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

Ontroerend Goed: Fight Night

Roman, Charlotte, Sophie, David, Valentijn. Who will you vote for? Who will I vote for?

Voting here in this theatre set-up is anonymous, just as it is in the ballot box in the wider world. As we come into the auditorium we are issued with little electronic devices that will allow us to tap in our votes. We start with some straightforward questions: Are we male or female? Married, in a relationship, single? Which age group? Enter our contestants. All relatively young, all white. Three men (plus a male MC), two women. We have, at this stage, nothing to go on other than how they look (but let’s face it, we make snap judgements every day of our lives based on what we see/perceive/judge people to be, based on how they look).

So who do I choose? And how do I choose? Choose for what, I want to ask. To be friends with, to have sex with, to nurse me when I’m sick, to build shelves for me, to entertain me? I decide on Charlotte – the logic being that this is a theatre show, and I’ve seen her perform before and like her stage presence, so I want her to stay. At the very last moment I switch my vote to Roman, the renegade one, just for the hell of it. It’s a game, so let’s play games. Charlotte gets eliminated, and I feel sad – it’s my fault! And so it goes. This is democracy. You could argue that it is a theatre game, it doesn’t matter – but out there in the real world (whatever that might be), people vote for other people, including the people that will take crucial life-changing decisions on their behalf, for all sorts of strange and often trivial reasons. How many people vote for a candidate they really know and trust, and how many for someone they just like the look of? I like Valentijn’s cool mod looks (which he, oddly, describes as old-fashioned), and his gentle humour. David looks gormless, although he has a pleasant self-deprecating air. I don’t like Sophie’s sassiness, she’s too much of a winner, too much of a networker, always saying what people want to hear – and her sheer black tights and high-heels don’t feel right for a sunny afternoon.

For much of the time it’s all gentle fun. There are a few edgy moments, a few unsettling questions, and these I like. There’s a question about our response to offensive words (‘nigger, faggot, cunt, retard’) that offers one of the contestants the opportunity to adopt the legendary Lenny Bruce stance that saying the words out loud breaks their power. A question about whether audience members consider themselves to be racist, sexist, or violent brings forth the predictable response that most of this middle-aged middle-class group do not believe themselves to be any of the above. Liar, liar pants on fire! Anyone who knows anything knows that they are kidding themselves.

Director Alexander Devriendt sees the key element of the show to be the emphasis on democracy – the voice of the majority. That’s what he wants to explore, and there is thus no singling out of lone voices to express their views or to challenge the majority decision. There is, though, a moment when a sizeable minority is gathered up on stage – the voice of protest. There is also some clever play on the engineering of voting decisions – candidates at one point encouraged to form coalitions to eliminate other candidates.

All is done with the usual Ontroerend Goed flair and panache. Strong performances, simple but effective staging – and a thought-provoking premise: What does it feel like to be in the majority? What does it feel like to go against the grain? And who the hell needs consensus politics if there’s a revolution to be had?

Little Bulb: Squally Showers

Silver slash, naked mannequins, clear plastic chairs, a water cooler, a British Isles rug – welcome to the newsroom, the well-oiled machine of monumental broadcasts.

Little Bulb’s latest show is a kind of physical comedy sit-com with the comic twist that all the (black-legginged, bare-footed) characters express themselves not only through the sort of tit-for-tat dialogue familiar from a hundred-and-one sketch comedy shows, but also with cod expressive-dance moves. There is a more than a hint of classic Spymonkey and Peepolykus here – although I have to, in all honesty, say that those older, wiser companies have the clowning and physical comedy skills to pull off this sort of thing, and I’m not convinced Little Bulb have (or even want to have) – postmodern parody is the name of the game here. The young audience are delighted by it all, but I find it hard not to draw unfavourable comparisons.

Where Little Bulb win out is in their choice of soundtrack music for their eccentric dances (starting majestically with Jon and Vangelis ‘I’ll Find My Way Home’ and ending magnificently with the Cleo Laine cover of ‘Send in the Clowns’), and in the design/sceneography – the elements listed above are just the opening gambit, by the end of the show they’ve been augmented by bubble machines, big metal fans, rubber animal masks, Margaret Thatcher costumes, a unicorn head, and numerous glitter wigs and false moustaches. There are some fantastic visual tableau in the piece – breathtakingly funny, leading me to wish there was more of this and less of the sketch comedy palaver.

