The problem of theatre in our lifetime is not an aesthetic one. It is social. It is not that we do not know 'how' a play should look, or what a theatrical form should take: it is that we do not know how to make it. We are unable to grasp the importance of theatre, for theatre's sake, understood on its own terms.
Because we cannot see theatre in theatrical terms, we cannot understand its position in society. And so every time we go to see a play, our reaction expresses discomfort. Not discomfort over particular social actions or circumstances: but discomfort with theatre's way of telling it.
Theatre seems constantly to be telling us about something else's view of the world. It is society's little secretary. A secretary which thinks its speech combines the polyphony of voices and stratas in all aspects of the corporation. But in actual fact, in losing itself, in becoming a mouthpiece with no mouth of its own, it simply keeps the boss in charge.
Because we cannot see theatre in theatrical terms, we cannot understand its position in society. And so every time we go to see a play, our reaction expresses discomfort. Not discomfort over particular social actions or circumstances: but discomfort with theatre's way of telling it.
Theatre seems constantly to be telling us about something else's view of the world. It is society's little secretary. A secretary which thinks its speech combines the polyphony of voices and stratas in all aspects of the corporation. But in actual fact, in losing itself, in becoming a mouthpiece with no mouth of its own, it simply keeps the boss in charge.
If theatre is a secretary, what is the political shape of the world in which it functions? Is there a power in being secretarial? And how does this relate to an understanding of democracy - or otherwise - in the cultural and social landscape? Does a secretary not represent many of the most repressed, and repressive, aspects of representative democracy?
Who do we elect to represent 'Theatre' now? And why does it need representing?
Theatre wants us to fill in a form. Age, name, date of birth, postcode, email, tick this box to receive further details.
How can we move it to a position of asking questions?
Several months ago I saw Toneelgroep's Roman Tragedies at the Barbican, directed by Dutch-born Ivo van Hove. The Hall was transformed into a muzak-filled corporate lobby: grey block sofas across the stage, a bar, first aid area, and internet zone all occupying the space. The audience were invited on stage, moving between dispersed video screens and relays of the action. An electronic ticker tape below the main projection screen showed the latest world news, noted forthcoming scene changes, and even provided a Roman history countdown: 3 mins til the death of Julius Caesar; 75 minutes til the death of Antony, etc.
At the end of the performance, when many members of the audience were already heading for the door, there was a projection of 40 questions concerning politics, theatre and acting.
Is it possible to have politics without a desire for power?Is anti-political rhetoric the key to popularity?Are all politicians actors?
I am interested in how van Hove's questions, and the extraordinary, sprawling-yet-minutely calculated 6 hour collation of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra might encourage some consideration of theatre escaping its reflective duties of echoing social 'reality' and theatrical tradition.
There is something in the overt posing of questions which abrogates a sense of self - and simultaneously a sense of invitational, inclusive debate - so rarely seen (unless in pure egoism) in contemporary productions of Shakespeare. Roman Tragedies was not mute secretary; we were handed no forms. Instead we were confronted with a brief epilogue which challenged the timid assumption that theatre interrogates social reality only through dramturgical cleverness and mimesis.
Yes, Toneelgroep's production had sublime moments of dramaturgical re-visioning: playing Calpurnia's bad dream scene with Julius Caesar face to face with Brutus' final night with Portia; choosing to cast Octavius Caesar as female. Yet it also did something I have never seen in theatre: it combined this subtly woven re-vision with direct questions. It literally turned to the audience and said "what do you think? What does theatre have to do with politics?"
Whilst I was surprised how many people were already ignoring these directed challenges by the end of the show, apparently the London audience paid them most attention.
This was one of the observations made on Thursday 21st January when van Hove gave a talk and a round-table discussion at King's College London of his recent work and general practice.
A sleek, well-dressed man in his forties, van Hove is not particularly well-known in the UK, though his international reputation, having begun his career primarily in New York, is weighty.
More of us should know who he is.
