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

Edinburgh: On the Cusp of the Awards

So where was I? Ah yes – the Total Theatre Awards shortlist meeting, and having 28 shows to see in a week, above and beyond the things I already had booked.

Well, I’ve done that. Since the Total Theatre Awards shortlisting meeting on 16 August, I’ve run madly around town, determined to see all the shows in each of the three category shortlists – Physical and Visual Theatre, Innovation, and Emerging Artists. And YES, with Dr Brown tonight as my last show I can say MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. I’ve even managed to write some reviews in between times, for example, here’s one of Chris Goode’s lovingly crafted verbatim piece transposing children’s words to adult voices, Monkey Bars. And here’s one of a surprisingly joyous piece about illegal immigration and exploitation, Juana in a Million (shortlisted in the Emerging Artists category).

Also in Emerging is the extraordinary XXXO – suffering a little in a totally unsuitable space at Pleasance Courtyard, but rising above that to create an adventurous piece of theatre which is ostensibly about girls crying, but broadens out to be a reflection on how we respond to all the sadness in the world, real or fictional. Each of the works in the Emerging group have been so completely different in form and theme – from the grown-up puppetry of Tortoise in a Nutshell, Grit, investigating modern warfare, to folksy and heart-breaking music-theatre piece Beulah by the Flanagan Collective, to Lecoq-trained bouffons Clout, to the knowing multi-media experiments of Sleepwalk Collective, to the live art/theatre cross-over of Best in the World, an homage to darts-playing and to celebrating one’s personal best, to the comedy-theatre crossover Not Treasure Island, in which Sleeping Tress make a bid to be the new Penny Dreadfuls.

In the Innovation category, I saw Sue MacLaine’s Still Life for a second time (the first was in Brighton last year) and was pleased to find the show as rich and rewarding second time round – if you haven’t experienced it yet, it merges a poetic biographical story with a life drawing class – experienced artists and absolute beginners equally welcome! The Pride was a weird one: I started out hating it and ended up loving it – a kind of Australian Abigail’s Party acted out by a trio of people in lion suits who use ‘lion-ness’ to investigate gender, social climbing in suburbia, and masculine pride and competition. Great jungle wallpaper too! There are two children’s shows on the shortlist this year:Paperbelle and The Curious Scrapbook of Josephine Bean – the former for under-sixes and the latter for over-eights. Paperbelle is – and I know they will hate me for pointing this out – too close to the subject matter of previous Scottish show White to really rise above the comparison, although it is a charming and lovely show with a gorgeous design and great live music (the eponymous Paperbelle’s voice rendered on guitar). Shona Reppe’s Josephine Bean is gorgeous, just gorgeous – all based round a scrapbook, the contents of which are cleverly animated; a truly innovative children’s show, and performed with great panache by Ms Reppe.

I also got to see Dr Brown – and all I can say is go, get a ticket and go. He takes physical theatre and clowning to new levels – and as for how he works the audience… Wow! See Edward Wren’s review here, he sums it all up pretty well!

I’d seen much of the Physical and Visual category pre-shortlist, but Teatr Biuro Podrozy’s Planet Lem was a late opener, so I got to see that – a large-scale sci-fi extravaganza that featured humanoids depicted as what one person I know described as ‘Tellytubbies with tits’, dominated by a terrifying team of robots. As always the stilt work and staging was great, and good to see TBP going for a different aesthetic and playing with comedy. Great spaceship too!

Nothing is Really Difficult is enormous fun: three male clowns of the highest order and one big box – cue an hour of rip-roaring fun that manages along the way to investigate masculinity and parody the notion of three blokes stuck together for life. And they surely have the most innovative show flyers in the world – they are wood, in the shape of ‘Dutch animals’ or handbags or maybe just plain wooden squares, carved before our very eyes from on top of their box pre-show.

