tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44010076960215329452024-03-05T10:05:28.902+00:00Matt MorrisonA creative writing diaryMatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-6269354688736587982020-07-25T11:08:00.005+01:002020-07-25T11:21:00.104+01:00My new play, Dance, streaming now.<p style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><font face="times">Cross-posted from <a href="http://www.dancetheplay.co.uk">www.dancetheplay.co.uk</a></font></p><p style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><font face="times">*Spoiler Alert* (Don’t read before watching!)</font></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW3LSHaZ1zeR-Wn-NNf0ENkKvP-S8TD9W2FMtVch4Cz0bU81fr4jQ72rVp6d-qu4m_FgOqtxk-fKX_jYXJN9LGnTNTcGqVRda3UplXXbCbGNwHwgm3zfEGzZ_wjCj7-EU6Pj02wLsj3ls/s2048/Dance+Clean.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW3LSHaZ1zeR-Wn-NNf0ENkKvP-S8TD9W2FMtVch4Cz0bU81fr4jQ72rVp6d-qu4m_FgOqtxk-fKX_jYXJN9LGnTNTcGqVRda3UplXXbCbGNwHwgm3zfEGzZ_wjCj7-EU6Pj02wLsj3ls/w320-h320/Dance+Clean.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 1rem 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><font face="times">The Soho Poly was famous in the 1970s and 80s for lunchtime theatre, and its writers quickly had to adapt their style for short plays that people watched as they ate their lunch. Some playwrights, like Snoo Wilson and John Grillo, developed very visual, cartoon-like plays, designed to grab and hold an audience’s attention. But monologues were also popular, since tiny ‘fringe’ spaces like the Soho Poly encouraged intimacy between performers and audience. It’s not surprising that monologues have become popular again during lockdown. They’re the form least affected by social distancing and meet people’s need for closeness and companionship. But I also think it’s interesting that, just as writers, directors and actors were responding to the constraints of physical space in the 1970s, today they are responding to the limitations and opportunities of platforms like Youtube and Zoom. Dance was written before the lockdown, but maybe feels <em style="word-wrap: break-word;">more </em>suited to these new virtual spaces.</font></p><p data-rte-preserve-empty="true" style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 1rem 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"></p><p style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 1rem 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><font face="times">As for the play itself, Dance came about after I read an article about an Adele concert where a member of the audience was called out by the singer for filming. You can see the clip <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/video/2016/may/31/adele-calls-out-fan-during-concert-stop-filming-me-video" target="_blank">here</a>. </font></p><p data-rte-preserve-empty="true" style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 1rem 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"></p><p style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 1rem 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><font face="times">Concerts have always been very important to me (I realise I’ve given that exact line to Richard in the play) and when I read this story I had a visceral reaction to it. I know what it means to see a band or singer you love, and how much you want to feel included in the experience. The thought of being humiliated in front of thousands of people by someone that you’ve invested so much in made me freeze. In a way, Dance is the story of that person at that gig.</font></p><p data-rte-preserve-empty="true" style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 1rem 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"></p><p style="font-family: omnes-pro; font-size: 17.600000381469727px; margin: 1rem 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><br /></p>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-85799583433287446092020-01-06T14:50:00.003+00:002020-01-06T16:06:39.117+00:00Soho Poly update<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For the last few years, my colleague Guy Osborn and I have been spearheading a project to revive the Soho Poly Theatre, one of the most important post-war alternative theatre venues. The link <a href="https://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/groups-and-centres/centre-for-law-society-and-popular-culture/projects/disrupting-the-everyday/the-soho-poly-project">here </a>gives much more detail.<br />
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As part of this project, we have run several pop-up festivals and events in the space, often with the generous support of the <a href="https://beinghumanfestival.org/">Being Human Festival</a>. We have also been developing an artistic policy based on the value of disrupting our everyday lives with the arts.<br />
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Recent events have included:<br />
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<a href="https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/climate-crisis-action-and-the-arts/">Climate Change: Action and the Arts</a><br />
<a href="https://www.westminster.ac.uk/events/martin-stephenson-in-concert-part-of-digging-deeper-at-the-soho-poly">Martin Stephenson in Concert</a><br />
<a href="https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/art-music-memory-at-the-soho-poly-zine-workshop/">Art Music and Memory: Zine Workshop</a><br />
<a href="https://www.westminster.ac.uk/events/pop-and-politics-part-of-digging-deeper-at-the-soho-poly">Pop and Politics: Alex Hancock in concert</a><br />
<a href="https://www.westminster.ac.uk/events/the-soho-theatre-at-50">The Soho Theatre at 50: One Autumn Evening</a><br />
<a href="https://beinghumanfestival.org/university-westminsters-found-theatre-poetry-disrupting-everyday/">Found Theatre and Poetry: Disrupting the Everyday</a><br />
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As this project develops, there will be much more information available, so watch this space! You can also follow us on Twitter at <span style="color: blue;"><b>@thesohopoly</b></span><br />
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Some other links below:<br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span><a href="https://londonist.com/london/things-to-do/being-human-festival"><span style="font-family: inherit;">https://londonist.com/london/things-to-do/being-human-festival</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/the-soho-poly-theatre-festival">http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/the-soho-poly-theatre-festival</a></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.whatsonstage.com/west-end-theatre/news/06-2012/bargain-basement-re-visited_3755.html">http://www.whatsonstage.com/west-end-theatre/news/06-2012/bargain-basement-re-visited_3755.html</a></span><br />
<a href="http://sohopolyfestival.blogspot.co.uk/">http://sohopolyfestival.blogspot.co.uk/</a><br />
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Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-62342539149252566472016-10-10T15:46:00.001+01:002016-10-10T16:05:10.014+01:00True 'enough'<div class="MsoNormal">
Last week, I began co-teaching one of our creative writing
courses with the playwright Ben Musgrave. And when Ben asked the class to write
down something they believed in ‘as a writer’, I thought I’d take part in the
exercise too. At first I was slightly surprised by what I wrote: ‘your writing
needs to be true <i>enough’</i>. But as we started talking about our
different answers, I realised I’d been thinking through versions of Ben’s
question for a very long time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The search for ‘authenticity’ and’ truth’ is a preoccupation
for many writers. And at the same time, we’re often given advice like ‘write
what you know’ – as if that will automatically confer some kind of truthfulness
on our work. But writers are always champing at the bit to write what
they <i>don’t </i>know, just as readers want to read what is new and
unfamiliar. (Which reminds me of something similar I once heard a theatre
director say: that an audience most wants an authentic voice from a world
they’ve never been to.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Writers quickly understand, therefore, that truth and
truthfulness are very slippery ideas. What will happen to them both as our
imaginations take flight, as characters drawn from our own experience develop
lives of their own? And perhaps more worryingly, how can you be sure
that your work speaks to your own wider sense of truth? Your feelings about the
way the world is, or ought to be. Not all writers are motivated by such ‘moral’
concerns, but many of us worry about the ‘meaning’ of our work, and how
that meaning translates onto our own values, our own beliefs about what is
true.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The problem for me is that I always find
it impossible to quite pinpoint meaning – at least, not without reducing
what I’m writing to a banal platitude, or trivially obvious statement. It’s
also impossible to ever say, once and for all, what I believe about
something. Instead, I find myself constantly testing the things I feel most
certain about, unable to avoid the possibility that I’m wrong, that things
aren’t really that way at all. In other words, I never know what the whole
truth is about what I’m writing, or about my own values, or what I think might
need to change about the world.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Which is where true <i>enough</i> comes in – a
strategy, maybe, to stop me becoming frozen in the headlights, confused and
intimidated by the difficulty in achieving complete truthfulness or authenticity.
