Author Archives: Simon Benson

Freedom Studios & EnteIechy Arts: Home Sweet Home

This latest production from Bradford-based Freedom Studios, in a collaboration with Deptford-based Entelechy Arts, delves into the complexities of ageing in contemporary Britain and aims to ask pertinent questions as to how ageing is both perceived and experienced – and how we should approach it. Their last major piece of community theatre was The Mill – City of Dreams (2011), a promenade production performed in an abandoned textiles mill. Home Sweet Home, although performed in Bradford’s Ukrainian Centre, is significantly less dependent on its venue, but it owes a considerable amount to the lives of those older people, from Bradford and elsewhere, whose stories, gathered over two years of research, form the basis of the production.

A moving and intimate production, Home Sweet Home begins with the spectators being greeted by hosts (‘older emerging artists from London, Bradford and Stockton’) who usher us through the curtains into a square, each side of which is set out as a pair of living-rooms. Seated in a living room, we are offered a cup of tea and a biscuit from the tea trolley as our hosts chat with us about where we’ve come from, if we had any problems finding the venue, would we like another biscuit? The hosts then become the chorus who guide us through the play – introducing scenes, rounding them off, sometimes singing, sometimes dancing, even performing magic tricks for us.

The stories making up the play’s central narrative are performed by professional actors – and there is a stark contrast between their highly polished and nuanced performances and the more straightforward and naive performances of the chorus. But therein lies much of the depth and the delight in this play – where the sharpness, the rawness, of the lives portrayed and issues explored bite more keenly and are exposed more acutely by the simplicity, charm and warmth of a chorus who stand next to us – outside of the action – smiling and totally unfazed either by the events of the play or by their own occasional losses of memory, the awkward silences as they strive to remember their lines.

Home Sweet Home, written by Emma Adams, looks beyond the label of ‘old age’ and examines how our systems and thought processes so often work against older peoples’ desire to live with dignity and independence. The conflicts this produces are played out before us as we watch Moses (originally from the Caribbean) attempting to escape his care home to find out what has happened to his friend Mary. He recruits Rosa (originally from Ukraine), a new and reluctant resident of the same care home, who simply wants to go home. Meanwhile, Barbara (played by Jean Rogers) fights to know the truth behind her husband Ron’s scalded hand, and care-worker Iffty (played by Mani Dosanjh) is torn between his natural instinct to treat the residents as human beings and the demands of an institutionalised system that treats people as objects to be controlled. Outstanding performances come from Phillipa Peak as residential care home manager Jo, who spends much of the play entangled in telephone lines that keep her firmly attached to the filing cabinet that is wheeled on and off stage, and Balvinder Sopal who, as Iffty’s late grandmother, Daadi, haunts Iffty’s life, interrupting it in a series of comic interventions that force him to confront the confusions created by his job. Under Tom Wright’s direction, Jo’s symbolism, literally tied to the phone and the filing cabinet and her increasingly anxious twitching movements as she responds to events like a frightened animal caught in a trap, make her dilemmas – and, by extension, all those whose job it is to organise, manage and work in residential care – as central to this production as those of the residents and relatives whose experiences form the bulk of the narrative.

At times, the attempt to immerse the audience in the world of the play felt a touch heavy-handed. Being offered bottles to smell at various points (boiled cabbage, disinfectant) and, at other times, family photo albums to look at, these moments, far from immersing me in the play and intensifying my engagement with it seemed to distract and take me away from it. On the other hand, the inclusion in the photo albums of brain scans showing the steady advancement of Alzheimer’s were revelatory: I was genuinely shocked to see the huge physical changes in the brain as Alzheimer’s develops. It was difficult, on these occasions, not to look up from the albums and see the character of Ron – a retired former tea-blender, suffering from Alzheimer’s, who simply wants to pour his own cup of tea – with fresh understanding and sympathy.

A timely, engaging and provocative play, Home Sweet Home challenges assumptions that old age is necessarily something to be dreaded and feared. There is charm, punch, plenty to challenge us here – and always another cup of tea and a biscuit. The production returns to Bradford in September before moving on to Deptford and Stockton.

Common Wealth Theatre: Our Glass House

Common Wealth produces site-specific theatre that ‘places the audience at the centre of their work’, claiming that ‘theatre should be a memorable event and give you that feeling of being at a gig, of being part of something’. Standing in a freezing cold, largely empty pub car-park on the outskirts of Bradford on a grey Saturday afternoon (wondering if I have come to the right place), I certainly felt the need to be part of something memorable.

