the passing over of place as experience
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Non-place
Just before the play commences, two figures emerge to unfold a massive brown tarpaulin across the stage. A couple of buckets are strategically placed and stage left there is a large chain sling connected to a commensurately sized hook. Fitting for a large industrial farm. Yet it looms menacingly. As the lights go up, they do so only insofar as to give off a brown industrial hue. The type that predictably drains all other colour from industrial sheds. All of this, of course, is the portent of things to come.
A man sits on a bare stage. He is preceded by a white bench…and however many days it has taken to reach this moment. As he contemplates existence, the audience contemplates him. This is how Ascension starts. The man, Dutch sailor Leendert Hasenbosch (Dan Hazelwood), has been exiled on an island as punishment for sodomy. The year is 1725. Probably. Hard to say for Ascension is uninhabited. What is certain is Leendert is dying. But he doesn’t want us to dwell on that right now. He’d first prefer for us to consider his story.
Parodying people such as Elon Musk is not a trivial task. He already seems like a cartoon. Musk says and does ridiculous things in real life. Leaning yet more in that direction demands plutonium grade material so as not to replicate the version who frequently appears in the news. Elon Musk: Lost In Space is pencil lead grade.
I know so little of Marlene Dietrich’s life that a mere trace of information would register as a new classification in my knowledge base. So, to come away with a rounded sense of Dietrich’s life during the war years in the space of an hour is a massive tribute to the talents of writer Tjaša Ferme.
Physical transformation might be the ultimate in ‘show, don’t tell’. The power of speech is replaced with the universality of body language. The transition between the inner and outer self is dialogically framed to arrive at a shared understanding with the audience. This is powerfully projected by writer and performer Edu Díaz as he transforms from an everyday bloke into the queen of the carnival.
Theatre 118 has got off to a flying start with their Play of The Week series which has delivered a new production for each week of July. It is a testament to their talent, ideas and utter dedication that they have pulled this off in so short a time without an iota of a hitch. In so doing, they have managed to create a community, a buzz, in an unused office block, just off Glassford Street.
The view from a bridge catches people in different ways. For some it is a salve for that which has come before. For others it offers the promise of a way out. For all it is a displacement activity: some place other than here, now. Kieran Lee-Hamilton’s play explores both strands from near opposite ends of the age spectrum…
The first to disappear in any murder story is the person who has suffered fatal harm. They are reduced to an ethnically defined, gendered, life-styled archetype with a number pertaining to their age stamped on their forehead. Oh, and they are always warm, generous and friendly. To a fault. Which is perhaps the fault that finally denudes them of any real personality and renders them unseen. Woe betide anyone that says “Aye Jim, could be a carnaptious so-and so from time to time” or “Jacky could be obstreperous when the mood took her”. It would add colour to those perfect bones…adding flawed human flesh.
They walk amongst us in ever greater numbers. The Faithfull prefer to believe in some nebulous entity before countenancing us. They don’t care for your opinions. For they are beyond reproach. They walk the path of the righteous and you? Well, you are simply too messy. The thing about religion is that it is a great consumer of time. Time you could better use to consider (let alone act on) climate change, food banks or unethical wars…or any other number of atrocities playing out across the globe now. Say what you like about the Greek gods: Helios at least intervened when his golden cows were slaughtered…
It’s an unenviable task bringing together two lives which shared no earthly bond. And contrivances to achieve such ends rarely convince. But every now and then a performance breaks loose from the threads of the inevitable and becomes something else. The Badly Behaved Poets Society takes two erstwhile non-contiguous lives and skilfully synthesises the coordinates of coexistence. The result is a play which more than convinces, it enthrals.
I am delighted to announce that Bring Again The Now Of Then is now available for downloading and streaming. With approximately 30 revisions and 2 read-throughs, it has been the culmination of 5 years’ work. I am really happy with the outcome! Everybody involved has been thoroughly tremendous: Alex Bennett, Paul Gallagher, Jill Korn, Mark Coleman, Stuart Edgar, Andy Jones, Dani Heron, Lauren Downie, Iain McAleese, Julia Ndlovu, and Lorenzo Novani. It is slightly surreal to know the drama is complete. Now, I have to convince people to take a wee gamble and listen to the series. All episodes are available here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bring-again-the-now-of-then-the-bauhaus-in-weimar/id1799557549
This week I received the draft of the first two episodes of Bring Again The Now Of Then…and it sounds amazing! As the introductory music fades we hear the crackling of an open fire and bang…we’re in Gertrud Grunow’s study where she regales us with the story of the spiritual years of the Bauhaus as she goes about her paperwork.
Some memories are so vivid, so powerful as to remain with us for all time. Occasionally, living on beyond our own existence. Those memories involving loss go deeper, scarring our conscience and creasing the moments of recall. We are all reluctant collectors of such moments. We seek no claim of them, yet deep down we know a life without loss is like a bag of chips without salt n vinegar. Just not worth the pickle.
As you enter a performance space, more often than not, a set rushes at you with its questions. Where? A back-garden featuring an outhouse and a tennis courtyard. What? Tranquil birdsong belying a certain tension. Who? Well, exactly!
For me it’s walking. It’s when all my best ideas come. Their genesis, their development, and their resolution. It literally never happens whilst I am sitting at the PC. Something about the subconscious, I suppose. One day after watching a documentary on BBC 4, celebrating the centenary of the Bauhaus opening in Weimar, I went for a walk. I think you know what happened next…
Universal evocation. Nice idea if you can nail it. Setting a play in a school gets you 100% audience buy-in. Young or old, we have all been there and have our memories of it. For some it is perhaps the best days of their lives. For most, probably not. VL, written by Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair, is set in a secondary school and the ghost of that place clearly comes flooding back for a good deal of the audience.
