Gothenburg and home

Saturday night saw a great Swedish feast at Teater Eksem's Gothenburg HQ, which gave me the chance to thank everybody properly. It was quite emotional - the end of two years' work with a very inspiring and tightly knit group of people. Not that it will be an end really - the show may well come back, and even if it doesn't the potential legacy projects are legion.

Still, we went into the final show on Sunday with a combined sense of loss and determination to be brilliant - and as a result had an amazing night. Last shows are often faintly disappointing, because the cast strive for a definitive performance and there really is no such thing. But this show, which is in many ways about loss, benefited hugely from the circumstances, and was very moving and beautiful. At the reception afterwards, the Swedish managements, funders and artistic guests all kept using the same word: "poetic". I like that. The performance was in the space at Pustervik, where I saw Victoria perform in the Festival on my first Swedish trip in 2008. Exciting to end the project in this lovely space which I know from its beginnings.

Filip and I shared the driving of the van to Dusseldorf on Monday, and then I did the last slog through the fog of northern Europe on Tuesday. The air of melancholy was appropriate, I suppose. But I didn't linger in it for long - the emails and meetings have been constant since I got back, and of course we are recruiting staff!

Boras

That's Boras - not Borat. Cultural Learnings of Sweden Make Benefit Glorious Nation China. The town where we performed last night.

To be honest, we didn't expect much of Boras. It's an industrial town, a bit grey and rainy, and nothing like as pretty as Skovde was in the snow the other day. The theatre is a converted 50s cinema, with architecture that wouldn't have disgraced Stalinism, and Filip confessed it was really only in the tour so that there were three regional venues. When we set out from Gothenberg yesterday morning, only 15 people had booked to see the show there, in spite of the radio and TV coverage.

In a way, I guess that meant the pressure was off. Lloyd, Amy and Dori were very relaxed as they sorted out the set and lights, and we looked through all the states in detail. We even had time to rehearse some of the more tricky scenes on the tiny stage. No dimmer panics here: a new improved show featuring actors in light! So - oddly - we had rather a wonderful night. Especially since the audience which actually walked through the door was large, lively, diverse and appreciative. Lots of rhythmic clapping at the end. People buzzing with joy to have seen work of this kind in such an unlikely place.

Oddly, the final scene, which was a comic highlight in both London and China, doesn't seem to appeal to the Swedish sense of humour. With only three performances here, it's tricky to re-work it, but I'm fascinated to know why (and so far I have no idea). Other comedy works really well - especially, and not surprisingly, the tri-lingual scene in which Maja and Sammy learn bits of Swedish and Chinese. The Miss Julie bits have a strong resonance too. All part of the fascinating journey of this show between different very specific local responses to global ideas.

I've been reading some of the new Plagrave series of Theatre and... books since I've been here: specifically Ric Knowles on Interculturalism and Dan Rebellato on Globalization. I'm starting to wonder if it's right to define what we are doing as intercultural theatre. In Knowles's terms, this idea seems suspect, smacking of cultural imperialism, unless it's a form of "interculturalism from below", by which he means work initiated by non-white cultures and by-passing white mediation. Which doesn't cover us. A closer approximation is the idea of cosmopolitanism, at least as explained by Rebellato, who puts it forward as a positive response to globalization, which avoids the capitalist imperative of that movement, and the Luddism of localist response. In the end, theses are all just words, but they help to stimulate artistic and political ideas about where we might go next.

Touring Sweden in the snow

Skovde is a little town, about two hours' drive from Gothenburg. We got there in our van, a hired minibus and a little car driven by yours truly - up from the coast past lakes, forests and elk in the deep snow. Spatica, who arrived a day late because of the inevitable visa complications, was bouncing arond the car like a child on speed - you don't see much snow in Bangalore. Mia says it's strange for Sweden in early November, but anywhere there it was. Once we got to Skovde we had a snowball fight. Jue lost.

