I Saw the End of the World

The Seven Streams of the River Ota

It seems horribly appropriate that the last piece of theatre I saw before the country went into lockdown was Robert Lepage's The Seven Streams of the River Ota. The play is overwhelmingly concerned with 'apocalyptic' catastrophes - the Hiroshima bomb, the Shoah, the AIDS epidemic. In the Lyttleton auditorium, for a sell-out theatrical occasion, there were empty seats all around.  Walking through Central London on a Saturday night, the streets were eerily deserted. Even the Gents loo was a markedly changed space, with orderly queues forming as men meticulously washed their hands.

I had seen the play twice before: once in a very early version, which concentrated largely on Jana Capek and her experiences in the Terezin camp; and then in the first full version of the mid 1990s. It was a significant, formative experience for me: I was fascinated by the global reach and epic scale of a piece that was also, in many ways, like a soap opera, and thrilled by its technical panache and daring theatricality. Lepage's great skill has always been the theatrical magic of transformation - by turning something into something else, he suggests all kinds of links between narrative moments and characters' experiences, frequently leaping across time and space. It was wonderful to revisit the stunning moment when a silhouette of a Japanese doll transforms into the living woman who gave the doll to her American lover as a present for his child - the meaning of the gift for the man becomes movingly present in the performer's body.

Perhaps it was because the production was so theatrically thrilling that I hadn't been quite so aware in the 90s of its deep preoccupation with cataclysmic events, or perhaps it was because the current context made the content so much more intense than the form? Looking over the published text, I realised that Lepage and his collaborators had made a number of alterations to the piece, and these also shifted the balance of the play. In the 90s, the director and company (and this spectator) were significantly younger, and there was a great sense of youthful energy in the play, resisting the potential for the events portrayed to provoke a nihilistic response. I remember hearing Lepage talk about the inspiration for the play being a visit he made to Hiroshima, where he had expected to find a city dominated by tragedy, and instead discovered vitality, creativity, energy. The 1996 text begins with a Prologue by the older Jana, which makes the same point: "If Hiroshima is a city of death and destruction, it is also a city of rebirth and survival." The current version begins instead with the figure of the child Hanako, blinded by the atomic bomb, and her elder self speaking far more portentous lines, which recur later in the show: "I saw the end of the world." So I don't think it was just me or the coronavirus - I think there was a real shift in the emphasis of the play.

I suppose this might be partly to do with the recent criticisms Lepage has received around issues of cultural appropriation. The cases of SLAV and Kanata have been much discussed - and I have written elsewhere about the question of representation in Ota.  Here's an extract from my Module on Post-Colonial Theatre for Rose Bruford College:

The issues around multi-lingualism in this play relate closely to the fact that it was created with international touring in mind, and so reflect the possibility of diverse audiences. Much of the play is about the business of being an audience, the act of looking. There’s one truly extraordinary moment at the end of the section about the older Jana looking at her own memories of Terezin, when “the lights switch so that the audience can see its own reflection in the downstage mirrors”. In an instant, our spectatorship of the event is foregrounded as a crucial part of the event’s meaning.

Yet, the question surely arises, who are ‘we’? With the exception of Jana, who is only the spectator figure in this one section, when she is also the object of the gaze as her younger self; the spectator figures in Ota tend to be Québécois. What’s more, Québécois on their travels. These figures, (e.g. Patricia, Walter, Sophie, Pierre) are observers, through whom we approach the Otherness of other cultures, whether this be Japan (as, for example, when Pierre, and the audience, watch Hanako’s demonstration of butoh) or Terezin (when Patricia interviews Jana).