What’s it all about? It’s a farce about 1980s cultural obsessions. Yuppies, media jobs, alien abductions, electro-pop, leotards, OHPs, loads-of-money, networking, powerpointing, conflict analysis, fitness videos – it’s all here, its all parodied. Director-performer Alex Scott seems in his element, equally happy as a mullet-head or a unicorn. Claire Berresford is at least on the road to having the clowning skills needed to pull off this sub-Spymonkey scenario. And she can dance, so her parodies of dance come off. The others are personable and occasionally shine, but for my taste it is all too far down the sketch-comedy road of humour and not far enough down the truly skilled physical comedy/clown road. I realise, though, from the tumultuous reception they receive that I’m a bit out of kilter with the majority vote –and perhaps just not Little Bulb’s target audience.

Fire Exit / David Leddy: Long Live the Little Knife

Stage backdrop, floor and even the audience seating are covered with paint-splattered canvas. It’s like sitting in the middle of a Jackson Pollock painting. Although we are seated in a regular theatre space, I read in the script notes that the author (David Leddy) envisions it as set in an art gallery or disused warehouse. Both of which would be very appropriate to the subject matter, which we’ll get to later. A man and a woman are fidgeting round the space, nodding along to the kitsch, screechy Yma Sumac tunes on the soundtrack. A technician at his desk is placed upfront, in the performance space. And off we go, into a rip-roaring and hearty tale about a pair of con-artists, a husband and wife team called Jim and Liz who, when their stock goes up in smoke, switch from the fake vintage handbag business to art forgery. Although what exactly do we mean by a fake, a forgery? The deliberately distressed vintage handbag is a real bag, it isn’t fictional; the forged paintings are done by real artists using real paint.

But nothing is real about these two, we are lead to believe. ‘We tell lies for a living’ they say (and yes, we get the irony – that’s what actors do, you could argue). This fake existence, an existence living a lie, is played out dramaturgically by deft switches in accents and indeed roles as storyteller and character constantly swap skins – he plays her, she plays him, and they both play other people. Meanwhile, the technician plays author David Leddy, who allegedly heard this story verbatim – but plays him badly, you understand, because he’s not an actor. The innate fakeness of theatre is played with and challenged by the lighting and technical choices: lights are mostly household or builder/decorator lamps; the technician’s actions throughout are upfront and visible, not hidden. There’s also a slightly silly pretence of electrical faults causing interruptions in the action. The characters are aware of their own theatricality, so yes, it’s meta-theatre (and yes, Derrida does get mentioned somewhere along the way).

The game is that the boundaries between the fake and the real shift all the time. The goodies in the story turn out to be the baddies and vice versa. Who’s conning whom? It’s impossible to tell. Ultimately, it’s a redemption story: the crooks come good, and find salvation (bizarrely) in rescuing trafficked sex workers. They manage this by doing something they’ve never done before: using their real names and real passports to leave the country.

There are many narratives and threads of investigation that weave through and round the central story. The much-touted theme of castration in the play is played off against a theme of female infertility, which is linked in to a running thread about adoption and never knowing who you really are (do any of us?).

The design is great – I love the canvas, the hand-numbered ‘original artwork’ programmes, the lighting choices. I love the onstage technician. The dialogue is sharp as a butcher’s knife. I find the ‘theatre constantly referencing itself as theatre’ mode a wee bit passé and a little irritating – whilst of course understanding that in a show about the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ going down that route is a temptation hard to resist. But for my part, having the mechanics of the theatrical process and the role swapping / accent swapping would have done the job without hammering it home in the text too.

It’s very well written and performed with pizzazz, a rumbustuous romp that works on many different levels. Despite the fact that castration, miscarriage, sex trafficking, and the sexual abuse of children all feature in the story, it’s ultimately a feel-good play, feeding us the notion that there is the potential for salvation in all of us, no matter how far we might have strayed down the wrong path.