The theatre in Skovde is beautiful - modern, open and acoustically warm. It also has dimmer racks which don't work - so they had to be replaced before we could focus the lighting rig. As a result, the planned dress rehearsal went by the board - leaving Dori to operate her first show as her first run-through. It didn't seem to faze her as much as it did me. The lighting was actually more of a problem than the video, since we had no time to work through the cues or to make focus adjustments. There were key moments which were very dark, and moody moments that were too bright. It was all a bit of a mess, to be honest. And nobody's fault, really.

Still, the audience enjoyed the night. And it was a big audience too - several schools seemed to have decided this was one for their older pupils, so there was a large teenage contingent. The humour was as lively as it was with other young audiences - though in slightly different places, of course. One of the great joys of this project is the way the play's meaning alters slightly with every different audience. We changed a couple of moments - Bjorn's award acceptance now goes into Swedish when he's becoming most personal with Maja, and his "meltdown" is in a mixture of Swedish, English and Chinese. He also translates Radhakrishna's poem into Swedish. Oddly, I find the music of Swedish and Kannada rather similar. For the first time, this sounds like a duet.

Road Movie

At 9am on Sunday, Lloyd arrived at my house with a fully loaded van, hired from another theatre company, which, in the interests of charity and solidarity, will remain nameless. The idea was that we would take two days to drive it to Sweden for the next leg of the tour.

At 9.20, it ground to a halt on the M25. Total stasis. The engine wouldn't re-fire. I phoned the RAC. Forty minutes later Derek showed up (this is the cameo which Michael Gambon will play in the road movie). Derek looked under the bonnet and shook his head. The engine rattled about. He employed a few choice technical terms to suggest that we weren't going to get to Sweden in this particular van. He then said that, even though we'd specifically taken RAC international cover for it, and that I'd been told my personal cover would work in the UK, this van was too big for them to recover. And he left us at the side of the road.

The van itself seemed to have AA cover. So that was worth a try. Forty minutes later Jeff showed up (this is more a John Hurt role). He instantly towed the van. To Thurrock services. There it ws met by a mechanic who agreed that Derek had been right. At least the AA would take it home - but that was that.

Phoned Nisha and got her to do some mad Googling. Somehow she managed to find the only van hire place in the entire world which is open on Sunday mornings and hires vans to go to Sweden. She then drove round to Thurrock, children in tow, to pick us up. By now it was 1pm, and the van hire place closed at 1.30. I drove like a lunatic back to Enfield, and somehow made it in time to hire the new van. We drove it to Thurrock services, and re-loaded everything in the rain on the car park tarmac. Luckily another AA tow-truck arrived with perfect timing to deal with the wreck, and we were on our way. We finally made it to Calais at 6.30pm - when it had been planned for noon.

Somehow, with insane dashing through Europe and a snatched kip in Dortmund, we made it to Sweden by Monday night. It's very cold here. Snowing. But the team is re-assembled.

Living in an unsettled time

I've been back in the UK for just over a week, and it has been a very remarkable week. After our election last Thursday, it's got to Tuesday and it looks as if David Cameron might finally be about to limp battered and bruised into Number 10, having conceded vast amounts to a Lib-Dem party that actually didn't get anywhere like the number of votes it should have done on the basis of the campaign.

Everybody is treating this as if it's a bizarre event - but globally, and certainly in Europe, coalitions are the norm. In fact, Europe now has only three remaining majority governments - in France, Malta and (wait for it) Greece. Hardly a recipe for perfection, then. The fact is that coalitions, and their attendant negotiations, are the essence of a consensual democracy. In recent years, they have been waylaid by the centralising of party power in the leaders' offices. Before that, parties were also mini-coalitions, which only evolved in the first place to facilitate the inevitable process of give and take involved in forming a government. I said before the election that a hung Parliament would be the best result because it would re-vitalise our democracy - and nothing I have seen in the last few days undermines that idea. Who knows - we may even get a Tory-led government which brings in a form of PR and raises the tax-free allowance to help the poorest workers.

