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If you kiss me, kiss me: Young Vic

The inspiration behind Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice was the playwright wondering what would happen if a young girl opened her mouth and it wasn’t her voice that came out, but other people’s. Jane Horrocks burst onto the musical scene in that stage play and subsequent film and also later, on the Young Vic stage, in Richard Jone’s sharp critique and homage to and of Hollywood and Broadway in the main role in Annie Get Your Gun. It could be that the same inspiration behind Little Voice and AGYG is similar here: what will happen if a 53-year-old Lancastrian actress, with a smokey yet belting voice, got up onstage and fronted the albums that made North Britain’s punk and rock powerhouse famous in the theatre that, in the 1970s, echoed to the beats of The Who, who were rehearsing their masterpiece Who’s Next?

What happens is a hybrid mix of dance, throbbing music, commentary and tragicomedy as Horrocks and her dance troupe, accompanied by a humorously deadpan band including an amused Kipper on guitar and glass encased Rat Scabies holding out on the drums, croon, and bellow out Gang of Four’s Anthrax through to Morrisey’s Life is a Pigsty.

It’s already been talked about that the albums, including Fiction Romance and My New House, made up the soundtrack of Horrocks’ 70s and 80s youth. Most of the covers, strung along by a thematically conceived narrative in this pulsating and dramatically exciting 60 minutes, are a poetic mix of the pain and ecstasy of a North of England quietly losing its soul during the Thatcher years and reinventing itself- loudly- singing about love and all things kitchen sink. But “Why sing about it?” asks Horrocks in the intro as dancers pirouette and gyrate through cunnilingus inspired moves conceived by Aletta Collins, who also directs.  The answer is in Bunny Christie’s stripped back stage design.  In “Persil white” (the washing powder was the epitome of 80s youth culture) it is a passing nod to kitchen sink realism with the appearance and reappearance of a whiter than white fridge (we are all fridge junkies now but in the 1970s only 58% of people owned an ice house) and a Formica table, badges of a materialistic obsessed culture clashing against  the idea of dirty beer sodden, drugged up clubs and pubs of the North. We want our drug fuelled dirty beerhouses but also our Persil Whites and possessions, but these two different sets of values rub up against each other; one is a railing against the status quo, the other is an acceptance of it.

Accidentally, this show is a perfect compliment to Jim Cartwright’s new play Raz, soon to open at the Trafalgar Square studios. Although contemporary, it is about a similar scene and a critique of the disenfranchised northern working class who are lost. They, as Horrocks donning her listless boiler suit at the beginning and end of the play suggests, also work hard all week and party like weekend millionaires. The music’s similar, but the sentiment is not. There’s no political engagement or kick against the establishment (as portrayed in traditional kitchen sink realism )and, yes, everyone is having constant sex. If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me, harks at a similar kind of loss of pride, even if we can’t quite pinpoint it. But it is there as dancer Michael Walter pirouettes and hip hops on his own stark dance floor surrounded by Tim Reid’s video that harks to a JG Ballard esque dystopia that smacks of Chris Cunningham’s film Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin. Horrocks, in her role as  curator of these sad tales, watches in melancholic spirit.

It’s theatrical too. One of the most poignant, emotionally enthralling moments comes during The Smiths I know It’s Over. Horrocks barely sings but chokingly expostulates “It’s over and over and over”. It’s like Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (where a female can’t ingest the world’s crises anymore) and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (where a female character, stuck for words, can only utter “terrible rage”) meets Horrocks and The Smiths. And it gets you. Horrocks howls like a banshee, the effect of which travels up your spine and ends as tear pricks in the eyes. What’s this cry for? Love lost. Time lost. And not just Horrocks’.

“It’s an archeological exercise,” says Horrocks. But as we know, all archeology is about the future. As the lights dim and Horrocks leaves the stage, there’s a sense of wistfulness and uncertainty. “Life is a pigsty and is always the same”? Perhaps. But whilst there’s music and theatre and may be the beginnings of a new theatrical form…? 

