Author Archives: Christopher Madden

About Christopher Madden

Christopher Madden is a freelance writer and academic. He works on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, and has reviewed for The Wolf and 3:AM magazines.

Homotopia 2012

Liverpool’s queer arts festival Homotopia has been a regular feature of the city’s jam-packed calendar for nine years. A month ago Gary Everett, its founder and artistic director, was named by the Independent on Sunday’s Pink Power List as one of the country’s movers and shakers. The accolade is a long time coming. Homotopia has championed all artforms alongside a sustained commitment to human rights. Indeed, a number of the major projects it has programmed have arisen out of the urgent issues facing gay and transgender peoples across the globe. International in reach but firmly rooted in its home city, the festival consolidates queer history as it nurtures queer futures, particularly in the form of its ‘Queercore’ programme. In the year of worldwide controversy about gay marriage and what it means to be queer in certain parts of the world in which it remains punishable by death, Homotopia has provocatively named ‘Traditional Family Values’ its overarching theme. It is unsurprising, then, that the festival should act as an annual barometer of where queer performance finds itself.

My journey through the festival began in the company of one dancer in the Unity Theatre’s upstairs bar. Performed by Darren Pritchard (artistic director of Manchester’s Company Fierce) and commissioned by Homotopia, 1 was six minutes that referenced the conventions of lap dancing with the critical reflexivity of contemporary dance. Played to Radiohead’s ‘Creep’, the fluid movements of a male dancer put the viewer in a compromised position in both moral (Am I the creep here for consenting to the dance?) and physical terms (This is too close for comfort. Am I being challenged to dance?). The lyrics spoke more about the literal positioning of the dancer – his isolation and vulnerability, paradoxical insofar as we could have reached out to each other by dancing together. But of course we didn’t. The odd moment in which he cast a glance at me or mimicked my physicality tipped the balance in his favour. It seems I needed him more than he needed me. The piece provoked thoughts about the blurring between entertainment and art, or more particularly still the sexual and gender politics of so-called ‘gentlemen’s clubs’, in which entertainment becomes a commodity artform in the terms of an exploitative one-to-one relationship. 1 served as a proxy of this grim reality.

In Truant Company’s The Right Ballerina, a female ballet dancer pays a heavy price for joining the BNP as a protest against Britain’s immigration system. Portrayed as an innocent sacrificed on the altar of freedom of expression, her membership leads the ballet company to the brink of total demise. Billy Cowan’s play is not-so-loosely based on real events at English National Ballet. Obscenely at odds with what it means to be an artist let alone a ballerina, such political views are (and were) ripe for sensationalist media attention. Perhaps this is why the writer converted the story into a thriller. The play began with an image of the ballerina in black, pirouetting for an imaginary audience whose adulation turns fast into catcalls and booing. At the end, having been strangled by her former lover not so much for the stress she creates for his position as the company’s artistic director but for the resurrected issue of her abortion of their child, the ballerina is in white. But was she really that innocent? During meetings with the company’s artistic director, the representative of the left-wing group protesting against the ballerina is incapable of compromise and hell-bent on protest just for the sake of it. Fishing utility bills out of his bag rather than communiqués from his organisation’s committee, the middle-aged militant in tan corduroy is caricatured as a bumbling idiot. What a calumny, I thought, against the left and its causes. None of the actors could be blamed for this. The actor playing the stereotypically flamboyant, sharp-tongued older gay man who swans in and out to admonish his artistic director for lack of nerve did his best to offset the sense that the production was putting it on with a trowel. Lacking intellectual rigour and overstuffed with stilted direction and choreographed scene changes that were over-determined rather than apt for the play’s subject, The Right Ballerina convinced me that moral dilemmas are sometimes best left to philosophers.

