Celebrating the Play recorded plus polemics

Yay for TheatreVoice: the event, Celebrating the Play, which I reported on below, was faithfully recorded in two parts. You can listen to it right now if you have the time; and you could even correct my original paraphrases for me, if so inclined.

Just as important, Mark Brown makes a case on the TheatreVoice blog for political theatre that is political in its handling of metaphor, rather than in its topicality of dialogue. In part a report from the Theatre Europe Prize in Thessaloniki, in part a polemic on the dramaturgical rigidity calcifying much of English theatre, Brown makes the point that "a play is not a spanner." (So that's where I'm going wrong with the Ikea furniture...) He criticises Free Theatre of Belarus's aesthetic approach in the process, so there might end up being some hearty discussion of this one.

The art of killing

Further evidence published today of the depravity of the Iraq war: attacks on artists.

Singer Muthana al-Jaffar, 37, from Baghdad, said: 'The government is not giving us any protection. I witnessed two of my friends being killed for singing western songs at weddings.'

This is where the process (or lack) of planning for the war and its aftermath plays out. The effort that went into the lies and misrepresentations to get us all into a war meant that a society would be created of its shadow: a sort of wilfully neglected Taliban state. Would it not have been better to have supported democratic and feminist factions rather than invading and disrupting water supplies and electricity to all?

This is why you need instruments such as the UN - even given its flaws in places such as Rwanda and Kosovo - to give military actions a mandate. When the reasons for going in are not mendacious, the sort of societies that grow out of the aftermath aren't a matter of factions imposing themselves with guns but hold some hope for conflicting interests being mediated. The coalition of the willing, by avoiding any kind of mediation by institution beforehand, was never going to be able to create such institutions in Iraq afterwards. This is why I disagree with what Nick Cohen said and continues to say. Of course democratic alliances needed to be built between the west and with those in Iraq, and it's for that reason the war as it proceeded required stopping; it could not be modified by the left joining up to it with qualified support; its very processes were fantastical and corrupt; nothing good could come of a war (not) planned in this way and very very little has, unless you think that killing people for non-figurative painting is a genuinely just cause.

Without language, you don't know you're impoverished

It's the centennial of the Society of London Theatre this year, the society that more or less represents Official London Theatre in the West End. And they've chosen today to kick off some celebrations - involving talks, debates and Q&As. If you're a theatre junkie, that's actually quite a bit more appetising than it might otherwise sound.

Somehow I made it onto the invitation list - as a blogger - for Celebrate the Play: Spotlight on Drama, featuring the Guardian'sMichael Billington chairing a panel of Roy Williams, Sonia Friedman, Michael Attenborough, Edward Hall and Peter Gill. The main topic? The state of the play. The place? Downstairs at the Royal Court. (Plus, he gushes, in the media pack SOLT gave me is the mention that "May 7 marks the date of the very first play staged in the West End (The Humorous Lieutenant which opened in 1663) and the 44th anniversary of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger being staged for the first time.)

What could have been another dreary "yup, the play is dying - um, no it's not - er, this is a dialetical bind, then isn't it" discussion carried a bit more zip. None of the panel believed the play itself was on the way out, but rather focussed on the conditions affecting productions of the mythical beast, particularly in the West End.

Sonia Friedman, who's producer of the commercial transfer of Polly Stenham's That Face opening next week, felt that as a producer in the West End she faced not a problem of what play to produce, but how to produce it. And part of that, she said, was a lack of actors willing to commit to work in theatre, and a theatre system that has trouble producing bankable star actors. Michael Attenborough agreed that who's on next was dominating producers' thoughts rather than what's on next.

Quite apart from those issues, Peter Gill - as elegant and precise a speaker you could wish to hear - raised the issue of a current fissure pushed by the Arts Council of England of theatre of play versus theatre of anti-the-play, saying that ACE has been quite clear in its policy statements about this. Later in the session, he blamed this development to a great degree upon university drama department teaching since circa the '70s; devised theatre's recent boom out of the colleges might have much to do with drama departments being determined not to be literary departments. You could, he said, come out of a drama course not having read many plays; and now administrators for ACE tend to boast such training; they've been taught about Pina Bausch, but they've been warned from text. The subtext of "the stand-up generation's" disdain for theatre than includes the play was based in an "infantile fear", unresolved, created in the past by A-level studying of Shakespeare. Gill wanted to stress that this fissure was a recent introduction into the theatre ecology; what, after all, was Keith Johnstone doing at the Royal Court for so long in the 60s? He believed that New Labour's endless search for "soft points of access" meant that enthusiasm by New Labour for events such as the elephant trudging through the streets a few years ago is confused with being the only kind of theatre worth cultivating through government agencies.

