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

neTTheatre: Puppet. Book of Splendour

Edinburgh: The Story So Far

neTTheatre, Puppet. Book of Splendour
So, I’ve made it to the halfway point and more – that feels like something! And the Total Theatre Awards shortlist is done. Just 28 shows to see and judge, then, plus all the late-opening shows / shows I’ve promised myself or someone else I’ll see even if not shortlisted…

And the story so far?

The Fringe started quietly. The first few days of previews and openings are always relatively quiet, but by the end of week one it was clear that there was a discernible Olympics knock-on effect – with people obviously choosing to stay home to watch the sports on TV rather than come to the Burgh for a bit of art or live entertainment. Many venues, though, chose to have the Olympics screened in the bar, so you could get the best of both worlds – see a show and catch up on the medal count on your way in or out.

My first few days at the Fringe are always my favourite time – there’s an easy pace, and I spend my time picking and choosing from favourite companies or interesting looking shows. People often ask me how I pick and choose from so much on offer, and the answer is that initially I tend to go for shows presented in curated programmes within the Fringe: Escalator East to Edinburgh are an annual regular, joined this year by a North East producers’ venture called Northern Stage at St Stephen’s, housed in what will inevitably always be known as the former Aurora Nova venue. There was also the Polska Arts programme of top Polish companies, including neTTheatre, KTO, Song of the Goat, and Teatr Biuro Podróży who are presenting not one, not two but three outdoor theatre shows at the Old Quad for this year’s Fringe: old favourite Macbeth(previously shortlisted for a TT Award), outdoor theatre classic Carmen Funebre, for one night only as an Amnesty International benefit (and what with the Pussy Riot outrage and all that, Amnesty are big on this year’s Fringe), and an Edinburgh premiere for new show Planet Lem. I’ve seen the first two and look forward to the third…

I saw a fair few Escalator shows, and didn’t, to be honest, feel the programme was as strong as usual, based on the four or five things I saw – but did very much enjoy Pete Edwards’ FATYou Obviously Know What I’m Talking Aboutalso gets brownie points for including a scene in which a man watches a kettle boil, in real time.

Over at St Stephen’s, this was rivalled by a woman watching tea brew in real time – Faye Draper in Tea is an Evening Meal, a cheery and intimate wee show that which I saw (and very much enjoyed) before seeing another show co-authored by Third Angel’s Alexander Kelly, What I Heard About the World, which has been shortlisted for a Total Theatre Awards (more on that later).

Over at the Assembly Roxy (what was the Zoo Roxy last year, and the Demarco Rocket before that, and the Roxy Arthouse before that – veterans of the Fringe will know of it as Richard Demarco’s gaff!) I saw some of the marvellous Russian programme curated by Anna Bogodist of Derevo, who was awarded a Herald Angel for her efforts. I didn’t make it to DO-Theatre’s Hangman, but that’s a show I’ve seen before and strongly recommend – what I did see and love was Derevo’s wonderful new show Mephisto Waltz and Akhe’s wonderful old show Mr Carmen.

A small tale of how the right sort of PR can work: ages ago I got a Facebook message from a friend now living in Australia inviting me to a show she had connections with, a piece called (remor) by Spanish dance/theatre/circus company Res de Res, an eleven-minute long show set in a prison cell – the audience join the two performers inside the ‘cell’. I thus saw the show on the first day, flagged it up to others on the Total Theatre Awards team, and I’m now delighted to see it on the Total Theatre Awards shortlist in the Physical and Visual Performance category (alongside Mr Carmen and Mephisto Waltz).

I also made sure that I spent some time at the Traverse, as that is always time well spent. As a venue dedicated to new writing, not all of the work programmed is of interest to TT reviewers and assessors – but lines between ‘new writing’ and ‘new work’ grow ever blurrier, with so much new writing for the stage now crafted by actor-creators (Tim Crouch being a good example), and so many writers also interested in creating a ‘total theatre’ on stage, using whatever ways and means they wish.

Traverse hits seen in the first week include Bullet Catch and All That is Wrong(the latter now closed). Both of these have made it onto the shortlist. Late opener Monkey Bars by the ever-resourceful and interesting Chris Goode is also strongly recommended (I write this having just left the auditorium – review will follow soon!), and I loved Daniel Kitson’s play on making a play (yeah I know: theatre referencing theatre, so last year – but I loved it!).

