Author Archives: Beccy Smith

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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.

We or I?

My work for Total Theatre has sporadically placed me in contexts where critical opinions on a production are collectively scrutinised. In these conversations, very often a consensus is reached: shared languages do exist for the analysis of how ideas are executed through a production, the quality of that production, or the quality of a performer’s work. Where things get messier is with work where the form or basic proposal is more experimental – particularly in shows that relate to the audience in unusual or provocative ways (I’m thinking of the difficulties critics faced in meaningfully justifying their – justifiable in my opinion – revulsion at Badac Theatre’s The Factory in Edinburgh a couple of years back) or which deviate too extremely from the basic premise of the well-made play (early reviews of Sarah Kane’s work are one obvious example).

For this concept of the ‘well-made’ play often exerts its influence even here in Total Theatre territory (a place whose borders, thankfully, are increasingly ill-patrolled). When you are writing a review you’re stepping into a literary discourse, or a manner of literary analysis, that focuses on concrete elements such as plot construction and the way solid things have been built more readily than on the abstract feelings and meaning proposed by fleetingly coalescing bodies and images.

I’m conflating two ideas here that should perhaps be the subject of two separate posts, but the impulse of the idea was this: as a dramaturg of contemporary, non-literary theatre, I am most interested in the ways we can evolve languages (of action as well as words) that define how meaning is contained within emerging theatre forms. There’s much to be gleaned from established principles – rhythm, shape, truthfulness and interest within character portrayals, the forward momentum that in text-based theatre is described as plot – but in ‘experimental’ new work there is often a surplus of meaning created, for me similar to the powerfully evocative metaphorical languages of visual arts and music. What criticism of both these forms shares is a reliance on the personalities of individual critics. The word ‘controversial’ is often bandied about in relation to art critics in a way it simply isn’t with theatre / media reviewers. I think that’s because there is a much harder-to-reach consensus about the nature of effectiveness or artistic ‘success’ in visual arts, because this medium is so geared towards triggering metaphorical associations in the onlooker. Our responses to visual arts reach into our feelings and unconscious: a piece of music or a painting ’speak’ to us or they don’t. As contemporary theatre becomes increasingly polyamorous of visual, musical, interactive languages, this individuated response becomes increasingly appropriate.

What’s peculiar about this process is that there is also a strong degree of consensus here: it’s a principle I often discuss with students when I am teaching theatre-making that the more rigourous you can be in your honest portrayal of your thoughts, feelings, and interests, however idiosyncratic, the more they will resonate with audiences. By being a true individual in your approach to the work you will be embedding a truthfulness that others will recognise.

So perhaps I’ve come full circle here. But I’m still stuck in my consensus-seeking conversations with other critics.

On more than one occasion my criticism of a particular piece of work has been interpreted by other critics / promoters as a personal lack – the absence of a strong critical framework from which to respond to new work means that the default in cases of disagreement is to go personal (perhaps you simply don’t like being uncomfortable / direct interactions / eating in front of people!).

Embarrassment is a very odd mechanism, probably performing some vital function in the running of society that I can’t make out, and having a different opinion to everyone else definitely triggers it. The consensus is damned seductive. But from my point of view, and within the case I’m attempting to make here, honest personal response is the most appropriate response formally (as well as ethically) to work whose main languages operate on a metaphorical level.  A personally truthful, contextually informed response makes for a wonderful piece of criticism that can go to work scraping the boundaries of new performance. Where this sits in relation to blogs (ahem!) versus / alongside professional reviewing (still a profession I hold in great affection) will have to be the subject of another post.

Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg: Motor Show

Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg: Motor Show

Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg: Motor Show

Motor Show is the second collaboration between Shunt co-founder David Rosenberg and choreographer Frauke Requardt, following 2010’s critically acclaimed Electric Hotel. It is the major project supported by 2012 round of Without Walls commissions and will be touring nationally following its premiere here. In stark contrast to the elaborately constructed edifice ofElectric Hotel, the scene is set in a desolate corner of wasteland that has become a place for late-night parking up. It shouldn’t be difficult to relocate to sites in many of Britain’s recession-struck cities, especially in the north. The languages of this world felt peculiarly non-English however. Whether it was the sultry, throaty cover of AC/DC’s Hells Bells that opened the show like a private rock gig (or a private dance), recurring at intervals throughout, or the isolation-in-a-landscape style that certain American artists have nailed into the popular consciousness (images from both Davids – Hopper and Lynch – floated up for me during the performance), the show’s world felt more American than English.