Knee Deep is contemporary circus at its best, skills-wise – astoundingly talented performers challenging our expectations of male and female roles in circus performance. You’ll have to go a long way before you see a female base with this strength and power! Stepping outside of the shortlist for an hour or so, I nipped in to see Tumble Circus, mostly because I wanted to compare and contrast with Knee Deep. Tumble is flawed, and the skill level nowhere near as high, but it is a very interesting piece, using circus to investigate what it is to be a circus performer. Navel gazing, perhaps? Well, theatre has certainly had its share of shows that turn the gaze on itself, and I for one greatly enjoyed this piece that reflected the agony and the ecstasy of being a ‘circus couple’.

I finally got to see the much-touted sell-out show at Summerhall, Teatr Zar’sCaesarean Section: Essays in Suicide. And yes, wow, a great piece of ‘total theatre’– the song, music, movement work, and scenography all superb. I will also confess that this company have been trying to attract my attention for the last couple of years, and I have received numerous emails about this work as it was developed and presented in Poland and Italy – and in a very biased way kind of ignored it because of the title. Well, just goes to show… Song of the Goat’s Songs of Lear is amazing and beautiful in some similar ways, but with a radically different staging – almost a recital, although with the company’s physicality evident in the dramaturgy. So good I saw it twice!

Outside of the TT Awards shortlist I have also managed to attend the Guild of Cheesemakers event at Summerhall – good cheese and wine, but I wasn’t personally taken anywhere by the accompanying story of timelessness versus ageing, even if the three performers and various ‘non performers’ – experts on bread, wine, and cheese – were all highly entertaining and watchable. I got to travel on a boat to a remote island for a rendition of Macbeth that is a tribute to a classic Demarco production – beautiful experience, gorgeous site, but a rather dull production of the Scottish Play which missed many opportunities to really use the site, although there were some nice touches such as witches popping up in windows above us, footsteps echoing around the old abbey, and a lovely servant woman with a great Scottish accent who spoke Shakespeare’s lines with a natural ease missing from the other performances.

We Are Not Here, like the above two a Summerhall show, is an interesting piece of dark clown work – very dark clown! – that knowingly references the works of Samuel Beckett (Godot arrives in a pram at one point). Feisty performances from what are obviously seasoned physical theatre actors, presented in the suitably terrifying Demonstration Room. Like Clout’s How a Man Crumbled and The Shit, this is a show that really suits this spooky space, with its hooks and shadows and peeling walls and pews.

Elsewhere, in St Andrew’s Square to be precise, I caught most of a Made in Scotland outdoor aerial-dance show called Leaving Limbo Landing. A strong all-female team of acrobats, aerialists and dancers telling a tale of migration and investigating the meaning of belonging, using sound recordings, and played out on an outdoor rig using rope and silks as well as floor-based choreography. A familiar theme, and it was hard not to compare to Mimbre who are also an all-woman circus-trained company who have made a (better) show about ‘leaving home’. But there are some lovely touches – great costumes including a luggage-label dress, and nice to see side-by-side rope, and to see the contrast between air and ground used well. Oh and there’s a water feature, the show’s USP which is – yeah – a nice climax, although I struggled to understand what it meant, dramaturgically. This could be because I missed the beginning of the show!

I’ve also managed a couple of cabaret shows, although I find it hard to stay awake after 11pm with so much daytime activity going on. Bourgeois and Maurice are their usual outrageously witty and entertaining selves in Sugartits. And East End Cabaret – also a two-person singer and musician combo doing songs with outrageous lyrics and playing with their ambivalent onstage (and suggested offstage) relationship – go from strength to strength. They are so beautifully bawdy, so wonderfully in control of their audience, such a great singer and multi-instrumentalist, that it is hard to find fault. They do come with a health and safety warning though: if you are easily offended by women who are not afraid to name body parts and state what you can do with them, then this is not the show for you!

So, it is close to the end of this year’s Fringe. Just one last weekend. Today I am having a day off from seeing shows in order to judge the Total Theatre Awards. The winners will be announced at 5pm (Thursday 25 August). Oh and also to say that unlike other awards, ours involves a long and convoluted process of assessing and judging by an impressive mix of national and international critics, producers, artists et al – so it’s not just one or two people’s opinions. And we NEVER tell people before the announcements if they’ve won or not, no-one is in the know!

