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

Third Angel: What I Heard About The World

Somewhere in the world is a radio station tuned to silence; a couple so dedicated to their virtual child that they allow their real-life baby to starve to death; a bus-load of girls who are all called Natasha who cross the border to serve men’s sexual needs; a zoo that paints its mules black-and-white to pass them off as zebras; a country where only five types of male haircut are allowed.

All these stories are true. And meanwhile, the Maldives are sinking – no, stop, the Maldives aren’t sinking, the sea-level is rising – and so obviously we can all help by suppressing our gag reflex and drinking a litre of sea-water a day, as demonstrated by Chris Thorpe whose litre of tap water has had 35 grammes of salt added to it before our eyes. And that, says Chris, is equivalent to ‘a fuck-load of crisps’. And if drinking salt water kills off a few of us – well, that’ll only help things in a world so overcrowded, don’t we agree?

Chris, when he’s not puking salt water into a bucket, turns his hand to a bit of heavy-rock singer-songwriter stuff wielding an electric guitar. Also on stage is Third Angel’s leading light, Alexander Kelly, and Portuguese actor Jorge Andrade of mala voadora.

Together they’ve devised this gorgeous piece of theatre that investigates the whole question of ‘storytelling’ and its place in theatre. Media of all sorts infiltrate our every waking moment, and we find ourselves constantly swimming in a sea of stories from around the world, trying to keep our head above the water. What stories are we drawn to, how are they transmitted to us, and what do we do with the information they give us? When do we ignore things, when do we panic like a rabbit caught in headlights, and when do we act rationally in response?

Korea, Alex points out, acts as a kind of safety-valve for weirdness for us, our prejudices summed up by ‘they eat dogs’. We can relax, bask in our sanity, because all the really strange and horrible things – like people allowing their real baby to starve as they care for the virtual one – happen ‘over there’, to people who are not like us. Or are they?

The extraordinary stories pile up: a 24-hour marriage in Iran, smuggling Snow White costumes through the Gaza border, flat pack Dads in America. The stories are told verbally, physically, musically, visually – always with a visceral punch. As our three performers tell their tales they sit, stand, play, sing, and lounge around their odd junk-shop-of-the-world living room, in which there is a turquoise brocade moose, a fish tank, a large pharmacy green cross, a stuffed ferret, a coat-stand, and a couple of mismatched sofas. There’s a harrowing, yet darkly funny, climax in the re-enactment of a massacre, played out with plastic sheets, a white coverall forensic investigation suit, and a water pistol loaded with fake blood.

And meanwhile, that family in Israel are off to bed to the sound of silence coming from their radio – a very special sort of silence, a loaded silence full of possibilities.

Third Angel have made a name for themselves bridging the gap between ‘new writing’ and ‘live art’. Great to see them supported by Northern Stages, and a pleasure to witness such a thought-provoking and entertaining show. Makes you think about the world, makes you laugh about the world, makes you glad to be part of the world in all its madness – what more could you want?

www.thirdangel.co.uk

Cristian Ceresoli / Silvia Gallerano: The Shit / La Merda: The Disgust Decalogue #1

What better a setting for a rap on female insecurity about the body, sexual insecurity and fear of being judged than this? There she is – exposed, naked, sat on a high stool under harsh spotlights – in the demonstration room of an old veterinary school, a bleak white-walled space with onlookers sat on a steeply-rising bank of wooden pews overlooking her. And our specimen of the day is: Italian woman!

The absent ‘other’ which all things relate to is Big Daddy – variously, our anti-heroine’s own suicidal father; the casting director she has to charm in order to get work; and, on a more allegorical level, Italy itself – or more specifically, patriarchal Italy, a country that has only been unified for a little over 150 years (an occasion marked with the creation of this show).

Subtitled The Disgust Decalogue #1, and with a debt acknowledged to the artistic rage of Pasolini, The Shit offers a stream-of-consciousness poetic rant that is part personal story (being apparently loosely based on autobiographical material) but which also doubles as a portrait of, and commentary on, contemporary Italian society, and in particular attitudes towards women. This is, after all, a land governed by a man who makes his money manufacturing media fodder for the masses; a man who spends his spare time cavorting with call-girls young enough to be his granddaughters.

The language of this almost-breathless monologue veers from the mock-naturalistic (worries about her ugly thighs), to fabulist (stories from the deep of octopi that eat their tentacles) to surreal (maybe she could problem-solve by eating her own thighs?).

