Harper Regan was one of the best plays I saw in 2008, and its writer, Simon Stephens, is one of the hottest theatre properties going. (He also seems to be a particularly fine and friendly man.) But Punk Rock, which I saw at the Lyric last night, isn’t his most resonant work. In fact, it doesn’t resonate much at all.
It’s set in a public school in Stephens’ native Stockport. Stephens used to be a teacher, so one might expect the play to derive from personal experience. But one of its major flaws, to this viewer at least, is that it lacks credibility. The criticism often applied to Alan Bennett’s History Boys (although less appropriately, because that play barely even pretended to be realistic) applies here too: these teenagers are preternaturally articulate, and masters of a degree of emotional self-awareness (not total, but considerable) that didn’t characterise my adolescence, nor that of anyone else I know.
Of course, Stephens’ portrait of youth, and privilege, is in other places acutely observed. And with the artful bluntness of his writing, he engineers some heart-in-mouth moments. But they’re often phoney – as when, having asked out new girl Lilly (Jessica Raine), and been spurned, geeky William (Tom Sturridge) admits how exposed he now feels. “I’ve never done that before,” he says. “It didn’t go well.” A lovely, startlingly vulnerable moment. But not one that’s convincing – at least, not in the context of a play where too many characters are too self-aware, too much of the time.
It’s a play that depends for its effects on some fairly tired dramatic conventions – as when bullied pupil Chadwick Mead steps downstage centre to deliver a monologue on the coming apocalypse. We’re not listening to a real schoolkid speak here; we’re listening to a speech written by a playwright, to which the other characters onstage pay dutiful if uncharacteristic attention. Elsewhere, there are wide credibility gaps. Why does everyone defer to the bully Bennett (Henry Lloyd Hughes)? He seems a pushover to me. And why is it only Chadwick who makes a run for it when William starts waving a gun around?
Which brings us to the dramatic denouement, when a meandering play about posh kids’ schooldays becomes something darker and more topical. But one’s understanding of the psychology of Columbine-style shootings isn’t added to by Punk Rock. On the contrary, its anti-hero (and by implication, Stephens) explicitly denies us an explanation for the crime. I was left nonplussed, and I left the theatre empty-handed, as it were – passably entertained, but with no new insights into adolescence or violence.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
King Lear, Young Vic
It’s no secret that Rupert Goold’s King Lear is a curate’s egg. It’s good in parts – Pete Postlethwaite is beautiful as an ex-king, albeit less effective while still in situ. There’s something terribly tender about the production’s final tableau, as Pete sits there with ashen Cordelia in his lap, his small voice ever reducing, his kingship, manhood and paternity destroyed. So this is what’s left when everything that shores up selfhood, everything that obscures our impotence and pointlessness, all that separates us from the beasts, is brutally removed.
But there’s some rubbish in here too – and (although I wish it weren’t so) the rubbish often makes the stronger impression. The scene in which Cornwall and Regan blind Gloucester is the most ridiculous of the year. It’s not the only moment in Goold’s Lear that is psychologically unconvincing. But it’s the most preposterous, as Lear’s daughter and her hubbie flit instantly from believable human beings to shlock Gothic sex fiends. Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s left eye. Regan snogs him, wallowing in the gore. She bites out the old man’s other peeper. Blood spews everywhere. The couple get frisky again. Savagery is a turn-on, see? And Regan and Cornwall are, like, baddies. Thus are two of the plays intriguing characters shrunk to cartoon grotesquery.
Have you ever tried biting out someone’s eye? I suspect it’s more difficult than it’s made to seem here. I may be wrong.
I pitied Poor Tom. Why is he pretending to be an idiot, in the middle of a wood? Goold’s production doesn’t make it clear. How shallow must Lear’s love for Cordelia have been, to be so hastily disposed of? Why do the fathers misjudge their children so spectacularly? Has Gloucester never had an inkling Edmund might be a bad ’un? As Maly Theatre director Lev Dodin flatly asked, when I interviewed him a few years back: “how has Gloucester managed to be basically Lear’s prime minister for so many years, living in court, and yet not be able to decipher who is a liar and who is not?” There are no answers – nor suggestions of answers – here. There’s fine image-making, a forward thrust and performances with pizzazz. But Lear’s greatest mysteries aren’t unlocked.
But there’s some rubbish in here too – and (although I wish it weren’t so) the rubbish often makes the stronger impression. The scene in which Cornwall and Regan blind Gloucester is the most ridiculous of the year. It’s not the only moment in Goold’s Lear that is psychologically unconvincing. But it’s the most preposterous, as Lear’s daughter and her hubbie flit instantly from believable human beings to shlock Gothic sex fiends. Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s left eye. Regan snogs him, wallowing in the gore. She bites out the old man’s other peeper. Blood spews everywhere. The couple get frisky again. Savagery is a turn-on, see? And Regan and Cornwall are, like, baddies. Thus are two of the plays intriguing characters shrunk to cartoon grotesquery.