Theatre sets are fascinating. Sometimes you enter an auditorium and wonder at the world immediately before you as it induces uncertainty. Other times, an unexpected familiarity envelopes you in its warm cocoon. On this occasion, it’s the latter. The pre-millennial décor of a 1990s living room draws the focus: an extrapolation of the room which will readily feature in the home videos. The protagonist, Rob Madge, is the absolute epitome of that generation of kids who grew up in a family where the camcorder is an extension of the parental eye: the era of affordable video technology prior to mobile phones breaching their original USP to usurp the former. Subsequently, we see Rob at the age of 12 putting on a Disney show in their living room where he plays Mary Poppins, Mickey Mouse and a host of other characters. It doesn’t quite go to plan and their father - stage manager and Goofy - gets all the blame but their grandmother is having a ball in a ‘teacup’
As the saying goes: the road to success is littered with failures. But who amongst us, lying in a rain-filled pothole, has ever thought “Ah! My greatest success lies just around the corner!”? Failure is all-consuming and leaves no room for such thoughts…and that road is all the longer and in a greater state of disrepair if you happen to be black and female.
Time-shifting is a guaranteed way of manifesting avenues for drama and comedy. Dropping characters into time-zones clearly alien to them yet recognisable to the audience is, at least, amusing. However, it requires a clearly delineated development to control the dramatic irony. Allowing the audience to always be one-step ahead of the character risks a punctured performance.
What could possibly be more reasonable than making common ground with the company you’re in? Aligning your personal view with your audience is a reasonable thing to do, right? But in theatre, we need conflict! What if we shifted the conflict a few feet from the stage into the guiding mind of the audience? That enough conflict for you?
It was a pleasure, last week, to mingle with an excellent cast for a reading of my new audio play Bring Again the Now of Then on the early years of the Bauhaus. The aim was to establish the correct mix of voices for the piece and, as ever, to ascertain whether another draft of the play is required. Happy to say only small edits are needed.
A year ago tonight, Dance The Colour Blue played to its last audience. My first professionally produced play was an entirely unexpected affair…as well as something of a revelatory experience!
It is not easy for art, rooted within one medium, to transcend its source and achieve equal salience within an adjacent medium. The well-trod path from page to stage is littered with an unintended dialectic between literature and performance. Curatorial precision is required at all times. This is perhaps most true when considering the memoir: a medium which confers unto the reader the intimacy of personal insight.
These last few months have been busy ones. Writing a play is often a process of discovery. You have the map of your previous navigation, but it is rarely of much use. And sometimes the things you discover are not immediately apparent from the content on the pages…
The cognitive dissonance between the person we perceive ourselves to be and the person others see is least for those who don’t give a shit. Blithely crashing through life, the Stanleys of this world lose not a wink of sleep on what others think of them. Whilst society can hardly be split into ‘Stanleys’ and ‘Blanches’, the latter group will move heaven and earth for others to see them in the right light, even if that means living in a perpetual twilight.
“Some are in the darkness…others in the light”
We see the moon and the moon sees us…and the shark with the teeth pearly white. One minute in and an orchestra introduces that most recognisable of songs: Kurt Weill’s Mack The Knife or Mackie Messer as it is known in its native source text; a piece on people and their amorality. A disembodied face shines as ‘The Moon Over Soho’ (Josefine Platt), suitably elevated betwixt glittering curtains. Those four world-weary yet entertaining minutes set the tone. Then suddenly, the societal structure of which the moon sings protrudes: inflexible, delineated, skeletal. A structure without sinew or tissue. A construction in progress. A machine for living…on-stage or off. Each person hierarchically valued as decreed by a strict system of rigour.
What would you do if your native country ended up at war with your parents’ native country? Where might your loyalties lie? How much love have you for your parents? How much have they for theirs? Patriotism is a complex equation wherein variables change value with time. All very well fighting for culture and values, the question is: whose?
Surviving an event where other people experience loss of life is likely to follow, if not define, you for the rest of your life. This was the lot of Yuri Yudin.
In January 1959, 10 experienced Soviet hikers set out on an expedition to the Ural Mountains. Part of this initiative was the attainment of the highest level of Soviet accreditation. An honour none of the party would attain. 9 hikers died on Kholat Syakhi and the sole survivor, Yuri Yudin, earlier succumbed to the recurrence of an ailment forcing him to abort his mission. Yudin became one of life’s guilty without guilt.
FOCUS ON
Focus On
At the very moment of creation, theatre may be ‘of its time’ or be ‘timeless’. That is to say the production has a life beyond that which was originally expected. Whilst a reasonable assessment may be made as to a play’s immediacy, it is impossible to tell with any accuracy whether the piece will endure. The designed terms of engagement; however, may undergo something of a resonance shift, subsequently establishing a useful range within which the play can operate, thereby readily connecting with different audience types. Under these circumstances, an element of timelessness emerges, further fuelling the play’s useful life. Whilst it is not possible for playwrights to design or discern ‘legacy’ at the time of writing, they can ask the question: why now? In so doing, they may well be incognizant to the fact they have also answered the question “why then?” as they write a play which speaks across time.
In the experience of sense, the question arises what happens when we dead awaken? There is; however, another question: what happens when awakening, it goes unnoticed? Lost Lear is a lament to the creeping grief witnessed by most families: dementia.