Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking

Ben Evans at Oval House has brought a show over from South Africa - I was at the Press Night yesterday. The company is Magnet Theatre from Cape Town. The play has a wonderful title - Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking - and that title is horribly appropriate to the theme of displaced people. As the richest country on the African continent (though I bet that's sometimes pretty hard to remember in Soweto), South Africa is the goal for most African refugees. I'd heard quite a lot about the Zimbabwean exodus to South Africa: the characters in this play come from a Francophone country - it's not specified which one.

And, in a way, that's my concern about the piece. It's very sympathetic in its portrayal of refugees, and it's very theatrical - but the characters are just refugees... we don't know from what, or from where, or how the political or cultural or social meltdown which displaced them occurred. And so the play becomes sentimental - it doesn't allow us to be moved to action, only to pity. It doesn't allow us to feel in any way implicated. And we are.

Because of this, all the theatricality (and there's lots, and it's impressive) doesn't really work for me. It's not in the service of real storytelling - it looks whizzkidding. I probably would be more positive about it, except that I've been studying a lot of work about refugees recently for a new MA Module I'm creating for Rose Bruford, and I've come to feel that contextualising the stories, as well as allowing the refugees to be heard, is crucial. The best example is Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravanserail. When I met her, she said that play was "A punch on the nose. For everybody."

Post-colonial Scotland, post-revolutionary China

Nisha and I saw David Greig's new play for the RSC at Hampstead. It's called Dunsinaine, and begins with the English army advancing towards the castle with branches in hand. So we're definitely post-Macbeth. I remember when we did Macbeth in Mauritius being interested by the fact that the colonialism actually comes at the end of the play, with Malcolm being swept into kingship by conquering forces. Most post-colonial productions, especially in Africa, make Macbeth the Mugabe-figure - but it's actually a bit more complex than that. Greig's play is concerned with the next stage - and the analogy with Iraq and even Afghanistan is very clear. You go in to topple a tyrant, you put in a puppet ruler, and the country degenerates into chaos.

My other little cultural treat this week was a Chinese film from 1964, called Two Stage Sisters. I went to see it because it's about Yueju, and Yueju before the Revolution at that. The film begins in the 30s, with a group of travelling performers in the countryside, and moves to Shanghai during the war years, ending after the establishment of the PRC. It was fantastic to spot the locations - especially the Peace Hotel and the wonderful Yi Fu Theatre - still today much as it was in the 40s. The revolutionary iconography is fascinating: early on, there's a moment when the main actress is strapped to a post, dressed in red, in a clear echo of The Red Detachment of Women, and near the end she's seen performing The White-Haired Girl. It's hardy subtle stuff: the last line is "Let us re-educate ourselves diligently, and always perform revolutionary operas". And yet, this film was banned in the Cultural Revolution. Apparently the fact that the performer who buys into decadence and capitalism is forgiven and re-habilitated was considered corrupt.

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11 and 12... and 14

A rich and fascinating couple of nights in the theatre, linked by West Africa and not much else. Peter Brook's 11 and 12 is based on the autobiography of the Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, and is largely concerned with debates (turning into conflicts) about how many times a particular Islamic prayer should be recited. Actually, there is only one scene in which you get to see any real conflict portrayed, so most of the time you have to take it on trust that what is being portrayed is a society in turmoil - it all looks and sounds rather peaceful and beautiful, with a wonderful Japanese musician sitting on the side of the stage, accompanying every action with a delicate soundscape. The main focus is on wise men sitting under trees, whose words may suggest that they are engaged in the world around them, but whose manner in performance implied to me that they were "rising above it". Whatever that's supposed to mean.

The best work I've seen by Brook has been fired by the energy of the immediate - like his Sizwe Banzi is Dead a couple of years ago (admittedly a bit late to protest against apartheid - but it felt like a lived piece of work). Where I part company from him is in his belief that there is something to be expressed through theatre that is "universal", and that stories from Africa and Asia are valuable not for what they say about the context from which they arise, but for "humanity". Of course, the West has much to learn from Africa (and vice-versa), but the reason for this is the difference between us, not the similarity. In his post-show talk (which was a tour de force, I may say), Brook explained that his first attempt to dramatise this story had been "very African", whereas now he was working with "humanity". In practice, this meant that the two wise men were played by Palestinian actors.....