Have you ever tried biting out someone’s eye? I suspect it’s more difficult than it’s made to seem here. I may be wrong.
I pitied Poor Tom. Why is he pretending to be an idiot, in the middle of a wood? Goold’s production doesn’t make it clear. How shallow must Lear’s love for Cordelia have been, to be so hastily disposed of? Why do the fathers misjudge their children so spectacularly? Has Gloucester never had an inkling Edmund might be a bad ’un? As Maly Theatre director Lev Dodin flatly asked, when I interviewed him a few years back: “how has Gloucester managed to be basically Lear’s prime minister for so many years, living in court, and yet not be able to decipher who is a liar and who is not?” There are no answers – nor suggestions of answers – here. There’s fine image-making, a forward thrust and performances with pizzazz. But Lear’s greatest mysteries aren’t unlocked.
Monday, 2 March 2009
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, National Theatre
I queued for this one morning last week at 8.30am, with a thermos of Bovril in one hand and a John Buchan novel in the other. I recommend it. Front-row seats for a tenner – and you feel like you’ve earned it.
I caught the last performance. I couldn’t very well miss it, after so many people told me how great it was. And sure enough, when it finished, and the audience filed out of the Olivier Theatre, I heard it again: “wasn’t it wonderful?”; “beautifully performed”, etc.
Fair enough. It’s a ravishing production, an all-enveloping (the more so if you’re in the front row) total-theatre experience that makes you wonder how Stoppard’s play could ever have been performed without an onstage orchestra. The cast is terrific. The interplay between musicians and actors is well-worked and expressive. But something tells me that, when you watch a play about political persecution in Soviet Russia, your first reaction shouldn’t be: ooh, what a sumptuous staging.
I think the fault – as far as this argument goes – is Stoppard’s. The play is about a sane man, locked up in a psychiatric prison, accused of being mad. The proof of his madness, according to his keepers, is his belief that, in Russia, sane men get locked up in psychiatric prisons. It’s a fiendish paradox, with which Stoppard is clearly delighted. He duly dramatises it in a spirit of jaunty absurdity that eclipses the story's tragedy. Despite the production’s best efforts (there is, for example, a terrific choreographed sequence in which members of the orchestra become torturers and battered prisoners), the play itself is funnier than it is disturbing.
It also has a (sort of) happy ending. The incarcerated hero is finally released – albeit accidentally – to be with his son. Tom Morris and Felix Barrett’s production drowns this conclusion in tears and doomy strings, as if to demand that we weep for all those who weren’t/aren’t released. But their best efforts can’t obscure the ending Stoppard scripted, which lets us all off the hook. And which makes the play, finally, a comedy.
I’m not asking that a play about political repression necessarily whip us into a righteous fury. But Stoppard’s is all wit and too little feeling. We emerge delighted by what’s gone on onstage, but not horrified enough by what goes on in the world.
I caught the last performance. I couldn’t very well miss it, after so many people told me how great it was. And sure enough, when it finished, and the audience filed out of the Olivier Theatre, I heard it again: “wasn’t it wonderful?”; “beautifully performed”, etc.
Fair enough. It’s a ravishing production, an all-enveloping (the more so if you’re in the front row) total-theatre experience that makes you wonder how Stoppard’s play could ever have been performed without an onstage orchestra. The cast is terrific. The interplay between musicians and actors is well-worked and expressive. But something tells me that, when you watch a play about political persecution in Soviet Russia, your first reaction shouldn’t be: ooh, what a sumptuous staging.
I think the fault – as far as this argument goes – is Stoppard’s. The play is about a sane man, locked up in a psychiatric prison, accused of being mad. The proof of his madness, according to his keepers, is his belief that, in Russia, sane men get locked up in psychiatric prisons. It’s a fiendish paradox, with which Stoppard is clearly delighted. He duly dramatises it in a spirit of jaunty absurdity that eclipses the story's tragedy. Despite the production’s best efforts (there is, for example, a terrific choreographed sequence in which members of the orchestra become torturers and battered prisoners), the play itself is funnier than it is disturbing.
It also has a (sort of) happy ending. The incarcerated hero is finally released – albeit accidentally – to be with his son. Tom Morris and Felix Barrett’s production drowns this conclusion in tears and doomy strings, as if to demand that we weep for all those who weren’t/aren’t released. But their best efforts can’t obscure the ending Stoppard scripted, which lets us all off the hook. And which makes the play, finally, a comedy.
I’m not asking that a play about political repression necessarily whip us into a righteous fury. But Stoppard’s is all wit and too little feeling. We emerge delighted by what’s gone on onstage, but not horrified enough by what goes on in the world.
