Cock

Last night, at the opening of Mike Bartlett’s new play at the Royal Court, there were plenty of opportunities for ribald jokes about the play’s title, Cock. It was also a welcome addition to a litany of in-yer-face Royal Court titles, which have already attracted parodies. A couple of examples: Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) kicked off the trend, which was taken up by Gae Cleugh’s Fucking Games (2001). In the playtext of Simon Farquhar’s Rainbow Kiss (2006), there was a note that said that explains that his original title was Fuck Off. Oddly enough, he claims that he changed it “not because of an uncharacteristic prudishness on the Royal Court’s behalf, but because it was in danger of causing the play to be misperceived.” To which, the only answer is: yeah, right. Such titles have been deliciously parodied not only in Tim Crouch’s The Author (2009), which tackled the content of these kinds of play, but in a book by Christopher Douglas and Nigel Planer (no less) called I An Actor (written under the pseudonym of Nicholas Craig), which is a satire on British theatre today. Here, the author says he has been called everything from the “Blowtorch of the Barbican” to the “Uncrowned Vesuvius of the English Classical Stage”, and mentions one role in which he found himself “wading through a sea of syringes and crème fraiche” in a play called Fist F***ing which was staged — and you really get no prizes for guessing this — at the Royal Court in 1994. “I still have a burning need,” says Nicholas Craig, his tongue practically bursting out of his cheek, “to perform, to communicate and to immerse myself in all the roiling, squalid splendour of life — quite literally in the case of the notorious kitchenette scene from Fist F***ing”. A lovely reminder that these titles can never be given in full, without asterisks, on public notices — for fear of prosecution. Anyway, Cock has no such problems — and, oh, it’s a cracking play too!

Theatre outside London

Sundays are good days to put your feet up, watch rain dribbling down the window, and read the broadsheet papers. And get hot under the collar. In the Observer, for example, critic Kate Kellaway describes the latest developments in theatres outside London. This, it has to be said, is a high-risk subject. Basically, there is so much theatre outside London — some 40-plus venues — that arts journos can only really manage two stories about them: they are either a) in crisis, or b) entering a golden age. And the inevitable response to any article is: why have you left out my local theatre? As Kellaway points out, the terminology is pretty difficult: “Provincial is a dirty word. Regional isn’t. How much the language reveals. Provincial theatre – dusty rep, cynical programming, clapped-out musicals – is a thing of the past. Regional theatre is far more likely to mean classy acting, good design, smart musicals, innovative writing, and to be led by an adventurous new breed of artistic director who actively chooses to work outside London.” The only trouble with regional is that these places —Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol or Plymouth — are only regional in relation to, you guessed, London. To their inhabitants they aren’t regions, they’re home. So big is the theatre scene outside London that any survey by a metropolitan journo is bound to be found wanting. What’s the solution? Use the internet! Instead of bitching about how London theatre critics never cover your shows, why not create a thousand local blogs with local critics covering local shows. And then tell us all about them!

Our Class

It’s not often that theatre actually teaches us anything, despite its good intentions. So I’m pleased to say that I left the National’s current production of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class feeling wiser than I had been a little earlier in the evening. In this, I was greatly helped by the programme, especially the short article called ‘Victims and Perpetrators’ by psychologist James Thompson. In this brief but marvellous piece, he questions — as does the play — the common assumption, shared by me, that most people would commit genocidal acts if given permission by those in power. In fact, he points out some flaws in the psychological experiments that once were taken to prove that people would unquestioningly obey authority and harm others if they were told to do so. And he also questions Hannah Arendt’s famous account of the “banality of evil”, pointing out that Arendt only attended the first part of Eichmann’s trial, and so missed the second half which showed just how extraordinarily determined he was to wipe out Europe’s Jews. He wasn’t banal at all; he was an unusually committed fanatic. Perpetrators of genocide are not ordinary people, but unusually cold or fanatical individuals. What the play, directed by Bijan Sheibani and translated by Ryan Craig, shows is that people react differently to extreme situations, and that monsters and heroes are rare. And that we are all responsible for our own actions.