Now - there's no doubt that these guys are very fine performers. But don't tell me they related to the story just because they were "human". And don't tell me that the audience simply read them as "human". Their presence was a clear and immediate reminder of another political conflict arising from a religious background. There's nothing "universal" about this resonance - and it's no less "spiritual" for that. Our spirituality is at its most profound when it engages with the actualities of our existence.

By contrast, I also went to the press night of The 14th Tale at the National. Rare to see the National take on something like this - a solo performance by a young black man, largely in the form of performance poetry. His name is Inua Ellams, and he manages to be very accurate in his portrayal of Nigeria, England and Ireland; of childhood and young adulthood; of family... and very funny indeed.

Peter Brook

Peter Brook is in London at the moment - his production of 11 and 12 is at the Barbican this month, and there's also a retrospective of films. On Thursday I went to see his film about Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men, which he introduced himself - and today I've been at a lecture he gave for the Directors Guild.

I wrote a while ago in this blog about the importance of finding Elders in our culture, and receiving wisdom from them in the same way it's done among First Nations peoples. Peter Brook is certainly an Elder among directors. He's 85 next month. When I was just starting out, I was reading his books and studying his productions as "the model", and realising that all the model told me was that you had to keep changing, and that there was no specific doctrinaire method. It's amazing that he is still making fresh and challenging work - as I hope I will be in 40 years time.

Of course, this guru status isn't entirely a positive thing. The audience at this afternoon's lecture (which was actually more of a chat) was packed with famous faces - Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, Richard Eyre chairing it, Mike Leigh, Michael Morris.... so it was important that Brook didn't simply allow himself to be feted. Asked how he'd liked to be remembered, he replied that he didn't want to be remembered at all - except perhaps on a small scale by people he had worked with directly, and to whom he had passed on some sense of the craft. Of course, he will be remembered - if only for the books, which will doubtless be turned into "a theory" - but I think he's right to be cautious about this. Our art of theatre is ephemeral - and so are our lives. Maybe all the archiving and writing about theatre is actually just over-loading us. Maybe we need a little less theory and a bit more playfulness. On Thursday, he carried the same idea further, when Graham Sheffield introduced him in "god has condescended to come among us" terms, and the whole audience applauded for ages before he'd even said a word. That introduction and those applause, he said, were very dangerous. We must never elevate a human being to the status where what he says becomes something we will accept without question.

It seemed a strange way for him to introduce a film about the man he has acknowledged as a spiritual guru - but maybe appropriate for just that reason. Gurdjieff, after all, was a decidedly complex figure: I remember Robert Lepage's version of him as a naked devil shuffling around Tony as Frank Lloyd Wright in The Geometry of Miracles. Brook's Gurdjieff is very 1970s - a rebel determined to "seek truth" at any cost; and at times the film seems very dated and a bit pompous in its self-conscious spiritual significance. But it is also a thinly veiled autobiography, at its most interesting when it explores Gurdjieff / Brook's determination to keep looking for a better way of living, for something that feels deeply truthful, for endless journeying both physically and internally. It's also very clear that the artistic / spiritual search is not something which you can do alone. Gurdjieff's group of close friends work with him - and they are played by Brook's regular actors, like Bruce Myers and Natasha Parry. And the whole thing ends with Gurdjieff learning ritual dances, which look remarkably like the warm-up exercises at the Bouffes du Nord.

It's very true that you can't do these things on your own. I've been much helped by Paul coming into the company recently, and by the strengthening of the relationship with Polygon. But it's been a few months since I was in a rehearsal room, and I'm really missing the creative companionship of performers. The creative work is the real space where the search can be conducted.

Mrs. Mandela

It seems to be a bit of a Mandela moment. The tubes are covered with posters for the new film Invictus, in which Morgan Freeman will at last give his long-mooted performance as the great man. Relief that it's not a bio-pic: there's so much more the medium of film can do with a specific event. Which said, last night's broadcast of the BBC's Mrs. Mandela was a really interesting approach to the bio-pic problem. By avoiding chronology, the film was able to make powerful links between moments in Winnie's life - most strikingly at the end, when it cut between her being brutally interrogated by Swanepoel and her own attack on the child Stompie. Seeing the film took me right back into our own work on this material - some years ago now. The project, which is a music theatre piece, is still bubbling away on the back burner, and has a libretto - it just needs music and backing! Jeremy Silver, Eugene Skeef and I have had a few serious chats about it... Maybe now is the moment. But I am so snowed under with getting the Trilogy kick-started that I honestly can't find the time.