Dudendance: This Side of Paradise

Apocalypso! Our culture is awash with images of violence, destruction, despair and degradation. 24-hour news coverage beamed from war-torn countries, TV documentaries exposing the use of torture, gory and sadistic films, shoot-em-up video games. Almost daily we encounter yet another dystopia, another vision of apocalypse – the end is nigh, it seems. The end is never-ending.

How do we process these images? How do we assimilate and evaluate them? Dudendance’s This Side of Paradise grasps the conundrum by the short and curlies and beats out an answer with a cleverly manipulated use of site, intriguing imagery, and engaging physical performance.

We are first invited into a chamber of horrors that is all the more desolate for the fact that it is daylight lit – the Autopsy Room, a high-ceilinged space with a dust-smeared glass roof, cracked tiles, deep sinks, a cupboard full of ominous looking tools and medicinal bottles, and a big pulley hanging above. (‘Maximum load one tonne.’) As is often the way with truly site-specific theatre, it is hard to tell what is found object and what has been placed as ‘set’ or ‘prop’. There’s a pile of mattress stuffing and rags on the floor that seems to be moving, a hospital gurney that has what might be a human figure on it, and an ape-like man with clenched knuckles chained to the wall, dragging himself to and fro. He wears ripped and torn joggers, patched together with gaffer tape, and a skewed balaclava that reveals just one eye.

A melancholy usher, also wearing a balaclava, escorts us into the neighbouring Demonstration Room, which by contrast is in almost- darkness. This room is occupied by a number of writhing figures, stuffed in strange ways so that they seem more puppet than human figure – horrible deformations of the human form that are headless or spineless or abnormally long-bodied. Mutants! The ape-man and another one-eyed figure seem to be the ‘guards’, manipulating and tormenting the other figures. Just when it reaches a point in the show where the point seems to have been made, enough already, a shift occurs. With the introduction of kitsch lounge music and vocalised ‘pows’ and ‘kerrangs’, the world witnessed slips into cartoon violence, humour releasing the tension that has been held taut. Ape-man morphs into a ludicrous club-armed creature rampaging round the space, others wield tacky cardboard weapons and toy guns. We’ve moved from nightmare terror to Hallowe’en party horror.

This Side of Paradise uses its chosen site very carefully and beautifully (if I can use that word of something exploring the opposite of beauty). The opening and shutting of doors that allow in a limited ration of light in the main (second) space; the movement of the performers through the spaces; the careful integration of the found objects/physical aspects of the site into the dramaturgy of the piece. The choreography is fluid, precise, meaningful – I particularly like the puppeteer-puppet dynamic explored between the various pairings of performers.

It’s a dark subject, but there is humour for those happy to find the dark side of life amusing – and those who are this way inclined might spot some of the many passing references to video gaming, comic book and film characters – from the shadowy Nosferatu to the lurching zombies of Resident Evil, via Batman and The Hulk.

Made by Scottish company Dudendance (Paul Rouse and Clea Wallis), in collaboration with artists from Campinas, Brazil and a group of young Scottish performers who were trained in residence in Brazil. Paul Rouse (the ape-man cum club-armed monster) is, as always, a mighty physical presence on stage. The rest of the team work well together, and it is all very ably directed by Clea Wallis. There is nothing so entertaining as other people’s misery.

Theatre Ad Infinitum: Ballad of the Burning Star

Shalom! Peace be with you, prosperity, welfare –hello there! Oh, and while I have your attention, can I look in your handbag to see if you are hiding any bombs? And – well now, how interesting – don’t worry honey, I won’t tell a soul…

Meet Star, an Israeli diva who has a wicked way with words. She knows that they often say one thing but can be twisted or used ironically to mean quite the opposite, that they can beguile and seduce and entrance and ensnare. Star sings and dances and tells stories, aided and abetted by a boy musician called Camp David, and a pentangle of cute cart-wheeling girl foot-soldiers, the Starlets, who strive to obey her every command – ‘Yes, Star, yes!’

The troupe tell us two parallel stories – the story of an Israeli family living in a settlement in the ‘occupied territories’, and the story of the Jewish people and their quest for a land of their own, and how things have been since finding that land. Meet Israel, the country – and Israel, the little boy who shares his name with his homeland.