I find that I can continue to have faith in something I’m working on as long as
there is at least <i>some </i>truth – <i>some</i> moments
of recognition, <i>some</i> details from my own life and experience
which I feel, for now, I can stand by. Perhaps, for me, truth is like a single
drop of dye in a pipette, with the power to colour an entire cup of water.<o:p></o:p></div>
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All this is why, when another writer comes to me and says
that they are stuck with their idea – when they’ve lost interest, or belief in
it – I suggest that they give the story, or one of its characters, a little bit
of themselves. To hand over a detail from their own life. Because usually that
tiny injection of the author’s real, lived experience is enough to re-vitalise
the story, and rekindle the writer’s passion for telling it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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(cross-posted at <a href="http://writewestminster.wordpress.com/">writewestminster.wordpress.com</a>)<br />
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Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-46352242790399166522014-10-28T17:22:00.001+00:002014-10-28T17:33:54.891+00:00London Revolution<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5TyAiVEyt9itqd1Y4PyT07xB1eCap7Civ63uuFjFNGA6iSDJR-0-QjjOhfgVg4y0RdWovBSQGye-g5TLJ147rgcKFNho6g1JkFNq6vE11lfS8RmITq9Fd5ez9K1uBGYYqOBdja0njLps/s640/blogger-image-2061186858.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5TyAiVEyt9itqd1Y4PyT07xB1eCap7Civ63uuFjFNGA6iSDJR-0-QjjOhfgVg4y0RdWovBSQGye-g5TLJ147rgcKFNho6g1JkFNq6vE11lfS8RmITq9Fd5ez9K1uBGYYqOBdja0njLps/s640/blogger-image-2061186858.jpg"></a></div></div><br></div><div>In my MA playwriting class at Westminster a couple of years ago, I looked at Alecky Blythe's play 'London Road'. Writing in this blog, I argued that the play was fascinating for the ways in which its troubling critique of 'community' was underpinned by specific dramaturgical choices. This week I've been reading another verbatim piece, also by Blythe, about the London riots. Again, the play demonstrates a striking interaction between form and content.</div><div><br></div><div>In its simplest terms, 'Little Revolution' is constructed out of the testimony of those directly affected by the events of summer, 2011. Issues of class are at the forefront, as rival support groups are set up by the more well-healed Clapton Square Users Group and the residents of the Pembury estate. What is most interesting about the play, however, is the way in which Blythe inserts herself into the action. Rather than being an invisible witness, she becomes one of the voices - a part of the story she is telling. It's a dramaturgical intervention that allows the play to be deeply insightful about the nature of the riots themselves - too often analysed for a 'meaning' independent of the commentary surrounding them.</div><div><br></div><div>The significance of 'bearing witness' is alluded to throughout the play. And certainly, acts of 'seeing' and 'being seen' were integral to the riots. As a local councillor notes at one point, '[...] that'll be exactly the way the riots were actually. / About twenty people actually doing it and everybody else watching'. There is also a powerful tension in the play between the performative nature of 'reclaiming' the streets, and the desire to avoid detection. Blythe herself has a hair-raising experience with one looter whom she has accidentally photographed. He demands that she delete the picture or surrender her phone. And then, of course, there's the way in which CCTV, media images, and records of mobile phone messaging helped to secure the convictions of those who were (often very minimally) involved. In other words, witnesses to, and recorders of, the riots were part of the fabric of the events themselves. The point is made explicit at another moment in the play when Blythe finds herself present at a stop and search. Another onlooker remarks '[...] if you wasn't there or we wasn't there they [the police] woulda handled him shabbier.' The act of observing things changes the nature of what is being observed.</div><div><br></div><div>Similarly, the act of storytelling is never neutral. There is another powerful scene in the play in which shopkeeper Siva, a victim of the looting, is asked to appear on This Morning. He expresses his anxiety as follows: 'Everybody ask the same question, "Do you think local people done it?"// I'm going to serve them again. What can I say?'. The story Siva will tell on live television will reflect complex circumstances.</div><div><br></div><div>Blythe's decision to include herself in the play - as a self-appointed chronicler - therefore becomes the means by which we better understand the events themselves. By drawing attention to the integral importance of acts of witnessing and being witnessed, of both being and telling the story, her play undermines any reductive attempt to analyse the riots as a discrete phenomenon. Throughout the play, many people express their opinions about what actually happened and why. It would be a mistake to think that any of these views are right or wrong - closer to, or further away from, some idea of objective truth. These conflicting voices - these conflicting stories - are part of this 'truth'. The tales told about the London riots cannot be divorced from the things they describe. That, at least, is the provocative argument Blythe's dramaturgical choices offer up.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-23395238525983709852013-03-06T17:43:00.000+00:002013-03-06T17:46:28.596+00:00Ghost Writing...<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Having
recently seen The Turn of the Screw at The Almeida, I've been thinking about
ghosts on stage, and also about literary adaptations. Both these things seem
quite problematic to me, although I've always wanted to write a ghost story for
the theatre, and I quite like the idea of adapting a novel.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Probably
the most famous stage ghost is Hamlet's father, and I'm always fascinated to
see how productions handle the battlement scenes. There's one very simple
reason why they're so compelling (as well, probably, as lots of complicated
ones): the ghost has an agenda, which is as concrete as any living character in
the play. When a play's action is grounded in the mechanisms of cause and
effect such agendas are pretty essential. After all, most forms of 'realism'
depend on a clear relationship between actions and their predicted
outcomes. But the 'ghosts' in The Turn of the Screw are quite different. In
fact, they may well be pursuing particular devilish aims, but we can never be
sure because of the persistent implication that they are figments of the
governess' imagination. That isn't a problem in the novella - it's the heart of
the story - but on stage...</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The
distinction between subjective narrative unreliability in prose and dramatic
objectivity in realist forms of theatre has quite profound consequences.