Rockingly good, this is a must-see, even if you don’t know or like, the music.

cast includes: Fabienne Debarre, Conor Doyle, Daniel Hay- Gordon, Jane Horrocks, Kipper, Mark Neary, Lorena Randi, Rat Scabies, Michael Walters

direction & choreography: Aletta Collins

Musical Producer & arrangements: Kipper

Design: Bunny Christie

Light: Andreas Fuchs

Sound: Paul Arditti

Video: Tim Reid

Musical Direction: Kipper

Assistant Director: Joe Hancock

until April 16

first published in Exeunt

To Moscow?- a brief look at the state of Russian theatre

Some Russian critics “love to kill what they can’t control” wrote John Freedman in the Moscow Times in 2015. He continued: “Theatre, of course, is bigger and messier and more lively than all of us put together.” After four consecutive nights watching new Russian plays (little performed in the UK) translated by Noah Birksted-Breen at London’s Frontline Club—plays that are consciouslyabout the social state of Russia and her theatre, one could go away thinking Russia herself wants to kill what she can’t control. The question is whether and how this may happen. Is Russian theatre in peril? Sources comment that it is alive and kicking in the provinces, where most new plays are staged. But they are dystopian works “that define Russia as an unconquerable, forbidden, illogical country where any social experimenting is drowned in the mysticism, viscosity, and waywardness of the Russian soul.” The theatre critic Pavel Rudnev writes that Russia’s theatrical elders are expressing “anti-liberal” notes with stagings of some of Dostoevsky’s best-known works expressing the pointlessness of a revolutionary spirit . And the Putin government’s insistence on converting more and more theatres into state-run institutions and its pressure on private landlords who rent out space to the politically independent and outspoken theatres such as Teatr.doc must ring alarm bells. Softly, maybe, but ring they must.

A post-show discussion featuring Alexandrina Markov, Oliver Bullough, Vladimir Ashurkov, John Freedman, among others. Photo by Sophie Kayes.

On the first night of the play readings, a venture between the journalists’ charity, Plymouth Theatre Royal, and Sputnik Theatre, the choice of work, Doctor (Notes of a Provincial Doctor) was a good illustration of the present federation’s disintegration of social structures. The play explores how many hospitals in the Russian provinces are understocked, understaffed, or are being dismantled, often leaving patients with nowhere to turn. The play has been in rep at Teatr.doc for ten years as a result of its popularity with the medical community, in particular. Elena Iseva, the playwright, uses verbatim techniques to expound, word for word, the experiences of a doctor as he journeys from medical student to surgeon in rural Russia. Played with a hint of wistful yet slightly boorish sentimentalism by Alex Cox, drawing surely on Chekhov’s Mikhail Lvovich Astrov in Uncle Vanya or Tcheboutykin in The Three Sisters, Doctor (Notes of a Provincial Doctor) lays bare the sick, badly financed, and sometimes hilarious state of the Russian health system.

Reading of Zhanna. Photo by Sophie Kayes.

The reading of Zhanna the night after, by twenty-seven-year-old playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich, may, at first, seem to bear no connection. It’s a stark look at a self-made new Russian woman who outmaneuvers the mafia gangs in the lawless “pop, glamour, and gangster” period of the 1990s (the first chaotic decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union) to manage a small chain of boutiques, making herself wealthy in the process. We join Zhanna just as her toy-boy is about to leave her for his younger and pregnant “real love.” What follows is a hard-hitting account of Zhanna’s quest for revenge. While Zhanna has been commonly referred to by the critics as a “straightforward melodrama,” it charts an important psychological shift in Russia’s national character during Perestroika and the move from economic restraint to excess living in a “grab what you can” cultural moment.

If the first two plays deal with Russia’s immediate history, Grandchildren by Alexandra Polivanova and Mikhail Kaluzhsky, is an attempt to rationalize Stalinism. Dealing with territory written about so hauntingly and truthfully by Vassily Grossman in Life and Fate, the play offers testimonies from the grandchildren of those whose family members were Stalinists, in the NKVD, or members of the Communist Party. It deals with guilt, self-censorship, and with the need to excuse and the desire to forgive. It is original, for when do we hear about or from the relatives of mass murderers, executioners, or any kind of criminal offenders? Who tells their stories? They are often the ones forgotten in the mass outcry pitying victims and venting rage against the victors, and they are left to process the legacy of inherited guilt on their own, when in fact, one could argue, it should be a communal experience. But if this play is trying, in some small part, to do what the Nuremberg Trials did for Germany—to bring a country to face and therefore to reconcile with its past—the post-reading discussion, given by speakers Alexandrina Markov, Oliver Bullough, Vladimir Ashurkov, and John Freedman warned that Russia may be creeping back into the Soviet Era, not out of it. The fact that a new Stalin educational center has opened in Penza, Meyerhold’s birthplace, is not lost on Russia’s artistic community, yet it highlights a deep psychological conflict raised in the play. Russia has not processed Stalin and WWII, yet through censorship and political pressure (Putin’s version of Stalin is to be taught in schools for example) her government continues to inflict wounds on open sores before they have had a chance to be understood or heal, a typical old-style KGB tactic. Is Russia heading back into the dark murky days of the USSR?

