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

If it’s Thursday it must be Edinburgh…

So, here I am in Edinburgh, on the eve of the opening of the Fringe – it officially kicks off tomorrow, Friday 3 August. Today was planned as a quiet, settling in sort of day. Two shows booked to review (some have opened early), and maybe a bit of networking and organising. This is how it went…

11.00: I’m at the Pleasance Courtyard which is relatively quiet and calm – the Fringe hasn’t really started yet, after all. I’m here to see a children’s show, Ripstop Theatre’s Luminous Tales, which is part of the Escalator East to Edinburgh programme. I have high hopes, as Escalator is usually a mark of quality, and the show comes tagged as a Norwich Puppet Theatre production – or endorsement, at least – hard to tell for sure what the relationship actually is. It’s a bit of a disappointment – and worryingly the puppetry is below-par. I’m left feeling a bit confused, and feel the need to phone Total Theatre reviews editor Beccy Smith for a quick counselling session. She advises that I should write the review that needs to be written, regardless – so that’s what I’ll do (it’ll pop up in the reviews section soon, folks). Not a very auspicious start to my Fringe experience…

12.40 Still at the Pleasance. Now I’m off to see Pete Edward’s FAT, another Escalator show, billed as ‘the multi-media journey of a gay disabled man in search of his heart’s desire’. This one is good – thankfully. I’m thinking it might be time for lunch, but a persistent person with a bunch of flyers is insisting that I need to See Exterminating Angel at 14.00. He offers me a free ticket. I point out that if I wanted to see it for free, I’d go and get myself a press ticket, and anyway I am pretty sure I’ve already allocated another Total Theatre reviewer to see this one. He looks at me with big soulful brown eyes and shrugs. If he’d have carried on with the sales pitch I’d have walked on, but there’s something about that shrug. I take the ticket from his hand…

14.00 Pleasance Above, Exterminating Angel. Not a reworking of the Bunuel film, but inspired by it, with a dash of Maeterlinck’s The Blind to boot. An improvised show, the action set around a never-ending dinner party – the outcome is never the same is the USP. How much is improvised, and how they go about setting their improv rules I have no idea – but it’s good, very good. Dangerously funny, edgy, and working the balance between the mundane and the surreal very cleverly. I’m glad I went, so thank you tall dark handsome stranger.

15.30 After a hurried lunch, it’s off to Fringe Central to meet the press (department). Media passes for me and the Total Theatre reviewing team sorted; spreadsheets of venue and show contacts acquired; access to computer and office facilities organised.

16.40 I’m now at C Nova – one of the newer venues of the ever-expanding C Venues empire – for Remor, a show in a box by Spanish company Res de Res. Eleven minutes of intense non-verbal performance in a mock prison cell. Take no prisoners performance you might say…

17.00 Ah, a press launch! I’ve managed to miss the Zoo Venues one but make it to the Gilded Balloon for wine and canapés. A number of keen theatre-makers try to sell me their shows: there’s the one about the wife of a porn addict and how she got divorced and got a life (‘it’s based on a true story – and there aren’t many Fringe shows by and about middle-aged people’), the one by two Cornish rappers and a Casiotone (‘er, are you busy? I suppose we should be telling you about our show as you’ve got a reviewer’s badge on. We’re from Cornwall…’), and the one with a gun wearing a condom on the flyer (‘some people find the image disturbing, but don’t mind that, read the back!”) which is the proud winner of the Sir Michael Caine award for new writing. Luckily, I’m rescued by Steve Forster (Escalator’s ever-cheerful press officer), who tells me about something I genuinely do want to see – Thread, the new show by Nutshell, creator of last year’s site-specific success Allotment, which is also back for a one-week run. He also reminds me to come along to the Hunt & Darton Café, which is, yes, a café – but a café as ongoing art project. Kind of like the late-lamented Forest Café but will less lentils, perhaps?

18.00 Somehow – and Lord knows how this happened – I have found myself agreeing to join a makeshift ‘community choir’ being put together for h2dance’s interactive/immersive dance-theatre show Say Something at Summerhall. I tried grumbling that it was all a bit of a busman’s holiday, given that I’ve opted out of paid work with my company Ragroof Theatre in order to dedicate August to my Total Theatre duties at the Fringe, but nevertheless, here I am crawling on the floor and singing ‘la la la la nananana-nanu’ as if my life depended on it. ‘So, see you at tomorrow’s rehearsal’ says h2dance’s Heidi Rustgaard at the end of the evening, and ‘yes’ I say. So that it that….