In Blackout: Twilight of the Idols, Dickie Beau’s angle on queer performance was subtle as it was startling. The camp and self-ironising art of lip-syncing characteristic of drag queens was transformed by a mute and ponderous dark clown situated behind a veil stretching across the entire stage. A capacious desk and classic typewriter on one side and a stool behind which a piece of white cloth hung from floor to ceiling on the other suggested a queerly postmodern Krapp’s Last Tape. Indeed, the queer idol worship of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland was explored in ways of which Samuel Beckett would no doubt have been proud. Governed by an impulse to recount memories looming large over a life, thoughts about time and the recorded voice, imitation and spectral echoing, were just some of the Beckettian tropes to which the performance was particularly attuned. A slow torrent of sound, moving image (projected onto the veil to astonishing effect), and live action responded to Garland’s progressively manic diaries and Monroe’s final taped interview. Moving between the facts and chilling reflections on Monroe’s rapidly deteriorating inner world, excerpts from Beau’s interview with Richard Meryman – the man in possession of the interview tape and interlocutor of the dead – confirmed the tragic inevitability and sordid nature of Monroe’s death. Amplified by vivid physical gestures loyal to the character of speech, Beau’s strikingly uncanny and accurate lip-syncing of all three voices suggested that idol worship was a process of ingestion. At one point pulling a seemingly endless roll of tape/paper from his mouth, the clown confirmed that idols become part of the fabric of the self; in queer experience, the body often plays host to the queer’s chosen saviour. By far the most impressive offering at this year’s festival, I greatly anticipate Dickie Beau’s future work. I would also hazard that the future of queer performance is likely to emerge from practices like his.

In a show about the highs and lows of entertainment and art, A Right Pair thrived on the intimacy between the audience and the performer. Long-time theatrical collaborators and partners Paul Shaw and Bette Bourne spoke about life lived on and off the boards, footnoting queer histories to immaculately performed set-pieces that vividly brought to life cherished memories. In the manner of ‘An Audience With…’ we were treated to participation from the audience, poignant and comic excerpts from the performers’ autobiography, celebrations of queer legends such as Quentin Crisp (a friend of Bourne’s) and Oscar Wilde, and at one point an exquisitely rescued lapse in memory which had Bourne walk across the stage exhorting his partner to take the script from the wings and ‘bring the bloody thing on; bring it on, darling!’. The show was a salutary reminder of how far queer performance, and let’s not forget queer life, has progressed because of figures like Bette Bourne. Recalling his time with a queer theatre troupe, Bourne made me realise again the considerable achievements of activism within the arts.

Traditional family values are always relative, constantly adjusting to the needs and desires of those who don’t fit in but who crave community. And the future does not materialise from nowhere but is forged from within the crucible of queer history. Whatever and whoever shapes the future of queer performance, Homotopia will undoubtedly be its chief custodian.

Gare St Lazare Players: Moby Dick

In recent years Cork company Gare St Lazare Players has brought the pared-down texts of writers like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to the stage. Last year I was mesmerised by artistic director Conor Lovett’s performance of Beckett’s short story ‘The End’. This was my first experience of Lovett’s intimate style and it made me hungry for more. Here was a company whose minimalist realisation of a narrative text mirrored the aesthetic of the writer on its own terms. But while this made sense for Beckett’s minimalism, what would happen with a novel whose loquacity seems to resist the time-bound constraints of theatre performance? Fortunately, the company’s Moby Dick was as at ease with Herman Melville’s maximalism as it was unperturbed by Beckett’s restraint. An almost defiant gesture against its season of Beckett performances, Moby Dick dispelled any doubt that making Melville’s epic narrative truly intelligible for the stage was ever possible.

This is a company who cleave to the immediacy of the act of storytelling. Lovett is an intimate and ultra-focused companion, simultaneously reaching out to the audience and maintaining his control as storyteller. This accounts for the economy of Moby Dick’s staging: with the set comprising a desk, smaller desk and chair, neither Lovett’s and live musician Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh’s funereal attire nor the almost imperceptible lighting altered the feeling of an empty space. For Gare St Lazare it seems that all design beyond muted lighting and monochromatic costumes is vulgarly extraneous, since it would obstruct the flow of language and music.