This Québécois mediation is perhaps to be expected from a Québécois company – even the actress performing Hanako was Québécoise – but it suggests an assumption of audience viewpoint. In Québec, the play would probably have felt like a meditation on bi-lingual Québécois culture in the context of globalisation. Indeed, in his film Nō, Lepage reworks sections of the play alongside a narrative about the referendum on Québec’s proposed secession from the rest of Canada. This audience would, crucially, have understood all the passages in both French and English. There would therefore be no sense of any of the North American or Western European characters as Other: that status is reserved for the Czechs and the Japanese. To other Canadian audiences, however, the French passages would have been more obscure, having the effect of making the play a statement about the Québécois culture as itself Other to them. It’s the Québécois audience that would have related most fully to the way French becomes a langue-identité in the play.

For a European audience (and, as the list of tour dates in the front of the printed script suggests, most of the audiences were European), the play’s effect would be different again. European languages and theatre forms are the main route in to the play, so this audience also feels close to the Québécois tourist characters. For them, however, the specific Canadian resonance of their bi-lingualism is not so important (or, perhaps, even apparent). The use of French simply becomes another part of the play’s post-modern engagement with the global village, another site for the audience’s essential process of translation (of which much is made in the play).

The one audience which would, I feel, have responded very differently to the play is the Japanese one: the only audience for this ‘global’ project which was not from the Western hemisphere (though, like all the rest, it was from the Northern hemisphere). Japanese culture is presented in the play through the mediating gaze of the Québécois tourists (and the American soldier Luke). This is, in many ways, a commendable thing for Lepage to have done: he hasn’t presumed to know Japanese culture from inside. But this makes it all the odder to present the finished work to an audience who do know the culture, because they live it. To see oneself presented as Other must be strange indeed.

The 2020 version of the play has certainly taken on board much of the criticism around casting: the Japanese characters are now played by actors with East Asian heritage, and Hanako's appearance at the start of the play makes for a stark contrast with the European mediation offered by Jana's Prologue. The opening speech being given to this blind Japanese woman had the effect of distancing the audience from the material, rather than drawing them in. This was actually very powerful, as the subsequent sequence around the American soldier Luke and his slowly developing love for Hanako's mother Nozomi is an example of a Western character leading the audience into a relationship with a Japanese Other, and that was constantly offset by our ongoing awareness of Hanako's prologue. So I found it all the stranger that the order of the Parts had been altered, so that the adult Hanako was first encountered as a translator for Québécois visitors to Japan, rather than (as in the 1996 version) as a compassionate presence at the assisted suicide of her half-brother. This made her ancillary to the Québécois characters, rather than a powerful presence with her own agency.

I suspect this change of order reflects another aspect of the artists' shift over a quarter century, which is a more circumspect approach to sexuality. In the original structure, the French farce on tour in Japan and its parallels in the lives of performers and diplomats came quite late on, with the play acquiring a more comic tone as it rushed towards a climactic celebration of life and zest, particularly in the Québécois dancer Pierre's sexual liaisons with both Hanako and her son David. In the 2020 version, which reflects a post-#MeToo mentality, David has disappeared as a character, and the sexual element in Pierre's encounter with Hanako is hugely downplayed in comparison with their artistic relationship. The seedy diplomat Walter no longer seems a figure of fun after Weinstein, and the weirdly erotic Japanese puppet play, which was theatrically extraordinary in 1996, has completely disappeared. I guess it was problematic both in terms of racial and sexual politics - but I still rather missed it.

Without the growing sexual energy of the latter sections, the seven-hour play seemed less resolved than in 1996 - and maybe that also reflects the uncertainty of the current moment. The play still ends with a Québécois artist making work that attempts to bring many cultural strands together: all of Lepage's pieces seem to end in this way, even Kanata, but it no longer seems to carry the conviction that creativity is the answer to everything. The new Ota is rightly aware of our current moment as a time of disturbance and deep uncertainty.

We left the theatre, and locked ourselves into our homes. When we emerge again, there will be huge questions around how we can meet and gather in our theatres, our polities, our globalised space.

