Barking

I've been on a semi-sabbatical from Border Crossings over the last few weeks (although I've still been having to do the financial reports for the EU through the evenings and weekends....), with Lance looking after the office and fundraising. I've been in rehearsals for Howard Barker's play The Europeans, which opened last night at the Unicorn. It's a final year student production for Rose Bruford - so it only plays four performances - two more today and one tomorrow afternoon. Which is a shame after five weeks of very intense rehearsals!

I've enjoyed working on the play very much - partly because the students are terrific, and partly because the text is fascinating. It's the second Barker I've done - the previous one was Victory, also at Bruford. In each case I've found that it feels horribly obscure when you first read it, but yields more and more depth, humour and energy as you go on. The Europeans is set against the background of the Siege of Vienna - so it's about a war between the Western powers and Islam... which is pretty relevant to us at the moment.... So we've found ways of setting the piece simultaneously in the 17th century and right now. Somehow it doesn't seem to jar at all.

The Unicorn is a wonderful space. The auditorium curves around a quite intimate downstage area, and then there is a huge open space behind. This means we can make some scenes very intense and others incredibly epic. It's as if the space breathes, moving between the public and the private. Like the Greek theatres.

Tony came last night, as did Carissa, and they both seemed to enjoy themselves! I also got to meet Gerrard McArthur, who is Associate Director of The Wrestling School. he said we had really found the style which Barker's work demands. So that was nice....

Rehearsal as refuge

I have spent the entire weekend doing accounts. And I mean the entire weekend. From 9am to 9pm Saturday and from 9am to 7pm today, with brief meal breaks and a quick trip to Tescos. This was not what attracted me to the theatre as a career. Last weekend was very similar, and next weekend promises to be even worse.

In my spare time, I am directing Howard Barker's The Europeans for Rose Bruford. It's a final-year production, so the actors and team are trained and ready for the profession, which means the quality of their work is very high. It feels like a holiday to go into the rehearsal room with them - though this is meant to be the real work. Bizarre.

On the train down to Sidcup on Friday, I had a long chat about this with Iain Reekie, the Head of Acting. He said he felt much the same, rehearsing another of the shows. For him, the tension is around the fact that the future of higher education generally, and drama schools in particular, is so uncertain right now. He, and the other Bruford staff, are all caught up in a web of politics and finance like the one that's dogging me. And, like me, he finds the rehearsal room to be a refuge. A safe haven in a storm.

Canada, the Arctic - Howard Barker

I've been at Canada House quite a lot this week. On Monday, I was talking about Origins at an academic conference on Aboriginal Studies. I think the idea was that I should be a bit of light relief at the end of the day, after all the academic papers. As it turned out, this meant I had very little time available - so I extemporised as best I could, saying I would try to be like a First Nations person and not let the pressure of time get the better of me. I managed to talk about the Theatre and Healing workshop at least, and to make the crucial point that Yves and Catherine had been very generous with the Huron-Wendat culture, and had shown ways forward to people from a very diverse range of backgrounds. This points to the fact that scholars studying indigenous people can't just watch them from the outside, or look at the problems in the society and history in a scientific way. We are implicated in this - and so we need the healing too. So we should be doing more than learning about these people - we should be learning from them.

Tuesday night took me back there to see Atanarjuat - one of the films in the series about the Arctic that Canada House is showing in association with Origins. It's an incredible piece of work: with an entirely Inuit cast and director (Zacharias Kunuk), and in Inuktitut with subtitles. Imagine the organisational feat! But more than that, it is completely a film that emerges from the specific culture and landscape of the Inuit. It doesn't give cultural information as information - you just come to realise certain assumptions and ideas through the narrative itself. So, when a woman commits adultery, the man's wife says to her: "He's your brother-in-law. You're not even supposed to speak to him, never mind sleep with him."

Wednesday night, by way of contrast, takes me to Riverside Studios to see the latest Howard Barker play, presented by The Wrestling School. Chris Corner, the General Manager, is an old friend (he's administered several projects for us), and he's on fine form. In fact, I'm amazed to see from the programme that the Arts Council has cut its funding to this company, and it is now living off a private benefactor. In terms of production values and acting standards, it has done them no harm at all. In fact, the production is probably the finest I've seen from the company. The play itself, Found in the Ground, is very much in the vein of Barker's recent work - clearly about the process of ageing, and the fight to cling on to a sexual energy which goes with that. Barker has always associated sex and death - and he does it particularly violently here. Much of the play feels very ritualised, which is in keeping with its subjects, and turns it towards installation art. But I felt it lost its way when Hitler appeared as a rather benign character, chatting about art, and there were a great many false endings. Still - he is always incredibly brave.

At Riverside, I met up with Susie Self, who is a singer and composer, and was in Nixon in China in Greece. She saw the Re-Orientations showing, and is very excited about it. She's interested in writing music for us, and suggests that she try and do a couple of substitute bits for Re-Orientations, just to see if it works. From such beginnings.....