In the roundtable discussion, Van Hove said that he treated the plays - Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra - as if "Shakespeare had sent them to me that morning". (Somewhat eerily - or perhaps she had heard it before - Lyn Gardner's review for the Guardian makes the same observation almost word for word).
Read only what is there, not what other readers and directors have found there.
Of course, we could argue that each text of Shakespeare is itself an historical construction which must be scrutinised; but not in the realm of a theatrical production. Not in the beginning stages of bringing a text to the stage. Van Hove's comments insinuated that his process was one of mapping, of plotting points in the plays' existing fabric against his own points of view ('the end must be slow'; Antony and Cleopatra would always come last; the snake had to be real): creating lines and planes of dialogue, a fresh play.
The ferocity of the vision must take precedent in this process; but van Hove equally remembers where it came from. The triumphant epic quality of Roman Tragedies came from within one quick reading of Antony and Cleopatra on an aeroplane: it is a direct response to something that clearly is conversant within Shakespeare's Roman plays.
A distinctive quality of van Hove's work is his insistence on an element of the 'real' - usually a very fleeting encounter which once again forces a tumultuous reevaluation of the context. He attributed this to his background in performance art. In Roman Tragedies, this came with Enobarbus' speech prior to his death:
I fight against thee? No, I will go seek
Some ditch wherein to die; the foul'st best fits
My latter part of life.
In every performance, the actor playing Enobarbus fled the auditorium, followed by a camera which then relayed the outdoors back indoors to the audience members huddling around the grey sofas of the 'conference centre' playing space.
Van Hove noted in the discussion in January the importance of place in the success of this 'real' moment. It is a moment when, in a playing space already dissolving lines between audience and actor, we are abruptly reminded that there are thousands of other barriers, spaces and borders to be dissolved. The actor crashes into the Barbican carpark: eerie but for the comical sight of my friends Rachel and Hugh having a sneaky cigarette mid-performance, stepping out of their 'moving'-audience role assigned in the auditorium, to another role. The borders, it seems, are not just dissolved and reconstituted: they choose and change themselves.
Van Hove's favourite city for this moment was in Amsterdam, as the play was staged in a theatre located on the city's most central square: Enobarbus would emerge into the scream of traffic, trams, taxis, commuters, hawkers, vendors, businessmen, beggars, fighting amidst the din to have his own wailing heard.
Van Hove construed the production as a study, charting from republic to empire and onwards 'the fragile birth of democracy'.
Van Hove noted in the discussion in January the importance of place in the success of this 'real' moment. It is a moment when, in a playing space already dissolving lines between audience and actor, we are abruptly reminded that there are thousands of other barriers, spaces and borders to be dissolved. The actor crashes into the Barbican carpark: eerie but for the comical sight of my friends Rachel and Hugh having a sneaky cigarette mid-performance, stepping out of their 'moving'-audience role assigned in the auditorium, to another role. The borders, it seems, are not just dissolved and reconstituted: they choose and change themselves.
Van Hove's favourite city for this moment was in Amsterdam, as the play was staged in a theatre located on the city's most central square: Enobarbus would emerge into the scream of traffic, trams, taxis, commuters, hawkers, vendors, businessmen, beggars, fighting amidst the din to have his own wailing heard.
Van Hove construed the production as a study, charting from republic to empire and onwards 'the fragile birth of democracy'.
What might an understanding of birth, fragility and democracy make me see when I think now about Shakespeare, and about this nominal democracy of Britain 2010?
I think about voices, and about van Hove's earlier comment on treating a script as if the writer finished it this morning. About having certain approaches or techniques when it comes to staging, but never becoming an aesthetic brand. About being delicately democratic with a text - any text, Shakespeare or otherwise - rather than despotic or tyrannical.
I also think about van Hove's practical approach with his actors, a mode of being which he calls 'intense relaxation'. The performers are at ease, yet are able to change gear into moments of real violence or extreme emotional ferocity swiftly and believably.
Van Hove's approach to theatre is unremittingly even-handed. Respectful. There are no heroes or special stars. Of course he has favoured actors, preferred venues; but as he himself admits, there isn't a recognisable 'van Hove' style. Instead he treats each play, each performance, as if it were born then and there. He reads a text and asks what it wants to be, not what it has been before.