Jatinder Verma

Back in 1990, I took my parents to see Tartuffe at the National Theatre. It was a long way from the powdered periwigs and camp capering they had expected. This was Jatinder Verma’s production - the first by any non-white director at the National - and he had, characteristically, set it in 17th century India, and employed an acting style to match the transmogrification. Mudras and accented English offered a perfect parallel to the manners of Moliere’s France, the body language as coded as traditional Asian theatre, the rhyming couplets as sing-song as the “Binglish” delivery that Jatinder drew from his performers.

Jatinder’s presence on a National stage was not simply a progressive gesture by Richard Eyre, embracing the changing ethnic and cultural make-up of 20th century Britain.  It was a statement of intent, from both directors, as to what cultural diversity ought to mean. Jatinder didn’t direct a play from India, or one dealing with Asian people in Britain (although he certainly can do both, and frequently has with Tara Arts). On the National stage, he laid claim to a European classic - and he has many times applied his resolutely distinct Asian style of performance in that genre, including Shakespeare as well as Moliere. He has always been incredibly bold: he states his right to address “our” classic texts, and to do them in his own way. His productions are absolutely about cross-cultural dialogues and interactions - but they emphatically refuse assimilation.

It’s a stance we really need at the moment. Thirty years on from that memorable Tartuffe, the National, and the arts in general, are apparently far more “diverse”, with black and Asian people engaged, and often leading, right across the sector. It’s undoubtedly positive that the arts and culture are more representative of the society from which they emerge. But I can’t help feeling that a lot of this apparent “diversity” is - literally - skin deep, and that people of colour are performing, both on and off stage, in exactly the same way as their white counterparts. I recognise that second and third generation migrants may well feel themselves to be as fully British as white people - but that doesn’t stop me questioning whether it is really “cultural diversity” if the cultural product itself remains essentially unchanged, and therefore the cultural and social assumptions remain intact. It’s very rare nowadays that we see anything as bold, as challenging, as Jatinder’s confrontations with the classics.

Over the years, he has become a friend and an ally. We’ve co-produced CONSUMED with his company Tara Arts, and will be presenting THE GREAT EXPERIMENT in their beautiful new theatre in February. Jatinder and I have had many conversations about the arts landscape, about theatre in Britain, India and Africa, about the politics of the aesthetic. I was genuinely shocked when he emailed on Tuesday morning to say he would be stepping down from Tara at the end of the year.  It feels like the ravens leaving the Tower of London - the company he has run since 1976 feels totally synonymous with him.  I hope we’ll still be able to see his work and to hear his voice: he stands against the blandness and sameness, the complacency that can so easily creep into our art form.

Imperious spaces

Hellerau

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Germany for a meeting on our MORE THAN WORDS project, and took the opportunity to pop down to Dresden, where Avatâra Ayuso was showing her extraordinary new dance piece UKI - a collaboration with Ink elder Naulaq Ledrew.  I'll probably have more to say about the performance at a future time - today I want to write a bit about the theatre itself, and some thoughts it stirred around space, history and culture.

Hellerau is on the outskirts of Dresden.  Travelling there does not feel like a journey to a major European arts space: the suburb sits within a forest, and is deliberately not "urban".  It was built in the early 20th century, as Eastern Germany's version of the Garden City movement - with the vast Festival Theatre incongruously surrounded by rather twee, Hansel-and-Gretel style workers cottages. The theatre site, on the other hand, is vast and imposing.  It reminded me of the Cartoucherie in Paris - partly because of its sheer scale and the resonance of workmanlike celebration in the spaces, and partly because, like that disused ammunition factory, it carries a military history.  That's good for a theatre - these are spaces where explosions should happen...  

In the case of Hellerau, however, engaging with the history remains a challenge, to say the least.  The theatre's website coyly remarks: "in the 1930s it served as a military camp; later the Soviet army used it as their barracks."  The 1930s were, of course, the Nazi era - and it's clear how the combination of the theatre's austere and imposing facade and its folksy surroundings made it deeply appealing to deranged nationalism.  The open space in front of the theatre used to be called "Adolf Hitler Platz".  Of course, that name no longer features on any map, but the space has never been re-named, and so suffers from an uneasy anonymity.

