July in Theatre

This July was defined by four trips to see four very different plays. 

We kicked off the month with a trip to see Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree, which was in the National Theatre's Temporary Space. I've already written a lengthy post on just how much I loved it. But I'll just say it again: it's an incredible piece of theatre and is about to embark on a short tour. It's well worth getting to one of the venues to catch it. 

Then it was to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see the RSC's Othello, which left me disappointed in both the production and the director Iqbal Khan's seeming lack of trust in the play itself. It was full of annoying gimmicks; at one point a television was lowered and a scene was acted out over a live video link, but it was blatantly prerecorded. Cheek By Jowl's production of Ubu Roi is how you use multimedia, and the work of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam  also demonstrates a brilliant use of live video. The actors never stood still, they were always fussing about enacting mundane tasks like setting up wi-fi and changing items of scenery. Khan didn't seem to understand that this play is still so popular for a reason, that reason being that the language and characters are brilliant. Lucian Msamati was a very good Iago, but even his pantomime cackle at the end seemed cliche. The RSC'S Othello is an uninteresting reading of a brilliant play, which the elderly Stratford audience lap up, calling it 'radical' and 'out there'. It just left me feeling a bit cold and a bit numb from the three hour running time. 

Then it was to London's Donmar Warehouse to see Temple, a new play by Steve Waters about the Occupy movement and the action initiated against it by the City of London. The play was nice. It was a calm, measured production directed by Howard Davies, with a lovely, powerful performance from HRH Simon Russell Beale as the Dean. Sure, it's not going to change the ways we look at theatre as an artistic medium, but it was a well written, brilliantly acted piece which trusted the audience to answer the questions the play raised themselves. And SRB could be an underdog Olivier nominee. 

And finally, back to Stratford to see Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, directed by Justin Audibert. It was brilliant. And I'm not just saying that because the RSC has, on a whole, been a bit disappointing this year. It's a really brilliant production. Jasper Britton is hilarious as the titular Jew, Barabas, and it makes great use of the smaller Swan Theatre. There were some goregeous period costumes, and having the choric Machiavel appear in a Royal Marlowe Company t-shirt was a clever touch. Basically, if you see anything in the RSC's summer season, go and see The Jew of Malta.

I Didn't Like Antigone at the Barbican, But I Loved What It Had to Say About Us

When the Barbican announced that their production of Antigone, written by the ancient playwright Sophocles in a translation by Anne Carson and directed by the man-of-the-moment Ivo Van Hove, anticipation began for what was one of the hottest tickets of 2015. It was going to tour all over the world, and to top it off Juliette Binoche (making a return to the London stage) would play the lead role.

So it was all a bit awkward then, that when it opened people found the production to be quite different from what they were expecting. I was one of these people. I found the production to be slow and lacking in focus. I wouldn't have been surprised if, in the rehearsal room, Van Hove just told the actors to "move around a bit" and to "shout that line". It seemed loose and methodical, which is interesting when this is a play about a young woman defying the state to continue the cause of the gods, with two suicides and a government issued burial (whilst alive) all happening within the 90 minute run time. Although the use of Lou Reed's Heroin does deserve special mention: that's one powerful way to end a show, with that discordant lament to the 60s rocker lifestyle blaring as the chorus continue to, well, live. 

But as the days passed since I saw it, something began to grow inside the back of my mind. An idea, just a notion of something bigger. Which was weird, because I'd felt my eyes getting heavy when I was actually watching the production. After watching the filmed version of the production on BBC 4, it quickly began to dawn on me, however, just how wrong my thinking about the production was. It wasn't until I sat down to read the programme the following week that I began to appreciate just how bold and powerful Van Hove's reading of the play was, which is summarized in the form of an essay entitled The Unanswered Question - How to Get to the Dark Soul of Antigone.  For the rest of this post, I'll put Van Hove's notes in italics, complete with the Greek (as opposed to the traditional Latin) spellings this production employed. 

Antigone goes on a long, solitary road towards death. That's interesting. Does Van Hove feel Antigone is fully aware of the fact that she won't survive? Scene by scene, she cuts herself loose: from her sister, who won't help with her brother's burial; from Polyneikes (not sure I fully see this. It's Polyneikes who causes her to do what she does, right until the bitter end); from the love of her fiancé Haimon; from Kreon's policy; and, as an inevitable consequence, from society. This seems to suggest that Van Hove didn't approach the play as a political thriller in which the course of modern democracy is changed forever by the actions of one woman, but views it more as a structurally abstract death-note. When the political aspect is ignored, the play turns into one woman effectively preparing herself for death.

I also love Van Hove's idea that the blind prophet Tiresias acts almost as an anti-Chorus, saying what the actual Chorus are too afraid to: that Kreon is the cause of all of the problems in the play, and not Oedipus, nor Antigone, nor Polyneikes nor Eteokles. In Antigone, the chorus take the form of Kreon's advisers. Their status within the clear political hierarchy of Thebes stops them from fully speaking what they think.  

But the most powerful piece of Van Hove's writing comes at the end of his essay: Kreon's efforts to turn around his punishments come too late. By the end of the play his wife, Eurydike, and two sons are dead. Like Antigone, Kreon is 'alone on his insides.' Like many directors, Van Hove is aware of the fact that Kreon ends up in the same position as Antigone. He has lost everything, but has no choice but to keep moving forward into an uncertain future. He has been driven by a sincere ambition to turn Thebes, his beloved city, into a better place and has failed In every scene he is given the chance to adjust his law but he can't. His inflexibility leads to his downfall. The sums up the character of Kreon perfectly: he is a man with a clear sense of morals, and is someone who sticks to his own laws without hesitation, even rejecting Tiresias (and because of this the Gods) until he realises that the prophet actually speaks the truth. 