23.00 Home – or at least home to the place that will be my home for the coming month. Gosh, it hasn’t even started yet and I feel like I’ve been here forever. Has it really been just one day?

www.edfringe.com

Rob Drummond: Bullet Catch

Do you believe in free will? Yes, you answer. Well, did you choose to be born? No, you answer. So, given that this first moment of your life was determined by someone or something other than you, something other than your ‘free will’, and given that every moment from then until now has been a continuous chain of events, each choice the result of an accumulation of circumstances that have gone before, ergo you do not have free will. That, anyway, is the scientific conclusion.

In Bullet Catch writer/performer Rob Drummond, in his alter-ego William Wonder, uses illusion and psychological magic – along with a whole box of clever theatrical tricks that include storytelling and audience interaction – to investigate the big life-and-death questions at the heart of human existence: the free will conundrum; existential angst and the appeal of suicide; the meaning of happiness and how to achieve it. And this all before breakfast! (This was a 10.30am show.)

Key to the tremendous success of Bullet Catch is the clever exploration of the relationship between truth and fiction; between fantasy and reality; between choice and persuasion. Magic turns out to be both metaphor and means for this exploration. Within and around the stage action, the questions are weaved, directly or indirectly. Can we distinguish between real historical reference and a fictional theatrical story? Between scientific fact and religious belief? Who is telling the truth and who is lying? Are we choosing this or is someone choosing for us? Do we want to know how the trick is done – or do we want to hold onto the fantasy and not spoil the magic? If so, close your eyes now – and you might want to put your fingers in your ears too. There’s a big bang coming…

It all circles around an exploration of the (allegedly) true life story of magician William Henderson, who, it is said, ignored his friend Houdini’s advice – which boiled down to ‘don’t do it’ – and was subsequently shot dead on stage whilst attempting the infamous ‘bullet catch’ trick. And yes, you’ve guessed it, the climax of the show is a demonstration of this very trick. Drummond cleverly pairs a reading of Houdini’s letter with a letter allegedly from the Traverse’s health-and-safety office – whose advice is similarly ‘don’t do it’. He beguiles us with his cleverness, and seduces us into accepting that it is fine for us to watch someone shoot at him with a loaded gun.

The twist in the tale comes with the idea that Henderson’s death was not so much a failed trick as the ultimate trick of them all – a clever suicide engineered by the magician, using an innocent audience member as his stooge. Yet why would someone happy and healthy with everything to live for want to kill himself? Enter stage left the sinister spectre of existential nihilism. If free will is the ultimate illusion, then what is there left to live for? Drummond reflects on the appeal of such a suicide tactic – yet still we let him load the gun.

Do we think the gun is loaded with blanks? Or that the ever-willing audience member who has shared the stage with him for practically the whole show as a kind of magician’s assistant cum confidant cum second-actor is a plant? Or do we just trust that whatever is happening on a stage is OK because it is theatre not real life? After all, there are the theatrical trappings – the hand-painted signs and the sepia portraits; the wooden tables, big old trunk, and Crombie overcoat. This is a story, about something that maybe happened in the long-distant past, nothing to do with the here-and-now… isn’t that so?

Ultimately we realise that we never have any way of knowing what is real and what is illusion: the play becomes a metaphor for the great big conjuring trick that is our lives.

With writing as precise and penetrating as a speeding bullet, a very clever use of audience participation that both honours and usurps the traditions of theatre magic shows, and the whole seductive lure of the most infamous trick of them all, Rob Drummond’s mild-mannered William Wonder proves the age-old maxim – that it’s the quiet ones that you have to watch.

Res de Res: (remor)

We climb a forbidding flight of stone stairs and reach a high-ceilinged panelled room (this in the C Nova venue, the latest pop-up theatre space in the C Venues empire, housed in a government building). Almost the whole room is taken up by a large rusty-looking box, a kind of shipping container with peepholes. Peering in, we see what looks to be an austere prison cell – distressed white walls, a bare wooden table and chair, a sink with a dripping tap, and an unwelcoming metal bunk bed with no bedding.

