not necessarily suitable – location. That’s fine. But short-changed audiences will quickly learn that immersive shows often don’t deliver on what they promise, and they will stay away.

Strong and portentous words from the venerable Gardner, and she is rarely wrong, in my opinion. Her reference to The East Coast Trains Show written by a fellow critic Natasha Tripney, and published in Exeunt is definitely worth a read (and a wry smile). Beautifully tongue-in-cheek, but harbouring similar grievances expressed by Gardner and a sense that she too has experienced one too many pieces of immersive theatre that simply are not.

Gangstas In Greece

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

I have a few posts to make today, so I am going to start with cheekiest one first. My colleague Sean and me are currently delivering a course on Greek theatre with Oedipus Rex as the key text. Murder, incest and mutilation generally secures the rapt attention of 14 year olds! However, it is hard to find a filmed version of the play that isn’t very old, dated, badly filmed or just bad. For a number of years we have used a copy of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1967 filmed adaptation, Edipo Re to show excerpts from, and despite being in Italian, it served its purpose well. However, our copy has gone astray, and while searching for alternatives, (Pasolini’s version is seemingly impossible to get hold of anymore) Sean introduced me to the Thug Notes Oedipus:

I have to say, despite it’s outrageousness, I thought what a superb idea! Greg Edwards’ Sparky Sweets, Ph.D is a great vehicle for delivering snap-shot summaries and analysis. To quote the New York Times

Thug Notes is a deliciously executed example of a trend that has been around for years: the application of street sensibility to high-culture, high-concept areas and, more generally, any place where it’s not expected.

To date there are over 50 Thug Notes, but another of my favourites is most definitely his take on Hamlet

The Independent in the UK has a great interview with Sparky.

To date there are 300,000 subscribers to the the Thug Notes Youtube channel and 850,000 hits on his ‘drop’ on To Kill a Mockingbird alone. As of today, I’m a subscriber too.

Over Our Heads

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

salome A blog post by theatre critic Lyn Gardner brought me to a realisation this week. Virtually every theatre-going experience I have in Hong Kong is dominated, literally, by surtitles – either in English, Cantonese or sometimes both. I have often wondered how the complexity of a play in one language translates into another for a live audience. Are my Cantonese speaking compatriots having an easier time understanding the nuances of King Lear than I am? I know for sure that my students read the Cantonese surtitles when the spoken language of a play is impenetrable to them or the dialect or accent is too strong. In her post, Mind your language: the trouble with theatre subtitles, Gardner notes that great translations make foreign productions accessible, that poor ones are a distraction and asks whether surtitles always a necessity in communicating meaning to an audience:

One of the pleasures of London theatre-going over the past 20 years has been just how many foreign-language productions it has been possible to see. Shakespeare performed in another tongue has been a particular revelation as the Globe’s 2012 Globe to Globe season amply demonstrated, although what made that – and it’s ongoing spin-offs – so pleasurable was the chance to see Shakespeare amid an audience whose native tongue was the language in which the play was being performed. If you want evidence that London is truly an international city, this is it.

HEDDA GABLER, director Thomas Ostermeier

But there have been plenty of other opportunities to see oh-so-familiar classic plays in other languages, particularly at the Barbican, where Thomas Ostermeier has made us rethink Hedda and A Doll’s House and Hamlet, and will shortly be pitching up with An Enemy of the People. The London international festival of theatre has also done more than its bit to bring the world to London. In many of these cases it is the arrival of surtitles that have really made foreign-language productions accessible to those of us who do not speak or understand enough to get by. Without them I suspect many such shows wouldn’t get an English-speaking audience.

I remember a time when if you went to see a play in another language the best you could hope for was headphones and intrusive simultaneous translation or a free sheet detailing the action in each scene.

Good surtitles are a real art. One issue with surtitles is positioning. Poorly sited surtitles are like trying to hold a conversation in a room where a TV is on. However much you try not to look at them, your eye is constantly drawn towards them, even if you speak the language. You end up relying on the text rather than looking for other clues, which in a great production of a play in any language are demonstrated in a myriad of ways from the positioning and space between the characters to the timbre and tone of what is being said. It’s possible to understand a great deal about a production from its look and sound, even if you don’t speak a word of the language in which it’s being performed. Too much reliance on surtitles turns audiences into dummies, a bit like those tourists you see at Stratford who follow the entire production with their nose buried in the text on their lap as if it’s only the text that matters and looking at the stage is not necessary.

Rakata perform Punishment Without Revenge by Lope de Vega at Shakespeare’s Globe

Poor surtitles can be a hindrance rather than a help, as I found at the Globe last week with a Spanish-language production of Punishment Without Revenge. In this instance they were simply describing the action and not particularly well: it’s enormously frustrating and sometimes bewildering to be told that someone is speaking in metaphor or telling a joke and not to be told what the joke is. I reckon that in this instance no surtitles – and a simple synopsis sheet – would be far better than surtitles that distract the eye from what is happening on stage and are way too blunt to add any value to the viewer. What do you think? And if you’ve ever seen any real surtitle howlers do share.

I have considerable sympathy with Gardner. I have, on occasion, found myself at the front of the stalls, unable to read the surtitles (which are almost directly above me) and watch the stage action without needing a visit to the physio the following morning. In some of our smaller and older theatres the surtitles are shown to the side of the proscenium and you end up looking like a spectator at a tennis match. I’ve also experienced the earphone and recorded translation version elsewhere in Asia when watching theatre – once I had to leave a Bunraku performance in Osaka after about an hour because of my ever-growing irritation with the mono-tonal drawl of the voice in my (one) ear.

The comments section that follows Gardner’s blog continues the debate as does this post from BTI Studios, which talks about the difficulties of ‘captioning’ in the theatre. One theatre in Germany, the Komische Oper in Berlin, has the surtitles shown on the back of seat in front of you, as does La Scala in Milan (both opera venues you’ll notice). This is clearly a move in the right direction in terms of being able to view surtitles clearly, but of course, does nothing to address the translation issues or how they are used by a venue (as in the example given by Gardener at The Globe Theatre). It seems that any large city with cultural aspirations now stages an international theatre festival, so watching performance in a language other than your own is no longer an unusual or unique experience. Given this, I think it’s about time venues in particular, but theatre makers more widely, become a little more adept at making captioning work for the audience, both technically and artistically.

By way of a post script, and not unconnected, the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK have just announced that they are going to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into Mandarin, as well as translating 14 seminal Chinese plays into English (although these have yet to be named). Quieting the cynic in me and over-looking the PR puffery about boosting business and cultural links between Britain and China, this could mean some exciting Chinese work being available in translation for the first time.

Old News

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Theatre Room Asia

A quick share today of something that recently caught my eye. British Pathé, to quote it’s own website…….was once a dominant feature of the British cinema experience, renowned for first-class reporting……Now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in the world, British Pathé is a treasure trove of 85,000 films unrivalled in historical and cultural significance. Spanning the years from 1896 to 1979, the collection includes footage from around the globe of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, science and culture.

This archive has now been digitised and made available on Youtube. A real gift for theatre makers who want to include historical footage from around the globe in their work. The archive, which covers the most important and significant political, human, and cultural events of the 20th Century, even charts the development of mechanics in theatre. From 1945 and 1932 respectively:

Scenographers everywhere will be thrilled. The archive even has it’s own Facebook presence. Having done a bit of exploring, it seems its easier to search for the content of the footage you might need on the Pathé website itself, locate the title of the video/s that contain it, then search for those titles on the Pathé Youtube channel.

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