At 2pm exactly, the directors arrive and an audience emerges from the cars dotted around us. We are then (all twenty-two of us, including two uniformed community police officers) walked down into a housing estate whose streets are eerily deserted. Eventually, we are told that the house is up on the right (number thirty-five, with the red door) and that we will be allowed in one pair at a time – ‘Oh, and please remember to wipe your feet as you enter.’ Once inside, we wander through the rooms as we wish: there is no central performance to spectate, no need to be in any particular part of the house at any particular moment – we can simply ‘explore the house and choose our own journeys’.

I wander through the living rooms, the kitchen, a bedroom, bathroom, a child’s room, a back room. Five adults (four women, one man) inhabit a room each – and it is here that their stories begin. A young boy moves silently from room to room, listening, observing – at times detached, in his own world, at other times variously connected to, or implicated by, the stories being told.

Our Glass House comprises three sections. First, the characters share their reasons for staying in a relationship that has turned abusive (but where affection remains – a hope that the difficulties might, somehow, be resolved). Next comes fear – lonely, isolated individuals overshadowed by the constant threat of violence and abuse. Finally, the characters find ways of breaking free of the house and the relationships it has accommodated. At the play’s end, the audience stands outside in the garden (it is bitterly cold), watching the characters make their escapes out of the building and into another world (which, in this weather, seems as inhospitable as the one they are leaving).

The performance is a fragmented collection of monologues and choreographed movement sequences (at times powerfully underscored by a mix of recorded music and sounds performed by the actors). Though the play begins with memories (of relationships, once close and loving, now sour and violent), as I wander through the house it is a present atmosphere of oppression and intimidation that I am most aware of. These are characters made vulnerable, fragile even – and I catch snippets of dialogue, a few words, the throb of music pulsating from the bedroom where a teenage girl (surrounded by pornographic images) struts in front of a full-length mirror before mounting a vertical pole in the middle of the room. Just a short time later I will stand in the corner of the bathroom watching her, first standing over the bath contemplating suicide, then having her head held under the water by a jealous boyfriend.

Our Glass House invites us to create our own experience and to leave with our ‘own version and understanding of domestic abuse’. The play tackles a complex and challenging issue – and takes this into the heart of a non-theatre community that has (to judge from feedback given in the post-show discussion) come to receive it with a sense of ownership. It is a courageous production that makes no effort to hide the pain and suffering that lies at its heart. There is also great (almost naïve) beauty here: we can occupy the same space as these victims, watch and listen to them, yet are able also to admire their dignity and humanity – so it is not, ultimately, their victimhood that comes to define them, but their capacity for overcoming and redefining their circumstances.

www.commonwealththeatre.co.uk

Imitating the Dog: The Zero Hour

In terms of plot, The Zero Hour must surely be Imitating the Dog’s most ambitious production to date. Conceived as the final part of their Harry Kellerman Trilogy (following previous pieces Hotel Methuselah andKellerman), The Zero Hour continues the company’s exploration of the interactions between film (especially cinema), theatre and the construction of narrative. The Zero Hour (or Stunde Null in the original German) was the term used to describe Germany at the very end of World War Two – a ruined and devastated country, confused and demoralised, and at a point where one period of history had ended and another was about to begin. But what exactly constitutes those histories, who decides, and how those histories are to be written, recorded and disseminated – these issues are yet to be decided. It is in this very particular historical moment that Imitating the Dog locate their production – at a point where narratives are about to be constructed and where history as an authorised record and explanation of events is about to emerge.

The Zero Hour deals not simply with World War Two, the choices made by individuals and the ways by which we choose/have chosen to remember and account for the past. By exploring a range of possible outcomes of the war (and mediating these through the work of an onstage contemporary 21st century Chinese film crew making a documentary about it) The Zero Hour provides a lens through which events are viewed, filtered and defined. What it highlights are some of the processes through which history is constructed – and how what emerges through these is never impartial.