So, we wait on the cusp…

Sleeping Trees: Not Treasure Island

Three boys messing about on a stage – it’s become part of the Edinburgh Fringe tradition, and with the Penny Dreadfuls taking a long and possibly permanent break, and Pappy’s allegedly on their Last. Show. Ever, there’s a gap to be filled. Enter Sleeping Trees with their patchwork version of Treasure Island – indeed, Not Treasure Island.

It’s a great idea, to recreate Treasure Island without rereading it, digging up the buried memories and throwing them together to make a show. The problem I fear is that the concept doesn’t quite translate to the stage, possibly because none of us know the story well enough to distinguish between what actually happened in the story and what is a figment of the collective Sleeping Trees imagination.

That aside, it is all a jolly good romp, with feisty performances from our three lads. It stays fixedly within the sketch comedy format: no props or set, the story driven on by the fast-paced writing, the clownish characters, and the running jokes – in this case, all built round the constant deaths and fake deaths and resurrections of a whole load of old sea dogs, which include a jolly Jimmy Jim Jim, a moribund Jolly Roger, a bevy of hook-bearing Long John Silvers, and various Blind Petes. The humour is old-fashioned and blokish. The audience are mostly teenagers and young adults, and happy to squeal with laughter at the idea of two old pirates snogging, and a loud shout of the word ‘twat’ gets them rolling in the aisles. I much prefer the quaintly boyish touches, for example when we have a small eulogy to jelly, ‘the perfect blend of food and drink, in some ways the only real meal’.

Sleeping Trees are a theatre company emerging from Chichester’s BA Ensemble Theatre course, and are mentored by Bootworks (another three-man team of theatre-makers). They have obviously made a choice to play the sketch-comedy-troupe card, to see how they can make that work for them – and they have certainly proved that they can do that. But I would personally much rather see them playing with form with a little more courage. How, for example, might Not Treasure Island have been if they had taken inspiration from Bootworks’ Predator and put themselves and their relationship to the story into the piece? There are spaces between comedy and theatre to be explored – see for example the work of Total Theatre Award winners Dr Brown, Spymonkey and Will Adamsdale (the latter perhaps the only artist to have won a Fringe First, a Perrier Comedy Award and a Total Theatre Award over two shows); legendary companies such as Peepolykus and The Right Size (aka Hamish McColl and Sean Foley who went on to West End success withThe Play Wot I Wrote); and indeed the wonderful Mighty Boosh, who we should remember started out as an Ed Fringe show directed by Cal McCrystal.

What is obvious from seeing this show is that the Sleeping Trees trio have stage presence, great character skills, a good sense of comic timing, and that they know how to play to and with an audience. So, the question is: what are they going to do with all these skills? The possibilities are endless…

www.sleepingtreestheatre.co.uk

Tumble Circus: This Is What We Do For A Living

One man, one woman. Ropes, a static trapeze, strops, straps, juggling clubs, hoops, a shared red dress, a sofa, a pile of cushions. A whole load of tricks, and a bunch of kitchen sink stories. Two reconstructed shoulders, a smashed wrist, and a broken foot. Seventeen years, 7 months, 23 days.

She’s called Tina, and she’s from Sweden. Seventeen years ago she was a bit of a punkish rebel. She left Sweden, she went to Belfast. He’s called Ken, and he’s from Belfast. Ken is a bit of a joker – Belfast was ‘big in the 80s’, he says.