Both of the two performers entered the auditorium from its side doors as if they had stepped in on proceedings to which they had not been invited. Lovett took position standing in darkness behind Ó Raghallaigh who tentatively played his fiddle. The latter’s music – lying somewhere between abstract sound and a Celtic-maritime style – was all whispers and scrapes, rough-textured and mellifluous. Replete with harmonics and sweet dissonance, it was also other-worldly and introspective. Lovett then haltingly opened up an epic storytelling world as if he were dredging up long-dormant memories that, paradoxically, also remained vivid in spirit and mind. He started, perhaps inevitably, with the novel’s first line: ‘Call me Ishmael.’ But his rhythmic delivery gently convinced that this was a story being told as if for the first time.

The art of adapting novels for stage entails the painstaking art of excision. What should or can be left out while claiming fidelity to the text? Lovett’s realisation fastidiously marked the outline of the novel’s plot but retained ample sense of Melville’s digressive writing. A high-wire act that permitted access to interior worlds, I knew clearly the course of Ishmael’s journey in the geographical one. The course of the Pequod is really only half the story, for the novel frequently digresses from the plot to convey the awe-inspiring nature of the indomitable forces to which the characters are subject. Not all of these forces are natural or emanate from the leviathan. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, the following line struck me as an interpolation for a contemporary audience: ‘Grand contested Election for the Presidency of the United States / WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL / BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.’ But in fact, this is a quotation from the novel’s first chapter. The art of excision can sometimes entail the practice of artful selection.

As Lovett’s dynamism catapulted us into the swell of the sea, O’Raghallaigh’s creaking music suggested the ship’s ultimate vulnerability. In one scene, almost lost to his own gentle swaying, Lovett evoked the Pequod’s movement. Vivid enough without overstating the case, a similarly light physical touch was deployed to illustrate bodies coursing through and up and down the ship. Startlingly, Lovett’s vocal range jolted us within seconds and across decibels from an interior sensation to a storm-tossed Pequod. O’Raghallaigh’s melancholy strains had a rapt audience in Lovett as if the music was evoking Ishmael’s soul. Musician and performer rarely acknowledged each other’s presence, but when they did it was alarming, signalling that our interlocutor was submerged in remembering the past or that events were about to take a turn for the worse. Before the plot climax of the Pequod’s destruction by Moby-Dick, the performers simply changed positions. Having kept throughout to their own territories on stage, this was all we needed to know that the disaster was forthcoming.

Gare St Lazare Players’ technical verve for making narrative texts come alive through the fullest yet simplest of theatrical stagings retains the integrity of the source material. Through its shifting transitions and a restrained colour palette, the lighting design conveyed the mood-currents that come from turning over the book’s pages. But in the end we were in the hands of an astute live performer. As the lighting faded to black, Ishmael having acknowledged his eternal status as an orphan despite having survived the Pequod, it was impossible not to feel brushed by the chill wind of his existential isolation.

www.garetour.squarespace.com

Cut to the Chase: Treasured

This year marks the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, an event that continues to reverberate as an archetype of tragedy and disaster. But despite being very old news, the sinking of what the White Star Line billed as its biggest ‘super-liner’ captures the public imagination as if it happened only yesterday. In association with Aspire Trust and in the awesome setting of Liverpool Cathedral, Cut to the Chase Productions has produced Treasured, an immersive site-specific performance that offers a way of discovering the history of the Titanic while providing the space to commemorate and mourn its victims.

An indoor performance setting more immense than Liverpool Cathedral is unlikely to exist. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s building is dramatic enough on its own terms, so it is little wonder that director Jen Heyes was attracted by the vast potential of the space as a blank canvas for a multimedia performance. My journey began in the relative intimacy of the Lady Chapel, in which a girl dressed in the style of a crew member kindly invited me to ‘Enjoy your journey’. The historical irony of this phrase resounded as I walked around a tableau vivant featuring Nick Birkinshaw as ‘Artefact Man’, who sat amongst archive boxes scanning documents onto an iPad. Brendan Ball’s live trumpet solo – a kind of fragmented, atonal Last Post delivered from a balcony – left little doubt that Treasured was going to be a mournful traversal of its subject.