Like Mrs. Mandela, our piece begins with the iconic moment of Mandela's release. In our case, we also end with it - but hopefully the audience will view it very differently after what's happened in between. Many moments are the same - Swanepoel, Stompie, Mandela asking Winnie about the boy's death... But in our version the gritty realism of the film is replaced with the theatrical, as the form requires. My note to myself watching the film, and especially Sophie Okenedo's incredible performance, was to avoid any hint of sentimentality. Which is what the film did so well.

I've just come from a meeting with George Zhang, who runs the Confucius Centre at SOAS. He's excited by the exchange we're doing with China, and we're finding some really interesting ways to co-operate. He tells me that Shanghai was his home city - but that "The city of my childhood no longer exists". I ask him when he left, and he says 1971. That's right in the thick of the Cultural Revolution. "Yes", he says: "and we went back every year. It was quite a way to spend my formative years..."

I am Yusuf and This is My Brother

Friday was a very intense but inspiring day. During the morning, David Furlong from Exchange Theatre came to the office, and we talked about Mauritius. David first got on touch some years ago in response to the presence of Toufann on our website - he's a Mauritian actor, and there aren't exactly a lot of companies with links to the island! He's just been back - which we haven't done for about six years - and he's enthusiastic about the creativity there. That excites me for the planned trip later in the year.

Work with Gabrielle from Polygon on an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, looking at a Participation and Learning programme around the Trilogy; and with Paul on possible approaches to some core costs. The latter have become very crucial as the company grows, with the board working hard on strategies for expansion and the arrival of Paul and Gabrielle in the office. Change management seems to be what excites funders of core costs, and we have some quite productive phone calls. Paul goes off to draft an application.

I head down to the Young Vic, and grab some Chinese dumplings in the nearby restaurant before the show. A former student, Lucy, is sitting there, and in the absence of spare tables I ask if I can sit with her. She introduces her friend, who turns out to be the director Di Trevis - I've never met her before, but have admired her work for years (I remember her Arturo Ui at the National with Antony Sher with particular relish). These days, she's largely based in New York, with an emphasis on teaching.

The play is a production from Palestine, by a company called ShiberHur, which means "an inch of freedom" in Arabic. It's written and directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi, who did the wonderful Alive from Palestine in the same venue. This piece, I am Yusuf and This is My Brother, is about 1948, and the way its ghosts are still shaping Palestinian lives. It swaps between English and Arabic (often for no apparent reason), and, in performance, felt just a little dull and worthy. So I was surprised, as I read the programme-script on the train coming home, at just what a brilliant piece of writing it is. Somehow, the production has directed the poetry out of the play. There's little sense of the mystery, of the presence of the dead, of music and rhythm. But the play is quite wonderful.

Wise Thoughts

A very interesting meeting with Niranjan Kamatkar, who runs Wise Thoughts. We've known each other for a while - they used to be our neighbours in Chocolate Factory 2, and now they have an office above Wood Green Library. Wise Thoughts is an organisation for minority ethnic and minority sexuality people - and so particularly interesting to us as we prepare the Trilogy. Gabrielle from Polygon Arts (who is about to take some desk space in our office - making Wood Green more crowded than ever!) and I have been looking at creating outreach work around this, and we've had a chat with the Heritage Lottery Fund, who seem keen. Wise Thoughts are obvious partners, particularly since they run GFest every November - which could be a great platform for any work produced by people participating in the outreach project.

Niranjan is an incredibly committed activist. He tells me his priority for 2010 is called "LGBT Arts for All" - which translates as getting sexual minority work out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. Since all of our work is about opening up dialogues between the different groups in society, we can easily buy in to this.

I was wrong about China, by the way. The Mr Gay China event was closed down by the police. On a technicality.

A bit more on censorship

Since I wrote about Chinese censorship the other day, the news has broken that Google may pull out of China because of attempts to hack into the gmail accounts of human rights activists. Having famously capitulated to the censor, Google is now saying that it wants freedom to publish as it will. You'll remember that access to this blog has been pretty erratic in China - at a rough guess it won't be very easy to find it today - the firewalls are up very high.

