Author Archives: Beccy Smith

About Beccy Smith

Beccy Smith is a freelance dramaturg who specialises in developing visual performance and theatre for young people, including through her own company TouchedTheatre. She is passionate about developing quality writing on and for new performance. Beccy has worked for Total Theatre Magazine as a writer, critic and editor for the past five years. She is always keen to hear from new writers interested in developing their writing on contemporary theatre forms.

Les Enfants Terribles: The Trench

Since 2008 Les Enfants Terribles have been wowing Edinburgh audiences with their combination of strong physical storytelling, vaudeville styling (episodic storytelling combining ‘turns’, puppetry, wild costumes and song) and new writing from one of the two directors Oliver Lansley, who also stars. The Trench comes to Brighton Fringe hot from a barnstorming Edinburgh run with a clutch of strong reviews, but its combination of repetitive couplets and oddly static sung interludes of repeated actions (rhythmic show shining – check!) really left me cold.

The show opens with a group of shadowy figures crouched on stage against the imposing flats of Sam Wyer’s trench design. The auditorium is filled with thick haze and an air of sombreness and leaves you in no doubt that this is a show that takes itself seriously. Its story – of a doomed miner entombed beneath his trench, which is only the beginning of a strangely fantastical adventure – unfolds in old fashioned rhyming couplets, a form the company have developed through previous shows such as The Terrible Infants (a variation on the cautionary tales genre similarly explored by Improbable Theatre). In that context the rhyming makes sense – a witty variation on Hoffman’s style – but here it rings oddly: with no obvious connection to the story’s material, the pentameter feels inflated and the writing is simply not good enough, with pronunciation and emphasis often mangled to hit the iambic pentameter and justify its use.

The show is at its best when demonstrating a deft eye for poor theatre transformations (planks become a mine shaft, with dropping coins as earth falls ominously overhead), and the excitingly designed discoveries of the large-scale puppets are realised with boldness and aplomb. But it’s at its worst when it gives in to its own sense of grandeur as it hammers through plodding pentameter or in the over-extended sub-Radiohead styled songs during which the action stops completely.

I also have some political objections to the story: devising a tragic beginning for your protagonist’s narrative (who suffers a devastating blow just before his tunnel caves) smacks of making it ‘okay’ for them to march off into the light at the end. How much more brave and profound it could have been to show the soldier making a real sacrifice for his friend by saving him when he himself still had it all to live for, or to show both dying as a result of the mindless conflict they were caught up in. It seems to me naïve to make a piece of work on this subject without thinking through the political ramifications of your creative choices. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that there’s something rather lacking in taste or sensitivity to take such a historical moment, already saturated in drama and action, and instead feel the need to overlay your own quasi-mystical quest story over the top to develop your subject.

www.lesenfantsterribles.co.uk

version 1.0: The Disappearances Project

When somebody disappears without explanation you can’t fail to notice, as you process the excruciating painfulness of it, that the experience is also a curiously powerful one. The suspension of normality, a heightened awareness of every possibility around you – the ongoing lack of any resolution fundamentally skews your perspective on the world. The sense that discovery, return, some kind of conclusion is imminent around every corner, with every ring of the phone, is debilitating. You live your life in an intense state of suspense that drains all normal experiences of their power to offer any sense of shape or satisfaction.

Unfortunately, resolution is also a quality crucial to drama, and by focusing on an experience that categorically denies it, Sydney company version 1.0’s production creates a piece of work that has intellectual and emotional merit, but that’s profoundly unsatisfying as a theatrical experience. The illusion of movement and development might be suggested by the constant scroll of the full-stage video screen that rolls through suburban landscapes like a constantly searching eye, but this doesn’t compensate enough for the shapeless sense of a piece re-enacting stasis, and leaves me questioning why I am watching it live.