Ken and Tina have been together, on and off stage, for – yes – 17 years, 7 months, and 23 days. They work, they play, they fight, they make up. This Is What We Do For a Living tells their turbulent story – or stories, they agree on very little. ‘I left Sweden for this?’ she howls, and he can’t even remember that she doesn’t drink tea, only coffee. Yet still the love is there…

The show is a hotch-potch of performance modes and means, the whole thing (like their personal relationship, like their circus relationship) somehow hanging together, dangling by a delicate thread. We ricochet from rhythmical recorded texts – lists of dates, personal and professional landmarks, and injuries – to ranting monologues, to clever tricks mixed with spoken commentary, to audience interaction. Tina designates a man in the audience ‘my new boyfriend’ and does a spell of hula-hooping for her beau, dressed in a cute red dress. Ken dubs him a ‘dirty old man’ and retaliates by trying to win the heart of a lady in the second row with a corde lisse act to the tune of Je T’Aime, built around a quest for a rose at the top of the rope.

Abandoning their new ‘lovers’ and going back to each other, there’s a nice play on gender expectations with that red dress migrating from her to him in the course of an acrobalance sequence in which both base, both fly. And there’s a poignant reflection on the decision whether or not to have a baby, in which the cushions are gainfully employed – ending in a great flutter of feathers across the stage as a music-box tune tinkles way. A nifty aerial double-act – a nice mix of doubles trapeze, and side-by-side trapeze and corde lisse – is the show highlight, followed by a cheery cushion-throwing finale that the audience joins in with eagerly. The final words bring us full-circle: they’ve decided to stay together. They can’t do anything else. This is what they do for a living…

It’s not the only show out there in which circus turns the gaze on itself – there is, for example Cirkus Cirkör’s Underman, recently seen at CircusFest at the Roundhouse. But that’s OK – there’s room for both, it’s a worthy subject. And I suppose you could argue that the narrative is built around a series of pre-existing circus turns – but as the piece is about making circus, and about being in a circus-making relationship, that seems fair enough to me. There are a few odd transitions and some clunky moments, and there are sections I’d trim or cut – but for the most part it, it all works very well, and I’m genuinely drawn to these two honest-to-goodness circus lifers.

www.tumblecircus.com

Edinburgh: The Story So Far

So, I’ve made it to the halfway point and more – that feels like something! And the Total Theatre Awards shortlist is done. Just 28 shows to see and judge, then, plus all the late-opening shows / shows I’ve promised myself or someone else I’ll see even if not shortlisted…

And the story so far?

The Fringe started quietly. The first few days of previews and openings are always relatively quiet, but by the end of week one it was clear that there was a discernible Olympics knock-on effect – with people obviously choosing to stay home to watch the sports on TV rather than come to the Burgh for a bit of art or live entertainment. Many venues, though, chose to have the Olympics screened in the bar, so you could get the best of both worlds – see a show and catch up on the medal count on your way in or out.

My first few days at the Fringe are always my favourite time – there’s an easy pace, and I spend my time picking and choosing from favourite companies or interesting looking shows. People often ask me how I pick and choose from so much on offer, and the answer is that initially I tend to go for shows presented in curated programmes within the Fringe: Escalator East to Edinburgh are an annual regular, joined this year by a North East producers’ venture called Northern Stage at St Stephen’s, housed in what will inevitably always be known as the former Aurora Nova venue. There was also the Polska Arts programme of top Polish companies, including neTTheatre, KTO, Song of the Goat, and Teatr Biuro Podróży who are presenting not one, not two but three outdoor theatre shows at the Old Quad for this year’s Fringe: old favourite Macbeth(previously shortlisted for a TT Award), outdoor theatre classic Carmen Funebre, for one night only as an Amnesty International benefit (and what with the Pussy Riot outrage and all that, Amnesty are big on this year’s Fringe), and an Edinburgh premiere for new show Planet Lem. I’ve seen the first two and look forward to the third…

I saw a fair few Escalator shows, and didn’t, to be honest, feel the programme was as strong as usual, based on the four or five things I saw – but did very much enjoy Pete Edwards’ FAT. You Obviously Know What I’m Talking Aboutalso gets brownie points for including a scene in which a man watches a kettle boil, in real time.