Has Germany really come to terms with its past?  These days, the discourse around Nazism is deafening in its silence.  It was an attempt to confront that past that led to the Baader- Meinhof Gang, and (more productively) to much of the disturbing power in the drama of Heiner Müller and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  Gerhard Richter (himself from Dresden) uses his art to tackle the deliberate suppression of memory in German culture.  Otherwise, all you see are a few ghosts - the little bronze plaques that mark the last sightings of German Jews in the streets of Berlin, the Jewish Museum, bizarre survivors like the Olympic Stadium.  Hellerau is full of ghosts - and to my mind it would be a much more powerful and evocative arts space if it were to embrace that, rather than rebuilding everything to a de-historicised, virginal blankness.  I would love to see it preserve the military "look", the imposing vastness of the square that threatens to become a car park, the peeling plaster on the outer walls of the former barracks walls.  In such a space of memory the wonderful progressive initiatives of the theatre - its Refugee Arts Centre, its Intercultural Garden - would acquire deeper meaning and resonance, being located in a continuum with history.  I can see it is uncomfortable to maintain that past - but it is actually what gives energy and hope to the present and the future.

Translations

I was still mulling these thoughts when I went to see Brian Friel's great play Translations at the National Theatre.  The reviews for this production have been adulatory, and justifiably so.  Translations remains one of the greatest plays about the process of colonisation - the way in which systems of oppression are established in the minds of the oppressed, partly by a discourse of superiority, but also by a wiping out of language, of history, and so of identity.  In my mind, it sat with Hellerau in a ying and yang relation - if oppression is made through the obliteration of folk memory, then might not that process be just as dangerous when applied to the oppressor?

The National's decision to present the play is laudable for precisely that reason.  It is the second time in recent years that a great post-colonial play, a theatre piece striking back against our country's imperial history, has been staged in the Olivier Theatre (the first was Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman).  I can see the reasoning - and yet somehow the vastness of the Olivier space, its sheer imperial bombast, its architecture of national arrogance, militated against the play's attitude of delicate resistance on a human scale.  Translations is set in a hedge school - a space that is theatrically powerful in relation to the invading army precisely because it is small and poor.  And the most effective response to the army does not come from anger or (offstage) violence, but through the cultural engagement followed by the schoolmaster Hugh and the emotional engagement of the "peasant" Máire.  It's one of the play's many provocative ironies that Máire views the English language, and her burgeoning love for the English Lieutenant Yolland as a means of potential escape into a "modern" world; while Yolland responds to the "authentic" and "natural" world that Ireland and Máire seem to present to him.  Their great scene of mutual comprehension and incomprehension - when Máire the "uneducated" switches from Irish to Latin in an attempt to communicate and the "educated" colonist doesn't even realise she has done so - is played with great delicacy and warmth; but I couldn't help feeling that its point was intimacy and physical proximity, and that the scale of the theatre was expressing almost exactly the political opposite of the play.

Aboriginality on the London stage

Nicôle Lecky in This Heaven

In the past week, I have seen two very distinct representations of Aboriginal Australia on the London stage.  The first was a play by an indigenous Australian writer, Nakkiah Lui's This Heaven, which has just finished its run at the Finborough.  I was asked to take part in a post-show panel discussion, which, given the play's concern with the issue of deaths in custody, inevitably turned to Beautiful One Day, and also to Bullie's House (the latter ends with a death in custody, although here the implication is that the Aboriginal man dies because of his separation from land and community, rather than as a direct result of police brutality).  Like both of those plays (to a greater or lesser degree), This Heaven is the result of the Belvoir Theatre's sustained engagement with indigenous culture - and so it is perhaps all the more disturbing to hear in it the voice of discontented Aboriginal youth, in the character of the trainee lawyer Sissy, expressing fury that even her success as an indigenous person is measured in terms of a white world view.  But isn't this exactly the problem of the whole "development" agenda?  We measure "improvements" in the post-colonial space and the lot of indigenous peoples solely in terms of how close they can come to our way of living.  We praise them for becoming more like us, and lament our own failings when they refuse to do so.  We assume that economic prosperity is the only measure of human endeavour, and we impose this on those whom our ancestors once conquered.  Theatre may be as guilty as every other field of endeavour, and Lui is right to provoke.

