Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Théâtre du Soleil: Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir ¦ Photo: Michéle Laurent

Théâtre du Soleil: Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores) / The Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises)

Théâtre du Soleil: Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir ¦ Photo: Michéle Laurent

‘It has taken 48 years for the Edinburgh International to bring us here,’ says Ariane Mnouchkine (founder-director of Theatre du Soleil, legend in her own lifetime) before the show, on this their last performance of a sold-out five-day run.

And we can see why: it’s a tall order, bringing this lot over the water. A cast of – how many? 35 or more? They can’t all fit across the breadth of this enormous stage to take their bow – and tons, and I mean tons, of kit (the great wall of wooden packing cases stamped with their name form a barrier between the bar area and auditorium in this great cavernous hangar of a space, close to Edinburgh Airport). All in the service of an epic show that is about an amateur theatre company, who are also cooks and waiters in a restaurant cum dancehall, making a film that is loosely based on a lost Jules Verne story of a voyage to the freezing South Atlantic in search of – well, quite what is hard to say. In search of the dawn of a new age as the world enters the twentieth century, in search of the noble savage of South America, in search of hidden treasure (gold, oil, minerals), in search of modernism, in search of Darwinism, in search of Marxism, in search of feminism, in search of an exposition of Queen Victoria’s brand of imperialism, in search of an explanation of the madness of waging war over lands that hardly seem worth fighting over (The Falklands, say), in search of the reasons for the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and the beginning of the Great War, in search of… It’s exhausting just thinking about it, never mind watching it. The show is devised by the company and, as the programme notes put it, the script ‘half-written’ by leading feminist writer, philosopher and theoretician Hélène Cixous. (Warning! Could contain didactic and polemical tracts loosely disguised as theatre writing – and it does.)

I’d like to say it was worth all the effort, but sadly it didn’t rock my boat, and I felt a little exhausted by it all – despite admiring the evident theatre-making skill, despite knowing that I was watching a truly legendary company, despite the obvious enthusiasm of the audience, who rose to give them a standing ovation at the end of the four-hour marathon. Yep, four hours, sitting in uncomfortable metal seats, with one short interval.

So, how does it all play out? My favourite bit is the start. As we enter the auditorium, we pass along a corridor one ‘wall’ of which is a stretch of lace curtains, behind which we see a scene that is perhaps how we might imagine the backstage at the Chat Noir Parisian cabaret circa 1890. Ladies in white petticoats and bloomers pull on their stockings and boots; gentlemen with twirly moustaches paint their eyebrows and rouge their cheeks. There are some nice anachronistic reminders that this isn’t 1914 in the plastic bottles of water and modern brands of make-up remover. Past the ‘dressing rooms’, stage left is a room half-shielded by a wooden wall and half in full view, filled with a marvellous collection of musical instruments: stringed things of every size and type, drums, zithers, tubas, horns, full-size pianos and toy-pianos. A rotund man with a white bushy beard is standing guard over his treasure. (I presume him to be the company’s musical director Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, playing Monsieur Camille Berard the musician, but I might be wrong.)

All great so far! I suppose this start leads me to expect that this might be a promenade piece, but no – we are sat in our seats and there we must stay. The stage area is massive and – a nice touch – there are also lighting towers to each side that are climbed at regular intervals by characters designated as lighting operators for the ‘filming’. And so the story begins, the story of the making of the film, a film directed by Monsieur Tomasso (who plays many parts in his own film) with assistant director Madame Gabriel also taking on the role of camera-woman, making for some very nice swinging-around-in-a-harness opportunities. So yes, there are characters playing characters playing characters. There are clownish waiters who act as commentators on the action, also providing eccentric dance interludes, and there is – just to add another layer – a pre-recorded soundtrack in voiceover (in English, thankfully).

As each scene is shot, painted backdrops of Arctic wastes or Victorian drawing-rooms or cabins in the countryside are bussed onto the stage by bustling actors/waiters, carriages or chairs or mock-ups of the boat brought into play, snow or wind machines switched on and off, and Foley sound effects created for the ‘film’.

Poor theatre this is not. It might even be the ‘theatre of scene shifters’ that Jacques Copeau strove so hard to eliminate. I suppose the counterargument is that all this ‘stuff’ is being done with ironic intention, a kind of commentary on the complexity of this sort of creative endeavour.