We then ascended slowly into the Cathedral proper. Barely visible in the rich darkness, performers from Aspire’s Ensemble dressed as Edwardian figures watched over us silently as we made our way. The sense of something being held back from the brink created eerie tension: at any second those figures might have addressed us in speech or emitted sound. But it was during my procession up the North Choir Aisle that Treasured’s nature as a site-specific performance came into focus, since it was impossible not to view the Chancel as the inverted hull of a ship. Along with the masses of plastic sheeting, spilling out of the building’s corners like water suspended in time, this conveyed the suggestion of history having gone awry. Like anyone peering into the wreckage, we traipsed our way through the ruins in order to make sense of it all.

Our journey around the tableaux prepared us for the main performance in the Central Space. Banks of seating were surrounded by a stage comprised of a ship’s funnel lying prostrate; in its sculptural deterioration it resembled the carcass of a whale – indeed, as one repeated line put it during the performance, the Titanic was a ‘leviathan of the seas’. Despite its potent imagery and mixed dramaturgy (notably in the form of aerial dance from Wired Aerial Theatre),Treasured then had little option but to trace a linear narrative in naturalistic terms. This through-line, though, was interrupted by multimedia elements that tugged at the fictive nature of performance by reminding the audience of the archive’s presence. Illuminos, a company focusing on large-scale projections in the public realm, created abstract designs that harmonised well with Heyes’ imagistic-cum-naturalistic direction to form a critical representation of the Titanic story. Resisting a total immersion in the past or the present, the performance moved fluently between the two to orchestrate precisely this outcome.

‘We need the work’: these words, delivered by an implacable Scouser, opened a bracing exchange with a Belfast docker about whether Liverpool or Belfast was the city to build the Titanic. It was difficult in this moment not to think differently about the relationship between Liverpool and Ireland – perennial reflections on which course through the city’s lifeblood – or to consider the shrewd priorities of the city’s historic docklands. Liverpool in its broadest sense was absorbed into the performance site.

Before its maiden voyage, the Titanic inspired dreams of plentiful labour for a docklands workforce always desperate to earn a living. This is why our sympathies rest with Hollinshead’s docker, who spun the idea of Belfast building the Titanic into a paean of working class pride and symbol of a brave new world of technological progress and mobility. His wife touchingly held her husband’s dreams in check while loving him for dreaming in the first place. A maid from the West Country named Lucy was a doughty and sensitive working class woman yearning for a better life. With the news that Lucy survived the disaster but that ‘the Titanic had taken her tenacity’ comes the rueful acknowledgement that the super-liner’s after-life was disastrous in its own way for the survivors too.

Treasured was concerned with class critique and the internationalism of its passenger list, a number of whose names were called during the performance in the manner of official mourning. The history of the Titanic is world history. It is therefore unsurprising that the performance’s theme revolved around the merciless objectives of capitalist hubris, a point made startlingly clear by the repetition of the phrase ‘first class’ on the plans of the Titanic, projected in motion onto the Cathedral’s walls by Illuminos. Towards the end Treasuredmade a similarly eloquent statement about the inescapability of history when the projection of passengers’ names settled into an image of the offices of the White Star Line in Liverpool, a building still in existence today. Respectfully lifting the lid on the archives for dramatic purposes, Treasured demonstrated that unlike the physical ruins of the super-liner, this history will never be laid to rest.

www.cuttothechaseproductions.co.uk

Tmesis Theatre: Wolf Red

A bright, full moon shone as I walked to Liverpool’s Unity Theatre to see Wolf Red, the first solo show from Elinor Randle, one half of innovative Liverpool-based company Tmesis Theatre. Even in the city it is impossible not to entertain sublunary thoughts of wildness and lurking threat. By even wilder contrast, Wolf Red is ostensibly about a young woman held captive in a room in the depths of the forest. More intriguingly, the show explores the ambiguity around the idea of ‘captivity’ and captive space to address themes of madness and female domesticity. Such shifts are mobilised by the postmodern mix of the show’s narrative sources, which jump-cut between, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, and The Red Shoes to build a coherent feminist critique of fairy stories.