This certainly isn’t necessarily a criticism. In fact, if anything it adds to the sense of alienation the production seeks palpably to evoke. I left the performance feeling electrified by the experience: the simultaneous distance imposed by the scale (an expanse of lonely gravelled car-park in an obscure corner of Brighton in which most of the characters are discernible only as moving colours and shapes, faces too distant to make out) and the uncomfortable intimacy of the headsets through which Ben and Max Ringham’s pitch-perfect, richly atmospheric score of strange covers are amplified is spine tinglingly weird.

The show satisfies on an aesthetic level that includes the rhythmic arrival and withdrawal of a range of vehicles like a sort of motorised ballet, each unfolding a weird world that pursues a dreamlike (or nightmarish) logic, only occasionally feeling too clinically precise. I found the recurrent image of a schoolgirl emerging from the boots of different cars to tentatively explore the space, eventually proving herself the downfall of the piece’s protagonist, particularly powerful. Thematic repetitions of characters and choreography effectively amplified the thematic build, but this abstraction was tempered by nuanced character-driven choreography and humane storytelling.

I can’t imagine another show where I could be touched by the nerdy posturings of a caravan holidaymaker attempting to seduce a pair of cool girls, disturbed by a tumble of gimp-masked chauffeurs rolling out of his caravan, or moved by the elegiac choreography of empty romance around three matching Nissans. Suffused with surreal beauty and revelling in its weird world, Motor Show’s bleakness is a powerful example of the unusual form of theatre Rosenberg and Requardt have made their own.

www.requardt.com / www.fueltheatre.com/artists/david-rosenberg

Vanishing Point: Interiors ¦ Photo: Tim Morozzo

Vanishing Point: Interiors

Vanishing Point: Interiors ¦ Photo: Tim Morozzo

Interiors has an intriguing, almost sociological, premise. We observe, through an enormous, stage-wide window, a midwinter dinner party. The table is laid, the guests arrive, there’s music, food and alcohol. We observe their interactions, the interplay of social expectations with private impulses and conflicts, as narrated by a mysterious voice, later seen to be a white-clad figure, also watching at the window. But all is silence: the glass may as well be sound proof. We are absolutely engrossed and absolutely removed, out in the cold, the sound of snow creaking around us as the wind howls.

Perhaps we are out in space: the play of enormous projections that beautifully frame the window suggests dark waters, particles floating in and out of focus, a chill night sky. This world is expansive and the theme of hopeless aspiration in the party’s attempt to ward off the existential darkness or meaninglessness of winter, of the universe, of life, is reiterated by the narrating voice. Inside too, the setting is ambiguous: each character checks their guns at the door as they arrive, and the narration is laced with menace, made all the more threatening by the fact that it is never fully articulated.

Against this philosophical bleakness the social drama of the dinner party plays out. The silent performances are incredibly detailed but I found the tone unsettling, at times even crude. The necessity to fully articulate moments of storytelling through the glass led to several rather forced interactions in mime that sat unevenly with the precise naturalism of the piece as a whole. I felt the director Matthew Lenton didn’t quite trust us enough to spot gags in the action without emphatically pointing them up (a character coming to face directly out at the window to spray her crotch with perfume in preparation for her date for example). Overwhelmingly my sense was that these characters were played for laughs: more than that, that we were encouraged to laugh at and not with them, and this really troubled me. The narrator’s wry commentary punctures the social posturings of the group with incisive, sometimes cruel insights (What’s that smell. Is it Anne? Oh… it is) and the farcical treatment of the characters undermined the pathos that the overall frame seemed keen to evoke.

A climactic scene outlining the random cruelties of the characters’ future fates (a nice anti-naturalistic touch) left me feeling angry and rather sad. I didn’t feel the company earned the right to trade on the pathos of these characters’ demise when their principle use had been as comic fodder in the preceding scenes.Interiors was an intriguing concept that felt somewhat compromised by some failure of confidence in its form and desire to make profound points by usingcharacters without really caring about them.

www.vanishing-point.org

Improbable: The Devil and Mister Punch

Improbable: The Devil and Mister Punch

Improbable: The Devil and Mister Punch

Improbable’s new show, led in this case by director / designer Julian Crouch, is a strange and stirring affair. The opening moments are near perfection, for me. In a gilt frame, against a blue sky, a single, gloveless hand presents itself: the puppet unmasked. Through another small panel, a hand reaches out and sets a chiming metronome running. Later we learn that its rhythm is set to mirror the incidence of murder globally (every 1.36 seconds, apparently) as a sop against Punch’s heinous crimes, but for now it simply enhances the sense of claustrophobia and the fragile orderliness of the scene. The images are charged and resonant.

