Monday 12 December 2011

The play's the thing...

The purpose of this blog was to record all the theatre-related things that I find myself involved in. So the reason I haven’t posted for almost a fortnight is slightly ironic: actually doing a play.

But that’s also been a reminder of the fact that trying to be a writer means much more than just ‘the work’. And perhaps theatre, more than any other literary form, is about process rather than product. Not only because a play script is on some levels a blueprint for performance; that it doesn’t become ‘theatre’ until rehearsals with actors and a director bring it to life. But also because it’s an intense and emotional social experience. Rather than being a means to an end, writing sometimes just feels like a way to live.

It’s exhausting though. The play (‘Through the Night’) went well. It was, as always, a learning experience. There’s nothing more exposing that putting your words into the mouths of actors – they won’t let you get away with a single inconsistency. And then you have to accept that the audience reaction is completely out of your hands. It’s nerve-racking, and a bit of me is glad to be back to some kind of normality today. But I’ve never been able to resist the addictive qualities of the theatre, and in no time I’ll be itching to get involved in the next project. Ultimately, I know that it’s only when I’m standing in a rehearsal room that I’m in my right space...

But there has been some other activity in the last few weeks, not least the end of my first MA playwriting course. That has been an incredibly enriching experience, and together we’ve interrogated some fascinating questions about the internal dramaturgy of plays, and how that can reflect or resist content. Our discussions about ‘London Road’ and ‘Jerusalem’ have been particularly interesting. The former explores the nature of community, marginalising, almost to the point of eradication, the ‘outsider’ figures – the prostitutes whose lives have been threatened, or taken, by the murderer Steve Wright. And ‘Jersualem’s two productions (in the West End and in the Occupy London encampments) have raised compelling questions about the radical (or otherwise) impulses in the storytelling.  In the last class of the semester, I also revisited a paper I wrote at the beginning of the year about presentations of ‘the apocalypse’ in modern drama. There, I argued that it is only the plays that break form with the aid of lyricism, metaphor and poetry that can hope to provide a truthful glimpse of such a catastrophic rupture.

I’ll also give a quick mention to another play which deals with a different sort of breakdown. ‘Haunted Child’ at The Royal Court is about a husband who announces one day that he’s found a new spiritual path, in the form of a bizarre, quasi-scientific cult. It’s a strange play, which seems to have left a lot of reviewers puzzled. Personally, I thought it was quite beautiful and moving. The way it presents a kind of mania as endlessly self-fulfilling was frightening, and the play addresses the nature of fundamentalist philosophies without losing the sense of a deeply personal tragedy for the family…

Tuesday 29 November 2011

Opera and muddle...

On Monday night, I had the more unusual experience of going to see a production of Verdi's opera La Traviata - and for all that some people dismiss opera for being overblown or melodramatic, what struck me was the simplicity and subtlety of the storytelling. A friend once told me that they loved drama because it was just about human beings getting themselves into a muddle. I was reminded of that when I realised that (in this interpretation at least) the opera lacked anyone obviously villainous. Instead, characters just make wrong choices (although right, at the time, from their own points of view). There’s a particularly moving scene between the heroine and her would-be father in law, in which he tries to dissuade her from marrying his son (her past as a courtesan is wrecking the family honour). There’s no malice in the interaction, just determined positions. But the fallout is as great as in any tragedy.

The opera is in four acts, and each one has an entirely different energy, which was beautifully reflected in the aesthetics of the design. I left the theatre with a strong sense of the ‘colour’ of each phrase of the storytelling, both figuratively and literally. It reminded me that ‘structure’ in writing is much more than just ‘narrative structure’. Indeed, perhaps the most important thing about a story is that we see it from all angles, as if it were a three dimensional object. So, we witness all the central characters interacting with each other, revealing different aspects of themselves in the fresh permutations. And we need to see those same characters in different ‘universes’ too, to deepen our sense of them by observing their choices in these contexts. This kind of structural ‘patterning’ allows a story to be pulled along by the slightest of ‘plots’, giving us space to concentrate on the richer elements of characterisation. Many of Harold Pinter’s plays seem to operate in this way. In The Caretaker, for example, there are three very simple acts. In the first, Aston brings a manipulative outsider (Davies) into the house, where he is also exposed to Aston’s vicious brother Mick. In Act 2, Davies is established as the 'caretaker' and enjoys a fragile acceptance. In the third act, Davies overplays his hand and is ejected. These three sections sit at dramatic right angles to each other. I wonder if their elegance would be undermined by the kind of Robert McKee style ‘plotting’ that seems to dominate contemporary approaches to dramatic writing?

