Author Archives: Beccy Smith

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.

Hofesh Shechter Company: Sun

At its best the work of Hofesh Shechter, director of this year’s Brighton Festival, can feel almost shamanistic – an overwhelming spectacle of pounding sounds, visceral movement and visuals. When I saw 2012’s Political Mother as part of last year’s Derry City of Culture programme, the arena was set up for a gig and hundreds of young people piled in, standing and dancing close to the stage, soaking up the atmosphere. Shechter’s gestures are writ large and accessible, bold and uncompromising: he wants to make strong statements and make them loudly.

In Sun, the object of his ardent scrutiny seems to be false dualisms: the over simplified dichotomy of good and evil set up by our instinctive, primitive relationships with light and darkness. It begins with a threat: ‘You will never catch us,’ growls his sinister voice, close to the mic, evoking contemporary anxieties about difference (what better catchphrase for the enemy within is there than ‘the war on terror’?), before morphing into something more ingratiating – a conventional and reassuring welcome. There’s a cheeky teaser of the end of the show, to ‘reassure’ us it will ultimately all be alright. Then a bathetic, pencil-drawn cardboard sheep on a cardboard flat appears in a powerful spotlight, to the bagpiped blasts of Abide with Me. There’s a lightness, comedy even, in these opening moments that feels intriguing. But when his opening voiceover is repeated a few minutes in, already it feels more heavy handed, a reminder we don’t need – did we hear him? Did we get it?

The first half of the piece develops through a looped sequence: courtly dancers evoke studied postures and gestures, occasionally disturbed by ripples of something more primitive, but overall their movement and costumes (they’re dressed by Christina Cunningham like eighteenth century harlequins and courtiers) evoke the civilised order of the harem or medieval court. They are here to entertain us, gently. The court dissolves and, in blackout, the sheep multiply, and then they dance, bouncing and gambolling with balletic irony. ‘Look how simple we are!’ they seem say, before a 2D wolf appears, sidling closer with discomfiting menace. The tense stand off is interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream from the front row and we are plunged into ear-splitting darkness, where hellish, dimly lit figures flit and roil about the stage. Finally, the balm of the sun – cleverly created by a simple upstage lamp casting a rich amber disc onto a sheet held midstage. In later episodes the wolf and sheep are replaced by more contemporary figures of threat – colonisers, bankers and hoodies. The sequence plays with false dichotomies – order versus chaos, blasting sound versus silence. Difference and perceived threat trigger the collapse from one into another: it’s significant that we never see the threatening figures actually attack – it’s the onlooker’s scream of fear that ruptures the scene. But the repetition, again, flattens out the meaning, like the cardboard cut outs of the enemy Shechter is presumably satirising. The rich, ambiguous poetry of his movement is reduced to a pretty simple message – that those we think of as the enemy may well not be. Hey! We, the middle class audience quietly consuming the show, might even be the bad guys, complicit in some pretty terrible deeds done in the name of our comfort! Do you feel like you’re a sheep yet?

Later sequences where this tight structural form breaks down offer greater interest: there’s a ravishing image of man in thrall to the power and beauty of light, as embodied by designer Merle Hensel and lighting designer Lee Curran’s stunning firmament of pendant tungsten bulbs, whose rich amber glow and glass reflections seem to ripple above him as he chases, or perhaps follows, their swirling movement with his fingertips. The significance of the standalone sequence where some of the female dancers stripped down to their underwear passed me by, however. Sun worshippers perhaps? The visuals as a whole are gorgeous: a stony, granular upstage wall shifts through an array of painterly tones courtesy of the incredible lighting design, transforming the stage picture from the feeling of Breughel right through to Bosch.

Shechter’s choreography is densely patterned and intriguing, jewelled with lovely moments and images, almost too rich a meal to fully absorb through this 70 minutes. And so we fall back on the structural ‘message’ and it is a polemic, shouting at us. I am left feeling that Shechter’s approach to his audience is rather too closely informed by his approach to his work – which he composes, choreographs and often dances: one of absolute control. But when everything is conducted at full volume (and despite the moments of silence, make no mistake, this is a performance whose ideas are expressed almost entirely at that pitch) we stop being able to hear any subtlety. His politics and ideas feel heartfelt; I hope he can start to trust us a little more, and realise that there’s no need to shout.

Copperdollar: The Back of Beyond

Copperdollar have been creating immersive theatrical events since 2008, their work crossing performance and music genres to effectively appeal to the increasingly interdisciplinary festival scene. The Back of Beyond was originally created for Glastonbury in 2011 and is a great choice to open the Fringe festival, plunging its audience into a hedonistic atmosphere that brings together many of the festival’s favourite flavours – cabaret, music, experimentation.