In Crouch’s production, commissioned to mark the 350th Anniversary of Punch’s ‘birth’ in England (in fact his first recorded reference here – in Samuel Pepys diary), the anarchic energies of Punch are recast within a panelled parlour, against which contrast his potency strains effectively. The set, designed by Crouch with Mike Kerns and Rob Thirtle (who also performs), is a bold and impassive wall of wood, its rich tones opening into a series of frames where classic Punch sketches are brought back to life. These modernisations work particularly well, subtly contemporising the well-known material – Punch and the crocodile, the hanging scene, the courtroom – to give them an immediacy in tone and language that brings them closer to us.

Ironically, perhaps, the actual frame felt thinner. Crouch’s research had unearthed touring American nineteenth-century Punch performers Harvey and Hovey, who were presumably a gift for bridging the diverging imperatives of a cross-Atlantic commissioning team (the Barbican, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, and the Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center). The deteriorating relationship between these two clowns (brilliantly conveyed by Rob Thirtle and Nick Haverson, all mustachioed grandeur, histrionics and some rather good voice throwing) and between them and their audience conveyed something of the pathos of the end of the music hall age. Who the other performer / musicians were supposed to be, or how they fit into the frame of Harvey and Hovey’s travelling puppet show never became clear and some of the music, particularly the folksy American duets that bookended the show, felt woefully unintegrated and unjustified.

This was, it became clear, fundamentally a show about theatre-making, its object the demise of the itinerant player and with audience expectations themselves in the dock. This felt clever, and somewhat unearned. Punch has always been a crowd pleaser; with more in common with commedia street performances than dramatic narrative, he embodies a spirit more than a story and so feels ill-suited to carry meta-theatrical angst. Perhaps what was being recast was Crouch’s own anxiety about the production’s reception, which feels a shame, as the show’s finest moments were those with least self-consciousness. This was also, though, a show about puppetry, populated by Sicilian fighting marionettes, live sound effects, dancing pigs (turned into sausages, naturally), humanettes, masks and an army of beautifully disembodied hands. As a tiny glove punch reaches out to silence the ever-ticking metronome and both human performers lie dead, I can’t help but feel that this show really captures some of the strange power and ritual of Punch, which transcends even the most dramatic or intellectual of attempts to contain him.

www.improbable.co.uk

Clout: Flynch, Looking

Clout: Flynch, Looking

Clout: Flynch, Looking

Clout are a new young company of Lecoq graduates who have created a memorable production that engagingly epitomises some of the methods the school has made popular. We follow the unfortunate story of the hapless and endearing James Flynch, a young man unceremoniously dumped in the opening minutes of the show for being ‘ridiculous’ and ‘boring’ (which he certainly is, all too-loud voice and gauche clumsiness) by a girlfriend who he fails to get over in the ensuing holiday in a strange English seaside hotel.

It’s a simple concept but the company develop consistently interesting and unexpected choices in their characterisation and storytelling. It’s great to see such original characters being put forward by a young company. Frank Minelli, for example, the disarmingly charming and passively threatening New Jerseyite who keeps the furniture in his room protected by sheets, both tries to adopt Flynch and to force his pretty and inscrutable wife on him in a thrillingly ambiguous game. The story moves through absurd hotel farce, poignant character-driven drama and hilarious and bizarre dance sequences with the shifts in tone giving dynamism to the whole.

The production is stylish and atmospheric. Dream sequences, where the stage image is bisected by silently statuesque female figures in yellow one-pieces inspired by Flynch’s memories of his girlfriend’s love of swimming, feel straight out of David Lynch. Transitions between sleep and wakefulness, drunkenness and the cold hard light of day are slickly executed choreographically, demonstrating a really articulate use of rhythm and space. The piece is well acted too, with its extremely diverse cast of characters grounded in detailed and well-observed physicality.

This is a bold first production, full of striking images and creating an interesting and original world. The storytelling takes rather a leap in the closing sequences which, though foreshadowed, feels abrupt, but this is a young company with bright ideas and the skills to match them. Flynch, Lookingestablishes Clout as a company to watch.

www.clout-theatre.com