Monday, 23 February 2009
Shun-kin at the Barbican
Complicite’s latest show comes with its own apologia built in. The play draws on a short story by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, about the sado-masochistic 19th-century relationship between a shamisen teacher, Shun-kin, and her servant and lover Sasuke. It also cites as an inspiration Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows. But that essay contributes little other than a tacked-on epilogue, which argues: we’ve become so used to electric light, we have no idea how dark the world once was.
That’s a concept to make the mind spin. But it’s got nothing to do with the story we’ve spent two hours watching. Its only relationship to the tale of Shun-kin and Sasuke, it seems to me, is to say: You probably struggled to identify with this story. Blame modernity. Don’t blame the director.
Certainly, we don’t care about Shun-kin or Sasuke. McBurney’s production is compelling enough – always beautiful to watch, staged with meticulous economy, always charged. But we never feel we know the obsequious servant, or the steely, blind Shun-kin (who is played for much of the show by a puppet). They are archetypes, not human beings. The production challenges us to see the sacrifice Sasuke makes – he relinquishes his independence, his whole life, to the pleasure of being Shun-kin’s whipping boy – as ‘transcendental’; as a paragon of selflessness. But (as McBurney must sense) few of us will buy that. Hence the catch-all homily about darkness and electric light. Things were different back then. How can we possibly understand?
I must say I quite enjoyed ‘Shun-kin’. I got on its wavelength and was drawn in. But I can still see that it doesn’t entirely work. It lacks poetic justice or characters with whom we can easily engage. It too uncritically buys into the mystique of Shun-kin’s beauty – and works an already tired caged-bird image to within an inch of its feathered life. It also makes one marvel that Complicite once won the Perrier Prize for comedy. What is becoming of their (his) knockabout sense of fun?
Another word on that epilogue. As the ‘In Praise of Shadows’ text is narrated in voiceover, McBurney contrasts the hurly-burly of the Tokyo metro, and of our hurried technological lives, with the simplicity of the shamisen – and, by implication, of Shun-kin and Sasuke’s story. A safety curtain descends, with clattering footage projected onto it of metropolitan busy-ness. As the curtain reaches floor-level, it crushes a solitary shamisen into splinters.
On the one hand, I thought: great. Whenever curtains descend upon stages, I long for something to get accidentally crushed or bonked on the head. But this was deliberate – and, insofar as it was meant as a resonant concluding image, specious. Because if anyone’s entitled to preach about the superiority of simplicity over technology, it ain’t Complicite, whose shows grow ever busier with video, projection, SFX, the works. A crushed shamisen may be a profound symbol of something or other. But it doesn’t sum up the story of Shun-kin, nor, coming from theatre’s very own Inspector Gadget, Simon McBurney, is it easy to take entirely seriously.
That’s a concept to make the mind spin. But it’s got nothing to do with the story we’ve spent two hours watching. Its only relationship to the tale of Shun-kin and Sasuke, it seems to me, is to say: You probably struggled to identify with this story. Blame modernity. Don’t blame the director.
Certainly, we don’t care about Shun-kin or Sasuke. McBurney’s production is compelling enough – always beautiful to watch, staged with meticulous economy, always charged. But we never feel we know the obsequious servant, or the steely, blind Shun-kin (who is played for much of the show by a puppet). They are archetypes, not human beings. The production challenges us to see the sacrifice Sasuke makes – he relinquishes his independence, his whole life, to the pleasure of being Shun-kin’s whipping boy – as ‘transcendental’; as a paragon of selflessness. But (as McBurney must sense) few of us will buy that. Hence the catch-all homily about darkness and electric light. Things were different back then. How can we possibly understand?
I must say I quite enjoyed ‘Shun-kin’. I got on its wavelength and was drawn in. But I can still see that it doesn’t entirely work. It lacks poetic justice or characters with whom we can easily engage. It too uncritically buys into the mystique of Shun-kin’s beauty – and works an already tired caged-bird image to within an inch of its feathered life. It also makes one marvel that Complicite once won the Perrier Prize for comedy. What is becoming of their (his) knockabout sense of fun?
Another word on that epilogue. As the ‘In Praise of Shadows’ text is narrated in voiceover, McBurney contrasts the hurly-burly of the Tokyo metro, and of our hurried technological lives, with the simplicity of the shamisen – and, by implication, of Shun-kin and Sasuke’s story. A safety curtain descends, with clattering footage projected onto it of metropolitan busy-ness. As the curtain reaches floor-level, it crushes a solitary shamisen into splinters.
On the one hand, I thought: great. Whenever curtains descend upon stages, I long for something to get accidentally crushed or bonked on the head. But this was deliberate – and, insofar as it was meant as a resonant concluding image, specious. Because if anyone’s entitled to preach about the superiority of simplicity over technology, it ain’t Complicite, whose shows grow ever busier with video, projection, SFX, the works. A crushed shamisen may be a profound symbol of something or other. But it doesn’t sum up the story of Shun-kin, nor, coming from theatre’s very own Inspector Gadget, Simon McBurney, is it easy to take entirely seriously.
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