Gary Wood in Our Country's Good

I was still thinking about these concerns when, the next night, I saw the National Theatre's production of Our Country's Good.  In spite of its "modern classic" status, I'd actually never seen the play before - though I knew Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, on which it is based.  Since Tom also wrote Bullie's House, I had expected another nuanced and provocative engagement with Aboriginal culture.  Indeed, The Playmaker is dedicated to "Arabanoo and his brethren, still dispossessed", in a direct acknowledgment of Aboriginal man who worked to build a relationship with Captain Arthur Philip, whose expedition to Australia forms the background to the story.  In Tom's novel, this relationship is central - but in the play, it has been abandoned.  There remains, however, the figure of "The Aborigine", whom the text shows as speaking four times in a direct audience address.  These moments have the potential to be powerful theatrical interventions in the colonial narrative: for example, the second scene of the play is titled "A lone Aboriginal Australian describes the arrival of the First Convict Fleet in Botany Bay on January 20, 1788", and the spoken text reads: "A giant canoe drifts onto the sea, clouds billowing from upright oars.  This is a dream which has lost its way.  Best to leave it alone."

This language is sparse, poetic and evocative.  It was also totally lost in the National production.  I'm not sure if it was even spoken, or, if it was, whether it was spoken in English.  Certainly there was no contact between the Aboriginal character and the audience.  Every production decision was calculated to make him distant and "Other" - exotic, and therefore of no concern to us.  Michael Billington's review talks of him "exerting some mysterious Puck-like power", as if the indigenous were literally another world.  The production brings him into the action whenever there is violence or cruelty between the white characters, as if he were the embodiment of their savagery.  This is about as far from the open spirit of Belvoir as it is possible to get - and it really saddens me to see it on Britain's national stage in the 21st century.

Well done Tessa

Tessa Ross

It takes a brave person to step down from what could be considered the top job in British theatre within a few weeks of taking the reins.  Tessa Ross is clearly a brave person.  We don't know the ins and outs of her decision to leave, but we know it seems pretty amicable, and that both she and Rufus Norris felt that the model of a Chief Executive supervising the Artistic Director just wasn't working.

It's a model that the National sneaked in.  When Norris was announced as Nick Hytner's successor, the general sense was that he would be Director of the National in the same way that the previous five had been - the person at the head of the organisation, leading it artistically, with the administrative staff reporting to him.  The senior post arrived with no fanfares, but senior it was.  This has happened with disturbing regularity in recent times, particularly but not only in larger organisations, presumably because boards have been feeling that in the age of Osborne business acumen is what keeps arts organisations on track.  "Balances the books".  The extreme of this is the ENO board's response to being placed in special measures by the Arts Council: hiring as Chief Executive a seconded management consultant with no arts experience at all.

They could not be more wrong.  When an arts organisation does well - by which I mean produces work of quality and significance which excites and builds audiences - it is always because of the vision of the artist who makes the work.  An artistic leader does not always operate in direct relationship to the work - Nick Hytner programmed seasons with plenty of other directors involved - but it is always the result of an artist's vision and ideas.  When an arts organisation does badly - by which I mean produces work which is dull and loses the interest of the audience - it is usually because they are trying to "be more commercial", to "give the audience what they want", to be led by commercial rather than artistic considerations.  What audiences actually want is to be surprised and inspired.  Which is not something you can do with a business plan.