On a completely separate note, I’m off to see Foxfinder at The Finborough tonight. It’s part of a festival of new writing that a play of mine is also appearing in. So apologies - the link below is really just a shameless plug…
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2011/production-papatango.php

Tuesday 22 November 2011

Blogs on Blogs


A friend of mine’s just a done a bit of research to discover some of the blogs/websites playwrights find most interesting or helpful.

So, in an example of the blogosphere eating itself, I thought it might be useful to quickly re-post here…

-Lyn Gardner’s Guardian blog:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog
-Chris Wilkinson's Noises Off column/twitter feed: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/series/noisesoff
-Aleks Sierz' blog: http://sierz.blogspot.com/
-BBC Writersroom: http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/
-Spread the Word (for Londoners): http://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/index.php
-Dan Rebellato’s website: www.danrebellato.co.uk
-Playwriting UK page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Playwriting-Network-UK/116625928420542
- the many theatre websites – especially new writing companies (Theatre503, The Bush, The Arcola, Soho, The Royal Court, etc…)

Friday 11 November 2011

From the West End to revolution...

In my MA playwriting class on Wednesday, we discussed Jez Butterworth’s play ‘Jerusalem’ and the extent to which it could, or couldn’t, be considered a radical text. As part of that conversation, we looked at the significance of the place of performance: although originally a Royal Court production, it’s now a sell-out West End hit. Although I’m a fan of the play, I asked why a story with such a subversive or marginalised central character should be so easily embraced by the mainstream (in a way that the residents of Dale Farm, for example, were not). Is there actually something conventional about the play - formally at least - that encourages us to engage with it from a position of safety? Is the character of Johnny Bryon romanticised; is there an element of voyeurism or ‘tourism’ at work? Such a debate has been made fascinatingly more complex, however, by the news that one of the Occupy the Stock Exchange protesters is now staging ad hoc readings at the foot of St. Paul’s. Here’s a link, via Jez Butterworth’s publishers, to ‘Bill’s’ incredible blog documenting these guerrilla performances:

http://nickhernbooksblog.com/2011/11/11/jerusalematstpauls/

Still on the West End, I also wanted to mention ‘One Man, Two Govnors’, which has recently returned to The Adephi. I wasn’t looking forward to this much, but it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable productions I’ve seen for ages – and perhaps the best farce I’ve ever seen. What impressed me in particular was the level of skill on display: the physicality, the comic timing, the improvisation, the music. Human beings love displays of virtuosity, and plays that embrace that can be a joy to watch. This thought also reminded of an old writing trick for building audience/reader empathy: if you want to make an audience like one of your characters, write the scene in which they do something they’re genuinely good at…

Monday 7 November 2011

To research or not to research...

A couple of links to start the week. First, an interview with Jez Butterworth about his play ‘Jerusalem’:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/video/2011/nov/02/jez-butterworth-jerusalem-video-interview?newsfeed=true

I was particularly interested in what he says here about how he researches (or doesn’t research) his work. I certainly agree that researching a play is very different to researching a piece of journalism. And maybe this thought links back (see my post of 28 September) to a difficulty I have with plays that try to ‘prove’ certain political or scientific theories. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s helpful, or even legitimate, for writers to set themselves up as ‘experts’. I’d argue that great writers reveal truth by exposing the cracks between people’s value systems, rather than by proposing solutions of their own.