With regards to Shakespeare, or otherwise, his approach is something which every British director can learn from.
It strikes me that there is something ridiculously undemocratic, and brittle rather than fragile, about attitudes to Shakespeare productions in English, in this country. Roman Tragedies was lauded, and rightly so, for its sublimely Brechtian puncturing of political and theatrical precepts. Yet I cannot help thinking that its unrivalled praise in the British press was also gilded by its foreignness; by its not being in English. After all, we love Shakespeare in another language - a Japanese Titus Andronicus, a Polish Macbeth. It allows us to focus on the poetics of the stage, on the physicality of the bodies and sounds, rather than the semantics.
Yet this wild praise for foreign language Shakespeare insinuates a still-existing tyranny of language: that the words, the exquisite "poetry" (always 'the poetry'!!) of Shakespeare are all, or nothing. The absent marker in the Dutch muscularity of Roman Tragedies or the central lynchpin of Trevor Nunn's woeful read-a-long Lear for the RSC a few years ago. English productions of Shakespeare become more and more like radio programs, or audio books; international productions are subsequently expected to dazzle us with 'physical theatre' (a term which only seems to exist in theatre communities in Britain: other cultures just call it "theatre") - something to make up for that absent "poetry".
Any English production that does dare to change the language or structure significantly is itself accused of violence: it is arrested, and taken to the gallows for its insult on the sovereign of our great literary landscape.
Declan Donellan's seriously under-appreciated Troilus and Cressida in 2008, was criticised heavily for some of the staging choices and cuts. by a press unwilling - or perhaps unable - to engage with the reasons for those choices.
It seems that the English press can only judge any Shakespearean performance against Shakespeare, and the history of shakespeare in performance. Different rules seem to apply: you even get it in the US; take a look at recent press for Young Jean Lee's Lear-less LEAR at the Soho Rep in New York. The New York Times critic judged the piece a brave failure because it did not 'speak' sufficiently to the themes of original Shakespeare text.
I think about how this severity, this unchanging reification of a writer's plays into one voice, "Shakespeare", might bear similar traits as the voice of an ex-Prime Minister who, nearly a decade after some of the twenty-first century's most devastating political decisions, declares that he would 'do it all again' with half the chance.
Blair's attitude is a resolute, though highly self-motivated, failure to acknowledge the undeniable restlessness of political reality. The unending festering of social life which means that people cross borders, bodies are buried under rubble, decay and are never found, stock markets change every instant, money changes hands, languages interfuse.
And in Blair's stony declaration, I hear echoed the radio-friendly tones of a certain booming, boring Shakespearean theatre which has been 'doing it all again' without ever noticing that the decision to play it like that was wrong in the first place!
I think about voices, and about van Hove's earlier comment on treating a script as if the writer finished it this morning. About having certain approaches or techniques when it comes to staging, but never becoming an aesthetic brand. About being delicately democratic with a text - any text, Shakespeare or otherwise - rather than despotic or tyrannical.
I also think about van Hove's practical approach with his actors, a mode of being which he calls 'intense relaxation'. The performers are at ease, yet are able to change gear into moments of real violence or extreme emotional ferocity swiftly and believably.
Van Hove's approach to theatre is unremittingly even-handed. Respectful. There are no heroes or special stars. Of course he has favoured actors, preferred venues; but as he himself admits, there isn't a recognisable 'van Hove' style. Instead he treats each play, each performance, as if it were born then and there. He reads a text and asks what it wants to be, not what it has been before.
With regards to Shakespeare, or otherwise, his approach is something which every British director can learn from.
It strikes me that there is something ridiculously undemocratic, and brittle rather than fragile, about attitudes to Shakespeare productions in English, in this country. Roman Tragedies was lauded, and rightly so, for its sublimely Brechtian puncturing of political and theatrical precepts. Yet I cannot help thinking that its unrivalled praise in the British press was also gilded by its foreignness; by its not being in English. After all, we love Shakespeare in another language - a Japanese Titus Andronicus, a Polish Macbeth. It allows us to focus on the poetics of the stage, on the physicality of the bodies and sounds, rather than the semantics.