It is of course all absolutely beautiful. There are some gorgeous tableaux – groups of actors poised at the helm of the Fol Espoir, or trekking across the Antarctic in ludicrous slow-mo, walking against the wind. There are some lovely little visual jokes that will appeal to contemporary theatre-makers: every scene shot contains at least one puppet bird on a rod, and the cry of ‘Ou est l’oiseau?’ is a constant refrain. The shipwreck scene with a miniature boat decorated with fairy lights floating in a tub is delightful, and brings a smile to my lips. The onstage musician is a genius – I happily watch him when I get bored of the inevitable cranking up of the snow machine, his tinkling on his piano and banging of his drums and gongs and bells, onstage or just out of sight, is constantly entertaining.

There are a lot of lovely things here, but four hours’ worth of material? I don’t think so. Perhaps if they had thought through the surtitle business, I might have enjoyed it more. This was an odd one: as what we were watching being created was a silent film, title-cards were used – except they weren’t. What we had instead were the surtitle screens also used for the title-card text, as well as both lots of text being projected onto the scenery and backdrops. The company seemed to feel that just changing the font was good enough to distinguish between the two forms of textual content, or maybe they thought it was an interesting postmodern provocation to mix the two up, but to my mind it was a dramaturgical boo-boo – totally confusing, and as I was in one of the front rows, to the side of and parallel with the main surtitle screen which I thus couldn’t see, I had to resign myself to trying to read white words often projected onto an off-white or pale-blue backdrop, mostly illegible. I gave up after a while and just watched the actors making nice moving pictures, but as the text was evidently supremely important, I feel a little bit cheated of one key element of the show.

It was great to have the opportunity to see such a legendary company, this being my first encounter with Théâtre du Soleil, who are rarely programmed in the UK despite their iconic status – but I get the feeling that I have perhaps missed the Mnouchkine boat.

www.theatre-du-soleil.fr

Théâtre du Soleil: Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir ¦ Photo: Michèle Laurent

Théâtre du Soleil: Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores) / The Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises)

Théâtre du Soleil: Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir ¦ Photo: Michèle Laurent

‘It has taken 48 years for the Edinburgh International to bring us here,’ says Ariane Mnouchkine (founder-director of Theatre du Soleil, legend in her own lifetime) before the show, on this their last performance of a sold-out five-day run.

And we can see why: it’s a tall order, bringing this lot over the water. A cast of – how many? 35 or more? They can’t all fit across the breadth of this enormous stage to take their bow – and tons, and I mean tons, of kit (the great wall of wooden packing cases stamped with their name form a barrier between the bar area and auditorium in this great cavernous hangar of a space, close to Edinburgh Airport). All in the service of an epic show that is about an amateur theatre company, who are also cooks and waiters in a restaurant cum dancehall, making a film that is loosely based on a lost Jules Verne story of a voyage to the freezing South Atlantic in search of – well, quite what is hard to say. In search of the dawn of a new age as the world enters the twentieth century, in search of the noble savage of South America, in search of hidden treasure (gold, oil, minerals), in search of modernism, in search of Darwinism, in search of Marxism, in search of feminism, in search of an exposition of Queen Victoria’s brand of imperialism, in search of an explanation of the madness of waging war over lands that hardly seem worth fighting over (The Falklands, say), in search of the reasons for the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and the beginning of the Great War, in search of… It’s exhausting just thinking about it, never mind watching it. The show is devised by the company and, as the programme notes put it, the script ‘half-written’ by leading feminist writer, philosopher and theoretician Hélène Cixous. (Warning! Could contain didactic and polemical tracts loosely disguised as theatre writing – and it does.)

I’d like to say it was worth all the effort, but sadly it didn’t rock my boat, and I felt a little exhausted by it all – despite admiring the evident theatre-making skill, despite knowing that I was watching a truly legendary company, despite the obvious enthusiasm of the audience, who rose to give them a standing ovation at the end of the four-hour marathon. Yep, four hours, sitting in uncomfortable metal seats, with one short interval.

So, how does it all play out? My favourite bit is the start. As we enter the auditorium, we pass along a corridor one ‘wall’ of which is a stretch of lace curtains, behind which we see a scene that is perhaps how we might imagine the backstage at the Chat Noir Parisian cabaret circa 1890. Ladies in white petticoats and bloomers pull on their stockings and boots; gentlemen with twirly moustaches paint their eyebrows and rouge their cheeks. There are some nice anachronistic reminders that this isn’t 1914 in the plastic bottles of water and modern brands of make-up remover. Past the ‘dressing rooms’, stage left is a room half-shielded by a wooden wall and half in full view, filled with a marvellous collection of musical instruments: stringed things of every size and type, drums, zithers, tubas, horns, full-size pianos and toy-pianos. A rotund man with a white bushy beard is standing guard over his treasure. (I presume him to be the company’s musical director Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, playing Monsieur Camille Berard the musician, but I might be wrong.)