Over the weekend, my friend Samantha Ellis also drew my attention to this article on the BBC’s Writers Room website (an invaluable resource if you don’t already know it). As the author himself says, he’s really just restating the old idea that to succeed you should ‘write what you know’. But he brings a fresh clarity to that idea here, with respect to the commissioning of his first TV drama ‘Death in Paradise’: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/2011/11/death_in_paradise_my_first_bro.shtml

And still with TV, here’s a final link to an E20 episode, written by a second year Westminster student. Really impressive as a first piece of TV scripting - precise storytelling and characters drawn with maximum economy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00l5ymk/EastEnders_E20_Series_3_Episode_15/

Monday 31 October 2011

Light and dark…

Just time to recommend a good Halloween film for anyone still trawling ‘best horror movies’ sites for inspiration. ‘The Village of the Damned’ was the one I plumped for (a little early) last night. It’s brilliantly grim and, with its opening scene of an entire community falling asleep at the same moment, it slightly reminded me of Mike Bartlett’s current play ‘13’ at The National Theatre. Anyway, I won’t spoil the story for anyone, suffice to say it’s a good antidote to anyone who thinks that children are the future.

Over the last few days, I’ve seen two other films worth recommending. ‘Midnight in Paris’ is the new Woody Allen movie, about a writer who finds himself transported back to the 1920s. It’s incredibly light, but also shows what you can do if you have the strength of your convictions. Just when you think the story’s backed itself into an impossible corner, it manages to raise things nicely to the next level. (Trying to make another link to ‘13’ here may be tenuous, but I had a sense whilst watching that production that it didn’t know quite how to do this. It has a similarly extraordinary premise, but ultimately retreats to safer territory, rather than fully expressing its potential.)

I also saw a screening of a fascinating new documentary ‘This is Not a Dream’ by Gavin Butt and Ben Walters as part of ‘Trashing Performance’ – a series of events looking at how artists and performers have explored the moving image. The film was at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, a great venue if you don’t already know it: http://www.timeout.com/london/clubs/venue/2:18800/bethnal-green-working-mens-club Amongst many of the revealing insights and bon mots provided by interviewees (including the likes of Dickie Beau and Scottee) was this, from American performance artist Vaginal Davis: ‘I prefer bad reviews. Especially the vitriolic ones. They really show that someone was paying attention.’ I’m not sure when this documentary will next be shown, but I’ll repost when I have more info…

Finally, a quick mention of April de Angelis’ new play ‘Jumpy’ at The Royal Court. Again, this felt very ‘light’, although there were lots of poignant moments. It’s a very enjoyable watch, and Tamsin Greig is great as the mother approaching 50, and meltdown, simultaneously. If you’ve seen it, though, it might be worth checking out Michael Billington’s Guardian review, which addresses the question of what sort of play a theatre should be producing... http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/20/jumpy-review

Thursday 27 October 2011

All in the detail...

Over the last few days, the discussions I’ve had about drama seem to have revolved around precise, or 'authentic', detail’. With my Making Plays class, for example, we were looking at Conor McPherson’s ‘Port Authority’. For me (not everyone agreed!) it’s a very moving, and funny, meditation on missed chances (mainly romantic), and there are moments when an incredibly specific image seems to sum up everything important about a character. At one point, for example, Dermot - a hapless alcoholic who’s been given the job of his life thanks to a case of mistaken identity - wakes up to find a strange woman in his bed. Bleary-eyed, he rings his wife and overhears his kids playing in the background. As his gaze wanders back to the girl lying naked on his bed, he wonders, ‘if this funny feeling of the carpet under my feet was a feeling of remorse’. The thought is so precise it’s almost obscure. And yet, in the context of the play, it feels completely real: fully-imagined, by the writer.

McPherson’s most famous play ‘The Weir’ is full of such moments: the table-tennis table that Valerie’s daughter is placed on; the sandwich that the barman makes for Jack after the wedding of his former girlfriend… But ‘Port Authority’ is also notable for the way it's set out on the page. Each unit of thought stands separate, almost like lines of verse. Initially it makes for a slightly jarring reading experience, but it also draws attention to the deliberate choice that each line represents. It almost gives the impression of dialogue chiselled precisely from a single block of text.