Michael Billington noted an anxiety, possibly a miasma, floating about that the world suspects that the text known as 'the play' is now something as fashionable as a nineteenth-century women's swimsuit, provoking Michael Attenborough to assert passionately that (and I am paraphrasing) we are language, we think with language, we know through language: reduce and impoverish language in the theatre and you impoverish us.

From that point, most of the discussion returned to complaints about actor's projection, the suitability of West End venues' internal decoration for young audiences and how the BBC gives Lloyd-Webber and his musicals an eight-week Sunday night promotion when they run a reality show to cast a part. I'm not sure what novel Sonia Friedman is reading at the moment, but it must be a good one, because she started to read it, takeaway coffee in hand, while her fellow panellists spoke. Perhaps she was looking for a suitable passage to quote, but it was an interesting distraction.

I'm missing out on other points brought up in the discussion, of course, such as ruminations that the subsidised theatre's relationship to the commercial sector was a big reason as to why 2.5 million of the the 13 million West End tickets sold last year were for plays; or the difference between a "star" and a "name" and what that sells. If you were there, feel free to add or to correct me. If you weren't, you could do worse than to check out some of the other Celebrate the Play events.

In the meantime, anybody got any tips on learning to take shorthand?

August in April

A couple of things that you might want to look at. First is the American Theatre Wing website in general and the hour-long interview with some of the Steppenwolf Ensemble regarding August: Osage County in particular. (Click on American Theatre Wing here.)

Skip across the Pacific via the Guardian, and Alison Croggon sums up her 2020 summit experience.

Contemplating why I have a small (not overwhelming) reserve towards the idea of the 2020 summit, I realise that it's because the summit is the right kind of process, but a process that's been removed from the apparatus of political parties. Look back to the building of ALP policy led by Bill Hayden before the 1983 election and you realise that the summit was the sort of thing that once went by the name of a branch meeting. While we might enjoy that Australia has a new Prime Minister who is unafraid via the mere organisation of the summit to admit that the party political system is unworkable for the generation of policy, I wonder for how long this enjoyment can persist. Maybe the era of mass membership of political parties is over; too many of us are willing to retreat in disgust at the behaviour of factional potentates or betrayal of single issues (yes, that includes me); but is the party political system so rotten now that 2020 style events - as productive as they are in themselves - effectively provide a pleasant mask?

Back again - with 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

April is not necessarily the cruellest month, even with my birthday plonked in the middle of it and with Boris Johnson running strongly in the London mayoral election polls. I've been temping quite a bit lately and have now come up for breath.

One of the positive things I'm pouring my own body's CO2 emissions into is a project with the Bush Theatre, working with four other playwrights. It's part of this year's Latitude Festival. And, basically, if anyone has any break-up stories they'd like to share, we'd like to know about them. They're also running a competition for any stories submitted through the Latitude Festival site (click here). (You'd want to be near London to claim the prize, though.)

The fine print for entering the competition is that you need to enter it by 18 April. You also need to mark it 'Bush ticket offer'.

Vent, my friends. Vent. (You can even do it here, if you must.)

Howard's Un-end

"[I]f the butter of common national values is spread too thinly it will disappear altogether"
- John Howard, praising Reagan and Thatcher in a recent speech.

Well, I don't know about my national values, but he's got my stomach churning again.

I've got a theory. The man has been dead for several years already and he's undead. He's the embodiment of resurrecting decayed morality and a deceased view of humanity. The bastard's not going to stop. On the plus side, he'll never get a state funeral.

I'm sure somebody will tell me to get over it. Don't worry. Just have.

What a turnip

To my enormous surprise, according to the press agencies that the Age relies upon, the Taleban does NOT rely upon New Idea for its military intelligence.

Much to report, not much reporting

LRB · John Lanchester: Riots, Terrorism etc
John Lanchester writes, engagingly as ever, of Nick Davies's Flat Earth News in the latest LRB. Having returned from a recent trip to Australia via long-ish stopovers in Tokyo and Singapore, I can say that I'm now jet-laggingly familiar with news stations like CNN and BBC World and would add that television news is no longer news, but seems to fall into two broad, overlapping categories: 1) how people feel or are meant to feel, and 2) speculation about what is actually happening or might happen. For an example of news in the first category, you've got introductions to stories that begin, "There was anger today to the announcement of [insert story here]..." What gets privileged in these stories is the emotion over the fact; so much so that we seem to be entering a world in which we primarily emote, searching for the flotsam of alleged fact that will support these anxieties or pleasures. By contrast, the second category, that of speculation over reporting, is everpresent. We hear of speeches "about" to be made; of bodies that "are yet to be found"; of representatives of sports teams telling reporters what their teams will do on the pitch come Saturday. Strangely enough, the most speculation related to news appears to come with not the weather, but with crime. A child disappears, a reporter is sent "to the scene" of the disappearance, from which she or he reports "live" on the lack of information she or he has obtained and relates the rumours about what "might have happened here" and "what police say they will do tomorrow". The backdrop of a "real" neighbourhood or park tricks us into assuming the report is of reality. The reporting, however, seems to put us into a holding pattern, waiting for clearance from the truth. The reporting becomes the holding pattern; the unacknowledged objective of reporting may now be to keep us from knowledge. As soon as we know, we may need to switch off in order to reflect. Or properly assess the importance of what we know in relation to everything else.

