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

Adrian Howells: May I Have the Pleasure…?

May I Have the Pleasure…? purports to be a wedding party, and is set in a room-with-a-view at The Point hotel. We, naturally, are the wedding guests. There are ribbons and streamers and purple balloons; and celebratory silver sugared almonds and teeny little gold bells set out on all the tables, which are arranged around the dancefloor. Ah, the dancefloor! Where would any wedding be without the dancing? And yes, there is dancing, and there is a glitterball…

But that comes later. First, Do’s and Don’ts for the best man (mostly don’ts): Remember the ring. Don’t make long speeches, and don’t talk about yourself. Don’t crack inappropriate jokes. Don’t include sexual innuendoes, or tell embarrassing stories of the Groom’s sexual peccadilloes. Don’t shag the bridesmaid in the toilet.

Adrian Howells has been to scores of weddings, and quite a few civil partner ceremonies, and he has been a best man on – oh, I think he said eight occasions. And he is guilty of all the ‘don’ts’ above. Well, all except shagging the bridesmaid in the loo, although he has also been a bridesmaid himself. We don’t get to hear whether he made out with the best man on that occasion, but we do get another toilet sex story, which turns out to be a very poignant little tale about being single, making personal judgements and choices, and handling expectations.

Most awfully and heartbreakingly, he’s been best man to his (then) best friend Rich, and on the night before the wedding shared a hotel room with the groom and lay awake desperate to touch the man he was in love with. Yvonne Fair’s fabulous lament It Should Have Been Me resounds round the room, and Adrian stands still and upright, beating his chest fiercely and rhythmically. He has hardly heard a word from Rich since the wedding day all those years ago, we learn, and having seen (on film) the excruciatingly embarrassed Rich listening to Adrian’s saucy comments in the speech, this doesn’t surprise us too much. But don’t beat yourself up about things in your past you can’t change, is Adrian’s message.

We learn all of the above through tasty little titbits of confessional-autobiographical storytelling; through watching the gorgeously fuzzy Kodachrome Super-8s of the various ‘best man’ speeches; and through stylised re-enactments of key scenes and lines from those weddings.

But it’s not all about him, it’s about us too – and would you believe it, there’s a couple at the show who just recently got married! Adrian quizzes them about their wedding (held in a field, as it turns out), and in one of the lovely little interactive games we play – games that are reminiscent of Adrian’s earlier show, An Evening With Adrienne – we are asked to make a list of wedding essentials: the guests, the bride and groom, the vicar or celebrant, the cake, the fizz, and of course the music. Cue laminated sheets listing the most popular wedding songs, and each table goes into a huddle to pick their song. Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Three Times a Lady’ is our table’s choice, and someone is elected to join Adrian for the ‘bride and groom’s first dance’. They snuggle into each other’s arms and dance, and when the dance finishes, they hold hands and stand silently, side-by-side, representing all the brides and grooms that have ever been and will ever be. (I could shout ‘It Should Have Been Me’ here, but actually on this occasion, it was me!) As the night progresses, there are other dances. We get taught ‘The Sloop’ and it all ends – as it must – with the demented dad-dancing disco.

As with all Adrian Howells’ work, the structure and execution of the work is beautiful – and he always takes the most tender care of his audience. If there is a minor criticism, it is that the ‘set piece’ texts are not quite as comfortably delivered as the more improvised sections, and there are a few ‘settling in’ things to do with audience chair-shuffling and attention shifts that need easing in. This is said, though, with the qualifier that it was a preview night at the beginning of a run in a non-theatre-space, and such tiny blips are to be expected.

Adrian Howells’ work of recent years has divided into the one-on-one pieces (such as The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding, also presented at The Point during this Fringe) and what we might call the ‘come into my parlour’ shows, in which we share an environment with Adrian that is designed as a vehicle for his autobiographical writings. What both strands of work share is an absolute understanding of the mechanics of theatre and a celebration of the performer and audience relationship. In this age of interactive/immersive theatre, it’s good to remember that Adrian Howells has been there a long time, and this experience shows in the quality of the work he presents. What a pleasure it is to be in his company!

David Hughes Dance / Al Seed: Last Orders

Through the glass darkly… And what do we find if we cross the divide? Heaven, hell, or a purgatory of eternal partying? Last Orders uses smoke and mirrors – literally and metaphorically – to explore its twilight world, a dreadful disco of lost souls condemned to a St Vitus’ Dance with no respite.

