Author Archives: 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

Res de Res: (remor)

We climb a forbidding flight of stone stairs and reach a high-ceilinged panelled room (this in the C Nova venue, the latest pop-up theatre space in the C Venues empire, housed in a government building). Almost the whole room is taken up by a large rusty-looking box, a kind of shipping container with peepholes. Peering in, we see what looks to be an austere prison cell – distressed white walls, a bare wooden table and chair, a sink with a dripping tap, and an unwelcoming metal bunk bed with no bedding.

An usher opens a door in the container and invites us to enter, and we see two figures lying with their backs to us, bodies squashed against the wall – a woman on the top bunk and a man on the bottom. Over the next eleven minutes, a poignant choreography of angst, loneliness, frustration, and comfort-seeking is played out. An envelope on the table is opened slowly to reveal a letter and a grainy photograph, which is then stuck on the wall. A grille above the bunk bed becomes the scene of a dance of shadowy hands seeking escape. The bars of the metal bed are used to twist and weave through and over as our couple move with and against each other. Relationship to audience in the piece is interesting: the performers don’t acknowledge our presence, but we sit on stools holding torches that we may use in any way we wish – thus cast in the role of prison guards. Our torch beams create a dance of light and shadow around and upon the moving bodies.

There is no clear, determined narrative – instead, we construct narrative. In my head, the Hispanic appearance of the performers and the use of the black-and-white newspaper photographs conjures up memories of the terrible oppressions that took place in South America in the 1970s when so many people were captured and then ‘disappeared’. Other audience members will no doubt have their own thoughts and responses. There is also the possibility that this cell containing one man and one woman is a metaphor for the lifelong struggle of personal relationships.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination a circus show – but the circus skills of the two creator-performers (Marta Barceló and Joan Miquel Artigues) from this renowned Spanish company are evident, and the movement work is breathtakingly precise and gutsy. They are also masters of restrained physical acting – faces portray people who have trained themselves not to give themselves away to onlookers, with eyes that stare forward in blank pain, and small gestures of hopelessness are played with an admirable control and restraint.

Every element of the piece – design, lighting, sound, performance – is thought through carefully, each aspect contributing beautifully to the dramaturgy of the piece.

A visceral and thought-provoking physical theatre piece creating intense visual images that stay burnt in the mind long after we’ve left – some companies manage to say more in eleven minutes than others do in two hours!

Theatre Corsair: The Dead Memory House

Take three girls – Bea, Anne and Sylvia are their names. Sylvia is the sensible one, a bit older than her years, dressed in clothes her companions describe as matronly (although they don’t really read in this way). Anne is the good-time girl, sitting around at home in a red halter-neck dress, full make-up and jewellery, helping herself to constant refills from a bottle of wine. Bea is the ethereal melancholic, the arty one – reproductions of Millet’s Ophelia on her bedroom wall, wild dark hair pulled into braids, floaty pale pink dress slipping from her shoulders.

We are invited into their home to hear their stories. Or at least, to witness them play out their assigned personality types through a series of encounters in what purports to be their home. These encounters are mildly dramatic, mostly verbal monologue or dialogue, and sometimes involving low-key movement sequences, but are unfortunately not particularly engaging, and there is a fair amount of clunky writing and over-acting.

The Dead Memory House is described as ‘site responsive’ but is hardly so, unless the site being responded to is an Edinburgh junk shop – we are in a couple of rooms upstairs at Summerhall that have been kitted out in old furniture and bric-a-brac. There is no obvious logic to the design or choice of objects – it’s just random old stuff, the sort you’d find at your nearest British Heart Foundation charity shop. Maybe that’s the point, but it looked like an attempt to signify ‘old things with memories attached’ that didn’t work as nothing had any resonance – it just doesn’t look or feel like someone’s home. There’s also an intriguing pile of black-and-white photos on the table, but these aren’t brought into the show in any meaningful way, which is disappointing.

It is described as a ‘promenade play’, but we don’t really go anywhere. Once we are invited in, we stand awkwardly about, watching and listening. At one point we are beckoned to enter an adjoining bedroom, but that’s about it.