The text, performed by two actors from static positions on either side of the screen, is a collation of verbatim material taken from missing persons cases in New South Wales and further afield. In general, the selected cases imply some undisclosed foul play: bank accounts are untouched, social security cheques remain un-cashed. I find this an odd choice, as such cases are the minority – statistically the most extreme – and the more common experience of disappearance, when an individual has gone with some degree of volition, offers stories at least as unsettling and arguably more universal. The performers’ delivery is radio miked and often deadpan, with a certain opaqueness about the logic of directorial choices such as why the performers stand or address one another at points.

This is a beautifully produced and clearly seriously thought-about production that simply, for me, lacks any theatrical flair. The sound and lighting designs, which feel very present, are heavy-handed (a dramatically tolling bell often underscores discussion of possible death and rows of lanterns sombrely fade down, one by one). Perhaps the company are playing with conventions of the post-dramatic genre, emphasising the artificiality of their form, but there’s a naivety and clumsiness about their approach that doesn’t serve their audience or their material well.

http://www.versiononepointzero.com/

Fevered Sleep: Above Me The Wide Blue Sky

Fevered Sleep are famously experimental in their approach to making work, with their output spanning a dizzying array of forms, featuring audio installation, interactivity with children and adults, and even a live horse. Above Me The Wide Blue Sky does not disappoint in this respect: it is difficult to classify and complex as an experience in real time.

Ali Beale’s beautiful design envelops us, with clouds growing and traversing across screens placed high up on every side. The ground is a loose pavement of chalk blocks, interspersed with slender, bending lamps whose white lights dim and glow in myriad changing sequences. The design encapsulates a key theme of the piece – the detailed translation of the natural world into deliberately artificial form. Those chalk blocks are both roughly hewn and all cut to exactly the same dimensions; the lanterns suggest the organic – like flowers on stems – but emphasise their theatricality with abrupt blackouts and flashes up and down.

We are initially invited to experience the space as an installation, giving us time to enjoy the sky, the lighting and the gentle atmosphere created by the low, artificial hum of Jamie McCarthy and Charles Webber’s sound design (also some slightly uncertain reel-to-reel styled sea footage on tiny upturned chalk ‘screens’). It’s soothing, evocative and strange. The entrance of the performer (Laura Cubitt) and her rather anxious looking dog (who she settles in a bed onstage) prompts a shift in expectation and this is where the piece runs into difficulties. Using deliberately clear and simple language Cubitt attempts to conjure fleeting images of the natural world and of people in nature, engaged in activities sometimes bucolic (making love in the sand-dunes), and at other times unsettling (rabbits clustered together with oddly swollen eyes). The imagery is often arresting and gradually builds into a sort of elegy for a world slipping between our fingers.

But the form is also alienating, perhaps deliberately so, and whilst the production’s intellectual credentials are beyond reproach (as established in the extensive programme notes) its formal patterning and stubborn refusal to slide into anything resembling a narrative, even briefly, feels disengaging. The context is certainly theatrical, as we sit in raked ranks in the round and the Young Vic’s bar buzzes outside, but the show attempts to subvert this engagement. Its long lists, lopping structure and cycles of sound and light require, and gradually encourage, a different type of attention: for some this may be meditative, for others frustrating. Cubitt works hard to vivify each simple image with subtle variation in tone and physicality, but the repetitive patterning of the text (every sentence in the first two thirds of the show begins ‘There is’) feels like hard work for her and for us and there are moments where this quality seems unhelpfully to undercut the more delicately shifting tones of sound and light. Much thought and skill has gone into Above Me The Wide Blue Sky and I felt ready to be transported by its vision of our changing world. But in the end it reached me intellectually but left me reaching for emotional theatrical transcendence.

www.feveredsleep.co.uk

dreamthinkspeak: In The Beginning Was The End

Dreamthinkspeak have developed a unique and identifiable theatrical idiom which, at its best, alchemises site, space, installation and interaction into meaning and experiences that cast new light on old classics. Before I Sleep (2010) recast The Cherry Orchard into a poignantly iconic Cooperative department store in an unloved corner of Brighton, a hugely resonant marriage of place and theme that deepened and enriched our connection to the play’s exploration of transience and the limitations of modernity. In The Beginning Was The End draws its inspiration from a Da Vinci Drawing, ‘A Cloud Burst of Material Possessions’ and, as implied by the title, echoes of Revelations, attempting to animate their ideas through the Neoclassical architecture of Somerset House and the cool stone corridors of Kings College basement.