On the other hand, sexual morality just doesn't seem to be an issue any more. To underline what I was saying last time, a comment in Chinese has appeared on my entry "New Year blog". On closer investigation, it turns out to be a link to a Chinese porn site.

Happy surfing, everybody....

China and the censor

A fascinating video has appeared on the Guardian website, about China's first gay pageant - Mr. Gay China. Apparently it's even been given positive coverage on the English-language branch of state-sponsored media (not yet the Chinese-language branch). Following on from last year's events in Beijing, with people calling in public for gay marriage, it would seem that the tongzhi community is now very visible - almost mainstream in the cities, at least. It's an important moment to be showing the Trilogy.

We've been discussing the censor, who will be wielding the blue pencil before the plays are shown in Shanghai. None of the gay scenes are a problem - although we can't be explicit about it. The problem - as so often - is politics. In particular, the Mme. Mao scenes in Dis-Orientations will never pass the censor. I'm going to see if I can re-work them, so it's all done through the performance of A Doll's House - which might be theatrically exciting, and will allow a Chinese audience to make their own connections. We can point things for the UK audience with projected titles, and then cut them for China. Well - that's the hunch, anyway.

New Year Blog

Happy New Year everybody! I'm typing this on my new iMac - which will hopefully contribute to the development of Border Crossings over 2010 and beyond.

2009 has been an amazing year for the company - by far our busiest to date, and one which has clarified and defined our aims and identity for the future. For a start, there's a completely redesigned website, courtesy of Sam Hope-Evans at Phuture Design, with social networking and all that jazz! Now the iMac's in action, we should be able to get much more exciting content onto the web, with more videos to whet the appetite for performances, screenings, publications, workshops and talks.

The fact that I can list all of these things as Border Crossings activities is largely due to the Origins Festival of First Nations, which was the biggest single event in an amazing year. Just to present so much work in those two weeks was incredible - but what was even more exciting was the way in which the programme managed to lay down a coherent vision in terms of political, spiritual, artistic, social and environmental thought. All of which has shown its importance more and more as the year has gone on, with the Copenhagen summit rounding it off convincingly. If a gathering of world leaders, with the express purpose of slowing climate change, can be so dominated by petty economic self-interest as to fail to produce anything of any value whatsoever, then boy are we in trouble. We have got to start listening to ways of living on this planet which present alternatives to the power of the market - and First Nations offer them. So there will be more Origins Festivals: and in March I am off to New Zealand to start working on the next one.

On top of that, much of the year has been spent working on the development of Re-Orientations, the third part of the Trilogy, which we'll be presenting next autumn. I can truly say that February and August of 2009 were two of the most extraordinary, creative and open times I can ever remember - and I think the play, which we showed as work-in-progress in early September, more than proves the point. There's still a lot to do before we can perform them, but the foundations have been soundly laid. So look out in the autumn in Soho and Shanghai!

Outside of the company, it's also been a rich year culturally. In my freelance work, I've particularly enjoyed directing my first Brecht, The Good Soul of Szechuan, for Rose Bruford College, and beginning to write MA materials for the same academy - a job I'll be continuing in January. At the theatre, the highlights for me were Complicite's beautiful production with Japanese performers, Shun-kin at the Barbican; the Toneelgroep Amsterdam's six-hour epic Roman Tragedies at the same, ever-fertile address; and the National's staging of Wole Soyinka's classic Death and the King's Horseman - amazing just to see the play at last, and especially so well done.

In film, the London Film Festival was a highlight again, with Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah the star event. Obviously a film for a future Origins - unless it's had a huge general release first, which is far from impossible, given the awards it's harvesting! I've also read some great books - all of which inform my work, and the choice of which is of course informed by the work. So, in the early part of the year, I read Xinran's China Witness while in China - making its insights into the lives of older Chinese feel all the more immediate and all the more poignant. This also helped me think more deeply about the theme of Elders in the Origins Festival: the way in which First Nations value their older people so much more than we do in Western societies - and the social meaning of that value. So it was also very warming to spend a series of summer afternoons in the garden reading Seamus Heaney's book of interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll: Stepping Stones. Here is the quiet wisdom of one of our own Elders.