This importance of respecting and investing in every single line struck me particularly forcefully as I’m currently co-translating a play from Italian into English. This process is throwing up many fascinating challenges (how to preserve the Italian-ness of the original, how to recreate images, as well as rhythms and cadence…) but what is becoming increasingly apparent is the absolute necessity of engaging with the text on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I think that’s a process that becomes more and more natural for writers as they develop. But it’s also scarily easy to let you eye race over passages that you think are unproblematic. In fact I’ve come to realise that, when I find myself skim-reading my own work, it’s usually a sign that something’s wrong, but I’m just not prepared to deal with it yet…

Thursday 20 October 2011

Community and the city…

In my MA playwriting class last Wednesday we discussed Alecky Blythe’s extraordinary musical ‘London Road’, drawn from verbatim interviews with the Ipswich residents who neighboured the murderer Steve Wright in 2006. I argued that the play is remarkable in the way it explores the nature of ‘community’, and went on to suggest that this concept has a different meaning in urban and non-urban contexts: in the former, communities are often fractured, temporary and under perpetual threat; in the latter they are homogenising and dominant. This week I’ve seen three plays which seemed to develop, or deepen, that idea.

First up was Ben Musgrave’s fantastic new piece for Only Connect (‘His Teeth’), a theatre company dedicated to working with ex-offenders. Ironically, given the company’s name, the play provided a powerful critique of how the city can resist the formation of even the most basic human networks. In the story the main character, Eric Adegeye, arrives in London from Nigeria and is immediately pulled into a human trafficking ring. Out of a need for self-preservation, he becomes part of the infrastructure himself, compromising all attempts to find common ground with the people he is forced into a position of power over. A love affair with the girlfriend of the gang’s leader is also stillborn, crippled by her drug addiction and fear of discovery. The play presents an underground criminal ‘community’, constantly under the threat of attack from without and collapse from within. http://www.oclondon.org/histeeth

‘My City’ at The Almeida begins, as do so many London stories (‘His Teeth’ included) with a chance encounter - this time between a young man and the woman who used to teach him at primary school. The teacher, Mrs Lambert, has now become entirely nocturnal, wandering the streets collecting hidden stories and meeting, amongst others, the people who walk the tube tracks in the early hours, clearing litter before the day ahead. If these workers are to be thought of as one of London’s many micro-communities, they are also contingent, marginal, invisible… http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/mycity

‘13’ at The National presents another view of a decaying London, the rot from within expressed psychosomatically in the identical recurring nightmare of its inhabitants. In this play, connections are continually made and remade. The characters (rioters, politicians, visionaries, workers) are all linked by criss-crossing narrative threads, without ever coalescing into a permanent unity As one of the characters remarks, it takes almost nothing for a crowd to disperse and resolve itself back into a collection of individuals. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=66098

Finally, and on a different note, thanks to Peter for his comments and questions on my last post. Off the back of Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’, he asks about the presentation of the working class in drama. I’d love to throw that question open – so examples of working class drama and its possible stereotypes greatly appreciated! I’ll kick off, though, with a slightly side-stepping point about the means of theatrical production, which in recent history at least has been predominately middle class. That is to say, that the economics of theatre have favoured those with private means. Consider the culture of theatrical internships for example, often impossible to take advantage off without parental (or other) financial support. There is also a tendency for middle class gate-keepers and opinion-formers to self-identify in the construction of a ‘canon’, meaning that marginal or non-dominant voices are squeezed out.

The history of theatre in the late 60s /early 70s is particularly interesting from the point of view of class. 1968 is often taken to be a seminal year in the development of radical theatre practice and several critics have pointed to the existence of two dominant strands. On the one hand were university-educated provocateurs (David Hare, Howard Brenton…) who eventually graduated to establishment powerhouses like The Royal Court and the National Theatre – ‘fighting the fight from within’. On the other, were more ‘working class’ groups like Red Ladder and CAST which sought to grow their performances out of the direct experiences of individual communities. That work was then often produced in situ in working men’s clubs, pubs, village halls, and so on. (In fact, I find this analysis somewhat problematic. Nevertheless, it is the work of the former group that you will find on the bookshop shelves today.)

Anyway, apologies Peter that I haven’t quite addressed your questions here. But some further food for though (and argument) perhaps…

Monday 17 October 2011

Three films and a play...

Last week seemed to be all about films rather than plays. I saw three, and all of them might be considered unconventional in certain respects. But they also reminded me of a few important writing concepts.