Over at St Stephen’s, this was rivalled by a woman watching tea brew in real time – Faye Draper in Tea is an Evening Meal, a cheery and intimate wee show that which I saw (and very much enjoyed) before seeing another show co-authored by Third Angel’s Alexander Kelly, What I Heard About the World, which has been shortlisted for a Total Theatre Awards (more on that later).

Over at the Assembly Roxy (what was the Zoo Roxy last year, and the Demarco Rocket before that, and the Roxy Arthouse before that – veterans of the Fringe will know of it as Richard Demarco’s gaff!) I saw some of the marvellous Russian programme curated by Anna Bogodist of Derevo, who was awarded a Herald Angel for her efforts. I didn’t make it to DO-Theatre’s Hangman, but that’s a show I’ve seen before and strongly recommend – what I did see and love was Derevo’s wonderful new show Mephisto Waltz and Akhe’s wonderful old show Mr Carmen.

A small tale of how the right sort of PR can work: ages ago I got a Facebook message from a friend now living in Australia inviting me to a show she had connections with, a piece called (remor) by Spanish dance/theatre/circus company Res de Res, an eleven-minute long show set in a prison cell – the audience join the two performers inside the ‘cell’. I thus saw the show on the first day, flagged it up to others on the Total Theatre Awards team, and I’m now delighted to see it on the Total Theatre Awards shortlist in the Physical and Visual Performance category (alongside Mr Carmen and Mephisto Waltz).

I also made sure that I spent some time at the Traverse, as that is always time well spent. As a venue dedicated to new writing, not all of the work programmed is of interest to TT reviewers and assessors – but lines between ‘new writing’ and ‘new work’ grow ever blurrier, with so much new writing for the stage now crafted by actor-creators (Tim Crouch being a good example), and so many writers also interested in creating a ‘total theatre’ on stage, using whatever ways and means they wish.

Traverse hits seen in the first week include Bullet Catch and All That is Wrong(the latter now closed). Both of these have made it onto the shortlist. Late opener Monkey Bars by the ever-resourceful and interesting Chris Goode is also strongly recommended (I write this having just left the auditorium – review will follow soon!), and I loved Daniel Kitson’s play on making a play (yeah I know: theatre referencing theatre, so last year – but I loved it!).

Another venue that I made a beeline to was Summerhall – only in its second year and already established as a place to find a really eclectic range of experimental theatres of all sorts. Favourites there have included the Italian production The Shit, Amusements (by Sleepwalk Collective) and How a Man Crumbled by Lecoq graduates Clout Theatre (and yes, you’ve guessed – those three are shortlisted, as are Song of the Goat’s Songs of Lear and Teatr Zar’sCaesarean Section: Essays on Suicide, neither of which I have yet seen but both of which come very hotly tipped). NeTTheatre’s new show Puppet. Book of Splendour (also Summerhall) was an epic, intense evening. I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I admired it! It’s closed now, so you won’t be able to see for yourself if you haven’t already. I must also mention h2dance’s Say Something, a really interesting dance/choral voice crossover (declaration of vested interest: I’m in it!), which is also at Summerhall. This piece will be the subject of a Being There feature, which will be online soon. I also tried very hard to see Square Peg’s contemporary circus piece Rime, which is in the same space (the wonderfully named Dissection Room) at Summerhall as h2dance, so I’ve been staring at their set/rig a lot in recent days – but after three attempts foiled by cancellations (due to the company first ‘not being ready’ to open, then suffering injury) I eventually gave up, and have sadly now missed it as it closed a few days back. Well, that’s the Edinburgh Fringe for you – there are always some that get away…

Things I have seen and liked at other venues include Look Left Look Right’s verbatim piece NOLA at Underbelly. And I want to flag up shortlisted show Still Life by Sue MacLaine which I haven’t yet seen in Edinburgh, but enjoyed greatly at the Brighton Fringe last year (yep, another shortlisted one!).