Indeed, I think it's possible to argue that characters in such plays have no
'meaningful' psychological reality beyond that which is expressed in action. Or
to put it another way, there's no point telling me what a character 'really'
feels or is 'really' thinking if I never get to understand that myself from
what I see in front of me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The
attempt to sustain a purely subjective experience, therefore, seems to me to be
beyond the reach of theatrical 'realism'. (I'm just using 'realism' as a short
cut here - to pick out stories where the logic of the 'storyworld' can be
learned and followed by the reader/audience, even if initially strange.) Yes,
we can watch a stage character who sees things in a way we know to be skewed.
But only if we can also recognise the reliable reality against which their
actions and perceptions can be measured.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Hopping
to the issue of adaptation, Salman Rushdie has some interesting things to
say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He writes about the need to
preserve a work's essential qualities when moving between art forms. If the
governess' subjectivity is one of The Turn of the Screw's essential qualities (somewhat complicated by the novella's frame narrative, perhaps) then the question
becomes: how can that be preserved in translation? I think 'realist' dramatic
forms run into a problem here: the unreliability of her subjective viewpoint
can only be preserved if we see the governess juxtaposed with an outside world
that throws her beliefs and conclusions into question (for us, the audience).
In other words, in order to preserve the subjectivity inherent in (essential
to) the novella, we have to introduce an externality that is lacking from the
novella. I'm not sure such a contradiction is sustainable. And I wonder if the
playwright who wants to explore only the 'locked in' world of a character's
subjective viewpoint has to dramatise that through a different, non-realist,
dramatic form. I also think it explains why the recent production left me a bit
cold. It functioned absolutely fine as a B-movie style chiller. But it lost
the essence of the original without finding a true theatrical core to replace
it.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">(BTW, the photo is a still from The Innocents (1961). How film handles such adaptations is, no doubt, an entirely different question...)</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-68881272503254118902012-11-12T10:04:00.000+00:002012-11-12T10:04:29.180+00:00Shakespeare in 3D...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY_Y-NDgM-lF2mhThcxBvve_CDJsUDVEMqva1DjjAiyAM1chL4YXZssfXqGrj4OyOi9sNUyBVtOsUp3A9H5kxcEjmdjx7LsmsXQrwPWw1OtlogNy6X2AMWLFPkB9Dd0mDagmmCueQdgGw/s1600/shakespeare's+handwriting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY_Y-NDgM-lF2mhThcxBvve_CDJsUDVEMqva1DjjAiyAM1chL4YXZssfXqGrj4OyOi9sNUyBVtOsUp3A9H5kxcEjmdjx7LsmsXQrwPWw1OtlogNy6X2AMWLFPkB9Dd0mDagmmCueQdgGw/s200/shakespeare's+handwriting.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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Last week I finally made it to the ‘Staging the World’ exhibition
at the British Museum. It’s only got another week to go, by the way, and it's
well worth it: <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/shakespeare_staging_the_world.aspx">http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/shakespeare_staging_the_world.aspx</a></div>
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The exhibition is mainly dedicated to artefacts from the
period in which Shakespeare was writing. There is one of the very few surviving
examples of his handwriting, as well as copies of the First Folio. (There’s
also the modern collected edition smuggled onto Robben Island by anti-apartheid
campaigners. It’s incredibly moving to see Nelson Mandela’s signature scrawled
beside a passage on the nature of tyranny from ‘Julius Caesar’.) And then there
are the maps - extraordinarily detailed visual descriptions of London (and
Venice), drawn by hand or printed in intricate details from wood blocks. There are items of
clothing from the time, paintings, swords and daggers, old clocks… And in all
of it, an overwhelming sense of ‘making’ – a physical engagement with the
materials of the time.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It’s often said that Shakespeare’s plays are all about the
ear (you went to ‘hear’ a play, etc.). But what struck me was the sheer ‘materiality’
of theatre, and how this is one of its essential qualities. The magic of prose
and poetry seems to derive from its ability to translate marks on the page into
images and thought. Fine art is about texture, and creates the illusion of three-dimensionality.