The first was ‘Terraferma’ by the Italian director Emanuele Crialese. The tone of the film was slightly uneven, moving from quite a light coming-of-age story set in the Sicilian island of Linosa, to something altogether darker, following the desperate plight of illegal immigrants fleeing nearby North Africa. One of the most striking scenes was an underwater sequence in which a character swims through a mess of dropped/discarded clothes and personal effects (passports, official documents, etc.). It was one of those images that, through its very strangeness, has the power to re-engage you with the realities of other people’s lives. http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/films/cinema_europa/1821

The second film was ‘The Kids Are Alright’. It’s a touching and understated story, despite a deceptively ‘extreme’ set-up: the teenage children of a gay couple track down their shared sperm donor, only to watch on helpless as he starts an affair with one of their mothers. The story was a reminder that for a film to dramatise and speak to our everyday hopes and fears, it often needs to reach towards the limits of narrative possibility. Paradoxically, it’s precisely because this film is about lives more (apparently) extraordinary than most of ours, that it has such universal appeal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Are_All_Right_(film)

Finally, I saw Steve McQueen’s ‘Shame’ (like ‘Terraferma’, showing at the London Film Festival). It’s an extremely intense and upsetting film in many ways, but there’s one very funny (almost slapstick) scene: a date in a restaurant made excruciatingly awkward by an over-attentive waiter. It’s a great example of how identifying a ‘ritual’ that we all recognise and relate to can direct the writing of a dramatic scene. The ordering and mis-ordering of the food, the achingly slow pouring of the wine, the confusion over the evening’s specials… These provide all the action and dialogue McQueen needs, allowing him to concentrate on the development of subtext. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/04/shame-review-steve-mcqueen-venice

The week wasn’t completely without theatre, however. I also saw the revival of ‘Saved’ at the Lyric Hammersmith. Precise and unsettling, with echoes of Pinter, Orton and Osborne. Glances forward in time to Sarah Kane too. Anyone interested in the history of British theatre over the last fifty years or so should probably check it out: http://www.lyric.co.uk/whats-on/production/saved/

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Dystopian cities and Postmodern teapots…

Thanks to those of you who commented on my most recent post. Some really fascinating points about the use of backstory. Certainly, many plays revolve around characters dealing with the past in the present, and that creates powerful drama. I think I agree with Nick, though, that it can become problematic when backstory has a mainly explanatory, rather than dramatic, function.

Today I just wanted to mention the Postmodernism exhibition at the V&A which I visited over the weekend. Lots of great material – although you could be forgiven for thinking that the ‘movement’ was primarily concerned with designing teapots… http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/

What really stayed with me, however, were three films which had revealing things to say about the modern city. The first, by the Italian artist Robert Venturi, was of a car driving through night-time Las Vegas. Venturi used this to argue that the architecture of the strip was designed to be read ‘while the body is travelling at 35 miles per hour’. There’s a great deal of literary and critical work about how we (re)interpret cities through the act of walking them, so it was interesting to re-imagine this idea in the age of the motor car.

The second film was an extract from Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’. On loop was the opening sequence showing 2019 Los Angeles from above. Bursts of fire blast out above the cityscape, bathed in ‘post-nuclear’ blues and blacks. The design references fantasies of a dystopian future as well as the ruined cities of the past. Ruins have often been a preoccupation of visual artists (I’m looking forward to getting to the John Martin exhibition at the Tate Britain soon too…). It seems that we’re compelled to re-visit images of destruction as a means of expressing anxieties about the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaR5wVL9x2I

The exhibition closes with an excerpt from Godfrey Reggio’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ I’ve just finished a class with my MA students in which we discussed narratives of fracture and alienation in modern cities. This film, with its footage of a cityscape almost surgically dissected by accelerated, stop-motion traffic flows, provide a vivid visual reference point: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5a5u1_koyaanisqatsi_shortfilms

Friday 7 October 2011

Going backwards...