What else? Well, despite picking carefully I sometimes find myself in the dark wishing I were elsewhere. If I feel the show has some merit – particularly if by an emerging company – I review the work and offer what I hope is constructive criticism. In some cases, I just feel I have nothing to say other than ‘do something other than make theatre’ and I am not really keen on the sarcastic and scathing reviewer mode, so I usually just don’t write the review in that case. It seems pointless just publishing vitriol!

So now, off I go on my quest to see all the shows on the shortlist I’ve not yet seen – every year to date I’ve managed to see the complete Total Theatre Awards shortlist, and this year I intend to do the same. Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye – I’m off now to see two on the Emerging Artists’ list –XXXO and Juana in a Million. I have high hopes…

Vicky Araico Casas: Juana in a Million

Tequila, sombreros, Mariachi, tortillas… Juana’s had enough of all that. What she wants is fish-and-chips, Billy Elliot and Buckingham Palace. Launched on her journey by a fiercely beating drum and a wild-as-the-wind Aztec dance, our heroine sets off from a small town in Mexico beset by economic depression and gang violence to seek out the bright lights of Londres. Passing through immigration is easier than she expects. She hopes for the fat and friendly-looking officer, and when she gets to the head of the line she says ‘tourist’ and gets through without any cross-examining.

The next hour or so whirls by in a wonderfully robust portrayal of the trials and tribulations of an illegal immigrant, the eponymous Juana, all weaved beautifully together with flashback memories from her life in Mexico – which include a truly terrifying enacted memory of the nightclub murder of her salsa-dancing boyfriend Pedro – and snippets from Mexico’s history and folklore. A recurring character conjured is La Malinche, the native Mexican woman who played a key role in the Spanish conquest of the country, an interpreter, intermediary and lover of conquistador Hernán Cortés. (‘We are all the sons and daughters of Malinche,’ says Juana, who is keen to dispute her mother’s constant harping back to past grievances, and blaming of all Mexico’s ills on the invaders. ‘The drug barons are not outsiders, they are Mexican!’ wails Juana.)

We see Juana ‘hot-bedding’ with a smelly woman called Guadalupe; sacked with no pay from Los Amigos, a Mexican restaurant in Elephant and Castle, when she kicks up a fuss about being groped in the kitchen (flashback to her restaurateur mother in Mexico saying, ‘But this is your restaurant here, why would you go and work in a restaurant there?’); and sorting shoes in a warehouse in Croydon, sent by a dodgy agency that disappears overnight without – you’ve guessed it – paying her a penny. Eventually she takes the only option she has left, and phones the seedy old guy without a dancing bone in his body she was fixed up with on a double-date. (‘Roger has money, all you have to do is spread your legs!” says her new friend Maria).

Countering the depressing nature of the stories told, the show sings with a vibrant energy, full of dance, rhythm, physical expression and humour. Performer Vicky Araico Casas and her ankle-belled onstage musician (Adam Pleeth, who plays drums, percussion, guitar and trumpet eloquently) are both excellent, and the piece is directed with due care and attention by Nir Paldi (of Theatre Ad Infinitum).

The mix of verbal storytelling and physical expression is perfectly pitched, and I particularly like the moments when words and movement motifs come together to create something akin to a highly physical performance poetry as, for example, in a show-stacking riff in which a repeated sequence of precisely mimed actions is accompanied by a litany of shoe colours: ‘… simply red, baby blue, navy blue, electric blue, apple green…’ The snippets of popular dance interspersed into the story also work very well, and the dream-space transition from sexy salsa dance to horror as the drug barons descend on the nightclub rolling human heads across the floor is done beautifully. This is a piece using a lot of text, but the physical performance is intrinsic to the piece, and built into the dramaturgy. Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, the piece reminds me of Theatre Ad Infinitum’s work, and it bears evidence of the same rigorous writing, devising and performing processes.

A gorgeous piece of theatre, shining a bright and colourful light on a difficult subject. If you’d had told me that a tale of illegal immigration and oppression would be one of the most heart-lifting shows in the Fringe, I might not have believed you – but here it is!