I've also spent quite a bit of time with David Mitchell, whose novels combine plot-lines and locations in ways which I find very helpful in thinking about our own devised work. I thought Ghostwritten, his first novel, of some years ago, was even better than Cloud Atlas: and experienced quite a shock while reading Black Swan Green, which at times felt uncomfortably like my own autobiography!

Have a great year, everyone....

Red Shift

Emma invited Nisha and myself for dinner last night, to meet some other friends of hers. They were Jonathan Holloway, and his wife Jane. Jonathan is AD of Red Shift. I first saw his work as long ago as 1983 (!), when he directed The Duchess of Malfi at the Edinburgh Fringe. It was a really important production for me then - formative in terms of my early voice as a director - so it's nice to be able to tell the director in person!

Much in common. Jane used to be General Manager of Opera Factory, so they know David Freeman, Susannah Self, Janis Kelly.... Jonathan is involved with Central and Middlesex.... It's kind of amazing we've not met before. It's particularly interesting to hear how he's fared with running a company over a quarter of a century. For a long time, Red Shift was an Arts Council RFO (regularly funded organisation), and was a client of the national office, running long tours on the small to medium scale. Then everything was devolved to the regions, and touring became far less of a priority. Jonathan decided he wanted to move into more specific forms of theatre anyway - and actually gave up RFO status as a pre-emptive strike against a likely cut. Now, like us, they rely on project grants and partnerships. Interestingly, he regards it as a liberation. Strange to hear when RFO status is regarded as your holy grail....

Opera Jawa

I spent last night watching the DVD of Opera Jawa; one of the films which Peter commissioned for the New Crowned Hope Festival. Click here for a synopsis and a review by the ever-perceptive Tony Rayns, who also wrote about it for the Festival programme.

For me, what was fascinating about this film was the combination of traditional Indonesian performance forms with a contemporary setting, and with very strong social and political concerns. Like our Trilogy, this film draws off Hindu mythology and the danced and sung theatre forms of Asia, at the same time as confronting some of the contemporary issues in the region. In the Trilogy, I've been alternating scenes of naturalism with more fantastical, magical and mythological moments. In Opera Jawa, the film-maker Garin Nugroho makes no distinction between the mythic and modern worlds. His Ram and Sita are contemporary working-class Indonesians, and they sing and dance as well as make pots and ride bicycles. The film is through-sung, so totally operatic - the only spoken text emanates from a TV, which (with the multiple layering characteristic of this work) is a carved statue. I can learn something from Garin's approach: I should trust non-naturalistic styles as being capable of conveying everyday life as well as the dream - indeed, of showing what is magical and dream-like in our everyday lives. It's a beautiful film.

Annika, our intern, has got herself a permanent job in a casting agency. She's only been with us a short time, but did some terrific work: transcribing the Swedish sections of the Re-Orientations script, preparing sponsorship proposals, and more than doubling the number of friends we have on MySpace! Thanks and good luck to her.

Paul Sirett joins Border Crossings

Paul Sirett, a leading dramatist with a special interest in intercultural theatre, is joining Border Crossings as Associate Director. Paul is currently International Associate at Soho Theatre Company, and Associate Writer at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. He was formerly Dramaturg at the RSC. Recent plays include: Bad Blood Blues (Stratford East), Running the Silk Road (Yellow Earth at BITE), The Big Life (Stratford East and Apollo West End), and Rat Pack Confidential (Whitehall, West End). Two volumes of Paul's plays have been published by Oberon Books.

Paul will be working closely with me to develop the company's programme and infrastructure. His wealth of experience will be invaluable to the company; and his inspiring work in intercultural theatre makes him an ideal member of our core team. Anyone who knows plays like Worlds Apart or Crusade will recognise his as a distinctive and perceptive voice, talking with humour and urgency about cultural cross-currents in the contemporary world.

Wangari Maathai

The British Council invites me to a lecture, in a series called Talking without Borders (logical enough I should be there, I guess). It's at the RSA, and is given by Wangari Maathai: the Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement, who in 2004 won the Nobel Peace Prize. She's on her way to Copenhagen, where she'll be lobbying at the summit on behalf of Africa, the forests and the poor.