In December 2014, Vladimir Putin signed a new cultural policy document detailing Russia’s “rejection” of the “principles of tolerance and multiculturalism.” It goes on to caution against arts and culture that diverge from Russia’s traditional values, stating,  “No experiments with form can justify the substance that contradicts the values traditional for our society.” What must this do to a people?

Reading of The War Has Not Started Yet. Photo by Sophie Kayes.

The closing play, Mikhail Durnenkov’s The War Has Not Started Yet, commissioned by A Play A Pint & A Pie and the National Theatre of Scotland, perhaps has a preemptive imaginative answer—of sorts. Reminiscent of the style in Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, and premiering just as Russian troops occupied Ukraine, it is not about a war on a frontline, unless you see that line as a domestic one. Instead, using a large number of vignettes, it explores a variety of Russian characters suffering neurosis, psychosis, and schizophrenia as a result of what is happening to them in their own country. Characters are unable to function in a world that is increasingly lived through the pursuit of sensual fulfillment or, in equal amounts, internal and external oppression. They suffer mental and emotional overload and their natural human tendencies are suppressed, either by themselves or others. In the play, the characters fail to distinguish between what is real or not real (referring to Russian State TV’s tendency to fake news reports, or bend the truth of news stories to fit their agenda), they cross boundaries, abuse others, and look at the world through a filter of mysticism. One scene recounts a moment where a father feels that there is a connection between the simultaneous events of his son going missing and his ability to refrain from smoking at such a time of great stress. We don’t hear if the son is found and we presume that he is not. We realize that so many Russians are in jail, searching for meanings of their own, as the state’s official roads to truth dead end. Russia’s citizens look at their own lives and their country’s history, through the bars of state-led oppression.

What does the future look like for Russian theatre? It is unknown territory, though some fear one path may already have been laid out years ago in the Stalinist period. Teatr doc. itself is allowed to exist for the moment. But the authorities could shut Teatr. doc down if they wanted. Why don’t they? Perhaps it is something to do with why Putin invades other countries: he keeps himself in power by creating problems only he can solve. Perhaps the announcement that the Minister of Culture would vet new plays and since redacted because of a public outcry, was also a psychological trick. For now, though, Teatr.doc’s artistic director refuses to listen to what she calls the “whispers in her ear” or believe any “conspiracy theories” about the State’s real feelings about theatre, and the one she runs especially.

Putting in half measures against Russia’s artistic dissent by kicking Teatr.doc from building to building, yet allowing their plays to take place, or by threatening the censorship of new work but not following through with it, seems a fine line for the Russian government to tread and it forces the theatre world to be constantly on guard. Theatregoing in Russia is a serious business, though they reject it as a “time killing” enterprise. The 115 theatres in Moscow pride themselves on being almost completely sold out all of the time. Where else in the world does theatre matter as much as this? Putin is, for now, cutting just enough slack for theatre to survive as a much-muted place of dissent, but will it be enough for its people? Might they demand more? Theatre is “messier” and “bigger” than us, so it seems only time will tell.

This article was originally published by Howlround

– See more at: http://howlround.com/to-moscow#sthash.a87bQnpf.dpuf

Belarus, the disabled, the KGB and Belarus Free Theatre’s Fortinbras

Belarus Free Theatre’s theatrical laboratory Fortinbras’ provocations of pop up contemporary art and theatre shone a bright light through the chinks of the armor of Belarus’ dictatorship this past December in a cold and rainy Minsk.

Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) pioneer performance inspired campaigning, now, only months after Belarus signed the UN convention to protect the human rights of those with disabilities, Fortinbras’ students yielded the fruits of their own training to mount a series of “public actions, installations and performances across Minsk asking: ‘Why don’t we see people with disabilities around us?’”

Belarus Free Theatre and Fortinbras stand with the banned and the disabled are banned in Belarus. The theatre’s modes of theatrical practices have grown, by necessity, out of the stranglehold of Alexander Lukashenko’s continuing dictatorship. The time seems right to up the ante, Lukashenko was recently returned to power in what many believe to be rigged elections in October 2015. In a city run by the KGB, the only secret service agency opting to keep its name after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, how can such performance interventions affect the citizens of this oppressed municipal? The answer is to bring the disabled and impaired out onto the streets of Minsk and invite its citizens to look at, see, acknowledge, and accommodate difference. In a country which seems to function as a satellite state, where even the mention of Lukashenko’s name in derogative terms seems sacrilege, the time is ripe for such a move as NGOs and The Office for The Rights of Persons with Disabilities watch, over the next two years, to see how the government will fulfill its obligations set out in the UN convention. It’s a country where 50 percent of its people have said they are ready to integrate those with disabilities, but where 80 percent of those who are disabled are unemployed. You might say, Belarus is in the grip of uncertainty, it stunts itself when it embraces difference with only half hearted measures, it is plagued with anxiety when these measures are tested and are found wanting, it wishes to go forward but is caught in the throes of a dictatorship which forces the country to tread water.

