Author: Civilian Theatre

The Master and Margarita – a devilish concoction of imagery

The Master and Margarita – Complicite at the Barbican, until 07 April (Sold Out)

Few companies generate the same level of excitement before a new production as Complicite. There is a noticeable frisson of energy circulating the foyer before the audience takes it seat that is the result of a reputation for innovation and startling coup de theatre. It is a position that is very much deserved, as for three decades Complicite have pushed at the boundaries of the possible in both staging and story-telling; they have championed physical theatre and challenged the standardly linear model of naturalistic performances as a mechanism for exploring deeper metaphysical questions in their work.

This approach has been extraordinarily effective in tackling themes and stories that would otherwise be far too complex to bring to stage. Who else would have attempted A Disappearing Number, a play that shone a light on the 20th century mathematical genius, Ramanujan, and engaged the audience with the complexities of sting theory? Or attempted Mnemonic, a play that was part anthropological lecture told through the story of a corpse entombed in ice, part-character study of those involved in his later discovery and throughout an examination of memory and its mutability, fragmentation and unreliability.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1930’s Soviet satire, The Master and Margarita, often held up alongside the greatest novels of the 20th century, has defeated visionaries from Polanski to Fellini. It’s digressive storylines and recursive plotting variously tells the story of the titular characters, The Master and Margarita, and the lengths they would go to for love, whilst also featuring the devil in the shape of Woland and a retinue of associates who wreak havoc on the Soviet literature establishment, whilst a dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Christ interweaves and informs the narrative throughout.

<Click her for the full review>

Around the Web

To fill the gap in the Civilian Theatre reviewing schedule (taking some respite before the Cultural Olympiad kicks off:

1) For those who like their reviews laced with a splash of acid then those good folk at West End Whingers are more than happy to oblige. They have cast their eye over Bingo and most appropriately have been to the Menier to see Abigail’s Party; a play that Civilian Theatre’s middle-class squeamishness means it cannot be endured:

2) Digital Theatre have been adding to their collection of downloadable plays, and now  Much Ado  About Nothing (with Tennant and Tate) and the wonderful David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker headed production of All My Sons are both available in glorious HD. Given that top price tickets can set you back up to £65 then how about enjoying it in your own house with a glass of wine for £10?

3) Over at the Guardian, there is an editorial praising Stephen Sondheim to tie in with his lifetime achievement from the Critics Circle. Little needs to be said apart from…West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music. Oh yes and Sweeny Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Into The Woods and Sunday In The Park With George. The last remaining great American lyricist even if his career has slowed down dramatically in the last decade.

Here are a couple of clips from two of his most best-loved works:

4) Webcowgirl over at Life in the Cheap Seats discovers the perils of reviewing student shows. Student + Sarah Kane = Pretension – Original vision. As much as I admire Sarah Kane, there can be few artists that have had such a devastating effect on the originality and interest of drama students.

This week Civilian Theatre has been mostly…

…listening to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (the Jason Donovan version naturally). Don’t judge me, blame the BBC’s fantastic The Story of Musicals, which does everything it says on the tin and more.

…watching Game of Thrones Season 1. Again. It’s all worth it for lines as amazing as…“The  next time you raise your hand to me will be the last time you have hands.”

God bless fans with time on their hands

…making my own Salt Beef thanks to Hugh F-W.

The mystery man and the problem play

Bingo – Young Vic, until 31 March

Edward Bond tends to write exactly the sort of plays that you would imagine a British Marxist growing up in a declining post-war England to write. Heavily influenced by Brecht, Bond’s writing operates with a rigidly mechanistic quality that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Soviet factory. There is a brutalism to life in Bond that may have reached its apotheosis in Saved and its infamous scene of a baby stoned to death. Saved, his second play, cemented Bond’s legacy due to the role it played in the battle to overturn the Lord Chamberlain’s Office right to censor works for the stage.

Deliberately challenging his audience and a notoriously prickly individual to work with, Bond has fallen from the public eye and in recent years has worked outside of the mainstream. However the Cock Tavern in Kilburn, now sadly closed, staged a number of older plays alongside new work in 2010 and the Lyric Hammersmith took on Saved in 2011 to suggest that we may finally be rehabiliting ourselves towards one of our most overtly political playwrights.

The Young Vic has continued this process with Bingo; it is seemingly an astute choice, one of Bond’s most accessible plays featuring Shakespeare as its central protagonist, and the casting of Patrick Stewart, who originally played the role in the 1970’s, guaranteed to bring in an audience that might otherwise avoid such austere fare.