The ENO's troubles do not come from a poor business model.  They come from a crisis in an art form that does not currently know how to respond to the 21st century, and which needs a new creative drive if it is to flourish.  Business planning and sound financial management are all well and good - but they have to serve artistic ideas, rather than dictating them.

Tessa Ross is not a management consultant.  She was OUDS President when she was a student, and started her career as a director.  She's been a very successful film producer.  So, at a guess, she could see that what was needed at the National was real artistic leadership, which is something that in the end has to come from a real artistic leader.  I think she's done a brave and noble thing, and I hope the Arts Council and the boards of arts organisations take note.

We might also apply the same model to the election.  Everyone is talking about their ability to manage and to "balance the books".  Nobody is talking about their vision for the future.  Where, oh where, have real leadership and imagination gone?

Indoors and Outdoors

The Duchess of Malfi

I was lucky enough to go to the new Sam Wannamaker Playhouse at the Globe recently, to see its opening production, The Duchess of Malfi.  I've always had a soft spot for Webster - if that's the right term...  not least because my first ever professional production was The White Devil.  Never believed in making life easy for myself.  Not that this particular evening was really about the play - except in so far as it made sense to choose a piece that took place mainly in the dark.

The production is a fascinating experiment in how the indoor theatres of the Jacobean period might have functioned - and it suggests that this new space may well prove even more revelatory than the restored Globe has done.  After all, most of the great plays of the Jacobean age (including the major Shakespearean tragedies) started out in spaces like this - only moving to the Globe stage later on.  I often wonder how a play like Malfi or Macbeth would have coped with the transfer.  This Malfi is occasionally illuminated by the artificial "daylight" that comes through the playhouse windows, but most of the time the shutters are closed, and the space relies on an ever-shifting palette of candlelight.  There are chandeliers that fly from high above the stage to the level of the actors feet - candles on pillars, candles held by the performers.  There is a whole bank of votive candles illuminating the wax effigy of Antonio and the children.  And, of course, there is darkness - real, total darkness, when Ferdinand gives his sister the dead man's hand.  What is really wonderful is the way the candlelight reflects off the gilding which is so present in the decoration of the space, and the jewelled costumes of the performers.  In the 17th century, there would have been just as much metallic glitter on the clothes of the audience, which must have generated a magical glow, and a sense of complicity between stage and auditorium, as both areas were caught in an elevated, transformed, religiose world.

King Lear

I was still thinking about this when I saw the National's King Lear a week later.  Sam Mendes has read it in part as a play about homelessness, and that's fascinating, given the preoccupation of the Jacobean stage with indoors and outdoors.  Lear in an indoor space like the Wannamaker would be the intimate family drama of the interior: Lear in the Olivier is closer to the Globe - demanding acting that defies the scale of open space.  But the secret of the play is surely in the dialectic set up between the two - the sense of home, of family, even of love, set against the impersonal vastness of the elements and the implacable amorality of an atavistic universe bereft of gods.

Greeks

I went to see Timon of Athens at the National on Friday.  I doubt many other people there had seen the play at all - I have the dubious privilege of remembering two previous productions.  Jonathan Pryce played Timon for the BBC a very long time ago - and David Suchet did it at the Young Vic, with Trevor Nunn directing.  The Nunn-Suchet one was the production that made me think this really could be a very exciting play for the present money-obsessed age - and to keep suggesting it as a show I'd like to direct to American Shakespeare companies.  Needless to say, nobody ever rose to the bait.  Shame.

The timing for the current revival could hardly be better.  Financial crisis - and Greece getting the worst of it (I liked the irony of the production in the Globe to Globe Festival being by a company from Germany).  But Nick Hytner hasn't gone anywhere near Greece - his Athens is unequivocally London, with various iconic landmarks making appearances in the set, and hints at current movements, politics and even individuals (Tracy Emin is definitely the model for the Painter!).  The reviews have been glowing, and I expected this to be another moment like his Henry V at the time of Iraq, when Nick brings a bit of Shakespeare right into the present moment.  In the first half, he does.  Lots of it is quite jokey, but the jokes work - and when Simon Russell Beale is left alone on stage before the interval for the first blast of misanthropy, it is truly electrifying.  But the play, which becomes one long rant after the interval, doesn't allow this to be sustained. It's hard to see where any of it is going.