– See more at: http://howlround.com/pop-up-performance-in-a-dictatorship-no-problem#sthash.LlMIvqPX.dpuf

On male and female Sociopaths, rejection and the importance of endings – a look at Blue Jasmine, Another Year, Scarlett Street and La Chienne

 

Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine has Cate Blanchett, in the film’s final scene, sitting on a bench next to a woman and talking to herself out loud before, presumably, shuffling off to be a bag lady. Mike Leigh’s most recent feature, Another Year, and in homage to Truffaut, places the camera on Lesley Manville [Mary] as she is somewhat reluctantly welcomed back into the group of friends she once so needed, but, through her own self destruction, becomes estranged from- in the film’s finale Mary is allowed to the dinner table, but all chat excludes her and she is isolated once more, the camera allowing itself to almost freeze on her poignant desolation in its final frames.

There are other contemporary films charting the tragic/comic demise of female figures in modern society [think of Terence Davies’ Deep Blue Sea and Rachel Weisz’ beautiful portrayal of an epiphanous woman who literally lets go of her lover- there are no fears in Davies’ interpretation that she will repeat a suicide attempt, as in Reisz’] But I wanted to focus on these two in particular, not least because the two seem to be in conversation with each other [they are both by men, placing women at their core and watching Blue Jasmine, I immediately thought of Mary in Leigh’s film]. Blue Jasmine’s possible homage to A Streetcar Named Desire is already well documented [something Allen himself is skeptical of]- except that we now see a deluded and hysterical coat tailing Blanche/Jasmine who, rather than being thrown into an asylum by an irate Stanley, simply lies about her prospects to her sister Ginger [who either doesn’t care or is unconscious of Jasmine’s state] and storms out of the house, to wander the streets homeless and talking to herself. This measure of feminism, which in this case, is a simple ignoring of Jasmine’s helpless state by everyone concerned, is perhaps a cynical comment on the state of equality and the change to our modernized feelings of responsibility for each other.

Allen’s ending is fatalistic, resisting a journey off into the land of fantasy, the place where Jasmine herself is so imprisoned. Allen’s Jasmine is a tantrum-ess, dominated by her feelings and unresolved child conflicts etc, unable to prevent herself enacting that self-destructive rampage which effectively destroys her family. His film is not so much about a Park Avenue Goddess who finds that her financier husband is a con man and adulterer, than a socialite, seemingly untouched by the feminist movement [this is an ambiguity in the film] and lacking in skills, who is fatally controlled by her emotions and need for revenge [emotions, says Allen, contributes to 99.9% of our decision making].

So too with Mary in Mike Leigh’s Another Year, although she is very much aware that she is the sinner and stands condemned by those she cares about most. In a low wage job as an admin assistant, Mary’s middle-aged hopes revolve around finding that dream man, buying a car and finding freedom. She unravels [and the extent is measured against her successful Counselor friend, wife and mother Gerri [Ruth Sheen]] as she heads along a path of alcoholism and fantasy, her unrealistic long term crush on Joe, Gerri’s son, soon to be her undoing. Unable to accept his new girlfriend, she compounds the tense family meeting with insults- to the extent that Leigh focuses the rest of the film on Mary’s attempts to apologize and be reaccepted into the fold.

Both Blue Jasmine and Another Year have key scenes where both characters, under the spell of their feelings, make fatal decisions. In Blue Jasmine, it is revealed at the end of the film, in Another Year, it is subtly worked up to. But what’s interesting is how we view these two characters and how our views are shaped by the films’ endings. A friend of mine, who loved Another Year, was antagonistic to the Mary character [I’ve got plenty of those she said] but loved Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine. I wondered why this was.  Perhaps because, at the end of Blue Jasmine, Blanchett is wittering away, she knows the end is nigh, but even if she’s going down she’s still firing her guns. Mike Leigh’s treatment is far more Hamlet esque, Mary is more Ophelia in her sense of powerlessness and rejection- she does not go to her fate shouting at the world, but succumbs with a teary face. If both were to commit suicide, Jasmine would surely use a gun, whereas with Mary, it would be vodka and pills.