The creation of Star as storyteller (Theatre Ad Infinitum’s co-director Nir Paldi, the writer of the piece, plays her in glorious drag – all shimmering gold lame and skin-tight Lycra leggings, topped off with a sleek black Cleopatra wig) is a stroke of genius. With more than a hint of pantomime she steps in and out of the stories, commentating on the action, and teasing the Starlets in a way that only shiny and powerful people (entities, nations) can get away with. She’s a bully, but a loveable one. That ‘she’ is a man in drag humiliating women adds another level, a commentary on gender politics, into the mix.

No stone is left unturned, no closet left unopened. There are stories within stories, the layers building and unpeeling beautifully throughout a fast-paced and (yes!) fun-packed hour that proves that political theatre doesn’t have to be polemical, it can be as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. (Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill taught us this many years ago, and Joan Littlewood took up the baton with Oh What a Lovely War, but in recent years we seem to have lost the way when it comes to combining politics with theatrical entertainment.)

Real air attacks and schoolyard war games – the War of Independence, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War and the first Gulf War. Gas attacks and big bad bogey man Saddam Hussein. Innocent Jewish teenagers killed in bomb blasts on Jerusalem’s big yellow school buses, and innocent Arab teenagers killed by soldiers entering sewage-filled villages. Tiny children killed whilst trying to flee from the Nazis, and Holocaust memorial school trips to visit Auschwitz. Is this appropriate subject matter for a cabaret song-and–dance? Yes indeed. In one hour we learn more about the history and complexities of the modern nation of Israel than any history course could teach us in a year.

And it is the attention to detail that makes the show – detail that comes from Nir Paldi’s personal knowledge and experience (we learn, for example that the reason the Arab settlements are filled with the smell of burning rubbish is because the bin men don’t visit what is seen to be no-man’s-land; and that the Jewish settlements are at the top of the hill, and the Arab settlements at the bottom, so the sewage flows downhill). Living detail and the awareness and expression of the complexities of the history and politics of Israel. Nir’s story is one of someone who loves and cares about his homeland, but who has never felt comfortable with a one-dimensional viewpoint. He sees two, three, four, more sides to every story – and we learn that there can be many ‘truths’ that co-exist simultaneously. He takes elements of his own autobiography – growing up in the settlements, doing military service, being educated in the three forms of anti-Semitism, being surrounded constantly with stories of war and the threat of war – and with the support of the company’s co-director George Mann and the input of the five-woman supporting cast, builds on this material to take it beyond one person’s story; to make it the story of a nation.

And what an inventive way to tell this difficult story! In a lovely modern example of the Brechtian verfremdungseffekt (or, if you prefer, with a nod towards Mel Brooks’ The Producers) Nir’s creation Star brings on each terrible chapter in the story of ‘classical anti-Semitism’ – the Roman massacre of the people of Judea two thousand years ago, the Crusades, the Inquisition – with a wave and a smile: ‘Camp David, play the Persecution music…’

And of course the outrageous Star can say all the things that most wouldn’t dare to say. Holocaust stories are told, and Star cuts in to complain that every family festival is blighted with these stories. ‘We know, we know…’ she cries, bored to death with dull-as-dishwater death and destruction. Meanwhile, the Starlets high-kick and circle-dance merrily to Hava Nagila.

Ballad of the Burning Star merges its component elements with exquisite skill, and everything is delivered by our onstage cast of six with the level of technical expertise and artistic sparkle that we’ve come to expect of Theatre ad Infinitum. Some audience members might be surprised by the differences between this new show and the previous worldwide success, the word-free Translunar Paradise, but those familiar with the company’s other works, and with their working methods, will know that every show they make uses whatever tools from the theatre-makers’ box that they feel fits the job in hand. The Lecoq training is still highly evident in the precision of the physical acting and choreography. The longstanding interest in the integration of live music into a theatrical setting is there to see. Most importantly, the desire to use theatre to tell stories that really, really matter is paramount. A wonderful piece of theatre, the latest brightly glowing star in Theatre Ad Infinitum’s firmament.