All great so far! I suppose this start leads me to expect that this might be a promenade piece, but no – we are sat in our seats and there we must stay. The stage area is massive and – a nice touch – there are also lighting towers to each side that are climbed at regular intervals by characters designated as lighting operators for the ‘filming’. And so the story begins, the story of the making of the film, a film directed by Monsieur Tomasso (who plays many parts in his own film) with assistant director Madame Gabriel also taking on the role of camera-woman, making for some very nice swinging-around-in-a-harness opportunities. So yes, there are characters playing characters playing characters. There are clownish waiters who act as commentators on the action, also providing eccentric dance interludes, and there is – just to add another layer – a pre-recorded soundtrack in voiceover (in English, thankfully).

As each scene is shot, painted backdrops of Arctic wastes or Victorian drawing-rooms or cabins in the countryside are bussed onto the stage by bustling actors/waiters, carriages or chairs or mock-ups of the boat brought into play, snow or wind machines switched on and off, and Foley sound effects created for the ‘film’.

Poor theatre this is not. It might even be the ‘theatre of scene shifters’ that Jacques Copeau strove so hard to eliminate. I suppose the counterargument is that all this ‘stuff’ is being done with ironic intention, a kind of commentary on the complexity of this sort of creative endeavour.

It is of course all absolutely beautiful. There are some gorgeous tableaux – groups of actors poised at the helm of the Fol Espoir, or trekking across the Antarctic in ludicrous slow-mo, walking against the wind. There are some lovely little visual jokes that will appeal to contemporary theatre-makers: every scene shot contains at least one puppet bird on a rod, and the cry of ‘Ou est l’oiseau?’ is a constant refrain. The shipwreck scene with a miniature boat decorated with fairy lights floating in a tub is delightful, and brings a smile to my lips. The onstage musician is a genius – I happily watch him when I get bored of the inevitable cranking up of the snow machine, his tinkling on his piano and banging of his drums and gongs and bells, onstage or just out of sight, is constantly entertaining.

There are a lot of lovely things here, but four hours’ worth of material? I don’t think so. Perhaps if they had thought through the surtitle business, I might have enjoyed it more. This was an odd one: as what we were watching being created was a silent film, title-cards were used – except they weren’t. What we had instead were the surtitle screens also used for the title-card text, as well as both lots of text being projected onto the scenery and backdrops. The company seemed to feel that just changing the font was good enough to distinguish between the two forms of textual content, or maybe they thought it was an interesting postmodern provocation to mix the two up, but to my mind it was a dramaturgical boo-boo – totally confusing, and as I was in one of the front rows, to the side of and parallel with the main surtitle screen which I thus couldn’t see, I had to resign myself to trying to read white words often projected onto an off-white or pale-blue backdrop, mostly illegible. I gave up after a while and just watched the actors making nice moving pictures, but as the text was evidently supremely important, I feel a little bit cheated of one key element of the show.

It was great to have the opportunity to see such a legendary company, this being my first encounter with Théâtre du Soleil, who are rarely programmed in the UK despite their iconic status – but I get the feeling that I have perhaps missed the Mnouchkine boat.

www.theatre-du-soleil.fr

Bootworks Theatre: 30 Days to Edinburgh

Bootworks Theatre: 30 Days to Edinburgh

Bootworks Theatre: 30 Days to Edinburgh

‘A Spaceman, a Cowboy and a Disco-Dancer are going on a journey. A journey undertaken in the spirit of discovery. There’s a gig that they’ve got to get to and they’re the performers. The gig’s 468 miles away and they’ve only their feet to get them there. This will be 30 Days to Edinburgh.’

And they did it! James Baker, Rob Jude Daniels and Andy Roberts – collectively known as Bootworks – walked the whole length of the country to get from Chichester in Sussex to Edinburgh on the very last day of the Fringe, just in time to present the show made en route. In fact, they got here early and had to dawdle for the last day before making their triumphant journey down the Royal Mile singing The Proclaimers’ I Would Walk 500 Miles (inevitably, I suppose).

I’m in seeing another show and sadly miss them arriving at the door of Summerhall at 7pm. By 7.30, they are hanging out in the corridor chatting to mates. I give James (aka Spaceman) a hug – it’s odd hugging a guy in a slinky silver jumpsuit laden down with a giant backpack.