I've always felt that the most challenging element of the text is Alcibiades - and it's not a bad idea to equate his dissent with Occupy.  Really to pull it off would need much more textual doctoring, I think  - and more ensemble work.  The crowd acting is very "blocked" - you don't feel the mass movement.  When Nick ends the piece by having Alcibiades and his main cronies absorbed into the suited world of the bankers, it should be a cynical staging triumph - but somehow it isn't, because we don't really sense that there is anything to betray.

Alaknanda, who went with us, told me that Mike Alfreds (great and now overlooked director) is feeling very unhappy about the theatre in the UK at the moment.  Actors, he says, are just playing manufactured caricatures of themselves.  It was an interesting thought to carry into Kristine Landon-Smith's workshop on intracultural approaches to Greek drama, which she invited me to visit this morning.  Kristine was working with young actors from a very wide range of diverse backgrounds - lots of South Asians, with all the variety of that community today, and also people from (for example) West Country vicarages.  What was fascinating was the way she hardly bothered about "the character" or "the text" at all.  What interests her is the actor, the actor's imagination, the actor's voice.  Her way in to Greek tragedy was to place each actor in a situation they could relate to and perform in their own voice - and the situations were not necessarily even related to that in the text.  But, in the instances where the performers responded well, it was astonishingly freeing.  As in our own work, the key to interculturalism is for people to work from who they are - not to attempt to fit into some preconceived idea of what mainstream performance should be. 

Peter Sellars on Africa

A fantastic evening at the Africa Centre last week, with our Patron, Peter Sellars, talking on the theme Dialogue with Africa.  It's the first time we've been able to include Peter directly in our work (apart from his inimitable programme notes and Foreword to the Trilogy book), and so a really exciting event for us.  We're in the thick of a whole series of Africa-related projects: Sunshine on a Rainy Day was great a few weeks back, and now we're doing a whole series of events with the Africa Centre for the Africa Salon - watch this space!  Alongside that, we're developing an arts and cultural strategy for Botswana, and a number of potential new theatre projects in a number of countries.  And there's written material about Shakespeare in Africa on its way.....

All of this coincided with Peter bringing his production Desdemona to the Barbican, where it performs next week.  I saw (or perhaps I should say heard) the piece last year in Berkeley, and thought it was fantastic.  Toni Morrison has re-imagined Othello in terms of Desdemona's after-life, and her dialogues with other dead, including Barbary, her mother's maid.  The name, in Shakespeare's time, meant "Africa" - and so Toni and Peter's idea is that Desdemona was brought up by a black woman.  This role, played by the great Malian musician Rokia Traoré, brings an authentic African voice into the production.  As Peter says, Shakespeare's Africa was exotic and imagined - today our engagement with Africa has to be real and human.  It's a very strong case for the kind of work we do: creative collaborations between artists from wildly differing cultures.  Peter explains that these are not simple things to engineer, but that is the "harsh reality of shared space".

I'm not going to blog about this at length, because the talk was videoed by the National Theatre archive for their new black theatre site, and we'll be putting it on our site too.  Suffice to say that a packed room hung on his every word: he really is the personification of passion when it comes to intercultural theatre. 

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl

It was wonderful to see this play on Saturday night.  For one thing, I had known the text and its reputation for years, but never actually caught a performance, in spite of chances at the Almeida and Stratford East.  Now it's got a production at the National, and I finally got to see that it's every bit as good as I suspected.  And then some.  The play was written in 1958, only two years after Look Back in Anger - but its portrayal of life in the desperate poverty of Trinidad certainly shows up British plays from the time for the bourgeois whinges they were.  Errol John's characters are struggling to hold their lives together - and have their own idiosyncratic ways of doing so, from the never-ending graft of Sophia, to the opportunistic thieving of Charlie and Mavis selling her body to any passing American sailor.  You can understand why Ephraim wants to leave - and you so want him not to, because he'll only leave more havoc in his wake.