You can look all the way around a sculpture, but sculptures rarely move and
speak. Film is all about the eye. Theatre is sometimes described as a metaphorical
medium, but there is something literal about it too. Through costume, set,
light and shade and the sheer fact of the actors’ presence, theatre speaks to
our world in the physical language of our world.</div>
Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-11447900523618572212012-11-01T12:40:00.002+00:002012-11-01T14:13:21.808+00:00Escaping the city…<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCgiRh4SsX7pRYEi10ZhyCWhSALhVfeGxiGH0Qjws95qHMnn83sx0LBSEX6Pq7j_mtxVer5HalWl8pStPpgOB3Ejlm9kkxJJZnPBWhht45xH3eVf4CFptKog-h_1V2uyysZIjN9ARNeyY/s1600/cranes+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCgiRh4SsX7pRYEi10ZhyCWhSALhVfeGxiGH0Qjws95qHMnn83sx0LBSEX6Pq7j_mtxVer5HalWl8pStPpgOB3Ejlm9kkxJJZnPBWhht45xH3eVf4CFptKog-h_1V2uyysZIjN9ARNeyY/s320/cranes+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
As well as Martin Crimp’s ‘The City’, I spent some time
last week discussing ‘How Love is Spelt’ by Chloe Moss and ‘Eigengrau’ by
Penelope Skinner. In different ways, these also use the urban space as a
metaphor for constructing identity.<br />
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<br /></div>
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In ‘How Love is Spelt’ the central character, Peta, carries
her building materials in from the outside world. Scene by scene she adopts attitudes
and value systems as easily as the cardigan left by one of the strangers she
invites to her bedsit. Then, when Colin – the lover she has run to the city to
escape – finally arrives to take her home, she describes her discovery of a strange,
almost fantastical, building near Crystal Palace. But attempting to locate it for
a second time - with the hope of being able to tell Colin about it - she finds
it has been completely demolished. Acts of construction and de-construction
frame the play.</div>
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<br /></div>
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On the other hand, ‘Eigengrau’ is fascinating in the way it
deals with the idea of ‘contingency’ in the city. Characters meet by accident
and make fast, almost arbitrary, commitments to living spaces, friendships and
ideologies. At the same time, a chorus of ‘voices’ manifests the city in broken
extracts from Gumtree adverts. There is a sense that settled relationships are impossible
– or, at least, under permanent existential threat - in an environment where
movement, speed, conflict and coincidence are essential qualities. (‘Closer’ by
Patrick Marber is probably the most famous play of recent years to explore this
territory. Here, characters are pulled together momentarily by the ethereal
figure of Alice, a binding agent or catalyst, whose reality is finally questioned
by the play's mysterious resolution.) At the end of ‘Eigengrau’ two of the characters,
Tim and Rose, form an ambiguous alliance – a happy ending, of sorts.
But having created such a unit, it’s as if the metaphysics of the city can no
longer accommodate them. They leave to live in Eastbourne.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
By way of contrast, over the weekend I watched ‘The
Village at the End of the World’, a documentary about a community of 59 people living
in a remote corner of North East Greenland. One of the central characters is a
teenager called Lars, whose aspirations and worldview are at odds with the ways
of life surrounding him. Finally he leaves his home for one of the larger towns
further south. This film seemed to re-enforce a key distinction between urban
and non-urban stories. In the former, characters must confront contingency and continual
restlessness. Peace can only be found beyond the city’s limits. In the latter,
the act of leaving dramatises a contrasting desire for rebirth, free expression and change.</div>
Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-17160264171789407802012-10-16T09:54:00.002+01:002012-10-16T09:54:20.847+01:00Losing the plot...
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
For my MA playwriting class, I’ve just read Martin
Crimp’s ‘The City’. The play opens with a woman, Clair, describing to her
husband a meeting with a writer, Mohamed, at a railway station – one of those
transitional spaces that feature so often in urban stories. Mohamed has nipped
into a shop to buy his daughter a diary before she leaves to live with his
sister-in-law, but it takes too long and he misses his last goodbye. Instead,
he gives the diary to Clair.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Later in the play Clair meets Mohamed again at a
conference. Arriving at her bedroom door, he reveals that his daughter has been
killed. In a scene also loaded with sexual possibility, he confesses his guilt
at having prioritised writing over parenthood whilst she was alive. More shockingly,
he reveals how he now feels liberated by her death. Not only will he have more
time to write, but he’ll also have new material: ‘My child, you see, is like a
log thrown into the fire, making the fire burn… more brightly.’ </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Clair’s appalled reaction is an emotion we can relate to
immediately, in a play where empathy and understanding are otherwise just
beyond our grasp. But at the end of the play we discover that Mohamed is
entirely a product of Clair’s own writer’s imagination – a fact she records,
disorientatingly, in the very diary Mohamed is supposed to have given her. Her
husband Chris is moved to ask if he, too, is merely a fiction. In fact, the
danger is even greater. These self-referential slights of hand imply that the
whole story has been created out of nothing. ‘The City’ becomes a kind of
anti-story, existing and not existing at the same time. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
It also reminded me of Martin McDonagh’s brilliant ‘The
Pillowman’ – a surreal satire on the crossover between writing and
totalitarianism. McDonagh’s play builds around an extraordinary set-piece
fairytale featuring a creature (the Pillowman of the title) who travels back in
time to convince children destined for suffering to kill themselves before
their personal tragedies can unfold. So traumatic is this job, that eventually
the Pillowman can’t bear it any longer. Returning to his own childhood, he
persuades his younger self to commit suicide before he can fulfil his terrible
vocation. At which point, the universe is filled with the screams of previously
dead children coming back to life and living out their pain-filled lives. As
with ‘My City’, this is both a story and not a story; the whole grim tale
derives from the actions of a character who turns out never to have existed. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Similar features can be seen in other stories rooted in paradox.
The new science fiction film ‘Looper’ is one example. Whilst on a certain level
the story clearly ‘exists’, it also contains a sort of self-deleting code. Searching
for meaning in these circular narratives can be a perplexing and
frustrating task - which isn’t to say they’re meaningless. All stories are a ‘construction’
of one kind or another, with - depending on which way you want to look at it -
more or less reality that ‘real life’. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Next week I’m going to see Hedda Gabler – a more
straightforward play about what happens to a writer when their life’s work is
undone. And I’m also quite tempted by the film ‘Ruby Sparks’. A film about
a novelist who writes a character into existence…</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-78324470455403102642012-10-09T09:41:00.002+01:002012-10-09T16:43:23.099+01:00Engaging the audience...<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Having seen Will Eno’s ‘Oh, The Humanity’ at Soho Theatre
last week, a lot of my students commented on the unconventional ‘interactive’
elements of the production. Only, when I thought about it, I realised that the
last four things I’d watched at the theatre had all attempted a quite
deliberate and specific engagement with the audience. And in each case,
something about that transaction defined my feelings towards the play. Those
productions were: ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ at the Globe; the Danish theatre
company Republique’s version of ‘Hamlet’; Will Eno’s collection of shorts
mentioned above; and The RSC’s production of ‘Julius Caesar’.</div>
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<br /></div>
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As far as the two (original) Shakespeares were concerned,
the nature of this engagement derived mainly from the place of performance. The
Globe is a theatre that demands the acknowledgement of a shared space.