Another venue that I made a beeline to was Summerhall – only in its second year and already established as a place to find a really eclectic range of experimental theatres of all sorts. Favourites there have included the Italian production The ShitAmusements (by Sleepwalk Collective) and How a Man Crumbled by Lecoq graduates Clout Theatre (and yes, you’ve guessed – those three are shortlisted, as are Song of the Goat’s Songs of Lear and Teatr Zar’sCaesarean Section: Essays on Suicide, neither of which I have yet seen but both of which come very hotly tipped). NeTTheatre’s new show Puppet. Book of Splendour (also Summerhall) was an epic, intense evening. I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I admired it! It’s closed now, so you won’t be able to see for yourself if you haven’t already. I must also mention h2dance’s Say Something, a really interesting dance/choral voice crossover (declaration of vested interest: I’m in it!), which is also at Summerhall. This piece will be the subject of a Being There feature, which will be online soon. I also tried very hard to see Square Peg’s contemporary circus piece Rime, which is in the same space (the wonderfully named Dissection Room) at Summerhall as h2dance, so I’ve been staring at their set/rig a lot in recent days – but after three attempts foiled by cancellations (due to the company first ‘not being ready’ to open, then suffering injury) I eventually gave up, and have sadly now missed it as it closed a few days back. Well, that’s the Edinburgh Fringe for you – there are always some that get away…

Things I have seen and liked at other venues include Look Left Look Right’s verbatim piece NOLA at Underbelly. And I want to flag up shortlisted show Still Life by Sue MacLaine which I haven’t yet seen in Edinburgh, but enjoyed greatly at the Brighton Fringe last year (yep, another shortlisted one!).

What else? Well, despite picking carefully I sometimes find myself in the dark wishing I were elsewhere. If I feel the show has some merit – particularly if by an emerging company – I review the work and offer what I hope is constructive criticism. In some cases, I just feel I have nothing to say other than ‘do something other than make theatre’ and I am not really keen on the sarcastic and scathing reviewer mode, so I usually just don’t write the review in that case. It seems pointless just publishing vitriol!

So now, off I go on my quest to see all the shows on the shortlist I’ve not yet seen – every year to date I’ve managed to see the complete Total Theatre Awards shortlist, and this year I intend to do the same. Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye – I’m off now to see two on the Emerging Artists’ list –XXXO and Juana in a Million. I have high hopes…

Vicky Araico Casas: Juana in a Million

Vicky Araico Casas: Juana in a Million

Vicky Araico Casas: Juana in a Million

Tequila, sombreros, Mariachi, tortillas… Juana’s had enough of all that. What she wants is fish-and-chips, Billy Elliot and Buckingham Palace. Launched on her journey by a fiercely beating drum and a wild-as-the-wind Aztec dance, our heroine sets off from a small town in Mexico beset by economic depression and gang violence to seek out the bright lights of Londres. Passing through immigration is easier than she expects. She hopes for the fat and friendly-looking officer, and when she gets to the head of the line she says ‘tourist’ and gets through without any cross-examining.

The next hour or so whirls by in a wonderfully robust portrayal of the trials and tribulations of an illegal immigrant, the eponymous Juana, all weaved beautifully together with flashback memories from her life in Mexico – which include a truly terrifying enacted memory of the nightclub murder of her salsa-dancing boyfriend Pedro – and snippets from Mexico’s history and folklore. A recurring character conjured is La Malinche, the native Mexican woman who played a key role in the Spanish conquest of the country, an interpreter, intermediary and lover of conquistador Hernán Cortés. (‘We are all the sons and daughters of Malinche,’ says Juana, who is keen to dispute her mother’s constant harping back to past grievances, and blaming of all Mexico’s ills on the invaders. ‘The drug barons are not outsiders, they are Mexican!’ wails Juana.)

We see Juana ‘hot-bedding’ with a smelly woman called Guadalupe; sacked with no pay from Los Amigos, a Mexican restaurant in Elephant and Castle, when she kicks up a fuss about being groped in the kitchen (flashback to her restaurateur mother in Mexico saying, ‘But this is your restaurant here, why would you go and work in a restaurant there?’); and sorting shoes in a warehouse in Croydon, sent by a dodgy agency that disappears overnight without – you’ve guessed it – paying her a penny. Eventually she takes the only option she has left, and phones the seedy old guy without a dancing bone in his body she was fixed up with on a double-date. (‘Roger has money, all you have to do is spread your legs!” says her new friend Maria).

Countering the depressing nature of the stories told, the show sings with a vibrant energy, full of dance, rhythm, physical expression and humour. Performer Vicky Araico Casas and her ankle-belled onstage musician (Adam Pleeth, who plays drums, percussion, guitar and trumpet eloquently) are both excellent, and the piece is directed with due care and attention by Nir Paldi (of Theatre Ad Infinitum).

