Simon Stone's Yerma

“My son.

My daughter.

You’re not coming to me.

But I’m coming to you.

I’m coming.”

Proper spoilers within.

To anyone familiar with his work, one of the most obvious aspects of his earth-shatteringly good production of Yerma for the Young Vic will be the fact that it acts almost as an amalgamation of his other productions. We’ve got the glass walls of his Wild Duck and the scene titles / traverse from Thyestes for the Belvoir, the mud and dirt of his Medea along with the rain from his Husbands and Wives for the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Even the grass covering the floor of the stage for certain scenes seems plucked from his Cherry Orchard for Melbourne Theatre Company. Yet Yerma feels absolutely, 100% fresh and original.

From it you wouldn’t get the impression that Simon Stone is an Australian director who works mainly in Europe. This is his most British production – not in the fact that it seems like a British piece of theatre, but that it’s set absolutely in modern day London. It’s insane. Stone makes so many cultural comments about British society that you’d think he’d lived here his whole life. I’m inclined to call his adaptation that best British play of the year so far. To get a play which was written in 1934 speak to explicitly to *us* and *our society* does Lorca more justice than a line-by-line translation.

The piece starts with the lights dimming to this beautiful, almost angelic choir. On two screens above the stage – technically four screens, it’s played on a glass-walled traverse -- the words “YERMA, AFTER LORCA” appear. (On a side note, it’s proper class to see an author actually get credited *in* a production instead of just getting a few paragraphs in a crappy programme.) We then get the chapter number, scene number, scene title.

The first scene makes the realistic nature abundantly clear: a young couple, Her (played by Billie Piper) and John (played by Brendan Cowell) have just bought a three floor house in a gentrified area of London. We never find out where the house is, but it seems somewhere like Southwark or even Islington, the sort of place where you actively want to raise a child. The acting here walks brilliantly the line between realistic naturalism and unrealistic naturalism. It isn’t naturalistic in the Richard Eyre sense, where the acting is so obvious in attempting to appear naturalistic that is fails completely, but it isn’t naturalistic in the Katie Mitchell sense either. Instead, it’s just a perfectly happy couple eating pizza, drinking wine and making jokes about Sadiq Khan vs Boris Johnson, IKEA furniture and anal sex. And thinking about filling the house with children turns into planning. But what’s brilliant is that even here, in this scene of domestic bliss, Stone starts to suggest that maybe, just maybe, this couple aren’t compatible . Her has discovered pornography on John’s laptop, and while it’s all very joking you get the very clear impression that neither party is wholly at ease. When she makes a jab about coming on his  if she had a dick his face squirms.  But it’s realistic for both actor and audience. This is a couple who we see everyday walking down the street, holding hands, planning where they’ll go for lunch. The later scenes of so devastating because they warp what we see on a near constant basis.

Then, as at the end of every scene, the lights abruptly dim, mid-sentence, the screens tell us we’ve skipped a few days and that Her is going to tell her family. In the space of a few seconds, the pizza and wine of the first scene have been cleaned and the space is now littered with cardboard boxes. It makes you gasp – the stage management here is absolutely exemplary. At one point, the lights go down and raise to reveal that the floor is now covered in grass, and there’s a little tree being planted. We later see the same tree only this time it’s withered, the leaves dead with Her slumped against it. Like the tree, her womb has no life.

And what makes the story even more tragic is that it seems everyone else is getting pregnant. Her’s sister, Mary (Charlotte Randle) is stuck in an unhappy marriage with a husband who can’t keep his cock away, yet finds herself pregnant on a yearly basis. She’s postnatally depressed. When she asks Her if she wants the baby, she’s only half-joking. Their distant mother, Helen (Maureen Beattie) doesn’t really give two shits about her kids and is more interested in her job. Even John doesn’t care too much. Sure, he wants kids – but not in the same way his wife does.