Elinor Randle’s first appearance, in yards of lush, blood-red material tightly wrapped around her head and cascading to the floor, breaks the silence with an incantatory text direct from the darkest corner of the fairytale world. As Randle exhorts a young girl to be wary on her way in life, her delivery is razor-sharp and ever so chilling – a fact heightened as she rises slowly on a tree trunk to the very lupine source of light I thought I’d turned my back on as I entered the theatre.

But who was this figure? Was she the postmodern realisation of Red Riding Hood aged into hardened cynicism? The following image of Randle writhing on a mattress under the same red cloth, as if being born into the story, seemed to suggest that narrative is a mode of transmission through which characters undergo continual metamorphosis.

Lois Maskell’s sparse set design was all the more intensely evocative of the wayward paths luring any young fairytale girl to her destiny: a sculptural branch hanging adrift as a minimalist symbol of the primeval; alone on the fringe, the fat trunk of the tree. And so combative was Randle’s physicality (in one scene echoing a bull-fight) that the square space marked out as ‘the room’ may just as well have been a boxing ring, albeit one for the conflict between the phantasms of the mind and the phantoms of the forest. Messy earth and brittle fragments of tree appear to have been kicked around the edges of the space as if to suggest there is no escape from the depths of the forest – or equally, from the girl’s attenuated mental landscape.

Wolf Red shifts between the otherworldly time of the fairytale and the concrete time of history: recalling gender servitude and oppression in 1950s America, Randle danced to Doris Day’s ‘Tea for Two’ having transformed her primitive near-nakedness into a feminine cliché of blonde wig, floral-patterned dress, gaudy red lipstick, and shoes just like Dorothy’s. Such shifts and transformations seem to be motivated by a critique of storytelling as patriarchal ideology, and in this way Wolf Red betrays more than a hint of Angela Carter’s remodelling of fairytales in The Bloody Chamber. As in Carter’s stories, the key to female liberation is in the subversion of tradition. This accounts for the nuanced irony in Randle’s performance. The title of Day’s song was undercut by the fact that this young female danced alone, with only the company of her pillow, a prop swung around by the skin of the performer’s teeth and repeatedly dashed to the floor, flying feathers as collateral damage.

Poignancy slipped in during such moments, but not for long: the red lipstick became wilder and more clown-like in its application the more she cleaned the room, signalling a psychological turn for the worse while heralding emancipation from the conventions of feminine beauty. The feather duster used to comic effect for the cleaning left little doubt in this regard as she inserted it in her apron pocket and rubbed herself to a relieved climax to Day’s ‘Never Underestimate a Woman’s Touch’. While in the song the woman’s touch is domestic and placed in the service of others, this one was very much her own. Some may view this scene as precipitating her ultimate breakdown, her invitation to the wolf – ‘Come in, come in, come in’. But in a way there was no such beast as the wolf. Instead, and far more disturbingly, the wolf was the beast within: it was the girl’s latent sexuality, repressed and contained by the captive space of a mind numbed by patriarchy.

Although Wolf Red is Randle’s first solo show, the programme notes emphasise the collaborative nature of the project. Directed by Yorgos Karamalegos (the other half of Tmesis Theatre), it was devised in collaboration with Chris Fittock, who also wrote the finely tuned text. There was creative input from international practitioners too, the late and sadly missed Nigel Charnock having provided the initial creative input. Wolf Red consolidates Tmesis Theatre’s growing reputation as an exciting company dedicated to expanding their medium, a status underpinned by their creation of Physical Fest, Liverpool’s annual and hugely popular celebration of physical theatre and contemporary dance. But without doubt Elinor Randle’s virtuosity is impressive on its own terms, bearing the hallmarks of crisp articulation and fluency of movement, deft characterisations, wit and verve. It is a performance that balances being serious with not taking itself seriously. Wolf Red is a dark and exhilarating journey of moods and ideas that harnesses physical theatre’s rich symbiosis of movement and acting to startling effect.

Total Theatre