The mix of verbal storytelling and physical expression is perfectly pitched, and I particularly like the moments when words and movement motifs come together to create something akin to a highly physical performance poetry as, for example, in a show-stacking riff in which a repeated sequence of precisely mimed actions is accompanied by a litany of shoe colours: ‘… simply red, baby blue, navy blue, electric blue, apple green…’ The snippets of popular dance interspersed into the story also work very well, and the dream-space transition from sexy salsa dance to horror as the drug barons descend on the nightclub rolling human heads across the floor is done beautifully. This is a piece using a lot of text, but the physical performance is intrinsic to the piece, and built into the dramaturgy. Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, the piece reminds me of Theatre Ad Infinitum’s work, and it bears evidence of the same rigorous writing, devising and performing processes.

A gorgeous piece of theatre, shining a bright and colourful light on a difficult subject. If you’d had told me that a tale of illegal immigration and oppression would be one of the most heart-lifting shows in the Fringe, I might not have believed you – but here it is!

Chris Goode: Monkey Bars

Chris Goode: Monkey Bars

Chris Goode: Monkey Bars

In which Chris Goode comes of age, taking words out of the mouth of babes and onto the stage of the Trav…

Monkey Bars is a piece of verbatim theatre, with texts taken from interviews with children between the ages of six and eleven (conducted by Goode’s collaborator Karl James – mediator, facilitator, and director, known for his work with Tim Crouch) placed into the mouths of adult actors – actors who play adults, not adults playing children. Still with me? Good. Goode. Those who have followed his work will know that Chris Goode likes words, and likes using words spoken or written by others to craft extraordinary and eloquent theatre pieces – see, for example, Hippo World Guest Book, which used texts from a website for hippo enthusiasts. Yep, hippos. ‘Never work with children or animals,’ said WC Fields. Well, we can ignore him and live dangerously…

So, we have wine-supping ladies talking about the joys of Haribo fried egg sweets; and grown men in ties grumbling that all the girls want to do is play, ‘Girls catching boys. It’s wrong.’

There are cakes and superheroes and bubblegum and broken arms. There’s a boy who sings to his jelly, and a girl who likes to play rugby. We have reflections on fame (‘You have to put on your make-up just to go down the corner shop, which I think is quite sad really’), on the oppression of the media (‘They’re telling you the crime rate has gone up… we don’t need to know that cos now we are going to be even more scared’), and on the monarchy (‘Our money’s going to them, like buying their jewels.’) There are eloquent accounts of frightening experiences: ‘A man he got hit by a car… and it looked like a ragdoll, and it was just lying on the floor. And I got so freaked out, I was so scared.’ There are hilarious exchanges on money and wealth: ‘Fake money – they can print it off the internet!’ There are worrying exposes of domestic violence and family discord: ‘When my dad was beating up my mum, I gave my mum the umbrella…’

It’s crafted beautifully, the whole thing choreographed with tender loving care. The scenography is simple but effective: a set of ten white glowing cubes are moved around the space by the actors, sat on, stacked, turned into sofas and desks and chairs as needed. A red light upstage references the recording ‘on’ of the interviews. The actors group and regroup in the space, the scenes played out as monologues, dialogues, group discussions. These adults behaving as adults but talking like children reveal, through the children’s words, that we are all – of whatever age or social class – essentially the same, concerned about the same things. We want to be loved. We want to be happy. We want to be approved of. We want to be successful; on whatever terms we define success. We dream of falling. We are frightened of being mugged. We don’t know quite how to handle the opposite sex. We are distrustful of authority. We sometimes feel ashamed or overwhelmed. We worry about change – be it a new job or moving on to Secondary School (and although  the age range of children interviewed was six to eleven, I think I detect more voices from the older end of this age span.)

If there’s a criticism, it is less of the work – which is a very complete and inspiring piece of theatre – than of some of the hyperbole around it. Monkey Bars works as a piece of theatre because transposing words said by one person to a different person, one who we wouldn’t expect to be saying those words, often opens our ears to really hear what is being said. As, for example, in Forced Entertainment’s ground-breaking show Speak Bitterness in which women’s stories of abuse are spoken by male actors. So this is in fact a tried and tested theatrical device. And although appreciative of the way in whichMonkey Bars reappraises children’s words, I’d dispute the claim that we don’t listen to our children. In my experience, parents (myself included) are often full of awe and wonder at how intelligent and insightful our children are, but aware that people who are child-free are often suspicious of and impatient around children. That Chris Goode is a man who, despite not being a parent, is someone who really wants to listen to children and honour and respect their words, is to be commended.

