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Showing posts with label Cans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cans. Show all posts
Friday, December 26, 2014
Friday, December 26, 2014
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Whenever the big yearly theatre awards swing around I always a get a bit befuddled. Half the plays nominated I've never even heard of, and the winners tend to be things I thought stunk up the place. This is a symptom of living in a city with upwards of a hundred theatres, not just the big plastercast and chandelier glitz palaces of the West End, but the sweatboxes above pubs, tucked into the basements of shops and the very streets of London itself. Once again I've seen an awful lot this year, but here's my favourites:
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
'The Picture of John Gray' at the Old Red Lion Theatre, 8th August 2014
While watching The Picture of John Gray I assumed it was a revival of some unjustly forgotten classic. I was blown away when I later learned that this was the first staging of a new work by C.J. Willmann. Emulating the cut and thrust conversations of late Victorian aesthetes is a tricky prospect, much less interweaving a genuinely touching love story and interrogation of hedonism versus Christianity. That script, coupled with a confident cast and intelligent staging, made for a total triumph. Best of it, it spurred me on to learn more about the people featured within, a gaggle of people with outstanding biographies.
'King Charles III' at the Wyndham's Theatre, 13th December 2014
That a play so virulently anti-monarchy can be released to wide acclaim in 2014 warms the cockles of my heart. Merely voicing suspicions of the monarchy makes you feel like a social pariah, let alone advocating their safe, smooth but quick removal from power. Their laminated, rubbery faces peer from the front of every magazine, every new familial development greeted with hushed deference from the media. I shudder when I see the submissive masses furiously tugging their forelocks at the neverending cycle of weddings, jubilees and births.
Yet in the midst of all this Mike Bartlett's King Charles III reminds us that a) these people are morons, b) they're a medieval anachronism and c) the Royal family are a potential political catastrophe. I was all a-quiver with enjoyment from minute one until the curtain fell; a play that may as well have been made for me.
'Cans' at Theatre 503, 7th November 2014
One major advantage theatre has over other narrative forms is the intensification of emotions. Obviously it's possible to be moved by television and cinema, but when you have a living human being being put through the emotional wringer mere feet from you, their tears glistening under stage lights, it's so much more visceral. This is further magnified when a playwright chooses to probe an open wound, in Cans' case the tendency of popular radio personalities to rape and abuse their way through their fans.
Stuart Slade even takes the difficult path through this subject, examining the limits of sympathy and empathy by showing us the impact of a destroyed reputation on the DJ's family members. Both Jennifer Clement and Graham O'Mara knocked their roles out of the park. A bold play that successfully picks its way through a figurative minefield. My kinda stuff.
WINNER
'Here Lies Love' at the National Theatre, 17th October 2014
Given my twin love of both Talking Heads and chunky dance beats, it is unsurprising that I dug Here Lies Love right down to its molten core. This is a musical like few others, less a passive experience and more like you're attending the greatest party on earth. The songs are upbeat, the costumes are dynamic and the performers simply sweat charisma. The performance space roughly simulates being in a nightclub, the audience either looking down on the dancefloor or right in the midst of things being bumped by elbows and catching the eyes of the pretty person dancing next to you. It's an intoxicating vibe.
Offsetting these good times is that Here Lies Love tells the story of Imelda Marcos, an egomaniacal monster who exploited the peoples of the Philippines, living a life of luxury while the people starved. But Byrne doesn't so much show us her life as try and seduce us into it, the show roughly emulating the amphetamine rush of living within a neverending party where anything flies. It's equivalent to Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street in condemning behaviour while showing it as enjoyable - but where Scorsese just lets us watch his wild parties, Byrne lets us dance, drink and lust away with Imelda. It's ace and it's still on in the National. If you dig cool theatre you've got to check it out!
Sunday, November 9, 2014
Sunday, November 9, 2014
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Set entirely in a dingy Yorkshire garage, Cans begins with its two characters drowning trapped mice. It isn't the cheeriest opening sequence I've ever seen, but then this isn't the cheeriest play I've ever seen either. Writer Stuart Slade grasps a very painful and timely nettle; historic sexual abuse in the entertainment industry. With the cackle of Savile still ringing in our ears, this feels like theatre set firmly in 2014.