Shakespeare’s characters often directly invoke the audience and, as well as a
running metaphor of theatre-as-life, site-specific references are frequently
embedded within the texts. (These days, we have the added anachronism of planes
flying overhead; actors stopping to let them pass being a guaranteed crowd
pleaser.) With that in mind, the critical response to ‘The Taming of the Shrew’
was interesting. Whilst the Daily Mail <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">revelled
in the simple fun of it all, the Guardian characterised it as ‘conventionally
jolly’, never digging far beneath the surface. Michael Billington is
sometimes criticised for a fixation with the ‘political’ in the theatre, but
although I thoroughly enjoyed this production, part of me agrees that it was a missed opportunity to present one of Shakespeare’s most unsettling works in a
relatively un-nuanced way. Isn’t a venue that has this relationship with its
audience hardwired into it the perfect place to confront the play’s more troubling aspects? (By the by, it’s probably not worth being angry at the Daily
Mail any more, but it’s amazing how effortlessly it can cause offence. Take
this casual aside: ‘The Shrew will never be Harriet Harman’s favourite
Shakespeare…’)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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On the other hand, ‘Julius Caesar’, a West End transfer for
the RSC, attempted to co-opt some of the Globe’s spirit. With the house lights
up, the play was prefaced by music and dancing on stage, but the performers struggled
in vain to reach out beyond the proscenium arch. Over the weekend, I read a
piece of political commentary by Andrew Rawnsley that borrowed and adapted an
Oscar Wilde quotation (quite freely, I think, as I haven’t been able to
source the original…) Anyway, the basic idea was that authenticity is a
uniquely prized possession. And once you can fake it, you’re made. It turns
out to be a rather apt quotation in the context of Julius Caesar itself, but it
also speaks to the dilemma of ‘artifice’ in the theatre. At any
rate, this attempt to import something of the Globe’s participatory aesthetic
into a West End venue didn’t fake it well enough for me.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In ‘Hamlet’ at the Queen Elizabeth Hall - a highly physical,
multimedia ‘adaptation’ with live music by the Tiger Lilies - a different kind
of engagement relied on the extent to which the audience knew the source
material. Although some key scenes were preserved reasonably intact, much was
skipped, re-ordered, or replaced. The result was a production that fell between
two stools. Knowing the original fairly well, I found the snippets of text
aggravating; I’d have preferred a freer interpretation. At the same time, I
don’t think a newcomer to the play would have had much idea what was going on.
The interaction with the audience was predicated on an assumed familiarity with
the story, which simultaneously robbed it of its own energy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so to ‘Oh the Humanity’, a series of five short plays
(mostly monologues) riff-ing on the gap between presentation and belief, and
the hopeless ways in which we try to suppress our emotions. The plays are
certainly beautifully crafted and lyrically realised. But they left me a bit
cold. Perhaps the most distancing (if arguably the most interesting) was the fourth
piece. Here the action spun 180 degrees, and the two characters on stage
suddenly involved the audience in the setting up of a staged
photograph. As we in the auditorium tried to fix our faces in an appropriate
way, we were gently hectored and cajoled. The piece was all about authenticity
- what can you read behind the eyes of those frozen on film? Formally, then,
the device was in keeping with the wider questions of the play. So why did it
feel so false? Why did I find myself becoming irritated by the
faux spontaneity of the performers? The acting mantras of ‘living in the
moment’ and ‘saying everything for the first time’, which count for so much
behind a fourth wall, seemed contrived and disingenuous in this shared space.
Ironically (perhaps) the audience’s inability to participate in a real
conversation with the characters/performers was more starkly obvious here than in much
naturalistic drama. Andrew Rawnsley’s butchered Oscar Wilde quotation seems
appropriate in this context too. And while it’s a commonplace that the theatre
depends on, demands, even inherently contains the concept of an audience, it’s
also fascinating just how fragile and contingent that relationship can be.</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-38062611912364069402012-05-24T19:58:00.000+01:002012-05-24T19:59:43.657+01:00Just a quick post to say...<br />
<br />
Check out sohopolyfestival.blogspot.co.uk for some very exciting news about the 40th anniversary of The Soho Poly Theatre. On the bill: David Edgar, Robert Holman, Michael Billlington, Fred Proud, The Miniaturists, Michael Coveney, Irving Wardle, The Soho Theatre...<br />
<br />
Follow our progress @SohoPolyFest<br />
<br />
And for all tix info, email sohopolyfestival@gmail.com. Free, but limited availability!Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-3481891326739611312012-05-11T17:46:00.000+01:002012-05-11T17:49:40.287+01:00Festivals, Shelters, and Being Human…<br />
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It’s been quite a while since ‘Brightest and Best’, and
although I’d intended to write a wrap-up post, the end of a project is never
quite the decisive moment I imagine it will be. These days I find I can walk
away from such things quite fast, almost not thinking about them at all in their
immediate aftermath. Very different to the come-down I used to feel after finishing plays when I was younger. A shame not to miss things in the way I used to; or
healthier, maybe, to be able to move on...</div>
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In any case, I’ve moved straight on into two new projects
which I wanted to write a bit about here. One is a mini-festival I’m curating in mid June. The other
is a writing commission I’ve just begun with Natalie Ibu, working with LAMDA
second-year drama students to develop a play. The first of these will have
a blog of its own, so I’ll post a link to that soon. But in brief, the festival will mark 40 years since The Soho Poly Theatre (now The Soho Theatre)
moved into a tiny basement on Riding House Street and established itself as one
of the most famous fringe venues of the 1970s and 80s. It was a home for new
writing and the starting point for many actors and directors still working
today. For the week beginning 18th June the plan is to bring it back to life for
a series of short plays, readings and discussions about theatre then and now. More details to follow…</div>
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The LAMDA project is in its second week, and is quite a