Could these endings be products of the directors’ cultural upbringing? Yet Allen himself commented that Jasmine could easily have patched up her marriage- why not have her patch it up, or at least try? Would that be more interesting? Or is Allen tapping purposefully into this hidden fear that all women have i.e. of becoming a bag lady? [The Fear that Dare not speak its name, by Lisa Schwarzbaum] Why couldn’t Leigh allow Mary to pull herself together and at least try to be happy in the last scene? I’d suggest it’s because of both the directors’ needs for realism, even if Allen’s is, in the good old American way, slightly romanticized.  But these needs, I’d suggest, are products of our own cultures and are not so much about portraying reality as about refusing to explore other possibilities.

Compare this with two films by Renoir and Lang, of the same story but given vastly different treatments.

Renoir’s film comes first, based on a novel by George de La Fouchardière [La Chienne, or The Bitch] and tells of Maurice [Michel Simon] a married impoverished clerk and amateur painter, who soon falls in love with street walker Lulu. Aided by her boyfriend, Lulu swindles Maurice of all his finances and paintings and Maurice, when discovering this and her and the boyfriend in bed together, loses his self-control and kills Lulu. Lang’s film is basically the same story, albeit with a few changed details. But what’s interesting is the ending of these two films- the parting shots as it were- made 13 years apart. Maurice is caught and loses everything- his wife, his money, his job. But Renoir [similar to his film Boudu saved from Drowning] gives the audience an ambiguously uplifting end- rather than sink into misery and mourn all that he has lost, we see a Maurice freed from what was a life of burdensome love full of financial problems and embracing life as a homeless person. Lang’s treatment is much darker and closer to Leigh’s and Allen’s treatments of their heroines. Maurice who becomes Chris in his version, struck down by all that he has lost, is left curled up on a bench and crying out to God with the snow falling all around him, inviting certain death in the freezing conditions.

Thinking about all four of these films and how closely they seem related [the end shot of Jasmine made me think of both Renoir’s and Lang’s films] I am struck by how so much value and stress is laid [intentionally or not] on the last shot. On much we as an audience, are asked to accept or cry out against in indignation at the filmmaker’s vision. On how the endings in the best of films, whilst signposting a definite pathway, still, leave it up to audience to decide how the scene after, the one after the film finishes, would work out.

But surely the question must be asked, do we want realism or idealism at the end of our films? Do we want a Renoir vision, where the characters turn every situation to their advantage and potential happiness [and teaching a vital life lesson, I feel] or a more closed but truer vision that Lang, Allen and Leigh sometimes offer? It’s a question I often ask myself as a filmmaker- do I want to cure the world or show it how it is? Or can I do both?

Boki’s Superstar

you know how to find me

what is it

four years now

the  past


usually I’m minding my own business

walking in Brockwell

or swinging past Boki’s

you couldn’t be further from my mind


and then

a look, a glance

an angry acceleration

of the car


racing fast towards the latter years

a blast, a flash

past me

leaving me unutterrable


unutterable!

how did you find me, the past

when I thought I was in the present at least

walking past Boki’s?

I am a fool I thought

I should have known it works like this

holed up in my room

cold

because of the damp 

the landlord won’t sort out

short of breath also,

asthma

because of the damp

Channel 4 would have a field day

I think

stuffing earplugs down my ears

against the barrage from above

but I can’t think

of any of that

or that

I am running out of money

because they changed how we work at work

and didn’t tell us until they’d done it

now we are all worse off

but everyone can’t say anything

no, I can’t think of any of that

nor how the tax trouble me and steal my money

or how I might be a narcissist [Sam Vaknin]

or a depressive and need help 

I can’t think of that

because I found out whilst I was thinking all of that

you were but 5 minutes down the road

so close we could breath each other’s air

sit in the same seats

walk the same pavements

and I was so happy

in spite of all the pain, the anger

the thick thick thick pain

I was so happy when I thought you had been near

and that told me so much 

it told me so much and yet 

the next day

nothing

an empty space where the happiness was

where the relief was

because you make me feel relieved

and I should have known

I should have know that what keeps me warm

dies out, crumbles to dust

and is nothing but a cold fireplace in the morning

I look in my room

at the boarded up fireplace

it’s a metaphor for everything, isn’t it?

Turning right instead of left on Carver Road

at Nunhead you’re back

and the night’s a grey air 

so I tingle pink because you drive the same roads

walk the same paths

turning right on Carver Road

taking you past my house


but the next day

I’ve fallen under my exultation

it’s the Half moon in Pizza Express 

and sitting in the window

I can’t see your curtained eyes

you are like a man in a coma

there’s all this stuff I keep reading

mostly on twitter really

‘you must go through darkness to get to the light’

no we don’t

we are in eternal darkness

the only light is the light of accepting that