Seizing upon a wider sense of public betrayal and anger; Cans understands that examining the actual abuse is next to impossible to tastefully stage, so instead we probe the aftermath. The vehicles for this drama are Uncle Len (Graham O'Mara) and his niece Jen (Jennifer Clement), a disconsolate, slightly crushed pair who glug their way through Strongbow while hiding from the world in their garage.
Len is instantly familiar; an extroverted loudmouth who hoots and hollers in unfunny skits to conceal his own inadequacies. He's not the brightest tool in the shed and we quickly surmise that he's pissed away the best years of his life in a haze of cheap cider and nights spent glued to a barstool. For all that, we sense a glimmer of basic kindness deep down inside. Gradually we understand that his personality is a symptom of some deeper psychological wounds.
The straightman to his acting out is his niece Jen, who's more outwardly depressed. Sullen, withdrawn and hiding underneath a baggy jumper, she's volatile and defensive. We quickly realise that she's grieving, and like detectives we slowly piece together the jigsaw of what's happened. Without spoiling too much, her beloved father has died in disgrace and the play follows her through the stages of grief as she tries to come to terms with her perception of him.
Though this is a two man play there's a third, unseen character looming above. Never named, Jen's father and Len's brother haunts the play; from the junk behind the characters, to the boxes of clothes, books and anecdotes that reveal the life of the dead man. Eventually we build a mental picture of the man; an amalgam of Rolf Harris and Dave Lee Travis with a pinch of Alan Partridge for good measure. Our perceptions gradually shift throughout the play, roughly aligning with Jen's.
Cans swings its tonal pendulum between depressing and funny, the generally gloomy tone punctuated by moments of mordant black humour and odd splodge of genuine goofiness. What shines through above all else is an extreme empathy; most obviously towards Jen and Len, but stretching out to the peripheral characters we only hear about and even, boldly, towards the disgraced rapist.
The idea of 'sympathy for the rapist' is a unimaginably deadly dramatic minefield, especially when the victims are anonymous off-stage presences. Cans successfully traverses it not by justifying or defending unforgivable actions, but by analysing them as the actions of a person rather than a monster. Cleverly we demolish some false defences: that it happened so long ago that he can't be held accountable now, that the good the rapist did in his life outweighs the bad or that simply someone who was such a good father couldn't possibly have done things like this.
Slade is smart enough to allow us to identify and sympathise with his characters at precisely the same time as we recognise that they're in deep denial. This is the knot that lies at the heart of the play, layers upon layers of lies, anger and paranoia gradually being disentangled and discarded until we arrive at a cathartic acceptance that Cans has painfully earned.
Both Graham O'Mara and Jennifer Clement give beautifully complex performances. They quickly establish a mutually supportive performance style whereby one can feed from the other's performance. The sense that they're old friends bouncing off each is crucial to making the characters work, and at their best moments you can almost peer inside their heads and watch their thoughts formulate. Though both Jen and Len are occasionally exasperating and sometimes just plain wrong, the carefully pitched performances give us space to totally disagree with them and still find them basically likeable.
The entire play being set inside a concrete walled garage doesn't make for the most dynamic staging you'll ever see; but the grey walls adequately mirror the numb emotional funk that fills the play, something underlined by the detritus of a dead man that's scattered all around them. Among this naturalistic scenery there's a few expressionistic touches, between scenes the fluorescent flicker madly, sending harsh shadows across the scattered furniture. Within this there's a careful attention to detail. As we go through the dead man's possessions we can read the books he read, all of which appear to have been chosen specifically for what they say about him. It's touches like these that elevate a production above the crowd, cramming character into even the smallest part of the production.
I go to the theatre a lot, and (with some exceptions) you can usually tell within the first 10 minutes whether a play is going to suck. In Cans I realised almost straight away that it was going to be great. This is a confident, intelligent and well executed piece of drama that deserves an audience. Go check it out!
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