new experience for me. Evolving a play for twelve actors feels like writing in
3D. Rather than spending time thinking, I’m forced to react in the room to
scores of questions and suggestion. It’s been pushing me into quick decisions,
which is bracing but frightening too. Balancing that with the need to maintain
an overarching ‘concept’ for the play is going to be one of the biggest
challenges. </div>
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The idea we’re all working on grew out of something I
read in a book by Matthew Sweet about hotels during WW2. In particular, there’s
a story about a group of Communists marching to the Savoy during the Blitz and
demanding to be let into the downstairs ballroom, a makeshift shelter for the
(rich) guests. This demand was a protest against the inadequate provision of
shelters for the desperately poor residents of places like Stepney in the East
End. It’s a story which seems to question the Home Front myth that everyone was
in it together.</div>
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Inevitably, researching these events throws light onto
the present. Something that particularly strikes me is the way the current
coalition has co-opted that famous phrase ‘in it together’ – partly to justify
their reduction in support for the public sector and the championing of charities,
volunteer organisations and the Big Society. Of course, there are many lenses
through which to view such a comparison, but one of the interesting discoveries
for me has been how the crisis of 1940 underscored how necessary government-led
action was, and how poorly-funded and poorly-coordinated local provision was
often unequal to the task at hand... </div>
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Then again, I’ll always look for the left-wing angle - which
is a realisation that makes writing a play with political dimensions troubling
and problematic. I’m not someone who finds it easy to write something that
champions a particular ideology. It’s not that I don’t want to, but more that I don’t seem to have the tools to do it without becoming reductive or simplistic. Certainly I’m not an historian,
and I don’t think it would be legitimate for me to try and change people’s
thinking about the Second World War (at least not in such a blunt way). I’m not sure that can ever be a
playwright’s primary responsibility. I’ve argued this point before, but I’m
uncomfortable with the idea of a writer using whatever powers of persuasion
they might have to attempt to establish themselves as ‘an expert’ in any field
other than writing itself. So, at the moment, I’m wrestling with the question
of how to approach historical, and by implication political, material.</div>
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Worrying about it all over coffee the other morning, I kept
returning to the question of characters and what they want. In a sense
that felt like cowardice: I don’t know what I want my play to say or mean, so
I’ll let my characters worry about it all instead. And yet, that’s the choice I
always seem to arrive back at. In the end, I found myself reformulating the
idea that a play (well, one type of a play) is really just about testing characters’
value systems. I wondered if the most vivid question for each character is simply
‘What are your responsibilities as a human being?’ After all, isn’t that what
all of us worry about most, at the crisis moments of our lives? And maybe plays
are just one of the forms of art that help us develop a framework to articulate
that question. </div>
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So, for now at least, I’m not thinking ‘What point do I
want the play to make?’ or ‘How can I tie this story in to my own political opinions?’
Instead I’m just asking my characters, via the three-dimensional students who
are embodying them, ‘What do you believe are your responsibilities as a human
being?’ And then trying to think of how those beliefs might be put under the
greatest possible stress…</div>
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<br /></div>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-31046328026066318062012-02-14T08:27:00.000+00:002012-02-14T08:30:18.150+00:00Playwriting, Editing, Techs... and Knitting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Sunday was the first day of tech-ing for ‘Brightest and
Best’. It was also - I realised with mixed feelings - almost 23 years since my
first similar experience, for the Barnes Theatre Company’s production of The
Mermaid some time in the last century. The BTC was run by <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/jan/17/theatre-new-year-honours-list">Anne Carroll</a> - one of
the most inspiring theatre-people I’ve ever met. It was just a youth drama
group, but those early experiences are still the ones I measure everything
against. Techs were magical at the church hall on Kitson Road, and I vividly remember
coming through the doors the weekend before the show to find Coeks and Darrol suspended
up ladders, fixing lights and painting flats. That’s where I fell in love with
theatre.</div>
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The first day in the ‘space’ is also the moment I revert
to theatre geek. I find it incredibly exciting to look around me and see everyone
locked into some kind of activity: Helen engrossed behind her sound desk; Eliot
attempting to design an improvised window effect with a hi-tech lighting board and
square of black cardboard; Ali – seconds earlier hanging by her fingertips from
the rafters of the rehearsal room – now dressing the set; Will and Hetty trying
costumes for the first time; Anna and Nadia… knitting.</div>
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But what struck me most in Sunday’s epic eleven-hour call
was that it felt like just another form of writing, or at least an evolution of
that process - the high speed making and unmaking of decisions (blocking, sound
and lighting levels, props…) just another act of (physical) editing.</div>
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Something that has also been incredibly important for
Natalie is the idea of spaces, or gaps. On one level, that’s been about filling
in the world of the play. Just as a playwright develops the back-story that
belongs outside the play, she and the cast have done amazing work to discover
what the audience never sees. What Daisy Gibson looks like, for example? Or what
happened when Terry was chased round the biology lab with a scalpel?</div>
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But even more significant has been the discovery of what happens
between scenes. ‘Scene change rehearsals’ have been a major part of the process,
and not just for practical reasons of slickness, etc., but because they form an
integral part of the drama. So much of the storytelling exists in these liminal
moments of change and transition. It’s in seeing these that I get to witness
the expression of ideas that have been explored in detail during rehearsals.