The lecture is very good, although nothing she says is particularly surprising. There are some exciting new ways of putting old problems - I particularly liked her question as to how we can make a tree which is standing worth the same, economically, as one which has been felled. What is perhaps more striking about the evening is the way in which climate change activism has become establishment. You don't get much closer to the establishment than the British Council at the RSA, with the Acting Chair doing the introduction. Lots of the guests, who all toe the line, are people from embassies, government departments, quangos, even industry. The man sitting next to me turns out to run BP. "I'm interested in environmental issues", he tells me.

So - with Copenhagen on the way - the burning issue is surely not "there is an environmental problem", not "what can we do to solve the environmental problem?" but "why are we not acting to solve the environmental problem?"

Problems of a global audience

In this weekend's Guardian, there's an article by Pankaj Mishra which talks about the problems of writing for a global audience. Writers from non-Western countries, he suggests, may often end up perpetuating the exotic cliched way in which the West looks at their cultures, because that is what sells to the monied Western audience. So Cuba is sex and salsa, Africa is starvation and corruption, India is poverty and spirituality in equal measure. I've written a bit about this before, thinking in terms of the Indian novel, and how often it is actually written with an eye to British and American readers, for all its "authenticity".

Usually, this isn't an issue which affects theatre. After all, theatre tends to address a specific, often very localised audience, about particular issues and concerns. Often its power comes from its very specificity. But in the case of work created cross-culturally, and intended to be seen in more than one country, this is no longer so. And so, if we're not careful, the globalised cliches could easily sneak in through the back door.

The sentence in Mishra's article which set the alarm bells ringing ways near the end: "Perhaps, one day soon, a Chinese novelist aspiring for an international reputation will be able to steer clear of the misery of the cultural revolution or the massacre in Tiananmen Square (perennial favourites in the west). " Dis-Orientations includes (admittedly very subtle) references to both of these things, and the imagery continues into Re-Orientations. Does that mean we are simply doing what the West expects / wants us to do? I remember Wang Jue being worried that the image of China presented in the plays might be too negative (although I do feel there are many, many positive things we say about the culture). On the other hand, part of the point of this work is to deconstruct the exotic cliche of the Orient: if you don't show aspects of this, then you can't overturn it.

Tewanee Joseph

I was at the Canadian High Commission last night, to hear a talk by Tewanee Joseph. Tewanee heads up the Four First Nations groups who are hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. This does seem to be a genuine embracing of the Aboriginal people and culture of Canada by the IOC - they really are the hosts, their protocols are really being respected, and there are real economic initiatives which are allowing them to generate a legacy for the Aboriginal communities. Hopefully the 2012 team will learn a bit from this achievement.

This morning, our new intern, Annika Magnberg, started in the office. She's from Sweden, and at the moment she's wrestling with how to turn three files into a single .pdf to send as a funding application. What a way to begin.

Good news from New Zealand - Creative NZ have invited me to the International Festival in March, and the British Council in NZ have agreed to fund the flight. This will be a terrific opportunity for Origins. What's more, I'll be doing some workshops with Taki Rua while I'm out there. Very exciting.

Karnad in Punjabi, Shakespeare in Dutch

Girish Karnad emailed from India to say that I should see Neelam Mansingh Chowdry's production of his play Naga-mandala (Play with a Cobra) at Sadler's Wells. It's a fascinating piece of work - though not perhaps at its best in this vast theatre, and definitely not helped by the worst supertitle operator in recorded history. But the play is so strange and wonderful, and the leading actors make the transitions between characters incredibly powerfully. Chowdry has expanded on the doubling already present in the text, so that the same actor not only plays the husband and the cobra, but also the playwright in the prologue. Similarly the "Story" is also one of two performers who play Rani - so that role is doubled in a different way. The production actually becomes about those layerings and correspondences. And so about theatre as life.