The theme is the day of the dead and we are greeted by a collective host of charming skeletons, who lean insouciantly in effortlessly strange and elegant poses that feel completely at home round the beautiful Speigeltent interior. Other performers have a more battered, steampunk air in aviator hats and tailcoats, all thickly aged with dust and ghostly chalk. All work as charming clowns, greeting us warmly as old friends and inviting us to join in various interactive dances and games. The evening is woven through with fine aesthetic quality: the costumes are beautiful, and featured elements located around the space, like an illuminated shrine and spindly wishing tree, effectively combine Mexican-gothic with sideshow chic.

What drives the night, though, is music, with a set that progresses through a dizzying array of styles: from remixed hip hop through reggae and electro-swing. It isn’t immediately clear that this is the form: there’s an uneasy opening hour or so in which a significant proportion of the audience feel like they are waiting for something more organised – for a show – to begin. Yet gradually, the interactive features build momentum. There are some great collective dance sequences and play with lights and video. Smaller interactive elements – writing letters to someone else in the room, hanging wishes on the tree, some mad bits of play with blindfolds and limbo – transform this into an event we are part of.

From the moment we arrive, audience members are invited one by one to lie in a coffin in order to be face-painted to join the skeleton crew. There’s something quietly brilliant about converting your audience, one member at a time, over the course of the evening. By the end of the night performers and guests feel as one, an effective image of exactly what the event sets out to achieve.

Tim Crouch & Andy Smith: what happens to the hope at the end of the evening

Tim Crouch’s plays effortlessly combine compelling character drama with an interrogation of political and theatrical ideas that is exhilarating. In this performance, a collaboration and two hander with Andy Smith, that he professes in the programme has been on his wish list since writing his play An Oak Tree (2006), the subject is connection or the lack of it. It’s an idea that’s inherently dramatic as well as, brilliantly, about theatre’s own essentials.

Tim and Andy play two old friends whose life has drifted apart: Andy is settled, expecting his second baby, finishing a PhD (which sets up a frame for some of the performance theories drawn into his monologue). Tim is the one left behind, trashing his marriage with a dead end affair, still living in the old place, keeping up the old habits – smoking, petty crime, inflammatory anti-fascist marches – and furious about it all. He is a man so enraged with the world that even a ‘Baby on Board’ sticker reads like a passive-aggressive attack. Tim is playing a character, he is puffed up on stage, every nerve over-stretched and ready to blow. Andy, seated, reading from a script on a simple metal music stand, is playing himself, or a version of himself. The blurring of performance and reality, conversely, draws us more deeply into the fiction: we are in on the joke, the house lights are up throughout, and Andy often speaks directly to us, the complex ideas being discussed feel offered with an open hand. ‘Join us,’ they seem to say, ‘as we try to work this out.’

What both dramatic situation and theoretical discourse (which arrives through a series of simple quotations and comments peppering Andy’s account of the evening) explore is our need to connect against all the odds of the modern world. These are, essentially, two monologues, albeit one full of appeal and demand for response, and both punctuated by moments of electric physical connection on stage – a perfectly placed look, a hug, a moment of awkward intimacy. The form perfectly reflects the shared longing to find one another’s friendship and the impossibility of achieving this. In fact, here any shared understanding can only be reached in the other’s absence: the reality of dealing with the other person repeatedly scuppers attempts to actually find one another in the moment.

Yet, as we wade through the evening from hell with these two estranged friends, their disputes and increasingly hilarious clashes of perspective in Crouch’s fizzing exchanges, something happens, something changes. This is theatre, of course it does! Theory illuminates dramatic situation and our own place in it: they may not be able to reach one another, but both of them touch us. The rage and fear of Tim’s character is, in many ways, more identifiable than Andy’s cool detachment, an inevitable response to an alienating, alienated world which perhaps, as the Mayans suggest (and Andy explains) actually did end in 2012, the process of dissolution beginning invisibly, interminably. In such a world, the theatre as a place to briefly come together, discarding those anxieties like un-needed shoes at the door, has never felt more beautifully idealistic.

ice&fire: The Nine O’Clock Slot

‘The nine o’clock slot’ is the typical time for a pauper’s funeral. It’s the slot no one else is likely to buy. There won’t be any guests, or any grave stone, and the priest may lead the ceremony alone. It’s a startling opening premise for any production, particularly one already on slightly intimidating ground by concentrating its focus on experiences of death and dying. I approach the nattily done up Red Gallery, its frontage restyled as an old fashioned funeral parlour, with some trepidation about a potentially bleak night ahead.