We file into one of Summerhall’s lecture theatre spaces, three mics placed in the stage area, and the Bootworks boys take to the stage, take off their backpacks and begin…

It’s (unsurprisingly) a bit of a ramshackle performance. Notebooks in hand, fluffs on the mic, lots of in-jokes. All-in-all it’s like a cross between stand-up comedy and performance poetry, with a few bits of mildly entertaining physical action chucked in. There’s a very funny failure to erect a tent (some children in the audience are called upon to help). There are jokes aplenty about Spaceman’s dangly bits, clearly outlined in the slinky silver suit, and about his bad poetry. Disco Dancer (Rob) is honest about the fact that he has found it all a bit hard going – he hasn’t had sex in ages, and his feet hurt, really hurt. The Cowboy (Andy) channels the energy of those that have gone before him: Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy, and John Wayne in – well, in everything John Wayne has been in, which is a lot of cowboy movies.

We get a whole lot of numbers and lists (meals eaten, animals spotted, towns passed through, pubs visited, constellations gazed at) and a fair few namechecks – Josh and Hannah who phoned them regularly from Edinburgh (there was a mobile number given on cards placed next to the Lego map in the hallway at Summerhall that showed their daily progress with little flags); Mim who called from a train going through Cumbria mid-August, saying she was probably very near them right now, and they were all looking at the same sunset; Winnebago Jeremy and the various nice landladies whose cafes provided them with life-saving All-Day Breakfasts. There’s quite a bit about food, and I particularly like a eulogy to the great British tradition of the Ice Cream van (‘Knobbly Bobbly! Mr Whippy with two flakes!’) There’s a lot about blisters and boots, about moments of friendship and fights, about torches and tents. Andy reads a letter composed en route: ‘Dear Vango, I quite like your sleeping bags, but please could you stop making tents?’

There are some nice moments of rhythm and repetition in the spoken text (the refrain of ‘We could have taken the train/car/plane,’ for example). Some of the observations from the journey and the recalling of encounters along the way are witty and interesting, but rather too many are not particularly inspiring, and there are more than a few dismissive comments about towns encountered along the way – although our lads are always keen to emphasise that ‘the people are nice’.

A criticism that has to be made is that it is all geared towards those in the know: the family and friends who have followed the progress along the way. A posse of international delegates in to see the show are completely bemused. Essentially, this is raw, undigested data, and life takes a lot more mulching down to become meaningful theatre. Compare and contrast to (say) Forced Entertainment’s The Travels, which similarly uses tales of journeying and random encounters across the UK – but which took many years of writing and editing and theatrical crafting to become the great show it is.

Which brings me to say that I feel that the choice to do the show was a mistake. The 30 days on the road was the show – a beautiful, wonderful thing, in a noble tradition of walking-as-art that includes the work of Janet Cardiff, Richard Long, and Wrights & Sites. The interaction with people from afar (by phone call, text, Facebook, or Twitter) was of course an intrinsic part of this. It is a wonderful achievement that is somehow lessened by being reduced to an hour-long hurriedly constructed theatre show. A celebratory welcoming party would perhaps have been enough to close the 30 days.

Should the company feel that a theatre show could emerge from the project, then that could be worked on with the sort of rigour and structured process that is needed to create an hour-long theatre piece, and what would emerge would be something of a standard worthy of Bootwork’s wonderful track-record.

But as said, I don’t feel that the theatre show is at all necessary in any case. 30 Days to Edinburgh was an extraordinary performance art project, a beautiful challenge to the Edinburgh bubble – but the art happened before they stepped into that lecture room. Nothing more was needed.

www.bootworkstheatre.co.uk

Tom Marshman: Legs 11

Tom Marshman: Legs 11

Tom Marshman: Legs 11

In which Tom Marshman takes us on a journey from Leg Shame to Leg Fame, telling the story of how he survived the pain and trauma of varicose veins, gaining a place in the Pretty Polly Legs 11 final. Along the way, we get an investigation of gender expectations, and liberation from those expectations, in this gentle, poignant and amusing performance piece.

The show is in the solo performance confessional-autobiographical tradition, using spoken text (written by the artist), film, song, and embodied actions. It sits between live art and theatre, perhaps more of a live art piece by most people’s definitions – Tom is himself, not acting a part – but it has a good dramaturgical structure, respecting the need for something presented in a theatre space, with a captive audience, to have the necessary pace and rhythm.

As we arrive in the space we see Tom pottering around, dressed in an old-gold tux and a pair of star-spangled tights. We are welcomed and invited to tie together a colourful selection of tights (sparkly, fishnet, bisque, American tan) to make a line, later used for an on-the-floor tightrope walk. The autobiographical texts are presented in various ways. There’s regular storytelling, as when we learn of Tom’s mother’s job in a supermarket, eschewing the spam and beans to promote brands such as Del Monte fruit cocktail, Martini Rosso, and – yes – Pretty Polly: ‘You’ll never catch a Pretty Polly girl in trousers!’ There’s a different kind of performance mode in the poetic ‘And when my legs were five… seven… eleven…’ sequence in which we get a quick run-through of Tom’s childhood and adolescence with moments of shame, embarrassment, self-awareness and emerging personal identity exposed and honoured (his legs running away from home aged five, red vanity case in hand; his legs having their trousers stolen at a party aged fifteen, resulting in a trip home in his Dad’s car with legs cocooned caterpillar-like in a sleeping bag). There’s ironic film clips (Busby Berkeley choreographed legs, and – inevitably – vintage Pretty Polly ads) and there are songs sung (these a little shaky it has to be said).