It’s made me more aware than ever that a play isn’t theatre until it’s in performance,
and that this transformation is much more profound that simply a movement from page
to stage. In fundamental respects, the direction has just been a continuation
of the process I began with pen and paper. </div>
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And the process isn’t over yet. We just about got to the end
yesterday, but now’s the day of the dress rehearsal. </div>
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Then, tomorrow, we’ll be in front of an audience for the
first time.</div>
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Gulp.</div>
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(This is a cross posting with Natalie's website and the official BB blog - with lots of information about the show and the company: <a href="http://www.natalieibuwashere.co.uk/Natalie_Ibu_Was_Here/BB_Blog.html">http://www.natalieibuwashere.co.uk/Natalie_Ibu_Was_Here/BB_Blog.html</a>)</div>
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<br /></div>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-8681247006725542352012-01-31T17:14:00.000+00:002012-02-01T10:41:18.573+00:00<br />
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<b>James Bond, post-its, and behaving very badly…</b></div>
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Almost three weeks ago, I wrote that I intended to track the
process of producing 'Brightest and Best' on this blog. So the reason
I’ve been completely silent is slightly ironic – the process of producing 'Brightest and Best'.</div>
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I suppose there’s been some other stuff going on, with the
start of the Westminster term and seemingly endless marking. But the
challenges of mounting a fringe production are pretty overwhelming all on their
own. </div>
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My last post was just before auditions – which ended up
spanning a week. We saw fantastic people, but after a while you feel you’re
going snow blind. Still, we managed it and have now finished week #1 with an
amazing team. And not just of actors. In fact, almost the most exciting moment
for me was the first production meeting where I sat in awe listening to the designers
and stage managers talk logistics. It’s such a privilege having all these
people working to make the play a success. And hearing them chat about the
technical kit they need to do it makes me feel like I’m in a James Bond film. </div>
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Now I’m taking more of a back seat. All playwrights make
negotiations with directors over their involvement in rehearsals. It’s
certainly true that vital re-writes come out of the experience of seeing actors
test your scenes. But I think you have to put your trust in the expertise of
the people you work with. Not everyone will agree, but I’m not sure a writer
necessarily has the clearest vision of their own work. (Natalie is certainly
able to describe 'Brightest and Best' much better than me.) Of course, it may be
possible for a director or actors to misinterpret a play, but I’d rather take
that risk, knowing that there’s a much greater chance their take will release
new energy and ideas.</div>
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When I have been in the rehearsal room (barn/shed?), one
thing I’ve noticed is that the wall is becoming increasingly plastered with bits
of paper: the cast’s research into the play. It reminds me of the moment a colleague
arrived at Westminster to share my office. The first things he noticed were post-it
notes everywhere – my first attempts to plot out the structure of the play. It
seems like the achingly painful process of writing can be summed up by the
movement of small bits of paper stuck to one wall, to slightly bigger bits of
paper stuck to another.</div>
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Another thing that happened on the bus home last night was
that I bumped into my old French teacher. We had a lovely chat,
although I guiltily remembered that I was one of his most annoying pupils. I
was only eleven at the time, but I think I remember him sending a letter home
to my parents about my terrible behaviour. That trauma aside, I'm hoping the
meeting was a good omen..</div>
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So now it’s back to work on another crucial aspect of
putting on a play: getting an audience. With that in mind, here’s a link to an
article in today’s Guardian about how the fringe really is the place to be
(and thanks to @peter_raynard who tweeted this earlier). Oh, and there's a link to tickets too!:</div>
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2012/jan/30/london-fringe-theatre-good">http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2012/jan/30/london-fringe-theatre-good</a><br />
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http://www.wegottickets.com/f/3727<br />
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<br />Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-19790411242143409582012-01-08T12:01:00.000+00:002012-01-09T17:19:02.905+00:00New Year / New Words<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIW3spGGGk3-KQC07a_KxVWgH_6E5b2TXeoNKDMc5BwpJIn2fp8zs3IsnOz4LC_ysaBI1_Qs2h27JVDL3gAPqS0iNL6sWu4dMc3_GwQk4rtSHmO4yJ3McHckJFKkZpQuUJBbE5C4B9Tqs/s1600/B%2526B+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIW3spGGGk3-KQC07a_KxVWgH_6E5b2TXeoNKDMc5BwpJIn2fp8zs3IsnOz4LC_ysaBI1_Qs2h27JVDL3gAPqS0iNL6sWu4dMc3_GwQk4rtSHmO4yJ3McHckJFKkZpQuUJBbE5C4B9Tqs/s1600/B%2526B+image.jpg" /></a><br />
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The Westminster term
hasn’t quite started yet, although I’ve worked out that I’ve read roughly two,
decently-sized novels’ worth of student writing this Christmas! Some great
stuff though – makes me anxious to do some of my own…</div>
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But there’s not much
time for that at the moment, as I’m right in the middle of auditions for my new
play ‘Brightest and Best’ (details on the link opposite…) In fact this term I
have a bit less teaching, so for the next few weeks I’m going to be posting
more on the practical side of things. ‘Brightest and Best’ opens on 15<sup>th</sup>
February, and I think it’s going to be an exhausting (but exhilarating) task to
get the show on its feet by then. The director is Natalie Ibu, who I’ve worked
with on a few different projects and is one of the most inspiring people I know
in theatre. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The audition process
has been fascinating so far, particularly for the way that it starts to reveal
the play in new ways. Hearing actors interpret and
re-interpret scenes opens up so many possibilities, and I’m going to be re-writing /
re-working for much of next week as a result of things I’ve learnt already. In particular two phrases, or questions, have really stood out for me – Natalie uses them a lot: What is the ‘offer’ the character is
making? And what is the ‘cost’ to them of what they are saying/doing? Really,
this is just another way of addressing dramatic agendas and stakes, but ‘offer’
and ‘cost’ are much more dynamic and evocative descriptions of those processes.
I was reminded of Declan Donellan’s book 'The Actor and The Target' in which he
talks about the weakness of the traditional question ‘what does a character
want?’ and the energy that is released instead if you ask ‘what does one
character need from the other?’ So much of the creative process seems to depend on the choice of words we use to describe what we’re up to.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The auditions have
also been fun because I get to read in all the other parts. It’s hard, being a frustrated actor…<o:p></o:p></div>
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Right, time to rush off to audition day #3. But for anyone who’s interesting in tracking the process of
putting on this play a bit more closely, I’ve decided to take a jump into the
twittersphere. So you can follow me, and other members of the creative team
here…<o:p></o:p></div>
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@matt_morrison77<o:p></o:p></div>
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@NMHIBUIsHere<o:p></o:p></div>
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@zannawharfe<o:p></o:p></div>
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Do sign up and keep in touch!</div>
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<br /></div>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-57550449617445514962011-12-12T12:13:00.001+00:002011-12-12T12:16:08.448+00:00The play's the thing...<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">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...</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">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 ‘<a href="http://matthewmorrison77.blogspot.com/2011/10/community-and-city.html">London Road</a>’ and ‘<a href="http://matthewmorrison77.blogspot.com/2011/11/from-west-end-to-revolution.html">Jerusalem</a>’