And then, finally, the kicker: Antigone develops from a play about a brutal war to a play about politics and public policies and ends as a play about the helplessness of humans, lost in the cosmos. It is a play about survival: not the survival of an individual or a family, but of a whole society, perhaps even the world. The play is ambivalent and dark, modern and mythical, leaving one with more questions than answers. This could be considered Van Hove's manifesto when approaching the play; to create a production which doesn't follow one woman, but to stage a production which explores the role of every individual in society. To Van Hove, Thebes isn't a city in ancient Greece, but a space metaphoric for every city ever, regardless of time or place. Van Hove was also influenced by the response to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 being left in an open field for a week, an act which seemed to violate timeless laws of death and the ways through which we honour and respect it. Just like how the Western press criticised all involved with the bodies (until the Dutch government intervened and arranged a 100km funeral procession, almost like the honours bestowed onto Eteokles), Antigone defies Kreon to bury her brother. Van Hove placed the play in a world which was timeless yet grounded in the present, in which Antigone's defying of Kreon's edict is an act of both personal empowerment and political protest, almost akin to the Occupy protesters. And like the war in Iraq, Kreon ignored the advice of his people to avoid showing weakness to his citizens.

At the end of Antigone, the surviving characters are forced to accept that they have no choice but to keep moving forward blindly, past a devastating war and into whatever the future holds. In Anne Carson's translation, a member of the Chorus remarks to a sobbing Kreon: "That's the future, this is the present. You deal with the present." This becomes a parallel to us: we don't know what's coming, but we know what's happened. Wars, a recession, austerity. So we deal about the present, and wait to deal about the future when we're living through it. 

This took a while to write, and nearly all of it came from myself, although Van Hove's essay obviously formed the basis. However, the Guardian's article, Death Becomes Her: How Juliette Binoche and Ivo Van Hove Reinvented Antigone was very interesting and is easily available online, and having the production when it was broadcast of BBC 4 recorded also proved to be invaluable.

Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree or: How I Learned To Stop Caring and Just Watch

When I first booked tickets to see Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree at the National Theatre's Temporary space I didn't really know what I was going to see. I knew that Crouch wanted details of the piece to be kept deliberately secretive, and I knew that half of the cast changes every performance and hasn't read a word of the script until they step onto the stage in front of the audience. To be completely honest, my main reason for going was because I'd sat in front of Crouch when I saw Our Town at the Almeida Theatre last November and wanted to see him on stage.

I also knew that the cast was two people, including Crouch, and that the show was Kind of a Big Deal. It was Kind of a Big Deal in that this was the tenth anniversary revival after runs in London, New York and Los Angeles, and it was also Kind of a Big Deal because famous people have done it. People like Mike Meyers, Sophie Okendo and Frances McDormand. People that you tell your friends about over dinner. And tickets were £15, so even if it was awful, it was only £15 worth of awful.

So when we sat down in the theatre, the start of the show was indicated not by the dimming of the lights or a loud sound effect, but by Tim Crouch strolling onto the stage, completely out of character and saying hello, which we warily replied to.

"Hang on", I thought. "This is supposed to be experimental! Shouldn't he be contemporary dancing around the set to an unsettling ambient score, while we all try to figure what's actually going on? Maybe it'll start normal and get weirder."

I was wrong. An Oak Tree is a simple, raw piece of theatre. It's the complete antithesis of the stereotypical 'experimental' piece. There's no gimmicks. The other characters in the piece are played by white chairs. The script walks the line brilliantly between beautifully abstract and language so simple it could have been improvised on the spot.

But the thing that made me fall in love with An Oak Tree is that every performance is just so, so special. The inherently repetitious nature of theatre means that, even if you're in love with a production, you're always aware of the fact that what you're watching will happen again. And again. And again until closing night and then if the show gets a West End transfer the process just repeats itself.

Every performance of An Oak Tree, then is a completely individual performance. Even the cast lists could be seen as collectors items. I wondered why no programmes were being sold until I realised that it would be kind of of impossible to do so. On a side note though, I'd happily pay for a commemorative limited edition book on the play, a bit like what Punchdrunk just did with their book on The Drowned Man. It's this feeling of individuality which makes every performance of An Oak Tree so special. Because the second actor changes every performance, the bond between cast and audience ceases to exist after the cast take their bows. We can't look at pictures on the website to bring back memories, nor watch a trailer on Youtube. We just have in our heads what we saw with our eyes and listened to with our ears. I even felt my eyes getting a bit damp at one point, which has never happened to me in a theatre ever.

And as much I hate the word, An Oak Tree is defined by the metatheatrical. Crouch plays a hypnotist, who hypnotises a man whose daughter he killed in a car crash. But isn't that just theatre in itself? Aren't the actors on stage the magicians, and we the willing participants? We hand over our tickets, find our seats and wait to be amazed? The piece is so dense, so jam-packed with clues and puzzles that it would be impossible to analyse it in the theatre. You come to appreciate the language not for what it symbolizes, but for how it sounds. When Crouch halts the piece to ask the second actor how they're finding it, never have questions so mundane sounded so shattering. Even as the lines between author and performer start to blur, I've never felt so emotionally exposed as I was on that sunny Saturday afternoon in July. I've been wanting to write something about An Oak Tree since I first left the theatre, but words have just escaped. Only three weeks later can I speak about it in a vaguely coherent way.

Because, ultimately, An Oak Tree is a love letter to theatre. Crouch (who seems to know much more about theatre than any Oxbridge-educated director does) has constructed a tender, heartfelt piece about something which the government want to cut to oblivion. The play could be seen therefore as a piece of political protest, standing tall in the face of everything. But I think it's best to just appreciate An Oak Tree for what it is: two people transforming themselves before our very eyes, and as a result, the audience transforming with them.