The Zero Hour does not attempt to rewrite the history of World War Two, or even offer alternative possibilities for what we think we know about it. Instead, it presents a 90 minute sequence of shots (staged, framed and recorded by the Chinese film crew) that reveals history not so much as ‘what happened’ but as privileged perspective – ‘this is what is happening’ – a series of selected shots that will ultimately provide the definitive accounts of the events they will also come to replace. The Zero Hour makes us aware that alternative readings are (and always were) possible, that the narratives we cling to are not the whole picture – that what has been passed on to us, what we have absorbed through the films we have seen, the books we have read, the stories we have been told, the games we have played, is always partial and incomplete.

Add to this epistemological enquiry a broadcast lecture that intervenes in the production at a number of points (where what would appear to be a Chinese academic gives a detailed account of a train, thousands of carriages long, travelling through time and space) and you have a strangely unsettling eschatological element that infuses The Zero Hour with a sense of hopelessness, even despair. Our desire for fixed meanings and stable narratives is exposed, so we are destabilised and made vulnerable by the suggestion that the intimate relationships between past, present and future are, though keenly felt, unpredictable and elusive.

6 Degrees Below the Horizon (another Imitating the Dog production currently touring the UK) follows a more conventional narrative structure that unravels in more familiar ways. To fully appreciate The Zero Hour (with its unconventional interweaving of and cutting between multiple plots – three of which are different versions, or possible versions, of the same events) demands real concentration and commitment. This is an intense production challenging the audience to watch and listen attentively – the reward, however, is the experience of an utterly engaging, challenging and compelling piece of contemporary performance.

www.imitatingthedog.co.uk

Kneehigh and West Yorkshire Playhouse: Steptoe and Son

Well known for a pacy, inventive and playful approach to theatre-making, much of Kneehigh’s previous work has explored and re-presented stories familiar to us through other sources (Tristan & Yseult, Brief Encounter,Cymbeline, Rapunzel, Nights at the Circus, The Bacchae – to name but a few).Steptoe and Son, a Kneehigh collaboration with West Yorkshire Playhouse, represents something of a departure from this tradition as it not only draws directly from four episodes of the BBC TV series, written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson between 1962 and 1974, it also sticks pretty faithfully to those scripts (in content and spirit). Emma Rice speaks of the hours spent poring over the scripts prior to embarking on the production, of the laughter and tears they provoked in her – and it does feel as if Kneehigh and West Yorkshire Playhouse, in this production, are seeking largely to excavate those original scripts and to present them to us as an act of homage to the original TV series (rather than as re-contextualised theatrical stagings for a modern audience, many of whom will be unfamiliar with the originals).

There are some thoughtful and creative responses in the production to what is strikingly absent in the original Steptoe and Son television series – namely, women. Kirsty Woodward beautifully plays a variety of (largely silent) female characters, their feminine presence reminding us of the women mourned by both male characters (Albert’s wife and Harold’s mother), of how life might be so completely different for the men if only their world were shaped more by the companionship of women – and of how curiously like a marriage this particular father/son relationship actually is.

There are in Steptoe and Son some familiar Kneehigh elements: music, song, routines that merge choreography, plot and character development, a wacky set that, like a magic box, opens up and spills onto the stage – providing a chaotic world for the men to live in (a world of other people’s junk and discarded bric-a-brac). The actors resist the temptation simply to replicate the legendary performances of Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett – both Mike Shepherd (Albert) and Dean Nolan (Harold) have Cornish rather than London accents, Nolan’s ‘You dirty old man!’ lacks the memorable emphasis and musical line that Harry H. Corbett infused it with, and Nolan’s colossal frame physically dominates the stage in a way that I do not remember Corbett dominating the screen. And, though there is much humour in the production (as one would expect), yet there is also a great deal of tenderness and pathos (which I had not expected). The second half, especially, explores the claustrophobia of the two men’s relationship with great affection and insight.

Kneehigh are to be commended for their willingness to take risks, and choosing to tackle such an iconic and well known sitcom of the 1960s and 70s is perhaps one of their riskiest ventures to date. I am not sure it is entirely successful, however. Steptoe and Son (the TV series) is a curious choice, andSteptoe and Son (the play) a somewhat puzzling production. Kneehigh certainly succeed in paying homage to and producing a sense of nostalgia for an old, familiar story; yet I could not help but wonder if, maybe, the production was not simply too indebted to the work of Galton and Simpson, that, maybe, these scripts and these characters are simply so resonant of their original time and contexts that there is something in them that, ultimately, stubbornly resists adaptation to the modern stage.

Total Theatre