Shakespeare retains central to Britain’s cultural heritage and represents the country’s main claim to a true cultural genius to rank alongside Da Vinci and Mozart. Those individuals that command an international agreement of their stature are rare indeed and whenever their legacy is challenged people have a tendency to react defensively.

<Click here for the full review>

Funny but flawed people

All New People – Duke  of York’s Theatre, until 28 April 2012

The tone for the evening is set pretty much immediately; the music playing over the PA system is so hipster-y that you spend the first 5 minutes waiting for Zooey Deschanel to emerge from the wings wearing a vintage polka-dot dress whilst eating a cupcake. Also immediately obvious to a jaded theatre-goer is that the audience waiting expectantly is notably younger than those entering Hay Fever, the Noel Coward-revival currently playing 50 metres down St Martins Lane.

Can we go as far as to make rather-too-obvious allusions about a baton changing hands? Well, yes and no, Braff’s ‘All New People’ is his first attempt at writing for the stage and there is a definite sense that he is a little green around the edges; in Coward the jokes slip down easier than the regularly consumed cocktails that punctuate his plays, for Braff the punchlines are clearly influenced by his background in TV, harsher and with a more obvious break for audience laughter. 

However there are signs that, if Braff sticks with it, he could be a genuinely talented new comic voice for the stage. And it is a voice that is desperately needed. Comedy appears to be treading water in the West End; if you strip out the celebrity revivals (Lenny Henry in Comedy of Errors), the old-hands (the annual Ayckbourn) and the reworkings (One Man, Two Guv’nors) then we are left with a rather bare cupboard.

Braff is a talented writer and knows how to craft a gag, either verbal or visual. The play starts with a well-judged physical comedy routine where Braff, about to hang himself, discovers he has nowhere to ash his final cigarette. The rest of the play is stuffed full of decent punchlines, even if it rather too often veers towards the profane but this could be a natural reaction against the restrictions of TV comedy. Braff has a very referential and post-modern style, which judges its target audience astutely. These are characters that clearly exist in the real-world, even if it is a much abstracted one.

<Click here for the full review>  

A valuable lesson about forbidden love

‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore – Cheek by Jowl at the Barbican, until 10 March

‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore does not make itself the easiest of plays to love; even given the general sense of impending and unbending doom and attendant cast of flawed humanity that appears as a hallmark of Jacobean tragedies, John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity… is unsentimental, hard as flint and packed full of characters that do not exactly strain to gain the audiences sympathy.

It is difficult to imagine what was made of it in the 17th Century but its tale of intrigue, incest, and murder is one that retains a genuinely shocking impact two centuries later, whereas other plays, such as The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi or The Changeling struggle to escape the period detail of their plots.

The effectiveness of the impact may have much to do with the key subject matter of ‘Tis Pity. Whereas the actions of characters may appear a little antiquated to a modern audience – suicide and a bloodbath in the course of avenging another seems a little outré these days – incest remains one of the last remaining taboo areas. One needs only watch the end of Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece Chinatown to see that it retains a visceral power. It maintains a mysterious otherness by sitting so far outside an audience’s range of experience.

Few plays tackle the subject openly; the inexorable slide through its beginnings into initiation and onwards onto final devastation is laid out in front of the audience in an astonishingly frank manner with surprisingly little of the expected moral criticism. Ford’s play wrong-foots the spectator at almost every turn leaving the audience fully engaged in the spectacle despite an awareness that the conventions of drama practically dictate the inevitable conclusion.

<Click here for the full review>

The Week Ahead

Well after a month out from the blog – mainly spent drinking cocktails and eating wonderful food in Malaysia investigating the diverse cultural scene and eating wonderful food in Malaysia – its time to cast an eye over the weeks ahead. I had a chance to see Cheek by Jowl’s latest production at the Barbican last week, the enjoyably gory Tis Pity She’s a Whore and staged with the inventiveness that comes as standard with a CbyJ production. A review will be up later in the week.

Next week I will be trotting along with the rest of London’s hipsters too see Zach Braff’s first foray into stage plays, ‘All New People‘. After receiving broadly positive if not ecstatic reviews in America, it has now crossed the pond and looks to be a reliably enjoyable if rather predictable evening.

Also worth pointing out the National Theatre Live series continues with A Comedy of Errors, which will be airing at cinema’s round the country on 01 March. Lenny Henry got very positive reviews on his latest return to the stage and whilst it is not the same experience as watching live, it is a commendable project to bring the theatre to those who do not have the time, money or ability to venture to London at the drop of a hat.