Relationship to audience is confused. It starts well, as we wait outside the door and a flustered Sylvia arrives, keys in hand, acknowledges our presence, and invites us to follow her in. Once inside, we are offered bourbon biscuits (sadly no tea!), and then given slips of paper and asked to write our replies to the given questions (mine is ‘what is the first book you re-read?’). But then we are ignored, so we kind of morph from invited guests to barely-visible ghosts. The jar of written questions and responses does get brought back later, but the material isn’t used in a particularly interesting way.

It is to be acknowledged that this is a difficult card to play – even highly experienced companies such as Grid Iron don’t always succeed in properly integrating the audience with the action in a meaningful way in work of this kind, and Theatre Corsair are obviously young and inexperienced.

But at least they’re making an attempt to do something other than just write and present a regular play on a regular stage, and their intentions are good even if the end result is not yet particularly satisfactory. Perhaps if they stick together and try to give some serious thought to what they want to say and how they want to say it, things might improve.

www.theatrecorsair.co.uk

Pete Edwards: FAT

Meet Pete. He has a shaved head and skinny legs, and he’s dressed in a pair of turquoise-blue shorts and sparkly trainers. Pete has a story to tell – the story of a quest for love. Pete is gay and has a predilection for men with a bit of fat on them.

We start with a big-screen film of London’s South Bank, and the camera’s eye takes us past streetlamps and over the river wall to the shimmering waters below. It’s beautiful, a visual reminder of how vital the River Thames is to London’s heart and soul.

Enter Pete, who uses a wheelchair and has a voice that is kind of hard to understand if you are not used to it, so he’s provided subtitles for his spoken commentary. At first my eyes are drawn a lot to the titles; as the show progresses I find myself listening rather than reading, learning and understanding more, discerning the patterns in the spoken language. It’s all just a matter of time and effort. As Pete talks to us he moves his chair around the space, in a gentle choreography, often coming close to us, then retreating. In the centre of the floorspace is a circular blue crash-mat.

Pete reflects on his walk by the riverbank, and eulogises on the beauty of the moment. The London Eye passes by in the background and Pete tells us he’s been on it six times. We also learn of his love of street art as the camera passes the skateboarders and graffiti writers of the Southbank. We are taken through his journey as if it is in present time. ‘What would make this perfect,’ he says, ‘is if I could meet a beautiful fat man tonight.’

The journey then divides into three different strands, developed through film, spoken text, and physical action in the space: we have the ‘city symphony’ in which Pete paints a picture of London’s beautiful river landscape and monuments – Shakespeare’s Globe, the Gherkin (‘Beautiful, erotic!’) – as well as such smaller quieter stuff as a paper bag blowing in the wind. Then there is the folkloric/archetypal dream-journey, in which we hear fantastical tales of leaping over the sides into the water to commune with mermen; or a bizarre and hilarious story of the disappearance of all the men from London, which is then taken over by cats who make all the women cut off their long hair and cook it; or again a fantasy built around the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, which is turned into a kind of human stew pot. The third strand is the journey of the sexual quest. This strand sits between the reality of the first one and the total fantasy of the second – a realistic dream, you might say. Perhaps it happened, perhaps it didn’t.

The man Pete meets – Dave – offers him a Coke and invites him back to eat spaghetti. We see the spaghetti cooked on film, and live in the space we see Pete assisted in moving from his wheelchair onto the blue mat, his clothes removed, and a plate of spaghetti brought to him, the messy spaghetti eating becoming a metaphor for the sexual encounter. Throughout the show, the links between food and sex are paramount.

What I enjoyed most about the show was that it reaffirmed things I knew and loved, yet showed me new things. As a Londoner born and bred, I was drawn instantly to this homage to my city of birth, and identified with both the real-life portrait of an area I know well and the dream-imagery connected to London’s river and monuments (reminding me a little of the fantasy writings about and around the Thames authored by Jeanette Winterson, Russell Hoban and, more recently, Ben Aaronovitch). The story of the sexual desires and quests of a gay disabled man were the new element for me – here’s a story I haven’t heard before and felt pleased to have been invited in on. And of course we are none of us often presented with someone with extreme physical disabilities on a stage, there to be looked at and listened to, fairly and squarely. No need to stare, but no need to look away either. Just look, and see the person before us.