A few thoughts about the week, below, but first a couple of excellent tip-offs:

Ben in my MA Conflict and the City class has reminded me about ‘Decade’, a site-specific response to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. Theatre company Headlong and director Rupert Goold both have excellent form, and student tickets are still available until tomorrow, so check it out here: http://www.decadeheadlong.com/ Ben’s also drawn my attention back to a neat article from the guardian on how Charlie Kaufman wrote ‘Being John Malkovich’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/03/charlie-kaufman-how-to-write?INTCMP=SRCH And speaking of form-breaking narrative, Will in my first-year Writing the City class mentioned another film called, intriguingly, ‘John Dies at the End’: http://johndiesattheend.com/

Thursday also saw the beginning of the Creative Method module, which introduces students to many visiting writers over the course of two semesters. It kicked off with Francesca Beard, who’s going to be taking four sessions in which she explains her own writing practice. Having had the pleasure of hearing some of her amazing performance poetry piece ‘Chinese Whispers’ the other day, I’ve included a link to her website here: http://www.francescabeard.com/

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had this week was at my own writers group. (We’ve been meeting almost every Tuesday for eight or nine years now, with a core consisting of Samantha Ellis, Ben Musgrave, Nick Harrop and Robin Booth – all brilliant writers to watch out for...). We were talking about some of the difficulties involved in developing ‘backstory’ in plays. Of course, it’s incredibly important for writers to research their characters fully (see Monica’s interesting comment about this under my last-but-one post), but I think it can be problematic to explain characters by reference to too many events in their past. Drama is fundamentally about the present: it happens before an audience as if for the first time. The actions, interactions, dilemmas and choices we see before us are the ones on which we build our understanding of character. And when something dramatic has happened before the story of the play, I think that event needs to be easily ‘read’ by the audience. Swallowed in a single gulp, as it were, and digested effortlessly. So, Hamlet’s father has recently died in unexplained circumstances. Nora (in ‘A Doll’s House’) has told a lie to her husband. Christian (in the film/play ‘Festen’) has been sexually abused by his father… It may be something of a paradox, but backstory which is too diffuse, even if psychologically ‘accurate’ often fails to convince. Perhaps that’s because we can only ever hear about it, and we tend to resist information that we can’t see and scrutinise for ourselves. This debate arose out of a discussion on comedy writing, and here more than anywhere complex backstory has the potential to muddy the waters. In the present-tense action, we intuit all sorts of things about particular characters. We can all imagine what David Brent’s childhood was like, but we don’t have to know about some devastating formative experience in order to fully understand him.

I was thinking about this again on Wednesday evening when I went to see ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ at The Old Vic. It’s a strange play - particularly in the second half when it develops from fairly broad comedy into something almost absurdist in register. The set-up, too, is disarming. A young man rocks up to pub on the west coast of Ireland claiming to have murdered his father, and becomes an instant celebrity. What’s extraordinary (and very funny) is that no-one seems to question his bravery and heroism. Even the older men in the pub, who may well be fathers themselves, completely accept it. There’s a lovely sense in which everything that is important in the play begins when it begins. We don’t need to know anything about the word of the story, except what the story shows us.

Tuesday 4 October 2011

Short plays, and being afraid...

Just wanted to post some incredibly useful information a friend of mine sent through the other day. It’s a list of venues/theatres that produce short plays – usually as part of new-writing evenings. Fantastic for up and coming playwrights in particular…

· http://www.theatre503.com/writers/events-and-projects/
· www.barebonesnights.com
·
www.firstdraft.org.uk/
· http://www.thelovebitesplays.com/page2.htm
· http://www.stratfordeast.com/whats_on/Central%20lines2.shtml
· http://www.redliontheatres.co.uk/redfest-2012.htm
· http://www.theoffcutfestival.com/
· http://www.drywrite.com/welcome.php
· http://www.arcolatheatre.com/?action=showtemplate&sid=451
· http://bushgreen.org/web/guest/create_account
· http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/article/2726/hackney-wicks-the-yard
· www.tinydogproductions.com

And also a great tip off from one of my MA students about the following play at The Kings Head in Islington. It’s a production of Stephen Berkoff’s play Kvetch (all about notions of fear), on until 4 November. (The website makes it look pretty appealing…) https://kingsheadtheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/126517786/events

Sunday 2 October 2011

London in the sun…

A final post to round off the week.