Dominating the stage for most of the show (once we’ve got a weird, blobby alien-birth scene out of the way, anyway) are two large semi-opaque mirror-screens that give a Hall of Mirrors fairground vibe and provide a kind of Pepper’s Ghost effect, casting figures in a halfway world between reality and illusion. The performers (four men and one woman) emerge from behind as Village People disco-queen parodies in orange boiler suits or pink lame jackets; with bone-white animal heads; or as fallen angels with twisted wings. They sleepwalk across the stage, or shake and twitch in solo anguish, or dance distorted versions of partner dances – deranged tangos and manic sambas.

Last Orders is a further collaboration between David Hughes Dance Productions and physical theatre director Al Seed, who is both choreographer and director of this piece, with David Hughes in creative producer role. Ideas and obsessions evidenced in their last co-production, The Red Room (a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’), are taken forward into this piece: most obviously, the ‘party, party, party in the face of death’ theme, and the development of a kind of contemporary bouffon in the parade of grotesque characters.

The aesthetic is very clearly Al Seed’s, evident in the oppressive Gothic gloominess of it all, and in the soundtrack, which veers from Ornette Coleman style free jazz, to scrambled voice recordings that sound like relays from the moon, to distorted disco beats – with the odd Scottish folk tune thrown in for good measure. A recurring sound motif is a distressed rendering of bubblegum classic ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy I’ve Got Love in my Tummy’: a perfect herald for a cannibal. For Last Orders is, apparently, inspired by the sixteenth-century Scottish myth of cannibal Sawney Bean, transposed into a modern tale of a sexual predator who feeds off younger flesh. I’m not sure what of the original narrative of Sawney Bean’s outsider life is intended to be read in this production, but little comes across beyond that key central idea of the charismatic monster consuming others in whatever ways he can get his teeth into them. Alex Rigg as Sawney is perfectly cast, a magnetic presence who overshadows his fellow performers by a long stretch. (He also designed the show, and is a professional printmaker and former blacksmith – a veritable Renaissance Man).

Al Seed has always been a sort of Marmite artist, inspiring devotion and derision in equal measure. I’m a long-term devotee, but found Last Orders less compelling then other work I’ve seen – even though it has much to commend it.

www.alseed.net / www.davidhughesdance.co.uk

Spielpalast Cabaret: Spielpalast Cabaret

The Spielpalast Cabaret, who hail from Burlington, Vermont in the USA, are a troupe dedicated to restoring cabaret to its feisty, transgressive, gender-bending, political origins – referencing the bathtub gin of the Roaring 20s, the artistic rebellion of Dada, and the transgressive decadence of the Weimar Republic.

And how does this manifest? In a rip-roaring extravaganza of songs (Mack the Knife! And less predictably, Lilly the Pink!); dances – luscious ladies of all shapes and sizes in a lovely white-feathered fan dance, and a sexy-but-funny version of Tom Lehrer’s ‘Masochism Tango’; clown routines – a shoe puppetry piece kicks off proceedings; and live music from an excellent band made up of drums, double bass, violin and accordion. The band’s drummer (who, it must be admitted, I was predisposed to like as he had lent me a tenner when I arrived outside the venue in a cab, three minutes before the show’s start, with no cash on me. Having stepped outside for a quick fag break, he saw a damsel in distress and offered help unequivocally – and yes, dear reader, I did repay him!) was also an excellent clown, emerging from behind his kit to join the action on numerous occasions.

There’s saucy satire aplenty, particularly when it comes to sexual politics, with a storyline about a born-again Christian showgirl; and one about robot-women featuring a lovely automaton girl, described as the ‘perfect woman, hardly moves or speaks’; and an outrageous skit called ‘My Girl’s Pussy’ which features ladies with tails and whiskers emerging from other ladies’ – well, I’ll leave you to work it out.

On the animal costume front, there is also a very marvellous small person who is the White Rabbit: he doesn’t appear pulled from a top hat, but rather has a top hat pulled from him.

A word of praise also to the company for the thought that has gone into the whole aesthetic and presentation, with, for example, ‘cigarette girls’ prowling the bar pre-show selling very lovely mock-vintage postcards of voluptuous ladies (and gentlemen!), and I hear a special pre-show cocktail hour (although being in that late-running cab I missed that).

Despite being in the very lovely Hill Street Theatre, supported by Remarkable Arts, and at a perfect time slot for cabaret (at 10.45pm) the show didn’t have the audience numbers it deserved, although it was very well received. Perhaps they need to be in a more traditional cabaret rather than theatre setting? A Spiegeltent of course would be perfect for them!