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. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">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…</span></div>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-83336991565481064612011-11-29T19:01:00.006+00:002011-12-12T12:15:06.016+00:00Opera and muddle...<span style="font-size: 85%;">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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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…<br /></span><a href="http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2011/production-papatango.php"><span style="font-size: 85%;">http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2011/production-papatango.php</span></a>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-65636038813229888872011-11-22T09:24:00.000+00:002011-11-22T09:28:12.362+00:00Blogs on Blogs<p><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />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.<br /><br />So, in an example of the blogosphere eating itself, I thought it might be useful to quickly re-post here…<br /><br />-Lyn Gardner’s Guardian blog: </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">-Chris Wilkinson's Noises Off column/twitter feed: </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/series/noisesoff"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/series/noisesoff</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">-Aleks Sierz' blog: </span><a href="http://sierz.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://sierz.blogspot.com/</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">-BBC Writersroom: </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">-Spread the Word (for Londoners): </span><a href="http://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/index.php"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/index.php</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">-Dan Rebellato’s website: </span><a href="http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/"><span style="font-size:85%;">www.danrebellato.co.uk</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">-Playwriting UK page on Facebook: </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Playwriting-Network-UK/116625928420542"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://www.facebook.com/pages/Playwriting-Network-UK/116625928420542</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">- the many theatre websites – especially new writing companies (Theatre503, The Bush, The Arcola, Soho, The Royal Court, etc…)</span></p>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-58163318554193562202011-11-11T17:12:00.003+00:002011-11-11T17:19:59.537+00:00From the West End to revolution...<span style="font-size:85%;">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:<br /><br /></span><a href="http://nickhernbooksblog.com/2011/11/11/jerusalematstpauls/"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://nickhernbooksblog.com/2011/11/11/jerusalematstpauls/</span></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />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…</span>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-38200064519153534892011-11-07T14:06:00.004+00:002011-11-07T14:13:57.517+00:00To research or not to research...<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--StartFragment--> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia;mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-USfont-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A couple of links to start the week. First, an interview with Jez Butterworth about his play ‘Jerusalem’:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia;mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-USfont-family:Georgia;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/video/2011/nov/02/jez-butterworth-jerusalem-video-interview?newsfeed=true"><span style="color:#0000F1;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/video/2011/nov/02/jez-butterworth-jerusalem-video-interview?newsfeed=true</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia;mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-USfont-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia;mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-USfont-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">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’: </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/2011/11/death_in_paradise_my_first_bro.shtml"><span style="color:#0000F1;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/2011/11/death_in_paradise_my_first_bro.shtml</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia;mso-bidi-mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language: EN-USfont-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">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: </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00l5ymk/EastEnders_E20_Series_3_Episode_15/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00l5ymk/EastEnders_E20_Series_3_Episode_15/</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-52372577978778315932011-10-31T17:57:00.005+00:002011-10-31T22:45:58.878+00:00Light and dark…<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNwl1Ql6dMOCFGa1YPPJ-ZaXnWhBe7QvZkxx6H0c4OmCOxr2FjOGrOUL-j9S6OXMBfzcyxFFwFRV0IOMVnWysoaAHGzhotdSpbNzq-ECzgoDvKqOqLoWFi-fsLBXw2CGNgF4vQYxc8jA8/s1600/damned.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669717702433952706" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 127px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 72px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNwl1Ql6dMOCFGa1YPPJ-ZaXnWhBe7QvZkxx6H0c4OmCOxr2FjOGrOUL-j9S6OXMBfzcyxFFwFRV0IOMVnWysoaAHGzhotdSpbNzq-ECzgoDvKqOqLoWFi-fsLBXw2CGNgF4vQYxc8jA8/s200/damned.jpg" border="0" /></a>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.<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.timeout.com/london/clubs/venue/2:18800/bethnal-green-working-mens-club">http://www.timeout.com/london/clubs/venue/2:18800/bethnal-green-working-mens-club</a> 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…<br /><br />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... <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/20/jumpy-review">http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/20/jumpy-review</a>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-17261208280813579442011-10-27T00:03:00.002+01:002011-10-27T00:09:24.091+01:00All in the detail...<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">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.</p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">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.</p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">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…</p> <!--EndFragment-->Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-77756154741264447832011-10-20T14:50:00.002+01:002011-10-31T22:46:44.237+00:00Community 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.<br /><br />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. <a href="http://www.oclondon.org/histeeth">http://www.oclondon.org/histeeth</a><br /><br />‘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… <a href="http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/mycity">http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/mycity</a><br /><br />‘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. <a href="http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=66098">http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=66098</a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />Anyway, apologies Peter that I haven’t quite addressed your questions here. But some further food for though (and argument) perhaps…Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-27054108864266148492011-10-17T16:06:00.002+01:002011-10-17T16:12:49.948+01:00Three 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.<br /><br />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. <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/films/cinema_europa/1821">http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/films/cinema_europa/1821</a><br /><br />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. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Are_All_Right_(film)">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Are_All_Right_(film)</a><br /><br />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. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/04/shame-review-steve-mcqueen-venice">http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/04/shame-review-steve-mcqueen-venice</a><br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.lyric.co.uk/whats-on/production/saved/">http://www.lyric.co.uk/whats-on/production/saved/</a>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-16330235421460017222011-10-12T17:19:00.003+01:002011-10-12T17:23:26.298+01:00Dystopian cities and Postmodern teapots…<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJlvTfnRkaplCFG_n2sl27aCi9iq1x-OkJTpq-Uojkl60f5YefNd179Trc_0sVA1ChNCvSlgd1b5ZPkk_zAuGcVH92FnBa9lOVl_322aIsQvfeL4ETNwO44Co8-TFV7oeXBa_Dizo0tf8/s1600/teapot.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5662641193091661298" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 150px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 149px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJlvTfnRkaplCFG_n2sl27aCi9iq1x-OkJTpq-Uojkl60f5YefNd179Trc_0sVA1ChNCvSlgd1b5ZPkk_zAuGcVH92FnBa9lOVl_322aIsQvfeL4ETNwO44Co8-TFV7oeXBa_Dizo0tf8/s200/teapot.jpg" border="0" /></a>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.<br /><br />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… <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/">http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/</a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaR5wVL9x2I">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaR5wVL9x2I</a><br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5a5u1_koyaanisqatsi_shortfilms">http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5a5u1_koyaanisqatsi_shortfilms</a>Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4401007696021532945.post-59853688372179978852011-10-07T11:47:00.002+01:002011-10-12T17:24:41.580+01:00Going backwards...A few thoughts about the week, below, but first a couple of excellent tip-offs:<br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.decadeheadlong.com/">http://www.decadeheadlong.com/</a> Ben’s also drawn my attention back to a neat article from the guardian on how Charlie Kaufman wrote ‘Being John Malkovich’: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/03/charlie-kaufman-how-to-write?INTCMP=SRCH">http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/03/charlie-kaufman-how-to-write?INTCMP=SRCH</a> 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’: <a href="http://johndiesattheend.com/">http://johndiesattheend.com/</a><br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.francescabeard.com/">http://www.francescabeard.com/</a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16697153460442127011noreply@blogger.com4