In the programme notes, Stone speaks of a wish to “elevate [Lorca] to the ranks of mythmaker”, which I assume means in the sense of contemporary staging of ‘classic’ (read: old) plays. His staging strips Lorca to the bone. When we think of productions of his work, we think of women in ankle-length dresses dragging baskets and sowing, and men in in caps with moustaches stomping around all played in a perfect recreation of a 1930s Spanish farmhouse. Yet Stone drags the play away from the original social context and into, as was his intention, the realm of myth by adapting the script freely. Here, Yerma is no longer a farmer’s wife but a lifestyle blogger and magazine editor, and her husband works for some City firm. They drink organic fruit smoothies and shop in Marks and Spencer. And Stone then uses these modern updates to fuel the story. Towards the end, when they decide to go ahead and try IVF, the relationship is put under even more strain as he has to start working even more to cover the costs while his credit card is being declined in the supermarket. It’s fucking devastating. You have absolute pity for these characters because, fundamentally, they’re good people. The original is set in a society which is wholly and completely misogynist, and when Yerma kills her husband you have to respect her even. Yet Stone makes it possible to relate to every one of *his* characters. We see that Her is so focused on having children that she ruins her personal relationships, but also that she’s completely allowed to want children that desperately. We also see that John is a bit of a twat but also that he legitimately wants what’s best for Her as he cooks up avocado on toast because it’s her favourite breakfast.

And the scene where she kills herself. Fuck. I saw Cleansed without fainting and found this tough to watch. We get a blackout of a few seconds, then see Her using the glass walls of the set to push this knife into her womb. Blood is running down her legs and covering the glass. She collapses on the ground, sobs, and pushes the knife in even further. Says some things. Then we cut to black. We don’t know if she lives or dies, though the implication is pretty bleak. Maybe she killed her husband – the last we see of him is Her forcing him into the corner with the knife. The audience were silent. I wasn’t really sure whether to clap or cry.

It was scenes like that where Lizzie Clachan’s beautiful set really came into its own. It’s easy to drop the Brechtian verfremdungseffekt bomb on it but that’s what it was. By physically cutting us off from the actors Stone makes the whole thing feel so intense and awful. Anything can happen because they’re in a different room to us. And I’m not normally a fan of things like mud on stage, but the glass stopped it being too much of a distraction and using it meant the Glastonbury scenes were even more weird and disjointed. Her crawling around in the mud, looking for someone to fuck her so she can get pregnant worked so well on a physical / symbolic level: here is someone reduced to animal status in her desperation to have a child.

The set is also interesting because it completely dictates the way in which we view the production. Whether we want to or not we are absolutely forced to take a side. By slicing the Young Vic’s auditorium in half and enclosing the traverse stage with glass walls Clachan ensures that our perspective of the events is controlled not by simply “where we chose a seat while hoping the director has sympathy on us”, but instead directed by Stone creating a show which feels utterly real and controlled not by a need to cater to the desires of an audience but the desires of the show itself. That sounded confusing, and it’s a fucking mess of a sentence, but it’s the only way I can summarise the effect of the set on us. I’ll use the final scene of the play as an example: I only saw Her use the walls of the set to push the knife into her womb because that’s where I was sat. Similarly, I didn’t see her push the knife further in to her after she collapsed as she was against the glass facing away from me, while the people across from me did.

It’s also interesting that in Stone’s adaptation Yerma kills herself while the fate of the husband is left more vague. Instead of strangling him to death and then going even madder, we get a sudden cut to black as she forces him into the corner. Lights up, he’s vanished and she’s pacing furiously and sobbing. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t – it was never the husband’s story to begin with.

The acting is fucking phenomenal. Every performance is top-notch which makes it difficult to single one out to attempt analysis on. Not much more to say really. Piper is utterly crushing, I’m sure awards will beckon for her and they’re wholly deserved. It’d also be nice to see Brendan Cowell get best actor for something, although he’ll probably get relegated to best supporting. Screw that.

So yeah. Basically see this. It’s completely sold out now, but if you can brave the returns queue then you absolutely have to. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen in a British theatre. If it doesn’t transfer to the West End, then I can easily see this getting revived at the Toneelgroep Amsterdam or the Schauspielhaus. I’m sure Ivo Van Hove has already sorted something out. It has the fuck-it-all attidue of a young Thomas Ostermeier with the droning guitar strums that play throughout the final chapter.

A lá Cleansed, I’m convinced that we’re finally going somewhere. In five years time British theatre might not be so shit if we carry on making productions like this. Leaving the theatre and realising I’m in London and not Amsterdam, or Berlin, or a European country which knows what theatre actually is was one of the best feelings I’ve had in ages. 

Christ. 

Katie Mitchell's Cleansed

"All I want is a room with a view
A sight worth seeing, a vision of you
All I want is a room with view.
I will give you my finest hour
The one I spent watching you shower
I will give you my finest hour, oh yeah"

Blondie, "Picture This"

When discussing a piece of theatre, it seems logical to begin by discussing the piece of theatre itself. 