 

Nathalie Marie Verbeke and Charlotte De Bruyne: XXXO

Nathalie Marie Verbeke and Charlotte De Bruyne: XXXO

Nathalie Marie Verbeke and Charlotte De Bruyne: XXXO

Two girls with laptops at a table, upstage. The content of each screen is projected side-by-side behind them onto the rear wall. The images we see are of two tear-stained faces – a whole slideshow of them. It goes from photos to real-time videoing, and we see the tears really falling. This moves into footage of famous tear-jerking film moments, from Bambi to Titanic – some amusing, some disturbing. Every genre of film and TV is touched on, from horror to thriller to soppy romance to soap opera. The girls are now on the floor downstage, playing out the scenes – death-bed scenes and murder scenes and child-hugging scenes – to and with each other, synching their live words to the relayed screen images, and joining in the crying and howling and comforting. There are bad wigs and a few props, and it is all both ludicrous and strangely touching: I’m reminded of Forced Entertainment’s And on the Thousandth Night in this ironic telling of so many stories upon stories upon stories.

It strikes me that it’s the girl equivalent of playing Pokemon or superheroes or Power Rangers. I’m reminded of my own sons’ acting-out games when younger, and of a marvellous moment in Martin Amis’ novel The Informationwhen he perfectly captures boys role-playing: ‘I want to be the blue Power Ranger!’ ‘No. I’m the blue Power Ranger!’

I’m also remembering being 16 and practising frowning and crying to the mirror: How will I look when the newspapers photograph me if I suddenly find out that both my parents were killed in a plane crash? I’d forgotten that till now… So this is the 21st Century version of the faces-in-the-mirror alone-in-your-bedroom game. It’s a girl thing, a modern girl thing.

In their programme notes, the show’s creator-performers Nathalie Marie Verbeke and Charlotte De Bruyne – who came to fame as teenagers starring in Ontroerend Goed’s Once And For All We Are Going To Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen – explain that the starting point for XXXO came from discovering that they had both filmed themselves crying, and that many of their friends had confessed to doing the same. It kick-started an artistic investigation of what makes us cry, and of how this generation of young people are responding to the constant bombardment day and night with images of grief – real and fictional – in media of all sorts. How to know when grief is real? How to feel real grief? When are crocodile tears as therapeutic as real tears, and are there different sorts of tears anyway? My train of thought moves into: Why did I cry when Lady Di died and stay stony-faced at my own mother’s funeral? As Camus pointed out, we are willing to persecute someone who does not cry when they are ‘supposed to’ – crying is expected. Use onions if necessary to bring on the tears (and they do).

The screens switch to projected play texts, and we see our heroines acting out Medea’s despair and rage at the point when she decides to kill her children to exact revenge on her erring husband: ‘Let no man say of Medea that she is mild as milk.’ We move into a montage of clips from YouTube: everything from Nessun Dorma to lost penguins in the wild to newborn babies first cries, via car crashes, bomb blasts and desperate last phone calls from the struck towers of the World Trade Centre. Oh, life! Oh, death! Remember, these young women would have been nine or ten years old when 9/11 happened, would have seen it all played out on TV. They will have seen the Gulf War footage and torture and slaughter from all across the world played out on their computer screens night and day. They would have had access to all sorts of horror, real and imagined, throughout all their growing years. They will have surreptitiously watched all sorts of things on YouTube that their parents wouldn’t have wanted them to see. How does that affect you? How do you deal with all this pain, all these tears?

Children have always coped with distress and terror and grief by acting out what they’ve witnessed in their play. Adults do the same, but they call it making plays rather than play. As young theatre-makers only recently arrived at adulthood, these two have created an exciting and imaginative piece of work that sits between ‘play’ and ‘a play’. It’s courageous and disturbing and funny and curious, all at once.

There are dissenters. A friend (who disliked the show) described it as ‘a Marmite show’ – love it or hate it – and I am sure that there are many people who, like him, wonder who the audience is for this sort of work. It is not an obvious crowd-pleaser, and I feel that placing it in the home-of-the-jolly-romp Pleasance Courtyard is really not the right decision for the company. The gloomy cavernous space feels completely wrong for the show, and the black curtain backdrop means that the projections are murky and hard to make out at times. I do feel British audiences are open to this sort of experimental theatre-making – but how, when and where such work is presented is a key issue.