The amazing production of The Roman Tragedies which I saw at the Barbican on Saturday is also about theatre as life. Political theatre and political life, to be precise. It's a version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra - all in six hours - by a company called Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove. I thought I was at least aware of the world's great directors - but his is a new name to me, and he is beyond doubt a really important artist. The production is "modern-dress" and multi-media - nothing new there - but in this case the use of video is so carefully shaped that it becomes about the way in which modern politics, modern life perhaps, is constantly performed from the camera, to the extent that only the image on the camera seems to carry any meaning. So, the scenes of private life (Coriolanus and his mother, Caesar and his wife) are filmed and relayed on TV and big screen - but all the scenes involving ordinary people, even soldiers, are cut. Not that there is any shortage of "the people" on display. The audience moves between their seats and the stage, where there are lots of sofas, and you can watch the highlighted action on a TV, as well as seeing the actors from another angle, choosing your own route of composition. This also means that you constantly see "ordinary people" in the play, consuming the action and so contributing to it. The form in which the theatre is used contributes to the meaning. There are no intervals as such, but lots of short breaks, during which sets are changed, and the audience buy drinks and food onstage, and contribute their thoughts on the show via a computer station - these are then relayed to the rest of us! So there's an element of real democracy about the whole thing. It raises endless questions about theatre and politics - not least whether politics might be turning into nothing but performance.

I've been thinking about this production ever since. Wonderful to be stimulated so strongly and to have my faith in the power of theatre so powerfully renewed.

The Illegals

I was at the Rich Mix last night (London's most car-park like venue), to see a piece called The Illegals, presented by the Actors for Human Rights branch of Ice and Fire. It's a company with which we have a lot in common - so as much as anything I was glad to see them in action.

The play is verbatim theatre, based on interviews with "illegal immigrants". I'm not a great fan of verbatim as a form - just because somebody "real" has said something, it doesn't instantly become valid as dramatic dialogue - but this piece was skillfully composed from five very intense personal stories, intercut with quotations from the likes of Jackie Smith, John Reid, and the Border Agency. The collage effect was what gave it the artistry - official lines juxtaposed with human truths to make a very clear and powerful political point.

The actor who'd invited me, Jeremy Tiang, speaks the words of a Chinese man who came to England for economic reasons, and works in Chinese restaurants for incredibly low wages, in constant fear of the police, while sending money home for his children's schooling. The loneliness which came through was very touching. Then there's an Egyptian driver, whose passport has been with the Home Office for two years, so he can't even leave the country(!), a political refugee from Ethiopia who went underground when the authorities refused to recognise the nature of his persecution; and a woman with a similar case from Ecuador, who cleans toilets all night for a pittance. The last case is a woman from Guatemala, who was deported because she had too little money. As always, the border controls favour the rich. It's only poor people who have problems moving around.

Interns and Architecting

We’re taking on an intern. This has worked well in the past, with both Wojtek and Roe being a huge help in the office and learning enough to move on in their chosen spheres. In fact, Wojtek went straight from us to being Administrator at Paines Plough. I think internships have to work in this way, as a genuine exchange, and they have to be a fixed term, allowing that exchange to happen. Otherwise it just turns into slave labour. We put something to this effect in the job ad. So I was a bit surprised on the morning of the interviews to get a very angry email from the first interviewee, saying that he wouldn’t be coming because he felt that unpaid work was morally unacceptable. He’s entitled to his opinion, of course – but I can’t really see why, under the circumstances, he applied for the job at all… Anyway, it puts me on my guard for the rest of the day, and I make sure that all the other interviewees are fully on board for the exchange, and that I am clear what they want to get from it.

I end up offering the internship to a young woman from Sweden, called Annika Magnberg. Annika did a dance training in Gothenburg, and is aware of Teater Eksem. She’s also got a band here, and has done lots of PR and the like. But, most important, she’s passionate about theatre and intercultural dialogue. And has the right sort of energy to be around our office for a few months. Good luck and welcome to her! She may well be writing the odd posting on this blog too.

Long and creative discussion with Gabrielle from Polygon. We’re both very pleased with the work we were able to do together on Origins, and want to continue the association. Some very interesting ideas about keeping Origins moving until the next festival through the education work, and for ways of building on the education aspects of the Trilogy. We’re thinking about linking workshops in China and the UK, so that the interculturalism becomes a direct part of the education work too.

I went to see Architecting at the Pit on Friday. It’s a piece about America’s failures to rebuild itself, after the Civil War and after Hurricane Katrina. The main resource it exploits for this is Gone With the Wind, both film, novel and cult – and it’s all done with wit and intelligence. So this is, in many ways, just the sort of theatre that excites me. But I wasn’t moved. The intellectual side took over so much that there wasn’t a real human engagement with the characters, and many of them weren’t very well acted either. There was a lot of engagement with technical possibilities too – but these also weren’t very elegantly done. Ideas alone aren’t enough – you’ve got to pull them off as well.