Bucharest

I’m just back from a couple of days in Bucharest, as a guest of the Romanian National Theatre Festival. Boy, was Pirate Dog pleased to see me back: those licks, that tongue! Anyway, in Romania I had the good luck to overlap with theatre legend Richard Schechner, a New York performance studies prof and editor of TDR: The Drama Review. He’s great in action, a real guru, all incisive simplicity and warm humanity. The presentation I saw was all about his 1968 classic, Dionysus in 69, a piece of “environmental theatre” which was based on Euripides’s The Bacchae and which played in his Performance Group’s SoHo garage. As ever, I was less interested in the deconstruction of the Greek text than in the relationship between performers and audience. Schechner projected some photos of the actors, who didn’t take curtain calls (there was no curtain in this found space and the action took place all around the audience); they just left the theatre at the end of a show. (He also made the point that actors bowing is a nostalgic gesture which nods to a past when all theatre people were in awe of the aristocracy.) There was one shot of the actors leaving the show dressed in ordinary clothes and covered in stage blood. Passers-by look at them with frank amazement. Somehow the Vietnam war protest politics, which was a small part of the show when it was taking place inside the garage space, becomes magnified when the actors walk into the street. Look, I know that this is a well-known show, and I don’t claim to be rediscovering it, but it is interesting to revisit theatre history. Who knows, if more theatre-makers did that, maybe we’d have some more politically powerful plays, or some better theatre. Anyway, the good news is that Rude Mechanicals in the US are reviving Dionysus in 69: it will be interesting to see how contemporary audiences react.

Cultural Olympiad

The Arts Council has recently announced the 12 commissions, worth £5.4m, that have been selected for Artists Taking the Lead, one of the opening schemes for the Cultural Olympiad. Ever since the Royal Opera House chief executive Tony Hall became the new chair this summer, hope have soared that he would be more sensible than his predecessor, Southbank artistic director Jude Kelly. No need to worry — he is just as bad as the rest. It’s always a bit too easy to shoot sitting ducks but I’m in a bad mood so here goes my trigger finger. Shauna Richardson, representing the East Midlands, will create the Lionheart installation, exploring the values that big cats and the Olympics share by making crocheted wool lions 10m tall. Look, I like the idea of crocheted lions, but is this really Olympic quality art? Scotland’s Craig Coulthard will create Forest Pitch, a football pitch within a forest by felling the trees, and, after one match is played, the forest can grow back. This must be what they mean by “legacy”. Then there is a water mill, some art created by the public (like that ever-so-exciting fourth plinth, yawn) and a film from the Pacitti Company. So, and lots of other outdoor stuff, none of it very artistic. I suppose it serves us right — we did let the Arts Council lead the project.

A Prophet

This weekend, I was lucky enough to go to the gala screening of Jacques Audiard’s film, Un Prophete, at the Vue cinema in Leicester Square. It was part of the London Film Festival and it made a nice change from going to endless press nights. (Although, let me pause here to pat Pirate Dog on the head in a reassuring manner, as I do know that he’s not very keen about me going out at all, unless he’s with me. And unless it’s walkies.) From the point of view of the experience, a couple of things won me over to this film screening: the seats were really comfortable (Why, oh why are theatre seats so poor? Wake up guys, it’s the 21st century!); each seat came with a bottle of water and a small chocolate bar (why, oh why can’t theatre get this kind of sponsorship?) And, of course, the film was great, a really compelling watch (Brit film has nothing of comparable power and mythic significance). Although the postshow Q&A was a bit of shambles, I would recommend this film which offers an unforgettable picture of race, crime and prison in contemporary France. Excuse me now, I must check out Audiard’s other films...

Liveness

It’s not often that high-powered academic books make for good theatre blogs, but Matt Trueman’s account of reading Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture on the Guardian blog is thought-provoking, as are the comments on it. Like the idea of “audiences”, the notion of “liveness” seems to be both integral to any definition of theatre, and one of those ideas that threatens to become mystical simply because it’s so vague. But while it is true that we tend to think of the live and the recorded as diametrically opposite, it is equally clear that theatre has always engaged with technology: wasn’t the mask originally a piece of tech? Not to mention the dieux ex machina machines, the flying scenery and electric lights... Perhaps it’s worth considering that just as there are different kinds of audiences, and not just one monolithic audience (“the audience”), so there are also different kinds of “liveness”.