Regardless of these production issues, and the problem of targeting the right audience, a great debut from two young women who have grown up with Ontroerend Goed and have now set off on their own path as theatre-makers. I eagerly await whatever they decide to do next, together or alone.

Teatr Biuro Podróży: Planet Lem

Teatr Biuro Podróży: Planet Lem

Teatr Biuro Podróży: Planet Lem

Welcome to the future! This is the future as it used to be – spaceships, robots, and hovercraft-like vehicles. Planet Lem’s vision is of a world in which experiments in Artificial Intelligence have led to robots taking over all the important work of the world. Humans, relieved of all major responsibilities, with no productive work to do, have become idle and useless.

In their latest piece of spectacular outdoor theatre, Teatr Biuro Podróży present ‘a story never written’ – a kind of loving homage to the ideas of Polish writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem. Lem is probably best known as the author ofSolaris, a metaphysical sci-fi novel which ponders on the nature of reality and has been filmed three times to date, although it would seem that this show is more interested in referencing the more humorous and satirical Cyberiadstories. It all works on many levels – there’s enough ‘Lem’ details to amuse the fans, but the story is an archetypal one that questions what it means to be human, and it is presented as a jolly good bit of outdoor entertainment, so knowledge of the novels is certainly not a prerequisite to enjoying the show.

Teatr Biuro Podróży have a deservedly high reputation for their inventive use of stilts in outdoor performance. Shows such as the legendary Carmen Funebre(which played for just one night here at the Quad as a fundraiser for Amnesty in the week of the Pussy Riot trial verdict) and the more recent Macbeth: Who Is That Bloodied Man? (which had a good run for the first half of the Fringe at the same venue) prove that stilt-work can be more than cheery walkabout festival fodder – it can be used to dark and dangerous effect in stories that tackle such subjects as the Bosnian conflict, as is the case in Carmen, or rework and cast a new light on the terrible tragedy of the Scottish Play. Their influence has been seen far and wide – with UK street theatre artists such as Periplum acknowledging their debt to the company.

There is a certain aesthetic that we associate with Podróży – black-cloaked creatures towering above us, flame-bearers racing through the space, rusting metal structures, fires in braziers – all pretty Gothic. In Planet Lem, director Pawel Szkotak goes for something completely different – everything is white and bright, and there’s a kind of retro sci-fi look to it all, a techno soundtrack adding to the back-to-the-future feel.

The robots are suitably big and shiny-silver, and there’s a great ‘spaceship’ frame-construction which is like a giant trampoline on its side that rises up to great effect, the human figure inside it spread-eagled, Catherine-wheel style. There’s plenty of kit involved in this production – including video screens, TV monitors (which, if I’m not mistaken, play some vintage footage of Lem himself speaking), and a whole formation of high tech shopping trolleys that act as sleeping/eating stations for the humanoids, who are kept docile by being fed hallucinatory drugs (a nod here to the placating Soma in Brave New World, then – although perhaps Lem had the idea independently as he and Huxley are often working on similar territory). These poor hapless humans are played by actors in squidgy pink whole-body-mask suits (‘like Teletubbies with tits’ as a colleague remarked gleefully).

It’s all a jolly good sci-fi romp for much of the time, with lots of crowd-pleasing lift-offs and robot-battles and whatever, but the sections that I enjoy most are the ones that are the least spectacular, such as the scenes in which a roller-blading man-in-black and a ‘noble savage’ space explorer forge a relationship. I’m assuming these are representing robotic engineers Trurl and Klapaucius from the Cyberiad novels, ‘constructors’ who, god-like, roam the universe fixing problems on distant planets, alternating between rivalry and friendship. The way the performance space is used in these scenes – both figures on the same level – no stilts – but moving with different patterns at very different speeds – is an interesting contrast to the robot/humanoid encounters that use the more familiar play-with-scale Podróży-style groundlings versus stilt-walking monsters dynamic.

The show is in its first year, and it hasn’t yet bedded in, but it is good to see Podrozy playing with a very different aesthetic, and introducing humour in a more upfront way. I’m also amused by the use of cigarette smoking as a motif of individualism and redemption! An interesting show rather than a great show, but it is early days yet for Planet Lem.

There’s a message here in this depiction of Lem’s vision – which shares with other ‘philosophical’ sci-fi writers of the 20th century (Aldous Huxley, Philip K Dick, JG Ballard) an interest in exploring what it actually means to be human in a world of ever-increasing new technologies. In our contemporary striving for everything to be clean-cut, smooth, easy, and trouble-free, we are in danger of losing our core humanity. No pain, no gain.