The words have been wrought together (‘written’ seems too tame a word to describe the process here) by actor Silvia Gallerano and the show’s writer/director Cristian Ceresoli. Despite the fact that English is a Gallerano’s second language, her delivery is faultless. The work divides up into four or five ‘movements’, to steal a musical term which feels appropriate here, and each rant or rap is interspersed with a sip of water and a shifting of position on the stool. In the pauses, the lights cast a triple shadow across the ceiling and for a moment, as she sits hunched and ready to restart her howl of indignation, she seems to be a puppet waiting to be animated by words.

A truly electrifying performance that will leave you reeling and gasping for breath.

Faye Draper: Tea is an Evening Meal

Breakfast, brunch, lunch, tea, dinner, supper… Well, at least we are all agreed on breakfast. But what does ‘tea’ mean to you? A brew with biccies or an evening meal?

There are around twelve of us gathered around a nice old-fashioned kitchen table, a decent solid pine-wood table, not one of those lightweight things from IKEA. We are welcomed by Faye, who’s wearing a neat little blue dress and apron, with a hostess trolley for her bits and bobs. There’s a hotch-potch of teapots on the table, including a cheerful spotty one, and a metal one with electrical tape on the handle (to make it less ‘burny’, as Faye’s Gran said when she lent it to her). So there’s tea, and milk in jugs, and sugar bowls, and plates of Bourbon biscuits and Custard Creams (Britain’s favourite biscuit!).

As we take our tea, the table acts as a conduit through space and time. Mixing autobiography, true-life stories, and gentle philosophical musings, solo performer Faye Draper bring us an endearing show built around an immersive ‘British tea-time’ experience.

The tea-time theme broadens out to include other tables and other meals – and we are cast in a variety of roles. Look, there’s Grandma at the head of the table (where Grandad always longed to be), and over there little Mark, aged 8, who is playing with his peas, and on this side Aunty Selina. So it must be Christmas, because Aunty Selina only ever sits down on Christmas Day – she’s about to announce the start of the meal, cautioning everyone to have their party poppers ready, and she makes her usual health-and-safety announcement about not ‘popping’ too early because of Grandad’s pacemaker, and someone always does, and Grandad always fakes a heart attack, on cue. Oh and now we are in a restaurant, and we wonder who the man is who always sits alone, no phone to distract him, no book to read. Joe’s mum is here in the restaurant and she accidentally leaves her new-born baby in his car seat under the table, panicking when she gets to the car with no baby in tow.

The teapots, jugs, mugs and biscuits now morph into a wedding party, with Faye struggling to sort out the seating arrangements: ‘he can’t sit on that side of her because that’s her deaf ear’.

And so you will have gathered that what we have presented here are tiny tales of everyday life – nothing epic, nothing more dramatic than a baby misplaced for a matter of moments, or someone inadvertently sitting at the head of the table when they shouldn’t – but it all makes for really engaging theatre. Everything is just so – it is a deceptively clever piece in its dramaturgical structure. Themes are circled round and returned to, small pieces of text repeated again and again to give a poetic rhythm to the piece (Mark and his peas become something of an anchor point!).

If there is a small quibble it is on the integration of a section in which the audience are given salt cellars and asked to draw dinner settings, and then each given a place to reference. These places – Bristol, London, Devon, Newcastle, Blackburn – are obviously places of significance to Faye, but exactly how and why is glossed over, which given the care and attention to every other section is a little puzzling. That said, it was great to get to draw with salt, and to look afterwards at a table covered in salt plates sporting salt sheep, shopping trolleys, bridges and Big Wheels!

Beautifully written (by Faye and the show’s co-creator, Alex Kelly of Third Angel), beautifully performed – a very lovely and loving reflection on lives lived ‘up north’.

www.fayedraper.wordpress.com

Ontroerend Goed: All That is Wrong

Girl, 18. She’s dressed in a loose pink jersey and skinny jeans, limp blonde hair falling over her face, no make-up. There’s an echo of the Corinne Day photos of the young Kate Moss in her cool and loose prettiness. She’s sitting on the floor next to a young man, and they’re talking in a relaxed way as the audience enters.

A slide projector is switched on: images clunk by, amused laughter from the audience as standard teen maxims and Facebook faves whirr by: ‘The Kids are NOT Alright’ and ‘Fuck the Pope – but use a condom’. Amongst them is one with rather more resonance: ‘Protect me from what I want.’

