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”.

Howard Barker

All celebrations are much alike, but some are just more extraordinary than others. Next week, on 21 October, playwright Howard Barker celebrates the 21st anniversary of the Wrestling School, the theatre company which specialises in exclusively performing his work. Despite the axing of its Arts Council grant in 2007, the Wrestling School has lost neither its fighting powers, nor its ability to inspire. As he told me when I interviewed him recently, “To my delight and relief, we are now finished with the Arts Council. I have a theory about why they cut us: we couldn’t possibly uphold their agenda, which is political. They have a socio-political agenda. Which is purely Stalinist. You can’t tick the boxes if you aren’t doing the work they want. It’s not about art, it’s about sociology. We always fooled the Arts Council by pretending that we were doing things we didn’t do, but of course we were going to fall foul of them at some point.” Anyway, the 21 for 21 festival involves a global cascade of performances of Barker’s work, starting in Perth, Australia, and ending up in Burnaby, Canada. Barker expert George Hunka in New York has already posted details of events there. The RSC will perform The Castle. Actors from 18 countries stretching over four continents will take part, and as well as readings, devised work and full-scale productions, there will also be a performance in the digital world of Second Life. Extraordinary indeed. Even Pirate Dog is impressed.

Monkey

One of the good things about blogs is that they provide a fresh source of information about audience reactions to theatre shows. When I finally caught up with Inherit the Wind — a fictional version of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 — at the Old Vic last week, I was delighted to see a little rhesus monkey make a brief appearance on stage. Like Pirate Dog, the monkey had an air of supreme indifference to the drama unfolding onstage, and played its part with a complete lack of stage-fright. According to the programme, it was trained by Amazing Animals and protected by the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976. And it did not piss or shit on stage. Still, the interesting thing about its appearance was the fact that a distinct ripple of excitement went through the audience, with the spectators nudging each other and whispering. In fact, for a short while, the monkey upstaged the humans. The play itself is a clunky old thing, but the audience gave a standing ovation to actors Kevin Spacey and David Troughton: a kind of mass adoration. And a reminder that stars exist because, in some almost religious way, the audience demands them. Needs them. Gives them its power.