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

Metis Arts: 3rd Ring Out: The Emergency

It’s 2033 and this is the premise: What would happen if Suffolk got flooded, and you – a gathering of twelve random members of the public who, as ‘audience’ for this piece are gathered round a table with buttons to push and plastic policemen to position – you, yes you, had to make the key decisions that would save or sacrifice resources (human or otherwise). What would you do?

The answer, of course, is that you’d behave like the good, bleeding-heart liberal that you are. I mean, are any of us going to press the button that tells the authorities to refuse permission for the refugees in the boats offshore to land? Are we going to deny the squatters the right to occupy the empty (although furnished and only temporarily abandoned) houses? No, of course not. Even though our responses are anonymous, we all play the game the ‘right’ way and pick the answers we ‘should’. And we make those decisions because it isn’t real, it’s a simulation – a very flawed one that doesn’t really encourage any deep thought on the subject to hand. After all, they aren’t real people or real houses, and there is no real incentive to suspend disbelief in this 2033 world in which everyone dresses and talks like us, and in which the camcom video conferencing is below the level of technology normal for 2011. I don’t for a minute, no matter how hard I try, believe that it could possibly be 2033, or that this scenario could really be happening ‘out there’, and this scepticism isn’t helped by the two actors (one with us and one in the other container) who are lacking any real credibility as our guides in this future world.

For me, the gaming format of the show, with its instant decision-making at the touch of a button, is an interesting gimmick, but is nothing more than that. It encourages a trite response, not a real reflection on issues at hand. The strongest part of the piece is a short section at the end when the ‘conference facilitator’ leaves us in the ‘Emergency cell’ to make decisions alone. We are encouraged to confer with our fellow audience members cum participants, take on different roles, and come up with some solutions. But because, until this point, we have been in splendid isolation pushing buttons and rearranging the plastic figurines, vehicles and road signs in what is a kind of alternative game of Risk, we have no relationship, so we are only just touching on how to work together when our time is up. Perhaps it is all one big commentary on how decision-makers make decisions blithely or can’t make decisions because they have no way of interacting in the given time – but that doesn’t make for an enjoyable or thought-provoking theatrical experience.

I’m also aghast at the amount of kit used in this show about environmental concerns: two massive shipping containers, an illuminated table, the gaming set-up, various video monitors, etc, etc. Presenting the ethical and environmental dilemmas that needed solving as written questions on pieces of card, discussed by a group of people sat on chairs in an empty room, would have made a lot more sense on all sorts of levels. Let’s start to live with the low-tech, low-energy solutions that will, in fact, make life better for all!

A worthy piece with, no doubt, its heart in the right place – but from my viewpoint it gets things very wrong in so many ways. The one positive thought that I did have is that this could work as a ‘theatre in education’ piece. Perhaps if it was used to introduce schoolchildren (as opposed to seasoned, weary experimental theatre-goers!) to some of the dilemmas potentially facing our country in the coming decades, and to examine the notion of ethical decision-making versus political decision-making, then that could be something of value.

I also enjoyed the installation in the neighbouring ‘Strategy cell’ (more interesting than the performance itself, in my book) where there are opportunities to write proposals of improvements you feel could be made in the here and now, or to endorse, contradict or add to other people’s proposals on such issues as public transport, water usage, and the pros and cons of nuclear fuel.

www.metisartshost.co.uk

Tim Crouch: I Malvolio

I Malvolio is the latest of four works by Tim Crouch that interrogate well-known plays by a certain Will Shakespeare, viewing the story from the perspective of a minor character (here, Malvolio, the much-mocked Steward ofTwelfth Night, would-be lover of Countess Olivia, and the butt of Sir Toby Belch’s cruel tricks).

This series of solo plays is aimed at young audiences – although there’s no evidence of that in the packed Traverse Theatre: a quick cast around the auditorium (easy to do as the house lights are kept on!) reveals that there is not one person under the age of majority present in the audience.

Which is no a criticism of the artist, nor of his producers, but there is a question here for the marketing team: surely it is good for a production to be viewed by its target audience, so even though this is an Edinburgh Fringe / British Council Showcase presentation, could we not have had some seats set aside for young people, so that there was some experience of viewing the piece in the company of those for whom it was written?

I know that this is rather a long introduction, but I feel it is key to a piece of work that we understand who the intended audience is, and how the piece relates to that audience – and having seen the show previously presented at the Brighton festival, I do feel strongly that the presence of the young people it was written for is crucial in a show in which (like all of Tim Crouch’s work) the audience involvement is core.

And so much of the text very cleverly meshes Shakespeare’s themes and Malvolio’s words into the sort of contemporary dichotomy that is of such interest to teenagers, and manifests in so many varied ways in their daily lives, at home and at school: the battles between an excessive Puritanical orderliness and repression of desires on the one side; and personal freedom, anarchy and slovenliness on the other. So at one point we have Malvolio, dressed in filthy longjohns and sporting a turkey wattle, spitting with ironic contempt: ‘I’ll just throw this piece of gum here, shall I? This piece of peel, this wrapper, this tiny little ring pull…’ And then a little later: ‘I’m just having FUN… I’ll just stay up all night and drink this and spill this and vomit this and abuse these and destroy that…’

And there’s a lovely moment, a bit lost on this adult audience, where Malvolio ruffles scruffy heads of hair, or tuts at scuffed shoes with the sort of headmasterly jibes we all recognise from our youth (‘Who allowed you to leave home dressed like that?’), then uses the standard schoolteacher wheeze: ‘Now, I’m going to go out. And when I come back in I expect everyone and everything to be exactly where I left it.’ Of course there is just polite silence when he exits – not a titter is heard, and no one moves. Oh how I wish I’d witnessed this scene when the show was premiered at a comprehensive secondary school in Brighton!

The scene that follows is a very clever exploration of mob rule and a play on the ‘real’ and the ‘pretend’, as Malvolio hooks up a noose to the rafters and coerces audience members into helping him to hang himself, egged on (or not) by the audience. Having failed to hang himself, Malvolio scrubs up and dons his Sunday best and treats us to a scathing resume of Twelfth Night’s plot (from his bitter perspective) – the story of cross-dressing girls, ‘peevish’ boys, lovelorn counts, and celibate widows who marry at the drop of a hat mocked and reviled: ‘And they say I am mad!’. In the end, he gets his revenge on the schoolyard bullies (us) by abandoning us… and without someone to bully and laugh at, where are we?

This is my third viewing of Tim Crouch’s I Malvolio and I discover more each time. On previous occasions, I’ve been wowed by Crouch’s wonderful way with his audience, and the lovely physical/visual clowning moments. (The mocking signs stuck on his back! The bared buttocks! The kerfuffle with the noose! The striptease moment with the gartered yellow stockings!) That stuff’s all as great as ever, but this time round, it was the exploration of the concerns of the adolescent child, and especially the clever casting of the audience as the bully– a kind of collective Toby Belch – that I enjoyed most; and the awareness of what a pertinent text this play is for a teenage audience, even if that audience was absent here. Perhaps it was their very absence that flagged up how crucial their concerns are to this play.

www.timcrouchtheatre.co.uk

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!