First, a few links to some interesting London-related projects. These suggestions came out of a chat with Rachel Lichtenstein, who was at the University to start her mentoring of three final-year students. For those of you who don’t know her work, here’s a good link, which refers both to her back-catalogue and current practice, and also introduces the arts lab Metal: http://www.metalculture.com/about-metal/

I’m a particular fan of Rachel’s book ‘Rodinsky’s Room’ - an extraordinary mix of memoir, history and detective story with chapter interventions by Iain Sinclair adding an almost visionary twist. Recently, she’s also been asked to contribute to a new collection ‘London Fictions’, which is all about contemporary writers commenting and critiquing some of the great London novels. Here’s the website to that project: http://www.londonfictions.com/ And here’s a link to Artangel, which for twenty years has worked with experimental contemporary artists, often creating site-specific works designed to engage the audience in immersive experiences: http://www.artangel.org.uk/

The question of ‘the audience’ also cropped up in my second Making Plays class. Although I missed it myself, there was an interesting show at The Edinburgh Festival this year going by that name. This next article talks about the provocative ways it confronted its spectators. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/theatreblog/2011/aug/10/audience-ontroerend-goed-witchhunt-aisles We also talked a bit about Peter Handke, whose plays ‘Offending the Audience’ and ‘The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other’ interrogate the boundaries between spectator, voyeur and performer.

In my third-year tutorials on Friday, our discussion moved to the relationship between a character and their value systems. A common characteristic of classical storytelling is a protagonist who attempts to honour a particular value at all costs (the pursuit of power or love, self preservation / revenge / freedom). The story’s movement in the direction of tragedy or comedy turns on whether a destructive value system can finally be rejected, or a positive one maintained to the end. An extraordinary example of a value system bringing a character down is Ibsen’s play ‘Brand’, about a young idealist who refuses to compromise in his dedication to religion, even when the consequences of doing so prove disastrous to him and those he loves. It’s a play that left it’s mark on me in a very strong way, and has probably influenced many of my own feelings about the construction of dramatic writing.

Enough blogging, I think - time to enjoy some sunshine!

Wednesday 28 September 2011

Conflict, cabaret and the end of the world…


It’s only Wednesday, but already it feels like an incredible amount has happened. This afternoon was the first MA class for Conflict in the City. Great to meet students with such amazingly different life experiences - three who have lived in Saudi Arabia, others from the Lebanon and India and other places besides. And out of our discussions on theatre’s relationship to the city came some excellent suggestions for events I could share here. In particular, the platform discussions at The National Theatre with writers like Mike Bartlett, whose city-themed play 13 opens soon: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/1355/platforms/all-forthcoming-platforms.html

And this is another link to the Review Show’s segment on Stephen Poliakoff’s new play My City (28min 30sec in): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0153n2z Not hugely positive it must be said – so probably best to watch after seeing the play if you’re going.

In my Making Plays class on Monday, I also gave my students an off-the-top-of-my-head list of some major new-writing theatres, which I thought might be worth copying here. It’s very selective – and London-centric. They’re just the places I tend to visit most (do let me know which ones I must add!). But for starters: The Bush, Theatre503, The Finborough, The Gate, The Arcola, The Southwark Playhouse, The Kings Head, Hampstead Theatre, The Battersea Arts Centre, The National Theatre and The Royal Court. There are also many companies-at-large who produce new work across the country. Paines Plough, Shunt, Punch Drunk, HighTide and Kneehigh are just some of the best known. I’m also going to add a company that it turns out one of my new first-year students, Anna Beecher, has run for the last few years: Fat Content (check them out here: http://fatcontent.org/). They have a particular interest in cabaret, which reminded me about The Soho Theatre’s new downstairs cabaret studio. (If you’re interested in the wider scene, by the way, Ben Walters - TimeOut’s cabaret editor - is the go-to guy: http://www.timeout.com/london/cabaret/article/1934/cabaret-a-beginners-guide-to-the-london-scene).
One other topic kept resurfacing this week: the question of the presentation of science in drama. How do we research it, and what are our responsibilities as writers? My feeling (and I’ve had plenty of arguments about this in the past) is that it’s a mistake for writers to try to turn themselves into, or present themselves as, ‘experts’. Recently there have been many important plays dealing with climate change (Greenland, The Heretic, The Contingency Plan are just three). But the dilemma for me is to what extent, or on what level, the writer can contribute to the debate and cast new light on the problem. Is it legitimate for a play to try and ‘teach’ an audience science? Writers spend their careers learning how to persuade with words. But what’s the guarantee that they really understand an issue in all its nuance and complexity, even after months of research? I often feel that the writers who embrace poetry, lyricism and metaphor succeed in a way that those who try to display their research and promote new solutions don’t. Although it’s not explicitly about environmental issues, The Drowned World (by Gary Owen) is a play which deals with politics and society in the aftermath of another kind of apocalyptic event or transformation. I think it’s a beautiful treatment of such a shattering possibility, which finds a muscular dramatic language to express its ideas…
On a completely different note, I’ve just got back from The Veil at the National Theatre. It’s going to take me a little while to work out what I thought, though…
(And finally, thanks to those who have commented, online or off, about the idea for this blog.)