And the show was only in Edinburgh for a short run, closing the day after I saw it. I worry that the company didn’t really get the exposure they so definitely deserve for one of the wittiest and prettiest cabaret shows I’ve seen in a long while.

I do hope – and saying this, I’m aware it is a long way to come, and they are a very large troupe – that they take the risk and return for a future Fringe!

www.spielpalastcabaret.org

Immerse Yourself

Leaving Edinburgh mid-fest is always a weird one. It doesn’t seem right somehow, and hard to imagine that it all carries on without you. But it does! It does! Just take a look at the reviews section and you’ll see what a busy bunch of bees the TT reviewers have been, swarming all over Edinburgh.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying a short blast of summer back in Brighton for a weekend of family birthdays – not to mention the Gay Pride celebrations, which are a reminder that theatre is everywhere, planned and unplanned. A favourite moment for me was witnessing a small line of people, stony-faced and resolute, standing in the middle of the cans-and-glitter strewed London Road bearing placards that said ‘You too can be born again,’ and ‘Jesus loves you and forgives you your sins’. They are surrounded by a ridiculously large number of policemen who are ‘protecting’ them, and then in an outer circle around the policemen are scores of singing and dancing men in pink tutus and tiaras. It’s Rio Carnival all over again!

But now it’s back to autumn in Edinburgh, with what the weatherman might call ‘squally rain showers’, a nippy wind, dark evenings, and the local kids back at school. Bye bye raw food Brighton and hello all-day-breakfast Edinburgh. Haggis, black pudding – bring it on!

Overheard in a café in the North Laine, Brighton:
Hippy in flip-flops: Did you hear the riots came to Brighton? Yeah – they took all the hummus…
Overheard in a café in Tollcross, Edinburgh:
Tourist: ‘Is there green tea?’
Waitress: ‘You want green tea? Are you kiddin’ me on?’

So – Edinburgh. Where was I? Ah yes, the wonderful Dance Marathon (see previous blog and review), one of many interactive / immersive shows here at the Fringe. With a longterm interest in this sort of work (as both artist and critic), I usually hunt out what there is on offer here every August.

I’ll say first of all that it is, I know, an issue for many theatre companies making the sort of larger immersive/site responsive pieces that take over a whole building, that Edinburgh Fringe is just not considered ‘d0-able’. Punchdrunk, for example, have said that they can’t consider ever coming to the Edinburgh Fringe. All respect therefore to Zecora Ura for getting Hotel Medea off the ground, an all-night throughout-the-site immersive show at new venue Summerhall. But talking to them, I know that it hasn’t been easy. One company member told me that the first week of rehearsals had to be put aside for cleaning the place! But what seemed like an impossible task at first has paid dividends.

Dreamthinkspeak managed the almost-impossible a few years back with their wonderful Total Theatre Award-winning Don’t Look Back, set in the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, Quite a feat as it was a working building, not an empty shell. 30 Bird Productions created a lovely piece, Plastic, in abandoned spaces underneath the Pleasance. And of course Edinburgh’s own Grid Iron have, for fifteen years now, been the leaders of the pack for Fringe site responsive / immersive works, with shows that I’ve seen including Those Eyes, That Mouth, set in a beautiful empty old house in the centre of New Town, and The Devil’s Larder, which took us on a performative tour of Debenhams on Princes Street. This year, Grid Iron are presenting What Remains? at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Anatomy, a sound-and-site led piece that is a showcase for the talents of composer David Paul Jones (see review).

Elsewhere, there is immersive and/or interactive work of a rather different sort. Il Pixel Rosso take the audience on a scary drive (all done with goggles and headphones) in And the Birds Fell From the Sky; and Me & the Machine bring two of their one-on-one filmic immersive pieces to Summerhall (including their TT Award shortlisted piece, When We Meet Again Introduced As Friends (pictured above). Also at Summerhall is the lovely Rotating in a Room of Images, by Lundahl and Seitl, in which the lone audience member is guided through a labyrinth of curtains by a disembodied voice, with interesting encounters along the way.

It’s a piece I saw previously at the BAC one-on-one festival, which also played host to the wonderful Adrian Howells, with The Pleasure of Being: Feeding, Washing, Holding – in which the audience member / participant is invited into a beautiful and sensuous environment of candles and rose petals, then lovingly washed, cradled and fed chocolate by Adrian. This piece is being presented in Edinburgh as part of the British Council Showcase, as is his new work, May I Have the Pleasure…? in which we are invited to join Adrian at a wedding reception for the last dance… I’m going tonight, and I can’t wait!