The show is pitched somewhere between performance art and theatre – performance art in that we are presented with this person, this body in this space at this moment in time: there’s no acting, no character, no ‘other’.

Yet in its realisation – the integration of soundscape, moving image, spoken text, physical action – it has a rhythm and direction that shows a keen awareness of dramaturgy. In other words, it’s a great story, told well! A very beautiful and moving piece of ‘total theatre’.

Ripstop Theatre: Luminous Tales

Mixing traditional tales from around the world (including the Native American story of the crow who stole the daylight) into a narrative about the necessary balance between day and night and the value of both, Ripstop Theatre’s beautifully titled Luminous Tales is billed as a ‘gentle journey through the darkness of night, over the light of the moon and back in time for bed’ that uses shadow play and storytelling.

Presented under the auspices of Escalator East to Edinburgh, usually a mark of quality, and the Norwich Puppet Theatre, no less, with company endorsements from renowned puppeteer Luis Z Boy, I had high hopes of seeing a children’s show of exceptional quality but sadly this wasn’t the case.

In the interests of fairness, I saw the first show of the Edinburgh run, and get-ins are notoriously fast and furious in the Fringe, which might explain the nervous performance and the clunky transitions – for although Zannie Fraser is an experienced puppeteer and performer, she struggled to cope with the enormous demands of managing the many and various props and effects in this one-woman show: screens of various sizes, projected paintings, OHP, shadow puppet hares, glove puppet dogs, hand-held shooting star torches, calico bags that were supposed to capture the blue night-sky (and instead, confusingly, captured the projection of the green trees), etcetera, etcetera.

But beyond this, I disliked her character’s cheery Jackanory/Playaway tone, in particular the cringe-worthy ‘No more night-time’ song and dance. Children’s theatre has moved on so much in recent years, and her tone struck me as dated and a little patronising. Surely part of the remit of children’s theatre is to give young people things they didn’t know they wanted, rather than play to cliché and the lowest common denominator? And I had no idea why this old lady character was dressed in a Mrs Mop housecoat and 1950s style scarf but with trainers. What was this supposed to signify?

Aside from any first-show nerves, the piece seemed, in essence, deeply flawed: the writing was dull as dishwater (prosaic where the publicity copy had been poetic); the dramaturgy all over the place, with the integration of the traditional tales into the narrative clumsy. There were some very odd choices about what to place in shadow and what not, and generally the shadow theatre and puppetry work were disappointing coming from a company with such a solid backing.

On the positive side, the painted and projected landscapes were lovely, I liked the soundscape (at least when it wasn’t competing with the spoken text, of which there was far too much delivered in a nervous frenzy, with not a pause for breath in the whole 45 minutes) and there were some nice visual images – including a rice-cake moon munched to bits, a rubber glove ‘flappy batty thing’, and some entertaining shadow-puppet boxing hares.

Perhaps it’ll settle in for its run, but regardless Luminous Tales sadly isn’t the future for children’s theatre.

www.ripstoptheatre.com

So You Want to be a Theatre Producer

by James Seabright

May 2010

£12.99

Yes! A good book on producing theatre, written by a successful theatre producer! So You Want To Be A Theatre Producer? describes itself as ‘a comprehensive guide to every aspect of producing a show, from raising the money to creating a hit’. And that is indeed what we get: valuable insights on everything from the creative issues of coming up with the ideas and casting a show, through to tackling touring costs, insurance, marketing, PR and so forth. The emphasis is more on the mainstream/potentially commercial sector rather than the experimental theatre/live art sector – but there is valuable information for anyone putting on a production of any scale in any setting. After all, ‘success’ takes many forms but surely, if we are putting work in front of an audience, we want to do this successfully? So here’s how… And one marvellous idea is the addition of companion website with downloadable contract templates, marketing packs and budget spreadsheets – all for free atwww.producerbook.co.uk