Monday 26 September 2011

‘Felt-likes’, revolving doors… and other ideas I've pinched from someone else

This is slightly nerve-wracking. A first blog post. My first blog post. Years behind the curve…

So why have I started?

For about eight years, I’ve taught creative writing at the University of Westminster. And for the last five, I’ve worked with students moving from their first to final years across a whole degree. In that time, I’ve had the privilege of engaging with their work – which has often been brilliant, funny, inspiring and surprising – and also with a huge number of visiting writers, for whom exactly the same can be said. But I’ve never made any record of it. I’ve allowed these interactions to happen in the present tense – which has been exhilarating. But this summer I realised I wanted to have something to look back on...

That isn’t the only reason. I also want to write something ‘live’. Active. Something that people, if they want, can follow and respond to, and which tries to give some shape to the collective experience of a creative writing degree. More personally, I want to think about what it means for me, as a playwright myself, to teach what I do. How it feeds back into my own practice. How it inspires it. Blocks it sometimes. Frees it at others.

These are the sorts of things I hope to include:

- a sense of how the weeks play out. Today is day 1, week 1, of the autumn term, 2011. For some students, it’s the first day of their degree. For others, it’s the beginning of their final year. I hope for both these groups – and the one stuck in between - some of what ends up posted here may actually be quite useful

- the chance to share some of my experiences. Plays and books I love (and don’t love). The work I’m engaged in myself. Challenges, problems and breakthroughs

- a record of the conversations I have with the writers (old-hands and brand-news) that pass through the same doors as me everyday.


With the first of these points in mind, here, literally, is what this week means for me: it’s the week I start teaching two groups of second years for my playwriting course ‘Making Plays’; it’s the week I’ll be teaching two ‘Writing the City’ classes - a course looking at London as a place of literary inspiration and production; it’s the week I teach my first MA playwriting class, ‘Conflict and the City’; it’s the week I (re)meet the six third-years I’ll be tutoring for final year playwriting projects. And then there’s all the other theatre/writing-related stuff that fits in around it all, which I’ll try and cover as I go along…

In the spirit of sharing experiences, I’ll kick off by just mentioning two plays I saw this weekend: The God of Soho at The Globe and The Wild Bride at the Lyric. Both exuberant, funny, full of panache. The first had some unfair reviews, I think. There was something delightful and anarchic about it, even if the script has the sort of structure dramaturgs get very exercised by. Something iffy too, about the structure of the The Wild Bride - but otherwise the macabre mix of bluegrass and torture worked just fine for me... Unfortunately, The Wild Bride finished on Saturday - but I'd really recommend going to the next Kneehigh show, whatever it is (here's their website: http://www.kneehigh.co.uk/ ). There’s one more chance for The God of Soho (this Friday), and the director Raz Shaw is worth watching out for...

I'll sign off with a couple of ideas that have stayed with me from the last week - when the corridors filled with students as if a damn had suddenly burst nearby. On Wednesday, I met forty of them with my colleague Nick Johnstone and we talked about the differences between literal and artistic truth. Nick also introduced the concept of ‘felt-likes’: a phrase his daughter uses to describe what the rest of us would probably just call fibs. Only, for her, ‘felt-likes’ aren’t untrue at all. They’re just a much more interesting way of expressing the world as she understands it. (If you want more context to this discussion, check out this article about James Frey’s controversial ‘memoir’A Million Little Pieces: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/sep/15/usa.world)

Finally, Nick had another nice metaphor that I wanted to remember/poach. He described writing over a lifetime as like spinning around in a revolving door. With the hope that, if you’re lucky, you might be flung out the other side a very slightly better person.

Ok, enough for now. Off to the first class of the new year...