The adult legs have a tale to tell of pain and medicalisation and recovery, and we get the varicose veins story told with plastic drinking straws wedged down into Tom’s tights (the straws a nice shade of turquoise plastic, fitting in well with the red-and-turquoise theme throughout).

And so to the central story: when Pretty Polly announced that they needed a new pair of legs to represent them, Tom thought ‘I have a new pair of legs!’ and thus began his quest. We are now entering something resembling reality TV territory as we learn of the contest, the shortlist (the only man amongst a bevy of lovely-legged girls) and the outcome of the final – a tale told with suitably dramatic pauses and film interludes interspersed throughout. real6.ch Audience members get invited up for some Martini Rosso, drunk through straws (yes, those straws – still attached to Tom) and somewhere along the way, there’s a very nice section where the audience’s dancing legs are filmed and the film is played back to us.

Tom seems a little shy and unsure of himself at times, but this just adds to his charm. A very enjoyable little show, cleverly constructed, and as soft and velvety a fit as a pair of Pretty Polly 15 deniers. And actually, with a serious message hidden under the glossy sheen: we are all lovely, we can all be lovely – just believe, be brave, and be yourself.

www.tommarshman.com

Teatro Sineglossa: Remember Me

Teatro Sineglossa: Remember Me

Teatro Sineglossa: Remember Me

Inspired by an aria from Purcell’s Baroque opera Dido and Aeneas (‘Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.’), Sineglossa’s short filmic theatre show (just 20 minutes in duration) is less a story than a visual and aural poem exploring how the desire to love absolutely can become a form of narcissism, the one who desires and the one who is desired merging into one entity… Or perhaps it can be read as a lament – the dead lover living on in the body of the one who remains behind.

Scenography is everything in this piece – all done with lights and mirrors, you could say. We are sat in tiered seats facing a sheet of glass, so all we can see is our own reflection – a group of people staring ahead in expectation. We are then plunged into total blackout. (The performance space is Summerhall’s specially-adapted Black Shed venue, used only for the two Grotowski-inspired shows here, this and Teatr Zar’s Total Theatre Award winning Caesarean Section: Essays on Suicide, both of which require complete blackout.)

From the darkness we see glimmers of light and we make out a figure looking at us from behind the glass, as recorded applause plays. It’s a female figure, dressed in a smart cocktail dress, high heels and a hat. She raises her hand and steps towards us as the applause crescendos, then there is a moment of blackout and we next see her to the rear of the space, hatless, confined by what seems to be a triangular formation of glass walls. The figure becomes more elusive, almost ghostlike. An electronic soundtrack starts up, small bleeps sounding almost like digital cicada, then a male voice begins to hum. The woman stands by a table lamp that is giving off a bright but blurred light, a beacon in the darkness that seems to be shining right through her body. She bends over and removes her shoes and possibly her underwear. The man is seemingly behind her. She wrings her hands, agitated, then almost signs the sounds heard (‘Re-mem-ber me…’) in a kind of eurythmic hand-dance. She turns and stares into what might be a mirror, and through the glass darkly a male figure appears. The lights are very low and it is hard to distinguish what happens next, but what appears to happen is that both figures, naked, merge together then vacillate between the two states, male and female, momentarily separating out in the blink of the eye, then merging again, the pace of the ‘frames’ increasing to a frenzy.

The figures fade away before our eyes and we are left once again facing a sheet of glass, watching ourselves applaud. We can imagine this as a circular piece, with the female figure in the cocktail dress once again emerging from the applause – but this doesn’t happen, other than in our imaginations.

Afterwards, it is hard to recall just what we have actually seen and what we have imagined – the piece plays cleverly with that tug between memory and imagination, and is of course also playing very knowingly with our perceptions, challenging us to differentiate between the real and the illusory. The ‘morphing’ effect is obviously a version of the classic stage magic illusion called Pepper’s Ghost, used here to great effect.

I go back the next day to see the show again, hoping for a little more insight – I’m just as entranced, but none the wiser. Sometimes that’s how it has to be.

www.sineglossa.eu