An usher opens a door in the container and invites us to enter, and we see two figures lying with their backs to us, bodies squashed against the wall – a woman on the top bunk and a man on the bottom. Over the next eleven minutes, a poignant choreography of angst, loneliness, frustration, and comfort-seeking is played out. An envelope on the table is opened slowly to reveal a letter and a grainy photograph, which is then stuck on the wall. A grille above the bunk bed becomes the scene of a dance of shadowy hands seeking escape. The bars of the metal bed are used to twist and weave through and over as our couple move with and against each other. Relationship to audience in the piece is interesting: the performers don’t acknowledge our presence, but we sit on stools holding torches that we may use in any way we wish – thus cast in the role of prison guards. Our torch beams create a dance of light and shadow around and upon the moving bodies.

There is no clear, determined narrative – instead, we construct narrative. In my head, the Hispanic appearance of the performers and the use of the black-and-white newspaper photographs conjures up memories of the terrible oppressions that took place in South America in the 1970s when so many people were captured and then ‘disappeared’. Other audience members will no doubt have their own thoughts and responses. There is also the possibility that this cell containing one man and one woman is a metaphor for the lifelong struggle of personal relationships.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination a circus show – but the circus skills of the two creator-performers (Marta Barceló and Joan Miquel Artigues) from this renowned Spanish company are evident, and the movement work is breathtakingly precise and gutsy. They are also masters of restrained physical acting – faces portray people who have trained themselves not to give themselves away to onlookers, with eyes that stare forward in blank pain, and small gestures of hopelessness are played with an admirable control and restraint.

Every element of the piece – design, lighting, sound, performance – is thought through carefully, each aspect contributing beautifully to the dramaturgy of the piece.

A visceral and thought-provoking physical theatre piece creating intense visual images that stay burnt in the mind long after we’ve left – some companies manage to say more in eleven minutes than others do in two hours!

Theatre Corsair: The Dead Memory House

Take three girls – Bea, Anne and Sylvia are their names. Sylvia is the sensible one, a bit older than her years, dressed in clothes her companions describe as matronly (although they don’t really read in this way). Anne is the good-time girl, sitting around at home in a red halter-neck dress, full make-up and jewellery, helping herself to constant refills from a bottle of wine. Bea is the ethereal melancholic, the arty one – reproductions of Millet’s Ophelia on her bedroom wall, wild dark hair pulled into braids, floaty pale pink dress slipping from her shoulders.

We are invited into their home to hear their stories. Or at least, to witness them play out their assigned personality types through a series of encounters in what purports to be their home. These encounters are mildly dramatic, mostly verbal monologue or dialogue, and sometimes involving low-key movement sequences, but are unfortunately not particularly engaging, and there is a fair amount of clunky writing and over-acting.

The Dead Memory House is described as ‘site responsive’ but is hardly so, unless the site being responded to is an Edinburgh junk shop – we are in a couple of rooms upstairs at Summerhall that have been kitted out in old furniture and bric-a-brac. There is no obvious logic to the design or choice of objects – it’s just random old stuff, the sort you’d find at your nearest British Heart Foundation charity shop. Maybe that’s the point, but it looked like an attempt to signify ‘old things with memories attached’ that didn’t work as nothing had any resonance – it just doesn’t look or feel like someone’s home. There’s also an intriguing pile of black-and-white photos on the table, but these aren’t brought into the show in any meaningful way, which is disappointing.

It is described as a ‘promenade play’, but we don’t really go anywhere. Once we are invited in, we stand awkwardly about, watching and listening. At one point we are beckoned to enter an adjoining bedroom, but that’s about it.

Relationship to audience is confused. It starts well, as we wait outside the door and a flustered Sylvia arrives, keys in hand, acknowledges our presence, and invites us to follow her in. Once inside, we are offered bourbon biscuits (sadly no tea!), and then given slips of paper and asked to write our replies to the given questions (mine is ‘what is the first book you re-read?’). But then we are ignored, so we kind of morph from invited guests to barely-visible ghosts. The jar of written questions and responses does get brought back later, but the material isn’t used in a particularly interesting way.