Da Vinci’s subject seems to be materialism and apocalypse, and the show expands on such ideas through a number of strands. A series of superannuated engineering labs (in the basement of Kings College) become haunting installations, overpopulated with circuit boards, mountains of filing, and ghostly dead or dying green CRT screens, a sort of lament to the vanity and futility of technology and learning. A futuristic corporation inhabits the upper storeys (though it feels strangely like an 80s vision of the future) seeming to offer a flawed antidote to the obsolescence below. Recurrent images of flying and falling, of rising waters, formulae and alphabets flit past. There are glimpses of epic flood, in the rain that echoes throughout, and Babel in the many language of the corporation’s sales reps (a witty touch that nevertheless undermines any real interaction we might have with many of the performers). At moments we are giants peering into miniature worlds. At others a giant face seems to laugh at our progress.

Cumulatively, this is sometimes intriguing and often provocative but there’s a sense of dramatic shape missing in this production. It’s tempting to link this to the process of starting from a single image and a set of themes rather than drawing from a dramatic arc with its built in mechanism of transformation and change. There’s a sequence near the middle of the show which, partly by virtue of being close up, live and intimate feels compelling and climactic but which unfortunately leaves what follows (at a remove via video or other barriers) feeling underwhelming. There’s a danger too that the production’s philosophy – broadly speaking, that myths of progress, especially commercial ones, are unsatisfying and not to be trusted – can feel somewhat pat. I’ve seen my share of contemporary theatre decrying the dissatisfying, dehumanising effect of corporate employment and such statements only over-simplify both sides of the argument. I need my art to add to the debate, not simply rehearse it. If there is something more nuanced being explored here, it’s obscured by the familiarity of this story. This sense is unhelpfully magnified by the grandiosity of the discourses the production references.

Judged against the brilliance of dreamthinkspeak’s recent back catalogue this show feels disappointing, even though it does have much of beauty.

www.dreamthinkspeak.com

Invisible Thread: Les Hommes Vides

The empty men are thick, greyish-white, heavy creatures with googling eyes and lead in their feet, which land heavily on the table-top stage. Their expressions manage to be both gaunt and gormless. They are vaudeville creatures, nearly beheading one another with that old classic, the too-fast-turning plank. They are almost unable to take to their stage – the table itself proving too ambitious a clamber. This styling re-contextualises the ever-failing puppets of Liz Walker’s repertoire (both with Invisible Thread and her previous company Faulty Optic) in the genre of slapstick silent movie, complete with jaunty soundtrack. Here they are workaday everymen and their ineptitude and simplicity are our own.

Their story however is only one part of this production, which moves into interactive shopping with Dam Busters themed music and an Ozymandias-like consumer Wasteland (with Ozymandias as a coldly fratricidal baby monster). What links these scenes is some rather bleak poetry, intoned with Dylan Thomas resonance, that gradually links our sense of these endearing, frightening empty men to ourselves. Emptied out by the deferral of desire to shopping they are vulnerable to all we project onto them.

There’s nothing slight about this twenty-minute performance, which, despite its size, cycles us through a dizzying range of emotions, including a profound and brilliantly unsettling questioning about our relationship to the world. There are some aspects however which do feel that they’d merit further development. The presence of the puppeteers, greeting us with raffle tickets at the start of the show, feels uncertain and unclear and as the darker satire of the piece grows stronger I felt the lack of a clearer sense of their relationship to one another, to us, or to their puppets. It’s great to see Walker experimenting with text, which worked best when it set up intriguing tension with the imagery and action, opening up the scale and contrast of the piece. Yet text can be an unwieldy ingredient in visual theatre and sometimes the effect of its incessant questioning (‘Who are these objects? Why are they here?’) was to make me wish the piece trusted its material world to suggest more of the answers.