The production is fabulous - tons of local detail, reminding us of Mauritius (Nisha recognised exactly the cookery technique being used by Sophia).  The acting is wonderful - with Martina Laird incredible as the tough and witty Sophia.  And it was great to see my old friend Jude Akuwudike as Charley - here they both are in the picture.  Jude and I acted together in our student days - which seem rather a long time ago now!

Frankenstein

The National Theatre's production of Frankenstein has been given some of the best reviews I've seen in years, and is a massive sell-out hit. So I was a bit surprised to find that it's not really all it's cracked up to be.

Benedict Cumberbatch was the Creature on Saturday, and he was undoubtedly brilliant. The opening scene, in which he emerges from a womb-like drum into life, was a tour de force. But the world into which he emerged was basically a series of effects from the National's massive budget, with nods at Les Mis in the form of snarling 19th century prostitutes. There was even a train. Not that I'm one to object to visual flamboyance in the theatre - but it needs to be done with a sense of meaning, and not just for show.

The crux of Mary Shelley's novel is the character of Frankenstein himself, the Modern Prometheus, and the question as to why he should create life, only to abandon it. In this production, for all the gimmick of the leading actors swapping roles, the character became a cipher, only of interest to the director and playwright in so far as he encounters the Creature. But without Frankenstein's urge to create, there is no Creature - so why should we care?

Heresy, I know.....

Alaknanda's wisdom

Long chat with Alaknanda Samarth. As so often, she is incredibly inspiring, even in her deep pessimism about the present moment. "How can you put on stage the fact that everything is falling apart?" she asks me. "Even language". Of course - she's hit the nail on the head. That is the challenge - and a huge one.

I have some ideas, but they really need to be tried out experimentally. Alak tells me to contact the National Theatre Studio. Just as I decide to do so - they contact me. Which is a very exciting development indeed!

Two actors, Jeremy Tiang and Julia Sandiford, invited me to a play called Limehouse Nights. It's about the Chinatown which was in Limehouse in the 19th century, and is performed in the dilapidated old Limehouse Town Hall. A beautiful sense of ghosts hanging over East London.

The Observer

I saw The Observer at the National the other night. Two reasons for going: firstly that it's a new play about Africa, which is always of interest; and second that Joy Richardson (who played Olivia when our Twelfth Night went to Zimbabwe) is in it. Joy plays the mother of a young man who's been beaten up during a supposedly "free" election, for ferrying people to the polling station on his motorbike. The underlying point is that the people in the rural areas of this fictional African country (coyly un-named, but reminiscent of Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nigeria and even hinting at Ghana) are more likely to vote for "the leader of the opposition", and so become targets for the bullying tactics of "the President". What's interesting in the play is that the "democratic" opposition is the preferred candidate of the western powers in terms of trade, getting their hands on resources etc., and the altruistic heroine finds herself becoming their unconscious agent as she endeavours to get voters to register. The fact that her encouragement is concentrated in the rural areas also compromises the apparent objectivity of the international observer. It's intelligent, and at times very powerful - but I found it a bit Shavian, with the characters existing primarily to voice particular viewpoints, and the African voice being denied. Joy's big scene is wonderfully acted (of course), but it's almost entirely in Igbo, and so relies for its effect on her emotional performance, rather than on the articulation of viewpoint. The figure of the translator is, symbolically enough, the only African character who is explored in any depth, and his role as translator seems so specific that he only really exists to explain. It's difficult territory, of course. But it did make me feel that we're right to be looking to create our work through many different voices, rather than looking at ourselves looking at "the Other". There's a reason this play is called The Observer.