Next, a word chalked on the floor: ‘I’. From that one tree-trunk word grows branches and offshoots. First come the factual details (girl, 18, mother, sister, father on Sundays), then the more subjective statements: ‘skinny, not anorexic’, ‘don’t sleep well’, ‘will study languages’. From there it spirals out and out, from the personal to the familial to the communal, the imagist word-pictures and statements becoming more and more focused on what is wrong with the whole wide world: racism, too many people, Shell, Starbucks, superficiality, sweatshops, homophobia, capitalism, waste, abuse, rape, porn, pain…

As the chalk mapping grows and grows, amendments are made, qualifiers are tagged on, new things are added (‘the Batman shooting’ and ‘Do I want children?’ and ‘I will try not to buy Coke’), and with this we hear a mix of sampled soundbites: a stock-market dealer bragging of his abilities to profit from recessions; a first-person account of genital torture; an allegation that in India people are mutilating their kids to make them more efficient beggars.

Oh, the terrible, terrible pressure of being 18 years old and feeling responsible for changing this whole wide world of injustices! Yet there comes a moment of immensely mature reflection: ‘I can’t understand everything,’ she writes.

All That is Wrong is ultimately a piece about writing and about the power of words. Words surround us, chalked on the floor, written with a pen and projected via OHP onto the walls, sculpted in clanking metal letterpress forms. Words are read aloud from emails and Facebook comments, and broadcast via laptop and PA. Words pile upon words. We may not be able to understand everything, we may not be able to change everything – but through words we can understand more, change more. Here, writing is a presented as a visceral, physical activity, not merely a cerebral process.

This show is the third in Ontroerend Goed’s ‘teenage’ trilogy, preceded by Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, andTeenage Riot, which were both presented at the Traverse in previous Edinburgh Fringe fests. It is a powerful body of work, capturing the changes through the teenage years with extraordinary precision and insight – from the just-on-the-brink kids caught between childhood toys and adult pleasures that we meet in the first show, through the ‘I want to be understood but not by YOU’ boxed-in horrors of the mid-teen years, to finally the dawn of young adulthood with a new mantra – no longer ‘you don’t understand’ but now ‘I want to understand’.

It is a pleasure to watch young writer and actor Koba Ryckewaert (who appeared in both of the previous shows in the trilogy, the youngest in the group) in her first show with Ontroerend Goed as an adult artist. Her co-performer Zach Hatch is the perfect foil, and their onstage relationship is relaxed and convivial. The piece is structured beautifully, so all credit to director Alexander Devriendt and dramaturg Joeri Smet.

As for Koba, she will write, she will write – how perfect that she finds her writing voice in public, in the Scottish venue dedicated to discovering and promoting ‘new writing’.

www.ontroerendgoed.be

Clout: How a Man Crumbled

In How a Man Crumbled, Lecoq trained Clout Theatre invite us to dive head-first into the absurd and violent world of Russian poet Daniil Kharms. They tell their tale with a great deal of panache, using a provocative mix of dark clown, slapstick and surrealist imagery, and the end result has something of the feel of a Mikhail Bulgakov story retold by The Three Stooges.

As we enter the extraordinary space that is the Summerhall old veterinary school’s Demonstration Room, there leaning – hung, almost – from the bleak, peeling whitewashed walls are three steampunk bouffons. Their coats are brushed with the whitewash, and they sport the dust of aeons; their trousers or dresses are patched in a hotch-potch of fabrics and embellished with hemp and string. There are oddly-shaped hats; there is distressed make-up. As they move from their wall and around the space there is the echoing scrape of metal-tipped shoes across the concrete floor.

What follows is a kind of live version of an Expressionist film, all done with hand-held and cone-shaded lamps, the live action paired with projected slides, resulting in a kind of low-rent 1927 effect. We meet The Writer, an arrogant and possibly insane young man who wonders ‘what’s all the fuss about flowers, it smells much better between a woman’s legs’; The Old Woman, a kind of batty babushka; and a plethora of other characters, both male and female, played by the third performer. Roles, though, chop and change – at one lovely moment we have three old babushkas in headscarves staring out at us, chewing on their gums.

Terribly violent deeds occur, including assault and battery with garden vegetables, and inevitably there is a body in a trunk that needs transporting on a train – cue a horribly funny sketch of opening lids, escaping limbs, and disappearing bodies.

It is a delight to see the traditional Lecoq skills of mime, clown and bouffon used by a young company with such evident relish and pleasure in the creation of their work. The projection work could be improved, and the integration of performance and projection needs looking at, so for me although this is an interesting show, it isn’t (yet) a great show. But the ideas are there, and the performances are full of vim and vigour, so this is indeed a company to watch.