The company have approached this challenge in content by throwing everything they’ve got at the production. There’s an opening installation, a coffin is carried along the street and through the venue doors, and the back corner of a graveyard is conjured in the foyer (becoming something quite different by the time we track back through at the end); there’s 360° video design, adding texture and location to the multiple stories told; there’s an immersive set which places us the audience right within the world of sleazy bars and tube stations and hospices; there are numbers that are sung giving the form at times an air of agitprop; and there’s a full two hours of storytelling, in one enormous single seating. There’s a wealth of material here and, as implicit in the in-the-round staging, a dizzying range of perspectives on offer. It’s a great choice to place us fully within the world and the tricky in the round staging is generally well-handled by director Lisa Spirling, though at a cost of some of the stage and video imagery. The world is drawn in full with no minor characters – the production takes the time to develop everyone from the traumatised witness of a trackside suicide to the hospice nurse conflicted about the (now controversial) Liverpool care pathway.

The cast of six multirole effectively to achieve some very strong performances in this intimate setting. Drawing their material from real biographies, the company have developed moving and intriguing stories about the sort of experiences rarely dramatised – the story of a dying alcoholic is especially powerful and it’s good, and important, to hear these voices on stage. But the plenitudinous approach also has its casualties, and the sheer ambition of the piece means that some moments with other characters feel sacrificed. The inclusive dramaturgy loses a sense of rhythm and parts of the storytelling feel shapeless and overlong as a result. The production attempts to integrate the closing chapters of four whole lives, along with their own supporting characters, and this feels like too much, however interesting the stories: the company need a little more faith in their material – they can do it justice with less.

The show’s in-depth, research-led approach is undoubtedly influenced by its backing through the Wellcome Trust, an increasingly present funder in the contemporary performance landscape. As such, these questions about balancing content with story are worth further exploration by this company and others. The Nine O’Clock Slot is perhaps one revision away from really firing, but amongst the wealth of material on offer there’s still much to enjoy on this most provocative of subjects.

Frank Alva Buecheler: In May

The story starts off with a casually-delivered bombshell. A simply-dressed young woman takes centre stage, reading from a sheaf of papers on a downstage table. ‘That’s final – it is inoperable,’ she reads. Cancer then, and terminal, in the opening lines, or rather bars, for this story is to be sung, supported by a chamber string orchestra (the Ligeti Quartet, with piano) to a score written by the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon. As an audience member it’s a daunting opener, but the company, led by Nuffield Theatre Lancaster’s director Matt Fenton have worked to extract every drop of beauty from the premise in their staging.

Beucheler’s script provides the underpinning to this moving and humane approach. It progresses through a series of letters covering the span between this terrible diagnosis and the protagonist’s inexorable decline as the year turns from winter towards early summer. The letters are written from dying son to distant father, whose arrival is held at bay by his son’s wishes that he not visit. The writer places moments of transcendence amongst the identifiable realities of paving stones, answer phones and familial tensions. The son is a musician and the relationship to music, to his piano, sets up a relationship with the transcendent as well as fully embedding the musical form within the narrative. Further, the sung form (I’m reticent to use the word opera because of its associations with a certain quality of voice not in evidence here) creates an aesthetic distance to the material and this is amplified by the decision to cast the central role who signs off each letter sung as ‘Your Son’. These distancing effects make it easier to more readily accept the beauty on offer on stage without worrying about in any sense ‘enjoying’ such a painful story.

Hannon’s rich song cycle, including some stunning instrumental interludes, provides a ravishing current for us to ride. The unusual cadences he often works with, immediately identifiable to fans of his work, develop a lush strangeness diverting the classical forms and instrumentation used. The staging, by Imitating the Dog, is a fragmented mosaic of screens across which dates and images – sometimes highly specific, often metaphorical and abstract – play with a dream-like language of metaphor and movement. Birds scatter, raindrops fall; french windows appear and disappear. Always there are blank spaces and darkness amongst the light and the threat of complete disintegration: it’s a terrific visual metaphor. The visual and literary presence of the changing seasons provides a suitably epic backdrop to the tale.

There were lapses in this wash of style and emotion: I occasionally felt frustrated by the solo actor’s inability to reach all the notes required of her by the score and the video software seemed to be straining at times to deliver the design. But it’s early days in the production’s life and this is a powerful, meaningful performance which succeeds in its moving exploration of the most difficult of subjects, realising the vitality of immediate human experience through its heavily aesthetic lens.