Anyway. I'm back in London. Australia felt very different (see - I do it, too), thanks to the Apology given by the Parliament to the Stolen Generations and other indigenous communities. It was a good day to be there.

And juxta for all

Two entirely unrelated things today.

The first - a blog written by playwright Christine Evans, writing as an expat from the US, with plenty of insights into her process and thinking. I feel silly for not having taken notice sooner. You'll find lots to agree and to disagree with, and I like in particular her wondering about "how Beckett or Ionesco or for that matter, Sarah Kane or Howard Barker would have fared trying to start their careers in the American theatre."

The second? One of those news oddities involving a Labrador in Austria (and isn't there one of those every January?) To paraphrase Frank Zappa, don't you eat that yellow dough...

Fit for purposelessness

** UPDATE 7/1 - you can help try to save the Bush Theatre by signing their on-line petition at www.bushtheatre.co.uk before January 15. Worth a visit even if you're not sure **

Welcome back. Hope you all had restful holidays and rituals. I spent parts of my December in Tallinn, Estonia and in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, variations of white and green. Not the sort of places I wanted to blog in, I have to say. Too postcard beautiful.

On the subject of blogging, I'll admit to something since the rise of facebook (on the computer at home anyway) - I'm less and less sure of this blog's audience and no longer sure what to focus upon. Before the social network sites, blogging was a great way for me to keep in touch with people albeit one that occasionally drew in many more. This isn't a complaint, only an admission that this blog's purpose has gone a little fuzzy and I'm still trying to work out how to refocus.

Anyway. Some things I've been reading that I'd like to point to are Steve Bloomfield's coverage of the current civil strife in Kenya; there's also Michael Billington's interview with Edward Bond and the idiotic news that the Arts Council England thinks that the Bush Theatre doesn't give enough value. To whom? By what standard? If I read another news story with the phrase "fit for purpose" quoted, I might implode.

Among the books I've been entranced by, Chimanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun stands out along with the humourously self-centred Memoirs of Goldoni: Written By Himself (John Black's 1814 translation of Carlo Goldoni's memoirs) that I've been chugging through via google books for the princely sum of electricity and broadband. I've got a great big pile of unread tomes, including a couple of my own plays that I'm gearing up to rewrite.

Tell me, what's on your reading list? Why? And what would you like to see more of on this blog over the next year?

Squirrel Squad

You have to earn a crust somehow. This little blighter entertains me when I'm pounding the keys at home.

Finished writing my November play, only to fall 5 pages short of the target for Nawriplmo (75 US Letter pages). No matter. I've wanted to have my own go at a Woyzeck-inspired structure for sometime now, and having a "write a play in a month" festival was a great way of getting me to apply my bum to my seat.

Seriously, though, this squirrel is in my view from this desk. Sometimes it bounds over the bricks with an apple from one of the neighbours' trees in its mouth. Must have strong teeth.

Got to say, checked my stats for the first time in a while, and the queries that people use to get here astound me sometimes. "I enjoy random" - huh? "Price for majorette act booking?" - huh, again? "Patrick Ross tattoos" - wtf?

Nice to have new readers any day, I suppose. Enjoy your random!

A point with which I agree

David Eldridge posts his response to Michael Billington's new book, State of the Nation. After reading some of the to-ing and fro-ing in certain other UK blogs about form and content, I have to say that I'm with David on point 3 of his response. In the history of theatre-making, you could have had a group without a playwright explore sexuality in the 1970s for weeks and come up with an interesting event, but you wouldn't have got Cloud 9. In English theatre, compared to my Australian experiences, you get an incredible deference paid towards you as a playwright; that so much is paid might be a bit habitual and over-the-top. Perhaps that is what the form-breakers/no-playwright-makers are reacting to, but that can be addressed by a touch of irreverence instead of throwing out bathwater and babies. To use a potentially weak metaphorical question: are the best buildings made with or without architects?

Does this make me a conservative? Or does this mean that I am confusing my drama with my theatre? (Don't forget that I'm couching these comments in the context of what moves and develops the artform.)

The only thing to do now is to link to George Hunka's first Organum, where he now includes references to form/content debates.