Yet this wild praise for foreign language Shakespeare insinuates a still-existing tyranny of language: that the words, the exquisite "poetry" (always 'the poetry'!!) of Shakespeare are all, or nothing. The absent marker in the Dutch muscularity of Roman Tragedies or the central lynchpin of Trevor Nunn's woeful read-a-long Lear for the RSC a few years ago. English productions of Shakespeare become more and more like radio programs, or audio books; international productions are subsequently expected to dazzle us with 'physical theatre' (a term which only seems to exist in theatre communities in Britain: other cultures just call it "theatre") - something to make up for that absent "poetry".
Any English production that does dare to change the language or structure significantly is itself accused of violence: it is arrested, and taken to the gallows for its insult on the sovereign of our great literary landscape.
Declan Donellan's seriously under-appreciated Troilus and Cressida in 2008, was criticised heavily for some of the staging choices and cuts. by a press unwilling - or perhaps unable - to engage with the reasons for those choices.
It seems that the English press can only judge any Shakespearean performance against Shakespeare, and the history of shakespeare in performance. Different rules seem to apply: you even get it in the US; take a look at recent press for Young Jean Lee's Lear-less LEAR at the Soho Rep in New York. The New York Times critic judged the piece a brave failure because it did not 'speak' sufficiently to the themes of original Shakespeare text.
I think about how this severity, this unchanging reification of a writer's plays into one voice, "Shakespeare", might bear similar traits as the voice of an ex-Prime Minister who, nearly a decade after some of the twenty-first century's most devastating political decisions, declares that he would 'do it all again' with half the chance.
Blair's attitude is a resolute, though highly self-motivated, failure to acknowledge the undeniable restlessness of political reality. The unending festering of social life which means that people cross borders, bodies are buried under rubble, decay and are never found, stock markets change every instant, money changes hands, languages interfuse.
And in Blair's stony declaration, I hear echoed the radio-friendly tones of a certain booming, boring Shakespearean theatre which has been 'doing it all again' without ever noticing that the decision to play it like that was wrong in the first place!
The man who agreed to invade Iraq was wrong, though he made a spectacularly elaborate attempt to derive empirical justification from absolute fiction. The practitioners who decide to 'read' Shakespeare to their buttock-numbed audience have trodden the same path - not in relation to this one writer, but in enslaving and corrupting our theatre in its entirety. They have bastardised it in constituting it, and given it a nice name badge to wear.
In Iraq that name badge reads 'democracy'. In theatre, I have no fucking clue what it reads, but I don't like it.
I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's 'Introduction' to A Thousand Plateaus, and of my friend Jonny, who will read this post, with whom I discussed just what this might mean for a theatre-maker:
In Iraq that name badge reads 'democracy'. In theatre, I have no fucking clue what it reads, but I don't like it.
I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's 'Introduction' to A Thousand Plateaus, and of my friend Jonny, who will read this post, with whom I discussed just what this might mean for a theatre-maker:
We assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why
have we kept own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make
ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not
ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's
nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody
knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where
one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any
importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will
know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
And just what might this mean for a theatre-maker dealing in the biggest oak-tree of them all? What tiny dendrite or little polyp can weld and weed itself about this monumental structure? Surely the only way for an oak like Shakespeare to keep growing is laterally, subterraneously: re-germination, decay, cutting, trimming, suturing as re-construction not de-construction. Trimming to stimulate growth: or simply delving into the soil - soil is a false surface; not a plane but a planet of its own, a dense forest - to seek out the freshest, most living part of Shakespeare. The part that can thump on your desk at 9am this morning - underneath your hands and in your fingernails like sods of mud. The part that is still growing, even whilst the tree above, in all its hopeless verticality, dries out.
The [boss] is dead, long live -
!!
...Now boast thee, Death, in thy possession lies
A lass unparalleled.
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