It is to be acknowledged that this is a difficult card to play – even highly experienced companies such as Grid Iron don’t always succeed in properly integrating the audience with the action in a meaningful way in work of this kind, and Theatre Corsair are obviously young and inexperienced.

But at least they’re making an attempt to do something other than just write and present a regular play on a regular stage, and their intentions are good even if the end result is not yet particularly satisfactory. Perhaps if they stick together and try to give some serious thought to what they want to say and how they want to say it, things might improve.

www.theatrecorsair.co.uk

Pete Edwards: FAT

Meet Pete. He has a shaved head and skinny legs, and he’s dressed in a pair of turquoise-blue shorts and sparkly trainers. Pete has a story to tell – the story of a quest for love. Pete is gay and has a predilection for men with a bit of fat on them.

We start with a big-screen film of London’s South Bank, and the camera’s eye takes us past streetlamps and over the river wall to the shimmering waters below. It’s beautiful, a visual reminder of how vital the River Thames is to London’s heart and soul.

Enter Pete, who uses a wheelchair and has a voice that is kind of hard to understand if you are not used to it, so he’s provided subtitles for his spoken commentary. At first my eyes are drawn a lot to the titles; as the show progresses I find myself listening rather than reading, learning and understanding more, discerning the patterns in the spoken language. It’s all just a matter of time and effort. As Pete talks to us he moves his chair around the space, in a gentle choreography, often coming close to us, then retreating. In the centre of the floorspace is a circular blue crash-mat.

Pete reflects on his walk by the riverbank, and eulogises on the beauty of the moment. The London Eye passes by in the background and Pete tells us he’s been on it six times. We also learn of his love of street art as the camera passes the skateboarders and graffiti writers of the Southbank. We are taken through his journey as if it is in present time. ‘What would make this perfect,’ he says, ‘is if I could meet a beautiful fat man tonight.’

The journey then divides into three different strands, developed through film, spoken text, and physical action in the space: we have the ‘city symphony’ in which Pete paints a picture of London’s beautiful river landscape and monuments – Shakespeare’s Globe, the Gherkin (‘Beautiful, erotic!’) – as well as such smaller quieter stuff as a paper bag blowing in the wind. Then there is the folkloric/archetypal dream-journey, in which we hear fantastical tales of leaping over the sides into the water to commune with mermen; or a bizarre and hilarious story of the disappearance of all the men from London, which is then taken over by cats who make all the women cut off their long hair and cook it; or again a fantasy built around the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, which is turned into a kind of human stew pot. The third strand is the journey of the sexual quest. This strand sits between the reality of the first one and the total fantasy of the second – a realistic dream, you might say. Perhaps it happened, perhaps it didn’t.

The man Pete meets – Dave – offers him a Coke and invites him back to eat spaghetti. We see the spaghetti cooked on film, and live in the space we see Pete assisted in moving from his wheelchair onto the blue mat, his clothes removed, and a plate of spaghetti brought to him, the messy spaghetti eating becoming a metaphor for the sexual encounter. Throughout the show, the links between food and sex are paramount.

What I enjoyed most about the show was that it reaffirmed things I knew and loved, yet showed me new things. As a Londoner born and bred, I was drawn instantly to this homage to my city of birth, and identified with both the real-life portrait of an area I know well and the dream-imagery connected to London’s river and monuments (reminding me a little of the fantasy writings about and around the Thames authored by Jeanette Winterson, Russell Hoban and, more recently, Ben Aaronovitch). The story of the sexual desires and quests of a gay disabled man were the new element for me – here’s a story I haven’t heard before and felt pleased to have been invited in on. And of course we are none of us often presented with someone with extreme physical disabilities on a stage, there to be looked at and listened to, fairly and squarely. No need to stare, but no need to look away either. Just look, and see the person before us.

The show is pitched somewhere between performance art and theatre – performance art in that we are presented with this person, this body in this space at this moment in time: there’s no acting, no character, no ‘other’.

Yet in its realisation – the integration of soundscape, moving image, spoken text, physical action – it has a rhythm and direction that shows a keen awareness of dramaturgy. In other words, it’s a great story, told well! A very beautiful and moving piece of ‘total theatre’.