This is not one of those discussions, because this is a piece of theatre directed by Katie Mitchell - and there are few directors working today who are burdened with suitcase after suitcase of useless critical baggage like she is. Her naturalistic productions of Chekhov, Euripides and other writers at the National were divisive, and her multimedia productions (which fused live performance with technology to create what she called "live cinema") were practically groundbreaking. In the years following however Mitchell quietly disappeared, instead working in Europe at theatres like the Schaubühne where she felt she could create her most radical, extreme and feminist productions. 

So her production of Sarah Kane's Cleansed  is quite a big deal. Not only does mark the National Theatre of Great Britain staging a play by one of the best playwrights in Great British history for the first time - I never quite believed this, yet somehow it seems that even our biggest theatre is capable of committing such an injustice - it marks something of a homecoming for Mitchell herself - an institution whose misogyny caused her to leave it.

The play itself follows various figures attempting to survive in some kind of bizarre torture institution. We have Grace, who has come to look for her dead brother Graham, and then Road and Carl, a young gay couple being tortured to test their love, and then Tinker, a psychopathic dealer/doctor who craves the love of a peep-show dancer yet doesn't know how to feel love.

While the use of a university setting was clearly the intention of Kane, Mitchell instead opts for a psychiatric institution which, due to abandonment or other reasons, has been overrun by dirt and trees, gorgeously summarizing the clash between love and hate Kane portrays. It's a beautiful design by Alex Eales. Not because it's aesthetically pleasing in the way an Ivo Van Hove production is, say, but because it's just so realistic. What he and Mitchell have done is create a small slither of a fully-realised world, and it just so happens that the slither they chose was one where such horrific, atrocious things happen. The lighting by Jack Knowles is also top marks: dark enough that this place seems like hell, but bright enough that we can see every act of mutilation crystal clear.

It's this idea of a *fully realised* world that brings me to the performances, which are some of the most un-naturalistic yet naturalistic performances I've seen. Like her production of Alles Weitere Kennen Sie Aus Dem Kino at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Mitchell has the characters perform their lines under duress, with Tinker and his attendants being an inescapable force who are often present even in the scenes the text says they aren't. Dialogue is sparse, and it's interesting to note just how little of it there is full stop. Words just sort of crop up in the haunting soundscape (sound design by Melanie Wilson and music by Paul Clark) which mixes helicopters passing overhead with ghostly replayings of lines screamed by the characters. When there are exchanges, the characters speak fast because they know they could be dead in a few minutes. All of the performances are fantastic, but Michelle Terry (on-stage the whole time, often fully nude for long stretches of it) is once again proving to us all that she's one of the best actresses working today. Her performance is worth the cost of admission alone, if I'm happily honest. And this is a demanding play, especially on Peter Hobday as the tortured Carl. Over the course of the play he has his tongue pulled out, and then his fingers and toes shredded. 

And the violence itself is disgusting. Realistic enough that it seems to be plausible, but not realistic enough that it distracts (like the working taps in Othello a few years back). When Carl has a large metal pole pushed up his anus, we see the pole lubricated and a small cardboard tray placed beneath him to catch any droppings. It's this horrendous attention to detail that just makes you squirm, and yet you can't look away because the world Mitchell presents is just so beautiful even in the moments of torture. On a personal note, the scene I found toughest to watch (after the needle being put into the eyeball) was the scene where Robin is force-fed an entire box of chocolates he bought as a present for Grace. This was the weaponisation of romance, affection as a noose. 

But the thing I loved most* about the production was how completely and utterly un-British it was. This is the kind of frightening, shocking yet ultimately moving work that just wouldn't be made under the National's previous artistic director, Nicholas Hytner. It was incredible to watch Cleansed and then step outside into the chilly London night. If this marks the start of the National producing more challenging work that will - one day - put us in the same league artistically as theatres in Germany and the rest of Europe, then this really is a significant production. Not that is isn't significant without all the contextual baggage about our relationship with Europe - it's pretty much a flawless production in every regard. It's one of the few pieces of theatre (re: Oresteia) that I've become utterly and completely *lost* in. The sum experience, the emotions that emerge organically from every single individual reaction it causes are so overwhelming and powerful. It's relentless in both horror and love, so uncompromising in the message it blasts into the head of anyone who watches it. 

And hearing a song by Blondie in a National Theatre production put a big fucking grin on my face: 

* I didn't, actually. I loved everything about it.