Talking of helping poor workers.... (!) we've had some positive results on some of our recent funding bids. The Swedish Embassy is helping us, as is the Commonwealth Foundation, and Nick Moran has some funding for the research aspect of lighting the show. It's still not as much as we need - so we've had to take the difficult decision to stage only Re-Orientations this autumn, rather than the full Trilogy. Which said - that's the new show and the one we are most proud of - so there's still a very big and exciting project here!

Also sent in another EU bid - this time for a project with Palestine. All fingers crossed, then....

The reviews for the Houston Xerxes are out. They are all really good - but here's a link to my favourite!

Sweden

I´m in Göteborg, and have been since Sunday night. This (at last) is the first hint of the Trilogy project coming together artistically, as I lead a workshop with our Swedish partner company, Teater Eksem. They are a young group, formed from drama school by several actors and a very dynamic producer, Filip Aiello. I found them through colleagues of colleagues when I was putting together the European proposal, and have got to know Filip quite well since (he and his partner Malin even came to Sidcup to see Attempts on her Life in the early part of the year) - but this is the first time I´ve encountered Malin and her colleagues as performers.

It was a calculated risk, I suppose. We needed European partners to secure the grant, and I was intrigued by the idea of introducing a Scandinavian element into this dialogue between Europe and Asia. Luckily, they turn out to be very talented, very open, and full of creative ideas. I feel a bit bad that only two of them will be chosen to work on the show.

The workshop has been far more than an audition process, though of course it fulfils that function. It´s also been the first chance to look at the material through Swedish eyes, and see what they may be able to add to the cocktail. We work on Strindberg (if ever there was a dramatist who had things to say about gender, it´s Strindberg), and on contemporary Swedish attitudes to Asia, to gender, to sexuality. We touch on the notorious porn industry. And, most fruitfully of all, we look at Swedish folklore. Until this week, I had never heard of the Näck. This mythic figure, much painted during the Romantic period, is an androgynous young man who plays the violin while sitting naked in water, and lures women to their doom. Given the Trilogy´s use of music, androgyny, Romanticism and drowning, this is a pretty resonant image for me! We work around the idea of Näck, and it begins to suggest many interactions with other areas of the work. Näck is pronounced "neck", and means "naked". He is a Water Sprite, a Trickster, and the ideal androgyne.

At the flat they've found for me, I spot on the bookshelves a study by Robert Lyons of a production of the Dream by the Götenborg director Eva Bergman. Having recently done the play (it finally closes tonight!), I´m curious to read what she did with it, and discover that she made use of a musician, whose image appears on the cover, based on Näck. Lyons discusses the folklore at some length, and the paintings of Näck by Ernst Josephson in the 1880s. He hints that there´s a further story here, when he says that Josephson "imbued the motive with an extraordinary vitality by channeling his own personal sufferings and conflicts through the figure".

As is this wasn´t synchronicity enough, I was sitting with Filip and Mia (one of the performers), waiting for a meeting, when who should walk into the coffee bar but Robert Lyons, who heads the drama department at the univesity here? So now we have a link to a researcher who has studied this figure in some depth, and is fascinated by the use we'll be making of him.

The meeting was with Birgitta Winnberg-Rydh, who is Artistic Director of the Göteborg Festival, and seems very excited by the idea of bringing the Trilogy here in 2010. It´s necessarily a brief chat, since this is Festival week, but the foundation is laid. It's a good week to be in Göteborg. I've seen Tim Etchells´piece with Belgian children (called That Night Follows Day), and heard him discuss his work at some length in the Open Lab curated by Ong Keng Sen (this being Sweden, the Open Lab can be held in English and nobody has any problem). I´ve also seen Akram Khan´s work with the National Ballet of China, bahok. Like our own work, this is concerned with the nomad, the migrant, with global diasporas and zones of transition. I loved his use of an airport departures board.

Tonight, I shall be staring at one myself, as I head back to London.