The thing I love most about Adrian Howells’ work is the loving care he takes of his audience. Other artists take a different approach. Ontroerend Goed, in new show Audience, prefer to provoke. My review – in which I expressed the view that although I have strongly supported earlier work by them, I feel that they have crossed a line into something morally unacceptable in Audience – seems to have provoked the company in turn. Well, it wouldn’t be Edinburgh without those controversies about morality and boundaries, I suppose. Last year it was Tim Crouch’s The Author (a show I whole-heartedly support as I feel the boundaries are in fact clear), the year before that it was also Ontroerend Goed with Internal (which I thought was the weakest part of the trilogy of small-scale interactive pieces they created, but nevertheless felt OK with), and the year before that was Badac subjecting its audience to a mock-Nazi-death-camp experience, with all sorts of artist/critic fisticuffs ensuing.

For those with an interest in immersive/interactive theatre, and the questions it raises about the artist/audience relationship, there’s a discussion at Forest Fringe thus Thursday, 18 August, ‘Interactivity in the age of the audience’ with panel speakers from Blast Theory, Hide & Seek, Lundahl and Seitl, New Media Scotland and guardian critic Lyn Gardner. The question on the table is: How can meaningful interaction with audiences truly respond to the choices and actions of its participants? It’s at the Forest Café, 3-4.30pm.

Other ongoing questions that might arise, and aren’t going to be answered easily: What is reasonable and acceptable in theatre? How far can an artist push the reality/fiction boundary? Do artists have a moral responsibility to care for and look after their audience? As audience, do we get a better understanding of something if our face is pushed into it, so that we come close to experience the emotion or experience portrayed, or is a bit of Brechtian alienation helpful in allowing us the space to reflect and make our own mind up?

Answers not on a postcard… Your comments welcomed!

MetaMorpho: Devil in the Detail

MetaMorpho is the new company formed by writer and director Toby Wilsher, the co-founder and former director of what, for many years, was England’s leading mask theatre company, Trestle. MetaMorpho’s first production, Devil in the Detail, is a full-mask farce loosely based on a Victorian one-act play, Box and Cox which is itself based on a French ‘vaudeville’, Frisette.

You can understand why they’ve chosen it: it’s a classic farce with a storyline perfect for physical theatre. A wily landlady decides to make a fast buck by renting out a room with ‘double tenantry’: to a sharp-witted foxy guy who is out during the day and sleeps by night (‘the swindling accountant’) and a rather dreamy and moonish night-watchman, who returns to what he believes to be his room to sleep during the day. The buxom landlady and her floozy daughter therefore have to race around twice a day rearranging furniture and houseplants and knick-knacks, and changing over the sheets. Of course, things go terribly wrong, resulting in a whole Brian Rix-style banging of doors, fumbling under beds, mixing-up of drinks, and hiding in cupboards. Add into the mix a snake under the bed, a yapping dog, a family of mice, a wine bottle filled with poison, and a drug baroness looking for the accountant’s hidden loot, and you have a merry romp that (despite a few contemporary details) could easily have been created at any point over the past half-century.

This isn’t a criticism: I am not one for innovation for its own sake, and MetaMorpho are masters of the art of full-mask physical theatre. It’s a well-written piece, performed with great skill by a cast of five, which includes Trestle stalwarts Alan Riley, Sarah Thom, and James Greaves, plus puppet dog and snake. It’s a word-free piece, the action driven by the physical performance and by a feisty recorded soundtrack of Balkan beats, Marvin Gaye classics, and jazz piano (much of which is heard as if from the bedroom’s transistor radio, and which becomes symptomatic of the battle for the space).

The mask work is of course impeccable, and the puppetry is good too: the drugging of the puppet dog a lovely moment, as is the whole fandango around the mice in the vents, caught and fed to the snake…

There are a few things I feel a little uncomfortable with: I don’t understand why the white actors are (masked) playing characters of other ethnicities that seem a little stereotypical. We’ve moved on from actors blacking up to play Othello, so not sure what the justification was here in the mask character of a black drugs baroness? It seemed a little odd.

That aside, good to see Toby Wilsher up and running again in the UK after a long sojourn elsewhere. Devil in the Detail is perhaps not a piece that would be to everyone’s taste – it could be said that it is firmly within a mould established by Trestle rather than breaking new ground – but within the framework that it is choosing to work, it is a good, solid piece; an enjoyable hour or so’s entertainment. It won’t change the world, but I don’t think it aims to.